Poetry in the Age of Bush
State of the Union: 50 Political Poems, Edited by Joshua Beckman and Matthew Zapruder, Wave Books, 2008, 112pp, $14.00
There’s no introduction to State of the Union, a new collection from Wave Books composed of, as the subtitle puts it, 50 Political Poems. There’s no afterword, no manifesto, no explanation of how the word “political” might be meeting the word “poem.” Even the press release is silent on just what editors Joshua Beckman and Matthew Zapruder might have had in mind when making their selections. But while it might be easier to review a book that is clear on what its politics are, this refusal of explanation returns the poem to centrality. Dan Chiasson, in reviewing an anthology of poems by Guantanamo detainees wrote, “It is hard to imagine a reader so hardhearted as to bring aesthetic judgment to bear on a book written by men in prison without legal recourse…You don’t read this book for pleasure; you read it for evidence.” It’s hard to imagine any of the poets in State of the Union wanting to be read for evidence—neither in the documentary mold of Muriel Rukeyser, nor the earnest tableaus of Margaret Atwood.
These poems all address themselves to the period of time between the attacks of September 11th 2001 and the end of the Bush years and you need to come to the poems with knowledge of the politics and events of that period. The poems mostly address what it felt like to live through the Bush administration, with its combination of secrecy, mendacity, bellicosity, intrusion and control, and do not shy away from confronting the scandals and violence of the administration. By refusing an explanation of what it means to be a political poem, the collection puts the burden on the reader and the poems to find how these poems might be rightly called political. But very few of the anthologies designed to address these difficult times go about defining what politics is. Neil Astley makes the claim in Staying Alive: Real Poems for Real Times that poetry is the best antidote to the “debasement of language,” and he quotes Brodsky as insisting on poetry coming before “biography and politics. In Garrison Keillor’s introduction to his highly popular anthology Good Poems for Hard Times, he addresses politics obliquely, assuming that the reader already knows what “politics” are:
America is in hard times these days…politics even more divorced from reality than usual, the levers of power firmly in the hands of a cadre of Christian pirates and bullies whose cynicism is stunning…American poetry is the truest journalism we have.
This feels less like a claim for poetry than an attack on journalists. In William Carlos William’s famous phrasing, “’It is difficult/ to get the news from poems/ yet men die miserably every day/ for lack/ of what is found there.” Keillor tries to put the news back into the poems—in fact his claim is that the news is best gotten from poems, but this anthology is more aligned with Williams. State of the Union is the collection of what’s not found in the newspaper. You’d be hard pressed to get the news from this collection, and yet it’s full of what the news reports couldn’t capture—it’s full of what it was like to live through the news, to live with the news. The best poems in the volume sprawl out into unintelligibility and confusion, embodying how it felt to endure the frustrations and obfuscations of the past eight years.
So is that what a political poem is? The expression of what it feels like to be governed? If politics is simply that which has to do with governance, then in a democracy it seems that we can never be outside of politics. The original formulation of “the personal is political” was that “the political is personal”—it was an insistence that we have to be wary of how the government polices our pleasures and our lives, not that we had to police our pleasures and lives to fit a particular mode of governance. But the notion that good art should be apolitical is a powerful position for those whose personhood is politically dangerous (e.g. Oscar Wilde) though it often fails as a defense (as, for example, Oscar Wilde demonstrated in both instances). McCarthyism firmly entrenched a gap between political activism and artistic production, at least in the mainstream—though the art world has hardly been disengaged since the cold war. These poems don’t bother to position themselves against a call for political action, rather they simply show that poetry, like politics, is part of our world. Human experience is never far from the organization of power.
Some poems are explicitly concerned with the government. Lorenzo Thomas’s poem “The Marks are Waiting” is in two sections—the first part a free verse poem that feels consistent with most of the collection’s tone: “Our new acuity / Has been misread / As short attention span.” The second section is a prose gloss on the free verse that precedes it. It’s the most directly argumentative section of the anthology:
If history can still be understood as a record of the deeds of leaders, then the recent history of the United States is the record of bizarre plots and frantic attempts to cover their behinds performed by an amazingly conscienceless batch of born-again hypocrites and felons in waiting.
Thomas builds a fairly straightforward argument that since World War II, the military involvements of the United States have been a distraction from the operations of power. This may be precisely what Garrison Keillor meant.
Most of the best poems approach the period obliquely. The poets here are primarily lyric poets, interested in mood, tone, disjunction and persona. The form of the poem is always central to these poets. As Thomas shows by example, if prose were the best medium, they would use it. John Ashbery might be the case study for how a poem can be political. The tendency towards syntactical collapse in his work has long made it difficult to critique or explain his work. Impossible to paraphrase, his work is most often considered as a thing of beauty, almost never as a thing of meaning. Within his isolated phrases there seems a glimpse of how we are living. “We have shapes but no power,” seems like an excellent way of describing the fact that the anti war protests did nothing to stop the war, despite being the largest protests in the history of the world. But more importantly, the slippery nature of his work perfectly captures the curious twists of language we had to suffer. How wonderful to see the collapsing nature of language wrested from the clumsy truisms of Rumsfeld and returned to Ashbery’s well wrought urns.
