Poetry and History 2016
In the metaphysical philosophy of Martin Heidegger, poiesis is "the essential agency of
primary truth." Seeking to rescue diverse human experiences from
godlessness, Nathan A. Scott, Jr. noted in The
Poetry of Civic Virtue (1976)
that
Indeed, Heidegger
considers any truly fundamental act of reflection to be an affair of
"poetizing," for it is the poet (der
Dichter) who is, in his view, far more than the thinker (der Denker), a proficient in the art of
"paying heed" to the things of earth.
And it is just the capacity for this kind of attentiveness that he
regards as the great casualty of those attitudes toward the world engendered by
a culture so heavily dominated as our own by the general outlook of scientific
positivism. For, in such a climate, the
sovereign passion controlling all transactions with reality is that of turning
everything to practical account: the furniture of the world is approached
predatorily, with an intention to manipulate it and convert it to use. (5)
In contemporary American culture, the sovereign passion is
irrational, regressive and hate-driven, and how Heidegger positioned
"paying heed" must be revised.
Poets and historians and readers
of poetry and history (narrative
reconstitution of verifiable facts) are also thinkers. We have no necessary and sufficient evidence
to prove that one camp or the other is more proficient in attending to the
glories and horrors of everyday life.
The point is nailed by Philip C.
Kolin's Emmett Till in Different States:
Poems (Chicago: Third World Press, 2015), and the coffin is nailed tightly
should we compare Kolin's extraordinary book with The Lynching of Emmett Till: A Documentary Narrative
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002), edited by Christopher
Metress, or with Devery S. Anderson's Emmett
Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015). Navigating back and forth between history and
poetry can't prevent the assaults of sovereign passion, but it can strengthen
us, perhaps, as readers to conduct defensive combat in 2016.
Kolin's poems on the iconic tragedy of Emmett Till urge us
to remember that acts of reflection can have the properties of a prism; they
can split enlightenment into component parts. Unless I am blindly misreading Kolin, he is encouraging us to discover the
pragmatic linking of history and poetry.
Emmett Till in Different
States follows in the tradition of Gwendolyn Books, Julius E. Thompson,
Langston Hughes, Richard Davidson, Audre Lorde, Bob Dylan, Wanda Coleman, and
Sam Cornish ---a few of many American
poets who remembered 1955, who used art and their aesthetics to create a
socially responsible prism or literature of everyday life to buttress cultural
memory. Kolin takes us into the territory of abrasive remembering, the space
where language gives birth to images of an iconic moment in America's violent
past. These morph into kindred images of
a terrible present. Kolin's poems
deliver us into the dread of an existential future. They demand that we abandon delusion, embrace
common sense to eschew spinformation, and make our peace with the unending
obligation of reckoning. A
life-promoting account of the furniture in our minds is a virtue not a vice.
As a title, Emmett
Till in Different States refers at once to Till's life and death in
Illinois and Mississippi and to the aesthetic states advocated by poetry and
history in concert with one another. We
have options in how to read Kolin's book, but two of them intrigue me. If one reads the forty-nine poems printed
between pages 7 and 72 and delays reading paratextual matter, one may hear a
long black song performed in many voices, a particular sonic remembering. On the other hand, if one reads the book from
cover to cover, one dwells on the architectonics of remembering, the structural
machinery of engaging history through the poetic prism of a different
consciousness. In this case, one moves
through the frames of Till's extended chronology (1902-2016), a prologue
extracted verbatim from parts of The Lynching
of Emmett Till: A Documentary Narrative, the multiple voices of the poems,
the notes on the poems, and Kolin's concise biographical sketch. These two states of experience are relevant
for cultural literacy and cultural memory, for the "paying of heed"
that the velocity of 2016 tries to deny us. Through the efferent and aesthetic
reading so nicely theorized in Louise M. Rosenblatt's The Read The Text The Poem:
The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work (Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1978), our minds can give rise to a third state of
awareness: the reconstituting in the dreadful contexts of 2016 of what Faedra
Chatard Carpenter calls "the well circulated, yet never exhausted story of
Emmett Till" and of how, as Devery S. Anderson aptly reminds us, the Till
case "remains an open wound not only in the South, but throughout
America." Like the poems in Frank X. Walker's Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting
of Medgar Evers (Athens: University
of Georgia Press, 2013), the poems in Emmett
Till in Different States invites us to stare all the ghosts of America in
the eye. It is significant that in the
final poem Kolin uses his Roman Catholic poetic sensibility to canonize Till on the feast of St. Moses the
Ethiopian, thus putting the domestic terrorism of lynching into the purview of
eternal verities and sending us back via
poiesis to the continent of mankind's
origins.
For 2016, I urge
those who say they "love" poetry to explore the territory of Kolin's
poetry and be born again in a baptism of blood.
We can perhaps manifest our
"love" for poetry and the sanctity of human life and have better transactions with
reality by walking in the minefields of American and world histories.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
January 1, 2016
No comments:
Post a Comment