In his essay “Vermin: a Notebook”, the Australian poet John Kinsella writes that without acts of resistance, “the environment has no chance.”

This seems obvious enough.

The way things are going, the earth (or at the very least, life on it) is in danger of being irreparably damaged by humanity’s heedless gobbling of resources. Resistance and change need to happen. Everyone from Barack Obama to T. Boone Pickens agrees on that.

What no one quite agrees on is what form these acts of resistance should take. Should we chain ourselves to trees and squeal at passersby, or should we just use Flexcar once a week? Should we turn the living room lights off during the day or develop a bedroom bucket sewage system? Firebomb the coal plant or compost the coffee grounds? Let the free market take care of the polar bears or demand cap and trade?

For Kinsella, there’s one act of resistance that encompasses the full range of these possibilities, yet no one has talked much about it: Poetry.

“Poems,” Kinsella writes, “can stop bulldozers.”

A vegan pacifist currently living so off the grid no one is quite sure where he is, Kinsella believes that poetry is one of the most effective tools for political and ethical change. Not because it is simply a quick way to convey information through words (I think we can all agree that saying “Destroying the environment is wrong!” does not make for much of a poem nor does it do much to help the environment), but for precisely the reason most people don’t spend much time with poetry. Because it’s difficult. Because it resists easy interpretation. Poetry stops bulldozers because, Kinsella says, “the intricacies of language challenge, distract, and entangle the bulldozer.”

Here’s more:

No poem really knows a truth, but it has knowledge and offers ways of approaching truth. The use of language is precise, even when it gives a semblance of the unconscious, even when it is automatic writing. In the Surrealist sense, the conducting of automatic writing exercises was experimental textually and scientifically, and was as much about the act of recording the data of process as it was about the subject connecting with the unconscious. It was, at least, quasi-scientific.

And the pseudo- and quasi- interest me. The games of dismantling and rearranging, of exquisite corpse and chance, are all part of the science of a poem for me: they are just different systems of knowledge. That’s why an activist poetics can include the radically linguistically innovative, as well as the straight declaration (”logging the Tuart Forest is wrong”). Parataxis, conventional end-stopped lines and enjambment, narrative description, metaphor and metonymies, are all part of a process towards confronting hierarchies and imposed structures. We work from inside to open a view of the outside, but not one that destroys in the process.

Working from the inside to produce change on the outside. It’s a pretty radical idea, one that takes the concept of the personal being political to a different level. Not only what happens at home but also what happens in the mind–it’s all part of the world. While poets like Wendell Berry, Lisa Jarnot, and Gary Snyder have used poetry as a part of their environmental activism, few have put it at so central a position.

Is he on to something besides a fool’s errand?

You see the phrase, “poetry makes nothing happen” trotted out over and over again, attributed to W.H. Auden as some sort of evidence for the reductiveness and hermetic inutility of poetry.  And yet…This ignores the fact that the phrase occurs in a POEM – one, moreover, that eulogizes a poet who made things happen (being a politician and activist, as well as a writer), W.B. Yeats. And in context – only part of that context, since I can’t legally quote the entire poem, and that context is absolutely enormous – the poem actually says:

     For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
     In the valley of its making where executives
     Would never want to tamper, flows on south
     From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
     Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
     A way of happening, a mouth.

I’m not practicing literary criticism here, by the way; I’m reading exactly what it says on the page: poetry survives: it is a way of happening, a mouth.

Even if, as some argue, by the time of the poem’s publication Auden had lost his belief in poetry as an agent of political change, he would not, as Jon Stallworthy points out, have dared say the words “poetry makes nothing happen” to the living Yeats, no sir.

