The state of the world calls out for
poetry to save it.
If you would be a poet, create works
capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if this meaning
sounds apocalyptic.
You are Whitman, you are Poe, you are
Mark Twain, you are Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay, you are
Neruda and Mayakovsky and Pasolini, you are an American or a non-American,
you can conquer the conquerors with words....
(From Poetry as Insurgent Art
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Copyright - 2007 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Used by
permission of New Directions. All rights reserved.)
GC : That's
splendid! That's the power of poetry! So much can be said with a few words! I
often think of it as "packed language"--packed the way a tube of dynamite has
the gunpowder packed so tightly" and then a little spark will set it off. The
style is very simple here; other poets will use various styles. " I think what
is most important is a concept of appropriateness. Are the words, the
metaphors, allusions, etc.--appropriate to the meaning and feeling the poet
wants to convey? Ferlinghetti's message is a simple challenge: "you can conquer
the conquerors with words"." The
language is appropriate for that message!
VP: That
poem reminded me of the necessity to keep the flame! That is, we have
obligations towards the great poets to continue their work. I have always felt
this and this inspired me greatly. We don't have a duty so much to one's
country, one's family, clan, etc. But we have a duty to our great precursors, a
duty to posterity, so to speak. Strangely, I feel more connections to the
writers and poets of the past than the present. Sometimes I think that the
culture (in Russia and in the world at large) is in decline. I think it has a
lot to do with the environmental destruction and the growing enmity among
nations, religions, etc. The rich try to use this to their end: divide and
rule.
In our first "cycle," we also
"spoke" about "Poets of Today"--the 1966 anthology of "new American poetry,"
edited by Walter Lowenfels. You wrote that you had seen it back in the day,
perhaps thumbed through it. I wanted to send you this from that anthology, as
an example of a modern American poem that should be translated and disseminated
in different cultures:
Award [A Gold Watch To The FBI Man Who Has Followed Me
For 25 Years]
By Ray Durem
Well,
old spy
looks like I
led you down some pretty blind alleys,
took you on several trips to Mexico,
fishing in the high Sierras,
jazz at the Philharmonic.
You've watched me all your life,
I've clothed your wife,
put your two sons through college.
what good has it done?
sun keeps rising every mourning.
Ever see me buy an Assistant President?
or close a school?
or lend money to Somoza?
I bought some after-hours whiskey in L.A.
but the chief got his pay.
I ain't killed no Koreans,
or fourteen-year-old boys in Mississippi
neither did I bomb Guatemala,
or lend guns to shoot algerians.
I admit I took a Negro child
to a white rest room in Texas,
but she was my daughter, only three,
and she had to pee,
and I just didn't know what to do,
would you?
see, I'm so light, it don't seem right
to go to the colored res room;
my daughter'
s brown, an folks frown on that in Texas,
I just don't know how to go to the bathroom in the free world!
Now,
old FBI man,
you've done the best you can,
you lost me a few jobs,
scared a few landlords,
You got me struggling for that bread,
but I ain't dead.
and before it's all through,
I may be following you!
GC: I like it! It's straight-forward, witty, conversational,
easy to "get into"--and then, we're WITH the writer, in his skin, in
a very human situation with his 3-year old daughter in backward Texas! It's memorable.
Definitely worth repeating, worth sharing!
The great Anglo-American poet, W.H.
Auden, was once asked, "What is poetry?" And he replied simply, "memorable
speech."
So, yes, let's continue to bring this
kind of work to the attention of our respective cultures! These ideas, these
sentiments need to be reiterated" because we're up against the propaganda
machines of this modern world--and "they" (the State, the corporations, the
oligarchs, the religious organizations, the political parties--and the "artists"
who have been co-opted!) are constantly reiterating their messages of hatred
and xenophobia!
Just a month ago, the major news in
America was all about Travon Martin--an un-armed African-American 17-year old
who was shot and killed by a white "neighborhood-watch" guy when Trayvon was minding
his own business, just walking through the white guy's area. Even Obama
commented upon that incident! But" a poem like Durem's "Award," properly
understood, properly explicated, could have bridged the gap between those
disparate American cultures! That's what
we need to do--walk around in the other person's skin!
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