(Joe Wilkins, Matthew Zapruder, Robert Wrigley, Rachel Zucker, C.K. Williams) The politics of our age are rabid, dazzling, blinkered, ridiculous—yet they matter, deeply, in all our daily lives. We click the television over to the latest protests in Wisconsin, we open a newspaper and try to make sense of this latest war, and we feel called speak. How do we do so honestly and with conviction, nuance, complexity? Five poets take on these questions and more as they read from and discuss their own work and that of other poets who’ve successfully written political poems.

Published Date: May 15, 2013

Transcription

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the AWP Podcast Series. This event originally occurred at the AWP Conference in Chicago on March 3rd, 2012. The recording features CK Williams, Robert Wrigley, Matthews Zapruder, and Rachel Zucker. You will now hear Joe Wilkins from the University of Idaho provide introductions.

Joe Wilkins:

Welcome everyone to the need to speak, writing the political poem. This panel grew out of my own desire as a poet to try to speak about the rabid dazzling blinkered politics of our age. A politics that despite its ridiculousness matters and matters deeply in all our daily lives. It grew as well out of the notion that desire is perhaps too soft a word that when it comes to certain issues or political moments, we feel a need to speak. But how? How do we guard against received voices and notions? How do we speak with conviction while still honoring nuance and complexity? The very things our politics too often ignores or destroys. To help think through these questions, to share some poems and offer some ideas. I contacted four poets whose bodies of work I deeply admire, four poets whose poems speak in necessary ways.

When I contacted these folks sitting up here, I knew I was putting together a wise, exciting, challenging group of poets. What I didn't quite realize though was that I was also putting together a panel of poets whose end of the alphabet last names Williams, Wrigley, Zapruder, and Zucker all came after my own end of the alphabet, last name Wilkins. Which means I will introduce the panel and then very nervously present first. My name is Joe Wilkins and I'm the author of a memoir, the Mountain and the Fathers, and two collections of poems, the forthcoming notes from the Journey Westward and Killing the Marion Dogs, which is now out from Black Lawrence Press. My work has appeared in the Georgia Review, Harvard Review, the Son, Orion and Slate. I live with my wife, son, and daughter in North Iowa where I teach writing at Waldorf College.

CK Williams's collected poems appeared in 2006. He has published nine other books of poetry, the most recent of which, The Singing, won the National Book Award. His previous book, Repair, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and his collection of Flesh and Blood received the National Book Critics Circle Award. He's a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He teaches at Princeton University and lives part of each year in Paris.

Robert Wrigley's books of poetry include In The Bank of Beautiful Sins, winner of the San Francisco Poetry Center book Award. Reign of Snakes, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award, Lives of the Animals, winner of the Poets Prize, Earthly Meditations, New and Selected Poems, and most recently, Beautiful Country, A six time Pritzker Prize winner. He lives with his wife, the writer Kim Barnes near Moscow, Idaho, where he teaches in the MFA program at the University of Idaho.

Matthew Zapruder's most recent collection, Come on, All You Ghosts, was selected as one of the top five poetry books of 2010 by Publishers Weekly. As well, it was also named the book list Editor's Choice for Poetry in that year. His previous collection, The Pajamas won the William Carlos Williams Award and was named one of the top 10 Poetry volumes of the year by Library Journal. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in San Francisco where he is an editor at Wave Books and on the faculty at the low residency MFA and Creative Writing at UCR Palm Desert.

Rachel Zucker is the author of seven collections of poetry. Most recently, Home/birth: A Poemic, co-written with Arielle Greenberg and Museum of Accidents, which was named one of the best books of poetry in 2009 by Publishers Weekly and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Zucker has co-edited two anthologies, women poets on mentorship efforts and affections and starting today 100 poems for Obama's first 100 days. She teaches at NYU and at the 92nd Street Y. We'll all present for about 10 minutes and then we'll make sure to save some time at the end for questions.

And I had like to start us off by talking about seeing. Where we're from, how we grew up, what we believe, how others have looked at us, all of these things and more change the way we see the world. Yet our political leaders would too often have us believe that seeing is easy, that a quick look is all it takes, that those who see things differently or come to different conclusions are not fellow human beings struggling to make sense of things, but ignorant or unpatriotic or even evil.

More terrifying are those who argue that seeing itself is inessential. That the world before us is unworthy of our attentions, that their particular vision of what might be is without doubt, right. I don't believe seeing is easy, and I believe it's necessary. For two years I taught junior high math at Sunflower County, Mississippi. Before I left for the Mississippi Delta, I had a lot of ideas, a lot of visions for what my time there might look like. I was from top to bottom, wrong. I knew Indianola. The little bayou town I taught in was the birthplace of B.B. King and the White Citizens Council. I knew that Fannie Lou Hamer had been arrested there for trying to register to vote. And I knew that nearly 50 years after Brown beat Brown v Board of Education, the schools in Indianola were still very much segregated. Whites in the private academy on the outskirts of town, blacks in the old public school near the tracks.

What I didn't understand however, was that knowing wasn't near enough that there was nothing like seeing like walking across the tracks looking one way and then looking the other, that there was nothing like watching my 150 students spill out of the school doors at the end of the day. In my first year of teaching, as we held meeting after meeting about the ramifications of the brand new known child left behind law, Laura Bush came to the Mississippi Delta. I remember being excited for her visit. I remember thinking that someone would see what was happening here. This I remember thinking will matter. But it didn't.

