Is Starbucks Harboring a Secret Pulitzer-Worthy Poetry Stash?
Yeah, so I used to write a poetry column here and I think I might take it up now and again, or at least until Phil yanks my credentials. Perhaps then Godjilla might come to my defense?Since my last entry, I've left Kansas and moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, to get my PhD in English at the University of Tennessee where I teach writing and serve as poetry editor for the literary journal Grist: The Journal for Writers. But enough about me....We finally found a place near us where we can get coffee and sit outside undisturbed to read, and one that is not our back yard where the chiggers refuse to succumb to the numerous layers of malathion I've put down since summer. Yeah, your kids aren't safe to play in our back yard.The place we found, and I love saying this, is "The Starbucks by the Mall." I'm not ashamed. There's busy side street traffic, I-40 is a stone's throw, and there's a subtle whiff of waste management. And it's by a Korean grocery store! Who knew there was such a thing in Knoxville. And now it's all the kimchi I can eat....This particular Starbucks, I've been there three times, it has only served (during the last two times I've been) the new "everyman" coffee: Pike Place Blend. Uh, yeah. It's disgusting. On Saturday when we went in, I asked for "One small regular coffee black, please." The "small regular" really annoyed the barista, but when I asked if they had any other coffee up that was not Pike Place they told me they could give me a tall Americano for the same price. I'm not sure I got a deal on that, but the next day, the same Pike Place situation, and they gave me the Americano for free. So let that be a lesson to you, because now I'm drinking free Americanos (for life!) at The Starbucks by The Mall.Perhaps someone out there knows what Phil Levine poem this is excerpted from. I certainly can't think of one, but then again, I don't own his recent books and the entire Levine section at the university library was checked out.I'm thinking some aspiring graduate student compiling a comprehensive bibliography of Levine would be interested to know that these lines can be found printed on the side of select Starbucks paper cups. It's part of Starbuck's efforts to entertain us while we drink their expensive pap and to distract us from the fact that the cost of one grande mocha frappucino could just as well paid for the groceries of a delicious home-cooked meal. Or, as Starbucks describes it:"Sparking conversation In the tradition of coffee houses everywhere, Starbucks has always supported a good, healthy discussion. To get people talking, "The Way I See It" is a collection of thoughts, opinions and expressions provided by notable figures that now appear on our widely shared cups."And so, Levine is on one of these cups. He's actually #39. Here's his contribution:Every morning when I brush my teeth, I look at the aging face in the mirror and think, Wake up, honey, it could be worse. It could be happening to you.- Philip Levine (Pulitzer Prize-Winning author of numerous poetry collections including The Simple Truth.)Now I must know. Is this from a printed poem? Are these the lines and breaks Levine wanted? What exactly is Starbucks's poetic aesthetic?
