Here's a terrific poem

by Jacob Rakovan, reprinted as permitted from the Split This Rock Poem of the Week site (see info after poem). Which site is worth checking, well, weekly. Split This Rock is a national network of socially engaged poets.

Hilt's Law 

 

The bones cast in the field like seed corn grow nothing,

grow briars in the boarded gas stations
brown stalks ready for the fire.
You do not hear our song,
earth thick in our throats, benzene, chromium
cadmium and arsenic

shuttered stores,

hosts of dead in cold-mill towns
the day that does not come though prayed for.

The trains of coal and corpses, the price of power
though wires are stretched like a mandolin on our backs
though the saints bob above us like car-lot balloons
You do not hear our singing.
In electric light the bubble gum machine is full of teeth
the babies' bottles with a slow sweet poison
the air thick with cancer, the rain with
teeth, without flowers, without cease.

This dream of sleep, in hunter's orange
over oil-black in cups, in the hollows under eyes.
The unborn sun in the darkest river, the hollow hills
unsong of un-place, Bloody Harlan, Centralia
the blessed fly over in air conditioned comfort.

    

Let the bone-fire of your city burn 'till your shadow stains the bricks 

Let the dark come spilling from the mine thick as molasses
Let the end come if it is coming,
Let the rich hang from their ankles,
a washtub full of black blood.
You do not hear.

 
Let the hills and stones fall on us and cover us
Let those curse us who curse the day, who are skillful
the smelters of iron, and armaments, the hilltop removers. 

 

Though we are dying, though we breath black dust
and blue powder, spit liquor and blood
the black drink, the earth's secret breath.
Though we are toothless, though we are blind
we hear this: 

 

Steady trundle of the train under storm clouds
loaded down with malediction,
the radio tower's Babel-bleat to heaven
with the black stone, with the dead for burning 

song of electric light, and sleeplessness.

 

Weariest river at the end of all things 

We follow you into the earth.

-Jacob Rakovan   

Used by permission.

Jacob Rakovan is an Appalachian writer in diaspora. He is a 2011 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Poetry and recipient of a 2013 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. His work has appeared in numerous journals including The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, The James Dickey Review, Anon, Thrush and Phantom Drift: A Journal of New Fabulism as well as anthologies by Salmon Poetry Press, MTV Books and The Arsenic Lobster. His manuscript The Devil's Radio was a finalist for the 2012 Linda Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature and the Gell poetry prize and is forthcoming on Small Doggies Press. He is co-curator of the Poetry & Pie Night reading series in Rochester, New York. 

Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!

Alice Walker's poem for Hugo Chavez

The great and good Alice Walker has posted a beautiful poem on her website Alice Walker's Garden. The title is "The Good Ones, for Hugo Chavez, Presente."

The good ones
who listen
to women
to children and the poor
die too soon,
their lives bedeviled
by opposition:
our hearts grieve for them. ...

Read the entire poem here. I especially like the line "What a mighty ruckus Hugo Chavez made!"

Hugo Chavez presente! Gracias por todos!

Daljit Nagra

I just read a brilliant poem in, of all unlikely places, the New Yorker. It's titled "A Black History of the English-Speaking Peoples." The poet is Daljit Nagra of whom I'm an instantaneous fan. I'm definitely going to get his most recent book, Tippoo Sultan's Incredible White-Man-Eating Tiger Toy Machine!!!. First, though, I'll reread the New Yorker poem once or twice. There's much meat to it. It's amazing in terms of craft and structure, but mostly its language and especially its broad, profound political sweep and scope blew me away. The poem begins with the poet in the audience at a Shakespeare play--King Lear, I think, though I'm not 100% sure I understood the allusions--at the modern reconstruction of the Globe Theatre, and it spins outward with his thoughts as they're spurred to range upon empire and history. I am, as I've confessed before here, spectacularly uneducated and ignorant in poetry, but as they say I know what I like and I like this very much.

Poetic Injustice

I've been looking forward to reading the new poetry collection Poetic Injustice-Writings on Resistance & Palestine by Remi Kanazi, a young Palestinian-American poet and activist. Come next payday I'll order it.

I've heard Remi's work several times when he's performed his poetry at rallies in solidarity with Palestine but, bummer, I couldn't make it to his big book release event earlier this month uptown, which featured, along with him, an amazing lineup.

