" When I hear the word 'culture' I reach for my gun."

Joseph Goebbels

I haven't been asked to give a keynote address before, nor do I think poets are often invited to do so, at least outside a strictly literary context. Perhaps our " notes" and " keys" seem a little too aberrant, too " off," too " blue" for most occasions. It's equally possible that our modes of thought would appear too given to errancy and vagabondage, too committed to non-reason, to be entirely trustworthy in most contexts, and there may well be some justification for that assumption. I trust, at the very least, that I'm not entirely trustworthy. In any case, as a novice in this area, I'd like to begin by examining some relevant terms. Let's see after that where " poetic reason," however oxymoronic, may take us regarding the sustaining of culture at a fraught and contentious and corrupted moment in our history. And please allow me to speak with you from a certain muteness and impossibility, since words certainly don't come easily, or why else would there be poetry?

" Synergy" seems a rather blowsy word these days, with its implications of corporate merger for profit-enhancing capacity right alongside those that should most concern us here. I would like to define it for our purposes in its early sense as simply a kind of " working with," an interaction, from the Greek sunergia, " cooperation," in turn derived from sunergos, " working together." Its opposite then would be " working against," or less negatively, " working apart." All of us in our lives at one time undoubtedly have worked with, have worked against, and have worked apart. " Keynote" in musical terms is the tonic of a musical key, the first note of a diatonic scale. It is this for which we are searching, hoping the notes will ascend from there in a play of harmonies and disharmonies, freeing the measure. (As a gesture toward synergy, by the way, I'll be occasionally interlarding my paragraphs with quotations from my friend Eliot Weinberger's article, " What I Heard about Iraq," just published in the London Review of Books, Vol 27 No 3, 3 Feb 2005.)

In February 2001, I heard Colin Powell say that Saddam Hussein 'has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors.'

In July 2001, I heard Condoleeza Rice say: 'We are able to keep his arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt.'

For the word " culture," I turn to Raymond Williams' important book, Keywords. Williams first confirms our suspicion that it " is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language." Interestingly, its root Latin word is colere, which " had a range of meanings: inhabit, cultivate, protect, honor with worship." From colere derives cultura, hence our " culture," a noun of process " for the tending of something, basically crops or animals." Around the 18th century, its multiple modern meanings begin to emerge and evolve, but the ancient resonances, I would suggest,

never entirely disappear. They linger as faint echoes in our contemporary word " culture," reminding us that " culture" must be mindful of the earth and of husbandry, and that without a spiritual dimension, a dimension of reverence if you will, it is empty. (We should note too the parallel that has often been drawn between the plowing or cultivating of a plot of land and the movement of lines of verse across the field of the page, a field that may be open or closed, regular or irregular. The word " verse" of course comes from the Latin versus, a turn.)

On 11 September 2001, six hours after the attacks, I heard that Donald Rumsfeld said that it might be an opportunity to 'hit" Iraq. I heard that he said, 'Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.'

The sustaining of culture is an issue of particular urgency in these times that I have called dark, when language itself seems under daily assault, and when the living arts are declared suspect or more frequently simply ignored by those in power. The assault on language, its communicative and truth functions and its acknowledgment of the other, is a necessary prerequisite to the assaults on the environment, civil rights, women's rights, the Constitutional separation of church and state, social programs, education, science, international treaties and, quite explicitly, reason itself, post-Enlightenment culture itself. The list goes on. The war, and the systematic propagation of fear in the populace can certainly be viewed as both emblematic of, and bogus rationale for, all or many of these things. It represents the triumph of a kind of phantasmatic medievalism, a hubristic turning away from the actual lessons of the past, from cultural memory, from the founding values of the Republic, toward a fevered and one-dimensional pseudo-messianism, a relentless " working against" the many for the few, the other for the same. It has about it an air of nihilistic fantasy, a fever-dream of empire founded on air by those awaiting the Rapture, when the Elect will be assumed into the eternal, celestial Reich of the pure of blood and spirit, while the rest of us experience Armageddon here below. What need to preserve resources or suffer questions or acknowledge others when fired by such visions of time's end?

Demagoguery, deceit, and denial of the other, such crimes against language are the grounds of despotism. And all in the trusted name of " liberty," " freedom" and " democracy," repeated mantra-like as death and mutilation reign down on untold (and unacknowledged) numbers. Yet, for brazen and blatant lies to work, there must be people to believe them, or choose to believe them, or simply be indifferent. Recently, my attention was drawn to a passage in Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, which reads:

In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true...Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

I don't mean in the least to suggest precise historical parallels here, merely to raise questions that must be asked in time and then asked again, lest we reach a point where questions may not be raised.