the real enemy
No doubt you've heard by now that President Bush has commuted Scooter Libby's sentence for perjury.In his statement about the commutation, Bush said the following: "I respect the jury's verdict, but I have concluded that the prison sentence given to Mr. Libby is excessive. Therefore, I am commuting the portion of Mr. Libby's sentence that required him to spend thirty months in prison."30 months. 30 months? It would not have been even three years for what, and I'm sure this will all be made clear in twenty years or so, amounts to one of the hugest crimes in American history. One wonders what sentence Bush might actually find suitable for someone who jeopardized national security resulting in the deaths of 3586 U.S. men and women and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians.Reading the news this morning, I remembered a story from Bush's years as governor of Texas.You probably remember Karla Faye Tucker. She was the woman from Texas, who in 1983, killed two people with a pick ax and was subsequently sentenced to death by lethal injection. While on death row, she became born-again and an icon of death penalty abolishment.Almost ten years later, when it came time for her execution, she made a request to Governor Bush that her sentence be commuted. (This is exactly what Scooter Libby just got.) Remember here that a commutation is NOT a pardon. For Tucker a commutation of her sentence would NOT have meant she would get out of jail (though one wonders if anyone ever sat Bush down and explained the differences between commutation and pardon). It would have meant a new sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.And yet despite Karla Faye Tucker's request for commutation, and despite the vocal protests and pleas of everyone from Pat Robertson to Pope John Paul II, from Newt Gingrich to the United Nations, Bush was unrelenting in his quest to execute and signed off on her death warrant. (By the way, did you know that during his six years as governor of Texas, Bush oversaw over 152 executions? Pretty sure that's more than any other governor in history. Heckuva job Bushie!)During the 2000 campaign for the Republican nomination, conservative talking head Tucker Carlson interviewed Governor Bush and asked him about the Karla Faye Tucker case. Here's what Carlson wrote about the interview:In the weeks before the execution, Bush says, a number of protesters came to Austin to demand clemency for Karla Faye Tucker."Did you meet with any of them?" I ask.Bush whips around and stares at me. "No, I didn't meet with any of them," he snaps, as though I've just asked the dumbest, most offensive question ever posed. "I didn't meet with Larry King either when he came down for it. I watched his interview with [Karla Faye] Tucker, though. He asked her real difficult questions like, 'What would you say to Governor Bush?'""What was her answer?" I wonder."Please," Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, "don't kill me."I must have looked shocked - ridiculing the pleas of a condemned prisoner who has since been executed seems odd and cruel - because he immediately stops smirking.This, my friends, is the innate depravity of our President. He mocked the pleas of a dying woman. He spat in the face of a woman who'd sought forgiveness. And this is also what our President thinks of you, Everyday American.Let the bodies of our friends, children, parents, spouses pile up in Iraq. Let the poor suffer and drown in New Orleans. Let men and women in inner cities just trying to survive be given mandatory sentences for drug possession no matter how little. And let the rich and powerful cronies of this administration get off free of their crimes without even blinking at the injustice of it all.This has got to end.Yesterday, the White House actually closed the public comment line. Amazing.Well, it's back up and running. Call the White House. Tell them what you think. 202-456-1111.Here's a poem by Steve Scafidi that exemplifies my overall point. The crime and circumstances are not necessarily the issue here. Injustice is. Horror is.To me, President Bush is the embodiment of both.On the Death of Karla Faye TuckerAnd why not celebrate the deaths of our enemies? Achilles dragging the corpse of Hektor through war fields of Troy sang a lost and hymnal cadence of joy I imagine that warmed the cold hearts of the godsfor love of blood and vengeance and victory has always been a kind of prayer. Dante among the souls in hell's garden swooned to hear so many tormented cries from the delicate blue mouthsof the damned and was full of sympathy at first which was blasphemy and he learned slowly to savor the terror of sinners and learned compassion only goes so far and then must end and turn to an uglinesswithout end which is hell. And so the idea of heaven must also be steeped in a cruelty without end. Why not then, celebrate the deaths of our enemies-- those who break into our lives without being asked,to crush and to maim? For Texas just killed a woman who took a pick ax for a while against