A POET ON ASSIGNMENT
INTRODUCTION
September 2001: I am in residence at Norcroft, a writing retreat for women on the north shore of Lake Superior. The beauty, the silence, the otters in the cove, the view of tree trunk and birds from my desk, the rule against speaking before 4pm—are all elements in that stilling of the mind that lets my writing flow late into the night.
I’m deep in the 19th century, writing out the early chapters of a novel. The only public phone is two miles along the shore at the Lutsen Resort, a lovely walk at dusk. And there’s emergency line in the office. Tuesday morning I’ve arranged to go into town with the director, a woman I know from co-counseling, so that we share a language of mutual support and a set of active listening practices for dealing with most things. But something has happened. There’s an emergency message from my husband. I’m thinking of my daughter who should have flown home to California the night before. We’re hours away from the end of the talking ban. She looks at me and relents, handing me the phone.
He tells me there have been planes crashing into buildings, the entire air fleet of the country is grounded, a state of emergency, terrorist attack. I can see the blue grey water of the lake, serene under the autumn sky. I think this sounds like a movie trailer I saw. He fantasizes about packing up the station wagon and his son, picking me up and heading for Canada. And leave my daughter in California? Sometime in the first few minute I think Please, God, let it not have been Palestinians. Let it be more white boys from Oklahoma. I’m moving into organizer mode. What will we be facing? What work will we need to do? What poems will I need to write?
I get off the phone and we stare at each other. Silently get in the car. Drive off the property and pull over. You first, she says, or me? We sit there shaking, listening, comparing notes, deciding there will be a lot of other people who need listening to. The gas station, the grocery store, every place we stop the tv is on, showing the same clip over and over, and before long there’s a clip of cheering Arabs. Who are they setting up for retribution? Which target?
A town meeting. The two of us decide to go. Our intention is to listen to people, help them process what has happened. But I can’t. One after another people say “why do they hate us” and answer, one way or another, “because we’re the best.” A woman says it’s because this is the only free country in the world and they’re jealous. Someone says that the pastor knows all about religion. He can explain what’s wrong with Muslims. He says it’s a religion of the sword, inherently violent. That’s when I can’t sit still any more. I speak in a reasonable tone. I say I’m a historian. I tell them Islam values integrity, values intellect, gave Europe science. I say every religion has its good and bad. For instance, I say, an outsider might even think, what with the Inquisition and the witch burnings and baptism on the hilt of a sword and massacres all over the Americas, might even think Christianity is a religion of violence. The pastor walks out. War is obviously gathering, ready to burst into the lives of people somewhere.
The thing that gets to me is the injured innocence, an outrage that someone could do this to AMERICANS! Our flag, says someone, is a beacon of hope to people all over the world and I think, How do I tell them that YANQUI GO HOME is written on walls all over the planet? How do I explain that US embassies direct assassins to eliminate union leaders and poets, journalists and presidents? That almost two hundred years ago Simon Bolivar was already saying “The United States seem destined by Providence to plague America with misery in the name of freedom?”
Then other voices emerge: the woman who talks about ostentatious wealth and world hunger. The WWII veteran who wants to understand the people who did this, not kill them, because he’s had enough of war. September 12, I wake up at five in the morning with the first lines of a poem ringing in my ears, and muttering them over and over to myself so I don’t forget, I pull on my pants and stumble out to the writing shed. Five hours later I have written Shema a 2500 word outpouring. I stay at Norcroft, writing in the stillness, while the country shrieks and growls. I don’t watch TV. At night I trek to the resort and make phone calls. When I hear that Congresswoman Barbara Lee has stood alone to oppose the war that is being brewed, I weep with pride that she is mine.
Two weeks later I am in the Twin Cities, reading Shema at a public library. I fly home to Berkeley. Within days my poem is all over the internet, and people are reading it at demonstrations and meetings. A gay couple in Minneapolis send me a check for $100 in appreciation. I forget to copy down their address before I cash the check, so I can’t write back to thank them. Then Dennis Bernstein, producer of Pacifica Radio’s Flashpoints news magazine asks me to read it on the air.
The response is overwhelming. People call in to say they cried with relief. That they had to pull over. That they told their children to stop talking and listen. Flashpoints rebroadcasts it again and again. What else do you have, he asks me, and that’s how I become a poet on assignment. For three months I even get paid!
