VOX Oxford, Mississippi’s Independent Literary Journal

Archive Contributors Distribution Interviews Links Press Samples Staff Submit Support Translations

John Balaban, Path, Crooked Path

Benjamin Alire Saenz, Dreaming the End of War

Denise Levertov, Making Peaces

Review by Tom Pynn

Can sung words calm the guns of a steeled fleet?

--John Balaban, from “The Lives of the Poets”

I dream. The day. I dream that all

The wars are done.

--Benjamin Alire Saenz, from “The Twelfth and Final Dream: A Dream of the Day"

A voice from the dark called out,

“The poets must give us

imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar

imagination of disaster. Peace, not only

the absence of war.”

--Denise Levertov, from “Making Peace”

When Laura Bush announced the White House sponsored poetry reading she named “Poetry and the American Voice” and then abruptly canceled the event when it was learned that some poets planned to read works strongly opposed to her husband’s war in Iraq, Sam Hamill and others went into action. The result is the anthology Poets Against The War (2003). In his Introduction, Hamill asks, "Can 13, 000 poems inhibit this or any administration planning a war?" Like John Balaban, Benjamin Alire Saenz and Denise Levertov, Hamill takes up the question of the poet's place in a culture dominated by a death drive and poetry's efficacy regarding war and peace. It is clear that Hamill does not accept the premise "poets are the conscience of our country," but he does maintain that "through a miraculous marriage of intuition and scholarship, we are 'given' poetry to write." Furthermore, he suggests that "poetry is born in an act of questioning," and poets "must struggle to reveal clarity by way of musical and imagistic expression." For poets, the result of questioning deepening into meditative thinking, what Denise Levertov calls "inner colloquy," is communicated as poetry. For the reader, Hamill insists, "There are things learned from poetry that can be learned no other way."

John Balaban's Path, Crooked Path suggests that a poet's relationship to his/her times is obliquely rather than directly efficacious. In the volume's beginning poems, we are offered images of the poet looking out onto the world from the edge of things--of time, memory, and history. The poet stands in the world's midnight where we are too early for Being and too late for the gods. In the opening poem, "Highway 61 Revisited," the poet is traveling through the American southwest during a time of upheaval: "lighting out again, away from the fanfare and drumbeats, / the couples holding hands in their slow-motion leaps/ from the skyscraper windows billowing smoke." The landscape and culture is a space haunted by voices, "strange cries echoing across America," where the traveler's compassionate actions --picking up a soldier who has been mugged "teeth kicked in, wallet taken," helping a crippled old man get into his car--are metaphorical of the poet's dwelling: seeing deeply into the present, listening to the voices, and responding poetically. In "Looking Out from the Acropolis, 1989," the voices are of the ancient Aegean world of Socrates "of the examined life that is worth living, a place/ where gods and men can struggle with success, striving/ to widen the wealth of the human soul, the size of heaven." Yet for all of Balaban's difference from Socrates and his time, the concern of the poet for "the wealth of the human soul" remains. As was Socrates, Balaban is concerned for the language the soul uses to express its life. In "Georgi Borrisov in Paris" the poet asks "But what can poets do about the missing words . . .?" "In a world reduced to billboards," what has the poet to offer?

The myth of Orpheus, of the poet whose singing and harp-playing was so compelling that stones rolled down hills to be near him, is the modern poet's foil. Balaban asks in "The Lives of the Poets", "Can sung words calm the guns of a steeled fleet?" In the next lines' parenthetical he notes how "(Orpheus moved stones and trees. But a poet/ can't perform a hysterectomy or send a vehicle/ out of the solar system.)" Poetic efficacy lies elsewhere. But where? Balaban contends that poets form "a bigger tribe than one can name and tough/ as anything put up by corporate America." The following lines suggest that poetry is a creative--at times a mythic-- use of language reacquainting us with wonder in the mundane, so we may "re-inhabit" the land we live on and with:

Maxine Kumin with her horse-broke neck, still

Writing, still hitching up and riding Demeter.

William Meredith struggling back toward speech.

Hayden Carruth raising a toast with his "poet's

cheap, sufficient chardonnay." Richard Wilbur

calling us to morning air awash with angels.

Merwin in Hawaii, Snyder in the Sierras,

both taking the nothingness of sunyata

to conjure up a habitation.

Corporate America commodifies and reifies things depleting the ordinary of its vitality and replacing it with everydayness repackaged ad nauseum, draining our wallets and lives of real currency, the meaningful purposelessness and play as well as self-examination that is the soul's delight and depth, respectively. "Here, where I have to live," Balaban writes in "Romania, Romania," "it will be enough to remain a poet." In part, "enough" is "toasting the first life in small things/ fresh from the earth with their tentative yes." A poet's attention, like Socrates' oracular and philosophical service to Apollo, is turned toward the inward, gentle and wondrous experiences of being human. Simply by the way they see things, as Balaban suggests at the end of "Van Gogh", artists make things more real than facts, can give us the "charged, exquisite music that we long to hear."

Path, Crooked Path shows us how easily we can be diverted from the things that matter "amid the loud hilarities, the trivial hungers/ at the end of the American century." In this sense, Balaban writes from a position of exile. From the vantage point of exile, the poet listens and responds from the periphery and so is in a unique position to indicate the frailties, absurdities and inadequacies of contemporary life as well as the subtle and overlooked experiences that can help us to re-member our humanity. For Americans today, there is the poignant reference to Li Po at the close of "Soldier Home": "'Captains and soldiers are smeared on the bushes and grass; / Our generals schemed in vain'." In many of these poems, including "Varna Snow," Balaban contrasts the fleeting hubris and violence of empires with poetry. Poetry is "the delicate thing which lasts." Not only does poetry appear to last where empires in their folly get swept away in the tides of their own warmongering--those who "think it disgraceful to live without plundering"--, but poetry, like "Burmese orchids" flowering after a hurricane, offers "its reply to wreckage." Poetry's reply helps us to realize, make real, our humanity in the midst of violence.

Benjamin Alire Saenz' poem Dreaming the End of War is also a response to the wreckage wrought by war: "I know that wars are raging/ everywhere. Even in my heart." Saenz is well aware of the extent to which violence permeates human consciousness: individual, familial, institutional, national and international. Wars are not simply waged by nation states for natural resources, ideology or the balance of power, but arise internally and are extended into the world. As a New Mexican native currently residing and working in El Paso, the poet offers us a glimpse into the violence permeating this border region. While the current federal administration has given tacit approval to paranoid and racist driven vigilantism along the border with Mexico, it would be facile to claim that the violence is strictly due to political opportunism and/or white racism. Yet, it is the case that "Some have drowned. Some/ Have been killed by vigilantes who protect us in the name/ Of all that is white." These poems, however, are not simply occasional poetry about immigration, flag burning, and war in Iraq. They are deeply meditative poems about the source of war that is within all of us. Saenz' sustained meditation suggests that if the origins of war are internal, then we can begin moving beyond war through the inner transmutative process of dreaming that is at once recollective and creative.

Dreaming the End of War shows us that the origins of the killing urge are complex--"The wars are everywhere"--a synergy of one's own mind and culture. In a series of twelve "dreams," Saenz exposes the ways by which we are initiated into the cult of violence and the myriad of ways by which we bear our violence into the world. In "The First Dream: Learning to Kill," the child's initiation into killing is "sweet, uncomplicated, I spent// hours blowing up/ ants with Black Cats." It becomes apparent that violence is not innate but enculturated: "Daily, on that/ farm I learned/ the meaning of the simple/ joy of killing." The farm of his boyhood is the setting of man against earth as well as man against man. Earth, he writes, "in its stubborn intelligence/ refused to learn/ our rituals and our/ language." The earth can kill you if you do not grow as hard as it is hard, or so the perverse reasoning goes. Even its softness "could fool you." On this farm, in this world, he learns that "killing was part of what it meant/ to live." Even the theology learned in childhood is violent: "but original sin has always/ mattered more than/ original innocence." It was a "theology handed down// by grandmothers and grandfathers// who were taught to hate themselves by a nation and a faith// that could spit// rivers on their faces."

Yet, understanding is not enough to de-colonize a mind-body complicit in a culture of death. In "The Second Dream: Killing and Memory and War," Saenz writes:

I understand loss and how a bullet

cuts through a family and how that bullet

becomes the air we live and breathe.

I understand these shadows, and how

these shadows become politics

and how that politics becomes a flag

and how that flag becomes the only house

we live in.

One may still find one's self carried away by the desire for revenge, especially if one's family has been violated as the poet considers in "The Fourth Dream: Families and Flags and Revenge": "Once, / I dreamed I found these men, I woke/ searching for a gun, could feel/ the spit in my throat. I knew/ that spit to be the only weapon/ I could call my own." Revenge is not restricted to one's own family but is also operative in culture. At the end of the poem, Saenz refers us to the contemporary cultural phenomenon of some Southerners, "those// who are obsessed with the Confederacy, / with the battles and the names/ and the graves. They carry the taste/ of treason on their tongues." This leads the poet to ruminate on the dialectic of forgetting and remembering, how nostalgia can become a trap: "Those who forget are shallow; / people who keep things wallow/ in the forest of bitterness."

Living in the tension of war and peace is exacerbated by the fact that the details of violence are so evident in our daily lives while "Peace/ Is like the horizon. We can see it in the distance/ But it is always far and we can never touch it." As a poet, Saenz admits that

My identity as a writer

Is useless

In the face of the many aggressions

That surround

The globe

Like the barbed wire

Around a concentration camp.