gravity and swung it down into the curled body of another woman trying to sleep--just to sleep--one nightand who begged after a while more to be killed quicker and who was not. Why not raise a drink and sing when the murderer's arm swells up darkly and the brain stops and her shining soulplummets into whatever abyss her god invented meticulously and patiently one night raking over the coals of His own--I suppose--mysterious rages and childhood dementia and darkness oldas His gods which are the coals themselves twinkling like starlight here in America where what is commonly unspeakable is frequently described-- a thing by which we might recognize ourselves. No,I can't celebrate the death of Karla Faye Tucker although I would like to. Although I have tried. So goodbye ax. Goodbye stars. Goodbye gods we make to sanction who we arebut will not now admit--simple thugs of history we are given today to alter somehow for our own sake. Even the bloody Achilles eventually gave Hektor's body to Hektor's father at the gate.Lord, I give you back your image and the myth of benevolence and the illusion You exist. Karla Tucker was not my enemy. Horror is. That common murderous evil bitch.+++Acknowledgments:I wasn't able to post the poem here with its proper format due to html constraints. Please [click here to read the poem in its proper form][1]."On the Death of Karla Faye Tucker" from For Love of Common Words by Steve Scafidi © Copyright 2006 by Steve Scafidi. [1]: http://againstoblivion.blogspot.com/2007/07/and-why-not-celebrate-deaths-of-our.html
Godjilla in New Orleans
![][1]As you know, [Godjilla][2] is in New Orleans during Spring Break doing whatever she can to help. 1,000 thanks to everyone who donated money, food, time, prayers.Jill sent this photo of the 9th Ward to me via cameraphone/e-mail. This, folks, is the 9th Ward today. [[Click here to see the photo in full detail.][3]]Really, what can you say?Here's a poem from Martha Serpa's book The Dirty Side of the Storm.The Dirty Side of the StormDeath just misses you, its well-defined eye and taut rotation land on someone else. No need to study the skyfor signs or watch the cows- not with satellite loops, infrared imagery, recognizance flights shrinkingthe orange cones of uncertainty. If it makes you feel better, go ahead and push pins through a brittle chart.Your coordinates square neatly east of the worst wind shear, lightning strikes, and bursts of air.All convection steers clear of your splattered doorframe. The Red Cross mobilizes elsewhere.Take a good look at those oak roots from a calm doorstep and wait. The sadness is a surge carryingall its debris back to you, a flood that shoves clods of ants and snakes through your walls and thensits in your house for days and days. This is the dirty side of the storm. Would Death had blown straight through.Martha Serpas from The Dirty Side of the Storm [1]: http://bp1.blogger.com/_bnxzJOtFmDU/Rf9DJyyJZmI/AAAAAAAAAHo/IJHtRHPFXYg/s200/9th+Ward+copy.jpg [2]: http://www.lawrence.com/blogs/godjilla/ [3]: http://bp1.blogger.com/_bnxzJOtFmDU/Rf9DJyyJZmI/AAAAAAAAAHo/IJHtRHPFXYg/s1600-h/9th+Ward+copy.jpg
Poetry and profanity….
This week I received and e-mail from an old friend who recounted a recent memory. As she remembered it, we were walking around the university area of Seattle and it was one of those clear days when the sunlight strikes the trees just right and catches the chrome on a parked car and something inside you vibrates. It was one of those rare afternoons when the air is still enough to hear both the whisk of the broom on the sidewalk and the tune hummed by the man sweeping, and for just a moment you feel good to be human, so good in fact that you shout things like, as I'd shouted at her, "I want to fuck the world and everything in it!"I don't think I'm off base here, but most people have felt that spontaneous overflow of emotion at some point, right? Or, is it time for me to get checked back in?Perhaps no lines of poetry can better describe that feeling than the closing stanza of "Counsels" by the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz who writes, "There is so much death, and that is why affection / for pigtails, bright-colored skirts in the wind, / for paper boats no more durable than we are...." Milosz writes with a unique tenderness and his poems always insist that we recognize and celebrate humanity, however fragile it is, a thing "no more durable" than paper.Since reading my friend's e-mail, I've also been thinking about that word: "fuck."Raise your hand if it's your favorite word.Okay, I can see it is the majority of you reading this who have your hands up and I'm certain we could go on and on about "fuck" and its uses and utilities, about our much loved pastimes, good jokes, and our favorite examples from "Big Lebowski," etc. But, for now at least, we can save that for the comments.One of my favorite poems, though, about the word and the word's potential to signify and mean is by Steve Scafidi.Ode to the Middle FingerBlunt eloquent digit- it points to the sky