It is the act of witness
that compels me to write. So the issue at hand was which moment? Should I
describe witnessing the body of a lawyer for the Sendero Luminoso in the
Chorillos Tunnel, Lima, the daily news covering his face, the garua drizzling
on the windshield, Carlos Orellano speeding us off, saying “Don’t look!” Or the
Sendero’s reciprocal attack blowing up the power plant and the US Embassy so we
ate soupa criolla by candlelight Independence Eve; or having to bribe our way
out of the Peten Itza jungle when things between the guerrillas and the
Guatemalan Army were heating up—a friend’s sister, a nurse, missing in action;
or being stuck at the Guatemala airport with no way home because the US invaded
Tegusigalpa—shamelessly resorting to bribing ticket agents for the next flight
out anywhere in Mexico; or winding up in the USSR at the exact right moment, I
was interviewed at a reading (on the Beat Poets, no less, not knowing the
socio-political significance THAT had on my audience) right when Jesse Helms
began his NEA purges? The shame I felt as a US citizen... And I haven’t even
mentioned the home front: 9/11 or AIDS. As I tried to narrow down a particular
a moment, I began to feel like one of Tom Stoppard’s reporters in “Night and
Day,” always after the big story. In fact, at the time, I was a penny-ante
freelance photojournalist, I knew the thrill of the hunt, front page bylines in
yet another newspaper...
How did I get into this
sordid business anyway? I was in workshops with Carolyn Forché after she and
her photojopurnalist friend, Harry had returned from the atrocities of El
Salavdor. She told us that poetry in America wasn’t enough, she told us to go
out and to bear witness. El Salvador was a little too real for me, but as my
then boyfriend John Oliver Simon and I traveled in other safer periphery
countries meeting with, and translating Latin American poets, the trouble came
naturally to us. Right place right/wrong time, depending on the viewpoint.
I rendered those experiences
into poems, always struggling with the dilemma of didacticism, polemics, and
rhetoric. San Francisco poet David Meltzer wrote that poetry is where inside
and outside worlds collide. You have to be ready to reassemble the parts. But as I rendered experience into art, I found that
this bearing witness also came at
a great cost to the soul. Stateside, I was dreaming of snipers in the closets
with Uzis and I could tell an AK47 on sight. One time I slid out of bed and
broke my tailbone, thinking it was an embankment, and I was under fire. I
learned I had thin boundaries. Why couldn’t I be more like sweet Emily alone in
her garden, writing small, internal, psychological poems about plants, why was
I chasing around the world in search of a good story, or a good poem while so
many of my friends were content to write from the home front, so to speak? So,
I went to post-Glasnost USSR on a Soviet-American Friendship exchange, thinking
it would be a piece of cake... And the walls of the Cold War came tumbling
down. There was this Soviet poet... But that’s another chapter. I’m from the US
where despite what Dana Gioia said, where
poetry doesn’t matter. Or does it?
Well, when I got home from
Brian’s class, I learned the home front had turned into the front lines: Jack
Foley forwarded us an email from Sam Hamill (who was at those same workshops
with Carolyn Forché) asking for poems to make an e-book to take to the White
House for a poetry tea with Laura Bush, “Poetry and the American Voice.” I
didn’t have any poems about Iraq, or on last Saturday’s big peace march—it was too soon for me to
write about it—so I contacted poets around the world. It was the least I could
do. But the White House got wind of the fact that Sam had received some 2000
poems protesting Bush’s planned Iraqi war within 24 hours, and fearing
politicized poets, Laura Bush canceled the event. So the rest of my week has
been spent sending emails, politicking and organizing. Not writing my assignment
in the way I had envisioned.
ENVOI One email I got from Eliot Weinberger’s
Feb. 1 talk at St. Mark’s Poetry Project in NY, had this to say about bearing
poetic witness, though it’s well worth reading in its entirety, I’ve included
some selections as further food for thought. Weinberger states: “I take this
gathering as a kind of union meeting-- the union of writers, mainly poets--...
the primary question for us is: things are going to be happening with or
without us, are we going to be part of it, or are we going to continue to talk
about ...finding your voice at the AWP? Poets in times of political crises have
three models. The first is to write overtly political poems, as was done during
the Vietnam War. 95% of those poems will be junk, but... 95% of anything is
junk. It is undeniable that the countless poems and poetry readings against the
Vietnam War contributed to creating and legitimizing a general climate of
opposition; they were the soul of the movement. And it also resulted in some of
the most enduring poems of the 20th century, news that has stayed news indeed.
The second model is epitomized by George Oppen... [who] stopped writing and
became a union leader.
The third model is César
Vallejo, another Communist in the 20's and 30's. He refused to write propaganda
poems-- he wanted to write the poems he wanted to write-- so to serve the cause
he wrote a great deal of propaganda prose. People who are poets presumably know
something about writing. So why does it never occur to them to write something
other than poems? There are approximately 8000 poets registered in the
Directory of American Poets--are there even four or five who have written an
article against the Bush Administration? ...most of us do have access to
countless other venues: hometown newspapers, college newspapers, professional
newsletters, specialist magazines, websites, and so on. All writers have
contacts somewhere, and all these periodicals must fill their pages. Even
poetry magazines: Why must poetry magazines always be graveyards of orderly
tombstones of poems? ... How many of them today have any political content at
all?...
I send my articles out
via e-mail. It's one of ...the easiest, to publish political writing in this
country...Let the readers vote, not with their feet, but with the forward
button. ....most American writers have lost the ability to even think
politically, or nationally, or internationally. In ... anthologies and
magazines devoted to 9/11..., nearly every single writer resorted to
first-person anecdote: "It reminded me of the day my father died..."
"I took an herbal bath and decided to call an old boyfriend..."Barely
a one could imagine the event outside of the context of the prison cell of
their own expressive self. (Or, on the avant-garde, it was a little too real
for ironic pastiche from their expressive non-self.)
We are where we are in
part because American writers-- supposedly the most articulate members of
society-- have generally had nothing to say about the world for the last 30
years. How many of those 8000 poets have ever been to a Third World country
(excluding beach vacations)? How many think it worthwhile to translate
something? How many can name a single contemporary poet, not living in the
U.S., from Latin America or Africa or Asia? In short, how many know anything
more about the world than George Bush knows?
After thirty years of
self-absorption in MFA and MLA career-mongering and knee-jerk demography and
the personal as political and the impersonal as poetical, American writers now
have the government we deserve. We were good Germans under Reagan and Bush I;
we were never able to separate Clinton's person from his policies and gave him
a complacent benefit of the doubt; and the result is Cheney and Rumsfeld and
Ashcroft and Perle and Wolfowitz and Scalia and Rice and their little president.
They can't be stopped, but I do think they can be slowed down.”
Feb. 5, 2003
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