American Poetry and Political Protest
from Poetry Northwest, Spring / Summer 2008
Criticism of protest poetry appears often enough to be familiar. But with two recent essays in response to Poets Against the War, both W. S. Di Piero and David Wojahn offer a more forceful articulation. They point to an irony: Not only does most protest poetry remain mere versified opinion, but it tends strangely to mirror the smugness it rails against. Di Piero describes a stand-off in which "absolute pacificism and absolute jingoism each believe that God or Absolute Principle is on its side, which has the irreducible moral value of being right." Wojahn writes of these protest poems that "their bad writing connotes a lot of silly, sentimental, and sanctimonious thinking—the very sort of thinking which, allied with greed, helped to bring America into Iraq in the first place." This might seem an outlandish connection to draw, like linking clinical depression to the migration of haddock. I've read the work in Poets Against the War, however, and have found the experience both melancholic and fishy. To be sure, there are some fine poems in the anthology and on the web site. There are also impassioned pleas from pacifistic fourth graders and lefty grandpas that are not fine poems but are poignant in their fashion. The flaw doesn't lie in the interest group itself but in the tendency it displays. To read poem after poem from Poets Against the War, as well as most of the political poetry in the journals, is to watch individual expression, however sympathetic, fog into collective grumble as the writers retreat to the heights of their own enlightened views.
I'm left agreeing with Di Piero and Wojahn, but also wondering what's to be done. Two challenges come to mind, one modest, the other not. The first is a formal problem: How does a poet who feels righteous indignation give it an enduring structure? What are the unique risks of writing political poems? The second challenge has to do with efficacy: What action is the poem performing? Even if the poem exists in the "valley of its own making," how can it make something happen?
Maybe the first step would be to understand the problem with most arguments against protest poetry. Most of them suggest writers should just cool it. Even when the critiques are written from the left, they often sound conservative, cautious about displaying anger. They tend to imply that a poet needs to see both sides of a subject, that she should at least temper her rage with some restraining force, should employ something like prolepsis. Often, such criticism repeats Yeats's claim in Per Amica Silentia Lunae that "[w]e make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry." There's a difference, though, between those usual maneuvers of argument and the kind of agon that Yeats imagines.
To understand the uniquely American directions such a quarrel can take, and to see how it can mount effective protest against the political structures we live inside, I want to look at two very different passages from Whitman.
"Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" would hardly seem like a protest poem. With its effusion of civic love, it might actually read as the opposite of a protest poem. It starts to form in a notebook of Whitman's from late 1855. He's still glowing from the famous letter Emerson sent him in July of that year, and he copies over in the same notebook the philosopher's salutation, "I greet you at the beginning of a great career." The exuberance of that beginning shines up from a rough draft of "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry":
dazzle in a track from
the most declined sun,
the lighters—the sailors
in their picturesque costumes
the nimbus of light
around the shadow of my
head in the sunset.
When Whitman finishes the poem the following year, this becomes not only the central image but an entire reimagining of the body politic as a democratic being. Here's how it appears in the third section:
I too saw the reflection of the summer sky in the water,
Had my eyes dazzled by the shimmering track of beams,
Look'd at the fine centrifugal spokes of light around the shape of my head in the sun-lit water. . .
And here's how it reappears in the eleventh section:
Receive the summer sky, you water! and faithfully hold it, till all downcast eyes have time to take it from you;
Diverge, fine spokes of light, from the shape of my head, or anyone's head, in the sun-lit water;
As Whitman repeats it, the image melds an ultimate appreciation of selfhood (it comes pretty close to the familiar portrayal of Narcissus!) with an ultimate vision of collective exchange. The almost angelic image of the self—the hub from which stream those lucent spokes of light—can be inhabited by different selves.
There might not seem to be a quarrel as such running beneath this junction of the individual and the aggregate, but there is a tension. As Philip Fisher puts it in his Still the New World, Whitman's image "eludes what we might call the depression of common experience, the feeling that whatever is there for everyone is unavailable simultaneously to let me experience my own singularity as thrilling." The space between the individual and society proves a potential gulf, as well as a connection. What makes Whitman's work political in the deepest sense is that he not only looks for ways to elude this tension, but also to engage it. If he sees how the democratic project might drift into what Fisher calls the "depression of common experience," he also recognizes how independence can shade over into mere selfishness and worse. Consider how, in the sixth section of "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," he takes onto himself the burden of evil:
It is not you alone who know what it is to be evil;
I am he who knew what it was to be evil;I too knitted the old knot of contrariety,
Blabb'd, blush'd, resented, lied, stole, grudg'd,
Had guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak,
Was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly, malignant;
The wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me,
The cheating look, the frivolous word, the adulterous wish, not wanting,
Refusals, hates, postponements, meanness, laziness, none of these wanting.
