[In announcing the publication of
my latest book of poems from Black Widow Press, I thought the following
Postface might be of interest in what I say about the book’s title and the
concerns that inform the book as a whole.
Further information, for whose who seek it, can be found at the Black
Widow web site (https://www.blackwidowpress.com/ModernFrames.htm),
but for now I would hope to make the context of the work, including a number of
procedural and aleatory poems, as clear as possible. The span of time covered is from the end of
the previous century through the first two decades of this one. (J.R.)]
POST-FACE
The
title of the present gathering – like much of what I’ve written over the years
– points to the time through which we’re now living and to the times before
through which I’ve also lived. The sense
of desolation and devastation – a sadly rhyming pair – continues to inform our
lives as vulnerable beings, both politically and ecologically, and it enters
into our words and thoughts as poets in what Pablo Neruda famously titled our
(all too bounded) “residence on earth.”
To all of this I am a witness, or, better put, the poems bear witness on
my behalf, even where the writing is procedural or seeming to put process over
substance – & maybe especially then.
In composing this book I’ve inserted some accounts concerning form &
occasion, but my sense of the life & politics outside the book come across
more directly in the following excerpt from an interview recently conducted for
Spanish publication by the Mexican poet Javier Taboada.
I would like to link one of your
poems, Twentieth Century
Unlimited, with the outcome of the
presidential elections (2016) in the United States:
As the
twentieth century fades out
the
nineteenth begins
again
it is as
if nothing happened
though
those who lived it thought
that
everything was happening
enough to
name a world for & a time
to hold
it in your hand
unlimited
the last delusion
like the
perfect mask of death
Do you think that the ‘last
delusion’ has already been unmasked?
The
poem goes back to the 1990s when the Cold War was coming to an end and with it
– for better or worse – many of the twentieth-century dreams of human
perfectibility and unlimited progress that we had taken too easily for granted.
That was the “last delusion” I was talking about then, but the still darker
thrust of the poem was the sense, already forming, of a retrogression to
precisely the conditions that those dreams and delusions were aiming to
address. We were moving, in other words, into a new century and millennium, but
what was emerging already was a return to the conditions of the century before:
“nationalism, colonialism and imperialism, ethnic and religious violence,
growing extremes of wealth and poverty” in the description Jeffrey Robinson and
I provided for the pre-face to the third volume of Poems for the Millennium. To which we added: “All reemerge today
with a virulence that calls up their earlier nineteenth-century versions and
all the physical and mental struggles against them, struggles in which poetry
and poets took a sometimes central part.”
This wasn’t prophecy (though it
might have been) but my sense of history speaking and unfolding for us in the
here and now. And it has only intensified over the last two decades: the farce that history has now become in
Trump’s time, but not without the threat of tragedy
as well. To speak more specifically, what’s marking the present century –
whether it resembles the nineteenth or not – are two distinct emergences: the
rise of ISIS-like religious movements
over the last two decades (and not only Muslim) and the rise of the nationalism
and jingoism that Trump is bringing to us in the United States, and others like
him elsewhere. Not to equate the two too easily, both are threats to a
fact-based sense of reality on the one hand and to an open life of the
imagination on the other, and my own push, like that of most poets I know, is
to bring the two together: “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” as
Marianne Moore once had it.
So yes, I
think the mask has already fallen off and we again have to take account of the
actual present that confronts and threatens us. For this, poetry would be my
own immediate answer, as it has always been, but there are other answers as
well –and maybe, in the short run, better. Under any circumstances, the threats
of violence and closure are what we have to stand against –wherever found and
however answered.
Those
anyway are the deeper thoughts (“too deep for tears”) underlying the bulk of my
present writings, and I thought it useful to call attention to them here.
Is
this what you meant when in A
Further Witness you wrote: "the age
of the assassins/ once deferred/ comes back/ full blast"? Where do you
think all this will lead?
At my age I’m suddenly feeling
closed off from a future that I’m not likely to see, but I can try to answer
the question as if I’ll be a part of it. With that in mind I can reconstruct
fairly easily what I was getting at in A
Further Witness: the sense of terrorism (also a tactic with
nineteenth-century roots) as a notable and distressing fact of our new and
present reality. By assassination, then, I mean murder as a public and
political act, not only aimed at rulers and leaders but, very much so, at the world-at-large.
I could have also said the age of the murderers but I think that “age of the
assassins” carries an echo for me and others of something from Rimbaud (Voici le temps des Assassins); at least
that was the way I used it here. And there was also the other word that kept
coming into the poetry –cruelty– as a
signal of what we had to fear in the world that we knew from before and that
kept coming back no matter how much we tried to defer it. As much as I feared
and hated it, whether active or passive, I knew it was something that had to be
right there, at the core of what I thought and wrote as a poet. It is for this
reason that I used it several times as a book title, A Cruel Nirvana, in English, French, and Spanish, and in a poem of
that name, which ends with these lines:
It is summer
but the trees
are dead.
They vanish with
our fallen friends.
The eye in torment
brings them down
each mind a little world
a cruel
nirvana.
That
would put it even at the heart of religious or spiritual attempts to escape it
– the cruelty of the escape from cruelty – but its most hideous effects are in
the public world and in the murders and tortures that serve as instruments of
policy or, worse yet, of belief. So the idea, much needed today, is not to
exclude it but to bring it into the body of the poem, as a sign of both the
terror and the pity that the poem calls forth.
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