spread - new underground guerrilla experimental art + literature
By Michael Bibby (copyright © 1997, all rights reserved)
My paper might seem inappropriate for a panel entitled "Poetry Against War." The poetry my paper is concerned with is not, strictly speaking, pacifist or nonviolent--its writers were activists in political movements which were willing to take up arms against their oppressors, and in some cases, these poems advocate revolutionary warfare. What I want to focus on is a poetry of insurrection written in the heat of urgent political resistance. Such poetry not only violates a "poetry against war," a concept of poetry as a pacifying discourse of order in opposition to the incoherence of war; it also mortifies dominant views of the poetic, views which, derived from western Romantic and Modernist traditions, have banished politically tendential poetics from the arena of civilized discourse. The poetics currently hegemonic in education and criticism derive their character from the bourgeois structuration of the public sphere described by Habermas.^1^ Such poetics valorize distinction and quality relative to an aesthetic formalism rooted in liberal bourgeois tastes. While the dominant poetic perpetuates the norms of this hegemonic "public sphere," the poetry of insurrection seeks not only to articulate a counter-public sphere, but also to fragment and transform the very nature of "public spheres."
Insurrectionist poetry is often written by partisans who have sought extreme, militant measures to agitate the public, defend their rights, and resist oppression. By attending to such poetry, however, I don't mean to promote armed conflict; but by reading insurrectionist poetry, I hope both to challenge the critical doxa that has traditionally marginalized such texts and to call into question the ideological limits of dominant Western poetics. The poetry of insurrection often violates the values of these poetics. Yet it nonetheless articulates a "poetic" unique to its conditions of production, and thus bears closer critical scrutiny. Insurgent poets often cannot afford the social luxuries implicit in the subtleties and linguistic complexities, the transcendent epiphanies and paradoxes valued by Western poetry criticism. As Claribel Alegria once said, conditions in Central America didn't allow poets the opportunity to produce "art for art's sake." The poetry of insurrection must communicate to people in struggle whose lives are on the line.
Although there has been a recent renaissance in politically engaged poetry in the U.S., American criticism has mostly ignored it. Such poetry is often dismissed as a "low" form of discourse in which "content" overshadows "form." It is considered mere "reportage," "transitory," "mass language," "sloganeering," "artless," "doggerel," "agitprop," "propaganda." Viewed as crude and uncivilized, such poetry has become the savage "other" of American poetics, and thus, has been banished from the "public sphere" of civilized, rational discourse. What is it about agitprop, sloganeering, reportage that we find so distasteful? Is it simply that such rhetoric is universally "bad"? Or is it that literary critics in the U.S. reject such language because we don't like being preached to--we like language that respects the ambiguities of intellectual inquiry, that is complex and challenging, not dogmatic and simple in its message. Although the evaluative criteria of the literary canon have come under scrutiny for race, class, and gender biases in many areas of recent criticism, few question these values in poetry.
In a time of armed struggle, a poetry addressed to partisans and the dispossessed may find realist, didactic, and agitational rhetoric valuable and strategic. This is not to say that explicitly propagandistic rhetoric is the only legitimate discourse for political poetry; rather I want to argue that such language is not necessarily anti-poetic. Criticism's banishment of politically agitational language from poetry points to its implicit ideological function. As Barbara Harlow has argued, it serves ultimately to "deny to poetry and culture any political role or access to political power. Literary production must, for the most part, be either domesticated or else disacknowledged as `literature'" (54). The poetic values promoted by most American critics in effect contain the poem as a textual medium alien to political struggle--which in turn silences insurrectionist poetry, denying its presence as a legitimate and articulate form of expression. Yet despite such critical acts of "disappearing," poetry has been important throughout late twentieth-century insurgencies from El Salvador to Palestine, Mozambique to Puerto Rico, as well as the U.S.. But to appreciate this poetry in its contexts challenges many of the cherished assumptions of dominant literary criticism. It requires rethinking poetics in relational and contingent ways: for example, re-reading the value of figurative language, ambiguity, particularity, and immanence; reconsidering how direct exhortation, generalities, and the explicit may be valuable formal elements for a poetry of armed struggle; it must rethink the ideologically structured dichotomies between form and content.
In my paper I hope to make a limited incursion into the terrain of dominant poetics by examining the poetry of the Black Panthers and the GI Resistance, two American insurrections of the Vietnam era. Both movements engaged in an armed struggle against political oppression, and for both poetry was a politically significant medium of expression. Yet the poetry of these movements has been practically erased from public memory. Studies of the "poetry of witness" tend to ignore political poetry in the U.S., implicitly "alienating" a poetry of insurrection as a foreign "other." Yet the continuing political incarceration of Puerto Rican liberationists and AIM partisans, as well as members of the Black Panthers and dissident soldiers belies the myth that the U.S. is not itself a "front line" for armed resistance. By examining the poetry of Black Panthers and GI Resistance activists, I want to read insurrectionist poetry "on the front lines" of America.
