Juliana Spahr
paper for UCSC panel on Poetry and Crisis, April 2004

1.
The title of this panel comes from an MLA panel of 2001. Although this MLA panel does not show up in the MLA program. The panel was a last moment response by Charles Bernstein to a crisis that was brought on by the poet Charles Tomlinson being unable to attend.

I just used the title of panel for my paper. And then Roxy et al approached me about this panel. I just want to point out that I can't take credit for the title.

But, I began that paper at the MLA like this:

Shortly after I finished Everybody's Autonomy, my critical book, I got to thinking, as I'm sure many have, about how many years it had taken me to write. Then I started thinking about all the things that had happened in those years. Some of these things were personal, the death of my father for instance. But I also realized I could chart my progress through this book through various U.S. military actions. I began the book during the Gulf War because I remember watching the coverage to avoid beginning writing. I finished rewriting it while we were bombing Belgrade. When I realized this, I felt a momentary hope that I had been writing during unique times, that I was writing in a time of crisis. But as I thought it over, I realized I had done no writing at any point in my career when the U.S. was not bombing someone. I wrote this paper, for instance, during the bombing of Afghanistan and the continued bombing of Iraq. Even my sometimes home was being bombed: as I wrote this as the U.S. military was practicing their bombing skills on the Makua valley on the North Shore of Oahu. I could go on. I'm living in New York City this year. Some where around 3,000 people died in the World Trade Center while I watched from a street corner in Brooklyn. But that is nothing. Some 72,000 have died from AIDS in New York City since 1981. There is, thus, constantly crisis. We cannot say that unique, or interesting, times arrived on September 11.

Nothing has changed since then. It is all crisis all the time. And a great deal of it caused by the United States. I rewrote this paper during the post-Iraq-war war.

2.
When I was in graduate school in the 90s, a lot of time in graduate seminars was spent arguing about that Auden line "poetry makes nothing happen." The truth or untruth of this line was something we debated as if our lives depended on it. We never really looked at the poem. We didn't mention Yeats. We refused to complicate the line, to wonder if poetry makes something happen by making nothing happen. We read with a sledgehammer because to some extent, our critical and poetic lives did depend on whether poetry makes things happen or not. The truth or untruth of this line would impact our writing and how we saw other's writings, would privilege a different set of works, would require us to direct our attention differently.

I think many people left those seminars agreeing with Auden. I just left them confused. I left with those questions about does poetry matter; is poetry enough; what is it about poetry and crisis unanswered except on a personal level. I could tell a personal story about how poetry mattered to me, how it had dramatically changed my thinking about things and how it had reshaped my brain in ways that I couldn't have done on my own or even with the help of various psychoactive drugs. It was clear to me that poetry changed my social life very profoundly (the huge number of poets that I count as friends) and changed my intellectual life also (how, say Ginsberg's Howl blew my mind in high school starting off a whole chain of events where I realized I didn't have to follow my peers down the path of right wing bigotry and narrow mindedness because my thinking that wasn't the way to go had a whole literature that supported me). I was changed. My mind was changed.

But somehow, for reasons that I still can't fathom, despite the intensity and urgency and endlessness of these graduate school debates, poetry's role in various political movements was never mentioned. We were in Buffalo but we never mentioned that a few miles down the road a mere thirty years ago the prisoners of Attica prepared to fight for showers and education by circulating copies of Claude McKay's "If We Must Die." At least one of us had a boyfriend who owned a copy of Poetry and Militancy in Latin America but we never quoted from this essay where Dalton states that "the poet must acquaint all his comrades with Nazim Hikmet or Pablo Neruda, and give them a clear concept of cultural work within the context of general revolutionary activity." We didn't even mention William Carlos Williams's famous statement that "It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there" even while we often talked about Williams. One of us wore a Che t-shirt but we didn't discuss why he might see the "new impulse" of "artistic inquiry" a crucial part of the new man. We didn't turn to Zapata and quote him saying "It is not only by shooting bullets in the battlefields that tyranny is overthrown, but also by hurling ideas of redemption, words of freedom and terrible anathemas against the hangman that people bring down dictators and empires." We didn't think about what Haunani Kay Trask might mean when she describes her poetry as "both de-colonization and re-creation"; and as "expose and celebration at one and the same time"; as "a furious, but nurturing aloha for Hawai'i." We didn't mention Mao's two fronts of the pen and the gun. Or Mayakovsky's claim that one must begin poetic work only after one first has "the presence of a problem in society, the solution of which is conceivable only in poetical terms." We never once mentioned the attention Fanon and Ngugi and Gramsci and Lenin and Cabral and others give to art and literature's role in political education.

Our main concern with this Auden line was how to make our own story of our mind being changed-our political education-matter. We tried to write out of being white and articulate and privileged even as we tried to write against this-both as critics and as poets. In many ways we were not typical graduate students, if there is such a thing. We saw community as more crucial than professional development. We spent more time editing and publishing small journals and books than researching our dissertations. We met in bars late at night and had fights about form's politics when we should have been in bed and sober. Most of us were skeptical about conventional ways of writing poems, which we saw as part of the, some, "system," and also of the institution of graduate study which we saw as training us mainly in critique and alienation. We knew that poets in the United States risked writing for the poetry wing of the Hollywood/military industrial complex and we didn't want to do that. Most of us preferred Brecht over Adorno. But we didn't have many good models about how to take on what it means to be white and articulate and privileged and see it as in any way related to something such as the crisis of anticolonial struggles. We could see we were a part of the most powerful nation who abused its power and we could see how there was much poetry that was complaining about this abuse of power in the world, but we couldn't seen any possibility of alliance with these poetries. And we missed a lot because of this.

