Of course the whole of humanity has been victim under the non-egalitarian plan which has been edging out peoples all over the planet, using war to settle conflict, for at least the last 5,000 years. Here's a poem from about 800 years ago when pagan Mongol tribes destroyed ancient Asian civilizations. This poem, by Wen-siang, a Buddhist poet, who was also a political prisoner, could be sent to every American military wife, lover, or family waiting for a soldier to come home from Iraq or Afghanistan. The poem is titled Night Birds Calling:
The roof and trees
of the house to the east
are level with the clouds;
every night some birds
come to roost in there.
They sadden to death
the soldier's wife
in the window there;
the government people
have sent men
to fight up in the north—
for three years
he hasn't come back;
she's been keeping
an empty bedroom.
The birds cry, unceasing,
the woman weeps even more.
The trails of her tears
are like rain
wetting her blouse and skirt.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote, "The truth is replaced by silence and the silence is a lie." I have for many years clung to such lines of poetry that bear painful witness not only to Yevtushenko's Stalinist Russia, and the persecution of Jews, but also to much of the silence of an American poetry that may complain yet not transform, may criticize but not provide what Rich calls the process whereby language and consciousness can dialectically change each other, a process she suggests would bring us toward a poetry of ourselves and others living under the conditions of twenty-first century absolutism, making us discernible in a time when the human concrete is continually being erased by state and religious violence and by disingenuous jargon serving state power.
This process would be the phenomenon Debord has said continues to escape theorists of revolution (and many poets with them): That every revolution has been born in poetry, has first of all been made with the force of poetry. Every history of social change and resistance has had a poetics able to serve it and describe it. One need only read the lamentations of the high priestess of Sumer, En-hedu-Ana (c.2285 BCE), to see this ancient practice of transcribing personal and political dissent. I believe the world is still watching, waiting for an American poetry, as I wait for a non-violent American movement, to change America from the inside out, toward a full realization of human potential in harmony with our own as well as the peoples of the world.
The citizens suffering from lack of assistance before and during Katrina are still the people of Langston Hughes' dream deferred. What has happened to that dream is still not settled as it wrestles, fluid, revolving somewhere between progress and the ongoing nightmares of anti-social institution, both of which contribute to cultural divisiveness and its varied arguments which relate, above all, a system into which every child is born, advantaged or disadvantaged—and these days with less and less margin in between. Gwendolyn Brooks recognized the struggle between a consciousness of personal responsibility and a consciousness of social constriction. We Real Cool is dedicated to seven drop-outs shooting stick:
We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk Late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon.
Converse to the admonishment above, The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till relates the apartheidic constriction, a constriction that has many ways to force its will, a constriction to which many New Orleanians were forced to bend:
after the murder,
after the burial
Emmett's mother is a pretty-faced thing;
the tint of pulled taffy.
She sits in a red room,
drinking black coffee.
She kisses her killed boy.
and she is so sorry.
Chaos in windy grays
through a red prairie.
My work today is not a call to violent revolution, but an evolution, a putting into place not just a poetry and poetic consciousness to which we can turn, and certainly not a poetry that exists as Roque Dalton has written merely for the dazzling adornment of melancholy, but a poetry that actually serves to improve us as we evolve toward a consciousness of intentional humanity, a poetry that will help us to act as well as to think. A poetry of public function created to serve as in Yevtushenko's Pushkin's Pass, a poetry willing to act as the border guard [not near El Paso or Montréal but] at the frontier of the country's conscience.
This conscience, this consciousness, includes intercultural dialogue which must also become intercultural action. The guarded border is not one of exclusion, but of inclusion, it's an eradication of the Ideology of Other. In Warrior for Gringostroika, Guillermo Gómez-Peña talks of border, including written border, crossed through reading. He talks of border itself as culture, insisting the so-called dominant culture is no longer dominant. He says:
"Today, if there is a dominant culture, it is a border culture. And those who still haven't crossed a border will do it very soon. . .As you read this text, you are crossing a border. . .Border culture can help dismantle the mechanisms of fear. Border culture can guide us back to common ground and improve our negotiating skills. Border culture is a process of negotiation towards utopia, but in this case, utopia means peaceful coexistence and fruitful cooperation. The border is all we share / La frontera es lo único que compartimos."
A poetry created in guardianship of such utopia is a poetry that will serve itself as well as the servants who work hard to achieve that utopia. Words on a page that act to serve action are more than words on a page. This is Roque Dalton's poem titled Poetic Art 1974:
Poetry
Forgive me for having helped you understand
you're not made of words alone.
Again, in To Poetry, Dalton begins:
I welcome you poetry
grateful because meeting you today
(in life and in books)
you don't exist merely for the dazzling
great adornment of melancholy.
