Are you related to Robert Browning?

I don’t think the eleemosynary is good for poetry.

When the picturesque went out of painting, the revolutionaries decided poetry should not concern itself with the beautiful, but even as painting has remained colorful– since the eye cannot be convinced to be utterly betrayed– poetry gave up the glories of the ear in order to wander where it wanted in the mind, the reaches of which are so vast, the art became less an art than a window into everything, and everything, as you know, is the enemy to art, which lives by an ecstasy of delimitation.

The raptures of art, like love, are selfish. The delight given by the painting, the poem, or the beloved is not contrived for anyone’s advantage; the pleasure is anonymous and unconscious; the delights are not aimed to help, they belong to their own life alone.

Political poetry seeks the good; its realm is the polis, not the ecstatic, which inhibits sober reasoning on that count.

Political poetry is oil and water; it offends the Muse.

Lincoln was a statesman, a politician and an orator. His Gettysburg address, placed in an anthology of poems, would immediately stand out as an historical document—its aura belongs to its historical occasion; its atmosphere does not arise from the intricate beauty of its rhetoric, but rather from the swiftness of its appropriateness delivered with sober, surgical skill. The acknowledged legislator of the world succeeds as an orator; Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech was a speech—not a poem. Had King interrupted his address with “I’d like to read this poem, now” the oration would have fallen into a pit of aesthetic darkness from which it would have never recovered. The orator would have been slain by Whitman’s private ecstasy.

One would not stand up at a Teamster’s meeting, or in the halls of Congress, or a local town hall meeting, or a local school board meeting, or a local zoning board meeting, and read a poem, if one were serious about proposing an important piece of legislation, or effecting real political change. One would instead use statesmanship, oration, political savvy, and if, once in a blue moon, a poem might come in handy at a certain moment, one might even use that, but the poem would be subsumed under the larger category of legislator.

The political poetry conference, Split This Rock, is not about poetry nor politics, but a kind of tame blending of the two, making politics and poetry both less effective. I’m sure the people gathered there will be well-meaning, intelligent, nice, and maybe even funny. But wild horses couldn’t drag me to an event like that. The eleemosynary will murder the poetry and the politics will cover up the deed.

Thomas
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But every time I try to go to the site today my browser seizes up – I can’t scroll, I can’t do anything. And the Wave Books page on the anthology seems to be down so I’m having trouble finding out who’s included in the collection. Telling? Hmmm – technological helplessness… as metaphor for women’s relative powerlessness in cyberspace? Should I write a political poem?

Of course I’m being glib, but let’s examine Hill’s basic premise: that only certain people — veterans of conventionally understood war zones — have the standing, the right, to write poems about the broader world. Only in America have I heard this position asserted. In Italy I had to explain at length why we needed Poets Against the War or Split This Rock. Italians couldn’t imagine poets who write socially engaged works feeling isolated from the poetry mainstream.

We are all citizens of this fast-dying planet; we are responsible for its death. As Americans we consume the cheap products of poorly paid and otherwise exploited workers in our own country and around the world. We were governed for 8 years by a murderous, lying political regime. Even today, the Obama administration continues to wage wars in our name, to turn a blind eye to Israeli occupation and oppression of Palestinians, to impose US military bases all over the world, to support economic policies here at home that keep the poor and working classes powerless. Our systems of education, criminal justice, and health care are grossly inequitable.

Myles makes the critical point that if we are female or queer or a person of color, everyday life is a war zone in the United States: rape, hate crimes, violence in our neighborhoods and homes.

But even if we are “comfortably middle class,” as Hill apparently accuses the poets in State of Union of being, it seems to me that we’re not given a pass. Indeed, we have an extra responsibility to speak out, to expose the inequities, to make clear the ways in which we benefit every day from, as in my case, white skin, education, heterosexual marriage.

I also deeply resent the notion that we should take some part of our lives (our relationship to the wider world) and rope it off, not write about it. Please don’t tell me what I can’t write about. I assert: Any topic is worthy of poetry. John Updike wrote a poem to a particular turd he “struck off” one afternoon. Childish? Perhaps. But no one told Updike what topics he should consider worthy of poetry.

