Poets of Commitment

...Waiters&Writint POETS OF COMMENT BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL THE POEMS of Ernesto Cardenal collected in Zero Hour (New Directions, 106 pp , $12 00) will interest many readers in the United States less as poetry than as political commentary These verses, translated by Donald D Walsh, Paul W Borgeson, Jonathan Cohen, and Robert Pnng-Nell, describe events leading up to the revolution in Nicaragua and the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship in 1979 Father Cardenal is a Roman Catholic priest who for a period studied under Thomas Merton in the Umted States Returmng to his native land, he gradually converted from pacifism to social action He became a Marxist after a visit to Fidel Castro's Cuba, joined the Sandimsta guerrillas and now, as minister of culture in the new Nicaraguan regime, is one of the leading exponents of Catholic Marxism in South America But despite his adherence to the "theology of liberation," he accepts the late Mao Zedong's view that "revolutionary art without artistic value has no revolutionary value " Indeed, how Cardenal attempts to reconcile the demands of poetic creation with revolutionary activity constitutes much of the dramatic tension of Zero Hour The eight long poems in this book are "documentary," almost cinematic accounts of recent life in Nicaragua Historical vignettes and current events are flashed on a backdrop of lush tropical vegetation, projecting a runmng Marxist account of a revolution in the making As might be expected, the complex technique is more successful on some levels than on others In the title poem, Cardenal fashions a terse commentary on the brutalities practiced by Anastasio Somoza's government Or, rather, hemarshalsfaetsintoacryofoutrageagainst torture, murder and oppression that is all the more hard hitting because such events speak tor themselves At 10 00p m they drive down to Managua Halfway down the guards stop them The two oldest are taken off in one car and the other three in another car in another direction, to where four prisoners had been digging a hole "Where are we going''" asked the man they made the hole for And nobody answered him In this moving bit of propaganda, our pity and indignation rise as we are forced to watch the cruelty of the powerful against the weak There are similar pungent images in the poem Political prisoners strain to hear dance music wafting down from the presidential palace in their effort to block out the screams of those being tortured, in Washington, Franklin D Roosevelt tells Sumner Welles," Somoza is a sunofabitch/ but he's ours " Nor is Cardenal romantic about the war waged against tyrants "Glory isn't what the history books teach / it's a flock of buzzards in a field and a great stink " Sometimes m Zero Hour, however, a longwinded and preachy ideologue takes over who forces his material to serve his theones In this vein, Cardenal freely admits Thev've told me I only talk about politics now It's not about politics but about Revolution which for me is the same thing as the kingdom oj God Admirable as Cardenal's humanism mav be, his tone also occasionally plunges into bathos General Genie's "interrogation chambers"shall become rooms where little girls mav pla\ with dolls tanks turn into tractors and polic e vans into sc hool busses Cardenal's most effective voice is the purely dramatic, particularly since he has an ear for conversation somewhat reminiscent of the late Frank O'Hara's In "Trip to New York" the poet flies to Manhattan for a poetry reading and, as the Watergate hearings are being broadcast, visits James Laughhn, his publisher He discusses politics with members of the American radical Catholic movement, from Dorothy Day to the Berngan brothers, all the while perceiving Mer-ton's benign ghost hovenng over these encounters Although here, too, Cardenal is unable to resist donning his Marxist spectacles along the way to take a broad look at capitalism, the overall mood of the poem is ruminative, the dialogue perfectly captured, the scene graphically conveyed It is unfortunate that Cardenal cannot separate his tracts from his poems He has the gift of making his characters sound fully human Only when he ascends the pulpit is that skill lost in a windy rush of rhetoric Father Cardenal ought to know as a poet, if not as a priest, that no man can serve two masters Imagination is the freest thing we possess, it cannot be a servant, even to Revolution Q ^ta^ eamus Heaney is another poet who has been forced to confront the problem of reconciling political commitment with his art He took one obvious step in this process in 1972 when he abandoned his war-torn homeland, Northern Ireland, to settle in Eire—a migration that was celebrated last year in his collection of poems entitled Field Work (see "WritersandWnting," NL, January 14,1980) NowHeaney has issued the best of his earher work in Poems 1965-1975 (Farrar Straus Giroux, 228 pp ,$12 95) together with a companion volume, Preoccupations Selected Prose 1968-1978 (Farrar Straus Giroux, 224 pp., $15 00...

