the 60s and 70s called. They want their news back.

Wake up its 2008 ;-)

a decade-ago-plus called. it wants its lame joke back.

Weinberger's comment is interesting and seems true to a significant degree, and though I can think of a few exceptions and despite the fact that the internet makes it easy to be almost anywhere and stay in contact with other poets, physical presence in a particular community counts for a great deal. It's true too of the scenes that exist somewhat outside of academia, such as those in NYC or SF. If a poet can't go to readings and read, that poet risks fading. Nonetheless, that poet can, still, keep writing, publishing and--as long as international air travel remains affordable--making the occasional physical appearance on the scene, and do it all without significant delay. Yet there is, still, a major difference that comes from being there.

Of course, that pretty much pertains only to the North American anglophone poetry world, as far as I can see (which isn't, perhaps, very far). I've been in China for the past couple of years (it's smoggy), where many of the PRC's major poets have, of course, made a large part of their careers outside of the geographical bounds of the country (and certainly outside of China's stultifying official and academic cultures). And the poets here I've talked to carefully manage themselves to avoid trouble with the authorities--in fact, a Shanghai poet just informed me that an informal reading we'd been discussing organizing involving a few American writers, a Japanese-American writer, and some local Chinese poets should be abandoned. His given reason: the Sichuan earthquake. The real reason, I'm quite sure: the government is disrupting the lives of anyone who might be seen as "dissident" ahead of the Olympics and in the wake of the recent trouble in Tibet, and they're especially watchful of Chinese who deal with foreigners. I don't want to open that particular can of worms any further; I just want to point out that Weinberger's comment, as interesting and relevant as I find it, is quite limited in a global context to quite a specific community of poets (North American native anglophone "careerists," more or less).

But back to Gilbert's points about the difficulties of writing from and about and in a place that is culturally not anglophone North America (we're both white male poets, and I think this is significant), there's really something there, at least I'm finding it to be the case as I try to figure out what it means to live and write in Shanghai after starting my "career" in NYC and having seen it stall out since leaving NYC (due mainly to my own laziness, to be sure, but that laziness has some determinants in the kinds of questions of travel Gilbert touches on here).

I'm quite interested in Gilbert's note that the symposium failed to address tourism or cultural appropriation, and I think that, for me (and perhaps for Gilbert too, vis-a-vis his experiences in India and Chiapas and apparent difficulties writing about them in ways that worked for him), these issues loom large. Of course, colonialism, orientalism and imperialism are the ghosts in the tourism industry machine, and writing through such heavy historical complexity--or attempting it in a conscious and responsible way--can often, I find, make poetry difficult to write. (That's probably a good thing.)

I appreciate Gilbert's reframing of the "enlightenment" model (a kind of spiritual tourism, really) with a broader desire to increase knowledge, empathy, and political awareness, though this too entails a certain position-making and position-taking derived from a range of privileges (mostly economic at root) and that complicates writing enormously (or should). I'm a bit worried about how, under the pressure of these complications, this impulse always threatens to devolve into a pat expression of a desire "to become a better human being." It's not that that's not a worthy goal in and of itself, but in the way its often used it contains and conceals a host of pop-psych cultural assumptions about what being "a good person" means, assumptions that are, again, largely determined by and rooted in degrees of privilege. This might be part of the reason for the skepticism on the part of the Indians on the panel--so often Western approaches to the rest of the world are freighted with these layered assumptions (of course, such skepticism can devolve into pat dismissal, witness the tired "Wake up it's 2008" quip above).

Anyway, thanks to AG (and AG) for the food for thought. And given the global nature of nearly everything in 2008 (thanks to One of the Billions of Indians Out There for setting the record straight), I think it makes great sense to discuss, reconsider and evaluate the intercultural dimensions of 20th century poetry and use that discussion to energize contemporary writing and criticism on all fronts.

For an Indian take on the Western hippie movement, 60s/70s drug culture, and cultural appropriation/pollution, I very strongly recommend the film "Hare Krishna Hare Ram," which featured the beautiful and very groovy Zeenat Aman "singing" Asha Bhosle's classic song, Dum Maro Dum.

Asha Bhosle is one of my all-time heroines!!!! Thanks for this great link.

In case you missed it, we recently published an interview with Gary Snyder in which Alan Williamson asked Snyder about his previous experiences in India and Japan.

Emily Warn