R.E.M.'s "Talk about the Passion"

Having never seen this video "back in the day," I surprised how political it is; the suturing of the homeless man's plight to the palatial and murderous opulence of the aircraft carrier couldn't be more clear...all this from Michael Stipe, a former "army brat" himself. There is something so rousing about the pulling resonance of that cello solo at the end, so simple and yet so much the objective correlative of a soul bestirred and be-hummed.

"Talk About the Passion"

Empty prayer, empty mouths, combien reaction
Empty prayer, empty mouths, talk about the passion
Not everyone can carry the weight of the world
Not everyone can carry the weight of the world

Talk about the passion
Talk about the passion

Empty prayer, empty mouths, combien reaction
Empty prayer, empty mouths, talk about the passion
Combien, combien, combien de temps?

Not everyone can carry the weight of the world
Not everyone can carry the weight of the world
Combien, combien, combien de temps?

Talk about the passion
Talk about the passion
(repeat)

James Bishop's "Basic Training"/What it Looks Like from Inside

I received a call the other day from Lt. Col. Jim Bishop, who happened to be in the thick of a review of Behind the Lines (the book) for War, Literature & the Arts, a journal located at the Air Force Academy, and we had a good conversation about the book and the issues at stake in my arguments about poetry and war. As soon as I learned who he was, and that he was a member of the Armed Services, I immediately anticipated a harsh critique of any number of aspects of the book (the lack of discussion of soldier and veteran poets, the persistent critiques of the U.S. conduct of war, etc.), but Jim was gracious in ways that surprised me. It is amazing how different his perspective was from what I imagined, given his profession and his institutional affiliations. Oddly enough, he quoted passages and cited ideas that, if I were in his boots, might irk or outrage me. Jim's demeanor and outlook demonstrated to me how easily my essentializing fantasy of what a soldier "must" think. His poem, "Basic Training," extends this complex portrait of how military people face their fates and the fantasies of others like Langston Hughes' portrait of African-American life...


"Basic Training" by James Bishop


See the colonel.
See the colonel lead the troops.
Call the area to attention when
He walks by, and the dirt
And grass stand tall.
He was going to retire and hike
The Pacific Crest Trail last year.
Maybe next year.
That’s what happens
To a dream deferred.

See the captain.
See the captain yell two inches
From the face of a recruit.
We hear her 100 yards away.
The captain bakes pound cake
With white confectioners glaze
For the staff. She is loud
And harsh and kind
Mixed into one.
That’s what happens
With so many ingredients.

See the lieutenant.
See the lieutenant watching the recruits
Stand where he stood five years ago.
His arms are bigger than my calves
His voice, a paradox of gentle loudness.
When he called a civilian to ask
If she might sponsor a recruit,
He mentioned he played
Football at the Air Force Academy.
“Did you rape anyone?” she asked.
Stunned, he said, “No, I did not.”
That’s what happens
When civilians go to war.

See the recruit.
See the recruit rise at 0500,
Shower in 30 seconds, squeeze in time
To memorize Schofield’s quote,
To hold a thousand details in panicked
Suspension. Curl your fingers at attention,
Touch your middle finger to your eyebrow
When you salute. Promise to die for your
Country if necessary. Lying on concrete,
His legs lifted six inches off the ground
For the last three minutes until he can’t stop
Shaking, the recruit wonders about the violence
That attaches to dreams.
That’s what happens
To the Basics.

R.E.M.'s "World Leader Pretend"

About this song, Michael Stipe once revealed that: "I felt the lyric would actually look good to read, and it does read well - there's words like divine and decree, they all start with a 'D', which is good, and things rhyme,but they don't rhyme too much. I can't remember what it's about... Well, somone's at war with themselves.....Anyway, in World Leader Pretend, that was me copying Leonard Cohen, using something like military terms to get across a very simple human emotion."

But what makes this song more than that imitation of Cohen is that we can read the metaphor back upon the actual World Leaders, and question to what degree they themselves have engaged in self-struggle, to what degree they have walled themselves out of the realities around them.

"World Leader Pretend" by R.E.M.

I sit at my table and wage war on myself
It seems like it's all, it's all for nothing
I know the barricades, and
I know the mortar in the wall breaks
I recognize the weapons, I used them well

This is my mistake. Let me make it good
I raised the wall and I will be the one to knock it down

I've a rich understanding of my finest defenses
I proclaim that claims are left unstated,
I demand a rematch
I decree a stalemate
I divine my deeper motives
I recognize the weapons
I've practiced them well. I fitted them myself

(chorus)
It's amazing what devices you can sympathize, empathize
This is my mistake. Let me make it good
I raised the wall and I will be the one to knock it down

Reach out for me and hold me tight. Hold that memory
Let my machine talk to me, let my machine talk to me

This is my world
And I am world leader pretend
This is my life
And this is my time
I have been given the freedom
To do as I see fit
It's high time I've razed the walls
That I've constructed

(repeat chorus)

You fill in the mortar. You fill in the harmony
You fill in the mortar. I raised the wall
And I'm the only one
I will be the one to knock it down

Husker Du's "Divide and Conquer"

A bit of agitprop from one of the fastest bands who never lost their minds to speed (in both senses of the term). "Divide and Conquer" looks a bit like Rush's "Subdivisions," but it's hard to imagine Neal Peart coming up with the line: "and longitude, longing to find out/just what they're missing." In its politics of division, it may be firmly located in the mid-1980s anxieties over how globalization appeared to spell the death-knell of dissenting movements.

