From Reznikoff to Public Enemy (to 44th St.)

Towards the tail end of a party last Saturday night in St. Elmo, I took a walk with Matt Allison. As if following a cue from the air's easy calm, we slipped off the crowded backyard deck where we'd been perched for the last couple hours and started off down the alley at the edge of the yard below. In a couple of minutes we were standing at the corner of Virginia Ave. and 44th Street watching the wind push shadows through the streetlight beam focused beneath our feet.

Distracted by our conversation, I hadn't realized the significance of this intersection until it was upon us. So I had the experience of being flooded all at once by the memories of my last visit there. This was a night two months earlier when Kiko and I witnessed the crash of a Mercury Cab into the garage five feet from where I now stood, the driver shot dead inside. I had relived that crash in my head countless times since, but none of these recollections had occurred here, at the scene of the crime. Now, standing on the same patch of pavement where I stood that night when I first saw the driver's head, holed and still, the memories returned with a new gravity.

As we rounded the corner and continued up the street, I recounted to Matt what I'd seen that night. He was familiar with the details of the crash because of an email I'd sent out the morning after. Still, I felt a need to recount the experience again, as if repeating the objective details we both knew might somehow get across the invisible emotional responses this violent scene had stirred within me. Yet I felt as if I was coming up against a wall. I felt a need to break free from the constraints journalistic reporting put upon my expression of the event. I had felt this same need the morning after the accident when I awoke early, grabbed a pen and paper, and wrote a poem about it. As I reflected later on what I'd written, I began to wonder if it was closer to journalism or poetry. I then wondered if this was a necessary distinction for me to make.

The American poet and translator Philip Metres takes up this question in a recent article published by The Poetry Foundation, From Reznikoff to Public Enemy: The Poet as Journalist, Historian, Agitator. Metres gives us these famous lines from the poem "Aspodel, That Greeny Flower," by William Carlos Williams:

It is difficult/ to get the news from poems/ yet men die miserably every day/ for lack/ of what is found there.

These lines "argue against viewing poetry as reported news," says Metres. "Yet Williams, most notably in Paterson, and many other 20th-century poets (from the Objectivists to hip-hop artists) have sought to marry poetry with the news. Drawing from the ballad tradition and from Modernist poets’ experiments with collage, these poets frequently employed documentary materials to give voice to stories of people and movements that the mass media tend to ignore or misrepresent. In this sense, they echo earlier lines in “Asphodel”: “my heart rouses / thinking to bring you news / of something // that concerns you / and concerns many men.”

According to Metres, "the successful documentary poem withstands the pressure of reality to remain a poem in its own right: its language and form cannot be reduced to an ephemeral poster, ready made for its moment but headed for the recycling bin....While it may be that such poems will not 'stand up' in a court of law, they testify to the often unheard voices of people struggling to survive in the face of unspeakable violence. In the words of C.D. Wright in One Big Self, “I too love. Faces. Hands. The circumference / Of the oaks. I confess. To nothing / You could use. In a court of law.” These poems ride the ambiguity between a nothing and a something that can be used. Their power resides in their negotiation between language of evidence and language of transcendence."

Even before reading Metres on this subject, I had concluded that the disctinction between journalism and poetry is one that I should continue to make. But Metres' studied understanding deepens the discussion. He delineates that line and argues for a sort of resolution that "courts [its ] own collapse, testing a poem’s tensile boundaries in the face of what Wallace Stevens called 'the pressure of reality.'" In further drafts of my poem about the slain Mercury Cab driver, I'll seek a more confident "negotiation between language of evidence and language of transcendence." I imagine it'll be an "ambiguous" divide to "ride," but that's the thrill and the satisfaction of testimony.

To illustrate his definition of documentary poetry, Metres concludes his article with a list of ten poems by the likes of Bob Dylan, Denise Levertov, Charles Reznikoff, and, of course, Public Enemy. Each poem is worth checking out if you haven't already.


<--Charles Reznikoff