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The Purpose of Poetry

Published in The Bookpress

After her direct experience of the Spanish Civil War and in the wake of the enormous war that raked across all of Europe as well as most of Asia, Muriel Rukeyser asked, "And poetry, among all this-where is there a place for poetry?" We too reel from war, one that lasted more than a half a century, and a new kind of war. In an age of uncertainty and violence like our own, reading and writing poems can seem a frivolity or decadence. And yet, into this chaos is a remarkable book like John Balaban's Locusts at the Edge of Summer: New & Selected Poems.

Balaban gathered work from his previous three books (one a Lamont Prize winner and another a National Poetry Series award) including translations from Vietnamese, Romanian and Bulgarian, and arranged them with new poems into a coherent and powerfully affirming whole. The book journeys out through the brutal world of war and back to a place in a single human person that speaks to that deep unity in humanity. He speaks of this place in "Reading the News and Thinking of the T'ang Poets":

But hearing those healing rhythms has a price, as if we must be brought to a point of famine to appreciate bread. This is the need that manifests itself in times of great turmoil. Muriel Rukeyser says, "In a time of the crises of spirit, we are aware of all of need, our need for each other and our need for ourselves. We call up our fullness, we turn, and act. We begin to be aware of correspondences, of the acknowledgment in us of necessity, and of the lands." I don't know if John Balaban knows these words, but his book is structured as if they were his map, marking a way out of the wilderness-crises, correspondences, and fullness.

Divided into three parts Locusts at the Edge of Summer opens with poems from the Vietnam era, which Balaban spent as a conscientious objector to the war serving with relief agencies in Vietnam. Part One, "Speak Memory," begins the "crises of spirit," ranging from the sharply drawn portrait "The Guard at the Binh Thuy Bridge" to the invective "Carcanet: After Our War." It also works up to the moving montage "The Gardenia in the Moon" which weaves together reports by and about Dave Gitelson, a fellow International Volunteer Service killed in 1968 under suspicious circumstances. The emotional spectrum of this piece is held in tension because of the official tone of some reports and the lyricism of some of the verse section as Balaban accompanies Gitelson's body back to Saigon. Many of these poems lament the passing of friends, both Asian and Western, giving the section a weight of sadness. It is most clear in this section from "News Update":

The poem ends with an off-hand comment that he was written up in the local newspaper was because he punched "a loud-mouthed punk in the choppers./ Oh, big sighs. Windy sighs. And ghostly laughter." The violence "out there" corresponds to the same rage "in here." It is easy to write poems denouncing "the devils," until one passes through the crisis of spirit into the realization that we are all the same. As Camus put it, "We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes, and our ravages. But it is our task not to unleash them on the world; it is to fight them in ourselves and in others." One way to fight these demons is to transform them into poems. Balaban has a stanza which could be a complete Oriental poem:

("For Mrs. Cam, Whose Name Means 'Printed Silk' ") Part Two, "Riding Westward" begins with a kind of flight from all the violence in the world and in the self. He returned from the war, like so many of the luckier ones in every era, to safety, a job, even a happy marriage, but in "Heading Out West" he writes "all I could think of...was how to get away." In this section, the poems range the landscape of the United States, but especially of the Southwest. If there was any escape from the inhumanity, it wasn't here because the war in Asia has always had what Rukeyser calls "correspondences" in America's own violence. Balaban bears witness to this in several poems before turning to his mythical Blue Mountain, that place every person is searching for because "from it's peak, one can see everything clearly." One of the first visions is "Deer Kill," a bloody, nearly ritual poem that ends, "Dabbed leaves in blood and stuck them to my face. / Screamed "wolf" at the moon; moon said, "man."

Rukeyser said we become aware "of all of need, our need for each other and our need for ourselves." Balaban arranged his poems, not to reflect the order of his previous books, but to point to a way out of the wilderness. The poems present a "version of 'me'" ("Collateral Damage") who faces the crises and recognizes the correspondences "out there/in here" and "over there/right here," and then they present our deep need for each other and ourselves, "and of the lands."

When I first read Rukeyser's words, that phrase "and of the lands" felt out of place. And yet, it fits how Balaban's ordering of his poems. The land, too, holds "rhythms that could heal, if heard." His journey into the desert brings him the comfort of the land's long span and its irrefutable veracity:

Our need for the land, especially in the harsh and beautiful deserts of the American Southwest, teaches us that there is a larger scale of time than our own lifetime. It also teaches us that beauty is possible even in the harshness. Balaban's poems all have a tenderness to this natural beauty without sentimentality, but in this second part of the book, he builds to a confrontation with the harsh landscape. Out of this wrestling arises an experience of being "in the innocence which humans find in love." This "descent" and discovery enable an opening in the poems, a "listening to things that make a song," a compassion for people and events.

The following poems include a still-life of migrants crossing the bridge from Juarez to El Paso ("Portal"), offerings for his mother and sister, and a moment on a snow-clogged highway where sympathy illuminates the many lives frozen still until a single lane is cleared ("Snowbound"). In and around these are poems that honor the "need for others," for his wife and daughter. "Flying Home," which completes the second part of the book, ends addressing his daughter, "My tiny guide to a wiser life./ Little wren who calls me home." The returning seems complete; the speaker is choosing his own life and from there can reach beyond it.

The final section "Viewing the New World Order," speaks from the "fullness" of one who has faced the past and vows "that we will be keepers of a garden, nonetheless." This responsibility has a conviction to it that is rare because words have become so corrupted and promises so brittle, even in poetry where the sincere gesture has become fashionable. Through the prism of the past, the future is visible. "For the Missing in Action," and "Mr. Giai's Poem" return to Vietnam and put to rest some ghosts while "Hail to the Chief" and "Hissarlik," go to the ancient European past and find a parable for the present. The five-sectioned "Letters from Across the Sea" focuses on the poet, Ovid; here all the strands of the book come to fullness, but in exile. Balaban writes:

Anyone who has lived abroad knows that you are forever an expatriate, even in your homeland, and anyone who has experienced people's savagery-from vast bureaucratic war-making to random street violence or family terrors-knows the distrust and banishment from the rest of your fellow human beings, even yourself. One can turn bitter, especially in a mass culture where comfort and intimacy are glibly offered like gumdrops, or a deeper acceptance and resistance can bloom. Reading Locusts at the Edge of Summer is an experience of the latter transformation, especially the way poetry makes it possible. Elsewhere in The Life of Poetry (which thankfully has just been reprinted), Muriel Rukeyser says, "Art is practiced by the artist and the audience. It is not a means to an end, unless that end is the total imaginative response."

John Balaban's poetry rewards this kind of full response in this collection. By the time we read, "No poet ever had a home, but the one his art invented," we too sense the timelessness of poetry, both as an object and as our own experience. It is the response of hearing "in our raging hearts" the "rhythms that could heal." We, like the dead in "All Souls Night" find what we "hunger most for" in "poetry/which comforts [us] like well-said mass." Locusts at the Edge of Summer is an extremely rare volume of selected work: finely crafted poems ordered to achieve a more moving unity, one the reader participates in, each finding a home.

Edward A. Dougherty
452 Grace Street
Elmira, NY 14901
308 words

John Balaban
Locusts at the Edge of Summer: New & Selected Poems
Copper Canyon Press, 1997. $15 paper, 155 pgs.

This collection is a mythic journey through recent history to come, battered, to the solid shore of poetry, and the experience is one of deep resonance for the reader. Rather than keeping to the order of his previous four books, John Balaban has arranged the poems in Locusts at the Edge of Summer to emphasize this going out and coming back. Part One takes us to the ravages of the Vietnam war, which Balaban witnessed while doing his conscientious objection service and where he was wounded. An elegiac mood begins in this part as well as the book's undercurrent of anger as he recalls friends "happily dead and gone."

The second section moves as if in flight from the past (and the banalities of ordinary life) to the American Southwest desert where a sense of scale is achieved: "Small. Alone. No better than a bug." With this acceptance of a wider context for one's life, Balaban's poems take responsibility for the people and places in it. There are lovely offerings for his mother, sister, and daughter here.

The final section, mostly new poems, expands this scale by visiting ancient Europe and enlarges the aspect of responsibility in the art of poetry which lives on despite the savagery of history: "Tu Fu wrote that poetry is useless,/ in a poem alive these thousand years." And it is in poetry that both speaker and reader find a deeper, truer home. In "Letters from Across the Sea," Balaban meditates on Ovid in exile; this expert sequence ends, "No poet ever had a home, but the one his art invented." These poems never hit a false note as they travel these personal, tragic, and ultimately affirming themes. Locusts at the Edge of Summer is finely crafted poetry ordered to achieve a unity rare in retrospective volumes.

© Edward A. Dougherty