I have read hundreds – perhaps thousands – of “political” poems while editing Poets Against the War anthologies, curating the Sunday Kind of Love reading series at Busboys and Poets in DC, and organizing now two Split This Rock Poetry Festivals. The fact of the matter is that there are as many ways to write a political poem as there are poets. More, in fact, since many poets write lots of different kinds of such poems. Poets are writing challenging, funny, grieving, confounding, angry, hopeful poems about our benighted and beautiful world. American poets are doing this and doing it in all kinds of interesting ways, far more poets than we can hope to feature in a decade of biannual festivals. I salute you all.

Rather than tread the tired territory of whether one should write political poems, and who deserves to do the writing, again and again, let’s read this work, spread the good word, celebrate these poems and poets. We could begin – and I will – with the poets who will read at Split This Rock next year, March 10-13, 2010. Check out this list: Chris Abani, Lillian Allen, Sinan Antoon, Francisco Aragón, Jan Beatty, Martha Collins, Cornelius Eady, Martín Espada, Allison Hedge Coke, Andrea Gibson, Natalie Illum, Fady Joudah, Toni Asante Lightfoot, Richard McCann, Jeffrey McDaniel, Lenelle Moïse, Nancy Morejón, Mark Nowak, Wang Ping, Patricia Smith, A.B. Spellman, Arthur Sze, Quincy Troupe, and Bruce Weigl.

All of these poets are in the world, are poet-citizens, in a variety of ways. Lillian Allen is an originator of dub poetry and a leader on diversity and culture in Canada. Fady Joudah was a field doctor with Doctors Without Borders. Cornelius Eady is a founder of Cave Canem, the organization for African American poets. Jan Beatty has worked as a welfare caseworker and an abortion counselor. Mark Nowak facilitates “poetry dialogues” with Ford autoworkers in the US and South Africa.

And their poetry reflects this diversity of experience and background: Jan Beatty’s plainspoken explorations of gender and working class life; Mark Nowak’s documentary poetics, weaving news accounts and corporate instructional guides into the poems; poem-songs of Lenelle Moïse; the often short sharp lyrics of Cornelius Eady; A.B. Spellman’s jazz-inflected sounds.

Political poetry – even the term is tainted, in America; at Split This Rock we often call it socially engaged poetry or social justice poetry –contains multitudes. To further adapt Walt Whitman, the godfather of these poets, social justice poetry is not a bit tamed, it too is untranslatable, it sounds its barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

NOTE: This evening I can access Harriet without my browser freezing up, so I’m now posting this rant in its entirety here, even though I ended up writing it this morning for my blog (shameless plug: http://www.sarahbrowning.blogspot.com). I couldn’t figure out where to excerpt.
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My favorite part is this: “I have nothing against rich people per se. I love some quite a lot. The ones I know. Work is not a shame. Wealth is not a shame. Lying is.”

Some of the layers to the discussion in this comments section don’t interest me. To me, two key takeaways are that 1. Poetry reviewers are in general glib these days. 2. Political means the whole polis (which of course includes poets).

The first thing is that it is fair game for Eileen to question the reviewer’s motives and to look at his own poetry as a way into understanding them. Are the reviewer’s motives more aesthetic than political (aesthetic being its own kind of politic)–I don’t really know. Nevertheless, this would be a good trend, I think, for poets to be part of the review discussion again, for real. I don’t know. I have only written two poetry reviews in my life and it is a hard job when it is done right. I don’t think most are done right. I think, in general, the role of critic has become smashed with the role of poet and not all critics are poets, and so many of them really just don’t know what they are talking about.