Mrs. Bush was only there a few hours. She gave a speech to us about her husband's vision for education. Then she left. Years later, in graduate school, I thought about Laura Bush's visit often. I was feeling intensely the need to write about my time in Mississippi, but I didn't want to speak to or speak about. I did not want to give a speech. I wanted rather to speak Sunflower, to speak Mississippi, to speak what I had seen. And so as I often do when I'm stuck, I started pulling books off my shelf and I rediscovered the Native American poet James Welch. His lyrics became my models, especially his poem. Christmas Comes to Moccasin Flat, which I'd like to read for you now.

"Christmas comes to Moccasin Flat. Christmas comes like this, wise men, unhurried candles bought on credit, poor price for calves warriors face down and wine sleep winds cheap to pull heat from smoke. Friends sit in chinked cabins, stare out plastic windows and wait for commodities. Charlie Blackbird 20 miles from church and bar stabs his fire with flint. When drunks drain radiators for love or need, chiefs eat snow and talk of change and urge to laugh, pounding their ribs, elk play games in high country. Medicine woman, clay pipe and twists tobacco calls each blizzard by name and predicts five o'clock by spitting at her television children lean into her breath to beg a story, something about honor and passion, warriors back with meat and song, A peculiar evening star, quick vision of birth. Blackbird feeds his fire. Outside, a quick 30 below."

Now Welch is doing all sorts of things here that I think allow him to speak what he saw living on the Blackfeet reservation of Northwest Montana. First, he places us. He situates us in time and landscape and so affords us some ground to stand on to carefully look out from and so see into the world.

Second, once he has placed us, he pans the camera across Moccasin flat. He slips from scene to scene and this movement allows and honors the complexity of the place as well as the attendant political realities. Finally, he refuses resolution. He refuses to allow the reader to put a cap on the poem to end it. Medicine woman might tell her story, she might not. There might well not be a quick vision of birth this Christmas.

So as I wrote and rewrote, I stole every single one of these moves Welch makes, and I kept another thing in mind as well. Welch wrote about Moccasin flat as someone native to that place, which I think allows him to leave himself outside of the poem to be the all-knowing narrator. I wanted to make sure in writing about the delta that I placed myself, that the reader knew who and where I was to both identify myself as an outsider and to clearly speak about the political role teachers were and are asked to play in areas of socioeconomic poverty, especially under No Child Left Behind.

And so I'll end with a poem of my own that is in response and inspired by Welch. This is called the School Teacher Blues Again, Sunflower, Mississippi 2002.

"The slump backed fish cutters slicing their blood hand, then their knife hand out back of the plant in a ditch that drains to an acre trough lip full of a day's guts. Mr. Carver, one time freedom writer and first black lawyer in town shutting down his office on the second floor of the Planter's Bank building at the corner of Lee and Evers, the way the long fields back of Sunflower pulse like veins as the sun goes down, my neighbor telling me she wants her kids to be with their own race, it's better that way. Her small daughter, all blonde hair and smiles, peeking at me from behind the bars of her mother's legs. The new place across town where tourists clap like idiots from mumbling drunk Cadillac Jackson who swallowed half his teeth one morning when he woke to a tire iron across his face, a white rain of dogwood blossoms on the trim lawns of the big houses by the river.

The men on buckets and Cyprus stumps staring through the smoke of their cigarettes and a blood sun as Mr. Carver makes his way across the cotton run tracks, down Church Street, past Old Freedom Hall and Junior's Joint dogs on piles of tumbled bricks. The music teacher down the hall whooping hell out of Orlando because too many of the words he knows are some derivative of motherfucker, the private academy across town spit shine to a gleam. The man who owns Sunflower Food Store helping my wife to her car, telling her, yeah, maybe it'd be nice if they could all go to school together. Then just stopping grocery bags in his hands. The girl in my fourth period class whose mother left for Memphis three weeks ago and hasn't come back. The house fires that flap and rage like bright hearts in the night. Mrs. Butler, who's pulled 30 odd years of mop water across these floors shuffling into my room asking, what did you teach those children today, Mr. Wilkins?" Thank you.

CK Williams:

I'm CK Williams. My most recent book isn't The Singing, its Wait. That's all right. I'm going to do a two-part presentation. The first part addressing the subject, the need to speak in the second part, a little history. There are times I've asked myself in all seriousness how it comes to be that a certain proportion of my poems were dealing with public matters, mostly dark matters or injustice, poverty, suffering and misery of all sorts. And lately most insistently environmental emulation. There's no question that our splendidly multi-language planet, there have been a greater number of poems written that have to do with more overtly personal events and emotions, light or dark, happier, sad, tragic or ecstatic, but mostly private. The evocation and enactment of a self in the world. A particular self chanting or singing or whispering or crying aloud and measured language is in truth the very ground of the poetic act.

So poetry doesn't have to concern itself with public sadnesses, and there are readers who would prefer poems that don't. Yet at some point early on I realized that there was a portion of myself, of my deepest self, that consisted of my responses and my reflections on such larger matters. It became essential to my belief in myself and my work that I take such moral struggles into account in what was clearly the most vital activity in which I was engaged. The writing of poems. I've wondered if the real ground of my decision might actually have had its roots in the part of the psyche which remains eternally a child, and that perhaps what I really want is just to be a good boy. But then maybe everyone does. Maybe our most sophisticated concepts, our 10 commandments, our categorical imperatives ultimately arise from that source.

For myself though, whatever the origin of this choice, once I made it, perhaps even before that, perhaps once I even entertained its possibility, I found I was committed to it. And certainly there's no question that many of the most powerful emotions I've felt and still feel have had to do with my despair or my rage at beholding and helplessly, haplessly, participating in the stupidities, absurdities and cruelties of our common life. Injustice is the most common manifestation of our human limitations and war, their most dramatic enactment. I'm almost stunned to have to realize how many times in the relatively short segment of history I've lived through I've had to behold war presented as a solution to a problem, and how often actual wars, large and small, though is there ever a war which is small for those who are afflicted by it, have been committed.

