POETRY AND ANSWERABILITY:

SOME RECENT EXAMPLES FROM EASTERN AND CENTRAL EUROPE

RICHARD JACKSON, UT-CHATTANOOGA

In several essays, Mikhail Bakhtin discusses the notion of art’s answerability. For him, this complex notion means first an acknowledgement that the poet’s “poetry bears guilt for the vulgar prose of life” just as the everyday person must understand that art gains its power from the need in our lives for art’s rhythms and visions. As he says later in the essay, “it is easier to create without answering for life, and easier to live without any consideration for art.” In a sense he is asking the famous question of the german Romantic poet, Holderlin: "And what are poets for in a difficult time?" In our own age, exiled Polish poet and Nobel Prize winner, Czelaw Milosz, seems to echo the question: "What is poetry which does not save / Nations or people?" But, we might also ask today, what sort of poetry can do this and not participate in its own self-made imperialism, its own self-righteuosness? What sort of poetry can do this and not look down upon the very people it should serve from some high Parnassus? The French critic, Julia Kristeva, one of the leading feminist writers today, says in her essay, "Women's Time,"--"As with any society, the counter-society is based on the expulsion of an excluded element, a scapegoat charged with the evil of which the community duly constituted can then purge itself; a purge which will finally exonerate that community of any future criticism. Modern protest movements have often reiterated this logic, locating the guilty one- in order to fend off criticism- in the foreign, in capital alone, in the other religion, in the other sex. Does not feminism become a kind of inverted sexism when this logic is followed to is conclusion?" This is a stunning statement about the politics of revolutionary movements, how the revolutionary voice claims a certain privilege and power. What she is talking about is our tendency to form exclusionary groups, even when we think we are trying to effect a higher ideal for a larger society--and poets are certainly not immune to this tendency. The danger comes when writers do not question themselves, when they see themselves immune to the problems inherent in an opposition, when they see themselves as ideal.

At issue is what we might call the answerability of the poet.The great Polish poet, the late Zbigniew Herbert, writes in one poem:

The bullet that I shot

at the time of the great war

made a circle around the globe

and struck me in the back

In another poem “Mr Cogito Reads the Newspaper” Herbert describes how his character finds on the first page a “report of the killing of 120 soldiers” and how since “the war lasted a long time/ you could get used to it.” Numbed by accounts of the war, Mr Cogito finds instead a story about one laborer who kills his wife, complete with graphic details, and it is this one story that holds his attention. As for the 120--- “you search on a map in vain...//they don’t speak to the imagination.” What Herbert describes, our modern taste for the odd and personal horrors to take our mind off the larger everyday horrors is a problem that faces the poet. How can the writer awaken a responsible, answerable perspective in his or her audience? In a way the answer is here in the poem: the poet must, after all, “speak to the imagination,” by making the stories of the 120 come alive as individuals.

Czeslaw Milosz, the Nobel prize winning poet enacts an important structure this process of questioning and self-questioning in his poem “lecture IV”--:

Reality, what can we do with it? Where is it in words?

Just as it flickers, it vanishes. Innumerable lives

Unremembered. Cities on maps only,

Without that face in the window, on the first floor, by the market,

Without those two in the bushes near the gas plant.

The face and the two people exist here as examples and indeed are soon placed in the context of "returning seasons, mountain snows, oceans" while "the blue ball of the Earth rotates." But about a third of the way through the poem the direction changes, the poem begins to question its own premises by noticing the simple reality of --

Miss Jadwiga,

A little hunchback, librarian by profession,

Who perished in the shelter of an apartment house

That was considered safe but toppled down

And no one was able to dig through the slabs of wall.

This emphasis on the specific brings Milosz to the crucial discovery of the poem: "The true enemy of man is generalization." In the end the simple reality of her life transcends all speeches, sayings and belief systems:

The little skeleton of Miss Jadwiga, the spot

Where her heart was pulsating. This only

I set against necessity, law, theory.

