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My letter to WUKY and other meanderings
(4)Here is part of what I wrote to WUKY last week:
Plato banned poets from his Republic, which was not a democracy but an oligarchy, because they were too dangerous. Julius Caesar may well have had Catullus killed, Augustus banned Ovid. Chaucer disappeared mysteriously after the Henry IV overthrew the throne of England. Poets have been routinely jailed and disappeared in the Soviet bloc and South America. The Ayatollah Khomeini put a fatwa out on Salmon Rushdie. Saddam Hussein pretended to be a poet while suppressing the real poets in Iraq. Frank Zappa, whose lyrics are sometimes as lewd as anything you’d ever hear, has been credited with keeping the underground freedom movement alive in 20th century Poland.
It is the first mark of a tyrant to suppress the poets.
All those statements are true, but they seem a little bombastic to me today. The fact is, most of us protested not that The Writer’s Almanac was dangerous and deserved to be heard but that it was harmless and didn’t deserve to be silenced.
Although there are places in the world where poetry is considered dangerous, the United States of America is not one of them. Somewhere, and how I wish I had an encyclopedic mind like that of Jack Higgs so that I could remember where, I read that in the United States poets are not silenced by opposition and suppression. Rather they are given all freedom and trivialized. Bought out, too, perhaps. Certainly all the dangerous rock anthems of the sixties have been co-opted by nostalgia and commerce. Poets come considerably cheaper.
Sam Hamill tried to make poetry dangerous when he refused his invitation to Laura Bush’s garden party and founded Poets Against the War. He’s still out there trying but I don’t think he was ever taken seriously as a voice of opposition. Certainly he hasn’t hit the same kind of chords that Cindy Sheehan hits. Amiri Baraka just managed to turn himself into a bit of a laughing stock.
Where is our Ginsberg?
Or is it true that poets should not mess head on into politics? Black and white is the warmonger’s game. To quote Dylan in “My Back Pages: ” “…I’d become my enemy / In the instant that I preach.”
These questions are too complicated for some one of my small scholarship. I wrote a few outraged poems in the days before and after our invasion of Iraq, published a chapbook in fact, and I don’t regret it. I wanted somehow to leave a record, a quiet whisper within the frenzy. Outrage is born of hope, I think, like satire. I feel sadder and quieter these days, exhausted, incredulous, and not so hopeful.
I am told that Plato distrusted democracy because he thought it had killed Socrates. His reasons for exiling the poets (poesis here, meaning “creative arts” in general) are so complex whole books of exegesis have been written. Maybe he exiled artists, not because of their dangerous political opposition, but because they were ungovernable, irrepressible, tricksters. It may still be that somewhere in this country, there is an irrepressible spirit of creativity.
Shortly after the September 11th attack, W. H. Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939” was widely circulated by e-mail. A fair number of people were taking comfort, not from public platitudes, but from this fairly complicated and, in Auden’s eyes, flawed poem.
Was that dangerous?
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4 Responses to “My letter to WUKY and other meanderings”
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[...] silenced by opposition and suppression. Rather they are given all freedom and trivialized. Read the rest. Filed under: Espresso Shot Poetry — Jeff Hess @ 0649 [...]
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Charles M. Whitt August 17th, 2005 at 10:53 am
You have a way of rooting out the most relevant facts (no matter how obscure) on the subjects you chose for blogdom. i.e. the comment for which you couldn?t remember the source. Well, I know it wasn?t me, but it could have been. I have thought the very same thing for a long time, that is, that not just poetry is trivialized, but an entire way of life has been nearly trivialized out of existence. I find it remarkable, and truly unbelievable that they have found a way to convince a majority that we have been shamefully wrong for years. And that is what has happened. No minority can dictate to a majority unless the majority lets them.
And why do we let them? We let them because we have been weak. Years of pounding on our beliefs, and the right political climate, have stripped away our confidence, and replaced it with a kind of perverted fear that works just like ropes around our necks leading us wherever they want to take us. In normal times everyone would know without thinking that if one must tear down someone else to advance oneself success can only be temporary.
The censorship we are seeing is becoming as pervasive as freedom once was. But don?t question yourself. You are doing your part. And as poets we certainly don?t have to travel abroad to find ruin enough to write about anymore. In a poem about eighties politics I wrote: ??our dreams didn?t change, they just became irrelevant.? I could have said, ?Trivialized.?
Indeed, where is our Ginsberg? Where is our poet whose persona is to large to be trivialized, and too strong to be lost to madness? And for that matter, where is our Ferlinghetti?
Charlie Whitt -
Sherry,
In some discussions I had about WUKY’s censorship I brought up the “Parental Advisory” labels and pointed out that if the poem by Amber Coverdale Sumrall were recorded on a CD it would be labeled and not be sold at many stores. I see such a clear connection, but I don’t think everyone does. Oh well, hopefully MP3’s will make that irrelevant.
And maybe there’s a lesson in that: getting it out there is what its all about and the subvervision is in the distribution as well as content.
By the way, tomorrow I start classes in the MFA program at The Jack Kerouac School which is also home to the Allen Ginsberg Library.
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I like to think Plato knew his republic would not work, and that perhaps he wished for his dialouges to spark the human mind to reason why one can not direct the heart… i agree with everything you said above; now how are the poets of today to get the human mind to listen?
…there is some(poerty) that has touched hearts and found frames
whilst others direct generations and lay foundations for future civilizations; it is the poet who gives you your language and to refuse him would leave all of life silent.
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Sherry has also received an Artist Enrichment grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women.
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