Book Review: Poetry of Witness

Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English 1500-2001edited by Carolyn Forche and Duncan WuW.W. Norton, 20141993's Against Forgetting, the previous anthology by the team of Carolyn Forche, brought together dozens of the best and most memorable examples of 20th-century "poetry of witness," poetic works attesting to shared and often traumatic experiences, experiences whose public dimensions rendered them at odds with the main currents of contemporary poetry. Forche's new collaborator, Duncan Wu, points this out in his opening remarks to Poetry of Witness, the capacious and excellent follow-up to Against Forgetting, reminding us "that the concentration of contemporary poets on the realm of the personal, almost to the point of myopia, is peculiar to recent times. Prior to that, poets commonly discussed experiences shared by the larger community in which they lived." This new anthology, solidly produced by Norton, takes the inspired thematic idea of Against Forgetting and searches for it across five centuries of the Western canon, with some truly invigorating results.As in high school romance, so too, apparently, in poetry anthologies, however: you've got to suffer for your invigoration. Both of our editors have spent more time writing in academia than is good for them. Wu uncorks several sentences on the order of this one: "Poetry of Witness foregrounds the historical context inhabited by the author, obliging us to consider the manner in which it impinged on his or her vision." And Forche voyages even deeper into what Star Trek parsers might refer to as the Neutral Zone (where all navigation is perilous):

In the poetry of witness, the poem makes present to us the experiences of the other, the poem is the experience, rather than a symbolic representation. When we read the poem as witness, we are marked by it and become ourselves witnesses to what it has made present before us. Language incises the page, wounding it with testimonial presence, and the reader is marked by encounter with that presence. Witness begets witness. The text we read becomes a living archive.

After which alarmed readers should be reassured that neither these poems nor any other poems are the experiences they recite. You will not suddenly find yourself in the Tower of London awaiting execution, or in a Swiss sanitarium watching your giblets putrefy from venereal disease. You will not be shelled or gassed or hanged. The poem is not the experience - or else we wouldn't need poetry, now would we?But as any reader of Homer's Iliad can attest, the poem can sometimes sharpen the experience into a pick and drive it home. This is a corollary of the fact that "poetry of witness" is more concerned with effect than inspiration, and that emphasis often leads to a realization our two editors are nice enough, optimistic enough, not to mention: this type of verse runs a very high risk of being atrocious. There's a whole kennel's worth of doggerel in this anthology. Some of it comes from poetasters who never produced anything else - like good John Harington, translator of the Orlando Furioso and participant in the Earl of Essex's ill-fated mission to put down the rebellion of the Earl of Tyrone in 1599, writing in in "Of the Wars in Ireland" about how his experience of war has sharpened his enjoyment of peace:

I praise the speech, but cannot now abide it,That war is sweet to those that have not tried it;For I have proved it now, and plainly see't,It is so sweet, it maketh all things sweet.At home Canary wines and Greek grow loathsome;Here milk is nectar, water tasteth toothsome.There without baked, roasted, boiled, it is no cheer;Biscuit we like, and bonny clabo here.There we complain of one rare-roasted chick;Here viler meat, worse cooked, ne'er makes me sick.At home in silken sparvers, beds of down,We scant can rest, but still toss up and down;Here I can sleep, a saddle to my pillow,A hedge the curtain, canopy a willow.There is a child but cry, oh what a spite!Here we can brook three larums in one night.There homely rooms must be perfumed with roses;Here match and powder ne'er offends our noses.There from a storm of rain we run like pullets;Here we stand fast against a shower of bullets.Lo then how greatly their opinions errThat think there is no great delight in war.But yet for this, sweet war, I'll be thy debtor:I shall forever love my home the better.

But even much better poets than Harington, confronted with the task of transmuting news into news that stays news, are forced to fall back on gambits they would otherwise spurn. Take Andrew Marvell, whose moving "An Horatian Ode Upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland," written in bitter gall in 1650, doesn't exactly read like his best work:

But thou, the war's and fortune's son,March indefatigably on,And for the last effectStill keep the sword erect:Besides the force it has to frightThe spirits of the shady night,The same arts that did gainA power must it maintain.

