On the masterpiece
of a poem that destroys easy “us vs. them” narratives.
I made the case
for my favorite American poet, Sarah Piatt, in one
of my first posts, and did so in large part through her best poem, “The
Palace-Burner.” There are a lot of factors that make “Palace-Burner” one of
the great American poems, but at the top of the list for me would be Piatt’s
incredibly sophisticated representation—through the lens of a mother and young
son discussing a newspaper picture of a female rebel from the 1871 Paris Commune—of
what I called in this
post three crucial and interconnected levels to empathy: “connecting to seemingly distant others, working to understand those to
whom we’re close, and examining our own identities through those lenses.”
This wasn’t necessarily the case in the 1870s (although given the
immense popularity of Horatio
Alger novels in the period, maybe it was), but over the century and a half
since I would say that there have been few world communities with which
Americans have had, collectively, a more difficult time empathizing than communists.
Of course there are significant exceptions, both in terms of time periods
during which that philosophy has seemed more appealing (such as the Depression,
about which more in Wednesday’s post) and in terms of American communities who
have been sufficiently disenfranchised from our dominant national narratives to
see the wisdom of such alternatives (such as African Americans in the mid-20th
century, on whom likewise more on Wednesday). But when it comes to those dominant
narratives, communism has been one of the most consistent “them’s” to our constructed
“us” for a long while.
There would be various possible ways to complicate and revise that
kind of “us vs. them” narrative, including highlighting the many originating
and influential forms and moments
of American socialism and communism. But Piatt takes another, and to my mind
particularly compelling, tack: creating in her poetic speaker a woman who seems
thoroughly removed from not only communism but political conversations in
general (especially in the “separate
spheres” mentality that continued to reign for most middle-class American
families in the period); and then giving that speaker the opportunity to
consider whether and how she and a foreign communist woman might have anything
in common. She doesn’t come to any easy or comfortable answers—empathy is
neither of those things in any case—but she asks the questions, and that seems
to me to an impressive model for all of us.
April Recap tomorrow, and this series resumes on Wednesday,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Texts about communism you’d highlight?
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