Gwen is the editrix of _JEJUNE: america eats its young_, one of the three or four hardcopy little magazines in the language worthy of subscription (send $15 to Vincent Farnsworth, PO Box 85, 110 01 Praha 1, Czech Republic now!).

She can be reached at aifsprag@mbox.vol.cz.











Invitation Only:
the Czech Republic Celebrates the Velvet Revolution

Whenever visitors to the Prague ask me why November 17, the acknowledged anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, has yet to be declared a national holiday, I am always at a loss for words. Perhaps this more recent association cannot yet unseat the original designation of the 17th as International Student Day -- at any rate, my Czech friends can't explain it either, not that it seems to bother them. Three years ago I would have chalked it up to a sort of "memorial fatigue," the kind one could easily imagine settling in on a Central European country at the close of the twentieth century. After all, street names and state holidays, not to mention states, have changed here more than once over the decades. But these days I'd say it's because there isn't much here to celebrate.

Celebrate no -- but demonstrate over, yes. The last two weeks have seen three separate demonstrations, the largest of which, a trade union event numbering 60,000, drew protesters from all over the country to the capital. That same weekend a Sudanese student was knifed to death by a Czech skinhead, occasioning a Monday afternoon official demonstration at the University of Economics which was attended by politicians and students alike. The politicians were later accused of grandstanding, and the emptiness of their calm remarks found its parallel in a different anti-racism demonstration on the Old Town Square the following Saturday. Despite the initial pleas of a dissident of the older generation for a peaceful protest, the tv cameras were soon trained on the youthful, energetic and ever-so-slightly rowdy punks climbing atop the Hus monument to shout "Skinheads aren't human!" -- words which caused the ordinary folks assembled with their candles to shake their heads in disappointment and drift slowly away. As a fellow observer said to me later, the idea that a black body, now bereft of dignity and life, was lying slashed up on a slab somewhere was quickly overshadowed at both gatherings -- in the one case by platitudes, in the other by adolescent attention-seeking.

On the heels of all this civic activity I attempted attending two events which supposedly concerned the public this November 17: the re-opening of Café Slavia, and a discussion of the meaning of the Velvet Revolution by a panel of Czech and Slovak dissidents. Slavia, pre-89 headquarters to many a Czech intellectual, had been one of the first places to display a video of the November 17 police attack in their streetside windows. Since then it has been closed for more than five years as the result of a lawsuit, a pathetic symbol of the market economy's deleterious effects here. Predictably, the gala re-opening was an invitation-only affair. TV coverage later that evening showed celebrities whooping it up, minus their ailing President -- but not the disappointed crowds on the sidewalk outside, nor the surly private security guards at the door.

Slavia's elitism was mirrored in the next event on my list. A newly opened bookstore had advertised the appearance of eight well-known Czech and Slovak dissidents (all male). But was there any reason not to provide enough seating for the predictably large turnout -- or, barring that, some kind of amplification so that everyone could hear the discussion? The tired faces of those standing beyond the bar - a student here, a retiree there -- showed the weary resignation of those who wait for a train in which they will never take a seat, disconcertingly juxtaposed with the beautifully designed bookjackets of the hardback translations of Popper, Arendt and Camus on the shelves above them.

Maybe there was some sort of livelier celebration somewhere else in the country, outside of Prague -- but if so, it didn't make the news. To be sure, the usual haunts for the anonymous to demonstrate their remembrance still exist -- namely the monuments on Wenceslas Square and Národní tøída and the candles and flowers left there. This November 17, however, I was struck by the particularly female face of many of the events of the preceding weeks, and by how starkly that face was missing from the quasi-official celebrations of this November 17 non-holiday. Older women form the unacknowledged backbone of many a peaceful demonstration in Prague. They were with the trade unionists, they were wedged in among the students last Monday at the University, and they were out of range of the cameras last Saturday, trying to join a demonstration against racism. And they were definitely left out on the sidewalk at the glitzy Slavia celebration.

