revisiting Baraka's "Somebody Blew Up America"

Because of the recent uproar regarding Ward Churchill's extemporaneous essay on 9/11 and the United States' history of going against the political & social grains of other nations & peoples, I thought it would be appropriate to revisit Amiri Baraka's poem "Somebody Blew Up America" and pointto some of the discussion surrounding it. In addition, I would like to address the question of how does poetry enter the social/political milieu and should it? (Thanks to Ms. P. Bloodworth for asking me about Baraka's poem in the first place. Regarding W. Churchill, go here.)

Before getting to my own thoughts, here are some links to articles & essays addressing the controversy:
An article from the Skeptical Inquirer which has a poignant & direct statement regarding poetry & politics: "[P]oetic license should not absolve Baraka, who professes to use poetry to make provocative social and political statements. If that's the ethical purpose of his poetry, he has an obligation to motivate people through truth, not lies."
Here is a thoughtful essay, One Way of Reading "Somebody Blew Up America", that addresses the poem as a literary artifact rather than simply as sociopolitical polemic.
An op-ed from The New Yorker has one of my favorite juxtapositions about "the role of poetry in today's fractious world" at the end of the article with a quote from Baraka and one by Ashbery.

I am tempted to say that all poetry dwells within the social-political milieu but then I enter into a situation that is reflexive & self-fulfilling. To ask if poetry should enter the social-political milieu begs the question, wherein “should”, an auxiliary verb to express moral obligation, is a matter of choice. In point of fact, Amira Baraka raises some interesting & justified points in his retort against his detractors, albeit soured & frustrated with his special brand of anger & diatribe. Baraka’s attempt to riff on current events toward a history of similar & relevant events is one that should encouraged, even championed, especially when it seems more members of the so-called educated elite are ignorant of the past and its relevance to our lives in view of a meaningful (& hopefully fruitful) future. Personally, I am not terribly fond of Baraka’s poem; anaphora, especially in a long poem, can be tiresome & sometimes difficult to pull off. In certain ways, the poem strikes me as pedantic & didactic, political furor as bludgeon. Too much political poetry is preoccupied with message; poetry as propaganda is propaganda and the poetry usually suffers as result. David Wojahn touches on this subject in his Q&A for the journal Smartish Pace more articulately than I could, so I would like to direct you there and quote a little of his remarks:

Your first question is a complex one, and I fear I'm not going to be able to do it justice. I am highly wary of the term "poetry of witness," which became fashionable after Forche published her POETRY OF WITNESS anthology in the early nineties. North American readers have tended to see the term reductively, thinking that poetry of an activist nature is best written by those who have seen political turmoil and experienced terrible suffering--and then they invariably try to compare themselves, always unfavorably, to figures like Milosz, Herbert, Neruda, Vallejo, Hikmet, etc.--writers whose politics or historical circumstances caused them to endure terrible tribulations. What right do I have, they seem to say to themselves, to write about politics and injustice, coming from the privileged lives that most American intellectuals and academics live? This stance saddens me, especially during a time in when the pressures of addressing the political and social are going to be ever-greater. You saw that timidity and fuzzy thinking manifest itself in the Hamil anthology of poets against the second Iraq War that came out last year--as important as it was for us to raise our voices against the Bush administration and all it represents, most of the poems in the collection were trivial. Largely, I think, because of the attitude I'm speaking about.

Anyway, I have always hoped that my poems would be viewed as political, as
activist, that they protest injustice while at the same time not devolving into familiar lefty pieties or agit-prop. Sometimes what your question calls a "documentary" approach is one way of achieving this, and I often find myself focusing on moments of crisis or traumatic events because those events tend to focus and allegorize injustice, bring it into high relief, both in terms of the poems' ideology and of its craft. Do these treatments run the risk of being gratuitous? Sure, that's the danger one faces when writing such poetry, as you see in the work of three of my favorite contemporary poets, Dubie, Seidel, and Ai. As much as I love their work, certain of their poems give me the creeps, for the very reasons you cite in your question. But part of the bravery of their poems comes from their willingness to risk the gratuitous, risk seeming to glamorize violence and injustice even as they attempt to condemn it. Needless to say, that challenge isn't a new one for poets, since it's been with us ever since Homer and the Gilgamesh epic.


I am not as heated as Baraka & Wojahn are about addressing the sad political situation/climate we inhabit at the moment and I certainly don’t 100% agree with Wojahn that we American poets are sadly devolving into solipsism (though he certainly makes a good & important point). That said, Wojahn goes on to mention that what makes a lot of poetry, political or otherwise, last & make an impact is its artistry. This is something that Baraka’s poem, for me, clearly is in need of. If his poem were subjected to a workshop (gasp!), one thing that would jump out is that he leaps into his subject matter without clearing a little more ground first; I get his point but not all readers are going to and it is a common, thorny issue of how much credit & information does the poet give to the reader. The second thing that would come up in our imaginary workshop is that the poem is too long; to borrow a geometry definition (and the title of an over-rated Liz Waldner poetry collection), a point is that which has no part — as poetry, I think his poem would be better served by compression, by fierce directness; as propaganda, then, sure, repeating yourself to death a la Republican campaign strategy will work but in poetry, for better or worse, repetition often equals dilution, especially when a good deal of the poem relies upon sophomoric wordplay (e.g., “Tom Ass Clarence”, “Colon” for Colin [Powell]) and then he throws out “the Reichstag Fire” which he could have built upon (it is a powerful image that could be exploited in the way that Wojahn expects political poetry to do; instead Baraka expects everyone to get it; if it was so important, he should have made it more of a piece in the poem rather defending it at length in his speech/letter, especially considering that it is a small part of a long poem).

