Response to: "Desperate Times and Desperate Measures: Poetry Out of the Ivory Tower?"

Carrie Hopkins

After just leaving the talk, my head is still whirling with thoughts. Smith discussed how poetry is needed in times of desperation.  His point is that people need to read poetry, but they also need to write it.  Poetry consoles us and heals us when we need it most.   I immediately thought of the poem we read in class on Wednesday.  Until that poem I had been ignoring Japan, glossing over it in the news, saying the “oh isn’t it awful” with no real thought, because I was protecting myself.  After class I went home and read article after article immersing myself in the pain and the destruction of what was going on in Japan.  I called my mom and she told me a story that caused me to read the poem from class again.  The story is about a man who lived in a fishing village and after the first earthquake realized the possibility of a tsunami. He got in his car and started to drive.  When he got to a tunnel that you have to go through to get out of this remote area he was stuck in a line of traffic.  He knew too much time had gone by and instead of waiting in the traffic he drove up the hill and parked his car to get on higher ground.  Time passed and he watched waves come in and flow through the tunnel washing out the lines of traffic he could have been in.  That story broke my heart. I reread Etc. a couple times after hearing that story, just to try and find some meaning in it all.  I am still struggling to find the meaning.  The reading tonight helped though.

Smith forced me to look at the disasters that have happened during the course of my lifetime and beyond that.  He made me listen to poetry that healed people before and that could maybe heal me now.  The one poem he read, Collin’s response to 9/11, really moved me. Just the sheer names of people who died then and are dying or missing now in Japan are unimaginable and in a way uncountable.  Sure we can put a number on how many people have died, but we cannot count what they mean, or what they could have meant. Professor Kennedy added to this feeling with her poems that linked the treatment of witches to the Iraq war.  Her poetry was unexpected and horrifying.  She made a joke about weak stomachs before reading her poem T, but to be honest it made me feel sick. Growing up in a Quaker school war has always been cruel and unimaginable to me. To hear her put that cruelness into words that stick with you meant a lot. I am really thankful to have chosen this reading to attend, because it was just what I needed during my own brink of desperation. 

And this just in, from the New York Times:

The Poetry of Catastrophe

By SAM TANENHAUS

Even devoted followers of the news seem overwhelmed by the sheer volume of horrific events unfolding just now — in particular the continuing bloodshed in the Arab world and the ever-worsening story of the earthquake-tsunami-nuclear crisis in Japan. These headlines recall the most frightening chapters of antiquity, times of pestilence and war, a steady mood of darkening apocalypse.

Reports From the World of Books

To a great extent, literature has provided us with the imagery and vocabulary of disaster: whether the Bible, with its plagues and floods, its terrible judgments (“Ah sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a seed of evildoers, children that are corrupters”); or Greek tragedy, with its blood-crimes and murderous revenges.

What follows is a sampler of literary catastrophe. Don’t run away. It’s not as depressing as it sounds. One of the enduring paradoxes of great apocalyptic writing is that it consoles even as it alarms.

This has been, in fact, one of the enduring “social” functions of literature — specifically, of poetry. Narrative prose is less well suited to the task. This isn’t surprising: narrative implies continuity and order — events that flow forth in comprehensible sequence, driven by motive forces of cause and effect. To tell a “story,” whether real or invented, is to presume at least the possibility of rational understanding.

But catastrophe defies logic. It faces us with disruption and discontinuity, with the breakdown of order. The same can often be said of poetry itself. It operates outside the realm of “logic.” Rather, it obeys the logic of dreams, of the unconscious. This is especially the case with lyric poetry, with its suggestion of vision and prophecy.

“Catastrophe is indeed already the condition of language, the condition of the ruins of time,” Harold Bloom, perhaps the foremost living scholar of lyric poetry, wrote in his book “Agon” (1982). Poems, he argued, are “gnostic catastrophe creations” — the term gnostic derived from the ancient religious doctrine, or heresy, that creation is itself a form of catastrophe, a string of disasters generated by a flawed creator.

Indeed for Bloom, the very act of writing a poem entails a kind of crisis. The outward drama the poet responds to mirrors the interior one he struggles with all his life. As one of Bloom’s favorite creations, Milton’s Satan, declares in “Paradise Lost”:

The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n.

A decade ago, after the 9/11 attacks, The New Yorker published Adam Zagajewski’s poem “Try to praise the mutilated world.” Though written in 2000, Zagajewski’s verse presciently distilled the drastically altered American mood. “You’ve seen the refugees heading nowhere,” Zagajewski had written, or prophesied. “You’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.” Those words are relevant again today, as Japan’s “nuclear refugees” are streaming into the mountains, and the governments of Libya and Yemen train fire on protesting citizens.

Another poem much quoted after 9/11 was W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939,” written at the outbreak of World War II, but again utterly contemporary in its intimation of anxiety:

Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odor of death
Offends the September night.

The truth is that terrible forebodings — “the dark/Encroachment of that old catastrophe,” as Wallace Stevens described it (in “Sunday Morning”) — inform much of  the Anglo-American poetic tradition.

Its preeminent master is Shakespeare. Lear on the heath, his world destroyed, dares the unseen demons of nature to afflict him with yet greater punishments:

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!
You sulph’rous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ th’ world,
Crack Nature’s moulds . . .

Walt Whitman captured the helplessness of a grief-stricken nation after Lincoln’s assassination in “When Lilacs Last in the Door-Yard Bloom’d,” with its sorrowing images of the funeral procession, the

Coffin that passes through lanes and streets,
Through day and night, with the great cloud darkening the land,
With the pomp of the inloop’d flags, with the cities draped in black,
With the show of the States themselves, as of crape-veil’d women, standing,
With processions long and winding, and the flambeaus of the night,
With the countless torches lit—with the silent sea of faces, and the unbarred heads
With the waiting depot, the arriving coffin, and the sombre faces,
With dirges through the night, with the thousand voices rising strong and solemn;
With all the mournful voices of the dirges, pour’d around the coffin,
The dim-lit churches and the shuddering organs — Where amid these you journey,
With the tolling, tolling bells’ perpetual clang . . .

In the 20th century, too, catastrophe has inspired memorable verse. In “The Second Coming,” W. B. Yeats distilled the loss of coherent order caused by World War I and the rise of Bolshevism:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

All this prompted Yeats to declare, or hope, “Surely some revelation is at hand.”

In the 1950s, a decade shadowed by fears of nuclear extinction, many quoted T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men,” written in 1925. Its taunting, nursery-rhyme conclusion seems to predict the technological apocalypses of a later time, including our own:

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

This is only a sampler. Other, more learned poetry readers, no doubt, can furnish additional verses. Please send them along. To name the catastrophic demon won’t slay it. But it can help chase our fears out of the shadows and into the sunlight.