POETRY AND REVOLUTION

                              In numerous
                              lectures and writings on Investigative Poetry
                              I've urged poets
                                                   to write history
The goal, as I wrote in Investigative Poetry, is "an era of investigative
poesy wherein one can be controversial, radical, and not have the
civilization rise up to smite down the bard."

I was even so bold as to write that "poetry, to go forward, in my view, has
to begin a voyage into the description of historical reality."

Charles Olson, of course
had pointed out how difficult
it is to be BOTH an historian
AND a poet

I've also urged in works
such as "The Z-D Generation"
that poets investigate
the state of the military
and the military state
and the plots of the right

to make things more sharing and more benign

I'm going to suggest
in this talk

that poets become revolutionaries

I don't mean
revolutionaries in
computerized hieroglyphic verse

but what I would call
          Leftist Multi-Century Activists
          that's correct: Leftists--
          Socialist Revolutionaries

                    or
                    write poems
                                   at least now and then
                            throughout a career
                    with revolution
                                    as a theme

A career is a 60 year event
Why not study revolution
for a few decades
as a Scholar-Bard-Activist?

At the end of my investigative poem
"Melville's Father"
(in Hymn to the Rebel Cafe)
I wrote:

No one
          no group
lives long enough
to structure
          a system
to ease the pain
                              of living.

The cycles of life
being 80 years
let's say--

makes revolution
in my opinion
a 500 year process

That'll be fine for America
for it often takes centuries
to make a civilization
more benign

The Rose is
carried through
history in
many ways

The Silent Work
of Silent Revolutionaries
also carries the Rose

William Blake
in the right wing oppression
after the French revolution

Sappho
Archilochus
Dickinson

whisper in the time-track
long after tyrants and spies are dust

It's true that there have been untold ghastly wheelbarrows
of leftist doggeral
foisted into ink

but how many more ghastly wheelbarrows
of bitter, tight-lipped
crypto- and not-so-crypto
rightist drivel
have been shoveled into print--

too often and so blatant we
don't even recognize the genre?

In our own little era
millions of confessional poems
have been composed

billions of erotic lyrics

trillions describing
the conditions
of the poet's
personal plight

quadrillions
on the interplay
of light and leaves

Why not make
revolution a big theme
in your work?

It can join
the philosophic ode
the confessional ode
the difficult-to-decipher dithyramb
the love lyric
the disgust lyric
the stroll poem
the room description poem
in the Field of Bardic Content

Why not?

The World of Text

We need to bring revolution
to the textbooks
and to education

It's not easy
          for my generation,
                           it seems to me,
                                              lost the battle of the textbook

& just as many great poets
are left from the textbooks
for reasons of culture

and class
so revolution
is being erased from the digital dream

If it's true that "form is nothing more than
an extention of content,"

then the poetry of revolution
must have its form
in the weave of eternity,

& that revolution, as a genre,
has a

rightful place in poem and text

It's true
that poetry
is vastly more complex
than the usual slogans of rev

but it's time
to plant the seeds

We are the
rose-growers
and the plow-bards
of revolution

I have written about it
in my poetry:

Every few years
1789
1848

Every few years

1871
1905

Every few years

1917 &
1968 too

the masses
have tried

to bring a new
                              economic
                    order to their
                                                  throes

It's inevitable

Let's say
around 2008
those who work for
the masses
make their move
to bring about
a new economic order
based on true sharing

It's our duty
to set the soil
to prepare the day
so that it happens
really happens this time

and lasts.

We pray that it
will be nonviolent

but call it
what it is:

Revolution.

The creation
of institutions
of freedom and classless sharing
that last

The first step, it seems to me,
and it may take centuries
will be to create a Social Democracy
in the USA

so that Europe
can swing to
Democratic Left of that

For in a way
the attacks from the American right
are really against the European Center.

Poets are always thieves
They steal time
from eternity's flow
for their work

In a revolution
so many things are stolen

and Silence
is hard to find
for the work
of verse.

It's possible,
                              as everybody knows,
                                                  to write great great poetry
that takes no risks
                                                  of having the military-industrial bootheels
                                                  grinding your face

It's possible, for instance,
                                       to be a pilot fish among painters
or
          spend all day reading
                                                  specialized learn�d colloquy
                                                                                          on internet chat lines

One vat of quicksand
is knowledge of
and shame for
the cruelty of the human species--

left, right and center.

Kenneth Rexroth turned his back
on American politics
and refused to vote

On Dec. 2, 1851
Napoleon's nephew
                    then president of France
made himself emperor
and intellectuals
all over France
                              felt revulsion

It caused Baudelaire
to vow
                    "to remain
                              from now on
                      aloof from all
                                                  human politics."

