The University of the Imprisoned

There is a kind of writer appearing with greater and greater frequency among us who witnesses the crimes of his government against himself and his countrymen....His is the university of the imprisoned, the tortured, the disfigured, and the doleful authority for the truth of his work is usually his own body.

- E.L. Doctorow

From time to time, debate arises in First World poetic circles as to whether "politics" is a fitting subject for poetry. The absurdity of cordoning off parts of human experience, labeling them "political," and discouraging poets from writing about them is made refreshingly clear in these four collections. Who would dare tell a writer like Alicia Partnoy, disappeared by the Argentine military, or Luis J. Rodríguez, raised in poverty in Watts, not to touch on "politics" in their poems?

"Political" is often a label created by critics to distance themselves from realities they aren't immediately affected by and would rather not think about. Thus it is considered acceptable for a poet to write about a child down the street killed by an abusive parent, but "political" if the same poet writes about a child in El Salvador killed by the death squads.

Writers like Rodríguez and Partnoy make clear that the terms "personal" and "political" become meaningless once we look beyond a small circle of North American poets. Rather than branding poets who describe injustice "political," many critics have begun to call these writers what they are: witnesses.

Ezra Pound once defined good art as "art that bears true witness." Of course, it takes more than accurate witness to make a poem leap off the page and zing through one's heart, to create a song people yearn to hear over and over and teach their grandchildren. But witness is a powerful beginning for song, and the poets in these collections are witnesses from the Americas with strong words on their tongues.

CAROLYN FORCHÉ'S Against Forgetting collects the work of 143 poets who, in Forché's words, "endured conditions of historical and social extremity during the 20th century." Forché began collecting the work of poets like Anna Ahkmatova, whose "Requiem" describes Stalin's repression, and Robert Desnos, a French resistance fighter, after her own poetry about El Salvador (The Country Between Us) was criticized as "too political." A creative writing teacher, Forché also found herself endlessly xeroxing such works for her students, and decided an anthology was needed.

The anthology she has assembled is breathtaking in its scope of countries and social events represented. Forché divides the poets by the social upheavals that affected them, beginning with the Armenian genocide and moving through the poetry of World War I, the Spanish Civil War, World War II and repression in the Soviet Union, Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, South Africa, and China. The work also includes sections on civil rights in the United States and the Vietnam War.

There are hundreds of poets who couldn't be fit into the volume, of course, but Forché has cast her net wide and brings her reader poets most North Americans would not otherwise have access to, from the Armenian Siamanto who describes how his people were slaughtered, to Miklos Radnoti, a Hungarian killed in World War II, whose poems were buried in a mass grave and later found by his wife.

Out of 143 poets in Against Forgetting, only 21 are women. This is partly explainable by the fact that many periods of social violence are defined by wars (in which women participate less formally) and partly because in some cultures women's voices don't get into print. But I can't help wondering why women, particularly women of color, are absent from the section on "The Struggle for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in the U.S." (of the 10 poets in this section, only one--white poet Muriel Rukeyser--is female).

Why was a poet like Gwendolyn Brooks, who has been touched by and written against racism for 45 years, kept out of this section in favor of poets like Rukeyser and Galway Kinnell? And why were no feminist poets included, as if the struggle for women's rights played no part in the social witness of this country?

Even recognizing this, Forché's anthology is moving and essential. Against Forgetting should, as Forché states in her introduction, chip away at Western culture's "reliance on oblivion," our tendency to cope with sins like genocide by forgetting them.

SOCIAL VIOLENCE, Forché believes, leaves its mark on a poet's language no matter what that poet writes about thereafter. Alicia Partnoy is a poet who could test this theory. In 1977, as a college student, Partnoy was "disappeared" by the Argentine military. She spent three-and-a-half months in a secret concentration camp (described in her memoir The Little School), then two years as a political prisoner before being exiled to the United States. Partnoy's poems have been published sporadically and set to music by Sweet Honey in the Rock, but Revenge of the Apple is her first published collection. In The Little School, she positioned herself as the rare survivor speaking for the many desaparecidas who were killed. The poems in Revenge are more personal. Some were written in prison in Argentina, others describe the pain of exile (including four moving poems about her brother's suicide while she was imprisoned). Many more are poems of defiance that witness to Latin American lives crushed by violence, such as Rodrigo Rojas, a teen-ager burned to death in Chile.

Like The Little School, Partnoy's poems are earthy, understated, and spiked with humor. Her most powerful poems weave abstractions and earthy images (sun and salt are common) into a crescendo of lyrical defiance, as in the poem to Rojas:

From the Future your life greets us
and mercilessly we cock the trigger of conscience
for it is time to collect all that is owed us:
the salt in our wounds, your death, the burning
heart of dawn, and the innocence

or have the pointed simplicity of fables:

I am talking to you about poetry
and you say
when do we eat
The worst of it is
I'm hungry too.

