Behind the Lines: Poetry, War, & Peacemaking

Nikky Finney's acceptance speech for the National Book Award

2012-01-27T16:08:00.000-05:00

For the ones who longed to read and write, but were forbidden, and those who have the freedom to do so.

Why Haven't You Heard (of) Phil Ochs?

2012-01-26T09:29:00.000-05:00

Watch Phil Ochs: There But for Fortune on PBS. See more from American Masters.

Globalization and its Discontents: What's Up in China

2012-01-18T11:25:00.000-05:00

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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Jon Stewart, you did it again.

"The Burn" by Naomi Shihab Nye

2012-01-14T09:19:00.000-05:00

The Burn

Such a swift lump rises in the throat when
a uniformed woman spits Throw it away!
and you tremble to comply wondering why
rules of one airport don't match another's,
used to carrying two Ziploc bags not just one
but your pause causes a uniformed man to approach
barking, Is there something you don't understand?
and you stare at him thinking
So many things, refugees marching
from one parched field to another,
rolled packs on their heads,
burn of ancestors smoldering outside stolen homes,
or you could be six again, yelled at on the playground
by a teacher who knew all the bad things you could do.
You're pressing little shampoos and face creams
firmly into a single plastic bag, he could slap you.
Sorry, so sorry, not wanting
to give up seven extra bottles of Bliss brand
lemon & sage soapy soap fresh-foaming shower gel
that you tipped the W houseboy into leaving
so you could pretend you live a Happy Hour life
back home, you hope she takes it out of the trash
when you turn away, obviously she needs a relaxing shower
and a stiff gin and he needs something like a long trip
into a country full of foreign soldiers and we all need
to swallow hard again so the lumps dissolve
and pressure eases and our worlds mingle kindly
and he no longer feels the gun in his back.

-Naomi Shihab Nye
from Transfer (BOA Editions, 2011)
Used by permission.

Naomi Shihab Nye is the author of numerous books of poems, including Transfer (BOA Editions, 2011), You & Yours (BOA Editions, 2005), 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (2002), Fuel (1998), and Red Suitcase (1994). Nye has received awards from the Texas Institute of Letters, the Carity Randall prize, and the International Poetry Forum. Her poems and short stories have appeared in various journals throughout North America, Europe, and the Middle and Far East. She has written books for children and edited several anthologies of prose.

Shihab Nye will be reading at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, March 22-25, 2012. Join us!

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!

Split This Rock
http://www.splitthisrock.org/
info@splitthisrock.org
202-787-5210

--------------------------------------------------
Split This Rock Poetry Festival:
Poems of Provocation & Witness
March 22-25, 2012
Washington, DC
Readings, workshops, panels, activism. Make common cause, imagine a way forward, celebrate poetry in the public sphere. Featuring Homero Aridjis, Sherwin Bitsui, Kathy Engel, Carlos Andrés Gómez, Douglas Kearney, Khaled Mattawa, Rachel McKibbens, Marilyn Nelson, Naomi Shihab Nye, Jose Padua, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Kim Roberts, Sonia Sanchez, Venus Thrash, Alice Walker, and honoring the life and legacy of poet-essayist-activist-teacher June Jordan. Register today!

What is Abu Ghraib Arias Made Of, and What Do You Make of It?

2012-01-08T10:28:00.000-05:00

I recently had a conversation with my father about my new chapbook, the substance of which was that he didn't really know what to make of it. It's a troublesome and troubling little book, partly because what it's made of--literally and figuratively, of military cloth. That's not to lay the troubles of Abu Ghraib at the feet of the military, but to say that it happened in wartime, and that the military as much as the intelligence operatives played a role in making it happen.

In contrast to my dad, my mom said the book made it hard for her to breathe. That's pretty much the response most writers would dream for.

And yesterday, this came out of Joseph Ross' blog, a review of abu ghraib arias:

Philip Metres has created an important document here, an important poetic document. It’s not easy to read; in some ways it makes true the cliche “beautiful but not pretty.” This series of poems reminds us of the misery war brings. It reminds us of the potential in all of us to disfigure one another, to treat one another as worse than objects.

I first learned of Joseph Ross through his co-editorship of a great little anthology, Cut Loose The Body: An Anthology of Poems on Torture and Fernando Botero’s Abu Ghraib--a key contribution to the poetry of human rights and in response to torture, and later at Split This Rock. His first book of poems, Meeting Bone Man, is shortly forthcoming from Main Street Rag, and I suspect that his work will broach some of these themes as well.
read the entire review here.

If you've read this book, and want to weigh in, I'd be curious to hear what you make of it.

If You Need Another Reason to Live, Try This: "The Unsinkable Fats Domino"

2012-01-06T15:30:00.000-05:00

Old rockers miming the moves of older rockers when they were once immortal--right down to the bassist spilling himself all over the floor. We should all be so lucky to fall in this messy and tuneful way.

2012-01-03T15:14:00.000-05:00

In the first review of the new Lev Rubinstein box, published by Ugly Duckling Presse, Geof Huth notes:

Rubinstein plays games with you as thoughts slowly and indefinitely arise from the sturdy pages in your hands. "Here," you read in the fourteenth footnote, which appears on Page 14, "something should be written," and you realize it has been. These are conceptual games, but serious, and satisfying. I smiled broadly near the end of the book, filled with a kind of joy at the beautiful rendition of the book's own genius in my head.

Here's the review, in its entirety

http://dbqp.blogspot.com/?v=0

Sergey Gandlevsky and Timur Kibirov, talking poetry.

2012-01-03T15:11:00.001-05:00

"News About No One" by Sargon Boulus

2012-01-03T14:58:00.000-05:00

News About No One

by Sargon Boulus

Those about whom we hear no news
Those who are remembered by none:
What wind has swept their traces
as if they never were?
My father and the others
Where are they?
Where?

*

What became of the man
who made beds and bridal chests?
Wood was so sacred to him!

*

Where is the silent shoemaker?
Hugging the anvil
chewing on his bitter nails?

*

His cave was full of old shoes
Did they bomb it
with one of those “smart bombs”?

*

Where is the coppersmith?
Where is the gold tray?

*

The wheat spike
entangled with the saint’s picture?
The horseshoe on the door?

*

What became of
Um Yusif
The midwife?
How many crying children did her hands pull
from the warm darkness of the womb
to the bareness of this world
Gone astray in the valleys of their fates
Soldiers fighting in lost
and unjust
wars?

*

After they had tired
of toiling in the mills of poverty
to fill the tyrant’s silos

*

Were they embarrassed
by the way this world
was made?

*

Were they disgusted by those lies?

*

After wars
After embargos

*

Beyond hunger
and enemies
Safe from the executioner’s hand

*

Did they finally go to sleep?
To sleep and
cover themselves
with dust?

[Translated from the Arabic by Sinan Antoon]
first appeared at Jadaliyya
http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/3850/sargon-boulus_news-about-no-one

This Body, the Extent of Eternity: A Review of Kazim Ali’s "Fasting for Ramadan" (Tupelo, 2011).

2011-12-22T21:10:00.001-05:00

This Body, the Extent of Eternity: A Review of Kazim Ali’s Fasting for Ramadan (Tupelo, 2011).

Kazim Ali’s Fasting for Ramadan is a meditative journey through the experience of Ramadan fasting, ranging from nitty-gritty details about the writer’s daily diet and doings, to how the fast registers in the body and on its perception, to broader explorations of faith, identity, and tradition. Fasting is composed of two daily journals kept during the period of Ramadan fasting in 2007 and 2009—the latter of which was published online at the Kenyon Review, the former of which was written as a private diary.

Though he grew up in a Muslim household, Ali’s book marks his return to the devotional practices he shared with his mother during his youth. His private revelations, particularly in the earlier journal, broach his pain at his exclusion from the “ummah,” the community of faith of Muslims, because of his love for another man—a theme he explores with delicacy and poignant beauty in his book of poetic essays, Bright Felon (2009).

As an outsider to Islam, I found in Ali a bracing and delightful guide—one who admits to feeling both inside and outside the tradition of the faith of his parents—and by virtue of practicing the fast, enters into its question.

Ali brings his study of yoga to his experience of the fast, and creates all manner of philosophical interweaving between the yogic and Islamic traditions, in ways that illuminate the secret unity of the faith journey. In one passage, after Ali injures himself trying a yoga pose, he writes, “as a yoga teacher I have always viewed the limitations of my body as part of what I have to offer.” And later: “Maybe this body, this one, mine, yours, this fleshly thing, if this is the extent of eternity, is all there is of divinity, maybe there isn’t anything else.” Throughout, Ali proposes that we take the body—in all its limitations—as not a temple, but the temple, the place where we experience the divine, the infinite.

At times, I wondered why Ali chose to reveal certain prosaic facts of the fast—for example, that he’d eaten miso soup, or had drunk water too quickly in the pre-dawn morning. Yet, in such details, Ali reveals how the novice faster can make the fast harder than it needs to be; for example, drinking too quickly can cause the body to process the fluid quickly, and thus create more thirst. In such a revelation, we learn how fasting requires a patient and intentional consumption of food and drink, to savor it in order to let it last through the long day.

While I longed for a bit more research on fasting in general and on the Ramadan fast in particular, Fasting delivers its own unexpected wisdom, the wisdom of the body communing with an exquisite mind, the intelligence of observation of opening. As Ali writes, “we pray best by opening ourselves like a book.”

Meanwhile, back on the homefront, Muslim-Americans

2011-12-19T10:33:00.000-05:00

My Fellow American, a website dedicated to standing in solidarity with our Muslim American fellow citizens, is soliciting your stories "about a Muslim friend, neighbor, or colleague that they admire. Using the power of social media, My Fellow American seeks to change the narrative – from Muslims as the other, to Muslims as our fellow Americans."

When millions of dollars have been pumped into the media to promote Islamophobia, we must counteract the fearmongering in any way we can.

Why not add your voice to the chorus?

Goodbye, Iraq. Hello, Darkness.

2011-12-18T13:22:00.001-05:00

“The Iraqis are going to wake up in the morning and nobody will be there,” said a soldier who only identified himself as Specialist Joseph. (from the New York Times).

Nobody, meaning Iraqis.

And nobody, more or less. Since there is certain to be U.S. presence in the form of security contractors and the whole apparatus of supplementary security.

So I guess the war's over, nine years later, and many years after President Bush stood under "Mission Accomplished" banner on an aircraft carrier--the ultimate pie in the sky sold to the public, one news bite at a time.

Was it worth it?

In an AP story, Rebecca Santana writes:

The war cost nearly 4,500 American and well more than 100,000 Iraqi lives and $800 billion from the U.S. Treasury. The question of whether it was worth it all - or whether the new government the Americans leave behind will remain a steadfast U.S. ally - is yet unanswered.

If you can't answer the question when the costs have been so great, and the reasons for war so flimsy, so nakedly imperial, the answer isn't one that any of us is going to like.

Time to count the cost.

Come On Now, Lowe's. You've Reached, Well, You Know.

2011-12-16T15:13:00.000-05:00

One of my students, for her final presentation in the course "After 9/11," chose to examine representations of Arabs and Muslims in the United States--in particular, "Amreeka" and the new show, "All-American Muslim." And now, right on time, the Right has chosen to attack this show for NOT showing "the radical side" of Islam in this show. Sorry for not confirming your stereotypes. And Lowe's, being the upstanding American corporation, stopped advertising on the show because of the "controversy." Thanks, Jon Stewart, for stepping into this madness.

The Daily Show
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Field Magazine: The Muriel Rukeyser Issue (Fall 2011)

2011-12-11T16:29:00.000-05:00

One of the odd and slightly inexplicable aspects of literary culture is the literary magazine, or literary journal. Increasingly beset by digitization, and the loss of university funds, the literary journal as a material artifact very well may be going the way of the LP, the V.H.S. tape, and the business card. The most faithful adherents to literary culture subscribe to multiple journals, or read them in the library, and necessarily so. I know I could do more of it. Each journal is a kind of microbrewery for poetry--bringing together various and often very-unlike poetic styles, generations, and visions of what poetry might do.

A good journal, like Field, which has been around for over forty years, reflects the largesse and care of the editors; among them, David Young and David Walker have been around for quite some time, producing their own esteemed poetry, translations, and edited collections. One of the concepts of Field--and, I'd argue, of good literary magazines--is that the journal is a kind of communication to its readers, and between its writers and editors. This notion is embodied in the very form of the journal: each issue is sandwiched in a personally-addressed postcard, the front of which is the front of the postcard, and the back of which is the back of that postcard, with the message and author intact. There is something plainly beautiful about that idea, that the journal is like a kind of polyphonic postcard--that intimate, that open.

The new issue (85, Fall 2011) features a Symposium on the visionary poet Muriel Rukeyer, including classic poems of hers and essay readings of those poems. Rukeyser is a poet who was almost forgotten, until Adrienne Rich, Jan Heller Levi, and a couple other poets decided to make it their job that another generation of poets had access to her work; I can't recommend her highly enough, and the decision by Field to send us another reminder of why she should not be forgotten.

Other poets in the journal include Betsy Sholl, Laura Kasischke, Alexandra Teague, Georg Trakl (translated by Stephen Tapscott), Karin Gottshall, Chana Bloch, Sarah Barber, Elton Glaser, Sarah Maclay, Sandra McPherson, Philip Metres, Catherine Pierce, Christopher Howell, Cynthia Cruz, Gretchen Primack, Rachel Contreni Flynn, Thorpe Moeckel, Angela Ball, Anna Journey, and others.

Catherine Pierce and Cynthia Cruz's work again caught my eye, as well as the translations of Venus Khoury-Ghata (by Marilyn Hacker)...many, many intriguing poems here.

Two Songs for Veterans of Wars, for Whom the War Has Not Ended

2011-12-09T13:15:00.000-05:00

My dad's been working with veterans suffering after their war experiences. These go out to him, and to them. One way to stop PTSD is to stop us from getting into stupid, unwinnable wars.

On Khaled Mattawa's Tocqueville

2011-12-08T11:06:00.000-05:00

This is the beginning of my review of Mattawa's Tocqueville, which appears, among twenty other reviews at "On the Seawall":

Khaled Mattawa’s Tocqueville, his fourth book of poems, is an experimentally-daring meditation on what it means to be a poet at the center of American power. But Tocqueville, in contrast to his lyrically-driven previous work, pronounces that it no longer suffices to sing, even to sing of dark times, as Bertolt Brecht proposed. Rather, through the poetry of Mattawa — born in Libya and for years an American citizen — we become witnesses to our own implicatedness, our own vulnerable privilege.

While the first poem is entitled “Lyric” — and begins, “Will answers be found / like seeds / planted among rows of song?”— the lyric “I” of the poet pulses through the entire collection, through its wider networks of imperial history, global economic flows, and Machiavellian politics, emerging in the diverse voices of a Somali singer, a Sierra Leonean victim/perpetrator of atrocity, a gallery viewer of photographs of Palestinian exile, a factory worker in Georgia, Ecclesiastes as insurance salesman, a terrorist, a State Department insider.

The keynote poem of the book is “On the Difficulty of Documentation,” a dialogic meditation on the role of art in a world of violence...
(read the rest of the review, and other reviews, from Ron Slate's "On the Seawall")

Changing the Narrative of Protest: How Creative Protest and Occupy Wall Street Have Garnered New Media Attention (and Why That's Only Part of the Point)

2011-11-26T15:01:00.001-05:00

Allison Kilkenny's article, "Occupy Wall Street and the Importance of Creative Protest" (The Nation Blog) explores the ways in which the creativity of the movement has garnered more media coverage partly because their protest has been novel in ways that excite the novelty-addicted mass media.

Yet part of the anarchism of the movement (and some of its anarchy) is related to its attempt to create something beyond hailing the Other, of performing dissent for the news media. By making the movement about making the movement, OWS has shifted the eros inward, which is partly why the media (and we) are so fascinated--and frustrated--by the way in which OWS partisans refuse to play to the rules of traditional dissent.

The article, to my mind, does not push far enough in this direction, though its valorizing the creativity of the movement is welcome and necessary. She's also embedded video of some of the most effective moments of the OWS--in particular, the silent protest at UC Davis. This from Kilkenny:

Perhaps the single biggest factor that helped lead to the Occupy movement’s success in capturing the media and public’s attention has been its creativity. Novel protest strategies have served as OWS’s foundation since its first days. The very idea of occupying, and sleeping in, a park twenty-four hours a day was new and exciting.

Up until Occupy, most protests had become exercises in futility. Protesters would show up with their sad, limp carboard signs, march around for a little while—maybe press would show up, but most likely not—and then everyone would go home. Hardly effective stuff.

Even when the protests were massive, say during the lead-up to the Iraq invasion, media had learned to ignore protests as being the hallmark of a bygone era of granola-munching hippies. Whether consciously or unconsciously, the media helped hand protesters loss after loss, perhaps recognizing the fact that protest waged within the perimeters constructed by city officials is completely ineffective.

Occupy Wall Street Meets U.S. Militarism

2011-11-14T09:56:00.000-05:00

The recent clashes between police and occupiers have a kind of traumatic repetition effect for anyone who's lived through past uprisings (the 1999 Battle in Seattle, or further back to the late-1960s protests against Vietnam), and of course it worries me that the clashes become the thing, rather than the attempt at democratic social change. For a change of pace, here's a visual demonstration The War Resisters League's recent action, making connections between the Occupy Wall Street movement and American militarism and empire.