The sudden plunge into negativity, which Whitman then absorbs into the exultant tone of the whole, may seem one of his familiar moves. In "There Was a Child Went Forth" it comes with the line about "[t]he blow, the quick loud word, the tight bargain, the crafty lure..." In the eighth section of "Song of Myself" it occurs with the image of the fistfight. This turn toward ugliness works formally: By its tempering contrast, it strengthens the celebratory tenor of the whole. Looking at this passage from "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," you hear how fully experienced that turn can be, how far beyond technical maneuvering. It has to do with the very body of the poet. The argument has been circuited through the lyric "I," wired into experience and cut from the surrounding static of public speech. At the same time, the poet has reached beyond private grumbling, has exceeded the very limits of being an individual. With the rapid series of admissions, Whitman sets himself up for his descent to the ultimate depth, which comes with the cinching monosyllables, "the wolf, the snake, the hog..." And it seems a moment of both embodiment and disembodiment. In accepting his degradation, the poet becomes sheer animal even as he loses his identity.
This strange play of perspective remains essentially political, and essentially American. I mean that Whitman shows evil adopting the various forms of individual withdrawal; his image of corruption is not, as images of corruption tend to be in his work, effete and European. The abject animal reads, in fact, like the flip side of Whitman's own picture of native self-determination. In his 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass, he writes of his ideal citizen: "Obedience does not master him, he masters it." In "The Song of the Broad Axe," his America is a place where "the men and women think lightly of the laws." Admitting in "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" to the perils that might edge these images, Whitman in fact toughens his convictions about American exceptionalism. His national ideal appears more possible, not to mention less chauvinistic, when we hear him admitting to its real dangers.
Following Whitman's progress, you see this dialectic intensify, even to the point of breakdown. At the beginning of the eighteen seventies, he attempts a reply to Thomas Carlyle's "Shooting Niagara" in the prose that becomes Democratic Vistas. He finds the Scotsman's antidemocratic essay repugnant, but before identifying in America the "loftiest final meanings, of history and man," he argues with such vehemence against the worst of his own culture that the overall tone of the book becomes deeply melancholic. ("Passage to India," the poem in which he attempts to address this same malaise, seems to me more balanced but less successful than its prose counterpart.) The reasons for his disenchantment lie in the impeachment of Andrew Johnson and the corruption of the Grant administration, the beginning of what Twain called the "Gilded Age." But Whitman locates this dissipation in the populace itself: "The best class we show, is but a mob of fashionably dress'd speculators and vulgarians." His disgust becomes so powerful that it seems at times to apply to the actual existence of America itself, the very sweep of its sheer facts, which we normally take to be the subject of his poetry. He writes:
Fearless of scoffing, and of the ostent, let us take our stand, our ground, and never desert it, to confront the growing excess and arrogance of realism. To the cry, now victorious the cry of sense, science, flesh, incomes, farms, merchandise, logic, intellect, demonstrations, solid perpetuities, buildings of brick and iron, or even the facts of the shows of trees, earth, rocks, etc., fear not, my brethren, my sisters, to sound out with equally determin'd voice, that conviction brooding within the recesses of every envision'd soul— illusions! apparitions! figments all!
Sure, at the beginning of his preface to Leaves of Grass, Whitman did call for a national spirit "untied from strings necessarily blind to particulars and details magnificently moving in vast masses." But even Emerson didn't believe that rocks and trees were illusions! And isn't Whitman supposed to be the poet whose work is "install'd among the kitchenware?" In Democratic Vistas itself, he praises such day-to-day realities as "Broadway, the heavy, low, musical roar, hardly ever intermitted, even at night; the jobbers' houses, the rich shops, the wharves, the great Central Park, and the Brooklyn Park of hills..." It's not that Whitman has changed his tune, but that he sees in his own urges the temptation toward corruption. I mean that he writes of the "arrogance of realism," as if to challenge his own catalogs of facts to maintain the electric spirit he sees flowing through matter. Most crucially, he sees this personal, artistic process existing within the larger process of national decay and regeneration.
Such a recognition is precisely what so much of our current protest poetry lacks. This poetry seems to accept no responsibility, no complicity. Maybe some of the reasons are understandable. Who genuinely feels, after all, that he or she is responsible for a war begun under the cover of lies? What rational person would see in his or herself the image of George Bush, not to mention his reptilian cabinet? Yet if the outrage that boils beneath those questions might swell the picket lines, it doesn't, at least on its own, make for good poems. This is the difference between protest itself and the art of protest. The task that the latter performs, the rendering of consciousness in crisis, needs to contain its own countering forces. This can make it even more radical in the end than the kind of protest that goes down on the street. Since artwork shows us the totality in which we're caught, those political structures we live inside and that live inside us, aren't we then impelled to resist more fundamentally?