It's not just coincidence that I'm thinking again about how much I want to get this book into my hands. Today the criminal apartheid state of Israel carried out a renewed murderous bombing attack on a civilian area of Gaza. At least 10 Palestinians were killed. While the U.S. launches missiles against the sovereign African nation of Libya, riveting much of the world's attention on, and rage against, this latest outbreak of brazen imperialist war, Washington's Tel Aviv pets take the opportunity with no one looking their way to launch another round of their own killing.

Yesterday I ran up to Times Square after work and caught the tail end of a protest demonstration against the war on Libya. Then today we hear of this latest bit of dirty work by the Zionist state.

I am not of the poetry-can-save-the-world party. I am of the we-must-make-revolution-to-save-the-world party. But I do think poetry (and fiction) can help buoy and strengthen the revolution makers, and also help draw new fighters toward the revolutionary path by contributing to the awakening of consciousness. My sense is that Poetic Injustice is this sort of literature. I'm looking forward to finding some quiet afternoon to sit with it and hear its truths.

Politically correct

Rising out of the drear 1950s, led by the civil rights movement which in turn gave rise to the anti-war movement and the women's movement and the gay movement, inspired by the anti-colonial uprisings and wars for national liberation in Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and Pacific islands, on through the 1960s and into the 1970s, there was in this country a flowering of political consciousness. As we all know. It is now most often referred to with the all-encompassing term "the 60s." To the bourgeoisie and all those in the grip of that class's ideology, which most definitely includes the liberal intelligentsia, "the 60s" is now a term of opprobrium. To those of us who are partisans for the class struggle and against racism, sexism, LGBT oppression and all forms of bigotry and exploitation, "the 60s" is or should be shorthand for everything righteous—rebellion, revolution, activism—for rejecting the norms of capitalism and fighting toward a new way of organizing society. This latter, our view of the 60s, is also known by another term, especially as regards education and the arts: politically correct.

Those of us of the 60s/70s generation of activists did indeed come to understand some things as correct and some other things as incorrect by the lights of our politics. That which seeks to advance the struggle, that which conveys the reality of oppression and exploitation, that which upends the old hierarchies and gives voice to those whose voices were heretofore suppressed, this is correct. The old ways of seeing, doing, explaining, steeped as they are in bourgeois consciousness and backward, reactionary ideology, are wrong. Incorrect. Offensive. Above all, untrue. Based on all the false old assumptions, all the lies and justifications of the chattel-slavery-subjugation-of-women system that built the wealth of this country's capitalist class. By our lights, all this needed, and of course still needs, correcting. This is a noble and necessary endeavor.

It is also a frightening challenge to the status quo and for that reason has been subjected to a 40-year-long onslaught of taunts, derision and every other possible means to flip the truth into its opposite. The problem isn't racism, sexism, oppression, exploitation, we're told. The problem is all these uptight rigid purveyors of the whip of political correctness, which is portrayed as an assault on freedom of expression. How dare these people—and for these people read people of color, women, LGBT people, workers, the disabled—how dare anyone trespass on anyone else's freedom to be as incorrect as they please? Is this a free country or what? And so they've managed, the bourgeoisie and its witless mouthpieces, to turn reality on its head with the well-worn Big Lie tactic of endless repetition. And so "politically correct" joins "the 60s" (and especially its literary sub-genre "the madness of the 60s," which I've ranted about before) as A Bad Thing. None of this is surprising. Not the ruling class's efforts to shore up its image and beef up its propaganda; not the bosses' vicious, mendacious attacks against any and all who do try to tell the truth; and, saddest of all, not the efficacy of these efforts. Hardly anyone proudly, boldly claims the mantle of politically correct anymore. Most run scared of being so named, and if so named turn somersaults to defend against the accusation.

Which brings us to the latest round of doings in the literary world. First, by way of noting that "the 60s" is a broad term and can be stretched decades to make a point, I must quickly mention a book I read about in this past Sunday's New York Times Book Review. It's a "madness of the 60s" memoir—set in the 80s! Apparently it tells the poignant tale of a young woman who was so misguided as to travel to Central America and join a bunch of wacky internationalists doing solidarity work in support of the anti-imperialist struggles there. The men she worked with were of course louts. The women were, like her, naïve and confused, and motivated by their pitiful devotion to the loutish men rather than any of their own opinions or political ideas. None had the slightest inkling of what they were doing, and all were completely misled by the Nicaraguans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans fighting the Reagan administration's overt and covert military intervention. The reviewer loved it. I expectorated onto the review.