I heard the president say: 'Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical and biological weapons across broad areas.' I heard him say that Iraq 'could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as 45 minutes after the order is given'.

Early in the last century, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, born Wilhelm Apollinaris de Kostrowsky in Italy, composed a poem entitled " zone." It was one among several founding gestures of a new, global poetic sensibility, a vision of flight and unboundedness, an erasure of borders. Colored by a Whitmanic rhetorical exuberance and excess, it would challenge the limits of the real and the everyday, while at the same time being filled with the movements of the streets and of cosmopolitan life. It would, in effect, attempt to create an alternative space within the actual. And this, while Apollinaire worked in intimate collaboration with the Cubist painters and others attempting to embody the " new spirit." The poem is at play both with state power and religious authority, one foot still in the rhythms of the late 19th century, one in the 20th. It is a bridge under construction.

You're tired of this old world at last

The flock of bridges is bleating this morning O shepherdess Eiffel Tower

You've had enough of living in the Greek and Roman past

Even the cares look ancient here

Only religion has stayed new religion

Has stayed simple like the hangars at Port-Aviation

O Christianity you alone in Europe are not ancient

The most modern European is you Pope Pius X

And you whom the windows observe shame forbids this morning

Your going into a church and confessing

You read the handbills the catalogs the posters that really sing

That's poetry and there are newspapers if you want prose this morning

There are dime serials filled with detective stories

Portraits of great men and a thousand other categories

This morning I saw a pretty street whose name I have forgotten

Clean and new it was the bugle of the sun

The managers the workers and the beautiful secretaries

From Monday morning to Saturday afternoon go by four times a day

Each morning the whistle wails three times

About noon a clock barks out twelve angry chimes

The words written on signs and walls

Like squawking parrots the plaques and Post No Bills

I love the charms of this industrial street

Located in Paris between the rue Aumont-Thieville and the avenue des Termes

(trans. Ron Padgett)

In the coming years, Blaise Cendrars would ride his Trans-Siberian Express all the way to São Paolo, where the seeds of a new and distinctly Brazilian vanguardism would be planted, which would in turn leave its mark on the new poetry cultures of Europe. Vicente Huidobro, the " poet of air," would make his round-trip journey from Chile to Buenos Aires to Paris to Barcelona to Chile, eventually creating his Altazor, perhaps the ultimate 20th century poem of global flight. Aime Cesaire and Leopold Sedar Senghor would appropriate and transfigure the rhetoric of Surrealism to found the Negritude movement in Africa and the Caribbean, and spur anti-colonialist expression among their peoples. Influenced as well by the Harlem Renaissance, they would add their tones to African-American poetries of the sixties and seventies in the United States, just as the example of Apollinaire would resurface in the activities, ironies and interactions of Frank O'Hara and the New York School of painters, poets, dancers and composers. The Russian Formalists and Futurists would dream of a truly revolutionary art and, even after their suppression by Stalin, would go on to influence countless political and artistic formations around the world. The stories of these pockets of cultural renewal, resistance and circulation are, of course, far too numerous to elaborate here. (You can follow the tale in its full flowering in the capacious two volumes of Poems for the Millennium, edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, from the University of California Press, though even there the full story can't possibly be told.) In our moment, the Internet has already dramatically enhanced and altered this form of global interaction and exchange. Its virtual space has fostered the notion of virtual place, the gathering point that is-not, somewhere in between. It is easy to speculate on both the positive (no boundaries) and negative (no there there) aspects of this development for the future of artistic cooperation and collaboration. (I do not speak here for our indigenous and tribal arts, our " technicians of the sacred," who would present a different if no less complex tale of transmission and exchange.)

I heard the vice president say that the war would be over in 'weeks rather than months.'

I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: 'It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.'

I heard Donald Rumsfeld say there was 'no question' that American troops would be 'welcomed': Go back to Afghanistan, the people were in the streets playing music, cheering, flying kites, and doing all the things that the Taliban and al-Qaida would not let them do.'

