If, like me, you tend to think of "American poetry*" the way you would "great Canadian novel" then Rolf Potts' Nation tribute to Allen Ginsberg's "Wichita Vortex Sutra" is interesting for reasons having nothing to do with its putative subject, the politics of language.
Because Ginsberg's revelations are difficult–because they seem to question the potency of poetry–it's no surprise that the anniversary of "Wichita Vortex Sutra" has been ignored this year, despite the poem's jarring relevance to the current American landscape. […]
Oh, please. Ginsberg's revelations are all antis in search of a climax, and they're couched in lousy verse.
Just as "terrorism" (another nine-letter word) has become an incantation that aims to blur all manner of failures and lies by "inferior magicians" within the Bush Administration, the word "Communism" was central to the alchemical formula for Johnson-era spin and manipulation–a drab reminder that language could obscure truth as readily as express it.
Wait a minute, I thought we were comparing Vietnam to Iraq? I guess "Baathism" with its 8 letters, and "insurgency" with its 10, sort of spoils the moral and lyric equivalence, huh?
Antiwar poetry is the exclusive demesne of the British, with Wilfred Owen as head groundskeeper:
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots Of disappointed shells that dropped behind. GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!– An ecstasy of fumbling, Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time; But someone still was yelling out and stumbling And floundering like a man in fire or lime.– Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. If in some smothering dreams you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,– My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.
Wielding cliches like daisy-cutters, Potts makes the obvious allusions to Shelley ("poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world") and Auden, who said "Poetry makes nothing happen" in mid-stride through his wonderful memorial to W.B. Yeats. As it happens, Yeats was once asked to deliver a war poem himself; the occasion was the same world war which made Owen famous before claiming his life. All the Irishman could come up with was the following strophe, which really does put Auden's career-humbling pronouncement in better perspective:
I think it better that in times like these A poet's mouth be silent, for in truth We have no gift to set a statesman right; He has had enough of meddling who can please A young girl in the indolence of her youth, Or an old man upon a winter's night
*T.S. Eliot, the "Rock" choruses — yes.
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