What the poet discovers through his self questioning is something the state and various political systems would have preferred to remain buried with Miss Jadwiga, that the individual transcends the state, that self questioning leads to questioning of the state.

As Kristeva points out in her book, Revolution in Poetic Language, the poem is a unique form of discourse, always subverting the accepted view of things, always proposing new and unique perceptions and visions, based on desires, hopes. A poem is, to borrow from Longinus, a transport, a metaphor that takes us to another realm, another world, with different values, visions, rules, and which is why Plato was so afraid to have the poets in his Republic. To be able to take a reader to this other realm, or to see the "real" world differently, if only slightly askew, threatens the established order because it implicitly questions it-- as leaders of totalitarian states well know, even if we hardly recognize that here in our country.

Thus Milosz writes: "whoever wields power is also able to control language and not only with the prohibitions of censorship but also by changing the meaning of words." It is not just subject matter, then, but the very nature of language that is the issue here. Thus Stanislaw Baranczak, another Polish poet, writes: "regardless of theme and specific address, poetry is always some kind of protest....That's why all the metaphors and rhythms-- it's just a way of putting the world's chaotic gibberish in some meaningful order and restoring the original weight to abused words. That's why all the concreteness and conciseness-- to resist the engulfing power of the world's empty abstractions and statistical generalities. That's why all the speaking in first person singular and seeing things from a strictly individual perspective -- it's poetry's way of standing up to the world whenever it tries to elbow the individual aside and of the stage." As the late Joseph Brodsky, the 1987 Nobel Prize winning Russian poet, has written: "With a poet, one's ethical posture, indeed one's very temperament, is determined by one's aesthetics." The poem itself must question its own procedures-- perhaps by shifting stylistic gears, asking questions, suggesting alternatives, changing tone or course in the middle, keeping an ironic tone, understating or overstating for effect. For the poet, the danger is still always that political and social poetry will become mere propaganda and sophistic, simplified persuasion; --playing to easy responses and catering to the 'correct' side. It is always a question of language first: even the most political of poems, if they are strong, are language driven rather than theme driven. This is a crucial notion more understood by poets than critics and teachers--language per se, even the playful attitude towards language that is at the heart of any good poem, is always a political instrument. As Jaques Derrida says: "'everyday language' is not innocent or neutral. It is the language of western metaphysics, and it carries with it not only a considerable number of presuppositions of all types, but also presuppositions inseparable from metaphysics, which, although little attended to, are knotted into a system." But this play of language is precisely what creates a world that provides alternatives to the official worlds of various political powers.

But in a world whose history of war, holocaust and political oppression has devalued language, what values can words suggest? According to Italo Calvino, the Italian critic and novelist, poetry and fiction have "the ability to impose patterns of language, of vision, of imagination, of mental effort, of the correlation of facts, and in short the creation (and by creation I mean selection and organization) of a model of values that is at the same time aesthetic and ethical, essential to any plan of action especially in political life." And Martin Heidegger writes that poetry "founds the world," for "Only where there is language [poetry being the most "authentic" language] is there world, ie. the perpetually altering circuit of decision and production, of action and responsibility, but also of commotion and arbitrariness, of decay and confusion." It is by trying to absorb this confusion in the form of honest self-questioning that the more overt political poem achieves an ethical stance, an answerable style, to borrow Milton’s phrase.

A perfect and subtle example of the sort of self questioning I am talking about is the poem, My Tribe," by the Slovene poet, Tomaz Salamun. He opens the poem by saying--

My tribe

does not hear

freedom anymore,

does not recognize it,

does not even see it

when it's touched by it.

My tribe

thinks

that the gradual

killing

of its bodies

and souls

is natural.

What is crucial in this passage is the way the poet takes responsibility for this societal murder on behalf of the human tribe, his own Yugoslav and Slovene tribe, indeed even implicitly assigning blame upon himself as a member of such tribes. Thus, for example, stanzas one and three begin with the first person possessive pronoun that emphasizes the poet's own membership in the tribe. At the end of the poem this vision is described as a nightmare, a fairly damning view of the culture.

