The BlueIris Semi-Nightly Poetry Break, 4/4/08

"TCAT Serenade: 4 4 98
(New Haven)"

30th anniversary of MLK, Jr.'s killing;
the cure to come

the wound of race as metaphor
in Seamus Heaney's TCAT

what he calls Homer's Ghost
and where the black heart of hope

reside in future
in the arc of history

as dramaturg, as bard, as sage,
as only in a lover's hold

where rape incest
miscegenation

can be embraced as play
as useless curiosity

the anthropologists
store up as details

for the compass
of compassion

as prism
understanding

action
morality

grace
under extreme pressure

art
life

4 Little Girls
notes from a Birmingham jail

can be the cure at Troy
Philoctetes

with bow that never misses its mark
will break the arc

and let the other
speak

—Michael S. Harper

"I was invited to Yale for a dramatic presentation of Seamus Heaney’s play, TCAT, or The Cure at Troy, and though I was asked to perform on a panel, I had already written my response in the form of ("TCAT Serenade: 4 4 98"). I also wrote out a reading of the parable of Philoctetes as an interpretation of the racial situation in America. Heaney, as a colonial, victimized in the aftermath of the British Empire, has his own kettle of fish re Northern Ireland; Edmund Wilson’s take is another, but the date of Martin Luther King, Jr's death, April 4, sent me in another direction, that of 'intentional suffering' as a philosophical assumption, that nonviolence has a particular resonent in 'lasting' through the wilderness of American racism. I had already written about the four Birmingham girls blown up in the 16th street church in a poem called 'American History' and did not want to repeat myself. Poets find their voices when they articulate the wishes of the dead, particularly those slain as sacrificial talismans to a larger frame of existence. Hence, the spirituals, the ritual of resurrection practiced in the (B)lack church, and the great songs of redemption: 'every time I hear the spirit I will pray'; or 'I been down so long that down don't worry me'; or 'I don’t know why my mother wants to stay here, for this old world ain't been no friend to her.' Heaney's worldview of canonical storytelling in a paradignamic frame of the ancestors is ritual ground for any poet whose testifying is connected with extreme pressure and extreme sacrifice. The duty of the poet is to conjure that pressure where the victim, in ritual sacrifice, is given voice (intentional suffering)."

Ah, how dark this one is...

And so appropriate too, for today...

Thank you!

:hi: