Gaza 2

Harvey Chisick

Hi Norb,

Your poem reminded me of a poem called “Power Songs” that you wrote many years ago. I could  imagine a way to sing that poem/song. The world it reacted to was clear and my  opposition to it was motivation to want to find a way to sing it. The  “Gaza” poem you posted is mostly unspecific, and, if I read it as intended, it does not take sides but takes aim at the violence and war. Violence  and the harming of weak or innocent people is always distasteful and  immoral. The narrative I have of the Gaza situation, and which at present  I cannot see is basically inaccurate, makes it difficult for me to  accept the poem's cosmic evenhandedness. Hamas has clearly and  repeatedly stated its policy that Israel is illegitimate as an alien and hostile element in Daar-al-Islam and must be destroyed. Since the  evacuation of Gaza  it has fired more than 5,000 rockets at  settlements within range, often timing them for when kids are leaving  home for school. They have killed tens of innocent people and  celebrate each death. So how, politically, or poetically, am I to  relate to that? The Israeli response was a gift to the media-savvy  Hamas. But what were we to do? What is an appropriate response to the  position, articulated by rocket fire, that we have no right to exist?

The song I would be inclined to sing here is the lament of a  Palestinian mother in Gaza caught between the fanatical  politico-religious ideology of some of her own people and an enemy  that responds with Hobbesian harshness to attacks on its own people.

 This is not to say that I don't appreciate your poem, only that we  seem to be working from different metanarratives. And maybe that the broadly liberal assumptions that seem to work in Europe and North America don't work so well where people don't share the relativist and individualist values, or lack of values, of the West. Can most North Americans get into the mind of the Spartan mother who asked a soldier returning from battle whether Sparta had won and when she was told in reply that all her sons had been killed she said that she had not asked about her family, but whether Sparta had won? When she was told it had, she seemed pleased. Or can we understand the Japanese wife and mother whose husband wanted to become a kamikaze? The Japanese army being, like most armies and big organizations, run by a rational bureaucracy, had its criteria for different kinds of missions.

As a married man and father, he did not meet the criteria. The soldier applied for suicide missions a number of times and was turned down each time. His wife was sensitive to the suffering this caused him. So she drowned her children and then committed suicide. The soldier's next application was approved, and he flew as a kamakaze. According the the TV program on the Second World War where I heard about this (so it must be true), this family is commemorated in a museum for the kamakaze somewhere in Japan. Do we see in this story monstrosity, or do we see a kind of heroism and devotion to the common good that we can hardly grasp? The Spartan mother has daughters in Japan, among the fundamentalists Palestinians, and among the fundamentalists in Israel. There are probably fewer in Israel, very few in Tel Aviv, quite a few in the territories. But enough to introduce absolute and irrational values into Israeli politics, and these are leveraged out of proportion to the size of the population that holds them, But that is another story. You have my vote in favor of a reasonable compromise to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Now someone needs to convince the Islamic fundamentalists in Hamas and Hezbollah and the rest of the Islamic world, and the religious nuts in Israel.

Peace and love, Harvey

Reflexive Polyphony

Norbert Ruebsaat

Vancouver: A Poem

By George Stanley

New Star Books, 2008

125 pages 

The idea that your mind could hold a city within itself, and that a city could be a kind of group mind, was exciting when many of us first read William Carlos William’s book-length poem, Paterson, in the 1960s. Williams’ suggestion to give our attention to the things immediately around us, to “the local,” in order to experience a place directly, uninterrupted by inherited ideas or wayward thoughts, excited many. “No ideas but in things,” ran Williams’ imagist slogan, and a person, especially a poet, by applying it, could become “a man”  (gender delineations were strict and exclusive in those days) in a city that was “his” in a previously un-thought-about way.  

