A Very Partial Response to Bill Mohr and an Appreciation of the Work of James Scully

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I was delighted to see a six-pack of Jim Daniels poems as a treat in the Fall 2005 edition of Pemmican and an accompanying article with the promising title: "The 'Where You At' of Jim Daniels' Poetry: Breaking the Machine, Line Breaks, and the 'Here' of Silence" by Bill Mohr. Mohr's essay is engaging and provocative in its deep understanding of the nature of work and how Daniels' poems effectively use silence "to make his figures stand out in relief." But he takes a wildly wrong turn in a strange side assault on the poet James Scully, whose work, I believe, is a must-read for politically-engaged writers. In the interest of full disclosure, Scully was an important teacher for me when I was an undergraduate at the University of Connecticut. His work continued to influence, provoke and challenge me as I returned to his essays and poems after we both left the university. Recently, we've been in contact again. His book of essays Line Break: Poetry As Social Practice has been championed by Adrienne Rich and was republished in Summer 2005 by Curbstone Press, the publisher of my first book of poems. I don't want this to be a piece of self promotion, so let me say at the outset that my purpose is two-fold: to respond to some specific, but serious mistakes in Mohr's otherwise excellent analysis, and to bring the work of James Scully to the attention of readers who might not be familiar with his contributions to the poetry of resistance.

Some background: Jim Daniels doesn't know it, but his work helped to change my life. In 1988, I went to UConn, thanks to much needed financial aid, parents who sacrificed what they could, and a job at a lumberyard that allowed me to work all summer, a month in the winter and any Saturday I wanted. I also had the good fortune to have James Scully as a professor in an introductory creative writing class. When I met him, I was trying to write - without any models - poems or lyrics about my life, which included my parents' struggles to work and raise a family despite lay-offs and social disintegration, and my own bewildered attempts to make some sense of things, or just make some sense. Scully, quietly, powerfully, let me know that my experience was important. No warm-fuzzy, clearly a tough customer, he made sure that I didn't let my class-based sense of inferiority get the better of me. He introduced me to the work of many poets, but the most important for the where-I- was-at then was Jim Daniels. I read Places/Everyone with more relish than anything I had read before - it was an experience that blew the top of my head open. Here were poems that captured the rage and "ugly beauty" of life, the extraordinary complications of bare-knuckled ordinary hero journeys. These poems had people—workers, even—not just dehistoricized streams of consciousness. Like just about everyone I knew, these workers were struggling to make lives in a system that demeans and hammers at the soul. For my money, abstracted, fitful characters like J. Alfred Prufrock didn't stand a chance next to Digger.

Bill Mohr quotes Scully: "the simplest decision about line breaks will ramify, affecting not only the structural economy of a poem but its social practice, the way it works as a poem. For instance, we know that a line break will influence the way a word or syllable is attacked (in the sense that a musician attacks a note)". It seemed pretty clear to me that this straight-forward quote would amplify or compliment Mohr's appreciation of Jim Daniels' carefully-crafted lines, words, and silences. Instead we get this huffing and puffing: "Scully, however, is perceiving the line as much more complete than it needs to be. Even the repetition of the word 'attack' in Scully's statement emphasizes that his reductionist approach to poetry involves the same kind of patriarchal rapidity involved in the political economy which he believes poetry should be confronting."

Scully perceives "the line as much more complete than it needs to be"? Scully, at this point in his essay is hardly going out on a limb, but simply establishing, or re-establishing one function of line break as socially-situated technique, in order to go on to more difficult problems facing political-engaged poets, including the stranglehold of market ideology in the academy and the sometimes subtly complicated, sometimes brutally crude interplay between cultural and social practice. Furthermore, Scully's essays are anything but "reductionist." In the middle of some of Scully's more ambitious passages in Line Break, one might even wish that Scully's uncompromisingly dialectical and hyper-educated musings were a bit more "reductionist," if it would only make them more transparent. But this would be mere laziness. Scully's essays are challenging not because they obfuscate the simple, as is standard practice in the academy, but because they take on what's truly complex: the political hegemony gripping contemporary poetry - particularly North American poetry.

As far as "patriarchal rapidity," I can only say that this term has no place in describing James Scully. In his life and in his work he has stood against the chauvinism and homophobia of the old left. Socialist feminist poets including Maggie Jaffe, Sarah Meneffee, Margaret Randall, and Linda McCarriston have expressed enormous respect and gratitude for Scully's poetry and positions. It's clear to me that Scully, in turn, has been influenced and buoyed by these voices, and in particular has singled out the radical works of Carolyn M. Rodgers and Mari Evans as having been important to him in the 1970's and 80's in his 1994 essay "Culture Wars."

Mohr's major point, however, is that silence in a poem, even a "hemidemisemiquaver" (!!!) of silence is a "technique" in poetry, and that this technique is more important than heavy-handed line breaks. An audience may or may not, as Mohr suggests, be in the same socially constructed situation as the poet - especially in relationship to the tools of poetry, but he's absolutely right in saying silences are vitally important to the poem. However, as Scully points out in Line Break, poetry today hardly suffers from a lack of silence. Furthermore, the ideological quality of that silence is at the heart of things. A truly reductionist insistence on silence (ie. "don't tell the reader what to think") has gone far beyond technique to become a disabling artistic law of the ruling class. Not even a law, really - an unexamined assumption, which has trickled down to the rest of us as unassailable axiom. We are to understand and obey: Don't preach (i.e "say"). But Scully asks "What is the moral or aesthetic flaw in saying? Who says? And why? Must poetry only be symptomatic, a social function rather than social practice? A nonsaying comparable to hack teaching whereby a 'problem' is posed and 'answer'…withheld?" (Line Break 67).