In the disappointed faces of these Czech grandmothers I cannot help but see a grim future, that of selling onions and flowers out of a streetside bucket -- or worse, scavenging trash cans like their counterparts further east, and west. Walking home through the autumnal fog towards an evening of Czech tv channels featuring British and American sitcoms, I could see the flash of fireworks somewhere in the distance. The accompanying sound was that of a considerably dampened enthusiasm.


November 17, 1997
Prague











Frankly, I Feel Skeptical: What's the Use of the Poetry Renaissance?
by Gwendolyn Albert

According to such purveyors of truth in fashion as the New York Times, there has been an upsurge in interest in poetry in the US. Conferences and writing workshops abound, despite the demise of the NEA. Bill Moyers interviewed some twenty-odd poets for his "Language of Life" program, and Bob Holman's "United States of Poetry " was a star-studded event. Slams are thriving and every divergent social group seems to be raising its voice in anthologies addressing specific issues and audiences. To judge by the applause meter, poets are certainly gaining their 15 minutes of fame as the millenium draws to a close.

And what, with this precious time, have they been saying?

Perhaps it is to be expected that the poetry which rises to the level of mass consumption (as in Moyers' PBS special) is not directly threatening to or critical of the political order in which we find ourselves. In other words, writers of book-length poetic indictments of the role of the US in global politics (such as Peter Dale Scott) and poets who make the point briefly (such as Tom Clark) are probably not surprised at having been left out of fashion's wave. Unfortunately, the self-censorship that gradually took hold of most of journalism during the Reagan '80's seems to have seeped its way into poetry as well. A connection between the past and current events, a sense of responsibility for the actions of the government which claims to represent us while wreaking havoc abroad or at home -- what we might call a civic awareness -- is missing from the poetry most widely available at the end of the '90's. What we do find is a kind of split: either a focus on the political world outside the US (the very distant), or a focus on the personal stories of individual poets (the very close), accompanied by an extolling of poetry as a self-help method.

Poetry is certainly an appropriate tool for a person to use in developing a voice with which to express the inner life of the soul. It would be ridiculous to hold, for example, Frank O'Hara's or Jim Carroll's poetry in contempt for its lack of explicitly 'civic' commentary. A degree of self-involvement is to be expected. But the more or less open secret of How Things Run (i.e., to what do we in the US owe our dominant position in the world economy and our affluence) is shied away from by poet after poet to a degree that reflects the mass denial of the society at large. It is not just a willful ignorance that concerns me. It is the threat to American democracy inherent in the present order.

Strangely enough, it seems hard to find people willing to engage in a direct discussion of the US's global role and its effects on US democracy even among those who work for social justice. I will focus on the example of one well-known activist and poet, Carolyn Forché: when I interviewed Forché on the radio in Berkeley in 1994, I was surprised to find her evading questions about US politics, describing instead her recent visit to South Africa. She preferred to condemn by inference ("Johannesburg felt familiar -- like Washington, DC")and was careful to call the military industrial complex a 'tendency'.

Earlier, I had attended the Amnesty International benefit held to celebrate the release of Against Forgetting, Forché's anthology of twentieth century "poetry of witness". This wonderful event included many world-class readers. The variety of human emotion and intellectual style embodied by poets such as Czeslaw Milosz and Quincey Troupe was undercut, for me, by the stridency of the Amnesty volunteers, who at intermission reduced the poetry to a mere prologue to their single shrieking demand: give us your money or rot in hell. "AND IF YOU THINK," screamed the young woman, "that you can NOT DONATE and still consider yourself a GOOD PERSON!!!" Such self-righteousness is not only poor tactics, it also betrays the hubris which marks many a good or seemingly good cause. The history of institutionssuch as Amnesty is a human history, fraught with error despite the best of intentions. Certainly the International Red Cross made the grossest of errors in 1943 by allowing itself to be convinced that the Nazi show camp at Terezín in Czechoslovakia was humane. Similarly, as 'non-governmental' as it is, Amnesty cannot avoid playing into the web of global politics any time it focuses -- or fails to focus -- on specific events.

