Poetry in an Age of War and Atrocity

by Eleanor Wilner

Toni Morrison, Nobel laureate novelist, once said of writing: “Make it political as hell. And make it irrevocably beautiful.” But how is it possible to do both of those things at once, and why must we try? Those are the questions I’d like to take up in this essay, speaking as a practicing poet writing in a time of public dismay.

Though it is a dramatic commonplace, and an often overstated claim, to say that we are at a crossroads--nevertheless I am going to assert that we are, as writers, at a very particular one. Because once again we are at war, and, in the words of the critic Lionel Trilling, we stand at “the dark and bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet, “ and not at all by choice, but by circumstance. We cannot choose our history; we can only choose to ignore it--and silence, as the law says, gives consent.

Now here it is necessary to speak not only of what many of us feel impelled to write about, but the excruciating difficulties for a writer involved in awakening in words what is currently troubling our nation’s sleep, an ethical anxiety I suspect is quite widespread. The first difficulty, which we need to face head on, is the particular American distrust of the words “political poetry,” as if it were almost by definition “bad poetry,” one which has designs on us, and in which a polemical purpose must necessarily overwhelm the poetic one.

Since there is bad poetry of every kind, I see no reason to single out socially engaged poetry—and think we need to look deeper into this prejudice—into our shrunken, isolating definition of the individual, one that damages our commonality, and hides our common plight. “I remember, as a student,” wrote poet Lucia Perillo in The American Poetry Review (2001), “being advised not to use ‘we’ as my mode of address, not to try to speak on behalf of anyone but myself.” This is the ultimate separatism; we have been drawn away, even in speech, from the company of others. Notice that I say “we.”

Our popular psychology reduces our problems to the personal: you and your little immediate family are offered as sufficient cause for so many effects--which not only robs us of history, depth and connection, but keeps us from seeing how we are manipulated to an unthinking conformity and self-absorption by the powers that be, how we and our world are shaped and defined by “invisible hands,” to borrow an image from Adam Smith. “The Marlboro man thinks for himself.” Think about it. We are, of course, connected to a much larger world, and within each of us, and our language, is the convergence of great forces and currents—past and present, local and planetary.

So, to deepen and enlarge our awareness of who we really are, and to jettison the heavy cultural baggage that comes with the term “political poetry,” I would put in its place what is both a less loaded and more accurate term. The Russians do not use the term political poetry, but call it, instead, grazdanskaya poesiya, “citizen’s poetry.” The term “citizen’s poetry” reminds us that part of our being as individuals is that we are citizens, and thus our perception, vision and voice as poets necessarily reflect that part—and never more urgently than when the citizen in us is insulted, or suppressed.

And here we, as writers, face the problem of living in a time of war and atrocity, of the violation of rights, when the citizen within must speak, when the political has become deeply personal, but when, as writers, we face material potentially intractable to the imagination, and face that question of how, as Morrison instructed us, to make our citizen’s witness and protest “irrevocably beautiful,” or, put another way, moving and powerful as poetry and art. It is Shakespeare’s question, in a new context: “How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea/ whose action is no stronger than a flower?”

For most of us here in the U.S., the lucky ones, atrocity is distant in physical fact. But, like a cloud over the sun, it does shadow our days, and our democracy—and, though many of us writers feel we should respond, how easily that “should” can become a shield, behind whose opaque righteousness may lie hidden a tangle of conflicting motives, including a false sense of our own moral superiority. And the subject—its violence and cruelty—whatever our outrage, compounds the difficulties of expression.

In spite of our revulsion at scenes of horror, we must also acknowledge their omnipresence, both real and virtual, and their equal power to attract. As my AOL news, announcing a bomb that tore through a bus in India, killing and maiming many, advertised, with a big fat excited exclamation point: “See images from the deadly explosion!” That people tend to slow down passing an accident and gape, that horror movies overflow the video shelves, that screaming headlines and war movies sell, and leaders who kill the most people get to, as they say, “go down in history”— that we publicly deplore war as barbaric, yet go on waging it—all this is mere commonplace. In her book on photographs of torture and war, Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag, says of “the wish to see something gruesome” that “Calling such wishes ‘morbid’ suggests a rare aberration, but the attraction to such sights is not rare, and is a perennial source of inner torment.”

Of course, we, as spectators, do not wish to think of ourselves as bloodthirsty flies drawn to the road-kill of our own kind. What is required, and generally found, is a serviceably good reason to justify this prurient craving. Opening an issue of TIME Magazine which featured a multiple page spread of the notorious photos of the torture and humiliation of prisoners by US soldiers in Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, I felt as if I had picked up an S & M magazine off the adult rack at the back of the store. My instinctive response was that this wasn’t news, it was pornography. It only took one photo to be news, after all; to get the message—and I had seen that often-shown image of our shame, as had most of us. But a spread of such photos, insisting on the variety of possible postures of humiliation and inflicted pain? I thought again of William Blake’s admonition: “They became what they beheld.”

In her essay, “The Poet’s Calling,” Mary Kinzie says: “One argument against unfettered exposure of the ghastly and depraved is that it depraves the exposer,…”; she goes on to quote the British poet Edwin Muir: “the resolve to expose evil in its most squalid form …[may] set out with a moral purpose…but almost invariably something sordidly inquisitive comes into the treatment as well, adding to the moral confusion. The result is that the spectator is not cleansed, but involved in the impurities he is witnessing, and the moral intention is perverted into its opposite.” In Shakespeare’s words, “and almost thence my nature is subdu’d/ To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand.”

We are also dealing just now with a climate in which there is already a numbing amount of exposure to horror and violence—both fictional and real, so that the two tend to merge, and desecration risks becoming unreal, a mere spectacle—or worse, entertainment. Atrocity is, for millions of people, all too real, but for most of us in North America, who are being exposed daily as distant spectators to its report--one dreadful but dramatic image giving way to the next, we become like disoriented passengers in the dining car of a train speeding through a dozen killing fields in as many countries, watching helplessly a blur of horror shorn of context and significance. Or misrepresented and diminished, as our brains are nibbled and gnawed by sound bytes.

How, then, as poets, to make desecration real, without simply re-enacting the violence done to others, and violating ourselves in the exposure; how to approach the vortex, the whirlpool of cruelty in human nature, without being drawn into it? The first and last thing to know is that there can be no adequacy of speech to what is ultimately unspeakable, and poetry can, and must, precisely by the presence of the unspoken, preserve that sense of the unspeakable, alluding to what cannot be approached directly in such a way as to recover something of the humanity that underlies the judgment in the word “atrocity” itself (a word which comes from the Latin word atrox, atrocis, meaning cruel). To approach it, writers need all the imaginative and prosodic resources we can muster, and a tenacious hold on the values of life that inspire our outrage; otherwise, our poems are in danger of themselves becoming atrocious.

The rest of this essay with examples of poems that manage to walk this line, can be found in the forthcoming issue of WEBER STUDIES (Fall 2008)

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