Anne Waldman: Poetry and Poetics of Adonis

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

—    Adonis

Weneed to acknowledge, as Adonis reminds us, that poetry is the place togo for the history, and the concomitant human dimension that interpretsthe history. What else can we trust but poetry?

But there aredifficulties in the vexed and freighted history of poetry, in themaster versions versus the subterranean visions, the marginalized"others" of little ink and audience. In a country that has no "use" forit, understands it — rightly — as thorny, controversial, against thegrain, imagination in many quarters is suppressed. Unlike the richtradition of a poetics going back many centuries, such as pre-IslamicPersian with a modicum of "unbroken lineage" albeit with interventions,the rebellion here (the US front) has been short-sighted — standardverse culture's left hand margin up against Projective verse, lyricaland self-consumed versus the "eschewing of the "I" of personal history(confession), or Documentation versus Appropriation. Yet Adonis remindsus of the dilemma in his own culture, in his own language — theproblems of modernity — greater battles than ours, more interestingperhaps, philosophical, going back many centuries . .. the separationof poetry and thought, or knowledge, in pre-Islamic poetry, otherpenetrating concerns.

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

Adonisspeaks of the "double siege" of the Arab poet who is dependent on thefeudal 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'vebeen 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 Americanpolitical hegemony as well. And the suffering of so many denizens onthis planet affected by the incursions, assaults, and maintenance ofhabitually 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 countrycurrently reels more desperately in its contradictions. What is therelationship to other, "other" which is not a fiction? IsEuropean-American West now the scary "other?"

In 1967 Adonis wrote:

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

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

For white mongrelsEurope is presumably the lineage until we get to Whitman — are wefeeding 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.

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

FROM: "Poetics and Modernity"

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

Iremember zones fraught with danger, out of my poetic control. Exiting aplane at gunpoint in Beirut during the Six-Day War, arrested at RockyFlats, held for hours by the altifems in San Andreas de Lorianzar inChiapas. 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?

Oneconsiders the role of poet a privileged niche in some quarters. Inothers you are nothing, you are dust, you are one of the rabble, youare one of the oppressors. You enter a safe haven or in my case youcreate an alternative safe haven (The Jack Kerouac School at NaropaUniversity, co-founded with Allen Ginsberg in 1974) — a university —you are safe in the professionalism of your calling. You are often insuch contexts to comment upon, to muse, to expound on the exigenciesof the phoneme, the hypertext, the "phatic function."When we are donewith communication, will we prolong the conversation virtually? Isn'tit crucial to question a poetics of privilege?

I found myselfdismayed to be at a conference recently at a reputable US university, aconference white, western-oriented, avant garde, post-modern in sway.And wonder why we persist in living this fiction, upholding it sotenaciously or unconsciously. I remember that this institution also hasone of the first academic Departments of Homeland Security, institutedjust two years ago. You might train in racial profiling, among otherthings.

That is why this gathering at CUNY is welcome, and aparticularly heartening occasion as we gather here tonight in "a humanuniverse" to honor and hear the poetry of a great humanitarian poetborn 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"

Whenwill a more comprehensive poetics shatter this illusory edifice ofdominance? It seems to be happening as things fall apart and thewillful totalitarian center cannot hold. Of course "field poets"(as infield notes and I'd also like to invoke Robert Duncan's "opening of thefield" here) and cultural workers know the score and are engaged incross-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 hisdocumentary project (to record stories of flood victims) in whicheveryone is invited to partake. He recommends we consider all theafflicted communities of the polis. Include the Vietnamese from EastNew Orleans — at least 12,000 made homeless and "refuge-ed" twice inthe past three decades.This was below the radar in first run newsreportage, also the Native American communities afflicted by hurricaneKatrina.

The range of poetics on this part of the continent isimmense, palpable, exciting — -whether lyrical, investigative,performative, yet what power does it have to end the war .. .When is itthe 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"

Howcan you be excited by a poem when over 55,000 Pakistanis have just losttheir lives tragically for lack of the basic human dignities ofnourishment, shelter, medical care —

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

Ifind myself thirty years after the American war in Vietnam still comingto terms with that history and know I need to include it in the writingbecause it was my generation's war. I felt extremely welcome as a poetin Vietnam. I went as a penitent, someone begging forgiveness. Therewere few citizens my own age, most of them having been destroyed inwar. A whole generation wiped out. Many youth born after the war, manymaimed and gnarled old men. And things Vietnamese, the people, thelanguage, 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 soldiersreturn with language, truly knowledgeable of another's culture? Veryfew. The Marines sit in their bubble worlds, isolated, paranoid,nervous about their armor. Not welcomed, not wanted. Go home, get outnow.

Will I visit Iraq as a penitent?

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

But the fiction goes on. Out of touch withthe time. A manipulated fiction. The plight of the Palestinians formany 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.)

Formany of us now, New York City is psychologically the safest site inAmerica. We speak of New York as its own country. It affords a shelteragainst the schadenfreude of our daily existence, the daily psy ops. Itcan also be occupied — as it was during the Republican Nationalconvention — with armed guards, surveillance helicopters, andinfiltrated by agent provocateurs. But the underground grows, persists,ancillary to the normative rules of engagement. New York is rife withhybridity — the margins where cultural differences come into play andin Homi Babha's analysis "unsettle all the stable identities that areconstructed around oppositions such as past and present, inside andoutside, inclusion or exclusion." We need to celebrate the "in between"spaces created and inhabited by hybrids. Class, race, gender are theprimary categories, let's continue to deconstruct their shackles evenas 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"

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

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

As a frightening, ongoing andfamiliar militancy — "the eternal war" — continues to play out itsstrange karmic destruction on the planet and its myriad denizens. Poetsneed to keep a fluidity with their "cultural interventions," in theirrole as interlocutors, archeologists of morning, of perpetual inquiry.Adonis in his prodigious work as poet, scholar, historian, translatorand philosopher reminds of this most forcefully in his profoundconsideration of the human.

The word for "earth" at thebeginning of the Indo-European language thousands of years ago wasDhghem. From this word simply meaning "earth" came the word "humus,"the generous handiwork of soil bacteria. And humble, human, humane. Isthere 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

TheBodhisattva-like urge toward "unworldly love" motivates poets such asAdonis — propels them to move the century forward a few inches towarddelight, toward Other, toward the Human.

Anne Waldman, Cuny Conference, November 4, 2005