There are, in fact, contemporary poems that respond to our political experience in this deeper sense. One of these is "Discipline" by Tom Sleigh. The poem is the narrative of a brief encounter. Here's the first half:
Random meeting at a bar,
random association that didn't
need to happen, was it me
feeling and saying what I said,
shaky after, but at the moment
loosening to friendship
during time of war?—He had good biceps,
straight teeth, fancy sneakers.
Then he showed a pic of
his soldier lover: tall, skinny,
appealing in a young Abe Lincoln way:
"When's he come home?"
"Six months but healready got extended ninety days."
He looked so young—and what? Was it
heat building in my gaze as we
stared together, desire crossing
so that me thinking
I'm straight, my war Vietnam
began to chafe at strict
division enforced along lines
of discipline laid down
of what naked bodies do
and uniformed bodies don't?—
anyway, shouldn't a patriot want
to go to bed to solace a soldier
as handsome as this one, to feel pressureof his eyes hard against
mine, his body in the line
of fire conspiring to let me move
closer, closer...
Like Whitman's ideal Americans who "think lightly of the laws," the poet certainly moves beyond usual boundaries. His transgression lends the poem both its allure and its dramatic tension. Narrative allows Sleigh to dramatize, in isolate moments, the kind of moral ambiguities that in Whitman are dispersed throughout the work. But Sleigh's talent is not for narrative alone. Much of the drama here flows from a collision of genres. The poem begins with one convention of storytelling ("I met this guy in a bar.. .") but the actual story leads us into the classic triangulation of erotic lyric. And the interior force of desire not only tempts the poet, but also pushes against the exterior plot of the poem. Neither narrative nor lyric has any set political identity, and they're fused here anyhow, but the tension between them corresponds roughly with the pull between freedom and constraint, the transgression as well as the "division enforced along lines" that it makes apparent. That friction takes a fascinating turn as the poem moves toward its ending:
then the lover took out a letter from his soldier
that he showed me in what? A subtle gesture
of flirtation I just as subtly invited,aware even in my straightness
I was over the line, voyeur
to myself, the war, the lover and his soldier
writing home how hot
the sun got, he'd shot a rubber bullet
into a crowd, he was going a little nuts
like those movies where the soldier always loses it—the crowd was yelling, running, crossing
a line, zigging,
zagging, someone
stumbled, went down—
I turned my gaze from the photo's
smiling eyes, heat building in my looking
burning off and leavingus awkward, cooling in
the once companionable dark:
"You must miss him."
"Well, you can see how
tall he is. His feet hung over
the edge of the bed. He
makes an easy target."And then we got up to go,
me to come here, losing, then finding another
like him and his soldier
and the war far away
in these words but still
going on, each walking his own
shifty line of discipline.
The whole poem balances on the fulcrum of that moment when the poet turns his gaze from the picture. Imagine how much weaker the poem would be if Sleigh hadn't included those four words, "building in my looking." It almost seems the erotic attraction has been intensified by the glimmer of violence. If the poet's interest had suddenly evaporated after hearing about the shooting in Iraq, how schematic, how unreal the politics of the poem would have felt. Desire simply doesn't work that way. As it stands, the poem complicates our sense of the connection between emotions and beliefs. It's as if the poet has taken the old, sixties slogan, "the personal is political" and explored the implications that stretch way beyond its usual, bumpersticker usage. Sleigh's poem works to reveal our entanglement in those "shifty lines" that we often ignore, but that still crop up—as when a straight person feels an attraction to someone of the same sex, or when Eros mingles with Thanatos, or a gay soldier has to hide his identity, or a soldier who doesn't want to fire even rubber bullets is forced ("he already got extended ninety days") into his frightening role.
But can a poem do more than show us our entanglement? Wouldn't that work alone be fatalistic? I think it can perform something greater. At the very end of "Discipline," Sleigh admits that the people in the poem are virtual, are not the actual men in the bar and in the photo. This might seem to leach power from the artwork, to remove it from the plane of action. But Sleigh's turn at the end is no stock, po-mo evasion. As the people morph into words they manage two things at once: they confer a sense of responsibility upon the writer who must render them and, since they become fictional, they allow the kind of creaturely play that pushes against the lines of our moral systems.
After all, one of the features of the best political poetry is the collapsing of the division between play and responsibility. It's what happens when in reading Whitman, for example, we come across such contradictory passages as the exalting of those reflected faces in the water and the grumbling that "the best class we show, is but a mob of fashionably dress'd speculators and vulgarians." These passages gain their moral power and endurance from being propositions rather than rhetorical opinions. As such, they ask us to test the connections between emotions and beliefs, between statements and their referents. They compel us to consider a totality that evades our too-easy binaries, to imagine the causes and effects of our actions as more mysterious and more vital. One result is that we leave the artwork able to praise and protest more fully in the world.
About the Author
Peter Campion is the author of a book of poems, Other People. He is the editor of Literary Imagination.
Portland, Oregon
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Copyright © 2008 by Poetry Northwest
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission
