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Guantánamo Poetry

The New York Times * June 20, 2007, 9:28 am

Ex-Poet Laureate on Guantánamo Poetry

By Mike Nizza

The imminent publication of a book of poetry gets gives front page treatment in The Wall Street Journal today. “Poems From Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak”gives readers “an unusual glimpse into the emotional lives of the largely nameless and faceless prisoners there,” the paper explains.

But is it a good read?

Last month, an interviewer on PRI’s “The World” put that one to Robert Pinsky, the nation’s poet laureate from 1997 to 2000.

Isit possible to draw a line between poetry and the legal concerns about theprison at Guantanamo Bay in 10 words or less? Robert Pinsky made it seemeasy: “I think of habeus corpus; poetry is a corporeal art.” (Photo: JuliaMalakie/The Associated Press)

“I havent found a Mandelshtam in here,” he said, referring to the great Russian poet who died in a Stalinist labor camp.

His full answer was much more carefully worded (listen to it here).Leavening his literary judgment that these are “not particularly distinguishedor wonderful poems” is an attempt to adjust the scale for some exceptions:the poems were written by amateurs following in the Arabic tradition of poetry,and they were rendered into English by legal translators, not literary ones.

A blogger at Encyclopedia Brittanica’s Web site tried to decode Mr. Pinsky:

What Pinsky ultimately says, it seems, is that the technical merits of thesepoems are unimportant, especially since we Westerners aren’t likely to understandtheir cultural context — what counts as “good” — anyway. Their value insteadcomes from their urgency. (Indeed, Pinsky uses some form of the word urgentat least three times.)

That word turns up in Mr. Pinsky’sblurb on the book as well — and could also serve as a disclaimer on so muchof what The Lede reads all day.

“They deserve, above all, not admiration or belief or sympathy — but attention,” he wrote. “Attention to them is urgent for us.”

not an extended metaphor

one extended metaphor

denying the length you run

the distance at which you

can still hear the harp

man, your extended arm

only gives me idea that

you represent weakness

getting deeper and deeper

6/19/07

Herod's Funeral : they want to love you

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