The politics of art

Politics in Art -- by Hank Kalet

"The cities break up The land is a train of dust Only poetry knows how to marry this space." — Adonis

The great poet Denise Levertov, who spent some time teaching at Drew University in Madison, believed the poet should be engaged with the world.

She was a regular presence for years at anti-war demonstrations, both against Vietnam and the first Gulf War (she died in 1997), and has been was involved in other political causes.

For her, the poet should avoid what she called the "dangers of self-indulgent sentimentalism," or confessions for confessions' sake.

"I feel that if a person is just coldly, cynically unconcerned, that his or her art will suffer from this," she said in an interview reprinted in "American Poetry Observed: Poets on Their Work," edited by Joe David Bellamy. "But I also think that many people are concerned with the fate of their fellow beings but are just constitutionally not capable of giving their time and energy to activism. I think it would be wrong to judge them; people's own consciences should judge them, not another person."

I mention Levertov as a way of addressing something a friend of mine wrote to me a week or so ago and of defending the political prerogative in verse. I received an e-mail recently from a friend, the poet Emanuel di Pasquale, commenting on a small, self-published chapbook I'd sent him. We've been corresponding off and on over the last few months with a regular theme being political poetry. He admits that he does not"not respond well to political poems," and tends to be critical of them in ways that he might not be of other poems.

"Passion counts," he wrote. "Not politics, not anti-Bush, this or that; no one remembers the politics of a moment, but we remember the passion of the moment which is every moment's, human, passion."

I responded that politics is part of this equation, that even Dante and Shakespeare were writing from a political point of view.

"Politics is OK," he responded, "as long as the poetry is art. Generally, what happens is that the intent, political, corrupts art. One writes to convince. One forgets he is creating art. Big difference."

I have been thinking of his comments as I watch the news from the Middle East, wondering whether the people in southern Lebanon and northern Israel view politics as separate from their daily lives and loves and watching as this new Middle East we keep hearing the Bush administration talk about falls into the same ugly patterns that have plagued the old one for much of its modern history.

Reading the Israelis Aharon Shabtai and Meir Weiseltier and the out-of-print anthology "Modern Poetry of the Arab World," I am struck by how tragically familiar all of this is, how history seems stuck on the same page as the two sides replay the same tired drama over and over.

The books — "Love and Selected Poems" and "J'Accuse" by Mr. Shabtai, "The Flower of Anarchy" by Mr. Weiseltier and the anthology edited by Abdullah al-Udhari – all return again and again to the commonplace, setting it against the violence and treachery of the time, turning it into something else entirely.

"We live in an age when it's hard / to write about basic things / like a kiss or eating cheese," Mr. Weiseltier writes in "Cheese."

The accumulation of small details in his poems is set against the larger world of violence, one that perpetuates itself, violence begetting violence, a cycle that he refuses to fall into – "don't dare say / that my blood permits you to justify your wrongs."

Mr. Shabtai also refuses to engage in this kind of moral calculus, taking on the Israeli establishment with poems that question the ethics of contemporary Israeli society, criticizing its acceptance of war as the nation's primary condition. Perpetual war and the desire to wall itself off from the Palestinians, he implies, has cast Israel into a ghetto of its own making and "identity becomes the ghetto, / and the ghetto becomes the identity."

It is an attitude understood well by the Arab poets in the al-Udhari anthology, who write of military defeats, isolation and unresponsive governments, of religion and a constrained future with passion and stark imagery.

And in these poems, the reader can see the contours of the current stalemate, the growth of militant groups like Hezbollah from the ashes of pan-Arab identity and possibly, just possibly, something better down the road.

The impact that all of these poets have as artists grows from the intertwining of the seemingly mundane motion of daily life and the larger currents of history and politics that color and corrupt it.

"For that's how it's always been —" Mr. Shabtai writes in "Rosh Hashanah," "the murderers murder, / the intellectuals make it palatable, / and the poet sings."

(Hank Kalet is managing editor of the South Brunswick Post and The Cranbury Press. He can be reached via e-mail, or through his weblog, Channel Surfing.)