This is an extract from a panel on “The Political Poem” that Fred Wah, as Parliamentary Poet Laureate, organized as an adjunct to the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing event held in Ottawa on March 6, 2013. This is a small selection of conversation during the Q&A at the end of the panel. A video of the full panel along with text is available at: http://www.parl.gc.ca/About/Parliament/Poet/index.asp?language=E¶m=3&id=5&id2=5.
Nicole Brossard: I know for sure that when the “I” and the “we” encounter, it’s a special moment in history. It doesn’t happen very often. It happens when there is a quest of identity and a refusal of alienation. Poets like Leopold Sedar Senghor, Aimé Césaire, Gaston Miron, and Michèle Lalonde witnessed to that in their poetry. That encounter of “we” and “I” also happened with the feminist and lesbian movements and here I specifically think of poets like Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde for the USA, Dionne Brand and Daphne Marlatt for Canada, Louky Bersianik and myself for Quebec.
There is an inexhaustible utopian resource within us that wants and needs to explore the best of ourselves, especially when the “I” and the “we” have been disfigured by alienation, exploitation, and domination. There is always a part in us that wants to resurface, to recover and deploy itself with dignity. In order to do so it has to constantly move from the “I” to the “we” and vice versa. Certainly in writing, one is always alone: alone with one’s experience, emotions, thoughts, memory, all of it filtered and nourished by language, because of course there is no literature if a person’s emotions and thoughts are not processed, filtered, and renewed by language as a whole but mostly by the mother tongue. And when I say “mother tongue,” I include, of course, memories of childhood, but also the history of our own literature, which usually accompanies every writer during the act of writing.
Fred Wah: Dionne, I wonder if the notion of this problematic of the “I/we” enters your thoughts in terms of the foreign that we encounter in your book Inventory.1 The foreign becomes that thing that we both want to engage and move into because it’s fascinating, it’s interesting, it’s mysterious. At the same time it becomes that wall sometimes that we want to work against.
Dionne Brand: First let me say that I think Nicole answered this perfectly and beautifully. I think that I was dealing in this particular book, Inventory, with this notion of a “we.” Yeah, that even the “we” is a kind of contested terrain — who is “we”? The number of ways in which North America has been invested, is invested, in a “we” and — but how that “we” becomes daily undermined by corporate capital. You know, “we,” what we love, what we must defend, etc. . . So, I wanted to make a — and sometimes we want to make a separation between that “them” — there’s a “them” doing these things and there’s an “us” who are really good people. I guess the book is trying to complicate that idea that “we” are really good people, you know. When are we really good people, how are we really good people, how do we know we are really good? You know, so I wanted to shake loose, who is the “we” when we speak. Who are we speaking for and about and if we are a “we” then there is a “them” and that language was much — sometimes in those broadcasts (on the first war in Iraq referenced in Inventory) you couldn’t tell the difference between the reporter and the government. “We” were bombing some place — wait a minute! Yes, and “we” are indeed, even those of us who feel we are not implicated, we are. I wanted to own that, to own, what we buy and what we buy into so that we may be aware all of the time of the shifting of that pronoun, if you will. Equally so, (regarding another kind of “we,” a benign and welcoming one, I discover in Inventory) I walk into the shop at Cairo and the lovely man who says to me, “Welcome home, cousin.” But, of course, there are so many similarities and so many differences; gender being one — a major one, yes. “Come back alone tomorrow,” he says. So, I want to work in that. I think a poet, I think a poet works in that unresolved space trying to — not trying to find a solution, but trying to analyze those moments, to analyze those possibilities.
FW: The pronoun, of course, is an interesting problem, but prepositions are also interesting and Dionne raised the question of “how”; the “how” we can go about it. She used the term “recuperate.” One of the desires, at least from some quarters, is for the poem to be recuperative, for there to be some solution, some resolution. I’m not sure if recuperation is the right term — I can align cooperation with solution there, but I’m interested in the helplessness that Nicole mentioned, this sense of hopelessness I feel particularly in a younger generation and how to handle that hopelessness, yet we keep working away at our practice. I wonder if either of you would like to respond to this notion of what can we recuperate by practising this working at words.
