“‘Let America Be America Again’”:The Politics of Keeping Politics Out of Poetry

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“There is nothing political about American literature.” With this pronouncement, Laura Bush believed she was firmly closing the door on political poetry. But did she?

The First Lady had planned “The White House Symposium on Poetry and the American Voice” to take place on February 12, 2003. The poetry of Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Langston Hughes was to be discussed. But thousands of American poets were writing poetry against the pre-emptive war on Iraq, and poet and editor Sam Hamill, who had been invited to attend the symposium, was going to present these anti-war poems to the First Lady. End of event. End of discussion. The cancellation of the symposium, however, triggered hundreds of poetry readings across the country protesting the US war on Iraq, as well as the publication of many anti-war poetry anthologies. If avoiding all trace of controversy was what Mrs. Bush wanted, and convincing us that politics have no place in poetry, she may have later wished she had not canceled her symposium.

Living through the Vietnam War, I had thought this topic had been settled, however reluctantly. That undeclared war triggered waves of civil unrest, which resulted in exciting experiments in all the arts. Poetry, in particular, saw a blossoming. And the spark was politics, whether dealing with the war, or race, or feminism, or the environment. Think of the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, Adrienne Rich, Gary Snyder, and Denise Levertov, to name a few poets of that era. They produced groundbreaking work. But in America, we shed our history the way a snake sheds its skin. We seem to continually revert back to the pose of American Innocence. And now we are back in full Innocent mode.

I’d like to discuss this vision of apolitical poetry, as it most likely reflects the opinions of many Americans. Before I do that, though, I wish to give credit to Laura Bush for holding symposiums on American poetry. Poetry lives a marginal life, at best, in America, and it needs all the advocates it can get. But, some may wonder, does it need this kind of advocacy? Should American poetry be promoted as apolitical art? Or, to put it another way, should American poetry be neutered of its politics?

Let’s look at the three poets that Bush chose to honor. All three certainly have distinctive voices, yet is it possible to honor an original voice while ignoring or denying what is being voiced? Let’s start with Emily Dickinson. Known for her reclusiveness, Dickinson might be seen as an apolitical poet because in her adult life she rarely came out of her home. Indeed, there are stories about her speaking with her visitors through a screen. But does reclusiveness mean apolitical poetry? Here’s a short poem of hers that still startles me.

                    “Faith” is a fine invention
                     When Gentlemen can see--
                     But Microscopes are prudent
                     In an Emergency.

Emily Dickinson writing about microscopes in 1860? This is one of the reasons that the poem startles me, but it’s hardly the main reason. Her fearless comment on the great debate, still going on, between faith and science feels as if it could have been written this week. How is this poem not political? And why shouldn’t she be able to offer her thoughts on this issue? Dickinson frequently explores aspects of faith in her poetry. We don’t normally think of these poems as political, though some of her poems no doubt would raise eyebrows today, should they be read outside the classroom. But here, in a short, more direct poem, it’s hard to deny the political dimension of Dickinson. By “political poetry,” I mean poetry that comments, whether directly or indirectly, on social issues. This type of poetry assumes that the life of the individual isn’t simply private and separate from the whole; political poetry, for me, assumes that what the individual experiences is a part of the larger whole. Surely Dickinson’s poem illustrates this. Her experience of using a microscope in school provided her a metaphor to make a larger observation. Just because she spent most of her life in seclusion in Amherst, Massachusetts, doesn’t mean she was cut off from the controversies of her day, or had nothing important to say about them. Or was she simply ignorant of the aesthetics of banning politics from poetry?

Let’s look at the next symposium poet. If you want to read some sobering poetry on war, Walt Whitman is your poet. Contrast his early poems praising heroism in war in the initial Leaves of Grass with those he wrote after seeing war first hand as a caregiver for both sides in Civil War hospitals. I’m referring to the poems of “Drum-Taps.” This excerpt from “A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown” feels almost hallucinatory in its feverish detail:

     Faces, varieties, postures beyond description, most in obscurity,            some of
                              them dead,
                    Surgeons operating, attendants holding lights, the smell of ether, the odor
                              of blood,
                    The crowd, O the crowd of the bloody forms, the yard outside also fill’d,
                    Some on the bare ground, some on planks or stretchers, some in the
                              death-spasm sweating,
                    An occasional scream or cry, the doctors shouted orders or calls,
                    The glisten of little steel instruments catching the glint of the torches . . . .

