Poetic Discourse
the Current Policitcal process and other writings
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Poetry, Poets, the Poem and the Political Process Today
by John Peterson, Poetic Matrix Publisher
If the political process is to be imbibed with the stuff of poetry it seems we as poets and lovers of poetry have a difficult time.
Poets have the reputation as being soft, lovers not fighters. Unwilling and unable to enter the vicious world of politics.
Eugene McCarthy, peace candidate for President in 1968 openly wrote poetry. Jimmy Carter once out of office again openly
wrote and published poetry. (Here is not the place for a critique of this poetry.) McCarthy was cast aside in the 1968 run up to
the election though he is credited, by many, with opening the Democratic Party to the peace movement. Hubert Humphrey, the
eventual Democratic Party nominee once Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, easily pushed McCarthy aside, and of course went
on to lose to Richard Nixon. Carter blazed his way from an unknown to the presidency during one of those times in American
history where an opening exists for something new and essential to find its way into the political process. Yet the opening was
lost to Ronald Reagan 4 years later.
Eugene McCarthy showed great courage in 1968 running against one of the most powerful presidents in our history and forcing
Lyndon Johnson to refuse to run for a second term. By McCarthy stepping forward and finding the voice of so many disaffected
in this country he may have blunted a more revolutionary solution. This could be seen as a good or not so good thing
depending on how radical your political persuasion was at the time. Certainly courage is not one of the characteristics lacking
in one with a poetic voice.
MY LAI CONVERSATION
How old are you, small Vietnamese boy?
Six fingers. Six years.
Why did you carry water to the wounded soldier, now dead?
Your father.
Your father was enemy of free world.
You also now are enemy of free world.
Who told you to carry water to your father?
Your mother!
Your mother is also enemy of free world.
You go into ditch with your mother.
American politician has said,
"It is better to kill you as a boy in the elephant grass of Vietnam
Than to have to kill you as a man in the rye grass in the USA."
You understand.
It is easier to die
Where you know the names of the birds, the trees, and the grass
Than in a stranger country.
You will be number 128 in the body count for today.
High body count will make the Commander-in-Chief of free world much encouraged.
Good-bye, small six-year-old Vietnamese boy, enemy of free world.
Eugene McCarthy
Jimmy Carter has been seen universally as an unsuccessful President and yet a very successful ex-President going on to win
the Nobel Peace Prize for his humanitarian work around the world. He certainly opened the presidency to the empathy and
compassion that are traits of those with poetic sensibilities. Still, he is seen by some to have been lacking in the kind of
character traits that would allow him to navigate the hostile world of politics in this country.
Mostly poetry is left to galvanize the political process in the hinterlands, out where the people live and die. The link between
poets and politics goes back almost to the beginning of time and certainly looms large in the period of the Vietnam War. Poets
like Alan Ginsburg and Robert Bly are seminal voices in that period and much adieu is given them for their part in energizing a
culture to end that madness.
Mao Zedong was also a poet and quite a good one it seems, as was Ho Chi Minh. Both of course serious revolutionary leaders.
Reascending Jinggang Mountain - 1965
I have long aspired to reach for the clouds
And I again ascend Jinggang Mountain.
Coming from afar to view our old haunt,
I find new scenes replacing the old.
Everywhere orioles sing, swallows dart,
Streams babble
And the road mount skyward.
Once Huangyanggai is passed
No other perilous place calls for a glance.
Wind and thunder are stirring,
Flags and banners are flying
Wherever men live.
Thirty-eight years are fled
With a mere snap of the fingers.
We can clasp the moon in the Ninth Heaven
And seize turtles deep down in the Five Seas:
Nothing is hard in this world
If you dare to scale the heights.
Ho Chi Minh
Poems Written While In Prison
Translated by Kenneth Rexroth
A COMRADES PAPER BLANKET
New books, old books,
the leaves all piled together.
A paper blanket
is better than no blanket.
You who sleep like princes,
sheltered from the cold,
Do you know how many men in prison
cannot sleep all night?
AUTUMN NIGHT
Before the gate, a guard
with a rifle on his shoulder.
In the sky, the moon flees
through clouds.
Swarming bed bugs,
like black army tanks in the night.
Squadrons of mosquitoes,
like waves of attacking places.
I think of my homeland.
I dream I can fly far away.
I dream I wonder trapped
in webs of sorrow.
A year has come to an end here.
What crime did I commit?
In tears I write
another prison poem.
CLEAR MORNING
The morning sun
shines over the prison wall,
And drives away the shadows
and miasma of hopelessness.
A life-giving breeze
blows across the earth.
A hundred imprisoned faces
smile once more.
So it is not that poets and poetry do not have a place in the political life of a people. And it cannot be said that poets don’t know
how to engage the political process whether from the presidency, the streets or from revolutionary necessity. So what is it that
keeps the poetic sensibility mostly out of the current political arena? The easy to blame scapegoat is the quickie sound bite,
speedy image of pop culture, propaganda manipulated, fear induced culture of easy sounding solutions and then nothing really
changes mentality. Here we visit the same old problems over and over and we blame the lack of real substantive change on the
all embracing “terrorist” who now keeps us forever in their grasp and forever out of the kind of humane society we all desire. (Oh
where oh were has the red scare gone!) Rather it seems poetry forces the discussion to go to a level that so often is resisted in
this culture.
Here is the most insane example of the kind of problem we get into when poetry is taken out of the political conversation and yes
I said taken out. The new poetry of Donald H. Rumsfeld. From the Slate website. "And so Slate has compiled a collection of
Rumsfeld's poems, bringing them to a wider public for the first time. The poems that follow are the exact words of the defense
secretary, as taken from the official transcripts on the Defense Department Web site."
Happenings
You're going to be told lots of things.
You get told things every day that don't happen.
It doesn't seem to bother people, they don't—
It's printed in the press.
The world thinks all these things happen.
They never happened.
Everyone's so eager to get the story
Before in fact the story's there
That the world is constantly being fed
Things that haven't happened.
All I can tell you is,
It hasn't happened.
It's going to happen.
—Feb. 28, 2003, Department of Defense briefing
The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.
—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing
Glass Box
You know, it's the old glass box at the—
At the gas station,
Where you're using those little things
Trying to pick up the prize,
And you can't find it.
It's—
And it's all these arms are going down in there,
And so you keep dropping it
And picking it up again and moving it,
But—
Some of you are probably too young to remember those—
Those glass boxes,
But—
But they used to have them
At all the gas stations
When I was a kid.
—Dec. 6, 2001, Department of Defense news briefing
Wrapped in this madness is a truth that we need to discern and maybe more quickly that we think. It is said that Osama Bin
Laden is an aficionado of poetry of a sort as well and that too is scary.
Poetry as we know so dearly demands some depth and it demands that the reader, listener likewise engage deeply. But how
do we engage the populace in the deep discussion that is the purview of poetry. Steve Kowit became a voice for Stand-up
Poetry, a unique blend of the role of stand-up comic and the stage poet. Poetry and Jazz, first by Langston Hughes and then
Kerouac and Ginsburg brought the word together with jazz to energize the listener. The song lyrics of Dylan, Paul Simon, Sting,
push the poetic melody out on rhythm and harmony. Slams, rap, spoken word, the Internet all continue conveying the poetic
line. Books still give us the tangible, in the hand feel, and the chance to sit and deepen the experience. But mostly it seems it
takes daring. Daring to find any means necessary to get the poetic voice out there in the face of the populace. We better hurry,
the new "poetic" voice of D.H. is following closely on that of another past master of the genre Ollie North.