Committed most rendering and enragingly all too often by my own nation, a nation whose population I know consists of people who are for the most part good, good boys, good girls, good men, good woman, people who are not fools, although many are apparently ignorant of how their political system works and how they participate without realizing it in the evils their government perpetrates. The heart breaks to behold the whole of our sad human history. It's thrice torn by the portion that is one's own. Sometimes lately I feel that there must be another element of my child's mind being resurrected in me, the part that wants just to hide its eyes when the bad thing, the monster looms large in a dream or a movie or these days the world, leave me alone, go away, don't be there.

How often does that reflexive whimper take me? It might be that trying to live as consciously as one can entails a dialectic struggle between these two parts of the soul, the self as possible, agent of change and the self as the partial obliviousness one what lives in every day. It is a conflict that may by definition be tragic because neither impulse can ever entirely triumph. I suppose all we can do is hang on and try to convey the attempt.

The second part of my presentation is the history of my education and political poetry. I began to write sort of gropingly political poetry in the early 1960s. It happened in an odd way. I'd been trying to write a poem about Anne Frank. This was in the early sixties before she became an industry. And there was an article in a magazine by an African-American author named Thomas Williams, about traveling through the south as an African-American and how terrible it was, and how it was so uniquely awful. And I started to write him a letter to say, wait, it's not uniquely awful. In fact, what we now call the Holocaust was even worse. And as I was writing the letter, I suddenly realized no I was wrong, that there is no uniquely awful thing that the civil rights situation in the south was just as bad as it has had been with perhaps the historical drama that the Holocaust had had.

Then we skipped forward a few years and the Vietnam War starts, and sometime in the late sixties, I can't quite remember, I think it was '68, Robert Bly and some other poets, mostly Bly, organized a series of readings. And they went around the country, different poets and every place they went, the local poets would read with them. And Bly was the great star as he always is in presentations. And as he traveled, he was writing a poem called The Teeth Mother Naked at Last, which was a stunning poem then. It's still I think probably the most effective political poem that's ever been written in America, maybe anywhere. And I'll read a part of the beginning.

The Teeth Mother Naked at Last, I wish I could read like Bly. "Of course, these massive engines lift beautifully from the dark deck. Wings appear over the trees wings with 800 rivets engines burning a thousand gallons of gasoline a minute sweep over the huts with dirt floors. The chickens feel the new fear deep in the pits of their beaks. Buddha with Padma Sambhava. Slate ships float on the China sea. Gray bodies born in Roanoke. The ocean to both sides expanded, buoyed on the dense marine. Helicopters flutter overhead. The death-bee is coming. Super Sabres like knots of neurotic energy sweep around and return. This is Hamilton's triumph. This is the advantage of a centralized bank. B-52s come from Guam. All the teachers die in flames. The hopes of Tolstoy fall asleep in the ant heap. Do not ask for mercy. Now the time comes to look into the past tunnels, the hours given and taken in school. The scuffles in coat-rooms, foam leaps from his nostrils. Now we come to the scum, you take from the mouths of the dead. Now we sit beside the dying and hold their hands.

There is hardly time for goodbye. The staff sergeant from North Carolina is dying. You hold his hand. He knows the mansions of the dead are empty. He has an empty place inside him. Created one night when his parents came home drunk. He uses half his skin to cover it. As you try to protect the balloon from sharp objects, artillery shells explode. Napalm canisters roll end over end, 800 steel pellets fly through the vegetable walls. The six-hour infant puts his hands instinctively to his eyes to keep out the light, but the room explodes, the children explode, blood leaps on the vegetable walls."

It goes on for about eight pages as I recall. I won't read them all, but it did change... Bly had been in the process of bringing a lot of poets from around the world into American poetry, particularly Narundan Viejo. And he used their poetic implements, let's say, to write his own poems. And that began to spread throughout the poetry world, including to me not so much the way of writing it but the letting that passion, the political social passion have a larger place than it had before.

I'll end with a poem that's a sort of the end of the other part of my talk, where sometimes you just wonder whether the whole thing is a difficult adventure.

Butchers. "Thank goodness we were able to wipe the Neanderthals out, beastly things from our mountains, our tundra, that way we had all the meat we might need. Thus, the butcher can display under our eyes his scrubbed hands on the block and never refer to the rooms hidden behind where dissections are affected. Where flesh is reduced to its shivering atoms and remade for our dilatation as cubes cylinders, barely material puddles of admixture horror and blood.

Rembrandt knew of all this. Isn't his flayed beef carcass really a caveman? It's Christ also of course, but much more a troglodyte such as we no longer are. Vanish those species, be gone those tribes, those peoples, those nations. Myrmidon, Ottoman, Olmec, Huron, and Kush, gone, gone, and goodbye. But back to the chamber of torture to Rembrandt who was telling us surely that hoisted with such cables and hung from such hooks, we too would reveal within us intricate layerings of color and pain alive the brushes with pain, a glow with the cruelties of crimson, the cruel oblivious ivory of our innards. Fling out the hooves of your hands, open your breast, pluck out like an Aztec, your heart howling its Cro-Magnon cries that compelled to battles of riddance. Our own planet at last were purged of wilderness homesickness, prowling. We're no longer compelled to devour our enemy's brains thanks to our butcher who inhabits this palace, this senate, this century barbed wire enclosure where dare enter none but subservient breeze, bent, broken blossom, dry rain." Thank you.