Purely descriptive? Not political? Imagine reading this in a classroom, bookstore, or church during our most recent war. It could easily be taken as a first-hand account of a scene in Iraq. What war does to those who fight it or who are caught in its path has not really changed since Whitman’s day. And though he doesn’t directly speak his mind on the morality of war here, his nightmarish vision makes any moralizing unnecessary. If this poem is political, is it “un-American”?

The last of the three poets Mrs. Bush selected for her symposium was often attacked for his politics. Langston Hughes was called up before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) during the McCarthy era. I’ll be the first to admit that this alone doesn’t make someone a political poet, but this is the poet who wrote “Looks by now/Folks ought to know/It’s hard to beat Hitler/Protecting Jim Crow.” America’s racial politics, in particular, stirred his blood. Here’s the last stanza of his “Let America Be America Again”:

                           O, yes
                            I say it plain,
                            America never was America to me,
                            And yet I swear this oath--
                            America will be!
                            An ever-living seed,
                            Its dream
                            Lies deep in the heart of me.
                            We, the people, must redeem
                            Our land, the mines, the plants, the rivers,
                            The mountains and the endless plain--
                            All, all the stretch of these great green states--
                            And make America again!

While there’s much of Whitman’s voice in this poem (“I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,/I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars. . .”), Langston Hughes did posses an original voice, drawing on the richness of African American culture. Here, in praising the richness of the American continent and the American dream, he fearlessly states “America was never America to me.” And yet he still celebrates what America could be, if it extends its promise to all of its citizens. This poem is most certainly political. Wouldn’t it have been fascinating if these three poets had been openly and honestly discussed at “The White House Symposium on Poetry and the American Voice” to see if the doctrine “There is nothing political about American literature” applies? I would have paid good money for a ticket of admission to that symposium.

Surely, our First Lady is well read. Why would she make a statement that inaccurately describes our poetry? I suspect that this is how many Americans wish to see their literature. It should be inspiring; it should be safe; it should not produce heated debate; it should not challenge; it should not keep the reader awake at night. The same goes for the writers. Once a poet is raised up into the August regions of the literary cannon, then it is assumed that the politics, if they were ever there, are now scrubbed out. The work must be about the eternal topics--Truth and Beauty. The artist, once raised up, transcends topical, worldly concerns. Now we can marvel at the poem the way we might regard the Grand Canyon or Mount Rushmore. Everyone knows that Mount Rushmore isn’t political, right?

Some might say that by challenging the First Lady, I’m unfairly picking on someone not versed in arcane literary issues, someone only trying to help bring an audience to American literature. In that case, let’s look at someone who is well known in the literary world as a “public intellectual,” as he calls himself. With the publication of his essay “Can Poetry Matter?” in The Atlantic in 1991, Dana Gioia became one of the best known, and most controversial, American literary critics. I had long known of his dislike of politics in poetry, but I was astounded at the vehemence of his opinion when I read a recent interview with him (Contemporary Poetry Review, “Dana Gioia and the Role of the Poet-Critic,” interviewed by Garrick Davis, http://www.cprw.com/ Davis/gioia.html). Here’s Gioia’s complete response to the interviewer’s question “What do you think of the yoking of politics to poetry, which is a fixture of recent American poetry?”

     To judge poetry as political speech is to misunderstand the art
     on the most basic level. Poetry is not primarily conceptual or
     ideological communication. It is a different way of knowing--
     experiential, holistic, and physical--that is largely intuitive and
     irrational. To treat poetry as political statement reduces a
     complex and dynamic art to a few predetermined categories.
     No wonder the urge to politicize art proves irresistible to the
     ignorant and small-minded of all persuasions.

