(response to a post by philip metres and others)
As a reader and sometimes contributer, i'd highly recommend Phillip Metres' blog, as well as his fascinating collection of anti-war verse
BEHIND THE LINES: WAR RESISTANCE POETRY ON THE AMERICAN HOMEFRONT SINCE 1941.
The blog and book both raise many intersting and challenging questions, a good deal of which have been for the most part have exiled to a more or less extent from American poetry today. What does this say about the current "atmosphere" of poetry, academically supported and otherwise? Is"quietude" limited to only one form of "quiet" or ""silence"? Might not the term be seen, heard and written of in a different comtext from that originally assigned to it?
There are some earlier collections from the 1960's which are quite good; especially i'd recommend Walter Lowenfels' 101 AMERICAN POEMS OF PROTEST--which has an amazing range among the 101 poems from al periods and "groups" of persons in the US--including the famous statements of Vanzetti before his and Saco's 1927 execution. The peaceful contributions of American Anarchists are often overlooked, except for Patchen perhaps.
Another book i'd highly recommend is:
American Protest Literature With a Foreword by John Stauffer and an Afterword by Howard Zinn Edited by Zoe Trodd from Harvard U Press--
From the Declaration of Independence and previous pamphlets to the War in Iraq this anthology has a really wide breadth of perspectives and writers--a lotof terrific writing in the book, which contravenes the usual assumption that "protest writing is bad writing."
In re some of these questions of "protest/Peace writing is bad writing" I've written two review/essays on line re what i consider one of the most significant books to emerge from the current wars:
Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak a collection of 22
poems by 17 detainees at the US detention center at Guantánamo Bay.
Edited by Marc Falkoff
David-Baptiste Chirot: "Waterboarding & Poetry"
Wordforword #13 Spring 2008
(also has Visual Poetry by chirot)Kaurab Translation Site
Poems from Guantánamo
The Detainees Speak
David Baptite Chirot
In these two pieces I write not only of the poems, the book and its manner of translation, but also of the American reception of the poems in print, radio and email (including this list, though without mentioning names) reviews and remarks. As with the generic opinions of protest poems--and/or "poems of witness"-- being "bad poems" in formal terms, the Guantanamo poems are considered as "failures" as poetry, which helps in evading any of the issues associated with the book and its authors and translators. In many ways, the poems reveal more about their American readers than about the detainees themselves.
An interesting question for our times is why this convention of (and conventional) response is so widespread and expressed in the types of elitist, formal, distanced, "complex and ambiguous" terms which protest protest writing to begin with. It is interesting to me that it is not the War nor the government nor practices of torture and illegal detention that are protested against, as it were, but that the poems of protest which the war has produced are.
In this vein i wrote a critique of Chalres Bernstein's "Enough," addressed to the "community" as a call to evade the direct protest poem in favor of a "complex ambiguous" language for dealing with the situation. The piece originally appeard in galatearesurrection #3 and has been reprinted here and in the UK a few times. The "Poets Against the War are considered inferior because they are written in the same language Bush uses--(one might contest this; did Bush speak poetically? etc)--that is, the poems openly express opposition rather than presenting a formally contructed poetic object making use of a form of New New Criticism: the "complex," "the ambiguous" (seven types of ambiguity perhaps--??)--as response. As Amiri Baraka has remarked, this perhaps a way of "playing it safe;" after all, if statements are ambiguous, they might be difficult to "charge with dissent" by either a prospective employer or this or that group supportive of the wars , or agency of the government on campus etc.
Unlike the avant-gardes of the past, which took the dual militaary meaning of the term seriously, today the avant does not openly express either pro-War attitudes (Italian futurism) or anti-War dissent (Dada.) Perhaps, then, what "avant" has come to mean is a removal not only from War itself, but from the aspects of War which signal an engagment with Peace or actually societies, human lives. That is, due to the emphasis on the Formal, there is a certain evacuation of resistence which might cause one "any trouble." The sense of cautiousness and a form of fear and anxiety, echoes in many ways the Eisenhower- McCarthy years and hence a connection with aspects of the New Criticism of that era, which also stressed the Formal over direct engagements with the times.
This area and conception of poetry in itself might be investigated along side the poems of protest and Peace, as another response which the society has given to the wars being fought in its name.
For a great deal more of info and examples of poetry writing film music art peace war and questions thereof one might check out also
http://davidbaptistechirot.blogspot.com
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