George Stanley’s new book, Vancouver: A Poem, picks up Williams’ heady theme and asks how it looks and feels here, today. Stanley takes us on walks and bus rides through our Paterson, reading Williams’ text as he goes, and he pays attention to the things. There are old things: the W atop the former Woodward building (the beacon could originally be seen in Chilliwack); the shoe department at the Army and Navy store; the Stanford pub at Pender and Gore. And there are new ones: vacant city lots fenced off so resident children can no longer use them as playing fields of the mind and body; “seniors’ homes” where the old (they used to be old people, now they’re seniors, Stanley quips) wait for a moment…they don’t know what kind of moment…they know there will be/ the right moment… the right time—. His attention goes to the grungier parts of town, the Downtown Eastside where Vancouver got started, and crosses Burrard Inlet …many times—/peaceful waters of the mind; and it frequently finds itself in gentrified Kitsilano, or looking up to The Lions, Landmarks… We see two rocks, & call them Lions. 

Stanley’s observations are sharp, almost mercilessly truthful. They have rhythm and heart in the objective sense, and are direct descendants of the imagist tradition Williams taught.

I noticed major differences, though, between the two poets and their books. Where Williams could imagine a man as a city, Stanley, despite his reading efforts and focus, cannot. Or does not. I am not a man, and this is not my city, he states, right at the start of the book. He means this in both the autobiographical sense (Stanley grew up in San Francisco and came to Vancouver in the 1970s) and in the metaphorical sense: A man cannot, he implies, be a city anymore in that old manly sense, and a city can’t be owned (or, let’s say, held by) a set of verses. The romantic wholeness and sensual democracy that Williams envisioned can’t be known (biblical sense) anymore in the utopian mode that energized the exuberant ’60s. 

What happened? Two things. One is that the things of the city (and when he mentions things, by the way, Williams also means voices, people, written records, newspaper clippings, land deeds, personal letters, etc.) have shape-shifted. They are not the often natural but also human-made objects Williams knew and could encounter phenomenologically, that is, without historical or rhetorical baggage—for Stanley, they are things, more often, in the economic sense. They are commodities. Things today in our cities (cities are no longer ours, by the way; they belong to something else called the market) signify exchange, not use value (to use the Marxist shorthand).   

That’s one thing. Stanley describes it this way:  

I’m perched on a welded steel stool leaning on the steel counter of a pomo coffee shop which I guess is called Trees Organic Coffee Co. (at least that’s what it says on my coffee cup—dark Sumatra coffee—the image—the image of the map—of Indonesia—from the Globe and Mail & BBC on-line—in mind) east side of Granville just north of Pender… 

The other thing, as you can already start to see from the above, is that what a person is has also changed. A man is no longer a man, or even a less specifically gendered being; he is a consumer. Of places and things and experiences. The transformation of reality into products, (or of the local into the post-modern globalized) is pretty complete in our day, and even a poet of Stanley’s acute sensibility—especially a poet of such sensibility—takes note of this. 

What’s the result? Stanley’s prosody echoes the fragmented, enthusiastic, sometimes over-the-top-and-breathless “heart” rhythms of his mentor, repeating the dashes, half-stops and full stops that mark Williams’ peripatetic verse style. But Stanley’s interruptions are of a more contemporary kind: 

Watching it go by on the bus even—that’s relativity—I mean watching me go by—the city. So a catalogue of moments, glimpses—no, just a disconnected (I imagine a poem about Vancouver in which Vancouver never appears—no, I mean no glimpses—Vancouver only in the mind of—trying to let it be, thinking that if (and what about the subject position? that revealed coyly or just blurted out?)…  

What’s happening here? Well, we hear the poet as often as we hear the poem. We get a reflexive polyphony that reminds us of our selves even as we hear the voices of the commodities on offer. It’s almost, at times (at least it was for me), as if we—poet and listener—were one of the commodities, a celebrated thing among all the other things trickstered into products. 

The idea that the poet should step between the poem and the reader with autobiography was a no-no for Williams, but Stanley, with what sounds often like a sigh—Take refuge in a long poem//Avert/inspiration.///Write carelessly—lets in the postmodern self/voice that encounters itself while it walks and busrides though the city. Yes, we are on display, it says. The self that Williams called the mind, splits:  I can’t stop thinking of this—my mind’s/a captive audience of my brain, doomed/to hear it out. Brain says—/I’m running this program, & you/just pay attention.. [My brain] is wondering how it thinks. It ought to know… and: The thought has no words and no name./If it had words, it could be given a name.  

This mind-brain split becomes a major player in Stanley’s Vancouver, and I read the book at times as elegy. If my mind holds in it nothing more than my brain (or does the brain hold the mind?), what happens to the city? When names become brands, how do we talk? What happens to place and the local and the things and voices that in Williams’ world were still numinous; that had—yes, let’s say it—heart? 

The good thing about Vancouver: A Poem is that Stanley asks these questions and gets our readers’ minds and brains and temperaments—and, yes, our hearts—involved, and he does not at the end cash in his chips and leave the split-decked pomo table. He persists; he makes poetry. He makes it new: leave it to the brain,/leave it to the big boy to feel, even if it/makes big mistakes, it’s the big boy,/it’s the one/must/(& I will not say die. 

And Stanley’s poem “Seniors,” set in the middle of Vancouver: A Poem, is a must-read for those who read Williams back then and who—yes we can—are still reading today.

Gaza

Norbert Ruebsaat

Gaza, January 18, 2009

Norbert Ruebsaat


A word is a thing that we have against death.
It is only a word:
It is as simple as a feather.

I hold it up:
Here is the word, I say.

My enemy holds his child against his body
For protection.
He shoots: who falls?

Name me not as your killer,
Says the word.
I am that which you have
Against death.





Name
The silence of weapons,
The sound that follows a gunshot:
Who are you?
Asks this silence.

Describe your exact features.
Describe the country you come from,
The names its lips have re-
Collected.
Describe your worth.

When you cannot speak,
When silence holds you,
When all of you aches
Like a lost arm,
When you curse your birth,
And your mother, long dead,
Has forgotten your skin,
What is left of you?

When you crouch in the space
Behind your teeth,
Give yourself a name.
Urge forward,
Dream it.




A country that failed.
Its inhabitants flee.
Where they then were
Is not.
You are facing into a wind,
Your thoughts inhabit
Phases of you
That whip by.

Turn, and you remember
An equation, something
Someone said. Once.
No longer a miracle.

The country that failed
Walks away from its inhabitants
Like a seaman,
And loneliness invents
New rules.
   
You are within earshot.

for HC.

Poetry and Truth 3: Smart People

Norbert Ruebsaat

I.

On our drive to Lynn Canyon Park in North Vancouver some weeks ago, my grandson Caleb, who is seven, told me about some smart people, both adults and children, that he knew. After listening for a while (I’ve forgotten the names of the smart people) I asked him what “smart” meant, and he said it meant you know stuff.

I asked then (because I had been reading American philosopher Richard Rorty on the subject of pure versus instrumental reason) whether knowing stuff meant you knew something, or you just knew how to do something. Caleb said, Both: you knew stuff and you knew how to do stuff.

I asked if you could be smart if you only had one of the two: for example, you knew how to do something but you didn’t know how or why that something worked; or you knew how and why something worked, but you didn’t know what to do with it or why you would do anything with it. He paused for a moment and then said, Can you give me an example?

I was going to say something about the computer (I know how to do some things with it but I don’t know how or why it works) but before I could get started on this Caleb said, Well, for example, my leg: I know how to move it, but I don’t have to think about how to move it. It just moves.

I said, Well, do you know how your leg works? He said, Sure: my brain sends a signal to my leg and my leg moves.

I asked, How does this signal get from your brain to your leg? He said, Well, little electrical things or products or something, little balls, move down some passageways, they’re like, they’re nerves, and they go from your brain to your leg and make your leg move. But you don’t have to think about it; it just moves by itself.