Partnoy's poetry is at its most searing when she reads it out loud, with the dignity and emotion of one who has survived and will tell. This bilingual collection is a powerful echo of her voice.

Luis J. Rodríguez witnesses to pain closer to home. Rodríguez, author of the autobiography Always Running (see "At the Border of Soul and Body," by Aaron Gallegos, June 1993) and once an LA gang member, also "disappeared" within the U.S. criminal justice system: After a 1970 march protesting the high number of Spanish-speaking casualties in Vietnam, police held him and two other teen-agers unofficially for five days, as Rodríguez recounts in the poem "The Twenty-Ninth."

Actually "The Twenty-Ninth," like several other pieces in The Concrete River, seems more prose reportage than poetry, but it's so fascinating the reader doesn't care what it is. Rodríguez's poetry reminds me of what I once heard said about Sonia Sanchez's work; it's the life itself that gives power to the writing.

Rodríguez is a lyrical voice of survival from the "inner city" we read endless editorials about these days. His collection loosely traces his life, from his childhood in Watts and East LA (evictions, street scenes, family love) to his years of gang life and beatings from cops, to his early marriage and struggle to support two children while working in a steel mill. Everywhere Rodríguez has been, he's had his eyes wide open, and he has especially learned to sing of factories:

Oh sing me a bucket shop blues
under an accordion's spell
with blood notes cutting through the black air
for the working life, for the rotating shifts,
for the day's diminishment and rebirth.

and the people who work in them:

they come to dance
and forget
the pounding hum
of an assembly line
while the boss' grating throat
tells everyone to go back to work
over the moans of a woman
whose finger dangles
in a glove.

Rodríguez's poetry can break beautifully into unexpected surrealism or witness to hard moments with terrifying simplicity. Some of his poems seem more witness than poetry; they tell, but do not sing in a way that makes us remember. Editing would have made The Concrete River a stronger collection. Yet even Rodríguez's less well-crafted witnesses are hard to look away from.

IN HAULING UP The Morning, 56 writers witness to us from within U.S. prisons. These writers are political activists--Puerto Rican nationalists, former Black Panthers, MOVE members, and many more--most imprisoned on politically related charges. Many have life sentences, many more have been in prison for decades, consistently denied parole.

This anthology channels the voices of people imprisoned for politics, a group the U.S. government will not admit exists. As co-editor Tim Blunk writes, "We are disappeared from the American consciousness....The seams of a fictionalized past and a pacified future are drawn together around us and stapled with iron bars. But...we dream. We create."

Hauling Up the Morning (the title is taken from a letter sent by imprisoned Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton to Turkish prison poet Nazim Hikmet) contains prose and artwork as well as poetry. Some of the poetry is propagandistic, but much of it reveals with haunting simplicity the terrors, loneliness, and solidarity of years in prison--

The fence--chainlink with six barbed strands above--
is always at my right shoulder
...Tonight I long to lean upon it,
hook my fingers into the links,
lay my cheek against cold wire
and feel the wind bathe me
as it pours through.
But the lights would reveal me;
the cameras would report me;
and loudspeakers would summon me
(Katya Komisaruk, imprisoned for nuclear protest)--

or the realities of living as a radical activist, as in Ray Luc Levasseur's poem to his grandmother--

she died while i was underground
the fbi hangin from trees
at catholic cemetery
cause they knew i was close
to her

It is striking how many poems are written to fellow activists and how many are written to children. Particularly haunting is a poem Ethel Rosenberg wrote for her sons the year she was executed. David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin, a husband and wife incarcerated since 1981 with a son on the outside, have written creative children's literature in prison.

With the U.S. prison population increasing by 150 percent since 1970, our prisons are becoming more and more the place that silences the very witnesses whose testimony we need. Hauling Up the Morning brings us songs the powerful do not want us to hear.

There is another debate in the poetry world: Can poetry affect social change? The English poet Auden declared "poetry makes nothing happen"--yet American poet Lucille Clifton believes LA cops could not have beaten Rodney King so savagely if they had been readers of poetry.

These collections make no claims for what poetry can or cannot do, nor do they need to. Poems will always be one way humans create beauty and cry out against pain, and each cry has immeasurable power, whether it turns the hearts of hundreds or only strengthens the heart of the crier. As Alicia Partnoy says, "poetry is [my] last refuge."

Naomi Thiers was a free-lance writer and poet living in Alexandria, Virginia, and author of Only the Raw Hands Are Heaven (Washington Writers' Publishing House) when this article appeared.