Unquestionably the most
ironic inclusion in the new issue of Radical Society
is Andrei Codrescu, the Romanian exile turned Louisiana academic & part of NPR’s decorative collection
of “quaint dialect” commentators alongside the likes of Bailey White. For
reasons that are understandable enough, Codrescu has always been an
anti-Communist & resistant to the idea that would be shades of difference
between the likes of, say, Stalin & western Marxists in general. To find
Codrescu in a journal that was issued initially under the banner Socialist Revolution is itself an index
of exactly how much the world has transformed in the past thirty years.
Not that Codrescu can stop
himself from revisiting the past in introducing the work of Eugen Jebeleanu
(1911-1991), whom he characterizes as the “epic poet” of Romania ’s Communist period (1947-89). In Codrescu’s
narrative, Jebeleanu started as a true believer in Soviet bloc modernism.
Codrescu compares him with Nazim Hikmet, Pablo Neruda & Yannis
Ritsos, all of whom played important roles in their
own national literatures. However, as the Stalinist project decayed into “folk
kitsch,” Jebeleanu rebelled. In Codrescu’s words, “Jebeleanu woke up.”
The poetry we are offered in
Radical Society comes from
Jebeleanu’s later works, when he has become a lyric surrealist of a modern,
maybe even post-modern type. Vasco Popa & Tomaž Šalamun are closer in
temperament & style to the works that Mathew Zapruder has translated here
(and elsewhere across
the web – Zapruder has been the key to Jebeleanu’s arrival in the West) than Yevtushenko or Vosnesenski.
The poems themselves are
okay but the question they raise for me is one of value with regards to the
context of language & state. What does it mean to be a national figure as a
poet when the nation itself consists of just 22 million people? It’s a question
that bedevils any thoughtful writer, regardless of our proximity to the
imperial center. Twenty-two million people is notably
fewer than the number who live in Canada , which itself has only two-thirds of the population
of California . The situation for any Canadian poet is in some ways
more complex, given their participation in at least two larger linguistic
literary traditions as well as their nearness to the heavy-handed hegemon along
their Southern rim. But these broader traditions mean that a writer like Steve McCaffery , George Bowering ,
Michael Ondaatje or Nicole Brossard can reach & have an impact far beyond
their borders without necessarily having to submit to the curiously alienating
process of translation, whereas the Romanian-writing Jebeleanu was constrained
by a literary community that did not exist significantly outside of his
country’s own borders.
Twenty-two million certainly
makes a nation if it so chooses. Romania ’s population today ranks 47th
among the 235 nations of the world, well ahead of Australia & Greece , though smaller than Uzbekistan or Tanzania . It’s twice the size of Pennsylvania , maybe 1½ times the size of metropolitan New York . This is precisely where questions of state &
language on the one hand and the value
of the local on the other flood one another. One poet becomes, in
Codrescu’s formulation (for which he credits Allen Ginsberg), the “epic poet”
of his nation, another is merely a New York School writer in a town that is itself wider & more diverse than that.
One Sunday last November, I
posted an email
from Juliana Spahr in which she argues for a diversity of literatures:
I think it is crucial that we all not be scared of the
diversity of contemporary poetries. I think it is a great sign of health. I love
it. I like to think, and I think it might be true even, that right now, when I
am alive, right now there are more poetries or I have the possibility of
reading more poetries than humans at any other time. What a huge weird world of
poetries! I can't read it all. I admit it. But what a great
thing.
Yet, now the note of sadness, what has happened is a
peculiar myopia. I say this over and over, but one of the strangest, saddest?,
things that is the result of this wealth is not that it is hard for readers,
but that so few of these poetries talk to each other. So language poets and
Nation language/Caribbean poets and pidgin/Bamboo Ridge poets and Scots poets
and etc. all have these arguments against standard
English. They are different arguments but they meet in various ways. And yet
the poets so rarely meet in journals, in readings, at parties. What a lost
opportunity.
Spahr’s complaint, which is
completely legit, seems to me the obverse face of this same coin. For these
poets to meet, to truly commingle & communicate, there has been a commons
& little magazines are never that. Either they are local, if not to a
region, then to an aesthetic, or else they are entirely shapeless. Neither
strategy can claim to solve the problem of the minority language writer exiled
within a city or state of another tongue. Neither can bring Jebeleanu’s poetry
to us without the intermediation of a Mathew Zapruder (aided in Radical Society by Radu
Ioanid). Writers who inhabit more than one such world
– I’m thinking of Tsering Wangmo Dhompa as one example, but Edwin Torres could
just as easily serve as another – never do so abstractly. They are as specific
to their respective contexts, each one, as a human could be.
It’s not clear what the role
of poetry will prove to be in Radical
Society over time. The history of
Socialist Review doesn’t necessarily
auger well. The journal has had what can only be characterized as a tortured
relationship to culture over the decades.* The
presence of so much creative work in the first issue of the new regime is
noteworthy, but so is the somewhat scatter-gun nature of its aesthetics.
Hirschman’s Depestre and Codrescu’s Jebeleanu fall
into the category of a late modernism of the margins. Charles Bernstein & Katha Pollitt may have attended Harvard at the same time, but
they represent radically divergent poetics. & only Sikelianos offers a
sample of what writing might be like by anybody under the age of 50. Samples of diverse poetics presented precisely as that comes closer
to a mode of literary tourism** than it does to the commons for which Spahr
& I yearn alike.
Where is Radical Society heading? We shall see.
* Thus the
journal may have published Don na Haraway’s “Manifesto for
Cyborgs,” but it twice – several
years apart – failed to accept Samuel R. Delany’s
classic response to Haraway.
** Thus it
strikes me -- & the Sikelianos piece I looked at yesterday is what really
drove this home – as being poetry for people who don’t read poetry, that
curious genre. But does that expand the audience for poetry or merely absolve
these non-readers from ever having to confront all of poetry’s gloriously
incommensurate difficulties?