Speaking of whether or not poetry can change the world, I couldn’t help but repost Salah al Hamdani’s “Baghdad, Mon Amour” as our poem of the week. If any one poet can make a difference, it’s someone like al Hamdani, who began writing in his twenties, while imprisoned for his opposition to Saddam Hussein’s regime. He’s been living as an exile in France since 1975. Thirty years after having to flee his homeland, he remains a steadfast anti-war voice, opposing even the removal of the dictator who caused him so much hardship.

There’s nothing we’ve done at Rattle that I’m more proud of than publishing “Baghdad, Mon Amour”–scrambling to find a translator at Sam Hamill’s suggestion, and squeezing it in to the seemingly random Poets Writing Abroad tribute. Molly Deschenes translated the piece in a matter of days, and though she claims not to be a poet herself, her ear for the musicality of language says otherwise. The poem has since been translated by C. Dickson, but I still prefer Molly’s less-embellished version.

As powerful as the poem is, as grateful as I am for the opportunity to share it with an American audience, I’m still unconvinced of its impact. If we took out a full page ad and featured it in the New York Times, in the Washington Post, then put up billboards of the poem on the highways, if we tied the war-mongers to a chair and made them read the poem over and over again until they could recite it in a drugged stupor–would anything come of it?

I doubt it. Those inclined to agree with al Hamdani would nod along, store it affectionately in the corner of their hearts, maybe read it to a friend. The friend might show another friend, and maybe there’s a wave of more eloquent pacifism. The greedy xenophobes and those regulated by fear would see only words on a page, and excuse away whatever love or logic they stoop to understand. But nothing else.

And if we didn’t go out of our way to give the poem an audience, if some pimply college student had miraculously written it for a class and posted it on his blog, we wouldn’t even see that meager result. Poems don’t spread on their own, not in today’s age of the sound byte, if they ever did.

Of course, in other countries, in other times, poets have been jailed for their politics, some of their families even murdered. But I’d still argue that it’s the poets, and not the poems themselves, that are sometimes a threat to the establishment. It’s the poets’ intelligence, and passion, and their ability to speak for and mobilize a crowd. It’s Salah al Hamdani and Sam Hamill and Jon Andersen and Anna Akhmatova. Not necessarily what they wrote, but how they wrote it, what they did with it thereafter.

Or maybe there is a subtle effect, en masse, on the receptive end. Ignorance and oppression go hand-in-hand. Having the words to understand and communicate your thoughts is a powerful thing. So, too, is the focused attention and fine perception of a poem.

This is where, in my mind, poetry becomes one of the most important things we can pursue. It’s the subject of one of my favorite books, Erik Campbell’s Arguments for Stillness — a way of using that word made suddenly popular by Oprah’s new dreadful sensation Eckhart Tolle. That focused attention, that empathetic concentration, can be seen as the greatest thing that’s missing in modern society. The Buddhists call it enlightenment; new-agers like Tolle call it awakening a new consciousness. Either way, it’s the critical component in moving beyond things like war and greed — and nothing embodies it better than poetry.

I really believe that if we all read poetry, we’d all be better people–that falling in love with poetry is its own kind of awakening. So maybe the poems themselves really can change the world, as a conduit of goodness. If that’s the case, “Baghdad, Mon Amour” is a great conductor. But even if it’s not, Salah al Hamdani is pure lightning.

    You watch her fingers leave your robe how they arc in the air
    to papers on her desk, and you realize that at various times
    in the past five years you have thought of her fingers, their short
    nails, and how she called you and said into the mouth of her
            phone,
    really as an afterthought, that in the site of the malignancy we
            found
    a little milk. A little she said, like the purr of a cat…

Shapiro’s poem — believe it or not, her first publication — lazes as she lays its sweet trap. Stroll through the cancer clinic and it might be heaven, beautifully light and airy, everything haloed. The workers are shepherrdesses and sirens; the chemotherapy suite is a skylight; flowers bloom in gold vases over plush gold carpet. The poem reveals itself slowly, deliberately, lingering on each empyrean image. Only deep into the poem do we realize the vision’s source is the chemotherapy, that we’re seeing Sloan-Kettering through the haze of painkillers. The trap is sprung and we’re forced to feel the full weight of maternal longing embodied in that delicate phrase, a little milk. A little, representing so much loss.

      and not just mailmen, men from across the street,
      men who have been following her for four days and want her
      address to be their address

Maybe Alan should comment on this week’s poem, because it’s one of his all-time favorites.

(I think he had an opera singer once.)

(Actually, I know he had an opera singer once, on a cruise in the Meditarranean, he told me…the last time he wore a tux.)

(The ’80s…and that’s salmon, not pink, by the way.)

But whether you’ve had your own opera singer or not, the lyricism and playfulness make this a quintessential RATTLE poem. “frame programs from every show, sit in front / of the front row” Try to read it it without smiling. I dare you.

      Don’t ever think of human beings you love
      And need as like those shifting shimmerings,
      No matter how liquescent memorable enduring
      Against the immortal darkness of the sky.
      The northern lights will break a heart and heal it
      In the same motion, raveling and unraveling.

Mark Jarman remains one of the most influential poets for me — both as a writer and reader of poetry. I came across his Questions of Ecclesiastes, and then Unholy Sonnets, during a period where I was searching for some kind of spirituality. The son of a preacher, Jarman’s need to understand divinity took a much more Christian angle than my own, much less agnostic, but his longing was the same that drove me to read the Bible cover to cover, then the Koran, then the Mahabharata, looking for something that might make sense.

This week’s poem, I think, is written from the same place as that earlier work–that desire to grasp the ungraspable, the futility of it, and then beneath even that, the quiet shame of remaining unsatisfied by belief alone. Over and over in his poems, Jarman turns these concepts like small stones in his hand, probing the cracks for clues to what’s inside. Some poets write to express, but Jarman writes to explore, and that’s what always draws me to his work.

In this piece the overarching metaphor couldn’t be more perfect, even if he cautions against it–a great marriage as those magical, dancing, elusive lights.

      The new year has come, to the brave and the
      Stupid, the ones who sharpen blades and the
      Ones who grind what’s cut to bread, to the good
      And the evil, but never to the dead.

This week’s featured poem is the first of our six pushcart nominations from 2006. Here Gary Lemons pulls off two things I don’t often enjoy in poetry: a longer piece, written intentionally as a tribute to someone else. Sam in the dedication is Sam Hamill, who everyone reading this probably knows as the founder of Copper Canyon Press, finally driven out by the leaders of his own board, over the kind of personality conflict that seems to happen so often wherever art and administration intersect. The same thing that happened to Justice at Iowa, and in my own experience, the same thing that’s happening to Jim Ragan right now at USC.

Without getting into the politics involved, I can say that we appreciate Sam, and what he’s spent his life doing — from Copper Canyon itself to his snubbing of Laura Bush, and especially what he’s done and continues to do with Poets Against War. Alan interviewed him in RATTLE #22, and given it’s political importance — including the opportunity to publish both Sam’s “Amerika, Mon Amour” and Iraqi exile Salah al Hamdani’s “Baghdad, Mon Amour” — it remains my favorite issue.

In “New Year’s Day 2005,” Lemons weaves a long narrative that examines something we’ve all felt at times, I think, about this community we’re part of: “The fellowship that sustains and suppresses poetry.” The camaraderie, the isolation, and that unavoidable question — is it really worth it? But of course, it is. And in a way, that dark question becomes it’s own sustenance. As Lemons writes, “In everything there is a poem, / Stepping out of its own death.”

Happy New Year, everyone, and may 2007 flow with poetry. (And not beer with tomato juice…that’s nasty!)