When I first began studying literature seriously in college
in the early 1970s, I was drawn to the most openly rebellious voices. I loved
the Beat Generation, the Surrealists, D.H. Lawrence, Walt Whitman, William
Blake, and the poets of the Black Arts Movement like my undergraduate mentor
June Jordan. I still love them.
 |
| William Blake |
During the period when I was a student, the New Left was at
its peak. It was also the era when the movements against the Vietnam War and
the civil rights movement flourished in the United States. The doctrine of many
revolutionaries at that time was that anything less than total revolt was
irrelevant and self-defeating: “Ceux qui
font des révolutions à moitié n’ont fait que se creuser un tombeau.”—“Those
who make revolutions halfway have only dug their own graves.” I first
encountered those words of Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, the French
revolutionary from the period of the Terror, when Jean-Luc Godard quoted them
in a movie. Godard was my artistic idol at the time. That quote embodied much
of what my friends and I were thinking then about politics and art.
But the New Left, with its stir fry of Maoism, Trotskyism,
and anarchism, never came close to becoming a majority movement in the United
States. Maybe that’s because the U.S. is generally allergic to isms. I came to realize that it was those
who make revolutions all the way who only dig their own graves.
But what does all this have to do with literature? Well, the
writers who openly declared themselves in revolt against the artistic and
political establishment were clearly rebels to my adolescent or post-adolescent
mind. Those were the writers whose stances I admired when I began my
own literary attempts.
I’m not sure how I came to realize that there were actually many
ways to express rebellion, dissent, and innovative ideas in literature, some of
them bravely open, and some more subtle.
Maybe it was by reading the work of feminist writers, who
often didn’t stand on a soapbox and declare their political viewpoints, writers
such as Virginia Woolf. The slogan of the feminist writers of the 1980s, “The
personal is political,” leant itself to a more nuanced aesthetic. If even the
small moments in life have larger social significance, then a writer doesn’t
have to scribble a manifesto to make a strong point. Understanding what is
political in a poem by Sharon Olds isn’t like understanding the ideas of
Mayakovsky or Amiri Baraka, where the writer is clearly waving a red flag.
Learning what is revolutionary about the more subtle rebels
has been a lifelong study for me. In the next couple of blogs, I’ll talk about
a couple of the writers where the social change implications of their work have
only become clearer to me as I’ve read more.
_________________________________
Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging.
Order in the USA Order in the UK
Zack’s most recent translation:
The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger
Other posts of interest:
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle
