Today I am on nuclear power. Der Spiegel says the Japanese disaster could be the end of the nuclear era, of our thinking that nuclear power is safe. My native Finland has four active nuclear reactors, with a fifth scheduled to go live in a couple of years; these are highly productive energetically speaking, and have a good safety record, but I was a little kid in 1986 when Chernobyl exploded next door in the USSR. The effects were wide and long-term. Can we live safely near nuclear power? Clearly we cannot. Is it "clean"? It is highly efficient and has relatively little immediate consequence, but as Bobby pointed out in the conversation we had yesterday, humans haven't been able to build anything that would still remain intact during the half-life decay of our nuclear waste. We can't build anything that would outlive the consequence of our "clean" energy. And if we continue having epic nuke disasters every twenty-five years, well.So in this world, what should we be writing? In the 90s, Carolyn Forche's poetry of witness called for a "social" space within which to grapple with our disastrous world. Take Nick Flynn's new book, The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands. Is this considered poetry of witness? I find the differentiation between personal, political, and social in Forche's description to be the troubling bit. Flynn's book pulls together references to news headlines, lines from Galway Kinnell and Krishna and Arcade Fire songs and Abu Ghraib testimonials to create a timely portrait that is not apolitical, not apersonal, and not asocial. I guess also the other thing I feel weird about is the passivity of the word "witness," as if it could only take information in and then testify. I think the writer should have a powerful opinion because the writer has a powerful conscience.
So I'm sorry this blog entry is so half-baked, but I guess what I'm asking is how can we write about the space of the world we inhabit, without separating ourselves or the poem from it, without taking a stand after-the-fact and testifying? We live here and work here. What aren't we doing?
4 comments:
i've been thinking about this so much, particularly ideas of being witnesses. buy where does the proactive part come in? listening to pj harvey's new record is making my brain think overtime about war, suffering. there is a really excellent piece on this week's this american life about us soldiers and what their lives are/become. as for poems...i don't know yet. how can i know? xox
I guess the first step is thinking about it. Witnessing is simultaneously passive and active -- like, it's a really active role actually but not in the space of the action itself. Do you know what I mean?
The PJ Harvey album is another good reference point for this discussion. I'd love to see more thoughts on the subject as you mull it over, and will check out the piece you mentioned.
the thoughts you present here are timely and important. i think every writer makes a choice really, to define the political and then to decide how it will inform her work. I don't think my work is political, but then people tell me what they see in it and I realize that it is. that is because I am aware. I think witnessing is passive, but awareness is active thought. Actively engaging our minds and allowing the political to inform our daily lives. that has to show up in our poems. its in there.
a lot of the ecopoets are doing things like this. Brenda Hillman, for example. I see a lot of women taking this on. perhaps I'm biased because I read more female-identified poets. i think this is an important discussion too though and I think some answers lie in not just the witnessing or the awareness, but what we do when we are not writing.
Laura, thanks for your comment. It heartens me when people take their world seriously. In graduate school, I saw a lot of people sift desperately through the minutiae of their personal miseries for some material. It made me think "hey, the material is not all about you." There was no reflection/refraction of/to the world. The message was "go smaller." I think we should go much, much bigger.
Also, I don't think there's anything wrong with having a bias to what you read. You read what you like. As long as you don't let it dictate ALL of what you read. This is slightly off topic but I'm reading the New Yorker piece on Anna Faris and misogyny in the screenwriting industry, and how men aren't writing meaty roles for women because they just don't understand them or care to. The assertion there is that women write for women. I don't think it's true for what you're saying. It just made me think of it.
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