The Best American Poetry

Language Compass [by Catherine Woodard]

If the recent protests in India prove to be a tipping point for a safer place in society for women, language may need as much reform as police or judicial procedures.

As the mother of two daughters in college, I chose to start 2013 at the New Delhi protests over the brutal gang rape and subsequent death of a female paramedical student. I was in India to meet my eldest daughter who’d been traveling with a classmate born in Nepal. As a poet and former journalist, I also dove into the language of the event, spending my nights surfing the extensive coverage in English on 24-hour news channels and reading the robust print media. Many of the words were worrisome.

"Eve teasing" is a common media moniker in India for a broad spectrum of sexual harassment, essentially everything that falls short of rape. Verbal street harassment, flashing and molestation are all a lot more serious than the archaic euphemism suggests. In a 2012 poll, 78 percent of New Delhi women reported verbal or physical sexual harassment and 98 percent of young men admitted it's commonplace among their friends.

I sensed a hunger for leadership in framing the debate. The presence at protests of so many young men as well as parents with their children was encouraging and mirrored hopes for change reported by media. I discounted fringe theories such as the regional minister who concluded, “stars are not in position.” (One expects noise from the most conservative corners as I recalled the barbaric theories about rape from several U.S. Congressional candidates this fall.) Most discouraging, however, was the range of government and religious officials across the nation who blamed women for the violence, whether because of immodest dress or a decline of Hindu values. The son of the President of India, a member of Parliament, called female protesters "highly dented and painted" women who “have no connection with ground reality.” A popular Delhi spiritual leader said the gang rape victim could have saved herself by praying at her attackers’ feet. And far too many of the screaming heads on television were yelling for chemical castration even though experts pointed out that violent crimes against women are more often about power than sex.

Even the propensity to label the 23-year-old a girl in headlines indicated how language contributes to the lack of respect and response from the streets, the police and the courts. Only one of more than 600 rapes reported in New Delhi in 2012 has produced a conviction. And few people dispute that rape is vastly underreported because of the widespread conviction that only people with political connections will get any semblance of justice from corrupt, underpaid, poorly trained and mostly male police departments and the overwhelmed and understaffed courts.

Even so, there is no shortage of reporting about violent attacks each day. In two national newspapers, daily roundups of recent rapes across the nation are headlined “Criminals Everywhere” and “Meanwhile…” In early January those briefs included a dead 16-year-old found hanging from a tree, a 15-year-old allegedly kidnapped by a neighbor dead in a school toilet and a 15-year-old held captive and raped for 15 days by three men from her village.

It’s dangerous to be female in India from the womb to old age. The list of causes is long and complicated: aborted girls, female infanticide and neglect, domestic violence, sexual violence, dowry and family disputes. From cradle to grave, males get a larger share of family resources whether for nutrition or health care or mosquito netting for malaria.

“If there’s one glass of milk left, it’s still going to the boy in the family,” said a mustached, middle-aged office manager at the New Delhi protests on New Year’s Day. “It’s just disgusting how we treat women of all ages.”

He’d approached me with a very nervous mother and her teenaged daughter he’d just met, in case my camera meant I was a reporter. Their faces were already partly covered by bright scarves, which they instinctually pulled even tighter as he relayed their dilemma. The 17-year-old went to the police at her mother’s behest after being raped by a neighbor in South Delhi. Not only did the police do nothing, the man and his friends are now regularly threatening mother and daughter. “Can you tell me who they can talk to who will take them seriously?” the man asked.

The stakes inherent in that question are quite high. About 25 million women could be alive if the suspiciously low ratio of women to men in India was more in line with areas of the world with more equal gender care, according to research published in December in the Economic & Political WEEKLY.

The analysis of government mortality data concluded that 100,000 women are burned to death each year and another 125,000 die from violent injuries rarely reported as murder or suicide.

“The plight of adult women in India is as serious a problem as that of young girls who were never born or die prematurely in childhood,” wrote the authors Siwian Anderson of the University of British Columbia and Debrai Ray of New York University. They called for further study of their hypothesis that the excess adult deaths are “associated with the custom of dowry which has been linked to bride-burning and dowry-death if promised dowry payments are not forthcoming.”

