Thought this talk delivered the other day by Eliot Weinberger would be of
interest. Kent

*
                Statement for "Poetry is News" conference
                St. Mark's Poetry Project, NYC, 1 February 2003

                                Eliot Weinberger


I am both pessimistic and optimistic about what's happening and briefly, or
not so briefly, I'd like to say why:

First, I take the word "politics" in a very narrow sense: that is, how
governments are run. And I take the word "government" to mean the organized
infliction or alleviation of suffering among one's own people and among
other peoples.

One of the things that happened after the Vietnam War was that, in the
U.S., on the intellectual left, politics metamorphosed into something
entirely different: identity politics and its nerd brother, theory, who
thought he was a Marxist, but never allowed any actual governments to
interrupt his train of thought. The right however, stuck to politics in the
narrow sense, and grew powerful in the absence of any genuine political
opposition, or even criticism, for the left had its mind elsewhere: It was
preoccupied with finding examples of sexism, classism, racism, colonialism,
homophobia, etc. -- usually among its own members or the long-dead, while
ignoring the genuine and active racists/ sexists/ homophobes of the right--
and it tended to express itself in an incomprehensible academic jargon or
tangentially referential academic poetry under the delusion that such
language was some form of resistance to the prevailing power structures--
power, of course, only being imagined in the abstract. (Never mind that
truly politically revolutionary works-- Tom Paine or the Communist
Manifesto or Brecht or Hikmet or a thousand others-- are written in simple
direct speech.) Meanwhile, Ronald Reagan was completely dismantling the
social programs of the New Deal and Johnson's Great Society-- creating the
millions of homeless, the 25% of American children who live in poverty, the
obscene polarization of wealth, and so on. (And the poets, typically, were
only moved to speak up when he cut the NEA budget.) Clinton might have had
a more compassionate public face, but essentially the political center had
shifted so far right that today the Democratic party is to the right of any
European conservative party, and the Republicans just slightly to the left
of a European national front party. We may never live to see an American
president as left-wing as Jacques Chirac.

The main result of almost thirty years of these so-called politics on the
left is that there are now more women and minorities in the Norton
anthologies, and we all know how to pronounce "hegemony"-- surely a great
comfort to the 4 million people, predominately black men, currently in the
prison system, or the teenage girls in most places in America who need an
abortion and there's nowhere to get help, or the parents and babies who
create the statistics of by far the highest infant mortality rate among the
technological nations, or the 20% of high school seniors who can't find the
U.S. on a world map.

The good news about the monstrosity of the Bush administration is that it
is so extreme and so out of control that it has finally woken up the left,
and once again we're talking about politics as the rest of the world knows
it, about people getting slaughtered, people being hungry, and people
deprived of basic human rights-- and not about language as a capitalist
construct or queer musicology. The best news of all is that very young
people-- the generation of the Zeroes-- after the decades of MTV and
Nintendo somnambulism, are being politicized by the collapsed economy, the
prospect of a reinstituted draft, and the realization that their sneakers
are made by child-slaves in the Third World. Every political youth movement
has its own culture-- look at the 30's, the 60's, or radical Islam today.
It will be extremely interesting to see, and utterly unexpected to find,
what culture this youth movement produces: What will be their ideals and
practices, their music and poetry, or even their dress? I have a feeling
that we won't have a clue, and that their response may well be a sort of
iconoclastic asceticism, not unlike radical Islam, impervious to corporate
takeover, and completely alien to their parents. [One of the hardest things
for people my age to understand is that this is not 1967 all over again,
that things are going to be very different, and that, if we don't learn to
listen, we are going to end up being, as our old formula goes, part of the
problem and not part of the solution.]


I take this gathering as a kind of union meeting-- the union of writers,
mainly poets-- and it seems to me the primary question for us is: things
are going to be happening with or without us, are we going to be part of
it, or are we going to continue to talk about essentialism at the MLA and
finding your voice at the AWP?

Poets in times of political crises basically have three models. The first
is to write overtly political poems, as was done during the Vietnam War.
95% of those poems will be junk, but so what? 95% of anything is junk. It
is undeniable that the countless poems and poetry readings against the
Vietnam War contributed to creating and legitimizing a general climate of
opposition; they were the soul of the movement. And it also resulted in
some of the most enduring poems of the 20th century, news that has stayed
news indeed.

The second model is epitomized by George Oppen, who as a Communist in the
30's, and a poet uncomfortable with the prevailing modes of political
poetry, decided that poets should not be treated differently from others,
that the work to be done was organizing, and so he stopped writing and
became a union leader.