Not only do the facts of war outnumber and threaten to overwhelm us, but the capacity of language to bear the complexity of the human heart and the burden of trauma is limited: "There are things that writing cannot hold." Furthermore, there is a difficulty in arranging the language of poetry to communicate the complex dimensions of being human. "I am not fooled," Saenz writes, "by my own aesthetics. There are complications/ buried just beneath these words."

At the same time, however, what one knows about one's self and the world one lives in does not necessarily eliminate the capacity for the kind of dreaming Saenz undertakes in this poetry. In "The Eleventh Dream: Fathers and Other Gods," even the formidable presence of "death stops nothing of what matters." It is "what matters" that has been behind the struggle to remain in hope of resurrection despite the deadening weight of despair. In the poem's twelfth and final dream, "A Dream of the Day," dreaming has recovered hope for the end of war. It is a "dream that all/ wars are done," that "nations do not matter," that "all who left my city/ will come back. / Exiles returning/ to build again what has been/ left unbuilt," that the animals "All the dead animals, all/ the animals we killed to build/ our kingdoms" return. As the poem began with a child inaugurated into the cult of war, so the volume ends with an image of the poet dreaming his re-birth in death (resurrection) where "Those who/ have crossed before me await/ the arrival of this new immigrant." In this ending Saenz shows us that a poets efficacy in a culture of violence is to dream the end of war by dreaming a new day.

New Directions, in their Bibelots series, has added Denise Levertov's (1923-1997) words to the call for an end to war in Making Peace, a selection of poems culled from eleven previously published books. This work shows that Levertov was not just a poet, that is, if poetry is simply an aesthetic statement or contrived artifact for the market-driven workshop circuit and its auxilliary of hack zines. For the last thirty years of her life Levertov took her responsibility seriously as a poet-citizen of the world and so sought to be responsible for her words. In her essay entitled "The Poet in the World," Levertov argues that a writer takes " personal and active responsibility for his words, whatever they are, and to acknowledge their potential influence on the lives of others" because "when words penetrate deep into us they change the chemistry of the soul, of the imagination." Making Peace is a collection of 30 poems organized, as was her custom toward the end of her life editor Peggy Rosenthal tells us in her Introduction, around four themes: Life at War, Protestors, Writing in the Dark, and Making Peace. This book can be seen as the culmination of a triptych of poems (the first two volumes, The Life Around Us and The Stream & the Sapphire, Levertov herself edited toward the end of her life) marking the three principle themes of Levertov's poetic life: spirit, nature, and peace.

In "Origins of a Poem," she explains that "writing poetry is a process of discovery, revealing inherent music, the music of correspondences, the music of inscape." As a poet's love for language connects her to things, so does poetry connect Levertov to the wider world. The things of this world, Wordsworth once wrote, must haunt the poet "like a passion." To be haunted "like a passion" necessarily implies deep listening. The volume's first poem, "Life at War," bears the traces of deep listening first and foremost to one's self. Levertov hears "the disasters numb within us/ caught in the chest, rolling/ in the brain like pebbles." Such listening leads to aporia, an unresolvable tension between

the knowledge that humankind,

delicate Man, whose flesh

responds to a caress, whose eyes

are flowers that perceive the stars

whose music excels the music of birds,

whose laughter matches the laughter of dogs,

whose understanding manifests designs

fairer than the spider's most intricate web,

still turns without surprise, with mere regret

to the scheduled breaking open of breasts whose milk

runs out over the entrails of still-alive babies.

In "Thinking about El Salvador," what the poet hears when she listens is the silence of those murdered in a brutal civil war encouraged and supported by the Reagan administration with and without the consent of Congress. It is "the silence// of raped women, / of priests and peasants, / teachers and children, / of all whose heads every day/ float down the river/ and rot, / and sink." She hears the muted witness of Iraqi soldiers reportedly buried alive by U.S. troops in the first Gulf War, the silence of "buried trenches/ with peoples'/ arms and things/ sticking out." How many killed? "For all I know, / thousands, said/ Colonel Moreno." Still deeper, Levertov hears the irony behind generals and corporate-sponsored talking heads who "speak of the art of war, / but the arts/ draw their light from the soul's well, / and warfare/ dries up the soul and draws its power/ from a dark and burning wasteland."

