Every Generation Has to Find Its Own Way to Protest

"The Almost of Hope"

Joseph Ross' Meeting Bone Man (Main Street Rag, 2012) is a ruminative journey through the violence and hope of what it means to be human in the 21st century.  Presided over by the "bone man," a recurring character who brings a comic-macabre sense of death into the everyday, each section unfolds a particular part of the map of that journey. 

Beginning in Darfur, Ross vividly imagines himself and us in the tents and camps of the displaced, moving to the urban blight and graffito artists of America.  Further sections pay tribute to his mother, to veterans, to the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, to his own veteran father's gradual decline and disappearance into death.  What struck me about the book was where it ended, with a poem like "Rising at Dawn," the kind of aubade that is now freighted with all the grief and loss that precedes it:


Rising at Dawn

Rising at dawn
in my hushed house,
I see from the bedroom window
that the sky is brushed
with the prelude of pink,
the not-quite of light,
still surrounded by the
certainty of darkness.

This faint rose in the night sky
does not bloom,
rather, it gathers shape imperceptibly,
while the persistent night considers
the perhaps of surrender.

It is this most gradual approach,
this silent other,
that changes into
the almost of hope.

It is, of course, "the almost of hope," what Nadezhda Mandelstam called (after St. Paul), "hope against hope," that propels the poet of witness into the poet of survival, of faith in persistence.  Thank you, Joseph Ross, for your persistence, your clarity, your hope.

War: Anybody's Son Will Do

Thanks to Tim Musser for passing this along.  This documentary is nearly 20 years old, but the story remains the same.

Residuaries: Morgan Lucas Schuldt's Especial Unvanishings

Morgan Lucas Schuldt's obituary can be read here, but his "residuary" (the name incidentally, of one of his poems in (as vanish, unespecially) (Flying Guillotine Press, 2012)) resides in the three chapbooks and assorted poems he found places for in the world.

Schuldt's (dis)ability poetics is one of lyrical fracture, brokenness as neologism, archaicism as innovation:

Bc the body--
lopsed, scrawned, convolved--

is ex-why.

The nouns of normative syntax and nominative language do not suffice, to reach toward the language of the body, "lopped, scrawned, convolved" as it is.  Spellchecker offers "scrawled" for "scrawned."

Suffering from cystic fibrosis, a gradual deterioration of the lungs, Schuldt had to invent a new way of breathing words.

Lung ache.  Lang-ache.

Or, in "Becoming Regardless,": "If I could forget/this breatheathing"

With the inevitability of his own death hanging over him, in his early thirties, everything is shot through with the intense need to get it right, right now:

Like the heard words in the sounds--

every place we are
...............................is one we'll aren't.

Elaboratably.

--("Memento Mori") 

And:

Days giving way like birth bone.

--("Becoming Regardless")

And

the pain

wd be with & w/ out form

........................usefulness longing

for how nothing in the word

(other than us)

.........................performs

--("Body as Go, Body as Believer") 

Such relentless invention.  Such reaching toward the ribs and breathing of language, our worst-best prosthesis, our open sarcophagus.

Would that Schuldt could have built longer.  And what would he have done, had he had longer--the question we ask of all struck down in youth--seems less important than to read what he did with the time he had.  So: read him.

I first met Amy King in 2005, at the PCA/ACA conference in San Diego, where we participated in a poetry reading.  Since then, she has been all over the map--literal and figurative--publishing a number of books of complexly textured poems which echo various experimental traditions--bits of flarf, collage, lyric, all mashed and collided--but somehow sound inimitable.  Amy King's latest volume of poetry concludes with "An Opera of Peace"; how appropriate, how right, to have the lines of this polyphonic piece voiced by so many other poets:

to hear my hairs whisper
what you mean
to the secret awareness
of turning the news,
the political drudge
into words of oil on skin.
Now my signature aligns
with your bible,
I'm carrying the baby
wren beneath my tongue
in the hollow of my head
back to you....

60 Minutes: Christian Palestinians in the Holy Land

  This may well end up being one of those classic "60 Minutes" episodes, just for the last few incredibly awkward minutes with the Ambassador of Israel, who apparently went to the President of CBS with rumors that this piece would be a "hatchet job."
Shades of:

60 Minutes - These bloopers are hilarious

Tarfia Faizullah's "Reading Transtromer in Bangladesh"

Split This Rock  Poem of the Week -  Tarfia Faizullah                                                                 Reading Tranströmer in Bangladesh        .......for Meherunnessa Chowdhury, 1924-2010    i. In Grandmother's house, we are each a room that must remain locked. Inside it, a prayer mat carelessly folded on a low table, as though hands that once pressed down on it are not below ground. Who has stripped bare the white walls of the black velvet tapestry depicting Ka'bah, house of God? I let in the netherworld. Something rose from underneath. I sit, wait through my cousin's sobs. This morning, another sudden loss: a classmate's death, she says. Sordid details flare out like sails of a ship: mother trapped in an asylum, father weeping, son's warm body cradled in his arms, bone still lodged in his young throat. To whom would this not be an inelegant death--a caught bone, too much like one of our own? ii. We leave the city as we entered it: cloaked in fog, lightbulbs, lanterns, blurred gold-- the rumbling traffic on the highways, and the silent traffic of ghosts. I reach for my mother's hand like a child. Here hang the years . . . they sleep with folded wings. Already my body begins to shed each jagged dirt road, bodies jostled inside each swerving car, trains draped with bodies dangling like writhing vines-- iii. The cars, packed tight, do not move. I saw the image of an image of a man coming forward . . . sudden as starlight, he lifts an arm: mere bone, wrapped in brown skin, stem of an iris rotting in water. He taps the glass. I close my eyes, see his arm trapped in a young boy's throat. It is still beautiful to hear the heart, but often the shadow seems more real than the body. How small the distance between the world and the world: a few layers of muscle and fat, a sheet wrapped around a corpse: glass so easily ground into sand.   -Tarfia Faizullah              Used by permission. Originally appeared in The Missouri Review.  Tarfia Faizullah's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Passages North, New Ohio Review, Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. A Kundiman fellow and a graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University's creative writing program, she is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, a Bread Loaf Margaret Bridgman scholarship, a Kenyon Writers Workshop Peter Taylor fellowship, and other honors. She lives in Washington, DC, where she helps edit the Asian American Literary Review and Trans-Portal.      Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of theWeek widely. We just ask you to include all of theinformation in this email, including this request. Thanks! If you are interested in reading past poems of the week, feel free to visit the blog archive.     Split This Rock www.splitthisrock.org info@splitthisrock.org 202-787-5210