The second part is that it is fair and wonderful for Eileen to bring up the idea that anyone alive today has reason to write a political poem if they so choose. Why is combat fighting now a street cred element when it comes to speech and language and what they represent? Is blood entirely literal now? War has a different meaning in our age (and now that we understand it to). This kind of good/bad, real/unreal thinking is too early 2000s Bush administration thinking for me and I want out of it. Identities and roles in the 21st century are malleable. When people fight in wars they might not always have the means or position to speak about it (or the desire to convey it in written or spoken language). Is it not the role of the artist to both speak of their own real experiences and to reflect the concerns of the entire society? Come on now. Everyone knows that language is a summation of a society. There goes the fact that anyone who can or is willing to speak has the political right to represent the society equally. If people are asked to be in a political anthology, then they have every right to say their piece. They represent our society in doing so, regardless of whether they represent the part of society a reviewer of a political poetry anthology has the ability to comprehend or not.

Anyway, I think a much more productive discussion would be to discuss here at least point 1, if not point 2. Maybe some people are already doing so. I can’t lie: I have not made it through all the comments.

Thanks again for writing this piece, Eileen Myles!

Good day to all here,
Dorothea Lasky
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You win!
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When someone reasons on a subject, why do you assume they are ‘trivializing’ it?

You guys are reducing the act to bullying–that’s essentially what you are doing. Which is fine.

I’m trying to get at the complexity.

Bill Clinton was accused of rape.

Depending on what political party you belonged to, that charge was taken seriously, or not taken seriously.

The ‘power’ of the rapist and the ‘power’ which protects the rapist, or the ‘power’ which accuses a person of rape are different types of ‘power.’

Shall we reduce the whole discussion to ‘everything is about power?’ I suppose we could.

To say rape is ‘about power’ is a little too vague for me. It really does get said again and again, and after a while people stop really thinking about the subject. That’s how I feel. That’s all.
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Bullying? What a trivialization. Any individual who has known a rape,(yes, I have) could not ignore the primary element of forced dominance, and could not fail to understand what has been spoken here.Scream, and silence, but a crime of power. And political. Rape is/has been an act by armies and their soldiers, husbands, abusers, torturers, teenagers, and violent women, also, strangers, friends, land owners, slave owners, (and includes the rape of land.)

No question that law pertains, and should. Ancient crimes of power. HARDLY CLICHES. Whether mythological, poetic, or mundane. To intellectualize it, to make it about words that stay in their corner, so it does not hurt – is one more failure of this exchange.

Rachel, you mention on the adjacent post on posts– why few women participate in this Harriet space. This subject has been a case in point.

margo
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And is law poetry’s domain?

And if not, how can poetry be truly effective in tackling political subjects beyond matters of pure aesthetics?”

Thomas, you are right that rape is a matter of law. It’s also a matter of who writes the laws and who carries them out. Would it be possible for poetry to get politicians and lawmakers in this country to process rape kits and get the DNA of rapists filed into a national database? If so, do you really think a mythological approach would be the best one?

BTW, I apologize for the cheap shot in my above post. sigh Your response to Terreson was puzzling to me.
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Ah, the irony.

Margo wrote: “Could poetry reach a chord to match rape’s scream? or silence? Find or fault such a “poem.” In your point, that’s what matters. But don’t insult the subject by cornering the act into a safe box that you can handle. Please!”

Although Terreson’s post wasn’t a poem, I felt the silence in what he wrote. I agree with Margo about the humanizing effect a good poem can create.
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Your reasoning gives me great comfort.

Your philosophy is this: all rape is bullying, all rape is political dominance.

Thus, the substance of what you are saying is:

Bullying is bullying.

I guess it’s pretty simple, then.

I do like simplicity, so I will defer to you.

The argument is yours.

You win.

I take back all I have said on the subject.

Thomas
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“I don’t know if rape is ‘political’ so much as it is a concern of the law.

Poems which say ‘rape is bad,’ are not going to win much praise. As citizens, we know that rape is bad.

The question becomes: are there enough laws in place regarding rape? Are they good laws? Are they fair? etc etc

So, it’s really a question of law, not politics–whatever we might happen to mean by this latter term, which I am not faulting, per se, but just trying to get a handle on.

One can see why Yeats, for instance, is better able to explore the issue of rape by dipping into myth; Zeus allows the poet to ‘look at the object as it really is’ in the Arnoldian sense, instead of covering it up in moral platitudes.

Yet immediately we are struck by the irony: we see things as they really are in myth??

Here then is the great paradox which must afflict poets like Eileen, anxious for poetry to further political enlightenment.

Shall there be poems on the horrible, feverish lust of amoral men? Is that the bar we need to rise to?

Or is actual rape–or the accusation of rape–a matter of law?

And is law poetry’s domain?”

Then he says:

“Margo,

I’m familiar with this tired cliche, but how can you be sure it’s ‘not about sex’ or any number of things?

Taking music lessons, or getting a good job, is ‘about power.’

Do you really think ‘about power’ gets to the heart of the matter when ‘about power’ refers to a million things?

Law is more specific than vague terms like politics or power.

I’m not saying ‘politics’ and ‘power’ are not important terms–yes they are very important–but if we don’t really know what we’re talking about, we’re in trouble.”

These comments say two things to me. That for Mr. Brady rape could be a sexual act between two equals. And that calling rape a political act of violence is a cliche. It is clear to me Mr. Brady is talking like a man too secure in his cubicle.

I got raped once. This was over thirty years ago when I was a young roustabout on an oil rig in the Gulf. The rape was the then way of initiation. It was their way of saying you are one of us. It took five men.

Rape is political because it is an act of dominance. Rape is violent because it is against one’s will. Not that I expect mr. Brady to get this or any other connection.

Terreson
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Retracting what?

C’mon. I was responding first to SPH’s dumb review which is long gone in the minds of you climbing bozos and in ref to EW I was responding to his very clearly intentioned writing and attempting to give it living context. It hasn’t even come up that Eliot blurbed Kent Johnson’s last book of translation and declared it better than the original. Some of EW’s greatest defenders are wards of the state of EW. I’m glad that people I blurb don’t think I’m so weak and defenseless or precious that I need them positioning me so desperately or in the case of you demanding retractions like you’re working in some cheap law office. I still work in the realm of ideas and you’re trying to give parking tickets.
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Margo,

I’m familiar with this tired cliche, but how can you be sure it’s ‘not about sex’ or any number of things?

Taking music lessons, or getting a good job, is ‘about power.’

Do you really think ‘about power’ gets to the heart of the matter when ‘about power’ refers to a million things?

Law is more specific than vague terms like politics or power.

I’m not saying ‘politics’ and ‘power’ are not important terms–yes they are very important–but if we don’t really know what we’re talking about, we’re in trouble.

Thomas
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We came in search of intelligent life

and so must abort our mission.
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Be careful what you wish for.
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.
Easter Sunday

Late Spring, still cold
this dark, metallic day.
The pond looks like quicksilver.
We’ve been expecting robins and roses
but still the light comes down solid
like steel, down
slow and hard from leaden gray.
Rain since not quite dawn, no sun;
not expected to soon return.
A puddled lawn, more topsoil,
even some driveway washed away.

We stood shivering in the sharp spring rain.
The cat watched us from the wood.
Stark and wet, leafless trees impaled
in earth like spikes of blackened iron.
We gathered at the Paschal grave,
the muddy soil easily turned
as we buried the poor baby rabbit.

.
Copyright 2008 – HARDWOOD-77 Poems, Gary B. Fitzgerald
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Could poetry reach a chord to match rape’s scream? or silence? Find or fault such a “poem.” In your point, that’s what matters. But don’t insult the subject by cornering the act into a safe box that you can handle. Please!

margo
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“Have you ever witnessed one animal kill another? Could you describe that, make it real?”

Now you’ve really pissed me off, son! We see more violence and animal blood in a month out here in the country than you’ve probably seen in your entire life, city boy! How dare you? You want sentimental? Try this.

.
Rabbits and Mice

Serrated, sharp with purpose,
razor hook and pointed saw,
deadly bite and slashing paw,
dangerous, meaning business,
designed for humorless need.

Yet beautiful, these predators,
how they touch our hearts.
How we admire their majesty,
their patterns and their power,
forgetting how they, too, with
savage jaw must feed,
forgetting who must bleed,
who, lying in the mud
will die today.

