In a recent review of a book by Max Boot, titled The Savage Wars of Peace, Rick Eden writes, "Few Americans realize how many nations' history books include chapters on a U.S. attack, invasion or occupation." To the point of this writing's argument, I would ask what kind of American poetry exists to stop—not just complain about but actually stop—the processes of invasion, of occupation, of exploitation, of bias based on class, sex, race, ethnicity, religion, etc.? What kind of poetry exists to open and change people's minds about such processes and what would it really mean to American culture, American economy, to put an end to this business of war and invasion, of arms and weapons sales, of Schools to train operatives for other nations? What would it mean to get ourselves off oil and nuclear energy, save the environment, house, and feed, clothe, medically insure, and educate everyone? What would it mean to socialize ourselves? To which poetic course is American poetry aligned to effect such change: A competitive poetics of individualized, self-interested and ultimately self-serving gain, or a social poetry willing to act in consciousness?
Truth is imperative. Relativism in the mainstream is used to mask, minimize, diffuse, hide, negate and obliterate truth. Admitting this is one thing. Thinking about why relativism is employed in the context of which lifestyle comes your way via American guarantees is quite another thing altogether and this pushes one to the brink of personal responsibility in considering the difference between being subject to and object of. A revolutionary poetics understands its obligation to those who suffer within hierarchical arrangements, its obligation to those who cannot write or perform poetic or other acts as means of eliciting dialogue or contributing to deliberated social change and the dismantling of exclusive arrangements. A revolutionary poetics understands its obligation to those who cannot act or get sufficient attention for any actions they may take because they are in a constant State of Punitive Arrangement, hungry or ill or homeless or just so poor or poorly educated they have virtually no way out of their particular oppressive circumstance. An evolutionary poetry never forgets its commitment to human beings, it never forgets to challenge the thinking erected out of this State of Arrangement, including an accepted status quo poetics structured out of that thinking. It is poetic responsibility to cope with the realization that thinking itself can be a machination, a construct of de-socializing order whose product we are individually, and as a whole, to the extent we do not consider such constructs and machinations, particularly now, as we are increasingly asked to relate ourselves to them through money.
An effective poetry is one that bursts the bubble of collective comfort around such constructs, and those made most comfortable by them. I see an effective poetry as one that recognizes human safety is secured through socialized compassion, and that the forces oppositional to the egalitarian paradigm are those that must be addressed if we are ever to evolve beyond them. An effective poetry forges into the mainstream to reach the minds of those who have been taught to forget how we are related to each other. An effective poetry, like the ancient chants of healers and shamanic women, knows its deliberation is involved in consciousness-transformation for communal benefit. The proper response to intentional ignorance is extensive and purposeful consciousness. Part of that response includes a poetics defined as that which absolutely breaks its contract with social silence.
In Line Break: Poetry as Social Practice, James Scully describes the problem of social silence, calling it, simply: fear. It's a silence, he says, that signifies accommodation not resistance. Silence is job, career, acceptance. This silence found harbor in much of America's pre-9/11 poetry and has taken new refuge in much of its post-9/11 poetry. Scully takes up the silence of language itself:
"Language generates a more reverberant, spellbinding, insidious silence than 'silence itself' does. Social silence may be projected as speech, writing, data or news. Then words are used reflexively, as screens, walls, mirrors facing in on their own ideological garden, which is what they cultivate. They become...the silence within speech. Social silence may be called law, poetry, torture or tolerance. Or it may be named beauty, harmony, civilization, history....Whatever, it is the silence pressuring all lives to be opaque, self-preoccupied, personalityless, interchangeable and, it follows, redundant. Lives become commodities that they may be, in the perverse logic of this system, valuable. Meanwhile, socially sanctioned language mediates and shares that degradation—the language of love no less than that of politics or 'educational' (i.e., domesticating) systems."
My talk today is not about an advancement of poetry for poetry's sake but about a socialized poetry, a reflection on a kind of poetry that works not just to further possibility, but to shift a paradigm. I'm talking about a historicized poetry, whose speech and language insist on memory, and whose purpose, similar to Edward Said's suggestion in Culture and Resistance lives in activation and use. I'm talking about a poetry that can actualize advancement, assist in evolution, exist, ready at any moment to serve the r-evolution of human culture, by advancing critical thinking about one's life, about the world, and about how one's life has been framed within and goes on to frame that world. I'm talking about a time of transformation, and a poetics toward which that transformation can turn, as in the following excerpt from Sonia Sanchez's Poem for July 4, 1994:
It is essential that Summer be grafted to
bones marrow earth clouds blood the
eyes of our ancestors.
It is essential to smell the beginning
words where Washington, Madison, Hamilton,
Adams, Jefferson assembled amid cries of:
"The people lack information" ....
It is essential to string the sky
with the saliva of Slavs and
Germans and Anglos and French
and Italians and Scandinavians,
and Spaniards and Mexicans and Poles
and Africans and Native Americans.
It is essential that we always repeat:
we the people....
human being....
African American. Whites. Latinos.
Gays. Asians. Jews. Native
Americans. Lesbians. Muslims.
