As I do not believe that neuroscience can illuminate anything about artistic activity (I disagree with the anti-platonic claim that «literature and erudite culture in general, is already well along the road to extinction», i.e. that poetry is about reference, information, neurological stimulus, progress…), I think that criticism does play a vital role in illuminating why poetry does not make anything happen», but instead is «a way of happening, a mouth».
In these lines, Auden does envisage a vital role for poetry (as opposed to political discourse, for instance, but not to Marvell’s ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return to Ireland’, just to give an example of a highly political poem), a role which has something to do with perception, understanding, to a «self-examined life», to freedom from causality…

Follow poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

ps. Isn’t Wordswhorth’s prelude and autobiography a way of happening too?

best,
margo

funny, ‘i am goya’ was the first poem i ever read in russian, when i was a kid in school. the bi-lingual edition, ‘anti-worlds,’ came out in ‘67 (my used copy, when i got it probably in ‘97, was already aged to a golden crisp) and had that same kunitz translation. actually it’s the very first poem; it was an early ‘un, and is his certified anthology piece.
that takes me back.

ferlinghetti traveled with voznesensky if i remember right, here and in russia. excepting a few very good poems (and ‘i–am goya’ is one of the best) i always group voznesensky with evtushenko–two poets that i think ultimately failed because of their flat ambition to become poets of the people. both could fill concerts and were incredibly popular, but allowed themselves to moralize with boring results. but, when i think about it, he was a cool poet and did write more good stuff than i’m giving him credit for.

james

Why don’t you do me a favor: keep ignoring them.

Martin

ps:
Vietnamlaoscambodiagrenadanicaraguaelsalvadoreasttimorisraeliraqiranserbiakosovo, that’s a pretty long name for a country.

And I was referring to the Bush Doctrine (should have been more specific). Maybe you should move to Alaska. I’ve heard that you can see Russia from there.

I’m remembering how an earlier poet than the ones you cite, Vosnesensky & his “Arrow in the Wall” appeared in ‘87 –apt to this post, again– I just read this short poem from it,which I find good to add to the brew.

I Am Goya, By Andrei Voznesensky


I am Goya

of the bare field, by the enemy’s beak gouged
till the craters of my eyes gape
I am grief
I am the tongue
of war, the embers of cities
on the snows of the year 1941
I am hunger
I am the gullet
of a woman hanged whose body like a bell
tolled over a blank square
I am Goya
O grapes of wrath!
I have hurled westward
the ashes of the uninvited guest!
and hammered stars into the unforgetting sky–like nails
I am Goya

TRANSLATED FROM THE RUSSIAN BY STANLEY KUNITZ

but isn’t america a little better-positioned to survive any loss of supremacy in the world-market? comparable mineral resources, more intensely-arable land, and (especially) a growing work-force. plus, borders that aren’t being challenged and eaten away at, even if, and probably largely because, they are so deeply compromised.
economic power is all about growth. colonial-like exploitation is expensive.
maybe i’m getting ahead of myself–i’m not nearly as confident predicting america’s success as i am russia’s decline.

speaking for my neighbors–we are stupid idealists, and buy into the narrative fallacies constructed for us all the time. (sorry, that should be: narrative IS a fallacy, as a rule.) the virtues of democracy themselves are all crudely misconstrued lessons in cause-and-effect, as if the u.s. were founded as a democratic nation, anyway.

but what about russia? what russians accept from their gov’t is more like skeptical resignation. their bureaucracy doesn’t function on such a basic level i think it would be hard for most americans to comprehend, we who are mostly ignorant of our own less-severe dysfunction because of a deep-seated material complacency. corruption and impotence are matter-of-fact assumptions in russian life, which gives putin a very different kind of power than u.s. presidents. democracy, rather than serving as a legitimate check against power, really just requires the powers-that-be to mass-manipulate public will as it operates to gain office. real elections are expensive. we are supremely propagandized. leaders seek power, and move through the organs of power however they can.

