University of Michigan Press

Chapter Title: Ambivalence and Despair

Chapter Author(s): Kevin Prufer

Book Title: The News from Poems

Book Subtitle: Essays on the 21st-Century American Poetry of Engagement
Book Editor(s): Jeffrey Gray, Ann Keniston
Published by: University of Michigan Press. (2016)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3998/mpub.9227505.14

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/   eleven   /

Ambivalence and Despair

Kevin Prufer

I was living in a very small town in west central Missouri during the run-­up to
our disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Just a few miles down the road
was Whiteman Air Force Base. I won’t forget the sound of the Stealth Bomber
(never all that stealthy) rumbling over our house in the mornings. Many of my
students were in the military and quite a few felt ambivalent about the wars.
They understood their immediacy and complexity in ways the rest of us prob-
ably couldn’t, knowing that they might soon be called up to fight. My posi-
tion was safer, though in its way also uncomfortable. I’d lie in bed reading the
newspaper, growing increasingly furious with the likes of Paul Wolfowitz and
Dick Cheney, filled with a rage that was nearly blinding. I couldn’t sleep. I’d
pour myself another drink.
This was not an especially productive time for me as a writer. I wanted to
speak out about the ways enormous national power was being misdirected
and used for evil purposes. I wanted to create a poem that would open Ameri-
cans’ eyes to the dangers of the nearly unlimited reach of our empire, the
porosity of our borders, the strange sense of national exceptionalism that
washed over us at the beginning of the twenty-­first century. I wanted to write a
big poem, but was plagued by false starts and feelings of despair as my work
turned away from what I imagined poetry to be into something more closely
resembling dogma.
Those days, I spent much of each day at work editing Pleiades: A Journal
of New Writing and directing Pleiades Press. Most of this involved reading
thousands of poetry manuscripts by aspiring, generally youngish American
authors, the vast majority of whom had studied in university workshops.
I remember how around the turn of the century, I began to see an uptick in
apocalyptic poetry, which grew enormously after September 11, 2001. The
tone was ambivalent and despairing, much of it meditating on the simultane-
ous beauty and terror of destruction, the poetic mind searching through the

217

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218  •  the news from poems

chaos of conflagration for some political sense of how we went wrong, how
we came to destruction—­never finding any. These new poets, above all, ab-
horred sentimentality and what I came to think of as sentimentality’s cousin,
dogmatism.
Inspired, perhaps, by my present moment, I was also reading about the
war fever that spread across Europe during the run-­up to the Great War. There
were parallels—­vast numbers of people eager to rush recklessly into a war
they (or I) didn’t really understand, convinced that it would all be over in a
few months . . . followed by a poetry of horror, ambivalence, emptiness, and
apocalyptic vision. I reread The Waste Land in the context of Arielle Greenberg’s
“City of Paper” or Noelle Kocot’s Poem for the End of Time and found new reso-
nances. And, one way or another, these observations led me to rethink Wil-
fred Owen’s great war poem “Dulce et Decorum Est,” his horrifying descrip-
tions of soldiers “bent double like old beggars under sacks, / knock-­kneed,
coughing like hags,” or the image of one of them suffocating in a gas attack,
“flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.” What, I wondered, might Wilfred
Owen’s canonical poem say about our contemporary moment of politics, war,
and poetry?
“Dulce et Decorum Est” is addressed to a “you,” whom I knew to be Jessie
Pope, a war propagandist who lured young men into the trenches with senti-
mental, patriotic poetry. I imagine Owen’s dislike of Pope resembled my own
loathing of the talking heads on the news, each of them trying to sell me (with
slogans and flags) a war that I believed would ensnare thousands of people in
decades of misery.
These visceral feelings—­a then-­hazy sense for the importance of Owen’s
poem in understanding twenty-­first-­century political poetry, that feeling of
despair and rage and impotence—­grew stronger when another poet, Joy Katz,
asked me if I’d write a piece on sentimentality for a print symposium. What,
she asked, does it mean to call a work of art sentimental? Is the word particu-
larly political or gendered? Do we wield it as a way of ushering young people
into wars? Or keeping women poets in their place by making subjects that
might especially concern them—­including female sexuality—­off limits? Or is
sentimental language a way that we comfort ourselves in the face of an op-
pressive status quo? (Think of the images of happy slaves asleep after a day’s
work, or descriptions of pure, white, innocent womanhood—­all constructed,
I think, not just to make us smile, but to assure us that the status quo is sweet
and right.)
The more I thought and read about it, the more I became convinced of two
even more primary ideas. First, I grew certain that our accepted definition of
the word—­an overabundance of inappropriate or contrived emotion—­was to-
tally inadequate. And I decided that our cultural suspicion of sentimentality

