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Review
The
Luminous Burden of Conscience
by Jacqueline
Marcus
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Poetry Review:
J.P. Dancing Bear’s Conflicted Light
(Salmon Press; 12.00Eur;
Paperback; 86 pages; March 2008)
Introduction
...
how the hated door banged shut against
an old woman howling like an animal. --Anna Akhmatova
Given
the turbulent and dark politics of our times, I welcome J.P. Dancing Bear’s new collected poems,
Conflicted Light, like a
quiet hunger for truth that only good poetry can provide in
original and startling ways.
I
have selected certain political poems from this collection that appeal to my
conscience, but J.P. Dancing Bear’s subjects are wide and diverse in
the sense that he is attentive to the paradoxes of life, a light that is
often conflicted with material and spiritual opposites.
As Natasha Sajé wrote, "Using myth, politics, nature, and art, J.P. Dancing
Bear asks questions that can only asked through poetry. These
accomplished and various poems feature sure-handed lines and vivid images."
Thus
my intention in this review is to provide a political and cultural
background for context without giving a line by line explication of the
poems I've selected. I leave that challenge to the reader. I don't
want to give the impression that J.P. Dancing Bear's book is a political
critique of the Bush administration. But I've a special preference for the
poems that address the unconscionable policies that have been troubling to
most Americans viz. the illegal invasion of Iraq, the global warming crisis
and the corporate ownership of our media networks and government.
However, there are many poems in this book that have nothing to do with
politics.
There is a long literary
tradition of poets who’ve protested injustices from insufferable conditions
of the poor to the exploits of war. So political poetry is nothing
new, but it’s far more difficult to write poems of conscience than one would
think. In the end, political poems should meet the expected critical
standards or they won’t be considered more than meaningful statements of protest.
Dancing Bear’s poems do indeed
meet the standard of high poetry: those elements, form and content, natural
imagery, irony, ambiguity, music, lyrical and imaginary lines that strike
that special chord within the mind and heart—are all present in these
illuminating poems.
For example, this poem,
“Auricle”, which was chosen as a runner up in the 2005 Mississippi Review
Prize and reprinted in Good Times Weekly 2006, needs no introduction
or explanation. It’s best to let the poem speak for itself:
Auricle
I heard the humming
engine
of a heart smaller than an anvil;
in the hummingbird’s forest
my ear was mistaken for a flower—
I should be complimented
for the brief moment before
the taste of my ear canal
will forever mark the thin tongue.
The hunger that was whispered
to me, woke me from a dream:
I was the drum in the
redwoods,
the tongue of green prophecies,
the anvil of summer hunger,
awakened to the canopy songs
that had lain in the linens of leaves
I called my stomach. Now I hear
the hammer’s rumor of sparks
on the anvil and can taste fear.
Now I realize I worked for years
in the coded silence of a paper heart.
Perhaps the darkest
democratic crisis and tragedy of our times is the massive corporate
indoctrination to become merely consumers instead of thinking,
questioning and sensible individuals. When a government represents the
interests of corporate profits at the expense of public safety, education
and individual liberty, environmentally and economically speaking, that is
called Corporate Fascism. And that is exactly the situation we are facing
in America. The Iraq war, for example, was marketed to Americans like a
corporate advertisement, which shouldn’t surprise us because it’s a war
waged primarily for American oil companies and weapon contractors.
And then there is the
strange marriage between corporate oil, weapon and coal stock-holders and
conservative mega-churches, televised evangelists who’ve turned the Dove of
Peace into a Hawk of Bigotry, a CEO with a M16, which the Republican Party
patronizes by broadcasting prejudices, through the corporate media, against
immigrants, gays and lesbians, Middle Eastern people and liberals that are
still referred to in the South as “Commies”.
Sadly, this form of human
exploitation is an old story in our history. As Barack Obama points out in
his book,
The Audacity of Hope, “For almost a century…erudite men
like Senator Richard B. Russell of Georgia…used the filibuster to choke off
any and every piece of civil rights legislation before the Senate, whether
voting rights bills, or fair employment bills, or anti-lynching
bills…Southern senators had succeeded in perpetuating black subjugation in
ways that mere violence never could...For many blacks in the South, the
filibuster had snuffed out hope.” (p.81).
