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<H3>Fear and the Muse: </H3>

<H3>Political Poetry In Eastern Europe </H3>
 

 
In 1799 the English poet and artist William Blake could write with utter optimism
that "This world is a World of Imagination & Vision." By 1810 he could state with
even more confidence that "This world of Imagination is the world of Eternity." For
Blake there seemed to be no limits to the potential power of imagination: imagination and
freedom were synonymous. But there is also an undercurrent of skepticism throughout
Blake, for this state of seeing the world imaginatively was, for Blake, never fully
achieved by mankind. The material of language itself holds us back, and ironically poetry
must somehow be made free of the language that is its basis. As he says in <CITE>The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,</CITE>
we are limited by our five senses, and as he shows in <CITE>Songs of Experience,</CITE>
we are also limited by the political and social systems we live under which impose
their own ways of thinking and feeling, their own value systems. 
"If the doors of perception were cleansed," writes Blake, "everything would appear
to man as it is, infinite." For Blake, then, imagination is always straining against
something: "Without Contraries is No Progression," as he says. This is precisely
the situation enacted by the Spanish poet Miguel Hernandez in his poem, "Tomb of the Imagination."
The poem describes how a stonemason "wanted, stone upon stone, / wall after wall,
to raise an image to the wind, / to the unchaining wind of the future." What he
tries to build is a structure beyond the physical limitations of his art, a "structure
capable of the ethereal." As a result his "imagination lifted stones made of feathers,
/ walls made of birds." But these "wingbeats" of the imagination do not last long and he finally must resort to stone, to the elements of the limited physical world:
"Stone by stone it weighs down and crushes / all it encloses, even a world of living
desire." What the man is constructing, in effect, is "his own prison." What the poet
constructs is a prison whose walls are the words, the very language he uses to build
with. What the words, the stones, can do is point towards something beyond that remains,
like true freedom, always unattainable. And yet, because the stonemason has been
able to use his imagination earlier, now "in his work / he and the wind were driven
headlong" and if that wind and he are no longer "unchained" as he hoped in the beginning,
there is at least some sense in which a measure of freedom has been achieved. 
We might ask, then, with 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? 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." The poet, in sense, reclaims this world of simple objects an
images, of the language of simple objects and images, for human and humane use. As Rilke says
in his Ninth Duino Elegy, 
Perhaps we are here to say: house, 
bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window-- 
at most: column, tower.... But to say them, you must understand, 
oh to say them more intensely than the Things themselves 
ever dreamed of existing. 
The modern Slovene poet, Edvard Kocbek, in his little poem, "I'm Not Played Out,"
talks about the "dangerous game of words" that the poet undertakes. Poetry makes
its world, it's freedom, out of the tools of the imagination, words. Thus, "Freedom
is the terrible freedom of nothingness," he says, and sets the writer "apart, / hidden in
the earth" as Hernandez stonemason is. Kocbek understand the limits of imagination
as an opportunity to keep imagining, to keep inventing a new language. He sees the
limits of the imagination as a reponsibility to keep establishing his freedom through language.
That is why he says he will always continue generating new words with a new freedom"
"I will pronounce / unheard of words through aeons, perhaps through / all eternity...." 
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. 
To create in essence new language that is the language of the poem as it discovers
new relationships among objects, more intense relationships, as Rilke says, is to
see "real" world differently, if only slightly askew. Take, for example, Czech poet
Miroslav Holub's "The Fly" -- 
 
She sat on a willow-trunk 
watching 
part of the battle of Crecy, 
the shouts, 
the gasps, 
the groans, 
the tramping and the tumbling. 
 
During the fourteenth charge 
of the French cavalry 
she mated 
with the brown-eyed male fly 
from Vadincourt. 
 
She rubbed her legs together 
as she sat on the disemboweled horse 
meditating 
on the immortality of flies. 
 
With relief she alighted 
on the blue tongue 
of the Duke of Clervaux. 
 