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 Ambivalence and Despair  •  219

had deep, political roots, roots that stretched back (at least) to Wilfred Owen’s
anger and despair about Jessie Pope and the Great War—­and forward into our
current sensibilities about “political” poetry.
Back in 1967 in the pages of College English, Brian Wilkie considered a
deeply sentimental, Victorian song about the father of a poor family who, in-
stead of caring for his dying son, goes out drinking every night. The lyrics,
from Henry Clay Work’s “Come Home, Father,” conclude

Father, dear, come home with me now!

The clock in the steeple strikes three.
The house is so lonely, the hours are so long
For poor weeping Mother and me.
Yes we are alone, poor Benny is dead
And gone with the angels of light;
And these were the very last words that he said:
“I want to kiss Papa good night.”

Is this, Wilkie asked, sentimental because it is overly emotional? Of course

not. There is nothing exaggerated about the level of emotion here. The death
of a neglected child is, after all, very emotional territory. Nor, he observed, is
the situation contrived. In Victorian London, as now, this kind of situation—­
alcoholism, sickness, untimely death—­ is unfortunately common. Is the
poem, he asks, sentimental because it asks for our participation in an affair
that doesn’t concern us? But of course it concerns us as much as any human
situation . . . so being emotionally moved by it is probably natural and right.
By any standard definition, Wilkie observes, this very sentimental song is not
sentimental at all.
Perhaps, I thought, reading Wilkie’s essay, the root of the sentimentality
in “Come Home, Father”—­and in many works we call sentimental—­isn’t an
overabundance of emotion but a simplification of emotion to a single chan-
nel. Poverty is complex, as are sickness, alcoholism, and death. Work’s piece
doesn’t fail because it’s inappropriately emotional, I decided, but because it’s
inappropriately simple. It doesn’t really think about the situation—­what has
caused it, why a father would do this, what larger social forces are at work;
rather, the writer offers up a reductive moral message: It is wrong of that man
to be out drinking while his son is dying.
By this time, I’d tracked down some of Jessie Pope’s writing, and it re-
minded me of Work’s song. Here’s an example:

Who’s for the trench—­

Are you, my laddie?

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220  •  the news from poems

Who’ll follow French—­

Will you, my laddie?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Who’ll earn the Empire’s thanks—­
Will you, my laddie?
Who’ll swell the victor’s ranks—­
Will you, my laddie?
When that procession comes,
Banners and rolling drums—­

Like Henry Clay Work, Jessie Pope approaches complex topics—­including,

for her, the Great War, our responsibilities to our nation and to ourselves, the
meaning of victory and power, and the morality of combat—­with an inappro-
priate simplicity. She, too, is sentimental. And this kind of political sentimen-
tality—­a way of thinking that requires no thinking from the reader but excites
powerful, simplified political emotions—­is dangerous. “My friend,” Owen
writes to Ms. Pope

You would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory
The old Lie; Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

One thing we may have learned from the disastrous twentieth century is to
be mistrustful of totalizing, sentimental art because sentimental language is
politically dangerous. It whips us into frenzy and shuts down thinking. Stu-
pid, fervent nationalism is not only dangerous, but it almost always comes
wrapped the gauze of sentimentality.
The World War I poets saw the rhetoric of late Romantic and Victorian
writers—­their longing for transcendence, moral clarity, and ethical purity,
their belief that great truths might exist outside of the mind of the observer—­
twisted into the radical nationalisms that led to tragedy. And, while many
modernist authors and artists fell for the banality and sentimentality of fas-
cism, much of the new modernist (and, in different ways, postmodernist)
sensibility retreated from Victorian rhetoric (and its many attendant dangers)
into often radical interiority, uncertainty, suspicion of totalizing truths, and
fragmentation. Where the Victorian “man of letters” wrote poetry to instruct
and to offer a system of moral or ethical values, the twentieth-­century poets I
grew up reading were suspicious of this position, preferring the notion that
we create the world in the act of observing it, the subjectivity of stream of con-

