A
work of art is a prophetic loan, drawn on fugitive premises; the artist acts on
it, and, presumably, sustains some faith that others will do so too, or at
least could.
For
the present, timing is everything.
Overhead
a configuration of crows appears.
Times
slide.
Predictions
are a different matter; a massive earthquake is coming, as is the death of the
sun, tyranny, another wedding, more war.
The
trees rise, elm against fascism, ash against misogyny, unalienated beech, free
willow, trees presenting continuous oak.
It
is only by silencing the dead that
Death can resist them. (“Ring Burial”)
The
latest from legendary American poet Lyn Hejinian is Tribunal (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2019), a collection of long, lyric
sequences composed as essay-poems, irrevocably linking poetry and thinking in a
tradition that would include multiple other poets such as Erín Moure, Lisa Robertson, Elisa Gabbert, Jennifer Moxley, Margaret Christakos, Rosmarie Waldrop and Phil Hall. Composed in three longer sequences—“A Human of Mars,” “The
Time of Tyranny” and “Ring Burial”—the poems in Heijinian’s Tribunal stretches her meditations across
wide canvases, writing through what others have deemed the Age of Trump, the
faux-coiffed canary in the coal mine of world politics. She writes on the
recent shifts reasserting white supremacy, nationalist tides and corporate
greed, and her own attempts in not only responding to stem those tides, but
battle her own exhaustion throughout the process. As she writes as part of the
third section:
The
tyrant closes the world tightly around himself, he is in the embrace of his own
narcissism.
With
the melancholy of self-condemnation and a pen, I, also a tyrant, draw a wall.
Stand,
attend, account, shout.
All
ideas but no acts so no association, no activism, no theater.
A
tyrant proclaims that the future dreams of him, which only means that old age
dreams of him.
Is
it possible to not only exist, but to thrive and create through such difficult
periods? Through Tribunal, her
assertion would clearly not only be yes, but the importance of art as both
salve and a reliable defense against such backwards thinking, as she writes in “The
Time of Tyranny”: “The roof on trust of hover can’t render love / pathetic. I claim
too much and yield to the Bighorn Mountains / of which the truth of history is
but an indifferent silence.”
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