Actualizing Democratic Vistas

Tribute to ...Pinsky, Walcott?. Poet, Educator, Mentor

The cold, cyclical dark, turning and returning.
Even in the scorched and frozen world of the dead after the holocaust
The wheel as it turns goes on accreting ornaments.
Scientists and artists festoon it from the grave

Toys and messages, jokes and zodiacs, tragedies conceived
From among the dreams of the unemployed and the pampered,
The listless and the tortured.

(Pinsky, “The Figured Wheel” 4)

I did not see this coming, dear reader. I was fresh out of Reed College, bolstered by some fortuitous job opportunities, and surrounded by privilege and luck. Just so. Elizabeth Treadwell, whose mind, poems, wisdoms, spirits, and full total being never wavers from brilliance (not to mention her feminism, which transformed me as a human being in the 80s—and still does, every day). She kept saying while we were in college, “You would love my best friend’s dad! “ I think I was too cool for school. However, during that time I was coincidentally deep inside Robert Pinsky’s book The Figured Wheel. Early on as a teen, it was Leslie Scalapino and Gary Snyder who drew me to Reed. Far too often, it would seem within the poetry scenes, there are exclusions—don’t be reading that L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry as long as you’re with us. Really. And, conversely, don’t come near the formal and more “accepted” verse as a “radical.” Much the same with probably every form of human relations to ever to pass through the earth’s vast revolutions. Here, the point is not to dwell resentfully on this. Rather, sometimes to be blessed by the unanticipated and learn. really learn. The very poets I associated with formality (and thus, “institutional thinking”) turned out to produce amazing works.

Elizabeth never told me what his last name was. I knew her best friend’s first name. I knew his work, but never the communication to realize that as she was advising me this, I was reading his work and notably being an idiot male for not listening more. In high school, we were assigned Robert Frost’s Selected and Emily Dickinson’s Selected (Johnson edition). I burned both of these books in the back yard in a fury and rage against authoritarian propaganda and hegemony (plus burning things in a small town is kind of fun). I was revulsed by them both as ossified, old, the Superstructure of Domination, and beyond.

During most of my high school years, I was taught to approach poems as solving math. Poetry as rubik’s cube. This means that once arranged, once the various physics of line, word, accent are exposed, then the full one and only meaning of “the word” will be disclosed. A hermeneutics of one singular meaning to be deciphered. Within our educational system (or at least many public school systems), poetry becomes that thing that either you “get it” or you don’t. As with other disciplines, this hinges largely on cultural bias, racist, patriarchal, homophobic, classist ideology. Each and every single one of these. The idea then is the “gifted” understand the meaning of the scripture, of the new word, whilst the masses are met with dismissal for being confused and voicing that confusion. This frequently may result in rejection of verse. Verse is the transmission of cultural meaning and his (sic) story. And as such, Herstory, multiplied is killed. Verse passes through much of the authoritarian discourse of academia and with that continues to tell the stories, maintains a memory, and creates. Yet, often I am greeted with the “I just don’t get poetry.” And how many, how many of us—of all here on the earth—may well be exposed to this sort of erasure of anything we may think and anything that is beyond what is educationally or authoritatively dictated within the classroom or the work place (Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire—and Engaged Pedagogy by bell hooks)? As long as we agree to subject/object dualism, the educator is the thinking subject and the student is a passive blank object to be filled up with “knowledge” (i.e. do as I tell you). Ever, a dictatorial obedience of the banking system (Freire). However, as I write this in National Poetry Month, You are a thinking subject in/out of historical creation. You are the diadem. You are the “Crown of Creation,” and defy “their obstruction” (Jefferson Airplane). You are the poem. Every language, diction, mind, experience, metaphor, and being itself. Enfolding. As we are perched on the brink of ecological, social, political, and internal implosion and collapse, our “first birth” and becoming as well as the “word and deed” of our second birth serves as miracle. And within that, the explosiveness of poetry’s redemptive qualities emerges.

The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, “natural” ruin is ultimately rooted in the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted. It is, in other words, the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born. Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope, those two essential characteristics of human existence which Greek antiquity ignored altogether, discounting the keeping of faith as a very uncommon and not too important virtue and counting hope among the evils of illusion in Pandora’s box. It is this faith in and hope for the world that found perhaps its most glorious and most succinct expression in the few words with which the Gospels announced their “glad tidings”: “A child has been born unto us” (Arendt 1958, 247 emphasis mine).

Men cannot give birth. This experience of mind/body/being/soul exists only externally to us. That is to say, no men understand the phenomenological principle of actually beginning anew. Small wonder then that so many of us (men) have entered the earth and world looking backwards at one direction, all the while heading face forward into another into which we see only the end of things.

With all its eyes the creature-world beholds
the open. But our eyes, as though reversed,
encircle it on every side, like traps
set round its unobstructed path to freedom.
What is outside, we know from the brute’s face
alone; for while a child’s quite small we take it
and turn it round and force it to look backwards
at conformation, not at that openness
so deep within the brute’s face. Free from death.
We only see death; the free animal
has its decease perpetually behind it
and God in front, and when it moves, it moves
into eternity, like running springs.
We’ve never no, not for a single day,
pure space before us, such as that which flowers
endlessly open into: always world,
and never nowhere without no

(Rilke, “Eighth Elegy”, Trans. Leishman and Spender 67)

Thanatos. The death trip. Altamont. Sympathy for the Devil. Zeus “birthing” from his leg. “Manhattan Project” and/or Tuskegee Experiment. Cocaine. The seventies. rearranging it.

And we, spectators always, everywhere,
looking at, never out of, everything!
It fills us. We arrange it. It decays.
We re-arrange it, and decay ourselves.

Who’s turned us round like this, so that we always,
do what we may, retain the attitude
of someone who’s departing? Just as he,
on the last hill, that shows him all his valley
for the last time, will turn and stop and linger,
we live our lives, for ever taking leave.

(Rilke, “Eighth Elegy” 71)

The “masterful” illusion of autogenesis begets the realm of the “self-made man” and with that, all the perils therein. And yet, a child has been born unto us—although as Rilke notes, there are some critical problems of hope there. Still. even in the “taking leave,” even as we attempt to direct a realm that cannot, the beginnings of word and deed—the consequences of them are infinite and unpredictable. Rather, that within word and deed are the creation of possibility, of the miraculous. And here, there isn’t merely the solace of feeling better, but actual redemptive patterns, resistances, revolution, new beginnings.

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Robert Pinsky began developing his project as Poet Laureate (1997) by recording a vast array of people reading their favorite poems in their own voices. This emerges for me as one of the most embracing and great projects a Laureate has done. For me, his work here (and it is truly a great and real work) captures and invigorates a great natal impulse of word and deed and the plurality of what is between us, what binds us. And, just as this spirit of regard for the people echoed into his works as a poet and as the Poet Laureate, so it can be said for him as an educator. I could not recommend another more strongly.

Thus, in an oversimplification, I figured anyone I was assigned to read was of that which would kill the natal, destroy youth, and enrich the police state.

. This is so absurd. As if the only way to engage with music

Typically, reading Rimbaud, William Burroughs, Jim Carroll, Jim Morrison, Patti Smith....You know, the “real” stuff. Nothing that would conflict with what Iggy Pop would do. Such was my thinking (not that I no longer think they have merit, each and every does—and all are underrated and eschewed from institutionalized classist pedagogies of the status quo ultimately). As I encountered The History of My Heart.