Happy Veterans Day, But I Ain't a Marching Anymore

2011-11-11T10:17:00.000-05:00

Outside, hail, hail turning to snow, and near the chapel, the names of fallen soldiers during the War on Terror are spoken into a microphone, one by one, all day long.

In the silence between the names, perhaps, the unnamed dead.

Always the young to fall. What I find haunting about Phil Ochs' song is the traumatic repetition of the chorus; it's as if, despite all resistance, we find ourselves, inexorably, marching again and again.

"A TREATISE ON POWER (IN 32 STROKES)" by Wayne Miller

2011-11-07T11:23:00.000-05:00

Wayne Miller's new book, The City, Our City, is at once a meditation on The City itself as a human production, a mythic fable of City, and a secret autobiography of a denizen of certain cities; living in a city becomes an extension of ourselves, the way the cover image does, a picture ostensibly of an urban bedroom, when turned upside-down, becomes a massive city block. One of my favorite poems from the collection is "A Treatise on Power (In 32 Strokes)" for its taut epigrammatic explorations of power, how it lights and blinds, how it leads and lures us.

A TREATISE ON POWER (IN 32 STROKES) by Wayne Miller

(1) Even a leaf presses its weight against the table.

———

(2) In fog, the brighter the lights, the worse the driver’s blinded.

———

(3) How traffic makes way for the flashing ambulance,

(4) then jostles to ride the wake of its passage.

———

(5) How the dead keep writing us from down there . . .

———

(6) And they who lay down in the fields
to be shot—who’s cushioned by their ghosts? Now

———

(7) the fan in the window is turned by the wind;

(8) now it makes the wind.

———

(9) Let’s burn the leaders in effigy;
let’s beg for their return.

(From what space is the wind so endlessly hollowed?)

———

(10) Tonight, the street’s voice is

-----------------[glass breaking].

(11) Tonight, death will empty somebody’s face.

———

(12) In the abandoned government building,
papers covered the floor like spent lottery tickets.

———

(13) How quickly we erase ourselves—

(14) in favor of abstractions.

———

(15) And yet, people can become so cramped
pressed up inside their words—.

(16) (And when they recede into their silences, sometimes
the words remain.)

———

(17) Observe you father
bend to kiss the wealth on a bishop’s finger.

———

(18) Beyond the fence, a police helicopter
pinned to the ground by its spotlight—

(19) and by whomever the spotlight is trained upon.

———

(20) We find we’re not who we said we were.

(21) We ask: is this always the case?

———

(22) It’s impossible to enter a lake without chaosing the surface,

(23) and thus, how close yellowcake comes to being
the most beautiful word in the English language.

———

(24) Note how a young man looks
-------------------------------------at a gorgeous nun,

———

(25) watch as a finely dressed woman gets her luggage
stuck in a revolving door.

(26) There’s no better time for the bellhops
to take their smoke break.

——

(27) Without power, we’d be stuck in this elevator.

(28) Without power, the world’s submarines would sink silently
to the abyssal plain.

———

(29) Let’s remember:

(30) every direction meets in the compass rose of a body.

———

(31) So listen to how the body cries out!—

———

(32) how the wind dashes in to steal the echo.

"Sonny's Lettah (Anti-sus poem)" by Linton Kwesi Johnson

2011-11-06T07:30:00.000-05:00

One of the "33 Revolutions" featured in the encyclopedic 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs, from Billie Holiday to Green Day (2011) by Dorian Lynskey. Although I know most of the songs featured by Lynskey, this reggae-inflected poem by Linton Kwesi Johnson, "Sonny's Lettah (Anti-sus poem)" was a new one; it was written in protest of the so-called Sus law, which allowed police to detain people suspected (hence, the "sus") of having "intent to commit an arrestable offence," in England. The story of Sonny is a condensation of many experiences gathered by Johnson into this epistolary song, about a man who fights back, to defend a friend detained and beaten by police. In our post-9/11, Occupy Wall Street moment, we are thrust back into the past, where it seems yet again that citizens are suspected of guilt by color or creed or association.

Sonny’s Lettah (Anti-sus poem) by Linton Kwesi Johnson

Brixton Prison
Jeb Avenue
London, South West 2
Inglan

Dear Ma Maa,

Good Day
I hope that when these few lines reach you
they may find you in the best of health
Ma Maa I really don’ know how to tell yu dis
’cause, I did meck a solemn promise
to teck care a likkle Jim and try
mi best fi look out fi ‘im
ma Maa a really did try mi best
but none de less
mi sorry fi tell yu sey
poor likkle Jim get aress’
it was de middle a de rush ‘our
when everybody jus’ a hustle an a bustle
fi go ‘ome fi dem evenin’ shower

Me and Jim stand up waiting pon a bus
not causing no fuss
when all on a sudden a police man
pull up
out jump 3 police man
De ‘ole a dem carrying baton

Dem walk up to me and Jim
one a dem ‘ole on to Jim
sey ‘im teckin ‘im in
Jim tell him fi leggo a ‘im
fa ‘im no do nuttin
an ‘im naw tief, not even a button
Jim start to riggle
De police start to giggle

Ma Maa, meck a tell yu weh dem do to Jim
Ma Maa , meck a tell yu we dem do to him
Dem tump ‘im in ‘im belly
an’ it turn to jelly
Dem lick ‘im pon ‘im back
an ‘im rib get pop
Dem lick ‘im pon ‘im head
but it tuff like lead
Dem kick ‘im in ‘im seed
an it started to bleed

Ma Maa I just couldn’t just stan’ up
deh a no do nutten

So mi juck one ina ‘im eye
an ‘im started to cry
Mi tump one in ‘im mout
an ‘im started to shout
Mi kick one pon ‘im shin
an ‘im started to spin
Mi tump ‘im pon ‘im chin
an ‘im drop pon a bin
an crash an dead

Ma Maa more police man come down
an beat me to de ground

Dem charge Jim fi sus
Dem charge mi fi murder

Ma Ma! Don’t fret
don’t get depress an down ‘earted
be of good courage
Till I hear from yu
I remain your son

Sonny

Thinking of the Occupy Wall Street Demonstrations, Here's "At the Demonstration"

2011-11-05T10:54:00.000-04:00

At the Demonstration

Back when I used to march
in the noon of the green world,

I sang like a crow.
The cacophony of insistence

burnt like lightening.
Now ash lowers the sky

and I gasp through slits in my ribs.
Injustice, are you listening?

Light rises from my round mouth
and my heart jerks in my hand.

Greed hangs among clouds
as we stand here together,

palms up. Whatever sifts down
is our only food.

-Penelope Scambly Schott
Used by permission.

Penelope Scambly Schott is the author of eight collections of poetry, including a verse biography of Protestant dissenter Anne Hutchinson and, most recently, Crow Mercies (2010), available from CALYX Books.

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!

Split This Rock
http://www.splitthisrock.org/
info@splitthisrock.org
202-787-5210

"Fatal Embrace in the Holy Land": Mark Braverman in Cleveland, November 10th, 7pm

2011-10-31T09:51:00.000-04:00

Peace Action Brings Mark Braverman to Cleveland November 10

"Fatal Embrace In the Holy Land "
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dr. Mark Braverman comes to Cleveland Thursday, November 10th, 7 pm. The author of Fatal Embrace: Christians, Jews and the Search for Peace in the Holy Land brings his fascinating, compelling perspective on the Middle East conflict to our community. Download and distribute event flyer

A taste of what Braverman brings to the quest for Middle East peace can be found in Sam Bahour's book review: "The book is remarkable for its deft interweaving of the personal and the political in Braverman's account of his journey of understanding, an account which moves forward or backward in time as required but remains coherent and clear. The author does not lecture at us; he recounts, and describes, and discloses, and considers-and gradually disarms us. He shares vivid accounts of the people he has met in Palestine and Israel" - read more

Braverman will speak at Trinity Cathedral, 2230 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, OH 44115. Admission: $10.00 - Supporter: $25.00 - Benefactor: $50.00. Ample Free Parking.

For more information call: 216.231.4245, email: volunteer@peaceactioncleveland.org or go to our website

Visit Cleveland Peace Action's website for news, events, action alerts, and find out what you can do for peace.

The Ghost of Tom McGrath at Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-23T11:52:00.000-04:00

I've been reading and seeing the some great signage at the Occupy Wall Street protests, and thinking of Tom McGrath, who called for "tactical poetry" as one mode of poetic intervention into the political life. The level of humor, self-referentiality, and acid critique--all at once, sometimes--would have made McGrath and the poets of protest from our tradition--the Fugs, IWW Song Book, and on and on--pretty pleased.

It's not a replacement for "strategic poetry," poetry built for the ages, but rather a kind of poetry for the immediate, for "thinking with things as they exist" (Zukofsky), rather than endlessly waiting for recollection in tranquility (Wordsworth):

McGrath: One is the kind of poetry that might be called tactical, about some immediate thing: a strike, let's say; some immediate event. The poet should give it as much clarity and strength as he can give it without falling into political slogans, clichés and so on. I also thought we needed another kind of poetry that is not keyed necessarily to immediate events, a poetry in which the writer trusts himself enough to write about whatever comes along, with the assumption that what he is doing will be, in the long run, useful, consciousness raising or enriching. A strategic poetry, let's say. There have been a lot of tactical poems directed to particular things, and those poems now are good in a certain sort of way, but the events they were about have moved out from under them, Somebody asked Engels, "What happened to all the revolutionary poetry of 1848?" He replied: "It died with the political prejudices of the time." That is bound to be the fate of a lot of tactical poetry. But that's O.K. If we have to have somebody give us a guarantee that our work is going to last a thousand years before we'll be willing to write it, we may as well give up the ghost.

The Brecht song from the old Comintern: "And just because he's human,/ he doesn't want a pistol to his head./ He wants no servants under him/ and no boss over his head." That's as direct as you can make it, and it's got imagery to go with it... On the other hand we take a poem like Neruda's Canto General, a marvelous big poem, but it's not there to help in some immediate kind of situation; it's a strategic poem. But anyone who reads it will have his consciousness expanded by the reading of it... The ideal thing of course is to bring the tactical and the strategic together so that they would appear in this massive poem of pure lucidity, full of flying tigers and dedicated to the removal of man-eating spinning wheels from the heads of our native capitalists--absolute lucidity and purest, most marvelous bullshit. That's the poem I would like to have, because there's a place where those two are the same. That's in the archetypal heavens of course... I would like to put them together. We all would.

From an interview with Tom McGrath, appearing in North Dakota Quarterly (Fall 1982). Also online at Cary Nelson's Modern American Poetry site.

Hisham Matar's Anatomy of a Disappearance

2011-10-18T09:22:00.000-04:00

My review of Hisham Matar's Anatomy of a Disappearance appears in today's Cleveland Plain Dealer. It begins:

Hisham Matar's second novel is at once a probing mystery of a father's disappearance and a vivid coming-of-age story. Matar, whose celebrated first novel "In the Country of Men" was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2006, returns to the theme of the missing father in "Anatomy of a Disappearance." Matar's own father was abducted and vanished in Libya in 2002.

Sigmund Freud would have been intrigued -- as the Oedipus Complex pulls the undercurrents of this dreamlike, mournful, deeply sensuous novel. The first sentence heralds a complex father-son relationship: "there are times when my father's absence is as heavy as a child sitting on my chest."

The narrator, Nuri el-Alfi, begins his story at age 14, when he and his father, Kamal, meet the lovely Mona, closer in age to the son than his widower father. "I saw her first," Nuri will claim, as if to justify what will transpire between them.

read on....

Interim Magazine and Ecopoetics

2011-10-16T10:50:00.001-04:00

The new issue of Interim Magazine, edited by Claudia Keelan, focuses on the conversation between poetry and the natural world; one of the exciting aspects of this gathering was the political action invitation by Jonathan Skinner, in which poets were invited to write something in light of the recent Deepwater Horizon catastrophe and visit with their congressional representative.

This is Keelan's introductory note:

This special issue of Interim collects sui generis work to pose questions and positions relevant to the on going interactions of human beings and what we call the natural world. I am thankful to Chris Arigo, Matthew Cooperman and Jonathan Skinner for the innovative work found here, and I am indebted to the many writers and artists whose continued experiments in artistic expression further the dialogue and expand the possibilities of what is, precariously, our democracy. Here in these pages is a transfigured, yet communal space, countering the transfiguration of an oil rig planted in the ocean floor. You will find here, our legislators.

Many of the poets not only succeeded in engaging the political process, but wrote about their experience (see, for example, Brenda Hillman's piece). Arielle Greenberg's letter to her representative, with its dual fonts, creates something like a reverb effect. She ends her letter/poem:

And yes, this is a poem. When I was working on the homebirth legislation, I was instructed by wise, well-informed activists not to write letters like this when meeting with my representatives, not to stray from the party line or from the key points. It feels something of a radical act to write in the way I most want to write, to a person in your position, a position of legislative power. So that's what makes it a poem, to me.

On the heels of the "Poets for Living Waters" online collection, this anthology extends the conversation about what it might mean to bring poetry (and poets) to bear on our national (and, arguably, global) conversation about how we might change the deleterious dynamics between human beings and the rest of the ecosphere.

For what it's worth, here's my small contribution. But the contributors, just for the Skinner-edited section are many, and I'm still picking my way through them (many friends, notables, and others I'd wish I knew better): Jen Hofer & Hillary Mushkin, CAConrad, Ian Demsky, Diane di Prima, Alison Pelegrin,
Jack Collom, Marcella Durand, Benjamin Friedlander, Laura Elrick, Heidi Lynn Staples, Cara Benson, Ann Fisher-Wirth & Gara Gillentine, Sheryl St. Germain, E.J. McAdams, Michael Leong, Christine Leclerc, Timothy Bradford, Evelyn Reilly, Arielle Greenberg, Jared Schickling, Laura Mullen, Sharon Mesmer, Philip Metres, Kristen Baumliér, Brenda Hillman, Rodrigo Toscano, Martha Serpas & Heidi Lynn Staples, Brett Evans & Frank Sherlock, Keaton Nguyen Smith, Abby Reyes, JenMarie Davis, Jennifer Scappettone, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Michael Rothenberg, Andrew Schelling, Jonathan Skinner, Cecilia Vicuña. Much good work to read and consider.

Nahshon Cook's "From a Conversation-Hour Discussion About Intolerance with Adult English Students"

2011-10-15T17:03:00.000-04:00

Nahshon Cook

"From a Conversation-Hour Discussion About Intolerance with Adult English Students"
Pak Kret, Nonthanburi, Thailand

Then he explained
how the Buddha

instructed us
to reflect on the body

our skin
our hands and feet

our body hair
our nails and teeth

our noses
our eyes

our minds
our hearts

so that we can see
ourselves clearly

in every person
no matter where

-Nahshon Cook
Used by permission.

A note from Nahshon:
This poem is an offering of
gratitude for the healing power of love
and I hope (with my whole heart)
that you enjoy it
Peace and a smile, beautiful people,
Nahshon Cook
__
Cook's second collection The Killing Fields and Other Poems will be published in 2015 by Shabda Press.

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Split This Rock
http://www.splitthisrock.org/
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2011-10-14T09:45:00.001-04:00

Perspectives of Three Recent Delegates to Israel and the Palestinian Territories

Gloria Brown, Randy Wilson & Kazim Ali at Peace House Oct. 19
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Perspectives of Three Recent Delegates to Israel and the Palestinian Territories, Wednesday, October 19, 2011, 7:00 - 9:00 PM, Peace House, 10916 Magnolia Drive, Cleveland, OH 44106 (University Circle, behind Western Reserve Historical Society)

Presentations & Discussion: Each speaker will report on their own observations about Israeli and Palestinian peacemakers they met as members of Interfaith Peace Builders delegations.

Gloria Brown, Director, Racial-Ethnic Ministry, United Methodist Church, E. Ohio
Randy Wilson, Community Organizer
Kazim Ali, Associate Professor, Oberlin College

For more information please download and distribute this flyer
Co-Sponsored by: American Friends Service Committee NE Ohio, Cleveland Peace Action Education Fund, and Interfaith Peace Builders, Ohio Chapter.

Free and open to the public. Refreshments served.

For more information contact: Cleveland Peace Action Education Fund, Tel: 216-231-4245, e-mail: volunteer@peaceactioncleveland.org

Visit Cleveland Peace Action's website for news, events, action alerts, and find out what you can do for peace.

Join Cleveland Peace Action or renew your membership by using our secure online donation form - click here Online donors will make a tax-deductible donation to the Cleveland Peace Action Education Fund.

Contact Information

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

email: volunteer@peaceactioncleveland.org
phone: 216-231-4245
web: http://www.peaceactioncleveland.org/

9-11 by Giddra: Japanese hip-hop takes on the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath

2011-10-11T13:17:00.000-04:00

Today, in my "After 9/11" class, we were discussing the film "Syriana," and situating al-Qaeda as a kind of symptom of globalization and its discontents. A student from the class sent me this video (thanks Stephani), a Japanese hip-hop artist's take on 9/11, connecting it to Japanese experiences of the nuclear bomb, but in the style and content delivery that shows the true global reach of hip-hop itself. Pretty stunning to see the gestures of Giddra as a hybrid product of American culture and Japanese culture.

"I Parted with My Mother at the Country of Skin": Deema Shehabi's "Migrant Earth"

2011-10-09T09:38:00.000-04:00

Deema K. Shehabi
"Migrant Earth"

So tell me what you think of when the sky is ashen?
...............................-Mahmoud Darwish

I could tell you that listening is made for the ashen sky,
and instead of the muezzin's voice, which lingers like weeping at dawn,
I hear my own desire, as I lay my lips against my mother's cheek.

I kneel down beside her, recalling her pleas
the day she flung open the gates of her house for children fleeing from tanks.

My mother is from Gaza, but what do I know of the migrant earth,
as I enter a Gazan rooftop and perform ablutions in the ashen
forehead of sky? As my soul journeys and wrinkles with homeland?

I could tell you that I parted with my mother at the country of skin. In the dream,
my lips were bruised, her body was whole again, and we danced naked in the street.

And no child understands absence past the softness of palms.

As though it is praise in my father's palms
as he washes my mother's body in the final ritual.

As though it is God's pulse that comes across
her face and disappears.

-Deema K. Shehabi
Used by permission.

Deema K. Shehabi is a poet, writer, and editor. She grew up in the Arab world and attended college in the US, where she received an MS in journalism. Her poems have appeared widely in journals and anthologies such as The Kenyon Review, Literary Imagination, New Letters, Callaloo, Massachusetts Review, Perihelion, Drunken Boat, Bat City Review, Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry, and The Poetry of Arab Women. Her poems have been nominated for a Pushcart prize three times, and she served as Vice-President for the Radius of Arab-American Writers (RAWI) between 2007 and 2010. She currently resides in Northern California with her husband and two sons.

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Alan Gilbert on the Cost of War

2011-10-07T14:04:00.000-04:00

In this piece, Alan Gilbert explicitly links the cost of war with the Occupy Wall Street protest movement now sweeping the country; one possible part of the solution to our economic woes is to redistribute our wasteful military spending on pork and pet projects.

From: Alan Gilbert
Subject: [Democratic-indv] The dead
To: "democratic-indv@du.edu"

The dead

Under Bush, dead American soldiers from Afghanistan and Iraq were flown secretly to the US. There was no public act of mourning, no attention to coffins.

But as I was flying to Chicago for a connecting flight to Richmond this week, the pilot came on the air to announce that two soldiers, an honor guard, were seated in row 14. Could they be allowed to get off first, he asked, to honor them and their fallen comrade?

As the flight landed, the captain repeated the announcement. The two soldiers stood up and many people applauded. I did not, nor did the black officer who was sitting next to me. I said: “I don’t know about applause. Seems like silence and prayer would be more fitting.”

I was in a window seat. I and he took turns looking out, he sometimes turning away (hard to look too long at one who paid such a price; not everyone is killed or wounded among soldiers, but it is people one knows, never far…). Six soldiers, two black, four white, marched up to the ramp where the flag-draped coffin was brought out, lowered to the ground. They stood three by three, and then a black officer turned to face the ramp, receive the coffin.

The army, below sergeant, is the one, genuinely integrated institution in American society. Wednesday morning, in a class at Metro, Armando, an army vet, said to me firmly: “you’ll be at the Occupy Denver march this Saturday.” I said no, I am going to a black history conference in Richmond this weekend. He then told me about being one of the two hundred people who had marched on Broadway this past Saturday, and how good it felt.

Among the demands floating from this Occupy Wall Street movement is the demand to withdraw troops at last after 10 years from Afghanistan. A march in Washington will raise this shortly. Wednesday evening, 10,000 workers from many unions and college students marched on Wall Street, demonstrating their solidarity with the growing movement.

The honor guard received the dead soldier. He will be buried with honors. In America, now, perhaps private air lines can share the dead briefly with ordinary citizens. Perhaps we can think, now in the Obama era, of why we should withdraw, why there should be no more dead on far away foreign soil, having not the vaguest idea of why they were in Kandahar nor any hope of doing damage to Al-Qaida (that was done by the seals taking out Bin Laden in Pakistan, but not by invading armies, let alone drones which take a tremendous civilian toll, are morally vile, politically breed new enemies and are counterproductive).

The soldier and I spoke briefly of the war. Someone behind us said: it’s cheaper to send the honor guard and the corpse by private airlines...

The human effects of American militarism are amongst us. There was no comment on the war (United Airlines is a business, and the war complex, like Wall Street, does not want to hear from the citizens). But Chris Tranchetti, a naval officer and my student who has written a master’s thesis on Socrates and Jesus, sent me the following story from the Atlantic of an officer shot through the throat who miraculously survived, his caregiver and others who suffer like him.

"Alan Gilbert

On the Death of Taha Muhammad Ali

2011-10-04T11:01:00.000-04:00

Recent news of the passing of Taha Muhammad Ali brought me back to his poem, collected in "Come Together: Imagine Peace," which ends:

After we die,
and the weary heart
has lowered its final eyelid
on all that we've done,
and on all that we've longer for,
on all that we've dreamt of,
all we've desired
or felt,
hate will be
the first thing
to putrefy within us.

Here's another poem that's circulating:

REVENGE by Taha Muhammad Ali
translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, and Gabriel Levin

At times ... I wish
I could meet in a duel
the man who killed my father
and razed our home,
expelling me
into
a narrow country.
And if he killed me,
I’d rest at last,
and if I were ready—
I would take my revenge!

*

But if it came to light,
when my rival appeared,
that he had a mother
waiting for him,
or a father who’d put
his right hand over
the heart’s place in his chest
whenever his son was late
even by just a quarter-hour
for a meeting they’d set—
then I would not kill him,
even if I could.

*

Likewise ... I
would not murder him
if it were soon made clear
that he had a brother or sisters
who loved him and constantly longed to see him.
Or if he had a wife to greet him
and children who
couldn’t bear his absence
and whom his gifts would thrill.
Or if he had
friends or companions,
neighbors he knew
or allies from prison
or a hospital room,
or classmates from his school …
asking about him
and sending him regards.

*

But if he turned
out to be on his own—
cut off like a branch from a tree—
without a mother or father,
with neither a brother nor sister,
wifeless, without a child,
and without kin or neighbors or friends,
colleagues or companions,
then I’d add not a thing to his pain
within that aloneness—
not the torment of death,
and not the sorrow of passing away.
Instead I’d be content
to ignore him when I passed him by
on the street—-as I
convinced myself
that paying him no attention
in itself was a kind of revenge.

Nazareth
April 15, 2006

Be Ignited or Be Gone

2011-10-03T14:55:00.001-04:00

Art Makes Something Happen: the Vassar Haiti Project

2011-10-02T17:08:00.000-04:00

My Aunt Lila and Uncle Andrew have been engaging in a project for a number of years to help fund Haitian development through the sale of Haitian art. With all the violence and exploitation of the world, we need projects like the Vassar Haiti Project to remind us what is possible.

Julia Bacha, Director of "Budrus," on Nonviolence in the Middle East

2011-09-25T10:54:00.000-04:00

Why the cancellation of the Gaza Children's Art exhibit matters

2011-09-21T11:03:00.000-04:00

It is a small matter, the cancellation of the Gaza Children's Art exhibit at the Oakland Museum of Children's Art due to outside pressure, but for the fact that it repeats a sort of social trauma experienced by Palestinians since the founding of the state of Israel--that their very experience, their reality, their identity, their rights, their humanity, their desire for recognition are refused, excised, suppressed, ignored.

As the PLO has embarked upon an effort to gain U.N. recognition of a Palestinian state around this time--itself a more "important" political matter, one which Palestinians themselves are fiercely debating--and as the U.S. continues to discourage such attempts (partly in the fear that it will lose whatever sway it has in the region, in a player in the now long-moribund "peace process)--it seems useful to pay attention to why such small things matter, and why the PLO might engineer what is really such a small and desperately symbolic move, one that risks the loss of Right of Return for Palestinian refugees from 1948.

The exhibit, organized by the Middle East Children's Alliance, depicts the horror of war experienced through the eyes of Palestinian children. According to the article in the San Francisco Chronicle,

"Our aim, as with all exhibits, is to foster insight and understanding," Sorey said in a statement. "However, upon further review and engagement with the community, it became clear that this exhibit was not appropriate for an open gallery accessible by all children."

Yet it wouldn't have been the first time the museum has featured wartime art by children.

In 2007, it exhibited paintings made during World War II by American children in the Kaiser shipyard child care center. The art featured images of Hitler, burning airplanes, sinking battleships, empty houses and a sad girl next to a Star of David.

In 2004, art by Iraqi children hung on the museum's walls. The pictures, made shortly after the U.S. invasion, included a picture of a helicopter shooting into a field of flowers.

The art by the Palestinian children was similar in content.

In one colorful picture, a row of buildings burns as five tanks move through the area. In the foreground, women and children are crying as are trees and the sun. What looks like a small, abandoned teddy bear lies face up in the street.

In a simpler image, a frowning girl with a bandage on her forehead faces out from behind prison bars.

There is little doubt that the exhibit is politically-motivated, but it's not necessarily merely "political," in the sense of partisan--i.e. "Israel-bashing." It's motivated by people who want to see Palestinians as human beings, whose stories have not been told, or have been so distorted as to make them seem irrelevant. But that's the trouble. Every time that Palestinians want to tell their story, it's seen as an existential threat, or a device for shaming pro-Israeli people.

Ziad Abbas expresses that feeling of silencing in this way (not without a dollop of shaming!). This is from the Chronicle piece: "Even while the children in Gaza are living under Israeli policies that deprive them of every basic necessity, they managed through art, to express their realities and hopes. It’s really very sad that there are people in the U.S. silencing them and shredding their dreams,” said Ziad Abbas, MECA’s Associate Director.

A colleague I respect wondered whether the exhibit could have displayed art by Israeli children who also have experienced trauma from violence--to demonstrate that all children suffer from conflict. It's actually an interesting possibility, and one could imagine an exhibition which would bring those children together for an opening--one that would need to involve a lot of peacebuilding preparation and support, to move into further dialogue.

And yet--and this is what I wrote in reply, the level of trauma in Palestinian children is so devastating, it deserves its own stage. Studies have been done that show Pal children with levels of PTSD ranking moderate to severe... at 90%. Israeli children, of course, particularly in zones of vulnerability/conflict (settlements, border, Jerusalem) also suffer from levels of PTSD, though they are much considerably lower. Actually, my understanding is that most people in Israel live as if there is no problem at all; the Wall has solved everything. I say this even though I'm believe that comparing suffering is always a dangerous and politically blindered game. Suffering is always suffering, and children's suffering an atrocity.

I don't have the answers to this conflict, but something needs to change. And soon.

Lisa Suhair Majaj's "Guidelines"

2011-09-19T10:35:00.002-04:00

Lisa Suhair Majaj's "Guidelines" is the sort of how-to kit that more than a few Arab Americans could have used after the 9/11 attacks, when suddenly they became a national suspicion and felt the need to drape themselves in flags to prove their loyalty.

Guidelines

If they ask you what you are,
say Arab. If they flinch, don't react,
just remember your great-aunt's eyes.

If they ask you where you come from,
say Toledo. Detroit. Mission Viejo.
Fall Springs. Topeka. If they seem confused,

help them locate these places on a map,
then inquire casually, Where are you from?
Have you been here long? Do you like this country?

If they ask what you eat,
don't disassemble. If garlic is your secret friend,
admit it. Likewise, crab cakes.

If they say you're not American,
don't pull out your personal,
wallet-sized flag. Instead, recall

the Bill of Rights. Mention the Constitution.
Wear democracy like a favorite garment:
comfortable, intimate.

If they wave newspapers in your face and shout,
stay calm. Remember everything they never learned.
Offer to take them to the library.

If they ask you if you're white, say it depends.
Say no. Say maybe. If appropriate, inquire,
Have you always been white, or is it recent?

If you take to the streets in protest,
link hands with whomever is beside you.
Keep your eye on the colonizer's maps,

geography's twisted strands, the many colors
of struggle. No matter how far you've come, remember:
the starting line is always closer than you think.

If they ask how long you plan to stay, say forever.
Console them if they seem upset. Say, don't worry,
you'll get used to it. Say, we live here. How about you?

-Lisa Suhair Majaj

From Geographies of Light (Del Sol Press, 2009)
Used by permission.

Lisa Suhair Majaj is the author of Geographies of Light (winner of the Del Sol Press Poetry Prize) and co-editor of three volumes of literary essays: Intersections: Gender, Nation and Community in Arab Women's Novels (Syracuse University Press, 2002), Etel Adnan: Critical Essays on the Arab-American Writer and Artist (McFarland Publishing, 2002) and Going Global: The Transnational Reception of Third World Women Writers. (NY: Garland/Routledge, 2000). She publishes poetry, creative nonfiction and critical essays in journals and anthologies the US, Europe and the Middle East, and has read at venues such as London's Poetry International. She currently lives in Cyprus.

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www.splitthisrock.org
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Jeff Gundy's "Touching a New Kingdom (On William Stafford and Peace)"

2011-09-14T10:47:00.000-04:00

This sermon by poet Jeff Gundy deserves a wider audience; Gundy, a Mennonite, has been one of the contemporary poets who has struggled with the question of how we respond to violence in both poetry and life, and I admire his steady and grounded vision:

"Touching a New Kingdom (On William Stafford and Peace)"
Sermon Given at First Mennonite Church, 9/11/2011

I suspect everyone here who’s old enough remembers the morning of 9/11/01, ten years ago today, and what we were doing when we heard about the planes crashing into towers and buildings. I was at my desk, getting ready for class, and at first thought the web headline about a plane crash was just a curiosity, a freak accident. Of course, I soon learned otherwise.

But a moment I especially remember came a few days later, when Marlyce and I got to talking with some other soccer parents. We were all still stunned and reeling from the images on the news, collapsing buildings and plumes of smoke, people running through the streets, faces of hijackers, all the rest. And yet here we were at the field on a beautiful early fall evening, watching our sons run around. It seemed so ordinary, and yet we knew things were going to change.

“One thing I know,” another parent said, “things like this bring us together as a country.”

“True,” I found myself saying to him. “But together to do what?”

I’ll come back to that question. But first, a little background on our feature person for today, poet and pacifist William Stafford. He was born in Hutchinson, Kansas in 1914, grew up in various Kansas towns, in a close but not wealthy family. He was an older student at the U. of Kansas in December 1941, already starting to write poems; his life was changed by Pearl Harbor as ours were by 9/11, but even more dramatically. Stafford was not a birthright Anabaptist or member of a peace church; but when his society was swept up in war fervor and total mobilization for the vast enterprise of World War II, he became one of that small group who refused to go off to war. He convinced his draft board to grant him conscientious objector status—then a new thing—and was sent to Church of the Brethren camps in Arkansas and California, where he did forestry work and firefighting.

Naomi Shihab Nye reading last night

2011-09-14T09:13:00.000-04:00

Last night, after a day talking with students, Naomi Shihab Nye read her poems--particularly from her new book, Transfer, and shared her ebullience for poetry. Spending the day with her is to feel her great enthusiasm and curiosity for just about everything--the Cleveland artist who bought 1000 sweaters he found in a closed garment factory, a memoirist who said she hated memoirs, a student's poem about making smoothies, why Philip Roth says he doesn't read poetry (though he writes it), a St. Louis accent, why a Gazan children's art display was canceled in Oakland, a child's gerbil named Butterscotch, etc. She is the rare bird who makes poetry seem possible. For everyone. If only we had a cadre of Naomi's. Naomi for Poet Laureate!

And now, Naomi Shihab Nye. I'll spare her the embarrassment of hearing the catalogue of her numerous accolades and awards, for her thirty books, and just tell you why I love her work, and why I invited her here tonight, just after the tenth anniversary of 9/11.

The terrorist attacks struck each one of us in this room, all of us in different ways; a college friend of mine lost his father in the towers, another friend worked the emergency rescue operations, my aunt ministered to rescue workers for weeks after. We felt shock, confusion, fear, grief, and rage, in a toxic confusion of emotion, and the days that followed were like living under water.

Those of us who are Arab American felt all of this, and more, a sense of shame, isolation, and terror, at how people might use this act to attack us, and people we love, people and places where we and our ancestors came from, who had nothing to do with hijacking and murder.

Naomi Shihab Nye was one of a handful of Arab American writers who courageously stepped into the fear, and spoke and wrote with clarity, with authority, and with anger, at those who threatened to make us all targets, and who tried to explode all the work we'd done to bring cultures, and peoples, and faiths together.

In short, she spoke for us, and we were not alone. And though we knew that these attacks would lead to more terror, she reminded us that terror would not be the last word. And through her witness, through her words, that we could and would work again to awaken us to the fact that what we all share is far greater than what separates us. That is her gift, and why I am grateful she is here tonight.

Here's a poem from her new book:
"Problems" (reprinted from Molossus)

They are not yours.

You may observe them without owning them.

Conflict and chaos that wanted to go on a journey.

There was always a way to walk around them.

Often a difficult path.

You couldn’t fix them if you tried. And you did try.

It was presumptuous to think you could fix them.

William Goyen said his writing started with Trouble.
Something you could do with it, that took you out of it,
or let you look at it.

The power of people saying nothing.
You don’t know my problems, I don’t know yours.

I don’t have problems.

I am happy when I have something to sew.

Matisse said, “The moment I had this box of colors in my hands.
I had the feeling my life was there…”

Where is your life without problems leaning?

Will it go somewhere without you?

She would find something not to like, even here.
But that is not yours to heal.

No one healed the fire.
Dormant seeds popped up in its wake.

September 12, 2011: abu ghraib arias is hereby released

2011-09-12T14:50:00.000-04:00

Flying Guillotine Press has just released *abu ghraib arias,* my new chapbook of poetry. More information shortly forthcoming! See Flying Guillotine Press' blog.

Reflection on 9/11 by Sister Camille D'Arienzo, RSM, on CBSNewYork.com

2011-09-12T10:12:00.000-04:00

What is an adequate response to mass violence that does contain the seeds of future mass violence? Sister Camille D'Arienzo considers the options.

Reflection on 9/11 by Sister Camille D'Arienzo, RSM, on CBSNewYork.com

August 23, 2011 4:53 PM

With the tenth anniversary of the suicide bombing of the Twin Towers
remembrances of that life-changing event seem inescapable. Adults, especially those who worked in the city or know people who died there, recall the anguish. My niece’s husband Jerry can’t forget the scene he witnessed as he exited from the subway into a smog-like atmosphere. He looked up to see people holding hands as they leapt to their death to escape the flames. Two of my nephews, Michael and Ronnie, as New York City policemen, were among first responders. Their memories are terrible.

Thousands of stories of anguish and loss contribute to the way we now see
ourselves. We, unlike citizens of other continents, had never suffered an enemy attack. We didn’t know how to respond. Although we’re a nation that values “thinking outside the box,” we’re not good at doing it. So it was no surprise that our first response was to return violence with violence.

While the buildings were still smoldering and our world was severely shaken, President Bush and his administration launched a search and destroy mission. They were determined to find Osama Bin Laden and to take revenge on those responsible for the deaths of the people killed here. Almost three thousand people in Manhattan – including 343 firefighters, 60 police officers and 8 medical technicians and paramedics. More in Washington, D.C. Then there were the brave souls who took over the plane meant to be a weapon and disabled it, losing their lives in a Pennsylvania field.

Our rage and fear was widespread. In many quarters it still is. And then there was this thing called national pride to uphold.

Whatever the intent, this strategy has cost us the lives of more than 6,000
American soldiers – twice as many as victims of the initial attack. Many who survived have returned to us broken in mind and body. The suicides among them have equaled or excelled those of returning Vietnam veterans.

And decency doesn’t allow us to ignore the fact that this decade of warfare has claimed the lives of thousands of innocent Iraqi and Afghan citizens.

Then there’s the financial cost of this conflict. Surely it continues to contribute to the collapse of our economy.

Might there have been a better way?

We’re not conditioned to solve problems peacefully. Although we recognize the commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” we approve many exceptions –from womb to tomb. From abortion to the death penalty, we make excuses to justify our choices.

But every once in awhile individuals demonstrate by their very different choices that recovery can take alternative forms.

We had proof of that when on Oct. 7, 2006 the Associated Press reported out of Georgetown, PA: “Dozens of Amish neighbors came out on Saturday to mourn the quiet milkman who killed five of their young girls and wounded five more in a brief, unfathomable rampage.”

Reports of the actions of a local Amish man with children of his own stunned the quiet, peace-loving religious community. Charging into the West Nickel Mines Amish School, 32 year old Charles Roberts released fifteen boys and four adults before shackling and shooting ten girls, aged seven to thirteen. This shocking crime, perpetrated by a local husband and father, rocked that neighborhood and the nation. Even more startling than the massacre was the Amish response to that violence – especially in a world that seeks instant retaliation. Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister reflected in her column in The National Catholic Reporter:

“What kind of people are these? It was not the murders, not the violence that shocked us; it was the forgiveness that followed it for which we were not prepared. It was the lack of recrimination, the dearth of vindictiveness that left us amazed.”

She’s right. The Amish Christian culture is predicated on the acceptance of
Jesus’ instruction to extend forgiveness to those who inflict harm. They believe to do so ensures citizenship in heaven. Two aspects of forgiveness in this case were its immediacy of expression and the victims’ families’ outreach to the wife and children of the murderer.

The Amish people, out of sync with modernity and contemporary culture, set an example outlandish to nations who equate retaliation with self protection.

Sister Joan Chittister wondered what the world would be like today if after the attacks that felled the Twin Towers on September, 11, 2001, we had not
invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and, instead, had gone to every Muslim country on earth and said: “Don’t be afraid. We won’t hurt you. We know that this is coming from only a fringe of society and we ask your help in saving others from this same kind of violence.”

Laughable, ridiculous! some would respond. Perhaps including those who lost loved ones in that tragedy. After all, almost 3,000 perished in the attack on the Twin Towers.

But we have to wonder if it’s less foolish to have deployed thousands of
American troops on punitive raids that brought death to countless innocent
civilians, returned over 6,000 U.S. servicemen and women in body bags and left thousands of others physically, emotionally and spiritually maimed, their families forever changed.

It’s unlikely we’d have such obscene statistics to report if diplomacy had been substituted for preemptive strikes. We have as yet no accurate accounting of the residual damage to survivors who have lost loved ones and property in this conflict; however, history warns that its damage may find expression in future violence.

What can we expect of those Middle Eastern civilians who have lost loved ones and property?

In 1991, during the first Persian Gulf War, American soldiers rode into Baghdad, demonstrating good will, especially toward children. While handing our candy bars and other treats, one G.I. asked an eleven-year-old what he planned to be when he grew up.

“A pilot,” the boy replied.

The soldier encouraged his pursuit of such a profession, but a reporter standing by asked the child why he wanted to be a pilot.

“So I can fly to America and bomb the people who killed my family,” came the chilling response. Ten years later when suicide bombers flew into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, I wondered if that child, then 21, had become a pilot. Is it possible that we will ever grasp the consequences of relentless retaliation? If so, perhaps when we mark the 20th anniversary of 9/11, our nation will resolve to build bridges instead of bombs.

President Abraham Lincoln left advice worth considering today. He said the best way to destroy our enemies is to befriend them.

Camille D’Arienzo, R.S.M., a member of the Mid-Atlantic Community of the
Sisters of Mercy of the Americas, is a past president of the Leadership
Conference of Women Religious. She has delivered commentaries on 1010 WINS
Radio for more than four decades.

Poetry after 9/11 at the Poetry Foundation

2011-09-09T07:03:00.000-04:00

I've got an essay up at Poetry Foundation right now: "Beyond Grief and Grievance: Poetry after 9/11." I'd love to hear what you think, and what poems you went to, and go to now, in the wake of such terror. Post directly at the PF!

Peace Show 2011: Peace Poetry Village (Gandhi Meets Poetry)

2011-09-06T07:46:00.001-04:00

Thanks to Maria Smith, for dreaming up the original idea of the Peace Poetry Village, based on the Gandhian principles of nonviolence, and for the collaboration of Phil Althouse, Paul Kapczuk, Noah Hrbek, my daughters, and me--ushering this installation into being.

Ken Butigan's review of Brian Willson's autobiography

2011-09-03T15:27:00.001-04:00

This piece is pretty stunning. I remember hearing Brian Willson's story many years ago, and his stunning, word-defying act of resistance. Why would one risk one's life, to stop a munitions train? For Brian Willson, one can draw a direct line between that moment and his experience in Vietnam.

by Ken Butigan | September 1, 2011, 6:06 am

Twenty-four years ago this morning---September 1, 1987---Vietnam veteran Brian Willson joined a handful of peacemakers on the railroad tracks at Concord Naval Weapons Stations to begin what they envisioned as a forty-day fast and vigil to protest arms shipments from this Northern California military base to US-backed forces in Central America.

Instead, a 900-ton munitions train, traveling at three times the legal speed limit, plowed into Brian and dragged him under. Standing a few feet away, I saw him turn over and over again like a rag doll and then (as the never-slowing train rumbled on toward a nearby security gate) sprawling in the track bed, a huddled mass of blood.

Miraculously, Brian survived (thanks, largely, to the tourniquets applied by his then-wife Holly Rauen, a professional nurse), though both legs were sheered off and his skull was fractured.

Now, over two decades later, he has published Blood on the Tracks: The Life and Times of S. Brian Willson, a new autobiography available from PM Press. This book does not simply recount a horrifying event from long ago. It offers, more importantly, a vivid example of a still-unfolding pilgrimage for peace that turns on a burning question: "What is my responsibility to make peace and challenge murderous violence in a direct and meaningful way?"

At a critical turning point in his life, Brian allowed this question in and everything changed. Of course, this question is not Brian's alone. It is meant for each of us in the midst of the storm of horrific violence that continually bears down on our planet and its inhabitants.

Brian's memoir recounts his journey from childhood in Upstate New York (born on the Fourth of July, he enthusiastically shared his family's pro-military and anti-communist convictions), to his decision to go to law school, and then his being drafted and sent to Vietnam as an Air Force captain, where two incidents changed his life.

One was a rocket attack in which he was saved by a quick-thinking companion who pushed him to the ground and out of the way of the blast. Though they survived, another soldier was blown to bits a few feet away. The second event even more clearly seared his soul. He had been sent out to do damage assessment of US bombing raids on villages and found a blackened mess that used to be huts, littered with bodies:

My first thought was that I was witnessing an egregious, horrendous
mistake. The "target" was no more than a small fishing and rice
farming community. The "village" was smaller than a baseball playing
field. The Mekong Delta region is completely flat, and the modest
houses in its hamlets are built on small mounds among rice paddies.
As with most settlements, this one was undefended---we saw no
anti-aircraft guns, no visible small arms, no defenders of any kind.
The pilots who bombed this small hamlet flew low-flying planes,
probably the A-37Bs, and were able to get close to the ground
without fear of being shot down, thus increasing the accuracy of
their strafing and bombing. They certainly would have been able to
see the inhabitants, mostly women with children taking care of
various farming and domestic chores ... The buildings were virtually
flattened by explosions or destroyed by fire. I didn't see any
inhabitant on his or her feet. Most were ripped apart from bomb
shrapnel and Gatling machine gun wounds, blackened from napalm
burns, many not discernible as to gender, and the majority were
obviously children.

I began sobbing and gagging. I couldn't fathom what I was seeing,
smelling, thinking. I took a few faltering steps to my left, only to
find my way blocked by the body of a young woman lying at my feet.
She had been clutching three small, partially blackened children
when she apparently collapsed. I bent down for a closer look and
stared, aghast, at the woman's open eyes. The children were
motionless, blackened blood drying on their bullet and
shrapnel-riddled bodies. Napalm had melted much of the woman's face,
including her eyelids, but as I was focused on her face, it seemed
to me that her eyes were staring at me.

She was not alive. But her eyes and my eyes met for one moment that
shot like a lightning bolt through my entire being. Over the years I
have thought of her so much I have given her the name, "Mai Ly."

I was startled when Bao, who was several feet to my right, asked why
I was crying. I remember struggling to answer. The words that came
out astonished me. "She is my family," I said, or something to that
effect. I don't know where those words came from. I wasn't thinking
rationally. But I felt, in my body, that she and I were one. Bao
just smirked, and said something about how satisfied he was with the
bombing "success" in killing "communists." I did not reply. I had
nothing to say. From that moment on, nothing would ever be the same
for me.

Thus began a deep transformation, which led him in the 1980s to notice with deep alarm the connection between what he had experienced in Vietnam and the Reagan administration's war in Central America. He traveled to the region and saw a vivid parallel between the two conflicts, especially the wanton attack on civilians, and became convinced that he had to take action.

"We are not worth more, they are not worth less," he declared, and joined the Veterans Fast for Life on the steps of the US Capitol in 1986, where he and three other former members of the US military fasted for 47 days. One year later, he and others formed Nuremberg Actions---named after the principles of international law enunciated in the wake of the Nuremberg tribunal following World War II that defined crimes against humanity and the responsibility and complicity in such crimes---and organized a 40-day fast at Concord in which he and others planned to block weapons trains. A Freedom of Information Act request had yielded concrete evidence that ships leaving this base were carrying 500-pound bombs, white phosphorus, and millions of rounds of ammunition, and Brian wanted to stop such shipments in their tracks.

He expected the train to stop, at which point he would be removed and arrested---in effect compelling the military to demonstrate the kind of care that should also be accorded to those at the other end of the line in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Instead, the government ran the train (in spite of the clear communication with the Navy over the prior ten days), thus dramatizing with palpable clarity what those at the end of the line faced every day.

We are not worth more. They are not worth less.

Brian's autobiography details the aftermath of the Concord attack, including his activism, his own inner and outer growth, his comprehensive and embodied choices to live simply (on this recent book tour, for example, he traveled by pedaling a special bicycle that uses his hands instead of his feet), and his thoroughgoing critique of the American Way of Life (AWOL). (Less than three months after being run down by the train, Brian testified in Congress about this event. You can read his engrossing testimony here .)

What can we learn, after all these years, from Brian's journey?

One lesson is the importance of "finding your own tracks and taking a stand there," as he has often said. A catchphrase we used at the time held that "Stopping the war starts here"---stopping it at a weapons base, but also in many, many other places. Brian did so by taking this action "in person": using the most powerful symbol at his disposal, his vulnerable, resilient, determined, and spirited body.

We can do this, too. This is not to say that we are all called to sit on train tracks (such action requires much discernment and training). But there are many places to stand nonviolently, withdrawing our consent and pointing our communities, our societies, and even ourselves in a new direction.

The world begins to change when we find this place.

Steve Earle, on the Death Penalty and John Walker Lindh, and Singing "John Walker's Blues"

2011-09-02T14:05:00.000-04:00

Thanks to Paul Lauritzen for passing this along; a text for our discussion of the songs of 9/11, coming up on Tuesday.

Cleveland Air Show? Try the Peace Show this Labor Day...

2011-09-02T12:55:00.000-04:00

10th Annual Cleveland Peace Show
Labor Day, Monday, September 5th at the Free Stamp
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

10th Annual Cleveland Peace Show is on September 5th from 12:00PM - 6:00PM. As always, the Peace Show is at the Free Stamp, corner of E. 9th and Lakeside, in downtown Cleveland. And, as always, it's free. Sponsored by Cleveland Non-Violence Network - details

Performers this year include Early Girl, Deborah Van Kleef, E&JNtoxicated, Zak, and Revolution Brass Band. A key feature of this show will be Peace Poetry. Come for the children's activities, music and lots of activists; the Bloodmobile will be onsite for donations as well. The Eyes Wide Open display of boots representing Ohio's lost servicemen and women will be featured.

Rain location: St. Paul's Community Church, 4427 Franklin (W. 45th & Franklin), Cleveland.

Volunteers needed...We need help leafletting at fairs and festivals in August; call 216-932-8546 for details.

Check our website for news on military spending, nuclear weapons, Afghanistan, the Middle East, Iraq and more. You'll also find contact info for your elected officials and what going on currently in Congress.

Putting the Blood Back into Words

2011-08-30T16:44:00.000-04:00

In "On 9/11 and the Politics of Language: An Interview with Martin Espada," Espada discusses his poem "Alabanza," written for the workers in the restaurant who died in the terrorist attacks, and also the politics of language around 9/11 more generally. One nugget:

What I want to do as a poet is to reconcile language with meaning, to bring them back together again. A phrase like enhanced interrogation or, for that matter, weapons of mass destruction removes the blood from words, drains the blood from words. Our job, whether we are poets, activists, or teachers, is to put the blood back into the words, so the words are once again vivid, alive and charged with meaning.

From Louisa Thomas' "Give Peace a Chance" op-ed

2011-08-29T10:52:00.000-04:00

From Louisa Thomas' "Give Peace a Chance," that appeared in the New York Times on August 27, 2011 (thanks to Tim Musser for sending it along):

FOR the most part, though, nonviolence and pacifism in the United States are today discredited as utopian, hippieish or narrowly religious, more anti-American than anti-war. There are still people who say that force only destroys, that its consequences are uncontrollable, that it is unethical — but those critiques trouble us on the margins, or in books or movies. There are still a few antiwar groups (not all of them pacifist) — the War Resisters League, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the Albert Einstein Institution — but hardly any serious public figures take the stage to defend their views.

Some of what the American peace movement fought for has come to pass: there is no draft, there are no special taxes raised to pay for war, the threat of nuclear Armageddon has receded and the country plays a leading, if controversial, role in multilateral institutions. Rooting out terrorists and intervening in civil conflicts, soldiers often do more police work than conventional combat.

The results have been mixed, though, and in some ways at odds with pacifism’s longer-term goals. Most people don’t want to think of war, and thanks to the lack of a draft, most don’t have to. Huge worldwide protests against sending soldiers into Iraq in 2003 were a sideshow for many people. Significant antiwar sentiment over the Iraq and Afghanistan wars has mostly challenged the time, the place, the conduct and the costs of deployment, not the use of force itself. Those who are on active duty — less than one percent of the population — and their families bear most of the burdens.

Such complacency has allowed for the possibility of unending war. Because of the nature of intelligence gathering and weapons technology like drones, the government can use deadly force without popular support or approval. The president has claimed — and we have given him — extraordinary powers.

We should respect the sacrifices of soldiers and the complexity of governing in a dangerous world. But war has a way of coming home, eroding our democratic culture as well as our safety. American pacifists of the past knew that, and we need people like them today: people who don’t believe war is inevitable, who will challenge what we assume and accept, and who will work to end it.

Two Versions of President Bush's Initial Response to 9/11: Bush vs. Moore

2011-08-27T17:39:00.000-04:00

As we near the 10th anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the nation begins the necessary memorializing of that terrible event, we need to pay attention to what it is that our public gatherings propose to remember, and what gets left off the page of memory, outside of the frame. Recently, National Geographic interviewed President George W. Bush about that fateful day, and some of his comments articulated some degree of regret about the "fog of war" that surrounded those hectic hours when no one quite knew the extent of the attack.