NB: I have the impression that everything is possible, all options are open, despite the despair, the last lines of the poems I read, because words are virtual and our brains are so complex that they continually make life virtual. Everything continually becomes possible again despite the way history repeats itself, as you mentioned with reference to [Andrea] Cohen’s poem “Hiroshima,” etc. Despite history repeating itself, everything remains virtual. And I believe that all poems, whether they are sad or not, are an act of life and testify to the living. And that is why poetry is so precious. I like to cite the line from the French poet René Daumal, who said, “Prose tells you something. Poetry does something to you.” And that’s the difference. That is also why I thank you for being here at ten in the morning and letting us do something to you through poetry, because these emotions are becoming rarer and rarer. We go to the cinema or the theatre to feel alive, or we feel alive when we are hit by the hardships of life. This is incredible, really. So, it is up to us to live life fully too, despite all the real hardships that surround us. But I know that the pleasure of words is also a pleasure derived from living and from recognizing this complexity — and I’ll use the word “beauty” because there is beauty in trying to understand life.
DB: I want to propose — to say a couple of things. One. Sartre says: “One need not hope in order to undertake one’s work,”2 and I’m okay with that. You know, the work we do, this work in language, is to make new meanings, yes. To understand things differently; to put them at various angles to each other in order to see them newly and differently, in order to proceed — to see the possibilities for proceeding in different ways. I love — there’s a line by Derek Walcott that I love and I just hope that I remember it properly here, but it is simply this, “After this sentence rain will fall”3 — this is the most perfect line in the English language because what it says is something about the possibility of the future, but it also says that once I utter something it is — it shapes the air that follows, right. It shapes the world that follows and, I mean — if there is something called “hope” then that may be it; that what one utters, shapes the world that follows. I think poets are trying to make new ways of seeing the world. That is what a metaphor is, putting two totally different things together and making a new thing altogether. So, one is constantly in the process of remaking meaning and remaking language. So, despite the bad news I bring in the poems, there’s good news ahead somewhere, you know.
FW: I think it’s wonderful how Dionne keeps choosing these “re-” words, which is this prefix that recuperates and brings us back. One of the things that seems to be coming up here is the — and Nicole mentioned the virtual nature of our imaginations and which — I’ll kind of throw out William Carlos Williams’s “Only the imagination is real.”4 You both seem to be proposing that at least the imagination is a place that we can practise this notion of recuperation, of remaking, of renovating, in a sense as another well-known poet, Daphne Marlatt, makes use of it in composing Salvage. Kind of rewriting, literally, redoing it again and again and again, and it’s that sense of iteration and repetition that’s part — so much part of work — I’ll try it again, I’ll try it again. I wonder if you would like to comment on how you seem to be offering imagination as the answer to my question about hopelessness.
NB: Well, we don’t have much choice, indeed. We don’t have much choice because the news is bad, but we know we bear something in ourselves that is interesting and we have to work with that and on that in a certain way. It’s — yes, we absolutely have no choice and I’ll stop there. I’ll stop there. It’s funny, in the early twentieth century people were all buying pianos and they were buying pianos not because they liked music, but because they wanted to make sure that their piano would make more noise than the piano of the neighbour. So, now we live also in a kind of crazy society where we keep making a lot of noise to cover the noise of our neighbour, and the poet is making a sort of beautiful silence and that’s a chance to start all over with that silence.
1 Inventory (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2006).
2 From Sartre’s 1946 lecture in defence of Existentialism, “Existentialism is a Humanism,” https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm.
3 From Walcott’s poem “Map of the New World,” The Fortuante Traveller (New York: Farrar, 1981), 25. The Walcott line is actually “At the end of this sentence, rain will begin.”
4 From the poem “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” in Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (New York: New Directions, 1962), 179.