Zaccheus the peasant

re previous post : it occurs to me that this "conservative" stance, so described, is not so different from the attitude of the medieval (or older) peasant, who hides his grain under the cellar floor whenever the Royal Tax-Collector, or the Army, or the local mercenary band comes around, to grab what they need. Not the most civic-minded attitude, I suppose... but maybe it's very local.

As it happens my great-etc-grandfather Zaccheus Gould, of Topsfield, Massachusetts, penned what must be one of the earliest public petitions to government authority in America. I found it long ago in the old Essex County record books. It dates back to the 1630s. Zaccheus & his fellow farmers petitioned the Massachusetts colonial government to allow the young men of the township to skip militia training practice during the summer months, because said military duty greatly increaseth the hardship on farmers, as it interferes with the haying.

Zaccheus' petition appears in the long village-history poem, In RI (ably translated into Italian by Anny Ballardini).

(- as I say, this attitude may strike you as not very civic-minded - as rather small-minded & tight-fisted, conservative... but I would not be surprised if you also find traces of it in your own family history.)

Back to the Bull Moose

Sent this comment to the blog digital emunction just now :

"People gen­er­ally on the left (as in this post) wonder at the seem­ing dis­junct between Amer­i­can qui­etism & the impov­er­ish­ment of the middle class of recent decades. But there is a basic con­ser­v­a­tivism in Amer­i­can expe­ri­ence which has to do with the desire of indi­vid­u­als & fam­i­lies to manage & dis­trib­ute their own wealth, the pros­per­ity & well-​being they have labored at them­selves. This is at the root of the idea that “the best gov­ern­ment is that which gov­erns least.” Now those on the left may mock this posi­tion, as deluded-​sucker false con­scious­ness; but there it is – the basis of the dis­junct.

Some­body will figure out a con­vinc­ing cen­trist vision – some­thing like Pop­ulism or TR Pro­gres­sivism. Because the solu­tion is not in some economist’s math­e­mat­i­cal pro­jec­tions or sta­tis­tics; the solu­tion is in Amer­i­can soci­ety as a whole, making a com­mit­ment, with con­fi­dence, to a new sense of a shared common good. It’s not down with cap­i­tal­ism; it’s up with fair­ness & good gov­er­nance (TR’s trust-​busting as one exam­ple).

Part of the prob­lem is that Tocqueville’s repub­lic began with town­ship democ­racy. Vil­lage self-​governance is hard to trans­late to the scale of con­tem­po­rary nation-​states. But this is the exper­i­ment we must take ahold of, with… gusto… !"

(p.s. in this regard, see my "Teddy in the Amazon jungle" poems in Rest Note.)

Henry the Activist (ret.)

Now & then I seem to get pigeonholed in poetryland as a (political, poetickal) conservative (if not Neo-Neanderthal Reactionary). So some might be surprised to learn that I come out of a vocational background in (the Republican-vilified) community organizing.

Yes, while other young 20-somethings were getting their MFAs & Phds., I was out there in the grungy streets & asbestos-flaking factory bldgs. of little old Providence, being a VISTA volunteer (5 years+). I specialized in grassroots legislative training - working with neighborhood organizations with lobbying at the RI State House. We published an annual detailed review of the (often execrable) doings up in the big white marble dome. & other things, too - fundraising, organizing. Food coops & community gardens, wholesale produce collectives. Mass meetings, street theater. We held a mass meeting in a hockey stadium with the RI congressional delegation, running up to the Reagan election. Many many many long late nights in smoke-filled rooms, with the 70s crop of Saul Alinsky-inspired activists. Many actions on the defense budget, Reaganomics, housing, etc. & so on...

This is some of my background. My life comes in distinct layers of re-fashioning (maybe too distinct). Actually I think my skepticism about some of the doctrinaire-enthusiastic blendings of poetry & ideology in contemporary poetry, stem not so much from any "conservative" allegiance to tradition, but from my everyday very hands-on experience with something Alinsky focused on : the differences between theory & practice. We went through many scenes, melodramas & turf wars between "radicals" of various left-wing clans & stripes; the neighborhood organizing movement itself grew out of a disillusionment with 60s New Left abstractions.

Of course, I haven't hesitated to drone on with my own theories & doctrines about poetry (physician heal thyself)... nevertheless one of the things that has consistently bothered me, through the 90s & up to now, is the scheming & bloviating about political styles in poetry. What you learn in practical politics is something about the difference between words & deeds : about the limits of "windy discoursing". This background, combined with the fact that I'm from the understated & stoic Midwest, might have more to do with my attitude than any commitment to "traditional styles" in poetry (though there's that, too, I guess).