where Johnny Cash is reunited with his bride and his brother Jack who died in the teeth of a mill saw ripping boards a long time ago and the circle is at last unbroken for Johnny Cash who gave the finger to the warden famously once at Folsom Prison singing to the citizens there in 1968 and so I also thank god for all the rich blessings of the middle finger which the middle finger bestows somehow on the giver and even the redwood, the mighty redwood tree takes the shape of it. Even the dandelion. And Johnny Cash is dead and gone today and the bird he raised remains a common thing I thank god for giving me everyday to raise here with fury and love, Oh lord let this be my prayer.The word (and the gesture) imply a freedom like no other because the word itself is human like no other. So human in fact that even the gesture associated with it is almost like an incantation of being. It's a word of consecration. It's a prayer.Another of my favorite poems by Czeslaw Milosz is "Ars Poetica?" because of the wisdom of these two simple lines, "In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent: / a thing is brought forth which we didn't know we had in us."Really there is only one word that always expresses what you didn't know you had in you. There is only one word that means what you always need it to mean.And that, my friends, is a blessing.Now...go fuck yourselves.![][1]+++Acknowledgments:"Counsels" and "Ars Poetica?" from The Collected Poems by Czeslaw Milosz © Copyright 1988 by Czeslaw Miosz Royalties, Inc."Ode to the Middle Finger" from For Love of Common Words by Steve Scafidi © Copyright 2006 by Steve Scafidi. [1]: http://img394.imageshack.us/img394/2917/johnnycashfinger7va.jpg
Sad Little Breathing Machine
![][1]This New Year's I made two resolutions: to not make any resolutions, and to write here with regularity. With this entry I'm at least keeping one, and I'd like to start the new year off with a recommendation: [Sad Little Breathing Machine][2] by [Matthea Harvey][3].The poetry in this collection is, well, not the type I normally read. Though some might not call it experimental per se (though if this isn't the avant-garde then, in all seriousness, what is?), Harvey's poems have reminded me what the best poetry does: illuminate human experience by staking a claim in the unknown.Comprised of catalogs, prose poems, fragmented conversations, and lyric experimentation, the book itself operates as a kind of machine. Each poem tugs and drives, spins and whirs, closes and opens, forces the reader to make new connections. The result is a tremendous energy.Many of the poems use what Harvey calls "engines," mathematical symbols that provide a function for the associations of various images that follow in the poem. They act as a kind of guidepost for how to interpret and/or read the poem. Here is the collection's title poem:Sad Little Breathing MachineEngine:@_Under its glass lid, the square of cheese is like any other elementof the imagination--cough in the tugboat, muff summering somewhere in mothballs.Have a humbug. The world is slow to dissolve & leave us. Is it yourhermeneut's helmet not letting me filter through? The submarine sinkswith a purpose: Scientist Inside Engineering A Shell. & meanwhileI am not well. Don't know how to go on Oprah without ya. On t.v, a documentaryabout bees--yet another box in a box. The present is in there somewhere.The "@" symbol provides a way of organizing the objects in the poem in terms of orientation and source. Even something as antipoetic as a square of cheese has as much potential to be a vehicle of imagination as any other traditional poetic image. Nothings says a poem has to be about clouds or daffodils or your mother, right?I think of Wallace Stevens' poem "Anecdote of the Jar" and its analysis of how a single object can define all that surrounds it. By placing something as matter-of-fact as an empty jar on a hillside, all the trees and grass and animals that surround it become clearer via their relationship to the jar. The landscape is contextualized by the jar. For Harvey, the world is indeterminate and without order, and her poems, like Stevens' jar, are machines created to impose one.With their imagistic cleverness, their puns, these poems are certainly hip and one is as likely to encounter holographic daisies and Chairman Mao flying his heli-car as nursery rhymes and satirical musings on meta-language and the "post-romantic." There are times though where the whimsy comes off as associational faltering, as in, for example, the closing couplets of "I May After Leaving You Walk Quickly or Even Run":When I said did you want me I meant in the general sense.The drink we drank was cordial. In a spoon, the ceiling fan whirled.The Old World smoked in the fireplace. Glum was the woman in the ostrich feather hat.In reading these poems, there were a few moments where I wanted to chuck the book across the room and be done with it, frustrated as I was by their opacity and hip cleverness. Ultimately, though, I found the book rewarding and a few moments hauntingly beautiful, laugh out loud funny, intuitive and shrewd. Here is one such poem:Introduction to the WorldFor the time being call me Home.All the ingenues do.Units are the engines I understand best.One betrayal, two. Merrily, merrily, merrily.Define hope. Machine. Define machine. Nope.Like thoughts, the geniuses race through.If you're luckyafter a number of revolutions, you'llfeel something catch.