Word: poem
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...image stems from an ancient Irish legend which predicted that the peasants would one day overcome their oppressive enemies in a climactic battle in a mysterious Valley of the Black Pig. W.B. Yeats used the phrase for the title of a poem...
THERE are two ways of looking at The Nixon Poems, either as poetry or as political criticism. As poetry it fails, but as a political statement it sometimes succeeds. It fails as poetry for its lack of a subject, and also for its lack of form. Great poetry is often written in totally unstructured form, and much trivial verse, especially classical verse, has survived because of the beauty of its structure. A poem without structure, on a trivial theme, has no hope from the beginning. Thus, the first half of a poem from this volume: "dicketydicketydick / dicketydicketydick / click / priorities goals...
...Stalinist "correctional" prison camp in 1945. It is a place Solzhenitsyn calls "the invisible nation," where "99 men weep and one man laughs." Most of the prisoners are "politicals" whose sentences run from ten to 25 years. Their crimes? "Failure to turn informer." Reading a poem unsanctioned by the regime. Writing a letter calling Stalin "the man with the moustache" and commenting ironically on how bad his Russian is-for which "crime" Solzhenitsyn himself spent eight years in Russian prisons. The prisoners' horizon is a gray-black wall. High up on the wall, in two ominous apertures, guards stand...
...MANY WAYS, the play is a prose-poem, a multi-media Greek tragedy: the pantomime of lovemaking, pregnancy, childbirth, all in rhythm; the sitting home waiting, the pains of leaving, all in rhythm; the cries of anguish, synchronized. The new-born parents dealing with newborn child ("It's a girl!"-"Oh, shit."), the kid jumping about uncontrolled as the father shouts helplessly, "Do something...
...raise some money for Democratic candidates with a speech and a poetry reading. Political plans? He would not be the Republican presidential candidate in 1972, but "beyond that, all possibilities are open." Political reminiscence? "Whenever we got too serious about the '68 campaign, I quoted Yeats' poem Politics, which concluded: 'But O that I were young again and held her in my arms!' " Poetry? From his forthcoming volume, Other Things and the Aardvark: "I am alone/ in the land of the aardvarks./ I am walking west/all the aardvarks are going east./They are behind me/ They...