But the main event I want to point to is a bold, courageous initiative by poet Claudia Rankine, begun at the AWP conference in D.C. earlier this month and still under way online. AWP is the big daddy of literary conferences, put together by the organization of college writing programs and attended by many thousands of poets and writers, almost all of them associated with a writing program in one way or another. I went once, a few years ago when it was here in NYC and the staff very kindly allowed me to attend for free as a worker, rather than student or faculty, at a university. That once was enough, for the whole thing was far too drenched in academia for me. Not my scene. Still, thousands of folks attend, and in a literary culture where it's virtually impossible to be published without an MFA and the only way for writers to make a living is by teaching, I can understand why they do. Once in a while something noteworthy occurs, as it did this year.

I've read a number of accounts of it and I'd urge you to do the same. Basically, at one of the poetry panels, Claudia Rankine's presentation consisted of having Nick Flynn get up and read Tony Hoagland's poem "The Change," then her reading her response to the poem, then her reading his emailed response to her response. Google the key names and you'll find lots of blog postings including several that have the full texts. You'll find that Hoagland's poem includes blatant racist language and imagery. You'll find that Rankine's response is deep, incisive, painful, and so full of truth that … that, yes, sure enough, in his response, Hoagland accused her of "political correctness, with its agendas of rightness, perfection, enforcement, and moral superiority." He also calls this brilliant African American poet "naïve," explains the nuances of U.S. racial history to her, and avers that his poem "is not 'racist' but 'racially complex.'" Hoagland's stunningly, yes, racist and sexist condescension becomes even more breathtaking when you reread and think again about Rankine's thoughts, which are nothing if not complex. "Who let America in the room?" she asks. She says she "could taste the vomit of Reconstruction and slavery in the back of my throat"—but only after acknowledging that she knows what she's opening herself up to by daring to speak up about any of this.

I don't like using the word racist because of you use it it means you are an angry black person. Angry black people are the old black and everyone knows that's pathological. … The old black is positioned in a no-win situation where to express an opinion based on what you see, experience, feel or deduce rsisk falling right into some white folk's notion of black insanity.

This is one brave truth-telling artist. Further, in the wake of all the commentary that's been swirling since AWP, she is not shying away from pursuing the issue. She recently posted an open letter on her website, calling for people to submit their own "thoughts on writing about race." She poses a series of provocative questions as "a few possible jumping-off points." They include:

• If you write about race frequently what issues, difficulties, advantages, and disadvantages do you negotiate?
• If you have never written consciously about race why have you never felt compelled to do so?
• Do you believe race can be decontextualized, or in other words, can ideas of race be constructed separate from their history.

Rankine will post responses received by March 11 on her blog.

Finally, one other item under the Politically Correct rubric. I was planning to write about this but I've gone on too long as it is so I'm just going to point you to this article. Headed "Let's say goodbye to the straw-feminist," it's Cordelia Fine's response to a slew of reactionary reviews of her book Delusions of Gender. In that book, which I've now added to my to-read list, she dismantles the sexist underpinnings of the increasingly dominant strain of evolutionary biology and psychology, the Steven Pinker school of biological determinism as regards innate sex differences, i.e. trucks vs. dolls or, as per Lawrence Summers, home ec vs. science. These reviewers to whom she responds in this piece accuse Fine of political correctness, that most dreaded of offenses. Kudos to her for taking them on.

Yosimar Reyes tells it

I just saw this at the We Got Your Back Project and had to share it. Listen to poet/activist Yosimar Reyes:



Yosimar Reyes; "for colored boys that speak softly" from Corduroy Media on Vimeo.

Cop-out though it is ...

... and date me though using "cop-out" does, I'm going to go with what I've got. And what I've got is a hodge-podge. To whit:

I haven't read any of the books, but this piece about three Young Adult novels with trans teenaged characters is important. Although I haven't been blogging about it consistently, by no means have I dropped my interest in learning more about YA literature in general and in particular YA literature that features characters of color and/or LGBT characters. I've got several on my pile, and I've lately read several. When and if I've got something new or worthwhile to say about them I'll do so. In the meantime, these titles are added to my to-read list.

For 10 years or so I've been on an occasional drive to read "classics" that I'd never read. By classics I mean, yes, books considered central to "the canon" by the literary establishment, mostly Dead White Men stuff. I went to a hippie college in the early 1970s and was able to study what I wanted with few requirements, which is why I never read many of these volumes, and on through the years what I've read for my own pleasure has, as will be obvious to anyone who follows this blog or even looks at its name, not been the roster of DWMs. But for some time, a decade or more, I have been reading, or trying to read, some of them because it became frustrating reading book reviews or other literary commentary when so many of these make reference in one way or another to the "standards" and I couldn't fully get the reference. So. I've read a fair number of Shakespeare's plays. I tried reading Henry James until that proved almost fatal as the boredom damned near killed me. I finally read The Great Gatsby. And so on. All of which is my long-winded way of noting this news about another volume that, sorry all you book clubbers, I found impossible to read since I'm unable to read when I'm asleep.

