Further thoughts on the cultural labor of poetry and art. Not merely "is it good?," but "what has it accomplished?"...reviews of recent poetry collections; selected poems and art dealing with war/peace/social change; reviews of poetry readings; links to political commentary (particularly on conflicts in the Middle East); youtubed performances of music, demos, and other audio-video nuggets dealing with peaceful change, dissent and resistance.
David-Baptiste Chirot explains: "'Light Remains' is from a series of pieces called 'No Place to Move,' a series within a much larger one to do with Walls, which has been going on for the last 17 months now."
The title comes from a phrase he made for another series a few years ago: "'To absorb darkness until all that remains is light'--(the opposite of a Black Hole)--Light having the ancient associations which continue to this day--and 'Light Remains'--even when hope may seem gone--it remains--'One cannot hide from that which never sets,' as Heraclitus says. So though people may be Walled off, imprisoned, 'disappeared,' and turned into non-persons--yet they exist--and Light Remains--they are visible--and see through those fences and Walls--even when it says 'no place to move'--
"A lot of the pieces are inspired by the situation of the people inside Gaza--and then extended and continuing to extend to many more areas and situations all around one in the world in which Walls may be thought of as censorship, surveillance, "security"—not only physical Walls, mental and spiritual ones--and ones made by language, built with words and images--
"Light Remains" also as it is the constant in the relativity theory for example--all these Walls and words change through time--can be changed in time--so to see even through the fence and a chink in the Wall--is creating an opening--possibilities--"
Following the tradition of anti-war veterans, these Iraq War veterans, like the Vietnam Veterans Against the War before them, have staged demonstrations on the American homefront, dramatizing for civilians what it might look like to live under foreign military occupation. On this Veterans Day, I want to remember those who died serving our country, regardless of the political machinations that led to their service, and also those whose lives were never the same after their service.
Jonathan LaGuardia, a graduate student at John Carroll University who has been an invaluable assistant to some of my various projects, including *Behind the Lines* the book project, participated in our Stories of War and Peace project, which led to this reflection, part of a research project on narrative and violence:
I participated in a project this summer under the direction of Philip Metres, a professor of English at John Carroll University. This project, which Prof. Metres called the "War and Peace Story Project" gathered stories from people who attended the Cleveland Peace Show at the Free Stamp Park on September 3rd of this year. The show is an all-day event that provides an alternative to the Cleveland Air Show, with the idea that while we can celebrate the technological prowess and destructive might of the United States, we might also celebrate our peace-making abilities. The Free Stamp park is filled for the day with booths of political activists, organizers, food vendors, even sequin-clad performers on stilts.
Prof. Metres had the idea that we could use this event as an opportunity to collect narratives of war and peace experiences from a diverse group of people, preserving these narratives in an online archive. A slew of student volunteers worked their way through the crowd, recording the stories they heard on digital recorders.
Early in the day, I tagged along on an interview with a Vietnam Veteran, a clean-shaven man of about 60, dressed in a Vietnam-era army shirt and a pair of dull gray cotton shorts. He carried an American flag on a pole over his shoulder in which the separate little white stars—one for each country in the Union—was replaced by a peace sign.
When we started the recorder and asked him to introduce himself, he began factually—basic training at such and such a location, elevated in rank to such and such a position, eventually stationed just north of Saigon—though it quickly turned to personal loss: "Two days after [the January 31, 1968 offensive]," he said, "one of my lieutenants was killed. It was a huge shock to me, and it's still"—his voice began to break, and his eyes shifted from the tiny microphone he had been watching to some remote, unidentifiable position in the distance—"and, ummm, it's going to be a shock to me for the rest of my life."
A little while into the interview, after more factual "I was here and then went there," the subject of death came up again, and again the speaker hesitated, staring off into the distance and letting his lip quiver before regaining control. His hesitations were so perfect that I could not help but view them as performances—staged, rehearsed performances of the same talk he had been giving for the last 40 years.
About four or five hours later, an Iraq Vet came up to me, a black man of about my age with short, loose dreadlocks and no visible wounds. He came up to me not to give a story, but to give his name and contact information, in case we'd like to get in touch with him at some point in the future. "I'm sure you'll want to hear what I have to say," he said, "but my head just isn't straight enough to submit to an interview yet."
So, here I have these two generations of veterans: the Vietnam Veteran whose grief seemed rehearsed, and the Iraq Veteran who, in his own words, couldn't get his head "straight enough" to submit to an interview. When the Iraq Vet left me, I turned to where we had interviewed the Vietnam Vet, and there he was still, parading up and down the grass with his American Peace Flag over his shoulder—this 60 year old man in a long sleeved army shirt in the sweltering sun had been walking back and forth for 4 solid hours for no other reason than to be there, to be seen.
With this sight, I saw new value to his performance, thinking that there was a truth to the performed grief that immediate grief could not have delivered. Perhaps it took those 40 years to put those moments into a coherent narrative, the truth of his performed grief identical to his somber but dedicated march: exhausting, but necessary.
*** My father, a Vietnam War veteran, once recounted to my students that the most important thing he did in Vietnam was to volunteer at a Catholic orphanage, teaching English to young Vietnamese women.