Robert Wrigley:

I'm Robert Wrigley. What I have to say about what I think I would call the so-called political poem is fairly straightforward. Therefore, I'll begin with a fairly straightforward poem I did not write. This is Wislawa Szymborska. Children of our age.

"We are children of our age. It's a political age. All day long all through the night, all affairs, yours, ours, theirs are political affairs. Whether you like it or not, your genes have a political past. Your skin, a political cast, your eyes a political slant. Whatever you say reverberates. Whatever you don't say speaks for itself. So either way you're talking politics. Even when you take to the woods, you're taking political steps on political grounds. Apolitical poems are also political, and above us shines a moon no longer purely lunar. To be or not to be? That is the question. And though it troubles the digestion, it's a question as always of politics. To acquire political meaning you don't even have to be human. Raw material will do or protein feed or crude oil or a conference table whose shape was quarreled over for months. Should we arbitrate life and death at a round table or a square one. Meanwhile, people perished, animals died, houses burned and the fields ran wild just as in times immemorial and less political."

Wislawa Szymborska who died this past February 1st at the age of 88, won the Nobel Prize in 1966. She insisted no one was more surprised by this than she was. Newspapers all over the world reported her embarrassment at the attention brought to her by the prize. The humility seemed then and still seems genuine. Szymborska poems are as they say, plain-spoken, and also continually charged with a sly irony that manages to be both rueful and insouciant. She was 16 when the German army invaded Poland in 1939. She came of age in the era of Auschwitz in the Warsaw uprising. And after the end of World War II, Poland as you know was dominated by a totalitarian government installed by the Soviet Union for much of the next half century. Her first book was deemed unworthy of publication by government sensors in 1949. It was reported by those sensors that the book did not live up to socialist needs and it was too obscure for the people's standards.

I don't think anybody's referred to her poems as being too obscure ever since. She was a child of her age and it was most certainly a political one. Children Of Our Age, it seems an overtly political poem though it is also a poem that states that fact with her trademark irony and root. She was once asked by an interviewer why she didn't write more overtly political poems, and her response delights me. "Because I have a trash can." She replied, I have myself always had an uneasy relationship with overtly political poems. I had committed myself to the life of poetry. In 1971 I was 20 years old, I'd been drafted into the army and after basic and advanced training applied for discharge on the grounds of conscientious objection. For the last five months of my military career, I was attached to an army company known as special training detachment.

Although the training I received in that company was nothing the army would have approved of. My fellow soldiers in STD, an acronym not meaning in those days what it means today, were all like me. Either COs trying to get out of the military by legitimate means or they were something known as two-twelves. Men deemed unfit for military service. A few gays, a sociopath or two and some guys who might be charitably described as thugs. There was one guy whose, name I can't remember, who one night recited from memory Edwin Mueller's poem, The Horses. A post-apocalyptic narrative fable. I'd never heard anyone say a poem aloud before, and it was probably that recitation that moved me more than anything else toward the possibility of a writing life. In other words, it seems that early on I aspired to write poems that addressed my, age and as Szymborska makes clear, they're all political.

The problem is that you somehow have to be a poet first and then a partisan. The reason most, not all, the reason most of the plentitude of poems written throughout the late sixties and early seventies in opposition to the war in Vietnam have been forgotten is that they were and are forgettable. They were propaganda. They preached to a devoted choir and more often than not, while they may have aspired to the condition of literature, they did not attain it. A fair question to ask at this point would be what on earth is the condition of literature? Well, let me saunter out onto this thinnest device with an anvil under each arm and say this. The condition of literature of which I speak as far as I can tell is attained in a poem when how one says something is of equal value and significance to what it is one says. One brings to the page an aesthetic, a poetics and one uses that aesthetic to confront the political issue.

One does not compromise one's literary and poetic values and one does not shy away from the complexities of the political situation nor from the complexities that literature demands. One welcomes complexity and one maintains one's commitment to one's aesthetic. For me, this has to do with responsibility. A poet's primary responsibility must be to the poem itself, to the art. The what one says must in fact be not only equal to but subservient to the how one says it. And if one maintains the determination to make a statement of political significance that is aesthetically vital, one might achieve the condition of literature. And the responsibility of literature is to tell a truth that cannot be said any other way. This last point seems to me indisputable.

The poem of my own I'm about to read was written over a period of months from late 2006 through mid 2007. It began as a meditation on the word tolerance as an engineering term. In the engineering world, tolerance is the amount of space between two moving parts of a machine. The smaller the space, the more finely machine departs must be. A BMW engine is machined to the finest possible tolerances of Hugo's not so much. I had thought the poem might be about human relationships. I live in a state that has an unfortunate reputation for intolerance. It is not nearly so intolerant as this reputation suggests, but that reputation is out there and for many of us who are citizens of Idaho, it is hateful and embarrassing. I had thought the poem's political urge was in that direction, but as I worked, things began to happen. That surprised me and the poem began to take off in a different direction. This was January 2007. The Bush administration began what was then at first called a new way forward, then quickly became vernacular as the troop surge.

By then we all knew what an IED was. We all knew about stop-loss policy and extended tours. It was one morning early in 2007 that having googled the phrase, tolerance in engineering, yet again and trolling through page after page the typically otherwise useless information Google gathers. I came across the website of LTI. Liberating Technologies Incorporated, accompany a very good one it seems in the business of manufacturing prosthetic limbs. It's been a good time for that business. A passage from the LTI website describing an artificial arm even made it into the poem. In late 2008, a fact-checker at the magazine I published it in, emailed me a couple of weeks before the poem ran to ask if I knew those lines. They're in quotes for God's sake. Came verbatim from LTIs website. "Yes I did."

