Peterson 1

Beyond the Verdict: Toward a Contemporary Poetics of Witness

Claire Peterson

Research Intensive English: Senior Honors Project

Mentor: Ted Mathys

25 April 2017
 Peterson 2

Table of Contents

I. Preface

II. Quetzltepek

Quetzltepek

House Visit

Renovation

Piatera on Boulevar de Constitucin

Southern Hospitality

Real Estate

Act

Last Homily

Top Comments

Dead Metaphor

Diversion

ZIP, ZAP, ZOP

Chairs

Casa de La Mujer

Return

III. Beyond the Verdict: Toward a Contemporary Poetics of Witness

 Peterson 3

Preface

From August to December of 2015, I lived in a suburb of San Salvador, El Salvador,

where I took classes in Salvadoran literature, theology, history, and sociology at the Central

American University in partnership with the Casa de la Solidaridad. I spent two days a week in

field praxis accompanying people in marginalized communities on the skirt of a volcano, making

house visits, participating in a womens group, and meeting with adolescents of the area. Since

this time, I have developed key friendships, translated work, and researched the countrys

history, but struggled with writing poetry about El Salvador. As an educated upper-middle class

white woman, I am concerned about the appropriation of marginalized voices. I have questioned

the ways in which well-meaning projects can end up working against the people they are

supposed to uplift, and how my telling of others suffering could be another form of oppression.

In addition, upon my return I have remained active in thinking about my position as witness and

poet in the context of prisons in Los Angeles. I visited the California Institution for Women in

Chino and the California Rehabilitation Center in Norco, spending three days inside the prisons

meeting with inmates. This immersive trip was focused on learning about restorative justice

through hearing the stories of others and encountering organizations and institutions that are

practicing it, such as the Jesuit Restorative Justice Initiative, the Anti-Recidivism Coalition,

InsideOUT Writers, and Homeboy Industries. As a continuation of these experiences and

questions, this Research Intensive English project is two-fold: it includes poems based on my

time in El Salvador, and builds upon the existing scholarship on the poetry of witness in a

critical essay.

Poet and critic Carolyn Forch describes poems of witness as those in which the poet

bears witness to forms of violence, atrocity, war or persecution. For Forch, a poem of witness
 Peterson 4

reclaims the social from the political and in so doing defends the individual against illegitimate

forms of coercion (Against Forgetting 45). In order to practically explore the implications of

writing a poetry of witness, I will use El Salvador, its history, and its current circumstances, as a

case study. I want to question what factors may have changed since Forch herself spent time in

the country as a journalist and poet.

The history of El Salvador is violent and cyclical. The United Nations Truth Commission

Report From Madness to Hope: The Twelve Year War in El Salvador recounts, Between 1980

and 1991, the Republic of El Salvador in Central America was engulfed in a war which plunged

Salvadorian society into violence, left it with thousands and thousands of people dead and

exposed it to appalling crimes (UN Security Council 3). Fought between the military

government of the right and leftist guerilla forces, the war was marked by brutal massacres,

human rights violations, and the martyrdom of figures like Oscar Romero and four American

missionary women who were raped and murdered by members of the Salvadoran National

Guard. The war continued until the day - 16 January 1992 - when the parties, reconciled, signed

the Peace Agreement (3). But the conflict persists. Cultural trauma has been passed down from

generation to generation in a myriad of forms. The current economic, social, political, sexual,

and gender injustice in the country is, in many ways, a function of untreated wounds.

The United States is also deeply implicated in this conflict. In addition to funding the

Civil War, the Salvadoran National Guards deadliest Atlacatl Battalion was trained at U.S.

Armys School of the Americas. Atlacatl was responsible for two of the most brutal massacres of

the war and the murder of six Jesuit priests and their housekeeper and her daughter who were

killed at the Central American University (UN Security Council 22). In addition, many migrants

who came to the United States during and after the war became involved in gang activity. In
 Peterson 5

response to surging violence in Los Angeles in the 1990s, the United States began deporting

gang members back to El Salvador, where they have spread violence throughout the country.

Among its population of 6 million, El Salvadors 2015 murder rate of about 104 homicides per

100,000 people, an increase of about 70 percent from the year before, is estimated to be among

the highest in the world for countries not at war (Partlow). In addition, a generally misogynist

and homophobic culture oppresses women and queer people, through politics, social structures,

and religion. These forms of war and the changing nature of new media consequently challenge

what the poetry of witness means when methods of perpetrating and viewing violence are

changing. This project aims to witness the suffering, joy, violence, and beauty of El Salvador and

its people, while interrogating my position of privilege as a witness, a poet, and a United States

citizen.
 Peterson 6

Quetzltepek
 Peterson 7

Quetzltepek

I sit with you in the cool

shade of the mango tree.

Your stone bench,

my plastic chair,

a whiff of distant burning,

and I cannot think

of another thing to ask,

so I write, you text, insects

drone, more drunk

on dampness than sun.

I know your mother

is dead, that you are sixteen

and were supposed to practice

English. You wont even dare

hello. The words that might

be, but are not yet, buzz between us

like the flies. The questions in

your ears cling on your lips in long

strings of mysteries you keep, dreams

of being a car mechanic.

Your cropped hair capped, your nails

flaunt the pinks you indulge.

Your brothers in jail

and your aunt has told you you

are not allowed to visit.

The words on my tongue stick.

What you cant say

I project, what you can

I collect like
we collect obsidian glass
 Peterson 8

that beams eagerly out

from under gray brown soil,

the ash that wraps the cone.

When our time is up,

Mara Tomasa, Mara Teresa,

Hector, you, and I gather

our bags of rice and plastic

bottles to climb past the graffiti

to aluminum houses at the tree line.

We lift thin veils of dust

with our heels, as the others

debate the name of the volcano.

I smuggle us a jagged
chunk of black glass in the mesh

pocket of my pack, where it catches

the sky and darkens the sun.
 Peterson 9

House Visit

All we know from our briefing

is that the husband is severe
in his diabetes,
and the pharmacy
is out of the medication
he needs to stay alive.
I prep to hear his struggle,
stepping over trash, mud, oil,
intermittent piles of dog shit.

The house is near the river

that flows down the volcano.
This rainy season there is drought
but in the past, flooding and mudslides.
In the cleft
where the river should be,
there is a rainbow of plastic,
diapers, mud.

In the front yard,

we sit underneath
the mango tree that drops fruit
on the tin roof.
They say they are not fazed.
This time, a low table between us.
This man is particularly chatty,
a devout evangelical. We nod vigorously.
We can small talk.

As soon as the yellow house

swallows both Maras
(they dont let the gringas cook),
the conversation turns. First,
with friendly religiosity. And then,
gaining confidence, he speaks directly.
Before lunch is ready,

Nicole is going to hell

for wearing saints medals
on her neck chain, Jenna is made
to serve men since she was created from a rib
low on Adams body,
and Pope Francis is the anti-Christ.
 Peterson 10

The armada of Maras swoops in,

hearing the volume go
from confessional to
Christian rock. The man shrivels.
It is one of the best meals
we eat in San Ramn, minus the beets.
Halfway through roast chicken and rice,
the mans wife walks in the front gate.
In her right hand, two dead hens.
 Peterson 11

Renovation

Dust motes
plume from cinderblocks
being leveled. A blue flash
of metal against flame.
Behind the steel grate,

the house in San Ramn

is carved out to make an accessible space
where Hortensia will stay,
when she returns from the hospital
with part of her cerebellum cut out.

