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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Wednesday, February 12, 2003</span></h2>

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<span style="font-family: Arial;">One of the great lessons of
the Vietnam War is that a nation of people opposed to a foreign war can
actually constrain &amp; eventually halt that conflict. Unfortunately, one of
the other lessons of that war is that this process takes time. Between the
so-called </span><st1:place><st1:placetype><span style="font-family: Arial;">Gulf</span></st1:placetype><span style="font-family: Arial;"> of </span><st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial;">Tonkin</span></st1:placename></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;"> incident on </span><st1:date day="4" month="8" year="1964"><span style="font-family: Arial;">4 August 1964</span></st1:date><span style="font-family: Arial;"> and the day when the last Huey pulled the final
refugees off of the roof of the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">U.S.</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Arial;"> embassy in </span><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Saigon</span></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;"> in April,
1975, eleven years, over 50,000 American &amp; millions of Vietnamese lives
were wasted. The current regime in </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Washington</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;"> doesn&#8217;t know much about history books, but it does
know that a &#8220;surgical strike&#8221; campaign, a war that can be measured in months or
even weeks, is politically feasible.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Today was the day that </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Laura</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;"> Bush originally set aside to invite a few poets to the White House to
discuss Whitman, Hughes &amp; Dickinson under the banner of &#8221;Poetry and The
American Voice.&#8221; This event won&#8217;t happen because one of the invited poets, Sam
Hamill, turned out to be a conservative only in his aesthetics. Hamill, as
concerned as any American about the impending disaster, sent out an email to
some friends:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: &quot;Courier New&quot;;">I am asking every poet
to speak up for the conscience of our country and lend his or her name to our
petition against this war, and to make February 12 a day of Poetry <span class="GramE">Against</span> the War. We will compile an anthology of protest to
be presented to the White House on that afternoon.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">That email spread like a
computer virus, replicating over &amp; over again until virtually every poet in
the country must have received it at least once. I know that I stopped counting
the copies I received when it got into double digits.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Somewhere along the way,
somebody &#8211; it would interesting to know just who &#8211; thought to let Ms. Bush know
of this impending anthology &amp; the event was cancelled, generating several
articles in the media. As it turned out, the poet laureates of both </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Canada</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Arial;"> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">and </i>the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">United States</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Arial;"> weighed in against the war. </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Todd Swift</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">&#8217;s ad-hoc antiwar anthologies got some media
attention that they almost certainly would not otherwise have received.
Editorial writers generally took the line that &#8220;poets will be poets,&#8221; which,
condescending as it certainly is, at least acknowledges the historic opposition
to war &amp; brutality that many &#8211; but by no means all &#8211; poets have shown over
the years. Even less surprisingly, writers who function professionally as right
wing commentators, such as Roger Kimball &amp; J. <span class="SpellE">Bottum</span>,
both invited to the cancelled soiree, weighed in to scold their peers for a
lack of manners, a curious way to balance the impolite bombing of the citizens
of </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Iraq</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Arial;"> whose only crime is to have failed to oust a brutal
&amp; murderous dictator. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Since then, there have been
plenty of opportunities for second-guessing. <span class="SpellE">Hamill&#8217;s</span>
website has reminded everyone of what they knew all along &#8211; he&#8217;s really a
conservative as a poet, even if he does oppose the war. His &#8220;chapbook&#8221; in fact
reflects an establishmentarian poetics that wants more than anything to retain
its role as just that. Others have suggested that attending the event &amp;
making a scene there might have generated even more media attention to the
rapid arrival of a wide-spread &amp; popular opposition to Bush&#8217;s war. I&#8217;m a
skeptic on that one myself. I think that <span class="SpellE">Hamill&#8217;s</span> email
took on a life of its own precisely because there is such widespread
opposition. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">But what <span class="GramE">concerns</span>
me is not the usual &#8211; &amp; ultimately petty &#8211; divisions between traditions of
poetry. I am experiencing emotions that I suspect many Germans must have felt
in the late 1930s: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">my </i>government is
about to rain death onto the world in great quantity. The legitimate safety of
the nation in which I live, one ostensible reason for this, can only be damaged
by any invasion of </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Iraq</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Arial;">. The other reasons for an invasion &#8211; ranging from
the importance of upholding UN resolutions to Iraqi connections to al Qaeda &#8211;