Mohr mouths the well-intentioned but tired old rule when he quotes John Carlos Rowe, who wants to teach his students "to think of others without thinking for them". But in the same essay that Mohr quotes and leaves earlier, Scully makes clear how this seeming courtesy is dangerously presumptuous in poems: "…no one is prisoner of a poem. Poems can be persuasive, not coercive. What will crimp 'freedom of thought' are the desires, needs, exclusions, the fears and mystifications, constituted by the conditions under which we live and make our living" (71). He goes on about this type of "authorial discretion" which "seems considerate of the reader. No one gets breathed on…. The reader is projected as passive - seen, known, acted upon-whereas the poet appropriates and reserves the privilege, to herself or himself, of acting, seeing, and knowing." (71)

Ironically, the salient characteristic of the Daniels poem "Time, Temperature" that Mohr explicates is not its skillful silence but the refreshing directness that makes that silence crackle with energy: "It's too easy/ to say That's the kind/ of cooperation we need./ That's the kind of cooperation we need." Daniels acknowledges the aesthetic law of the poetry establishment, the aesthete's dictum against saying, and then goes right ahead and SAYS. In one deft move he galvanizes the present-tense moment of the narrative's workers and K.O.'s the precious assumptions of the Poetry Pantheon. With this "Brechtian directive," as Mohr puts it, the silence left for us is rich and challenging, as dramatically opposed to the soporific silence left by so much of what else passes for poetry. The silence in this poem is there for us to fill, buzzing with questions: How do we achieve this cooperation? How do I, the reader, push against the barriers of race towards this cooperation? How do we make this cooperation transformative and irresistible? Finally, I don't think it would be making too much of line breaks to say that not only do the breaks here potentially inform the oral delivery of the poem, but they pace the realization perfectly: That's the kind—break—of cooperation we need. Then, the full, bold statement in one breath: That's the kind of cooperation we need.

I believe most Pemmican readers will find Scully's poems similarly energizing. Scully grew up in New Haven and through a series of fortunate events went from the streets to the public university system in Connecticut where he met a few great teachers. By the early 60's he was a rising star in the poetry world, regularly publishing in The New Yorker and winning the Lamont Prize for his first book of poems, The Marches. He began to run amok, however, of the staid expectations of the formalists when his work became overtly political. While he and his family were en route to Chile to spend a year on a Guggenheim, they received word of Pinochet's bloody coup. They went anyway, helped the resistance movement, and Scully wrote Santiago Poems, documenting and attacking the horrors of the CIA-backed right wing dictatorship and boldly declaring his own communist commitment. This sealed his fate as a North American poet. No one would touch Santiago Poems, so a friend of his, the poet Alexander Taylor started Curbstone Press along with his wife Judy Doyle to get the book out there. Scully was instrumental in bringing poets like Roque Dalton and Leonel Rugama to the attention of North American readers. I suspect that his unwillingness to pen blather for academic journals and publication credits didn't make his professional life at UConn any easier, but so much better for the rest of us: the books he wrote during this period like Scrap Book, May Day, and Apollo Helmet are fiercely original and inspiring. They are poems of someone engaged in theory and practice, often documenting his experiences in political struggle - demonstrating for workers' rights, landing in jail for militantly facing off against the Klan, etc. Importantly, these poems are never self-aggrandizing - if anything, they occasionally suffer from a strenuous eschewing of the personal. His translation with Maria Proser of Quechua People's Poetry is a breathtaking bridge for workers throughout the Americas. For more information on his work, check out www.poevotes.com.

Of course, I did not write this appreciation to say that Scully's work as an intellectual or as a poet is flawless - far from it - but to say that his cultural production has been too profound to dismiss out of hand and out of context. I, too, have criticisms of Scully's work. There are times I want his poems to have more personal warmth to take a break from the scalding political fire. And in his 1994 essay "Culture Wars," he explains why he no longer wrote poems and had begun to learn to write plays. I remember thinking when I read that essay (I wasn't in touch with him during this period) "What gives? Why not just take a break from the poems? Why should he let the monolith of the poetry establishment get him down at this point ?" Fortunately, he's had to eat a little crow on this one and has been writing poems again for a few years now.

Still, it seems to me that the great achievement of Scully's uncensored work is to remind us that far too often, we have allowed the "culture police" to place gags over our mouths. Or, even worse, we have volunteered to put the gags on ourselves - so tightly in many cases that we not only become muffled, but distorted as well. I believe that a potentially revolutionary, and much more capacious poetry, as in the work of Jim Daniels, is, by turns, meaningfully silent and scathingly direct, individually humble and culturally audacious. Witness just in the last half-century the work of poets who sustain us: Langston Hughes, Margaret Walker, Audre Lorde, Roque Dalton, Thomas McGrath, Nazim Hikmet, Cesar Vallejo, Pablo Neruda. Witness the partisan poets emerging today: Martin Espada, Lyle Daggett, Rob Whitbeck, Alix Olson, Luis J. Rodgriguez, Kelly Jean White, Christopher Butters - and those still pressing on through decades of struggle: Jack Hirschman, Daisy Zamora, Margaret Randall, Marge Piercy and countless others. All of them not only intimate, but dare to say - or to sing or proclaim or yawp-- that we need to find our revolutionary hearts, we need to join the historic movement towards a society in which each individual is free not only to think, but to eat, to sleep, to read, to work, to love. Our poems should demand life. I'll give the last words here to Scully himself, from his poem "Comrade Love":

     We were bringing the heavens home.
     We had married one another
     to a bleak, elated planet.

     Unconscious of caring, in blind honor
     we took this life like an iron bar
     —it was frozen—
     and still we pressed our lips to it.

(from May Day, Minnesota Review Press, 1980).