In his book The Witness of Poetry, Czeslaw Milosz states “In our time, we have quite often heard that poetry is a palimpsest that, when properly decoded, provides testimony to its epoch.” He goes on to say “I do not doubt … that posterity will read us in an attempt to comprehend what the twentieth century was like”1. Also “poetry … is a more reliable witness than journalism”2.
I feel that since Hiroshima and the Holocaust, poetry does reflect an underground and growing conviction that the use of force is no longer a valid human activity. Weapons are too terrible now and cause too enormous a destruction in the collective lives that humanity has built in different ways throughout the world. The only alternative is to negotiate conflicts.
People everywhere are resisting empires, which crumble away like the Soviet Union. They will not tolerate an American empire. Meanwhile poets ridicule power and affirm the rights of individuals in the United States, China and elsewhere.
2005
1Harvard University Press, 1983, pp 10-11
2ditto, page 16
Coyote Vision 