all fall into the categories of dubious to laughable. The history of the </span><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Soviet Union</span></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;"> has demonstrated that containment works against far
stronger foes than Saddam Hussein. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Which
leaves only one plausible rationale for sending troops into </span></span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Iraq</span></span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">: the liberation of the Iraqi
people.</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> I&#8217;m certainly sympathetic
to that argument &amp; can understand why left intellectuals from Ellen Willis
to <span class="SpellE">Salman</span> Rushdie could be persuaded of the need for
force to oust a genuinely barbaric dictator. But I have two problems with this
argument itself &#8211; first is a rather long list of other nations that would, by
logic, then force us to engage. Hussein may be the worst of a bad lot, but he is
hardly alone. The second is that, from an Iraqi perspective, the last nation on
earth I would to become an involuntary protectorate of would be the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">United States</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Arial;">. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Far from &#8220;helping to spread
democracy&#8221; to other Middle-Eastern states, the Bush strategy is a recipe for
long-term destabilization of an entire region, stretching from sub-Saharan </span><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Africa</span></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;"> and extending to the western provinces of </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">China</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Arial;"> &amp; the <span class="GramE">Philippine<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>archipelago</span>. And, as should be
apparent to anyone in the post-September 11<sup>th</sup> world, destabilization
abroad can have profound consequences at home as well. Any attempt to stretch
our military dominance over such a vast terrain &#8211; one that includes or touches
at least four nuclear states &#8211; would require a transformation of the American
economy toward a fortress </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">America</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Arial;"> prepared for permanent conflict. It is no accident
that no nation in history has been able to sustain an empire &#8211; the costs far
outweigh any riches reaped. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">What can be done to halt
this disaster before it occurs? <span class="GramE">Short of a massive general
strike in the </span></span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">United States</span></span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">, virtually nothing.</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> The present regime has already demonstrated that it
will not listen to the majority &#8211; that isn&#8217;t how it got into office, nor an
impulse it has had even for one day since taking power. </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Furth</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">er, it has subsequently consolidated power in all
three branches of federal government.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Poets need to continue to
speak out, to demonstrate to the world the absolute lack of consensus the
actions of this regime have, to point to the hypocrisies &amp; to call
attention to all of the various new threats on democracy and justice that emanate
from the axis of evil situated between </span><st1:place><st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">Crawford</span></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">, </span><st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;">Texas</span></st1:state></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">, and the White House. But nobody, poets most of all,
should be </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">del</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;">uded into thinking that this by itself constitutes
effective action. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The problem that poets have
is one that we share with all progressives &#8211; the forces who promote this
conflict have dramatically reorganized &amp; transformed themselves since the
1960s. Progressives continue to use the same tools that took so very long to work
four decades ago that millions died needlessly. Unless &amp; until we can
transform that imbalance, more to the American Voice than just poetry will
continue to go unheard.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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          <div class="date-outer">
        
<h2 class='date-header'><span>Tuesday, September 17, 2002</span></h2>

          <div class="date-posts">
        
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Against the orgy of
unrelievably bad public poetry commemorating the first anniversary of the
September 11<sup>th</sup> attacks, I had the occasion to read Allen Curnow&#8217;s &#8220;A
Framed Photograph&#8221; from his 1972 serial poem <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Trees, Effigies, Moving Objects</i>, in which the assassinations of the
brothers Kennedy is posed against the consequences of their own actions
elsewhere in the world, as in this stanza:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Act
one, scene one<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">of
the bloody melodrama. Everyone listened<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">while
everyone read their poems. BANG! BANG!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">and
we cried all the way to My Lai.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Which in turn brought me
back to the poems concerning JFK&#8217;s assassination that were written by Jack
Spicer and Louis Zukofsky and beyond that, the anti-Vietnam War poems by Robert
