I wrote “Non-Person” on February 6, 2008 after reading about Romanian poet Nina Cassian. In the introduction to her collection Life Sentence, I was struck by the following passage:
“She has been written out of her country’s literature, its anthologies, its histories, its
textbooks. Her books, even her totally apolitical children’s books, have all been
withdrawn from circulation. At present she is a nonperson; she does not exist.”
Not that any writer would wish to be rejected by the wider culture, nonetheless I began wondering what being a “nonperson” would be like. In many ways, since I live in a radically different country than Romania, my existence as a poet is not thought of as posing a threat to “authorities.” My poems are not scrutinized to detect maligning comments about particular political figures. On the other hand, I am aware that my poems do, in fact, push back against certain values within my culture (and even within poetry itself) that I do not share. I began thinking about subversive ideas I see existing within my poems. For me, at least, there is a freedom in being a nonperson, in remaining unknown, in daily offering my “thoughts unofficial,/unsanctioned, askew.”
NON-PERSON
How lucky for me:
a non-person.
Entire languages,
countries, cultures,
governments
do not know
I exist.
If I am a threat;
if I have thoughts unofficial,
unsanctioned, askew;
if I have set as my task
the overthrow
of a language;
who will know
how I walk beneath maples,
whispering phonemes?
A morning like all others:
I sit on my porch,
sip coffee,
wait
for what comes next.
A sniper doesn’t aim.
No decree against me
has been issued.
Authorities are searching
elsewhere,
ransacking others’ lives.
A wind brushes against me,
having come from
somewhere unexplained,
and whither it goes
I cannot predict.
Some insinuation
set loose
now moves freely.
How lucky I am,
a nonperson
touched and singled out
for being.
I grew up in a Baptist church where I was taught that language is generative. It creates. It moves out over the void and brings, out of nothingness, something into existence. Words do not return void. They have power. That being said, for more than thirty years as a writer, I have assumed that one of my purposes is to challenge, subvert, change, refine, or “overthrow” the language of my culture.
My journals are full of starts and stops, snippets that never went anywhere, ideas and sketches, random lines and images. Once, before going to speak to 5th, 6th, and 7th graders at a local school, I was pilfering through a journal from the early 2000s. I found five lines:
You could sit half your life
and not say one word
about moonlight over cornfields
or that small bloom fish make
kissing the sky of their world.
A few pages before, I discovered a random title, “City Diner,” and the two suddenly came together as a poem, which I used to frame my discussion regarding what kind of language we have versus what kind of language we might aspire to. I have always thought that the most important word in the poem is could. You or I could sit in a city diner and not speak of these things—landscape, beauty, mystery, appreciation. You or I could stay silent, but the poem, at least for me, asserts by implication—“[s]ome insinuation/set loose/now mov[ing] freely—that there is another way to speak to one another in which we acknowledge those things that fascinate and enthrall us.
We live in a world where people in a city diner feel comfortable turning to one another and talking about subjects like weather and sports but don’t feel comfortable talking about “moonlight over cornfields/or that small bloom fish make,/kissing the sky of their world.” Among others, that is the language “I have set as my task” to overthrow. I am trying to establish a language of intimacy and praise, of gratitude and tenderness, of “the premise-rich quiet between two worlds,” of “stillness” rhyming “with every other word.”
Poetry, if it is anything, topples supremacies, deposes dictatorial ideas, unseats convenient assumptions, and dethrones idols. Echoing my book’s title, the small revolution of poetry is to recognize the miracle and the wonder of being a “being,” the mystery of what it means to be “touched and singled out.”