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Civil
Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action
Excerpt
Introduction
by Anne Waldman
Do
we really want to expel poets from the Republic? Imagine
Plato going through security at the Athens Airport,
then arriving in the USA for a Modern Language Association
convention. Would he be affronted? Amused? Would not
the threat of censorship be worrisome? Would he appreciate
the decor? If Henry David Thoreau were to travel, would
he suffer humiliation and indignation? What might compare
back then? Imagine your favorite radical literary heroes
going through security: Lao Tze, Sappho, William Blake,
Mary and Percy Shelley, Gertrude Stein, W. E. B. DuBois.
There
is currently--and one feels this is not going to go
away--a strange and disturbing “disjunct”
or “rip” in our culture that calls for an
articulate active response to the current repressive
agenda where anyone who doesn’t agree with current
USA administration junta policies is “unpatriotic.”
It’s as if people have given over control of their
“destiny”--in fact, their “imaginations”--to
a hopeless gray area of defeat and despair. When I get
an e-mail that “someone is investigating your background”
is it just a scam or something really creepy? When I
hear little “dips” in the phone stream is
it a malfunction or the U.S. Attorney General listening
in? When I am harassed by the IRS am I being paranoid
or just seriously targeted? And so on. Are “they”
trying to drive “us” crazy? The point here
is the irony of the artist’s situation--and others
have experienced similar aggressions--specifically in
our presumed democratic American culture and how one
needs to “act” to feel sane, human, alive,
intelligent, effective. Is there still some power in
the word, in a poetics that engages the spirit, that
delights the intellect, that moves--in William Carlos
Williams’s phrase--the century a few inches forward?
This
anthology answers an urgent call to a poetics of engagement,
which includes inquiry, contemplation, lively investigation
into history and fields of gnosis. It covers an enormous
range of particulars--from a fascinating account of
plant/animal symbiosis to a radical discussion of gender
and identity politics. It is a “talking” book--composed
in many cases elegantly on the tongue. Genres include
talks, lectures, essays, manifestoes, colloquia, interviews,
and documents such as site-specific histories, an essay
on Buddhist poetics as well as urgent political statements
meant for public dissemination. These texts are not
necessarily “polished” or academic. They are
refreshingly free of the jargon of critical theory and
predictable received ideas. They are also delightfully
intergenerational, reflecting the vital exchange between
established writers and younger adepts. For the most
part this collection is to be read as a poet-activist’s
handbook, balancing a rootedness in the act of writing
poetry that includes reading and thinking about it,
and understanding how the imaginative mind works in
response to its own dreams, longings, and the “outside”
world, with a sense of being able to take this knowledge
out into the public arena, into the streets as it were.
There is the intention here of making a difference,
of words as actions, of keeping the world safe for poetry
with wit and attendant wisdom. It is of major importance
to anyone curious about why poetry can make things happen,
and why poets have seemed to have more public relevance
since the difficult political events of recent years.
This book unequivocally implies that poets as thinkers,
as “legislators of the race,” exist to be
heard.
Many
of these discourses, lectures, and discussions took
place at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics’
legendary Summer Writing Program held annually on the
spine of the North American Continent at Naropa University
in Boulder, Colorado. Founded in the early seventies
with inspiration from the poetics and politics of the
Beat Literary Movement and the other “outrider”
wings of the New American Poetry against a backdrop
of the “crazy wisdom” lineage of Tibetan Buddhism,
Naropa has continued to be a mecca and--in Hakim Bey’s
term--a “temporary autonomous zone” for serious
writers and scholars and students since that time. The
anthology attempts to convey the excitement and aspiration
that arises in this unique educational community which
is like no other “writing program” in the
world.