...In these books Heaney struggles to find his own place in Ireland's troubles, to unravel "the weary twisted emotions that are rolled hke a ball of hooks and sinkers m the heart " He cnes out against being " fatigued by a continuous adjudication between agony and injustice, swung at one moment by the long tail of race and resentment, at another by the more acceptable feelings of pity and terror " Going on to describe existence in Belfast during 1971, he confesses "We live in the sickly light of TV screens, with a pane of selfishness between ourselves and the suf fenng We survive explosions and funerals and live on among the families of the victims, those blown apart and those in cells apart " Deeply as he cares for his native land in its suffering—and his prose conveys a passionate poignancy—Heaney ruefully admits in discussing Belfast that "Poetry is out of the quarrel with ourselves and the quarrel with others is rhetoric It would wrench the rhythms of my writing procedures to start squaring up to contemporary events with more will than ways to deal with them " In fact, Heaney has been inspired to make his most powerful metaphor to date out of the "bog people " These sacrificed corpses of Iron Age men were recently discovered after having been preserved for centuries in the loamy peat Heaney found that "the unforgettable photographs of these victims blended in my mind with photographs of atrocities, past and present, in the long rites of Irish political and religious struggles " In his poetry, the unearthed figures become the archetype of murdered Ireland Read the inhumed faces of casualty and victim, how we slaughter for the common good and shave the heads of the notorious how the goddess swallows our love and terror The female diety invoked is Kathleen NiHoulihan, who became, through Yeats, a symbol of the ancient motherland calling her boys to give their lives in the battle against the foreign oppressor Rebirth has a strong appeal for revolutionaries In "Zero Hour," Cardenal pictured the martyred Sandino and his followers reborn in the next generation of freedom-fighters But to Heaney, resurrection is a more mysterious process "Requiem for the Croppies" is a lament for those early Republicans of 1789, brutally cut down by the British The poem begins with the thoughts of a fleeing rebel who notes, "The pockets of our great coats full of barley?No kitchens on the run," and ends with an image at once sorrowful and triumphant "They buried us without shroud or coffin/And in August the barley grew up out of the grave " The croppies were looked on as protomartyrs by the rebels of 1916, but Heaney connects them with a still more powerful force—the mythic vegetation god, John Barleycorn, who, the more he is beaten, rises again in glory "I did not realize at the time" Heaney sadly points out, "that the original heraldic murderous encounter between Protestant yeoman and Catholic rebel was to be initiated again in the summer of 1969, in Belfast, two months after [this poem] was published " In another country Heaney probably would have become a purely bucolic poet His most evocative passages, prose or verse, spring from the land That he is Irish, trapped in that struggle Yeats defined as a contest between rage and beauty, no doubt in some measure defines his subject, his commitment But I feel certain that beauty will always come out on top in Heaney's art In a moving prose tribute to Irish poets, he summons up an image of the ancient Gallarus Oratory perched on the edge of the windswept Dingle coasthne "Inside, in the dark of the stone, it feels as if you are sustaining a great pressure, bowing under like the generations of monks who must have bowed down in meditation and reparation on that floor But coming out of the cold heart of the stone, into the sunlight and dazzle of grass and sea, I felt a lift in my heart, a surge toward happiness that must have been experienced over and over again by these monks as they crossed that same threshold centuries ago This surge toward praise, this sudden apprehension of the world as light, as illumination, this is what makes [our poetry] a umque inheritance...