Toward an Anti-Capitalist Poetry (evolving pamphlet)

in memory of Sara Ann, my mother, and Rita Naomi, my little sister
for David, my beautiful father
for my wonderful sisters, Gina and Rachel
     for Kent Johnson
         for chris murray
             for all my dear, dear comrades (that means you, friend)
in gratitude and loving solidarity
all hope for a humane future

                    I have looked over the wall and seen the corpses
                    floating downriver; I know their lot shall be my lot.
                        — The Gilgamesh Epic (if one remembers correctly)

Whose God Would You Adore? Whose Kindness Would You Kill For?
Tell Me, Whose Poetics, Whose Politics Are Yours?

        Poet, play at your depth, though these be empty climes.
        New Angel, piss in our wind, while another empire declines.



Quatrain for an Imaginary Ballade Entitled Terror in the Sand

        Compa, the wells are dribbling oil;
        You have no jet and I can’t spit;
        The smirking serpent stacks coil on coil
        And we are in a world of shit.

    

To Whom it May Concern (after Adrian Mitchell)

            You put your bombers in, you put your conscience out,
            You take the human being and you twist it all about

        Hey, how do you like my GM SUV?
        No, I make my payments: it belongs to ME
                  So encase my feet in Nikes
                  And feed me lies about
                  The working class

        I look to the mirror and what do I see?
        An aging stranger who can’t possibly be me
                  So blight my face with Botox
                  And feed me lies about
                  The working class

        They never taught me anything at school
        I’m grown up now and I ain’t nobody’s fool
                  So tatoo my skin with another’s totem
                  And feed me lies about
                  The working class

        I put my earplugs in, I put my good eye out
        I go to AWP and I fake it all about
                  So buy into my book of poems
                  And feed me lies about
                  The working class

        They taught me much too much at school
        I’m wiser now and way too cool
                  So parry my eyes with pop-cult
                  And feed me lies about
                  The working class

        I keep my game face on, I keep my kind heart out
        I go to conferences and get cozy with the crowd
                  Who prison my tongue in poetry
                  And feed me lies about
                  The working class

        Encase my feet in Nikes
        Blight my face with Botox
        Tatoo my skin with another’s totem
        Buy into my book of poems
        Parry my eyes with pop-cult
        Prison my tongue in poetry
        And feed me lies about
        The working class



Blues (after Jimmy Reed and Sonny Boy Williamson II)

        Big boss man
        You never hear me when I call
        Big boss man
        You hardly listen when I fall
        Well, you ain’t so deaf
        You just plug your ears, that’s all

        Big boss man
        You get fat and down I fall
        Big boss man
        You never see anything at all
        Well, you ain’t so blind
        Someone owns your eyes, that’s all

        Well, you got me stuck here, in your rat race
        And if I kick there’s always someone waiting to take my place

        Big boss man
        You never hear me when I call
        Big boss man
        You hardly listen when I fall
        Well, you ain’t so deaf
        You just plug your ears, that’s all

        You wear a real Rolex and thousand-dollar shoes
        But why you acting so damn proud when I bought that shit for you?

        Big boss man
        Someday I’m gonna come to call
        Big boss man
        No one else will take your fall
        Well, you won’t act hard
        When I stand you ‘gainst the wall



What Would Álvaro Do?

        God damn it, all too much isn’t very much at all!
        God damn it, so much idiocy in so small a global percentage!
        God damn it, this is the USA they see!

        Let us see the USA they don’t let us see!

        To be seen: that’s what the USA is.

        End of story.

        OK, OK, here’s the Manifesto:
        Fuck!
        FUCK!
        You heard me.
        FFUUCK!



Cattle Look at Humans (CDA mildly transelated)

        They’re even more delicate than shrubs and they run
        and run from side to side, always forgetting
        something or other. We suppose they must be lacking
        who can know what essential attribute,
        although at times they do present themselves
        as noble and serious. Ah, shockingly serious,
        even sinister. Do the poor things ever listen
        to the song of the air or the secrets of hay?
        do they even notice what’s visibly common
        to each of us, in our space? They are tragic.
        Their tragedy leads them straight to cruelty.
        All expression dwells in their eyes and is lost
        to a simple lowering of lashes, to a shadow.
        There’s nothing in their fur, in their impossibly
        fragile limbs; there’s not much mountain in them
        and their dry chill and that clever way of hiding
        make it difficult for them to organize
        into a calmly evolving, necessary form.
        They possess a certain fleeting, melancholy grace
        which allows them to ignore the awkward turmoil,
        the translucent inner void that makes them seem
        so poor and bankrupt while they emit noises
        of grievous nonsense: desire, love, jealousy
        (what do we know of these?), sounds that crack
        and crash down on our fields like anguished rocks
        and burn our grass and water and after that
        it’s hard for us to ruminate our truth.