Will blue flash

in the operating room?
Will she get into surgery
before the tumor devours her,
or she caves to a pathogen
vacationing in the ward?

Shes waited weeks,

all the while
doctoring other patients.

They report back to Anita,

her caretaker and the owner
of the house.
She helped me distract myself
from the pain by telling me stories

of how she survived the Civil War

they say, she brought me
a dish of plantains
because the nurse gave me
a plate full of chicken
and I get hives.

While Anita relays their stories,

the little girl Dayana Michelle
kills a worm
Anita mistook for a stick.
 Peterson 12

Piatera on the Boulevar de Constitucin

I know the turn of the road,

the youre-almost-there-turn,

at the piata shop on Constitution,

a strip of green buildings,

one-storied, the piatera,

a store that makes and sells piatas,

Life-size yellow Minions, soccer balls,

and feral dogs. The faces are sweet,

but I only see violence

in the act. Plaster girls and boys

beaten to pieces by their twins,

their cellophane guts,

the crack of hard candy

hitting concrete,

like hail. Piateria, a word

that means armed robbery.

On the Day of the Girl and the Boy,

I piece together the vehemence

when paper mach twins

swing from the tree

that overhangs the schools

red basketball court.

The clown pretends to fill a plastic cup

with a boys urine. He makes the girls dance,

the boys judge, and a six-year-old

named Flower wins the contest.
 Peterson 13

Southern Hospitality

Pupusas are tossed on plastic plates

in the pink kitchen.

A group of students
in a delegation

from St. Somebodys

eats with us tonight

in Casa Silvia. I translate

for a United States guy

and Blanca. He presses

the pupusa like a button and says,

yeah we havent really slept

since we got to Per.

I tell Blanca
the boy is tired,

but I leave out the part

how this dude from Wisconsin

thinks hes 1,845

miles further

south than he is.

She sympathizes.

She majors in physics,

pulls all-nighters, so she gets it.

At the end, the guy thanks me for

helping him really connect

with the people here.

I say, good luck.

Good night, he manages.

I imagine him say

to his Aunt Becky,

Ecuador was great.
 Peterson 14

Real Estate

On the inside, Mara Teresas house

has no walls between inside and outside
once you enter through the painted door.

No door between kitchen and the green

shock of a tree in the courtyard, only
a two-foot ledge. I feel like Im inside

because the roof is over my head.

Her black lab licks the iron grate
and she fills a bucket to wash the concrete

where the dog has peed.

She rinses it down the drain,
explains the dogs menstrual cycle,

how she washes away blood too.

She scans the slice of street she can see.
She doesnt leave after dark. She feels

the house is secure because of the bars

on the windows and door, the locks,
but to exist is to find safety

hiding behind gaping structures.

Its hard to understand her raspy whisper.
There isnt proper syntax for fear.

Except for the dog, except for her bed,

where she insists I sleep, the home is empty,
except for the pictures

of her grandparents and children

on the faded emerald wall.
Shes selling. The dog too.
 Peterson 15

Act

Three old men,

old enough to have lived
and fought, spit
as I pass them,
or they pass me.

Ive learned this history

of the Civil War.
I paste their pasts
together. The bodies, the greenery,
naked, tortured, wrists

bound in barbed wire,

dismembered with
machetes, gutted.
My brain indulges
a collage, matte with

dysphoria.
Jorgelina the playwright
tells us, Green
is the color of death.
I dont see

bodies in the city,

along the roadways,
I hear about
their appearances,
how one appeared

in the cemetery, another

on the Road to the Volcano
in the community
named The Clouds,
and in La Valencia,

near the auto-body shop.

We are instructed
not to say the Spanish
words for gang,
never Calle 18,

never Mara Salvatrucha,

not to ask.
 Peterson 16

This is languages way.

When voting is not,
and working is not,

and childbearing
and murder
are not, it is still
political, this act,
to name.
 Peterson 17

Last Homily
We want the government to face the fact
that reforms are valueless if they are carried
out at the cost of so much blood.
-Oscar Romero

Accompanied by three members of the National Guard, we

hike to the River Sumpul. Salvadoran noncombatants wanted
to flee the violence and ran to the
water for safety here in 1980. Salvadoran and Honduran governments
downplay the six hundred who were killed, as they tried to
get to the border, but they faced

bullets, drowning, and bayonets at each bank. The

surviving witnesses divulged the reality:
their children tossed in the air, the soldiers that
caught them on their spears. Today, the reforms
appear and appear and we are

wading the tributaries, traipsing valueless

gravel. The lanky guard, his uniform, rifle, and boots as if
nothing has changed, offers a hand to help me cross the stream where they
rained bullets on whole families, where there are
intergenerational wounds still to

be sutured, to be
dressed. Julio opens a round of cheese he carried,
realizes he accidentally stole it from Mara the ex-guerrilla. Out
at the circle of tree stumps we stop for lunch, at
the massacre monument. We chuckle before moving on in the

heat. We cut barbed wire, a short cut that cost

us miles of farms. We skirt herds of
steers. At the fences, the lowest cable is snipped so
we can duck under. Metal catches my mesh shirt and much
of my back. The skin doesnt break. Just scratches. No blood.
 Peterson 18

Top Comments

El Salvador: Assassins for Sale

Allegations that private security companies

are being hired to murder organised crime gang members.

No mature content
Category: News

Dick: Garbagemen should be rewarded,

someone has to take out the trash.

William: thank you

M. H.: The gang member extermination squads

are doing a great job!
If I knew where to send
them a donation, I would!
I was the victim of gang violence here in America.
I was almost killed by 20 gang members.
They got community service at most.
thats not acceptable!

Masih: The only solution to a bad guy with a gun

is a good guy with a bigger gun

claudia: Masih agree

Patricia: This stuff happens here in the U.S.

but here the assassins are called cops."

Merjan: It is the government's job

to hire and trains extrajudicial death squads
to rid society of the corrupt and the otherwise untouchables.
If corruption is exterminated, other societies
plagues soon follow. Prostitution, murder, theft
are often symptoms of poverty
which itself is a symptom of corruption.

Scott: Empire of Liberty needs to set it straight

down south of the border.

Bill: I live in a part of El Salvador where death

squads (exterminios) were formed 4 years ago.
Its the best thing that ever happened. No more
 Peterson 19

worries about animals ripping my stereos

out of my vehicles or gang members charging me
tax to support their lazy butts.

El Perro Loco: El Salvador should allow for abortions

and more contraception. Poor people
shouldn't be breeding so much.

sound sytem: You are correct the problem is the church

here it has a strong influence also the right wing
government didnt invest in education because to them
having the population poor and ignorant was a plus

Scott: Change will only happen if drug

prohibition is dismantled.

