Antonio Gramsci wrote of the culture of the future that “new” individual artists can’t be manufactured: art is a part of society—but that to imagine a new socialist society is to imagine a new kind of art that we can’t foresee from where we now stand. “One must speak,” Gramsci wrote, “of a struggle for a new culture, that is, for a new moral life that cannot but be intimately connected to a new intuition of life, until it becomes a new way of feeling and seeing reality and, therefore, a world intimately ingrained in ‘possible artists’ and ‘possible works of art.’”
In any present society, a distinction needs to be made between the “avant-garde that always remains the same”—what a friend of mine has called “the poetry of false problems”—and a poetics searching for transformative meaning on the shoreline of what can now be thought or said. Adonis, writing of Arab poetry, reminds Arab poets that “modernity should be a creative vision, or it will be no more than a fashion. Fashion grows old from the moment it is born, while creativity is ageless. Therefore not all modernity is creativity, but creativity is eternally modern.”
For now, poetry has the capacity—in its own ways and by its own means—to remind us of something we are forbidden to see. A forgotten future: a still-uncreated site whose moral architecture is founded not on ownership and dispossession, the subjection of women, torture and bribes, outcast and tribe, but on the continuous redefining of freedom—that word now held under house arrest by the rhetoric of the “free” market. This ongoing future, written off over and over, is still within view. All over the world its paths are being rediscovered and reinvented: through collective action, through many kinds of art. Its elementary condition is the recovery and redistribution of the world’s resources that have been extracted from the many by the few.
There are other ghostly presences here along with Hugh MacDiarmid: Qaifi Azami. William Blake. Bertolt Brecht. Gwendolyn Brooks. Aimé Césaire. Hart Crane. Roque Dalton. Rubén Darío. Robert Duncan. Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Forugh Farrokhzad. Robert Hayden. Nazim Hikmet. Billie Holiday. June Jordan. Federico García Lorca. Audre Lorde. Bob Marley. Vladimir Mayakovsky. Thomas McGrath. Pablo Neruda. Lorine Niedecker. Charles Olson. George Oppen. Wilfred Owen. Pier Paolo Pasolini. Dalia Ravikovitch. Edwin Rolfe. Muriel Rukeyser. Léopold Senghor. Nina Simone. Bessie Smith. César Vallejo.
I don’t speak these names, by the way, as a canon: they are voices mingling in a long conversation, a long turbulence, a great, vexed, and often maligned tradition, in poetry as in politics. The tradition of radical modernism, which crosses and recrosses the map of poetry. The tradition of those who have written against the silences of their time and location. Without it—in poetry as in politics—our world is unintelligible.
A friend asks: And what about Baudelaire, Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, Gerard Manley Hopkins, D. H. Lawrence, Montale, Plath, Ezra Pound, Rimbaud, Rilke, Wallace Stevens, Yeats? In the context of that conversation their poems flare up anew, signals flashing across contested, even infected waters. I’m not talking about literary “intertextuality” or a “world poetry” but about what Muriel Rukeyser said poetry can be: an exchange of energy, which, in changing consciousness, can effect change in existing conditions.
Translation can both betray and make possible that exchange of energy. I’ve relied—both today and in my lifelong sense of what poetry can be—on translation: the carrying-over, the trade routes of language and literature. And the questions of who is translated, who are the translators, how and by whom the work is done and distributed are also, in a world of imbalanced power and language, political questions. Let’s bear in mind the Triangle Trade as a quintessential agony of translation.
In his Poetics of Relation Édouard Glissant meditates on the transmutations opening out of that abyss of the Middle Passage. He writes of the Caribbean that,
though this experience [of the abyss] made you, original victim … an exception, it became something shared, and made us, the descendants, one people among others. Peoples do not live on exception. Relation is not made up of things that are foreign but of shared knowledge….
This is why we stay with poetry…. We know ourselves as part and as crowd, in an unknown that does not terrify. We cry our cry of poetry. Our boats are open, and we sail them for everyone.
Finally: there is always that in poetry which will not be grasped, which cannot be described, which survives our ardent attention, our critical theories, our classrooms, our late-night arguments. There is always (I am quoting the poet/translator Américo Ferrari) “an unspeakable where, perhaps, the nucleus of the living relation between the poem and the world resides.”
The living relation between the poem and the world: difficult knowledge, operating theater where the poet, committed, goes on working.
Santa Cruz, California
2006