Women have made enormous strides in India in recent decades in education and workplace opportunities but still live in a patriarchal society that has traditionally defined them by their relationships as daughters and wives and mothers. The visible successes of Indian women among the uncertainties and opportunities of the global economy makes them a target of the vast numbers of young men, many unemployed or underemployed, who outnumber young women of marriageable age.

“The modern woman is seen to be on a collision course with our age-old traditions, part sex goddess part super achiever, loathed and desired in equal measure,” Sagarika Ghose wrote in a column in The Hindustan Times. “A profound fear and a deep, almost pathological, hatred of the woman who aspires to be anything more than mother and wife is justified on the grounds of tradition.”

Amartya Sen, an economist who won the Nobel Prize in 1998 and pioneered the concept of missing women, notes that the acceptance of elite women in top positions of political power since India became an independent nation in 1947 does not have a trickle down effect. In his book of essays The Argumentative Indian, Sen places improved gender equality high on his list of what India needs to maximize opportunities in the global economy. If the nation needs a model on how to do better, he and other respected voices say look no further than the teachings and example of Mahatma Gandhi.

I started 2013 in the footsteps of Gandhi, literally; his last steps are marked on the path where he was assassinated in 1948 for his advocacy for equality for all of humanity. Beside those steps, beside the Gandhi museum, the Women’s Initiative for Peace in South Asia hosted an interfaith prayer meeting for “Peace Dignity Equality Justice & Respect for Women and Girls” on New Year’s Day. A picture of Gandhi towered over the open-air auditorium as I sat down with a book of his writings I’d just purchased in the museum shop. 

“Of all the evils for which man has made himself responsible, none is so degrading, so shocking or so brutal as his abuse of the better half of humanity to me, the female sex, not the weaker sex,” Gandhi wrote.

I flipped the book over and printed on the back binding was praise of Gandhi’s vision of greatness by Rabindranath Tagore, the Nobel Laureate poet whose words I happily bumped into all across India.

No poet has to be convinced that language can be a compass.

*****

Upcoming this week: Indian writers on respect and reform, a poets walk with a Delhi arts curator and a review of an extensive new anthology of Indian English poetry and interview with the editor.

When Ed Koch met Kenneth Koch [by David Lehman]

Shortly after taking office as Mayor of New York in 1978, Ed Koch met the poet Kenneth Koch. By this time everyone had learned how to pronounce Hizzoner's name: Koch, like "catch" but with an o sound instead of the a. Kenneth pronounced his last name like the soft drink (so that, years later, I could title a Newsweek piece about Kenneth's poetry "Back to Classic Koch). When the two tall gentlemen met, Kenneth said, "Because of you, everyone is calling me Kotch," to which the mayor, wiothout losing a beat, replied, "And because of you, everyone has been calling me Coke." -- DL

R.I.P Ed Koch 1924-2013

Athens Graffiti, January 2013 [by Our Man on the Ground]

<<<
We were only in Athens the second week of January, after three weeks in western Crete, and while the differences were noticeable, so were the similarities in the ways people we know or heard about are enduring and talking about year five of the financial crisis. Crete is self sufficient and semiagrarian: even men and women who live in the cities are closely tied to the villages where their families are from and where they still get their oranges, lemons, olive oil, and raki—in some cases from farms they still own and work. Nevertheless, one couple with a son who's an officer in the military, married with one child, told us his pay had been cut by a third. And Chania's youngest alderman, a high school tech teacher, isn't completely sure he'll have a teaching job next year. Athens, of course, is another big city, some four million, I think, with all political extremities well represented, the left by anarchists and Communists, the right by the protofascist anti immigrant Golden Dawn. While it's tempting to think that a country as cosmopolitan as Greece could never be taken in by an ultra right wing, it's worth remembering that the Communists lost the civil war that tore Greece apart after the Allies drove out the Nazis in 1944. People here are too nervous, said an actress in Athens who plans to leave as soon as she can, first to France and then possibly to the U.S. The take home monthly pay of our cab driver to the airport, who studied in Germany, had been reduced to 400 euros from 500. She has no faith in the current government or, worse, in any government that could replace it. By the way, nonstop flights to Athens from New York and back resume March 15. Whether they stop mid October as they did last year, for the first time in recent memory, probably depends on whether the Greek economic situation improves in the interim. That seems unlikely.
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A Few of My Favorite 2012 Things (by Cara Benson)

