From the 6/16/2001 Guardian (the UK's highest-selling daily newspaper),
Review section p.9:
http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/politicsphilosophyandsociety/story/0,6000,507504,00.htmlBURNING
BUSH
Robert Potts sees Dubya derided
100 Days: An Anthology
ed
Andrea Brady
184pp, Barque Press, �10
This formidable book is an
anthology of prose, poems, essays and graphic art in
rapid response to the
Bush presidency by a variety of politicised artists and
writers; it ends with
a timeline of Dubya's achievements to date that might
shock even the well
informed. Its scores of contributors, though united by a
common enemy
and focused on a specific target, show considerable diversity
of
response. The result is funny, passionate, scared, defiant,
intelligent and
self-aware.
Several contributors focus on Bush's
legendary inarticulacy, those strangled
soundbites and malapropistic ad libs
that people laugh at (though maybe "We
better stop sending cute Bush jokes
around! It's like finding funny stuff in
Mein Kampf!", as Alan Sondheim says
in his fascinatingly ironic "Emotional
Politics"). At their most
inventive, these collages of Bushisms are comic and
terrifying at the same
time, suggesting that a contempt for and ignorance of
language and concepts
is not wholly unrelated to the contempt and ignorance in
Bush's
politics.
Throughout, there is an intelligent focus on the different
languages through
which politics emerges: from the broken speech of the
President to the economic
language that is the current theology; through the
personal and romantic to
slogan or political critique. Most noticeable,
though, are the pet cliches of
the media, here appropriated until their
dumbly partial version of events
cannot be so easily accepted. It is
noted by more than one contributor that
Bush did not have a poet at his
inauguration, as is traditional; and the old
piety of Shelley's, that poets
are "the unacknowledged legislators" of society,
is invoked. At the
same time, the political impotence of the artist lurks
behind many of these
pieces, and the ingenuity and hunger with which they
explore possibilities of
resistance and dissent, and imagine alternatives, is
fierce and sometimes
inspiring. There are also some excellent essays --
analyses of the
shadier politics of the Bush dynasty, accounts of the
demonstrations at the
inauguration.
As well as these linguistic tactics, there are several
formally ingenious
pieces, notably Juliana Spahr's concrete poem about Bush's
"gag" law, which
suspended federal funding for any organisation giving
abortion or contraceptive
advice: the poem effects an apt concealment in a
form that more commonly leads
to revelation. The graphic work -- Tom
Raworth's montage "A Salute to
Democracy", for example, in which the state of
Texas becomes an upraised
finger, slipping us the bird -- also makes its
swift, wordless point. There
are hexes, spells, rants and litanies, and
invocations of cultures that run
against the western capitalist
grain.
In her editor's epilogue, Andrea Brady writes with stoic pessimism
that: "I
doubt that there is any possibility for effective dissent. I
wanted to make a
place to say so." She also wonders "Can writing be a
light in no light time?",
an echo of Hoelderlin's question "And what are
poets for in a destitute
time?".* This book, in which so many writers
and artists have pooled their
time and their resources to such moving and
thought-provoking effect, might
just be the start of an answer to both those
questions.
order from: Barque Press, c/o A Brady and K Sutherland,
Gonville and Caius
College, Cambridge CB2 1TA, or see
www.barquepress.com
