Adonis by Anne Waldman

When there is no poetry in a period of history,  there is no true human dimension.

—    Adonis

We need to acknowledge, as Adonis reminds us, that poetry is the place to go for the history, and the concomitant human dimension that interprets the history. What else can we trust but poetry?

But there are difficulties in the vexed and freighted history of poetry, in the master versions versus the subterranean visions, the marginalized "others" of little ink and audience. In a country that has no "use" for it, understands it — rightly — as thorny, controversial, against the grain, imagination in many quarters is suppressed. Unlike the rich tradition of a poetics going back many centuries, such as pre-Islamic Persian with a modicum of "unbroken lineage" albeit with interventions, the rebellion here (the US front) has been short-sighted — standard verse culture's left hand margin up against Projective verse, lyrical and self-consumed versus the "eschewing of the "I" of personal history (confession), or Documentation versus Appropriation. Yet Adonis reminds us of the dilemma in his own culture, in his own language — the problems of modernity — greater battles than ours, more interesting perhaps, philosophical, going back many centuries . .. the separation of poetry and thought, or knowledge, in pre-Islamic poetry, other penetrating concerns.

Arab thought conditioned by religion, the notion of a solid "Arabness" of language deemed a heap of words ...

Adonis speaks of the "double siege" of the Arab poet who is dependent on the feudal past but also by a contemporary "culture of dependency." The "modern" of the west being both a lure and perhaps a betrayal. "Modern" for Arab poetics, begins in the 8th century ... And so on ...

I've been considering one continuing eidolon on this home turf— the "fictions of whiteness"— this terrorizing legacy, this maintained "fiction" or activity which "syncretically" rubs up against American political hegemony as well. And the suffering of so many denizens on this planet affected by the incursions, assaults, and maintenance of habitually patterned fossil fuel lifestyle and greed of those "fictions." Suffering beings — the Others — who are anything but white. I thought I'd done -with this but it keeps coming back as this country currently reels more desperately in its contradictions. What is the relationship to other, "other" which is not a fiction? Is European-American West now the scary "other?"

In 1967 Adonis wrote:

"We no longer believe in Europe. We no longer have faith in its political system or in its philosophies ... Europe for us — backward, ignorant, impoverished people — is a corpse."

And here we have a governance that hides its prey, its corpses in Iraq, and Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and criminally neglects its own in New Orleans until the bodies are exposed for the world to see?

For white mongrels Europe is presumably the lineage until we get to Whitman — are we feeding off corpses of the canon or an old fiction? Too many corpses, everywhere ...

A corpse this, which confuses the flesh for the garment
A corpse this, reclined as a book not as ink
Corpse this, which does not live in the morphology of the body
nor its garment

FROM: "A Grave for New York"

For Adonis the opposition is not poetical, however.

Consciousness of the other assumes a realization on our part that the opposition between the Arab-Islamic East and the European-American West is not of an intellectual or poetic nature, but it political and ideological, originally a result of Western imperialism.

FROM: "Poetics and Modernity"

How does a poetics needing to engage politically extend to endangered, as well as "consociational" (note: this is term used by anthropologist Clifford Geerst to indicate the complexity of relationship within a given time frame, given that every individual is on his or her own time cycle) "other" — there — everywhere. Occasions are everywhere and one senses it will be the spiritual practices, the visualization of other, the poetry in exchange with "other" that might redeem, save us.

I remember zones fraught with danger, out of my poetic control. Exiting a plane at gunpoint in Beirut during the Six-Day War, arrested at Rocky Flats, held for hours by the altifems in San Andreas de Lorianzar in Chiapas. Or traveling by bus into Iran, with rucksack, your passport is -withheld, you are coerced to pay a fee (this is under the Shah), bribes at the Yugoslavian border and so on ...

How does poetry protect you? How does a poetics of conscience, witness, rage sustain your daily struggle?