Every week I write poems in response to the news. I don’t have time to polish them. They are not smooth and exquisite. They are sharp, rough, purposeful. Each day I ask myself, how can I make the news real? How can I keep people from going numb? How can I put a face on this story? How can I explain its history? It’s not whether the music’s good, says Pete Seeger, but what it’s good for.
Think of these poems as graffiti on the wall of a certain historical moment. I wrote fast, on a short deadline. Each day I scanned the headlines online, looking for the stories that I could make into something useful. A short item about women in Baghdad inducing labor so as not to be caught out in the coming bombardment. The death of Lori Piestewa, a young Hopi woman billed as the first female Native American combat casualty of a foreign war. The White House appeal for contributions to drop food on Afghanistan. The posthumous granting of citizenship to dead Latino soldiers. I began asking organizers what poems they needed. Barbara Lubin of Middle East Children’s Alliance said, Write about how scared the children are.
In the grocery store, at the doctor’s office, walking down the street, people who knew me, people who saw me write down my name, told me how much the poems meant to them. I got masses of emails. The day I got my fiftieth birthday colonoscopy, as I waited for my ride home, woozy with medication, a doctor with an Arab name came up to me holding my chart and asked, “Do you have something to do with the radio?” I started to say “Yes, I write poetry for…” and he dropped the chart on the floor and threw his arms around me. “Thank you,” he said. So I abandoned my perfectionism and decided these rough constructions of spit and ideas were enough.
Each day I thought about what was missing from the conversation and how to add it: Hope, clarity, a sense of history. That we have to love our country with an accurate and radical love and not surrender it to warmongers. That radicals must have double vision, one eye on the muddy present, one eye on the future we build toward. If either one closes, we fall. That it’s a long haul, and each step counts.
The pieces in this book were mostly written during the three years following 9/11. They include poems about Afghanistan and Iraq, Palestine/Israel, about Cuba, about union-busting and repression, about sustained radicalism. Writing under pressure, in direct response to immediate political needs, with instant audience response in the form of calls to the station, was unlike any other writing experience I’ve had. It wasn’t a sustainable way of life for me. I prefer to write slowly. I prefer to polish. I like to be sure of my words before I send them out in the world. But for a short while, putting everything I had into writing urgent-response poetry was my difficult joy.
©2014 Aurora Levins Morales
September 2001: I am in residence at Norcroft, a writing retreat for women on the north shore of Lake Superior. The beauty, the silence, the otters in the cove, the view of tree trunk and birds from my desk, the rule against speaking before 4pm—are all elements in that stilling of the mind that lets my writing flow late into the night.
I’m deep in the 19th century, writing out the early chapters of a novel. The only public phone is two miles along the shore at the Lutsen Resort, a lovely walk at dusk. And there’s emergency line in the office. Tuesday morning I’ve arranged to go into town with the director, a woman I know from co-counseling, so that we share a language of mutual support and a set of active listening practices for dealing with most things. But something has happened. There’s an emergency message from my husband. I’m thinking of my daughter who should have flown home to California the night before. We’re hours away from the end of the talking ban. She looks at me and relents, handing me the phone.
He tells me there have been planes crashing into buildings, the entire air fleet of the country is grounded, a state of emergency, terrorist attack. I can see the blue grey water of the lake, serene under the autumn sky. I think this sounds like a movie trailer I saw. He fantasizes about packing up the station wagon and his son, picking me up and heading for Canada. And leave my daughter in California? Sometime in the first few minute I think Please, God, let it not have been Palestinians. Let it be more white boys from Oklahoma. I’m moving into organizer mode. What will we be facing? What work will we need to do? What poems will I need to write?
I get off the phone and we stare at each other. Silently get in the car. Drive off the property and pull over. You first, she says, or me? We sit there shaking, listening, comparing notes, deciding there will be a lot of other people who need listening to. The gas station, the grocery store, every place we stop the tv is on, showing the same clip over and over, and before long there’s a clip of cheering Arabs. Who are they setting up for retribution? Which target?
A town meeting. The two of us decide to go. Our intention is to listen to people, help them process what has happened. But I can’t. One after another people say “why do they hate us” and answer, one way or another, “because we’re the best.” A woman says it’s because this is the only free country in the world and they’re jealous. Someone says that the pastor knows all about religion. He can explain what’s wrong with Muslims. He says it’s a religion of the sword, inherently violent. That’s when I can’t sit still any more. I speak in a reasonable tone. I say I’m a historian. I tell them Islam values integrity, values intellect, gave Europe science. I say every religion has its good and bad. For instance, I say, an outsider might even think, what with the Inquisition and the witch burnings and baptism on the hilt of a sword and massacres all over the Americas, might even think Christianity is a religion of violence. The pastor walks out. War is obviously gathering, ready to burst into the lives of people somewhere.
The thing that gets to me is the injured innocence, an outrage that someone could do this to AMERICANS! Our flag, says someone, is a beacon of hope to people all over the world and I think, How do I tell them that YANQUI GO HOME is written on walls all over the planet? How do I explain that US embassies direct assassins to eliminate union leaders and poets, journalists and presidents? That almost two hundred years ago Simon Bolivar was already saying “The United States seem destined by Providence to plague America with misery in the name of freedom?”
Then other voices emerge: the woman who talks about ostentatious wealth and world hunger. The WWII veteran who wants to understand the people who did this, not kill them, because he’s had enough of war. September 12, I wake up at five in the morning with the first lines of a poem ringing in my ears, and muttering them over and over to myself so I don’t forget, I pull on my pants and stumble out to the writing shed. Five hours later I have written Shema a 2500 word outpouring. I stay at Norcroft, writing in the stillness, while the country shrieks and growls. I don’t watch TV. At night I trek to the resort and make phone calls. When I hear that Congresswoman Barbara Lee has stood alone to oppose the war that is being brewed, I weep with pride that she is mine.
Two weeks later I am in the Twin Cities, reading Shema at a public library. I fly home to Berkeley. Within days my poem is all over the internet, and people are reading it at demonstrations and meetings. A gay couple in Minneapolis send me a check for $100 in appreciation. I forget to copy down their address before I cash the check, so I can’t write back to thank them. Then Dennis Bernstein, producer of Pacifica Radio’s Flashpoints news magazine asks me to read it on the air.
The response is overwhelming. People call in to say they cried with relief. That they had to pull over. That they told their children to stop talking and listen. Flashpoints rebroadcasts it again and again. What else do you have, he asks me, and that’s how I become a poet on assignment. For three months I even get paid!
Every week I write poems in response to the news. I don’t have time to polish them. They are not smooth and exquisite. They are sharp, rough, purposeful. Each day I ask myself, how can I make the news real? How can I keep people from going numb? How can I put a face on this story? How can I explain its history? It’s not whether the music’s good, says Pete Seeger, but what it’s good for.
Think of these poems as graffiti on the wall of a certain historical moment. I wrote fast, on a short deadline. Each day I scanned the headlines online, looking for the stories that I could make into something useful. A short item about women in Baghdad inducing labor so as not to be caught out in the coming bombardment. The death of Lori Piestewa, a young Hopi woman billed as the first female Native American combat casualty of a foreign war. The White House appeal for contributions to drop food on Afghanistan. The posthumous granting of citizenship to dead Latino soldiers. I began asking organizers what poems they needed. Barbara Lubin of Middle East Children’s Alliance said, Write about how scared the children are.
In the grocery store, at the doctor’s office, walking down the street, people who knew me, people who saw me write down my name, told me how much the poems meant to them. I got masses of emails. The day I got my fiftieth birthday colonoscopy, as I waited for my ride home, woozy with medication, a doctor with an Arab name came up to me holding my chart and asked, “Do you have something to do with the radio?” I started to say “Yes, I write poetry for…” and he dropped the chart on the floor and threw his arms around me. “Thank you,” he said. So I abandoned my perfectionism and decided these rough constructions of spit and ideas were enough.
Each day I thought about what was missing from the conversation and how to add it: Hope, clarity, a sense of history. That we have to love our country with an accurate and radical love and not surrender it to warmongers. That radicals must have double vision, one eye on the muddy present, one eye on the future we build toward. If either one closes, we fall. That it’s a long haul, and each step counts.
The pieces in this book were mostly written during the three years following 9/11. They include poems about Afghanistan and Iraq, Palestine/Israel, about Cuba, about union-busting and repression, about sustained radicalism. Writing under pressure, in direct response to immediate political needs, with instant audience response in the form of calls to the station, was unlike any other writing experience I’ve had. It wasn’t a sustainable way of life for me. I prefer to write slowly. I prefer to polish. I like to be sure of my words before I send them out in the world. But for a short while, putting everything I had into writing urgent-response poetry was my difficult joy.
©2014 Aurora Levins Morales