One of my favorite professors in grad school (Part I) was Lynda Koolish. She introduced me to a great deal of poetry that actually kind of matters to me, though I don’t love poetry just for the sake of loving poetry. She, like many scholars, made a case for a Audre Lorde’s position of rhetoric and poetry being oppositional. Lorde’s poem, “Power,” begins with this:
The difference between poetry and rhetoric
is being
ready to kill
yourself
instead of your children.
Now, I don’t care for Lorde’s poetry, to say the least, but this is useful to me because it calls into question what rhetoric, poetry, and language do. For Lorde, poetry is compassion and rhetoric is untruth. Now, I have always objected to this from both sides, but let’s hold onto it for a bit and move on.
In political poetry, there is the common model we see in “spoken word” or “slam” poetry, wherein the poet tells you what’s wrong with the world and how much they hate the bad things and the bad people. Then, there is the other political poetry which is more subtle and tells you what’s tender and human about bad things and bad people. You will notice that Lorde’s poem does the first more than the second, yet Lorde gets credit for being compassionate. In fact, she has no compassion for the pig police officer who did the despicable deed, though she does have compassion for the slain child and the raped 85 year-old white woman, but here’s the rub: there’s no challenge in having compassion for victims, and that is why I think Lorde has produced rhetoric here, instead of poetry, by her own definitions.
Compare that with Rita Dove’s “Parsley” (audio below). Dove approaches a despicable, murderous character with compassion, showing him to be human and thus acknowledging (confronting) her and our own capacity for “evil.” It doesn’t hurt that Dove’s poem is infinitely better in poetics. She has great images that reappear and take on multiple meanings and significances, unlike Lorde’s poem, which comes in the hip style we see so much today.
1-vol-4-27-parsley-rita-dove3
What is the point? Lorde is divisive in it’s treating of the perpetrator, even as she seeks to unite in compassion for victims. Dove succeeds in producing a compassionate and unifying text even as it criticizes the general. The result is a much more significant piece, a poem the blogosphere and the participants of public discourse could learn a thing or two from.
Lorde’s police officer is the other. He’s not like us except that he can make us do bad things because he’s so bad.
Dove’s general is just like us. He’s vulnerable. We can understand why he did such bad things, and that might help us learn to live in our world a little better.
Here’s another shot:
Lorde is to Dove as rhetoric is to dialogue. Get it?
I made this post as a note to myself, something to draw on in the future when I am putting together something more substantial. I’m sorry you read it.
P.S. Lorde’s use of “childish” is very weak. Also, “a greek chorus will be singing in ¾ time” is weak. She tries to turn hip phrases, but hip phrases and puns do not make poetry.
hey. do you think that in the future you can post something that the rest of us can draw on later. (selfish jerk)
geez, i should be working. but it’s been a while since i’ve remembered to stop by this site and read. because i haven’t had the opportunity to closely follow this blog, this passage lacks context for me other than a conversation we had over the phone while i was shopping about otherness and the polarization of political discourse.
so, because of that, i’m not sure what your post is trying to communicate. are you saying that patient translation of difference, compassionate negotiation of otherness, allows for a more productive or just relation of exchange? i’m not sure if i dispute that. but then i wonder, also, if you’re then advocating or reinforcing a sort of meritocratic fiction of the ‘marketplace of ideas’ that seem to mask a relation of force, a disparity of power and real operations that uphold and privilege certain discourses over others? are there circumstances where we can justly occupy a position of intransigence? is grace or compassion the only poetic challenge we can face against despicable acts of “power”? is consensus the only way to “move forward”?
A response to the comments of “Bryan.”
If productive and/or just exchange is the object, I would think that “patient translation of difference” is preferable. “Translation” is an apt term here because my position is not that all differences can be easily reduced to their common denominator and solved. My purpose is not to advocate a simplified solution to politics as we know it: “Oh, Israel and Gaza! Can’t you see that you’re just being divisive? Israel, can’t you see those rocket attacks you hate so much are just cries out for attention? Hamas just wants to love you! And Gaza, you know how Israel has been killing hundreds of your citizens every week in response to near-harmless rocket attacks? Well, that’s just Israel’s way of hugging! You’re really just the same!”
Ahem. I think in the privileged west, we tend to be dismissive and arrogant when we need not be. Perhaps this is common either because that is the American character, or it is the American character because this is how we practice communication.
Do I privilege certain discourses over others? Yes, though my point is not to do so but to privilege certain discourse styles over others. If one can present a reasonable persona, one is better prepared to engage effectively, whatever the issue, whatever the goal is. A reasonable persona in this case is open and fair, not dismissive and arrogant.
“Are there circumstances where we can justly occupy a position of intransigence?”
Certainly. Not all things can be resolved simply, but presenting one’s position reasonably, without dismissiveness or arrogance, will create a healthier exchange, which will open (or fail to close) the possibility of resolution.
“Is grace or compassion the only poetic challenge we can face against despicable acts of ‘power’?”
The use of the word “poetic” here seems multiplicitous. Taken literally, I do not believe poetry can combat power. Perhaps once it could have, but I simply don’t feel that it is relevant, anymore. Figuratively, if poetry is the opposite of rhetoric, as Lorde suggests, then public discourse itself has the potential to be acts of poetry (compassionate, yet not divisive, as with Dove) instead of acts of power. Here, I think there is a chance I am contradicting myself, and there is no better time to contradict oneself than when discussing poetry because it’s a fine transition to quoting Whitman from “Song of Myself” (http://www.bartleby.com/142/14.html):
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
Of course, this is a can of worms. One could read this as intransigence – “I will not budge, despite my lack of reason.” This would reveal an irrational position, a divisive one in a sense. One could also read it as the opposite, as the rough synthesis of two positions (the statement, the contradiction, and the acknowledgment of the disunity between the two) Never mind.
“Is consensus the only way to ‘move forward’?”
I can’t imagine what “move forward” means, but I think striving for a reasonable dialogue is different from striving for consensus. Consensus is nice, but it is a dream. Perhaps Democracy is its contemporary (though not perpetual) waking-life equivalent, at least in the context to which the blog is addressed – political discourse.
One last note: the name of this blog is “Graystate” – this is chosen deliberately because it’s not blue, not red, and not purple. Gray is not a blending of two opposites, but a third position that comes from observing and opposing the two. In the metaphor, I am not suggesting that I have the solution, the synthesis of competing theses/anitheses, nor am I suggesting that the matter is simply black and white (which is good because “white state” or “black state” or “black and white states” would have been comically racially suggestive. This would certainly have increased my hits from white supremacists – haha. They’re dumb – note the intransigence in that statement, and in fact the divisiveness and arrogance, which is apt for my supposed audience, though it would certainly be a turn-off to some readers who might happen by). At best, this blog asks, what happens when blue and red make gray? I don’t know, and there is not a definite aim here. I don’t think I dream of “a better democracy” or a replacement of democracy, and this meager blog certainly wouldn’t have any impact on either of those goals. It must be, then, just an exercise, a passing of time by chewing on culture, perhaps with some vague hope that someday I’ll think of something useful to do with it (note the multiplicitous/ambiguous pronoun use).
Touch base.
[...] January 13, 2009 by graystate In response to Bryan’s comment on my post from December 29th. [...]