All of us must bury
the elitism of race superiority
the elitism of sexual superiority
the elitism of economic superiority
the elitism of religious superiority....
Come, move out into this world...
nourish the world ....
nourish ourselves...and say
no more hiroshima
no more auschwitz
no more wounded knee
no more middle passage
no more slavery
no more Bosnia
no more Rwanda....
...it'll get better...
if we the people work, organize, resist,
come together...
This is not a poem in quest of its own meaning but a poem serving as an assertion toward action, toward further meaning, toward meaningful living, a poem of non-alienation working to put an end to the constructs that make of peoples Other; it's a poem ready for any change-makers who may come to it.
In writing of Michel Deguy's poetry, Wilson Baldridge says:
"The emergence of a poetry in quest of its own meaning and marrow corresponds, for Deguy, to a 'moment' when poetry is threatened. A moment of great peril for poetry, of real danger; he calls this threat in general le culturel, or mass-media, our age in which the logic of likeness, similitude, and common humanity (in a word, poetic reason) faces a plethora of forces asserting, often violently, the other extreme: Identity."
It is the problem of identity that lends itself to our forgetting our humanity by the acceptance of an Ideology of Other. This ideology was implemented in Hitler's Germany, Bush II's current Iraq, Stalin's Russia, South Africa's Apartheid, Rwanda's Genocide, and it is used every day in our cities and States in every moment where such things as sexism, racism and class differentials maintain the arrangements of containment, as Hurricane Katrina makes us so aware.
Here is a powerful poem by Negritude proponent (something Jayne Cortez is revisiting in her work) and surrealist poet Aimé Césaire. This poem, The Tornado, could have been titled "Hurricane Katrina." Be forewarned of Césaire's use of the "N" word which he, a black man, used to reveal not condone:
By the time
the senator noticed the tornado was sitting in his plate
the tornado was in the air foraging through Kansas City
By the time
the minister glimpsed the tornado in the blue eye of the sheriff's wife
the tornado was outside displaying to everyone its huge face
stinking like ten thousand niggers piled up in a train
By the time the tornado guffawed
it had performed over everything an elegant laying-on-of-hands, those beautiful
white clerical
hands
By the time God noticed
that he had drunk one hundred glasses of executioner blood too many
the city was a brotherhood of black and white spots
scattered like cadavers on the hide of a horse felled in full gallop
And the tornado having survived the provinces of memory rich rubbish
spat from a sky packed with verdicts everything quaked
for the second time the twisted steel was retwisted
And the tornado which had swallowed like a flight of frogs its herd of roofs and
chimneys noisily
exhaled a thought the prophets had never known how to divine
This poem calls out for a determination of what that thought could be, in a language seeking relief for those having to endure the pressures of an indifferent, dictatorial, totalitarian or colonizing government. In this case Césaire was looking at America from the outside, something I often feel so much of American poetry misses: We are not the only audience of ourselves. There is a world audience whose opinion of us comes from direct experience and the consequences of US foreign policies that benefit America as a nation, even if not all its citizens, and certainly not the many people of those countries with whom Government deals and arrangements have been made, too often to the detriment of those peoples. The problems in capitalism are not just American, but surely for the last sixty years or so America has been leading in imperialist statehood leashed to the capitalist plan.
Here are several rather eerie poetic excerpts echoing such ties to history that are still pertinent today. These are the opening lines from Yehuda Amichai's The U.N. Headquarters in the High Commissioner's House in Jerusalem. Amichai didn't like the U.N.'s presence in Jerusalem in the 1950's, but what strikes me is how contemporary these lines feel:
The mediators, the peacemakers, the compromise-shapers, the comforters
live in the white house
and get their nourishment from far away,
through winding pipes, through dark veins, like a fetus.
Not-so-conversely, this is part of Saadi Yussef's 1995 poem America, America. Yussef was born in Basra, Iraq, which he left in 1979:
America:
let's exchange gifts.
Take your smuggled cigarettes
and give us potatoes....
Take the books of your missionaries
and give us paper for poems to defame you.
Take what you do not have
and give us what we have....
We are not hostages, America,
and your soldiers are not God's soldiers....
We are the poor ones, ours is the earth of the drowned gods,
...America, we are the dead.
Let your soldiers come....
We are the drowned.
Let the water come.
The tragedy of these lines lives in the awareness not just of the suffering of the Iraqi people under US sanctions, but of how American will and military power literally stations itself throughout the world as well.
Another engaging poet looking at America from the outside is Nicaraguan Ernesto Cardenal, who writes as part of his Cantiga 33, in Cosmic Canticle:
...Nobody mentioned the word murder, Oliver North
would later confide. It was said simply:
—in a military context what's normally a crime's not a crime...
After my talk about Nicaragua in Hiroshima (1988)
the conversation with hibakusha (victims)...
"So many bodies with intestines hanging out, like sausages..."
Truman got the news over lunch. At once he proposed a toast.
Liquefied eyes streaming
Skin hanging off like black algae.
Shozo Muneto, hibakusha, says
"Now the whole of humanity is hibakusha."