As it happens, the origin of the phrase is Auden’s Partisan Review essay of about the same time (1939), “The Public v. the Late Mr. William Butler Yeats,” in which he imagines putting Yeats on trial for his belief in fairies and other “mumbo-jumbo.” As the British poet Angela Leighton remarks, “in the imaginary court case to which he brings the poet, the defence lights on a phrase which will yield its own poetic riches.”  In Auden’s courtroom “the case for the prosecution [of Yeats] rests on the fallacious belief that art ever makes anything happen, whereas the honest truth, gentlemen, is that, if not a poem had been written, not a picture painted nor a bar of music composed, the history of man would be materially unchanged.” When this gets reworked into the famous “makes nothing happen” bit, Leighton observes, the phrase “turns, by a tiny inflection, a redistribution of its stresses, into its opposite: ‘poetry makes nothing HAPPEN.’ By this accentual difference, ‘nothing’ shades into a subject, and happens. This is an event, and its ‘happening’ sums up the ways of poetry. Intransitive and tautological, nothing is neither a thing, nor no thing, but a continuous event.”  So for Auden, the job of the poet is not to be what he called, at about this time, a “crusader” – but to make poems happen.

“Poetry, that is, survives / in the valley of its making…”

Is it romantic to imagine poetry accomplishing anything in a world of happenings?  Maybe so, with a big R; as A.F. Moritz says in an essay, “What Man Has Made of Man,” in this month’s issue of Poetry magazine:

“Poetry is not at all what it’s often said to be, the indulgence, development, and expression of private inward life. This is one of those half-truths that is the worst error, even a lie. Poetry is inward self-development plus the insistence that this must have a principal place in the public forum plus a third thing, a conclusion that flows from the first two. Everyone must be allowed full personal development, and everyone must be allowed full participation, since only full participation leads to full personal development, and in turn a proper society can only be produced by full development of each member. Poetry is, above every other human endeavor, the place where person and society are not merely joined but revealed in their original unity. Poetry is the place where the strange, painful division we have created between person and society is suffered, despaired over, denounced, subjected to comparison with memories and dreams and myths of better times, and given the gift of a prophecy: that the proper unity still and always persists, and that it can become the world we actually live in, not just in verse, but on both sides of our front door.”

And Moritz traces this view back to Wordsworth, who came up with

“the famous phrase ‘what man has made of man’ … in a time of war: the French Revolutionary Wars of 1792 to 1802, which after 1800 merged into the Napoleonic Wars that lasted to 1815: twenty-three years of almost unbroken international violence. Let’s recall the history of this phrase in such a way as to underline its meaning and continuing relevance. It occurs in the poem ‘Lines Written in Early Spring,’ which Wordsworth composed and published in 1798, in the aftermath of great disappointment. Wordsworth had been in France at the time of the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789. At first he was an eager partisan of the Revolution. It seemed to promise that the world would suddenly be made new in the shape of justice, that people everywhere would shake off chains. ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,’ he wrote, ‘But to be young was very heaven!’ Soon, though, the Revolution descended into ruthless violence, partisan exterminations, then war by France against neighbors, and Wordsworth renounced it. But he was in despair because his hope had been destroyed, and he felt he did not know who he was or what he should try to make of himself. His beloved England had opposed the new freedom, and then the new freedom had turned into cruelty and tyranny. Was there hope of freedom anywhere in the world? Was there any way of living that did not mean joining in a worldwide status quo of injustice: being given influence if you serve oppressive regimes, being let alone if you acquiesce in them, receiving poverty if you happen to occupy a lower rung, and oppression, even death, if you resist? Could any of this be called communion? Wasn’t the whole landscape nothing but isolation, because even if you agreed and participated, you really were denying yourself, falsifying yourself?  In this desolate situation, which was equal parts political and personal, Wordsworth set out to rebuild hope and a vision of possibility for a transformed society.”

