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Protesting
in Verse, Not Shouts
By
ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS, August 1, 2004 in NY Times
THEY
could be called the New York Muses Against Bush-Cheney.
They are about 30 poets, who will be reading their poetry
during the Republican National Convention week in New
York, as a protest against four more years of the Bush
administration.
But
despite their concern with hot-button issues - the war
in Iraq, tax cuts - they are hoping that in a week of
passionate and perhaps angry demonstrations, theirs
will be the gentlest demonstration of all.
These
are poets, whose weapons are made of words, not steel,
so nonviolence becomes them. One is Marie Ponsot, an
83-year-old great-grandmother who came of age with the
Beat poets. Another is Vijay Seshadri, an Indian-born
poet from the heartlands of Columbus, Ohio, and Pittsburgh,
who now lives in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, with his
wife and 11-year-old son, despairing over the Mets and
writing personal, narrative verse. And there is Katha
Pollitt, the poet, feminist, leftist and columnist for
The Nation. And what better place to express their displeasure
than St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery, where William
Carlos Williams and Edna St. Vincent Millay once read,
and where the Muses will be reading on Sept. 1.
It
seems unlikely that the police, confronted with the
Muses, will need to conduct the drive-fast-and-park
maneuvers they have been practicing as the convention
nears. The reading may be anti-Bush and antiwar, but
it will also be, the Muses say, antifear. They want
to show there is no need for the strange fear of demonstrations
that seems to have gripped New York, normally a pretty
resilient town.
"I
think it's a really great idea to put out some positive
energy to counteract that mushroom cloud of negative
energy that is the Republican National Convention,"
Ms. Pollitt said last week.
"The
wonderful thing about poetry is it gives words their
true weight,'' she said. "It's not about manipulating,
it's not about getting people to like them for the five
minutes it takes to get people to do what they want."
But
what kind of poetry is the right poetry to read while
protesting the Republican convention? There is a long
tradition of protest poetry to draw from in the city,
from Walt Whitman to W. H. Auden to Allen Ginsberg.
Ms. Pollitt is tempted to read Auden's "The Shield
of Achilles," which she considers "perhaps
one of the greatest antiwar poems ever written,"
building bleakly to the lines: "That girls are
raped, that two boys knife a third,/Were axioms to him,
who'd never heard/ Of any world where promises were
kept,/Or one could weep because another wept."
But she knows from experience that reading these words
will make her break down and cry in front of strangers.
Auden's
ghost might be listening. Auden and Ginsberg frequented
St. Mark's, and a plaque on the side of the church quotes
a line from Auden that sounds bracing in these days
of compassionate conservatism: "Thousands have
lived without love, not one without water." Or
Ms. Pollitt may read her own antiwar poem, speckled
with allusions to Auden, which begins: "My daughter,
who's as beautiful as the day,/ hates politics: Face
it, Ma,/they don't care what you think! . . ."
Over
bagels and tea at the Second Avenue Deli, across the
street from the church, the poets reflected on the flickers
of political poetry at last week's Democratic convention.
Jen Benka, an organizer of the Muses, thought Bill Clinton
came close to poetry with his refrain about John Kerry,
"Send me."
Does
Mr. Kerry have the poetry to be a great leader? "At
this point, I would settle for prose," Ms. Pollitt
said.
President
Bush dipped into what might be called the spaghetti
Western school of poetry with his line about Iraqi insurgents,
"Bring 'em on," but Ms. Pollitt found that
a bit over the top.
Mr.
Seshadri was not sure what poem he would read, only
that he felt morally compelled to read one. Sometimes
he finds the news so depressing he wants to go straight
to bed.
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Few
muses could be gentler yet more emphatic than Ms. Ponsot.
She lives in Republican country, on the Upper East Side,
but not out of political affinity. She moved there from
Greenwich Village because she couldn't stand being around
26-year-olds anymore. She has a foreign, unconventional
history, shades of Teresa Heinz Kerry. She married,
then divorced, a French painter on the Left Bank, and
raised seven children.
She
is finishing a poem on language, and plans to read it
as a retort to the way Republicans have, in her view,
distorted certain words. "Who can say robust anymore?"
she said. "It's over. Bush is robust, and Kerry
is flip-flop. They're using it up the way they did liberal.
Who can say family?"
Her
poem begins: "I like to drink my language in/straight
up, no ice no twist no spin. . . ."
What
better topic for a muse?
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