Civil
Disobediences is divided into six sections. The
first section, “Talking Poetics,” invites
the reader to listen to personal commentary on the act
of being a writer, on the struggle and commitment it
involves, on the passion and individuality one needs
to maintain perspective and function as a full citizen
of the world outside the dominant mainstream of conformity
and consumerism. The next section, “Ancestral Presences”
includes scholarly tributes and invites the radical
spirit of both ancient and recent “presences”
into the mix. “Dharma Poetics” is a bow to
the important influence of Buddhism on American poetics,
while “Revolutionary Poetics” covers a spectrum
of relevant subjects, including a salient history of
money, which push to the heart of what Allen Ginsberg
calls a “breakthrough” in one’s own imagination
and consciousness that can literally wake people up.
The “Gnosis & Aesthetics” section advocates
strongly on behalf of urgent issues of environment,
gender, the mythic “Muse,” and considerations
of beauty and form in culture. Finally, “Documents”
offers brief pieces composed for specific topical occasions.
In many ways this book could be seen as a blueprint
for future communities of cultural poet-activists, opposed
to war, opposed to injustice, and ready to offer a language
free of euphemism as an antidote to an in-the-pocket
media’s strangle-hold on the imagination.
Henry
David Thoreau wrote in “Civil Disobedience,”
from which this volume takes its title:
A
corporation of conscientious men is a corporation
with a conscience. Law never made men a whit more
just; and, by means of their respect for it, even
the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.
A common and natural result of an undue respect for
law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel,
captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all,
marching in admirable order over hill and dale to
the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common
sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching
indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart. They
have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which
they are concerned; they are all peaceably inclined.
Now, what are they? Men at all? or small movable forts
and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous
man in power?
These are telling and cautionary words.
On
a date that seems ancient history now, and in a “kinder,
gentler” yet anxious and presciently dangerous
time--January 20, 2001--a group of us attended the events
of the Shadow Inauguration in Washington, DC’s
Stanton Park. We were there as poets-in-protest and
specifically to support African Americans and others
who had been disenfranchised at the polls in Florida
and elsewhere. Before beginning a march on the Supreme
Court Building, the large crowd (upward of 2,000 people)
took an oath to uphold the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
That law was established in order to reaffirm the right
of African Americans to vote, a right that had clearly
been hindered during the presidential election. We then
proceeded to circle the building in spite of the taunts
and banter from Bush supporters.
“Go
back to Russia!”
“Get
a job!”
“Get
back to the back of the bus!”
This
last ugly goad was a bracing reminder that the struggle
for peace and social justice never ends and that one
has to make a greater vow not to be discouraged from
the activist path.
We
were in an armed city. Then thousand members of law
enforcement agencies were out in full gear. Our small
cell of poets--Kristin Prevallet, Anselm Hollo, Alan
Gilbert, Maggie Zurawski--and Catholic activist nun
Maryanne Gleason kept steady with our stenciled signs
in the cold rain. Kristin had invoked Voltaire’s
famous “Écrasez l’infâme!”
(“down with infamy,” “make war on the
fanatics!” and in another version, “crush
bigotry!”)
Pondering
the tragic events since that day, which have led to
an even increasingly destabilized and globally warmed-up
planet, and reflecting on all the marches, rallies,
antiwar agitprop, a range of oppositional poetics activity
both local and global, and poised now on the eve of
the next decisive American election, one has to invoke
once again the long view. Never give in or up. It’s
possible to build sanity into our daily lives, into
our consciousness, as a spiritual and creative practice.
In
this spirit, Lisa Birman and I offer this tome, which
reflects a huge collective effort--as “civil”--polite,
dignified, conscientious, decentralized thinking--“disobediences,”
poetic acts that need to be outside the strictures of
repression, censorship, war, that are in disagreement
with the going “capital” and the agendas of
the rich and powerful cartels of the world. No one wants
to be “dissed” on this planet, more people
and life forms need to be heard from. Poets for countless
centuries have had a pulse on the ebb and flow of the
“polis” and can speak for the “tribe”
and for other sentient beings. We invite you to join
in this discourse.
The
Jack Kerouac School of Dismebodied Poetics
March, 2004
Year of the Wood Monkey
Books
by Anne Waldman:
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