[Julie Steiner]

Richard Wilbur's endnote on this poem in his Collected Poems 1943-2004 may be of interest:

For the Student Strikers This was written one afternoon at the request of Wesleyan students, during a "strike" against U.S. military actions in Southeast Asia. The poem supports a student-proposed "canvassing" program, under which the students were to go from door to door in the city of Middletown, discussing their views with the citizens. As the poem did not flatter the students in the manner to which they were accustomed, it was at first thrown into the wastebasket at the offices of Strike News, but later retrieved and published.

[Julie Steiner]

By the way, there are some very good essays in the link Gregory P. provided, too, and I encourage people to check them out.

I wish Toni Morrison's essay didn't focus only on the most extreme cases of racism. Yes, doing so drives the point home that racism is horribly still present in modern American society, and a very serious, ugly thing. But it is dangerously easy for white readers to grade their own racism generously, on a curve skewed by such atrocities: "Yes, bombing and shooting up black churches certainly is terrible, but I'm not doing those things...so how dare anyone think I'm at all racist when I support the actions of my police force without question, and when I advocate the deportation of millions of people who don't look like me?"

As a Californian who is a big fan of John Chiang--obviously, I have a weakness for nerdy, Democratic, Roman Catholic, Chinese-American engineers, since I married one--my favorite was the essay by Evan Osnos titled "On Saying No."

I also found Jeffrey Toobin's essay, "The Highest Court," riveting. It included a very poignant simile:

If Trump succeeds in overturning the Affordable Care Act, the Court’s two landmark endorsements of that law, in 2012 and 2015, will become nullities, like rave reviews of a closed restaurant.

But I'm digressing from Gregory's point.

Mary Karr's essay entitled "Donald Trump, Poet" makes much the same point I was trying to. Words matter.

If you ever doubted the power of poetry, ask yourself why, in any revolution, poets are often the first to be hauled out and shot—whether it’s Spanish Fascists murdering García Lorca or Stalin killing Mandelstam. We poets may be crybabies and sissies, but our pens can become nuclear weapons.

Clearly she uses that image because she means us to admire words' power, whether used by poets or politicians or protesters. But it occurs to me that, like nuclear weapons, certain kinds of language (such as demonization of one's opponents, thus robbing them of their human dignity) should be regarded as toxic to both attacker and attacked, and as inviting retaliation. No one wins a nuclear war.

I like her last three paragraphs.

[Andrew Frisardi]

It seems to me that Wilbur’s poem is suggesting talking to fellow common citizens, without necessarily saying anything about protesting or not against citizens in powerful governing positions.

There's no question that a lot of people who didn't vote for Trump could gain understanding by talking to a lot of those who did, and vice-versa.

And I agree that the violence and the hateful slogans on the part of the protestors is actually harmful to their cause, and to people in general. They should imitate Gandhi instead; it would be far more effective for what they’re trying to accomplish.

But also, Michael, you know there are great examples in poetry for speaking out, forcefully and even contemptuously, against abusive power. E.g., this famous scene from Dante’s Paradiso (canto 17, lines 124-35), where Dante’s great-great grandfather Cacciaguida encourages Dante to speak his mind fearlessly and without holding anything back against the corrupt and powerful of his day:

Those with darkened conscience, either of their own or of others’ [family members’] shame, surely will feel that your word is brusque/harsh. But nevertheless, set aside all prevarication, reveal all of what you see; and let them go ahead and scratch where there’s mange. Because if your voice is unpleasant with the first taste [of it], later it will provide vital nourishment once it’s digested. This outcry of yours will be like the wind that beats against the highest peaks [i.e., powerful leaders]; and that makes for no small proof of honor [since it requires such courage to denounce the powerful]. (my trans.)

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxCoscïenza fusca
o de la propria o de l’altrui vergogna
pur sentirà la tua parola brusca.

Ma nondimen, rimossa ogne menzogna,
tutta tua visïon fa manifesta;
e lascia pur grattar dov’ è la rogna.

Ché se la voce tua sarà molesta
nel primo gusto, vital nodrimento
lascerà poi, quando sarà digesta.

Questo tuo grido farà come vento,
che le più alte cime più percuote;
e ciò non fa d’onor poco argomento.

If Dante had done what Wilbur suggests, there would be no Divine Comedy. There’s a time to denounce, forcefully, what seems unacceptable or repugnant. Some might argue that this isn’t one of those times, but a lot of people clearly feel that it is.