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 Ambivalence and Despair  •  221

sciousness, and the belief that the experience of truth (moral, religious, ethi-
cal, political) depends on the mind that does the experiencing.
These days, still near the start of the twenty-­first century, we seem gener-
ally to have accepted the centrality of radical subjectivity without necessarily
remembering its historical and political roots. Moreover, we tend to conflate
political poetry with dogmatic poetry, which knows the answers and advocates
for them (and, therefore, with sentimental, simplifying poetry). Our current
distrust of political advocacy in poetry (what my students might call “heavy-­
handed” or “perhaps ironic?”) has deep historical roots—­roots we sometimes
forget exist. One of those many, many roots might just be visible in Wilfred
Owen’s pain and rage at the sentimental political poetry of Jessie Pope.
Although one might not find a poet more at odds with Owen’s formal sen-
sibilities, political activist-­poet Denise Levertov addresses many of the same
ideas in her famous essay on the function of the line. The ascendant sensibil-
ity of her age, she wrote in 1979, is uninterested in bearing witness to what
she calls dogmatic certitudes. We live in an age of open forms of poetry be-
cause open forms are more suitable for expressions of the uncertain mind, of
the mind in motion—­a kind of poetry she finds more suitable to the late twen-
tieth century than, for instance, Wilfred Owen’s rhymed and metrical lines. A
Shakespearian sonnet, she suggests, contains within it its own inevitable con-
clusion at roughly the 140th syllable. Rhetorically speaking, received forms
have built into their underlying structures the implicit idea of arrival at a con-
clusion. Open forms, however, are exploratory, and exploration—­a resistance
to the idea of totalizing truth and an affirmation of the psychologically interior
nature of poetry—­is one of the hallmarks of an age that has too often seen in
the sentimental, the dogmatic, the nationalist, and the religiously zealous an
inclination toward oppression, cruelty, war, injustice, and genocide. People
who come to us bearing large truths are not to be trusted, and poems wrapped
in the formal cloth of certitude are unlikely to be welcome.
Although her suspicion of totalizing political thought (and sentimen-
tal propaganda) mirrors Wilfred Owen’s, her arguments are more formally
based. With open forms, she implies, poems engage in open-­ended thought,
creating the sense of a mind at work on a problem, a position that undercuts
the nonsense Wilfred Owen abhors in Jessie Pope. Where the line breaks, she
says, we sense the mind reaching outward, hurtling forward. A series of quick
interrupted syllables suggests a false path the mind started to take, then dou-
bled back on. In the white space between lines or series of words, the mind
hovers in unarticulated anticipation, in a momentary wordlessness from
which the ideas that follow are sprung.
These two strands, Owen’s and Levertov’s, seem to me to say a great deal

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222  •  the news from poems

about the political sensibility of my generation of poets, who came of age at

the beginning of the new millennium and are probably nearing the height of
their power as I write. Like both poets, we are deeply suspicious of sentimen-
tality (and its cousins, uncomplicated dogmatic certitude and dangerous to-
talizing thought). Though we may have forgotten why this is—­my own stu-
dents tell me sentimentality is icky and unpleasant, but often can’t define the
term or explain why—­we have nevertheless inherited previous generations’
sense of the dangers of reducing complex situations, political or otherwise,
into emotional simplicity. Somewhere inside us, we know that this kind of
thinking is dangerous. We know enough not to participate in it, and so, many
of us have found in intense poetic interiority a solution. Resistant to rigid po-
etic forms and seduced by the polyvalent possibilities of a poetry adept at en-
acting the nuances of a mind in motion, we write politically in ways that are
thoughtfully engaged but do not, often, advocate directly.
I have often wondered, thinking about these issues, if ours isn’t an age
partly defined by a kind of muscular political ambivalence in poetry—­our best
political poets expressing a polyvalence of political thought, enacting in their
poetry the turnings of minds at work on political problems that can’t be re-
duced to single channels. The point isn’t necessarily to advocate for a political
position (though that certainly might be one end result), but rather to express
the complexities of living in a political world, our many emotional and criti-
cal responses going in conflicting directions. We circle questions of race or
gender, our thoughts and feelings never lining up in the same direction, but
we understand that the act of creating muscular, ambivalent poetry is itself
conducive to a deepening of political and social understanding. We look at the
war in Iraq and are outraged, sad, hopeless, frustrated, inspired.
Back in Missouri, as the Stealth Bomber flew over my house, I found a so-
lution by retreating into the distant past, writing a series of intensely interior
poems taking place in a number of historical periods simultaneously, always
meditating on the many possible ways of understanding empire—­the fluidity
of our borders, the failures of ancient emperors, the complexity of cultural
hegemony. The poems thought hard in multiple directions, but didn’t exactly
draw conclusions.
I’m not sure how good they are, but I think they’re probably typical of
many in my generation of political poets, mostly trained in MFA programs
and employed at universities. (It seems to me that other poetries—­spoken
word, performance poetry, or, for instance, poetry strongly rooted in the ex-
perience of ethnic, cultural, gender or sexual minorities, etc.—­have often re-
sponded quite differently to these and other historical forces, more vigorously
and directly.) Still, I see similar approaches to political subjects by many of the