This news is over a month old, but I'm still pissed off about it. I don't know why anyone should be surprised that there's a move to privatize the public libraries since the public education system is under the same attack. Good to see that there's some effort at fighting back.

A couple weeks ago I said I wanted to read a new book about the brain-cancer threat from cell phones. I'm happy to say that good science indicates there is no such threat. So that's one less book I've got to read.

I've got more. There's always more. Maybe later. For now, check out what looks like a great site, Poets for Living Waters, which describes itself as "a poetry action in response to the BP Gulf oil disaster of April 20, 2010." I'm not sure how I feel about that formulation "a poetry action." On the one hand, poetry is not the same as action, and action, mass militant united action on so many fronts, is desperately needed at this time of unemployment, murderous imperialist wars and invasions, and the ever-emboldened march of reaction (to which I simply must add a big Fuck You to Jon Stewart who's getting mighty rich off of fronting for the capitalist system's status quo as in his insipid speech at his anti-struggle Washington rally equating working-class organizing with neo-fascist mobs). On the other hand, I certainly do believe in, spend most of my words on this blog arguing for, partisan political poetry and fiction, which I think can aid the struggle in several ways. So it's always good to see these sorts of efforts to collect and promote it. I hope to spend some time reading the poems here. One I already have, and I commend you to it: "The Day We Added Ecocide to Our Vocabulary" by Andrew Rihn.

Howl & how not to hear poetry

Last night I watched the movie Howl. It's still showing in theaters but cheaper to see via cable's movies on demand gizmo that also keeps me home, which is where I mostly prefer to be and which I might add is, unlike movie theaters, guaranteed (so far at least) to be bedbug-free. But I digress. Howl. James Franco was great as the young Allen Ginsberg. Much of the movie consists of Franco, as Ginsberg, talking to an unseen interviewer about poetry, about the poetic process, himself as a poet, his life and its connection to his poetry, and about his great poem Howl. I found these segments riveting. I'd have happily sat through two hours of just this. There are also courtroom scenes, from the 1957 obscenity trial in San Francisco where the state tried to ban the City Lights publication of Howl in book form. While not fascinating the way Ginsberg talking about poetry was, these segments are interesting too. Interspersed with both are scenes of Ginsberg reading the poem in, I assume, San Francisco, in 1955. I very much liked this too, Franco's bravura capture of Ginsberg's unique persona.

What I did not like one bit were the animated sequences. These are literal, if whimsical, depictions of various passages from the poem that take over the screen enacting the words that we hear in voiceover. For me, they damned near ruined the movie. I can only guess that the filmmakers worried they would not hold an audience's interest with only the scenes of Ginsberg talking, Ginsberg reading his poem, and testimony at the obscenity trial, that they had to insert some visually arresting element. Well. I think it would have worked if the visual element had been abstract, suggestive, evocative, something to simply capture the eye, perhaps hypnotize us further into the poetic dream as the words washed over us aurally. Instead what we get is an interruption, a barging in on our attention to the poem's words, rhythms, layers of meaning, a most unwelcome assault on our ability to take in the poetry. An intrusion! I wanted to scream and throw something at the screen every time the animations appeared.

The problem, for me at least--and I know this sounds odd and contradictory but it isn't really--is that literature is not a literal art form. Poetry least of all. Yet with these animations in which the "story" of Howl is acted out, Ginsberg's creation is removed from the ineffable realm of imagination and yanked back down to earth, reduced to a matter of plot and character and this and that. To me this feels like a sad disservice to a great poet and a great poem.

I've read Howl twice (and now definitely want to read it again). There's no way I came close, in either of those readings, to truly understanding it. But, as with any quality literature, poetry or fiction, reading it was an intereactive experience between the words and me, between the mind of the poet and the mind of the reader, with me, the reader, my reading brain, creating images, ideas, feelings from the words created by the writer. As any writer knows, book, story, or poem, no reader reads the same thing. The words may be the same in every edition, yet every reader's brain makes of the writer's words something else. Even with fiction, even with the most straightforward conventionally written plot-driven story or novel, the act of reading is an imaginative, creative act--what each reader sees in her mind's eye is her own translation of the writer's words. This is what I mean when I say literature is not a literal art form--although on one level there is nothing more precise than words, on another, the most meaningful level, I think, the words serve as merely a sort of gateway, opening up worlds that the reader enters and creates as she reads. This is the interactive alliance between writer and reader. This is why reading, at least when the material you're reading is at the level of art, is a thrilling and creative act.

