Pattabi Seshadri on "Desert Grass"

What blurt is it about virtue and about vice?

Evil propels me, and reform of evil propels me . . . . I stand indifferent,

My gait is no faultfinder's or rejecter's gait,

I moisten the roots of all that has grown.

–Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

The context of “Desert Grass” is the Iraq war and specifically Abu Ghraib. The speaker is a godlike figure, perhaps the God of Abraham, perhaps someone else. The quotations are fragments of speech overheard by this figure from various players in the drama of the war—a tortured insurgent, the mother of a future jihadi, Lynndie England. They were sampled from or inspired by several texts, including the testimony of Abu Ghraib prisoner Ali Shalal to the Malaysian War Crimes Commission and newspaper articles. My process of composition can generally be described as rewritten collage. I combine samples from multiple texts, write over and between them, and repeat.

The poem's most conspicuous borrowing is from Walt Whitman. He can be found in several places, including the title. Why Whitman? I imagine that the godlike speaker might have been the source of Whitman's prophecies. I wanted the poem to have something of that omnivorous, roving attitude, an opening loose enough that I could fold all of the poem’s materials into it: not only voices and bodies, but petroleum deposits and phosphorescent light sticks, dried grass and barbed wire, satellites and surveillance recordings.

More significantly, “Desert Grass” was my attempt to get the America of Walt Whitman to reckon with the America of Abu Ghraib. I wanted to ask what it would look like through Whitman’s lens, in which every soul is infinitely valuable and everything has its place in the cosmos, even violence and criminality. I also wanted to explore one of Whitman's most particularly American self-contradictions: that fierce belief in the dignity of the individual, combined with a strangely passive fatalism in the face of human suffering (re: “manifest destiny,” “the invisible hand of the market,” “collateral damage”). 

I wanted to ask: has Whitman's America died, or can it still be seen in Abu Ghraib?  Have we lost the capacity for the empathy that compels Whitman (or at least the character named “Whitman”) to take in the runaway slave, dress his wounds, and invite him to dinner? Are we incapable of granting the same dignity to the prisoners of Abu Ghraib that he gives to the slave at auction, when he takes the auctioneer stand and declares him too valuable for the highest bidder? 

Or are we more like Whitman than we realize? We know from his newspaper editorials that while he opposed the spread of slavery, he was no abolitionist, arguing at one point that “slavery is not at all without its redeeming points.” When we condemn Abu Ghraib but write it off as the exception that proves the rule of American decency, are we lost in the same utopian complacency of Whitman’s “The universe is duly in order . . . . every thing is in its place /. . . / The call of the slave is one with the master's call . .  and the master salutes the slave?” When he announces that “The keptwoman and sponger and thief are hereby invited . . . . the heavy-lipped slave is invited. . . . the venerealee is invited” to his dinner table, what is he saying about his opinion of the slave? In other words, are we just smoothing things over with Whitmanesque gestures of love and brotherhood? 

Necessarily then, I am also asking: What is the proper role of the poet in the face of something like Abu Ghraib? Is Whitman right that it is not her place to call evil to account? Should she save a place for both the hooded prisoners and the smiling guards at her table? Even if I managed to do that, would I be able to respond with anything other than outrage? And if so, would I be aestheticizing a crime? 

Bruce Bond on Audubon

The story that sets the poem “Audubon” into motion is true: the night my father died I was miles away in Texas while he, who had suffered for so long in California, accepted the inevitable as it in turn accepted him. Unable to sleep, I set out to write a passage through the difficulty, my heart cast out of its usual place, exposed. It did not matter much to me if I had broken some decorum, if I made selfish use of suffering, his, mine, or that of future readers who knew the man. I was doing what a love of words had prepared me to do, to make something, to transfigure, as tragedies do, pain into meaning, heartbreak into the redemptive and confrontational pleasures of form. So much for emotions recollected in tranquility. I was in the thick of something that seemed not hostile to art, but rather at the core of the unspeakable from which art derives its language. To speak this place into being is both a form of supplication and a violation. It is to attempt the impossible, which seems to me still to be the function of art, to honor silence in its own tongue.

This is not to say I do not understand the objections some folks have to the unabashed and ready rendering of the tragic, though to see this as “exploitation” oddly suggests not only selfish motives but also an act at the expense of another’s well-being. I understand as well that the sudden creative transformation of grief may figure in some contexts as premature or an exercise in bad taste. But I also think a general denial of the paradoxical nature of art’s engagement with the horrible via the aesthetic is common. In her book Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, Hélène Cixious talks at length about how when your write about something, you kill it off. One interpretation I brought to this was the sense that representation is at once a negation and an affirmation, a barrier and a bridge to that elusive referent beyond our language for it. Thus whatever mastery we might sense in the act of creation is likewise mitigated by a certain helplessness, a knowledge that otherness can never announce itself as purely other.    

All this set the scene for my encounter with Audubon, who clearly loved birds but not enough to spare their lives in the service of his art. His particular form of aesthetic  murder, being literal, exploited his subject in a way that exaggerated the self-interest implicit in the act of creation. By way of his story, the troubling implications of the “detached attachment” of the artist’s gaze come into focus. I admit, I love Audubon’s paintings, and that love disturbs me when I think of the cruelty that made them possible. Part of what I admire is Audubon’s powers of attention, his near religious devotion to the designs of nature, not to mention the paint itself. As such his work, like all art, calls upon a simultaneous control and abandon, a ready hand, an open eye. Where the eye opens, the heart is soon to follow: such is our hope. In my poem “Audubon,” I wanted less to stand above Audubon in moral judgment than to make his tension my own. The only credible affection I know is through a hole in the self not the other direction entirely. I wanted the father now to participate in the writing act, to make of it less a declaration of feeling than an invocation to the unseen; less a testament of will than a collaboration with silence, the thing that dies the moment that it speaks.