Choose wisely

It began to take shape a week or so ago during a MSN Messenger session with my poet friend Cori, who decided she isn't talented enough and is going through the fire hoops of becoming a teacher.

As an assignment, she had to come up with a discussion relating to the following line of poetry, "wrap me in your/red orange rage/'til I ripen in your black field", in the context that here's an artist writing a poem about the civil rights/black power movement in the 1960s and 70s. We put our heads together to try to figure out questions she would ask students about the merging of art and culture at the forge of an artiste-blacksmith.

1) Referring to the lines "wrap me in your/red orange rage/til i ripen in your black field"is rage necessary for the advancement of oppressed peoples? In what cases has it been necessary, in what cases has revolution occurred without rage?

There's little doubt we've entered a time of polarization in this country, revolving on the axis of whether you want war in Iraq. The question is, if an artist takes up a cause, does the artist lose the ability to tell a story wholly? Now, I didn't say "without bias." Obviously authors have the ability to see a conflict and pick up on the meta-themes of freedom, equality, the defeat of tyranny and the like without putting real-life names to fictional faces. It's just so easy to fall into the simple rock throwing of saying "Bush sucks." Noun. Verb. Anger. Nine letters. Easy-cheesy.

2) Should poetry be a document or an advocate? Does the poet have any responsibilities to their reader? When the artist takes a stand, does the art suffer? What is the difference between art and propaganda?

But do you want to be known as a partisan? Does it help you to be known with a distinct political affiliation? Can you stomach sitting on a sideline as the forces clash? Lately, as I've been struggling to kick the habit of writing about politics, those three questions have been haunting me like the Christmas ghosts Scrooge faced. Before I made a mad dash for non-political writing, cringing at the entries I've made here in the past few months, I struggled thinking about the idea of voice, style, honesty and all that noble stuff. When I look back at my anti-Bush comments, I felt like I was part of a mob devoted to snap judgments and cheap political shots. It’s a quick, tasty rush to bang up a couple graphs of a news story, a link and a comment like “What a bozo.” But as I said before in this blog, it just isn’t…me. I want to be original, but I'm tempted to post-n-run.

You see, now I'm trigger ready to slap up a story about how the U.S. recently, very recently, struck a deal to import needed oil for its reserves from...what for it...Iraq. Yes, we're making trade deals with the very country we're supposed to be hating 'round-the-clock.

Part of me wants to post it, but I feel invisible hands holding me back, urging me in hushed tones to not give in. What would I accomplish by posting a news story? What would I gain? How much time devoted to creating original text would be wasted? What's more important? Why have readers come here?

3) Does this poem transcend its time and place, or is it specific only to the black power movement of the 60s?

Suppose you were me and you did post the story...when does it stop? When do you put down your protest sign and become the active writer creating and not the activist reacting? Can the artist look away for the short haul, not lending his or her voice to the din to come up for something larger, like a painting or a novel? Is the artist being derelict as a citizen or honest to his or her craft, skirting beyond society and democracy? Will you continue to be the activist, bending your muse to be the next cause celebre or will you be stuck in an era forever?

"Oh yeah," someone will say in a bookstore maybe 15 years from now, "I remember him, he wrote a lot about the '03 Gulf War. A bit about the abortion-decision riots in '05. A couple good novels, but he's stuck in the past. He’s an era-junkie."

Will my soul ache if, at some point in my old age, I sit back and think about what else I could have done, the marches I could have been in, the debates I could have contributed to, the articles I could have posted up here in a fit of termite activism? It’d be wrong not to act, to just assume someone else will do it. I don’t know.

Maybe I’m going about this all wrong. Maybe there’s room for both sides in the soul: the passionate activist and the aloof, self-involved artist. I can still write what I want and join 80-90 local strangers on Saturday morning to wave signs against the war at a nearby strip mall.

All I know is this: I imagine myself with finite fuel and two options: activist or artist. To which do I devote more resources? To which do I want to be known for? In what role can I make more of a change?

And yes, this is the kind of stuff I think about for fun.

P.S.

For helping me out with this entry, Cori said she wanted to be credited as "Dreaded elf sorceress, friend to the small and oppressed."

So, Cori, there you go.