10.

Love of Place

It's important
to many bards
to find a home

In a poem called "Spiritual Topography"
I said

Let the
whirls of your brain
fit in with
the contours
of the ground you love

for
when the curves
of your spirit
flow out to embrace
the curves of the land

That's
love
That's
habitat
That's
the kissing
of landforms
with your soul.

There is this thing
called love of land
love of community
and even love of nation

Don't let them
                    drive you away
                                        from love of your nation
                                        even if you're a revolutionary

Don't let them
isolate you

11.

It's the answer:
Until we have a revolution
a geniune revolution

we will be quailing in the Time-Track

Beatniks are not going to
                                                  get you National Health Care
A.R. Ammons
                                        is not going to get your National Health Care
Dana Gioia & the New Formalists
                                                                      are not going to get you
                                                                                N.H.C.

The MLA is not going to get you N.HC.

The Democrats are not going to get you N.H.C.

A believable climate of Revolution is
going to get your National Health Care

12.

One Capital B Big Problem
is the government agent

Read E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class
for that

So, as soon as we become real creators of change
with results felt by big corporations
government agents become a problem.

Being a revolutionary, if the right prevails
will prevent tenure

will prevent appointments
                                                         to illustrious commissions
                                                         on the interface of
                                                         computer stores and verse

The right
           for fifteen years or so
                                          has had a motto,
                                                            "Defund the Left,"

so I say it's time
for "Defund the Right!"

13.

And you can't rely
on streams of electrons and
light beams
to make your life less painful

I used to think there
would be an Electronic Achaea

and that a group of
poets
with a vision of sharing

could send out their words
on that worldwide Electronic Achaea

but now I know that
the right will choke
Achaea

and prevent its bardic use
for revolution

The Internet is not the revolution
E-mail is not the revolution
Point and click is not the revolution
The click of centuries is revolution

14.

Gradualism

Untold millions think
that gradualism will
twist the species dot by dot into a paradise.

People fear that urging revolution
can make something
horrible and concentration campish happen.
They say that revolution
gives men a chance to slaughter

Doing nothing
Letting the mills
          of laissez-faire capitalism grind their gore
                                        will bring more pain and slaughter
                                                                                          than revolution ever will

Horrible happens.
That's it. More horrible will happen
in quietism and gradualism
than ever will occur
in a multi-century urge of revolution

15.

The Unpleasantness of Rev

One big complaint
              is that psychopaths
                    and spiritual parasites
                                    bury their problems
                                                  in mass movements

and devour a revolution
within.

It's a great pain
for instance
to be "trapped" in an action cell
with shiny eyed crazy people.

Right wing mockery
is rising again
to spittle a bard

and one problem
          with a speed-driven culture
                                        is that a proposal more than
                                                                      fifteen years old
                                                                                          is the proposal of a fogey

16.

In eras long gone,
                    such as late-19th century Russia,
                    writers could be demonized
                    for not being "useful" enough
                    not enough on the line
                                                               for social change

& for not overtly opposing
the demons of the
police state.

A writer is never right enough
for the right
nor left enough for the left

17.

Mapping

A good map
is Revolution's best friend

and of course
a map can have
the dimension of time

A career in verse
is best served by a sixty-year map

My generation
lost courage
at the barricades

We didn't
create institutions
while we

forged what
we thought was Newness

Revolution
does not have to bring chaos

Some bards
need an orderly zen zone
in which to write

So the work of revolution
I am proposing
will have zen zones
and forgiveness

We'll admit mistakes
and laugh about it

We'll not be
overly vindictive
Nor hound our opponents
(except for "Defund the Right")

We'll be Scholar-Bard-Activists
We'll USE our research,
                    not
                    allow
                    it
                    to
                    be
                    mired
                    in
what Carlyle called
                    the
                    dry-as-dusts

18.

City and Country

Just as the salvation of the country and wild places
is inextricably tied
to the salvation of the city

so revolution
                    is inextricably
                                        tied to the creation of
                                                            a world of peace

and we have to let some things alone
and resist the temptation to
micro-manage Utopia--

What is content?
I have written, in Investigative Poetry,
that "the content of history will be poetry."

I still believe that.

I also believe
that the search for Ways that remain as Ways
is the Way

The pulses of form and content
are pulses
of eternity

& the drive for freedom, having a say,
and the sharing of wealth
are woven
into those same pulses.

You can deny the numinal
You can deny the rational
But America, Europe, Russia, China
and all the lands
on this globe and in space
will not
be able to deny
the pulse of revolution

because it is always there.

          --Edward Sanders
   Written for the Symposium
On Content at the Poetry Project
       St. Mark's Church, NYC
                 May 2, 1996