One considers the role of poet a privileged niche in some quarters. In others you are nothing, you are dust, you are one of the rabble, you are one of the oppressors. You enter a safe haven or in my case you create an alternative safe haven (The Jack Kerouac School at Naropa University, co-founded with Allen Ginsberg in 1974) — a university — you are safe in the professionalism of your calling. You are often in such contexts to comment upon, to muse, to expound on the exigencies of the phoneme, the hypertext, the "phatic function."When we are done with communication, will we prolong the conversation virtually? Isn't it crucial to question a poetics of privilege?

I found myself dismayed to be at a conference recently at a reputable US university, a conference white, western-oriented, avant garde, post-modern in sway. And wonder why we persist in living this fiction, upholding it so tenaciously or unconsciously. I remember that this institution also has one of the first academic Departments of Homeland Security, instituted just two years ago. You might train in racial profiling, among other things.

That is why this gathering at CUNY is welcome, and a particularly heartening occasion as we gather here tonight in "a human universe" to honor and hear the poetry of a great humanitarian poet born in a so-called "rogue state" (Syria), who has examined the "constant present" his whole life.

The road and the house love me
The living and the dead
The red jug
At home
Its waters in love with it
The neighbor loves me
The field and the threshing floor
The fire
The arms that toll
Happy with the world
or unhappy
the tear my brother shed
hidden by the crop
Anemone that mortifies the blood
I have been here as long as the god of love
What would I do if I died

FROM: "Love"

When will a more comprehensive poetics shatter this illusory edifice of dominance? It seems to be happening as things fall apart and the willful totalitarian center cannot hold. Of course "field poets"(as in field notes and I'd also like to invoke Robert Duncan's "opening of the field" here) and cultural workers know the score and are engaged in cross-cultural exchanges, crucial translation projects, correspondences, even as journalistcovering war on troubled homefronts. I think of Kalamu ya Salaam, embedded griot poet of New Orleans and his documentary project (to record stories of flood victims) in which everyone is invited to partake. He recommends we consider all the afflicted communities of the polis. Include the Vietnamese from East New Orleans — at least 12,000 made homeless and "refuge-ed" twice in the past three decades.This was below the radar in first run news reportage, also the Native American communities afflicted by hurricane Katrina.

The range of poetics on this part of the continent is immense, palpable, exciting — -whether lyrical, investigative, performative, yet what power does it have to end the war .. .When is it the poet's turn?

Whitman. Let it be our turn now. I make a ladder of my gaze.
I weave
My steps into a pillow, and we shall wait. Man dies but he is more
Eternal than the grave. Let it be our turn now. I wait for the Volga
To flow between Manhattan and Queens. I wait for the
Hwang Ho to
Empty where the Hudson empties. Are you surprised? Did the
Orontes not flow into the Tiber? Let it be our turn now. I hear a
Convulsion and a roar of thunder. Wall Street and Harlem
meet—leaves
meet the thunder, dust meets the tempest. Let it be our turn now.

FROM: "A Grave for New York"

How can you be excited by a poem when over 55,000 Pakistanis have just lost their lives tragically for lack of the basic human dignities of nourishment, shelter, medical care —

The fiction of power continues — the manufacturing of consent continues just as the fiction of this unjust war in "othered" Iraq continues. People suffer and die in this fiction.

And I confess: New York, in my country the curtain and the bed,
the chair
And the head are yours. And everything is for sale: the day and the
Night, the black Stone of Mecca and the waters of the Tigris. I
Announce: in spite of this you pant, racing in Palestine, in Hanoi, in
The North and the South, in the East and the West, against people
Whose only history is fire,
And I say: ever since John the Baptist, everyone of us carries his severed
Head in a tray and awaits a second birth.

FROM: "A Grave for New York"

I find myself thirty years after the American war in Vietnam still coming to terms with that history and know I need to include it in the writing because it was my generation's war. I felt extremely welcome as a poet in Vietnam. I went as a penitent, someone begging forgiveness. There were few citizens my own age, most of them having been destroyed in war. A whole generation wiped out. Many youth born after the war, many maimed and gnarled old men. And things Vietnamese, the people, the language, the mores entered the West through war through occupation. Cross genre cuisines...