In the first video, we have Bush recounting the events, narrating his first person impressions as he recalled them; in it, Bush is very much the self-branded decider, issuing orders, "intently listening" to the teacher's lesson, etc. In the second video, if you watch 16:34-19:39, we have Michael Moore's take on the same events; here, the voiceovers by Moore brand the President as a nitwit who has suddenly realized his utter helplessness, and is frozen in place, a deer in the headlights of history, unable to act.

At this point, if this were my classroom, I'd ask you to decide what you think of each take. The moderates among you may suggest the "truth" is somewhere in the middle of Bush and Moore. What it reminds us is that it was difficult not to feel some anger at the failure of the powerful to take the terrorist threat seriously.

"The Seinfeld Analog"

2011-08-27T09:00:00.000-04:00

The Seinfeld Analog from Bresland on Vimeo.

I've never liked "Seinfeld," for reasons that mostly evade me now. Perhaps it hit when I wasn't really watching television--during college, during a year out of the country, etc. Though I was one of those graduate students in the 1990s who saw pop cultural artifacts as the juiciest of texts to theorize, "Seinfeld" seemed to celebrate the narcissism of the culture through its profoundly narcissistic characters--all of whom the audience was invited to laugh at. Like a sitcom version of the Jerry Springer show, the audience was allowed to feel smugly superior to the jackassery of the fumbling Elaine, the ridiculous Kramer, etc.

John Bresland's fascinating video essay, "The Seinfeld Analog" juxtaposes three motifs--his obsession with a fast car from his youth, the genocide in Rwanda, and Seinfeld; through this juxtaposition, we see how difficult it is to navigate the insularity of our own culture in the face of our connectedness and distance to global catastrophes. He doesn't propose to judge Seinfeld or us, but simply to hold a mirror to our cultural conundrum.

Barbara Crooker's "Rewind"

2011-08-25T09:22:00.000-04:00

I'm about to complete my syllabus for the course, "After 9/11," and this poem came across my digital desk from Split This Rock, a wish-poem for the life previous to 9/11. I'm intrigued to hear how students who were less than 10 years old experienced September 11, 2001...Stay tuned for more details...

Rewind

Oh, how we'd like to put this video in slow rewind,
go back to September 10th, refurl the chrysanthemum
of ash to a bud, pull the towers back up
from their soft collapse, harden their sides,
slap cement on with our bare hands, smooth it flat
with a trowel, return the sky to its flawless blue,
no plume of black smoke, just windows glittering
in the September sun, office workers breaking
for coffee and bagels, the world's commerce
humming on. Let the planes remain in their hangars.
Let the men who plan harm get caught in traffic,
misplace their tickets, miss their connections.
Let us all sleep again at night.

-Barbara Crooker

Used by permission.

Barbara Crooker's books are Radiance, winner of the 2005 Word Press First Book Award and finalist for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize; Line Dance (Word Press, 2008), winner of the 2009 Paterson Award for Excellence in Literature; and More (C&R Press, 2010). Her poems appear in a variety of literary journals and many anthologies, including Good Poems for Hard Times (Penguin, 2006) and Good Poems, American Places (Viking, 2011) -- both edited by Garrison Keillor -- and the Bedford Introduction to Literature.

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Thinking of Khaled Mattawa During the Siege of Tripoli

2011-08-23T10:53:00.000-04:00

Libyan-American poet Khaled Mattawa appeared on the PBS NewsHour in March 2011, and the rebels are now in Tripoli, attempting to take down one of the longest-lasting dictators in the Middle East. I've been thinking of Khaled ever since the rebellion began, in his hometown of Benghazi, many months ago, thinking with the mixed feelings of one who wishes for dictatorships to fall, but also wishes that it doesn't require force of arms or Western involvement, which always comes with so many seen and unseen strings.

I wish good wishes for Khaled, on today his birthday, and for the Libyan people--that they may make a transition to a free and democratic society without the torrent of blood and retribution that so often comes with coups, that the promise of the future is not loaned to the empires of the past.

D. Boon's Mom is Awesome

2011-08-21T18:15:00.000-04:00

Finally got the chance to watch this documentary of the band, the Minutemen, and heard again the story of D. Boon's mother's encouraging him and Mike Watt to play music, and allowing them to practice in the house despite the unholy racket they created. Some of the best noise ever made in rock and roll, actually. And D. Boon is, as far as I'm concerned, as one of the best agit-prop poets ever to sing (or bellow, in his case).

David Rees, on the 20th anniversary of D. Boon's death, wrote a litany of thoughts, in Minutemen fashion, on one of the heroes of American punk rock:

That song's jarring first line: "Let the products sell themselves / fuck advertising, commercial psychology / psychological methods to sell should be destroyed," is the greatest first line of a song of all time.

-The band's political lyrics, printed on album covers without line breaks or capital letters, like James Frey channeling Noam Chomsky, are the greatest political lyrics of all time:

"I saw some military hardware today they changed the color olive drab to yellow/brown/gray the color of our dead the color of our glory"

-The band's other lyrics, many of which were combined with brief, angular melodies to create remarkably accurate approximations of what Western intellectual thought actually sounds like, are the greatest other lyrics of all time:

"starting with the affirmation of man I work myself backwards using cynicism (the time monitor, the space measurer)"...

That D. Boon's bassist and best friend, Mike Watt, still plays bass, writes music, and tours the country in a Ford Econoline van; and that Mike Watt ends his gigs with the exhortation to "start your own band, paint your own picture, write your own book"--twenty years after his friend's death broke his heart--and that Mike Watt continues to champion this D.I.Y. punk philosophy while many other punks have burnt out, grown soft, or given up; and that Mike Watt (I imagine) perseveres in part to honor his brilliant friend's brief life and the possibilities bequeathed to future musicians, artists, activists, punks and outsiders--is one of the greatest American success stories of all time.

"Our band could be your life."

D. Boon is dead. Long live D. Boon.

Cleveland Peace Show! featuring Peace Poetry...

2011-08-18T11:43:00.000-04:00

10th Annual Cleveland Peace Show
Labor Day, Monday, September 5th at the Free Stamp
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

10th Annual Cleveland Peace Show is on September 5th from 12:00PM - 6:00PM. As always, the Peace Show is at the Free Stamp, corner of E. 9th and Lakeside, in downtown Cleveland. And, as always, it's free - details

Performers this year include Early Girl, Deborah Van Kleef, E&JNtoxicated, Zak, and Revolution Brass Band. A key feature of this show will be Peace Poetry. Come for the children's activities, music and lots of activists; the Bloodmobile will be onsite for donations as well. The Eyes Wide Open display of boots representing Ohio's lost servicemen and women will be featured.

Rain location: St. Paul's Community Church, 4427 Franklin (W. 45th & Franklin), Cleveland.

Volunteers needed...We need help leafletting at fairs and festivals in August; call 216-932-8546 for details.

Folks, this year's Peace Show will feature some poets from the area, including Kazim Ali, Philip Metres, Mary Weems, and others!

Treasonous Poems That Name the "Enemy" Dead

2011-08-17T16:25:00.001-04:00

Check out this review by Maureen Doallas, of John Siddique's book of poems, Full Blood, in which exists one poem--which lists names of the "enemy dead" in Afghanistan--which would be treasonous to read aloud in the United Kingdom.

Armenian Cultural Event: Images, Poetry, Music

2011-08-15T14:09:00.001-04:00

I'll be reading some poems by great Armenian poets, and one of my own.

Don Share's "At Home"

2011-08-12T16:17:00.000-04:00

Here's Don Share's contribution to the Split This Rock series. In "At Home," Share echoes Elizabeth Bishop's "A Visit to St. Elizabeth's"--in which the poet employs "The House that Jack Built" nursery rhyme structure to capture the surreal meeting of the poet Ezra Pound in the asylum--to provide us with a comic scene of the wreck of domestic life (Ortega y Gassett: life is shipwreck). The poem suggests both the tenuousness and fragility of modern American life, and the greater fragility that appears on the doorstep, in the news of wars abroad.

At Home

Greetings to the red-eyed clouds
from this, the house that sits

on the mound and faces the corner
that marriage built, where wine

was drunk and semen flooded
the egg which lodged in the uterus

that built the daughter who greeted
the man and the woman here

in the mound at the corner in the house
that education built, and you

know from home-schooling
that the woman can be the teacher

and the man can be the tender child
and ditto the actual infant, depending

on her sex, dependent on love and
income; oh our dear dependent

is ruining the new chair in the house
that nested ambition built, along

with naked sense, and the beak
of god, the job of love, the hurt

of older homes, the hang
of it generally, the hands of pain,

the haze of Zoloft and the pudge
of Prozac, the twins of failed

marriages that manage to live on
in the ardor of our redone arbor

here in the house that books built,
that Yiddish and the Book of Common

Prayer built, that Presbyterian pride
built, that pogroms built, that blue

and white collars built, that Bildungs-
romans built, that the Biltmores built,

that mad dogs bayed at, that the baby
was born in that the cat bit and mouse

whispered within, over which, mortgaged,
the thunder caught its tongue and brought

great downpours upon while the coffee boiled,
while the paper, delivered late again, said:

We fight the terrorists abroad
so we don't have to fight them at home.

-Don Share

Used by permission.
Originally published in Squandermania
(Salt Publishing, 2007)

Don Share is Senior Editor of Poetry. His books include Squandermania; Union; and Seneca in English. Forthcoming are a new book of poems, Wishbone; a critical edition of Basil Bunting's poems; and Basil Bunting's Persia. His translations of Miguel Hernández, collected in I Have Lots of Heart, received the Times Literary Supplement Translation Prize and P.E.N./New England Discovery Award. With Christian Wiman, he has co-edited The Open Door: 100 Poems from 100 Years of Poetry.

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!

Split This Rock
www.splitthisrock.org
info@splitthisrock.org
202-787-5210

The Poetry of Resilience: A New Documentary

2011-08-10T12:59:00.000-04:00

Poetry of Resilience Excerpt from Penelope Pictures on Vimeo.

From the website:
'Poetry of Resilience' is a documentary by Academy Award®-nominated director Katja Esson about six international poets who individually survived Hiroshima, the Holocaust, China’s Cultural Revolution, the Kurdish Genocide in Iraq, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Iranian Revolution.

These six artists present us with a close-up perspective of the "wide shot" of political violence. Each story is powerful, but the film’s strength comes from its collective voice: different political conflicts, cultures, genders, ages, races – one shared human narrative.

Majid Naficy, who fought the Shah in Iran and then witnessed the murder of his family by forces of Ayatollah Khomeini, states: "Artistic creativity is the only thing left to you as a survivor."

"I wish I could say the human spirit is resilient," says Chinese poet Li-Young Lee, "some days I don’t think so."

Lillian Boraks-Nemetz knows why she survived the Holocaust: "I am a witness and I am telling the story."

Japanese poet, Yasuhiko Shigemoto, sums up his experience in one haiku:
"Still being alive / seems to be a sin for me. / Hiroshima Day."

The film takes us to memorial sites in Poland, Rwanda, and Hiroshima; we also travel to the clogged streets of New York City’s Chinatown and the boardwalks of Venice Beach. We witness the contrast between the voyages back to the poets’ home countries with their experiences of immigration and exile.

As we follow these survivors into their past and present lives we learn that they write for different reasons: to remember, to take revenge, to curse, to forgive, to honor, to commemorate, to transcend. For all, poetry was the gift that restored.

"Say Your Peace" Video Contest from September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows

2011-08-09T11:23:00.000-04:00

Dear Friend

As an American, how do you think our nation, it leaders and citizens can promote alternatives to terrorism, violence and war?

September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows’ Say Your Peace Video Contest is your chance to share your ideas for supporting the U.S. Constitution and creating a more peaceful world for everyone. Winners in three age categories will each receive a cash prize of $1,000.

Maybe you’d like to talk about how respecting the rule of law is more important than ever today. Or, why we should honor our Constitution and protect our civil liberties. Or, why we should pursue alternatives to war? Or, how we can better support our Muslim and Sikh neighbors as well as others who have become targets of misplaced anger and violence in the wake of September 11th?

Create a 30-second video with your camera, cell phone, or other video device, and upload it to YouTube to enter it in our Say Your Peace Video Contest. Be as creative as you’d like, but remember that your video must be 30 seconds or less in order to be considered.

All entries must be received by August 31, 2011 and winners will be announced before September 11, 2011.

You can download the application or read the contest guidelines, eligibility requirements for how to enter the contest by visiting: www.PeacefulTomorrows-SayYourPeace.org.

You can follow the contest on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube Channel.

Help create peaceful tomorrows for everyone when you say your peace!

Thank You,
September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows

Richard Foerster's "Savasana" on Poetry Daily

2011-08-07T19:41:00.002-04:00

Richard Foerster's "Savasana" (pronounced "shavA-sanA") is a good poetic rendering of the so-called "corpse pose" in yoga. If he hasn't done a series of yoga pose poems, then someone should! I call Warrior. Once I started doing yoga about ten years ago, I knew that a door had been opened in me that I hadn't known existed. It was as if all the codes of Western masculinity had forgotten about the most basic human action: breathing (kin to being)...

Savasana

The corpse I am become
lives in pure counter-
poise, between weight and
weightless tidal flow, its breath
osmotic, its pulse subsumed. Here
is death beyond fear, without
want of resurrection, unyoked

from hate or any spur to forgive,
where all the masks of God
melt into irrelevant silences.
Here the body surrenders all
tethers to the past, its crowns
and cups of woe, and hope's
a stain absolved of any future,

where the only present is presence,
a nothing that is everything stillness
yearns to inhabit, that lights
no way to or fro. Dark bliss!
Yet give me back, for now,
my stuttering heart, staccato air,
the buzzing contagions of the world.

Richard Foerster

Penetralia
Texas Review Press
reprinted at POETRY DAILY www.poems.com

Melissa Tuckey's "University Kiss in a Time of War"

2011-08-04T08:00:00.000-04:00

University Kiss in a Time of War

Two slight young women--
the smaller one
reaches for hands
leans close to give a kiss
to the taller girl
an in between things kiss
a so long for now kiss
and nothing breaks
no alarms are sounded
no one is injured
Other students pass without
comment or craning.
As the rain that's gentled
our spirits since morning.
But the giver of the kiss looks back,
a quick glance over her shoulder
as if she's learned
that kisses can be dangerous.
I'm reminded of children who live
on the border between wars,
how farmers pay them
to go to rocky fields and find
landmines. Small hands
mostly agile enough to keep the bombs
from exploding; the farmers
hungry to return to their fields.

- Melissa Tuckey
Used by permission.

Melissa Tuckey is the author of Rope as Witness, a chapbook published by Puddinghouse Press. She's received a Fine Arts Work Center residency, among other awards for her writing. Her poetry has been anthologized in DC Poets Against the War, Fire and Ink: An Anthology of Social Action Writing, Poets for Palestine, Days I Moved Through Ordinary Sounds: The Teachers of Writers Corps in Poetry and Prose, and is forthcoming in Ecopoetry: A Contemporary American Anthology. She is co-translator with Chun Ye and Fiona Sze-Lorrain of Chinese poet Yang Zi's collected works, which have been published by Conjunctions, Manoa, and Witness, among other journals. Tuckey serves as Poetry Editor at the online journal Foreign Policy in Focus (a think tank without walls). She teaches at Ithaca College, and lives in Ithaca, New York.

Tuckey has been with Split This Rock since its inception and served as a founding co-director. She now serves on the Board of Directors.

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!

Split This Rock
www.splitthisrock.org
info@splitthisrock.org
202-787-5210

Support Split This Rock
Please support Split This Rock, the national network of activist poets. Donations are fully tax-deductible.
Click here to donate. Or send a check payable to "Split This Rock" to: Split This Rock, c/o Institute for Policy Studies, 1112 16th Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20036. Many thanks!

Contact info@splitthisrock.org for more details or to become a sponsor.

2011-08-02T15:17:00.002-04:00

Don't You Hear This Hammer Ring?

Open Call for Poems to Build a Bridge Across Our Fears

This fall marks the 10th anniversary of the horrific attacks of September 11 and of our country's militarized and repressive response. Split This Rock calls for poems to help us mark this somber occasion, poems that mourn, rage, imagine, speak out for a new future. We'll choose our favorite poems for Poem of the Week and post some to 10 Years + Counting, inviting peace and social justice groups nationwide to read the poems at their events and to use them in their organizing.

This call is open to all, whether or not you have attended a Split This Rock festival or have been previously featured.

Split This Rock began Poem of the Week in 2009 as a way of publicizing the poets to be featured in the 2010 festival. We later opened it to registered participants at Split This Rock festivals. 90 poems later (and counting), the series reaches an expansive audience of poets, activists, and dreamers.

Guidelines:
Please send up to three short poems (poems of 40 lines or under work best) as a single Word document email attachment to: info@splitthisrock.org.
Include in the cover email your full contact information (name, address, phone, email address) and a bio of up to 75 words.
Poems may have been previously published in a book, chapbook, or print journal, but not on the web, please. If previously published, you must own the rights to the work. Please include the citation, including the web address of the publisher, so we may link to it.
Poems will be featured on a rolling basis.
This call is open to all, whether or not you have attended a Split This Rock festival or have been previously featured.
We will contact you if your poem is accepted to confirm details, and may request additional information at that time.
Questions? Please e-mail: info@splitthisrock.org

Naomi Shihab Nye, on "Inspiration"

2011-07-27T16:00:00.000-04:00

A gentle reminder to self about waking up again to all this loveliness.

