Boldt Words & Images: History’s Rhymes 9/11/73

Convergences

By Bob Boldt

[Appeared here originally four years ago today, on November 30, 2017.]

The poem below comes from a portfolio of poems that I submitted during fall semester for the “Poetry Workshop” at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri. I hope in the coming months to publish a few more of these poems on Moristotle & Co.
    As a frame for today’s poem, I have adapted from the essay that accompanied the portfolio some hopefully relevant reflections on poetry and a poet.

Where did I come from? Where am I? Where am I going? And why can’t I get an Uber cab to take me there?
    I think poetry writing, and especially a poetry workshop, is unlike anything else. Poetry workshops require students to deal as directly as possible with their personal, interior lives. In other writing classes, authors can, if they choose, stand wholly apart from the work they are creating. Only in poetry is the challenge of personal, living autopsy evident or required.
    So where to from here?
    On December First (tomorrow), I will be 80 years of age. (No cards please.) One of the things I find most difficult to take is the kind of barriers certain age groups have erected against certain other age groups. I am always looking out for opportunities to relate to people younger than me – waaay younger than me. One of the things I especially appreciate about the poetry workshop is the mix of people of so many differing ages, backgrounds, and histories. This can result in some pretty interesting interactions.
    I am a little concerned with the number of what some might consider morbid or dark themes like death and such in my work lately. There is a lot of it on my mind personally, politically, and socially. So, I guess it would find a way of leaking into my poetry. I certainly don’t want to be labeled a poet of gloom and doom – just a little on the lighter side of Leonard Cohen perhaps?
    I should not leave without some comment as to the somewhat death-defining, seeming apocalyptic direction some of my poems have taken:
    First is my dawning thought that I can only realistically expect another 20 years on the planet. If the next 20 go as fast as the last 20…Well, you get the idea. In my teens I was a regular Woody Allen (his early films only), very preoccupied with the idea of death – fueled of course by my German/Romantic nature.
    For those in the middle of life, be they poet or peasant, life takes up different prominent preoccupations, everything from taxes to tenure. As later life approaches, priorities change. Each stage in life’s way has its own joys and sorrows. Like Beckett said, “The tears of the world are of a constant volume.” The same way Brittany and Brianna (classmates of mine) write about social life and boyfriends, so I am writing about my experience at the end of life. I really dig their experience. It informs my own. I hope, reading mine, they might dig mine too. Where else am I gonna get inside the head, heart, and soul of a person half a century younger than me? If not Poetry Workshop at Lincoln University here in Jefferson City, Missouri – where?
    Secondly, it is no secret I have a rather alarming vision of what I think the future may hold. I believe humans in the very near future may face a reality far more fearful and disrupting than that endured by some of the most harried survivors of the Second World War.
    My poems almost always begin with an image, word, or phrase that sticks in my head. As I explore the future more and more, both in my dreams and in my waking thought experiments, the most interesting ideas come to me from my thinking and reading about the future. New discoveries abound, and these highlights cannot help but find their way into a poem or two. The end of empire, regime change, and other forms of war and disaster are fertile times and spaces for poetry to be heard again. From Homer to Neruda, the most eloquent language emerges in transitional times like ours. To contribute a few words or phrases to that conversation would be a worthy achievement for me.

Now about “History’s Rhymes 9/11/73,” the poem presented below. The idea behind this poem first solidified after I attended a Lannan lecture in Santa Fe by Lawrence Weschler. The idea of what I call visual coincidence throughout history that I tried to express in the poem relates strongly to his lavishly illustrated book, Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences.
    Weschler begins by tracing his fascination with convergences, most of them of the visual sort, back to a college lesson on John Berger’s The Look of Things, in which the great critic noted the striking similarity between a famous photo of Che Guevara’s corpse and Rembrandt’s painting, “The Anatomy Lesson.” Weschler writes that he remembers being dumbfounded by Berger’s power of perception: “This guy doesn’t read his morning newspaper the way I or anybody else I know reads the morning newspaper.” [See “Reviews of Lawrence Weschler’s Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences,” mcsweeneys.net]
    Coincidentally, I found a similarity in Andrea Mantegna’s painting, “The Lamentation over the Dead Christ.” Triple coincidence!

History’s Rhymes 9/11/73^*

“That Chilean Guy Might Have Some Problems.”
–Richard Nixon in conversation with Henry Kissinger.

Victor Jara, how will you sing now that he has cut out your tongue,
or caress your guitar with smashed hands?

Pablo Neruda, teach me to remember your love poetry
in a time of war.

Plato said only the Forms endure,
filling everything.

Occasionally we grasp their pure invasion
of our world when we clasp an image of the universal:

Che’s corpse in as isometric perspective as Andrea Mantegna’s
“The Lamentation over the Dead Christ.”

The naked Vietnamese girl fleeing her village
strangely recreated on a German beach thirty years later.

That sculptor in Chicago who anticipated our own 9/11
and a falling man on a Tarot card.

I have been lucky to have noticed a few places where the Forms
touched earth like lightning striking twice.

The Spaniard had no camera to remind the soldiers
cutting that man in two

that God, that persistent, fucking metaphor, loves words and images.
and would be reminded when Goya’s War art was reproduced.

These images are cloudy lenses through which I sometimes grasp
the ponderous movement of invisible, powerful things.

This is a vision hardly unique with me.
Yes, this is my eye. This is my camera.

It has captured birth, and copulation, and death.
That is all that matters, goddammit.
_______________
* See “Human rights violations in Pinochet's Chile,” Wikipedia.

Human rights violations during the military government of Chile refer to the acts of human rights abuses...from September 11, 1973 to March 11, 1990. Chilean armed forces, the police, and all those aligned with the military...suppression of all political dissidents, which led some to speak of a “politicide” (or “political genocide”).

Copyright © 2017, 2021 by Bob Boldt