[New-Poetry] Berger on engaged poetry

[jforjames at aol.com]

This weekend I was browsing thru John Berger's (known as an art critic) Selected Essays, and I ran across a good piece called "The Hour of Poetry," apropos to our discussion of political/issue-oriented poetry. Here are few passages:

The suffering of the present and the past is unlikely to be redeemed by a future era of universal happiness. And evil is a constantly ineradicable reality. All this means that the resolution—the coming to terms with the sense to be given to life—cannot be deferred. The future cannot be trusted. The moment of truth is now. And more and more it will be poetry, rather than prose, that receives this truth. Prose is more trusting than poetry: poetry speaks to the immediate wound.
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  One can say anything to language. This is why it is a listener, closer to us than any silence or any god. Yet its very openness often signifies indifference. (The indifference of language is continually solicited and employed in bulletins, legal records, communiqués, files.) Poetry addresses language in such a way as to close this indifference and to incite a caring. How does poetry incite caring? What is the labour of poetry?
  By this I do not mean the work involved in writing a poem, but the work of the written poem itself. Every authentic poem contributes to the labour of poetry. And the task of this unceasing labour is to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn away. Physical pain can usually be lessened or stopped by action. All=2
0other human pain, however, is caused by one form or another of separation. And here the act of assuagement is less direct. Poetry can repair no loss, but it defies the space which separates. And it does this by it continual labour of reassembling what has been scattered. 
  
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 To break the silence of events, to speak of experience however bitter or lacerating, to put into words, is to discover the hope that these words may be heard, and that when heard, the events will be judged. This hope is, of course, at the origin of prayer, and prayer—as well as labour—was probably at the origin of speech itself. Of all uses of language, it is poetry that preserves most purely the memory of this origin. 
[…]
Nevertheless poems are not simple prayers. Even a religious poem is not exclusively and uniquely addressed to God. Poetry is addressed to language itself. If that sounds obscure, think of lamentation---there words lament loss to their language. Poetry is addressed to language in a comparable but wider way. 
 To put into words is to find the hope that the words will be heard and the events they describe judged. Judged by God or judged by history. Either way the judgement is distant. Yet the language—which is immediate, and which is sometimes wrongly thought of as being only a means—offers, obstinately and mysteriously, its own judgement when it is addressed by poetry. This judgement is distinct from that of any moral code, yet it promises, within its acknowl
edgment of what it has heard, a distinction between good and evil—as though language itself had been created to preserve just that distinction!


—John Berger, “The Hour of Poetry,” Selected Essays (Vintage, 2001)
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