And if we are writers writing first of all from our own desire and need, if this is irresistible work for us, if in writing we experience certain kinds of power and freedom that may be unavailable to us in other ways—surely it would follow that we would want to make that kind of forming, shaping, naming, telling, accessible for anyone who can use it. It would seem only natural for writers to care passionately about literacy, public education, public libraries, public opportunities in all the arts. But more: if we care about the freedom of the word, about language as a liberatory current, if we care about the imagination, we will care about economic justice.
For the pull and suck of Capital’s project tend toward reducing, not expanding, overall human intelligence, wit, expressiveness, creative rebellion. If free enterprise is to be totalizingly free, a value in and for itself, it can have no stake in other realms of value. It may pay lip service to charitable works, but its drive is toward what works for the accumulation of wealth; this is a monomaniacal system. Certainly it cannot enrich the realm of the social imagination, least of all the imagination of solidarity and cooperative human endeavor, the unfulfilled imagination of radical equality.
In a poem written in the early 1970s in Argentina, just as the political ground was shifting to a right-wing consolidation, military government, torture, disappearances and massacres, the poet Juan Gelman reflects on delusions of political compromise. The poem is called “Clarities”:
who has seen the dove marry the hawk
mistrust affection the exploited the exploiter? false
are such unspeakable marriages
disasters are born of such marriages discord sadness
how long can the house of such a marriage last?
wouldn’t
the least breeze grind it down destroy it the sky crush it
to ruins? oh, my country!
sad! enraged! beautiful! oh my country facing the firing
squad!
stained with revolutionary blood!
the parrots the color of mitre
that go clucking in almost every tree
and courting on every branch
are they more alone? less alone? lonely? for
who has seen the butcher marry the tender calf
tenderness marry capitalism? false
are such unspeakable marriages
disasters are born of such marriages discord sadness
clarities such as
the day itself spinning in the iron cupola
above this poem11
I have talked at some length about capitalism’s drive to disenfranchise and dehumanize, to invade the very zones of feeling and relationship we deal with as writers—which Marx described long ago—because those processes still need to be described as doing what they still do. I have spoken from the perspective of a writer and a longtime teacher, trying to grasp the ill winds and the sharp veerings of her time—a human being who thinks of herself as an artist, and then must ask herself what that means.
I want to end by saying this to you: We’re not simply trapped in the present. We are not caged within a narrowing corridor at “the end of history.” Nor do any of us have to windsurf on the currents of a system that depends on the betrayal of so many others. We do have choices. We’re living through a certain part of history that needs us to live it and make it and write it. We can make that history with many others, people we will never know. Or, we can live in default, under protest perhaps, but neutered in our senses and in our sympathies.
We have to keep on asking the questions still being defined as nonquestions—the ones beginning Why . . . ? What if . . . ? We will be told these are childish, naive, “pre-postmodern” questions. They are the imagination’s questions.
Many of you in this audience are professional intellectuals, or studying to become so, or are otherwise engaged in the activities of a public university. Writers and intellectuals can name, we can describe, we can depict, we can witness—without sacrificing craft, nuance, or beauty. Above all, and at our best, we may sometimes help question the questions.
Let us try to do this, if we do it, without grandiosity. Let’s recognize too, without false humility, the limits of the zone in which we work. Writing and teaching are kinds of work, and the relative creative freedom of the writer or teacher depends on the conditions of human labor overall and everywhere.
For what are we, anyway, at our best, but one small, persistent cluster in a greater ferment of human activity—still and forever turning toward, tuned for, the possible, the unrealized and irrepressible design?
Given as the Troy Lecture, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in April 1997. First published in the Massachusetts Review, autumn 1997.
A Human Eye
(2009)
PERMEABLE MEMBRANE (2005)
1
Poetic imagination or intuition is never merely unto itself, free-floating, or self-enclosed. It’s radical, meaning root-tangled in the grit of human arrangements and relationships: how we are with each other.
The medium is language intensified, intensifying our sense of possible reality.
2
Ghostly touch on the shoulder: dust motes of air inhaled, snatch of talk heard boarding a plane, music stored in memory. A smell provokes another sensation, a half-forgotten scene. Dream remnant. “Room sound,” as in audio recording.
Working on a draft, I move by touch through what I can’t see clearly. My finger on the shoulder of the ghost who first touched mine. As my eyes adjust to dimness, the shape of what I’m doing declares itself. The poem makes its needs felt, becomes both my guide and my critic.
Behind and overall there’s the interpenetration of subjectivity and social being. Gleaning, not at first consciously selecting. Dissatisfaction, impulse to look at the world anew, scrape at the wounds, refuse popular healings and panaceas, official concoctions. I’ve learnt how much this work depends on knowing myself—including how astray I can go, have gone, but also trusting how certain poetic choices have taken me beyond any conscious knowing.
