Dispatches by Hank Kalet: Poetry and politics mingle in potential wartimes
By: Hank Kalet
W.H. Auden once wrote that poetry "makes nothing happen." But in the same poem, "In Memory of W.B. Yeats," Auden also reminds us that the poet through his poems can transform feeling and that through this transformation effect an alteration in the social consciousness. He writes that William Butler Yeats was "now scattered among a hundred cities," his songs of joy and anger internalized by his readers, made a part of them: "The words of a dead man/Are modified in the guts of the living."
Poetry, Auden is saying, is the voice of our collective conscience and "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."
And this mouth continues to speak. Even now, as the world waits for war.
Sam Hamill, a poet and founding editor of the Copper Canyon Press, issued a call in January for poets to speak out against the war and, along with some friends, formed the group Poets Against the War. A Web site was launched to provide a "venue for poets to voice their conscience against impending war, and to encourage our government to seek peaceful means of resolving conflict in company with the world community." Poets were asked to submit poems and personal statements about the situation in Iraq and to date, according to the Web site, 10,000 poets (myself included) have posted their poems and statements a remarkable number.
These poems what the group is calling "the largest single-theme anthology ever compiled" will be delivered to members of Congress on Wednesday as an artistic petition against war. On the same day, the group has scheduled what it calls a major poetry reading in Washington to emphasize its belief in the "long and rich tradition of thoughtful and moral opposition by poets and other artists to senseless and murderous policies, including those of our own government." It is calling on poets to hold their own local readings.
Nationwide poetry readings also were held on Feb. 12, including in Princeton at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Princeton, which featured the poets Paul Muldoon and C.K. Williams.
Some would say that poets should stay out of politics a view that First Lady Laura Bush apparently holds. She canceled a White House poetry symposium scheduled for Feb. 12 after it became clear that many of the poets who agreed to attend planned "to turn what is intended to be a literary event into a political forum," according to a statement from her office. The symposium, which was to celebrate the work of Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes and Emily Dickinson, was "designed to celebrate poetry."
This view of poetry turns it into an elitist art form, separates it from the world it seeks to depict and explore.
Think of the stir created by New Jersey Poet Laureate Amiri Baraka over his poem, "Somebody Blew Up America." Mr. Baraka was appointed to a two-year term as the state poet laureate by Gov. James E. McGreevey in August at the behest of the New Jersey Council for the Humanities and the State Council on the Arts. The position carries a $10,000 stipend.
The poem, which he first read in September at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, is in many ways a catalogue of indictments against the United States government, against Western culture and the impositions it has placed on the rest of the world. It is a fiery poem, if not a very good one, a poem that has trouble rising above its strident tone, a poem that is as weighed down by its polemic as it is carried by its language.
Shortly after the festival, the vultures started circling, calling for Mr. Baraka to be stripped of his post as state poet laureate because of the poem’s anti-Semitic tone. Mr. Baraka, in the midst of a 200-some-line rant, offers four lines "Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed / Who told 4,000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers / To stay home that day / Why did Sharon stay away?" that buy into the notion that the Israeli government, and possibly President George Bush, knew about the 9/11 attacks and did nothing to stop them.
The lines were quoted as evidence that Mr. Baraka was anti-Semitic, that he was anti-white, a divisive presence who was unfit to serve as the state’s poet laureate.
His responses to the criticism, of course, did little to extinguish the fires and, in fact, may have done him more harm than good, showing him to be a conspiracist of the first order. He said the information about the Israeli government was verifiable he found it on the Internet.
But this ignores the poem. The stanza in question, which to my mind is not so much offensive as it is ridiculous, is only a very small part of a relatively lengthy poem that spends a lot of time laying out Mr. Baraka’s indictment of American/Western/corporate culture. That culture, in Mr. Baraka’s eyes, has been racist and anti-Semitic ("Who put the Jews in ovens, / and who helped them do it / Who said ‘America First’ / and OK’d the yellow stars"). It is a poem that, despite its flaws, does force the reader to question the way he or she looks at the world, at the relationships between capitalism and all the other isms that make our world livable for some, but not for the majority.
Those calling for Mr. Baraka to step aside buy into Mrs. Bush’s view of poetry and art: that it ultimately is just decoration, just a swath of color to spice up the room.
But poetry is political. Even something as seemingly apolitical as William Blake’s "The Tyger" is a marvel of the political imagination, standing in opposition to the religious views of Blake’s contemporaries, of their belief in a separation of good and evil, of god from man. The tyger and the lamb were both made by the same hands, he asks, and did this creator smile to see it? And if so, what does that say about the creator, about man, about the imagination?
The poet Martin Espada calls it an "artistry of dissent."
"The question is not whether poetry and politics can mix," he writes in the introduction to the Curbstone Press anthology, "Poetry Like Bread: Poets of the Political Imagination." "That question is a luxury for those who can afford it. The question is how best to combine poetry and politics, craft and commitment, how to find the artistic imagination equal to the intensity of the experience and the quality of ideas."
Langston Hughes found that imaginative equilibrium, crafting a new style of verse that relied on the lived experiences of Black Americans, that turned their voices into song.
Walt Whitman found it creating a poetry so large, so all-encompassing that it became itself a metaphor for democracy.
And Emily Dickinson found it, as well:
"All but Death, can be Adjusted
Dynasties repaired
Systems settled in their Sockets
Citadels dissolved
Wastes of Lives resown with Colors
By Succeeding Springs
Death unto itself Exception
Is exempt from Change "
Hank Kalet is the managing editor of The Cranbury Press. He can be reached via e-mail at [email protected]. His poem, "The Storm," can be found on the Poets Against the War Web site: www.poetsagainstthewar.org.

