T.S. Eliot’s modernist poetic suite, The Waste Land, of 1922, was born of the Götterdämmerung that was The Great War. Its voices (personas) recount the loss of faith, the rubble-proven absurdity of European (colonial) ‘superiority,’ and the brazen (sexual) amorality afflicting its civilzation, i.e., the displacement of Jesus by jazz, of classicism by capitalism, and of law-and-order by the orgasm. Eliot’s long poem deplores a society wherein God has been machine-gunned to pieces in No-Man’s-Land, so now the world is ruled by top-hatted moneybags and/or the ‘masses,’ whose interest is drink and sex—to palliate the plagues and smog churned out by the wage-slave factories. Fast forward a century, to 2022, and the six versifiers herein, tasked via The Waste Land Project to reflect on Eliot’s masterpiece, do so in the context of a new, European war. While Eliot excavates the “ruins” of Christendom in the wake of the millions-murderous First World War, the sextet bards of The Waste Land Project reread Eliot’s narrative-lyric suite just when Russia invaded Ukraine and talking-head warmongers plumped for conflict with China (whose ‘communists’ have outpaced ‘our’ capitalists). Thus, timely—if not prophetic—is The Waste Land Project. Indeed, like dogs growling for red meat, warmongers bark loudest when they sniff the incipient butchery. Loud was their yelping in Fall 2002, as the U.S. set to sack Iraq; repugnant were they again in Fall 2021, when their anti-China snarling attained a deafening din. Except that the desired war erupted in Eastern Europe. Then, that theatre of war led the intercontinental triumvirate, Theater of War—i.e., The Toronto International Festival of Authors (Canada), Bristol Ideas (UK), and Aké Arts and Books Festival (Nigeria)—to nominate a Group of 12 poets (six appear herein) to comment on Eliot’s post-war apocalypse and the hundred-years-later new ‘Eurasian’ (see Orwell) war. Thus, Madhur Anand—a Canadian ecology prof, author, and poet—inaugurates the chapbook. She juxtaposes, in one poem, the brouhaha over the posthumous unsealing of Eliot’s billets doux to “My Dear Lady,” i.e., an occasion of relatively frivolous news, with the corrupt fact of “Five-star hotels next to slums, thirty-dollar cocktails / while children starve” and with the ominous truth of New Delhi’s “forty-eight Celsius,” “infrared radiation” temperatures. Ukrainian poet, translator, and scholar, Alex Averbuch, warns us of how irreparable—of everything—war is: “thick fragrant smoke / encircles pampered memory … / amidst sullen ancestors….” Worse, you turn off a light, “without noticing how you’d aged / daring to ask at last: how did I die?” Hailing from Tiohtià:ke/Montréal, Canuck poet Erin Robinsong employs her ‘ecological imagination” to meditate on the biological perils crafted by the “commodification of all life,” noting, for instance, “the pathology required just to pay the rent” and how “Writing & writhing come / from this same need, to move freely in / asymmetries….” A third Canadian bard, namely A.F. Moritz, raises the most dire, existential question, “Who cares?,” when “You sat there suffering of the world … / … and wanted hope,” including “A hope / for the world in the coming wars.” Hope is the prayer for a miracle to preserve the beautiful (“the blood-purple berries shining / in their green and shadow”) even amid continuous catastrophe: “Let it all / vanish, it will. / Who cares?” Halyna Kruk is a poet, translator, and medieval lit prof at Lviv State University, Ukraine. Her poetry is as visceral as is combat: “my love language has broken teeth spit, you / say, spit ‘em all out, spit ‘em quick! you’ll / get straighter ones. with a better bite.” Moreover, “you never know what a a word really means, which / memory you can touch, which will detonate.” (Aye, as I’ve written elsewhere, the first casualty of war is not merely truth, but language itself.) The sixth—and final—poet herein is Ukraine’s Iryna Shuvalova, a native of the Russian-attacked Ukrainian capital Kyiv, who is now “based in Nanjing, China,” a nation that the still- imperialist West yearns to attack, to force it to kowtow again. Shuvalova observes the disjuncture between what was—“those parks full of pine trees”—and what is: “blown up bridges gutted houses streets / densely covered in the shards of people’s lives / … what the archaeologists call / a cultural stratum,” where even, perhaps, “the epoch, skinned alive, lay in convulsions….” In 1939, the fourth year of World War II (which arguably started in 1935 with Japan’s invasion of Manchuria and Italy’s of Ethiopia), poet W.H. Auden intoned, “poetry makes nothing happen.” He’s likely right, eh? Yet we poets must have our say, to demand peace, a world where it is radically beautiful to sing, “Make Love, Not War!”
George Elliott Clarke
author of War Canticles (Vallum, 2022)
