Hass on Political Poetry, and "Rusia en 1931"

Poem "Rusia en 1931" by Robert Hass - within THE APPLE TREES AT OLEMA R HASS
This poem is about Mandelstam, who was a great poet and an anti-Stalinist, and Vallejo, who was a great poet and a Stalinist. Mandelstam was killed by Stalinist forces. Vallejo was at least metaphorically killed by fascist forces, in the sense that he wore himself out raising funds for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil war and got sick and died. Poetry, when it takes sides, when it proposes solutions, isn’t any smarter than anybody else.

But Mandlestam, who wasn’t a poltical thinker, loved the idea of the city-state. One of the emblems in his poetry of the politics he imagined, over and against the universalizing politics of Marx, was the medieval city of Novgorod, which had in its center a public well where the water was free to everyone. That became for him a figure of justice. So I say, "Poetry proposes no solutions: it says justice is the well water fo the city of Novgorod, balck and sweet," because

I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time

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Hass on Prose Poems, Political Poetry, and "Rusia en 1931"

el - I have a blog of stolen snatches of poetry and song.