It's also why I generally feel that movies aren't the sublime art form that literature is, a view that I know opens me to all sorts of attack and that, truthfuly, I probably can't defend terribly articulately and am even willing to allow might turn out to be harebrained once someone argues me out of it. Till then, though, I can't help but feel that because movies depict everything right there on the screen, show every character's facial expressions, broadcast every character's voice, breathing, tone, tears, display brick buildings, green fields, bullets, blood, and so on--because, that is, they leave little or nothing to the viewer's imagination, they can't and don't achieve what books can. I think this is why film adaptations of books almost always disappoint. It's not just that Hollywood's crass profit-driven aesthetic sabotages any hope of capturing the depth and beauty of a great novel. It's that, just by the act of taking all those words that had been left to the reader's imagination to conjure into images and ideas each inside her own mind, taking those words, stripping them of multiple levels of meaning and alternate interpretations and transforming them into one inescapable literal depiction, the movie by definition destroys, subverts, dumbs down, dare I say erases the art from, the novel, story or poem.

To me, that's what the animation does in this movie. Otherwise, it would have been an intelligent, interesting consideration of art, the artistic process, the clash of art and commerce, censorship, gay oppression, all spiced with enough exciting readings of parts of Howl to entice viewers to read, or reread, Ginsberg's masterpiece. It's still that, but just barely, because, for this viewer at least, the animation sequences deny me entry into the heart of the poem and the mind of the poet.

On our anniversary, a poetic interlude

Today this blog is two years old. Woo-hoo! What a wild old time we've had, my friends.

A time, anyway. With its ups and downs, its raves and rants, certainties and confusions. Threats of oblivion, promises of eternity. All this and more is no doubt in store as I proceed into year three. I hope you'll come along. There's a lot more red reading to do.

Now, to the matter at hand. I don't read much poetry, certainly nowhere near enough poetry, whatever enough would be. One of the side effects of not reading much poetry is that you become frightened, intimidated by the form. Overawed at its mysterious ways. Poetry is a strange, forbidding land to those of us who enter it rarely. We feel we haven't a passport. We most certainly don't know the language. Abandon hope all ye who enter here, as the poet said--not that poetry seems like hell, in fact it feels more like heaven, a paradise forbidden to we who haven't earned entry. And so you find yourself caught in a domino effect of your own readerly limitations, wanting, yearning even, to read poetry, but scared that poetry will reject you. Poetry the vast forbidding ocean, you a fiction-reading literal-minded landlubber of a dolt.

Nevertheless. I've read some poetry lately. A book and a chapbook. And it's been great.

The book is Blood Dazzler, Patricia Smith's profound, intense collection about New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina. These poems are pyrotechnic. Smith is a stunning artist. I have no idea how she does what she does with words.

The poems range upon the landscape (and seascape) of those terrible days five years ago. Many speak in a particular persona: a homeowner, an evacuee, the hurricane herself, other hurricanes, George W. Bush, a drag queen, even a dog. Even the Superdome itself weighs in. And, in a, yes, dazzling, heartbreaking series of short testimonies, a poem that takes the voices of 34 residents of a nursing home who were found drowned. Here's one:

And I am left, no deity hovering,
no black hair on my head,
all of me thinner than when I began.

Fingers of ice climb me,
reach my dimming light,
and choke my only angel.

Here's a bit from the amazing poem "The President Flies Over":

I babble the landscape--what staunch, vicious trees,
what cluttered roads, slow cars. This is my

country as it was gifted me--victimless, vast.
The soundtrack buzzing the air around my ears
continually loops ditties of eagles and oil.

Wow.

There's much more but my best advice is for you to buy the book and read it whole. It will break you a little. What better job can poetry do? (Also see Tayari Jones' blog about a "choreoplay" based on Smith's book that debuted in New York last week.)