To repeat : my life fractures into distinct layers. Perhaps also I've simply devolved, grown more conservative with age (a familiar ailment). I'd like to recover some remnant of my intense civic enthusiasm & engagement of those ancient days. Ah, yout'! But "youthful idealism" is something real (though often aligned also with youthful naivete, arrogance). The sense of community is a spiritual sense. The populist demand for justice comes from a (maybe inborn, innate) sense of fairness & humanity - the "ceremony of innocence" which suffers outrage after outrage over time - until the old man sinks into indifference, discouragement, anomie, & despair - all those spiritual blockages which confine Aristotle's virtue (man the political animal) & Dante's spiritual joy (man the animale compagnevole). What is poetry, Mandelstam was asked. "The poet's sense of being right," he answered. & he died for it : with the writing of one 10-line "political poem".

Reading fine work by Geoffrey Hill (in Collected Essays) on Emerson, Whitman, GM Hopkins.

From the essay on Hopkins (p. 518) :

"Among the numerous consequences of the era of so-called 'protest art' is the irrational embarrassment of the current reaction against the theme of protest, or of political writings in general. Whatever the excesses and affectations of the 1960s and 70s may have done to harm the cause of poetry, there is nonetheless a real connection between it and politics : as real now, if we could disclose its true stratum or vein, as in the Tudor court poetry of Skelton, Surrey & Wyatt or in the political sonnets of Milton or in the relation between Wordsworth's 'Preface' to Lyrical Ballads and his tract On the Convention of Cintra, or between Whitman's editorials for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and other papers, and Leaves of Grass...
"Civil polity - let us make the claim - is poetry's natural habitat..."

Civil polity is poetry's natural habitat. Curious rhyme there with the likes of Dale Smith or Kent Johnson (& obviously many others). But G. Hill strongly opposes "the divine common" (Whitman) with "the mean, flat average" (Whitman, too). The commerce of literature & po-biz, the power of the Big Cliche, is opposed to true "glory" (in Hill's parlance, both divine & human).

(Did you know he has a poem for/about Jimi Hendrix?)

One quality that shows clearly in Pound, and that you don't see much of in the extra-large milkshake of today's scene - he was, sometimes literally, hungry. This hunger sharpens (though not necessarily clears) his vision, and his cantankerousness. The motor of history is poverty... injustice, resentment... hunger. He went for insidious, crackpot solutions - but he was also attentive to the violence, the crisis, the scar-lines of the social complex. & so he ended up staggering - stupidly, absurdly - into the arms of Mussolini & the war itself.

The question of how society achieves justice - if it's possible at all - is the political question. The 20th-century authoritarian regimes dismissed the merely human-scale problems of human rights, equality, human imperfection, the conflict of interests, on behalf of fraudulent mass "solutions". But much of our literary culture either takes the forms of government and liberal democracy for granted, or assumes a cynical attitude of academic scepticism & dogmatic ideological righteousness. Neither attitude makes for an atmosphere conducive to a flourishing "civic" poetry (others - "activist" poets - will disagree with this). On the other hand, maybe this atmosphere is also latent with opportunity for some new kind of civic (poetic) speech.

Pound would have found a lot of poetic fodder in the current banking crisis.

Pretty much under the cartwheel of Labor lately, not thinking very much. Ambivalent response to John MacKay's fine book. The prospect & orienting markers of the historico-philosophical Left, so subtle, so fine-woven, so refined now. The flavor of the word "capital". A kind of superstructure or brahmin sense. Predicated on the assumption that the People cannot or will not correct (or ameliorate) economic injustices through the channels of law, democracy & civil society; that the idea of Revolution is a forceful idea precisely because it is an Idea fused with Force; and that such Forceful notions (ideology) are justified in a sense by a kind of historical Revenge Ethic : because of the brutal Force of Capital, the countervailing Force of Revolution is justified. But in refined brahmin academic Leftism, such Force is assigned to a kind of theoretical Utopia (where it won't really hurt anybody). (Slavoj Zizek, on the other hand, seems to be doin' the good ol' Big Man (Chavez) kow-tow, which worked so well for the 20th century.)

My 70s ancient history among the community organizers emphasized a more "hands-on" approach to social consciousness and public service. Less intellectually ambitious, perhaps, but more practical. (& public service, you might notice (if you read your local paper), often transgresses supposed ideological differences.)

Meanwhile, we live in a Red-Blue atmosphere, where political thinking per se is suffused by a religious-symbolic vocabulary (on the right) and frustrated ressentiment (on the left).

I, personally, have a lot of trouble holding historical, religious, aesthetic and political ideas in balance in a single conceptual process. Maybe others have similar problems. It helps me to think of Roger Williams' attitude toward relations between cultures, religions, and politics. He had a sort of Greek sense of the universality of civic and political goods (the common good); he somehow was able to hold absolute religious convictions without feeling the need to impose them on others or on the world at large - mainly by way of a sharp distinction between spiritual/heavenly/personal reality and earthly/historical/social reality. Maybe these are signs of a kind of "providential" political prudence. Very different from the various strains of apocalypticism, millennialism.