Here's to Frida Berrigan and Patrick Sheehan-Gaumer: Love, Not War

2011-07-21T19:29:00.000-04:00

July 15, 2011
Frida Berrigan and Patrick Sheehan-Gaumer
from The New York Times Society Pages

By LOIS SMITH BRADY

AFTER breaking up with a longtime boyfriend in the summer of 2009,
Frida Berrigan decided she wanted her entire life to change.

By February 2010, she had quit her job as a senior program associate
with the Arms and Security Initiative, a research group based in SoHo
and focused on military policy. She moved out of her apartment in Red
Hook, Brooklyn. She started running, partly because it helped her
think about what to do next.

"You need time to let something new blossom," said Ms. Berrigan, now
37. "None of us do U-turns. We're kind of like boats. You don't turn
on a dime, and if you do, you don't stay turned."

Seeking a contemplative place, she signed up to work and live in the
Lower East Side headquarters of the Catholic Worker Movement, whose
mission is to help the poor and homeless. Ms. Berrigan's bedroom there
was so small, it could not fit a bed, only a sleeping bag.

"No bed bugs!" she said cheerily. She cooked and served lunch to the
homeless, and provided them with everything from fresh clothes to long
conversations.

Ms. Berrigan has bright blue eyes that rarely dart around when she is
in conversation. Although she often discusses serious topics - banning
nuclear weapons, the conditions at prison camps - she has a way of
treading across them very lightly, like a deer.

Ms. Berrigan is the eldest child of Philip Berrigan and Elizabeth
McAlister, a Roman Catholic priest and a nun who left their callings
and founded Jonah House together in 1973. Jonah House, which still
exists, is a Christian-based community of peace activists living,
sharing meals and planning antiwar protests together in a Baltimore
town house. Mr. Berrigan, who died in 2002, was known for dramatic
acts of civil disobedience, as when, as part of the Baltimore Four, he
poured blood over draft records in the Baltimore Customs House to
protest blood lost in the Vietnam War.

Ms. Berrigan and her two siblings grew up in Jonah House, reading the
Bible at night (as well as Dickens and Shakespeare). She attended
marches with her parents, shopped for clothes in thrift stores and
recycled everything, even plastic bags, which the Berrigans washed and
hung to dry.

"We had this pretty extreme life," Ms. Berrigan said. "We were poor,
we didn't have any nice stuff, our parents were going off to jail all
the time."

In some ways, life at the Catholic Worker was like Jonah House. The
work was intense and purposeful, which she loved. She planned to stay
for years, until she started spending time with Patrick
Sheehan-Gaumer, an old friend and a fellow member of the War Resisters
League.

They had always liked each other, but never been unattached at the
same time. "We definitely had a spark," he said. "Our eye contact had
something more than normal."

Mr. Sheehan-Gaumer, now 29, is a caseworker for the Fatherhood
Initiative at Madonna Place in Norwich, Conn. A single father with
joint custody of his 4-year-old daughter, Rosena Jane, he helps
troubled fathers become better fathers. He is soft-spoken and
mild-mannered, yet magnetic. He resembles a character from a Walker
Evans photograph, with a bushy black beard, short hair and eyes that
shine abnormally bright.

"Patrick has an ability to relate to people that boggles my mind,"
said Rick Gaumer, his father. Mr. Gaumer was a founder of the New
England chapter of the War Resisters League with Joanne Sheehan, Mr.
Sheehan-Gaumer's mother.

The couple had their first real date on Valentine's Day 2010. They
went to Brooklyn Bowl in Williamsburg, but mostly talked. "She's
smart, she knows herself, she has a ridiculous vocabulary," he said.
"She can out-talk most people in any debate simply by using words no
one else can understand."

He described their chemistry as "off the charts."

On their next few dates, they took long walks around New York. She was
always amazed by the quirky things he pointed out. He brought her to a
cemetery on the Lower East Side, for instance, just to show her the
peculiar name - Preserved Fish - of a person buried there.

"I wanted to dig into this new life I'd planned for myself at the
Catholic Worker," Ms. Berrigan said. "But from the beginning, Patrick
was just so solid and forthright and honest and a lot of fun. Those
qualities just overwhelmed me."

Occasionally, Rosena joined them on their outings. "Falling in love
with Patrick also meant falling in love with Rosena, and falling in
love with a family," Ms. Berrigan said. "That was really easy."

Still, their courtship was slow and old-fashioned in many ways. They
saw each other only on weekends. He wasn't allowed in her room at the
Catholic Worker. They rarely talked on the phone. They communicated via
handwritten letters and packages.

"Every week, I'd get a very tiny envelope in the mail, an old love
card," she said. "He probably got them at a flea market." She added:
"One time, he sent me a bag of couscous. It was from Turkey, and it
was called Frida couscous. I just got this sense, 'Wow, he's out there
in the world thinking about me.' "

Soon, they wanted to spend all of their time together.

"From very early on," she said, "I would look at him and think: This
is someone I want a family with. This is a person I want to grow old
with. This is the person I want to struggle with."

After four months of dating, he formally proposed to her in his own
informal way. "I said, 'I don't have a ring, I don't have a plan, but
I want to marry you,' " he remembered.

She recalled: "I said yes because Patrick makes me feel really happy
and safe and inspired all at the same time. I said yes because I learn
a lot from him, and not just about the Red Sox." She also said yes
because he never tried to take her out to big fancy dinners or buy her
expensive things.

"Part of our vows to one another is wanting freedom, and part of being
free is living simply and not being encumbered by stuff," said Ms.
Berrigan, who moved in with Mr. Sheehan-Gaumer last November. "That is
something I learned from my family. You really don't need a lot of
stuff to be happy."

They definitely do not own a lot of stuff. They bought furniture from
the Salvation Army and Craigslist. "Our couch was 40-something
dollars, which was actually more than I wanted to pay," Mr.
Sheehan-Gaumer said. "I was looking for a $25 couch." They do not have
a TV. They buy food from the "get rid of it" discount bin at the
supermarket. They purposely keep their incomes below taxable level so
they do not "give money to the Pentagon," Mr. Sheehan-Gaumer said.

Ms. Berrigan now mainly works with Witness Against Torture, a
loose-knit group of volunteers trying to shut down the military prison
in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. She continues to practice Catholicism; he is
agnostic.

They wrote their own vows and said them twice, in two very different
ceremonies. The first was a big, communal "union party," as they
called it, on June 11 at Camp Happyland in Prince William Forest Park
near Manassas, Va. The weekend-long celebration emphasized simplicity,
frugality, peace and chores. Three hundred friends and family members
pitched in, cooking meals and decorating the pavilion where the
wedding took place with sunflowers, Christmas lights and strings of
paper peace cranes.

Their second ceremony, the official one, happened on June 27 at All
Souls Unitarian Universalist Congregation in New London, Conn. The
bride wore a long gray dress, a short veil pinned to the top of her
head, evoking the look of a nun, and a necklace that was so simple it
was practically invisible. The bridegroom, who wore a $10 three-piece
suit he found at the Salvation Army, said to Ms. Berrigan, "I feel so
lucky, so privileged and ridiculously happy to have your love." There
were no guests, just their friend and officiant, the Rev. Carolyn
Patierno, pastor of the church.

About their future, Ms. Berrigan said: "I have a sense there's nothing
we can't do together. Except shut down Guantánamo or end war. If
you're going to be involved in seemingly futile undertakings, you
might as well do it with someone you love."

Susan Brennan's "Poets Against the War"/from SPLIT THIS ROCK

2011-07-21T08:00:00.000-04:00

Poets Against the War

We stand at the Capitol
seized in snapshots
of curious tourists

our rumpled posters reflect
in an officer's shades as he speaks
so softly it surprises me

asking us to step off the sidewalk
his voice as a shepherd beckons
his flock, his accent sunned in Southern

syllables. Maybe "sheep" is not the most
desirable metaphor for human protestors
but clumped with the others I let go

of my small life to be a cluster
warmed by fellow shoulders
our faces a brief constellation of togetherness.

In the February chill as the Capitol
glows lunar behind us, our silence
mushrooms into a vortex

a great ear hinged to the cold skull of the sky.
Poets, watchers, news camera, officers,
residents hurrying by on their cells, callers

on the other end of those phones -- pinched
together in an irrevocable clay.
From the far end of Lafayette Park a drove

of starlings twists and wheels
silver flash under wings, black top feathers
sweep the space between us and the sun

as if to clean the sky
of blood and bone wind-born.
I'm not listening to the birds now clamped

to a single tree top, chattering whether
to stay or move on; I'm not listening to the listening,
the fruit of silence; I'm not listening to the deaf bell

stamping its hard thick notes to the downward wind --
I'm listening to the war. To its silence.
It sounds like peace, it sounds like rest;

but it is hollow, it is the whole endless groan
of mothers who have lost their motherhood.

- Susan Brennan
Used by permission.

Susan Brennan's poems appear in various publications. Her manuscript, Sweet Demons has been nominated as a finalist for several book awards. Vegas,a film she co-wrote, premiered in competition at the Venice and Tribeca Film Festivals.Her script for the web series Verse, a poetry murder mystery was awarded first place at the LA Webfest for dramatic script. She received her MFA in Poetry at NYU and is a yoga teacher. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband Ed.

Brennan was on the panels The Yogic Path to Poetry and Off the Page and Into the Streets - Reports From the Field at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness 2008 and attended 2010.

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!

Split This Rock
www.splitthisrock.org
info@splitthisrock.org
202-787-5210

Support Split This Rock

Please support Split This Rock, the national network of activist poets. Donations are fully tax-deductible.

Click here to donate. Or send a check payable to "Split This Rock" to: Split This Rock, c/o Institute for Policy Studies, 1112 16th Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20036. Many thanks!

Contact info@splitthisrock.org for more details or to become a sponsor.

The Perils of Drone Attacks, and Noor Behram's Documentary Photography

2011-07-20T06:50:00.000-04:00

I've written elsewhere about the perils of drone attacks as war policy, and this recent article in the Guardian corroborates the collateral damage from drones is far worse than has been reported. Noor Behram is doing the documentary work that uncovers what governments would rather hide:

For the past three years, Noor Behram has hurried to the site of drone strikes in his native Waziristan. His purpose: to photograph and document the impact of missiles controlled by a joystick thousands of miles away, on US air force bases in Nevada and elsewhere. The drones are America's only weapon for hunting al-Qaida and the Taliban in what is supposed to be the most dangerous place in the world.

Sometimes arriving on the scene just minutes after the explosion, he first has to put his camera aside and start digging through the debris to see if there are any survivors. It's dangerous, unpleasant work. The drones frequently hit the same place again, a few minutes after the first strike, so looking for the injured is risky. There are other dangers too: militants and locals are suspicious of anyone with a camera. After all, it is a local network of spies working for the CIA that are directing the drone strikes.

But Noor Behram says his painstaking work has uncovered an important – and unreported – truth about the US drone campaign in Pakistan's tribal region: that far more civilians are being injured or dying than the Americans and Pakistanis admit. The world's media quickly reports on how many militants were killed in each strike. But reporters don't go to the spot, relying on unnamed Pakistani intelligence officials. Noor Behram believes you have to go to the spot to figure out whether those killed were really extremists or ordinary people living in Waziristan. And he's in no doubt.

"For every 10 to 15 people killed, maybe they get one militant," he said. "I don't go to count how many Taliban are killed. I go to count how many children, women, innocent people, are killed."

The drone strikes are a secret programme run by the CIA to assassinate al-Qaida and Taliban extremists using remote, wild Waziristan as a refuge. The CIA does not comment on drones, but privately claims civilian casualties are rare.

The Guardian was unable to independently verify the photographs. Noor Behram's account of taking the pictures appeared detailed and consistent however. Other anecdotal evidence from Waziristan is conflicting: some insist the drones are accurate, while others strongly disagree.

According to Noor Behram, the strikes not only kill the innocent but injure untold numbers and radicalise the population. "There are just pieces of flesh lying around after a strike. You can't find bodies. So the locals pick up the flesh and curse America. They say that America is killing us inside our own country, inside our own homes, and only because we are Muslims.

"The youth in the area surrounding a strike gets crazed. Hatred builds up inside those who have seen a drone attack. The Americans think it is working, but the damage they're doing is far greater."

Even when the drones hit the right compound, the force of the blast is such that neighbours' houses, often made of baked mud, are also demolished, crushing those inside, said Noor Behram. One of the photographs shows a tangle of debris he said were the remains of five houses blitzed together.

The photographs make for difficult viewing and leave no doubt about the destructive power of the Hellfire missiles unleashed: a boy with the top of his head missing, a severed hand, flattened houses, the parents of children killed in a strike. The chassis is all that remains of a car in one photo, another shows the funeral of a seven-year-old child. There are pictures, too, of the cheap rubber flip-flops worn by children and adults, which often survive: signs that life once existed there. A 10-year-old boy's body, prepared for burial, shows lipstick on him and flowers in his hair – a mother's last loving touch.

There are photos of burned and battered Qur'ans – but no pictures of women: the conservative culture in Waziristan will not allow Noor Behram to photograph the women, even dead and dismembered. So he makes do with documenting shredded pieces of women's clothing.

The jagged terrain, the often isolated location of strikes, curfews and the presence of Taliban, all mean that it is a major challenge to get to the site of a drone strike. Noor Behram has managed to reach 60, in both North and South Waziristan, in which he estimates more than 600 people were killed. An exhibition of his work, at London's Beaconsfield gallery opening on Tuesday, features pictures from 27 different drone strikes. Clive Stafford Smith, head of Reprieve, the campaigning group, has launched a lawsuit along with a Pakistani lawyer, Shahzad Akbar, seeking to bring to justice those responsible for civilian deaths from drones. "I think these pictures are deeply important evidence," said Stafford Smith. "They put a human face [on the drone strike campaign] that is in marked contrast to what the US is suggesting its operators in Nevada and elsewhere are doing. "They show the reality of ordinary people being killed and losing their homes, not senior al-Qaida members."
[...]

"To World War Two" by Kenneth Koch

2011-07-15T14:48:00.000-04:00

To World War Two

by Kenneth Koch

Early on you introduced me to young women in bars
You were large, and with a large hand
You presented them in different cities,
Made me in San Luis Obispo, drunk
On French seventy-fives, in Los Angeles, on pousse-cafe's.
It was a time of general confusion
Of being a body hurled at a wall.
I didn't do much fighting. I sat, rather I stood, in a foxhole.
I stood while the typhoon splashed us into morning.
It felt unusual
Even if for a good cause
To be part of a destructive force
With my rifle in my hands
And in my head
My serial number
The entire object of my existence
To eliminate Japanese soldiers
By killing them
With a rifle or with a grenade
And then, many years after that,
I could write poetry
Fall in love
And have a daughter
And think about these things
From a great distance
If I survived
I was "paying my debt
To society" a paid
Killer. It wasn't
Like anything I'd done
Before, on the paved
Streets of Cincinatti
Or on the ballroom floor
At Mr. Vathe's dancing class
What would Anne Marie Goldsmith
Have thought of me
If instead of asking her to dance
I had put my BAR to my shoulder
And shot her in the face
I thought about her in my foxhole--
One, in a foxhole near me, has his throat cut during the night
We take precautions but it is night and it is you.
The typhoon continues and so do you.
"I can't be killed--because of my poetry. I have to live on in order to write it."
I thought--even crazier thought, or just as crazy--
"If I'm killed while thinking of lines, it will be too corny
When it's reported" (I imagined it would be reported!)
So I kept thinking of lines of poetry. One that came to me on the beach on
Leyte
Was "The surf comes in like masochistic lions."
I loved this terrible line. It was keeping me alive. My Uncle Leo wrote to me,
"You won't believe this, but some day you may wish
You were footloose and twenty on Leyte again." I have never wanted
To be on Leyte again,
With you, whispering into my ear,
"Go on and win me! Tomorrow you might not be alive,
So do it today!" How could anyone win you?
You were too much for me, though I
Was older than you were and in camouflage. But for you
Who threw everything together, and had all the systems
Working for you all the time, this was trivial. If you could use me
You'd use me, and then forget. How else
Did I think you'd behave?
I'm glad you ended. I'm glad I didn't die. Or lose my mind.
As machines make ice
We made dead enemy soldiers, in
Dark jungle alleys, with weapons in our hands
That produced fire and kept going straight through
I was carrying one,
I who had gone about for years as a child
Praying God don't let there be another war
Or if there is, don't let me be in it. Well, I was in you.
All you cared about was existing and being won.
You died of a bomb blast in Nagasaki, and there were parades.

Slavoj Zizek and Julian Assange on Democracy Now!

2011-07-06T14:34:00.000-04:00

Thanks to Frank Sherlock for posting this elsewhere. The anarchism of WikiLeaks has continued to cause much wringing of hands, and deserves much further debate; simply on the level of cultural phenomenon, WikiLeaks appears, on the one hand, to be a symptom of the dangers of increasing digital information flow, and, on the other, a poisonous antidote to the National Secrecy State, in which post-9/11, securitization has meant declining transparency in government.

The Obama Doctrine: Finding the Middle Quagmire

2011-06-27T12:26:00.001-04:00

Northern Ireland, Part 2: Tweets from the Journey to Peace

2011-06-24T14:06:00.001-04:00

Northern Ireland, Part 2: Tweets from the Journey to Peace

There was a time when Palestinian and Israeli flags were ubiquitous in Belfast, with Catholic Republicans flying the Palestinian, and Protestant Unionists the Israeli. When an Israeli filmmaker knocked on the doors of a Unionist and asked why he was flying the Israeli flag, he shrugged and said, "I have that flag because it bothers them (Catholics) over there."

