Eid Moborak! Norouz Pirouz! I am a little late this year in putting up a post for Norouz. Here is a lovely video of translations of poems by Hafez, one of Iran’s most important poets, that I found on The Poetry Channel. The video is really cool and the translations are gorgeous. Enjoy!
…and the results are not much different from last year. Women are still profoundly under represented in literary magazine publishing. This is not surprising, since as Erin Belieu writes:
[W]e know that significant cultural change takes time.
We also know that this is a conversation that’s not going away; when we talk to other writers, when we talk to our writing students, we know things are in the process of changing for the better, that our literary culture’s consciousness has been raised. And we believe we’ve begun to see hopeful signs. Yes, many literary outlets still produced their phallocentric Best Books list this year. But notice how careful most of them were to create some context for their lists’ inherent subjectivity. The word “Best” now has a permanent asterisk next to it, no matter where you line up in our writing community’s gender debate. And to acknowledge your bias is one step toward opening your mind. We’ve come a long way since Publishers’ Weekly breezily dismissed the total absence of women in their top ten list of 2009.
I wrote about why the count matters to me personally in this post, and I am happy and humbled (really) that Vida published a couple of quotes from it with their charts.
Or perhaps I should say only in the USA would they trademark bliss:
I’m reading two books right now, Roger Rosenblatt’s Kayak Morning and Venus Khoury-Ghata’s She Says (translated by Marilyn Hacker). The first is a meditation on grief; the second, a book of poems the first section of which, “Words,” is basically a mythologization of language. Each of them, for different reasons, has thrown me back onto the question of why, when I think of myself as a writer, I think of myself as a poet. Or, perhaps a more accurate way to ask this question is this: why, when I think about writing something, my first inclination, regardless of what I want to write about, is to turn it into a poem and only after the poem or poems that I try to write fail do I even consider that another form might be a more appropriate choice. In “Words,” Khoury-Ghata writes:
Words
blind flight in the darkness
fireflies wheeling in on themselves
pebbles in the pocket of an absentminded dead man
projectiles against the cemetery wall
they broke up into alphabets
ate a different earth on each continent
There is something about the way writing a poem focuses my attention on words, not on content per se, but on the meaning and sound and rhythm of individual words, and how they join to create sentences that also have meaning and sound and rhythm, and how the form of a poem – whether the verse is formal or “free” (which is really just another kind of form) – shapes that meaning and sound and rhythm into a music that, in turn, both shapes and transcends the overall content that is the aggregate of these meanings and sounds and rhythms. There is something about all this, and I think Khoury-Gata has captured it in her second line, “blind flight in the darkness.” Following the forms of language for their own sake is a kind of blind flight because forms are constantly evolving and you never know where they will take you, and then to be blind in the dark, which makes the dark redundant because even if it is lifted, you would not be able to see what is in front of you – or does the line mean that it is the darkness that blinds you?
Words do blind us. At the same time, though, without words we would live in the darkness of seeing and knowing without being able to name what we see and what we know; and so darkness would also be silence, and silence, ultimately – or, rather, the ultimate silence – is death. And so words are “pebbles in the pocket of an absentminded dead man.” They do him no good. And words are “projectiles against the cemetery wall,” that with which we try to shatter the silence of death, not just in the very narrow sense of wanting our words to outlive us – and all of us, not just writers, want someone to remember who we were after we are gone, to keep alive in their own lives the words we used in ours – but also in the here and now, the conversations we have, the jokes we tell, the bargains we strike, the loves we profess, because each of those uses to which we put our words is a way of insisting, affirming, proving that both we and the people to whom we are talking are here, that we and they exist, that we are in relation to them and that this relationship is precious, crucial, the opposite – or at least an attempt to be the opposite – of a “blind flight into darkness.”
Even oppressive language, the language of the oppressor, partakes in this dynamic. I do not mean by this that oppressive language is any less unjust than it is, or that it is not often deadly, literally fatal, to those who are being oppressed, or that it should somehow be accommodated, or fought against any less strongly because it is part of this dynamic. I mean merely to acknowledge the fact that the language of oppression, in its very existence, demonstrates that the oppressor needs the oppressed, that, without the oppressed, the oppressor would not, could not, exist. I know this is not a new idea, but it’s one that I think about when I ask myself why I am a poet, because I do see my work as being in opposition to the language of oppression, and then I think, What would it mean for me as a poet if suddenly there were no oppression to oppose? On the one hand, this is a meaningless question. Oppression is not going to disappear overnight. On the other hand, though, I don’t know how to think about myself as a poet and about my relationship to language without asking it.
