At Rutgers University’s 1997 conference on “Poetry and the Public Sphere,” I was invited to read my work and to make some remarks at a panel on “Poetry, Feminism(s) and the Difficult Wor(l)d.” Other panelists were Meena Alexander, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Susan Stanford Friedman, Alicia Ostriker, and Bob Perelman.
I am enormously pleased to participate in this realization of the visions and work of so many hands, along with poets and readers from so many poetic communities. Recently, I read an essay by Charles Bernstein criticizing a facile multiculturalism that can “have the effect of transforming unresolved ideological divisions and antagonisms into packaged tours of... local color of gender, race, sexuality, ethnicity, region, class. ... In this context, diversity can be a way of restoring a highly idealized conception of a unified American culture that effectively quiets dissent.” Many of us, I think, have had our doubts about such a “multiculturalism” or “diversity,” or symbolic “inclusion,” when the real question in our radically unequal society is power and privilege.
On the other hand, as I read and travel my way around the United States, it’s clear that dissenting poetic communities of many kinds are flourishing far from curricular packaging, textbooks, and anthologies. When I speak of communities I do not mean poets who speak as one, or readers or listeners for whom a poem works in only one way. Women poets, immigrant poets, prison poets, Latino poets, to name a few, have many voices and many poetic strategies. In this confused and embittered country, poetry is being made and sought at points of stress, at moments of emergence, by unpredictable voices, in unpredictable places. By contrast, a deadly sameness still pervades the poetics of well-known and prestigious literary magazines, and the products of MFA programs, where poems are produced as commodities in the academic marketplace.
I want to give a brief acknowledgment to this panel’s title, “Poetry, Feminism(s) and the Difficult Wor(l)d.” I take it that poetry—if it is poetry—is liberatory at its core. Not revolution itself, “but a way of knowing / why it must come.” I believe there can be no women’s liberation under capitalism. Women’s liberation—a more concrete and expressive term than “feminism”—will both deliver and be brought to birth by any genuine emancipatory movement. Without women’s liberation, no continuing revolution. Without continuing revolution—the long struggle for radical equality—no women’s liberation. We cannot hope, or work effectively, for one without the other.
But the thing I want to focus on here is the question of poetry’s very medium, language: what we think it can and cannot do, and how. I will draw on two apparently polarized attitudes and try to see what each can offer us. One holds that poetry is pure exploration of language, a kind of “research” into language, which by its rejection of conventional expectations is inherently subversive to dominant and oppressive structures, and to the degradation of language these structures have produced. Poetry that seeks to communicate directly, beyond or beside its formal dynamics, can only fall into collusion with this degradation, this impoverishment, of language. Charles Bernstein, again, has called our public space “befouled” by “spectacularly inequitable distributions of power.” In this “befouled” public sphere poetry cannot hope to lend itself to social change through conventional or contaminated methods of communication. Language, the medium, “autonomous and self-sufficient,” must do its work by its own methods. I am, of necessity, abbreviating and simplifying here.
In a recent essay in The Nation, June Jordan writes of the poetic and activist responses of her Berkeley poetry students to the passage of Proposition 209 in California, the attempt to strike down affirmative action. “They believe someone will come along and listen to what they have to say. . . . They believe that important, truthful conversation between people fosters and defends the values of democratic equality. They believe that other people deserve supreme efforts of care and honest utterance. . . . They reach for words that create rather than attentuate community” (emphasis mine). Included in her essay are poems by three of the young poet-activists; they are fresh and passionate political poems.
On the next two pages of The Nation are four poems by the winners of the magazine’s “Discovery” Prize. Here is the familiar sameness—the well-written, capable mediocrity of American middle-ground status-quo poetry. The poets are neither mining the medium of language for subversive purposes, nor are they reaching for words to create a community of resistance. Subversion is not even an issue here. It struck me, reading them, that the range of “Language” poetics and the range of revolutionary poetics, worldwide, have more in common with each other than either has with this middle ground.
Obviously, I believe language is capable of expressing both simple and complex intentions and meanings, and more—the physicality of our lives. In a country where native-born fascistic tendencies, allied to the practices of the “free” market, have been eviscerating language of meaning, academic postmodern theory has to shoulder its own responsibility for mistrust of the word and attendant paralysis of the will. The public space is indeed befouled. But I also think that Bernstein and others are right when they imply that threadbare language, frozen metaphors, poems in which we “cling to / what we’ve grasped too well” are part of the problem, and that the power of a poem to subvert, to “intensify / our relationships” depends on its being poetry—taking on the medium of language with all its difficulties. Difficulties of relationship and strangeness, of truth-telling and torsion and how the netted bridge is to be suspended over the gorge.
The longer I live, the more history I live through, the more poetries I read and hear aloud, the more I recognize the sheer difficulty and multiplicity of our art, the absolute necessity for it in this time, and the ethical and artistic responsibilities it demands.
I want the tradition of the oral voice in poetry, the remembering of what they tell us to forget. I want the landscape of the visual field on the page, exploding formal verse expectations. I want a poetry that is filmic as a film can be poetic, a poetry that is theater, performance, voice as body and body as voice. I want everything possible for poetry. I want to write, and read, different kinds of poems for different urgencies and kinds of pleasure. I don’t believe any single poem can speak to all of us, nor is that necessary; but I believe poems can reach many for whom they were not consciously written, sometimes in ways the poet never expected.
I want to read, and make, poems that are out there on the edge of meaning yet can mean something to the collective. I don’t believe it’s only the isolated visionary who goes to the edge of meaning; I think the collective needs to go there too, because in fact that edge is where we can see what it would really be like to live without meaning, dissociated.
But I also want to read, and make, poems that remind me “why it must come,” why what June Jordan calls the logic of “the infinite connectedness of human life” demands equality in community. This poetry is worth our most sacred and profane passion, because it embodies our desire, what we might create, in the difficult world around the poem.
1997