A struggle for breath

Monday 10 October 2011 by Andy Croft

 

In 1973 the US poet Jim Scully won a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship to travel abroad for a year. Excited by the achievements of the Allende government in Chile, he decided to move his young family to Santiago.

They were en route in Mexico when the army overthrew the government and murdered Allende in the Chilean capital.

“We went on to Chile anyway, figuring the military would assume I was a US agent, which they did,” Scully recalls.

“Access to the Pudahuel airport was restricted to soldiers and Dina, the intelligence police, mostly guys in business suits carrying automatic weapons. They didn’t even check our bags.

“We were North Americans, our kids were blonde, we were arriving on the heels of the ‘golpe’ – who else could we be but who we had to be?”

Although Jim and his wife Arlene had been involved in the anti-war movement in New Jersey in the early 1960s, living in Chile in the aftermath of the US-backed Pinochet coup was a brutal introduction to political realities.

“Imagine witnessing a woman from the Israeli consulate negotiating a shipment of Uzis with a colonel of the carabineros at a party with one of the Chicago Boys present,” he says.

One of their neighbours was Isabel Letelier, then living under house arrest. Her husband, who had been Allende’s Defence Minister, was later murdered by a car bomb in Washington.

For a while, the Scullys’ Santiago apartment was used as a safe house by the MIR (Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria) guerillas.

“They’d borrowed Avenue Of The Americas, a book of my poems, returning it with the verdict: ‘a little bit hippy, a little Trotskyite, but very definitely left.’ And smiled. They had a certain innocence, as did we. No reality is contained by its stereotype.”

Scully returned to the US with his collection Santiago Poems and Sandy Taylor created the now legendary Curbstone Press in order to publish chilling lines like: “Behind a TV screen/as in a shadow play/the general gavels his fist./His captive audience/is 10 million souls…When he opens his mouth/all Santiago/contracts to a shrunken head.”

The Scullys joined the Progressive Labour Party – “lots of street action for five years with some wonderful people, mostly Puerto Rican” – but later Scully and Taylor were arrested on weapons charges related to anti-KKK activity.

In the late 1970s they published Art On The Line, a series of Curbstone booklets by Roque Dalton, Cesar Vallejo, George Grosz, John Heartfield and Wieland Herzfelde.

It was a brave attempt to inform and raise a few caveats with mainstream US poetry. But it wasn’t, of course, listening.

“The mainstream does not critically engage with work outside its realm. How could it? It can’t critically engage itself,” Scully declares.

“The poetic field is no less a political construct than an aesthetic one. When we speak of mainstream poetry we’re talking basically about academic poetry, poetry in its institutional aspect, which is the basis for jobs, careers, publications and poetic norms. It’s where the continuity of money and recognition is maintained.

“There’s a lot of cute, too-clever-by-half poetry without an ounce of gravity, and of course no resonance. It seems we lack even the language with which to speak social or civic reality.”

Finding that his poetry was unpublishable in US magazines, Scully gave up writing poetry altogether for many years. He began to write critical essays, Line Break: Poetry As Social Practice being one of his better known.

But when the Bush regime broke out its ready-made “war on terror” immediately after the events of September 11 2001 he began writing poetry again.

“By that time the postmodernist thing was incapable of landing hard enough to say anything about anything,” he says.

“Worse, it had extended the tenure of social silence, leaving an opening only for identity politics and the academic discipline called post-colonialism – this with nearly a 1,000 US military bases, some the size of small cities, installed across the world.”

It is fair to say that Scully is not a fan of Bush’s successor in the White House. “Obama’s job, for which he was groomed, and which he’s accomplishing with stunning success, is to do for the US what Yeltsin did for Russia – accelerate the massive transfer of public wealth into private hands.

“I never anticipated the breakdown would be so vast, thorough and bald-faced. The enclosure laws of Tudor times and later were a primitive version of this sort of thing.”

In the last decade Scully has been writing furiously as though to make up for lost time. He has recently published three collections of poetry, a travel book about the break-up of Yugoslavia and a new translation with Bob Bagg of Sophocles’ plays.

And Smokestack have just brought out Angel In Flames, a collection of the best of his poems and translations from the last 40 years.