Norbert: So do these electrical balls or products talk to your leg and tell your leg to move? How do they communicate with your leg when they get to it? Caleb: They send a signal. Norbert: I guess it’s pretty smart, then, that leg. Caleb: Yeah. The signal’s smart, too.

Norbert: Where did you learn all this? Caleb: From Brain Pop, on the computer.

Later we hiked along Lynn Creek and a sign attached to a fence read, Danger. Steep Bank. Keep Back. Caleb sounded it out aloud and repeated it just as Caius, his brother, who is four, and who had been walking and singing along some distance behind us, caught up.

 Caius said, No, the sign doesn’t say that. It says No Cows Allowed.

II.

I had no idea where Caius’ quip about the cows came from. I put it down to his often-commented-upon ability to come up with side-splitting nonsequiters, outlandish puns and other vocal brain-defeaters.

I sent the story (above) to a few family members and friends, and my youngest sister Gisela wrote back that Caius’ words made prefect sense to her. Here’s part of her email:

I see the difference between the two boys (at least as filtered through the story) as representing the difference between gathered knowledge on the one hand, and instantaneous awareness that comes from the imagination or intuitive side, on the other. Both have limitations and benefits. For Caius, given the context, what might the sign say? It's a fence, so no cows allowed on the wrong side of the fence. Cows on one side, humans on the other.  Cows have four legs but maybe those legs are dumber than our human ones so the cows need more guidance, hence the sign.

Made total sense. But I hadn’t seen the sign. I had (like Caleb) read a sign. But not a location. A wooden fence, for Caius, means farm, and a farm means cows, and yes, on a profound Paleolithic, not to mention semiological level, humans and—domesticated—animals must be separated. Otherwise you get a mad disease, or a flu that’s spread by pigs with wings.  

Everything, I told my media studies students two days later, is context. Otherwise there’s no text (meaning). I wrote Gisela back and wondered if her revelation might have something to do with her being the younger child (I’m the oldest, as is Caleb) the one that finds niches in the larger world of texts being seamlessly composed by the adults and wannabe adults, i.e. older children.

They get right with the picture. I thanked Gisela for the exegesis.

Golden Voice II: Call and Response

Norbert Ruebsaat

CALL

Well Norbert, what puzzles me about all this [see “Golden Voice”] is why you gave up an interest in “pop” in the first place, especially given your concerns about poetry and society. Perhaps your use of the all-embracing junk label of “pop” is to blame. There has been some seriously good music out there over the last decades under many more specific labels (rock, folk, blues, punk, and so on), and the best of it (of which there is, in my view, a lot) often acts as the carrier for contemporary poetry. Leonard Cohen is obviously a poet, and stages himself as such just as Dylan did. But lyric writing is the poetry of our age, and most certainly of the young each in their own generation. As such, it is fabulously successful, and for the steelier sort of mind, sociologically interesting. Why did you stop listening? You must have figured out that “expecting to learn something about your future” was an unrealistic demand, arguably for any sort of poetry. That doesn’t stop you from learning a lot about your times and yourself.

—commenter Barry Buzan

RESPONSE

I used the word “pop” in the economic sense: something that is widely marketed. Cohen popularized poetry by singing it and adding professional instrumentation and related production values and he moved therefore from the world of poetry to the world of popular music—which includes, in my usage, the genres you mention.

I continued paying (partial) attention to him because I had read him before I heard him sing, and I noticed while listening that he was mindful of the words he was singing and his voice always drew attention to them. He was still a poet: a category of being with which I identified and whose existence I value.

I’m interested in the differences between words and lyrics. And between what poets do and what musicians do. Dylan, indeed, began as a poet (albeit, I was not aware that he ever published a book) but quickly became a pop star, then an icon, then a secretive celeb. I did not listen to his post-seventies lyrics because they no longer sounded like poems. They taught me—no, I’ve never grown up enough to stop believing that poetry can teach me something about my future—nothing about my future.

