[Note: This piece is a response to David Biespiel’s “Why Jihadists Love Postmodern Poetry,” posted on The Rumpus, February 3, 2015.]
We are caught unawares by violence, no matter how many news feeds we receive: this is one of the conditions of our modern, I’m tempted to say our postmodern, existence. Some of this violence is covert, or at least slow and crabwise in its approach: the betrayals of love, encroaching mortality. And some of it is overt: bombs and starvation, planes that fall from the sky for any number of reasons, a knife at 2 a.m. on an otherwise quiet street. David Biespiel has experienced one of those overt moments—obliquely and at a distance, as most of us did a few weeks ago. He has found poetry, or some sector of poetry, or some idea he has about poetry, decidedly wanting in the face of that violence. He is angry. He feels an art to which he has devoted a significant portion of his life is being used, treacherously, against him, and indeed against the values of art, society, and experience in which his life is rooted.
Like all bad polemics, Biespiel’s post trades in generalizations. At its heart is an implicit equivalence between “these 21st-century totalitarian thugs” and the poets he believes have behaved in irresponsibly “postmodern” ways, ways that apparently play (innocently or not-so-innocently) into Jihadist hands. But Biespiel never defines “postmodern,” beyond some sort of vague, mystical, even notional landscape of “relativism” whose aims are “not unrelated” to the violence he deplores. Of course he would never go so far as to name a poet or text that does this. The examples he offers include a poem he himself has composed based on swipes from the internet and an Osama bin Laden snippet he construes as a prose poem. As far as the landscape of contemporary American poetry goes, he contents himself with a pallid misappropriation of another polemic (Cathy Park Hong’s Lana Turner manifesto, which presumably was easier to access and excerpt than Cathy Park Hong’s actual poetry). Eventually he conflates the two poles of his polemic into a single phrase, “this vision of postmodernist jihad,” to which presumably both Muslim insurgents and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry diaspora must pay like fealty.
The only factual grist Biespiel’s post offers, beyond the opening citation that apparently set him off, is his brief roster of 20th-century poet-heroes. It’s an odd list, running from poets whose syntactic and political clarity were famously transparent (Auden) to poets whose imagination and crystalline approach to form resist any imputation of transparency (Holub, who was, of course, later accused of collaboration with Czechoslovakia’s Communist regime by sheer virtue of the fact he survived it in situ). Biespiel claims these poets “confront violence and extremism through cohesive argument and metaphor that is drawn from insight into shared human experience.” It would take another essay, I suppose—a rather more nuanced essay—to introduce poets who confront the real, in all its gore and sorrow, its terror and beauty, through other means: Whitman, Dickinson, Hopkins, Gennady Aygi, Paul Celan, René Char (whose bona fides are irreproachable politically, if not perhaps aesthetically, by the criteria Biespiel ascribes), and a host of living voices, from Aase Berg to Alice Oswald….
At an earlier moment, in 2009, in the immediate wake of the murder of Neda Soltan in Teheran and circulation of the video documenting the murder, I, like Biespiel, was far away from the scene of the actual violence. I was in Scotland. I did in fact have a volume of Milosz with me, and I did indeed turn to “A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto,” as well as “Tidings” and “Undressing Justine” and a number of other poems we may both venerate. But I also had with me books by Carla Harryman and Lisa Robertson and Alice Notley: poets who, I would argue, write urgently “from insight into shared human experience,” if not “through cohesive argument and metaphor”; whose work may or may not invite “communion and renewal,” and whom Biespiel must surely rank among the most nefarious “postmodernists” (although again I’m guessing, since Biespiel, presumably out of fear for his own safety, doesn’t name names). The single line I took with me as I walked across rainy Midlothian was not Milosz’s, though—not this time. It was Harryman’s: “Did we live in a constellation? Did it explode?” A fragment from a book I read in fragments, that I experienced as fragments, even as the Neda Soltan video replayed endlessly on YouTube. It’s either a Zen koan or an honest, even accurate, cosmological question. Or both.
When the Charlie Hebdo massacre occurred, I turned not to Auden’s “September 1, 1939” (although I could have: it is a great poem, one that I have all but memorized, one that I teach for what it offers concerning the relationship between public and private traumas), but to George Oppen’s “Route.” It’s fair to say that “Route” is a difficult poem. It is, in fact, a poem about the difficulty—as well as the necessity—of facing atrocity head-on (in any medium). It trades in the slippages and interstices Biespiel derides, that Biespiel accuses of somehow being complicit with terror, or at best abdicating relevance and political (even politicized) meaning.
This would be news to Oppen, who spent much of his life working for political relevance alongside a highly politicized, if idiosyncratic, sense of public meaning. In fact, Oppen insisted on “clarity”—“Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful / thing in the world,” as he famously put it in “Route”: “I have not and never did have any motive of poetry / But to achieve clarity.” Oppen’s “clarity,” however, embraces context and nuance—indeed, up to and including the fundamental indeterminism of much of our experience, individual and collective. “All this is reportage,” he insists: “the purity of the materials,” which for Oppen means “to present the circumstances.” In other words, the facts, even when those facts are doubtful, equivocal, subjective. This is, in a nutshell, what “postmodernism” means to me. It’s the most honest we can be—in language—about our complex, imbricated lives.
Sometimes we don’t welcome this sort of honesty. Sometimes we demand it—or it demands us.
It’s not my business who or what others turn to when faced with terror. (As a poet who also happens to be a practicing Christian, I have my ideas…just as you, whoever you are reading this, must have yours. Another friend of mine confesses she turns to Monet in such moments, even as she doubts whether this particular turn is a stinging luxury.) One of the glories of 21st-century human civilization is that the arts have provided a variety of texts, sounds, and images to which one can turn—in love as well as terror, in the face of life as well as death.
As it happens, the heart of Oppen’s poem is Nazi atrocity, and the irreducibly false (Oppen would argue, insane) choices atrocity poses to those would survive it. To charge that an embrace of context and nuance, as a reflection of “reportage” and in the face of atrocity, is somehow complicit with the atrocity it seeks to represent or process is one of the most appalling, morally abhorrent, and aesthetically ignorant arguments I have ever heard made about poetry.
Biespiel concludes “Well you can count me as one poet who is not reluctant to ask questions about the capriciousness of both postmodernist poetics and also violent extremist mayhem based on a similar affectation for disintegration.” For him, the barbarians have come—and no Cavafy-esque shilly-shallying about who those barbarians are, what they’re after, or what poetry’s response should be (to wit: “persuasive metaphor and communion and renewal” on par with “the best hashtag haiku I’ve read,” a concept that surely would have startled Auden).
It was Miroslav Holub who declared “It is against emptiness. A poem is being against emptiness. Against the primary and secondary emptiness.” And René Char who maintained “Poems are those pieces of incorruptible existence that we hurl at the repugnant maw of death, hurl sufficiently high that, ricocheting back, they fall into the world where names for the whole are found.” C.D. Wright adds “Poetry is the language of intensity. Because we are going to die, an expression of intensity is justified.” This being the case, I can only wish that Biespiel, speaking as a poet and for poetry, had been able to come up with better questions.