Poetry can’t stop our grief, can’t rescue anyone, not from the blast of bombs nor from pangs of hunger. “There are days when I cannot think of a single reason to write this life down,” the poet Dionne Brand wrote in 1994. But in 2006, in her long poem Inventory, she committed to writing it down. She wrote the dead into a poem and never stopped. It was her way of accounting for a present for which we were already too late. This past fall, a few weeks into Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, Brand wrote something else down, which she called both a continuation of her earlier project and a “prologue for now – Gaza.” In it she does not count the dead. Instead, she makes a new connection between poetry and politics by tracing Israeli political rhetoric to its source in poetic time.
: :
Poetic time has a politics. By this I mean that there are political consequences to the timeless present that never passes, what the scholar Jonathan Culler calls the “nontemporal lyric present.” This poetic time is outside of time and positions itself as outside of politics. The poet and scholar James Longenbach calls this time “the lyric now” and describes how poems create “the moment as we enter it.”1 He is not the first to theorize this ideal, endlessly new now, the same now that Walt Whitman summons when, describing the precise minute in his poem “Song of Myself” (1855), he says, “There is no better than it and now.” Dionne Brand sees this presentism, which is also a ritual of forgetting, as inseparable from the conservative line of poetry “to stay away from politics, […] assure us that we are benevolent and good at the core” (The Blue Clerk 53). For in the time of poetry, in the now that is also forever, we are something other than ourselves; absolved of our sins, we are innocent and we are good.
Most poems that eclipse our time—either by not seeing it or by seeing it as something other than it is—fail to reimagine it. In the same way that those who turn away from politics passively affirm dominant political ideologies, the lyric “now” dissimulates a conservative politics as no politics at all. These poems might seem, as the critical theorist Theodor Adorno says, to “express the dream of a world in which things would be different” in their turn away from time, but they reproduce something of our compromised world all the same.2 This is because our time is already defined by our failure to see it. Not only can we not see that which we fully coincide with, but we also refuse to look, which sometimes means looking only as desensitized spectators. Our downcast eyes let us poeticize our time at the same time that poetry primes us to look away, to avoid “the dreary intercourse of daily life” as William Wordsworth puts it.
Dionne Brand tells us this in so many words, in so many poems. Her poetic project is committed to the critique of the lyric “now” as that which conditions our political disengagement in the present, which translates into our unquestioned reproduction of the status quo. The lyric “now” produces the present as an ideal despite itself. It reflects an implicitly white, ethnocentric fantasy world whose violences are nothing to mourn. The poet Erica Hunt has explained that violence is lyrically displaced outside of the borders of the West so that “the industrialized countries […] managed to create the illusion of a world at peace – with the exception of a few remote places.”3 In Brand’s poetry the 1990s start to look like the 2000s, which start in turn to look like now, for all the ways our poetic gaze either strips it of historical specificity or turns it into ordinary spectacle “far from where it happened” (Inventory 426). So in a revised citation of W. H. Auden’s famous line “poetry makes nothing happen,” Brand writes in The Blue Clerk (2018) that the present borrows something from poetry such that “[n]othing happens here, at least nothing that is not entertaining” (62). The present is already a poeticized form of denial—disappeared unless it can be consumed as a form of entertainment or aesthetic pleasure.
The unchanging lyric “now” that structures the present is what connects the work of Brand’s Inventory (2006)—which collects the numbers of the dead from the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, from natural disasters, from shootings, from more—to her more recent “prologue for now – Gaza” (2023). Inventory imagines the dark political underside of poetry’s exit from time through an eternal inventory of otherwise suppressed woe, a never-ending catalog of corpses. “Prologue” accounts for this poetically mediated past by representing the history of political language in the present. If Brand’s project anticipates the present, it is because the future is already inscribed in the perpetuity of the lyric “now.” Between these poems and their contexts that constellate the U.S., Iraq, Afghanistan, and Gaza in and between 2006 and 2023, Brand indicts and displaces the lyric “now” as a technology complicit in the tragedies of our time(s).
: :
In 2006, Brand, fantasizing about a time without war, without tragedy, declared “now,// it’s too late for that” (415). Three pages into her 82-page Inventory, it’s already too late for a fantasy of a different future because we are overtaken by the fantasy of “now.” The sameness of the future and now is already written into the impossibility of pinning down the antecedent for which “that” is too late. In Inventory, now collapses into the future in the discursive and imaginary time of waiting for what will never arrive. “We waited, we waited” (416); “the metal, metal, metal of waiting” (433); “I too am waiting for the flutter of another century” (483). “[N]ow we must wait on their exhaustion, now,” Brand writes, and the waiting, too, is exhausted in the time it takes for the present to reproduce itself (421). Seventeen years later, three weeks into a new war that is also a continuation of an old war, in a new now that is also deeply dependent on an old now, Brand writes a line in “prologue” that echoes across time in an attempt to break free from its longer-than-life sentence: “Now, who am I fooling about now, anyway.” Apart from the title, these are the only two instances of “now” in the poem. And as if it is no longer on the precipice of something, the line moves on past it.
