the office of the poem

 

THE OFFICE OF THE POEM IN CRISIS

 

With its Whitmanesque imperative and sweep of sounds, Daniel Borzutzky's "Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018" models the pros and cons of what the poet calls "the artistic commodification of suffering."  The possibility that writers are often complicit in such a capitalist enterprise is as ancient as The Epic of Gilgamesh  and as new as poems that honor many victims of  police insanity in the United States.  The Western tradition abounds with works that elevate violence and death  above the dirt upon which tragedies are enacted.  The word "massacre" shows its obscenity to best advantage when it is located in a family relationship with "genocide."  If you discern an echo in Borzutzky's poem of "Bars Fight" by Lucy Terry, you no doubt  know that random massacres  in our nation are less random than they seem.  The horror is betrayed in the liberal construction of America's founding documents.

 

I digress with purpose.  Not only does Borzutzky's poem conjure memories of massacres -----the Wounded Knee Massacre (1890) with 300 dead Lakota people,  the Tulsa Massacre (1921) , 16th Street Baptist Church (1963) in Birmingham,  Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church (2015) in Charleston, Tree of Life synagogue (2018) in Pittsburgh------, it excavates something that might or might not have been intended by the poet:  deep resentment for the tourists who take aesthetic pleasure in either the natural or man-made suffering of others.  A few of us nurture that resentment in post-Katrina New Orleans.  Granted, dislocation, urban renewal, and gentrification are not identical with genocide; they are, however, omens of what genocide can produce.

 

The opening line of Borzutzky's poem ---"There is no country to claim you when you die inside the word" and the final line ---"The only breath in this cage is death " give us a frame wherein to negotiate the accumulative repetitions of

 

look

speak/ do not speak

breathe/breath

cage/ exiled cage/ cage of exile

pray gently, die gently

 

The words are nicely distributed to set anxiety in motion, to compel existential commerce with multiple forms of crisis.  The first line alludes to Yeats' opening line in "Sailing to Byzantium"----"That is no country  for old men. The young"; coming after "die gently," the closing line is the polar opposite of Dylan Thomas' "Do not go gentle into that good night."  The poem is a good example of how political is the office of the poem in crisis.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            October 23, 2020

 

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