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

Michael,
You posted a poem and linked it to a specific moment in history. I called ****** on the implied suggestion that what these people need to do is calm down and go door to door talking to their opponents. I have absolutely no idea who you who are or what your genetic background is. Your idea is the target.
This is not a case of a populace who need to hear the truth to understand a viewpoint they are unfamiliar with. This is a protofascist where the deportation of millions is being discussed, hate crimes are soaring not in isolation but in homage to an election. This is the election of a man hailed by the Klan. This is moment when an openly played video tape of the future president speaking of sexual assault and misogyny did nothing but increase the vigor with which people voted for him. That so many hid their preferences before the election only underlines their knowledge of what they were accepting. This is an election that traumatizes victims of assualt with a symbolic promotion of their attackers. This is an election that will gut the few environmental safeguards we have left, an election of a evil clown car cabinet that now includes a Goebbels-like propagandist
as its chief adviser as if underlining the sort of **** this government will need to mask its intentions.

All this is not only door-to-door already, it is common knowledge injected into their cellphones and facebook feeds. This is not a crowd that is being moved by a napalmed photo of a small girl in the streets of Southeast Asia, that as they see the truth is overcome with remorse. This is a crowd salivating for revenge against imagined sleights done to their whiteness and their rightness by brown people, gay people, Muslims...hell...almost anybody but themselves and as they vote against their own healthcare and food stamps they even vote down their own social safety net.

Btw, it doesn't matter if your grandfather was Caesar Chavez and your mother lives in Tehran. If you are not going to openly oppose this stuff with the same fire and clarity as the folks who are bringing it, then your just another complicit huero writing everything-is-alright-checks out of somebody else's account.

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

Greg,
My apologies for you being confused with me. You seem a calm, reasoned fellow and that was most unfair. Ha!

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

Originally Posted by Julie Steiner

Richard Wilbur's endnote on this poem in his Collected Poems 1943-2004 may be of interest:

Interesting note, Julie. Whether Wilbur can be taken seriously as a poet with a conscience regarding those events depends on what else he did to oppose the murderous War in question. If he simply wrote that and nothing else then I wouldn't think much of it. I have zero knowledge and zero opinions about him or his work. I would be happy to hear about his poetry in the face of all that blood.

[Roger Slater]

It's a rather dull poem, isn't it, quite apart from its message? Well crafted, of course, but unlikely to become anyone's favorite. (Unlike Orwn, I do find many Wilbur poems to be quite wonderful. Off the top of my head, The Pardon, Loves Calls Us to the Things of This World, The Undead, Boy at the Window, An Event, The Barred Owl, all are among my favorite poems).

As far as its message is concerned, I don't see that the strikers are being criticized very much at all. Wilbur is not calling upon them not to strike, just to say why they are on strike. The only criticism of the strikers is the suggestion that they need his advice, since presumably the student strikers themselves were hoping through their strike to stimulate discourse and convince people of the correctness of their views.

[Orwn Acra]

As Roger says, it is dull. Wilbur rarely excites me, and in this case his constant need to be smooth, or for his technique to be seamless, works against the poem (I would say it always works against his poems).

[Orwn Acra]

I will also add that anger is a perfectly acceptable reaction to this election, as is more subdued discourse. Both are needed, the former to fight against the complacency we slide into if we accept the unacceptable. Juster's response is tone deaf no matter how deep he dredges his genes (ooo! 60% hispanic!) when Trump has just appointed a white supremacist to his cabinet.

These calls to civil discourse only (as opposed to civil discourse and anger) are always hypocritical: notice, for instance, that a mere mention of Juster's whiteness has him crying ad hom, yet he expects those who have so much more to lose should muster the utmost restraint and simply talk it out. Rage, rage against the dying of your rights.

[Julie Steiner]

Of course, old heterosexual white guys have nothing of value to say, ever, and no one should listen to them, ever, because they never, ever, go through anything even remotely distressing in their lives of uninterrupted privilege.

But if, in our magnanimous tolerance, we are able to set down our buckets of tar and pillowcases of feathers for a few minutes, the following observations of Richard Wilbur regarding political poetry and Vietnam may be of passing interest to some.

From an interview published in the Paris Review in Winter 1977:

Interviewer: Your first book, The Beautiful Changes, contains many war poems, and your Vietnam-era books contain very few. Didn't Vietnam suggest fresh combinations to you?

Wilbur: Not very many. I have one poem called "On the Marginal Way," in the background of which you strongly feel the Vietnam War; and the poem explicitly states that I regard it as a dirty war. I also wrote what I called "A Miltonic Sonnet for Mr. Johnson," abusing him roundly and comparing him unfavorably to the founder of his party, Thomas Jefferson. But I had a distance from the Vietnam War. My physical involvement with it was limited to peace parades and those poetic-protest read-ins which got to be rather tiresome on the poetic side, but which, I suppose, were politically virtuous. So, yes, I didn't have concrete material to deal with as I did in such poems as I got our of World War II. In World War II I'm talking about the gun that's strapped on your shoulder, and the mine detectors that you're observing as they sweep back and forth across the ground--all kinds of details.

