Ars Poetica -- Meghan's Question

I am fascinated by the last poem of the book, "Poetry After the Occupation" and its companion poem, "Poetry Before the Occupation." As the foreword suggests—and as this final pair demonstrates—these poems do not operate as simple binaries. Although the reference is perhaps out of place or unjustified, I can’t help thinking of the companion poems between Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. For Blake, as for al-Joubouri, the nature of the companion poem is not to provide a correction or revision, nor to construct a simple, binary understanding, but rather to frustrate the desire to think in binaries. Although one is tempted to interpret Al-Joubouri’s final pair of companion poems as an ars poetica, this simplistic approach is frustrated by the struggle with poetry that seems to occur in both poems, on both sides of the binary. For instance, in “Poetry Before the Occupation” poetry is both a temptress with “beckoning eyes” and a “cheating love;” the speaker’s “slave” but also her “god;” a source of nourishment (“you [poetry] were my cord to the placenta”), but also a warrior or fighter who has “lost the war.” And yet, “Poetry After the Occupation” also casts poetry as a traitor—”a spy speaking half-truths,” a “sly cheat” who has fooled the speaker into thinking she knows it: “all these years, I thought / I knew you // I was wrong.” How did others read these contradictions, which are both compelling and ample? Do folks read this as an ars poetica, or simply a chronicle of the poet’s struggle with the futility, or the failures of her art? I found Alicia Ostriker’s inclusion of the quote, “Art destroys silence,” to be instructive and affirmed by the poems in this collection—until the last poem. Instead, in lines like “what a waste” and “This is my protest / This is my folly,” and “Defeated, you step down / from your horse, silent // A tiger / A paper tiger” I hear echoes of W.H. Auden’s famous quote, “Poetry Makes Nothing Happen” and even Adorno’s sober declaration that “There can be no poetry after Auschwitz.” What do you folks think? Is this last poem an ars poetica, the poet’s renunciation of the art that has failed her (“whenever I came to look for you / you’d drift // deserting me”), or confirmation of Adorno’s grim denunciation? Or rather some Blakean combination of all three?