Synthesizing the liberation theories of Frantz Fanon, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong, and Fidel Castro with indigenous black nationalist traditions epitomized by Malcolm X, the Black Panthers envisioned art as an indispensable tool of revolutionary struggle. As Capt. Crutch stated in a 1968 issue of The Black Panther: "the Black Panther Party is an armed body for carrying out the political tasks of revolution. . . . But we must also shoulder such important tasks as doing propaganda among the people" (22). According to Emory, the revolutionary art of the Black Panthers "enlightens the party to continue its vigorous attack against the enemy as well as educate the masses of black people. . . . [T]hrough their observation of our work they feel they have the right to destroy the enemy" (16). The revolutionary art called for by the Black Panthers is an aesthetic articulated precisely as an act of war against the dominant aesthetic, associated with white, imperialist culture. Based in black vernacular expressive culture and inflected by the rhythms of rally chants and oratory, Black Panther poems speak to a public traditionally denied access to the modernist languages reified in U.S. poetry criticism.
The use of didacticism, propagandizing, and imperative voice in Sarah Webster Fabio's poem "Free by Any Means Necessary" not only serve to mobilize her readers, they also wage an assault on dominant poetics (see Appendix 1). Her poem violates the poetry workshop dictum to "show not tell"; but within the cultural contexts of Black Panther activism, "telling it like it is" was highly valued. Yet beyond its rhetoric we might discern other formal characteristics which undermine attempts to oversimplify its poetic. What first strikes the casual observer is the brevity of the poem's line lengths and its enjambments. Line breaks, as James Scully argues, are themselves political acts; and the line breaks in Fabio's poem express the urgency of the political struggle, calling attention to both the free verse literary conventions they flaunt and the immediacy of their address, their enjambments propelling the audience onward to the final stanza's repetitious imperatives for freedom. On another level, the poem depends on a central metaphor which, by 1968 when the poem was written, had become a compelling trope of Black Liberation: the poem/pen as a weapon. After Amiri Baraka's 1966 call for "poems like fists," the trope of "the poem as weapon" became central to insurgent black poetry. But the force of Fabio's use of this trope depends not on reiterating the cliche of the pen being mightier than the sword; rather it depends on a radical transference of the qualities of the tenor to the vehicle in the metaphor: in other words, Fabio's poem posits a writing which would, in fact, act as a concrete weapon against oppression. From the metaphorical language of lines 3-14 the poem asserts that the pen "can kill" the false language of the white-owned media. The internal rhyme of line 18 ("oppressor's presses") underscores the inherent structural relationship between racial oppression and ownership of the media. From this the poem shifts in the fourth stanza to the imperative voice, calling on black people to turn away from symbolic forms of resistance ("water pistols") and take up arms. Later in stanza 6 the poem returns to the problem of the struggle for control of representation, fusing the figurative analogy between the pen and the gun, and in stanza 7 calling for poetry to "blast / forth the fire / of black / consciousness." Demanding freedom for the party's leaders, the poem's final repetitions not only denote revolution, they also "revolt" against the academic norms of poetic discourse and, indeed, are "revolting" to the academic listener--they violate the longing for harmony, music, and lyricism often sought in repetitious verse patterns, and instead emphasize chant and sloganeering.
Elaine Brown's "A Black Panther Song" also presents a direct assault against the hegemonic status of white Anglo poetics, and in particular against the convention of the sonnet, a verse form central to the production of a white lyric "I" (see Appendix 2). Brown's poem strongly suggests sonnet form; yet it subverts the sonnet's traditional insistence on the particularities of the "lyric I" and speaks from the relational position of a self-in-community. Its address draws the reader/listener into the recognition of a shared situation of black oppression, and answers this oppression by asserting a chiasmic call to arms. The questions which propel the poem to its conclusion demand an answer which can only be affirmed through a violent insurrection against racial oppression and an assertion of black identity. Neither the poem's meter nor its rhymes conform to the traditional sonnet, and while its closing lines resemble Shakespearean form, this convention is left unsettled. Instead of a series of quatrains closed by a couplet, its opening question comprises a tercet, followed by a quatrain, followed by a tercet. Its actual "turn" occurs in line 11, which begins an off-rhymed AAAA quatrain, if we read "be men" as a separate line (as it appears in both The Black Panther newspaper and its reprint in the book The Black Panther Speaks). Reading "be men" as the fourteenth line of the poem emphasizes its call for the assertion of identity against oppression; it supports those who "scream silently" that they are men. But this last strophe could also be read as a tercet, which violates the requirement of the sonnet form. The rhymes in these final lines are also significant, emphasizing a relational chain between friends, end, and men. Leaving "be men" hanging as a separate line, the poem both evokes sonnet form and subverts it at the same time. Appropriating the vehicle of the sonnet, Brown reasserts control over poetic expression, "rip[ping] off [the pigs'] technical equipment" and articulating an oppositional identity against the totality of white subjectivity.^2^
Although the Black Panthers have been widely recognized as an important insurrection of the 60s, the movement of dissident soldiers and veterans during the Vietnam War has been almost entirely ignored.^3^ The work of the GI Resistance posed a mutiny which threatened the military and the state more profoundly than perhaps any other movement of the 60s. While the Panthers were more organized, the GI movement nevertheless produced an extensive network of underground newspapers, many featuring dissident poetry by soldiers. By 1971 over 144 such newspapers, often crude mimeographs, had been printed and disseminated among soldiers during the war. The poem was an important mode of expression for these soldiers, whose time for writing was severely limited by military regimentation and seriously fraught with the concrete dangers of both combat and reprisal. As many GI activists have testified, dissident writing by soldiers could result in imprisonment, transfers to hazardous duty or to frontline combat, and physical reprisals.
