I just received a copy of the Fore­word that Yusef Komun­yaaka has writ­ten for my first book of poem, The Silence Of Men, which will be pub­lished in May by CavanKerry Press, and I am, truly, hum­bled. I will not quote from what he wrote here because the book is not out yet, but he pegged his intro­duc­tion on what, for me, is a cen­tral rea­son I write and almost the only rea­son I think poetry mat­ters in the world. To write poems is to make a moral ges­ture in the world, and to be fully con­scious of this ges­ture is to make one’s poems, what­ever their overt sub­ject mat­ter, a wit­ness­ing of the world. This bear­ing wit­ness, which is so much more than seeing, has become for me one of the mea­sures of whether a poem is worth­while. I didn’t say “good” because even com­pe­tently writ­ten poems, poems that are “good” in the sense that they have been writ­ten with real skill, do not nec­es­sar­ily bear wit­ness to what­ever it is they con­tain. Now there’s a state­ment that needs to be unpacked, but I have some things to do before class, so I will leave that for another time.

In this thread on Alas, A Blog, Ed, in com­ment #45, responded to some­thing I said in ways that reminded me of War­ren Farrell’s The Myth of Male Power. I hadn’t thought of the book in a very long time, but it strikes me that now, given the direc­tion in which the Bush admin­is­tra­tion and the right are push­ing this coun­try – though I should say that I have no idea if Far­rell is him­self a sup­porter of Bush’s poli­cies – it’s worth remem­ber­ing what the book was about, why it was so pow­er­ful and also what was wrong with it. Unfor­tu­nately, my copy of the book, along with the other two books I am going to men­tion, is in stor­age, and so every­thing I say here is going to be sum­mary and para­phrase. I read The Myth Of Male Power not too long after it came out and found it a mov­ing, force­ful and at times con­vinc­ing argu­ment that men are deemed expend­able in US soci­ety and that this expend­abil­ity can be seen in every­thing from mil­i­tary poli­cies and employ­ment prac­tices to social atti­tudes about how men should strive to pro­tect women, even to the death, from all of life’s dan­gers and the much greater rates at which men die from male vio­lence than women. (To be fair to Far­rell, I have to say that his argu­ment is sub­stan­tial and, at times, quite sub­tle, qual­i­ties hid­den by my rather blithe sum­ma­riz­ing of his posi­tion. Also, for the sake of this dis­cus­sion, I will sim­ply accept – though I really do not know for cer­tain – that the sta­tis­tics Far­rell mar­shalls are fairly and accu­rately interpreted.)

Where I have a big prob­lem with Farrell’s argu­ment is with his asser­tion that we in fact live in a female dom­i­nated cul­ture, where women hold far greater polit­i­cal and eco­nomic power than men do and where the entire soci­ety is designed for women’s com­fort and plea­sure. (Okay, that might be over­stat­ing it a bit, but, as I remem­ber the book, it’s only a bit.) When I first read the book, though, despite the fact that I intu­itively did not buy this over­all argu­ment, I did not have ay evi­dence with which to cri­tique it. Then I read David Gilmore’s book, Man­hood In The Mak­ing–again, though, a book that is in stor­age and that I there­fore can­not quote directly. The book is a sur­vey of cultlures in terms of their stance on man­hood, and what he found was that the value of male expend­abil­ity exists most strongly in those cul­tures where male dom­i­nant man­hood is how mas­culin­ity is defined. Gilmore iden­ti­fies three tenets of this mas­culin­ity: 1. To marry and pro­duce chil­dren; 2. To pro­vide a home and sus­te­nance for their fam­lies; 3. To go to war, if nec­es­sary, and, if nec­es­sary, to give their lives to guar­an­tee the con­tin­ued exis­tence of their soci­eties. These tenets, Gilmore argues, can be seen as a kind of nur­tur­ing, if the thing that is being nur­tured is under­stood to be soci­ety itself. He also goes on to talk about the ways in which this expend­abil­ity is roman­ti­cized in almost every cul­ture where it is prac­ticed; the macho sti­o­cism with which men are sup­posed to face this expend­abil­ity; and the priv­i­leges that being a man in such a cul­ture bring with it.

Now, please note that these three tenets pretty much define the ter­rain of the male expend­abil­ity that War­ren Far­rell exposes and opposes. In other words, the val­ues that Far­rell cri­tiques in his book are val­ues of male, not female dom­i­nance. This does not mean, of course, that there might not be instances where women ben­e­fit from these val­ues, but the fact that women ben­e­fit from them does not mean the val­ues are not male dom­i­nant. The argu­ment against male expend­abil­ity needs to be an argu­ment against male dom­i­nance, a fem­i­nist argu­ment, in other words, and not an argu­ment against a fem­i­nist under­stand­ing of how our cul­ture works.

If you want to read a book that does not start out from an obvi­ously fem­i­nist per­spec­tive in dis­cussing male vio­lence – not male vio­lence against women, just sim­ply male vio­lence – but arrives at the con­clu­sion that the only way to solve the prob­lem, includ­ing the prob­lem of male vio­lence against men, is through fem­i­nism, try Vio­lence, by James Gilli­gan. I will not try to recon­struct his argu­ment here, because his book is also in stor­age, except to say that it is one of the best analy­ses of how deadly the price of shame is in a male dom­i­nant cul­ture that val­ues the kind of man­hood Gilmore writes about, not only for the man who is shamed, but also for any­one who is unfor­tu­nate enough to remind him of that fact. Gilligan’s con­clu­sion, in part, is that if you look at our soci­ety, there are two kinds of objec­ti­fi­ca­tions that hap­pen: women are objec­ti­fied sex­u­ally, while men are iden­ti­fied as objects of vio­lence, but rather than insist that our soci­ety, there­fore, is not really male dom­i­nant, he insists that it is and argues that a fem­i­nist solu­tion is the only solu­tion. I remem­ber think­ing that the fem­i­nism he talks about sounded a lit­tle bit too middle-class lib­eral for me, but I also remem­ber being pretty wowed by the fact that he didn’t start his book from an obvi­ously fem­i­nist per­spec­tive, but let the force of his analy­sis lead him there.

I’m sit­ting in my office wait­ing for the water to get hot so I can take a shower and get out of here. I am head­ing to the Dactyl art gallery where they have an open poetry read­ing once a month or so that I like to read at. The space is won­der­ful; the peo­ple are respect­ful; there’s almost always some­thing worth lis­ten­ing to — even though most of what peo­ple read is pretty awful — and I have found it’s a good place to hear new mate­r­ial in my own voice. What I am think­ing about, how­ever, is that it will not be too long before this room is no longer my office. My brother-in-law will even­tu­all be com­ing from Iran and we need a bed­room for him, and this room will be it. It’s going to make our apart­ment awfully crowded — my in-laws are liv­ing with us already — but it is the way things are going to be. It’s just a mat­ter of when it’s going to happen.

It’s inter­est­ing liv­ing with my in-laws, actu­ally — since we get along really well and they don’t bother me at all. I get to see where a lot of my wife’s char­ac­ter and char­ac­ter­is­tics, both the good and the bad, come from, and it’s won­der­ful for my son to have a set of grand­par­ents liv­ing with him, though I think he will not really appre­ci­ate that till he is much older.

I’m always amused by people’s reac­tions when I tell them my in-laws are liv­ing with us, but that will have to be some­thing I write about another time. Right now, I think my shower is ready.

Dear C — , 

When my wife and I bought this apart­ment, I was in busi­ness for myself and we turned this room into an office because part of the rea­son for start­ing my own busi­ness in the first place was that I wanted to be able to work from home. It was the 1990s, and it was the dot-com boom, and free­lanc­ing was the way to take con­trol of your life, even if it meant being avail­able more hours a day, seven days a week, more or less every­where you went — I hated my cell phone — than you’d ever thought pos­si­ble. Yes, I read all the arti­cles about how you work to live, not live to work, and I actu­ally tried to take some of the advice the writ­ers of those arti­cles gave about set­ting aside time for your­self and your fam­ily, even just an hour-long walk around the block in the mid­dle of the day, but despite my best efforts the busi­ness seeped into every cor­ner of my life, like the water that was leak­ing, when we first moved in, from the roof into our din­ing room, and it took them for­ever to find the leak itself because it could’ve been com­ing from any­where, right above us, or even all the way at the other end of the build­ing, because who knew what fis­sures were run­ning through the building’s infra­struc­ture and water flows where there is space for it to flow. That’s what my busi­ness was like. Didn’t mat­ter what I was involved in, some­where in the spaces between what I was say­ing or think­ing or doing with my hands, images of the client project I was work­ing on, or the mar­ket­ing ideas I had yet to try out, or the thing I should’ve said at the net­work­ing event that I didn’t think of at the time, or doubts about whether I should even be try­ing to make it on my own, flick­ered across the screen in my brain, and if I wasn’t in busi­ness mode I had to remind myself, I had to strug­gle to remind myself, that there would be time to deal with it later, when I was in busi­ness mode.

And there were the emer­gency calls, the last minute, do-or-die change requests, the hag­gling over deliv­ery dates and dead­lines — all of it pulling me away from some­thing I knew I didn’t want to be pulled away from, and that too was part of the prob­lem, I didn’t know what this some­thing was. I only knew that doing busi­ness left me feel­ing like I was neglect­ing some­thing I couldn’t afford to neglect. I was mak­ing money, though, enough of it that the pos­si­bil­ity didn’t seem as far fetched as it should have that if I hung in there I’d even­tu­ally reach the point you saw immor­tal­ized in all those ads for cell phones and call­ing plans and lap­top com­put­ers and per­sonal dig­i­tal assis­tants which promised me that if I lib­er­ated myself from my desk­top it would be no time before I was doing busi­ness from the beach or some other fun-in-the-sun type spot. So I decided the prob­lem was not within me, but rather that I wasn’t out there enough in the busi­ness world. I needed to be with other peo­ple who were doing what I was doing. I needed for them to become my friends, col­leagues and men­tors, and so I signed up for net­work­ing groups, and I went to the dot-com and free­lance net­work­ing par­ties that were sup­posed to be as well a chance to social­ize, and I joined the new media trade asso­ci­a­tion and became active in one of their inter­est groups, but none of it helped. I was still feel­ing empty.

