{"id":22926,"date":"2017-04-14T08:00:32","date_gmt":"2017-04-14T15:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=22926"},"modified":"2017-04-09T20:01:31","modified_gmt":"2017-04-10T03:01:31","slug":"the-ethics-of-bearing-witness-in-poetry-to-violence-and-trauma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=22926","title":{"rendered":"The Ethics of Bearing Witness in Poetry to Violence and Trauma"},"content":{"rendered":"

The issues raised when one chooses to make literary art out of trauma are complex and, as have issues surrounding trauma in general, they have been getting more and more attention. Over at the Ploughshares blog<\/a>, for example,\u00a0Tracy Strauss has a series well worth reading called\u00a0Writing Trauma: Notes of Transcendence.<\/a>\u00a0On October 15th, at the\u00a0Western Maryland Independent Literary Conference in Frostburg, MD, I\u00a0had a chance to offer\u00a0some remarks\u00a0on the topic as part of a panel called “After Violence: The Poetics of Trauma and Resistance.” I’d like to share them with you here. (I also urge you to check out the three wonderful poets who were on the panel with me,\u00a0Margot Taft Sever<\/a>, Ellen Kombiyil<\/a>, and Susana H. Case.<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Thirty or so years ago, when I was a graduate student at Syracuse University, a common topic of discussion among poets was what it meant to write \u201cpolitical poetry.\u201d Hayden Carruth<\/a>, one of my teachers, using the word relevant<\/i> instead of political,<\/i> wrote in an essay that \u201cpoets are failing more and more in the substance of their work. I mean they do not write relevant poems\u2026.I\u2019ve \u2018taught\u2019 three poetry workshops [since becoming a professor late in my life and] not one student has turned in a poem that deals either directly or indirectly with the impending end of the world\u2026in nuclear war.\u201d (\u201cA Few Thought Following Professor Clausen\u2019s Essay,\u201d in Effluences from the Sacred Cave<\/a>,<\/i> pg. 154)<\/p>\n

Carruth\u2019s assertion that poets ought <\/i>to be writing \u201crelevant\u201d poetry, and his implication that we are responsible and accountable when we don\u2019t, resonated with me. Not two years earlier, at Stony Brook University, in the very first poetry workshop I ever took, June Jordan<\/a> had said much the same thing, though in very different terms. \u201cYou write,\u201d she once told me in her office, \u201cbecause you have something to say, and you write poetry because you want the person you\u2019re saying it to to be changed by what they hear. The change might be big or small, something of which they are conscious or completely unaware, but if that change isn\u2019t what you\u2019re after, why bother turning what you want to say into a poem? You could summarize it for them much more easily.\u201d<\/p>\n

The thing that I have to say, that motivates me to write \u201crelevant poetry,\u201d emerges from my experience as a survivor of childhood sexual violence and how being a survivor has shaped the way I choose to live in the world. To put it in different terms, my poems explore what that experience feels like, and here\u2019s the paradox: While sexual violence is anything but beautiful, a poem is, by definition, a beautiful thing made of words. To make a poem that somehow contains sexual violence, then, will inevitably be to falsify, or at least misrepresent, not only the violence itself, but also the victim\u2019s experience of it, by turning it into something it is not:\u00a0beautiful.<\/p>\n

When I say beautiful<\/i>, <\/i>of course, I am not talking about loveliness,<\/em> the simple, straightforward beauty of surfaces, but rather about the beauty that puts us in touch with the full depth of what it means to be human, that does not force us to choose between loveliness and ugliness, or between the impulses towards compassion and dehumanization, but allows us to experience them as they always already exist within us, and in the world around us.<\/p>\n

That state of simultaneity is, in large measure, where the misrepresentation I am talking about lies, because there is nothing simultaneous about being violated, or about the shame that follows it, or about the fact of survival, or about not surviving.<\/p>\n

To write what Carruth\u00a0called\u00a0relevant poems, then\u2014whatever the subject of relevance may be\u2014is to take responsibility for this misrepresentation, and to hold ourselves accountable to our readers for the fact that we do it. It\u2019s what makes writing that kind of poetry\u00a0the difficult and necessary undertaking that it is.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m going to read a poem of mine that I think illustrates what I\u2019m talking about here. It\u2019s called \u201cBecause I Can’t Not Know What He Saw\u201d (published, in an earlier version, as “The Rape of Nanking” in Unlikely Stories Mark V<\/a>). The subtitle refers to the fact that one detail in the poem, the sword in particular, diverges from what the actual photograph depicts, though I did not realize I had misremembered the image until I went back to check the page on which the image appears. I chose not to \u201ccorrect\u201d the poem because, at least for those who might choose to\u00a0see\u00a0the picture\u00a0for themselves,\u00a0I wanted the act of misremembering to be part of what the poem is about.<\/p>\n

Because I Can\u2019t Not Know What He Saw<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u2014remembering a photograph from Iris Chang\u2019s\u00a0<\/i>The Rape of Nanking<\/p>\n

This month, Harper\u2019s<\/i> \u201cReadings\u201d brings
\nfrom the people of Boro in eastern India
\na list of verbs impossible in English:
\nkhonsay,<\/i> to pick an object up with care;
\ndasa,<\/i> not to place a fishing instrument;
\nasusu,<\/i> to feel unknown in a new place.
\nSome sound like Yiddish curses:
\n\u201cYou should ur,\u201d<\/i> dig soil like a swine,
\nor \u201cMay your children gobray,\u201d<\/i>
\nfall in a well unknowingly.<\/p>\n

I want that kind of verb
\nfor the way whoever-it-was
\npulled the woman\u2019s robe
\nup over her head,<\/p>\n

for how the men
\nthe man who did this to her
\nforced to watch\u2014brother,
\nfather, husband, son,
\nneighbor\u2014for how each of them
\ninvades my sleep;<\/p>\n

and for the way I felt
\nwhen I first saw it,
\nwhat I feel now
\nremembering it,
\nthe way I kept taking Iris Chang\u2019s
\nThe Rape of Nanking<\/i> off the shelf
\nand crouching in the corner
\nof Borders\u2019 lower level
\nto stare, and to stare\u2014
\nfor that too I want a verb;<\/p>\n

and I want a verb as well,
\nand it\u2019s not rape,
\nthough certainly he raped her,
\nfor the sword hilt rising
\nfrom between her parted thighs,
\nand for the way I hate myself
\nfor hoping\u00a0she was already dead
\nwhen he buried his blade in her.<\/p>\n

Cross-posted<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The issues raised when one chooses to make literary art out of trauma are complex and, as have issues surrounding trauma in general, they have been getting more and more attention. Over at the Ploughshares blog, for example,\u00a0Tracy Strauss has … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[136],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22926","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22926","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22926"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22926\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22928,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22926\/revisions\/22928"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22926"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22926"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22926"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}