So magnificent and regal they,
such grace and speed,
such colorful spots and stripes.
We overlook the function
of hissing fang and strike,
the result of tooth and claw,
overlook the severing of parts,
the pain and slice and blood
of helpless prey.

You can not love life without
acknowledging its wages, or beauty
without knowing its price.

.
Copyright 2008 – HARDWOOD-77 Poems, Gary B. Fitzgerald
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If you can find it, you get a free book. The book is free. And the signature is only twenty-five bucks.

All of you people…ALL OF YOU…take Harriet, and yourselves, way too seriously. Get over it. In fifty years we’ll all be dead.

Chill!

None of us are really that important to the Earth. Or to God, for that matter.

.
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.
Antipirates

A sloop on the horizon, approaching.
White sails and black flag on blue seas.
Closing on a fat, laden galleon, rolling
like a pig in the swell, heavy with gold
from a government’s plunder,
the theft of a culture,
now plundered by those of no flag.
Sound and smoke of a cannon.
A predator encroaching, surrender demanded
from men condemned to have no tales to tell,
on a vessel abandoned and reeling
and soon to go under.
A raw justice, indeed. An irony
by the buccaneers laid:
the theft of that which was stolen.

Today the pirates still plunder,
but black flags in the breeze don’t portend the raid,
for those that are taking the treasure
pillage all that will sell or is sold,
all that’s of value to bring them more wealth;
privateers underhanded and stealing,
not silver or rum or emeralds or lace,
but the womb of our birth,
the soil and the oil and the trees.
No more honor among thieves
or brigand’s democracy,
for nothing is sacred except money,
not even the adventure of obtaining it.
A raw injustice, indeed,
for they commandeer not the gold
from government ships, but rape
and disgrace the very Earth.

.
Copyright 2005 – Evolving – Poems 1965-2005, Gary B. Fitzgerald
Copyright 2006 – Specimen – Selected Poems, Gary B. Fitzgerald
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I will admit to Mr. Robbins that I am not well versed in Economics. I would also remind him, though, that I was in class learning about World History while he was still getting his jollies on Sesame Street. I am well aware of the history that you remind us of here. Can you find, though, a single tribe or clan or nation on any continent (not counting penguins) that has not made war on or suffered due to a neighbor? Name just one country that, at no point in history, did not clash with another. La de da. People kill people. And? But, it is no longer an issue of internecine aggression, but of mass suicide.

Ultimately, I guess, there really isn’t anything any of us can do about it, including our ‘leaders’. It would be like Congress passing a law against hurricanes. Good luck!

Dear Mssrs. Simon and Swords, et al:

I am honored and flattered that you not only took time to read my poem, but also to consider and critique it. Your thoughtful observations were very impressive. Of course, I still think you’re basically full of shit! But please don’t take this personally. If you regularly hit the usual internet poetry sites then you will know that my opinion of critics (and editors) is no secret.

John, you mentioned how you once thought that you might have had to kill a rattlesnake. Let me tell you a story. I live out in the country in Texas and, believe me, Snakes R Us! One day I had a well-known critic up from Houston out on the farm. Earlier, I had been chopping up branches with my axe so I left it on the back porch.

We were sitting on the porch visiting, having a beer, when a huge Water Moccasin apparently crawled across the yard from the pond and came right up on to the porch. Startled, he stopped right in front of my visitor…then coiled and was about to strike. Luckily, as I said, my axe was right there so I cut the bastard’s head off. As I finished my beer, I watched the snake slowly make his way back to the pond.

At any rate, as for me and politics and war and genocide and disease and poverty and reproductive rights, all I can do about it is write poetry.

Green Revolution

The agricultural revolution changed us
from animals into men, from hunting
in the forest to beasts well fed and penned.
It moved us from furtive campfires,
hidden in our caves, to furrowed fields
and gathered tents together.

Villages grew up around us, then towns,
and like a package of firecrackers,
one revolution led to another:
writing and art, the law and musical sounds.
Then the great cities and states,
empires and nations and streets,
armies and church spires, and so came
civilization, the wild to tame and smother.

