Micaela Sahhar launches Rabbit 34: Reportage
‘Those are the links we need to make, between environmental degradation and humans – not just in their treatment of environments but in their relational treatment of people. But this kind of big news, is generally too big for the news.’
Micaela Sahhar is a writer, educator and researcher. Her current scholarly and creative projects relate to narrative appropriation and falsification, and the possibility of recuperating and reconstructing narrative in settler-colonial contexts.
‘What can poetry do for us right now? Can it help? Can it revive us? Can the alchemy of adding poetry to reportage deliver a remedy for the world’s gloomy predicament?’
Another difficult year has come to an end. The dominant mood is overwhelmingly low, as friends, family members, neighbours, colleagues, people on the radio and TV, are all reporting flat-out exhaustion—endless lockdowns, too much screen-time, separation from loved ones, worry about the future. . . We are all probably tired, too, of COVID-19 dominating news coverage, adding to the sensation of being caught in a bizarre rinse- and-repeat cycle. I do feel for the journalists who have had to live with the pandemic in that endless—and relatively unacknowledged—way.
What can poetry do for us right now? Can it help? Can it revive us? Can the alchemy of adding poetry to reportage deliver a remedy for the world’s gloomy predicament?
William Carlos Williams once wrote, in his poem ‘Asphodel, That Greeny Flower’, that ‘It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.’ He’s telling us that, while we can’t rely on poetry to deliver news bulletins, poems do offer something vital that we would do well to take in equal doses to our daily news consumption. So, what is this vital aspect—or aspects—that can be found in poems?
Matthew Zapruder (drawing on ideas of Wallace Stevens) notes that poetry ‘draw[s] us into a different form of attention and awareness’ than prose, which can aid in the development and preservation of the imagination (Why Poetry, 2017). Further, Philip Metres suggests that the about them turns toward the ineffable. Great poems may confound or delight, teach or provoke—but they are great because their forms vibrate and resonate beyond political platforms, slogans, or formulae.’ Metres recognises that poetry as a form inherently resists the clutches of rhetoric by ‘opening into the possible’ (The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance, 2018).
These arguments about the value of poetry need only be extended slightly to appreciate the value of the ‘reportage’ poem (which we might consider a close relation of the documentary poem). Cultivating skills in creative thinking can assist us in conceiving of new ways in which to act in the world—to not just receive and process the news, for example, but to imagine solutions to the world’s critical problems.
In one of the first essays on documentary poetry (‘The Documentary Poem: A Canadian Genre’), Dorothy Livesay notes ‘a conscious attempt to create a dialectic between the objective facts and the subjective feelings of the poet’ through the writing of such works. This draws attention to another aspect that can make a reportage poem strong, in that we can glean the movement of a mind—as emotionally responsive as the rest of us—navigating the world’s ‘facts’ relayed to us through screen, soundbite, newsprint. Sometimes I wonder how changed the world would be if poetry became the new journalism. There’d be a lot of chaos, perhaps. But I think we’d all become smarter, and more empathetic, too.
Thanks to the extended Rabbit team—Amelia, AJ, Jeanine, Tracy, Zoe and the BSP interns—for their assistance in drawing together another wonderful issue. Special thanks to this issue’s guest poetry co-editors, Kent MacCarter and Micaela Sahhar—you are both brilliant, generous souls of the kind that keeps poetry alive, beating, vital.
A bit less than 20 years ago I was taking an undergraduate subject in Media Law. I had a lot of criticisms as a student about the operation of law and institutions and I was working on a research project about the effectiveness of the newly minted Victorian Racial and Religious Tolerance Act and how it had failed to protect a piece of public art called “Fifty-Six”.
“Fifty-six” referred to the number of years since the Palestinian Nakba began (at that time) and was part of a laneway revival project – the artist, who was apparently at the VCA – was protesting the injustices of Israeli settlerism, and its effect on Palestinians, in terms of both the direct and indirect violences that had flowed from that founding violence of the state’s creation. It was not dissimilar, as a protest, to the ones we now see on January 26 in this country.