In the end, Wordsworth drew inward; society transformed itself in ways he hadn’t dreamed of, and he lived out his life writing lots of dull late-period poems few enjoy much now.  But the hope and vision persist, and Moritz traces them up through our own recent history by way of Juan Ramón Jiménez and Czeslaw Milosz.  The question of hope and vision remains timely.  There’s explosive political and economic turmoil around the world each day as I write this.  And this very week we note such landmarks as the first anniversary of Obama’s presidency – and the passing (at the age of 100) of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who wrote, in his classic Tristes Tropiques:

“Man is not alone in the universe, any more than the individual is alone in the group, or any one society among other societies. Even if the rainbow of human cultures should go down for ever into the abyss which we are so insanely creating, there will still remain open to us — provided we are alive and the world is in existence — a precarious arch that points toward the inaccessible. The road which it indicates to us is the one that leads directly away from our present serfdom: and even if we cannot set off along it, merely to contemplate it will procure us the only grace that we know how to deserve. The grace to call a halt, that is to say: to check the impulse which prompts Man always to block up, one after another, such fissures as may open up in the blank wall of necessity and to round off his achievement by slamming shut the doors of his own prison. This is the grace for which every society longs, irrespective of its beliefs, its political regime, its level of civilization. It stands, in every case, for leisure, and recreation, and freedom, and peace of body and mind. On this opportunity, the chance of for once detaching oneself from the implacable process, life itself depends.

Farewell to savages, then, farewell to journeying! And instead, during the brief intervals in which humanity can bear to interrupt its hive-like labours, let us grasp the essence of what our species has been and still is, beyond thought and beneath society: an essence that may be vouchsafed to us in a mineral more beautiful than any work of Man: in the scent, more subtly evolved than our books, that lingers in the heart of a lily; or in the wink of an eye, heavy with patience, serenity, and mutual forgiveness, that sometimes, through an involuntary understanding, one can exchange with a cat.”

To grasp the essence of what our species has been and still is: this is at once political, personal… and poetical.

The other editors have dropped by already, some in pairs, some individually, over the last few weeks to go over submissions. Leaving comments, yays, nays on each envelope. A very civil, democratic process among a spectrum of anarchists…as several hundred submissions per issue gets whittled down to about 40. The magazine and its website is an accurate foray into the very smart wit of its editor-in-chief. Each piece is published with a scan of the original handwritten draft next to it, every crossed t and scratched-out bit, right there, revealing how far the destination from the origin.

I’m set-up at his kitchen table; a pile of maybes in front, a pile of unopened virgins to the right, a plate of cheese and crackers with a short shot of straight whiskey to the left…and his 8-month old daughter seated across from me. She’s so calm, she’s never this calm, daddy says. Her piercing blue eyes, staring through me. I’m sure she senses my boy or maybe it’s my beard. But daddy puts his twist on and says, she’s probably commiserating.

The combo of editing, drowning rain, and family setting somehow gets me thinking of place as mess. Okay, not as in the house was a mess…I told Brendan I may mention this visit on the blog he immediately gave me more liquor and handed me his wallet. No, the house was as warm and inviting as you’d want for a sloppy wet pup.

I mean mess in writing. Leaving the signposts in the poem as you get towards your place. Whatever that blessed ending place is, which doesn’t reveal itself until after the poem’s conclusion, for me anyway…if ever. The settled place in the poem, a reflection of where I am when it arrived. And matching that to the world’s revolution, the reader’s internal mess, a confusion of mass. How many extra words or lines get us to the next line…as reader or writer. Seeing the original drafts of poems next to their published version, opens up just how far straying from the first thought makes for a second thought.

So long September. On this, the last day of the month, have a lasting look at Cathie Bleck’s “Transformations” above, also featured on the current cover of Poetry.  Inside, I see a hoof, a hand, and (blush) the distinct influence of Rockwell Kent.

In 2005, Winterhouse Studio redesigned Poetry and, while researching, principal William Drenttel found this Pegasus bookplate by Kent, which we cherish to this day.