Moreover you can improve me today
by helping me serve in
this long and difficult struggle of our people
Poetry acting in servitude of consciousness is an imperative, oppositional and resistant—what Scully calls tendency—poetry serving as obstacle to the status quo and the poetic adherents of that status quo.——Such directives as Archibald MacLeish's "a poem should not mean but be"—a directive discussed by Scully—a directive still heavily relied upon by many poetry careerists—a directive whose teaching I received as a high school and college student enrolled in poetry-writing courses—such a directive is one I have come to view as a reflection of the context in which it occurs, particularly as delivered by those who most benefit from that context within a hierarchical system they are least likely to denounce or reject for all the enjoyment they experience within its upper ranks.——I see the MacLeish directive as encouraging a poetics that pushes away from social, public, historical, and human consciousness, and toward a more personal, self-centered preoccupation with things other than social consciousness. This directive is what Scully calls the fetishizing of sensory experience and of things which he says:
"...has its broad rationale in empiricism. But traces of this bias...are evident even in the limited course of modern American poetry.... Pursuing the matter we find that the roots of this empiricist bias are not materialist, as might be assumed, but idealist. The drive is toward dehistoricized being. The attempt is to render the dehistoricized 'thing.' Not incidentally, it is also an attempt to purge language...to free it from the implication of history."
That is an assertion that still has relevance today as something deeply embedded in the psyche of cultural philosophy. Aimé Césaire wrote (in "Poetry and Knowledge"): At the root of poetic knowledge lies an astonishing mobilization of all human and cosmic powers. This counteracts the root of capitalist culture which thrives on the impulse to defer human and cosmic powers for powers related to profit, individual advancement, and the well-maintained circumstance of, simply, things as they are. Poetry—effective poetry—becomes, is actualized, and provides the breath of living resistance to that anti-human characteristic of hierarchical living whose impulses and roots are nurtured by the collective expression of non-conscious silence, under-analysis, and overwhelming inaction. Arguments against such poetry, Scully says—including arguments against what is called preaching and didacticism—are simply arguments from those who don't want to be troubled with a confrontation against the hegemony of social silence.
Saying and naming are obstacles to the silence that serves to protect those who benefit from it.——In a poem titled Truths, Michel Deguy writes:
...thought is trust
that knowledge does not falter
that saying saves itself
in truth for saying
Here is Roque Dalton again, very fitting it seems to the current climate:
Don't ever forget,
that the least fascist
among fascists
are also
fascists.
That poem is titled Advice that is No Longer Necessary Anywhere in the World but Here in El Salvador. . . .
I found a poem recently by Suji Kwock Kim titled Resistance, based on the writings of her maternal grandfather who was imprisoned by the Japanese Colonial Governor-General during the final stages of the Japanese occupation in Korea. The poem mentions the "Comfort Corps," which refers to, Kim notes, "the estimated 200,000 women of Korean, Chinese, Filipino, Dutch, and other descent who were mobilized into prison camps for sexual assault by the Japanese Army." At the end of the poem, Kim has her grandfather questioning:
What won't we do to each other?
After liberation I saw a frenzy of reprisals against former collaborators.
An old man—guilty or innocent?—lashed to a grille of barbed wire.
Bodies hung from trees on the sides of the road, swaying.
At night a sickle glinted in the sky, sharp and pure. What did it reap.
Summer wind sang through the corpse-forest.
Surely America has its own ongoing corpse forest. It is the forest itself. It is the melting glacier, the extinct or malformed frog. It lives in Detroit and on the Rez. We see it in New Orleans. Its children are hungry. Its people lack housing. Its people lack information. The forest extends to other cities, the city in which I live. It has intentional, decaying leaves meant to enrich the soil of some gardens but not all. It's a shocking forest of conditioned inhumanity, insidious silence and complicit acceptance of such forces that make it up through ongoing non-egalitarian schemes structured out of an ideology of oppression that includes warfare and genocide; an ideology with many committees; an ideology by and for which, as I opened this talk, people continue to die.
The poem relating the corpse-forest is an invitation to change bound by the question formed as an end in itself (with a period, not a question mark): "What did it reap."——Such a forest's counter-force, in memory and history, comes from the consciousness of two insiders looking out, each from their country, one of whom, in America, is a woman showing how the personal contains a history with its own implications not only for her world, but for different parts of the world as well, a history upon which readers can reflect, a history by which they too can cross a border to construct an alternative consciousness.
Such poems are readied for change. They are waiting for an evolution in thinking. The question remains: Who is ready for them? Which revolution will come to them? Who will advance their possibility by taking issue with the order they describe? Who else will break rank with social silence? To whose conscience will such a poetics infuse its energy, and begin, again, in the dismantling of the Old World Order? Such poems, "These poems," as June Jordan wrote, will continue to be things done:
in the dark
reaching for you
whoever you are
and are you ready?
...whoever you are
whoever I may become.
Leigh Herrick is a poet, writer and collaborator. For more information about her work, please visit www.MNArtists.org/Leigh_Herrick. To order her CD, Just War, please contact PrairieRecords [at] msn [dot] com with Just War CD in the subject line.