Social Responsibility as Worms

Oh! Look, a can of worms…

And by worms does he mean bait, despicable entities or those little wiggly things that keep our soils rich?

Well, whatever the case, social responsibility can be all of the above; worms.

bait: Social responsibility as agenda often baits a stance, draws someone or something toward or away from something/one else. I can write a book about my experience as a Latino (or whatever we call ourselves these days) for Latinos or for a non-Latino audience. Either way can be justified as a kind of SR but will only be considered responsible according to a rubric established by an unwieldly cultural consensus, big or small. But if controversy or sympathy has been garnered then I have successfully been socially responsible in some way even if it was only for money (after all, personal gain is not a part of social responsibility no matter what rhetoric you use since personal gain is not a relationship with others but with oneself). As bait, SR does not foster communication but instead relies on hooking an individual or group into a situation. While this may useful under some circumstances, it ignores the complexity of communication among citizens. A ripe example is the unfortunate & inaccurate passion of Nicholson Baker’s calculated diatribe Double Fold and the ensuing controversy.

despicability: Social responsibility can and has reared its ugly head in many guises and often for the wrong reasons. One such instance is political correctness. In being socially responsible, sometimes we become hyper-aware of the things that need attention or, worse, we focus on things that seem easy to address and only end making things worse or looking stupid. More often than not this approach takes on the character of victimization. For every angle of approach there is a corresponding angle of reproach until there is a splintering of perspective; cries for tolerance & upheaval lend themselves to self-repression, intolerance of other viewpoints &/or self-parody. Negativity disguised as positive energy remains one of the most dangerous enterprises in academic, sociopolitical & intellectual culture today. SR itself becomes a problem to which it would have addressed had it not been dressed up as a cure-all. SR fundamentally thrives on a balance and an understanding that a diversity of opinion is necessary in the marketplace of ideas. That some methods purport that SR is leveling device for the means of administering conformity is both irresponsible & misguided. Snakes in the grass, snakes in the trees.

wigglies: Social responsibility as guidelines or hard set rules allow a writer to open discussions, to question tradition & the status quo, dismantle rival systems, cull. And herein lies the oft-forgotten & true nature of worms: whether we use them as bait or consider them slimy yucky things best left underground, worms are an essential element of preservation & enrichment taken for granted. Just as subtext informs our writings & other communicative devices, so too does SR run the gambit in the great conversation. Despite the chance that SR may wriggle out of our hands as shown above, bear in mind SR works upon people within contexts. To lose sight of one’s current position in the milieu of the times is to forget what SR represents & how it comes about. SR exists for want to construct meaning & flexibility in a world fitted into the iron box of power & its struggles. The will to power in this case begs the question of when should we be socially responsible and how. As categorical imperative, SR cannot be taken more than a means & ends by which we establish a tentative plan for conducting our affairs. To make such a list of suggestions into sacrosanct commandments will only return us to a state of inflexibility. SR as a liberal & humanist endeavor must avoid this development; SR as a means of control becomes doctrine, laws which no longer allow the nature of social relations ample room to breathe & grow.

I personally do not believe writers need to be socially responsible. It is ultimately a personal choice though I would agree people ought to be socially responsible as citizens. Without actually discussing anymore what SR is, it is clear to me that the political & social dimensions often imposed upon creative efforts are artificial and loaded. One could argue that the Harry Potter books are socially responsible because they get kids (and adults) to read though this does not take into account that recently Ms. Rowling wished aloud in an interview she wanted to write anonymously in a coffee shop again with these stories to support herself and her child, a personal activity meant to alleviate the creative & personal pressures of being a single mother and a human being. In a nation that is fond of politicizing (even if mostly in the abstract) there is little understanding, even acceptance, of ambiguity & neutrality despite our inclinations toward a peculiar kind of indifference we enjoy. After all, the United States of America is one of the few countries that do not utilize poetry as a means to teach children language & memorization skills, where poets & other writers are not the first suppressed for disseminating their dissent. If anything, perhaps all writers have an obligation, a social responsibility if you will, to restore the greatness of speech & letters to a country claiming to be the haven of free will, free people, to knock down the poles & flags that seek to compartmentalize the human experience. A revival of a tradition set upon us by Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Twain, many other men & women, some gone, some forgotten, but all still an unpolished foundation stone within the great pyramid of history & culture we participate in.