Hear What You See: yup,

cuz theeres always gonna be
the user or addict

TheMoneyTeam: hire duterte

problem solved.

View all 13 replies

Ben: This country is to beautiful

to continue with this type of crime.

Jeysi: you guys have to understand

this is one of the most violent
places in the world and let me tell you
kids no longer have the choice
u either work for the gang or you die
they have to work selling,killing
and as post what do parents do
they stay behind and send their kids
to a safe place in the u.s
just imagine yourselfs
in those kids shoes

The14Families: I spent my childhood

in that beloved country of mine. as time went by
cleaning blood off my shoes
became norm . I remembered
my first day of school,
I remembered the anxiety of being left
 Peterson 20

behind my mother , the excitement

and relief when she came back
I few hours later. the chaotic scenes.
blood spilled on the streets,
the overwhelming scent of death. dismembered bodies .
I rolled my pants up
so blood would not leave a stain.
that's all I could do.

dodgeplow: The subtitles contain several errors

or imprecise translations. Get a better translator.

Mar Vin: Hahaha i call em

jokesterminios
they caught 40 bodies since summer
Here in my country philippines
we have vigilanteezz
they caught 3,743 bodies
60-70 deaths a day literally no joke
since my beloved president
came in to power
Rodrigo Roa Duterte god bless you

Raizulee: Good job Los exterminatos,

this kind of country needs violent vigilantes
to take out criminals, country like this needs duterte.
Pablo escobar wouldnt fall
without los pepes. Good job!
 Peterson 21

Dead Metaphor
Caminante, no hay camino
Se hace camino al andar.
- Antonio Machado

Traveler, there is no road.

We make the road by walking.
- Carolyn Forch

The 12-year-old boy

and the 13-year-old boy run
down a side street that connects

to the Calle al Volcn. Red stains,

their baggy t-shirts drip
in my periphery,

until I turn to catch

their crew cuts and glinting
diamond studs.

Two officers with rifles run

directly at me and shout, HALT, HALT!
I am between them and the boys.

I throw my hands up,

and they charge like soldiers
with bayonets, anachronisms,

but at the moment they are

supposed to gut me, they run right through.
I scurry down a side street,

away from the line of fire,

just before the wall
with the 18 graffiti.

If they make the road by walking,

what happens when they run?
 Peterson 22

Diversion

Many juveniles referred to juvenile court are first or second time offenders who commit offenses
such as shoplifting, malicious mischief, fare evasion, or possession of alcohol. These
youth may be eligible for an alternative to formal involvement with the court process
known as diversion.
I am not going to prison to write about it. This is not the exposition.
I am going because I know about L.A. because of El Salvador because of the U.S. because of the
Civil War because I am a privileged gringa whose Spanish is so white you could paint the
walls with it.
But also because of red-shirted, stud-earringed, and hard-parted boys who ran down the hill, into
the game life, tryna come up.
Because I wake up at four a.m. and remember to check the clock because four a.m. is four
weeks, four months, and four years from now is Jaimes date of release.
Diversion is provided by the Los Angeles County Probation Department. After a probation
officer reviews the case and determines that the youth is eligible for diversion.
Before I left, Henry sat on the porch and played Murder in the City. His fingers pluck, miss,
fall behind the time.
The youth will enter into a written agreement about what consequences will be imposed for the
youth's behavior.
His eyelashes are longer than mine. They flick up when he peeks ahead to the next chords. One
person dead from such is plenty. No need to go get locked away.
I wonder if Gama, Erick, or Alejandro back in Salvador know anyone at the facility.
The agreement may include community restitution work (i.e. community service), a fine,
counseling, informational or educational classes, and other options. State law defines
The warden says, I know you guys have good hearts, but they dont necessarily, and reminds
us Tyrone, Carlos, Johnny, and Reggie are property of the state, dangers of exposing their
genitals, and thats just being honest.
the types and extent of consequences that that may be imposed. If the youth does not want to
participate in diversion or fails to comply with the agreement,
John diagrams the prison showers, and Betty smuggles the paper out in Chaplain Teddys
backpack, to illustrate how shower sharks operate.
Jimmy and I sing Rivers and Roads in the prison talent show. Been talking bout the way
things change, my family lives in a different state.
the youths case may be referred to a hearing officer who will meet with the youth and parent or,
in formal diversion the matter could be submitted to the District Attorney
Tyrone raps, I pray for the day love replaces all my sorrows. Now hes out of General Pop, the
yard where the brothers he ratted out would take him out if given the chance. Back there,
the homie next to you is going to look down on you for doing homework.
for petition where the youth and parent would have to attend court and meet with a judge. The
youth
Tyrone is a poet who chose not to tattoo so he wouldnt be marked, an easy catch for the gang
files.
would require an attorney; one could be provided by the court if the family could not afford an
attorney for the youth.
 Peterson 23

I say vulnerability, and Johnny says, Your testimony can mean everything, and Kristian
says, That shits real!
Most Requested Information:
Job Opportunities
Sworn Peace Officer Instructions/Application
Area Offices & Hours
Camp and Hall Locations & Visiting Hours
Online Payment
 Peterson 24

ZIP, ZAP, ZOP

Only six people

in the waiting room
at a time. Screened
window, guard:

Dont lose
that visitors ID.
Thats your guyss
way out. Seriously.

Chink, window shut,

military buzzer to release
us into the prison.
The grey-beige of it all.

The guards uniform,

the fences, the paint,
the concrete, the convex
security mirrors,

the concertina wire.

Chaplain Teddy walks us
up the hill, to meet
the Guys in Blue.

Past Module G, Mailroom,

Module C, Civic Addict
Records, six sets
of seven stairs,

to the chapel,
crushed purple
petals, juicy
bursting succulents,

and the view,

the mountains
I dont want
to indulge.

At the top, a white guy

lounges in navy pants,
CDCR PRISONER
stamped in golden
 Peterson 25

block letters
down the right pant leg,
You guys the college people?
Mostly nods.

Yeah, were state prisoners,

incites a few guffaws
from men in white tank tops
stationed around him.

Red ink, on an easel

outside the chapel,
OUT OF BOUNDS
115 will be issued.

Once we are here,

filed in wooden pews,
Teddy soothes, In case
theres any commotion,

respectfully stay
where you are.
Thats all you need
to know.

First an ice-breaker,
a game Zip, Zap, Zop,
often used as a theatre exercise
or elimination game.

Objective: Warm-up
Materials: No Materials Necessary
Set Up: None
Directions:

The rules
have many variations.
The most basic form
involves a circle of people

sending a clap or impulse

or ball of energy
to each other in turn.
Someone begins by pointing

to another person
 Peterson 26

and saying ZIP!

That person then points
to yet another person

and says ZAP! That person

points to another person
and says ZOP!
This continues,

but the words must

be said in order:
ZIP, ZAP, ZOP.
If someone makes a mistake

and says a word

out of order,
that person
is out.

The game structure

is folkloric. It changes
with the location
and the players.

