Free The Devil Never Sleeps by Andrei Codrescu Page B

Notley in her poem “DÉSAMÈRE,” journeys through the desert, confronts evils and Evil, and finds, in the end, a commonality that transcends everything: “Brother, says Amère: ‘Why are you and I / Like this … soldier, widow, / Why aren’t we cars?’” This is the reply, in the voice of the poet Robert Desnos, “Because you grieve like animals … / Behaving as your species would / If it hadn’t turned into cars / You’re still the animals.”
    Here it is, all the tragicomic grotesquery of the spent century. It’s not a fond farewell. No one seems to have liked the deceased. And yet everyone suspects that the convention of the artificially designated “twentieth century” held something profoundly significant. While it is true, says Jack Anderson, that “there is never an end … / of treachery / lies / stupidity, arrogance / brute force, and lost causes,” there is also, as Arthur Sze puts it, the “moment when a child asks / when will it be tomorrow?”
    Elaine Equi gives us the possibility that “you can … sleep now, gentle / reader, and dream of comets trailing blood and / planets exploding. When you wake, it will be spring.” That would be nice. It would be nice, that is, if like the old movies, this narrative had a happy ending. It might have been possible if it had had a happy beginning, but, as Eileen Myles says, “the first thing we learned / was that the world would end / in our time.” I was born in 1946, the year that the beginning and the end were one at Hiroshima. My co-editor, Laura Rosenthal, was born in 1958, at the beginning of rock ‘n’ roll. “That’s the human song,” says Alice Notley, “from the past to nowhere.”

 
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    A Russian Poet at the Seashore
    S t. Petersburg, Florida, is what happens when you take out a box of pastels and paint in the sky, the houses, the bushes, and the people. Gold turned into pink then lavender then velvety blue over the Gulf of Mexico while evening-gowned, golf-course-tanned folks sailed past me, barely spilling a drop of their martinis or upsetting the cherry in the blue glasses. It was Sunday, November 5, 1995, and this was a literary soiree. I was holding on to my end of a toothpicked green olive, looking at the sunset, when someone whispered breathlessly in my ear that Yitzhak Rabin had been assassinated.
    Did anybody else know? I whirled around but there wasn’t a ripple in the crowd. I appointed myself bad-news bearer and went around informing the literati and the local oligarchy. It was a strange thing, like swimming through cotton wadding in a nightmare. Some knew, some didn’t, but few did more than shake their heads, annoyed at the interruption. I didn’t upset anyone very much until I told the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who made a huge, hurt noise and demanded to be led to a television set to watch the breaking news.
    He and I and a friend of his plunked down in front of the mega-TV and began flipping channels looking for the expected coverage. But, man oh, man, it was only football games and quiz shows and old movies. What was
going on? Had we hit a time warp? Every time we found another football game or quiz show or old movie, Yevtushenko exclaimed in frustration: “This is fascism!” And by that, he meant the extraordinary blitheness of TV at such a historic moment. Not to speak of the pastel crowd numbed by the surf and cocktails outside. Finally, we got to CNN and they were, of course, talking about it, but still they were running the sports scores at the bottom of the screen.
    The Russian poet shook his head in disbelief. He had once been the first, in the now nearly forgotten days of communism, to brand the specter of Russian anti-Semitism in his famous poem “Babii Yar.” Now, here he sat, under the Don-Cesare-pink sky of Florida, in the middle of a cocktail party, alone or