Josh Corey's Selah crossed my desk for the first time today; I was very impressed. Josh shows a tremendous amount of verbal gusto, allied with great stylistic acumen. The poems were much more original than his blog postings, which I find thoughtful, but often somewhat ingratiating/bien pensant - rhetorically impressive, you might say.

Today's post, covering literature/history/politics, is no exception. The somewhat ponderous self-righteousness of the left intellectuals, who feel they must recreate the wheel at every opportunity (justice, and the state, and violence, and so on).

I would encourage all bien-pensant anarchists to take a closer look at the radicalism of republican-democratic government (as attempted, albeit imperfectly - we live in an imperfect world, for the time being - here in the USA). What is democracy but the people taking responsibility for the state? What is democracy but the people establishing civil society as the measure of government? Anarchism would do away with the state entirely - how silly! Democracy takes responsibility for the state, without granting it "hegemony".

Inevitably, I can hear the wailing chorus, reciting the American government's serial betrayals of its own creed, its own careful & constitutional fragmentations of tyranny. The chorus from the left AND the right.

Take a look again at Auden's musings on Plato & the poets - their differing emotional chemistry. The poets are not Platonic-utopian, because, oddly enough, they are realists (immersed in the experiential & emotional particularity of the real).

Remember Stevens' lines about "the imperfect is our Paradise" (have I got it right?) - in flawed sounds & stubborn words, etc. -

Political dogmatism (gift of the 80s-90s) destroys the feeling for the future, the hope we carry along through the daily multifarious struggles - in the midst of human frailty - to make justice happen.

Josh talks about power. The American system is an inspired dispersal of power. It bears witness (on its good days) to the one thing that leavens power with grace : humility. What is the sign of humility in this world? Service, not power. "The greatest among you shall be your servant." That's the Jewish heritage for you : a recognition of the paradoxical (& hidden, & unworldly, & righteous, & pure) glory of freely-offered, unrewarded slavery to others. Love-in-action. Natural Law. Human (really human - childish, adoring) nature. "You must become as little children, if you would enter..."

Reginald Shepherd, in his emails to Josh Corey, made a forceful statement, judging from its effects : lots of bloggers commented - & even John Latta arose to defend Ron Silliman!

Are we all complete idiots, to be so fixated for so long on "poetry & politics"? Or has this been a real unresolved problem in contemporary poetry?

It would be hypocritical to stand for some kind of ivory-tower aesthetic purism. Everybody knows that style is suffused with, & motivated by, politics, at least in the broad "cultural" sense of the term (as in, "identity politics").

Underlying the American style & theory wars of the 20th century stands a deeper, Janus-like trend : the popularization of literature (poetry). Janus-like because it involves both the expansion and thinning-out of aesthetic literacy. Everyone writes poetry but nobody knows much about its history. It's not longer produced by the few and it's no longer read by the many!

Perhaps, then, the character of one's approach to tradition is the main catalyst for producing the affiliations with particular styles or literary groups. (This is an attempt at a literary, rather than political, interpretation of such phenomena.)

I'm with Shepherd, by the way. Ideology tends to shortcut literary criticism.

Think of a poetry of political diagnosis. Iliad, Odyssey, Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, Shakespeare, the Russian novelists... they all explored what could be acknowledged as good & right & normative, in contrast to all that could not be so acknowledged. Joyce wrote somewhere about Ulysses, something like, "I have affirmed what I was able to affirm about the modern world" (probably haven't got that quite right, sorry).

But their world is not our world; we're confronted with our own present-day spectacle of words & actions, plans & conflicts, ideals & realities, to be comprehended by & for ourselves.

To delve like reporters (rather than opinionators) into the history, turmoil, chaos, sickness, confusion, obtuseness, misapprehension, insight, foresight, suffering, sacrifice, greed, treachery, pride, hatred, war, ignorance... the whole 9 yards. That would be a sort of political poetry.