So then I joined a group billing itself as the kind of com­mu­nity entre­pre­neurs really needed, one that addressed both the unique busi­ness require­ments and the social needs of peo­ple who had their own com­pa­nies. I will not bore you fur­ther with the details of my year as a mem­ber of that group, but I will tell you that in my very first meet­ing — they called it a needs assess­ment — I began to gather the seeds that would grow into my deter­mi­na­tion not only not to be in busi­ness for myself, but to refuse any work that did not make some part of me feel more alive each day that I did it, even if that feel­ing of alive­ness came from my own anger and frus­tra­tion at the dif­fi­cul­ties that the work brought into my life.

“The first thing you need to ask your­self,” the group leader was sit­ting oppo­site me on the other side of a con­fer­ence table, a tin of choco­lates between us, and then his assis­tant came in with two cups of tea and the pad for tak­ing notes that he’d for­got­ten to bring in with him. “The first thing you need to ask your­self is whether this busi­ness is some­thing you’d die if you weren’t able to do.” The ques­tion seemed a lit­tle — a little? — hyperbolic to me, but I answered him seri­ously, explain­ing that what I wanted was to have a busi­ness that earned me the money that I needed and left me the time to live my life as I wanted to live it, even if I didn’t quite yet know what how-I-wanted-to-live-it meant.

“Well,” he put his pen down on top of the pad — all he’d done so far was write my name — and he leaned for­ward so I would know how impor­tant his next point was, “what you really have to decide is whether you are will­ing to devote your life to mak­ing this busi­ness into some­thing that will last.”

I tried to point out that he had not really heard me the first time. I wasn’t inter­ested in becom­ing a mil­lion­aire entre­pre­neur, nor was I inter­ested in build­ing a com­pany that would out­last me or that I would be able to hand on to my son, who had just been born a cou­ple of months ear­lier. I wanted to take what­ever design tal­ent I had and put it at the ser­vice of clients who would pay me well enough, and I repeated the phrase again, that I could live my life the way I wanted live it.

“But you don’t under­stand…” he tried again to get me to see things his way, and we went back and forth a few more times, and then I left feel­ing not like I’d wasted my time, but like I’d had that con­ver­sa­tion before, and when I got home I put on a Beethoven string quar­tet, num­ber 15 I think — it’s a trick I learned when I was an under­grad­u­ate: You put on a string quar­tet, it doesn’t have to be Beethoven, but his seem to work best for me, and then lis­ten, prefer­ably with a set of head­phones. You let your mind wan­der wher­ever the music takes it and your thoughts will inevitably come to some­thing you need. It may not be what you thought you were look­ing for, but it will be some­thing you need, you can be sure of that. Any­way, I sat for a long time in this big chair we have in our liv­ing room — my wife and son were out for the day so it was quiet and I had the time to let the music play till the end — and I don’t remem­ber much of what I thought about, but some­where in the quartet’s final move­ment, I real­ized why my con­ver­sa­tion with that com­mu­nity leader was so famil­iar to me. Do you know Rilke’s Let­ters To A Young Poet? They are a won­der­ful series of let­ters he wrote to a young man who asked Rilke for advice about being a writer. I pulled down my copy of the book, which I hadn’t looked at in many, many years and started to read. This is from the first letter:

There is only one thing you should do. Go into your­self. Find out the rea­son that com­mands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; con­fess to your­self whether you would have to die if you were for­bid­den to write. This most of all: ask your­self in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into your­self for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in the assent, if you meet this solemn ques­tion with a strong, sim­ple “I must,” then build your life in accor­dance with this neces­sity; your whole life, even into its hum­blest and most indif­fer­ent hour, must become a sign and wit­ness to this impulse.

I am not a writer, and while I am a graphic designer — or at least while I have been a graphic designer all my work­ing life, until recently, that is, when I lost the job I took after I gave up my busi­ness — I do not think of my design as an art to which I must ded­i­cate my life in the way that Rilke describes.

Ah, again I must leave you. Some­one is at the door and then — I’m look­ing at the clock — I have to go food shop­ping. We’re giv­ing a din­ner party this week­end and I’m cook­ing. More later or tomor­row.

I just real­ized I never fin­ished what I wanted to say in my ear­lier post about Abor­tion in Jew­ish Law, and it was sim­ply this: insist­ing that the fetus is not a per­son is, it seems to me, the only way to draw a clear and unam­bigu­ous line between not only the rights of the mother and the rights of the fetus, but also, in the con­text of the Amer­i­can debate on abor­tion, between the pro-choice movement’s posi­tion and the posi­tion of the anti-abortion move­ment. Jew­ish law pro­vides a model for draw­ing that line and for the kinds of eth­i­cal and pol­icy posi­tions that one might reach as a result of it, and I think its worth tak­ing that model and try­ing to put it to work, with what­ever mod­i­fi­ca­tions are nec­es­sary, in the debate over abor­tion in this coun­try.

I just got an email from New­Pages, a webiste cov­er­ing alter­na­tive print and media and they have accepted me as a reviewer, which is very cool! I have long wanted to write book reviews, espe­cially of poetry, so this is my chance. When I told her, my wife said, “Like you don’t have enough to do, right?” And in once sense she’s right: I am ridicu­lously busy, and I will be busier once I go back to teach­ing next week, but since I have promised myself not to become over­bur­dened with com­mit­tee and other work at school, I will have a lit­tle bit more free time and I am thrilled that I will be able to fill that time with books. This will give me, in addi­tion to this blog, two out­lets for say­ing things I want to say about books and cul­ture and pol­i­tics and such. The other one is The Great Amer­i­can Pinup, where I post once a month or so.

Right now I am sit­ting in the New York Pub­lic Library work­ing on a very long poem called “Poem For My Wife.” This will not be its title when I fin­ish with it. It is the second-to-last poem in my sec­ond book of poems, which is called Telling Sto­ries, and it is prov­ing a hard poem to work on. It has as its com­pan­ion piece a poem that is now called “Some­thing Whole,” but which started out as “Poem For My Hus­band,” which was pub­lished online at Mast­head in a slightly dif­fer­ent, because ear­lier ver­sion. Each poem is long, more than 15 pages, and I have hit upon an idea for the struc­ture, which is to think of them as piano sonatas, with themes and motifs that weave in and out of the poem’s “movements.” It worked for “Some­thing Whole” and I need to get back to try­ing to make it work for “Poem For My Wife.“

1.

The thing that struck me most about my friend’s let­ter was not her protest that I’d given her “far too much credit” for my own devel­op­ment as a writer. She’s said things like that in the past and it is some­thing about which I am sure we will always dis­agree. “All I ever was,” she wrote, “all I did, was be your friend and lis­ten to you.” As if being present for some­one who des­per­ately needs your pres­ence is not a huge thing in and of itself, even if being present is for you a sim­ple and easy thing to do. As if being the first per­son to take my writ­ing seri­ously — and she was that per­son; she saw before any­one else, and almost, I think, before I saw it myself — that writ­ing was what would, what could, keep me whole…as if that were not some­thing I would remem­ber and be eter­nally grate­ful for.

My friend was respond­ing to the very emo­tional inscrip­tion I wrote in the copy I sent her of my first pub­lished book, Selec­tions from Saadi’s Gulis­tan, and it is a kind of deflec­tion I remem­ber well from when we were younger. I was a fresh­man in col­lege, and I told this friend that I loved her, and I did, and I knew she loved me as well. She refused to acknowl­edge what I’d said, and then more than a decade later, over a din­ner we had because she con­tacted me again. She’d been mar­ried for ten years, and we had not spo­ken since I walked out of her wed­ding early, with­out say­ing good­bye. I was hurt she was mar­ry­ing some­one else, but I was more hurt that her hus­band, or at least it appeared that her hus­band was doing every­thing he could to keep her from talk­ing to me, and finally couldn’t take it any­more, and so I left. Any­way, at that din­ner, she told me that some­times she wished she’d had the courage to be a lit­tle more like me, adven­tur­ous, impul­sive, that she some­times regret­ted the very con­ser­v­a­tive choices she’d made in her life, and we held hands in that restau­rant, briefly, and I felt the same charge run through me that I felt when we sat in the dark in the room in her dor­mi­tory where I slept when I vis­ited her at the col­lege she was attend­ing and she danced her fin­gers up and down the skin of my arm. Her touch was warm and I wanted to bathe in that warmth, to feel it seep inside me, to inhale it, but I was not will­ing to promise her the future; I wanted to let it hap­pen or not. We were young; we’d be mov­ing from a deep friend­ship into romance, always a dif­fi­cult and poten­tially dan­ger­ous move, and I thought it would be bet­ter for us to take things one step at a time and not worry yet about whether there was a seri­ous com­mit­ment to be made. She wanted that com­mit­ment, though, and so we never got together.

Like I said, though, it was not my friend’s demur­ral that sur­prised me. What sur­prised me is that she did not ask me a sin­gle ques­tion about my life. She told me about her chil­dren, com­ment­ing that her old­est is now enter­ing “the stage of meet­ing peo­ple who will have a pro­found effect on her life and her world­view or who become life­long friends. She has met and become friends with chil­dren of my col­lege and high school friends” (some of whom, no doubt, were my high school friends as well, since we’ve known each other since we were in 8^th grade). She told me that things with her hus­band “are well” and that she stopped work­ing three years ago — and good for them that she could afford to do so! — “when all I did was work,” and that she has been “liv­ing, vol­un­teer­ing a lot and try­ing to stay healthy,” which sug­gests that all the work she was doing had been unhealthy for her in a seri­ous way. But she never once, in this let­ter that praises my accom­plish­ments as a writer, asks me about my wife or my child. The only ref­er­ence she makes to my life out­side of who I am as a writer and who we were to each other when we were in junior high and high school is this: “…when I received the book I was struck by how dif­fer­ent our lives have become, that you have become involved in a whole dif­fer­ent world, one so removed from my expe­ri­ence and knowl­edge. And yet I must say, it is one that I have not looked to be involved in and one that is at odds with my beliefs.”