I also recently read a chapbook, Outside the Clinic by Andrew Rihn, a kind gift from the poet himself, who has done something unique here. This is a collection about abortion rights written by a man. If I heard that description without knowing anything else, I'd probably get my back up--what does a man know about it, what right does a man have writing about this? But Rihn isn't trying to speak for, and definitely not trying to preach to, women. Rather, he's thinking about the question of women's reproductive rights from his perspective, that of a man who supports it. What's on offer here is a series of meditations that, somewhat similarly to how Smith writes in various voices, looks at the question from various angles, from varying perspectives, not shying away from any. The result is a sort of opening up, an unfolding, of this fraught issue, that has a fresh, liberating feel.

Rihn's chapbook is inspired by the work of, and a reaction to the assassination of, Dr. George Tiller, the dedicated women's health provider who was murdered because he refused to stop performing abortions, including late-term procedures. One of the more moving poems is addressed to Dr. Tiller. From "Taking Heart":

The first woman you refused
had no choice, but chose anyway.
She went where she had to, without
options or safety, and she died
of that drought. What kind of man
could understand such thirst? Our
bodies are different, our barometers
read other pressures. Such harsh lessons
are taught every day in clinics
we never enter. We pass by them,
as men of good standing, ignoring
their calls to ruthless education.

It's good to have allies. Long live political poetry!

Black History Month: Langston Hughes & Stalingrad

Langston Hughes' poem "Good Morning Stalingrad" was published in his 1943 collection Jim Crow's Last Stand. Along with being Black History Month, February is also the month when, in that year of 1943, the Soviet people defeated the Nazis after a months-long battle and siege and at unbelievable sacrifice. The victory at Stalingrad was the beginning of the end for the fascist forces. Hughes' poem reminds us how workers and oppressed people worldwide hailed the Soviet Union for this heroic feat. Here's the poem.

Good Morning Stalingrad

Goodmorning, Stalingrad!
Lots of folks who don't like you
Had give you up for dead.
But you ain't dead!

Goodmorning, Stalingrad!
Where I live down in Dixie
Things is bad -
But they're not so bad
I still can't say
Goodmorning Stalingrad!
And I'm not so dumb
I still don't know
That as long as your red star
Lights the sky,
We won't die.

Goodmorning Stalingrad!
You're half a world away or more
But when your guns roar,
They roar for me -
And for everybody
Who want to be free.

Goodmorning Stalingrad!
Some folks try to tell me down this way
That you're our ally just for today.
That may be so - for those who want it so.
But as for me - you're my ally
Until we all free.

Goodmorning Stalingrad!
When crooks and klansmen
Lift their heads and things is bad,
I can look way across the sea
And see where simple working folks like me
Lift their heads, too, with gun in hand
To drive the fascists from the land.
You've stood between us well,
Stalingrad!
The folks who hate you'd
Done give you up for dead -
They were glad.
But you ain't dead!

And you won't be
As long as I am you
And you are me -
For you have allies everywhere,
All over the world, who care.
And they
Are with you more
Than just today.

Listen! I don't own no radio -
Can't send no messages through the air.
But I reckon you can hear me,
Anyhow, away off there.
And I know you know
I mean it when I say
(Maybe in a whisper
To keep the Klan away)
Goodmorning, Stalingrad!
I'm glad
You ain't dead!

GOODMORNING, STALINGRAD!

Lucille Clifton

Poet Lucille Clifton died yesterday. She meant a lot to a lot of people, including me. Her poetry was full of depth of feeling, and raw, real words, and it engaged the raw, real world. It was accessible in the best sense of the word--it meant something, something you could wrap your head around. It's awful news that she's gone, and so young, only 73. Here is one of my favorites.

i am accused of tending to the past

i am accused of tending to the past
as if i made it,
as if i sculpted it
with my own hands. i did not.
this past was waiting for me
when i came,
a monstrous unnamed baby,
and i with my mother's itch
took it to breast
and named it
History.
she is more human now,
learning languages everyday,
remembering faces, names and dates.
when she is strong enough to travel
on her own, beware, she will.

This & that

A bit of this and a touch of that as the back-to-work horror looms ...

Yesterday Teresa and I watched a good movie, Sleep Dealer. It's sci-fi social commentary, very well done in my opinion. It envisions a near-future scenario in which U.S. megamonopolies have realized their fondest dream: wringing profit from workers without having the workers physically present. They've solved the problem of immigrant labor by doing away with the immigrants while retaining the labor. The means is a nightmarish high-tech hook-up. The plot also involves imperialist theft of water, which is more and more a top issue facing the nations of the South. Best of all, it ends on a note of hope and struggle. Very satisfying, and with fine writing and acting to boot.

