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.’”
Dennis Brutus wrote, acted on, was imprisoned then exiled for his opposition to the South African apartheid regime. And he continues to act and write in the international sphere in movements for global economic justice. I’ll read one epigrammatically terse poem—not typical of his work but expressing a certain point:
An old black woman,
suffering,
tells me I have given her
“new images”
—a father bereaved
by radical heroism
finds consolation
in my verse.
then I know
these are those I write for
and my verse works.
My verse works. In two senses: as participant in political struggle, and at the personal, visceral level, where it’s received and its witness acknowledged.
These are two responses to the question of poetry and commitment, which I take as complementary, not in opposition.
What’s at stake here is the recognition of poetry as what James Scully calls “social practice.” He distinguishes between “protest poetry” and “dissident poetry”: Protest poetry is “conceptually shallow,” “reactive,” predictable in its means, too often a hand-wringing from the sidelines.
Dissident poetry, however [he writes] does not respect boundaries between private and public, self and other. In breaking boundaries, it breaks silences, speaking for, or at best, with, the silenced; opening poetry up, putting it into the middle of life…. It is a poetry that talks back, that would act as part of the world, not simply as a mirror of it.