This sort of self questioning requires a certain attention to the poet’s own humble ignorance if he or she is to be listened to. The danger for the poet is that in trying to describe a problem he or she puts him or her self above the problem, sees the poet’s role as separate from the problem. This is the theme of Nobel Prize winning poet Wislawa Symborska's "Cassandra:"

It's me, Cassandra.

And this is my city covered with ashes.

And this is my rod, and the ribbons of a prophet.

And this is my head full of doubts.

It's true, I won.

What I said would happen

hit the sky with a fiery glow.

Only prophets

whom no one believes

witness such things,

only those who do their job badly.

And everything happens so quickly,

as if they had no spoken.

Now I remember clearly

how people, seeing me, broke off mid-sentence.

Their laughter stopped.

They moved away from each other.

Children ran towards their mothers.

I didn't even know their vague names.

And that song about a green leaf--

nobody ever finished singing it in front of me.

I loved them.

But I loved them from a height.

from above life.

from the future.

Where it's always empty

and where it's easy to see death.

I am sorry my voice was harsh.

Look at yourselves from a distance, I cried,

look at yourselves from a distance of stars.

They heard and lowered their eyes.

They just lived.

Not very brave.

Doomed.

In departing bodies, from the moment of birth.

But they had this watery hope,

a blame feeding on its own glittering.

They knew what a moment was.

How I wish for one moment, any,

before--

I was proved right.

So what. Nothing comes of it.

And this is my robe scorched by flames.

And these are the odds and ends of a prophet.

And this is my distorted face.

The face that did not know its own beauty.

In order to understand the problems Cassandra faces in terms of how we can learn from it today we can refer to Jacques Derrida’s essay, "Living On," where Derrida writes that any narrative has three structures or "frames" that should be considered. The first is the "recit," the story, the affirmation of what happens. In this case the prophet recounts how she has failed: it is a simple story of the unheeded prophet with poetic closure. The second frame is the story behind the "I" who tells the story. In this case, there are two authorial subtexts behind the poem for Symborska, two "trace structures" as Derrida would call them: her struggle against the communist government in Poland, a struggle that is also against the male dominated society. The role of the poet and the feminist is analogous to that of the prophet: she warns against and evil that she herself is taken to be. In order to understand the terms she chooses for the first narrative frame we must understand these political and sociological choices, how the description of the people avoiding her in paragraph 2 could have been taken from a newspaper account of a gathering on the streets of Warsaw as, say, a policeman approaches, especially since the only "prophets" of the future in her country were the infamous makers of five year plans, related to group of thugs we now see spouting visions for a pure Serbia, for “ethnic cleansing.”

The third narrative frame Derrida describes is the ironic, antithetical story, a story of the decisions of repression and change in the poem as it meets the demand of the genre. This is the frame that most concerns me today for it most concerns the conscience of the poet. In Symborska's case the monologue is a radical self questioning that involves the classical text, the Polish situation at the time, and the psychology of the poetic process. She begins affirmatively by defining herself with certainty: "It's me, Cassandra." And for a while it is only her role as prophetress that is questioned. By the time she reaches the fourth paragraph, however, the terms are more personal and dear: "I loved them. / But I loved them from a height." Her failure is not simply one of her role, but of her inner being: in placing herself above, like a star, she tries to transcend her own being, to remain unchanged, and so betrays her function and herself. It is not her words but her voice that offends. In the context of the second frame, the political frame, she becomes the distant and detached voice of the Polish government: she becomes what she hates. It is as if the poet and the speaker have entered a vicious circle where there is no closure to the triple framed story, no solution, only "odds and ends." What she is left with in the end is a distorted face: for the prophet, a failed role; for the poet, an unavoidable complicity with the role of the enemy; for the poetic speaker, a sense that it is not a simple statement like "It's me" that defines her, but a whole process that involves the progression through and interplay between these narrative frames.