When one listens and hears the "one ancient certainty" that "war means death, death, death, and death," what is the appropriate response? It is to speak. In the second section's title poem "Protestors," Levertov clarifies the existential moment of ethical crisis: "The choice: to speak/ or not to speak. / We spoke. // Those of whom we spoke/ had not that choice." What form should speaking take? The poet tells us that human violence is appropriately responded to with non-violence: candle light vigils, altars in the street, dance, street theater, liturgy--the crossing of "the boundary line", she reminds us, "back to a freedom that's not so free." By necessity, Levertov implies, listening clarifies choice and in choosing one way or another we act. Our freedom does not lie, therefore, in the resulting action or its consequences, but in choosing. The existential crisis of choice reminds us that we are connected to all others and that our freedom lies in being free to respond. While freedom must be free, it is a childish conception of freedom that would have freedom be freedom from. As protestors and poets alike are not free from temporality--Are birds free from the chains of the sky? -- so protest is bolstered not by certainty, but by dark hope. In the streets, she writes, "crying/ 'Sleepers Awake!'

hoping

the rhyme's promise was true,

that we may return

from this place of terror

home to a calm dawn and

the work we had just begun.

"It is hard sometimes," she writes in "The Love of Morning," "to drag ourselves/ back to the love of morning/ after we've lain in the dark crying out/ O God, save us from the horror." Despite the darkness of not knowing whether our actions are efficacious, there is something--courage? humility? faith? wisdom? love?--that compels and supports non-violent protest as witness. In the presence of authentic protest we cannot help being changed as in the astonishing poem "The Altars in the Street," where "Children begin at green dawn nimbly to build/ topheavy altars, overweighted with prayers, . . . // Where tanks have cracked the roadway/ the frail altars shake."

Clearly these poems are informed by the understanding that deep listening in our connection to others and things and responding appropriately are what each of us is called to, but what of the poet? Does the poet have a particular responsibility beyond this? The book's second half addresses the task of the poet in the world. Just as non-violent protest and civil disobedience is accomplished in the dark, so is the writing of poetry. Vocation, from the Latin vocare, "to call," defines the poet's life for Levertov. In "Vocation," the first poem of the third section, it is our willingness to "Watch! Hear them! / Through them alone/ we keep our title, human, // word like an archway, a bridge, an altar." In responding with compassion to the call of the other we fulfill our humanity. The difficulty in writing poetry out of the calling is addressed in "Advent 1966": "Because in Vietnam the vision of a Burning Babe/ is multiplied, multiplied . . .

because of this my strong sight,

my clear caressive sight, my poet's sight I was given

that it might stir me into song,

is blurred.

There is a cataract filming over

my inner eyes.

In our humanness, we cannot remain silent, for "our own words are for us to speak, a way to ask and to answer." Yet, as "Advent 1966" suggests, the horror of war can be so overwhelming, that one struggles to find words to speak. In "Where Is the Angel?" Levertov invokes the ancient Semitic myth of Jacob wrestling with the angel, not in the hopes of gaining some measure of transcendental wisdom, but "to wrestle with me and wound/ not my thigh but my throat, / so curses and blessings flow storming out." When the words finally arrive they "pulled you from the depths of unknowing, / words that flew through your mind, strange birds/ crying their urgency with human voices, / or opened/ as flowers of a tree that blooms/ only once in a lifetime: // words that may have the power/ to make the sun rise again."

As in Saenz' Dreaming the End of War, Levertov indicates the shamanic powers of poetry to usher in the dawn. Not the literal sun rising, but transformation of consciousness, to see the world anew with eyes and hands open rather than with clenched fists. In "from During the Eichmann Trial" the difference between those who are awake and asleep is embodied in the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. For Levertov, he is the man who participated in mass murder because he did not look into the faces of his fellow human beings: "It was the yellow/ of the stars too, // stars that marked/ those in whose faces// you had not/ looked." We are all little Eichmanns, somnambulant accomplices to terror, in so far as we do not awaken to the other and ourselves. All the little Eichmanns of our world are like apparitions "telling us something he/ does not know: we are members// one of another." The title of this last section as well as the volume indicates Levertov's conception of peace:

But peace, like a poem,

Is not there ahead of itself,

Can't be imagined before it is made,

Can't be known except

In the words of its making,

Grammar of justice,

Syntax of mutual aid.

"A line of peace," she writes, "might appear/ if we restructured the sentence our lives are making." Levertov surmises in "from An Interim," that "Peace could be// that grandeur, that dwelling/ in majestic presence, attuned/ to the great pulse." The "great pulse" is our attunement to the life around us in our dwelling. Peace is revealed by listening and responding appropriately, forgoing violence and war for a life of non-violence, a "grammar of justice, / syntax of mutual aid." In "City Psalm" Levertov, in prophetic voice, sees into the vital depth of things where even a city street in the graygrit dawn appears transformed leaving us with the possibility of a new life:

I have seen

not behind but within, within the

dull grief, blown grit, hideous

concrete facades, another grief, a gleam

as of dew, an abode of mercy,

have not heard behind but within noise

a humming that drifted into a quiet smile.

Nothing was changed, all was revealed otherwise;

not that horror was not, not that the killings did not continue,

not that I thought there was to be no more despair,

but that as if transparent all disclosed

an otherness that was blessed, that was bliss.

I saw Paradise in the dust of the street.

VOX