I’ve wanted to write subjective visions of objective conditions. But this sounds like a program. Say rather: Poems become suffused, as the existence, the inner life of the maker must, with what’s going on, the breaks in the assumed fabric. The makings of art are rooted in non-art labors—repetitive, toxic, body-breaking, minimum wage or less or none—that everywhere underlie those privileged creations. What you do and don’t see. What is seeing you. Eyes in the thicket, eyes in the street.
I need to reach beyond interior decoration, biography. Art is a way of melting out through one’s own skin. “What, who is this about?” is not the essential question. A poem is not about; it is out of and to. Passionate language in movement. The deep structure is always musical, and physical—as breath, as pulse.
3
In the culturally stunned, dystopic states of North America a poet needs a different (though no greater) kind of faith and commitment from that of poets under other cruel and t/ruthless political regimes. Faith in poetry itself, more perhaps than has been required in other, older societies. Commitment to a poetics not defined by the market, not complacent courtier verse or prose cut by template. A poetics of longing, of organic necessity.
Mayakovsky: The presence of a problem in society, the solution of which is conceivable only in poetic terms. A social command.1 I read him as saying that for the poet the problem is insoluble by her or him alone, yet he or she feels an urgency to meet it with poetry.
That urgency—emotional as a love affair—is finally the source and meaning of my work. Why go for anything less?
Mayakovsky was writing about making poetry within a socialist revolution: a moment, as it seemed, of widening hopes for human possibilities. The battering of those hopes, both from within and without, was an international tragedy. Here, as “winners” of the Cold War, we’re watchers at the bedside of a sick democracy, transfixed and emotionally paralyzed. Public conversation stripped of a common imagination
of what’s “humanly possible,” of human solidarity, of motives other than fear, shopping, and disgust.
In the doorway hovers a waiting dictatorship; let us listen to its language: We also have to work, though, sort of, the dark side . . . use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.2
We want to believe the fever can break, the sick body politic come back to life.
In such a crisis the efficacy of any art is not measurable by its quantifiable mass distribution. If it ever was.
4
There’s a permeable membrane between art and society. A continuous dialectical motion. Tides brining the estuary. River flowing into sea. A writer describes the landmass-“stained” current of the Congo River as discernible three hundred miles out on the ocean.3 Likewise: the matter of art enters the bloodstream of social energy. Call and response. The empathetic imagination can transform, but we can’t identify precise loci of transformation, can’t track or quantify the moments. Nor say how or when they lead, through innumerable unpredictable passageways toward re-creating survival, undermining illegimate power and its cruelties.
Nor how newly unlocked social energies, movements of people, demand a renewed social dialogue with art: a spontaneous release of language and forms.
René Char: The poet bursts the bonds of what he touches. He does not teach the end of bonds.4
She cannot teach the end of bonds; but she can refuse to justify, accord with, ignore their existence.
This appeared in a symposium on my work in the Virginia Quarterly Review (Spring 2006): 208–210, and is here slightly revised.
POETRY AND THE FORGOTTEN FUTURE (2006)
1
Poets, readers of poetry, strangers, and friends, I’m honored and glad to be here among you.
There’s an invisible presence in this room whom I want to invoke: the great Scottish Marxist bard Hugh MacDiarmid. I’ll begin by reading from his exuberant, discursive manifesto called, bluntly, “The Kind of Poetry I Want.” I’ll offer a few extracts and hope you’ll read the whole poem for yourselves:
A poetry the quality of which
Is a stand made against intellectual apathy,
Its material founded, like Gray’s, on difficult knowledge
And its metres those of a poet
Who has studied Pindar and Welsh poetry,
But, more than that, its words coming from a mind
Which has experienced the sifted layers on layers
Of human lives—aware of the innumerable dead
And the innumerable to-be-born . . .
A speech, a poetry, to bring to bear upon life
The concentrated strength of all our being . . .
Is not this what we require?— . . .
A fineness and profundity of organization
Which is the condition of a variety enough
To express all the world’s . . .
In photographic language, “wide-angle” poems . . .
A poetry like an operating theatre
Sparkling with a swift, deft energy,
Energy quiet and contained and fearfully alert,
In which the poet exists only as a nurse during an operation
A poetry in which the images
Work up on each other’s shoulders like Zouave acrobats,
Or strange and fascinating as the Javanese dancer,
Retna Mohini, or profound and complicated
Like all the work of Ram Gopal and his company . . .
Poetry of such an integration as cannot be effected
Until a new and conscious organization of society
Generates a new view
Of the world as a whole . . .
—A learned poetry wholly free
of the brutal love of ignorance;
And the poetry of a poet with no use
For any of the simpler forms of personal success.
A manifesto of desire for “a new and conscious organization of society” and a poetic view to match it. A manifesto that acknowledges the scope, tensions, and contradictions of the poet’s undertaking. Let’s bear in mind the phrases “difficult knowledge,” “the concentrated strength of all our being,” the poem as “wide-angled,” but also the image of the poet as nurse in the operating theater: “fearfully alert.”