It’s hard for me to know pre­cisely what my friend is talk­ing about here, but my guess is that she’s talk­ing about the fact that my wife is not Jew­ish, that she is, in fact, Mus­lim, and so I have betrayed one of the major tenets of the Jew­ish com­mu­nity within which we were both edu­cated (the high school we attended together was a yeshiva): Thou shalt not inter­marry. What I don’t know is whether the fact that I have inter­mar­ried is why my friend does not bother ask­ing me about my life. On the one hand, of course, her rea­son or rea­sons don’t mat­ter. Her silence — espe­cially given the fact that the intro­duc­tion to my book talks very explic­itly about my mar­riage — feels like a rejec­tion. What she wants, what she is will­ing to talk about is the book, to con­grat­u­late me for it, to dis­tance her­self from how I feel about the role she played in my devel­op­ment as a writer and to insist that I alone should “please take credit for all your hard work. It is yours and, because you are a sur­vivor, you should that you would have achieved this no mat­ter what.”

It feels, in other words, like she is will­ing to tell me about her­self, but at the same time she wants to make sure to tell me to keep my dis­tance and that makes me very sad. I could flat­ter myself by think­ing that she doesn’t want to get too close, or want me to get too close, because she’s afraid she’ll be tempted to dis­rupt the very sta­ble and con­ser­v­a­tive life she has built for her­self, but I really do think that would be flat­ter­ing myself. My sense — and I could be, and I hope I am, wrong — is that she doesn’t want that life to be con­t­a­m­i­nated. I think she sees in our friend­ship and how dif­fer­ent we have become, and the temp­ta­tion that I was for her when she was younger and when she reached out to recon­nect with me, a dan­ger that lies in wait for her daugh­ter. Most prob­a­bly I will never know because, most prob­a­bly, this let­ter she was writ­ten me will be the last I have from her. I plan to send her a copy of my own book of poems, The Silence of Men, which will be pub­lished next year, and which is ded­i­cated to her (Selec­tions from Saadi’s Gulis­tan is ded­i­cated to my wife and son), but I do not expect that she will respond to that. It’s just the feel­ing I get from the tone of her let­ter and from her silence about my life. I am sad and it almost feels like I have writ­ten here the epi­taph of our friendship.

2.

Or maybe I have mis­read my friend’s let­ter entirely. Maybe her silence is in response to a silence about her that she heard in the inscrip­tion I wrote in my book, and so I need to look to myself and my own feel­ings to under­stand what’s going on in her let­ter. Or maybe she wrote the let­ter quickly, and so she wasn’t think­ing about any­thing in my life beyond the book that I’d sent her — though it’s also true I sent her a birth announce­ment when my son was born and she never responded. Or maybe she wrote the let­ter over a cou­ple of dif­fer­ent sit­tings and put down what came to her mind at the moment with­out really think­ing about the let­ter as a whole, and so it never occurred to her that she hadn’t asked me about my fam­ily and my life. Or maybe, or maybe, or maybe, or maybe. I could go on and on mak­ing excuses for her, find­ing rea­son after rea­son why I should not trust my intu­ition that this let­ter, con­sciously or not — though I am pretty sure it was con­scious and I will tell you why in a minute — was intended to estab­lish, very nicely, but firmly, a dis­tance between my friend and me that I am sup­posed to under­stand as sig­ni­fy­ing the end of the friend­ship we once had.

Why do I think it was con­scious? Lis­ten again to how she closed the let­ter: “please take credit for all your hard work. It is yours and, because you are a sur­vivor, you should know that you would have achieved this no mat­ter what.”

I am a sur­vivor. What she is refer­ring to is the fact that I am a sur­vivor of child sex­ual abuse, some­thing I told her about when we met for the din­ner I wrote about above. I wanted her to under­stand why I’d reacted so strongly against her deci­sion first not to become my girl­friend and, sec­ond, to get mar­ried to some­one other than me. If you know any­thing about the psy­chol­ogy of sur­vivors it’s a pretty con­ven­tional nar­ra­tive: I felt myself to be dirty and unwor­thy of love and yet my friend clearly loved me — whether she loved me only as a friend or as some­thing more is beside the point — and so when she rejected me, I took it as a sign that I was, truly, unwor­thy. I felt ashamed and enraged, and while the none of the myr­iad nar­ra­tive threads that make up a person’s life story can ulti­mately be reduced to a sin­gle cause and effect, I know that this feel­ing of unwor­thi­ness has an awful lot to do with the choices I’ve made in terms of the women in my life — but that is grist for the mill of another piece of writing.

My friend was shocked when I told her that I’d been sex­u­ally abused, and I could see in her eyes both the com­pas­sion she felt for me and how much she wished she had known what was going on at the time, but here’s the thing: In her let­ter, she feels the need to remind me that I am a sur­vivor, that I shouldn’t for­get — as sur­vivors are wont to do — to take credit for what I have accom­plished. What I intended as an hon­est acknowl­edg­ment of how impor­tant she was to me as a friend and as the first real sup­porter of my writ­ing, in other words, she under­stood as an expres­sion of an inse­cu­rity and infe­ri­or­ity borne of hav­ing been sex­u­ally abused. This hurts. It feels patron­iz­ing and it feels, again, like rejec­tion, but this time I am not ashamed and I am not angry. I am only, deeply, sad. I have missed this friend a lot over the years. I have missed the way we used to talk and the way we would some­times go out for ice cream and French fries, a habit of eat­ing she intro­duced me to where the salti­ness of the fries pro­vided a won­der­ful bal­ance to the sweet­ness of the sun­daes we’d just eaten.

Most of all, I sup­pose, I have missed the chance we had after she got back in touch with me to recon­nect on a more per­ma­nent level, as indi­vid­u­als, as cou­ples and, once my son was born, as fam­i­lies. We told our­selves we were going to try, but we also — I still think rea­son­ably — told our­selves that we wanted first to meet a cou­ple of times, just the two of us, to talk out our unfin­ished busi­ness. My friend’s hus­band had a prob­lem with this, though — or at least that’s what she told me. He resented the time away from home that her meet­ing me for an occa­sional din­ner would mean, and when she told me about this, she con­nected it to the feel­ings he had about me when they first started dat­ing and then became engaged. He was jeal­ous. Look­ing back, I sup­pose I don’t blame him: She and I had been friends long before they started going out, and maybe he knew — because maybe she told him — that I had tried to become her boyfriend; and then once they became engaged, I gave him good rea­son to resent me: they were either liv­ing together, or he was often at her place, or she was often at his — I don’t remem­ber which — but when I would call to talk to her, as I still did, hop­ing secretly that they would even­tu­ally break up, and he answered the phone, I refused to acknowl­edge him, even though I knew him. He’d been a year ahead of us in high school. With­out say­ing his name or ask­ing how he was, I sim­ply asked if my friend was there. It must have felt to him as if I was try­ing to tell him that, as far as I was con­cerned, he didn’t exist.

Any­way, my friend con­nected her husband’s prob­lems with our see­ing each other to what had hap­pened ten years ear­lier, and even though I could under­stand why he’d felt the way he did back them, it seemed to me that if he was still hav­ing those prob­lems with me then there must be other, larger issues at stake between him and my friend and I didn’t want to get involved with that. I told her this in a let­ter to which, as I remem­ber, she never responded, and that — except for the birth announce­ment — was the last time we com­mu­ni­cated before I sent her my book. And I will not be sur­prised if the ded­i­ca­tion in next book I send her will be the last thing I say to her ever again.

3.

I am mourn­ing my friend­ship with this woman and yet I am also haunted by the fact that I could be wrong about all this, and that haunt­ing, oddly enough, is what makes it sad­dest of all.

My orig­i­nal inten­tion after first read­ing Jerome W. Clinton’s In The Dragon’s Claws: The Story of Ros­tam & Esfandi­yar from the Per­sian Book of Kings (Mage Pub­lish­ers, 1999), a clear, read­able and in places com­pellingly ren­dered trans­la­tion, was to post a com­ment in response to David Koehn’s post on the other blog where I post, The Great Amer­i­can Pinup, on Wil­low, Wine, Mir­ror, Moon: Women’s Poems from Tang China, trans­lated by Jeanne Larsen and pub­lished by BOA Edi­tions. I have decided instead, for rea­sons that are implied in the title and that will become obvi­ous as you read, to make this into its own post on the blog, but let me start where my think­ing about all this began, with this quote from David’s post:

“Larsen’s col­lec­tion does not pro­vide the Chi­nese as com­pan­ion for her trans­la­tions. Some of her trans­la­tions carry that awk­ward­ness that comes from search­ing for the Eng­lish equiv­a­lent of what is a tra­di­tional Chi­nese mode of expres­sion. At those moments I’d like to have had the char­ac­ters avail­able to me so I might decide for myself if her effort was an attempt to be lit­eral, to be mod­ern or otherwise.”

As I under­stand this, what David wants is to have the orig­i­nal Chi­nese poems so that he can think crit­i­cally about moments in Larsen’s book where he felt not so much that the trans­la­tions were unsuc­cess­ful — he does not use that word and so I don’t want to put it in his mouth — but rather where the translator’s hand was made vis­i­ble by her inabil­ity to chan­nel seam­lessly into Eng­lish a “tra­di­tional Chi­nese mode of expres­sion.” It sounds almost like there were some poems in which he felt he was look­ing at a knit­ted gar­ment that some­one was wear­ing inside out so that all the stitch­ing was vis­i­ble and what he wanted was to be able to exam­ine the pat­tern from which the gar­ment was pro­duced so he could deter­mine what the other side looked like, or, rather, what it was sup­posed to look like, or could look like, depend­ing on how that orig­i­nal pat­tern was read. This is not, I know a seam­less metaphor — par­don the pun — since you could always ask the per­son wear­ing the sweater to take it off and turn it right side out, some­thing that does not quite have a par­al­lel when talk­ing about lit­er­ary trans­la­tion, but it allows me to talk about my read­ing of Clinton’s trans­la­tion in a way that gets at the ques­tion of for­mal choices in trans­la­tion from a slightly dif­fer­ent angle.

Because David can read Chi­nese, he can in some sense ask the trans­la­tor to turn the sweater right side out by ask­ing to see the orig­i­nal poem. Or maybe it’s more accu­rate to see the orig­i­nal poem as the pat­tern from which the trans­la­tor knits the trans­la­tion. I’m not sure — though I will say that try­ing to come up with metaphors that cap­ture some­thing of the essence of what lit­er­ary trans­la­tors and their trans­la­tions do has become some­thing of a hobby of mine — but what I am sure of is that, because I do not read Per­sian, even if Mage Pub­lish­ers had put the orig­i­nal side-by-side with Jerome Clinton’s trans­la­tion, I could not have made the com­par­i­son between Clinton’s trans­la­tion and the orig­i­nal that David says he would like to have been able to make between Larsen’s work and the orig­i­nal Chinese.