Side by side the resemblance between Bleck’s and Kent’s style is striking. Look below for more of the same sort. For a full range of Bleck’s work on white clayboard, scratchboard, and paper, visit her website. For a backdoor to her inspirations, see her blog.

]]> http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2009/09/transformations/feed/ 4 http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2009/07/flarf-and-conceptual-writing-in-poetry-magazine/ http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2009/07/flarf-and-conceptual-writing-in-poetry-magazine/#comments Wed, 01 Jul 2009 16:03:00 +0000 Kenneth Goldsmith http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/?p=4018

An introduction to the 21st Century’s most controversial poetry movements.
From the July/August 2009 Issue of Poetry Magazine

by Kenneth Goldsmith

Start making sense. Disjunction is dead. The fragment, which ruled poetry for the past one hundred years, has left the building. Subjectivity, emotion, the body, and desire, as expressed in whole units of plain English with normative syntax, has returned. But not in ways you would imagine . . .

READ THE REST HERE.

The Top Ten Most-Read Articles on poetryfoundation.org

Of all the articles on poetryfoundation.org, these received the most page views:

1. “Show Your Work” by Matthew Zapruder

2. “Going Negative” by Jason Guriel

3. “Poetry Can Be Any Damn Thing it Wants” by Mary Ann Caws

4. “To Strive, To Seek, To Find, and Not to Yield” by Stephen Burt

5.  “The Hero and the Gunslinger” by Aram Saroyan

6. “Let’s Face It, Nobody in Love is Original” by Jeremy Richards

7. “Only Connect” by Tao Lin

8. “I Blame Blogs” by Allison Glock

9. “Born Digital” by Stephanie Strickland

10. “Sex, Drugs, and Thom Gunn” by Tom Sleigh

The Top Ten Most-Read Posts on Harriet

Of all the posts on Harriet, these received the most page views:

1. “Craig Arnold” by Don Share

2. “It’s Always a Bad Time for Poetry” by Kenneth Goldsmith

3. “I’ve never had a sad cup of coffee” by Nick Twemlow

4. “Plath as a Major Poet: A Thread from WOM-PO” by Annie Finch

5. “The Inaugural Poem” by Travis Nichols

6. “A Few Harriet Statistics” by Catherine Halley

7. “I Hate Poetry” by Eileen Myles

8. “Mystery & Birds: 5 Ways to Practice Poetry” by Ada Limón

9. “John Updike’s Non-Poetry” by Eileen Myles

10. “No, You Shut Up!” by Travis Nichols

Margaret Rockwell Finch, 1961

working poet, entering and once winning the contests of the Poetry Society of America, whose meetings she brought me to as a teenager; typing drafts and final copies (with carbon copies!) on her portable typewriter; keeping green metal fileboxes recording submissions to magazines and contests.

Lately I realize how much of my own poetic destiny has been shaped by my relationship with her.  I grew up on stories that ended up making a larger story whose outlines I can only now perceive.  It was her mother, and her aunt, who believed in her as a poet from the beginning. When she enrolled in a class with John Malcolm Brinnin in the 1940s, she was told that her poetry was “too lacey and Millayish,” but she kept on her path undaunted, proud to be associated with Millay.  She met my father at a lecture by Auden, suspects him of possibly “disappearing” her Millay collection after an argument early in their marriage, and stopped showing him her poems after he told her he thought she should write like T.S. Eliot.

Maggie has always been stubborn about her poetry—and a good thing, too.  Just this afternoon I suggested she add a “the” to the first line of her new poem beginning “Standing at window.”  “Hmmmm …” she replied, and then told me that one of my sisters had suggested the same thing by email earlier in the day.  Her tone made it clear she was unlikely to change it.

My mother has been writing since the 1920s, when she was too young to write and her mother had to write her poems down for her.   But I published her first book for her, in the mid 1990s. Why hadn’t she taken her poetry further in terms of a career, I asked her years ago.  She answered that as the mother of  five children, she just hadn’t been able to maintain enough silence.