The reaction to Baraka’s poem was blown way out of proportion but he didn’t help the situation. The folks he talks about, defends, praises, knew a thing or two about how to use their anger & their words to stand their ground. Indignation does not equal vitriol; the same goes to the reactions to his poem, but as I said, Baraka did not help the situation.

Poetry will always be a part of whatever milieu we wish it to be a part of. The social and the political, as components of the larger category, culture, will always carry with them an air of the moral and people will always question whether poetry, and art in general, should enter into the discussion. The question is not whether it should but how because it seems clear to me that poetry already is a part of the picture as soon as it is addressed in social or political terms.

Addendum:
First, I would like to point out that recently the First Amendment Project series on the Sundance Channel (and on its partner network, Court TV) included an episode on Amiri Baraka entitled “Poetic License”, directed by Mario Van Peebles.

And here is the end of an interview from a recent issue of Verse (“The Prose Issue II”, Vol. 20, Nos. 2 & 3); it is an interview of the Australian poet Kevin Hart by Stephen Watson (Watson’s remarks are in italics):

For some like myself, who’s lived most of his life in South Africa, a country which was literally at war with itself for decades, one is used to poetry being ascribed a vociferously political role. Poetry can, of course, be used to bring down governments, ferment revolutions, among much else. But why I responded at once to your work was precisely because it seemed to have very different ends in view. As soon as I read your work I thought of a sentence that Milosz also uses in his Nobel Prize lecture in 1980 to define his sense of the poet’s mission. “The poet’s true vocation,” he wrote, “is to contemplate being.” Would these words chime accurately with your own sense of the poet’s vocation? In your “Wimmera Songs,” for one thing, you allude to “The stranger we call Being.”

I find myself rebelling against sentences beginning, “The poet’s true vocation is…” There are all sorts of poets. Perhaps you can gather George Herbert and Walt Whitman together and say that they are both contemplating being, albeit in very different styles, but then “contemplating being” begins to seem a bit thin. If we’re not to beat contemplation to “airy thinness” we must let it work alongside other dispositions, including curiosity. I can imagine a poet who might object to Milosz and say, “No, the poet’s true vocation is to be curious about things.” I doubt that one can be curious and contemplative at one and the same time. Or maybe one is just pulled in those two directions at once. It feels like that when writing poems.

It seems to me that there’s always been a kind of alternative tradition in poetry itself — perhaps a real continuing underground. It carries, and is carried by, a certain conception of poetry itself and of a poet’s role. There have, no doubt, been dozens of ways of putting these, in idioms varying according to time and language. But all of these tend to define the art itself, as well as the poet, in terms that are unmistakably religious in their idiom. I think of Heidegger’s notion of the poet as “shepherd of Being”; of Montale; even of Octavio Paz’s conception of poetry as “the other voice.” I think of Milosz in his lecture again: “The poet’s true vocation is to contemplate being.”

Undoubtedly I’m at home in that alternative tradition. All the poets whose work I love are there. Thinking back to your previous question, I should add that this tradition doesn’t exclude outrage against injustice. Far from it! Poetry can offer testimony against oppression, can give voice to a people’s pain, and can object to idolatry, without abandoning its contemplative role. Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Celan, Yeats…Now there’s a range of examples!

The poets and others I’ve mentioned see their roles as poets, and that of poetry more broadly, not in socio-political terms. They’re compelled to assume, with whatever disclaimers as to their fitness for the task, the burden of the mystery — the mystery of being itself, both in its radiance and its opacity.

Oh yes, I agree: to regard poetry solely in socio-political terms is to kill it. That’s as bad as draining poetry of ethics. Today the problem is how to sop politics, especially identity politics, from determining what counts as ethics… Perhaps it’s possible, though, to respond to the mystery of being in an almost wholly social way: Dryden and Robert Browning might be examples, I don’t know. It’s no my way, but it’s a possibility.

Improbable as it might sound, I think that this tradition I’ve just sketched (and which your own poetry both continues and extends) perhaps provides a more viable route for poetry to continue to follow than almost any other. Even now — and perhaps especially now. For it answers more fully, more satisfactorily, that interminable, vaguely despairing question, “Can poetry matter?”

You can never really tell what sort of work a poem will do. I’ve had mail over the years from people who have told me that reading one of my poems helped them in times of desolation. A couple of years ago I was telephoned by a man who had been a political prisoner in Chile; he had been subjected to the most horrifying indignities. He called me to say that one thing that kept him going while in solitary confinement was a Spanish translation of my poem “The Room.” He told me that some of my poems had encouraged his friends in their struggles. He wasn’t talking about a poem like “Prague, 1968” that responds to a particular political situation but about those poems you associate with the contemplation of being. In a way, those poems did political work in helping that man and his friends to survive.