In a fascinating post by David Biespiel on the Poetry Foundation website, he makes the argument that there is a needed, nay, NECESSARY! link between poetry and civic life, between the life of the mind engaged in art and the life of the mind engaged in politics.
However, he claims, "I would further make a distinction between activism and volunteerism, which are not my subjects here, and civic discourse and democratic engagement, which are. I also don’t mean to take up the idea of poets engaging the public just through their poems or to address the role that hard-working poetry administrators play in trying to bring more poems to more people." He also excludes poets who "moonlight as cultural writers."
So I'm more than a tad confused about what really is his subject. When you exclude activism, volunteering in the community, writing poems involving the public sphere, bringing more of the public into the realm of poetry, writing the editorials/essays/books addressing larger cultural concerns, what have you got left?
He says, "I mean to question American poets’ intractable and often disdainful disinterest in participating in the public political arena outside the realm of poetry." So, we want Whitman for President? Donald Justice for appellate court judge? Maybe Donald Hall for Mayor.
Is he actually saying he just wants more writers in public office? Talk about power corrupting - look what happens when you just give poets a tiny taste of it! I'm thinking here of tenure, honorary chairs, prize purses. The infighting, backbiting, condemnation, scorn, self-pity and self-aggrandizing makes Congress look like a well-oiled Navy SEAL platoon. And that's just the letters page!
I don't dispute that there's some common ground between the private life of the mind and its public workings out in the town square. I quite enjoy reading topical poems, though nearly all of it is forgettable weeks after its composition. The stuff that lasts (and frankly the stuff that's usually worth writing in the first place) speaks to larger, broader issues that transcend the specifics of a particular issue or cause, showing us what it means to be weak, broken humans trying to make something better for us and others. "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" is apropos for both Kennedy brothers, James A. Garfield, Dr. King.
I don't take that to mean denigrating anybody who writes protest poetry, whose political convictions bubble over into their verse, who try to engage a larger, wider audience by speaking to something besides the beauties of their garden and memories of dead relatives. I respect that, it's something I'm terrible at doing yet still aspire to. Because my own political motivations are muddled, complex and still forming, I have a hard time making any kind of forthright civic statement.
In the article Biespiel mocks the idea of poetry's insularity and self-reference: "'To write about something other than poetry,' one poet spat at me in an e-mail, 'is to waste my time.'" But I don't get what exactly the problem is here: it's like asking why there isn't more socially relevant pottery, why architecture insists on always "being about buildings."
I don't ask Sting to tell me where I can shop for the best acrylic oil paint. I don't fret when Charlie Sheen refuses to divulge his picks for the Caldecott Medal. And I'm certainly not concerned that Robert Pinsky's opinions on which rocket propulsion system NASA should use doesn't make it into his verse. I've got no problem with that (frankly I think it could be a really cool conceit), but I'm certainly not expecting it.
Read the article for yourself: am I misinterpreting? If civic activity is his clarion call, why exclude all the everyday things that poets and ordinary people do to engage in it?
I dunno. But here's something not very good, from quite a few years ago, that's about as political as I usually get.
Thoughts on the Loss of the Columbia
Matt Quarterman
And now America has lost men in space.
The President announced there are no survivors –
Indeed, how could there be?
Fire, explosion, lack of oxygen,
and a 40 mile drop
are not to be surmounted.
Over Texas skies, Columbia
(a brave explorer who also ended badly)
is down, repeat, Columbia is down.
This is a poor week to launch.
The Challenger Disaster on the 28th,
Grissom and Apollo “X” on the 27th,
and now Feb. 1st will be forever
remembered
as the day Americans died in space,
on re-entry, lost their way back home.
The country condoles, but has more important
things on its mind these days.
So all rest assured, that though this breach
of our safety shows our susceptibility to danger,
it was not caused by the Israeli’s presence,
nor could ground-to-air missiles have reached
that high and that far into the morning air.
Terrorism is also ruled out now,
and we are left with
the simple, ordinary mechanical dangers
that everyone from Laika to Glenn has undergone.
I once was proud that “we’ve lost no men in space,”
that no omen or symbol could ever change it.
I wished then that I could be Gordo Cooper.
I was seven years old when Sally took her ride
And even the Challenger, well, wasn’t in space yet,
though it shook me to hear of the explosion,
and the setbacks to the program.
Fifteen years later I wonder at the heroism
(and hubris, and folly) of flight into space,
Daedalus, the Wrights, da Vinci, Godard
never said that growing wings would be safe,
only that if we grasped just beyond reach
we could sprinkle moondust on our grandchildren.
Instead, they are samples in hermetically sealed rooms
and the families mourn their dead.
Their grief is televised on the major networks,
and we can thank goodness no politics were involved.
We’re grateful that these dead have so little to do with us.
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