Though I'm still struggling with a hair-raising poem draft, I've had a productive writing week business-wise (though I am reluctant to use the word business in the context of my un-business-like career). As I told you earlier this week, the Solstice MFA program has contracted me to teach a lyric-essay class. In addition, I've been checking proofs and filling out paperwork for the first of several Same Old Story poems that will appear in state poet laureate Wesley McNair's Take Heart newspaper column. Autumn House Press has just announced the release of the third edition of The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, which includes several of my poems. I've also agreed to join the book-review staff at Green Mountains Review, and next week Vox Populi will be publishing my cranky literary-political essay "The Marketing of American Individualism."
And I am standing here at my desk, on this dim morning in the waning of the year, drinking black coffee, listening to the dryer rumble, writing to you, and thinking that nothing that I have done, either publicly or privately, has made even the slightest bit of difference in a world in which schoolchildren are slaughtered in the name of God.
I suspect that you, too, are looking at your own life, your own accomplishments and struggles, in light of this continuing barrage of evil. We are are, essentially, helpless.
I don't know what to do with this feeling. Do you?
4 comments:
“September 11 revealed one ground for hope….The terrorists’ resolve to make us feel we have no power showed that in fact we do. For they revealed how far evil as well as resistance to it remain in individual human hands. A few men with determination and pocket-knives killed thousands in an instant and set events in motion that threaten the earth as a whole. This would be reason for dismay, or at best for reflection, were it not for Flight 93….They failed to overcome the terrorists but succeeded in assuring that the plane crashed into an empty field. They died as heroes die (and) proved not only that human beings have freedom; we can use it to affect a world we fear we don’t control.”
- Susan Nieman, Evil in Modern Thought
Dawn,
I can honestly say there is not a day that goes by in which I do not find myself contemplating the nature of humanity, particularly as it exists in American culture. I have found myself lately listening to lots of lectures by Noam Chomsky and also some of the lectures of Joseph Campbell.
In David's response he echoes the word terrorist, a word, a tool, popularized by the American military industrial complex, or corporate congress, etc.
Here then is what I think we as Americans can do to destroy the evil the aforementioned ruling elite have piece by piece made an American institution of. We stop using their words. We make demands of our elected officials, and by that I mean we stop allowing them to not answer questions that need answering - questions about our infrastructure, education and healthcare to name a few. We must eliminate this single party of businessmen and begin again running this country for the people. Madison was wrong about the great beast, we the people, and as such, ever since the framing of our Constitution it seems that there is liberty and justice for some.
We must use our words Dawn. We must make them count and we must take the taskmasters to task. I know of no better way than through poetry. I am truly struggling right now to pursue a writing life, trapped as I am in this cubicle. That's no excuse, I know. I need to write more poetry I need to read more poetry.
I want to read all of Carolyn Forché's anthology "Against Forgetting" Our rallying cry is in there. The key to organizing ourselves and our efforts to changing America are in there. I believe this with all my heart.
We must use our words.
From - The City
BY C. P. Cavafy
TR. BY Edmund Keeley
"Wherever I turn, wherever I look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here, /
where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.”
Yes, we are poets so we must use our words. At the same time, as poets, we have to comprehend that our words are almost always forms of witness, not solutions. This is a vital task, but I still wake up in the night feeling powerless.
Where you have to get to as a human being (in name, anyway) to kill children by the score is unfathomable by most of us, which in itself may be its own kind of hope. As one theologian has pointed out, the fact that we’re shocked and puzzled by evil means it’s not normal. I notice the anthology you mention, Nicholas, looks like witness poetry of the twentieth century. No surprise: the century we were born in specialized in murderousness, and as someone recently pointed out, on a scale that dwarfed other eras, even back to the Mongols and beyond. The helpless feeling Dawn speaks about must be common to most of us when confronted with these evil things. For that reason I liked Nieman’s point, however bleakly it was put. And while the term “terrorist” may have been coopted by those in power for their own ends, I still think it’s a distinction worth making. So while I agree with Dawn: Auden’s “poetry makes nothing happen” is of course right in a way, it does make something happen when it witnesses. Which is where its power comes from. For what it’s worth, I’m so glad you both write. And, reading your comments, I couldn’t help but think of Auden’s other lines, however overused, so I’m adding them here:
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
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