RESIST MUCH / OBEY LITTLE: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance edited by Michael Boughn, John Bradley, Brenda Cárdenas, Lynne DeSilva-Johnson, Kass Fleisher, Roberto Harrison, Kent Johnson, Andrew Levy, Nathaniel Mackey, Rubén Medina, Philip Metres, Nita Noveno, Julie Patton, Margaret Randall, Michael Rothenberg, Chris Stroffolino,
Anne Waldman, Marjorie Welish, Tyrone Williams
(Dispatches Editions / Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2017)
Poetry and Resistance
It
seems incredible that this very thick book, here in its finished form, was
conceived, solicited, selected, assembled, edited, and designed in little more
than two months. Between the conception of the idea on the surreal morning of
November 10th, 2016, and our sending of the volume to press a short
fortnight after Donald Trump’s Inauguration, twenty editors of diverse
background somehow managed, in emergency mode, to rally more than 350 poets
from various countries into nearly 740 pages.
That
emergency mode was triggered, of course, by a brute and very “non-alternative”
fact, one which masses of people around the globe are still struggling to
fathom: that a racist, misogynist, bullying charlatan has succeeded in
snake-oiling his way to supreme power by manipulating the fears and despairs of
a substantial minority of the American electorate. As we write this, barely two
weeks after the Inauguration, his bizarre Cabinet nominees seem cast for
something like a new Reality TV Doomsday series. His personal Oval Office
advisors, whose appointments don’t require approval by anyone, appear even more
unnerving: smugly reactionary in their ideology; candid fans of current
neo-fascist movements in Europe; and with a third-column crush, like their
boss, on a crime-linked tyrant in Moscow with whom they very possibly colluded
during the campaign. Already, the new Administration is rattling WMD sabers at
China and Iran, endorsing the use of torture, tearing up climate-protection
policies, stating its intent to deport vast numbers of minimum-wage working
people and their families, preparing to cancel nuclear arms agreements,
blocking people of Muslim countries from entering the U.S., abusing dissenting
judges, launching plans for a 1000- mile-long “beautiful” Wall, and threatening
a Middle East meltdown with plans to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to
Jerusalem. From all appearances, this is
only the opening salvo in a scorched-earth war against most social and
economic progress since the days of the New Deal. And against who knows what
else, or with what horrific perils.
We can
hear some people asking: What purpose, for goodness’ sake, could poetry
possibly have in face of such an extraordinary and patently dangerous
situation? What would the point of an anthology like this be, beyond providing
its contributors a self-satisfied feeling they have registered their outraged,
paper-bound dissent? What relation would a collection like this have to the
duties and tasks of citizens at large in the coming four years or more,
vis-à-vis the new political reality and the mounting call for sustained
resistance?
Excellent
questions all. And the last thing we want to do is pretend that they can be
answered with any real certainty. On the contrary, we say: within the
unprecedented current conjuncture, the posing of queries and problems
themselves is the pressing and vital point. Confident solutions, for sure, are
not that favorable to poetry’s drive and spirit (or to those of any art, for
that matter). In that sense, it’s probably high time to shelve Percy Bysshe
Shelley’s quaintly heroic adage that “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators
of the world.” Or to at least dispense with its casual interpretation. For
poets, the record plainly shows, have no more insight about most things than
anyone else does. Nor are poets necessarily any more moral or less hypocritical
than politicians, architects, cab drivers, nurses, or construction workers on
the forthcoming Keystone and Dakota Oil Pipelines.
That
said, W.H. Auden wasn’t necessarily spot-on, either, in his own famous adage
that “Poetry makes nothing happen.” True, in the United States these days,
poetry is a marginal activity (self-proudly so), its products largely read only
by poets themselves (albeit a fair number of people, to be sure). And there can
be little doubt the professionalized lodgings of a large segment of America’s
poets in the literary suburbs of Academia over the past decades has only
deepened the genre’s isolation. But it would be a mistake to think this is the
natural state of the art: world history shows, and in fairly recent times (not
least in the nations to our south), that poetry, sometimes with surprising
force and velocity, can have new and unsuspected impacts, especially in times
of cultural upheaval. In Nicaragua, for instance, in the revolution against the
Somoza dictatorship, it proved centripetal. In Chile, within the struggle
against the Pinochet regime, avant-garde poetic shock actions had remarkable
resonance. Plenty more examples are to hand.
Even
in the United States, poetry’s current social and popular marginality is
relatively new. In the 19th century, and up until the first decades of the
20th, for instance, verse had a mass readership, and one hardly needed a
college degree to engage it seriously, or to be able to recite it from memory.
Not long later, in the 1950s and 60s, a new poetics arose outside the highbrow
precincts of University English Departments, then dominated by a narrowminded
formalist clique. This insurgency rapidly became a force within the emerging
counter-culture, proving to have deep and extended impacts on the mass culture
at large (think of the Beats, for example). Shortly thereafter, the
movement against the Vietnam War spawned a rich upsurge of political literature,
with poets regularly taking the stage at mass marches, their books selling in
the many thousands, their poems mimeographed without heed of copyright and
passed from hand to hand. And the bardic impulse of social lyric during that
period joined song, linking poetry back with its ancient roots (think of Dylan,
Baez, Seeger, others). More recently, the widespread Slam movement and numerous
artists within vanguard formations of hip-hop have been pushing--and to
stunning effect--poetic recitation into protest and social activism. These
“popular” forms of lyric expression will no doubt flourish in the next years
and bring forth new developments in radical content and prosodic means.