We push the chairs out

to make room
for our bodies. ZIP,
ZAP, the people who err

are taken out, ZOP.

There are twenty-four,
now thirteen, and six.
We are rowdy,

Everyone raises their hand

when Megan shouts,
All in favor
of a shootout?

except for T, the reigning

champion, and Castro,
two Guys in Blue
set against each other,

best players in the room.

Castro points his hands like a gun,
 Peterson 27

ZAPs, T ZIPs him out.

Its Paulina against T against Betty,

until Bettys out

too, and in the final
round, Paulina ZOPs T.
The chapel splits

open with the commotion

of bellows and high-fives
flung at the new
champ of the yard.
 Peterson 28

Chairs

The stone bench where Mara Tomacita tells us to chill our nalgas on a hot day
The wooden pews in the California Rehabilitation Center
Chairs that my skin clings to because of the sweat from my thighs
The carpet where I decide to spend four months in Central America
The living room floor of Kevin and Trenas, my swollen feet stink, I try to tuck them underneath
me to mask the stench
A tree stump, listening to Gustavo sing Imagine with his guitar
Steps on the path to Green Peak, alone, the humidity
The bunk beds
Hammock at Davds house, his father dying, stomach cancer, the plastic quality of his skin, his
smile, they tell us, he is deaf, he is mute, when we return two weeks later, he is gone
The ratty cloth cushions and wicker couches in the sala
The sofa outside Martas house where five-year-old sassy Erika sits, makes fun of my drawings,
and winks when she eats her boogers
Microbus seats, my backpack next to me, to say, not ready for talking yet
The pile of rocks at the summit of Santa Ana, the aqua of the crater lake, the clouds swallowing
the Izalco volcano to the south
Women who sit in two chairs, three, how their short legs swing
The phone chair where I fumble to ask Anita if I can stay at her house instead of walking up the
volcano
Seats under the tent watching the sun recede into itself
Wrought iron chairs on the patio of Casa Romero, where I tell Abi and Rose about the washing,
my feet throb in a jumbo purple bucket with an inch of ice water
The dirt where we all sit, too close to the fire ant nest
 Peterson 29

Casa de la Mujer

San Ramn, Mejicanos

On purple walls, paper butterflies taped to paint,

flanking a circle of orange, white, and green plastic
chairs. The House of the Woman is cinder-block, with
a tin roof. Here is where we end our afternoons. Jenna
is falling sleep. On my lap, a journal. Children run in
and out while we meet, between mothers and
grandmothers and the playground, often tugging at a
skirt for a quarter to buy a chocobanana from Anita.

On Sexuality Day, three sets of three pictures are

taped to the wall when we enter. A man and a woman
kissing, a man and a man kissing, and a woman and a
woman kissing. Were handed two pieces of paper:
green for what weve been told about the pictures,
white for what we believe. No one knows Im queer,
but I feel safe, even when some women say same-sex
couples are living in unforgivable sin. Mara Teresa
says, we have our beliefs, but we as a culture have
growing to do. The microbus beeps to pick us up.

On Wednesdays, Mara Teresa runs the meetings.

Shes no good at breaking the echo chamber and her
wispy voice is lost to the drumming of the wind, the
rain, the traffic, the children. We watch a movie on a
discolored screen during the rain. One orange
spaghetti strap tank top cries beside a bed. Its about a
woman who is raped by her husband. The carrots and
the cucumbers and the maggots. The women never
flinch. They know this. We cant hear much of the
sound, but we can make out the images.

On the Day Against Violence Against Women, we

light candles during the remembrance ceremony. The
little tea lights, small inside the women that circle
them. The women say its the hardest place to live in
the country. They have the market with the fish and
the cheese and the veggies for sale. And a cat that
lives at the clothing booth. Shes pregnant and her
belly is huge. Many women in the group work there
while their children are at school. Nia Mari is an
older woman who sells tortillas all day and she is
always asleep five minutes after she sits down.
 Peterson 30

On the stage outside the Casa, sun bakes the wood.

When I turn in my bare feet, it splinters me. Two
songs later and a rushed translation of the lyrics, on
an orange plastic chair, I sit, ushered by Liudimilla,
whose name nobody says because its too hard. She
sees me look at my feet, ushers me to a chair to help
me wash them. She is the sinful woman who brings
an alabaster flask of ointment. She stands behind
Jesus, weeps, and bathes his feet with her tears. She
wipes them with her hair, kisses them, and anoints
them with the perfumed oil. On the pads of my feet,
quarter sized blisters. On my mind, her voice calling
me princesa, reinitaprincess, little queen. On my
lap, a half-eaten sandwich. On my mind, such
women. On my mind, the volcano.

On the mural outside the Casa, a woman whose body

is a tree trunk, a rainbow of dragonflies, and the
words of a Culture of Peace. We stand for a final
photo. Reina shouts, Say clitoris! After the click of
the app on the camera phone, we laugh our goodbyes.
 Peterson 31

Return

I have lice.
My words, trapped in my journal,
are bound in cloth, buried in
my backpack wrapped in a
black Hefty cinch sack, zip-
tied in the basement, where theyll stay
until all possible hitch-hikers die.

This is the evidence, the life I bring back with me,

little parasites that live on my skin,
most of them I picked up
unknowingly. I probably got them
from Dayana Michelle in the campo
(they said dont let the kids play with your hair)

or from Sally, who is also enliced,

when I tried on her cotton shirt for size.
Dad sends an email to the extended family,
the subject line LICE to see you all on Christmas!
Aunt Mary thanks him for the heads-up.
My head was never itchy.

I wonder how long it had been

since Id had them, since theyd had me.
Its a relief, not to have the words,
not to have to have the words,
to answer, How was El Salvador?
with sense, soundbytes, satisfactory.

When two days are up, Ill rip

the black bag, unzip, dig in the red canvas,
to get at the words, but not before,
not to release them back into the house.
Mom sends a voice recording
to Uncle Gerard, Im so concerned,

theyre just not dying! after the second dose

of pesticides. A few brave souls tell me theyre itching
to say hello-and-merry-welcome-back-to-the-country.
At midnight, Joe sends an iPhone clip
from the other house, a panorama
of jokey cousins scratching their heads.
 Peterson 32

Beyond the Verdict: Toward a Contemporary Poetics of Witness

 Peterson 33

Beyond the Verdict: Toward a Contemporary Poetics of Witness

This essay interrogates what poet and critic Carolyn Forch calls a poetry of witness.

Adopting a term first coined by Czesaw Miosz, Forch describes poems of witness as those in

which the poet bears witness to forms of violence, atrocity, war or persecution. This twentieth-

century movement, according to Forch, is born in extremity, fights against forgetfulness, and

reclaims the social from the political and in so doing defends the individual against illegitimate

forms of coercion (Against Forgetting 45). At its core, poetry of witness claims political

efficacy for poetry, and thus raises important questions about the relationship between aesthetic

production and social change. In the introduction to her anthology Against Forgetting:

Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, Forch writes, In attempting to come to terms with the

question of poetry and politics, and seeking the solace of poetic camaraderie, I turned to the

works of Anna Akhmatova, Yannis Ritsos, Paul Celan, Federico Garca Lorca, Nazim Hikmet,

and others (30). Through collecting their poetic works, Forch found a repository of what

began to be called the poetry of witness, in which, the arguments about poetry and politics

had been too narrowly defined. Regardless of subject matter, these poems bear the trace of

extremity within them, and they are, as such, evidence of what occurred (30).

