Nelson uncovers, shares, and
comments on Left poets who wrote about the U.S. Depression and economic crisis
in the 1920s and 30s, about the anti-fascist struggle in Spain in the 30s, about
the right-wing attacks of McCarthyism in the U.S. in the 50s.
I’m hoping that the following
anecdote from Nelson—and some thoughts on my own practice of poetry—could encourage
readers of the Beloit Poetry Journal to
share important insights from your own lives as writers and readers .
Here is an excerpt from an
October 1937 letter by Fred Lutz, a volunteer in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion,
a U.S. fighting unit in the International Brigades that came to Spain to defend
the elected government against Franco’s fascist military campaign:
Heard
Langston Hughes last night; he spoke at one of our nearby units—the Autoparque,
which means the place where our Brigade trucks and cars are kept and repaired.
It was a most astonishing meeting; he read a number of his poems; explained
what he had in mind when he wrote each particular poem and asked for criticism.
I thought to myself before the thing started “Good God how will anything like
poetry go off with these hard-boiled chauffeurs and mechanics, and what sort of
criticism can they offer”? Well it astonished me as I said. The most remarkable
speeches on the subject of poetry were made by the comrades. And some said that
they had never liked poetry before and had scorned the people who read it and
wrote it but they had been moved by Hughes’s reading. There was talk of “Love”
and “Hate” and “Tears”; everyone was deeply affected and seemed to bare his
heart at the meeting, and the most reticent . . . spoke of their innermost
feelings. I suppose it was because the life of a soldier in wartime is so
unnatural and emotionally starved that they were moved the way they were.
(Nelson, 197)
Nelson says particularly of the
poets who wrote to build support for the anti-fascist Spanish Republic that
“they were not responding to the war;
they were part of it.” (190)
[You
can see Hughes’ translation of Federico Garcia Lorca’s Romancero Gitano
in the
fall 1951 issue of the Beloit Poetry
Journal. Garcia Lorca, a Spanish poet sympathetic to the Popular Front, who
was also gay, was murdered, presumably by fascist militia, in 1936. http://www.bpj.org/index/V02N1.html]
Poetry
as an active force
Under what circumstances, with
which audiences, as a result of what conversations, with what languages, in
relation to what political events—do we write a poetry that is not simply a response to liberation, but instead is an
active force in the process of
liberation?
I
began to write seriously as a poet after I came out and began to live openly as
a lesbian, in North Carolina in 1975. This was a time in that state when the
right-wing was violently racist, often under the aegis of the state, a de facto
continuation of the fascism of segregation.
In
1979, the Klan shot and killed five white and Black communists, who were
demonstrating against racism, in broad daylight in Greensboro—and were
acquitted in a jury trial. My Black students had direct experience of Klan
assaults on their homes and families. A coalition of left, community, and
women’s liberation groups organized successfully to free Joann Little, who had
killed her white jailer in self-defense when he attempted to rape her.
As
a white woman committed to anti-racist action, I struggled to create poems that
would do that anti-racist work in the world—poems like “The Segregated Heart”
in my first chapbook, The Sound of One
Fork. http://www.lesbianpoetryarchive.org/node/268
The
right-wing—and the mainstream where I lived—was also virulently homophobic. This
was the state where I lost custody of my children simply because I was a
lesbian. Much of my work at that time was about my sexuality, and I read the
poetry, sometimes alone, sometimes with other women, in women’s bookstores,
coffee houses and cultural centers; at regional and national women’s studies
conferences; at a conference on violence against women, at a lesbian writers’
conference, at an abortion clinic, at a rally against rape; at a MCC church and
in an Odd Fellows Hall; in the homes of lesbians, and many, many other places.
I
was making and reading my poetry in the middle of a historic fight for sex,
gender and sexual liberation, where the outcome was a matter of life and death
for many, if not all, of us.
These
readings were taking place during a time when it was still a felony crime to
physically love another person of the “same sex”—and many of us lost our
children, our jobs, our birth families, our friends, our homes, and sometimes
our lives, because of the hatred and bigotry toward lesbian, gay, bisexual, and
transgender people.
The
readings were often crowded, sometimes standing room only; they were attended
by working-class women, mostly white women, who were factory workers, social
workers, taxi drivers, stay-at-home mothers. These were movement events,
organized by and for local lesbian and women’s liberation communities in
Tennessee or Florida or Oregon or upstate New York.
Often
at the end of a reading, women would come up to me and say they’d never been to
a poetry reading before, but they’d enjoyed this one. And then sometimes they
told me their stories. One poem I made from these conversations is “All the
Women Caught in Flaring Light.” (Crime
Against Nature, 1989) http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178275
Poetry as the
“language of history”
Nelson
says of the poetry of the revolutionary U.S. Left that “Poetry was the language
of history and the story of ordinary lives” (243). During the 1970s and 80s I tried
to craft a poetry that could wield the stories of ordinary lives as the language of history, as an active
force in history.