Today, the corporate
model of the good, white American Christian must be willing to hate anyone
who is different from him/herself, (keep people divided and thereby
distracted from seeing the truth) and then go happily off to Wal-Mart to buy
more stuff. Watch TV, play video games, eat at McDonald’s, but do not,
under any circumstances, take up with a liberal education in Humanities! Oh
no, that would be the ultimate sin!
Jesus in
America
He stands on the corner
of Market Street
with hands agape at his sides.
each tear from his eye reflects
the city’s starvation.
He opens his doors, the robes
of his church,
to reveal the neon heart
blinking through its thorns;
he looks up the huge golden arcs
of fast food reaching for heaven
from across the street.
He is the bun of God,
the cola of deliverance.
People had to understand you could be
arrested for nothing.
--Akhmatova 1933-38
In the following poem,
we see the poet as a witness to the ugly side of patriotism a year or two
after the September 11th attack, a blind patriotism of fear and
revenge that mirrored a Stalin-like censorship where “Everything is going
gray. / All greens, all browns / turning gray.” President Bush provoked the
worst kind of black passions and fears. He stirred up emotions and used the
bully pulpit like a poker in a fire; he did and said nothing to lift us to a
higher ideal of courage. One expects that sort of barbaric tactics from a
street gang leader, but not from the President of the United States.
At the same time, most
Americans were entirely clueless about the sudden transformation that
essentially replaced our civil liberties with Police State control and
lock-down legislation paraded under Orwellian titles like The Patriot Act.
The Bush administration deliberately ratcheted up the fear, with the help of
the corporate media, to make everyone suspicious. And indeed, under the new
Homeland Security laws, every American citizen became a suspect.
And yet, Americans
were/are clueless because according to the
National Assessment of Adult Literacy, 11 million Americans are illiterate.
Most high-school educated Americans have never even heard of the Bill of
Rights or were never taught the value of our inalienable
rights, the
foundation of our democratic freedom. Most Americans believe that freedom
has something to do with being free consumers, free to choose between
McDonald’s and Wendy’s, Shell and Chevron, Toyota and Ford, American Idol
and Desperate Housewives. The report concluded that one in 20
American adults lack the literacy skills to perform everyday tasks. In 2003,
college proficiency tests revealed that 31 percent of college graduates have
a difficult time comprehending classic novels. TV and computerized
entertainment have replaced books and reading. As a result, we’re paying a
high price as other countries surpass us at all levels of higher learning.
After the Dawn
of the Patriot Act
All during the sun’s
Olympic willful triumphant arc
I watched banners and flags rise. I thought a parade
had commenced down Main Street, but the music was
a hiving hum and rumble of tanks. A low chant
of revenge hung in the air like bats blackening at dusk
ready to cover the moon. The people closest to me
had been replicated, replaced by mannequins with echo
chambers in their chests. They became megaphone-
mouthpieces of marching orders, and of distrust—they
were the new never-blink neighbor in the window,
suspicious and on the phone to police about everything
they thought was out place in my yard. Our days
were filled with small chatter of American Idol
and Desperate Housewives. At night I lit a thin candle
in remembrance; in quiet light I wrote letters to missing
friends gone on to a place where nothing is read or saved.
Like
many poets over the centuries, J.P. Dancing
Bear is drawn to Greek Mythology for good
reasons. We should all return to the Greeks for guidance on their concept
of Logos, that the spiritual and material are One, that the earth is an
organic, living body inseparable from us and therefore the more we destroy
it, the more we destroy ourselves. The Greeks had a keen awareness of this
organic vision of reality; it was a sacred topic in Greek literature from
Plato to Sophocles: the dangers of excess, hubris, greed, and when men
trampled upon God’s natural laws, it always led to a bad ending.