(Ed note:  We're almost at the point where it's too late to say "Happy New Year" but I couldn't resist asking Cara Benson for permission to post her favorite memories of 2012, which originally appeared on facebook. I was struck by her generosity and her warmth toward her community.  Thanks, Cara! -- sdh)


*Working with Anne Waldman and her feminist epic IOVIS for a Belladonna* polyvocal/group reading from the text at Poets House in NYC featuring Anne, Ambrose Bye, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Ana Božičević, Amy King, Julie Patton, and Stacy Szymaszek. A modern production? Someone mentioned denial of catharsis, but I was sweating gleefully.

*The UCSC conference on Emergent Communities curated by Andrea Quaid and Juliana Leslie. A thinking/talking through of becomingness by individuals together. Starring language. Supporting cast: somatics.

*Wrapping yellow Occupy tape around the Christopher Columbus statue at Columbus Circle in NYC with Merrill Garbus of tUnE-yArDs after seeing the show. I took my partner Jon Lathrop for his birthday. We had excellent Turkish food at a restaurant on 57th St. where our waitress read our futures through the coffee grounds in our cups. It’s bearing out, sorta.

*Exploring poetry, politics, place, higher education, and capital with Marcella Durand and Pattie McCarthy at Kelly Writers House. Curated by Genji Amino. Attendees included the amazing Emily Abendroth, Asher Lewis, Hassen, Sarah Dowling, and Jessica Lowenthal, so you know the conversations were pertinent and fraught. On one of the Philly visits, the also amazing CA Conrad housed me and recorded a reading for his

*Jupiter 88 ongoing online archive of contemporary poetry. I love the generous nature of CA’s attention to poetry community and the ACTUAL POETRY! It’s all there! Live! Performed and recorded live! Not to be believed!

*Buying Hannah Weiner’s Open House at Flying Object in Massachusetts at a Laura Goldstein reading.

*Decoding deciphering absorbing Frances Richard’s The Phonemes. (More on this to come in the form of a review.)

*Hearing of a fellow poet’s ms. acceptance! Julie Joosten’s deft work will be published by BookThug in 2013. I know the working title, but as it’s working, I won’t share it here.

*Ditto to hearing that Tim Trace Peterson via Fran Blau has more kari edwards work to release into the world. Can. Not. Wait.

*Seeing the unfolding line-up of faculty/workshops/happenings for Naropa Summer Writing Program for 2013. Very excited to be included - Jen Karmin and I co-teaching Language As Communal Action, but everything offered looks enticing.

*Observing the poetry/writing cluster/hubs geo-happening. Flying Object again and Karen Randall’s press is nearby in Western Massachusetts. The scene in Toronto that is BookThug, the recently relocated Hoa Nguyen, the Avant-Garden series by Liz Howard and Shannon Maguire. Casa Libre en la Solana in Tucson, run by tc tolbert and Kristen Nelson. Michigan with Gina Myers, JodiAnn Stevenson and Jeremy Benson only recently left. Of course Philly is thriving. NY/Bklyn, Bay Area, Chicago. LA with Amina Cain’s Empty Globe reading series and the Les Figues orbit. Here in my area, though I’m so often traveling when a lot of the good stuff happens, we’ve got the Yes! Reading series curated by James Belflower and Matt Klane (founders in emeritus: Douglas Rothschild and Colie Collen). Fence is here, and the SUNY program attracts poets like Anna Elena Eyre. Dan Wilcox does a Third Thursday, and Dan Nestor runs Frequency North. Of course a tremendous amount of important-to-me community is online; I need to continue actively to stoke and value the physical/actual. Even the terra temporal by design, such as the UCSC cluster of us (see also Wendy S. Walters’ work). Along these lines, I cannot enough mention the Belladonna* Collaborative.

  Cara Benson is the author of two books of poetry: (made) (BookThug, 2010) and Protean Parade (Black Radish Books, 2012). Her chapbook "Quantum Chaos and Poems: A Manifest(o)ation" won the bpNichol Prize. Benson is an active committee member of the PEN Prison Writing Program and teaches poetry in a NY State Prison. Her poem "BANKING" was chosen from the Boston Review by Kevin Young for the 2011 Best American Poetry.