+++Acknowledgements: "Sad Little Breathing Machine," "I May After Leaving You Walk Quickly or Even Run," and "Introduction to the World" from _Sad Little Breathing Machine by Matthea Harvey. Copyright © by Matthea Harvey 2004. [1]: http://www.mattheaharvey.info/books/src/sad_little_cover.jpg [2]: http://www.graywolfpress.org/component/page,shop.flypage/product_id,120/category_id,0485aa93fa0558fb1f755721e776984d/option,com_phpshop/ [3]: http://www.mattheaharvey.info/index.html
“Let America be America again.”
This was a painful week for you if, like me, you'd invested heart and energy and money into John Kerry as a presidential candidate. In hindsight, I see why I just couldn't help myself. I mean, the guy did take his campaign slogan from a Langston Hughes poem: "Let America be America again." I remember actually saying to someone during the last Presidential election, "Just vote for him, you'll see. He's not the next JFK! He's the reincarnation of F-D-fucking-R!!"Sigh....But alas, with his latest gaffe, one which was only all too easily exploited by the "in the last throes"-of-their-tenure Republicans (fingers crossed), what we've all known since the middle of his 2004 campaign was reconfirmed by this week's inane media blitz and its consumers' tit-for-tat responses of "John Kerry hates the troops," "He thinks our boys in uniform are stupid," and my favorite via Michelle Malkin, "The cravenness and condescension of John Kerry make me sick." John Kerry doesn't hate the troops. He's a decorated veteran for crying out loud. He's just not the leader we need right now.And yet, all is not lost. One good thing did come out of seeing Kerry in the news this week: I was reminded that this country is about so much more than the partisan gaming and electioneering, I was reminded that there are people out there who believe in the greatness of the people of this country, and there are people that want to do the hard work it will take to make America be America, to work for what it is we want. As Hughes writes, "Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed- / Let it be that great strong land of love / Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme."A little while ago I received a letter from some purported members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars who wrote to tell me that they disagree so strongly with my views expressed here and elsewhere that they'd given me an award for my "idiotic views." They'd taken it upon themselves to superimpose a picture of me on a urinal at their meeting place, and that although they "fought to protect good Americans freedoms [sic]," they now "wonder if in [my] case it may have been a mistake" because my "liberal views of the world and [my] idiotic statements about our President and Administration will never benefit the USA."Quite simply, this is exactly what's at stake in our country at this moment. Right now is the time we've got to come together and work as if we actually believe in America, as if we really believe we might live up to the standard of Langston Hughes when he writes,O, let America be America again- The land that never has been yet- And yet must be-the land where every man is free. The land that's mine-the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME- Who made America, Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain, Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain, Must bring back our mighty dream again.If we don't, we'll instead be forced to suffer without complaint under the rule of those who believe in all that ails our country: those that want an America to benefit the OILigarchy and corporatocracy, those that line their coffers with war profits, who advocate and legislate torture and the suspension of habeas corpus, who exploit the very real specter of racism for personal, monetary, and electoral gain, who cram through omnibus bills with fiscal breaks that benefit only the very few while callously and scornfully exploiting the very many, those who are anti-science, anti-environment, anti-thought, anti-choice, anti-Christian, those who sacrifice the Bill of Rights upon the altar of insatiable greed and materialism.To those of you who wish me ill or those who agree with me but lack the means to communicate it, let me close with these lines from Hughes' poem:Sure, call me any ugly name you choose-- The steel of freedom does not stain. From those who live like leeches on the people's lives, We must take back our land again, America!*** Acknowledgements:"Let America Be America Again" from Let America Be America Again and Other Poems by Langston Hughes. New York: Vintage Books, 2004.
