Prosody Castle 3.2- Urban Distant

Having old friend and former colleague Meg Hamill read from her book Death Notices, and even more excitingly new work on its way to being publishing-shopped, was extra dope. I'm reposting my long introduction below, as an explanation of why I thought she should read in this series on urban spaces, but really I just wanted Meg to come read, and she did, which was dope. Look for any and everything coming from her from now unto eternity.

I feel privileged to have seen the first few pages, the first few entries, of what would become this book-length gaze unto the dead of the Iraq war while Meg and I were both students at Mills, in Walter Lew’s workshop. Immediately I reacted to how brave the work was, both emotionally and intellectually. The former because, as Meg related to me recently, it committed her to a life wherein: “everyday for a year I woke up and thought about dead people and wrote about dead people”. And intellectually because its stance upon the obvious geo-political division between a citizen of the U.S. and either a citizen of Iraq or a member of the U.S. military, is to leap over it in act of imagination that is perhaps as terrifying to read as it surely must have been to write. The leap, both out to the world of occupied Iraq, and then back again to this city, Oakland, where Meg resided for the period in which she wrote Death Notices, is what excited me to include her in part two of this series of poetries of the urban.

Where last month we examined one of the happier realities of cities, that they are, almost without exception, gleefully multi-lingual, this month we examine one of the sadder realities of cities, that they are, almost without exception, war-zones- whether it be class war, police war, ethnic war or, in the case of Iraq, war to secure the markets of a foreign superpower. And in this century, if the U.S. goes to war at all, it goes almost without saying that this war will be urban, and the civilians killed will be legion.

The other reason I am compelled to hear from this work in our current examination takes a little more explaining, and comes by way of a curious pair of questions. The first is, “How does the reader of poetry know about foreign cities?”. Historically, I think, the answers are love and war, and let me give two examples to show what I mean. The first is the Iliad of Homer:

“and each one of our tens chose a man of Troy to pour wine for it,
still there would be many tens of the Achaians left without a wine steward...but there are companions from other cities in their numbers, wielders of the spear, to help them, who drive me hard back again and will not allow me, despite my will, to sack the well-founded stronghold of Ilion. (Book, Line 125)”

The second is Tennyson:

“Last night I wasted hateful hours
Below the city’s eastern towers
I thristed for the brooks, the showers
I roll’d among the tender flowers
I crushed them on my breast, my mouth
I look’d athwart the burning drouth
Of that long desert to the south”

There are obvious historical reasons why wars of conquest might be the impetus for writing about new lands, but the results are no less works of fancy than those of romance- Homer never went to Troy, and I’d be surprised to learn of Lord Tennyson smashing flowers to his lips in any desert, north or south. How poets get to imagining these places has as much or more to do with how they imagine love and war as with the place itself. How poets imagine love is a subject for another series entirely, but how poets imagine war, I want to look at. As a preliminary thesis, before I really go and look into it, I want to submit that the report of the conquering, or even occasionally defeated, warrior would have been the report of the poet in English language poetry up to today had not the twentieth century brought wars to visit the writers themselves. Let me pick a suddenly controversial writer, Charles Simic, followed by a saintly one, H.D.

“My mother was a braid of black smoke.
She bore me swaddled over the burning cities.
The sky was a vast and windy place for a child
to play.
We met many others who were just like us.
They were trying to put on their overcoats with
arms made of smoke.
The high heavens were full of little shrunken
deaf ears instead of stars.”

“Still the walls do not fall,
I do not know why;

there is a zrr-hiss,
lightning in a not-known,

unregistered dimension;
we are powerless

dust and powder fill our lungs
our bodies blunder

through doors twisted on hinges,
and the lintels slant

cross-wise:
we walk continually”

Now that the war becomes the territory of the writer herself, the lyric I seems appropriate, though it’s a troubled I. The city, even one’s home city, becomes instantly strange, mangled, disembodied, unreliable- such a strong phenomenology of what we are occasionally allowed to glimpse as watchers of our foreign wars. This movement from reporting deeds of warriors to reporting the effects of war on the self, certainly informs what we are seeing currently in poetry about war. Knowing, from our literature that these effects are there and are getting worse with every new ingenious war, we are frustrated by their absence from what is formally called “reporting”, and thus take up again the attempt to report these atrocities. But, as so many poetries take note and even impetus, being there and being here are extraordinarily different circumstances, and it is a troubling thing indeed to devise how to navigate this distance. Recently, much interesting writing has come from the distance itself. Here are two approaches found in the Volume 1 of Leslie Scalapino’s War and Peace collection. The first is Juliana Spahr:

“When we speak of Lisa Marie Presley having sex with Michael Jackson we speak of JDAM and JSOW air-to-surface missiles... We speak of the stinger anti-aircraft missiles and the massive ordinance air blast bombs when we speak of SAP AG and the Microsoft RPC hole and the Denial of Service attacks.”

The second is Etel Adnan:

“To go to the dentist early morning then drive back and come home. To lie down, waiting for the news at noon. To have a headache. To be impatient. To vomit the war. To greet the fog with joy, with tears. To find tenderness in stones. To greet Sarah Miles, with tea, with cakes. To miss the news. To chat. To say goodbye. To start a valise. To forget the war. To never stop thinking about it...”

These innovative forms of being here with a consciousness both of that fact and of the facts abroad fulfill, exactly as best they can, the task of not letting the report be one-sided. But the uniqueness of Meg’s form, though situated in precisely the same circumstance as these other forms, is to yearn so badly for the person there dying or dead in that carnage that it instantiates them, however fleetingly, in something more than an obituary. In this way the love poem and the war poem have found a slender space to co-exist.