T
here are many ways to say goodbye to the twentieth centuryâat least as many as there are to leave your loverâand I will not enumerate all of them in all the languages I know. You know what happened in California when too many people said, “Have a nice day”âthere was a four-year drought.
Most of us will say goodbye the way we said hello. In other words, we won't say anything because we have no choice in the matter. It is usually the parents who say hello when a baby is born, not the other way around. The parents always say a big HELLO when a baby is born, but in the case of those of us, like myself, born just after World War II, our parents said a real BIG HELLO because the war was over. But it wasn't an unambiguous HELLO, it was more like, HELLO, I HOPE YOU WON'T HAVE TO GO THROUGH THE SAME SHIT WE DID.
Well, we didn'tâwe went through different shit.
Jack Skelley, a poet and reporter from Los Angeles, asked me, how do you say goodbye to the twentieth century, and I told him: You get two hundred poets to say it for you. Laura Rosenthal and I edited an anthology called
American Poets Say Goodbye to the 20th Century
. We asked five hundred
poets to write a poem saying goodbye to it: Three hundred of them didn't want to. I don't blame them. I'm superstitious myself and I wouldn't want to say goodbye for fear that the century, in a bad mood, might say goodbye to me, before it was all over. In fact, it happened to several poets in our book: Charles Bukowski, Joe Cardarelli, Jim Gustafson, Gerald Burns, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Tom Dent. James Laughlin, who published the twentieth century, stayed out of it. He died before it was over, anyway. Others simply shied away from the whole idea because it was too portentous, maybe too pretentious. Others probably did not believe that there was such a thing as the twentieth century, an arbitrary division of time created for the convenience of historians and anthologizers.
For others yet, the twentieth century was not enough. They had bigger things in mind. Gary Snyder suggested that we call on poets to say their farewells to the millennium. The twentieth century, it seemed to him, was only a speck in the millennial tide and the millennium itself was no more than a blip to the earth, the living entity that sets its clock by rocks and stars.
Carving out a millennium from such duration seems like an exercise in futility. The only millennium we might have anthologized was the Christian one, beginning in original sin and ending in utopia. Not being terribly Christian, we were understandably queasy. But then, for the most part, the millennial perspective was willfully absent from the poetry we received, deliberately excised in fact.
And when that wasn't the case, it was dissolved in the bath of irony, a native twentieth-century substance. “god's very / possibly way outta here,” wrote Jonathan Williams. Faye Kicknosway wrote that “God is a dimwit.” And Maxine Kumin wondered, “And what terror awaits those among us / whose moral priorities are unattached / to Yahweh, Allah, Buddha, or Christ?”
It's hard to say adios when God's gone.
The truth is that the twentieth century, the American century, mattered far more to our poets than did the Christian millennium. There were few calls for redemption. On the contrary, there were many refusals of it. Tom Clark asked only (only!) what will become of the “lyric spirit,” that “seed of some miraculous plant preserved under the glacial weight of adverse times.” Robert Creeley affirmed that in his lifetime, “Yet I loved, I love.” And for Edward Field, hope attaches to “poetry, fantasy, weapons for non-fighters.”
There is no hint of the Messiah, not one welcoming sign. There are no calls for salvation. On the contrary, these questions and affirmations block, knowingly, the alibi of some Huge Other, whether evil or benign. Embarrassment escorts the end and denial greets the beginning.
The twentieth century is where we have lived our lives. Where we were compelled to embody modern differences. We were constituted to be utterly unlike the centuries that came before us. At times, this was a great hope, all that revolutionary newness in a stale world. Apollinaire and Marinetti, before the First World War, greeted the aesthetics of steel girders and engines. Mayakovski painted the bathos, beauty, and redemptive pull of his communist faith in twenty-foot letters. Such seriousness! Such faith! Likewise Marinetti, embracing a similar though more heinous faith, that of fascism. Happily, there was Mina Loy (who is not in the book) to apply that tonic and bitter irony without which the sorrow would never end: “The door was an absurd thing / Yet it was passable / They quotidienly passed through it / It was this shape / Gina and Miovani / Who they were God knows / They knew / it was important to them / This being who they were / They were themselves / corporeally transcendentally / consecutively / conjunctively and they were quite complete.”