Freedom’s Sad State: America
![][1]This debate over military tribunals for so-called "enemy combatants" and "terrorists" is no longer a matter divided by political party, nor is it merely another bullet point on the list of how Bush is ruining this country. It never should have been a debate. It never should have been a partisan issue. It's a matter of human rights. I just hope that people will wake up and see John Warner's split with the White House in the Armed Services Committee for what it is: people standing up against the state. And now, we need to do our part.The so-called "issue" couldn't be any more clear: this is about a government and an administration that believes the state knows best, that it may do whatever it wants whenever it wants, that it may charge you with a crime and keep its evidence secret. Above all, the state has final word.Secret evidence. Secret prisons. Torture. Disappearances. What's next?Although America has never come close to living up to its ideals, its authority in the world has depended in large part on its projected moral authority. It only takes some reading of basic American history to see that America has been working in the world for a long time without that moral authority, if we ever had it, and now it is clear. [As Colin Powell said the other day][2], "The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism."Along these lines, there's a discussion shaping up over at ["The Subscendentalist"][3] in terms of the poet's role in the world, so please check it out.Last night I argued for a poetry that, among other things, "employs the material of language in order to uncover the experience of Being" and for a poetry, "that takes language and makes it into something that a reader can encounter and come away experiencing something that is not normally interpretable nor communicable."There is certainly a political aspect to this, and concerning this matter I haven't yet formed my thoughts into a coherent system. But I'm feeling like there's an ethical obligation of poets to speak truth to power that is not being met by America very well.Where are they? Really, I'm asking. Please, someone open my eyes. It's got to be out there, right?Until then, I'll continue to find truth in the poems of Turkish poet Nazin Hikmet who spent 18 years in prison for protesting the government through his writing.A Sad State of FreedomYou waste the attention of your eyes, the glittering labour of your hands, and knead the dough enough for dozens of loaves of which you'll taste not a morsel; you are free to slave for others-- you are free to make the rich richer.The moment you're born they plant around you mills that grind lies lies to last you a lifetime. You keep thinking in your great freedom a finger on your temple free to have a free conscience.Your head bent as if half-cut from the nape, your arms long, hanging, your saunter about in your great freedom: you're free with the freedom of being unemployed.You love your country as the nearest, most precious thing to you. But one day, for example, they may endorse it over to America, and you, too, with your great freedom-- you have the freedom to become an air-base.You may proclaim that one must live not as a tool, a number or a link but as a human being-- then at once they handcuff your wrists. You are free to be arrested, imprisoned and even hanged.There's neither an iron, wooden nor a tulle curtain in your life; there's no need to choose freedom: you are free. But this kind of freedom is a sad affair under the stars.Nazim Hikmet from Poems of Nazim Hikmet [1]: http://www.cbc.ca/gfx/pix/bush_katrina_responsibility_cp_8434263.jpg [2]: http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/politics/20060914-0755-bush-congress.html [3]: http://subscendentalist.blogspot.com/
Remembering Katrina
"Well I fully understand people wanting things to have happened yesterday. I understand the anxiety of people on the ground. I can imagine, er, I just can't imagine what it's like to be wavin' a sign sayin', 'Come and get me now!' So there is frustration, but I want people to know there's a lot of help coming. I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees. They did anticipate a serious storm, but these levees got breached and as a result much of New Orleans is flooded and now we're having to deal with it and will" President Bush, on "Good Morning America," Sept. 1, 2005, six days after repeated warnings from experts about the scope of damage expected from Hurricane Katrina