There are several points relevant to our topic. First, though poetry is often considered a solitary art, and it may well contain an element of isolate making, it is always, from its inception, in conversation. (" Conversation is thought," says Jean-Luc Godard.) Poetry does not exist without a recipient, who must complete the circuit in his or her own manner and read among its various meanings. This never occurs without some degree of transfiguration, mind to mind, body to body, culture to culture. Second, what some may see as a purely aesthetic gesture is never in fact without its imbedded, social dimension. Third, though new artistic movements may begin as relatively small and isolated events, they will often conjoin with larger social forces and alternative disciplines to create an enduring effect upon our cultures, to insist upon the " other view" and to maintain, as Octavio Paz phrases it, the " other voice," between religion and revolution. With much justification, the poet Robert Hass traces some of the impetus for contemporary ecological movements to the Romantic Poets, as they confronted a world of nature and craft suddenly imperiled by the Industrial Revolution and the capitalist (not only, of course, capitalist) urge for endless expansion and endless exploitation of resources. This conjoining of energies will often occur more or less in the moment, but just as frequently it will constitute the unpredictable, contingent afterlife of the work. However anti-modernist, at their most direct certain of the Georgian Poets of World War I bear first-hand witness to the psychological and physical costs of war, and above all its folly and wasting of the spirit (echoing Greek tragic drama in this regard). The great post-Holocaust poet, Paul Celan, writes from the silence of ruined time. As another great poet, Andrea Zanzotto puts it, " [Celan] represents the realization of something that seemed impossible: not only to write poetry after Auschwitz but to 'write' within those ashes, to arrive at another poetry by bending that absolute annihilation while remaining in a certain way inside it." He goes on, "...language knows that it cannot substitute itself for the drift of a destructuration that will transform it into something other, that will change its sign. Yet at the same time, language has to " overthrow" history and something more than history; while remaining subjected to this world, it has to 'transcend" it and at least point toward its horrible deficits." So it is that the smothered tongue of Celan outlasts the thousand-year Reich, and Anna Akhmatova's intimate lyric voice survives the depravities of Stalinism by means of a poetry both inside and outside of time. It is her contemporary, Osip Mandelstam, who wrote in " The Word and Culture" that " Poetry is a plough, turning up time so that its deep layers, its black earth, appear on top." There's a closely related poem in the first of his " Voronezh Notebooks," written during his internal banishment at the hands of Stalin. Mandelstam would die at Stalin's hands within a couple of years, but the poems of the Notebooks seem already to emerge from an afterlife, where all of life has been denied by the State, where nothing but the poem and the earth remain as counters to the dictatorial word:

Black Earth

The damp clods of earth of my land and liberty

are all overworked, extra black and well-groomed.

They are all in airy little well-tended ridges,

crumbling, and forming a chorus.

In the early spring the earth is bluish black,

and ploughing is pacifist work.

The rumour is ploughed open revealing a thousand mounds.

Know this, there is something boundless within these boundaries.

The earth is a mistake and a rifle butt,

immovable, however often you implore her on bended knee.

She sharpens our hearing with a decaying flute.

She freezes our ears with a morning clarinet.

The fat crust of earth is so pleasant against the ploughshare

as the steppe lies in the April upheaval.

Salutations, black earth, be strong and alert,

there's a fertile black silence in work.

(Trans. Richard and Elizabeth McKane)

Here the different meanings of " culture" discussed above merge in a thinly veiled plea for memory, for renewal and for what must be sustained in the face of catastrophe and cultural annihilation.

I heard an official from Red Crescent say: 'On one stretch of highway alone, there were more than fifty civilian cars, each with four or five people incinerated inside, that sat in the sun for ten or fifteen days before they were buried nearby by volunteers. That is what there will be for relatives to come and find. War is bad, but its remnants are worse.'

There is one more instance I feel obliged to mention here, which has to do with the much discussed, and too often vaguely elaborated, notion of poetry-as-witness. Like great reporting and profound research, witness in its many forms renews memory and uncovers or ploughs up the truths that lie beyond the rhetoric of forgetting and denial. It is unavoidable to mention the example of Miklos Radnóti, one of the great Hungarian poets of the 20th Century. As a Jew, he was frequently conscripted into forced labor battalions. In 1944, the Nazis transported him to work in the Bor mines of Serbia. Toward the war's end, he was taken on a forced march toward Germany. Exhausted and ill, he was shot by guards in Western Hungary and interred in a mass grave. After the war, the grave was opened and a notebook with his last and some of his greatest poems was found in his pocket, poems that speak up to the moment of death and then live on, beyond their own assassination and burial. Here are the opening lines of his " Forced March," written roughly two months before his death, in my very provisional revision of an existing translation:

Crazed, you sink to the ground, rise up and walk again,

your knees and ankles move

but you begin again as if with wings.

The ditch calls to you, no good, you're afraid to stay

and if someone asks why, maybe you'll turn and say

that a woman and a sane death, a better death, await you.

A conversation, one might say, with madness, his own near madness and the insanity of the times, where the only " other" is the poet himself, falling and rising up. What hope, that these words would ever enter the world? There must have been just enough, perhaps spurred in part by the woman mentioned, the absent other.

