Fanny Howe's Tis of Thee
Atelos, 2003
ISBN 1-891190-16-4
104 pages
$12.95
www.atelos.org/tis.htm
reviewed by James Gibbons
Fanny Howe’s most recent work, the book-length poem Tis of Thee (Atelos Press), gives the impression of a much larger saga distilled to its essentials. The poem tells two stories, each recounting a doomed love affair between a black man and a white woman that leads to the birth and eventual abandonment of a son. Encompassing the seismic upheavals of American life since the Civil War, both of these parallel tales--the first taking place during Reconstruction, the second in the middle of the Cold War--are caught up in powerful currents of national history and ideology. Sweeping contextual backdrops ("After the end of slavery, the economy gained momentum like something freed / from the controls of law and ethics") suggest vast societal pressures bearing down on the poem’s characters; references to events such as Lincoln’s assassination, the North African campaign in World War II, and McCarthy-era witch-hunts are scattered throughout the poem. In its multi-generational reach, as well as its searching dramatization of the contradictions within American racial attitudes, Tis of Thee has the feel of an epic social novel. Since Howe is a novelist as well as a poet, this isn’t so surprising. But while employing the tricks of the fiction writer’s trade, creating moments of epiphany ("I looked up at her face as if from the source / of a well, and knew salvation, or meaning, existed") and staging fraught encounters between members of these broken, secret families, Howe wishes us to understand her characters as representative abstractions. She identifies the mother, father and son, the core trio of the poem’s overlapping narratives, only as "X: African American man," "Y: European American woman," and "Z: Their grown son," these terms standing for the central figures of both storylines. Tis of Thee consists entirely of their three interlocking monologues, each echoing, contesting, or extending the commentary of the others’. One of Howe’s more impressive achievements here lies in her ability to cast these characters as archetypes without propping them up as pasteboard signposts. (That their voices are quite distinct is made especially evident on the CD that comes with the book, featuring a recording of a 1997 performance of the text read by three actors accompanied by an original score.) Although the members of Tis of Thee’s haunted cast are named like variables in an algebraic equation, the reality imparted to each of them is never sacrificed to make an overly dogmatic point.
Rhetoric, indeed, is not entirely to be trusted--the male characters, particularly the fathers of the two white women (one of whom has views that "terrorized" his daughter), tend to pontificate and indulge in grand speculative gestures: "She always received her father’s letters in hospitals and other homes / but didn’t need to read them / to guess what was inside. Another lecture on female behavior / in regard to voting rights and birth control." And the frequent generalizations about race offered by the black and biracial men in the poem, incisive as they are, seem nonetheless laced with aggression and pain, the expression of their certainties a means to conceal searing inner anguish. Opposed to such habits of masculine assertion is a fantasy of earthly paradise called Tis of Thee, a nation free of the blight of racist laws, innocent, feminine in origin, emerging from the "silly little secret" of a schoolgirl daydream shared during a lovers’ encounter: "when I was a child singing / ‘My Country Tis of Thee’ I thought there was a secondary / and utopian country called Tis of Thee that belonged to me / and a few others." The woman’s imagination of this "nation of outcasts—outside history" blooms into a collaborative vision when her lover muses that "the citizens of Tis of Thee / would have no interest in power." Such a dream-society may have come into being fortuitously, one might say capriciously, by way of an imaginative misreading of a patriotic song, but once conceived this chimeric haven never quite fades from view. Instead it becomes the measure of national failures. "I just hope that when I die I will see my lost children again," laments the sorrowful mother toward the end of the poem. "And then we will drift off to Tis of Thee together." There are glimpses of joy and even of celebration in Tis of Thee, but of all the emotions given voice in the poem, what comes across most keenly is the sense of regret at wasted possibilities--personal, familial, American. If Tis of Thee had a national anthem, it would sound hushed and mournful, and as sad as the most desolate blues.
This text was presented by Clayton Eshleman to the Spanish department of the University of Texas at Austin on November 11, 2003.
César Vallejo (1892-1938) published his second and revolutionary book, Trilce, in 1922. As the poet himself later put it, the book fell into a void—no response, no reviews. Peruvian readers may have received Trilce with the same sort of bafflement with which American readers would have received 100 pages of non-bowdlerized Emily Dickinson in the mid-1860s. Both poets had cleared new grounds in consciousness that put them beyond the sensibilities of their times.
A year later Vallejo left Peru for Paris where, aside from some trips to Spain and Russia, he lived until his death (from an acute intestinal infection). Penniless upon arrival, he was always poor. In 1926 he met Georgette Philipart whom he married in 1934. While he joined the French Communist Party and taught in communist cells in Spain in the early 1930s (and wrote two prose books on the Russian Revolution), he was tortured with doubt about Communism it appears, for he kept direct political reference out of the poems he wrote in the late 1920s and throughout the '30s. Especially in the autumn of 1937, when on a daily basis he wrote 48 of the 110 poems composed in Europe, he developed his complex ambivalence toward happiness, suffering, meaning, and absurdity. His position, which feels political yet is basically ontological, might be described as follows:
Man is a sadness-exuding mammal, self-contradictory, perpetually immature, equally deserving of hatred, affection, and indifference. His anger breaks any wholeness into warring fragmentation, and its only redeeming quality is that it is the weapon of the poor, impotent against the military resources of the rich. Man is in flight from himself: what once was an expulsion from paradise has become a flight from self, flight as a way of being. At the core of life's fullness is death, the "never" we fail to penetrate. "Always" and "never" are the infinite extensions of "yes" and "no." Sorrow is the defining tone of human life. Poetry thus becomes the expression of the irresolvability of the contradictions of man as an animal, divorced from nature as well as any sustaining faith, and caught up in the trivia of socialized life.
Here it is worth noting that Vallejo's poetic development is quite unusual. His first book, Los heraldos negros, while well written and passionate, is, for the most part, conventional rhymed verse with traditional romantic themes. The reader is thus completely unprepared for Trilce which is still today the most dense, abstract, and transgression-driven collection of poetry in the Spanish language. For Vallejo to have gone beyond Trilce, in the experimental sense, would have involved his own version of the made-up language we find at the end of Huidobro's Altazor. On one level, then, Vallejo took a step back from Trilce in his European poetry, but not as far back as Los heraldos negros. In moving from Lima to Paris, the poet hit the aesthetic honeyhead of the European colonial world at the moment it was being rocked by political revolution. Given the strangeness of Trilce's language, it is possible to see him forming some sort of relationship with French Surrealism (the First Manifesto having appeared in Paris a year after his arrival). However, he had nothing but contempt for Surrealism and seems to have regarded it as Antonin Artaud did: an amusing parlor game, more concerned with pleasure and freedom than with suffering and moral struggle. The advance in the European poetry is into the ontological abyss that I have briefly described. Vallejo seems to have known that his days were numbered in the autumn of 1937, for death permeates this writing as the conductor of our unconscious symphony.
Vallejo died before his post-Peruvian poetry could be published, leaving it in a typed, hand-corrected manuscript published by his widow in 1939 as Poemas humanos, now considered to be a title that she attached to the book. It was not until 1988 that a definitive edition of Vallejo's Obra poética appeared, edited by Americo Ferrari. In the 1940s, Georgette Vallejo took up residence in Lima, supported by the Peruvian government and over the next 40 years made life as difficult as possible for Vallejo scholars, editors, and translators. She left what she had not destroyed of the poet's archive to a monastery. There is still no biography and virtually no information on Vallejo's life and contacts in Europe. As arguably the finest Spanish-language poet of the 20th century, he continues to have a much smaller readership than Lorca, Borges, Neruda, and Paz.
I discovered Vallejo's poetry while a student at Indiana University in the late 1950s and determined, in Kyoto, 1962, to translate Poemas humanos as my apprenticeship to poetry. By 1964, I had realized that because all editions of these poems contained errors, I had to inspect the worksheets in the widow's possession. With $300 and my pregnant first wife, I arrived in Lima in the fall of 1965. Not only did Georgette refuse to show me the worksheets, she refused me permission to publish my versions on the basis that Vallejo was untranslatable (this while she completed a translation of a selected poems in French). After I returned to the states in the summer of 1966, a friend of mine in Lima tricked her into signing a homemade contract. Grove Press decided that it would stand up in court, and brought out Human Poems in 1968. A few years later, in Los Angeles, I showed my translation to José Rubia Barcia, a Spanish scholar and essayist teaching at UCLA. He said that while it was not bad, it could be improved, so together we redid the whole collection, at this point with access to worksheets that had been privately published in Lima. José's and my cotranslation was published by University of California Press in 1978 as César Vallejo: The Complete Posthumous Poetry.
I have thought more about poetry while translating Vallejo than while reading anyone else, and if my own work has been influenced by him, such influence is indirect: via what I have turned him into in English. He taught me that contradiction is an aspect of metaphor and gave me permission in my quest for an authentic alternative world in poetry to try anything.
If Vallejo is one model for American poets today, as Eliot Weinberger has recently remarked, I think that his usefulness has little to do with writing political poetry—by which I mean poetry with a cause to advance. I think that the key Vallejo lesson may lie in a poet learning how to become imprisoned, as it were, in global life as a whole, and in each moment in particular. Some of the homework for such a position, for an American poet especially, involves learning what our government has been doing in the world for the past 60 years and to grasp the amount of pain we have caused others (as well as many of our own citizens). Vallejo's European poetry urges the poet to confront his own destiny and to stew in what is happening to him and also to believe that his bewildering situation is significant. To face one's own destiny is to know that not only is one finite but that the world one lives in is becoming more disposable by the hour and that no conceivable political revolution could make a significant difference. To be bound to, or imprisoned in, the present, includes confronting not only life as it really is but psyche as it really is not—weighting all affirmation against our imperial obsessions and one's own intrinsic dark.