The dissonance between what an American might see as hopeful & right, and what the woman &/or man on the street in Cairo or Beijing or Uganda or Bogota thinks and experiences; the difference between democracy & privilege, on the one hand, and poverty & the ideologies - the para-politics - of rage & revenge, on the other; the difference everywhere, including the US, between ideals of equality and freedom and the reality of hardship and pinched opportunities, between ideas and facts... there's plenty to write about, in the political sphere, if you can find a way into its reality.

Politics

I'm for government.
I'm for business.
I'm for labor unions.
I'm for nonprofit organizations.
I'm for helping the poor & weak.
I'm for private enterprise.
I'm for the public sector.
I'm for the rule of law.
I'm for democracy.
I'm for persuasion, not force.
I'm for the sovereignty of the people.
I'm for the dominion of civil society.
I'm for kindness with good manners.
I'm for public service.
I'm for doing your own thing.
I'm for the majority.
I'm for the minority.
I'm for individualism.
I'm for social responsibility.
I'm for education for all.
I'm for environmental protection.
I'm for disarmament.
I'm for civil rights.
I'm for tolerance.
I'm for the simple life.
I'm for fun.
I'm for change.
I'm for continuity.
I'm for freedom.
I'm for diversity.
I'm for equality.
I'm for human rights.
I'm for justice.
I'm for peace.
I'm for the right to be stupid.
I'm for the right to be different.
I'm for the right to see for myself.
I'm for the right to change my mind.
I'm for the right to be left-handed.

I'm for the ones who live & die for these every day.

It's an odd path I traveled to election day. I don't believe in military solutions to human problems. I don't believe in one nation imposing its will by force on others. I think there is a disconnect, as well as a relation, between American wealth and power, on the one hand, and the world's poverty & social oppression, on the other, which no amount of imposed political ideals, in themselves, can ever ameliorate. Only social justice and an effort to address grievances and basic economic problems can do that. I believe there is a fundamental contradiction in the notion that a few nations, armed to the teeth, can police the other nations, with respect to weapons of mass destruction : only further & universal disarmament will bring real security in that regard.

All that having been said, however... I hold another set of views, perhaps contradicting myself in the process. I think there is a global terrorist network & movement, dedicated to a mix of tyrannical politics and Islamic-fundamentalist expansionism ("the Caliphate"). I think for about the last half century, the Middle-Eastern Arab nations have chosen the path of authoritarianism and violence; and while the colonial powers of the West bear much responsibility for this outcome, the primary responsibility lies with the choices of the Arab governments themselves. I think that the events of 9/11 left the US government no choice but to deal with the problem of global mass terror in a systematic way, and I think the Bush policy of confronting state sponsors of terror, as well as the terrorist networks themselves, made sense. I think the nature & practices of the Saddam Hussein regime fit the category of state sponsors of terror. I think Saddam brought his downfall down on his own head, when he thought he could respond to US demands with belligerence and stalling. I think Iraq and the Middle East will be better off with the Saddam mafia out of power, and an elected government. I think the response of the anti-Bush peace movement and the European governments was blinkered by a kind of self-righteous and naive attitude of appeasement, in an untenable and unjust situation, in which Saddam manipulated the sanctions system to benefit himself & punish his own people.

Much of my progress to this position came about as a kind of dialectical protest against the attitudes and propaganda of the politicized "poet-networks".

My decision to vote for Bush never was & is not easy on my mind, or simple. I remember before 9/11 I was angered & bothered by Bush's Supreme Court victory, & the hubristic foreign policy attitudes which followed. But I would say the vote came after a gestation period which began when I saw the Left's, & most of the world's, reaction to the Bush policy toward Iraq & the sanctions problem. I was struck at that time by the ideological rather than the pragmatic nature of the response. I saw a lot of Vietnam-spectre hand-wringing; I saw a lot of purely partisan Bush-bashing; I saw a lot of sanctimonious pacifism, willing to appease, and indeed collaborate with, the Saddam regime, in order to avoid holding him to account. I saw the UN willing to do almost anything besides actually enforce the sanctions; I saw Europe gladly join hands with the Baathists rather than support the US in bringing down that neo-Stalinist regime.

