NEIL
LEADBEATER Reviews
Cross Worlds: Transcultural Poetics – An Anthology edited by Anne Waldman and Laura Wright
(Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, 2014)
This generous selection
from Coffee House Press contains some 35 essays on a wide range of topics drawn
from artist-poets, novelists, hybrid writers, playwrights, philosophers and
translators “speaking” from many different languages, geographies and cultural
standpoints. Contributors include Tom Pickard, Cid Corman, Nina Zivančević, the late Akilah Oliver, Lorenzo Thomas, Linh
Dinh, Cecilia Vicuña, C. S. Giscombe and Jen
Hofer. The word “essay” is used in the broadest sense since some of the
contributions come in the form of conversations with audience participation, never-before-collected
archival material and Socratic raps from the luminaries of the Beat Generation.
Essentially they are offerings from the now legendary annual summer sessions at
Naropa University’s program in poetics where writers gather from all over the
world to teach, challenge presumptions, especially in relation to the status
quo, advise on courses of action, read and take part in panel discussions. The
contributions date from 1975 up until 2012.
The
book is edited by Anne Waldman and Laura E. Wright. Waldman is a poet,
professor, performer, editor and cultural activist. She founded the Jack
Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University with Allen Ginsberg
and Diane di Prima in 1974 and, among many other things, has helped to direct
Naropa’s study abroad program in Indonesia. Wright has been a poet, librarian,
volunteer firefighter, musician and occasional adjunct faculty member at Naropa
University and, for a number of years, she curated the left Hand Reading Series
in Boulder. Biographies of all the contributors are included in the book.
The
size, range and subject matter of this book is of such magnitude that any
review has to be selective in its approach. The essays cover everything from
the ethics of poetry, Arabic poetics, hip-hop culture and the female shamanic
tradition to how to be an Eastern European poet in America today. For me, personally,
it has offered up many riches and a good deal of informed commentary on the
subject of social commitment and political engagement, writing and translation.
My aim is to share some of these insights with you, the reader, in the
paragraphs that follow.
Essays
abound on the need for the poet to be actively involved and engaged in the
world. History bears witness to the long tradition of the poet as cultural activist:
a tradition that can be traced back as far as Ovid. In more recent times, luminaries
such as Osip Mandelstam, Rainer Maria Lorca, Wole Soyinka, Nâzim
Hikmet, Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo and many
others all come to mind. Joanne Kyger, the late Akilah Oliver and Anne Waldman
all offer interesting perspectives on political engagement through protest in
the modern world today. Kyger longs to go beyond the media hype and the
soundbites that permeate the news so that we can focus on the real issues in
depth. Oliver focuses on the work of graffiti artists and how they find a means
of expression and the extent to which their work impacts on the public
imagination and the state. Behind every
piece of art there is a story waiting to be told. Waldman asks “Is there
anyone under that burkha?” She
cites images of women from Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Israel mourning the
death of their matyr sons. Should they shake off the burkha or rest comfortably
inside it? She ends her essay with these
words of hope and affirmation: When you
have two choices, always choose the third. Maybe that’s the direction for your
work. Always choose the third song.
Andrei Codrescu takes a hard look at the way in which it is possible to
infiltrate the mass media and manipulate it to political ends in his
penetrating insight into the chilling events which he witnessed at first hand
in Romania when he returned there to do some investigative journalism just two
days after the execution of the Ceauşescus in 1989.
From the standpoint of the theatre,
Judith Manila and Hanon Reznikov give a fascinating account of the The Living
Theatre (which started in 1951 in New York and is now something of a world-wide
phenomenon). It was founded on the principles of total theatre and commitment,
derived essentially from Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht, and has sought over
the years to actively encourage audience participation –often on stage – but
also in any public arena including such places as Times Square in an
improvisatory or partially scripted way as a means of, for example, public
protest in the face of intractable government policy. The idea is to activate
the audience by creating theatrical situations in which they can act, speak,
perform, change the ideas that have been presented, refute them, overthrow them
or bring new ideas into being. Manila says that art is there to strengthen our hope that we can live the way we really want to live. Engagement
vitalises and transforms writing in the theatre.
Lorenzo Thomas explores the relationship between literature and identity
and American society as we understand it today. He highlights the distinctions
that have been made between Asian American culture, Latino culture and African
American culture and how these distinctions can sometimes divide us rather than
unite us. Is inclusion, he asks, another way of reaching toward homogenization,
or is it another way of disguising the conflicts of interest groups?
Anne Waldman and Laura Wright ask Jerome Rothenberg what the role of
poetry is today. In his response, Rothenberg considers how the role has changed
over the past decade and points out that careerism or something very like it
has been encouraged by MFA programs, competitive awards and prizes.
In
Nothing I Withhold: A Socratic Rap, the American poet Cid Corman gives
good advice to would-be editors of poetry magazines. He also offers some sound
advice to poets: “What I do, I write
a poem and I put it away for a year, at least. Because there is what I call a
“halo effect.” When you write something it always seems a little better than it
really is…So I put it away until I don’t recognize the poem when I come back to
it. I have to find out if it moves me, if it does anything for me, if it works,
simply. If it doesn’t, and I find nothing there, I throw it away. Otherwise I
may find something there that I may be able to work with, that stimulates me
either to improve it, or to take off and do a different poem altogether, or
that rare, lucky thing when it turns out I did O.K. and I’m satisfied with what
I find.”
Several essays expound on the art of translation and its attendant difficulties.
Dennis Tedlock ponders the problems inherent in translating Mayan languages and
other Mesoamerican languages from the distant past. Sawako Nakayasu looks at
self-translation – the poet as translator of his or her own work into another
language and the way the improvisatory nature of interpretation and performance
can lead to subtle changes in meaning bringing about yet another kind of
translation.
A panel on prose translation offers up words of wisdom on the
difficulties of translation from one culture to another. Robert Frost’s dictum
that something is lost in translation is pitted against Pierre Menard’s view
that all translations are great and beautiful when unfaithful. In practice,
Nina Zivančević –one of the
panelists- believes that the truth lies somewhere in between, between the beauty of the untranslateable work of art and the beauty of a worked-upon or altered translation. She goes on to say that the problem
is a big one because you always feel in a
way you are deceiving the original; you know in a way you are creating an
independent work of art. She also points out that every poet has his own poetry’s poetry that cannot be translated.
Throughout the book, definitions are proffered on the meanings of such terms as ethics, poetics and po/ethics. Waldman defines this last term as referring to a poetics and an ethic accountability of
owning the word, of standing by the word; a sense of how one might live as a
writer, the role one might play as a citizen of a literary, as well as a
social, community. in a way, this definition, with its emphasis on
belonging to a social community, sums up the ethos of this book: the need for
writers to be actively engaged within their communities, questioning and
challenging the big issues that affect all of us in the world today.
This is the fourth published account of material from the summer
sessions at Naropa University and the strength and depth of the discussion is
as vital and engaging as ever.
*****
Neil
Leadbeater is an author, essayist,
poet and critic living in Edinburgh, Scotland. His short stories, articles and
poems have been published widely in anthologies and journals both at home and
abroad. His most recent books are Librettos
for the Black Madonna (White Adder Press, Scotland, 2011); The Worcester Fragments (Original Plus
Press, England, 2013); The Loveliest Vein
of Our Lives (Poetry Space, England, 2014),
The Fragility of Moths (Bibliotheca
Universalis, Romania, 2014) and Sleeve
Notes (Bibliotheca Universalis, Romania, 2016).
No comments:
Post a Comment