One of the great lessons of the Vietnam War is that a nation of people opposed to a foreign war can actually constrain & eventually halt that conflict. Unfortunately, one of the other lessons of that war is that this process takes time. Between the so-called Gulf of Tonkin incident on 4 August 1964 and the day when the last Huey pulled the final refugees off of the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon in April, 1975, eleven years, over 50,000 American & millions of Vietnamese lives were wasted. The current regime in Washington doesn’t know much about history books, but it does know that a “surgical strike” campaign, a war that can be measured in months or even weeks, is politically feasible.

Today was the day that Laura Bush originally set aside to invite a few poets to the White House to discuss Whitman, Hughes & Dickinson under the banner of ”Poetry and The American Voice.” This event won’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:

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 Against the War. We will compile an anthology of protest to be presented to the White House on that afternoon.

That email spread like a computer virus, replicating over & 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.

Somewhere along the way, somebody – it would interesting to know just who – thought to let Ms. Bush know of this impending anthology & the event was cancelled, generating several articles in the media. As it turned out, the poet laureates of both Canada and the United States weighed in against the war. Todd Swift’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 “poets will be poets,” which, condescending as it certainly is, at least acknowledges the historic opposition to war & brutality that many – but by no means all – poets have shown over the years. Even less surprisingly, writers who function professionally as right wing commentators, such as Roger Kimball & J. Bottum, 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 Iraq whose only crime is to have failed to oust a brutal & murderous dictator.

Since then, there have been plenty of opportunities for second-guessing. Hamill’s website has reminded everyone of what they knew all along – he’s really a conservative as a poet, even if he does oppose the war. His “chapbook” 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 & making a scene there might have generated even more media attention to the rapid arrival of a wide-spread & popular opposition to Bush’s war. I’m a skeptic on that one myself. I think that Hamill’s email took on a life of its own precisely because there is such widespread opposition.

But what concerns me is not the usual – & ultimately petty – divisions between traditions of poetry. I am experiencing emotions that I suspect many Germans must have felt in the late 1930s: my 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 Iraq. The other reasons for an invasion – ranging from the importance of upholding UN resolutions to Iraqi connections to al Qaeda – all fall into the categories of dubious to laughable. The history of the Soviet Union has demonstrated that containment works against far stronger foes than Saddam Hussein.

Which leaves only one plausible rationale for sending troops into Iraq: the liberation of the Iraqi people. I’m certainly sympathetic to that argument & can understand why left intellectuals from Ellen Willis to Salman Rushdie could be persuaded of the need for force to oust a genuinely barbaric dictator. But I have two problems with this argument itself – 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 United States.

Far from “helping to spread democracy” to other Middle-Eastern states, the Bush strategy is a recipe for long-term destabilization of an entire region, stretching from sub-Saharan Africa and extending to the western provinces of China & the Philippine  archipelago. And, as should be apparent to anyone in the post-September 11^th world, destabilization abroad can have profound consequences at home as well. Any attempt to stretch our military dominance over such a vast terrain – one that includes or touches at least four nuclear states – would require a transformation of the American economy toward a fortress America prepared for permanent conflict. It is no accident that no nation in history has been able to sustain an empire – the costs far outweigh any riches reaped.

What can be done to halt this disaster before it occurs? Short of a massive general strike in the United States, virtually nothing. The present regime has already demonstrated that it will not listen to the majority – that isn’t how it got into office, nor an impulse it has had even for one day since taking power. Further, it has subsequently consolidated power in all three branches of federal government.

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 & to call attention to all of the various new threats on democracy and justice that emanate from the axis of evil situated between Crawford, Texas, and the White House. But nobody, poets most of all, should be deluded into thinking that this by itself constitutes effective action.

The problem that poets have is one that we share with all progressives – the forces who promote this conflict have dramatically reorganized & 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 & until we can transform that imbalance, more to the American Voice than just poetry will continue to go unheard.

Against the orgy of unrelievably bad public poetry commemorating the first anniversary of the September 11^th attacks, I had the occasion to read Allen Curnow’s “A Framed Photograph” from his 1972 serial poem Trees, Effigies, Moving Objects, 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:

Act one, scene one

of the bloody melodrama. Everyone listened

while everyone read their poems. BANG! BANG!

and we cried all the way to My Lai. 

Which in turn brought me back to the poems concerning JFK’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 “command performance” occasions, all show the range of what might be possible within this genre that I might characterize as shared public emotion – from the most personal (Zukofsky’s “A”-23) to the most declamatory (Ginsberg’s “Wichita Vortex Sutra, Part II” or Duncan’s “The Fire, Passages 13”).

Spicer’s JFK poem appears in Language:

Smoke signals

Like in the Eskimo villages on the coast where the earthquake hit

Bang, snap, crack. They will never know what hit them

On the coast of Alaska. They expect everybody to be insane.

This is a poem about the death of John F. Kennedy.

Spicer’s poem replicates the process of grieving in the way that grief turns everything, no matter how remote – here a description of the 1964 Alaskan earthquake – into a commentary on its obsessive object. It’s no coincidence that two phrases – “Smoke signals” and “Bang, snap, crack” – apply equally to the devastation in Anchorage & the shots ringing out over Elm Street in Dallas.

Spicer’s ambivalence over public language is on record. His very last poem, concluding Book of Magazine Verse, takes an unnamed Ginsberg to task for allowing himself to be chosen Kraj Majales in a Prague May Day celebration. One poem earlier, Spicer makes the claim that

They’ve (the leaders of our country) have become involved in a network of lies.

We (the poets) have also become in network of lies by opposing them.*

It’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 “we both know how shitty the world is,” 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 Magazine Verse, 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.

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 The Prelude), a category that is as inclusive of emotion as it is of thought. Add to this the impulse to “even out” 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 – and Titanic – proportions.

*I have always wondered whether to assign the “missing” words in that second line to Spicer’s alcoholism, which would kill him only weeks after this was written, or if in fact the absence of “involved” in particular signaled a deeper level of meaning.

** See my comments for September 5.