This is Not an Editorial The following text is taken directly from the "Forum" that appears in the current issue. POM2 Forum Editors, Rodrigo Toscano, Carol Mirakove, Dana Ward, Laura Elrick, Anselm Berrigan The Editors As we considered submissions for issue four of POM2 in 2002, we (the editors) found that opposition to the policies of our government seemed imbedded within the majority of the poems we received. Certainly, we had received poems of a political nature in previous issues, but this seemed different. An overall reading of issue four bears this notion out. In submissions for issue five, we noticed a significant drop off in content covering U.S. politics and the direct voice of resistance. Why? What is driving the content? Certainly, it is a complex question with no easy answers. In the process of working it out for ourselves, the four editors came up with a few ideas we offered for meditation by five poets whose work regularly takes on political issues, albeit in very different ways. We asked them to engage in hopes of continuing the conversation. Allison Cobb: I sense that the shift in submissions parallels a larger shift in the poetry and activist communities. In 2002 and 2003, we were on the streets, the mood was very engaged, we wanted to stop the war. But the war happened anyway. Since then, I have had periodic exchanges with poets who say: "We should be in the streets!" But we're not. I wonder what it means that poets and activists haven't sustained that high pitch of political engagement, that we returned to our lives. Ethan Fugate: If we're talking about an occasional and specific form of written opposition to United States foreign policy in the wake of the attacks on NYC and Washington, D.C. in 2001, then in terms of myself, I documented what I wanted to document in my own writing and then . . . I just moved on. Whether I moved on out of boredom, frustration, indifference, the inability to carry on a 24/7 crusade against injustice, or the will to explore new territory, doesn't matter to me. But I imagine that is what happened to a lot of writers. We just moved on—for whatever reason. Jen Coleman: Maybe what we're seeing in POM2 doesn't reflect a shift in the larger community, but rather a trend in the activity of engagement among poets. Is it difficult—or taboo—for a poet to engage with/critique/complement the politics in a fellow poet's work? Susan Landers: I don't feel comfortable correlating the decrease we saw in submissions with overtly political content with a decrease in political engagement of poets in the larger community. The more politically engaged work I read serves as an analysis of (mediated) global events, and this interests me because not only does it shake up popular discourse, which limits our imagination as to what is possible besides destruction and greed, but because in reading the way others process the enormous amount of information "out there," we learn ways to better analyze that information ourselves. I wonder, then, if by reading politically engaged work, we will devise more effective strategies for political action, if poetry can help us better define and/or articulate alternatives to oppressive policies of and actions taken by the richest countries in the world. Rodrigo Toscano: The whole period of what I'll call the "ramp-up" (that is, the initial material mobilization of the U.S. military, plus the 24/7 ideological bombardment to sustain that mobilization) is clearly over. Not the violence of course, nor the logic driving it either. We're well on our way…on a rocky mountain railway, with a somnambulist at the caboose controls. Living in the U.S., we're part of that machinery (whether we like it or not). And so you might say, that as oppositionalists, in our capacity as poets, we too were mobilized. Mobilization at first stimulates people into a heightened state of awareness (through fear, or anger, or for some, even elation), which often turns to action. Later, as the thing grinds on (let's call it what the generals in their bedrooms call it, "Quagmire") a deep fatigue begins to set in. And so people try and find some sense of "normalcy" for themselves, or sources of resilience. In terms of poetics, some writers return to their core projects with renewed commitment, others adjust the scope of their social diction to see if they (or their friends) can hear certain words—if any words at all—through the din. So Quagmire, here, does not only suggest the current state of affairs on the" battlefield," but also an over-arching social logic, a state of being, a zeitgeist even. The poetic responses to Q are myriad. They are part of the weedy garden necessary for political renewal. Nathaniel Mackey's astute distinction between "fugitivity" and mere escapism is useful in this regard. He mentions that the Maroons (escaped slaves) of Jamaica headed for the hills to build their own society, one worthy of defending. But because they bailed "the scene" (of colonial violence) does not mean they'd lost the will and desire to ambush. So maybe, ramp-up submissions to POM2 are down, while Quagmire subs are up. Hopefully that's the case. But there's also such a thing as reaction, that is, retrograde forces coming into our midst. Some are pretty bald about decrying the over-politicization of poetic discourse. Open calls for the end of a Marxist perspective on cultural matters, for example, is de rigueur. Other retroids seem to prefer adjoining themselves, in an amoeba-like fashion, to the flooding of journals with poems that ("as themselves") evince an evacuated sense of the social. Such a movement can be difficult to critique, actually, since poems to these people represent direct expressions of their personhood. Returning to the ramp-up period poetics for a bit. One of the defining markers of the period, and ways of going about things, was to be very frontal about the situation as it was developing. Alice Notley went back to the Iliad to uncover mythical capacities of war-making. That's a kind of frontality. Carol (Mirakove), in Occupied, designed various kinds of media-capture fields, to help us view (and critique) some of the ideological flak