Maxine Kumin told me once, not too many years ago, that her mentoring energy now  is reserved not for younger poets, but for women poets not much younger than herself.  I understand this.

It’s mother’s day, and I’d like to pause to honor all the poetic foremothers whom we celebrate on the Wom-Po listserv—all the women through the centuries who managed to write, and sometimes to publish, in spite of everything.  And I’d like to honor all the poet-moms, to name another listserv—the contemporary poets who are also mothers and still struggling with many of the same issues of divided loyalties, divided poetic identity, and divided attention that made being a poet so tricky for my mother.  And most of all, I’d like to say Happy Mother’s Day to my first poetic influence, Margaret Rockwell Finch.

Margaret Rockwell Finch

THE SEVENTEENTH DAY OF MAY

Grow maples in me this grow-maple day;

I lie in the long chair and wait your coming.

Spin from branches heavy with fruit of leaves

My sudden seeds, my one-wings, turning, turning!

Leap in the wind that understands the life:

Land on on my leg and do not slide;

Catch in the ready furrows of my hair—I say

I have no pride.

For in me all the broad and murmuring branches

Wait but to hear it spoken.

The porch, the chair, the gutter will not take you.

But I am open.

Heads of life, stretched to the shape of flight,

Plunge to my upturned palm, and with good reason:

My earth, my rain, my sun, my shade will grow you.

Let your season bring me into season.

]]> http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2009/05/happy-mothers-day-to-foremothers-poet-moms-and-maggie/feed/ 11 http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2009/04/is-that-a-poem-in-your-pocket/ http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2009/04/is-that-a-poem-in-your-pocket/#comments Wed, 15 Apr 2009 17:19:09 +0000 Fred Sasaki http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/?p=2151

Poetry staff was happy to see Ana Benaroya’s e-mail come over the transom with big, beautiful illustrations for us to consider for the cover of the magazine. (See November 2008 for her first appearance and April 2009 for her latest, “Crazy Head.”) After perusing her website we found several poetry illos in her pocket that made us fall crazy head over heels for her work. Click on for a few samples.

Illustration for "Weeping Beech Park," by Shelley Deutsch Benaroya

Judith Shklar introduced her book Ordinary Vices by saying, “It is only if we step outside the divinely ruled moral universe that we can really put our minds to the common ills we inflict upon one another each day.” I suppose poets these days aren’t supposed to put their minds to grand tasks – you know, it’s more like write a poem every day for a month. But since it’s not only National Poetry Month but National Uh-Huh month, I thought I’d post something, you know, deep.

Montaigne, whom Shklar mentions in that introduction, was famous for his skeptical remark ‘Que sais-je?” (’What do I know?’). He wasn’t a poet (though his best friend Étienne de la Boétie was), but like a poet, he was quite good at making big pronouncements. Take these, all nicely applicable to poets:

* Obsession is the wellspring of genius and madness.
* Everyone calls barbarity what he is not accustomed to.
* If you belittle yourself, you are believed; if you praise yourself, you are disbelieved.
* No propositions astonish me, no belief offends me, whatever contrast it offers to my own. There is no fancy so frivolous and so extravagant that it does not seem to me quite suitable to the production of the human mind.
* Nothing is so firmly believed as that which least is known.
* Man cannot make a worm, yet he will make gods by the dozen.

What is it about the French that makes them able to come up with this stuff? In the April 2009 issue of Poetry – which is our annual translation issue - we’ve got a poem that seems to take up where Montaigne left off. It’s called “What I Know,” by Patrick Dubost, who has published more than twenty collections (including under the alias Armand Le Poete, a trickster alter ego) and several CDs. Trained as a musicologist and mathematician, he’s collaborated extensively with musicians, theater ensembles, and puppet theaters, and performs his sound poetry internationally. Here’s the poem in Fiona Sampson’s translation:

1. I know that language is within the world and that, at the same time, the world is within language. I know we are at the border between language and the world.

