ET TU, NPR? It needs must be said that in poetry, we dont abandon the works of past provocateurs and thinkers: Neruda, Ginsberg, Baraka are not old products and brands that we quickly remove from the shelves of our consciousness, they are human beings and thinkers whose works and ideas continue to provoke and instigate in our time. Thats why we have the permanent present tense when we discuss books and literature. And that’s why we have the Humanities, which are not based on a temporary banner or headline (at least, for now). But to say that poets are not political because they dont make headlines anymore or take to the picket lines (which I personally have done over 20 times in the past 10 years, and I am less active by far than other poets) is to suggest that poets should in some ways conform only to the specific structures of attention-getting that our society condones and which our media “covers.” Covers takes on a new meaning here, like a lid. In addition to several overt examples that come to mind of poets engaged in politics on a thematic level (and lets not even mention the role of poets in the Occupy movement, because the list would occupy the entire screen): among them, Claudia Rankine’s CITIZEN, Anne Waldman’s THE IOVIS TRILOGY and CIVIL DISOBEDIENCES, C.D. Wright’s ONE WITH OTHERS, and the special issue on Landays in POETRY Magazine, there is something more subtle and as essential that we as poets are contributing to. After all, we are in the structure business. We are creating and engaging others in structures that reconstitute wholes and defy preconceived boundaries---we are inventing innovative structures of international sharing, like Ubuweb and Penn Sound; we are imagining structures that revise our ideas of national boundaries, like the new TrafikaEurope which is looking at Europe through the lens of the Roma people as the largest minority in Europe and (in another future issue) focusing not on the UK but on “Europe’s northern islands”---which compels us to consider resonances between Scotland, Iceland, Svalbard, etc. instead of confining our idea of literature to nationalist boundaries); and we are creating laboratories of thinking like Peter Waterhouse’s Versatorium in which translators are actively fighting for the rights of asylum seekers using ingenious means. This NPR article seems nostalgic for a time that had many different opinions itself about what was political: I was struck by Ralph Ellison’s comments in some recently discovered sound recordings in which he says the following bold (and political) statement: “it’s a terrifically difficult thing this business of trying to decide what is real, what is valuable [...]” and to ask a writer “to go out on the picket line, [...] is all right by me, but it isn’t WRITING and I don’t think the two functions should be confused. I think that there is enough pain, there is enough psychological misery involved in really grappling with reality in terms of Art.... Some thoughts, this morning, before going to my apparently apolitical (or so says NPR) job as a curator of poetry.
Posted on: Fri, 05 Sep 2014 13:00:17 +0000
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