I already know the rebuttals that readers of this blog are thinking & perhaps preparing to post. There's the argument that the US should have been more patient with inspections. Then there's the argument that even if the war was justified, the aftermath has been botched, with horrific consequences. I understand the merit of these arguments, and of many others; but in the end they are not strong enough to convince me that the Bush long-term strategy of pushing democracy in the Middle East is fundamentally mistaken. Rather, I think the critics and the naysayers have got history wrong; they remind me, to a degree, of the people who opposed Lincoln in the Civil War, as a matter of fact.

History, fortunately or unfortunately, is not a clear glass displaying the clean triumph of good over evil; nor is the US exempt from deep wrongs of its own. But I happen to believe this particular cause is just.

I don't want to upset anybody, or stoke the fires. Will be glad to return to philology, soon. I learned at the start of the Iraq war that, by jiminy, not all poets think alike.

Some traditionalist churches are pushing for a ban on gay marriage, since they define marriage in their own "religious" terms. Bush pandered to them for their votes, and this was a low, low pitch. But he's also spoken in favor of civil unions for gay people, & for rights & respect in general. You can brand him a bigot if you like. To me this is just more of the same rhetorical overkill which stupid politics tends to trigger automatically.

The po-bloggers on the left, and there are lots of them, seem to be just as blinkered by paranoid fear, resentment & hate as any whackos on the right. Try to get real. I'll be glad to get back to Grand Fenwick, where people are almost as sane as Minnesotans.

Rhode Islanders just think differently. That must be it. While I was doing my strange voting behavior in the polling booth, RI's true-blue old-line liberal Republican - Lincoln Chafee - was announcing to the public that he would not be voting for his party's President - because of the Iraq war.

So the election is over, but the culture war, clearly, is not. Shrill keenings & cries of woe from poetry bloggers on every side. Joseph Duemer one of the more articulate ones among those I've seen.

Politics in America is, or has been, mostly a two-party struggle for power. The struggle involves framing issues & concerns, sharpening differences. It's a mistake, though, simply to take the partisan frames at face value, and impose them on the portion of the electorate that voted differently from you. Guess what, people in the red states are complex animals too; some of them may be even less like "true believers", chanting partisan mantras & slogans, than you are. Imagine: some of them may be reasonable, intelligent people.

Why should I accept that? you ask. They swallowed the vicious right-wing propaganda, the kultur-kampf which has been strengthening on the right for decades. They don't share my values, you say.

Actually I think it's more complicated. The story of the 2-party system is not a matter of decades, but of more than a century. The Republican Party has been an organized force to reckon with since the Civil War. Yes, it failed the country at the time of the Depression; yes, it followed Nixon into 8 more years of war in Vietnam & Cold War support for repressive regimes around the world; yes, it made a devil's pact with the southern bigots & Dixiecrats in an attempt to turn back racial justice; yes, it followed Reagan's hard right ideology into a new conservative era. This is a reactionary record, and that's the reason I've voted Democrat since I came of age.

But guess what: the Republican Party has also stood for some positive things, during various periods of American history. Two in particular: freedom (against slavery; against tyranny) and reform (particularly under the 1st Roosevelt). And many of the voters in the red states have affiliations with that party going back generations. Democrats love to mock the "values" orientation of their opponents, seeing them as manipulated pawns, trapped by their own reactionary, "atavistic" religious beliefs. But when a majority of them said "values" was the deciding issue, it may be wrong to jump to the conclusion that this was simply homophobia. I think a lot of church-going red-state voters were deeply offended by the morals of the Democrats' vaunted standard-bearer, Bill Clinton; I was offended myself to see the Oval Office turned into a porn site. & there was Bill, out campaigning for Kerry - a slick, ambitious, & opportunistic issue-spinner. When Republicans told pollsters that "values" were the pivotal issue, some of them were saying that while they were troubled by the economy and Iraq, in the end they decided that Kerry wouldn't make things much better on those fronts anyway, and that at least Bush set an example of personal integrity & decency, which they didn't think Kerry & his rich celebrity friends could ever do.

