​
We tore the children from their parents
    And babies nursing at the breast,
Believing cruelties make deterrents,
    Lest threats be misperceived a jest.

We stationed sentries at the border
    And gave them weaponry to shoot
At innocents—it was an order— 
    Lest poor folk be inclined to loot.

We claimed a conscience lily-white,
    Yet all the world hypocrisy
Perceived as clear as day from night,
    Ourselves blind who refused to see.

By sleight of hand invoking Jesus
    Yet we proclaimed gross murder good,
For profit sublimates, appeases
    The gods of justice understood.

Blood on our hands, yet we impugned
    The innocent and wounded, killed
Our heritage, and killing, swooned,
    So lies some subterfuge might build.

Blood on my hands, I will not say
    That I approve this course of action,
So, dying, let me bleed that way,
    A member of the losing faction.

Since I’ve had Adam Kirsch’s essay on “What Artists Can Do to Oppose Trump” opened recently, I’ve thought about different passages, with varying degrees of assent or disagreement. One paragraph—which begins with a premise I’m unsure about—leads to a quote from an American poet (the source of which I haven’t identified) that seems wise:

“The most difficult thing for any human being to accept is powerlessness. It is such a terrifying condition that we will resort to all kinds of magical thinking and conspiratorial fantasy in order to imagine we possess some kind of control over events. But in the words of the poet John Berryman, ‘We must travel in the direction of our fear.’”

Kirsch’s essay makes the point that art—and artists in their capacity as such—have no power to alter or influence the political landscape hardly at all, especially in a time as ours which pays so little heed to artists and philosophers; however that each of us holds such power in our individual and collective capacity as conscientious citizens.

How much sway any of us holds in any given situation may be hard to measure, however I am reminded from a book on negotiating which once fell into my possession, that it is always more than we think we hold. The example given by the author was of an adult spanking a child: the adult holds superior force in that situation, but the child can make the encounter so difficult and uncomfortable to the adult that he is loathe to rely on the method.

Something similar sounds in Claude McKay’s poem “If We Must Die” or in Lysistrata’s suggestion to her cronies that their men will not enjoy it (the sexual act) if they have to resort to rape.
​
Berryman speaks of something different: the internal conditions which hamstring and debilitate individual effort.

If this is not the right time to be concerned about the fate of one’s country, I don’t know when is.

Early on in this national crisis Adam Kirsch made a statement at Slate that I keep going back to. I recognized it at first, but it has continued to be a monument or reference point in these not entirely uncharted waters. He wrote:

“One of the definitions of a time of political crisis is that the public usurps the private; it becomes impossible to control what we think about, what dominates our minds and emotions.”

However in retrospect the article feels brilliant and prescient in ways I couldn’t understand at the time. (I left a comment that in retrospect—though I stand by it—feels narrow and limited: “The message art speaks to power is unchanged: You have the power to kill me, but not to define me.” Yet the fear and incredulity of some of the comments is palpable: “There is so much willful ignorance throughout this article I am embarrassed for the author” and so forth.)

Election of the so-called “conservative” movement’s current figurehead was catalyst for Kirsch’s article, published nearly a month later on December 6, 2016. He wrote: “If we are to oppose Trump and the policies and crimes that are likely to emerge from his administration, we will have to do so as citizens, not as artists.” This remains as true today as it was then, now that those predicted crimes have begun to manifest.

The full article is linked here.

It has been imputed that I “think that a thou or a forsooth or a word inversion makes [me] into [a] Keats” but nothing could be further stretched from reality. Inversions I have written about: usually they come about due to trouble clinching a rhyme, but they are not inherently bad, nor indeed the worst evil, as sometimes an elevated tone can be bolstered with (say) a Miltonic sound, while a sacrifice in meaning in favor of smooth syntax may “throw the baby out with the bathwater.” Generally it seems a defect, but on a per case basis is not always so. Pushing syntactical boundaries, in a reading society, may expand human interpretive capabilities.

Archaic word choice—as I have used “lo!” in a poem yesterday—similarly, at its best, serves as an attempt to polish some rust off of the antiquated lexicon: clearly not successful in all cases, yet, again in a reading society, allowing old vocabularies and formulations to slide into disuse but cuts contemporary readers off from their past. Reactivating them, at least in theory, contributes toward their potent rehabilitation, however unlikely. (I have never been happy with the “thou” usage, but, as a reviewer of my Sonnets once pointed out, it feels unseemly to address the Lord God of Hosts as “Hey you” even while traditional hymnals remain current.)

