`Preaching to the Converted'

I needed a laugh so I visited the Poets Against War web site again and was not disappointed. PAW favors what it calls “socially engaged poetry,” such as “Armless Iraqi Boy Bears No Grudges for U.S. Bombing,” by Brent Goodman. You know from the title alone the work in question is grim parody or shameless kitsch. Here’s a sample:

“We've replaced
his stomach with burning oil fields, his genitals
for expired reservist rations, his broken spine
with a chalk-blue contrail. This is
expensive business. We are lucky to have allies
who help us carry the bill. An armless torso
is difficult to look at. He bears no grudges.”

Even on its own terms – as clumsy, sub-Julius Streicher propaganda – this fails. One pities not the child described but the adult who wrote the manipulative, tone-deaf lines. Most of the poetry and prose at PAW shares the earnest ineptness of Goodman’s work, but nothing matches it for sheer pornographic lip-smacking. Two real poets have a few things to say about the distinction between poetry and propaganda. First, Basil Bunting:

“The effect of literature does not depend on its content. Its function is not propaganda, any more than the function of an analytical chemist is propaganda. Neither is its function to amuse the public. It is to explore the resources of language and make language available for all existing or potential thoughts. In doing so it must constantly bring into sight new thoughts whose relation to the immediate political and economic situation is so remote that no mind can trace it, and which do not depend for their truth or falsity upon the truth or falsity, usefulness or uselessness, of the sentiments they may incidentally inspire in a reader not a professional poet.”

This is from an unpublished manuscript, “Observations on Leftwing Papers,” written in 1935 and collected in Basil Bunting: Man and Poet, edited by Carroll F. Terrell. The other passage is from a book-length interview Anthony Hecht gave Philip Hoy, who showed the poet one of his uncollected poems from 1972:

“Here lies fierce Strephon, whose poetic rage
Lashed out on Vietnam from page and stage;
Whereby from basements of Bohemia he
Rose to the lofts of sweet celebrity,
Being, by Fortune, (our Eternal Whore)
One of the few to profit by that war,
A fate he shared – it bears much thinking on –
With certain persons at the Pentagon.”

Hecht was an angry, principled opponent of the Vietnam War, as well as one of our finest poets. Here’s part of his response:

“Thank you for exhuming those buried lines. They do indeed express my impatience of those years with indignant, sanctimonious poets. Even when a poem’s speaker is, by common consent, in the right, this is uninteresting because he is preaching to the converted, and because his poem lacks the drama of antithesis, or the antimonies that Yeats so rightly and shrewdly cherished.”