Avocations: On Poetry and Poets

Against the Tide: 1990-91

Against the Tide: 1990-91 In the case of heroes, it is not so much their procedures on the page which are influential as the composite image which has been projected of their conduct. That image, congruent with the reality, features a poet tested by dangerous times. What is demanded is not any great public act of confrontation or submission, but rather a certain self-censorship, an agreement to forge, in the bad sense, the uncreated conscience of a race. Their resistance to this pressure is not initially or intentionally political, but there is of course a spin-off, a ripple effect, to their deviant artistic conduct. It is the refusal by this rearguard minority which exposes to the majority the abjectness of their collapse, as they flee for security into whatever self-deceptions the party line requires of them. And it is because they effect this exposure that the poets become endangered: people are never grateful for being reminded of their moral cowardice. —Seamus Heaney A government is, first of all, a government of words. The British Parliamentary Act of 1774 decreed the abolition of any town meeting without prior written consent from a royal Governor, and its passage was in part a response to a Massachusetts Bay Colony law requiring an annual town meeting. Other weekly or monthly town meetings had been conducted among “freemen” eligible to vote since the birth of the Colonies. It was not simply the cry of “No taxation without representation!” that gave birth to the American Revolution, but also, perhaps equally, Britain’s attempt to censor our newspapers and our political discourse. Were it not for continued support for a stupid, brutal war in El Salvador and U.S.-backed terrorism in Nicaragua, were it not for memories of Grenada and Panama, were it not for memories of U.S.-backed terrorism under the Marcos tyranny in the Philippines, and were it not for the astronomical national debt built under Reagan and Bush, 1990 might have 16 Avocations been remembered as the year the First Amendment came under its greatest attack since the McCarthy Era. From the racist, homophobic diatribes of Sen. Jesse Helms to the utterly irrational homophobic rantings of Rep. William Dannemeyer (“Militant homosexuals pose the most vicious attack on traditional family values that our society has seen in the history of our Republic.”), the elected officials of this nation attacked the National Endowment for the Arts with a daily barrage of accusations, lies, and deliberate misrepresentation. Motions were made in Congress to abolish the NEA. A “clean art oath” dubbed the “Helms Amendment” was inserted into agreements signed between the NEA and grant recipients, only to be declared unconstitutional by the courts. Fellowships were stripped from controversial performance artists like Karen Finley, and just about everyone held passionate opinions on Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs, with or without seeing them. The controversy played out slowly, day by day, exploited at every possible turn by mass media in a kind of surreal danse macabre. Until George Bush began drawing lines in the sands of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iraq. Arts council budgets across the nation are now being slashed, many by as much as 80 per cent. On St. Valentine’s Day, 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini, supreme ruler of an Iran then engaged in a bitter war with our “ally,” Iraq, pronounced an irrevocable death sentence on Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses, a death sentence with a $3 million bounty that struck at the heart of every writer in the world. In October, 1990, the trade journal Publishers Weekly editorialized against publication of a paperbound Satanic Verses. In November, Rushdie emerged from hiding with the public announcement that there would be no paper edition. Even from his grave, the Ayatollah had the book suppressed. Over the past few years, the First Amendment has also come under attack from self-declared “feminists” like Andrea Dworkin who advocate censorship of anything they define as pornography, including magazines like Playboy. “In the male system, women are sex; sex is the whore,” Dworkin wrote in her 1981 book, Pornography: Men Possessing Women. Only war could prevent a little savage laughter over the delectable thought of Andrea Dworkin in bed—as it were—with Jesse Helms and Bill Dannemeyer. In 1984, the Feminist Anti-Censorship Taskforce was founded in New York and Madison specifically to oppose Dworkin’s censorious litigation. Most of my feminist friends are not censors, quite the contrary Public school boards spent...