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 Ambivalence and Despair  •  223

younger poets who I think are among the most vital and interesting at work in
America today.
This is perhaps best represented by Arielle Greenberg’s “City of Paper,”
which I believe is one of the truly extraordinary (and largely unrecognized)
political poems of our time. Greenberg begins with a scrap of charred paper
that has floated to the speaker from what we can only imagine is the destruc-
tion of the Twin Towers. On it, she finds a person’s name and, throughout the
poem, the speaker addresses her thoughts to that person, considering the role
of paper—­at times a site of self-­expression, at times suggestive of political
bureaucracy (“The city runs on paper. / We run through the paper city”), mon-
etary power (“Our money is paper / and it can and does burn”), or, as the ash
falls around her, powerlessness and political despair:

They spread the paper across the neighborhoods

so everyone could have some.
This is what it can mean to live in a democracy.
The disaster was flesh-­bits and twisted steel, as they say,
but even as far away as here we got paper
floating down over us.

It’s an extraordinarily thoughtful poem, one that probes for answers but never
finds any. From the chaos of disaster, Greenberg emerges in deep ambivalent
thought, counting the forces that have come together to create this destruc-
tion, asserting, finally, the existence of the thinking individual who would
make sense of a situation that confounds political sense. “Some sheets,” she
tells us in the final lines, “seemed perfectly new, fresh from the ream. / Some
had only a word left.” (Noelle Kocot’s Poem for the End of Time, Cathy Park
Hong’s “The Word Cloud,” and much of the environmentally inflected new
work of Timothy Donnelly exist in similar landscapes.)
Vastly different in voice, though similarly ambivalent, is Brian Barker’s “A
Brief Oral Account of Torture Pulled Down Out of the Wind,” which, inspired
by the images of torture victims at Abu Ghraib prison, is another of the great,
though little mentioned, political poems of the beginning of this century.
Here, the political mind—­a mind that seems to exist on the wind—­comes to
us fractured into multiple harrowing (and sometimes mordantly witty) indi-
vidually titled perspectives: “What the Torturer Whispers to Himself in the
Mirror,” “What the Hood Whispers to the Head,” “What the Boot Whispers to
the Heart Beneath its Heel,” “What the Dog Whispers to the Shape Cowering
in the Corner,” and so on. Again, if there’s a dominating tone, it’s horror and
despair, laced through with an obsessive attention to particularities of detail

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224  •  the news from poems

and polyvalent human experience. The scene of torture is ultimately phantas-

magorical and surreal, resisting clear sense and articulable meaning. The fi-
nal voice belongs to a fly, who tells us,

once when you could not lift your arms

I partook of your bodies
now you’re no more than puddles trapped in stone
forgive me my old opprobriums
as even tonight I’m about my father’s business
the world churns on
through endless joy and oblivion
so speak to me now as you disappear
and I will carry your message
to the cold lips of the sleepers
yes I will tell them I saw you standing amazed
smiling in another life
I will look them in the eye
I will tell them you longed to be loved

Although the poem ends with a yearning for human connection, the work
otherwise doesn’t allow for much possibility of that, not in a world of forces
so much bigger than ourselves, forces enacted in many competing, harrowing
perspectives on the scene of torture before us.
While memorable and extraordinary, the tone of despair and of energetic
thinking without conclusion will seem familiar to anyone who reads through
the work of the younger poets in the two leading anthologies of political po-
etry in print today, State of the Union (edited by Joshua Beckman and Matthew
Zapruder) and The New American Poetry of Engagement: A 21st Century Anthology
(edited by Ann Keniston and Jeffrey Gray). Again and again I encounter its
muscular ambivalence, its representations of the motions of thought, its con-
flation of intricate detail, beauty, horror, and sadness—­in the work of Mat-
thew Zapruder, Rachel Zucker, Forrest Hamer, Matthea Harvey, Lisa Sewell,
Claudia Rankine. When I encounter Matthew Rohrer’s “Elementary Science
for Dick Cheney,” in which the speaker asserts “It is you, the vice / president
of our country, / who is despicable . . . you set the people up to die . . . / and
walked away,” the moment of arrival at a conclusion, of pure assertion is
astonishing.
In one of the most frightening moments of my life, I had to interview W.
S. Merwin on a stage in front of about five hundred people. The lights blinded
me. I had a few questions written down on notecards, but the conversation
had run away from them and now he was talking about politics. I didn’t know