Finally, I will say that I sat on the poem for quite a while. I only half trusted it. As far as I'm concerned, there's nothing worse than sitting down at the desk to work and actually having something to say. Generally speaking, acts grinding does not make for quality poetry. This poem however felt different. It had surprised me and I had surprised myself in the writing of it. Its original title was Allowable Error, and other definition of engineering tolerance being the Limits of Allowable Error. This too pleased me. Just before I finally sent it off into the world. I changed the title to Exxon. That was it seemed to me and still does really the poem's most significant risk. It might seem to suggest that the poem, like the war, was and is about oil, but I maintain that the poem that is not, or rather that it is about much more than that. Most importantly for me at least, Exxon is simply the brand of gas station that appears at the poem's end. It's just part of the poem's setting. Exxon.

"Behold the amazing artificial arm, a machine eerily similar to the arm it replaced. Machine to exacting tolerances as its engineers say, to the limits of allowable error. Think of the hand in the glove, the piston in the cylinder, the cartridge in the chamber of an arm, a weapon that is a firearm to say it more primitively, more exactingly, more ceremonially and with more appropriate awe. Behold then the arm from which fire comes the hand of a God hurling lightning. Behold the digital trigger tick of the finger on the hand separated from the body by the bomb at the police station, the rifle smoking just beyond it as though it might yet shoot again. The digital tick of the bomb's timer also disembodied now. Study the artificial arm. Its array of hex-head setscrews, its titanium armatures and axes. Its silicone skins from light pink to dark brown.

Here is this from the company's catalog, the upper and lower forearm tubes are secured to a four position, manually locked elbow mechanism. And this from God himself having slain the man's family and saying to Job, 'Or has thou an arm like God and will thou also disannul all my judgment? Will thou condemn me that thou mayest be righteous.' The nerve and the lack.

Beyond the limits of allowable error, beyond the art of it, be it the story of job, the trajectory of narrative, the flight of the bearings and nails, the improvised explosive device. Beyond the war itself that honored aesthetic ever present evil, alive and vile in the story that is a lie about the truth and the truth, great engineer help us of the lie. Consider the ongoing problem of tactile sensitivity, the elusiveness of feeling those of us otherwise untouched for several dollars, touched for several dollars a gallon. And see the soldier in parade dress easing with his other non-silicone fingers, a credit card into and removing it rapidly from the slot in the pump. And entering through its portal, the world of disembodied money and the exacting tolerances of the world banking system.

Behold this soldier and know of his doubts about the surrendering of arms, which is to say not only the ambiguous tolerances of the Second Amendment but the limb abandoned in Baghdad. The soldier who has entered also into the system of government surveillance, the porn sites, the blogs, the maimed in the line of duty, collectives, the whiskeys and women the rehabilitations. See the soldier who nods and who's left intact, hand extended to your extended right one confuses you an instant, but who nods again to relieve you in your awkwardness. And behold them your untouched touched hands as he nestles his manmade right one over both of yours on his left, feeling between his old self and his new, a responsible citizen." Thank you.

Matthews Zapruder:

Wow. I'm going to begin with one of those poems that did survive I think that time in the Vietnam War to become literature. It's a poem by W. S. Merwin from his book, The Lice, which was published in 1967. It's a short poem called When the War Is Over.

"When the War is Over, we will be proud of course. The air will be good for breathing at last, the water will have been improved. The salmon and the silence of heaven will migrate more perfectly. The dead will think the living are worth it. We will know who we are and we will all enlist again."

For better or worse I think and worry about politics all the time. With despair and fear and the occasional glimmers of hope. It is inconceivable to me that this pervasive concern would not enter into my writing, along with all the other things I care most deeply about. Politics does not enter into my poems because it is more important than other things. It enters into the poem because its language is in my mind. The language of politics like that of technology or archeology or astronomy or esoteric religions or sports can sometimes present strange and beautiful textures. This language can be particularly absurd and revealing and therefore powerful and therefore attractive for poetry. It has been said the poet's task is to purify the language of the tribe. That doesn't seem to be what we need right now. Our American language already goes through a daily and brutal process of purification.

Certain terms are sanctified and repeated again and again and again until they permeate our consciousness. This mechanism is quite familiar to all of us. For a few days or maybe a week or two, a certain word or phrase will take over the language of pundits and politicians and make its way down out of our screens and listening devices and then pass through us like some kind of virus, Arab Street, Republican brand, public option, financial crisis, bailout, surge. I'm fascinated and horrified by this process. Especially when I hear those dead metaphors and totally familiarized phrases start to emerge from my own obedient mouth. Usually those phrases are ugly and stupid and without promise for poetry or anything else.

Last year at some point however, I noticed a certain word was being used with frequency in our political speech. Plutocrat. I felt a great attraction to it. It was old and powerful and seemed to carry with it the paradoxical essence of the fear and longing and hatred and admiration and capitulation towards wealth and privilege and inequality so deeply embedded in our late capitalist minds. The poem I'm going to read to you comes from thinking about that word. I believe all my poetry, whether it is political or otherwise, comes from an unreasoned and unpredictable attraction to something about language. A word, a phrase, even a syntax, and this word or phrase or syntax glows a little with luminous possibility. A token of what? Of a dangerous, exciting, paradoxical, mysterious awareness. Is that awareness political for the poet or reader. I really don't know.

The surrealists thought it was and they might have been right. Just to be in that state of liberation, to wake from the mundane half-life of dead language into a new awareness. This is the promise of poetry. For me, the need to speak in poems comes always from the same longing. To be in what Paul Valerie calls the poetic state of mind, the production of which is in the end the purpose of poetry. This poem is called poem for plutocrats.