Gioia’s certainly entitled to his views. I can understand that the idea of politics in poetry will irritate some writers and readers, and that this genre of poetry does have its limitations. Ginsberg’s groundbreaking “America,” for example, now requires extensive footnotes for the contemporary reader to understand all of his allusions, and this for a Beat poet who aspired to street accessibility! But what I don’t understand is Gioia’s branding the practitioners of political poetry “ignorant and small-minded.” Would he call Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Langston Hughes “ignorant”? How about Kenneth Rexroth, Muriel Rukeyser, Thomas McGrath, Denise Levertov, Yusef Komunyakaa, Carolyn Forché, Martín Espada? My list of poets who skillfully “yoke” politics and poetry could go on and on.

Let me address some of Gioia’s less-heated observations on politics in poetry. He says that good poetry is “largely intuitive and irrational” as opposed to bad poetry, where political content is ladled on. I think he’s setting up a false dichotomy here. There are many poems that can demonstrate this. Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet, comes to mind as someone who could effortlessly combine these elements. Here’s the opening of his “The United Fruit Co.,” as translated by Robert Bly.

                    When the trumpet sounded, it was
                     all prepared on the earth,
                     and Jehovah parceled out the earth
                     to Coca-Cola, Inc., Anaconda,
                     Ford Motors, and other entities:
                     The Fruit Company Inc.
                     Reserved for itself the most succulent,
                     the central coast of my own land,
                     the delicate waist of America.

With his allusion to the Biblical act of creation, Neruda uses humor--in a political poem!--to illustrate how international corporations parcel out the resources of the Third World. His homeland, with the skillful use of the word “succulent,” is another fruit to be devoured, but then with the word “waist” Chile becomes a person, someone who will be seduced, spoiled, left for “the dictatorship of the flies,” a phrase that appears later in the poem. Certainly Neruda is writing with intuition and tapping into the irrational at times. Every imaginative writer does that.

The last stanza of the poem, perhaps, more clearly shows Neruda’s use of the “irrational” when the author expresses his anger:

                    Meanwhile Indians are falling
                    into the sugared chasms
                    of the harbors, wrapped
                    for burial in the mist of the dawn:
                    a body rolls, a thing
                    that has no name, a fallen cipher,
                    a cluster of dead fruit
                    thrown damp on the dump.

The unknown Indian workers are exploited for their cheap labor and cast off. The next to last line presents the disturbing image of “dead fruit” and raises the question: Will they be eaten? Will the consumers up north consume the laborer with the “fruit” of their labor? But in the next line Neruda’s imagery takes us to the dump, where the workers are discarded, like damaged or inedible fruit. They have no use to anyone once they can no longer be exploited.

Here is a poem that, yes, attempts “conceptual or ideological communication,” as do many good poems. Is it “primarily” conceptual? No more, I would argue, than Neruda’s love poems, or his odes, or his autumnal poetry. (Some might argue that a weakness of Gioia’s poetry is that it is primarily conceptual, but I will leave that for critics who knows Gioia’s poetry better than I do.) In addition to the conceptual elements of Neruda’s poem, it is steeped in the intuitive and irrational, which can be seen in the rich imagery. I see no “reduction” of poetry here. Rather, I see a writer fully engaged in his craft as well as with his nation’s and region’s plight. In fact, this poem comes from an incredibly ambitious project where the poet extends the “complex and dynamic art” of poetry by writing a book of poems, Canto General, on the history of the New World. Some critics consider this book Neruda’s finest achievement. His magnificent poem “The Heights of Macchu Picchu” can be found in this book.

Another reason some object to political poetry is that the topical subject matter and references date it, preventing it from being “eternal,” unlike poems on love and poetry and the death of a relative, thus limiting its appeal to later audiences. Do Ginsberg’s allusions in “America,” however, really hamper our understanding of his grievances with America? And are the charges in Neruda’s poem really dated? “The United Fruit Co.,” published in 1950, and containing topical references to companies and dictators, could be read right now in many countries, and audiences would have no trouble, I believe, understanding the poem. I suspect the people of Iraq, for example, would find this poem rather contemporary. While Gioia never directly makes this charge regarding the “dated” quality of political poetry, his comments imply it.