In order to investigate contemporary poems of witness, I will use Jill Magis Poetry in

Light of Documentary, Susan Sontags Regarding the Pain of Others, and Alicia Ostrikers

Dancing at the Devils Party as a theoretical apparatus, and I undertake close readings of poets

Carolyn Forch, C. D. Wright, and Solmaz Sharif. Building upon the existing scholarship on the

poetry of witness, my own poetic production, and my time in El Salvador and prisons in

California, I question what a poetry of witness looks like today. In light of new media forms of

witnessing and the changing nature of transnational conflict, I argue that the poem of witness
 Peterson 34

ceases to be a purely evidentiary poem of the suffering of others, but instead becomes a highly

self-aware interaction between the poet and her subject matter. Because of new forms of war and

a hyper-saturated media environment, the poem of witness is often not the only evidence of an

events occurrence, but rather one means of negotiating a vast body of information in which

plurality takes precedence over truth and verdict.

The goal of this paper is not to prescribe modes or subjectivities that evade the problems

of witnessing in poetry. I do not believe that those modes exist. Rather, I seek to probe new

ethical quandaries about the limitations and elasticities of writing to witness, and how careful

attention to the lyric I results in a new avenue for poetry of witness as social practice. The

poem then becomes less about declaring truth about some outside reality, but rather the

dynamic between lyric self and the violent other. In the words of poet and critic Alicia

Ostriker, I am arguing for the smallness of argument as a poetic position, and I seek an

awareness of the impasse of reflexivity.

While Forch may have found that poetry and politics were too narrowly defined, her

own stipulations about a poetry of witness bears its own narrowness. Forchs criteria for

inclusion [in the anthology] were these: poets must have personally endured such conditions;

they must be considered important to their national literatures; and their work, if not in English,

must be available in a quality translation (30). Poems that bear the trace of extremity are, she

states, both evidence of what occurred and find their authority in the identity of the poet.

According to Forchs definition, the poetry of witness serves the purpose of recording or

capturing the extremity and injustice of the world at a particular technological and cultural

moment. But in the contemporary context, poems that function as evidence for what has

occurred seems to either undersell poetry or to operate as a bad form of journalism. I want to
 Peterson 35

suggest that given the changing dynamics of violent conflict and the revolution in the media

environment that has taken place since Against Forgetting, we need a new understanding of

poetics of witness. I seek to answer what Ostriker calls questions about the myriad ways poems

can grapple with political and social issues without collapsing into propaganda (ix). Amidst a

hyper-saturated media environment, different from that of Forchs time, the poem of witness is

no longer the only evidence, and the poets role is instead to navigate the profusion of

information and evidence, not provide it.

To understand this transition, it is necessary to evaluate the structure upon which media,

war, and truth have operated. In Forchs framework, the poem is the evidence that suffering has

occurred. The poet is a witness to this, and consequently offers a testimony in the form of the

poem. This interaction creates a courtroom drama in which the poet-witness is the gatekeeper to

truth. This, in turn, places emphasis on the believability of the witness. While the social and

political motivations of the poetry of witness are honorable, the movement stumbles in this

metaphorical framing. The poetry of witness relies upon the poem as evidence: In fact, the

poem might be our only evidence than an event has occurred: it exists for us as the sole trace of

an occurrence (Forch 31). The subjectivity of the poet is as witness, to the injustices, pain,

death, and extreme conditions endured by human beings. In this interplay, the reader is expected

to play the role of jury, the supposedly neutral party that decides whether the content of the poem

is innocent, guilty, or if there is not enough evidence to declare either way. The poetry of witness

is structured in assumptions of truth, one that is accessible to the reader, discernable, and

definitive. An example of the function of this approach to the poetry of witness is Forchs own

The Colonel, published in The Country Between Us in 1981. Written in May of 1978 during

the early parts of the Salvadoran Civil War, the prose poem opens its testimony with the
 Peterson 36

declaration of the speaker, What you have heard is true. I was in his house (16). The poem

exists in a space between documentary and lyric. While it claims to document the speakers visit

to a colonels home, with careful observations of the daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the

cushion beside him, the poems claim of objectivity clashes with its metaphorical imagery, such

as when the speaker describes how The moon swung bare on its black cord (16). After dinner

with the speaker, The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled

many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves (16). The speaker continues,

There is no other way to say this. After the colonel says, As for the rights of anyone, tell your

people they can go fuck themselves, he sweeps the ears off of the table, and the ears on the

floor where pressed to the ground (10).

Forchs approach in The Colonel raises several problems. In the context of the

twentieth-century movement toward a poetry of witness, the colonels guilt is clear, and the

reader has no room to entertain his humanity, for There is no other way to say this. In addition,

the prose poem form offers us the false journalistic integrity of the prose block that reports the

truth. The Colonel ultimately relies heavily on a single image, the ears. This image functions

as a snapshot, a war photograph of the brutality of the oppressor, which makes the poem

memorable. For this reason, I turn to Susan Sontags essay on war and photography in Regarding

the Pain of Others as a thorough criticism of the ways in which photography frames war and

human suffering for public consumption. As Sontag writes, In an era of information overload,

the photograph provides a quick way of apprehending something and a compact form for

memorizing it (Sontag 22). After reading The Colonel, who could forget the image of the ears

smashed to the ground? The difficulty then becomes a question of who is the witness? Perhaps

Forch is the ideal poet-witness for the job: In a system based on the maximal reproduction and
 Peterson 37

diffusion of images, Sontag continues, witnessing requires the creation of star witnesses,

renowned for their bravery and zeal in procuring important, disturbing photographs (33). The

role of violence in the poem then becomes a commodity, no longer controlled by the victims, but

rather for the purpose of making the poem memorable in the eyes of non-ideal witnesses.

In addition, the poem erects a wall between the jury and the defendant. For us, the reader-

jurors, the truth is pre-determined: looking at the colonel, Sontag reminds us, It is easier to

think of the enemy as just a savage who kills, then holds up the head of his prey for all to see,

rather than the man with a wife who carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her

nails, his son went out for the night (Sontag 70, Forch 16). This serves a very specific purpose,

one that, I argue, is near collapse into propaganda, or sensationalist war porn. In her essay

Dancing at the Devils Party: Some Notes on Politics and Poetry, poet and critic Alicia

Ostriker explains the margin between political poetry and propaganda, reminding us that we

love what is on our side (5). She continues, Any poetry that is merely politicaland nothing

elseis shallow poetry, although it may serve a valuable temporary purpose. This is the

difference between poetry and propaganda (8). Although The Colonel served a valuable

temporary purpose of bringing awareness to the atrocity of the Salvadoran Civil War and its

perpetrators, it fails to engage the reader in the ethical questions it wants to, fails to make us truly

entertain the colonels challenge: As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck

themselves (16). In this poem, there is no room for the reader to recognize the similarities

between herself and the colonel; the verdict of his guilt is already decided. Ostriker uses Shelley

as a counter-example of a poet who refuses this type of propaganda. In A Defence of Poetry, he

writes, The great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our own nature.A man, to be

greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of
 Peterson 38

another and of many others. I take this to mean, Ostriker explains, that we first crack the

wall between ourselves and our enemy, discovering the foe within the self. Then we find that we

and the world are neither single nor double but multiple (5). This democratic impulse, which

Ostriker finds in Whitman and others, is the mode in which the role of the poet is objective

multiplicity, not truth or guilt. Poetry does not operate on the rules of a courtroom. The

Colonel reinforces the wall between the reader and the man and inhibits the opportunity of

discovering multiplicity within, again confirming for the reader, What you have heard is true.