The collection is an extraordinary achievement by any standards, an eloquent and stubborn witness to the victory march of imperialism – “so Agamemnon lords it still, /Menelaos struts and struts, /they can’t stop / lording and strutting… and when the gods are gone/ into the long, drunken night – /gods of the globe /drunk with blood, drunk with money,/with hatred of life/we will go after them / into the same night.”

Scully points out that the ancient Greeks called “apolitical” citizens – those who care only for their own personal interests – “idiotai,”the opposite of politai, citizens in the “true” sense.

“For the Greek tragedians, the primary point of collective reference was society, not the individual,” Scully says. “They took everything on and in front of everyone. Full-bodied, adult stuff. Not crimped by the servility that comes of habitual evasiveness.”

Among the classical poets Scully most admires is the sixth-century BCE soldier-poet Archilochos, who is supposed to have said that “the fox knows many things; the hedgehog one big thing.”

For Scully, the one big thing is the belief that “poetry is a struggle for breath.” He says: “We write poems not because we want to but because we have to. I feel the necessity of speaking to where the social silence is. I’d prefer to be writing other things, but conscience gets me and won’t let go.”

James Scully, Angel in Flames: Selected Poems and Translations 1967-2011 is available for £8.95 (postage free) from Smokestack Books, PO Box 408, Middlesbrough TS5 6WA;  info@smokestack-books.co.uk; or visit Smokestack Books.

 

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Angel In Flames

by James Scully
ISBN 978-0-9564175-8-9
£8.95

Reviewed by Alan Dent
Mistress Quickly’s Bed (UK)

 

James Scully has been publishing since 1967 and has ten volumes of poetry to his name, among other publications. He’s a mainly small press American poet previously unpublished in Britain. I’d be surprised if many poetry readers in this country know his work. I didn’t and he’s the kind of poet I like. Beyond the matter of taste is the question whether his poetry stands up to scrutiny. The book is divided into two sections: after 2004 and before. There is no strong sense that his work has changed greatly or improved markedly over the decades, though there is clearly greater maturity in the later pieces, evident principally in tone. There’s a piece called Poetic Diction from the earlier work:

Certain words are not fit 
                                for poetry .

                                Boss, for instance
                                Our better verse
                                you may observe
                                has no boss in it.

The fifth line carries the weight: the tone of expertise, the kind of thing you expect to hear from the lectern. It is expertly placed to disrupt what might start to sound like polemic and to divert the reader’s attention to a contrary voice. The poem continues in this vein till it concludes that This is why no-one/ minds /poetry any more. I’ve picked out this poem because it encapsulates what the collection is concerned with: a civilization in denial, needing to change but lacking the courage to change, clinging to irrelevant values and inevitably dragging culture down with it as it commits slow suicide. Scully’s writing, from the beginning, is suffused with this sense of cutting against the grain. The entire collection asks the question: what can poetry do in such a world ? Where is the space it can survive ? What is the form it needs to take to have some purchase on present-day reality ? Samuel Beckett posed a kindred question when he remarked: To find a form to accommodate the mess, that is the task of the artist now. Scully’s achievement is to have found a form. It consists in using simple, straightforward language, creating an architecture which is easy to follow, allowing metaphors and images to emerge rather than imposing them, and working through complex ideas and experiences in a down-beat way. I’m reminded of Einstein’s chirpy remark when asked to put Relativity in simple terms: You sit on a hot stove for a minute, it seems like an hour; you sit next to a pretty girl for an hour it seems like a minute. That’s Relativity.Behind the joke is a serious point: what happens depends on where in the universe you observe it from. Scully is a bit like this. He has very serious and complicated things to say, but he doesn’t want to write like a clever-dick.  He doesn’t want to hide behind difficulty or show off his superior learning or sensibility. On the contrary, what all his poetry is driving at is that just as we have created economic abundance but don’t know how to share it, so we have created mass literacy but don’t know what to do with it. Writers always have an implied reader in mind. Publishers know that most novels are bought by women and many of them live in the Home Counties, so the volumes written for go-getting women in Reigate pile up in Waterstones. Scully’s implied reader is the educated, democratic citizen, the kind of figure Whitman would have recognised and Scully wants this citizen to assume his and her proper place in the world. This is not to suggest he’s toying with the fantasy of turning the masses into intellectuals; rather he’s putting faith in the power of culture to educate the sensibility. Shortly before he died, Jose Saramago commented that it was futile to try to get the majority to read seriously. Such reading has been and will remain the province of the few. I take him to mean precisely that you can’t make the masses into intellectuals; but that doesn’t imply a culture of quiz shows and celebrities’ backsides. Scully’s poetry is aware of being caught up in a culture war. There is no space in which poetry is allowed to live untroubled by the struggle over property and power. How then to put pen to paper ? Scully’s poems clear a little area of ground for themselves, chop away the brambles:

