Morning postcript to last night: today in the NY Times, I read a short interview with the British sculptor Damien Hirst--I think that's how you spell his name--the guy famous for putting dead animals in glass cases. When he was asked if he was angry at the way that the U.S. dragged the U.K. into war, he replied that he bore no ill sentiments and that he was not interested in politics. Then he quoted Sylvia Plath as saying that she was not interested in Hiroshima, she wanted to know what a tired surgeon was thinking late at night.

This struck me as stupid: the tired surgeon is thinking about Hiroshima, of course (assuming a surgeon operates out of compassion.) We are pebbles in the cement, making a sidewalk maybe. And the pebble can say: I'm not a sidewalk, I'm a pebble, an iconoclastic little singing pebble. But the pebble is still a sidewalk. That's why liberalism is sometimes annoying in its piety--how childish to pretend we're not all complicit. That we're not the sidewalk. And the pretense of disengagement also says: I'm not the sidewalk, and so is equally exasperating. How stupid the pebble is that doesn't want to admit it's the sidewalk. Or at least, conversely, the sidewalk is the pebbles. There's still an element of mutual cooperation whether the pebble accepts this or not.

Maybe the civic voice, the Jeffers voice, belongs to the fuddy-duddy grandpa. And some people recoil against Plath as childish. I guess most of us are muddled, between these two polarities.

Last week Scott Ritter came through town, the former weapons inspector who has turned against the war. He seemed like a blowhard, though he also made a lot of sense: the crowd revolted against his denigration of the peace movement as being ineffective ("you people did not stop the war, your candidate did not win the election, so obviously your tactics aren't working.") For a moment it seemed he might get hurt. I left feeling bad about my general lack of spine in relation to the war, my inability to come to any conclusion for more than the time it takes for the next thing I read to turn me around.

I was reminded about wanting to write about having seen Ritter today, when I stopped into the library and flipped through Dana Gioia's new book of essays on poetry. The essay that I paused with concerned the Auden poem that was circulated after 9/11 (though I was reading quickly to get back outside into the sun, it seemed Gioia was claiming responsibility for its circulation.) Apparently he'd been on a reading tour when the planes hit the towers, and cited Auden in the context of lobbying for poetry's ability to bring people together and give them solace, to speak to some fundamental common element that some might call the human soul.

I don't know much but I do know that this is a gross misreading of Auden's poem, as I've argued elsewhere. The poem in question is all about confusion and conflictedness, and that's the reason why it was appealing after 9/11: we were confused and conflicted. Poetry can't solve anything, can't "do" anything (too complicated to explain here--see Auden's essays) nor should it try to solve and do. That's not its business. You don't expect your dog to mow the lawn.

Still, poetry speaks to us, and to history (which is different from solving and doing.) I was thinking about Yeats' poem "The Second Coming," which is one of the few that I have been able to commit to memory--if you want to talk about freaky historical synchronicities, Yeats is your man, not Auden. (Come to think of it, we were almost precisely at the end of one of Yeats' 2,000 year vortex cycles on 9/11.)

But to write that poem here wouldn't serve a purpose, because a) I already know it and b) it's a little too apt--it would seem a little hokey. So I'll type this other one by Robinson Jeffers, someone I was reading because he's one of my voids.

Shine, Perishing Republic

While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity,
heavily thickening to empire,
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops
and sighs out, and the mass hardens,

I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make
fruit, the fruit rots to make earth.
Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances,
ripeness and decadence; and home to the mother.

You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life
is good, be it stubbornly long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than
mountains: shine, perishing republic.

But for my children, I would have them keep their dis-
tance from the thickening center; corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the
monster's feet there are left the mountains.

And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man,
a clever servant, insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught
--they say--God, when he walked the earth.
____
Some people would say Jeffers is a windbag, I guess. Maybe any poem that tries to be "civic," even crotchety-civic, is doomed.

This week was sucked into the vortex by dint of my having gotten my final dose of chemo, ever, I think--we the afflicted are quick to jump at the expensive carrots of the pharma-dowjones cartel. I haven't wanted to put much personal information on this anthology, but I will say that researching yesterday the next new treatment for my disease was distressing in that my googling turned up several prospectuses--prospectusi?--of what kind of dough investors could expect to make on the new drug.



I know this is how the system works here, and also that money can drive medicine in ways that are not all bad, which leads us to politics, which is really what I have wanted to write about, as I've been thinking about what a marginal operation poetry is, whether it has any cultural importance, which translates to political importance and communicative importance (I do think poems should communicate, should try to speak to somebody beyond the writer.)



Yet every now and again you (=I) come across a poem of such urgency, such nail-on-the-heading of what didn't seem to be able to be nailed, that the artform poetry becomes worthwhile again, and you (=I) remember why you were seduced in the first place.



O.K., it was this, from C.K. Williams. A couple of white people like Tony Hoagland have tried to write about race recently, brave attempts that nonetheless make me squeamish, I think because the white person enters the poem with lopsided odds, such heavy armor (racial/cultural engagement being the battleground of our current politics--the descendant of house slaves defending the war/the shareholder earning dividends from the invalid.)



Williams, though, captures the squeamishness and makes it the poem's center of gravity:



The Singing



I was walking home down a hill near our house on a balmy afternoon under the blossoms

Of the pear trees that go flamboyantly mad here every spring with

their burgeoning forth



When a young man turned in from a corner singing-- no, it was more of

a cadence shouting

Most of which I couldn't catch, I thought, because the young man was black, speaking black



It didn't matter I could tell me was making his song up, which pleased me he was nice-looking

Husky, dressed in some style of big pants obviously full of himself

hence his lyrical flowing over



We went along in the same direction then he noticed me there almost beside him and "Big"

He shouted-sang "Big" and I thought how droll to have my height incorporated in his song



So I smiled but the face of the young man showed nothing he looked

in fact pointedly away

And his song changed "I'm not a nice person" he chanted "I'm not

I'm not a nice person"



No menace was meant I gathered, no particular threat, but he did want to be certain I knew

That if my smile implied I conceived of anything like concord

between us I should forget it



That's all nothing else happened his song became indecipherable to

me again he arrived

Where he was going, a house where a girl in braids waited for him on

the porch that was all



No one saw no one heard all the unasked and unanswered questions

were left where they were

It occurred to me to sing back "I'm not a nice person either" but I couldn't come up with a tune



Besides I wouldn't have meant it nor he had believed it both of us

knew just where we were

In the duet we composed the equation we made the conventions to

which we were condemned



Sometimes it feels even when no one is there that someone something

is watching and listening

Someone to rectify redo remake this time again though no one saw nor heard no one was there





(Note: I took the text off a PBS newscast of Williams I had seen, but of course the text was butchered, which shows maybe how trivial poetry has become, that no intern corrected the poem. Which shows the butchering effect of cyberspace, too.)



I wish I had written this poem/I have written this poem in my head.