When silence settled 
and only the whisper of decay 
softly circled the bodies 
 
and only 
a few arms and legs 
still twitched jerkily under the trees, 
 
she began to lay her eggs 
on the single eye 
of Johann of Uhr, 
The Royal Armourer. 
 
And thus it was 
that she was eaten by a swift 
fleeing 
from the fires of Estrees. 
 
On the one hand we can read the fly as a simple metaphor for a human being, and certainly
the idea that she meditates "on the immortality of flies" invites this sort of reading.
But we are missing the point if we downplay the radical deconstruction of history here-- it is the peripheral, the small, the seemingly frivolous, that gives us
a key into our own actions. What is more important, the charge of the French cavalry
or the mating of the fly? We would like to insist that man's history is more important.
But from the point of view of the cosmos, from that larger frame, where man is a speck,
does it make much difference? The fly's perspective is only an arbitrary frame as
good as any other, and in turned framed as any other frame is framed. From the swift's point of view at the end, the fly is peripheral. The poem suggests that the historical
and ideological frames are just ways of privileging one perspective over another,
usually opposite perspective. That is why the great Mexican poet Octavio Paz said:
"The language that nourishes the poem is, after all, nothing but history, name of this
or that, reference and meaning....Without history -- without men, who are the origin,
the substance and the end of history -- the poem could not be born or incarnated,
and without the poem there could be no history either, because there would be no origin
or beginning." How does the poet rewrite the perversions of history, then? 
For many poets the answer is to focus on the everyday images that the language of
the state has perverted and to put these images into play, let them reveal their
truths. Here is the great Russian poet Ana Akhmatova in her poem"Voronezh"-- 
 
The town stands completely icebound. 
Trees, walls, snow as though under glass. 
Timidly I walk over the crystals. 
The painted sledge jolts along. 
In Voronezh there are crows over Peter's statue, 
poplars and a verdigris dome, 
eroded, in the turbulent sun-dust. 
here the slopes of the powerful earth still quake 
from the victory over the Tartars at Kulikovo. 
The poplars like glasses touching 
will chime loudly, 
as though one thousand guests were toasting 
our triumph at a wedding feast. 
While in the room of the exiled poet 
fear and the Muse stand duty in turn 
and the night is endless 
and knows no hope of dawn. 
 
The poem was originally published in the 1930's with the last four lines, referring
to her lover, the famous Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, censored out, for the censors
felt the rest of the poem portrayed a harmless scene but the last four lines seemed
to them to be subversive. Akhmatova let it be published as cut because she felt the poem
was already saying the last four lines to an observant reader without actually saying
them. That is, the poem deconstructs its own description of what seems on the surface a pastoral and harmless scene. The whole scene, remember, is under glass, like
one of those glass paperweights with a winter scene, so it is confined; it is fragile
enough to walk over gently, as if about to break apart and disintegrate so it is
very tenuous; the sled is painted over, covered over from its reality so to speak, and
is upset or "jolts," and ominous crows hover over Peter the Great's statue, like
the darker forces of history (this is more clear in another translation where they
shit on the statue), perhaps the censors themselves; and further battles threaten in the quaking
of the earth. I guess I could go on here, but the point is simply that the poem itself
presents a scene and then a ghostly trace that threatens to unravel it. Even without the last four lines the poem is successful because it questions and undercuts
what the surface reality is taken to be, the placid and simplistic communist world
is seen as a sham through the number of conflicting images put into play. 
Holderlin's question thus now becomes: 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." In a world where the
distinctions between good and evil, true and false, left and right, history and myth
have disappeared, where the state changes the meanings of words and dogma is valued
over the individual, some poets have given in to such perversions of language and become
spokesman for totalitarian states-- even the great Russian poet Mayakovsky fell prey
to this easy way. 
The poet, then, must always be suspicious of poetry in service to a center of power,
must always be suspicious of his or her own language, or else the poem, and the poet,
fail. What happens in such failures? Here is a good, if obvious, example,-- "Goodbye, Assassins," by Radovan Karadzic, the present leader of the Bosnian Serbs, a war
criminal whose crimes are too well known to need any reiteration here. This poem
becomes, unfortunately, prophetic almost to its last detail for the situation faced
in Bosnia today. 
Goodbye Assassins, it seems from now on 
The gentlefolks' aortas will gush without me. 
The last chance to get stained with blood 
I let go by. 
Ever more often I answer ancient calls 
And watch the mountains turn green. 
 
Goodbye, assassins, a rare thought of 
genesis enters my mind. Of knowing the heaven. 
And blood, that ugly word, violent and dark, 
Angers Milutin, the ancestor asleep, 
gentle even in death, as if in times of fasting. 
 
From the grave, as if from the primeval beginning, 
Innocent and simple, 
His love rises toward streams, 
A piece of bread, 
Which sufficed him. 
 
His thoughtful gaze at the streams, 
The heavens, unbroken, total, 
Takes in me as well. 
I cannot share your madness! 
 
Lost brothers, time puts us to the proof. 
Shoot the heads of the world without me! 
Insane mates. The century's ravens. 
The world travels a narrow path, 
Without strength or belief, a target or a bullet. 
The papers ooze the age lymph; 
Confused the devils get married. 
 
I detect forebodings, fear excessively 
For the heavens' light and the rare summers. 
 
Goodbye, assassins, the boundaries between 
The worlds are trampled 
Instead of the heart, a hornet drones in vain. 
History turned its back on us. 
What should one shoot at? 
Like an octopus, the age hides its vertebra, 
And the winter approaches 
With white drifts. 
 
The poem is not saved by any sense of irony, and it does not have the marks of a dramatic
monologue such as spoken by other evil characters such as Richard the III or Browning's
evil Duke in "My Last Duchess." Though he calls them "mad" he also gloats in and admires their madness since "History turned its back on us." And, after all, they
are called "brothers." Note, too, here near the end of the poem, he uses "us" thus
including and implicating himself. In other words, it is not a self-conscious portrait
of evil; there are no counter statements, no sense in the poem that the poet knows
more than the speaker, no context with which to understand the poem as anything other
than a simple statement of propaganda, a remorse at not being able to be a direct
killer with the mythological dagger. The speaker even acknowledges from the start that the
victims will be innocents: "The gentlefolks' aortas will gush without me./ The last
chance to get stained with blood / I let go by." Does the speaker show remorse? "Shoot
the heads of the world without me!" he exclaims loudly-- "What should one shoot at?" 
The Hungarian poet Miklos Radnoti, imprisoned three times in concentration camps under
the Nazis, was certainly aware of such evil. His poem, "The Seventh Eclogue," was
written to his wife from a camp in Serbia, begins with an assertion of the power
of the imagination to create an alternative world, to free itself and the poet from the
camp: 
Do you see the night, the wild oakwood fence lined with barbed wire, 
and the barracks, so flimsy that the night swallowed them? 
Slowly the eye passes the limits of captivity 
and only the mind, the mind knows where the wire is. 
You see, dear, this is how we set our imaginations free. 
Dream, the beautiful savior, dissolves our broken bodies 
and the prison camp leaves for home. 
 