 

Chuck Hagel and the Hegelian Dialectic [by David Lehman]

The controversy surrounding Chuck Hagel's proposed appointment as US Secretary of Defense has not been well understood. The Vietnam veteran and former Nebraska senator is a Republican, and yet the Republican establishment has raised doubts about his fitness to serve as chief of the nation's military industrial monopoly. Why? Is it because, initially in favor of the Iraq war in 2003, he realized belatedly that he had been duped and he turned dovish? It is true that his judgment has been questioned; he opposed the "surge" that seems to have been the most successful US military maneuver in the sourly disappointing years following "shock and awe," a phrase that you don't hear much anymore. In other quarters Hagel has caused concern because of his alleged softness on Iran and on violent Islamist outfits such as Hamas and Hezbollah. All this has been duly reported in the newspapers (or the crude electronic successors of that twentieth-century instrument of information control). But what the pundits and the pols have omitted, perhaps disingenuously, is the secret reason for the opposition to the senate's ratification of Obama's choice to head the defense department.

What has been completely overlooked is the relation between Chuck Hagel's philosophy and that of his distinguished ancestor, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the most systematic of the post-Kantian idealists in nineteenth-century Germany. In brief, Senator Hagel may be said to subscribe with such zeal to the Hegelian dialectic that the usual Washington big mouths have had to take crash courses in the work of that famously forbidding philosopher of history. Hagel's link to Hegel is such that the Magritte painting "Hegel's Vacation," in which a glass of water stand precariously atop an open umbrella, would apply to either of them. Sources close to the candidate are leaking the rumor that he plans to be sworn in with his hand on The Phenomonology of Spirit rather than the traditional Bible.

A leader of the opposition spoke to me on condition of anonymity. "The simple truth is that a vote for Chuck Hagel is an endorsement of Hegelianism, and that particular ism -- though less scary than the isms of Marx, Lenin, and the Commune -- arouses suspicion if only by association. Everyone knows that Hegel said history repeats itself and Marx revised Hegel to say that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. This line is quoted so frequently, and almost always as an admonition, that suspicion attaches to Hegel for being hoodwinked by either Marx or by History."  More particularly, Hegel's belief that “Truth is found neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis which reconciles the two” arouses worry among hard-liners because it acknowledges compromise as inevitable. Hegel also has the habit of speaking in different languages, which may simply be one way of disguising his penchant for repeating himself. "Nada de grandioso se faz no mundo sem paixão." "Rien de grand dans le monde ne s'est accomplis sans passion."

Hegel has been attacked for his oracular pronouncements on history. For example, "We learn from history that we do not learn from history,” or the same sentiment re-stated,  “What experience and history teaches us is that people and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.” On the other hand, Hagel could acquit himself by stating unequivocally that the study of history and civics should be mandatory in a democracy.

It could be argued that Hagel's nomination is itself an illustration of the Hegelian dialectic. It is the thesis to which the senate's opposition is the antithesis. And if Hegel taught us anything, it is that mind or spirit realizes itself in the temporary truces in the perpetual conflicts between, say, nature and freedom. Partisans of Hegel point to his ringing endorsement of freedom on the one hand and the sublime on the other at a commencement speech given a few years ago at the US Military Academy. “It is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained," he told the cadets at West Point. "The individual who has not staked his or her life may, no doubt, be recognized as a Person; but he or she has not attained the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness.”

My own sense of Hegel is complicated by the fact that every time I think I understand him, I realize that I don't understand him. This, too, the great philosopher anticipated. “Only one man ever understood me, and he didn't understand me,” he liked to say, and somehow it didn't sound like a German smart-ass showing off in an Oxford pub. He was a great bullshit artist in an age that prized that activity. Although the era of the World Historical Individual is gone, Hegel's analysis was subtler than people realize. He liked pointing out that world-conquerors were seldom happy. When they succeeded there was nothing left for them to do -- they were "like empty hulls from the kernel." Hegel shrugged. "Alexander died young, Caesar was murdered, and Napoleon was exiled to St. Helena." It was always amusing to see Hegel shrug.