A poem appearing in a 1969 issue of Eyes Left epitomizes the underground poetry of the movement (see Appendix 3):
When laughter ceases - loud - hideous laughter
Comes the silence.
Then the crying and screaming.
The legless and the mind blown far into the midst of a
bomb;
Consuming lifeless, headless babies with hysterical women.
Signed "A Peace Lover" this anonymous poem ends by blaming "Men in business suits," depicted above the fray on "two hills," for such atrocities. The poem's final lines describe these businessmen:
Feeling no pain
Seeing no blood
Losing no arms.
They say, "Stay and Fight."
I say, "Go to Hell."^4^
The poem structures an opposition characteristic of dissident soldier poetry written during the war. Those forced to fight the war are subject to disfigurement, mutilation, and death; those who manage war from the safe distance of their offices remain whole, undamaged, unaffected. In the last line, the soldier's curse subverts this opposition by turning violence back on the "businessmen's" bodies, commanding them to the Hell the soldier refuses. This poem's refusal of orders breaks the signifying "chain of command" that ensures the military managers' ability to wage war.
Similarly Greg Laxer's poem "For My Still Imprisoned Comrades," from a 1971 issue of The Bond, in celebrating dissident soldiers imprisoned at Ft. Leavenworth, also calls for the disruption of military order (see Appendix 4):
every time a yellow infant explodes forth unto the world,
from the womb-darkness to greet the sun,
though besieged on every side by napalm-phosphorus-
defoliant
another nail is driven into the coffin of capitalism
. . . .
comrades, do not despair, though the lackey-mindless
guards may taunt you unceasingly
for the time is not far off when the bones of the
capitalist shall lie bleaching in the sun
and up through the hollow eye-sockets shall push flowers
and the earth shall again bustle with the joy of life,
most of the weapons will lie rusting, but some we shall
preserve to insure
that never again does this class of bandits subjugate our
beings
By representing the birth of a Vietnamese child as an explosion, Laxer subverts that tragic reality in which Vietnamese children were themselves exploded by the U.S. military; here the child's explosive birth signals the death of capitalism and its military- -the child becomes a weapon for revolution. In the last lines' graphic images of the "capitalist's" rotting corpse, the poet rearticulates mutilation so that, rather than the body of a Vietnamese or the soldier who must fight against his will, it is the body of the oppressor that is mutilated. As in "A Peace Lover's" poem, resistance is articulated through representations of mutilation; by inverting the position of mutilated and mutilator, dissident soldiers sought to "frag" the chain of command and "turn the guns around" on the military.
In a 1969 issue of Gigline Ronald J. Willis presents a subversive rearticulation of militaristic jargon in his poem's portrayal of a soldier's death (see Appendix 5). Ironically titled "Victory," the poem anthropomorphizes military equipment while the human body is rendered inert, inhuman, and barely identifiable. Only military gear and body parts have any agency- -the whole body hardly exists. Focusing on equipment and parts, the poem traces in minute detail the fragmentation of a human body. In the incoherence of the war, the whole person had little meaning--it was an illegible sign, a cipher waiting to be tallied up in the body count. The poem's narrative represents the soldier's subjective memories as objects, similar to tissue or bone, that the bullet passes through. The poem proceeds through a catalog of thoughts and memories that define the human experiences of a man who is in the very process of being rendered inert, dead matter before the reader's eyes. The sentimentality of the images chosen to describe the soldier's memories is defused by the poem's focus on the agency of the bullet; the sentimental has been made senseless by the insensitive bullet. When the bullet finally explodes out of the other side of the soldier's head, the poem follows it to a tree where it lodges, "sitting there warmly-- / duty done-- / to map Hell where Paradise had been." In its clinical description of the bullet's penetration of the body, "Victory" appropriates military jargon turning it against itself to demonstrate its inherent inhumanity. Further by fragmenting the soldier's body the poem reveals the incoherence of the military "corps" as a political totality. Read within the contexts of the Vietnam-era military culture, this poem's flat, declarative style articulates an insurgency against a militaristic ideology which uses jargon to obscure the grotesque realities of its actions. In subverting this language, "Victory" also "turns the guns around."