Yet this is a com­par­i­son I would dearly love to make because my rea­son for read­ing In The Dragon’s Claws is that I am prepar­ing to make my own trans­la­tion of parts of the Shah­nameh. So, being able to think crit­i­cally, in the way that David is talk­ing about, about the choices other trans­la­tors have made would be a big help. Here, for exam­ple, is a pas­sage from Clinton’s ver­sion of the prologue:

The garden’s filled with roses; hyacinths
And tulips cover all the moun­tain slopes.
The nightin­gale laments through­out the glade
While the rose­bud preens her­self at his dis­tress.
Since clouds are send­ing down their wind and rain,
I won­der why nar­cis­sus is so sad?
The nightin­gale wakes through the dark­est night.
He laughs at wind and rain that set the rose
To trem­bling in fear. Snug in his perch
Within the rose, he sings his song. Mean­while
The cloud roars like a lion, as though he were
The lover, not the rose. Winds tear his robe
To shreds. Fires flash within the thun­der­head,
Fierce proofs of heaven’s pas­sion for the earth—
a love it offers here before the sun. (29−30)

I admire Clinton’s abil­ity to stick with the blank verse he has cho­sen as his form — and there are a great many pas­sages in the book that are won­der­fully ren­dered — but I feel an awk­ward­ness here, one that repeats itself through­out the book, an arti­fi­cial qual­ity in the lan­guage and a way in which the form and the con­tent end up work­ing against each other. In the fol­low­ing lines, for exam­ple, end­ing the sec­ond line on the verb “were” takes the empha­sis off the word “he,” where it seems to me it belongs:

…Mean­while
The cloud roars like a lion, as though he were
The lover, not the rose.

There are moments like this through­out the book, but while they do not hap­pen so fre­quently as to detract from the power of the story being told, they hap­pen often enough to make me won­der about the rela­tion­ship between Clinton’s for­mal choices and the form of the original.

I decided that I will not be trans­lat­ing the Shah­nameh into blank verse before I read Clinton’s book. I have lived with blank verse now for two years in my trans­la­tions of Saadi, and it is a form, frankly, that I am tired of, but read­ing In The Dragon’s Claws con­vinced me I’d made the right deci­sion. Instead, when I begin my work on the Shah­nameh, I will be work­ing in Anglo-Saxon verse, a form that has its own rela­tion­ship to epic nar­ra­tive (think Beowulf) and that I want to explore with the Shah­nameh because it feels to me like Anglo-Saxon verse will help me avoid what I felt was the way that Clinton’s adher­ence both to a very strict blank verse line and a very sim­ple and straight­for­ward lan­guage san­i­tized the story of Ros­tam and Esfandi­yar, rob­bing the con­flict between these two men of much of its drama. Over the long haul of more than a hun­dred pages, in other words, at least to my ear, Clinton’s verse clicks through its iambic pen­tame­ter too mechan­i­cally to carry the full emo­tional res­o­nance of the nar­ra­tive. As well, the iambic pen­tame­ter itself feels in places more like a schema over which the lan­guage of the trans­la­tion has been laid, rather than a form that grew organ­i­cally out of the translator’s rela­tion­ship to the poem.

You’re prob­a­bly won­der­ing what all this has to do with empire, Pres­i­dent Bush and the war in Iraq, and I will be get­ting there soon, I promise, but I want to make sure to say, first, that noth­ing I have said till now should take away from Jerome Clinton’s accom­plish­ment, which has been to ren­der one of the more impor­tant sto­ries from the Shah­nameh into acces­si­ble, enjoy­able and at times truly mov­ing Eng­lish, and if you are inter­ested in Per­sian lit­er­a­ture, or in epic lit­er­a­ture in gen­eral, In The Dragon’s Claws is a great place to start. The sec­ond thing I want to say is actu­ally two things — and this will get us to con­tem­po­rary pol­i­tics — and they are my rea­sons for choos­ing Anglo-Saxon verse as the form in which I will work on the Shah­nameh in Eng­lish.

To begin with, Anglo-Saxon and Per­sian poetry are both writ­ten in hemistiches, and while I will not be so arro­gant as to sug­gest that I will be able to make, or even be try­ing to make, the hemistiches in Eng­lish cor­re­spond to those in the orig­i­nal, this for­mal cor­re­spon­dence gives me a kind of infra­struc­ture on which to build out the rest of my think­ing in terms of the for­mal choices I will make. Sec­ond, and in many ways more impor­tantly, the warrior-talk that fills In The Dragon’s Claws reminds me a whole lot more of the warrior-talk in Beowulf than of any­thing I know that’s been writ­ten in blank verse. Here are the first lines of Sea­mus Heaney’s Beowulf:

So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by
and the kings who ruled them had courage and great­ness.
We have heard of those princes’ heroic cam­paigns.
There was Shield Sheaf­son, scourge of many tribes,
a wrecker of mead-benches, ram­pag­ing among foes.
This ter­ror of the hall-troops had come far.
A foundling to start with, he would flour­ish later on
as his pow­ers waxed and his worth was proved.
In the end each clan on the out­ly­ing coasts
beyond the whale-road had to yield to him
and begin to pay trib­ute. That was one good king. (3)

And here, in Jerome Clinton’s words, is Queen Katayun’s descrip­tion of Rostam:

This war­rior is an ele­phant in strength
And sets Niles of blood to flow­ing on the earth.
He tore the White Div’s heart right from his chest
And dri­ves the sun from its own path. He slew
Hamavaran’s bright moon, Queen Sud­abeh.
Yet none dared chal­lenge him with a word. (40)

The sto­ries of Beowulf and In The Dragon’s Claws are very dif­fer­ent, as are the focal points of these two pas­sages, but what I want you to notice here is that each par­takes of a very tra­di­tion­ally male dom­i­nant war­rior ethic. More to the point, this war­rior ethic is one of the main­stays of the empires ruled by the men in the sto­ries. Shield Sheaf­son is a good king because he was able to make the oth­ers clans sub­mit to him, and the kings of Iran, within the world of the Shah­nameh—though you don’t know this from the quote I have given you — have been able to rule largely because Ros­tam has been there to defend them on the battlefield.

The rulers of Iran are them­selves war­riors, of course, and when Esfandi­yar — whose father, Gosh­tasp, is shah — meets Ros­tam on the bat­tle­field, what we wit­ness is a strug­gle between titans, a bat­tle to the death between two men who not only have never been defeated, but whose vic­to­ries sur­pass those of all other war­riors. Indeed, it is the cir­cum­stance that pits these two men against each other in a fight that nei­ther of them wants and that each rec­og­nizes not to be in his best inter­est that led me to see a con­nec­tion between their story and the story of George W. Bush’s admin­is­tra­tion, its pur­suit of empire and, specif­i­cally, the war in Iraq. First, though, there are some things you need to under­stand about the world view in the Shah­nameh. This is from Jerome Clinton’s intro­duc­tion to In The Dragon’s Claws:

“In the world of the Shah­nameh, humankind seems to have existed before the first shah but as an undif­fer­en­ti­ated species. The for­ma­tion of human soci­ety required the shap­ing pres­ence of a divinely appointed ruler. Other shahs…provided human soci­ety with those gifts — fires, tools, agri­cul­ture and the var­i­ous crafts — that raise men and women above the level of beasts. In other tra­di­tions, these gifts that dis­tin­guish and sus­tain human soci­ety are gifts from the gods. In the Shah­nameh it is Iran’s shahs who pro­vide them, or, rather, it is through them [the shahs] that Yaz­dan, the sole god of pre-Islamic Iran­ian reli­gious belief, gives them [the gifts] to mankind.” (11−12)

Log­i­cally, then, “the focus of the tales” in the Shah­nameh “is the life of the royal court [and, there­fore,] one finds lit­tle mention…of the life of ordi­nary peo­ple such as farm­ers, shep­herds or crafts­men” (10). More to the point, “the theme that under­lies [the entire epic] is that God prefers Iran to other nations and sus­tains it through the insti­tu­tion of the shah. So long as His cho­sen shah sits upon the throne, Iran will endure” (12).

Per­haps you already sense some of the par­al­lels to con­tem­po­rary pol­i­tics in the United States, but let me draw them out for you. The cur­rent Bush admin­is­tra­tion, along with its neo-conservative ide­o­logues, is the first US gov­ern­ment in a very long time to advo­cate openly for the pur­suit of empire as a legit­i­mate and desir­able for­eign pol­icy goal. More to the point, they do so in terms that resem­ble the world view of the Shah­nameh as explained above in the quote from Clinton’s intro­duc­tion. Here, for exam­ple, is the first para­graph of The National Secu­rity Strat­egy of the United States, pub­lished by the Bush admin­is­tra­tion in 2002 (page num­bers refer to a PDF ver­sion of the doc­u­ment that I have but that I have been unable to find a link to):

“The great strug­gles of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury between lib­erty and total­i­tar­i­an­ism ended with a deci­sive vic­tory for the forces of free­dom — and a sin­gle sus­tain­able model for national suc­cess: free­dom, democ­racy, and free enter­prise. In the twenty-first cen­tury, only nations that share a com­mit­ment to pro­tect­ing basic human rights and guar­an­tee­ing polit­i­cal and eco­nomic free­dom will be able to unleash the poten­tial of their peo­ple and assure their future pros­per­ity. Peo­ple every­where want to be able to speak freely; choose who will gov­ern them; wor­ship as they please; edu­cate their chil­dren — male and female; own prop­erty; and enjoy the ben­e­fits of their labor. These val­ues of free­dom are right and true for every per­son, in every soci­ety — and the duty of pro­tect­ing these val­ues against their ene­mies is the com­mon call­ing of freedom-loving peo­ple across the globe and across the ages.” (3)

The United States, of course, accord­ing to this doc­u­ment, is the stan­dard bearer of free­dom. We are the one nation strong enough to pro­mote it, pro­tect it and to remove from power all who oppose it. The rest of the doc­u­ment is an expla­na­tion of how the Bush admin­is­tra­tion intends to bring, in Jerome Clinton’s words, “these gifts that dis­tin­guish and sus­tain human soci­ety” to the rest of the world; and just as the rulers of the Shah­nameh are placed on the throne by their god, so too the Bush admin­is­tra­tion and the reli­gious right argue that there is a spe­cial rela­tion­ship between the United States and the god of the evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tian­ity that is Bush’s pro­fessed faith. Unlike the Bush admin­is­tra­tion, how­ever, and many of its sup­port­ers, who seem to believe in the inher­ent right­eous­ness — polit­i­cal, moral, eth­i­cal, take your pick — of almost every­thing that has been done in pur­suit of this empire, Fer­dowsi, the author of the Shah­nameh, is not so naïve about how empire works, rec­og­niz­ing that there are good kings and bad, and that some­times the logic of empire, espe­cially of a divinely appointed empire, can com­pel oth­er­wise smart and essen­tially good peo­ple to act against their own best interests.

