Poetry and Commitment

I hope never to idealize poetry—it has suffered enough from that. Poetry is not a healing lotion, an emotional massage, a kind of linguistic aromatherapy. Neither is it a blueprint, nor an instruction manual, nor a billboard. There is no universal Poetry anyway, only poetries and poetics, and the streaming, intertwining histories to which they belong. There is room, indeed necessity, for both Neruda and César Vallejo, for Pier Paolo Pasolini and Alfonsina Storni, for Audre Lorde and Aimé Césaire, for both Ezra Pound and Nelly Sachs. Poetries are no more pure and simple than human histories are pure and simple. Poetry, like silk or coffee or oil or human flesh, has had its trade routes. And there are colonized poetics and resilient poetics, transmissions across frontiers not easily traced.

Walt Whitman never separated his poetry from his vision of American democracy—a vision severely tested in a Civil War fought over the economics of slavery. Late in life he called “poetic lore … a conversation overheard in the dusk, from speakers far or hid, of which we get only a few broken murmurs”—the obscurity, we might think now, of democracy itself.

But also of those “dark times” in and about which Bertolt Brecht assured us there would be songs.

Poetry has been charged with “aestheticizing,” thus being complicit in, the violent realities of power, of practices like collective punishment, torture, rape, and genocide. This accusation was famously invoked in Adorno’s “after the Holocaust lyric poetry is impossible”—which Adorno later retracted and which a succession of Jewish poets have in their practice rejected. I’m thinking now not only of post–World War II poets like Celan, Edmond Jabès, Nelly Sachs, Kadia Molodowsky, Muriel Rukeyser, Irena Klepfisz. I’m also thinking of contemporary poems in a recent collection from Israel that I’ve been reading in translation: With an Iron Pen: Hebrew Protest Poetry, 1980–2004, ignited by the atrocious policies and practices of Israel’s occupation of Palestine. There, poems of dissonant, harsh beauty, some thrusting images of the Occupation into the very interior of Israeli domestic life:

… I open the refrigerator door

and see a weeping roll,

see a piece of bleeding cheese,

a radish forced to sprout

by shocks from wires

and blows from fists.

The meat on its plate

tells of placentas

cast aside by roadblocks….

—Aharon Shabtai, “The Fence,” trans. Peter Cole)

The poem isn’t served meat and fruit

on a silver platter at night,

and by day its mouth does not long

for a golden spoon or communion wafers.

Lost, it wanders the roads of Beit Jala,

sways like a drunk through the streets of Bethlehem,

seeking you along the way in vain,

searching for your shadow’s shadow in the shrubs.

Close to the breast, the soul sits

curled up like a boy in a sleeping bag

dry as a flower bulb buried in the middle of the throat.

Then the poem feels it can’t go on any longer

wandering toward the refugee camp,

toward the fugitives’ cradle

in the Promised Land’s heavy summer

on the path to disaster

—(Rami Saari, “Searching the Land,” trans. Lisa Katz)

Do poems like these “work”? How do we calculate such a thing on a day when Israel is battering its way into Gaza, cluster-bombing Lebanon? Like the activist, the poet (who may be both) has to reckon with disaster, desperation, and exhaustion—these, too, are the materials.

And in such a time—when water is poisoned, when sewage flows into houses, when air becomes unbreathable from the dust of blasted schools and hospitals—poetry must gasp for breath.

But if poetry had gone mute after every genocide in history, there would be no poetry left in the world, and this conference might have a different theme: “The Death of the Poem” perhaps?

If to “aestheticize” is to glide across brutality and cruelty, treat them merely as dramatic occasions for the artist rather than structures of power to be revealed and dismantled—much hangs on the words “merely” and “rather than.” Opportunism isn’t the same as committed attention. But we can also define the “aesthetic” not as a privileged and sequestered rendering of human suffering, but as news of an awareness, a resistance, that totalizing systems want to quell: art reaching into us for what’s still passionate, still unintimidated, still unquenched.

Poetry has been written off on other counts: (1) it’s not a mass-market “product”: it doesn’t get sold on airport newsstands or in supermarket aisles; (2) the actual consumption figures for poetry can’t be quantified at the checkout counter; (3) it’s too “difficult” for the average mind; (4) it’s too elite, but the wealthy don’t bid for it at Sotheby’s. It is, in short, redundant. This might be called the free-market critique of poetry.

There’s actually an odd correlation between these ideas: poetry is either inadequate, even immoral, in the face of human suffering, or it’s unprofitable, hence useless. Either way, poets are advised to hang our heads or fold our tents. Yet in fact, throughout the world, transfusions of poetic language can and do quite literally keep bodies and souls together—and more.

Two items from recent news. One is a headline from the San Francisco Chronicle of July 17, 2005:

The story follows a Pakistani, Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost, arrested in Afghanistan and held without charges in the American detention camp at Guantánamo. There he wrote thousands of lines in Pashto, translated Arabic poetry into Pashto, at first scratching lines with his fingernail into Styrofoam cups. His brother and fellow inmate is quoted as saying that “Poetry was our support and psychological uplift…. Many people have lost their minds there. I know 40 or 50 prisoners who are mad.”

These men, detained as terrorists (released after three years), turned to poetry in the depths of Guantánamo to keep themselves sane, hold onto a sense of self and culture. So, too, the Chinese immigrants to California in the early twentieth century, detained in barracks on an island in San Francisco Bay, traced their ideograms of anger and loneliness on the walls of that prison.

From the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz of November 7, 2004, comes an article by David Zonsheine, a former commander in the Israeli Defense Force who became organizer and leader of the anti-Occupation movement within the IDF, the Courage to Refuse. Zonsheine comes by chance upon some lines from a poem of Yitzhak Laor and finds that,

Reading these lines a moment after a violent month of reserve duty, which was full of a sense of the righteousness of the way, was no easy thing. I remember that for one alarming moment I felt that I was looking at something I was forbidden to see. What this thing was I did not know, but on that same Friday afternoon I went out to look for every book by Yitzhak Laor that I could find in the shops.

The sense of mission with which I enlisted in the IDF was based … on … the painfully simple message that we shall not allow the Holocaust of the Jews of Europe to repeat itself no matter what the costs, and when the moral price became more severe, the sense of mission only increased … I am a freedom fighter … not an occupier, not cruel, certainly not immoral….

Something in Laor’s texts spoke to me about the place inside me that had been closed and denied until then….

Here I am, 28 years old, returning home from another month of reserve duty in Gaza and suddenly asking myself questions that are beginning to penetrate even the armor of the righteousness … in which they had dressed me years ago. And Laor’s strong words return to echo in my ears: “With such obedience? With such obedience? With such obedience?”

Ever since I refused to serve in the territories and the Ometz Lesarev (Courage to Refuse) movement was established, I have returned again and again to Laor’s texts….

… The voice is that of a poetic persona through whose life the “situation” passes and touches everything he has, grasping and refusing to let go. The child, the wife, the hours of wakefulness alone at night, memory, the very act of writing—everything is political. And from the other extreme, every terror attack, every act of occupation, every moral injustice—everything is completely personal.

… This is … a poetry that does not seek parental approval or any other approval, a poetry that liberates from the limitations of criticism of the discourse, and a poetry that … finds the independent place that revolts and refuses.”

Did Laor’s poetry “work”? Did Zonsheine’s commitment “work”? In either sense of the word, at any given moment, how do we measure? If we say No, does that mean we give up on poetry? On resistance? With such obedience?