"One mild day the body walks out of the lobby made of glass, then passed blue tents and all the shouting people who cannot or refuse to see abstractions like money and rights must be delicately assembled into great forces no one can touch, so they will push machinery that wants nothing, not even to stay still into building a factory or bridge these people can work in or cross. He thinks what they do not understand is whatever is must be this way exactly. No matter what, nothing will change. We will always be selfish and now it has begun to rain. The body gets a little warmer. Soon it will lie in bed and the doctors will solemnly to the bedside rush and do many things.

Tiny silver containers will be placed inside the body to hold terrible radiation next to whatever must be eradicated, but everyone will know it is the end. Some say it is just another country to be ruled. And maybe many years from now, long after the body has gone back into the earth where it belongs. Young people through a door below his name carved in gold will move into a room to learn gentle techniques for bringing justice to others and ourselves discovered at last by people all of us alive today are much too old to know."

Rachel Zucker:

A homespun of 20 questions pulled over the loom of gender and race with the voices of ancestral mostly living women speaking in the lacuna. One, is the question of feminized form of the statement. Two, what other than embarrassment, fear of sounding uneducated, unsure, a historical inexpert, unmasculine, untenured stops me from beginning this lecture where I want to begin with myself without the cloak of form. In this case a self-imposed skein of interrogatories. Alice Notley. Men who have written epics since Homer have tended or tried to be near the center of the politics of their time, court or capital. Thus, how could a woman write an epic? Three. How can I explain what I care about is not just what someone says but how someone says it and who says it. How is this political? Alice Notley it is the only power I have.

Four. Why do women need to tell their birth stories? Our birth stories, women's war stories? Alice Notley. It is essential that women like myself speak out. Five, aside from telling stories, especially the stories which involve the fracture, dislocation, explosion of the self, is there any way to put oneself back together again to become whole, to make sense of the moments in which we, you and I are transformed into life making or life taking beings and become super or subhuman? Is there any anodine or palliative for this fragmentation other than art making? Alice Notley. This is the only power I have.

Six. Perhaps poetry should not try to repair fragmentation but should move from the eye to the self. Which embraces and includes the eye, but which also includes the unconscious psyche and is an ideal greatness where everything is connected to everything else. Is the eye owned invented by the patriarchy anyway?

Bernadette Mayer. The history of every historical thing including God but not including all men and women individually is a violent mess like this ice. But for the spaces even hunchbacked history has allowed in between the famous and loud for something that's defined as what does please us. Which is perhaps the story of an intimate family, though you won't believe or will be unable to love it, driven to research loves' limits in its present solitude as if each man or woman in the world was only one person with everything I've mentioned separate in him or she didn't represent history at all though he or she had stories to tell and was just sitting kind of crazily before an open window in midwinter.

Seven. Am I saying that the self is always male and female and neither but the "I" is almost always male? White? Dominant? That to speak or write as we have known it is to put on that mantle of authority and what does this have to do with poetry or with government? Alice Notley, I don't have a lyric voice anymore.

Eight. Does this appease or inflame my student who recently accused me of reinforcing a gender binary that no longer exists, or another student who tried to convince me we live in a post-racial world?

Nine. Am I the token female? Alice Notley. No woman is like Helen, no matter what the male poets say. Only men are like them in the sense that they invented them. They are pieces of the male mind.

10. Do I dare call attention to our whiteness? Who would like to be the first to accuse me of identity politics? And which is greater, the danger of speaking for others or the danger of keeping silent? Why have we been allowed to speak now chosen, listened to? Bernadette Mayer. What But the impulse to move and speak can change the world. Where should we move? Who is this person speaking? Who am I speaking to, to you whom I love? Can I say that?

11. If I was writing poems before I had children, why do I say now that motherhood was the crisis that informed my real work? And that now though I am still primarily, fundamentally, eternally a mother first and foremost and forever that the crisis of motherhood has ebbed and truly I find the need to speak diminished blunted. What then retrospectively does this prove about the need to speak? Alicia Ostriker. But who can tolerate the power of a woman, close to a child, riding our tides into the sand dunes of the public spaces.

12. Why do women need to tell their birth stories? Are we healing ourselves or the culture? Was/is anyone listening? Tillie Olsen. "Traces of their making, of course, in folk song, lullaby, tales, language itself, jokes, maxims, superstitions.

13. If Alice Notley is my patronus, why does she not appear like a female stag with golden antlers and carry me away from this panel?

14. Why is there no name for the birth poem when we have allergy for death? What if I refuse to tell you what to think or what I think? Why should I tell this in order or make an argument or prove my point with evidence? Who invented that form? Why did the culture tell me not to say not to tell it? And why must I if I tell it, tell it slant? Bernadette Mayer. From Dreams I made sentences, then what I've seen today, then past the past of afternoons of stories like memory to seeing a plain introduction to modes of love and reason, then to end I guess with love a method in this winter season.

15. Why, when I had already read Stealing the Language, Alicia Ostriker, and Writing Like a Woman, Ostriker, and Of Woman Born, Adrienne Rich, did it take co-writing a book about giving birth at home and subverting the "I" voice of single authorship for me to see that I'd been speaking, always, in a borrowed language and pre-made forms?

16. Why did I not see, until writing an overtly polemical book. See the women crying in the audiences and the scorn of young graduate students at Prairie Lights and the pushback and anger and confusion and the gratitude. See how thoroughly I had been dissuaded from writing about something, from writing politically, in a political manner which is to say of/for/about people and power, which is to say also female, a feministic diatribe meant to affect social change and name names? Alice Notley. Perhaps this time she wouldn't call herself something like Helen. Perhaps instead there might be recovered some sense of what mind was like before Homer, before the world went haywire and women were denied participation in the design and making of it.

