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PARTISAN REVIEW
lives . So I don't see that there is any real conflict here . I think being a poet
is , in a sense , a political act- that is,
if
you 're a real poet, not just a kind of
court singer. If you're somebody who wants to go to the White House and
amuse people , if you 're the Sammy Davis of poetry, the Rod McKuen ,
obviously even that 's a political act, an act of lackeyism .
Int:
You would define politics in a broader sense , as Vallejo or Neruda did?
Levine:
Sure . You can define it in a number of ways, but certainly they are
great political poets , and if you '11 look at Vallejo you 'll find that he never
tells you how to vote , he never really talks about a political party.
Occasionally he mentions that X is a Red, and as such he's shot , but by and
large that's not what he 's concerned with-he's concerned with the agony
of living. One of the main reasons of living, why it's so agonizing , is that
people with power have no compassion . And the minute you make that
statement, it 's an enormously political statement, and it describes our
country as well .
Int :
I notice that in the poetry of Hernandez or Vallejo or Neruda, when they
narrow that political definition down into a particular party or person , it's
usually a weaker poem .
Levine :
I don't remember Vallejo or Hernandez writing that kind of
programmatic poetry. They may have , but I' m.not aware of it. I know, for
example, in the late Vallejo, some of the poems are magnificent and they
are war poetry, poetry trying
to
raise the spirits of the people . This is true in
Hernandez also . For example, he has a poem in which he says that his
breath, that which animates him, which gives him his language , and his
words and his mouth-this spirit is the same desire for worth and animation
of the people . And he talks about the Spanish people and their refusal
to
bow down
to
be sheep, and their insistence on living life as a full human
being rather than (and he uses the image of a gelded creature) the ox . And
then at the end of the poem he says something like , "If! have to die , let me
die with my head held high , dead, twenty times dead, with my mouth
closed on the rough grasses." He then has the image of a nightingale,
" There , among the rifle fire, where our struggle is, there are nightingales
singing ,,, which is the image of the poet . You make song among those who
fight .
It
is true that Neruda wrote some ugly, stupid , boring-mainly
boring-hymns to Stalin. They were boring and naive, but when you take a
look at the immense range of poetry the guy wrote and you single out a
couple ofshitty poems, and those poems are named over and over again as a
sort of example of what happens when you become political , I think it's a
real mistake. I think that that political power he took into himself and lived
so intensely animated hundreds of lines of great poetry , and if he wrote a
couple of clinkers , they shouldn't be held up as examples of what happens
