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Deniability

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Poetry is as ancient as language. It ranges from the simple pun to the complex metaphor. And at its best it is nothing less that music for the mind. Such is the caliber of poetry by George Witte that is now compiled into "Deniability". This is Witte's second anthology and is particularly notable for his deft skills in creating memorable verse. 'Just Cause': A line is crossed, unnoticed by command/But photographed in fame's amoral flash./Bodies piled, trophy game atop which rests/One boot; smiles of shy surprise, unabashed.//Another line and wilderness surrounds/Us, humid aisles where everything's displayed/Conscripted to absolve our choices God/Deserts to find a new identity.//We bushwhack through thick scrub, directionless/The way's degraded, markers overgrown/Where filthy water swamps the lowest place/We lost crusaders kneel, and choke it down.

I got this book after reading The Environmentalist's review and am amazed at the power of Witte's poetry and how it made me think about the last eight years in a different way. A good bet even if you're not a poetry fan. It will make you think.

George Witte's Deniability strikes me as unrivaled for a Pulitzer Prize in 2010. It is a dictionary of the gibberish and antiterrorist reasoning that has justified torture and murder since 9/11, and builds for us a cold storm of those lies that shred language and make virtues of Washington's hidden hand as it shapes vile acts into seemingly strong walls. This national mini-epic opens with the fall of the Twin Towers and then shows the world as "one nickel's worth of mineral/from eternity" as we pass through fear and suspicion and false witness becomes the real thing while official lies and lullabies promote phony fallback systems to curb disaster. As Witte shows, we lie buried under sham language forged at the Pentagon, leaked by the White House and stamped as genuine by newsprint and tv screen. "A leak implies affirming fact:/there's wiggle room should details contradict,/events reverse themselves,/a photograph prove forged." Is God on our side? "Conscripted to absolve our choices God/deserts to find a new identity." No, even God can't bear our twists and rending of truth. But I'll keep this short. Any new book of poetry that has even one standout poem is a success. Deniability is chockablock with standouts, none more standout than the opening poem "Uh-Oh" which sets forth the falling towers and the book's themes. But the dense heart and power of "Uh-Oh" arises only as much of the book is taken in and one looks back on these first chords. As with "Uh-Oh", each poem asks us, Do not understand me too quickly. I went back to "Uh-Oh" perhaps seven times in reading Deniability and found something new each time. This happened time and again with others I reread after reading later poems. As I read I began checking off the poems I found most successful but after awhile that became pointless, since I'd checked off nearly everything. Again and again here are lawyerly lines that dance on their subtext, as in "Rendition"--"A patient process, this:/to rend soft tissue and extract/one actionable fact..." I measured "Uh-Oh" against Galway Kinnell's "When the Towers Fell", a poem I talk about at length in my forthcoming Passion: Ardor and Desire in Great Writing and I quote for you here my final thoughts about Kinnell's poem: "This is an almost great poem whose graphic detail burns up for some years to come the possibility of the great poem we might hope for about the towers. It will be hard for another poet to set aside Kinnell's more successful passages or rise above them to create the visionary poem that event demands -- although Kinnell takes a great first swipe at the poem hoped for." Deniability sets forth at visionary length the supreme event that sickens 21st century American history: how the towers tore us apart in ways the terrorists could not foresee, with our soul soon rent by scam upon scam. When my greater understanding of "The Third Pig" came to me, after a long pause for dinner between readings, I saw a unity of story and strength of feeling in that poem that put it at the top of my list of standouts, along with all the others at the top of the list. Still, the storytelling and intense delivery of "The Third Pig" makes it the most likely to be anthologized, the way "Buffalo Bill's defunct" works for cummings. Witte's "Pig" is a tale built of bricks which no cry of Wolf! can huff and puff and blow down. As with the entire volume, his voice bears such amused intelligence and such a lively attack on syntax that each line underscores an unwillingness to slacken its irony and break faith with the reader, not to say with the nation and its armed forces. May the Sunday Times review Deniability and lead it toward that Pulitzer I think it deserves. However, if I may offer a cautionary tale, piecemeal quotes out of context from Deniability (even mine here) when not seen in their larger context do not do justice even to themselves and may well seem irksome to busy readers who may ask, What is he talking about? He is talking about you, with your thumb on the remote.