I think a poet, like any other being, should recognize that the world is mostly controlled by political forces and should become politically active too.
—Adrian Mitchell (1932-2008)
Late last year two great British pacifists died, the popular poet Adrian Mitchell and the even better-known playwright — and Nobel Prize winner — Harold Pinter. Although American writers occasionally venture into pacific waters (Allen Ginsberg and William Stafford spring to mind), the English have typically been more outspoken against their warring governments, more willing and able to intertwine politics with their art without getting jumped on for being too French-like.
Although we were born in the same distant year, and were occasionally in London at the same time, I never met Adrian Mitchell, who died December 20. Nevertheless, he's one of the reasons I've wound up writing Poet's Notebook columns, squeezing politics in with poetry. He made sense to me: even though poets, afraid of becoming dated, aim their poems at some nebulous future, they're also citizens, with citizens' rights and responsibilities.
Mitchell was a sweet-tempered pacifist, more to my taste than the angry anti-American pacifism of Pinter (look up his Nobel acceptance speech: "The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act," Pinter said. "How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal?").
I, however, wasn't a pacifist. Drafted for the Korean war, I would have fought, but it ended just in time (for me!), so I was sent to Germany to liberate the beer steins of Würzburg, while we waited for Russia to invade Eastern Europe. But, when they did march into Budapest in 1956, we just polished our tanks and tankards, and waited for them to leave. That was a good decision.
Still, my actual entry into the world of poetry readings began ten years later when Robert Bly and David Ray organized "A Poetry Reading Against the Vietnam War" in Minneapolis. I was asked to read with Bly (who had already served in the Navy) and other poets like Galway Kinnell, because I had published a few anti-war poems in The New Republic; and I lived nearby, teaching at Hamline University in St. Paul. The anguish and idealism of that time were brought back to life with the outbreak of the Iraq war, this time with poet Sam Hamill organizing the anti-war poets.
Do these poetry "protests" really help, or are we just a bunch of obscure scribblers showing off our infamous sensitivity? I think they do help, though slowly. I think the poems floated around cities and campuses, greasing the linguistic wheels of the public's imagination until both of these wars seemed, to a majority of Americans, to be moral and practical failures, as the poets said. But it's difficult to measure or predict a poem's effect on oneself, much less on a society. It's reassuring that our new president not only reads poetry, but is friends with a few of them.
Oddly, my most vivid memory of that 1966 protest was right after the reading, when a posse of poets hunched over a table littered with small anthologies printed for the occasion, in a room redolent of cigarette smoke and cheap jug Chianti. For hours, we conscientiously blacked out, with ink markers and crayons, E. E. Cummings's great anti-war poem, "I Sing of Olaf."
The publishers had surprised Bly and Ray at the last minute by refusing to let Cummings' passionate poem be included in the anthology (apparently at the request of his widow), which taught me early on how little power poets have, even over their own work. The poem was already famously censored, as in those dark days certain nasty words were verboten, so in the poem, while Olaf was being tortured, two of his exclamations read like this: "I will not kiss your f.ing flag" and "there is some s. I will not eat" — making one wonder just whom the censors thought they were fooling.
I know pacifists can be strange creatures, but lately, late at night, when I mull over the headlines about Israel and Gaza, I feel myself turning into one, like the opposite of a werewolf (my moustache thinning, my teeth softening like candlewax). I hear Pinter's angry form of pacifism (war is stupid and repetitive) and Mitchell's sweet-tempered one (life's too precious to waste), and they both make sense to me.
In 2005 — the same year as Pinter's Nobel speech — Britain's Poetry Society selected Mitchell's poem "Human Beings" as the one most people would like to see sent into space as a message to the universe. The poem runs through a catalog of things that divide us (nationalities, religions) and kill us (guns, bombs), concluding with an ancient heartfelt cry, one we should all add to our New Year's Resolutions:
look at all that life
all that beauty
you're human
they are human
we are human
let's try to be human
dance!
— Peter Meinke has finally joined the 21st century with a website (with illustrations by Jeanne): www.petermeinke.com .
This article appears in Jan 28 – Feb 3, 2009.