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Poetry anthology celebrates work of social critic Aaron Kramer
Andrea
Lynn, Humanities Editor
217-333-2177; andreal@illinois.edu
8/23/04
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CHAMPAIGN,
Ill. — Although frequently ignored by the literary establishment
during his lifetime, a self-described “peoples’ poet”
and outspoken-but-loyal critic of the United States is celebrated posthumously
in a new anthology of his work.
The new anthology, “Wicked Times: Selected Poems” (University
of Illinois Press) brings together for the first time the best poetry
of Aaron Kramer (1921-1997), considered by his co-editors to be one
of America’s “most compelling and accomplished poets.”
The book is the latest title in Illinois’ American Poetry Recovery
Series.
According to Cary Nelson, series editor and co-editor of the new book,
“Wicked Times” is a journey through the major events of
modern history. Along the way are dozens of poems about events nearly
forgotten: Ronald Reagan’s visit to Bitburg, the industrial tragedy
at Bhopal, the war in Grenada. “Kramer opens his heart to Cuba
in his poem ‘Seven Days’ in a gesture against the blockage
that teaches us a human lesson we very much need to learn today,”
Nelson wrote.
Prolific by anyone’s standards – Kramer wrote 1,000 poems
and translated 500 poems written by other poets, all while holding down
day jobs – he focused his energy and talent on fundamental social
issues – labor, racism and class struggle. Among his most frequent
topics are the Spanish Civil War, the Holocaust, civil rights and McCarthyism.
“Kramer loved his country deeply, especially his native New York,
but he also held his country’s feet to the fire when he felt it
was behaving badly,” said Nelson, a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The poet also wrote
passionately about his beloved New York, his travels, his craft and
his wife, Kitty.
Kramer was widely published in his youth and young adulthood, mainly
in the Daily Worker and the New Pioneer.
He soon became a recognized figure in Leftist literary circles and earned
a devoted following in New York, but as time went on he despaired of
reaching a large national audience and receiving wide critical acclaim.
He had reason to despair; he could not conform to changing norms and
standards.
Critics abandoned Kramer largely because of his enduring commitment
to metered rhyme in the new modernist era where free verse was king.
Nelson and co-editor Donald Gilzinger Jr. write that Kramer “adopted
traditional meters – favoring iambic trimeter, tetrameter, and
pentameter – in part to install a radical politics within inherited
rhythms. He wanted to radicalize root and branch of our literary tradition,
not to abandon it for alternative forms.”
At the same time, his main supporters, the American Left, began shunning
him, believing that their “natural lineage” was the free
verse tradition that began with Whitman. Ironically, the poets and critics
who were in the best position to appreciate Kramer’s craft “were
cultural conservatives who would have found his politics offensive.”
Kramer’s radical politics – he was for many years a member
of the Communist Party of the United States – also isolated him
from the mainstream, and he kept a low profile to avoid problems with
the FBI. By the late ’50s, he abandoned his strong political voice,
but reacquired it a decade later. These forces combined to deny him
the broad audience he craved.
Still, Nelson and Gilzinger argue that perhaps no other American-born
poet of the 20th century “has so successfully adapted traditional
forms to the combined projects of progressive social criticism and historical
witness. He sought in the music of poetry not only cultural knowledge
but also incitement to change.”
His universally recognized masterpiece, a 26-part poem titled “Denmark
Vesey” (1952), pays homage to an unsuccessful slave rebellion
in 1822 led by a charismatic, physically and intellectually imposing
African, Denmark Vesey.
“At the height of McCarthyism, when he was blacklisted by every
publisher, Kramer sat down and wrote his masterpiece, a towering indictment
of racial injustice,” Nelson said.
“Then he issued his poem in a privately published pamphlet and
it dropped almost entirely into oblivion.”
The theme of the poem, the co-editors wrote in their introduction, is
that “white civilization is grounded not only in its indifference
to the suffering it imposes on its darker brothers but also in a suppression
of its own humanity.”
Sentenced to death by hanging, Vesey wrote these last words to his fellow
mutineers: “What does it matter if we be / remembered or forgotten
…? / Ten thousand guns of liberty / we leave beneath the cotton.
/ “Ten thousand guns will sing our mass / when we no more can
hear it – / and those who dread us in the flesh / may dread us
more in spirit.”
“Kramer’s mastery of rhyme and meter is so complete he’s
like a musician working with words,” Nelson said. But he also
was a prophet – an “American Prophet,” the editors
claim. In “In Wicked Times” (1982), Kramer connects McCarthyism
to the Reagan era, but he also prophetically speaks to today’s
troubled times, as they play out across television screens. The poem
ends: “For several weeks I’ve noticed, / just about half
past ten, / a cramp in the pit of the stomach, / a craving to flee the
den; / I crawl to the dial – no question: / the times are wicked
again.”
Kramer cannot be easily categorized, said Gilzinger, an English professor
at Suffolk County Community College in Selden, N.Y., and Kramer’s
bio-bibliographer.
“No peer really comes to mind. … To my mind he resists categories
and comparisons.”
According to Gilzinger, Kramer’s best political poetry is from
the late 1940s to the ’50s and includes “Denmark Vesey”
and “Roll the Forbidden Drums.” His best family or travel
poetry springs from the 1970s and ’80s and he wrote beautiful
family/love poems in the ’40s.
Despite all, Kramer was never invited into the literary canon.
“He refused to write academically fashionable poetry,” Gilzinger
said, noting that it is “the academics who control anthologies
and hence the canon.”
“Kramer is glaringly and unfairly absent from the canon, something
I hope ‘Wicked Times’ will begin to rectify.”