I believe the Republican right's socio-religious platform is deeply Macchiavellian and uncharitable - victimizing - at its core. And this must be opposed. But Joe Duemer's analysis - that Democrats are enlightened free-thinking non-religious persons, while Republicans are backward, superstitious bigots, and we share no values, and we must sharpen the differences between the parties almost on a theological level... I think this is a strategy for further widening of the culture divide, more polarization, more stereotyping, and ultimately more ignorance and misunderstanding.

The Democrats who will remake their party are those who actually understand and in some cases share the traditional religious background and value-system of the other side; it is they who will be able to interpret history and politics and economics for the electorate, in a way that doesn't demean or deny their religious beliefs, but which challenges that reactionary, deeply uncharitable, partisan spin, which feeds parasitically on those values from the far right. I am not saying that Democrats must follow Republicans into some kind of hypocritical religious pandering. (I live in Rhode Island, for Roger Williams' sake!) I'm saying that it is probably those on the left who have at least a "liberal", non-judgmental awareness of the role of religious belief in human society, who know something about the foundations of Western faith-systems - it is these people who will be able to challenge the religious bigots on their own ground, and suggest a different set of foundational values for a just and free civic order.

At this point I should say, to be brave & foolish, that after standing in the polling booth for at least 10 minutes, I voted for Bush. My reason for doing so, despite my complete rejection of many of the Republican positions on social issues, the economy, and the environment, was because I think we are actually doing the right thing in Iraq. But that's a debate we've had before in this corner of the blogosphere, and I am not going to get into it now. I suppose I've lost about 35% of my blog audience by saying this (2 people, I reckon).

Charles Olson started working on poetry after he dropped out of his job as apparatchik for Democratic Party, right? Or something like that. With a sense of disillusionment.

Someone could do a history poem (in Olson & WCW vein) based on investigations & juxtapositions of "democracy" as global phenomenon, as a project of states & multinational groupings - "democracy in Middle East/Asia/Africa/South America" etc. - juxtaposed, that is, with historical roots in New England local politics (sovereignty of the people out of village town meetings). What it all means to have a superpower on a democracy mission compared to the felt reality of actual civic life (what that used to mean, what it amounts to now).

(Been reading de Tocqueville lately.)

I might even try doing this myself, if you don't get there first.

Why is Jim Behrle badmouthing Kent Johnson so much? I don't get it. I looked at Kent's Abu Graibh piece. It's standard political satire, it does what satire's supposed to do: it gets you down into the ugliness & makes you squirm. The last paragraph simply zeroes in on its probable readership (poets) & makes them identify/empathize/squirm too. He emailed me to ask what I thought of it, & I said the weakness of it is it seems aimed narrowly at the in-house poet audience, & that it should include more "emails" from all walks of life.

Behrle's take-off on Kent's last paragraph doesn't rise to the level of political satire, it just makes fun of somebody by harping on their supposed weaknesses.

Now I suppose the Behrle campaign will be mounted against me. I don't know all the "history" gossip or rumor behind Behrle's animus toward Kent, it's none of my business. As I recall, & my memory can be fuzzy, he's mad at me because he didn't like the way I was talking back to David Hess some time years ago (& he didn't like me calling him "Jimby", which I don't call him any more). But that's all water under the bridge. I'm blocked for some reason from his comment box (at his blog), so I won't be able to respond, when the torrent comes. I really don't care anymore about all this piss-ant poet "biz".

Everyone should lay off the badmouthing & recognize they have personality disorders which are not cured by aggression & petty sniping. That includes me, that includes you, Behrle.

[p.s. I see Kent has responded to the Behrle piece over at the Hotel today. Whenever I go to "Hotel Point" I think of some big windy light-filled drafty comfortable mostly vacant old hotel on some point in Lake Michigan. & then I think of the hotel in the "Quaker Hill" section of The Bridge.]

Wasted some time in comment-box squabbles over at limetree. I guess I must come across as a querulous curmudgeon, trying to shut down healthy discussion.

Surprised myself sometimes, at the extremity of my animus against poetry/politics debates.

