I don’t know what to make of Ron Ron Silliman’s take on Eliot Weinberger’s newspaper piece What I Heard About Iraq (which I read and recommended a few days ago on my other blog).
It had never occurred to me that anyone would mistake Weinberger’s writing as poetry, despite (or perhaps because of) his position as a poetry critic. The piece is a litany… more properly, it shares a rhetorical device with a litany. It doesn’t pretend at analysis, it doesn’t invite dialogue. It’s not a poem, nor mean to be a prose poem. It’s the ugly, naked, nauseating facts. I suspect Ron is onto something when he writes that:
But maybe it’s not a poem – that really I think must be a judgment call – perhaps it’s just a list, like a Pharaoh’s list of items with which to be entombed, or fields to be planted. Possibly it is the very absence of the poetic – which in this case would mean analysis – that Weinberger wants us to feel here.
None of this perturbed me. In fact, I found the indecisiveness of Ron’s post compelling… it’s not very often that he brooks any dissent, much less characterizes his own position as anything less than the sole proper analysis of a problem he’s sure he’s completely figured out.
Ginsberg’s “Wichita Vortex Sutra” is an interesting contrast. Ginsberg’s poem is full of rhetorical questions (direct and indirect) inviting the reader to ponder alternatives and answers:
Truth breaks through!
How big is the prick of the President?
How big is Cardinal Vietnam?
How little the prince of the FBI, unmarried all these years!
How big are all the Public Figures?
What kind of flesh hangs, hidden behind their Images?
Weinberger’s piece is a flat recitation that relies on the brute force of the facts for its weight and effectiveness. It doesn’t give the reader a place to go, and sometimes– particularly in the political arena where all sense of the human tragedy tends to get lost in a tempest of rheotric and spin– that’s a good thing. Maybe, in this kind of circumstance, even better than a poem, whose artistic execution detracts from our ability to just silently see something for what it is, the horror wholly in itself.