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.

supporting Ward Churchill and academic freedom

"...freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth."
Justice Louis D. Brandeis
Larkin vs. State of California, 1927

Recently there has been a flare of controversy at both Hamilton College and the University of Colorado (at Boulder) regarding an essay by Ward Churchill, a professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado. This controversy was precipitated by some of the survivors and the family members of victims of 9/11/01 when an essay of his (addressing the government of the US and the 9/11 tragedy) was found on the web before he was to give a lecture for the Kirkland Project (some discussion on the Hamilton end is ongoing including an ill-timed "review" of the KirklandProject); unfortunately, as he eloquently states in his press release, Churchill's words were taken out of context & soiled with a degree of emotionality alien (but not unreasonable or without cause) to academic discourse and to the bare facts. Moreover, it is clear by the chancellor's & governor's statements (and admittedly the chancellor is performing a good deal of damage control here) that some people would choose to condemn Churchill without trying to understand or even read his essay (click here to read Churchill's essay) but at least he is being given due process rather than the simple boot. The Board of Regents of the university held a special meeting recently addressing academic freedom and whether Churchill, according to its by-laws, should be dismissed (for some information on academic freedom at Colorado and for updates on the meeting, click here). Hopefully they will follow their by-laws and the advice of the American Association of University Professors.

Academic freedom (and other issues surrounding freedom of expression) have long been of some issue and particularly so with the political climate as it is and the introduction of the Patriot Act. Hopefully Mr. Churchill's ordeal does not become another black spot on the shiny road toward liberty & freedom that we hear so much about these days.

more on academic freedom:
Students for Academic Freedom
American Association of University Professors on Academic Freedom & Tenure
Collegefreedom.org
Human Rights Watch - Academic Freedom Initiative
Academic Freedom in the USA (one lawyer's take on what is & is not academic freedom)
Academic Freedom Lecture Fund (lectures available online in streaming video)
Council for Academic Freedom and Academic Standards [UK]
Committee on Academic Freedom on the Middle East and North Africa

Toward a Dis-Poetry

In “Four Statements On The Dance: Grace and Clarity” (from Silence), where poetry & dance are called time arts, works dependent on lengths of time and built of phrases much like nature is made of smaller & smaller parts, John Cage states:

With clarity of rhythmic structure, grace forms a duality.
Together they have a relation like that of body and soul.
Clarity is cold, mathematical, inhuman, but basic and
earthy. Grace is warm, incalculable, human, opposed to
clarity, and like the air. Grace is not here used to mean
prettiness; it is used to mean the play with and against
the clarity of the rhythmic structure. The two are always
present together in the best works of the time arts,
endlessly, and life-givingly, opposed to each other.

What I take from Cage’s remarks is that form is not a static formula for expression. Form, the morphology of a poem, its continuity, its expressive content, derives its movement, other than from the obvious devices of meter & sound, from the spontaneity born out of choice, experience & personality. Though this may appear obvious to any wordsmith, how this duality is played out is the matter that makes all the difference. Balance is not the order of the day however; different kinds of order may be established successfully if the poet seeks an appropriate representation of a poem’s constituent parts without sacrificing grace in favour of clarity and the reverse. How Cage composed his lectures speaks to this need to create works that operate on both levels. For example, by embedding a through-text that interrupts the general speech of the lecture we are given the underlying current of an idea or a lecture without weighing down the rest of the content with any unnecessary contextualization or explanation, so, like air, the through-text floats in & out of the general & straightforward elements, reinforcing the subject matter of the lectures.

Form in poetry is often aperceptive, a self-limiting & -perpetuating device; it is desired in work in order to place a kind of roadmap for reading (in the same way we expect to read a poem line by line from left to right, top to bottom). But form alone does not make the poem. Grace, in my view, is a kind of disruptive force like dispersion or decay or luck. It is where awe springs from; a mountain, a canyon, a blood-red moon cannot conjure the sublime without the messy collaboration of grace & soul.

Like Jorie Graham, whose poetry, though lyrical in a conventional sense even when cliché-dependent, achieves a heightened character in its attempt to give clarity to the ineffable and to provide multiple ways to see a scene, I want a poetry leavened by the clutter of human happening & by the Jacobian mental wrestling we experience in our reflective moments. This means a willingness to break out of the stable into the open fields of language. I agree with Cage when he says that a new music will foster new listening; therefore a new poetry will foster new reading. To paraphrase Cage paraphrasing Bergson’s statement about disorder: This dis-poetry is simply a poetry to which many are unaccustomed. Any art form untouched by an experimental spirit, or at least the vitality of change, will corrupt & deplete itself.

some notes on the First Amendment

Recently there was an uproar near Salem OR over an Adopt-A-Road sign reading "American Nazi Party". And who said theyare not capable of nice things? What i like about the article is the unsubtle mention that if the signs are destroyed, the sponsoring organization must pay to have them replaced (the initial two signs were put up at a taxpayer expense of $500). At any rate, the party's right to have their name on a sign and to adopt a road is protected by the First Amendment.

Speaking of the First Amendment, i am reminded that recently the Treasury Dept.'s Office of Foreign Assets Control changed regulations that will allow publishers to print work by writers from nations like Iran and Cuba (PEN American Center press release). This was precipitated by a lawsuit because Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian author & human rights activist, was unable to publish her work in the US because of her Iranian citizenship.

In related issues, it is disturbing to find that ignorance of & indifference toward what makes up free society is on the rise here in the US. One of my favorite lines from any song is from the Modern Lovers' "Modern World" when Jonathan Richman sneers,"The modern world is not so bad...not like the students say." But Richman was trying to give life back to the soul-sucking politicizing of fun that ran rampant with the stereotype & in the life of the socially conscious student; i am sure he would have acknowledged that this world weariness was not born of ignorance but of knowing some of the suppressed but glaring facts of the cultural climate of the early 1970s (and many of the same folks are back in power right now in fact). But today students don't seem to know very much of anything that is not mediated by television and the mall. Now, students say that the First Amendment is not a big deal.

Moving along...in keeping with the current administration's desire & need to keep its nose & fingers in the world's business (which, mind you, is not all that bad a thing; but just imagine the difference between a friend who is concerned, well-meaning& helpful to a friend who crosses the line into nosy, bothersome & coercive...we all have known folks like this so just use your imagination and you get the idea), the White House has been pressuring Qatar, an important MidEast ally, to sell Al-Jazeera because its broadcasts have sometimes been "inflammatory, misleading and occasionally false, especially on Iraq."(see the NY Times article) As Tim Grieve of Salon.com so joyfully points out (The White House vs. Al-Jazeera), the same may be said of the Bush administration and of the FOX News network. While Al-Jazeera certainly reports things that might be inaccurate (as do all news organizations), they are still one of the most, if not the most, credible news organizations from the Middle East. To seek to eliminate dissenting opinions abroad is unconscionable (it would cause an uproar here if theadministration had actively tried to suppress CBS and other news outlets), especially in light of Bush's claim of being a"compassionate conservative" and of "planting the flag of liberty" for all the world to see. If Bush and the administration indeed seeks to show the world that it is listening and cares about what others have to say, then one has to wonder how eliminating a foreign press aids that cause. And all this coming from an administration that pays pundits to disseminate its values & programs (for example), some of which are incorrect &/or unethical. Freedom of the press has often been a tricky game but this ongoing trickery has got to be checked.

On Freedom of Press and Culture: An Interview with Noam Chomsky

Some of the restrictions on freedom of expression have been collected in the Patriot Act. This leads me to ask you to call your Senators and ask them to vote against the approval of Alberto Gonzales for Attorney General. And let them know thatthey should not be afraid about being seen as anti-Hispanic because (a) alot of Hispanics are against his nomination and (b) despite our growing demographic, unfortunately a great many Hispanics don't pay much attention to the news or vote; what they should be afraid of is the continuing disregard for the Geneva Convention, human rights and other important issues pertaining to the American interests domestically and abroad. Here is the PFAW's Statement of Opposition to the Confirmation of Alberto Gonzales to the Office of Attorney General of the United States.