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.