Yoga for Leaders and Others
Mountain Pose
Stand tall, with feet together,
shoulders relaxed. Emote
the imperturbable power
of mountains to endure
pelting rain and rockfall,
erosion’s perpetual terror.
Indignation is elemental
but the peak does not acknowledge
the collateral damage of scree.
Take three deep breaths. Resume
holiday. Stay in touch.
Warrior Pose
Stand with legs apart
like sturdy tree roots, right
foot turned out 90 degrees
and left foot turned in slightly.
With right hand seize the horizon
and stare out, emanating
an aura of sensitive menace
that says while the day will be won
the losses are personally felt.
Hold for one minute before
resuming normal posture.
Bridge Pose
Like a bridge over turbulent water,
lie supine on floor with knees
bent. Place arms at sides,
exhale, then press downward and lift
hips. Bringing chest toward chin –
your whole body enacting
the need to be calm, in the face
of probable injustice –
hold for just one minute.
Model a deep breath
and resume holiday.
Child’s Pose
Like a villager, squat on your heels.
Roll your torso forward,
bringing your forehead to rest
on the bed in front of you
letting your body express
its grief of gristle and bone.
Lower your chest as close
to your knees as you comfortably can.
All viewers will understand.
No need to speak. Hold the pose
and breathe. Just breathe.
PHILIP FRIED
****
This week, a return trip to the work of the trenchantly political American poet Philip Fried, whose latest collection, Squaring the Circle, was published earlier this year. Jonathan Timbers (see his review in the link above) detects an Audenesque quality in these poems, and I agree. Fried, working in a context even murkier than Auden’s “low dishonest decade” is differently, perhaps more democratically, bold. The gently scolding Auden tone – perhaps best described as materteral or simply auntie-ish – might be missed by some. The poets’ cultural contexts are very different. But Fried’s forthright insistence on the ethical responsibility of poetry links him with Auden’s moral tradition. Neither political in the subtle avant garde manner, nor a “spoken word” ranter, Fried is a wordsmith with a public shit detector and a lively ear for the new vernacular. He understands precisely how language has learned to lie.
The geometer’s impossible challenge of squaring the circle has form as a literary metaphor. Fried’s collection extends it in various ways. In the sequence above, it’s the human body that occupies space through the more flexible geometric figures of yoga. All the poems describe actual poses, while they themselves pose as how-to guides for “the leaders and others” to square their circles, demonstrate fake emotions or flaunt responsibilities they have evaded.
It’s almost as if the poems were instructions on how to turn into a statue. Each reinforces this sense of 3D solidity by a rectangular-looking nine-line stanza, seemingly erected on the plinth of a more insistently imperative couplet. The figures seem poised between a sculptural image and a live body preparing for the camera. Such ambiguity makes a good analogy for the conflicts and subterfuge of personal empire building. Fried may hope to set up, by means of contrast, the qualities that might make a bad leader good. However, his main focus is on the dubious art of “appearances” and how the bad leader might “model” a stance of power and virtue, although everyone, leader included, knows the stance to be fake.
The first three poses evoke a clearly perceived opposition, a populace, critical and unhappy, that presents a threat to the leadership. The stance advised is constructed as much by that domestic threat as by a statement of achievement. In Mountain Pose, power is the bare peak that rears above the weather, well able to withstand it and allow for “the collateral damage of scree”. The instructor’s tone is almost mocking: the contrived, secondhand diction acknowledges the flakiness of the pose. “Emote / the imperturbable power / of mountains to endure,” the instructor says, and goes on to give the game away: “Take three deep breaths. / Resume / holiday. Stay in touch.” The leader isn’t even at work!
Suspense is established, even before the first poem: who doesn’t hope that pride will go before a fall? Moral outrage almost gets its wish in Warrior Pose, where the leader is made to look awkwardly theatrical, almost ready to trip over that in-turned left foot. The oxymoron “sensitive menace” reminds us of the intricately nuanced distortion leadership requires. The leader isn’t allowed to show his/her full pugnacity on camera. There must be a veneer of empathy even as the horizon itself is seized (the moment when I first began to think God might be one of the “others” requiring instruction).
If the imaginary leader is not quite Auden’s totalitarian Ogre, plenty of aspirant despots fill his place, some nearer home than is comfortable. And yet the poem isn’t simply about the abuses of power. It includes “poses” that might be genuine, useful, humane, although impossible to sustain. Bridge Pose offers images of self-sacrifice, although these are undermined in the couplet’s advice to “Model a deep breath / and resume holiday.”
Still, we seem to be getting nearer to an idea of how power might redeem itself, and Child’s Pose is its culmination.
Now it’s clear that the leader is being televised. (“All viewers will understand.”) The prostration the move requires (and the title) somehow suggests Christopher Robin, praying “at the foot of the bed”. But in Fried’s poem, the adult body is being trusted with an expression of fallibility, “its grief of gristle and bone” The final injunction to “hold the pose / and breathe. Just breathe” is significant. At last, the instructor has abandoned irony. There’s a certain hope that the body’s rediscovered naturalness and simplicity might engender a rediscovered humanity, and the reconciliation of the leaders with those “others” who are led.