...clearly, there are political poets whose dazzling personal intensity & fireworks of experience are far more exciting than the goodly little gray poet-figure I present... For these poets, life & politics & art are all one, fused in a demanding existential personal performance.

I go along with that. Everything, in my book, is infused with personality & personhood.

Yet I also like to think of Poetry itself - the communal endeavor, the "tradition" if you will - Poetry with a capital P - as the performance : & that we individual poets are the channels & the interpreters.

This has been a particular dialectic in American poetry, I think - between the scrawny, brave and inimitable voice of individual experience - and the Grand Communal Voice of Poetry. Quite a juggling act.

... & it sounds like a rather detached & mandarin approach to poetry, no? Indeed.

Math is only one possible element of composition, obviously. & another way to look at it is this : often the structure interacts dialectically or symbiotically with other elements.

When the language poets et al. - back in the 80s - were trying to infuse a political stance to their poetry by way of linguistic theory & philosophy, I was doing something simpler : I tried to apply old poetic forms to political themes. Thus I wrote a sestina about homelessness :

DOWNTOWN SESTINA

 
Downtown is gleaming, a nest of glass
Scant refuge for the homeless and the poor
Who trudge along under looming towers
Hungry, frazzled, begging small change
And subject to the better sort of people
Whose eyes reflect the glitter of the city

 
And so many circles animate the city
Captured in the high gloss of the glass
What's taken for the playground of the people
Erases every doorstep of the poor
In sprawling ellipses of loose change
Under the stolid mystery of these towers

 
Under the bright conundrum of these towers
These measuring rods allotting every city
Gyroscopes adjusting every change
By whirling speculation in the glass
The downward spirals of the ornery poor
Set stirring turbid shadows in the people

 
And shuttling promotions of the people
Forecast by divination in the towers
(Who's growing rich and who remaining poor)
Start dancing fevers in the chattering city
And snarl the artist in his broken glass
Frail craft undone by overmastering change

 
When fortune is the favored end of change
Suburbia the limbo of the people
And tender conscience faints before the glass
Rocketing skyward in pretentious towers
To serve the sleek imaginary city
Or swell the sullen rancor of the poor

 
Meanwhile the rhetoricians of the poor
In campus pockets rummaging for change
Inscribe the true authoritative city
And mint sterling mementos of the people
Studies wherein the mind serenely towers
Over safe specimens tacked up under glass

 
So let's raise a glass to the dizzy city -
A toast to towers, and all red-faced people!
And drink for a change among the homespun poor.

(Perhaps this poem only reveals how hopelessly mandarin & ivory-tower I am myself.)

(I came by a very roundabout way to "formalism" - via Mandelstam, to the Renaissance poets, to Villon, etc.)

In order to forestall some objections to previous post:

Simply to name something a symptom rather than a cause is only a beginning, obviously; otherwise, we're just playing with words, setting up another supposed defensive barrier for our aestheticism.

Social conditions are in part the result of political platforms & programs, which themselves project from ideologies & worldviews. When you see suffering & injustice & social pathology, the moral thing is to seek the right name for the problem & take positive political steps to correct it.

The 20th century was, for one thing, a worldwide laboratory for testing policies and programs at all levels of government; for every problem there's a program (except in many cases the right idea & the right action have not been invented yet). If you believe in government control of the market, you can advocate for that; if you believe in dog-eat-dog Darwinism and the inevitable failure of all public problem-solving initiatives, you can advocate for that; if you believe in a symbiotic balance between government policy and private initiatives, you can work for that; if you see consistent oppression of the poor & exploitation by the rich, if you see multifarious attacks on public governmental authority on behalf of powerful private interests, if you see egregious fraud & greed in high places, you can take action, participate in the political process.

No one is inhibited from political activity of some kind. But it's not the same thing as artistic work. Again, in the last century, we witness the swings in critical (& artistic) attitudes, from attacking art (for its indifference to social problems) to defending art (for its unique values) - like a constant pendulum channeling the inherent outrage & frustration with exigent reality. The consequences range from blaming the victim (artists themselves) to defensive camouflage ("political" artists) to aggressive indifference ("art for art's sake").

"Political" artists make poetry out of theoretical-systemic solutions - verbal abstractions - applied to ornery, many-sided, complex, intractable problems. (cf. Ange Mlinko's comments about the tendency to interpret poems as paraphrases of political arguments.) For the ideological poet, everything is grist for the mill : there's such heroic poetry in Utopia!