Spenser is much criticized for dredging up then archaic words (his rhyme schemes of choice practically necessitate it), whereas Shakespeare typically endorsed new coinage and contemporary slang. We prefer Shakespeare—as a rule (meaning not the royal “we” but normative social values)—however there is no justification to insist a writer today must avoid the Spenserian praxis. We do not all write in order to say, “I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death.” Rather, each poet may well be charged with a specific task—like a cat’s secret “name that no human research can discover” (per Eliot)—that only he himself can determine and designate. We do not all try to be Keats.

To shoot unarmed civilians
    Requires panache, aplomb,
A conscience with resilience
    Or else exceeding numb,

But yet, “Support the soldiers!
    Support the troops!” we hear,
When words are not divulgers
    Of honest meaning clear.

For, strutting proud like peacocks
    Whilst causing blood to flow
Remits dementia praecox
    In all who posture so— 

It is a tad ironic
    To see marauding thugs
Complexed Napoleonic
    As if they were on drugs.

No, do not point that rifle
    Nor let the bullets fly,
A soul is not a trifle,
    And men who kill must die.

A people countenancing
    Such murder and such crime
May call it self-defensing,
    But truth comes out in time.

For Jesus was a stranger
    And lo! you shut him out;
Was hungry, but with anger
    Did all compassion flout.

It was your own Lord Jesus
    You shot if shoot you did,
And rubbed his words in feces
    Which deed will not stay hid.

“His imaginings as to the precise relationship of this general indictment from the book to his own naked mess-tin were with suddenness and most imperatively impinged upon, as when an animal hunted, stopping in some ill-chosen covert to consider the wickedness of man, is started into fresh effort by the cry and breath of dogs dangerously and newly near.”

—David Jones, In Parenthesis

Considering the wickedness of man on this, the one hundredth anniversary of the ending of World War I. It was the day on which Wilfred Owen’s mother received news (via telegram) of her son’s passing the week before.

The American president refused to acknowledge the event due to some drizzle. Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau alluded to his lethargy and dereliction by saying, “As we sit here in the rain, thinking how uncomfortable we must be these minutes as our suits get wet, and our hair gets wet… it’s all the more fitting that we remember on that day in Dieppe the rain wasn’t rain, it was bullets.”

Wilfred Owen would be the first to proclaim that he (and they) did not fight nor die for “the old lie: dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. Still, we bestow honorifics even though the cause was unjust. Yet the American president has even devalued a nation’s highest awards, with Miriam Adelson, wife of billionaire Las Vegas casino magnate and GOP megadonor Sheldon Adelson, receiving lately the Presidential Medal of Freedom, once considered the nation’s highest civilian honor.

The hypocrisy of awards and honors is never a new theme; but with such travesties (of protocol at least) Americans will have to find new means of honoring and a new class of persons to honor (other than celebrities for their success) if the word is to retain any meaning. The corruption of honors—“worm-infested, rotten from within”—called to mind Claude McKay’s sonnet “Look Within” published in 1945 toward the close of the Second World War:
​

​
It seemed that out of battle I escaped 
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped 
Through granites which titanic wars had groined. 

Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned, 
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred. 
Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared 
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes, 
Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless. 
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,— 
By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell. 

With a thousand fears that vision's face was grained; 
Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground, 
And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan. 
‘Strange friend,’ I said, ‘here is no cause to mourn.’ 
‘None,’ said that other, ‘save the undone years, 
The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours, 
Was my life also; I went hunting wild 
After the wildest beauty in the world,
Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair, 
But mocks the steady running of the hour, 
And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here. 
For by my glee might many men have laughed, 
And of my weeping something had been left, 
Which must die now. I mean the truth untold, 
The pity of war, the pity war distilled. 
Now men will go content with what we spoiled. 
Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled. 
They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress. 
None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress. 
Courage was mine, and I had mystery; 
Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery: 
To miss the march of this retreating world 
Into vain citadels that are not walled. 
Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels, 
I would go up and wash them from sweet wells, 
Even with truths that lie too deep for taint. 
I would have poured my spirit without stint 
But not through wounds; not on the cess of war. 
Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were. 

‘I am the enemy you killed, my friend. 
I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned 
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed. 
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold. 
Let us sleep now. . . .’

—by Wilfred Owen, killed on this date one hundred years ago, almost exactly a week before the armistice which ended the First World War