Poly Ticks ( A lot of Bloodsuckers): Exposure

I admire that Totems includes the canon with the largely ignored crafters. I admire that a class on poets of color uses a text for which all colors of poet are included. It is also interesting that even the works of canonized writers were shaved to accommodate proper topics. Did anyone else know Robert Frost wrote political poetry? I remember snowy woods, but not semi-revolutions, from high school literature classes.

The poems in the political section are many-formed responses to injustice. (I found it humorous that Wikipedia notes, "Langston Hughes wrote a poem advertising the hotel.") The tone is often incredulous. I get a vision of the poet in a nightmare: walking around trying to speak, trying to shake people out of a trance, with the people looking through him or her, not hearing, not seeing, as if the poet isn't there. There is a feeling in the poems of something obvious being said, though at the same time startling. Startling because it hasn't been said, or because it needs to be said at all.

I am sickened at Cecil Brown's account of the Black professor facing blatant and blanketing racism. Two years after I graduated from high school, elitism, hate, prejudice was still ugly, alive, kicking. And then I think, wait, we have plenty of examples in 2009. This exposure is a critical purpose of poetry. Tell it, so we can't forget. Tell it on the page, so we can't change the channel. CNN's dad and his uncle too, they want us to forget. This is the dire importance of Reed's quest, and others intent on leveling this mantel.

These poets scream out, Have you heard about this??? Does this seem right to you??? June Jordan says the Pope should worry about his own sex life, or expose it to discussion. It's hard to argue with that, if we start from an agreement of equality, from a common-sense notion and a bible sound-bite: Do unto others..., if we banish the idea of one man (any man, pope, banker, president) mystified into absolute authority.

Will Heford makes a beautiful commentary in "That God Made." Using form hearkening of oral cultures (It reminds me of pantoume. Maybe it has a specific name, maybe he modified it.), the repetition is reminiscent of fire and song, of a time now ancient and a people who cared for the Earth. The poem is an almost quiet admonition to the powers; the form serves as a disarming disguise (The natives aint s'posed to know how to read!). Still the content is contemporary. The poem exposes the money circle and its merciless siphon of resources; and Religion as Brainwasher, the branch that ensures the golden wheel continues to turn. The final line sounds like a gong, speaking for a subjugated mass no longer silent but up on the scam.

I must say though, and I don't know if this is one of the canon or not, one of color or not, but I am in love with "1933." I love a poem that sends me to research, but that is not all. The mode of address struck me. It is written as if to a particular person, one on the wrong side, rather than the masses who must be made aware of injustice being perpetrated on them. The poem is haunting; the poet feels a betrayal. So much I don't know, and so much meaning, I'm sure, is lost, but what I have found reinforces my initial impression.

Kenneth Fearing is Jewish. He was known as "the Depression Poet," born in Illinois, raised by a crazy aunt who only ate spinach and cornflakes. This poem isn't only about events in 1933, the poet was writing in 1933. Hilter became Chancellor of Germany in 1933. I imagine that is "the gentleman, with automatic precision." But who is the "you."? The "you" accused of this monumental betrayal? Because of the specifics of the poem, it seems as if this "you" is a singular person, a particular man. The only man I found that might fit is Norman Angell, British winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1933. He wrote a book called "The Great Illusion" that established "common" thought on the obsolete nature of war due to the intertwined economies of the countries of Europe. Interestingly he uses Germany to illustrate this point.

"When Germany annexed Alsatia, no individual German secured a single mark’s worth of Alsatian property as the spoils of war. Conquest in the modern world is a process of multiplying by x, and then obtaining the original figure by dividing by x. For a modern nation to add to its territory no more adds to the wealth of the people of such nation than it would add to the wealth of Londoners if the City of London were to annex the county of Hertford." (The Great Illusion. New York and London: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1913)

Unfortunately for Angell and tens of millions of people, money is not the only reason one tries to take over the world.

Fearing does use economic terms throughout the poem. "But the stocks were stolen. The pearls of the actress, stolen / again. The bonds embezzled." Also, "no default, credit restored...steel five points up." Though he names U.S. companies, and at times seems to be speaking of happenings in the States, he does mention the London cenotaph preceding lines describing what I take to mean the denial of the holocaust, or the debate among governments regarding its acknowledgment. Normal Angell was also a member of Parliament. The London cenotaph is (from the Greek for empty tomb) a monument erected in honor of a person or group of persons whose remains are elsewhere. All of these pieces seem to fit, though there are others that don't.

Near the end of the poem, it seems the directive has switched, as if he is speaking to a system (possibly Capitalism - he was a member of the Communist Party for a little while following events of 1933) instead of a person. Perhaps by the time he gets to the end, all are culpable, all carry blame.

The poem is artful, and timeless, while marking a moment in time. One that requires the re-discovery of history for following generations. And unless the work is done, unless the echoing questions that reading the poem produces, unless these are answered, the reader - no matter the time - may well be included in the reference of the final line. Masterful.