In 1995, Forché was introduced to the Prague Summer Writer's Conference as "the single moral voice in American poetry" -- an assessment she did not attempt to qualify. In the discussion that followed her reading of the words of Holocaust and apartheid victims, someone asked what sort of dilemmas she ran into when deciding what to include in Against Forgetting and what to omit. Perhaps misunderstanding the question, she related the story of a radio interviewer in Los Angeles who had poutingly asked why the interviewer's own work wasn't included in the anthology. When Forché asked her what experience of 'extremity' she had witnessed, the woman responded that she had spent time in jail.

For what? asked Forché.

Unpaid parking tickets, was the answer.

The audience laughed. Forché shook her head in a "what can I say?" manner and went on to the next question. But her opportunity to live up to her billing had been sadly wasted.

Presumably the mostly American and able-to-afford-a-trip-to-Prague audience wasn't laughing because they found the idea of arresting someone for unpaid parking tickets amusing. They were laughing at the interviewer's egotism and her assumption that her experience compared to the sufferings of someone such as Paul Celan (to use Forché's example). This is the slippery slope of comparative victimhood. Instead of asking more questions -- why hadn't the woman been able to pay her tickets, and how expensive were they, and how easy is it to get a ticket in L.A., and who decides, and is jail really an acceptable remedy for this 'crime', and why does everyone there need a car so badly anyway -- Forché chalked up the experience of the somewhat ridiculous poet as insignificant because someone somewhere back in space and time had suffered more.

This lack of attention to the details of an ordinary US life is very dangerous, and the reaction of Forché's audience is telling. Those who are capable of laughing at someone spending time in jail for such a paltry offense are not questioning How Things Run. They are blind to the ways in which such seemingly trivial events police our lives. While mourning the memories of those who are long since beyond concrete assistance, they do not consider the implications of exactly such trivialities as parking tickets for all of us as citizens. When it comes to the point where people are arrested directly out of their cars for letting the meter expire, they won't think much of that either, as long as they can afford to buy their own immunity.

This lack of empathy is not surprising in a populace where fear and mistrust are the daily modus vivendi. No doubt the tendency for '90's America to identify itself on national tv talk shows as suffering from all sorts of victimization has made us sick of one another as well. Once, when asked to read for some students in San Francisco, I found myself in the company of a woman who was legendary in a local writing program. This poet had made her son's suicide the sole subject of her poetry and had reportedly used the seminars as a form of group therapy, constantly breaking down in public and monopolizing the time. While listening to the poetry itself, I found myself experiencing no sympathy for this woman -- in fact, I was utterly horrified. Under the guise of catharsis, she was perpetuating her own narcissistic wallowing. By the end of her reading I was livid that she should so misuse her son's tragedy -- indeed, it seemed that she was using poetry as a means of absolving herself of responsibility for his death. As we know, equivalent emotional debasements of and by the living take place daily on tv programs that make Oprah look like journalism.

Poetry is of course merely a human creation, a cultural artifact or tool like any other. In and of itself it is neither good nor evil. This is something Bill Moyers seems unable to grasp in his interviews throughout the Language Of Life anthology. His questions ("What does your poetry do for you?") would be more acceptable if they were at least the means of eliciting some words of wisdom. But the only poet who doesn't descend into personal mythologizing -- the only one who takes a civic tone in her opportunity to address the nation -- is Adrienne Rich:

"When people encounter a program like the one you are trying to create here on a television dominated by the messages of corporate capitalism, which has a kind of contempt for humanity, which represents humanity in the most gross and belittling forms, I have to tell you frankly that I feel skeptical about how the content and the substance of what you and I are trying to do here will be affected by this general context." -- pg.356, The Language of Life.

This is counterbalanced, perhaps in the interest of the "diversity" touted on the book's back cover, by the inclusion of James Autry, the Fortune 500 businessman whose verse on the PAIN of firing someone is sure to raise a tear among those who have been fired.

Moyers tells us in his introduction that the idea for the series came to him after reading some poetry during his convalescence from surgery -- and you can bet he was not reading Bukowski. Thus, with the exception of Rich, (whose efforts to avoid the descent into confession, despite Moyers attempts to lead her in that direction, are heroic) Moyers has gravitated towards poets whose poems function as palliatives, as coping mechanisms, as therapeutic excavations of lives which ennoble their poets as heroic survivors. The image I am left with after reading Language of Life is that of a disjointed series of traumatized persons who are busy building their lives as individuals. This focus on their own personal pasts keeps them from addressing their own place in How Things Run. The best example is probably the interview with Autry, who laments the deforestation of his native Mississippi after waxing eloquent on life in business as a high-volume magazine publisher.