Wherever there are trees, the blackbird's song.

I am ashamed to say I barely knew the existence of John Hume before I arrived in Northern Ireland. Was he the least known figure in the Northern Ireland Peace Process? Despite racism and violence, Hume held to nonviolence: "Difference is of the essence of humanity. Difference is an accident of birth and it should therefore never be the source of hatred or conflict. The answer to difference is to respect it. Therein lies a most fundamental principle of peace: respect for diversity."

"The night can sweat with terror as before/We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,/And planned to bring the world under a rule,/Who are but weasels fighting in a hole." W.B. Yeats

A wee something going on in my neck of the woods; one hundred "loyalists" in balaclavas hurling stones over the wall against their mirrors. I won't be going anywhere near the interfaces on East Belfast tonight.

Later, our driver to Derry recounts that he lives in the Short Strand, the Catholic enclave in East Belfast, and was hit by something thrown over the wall, ended up with seven staples in his head. "I woke up in an ambulance."

The legendary Baroness May Blood, on Northern Ireland: "I liken it to cosmetic surgery. We have changed the appearance of the place, but we haven't dealt with the underlying problem."

First smell, upon arrival into Belfast, was manure, from nearby fields somewhere we couldn't see.

I never thought I would say this, but the riot police in Northern Ireland use Gandhian methods of nonviolence to keep sectarian mobs from assaulting each other. Peace-keeping, indeed.

A former IRA killer: "every day I pass the pass I shot the British soldier, it's just up the street there, I cross myself and pray for his family."

A former UDA killer, after talking with the other side, gets questioned about it by his own. His reply: "What's the craic? His blood is red, just like yours."

A girl from Donegal, in a Derry mall, recommends a sight to see. It has nothing to do with any bloody history.

The curator of the Museum of Free Derry, whose brother was killed on Bloody Sunday, and who once said that he'll "never forgive the bloody British bastards," was oddly at peace, after the Saville Commission report vindicated his brother's innocence.

I heard a gunshot from my behind, and I felt a pain in my temple and my eyes started to fill up with blood, and I thought, if I can only keep my eyes open, I'll live.

"I am content to live it all again,/And yet again."

I am content to live it all again,/And yet again.

First Week in Belfast on Peacebuilding Tour

2011-06-20T02:11:00.001-04:00

I'm leading a John Carroll University course trip, with Rich Clark, on peacebuilding in Northern Ireland. While I intended to write extensively on the blog, I've been juggling logistical planning, reading Heaney and Yeats, and gathering private impressions--far too much, even to cohere into something like a blog post.

I've been reduced to twitter-sized facebook updates, the first week of which I'll repost here, with some images from the trip as soon as I can upload them.

On the first day in Belfast, we walked around town, ending up in a great glass-domed mall, replete with KFCs, i-Pad stores, and the same historically-barren capitalist spaces of my youth. On day two, having seen the 50 foot Peace Walls and sectarian neighborhoods, I thought, at least the mall is a space where kids can go and not see murals praising men with guns.

On day three, it was simply wondrous to watch former IRA gunmen sit across the assembly from Protestant Ulster "enemies" in Stormont Assembly, talking in civil tones, conducting the business of governing. That said, the Sinn Fein reps can't help but begin each statement with a little Gaelic Irish....

A day after we talked about Franz Fanon in our Northern Ireland discussion group and "The Wretched of the Earth," our former-IRA tour guide name-dropped Fanon and "Wretched" twice as a text they'd read in prison. Turns out that most postcolonial reading lists have an intriguing similarity to the IRA prison reading list....

Along the way, we've been meeting with peacemakers and peacebuilders, from Ed Peterson (Clonard Monastery) to Rory O'Neil (Peace Players International) to Bill Shaw (174 Trust). Rory O'Neil, a graduate of John Carroll and alum of the first version of this trip in 2004, now uses basketball to bring together children whose parents are "enemies", helping the next generation to see the other as a friend, not a target. http://www.peaceplayersintl.org/

A fella named Pat at the bar downtown Belfast had a tattoo of Che Guevara on his forearm, said "I could tell you stories [about the Troubles] that would make your skin crawl" but that he was so happy they were over, so his kids could have a future that he could not.

"Did you want to kill him, Buck?"

"Well, I bet I did."
"What did he do to you?"
"Him? He never done nothing to me."
"Well, then, what did you want to kill him for?"
"Why, nothing -- only it's on account of the feud."
"What's a feud?"
"Why, where was you raised? Don't you know what a feud is?"
"Never heard of it before -- tell me about it."
"Well," says Buck, "a feud is this way: A man has a quarrel with another man, and kills him; then that other man's brother kills HIM; then the other brothers, on both sides, goes for one another; then the COUSINS chip in -- and by and by everybody's killed off, and there ain't no more feud. But it's kind of slow, and takes a long time." From *Huckleberry Finn*, shout out to Rory O'Neil

The legendary Tommy Sands, on Northern Ireland: "it was said that for every solution, we had a problem. Perhaps now we have some of the solutions to some of the problems."

Despite all the hilarity at Benedict's Bar in Belfast--the drinking and dancing and strobe lights coloring everything, the parade of hen (bachelorette) parties with their angel wings and leopardskin dresses and inflateable penises--the wait staff still makes the rounds, eyeing the tables and floors for what may be suspect devices.

.

Voices in Wartime featured poet is some guy named Metres

2011-06-10T13:12:00.001-04:00

Thanks to Voices in Wartime, not only for the book and documentary, but also for featuring some of my poems today on their blog!

Robin Coste Lewis' "Verga"

2011-06-08T12:05:00.000-04:00

It just so happens to be Torture Awareness Month; I know, it's not in your calendar. Look under: "enhanced interrogation month," and it might show up.

Verga

"...women don't want the men to go into the
bush because the women will only be raped but
the men will be killed...I have seen a woman
who was caught in the bush by several men.
They tied her legs to two trees while she was
standing. They raped her many times and before
leaving her they put stones in her vagina..."

Abshiro Aden Mohammed, Kenya, 2000
Dagahaley Somali Refugee Camp
from A Camel for the Son,
by Fazal Sheik

Before leaving her they put stones in her vagina
The men will only be raped but the stones will be killed
The bush caught many men to go into the stones
The stones will be killed by several trees before leaving
The bush tied the men to the trees in their vaginas
Before bush go to trees they kill many stones
Many men will be caught by the trees in the bush
Several trees will be raped by the bush and killed
Only the caught men will be stoned and bushed by the .....trees
Several men were caught by the trees before leaving
The men will be killed but the stones will only be treed
The stones put many trees into the men's killed vaginas
By the bush, the trees were raped only several times
Before leaving, the vaginas were seen standing in the .....stones

-Robin Coste Lewis
Used by permission.

Robin Coste Lewis' work has appeared in various journals, including The Massachusetts Review, Callaloo, The Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review, GCN, The Pocket Myth Series, and anthologized in Black Silk and The Encyclopedia Project, F-K. She was a finalist for both the War Poetry Prize in 2010, and the National Rita Dove Prize iin 2004. A graduate of Harvard's Divinity School, where she received a Master's of Theological Studies degree in Sanskrit and comparative religious literature, Lewis was the Samuel Valentine Cole Professor of Creative Writing at Wheaton College and Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Hampshire College. She has been awarded residencies and fellowships by the Caldera Foundation, the Ragdale Foundation, the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Can Serrat International Art Centre in Barcelona and the Summer Literary Seminars in Kenya. Recently, she was awarded a Goldwater Fellowship by NYU's Creative Writing Program in Poetry. Born in Compton, California, her family is from New Orleans.

Lewis was on the panel The Poet as Historian in the 21st Century: A Rare Opportunity in Difficult Times at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness 2010.

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!

Split This Rock
http://www.splitthisrock.org/
info@splitthisrock.org
202-787-5210

Kriyayoga Seminar on Truth and Nonviolence (Cleveland Area)

2011-06-08T12:02:00.000-04:00

From Scott Lynch: you are warmly invited along with your family, co-workers, and friends to the 2011 Kriyayoga Seminar, June 15-22 in nearby Euclid, Ohio. All classes are free of charge. Pre-registration is requested but not required. Please contact us for registration requests or to answer any questions...

Because we are a local non-profit, our program is spread almost exclusively by word of mouth, so please pass this on to other friends and organizations...

My Fellow Americans, Is There a Muslim in the House?

2011-06-07T14:01:00.000-04:00

Time to widen the frame.

Our new translations of Arseny Tarkovsky in Poetry Magazine

2011-06-03T11:48:00.000-04:00

Thanks to the great poet Arseny Tarkovsky, and my co-translator Dimitri Psurtsev, for making these poems happen.

Here's the opening of the essay on the translation:

Perhaps all translations are Frankenstein’s monsters. The main question then becomes: is the creature alive? We know that translations, like the monster, are a grab bag of other organs and skin, stolen from the graveyards of other traditions whose sensibilities are not always our own, grafted together into something that approximates a whole. But has the translator provided the lightning rod, gathered the electricity? In the end, does it breathe?

read more...

"Laundry" by Alicia Ostriker: another installment of SPLIT THIS ROCK

2011-06-02T11:25:00.000-04:00

LAUNDRY

Just finished folding laundry. There's the news. A slender prisoner, ankles shackled, nude back and legs striped by a brown substance you might take for blood but which probably is feces, hair long, arms extended at shoulder level like a dancer or like Jesus, walks toward a soldier with rolled-up pants and a gun, posed legs akimbo in the tiled corridor. I cannot say from the image if the soldier is smiling, too few pixels to tell. Barely do the prisoner's elegant feet touch the floor. In another nude photograph a prisoner with shorter hair cowers against a wall while two dogs whose leashes are held by soldiers examine him. I cannot say from the photograph if the dogs are snarling or drooling. And in this one a girl soldier holds the leash, which leads to the neck of a prisoner lying on concrete.

Oil oozes a mile or two underground. Like sand, it was once alive.

In another photo the nude prisoners have been formed into a pyramid. They look like something in the back of a butcher shop. A stack of magnified calves' livers. Now the girl soldier leaning over a bleeding prisoner--are those dog bites--gives the thumbs' up sign and smiles her toothy wholesome Homecoming Queen smile, a smile descended from a Good Housekeeping cover, twinkle twinkle little... Oil oozes a mile or so underground. Atop it stands a palace of air conditioning. Somewhere in the green zone is a swimming pool for the officers, its water chemically purified. Stagnant waters are also good--to the flies. As is blood. A fly's life there would be prosperous. I put away the laundry. I put my nose in the laundry, it smells warm and well. My husband's underpants and undershirts I lay in his dresser drawer. In my dresser drawer go my underpants and t-shirts.

The correct word is not prisoner. The correct word is detainee.

Speaking of correctness, some other terms have lately come into play: hooding, waterboarding, rendition. The bleaching of the news. The rinsing and spinning. Some of the laundry items are not quite dry, a knit sweater of mine, a flannel of his. I hang them on plastic hangers in the bathroom. The bathroom is tiled in white, the tub is tourmaline. Above our twin sinks hangs a large flat mirror in which we are obliged to see ourselves each day, and on the opposite wall, that is to say behind us when we stand at the sink, a Rodin watercolor sketch depicts a semi-nude woman in some sort of peach diaphanous garment, seated, holding one pink knee in her hands, her shaven pubes showing, the lines at once easy, comfortable, and elegant. The correct word is detainee. The sweaters hang patiently. The mirror ponders a rebuke.

-Alicia Ostriker
Used by permission.

Alicia Ostriker is a major American poet and critic. Twice nominated for a National Book Award, she is author of twelve volumes of poetry, most recently The Book of Seventy (2009), which won the Jewish Book Award for Poetry. Ostriker's poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Antaeus, The Nation, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, The Atlantic, MS, Tikkun, and many other journals, and have been widely anthologized. She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Society of America, the San Francisco State Poetry Center, the Judah Magnes Museum, the New Jersey Arts Council, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Ostriker lives in Princeton, NJ with her husband and is Professor Emerita of Rutgers University and a faculty member of the New England College Low-Residency Poetry MFA Program.

Ostriker was a featured poet at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witnes 2008 and on the panels Fire & Ink: A Social Action Writing Anthology, and the Rewards of Teaching Activist Writing and Birth and the Politics of Motherhood in Poetry at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness 2010.

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!

Split This Rock
http://www.splitthisrock.org/
info@splitthisrock.org
202-787-5210

"Ballad of the Poverties" by Adrienne Rich

2011-06-01T10:19:00.000-04:00

"Ballad of the Poverties" by Adrienne Rich

There’s the poverty of the cockroach kingdom and the rusted toilet bowl
The poverty of to steal food for the first time
The poverty of to mouth a penis for a paycheck
The poverty of sweet charity ladling
Soup for the poor who must always be there for that
There’s the poverty of theory poverty of the swollen belly shamed
Poverty of the diploma mill the ballot that goes nowhere
Princes of predation let me tell you
There are poverties and there are poverties

There’s the poverty of cheap luggage bursted open at immigration
The poverty of the turned head, the averted eyes
The poverty of bored sex of tormented sex
The poverty of the bounced check the poverty of the dumpster dive
The poverty of the pawned horn the poverty of the smashed reading glasses
The poverty pushing the sheeted gurney the poverty cleaning up the puke
The poverty of the pavement artist the poverty passed-out on pavement
Princes of finance you who have not lain there
There are poverties and there are poverties

There is the poverty of hand-to-mouth and door-to-door
And the poverty of stories patched-up to sell there
There’s the poverty of the child thumbing the Interstate
And the poverty of the bride enlisting for war
There’s the poverty of prescriptions who can afford
And the poverty of how would you ever end it
There is the poverty of stones fisted in pocket
And the poverty of the village bulldozed to rubble
Princes of weaponry who have not ever tasted war
There are poverties and there are poverties

There’s the poverty of wages wired for the funeral you
Can’t get to the poverty of the salary cut
There’s the poverty of human labor offered silently on the curb
The poverty of the no-contact prison visit
There’s the poverty of yard sale scrapings spread
And rejected the poverty of eviction, wedding bed out on street
Prince let me tell you who will never learn through words
There are poverties and there are poverties

You who travel by private jet like a housefly
Buzzing with the other flies of plundered poverties
Princes and courtiers who will never learn through words
Here’s a mirror you can look into: take it: it’s yours.

----------------------------------------------------

for Jim and Arlene Scully
with gratitude to François Villon and to Galway Kinnell
first appeared in Monthly Review
from Adrienne Rich's recent book Tonight No Poetry Will Serve

purchase here

Remembering after Memorial Day

2011-05-31T08:00:00.000-04:00

Shara McCallum's "History is a Room": Widening the Frame of Memorial Day

2011-05-30T16:38:00.000-04:00

I first discovered Shara McCallum's poetry while co-editing the anthology, Come Together: Imagine Peace. Her "The Story So Far" was stark and vivid enough to lead off the "witness" section of the book. Her "History is a Room" explores that odd awareness we have, in imperial America, of our privilege and dislocation, our protection and vulnerability, on the "homefront." What better poem to dilate our sense of what to memorialize on this Memorial Day--not just the soldiers who've fought in wars, but the civilians who've engaged in their own battles to reclaim rights and dignity at home and abroad.

History is a Room

The study of History is the study of Empire.
—Niall Ferguson

I cannot enter.

To enter that room, I would need to be a man who makes History, not a girl to whom History happened.

Mother to two daughters, I guard their lives with hope, a pinch of salt I throw over my shoulder.

To enter that room, I would need to wield a gun.

Here, I brandish weapons that serve an art my mother and grandmother knew: how to make of plantain and eggs a meal.

To enter that room, I would need to live in the past, to understand how power is amassed, eclipsing the sun.

Beneath my children's beds, I scatter grains of rice to keep duppy at bay.

To enter that room, I would need to live in the present: This election. This war.

Beneath my children's pillows, I place worry dolls to ensure their peaceful sleep.

To enter that room, I would need to bridge the distance between my door and what lies beyond.

Standing in my foyer at dusk, I ask the sea to fill the crevices of this house with its breath.

History is recounted by the dead, returned from their graves to walk in shriveled skins.

In our yard, I watch my daughters run with arms papering the wind.

History is recounted by children in nursery rhymes, beauty masking its own violence.

In my kitchen, I peel an orange, try to forget my thumb must wrest the pulp from its rind.

History is recounted in The Book of Explanations: AK-47 begat UZI, which begat M-16 ... and all the days of their lives were long.

Pausing at the sink, I think of how a pepper might be cut, blade handled so the knife becomes the fruit slit open, its seeds laid bare.

History is recounted in The Book of Beginnings: the storey of a people born of forgetting.

In our yard, I name the world for my children—praying mantis, robin's egg, maple leaf—words for lives they bring me in their palms.

To enter that room, I would need to look into the mirror of language, see in collateral damage the faces of the dead.

In our yard, I sow seeds, planting myself in this soil.

To enter that room, I would need to uncover the pattern of a life woven onto some master loom.

Here, I set the table, sweep the floor, make deals with the god of small things.

To enter that room, I would need to be armed with the right question: is History the start of evening or dawn returning the swallow to the sky?

Here, I light candles at nightfall, believe the match waits to be struck.