Sontag again reinforces that pictures (and in the case of poetry, images) speak for

themselves: Nor should there be a need to speak for the photograph in the photographers voice,

offering assurances of the images authenticity, as Goya does in The Disasters of War, writing

beneath one image: I saw this (Yo lo v). And beneath another: This is the truth (Esto es lo

verdadero). Of course the photographer saw it. And unless theres been some tampering or

misrepresenting, it is the truth (45-46). Goyas captions sound nearly identical to the utterances

of the speaker in The Colonel, that What you have heard is true. I was in his house. The

speaker affirms worn out notions that Esto es lo verdadero and Yo lo v. Left glaring in the poem

is the impossibility (and unconvincing quality) of such statements, and their inability to speak to

the suffering of the individuals described. The more Forchs speaker tries to remove herself by

asserting the veracity of the poems information, the more she overshadows the real victims of

suffering. Forchs poem is evidence of the colonizing impulse of white America. Sontag

reminds us that The exhibition of photographs of cruelties inflicted on those with darker

complexions in exotic countries continues this offering, oblivious to the considerations that deter

such displays of our own victims of violence; for the other, even when not an enemy, is regarded

only as someone to be seen, not someone (like us) who also sees (72). As a poem of witness,
 Peterson 39

The Colonel reinforces the division between the enemy and the lyric I, collapsing into the

propaganda that Forch seeks to avoid.

So what does a contemporary poetry of witness mean for the lyric subject? And if the

claims of a twentieth-century poetry of witness are not useful in a contemporary context, what

has changed since that time to invalidate them?

Sontag raises the idea that public attention is steered by the attentions of the media

which means, most decisively, images. When there are photographs, a war becomes real

(104). We believe that war and suffering are true when there is evidence for them. But with the

introduction of media outlets like Twitter and Facebook Live, New technology provides a

nonstop feed: as many images of disaster and atrocity as we can make time to look at (108).

Online newsfeeds are flooded with not only photographs of atrocity, but also videos. Now, live-

streamed violence and death is readily accessible: Every picture is seen in some setting. And the

settings have multiplied (120). This creates an overloaded media environment in which

witnesses to violence are compelled to navigate a vast sea of information, with frequently

contradictory artifacts of truth.

In addition to the ways in which the media has changed since the conception of a poetry

of witness, the manner in which war is fought and captured by those media has changed. In the

case of El Salvador, although the Civil War officially ended in 1992 with the Peace Accords,

many Salvadoran citizens say that the conflict persists, to the point where author Horacio

Castellanos Moya has called violence part of Salvadoran-ness (Moya). The trauma from the

war, and from an already violent history, does not dissipate, but rather is passed from generation

to generation. Additionally, the government now works with the gangs, or stays out of their way,

rendering a new form of war disguised as merely violent crime. Below the surface, however,
 Peterson 40

are networks of extortion, coercion, and repression that keep gangs in power. Immigration is also

a factor in how U.S. policy has affected El Salvador through the relationships of deportation

from Los Angeles to El Salvador. Gangs prey on young boys and girls, often missing parental

figures, who seek status, power, identity, and family and hope to find it in the gangs hierarchy.

New media forms also facilitate gang activity. With smart phones and social media,

communication happens faster. In the article Salvadoran gangs use Facebook to track down

victims, Joyce Hackel of Public Radio International reports, Social media and the prevalence

of cell phones have allowed gang networks to communicate in real time (Hackel). In the

piece, Salvadoran American Susan Cruz relays, I had a situation with a young man who stayed

in communication with his younger sister, and through her friends at school [the gangs] found

him here in the United States, and they attempted to extort him again (Hackel). Even across

national borders, Salvadoran gang members are able to operate through and with the use of social

media. Cruz elaborates, Gangs take the place of family, and gangs fill society's voids and

Until [governments] provide those opportunities to those kids who need them, and they treat

them like family, and they give them the hope and sense of safety and belonging those kids need,

the gangs are going to continue filling those voids (Hackel). In the case of El Salvador and its

immigration relationship with the United States, gangs crime and media activity has become its

own type of warfare.

This other face of war still operates in the sphere of the visual, but now the images are

not just print, they are also posted on Facebook and Twitter. Sontag argues that the experience of

witnessing (or consuming) this media is always changing: The Spanish Civil War (1936-39)

was the first war to be witnessed (covered) in the modern sense: by a corps of professional

photographers at the lines of military engagement and in towns under bombardment, whose work
 Peterson 41

was immediately seen in newspapers and magazines in Spain and abroad (21). She continues,

The war America waged in Vietnam, the first to be witnessed day after day by television

cameras, introduced the home front to new tele-intimacy with death and destruction. Ever since,

battles and massacres filmed as they unfold have been a routine ingredient of the ceaseless flow

of domestic, small-screen entertainment (21). This effect is exaggerated with the proliferation of

laptops and smart phones, increasing the perch for a particular conflict in the consciousness of

viewers exposed to dramas from everywhere [which] requires the daily diffusion and rediffusion

of snippets of footage about the conflict. The understanding of war among people who have not

experienced war is now chiefly a product of the impact of these images (Sontag 21). The danger

of such diffusion and rediffusion, of course, is the idea that there is no real suffering

signified behind the images and videos of violence and extremity. This is a deeply problematic

notion, one that further commodifies victims of violence and leaves no room for any kind of

authentic relationship or reflexivity. If poetry, photography, and state-based war rely upon a

twentieth-century version of truth that can be litigated in the court of literature, todays hyper-

saturated media environment and changing dynamics of violence no longer require the poem as

evidence. Because there are so many evidentiary media, we need art that does not to show us

another perspective on an event, but rather poetry that asks us to negotiate the vast information

field already in existence.