By future, I mean the on-going intersection of private (imaginative) and public (political) life.

My interest in Cohen lingered because he didn’t entirely stop being a poet even after be became a popular singer. I flatter myself and us by thinking this has something to do with his Canadianness. He believed in language (so I tell myself) rather than following the going tune and filling in the words.

He has certainly become a performer, which is the stage death poets can easily suffer when they try and sometimes succeed at becoming stars, and media’s elixir starts to tweak them. Dylan (in my opinion) died of this elixir, as did, say, Paul McCartney (Lennon died of other causes) or even Paul Simon, who held out for a long time and is still to be praised for bringing to world attention the singing of Ladysmith Black Mambazo.

Cohen holds the edge, just barely, between poet and singer-songwriter. My friend Claudia, as noted in her comment on “Golden Voice”, was moved by Cohen’s recitation of a poem to the mass GM Place audience: I was moved initially, but noticed that, as more words poured into his mic, meaning began to drain out of them. The words, to my ears, became pop lyrics, spoken, country-and-western style, as I tried to explain in my earlier blog piece, and ceased being verse.

I don’t agree that music is or should be a carrier for contemporary or any other kind of poetry. When poetry requires a carrier, it’s already dying. The proper carriers for poetry are the ear and the mind of the poetry reader/listener, and when musical accompaniment is required to get the attention of this ear, the future (see above) is already endangered because the means to get there are suspect: politics and imagination drift apart and stop listening to each other.

I don’t doubt that seriously good popular music has been produced in recent decades. Two things have kept me from listening to a lot of it. Reason one is that when verses turn into vocals and are embedded in denser and denser instrumental and studio-engineered ambiences, I get distracted: the accompaniment starts to overpower the singer and I don’t know which of the two to listen to. What’s figure and what’s ground? What’s solo and what’s tutti? What’s call, what’s response?

Music labeled “folk” has avoided this foreground/background blurring, but it has become the domain, mostly, of the singer-songwriter profession, and here the problem of my future arises again: singer-songwriters teach me lots about their inner, imaginative (mostly love) lives, but they teach me little or nothing about the world of politics. The folk music legacies of Seeger and Guthrie and singer-poets like Joe Hill or Phil Ochs have gone psychological or environmental (the new political) and everyone loves the planet and maybe each other but nobody’s sure about how to do, well, simple things like sing songs together.

That’s my second reason. I’m exaggerating wildly in all of this, of course. Yes, early punk was good; I followed Billy Bragg for a while, because he was a poet first and singer second; I liked Ry Cooder and Dave van Ronk, men who stayed down in their bass voice ranges rather they crying out like whining teenagers in search of moms/dollars; I still like Johnny Cash.

Many female singer-songwriters write muscular lyrics that could lend strength to my wrestling matches with my future (which grow fiercer as the time I have to resolve them shrinks), but their tendency to become instrumentally involved with studio back-up bands, electronic modification and multi-track voices so that they comply with the standards of a music business that deals in stable, measurable audience segments, makes me morose. It’s a condition iTunes downloading doesn’t save me from.

Again, there are many exceptions. My main point here is that when poetry becomes performance, which it becomes when singing and music edge over into show business, the poem starts to die. The big story about poems is that they exist in a demi-world between life and language. They inhabit a space that is exactly halfway between music and words, between sound and meaning. That’s what the Muse is all about. When poetry strays too far into instrumentalized thickets, the Muse gets lost: there’s too much sound, and the ear starts to weep. Conversely, when the poem goes over into “texting,” the Muse weeps because sound is sacrificed.

Poetry as a form of knowledge and experience is sinking below the emotional/intellectual horizon of North American life, and I consider this a tragedy. It’s maimed by high school English classes, and then murdered when the poet-as-singer/performer gets out there on Much Music and becomes video phenomenon, icon, then legend. Platform shift onto YouTube and the planet’s your uncle. Guitar Hero greets Karaoke Man.

