Bearing Witness

"Out of our quarrels with others we make rhetoric. Out of our quarrels with ourselves we make poetry."- William Butler Yeats

One of the pleasures for me of looking again at Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and the situation surrounding its publication on its 50th anniversary has been re-encountering some of Ginsberg’s other work, and being reminded just how insightful he could be as witness to the actual conditions of his time. Like Whitman and the Melville of the wrenching Civil War poems, Ginsberg turned imagination’s visionary power on the felt reality of his own condition in time and place, and took, as it were, not a portrait but a CAT scan of his America, producing powerful poems of witness.

The origins of the word “witness” are obscured, of course, in the fog that covers the sources of the language we know as English. Somewhere back beyond the common Teutonic roots of all the Germanic tongues, back in the common Indo-European morphemes that underlie most of the western languages, linguists point to ‘woid’, ‘weid’, and ‘vid’, all having to do with sight (from ‘vid’ we also derive video, visual, and the other members of that complex), as forms near its root. From the beginning, then, it named the activity we know as “seeing”, even as the modern word does in one of its usages. Along another line of development from that early form we come to the ancient Greek ‘istorin, to see for oneself, from which we get “history” – which discipline most often, now, does not involve such unmediated encounter, though it did for Herodotus. But “witness” can also be a speech from belief, something known not by the eyes but by the heart, some construct that gives form to the apparently chaotic universe. To witness, then, is to see, and also to report on what has been seen with eye and heart, to give testimony.

Poets, given the roots of their practice in the observation of both the outer and inner worlds, offer a unique form of witness, one located in the resolutely particular human experience. The poet or poets we know as Homer, for example, witnessed the war-filled world of the Mycenaean era in verse that remains, in the hands of a good poet, very much alive, notwithstanding its great antiquity. Here, for instance, Lisa Jarnot’s new translation of the beginning of Book XXII of the Iliad:

So then the Trojans
poured down through the city
and fled there like deer
that were brightenedwith sweat,
and they drank
and they cooled down
their thirst,
and they
rested themselves
in the city’s embankments

and all of the troops of Achaeans
with their shoulders to steady their shields

and then there was Hector
where fate made him stay
in front of the city and alone at its gate.

No matter its age, a poet as good as Jarnot makes her text a new witness to lived reality.

Robert Duncan, Gary Snyder, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Adrienne Rich, Robert Bly, Wendell Berry, to name just a few, stand among the poets who have, in their various voices, engaged the contentions of the social world and provided powerful works of witness that are not just rhetorical quarrels with others, in Yeats’ phrase, in the recent history of our language. It’s something poets do when the muse of their moment in time summons them to the task.

Friday, May 19, a powerful roster of poets will gather at the Center to voice their own witness. The poets who will join together for the occasion include Emoke B'Racz, Laura Hope Gill, Glenis Redmond, Chall Gray, Rose McLarney, Ingrid Carson, and Thomas Rain Crowe, recently returned from his first trip to San Francisco since his work there as a key figure among the Baby Beats.

The reading grew from the WPVM show by and about poets and writers, their craft and ideas – that would be WordPlay, which airs Sundays at 4:00 and is rebroadcast on Tuesdays at 5:00 PM and Wednesdays at 7:00 AM. WPVM’s signal (at 103.5 FM) has very limited reach, but the show is also available as streaming audio from the station’s website at www.wpvm.org. Several of the poets reading on the 19th have already been featured on the radio program, and the rest will likely have shows in the future. Tune in! Having completed more than a score of shows, the production group for the program decided to take other steps to help foster the community of poets in the region, and sponsoring readings that would provide venues for poetry more public than the usual small gallery or bar seemed a good next step.

Asheville poet Jaye Bartell, a member of the WordPlay group, spoke to the nature of the occasion:

Community is the highest expression of resistance to brutality, whether social, economic, or otherwise. One needs constantly to clear the cataracts of fear and despair from the eyes, and poetry offers such a cleansing of vision by affirming the clarity possible of an experience, within or without.

Even the more acerbic work uplifts the heart, perhaps more than the bathetic, intentionally "meaningful" variety, for exactitude is relieving, and calling an emotional or social condition by its closest name, even in the bitterest truth, relieves the heart of its eagerness to equilibrate itself in a confusing situation. Witnessing then, arriving at such a position as to see from without, and not be seen within, the mire of whatever larger horror, is the apex of value for any poem wishing to serve the toiling, dear human heart.

With such an extraordinary and diverse assembly of poets, we can no doubt expect ample insight and witness of the sort that initiates the healing of wisdom – another word, curiously, that springs from the same archaic root.


Doors open at 7:00 PM. There's an admission fee of $7, or $5 for members and students with ID.

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A nod to Ron Silliman, on whose blog I encountered the Jarnot translation. The image is an engraving by Johann Balthasar Probst (1673 - 1748) held by the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco.