Greek Theater: second draft

Posted in poetry on March 13, 2013 by admin

UPDATE: a final draft of this poem has been posted here.

This is the second draft of a poem by Peter Dale Scott that was originally posted here in order receive feedback from readers. You can read the original draft along with the comments it received here, and what will probably be the final draft here. (Though you’re still invited to make comments on it.)

GREEK THEATER

How Mario Savio Changed My Life

But in diverting the city’s desires another way instead of complying with them…

that is the only business of a good citizen.

— Plato, Gorgias 517 B-C

It has taken weeks
of unsettled half-awareness
for me to recognize

the student wrestled to the ground	Cohen Freedom’s Orator 213
by six policemen in uniforms
a baton menacing his neck and tie

(an arm across his throat
to keep him from speaking)	San Francisco Chronicle December 9 1964
on the cover of this book

about how J. Edgar Hoover
slipped lies to the San Francisco Examiner

advancing the career of Ronald Reagan

Seth Rosenfeld Subversives 212-13, 227

is Mario Savio
on the stage of the Greek Theater	December 7 1964; Rosenfeld Subversives 224
wrecking the well-planned closure

of the assembly called to proclaim
an end to the protests and sit-ins
of the Free Speech Movement

and the inauguration
of a new era of freedom under law	Rosenfeld Subversives 223
by an ambitious professor	Cohen Freedom’s Orator 213-14

hoping thereby to become
our next Chancellor
who defended the war on TV

and is now less googled
than his daughter a language poet	Leslie Scalapino
The anticlimax when Mario

came back out to announce
there would be a Free Speech rally	Cohen Freedom’s Orator 213-14
on the Sproul Hall steps	Rosenfeld Subversives 224

up-ended my own planned life
I was just a few yards away
at the same camera angle

one of those who had urged
the students to trust
the decency of those in power

my head then filled with Anglo-Latin
verse from the ninth century
why the return of a cuckoo in spring

spoke to the heart
expressing aspirations of friendship
more deeply than Virgil could	Scott Alcuin’s Versus de Cuculo

and did more to invent Europe
at a higher level —
Christianus sum	I am a Christian

non possum militare —	I cannot make war – Acta Maximiliani 1.3
than the battle stopping the Moors
on the banks of the Loire

two different kinds of power
the power of dominance	Douglass Gandhi and the Unspeakable 25
and the power of persuasion

through not enmity but love
as I had seen in an iconic moment
alone reading Plato’s Gorgias	Plato Gorgias 503-21

in the Ambassador’s huge bed
when I was chargé d’affaires in Warsaw —
the power of persuasion

and that of the nightstick –	Cf. Arendt Between Past and Future, 93
the first a traditio
so precious and fragile

I gave up all those frills
(my chauffeur that flag up ahead on the limo)
to help preserve it in a university

Well – little could I foresee
how Mario in an instant
had changed me from a Latinist

into an activist
no longer a mere spectator
(as I had been five days earlier

when the students filed into Sproul Hall
singing We shall overcome)	December 2 1964; Rosenfeld 216-22
that same evening I spoke

at the crisis faculty meeting	Cohen Freedom’s Orator 214-15
and only one month later
my first public appeal

to get troops out of Vietnam
which though I could not know it
was doomed to help end

my evenings with Milosz
debating the right English
for what is poetry

that does not save
nations or peoples?	Milosz New Collected Poems 78
a heartbreaking loss at the time	Haven An Invisible Rope 69

but not one that deterred me
as much as the crazy violence
that broke out on all sides

the gates opened
to a decade of tear gas
from Filthy Speech to Prairie Fire	Smelser Reflections 30-38

and the struggle between
two kinds of decency
one struggling for an end

to racial hiring
in the local supermarkets	Rosenfeld Subversives 176-77
one that of the U.S. middle class

who did not want their kids dropping acid
or cursing Amerikkka	Ruether America Amerikkka
and so when given a chance

voted for Ronald Reagan
the great persuader	Broder Washington Post 6/7/04
while Richard Aoki

as a paid FBI informant
armed the Black Panthers	Rosenfeld Subversives 418-19, 421
and while I discomforted

by the screeds of the Situationnistes’
plans for Paris ‘68
plastered on the outer walls

of Cody’s bookstore
You have to maim a horse
on stage to remind these people	Scott Rumors of No Law 43

tried to write like Brecht
whose Entfremdungseffekt	alienation effect
leaves you wishing for something more

and I quoted from Chairman Mao’s
Talks at the Yenan Forum
which by then I was teaching

along with Lenin Gandhi and T.S. Eliot
to a large undergraduate class
love is a concept	Mao Tse-tung 260