I was going to quote just the Vietnam bit, but I like Wilbur's answer to the previous question too much to keep it to myself:

Interviewer: You've written that World War II was instrumental in starting you in poetry, that it gave you a need to organize your world. Can you tell us about that?

Wilbur: I think it was no different for me that for anybody else in that regard. War is an uprooting experience--that's at the very least what it is. It sends you to other places, puts you in other clothes, gives you another name and serial number. And it also fills your head with doubts as to what the world will become, an accelerated sense of change. And then, of course, if you're in a line company it fills your ears with "Bang! Bang!" and your heart with fear. And there's all of this to be allayed as best one can. There are letters from home, or you can drink: there are all kinds of ways to forget how frightened and disoriented you are. But I think one of the best is to take pencil and paper--which is all you need, thank heavens, to be a poet and which makes it possible to practice poetry in a foxhole--and organize, not the whole of it, because of course you cannot put the world in order, but to make some little pattern--make an experience. That is to say, jell things into an experience which will be a poem.

From an interview at Furman University in February 1970, published in the South Carolina Review in November 1970. (The Kent State shootings were in May.)

Panel: What do you think of the effect on poetry--anyone's poetry--of activism, political or otherwise?

Wilbur: Well, I should think that anybody's free to write about whatever is his natural subject; and it is possible to drop out of the public scene and write about nature, God, and love, and that's enough--isn't it?--for some people. But I think I should be disappointed in any very productive poet of the modern period who didn't react in some measure to some of the things that are happening about us and to us, some of the things that are being done by us. When you pick up books of poems about the Vietnam war or about the assassination of President Kennedy, that sort of thing, it's always aesthetically disappointing; most of the poems are bad. What you admire is the fervor of the poems, the genuineness of their feelings; you are sorry that they are not more substantial as persuasions or as tributes. The poster poem is a special kind of art which only a few people in any culture have practiced with any distinction. I suspect Mayakovsky was a great poster poet. Mostly when we turn to poetry--it seems to me--we don't ask of it that it say "Vote Socialist" or "Get out of Vietnam" or "Kill the Cops" or anything like that. We want poetry to be as nearly as possible a miraculous precipitation of somebody's whole soul, as Coleridge said. We want it to be honest in the sense that it spills the beans totally, that it says whatever it says with all the reservations, all the qualifications which the speaker must feel. My idea of a fine political poem is William Butler Yeats' "Easter 1916." The interesting thing about that poem is that Yeats moves you tremendously about the foolhardy, heroic men who fought at the post office in Dublin; and he persuades you that what they did has transformed the casual comedy of Dublin life into a terrible beauty, something tragic. He says, "MacDonagh, and MacBride / And Connolly, and Pearse," and you are moved about them. At the same time, he makes it pretty clear that political fanaticism costs the heart something, that about the time he dies in the post office, or is executed for what he did there, a man has lost some portion of his personality, some of the richness of his nature, to a political fever. He says also, "For England may keep faith / For all that is done and said." In the middle of a poem celebrating Irish martyrs he says, "Bear it in mind that what they did was foolish, that it was against the general's orders, that England may keep faith, that it may have been in vain, and that it may be that any continuation of their kind of spirit would be destructive." It is an extraordinary balancing act--Yeats' poem--and if you went around with a brush and pasted it on the hoardings of a city, it wouldn't move people to one kind of an act or another; it would move them to contemplation. And perhaps it would move them to thank God that somebody had been honest.

Panel: What about somebody like Auden? He is a bit more polemic, more political, wouldn't you say?

Wilbur: In his earlier poems, yes. I think that Auden and Day-Lewis and perhaps here and there Spender in the thirties assigned themselves the task of preparing what they regarded as a stuffy, played-out society for necessary social changes. They were doing a different kind of thing from what Yeats was doing in writing a poem about a violent situation which has just occurred. They were looking toward the future--until it came, of course, time to write about the Spanish Civil War. So much of their work--I think of Day-Lewis' wonderful, long poem "From Feathers to Iron," in which he tries to get us to feel about factories as if they were women's bodies producing children, tries to humanize the factory--is an effort to try to revolutionize the British sensibility in the direction of a new social economy. I'm not sure how much of that poetry now survives, is still alive. "From Feathers to Iron" probably is, because it is still, for all of our sensibilities, a big issue. [...]

Both interviews above were reprinted in Conversations with Richard Wilbur, ed. William Butts (University Press of Mississippi, 1990).