In a recent interview, Jorie Graham claims that “artists have a large responsibility at present—that of awakening the imagination of a deep future.” Her argument goes like this. The future, by and large, means nothing to us but the life that remains on our own private calendar; we don’t feel connected to the people who’ll be living x generations hence, i.e., when the debts of our everdayness (rising seas, resource wars, the end of civilization) will have to be paid, and paid in blood. If we can feel close to them, we’ll change our ways. This feeling—call it futural empathy—depends on our power to conjure them forth in acts of imagination. Poetry shapes that power.
Is this what we mean by political art, in the age of climate change? One is instinctively wary of poets bearing news. The usual complaint is that Graham’s new collection (and, say, the anti-war poems in Robert Hass’ recent Time and Materials) read like letters to the converted. Of course we need to change our ways. Of course the war is bad. Readers of contemporary poetry already know this stuff. Perhaps what the poems do is make their interlocutor feel that knowledge in a densely physical, unignorable way—they allow you, as Graham has it, to “make of your compassion a crisper instrument,” because “you will need its blade.” They do not bring the news, in other words; they bring it home. Is this a political act?
I’m reminded of Zbigniew Herbert. Like his Polish contemporary and sometime rival Czeslaw Milosz, Herbert felt betrayed and reduced by foreign readers’ tendency to see him only as a witness, a valiant flag-bearer for something called the “freedom of the imagination”, in the face of something brutish and impersonal called “totalitarianism”. Of course they were performing exactly the error of their enemies: reducing an artist to his political function (in this case, drafting him into the ranks of liberal democracy). Herbert wasn’t writing on behalf of anything. He was struggling to craft new forms; to dissect the heart of our sense-making; to channel the voices of alternate or forgotten or otherwise mysterious selves. If he had an enemy, it was the idea of history-as-drama, the abstraction that seeks to dissolve our contradictions, our stained and dirty spiritedness, in a fake unity. The contradictions keep our pain in view. This is mere realism. I wonder what he would make, then, of our historical moment—when poetry seems to so many of us to be trapped between the domestic and the vatic, between brass-polishing intimacy and choir-preaching testimony? Perhaps Graham is after a mode of poesis already imagined by Herbert, in a famous poem from his middle years called Apollo and Marsyas. The story comes from Ovid. Apollo has defeated the bold mortal flute-player Marsyas in a musical duel, and Marsyas, for his insolence, is being flayed alive. Herbert wants to know what the god makes of mortal torment. Marsyas cries are (in Milosz’s translation)
beyond the endurance
of the god with nerves of artificial fibre
along a gravel path
hedged with box
the victor departs
wondering
whether out of Marsyas’ howling
there will not some day arise
a new kind
of art—let us say—concrete
suddenly
at his feet
falls a petrified nightingale
he looks back
and sees
that the hair of the tree to which Marsyas was fastened
is white
completely
A “new art”, in which the cries of our future victims are made concrete, real, present. The poet remains Apollonian, a shaper of form, so that the reader is freed to become the nightingale, petrified by pity in her everyday flight. Is this still what we call “politics”?
— Tully Rector
Tully Rector is a freelance writer. He teaches philosophy and literature at universities in Beijing, China. — sdh