[Michael Juster]

For the Student Strikers

Go talk with those who are rumored to be unlike you,
And whom, it is said, you are so unlike.
Stand on the stoops of their houses and tell them why
You are out on strike.

It is not yet time for the rock, the bullet, the blunt
Slogan that fuddles the mind toward force.
Let the new sound in our streets be the patient sound
Of your discourse.

Doors will be shut in your faces, I do not doubt.
Yet here or there, it may be, there will start,
Much as the lights blink on in a block at evening,
Changes of heart.

They are your houses; the people are not unlike you;
Talk with them, then, and let it be done
Even for the grey wife of your nightmare sheriff
And the guardsman's son.


Richard Wilbur

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

**** if applied to this moment.
These are people facing deportation, persecution based on skin, sexual orientation, and religion. This is a generation inheriting an environmental disaster from your generation's selfish squandering of ecological resources, stupid wars, and complacent ass kissing of corporate greed. This a generation facing the rollback of decency and shelter on multiple levels. When they start talking about deporting your wonderbread mothers and fathers, annulling your marriages, or putting your healthcare back into the hands of the health insurance leeches, bring your quiet discourse. I know how serious taxes on tea were back in the day compared to this stuff but you don't get to offer this cheap advice without a response.

[Gregory Palmerino]

Forty-six years and the "nightmare sheriff" is still with us. Sad, very sad...

[Michael Juster]

Andrew:

You are proving my point.

Mike

[Julie Steiner]

I disagree with you, Andrew. This is exactly the time for the sort of discourse that has a hope of being listened to, and thus a hope of leading to "changes of heart".

Look at an example from the other side. Fred Phelps drove far more people away from his cause than he converted to it with his message of gay-hate. Likewise, those who hold "Love Trumps Hate" signs while demonizing bigots, racists, and homophobes in hateful terms convert no one from bigotry, racism, and homophobia.

Demonizing the other side DOES NOT WORK, no matter how just one's cause is. No human being is a demon beyond redemption. All human beings, on all sides of any issue, are prone to turning off their empathy when they feel threatened. So non-threatening persuasion and discourse--which is a two-way street, including each side listening to the fears and concerns of the other--is the only way to get others to turn that empathy back on again.

Non-violent protests need to use non-violent language, too (yes, even in a climate in which the media ignores protests until they have footage of something burning), if the protesters want to persuade their opponents that violence will not come to them if they cease hostilities. You can't change a heart that fears you. And you can't persuade someone that their fear of you is irrational if you are attacking them, whether literally or just verbally.

[Gregory Palmerino]

What was your point, Michael, that white poets have the luxurious choice of conversation?

Read another author's literary take on the outcome of this election

Greg

[Michael Juster]

Gregory:

You're proving my point too.

By the way, both of you, my late father was 60% Hispanic and no one on my mother's side went to college before me, so you should cool both the privilege rhetoric and the ad hominem remarks about someone you don't know or understand.

Mike

[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).