I'm intrigued and want to read the new historical novel Footnotes in Gaza by Joe Sacco. I did take in quite a nice haul of bookstore gift certificates last month, and either I'll use some of that to buy this book or take it out of the library. I'm a little wary given the praise from sources like the New York Times, which is no friend to Palestine. Also, unhip and behind the times though it makes me, I have to say that I'm not a fan of graphic books. I keep trying them and feeling let down, feeling at the end that, well, no, a picture is not worth a thousand words, a thousand words would have had so much more depth, this stayed so unsatisfyingly on the surface. Keep trying I will, though, and who knows, maybe this'll be the one that changes my view.

The Dec. 26 death of Dennis Brutus, the great South African poet and activist, must be noted albeit a week late. In a statement his family commented: "Dennis lived his life as so many would wish to, in service to the causes of justice, peace, freedom and the protection of the planet. He remained positive about the future, believing that popular movements will achieve their aims." Brutus, like most other South African leaders including Nelson Mandela, was always steadfast in his support of the Palestinian people, likening their struggle to the anti-apartheid battle to which he had devoted so many years. Just a year ago he led a protest in Durban against the Israeli ambassador to decry the criminal war against Gaza.

Earlier in December the novelist Carlene Hatcher Polite died. I'm sorry to say that stumbling upon this obituary was the first time I'd ever heard of her but it certainly makes me want to read her work.

Haymarket Lit for May Day (1)

From poet Kenneth Rexroth, this 1942 poem. Chicago's Waldheim Cemetery houses the graves of the Haymarket Martyrs as well as those of Lucy Parsons, who lived on for nearly 60 years after her husband Albert was hanged and never flagged in her revolutionary activism, Emma Goldman, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.


AGAIN AT WALDHEIM

"Light upon Waldheim"
--Voltairine de Cleyre on the Haymarket martyrs

How heavy the heart is now, and every heart
Save only the word drunk, power drunk
Hard capsule of the doomed. How distraught
Those things of pride, the wills nourished in the fat
Years, fed in the kindly twilight of the books
In gold and brown, the voices that had little
To live for, crying for something to die for.
The philosophers of history,
Of dim wit and foolish memory,
The giggling concubines of catastrophe —
Who forget so much — Boethius’ calm death,
More’s sweet speech, Rosa’s broken body —
Or you, tough, stubby recalcitrant
Of Fate.

Now in Waldheim where the rain
Has fallen careless and unthinking
For all an evil century’s youth,
Where now the banks of dark roses lie,
What memory lasts, Emma, of you,
Or of the intrepid comrades of your grave,
Of Piotr, of “mutual aid,”
Against the iron clad flame throwing
Course of time?
Your stakes were on the turn
Of a card whose face you knew you would not see.

You knew that nothing could ever be
More desperate than truth; and when every voice
Was cowed, you spoke against the coalitions
For the duration of the emergency —
In the permanent emergency
You spoke for the irrefutable
Coalition of the blood of men.

Salt of This Sea

I knew Suheir Hammad as a great poet and spoken word artist. In fact, I first saw her that same night I first saw Staceyann Chin, when both were in Def Poetry Jam on Broadway a few years ago. I've attended a couple of her poetry readings since then. She's an important artist, I think. I did not know that she's also an actor. She plays the lead role in the Palestinian film Salt of This Sea, directed by Annemarie Jacir and scheduled to be shown at the Tribeca Film Festival, which begins next week. Here's the trailer.



And here's a nuanced review by Maymanah Farhat, up today at Electronic Intifada.

The tulips!

The tulips! The tulips! Trace rootward my trance state

Induced by pinkest rubymost peachy lemonade shades

Read the rest of my goofy poem here, in the Mississippi Review's "Happiness" issue of some years ago.

"There's nothing brave about oppressing"

As promised, I'm posting below a few pictures I took at Saturday's New York demonstration in support of the suffering people of Gaza. First, though, check out what poet Remi Kanazi had to say there.



Remi is the organizer and editor of Poets for Palestine.



These guys on the left are from an orthodox Jewish grouping that rejects Zionism and stands in solidarity with the Palestinians. They've made some beautiful statements about how massacres and racism are anathema to Judaism. Their religiosity creeps me out, but their humanity is righteous: they made an exception to their Sabbath rules to take part in the Saturday demonstration because Israel's attack on Gaza constitutes a crisis about which they believe they must not remain silent. As for an atheist like me who identifies with my people's heritage of fighting for the oppressed, a heritage horribly besmirched by the Israeli state, the sign at the right says it all.

