Cyber Book Burning
In Canada, there is a shared secret truth that is believed by most Canadian poets and the poetry public (of what there is) and it has been believed ever since the first canadian poet put quill to birchbark. And that secret is "poetry does not matter". And even though, we have hundreds, if not thousands, of poetry books published each year, and though every university has at least one course dedicated to its study, and though we have the League of Canadian poets with almost a thousand members and though we have federal and provincial government agencies giving out grants for the writing of it and for its dissemination, we know that poetry does not matter.
True enough the idea of poetry is important to most cultures, even Canada. By the idea I mean lip service and as the misuse of it as a description of an action that has nothing really to do with poetry, poets nor poems. Donald Hall (14th poet laureate of The United States) in an essay in Harper’s magazine in 1989 wrote “Some days, when you read the newspaper, it seems clear that the United States (can substitute Canada) is a country devoted to poetry. You can delude yourself reading the sports pages. After finding two references to "poetry in motion," apropos of figure skating and the Kentucky Derby, you read that a shortstop is the poet of his position and that sailboats raced under blue skies that were sheer poetry."
None of these things really have much to do with poetry, although I know that in the hands of a poet these topics would become poetry in the true sense of the word. But in the hands of people who neither know or care about poetry it is anything but poetry.
I must admit that over the years I, too, had bought into the belief that poetry in our contemporary world does not matter. After all, I live in a country that honours and richly rewards toothless young men who can slap-shoot frozen rubber disks at each other over 90 mph. A.M. Klein (a Canadian poet-1909-1972) wrote in his seminal poem (for poets) “Portrait of the Poet as Landscape”, “We are sure only that from our real society/he has disappeared, he simply does not count,. . ./in a shouting mob, somebody’s sigh.”. This applies not only to poets but poetry as well.
Well, recently I had an experience that taught me otherwise. For a number of years now Elias Letelier, poet, publisher, friend, activist, big-mouth, and shit disturber, had been telling me how much he liked a poem of mine “Jews” from my book Surviving Words. He has spent many hours dissecting it from literary, structural, thematic, and political points of view. At first I was flattered that he liked the poem so much, then a bit embarrassed by how effusive he was. But he told me that he didn’t care how I felt, that was not his concern. The poem and its importance was what mattered to him. The fact that it was a Jew who wrote the poem, made it important but that it was his friend who wrote it, not a whit. As far as he was concerned it might have been written by a Jew from Tunga-Tunga; it would not have made a difference to him. The poem was what mattered to him.
Along with the rest of the poems of Surviving Words, he translated “Jews” into Castellan and published the book as Palabras Sobrevivientes under his publishing house imprint of Poetas.com.
Now, you have to know that Elias comes from a tradition and culture where poetry did matter. He comes from the country of Gabrielle Mistral and Pablo Neruda. He comes from the time of resistance against Pinochet when poems could land you in jail and get you tortured. He was one of the few poets who actually went underground and resisted. He spent time on the run with people to whom words of poets mattered and expected him to bear witness and give hope and celebrate the struggle for freedom. To them poems were part of their arsenal, their cultural ammunition. Elias did his part but on his terms. His poems are first and foremost poems. He believed that it was by being true to the spirit and craft of poetry that the poet did his duty. For this he was imprisoned, tortured and exiled. He ended up here in Montreal, Canada. The story of how we met and subsequent friendship is for another time and place.
Over the years, as the world wide web has became our world, the thing that has become important to him is the mastery of this technology, not only as an ignorant user of a glorified typewriter but as the programmer of it, and the understanding of the implications of its political and poetical potential. He has also constantly updated his knowledge in this field to promote the causes of freedom, politically and poetically.
As well, Elias has set up websites for a number of poets, including me, and gave me enough tools to run it myself. He believes in educating the artists to use the net effectively because it is here that the future struggle for freedom, the exchange of ideas and poetry will unfold and we should have weapons as good as the opposition. We shouldn’t be rock throwing Luddites facing laser blasting Darth Vaders.
The war in the Middle East was escalating and Elias thought that the poem “Jews” would be an important poem to republish but this time on the web. Along with it he put a photo of the two of us wearing yarmulkes/skull caps at a Passover evening.
By the end of the day, he had received over a hundred e-mails accusing me of being “a Fascist, a Stalinist, a Hitleriast, an anti-Semite, Anti-Israel and anti-Arab. To be all these contradictory things at the same time surprised me. What surprised me more was the volume of the response to a poem. I was amazed that a poem (I was proud that it was mine) could generate such a passionate reaction.
But then Elias’ website was hacked and crashed. I could not believe that someone or some organization was that threatened by the poem. I now saw first hand how a poem could be a lethal weapon and this weapon seemed to have hit a vital nerve. On both sides. This poem was critical of Israel only in the sense that I said that it had become a country, like any other, a powerful one, in The Middle East and therefore it must be held accountable as such and not as a “persecuted” people. The poem suggests that the parameters of the debate have to change. This not the most popular position to hold if you are Jew but I wasn’t interested in popularity. I gladly welcomed debate but what I did not welcome and was frightened by was the hacking and crashing.
What is worrisome to me is not the crashing of the site but what it symbolizes. What we have here is cyber book burning! This kind of action should get our attention. And not just poets’ We all need to respond whenever and wherever we see it. Freedom of speech is essential for political and poetic reasons. We can not allow cyber brown shirts to burn and pillage what they disagree with.. Therefore I am posting the poem as a statement to those who burn what they don’t agree with. “You can’t keep a good poem down”.
And I will keep this barbaric action close to my heart as a constant reminder that poetry has a role and does matter.
JEWS
They are The Chosen:
the ones who signed The Covenant,
delivered The Word
and constantly argue with God.
They are The Wanderers
who honour learning
because it is holy
and easy to pack at a prophet's notice.
They are Christ-killers,
bloodthirsty and dirty,
which excuses everything done to them
for millennia by the millions.
They are Shylocks,
international conspirators,
accountants, bankers, wholesalers,
jewing the world for their pound of flesh.
But now we know them better.
They are also cruel, ignorant
dealers in death; not so special
no more chosen than others.
They, too, use terror and torture
and have their own secret police
to guard with deadly weapons
their camps of barbed wire fences.
They are like everyone else
with their own land to protect,
prefer the Golan Heights for their big guns sites
to the moral high ground and their ancient rites.
They have lost the victim’s edge,
have become what they always were:
a people who follow visions and orders
and must be held accountable for that.
This essay comes from Harper's magazine, 1989. Much of it appears in the Introduction to Best American Poetry 1989. Reprinted here from Death to the Death of Poetry by Donald Hall, published by University of Michigan Press. Copyright © 1994 by Donald Hall.