Fundamentally we do not start from a concept	Scott Rumors of No Law 43
before I decided to follow Gandhi
the approach to Truth is through love	Gandhi’s Bible 2001, 169

But once one has seen
a student’s cheek under a boot
as an example of freedom under law

and a vivid pantomime
on a political stage
of the two kinds of power

one has to choose between
the power of the Internet
versus the killer drone

either the troops with DEA equipment
who massacred dozens of students
at Thammasat University in Bangkok	Scott American War Machine 127

and the cop who thanked Howard Zinn
for his talk to the Police Academy
then pled with him desperately

to please leave the antiwar blockade
before a little later
battering him with an outsized club	Ellsberg A Memory

or the power of satyagraha	truthforce nonviolence
which changed the American South
and expelled Russian troops from Poland	Schell Unconquerable World 227-31

encouraging me to search
at the limits of language
in the spirit of Mario

for new Socratic energies
(grounded on those hints
of human freedom

encoded in our DNA)
at a higher level
than the Occupy movement

still struggling to break free
from the habits of the past
that less than a year ago

led the UC campus police
to drag my colleague Celeste Langan
a Wordsworth scholar

across the grass by her hair

Robert Hass New York Times November 19 2011

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Acta Maximiliani, ed. H. Musurillo. The Acts of the Christian Martyrs. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972.Hannah Arendt. Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. New York: Penguin Books, 1993.

David S. Broder, “The Great Persuader,” Washington Post, June 7, 2004, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A21076-2004Jun6.html.

Robert Cohen. Freedom’s Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

James W. Douglass. Gandhi and the Unspeakable: His Final Experiment with Truth, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2012.

Daniel Ellsberg, “A Memory of Howard Zinn.” AntiWar.com, January 27, 2010, http://antiwar.com/blog/2010/01/27/a-memory-of-howard-zinn/.

Mahatma Gandhi, ed. Louis Fischer. The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas.

Mahatma Gandhi, ed. William W. Emilsen. Gandhi’s Bible. Delhi: ISPCK, 2001.

Ralph J. Gleason, “The Tragedy at The Greek Theater,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 9, 1964, http://www.fsm-a.org/stacks/R_Gleason.html.

Robert Hass, “Poet-Bashing Police,” New York Times, November 19, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/opinion/sunday/at-occupy-berkeley-beat-poets-has-new-meaning.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.

Cynthia Haven, ed. An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czeslaw Milosz. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2011. Contains Peter Dale Scott, “A Difficult, Inspirational Giant.”

Mao Tse-tung. Mao Tse-tung: An Anthology of His Writings. New York: New American Library. 1962.

Seth Rosenfeld. Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.

Rosemary Radford Ruether. America, Amerikkka : elect nation and imperial violence. Oakville, CT : Equinox, 2007.

Jonathan Schell. The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People. New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2003.

Peter Dale Scott, “Alcuin’s Versus de Cuculo: the Vision of Pastoral Friendship,” Studies in Philology, LXII, 4 (July 1965), 510-30, http://www.enotes.com/alcuin-essays/alcuin/peter-dale-scott-essay-date-july-1965.

Peter Dale Scott. American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010.

Neil J. Smelser. Reflections on the University of California: From the Free Speech Movement to the Global University. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.

4 Responses to “Greek Theater: second draft”

Peter Dale Scott Says:
March 21, 2013 at 3:02 pm

In response to comments in the earlier version of the poem posted here, I have reworked the ending, but not enough to satisfy some. I’d appreciate hearing from others, even very briefly, if they think the ending works or not.
I’ve also complicated the poem with new references to Brecht, the Situationnistes, Mao Tse-tung, and Gandhi. Do I get away with dropping so many new names?
If you want to compare with the old, simpler version, go to the top of this page and click there where indicated.
Thank you for visiting this site.
Peter Dale Scott

Reply
Brenda Walsh Says:
March 22, 2013 at 2:15 am

I like the ending Peter, very fitting…

Reply
Tony Bates Says:
March 23, 2013 at 4:42 pm

The more the merrier! in the conversation across time.
Mao and Lenin spoke for one kind of power and Gandhi, another
and it is interesting to look back at them in this light, adding scope
to the poem.

Reply
Peter Dale Scott Says:
March 26, 2013 at 5:56 pm

I’m thinking of slightly expanding my memories of the diplomatic life I gave up, to read

a traditio
so precious and fragile

I gave up all those frills
(my chauffeur that flag ahead on the limo
the sit-down banquet at Schönbrunn

for six hundred people
served by liveried footmen)
to help preserve it in a university

What do readers think?

Reply

Greek Theater: second draft

4 Responses to “Greek Theater: second draft”

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