the problem poetry tackles, politically, is the integration of tendencies and particulars. it’s not really facilitated by freedom in any appreciable way. sergei gandlevsky, a russian poet who came out from the underground after the fall of the soviet union, has said that poets don’t matter in a democracy. when i asked him whether it was better to be a poet now, when he faces indifference instead of censorship, insignificance instead of persecution, he said it wasn’t better or worse, just different.
poetry is extra-moral, operates outside of morality. it is interested in true rather than supposed values, which is why great artists move so closely with nihilism, and why enthusiasm is a serious danger for a poet, either compromising his integrity or his life-and-limb. a rigorous spherics requires a justification, and want of the latter is always on the verge of ending the former, which is the definition for me of pragmatic experimentalism. experimentation (i.e., problematics) as alternative to suicide.
most of us really are just looking for what’s real.

i don’t know if i’ve really used this platform before to promote boris ryzhii, a russian poet who hanged himself in 2001. as a poet he was mainly concerned with finding a justification of life (which is actually the title of one of his collections, ОПРАВДЕНИЕ ЖИЗНИ). contemporary russian poets have to find a way to understand their new, very-changed status (which coincides significantly with the fall of the berlin wall!) and so confront this issue of morality automatically, and their success as poets, i think, can largely be measured along these lines.

my two cents. thanks for asking.

james

Before I return to ignoring your posts, I wish to add that America also intervened in Great Britain in 1776, 1812, meddled with Great Britain’s secret ally the Confederate States of America in 1860, and also invaded Italy in 1943, and Germany in 1944.

Thomas

(now back to ignoring your posts. yea, you better believe it, ignore, ignore, ignore…I’m ignoring you…la la la)

I can’t imagine you really believe that Washington’s “interventionist agenda” really began after September 11 (although “it was in the works” before then; I’ll say!); if you do, then yr grasp of history is even more cartoonish than the embarrassing “introduction” to yr post reveals. September 11 changed essentially nothing structurally; you might have a look at the United States’ interventionist agenda since its inception, but if we just stick to the last forty years, a brief litany should jog yr memory: Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Grenada, Nicaragua, El Salvador, East Timor, Israel, Iraq, Iran, Serbia, Kosovo, to name only the most notable countries in whose affairs we “intervened” decisively.

If you want to regurgitate received wisdom & pretend it proves yr mastery of geopolitical history, I guess we’re stuck with it until yr unfortunate tenure at Harriet is up. But no one’s fooled by the charade.

To be blunt, Jasper’s problem is that his arguments fail to take in the complexity of how countries and cultures function. His responses to me are America-centric. He systematically discredits the venom that countries, tribes, sects, factions, war-lords, in short all that is local, reserve for each other. He thinks animosity against the US trumps local animosities and he doesn’t understand the strength of culture at that hard-scrabble level of plots of land, or where a river runs, and what a wall can do (remember Glendower in King Henry IV?…Cousins, of many men…). He’s into the big drama without realizing that the big drama is confected for people just like him. Politics in Iraq, for instance (now that they have politics) are not as dependent, as he would like to think, upon American occupation or influence. In fact, it is not really going as the US had planned. At a political level, it is clear that Nouri al-Maliki’s government is more influenced by the Iranians; troubling, though not surprising. In the West we saw the Iran-Iraq war, the whole eight years of bloodletting, as a war between two countries. A more accurate description is that is was a war between two sects, in medieval terms, a tribal and religious war, a civil war. Saddam’s Sunni dictatorship over a majority Shia population was, for post-revolutionary Iran, intolerable, just as the Shia diaspora was intolerable to Saddam. Saddam got his guns and his money from the US, but Iran had the advantage at the local level, which is why Saddam turned against his fellow Iranians, with chemical weapons, wholesale destruction of villages and communities and Stalinist-style atrocities via his secret police against anyone that disagreed with his kitsch agenda. America was, from their perspective, a bit player. A banking system. In their eyes, we are stupid idealists – something the American left has trouble understanding.

I would really like to here more of your ideas on Russia (poetry, politics, etc.). For the last three winters, each of them harsher for Northern Europe than the previous, manipulations of fuel supplies, have had a serious effect on Central European countries. You say that the shadow of the Russian empire is fainter than ever. And yet, they themselves are not behaving as though it were, and the return, in a kind of post-modern way, to command-control totalitarianism under Putin, which most Russians seem to agree with, tells us that, even without “empire status”, Western Europe and the US need to find a way to relate to and cooperate with the Russian agenda, more on Russian terms, that is without expecting them to behave “democratically”, especially since, these days, we’re not exactly behaving democratically ourselves.

Martin