I suggest that the question be put directly to Senator Hagel, who has never been a shilly-shallying sort. Do you believe that "history in general is the development of Spirit in Time, as Nature is the development of the Idea in Space”? And what, sir, did you mean when you said that “America is the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World's History shall reveal itself”? -- DL

Year in Review: Thursday Comic by Nin Andrews: William Carlos Williams

The Best American Poetry 2012 Draws a Crowd in California [by Stephanie Brown]

 

The crowd turns out for the Best American Poetry 2012 Launch at the Mill Valley, CA public library (photo by Mill Valley public library).

About 260 people reserved seats for The Best American Poetry 2012 West Coast Launch at the Mill Valley Public Library on November 8. 260 people! That's quite a turnout for a mid-week poetry reading. To accommodate the crowd, City Librarian Anji Brenner and library staff removed the periodical shelves and emptied the room to set up chairs facing a fireplace that was set into a white stucco Spanish-revival wall.  A fire roared. The ceilings soared. The big windows framed the pine-y outdoors of beautiful Marin County. 

 

Kay Ryan, left, at the West Coast Launch (photo by Mill Valley Public Library)

The 260 came to see and hear eight poets who were picked by guest editor Mark Doty for inclusion in this year’s volume of the annual anthology. The lineup of readers included heavy-hitters such as Rae Armantrout, Brenda Hillman, Jane Hirschfield, and Kay Ryan along with Dean Rader and Amy Glynn Greacen, Bay Area poets with followings of their own.  Bruce Bond, originally from southern California like me, came in from Texas and I from Orange County. These particular poets have a way with a crowd— they're not just confident public speakers but the kind that can hold an audience in thrall. It was therefore a night of entertainment and emotional connection from beginning to end. The audience listened and responded with laughter, that “mmmm” sound of understanding, spontaneous applause, and later, kind words of thanks. I was in awe to be in such company, but found everyone to be so welcoming and warm that I did not feel nervous or out-of-place among these rock stars of the poetry world.

The format of the evening was to have each poet introduce the next by responding to his or her poem in the anthology instead of by reciting awards and bona fides. These responses were personal, respectful, and insightful.  Kay Ryan revealed her admiration for what Rae Armantrout leaves out of a poem as much as for what she keeps in; Brenda Hillman singled out the spiritual notes in Jane Hirshfield’s work. Dean Rader noted that he finds himself placed between Robert Pinsky and Kay Ryan in the anthology, and I think we all understood his trepidation introducing the great Kay Ryan, though he did so with humor and aplomb. This format for introductions, unique in my experience, was Anji Brenner's idea. It worked beautifully and I'd like to see other coordinators try it.

The library reference desk had been turned into a bar. I am a librarian and was on something of a busman’s holiday, so I made conversation with one of the bartending staff members when I sighted the Haines Criss-Cross Directory behind her. Do we still get requests for Haines Criss Cross? she asked. "No," I said but our segue into talk about the conversion of reference books to electronic format was interrupted by the clamor of the entire audience lining up for more wine. The wine flowed generously all night, free of charge and happily shared by the library staff. The audience stayed for over two hours, and was as engaged at the end of the night as they were at the beginning.  When Brenda Hillman asked for a show of hands, we discovered that many in the audience had traveled from San Francisco and the East Bay and from as far away as Sacramento. Driving around the Bay Area is not easy, so when people make a long drive to come to an event, it means they were committed to being there.

As a library manager as well as a poet, I contend with the changing notion of the public library (they ask: “Who needs a library in the age of Google?”). The Best American Poetry 2012 West Coach launch at the Mill Valley Public Library is an example of the public library at its best: a place for storage and retrieval of information, a place for contemplation, but also a welcoming space for cultural and community gatherings. This night in November for The Best American Poetry 2012 brought a community of readers into the public library because of poets and poetry. Not only do people read poetry, they come out in large numbers to hear it. This pleases me no end.

-- Stephanie Brown

Shadow Patrol: Thoughts on the NYC Sandy Blackout, Plus a Poem by Elaine Equi [by Jerome Sala]

Like millions of other people in the NYC area,  Elaine (my wife) and I spent most of last week in the cold dark, without light or heat. We did have cold running water, and the toilets flushed, so we were luckier than many.