           Up in a clearing of the wood, beyond
                      the wavering incline behind our house
                      wild among scrub and poison ivy –
                      we find the high bush variety.

He’s writing about blueberries but the poem soon begins to question the nature of  modern existence; we aren’t innocent about nature anymore; we know how the world will end and when; we have conned essential mysteries, but knowing our place in the universe doesn’t help us get on with one another. I think it’s important to acknowledge just how far our consciousness has been transformed by modern cosmology. Until quite recently, say at least before the publication of The Origin of Species, virtually every poet was writing from the confident sense of humanity’s special place in the order of things and a faith that we are fulfilling a destiny laid down by benign  forces. There are still plenty of fanatics and deniers of one persuasion or another who refuse the evidence, but everyone who addresses the science seriously knows we have a brief tenancy of a doomed planet. The hubris that comes from believing the universe was made for humanity is impossible in the light of this. But much more.  No significance is ultimate. There is no eternal redemption. We can’t justify today’s cruelty by reference to some putative existence beyond existence. The world wasn’t made for humanity but humanity for the world. Of course, it’s still possible to wriggle free and believe in an afterlife and eternal existence. No science can dislodge faith. But faith or not the earth has a finite existence; the sun will become a red giant and burn our planet like a ball of paper on a bonfire.  No more people with immortal souls will be born long before that. We’ll be lucky if we’re around another two hundred thousand years. Scully’s poetry is full of this kind of disillusioned sensibility:

what is human-
                                a species of matter
                                cutting the water in long canoes
                                stroking the spume of passion, beauty, blood

                                terrified, terrifying

Scully understands how our cosmology keys into our history: if you believe the universe is ruled by a single, omnipotent deity (just as if you believe History is process without a subject) you tend to believe society should be governed in the same way; if the will of the deity cannot be defied, why should the will of the ruler ?; if earthly life is mere preparation for the real thing, what does it matter if millions die in wars ?; if killing the infidel brings eternal reward why not genocide ? This poetry is full of the necessity of a more modest and straitened view of ourselves. It is the work of a rare sensibility. Scully knows that our confusion about our human status makes us monsters to ourselves, full of hubris, believing we know where we’re going as we grope in the dark along a road without signs or landmarks willing to injure and kill others in pursuit of our demented sense of importance and justification. This collection is a plea for humility; species humility as well as personal. It is a plea expressed in beautiful, expert poetry. Let’s hope there will be a posterity which will grant Scully the praise he deserves.

from  FICTION INTERNATIONAL 42

These remarks were occasioned by a symposium based on the question whether “in a time of wide-scale ethnocide and systemic demonizing, consider . . . whether the attempt to remain hors de combat represents integrity or silent complicity, as with the hypothetical Aryan artist (in Berlin during the Third Reich) embarked on his ‘inner migration’.” This question was raised in the context of atrocities committed in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

My response(s) . . .