17. Did I think that re-imagining the story of Persephone from the female point of view had political value? Did I think telling the story of my second son's birth and all the mess and glory and dislocation in a way I had never seen birth described before in a poem had political relevance? Did I think telling the true story of my wife-hood was political? Did I think spending years collecting essays by young women poets about their female mentors in order to describe a permission giving influence instead of a kill the father model would change anything anyone did? I think asking 99 poets to write a poem for one of Obama's first 100 days of presidency would make me a responsible poet citizen? Would make me part of the political process.

18. How then did I feel when I realized the birth I had described was mine, but also the birth given to me by a patriarchal system of medicine which despises women's bodies? How did I feel when the mentorship book was dismissed as anecdotal, unscholarly and could not find a place in the academic mail storm? How did I feel when I realized that the Obama poems, though community building and about government, mostly failed to be political in their making or reception?

19. Why should you care how I feel or how anyone feels? Does caring about someone's feelings have anything to do with politics or poetry? What is the voice of a woman, a white woman, a Jewish, white American woman, and why does it matter who is speaking? How can it not matter?

20. If everyone were busy caring for someone, a child, parent, friend, person in need, or even oneself in a deep way, would we then have no time or energy left for war? What would the government be without the possibility of war? Can you even imagine it? Do you have the need, the language to imagine it? Do you have the need, the right privilege method or desire to speak?

Joe Wilkins:

Thank you to all of the presenters. We have a little bit of time for questions, so yeah.

Speaker 7:

Thank a lot of this, and I want to write about life's [inaudible 00:56:23] for my father Vietnam. I find myself having [inaudible 00:56:28] my experience of those experiences. [inaudible 00:56:37]

Rachel Zucker:

Question.

CK Williams:

I will try. Is this working. At another panel, it came up, I forget. I think it may have been the other political panel. Speaking about the inner state and the outer state and how do you connect them. And it seems as though the question you're asking is almost the question of the definition of poetry. You sound like you want to be encouraged to be a poet. Because, what a poet does in one way or another is connect those two states, the interstate and the outer state. And find a way to connect them in a language that compels and that is unique to the state, to the condition of that relation. And so there's really no answer to that except that that's what the job is. It's really to write poems.

Rachel Zucker:

I think those are such great questions, and they bring up two other related questions for me. One is for myself, I've really been unable to write dramatic monologues, which is a form that a lot of people quite like and I almost have a political aversion to them at this point. I don't know if that's going to stay the way it is, but I'm thinking a lot about what it means to write from your own perspective. And the way in which your own perspective could include more than the "I" or the autobiographical kind of narrow place. But what it means to step outside your own perspective beyond empathy, which I think is quite crucial and enlarges the "I" to become part of the self, but then what it means to step even outside of that and to really take on the voice of someone else, which is something that many poets do.

And I feel increasingly for myself uncomfortable about that, although I also don't want to make any rules about it. But I was thinking about that when you asked the question Todd. And the other thing when I was in graduate school, Mark Strand came and gave a lecture about paintings, and he was talking about how the paintings of the crucifixion are very beautiful and the paintings, all of these difficult dark moments were beautiful. And I asked a question and I said, "Well, can you avoid beauty the way you're asking? Can you make a painting that is not beautiful or a poem that's not beautiful?" And he said, "No." That was sort of the end of that.

I'm still asking that question. I don't know if the maid thing is the maid thing. And so somehow becomes beautiful in that very way, but I think there has to be a way to avoid the manipulation of beautifying things and the way that the lyric "I" can make the things that should not be clean and beautiful and normal and ordered. And we can avoid doing that in our poems. And I think that that's part of what I'm looking for, but I don't think I've found it.

Robert Wrigley:

It occurs to me that beautifying something is not beautiful, and then when in doubt I just do what Keith said, which is I just follow his advice, which is that in a great poet a sense of beauty obliterates all considerations or all consideration.

Speaker 8:

I understood that you know, any of you, who some of the poets are, that you would find important for yourself when [inaudible 01:00:48] or your ideas about writing poem has, what do you call it, content or [inaudible 01:01:02]?

Joe Wilkins:

I'll say for me, the folks on this panel are some of my primary influences and of course James Welch, who I mentioned.

CK Williams:

Mahmoud Darwish, Paul Solan. It's a long, long list. Bohes, a lot of poets who come to us from other languages. And I think that's really kind of an extraordinary place to go, Lorca, just to get away from American poets. We do have this tremendously stable seeming life that we live inside of when political administrations change. The tanks do not roll in the street much as they do in many other countries, and it is often thought that that gives us a sort of blinkered notion of how political things work. And that's not the case and it is not nearly so comfortable, I think from other countries. So I'd get outside of the USA.

I agree with that and disagree. When I first started thinking about it, I started thinking about Neruda and Viejo and the Polish poets. But then I realized that a lot of these poets, in fact, their base is in Whitman. And Naruda most clearly said it at one point, that basically without Whitman he wouldn't be. And I think that our great gift to the world of poetry and the world of socially conscious poetry, call it that, was certainly Whitman. I realized as I was reading the Bly poem, how much Whitman was in just the six-hour child, et cetera, and I realized that that poem had really sort of taken a Whittmanian stance and just gone farther with it.

Matthews Zapruder:

When I was... Where you going to say something?

Rachel Zucker:

No go ahead.

Matthews Zapruder:

No, I insist.

Rachel Zucker:

You're afraid of me.

Matthews Zapruder:

Have been for a long time.