Beyond the much-vaunted "diversity" of American life there is a very real and very frightening social and economic disjunction. It is significant that "diversity", and not its near-synonym "variety", has become the watchword and selling point of multiculturalism. "Diversity" is the condition of being different, period. "Variety", however, is the quality of having different forms -- one substance in many incarnations. The one word highlights how unlike one another we are -- a clear indication of the chronic disunity of America's citizens.

Unified or not, the fact remains that there are people claiming to represent "US interests" who are as far from being influenced by the US citizen as the CIA and the IMF are from being affected by Amnesty International. These actors in our name on the world stage must be reined in. While other societies, principally in Europe, began the '90's by challenging the status quo -- demanding the truth about their warped histories and secret police -- the US populace seems to have been simultaneously overfed and impoverished into an incapacity for civic feeling.

The role of the artists of the written word -- poets, playwrights and philosophers -- in the European movements of civic awareness has been well-documented. US poets should be inspired by their example. Unfortunately, as things now stand, future generations of Americans will not find analyses of How Things Run available in the majority of poetry presently in print. Can our poets ever serve this civic function -- and could their words find resonance with the public? Or is poetry about to become commodified as the latest form of entertainment, reduced to meaninglessness by the remote control?

I leave you with a quote from Czeslaw Milosz:

What is poetry which does not serve
Nations or people?
A connivance with official lies,
A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment...


Praha, Czech Republic
1997










DEMOCRACY


you can't
hear yourself
think so
you give
your voice
to someone
else

the choice of
choices avoiding
it's self
evident
truths

but GOOD LUCK!
in surviving
the banks of
wasted effort

on which
this flag
can be seen
to wave

it stands for you so
you stand for it as

through the night sky
through the sea and
under the earth
people murder
in your name

just a little something you can
call your own yes

you stand for this and
you stand for that

then it's
time to
vote









make yourself uncomfortable

1)

no one can tell me
which way the wind blows

I got a little lost
the buildings kept changing colors and the
rooflines skipped
like a computer
glitch

is that burdock
or just some bushes

a crate of peaches
covered with snow

the rain it raineth
every day
listless and grey

far away

2)

for those of you
who have been wondering:

the television
will not be
revolutionized

3)

I walked through the market
the smell of food
no car no mobile phone no gun
no personal entertainment system

a bag some waiting
in line staring at
high arched
scrollwork
sky


4)

do you do this every day
do you half understand
do you try and give up
are you embarrassed
do you lose patience
does no one notice
you
learning to be
uncomfortable

5)

if there is a freight train and a passenger train
at different speeds down the same length
of track if I have a vision
of trains on a length
of track if there is a stop
signal if
the signal malfunctions
the gauge is narrow
the President
dying

that's how it is
is not an argument

that's how it was
also not

6)

what was the last thing you made
before you nothing
after you music
gardens discoveries
an empty
space
a green
an orange
the last thing
a profit a
petrochemical
what was the
last thing you made

7)

clear blue sky
of an autumn day
yellow leaves
gone brown
to the ground
regular panes
of glass and wood
water wavers
some fog
some grit
in the
air a swan
flying
under the
moon

8)

the theory
is we conspire
to disbelieve
the existence
of those
most
clearly
responsible

in diaphanous
mirrored
rooms

9)

a warehouse of peaches
covered with snow

the secret police
of every land

drive home and
shut the garage door

and eat
in anonymous
peace

10)

I don't yet know
how to do this every day
how to fix this
half understanding
and one of those words I
try and give up
I always forget
we are so embarrassed
the rain it raineth
and we lose patience
from clear blue sky
no one notices you
learning
to be
uncomfortable

eternity aside
no one
ever
tells us

which way
the window
blows open
ahead











Gwendolyn Albert wrote an essay on the lack of local or national politics in American poetry, even the poetry of progressives, and mentioned the work and appearances of Carolyn Forche, an award winning and quite prominent American progressive writer. Carolyn Forche, a subscriber to RealPoetik, fired off a response, and Ms. Albert has been kind enough to respond to the response.