We live downtown, and by  Wednesday we learned that there were pockets of power up by 26th and 6th. So, to get out of the apartment, we'd trek up each evening about twenty blocks in the dark to find a restaurant.

The journey from our apartment to the land of light was other-worldly. It brought to mind images I've encountered over the years about the afterlife. You might think the pitch black streets would be empty, but they were loaded with other pilgrims scrounging around like us for food, warmth and whatever household supplies they were lucky enough to discover in the rare store that was open. 

Many of us carried flashlights in our hands to guide our way; some wore them on their foreheads like miners. Others strolled without light at all, as if they had night vision.

Walking these streets made you feel like you were part of an army of shadows -- one of the shades of the classical underworld. And the military reference is more than just an analogy. As we strolled back and forth to our destination, we'd periodically notice the men and women of the National Guard walking along side us in camouflage attire, gently laughing and joking into the night.

Continue reading over at Jerome's blog espresso bongo . . .

Just Another Day at the Neighborhood Polling Place [by Stacey Harwood]

The wait to vote was only about an hour this morning, not too bad on a brisk sunny day.  My polling place is an NYU building a few blocks away and as I approached I could see that the line extended from inside the building into the street. I was prepared to settle in for a long wait but after about five minutes a helpful young man called for voters in my district. “I can get you in right away,” he said, something I would expect to hear while waiting to enter a hot new club, not a polling place.  

I soon learned that what he meant by “get you in” was that he could get me into the building, where the line for my district was still quite long, though shorter than the lines for other districts. We all stood patiently in a crowded hallway as the lines crept along.  From time to time we cleared a path down the middle to allow an elderly man or woman to come through on the way to or from voting.  A blind elderly man made his way confidently.  When he passed, my neighbor, a tall striking young woman whom I assumed was either a model or an aspiring actress (there are many in these parts), looked at me and shook her head. “Amazing,” she said. “When do you ever see such determination?”

From there we started a conversation that made the remaining wait go by too quickly. We traded Sandy stories and agreed that it was strange to be in Manhattan, where things seemed to have returned to normal when just a short distance away so many were suffering. 

She was originally from Albania, and has lived in the US for fifteen years. (I had detected a slight accent.) “This is home,” she said. She’s in her first of four years of graduate studies at the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis, nearby on 13th Street.  When she completes her studies, which require 750 supervised hours of treating patients plus classroom work and her own thrice-weekly sessions with a psychoanalyst, an experience she described as life-changing, she hopes to treat children and young adult victims of sexual abuse. I asked if before she began her studies she considered herself to be a happy well-adjusted person. She seized upon “happy.”  “What does it mean to be happy?" she wondered.  "Isn’t that the big question?”  Well, yes.  We decided to use the word “satisfied” instead but after batting that about came up with “leading a well-integrated life with intimate relationships and satisfying work,” a much less satisfying phrase than the simple “happy.”  I never did get her answer, but she seemed like a happy person to me, at least during the time we were together. 

As I approached the sign-in desk, I was disappointed to learn that we were using paper ballots that we would fill out in a “privacy booth” and scan on site to be delivered to  . . . where?  The Board of Elections?  I had always looked forward to the private moments in the voting both, concealed from view by the grey curtain, when I moved the little red nob to indicate my vote and the check mark appeared in the box next to my candidate.  And, having made my selections, I liked to believe that when I shifted the big lever from left to right and the curtain swung open, I was connected with millions of  Americans who were doing the same thing.

Word To World [ by Sholeh Wolpé ]

My mother and her sisters were born in Ishqabad, “the city of love,” in Turkmenistan. She was educated in Cypress as a nurse, speaking both Turkish and Greek. She then went to Tehran, met my father and married him. This is how I came to be born in Iran. And what a country! A place where in every home you almost always find a copy of poems of the revered Iranian poet, Hafez; a country where even the illiterate can recite a line or two from the poems of Rumi, Hafez, Saʿdī or any other classic poet to make his or her point in a conversation. It’s a country where an amusing children’s game—and I played this as a twelve-year-old with much gusto—is moshaereh, a game of poetry and memory where using poems learned by heart, one child recites a line of a poem, and the other child using the last letter of the poem must recite another poem that begins with that letter. For example:

 Child one:  A seasoned traveler on the road to love’s door

                    Your blood leaves its mark on every step  [i]

                                                                            (H..E. Sayeh)

 Child two:  Prophets of words! You pen-wielding idols.