It seems that we are at an impasse. Globalization and technology have created an

information overload and new forms of war. From here there appear to be two approaches. We

can surrender to the bewildering profusion of imagery with our hands up and say, There are too

many images, too many texts. Or we can continue to pursue some form of the poetry of witness

in which the poet tries to navigate this sea of information. In the first approach, the poem of
 Peterson 42

witness is simply one reality among many. Sontag describes the contribution of Jean Baudrillard

to this line of thinking: This view is associated in particular with the writings of the late Guy

Debord, who thought he was describing an illusion, a hoax, and of Jean Baudrillard, who claims

to believe that images, simulated realities, are all that exist now (109-110). To Baudrillard,

whose provocative 1991 book was titled The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, Sontag responds that

this is merely Fancy rhetoric, and, something of a French specialty which is very persuasive

to many, because one of the characteristics of modernity is that people like to feel they can

anticipate their own experience. [] It is common to say that war, like everything else that

appears to be real, is mdiatique (110). The notion of Baudrillards hyperreality is for Sontag

a gross misunderstanding of the gravity of the role witness. It is symptomatic of the viewing

habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world, where news has been

converted into entertainmentthat mature style of viewing which is a prime acquisition of the

modern, and a prerequisite for dismantling traditional forms of party-based politics that offer

real disagreement and debate (110). Sontag continues, It assumes that everyone is a spectator.

It suggests, perversely, unseriously, that there is no real suffering in the world (110). Later,

Sontag condemns this perverse standpoint, deriding, No one after a certain age has the right to

this kind of innocence, of superficiality, to this degree of ignorance, or amnesia (114).

In poetry, the equivalent to throwing our hands up at the profusion of images is

conceptualism, the practice of pure transcription and reproduction of pre-existing texts into new

contexts, often with little or no alteration. In Poetry in Light of Documentary, critic Jill Magi

uses film theorist Bill Nichols work on documentary cinema to explore conceptualism and other

documentary approaches in contemporary poetry. One of the four approaches to documentary

she delineates is observational. The observational mode, sometimes called cinema vrit, or
 Peterson 43

direct cinema, is the mode in which the filmmaker sets the camera down and walks away,

claiming to capture daily life without authorial intervention (254).

Poet Kenneth Goldsmiths conceptual work is documentary, however its observational

mode paradoxically reflects attention back on the poet, even though it claims to be an authorless

response. Of all the modes of documentary, Magi states, the observational brings ethical

questions undeniably to the fore and while filmmakers who work in this mode might intend to

disappear as authors, and to make something impersonal, the effect of this tactic is often the

opposite (255). The observational mode is even more problematic when the poets subject

matter is violent. For example, Goldsmith, a white poet, performed a reading of the St. Louis

County autopsy report of Michael Brown, a young black man shot and killed by police in

Ferguson, Missouri on August 9th, 2014. During a poetry conference at Brown University, the

performance of The Body of Michael Brown, was one in which Goldsmith stood beneath a

projection of a photograph of Brown in his high-school graduation robe. He announced that he

would read a poem about the quantified self, meaning one that catalogued the evidence obtained

from the close examination of a body. He ended the reading with the doctors observation that

Browns genitals were unremarkable, which is not the way the autopsy report ends

(Wilkinson). Goldsmiths poem is in the authorless observational mode, but Magi criticizes,

With access so direct, we contemplate almost nothing other than Goldsmith himselfNicholss

idea that observational mode in documentary centers on the missing and appearing filmmaker

holds up (255). This pure frame, in which the poet claims to objectively capture the subject

matter without intervening, consequently creates a mirror in which the poets image is reflected

and virtually nothing else. It is both the lazy appropriation of proliferated text and a spectacle
 Peterson 44

that operates at the expense of others pain. This mode does not make an argument, and as

readers, the lingering question is, who is Goldsmith to be doing this?

While Goldsmiths observational approach does not function as a veritable form of

witness, it is possible to practice some version of documentary work that tries to negotiate the

media environment. The observational mode starkly contrasts the mode Magi calls expository,

which According to Nichols, [] addresses the viewer directly, with titles or voices that

advance an argument about the historical world (251). In addition, a poetic approach may

also be expository in that it sets out to describe, to attempt a portrait, a snapshot of a situation

(250). In this sense, the whole film or whole poem is evidentiary, but the expository mode also

acknowledges the influence of authorship by allowing for the insertion of the self.

This is the mode of poet C. D. Wright in One Big Self: An Investigation, a work in which

the poet travels to prisons in Louisiana with photographer Deborah Luster. The poems center

around the multitude of voices, including the inmates and the poet herself, swirling in a unit,

without quotation marks to denote speech. The authors awareness of the overabundance of

information accessible in the media is made clear when Wright states that she is Trying to

remember how I hoped to add one true and lonely word to the host of texts that bear upon

incarceration (ix). Wright is clearly aware of the proliferation of texts and the changing role of

the poet-witness, from journalist to navigator. The hyperrealism of Baudrillard directly contrasts

with this other approach, the extra-realism of C. D. Wright in One Big Self. In the preface, she

states, Something about the extra-realism of that peculiar institution caused me to balk, also the

resistance of poetry to the conventions of evidentiary writing (ix). The term extra-realism

sounds related to Baudrillards hyperrealism, but in fact functions oppositely in passages such

as in lockdown, you will relinquish your things: / plastic soapdish, jar of vaseline, comb or
 Peterson 45

hairpick, paperback (4). This banality is set in a collage with voices like Juanita, who says, I

wont say I like being in prison, but I have learned a lot, and I like experiences. The terriblest

part is being away from your families (5). The resulting effect is that the prison feels too real,

too familiar to those who have not encountered life on the inside. Thus, Wright continues, I

wanted to see if my art could handle that hoe (ix).

In addition, the notion of multiplicity is made very clear in the images and language of

the poems of One Big Self. Particularly in On the Lessening of Free-World Ties, in which we

learn, The men like The Young and the Restless. / Some of us be rootin for the bad guys; some

of us be rootin for the good. George / And some of us just be rootin (22). Here, the poetic

position of plurality is clear. In Wrights work, especially when it addresses us directly, (Ladies

and Gentlemen of the Jury / Is this your true verdict / What you say one and all) we are

reminded that As Nichols points out, knowing is not neutral; neither, I would argue, is the

ability to look away, to not have to know. (Wright 71, Magi 250). This, in combination with the

statement that, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury, the warp in the mirror is of our making

creates a deeply reflexive experience of the voices in the prison while still remaining rooted in

the notion of the underlying media and power structures that have created such an environment

(ixv). Though her work, unlike Lusters [photographs], proposes no particular solutions,

Wrights remains expository in that it points to a problem, a social ill (Magi 253). While This

empathy is the flipside of othering inherent in a project where the one who makes the work is

on the outside the danger of this expository mode is that the individual identities are more or

less subsumed into a larger argument and thus lose something of their individuality (253).

While Wright acknowledges the particularity of each inmates subjectivity in One Big

Self, Behind every anonymous number, a very specific face, Magi criticizes, Though it is
 Peterson 46

clear that as author Wright stands against prison proliferation, her expository approach

privileges, ever so slightly, the one who knows, who writes, who sees and arranges, and possibly

reinscribes the inmate as the one without the totalizing view, without the power to arrange this

logic, this portrait (Wright ix, Magi 253).

