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3.0 out of 5 stars
What Hides in the Light, March 27, 2009
This review is from: The Displaced of Capital (Phoenix Poets) (Paperback)
The Displaced of Capital, Anne Winters' second book, arrives nearly twenty years after The Key to the City. Waiting so long to publish a second volume is unusual, and probably admirable. Though it contains a few conventionally contemporary poetic moments, Winters more often resemble tendentious writers of the past, such as Muriel Rukeyser, Charles Reznikoff, Tillie Olsen, Meridel LeSueur, and Roque Dalton. Like theirs, Winters' Marxist sensibility sometimes leads her into didacticism, but at her best Winters uses the insights of historical materialism to uncover a New York City that hides in the light. In her observations of the poet's life in relation to the lives of working people--especially those "displaced" from their native lands after the introduction of what capitalism calls "civilization"--Winters speaks in a voice that at once stands in the stream of history with the oppressed and exploited and above it, intellectualizing, challenging, sympathizing, immortalizing, and critiquing. Winters' poetry can handle the stuff of the real world, even when all that is solid melts into air.
In the opening poem, "The Mill-Race," Winters rides a cross-town bus in rush hour. She describes the bus, the streets, the season, but the poem comes alive when a group of working women boards the bus:
. . . streaming from lobbies
come girls and women, white girls in shadowy-striped rayon skirts, plastic ear- hoops
black girls in gauzy-toned nylons, ripples of cornrows and plaits,
one girl with shocked-back ash hair, lightened eyebrows;
one face from Easter Island, mauve and granitic;
thigh on thigh, waist by waist; the elbow's curlicue and the fingers'; elbow-work, heel-work,
are suddenly absorbed in the corduroyed black rubber stairs of the bus.
Winters maintains a certain distance from her subjects--not an ironic detachment, but a sympathetic awareness that the poet is not, after all, one of them, not a working girl on her way home from work, not herself subject to the spectrum of exploitation they face hourly. She writes from a position of greater privilege (but not as privileged as their exploiters), but she uses her privilege--education, leisure, verse--to see what perhaps they cannot and to portray them in ways they perhaps would not. The women, who have taken off their uniforms and donned "the make-up, the monograms, the mass-market designer scarves," are hoping for a night of fun, but Winters muses: "If there is leisure, bus-riders, it's not for you,/not between here and uptown or here and the Bronx." Released but temporarily, these women will ride this bus again in the morning, return to work as raw material, mostly "forgotten of God yet still grinding, the salt-mill, that makes the sea, salt."
In the title poem, "The Displaced of Capital," Winters' leisurely reading of the Times at a café table is complicated by the nightmarish transnational "shift in the structure of experience." Winters finds she no longer needs to travel to experience the weird dreams of world: they come to her and make her an accomplice:
. . . can I escape morning happiness,
or not savor our fabled "texture" of foreign
and native properties? (A boy tied into greengrocer's apron
unplaceable accent, brings out my coffee.). But, no, it says here
the old country's "de-developing" due to its mountainous
debt to the First World--that's Broadway, my café
and my table . . .
Winters looks deeply into the nature of our contemporary existence and finds, as Marx and Engels said in 1848, no halos but only "naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation."
Each of Winters' poems has hits and misses, but the few that outright miss result in preachy sentimentalism, as in "The Grass Grower," a narrative of liberal guilt about pre-Civil Rights America and the poet's pre-adolescent friendship with a Black man from Jim Crow Georgia living in the Bronx who cultivates a little patch of grass outside his radio repair shop. The book's longest poem, "An Immigrant Woman," is a catalog of her strengths and weaknesses. It is a narrative about an NYU grad-student in Classics who befriends a neighboring immigrant woman who works as a hotel maid near the UN. They meet as each becomes involved in the Ramp Committee's protesting the dangers of the city's work on the Brooklyn Bridge. Though there is often nothing "poetic" in the narrative's prosy plot ("Luz told us Pilar has lost husband/and son to the Violence; a machine-gunned/death heap in the center of their village"), as the story unfolds and the speaker seeks a kind of intimacy with these Others, she realizes that her life is not like theirs and will never be, no matter how much her politics make her empathize. Unlike her new "friends," she does not have to resort to "The thousand/stratagems of those who simply must not spend." Instead,
. . . that summer,
I'd worked in my window like a scholar
in a lamplit bay, the night filled with myriad noises,
like Roman Juvenal, to whose ears "came ever
the sounds of buildings collapsing."
Winters' portrayal of her fascination with the exotic, politically-active, poor, foreign protesters, her tentative attempts to join their cause, and the ultimate futility of both is moving. The poem is most effective, however, when it's about simple things: interacting with Pilar and her daughter, comparing the lives of the working poor with the poor grad student, contrasting how the movements of capital affect each differently. The city, its dangers, the protests, and the infinite diversity of labor brought these two women together for a brief utopian moment, to give them peeks into one another's existences, but when tragedy strikes, the real social distance between them is unbridgeable: "All my laughable, my lovely, delusional studies," the poet realizes, "were now an affront."
A series of uneven poems called "A Sonnet Map of Manhattan" contains some stand outs: "McDougal Street: Old-Law Tenements," "First Avenue: Drive-In Teller," and "One-sixty-fifth Street: The Currency Exchange." The best is "Sixty-seventh Street: Tosca with Man in Bedrock." Inside the Met, Tosca is performed for an audience "in its stoles and fur tippets," but underground is the world of proletariat Atlases supporting the superstructure:
. . . Straight down, past sallow platforms, sewer
outfalls and steam lines, the man in the bedrock
. . .
hears, through bell curves of pings, each note
vibrate off his shaft of Precambrian schist. Gray, void . . .
our Manhattan Schist, laid down too early for fossils.
Winters' book will not appeal to everyone, and it is not perfect, but it is a valuable contribution to the tradition of political poetry. Winters adds possibilities to this tradition by giving deep emotional resonance to sometimes dogmatic assertions, and she does what all great poets ought to do: makes rational, trustworthy, moral statements that teach us what to see and how we ought to see it.
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