Antiphon to Slave Owners
(heavily transelated amalgamation of Cruz e Sousa’s Antífona and Escravocratas; extended hybrid sonnet in true international style with every requisite accoutrement)

        Brain-dead Surplus! usurping Personifications!
        Afloat in Capital’s Nirvana — malign
        Anarchic Void —, you featureless Emanations
        Of the most pathetic Fallacy — your Anodyne! —

        Counsel Immigration or Emigration,
        Those rusty Nails pounded into poor
        Hands and Feet while Exploitation hoar
        Past-ripens — fruit of your caitiff Desperation!

        If the Abode is Hallucination, the Nails are real:
        One day we’ll castrate you, proud, pampered Apis
        Bulls, and lead your sacred Kine and feckless Veal
                  Off to Slaughter.
        We shall answer your Bellow — the demagogic
                  Self-Defense you spiel —
                  With sad Laughter,
        For though your mighty Castles touch the Stars,
        These glorious Achievements have e’er been ours!



Notes

Images: 1), John Heartfield, self-portrait; 2), Genevieve Taggard (image from MAPS — see also); 3-4), two of the very few surviving photographs of Pernambucan guerilla fighter Maria Déa, nicknamed Maria Bonita, Lampião’s lover and comrade-in-arms; 5), guerilla fighters in the Contestado region of SE Brasil; 6), Red Clay Angel, from My Female: Appalachian Women Today (cropped); 7), José de Almada Negreiros, Àlvaro de Campos; 8), Franz Marc, Yellow Cow; 9), Tarsila do Amaral, Operários.

Antiphon to Slave Owners is extracted from a pamphlet entitled porous, nomadic, soon to be published in Crayon #5. p, n is the final part of an unfinished trilogy entitled We Bright Forms (begun in 1995), to which this pamphlet — minus the sonnet — will serve as one of several appendices.

Afterword

      But however much professional poets may be
      shocked by such carelessness, I consider it
      an advantage, since our brood of epigonous
      poets have nothing left but formal polish.
          — Marx

      This new art is incompatible with pessimism,
      with skepticism, and with all the other forms
      of spiritual collapse.
          — Trotsky

      Matter is strong and absolute.
      There’s no poetry without it.
          — Murilo Mendes

      There are a lot of traps in the world
      and we have to smash them all.
          — Ferreira Gullar


Tiradentes

We write, hoping for a massive, emancipatory, North American social movement, tirelessly at work in solidarity with other great movements around the world, in a never-ending struggle to transform human consciousness and with it, human society. We write, doing the best we can within our narrow limits which are painfully obvious to all who read this or indeed any other living North American poet or literary critic.

Nothing can be done to rid ourselves of the US Poetry Bureaucracy until we poets ourselves transform the conditions under which we are forced to create. But that doesn’t mean that poets should buy into the USPB.

Hypocrisy and lies must always be attacked and exposed wherever they occur, but not to provoke shame; not so that one can seem more “radical” or more “correct” than another!, for that game is played by sectarians, cruel pedants and the terminally self-absorbed and obtuse.

We have every right to insist upon honesty and good faith in human relations. Honesty and good faith are foundations of solidarity. Our struggles have been perverted, stolen and betrayed by smarmy place-seekers, time after time.

We oscillate between sadness and indignant mirth when criticized, however indirectly, for insisting that poets restrain themselves from destroying solidarity with furtive, sickly burlesques of the management strategies of the political elite.

If we can’t transform the world all on our own, surely we can transform ourselves. Of course, if certain people of our (purely on-line) acquaintance are so insensate that they are unable or unwilling to change, then we take tragic satisfaction in knowing that their fear of being shamed (a fear we don’t share) will force them to keep their distance from us. This is known as having a tactical advantage.

When we make the error of attacking from the right, as we sometimes do, then we owe it to ourselves to accept critique, to learn from our mistakes and to let our errors stand as object lessons to others who are with us in the struggle.

While we humbly accept the consequences of our ignorance, we’re plurally unimpressed by trappings of authority. We see Coolness for what it is and we ware the hawk like nobody’s business. Let others hide behind cutesy, leftish litcrit formulations, e-mail aliases, comment-box personae or anonymity, if they must. Γνώθι σεαυτόν, motherfuckers: we are neither afraid nor ashamed to make glaring mistakes, for we have great-hearted comrades who know us all too well and — mercifully! — call us on our shit.

Only when no one is exploited for the sake of any individual’s profit (be that profit of real import: wealth, power, domestic dominance; or a confused and distracting fiction: “cultural capital”), will human potential be free to flourish in ALL people, for the benefit of ALL people. While nobody can predict what kind of society would arise from truly humane conditions, we’re willing to bet that unlike this heartless oligarchy, such a society will be worth fighting to preserve. Meanwhile, we shall continue to shit on ALL vanguards, political, critical and artistic, until one arises that is not self-appointed, that would exclude no person of good faith and that would have the courage never to play the toady to our mortal enemies, the ruling elites and those who serve them.