and three days after the levees were breached.Oh how it takes you back and I can remember thinking, "No you won't 'deal with it.' You're a liar and the only thing you're going to do is make sure that you help to remake New Orleans into what you're crony friends have always wanted: a Six Flags New Orleans only with cheaper booze, shinier corporate neon, and guilt-free hookers for rich, white, Christian pigs to do the whole 'what-happens-here-stays-here' thing."And now, it's happening. Homes all across New Orleans are left in ruins to rot until the owners throw in the towel.I heard recently that the government of Indonesia had most of its damage from the tsunami cleared in a matter of months. This is what it looks like in America one year later.![][1]I can hardly write this I'm so enraged. How anyone in the future could ever vote Republican is beyond me, especially after the incompetent and moronic response to Katrina by President Weak & Stupid.If you need a little refresher on the response, here's a clip of Aaron Brussard, the president of Jefferson Parish in New Orleans, talking with Tim Russert on Meet the Press."Nobody's coming to get us."It's been a year later, which you'd think would bring progress and, if lucky, reflection, but I'm telling you the corruption of this administration and its non-response to Katrina is just beginning to unravel.Over the past couple of days, investigative journalist [Greg Palast has reported][2] that some of America's most important hurricane scientists were threatened with losing their jobs if they came forward with the truth that the administration knew beyond a doubt that the levees would break. The problem for Bush was that if the levees broke it instantly became a Federal problem instead of a state and local problem. Put simply, he just didn't want to deal with it.Any Republican hacks out there still want to call this man a "compassionate conservative"?We cannot afford to forget Katrina, the lives ruined, and the people killed by this White House's criminal negligence.But since this is a poetry column, here's a poem by Thomas Lynch responding to Katrina.Local Heroes - The Feast of All Souls, 2001Some days the worst that can happen happens. The sky falls or evil overwhelms or the world as we have come to know it turns toward the eventual apocalypse long predicted in all the holy books - the end-times of old grudge and grievances that bring us each to our oblivions. Still, maybe this is not the end at all, nor even the beginning of the end. Rather, one more in a long list of sorrows to be added to the ones thus far endured, through what we have come to call our history - another in that bitter litany that we will, if we survive it, have survived. God help us who must live through this, alive to the terror and open wounds: the heart torn, shaken faith, the violent, vengeful soul, the nerve exposed, the broken body so mingled with its breaking that it's lost forever. Lord send us, in our peril, local heroes. Someone to listen, someone to watch, someone to search and wait and keep the careful count of the dead and missing, the dead and gone but not forgotten. Some days all that can be done is to salvage one sadness from the mass of sadnesses, to bear one body home, to lay the dead out among their people, organize the flowers and casseroles, write the obits, meet the mourners at the door, drive the dark procession down through town, toll the bell, dig the hole, tend the pyre. It's what we do. The daylong news is dire - full of true believers and politicos, bold talk of holy war and photo-ops. But here, brave men and women pick the pieces up. They serve the living, caring for the dead. Here the distant battle is waged in homes. Like politics, all funerals are local.Thomas Lynch from Michigan Quarterly Review, Fall 2005+++For more, please, visit these links:Greg Palast: [Hurricane expert threated for pre-Katrina warnings.][2]Democracy Now!: ["For Whom is New Orleans Being Rebuilt? City Demographics Radically Altered With Many Black Residents Still Unable to Return"][3] - a segment from Greg Palast's investigative video Big Easy to Big Empty - The Untold Story of the Drowning of New Orleans_More from [_Democracy Now!][4] on Katrina_Crooks and Liars_ has a ten-minute video from Countdown with Keith Olbermann on [the damage Katrina brought to the Gulf Coast.][5] [The quicktime version is a much cleaner video] [1]: http://judicial-inc.biz/N.O.on2.jpg [2]: http://www.gregpalast.com/hurricane-expert-threatened-for-pre-katrina-warnings [3]: http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/28/1342222 [4]: http://www.democracynow.org/index.pl?issue=20060828 [5]: http://www.crooksandliars.com/2006/08/29/cls-a-look-back-at-hurricane-katrina-katrina-carnage-8-30-05/
