The old creative writing class imperative to “write what you know” may have its place, but lately I’ve been thinking of the power of poetry not to “know,” but to “no”—the ways in which linguistic negation can imagine an alternate reality, draw a line in the sand, or simply contradict received knowledge or assumptions to see the world more clearly.
While the mental exercise of putting creative focus on what things are not can lead us into the wonderfully absurd (think of Humpty Dumpty referring to his “un-birthday” present in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass), I’ve been returning to William Stafford’s poem “At the Un-National Monument along the Canadian Border,” a poem in which the initial absurdity of the premise of an “un-national monument,” like an “un-birthday,” allows the poem to disarm (pun intended) the reader into absorbing the author’s commentary on our societal values and priorities.
The poem begins:
This is the field where the battle did not happen,
where the unknown soldier did not die.
Immediately, the repetition of “did not” reminds us of how and why our usual monuments come to be: battle, death. But here:
This is the field where grass joined hands,
where no monument stands,
and the only heroic thing is the sky.
Our gaze turns to the sky (its own kind of no-thing-ness) and stays there for the first two lines of the second stanza:
Birds fly here without a sound,
unfolding their wings across the open.
And then our gaze returns to earth, which we now see as the monument of “no monument,” as the poem ends with three strongly enjambed lines, a kind of release of breath and formality after a poem of tonally stately (or faux-stately) end-stopped or end-paused lines:
No people killed–or were killed–on this ground
hallowed by neglect and an air so tame
that people celebrate it by forgetting its name.
While the repetition of “did not” and “no” (“no monument,” “no people killed”) clearly defines this space by what did not happen here and thus what it is not, Stafford laces his lines with other, more subtle negations and reversals of expectation, from the sky as the “only heroic” figure, to the birds flying “without a sound” (no cannons, no military bands), to the almost Lewis Carroll-esque celebration of the final line, in which we memorialize this place of no-memory, honoring it “by forgetting its name.”
Even in individual words, Stafford embeds the work of imagining our world otherwise. Echoing the “Un” of “Un-National,” we have the “unknown soldier,” a sadly familiar figure, but here, “the unknown soldier did not die,” inviting us to bring a kind of double negative to life. Can we imagine the solider not only alive, but known, not just reduced to an abstract, symbolic “heroic figure,” but returned to personhood and individuality?
While the “un-” in the image of birds “unfolding their wings” is even more subtle, my mind follows that action of folding to the flag-folding ceremony we might imagine occurring in a more traditional “national” paradigm. Here, the national gives way to the natural – no flag to fold as a mere symbol of freedom, just the actual effortless freedom of the birds.
Whether Stafford intended a nod to Auden in this poem, it feels like it’s in implicit conversation with Auden’s now famous statement that “poetry makes nothing happen” in another poem of “commemoration,” “In Memory of W. B. Yeats“:
For poetry makes nothing happen, it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
In our political moment, there is some comfort and hope in imagining what we might make not happen – what walls we might not build, what wars we might not initiate, what protections we might not dismantle in the perverse name of “progress.”