The instillation met with public scandal – there was a lot of noise about how the public purse should not be used to fund private agendas – and the law, which appeared like it would protect the under-resourced and under-represented Palestinians or their supporters – it may not surprise you to learn – failed to protect them. Maybe I was too enraged to make an argument – or maybe I thought poetry was the argument – but I recall submitting an essay to the subject co-ordinator which had a whole section, maybe 20% of the essay, comprised of poems reconstituted from media reports.
In retrospect, I don’t think they were very good poems, but to his credit, the academic marking the essay had some sympathy with what I was trying to do, or maybe with Wordsworth claim that poetry is the first and last of all knowledge – and he gave me a generous mark. That I could submit this kind of poetry to the law school (which at the time I connected to the surrealist idea of the “ready-made”) and get a first class honours grade, felt like a small win for poetry in the law, and also for Palestine in a conservative institution – poetry had helped me to smuggle in a perspective that was viewed, at the time, as sympathetic to terrorism, although in hindsight the injustice of this is, I hope, clear to all.
‘People who have lived in oppression are often told that their story is not the news, or what is happening to them is not the news.’
I am not sure if the concept of the hermit crab form was in particularly wide use in the early 2000s, but I can see now that this is actually what I was doing; and also that this idea of the hermit crab form is capacious for people who experience marginalisation, whatever the source of it. I mention this because I think it has an important link to the kinds of poems that Kent and I chose for Rabbit 34.
While we were reading the submissions, it was yet another deep Melbourne lock-down – and we read a lot of work on covid and isolation, on the bushfires eighteen months earlier, and about violence against women which had been catapulted to the headlines with Brittany Higgins’ allegations about the culture of sexual violence at parliament house – and the well-publicised response from the Defence Minister Linda Reynolds, that she was a “lying cow”. Reynolds was pilloried for this, the news-making catfight of a woman denouncing another woman – and although I don’t intend to defend her, I did think at the time that she was a structurally easy scapegoat – a second scapegoat – for everyone to pin the generally dismissive response to the allegations, that was characteristic of the mostly male cabinet. Reynolds was the distraction, when there was no institutional will to address the substance of what Higgins, and others, were pointing to.
Kent and I did select some poetry on each of these subjects – so prominently at the centre of news cycles and people’s lives – but I hope that in the selections we made we were not side-tracked by the media-will of a kind of institutional distraction, away from what should be news all the time.
People who have lived in oppression are often told that their story is not the news, or what is happening to them is not the news. In an immediate sense that is what Sara Saleh highlights in her poem, Live from Gaza. But in addition to the casual racial hierarchies of news, news struggles to be capacious – it cannot offer context to event – and this favours in a structural sense the untruth of parity or equality, when what you have is unequal sides, or maybe just oppression, that could not rightly be called antagonistic (as between sides) at all. I think this is what Sophie Belotti’s intriguing visual poem, no/or is working with, as it offers a profound grappling with the problem that “history is not well”, or what is constitutive of Australia, or how can a discredited national project portray a so-called national character.
To me many of these poems in the Reportage issue are using poetry as the hermit crab form to address both the shortcomings of public discourse and specious ideas in the journalism industry about what makes news news. And I think this body of poetry we have assembled is pointing at what public discourse should be, and what news needs to be. What is the point of talking about bushfires if you are not going to talk about the cannibalising logics of colonialism, racism and capitalism which are not just extractive and dismissive of the vulnerable but, as we now see, increasingly destructive of themselves? There is really no point in talking about environmental destruction anymore without acknowledging that it is premised on the same logics that find discrimination, exclusion or expropriation systemically useful. Those are the links we need to make, between environmental degradation and humans – not just in their treatment of environments but in their relational treatment of people. But this kind of big news, is generally too big for the news.
I think a lot of hopes we might have had about the way in which a pandemic would help the rich and powerful recognise that everything is connected has not come to pass - but it was a joyful thing to select the poems for Rabbit 34 and reflect on the vital role of poetry as a tool for knowledge, and as a key source for the production of knowledge itself.