Hmong people fishing for bass in the Saw Hill Ponds in Boulder, Colorado ...

How, I wonder, will Iraq fare in this? Coming after? How many soldiers return with language, truly knowledgeable of another's culture? Very few. The Marines sit in their bubble worlds, isolated, paranoid, nervous about their armor. Not welcomed, not wanted. Go home, get out now.

Will I visit Iraq as a penitent?

A small minority — at least 7 million or so Muslim adherents — dwell here on this complicated turf (half Arab-Americans) and are taken to task to do duty for all Muslims and answer to the state having our "white" America under terrorist siege. Islam continues to be profiled as anathema to the white west. Those Americans who might know Arabic to help crack the terror "codes" — who studied language were suspect, different, They might even be gay!

But the fiction goes on. Out of touch with the time. A manipulated fiction. The plight of the Palestinians for many years not even in the discussion.

And these lines from "Unintended Worship":

His soul hates wars
Yet his body loves destruction.
He used to mutter to himself:
The sky to the stars
The earth to the stones
Where do you fit, you who resemble me
You they call human?
... indeed, history thinks with its feet and here it is, laboring
to remain
afloat from stone to stone
here it is perishing like stunned birds
hissing by locked windows
delirious and about to faint...

("I hunt among stones" the poet Charles Olson wrote.)

For many of us now, New York City is psychologically the safest site in America. We speak of New York as its own country. It affords a shelter against the schadenfreude of our daily existence, the daily psy ops. It can also be occupied — as it was during the Republican National convention — with armed guards, surveillance helicopters, and infiltrated by agent provocateurs. But the underground grows, persists, ancillary to the normative rules of engagement. New York is rife with hybridity — the margins where cultural differences come into play and in Homi Babha's analysis "unsettle all the stable identities that are constructed around oppositions such as past and present, inside and outside, inclusion or exclusion." We need to celebrate the "in between" spaces created and inhabited by hybrids. Class, race, gender are the primary categories, let's continue to deconstruct their shackles even as we inhabit the Third World War:

1. Space is measured in units of cages or walls
2. Time is measured in units of ropes or whips
3. the regime that builds the world is the one that begins by killing its brother

FROM: "A Grave for New York"

At the end of his lecture "Poetics and Modernity in An Introduction to Arab Poetics," Adonis writes most eloquently, further opening the field:

If Arabic poetic modernity is partly based on the liberation of what has been suppressed — that is, on the expression of desire — and on everything that undermines the existing repressive norms and values, and transcends them, then ideological concepts like "authenticity," "roots," "heritage," "renaissance" and "identity" take on different meanings. Traditional notions of the continuous, the coherent, the one, the complete, are replaced by the interrupted, the confused, the plural, the incomplete, implying that the words between words and things are constantly changing, that is, there is always a gap between them which saying or writing the words cannot fill. This unbridgeable gap means that the questions "What is knowledge?" "What is truth?" "What is poetry?" remain open, that knowledge is never complete and that truth is a continuing search.

As a frightening, ongoing and familiar militancy — "the eternal war" — continues to play out its strange karmic destruction on the planet and its myriad denizens. Poets need to keep a fluidity with their "cultural interventions," in their role as interlocutors, archeologists of morning, of perpetual inquiry. Adonis in his prodigious work as poet, scholar, historian, translator and philosopher reminds of this most forcefully in his profound consideration of the human.

The word for "earth" at the beginning of the Indo-European language thousands of years ago was Dhghem. From this word simply meaning "earth" came the word "humus," the generous handiwork of soil bacteria. And humble, human, humane. Is there perhaps a philological parable here?

We often quote William Carlos Williams' (at the Jack Kerouac School at Naropa University):

unworldly love that has no hope of this world and cannot change the world to its delight

The Bodhisattva-like urge toward "unworldly love" motivates poets such as Adonis — propels them to move the century forward a few inches toward delight, toward Other, toward the Human.

Anne Waldman, Cuny Conference, November 4, 2005