Another of Gioia’s achievements, for which he takes responsibility in his interview, is the decline of the reputation of Robert Bly. “I fear my essay on Bly did help turn literary opinion against him,” Gioia confesses. Bly, a lightning rod for poets and critics since the 1950's, would have to be hailed (or lamented, depending on your politics) as one of the major reasons for the inclusion of politics in American poetry. His reading of “The Teeth Mother Naked At Last” during the Vietnam War still haunts me. By studying the poetry of Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, among many other poets, Bly learned how to create imagery that drew on the irrational and the political, often rooting it in the commonplace. Critics called this “the deep image.” I suspect that Bly’s role in popularizing the poetry of imagination and politics is why Gioia attacked him. Once again, I can understand Gioia’s antipathy for Bly. Bly certainly enjoyed stirring up his critics. But here’s what I find mysterious. In the interview, to show what a fair-minded critic he is, Gioia concedes that Bly wrote “one brilliant and original book of poems, The Light Around the Body.” I agree with Gioia that this is an astounding book, but I did a double-take when I first read this. The critic who ridicules those who mix politics and poetry singles out for praise Bly’s most consistently political book of poems! The interviewer fails to inquire about this amazing contradiction.

Published in 1967, The Light Around the Body deals head on with the Vietnam Conflict, as can be seen in the very titles of the poems: “Johnson’s Cabinet Watched by Ants,” “Counting Small-Boned Bodies,” “At a March Against the Vietnam War,” and “Driving Through Minnesota during the Hanoi Bombings.” There’s even a section title called “The Vietnam War.” I don’t think there can be any argument that this is a book of political poetry. Bly brings not only politics to these poems, though. As the title of the book suggests, he’s also interested in the spiritual, both the “outward man” and the “inward man,” to use the terms of Jacob Boehme, who Bly quotes in the opening of the book.

Bly’s poem “War and Silence,” in “The Vietnam War” section of the book, attempts to bridge these two worlds. Here’s the first section of that poem, which consists of four short sections:

                    The bombers spread out, temperature steady
                    A Negro’s ear sleeping in an automobile tire
                    Pieces of timber float by saying nothing

The opening line immediately calls to mind the bombing by the U.S. in North Vietnam that was going on daily, but the second line suggests that a logical reading will not work here. This poem, like the others in this book, is “largely intuitive and irrational,” to use Gioia’s terms. In fact, it’s so irrational that the reader will be forced to trust the imagery and abandon logic. The second and third lines, for me, suggest dissolution--things coming apart, the center not holding. In the second line, the ear is unattached to the body, but why is it sleeping in an automobile tire? Is it hiding, or has it been tossed away, or is it hearing something others don’t want to hear? In the third line, we see timber not being used as it was intended for, to build, but simply floating by. And its not saying anything, though I wasn’t expecting it to, suggests it has something to say but will not, for some reason, tells us what it knows. A mood of fear, distrust, impending destruction is conjured. The lack of punctuation suggests a lack of closure, the unease spreading.

The second stanza I find the weakest of the poem. Here are the next three lines:

                    Bishops rush about crying, There is no war,
                    And bombs fall,
                    Leaving a dust on the beech trees.

This is a weak moment in the poem because the poet can be seen going after bishops, who he is clearly angry at, rather than following the imagery of his imagination, as he does so well elsewhere in the poem. The one element of ambiguity in this section, the bombs leaving dust on beech trees, suggests that the war leaves a physical trace back in America, thousands of miles from where they were falling, does maintain the rich irrationality of the rest of the poem, but overall the stanza sags. The poet has given in to his personal political gripes. This is always a danger with political poetry, but Bly’s lapse here is hardly the kind of blatant propagandizing that Gioia tries to accuse all political poetry of committing.

