One Word Against Another:

Political Poetry in the Former Eastern Block

Richard Jackson, UT-Chattanooga

"And what are poets for in a difficult time?" asks the German Romantic poet, Holderlin. And 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.

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.

Czeslaw Milosz' poem, "Lecture IV," enacts in its own structure this process of questioning and self-questioning:

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, as Jacques Derrida has said, deconstructs the generally accepted reality, and this is politically dangerous. 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. 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, like Salamun, 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 evryday 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 observamt reader without actually saying them. That is, the poem deconstructs its own description of what seems on the surface a pastoral and harnless scene. The whole scene, remembr, 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.

Another such example is a seemingly neutral poem by the Bulgarian poet, Blaga Dimitrova, called "Bulgarian Woman From The Old Days"--

This is how I remember her--

saving all her life.

preposterously turning over

worn-out clothes,

knitting every loose end,

patching, darning, tying up.

And to her very last, remaining

true to the thrift

she's famous for: she has become

diminutive herself, as if

to save a scrap

of the space she occupies.

The way I see her now

she could tumble right

into the laundry basket --

scuttling around, a little mouse,

with everything about her

turning into a trap.

The woman's action is a kind of making do, but here Dimitrova warns against this gesture, and indeed every such poetic gesture has its own "traps." The difficulty is that the woman has let her narrow concern with the everyday overshadow the larger political threat from the totalitarian communist state just over time's horizon that leads to the present days: in short, the old woman's nest building, without a reference to any center of power, is insufficient. The everyday images and objects, seemingly innocent clothes and laundry, become redefined here as threats; in Dimitrova's vision these everyday objects must be reexamined. Indeed the state itself wants to confine the citizen's concerns to the realm of laundry, and in the post-communist era the capitalist society would also like to confine the citizen's concerns to such material concerns at the expense of more important issues. The poet, for Dimitrova must in turn remake the symbols and images of the day that the political or economic or social censors have attempted to control.

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." 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, many poets have adopted an extremely impersonal style focusing on objects rather than people to at once parody and subvert the official "patterns of language." Here, for example, is a poem, "The Pebble," that seems at first almost slight, even trivial; it is by the polish poet Zbigniew Herbert:

The pebble

is a perfect creature

equal to itself

mindful of its limits

filled exactly

with a pebbly meaning

with a secret which does not remind one of anything

does not frighten anything away does not arouse desire

its ardour and coldness

are just and full of dignity

I feel a heavy remorse

when I hold it in my hand

And its noble body

is permeated by false warmth

Pebbles cannot be tamed

to the end they will look at us

with a calm and very clear eye

History is present in the pebble, but in a negative way, by its absence, as Milosz has remarked. The pebble is like the good citizen, "perfect" in its reticence, "permeated by false warmth." That falseness is one of our first clues --- it undercuts the neat pattern that is imitating the sterile prose of the government. No one in any state government wants emotion and desire to disrupt the surface pattern, and if they cannot arrive at a citizen" mindful of its.limits," then they will settle for someone with "a secret that does not remind anyone of anything." Nothing beyond the simple, literal, prepackaged level, the level of slogans, five year plans, "contracts with America," or the like-- that way nothing will be frightened away or desired beyond the moment. But the pebble, or the citizen turned stone, has one advantage: "Pebbles cannot be tamed," they will be our conscience "to the end." And for the poet? Well, writing about pebbles is not going to get him into too much difficulty, and more, the poem, by becoming so general becomes universal, a mythic field where history does not happen just once but again and again and in as many contexts with as many effects as the imaginative reader can suggest for the simple stone that has now become a very complex figure.

The Hungarian poet, Gyula Illyes, states these themes in a somewhat more direct and satiric direction typical of the Hungarians. In "Deep Dusk" the approaching darkness is both a reminder of the lack of vision in the country and also a catalyst to see more:

Deceit goes well with a Fall afternoon.

The sky is sparing with its light

but it strengthens us to face loneliness.

The remains of the bright blue of summer

scatter from above the houses

like the parade of villagers

coming from the marketplace.

The smell of flowers is chilling.

The plowed gardens smell sour

like freshly-dug graves.

The man sitting in a chair

would feel warmer with a coat on.

Dusk pulled a book from his hands.

The theater in the sky keeps us bewitched;

it's heightened with falseness,

laced with a dark prophecy

that gleams and becomes true.

Two hands seek shelter

in each other's warmth.

They're knowing and prepared.

Instead of pears

trees let fall sad gestures--

the waving of a hand.

The surface, again, is made up of common and tranquil things in the first half-- nature, summer, a parade, the market, a garden, -- but it is also a time of "remains" that are "scattered," of the "chilling" smell of flowers that remind the speaker of death. Then comes the turning point: against the direct statements and the words that undercut the surface is the understatement about the man -- if only he had a coat, but of course the coat also seems to suggest everything he does not have. In the midst of all this, the two hands meet, "knowing and prepared,"--not whole people with full identities, but just two functions, truncated by the state yet countering the melancholy of the closing lines. It is those hands that deny, undercut, the simple nature metaphors that frame the poem, the simple tranquil surface, for they must take shelter in each other, in individuals rather than the whole scene.

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 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.

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.