An Open Letter to RealPoetik


Dear Sal and RealPoetik readers,

So. Since I sent you my musings on the supposed US poetry renaissance of the '90's, I have received quite a response. Unfortunately, my description of the experiences which led me to the question I was trying to ask -- why do American poets, by and large, tend to shy away from wearing the hat of "citizen" in their work? -- seems to have interfered significantly with that question being heard. However, the essay seems to have struck a chord despite its flaws, so I will try to clarify.

The various responses I received described the essay as "combative," as a "demand" for a "mandate" of "political content" in poetry, and as "accusatory". Unfortunately, the mistaken conclusion people are jumping to seems to be that I am advocating some sort of neo-Stalinist thought policing of America's poets. I am not.

I did not use the very general word "political" in my essay to describe what I sense is missing from the US poetry most widely on offer to the world, (to judge from the sample available to me). I did use the word "civic" -- in the sense of relating to citizenship or civil affairs, "of or relating to the general population," according to my Merriam-Webster. I am noticing that with a few exceptions (such as Adrienne Rich) the poets of this alleged renaissance do not address our common lives as citizens. I find this reflects a lack of that sense in the larger culture. It is an essay about what is missing: plain speech about the underlying premises of our civic or civil culture. Maybe it is the sense of civil culture that has gone missing. I don't know.

What I was taught in America is that politics are supposed to serve the citizenry. In a democracy, it is the responsibility of the citizen to determine the extent to which politics deviate from that aim and to use the means available to try and keep on course. I precisely do not advocate poets turning into lobbyists or propagandists. I'm talking about poets standing as citizens, looking at how the politics which is supposed to serve US ALL functions and then commenting on that function. My impression, which is all I am qualified to discuss, is that this is something very few of them choose to do. Why is that? Does it have to do with the nature of poetry itself? Of the American experience? I don't know.

My great fear is that if poetry ceases to be written from the stance of the citizen, there becomes yet one more area of human endeavour in which the idea of the "civic" or the "civil" -- that general population separate from politics and to which politics should be subservient -- dies a quiet death.

Now I would like to specifically address some of Carolyn Forche's concerns:

I am disappointed that Ms. Forche did not answer my question about her evaluation of US politics more directly in our interview, and that she told the anecdote she told in the way she told it at the Prague Summer Writing Conference. I will transcribe the interview and forward it to RealPoetik so it can speak for itself. I would only say here that I was not interested in "sound bites" and that it is precisely the "subtlety" of Forche's response that I find objectionable. I understood what was being said (and I am familiar with Chomsky's political writings), but I don't understand where all this pussyfooting around is supposed to get us.

At the time of the interview I considered it an honor to meet Forche. I have read all of her works, and I have attended her readings and talks whenever possible in the hopes of hearing her shed some light on what concerns and troubles me about life in our times. It is perhaps for this reason that, as a member of her audience, I found her behavior disappointing. I find it disappointing that the "after-reading question period is not, in [her] view, the place for sustained and serious discussion...." My essay discusses what I observe American poets saying and not saying when they have opportunities to address the public. It does not constitute a lament for my personal opportunities for "conversation" -- and my living in Prague, Oakland or Outer Mongolia is beside the point. Where I reside has no bearing on what Carolyn Forche said and how she said it.

I live in the Czech Republic because I prefer it to the US. But that's another story -- as is the "expat" "community" Ms. Forche assumes I belong to, and with which I have virtually no contact. I can assure her that the thousands of Americans here in this post-89 feeding frenzy do not constitute a community, but a collection of business owners and clientele. My "community" consists of the writers, musicians, artists and other people with whom I live and correspond, whether they are from the US or Ukraine. Due to the constant daily reminders that I am a foreigner, however fluently I go about my business, I am perhaps more aware of myself as an "American" here than when I lived in America. To see Czechs walking down the streets in "Desert Storm" tshirts is to experience that complex of myth and horrible reality that America has exported to the world -- on the receiving end. However, lately I'm beginning to realize that Americans buy their own advertising most of all. But I digress...

