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NEAL POLLACK SAYS SHUT UP!
Neal Pollack says: “Shut the hell up, poets!” In his article in the Seattle based alt-weekly The Stranger, Pollack launched an intelligent attack on poets and all writers writing on the war pro or con. Poets are sensitive -- for one, I know my feelings are deeply hurt. “No, you shut up, Neal Pollack,” I want to say, but he does have a point. September 11th and the “situation” in Iraq have given countless scribes the inspiration for terrible poetry.
Still, we poets want to matter (Is Pollack just a mean Dana Goia?), and nothing stirs our blood like the White House cancelling a poetry reading. In fact, for most of us anyone cancelling a poetry reading is a call, if not to war, at least to anger. Who is this Pollack, you ask? Why does he get to say “shut up?” Pollack is funny, he writes for Vanity Fair, he was originally published by McSweeney’s, and for a while many people thought he was Dave Eggers. He makes fun of poets, most other writers, and especially a certain type of macho Hemingway/Mailer/Sontag writer. His poem, “A Spoken-Word Poem for America,” is such a good parody that some people at his readings don’t realize he is making fun of performance/spoken word poets. What does Pollack think is important to talk about now?, I hear you mulling. If you really want to know, read “Wonderlust, My fetish for Wonder Woman and the erotic art of transformation,” his piece on Nerve.com -- which, by the way, has a great erotic poetry section if you are getting cranky with all the poets against the war stuff. Here’s a bit of Pollack’s essay:
“I’m certain that I’m not the only English-speaking man in his thirties whose first crush was on Lynda Carter, one of the most beautiful women of all time. On The Daily Show, Jon Stewart joked that she inspired his ‘lifelong commitment to masturbation.’ Yes, I said to myself sadly when I heard that line. It’s true. Her tits and legs look great when she’s running or jumping, and so do her legs. I admit it’s kind of sexy when she’s tied up or chloroformed. But my Wonder Woman fixation had little to do with Lynda Carter’s physical gifts. If I were turned on merely by the sight of jiggly boobs in a spangled bra, I would have gotten over the fetish years ago.”
BUT WHERE SHALL WE GO FOR TRUTH?
America always turns to superheroes when we are getting our war on. Even if Pollack is right about all the bad poetry written about the terrorist attacks and the sequel to the Gulf War, shouldn’t we poets try? Hasn’t war in general given us some of our best poetry? Is it sick to take pleasure in reading Radnóti? You remember Miklós Radnóti, the Hungarian poet who was shot and buried in a mass grave during World War II. In 1944, Radnóti was force-marched with 3000 other men from Yugoslavia back to Hungary. After surviving the march, Radnóti and 21 others were shot by Hungarian officers. In 1946, Radnóti’s body was exhumed from a mass grave. His widow, going through his pockets, discovered a notebook full of poems. Brett Foster translated three of the poems into English in Poetry International’s 1999 edition. Here is the last line from “Yesterday and Today”:
Already, the poet stands in slick blood up to the anklebone and every song he sings is his finale.The last stanza from “A Simpleton’s Song For My Wife”:
She’s just arrived, her day spent distantly.Last, here is the second couplet from “The Hunted”:
She holds a single, massive poppy petal
and with it forces death from our house.
I’m hidden, poems trickle from my pen,I don’t want Radnóti to stop singing. Think about his wife pulling that blood-soaked notebook from his rotting overcoat, his body thrown away like so much trash, heaped up with the other bodies of the expendable. How he tells their story. How we need to hear that story. How the Bushes need not just to have a tea party and talk about Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes -- but to read their work and understand what those two poets in particular were so worked up about. How everything the war is supposed to stop, war brings us posthaste. How we are defending our rights by losing them. How we are stopping Saddam’s cruelty to his people by bombing the Iraqis ourselves. There is so much Orwellian doublethink and triplespeak coming out of the White House that someone, even crappy poets, needs to say something.
but every word will cease;
Remember, Neal, the only thing we know historically about our leaders is that they seldom tell us the whole truth. I can still hear those chilling phone tapes, released last year, of LBJ saying in the early days of the American/Vietnam war “we have no way to win and no way to get out.” Where shall we go for truth? Some of us will go to religion, some to talk show hosts, some to the safety of Wonder Woman fantasies. Me, I’ll stick to poetry, even though most of poetry has been and always will be bad. Every once in a while a Radnóti leaps through and gives us humanity.
AGAINST FORGETTING: WHY POETS SHOULD NEVER SHUT UP
Have you heard about the concept of volunteer human shields? People have gone to Iraq to put themselves in the proverbial harm’s way. In the first Gulf War, Saddam Hussein captured foreigners living in Iraq and placed them at strategic locations to discourage us from bombing them. This time around folks are actually volunteering for this, much to the dismay of the original human shields. Should anyone who really cares about stopping the war become a human shield? If poets were human shields, wouldn’t the White House and Pollack be happy? Are not volunteer human shields and force-marched poets ripe for Pollack’s parody?
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The man who, having collapsed,
rises, takes steps, is insane;
he’ll move an ankle, a knee,
an arrant mass of pain,
and take to the road again
as if wings were to lift him high;
in vain the ditch will call him:
he simply dare not stay;
and should you ask, why not?;
perhaps he’ll turn and answer;
his wife is waiting back home,
and a death, one beautiful, wiser.
