The Unified Field of Poetry, FOREWORD, to
The Global Poetry Anthology ‘POETRY AGAINST TERROR’ e-book
Written by Daniel J. Brick
Translated by Sophy Chen
~*~
From many countries
The poets come together
To celebrate peace.
(Daniel J. Brick)
〜*〜
On November 13, 2015, I spent several hours composing a Poem of Memory, called ‘A Dome of Dutch Elms’. In my hometown, St. Paul, Minnesota, Dutch Elm trees had been planted along boulevards, and they formed a dome of leaves and branches arching over boulevards and streets. Sunlight filtering through that dome was a lovely sight. The loveliness was doomed when a disease invaded the city in the 1970s and destroyed virtually all of the trees.
I had planned to write that narrative but the poem decided on a different course, focusing on my adolescent experience. I followed the poem’s direction instead of mine, and did not deal with the disease. Another issue took over the poem, namely, rites of passage. My developing appreciation of natural beauty proved to be the theme the very process of writing had chosen. This unplanned passage summed up the new direction of the poem:
That sight was not only beautiful
in itself, but I believe the source
of my sense of beauty..
This passage of observation segues into a passage of meditation:
Beauty does not wait upon our wills or nature.
[..] We who live out lives, burnished
and bright, under the light of the sun
must take what is offered, when it is offered.
Such a pattern of observation followed by meditation is characteristic of a kind of lyric poetry. It occurs in a moment of calm regard, when other issues can be set aside, as the mind assesses its sensory experiences and places them into a larger philosophical context, but what happened next on that night of composing this poem shattered that calm.
A window opened automatically on my computer screen with the terse news report: 118 killed in terrorist attack in Paris. I felt the life squeezed out of me, I went limp in body and soul. My first thought was of the grief family and friends would be feeling over the loss of their loved ones. Then I thought of the beautiful city of Paris, the City of Lights, darkened by violence and fear. It was only after these thoughts that a helpless compassion for the victims seared my consciousness. These three sensations swamped my mind for the next several hours. At some point the irony of my privileged situation of external peace and internal calm that made my lyric poem possible assailed me. This event, this time demanded a different kind of poem from sincere and caring poets. But I was feeling helpless, unable to focus my emotions, much less my thoughts. This sense of futility bothered me, because a poet rendered silent by external events is not fulfilling his or her poetic mission, which is to give voice to common human concerns.
I turned to the internet and found that poets at Poem Hunter, some of whom were familiar to me, were already responding to this terrible event with that other kind of poem. It was heartening in the isolation of my apartment, in the silence of the night, to read their words expressing grief, condemning violence, promoting the arts of peace.
Reading their poems pulled me out of my paralysis of emotion, and before dawn, I too had written a poem in response.
Over the next few days, as news reports gave us more horrendous details and pundits commented on and assessed the facts, more poets offered their poems. Fabrizio Frosini and I have co-edited six eBooks of poems by poets who post their poems at Poem Hunter. Along with another co-editor, Pamela Sinicrope, we decided a new eBook of poems against terrorism was required. When we invited poets to join us, there were almost immediately tens and tens of respondents from many different countries. The poets had rallied to fulfill their poetic mission: to lend their voices in support of humane values.
I have alluded, in this Introduction, to a different kind of poem from the familiar lyric poem in which a poet speaks about issues of a personal nature. This other kind of poem does not derive from the poet’s individual consciousness, but from events in the world. John Keats confronted the need for this other kind of poem at the end of his life. In the revision of the opening canto of his unfinished epic, The Fall Of Hyperion, he describes himself meeting a new Muse named Moneta, who sternly chides him for failing to write this other kind of poetry. Moneta says to the humbled poet:
None can usurp this height [of poetic achievement]
But those to whom the miseries of the world
Are misery, and will not let them rest.
Keats wrote those lines in, but did not live to write the poetry they embody, but we poets of the early 21st century certainly can. And we should not rest until we have fulfilled that mission.
This kind of poem has been called ‘The Political Poem’, but the root word politics is a vexed word with too many connotations we may not intend. It has been called ‘The Poem of Conscience’, but that persists in locating the poem in a poet’s individual consciousness. A more inclusive term was coined by the American poet, Carolyn Forche. She reversed the terms of a phrase by the Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz, ‘The Witness of Poetry’, and offered us ‘The Poetry of Witness’. Her term directs our attention to the ‘what’ rather than the ‘who’ of the poem: the poet is looking outward, into the world, and finds his subject there, as ‘the miseries of the world’ summon him to become aware, to respond, to participate.
Carolyn Forche herself has written striking Poems of Witness. In ‘The Notebook Of Uprising’, she recalled what one of her aged relatives told her about the plight of refugees in the 1930s:
Anna said we were all to be sent: Poles, Romanians, Gypsies.
So she drew her finger across her throat.
Anna Ahkmatova’s great poem, ‘Requiem 1935-1940’, remembers the victims of Stalinist oppression. In her prose preface, she tells us about her motivation in a chilling incident of despair and hope:
A woman, with lips blue from the cold, started out of the torpor common to us all..
"Can you describe this?"
And I said: "I can"
Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face.
Miguel Hernandez, imprisoned by Franco’s forces during the Spanish Civil War and condemned to death, wrote desperate poems in prison expressing his longing to be reunited with his wife and son:
I sink my mouth in your life.
I hear the booming of space, and infinity seems to have poured itself over me.
I shall return to kiss you,
I must return..
He did not return, the fascists murdered his body but not his heritage as a Poet of
Witness. At the very end of his poem, he promises his loved ones:
Three words,
three fires have you inherited:
life, death, love. There they abide, inscribed on your lips.
The Palestinian poet, Rashid Husayn, speaks eloquently of the common life in an atmosphere of violence:
I will transform my life into all likelihoods of war,
So that the seed of love within me may grow,
and I will phone God a million times.
I will go on singing, more and more,
I will go on growing.
Despite years of imprisonment as a political prisoner, Abdellatif Laabi affirmed his purely human happiness:
So many years..
So many shooting stars inside my head
the fountain of tenderness murmurs
insistently
the strange happiness of the prisoner.
The lyric voice of the poet is not diminished but aroused by sufferings endured and witnessed. There is no sacrifice of lyricism in responding to ‘the miseries of the world’. That is why I titled this Introduction The Unified Field of Poetry.