Mina and Giovanniâwithout the ten-foot letters.
Happily and necessarily, irony was in the world. Tristan Tzara could declare, while the utopian machine of the Russian Revolution was being deployed: “I am still charming.” Thank God (in whom no one trusts).
Mayakovski, sick of his own grandeur and the lies it authorized, committed suicide. But Tristan Tzara became a communist. And the glamorous and ironic Mina Loy became a bag lady in the Bowery. There were ironies bigger than all of them.
The poetic enterprise of our century's beginnings consisted of attempts to partake of the bounty of forms bequeathed by the future and to humanize the machine. And there were those, happily, who censured both conceits, and put the focus on the daily. Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, Tristan Tzara, Marcel Duchamp ⦠and these are begetters of many of the young and youngish poets in this book. Words like
millennium
make them draw their slingshots. But nobody, neither the begetters nor the begettees, is safe from those bigger ironies that work, it seems, for a stern monolith just below hearing range.
By the 1930s nobody was smiling. What was human had to be defended
against what was not: vast warring ideologies, war itself, genocide. The mass graves just behind us had many poets in them. From Max Jacob, who was killed by the Nazis, to Paul Celan, who killed himself later because the Nazis had murdered his parents; from Osip Mandelstam, who was killed by Stalin for a poem, to GarcÃa Lorca, shot by fascists in Spainâfrom one gallows tree to another, there is little to smirk about. “Cunning, silence, and exile” indeed.
This terrible knowledge sustains a number of citizen poets. For Sam Abrams, the horrors in Bosnia make it necessary to scourge the polis by asking: “And how are we better than the good Germans, the so civilized French / who stood by, who averted their eyes?”
In her “Note from Memphis,” Lucille Clifton knows that “history is chasing you, america / like a mean dog.” Carolyn Kizer lists the victims, “Armenians, Jews / Gypsies, Russians, Vietnamese, / the Bosnians / the Somalians ⦠.” And Elinor Nauen, quoting Freud quoting Heine, declares, “One must forgive one's enemies / but not before they have been hanged.”
All these poets can be said to affirm their citizenship in this century, but there are degrees of awkwardness. Abrams, Clifton, Kizer, and Nauen do so with a straight face and thus make the strongest connection to Walt Whitman's nineteenth century. But for others, such certitudes become either hedged by absurdity or qualified by powerlessness. Eileen Myles ran for the presidency on a poetry-lesbian-feminist platform. Her mock-seriousness was not compromised by the knowledge that “100 years of the naked emperor / is more than my eyes can stand.” Her presidential platform was “Not me.” NOT ME. Now here is someone who understands herself: Elect the Not-I, as Fichte said. Not me, said the little red hen.
The clearest, and for that matter, least utopian goodbyes came from the grand elders who have lived in, seen, and questioned this century, having seen, as well, the shipwreck of presumptions big and small. The century belongs to them by virtue of their having survived it.
Speaking of his “impending demise,” James Broughton, born in 1914, notes: “Some kind of cold comfort to know that / one will be lying about the ruins / with Ozymandias Mussolini / and all the other residue of the millennium.” Robert Creeley asks only, sensibly: “But couldn't it all have been / a little nicer / as my mother'd say.” And from Carl Rakosi, the great Objectivist, now in his eighties: “The state of the world ⦠flaky.”
Anselm Hollo, born in Finland, was a child during the Second World
War. Looking back, he sees that “whatever it ever was / fights among
capos
.
”
The century's history was but a gang fight, a clash of mafiosi egos. Who the capos were and what they stood for is a mystery that everyone would like to solve. What is certain is that all the
capos
, from Stalin to Hitler, stood on pyramids of the skulls of other
capos
.
WHO DID IT? is a question these poets ask often. The “who” and “it” change, but the belief that there was a crime and that someone or something did it to us is unchanging. The
capos
, or those
capo
forces that Marxists and Neomarxists tagged and tag, are the object of many a poetic volley.