People think I'm being a-political or conservative, when I try to separate poetry from these theoretical or praxis-oriented discussions about literature & politics. But I don't believe that's really the case. I simply believe that poetry speaks most effectively to social & political concerns when it remains in its independent poetry sphere. Poetry-making has complex difficulties of its own, and the misguided attempts to water them down, through group efforts & theorizing, really get one no closer to either effective politics or authentic poetry.

I have to admit, also, that

      . . .as if the
random pain of lizard heads
on sticks were prettier to eat

is not simple. it gets at the horror at the heart of power politics - whether Elizabethan (heads on poles on London Bridge) or American (Saddam, Noriega, & collateral).

I guess the sadness saddens me. That a poet would have to imagine a lizard as the metaphorical vehicle of shared humanity. The estrangement.

Shakespeare did the same, though, in the dark tragedies. Only Shakespeare didn't couch it all in fey faux-simplicitie (he had other kinds of camouflage).

So what occurs to me, thinking about "Swamp Formalism"?

The reiterations ("as if. . .") - a Whitman technique, drawn originally from Biblical Psalms & prophetic books.

The concept of Donald Rumsfeld as a proponent of "swamp formalism" - the general idea of repressive/oppressive/repressed Order or (patriarchal - "men") Establishment, evolving into this Darwinian epitome (Rumsfeld) the "poet" of War news conferences. (Along with a glancing jab at all the "forms" of glaciated & crystallized & neo-conservative traditionalist or reactionary Poetry.)

This concept, combined with the neo-Romantic/Beat stance of Poet as apolitical Dreamer or anti-Establishment Rousseauiste innocent (Blakean-Ginsbergian) - which requires an identification with all things - including Rumsfeld : hence the (somewhat convenient, & perhaps hypocritical) ambiguity of the Odyssean-Edenic scenario. (ie. the speaker can imagine Rumsfeld only as a primitive lizard-aggressor - but the act of imagining is, at the same time, an ethical act, an expression of empathy - & thus a recognition of "common humanity": sinful, mortal - the "main dust").

This is fine. But my main thought, here in the main dust, is as follows:
That in a democratic culture, there is, in the poetry world anyway, a kind of unintentionally comic coincidentia oppositorum. Rebel pop avant-garde New American poetics becomes as mandarin-effete (an exact mirror-image) as the high-culture traditionalist poetry that it once rebelled against. How so? Just as with the arch-aestheticism & art-for-art's-sake of the Symbolists & Pre-Raphaelites 125 years ago, there is now an autonomous, pseudo- or semi-professional poetry culture, which requires a special dialect (a special poetic diction) of political-spiritual-social opposition. Within this subculture, it is not necessary anymore to come to terms with ethical, political, or philosophical dilemmas - to work them out, logically and rhetorically - by means of a lingua franca et jocundissima or vulgar tonggue. In other words, one need not "reason" with the public, or with the enemy : neo-post-romantic-postmodernism merely requires that the poet find a rhetorical "subjective correlative" - a Blakean baby-riff.

Trying to think again a little (& not getting very far this morning) about poetry & the political.

How it seems to come down to who is left out of the picture - whether it's women in Afghanistan, or low-wage workers in the U.S. This is also what it comes down to on a local level. Here in RI, as the national election season gets going, the state legislative session & budget process also gets underway. One of the contentious issues is zoning for low-income housing development. RI is one of the most crowded states, with the lowest rate of new housing development, & the highest rents, etc. Major problem.

A law went into effect which would have made it easier for developers to build low-income housing outside the metro ghetto, in the well-off suburbs. It was immediately stymied by court action & now the legislature is trying to work out a compromise.

What it seems to come down to, as usual (I'm simplifying for emphasis), is : are you going to make room for the poor in your world? Between the rich & well-off in RI, and the corrupt and grabby politicians & special interests (state employees, labor & business all together), the poor get short-changed, & suffer for it, & thus the general culture & quality of life are degraded too.

Of course whether you're talking personally, locally, nationally, or internationally, political issues are not simply objects of moral platitudes, but practical problems, subject to inventive solutions.

Neither the anti-government individualism of the Republicans nor the self-righteous patronizing attitude of pro-government Democrats is good enough. One leads to laissez-faire injustice; the other to onerous & often inhumane bureaucracies. But I lean toward reform & positive government efforts, collective public action for the common good. So I guess that makes me more of a Democrat (in the current definition of such, anyway). I don't see government as inevitably bad.

What does this have to do with poetry? Not much, I guess.

Poets will always be alert to the drama of history, small & large. The interlocking webs of mutuality. & will find ways of making verbal music out of this.

The frustration for me involves not even making a dent in the US subculture of poetry, much less reaching any kind of general audience. & what the heck, I'm hardly writing it at all these days. & I've learned to be irritated & disillusioned with the subculture in almost all its manifestations. For most it's enough simply to decry capitalism & demonize Bush & there you are. I think the US is a mess because we haven't come to terms on the social contract, but self-righteous honkings on left or right are pretty boring and unoriginal, not to mention unhelpful in any way. Very oddly & interestingly enough, we will have to re-learn this - the terms of the social contract - along with China.

(I should remember that my particular literary frustrations are not political at all, & that becoming involved in a helpful way does not necessarily have anything to do with writing. )

I imagine a poetry that doesn't purvey political stereotypes to its captive audience, but presents a complex image of "reality" through the medium of various traditions, modes, forms.

this is probably the last "political" poem I wrote (published a while ago in Fulcrum). A section from "All Clear". Note the figure of the abject, or the left-out; the dove; the "succession". I guess I tend to repeat myself (including blogging this poem before).

(p.s. note date of composition, with echoes of this.)

4

 
Christmas is coming      but here      in sleepy-febrile Florida
tied at the neck      under stage lights      one big brother
wrestles with another      and      when this battle is over
who will wear the crown?      as a gospel voice in the rotunda

 
croons in my ear      and as reporters cluster by the grave
of Robert Trout (“Iron Man of the Blitz”) and you perceive,
ephebe, the idiom of this      intervention      (requiem
for a midnight sun      or century)      and through the nave

 
today      they bore a body to the columbarium
(rotund profundity beneath nine bells)      only him
(Brown, William Wallace, Jr.)      a homeless man
and blind     who stopped the wheels of the imperium

 
one day      right on the street      asking the father of
George W.      please pray for me      and he paused there
(the President)      and said      come along with me
to St. John’s      we’ll pray together

 
the music of what happens      when      no man is
and the bell tolls for thee      like Janis Joplin’s
high note      who will wear the crown?      your doom
Kosmos      a little world      curls into bronze

  
and sounds      from the 132 rms of a pallid prize
to the 132 acres of N. Main Cemetery (Providence)
where you’ll find me (here now      there then) mourning
a vagabonded      end of century      where a dove strays

  
from San Francisco      down to Florida      an unknown
hobo Noman      left behind      his leaf gone brown
is your redemption      (sleepy time and railroad
nation)      W.W. is his name      crowned    here    and    gone

        
                                                           12.3.2000

Interesting article in this week's New Yorker on foreign policy, by George Packer. Challenge of fundamentalism as an ideology (rather than terrorism as a tactic), and the different (& inadequate) responses of Republicans & Democrats. Takes historical look at liberalism & postwar reconstruction efforts (since WW 2), limitations of current outlook of both parties.

[p.s. in his conclusion, he cites Walt Whitman.]

I'm sorry, but the culture of poets seems a total bore to me. It's as if we were supposed to be a devoted fan club for some obscure chess association, and required to be up to speed on the personal lives, gossip, awards ceremonies, funeral orations, etc., and that this somehow was the substance of the way of life. . .

& ironically the professed avant or post-avant wing of that society was supposedly dedicated to a depersonalized, politically-critical, collective notion of the role of the art form, against all that decadent & mealy-mouthed artsy narcissistic solipsism of the academicized mainstream. Their "collectivity" is nothing but a farm school or adjunct sub-college or self-help support group for league careers in that same greeny grove.