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In Kayak Morning, Roger Rosenblatt writes, “All I have to keep me afloat, all I have ever had, is writing.” In the most immediate sense, he is talking about how writing has helped him deal with the death of his daughter, but he also means it more broadly, in terms of his life in general; and it is in this latter sense that I identify with him. Writing poetry quite literally saved my life. When I was college freshman, I went through a period of deep, deep depression. I remember spending hours on the phone with a friend of mine from high school, talking about how pointless my life felt, how pointless I felt. In one of those conversations, she asked me, simply, “Are you writing?” I told her no. “Maybe you should be,” she said. She was the only person in the world at that time who could’ve known to say such a thing, and so I listened to her, and I started writing again Not poems, or at least not good poems. Just ramblings that I sometimes chopped up into lines. But the ramblings, even more than talking to her, made me feel less alone, less estranged from myself – which was where my loneliness was coming from – and I felt stronger, strong enough at one point to tell my friend I loved her. It was the first time I’d ever said those words to another human being and meant them as much for myself as for the other person. It didn’t matter to me what my friend said back; it just felt good to love her, to know the feeling as love – to name it, in other words – and to name it to her as being for her. It would be some time before I wrote the poem for her that was rooted in that love, and it was a love she would eventually reject, but when she told me she loved me too at the end of that phone conversation, I knew I would survive.
And so I can think of no better answer to the question that is the title of this post except to say that poetry, more than any other genre in which I have written, has given me the strength to say what I need to survive.
The poet is a creator of social values.
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[P]oetry is a subconscious conversation, it is as much the work of those who understand it as those who make it.
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The power that the poet has to create, preserve, or destroy social values depends greatly on the quality of his/her social visibility and the functionary opportunity to poetry to impact lives.
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But from the very beginning two types of poetry developed. One can be called the poetry of ethos because it was meant to convey personal experience, feelings of love, despair, joy, frustration arising from a very private encounter; the other, functionary poetry, dealt with themes in the social domain, religion, God, country, social institutions, war, marriage, and death in the distinct context of that society’s perception.
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How I tell the truth is a part of the truth itself.
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What I learned in deciding “how” to write was simply that most folks tend to think that you’re lying or jiving them if you have to spice things up just to get a point across. I decided along with a number of other Black poets to tell the truth in poetry by using the language, dialect, idioms, of the folks we believed our audience to be.
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The most fundamental truth to be told in any art form, as far as Blacks are concerned, is that America is killing us. But we continue to live and love and struggle and win.
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I still believe that the age for which we write is the age evolving out of the dregs of the twentieth century into a more human age. Therefore I recognize that my writing must serve a dual purpose. It must be a clarion call to the values of change while it also speaks to the beauty of a non-exploitative age.
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I cannot tell the truth about anything unless I confess to being a student.… The more I learn, the clearer my view of the world becomes. To gain that clarity, my first lesson was that one’s ego always compromised how something was viewed. I had to wash my ego in the needs/aspirations of my people. Selflessness is key for conveying the need to end greed and oppression. I try to achieve this state as I write.
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I keep writing because I realize that until Black people’s social reality is free of oppression and exploitation, I will not be free to write as one who’s not oppressed or exploited.
When my brother-in-law died a couple of years ago, I inherited from him a pristine set of The World’s Orators, a multivolume collection of “the greatest orations of the world’s history,” edited by Guy Carleton Lee and published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1900. The other day, I opened Volume 7, Part 2 completely at random and came upon Sir Robert Peel’s speech, “On the Disabilities of the Jews,” which, according to the editorial note, Peel made in order to support a bill intended “to place the Jew on the same footing, so far at least as civil rights, as the Christian.” The editorial note continues, “Peel, who was usually to be found on the side of toleration and justice, [gave a] speech replete with a dignified breath of tolerance.…” I have not yet finished the entire speech, but, early on, he makes an argument for the separation of church and state that I find disturbing, not because anyone is explicitly endorsing this way of thinking today, but because I think it is implicit in the notion put forth by some Republican candidates for president, and certainly by more than a few Evangelical Christian voices I have heard, i.e., that the United States is, at heart, a Christian nation and that our government and our laws ought to reflect that fact. This is what Peel said:
I must in the first place disclaim any concurrence in the doctrine that to us, in our legislative capacity, religion is a matter of indifference. I am deeply impressed with the conviction that it is our paramount duty to promote the interests of religion and it influence on the human mind. I am impressed by a conviction that the spirit and precepts of Christianity ought to influence our deliberations; nay, more, that if our legislation be at variance with the precepts and spirit of Christianity we cannot expect the blessing of God upon them. I may, indeed, say with truth that whether my decision on this question [of the Jews’ civil rights] be right or wrong, it is influenced much less by a consideration of political expediency than by a deep sense of religious obligation.
Between the tenets of the Jew and of the Christian there is, in my opinion, a vital difference. The religion of the Christian and the religion of the Jew are opposed in essentials. Between them there is complete antagonism. I do not consider that the concurrence of the Jew with the Christian in recognizing the historical truths and divine origin of the moral precepts of the Old Testament can avail to reconcile the differences in respect to those doctrines which constitute the vital principle and foundation of Christianity. If, as a legislature, we had the authority to determine religious error and a commission to punish religious error, it might be our painful duty to punish the Jews. But we have no such commission. If the Jews did commit an inexpiable crime nearly two thousand years ago, we have had no authority given to us – even if we could determine who were the descendants of the persons guilty of that crime – to visit the sins of the fathers upon the children, not unto the third or fourth, but unto the three hundredth or four hundredth generation. That awful power is not ours. “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.”