From this near-death solitude, this stark reminder of history, I'd like to move to some actual, personal instances of artistic practices that may serve as models for " working with," for transcending the isolate self and the isolate discipline.

I'll make no attempt to define or delimit the notion of " collaboration" itself. It is at once too vast and too slippery for that. It must also be evident that everything I do seems a form of collaboration, across time, with the voices of poets and others that pass through me as I work. Suffice to say that another, an other, becomes present in a way that is both like and unlike the dialogic work of the poem. My ideal of pure collaboration, never fully realized, produces a work that belongs neither to one maker nor to the other or others. It escapes or surpasses the kind of intentionality we associate with the product of an individual. It is a work, in the words of one of my poems, " that is neither you nor I." If we consider the topic of this conference then, " working with" is a means of overcoming what the poet George Oppen referred to as " the shipwreck of the singular," in an attempt to arrive at the experience (in Oppen's words again) " of being numerous."

I heard an old man say, after 11 members of his family - children and grandchildren - were killed when a tank blew up their minivan: 'Our home is an empty place. We who are left are like wild animals. All we can do is cry out.'

I heard that 100,000 Iraqi civilians were dead...I heard that 1,400 American soldiers had been killed and that the true casualty figure was approximately 25,000.

For over thirty years now, I've worked with composers, painters, other writers and one particular choreographer, Margaret Jenkins and her dance company in San Francisco. It was never my particular intent to do so, though I've never consider the arts as isolate entities, either from each other or from other pursuits in this life. They are part of a vision of creative labor, of the imagined life, no different in principle from the aspirations of others participating in this conference. We can I think, not glibly, speak of a shared cultural ecology that conserves as well as innovates, that resists habits of thought and action when necessary and builds a non-nostalgic vision of pasts and possible futures, and of a less predatory present. When George W. Bush claims that he doesn't think about his place in the future " because we'll all be dead," the remark provides singular insight into a certain mode of thought (if it can be called thought) that has no presence, since the future is not some vague abstraction but fact and consequence of present action. It inheres and defines us as we are. As present, it articulates notions of community and exchange, of making and unmaking, but here I'm wandering a bit from the topic sentence.

I cannot begin to speak here at any length about details of my collaborative history, though I would welcome any questions you may have later. I recently gave a one-hour talk and visual presentation on it at the University of Michigan that barely touched on the whole picture. So, let me just mention a few points and instances that seem relevant to our context and our topic, before moving on.

We began many years ago with an examination of those elements common to poetry and dance, such as rhythm, duration, concepts of measure and space (space of the page, space of the stage), and the performative. We thought a great deal about certain crossings, where language becomes gesture and gesture language. We thought about story and abstraction, narrative, anti-narrative and fragmentation. We thought about the given and the possible, convention and invention, and the difference between closed and open forms. In short, we considered how we view and represent the world and time through our arts. I was constantly reminded of body and voice in actual space, and therefore of the body in poetry and the world, circulating among other bodies. In this particular choreographic process, all are collaborators: dancers, lighting and set designers, costume designer, composers, choreographer all engage in a dance to make a dance. The difference from the apparently solitary work of poetry could not at first have seemed more different or more welcome, as a kind of balance. All elements of the whole work to modify all others. Looking at the resulting work, it is often difficult to completely separate one contribution from another, even though we all have our " titles" and supposed roles in the process. So, a certain paradigm for making and a paradigm for community, if a temporary and metamorphosing community, evolved together. I don't mean to offer a utopian model; the process itself can be difficult, contentious and fragile. Differences matter as much as agreements. In fact, one might speak of " a community of differences," not always perfectly resolvable. And then there is the odd business: the day arrives, the lights go up, the work is performed and disappears. The " product," if one can speak of such, is ephemeral. For a moment, time stops and is reconfigured, and then it resumes.

I'm not any longer so sure that this is so very different from poetry. The great geomorphologist, Carl Sauer, made the point years ago that to examine any square foot of earth is to examine infinite life and time, infinite intersecting histories. Walking with my wife and daughter and friends north of San Francisco recently, on the trails of Point Reyes, I thought about Sauer and about the " invasion" of non-native plant and animal and insect species. Grasses from China and elsewhere, French garden snails, Fallow deer, native to the Mediterranean and Asia Minor, Axis deer from India and Sri Lanka, and on. Similarly, imbedded in the poem (even the most determinedly " American" of poems) we find strains of linkage going back to the ancient origins of lyric and narrative. That is, we find infinite elements, native and foreign, but we also find countless other voices that constitute its voice. (Paradoxically, that voice, if it is truly a poem, has also never been heard before.) Viewed this way, the poem is less an isolate cultural artifact than a diachronic and synchronic cultural echo chamber. As for the stage and the curtain, when the reader closes the book, the poem is no more. Will the book ever be reopened? It is impossible to tell, but In most instances not. It exists though, only when it comes to light, by the grace of another or others.