But just as our experience is a many-layered reality of symptomatic fault lines & corrosive chaos (not always amenable to simple "translation" into verbal signs & systemic solutions) - so the complex pleasure/insight amalgam of the art work offers pathways to draw closer to it : offers an image of it which we recognize as authentic.

Digging around for more background on the Chicago critics, came upon this excerpt from Richard Ohmann (1976).

I can't pretend to be much of a lit historian, but this essay seems to appear toward the beginning of another generation of radical critique, based on a Marxist interpretation of culture. Ohmann seems even-handed & careful about New Critics, interesting overview here of the mid-century theories about nature & purpose of poetry.

Have trouble accepting the underlying premise, however, which seems to be: that social injustices are systemic in nature; that we understand what that system does; that the intellectual classes, the bourgeoisie in general, create their own self-protective ideologies which blind them to reality, etc. etc. [Here we note the parochial bias against business, entrepreneurialism, individual & family enterprise - all those economic activities which structure much of past & present world social economy.]

I don't deny the pervasive & insidious presence of injustice & evil. Nor the forces of conformity & exploitation which structure & process the social reality we inhabit. But I question whether the appropriate interpretation of this reality is a purely econo-political one. That is I think of injustice and inequality - & the seemingly entrenched patterns of oppression which they assume - as symptoms, rather than causes.

Taken as causes, the logic leads to the denunciation of bourgeois property rights, capitalism, the rule of law, democratic institutions, private enterprise, and so on; it leads to the moral disenfranchisement of independent cultural activity (academia, art, literature) - its chastisement for complicity in the "system" (cf. Ohmann's analysis).

If taken as symptoms, the entrenched injustices and inequalities of various nations & societies may have very different systemic shapes & developments; there may be no simple "answer" (Marxist, socialist, nationalist, ethnic, religious, etc.) which provides utopian solutions to the underlying causes : ie. the greed, selfishness, bigotry, aggression, malice, hatred, cowardice, fraudulence, intellectual/moral blindness of human beings, persons, individuals.

Understood this way, we might recognize the ethical value which sometimes accompanies (& enhances) those independent (semi-guilty) aesthetic pleasures & enjoyments (of various degrees of intellectual insight & innocence) which we give & take - in the midst of social corruption, injustice & cruelty. It's a value contained in the moral representation of realities for which we have no simple, abstract, systemic solution, no bureaucratic assignment of moral duties. This is a value in addition to the natural & inherent values offered by beauty in general.

Josh Corey responds in friendly & gracious fashion to my typically unkind & mean remarks.

I do have to remind readers that I predicted the response of Josh & Jonathan (the inevitable recital of American decadences) in the original post.

Chicken Little will continue to squawk about the sky falling. What I was trying to suggest was that attacks on the "system" in general are misplaced. The same egregious corruption & threats to democracy were around during the Gilded Age and at other times in American history. The Howard Zinns of the world will insist on laying it on thick with blanket condemnations. It's a partial & biased historical image they project, unfortunately very unfluential with at least a generation or two of college students. (There was a good essay in the NYTBR yesterday, a review of the changing patterns of American historiography.)

The American structure of checks & balances, rule of law, free press & civil rights - the "system" - what I'm saying is that its creation was worthy & its maintenance & reform is a valid goal. It's an admirable structure designed to subordinate government to civil society. What I am not trying to say is that we live in the "best of all possible worlds", that it's time for all relatively-privileged Americans to wallow in their luxuries & rest on their laurels & subsist on self-congratulation.

Far from it. No, the world is sick, and the people are selfish & misguided, and America's smug self-righteousness is often belied by policies based on greed, injustice & indifference to suffering. We have to make democracy work, by getting involved in making it work, not by simply sitting back & whining & carping & pointing the finger of blame, in our oh-so-sophisticated, oh-so-left, oh-so-self-righteous bluenose blue state ways.

OK, hopefully I am done with these gassy harangues.

In the previous comment box, Jonathan writes:

"The present regime is all about concentrating power, not dispersing it. Hence, attacks on the independence of the judiciary, increased police power, the eroding of civil society, the justification of torture, arrogance rather than the humility you so movingly advocate. I'll forgive Josh whatever youthful political earnestness he might have. That nice-sounding first-shall-be-last Christian rhetoric has nothing to do with the theocratic regime you voted for."

This is well-put, if exaggerated. & though I wouldn't pin the blame for unaccountable power in Washington solely on the Republicans, there are & have been things done in the name of democracy & American security - like detentions without trial, and shipping prisoners to places like Uzbekistan - for which we should indeed be ashamed.

Democracy should be about protesting & changing these things. So Jonathan is right to point up the problem. But he also twists a general statement of principles - what the plan of American democracy is about, as compared to anarchism - into an indictment of my vote. & that is a typical partisan inflammatory polemic. Typical : which is why - considering the current political climate - I wasn't surprised.