If it is already too late for now in Inventory, there is also “nothing but to continue” (446). What does it mean to continue when it is already too late? If Inventory critiques its own cruelly optimistic now, which imagines that “we were already living in another time” in order to go on, then its final lines, following the structure of “nothing but to continue,” figure the present through the tenseless nothing of infinitives (to continue, to revise) incapable of action and compulsive in their stuckness (418, 446). In a distillation of her poetic project, Brand concludes in her final lines,
I have nothing soothing to tell you,
that’s not my job,
my job is to revise and revise this bristling list,
hourly (495)
There is no period at the end of the poem. If it promises eternity—the poet’s task ongoing, meeting the consequences of the never ending “now”—it is a promise of endless war, of eternal hell. Brand writes in The Blue Clerk, her ars poetica in 59 versos that imagines the poet’s dialogue with her double, the keeper of the unwritten, “I can do nothing about anything, the clerk repeats. I can only collect” (53). I am not certain if there is a difference between these two sentences—like the negative and positive claims that form the final lines of Inventory—or if they merely reframe one another. But what I do know is that both doubling lines turn away from abstract helplessness (now) toward compulsive stuckness (nothing but to continue) that is grounded in a poetic practice, in the scene of writing—synecdoche for the history the lyric “now” represses—which produced the constraining conditions of the present at the same time as its promise of liberation. The present is Brand’s to contend with, even to write, because, as a poet, it always was.
We could say Brand’s more recent poem is an attempt at rewriting Inventory just as the positive claims she makes rewrite the negative ones. “I’ve taken this inventory before for all the ‘human animals’” she concludes. “Prologue” continues to collect, but it is less an inventory of “the quotas of casualty” than of the language of empire, of its fascist racism and liberal empathy. That Brand writes a prologue to “now” seems to suggest that before there were dead bodies (like those recorded in Inventory), there were deadly words. This is to say that although the deaths she records precedes her poem, these deaths are in turn preceded, anticipated, and justified by a long history of poetry that draws on the lyric “now.” This is not to equate language with “weapons of mass destruction” as Zadie Smith does, as if poetry were the same as the material reality of warfare, but rather to recognize, like Arundhati Roy, the role racist rhetoric plays in genocide.
In “prologue” “now” recedes into “the inconceivable decibels of all the things we’ve lived before” that cause hearing loss, including, as Brand writes in Inventory, “all that noise that poets make about/ time and timelessness” (437). The sounds include those of the words “human animals,” which ring with violence entangled in capitalist and ecological violence and genocidaire tourism. Together the words erase temporal difference, reducing the black narrator of “prologue” to a corpse upon entering the world in the flattened dimensions of a timelessness that props up what politicians call “this old wonder of the world[.]”
The temporality of the lyric “now,” Brand’s poetry suggests, structures violent Israeli rhetoric whose present tense accommodates multiple mythologies at once. It deflects from Israel’s perpetration of violence before October 7th, maintains Israeli innocence, and fuels the timeless narrative of Israeli indigeneity and racist essentialism that justifies the state’s right to exist. It not only erases the realities of the ongoing Nakba and the forced displacement of Palestinians, including the evacuation of 1.1 million people last October, but also deems some lives more valuable than others, including the narrator of “prologue” whose life becomes ungrievable (“who would love a corpse”). The presentism of the lyric “now”—which confuses the present with a different one made up impossibly of time and timelessness, of now and never and forever—becomes a resource for the paradoxical Israeli presentism stuck on October 7th. It is a time separated from past and future contexts of occupation and war crimes, upheld by a Zionist ideology with its selective historicizing and selective understanding of never again that forgets victims of past crimes can also be oppressors.
These are “old fantasies” sustaining and sustained by the old language of empire, and Brand shines upon them new light. Christina Sharpe tells us that Brand said she needed a new language after she wrote Inventory. The one at her disposal rendered the dead disposable. It was contaminated and contaminating, nothing poetry could salvage. In a verso of The Blue Clerk, however, I think Brand gives us a reason as to why the language of “prologue” is new:
Poetry has that ability to reconstitute language; it uses time. It can make you see the xylem between the then and the after, or the now and the after. It has no obligation to the present. It is time. (112)
What Brand does in “prologue”—something she begins to do in Inventory—is open up temporal difference. This makes it possible to historicize the “now” evacuated of history in order to recognize it as the temporal fantasy on which imperial language hinges. This is what those doubling lines and doubled poetic texts point toward as they begin, through revision, to let us see what might be all the difference.
: :
Endnotes
- James Longenbach, The Lyric Now (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2020), ix.
- Theodor W. Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society.” In Notes to Literature: Volume One, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 40.
- Erica Hunt, “Notes for an Oppositional Poetics.” In The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy, ed. Charles Bernstein (New York: Roof, 1990), 198.
Jessica Brofsky