Still, despite the imagination's power, despite the heart's freedom, the poet is conscious
that the wire around the camp is tight: he is conscious of the limits of imagination,
but continues despite, or perhaps because of those limits. As the poem progresses it moves gradually to the center of the camp, to the barracks where he writes,
to the bunk next to his, to his own very tiny world, but at the same time a counter
movement occurs as he imagines his homeland, and in a sense that imagining makes
it so present he begins to picture what it must be like and his imagination expands its own
confinements. His own position is to try to imagine his freedom for a moment, even
though the evil of the world surrounds him. He is writing a letter, after all, and
his words are so inadequate as opposed to what his physical presence would be to his wife
that they become a sort of prison themselves. That is why his very act of writing
attempts to surmount language even as it is trapped in its physical nature: "I write
poems the way I live, / in darkness, / blind, crossing the paper like a worm." In this
state he waits for "a free, a human fate." By the end of the poem, he lies "on the
plank, like a trapped animal, among worms," that last simile suggesting that he
too has become like his dying words. In a sense he is already in the grave, but he makes one
final leap of imagination by asking his wife to imagine where he is, how he is, so
that in a way they meet beyond the daily existence of each of them, in a realm of
imagination, of language beyond language: 
I lie on the plank, like a trapped animal, among worms. The fleas 
attack again and again, but the flies have quieted down. 
Look it's evening, captivity is one day shorter. 
And so is life. The camp sleeps. The moon shines 
over the land and in its light the wires are tighter. 
Through the window you can see the shadows of the armed guards 
thrown on the wall, walking among the noises of the night. 
 
The camp sleeps. Do you see it? Dreams fly. 
frightened, someone wakes up. He grunts, then turns in the tight space 
and sleeps again. His face shines. I sit up awake. 
The taste of a half smoked cigarette in my mouth instead of the taste 
of your kisses and the calmness of dreams doesn't come. 
I can't die, I can't live without you now. 
 
Now imagination in the figure of the moon sees only the reality, the tighter wires.
And yet imagination has allowed the poet to escape enough so that the world is one
of shadows cast on the walls and disembodied voices, disembodied language. In the
barracks words have been replaced by a prisoner's grunts. This is a world of limited freedom,
a world where the power of the imagination to escape fate is almost but not quite
overcome by the facts of imprisonment: thus even the man grunting and indecipherable
language in sleep is able to turn in his small space and his face "shines." In the end
the poet can neither live nor die, be merely imprisoned or free, live in the imagination
or reality, use words or not use them: his only hope is what goes beyond the words, the letter, the dream he hopes his wife sees. 
Martin Heidegger who 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. In concluding, I am reminded of the lines by Edvard
Kocbek, the Slovene poet, philosopher, religious thinker, a dissident who died in
1981 at the age of 77. Here is his poem, "In The Torched Village:" 
 
I lean against the wall, 
it is still hot 
from the long fire, 
there's no one around, 
the fiend has fled, 
the ground sinks away, 
the universe falls apart, 
the stars are dying. 
 
All at once comes drifting in 
the scent of violets, 
I begin to listen to 
gentle voices, 
the grass rises 
awaiting new footsteps, 
ash embraces ash 
for a new hardness. 
 
The brook splashes 
into the stone trough, 
the cat is coming back 
to the charred doorstep, 
I grow and I grow, 
I am becoming a colossus,-- 
already I can see 
over terror's shoulder. 
 