In our times, the idea
that actions have consequences is either mocked or neglected. Most of
our politicians are arrogant and greedy. If Pericles’ ghost could
appear before Bush and Cheney,
he would haunt them for making the Golden Cow of
power and wealth their only
god. Presumably, Bush wouldn't know Pericles from
Casper, given his lack of historical knowledge. If he did, he'd
remember that Pericles broke Athens with the same
selfish ambitions; the great
shining democratic city on the hill would never again rise after the long,
draining wars with Sparta.
Dancing Bear imagines what it
would be like if some of these legendary Greek
mythological figures became
ordinary people with our daily routines: the agony of Eurydice and Orpheaus’ fragile sensibilities,
“Persephone at the Farmers’ Market”, “Circe Waiting”, “Medusa in
Smallville”, “Ulyssess Takes the A-Train to Calypso’s Apartment” to name a
few titles from this collection.
Eurydice Lost
On the boulevard she
hears a clarion tone
reach into the underworld below her skin, whirl-
wind her senses, morals, a thing not unlike love.
She rolls down the
window and slows her car.
searching for the source, she cannot focus on all
of the tail lights, the wheels, the colored bodies.
He leaves this world one
more pure anonymous note.
Change is slow and it
doesn’t happen easily. But perhaps the Bush administration pushed corporate
greed to such an extreme that we are all desperate to move from the
Industrial Paradigm to the Green Paradigm. Indeed, the Green Movement is
now mainstream America. And the business world smells a profit from the
public’s demand to go Green. Ironically, Arabs are way
ahead of us in this venture. We are what we consume and the outcome
has been deadly during the industrial age: poisons, toxins, chemicals, GMO
farming – all combined on a massive scale is cancerous to the planet and
inevitably to our health.
In his poem, “The
Dandelion as the Wise One on the Mountain” the poet reveals Rachel Carson’s
worst fear: that a silent spring is now upon us.
There was no yellow
murmuring along the long
line of asphalt; no white velvet,
no applause of petals
for the wind, no black bee, no
water to drink, …
He closes with the
following ominous lines:
And what would I tell
a seeker should any come?
It was a bitter drought.
I am the witness, this is
my fact: I am here,
still afraid of fire and flood.
With the demand for
clean air and water came the advent of hybrid vehicles and biodegradable
cleansers made from plant materials instead of harsh chemicals, new housing
construction includes solar and low energy technologies.
Poets
of conscience are not writing from some sort of existential void. They hold
the meaningful belief that we can solve these problems. I’m thinking of
Robert Hass’ new book, Time and Materials, and his profound poetic
meditation on Lucretius, “State of the Planet”. The poem expresses Hass’
conviction that we must experience that special communion with nature, as
Lucretius did, if we are to preserve nature. He encourages his students to
take nature walks, to learn the names of plants,
trees and birds, to feel the sea wind and the bristling colors of the
leaves. The more our kids become addicted to computers and video
games, the less likely they’ll feel the moral imperative to protect our forests and wildlife. Studies have shown that the
more kids experience nature, for intrinsic or recreational value, the
more willing they are to join the Green Movement. They’re waking up to the
oil company’s lie that protecting the environment is bad for the economy.
On the contrary: far more new jobs will be created with green technologies.
I’ll end this review
with these two poems from
J.P. Dancing Bear's Conflicted Light.
This is a Must Read beautiful book of poems well worth your time!
Click the cover of the book at the top to buy it at Salmon Poetry Press.
When We Are
Stewards
We will each pick a wild
species
we pledge our lives to,
learn their movements
and moods, take their name
into our name, keep their calls
within our voices. In winter,
some of us will hibernate,
others will follow migratory paths,
or unearth stashes of food
we’d spent the other season saving:
This is my gift of acorns—
may it last like a grove of oaks.
this is my marsh summer home
I share with you. Welcome
to my den, let our bodies slow
to love. Here is my ancestral
burial ground-may we return
as our animal wards.
About
J.P. Dancing Bear:
You
can purchase Conflicted Light at
www.SalmonPoetry.com
—Jacqueline
Marcus, Editor of ForPoetry
ForPoetry
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