To take in, every day, a little of the moral whirlwind that was set in motion by the events of September 11, 2001 and then by the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and then given horrific velocity and force by the revelations of torture by Americans–this consumes a part of one’s vital and moral energy.  A part one feels one has to consume in order to stay human by not allowing oneself to flinch from the worst (–no, it is not the worst).  And to write about poetry, in the midst of all that, might seem to some as frivolous as writing about fashion, dieting, or celebrity love affairs, betrayals and plastic surgeries.  Of course I do not believe that poetry belongs in such a category, although I know that many people–those who would never discover, much less read, a comment like these I write–would file “poetry” under the heading “who needs it?”  I won’t rely on what is now almost the cliché of William Carlos Williams’s famous lines: “yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.”  (These words have been used by now to market all kinds of literary products, but I doubt they have ever been used to market a book of poems.)  On behalf of poetry, if I may, I would rather acknowledge the eloquence in the service of humanity of those who write with a prose acuity and clarity that poetry, with its usual compression, fast movement of thought, and intimacy, cannot achieve.

Andrew Sullivan’s article in the October 2009 issue of The Atlantic is an open letter (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200910/bush-torture).  “Dear President Bush” calls for the former president to take responsibility for the torture he ordered–in the way that Ronald Reagan took personal responsibility for the corrupt “arms for hostages” deal with Iran–and thereby acknowledge publicly an ethical travesty that has corrupted the Constitution and the moral stature of this country.  In my view, the presidential decision to authorize torture (by using carefully calculated euphemisms) is ultimately one of the major causes of the breakdown in discourse on all kinds of political, cultural and religious issues, a breakdown that seems to have unleashed truly maddened hate speech and even vehement calls for violence.  The breakdown in both behavior and language has certainly disrupted, perhaps fatally, the business of making just laws and executing them “faithfully.”

And poetry?  There have been fascist poets, communist poets, poets in love with violence, poets who hated any sensible practice of justice and who allied themselves with horrific injustice.  The twentieth century was thick with them, but they are not mentioned in polite company.  Their names can still provoke outrage, though.  I met the great and humane Spanish poet Jorge Guillén a few times near the end of his life, and, with my friend Anthony L. Geist, I interviewed Guillén for what became the book Jorge Guillén: The Poetry and the Poet (1979).  The last time I saw Guillén, he–in great old age–and his somewhat younger wife had moved to an apartment in Málaga where they had a high view of the sea in all its ancientness and shades of color and light and its rhythmic self renewal.  I told him (this was in 1978 or 1980–I no longer remember) that a street  in Cádiz, where I had just been, had been named for the notorious Spanish fascist poet José María Pemán, who had been a mouthpiece for Francisco Franco and was then still as alive as Guillén himself.  And immediately I saw that a surprisingly youthful vigor of outrage could still shake Don Jorge, even in his physical frailty, forty years after the end of the disastrous Spanish Civil War.   One does not forget the brute violations of justice and of ethics, or the corrupt justifications, even of poets–who are often given a lot of slack, once they are safely dead and their behavior, if horrible, comes to seem, to some, merely colorful.

A boy about 13 years old at the so-called “Tea Bagger” demonstration in Washington D.C. was photographed holding a sign that said “The Only Cure for Obama Communism is a New Era of McCarthyism.”*   After the fiasco of American torture and all the comment justifying, excusing, denying and normalizing it, should we be surprised that the deliberate destruction of words themselves is the ready technique of those who cannot produce any moral or ethical or even rational argument for the crimes they excuse?  I do not think it can be said of poets, perhaps even violent ones, that they have ever been as effective in the destruction of the meanings of words as have lawyers.  Is it at all surprising that a call for a new McCarthyism would be circulated by exploiting children to carry it into the public realm?  One almost cannot bear to think of the hatred that children without defenses are absorbing every day and night from adults who greedily seek to indoctrinate them.