The third model is César Vallejo, another Communist in the 20's and 30's.
He refused to write propaganda poems-- he wanted to write the poems he
wanted to write-- so to serve the cause he wrote a great deal of propaganda
prose.

The first model (political poems) is the most common, and no doubt the one
we'll be seeing the most, and frankly it will come as a relief from all
those anecdotes of unhappy childhoods and ironic preoccupations with
"surface." Oppen, of course, was a kind of secular saint-- and most of us
are too egotistical to take a vow of silence. But it is the example of
Vallejo that seems to me the least explored.

People who are poets presumably know something about writing. So why does
it never occur to them to write something other than poems? There are
approximately 8000 poets registered in the Directory of American Poets--
are there even four or five who have written an article against the Bush
Administration? Most of us can't get onto the Op-Ed page of the Times--
we'd never displace Condoleezza there-- but most of us do have access to
countless other venues: hometown newspapers, college newspapers,
professional newsletters, specialist magazines, websites, and so on. All
writers have contacts somewhere, and all these periodicals must fill their
pages. Even poetry magazines: Why must poetry magazines always be
graveyards of orderly tombstones of poems? How many of them in the 1980's,
for example, even mentioned the name "Reagan"? How many of them today have
any political content at all?


I've been writing articles since Bush's inauguration for translation in
magazines and newspapers abroad and, if nothing else, they at least help to
demonstrate that the US is not a monolith of opinion. Foreign periodicals
can't get enough of Americans critical of Bush-- which is why the
collaboration of such supposedly antiwar poets as Robert Creeley and Robert
Pinsky in the recent State Dept anthology was so grotesque. If, as they
claim, they wanted to give Americans a human face, there was no end of
other forums abroad-- they didn't have to do it as flunkies for Bush. More
tellingly, the only public condemnations of that anthology have come from
foreign newspapers-- American writers were either indifferent or afraid of
alienating a future prize jury.

In English, I send my articles out via e-mail. It's one of the best ways,
and certainly the easiest, to publish political writing in this country.
Send it to your friends and let the friends, if they want, send it on. Let
the readers vote, not with their feet, but with the forward button.

The last time I was here at St Marks, in 1994, I was practically laughed
off the stage for saying that the major organizing force of political
opposition in the future was going to be the internet. Now of course, it's
a banality. The internet has completely changed all the rules. It's how the
like-minded instantly find each other; it's the one national and
international forum that has been-- so far-- impossible to control; and
it's practically the only source of opposition information and opinions
from everywhere in the world: not only immediate access to the foreign
press, but also-- if you really want to give yourself nightmares-- to the
endless reports available from the Dept of Defense and right-wing think
tanks. That still-unrecognized prophet, Abbie Hoffman, said, almost 40
years ago, that if you want to start a revolution, don't bother to
organize, seize a television station. With the internet, we are all our own
tv stations and publishing companies and newspapers. The potential is
limitless: Trent Lott was brought down by a weblog; all the doubts about
the war that are seeping into the general public began online; and just
this week  even lovely Laura's Poetry Tea got canceled thanks to an e-mail
petition.

There are 8000 poets in the Directory, and Anne Waldman and Ammiel Alcalay,
a month ago had trouble coming up with a list to invite to speak here. One
eye may half-open when, like Laura's party, it directly involves them, but
most American writers have lost the ability to even think politically, or
nationally, or internationally. In all the anthologies and magazines
devoted to 9/11 and its aftermath, nearly every single writer resorted to
first-person anecdote: "It reminded me of the day my father died..." "I
took an herbal bath and decided to call an old boyfriend..."Barely a one
could imagine the event outside of the context of the prison cell of their
own expressive self. (Or, on the avant-garde, it was a little too real for
ironic pastiche from their expressive non-self.)

We are where we are in part because American writers-- supposedly the most
articulate members of society-- have generally had nothing to say about the
world for the last 30 years. How many of those 8000 poets have ever been to
a Third World country (excluding beach vacations)? How many think it
worthwhile to translate something? How many can name a single contemporary
poet, not living in the U.S., from Latin America or Africa or Asia? In
short, how many know anything more about the world than George Bush
knows?

After thirty years of self-absorption in MFA and MLA career-mongering and
knee-jerk demography and the personal as political and the impersonal as
poetical, American writers now have the government we deserve. We were
good
Germans under Reagan and Bush I; we were never able to separate Clinton's
person from his policies and gave him a complacent benefit of the doubt;
and the result is Cheney and Rumsfeld and Ashcroft and Perle and Wolfowitz
and Scalia and Rice and their little president. They can't be stopped, but
I do think they can be slowed down.





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