I have a certain forgiveness for our narrow focus. In the late 90s, the more radical discussions of canon had been dismissed as being "identity politics." The term, even for those of us who refused to use it because of its reactionary connotations, was symbolic though of how we were led to believe there were a series of rules about identity to be followed and thus a series of divisions between cultures to be respected. While we acknowledged the importance of and taught from a multicultural curriculum, some with devotion and some with resignation, we felt a certain nervousness about appropriation. And instead of thinking hard about how to get rid of this nervousness or how taking on and responding to this nervousness might shape our work and make it better with its hard questions, we just avoided work by people who were not in the same category or who did not write from similar amounts of privilege as ourselves when we talked about things that were relevant or important to our thinking and our writing. We would not have turned to anticolonial nationalists such as Ngugi for support in these debates about the Auden line because we were generally not involved in anticolonial movements and had not been to Africa or wherever and did not see our writing as having to take a stand on colonization. This was naive on our parts. No writing escapes being a part of anything. And the Mohawk Nation was right down the road if we need any close to home evidence of colonization. I think for the most part we respected the concerns of these communities. And the form that our respect took was a dismissal even as we said it was a refusal to belittle their goals with a claim of alliance on our part.

Basically, we were having, as Walter Lew pointed out in a recent email, a contemporary discussion that has a short history. One that, as he wrote, happens "only in modernity's (and imperialism's) unprecedented states of alienation and cultural frenzy/morbidity"; one that is "very historically/culturally circumscribed." This question of does poetry matter to crisis was one that was only possible right now at this very moment but we for some reason did not mention this, did not bother to wonder why we were having this discussion right now, a discussion that so many others from other times would have found absurd.

And we were missing other issues as we had this debate. Of course poetry matters. Of course poetry cannot be anything but political (for even to be apolitical is also a sort of politics). It should have been obvious.
Here is my argument, such as it is: this debate was for us a sort of blinder. The debate about if poetry matters or not was one that kept us from harder, bigger issues, that let us off from having to discuss how it did matter and then now what, what we had to DO in other words. It let us not have to move on to consider weightier issues-like who we wrote with and on and why or who we read with and on and why or even who we talk with and on and why. We avoided the now what. Now what, who do we respect. Now what, who do we publish in our journal. Now what, who do we invite to read in our series. Now what, where do we put our bodies, our time, our commitments. But we couldn't figure out the now what because the question about whether poetry matters or not somehow so occupied us that we couldn't get to the next stage of wondering what uses of poetry in other parts of the world are instructive. The question led us somewhere, it led us to think that we could fracture English's power by fracturing its syntaxes, by stuttering through its words but then it stranded us there. It didn't lead us to alliance. It let us think that we could do it alone, just with words.

Today our world erupts and poetry is one of the tools that get used in this eruption. When Osama bin Laden wanted to talk about the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole at his son's wedding he did it in poetry. None of my years of poetry study and late night talks about the politics of form gave me the tools to understand this moment. I turned to Steven Caton's study of poetry in Yemen to try and understand "the way in which poetry helps constitute tribal identity." That began to help.

One could say that I am just talking about cross cultural difficulties. But I think not exclusively. Because our dominant poetry paradigms don't help that much to explain a number of the most popular poems of our own culture, such as the poem "American Bad Ass" by Kid Rock that the U.S.S. Cole blasted as it limped out of Yemen. It might very well be that poetry swaggers and provokes and constitutes tribal identity as much as it calms or comforts or counters any darkness and perhaps the scary rebel yell of "American Bad Ass" is the best reply right now to the discussion of whether poetry matters. I guess I am asking for a model of study that acknowledges poetry as intimate with crisis. A model that might help explain Timothy McVeigh turning to Victorian poet Henley's "Invictus" before he gets executed. A model that might help explain the intensity of my own relation with poetry which I almost never find a comfort and almost always find provocative. And I guess I'm calling for an embrace of the poetry is political assumption so as to begin to move the debate to these issues of now what.

3.
But now to is poetry enough? And the answer is of course not. Poetry is only one part of enough. The part that changes the brain. In an email the other day New York poet Allison Cobb claimed she was paraphrasing Charles Bernstein as she wrote "the fact that poetry won't stop violence is not a reason not to try." I want to tweak her paraphrase a little to something like the fact that poetry hasn't led all that many poets into action doesn't mean we shouldn't ask where our poetry leads us finally. If poetry changes our head, and I think this is irrefutable, how does it also change our feet? It is the feet that Auden denies when at the beginning of the "poetry makes nothing happen" stanza he says that Ireland is unchanged and at the end when he says poetry survives as a mouth. But in reply, one could point to poet Rigoberto Lopez Perez after all who shot and killed Somoza in 1956. And it is feet that Dalton, Che, Zapata, Trask, Mao, and Mayakovsky want changed.

 

Note: Many thanks to members of Subpoetics-l for help with this essay. All errors are, however, my own and not the fault of anyone subscribed to subpoetics-l.