Forche and Wu maintain from the beginning of their endeavors that a proper historical context for these poems is vital, and they're excellent at providing those contexts in quick and often pithy introductions to each poet. Their set-up of William Wordsworth is a good instance of getting the reader up to speed easily and efficiently:

Sometimes parodied as a harmless (and therefore irrelevant) nature poet, the real William Wordsworth was, for a time, identified by the government as a serious security threat. The Home Office was sufficiently concerned to send an agent to spy on him and his sister Dorothy in 1797, when they were resident in Somersetshire, where it was believed the French would begin their invasion of Britain.

But even Wordsworth is cornered into couplet-versifying (all his greater, later work was inward-looking in its perceptions), as in this excerpt from his Descriptive Sketches, written during his time in Revolutionary France:

Oh give, great God, to Freedom's wave to rideSublime o'er Conquest, Avarice, and Pride,To break: the vales where Death and Famine scours,And dark Oppression builds her thick-ribbed towers;Where Machination her soul resigns,Fled panting to the center of her mines;Where Persecution decks with ghastly smilesHer bed, his mountains mad Ambition piles;Where Discord stalks dilating, every hour;And (crouching fearful at the feet of Power,Like lightning eager for the almighty Word)Look up for signs of havoc, Fire and Sword.Give them, beneath their breast while gladness springs,To brood the nations o'er with Nile like wings;And grant that every sceptred child of clayWho cries, presumptuous, "Here their tides shall stay!"Swept in their anger from the affrighted shore,With all his creatures sink - to rise no more!

Fortunately, this democratization of the Muse's bounty doesn't hold true all through the book. In fact, it's almost entirely absent from the one species of "poetry of witness" with which most general readers will be familiar: the battlefield poets of the First World War. Kudos to our editors for including here one of the finest such poets, Isaac Rosenberg, who was twenty-seven when he was killed in action in France in 1918, and whose "Break of Day in the Trenches," written in 1916, is still arresting, with its punch of a final line:

The darkness crumbles away.It is the same old druid Time as ever,Only a live thing leaps my hand,A queer sardonic rat,As I pull the parapet's poppyTo stick behind my ear.Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knewYour cosmopolitan sympathies.Now you have touched this English handYou will do the same to a GermanSoon, no doubt, if it be your pleasureTo cross the sleeping green between.It seems you inwardly grin as you passStrong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,Less chanced than you for life,Bonds to the whims of murder,Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,The torn fields of France.What do you see in our eyesAt the shrieking of iron and flameHurled through still heavens?What quaver - what heart aghast?Poppies whose roots are in men's veinsDrop, and are ever dropping;But mine in my ear is safe,Just a little white with the dust.

And of course not all crises are military. Forche and Wu include Thom Gunn's heartbreaking 1992 evocation of the AIDS epidemic in his famous "The Man with Night Sweats," whose "Hugging my body to me/As if to shield it" hacks to the heart of that tragedy's most private moments:

I wake up cold, I whoProspered through dreams of heatWake to their residue,Sweat, and a clinging sheet.My flesh was its own shield:Where it was gashed, it healed.I grew as I exploredThe body I could trustEven while I adoredThe risk that made robust,A world of wonders inEach challenge to the skin.I cannot but be sorryThe given shield was cracked,My mind reduced to hurry,My flesh reduced and wrecked.I have to change the bed,But catch myself instead.Stopped upright where I amHugging my body to meAs if to shield it fromThe pains that will go through me,As if hands were enoughTo hold an avalanche off.

Forche and Wu don't intend Poetry of Witness to function as any kind of antidote, since they almost certainly don't view modern poetry as something that needs a cure. But even so, readers who are perhaps a bit weary of slim volumes of disjointed verse about which cartoons the poet watched as a child or how her Starbucks barista got her soy machiatto order wrong again might find these hundreds of pages of poetry about actual things bracing. This anthology makes some eye-opening observations about the functions verse can serve (and its limitations while doing so) when it's not acting as a private diary; it will remind more than a few readers of the reasons why the form has shaped mankind's essential utterances for so long.