Indy Correspondent Podcast #1: Good Poems, Bad Dudes
Good Poems, Bad Dudes
by Dan Grossman
Transcript:
Hi, and welcome to the Indy Correspondent podcast. My name is Dan Grossman. I'm talking today in my very first podcast about poetry and politics, poelitics, as it were. If you’re looking for a light Billy Collins/ Garrison Keilloresque romp through the fields of contemporary American verse, this ain’t it. Instead, I’ll give you my oddball poetic take on some news that you may have heard about two men in Trumpworld, Kash Patel and Stephen Miller, who are poster children for a phrase from one of the two poems we will be discussing here. The phrase is, “The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” It’s a phrase is from “The Second Coming” by W.B. Yeats.
That is to say, both Patel and Miller are full of passionate intensity.
Recently, I learned that Miller would be serving as Trump's Homeland Security advisor, also as his Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy. Kash Patel's been nominated to become FBI director.
This news was not unexpected, considering the history of both these extremist characters in the previous Trump administration. I mean, you have to give Trump some credit because he’s been transparent about the Jeffrey Dahmer types he wants to surround himself with. I also consider what Trump himself has been saying, calling the media “the enemy of the people,” promising the largest deportation in American history, and vowing personal vengeance against the Justice Department for prosecuting him for attempting an insurrection during the 2020 election.
It was in thinking about Miller, Patel, and other Trump cronies, henchmen, and sycophants, searching my synapses for some solace, that I arrived at the two great poems that shed some light on this awfulness. I thought of Robert Lowell's "For the Union Dead," by Robert Lowell and "The Second Coming." by W.B. Yeats.
But I’ll talk first about Patel and Miller before talking about the poems. I might even read a poem of my own. And that's going to be the podcast for today.
Stephen Miller, during his time with the first Trump administration, was the architect of Trump's travel ban, and orchestrated a reduction of refugees accepted to the United States. He also concocted the policy of separating migrant children from their parents. Miller’s almost a comical character, comical if he wasn't so scary. He, like myself, is Jewish, but he nevertheless reminds me very much of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister under Adolf Hitler. And not for nothing, do I say that. You may remember his bile-filled October 27, 2024 speech at Madison Square Garden only where he said that "America is for Americans only." It was a phrase that recalled many similar noises that were made in 1939 during a Nazi rally organized by the German American Bund in that same exact location.
Miller comes off as angry and condescending in both photographs and video. The anger flowing from his mouth takes almost a liquid form. That is, if you were talking to him face to face you would probably get a face full of spit. Kash Patel also radiates anger and ferocity in his facial expression. And he put words behind those Manson Lamps, as it were, in his December 2023 appearance on Steve Bannon’s "War Room" podcast, in which Bannon signaled Trump’s intent to seek vengeance on his enemies in a future MAGA administration. Patel not only agreed, but outlined a plan:
"We will go out and find the conspirators — not just in government, but in the media ... we're going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections ... We're going to come after you. Whether it's criminally or civilly, we'll figure that out. But yeah, we're putting you all on notice, and Steve, this is why they hate us. This is why we're tyrannical. This is why we're dictators ... We're actually going to use the Constitution to prosecute them for crimes they said we have always been guilty of but never have.”
So what does poetry have to say to all this? At least for me, when looking at the poems I love, especially those from classical antiquity, I see how their concerns mirror ours. I see how there’s a season for everything. Think of Ecclesiastes, in the Bible, as referenced in the Byrds song “Turn! Turn! Turn!” To everything there is a season, turn, turn,turn…
Trump 2.0 will also pass.
But, maybe, not so fast. Because there is very little solace in the poems I’ve selected for today if you think about it. That is, both of my selections have an apocalyptic tone. But then again, apocalypses have their seasons too..
Robert Lowell wrote “For the Union Dead,” in 1964, during the height of the Cold War. It was a time when a potential nuclear apocalypse was on the mind of many. The renowned Boston poet addresses this fear. But the focus of the poem is on a bronze Civil War memorial in the heart of Boston surrounded by the commercial architecture that threatens to overwhelm it. While I’ll put a link to the whole poem, which I can’t quote in its entirety here because it’s copyrighted, I read some stanzas to give you the feel:
Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston
A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the ringing Statehouse,
shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens’ shaking Civil War relief…
And then Lowell plunges into the well of the past:
Two months after marching through Boston,
half the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze negroes breathe….
This is a poem of history, but it is also a poet of contrasts, which you see in the poem’s first lines:
The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now…
The metaphorical juxtaposition of Sahara and snow is striking, but then so is the juxtaposition later on in the poem of crass advertising and more recent history. That is, after evoking the ditch where Colonel Shaw’s corpse was tossed with his Black soldiers, Lowell writes:
The ditch is nearer.
There are no statues for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling
over a Mosler Safe, the “Rock of Ages”
that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
When I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro schoolchildren rise like balloons.
Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble,
he waits
for the blessèd break.
The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.
What gives that final stanza its enormous power is that final juxtaposition of a “savage servility” that echoes the juxtaposition in the first stanza “a Sahara of snow.” But that juxtaposition also extends to the moral difference between the sacrifice men were willing to give their country during the Civil War era and the moral indifference Lowell perceived in his.
“Savage servility” might be a good way to describe Senator Lindsey Graham who, in 2015, appeared on CNN and said “There’s only one way to make America great again,” he said. “Tell Donald Trump to go to hell.” But he’s since become one of Trump's most strident supporters. Go figures. Anthony Scaramucci, another notable quisling, was badmouthing Trump before the election and is now trying to make nice.
