www.newsandletters.org
|
|
NEWS & LETTERS, April - May 2008EssayReview: Poetry and CommitmentTerry MoonAdrienne Rich's essay, "Poetry and Commitment," has been published by W.W. Norton & Company in a beautiful small booklet, just the right size to fit in your pocket. The essay, given in 2006 at Stirling University in Scotland at a conference on "Poetry and Politics," continues Rich's explication of the meaning of words, here concentrating on poetics and "the action of poetry in the world" (p. 9). Rich does this by taking us on a journey through time, place, and poets--time and place of conflict, strife, revolution, and revolt; and poets who, like Shelley, saw "no contradiction among poetry, political philosophy, and active confrontation with the illegitimate authority" (p. 6). She begins with "the great Scottish Marxist bard, Hugh MacDiarmid" who is explicit about "The Kind of Poem I Want": one that is "'a stand made against intellectual apathy...'" (p. 1). And in this small book we meet poet after poet who made no separation between art, life, and the transformation of our world. We learn what poetry is not. It is not "a healing lotion, an emotional massage, a kind of linguistic aromatherapy...a blueprint, nor an instruction manual, nor a billboard." She quotes the wonderful James Scully distinguishing between "conceptually shallow" protest poetry and "dissident poetry": "a poetry that talks back, that would act as part of the world, not simply a mirror of it" (p. 14). WORDS CHANGE THE WORLDWhat spoke most eloquently was her examples of the power of poetic language to change the world. She shows this to us in the words of David Zonsheine, the organizer of the Courage to Refuse, those Jewish soldiers in the Israeli Defense Forces, who became known as "Refuseniks" for refusing to follow orders, refusing to be the means by which the Israeli government crushed the Palestinian drive for freedom and self-determination. Zonsheine tells us not only how poetry broke through to him but, as well, how the youth of Israel became the instrument of the oppression of another people, how the concept of liberation, of "never again," when speaking of the Holocaust, was transformed into its opposite. Israel has become, not a homeland for the oppressed, but an oppressor nation, using all means to stamp out not alone the desire for freedom, but the very lives of the Palestinian population. Rich, in quoting Zonsheine, shows us that it is a poem that unlocks his mind from his "sense of mission...based...on...the painfully simple message that we shall not allow the Holocaust of the Jews of Europe to repeat itself no matter what the cost, and when the moral price became more severe, the sense of mission only increased...I am a freedom fighter...not an occupier, not cruel, certainly not immoral." This was, he tells us, "the armor of the righteousness...in which they had dressed me years ago." What breaks through this armor, he writes, was the "strong words" of the poet, Yitzhak Laor, "which echo in my ears: 'With such obedience? With such obedience? With such obedience?'" (p. 28-29) Most important in our age of retrogression is Rich's discussion of what happens after revolution, with which she ends the essay. Its importance is at least twofold: First, because she makes revolution thinkable in a world whose rulers have tried to make it ridiculous; second, because she reveals the expansiveness of the possible answers to that question. Thus her last chapter begins by quoting the Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci on what it means to "imagine a new socialist society." It is, she writes "to imagine a new kind of art that we can't foresee from where we now stand." Then Gramsci speaks for himself: "One must speak of a struggle for a new culture, that is, for a new moral life that cannot but be intimately connected to a new intuition of life, until it becomes a new way of feeling and seeing reality and, therefore, a world intimately ingrained in 'possible artists' and 'possible works of art'" (p.35). ART AFTER REVOLUTIONThe whole of the essay is not about what happens after revolution, but rather how the relationship of life and art--when art refuses to separate itself from the Idea and the struggle for freedom--impacts the world. At the end, Rich is making manifest how expansive our discussion of what happens after revolution must become. By expanding the discussion of what happens after revolution to include "a new kind of art," she is revealing an indispensable dimension of what Karl Marx saw implicit in the human being, the "quest for universality." And by giving this talk and publishing this book, she is letting us know that we can't put off that discussion, that it must begin now. Words, she has shown us, do not only describe this world, but have the power to help change it. |
|
Home l News & Letters Newspaper l Back issues l News and Letters Committees l Dialogues l Raya Dunayevskaya l Contact us l Search Published by News and Letters Committees |