Over coffee and oranges, two poems on a Sunday morning
I'd planned on writing about what I've read recently by Adorno (he writes, "It should be said, at any rate, that the guilt in which one is enmeshed almost by the mere fact of continuing to live can hardly be reconciled any longer with life itself.") and how that relates to poetry, but it's Sunday morning now and doesn't seem worth it.But here's a [link][1] to the full quote and some of what I'd planned on writing about, if you're interested.If not, here are some poems and links.MonetUnable to get into the Monet show, Too many people there, too many cars, We spent the Sunday morning at Bowl Pond A mile from the Museum, where no one was, And walked an hour or so around the rim Beside five acres of flowering waterlilies Lifting three feet above their floating pads Huge yellow flowers heavy on bending stems In various phases of array and disarray Of Petals packed, unfolded, opening to show The meaty orange centers that become, When the ruined flags fall away, green shower heads Spilling their wealth of seed at summer's end Into the filthy water among small fish Mud-colored and duck moving explorative Through jungle pathways opened among the fronds Upon whose surface water drops behave Like mercury, collecting in heavy silver coins Instead of bubbles; some few redwinged blackbirds Whistling above all this once in a while, The silence else unbroken all about.Howard Nemerov from The Selected Poems+++Here's a poem by John Betjeman and an article in the [Guardian][2] at the centenary of his birth.Aldershot CrematoriumBetween the swimming-pool and cricket-ground How straight the crematorium driveway lies! And little puffs of smoke without a sound Show what we loved dissolving in the skies, Dear hands and feet and laughter-lighted face And silk that hinted at the body's grace.But no-one seems to know quite what to say (Friends are so altered by the passing years): "Well, anyhow, it's not so cold today" And thus we try to dissipate our fears. 'I am the resurrection and the life.' Strong, deep and painful, doubt inserts the knife.John Betjeman+++Some links to stuff on my other blog, [Little Epic Against Oblivion][3]:Read a great poem called ["George W. Bush in Hell"][4] from David Wojahn's long poem "Dithyramb and Lamentation".[Read a poem][5] by Ryan G. Van Cleave, author of The Magical Breasts of Britney Spears.[Two poems][6] by Yusef Komunyakaa. [1]: http://againstoblivion.blogspot.com/2006/08/crit-work-comes-so-easy-after-not.html [2]: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1858799,00.html [3]: http://againstoblivion.blogspot.com/ [4]: http://againstoblivion.blogspot.com/2006/08/george-w-bush-in-hell.html [5]: http://againstoblivion.blogspot.com/2006/08/kansas-photoblog-of-sorts.html [6]: http://againstoblivion.blogspot.com/2006/08/yusef-komunyakaa-poems.html
College for Bards
The students have descended (I won't say, "like a plague") upon us and classes have started. It's a time of energy, confusion, intense thinking & emotions, binge drinking.I'm curious, if you could design a course or a curriculum, what would you include? What courses do you wish you could take? If you were going to teach literature or poetry, what would you include? What is your dream class? It doesn't have to be lit-related.Here's some of the curriculum for poet W.H. Auden's imaginary college:In the daydream College for Bards, the curriculum would be as follows:1. In addition to English, at least one ancient language probably Greek or Hebrew, and two Modern languages would be required.2. Thousands of lines of poetry in these languages would be learned by heart.3. The library would contain no books of literary criticism, and the only critical exercise required of students would be the writing of parodies.4. Courses in prosody, rhetoric and comparative philology would be required of all students, and every student would have to select three courses out of courses in mathematics, natural history, geology, meteorology, archaeology, mythology, liturgics, cooking.5. Every student would be required to look after a domestic animal and cultivate a garden plot...W.H. Auden from The Dyer's Hand & Other Essays
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