On 'the Shadow of Austerity' in Greek Poetry

The New Yorker's David Wallace introduces readers to a new anthology, Austerity Measures, which collects Greek poets' responses to the nation's financial disaster. It's somewhat of a trend at the moment, Wallace contextualizes, referring in part to Karen Van Dyck's introduction to the compendium. In his words, Wallace writes, "It’s become a cliché to say that we turn to poetry in times of trouble, or that we need the vibrant language of poets to console ourselves after disaster." On from there:

Greece’s debt is a different kind of catastrophe, one that occurs in slow motion: its mechanisms are abstract and impersonal, although the consequences are very real for those who rely on government institutions. These strictures insinuate themselves into the ambience of everyday life and language, something that poets can observe with careful attention. Here, for instance, is the poet Elena Penga describing a menace in plain sight:

The cherry trees in the neighbor’s yard haven’t had fruit for years. Four men enter carrying sticks. They enter the neighbor’s yard along with the rain. They’ve come to discipline the trees and chop them down if they don’t blossom. I watch the men hit the trees. I watch the rain hit the men.

A few unadorned sentences weave together several ideas: the sense of failed growth, the coercion that upholds the rule of efficiency, the passivity of the onlooker. Are the men from the government or from a corporation? It seems appropriate that we don’t know. This ordinary violence doesn’t need to be spelled out, it seems to say—it’s right in front of us if we’re merely observant enough to record it. This is a signature of the poets in “Austerity Measures”: the subtle effacement of boundaries between the political and the everyday.

Poetry and economics are not typically thought of as cozy subjects, and the few poets who have tried to tackle the dismal science head-on have not always done so successfully. (Think of Pound trying to explicate the finer points of usury in the “Cantos.”) In an economic system that scrambles extreme scarcity (of resources and public cohesion) and extreme abundance (of images and entertainments), individual action can seem disempowered or useless, lost in the churn of financial transactions. Perhaps there’s an “economic” role for poetry in the solitude and independence that it calls for: it remains completely under the poet’s control to create it as he or she pleases. Consider the difference in capital required between writing poems and making a film. All you need, for the former, is pencil and paper, or maybe just your memory.

Read on at the New Yorker.