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 Ambivalence and Despair  •  225

what to do. “Do you think,” I asked him (because it was foremost in my mind),
“ambivalence is a viable political position for a poet?”
“No,” he said. “Not at all.” And then he continued with his other thought,
his real point.
I kept returning to his answer in my head. It bothered me. At the time,
I was still articulating for myself how, for poets of my generation, disturbed
ambivalence might be one of the engines driving our political poetry. But, of
course, ambivalence contains its own dangers—­in its refusal to take a stand,
in its insistence on thought alone and on the value of circling a problem and
allowing it to exist in its complexities. A political movement, for instance,
cannot afford too much rhetorical complexity if it is going to make its posi-
tion known. No one will shout Peter Gizzi’s political poetry at a rally the way
they might have declaimed Jessie Pope’s (though they would certainly find
some deepening of their political worldview from it). And a truly ambivalent
political sensibility might, having lost its urgency, verge into mere noodling
with political ideas (something I also encountered in my position as a liter-
ary editor). Mere vagueness or, worse, irresponsible political disengagement,
can often pass, at first glance, for serious, thoughtful ambivalence (or, just as
frequently, for a winking, ironic wordliness—­a reduction of complex political
feeling into simplifying irony, a kind of masked sentimentality in itself, I’d
argue). Maybe this is what bothered Merwin about my question.
But, like others, I have come to believe that the complex thinking and feel-
ing that arise from deep political conflictedness are, in other ways, a good
antidote for the dangers of our century’s political dogmatism, sentimental-
ity, and shouting. I turn on the television, the radio, the computer, and am
accosted by slogans, tweets, political talking points, and complex issues re-
duced to tiny nuggets of opposing processed thought. We all are. These are
the enemies of real political thought and dangerous to political feeling (as
well as to the well-­being of our country). We live in a world in which too many
vehicles of communication are too good at delivering this kind of simulated
thought to vast numbers of ready minds.
In its many ascendant sensibilities, poetry will never be as good as televi-
sion, Internet, and radio at telling us whom to vote for or convincing us to
enlist in the army. At its best (in our age of lyric interiority), it is too complex
and intricate for that, and its reach is smaller. The days when Jessie Pope’s po-
etry convinced men to die in the trenches seem, for now, far away. And that’s
all for the best, because it seems to me that the twenty-­first-­century political
poem engages in a kind of thinking that no other art form I know of is quite as
adept at. Poetry as I conceive it creates the possibility of a simultaneity of con-
flicting meanings, the experience of productive ambivalence, the chance to
begin to understand enormously complex questions with a large-­mindedness

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226  •  the news from poems

that can contain multiple, conflicting beliefs or feelings. The work of Green-
berg or Barker, for instance, accepts that this containment is part of the pro-
cess of thinking about not wholly answerable questions.
Provoking deep, ambivalent thought about political questions is not just a
prelude to a political act but, also, I think, a kind of political act in itself—­in
that it makes us more humane, serious, and insightful thinkers about politics.
Near that air force base in Missouri, where this essay began, I observed that
my military students had an understanding of the human and political impli-
cations of our wars that the rest of us did not. It’s this sort of nuanced under-
standing that I expect the new political poetry will communicate to those of us
who have not yet been born.

Works Cited

Barker, Brian. “A Brief Oral Account of Torture Pulled Down Out of the Wind.” The
Black Ocean. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2011. 54–­63. Print.
Beckman, Joshua and Matthew Zapruder, eds. State of the Union: Fifty Political Poems. Se-
attle: Wave, 2008.
Greenberg, Arielle. “City of Paper.” Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing 23.1 (2003): 14–­16.
Print.
Keniston, Ann, and Jeffrey Gray, eds. The New American Poetry of Engagement. Jefferson,
NC and London: McFarland Publishers, 2012. Print.
Levertov, Denise. “On the Function of the Line.” Light Up the Cave. New York: New Di-
rections Press, 1982. 67–­77. Print.
Owen, Wilfred. “Dulce et Decorum Est.” The Poems of Wilfred Owen. Norwalk, CT: New
Directions, 1949. 66. Print.
Rohrer, Matthew. “Elementary Science for Dick Cheney.” State of the Union. Ed. Joshua
Beckman and Matthew Zapruder. Seattle: Wave Books, 2008. 10–­11. Print.
Wilkie, Brian. “What Is Sentimentality?” College English. 28.8 (1968): 564–­75. Print.

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