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.