The third stanza reverts back dream-like imagery:

                    One leg walks down the road and leaves
                    The other behind, the eyes part
                    And fly off in opposite directions

As in the opening stanza, we see a landscape of dissolution. Even the body seems unable to hold its parts together. Perhaps this is an image of what was happening to the US during the Vietnam War, when the entire society, as well as family units, were coming apart. This was certainly the case in my own household

The poem ends without closure:

                    Filaments of death grow out.
                    The sheriff cuts off his black legs
                    And nails them to a tree

The first line here, the only line in the entire poem with a period, provides temporary closure, but it is the closure of death. Granted, it is a fertile image of death, which continues to grow. We normally think of growth as a healthy activity, but here it might not be the case. The last two lines leave us with a surreal image of an agent of authority harming himself. Is he trying to establish that he is in charge by this self-destructive action? That this is what he will do to the enemy? But he is only harming himself. Is he aware of this and doing it anyway? The nailing of part of a body to a tree seems a sort of crucifixion, but it’s a self-crucifixion, and it doesn’t seem that it will provide any sort of resurrection or spiritual salvation. Bly’s poem tells me that “outward” events are preventing “inward” growth. We are not and cannot pretend that we are healthy and all is well of we ignore events in the world. Bly conveys this not with “ideological communication” and propagandistic language, but through “intuitive and irrational” imagery. Gioia’s dichotomy does not work. I urge readers to examine The Light Around the Body for themselves. Though the book addresses issues and events of the Vietnam War, there is much in the book that speaks to our time, our President, and the current use of power and lies. As with all great works of art, it stands the test of time.

We live in a frightening time, a time of “war on terror” that appears to be endless. Our most simple, everyday actions, such as driving across a bridge, or attending a play, or even drinking tap water, now take on sinister dimensions. What if that truck stalled on the bridge is loaded with explosives? What if that brown paper bag under a seat in the auditorium contains an aerosol canister? What if that odd taste in the water means it has been tampered with? Given our new level of worry and fear, it is not surprising that we have willingly surrendered some of our most cherished constitutional rights.

But didn’t we go to war with the British to protect these rights? Do we really want to give away the right to know what crime we are charged with? And the right to consult a lawyer? Questions like these are bound to seep into our poetry, and why not? What if it was decreed that poetry couldn’t comment on trees, or baseball, or car accidents? Wouldn’t we say that’s absurd? Isn’t poetry flexible enough to handle anything? Aren’t poets skilled enough to handle politics? If not, then they will write some bad poems. Poetry has survived this for thousands of years. It won’t mean, however, that poetry cannot handle politics, or that politics should be off limits for poetry. If we read a bad poem dealing with sex, or a film with a bad sex scene, do we say that poetry cannot or should not be written about sex, and that all films should be devoid of sex? Why are we, then, so willing to go along with those who wish to purge the arts of politics?

Dana Gioia has recently been appointed head of the National Endowment of the Arts. Despite the fact that he has been critical of poets receiving grants, awards, endowments, etc, Gioia has been asked to head an agency that awards cash prizes to artists to help them practice their art. (Perhaps his statement of opposition to grants is why interviewer Garrick Davis withheld publication of his interview with Gioia until after Gioia was confirmed as head of the NEA by the US Senate?) But the main reason Gioia has been chosen to lead the NEA is, no doubt, because he believes that “there is nothing political about American literature.” Let me go out on a limb here. We will not see the NEA funding writers whose work “yokes” poetry and politics. That doesn’t mean, however, that Gioia will be able to stop artists from doing so. In fact, like Mrs. Bush’s pre-emptive strike on her symposium, it may even encourage a blossoming of politics in the arts. Thomas McGrath, a poet who would not allow blacklisting to silence him, beautifully expresses why we need such a blossoming: “The poet always has this task, it seems to me: to bear witness to the times; but now especially when the State is trying by corruption, coercion, and its own paltry terror to silence writers, or dupe them or convert them into the bird sanctuaries of public monuments--now especially the artist should be responsible to the world” (quoted in the Introduction to Poets of the Non-Existent City: Los Angeles in the McCarthy Era, edited by Estelle Gershgoren Novak, University of New Mexico Press, 2002). McGrath wrote this in 1955. Were he still with us, he could have written this today.