2. I don’t like phrases such as “nothing new under the sun” or “it’s all been said already.” I know that at every moment we could affirm: “everything is always new under the sun” or “almost nothing has yet been said of what could be said.”

3. I know that there’s no true coherence except in apparent incoherence. Every object clothes itself in chaos. To take shape, every thought must manage its own vagueness.

4. Among the obvious: I know that every human activity consists, one way or another, of battling death.

5. I know that time is bound up with space. Time is the shadow of space. Space the shadow of time. I know that we live in the shadow of a shadow and that it returns to the light.

6. I know that I know nothing about love.

7. I know that I live not in the world, but in the shadow of the world. I know that I go through the world the way an insect goes through its entire life in the shadow of a bank.

8. I know that nothing is simple. Or more, that what’s simple is never truly, never completely, so. I know that everything adds up and that every element of this total depends on the whole.

9. I know that everything around me is nothing but a mass of contingency. I know that every word props itself up on an immense architecture of contingency.

10. I know that thunder comes after lightning and sometimes, in my dreams, thunder precedes lightning. I know that to see its opposite simultaneously with every phenomenon you must widen your eyes.

11. I know that whoever finds himself loses himself a little.

12. I know that I love a woman enormously, but I don’t know which one.

13. I know that to talk is to walk a path with emptiness to the right and emptiness to the left. I know that nothing can grasp this path with two ends. I know that writing is talking in frozen time.

14. I know that the word “table” is like a thousand tables. That a phrase is like a thousand thousand phrases. And that thinking is a match for water sports.

15. I know that every authentic poet is in decay.

16. To read isn’t necessarily to analyze, is not necessarily “to understand.” At the swimming pool, we don’t ask the swimmer the composition of the water, the number and distribution of swimmers, or why he’s picked this date to go swimming. We don’t ask him to describe, in mid-crawl, the architecture or acoustics of the place, or to explain a bird trapped under its roof, or to do a better imitation of the progress of some Olympic seal. We don’t ask him to memorize opening hours or screw himself up by whistling from the bench throughout an entire race in butterfly stroke. No. Finally, we don’t ask him, before each dive, to bring up some secret meaning from the very bottom of the pool. No. We let swimmers swim. We let swimmers swim. And the swimming pools fill up.

17. I know that I live and think inside a storehouse of books. Some recent, new, remarkable books, but in the great majority books which are decayed, moldy, have turned to the lightest heaps of dust. Only their metal frames and some fine particles of knowledge remain, unusable. Light from a few windows crosses the storehouse unimpeded.

18. Having found some daguerreotypes on the floor of an attic—portraits eroded by time and light—I know that forgetting is something enormous, that forgetting is our highest destiny.

19. I know that God doesn’t exist. That’s written everywhere in the storehouse—it can be made out through the portholes, too. I know that after death there’s nothing but death.

20. I know that, seen from the border between language and the world, the universe is in increasing entropy. But I no longer know what it is if I climb to the top of a tree (one of these trees on the border between language and the world), from where you can see far into language and far into the world at the same time.

21. Because I have scaled a tree, I know that beyond language is a huge plain, with dark flowers and little mazy footpaths.

-

As number three says, “Toute pensée, pour prendre corps, doit ménager sa part de flou.” Hey, good advice for poets!

On this date one hundred years ago… T.E. Hulme, F.S. Flint, and Edward Storer met in the Cafe Tour d’Eiffel off Tottenham Court Road in London and started up the School of Images! Later members included H.D. and Ezra Pound.. and Amy Lowell, who tried to take over the whole enterprise.
In honor of the occasion, I invite you to take an Imagism Quiz. Click here and see if you can correctly distinguish between some Imagist poems (no pun intended) and some parodies of them.
If you fail, you’ll need some remedial work; try clicking here to see “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste”, and better luck next century.