Shara McCallum
This Strange Land
Alice James Books
thanks to Poetry Daily for reprinting this poem.

Rae Abileah Disrupts the Fantasy

2011-05-26T14:54:00.000-04:00

from Amy Goodman's introduction to Rae Abileah:
AMY GOODMAN: Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech was warmly received by Democrats and Republicans in Congress. According to ABC News, Netanyahu received 29 standing ovations during his address, four more than President Obama received during his State of the Union earlier this year. However, there was at least one dissenting voice inside the halls of Congress Tuesday...

....

RAE ABILEAH: I just wanted to say that the people that were sitting around me in the gallery of Congress yesterday were mostly wearing badges from the AIPAC Israel lobby conference. And I did not expect that people holding such power and representing such a huge lobby group would respond so violently to my peaceful disruption. And after I spoke out, Netanyahu said, you know, "This is what’s possible in a democracy. And you wouldn’t be able to get away with this in other countries like Tunisia." And I think that is ridiculous and absurd. If this is what democracy looks like, that when you speak out for freedom and justice, you get tackled to the ground, you get physically violated and assaulted, and then you get hauled off to jail, that’s not the kind of democracy that I think I want to live in.

Read more from this courageous woman.

"Literature and Uprising": My Interview on Kenyon Review Online

2011-05-25T12:02:00.000-04:00

Here's a recent interview I did with Hilary Plum for Kenyon Review Online on the recent uprisings in the Arab world.

Dara O'Briain: "Stop, You're Killing Me"

2011-05-25T11:57:00.000-04:00

A bit of humor in advance of our visit to Northern Ireland.

Interrogating Your Torturer (Argentina)

2011-05-25T11:55:00.000-04:00

This is the amazing story of a formerly-tortured victim who confronts his torturer: "I offer you total redemption."

Muriel Rukeyser's "Elegy in Joy"

2011-05-16T10:53:00.000-04:00

This weekend, I happened to read Muriel Rukeyser's "Poem" which begins "I lived in the first century of world wars" at a Peace Show fundraiser. When this poem came over the email from the Academy of American Poets (due props), I thought that I could have just as well read this one. Rukeyser was one of those poets whose fierce opposition to war and her progressive social politics was always articulated in a vision of "the love that gives us ourselves." In that way, she avoided the blood-lust of so much anti-war and anti-capitalist verse of the time (not to mention our time). Even if some of her lines wobble a bit, she seems to snap our attention back with a kind of mystic attention.

Elegy in Joy [excerpt]
by Muriel Rukeyser

We tell beginnings: for the flesh and the answer,
or the look, the lake in the eye that knows,
for the despair that flows down in widest rivers,
cloud of home; and also the green tree of grace,
all in the leaf, in the love that gives us ourselves.

The word of nourishment passes through the women,
soldiers and orchards rooted in constellations,
white towers, eyes of children:
saying in time of war What shall we feed?
I cannot say the end.

Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings.
Not all things are blest, but the
seeds of all things are blest.
The blessing is in the seed.

This moment, this seed, this wave of the sea, this look, this instant of love.
Years over wars and an imagining of peace. Or the expiation journey
toward peace which is many wishes flaming together,
fierce pure life, the many-living home.
Love that gives us ourselves, in the world known to all
new techniques for the healing of the wound,
and the unknown world. One life, or the faring stars.

This poem is from Birds, Beasts, and Seas: Nature Poems, published by New Directions. Reprinted with permission. Click here to purchase book.

Nathan Deuel in Beirut, "Beirut, After Osama"

2011-05-14T08:40:00.000-04:00

Journalist (and my friend) Nathan Deuel, in Beirut, on hearing about the death of Osama bin Laden.

The other day I ventured out into the sun-drenched city of Beirut, where I saw cafes and restaurants packed with young people spending money. At a stainless steel table, buff men ate olives. Nearby, two young women in gold shirts talked over a stack of books. One title: Elite Management Training. Down the block, a gleaming red Ferrari rolled by and a transvestite teetered on heels. Osama bin Laden had just been killed...

read more.

From the "The More Things Change" Department: on the "Irvine 11"

2011-05-13T13:23:00.001-04:00

I just learned about the "Irvine 11" case regarding a nonviolent protest of Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren in 2010. What disturbs me the most about this case is the way, yet again, that speech critical of Israel is so frequently branded as "anti-Semitic" and the dissenters punished disproportionately to their civil disobedience. Whether or not you agree with their criticism, these people will not be silenced by character assassination or disproportionate punishment. Nor, I expect, will playwright Tony Kushner, or Roger Waters, or anyone else recently punished by their conscientious critiques of Israel's policies toward Palestinians.

Here's the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee's statement:

ADC Stands with the "Irvine 11"

Washington, DC | www.adc.org | May 11, 2011 - The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) expresses support for the eleven students from the University of California (UC) Irvine and UC Riverside. According to the official website of the group known as the “Irvine 11,” www.irvine11.com, the students peacefully protested the February 8, 2010, speech of Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren at UC Irvine. At the event, the students stood up and made individual statements of dissent; they were thereafter immediately taken into custody. The students did not resist arrest, did not commit any property damage, or engage in violence. Following a year of criminal investigation, including the impaneling of a secretive grand jury, the Orange County District Attorney charged all eleven students with two misdemeanors.

ADC, along with other supporters of the “Irvine 11,” calls for the immediate dismissal of all charges against the students. Furthermore, ADC calls on the Orange County prosecutors handling the charges against the students to be immediately removed from the case based on prosecutorial misconduct due to expressed ethnic and religious prejudices. There is evidence that the prosecutors handling the case acted discriminatorily – calling the students “anti-Semitic,” comparing them to the “Klu Klux Klan,” and even internally labeling the case the “UCI Muslim Case.” Recently, attorneys for the group filed a motion seeking to bar the prosecutors from making any more public statements about the case. The attorneys argue in court filings that prosecutors have violated their clients' rights to a fair trial by making "ethically irresponsible" public statements, including wrongly branding the students anti-Semitic and declaring them guilty.

ADC is a firm believer in the first amendment rights of all individuals – regardless of race, ethnicity or religion. The actions by the Orange County Prosecutor’s office violate the basic fundamental principle of freedom of expression, afforded to the “Irvine 11” students and to all Americans.

ADC will continue to monitor this case. Accordingly, ADC asks the Orange County District Attorney to reconsider the actions of his office, and promptly move to dismiss all the charges against the students who were merely exercising their First Amendment constitutional rights.

###

NOTE TO EDITORS: The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), which is non-profit, non-sectarian and non-partisan, is the largest grassroots Arab-American civil rights and civil liberties organization in the United States. It was founded in 1980 by former Senator James Abourezk. ADC has a national network of chapters and members in all 50 states.

Turns out FOX News needs a course in poetry analysis

2011-05-12T13:53:00.000-04:00

The Daily Show - Tone Def Poetry Jam
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

The Daily Show - Tone Def Poetry Jam - Lyrics Controversy
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Peace Show Fundraiser 2011: Music and Poetry (May 14th, 7pm, St. Paul's Community Church)

2011-05-11T10:18:00.000-04:00

The Cleveland Non-Violence Network presents Music & Words for Peace, a coffeehouse fundraiser for the 10th Annual Labor Day Peace Show, with music by Deborah Van Kleef, Ian Heisey and the Cleveland Hip-Hop Club, and poetry by Kate Sopko, Phil Metres, Kazim Ali, Dianne Borsenik, John Burroughs and Sammy Greenspan. Free will donations accepted at the door. Baked goods & fair trade coffee. Parking on Franklin Boulevard an and adjoining streets. More info: www.clevelandnonviolence.org, 216-932-8546, engagepeace@gmail.com

"I learned the grass as I began to write": the poetry of Arseny Tarkovsky

2011-05-09T11:34:00.000-04:00

Our new translation of Arseny Tarkovsky's "I learned the grass..." is now at Two Lines Online. You can also read my short statement of translating Tarkovsky here.

Speaking of Soviet poetry during an interview toward the end of her life, Anna Akhmatova called Arseny Tarkovsky the one “real poet.” In her words, in 1965, “of all contemporary poets Tarkovsky alone is completely his own self, completely independent. He possesses the most important feature of a poet, which I’d call the birthright . . .” He somehow survived the Soviet Age and all its compromises to create an unforgettable verse.

Here's a beautiful scene from "Mirror," directed by his son, which features Tarkovsky's "First Meetings" poem, just to give you a taste of his music:

John Oliver, Rocking the Faiths

2011-05-06T11:34:00.002-04:00

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Big Mohammed's House

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

The Daily Show on Facebook

"Dear Tiara" by Sean Thomas Dougherty

2011-05-05T10:19:00.000-04:00

Dear Tiara
by Sean Thomas Dougherty

I dreamed I was a mannequin in the pawnshop window
of your conjectures.

I dreamed I was a chant in the mouth of a monk, saffron-robed
syllables in the religion of You.

I dreamed I was a lament to hear the deep sorrow places
of your lungs.

I dreamed I was your bad instincts.

I dreamed I was a hummingbird sipping from the tulip of your ear.

I dreamed I was your ex-boyfriend stored in the basement
with your old baggage.

I dreamed I was a jukebox where every song sang your name.

I dreamed I was in an elevator, rising in the air shaft
of your misgivings.

I dreamed I was a library fine, I've checked you out
too long so many times.

I dreamed you were a lake and I was a little fish leaping
through the thin reeds of your throaty humming.

I must've dreamed I was a nail, because I woke beside you still
hammered.

I dreamed I was a tooth to fill the absences of your old age.

I dreamed I was a Christmas cactus, blooming in the desert
of my stupidity.

I dreamed I was a saint's hair-shirt, sewn with the thread
of your saliva.

I dreamed I was an All Night Movie Theater, showing the
flickering black reel of my nights before I met you.

I must've dreamed I was gravity, I've fallen for you so damn hard.

(thanks to the Academy of American Poets, BOA Editions, and Sean Thomas Dougherty, whose new book, Sasha Sings the Laundry on the Line, is available for purchase)

Sarah Gridley, on her recent book, Green Is the Orator

2011-04-27T18:24:00.000-04:00

Sarah Gridley from CPAC on Vimeo.

Shout-out to Sarah Gridley, one of the keepers of the language.

What's a Literary Festival Without a Little Tear Gas?

2011-04-25T08:00:00.000-04:00

from the "Palestine Festival of Literature" website
PalFest 2011 Closes in Silwan
The 2011 Palestine Festival of Literature closed in Silwan, Jerusalem, last night. It was scheduled to start at 7.30pm, but from around 5.30pm the Israeli Army were in the area, roads had been blocked off and street battles had flared up. Nevertheless, some artists and audience members managed to get to the night's venue - the Silwan Solidarity Tent.

At 7.30pm the Israeli Army fired tear gas at the tent, and everyone inside fled.

But by 8.30pm all the different groups found each other - some had been in the tent, some had been stuck in road blocks - and they all walked back up to the tent and held the event with tear gas hanging in the air and soldiers watching from the hill. The night closed with DAM performing to a packed tent.

Persis Karim's "Other Mothers"

2011-04-16T11:55:00.000-04:00

Other Mothers

Their sons who speak of a cause
As if it were their two feet
beneath them. That they could hold an idea
and a weapon at the same time.

The way they could fool themselves
Into thinking they were pure
And righteous, that the great stories
of God or country could keep them safe.

When my son handed me an Israeli army shirt,
asking me to sew a button on its collar, I knew
my refusal would be the beginning
of a long goodbye, of steeling myself

for an angry boy with an inkling
of manhood, undeterred
by what I said or didn't say.
His determination grew
in his shoulders,
in sharp silences.

I thought of those other mothers--
their sons, who, whether with a gun or a car,
could find the white light of belief
that would sow the seeds
of an incalculable grief.

-Persis Karim
Used by permission.

Persis M. Karim is an associate professor in the Department of English & Comparative Literature at San Jose State University where she teaches world literature, comparative literature and creative writing. She is the editor and contributing poet of Let Me Tell You Where I've Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora (2006) and co-editor of A World Between: Poems, Essays and Short Stories by Iranian Americans (1999).

On March 31, 2010, Persis's stepson Kyle Strang (16) and their neighbor Prentice Gray, Jr. (19) were killed in a car accident. To learn about Kyle and the trip his father, Craig Strang, recently took to Israel and Palestine with thirteen of Kyle's Berkeley High School classmates to honor Kyle's memory, go to thekyletrip.blogspot.com. She can be reached at persisk@yahoo.com.

Karim was on the panel The War is Not Over: Writing About Iraq and the Case of the Mutanabbi Street Coalition and was part of the We Are All Iran group reading by Iranian-American poets at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness 2010.

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Mark Halliday: Yeah, He Has Some Good Clumpies.

2011-04-14T10:48:00.000-04:00

Last night, Jill Rosser and Mark Halliday read to a packed house last night at John Carroll. Both Jill and Mark held us all in thrall. Much laughter.

Here's my introduction of Halliday:

A few zinger lines of Halliday’s always buzz around my brain:

“A beautiful woman is a problem”
“One zucchini does not ask another zucchini for praise.”
“Romance hates democracy.”
“Schnordink? Oh, I suppose he has a few good clumpies.”
“Everybody’s father dies; but/when my father died, it was my father.”

Taken together, they suggest the odd brilliance of Halliday’s work; his psychological investigation of masculinity, his comical goofiness, his love of postmodern fictions and weird language, and, ultimately, his gravitas.

“Everybody’s father dies; but/when my father died, it was my father.”

Some time ago, Mark Halliday interviewed his former teacher Frank Bidart, who said, ‘If what fills your attention are the great works that have been written—Four Quartets and Ulysses and “The Tower” and Life Studies and Howl (yes, Howl) and The Cantos—-nothing left to be done. You couldn’t possibly make anything as inventive or sophisticated or complex. But if you turn from them, and what you look at is your life: NOTHING is figured out; NOTHING is understood…Ulysses doesn’t describe your life. It doesn’t teach you how to lead your life. You don’t know what love is; or hate; or birth, or death; or good; or evil. If what you look at is your life, EVERYTHING remains to be figured out, ordered; EVERYTHING remains to be done’ (232).

Halliday’s work has lived this contradiction. Everyone wants to make Mark Halliday into a New York School poet, a la Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch, two admirable poets whose hip novelty and charm and verve are certainly inherited by Halliday. But it is his immersion in and conversation with the tradition of more Romantically-inflected poets (Frank Bidart, Allan Grossman, even William Wordsworth and Walt Whitman) that Halliday earns his staying power.

Halliday has published five celebrated collections of poetry, including Little Star (1987), selected for the National Poetry Series; Tasker Street (1992), winner of the Juniper Prize; Selfwolf; Jab (2002); and Keep This Forever (2008), and is known for poetry that he has termed “ultra talk”—a kind of talkative, reflexive, hip, self-referential style.

But I like to think of him as the guy who hand-typed a one-page response to each of my grad school workshop poems when he was a visiting professor at Indiana (all of which I kept); who played hoops with us in his Converse high-tops; who expounded on the glories of Bob Dylan; who lifts his eyebrows, shrugs his shoulders, and does a little poochy-pout of the lower lip when he reads; who cleaned out his father’s house in Vermont after he died; who gave me the permission to listen to my own life, and see in it a text worth working on, and writing out. Mark Halliday.

Beyond "Politics" in Political Poetry (some notes for a seminar)

2011-04-12T10:17:00.000-04:00

Beyond "Politics" in Political Poetry (some notes for a seminar)

Though I've been thinking through the complex interactions of poetry and politics for about twenty years now, it was only with the introduction of Apollonaire's "Zone" and the flaneur essay that I went back to the original root of "political"--relating to the polis, the socius, the city, properly. In light of Sarah Gridley's work, and increasingly as I think through the future of political poetry, I'm struck by how reducing the conversation to "political" as human is just the sort of reduction that effaces our common ecological and planetary future.

Second, I've been thinking again about how, in literary criticism and theory, "the political" as a category has been ascendant (at least as an idea, not so much in practice), while in poetry circles and creative writing institutions "the political" remains a deeply problematic and derided category--through which the writer fails to remain independent, or fails to voice the common life, through special-pleading to niche audiences.

The sort of visionary poetics represented by Apollonaire has always been the kind that avoids the brute position papers (agitprop) of the hard (hard-headed?) avant-garde. Yet as a reader and writer, I'm constantly looking for language at the place of change, and thus I don't want to discount any possibilities where language makes something happen, brings unforeseen subjectivities into place, makes a new history visible.

Review of "Instants"

2011-04-11T10:12:00.001-04:00

An anonymous review of my chapbook, Instants (2006). Dear Anon, thank you for this:

Philip Metres’s “Instants” is no exception. The conciseness of the historical, poetic narrative remains intact as Metres challenges literary dominance through this mysterious thriller.

And more thanks are due to Phil Cordelli, the designer at Ugly Duckling Presse, who imaginatively worked through some shared ideas to make a truly stunning little book.

In Memory of Juliano Mer-Khamis, Director "Arna's Children" and the Jenin Freedom Theater

2011-04-08T12:05:00.000-04:00

James Carroll on Religion and Violence

2011-04-07T10:00:00.000-04:00

We've been talking religion, violence, and peacemaking in Northern Ireland lately in my Peace-Building and Conflict Transformation class, and I thought this might cast a slightly different light on the subject. Carroll repudiates what some theorists call "exclusivist" takes on religion, and falls more into the category of "inclusivist" or "pluralist," depending on context.