Over
the last ten years, I have worked on a different series of poems, which
culminated in a book, Inside the Money
Machine (Carolina Wren, 2011). The “machine,” of course, is 21st-century
capitalism. My intention was to create poems that revealed that complex
economic structure, its implications, and the possibility for resistance and
change, and to do so through the stories and observed details of working-class
lives.
I
wrote the poems for the “immense
majority”—of which I am a part—by going out into my neighborhood and its
streets and storefronts and 24/7 delis and beauty salons, and listening and
noticing other working people. I wrote the poems about the economic realities
of their lives—and my own life—being laid off, trying to find work, holding
temporary jobs, living away from my home and my loved partner.
I
wrote during an intensification of class war—the war waged by the owning class
on working people. I wrote during the worst economic bust the U.S. has
experienced since the 1930s—an economic catastrophe that has been world-wide. I
started writing these poems at the same time I was reading the poetic prose of
the Communist Manifesto for the first time. I said to myself: If the economists can write poetry, what
would happen if a poet wrote economics?
This
is one of the poems from Inside the Money
Machine:
“The
Street of Broken Dreams”
The
dog lunged at me and choked on its chain,
guarding
a house on the street of broken dreams.
What
does it take to be safe? A sun-porch window
barred
shut with a wood-spooled bed frame. Fradon
lock
store down the block, a giant curlicue key
advertising
sleep all night, sweet dreams. A bumble-
bee
in the clover fumbling to find its damp-dirt home.
No
way to tell who owns my neighborhood homes
until
the for-sale-by-bank signs grow overnight,
and
of course there’s the bank at James and Lodi
with
the blue light, CHASE, that stays on 24/7.
On
my street some people harrow a vacant lot,
green
turned under into small rows, they harvest
weathered
rocks and pile those up in the corner.
In
another city, some foreclosed people got
so angry
the
big finance company has to hide its sign, AIG.
The
people were so angry. That makes me feel more
safe.
The people come out of their houses to shout:
We demand. Not rabble or
rabid, not shadow, not terror,
the
neighbors stand and say: The world is
ours, ours, ours.
Poetry and the
current historical moment
I
was writing to make a poetry that could take its place in the struggle that is
always there. In 2011 the Occupy movement surged and called the “1%” to
account—the 1% that claims as private property the productive mechanisms of the
world. http://www.mediabistro.com/portfolios/samples_files/21804_sQriMkoM5p9sJ4kNCRjH70azM.pdf
Now
the Occupies have been attacked, brutally, with teargas, mace, rubber bullets
and truncheons, by the state. The movement has not yet been able to hold onto
continuous public space as a place for mass organizing and discussion about how
to struggle against and replace an economic system that is mounting endless
imperialist wars and environmental catastrophes, that is killing us and the
planet.
But,
despite these attacks, the organizing initiated by the Occupies continues
vigorously, in the U.S. and worldwide, and is linking up with other movements
that were already in motion.
While
the uninterrupted Occupy space was open, we know that poetry as “the language
of history” was at the heart of the struggle—the witty and pithy slogans on
hand-held signs, the poetry shouted at police as they moved in, seized, and
trashed the 5000 books in the OWS Library. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/2011/nov/23/occupy-wall-street-peoples-library
Even
now, the Occupy Wall Street People’s Library continues the fighting work of
poetry with an ongoing, ever-expanding poetry anthology. http://peopleslibrary.wordpress.com/2012/02/16/1913/
The
OWS Library, together with Nuestra Palabra: Latino Writers Having Their Say, the
May 1st Coalition for Immigrant Rights and many other groups, are sponsoring
a LibroTraficante solidarity action to resist the racist Arizona ban on Latin@
and Chican@ culture in the state public schools. Banned books include Paulo
Freire’s Pedagogy
of the Oppressed and left feminist Elizabeth (Betita) Martinez’s 500 Years of Chicano
History in Pictures.
The
LibroTraficante caravan will carry copies of the banned books from Texas across
the Arizona border to set up Underground Libraries. http://www.librotraficante.com/
Poetry and the unfinished work of liberation
Poetry and the unfinished work of liberation
Now,
in this month’s forum, the Beloit Poetry
Journal gives us the space and the chance to have a conversation about the
actions of poetry in our lives.
I’m
hoping that you as readers and poets will share some of your experiences:
Would
you write to share with readers of BPJ about
times when you felt poetry—yours or that of others—was be an active force in the process of
liberation?
Is
there a moment when you’ve experienced poetry connecting you and others to the progressive
struggles closest to your heart?
What
are the gatherings, translations, caravans, anthologies, political actions, web
sites that you want to make known to other poets—places where poetry is in
motion toward a better world?
Would
you describe the places where you have held and handed poetry on to others—as a
tool, a weapon, a force, in the struggle against oppression and for justice?
Would
you write to us about when poetry has not just spoken, but acted, in the
unfinished work of a moment in your history?
I
look forward hopefully to our conversation.