A poem for Palestine

From all accounts yesterday's New York demonstration in solidarity with the people of Gaza against the murderous Israeli bombing assault was, although called at the last minute and held without a permit, strong and spirited, drawing 3,000 to 4,000 people to stand with Palestine. Now a new coalition of New York/New Jersey groups has been created. It's the Break the Siege on Gaza Coalition, and it has announced plans for another, bigger demonstration this coming Saturday, January 3. I'm hoping I'll be well enough by then to go. I feel awful about missing yesterday's protest. In the meantime, here's a statement by the youth group FIST on the Gaza crisis. And here's one from the International Action Center.

For a more literary take on the Palestinian struggle, check out the recent anthology Poets for Palestine. There's also the Arab-American literary journal Mizna.

Probably the greatest honor so far in my writing life is that Mizna published a poem of mine a few years ago. In lieu of my physical presence at the protests until I get over this flu, I'm reprinting it here, dedicated to the memory of the great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, who died this past summer and whose voice is sorely missed at this moment.

Homeland

This is the Palestine poem I've needed to write for 30 years
to atone for cheering for Israel, '67, age 13. These are the lines
where I finally come clean: how I swallowed the tripe, even
as I grew, once I saw, I learned, once I'd heard about Deir Yassin.
I was scared to move, to cross the boundary from family, home,
all I knew, all they'd taught me it meant to be a Jew. That land
is ours, Mom said, given by God (in whom we don't believe);
it's safety, we need it, said Dad, after what we've been through,
it's ours by right, it's a guarantee. You can't change sides. They
threatened. They cried. They thundered: you'll kill us. You
won't be forgiven, they warned, you'll have torn us apart.
They said it would be a sort of suicide, a death of the self,
but they lied, and this is the poem where I tell the truth: that
massacre and theft disgrace my roots, that I claimed my future
by taking my stand with Palestine.

So this is the poem I owe--for the stolen land, for the
bulldozed homes, shattered bones, a nation scattered but
undiminished despite the blows. For Dearborn diaspora's rage,
for Right Bank slingshots, for elders who cling to keys
and dream of houses they were ousted from. For the
uprooted olive trees. This is the poem I have to write--
after curfews, checkpoints, the odious wall, after worst jobs,
insults, racist abuse, the buried babies and shortened lives--
these are the lines of sorrow and shame at the crimes that are
carried out in my name. This is the poem for Yafa, Ramallah,
Jerusalem, Jenin, for Nablus, Samakh, the towns that were
razed and those that remain. For these are the words of a
wandering Jew who dwells in the promise, the oath, the pledge,
the fist raised for the right of return, the shoulder against soldiers
rifles tanks. And this is my hand, my heart, my voice, the way
I chose and will never regret. And this is my vow to the cousins
who yearn for the beloved, unforgotten, unrelinquished place.
For the day that will come. For the great wrong reversed.
Yes, this is my duty. Yes, this is the poem it's an honor to write.
Yes, this is my love for Palestine.

The inaugural poet

My ignorance about poetry is vast though I am trying bit by bit to correct that. In the meantime I must admit that I have not read any of the poetry of Elizabeth Alexander, who will read a specially written new poem at the inauguration of President Obama. I'm intrigued to see that one of her books of poetry is titled The Venus Hottentot, especially because Barbara Chase-Riboud's novel Hottentot Venus was one of the best books I read in 2008. The story of Sarah Baartman is excruciatingly sad, epitomizing much of the pain and horror of European colonialism in and racism toward the nations of Africa. I'm interested to read it through the prism of poetry.

As to her inaugural assignment, Ms. Alexander says:

This is a powerful moment in our history. The joy I feel is sober and profound because so much struggle and sacrifice have brought us to this day. And there is so much work to be done ahead of us. Poetry is not meant to cheer; rather, poetry challenges, and moves us toward transformation. Language distilled and artfully arranged shifts our experience of the words--and the worldviews--we live in.

José Sucuzhanay presente!

Because I was under the weather over the weekend, I didn't make it to yesterday's demonstration in Bushwick, Brooklyn, about the December 7 beating death of José Sucuzhanay by a group of men shouting anti-gay and anti-Latino slurs. Teresa went. She reports that a couple thousand people marched. It was less than a month ago that she went to Long Island for another march about another Ecuadoran immigrant who was beaten to death by a gang of youths.In his blog, poet Eduardo C. Corral points to a poem by C. Dale Young in the Spring 2004 Virginia Quarterly. The title is "Torn."