----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Kenneth Wolman" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, February 20, 2008 9:50 PM
Subject: Re: "Remains of the Day"


> Frederick Pollack wrote:
>>
>> If I really believed that hope, including political hope, were a childish 
>> parlor game I wouldn't have said so in a poem.  I wouldn't write .  I'd 
>> be dead.
>
> I'm not dead but I stopped writing.  It wasn't a choice.  The well ran 
> dry.  Not politically related at all.
>
>> To vote this year could make a difference.  I have no illusions about 
>> Clinton or Obama.  But McCain would mean a big step closer to a the 
>> nationalist and overtly imperialist police- state we have not yet quite 
>> become.  As well as the end of legal abortion, and other things you could 
>> name as well as I.  I'm not claiming any moral high ground here.  I'm a 
>> parlor Red.  I've always been too timid, reclusive, mistrustful, and lazy 
>> to ACT on my convictions.  I tell myself that writing poetry about my 
>> times, rather than - like the groups I despise - about emotional trivia 
>> or nothing whatever - is a political act, but I know this excuse is 
>> doubtful and self-serving.  I know that democracy in our lifetime has 
>> become a narrow choice between evils, both of which get worse.  But I 
>> also know that opting out serves only the stronger evil.  I know students 
>> who are working for Obama because they think he'll make a difference in 
>> their lives, and in the lives of people who know only need.  If they're 
>> defeated, or betrayed - as you and I have been so often - some of them 
>> will try again.  If I can feel no other solidarity, I can with them.  Qui 
>> tacet consentit.  Hold your nose and vote.
>
> I'm not sure I can do the last but I can at least consider it.  Your 
> argument is as persuasive as it gets, and I don't like the thought of 
> opting out.  Voting at least affords me the illusion of some degree of 
> power.  But I am simply sickened by what my country has become.  I'm 
> turning 64 on Saturday and the thoughts that are in my head would have the 
> FBI at my front door if there truly were a Thought Police. Shit, I'd be 
> the one getting waterboarded.  McCain strikes me as a thoroughly stupid 
> and unanchored man, another Dubya even if he went to war.  I am still not 
> sure what McCain believes.  Huckabee at least is the evil I know.  So was 
> Fred Thompson, aka Foghorn Leghorn.  What's a McCain?
>
> Same as What is an Obama?  This is going to sound terrible, but oh well: I 
> once heard a union delegate in a place I worked 40 years ago referred to 
> as a Black Telephone Pole for his utter nebulousness and do-nothingism. 
> But he has *presence*. So again: what's an Obama?  I would like to feel 
> SOMEthing positive for him.  I don't--except he talks pretty and he's not 
> Hillary Clinton who touts her administrative and managerial experience as 
> one of the prize fuck-ups of her husband's administration.  And anyone who 
> wants something that much probably is entirely unsuited to have it.
>
> I wanted John Edwards.  Yeah, slip-and-fall lawyer, Lego-man hair, 
> blah-blah-blah.  And someone who pointed his finger at who the enemies 
> were and remain.  Yet I also was relieved when he quit because if he'd 
> stayed in and actually gathered some support, I am all but certain that he 
> would have been assassinated, and the hidden funding would have come from 
> a pharma or insurance company right here in little old New Jersey.  Right, 
> I am paranoid.
>
> Edwards' drop-out is for me where The Process hit the pavement and 
> splattered.  I am tired of a defensive game where the pawns are being run 
> off the board.  But indeed, it's all I've got, isn't it?  So we go back to 
> whatever drawing or chessboard there is.
>
> ken
>
>
For what it's worth: I had two friends in Chicago who lived acros the alley 
from Obama.  Two facing back porches; they used to talk to him when he came 
out for a smoke.  This was when he was in the state senate, and I believe 
during his first year in the Senate when he came back to town.  They were 
immensely impressed with him.  I'm using the past tense because one of them, 
my friend Peter Jansen, died last year.  I forget if I sent my elegy for him 
to poetryetc.  Peter was a German prof.  Said that Obama seemed remarkably 
balanced and thoughtful, even that he had a "dialectical mind" --  
systematically examined all sides of a question, actively looked for new 
angles.  I haven't read Obama's two books but a) he wrote them himself, b) 
every quotation I've read backs up my friend's impression.  Yes, I was for 
Edwards too.  Actually, I was for Kucinich.  But look at what we're saying 
and what you yourself are admitting.  There ARE factions to the left of 
Hillary Clinton and the Blue Dog Democrats.  Even Hillary has taken 
positions to the left of Bill.  On health care, on the environment, on the 
NAFTA scam he initiated.

There's an article on Obama in the current NYRB that is worth reading and 
may partly address your very valid point.  And I'm forwarding to the list an 
important blog-statement that appeared in Huffington's blog.

Re poetry: I'm 62 and I don't like to think about the "well drying up." 
Rebirth is possible.  Look what happened to Landis Everson.  There are poets 
who are genuinely apolitical, motivated by a private, mystical, and/or 
religious vision or by what Cezanne called the "little sensation."  I don't 
disparage such visions; far from it; I raid them for insight; I love purists 
like Trakl or Ekelof or Pilinszky.  But creativity for most of us has 
something to do, at a deep and peculiar level, with that secular hope for a 
better future which in the last few centuries replaced the hope of an 
afterlife.  I think that hope operates even in despair.  (Of which there has 
been much more, in Romantic and modern poetry, than confidence.  Shelley in 
1821, at 29, called himself "the last fly of a scattered swarm" - i.e., 
liberals inspired by the French Revolution.  That note, not Brecht's or 
Mayakovsky's, is the predominant one.)  Despair is despair OF something; if 
it weren't, it wouldn't be despair but stolid apathy.   I myself strike a 
pose of "heroic pessimism," or I quote Gramsci's "pessimism of the 
intellect, optimism of the will."   And sometimes I flirt with outright 
darkness, where the only future readers would be, as I said on this list at 
some point, alien archaeologists.  But it is only a flirtation.  It's too 
late at night to write this coherently, but I'll send it anyway.  What I'm 
saying, Ken, is allow yourself some hope or vision - even "quia absurdum," 
against your better judgment - and you might surprise yourself creatively.