Denis Joe wrote:emuse wrote:"
Poetry can bring to the fore conditions in need of change. This is not about being American or Middle Eastern or any other ethnic. It's about the brutalization of women where justice can depend on the intuition of a judge.
I write about what moves me. Don't we all?
Cheers and thanks!
E
E,
Whilst I have to agree about writing what moves you and I have no opposition to using 'issues' as a narrative in poetry I have to say that that your idea about poetry's ability to change is . . well . . outrageous.
First off, poetry is least appreciated of the arts. Go to any reading and the audience will either be made up of other poets or they will make up a sizable proportion.
Most important though is the fact that art does not bring about social/political change. Like other disciplines, art can only develop within the restrictions that are laid down by society and that is determined by the level of personal liberty that exists with a society.
I remember going to a reading by a couple of American poets who were affiliated to a Native American tribe. After their readings they took questions from the audience. One member told them that she wanted to write poems that would change’ people’s mind about being racists ‘ (her words, which burnt into my memory). I would have liked to have inflicted unspeakable violence on her, for her arrogance, but I also am a firm believer in free speech.
The point is that art is about raising an audience from the everyday (not as a form of escapism, mind, that is the role of entertainment, I believe there is a demarcation) rather than create a feeling of the banal. Like many reasonable people, I don’t particularly enjoy the fact that a woman (or anyone for that matter) will be put to death. I also don’t see Iran as a beacon of enlightenment. that said is it any worse than sentencing someone to death as is the case in some western democracies?
If we are to view the arts as part of the propaganda machinery then we have a situation which is no different from the Zhdanov years of the Soviet Union or, indeed, the Blair years of Britain, when Carol Anne Duffy acting like some lackey, bowed to pressure from the Home Office over her poem Education for Leisure by swearing that it fitted with government policy.
Any artist should not be answerable to anyone when it come to their creation, but if the arts are seen as being ‘on-message’ then the artist is subservient to a political doctrine or public opinion.
That’s all I meant really: You’re fully within your rights to use poetry in whatever way you see fit and me,; I’m within my rights to disagree.
Denis thanks for your detailed response. I don't get notices in my email account for threads in PG any longer so I have to come back and periodically check on things. Glad I did. After reading your thread I can't really see where the disagreement lies. I'd say it's more a matter of semantics. If poetry has the ability to raise the awareness of a subject, change can certainly be a byproduct of that awarness. If we take this concept from micro to macro it's easy to see how change is possible. How many of us write at certain moments for the cathartic experience of it? I don't know how many friends have told me that they were feeling a certain way, wrote a poem and then their viewpoint shifted. It happens on a smaller scale all the time. Can it prevent war? I don't know but I would never prescribe against its possibilities. My first exposure to poetry was in Switzerland reading the poems of Paul Eluard. I remember the moment I encountered “Liberté”, and learned that thousands of copies of his poem were dropped over occupied France during 1942. How many read the poem and became a part of the French Resistance? How many lives might have been saved? We cannot know but we cannot discount that even if this poem saved one life that it did not make a change. I don't know how much Neruda you've read but he was the poet of the people. Neruda's poetic activism was part and parcel of his life. As Chile's poet he was also very politically active in his country eventually take the seat of Senator and becoming an ambassador to France. When I interviewed William O'Daly, the translator of the last 8 books of Neruda here in the states we talked about Neruda's activitsm. The poem he wrote after touring a complex of buildings where Pinochet interrogated and tortured political prisoners. And what of Picasso's Guernica? And Lorca's death by the Flangists is then in vain.
It goes on and on. During the cultural revolution in China, poetry was everywhere...written on pinheads where they could only be read with a magnifying glass. Poetry as a means to change has been with us for eons. Even if my poem does nothing but get us all talking about art as a vehicle for change, then it's accomplished something. We each have the power to do this. No one has to -- it's a choice. The arts need not be part of the propoganda machinery -- but they can be a rage against the machine. Or they can be a whisper spoken in the night. Call me an idealist! But call me a poet
I leave you with Eluard's poem and thanks kindly for taking the time to respond:
Liberté
On my school notebooks
On my desk and on the trees
On the sands of snow
I write your name
On the pages I have read
On all the white pages
Stone, blood, paper or ash
I write your name
On the images of gold
On the weapons of the warriors
On the crown of the king
I write your name
On the jungle and the desert
On the nest and on the brier
On the echo of my childhood
I write your name
On all my scarves of blue
On the moist sunlit swamps
On the living lake of moonlight
I write your name
On the fields, on the horizon
On the birds’ wings
And on the mill of shadows
I write your name
On each whiff of daybreak
On the sea, on the boats
On the demented mountaintop
I write your name
On the froth of the cloud
On the sweat of the storm
On the dense rain and the flat
I write your name
On the flickering figures
On the bells of colors
On the natural truth
I write your name
On the high paths
On the deployed routes
On the crowd-thronged square
I write your name
On the lamp which is lit
On the lamp which isn’t
On my reunited thoughts
I write your name
On a fruit cut in two
Of my mirror and my chamber
On my bed, an empty shell
I write your name
On my dog, greathearted and greedy
On his pricked-up ears
On his blundering paws
I write your name
On the latch of my door
On those familiar objects
On the torrents of a good fire
I write your name
On the harmony of the flesh
On the faces of my friends
On each outstretched hand
I write your name
On the window of surprises
On a pair of expectant lips
In a state far deeper than silence
I write your name
On my crumbled hiding-places
On my sunken lighthouses
On my walls and my ennui
I write your name
On abstraction without desire
On naked solitude
On the marches of death
I write your name
And for the want of a word
I renew my life
For I was born to know you
To name you
E
