Contemporary Poetry

politics and poetics 77

time, history, and other people. But that doesn’t mean poetry

itself is passive.^47

Eliot Weinberger’s What I Heard About Iraq is constructed
from a montage of facts, sound bites, interviews and testimony.^48
Weinberger’s prose poem sequence combines statistical statements
with the words of politicians, soldiers and Iraqi civilians. Russian
theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s account of heteroglossia in the novel,
and his evocation of the text as ‘contaminated’ by a plurality of
discourses, helps to explain how Weinberger’s volume performs as
a political critique. Bakhtin notoriously privileged the language of
the novel as a site of verbal interaction heteroglossia, in relation to
what he indicates is the largely monologic language of poetry: ‘The
world of poetry, no matter how many contradictions and insoluble
confl icts the poet develops within it, is always illumined by one
unitary and indisputable discourse.’^49
What I Heard About Iraq gives challenge to Bakhtin’s anchor-
ing of poetry as a monologic language. ‘Found’ material acts as a
form of reportage; the text becomes impregnated with a plurality
of voices. Chronicling the reaction to 9 / 11 and the USA’s entry
into the Iraq War, the poem displays how political information is
disseminated and within time contradicted by the same sources.
Building with the refrain ‘I heard’, the poem also uses graphic
facts at intermittent points. The constant increase of Iraqi civil-
ian deaths becomes a shocking mantra in the poem: starting off
with an initial fi gure of 10 , 000 , towards the close we are told ‘I
heard that 100 , 000 Iraqi civilians were dead’ (p. 74 ). Through
the juxtaposition of quotations Weinberger is able to display
the tragic absurdity of political language and decision-making.
One key incident is the Bush and Blair administrations’ alerts
regarding Saddam Hussein’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’. In
the opening sections we read the words of Secretary of State
Colin Powell, President George Bush and Vice President Dick
Cheney:

I heard Colin Powell say: ‘I’m absolutely sure that there are

weapons of mass destruction there and the evidence will be

forthcoming. We’re just getting it now.’