2
What I’d like to do here is touch on some aspects of poetry as it’s created and received in an even more violently politicized and brutally divided world than the one MacDiarmid knew. This won’t be a shapely lecture; rather, I’ll be scanning the terrain of poetry and commitment with many jump-cuts, hoping some of this may rub off in other sessions and conversations.
To begin: what do I mean by commitment?
I’ll flash back to 1821: Shelley’s claim, in “The Defence of Poetry,” that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Piously overquoted, mostly out of context, it’s taken to suggest that simply by virtue of composing verse, poets exert some exemplary moral power—in a vague, unthreatening way. In fact, in his earlier political essay “A Philosophic View of Reform,” Shelley had written that “Poets and philosophers [italics mine] are the unacknowledged” etc. The philosophers he was talking about were revolutionary-minded: Thomas Paine, William Godwin, Voltaire, Mary Wollstonecraft.
And Shelley was, no mistake, out to change the legislation of his time. For him there was no contradiction among poetry, political philosophy, and active confrontation with illegitimate authority. This was perfectly apparent to the reviewer in the High Tory Quarterly who mocked him as follows:
Mr. Shelley would abrogate our laws. . . . He would abolish the rights of property. . . . He would pull down our churches, level our Establishment, and burn our bibles. . . .
His poem “Queen Mab,” denounced and suppressed when first printed, was later pirated in a kind of free-speech movement and sold in cheap editions on street stalls in the industrial neighborhoods of Manchester, Birmingham, and London. There, it found plenty of enthusiastic readers among a literate working and middle class of trade unionists and Chartists. In it, Queen Mab surveys the world’s disorders and declares:
This is no unconnected misery,
Nor stands uncaused and irretrievable.
Man’s evil nature, that apology
Which kings who rule and cowards who crouch, set up
For their unnumbered crimes, sheds not the blood
Which desolates the discord-wasted land.
NATURE!—No!
Kings, priests and statesmen blast the human flower. . . .
Shelley, in fact, saw powerful institutions, not original sin or “human nature,” as the source of human misery. For him, art bore an integral relationship to the “struggle between Revolution and Oppression.” His West Wind was the “trumpet of a prophecy,” driving “dead thoughts . . . like withered leaves, to quicken a new birth.”
He did not say, “Poets are the unacknowledged interior decorators of the world.”
3
Pursuing this theme of the committed poet and the action of poetry in the world: two interviews, both from 1970.
A high official of the Greek military junta asks the poet Yannis Ritsos, then under house arrest: “You are a poet. Why do you get mixed up in politics?”
Ritsos answers, “A poet is the first citizen of his country and for this very reason it is the duty of the poet to be concerned about the politics of his country.”
A Communist, he had been interned in fascist prison camps from 1947 to 1953; one of his books was publicly burned. For most of his countrymen he was indeed a “first citizen,” a voice for a nation battered by invasion, occupation, and civil war—in poems of densely figurative beauty. As such, he was also a world citizen. His long poem “Romiosini,” from its own place and era, speaks to the wars and military occupations of the twenty-first century (I extract from Kimon Friar’s translation):
This landscape is as harsh as silence,
it hugs to its breast the scorching stones
,
clasps in the light its orphaned olive trees and vineyards,
clenches its teeth. There is no water. Light only.
Roads vanish in light and the shadow of the sheepfold is
made of iron.
Trees, rivers, and voices have turned to stone in the sun’s
quicklime.
Roots trip on marble. Dust-laden lentisk shrubs.
Mules and rocks. All panting. There is no water.
All are parched. For years now. All chew a morsel of sky to
choke down
their bitterness. . . .
In the field the last swallow had lingered late,
balancing in the air like a black ribbon on the sleeve of
autumn.
Nothing else remained. Only the burned houses
smouldering still.
The others left us some time ago to lie under the stones,
with their torn shirts and their vows scratched on the fallen
door.
No one wept. We had no time. Only the silence grew deeper
still. . . .
It will be hard for us to forget their hands,
it will be hard for hands calloused on a trigger to question a
daisy. . . .
Every night in the fields the moon turns the magnificent
dead over on their backs,
searching their faces with savage, frozen fingers to find her
son
by the cut of his chin and his stony eyebrows,
searching their pockets. She will always find something.
There is
always something to find.
A locket with a splinter of the Cross. A stubbed-out
cigarette.
A key, a letter, a watch stopped at seven.
We wind up the watch again. The hours plod on . . .
This was Greece speaking; today it could be Gaza or Iraq, Afghanistan or Lebanon.
Second interview. The South African poet Dennis Brutus, when asked about poetry and political activity: “I believe that the poet—as a poet—has no obligation to be committed, but the man—as a man—has an obligation to be committed. What I’m saying is that I think everybody ought to be committed and the poet is just one of the many ‘everybodies.’ ”
Essential Essays Page 36