When Vincent was in the eighth grade, I drove him and a friend, a girl, back from a birthday party, and, like all mothers, I eavesdropped on their conversation. They were discussing the girl’s decision not to participate in a poetry contest. She had read the previous winners, she said, and they were composed of words such as “injustice,” “inequality,” “empowerment,” “action.” “What I don’t understand,” the girl said, “is why can’t we write about flowers anymore.”
“Of course we can,” Vincent said. “But ...”
He did not finish the sentence. I wondered if he was asking: Is there still a place for Emily Dickinson these days?
-- Yiyun Li, The New Yorker, October 23, 2023: "What Gardening Offered After a Son’s Death: Deep in mourning, I thought, What if spring never returns?"
In her heart-wrenching article, Yiyun Li, a Chinese American author whose life has been shaped by tragedy, responded to her son's hesitation with a thematically significant yet often misunderstood rhetorical question --"Is there still a place for Emily Dickinson these days?" -- one that reveals a typical/high school textbook image of one of the most popularized/popular poets in USA and around the world, Emily Dickinson, a reclusive/private poet who immersed herself in the beauty of nature with simple possessions and basic needs and search for life’s true meaning to herself.
"In fact, Emily Dickinson’s writing life peaked during the Civil War (perhaps half her poems were drafted in the years 1861-65), though her poetry often shows little relation to the cataclysmic event of the American nineteenth century. As was her wont, Dickinson tended to "write about the Civil War via metaphor," but she also contributed poems to a U.S. Sanitary Commission publication, her small, personal, contribution to the Union war effort." (Cecily Nelson Zander, "The Civil War in Surprising Places: Emily Dickinson’s Poetry and the Pop Culture Delights of Dickinson")
In 1863 as the Civil War raged, she wrote the following poem, one, unlike most of her poems, that directly discusses "themes of guilt, battlefield death, and the sacrifice of those who went South to fight for the Union cause during the conflict."
“It Feels A Shame To Be Alive”
It feels a shame to be Alive—
When Men so brave—are dead—
One envies the Distinguished Dust—
Permitted—such a Head—
The Stone—that tells defending Whom
This Spartan put away
What little of Him we—possessed
In Pawn for Liberty—
The price is great—Sublimely paid—
Do we deserve—a Thing—
That lives—like Dollars—must be piled
Before we may obtain?
Are we that wait—sufficient worth—
That such Enormous Pearl
As life—dissolved be—for Us—
In Battle’s—horrid Bowl?
It may be—a Renown to live—
I think the Man who die—
Those unsustained—Saviors—
Present Divinity—
Another two examples about the physical violence of war are “The name–of it–is 'Autumn'” and “My Life–A Loaded Gun.” For more, see Emily Dickinson and Violent Poetry: Women, Writing, and War
The mis/understadning of Emily Dickinson's poetry reminds me of the following penetrating remark:
People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.
-- Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird
Back to the conversation between Yiyun Li's son, Vincent, and his classmate, about the question regarding the role/goal of writing poetry:
...What I don’t understand,” the girl said, “is why can’t we write about flowers anymore.”
“Of course we can,” Vincent said. “But ...”
In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, "poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty."
-- Seamus Heaney, an Irish poet, playwright and translator who received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature.
For example, I wrote the following haiku in response to the siege of Gaza:
running out of water
running out of life:
Gaza in smoky darkness
NeverEnding Story, October 20, 2023
It alludes to the following "classical[nature] haiku"
lily:
out of the water …
out of itself
Selected Haiku, 1989
Nick Virgilio
(FYI: Nick Virgilio also wrote a lot of "'blood-less yet gory, i.e., less popular/less known haiku," about the Vietnam War, such as one of my favourites about the "man-nature" relationship:
deep in rank grass,
through a bullet-riddled helmet:
an unknown flower)
To conclude today's post, I would like to share with you the following tanka written in response to Associated Press, Nov. 14: "Tens of thousands of supporters of Israel rally in Washington, crying "never again"
This Brave New World, CVII
a wavy sea
of American flags mixed
with Israeli flags ...
at the corner an old man cries
Never Again for everyone
FYI: This is the sequel to the concluding tanka below of my tanka sequence, "Covering the War," for Edward Said, author of Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World
Never Again
a promise, a slogan,
a bumper sticker ...
now a rallying cry
for more chaos and carnage
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