Racism gets it in John Yau's aesthetic, moral, environmental, ironic, trivial, and, ultimately, political question: “Will this spill finally bleach me?”
On the same subject, Jonathan Williams delivers a moralist's blast at the enfeebling of the American mind, from “lorena to tonya.” There is much to gloss on here since I am an observer of popular culture, and I even know all the jokes. When I visited Milwaukee, a journalist took me to the site of Jeffrey Dahmer's house, now a vacant lot with a big sign that said AWAITING TOTS DAYCARE. An old man with a whip in his belt and a spatula in his hand was walking his fluffy poodle by the fence, and when he saw us, he said: “I didn't know him. Lived here 18 years. Maybe I saw him once or twice. First read about it in the paper.” The journalist said, “You know what I think about Jeffrey Dahmer?” “What?” I said. “He was just like usâhe wanted to eat his lovers and keep them forever. Like the eucharist.” “Yeah, but we only do that
metaphorically,”
I said. “Maybe.” She didn't see much difference.
So you can add to the enfeebling of the American mind, the TV-induced inability to distinguish between literality and figurativeness. Eventually, every mother who says to her baby, “I will eat you all up,” will do just that. That's the dystopian solution to the problem of hunger.
Terence Winch curses Carl Sagan in his poem, and with him, the antiseptic utopia of space salesmen. Like most real poets, Winch doesn't see space as the “ultimate frontier,” but just an extension of the military-industrial complex to a place somewhere over our heads. A few years ago, before the
Challenger
blew up, there was some plan to put a poet in space.
One of the greatest gifts American technology has made to the living of our century is amnesia. But even amnesia comes in for a whacking, by Paul Auster, who regrets losing the details of his life through an American riddled brain. And Anne Waldman finds that she “forgot / I forgot something / amnesia of holocaust / amnesia for war & war & more war ⦔ She has forgotten
precisely that which is unforgettable. What we would like to forget, if only it were possible.
None of these culprits, to be sure, stand shelled for long. The more obvious sins of America are not so much excoriated as noted in their complex interplay with the poets themselves. It is Allen Ginsberg who most completely identified himself with his time and place. In his poem he accuses America of poisoning the world's air and water, but it is his own body that is America. “Fire Air Water tainted,” he laments, followed by “poor circulation, smoke more cigarettes.” Four decades have passed since the poet's curse, “America, go fuck yourself with your atom bomb!” In that time, Ginsberg and America merged. He, no less than the rest of us, stood no longer outside because the outside, like clean air and water, had vanished, another fin-de-siècle casualty.
One can hear a harsh urgency now in the work of those whose bodies have become the battlefield of a new American politics. Here, in the arena circumscribed by the body, even Judeo-Christianity gets a new job. “The Voice kept tugging at my ear,” declares Jack Anderson in the persona of Noah, “ ⦠nagging and ordering me / to tell the people of the city, âBecause of your wickedness / this place will be destroyed.'” The place HAS been destroyed in the ravaged bodies of Michael Andre's friends: “the tragedy of the homosexual todayâall I can do for / such friends is make this hello to the magnetic / pole of death that draws us like the years. / I make few prayers while this cold Pole is pope.”
William Burroughs takes on Christianity in the flesh: “what about the Inquisition, that stinks of burning flesh, torture, excrementâits stultifying presence imposed by brutal force.” The meek, for whom Christ apparently died, are all but forgotten. For Charles Bukowski, it's not worth living in a future where “hospitals are so expensive it's cheaper to die.”
Bukowski is one of the few poetsâTom Dent was anotherâto speak on behalf of the downtrodden in a manner not checked by self-consciousness. From the 1930s to midcentury, such paucity of proletarian sympathy would have been shocking. Even more shocking to those distant ages of humanism would have been the radical doubts some poets have about the nature of humanity itself. Bruce Andrews produced an alphabetical list of words defined randomly by vaguely familiar found phrases. Rae Armantrout's faith is retained only by a question mark: “No one home / in the âVirtual Village'? / Between the quote marks / nothing but disparagement.”