Desesperanto: Poems, 1999-2002 (review)

We are going through a period when a chauvinist American public has decided to vilify France for refusing to support the invasion of Iraq. You could chide that public for forgetting that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are indebted to philosophers of the French Enlightenment; that our Revolution probably would have failed without the material support of France and the military services of Lafayette; and that French culture has been a central influence on American art and literature, if it weren't obvious that only a few American citizens know those facts. So I'm reassured to find a book by an American poet as much imbued with French subjects, locations, and language as Marilyn Hacker's Desesperanto. The title (to use Lewis Carroll's term for coinages of his own like "chortle") is a "portmanteau word" fusing Esperanto ("hope") with "despair," the result an oxymoron that sums up the author's conflicting feelings about current international events and her own personal prospects. As with all good poetry, the medium of language itself is foregrounded in this book. Esperanto, a largely Romance lingua franca invented by the Polish physician Ludwig Zamenhof in 1887, was constructed on a few simple rules so that it could be quickly learned and used as a medium of communication by world citizens outside their home country. In these poems we see an amalgam at least of English and French, one that made me think of the Red Queen's instructions to Alice in Through the Looking-Glass: "'Speak in French when you can't think of the English for a thing - turn out your toes as you walk - and remember who you are!'" The equivalent of turned-out toes in this context might be Hacker's astonishing skill with meter, rhyme, and verse form. The imperative of "remembering who you are" we find in the subject matter, which directly or indirectly affirms her status as an artist, progressive thinker and activist, woman, lesbian, Jew, and as an American living in New York or Paris. These affirmations are given substance and amplitude in poems dealing with personal struggles and losses, alongside others portraying salutary alliances with lovers, friends and fellow writers.

This is the moment to state that Marilyn Hacker, in addition to being a professional associate with views similar to mine, is a friend - which explains why this review will be more concerned with analysis than with evaluation. Besides, when you consider an international reputation based on some eleven books, an oeuvre that since the early seventies has been the subject of favorable comment culminating in a number of prizes, to hand out an "A" for the latest in the series seems superfluous. It's been widely acknowledged that Hacker's ambitions are carried to a level far beyond the ordinary; nothing I might say would detract from or add to the esteem she has earned. That esteem has come under fire recently because of her courageous speaking out (along with many other Jews and Israelis) in defense of the Palestinians and international law as it applies to them.

The volume opens with a poem titled "Elegy for a Soldier," addressed to the late June Jordan, a long-time champion of the Palestinian cause. Considering that elegies always have as much to do with the elegizer as the elegized, we may speculate that Hacker regards the title as apt for herself as well as the ostensible subject. It's certainly true that the poem, besides Jordan's death, mourns the loss of the New York City that she and Jordan knew in their youth. A rhythmic emblem for the mutation from early experience to later is encoded in the formal means Hacker adopts: the first part of the poem is lineated without regular meter, and the second part is cast in expert sapphic stanzas. Youthful improvisation bows to maturity and carefully gauged meter. Because the poem is an elegy, the implication is that Hacker regards experience as inevitably sadder than innocence.

But that is only one of her moods, and elsewhere...