Check out this recent finding. Next time you see a homeless person, ask if they served.
WASHINGTON - Veterans make up one in four homeless people in the United States, though they are only 11 percent of the general adult population, according to a report to be released Thursday.
And homelessness is not just a problem among middle-age and elderly veterans. Younger veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan are trickling into shelters and soup kitchens seeking services, treatment or help with finding a job.
The Veterans Affairs Department has identified 1,500 homeless veterans from the current wars and says 400 of them have participated in its programs specifically targeting homelessness.
Yesterday, I had the chance to meet up with Harvey (H.L.) Hix and interview him about his recent work, God Bless: A Political/Poetic Discourse, published by Phil Brady's Etruscan Press. Hix employs the language of speeches made by George Bush and Osama Bin Laden in various traditional Western and non-Western forms (from the sestina to the ghazal). It is a fascinating project, demonstrating an aesthetic attention that becomes a kind of ethical and political attention, a close listening of the first order. A document of listening, GOD BLESS aptly demonstrates the profound lack of listening at the heart of this administration's decision-making process. I'll do a full review of the book later, but wanted to let people know that it is eminently worth reading.
Check out this recent piece I did for the Poetry Foundation, on documentary poetry as a kind of tradition.
Date: Sat, 3 Nov 2007 17:16:20 -0700 From: Jennifer Karmin Subject: Malachi Ritscher: anti-war protester
SELF-IMMOLATION: A voluntary sacrifice or denial of oneself, as for an ideal or another person.
Most famously demonstrated by Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc on June 11, 1963 in Vietnam.
Most recently demonstrated by musician Malachi Ritscher in Chicago on November 3, 2006 as a protest against the Iraq war. One year ago, Malachi set himself on fire next to the Kennedy Expressway during morning rush hour. He left a statement and obituary on his website. http://www.savagesound.com/gallery99.htm
As the Iraq War moves towards year 5, I am taking some time to think about Malachi. I am wondering how we find new ways to express our sadness, rage, and disgust. When does the turning point come? When is it enough?
When I was a college student, poet Cyrus Cassells recommended that I read Robert Hass's Praise, and Hass became one of those poets who fundamentally influenced the way I saw poetry. Over the course of thinking through the issues of a poetry of war resistance, I found my former adoration cede to a skeptical enjoyment. In a talk in which I confronted Hass' dichotomizing of the political and the pleasureable, I phrased it this way:
In the essay, “Textured Information: Politics, Pleasure, and the Poetry of the Eighties,” Rogert Gilbert describes the dominant poetic period style of the eighties as one in which pleasure and politics are polarities: “the rival claims of pleasure and politics, the aesthetic and the social, private experience and public responsibility” (243). Gilbert’s assertion is based upon two limited notions: that poetry is the lyric version of a Pez dispenser, and that politics is unpleasureable, by definition, in poetry.
Comprehending both the meaning and the efficacy of explicitly political poetry requires a new critical vocabulary, one which accounts for what might be termed “political desire”—that is, the subjective longing, even pleasure, produced by literary texts that reach beyond the bounds of the privatized, commodified self.
Hass' poetry, to my mind, sustains this dichotomy in ways that limit poetry's possibilities and reduce politics to a sphere of obligation or subjective pain. Yet this recent review of Robert Hass' new book, Time and Materials, suggests Hass continues to revisit the conundrums of a political poetry:
So it's surprising that Hass' new collection, his first since stepping down as laureate, makes poetry and politics bedfellows. Time and Materials has the look of a catchall, mixing occasional pieces, imitations, translations, and the long narrative poems that are Hass' tours de force. And while the book is, overall, unmistakably Hassian—aging Berkeleyites come to life in rocky West Coast landscapes and an erotic imagination of impressive stamina—its author is also readjusting his approach to language and poetic responsibility. Not only are there explicit anti-war poems of the sort he's disavowed; Hass seems to stray, at times, from his commitment to immediacy.
Check out my recent review essay that appears in Jacket Magazine #34, on a book (d.a. levy & the mimeograph revolution) about the life and work of d.a.levy, a Cleveland poet from the 1960s. This is the opening paragraph:
Ever since I moved to Cleveland six years ago, I’ve been followed by d.a.levy. His poster-sized image — with all the gravitas of those iconic Warhol images of Che Guevara — looks at me every time I walk into Macs Backs Paperbacks, one of the last remaining independent bookstores in town. His voice is uttered in low adoring tones at local poetry readings. Recently, the 60th anniversary of his birth was recognized, and in 2005, Levyfest was held. Was this levy just another iteration of the Famous Local Poet, whose fan base spanned the geography of a postage stamp but whose devotion was outsized, mystical and unquestioning? I worried that he was a third-class Allen Ginsberg, whose poems — unlike Ginsberg’s best works — now emit only the moldering whiff of the Sixties.
I recently received a kind email from Bree, another Cleveland poet and founder of Green Panda Press, who wrote to suggest that 1) levy's spirituality was not as shallow as Allen Ginsberg's statement quoted in the essay suggested it was, and 2) his influence on poetry, especially concrete poetry, should not be underestimated.