Something essential is missing when you domesticize & acclimate poetry to its own (sub)-culture. What's missing is its own otherness, its capacity for criticizing, transcending, metamorphosing the social and aesthetic conditions which produced it. This is its originality, and its social function. But now a fake otherness - paralleling "rebel" social behavior in pop culture - an ersatz otherness pawns itself off as the very medium of literary exchange. Poetry subcultures are built upon modes of talking or writing in special ways, distinct side-of-the-mouth idioms, like in-house passwords.

The real challenge is to find a middle ground, a mode of address to human political, social, aesthetic and philosophical issues outside the poetry sphere. W.H. Auden was very interested in a kind of "objective" mode of address, beginning with his leftist sympathies during the 30s, and complicated later by his religious convictions (which permit a kind of general address to the human condition) and by his deep interest in the social & satirical poetry of the Restoration era.

Something is missing, folks. The real radical poet is not the denizen of an idiom-club or the successful careerist. It's the one whose "middle voice" touches a chord in the public at large : an effect of, rather than a betrayal of, originality. This is the continual challenge to the authentic literary professional, not the card-carrying clubhouse member, frittering away time with gladhanding pals & weeping crocodile tears on every occasion. Because poetry does not belong to individuals : it happens to them & changes them.

I admire the "Petersburg" notion of these things (Pushkin, Blok, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva [honorary member], Gumilev, Mandelstam, Brodsky). Pushkin started it. The human being possesses social dignity as inalienable right. The poet, as poet, possesses a particular social prestige or status as a consequence of fame for producing authentic works of art. One should defend the former with one's life, and treat the latter with professional detachment.

My sermon for today. (I know you can all think of contemporary poets, young & old, who do not fit my stereotype or deserve my diatribe.)

the political aspect of Forth of July hinges on premonitions of Jubilee.

         12

  
         Deep drone of train   or iron cicada
 across an infinite prairie   steppe or
 taiga   and where do the past
 and future   of these parallels   ascend?

  
         Accompanied by mute organ-pipes
 in Voronezh   or an anti-telephone
 in Moscow   (making superluminescent
 waves)   or just my new triangle on the barn

  
         banging and banging like an old tin can?
 The rapture of the universe   is on
 the radio tonight   everybody knows
 it   (even the D.A.R., Grandma)   it's Marion

  
         singing there   in Washington
 under the Depression   and the shadowy
 long hands   long face still   washed
 with kindness   twinkling like a star

  
         his homely lonesomeness
 is in her voice also tonight  a silky
 charity-chariot   with   malice toward
 none   we'll ride it home Bluejay   forget

  
         the bondage of the 44   rail-split and
 quartered in a milky map
 rivers and forests in your palm
 life-lines and   spirit-trails

  
         deep into tracklessness   a limber
 timbered   everlasting habitat
 we'll make it home   to bathe
 again   in that spring water   Abraham

  
         as the drone rises   to the tops of the oaks
 in an arc of praises   love and liberty
 are married there   a tribal tree of
 tribulations   crowned   a little school of J

      
                                     2.8.2000

Dave writes:

I don't really see any discussion or development going on, more like an endless string of tautologies that trip themselves up and then you have to start over again with the definitions.

You say you believe in a poetry beyond the ideological cliche or political position yet you constantly stress how your poetic beliefs stem from your centralist political beliefs and how Poetry should mirror those beliefs.

So what's up with that?

I've been at a music practice, hence the delay in responding to your question, Dave. I think what interests about literature, from Homer to Virgil to Dante to & so on, is that human choices & passions & speculations & dreams & guile & drama - all these things - trump the verbal systems that would contain them, be they religious, political, what have you.

Poetry only concentrates this effect & makes it more elegant and musical (as Dante is more musical than Joyce, despite his best efforts).

This is how poetry is beyond politics, at least in one of its dimensions.

I don't have "centralist" beliefs; I said that beneficial change comes to our earth from the center of humane values, & I said it was "central" only in the sense that it proceeds from life itself, that which survives & overcomes death & destruction - through its own wisdom, & through divine intervention (grace).

I think of poetry as a branch of this basic (yet mysteriously dual) life-force; a kinship recognizable in its freedom & unpredictable integrity.

I think that covers most of my supposed tautologies. But thank you for asking.