The industrial revolution turned it all
upside down, brought us to today…
dirty and brown, a world soaked in oil
and money and greed, a chaos of wealth
and desperate need, violence and war.
The green fields of crops killed the wild
that was green, then brought us full circle
back to the jungle, a different green,
the hunger of our lust, of desire,
back to mere survival, that law that rules
every other.

Copyright 2009 – Tall Grass & High Waves, Gary B. Fitzgerald
.
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A crushing criticism of Gary’s poem; this is every poet’s worst nightmare. Poets lose sleep over such things: ‘Am I really any good? Will I survive Criticism and Time?’

This is why the cocoon of the clique is so attractive. ‘Let friends, and friends only, judge my poems, and I may have a chance,’ the poet thinks.

But for Gary’s and poetry’s sake, let’s put things in perspective.

Your critique–as far as it went–showed solid perceptiveness and intelligence. You also deserve kudos for using the Arnoldian ‘touchstone’ technique–which Poe advocated prior to Arnold–comparison with other poems helps in ways which all the abstract criticism in the world cannot.

For instance, you write:

“The poem argues sentimentally in favor of Nature but shows no evidence of ever stepping out of doors with fresh eyes. Syntax is sacrificed to rhythm, and then rhythm to argument. The poem tells, but cannot show. Have you ever witnessed one animal kill another? could you describe that, make it real?

Here’s some real animals in poems: the clown-faced woodpecker in Robert Hass’s Meditation at Lagunitas. Richard Eberhart’s dead eponymous groundhog. D.H. Lawrence’s snake. Stafford’s road-killed deer. Jeffers’ hurt hawk. Lots of them in Mary Oliver. Blake’s Tyger.”

First,

Gary’s poem is not ‘sentimental.’

The term ‘sentimental’ is vastly over-used as a pejorative; it isn’t ‘sentiment,’ per se, which is the culprit in 9 cases out of 10 when the term gets used in contemporary criticism, but rather poor execution, which has nothing to do with ‘sentiment,’ per se, and yet there is a certain hard-hearted critical temperament which likes to fall back on the vague accusation: ‘sentimental.’ There are probably more contemporary poems which die for want of sentiment than for too much of it; but, really the term has caused so much confusion it should simply be retired.

Secondly,

Gary’s poem does not feature one animal, so it’s really unfair to compare his poem to Lawrence’s snake, Stafford’s deer, Eberhart’s groundhog, or Blake’s tiger.

Thirdly,

The Blake is successful through its use of language, not because the reader gets the idea that Blake stepped out-of-doors to describe an actual creature, which you insist Gary do.

Fourthly, and this actually builds on the first point:

We could fault Blake for his repetition: ‘tyger, tyger,’ an ‘unnatural’ utterance just for the sake of building a rhythm, a highly ‘sentimental’ gesture, we might say, but would this be a fair criticism?

If the critic go hunting for sentiment in any poem at all that speaks like a person, by God, the critic would find it, and the critic, therefore, can doom any poem they want with the charge, ‘sentimental.’ This, in fact, is a chief ploy of the modernists.

In addition, Stafford’s deer poem is as sentimental as any in the language, much more sentimental than Gary’s. But this is the value of the touchstone method, for we see exactly the difficulty any poet must overcome in trying to do what Gary is trying to do; and it also helps to put in perspective abstract terms like ‘sentimental.’

Finally, the Hass poem describes his woodpecker thusly:

“All the new thinking is about loss./In this it resembles all the old thinking./The idea, for example, that each particular erases/the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-/faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk/of that black birch is, by his presence,/some tragic falling off from a first world/of undivided light.”

Hass’s woodpecker isn’t so much described as USED for a philosophical point.

I don’t think “probing” is the most original way to describe what a woodpecker is doing, yet Robert’s poem is held up as an ideal, while Gary’s is faulted for having a snake “striking.”