While Wrights and Goldsmiths two approaches are different, the goal for Magi, who

cites Nichols, is not prescription: Rather than relying on ethics as the means whereby we can

evaluate and rank documentary film practices, an alternative tack would be to defamiliarize this

very practice and implant it within another one: the attempt to challenge and subvert the

dominant ideology of oppositions and hierarchy and the ethics that underwrite it (250). Magi

pushes this theory into the realm of poetry, arguing that ethics is only useful for a poetics if we

are conscious of the limitations of the good-versus-bad binary, and willing to consider the

political and ideological contextsBeyond good and evil lie the dialectics of a social practice

grounded in differences that do not coalesce into Them and Us, Self and Other (250).

Similarly, Ostriker is a proponent of this type of dialectical plurality, stating, Beyond the

dualities, however excitingly charged and contradictory? Of course: plurality. The world remains

a continuum, infinite in all directions, and the artist defies (our, his, her) impulse to interpret

everything dualistically, first by containing both halves of any argument and then by the attempt

to imitate the continuum (4). Ostriker continues that, while we can draw evidence of specific

ideologies from pieces of art, looking at arts plurality offers us a different conclusion: From

The Merchant of Venice we can argue pro and con anti-Semitism, from Lear pro and con

patriarchal absolutism, from Antony and Cleopatra the claims of the state against those of eros

but The Complete Plays of Shakespeare argues the smallness of argument (4). Further, she

believes that the plenteousness of great writers is always their most radical quality, in that it
 Peterson 47

implicitly defies category and authority. Exuberance, says Blake, is beauty. In whatever age, and

whatever the writers ostensible political positions, plenitude and exuberance signal the

democratizing/subversive impulse (4-5). To create temporally-bound propagandistic poems is

one thing, but to pursue transformation through the poetic implication of the self is another

(16). A contemporary poet of witness who does exactly this is Solmaz Sharif.

Regardless of the impasse, or perhaps in response to it, poet Solmaz Sharif embraces the

questions of a proliferated media environment and new forms of war in her collection Look, in

which she adopts terms from the United States Department of Defenses Dictionary of Military

and Associated Terms to interrogate her position as an educated American citizen with Iranian

descent. In a poem titled Personal Effects Sharif investigates the experience of the Iraq-Iran

conflict while probing the question of poet-witness subjectivity and the lyric I: I wasnt there

/ so I cant know, can I? (67). Along with voices questioning, How can she write that? / She

doesnt know, a friend, a daughter / of a Vietnam vet, told another friend, Sharifs speaker

super-imposes media advances in the poems, drawing attention to simple bulleted lists, captions

without photos, and a Wikipedia page entry describing Operation Ramadan, a page in which a

footnote leads to a [dead link] (62). The speaker of the prose poem that opens the series is aware

of the proliferation of images of war when she relays, I place a photograph of my uncle on my

computer desktop, which means I learn to ignore it (56). The poem then unfolds to intertwine

the subjectivity of the lyric I and the speakers uncle:

He stands by a tank, helmet tilting to his right, bootlaces tightened as if stitching

together a wound. Alive the hand brings up a cigarette we wont see him taste.

Last night I smoked one on the steps outside my barn apartment. A promise I

broke myself. He promised himself he wouldnt and he did. I smell my fingers

 Peterson 48

and I am smelling his. Hands of smoke and gunpowder. Hands that promised they

wouldnt, but did. (56)

In this inquiry, the speakers position is implicated with the subjects. By the end, the

poem further interweaves the speakers hands and her uncles, to the point where we no longer

know whose are of smoke and gunpowder [] that promised they wouldnt, but did. Sharifs

Personal Effects remains highly conscious of the limitations of the good-versus-bad binary

by knitting speakers and subjects together in a way that starkly contrasts Forchs The Colonel

in which What you have heard is true and the reader-juror is already given the verdict (Magi

250, Forch 16). Sharifs speaker and uncle are declared neither guilty nor innocent, and the

limitations of the self are muted: I smell my fingers and I am smelling his. In this sense, the

poem acts against the propagandistic impulse towards the declaration of truth and instead

inhabits a social practice of poetry, in which the divisions between good and bad poets, subjects,

and witnesses are further demolished. The result is neither a falsely apolitical poem, nor a piece

of propaganda, but rather one that argues the smallness of argument. The poetic resonance is

achieved in the image of the hands, which are not apart, but rather a part of. Consequently, we

are reminded that all have Hands that promised they wouldnt, but did. Despite this syntactic

fluidity, the individuality of the speakers uncle is kept in tact without being swallowed by a

larger argument at work in the poem.

What we are left with is The obvious truth, people are people. Equally, the damage is

never limited to perpetrator and victim. Also, that the crimes are not the sum of the criminal any

more than anyone is entirely separable from their acts (Wright xi). Neither are poets entirely

separable from their poetics, their forms of witnessing, their understanding of war, their political

ideologies, and their modes of documenting. While the expository mode is limited, poets like
 Peterson 49

Sharif and Wright who counteract the popular perception is that art is apart, this mode is a

frame that argues the smallness of argument (xi). Wrights insists that poetry it is a part of.

Something not in dispute is that people in prison are apart from. If you can acceptwhatever

level of discipline and punishment you adhere to momentarily asidethat the ultimate goal

should be to reunite the separated with the larger human enterprise, it might behoove us to see

prisoners, among others, as they elect to be seen, in their larger selves (xi). And in Wrights

words, If we go there, if not with our bodies then at least with our minds, we are more likely to

register the implications of entwining our juror-selves with the defendants rather than holding

them at a distance to decide their fates (xi). At the end is neither a collapse of self into other, nor

other into the lyric I, but rather a clear acknowledgement of the enemy within the self and the

self within the people we are taught to see as enemy. A contemporary poetics of witness that

responds to the ethical implications of inserting, imposing, and removing the lyric I from the

poem is one that acknowledges the poem and poet as a part of a larger system of politics and

aesthetics. The poem of witness then transforms into a social practice of witness. Not evidence

but participation. Not verdict or truth, but inquiry and navigation.

 Peterson 50

Works Cited

Forch, Carolyn, editor. Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness. Norton, 1993.

---. The Country Between Us. Harper & Row, 1981.

Hackel, Joyce. Salvadoran gangs use Facebook to track down victims. Public Radio

International. 26 May 2016. Accessed 15 April 2015.

Moya, Horacio Castllanos. Interview with Menjvar Ochoa. La violencia... es parte de la

salvadoreidad. Vrtice en lnea, 16 June 2002,

http://archivo.elsalvador.com/vertice/2002/06/16/entrevista.html. Accessed 14 April

2016.

Ostriker, Alicia Suskin. Dancing at the Devils Party: Essays on Poetry, Politics, and the Erotic.

U of Michigan P, 2000.

Partlow, Joshua. Why El Salvador became the hemispheres murder capital. Washington Post,

5 Jan. 2016.

Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003.

Sharif, Solmaz. Look. Graywolf P, 2016.

United Nations Truth Commission. From Madness to Hope: The Twelve Year War in El

Salvador. UN Security Council, 1993.

Wilkinson, Alec. Something Borrowed. The New Yorker, 5 October 2015.

Wright, C. D. One Big Self: An Investigation. Copper Canyon P, 2007.