When I think of “For the Union Dead,” I also think of the class at Johns Hopkins University where I first absorbed it. It was a survey course of contemporary American poetry that I took in my sophomore year as a Writing Seminars student. The course was taught by Wyatt Prunty who dressed in tweeds. He talked in class about how being a poet was a respectable profession like insurance. He mentioned that Wallace Stevens, one of America’s most denses poets, worked in the insurance industry. Prunty, come to think of it, kind of carried himself like an insurance agent. The kind of poetry we delved into in class were all of a certain type, the way the insurance offered by different companies varies very little. Aside from Donald Justice, there was also Howard Nemerov, Mona Van Duyn, Anthony Hecht, and Robert Lowell. Even then, in the late 80s, his take was something of a revisionist take on American poetics. But this was in keeping with his New Formalist sensibilities and reputation. The poets he championed all wrote in formal verse, had formal concerns, and were likely to dress formally at the functions they regularly attended. They were all old, except for Lowell and Stevens who were dead. They were also all white. They were ironic. Oftentimes, they greeted history with a yawn. But maybe I’m thinking more of Prunty himself, whose irony was as indispensable to his discourse as tweed suits were to his wardrobe.
Of all the poets who we read it was only Lowell who stuck with me. But he didn’t stick immediately. It took me a while to appreciate how the literary tradition was seared into his 10-syllable iambic pentameter lines, and how difficult it must have been, starting with his seminal book Life Studies, to tear himself away from formal verse and aim for something less lofty and more accessible. But his big subject remained history. In fact, “History” was the title of one of his later books. You might say that he was to the last half of the 20th century what W.B. Yeats was in the first.
What Yeats and Lowell have in common, at least in the two poems I selected, is a powerful political rhetoric that transcends all irony. “The Second Coming” is one of Yeats’ most famous poems, and, I think, occupies the same lofty place in his collected works as “For the Union Dead” occupies in Lowell’s. He [Lowell] is, by the way, hugely influential with some contemporary poets like Terrance Hayes, but that’s another story altogether.
Like “For the Union Dead,” “The Second Coming” conflates the past with the present. Yeats, who was Anglo-Irish, wrote the poem in 1919, in the wake of the First World War and the Easter Rising in Ireland.
Here’s the poem:
The Second Coming
William Butler Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it.
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Certain phrases stick out from that poem, and you might have heard them before. It certainly seems now, perhaps more than ever, that “the centre cannot hold.” Slouching Towards Bethlehem was actually the title of a book of essays by Joan Didion published in the 60s, an era which had its own apocalyptic spasms. And orgasms.(I think of the music of the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix in this regard). And, as I mentioned at the outset of this discussion, Yeats’ line “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passion and intensity” seems to have been concocted with Kash Patel and Stephen Miller in mind.
Whatever else you have to say about them, they’re not lacking in intensity right? But how about the other part of the phrase, “the best lacking all conviction”? I think of the trio of billionaires, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk and how each of them have kissed Donald Trump’s ass,in the runup to the November, 2024 election. They all recognized that they needed to pay tribute to the Orange Menace if they wanted their businesses to survive; they all put any moral integrity they might have had to the wayside. Elon Musk was by far the most gungho in throwing his support behind Trump. Bezos less so, although he conveniently made the decision for the paper that he owns The Washington Post, that it would not be endorsing a presidential candidate this year, after the editorial board was poised to publish an editorial stating their endorsement for Kamala Harris. The latest to bend over for Trump was Mark Zuckerberg, who met with him on Wednesday, November 27 at Mar-A-Lago. According to reports, they dined together, but in fact, Trump ate him for dinner.
Don ‘t take my word for it None other than Stephen Miller commented on this meeting. He said, “Mark Zuckerberg has been very clear about his desire to be a supporter of and a participant in this change that we're seeing all around America, all around the world with this reform movement that Donald Trump is leading," Miller said on Fox News.
Speaking of what’s going on in the here and now, I know that many in the migrant rights community are alarmed by the coming mass deportation of migrants promised by Trump and to be orchestrated by Stephen Miller. I know this because I have covered this community over the past year in my writing. I have also worked with migrant aid groups along the border, sporadically, over the past year, to get a sense of what they do. I have also started to attend, on a regular basis, what’s called Border Church. It’s an open air church, taking place every Sunday at an aid station along the US Mexico border run by the American Friends Service Committee.
The volunteers pass aid to migrants who are behind the border fence, waiting in an open air detention facility run by Border Patrol. But as they're waiting for Border Patrol. But as they wait, they're hungry, they're thirsty, and the American Friends Service Committee volunteers are able to hand them food and water. And during church services they actually offer communion to those on both sides of the fence. So it's a cross border thing, and I've come to know that church or come to participate in those church services. And I actually have a little poem about it, which I'll read here:
Border Church
(Tijuana River Valley, 32 32’23.7″)
Most of the congregants were migrants stuck
on the other side of the border fence.
The priest, on the US side, told them what Jesus
told migrants 2,000 years ago, “You must
love your neighbor as yourself,” before offering
communion. There was a weight to these words
transcending all attempts to twist them.
It was the last Sunday before the election:
I thought I could smell the hate. But it was only
the stench sewage wafting up from
the Tijuana River basin. As pigeons
flew back and forth overhead, I put
my hands on the warm fence bollards.
Hope, at that moment, still seemed posslble.
Now that Trump has won the election, and is putting his deportation policy in place, I don’t know what will happen to the 13-year old Border Church. I don’t know what will happen to the aid groups that feed and clothe migrants on the border and the migrants they care for. I fear that the border will be turned into a closed military zone. I fear that many aid workers will be arrested and many more migrants will die needlessly. Many questions, but few answers. But, when it comes to looking towards the future, as opposed to looking back into history, hasn’t this always been the case?