Poets are historians--that was one of their jobs way back when. I'm interested in your chronicling of history in your 'squares'(!). Do you see a need for such a poetic retelling vs. the 'usual' telling of history, which hides the real slant of the narrative behind the ideal of objectivity? Is poetic truth (don't laugh) better than, equal to or less than 'objective' truth. Ed Sanders has done a poetic retelling of the 60s and seventies. Don't know if you're familiar with that? Jess
Susan
Aloha Jesse--I'm back. The question of history is upon us now, isn't it? We're intimate participants in the ugly conjunction of 9/11 and 2008 (and probably other disasters) at the moment. We're also part of the larger cycle: Spanish Flu, the diseases that killed huge numbers of Hawaiians after contact, the plague. So we're involved in both material ways and also as witnesses to analogies between then and now. To my mind, then, there's a clear link between history and poetry. As a personal example, my parents had lived through World War II, had lived in Europe during the war, and my mother especially had reams of stories about her life there. These stories were personal, but couldn't not be divorced from the "theater" of war around her. Like the story she told of a pilot she knew who told a woman that, if she didn't marry him, he wouldn't come back from his next bombing raid. She didn't and he didn't. Who's to know if he wasn't just shot down? And another pilot whose life was changed when he was on the ground and saw a child ducking for cover during a bombing raid. We are deeply affected even by lives we don't participate in: the media puts us in a blender of personal and private, celebrity and soldier. The power of celebrity stories often comes down to the ways in which they participate in larger histories: that of adoption, say, or civil rights. As do sports stories. That we often tell them so neatly seems false to me. We speak as if history makes sense, as if it works in order. My time in the Alzheimer's home with my mother taught me otherwise. Time in that place was not the time I lived in. My mother, watching a television blasting WWII movies, said she didn't remember the War. As a witness to America's festival of mass shootings (and so many other traumas), I know that I'm affected by them, even if they're highly mediated. So that tends to be what I write about. The Honest Sentence book, like the Traherne series, is steeped in the blood of people I never met, from Freddy Gray to the Charleston 9 to parishioners in a Texas church to to to. The writing is first a private response to public events, and then a public performance of the events we share (if poetry can be said to be public!). The kindest responses I've had to my work involve a fellow-feeling, especially from friends whose parents have suffered Alzheimer's. Simply reporting what happens (a kind of historical writing) becomes a felt experience that brings our subjective selves closer. In our current time, social distancing exists outside the house, but not in our poems. That might be what poems are for now. I read somewhere a plea not to write your contagion stories now, as if they would somehow be wrong or polluted by too much contemporaneity. I say, write them. Write them from within the moment they occur. That's a writerly and a spiritual practice. (Not that I've been writing many poems, of late, but even in the quiet of not-writing, we need to be using and sharing those habits of mind.) Hope this helps, Jesse. Really helps me. aloha, Susan
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