In other words, if we were a religious Christian government, not merely a secular government guided by Christian principles, we would, perhaps, be in a position to make the Jews pay for their sins – in particular the sin of killing Christ, but, more generally, the sin of being Christianity’s antithesis. We are, however, not that kind of government and so (this summarizes Peel’s argument as far as I have gotten) we really have no choice; if we are going to be consistent, but to grant the Jews their civil rights.
What I find disturbing in these words is the, to me at least, clear implication that there is a part of Peel that would not mind having “the painful duty” of punishing the Jews, though, to be fair, I don’t know where the logic of the rest of the speech leads Peel and so it is possible that these two passages are part of a rhetorical strategy that does not necessarily reflect the actual position that he takes. Nonetheless, Peel’s implication that a theocratic government would, indeed, be justified in discriminating against, if not outright punishing the Jews is one that I hear echoes of in the US-is-a-Christian-nation rhetoric of some of our Christian politicians; and perhaps I will trace that echo in another post when I have the time. For now, though, while I am not suggesting that any of those politicians are out to get the Jews or even that any of them actively desire a theocracy, I will not deny the fact that their rhetoric makes me wary.
…and I think this is a worthwhile message to send to all students:
I have not posted a Fragments of Evolving Manhood piece on a long while, mostly because my attention has been focused elsewhere, but I have been working these past couple of weeks on an essay that is pretty important to me and since it fits in the “Fragments” series, I thought I’d share some of it. I’d love to be able to call the essay “The ‘Cunt Poem’ Challenge,” and I will probably send it out with that title, but I am betting not a few editors will have a hard time with it. In any event, here is the excerpt. Please be aware as you read that the first paragraph is the introduction, which I think you need for context, while the second and third paragraphs are from later on in the essay.
The leader of my first graduate poetry workshop — this was 1985 — was telling us about a challenge she’d issued to the men in the group of poets she hung out with when she was younger. “None of you,” she said she told them, “will ever write a successful ‘cunt poem,’ because, when it comes to cunts, men only understand clichés.” We all laughed, the three of us who were men perhaps a little uncomfortably, and then she informed us that a poem her challenge had inspired was in the anthology she’d assigned as our text. I read that poem four times when I got home that night, finding it harder to believe with each reading that anyone could have thought it deserved publication. Not only did it rely on precisely the kinds of clichés I understood my teacher to have been talking about, ending, for example, by calling women’s genitals, without irony, “the gates of paradise;” but the entire poem was built on the biggest cliché of all, treating The Vagina it discussed — because I still cannot help but think of the word as capitalized and in italics, even though it never appears in the poem — as nothing more than an object of the poet’s contemplation, like the Grecian urn had been for Keats, as if all the vaginas The Vagina represented were not in reality attached to the living, breathing bodies of actual women.
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The first thing I did was trash every poem I’d written to that point. Then, once I’d let go of the baggage all that old work represented, the poems that became my first book, The Silence of Men (CavanKerry Press 2006), began to take shape. At last, I felt like I’d found a language in which I could speak about my body as my own, in which my desires and my fears, my vulnerabilities and regrets, my joys and my failures, were mine and no one else’s to give meaning to. Committing to that language meant committing to a radical honesty about who I was, both as a survivor of child sexual abuse and as a man; it meant rejecting utterly the rhetoric of invisibility with which the man who forced his penis into my mouth had so effectively and for so many years hijacked what I had to say.
That kind of honesty is precisely what is lacking in the clichés my teacher defined as the limits of the male imagination when it comes to writing about women’s genitals. Take, for example, the cliché that ends the “cunt poem” I spoke about at the beginning of this essay, “the gates of paradise.” The dishonesty in this metaphor lies primarily in the way it objectifies women’s bodies, describing not women’s experience of being embodied, and not even men’s experience of women’s bodies as bodies inhabited by women, but rather the particular experience men have of our own bodies when we have sex with women. It praises women’s genitals, in other words, not for being what they are, but for how men can use them, and so, on a cultural level, renders women as invisible and voiceless as I was rendered by the men who used me. To meet my teacher’s challenge, then, to be a male poet who writes a successful “cunt poem,” is not simply to find a non-cliché way of calling women’s genitals “the gates of paradise.” Rather, it is to discover language that will make visible the women whose genitals they are, unwrapping from within a male perspective the layers of misconception and misrepresentation in which they are bound by the sexual objectification of women that is so central to our culture. It is, in other words, a profoundly political endeavor, one that requires a man not only to refuse complicity in the inherent violation that sexually objectifying women is, but also to articulate a way of being a man who sees women as sexual beings that does justice to who they are as human beings.
Just because they almost never sit together like this and they remind me of a yin-yang symbol that’s been pulled apart and I want to see what it is like to post a photo from my phone.