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We are left with an economic observation that also suggests
the environmental tensions of the day as the animals he lists used to live
where the suburban development is booming. What makes this and many passages
so exceptional is the combination of a sympathetic, optimistic voice with
an
amazingly shrewd capacity for locating (creating)
historical conjunctures of daily life and mythological investments
which are characteristic of American life and society. He finds
and defines points of engagement in what could have been, what was, and
what one hopes for when coming to America as an
immigrant. There is a tension
that can only be described as heroic at times, considering the endurance that
must have been required to maintain such loving acceptance of the
capitalist processes of exploitation that stand out in
class-conscious America. The tension born of suggesting the
overriding consumerism juxtaposed with say, environmental
conflicts between developers and activists, avoids becoming a form
of American nationalism that would seem ready to overlook real problems.
If anything, it is an anti-nationalism that interfaces well with a dynamic,
multiculturalist American ideology. The lines, "life is with me ... where
Arapahoes ... lived," suggests a phantom animism that coexists with the
"fastest growing suburb / in America"— which is not entirely
ironic: Zarrin is
not negating such economic issues but situating them as
facts of life in Denver. He writes:
Here Zarrin ties together the economy which creates
pressures and demands, whereby he "must work and make payments," and the
"authenticity" of something lost: "before the loss...." The losses are not
cured by realizing a necessity to supplicate to a higher order, as in Eliot,
but lead the poet to realize the inescapability of the alienating effects of
the way people relate to each other in a capitalist environment, so that the
desiring to be, belong and become includes reliving the process of
coming into the society to and for which he speaks. Desert's
driving aspiration is toward an encouragement of an American
consciousness
that seeks not exclusion, distinction-making, and one-up-manship, but a
giving and receiving of good will in the form of memories:
Return to the people who ate from your plate
and
from whose plate you ate,
to the adobe houses and the pottery jugs/that
keep your water cool.
Remember all traveling is a form of retrieving
something
from the past/or saving something for the
future.
Moreover, the praise of these relations suggests their
absence, similar to the phantom animals under suburban lawns. But
the "good intentions" outlast the material gifts that transcend
the estranged relations that develop in a society where
economic accumulation renders each other debits or credits.
From the
first line of the poem the voice of the poet summons the reader to join him
on a nostalgic venture to his past, to a time when dreams defined direction.
He begins with, "Come back / to 1838 Pine St., Boulder, Colorado, /
the yard overgrown," immediately calling on a personalized relationship
between the poet and audience, a bilateral understanding, not a dictation of
the muses, nor a monologic lyricism, but an engagement with 'others' as a
conscious aspect
of the reading of the poem. The effect is a dispensation
(but not of an airy sort associated with bourgeois subjectivity) of
a sustained, processual responsibility bound up in the relation
of linguistic voicings, social practices (issues made of "pollution and
deforestation"), and questions of social bodies — national,
ethnic,
familial, economic. The poet invites the reader not only to join him in
reflecting on values in an advanced capitalist society in which being
"alienated" is inevitably the norm. He seeks out the reader's active
participation, dealienated, halted continuities of reified subject
practices which fold and enclose all the above issues (of language,
social norms, and consciousness of social associations). Again, in
comparison to Eliot who writes
Zarrin emphasizes possibilities of recurrence and
continuity between one's own past and the lives of others in the present.
Zarrin finds his high school self himself at the school he once attended:
A common thread through Desert is the action of
being nostalgic and expressing this nostalgia — both involved in
a relation with a third element, that of quoted speech with itself has
made an issue of nostalgia and "tradition." Being nostalgic and expressing
nostalgia may be analyzed in association with the distinction of utterance
and enunciation. What Zarrin has done is situate his own voice and the speech
of others in similar relative importance within his poem, so that,
Eliot's
voice included, is at times indistinguishable from his own. Such
an approach does not necessarily suggest that Zarrin has followed Eliot's
famous ideas of "tradition" being altered ever so slightly in the poet's
interpretive reenactment of it, so that the poet's collates the voices of
"tradition" and reflects his
age in the process. Although we can say Zarrin
does all this, the relation of "tradition" to "history" is distinctly of his
own making. While Eliot is famous for juxtaposing a variety of voices so
as to submerge his voice in acts of ventriloquism, Zarrin has not abandoned
his own voice while engaging others.
This aspect is related to modern and
postmodern issues of logocentrism and the rhetorical positioning of lyrical
voices. Whereas Eliot's work is an attempt to recuperate a
moral orientation, maintain poetry as a medium capable of
resolving ontological issues, Zarrin's work does not permit
this
assumption (nor the prioritizing of philosophical discourses
in general), and Desert can in this sense be read as an attempt
to deal with issues of meaning, voice and one's relations with others in
one's community (local or "America"). Without wielding the divisive
abstractions Eliot does, Zarrin assumes a
postmodern, deflated value in
language, so that arrays of words no longer can be permitted or expected to
congeal into adumbrations of systematic, controlling metaphysics. In
Desert the very relation of the poet's "mind," "subject" or "voice"
(utterances) is situated within a pathos that is not so overwhelming as to be
metaphysical in the way Eliot's poems are. The distance between the
utterances, placed on the table like photos in the process of being arranged
and
dated in an album, and their consummation as enunciations consolidated
within the form of a poem, attempts to effect a transcendence into a less
philosophical "poetic" discourse —a poetry holding to
non-alienating mediations of relations with others, other's desires and
dreams, as well as his own. It is an
approach to poetry that resembles
Bahktin's ideal of the novel as a dialogic and democratic form of art, though
Bahktin marks poetry as a hopelessly monologic genre. Zarrin's work
shows how poetry need not be self-centered—even when
writing autobiographically. The discourse Zarrin would seem to
be
promoting is one closer to Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams
than to those interested in a social body predicated on race and traditions,
such as Eliot and Pound — though
by expropriating elements of Eliot as well as Pound Zarrin demonstrates a
postmodern version of a modernist interest in resisting the alienating
effects of capitalism, and the nightmares of modernism that adhere to
ultra-rational visions of history and that collapse tradition, race, religion
into a
dialectic sublation and containment of controlled and
exclusive totalities. His social vision is found in an appreciation
of linguistic as well as sensuous details that reorient us and offer new
ideas of what is significant in the everyday — rather than
attempting to present a transcendent vision. Like Williams and especially
Whitman, Zarrin, relishes diversity and the legendary visions of
participating in a society predicated on being a melting pot, for he lived
the legend from
the time he came from Iran to America as a teenager.
Desert is a culmination of a series of experiences. It celebrates
living the "legend" of being an immigrant in America and the role
of poetry and language itself as a lifeline rendering meaning to
his dreams in the past and present.
Not returning to the point of hatred
which is no
return, but arriving where you first arrived:
the glimmering city with its
darkness
taut and brisk, glistening with cobalt, stars, and
electrons
streaming the cosmos of the city—Denver.
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