Rachel Zucker:

You used the phrase explicitly political. And I'm not sure what that means to me right now. I think at this point if a poem does not have political relevance, and I don't want to semantically erase the usefulness of the word political and say everything is political, but I think if a poem does not have political relevance to me, it's not interesting. And a poem that is interesting has political relevance. And so I quoted from Bernadette Mayer's book Midwinter Day, which is a book length description of one day in her life, December. The Midwinter day in 1978. And I think that that's an explicitly political book, but maybe she wouldn't necessarily come to mind as a political poet.

Matthews Zapruder:

Just say really quickly that I found one thing that was very instructive to me was when I was first starting to read poetry and I came across the work of many Eastern European poets, Robert, I'm so glad you brought up Jim Boska, but there's speaking of Herberts and Popa and Shalomon, but also more overtly political poets like me, Walsh and many others. And the directness and clarity and also wit with which they were able to address their epistemological and ontological situations in relation to political things. That blew my mind. I had never seen that and there was something about their language in poetry. Of course it was in translation that opened something up for me. So I guess when this comes up, I recommend that people read that. I don't know how it'll feel to read it now as opposed to 15 years ago, but it was an interesting thing for me.

Joe Wilkins:

Yes.

Speaker 9:

[inaudible 01:05:11]

Matthews Zapruder:

It is inaccurate to say that, I think.

CK Williams:

Agreed. There is, someone said in there talk. I think Robert, quoting someone who said, there's really no such thing as a nonpolitical poem. And I believe that very much, that the selection you make of what to exclude and what to include is in itself a political act. And in a way you can define any poem as political. I do actually. Some of the politics I don't necessarily agree with, but I do feel that there is of necessity, the social being of the person who writes the poem and who selects what to write about and even how to write about it really has to do with a much larger question of who the individual is when you just glance at her. Okay.

Robert Wrigley:

I have a copy of starting today, 100 poems for Obama's first 100 days. It's a wonderful book. I would encourage... You still in print? It's still in print, you can get it. But I have to admit, it also sort of delights me to think of what sort of anthology of poetry George W. Bush might've spawned-

CK Williams:

The last 100 days.

Robert Wrigley:

The last 100... Actually you could-

Matthews Zapruder:

The Wave Books, where I'm an editor, we did a book called State of the Union in 2008 that was a collection of overt political poems in the sense that they actually engage with governance or politics or war things, so we tried to assemble these poems that you can judge for yourself whether that was a successful endeavor or not. I kind of want to wade into something that I think might be very dangerous, but it was noticeable that we were all white and mostly male, and that I'm sure that was apparent to all of us when we were asked.

And I'm a white American male from a certain privileged socioeconomic class. I have had a lot of feelings of awfulness about speaking at all about anything over the years, but also that's what I do. And it occurred to me not too long ago that actually it's interesting to be the person that I am because in a kind of way I am the sort of physical manifestation, certain senses of American privilege. And it's interesting to think about how one could be that person and not be a total fucking asshole, in poems and in life. And that's a problem and an issue that someone like me can deal with and try to do better at, I guess. So I think of that in my political poems or my poems in general. It's just interesting to be this person at this time and try to do better, I guess.

Joe Wilkins:

Yes.

Speaker 10:

[inaudible 01:08:40]

Robert Wrigley:

I'm the one who actually kept using that word responsibility, so maybe I'll just jump in and say that I really do believe that the poet's first responsibility is to the poem, and is to the art. But you can't be only responsible to the poem or the art and talk about the epitome of decadence. You have to have a life. You have to be aware of what's going on, not only in your life but in the lives of the people around you and in the nation and the planet. And so, I think that responsibility should probably have a capital R and I think that's got something to do with what Matthew's talking about too. I mean, we bear all of us responsibility for the actions of our government of in fact our species, our race, and that can be uncomfortable sometimes.

Matthews Zapruder:

Robert, do you know this poem by Tomas Shaloman responsibility?

Robert Wrigley:

I do actually. I just heard.

Matthews Zapruder:

It's a great, and it ends essentially, I'm going to try to say it. Responsibility. Responsibility. Who decided that the legs of the butterfly would not be four feet wide. Responsibility. Responsibility, baroque, sustenance of the people.

Joe Wilkins:

It's good. Yeah.

Speaker 11:

This question is primarily for Rachel [inaudible 01:10:29] think about [inaudible 01:10:49].

Rachel Zucker:

I'm using the pillar "I". I was interested in what Joe was saying about seeing, and that made me think about the, I, the other "I". But, I'm still thinking about what Matthew said. My brain can't work that fast. Mostly I was talking about the way in which as poets and as human beings, we often consider the self, but I mean the "I" as a singular entity that is separate in so many ways from the rest of the culture and history and other human beings. And in my particular life, that notion became very challenged with my first pregnancy. And it sort of turned around my whole understanding of what it meant to be one person, and then suddenly two people, and then suddenly two separate people and back to one person. I've never felt like one person again.

I actually think that I probably never did feel like one person. That was my understanding of what it was supposed to be like. I don't think other people come to that or similar experiences, not through pregnancy or motherhood. And I think that this notion of the "I" as alone and in one particular point in history and as gendered in a certain way, is very culture bound. And so I'm trying to think about how to enlarge the "I", and for lack of a better word, I'm calling that the self. And I'm trying to think about what it might mean to write poems from the self instead of from the "I". But I don't really know what I'm doing yet.

Joe Wilkins:

Well, I think we are out of time. But thank you so much for your questions. Thank you for coming. And thank you to our panelists.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for tuning in to the AWP Podcast Series. For other podcasts, please visit our website at www.awpwriter.org.