An old friend just called because she's going to write a piece for our new local alternative newspaper (the only other choice is a Gannet affiliate,) and she wanted to incorporate something from my blog, which is NOT a blog, really. She is a peace activist, and want to draw on some cockamamie thing I said (we both attended Scott Ritter's talk.) Have been thinking/writing about my youth, which was governed by Vietnam, a war that remains vivid to me, not so much because ofwhat actually happened overseas, events of which I had just the dimmest awareness (I am just now reading Fire in the Lake to learn about the actualities) but rather because of the psychic force the war exerted on our developing hormonal teenage brains. Because we were only dimly aware, death seemed a vapor that engulfed us. It was everywhere, we were doomed, so there was no reason not to (for example) take LSD, what did the long-term effects matter?

Now an opposing idea circulates in the culture (or is it an idea that circulates among those growing old) that our paramount duty is to maintain our health. This program is hard for me to sign on to because 1) America is being run by people whose motives are so incomprehensible and things seem to be going to hell, and 2) I am sick and do not desire a long life. I guess I would like to return to the youthful damn-the-doom way of living, but can't work up the oomph to party anymore.

Here is a poem by Hayden Carruth that seems to fit.

On Being Asked to Write a Poem Against the War in Vietnam

Well I have and in fact
more than one and I'll
tell you this too

I wrote one against
Algeria that nightmare
and another against

Korea and another
against the one
I was in

and I don't remember
how many against
the three

when I was a boy
Abyssinia Spain and
Harlan County

and not one
breath was restored
to one

shattered throat
mans womans or childs
not one not

one
but death went on and on
never looking aside

except now and then like a child
with a furtive half-smile
to make sure I was noticing.
__________

The poem's being so artless leaves you unprepared for the metaphor that closes and clinches the poem and leaves me breathless because I see that smile. Come to think of it...uh oh...I know whose smile it is. It is Donald Rumsfeld's smile.

My friend was talking about Wallace Stevens the other day, and I realized that I don't know much about Wallace Stevens, I'd always avoided him because I didn't understand his aesthetic. But. If you are talking about poems to be comitted to memory, then it's the Stevens poems that pop up: "Emperor of Ice Cream" (the corpulent one, the roller of fat cigars)--why? Maybe he was working on the problem of how to turn the psyche (the privatemost of utterings) into a civic utterance, a public utterance. Whereas someone like Ashbery is concerned with the psyche's utterings, but not necessarily turning them into something civic.

So while I was thumbing through my Stevens book I found this, which seems applicable to the recent posts. I don't think he intended it as a poem. Anyway, I'd never seen it before, so I will post it.

[Prose statement on the poetry of war]

The immense poetry of war and the poetry of a work of the imagination are two different things. In the presence of the violent reality of war, consciousness takes the place of the imagination. And consciousness of an immense war is a consciousness of fact. If that is true, it follows that the poetry of war as a consciousness of the victories and defeats of nations, is a consciousness of fact, but of heroic fact, of fact on such a scale that the mere consciousness of it affects the scale of one's thinking and constitutes a participating in the heroic. It has been easy to say in recent times that everything tends to become real, or, rather, that everything moves in the direction of reality, that is to say, in the direction of fact. We leave fact and come back to it, come back to what we wanted fact to be, not to what it was, not to what it has too often remained. The poetry of a work of the imagination constantly illustrates the fundamental and endless struggle with fact. It goes on everywhere, even in the periods that we call peace. But in war, the desire to move in the direction of fact as we want it to be and to move quickly is overwhelming.
Nothing will ever appease this desire except a consciousness of fact as everyone is at least satisfied to have it be.
_____

Back to Lucia: I'm still chewing on this. There is of course a problem with fact right now, that is has, in a flash almost, become so fluid that fact doesn't exist. At least in its "represented" forms. If fact was in opposition to the imagination in the WWII days of Stevens' writing, the fluidness of the new non-facts still aren't equivalent to the imagination. Or are they? Your imagination can create a cyber reality where you fly around on a pterodactyl. (Dactyl!) Or you quit typing and go outside to stare at the trees, so that's what I'm going to do.

No poem now, but I will post that I heard somebody quoting Mark Twain on the radio: "Patriotism is being proud of your country all the time, but proud of your government only when it's right." Or something like that. No, no--now I remember. It was from a documentary made from interviews of former CIA people and weapons inspectors, who stated that the administration, including honorable people like Colin Powell, knew it was lying on WMD. It made me feel badly about not having done enough...well, I didn't actually do anything...to stop the war machine. All I've done is write poems. Someone left a really thoughtul comment about this.

Vivian--who made this web site and tells me what to do since the electronic world is mostly foreign to me and I am content to leave it that way--said I should write: I do not have cancer. I do not have cancer, Lisa! Whew, what a relief. I only have m.s.--is that a code, as people once said the big C? The lesson is: stick to poetry, though I will say that the new drug I'd been researching, which I mentioned because it was recommended to my considereration, was taken off the market because someone died, and the disturbing thing about this news is that I learned it from the business page of the NY Times, reporting on how the company stock tanked as a result. Shine, perishing republic.