whizzing by, plus her text had the presence of mind to punch out lyric takes on that very process. In another kind of frontality, Laura (Elrick), in sKincerity, self injected several machinery subjectivities, so as to morph out of American Womanhood into a broken field of letters, then bricollaging that debris into a Subject (speculative) New. Brian Kim Stefans ran a very successful site called Circulars, which was equally on, as well as (adventurously) off topic, in terms of where poetry might roam in times like these. David Buuck wrote a very zany and poignant musical play around the Bush administration's idiotic posturing. Juliana Spahr and Kristin Prevallet both raised the bar as to what a post-personal, but super human intimate poetics might look like (Juliana through This Connection of Everyone with Lungs and Kristin through several aesthetic accretions of The People Database). The list really goes on and on. Of note were Anne Waldman's poem "Rogue State" and Amiri Baraka's" Who Blew Up America," probably the two most widely read and emblematic poems of the period. Leslie Scalapino's three major anthologies from that time stand out as well (War & Peace (parts 1 & 2) and the earlier Enough). There were hundreds, thousands of readings that were directed, in a frontal way, against the War Machine. Here in NYC, the Republican National Convention reading at St. Mark's Poetry Project was probably the culmination of the (counter-) mobilization. I should also say that, different political periods (or atmospheres) tend to superimpose one on the other, as to why a complex social interpretation of texts is still a major challenge. (from a recent ("Q") poem of mine, "State & Sensibility") "The last four years slipping away merrily Gorge, has it been waiting there 11 23 all along? Administration, are we auto-administrative tussled psyche, cramped trampolining— (the edges are of solid steel) I could— I squak vexed I squak      vexed . 'I'm alert' says writing barreling down" Carol Mirakove: It seems we are discussing two distinct decline(s) here: protest demonstrations and explicitly political poems. They may be related, but I think we cannot measure a correlation between the two. To begin where Rodrigo left off, I would say that while anti-war poems may seem less frequently occurring, I don't feel that political poetry on a large scale, or in a continuous sense, is less present. Rodrigo rightly points out that "the list goes on," which was painfully evident to me in writing my essay "Anxieties of Information" because I had to limit the number of contemporary poets I quote in accordance with the scope of the project. I quote around 25 poets and could have easily cited three times as many, right off the top of my head! I am not going to reconstruct that essay here, since it was issued last October with Traffic, Small Press Traffic's new journal. But, let's talk about the anti-war poems, specifically. We tend to feel things to be larger and more present when they are transmitted loudly. The protests of 2003 were loud. (There are still protests occurring each day, now, and many if not most of them are happening online. They are disembodied. Quiet.) Allison reveals something important in writing that "the mood was very engaged." The mood was engaged. Were our actions engaged? Most of us were going to work like good employees. I don't think that I, for one, ever left my life, such that I have not experienced a return. We were protesting after work and on weekends, obediently congregating in pens set up by local police forces. Of course I am not here speaking for everyone, but I believe I am describing the majority of protestors. We can shut it down, but we choose to not shut it down. Compare our protesting to protests in Argentina, Venezuela, and Bolivia, both in terms of numbers and in terms of results. It seems we feel we have too much to lose. I was among those who feared losing my job or even a month's pay by dedicating myself to stopping the war (or to rejecting the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, for that matter!) The truth is, we do have a lot to lose. To live in the U.S. without disposable income is a woeful prospect. This is, of course, by design. The U.S. government has destroyed social programs such that we are necessarily integrated with The Corporatocracy. So that's one thing. Another thing is, let's remember the stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. I think many people grieved the Iraq War. Perhaps a lesson to learn here is that we need to expect U.S. leaders to commit such atrocities, and avoid personal grief such that we may channel our energies to useful and productive ends. Part of this managing our energies involves sustainability. I don't know how long people can yell on the streets, as Ethan cites, especially when we can't truly expect our protests to change policy, given that the protests are not disrupting business as usual. The film Amandla! documents the import of music to the Anti-Apartheid revolution, which, as we know, was 46 years in the making! Political and social change is not easily won, and if we do not incorporate joy, hope, and celebration into our efforts, we will burn out. Now, celebrating means that we need to spend time together, and this trend is for certain on the decline. We are increasingly distant from one another. Our communities are vast and virtual (we betray our local merchants for online dot-coms, or Target, or [shudder] Wal-Mart). Do we lose trust in this model of social relations? Why, yes we do. For that reason, I believe it can be difficult for a poet to critique or complement the politics in another's work, as Jen wonders. If we can turn this around (on a large social scale), we have to refrain from speaking to one another in sound-bytes, i.e., we must meet with one another and engage conversation, and we must lose our individual egos in favor of a common good. Otherwise, we are hard-pressed to realize exploration in earnest. All that said, I don't know that it's all so grim for poetry. Personally, I am more grateful than ever to be working with a host of poets who are intensely engaged and profoundly