1

Annihilating all that’s made / To a green thought in a green shade
—Andrew Marvell, “The Garden”

In September 2008 Paul (Jerry) Bremer exhibited his oil paintings at The Framery in Bellows Falls, a 19th century post-industrial town in southeast Vermont.  The paintings had impressionistic titles: Rainy Day Reflections, Silo, Summer Shadows, etc.  Proceeds from the sale—which ran modestly, and with good reason, from $200 to $400—would go to the Historical Society in the seemingly more upscale town of Chester.  A former Kissinger Associate, Bremer had also been the ‘proconsul’ of Iraq.  In that capacity he presided over the disbanding of the Iraqi Army and the de-Baathification of the government—in effect, disintegrating the country and opening its archaeological museums to looters.  That was five years ago, by the Tigris.  The recent one-man exhibit was a stone’s throw, literally, from the Connecticut River.  It included a painting titled “Fenced In.”  Not a reference to Abu Ghraib, but to a tiny plot of deep green grass in a village dooryard enclosed by white picket fence.  Exactly the sort of art, and aesthetic, that a Bremer would be expected to produce and subscribe to.  What else could he do?  He of the Baghdad Green Zone?  He was planning to donate the proceeds to the Chester Historical Society—because, as he said, “I am a historian by trade, so when we moved to Chester I was really interested in the history of the town.  It’s really important to keep history alive and I hope the fundraiser helps that cause.”  And there we have it, exactly and inevitably: the art, the history, the destruction of both, and the philanthropy that a Paul Bremer had to come down to.  But what of other dooryard artists, those who have not wielded his direct life-&-death power but who, like him, have dissociated themselves from the world and the history they participate in, and which they are a living part of?  What country, what worlds, do they in the green prison of their oblivion disintegrate?

2

A few questions about the symposium topic . . .

First response.  The implicit analogy, based on psychological denial, is not easily applied to contemporary US writers and artists.  A more apt comparison might be to WWII French and other intellectuals, many of whom were more accommodating of, or indifferent to, the moral complexities of living under a Nazi regimen. One of the most unlikely was Gertrude Stein, who in 1934 told the New York Times Magazine that “Hitler should have received the Nobel Peace Prize,” a position she did not disown but simply forgot about after the war.  During it she got along nicely in Vichy France, supporting Marshall Petain so assiduously she translated many of his speeches and tried to peddle them in the US.

Who now is nominating Barack Obama—the boyish, human face that has been placed on the rotting Clinton-Bush legacy—for the Nobel Peace Prize?

No, Obama is no Hitler.  Neither was Hitler fully realized when he assumed power in 1933.  Only in retrospect do the mythic Hitler and the quasi-mythic Stein stand clear.  In retrospect, so will Obama, who at the moment, with Rahm Emanuel holding the house keys, looks not like Hitler but Petain.  Sans Petain’s medals, certainly.  But then Obama is on track to become his own kind of war hero.

Second response.  Is the implicit choice between inner emigration and actual emigration?  Or between inner emigration and resistance?  I assume (prefer) the latter.  Even so the distinction between existential ‘being’ and ‘doing,’ which underlies the question, is problematic.  Who knows where it will take us?  Consider this distinction as sharpened by Thoreau, who defended John Brown’s attempt to negate slavery, i.e. to do way with it, even as he attacked the mainstream Abolitionists’ determination to deny slavery, that is, to moralize on it.  This from a speech he delivered while John Brown was waiting to be hanged . . .

It was the fact that the tyrant [the slaveholder] must give way to him [Brown], or he to the tyrant that distinguished him from all the reformers of the day that I know.  . . . The slave-ship is on her way, crowded with its dying victims: new cargoes are being added in mid-ocean; a small crew of slaveholders, countenanced by a large body of passengers, is smothering four millions under the hatches, and yet the politician asserts that the only proper way by which deliverance is to be obtained, is by ‘the quiet diffusion of the sentiments of humanity,’ without any ‘outbreak.’  As if the sentiments of humanity were ever found unaccompanied by its deeds . . .  What is that I hear cast overboard?  The bodies of the dead that have found deliverance.  That is the way we are ‘diffusing’ humanity, and its sentiments with it.

By these exemplary standards we are almost all, so far as I can tell, ‘inner emigrants.’

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Postscript

This was written after Barak Obama had been elected president in 2008 but before his inauguration and, later, his being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October 2009. My comment had aspired only to be sardonic—not, as it turned out, prophetic. It’s worth noting that Stein, unlike Ezra Pound, was neither charged with treason nor confined to Saint Elizabeth’s psychiatric hospital for over 12 years.