The movement here enacts a reversal of positions and perspectives that is essential.
The defeated man leaning against the charred wall at the beginning of the poem, dwarfed
by the "universe" that is falling apart, and the dying "stars" becomes, by the end of the poem, the colossus for who these tragedies of war, personified by "terror,"
are themselves dwarfed by his encompassing vision. It is a vision, as the middle
of the poem asserts, that comes not from huge political statements or poems, but
tiny observations, the loving perspective of "gentle voices." Perhaps the turnabout comes most
subtly in the sense that "ash embraces ash," the very images of desolation from earlier
in the poem made here to enact a new beginning. If, as Milosz argues, "Language is
the fabric from which garments of all philosophies and ideologies are cut," what this
poem does, what the poet universally can do, is suggest ways to transform our language
of death into a language of life. 
Freedom of imagination and the imagination of any freedom, then, become the same thing.
In fact, it would be better to talk not so much of imagination, a static noun, but
of imagining, of a verb, a process, a hope for a future without which we will be
enslaved by our own human limitations, and then by the limitations of the state. There
is a poem, "What He Thought," by Heather McHugh which describes a meeting of a group
of writers where one poet, quiet, seemingly conservative, tells the story of Giordano
Bruno. This medieval thinker was burned at the stake in the Campo Dei Fiori in Rome
for imagining the impossible, that life, for example, might exist on other planets.
The poet describes how Bruno had an iron mask placed over his head so he would not
incite the crowd to save him. And then the poet delivers his definition of poetry based
upon this horrific scene of the burning thinker dying for freedom of thought: "Poetry
is what he thought but did not say." It is the responsibility of the writer to keep
freedom alive through the imagination, through language, to fight restraints upon freedom
and restraints upon the imagination and upon language. The writer's language, unique
to her or him and their culture, is not merely a record, but a gesture always trying to escape itself, escape our human condition towards something universal even as
it honors it in its particularity and uniqueness. The language of freedom is a language
of silences beyond language, free of all constraints, something we can strive for
but never achieve. If we fail to attempt that state, we fail not only ourselves but our
world, in which case Kocbek's "freedom of nothingness" becomes merely nothingness,
the death of both freedom and imagination. Today, in the light of how language is
trapped and imprisoned by so many politicians, businessmen, journalists, advertisers and
the like, that failure is the main danger threatening our various existences as unique
cultures, that "nothingness" could imply our moral, social, spiritual, even our very
literal, not simply linguistic, annihilation. Though imagination, through an imaginative
language, we will either be free or we will simply disappear with the iron masks
of our own making muffling our voices. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Richard Jackson
 
(423)624-7279 
3413 Alta Vista Drive 
Chattanooga, TN 37411 
svobodni@aol.com 
 
UC Foundation Professor of English 
UT-Chattanooga 37403 
 
Fear And the Muse: Political Poetry in Eastern Europe
 
 
Poems in the paper are from Slovenia, Bosnia, Russia, Spain, Hungary, Czech Republic
 
(All in translation) 
 
 
 
Richard Jackson
is the author of two books of criticism including <CITE>The Dismantling of Time in Contemporary American Poetry</CITE>
(Alabama, 1988), winner of the Agee Prize, and <CITE>Acts of Mind: Interviews With Contemporary American Poets</CITE>
(Alabama, 1983, rpt, 1987, 1989); three books of poetry, most recently <CITE>Alive All Day</CITE>
(Cleveland State Award Winner, 1992); and has edited<CITE> Double Vision: Four Young Slovene Poets</CITE>
(Aleph, Ljubljana, 1993). He has given talks at a dozen International meetings in
Slovenia, Bosnia, Hungary and the Czech Republic, and his poems have been translated
into 8 languages. His 50+ essays appear in journals such as <CITE>Boundary 2, Georgia Review, Studies in Romanticism, Contemporary Literature, Pacific
Review, Ploughshares, Verse</CITE>
(UK), and several eastern European journals such as <CITE>Nova revija, Delos, Quorum</CITE>
and others. he edits two journals, <CITE>Poetry Miscellany</CITE>
and <CITE>mala revija,</CITE>
and an eastern European chapbook series (20 books so far), directs the Meacham Writers'
Conference and has won several teaching awards at UT-Chattanooga, and is currently
editing a volume of Slovene poetry. A former Fulbright exchange poet to Yugoslavia,
he has won NEA, NEH, Pushcart and other awards including <CITE>Best American Poems, 1997</CITE>
. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

<H3>Fear and the Muse: </H3>

<H3>Political Poetry In Eastern Europe</H3>
 
 
 
"What are poets for in a difficult time?" asked the German Romantic poet, Holderlin.
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?"
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." The poet,
in sense, reclaims this world of simple objects an images, of the language of simple
objects and images, for human and humane use.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. By looking at such poets as Miroslav Holub, Anna
Akhmatova, Miklos Radnoti and others, we can see how various poets manipulate language into a form of freedom, and we can also see how language can be used in a perverse
way in poetry by Radovan Karadzic, current de facto leader of the Bosnian Serbs.Martin
Heidegger who 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. 
 

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