It is obviously not helpful to compare every point of the Hass and Fitzgerald poems, which are doing two completely different things (the Hass poem is loaded down with sentimental touches and observations, while Fitzgerald’s is not), but I thought it important to point out that Hass’s woodpecker is not described in an especially arresting manner, (nor does it have to be.)

Gary’s poem, sentimentalizing neither Nature, nor humankind, (damn, I was going to retire that word!) accomplished what it set out to do.

As correct in many instances as you were, I’m not sure the same can be said of your criticism.

Thomas
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“Politics, economics, poetry.”

A volatile mix.

Today’s headline: Britain receives a portion of Libya’s oil profits and the Brits have just been accused of making a deal to get the Lockerbie bomber released. We were just talking about the British Empire. Here’s the ‘partial information,’ materialist, ugly side to politics which poetry can hardly touch without becoming propaganda.

“I agree with Eliot Weinberger’s position (if I understand it rightly), that the explosion of poetry MFAs has contributed to poetry’s loss of cultural prestige, glamor, general public interest, whatever you want to call it (though “cultural capital” sounds like a clumsy metaphor). Nothing against MFA teachers or seekers; it’s just a hunch about the culture, not a criticism of any individuals. (Some of my best friends have poetry MFAs.) One of poetry’s old glamors was that it was perceived as independent & Romantic; MFAs give a patina of professionalism that damages that facet.”

John, this kind of sums up the whole tawdry business for me: “Some of my best friends have poetry MFAs”

I hate to beat a dead horse, here, but I’m curious why no one is interested in exploring the actual history of the MFA; it’s clearly documented where it came from and who specifically was behind it.(I’ve mentioned the pertinent facts–see John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Ford Madox Ford, etc–several times on Harriet) It’s dumbfounding to me that no one seems the least bit curious about such an important phenomenon in American poetry. While I agree with your general point: “MFAs give a patina of professionalism that damages…” the whole issue is much larger than that and goes back to activity in the early 20th century which came to fruition 2 generations later.
“Praising It New: the Best of the New Criticism” Garrick Davis, ed. is a great place to start.

“I very much agree with Eileen’s position that rape is political, that it has political effects. Since the reviewer (with which this thread began) seemed to find war-zone veterans glamorous, it seems to me that rape’s main political effect is that it makes almost any American city or town after dark into a war zone for women, as Eileen said.”

I don’t know if rape is ‘political’ so much as it is a concern of the law.

Poems which say ‘rape is bad,’ are not going to win much praise. As citizens, we know that rape is bad.

The question becomes: are there enough laws in place regarding rape? Are they good laws? Are they fair? etc etc

So, it’s really a question of law, not politics–whatever we might happen to mean by this latter term, which I am not faulting, per se, but just trying to get a handle on.

One can see why Yeats, for instance, is better able to explore the issue of rape by dipping into myth; Zeus allows the poet to ‘look at the object as it really is’ in the Arnoldian sense, instead of covering it up in moral platitudes.

Yet immediately we are struck by the irony: we see things as they really are in myth??

Here then is the great paradox which must afflict poets like Eileen, anxious for poetry to further political enlightenment.

Shall there be poems on the horrible, feverish lust of amoral men? Is that the bar we need to rise to?

Or is actual rape–or the accusation of rape–a matter of law?

And is law poetry’s domain?

And if not, how can poetry be truly effective in tackling political subjects beyond matters of pure aesthetics?

Thomas
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Thanks for the info.

But Gary is not disagreeing with this.

Gary was simply making an additional point (ingenuity and innovation as factors, too) which you are doing all in your power to ignore–which makes your pedantic rage:

“your naivete here is so infuriating that I’m going to limit my comments”

rather silly.

‘Please, please, wise man robbins, don’t limit your comments, oh please don’t, I promise to listen to you and be nice…!’
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At the expense of pointing out the obvious I will remind Robbins of what is a matter of record. The majority of African men and women who got exported to European countries and then to America were first captured by other African peoples who found it profitable to sell off their ethnic rivals to a white man. The record is clear. There just might not have been a slave trade but for Africans willing to bring other Africans in bondage to the Ivory Coast and to places like Cape Verde.

Terreson
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