No Grave Can Hold My Body Down

Aaron McCollough

 

An author’s statement

 

A few things:

In a famous letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville praises his addressee thus: “He says No! in thunder; but the Devil himself cannot make him say yes. For all men who say yes, lie.”

In the introduction to Writing Through, Jerome Rothenberg says,

“I have had a need (I emphasize: a need) to translate and, by translating, to connect with the work and thought of other poets—a matter of singular importance to me in what I have long taken to be my ‘project’ and the central activity of my life as a poet . . . . Accordingly, my work has involved not only translation but the use of techniques such as collage and appropriation as ways of opening our individual or personal poetry to the presence of other voices and other visions besides our own. I came to think of all of that—appropriation, collage, translation—in ideological terms. Long before our time, Whitman in Leaves of Grass set the task very plainly:

Through me many long dumb voices…”

I’m not a translator in any traditional sense, and I say No! in something less emphatic than thunder (but also in something that may be more continuous than thunder). In short, No Grave Can Hold My Body Down is a book meant to work in the mode Rothenberg describes: as translation (of musical tradition into poetic tradition, for one thing, but also of past into present) by appropriation and collage. Withal, this set of procedures is undertaken in ideological terms.

I have tried to open out in this book, which has included raising the dead in many ways, to address the violence and madness I find abhorrent but also, paradoxically constitutive in much that I value and depend on in American culture and life.

Looking back at the end of the American century (and even its footnote in the last decade), it is easy to be cynical. In fact, it’s terrifically difficult not to be. But a new American vision—a negative vision of the Melvillian stamp—will require more. No Grave Can Hold My Body Down is the beginning of such a vision. In it virtue and sin interpenetrate one another continually, much as dissent and commodity do in American capitalism and/or as liberty, deregulation, charity and hate do in American Liberalism. Resurrection is an American reality, but how will America-the-constantly-converted find salvation?