                    If your message was the Truth, why did it crash

                    like waves at the shores of degradation?  [ii]

                                                                              (Nader Naderpour)

    Child one:  Not for the sake of forests or for the sea

                     but for a leaf, for a drop brighter than your eyes.  [iii]

                                                                               (Ahmad Shamlou)

  … and so on.  There was so much poetry stored in our little heads that we sometimes kept the game going for as long as a half hour. 

 For Iranians, as for people living in many parts of the world, poets occupy a lofty position and to them poetry is like bread, air, and colors. It is in this way that poets wield power, and at the same time set trembling the hearts of politicians, dictators, and even religious leaders. Indeed from Damascus, to Beijing to Tehran in every revolution or uprising, poets are among the first to be jailed. But the voice of the poet cannot be arrested, and that makes them dangerous to oppressive regimes such as Iran and China.

 As an Iranian-American poet, I have always been a great advocate of literature in translation. As a poet who writes in English and saddles two languages and cultures, I have made it my duty to spend a portion of my time translating the poetry of Iranian poets. Not having access to the literature of a culture, movies like Argo and Not Without My Daughter, and news reports from sources such as Fox network bring to focus a whole nation through a single, and sometimes distorted, lens. I consider this kind of one-sided distorted presentation of any story dangerous, unfair, and in opposition to the peaceful direction towards which most human beings in this world wish to move.

 In a country like Iran, a great number of laws are passed just so that injustice can be carried out legally. In many cases poets bearing witness to injustices and atrocities are guardians against lies and half-truths perpetrated by the lawmakers and fanatic religious leaders. These poets are harassed, jailed, or forced to flee. It is imperative that their poems are translated into other languages, and that it is done so in a caring manner:  as living poems translated by poets who are fluent in both languages and cultures.  Carolyn Forché in her groundbreaking anthology Against Forgetting writes, “One of the things that I believe happens when poets bear witness to historical events is that everyone they tell also becomes responsible for what they have heard and what they now know.”[iv]  In my opinion, taking on this responsibility is crucial to our progress towards a harmonious and tolerant world society because to know the poetry of a nation means a closer look at its soul. Kenyan novelist and essayist, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, who has always urged dialogue between nations through culture writes:

 Culture is a product of a people’s history. But it also reflects that history and embodies a whole set of values by which a people view themselves and their place in time and space. Cultural contact can therefore play a great part in bringing about mutual understanding between peoples of different nations. Instead of armaments and nuclear weapons, instead of imposing one’s own version of democracy on tiny islands and continents through Rapid or Low Deployment Forces, let people of the world dialogue together through culture.[v]

 Presently, only 3 to 5 percent of books published in the U.S. are translations. Yet, literature in translation is a tool necessary in building bridges that connect people of different cultures and religious persuasions.  When there is a bridge, there will be foot traffic; and when we cross and engage with other cultures, through poetry, novels, and plays, we are that much closer to understanding them. That, I believe as a poet and a woman, is a good solid stride towards peace.

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[i] Art of Stepping Through Time, by H.E. Sayeh, translated by Mojdeh Marashi and Chad Sweeney. From The Forbidden: Poems From Iran and Its Exiles, edited by Sholeh Wolpé, Michigan State University Press, 2012.

 

[ii] A Homily on Leaving by Nader Naderpour, translated by Sholeh Wolpé and Sahba Shayani. From The Forbidden: Poems From Iran and Its Exiles, edited by Sholeh Wolpé, Michigan State University Press, 2012.

 

[iii] In This Dead-End Road by Ahmad Shamlou, translated by Sholeh Wolpé. From The Forbidden: Poems From Iran and Its Exiles, edited by Sholeh Wolpé, Michigan State University Press, 2012.

 

[iv] Against Forgetting, edited by Carolyn Forché, W.W. Norton & Company 1993.

 

[v]  Moving the Center: The Struggle For Cultural Freedoms, by Ngugi Wa Thiong’o; Heinmann Portsmouth, NH; EAEP, Nairobi; and James Curry Oxford, 1993.