The main grace of the anthology is that the writers are all so intelligent. Thomas Sayers Ellis contemplates the dollar sign as an “s” trapped behind the number 11. “S for September, s for suffering, s for save us. / Damn you, Autumn, / flags are not flowers.” By refusing the dollar sign as a simple symbol and taking it into pieces that might send new messages, Ellis offers a stunningly elegant resistance to the consumerism that replaced sacrifice and the flag waving that replaced mourning in the wake of September 11th. John Yau’s “Ing Grish” traces the inclusions and exclusions of Asian American identity politics while placing them in the larger scope of America’s abuse of those communities. Lucille Clifton’s “September Song: A Poem in Seven Days” is precisely the plain spoken but nuanced response that one would expect from her talent. The poem traces the feeling of each day, capturing the stunned confusions as she balances the competing impulses that everyone in American had to manage. Joe Wenderoth’s poem about the fading yellow ribbon bumper stickers on cars is the perfect image of the failures of consumerism as a response to tragedy. Mary Reuffle’s beautiful “Kettle” contemplates the difficulty of comprehending human cruelty. As she washes the kettle, using her fingers to find the blemishes, she thinks of the advice given to killers. “I kept telling myself perfectly clear minds/ killed the Jews.”The poem ends with the stunning lines, “we should try to be more like animals/ and less like them at the same time.”
When the poems do stray towards straightforward polemic, the aesthetics tend to wear thin. Matthew Roher’s “Elementary Science for Dick Cheney” starts out as a rewrite of Szymborska’s “In Praise of Feeling Bad About Yourself.” Szymborska’s poem begins:
The buzzard never says it is to blame.
The panther wouldn’t know what scruples mean.
When the piranha strikes, it feels no shame.
If snakes had hands, they’d claim their hands were clean.
Rohrer’s opens:
The shark is not evil,
not mean. The wolf
is not mean. The fox
is not mean.
The bunny isn’t good
the doe is not especially good.
But whereas Szymborska finds a conclusion in the general: “among the signs of bestiality/ a clear conscience is number one,” Rohrer settles his ire on Cheney: “It is you, the vice / president of our country, who is despicable.” Part of what makes Szymborska more successful is that she implicates herself—the suggestion is that as speaker, she has done wrong, and has an unclear conscience. Rohrer draws a clear distinction, placing Cheney as the bearer of the burden. The poem ends, “it is a very good thing/ to watch you die.” But of course, the darth vader jokes that circulate around Cheney are precisely that he doesn’t die—against all odds and health concerns. The poem becomes a left wing fantasy about the end of enemy number one, but it’s not really satisfying as a poem. It’s perhaps what left wing rhetoric needs more of—directly targeted anger that refuses to turn back on itself. Rohrer’s rebuke to Szymborska would seem to be that sometimes we have to point the finger rather than suggest that we should all feel bad—though Szymborska’s poem is already a rebuke to Cheney’s lack of remorse.
CA Conrad’s effervescent “Dear Mr. President There Was Egg Shell Under Your Desk Last Night in my Dream” satirizes the insularity of the Bush Administrations by taking an intimately chatty epistolary approach. The letter expresses concern for George W. Bush’s upbringing by his father George H. W. Bush: “i want to say i’m sorry about your parents i’m sure other children of CIA brass need a little craziness to get a little loose do a line of coke get naked and run around campus were you freer back then of course you were i’m an idiot for asking…” and generally freely associates about the need for love. The lower case “i”s get on my nerves, but that seems a petty complaint about a poem that manages to so wittily juxtapose the discipline and secrecy of it’s subject with the friendly banter of the writer. The subject of the poem is really what happiness, concern, and openness look like, and the reader sees here how these are political concerns. A counterintuitively “political” goal, Conrad suggest that we should stop looking to our fears to govern, and return to our foundational pursuit of happiness.
Beckman and Zapruder have put together an anthology that shows that art does not need to overlay politics on to its essential-art-self, but rather that the political is an unavoidable engagement art must make, that human organization is politics, and human expression is of the political realm. What distinguishes this collection from the more polemical anthologies it might be compared to (Poets against the War, 100 Poets against the War) is nuance. Politics demands positions. Politicians have to vote yes or no, and we’ve seen politicians ridiculed when they try to nuance their positions on votes, or in the case of Barack Obama, when they don’t vote with a yes or no. But it’s foolish to insist that one’s politics be as binary as one’s voting record. While the period after September 11th subjected many of us to a lot of terrible political poetry, Beckman and Zapruder have provided a coherent argument that politics and poetry are not incompatible—it’s just that each has to have a nuanced and carefully constructed idea of the other.
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