Paul Westerberg's Song for Sylvia Plath: "Crackle and Drag"

Thanks to Mike Danko, who keeps me updated on things Paul Westerbergian (all hail the Replacements), here's a song for Sylvia Plath (all hail Sylvia) in two very different versions.  The title, and the line, "her blacks crackle and drag," comes from Plath's poem, "Edge," published as the final poem in the Hughes-edited version of Ariel.  Westerberg's first version is manic, the second depressive--somehow I like the second one better, for its bleak poignancy.  But maybe the fact there are two, just as there are two versions of Ariel, just as there is bipolarity in the poet, makes a kind of absurd sense.
 
Edge 

The woman is perfected.

Her dead
Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
The illusion of a Greek necessity
Flows in the scrolls of her toga,
Her bare
Feet seem to be saying:
We have come so far, it is over.
Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
One at each little
Pitcher of milk, now empty.
She has folded
Them back into her body as petals
Of a rose close when the garden
Stiffens and odors bleed
From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.
The moon has nothing to be sad about,
Staring from her hood of bone.
She is used to this sort of thing.
Her blacks crackle and drag.

Nonviolent Resistance: Connections in Postcolonial Zones

This fall, I'll be teaching a version of a course on Global Peacebuilding and Conflict Transformation, focusing principally on Northern Ireland and Israel/Palestine.  When I saw this recent letter from Cindy Sheehan (the Iraq War protestor whose son died in combat in Iraq) and Mairead Maguire (Nobel Peace Prize laureate from Belfast), I thought of the connections forged in conflict zones, between mothers.

Give Palestinian Nonviolent Resistance a Chance


April 17, 2012
By Cindy Sheehan, Mairead Maguire
Belfast, Ireland & Berkeley, California

We are two women and mothers – one Irish and one American – who have experienced the loss of children in our families to the senseless violence of war. We hope that none of you will experience such pain. However, we know that our experience is hardly unique, and we have formed advocacy groups to end the violence and hold the leaders, militaries and paramilitaries of our societies accountable for robbing us of our loved ones.

Among those who know the sadness are thousands of Palestinian and Israeli mothers, many of whom we have met in person. We have made common cause with them to end the grief, which is why we both support nonviolent solutions to a conflict that has taken their sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters.

We therefore endorse and wish to encourage participation in the Global March to Jerusalem, taking place on 30th March, 2012. It is a movement to end, through nonviolent means, the expulsions and human rights violations in Jerusalem and the rest of Palestine. We recognize that the narratives of the movement may not be the same as those of the societies they are challenging, and that different elements of this very broad movement may not always speak with the same voice. However, they are agreed on the basics, which include respect for human rights and a commitment to nonviolence.

That is enough for us. The rest can and should be worked out. However, if the mothers of today and tomorrow throughout all the territories controlled and governed by Israel can believe that their children and family members will be spared and that they will not have to grieve for them, this is a huge step along the path to resolution.

We believe that the Global March to Jerusalem on March 30, 2012, is a beacon of hope for both the present and the future, as are the many nonviolent movements and actions to date, including the popular nonviolent resistance committees, the boats to Gaza, the caravans and convoys to Gaza, and many other peaceful challenges to the policies responsible for the suffering of all peoples in the region.

We have heard the doubts and criticisms delivered by the skeptics, but we do not believe in unrealistic standards. One of the most powerful dimensions of this movement is its inclusivity. If some people or groups do not find that the march meets their requirements, let them alter the dynamics through their participation in all aspects of the movement.

We cannot afford to let this opportunity pass. The Global March to Jerusalem gives voice to many who have been voiceless in the past and who are beginning to feel the empowerment of mass popular action, as did the Tunisian and Egyptian peoples before them. It also invites and encourages people from across the globe to participate in an unprecedented show of unity with their brothers and sisters in Palestine.

We find this act of international solidarity compelling, and we hope you do, too. Until now our Palestinian and Israeli brothers and sisters have been unable to end the injustice on their own, and there is no guarantee that our support will make the difference or that they might not be able to achieve resolution without our support. However, we believe in showing that we care and that we are serious about supporting a restoration of justice to this important community.

Let’s all give peace – and the Global March to Jerusalem – a chance.
This article was jointly written by Cindy Sheehan & Mairead Maguire

Naomi Shihab Nye, reading two poems from TRANSFER

I read somewhere that what characterizes a saint is that the saint is interested in everybody else; if this is so, then Naomi Shihab Nye is one of our saints.  To be with her is to feel her intense curiosity about everything.  Her latest book, TRANSFER, focuses principally on the loss of her father--the sort of person, we sense from her writing, that cultivated precisely that sense of openness, despite the awful personal and historical dislocations that he suffered as a Palestinian.  Two poems here deliver vignettes in that unwinding grief.