Today, I found the morning atmosphere at Broadway and Liberty Streets refreshingly calm,  short on yesterday’s punk rockers, pushy policemen, and putative provocateurs. Perhaps the light drizzle and smaller sidewalk crowds were a contributing factor. I read Bei Dao translations, from The Rose of Time: New and Selected Poems, edited by Eliot Weinberger and published last year by New Directions. As usual, I “heard” the poems in a different way with Zuccotti Park as a backdrop.  It was especially poignant to read some pieces written by the poet in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square repression of 1989, the event that marked his transition to a life of exile in the West. “Celebrating the Festival” comes with a note explaining that the student activists of Tiananmen cited Marx’s idea that revolution is “the people’s festival.” This poet of my exact generation (given name Zhao Zhenkai;  Bei Dao is a pseudonym meaning “North Island”) is very special to me because it was the discovery of his collection Landscape Over Zero in a San Francisco bookstore in 1999 that helped show me the way to a renewed focus on poetry after many years in which I had concentrated on prose so heavily that I almost ceased to think of myself as a poet. In his work, I saw uncompromisingly realized the ideal of a poetry that erects no artificial barrier between an interior, lyrical sensibility and the impact of history. I don’t think I exaggerate in saying it offered a kind of exorcism of the ghosts of doubts that used to plague me at the height of my immersion in the feminist poetry movement, when I could never quite rid myself of the idea that poetry needed to meet some instrumental criterion–to communicate approved sentiments within a frame easily recognized by its target audience.

Bei Dao’s poems are full of loneliness and disillusionment, but I think it is a salutary sort of disillusionment, an infusion of which can do no harm to a nascent movement of great vigor. It’s as if the poet had revised Gramsci’s famous slogan from “pessimism of the intellect–optimism of the will” to “pessimism of the intellect–optimism of the heart.” It was my good fortune to read those poems while standing next to a gray-bearded man named John, who had traveled down from Vermont to help occupy Wall Street. He had lettered a quotation from Mark Twain on his sturdy-looking sign, and he told me he has family roots in Brooklyn and plans to come down for a few days each month to make sure that the occupation doesn’t dwindle. He listened to several of the poems with great interest, asking me to repeat words he didn’t quite catch. He wasn’t familiar with Bei Dao but said the work reminded him of Lao Tzu, and that Thomas Merton is his favorite poet.  To my right stood one very young man and one very elderly man handing out fliers from TwoPeoplesOneFuture.org, with a message calling for an end to U.S. military aid to Israel. Next to them were three people who appeared no older than 20–perhaps even of high school age–and said they had come from Pennsylvania to join in.

Last night, at a meeting devoted to OWS community outreach efforts that was held in a union hall and attended by upwards of 75 people, I participated in a brainstorming session about ways to bring the energy and person power of OWS into a relationship with local groups around the metro area. There were participants from New Jersey and Connecticut as well as the five boroughs. A representative from the People of Color Working Group spoke about how that group is functioning as a caucus to address issues such as the impact of a heavy police presence and the threat to undocumented people, in an effort to ensure that a fuller spectrum of voices of “the 99%” will truly be reflected in OWS. We were given an extremely well-written Occupy Wall Street FAQ sheet that brilliantly finesses the question of the radical potential of this movement in reasonable tones insisting that OWS is simply about enacting the democratic ideals upon which this country was founded: “Our government must be accountable to us, and corporations must be accountable to the government. We are saying definitively: We no longer live in a democracy, and we refuse to accept that. We seek an end to the collusion between corrupt politicians and corporate criminals, as democratic and capitalist institutions have become conflated….we must see major advances in the arena of the relationship between corporations, and people, on par with the amendments which outlawed slavery and assured civil rights to all people regardless of race, sex, or class.”