Clark's poetry blog: The Witness of Poetry & the Poetry of Witness (3.20.19)

For our last project, “How to Critique a Poem,” I made the point that a poem’s true content is language and its true “poemness” resides in its fronting of language. I am more than aware that this definition is open to charges of solipsism, mere art for art’s sake, especially if it is taken as a total statement about poetry. Of course, it’s not.

So then, don’t poems mean? Aren’t they about something besides their own deployment of language? We wouldn’t be the first to ask these questions. And the obvious answers are, of course they do! Clearly they are![1]

I’ve been rereading the Charles Eliot Norton lectures of Czeslaw Milosz (Harvard, 1983), which he titled The Witness of Poetry, partly as a counterpoint to this existential argument. In these lectures, Milosz, a Pole who of course lived through the Second World War and the Cold War, speaks of poems as “evidence of the dark times in which they lived.” Poetry for such a citizen of the modern world is testimony. He delivers the lectures, technically, from Cambridge, Mass., and from his chair in Slavic Languages and Literatures at UC Berkeley. In other words, he reflects upon the witness of poetry in the context of our safe, more or less innocent America (in 1983):

[The poetry of witness] is a poetry that presents the American reader with an interesting interpretive problem. We are accustomed to rather easy categories: we distinguish between "personal" and "political" poems—the former calling to mind lyrics of love and emotional loss, the latter indicating a public partisanship that is considered divisive, even when necessary. The distinction between the personal and the political gives the political realm too much and too little scope: it renders the personal too important and not important enough . . . The effacement of the personal can be seen not as a moment of real enlightenment, but as a surrender of the individual to the overbearing realities of an increasingly alienated world. If we give up the dimension of the personal, we risk relinquishing one of the most powerful sites of resistance. The celebration of the personal, however, can indicate a myopia, an inability to see how larger structures of the economy and the state circumscribe, if not determine, the fragile realm of individuality.

To illustrate this point of either-or-ness, Milosz describes a late poem of witness by the Hungarian poet, Miklós Radnóti[2]:

Radnóti's poems evade these easy categories. They are not just personal, nor are they, strictly speaking, political. What is one to make of the first lines of "Forced March":

The man who, having collapsed, rises, takes steps, is insane;
he'll move an ankle, a knee, an arrant mass of pain,

and take to the road again

The poem becomes an apostrophe to a fellow marcher, and so it is not only a record of experience [italics mine] but an exhortation against despair. It is not a cry for sympathy but a call for strength. The hope that the poem relies on, however, is not "political" as such: it is not a celebration of solidarity in the name of a class or common enemy. It is not partisan in any accepted sense. It opposes the dream of future satisfaction to the reality of current pain. One could argue that it uses the promise of personal happiness against a politically induced misery, but it does so in the name of the poet's fellows, in the spirit of communality.

If there is one American poet whose name is synonymous with a poetry of witness, it’s Carolyn Forché. Forché is also a novelist, essayist and teacher, but her true métier is poetry, and, specifically, poetry that bears witness. She works often in long form, and her poems address history; they are ponderous and sober and searching. They bear witness to humanity and inhumanity, and, like the best poetry of witness, do so without overt comment or editorializing. When you describe an interview with a banana republic despot who keeps a sack full of human ears under his desk to show to visitors, what else are you going to say, This is a bad man? Read her essay on the poetry of witness at http://www.english.illinois.edu/MAPS/poets/a_f/forche/witness.htm.

This is the power of witness poetry—presentation of a wrong without further comment. The main thing, as Charles Simic says of the poetry of Vasco Popa, “the usual drama of the Self is completely absent.” In much East European poetry, and Milosz is a leading exponent of this kind [3], bearing witness to history is the reason for the writing. It probably goes without saying, but I’ll say it: it doesn’t mean much to bear witness to a balmy, sun-drenched afternoon in a meadow. But if in that meadow is a mass grave with the remains of an entire village of victims, and the lovely afternoon suggests how humanity endures even after holocaust, then you’re in the vicinity of witness.

I’d like to take this discussion of the witness of poetry as the basis for our next project: writing poems of witness. Review Milosz’s observations and caveats carefully, especially those about falling into too-easy categories like “the personal” and “the political.” Try to write a poem that, like Radnóti’s (or those following), steers between these opposites, that isn’t merely a record of (your) pain or hope(lessness) or moral outrage, and isn’t likewise just a manifesto of class hegemony or political morality. Don’t tell “what’s wrong with the world” or “cry for sympathy” or describe (your) perfect world. Rather, make a poem of witness, passionate in its dispassionate testimony.

Your subject can be just about anything, as the following poems indicate, but it will certainly incorporate how we live in a world that is larger and less forgiving than we are in our humanity and community.