And meanwhile, poetry?  Since the late nineteenth century there has been a view among some poets that poetry’s social usefulness derives from the care that it takes with words–as opposed to the way words are manipulated in political discourse, ideological and religious disputes, and the legalese for taking extra money from customers of one kind or another.  There is something to this view in favor of poetry, since we can assume of so many good poets that their motive in writing is exploratory, meditative, curious, rather than mercenary, like advertising, which uses poetic techniques.  Poets are not usually trying to get people to buy something, in either sense of the word.  But talk radio, for instance, is a laboratory of the ways of selling deliberate, endlessly repetitive, and ultimately all too persuasive–to all too many people–attitudes and impulses that depend on the remaking of the meanings of words, the normalizing of hate speech, and demonizing by names.  Words so treated do change their meaning, do lose their truth value.  This is a dynamic and collective process and it spills over.  This is how language works.  Some words then lose the sense they had and can be used to mean something else.  Can euphemize something hateful.  Can demonize another human being, or a group.  Among those who listen with enthusiasm, and those who repeat that enthusiasm for their own reasons.  (TV ratings, mostly.)  Enthusiasts are thus knowingly helped to corrupt their own language.  And they are eager to be corrupted because of their fears and anxieties, their old habits of paranoid self-pity, racism and xenophobia.

But “purifying the language of the tribe” is not much of a cause for poetry to take up, now, especially since we are many tribes and we acknowledge, or should acknowledge, that purity of language is itself a dangerous illusion.  So instead of an illusory and dangerous purity, we might safeguard a place in ourselves simply for honesty of expression.  (Don’t ask me to define that; civility, and civilization, such as it is, requires as much faith as religion, sometimes.)  Even in poems that explore with exuberant freedom, not with an ideological or mercenary agenda, how much language can say beyond what we usually say with it, we should find that a moral (perhaps as distinguished from a narrative or imagistic or metaphorical) honesty is a virtue for poetry.  (Not that it’s enough of a virtue in itself.  Who wants to read poetry whose only virtue is some kind of honesty to the truth of lived experience?)  A kind of poetic analogy, at least in the sort of poems in which it would be useful, of prose clarity.

Somehow, though, since the early 1980s especially, many American poets have taken to the idea that poetry doesn’t need to mean almost anything in the usual sense of clarity.  This is a very disabling stance if poetry is to say much about the shaking we get from the moral and political turmoil around us.  And poetic opponents of those poets, in the ever evolving disputes regarding poetic language, have all too often merely tried to write as if language were almost entirely reliable–even though all around us it is clear that it is not, precisely because of the way it is used, and the way usage changes it.

Poetry is as old as human culture, older than can be measured.  It is still practiced–widely, richly, variously, both well and badly–today.  Why should that be the case?  Because, I believe, it responds to an appetite in us to be linguistic, an appetite not entirely satisfied by the exchange of information between and among us.  And for most of us, our sense of language is inextricable from the validity of our inner lives.  I find the immensely long survival of the practice of poetry a very cheering element in the very mixed human repertoire.  To me it speaks of our desire, at our best, to be with each other in linguistically rich, valuable ways rather than in linguistically corrupted ways.  It speaks of our instinct or learned best impulses not to be corrupted by the manipulation of language for political ends and monetary profit.

If my position seems muddled to someone who regards poetry as a pointless and stupid pursuit (there are surprisingly different people in this category), I would argue that that is only because it’s a very complex subject that can be approached from many directions, and along each approach one sees someone else coming from an opposite direction eager to disagree.  But as I am convinced that as the writing of prose has its heroes–in the modern world, from Montaigne to Orwell, and among us now, some perhaps as wise and eloquent as they—so I believe that poetry does, too.  Eloquence in the service of our best impulses and highest ethical values–language like Lincoln’s at his best, language that acknowledges the truth of our lived experience and the value of humane ideals–cannot be the achievement only of prose.  (Even of prose as compelling as Sullivan’s in his open letter to George W. Bush.)

It’s late.  I must send this into the webosphere.

*To see the photo of the boy, see http://thepoliticalcarnival.blogspot.com/2009/09/photos-current-state-of-republican.html