Very briefly, one of many experiences of working with a painter, though not in the most immediate sense of collaboration. Three years ago, along with twelve other poets and the musician/composer Bill Frisell, I was invited by the poet and art critic David Breskin to respond to a sequence of eight abstract paintings by Gerhard Richter, in commemoration of his then forthcoming retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. I studied not only the eight paintings and the " images" sequestered within them, but also Richter's notebooks and interviews, wherein he subverts conventional notions of authorship and genre, abstraction and representation. As his work and voice passed through me, the eight poems of my sequence, " Scale," began to take form. The ice that I had been caught in was broken, and the sequence became the " hinge" or turning point between the first and last half of my new book, and also offered momentum for what was to come. A happy result of collaboration: to take you out of yourself, your accumulated habits of making, into a place that is not your own. The various participants become " communicating vessels," opening a space for making that is neither that of one nor the other.

Behind the work, as in the making of a dance described above, there is often an elaborate, silent backstory, a submerged and silent dimension. It is in this silence, beyond intention, that a work often grows. My new book, from which I read last night, is entitled Company of Moths. At frequent points it is inspired by a collaboration, a trading back and forth, with the artist Augusta Talbot. We agreed at one point, for many reasons, to focus on moths and see what that might generate between us. When a painter-friend of Augusta's heard about this, she pointed us toward an astonishing three-page passage in W. G. Sebald's novel Austerlitz. As it happens, I was a great admirer of Sebald's work and had been hoping to visit him in East Anglia, when I heard of his tragic, early death. I found the passage in question and copied it for Augusta. I then flew for a summer vacation to the East Coast, carrying along, among many other books, Austerlitz and a mystery novel by the popular Arturo Perez- Riverte, whose title, significantly, I've forgotten. The contrast, of course, could not have been greater. the Perez-Riverte was a classic piece of genre fiction, a " page-turner," though not without a degree of intellectual pretension. A reader speeds through it, riding the twists of the narrative, unimpeded by linguistic nuance or complexity. After three to five pages of the Sebald, I would have to stop, overwhelmed by its baroque textures, its folds within folds, memory and the moment impossibly intertwined. In the Perez-Riverte, time seems to accelerate and in a sense " vanish." It is a work for killing time. In the Sebald, time slows as echoes and enigmas encircle and control it. Completed, the Perez-Riverte left nothing behind. Its job was done, whereas the depths and narrative swerves found in Austerlitz continue to resonate for me. There is ample room in a culture for both, of course, but for a culture to sustain itself in any meaningful way, the latter, the slow food of Sebald and his interrogations, must find its place against the pressure of immediate gratification. It is a work " against forgetting." Finally, that summer I drew from the Austerlitz passage on moths to write my elegy for Sebald. In a sense,
I asked his voice to pass through mine:

Arc

There is the above and the below of each.

" Their wings...the lining underneath..."

There is our daily speech, so clear

and meaning-free. And meaning itself,

to be erased, almost successfully.

There is the red rose

and its double in the dark

avid to swallow us,

the dancing woman, many-armed,

in folds of cloth and gold,

and below, her silent counterpart,

undisclosed. The tree in full leaf

and the tree ablaze

are one we're told

by the riddling, riparian dream

(a dream I dreamt against the River Wye).

Do you remember how quiet

the skies became, that while,

before the clanging began again?

The wild poppies, their caps,

the sentinel owl,

the crescents and veining,

windrows and slopes?

Below they are tracing

an arc or enlacement

that can't be shown.

" No contrasts, no shading anymore..."

They are in the dark.

in memory of W.G.Sebald

We work in the company of others (philosophers and farmers, artists and

scientists, as we variously require), and we work in the dark.

The historian Daniel Boorstin has remarked that ignoring the past in making

decisions is like trying to plant cut flowers. Likewise, to ignore the future,

when " we'll all be dead," is to ignore the present. Here perhaps, at this

gathering, we can at least aspire to that alternative space I've been

addressing, one that is at once inside and outside, a part and apart, much

like the workings of our various arts, a space of circulation and exchange. In

opposing the profoundly destructive designs of those presently in power, we

might consider the architecture of what the poet Robert Duncan once called

the " symposium of the whole," a site where the other is addressed and not

demonized, and where reason and imagination conjoin. Maybe that is the

tonic from which the scale will arise. Thank you.

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