[New-Poetry] In our dark times

[David Graham]

I have great respect for Adrienne Rich and read her always with  
interest.  Her essay linked below is worth pondering, and is much  
more intelligent and subtle than any "we live in dark times" summary-- 
the phrase is quoted from Brecht, in any event, and Rich's argument  
is not that we live in dark times so much as an apology for the value  
of poetry in any times.

Here's a relevant paragraph from Rich:

"I'm both a poet and one of the "everybodies" of my country. I live  
with manipulated fear, ignorance, cultural confusion and social  
antagonism huddling together on the faultline of an empire. I hope  
never to idealise poetry -- it has suffered enough from that. Poetry  
is not a healing lotion, an emotional massage, a kind of linguistic  
aromatherapy. Neither is it a blueprint, nor an instruction manual,  
nor a billboard. There is no universal Poetry, anyway, only poetries  
and poetics, and the streaming, intertwining histories to which they  
belong. There is room, indeed necessity, for both Neruda and César  
Valléjo, for Pier Paolo Pasolini and Alfonsina Storni, for both Ezra  
Pound and Nelly Sachs. Poetries are no more pure and simple than  
human histories are pure and simple. And there are colonised poetics  
and resilient poetics, transmissions across frontiers not easily  
traced."

Still, the idea that we live in particularly dire times, historically  
speaking, is so common that it does deserve a skeptical glance.  I  
agree with Bob Grumman on this, which I hope doesn't dismay him too  
much.

I also hope that he doesn't mind agreeing with Robert Frost, who, way  
back in 1935, smack dab in the middle of that famously low, dishonest  
decade, expressed his own skepticism as follows:

"But speaking of ages, you will often hear it said that the age of  
the world we live in is particularly bad.  I am impatient of such  
talk.   We have no way of knowing that this age is one of the worst  
in the world's history.  Arnold claimed the honor for the age before  
this.  Wordsworth claimed it for the last but one.  And so on back  
through literature.  I say they claimed the honor for their ages.   
They claimed it rather for themselves.  It is immodest of a man to  
think of himself as going down before the worst forces ever mobilized  
by God."
  --Robert Frost.  "Letter to The Amherst Student."  25 March 1935.
-----

The risk of much self-consciously political poetry, as I believe Rich  
well knows, is just this:  it is immodest.  It makes a claim for the  
*poet* that overshadows other matters.



On Nov 18, 2006, at 4:12 PM, <JforJames at aol.com> <JforJames at aol.com>  
wrote:

> http://books.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,329635373-110738,00.html
>
> Legislators of the world
> Commentary In our dark times we need poetry more than ever, argues  
> Adrienne Rich
>
> Adrienne Rich
> Saturday November 18, 2006
>

==========================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu
Home Page:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
==========================================



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20061119/0b423c32/attachment.html