For a Coming Extinction

─ W. S. Merwin (1967)

Gray whale

Now that we are sending you to The End

That great god

Tell him

That we who follow you invented forgiveness

And forgive nothing

I write as though you could understand

And I could say it

One must always pretend something

Among the dying

When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks

Empty of you

Tell him that we were mad

On another day

The bewilderment will diminish like an echo

Winding along your inner mountains

Unheard by us

And find its way out

Leaving behind it the future

Dead

And ours

When you will not see again

The whale calves trying the light

Consider what you will find in the black garden

And its court

The sea cows the Great Auks the gorillas

The irreplaceable hosts ranged countless

And fore-ordaining as stars

Our sacrifices

Join your word to theirs

Tell him

That it is we who are important

Building the Barricade

─ Anna Świrszczyńska (c. 1944)

We were afraid as we built the barricade

under fire.

The tavern-keeper, the jeweler’s mistress, the barber, all of us cowards.

The servant girl fell to the ground

as she lugged a paving stone, we were terribly afraid

all of us cowards—

the janitor, the market woman, the pensioner.

The pharmacist fell to the ground

as he dragged the door of a toilet,

we were even more afraid, the smuggler-woman,

the dress-maker, the streetcar driver,

all of us cowards.

A kid from reform school fell

as he dragged a sandbag,

you see, we were really

afraid.

Though no one forced us

we did build the barricade

under fire.

Report

─ Johannes Bobrowski (in Shadow Land, 1941)

Bajla Gelblung,

escaped in Warsaw

from a transport from the Ghetto,

the girl took to the woods,

armed, was picked up

as partisan

in Brest-Litovsk,

wore a military coat (Polish)

was interrogated by German

officers, there is

a photo, the officers are young

chaps faultlessly uniformed,

with faultless faces,

their bearing

is unexceptionable.

A Ballad of Going Down to the Store

─ Miron Białoszewski (n.d., but WWII Warsaw)

First I went down to the store

by means of the stairs,

just imagine it,

by means of the stairs.

Then people known to people unknown

passed me by and I passed them by.

Regret

that you did not see

how people walk,

regret!

I entered a complete store:

lamps of glass were glowing.

I saw somebody—he sat down—

and what did I hear? What did I hear?

rustling of bags and human talk.

And indeed,

indeed

I returned.

Floornail

─ Vasco Popa (in The Little Box, 1987?)

One is the nail another is pliers

The rest are carpenters

The pliers grab the nail by the head

With their teeth their arms they grab it

And keep pulling and pulling

Pulling it out of the floor

Usually they just wring its head off

It’s hard pulling a nail out of the floor

The carpenters then say

These pliers are lousy

They crush its jaws break its arms

And throw them out of the window

Then someone else is a floornail

Another is pliers

The rest are carpenters

It Was Summer Now and the

Colored People Came Out

Into the Sunshine

─ Morgan Parker, from Magical Negro (2019)

They descend from the boat two by two. The gap in

Angela Davis’s teeth speaks to the gap in James Baldwin’s

teeth. The gap in James Baldwin’s teeth speaks to the

gap in Malcom X’s Teeth. The gap in Malcolm X’s teeth

speaks to the gap in Malcolm X’s teeth. The gap in

Condoleeza Rice’s teeth doesn’t speak. Martin Luther

King Jr. Boulevard kisses the Band-Aid on Nelly’s cheek.

Frederick Douglass’s side-part kisses Nikki Giovanni’s

Thug Life tattoo. The choir is led by Whoopi Goldberg’s

eyebrows. The choir is led by Will Smith’s flat top.

The choir loses its way. The choir never returns home.

The choir sings funeral instead of wedding, sings funeral

instead of allegedly, sings funeral instead of help, sings

Black instead of grace, sings Black as knucklebone,

mercy, junebug, sea air. It is time for war.

From When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d

─ Walt Whitman, in Memories of President Lincoln (1865)

Coffin that passes through lanes and streets,

Through day and night with the great cloud darkening the land,

With the pomp of the inloop’d flags with the cities draped in black,

With the show of the States themselves as of crape-veil’d women standing,

With processions long and winding and the flambeaus of the night,

With the countless torches lit, with the silent sea of faces and the unbared heads,

With the waiting depot, the arriving coffin, and the somber faces,

With dirges through the night, with the thousand voices rising strong and solemn,

With all the mournful voices of the dirges pour’d around the coffin,

The dim-lit churches and the shuddering organs—where amid these you journey,

With the tolling tolling bells’ perpetual clang,

Here, coffin that slowly passes,

I give you my sprig of lilac.

Ballad of the Soldier’s Wife

─ Bertolt Brecht & Kurt Weill (1940s)