Although didactic, blunt, and urgent, these poems are not "tact-less," they are not "art-less"; rather they are "tactical" and their formal elements are integral to the extreme conditions and urgent struggles in which they were written. Poetry criticism has failed to account for such contingencies in its assessment of insurrectionist poetry, imposing on it a reductively unified set of poetic values rooted in a cultural hegemony such insurrections as the Black Panther movement or the GI Resistance mean to contest. The insistence on these values and the debasement of political poetry as "doggerel" ultimately serve to disarm such poetry, pacifying it and containing its threat to hegemony. By not attending to the poetics of insurrection, poetry criticism in the U.S. risks implicitly perpetuating the cultural oppression insurgent poets write explicitly against. Excluding insurrectionist poetry from the "public sphere," such criticism ultimately works to silence those voices on the front lines of political struggle. Yet the poetry of insurrection calls into question the political and historical contingencies of this hegemonic "public sphere," a realm constructed in American poetry criticism as an elite circle of the privileged--and it challenges us to consider the necessity of poetry even in the most extreme public contexts.
Works cited:
A Peace Lover (pseud.). "When laughter ceases." Eyes Left Sept.1969: 4.
Brown, Elaine. "A Black Panther Song." The Black Panther
Speaks. Ed. Philip S. Foner. New York: Da Capo, 1995. 31.
Capt. Crutch. "Correcting Mistaken Ideas." The Black Panther
Speaks. Ed. Philip S. Foner. New York: Da Capo, 1995. 21-23.
Emory. "Revolutionary Art/Black Liberation." The Black Panther
Speaks. Ed. Philip S. Foner. New York: Da Capo, 1995. 16-18.
Fabio, Sarah Webster. "Free by Any Means Necessary." The Black
Panther Speaks. Ed. Philip S. Foner. New York: Da Capo, 1995. 20-21.
Habermas, Jnrgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public
Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Trans.
Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.
Harlow, Barbara. Resistance Literature. New York: Methuen,1987.
Laxer, Greg. "For My Still Imprisoned Comrades." The Bond 30 June 1971: 7.
Scully, James. Line Break: Poetry as Social Practice. Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1988.
Willis, Ronald J. "Victory." Gigline 1.4 (1969): 18.
Notes:
1. See Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).
2. This quote comes from Emory, "Revolutionary Art/Black Liberation," 18.
3. Much of the following discussion has been adapted from my book Hearts and Minds: Bodies, Poetry, and Resistance in the Vietnam Era (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1996), 123-172.
At the panel where I presented this paper, my co-panelist Jan Barry, an activist in the VVAW and a founding member of 1st Casualty Press (which published antiwar GI literature), argued against my reading of the GI Resistance as an armed insurrection. In Barry's view, the primary motivation for resistance was pacifism and anti-militarism, and Barry sees Vietnam-era soldier dissidence as part of a tradition of liberal pacifism. While I agree with Barry's assessment with respect to the VVAW and 1st Casualty, much of the underground GI press I discuss here was produced and supported by more militant groups, such as the Worker's World Party. As my chapter on GI Resistance in Hearts and Minds demonstrates, many dissident soldiers used fragmentation devices and guns in their efforts to disrupt the war and overthrow the military. A number of GI activists were originally active in civilian militant groups and enlisted for the purposes of infiltrating the military and sabotaging the war effort, hopefully to precipitate revolution. There are also several accounts of dissident soldiers returning to the U.S. to join armed militant factions.
Although it is critical to respect and appreciate the pacifist tradition expressed by soldier dissidence in the Vietnam War, I also believe it is historically important to recognize the extent to which resistance within the military threatened the state. I don't mean to romanticize the militant aspects of soldier dissidence; rather I want to claim that these aspects are nonetheless historically significant, and that the poetry produced in the contexts of militant, armed political struggle demonstrates a poetic anathema to dominant poetics.
4. This poem also appeared in two other GI papers that year: Rough Draft August 1969 and A Four-Year Bummer 1969. The AFB on the title of the reproduction of this poem from Eyes Left in Appendix 3 may be a reference to its appearance in A Four-Year Bummer (which was itself a riff on the acronym for Air Force Base).
