How to Write a Poem in a Time of War
And a North American genocide. Slow Read Poetry: Joy Harjo.
Infamously, Theodor Adorno remarked, in 1949, the year of his return to Germany from North American exile, that “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbarism.”
The remark is often misreported as, “To write poetry was impossible after Auschwitz.” Adorno was not so crude. He knew, like Walter Benjamin, that barbarism was the doppelganger of civilization. But such knowledge did not relieve the author of The Authoritarian Personality of his impatience with the poets who kept on writing poetry after Auschwitz and in the times of the new Cold War. Adorno’s aphorism belonged in the grand tradition of pronouncements by philosophers that disregarded the modest empirical facts of history.
However smart his aphorisms, Adorno was not a great guy, as Samantha Rose Hill told me in this interview last year.
He wrote, moreover, morose, abstruse social theory, not poetry for readers to endure times of war. Adorno was a hard taskmaster and a cruel marker. His Minima Moralia was subtitled Reflections from Damaged Life. His remark on poetry did not offer a way out of that pain. It could be reinterpreted as the complaint of a curmudgeonly critic whose damaged life had closed his heart and mind to the emotional outpouring after Auschwitz of poets from Paul Célan to Nelly Sachs.
Nor was the post-1945 generation of European poets the first nor last to write poetry in defiance of a genocide or other great collective trauma. Both history and poetry, it seems, are the voices of survivors.
The poet of my Slow Read poem this week, one of 100 Poems to Read Aloud in Times of War, is one of those voices of survivors in history, poetry, and genocide.
Joy Harjo (1951-) is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, one of the native nations conquered and massacred by that home of the brave, the USA. Her poem might be considered a reply to Adorno and a premonition of my theme for this slow read poetry season. It is titled, How to Write a Poem in a Time of War.
The poem is available in full online here, How to Write a Poem in a Time of War.
Without its original layout (limitations of Substack’s typography), the opening stanza reads:
You can’t begin just anywhere. It’s a wreck.
Shrapnel and the eye
Of a house, a row of houses. There’s a rat scrambling
From light with fleshy trash in its mouth. A baby strapped to its mother’s back
Cut loose. Soldiers crawl the city,
The river, the town, the village,
The bedroom, our kitchen. They eat everything.
Or burn it.
The Muscogee (Creek) Nation, or Este Mvskokvlke, is a sovereign, federally recognized tribe that originated as a confederacy of Muskogean-speaking peoples in the Southeastern part of the North America (in the states currently known as Georgia, Alabama, and Florida).
The Muscogee descended from the Mississippian culture (c. 800–1500 CE), who formed an influential confederacy (the Creek Confederacy) comprising numerous autonomous tribal towns, including the Yuchi, Hitchiti, Alabama, and Natchez. British traders called them “Creek” due to their settlements along Ochese Creek (Ocmulgee River).
I learned more about the Creek or Muscogee during my reading of Grandin, America América and writing on the origins of the Monroe Doctrine in the mistreatment of the unqual native nations of the Western Hemisphere.
Later USA President Andrew Jackson, exploited internal divisions over cultural assimilation and encroaching white settlement during the Red Stick War (1813–1814) and dispossessed the Creek of 23 million acres of land in 1814. In the 1830s, he practised a form of North American ethnic cleansing and death march through the Trail of Tears. Under the Indian Removal Act, the U.S. government forcibly relocated the majority of the Muscogee people from their southeastern homelands to territory in Oklahoma.
These intergenerational traumas of genocidal race wars, and their long lasting cultural consequences are dealt with in Harjo’s poetry.
It explores politics, tradition, remembrance, and how, in the midst of the USA’s endless homeland wars, to write poetry. Her works include In Mad Love and War (1990) which tell stories of violence and the difficulties for indigenous peoples in modern American society, including the murder of an Indian leader and the denial of the living heritage of history. The Woman Who Fell from the Sky (1994) is based on an Iroquois myth about the descent of a female creator. A Map to the Next World: Poetry and Tales (2000), and How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems (2002), weave mythology and folklore polyphonic poetic histories of cultural memory. Poet Adrienne Rich said, “I turn and return to Harjo’s poetry for her breath-taking complex witness and for her world-remaking language: precise, unsentimental, miraculous.” Her poetry saves Muscogee’s experience from the burning archive.
Harjo has also written a memoir Crazy Brave (2012) which plays with the meaning of her last name (“so brave you’re crazy”) and confronts colonization.
“Who are we before and after the encounter” of colonization, Harjo asked.
“And how do we imagine ourselves with an integrity and freshness outside the sludge and despair of destruction? I am seven generations from Monahwee, who, with the rest of the Red Stick contingent, fought Andrew Jackson at The Battle of Horseshoe Bend in what is now known as Alabama. Our tribe was removed unlawfully from our homelands. Seven generations can live under one roof. That sense of time brings history close, within breathing distance. I call it ancestor time. Everything is a living being, even time, even words.”
Please enjoy my full slow audio reading of Joy Harjo, How to Write a Poem in a Time of War, embedded here.
Thanks for reading and listening.
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Jeff