Duncan and Allen Ginsberg. While none of these were explicitly written for
&#8220;command performance&#8221; occasions, all show the range of what might be possible
within this genre that I might characterize as shared public emotion &#8211; from the
most personal (Zukofsky&#8217;s &#8220;A&#8221;-23) to the most declamatory (Ginsberg&#8217;s &#8220;Wichita
Vortex Sutra, Part II&#8221; or Duncan&#8217;s &#8220;The Fire, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Passages </i>13&#8221;). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Spicer&#8217;s JFK poem appears in
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Language</i>:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Smoke signals<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Like in the Eskimo villages on the coast where the
earthquake hit<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Bang, snap, crack. They will never know what hit them<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">On the coast of Alaska. They expect everybody to be
insane.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">This is a poem about the death of John F. Kennedy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Spicer&#8217;s poem replicates the
process of grieving in the way that grief turns everything, no matter how
remote &#8211; here a description of the 1964 Alaskan earthquake &#8211; into a commentary
on its obsessive object. It&#8217;s no coincidence that two phrases &#8211; &#8220;Smoke signals&#8221;
and &#8220;Bang, snap, crack&#8221; &#8211; apply equally to the devastation in Anchorage &amp;
the shots ringing out over Elm Street in Dallas. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Spicer&#8217;s ambivalence over
public language is on record. His very last poem, concluding <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Book of Magazine Verse</i>, takes an unnamed
Ginsberg to task for allowing himself to be chosen <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kraj Majales</i> in a Prague May Day celebration. One poem earlier,
Spicer makes the claim that<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">They&#8217;ve (the leaders of our country) have become
involved in a network of lies.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">We (the poets) have also become in network of lies by
opposing them.*<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">It&#8217;s a position that Spicer
knows is untenable. Indeed, irresolvable conflict is the primary Spicerian
theme. Spicer himself wrote obliquely about the Vietnam War earlier in that same
book. And the final poem to Ginsberg concedes that &#8220;we both know how shitty the
world is,&#8221; refusing to place Spicer above the very same behavior he is about to
criticize. Yet, while it is possible to argue that, at least in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Magazine Verse</i>, Spicer chooses
individual human relations over social ones (which thus would be the point of
his announced solidarity with the Prague police rather than the
counter-cultural demonstrators with whom Ginsberg was parading), the JFK poem
clearly places Spicer on the other side of that line. This is ambivalence in
the most literal sense. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">All of this harkens back to
Wordsworthian homilies concerning emotion recollected in tranquility when
tranquility is precisely what is lacking if the poem is to be taken as a
possible transcript of consciousness (as Wordsworth himself does in the
Crossing the Alps section of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Prelude</i>),
a category that is as inclusive of emotion as it is of thought. Add to this the
impulse to &#8220;even out&#8221; rough edges until the product shines with that glazed
state of crockery called the well-wrought urn** and you have a prescription for
literary disaster of titanic &#8211; and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Titanic</i>
&#8211; proportions. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">*I have
always wondered whether to assign the &#8220;missing&#8221; words in that second line to
Spicer&#8217;s alcoholism, which would kill him only weeks after this was written, or
if in fact the absence of &#8220;involved&#8221; in particular signaled a deeper level of
meaning.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">** See my
comments for September 5.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">MEMOIRS &amp; COLLABORATIONS</span><br /><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Leningrad-American-Writers-Soviet-Union/dp/1562790056">Leningrad</a><br /><a href="http://www.thegrandpiano.org/">The Grand Piano</a><br /><a href="https://www.saltpublishing.com/products/under-albany-9781844710515">Under Albany</a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">CRITICISM</span><br /><a href="http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/0937804207/the-new-sentence.aspx">The New Sentence</a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">ANTHOLOGY</span><br /><a href="https://secure.touchnet.com/C22921_ustores/web/classic/product_detail.jsp?PRODUCTID=327&SINGLESTORE=true">In The American Tree</a><br /><br /><br /><br />
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<br /><img alt="" src="file%3A///Users/Lynn/Desktop/silliman2a.jpg" / /><img alt="" src="file%3A///Users/Lynn/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/moz-screenshot.png" / /><span style="color: #990000; font-weight: bold;">RON SILLIMAN</span> has written and edited 40 books, and had his poetry and criticism translated into 16 languages. Silliman was a 2012 Kelly Writers House Fellow, the 2010 recipient of the Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation, a 2003 Literary Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2002 Fellow of the Pennsylvania Arts Council, and a 1998 Pew Fellow in the Arts. Silliman has a plaque in the walk dedicated to poetry in his home town of Berkeley and a sculpture in the Transit Center of Bury, Lancaster, a part of the Irwell Sculpture Trail. He lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />(c) 2002-2019 by Ron Silliman.
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