A eulogy, a requiem (quick, what’s the difference between eulogy and requiem?) is delivered to me when the Bob Dylan (or Beatles, or Rolling Stone) tunes jingle then jangle in my ear as I’m swimming in my local pool where the radio morning show ads on the sound system provide the bored lifeguards with something to think about while they watch my ears dip in and out of the water.

P.S.

It's customary to locate singer-poets like Cohen and Dylan (the latter more so than the former) in the so-called bardic tradition of poetic performance. The point is well-taken, but does not address the difference-in-kind between aural recitation (or vocal performance) and electrically enhanced and reproduced aural recitation. The latter mode creates a split (Canadian composer Murray Schaefer called it schizophonia) between the source of a sound, and the occasion of its being listened to, and this split changes listening experience. It has huge ramifications for bardic idioms.

The voice, when split from the speaker’s mouth, face, body, and heard in circumstances removed from those in which the voice speaks or sings, lacks, in my listening, the “heroic” depth that (I’m imagining) bardic recitation in cultures with no sound systems communicated. Amplified and electronically modified vocals celebrate technological heroism as much as they celebrate physical and vocal heroism, and they steal, in so doing, a part of the voice’s soul. How? By confusing the soul about whether it’s listening to a person or a machine.

Let’s recall Walter Benjamin’s pronouncement that when art is technologically reproduced it celebrates the power (heroism) of the producer, and only secondarily that of the artist.

Golden Voice

Norbert Ruebsaat

During his concert at GM Place in Vancouver on April 18, Leonard Cohen often kneeled at the front of the stage and bowed his head while singing. He also doffed his fedora frequently and held it to his chest and bowed to the audience, and to band members and to his three female back-up singers when he had finished a song. He moved near the latter people during the applause and stood close to them and listened with them to the clapping hands.

I went to the Leonard Cohen concert because Cohen is the only pop singer whose career I have somewhat kept up with since the days when I followed more pop singers’ careers because I thought I would while listening learn something from them about my future. I had never seen Cohen in real life. The second reason I went to the Leonard Cohen concert was that I could walk there, in a short while. GM Place is sort of in my neighbourhood (Strathcona), and so it seemed, although there were twenty-thousand-odd people there, most of them from places greatly beyond this neighbourhood, that Leonard was paying me and us a local visit. This gave me a sweet warm feeling.

Cohen sang almost all the songs in his compositional oeuvre during this three-hour concert (there were four encores) and I was surprised to note that I knew all but three of them; I could easily sing along, in my mind, with the lyrics, and could even hum a lot of the accompaniment—which was fantastic: Cohen’s band members are high-wired angels—and this sense of familiarity added itself to the warm feeling. At one point during “Hallelujah,” a man two rows above me in the stadium tiers sang out, loud, along with the chorus, and I got excited; I expected the entire audience, or at least a good part of it, say fifteen thousand, would soon join in on this well-known refrain (the song’s been covered by many singers and topped charts) because they would know and remember and then sing it just like I couldn’t resist doing. But when I sang then, and listened, and looked into the massed crowd down on the floor of what is on other occasions an ice rink, I heard no voices. Not even funny ones. No coughs, either. I kept singing nevertheless, along with the man in the row above me, and along with Leonard, kneeling down there on the stage (he holds the mic like a chalice, in two hands, close to his mouth) in subsequent “Hallelujah” choruses, and also in the “I’m Your Man” refrain; I glanced at the woman sitting beside me, a stranger (she was blond, and in my generational range) and I thought she might start singing with me and with my buddy from two rows back and help us to eventually infect larger and larger parts of the audience with the power of communal song. Or she might help do the do dum dum dum that Leonard’s back-up singers repeated for quite a long time while swaying their bodies after he was, so to speak, gone. But the blond woman made no sound. She just looked at Leonard. And at the back-up girls. Silently. With her mind. I became self-conscious then, and heard my own voice getting thinner and sticking out, and entirely lacking in gold.