I did not wish to imply that Amnesty International is guilty of anything -- and I was horrified that Forche should feel she had to apologize for the stridency of the volunteers in Berkeley (as if anyone could take responsibility for the stridency in Berkeley -- heaven help us!!) My point was that non-governmental organizations are the institutions that many concerned, um, citizens hope can address these issues of social justice. But common sense alone should tell us they cannot be infallible -- and that they can only do so much. I would like to know more about the "rather unblemished" history of AI -- especially since I recently came across an article in an underground publication here which was critical of Czech Amnesty's response to the Romany situation. I would be very interested to learn from whomever makes the decisions within Amnesty about how AI goes about verifying human rights abuses, how AI decides when to release information to the public -- in short, how does such an organization deal with its increasingly powerful role in global politics? How does it approach the reality that it is often up against the work of the very most secret, best-funded and highly organized defenders of the "carceral corporate state[s]"?

Unfortunately, Forche's response goes far afield. Once again the question -- why do American poets, by and large, tend to shy away from wearing the hat of "citizen" in their work? -- is being AVOIDED. Forche closes in a near-litigious fury by accusing Salasin of publishing potentially libelous material. Let's leave him out of it: I stand by my feeling of revulsion and the right to describe it, however inadequately I may have done so -- and however unclear the connection of that experience to the others mentioned may have been.

Forche's parting shot is a "subtle" dismantling of my having been inspired to address civic matters by the example of the writers of Central and Eastern Europe. She implies that they would be opposed to what she perceives as my "demands" -- perhaps as they were opposed to the demands of socialist realism? I know an "equals sign" when I see one, subtle or not. I can only think that Forche's sense of the need to defend herself has caused her to willfully misinterpret what I was saying. So I'll say it again in a different way: in my country -- and it is my country, even if I live elsewhere -- Oliver North is free to run for the Senate. In the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel is President.

And you wonder why I don't want to come "home"?

With great respect,

Gwendolyn Albert












ode to human imperfectability

zero:

faces
leaving a movie
or a lake

the drill
of the eyes
turned inward
to the heart

staggering over
the manmade
too rough or
too slick

antennae and
film

raveled thread
of the outskirts

quite clouds
big as houses

the bus
like a jet
engine
after
the breeze


one: history

a while back
Kapitsa, Peter
refused to work
on the atom bomb

held under house
arrest in Russia

little known
are the ones
who refuse

the amoeba split
the virus spread
the tentacle grew
a polyp

the bomb
"developed"

but he
refused

who grasps
what he
refuses
knows agony


two: happiness

like a spinning set of numbers
writing all over each other
which you see in your mind's eye
even as eyes are open
to the day
they spiral away
as if
on a private screen
so that state
inserts itself
into the slipcover
over the heart
itself covered
with blood and guts
and insufficiency
that state
slips itself in
and so we resist
as we are compelled
to resist the closest
of our sensations
and focus outward
so we resist
but that state
despite the rest
of the world
keeps its campaign
suffusing us only
when mindless
and thus
awake

three: the chroniclers

bukowski and
sometimes
eileen myles
write in
lines of
one or
two
words

imperial
columns
of light
and sound

this poem
now a
major
motion
picture the

kind of
truth no
paper

ever
prints


four, the last:

oh you twentieth century you are some sort of mutation
all right

you are death to the instincts, praise to the scalpel

birds in their spinning ritual
on the sweeps of plaster garland
under satellite dishes transforming
roofs into lunar outposts

oh my twentieth century there's not a thing
we have added
but junk

compassion blooms nowhere
not even in families

I love the sound of the
no-name insects
branches with leaves
and their rustling

in winter
their stalks against
sky and then
buds

oh dear twentieth century why
when I admire rosebushes
do they all harbor suspicious
human eyes
and a fence
all seems lost, to be
redeemed by a friendly dog
and the screel
of swallows

"you talk too damn much...and it's too damn much about you"

my voice reaches
the low
altoes

so far
away
from home




Gwendolyn Albert

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