Vulnerability

I just posted this in response to a strand on the Buffalo Poetics list, and thought it came out well enough to put here:

The claim that poetry and politics are essentially opposed is a sigh of resignation that wants to make itself universal.

In a recent workshop on "Poetry and the News" (given at Woodland Pattern in Milwaukee), Kerri Sonnenberg put some emphasis on the value of "vulnerability" for poetry that concerns itself with politics. The explicit suggestion was that a political poem is more likely to appeal to/reach a reader if the poet doesn't seem to already know all the answers to her questions (and, therefore, if the poem raises questions-- this said with the caveat that a totally open indecisiveness that anyone can feel comfortable with is NOT what's being recommended). There are a number of appealing things about this notion and the ways it can be expanded.

For one thing, "vulnerability," leaving oneself open to error and to multiple possible solutions (and to more interesting problems than the ones we're handed--and, because of all this, to attack), seems to me to be an essential ethical concept at this time, when we've suffered through almost five years of a relentless emphasis on "security." Support for the all-out "war on terror" has been (especially since 9/11) based largely on an insistence on the right to a total safety; do I need to point out that this safety is factually impossible? That nothing whatsoever can ensure an absolute safety on any scale? In the face of this, the demand for invulnerability amounts to a sociopathic paranoia. This is as true on the interpersonal scale as it is on the global. Letting vulnerability be is one way of removing oneself from power relations whose tendency is to reproduce themselves (indefinitely deferring their own impossible satisfaction), and whose consequences are brutal.

Recently, as part of an ongoing investigation of her book "The Fatalist," I watched a Kelly Writers' House talk given by Lyn Hejinian (archived on the PennSound site), in which she discusses the "open text" explicitly in terms of the contrary desire for closure, again in reference to 9/11. She identifies the need to close the narrative begun by the events of that day as one of the major political crises of our day.

Too often the idea of "openness" in poetry is oversimplified (made vague and broad) and caricatured, mostly by people who want to take a swipe at "LangPo," and can do so by not examining the actual work of those writers, but instead taking one or two sentences from an essay written in the late '70's and riffing on that. In her talk, Hejinian proposes one of many specific kinds and functions of openness (the "rejection of closure" for crucial political reasons) in poetic writing.

Openness and vulnerability. Poetry is a comparatively safe place to practice these. Even a prescriptive political poetry (isn't this an unlikely term? who will have their politics prescribed by a poem? "no-one listens to poetry") can allow its prescriptions to include their own cracks, uncertainties, provisionalities, tactical transiences, the new questions and problems raised by those very solutions offered as prescriptions. Vulnerability means maintaining a space for an active, thinking listening in the face of the insistent beat of rectitude that can only be heard and absorbed.

("no/ one listens to poetry")