generous. Sue's use of "(mediated)" strikes a chord with me, as that is the title of the manuscript I am working on. I have been thinking about that word a great deal over the past 2 years, and lately, I am most interested in the ways in which we might, collectively, achieve a mediated sense of "The Left," that is, a negotiation towards peace. Dana Ward: I'm compelled by Carol's calling to the fore the classic stages of grieving. I can, in my own work at least, chart something like that trajectory over the course of the past years, & see in its conclusion a horizon for protest, where that exhausted arc phases into a blend of its constituent elements. Perhaps I mean that grief doesn't have to give way to inertia, that it can in consort with all that is in its orbit & provide an activated ground for rejection & the propositional work of imagining the world anew. That work is for me & I know many others, a first principal of engagement with the art. I find myself proceeding from a place where perpetual disappointment & the constructive postures & animations of protest have formed some Frankenstein ground, or that's where I hope to be standing as I shuffle left into my own rhetorical surfaces every morning. This suggests that, as Rodrigo says, perhaps the poetry written during a quagmire orients its political aspect differently than the work done in advance of a war one hopes to stop, that once the ice-pick is firmly lodged in the skull, the permanent revolt goes on with its wounds showing. Perhaps then some efforts, a counter-quagmire offensive, may be in order? If the ramp-up provided, in its sick agitations, a dynamism that fired immense amounts of oppositional work, maybe we should, with an intensity commensurate with that which preceded the war, take on the sadistic-barbiturate zone of this crisis as it's figured now? Certainly, as noted above, this is already being done, but maybe not to the scale, & with the renewed & relevant nuance we would find satisfying as a critique & rejection? I think often of the lonely guy that stands, day after day, at the exit ramp to a local expressway, holding his "Out of Iraq NOW!" sign high, as emblematic. "initially missiled misled, (So I get this job in a cornucopia factory [[missiles]] & a myriad opposites bloom I put opposition up first as collateral (someone has said this & better before) opposable [benign riff on the sky, all fault of theirs, all fault of mine] even that figurine in captive & mutinous poses (so I pull over to the side of the road I heard "SUN, do you know what I'm stopping you for?" All of the popular songs All of the popular songs say shake, sh sh shake that. . . So I get this job in a factory, We make opposition there, courage & pretty futility bludgeon the systems I suddenly quit all of popular songs say "Break!"/intrinsically missiled or break, bb bb break that telepathy bracelet of sub-Matrix tear basins this too is something do to Laura Elrick: Yes… "a myriad opposites bloom…" And we are all implicated, being inextricably social beings, and that's the damned truth of it—it's complicated. That said, I think it's important, if just for a speculative moment, to isolate several phenomena that inevitably overlap in "the real world," if only in order to better see their relationship. We are talking about poetry, the current political landscape in the U.S. (and how it fits into a global reality), and personal strategies for dealing with the lack of a wide-spread social movement strong enough to change the course of history. That's a lot for a short space! So before getting to the specific topic at hand, why the perceived drop in political poetry, if there has indeed been a drop, there's a couple of points I'd like to touch on… One of the things that has often surfaced in my discussions with people over the last few years, is the notion that since we didn't stop the war, then the poetry aimed against that war was useless, or, at best, a distraction from the "more important" work of direct action. I'm more than a little wary about approaching poetry in this way. Needless to say, we definitely want to stop the war! But a quick look at history will show that this takes years and years of building, organizing, and creating a cultural groundswell large enough to propel us into a fullblown social movement. The political effect of poetry will never take an empirical, direct, A to B form. And this is precisely why poetry can be so alive and fructive at juncture such as this. For me, the practice of cultural work is necessarily not only tied to the present (and the demands the world makes on our thought and being) but also inextricably to the fabric of the past, the larger present, and that includes how our individual poems enter into an already existing, moving field of social forces that are in the process of creating our future. As someone who is committed to the overthrow of an unjust capitalist order that is ultimately unsustainable, and who also happens to be a poet, I get a lot of my personal strength from the incredibly rich cultural history of dissidents in this country and elsewhere—and I want to add to that, through success and defeats. I also want to add to the work of so many of my living peers that continues to defy the limitations being forcibly imposed on all forms of life. I believe it's important to add to that—that in fact, it makes a difference. Of course, my insistence on the political significance of culture does not preclude other kinds of political activity! And Carol is right to point out that the economy is where we can affect the largest blow in the immediate circumstances. However, how can we do this as individuals? If Rodrigo, or Dana, or any of us, walked off the job tomorrow, it would literally be less than a blip on the screen. We'd have to do it together—so that cultural groundswell again becomes key. From this point of view, it is interesting to return to the question of what happens to poetry in times of crisis. During what Rodrigo has called the "ramp-up"—when it was patently obvious to anyone paying attention that the country had in fact been hijacked by right-wing opportunists (who had been organizing and planning for this moment for decades, one might add)—I think that many people who normally do not think of themselves as oppositionalists felt compelled to respond. They may have even felt a new sense of allowance to write overtly political work. But why would we need a sense of allowance, one might ask, and from what or whom? The fact of the matter is that, despite our best efforts, we are writing in a reactionary climate that pervades nearly every aspect of our lives—and why should literature be impermeable to such political currents? Certainly we can say that the powers that be do not want a bunch of radicals showing up in the Norton anthology. But the extremes—Norton on the one hand and, say "avant-garde" literature on the other—do not represent the full spectrum of what's being produced. So we might even say that there are forces within the literary community that don't want radicals showing up in the so-called alternative anthologies. This is not paranoia. This really happens. Entire decades of radical poets have been practically erased from literature altogether, until leftist historians and critics have dug them up again. One good example is Cary Nelson's Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory 1910–1945, but there are countless others. At present, many of our most strident left intellectuals are being dragged out of the universities and held up as examples by the right-wing media. Or take the way radical poets who actually do make it into literary history are systematically watered down after their deaths, Langston Hughes being a good example here. (Take a quick look at any number of blogs on a given day, and see how "political" poets fare. What interests, what wishes as Brecht says, are doing the evaluating, and for what purposes? What forces do they end up working in concert with, whether or not it is their stated intention to do so). So is it possible that after the initial flood of anger came welling up out of people's poetry, the spigots had to be shut off, so to speak, or risk flooding the citadel? The pressure, as it is subjectively experienced, might be nearly impossible to identify, to speak to, or about. Yet it is out there. One last point: I'm intrigued by the notion of "quagmire" poetry. Not as the kind of repressive reaction I mention above, but as a necessary shift in how we craft our materials, both ideologically and affectively. It's both good and necessary to let events, as they develop, alter one's consciousness. So that to continue along a previous course ("rampup"), while we're engaged in a "quagmire" may be not only fruitless but practically impossible. What then might be the concerns of "quagmire" poetry, broadly speaking? Have I written any quagmire poems? Have you? I suspect the quagmire poem need not necessarily speak directly to the war, but perhaps equally as importantly, to the predicament of being both agent and victim to this horrible engineered violence. And then to dare to imagine, to call into being, the outlines of a social order based on something else. Anselm Berrigan: In regards to POM2 submitters I think it is probably worth looking at how many of those who sent in anti-war poems or" ramp-up" poems had much of a history of writing overtly political work prior to 2002. I very much doubt that writers with political surfaces evident in their work over extended periods of time, or writers with a conscious sense of the possibilities of political content (which can be vast if a person somehow manages to see politics as pertaining to how our species negotiates all these layers of widespread co-existence) prior to the onset of the War On Terror suddenly stopped writing political work once the campaign in Iraq began. I also have serious doubts about political content in writing acting as a kind of litmus test for a human being's engagement with matters of social justice. I don't think that's being implied in this forum, but I do feel it necessary to say given the vehemence with which so many poets are willing to rake their colleagues over the coals for being seemingly inadequate about, oh, everything. It may be just as interesting to ask why POM2 wasn't receiving more overtly political submissions prior to the run-up to invasion of Iraq. I suspect many poets, like many people in this country opposed to war, implicitly separated the prospect of an invasion of Iraq from the beast that is the War On Terror—and clearly the latter contains the former as a "theater," horrible as that is to write. One "strength" of the War On Terror as a concept is that it, by itself, has not engendered much large-scale opposition within the United States. Kerry, for instance, never really brought up the War On Terror as a subject for debate other than to say it wasn't being waged very well. While many people did publicly question the logic and factual basis of a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, very few public figures were willing to question the legitimacy of a war on terror as a response to the attacks of 9/11, and so the basic underpinning of the Bush administration's overall war strategy was rarely, if ever, truly challenged. People in America are capable of allowing really awful things to happen in the name of unity. Congress cowardly handed Bush the authority to wage war at his discretion almost immediately after 9/11 out of a publicly-stated belief that the country needed to stand behind the office of the Presidency (hide behind a Bush), and effectively negated itself as a check on the executive branch. By the time the public opposition to invading and occupying Iraq grew into the massive global protests of February 2003, the larger war had been going for over a year and the invasion was a done deal. There was no one but Bush for the public to pressure, and Bush dismissed the millions of protestors with two words: "focus group." Poetry, in these conditions, has a much better chance of enduring the times and standing as a record of opposition than direct action that can't see or hear the truth of its own irrelevance. You do have to have poets around to write the poems, but we certainly don't lack those.