FALL 2011/WINTER 2012

POETRY

Modernist Shame

A student asks some simple questions

of Modernists, of canonical tycoons

such as Eliot and Pound, Jeffers and

Rexroth, William Carlos Williams,

Amy Lowell, and Wallace Stevens:

Why didn't you write about Jim Crow?

Why didn't you include images of lynching

in your Images? Why didn't your art

confront the core savagery of your

American civilization?  Your

"achievements," as my professors

call them, are as nothing in the face

of what you chose to ignore, therefore

support.  Dare to eat a peach? Crowds

on London Bridge? Much depends on

a wheel barrow?  Much depended,

literally, from Southern trees. Brown fog

of London is nothing compared to

stench of a burned lynched body.

You can shove your peach.

Neighbors too loud in Carmel,

Mr. Jeffers?  A goddamned jar

in Tennessee?  Are you fucking

kidding me, Mr. Stevens? And

I read that letter, the student says,

in which you wrote, "niggers in

Ethiopia."  You, you Modernists,

your work lards anthologies I'm

asked to buy.  You didn't see

them as people, did you? You

didn't see their catastrophe as

your catastrophe, did you?

Hans Ostrom