Shah Gosh­tasp, Esfandiyar’s father, came to power by remov­ing the right­ful ruler of Iran, Esfandiyar’s grand­fa­ther, from the throne. As might be expected of one who seized power in this way, Gosh­tasp tends to be inse­cure about his rule and sees in the moti­va­tions not only of those who are against him, but also of those who help him, as Esfandi­yar does, the same desire for power that led him to seize the throne from his father. When the story of In The Dragon’s Claws opens, Esfandi­yar is in a drunken rage, com­plain­ing to his mother that despite his com­ple­tion of every task that Gosh­tasp has set for him, Gosh­tasp has failed to keep his promise and make Esfandi­yar the king. Esfandi­yar goes one step fur­ther, how­ever, and in his drunk­en­ness threat­ens to unseat Gosh­tasp if Gosh­tasp fails to honor this promise. Word of Esfandiyar’s threat reaches Gosh­tasp and Gosh­tasp imme­di­ately begins to plot Esfandiyar’s demise. (It is impor­tant to under­stand that Esfandi­yar would never actu­ally have car­ried out his threat; he is too loyal, hon­est and obe­di­ent a man for that. He said what he said when he was drunk, and when he real­ized what he’d said he was ashamed of himself.)

Goshtasp’s plan is quite inge­nious. He accuses Ros­tam, who has been a true friend of Iran’s rulers, of “hold[ing] him­self sub­or­di­nate to none” and of being too proud to “stoop to men­tion Shah Gosh­tasp.” He charges Esfandi­yar with going to Rostam’s king­dom, Zabolestan, and shack­ling Ros­tam, and bring­ing the hero back to the Per­sian court on foot, a humil­i­a­tion he knows that Ros­tam is unlikely to allow him­self to suf­fer. What Gosh­tasp hopes — because he has learned that Esfandi­yar is fated to die by Rostam’s hand — is that Ros­tam will fight rather than sub­mit and that this task he has set his son will seal Esfandiyar’s fate.

The shah’s charges against Ros­tam are trumped up and Esfandi­yar knows it, and he knows as well that it is his life his father is really after, not Rostam’s humil­i­a­tion, and he tells his father so:

…“O shah of all the world,” he said,
“Turn back from this. Your pur­pose here is not
Ros­tam or Zal. You seek Esfandi­yar.
You would not yield your place to any man,
And so you’d have me van­ish from the earth.
Let the crown and throne of all the Kays be yours,
And mine a sin­gle cor­ner of the world.
I’ll be your loyal ser­vant there as well
And humbly bow my head to your command.”

Esfandi­yar means it. He is not seek­ing the throne, and he would be will­ing to sit in a cor­ner of the world and bow his head to the shah’s com­mand, but Gosh­tasp believes none of it and he sends his son off the bring Ros­tam back. Esfandi­yar, bound as he is both by a reli­gious duty to obey a divinely appointed shah and by a fil­ial duty not to be a dis­obe­di­ent son, has no choice but to obey. To do oth­er­wise would, in fact, brand him as a trai­tor and a threat to the world order. So, he takes his own sons and some other men with him to Zabolestan to con­front Rostam.

It is pos­si­ble, at this point, to find any num­ber of par­al­lels between the story of Esfandi­yar and Ros­tam and the Bush administration’s war on ter­ror, not so much in the plot points of the nar­ra­tives, but in the val­ues the nar­ra­tives espouse and in the fact that these val­ues are held in the con­text of impe­r­ial ambi­tions, among them:

• Our leader’s author­ity should not be ques­tioned, nei­ther should we ques­tion his rea­son­ing or his motives;
• If you’re not with us, you’re against us.

What put me in mind specif­i­cally of the war in Iraq, though, were the var­i­ous exchanges between Esfandi­yar and Ros­tam lead­ing up to their final bat­tle. Not only do they smack of the shock and awe rhetoric with which the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion tried to intim­i­date the Iraqi forces lead­ing up to the inva­sion of Iraq, with each man retelling his exploits on the bat­tle­field in a way clearly intended to instill fear in the other, but, and more impor­tantly, Rostam’s attempts to talk Esfandi­yar out of what he is try­ing to do and Esfandiyar’s single-minded adher­ence to both to his father and his nation reminded me very strongly of the debate going on between Pres­i­dent Bush and his sup­port­ers and those who have sug­gested it is time for the US to find a way to get our forces out of Iraq. Here is Ros­tam puz­zling out for him­self the pol­i­tics of Shah Goshtasp’s charge to his son:

“Whether I let him bind my legs and arms,”
He thought, “or boldly choose to do him harm,
Both actions lead to evil and dis­grace.
To set such harm­ful prece­dents is wrong.
His shack­les will dis­grace my name, and Shah
Gosh­tasp will do me harm at last. Through­out
The world, who­ever has the power of speech
Will never weary or reproach­ing me.
‘Ros­tam was beaten by a sin­gle youth,
Who entered Kabol, bound his arms and brought
Him to Iran.’ My name will be dis­graced.
No scent or hue or Ros­tam will sur­vive.
And if he’s slain upon the bat­tle­field,
His death will shame in all royal eyes.
‘He slew the youth­ful shah,’ they’ll say, ‘because
His speech to him was impo­lite and harsh.’
For this, when I am dead, I will be cursed
By all, and called an infi­del. If I,
Instead, am killed by him, Zabol itself
Will lose all name and fame. No one will speak
Of it with pride.”

And here is what Ros­tam says to Esfandiyar:

“The years you’ve lived are few. You do not see
The shah’s mali­cious tricks. Your heart is pure,
And you know noth­ing of the world. Mean­while,
The shah in secret plots your death. Gosh­tasp
Will never weary of the crown and throne.
They’re in his stars. That’s why he sends you off
Adven­tur­ing around the world and thrusts
You into each new cri­sis he stirs up. He searched
The earth from end to end, his clever mind
As sharp as any ax or adz, to find
Some hero who had never turned aside
From bloody strife and who was strong enough
To do you harm. All this so this high throne
And crown would stay within his grasp. It wouldBe right for us to curse the throne. Should we,To serve his pur­pose make the earth our bed?”

Ros­tam goes on to beg Esfandi­yar not to do what he has come to do, and Esfandi­yar offers this reply:

“I will not dis­obey the shah’s com­mand,
Not for a crown or throne. I find in him
Whatever’s good or evil in this world.
My hell and heaven are con­tained in him.”

Esfandi­yar will not budge and so the two men have no choice but to fight, but don’t their posi­tions sound very, very famil­iar? Ros­tam argues, not unlike many on the left who think we never should have invaded Iraq, that because the shah’s motives for send­ing Esfandi­yar are sus­pect (read here inac­cu­rate, bad or pur­posely manip­u­lated intel­li­gence; our need to con­trol Mideast oil, etc.), that Esfandi­yar can and should back out of this mis­sion. More to the point, Ros­tam argues that doing so in response to those sus­pect motives is an hon­or­able thing to do. Esfandi­yar, on the other hand, not unlike many on the right, insists that he can do no such thing, that his alle­giance is to a higher call­ing (read here: the spread of democ­racy, national pride, the need to sup­port our troops now that we’re in Iraq, etc.) than whether or not his father’s motives are pure.

The value in see­ing this par­al­lel between clas­si­cal Iran­ian lit­er­a­ture and con­tem­po­rary pol­i­tics, how­ever, is not that the Sha­han­meh pro­vides any jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for one side or the other in today’s ongo­ing debates over Iraq or the war on ter­ror or any other Bush admin­is­tra­tion’ poli­cies. Not only is the world of the Shah­nameh too far removed from our own, but also, as a work of lit­er­a­ture, it is more an explo­ration of issues than it is an argu­ment for one side or the other. Indeed, it is this kind of explo­ration, the will­ing­ness on the part of both par­ties fully to explore the con­se­quences of their posi­tions, that is miss­ing from our cur­rent debate and that works of lit­er­a­ture like the Sha­han­meh can pro­vide.

At the end of In The Dragon’s Claws, Ros­tam kills Esfandi­yar and, as Ros­tam pre­dicted, he is shamed as a result; Esfandi­yar comes out as the “good guy” and the one with the great­est reward because he has left a good name behind him and will carry that good name into the next world. As for Shah Gosh­tasp, who is the only one in the story who has got­ten what he wants, once the cyn­i­cism of his motives is revealed, his peo­ple turn against him. And all of that is in keep­ing with the struc­tural prin­ci­ples that orga­nize the world in the Shah­nameh, and all of that can­not help but feel unjust. Accord­ing to Clin­ton, that injus­tice is pre­cisely what Fer­dowsi, the author of the Shah­nameh wanted his read­ers to ponder:

“I believe that ques­tion­ing God’s wis­dom in choos­ing and sup­port­ing Gosh­tasp as shah is pre­cisely what Fer­dowsi wishes us to do. He is no rev­o­lu­tion­ary. He accepts monar­chy as the sys­tem that God has cho­sen to order human soci­ety. But in this mag­nif­i­cent and painful tale he has cho­sen to reveal to us the dark and shad­owy side of that sys­tem. A bad monarch can be the enemy of all that is most admirable, and peace and secu­rity have been won here at a price that may be too heavy for soci­ety to bear.” (23)

If only those who so single-mindedly sup­port the war on ter­ror and the war in Iraq would, even if only in a sim­i­larly non-revolutionary way, ask the same kinds of ques­tions about how Pres­i­dent Bush and his asso­ciates want to achieve peace and secu­rity. I prob­a­bly would not agree with much of what they would come up with as an answer, but the ques­tion­ing itself would be a wel­come change from the rhetoric that now dom­i­nates our dis­course on the sub­ject.

It’s been months since I’ve writ­ten any­thing here, but I have been buried in trans­lat­ing Saadi’s Bus­tan, a mas­ter­piece of 13^th cen­tury Iran­ian lit­er­a­ture, a project I have finally — finally! — finished, and I am just now begin­ning to pick my head up out of that sand to look around and see what I have missed. Actu­ally, call­ing the Bus­tan sand is unfair, though the image is accu­rate for how lit­tle I have both­ered to keep up with what is going on around me. At the same time, though, it is also true that trans­lat­ing Saadi’s mas­ter­piece brought me pre­cisely back to much of what is hap­pen­ing in the world today. Saadi has an awful lot to say about what it means to run an empire, and since we are, here in the United States, being dragged by our gov­ern­ment into the role of impe­r­ial rulers, whether we like or not (many would say we are there already), I found it hard not to mar­vel at how con­sis­tently Saadi’s advice to the rulers of his time is advice that George Bush and those who work with and for him ought to take. This, how­ever, is not the par­tic­u­lar con­nec­tion I am inter­ested in mak­ing today. It’s too easy.

Instead, I’m think­ing about two things that have been in the news recently. One, the death of Afghani poet Nadia Anju­man, which I am embar­rassed to say I did not pay enough atten­tion to when it first came out; and, two, Dal­ton Conley’s op-ed piece in The New York Times on Thurs­day, Decem­ber 1, called “A Man’s Right To Choose,” which cap­tured my atten­tion not only because it is a badly rea­soned argu­ment for allow­ing a man, under cer­tain cir­cum­stances, to obtain a court order to com­pel a woman with whom he has con­ceived a child to carry that child to term against her will, but also because the issue it addresses is one that I wrote about almost twenty years ago in two essays that were pub­lished in a mag­a­zine called Chang­ing Men. The first arti­cle was called “His Sex­u­al­ity, Her Repro­duc­tive Rights;” the sec­ond, “Fer­til­ity and Viril­ity: A Med­i­ta­tion on Sperm.” (The link will take you to a PDF file that con­tains both essays. Before I con­tinue, one caveat: I will be quot­ing from both of these arti­cles and I am going to resist the temp­ta­tion to revise what I said in 1988 and 1989 to fit my under­stand­ing of these issues today. While I still agree with the main points I was try­ing to make in those essays, there are many things I would now phrase differently.)

What I tried to do in these two pieces was address Conley’s con­cern about how to “legit­i­mate men’s claims to a role in…reproductive decision-making,” but with­out doing what he does, which is to tram­ple on women’s repro­duc­tive rights in the process. The first essay was my attempt to work through my own sense that the “injus­tice of men con­trol­ling the biol­ogy of repro­duc­tion will find no rem­edy in the injus­tice of women’s con­trol over our emo­tional invest­ment in hav­ing chil­dren.” This is pre­cisely the injus­tice that Con­ley asserts moti­vated him to take the posi­tion that he does:

“About a decade ago, my girl­friend became preg­nant. It wasn’t planned, but it wasn’t exactly unplanned either, in that we obvi­ously knew how biol­ogy worked. I des­per­ately wanted to keep the baby, but she wasn’t ready, and there were some minor med­ical con­cerns about the fetus, so she decided to ter­mi­nate the preg­nancy against my wishes. What right did I have to stop her? As it turned out, none. It was, indeed, a woman’s right to choose.”

It must have been very painful for Con­ley to have to give up the father­hood he was imag­in­ing him­self into when his girl­friend had that abor­tion, but to argue that the log­i­cal mea­sure to take against such pain is for “a father [who] is will­ing to legally com­mit to rais­ing a child with no help from the mother…[to] be able to obtain an injunc­tion against the abor­tion of the fetus he helped cre­ate” is to argue, ulti­mately, that het­ero­sex­ual men do not have to bear any real respon­si­bil­ity for our own sex­u­al­ity. I know that what I just wrote sounds coun­ter­in­tu­itive. Con­ley, after all, is talk­ing about a man who is will­ing to take full respon­si­bil­ity for a child he helped to con­ceive, but think about it like this: One way of defin­ing the notion of tak­ing respon­si­bil­ity for your­self is the abil­ity to draw and live within one’s own bound­aries, while at the same time rec­og­niz­ing and respect­ing the bound­aries of oth­ers, and since there is no way that what Con­ley pro­poses can be con­strued as any­thing but both dis­re­spect for a woman’s bound­aries and a man’s fail­ure to live within his own, there is no way that what Con­ley is talk­ing about is het­ero­sex­ual male respon­si­bil­ity. This is how I put it in “His Sex­u­al­ity, Her Repro­duc­tive Rights:”

“Male het­ero­sex­ual respon­si­bil­ity should begin with the real­iza­tion that once we fer­til­ize the egg…what hap­pens there­after is beyond our con­trol. We need to start with what we can con­trol: the extent and nature of our het­ero­sex­ual relationships.”

I won­der, for exam­ple, whether Con­ley and his girl­friend had a seri­ous, explicit, nuts-and-bolts con­ver­sa­tion before they started hav­ing sex about how each of them felt about the pos­si­bil­ity of her get­ting preg­nant and the choice she would have to make if she did. His con­tention that while the preg­nancy “wasn’t planned…it wasn’t exactly unplanned either, in that we obvi­ously knew how biol­ogy worked” is a pretty strong indi­ca­tion that they did not have such a con­ver­sa­tion, since know­ing that a given con­se­quence is pos­si­ble is in no way the same thing as plan­ning for that con­se­quence; it’s not even close to the same thing. Indeed, if Con­ley really wants to talk about what it means for a man to take respon­si­bil­ity for his own sex­ual behav­ior, he ought to begin by acknowl­edg­ing that the prob­lem he describes might have been avoided if he and his girl­friend had had the kind of con­ver­sa­tion I am talk­ing about and made their sex­ual deci­sions accord­ingly, avoid­ing inter­course, for exam­ple, if their ideas about preg­nancy and abor­tion were sig­nif­i­cantly dif­fer­ent enough. More to the point, if this con­ver­sa­tion did not take place, he needs to hold him­self account­able for that fact.

In “Fer­til­ity and Viril­ity,” the sec­ond essay I pub­lished in Chang­ing Men, I tried to work through not only what that kind of account­abil­ity might mean, but also what kinds of repro­duc­tive rights men could rea­son­ably claim if we took that account­abil­ity and the respon­si­bil­ity I talked about above seri­ously. The prob­lem, as I phrased it at the time, and Dalton’s op-ed makes abun­dantly clear that the same prob­lem exists now, was this: “While the exis­tence of male repro­duc­tive rights may seem self-evident, most dis­cus­sion I have heard or read on this topic begins pre­cisely where it should end: after the egg has been fertilized.”

Men do not like to accept the real­ity that nei­ther the divi­sion of labor nor own­er­ship of the means of pro­duc­tion in the bio­log­i­cal processes of human repro­duc­tion is fair — women do more of the work and the bod­ies in which that work is done are theirs — and noth­ing is going to change that. A large part of what dri­ves Dal­ton Con­ley and men who feel as he does is the anx­i­ety this imbal­ance pro­duces. They fear women’s full and absolute con­trol of women’s own repro­duc­tive lives, because that means that men, or at least it feels like it means that men are left with no con­trol over when and whether we have children.

On one level, of course, if women have full repro­duc­tive choice, we don’t and can­not have that kind of con­trol. Whether or not we have chil­dren depends on whether or not the women with whom we con­ceive choose to give birth, and this, for me, is where the dis­tinc­tion between fer­til­ity and viril­ity comes in:

“Fer­til­ity lies as much in the poten­tial as in the fact of repro­duc­tion. Viril­ity lies only in hav­ing repro­duced. Men, by priv­i­leg­ing viril­ity, by invest­ing our sense of sex­ual [and repro­duc­tive] valid­ity in the effect our bod­ies can have on the bod­ies of women, have cre­ated a sit­u­a­tion in which our feel­ings of sex­ual [and repro­duc­tive] self-worth depend upon the pres­ence of women. Only when they give birth…can we see our­selves as fully sex­ual, fully human beings.”

Con­ley dis­tin­guishes between fer­til­ity and viril­ity as well, though he does so only by impli­ca­tion. More­over, a care­ful read­ing of his essay reveals that it is viril­ity and not fer­til­ity he is try­ing to pro­tect: “And my desire for father­hood was even­tu­ally ful­filled by two won­der­ful chil­dren. But every so often I think back to the fate­ful deci­sion and frus­tra­tion boils up.” Con­ley does not mourn this child-that-might-have-been; nor does he express regret that it was not brought into the world. Rather, he expresses his frus­tra­tion that he could not com­pel his girl­friend to give him the child. What he ulti­mately wanted, in other words, was con­trol, and the con­trol he wanted, and wants, is no dif­fer­ent from the con­trol that men have exer­cised over women’s repro­duc­tive lives for cen­turies, a con­trol that is at the heart of patri­archy and that is cen­tral to tra­di­tional notions of virility.

Please note: I am not sug­gest­ing that Con­ley should not have been frus­trated, nor that he should not con­tinue to feel this frus­tra­tion even now, all these years later. I can­not imag­ine, except to mouth the plat­i­tude that it must be very painful, what it would be like to want a child, to know that I have already helped to con­ceive the begin­nings of that child-to-be’s life and then, with no appeal pos­si­ble, to have to accept the fact that, against my wishes, the woman who was car­ry­ing the begin­nings of that child-to-be’s life chose to end it. Nonethe­less, to argue from that pain to a social pol­icy giv­ing men the right to take pos­ses­sion of women’s bod­ies in the ways that Con­ley sug­gests is to argue not for a valu­ing of men’s fer­til­ity, or even of men’s desire for father­hood — which is what Con­ley insists his argu­ment is about — but, rather, it is to argue that any given man’s desire to be a father, assum­ing he is will­ing to put his money where his mouth is, is tan­ta­mount to a legally enforce­able edict that he should be made a father. Power, in other words, is what’s at stake here, not fair­ness, and power is the province of viril­ity, not fertility.

So what would it mean to think through the sce­nario Con­ley presents us with in terms of male fer­til­ity? In “Fer­til­ity and Viril­ity,” I tried to sug­gest some places where we might begin to answer that ques­tion, start­ing with a seri­ous exam­i­na­tion of the social mean­ing of sperm. When I was grow­ing up, sperm was either some­thing you used to get a girl or woman preg­nant or some­thing that you needed to neu­tral­ize in order to avoid get­ting a girl or woman preg­nant; the fer­til­ity inher­ing in sperm was not some­thing of value in and of itself. I also wrote that plac­ing male fer­til­ity at the cen­ter of a dis­cus­sion of men’s repro­duc­tive rights means acknowl­edg­ing that the male body, just like the female, has a repro­duc­tive cycle and that we go through this cycle every time we ejac­u­late, whether we do so inside a woman’s body or not; and if we want to honor what that cycle means in a way that does not impose itself and take pos­ses­sion of women’s bod­ies, we need to think about how men can take con­trol of the fact that, bio­log­i­cally speak­ing, there is no dif­fer­ence for us between erotic and repro­duc­tive sex.

One way to take this con­trol would be to demand a form of male birth con­trol that is at least as effec­tive as the pill. (The ques­tion of whether or not women would trust us to take it is, for the moment, a sep­a­rate ques­tion; that is a trust that men would have to earn. All I am talk­ing about right now is how men might start to think about the issue of repro­duc­tive rights in terms of male fer­til­ity, not viril­ity.) Another way of assert­ing this con­trol would be, as I sug­gested above, for het­ero­sex­ual men to make the ques­tion of whether our part­ners agree with us about what should hap­pen if they become preg­nant cen­tral to whether or not we have inter­course with them. We, in other words, would have to take the respon­si­bil­ity of say­ing no to inter­course if we were not will­ing to risk what a dis­agree­ment would mean. If you really want to talk about fair­ness when it comes to repro­duc­tive rights, women always have to these kinds of judg­ments about the pos­si­ble con­se­quences of inter­course when they are decided whether or not to have sex with a man.

What kinds of poli­cies might flow from this very dif­fer­ent way of look­ing at inter­course for men is some­thing I will not pre­sume to pre­dict, but I would be will­ing to bet that if Dal­ton Con­ley had learned when he was younger to think about repro­duc­tive rights in terms of his fer­til­ity, what he remem­bered most about his child-that-might-have-been would be how he’d mourned fit and not how much he resented the fact that he couldn’t con­trol the woman who chose not to carry that preg­nancy to term.

This issue of con­trol­ling women is what brings me to Nadia Anju­man, the 25-year-old Afghani poet who died after a fight with her hus­band, Farid. They had been mar­ried for 15 months. He admits to slap­ping her dur­ing the fight but vehe­mently denies killing her. Instead, he insists, she com­mit­ted sui­cide, hav­ing swal­lowed poi­son after he hit her. Farid’s mother has also been arrested in rela­tion to the killing. This arti­cle from the Afghan Recover Report gives the fullest account of the story, along with the many ques­tions it raises. Appar­ently, Farid’s mother wanted him to marry some­one else and when he chose to marry Nadia instead, and she moved into his house — which is the cus­tom in Afghanistan — the ten­sion between the two women was intense. Nadia’s mother blames Farid’s mother for the death; the doc­tor who exam­ined Nadia’s body, Dr. Barakat­ul­lah Moham­madi, con­firms that there was “bruis­ing around her right eye, but no other signs of an injury that could have caused her death,” which lends sup­port to Farid’s insis­tence that his blows did not kill her; but Nadia’s fam­ily refuses to autho­rize an autopsy, which means that, in the absence of some­one mak­ing a full con­fes­sion, the cause her death will never be known for sure. Two other arti­cles that gives detailed cov­er­age to this story can be found here, in The Aus­tralian and here, in The Times..

Nadia Anju­man pub­lished one book of poems, Flow­ers of Smoke, to wide lit­er­ary acclaim, and she was at work on a sec­ond vol­ume of poetry when she died. (The name of her first book, Gule Dudi, has most com­monly been trans­lated into Eng­lish in the press as Dark Flower, but “dud” — pronounced dood — actu­ally means smoke in Per­sian.) Accord­ing to both The Aus­tralian and The Times, though this is not men­tioned in the Afghan Recov­ery Report, there is some spec­u­la­tion that her family’s shame over Nadia’s writ­ing, which dealt with love and beauty, might have had some­thing to do with why she was allegedly killed. If that is the case, then Nadia’s death would be the result of a kind of honor killing, a term which com­monly refers to the mur­der of a woman by her male rel­a­tives because she has sex­u­ally dis­hon­ored her family.

There it is. Male con­trol of the female body. The female body as the repos­i­tory of male, and there­fore fam­ily, honor. The respon­si­bil­ity of uphold­ing that honor in male terms weigh­ing entirely on the shoul­ders of the woman. The result­ing and often hor­ri­fy­ingly cir­cum­scribed nature of that woman’s life. The deaths, psy­chic and lit­eral, of women who can­not sur­vive such circumscription.

Dal­ton Con­ley would, no doubt, be hor­ri­fied at the sug­ges­tion that his pro­posal has any­thing at all in com­mon with the prac­tice of honor killing. He, after all, is talk­ing about life, the life of a child, nor does he pro­pose that the woman who is forced to carry a preg­nancy to term under his pro­posal, a kind of slav­ery though it may be (my words, not his), should be any­thing other than free to live her own life when that term is over; but, again, if you read care­fully, I think you will find that the same code of honor that men use to jus­tify honor killings is at work in his pro­posal. After stat­ing the pro-choice posi­tion that the debate about repro­duc­tive rights “is really about a woman’s con­trol over her body,” Con­ley goes on to write, “Hence my lack of rights to have any say in whether my seed comes to fruition.”

Think about that lan­guage: my seed. Not “the child we con­ceived.” Not even “our seeds” or “our com­bined seed.” Or any­thing else that would rec­og­nize and legit­imize her. But my seed. As if her body were noth­ing more than the soil in which he’d planted it. More to the point, though, the court order he would like men to be able to get is a way to pre­vent her from killing his seed, from dis­hon­or­ing him, in other words, in very explic­itly sex­ual terms. Still, Con­ley is not advo­cat­ing that such a woman be put to death, but what would hap­pen if she were to die as a result of com­pli­ca­tions from the preg­nancy she was forced to con­tinue? While he obvi­ously would not be guilty of mur­der in the legal sense, wouldn’t it be the case that she died as a result of actions he took in order to pre­serve his honor? Would that not be a form of honor killing? Would he be at all liable for her death?

I assume that Con­ley wrote his op-ed in good faith, by which I mean sim­ply that he was try­ing to work his way as hon­estly as he knew how through an extremely dif­fi­cult issue, but his piece is fright­en­ing to me nonethe­less because it attempts to pro­mul­gate pre­cisely the kinds of val­ues that may have led to Nadia Anjuman’s death. The Bush admin­is­tra­tion has made it clear in any num­ber of ways that they are eager to return the United States to those val­ues, to a time when men were men and women knew their place. It is part and par­cel of the empire build­ing to which Bush and com­pany have com­mit­ted them­selves with so much fer­vor. We need, and by “we” I mean par­tic­u­larly pro-choice men, to cri­tique Conley’s edi­to­r­ial and oth­ers like it as loudly as we can. We need to take respon­si­bil­ity for this because he is pre­sum­ing to speak for us, and I will end this now, very neatly, by offer­ing you a quote from Saadi’s Bus­tan which I hope I have lived up to, and sewing up the last loose end in this entry:

Beware the igno­ra­mus
who pre­sumes to speak for ten oth­ers! Speak
for your­self instead, once, after much thought,
the way a wise man does. If you let a hun­dred
arrows fly at once, each one of them
might go wide. Take a sin­gle shot instead.
Just make sure you shoot it true!

I don’t remem­ber when I first had the idea to me to write an essay that would con­nect all the dif­fer­ent arti­cles I read in the daily news­pa­per along what­ever asso­cia­tive lines came to me as I wrote, but it’s been knock­ing around in my head for a very long time. I’ve just never had the time or the dis­ci­pline, frankly, to do it; there was always some­thing else to do that had to be done and there was, always, the next day’s paper. The prob­lem was I never had the dis­ci­pline to read the paper con­sis­tently enough to make writ­ing the essay pos­si­ble. Then, after a dis­cus­sion with my friend Duane about his new book of poems, Cadil­lac Bat­tle­ship, about which more later, I watched as the thread of that dis­cus­sion wove its way through a whole bunch of things I was read­ing – poetry, fic­tion, crit­i­cism, the news­pa­per – and it sud­denly occurred to me that, rather than write an essay, the thing to do was to keep a read­ing jour­nal the point of which was to con­nect every­thing I read, or at least as much of what I read as I could, and this blog seemed to me the per­fect place to do that; and since it was my talk with Duane that gave me the idea, I want to start with his book, specif­i­cally one poem, “Out For A Date With My Fan­tasy.” (I also should add that I will say noth­ing in this entry that I have not said to Duane, either in per­son or through email.)

Her mouth’s exposed by shy­ness
& I want to stick my cock in it,

strip off her punk jeans, t-shirt, fuck
her in her hospitality.

Her face is just trashed enough:
my lit­tle gap-toothed slut.

Now, before I get into what both­ers me about this poem, I should say that, while the book is in part an explo­ration of sex­ual vio­lence, these lines do not char­ac­ter­ize the whole book. Nonethe­less, though, they do embody for me one of the ways in which the book is unsuc­cess­ful, which is that the vio­lence in them, and the misog­yny, seems to me entirely gra­tu­itous; there is noth­ing that takes me out of the fan­tasy, gives me a van­tage point from which to con­sider the speaker’s posi­tion vis-a-vis the fan­tasy, noth­ing that lets me know the speaker is at all aware that his fan­tasy is vio­lent and misog­y­nist. No, let me be more spe­cific than this: The woman is a slut to him and the way he fan­ta­sizes using her sex­u­ally is degrad­ing, and he knows it, and he wants to degrade her. The prob­lem for me is that noth­ing in the poem sug­gests that he thinks – either he the speaker, or the writer who has cre­ated this speaker – there is any­thing wrong with this desire; and so the poem descends for me into a very mun­dane and cliché kind of pornog­ra­phy. The fan­tasy is famil­iar; the feel­ings behind the fan­tasy are famil­iar; and so the poem gives me noth­ing; I nei­ther learn nor feel any­thing new, and I think this is true whether you read the poem as a fan­tasy, i.e., the speaker is imag­in­ing him­self out for a drink with this woman, or you read the poem as record­ing what he thinks when he is actu­ally out for a drink with her.

Before I go fur­ther, let me say this: It is dif­fi­cult to have been raised a man in this cul­ture and not have had, at some point in your life, some ver­sion of the fan­tasy Duane’s poem describes; and I imag­ine it is nearly impos­si­ble to have been raised here as a woman and not have felt one­self at some point to be such a fantasy’s object. And I will say this as well: It takes no small courage to tackle in one’s work, auto­bi­o­graph­i­cally, this aspect of being a man, and so I want to acknowl­edge this courage in Duane’s desire to deal with these issues in his work, and to acknowl­edge as well that one of the rea­sons what I see as the fail­ure of this poem trou­bles me so deeply is that I write about sim­i­lar issues. My new book of poems is called The Silence Of Men because it is about, for me, com­ing to terms with the silences in men’s lives about sex and vio­lence. (Here’s the plug: the book is forth­com­ing from CavanKerry Press; you can read sam­ples on my web­site: www​.richard​jnew​man​.com.) And so I guess I want to be up front about the fact that what I am writ­ing here is per­sonal because the ques­tions raised for me by the vio­lence in Duane’s poems are pri­mar­ily eth­i­cal ones hav­ing to deal with the writer’s respon­si­bil­ity not only to his or her read­ers, but also to the char­ac­ters with which he or she pop­u­lates the poems.

Think­ing about these ques­tions and about Duane’s poem leads me to another poem I just read – or rather part of a book length poem called 60¢ Cof­fee And A Quar­ter To Dance, by Judy Jor­dan. I haven’t read the entire book yet, but as I was pag­ing through it, decid­ing if I would put it at the top of my pile of books to read and pre-empt some­thing I already owned, I came across these lines:

12. Philly said to me, I could kill you. I could kill me any­body. I done took care of plenty before you. Philly pointed at his Dober­man & said, That’s my dog. He’s trained. Like you gonna be. Then he said to that dog, Lick her. Then he said, fuck her.

It’s just what hap­pened. It ain’t noth­ing else.

13. No. Now you lis­ten here. It was in the front room of the Pheas­ant. Every­body saw it. Any­body could have walked in & that wouldn’t have made a gnat’s ass of difference.

14. You got it girl. Training.

The book is about a time in her life when she was home­less, and from what the back cover copy says, I assume that the poem is at least as much about the expe­ri­ences of the peo­ple she met at that time as it is about her own expe­ri­ence, and, indeed, as I page a lit­tle more through the book, there do seem to be a fair amount of sec­tions writ­ten in some­one else’s voice. So this is a big dif­fer­ence between her book and Duane’s, and between her agenda and Duanes, but what strikes me nonethe­less, since the sce­nario in the lines I just quoted and the sce­nario in Duane’s poem that I quoted above are each, in their own way, clas­si­cally porno­graphic sce­nar­ios, is that Judy Jor­dan has crafted her poem to include the audi­ence – both the audi­ence lis­ten­ing to the speaker and the reader/audience – in a way that Duane’s does not. It’s not just that the speaker in Jordan’s poem addresses an audi­ence; it’s the space her poem gives the audi­ence to con­sider all aspects of what they have just heard/read. And that space opens up in the sim­ple word “No” at the begin­ning of #13. By mak­ing the pros­ti­tute have to argue for, to demon­strate the truth and valid­ity of her expe­ri­ence, puts the expe­ri­ence in a con­text that is much greater and more com­plex than the obvi­ous one about the exploita­tion of women. That word “no” is our entrance into the prostitute’s feel­ing about her own expe­ri­ence and there­fore about her­self. Duane’s poem does not let the audi­ence into his speaker’s feel­ings about his fan­tasy at all.

And this makes me think, I am not sure why, about the fol­low­ing pas­sage that I read on the front page of The New York Times on June 28, in an arti­cle by Jodi Wilgo­ren, “Kansas Sus­pect Please Guilty In 10 Mur­ders.” The arti­cle is about the BTK killer who was finally caught after 30 years of and it recounts some of the things he said in talk­ing about how and why he killed the peo­ple he did:

He [Den­nis Rader] told of pla­cat­ing one woman’s cry­ing chil­dren with blan­kets and toys in the bath­tub while he cinched a rope around her neck. He said he used a pil­low and parka to make a man with a bro­ken rib more com­fort­able before plac­ing a plas­tic bag over his head. He recalled mas­tur­bat­ing after hang­ing Josephine Otero, 11, in the base­ment of her home.

A news­pa­per is not sup­posed to give you the kind of insight into an expe­ri­ence that a poem does, and yet what I found as I read this, what I find read­ing it now after typ­ing it out, is that there is a part of me that wants, almost needs, to human­ize this guy Rader, not to excuse what he did or to sug­gest that there is any­thing less hor­ri­ble about him because, maybe, there is a com­pre­hen­si­ble and there­fore human logic to how he came to be the mur­derer he became, but because to leave him out­side the pale of human­ity is, in some sense, that there is a part of me that is out­side the pale of human­ity as well – the part of me that can’t help but be fas­ci­nated in the most pruri­ent, self-centered, guilt-ridden way with what he did. We are, all of us, capa­ble of com­mit­ting the crimes he com­mit­ted; we are all of us capa­ble of the irony con­tained in the first two descrip­tions in the para­graph above, calm­ing a woman’s chil­dren while mur­der­ing her, con­cern for the phys­i­cal com­fort of a man whom we are going to kill, and that irony, of course, would not have been lost on the man’s vic­tims, and this brings me to another pas­sage that I only remem­ber hav­ing read. I think it was in an excerpt from someone’s mem­oir (or maybe it was a novel) in Poets & Writ­ers. In the pas­sage I am talk­ing about, the author or nar­ra­tor talks about a man he knew in prison who was jailed for mur­der­ing both his wife/lover and the man he caugh­ter her in bed with. Her, he threw out the win­dow of their sev­enth floor apart­ment; he, the killer took to a field and shot in the knees and elbows – or maybe just the knees, or maybe it was the hands, I don’t remem­ber exactly – and then let the guy lay there in the field for some time suf­fer­ing a pain that the killer likened to the pain he felt at hav­ing been betrayed by the woman he loved, and then the killer shot the man through the heart.

Read­ing that pas­sage which, if I can find it, I will enter here, I found myself fas­ci­nated, and haunted, because there are echos of what that killer did in a poem I wrote called Op Ed that is a com­plete fic­tion­al­iza­tion. The poem – and it feels a lit­tle strange to be talk­ing here about my own work – is writ­ten as an op ed piece by a man whose wife and son were mur­dered by a man who now faces the death penalty. The lines I am think­ing about are:

and it would be so easy
to stand before the judge,
as some have urged me to do,
and let my wife speak through me.
The jury should know, one friend wrote,
what she would’ve wanted,
but even a mur­derer,
even this mur­derer,
who waited two hours
to end my family’s mis­ery
with bul­lets I’ve dreamed myself
in front of every night
since the bod­ies were found,
even he has the right not to die
just because some­one else
has decided he must.

I am tempted to end this entry here, because what comes next in the mate­r­ial I have gath­ered to include here feels in some mea­sure like a deep, deep, deep triv­i­al­iza­tion of what I have just been talk­ing about because it moves the dis­cus­sion into areas of craft, but I promised myself I was going to write here about the con­nec­tions I make as I read and I don’t want to deny or hide any of them, so here goes. This is from a review in Par­nas­sus: Poetry In Review, Vol­ume 28, Nos. 1 & 2 called, “‘And the Half-True Rhyme Is Love’: Mod­ern Verse Drama and the Clas­sics.” The review was writ­ten by Karl Ker­ch­way and it con­tains this passage:

In his [Carl Phillips’] pref­ace [to his trans­la­tion of Philoctetes], he describes “the fre­quent and rad­i­cal shifts in line length through­out” as “a means of con­vey­ing the con­stant shifts in moral­ity…” He intends is lin­eation to have an emo­tional dimen­sion too. “Too read Greek,” he writes, “is to know son­i­cally the dif­fer­ence between sud­den grief and frenzy, between bliss hoped for and bliss received. My hope is that these shifts might be rec­og­niz­able, here in the shift­ing of line length and in the ways in which the pos­si­bil­i­ties of line length and line break get deployed on the page.”.…As for his syn­tac­ti­cal manip­u­la­tions, Phillips speaks of their capac­ity “to reflect and enact psy­chol­ogy and emo­tion, and to make the reader (and lis­tener) an active par­tic­i­pant in such psy­chol­ogy or emotion.”

This pas­sage inter­ests me for two rea­sons: One it has obvi­ous impli­ca­tions for what I was talk­ing about above. It is, in fact, through a kind of syn­tac­ti­cal manip­u­la­tion – though it is not quite the same kind of manip­u­la­tion that Phillips is talk­ing about – that Judy Jor­dan gets her poem to work, and I would argue that a lack of syn­tac­tic manip­u­la­tion that, for me any­way, leads to the fail­ure of the poem by Duane Espos­ito that started all this ram­bling on my part. What do I mean by a lack of syn­tac­tic manip­u­la­tion? Par­tially, it is this: I don’t believe that the expe­ri­ence of hav­ing the fan­tasy his poem describes can be as sim­ple and sim­plis­tic and reduc­tive as the poems presents it and I find that “sim­plis­tic­ness,” that reduc­tive­ness in the sim­ple and straight­for­ward syn­tax of the poem. It is, sim­ply, a state­ment, an asser­tion, and yet it is also, by def­i­n­i­tion, so much more than. By treat­ing it, more or less, smply as a state­ment, I think, does nei­ther the speaker nor the object of the fan­tasy in the poem nor the writer nor the audi­ence justice.

What I was going to move on to was what the quote from Par­nas­sus made me think about my own work as a trans­la­tor (here’s another plug: my trans­la­tions of Saadi’s Gulis­tan, Selec­tions from Saadi’s Gulis­tan, is avail­able from Global Schol­arly Pub­li­ca­tions; you can read some sam­ples and see more of my work on my web­site, www​.richard​jnew​man​.com), but and I am look­ing at the time and think­ing I need to stop soon, and so I think I will end here and pick up a dif­fer­ent thread of con­nec­tions next week.

Cheers!