There
is good reason, therefore, to believe that poetic practice, across the formal
spectrum, may take on new dimensions of activist vision in the coming years.
Not only in modes, forms, and language proper, but in the ways that poets come
to see their roles within a generalized cultural defiance: coming to see their
praxis, that is, as more complex and fluid than traditional composition alone,
pushing the nature of poetic vocation into collective measures of performance
and action that move beyond the printed page. No one can now confidently
predict what paths of expression and commitment poetry will take in the coming
years, any more than one can confidently predict what fate awaits our
increasingly fragile planet as a whole. But there are many, many thousands of
practicing writers in the United States, spanning the banded red-shift of
aesthetic loyalties, and in their numbers and intellectual energies, they
constitute a potential force in their own right. Their resistance will be
registered in the embattled commons, and not just in journals, personal
collections, or anthologies like this one.
This
book, then, is not intended as an offering of unique, sophisticated “creative
writing.” It is, first and foremost, a collective, insurgent call that is part
and parcel of a sovereign people’s challenge to a narcissistic oligarch and his
lackeys, who smirk now from their temporary perches of power. Its pages are
bound in direct, literal ways, to the historic worldwide marches of January 22nd--and
they stand as evidence that the vast majority of American poets (and
artists and writers of all kind) revile the new reactionary dispensation.
And
what does it say, by the way, about the current Administration that virtually
no poets or artists will abide its ideology? Where are the poets who support
Donald Trump? What are their names? Why no Inaugural Poem to accompany lonely
Toby Keith on January 20th? (Though not that a President who doesn’t
read and whose tastes run to gold-plated toilet fixtures would request one.)
This book makes quite clear where today’s poets collectively stand, unique and
independent as each one is. They are united in resistance to the politics of
greed, intimidation, and divisiveness. In their gathering here--emblematic, to
be sure, of a vaster cultural opposition--there is a promise of solidarity and
collective action to come, the petty factions and coteries be damned, though
honest self-critique be exalted (a crucial difference). The book announces--and
this is immanent and key to its message and position--that though the new
reality has stirred emotions of hopelessness, isolation, and fear, it has also
given rise to deepening fellowship, stubborn hope, and fierce resistance. May
activists in the coming battles find inspiration in some of these poems and
share them widely with comrades and friends.
Our
book opens with an eerily prescient text, “Inauguration,” written in 1979, by
the great, underrecognized African-American poet Lorenzo Thomas. It closes with
one of Walt Whitman’s most neglected and misunderstood poems, “Respondez!”
first published (under a different title) in 1856. Whitman was one of the
world’s greatest poets of populist democracy, an idea that was still struggling
to find a home in the middle of the 19th century. Like all
historical beings, he suffered from biases of his time, but his commitment to democracy
and to the common people who are its essential actors was passionate,
visionary, and unshakeable. “Respondez!” was his angry, sharply ironic demand
that U.S. America respond to the betrayal of its democratic promise, its
abandonment of equality for oligarchy, of fraternity for institutionalized
racism and sexism, of spiritual generosity for greed and money grubbing, and of
the liberation of Eros for a violent, Calvinist repression of human energies.
His attack on U.S. American hypocrisy, his enraged, sardonic revelations of the
nation’s political and cultural self-delusions, rings all the more true today
as we witness the violent assault on egalitarian values and institutions
unleashed by the current regime in Washington.
But
the very same year he released “Respondez!” Whitman also composed the
rapidly-revered “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” one of the closest things to a
time-machine, linguistic or mechanical, ever made by a human being. In it,
Whitman intermingles past, present, and future in mystical, sometimes
unsettling ways. He addresses us head-on, in a kind of continuous, oceanic
temporal space, confidently aware that we are listening and looking back at
him, fully in his company on the democratic crossing. As he assures his readers
to-be-born, we deeply see what he sees and feel what he feels. The strange and
moving thing is that his voice is here with us, relaxed and common, crossing
over loud and clear, requesting our comradely presence and solidarity in the
mystery of time. And asking all generations to consider that our voices,
individual and collective, are to cross over and touch, in who knows what ways,
the unfolding present that has not passed and is yet to come.
Paradoxically,
while these two singular poems could not be more different, they are at the
same time deeply complementary. For it’s in their contradictory registers that
these near-simultaneous works (one discordantly dissident in its negative
critique; the other invitingly accessible in its affirmative hope) show how
profound and representative and complexly political a poet Whitman is: one who
is capable of moving in double-voiced ways between the registers of a clashing,
ironic protest and the prophetic harmonies of an unbounded solidarity. We will
require the tones and spirits of “Respondez!” and of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,”
both, in the coming period. We will need both the didactic and the visionary,
the demotic and the abstract, the satirical and the lyrical, combined in ever
more surprising ways, if poetry is to be heard beyond its generic provinces, in
which it has been too long caught. We need to be with Whitman.
In who
knows what ways? That is the large question we need to put to ourselves, as the
voices of a future poetry try to speak through ours (do they yet?) in this
difficult and momentous time. May this book be both a part of that asking, and
one small and inaugural contribution to an always unfinished reply.
Onward.
--Michael
Boughn and Kent Johnson
Editors,
Dispatches Editions
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