All three frames constitute for Symborska a complex process of self questioning, uncertainty and doubt where each frame leaves traces of meaning and begins to redefine the others. In the end there is no simple closure for there are crucial questions left unanswered. What, for example, is the role of the poet in a totalitarian society? Can the poet provide a vision and not alienate herself, not consider herself better than those she is giving her vision to? Can the poet avoid being part of the system she criticizes? Cassandra, obligated to tell the truth, only causes her audience to "break off in mid-word," their children to run to their mothers, the people to turn away. The problem Cassandra describes, though, is partly of her own making, for she makes no attempt to "embrace," as Lyotard once wrote, the audience, the present, their humanity. Instead, she sees them "haughtily" and "From heights beyond life." In short, she does not see their situation from "within life." In the end, she is isolated, alone, and though she was right in her prophecy, she says, "Nothing came of it."

The crucial thing here is for the poet not to place him or herself above the situation of the world: we are all complicit directly or indirectly, we are all guilty by omission, inaction, delay, verbal deferral or imprecision, or merely by the same sort of arrogance and self righteousness that Cassandra cannot avoid: we are all part of the problem. Basic to these poets are two principles: 1) that the poet’s knowledge is limited, and so the vision itself is humble; and 2) that consequently the poet does not place him or herself above the situation described, that is, there is a sense that the poet participates in the general guilt of humanity.

Today’s Cassandra knows not so much the future but the impossibility of finally knowing our lives’ knows a certain guilt we all share. Still, this humilty about the poet’s place in the world and our meager knowledge of the world is no assurance that the poet will be listened to, as the Slovene poet, Dane Zajc suggests in “The Garden,” a poem that resonantes with Symborska’s “Cassandra”--

He came back parched.

Only the furrow in the yellow sand behind him

proved that he was progressing.

Guards sent word from their nests:

a creature has emerged from the desert.

They assembled at the border.

Pulled him up into the world of green.

I am the one you sent, he said,

his voice like a pair of tongs

as he spoke.

Then his head fell to the side,

impaled on the twig of a weeping willow.

He is not like us, they thought

watching his dog-like tongue

lick the grass.

What is the message of the Forbidden, they asked.

It is all true, he chattered,

and the tongs of his mouth clammed shut.

They released a drop of water on his tongue, and demanded:

Isn’t a garden there, on the other side.

Isn’t there everything that we miss.

Whatever you know is true, he rustled.

It isn’t the one we sent, they said

and slashed his veins open.

When the gray, slow liquid began to flow

they were convinced

that he was a hostile creature.

They left him there (His ribs withered

into dry twigs.).

And they chose a new emissary.

The fault here is more with the listeners than the prophet who tries to convey an essential truth of the human heart: “Whatever you know is true.” And if we need anything in today’s world of hysterical political and nationalistic proclamations, today’s exclusionary ethnic agendas, today’s genocidal visions of apocalyptic utopias,--these horrific echoes from the future in places like Rwanda, Kenya, Serbia, Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, Pakistan, --then it is this truth of our ignorance, our responsibility, our participation in humanity that provides a way to embrace the world rather than peer at it from some peak of false knowledge or reject it as Zajc’s characters do out of fear, or alienation, or arrogance.

In “The Envoy of Mr Cogito” Herbert writes: “you have little time you must give testimony.” While it is true “it is not in your power / to forgive in the name of those betrayed at dawn,” still we must “beware of dryness of heart love the morning spring / the bird with the unknown name the winter oak.” The poet must “repeat old incantations of humanity fables and legends / because this is how you will attain the good.” For Zbigniew Herbert, and this is what we can take away from our reading of him, our knowledge of a failed world is no excuse not to love it, our knowledge of our failed selves is no reason not to love one another. For Herbert, answerability comes with our ability to embrace the other, even the most wayward, to embrace the criminals, the downtrodden, even the enemy, as the American poet James Wright shows us in his poems about murderers and rapists and the worst minds of our age. Otherwise our besieged cities will remain besieged, our besieged selves will remain besieged, and when we finally look around no one will be left either inside or outside of the city or the self.