Visual (and Other) Poets against the War

Swirling around us into an ever-decreasing vortex is a war, one not fought to protect a people, one not fought to save a country, but one fought to show that we can fight a war. The planners of this endeavor hoped that attacking one evil man’s country would serve as a warning to others, undermine the unjust regimes of the Middle East, and bring democracy to the entire region. We fight this war towards the death of one thousand of our own for no good purpose and certainly for no righteous one. We fight this war instead of stabilizing Afghanistan (a country we recently destabilized), instead of directly addressing the real danger of nuclear proliferation via North Korea, instead of staunching the flow of blood in the Darfur region of the Sudan.

Without a moral compass, we walk aimlessly across the planet in search of direction.

To address the unjustness of this war, Gulf War II, the second Bush conquest of Iraq (and the less justified one), visual poets John M. Bennett and Scott Helmes have edited something like an assembling of protest poems under the rubric The June 30th Manifesto. Most of the work in this small anthology is verbo-visual to some degree, but it includes collages, visual poems, textual poems, cartoons, and logos. Most visual poets work in most of these forms, and most visual poets are liberals and progressives, so there were plenty of contributors to this booklet.

Yet I always wonder if political poetry (and artistic political expression of any kind) can ever succeed. Who is our audience? Usually, only those who agree with us, meaning we are speaking to ourselves. What do we need to do to convince those who don’t believe as we do? Unfortunately, this booklet doesn’t answer that question. As a matter of fact, the focus of outrage in The June 30th Manifesto isn’t necessarily clear and will be less so in 25 years.

June 30th, we now know, was the date the Coalition Provisional Authority (dominated by the US) intended to hand over “limited sovereignty” to a few selected Iraqis. Instead, the date was pushed up to June 28th, 2004, so why was June 30th used in the title? I doubt that most of the contributors to this manifesto are opposed to transferring sovereignty to Iraq. What they don’t like—though this is not clear in the booklet itself—is that the transfer of sovereignty is essentially a sham. What is limited sovereignty? we must ask ourselves, and how does it differ from the concept of being a little pregnant?

This anthology includes a handful of strong pieces, works that make us pause and think anew about the situation facing us. But most people worked on their pieces of propaganda (since we must accept these as such) too quickly, leaving the reader with a sense of their outrage or their disgust with the current unministration running the US, but with little else. Many of the purely textual pieces suffer from excess length and a lack of focus. Propaganda usually needs to be punchy to be effective.

The booklet begins auspiciously, with a strong yet simple visual poem by Jim Leftwich on its cover. “INFAMY” consists of nothing but that word cut up into three pieces (through a process we call tmesis) and reorganized into a stark visual. With the word cut apart, we see other words within it: “IN” because we now exist within this infamy, and “MY” because this ignominy belongs to all of us who are US of Americans. Only the word “MY” appears on the page without subsequent cropping to stress the idea that it is our honor (that of all Americans) that is tarnished by this war. The cutting of the word, the use of a bold sans serif typeface, and the absence of lower case letters leave us with sharp lines, suggesting violence. In the center of the poem, “FA” (usually only heard in singing) plunges headfirst into the other words like a bomb tearing through the roof of a building. Of course, Leftwich used the word “INFAMY” because that reverberates in our brainpans, reminding us of the fatal attack on Pearl Harbor, which reminds us of the attack on this country on September 11th, 2001, which reminds us that even we are capable of inexcusable attacks.

Jim Leftwich, "INFAMY" (2004)
A more comical piece is the political poster “A Mambush Performed by” by Carlos M. Luis. The concept of “mambush,” a danse macabre consisting of equal parts “mambo” and “Bush,” propels this poem through its punnishing motions. The piece puts all stupidity and failure at the feet of George W. Bush and his cronies—all of whom are gene-splices featuring Bush as one of their halves: Rumbush, Conbush, Asshbush, Chenbush, and even Dumbush.


Carlos M. Luis, "A Mambush Performed by" (2004)
One of the most powerful and thoughtful of these poems is “The politics of revenge,” a stark minimalist visual poem by endwar. Dedicated to Nicholas Berg, an innocent American civilian working to help rebuild Iraq but who was, nevertheless, decapitated by militants in Iraq. The poem consists of a single letter (the letter i) cut in two—another instance of tmesis, but at an infraverbal level. The i lies on its side, dead, its tittle (the dot) resting upon its side. The i is now no longer an i, but a numeral one, a single body, a single death in a stupid struggle, another notch in a bloody tally stick.

I am a contributor to this volume (with my visual poem, “My Death is Just”), but I’m not sure we’ve done what we needed to do. Or even that there is anything poets can do. I suppose it is better to attack the darkness than allow it to swallow us without a fight.

And regime change, as we all now know, begins at home.
_____

For information on how to procure your own copy of this anthology, contact the editors:

John M. Bennett, Luna Bisonte Prods, 137 Leland Avenue, Columbus, OH 43214 USA

and

Scott Helmes, StampPad Press, 862 Tuscarora Avenue, St Paul, MN 55101 USA

ecr. l’inf.

[Today, my micropress dbqp released David Chikhladze’s “three green tea,” which is the 223rd item published by dbqp. As with any dbqp publication, this is available by trade, because I feel like sending you a copy, or because you sent me a tiny bit of money.]