Yet it also hearkens back to the old idea of how modern societies, in their increasing stratification, cause people to lose sight of their connectedness. Emerson put it this way in "The American Scholar":

It is one of those fables, which, out of an unknown antiquity, convey an unlooked-for wisdom, that the gods, in the beginning, divided Man into men, that he might be more helpful to himself; just as the hand was divided into fingers, the better to answer its end.

The old fable covers a doctrine ever new and sublime; that there is One Man, — present to all particular men only partially, or through one faculty; and that you must take the whole society to find the whole man. Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier. In the divided or social state, these functions are parcelled out to individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint of the joint work, whilst each other performs his. The fable implies, that the individual, to possess himself, must sometimes return from his own labor to embrace all the other laborers. But unfortunately, this original unit, this fountain of power, has been so distributed to multitudes, has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled into drops, and cannot be gathered. The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters, — a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.

Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things. The planter, who is Man sent out into the field to gather food, is seldom cheered by any idea of the true dignity of his ministry. He sees his bushel and his cart, and nothing beyond, and sinks into the farmer, instead of Man on the farm. The tradesman scarcely ever gives an ideal worth to his work, but is ridden by the routine of his craft, and the soul is subject to dollars. The priest becomes a form; the attorney, a statute-book; the mechanic, a machine; the sailor, a rope of a ship.

"Divide and Conquer" by Husker Du

Well they divided up all the land
And we've got states and cities
Cities have their neighborhoods
And more subdivisions

There's countries divided by walls
Oceans and latitudes
And longitude, longing to find out
Just what they're missing

They're lots of area codes
And nine digit zip codes
Secret decoder ring codes
Arteries, shopping nodes

We'll invent some new computers
Link up the global village
And get AP, UPI, and Reuters
To tell everybody the news

We'll be one happy neighborhood
Spread out across the world
But who's going to stop that burglar
From breaking in my house
If he lives that far away

We'll be just like old friends
No means to your ends
The police state is to busy
And the neighborhood's getting out of hand

It's not about my politics
Something happened way too quick
A bunch of men who played it sick
They divide, conquer

It's all here before your eyes
Safety is a big disguise
That hides among the other lies
They divide, conquer

Well I expect I won't be heard
Because my silence is assured
Never a discouraging word
They divide and conquer

They divide and conquer

"To See the Earth"

After many years of prodding and probing, hacking and shaving, "To See the Earth" is now a book. I have many people to thank for helping it into its final form--a list that includes but is not limited to the following gratitudes: Thanks to Maggie Anderson, Cathy Bowman, Mark Halliday, Roger Mitchell, Maura Stanton, and especially my advisors David Wojahn and Bob Cording. Thanks as well to Abner Bardeguez, Jenny Barker, Becca Black, Michael Dumanis, Jim Doppke, Rita Grabowski, Chris Green, Bob King, Mike Magee, E.J. McAdams, Paula McLain, Anna Meek, Drew Morse, Tyrone Simpson, Gigi Thibodeaux, my family (Dad, Mom, Kath, Dave), and all workshop comrades at Indiana.

Thanks to Dmitry Psurtsev, Sergey Gandlevsky, Olga Leontevna, the Maslov family, John Patton, Paul and Mary Asel, Bernie Sucher, Jeff Lilley, Jeremy Huck, Peter Rossi, the Thomas J. Watson Foundation, and all the other fellow travelers (Willem, Mike, Nina, Steve, Tom, Garrick-—you know who you are) who made my life in Russia possible. Thanks as well to Majed Abbadi, Kathryn Bryan, Khuloud Jaqaman, Rima Kapitan, Kadhim Shabaan, Vera Tamari, and the Cleveland Friends Meeting.

Thanks to Indiana University, John Carroll University, Ledig House, and the Ohio Arts Council, for supporting the writing of this manuscript.

Thank you, finally, to Amy Breau, and our daughters Adele and Leila, without whom this would not have been.

To See the Earth navigates the increasingly turbulent waters of a globalized world—from Moscow to Chicago, from Philadelphia to Ramallah. In poems haunted by Anna Akhmatova, Robert Lowell, and Lev Rubinstein, Metres renders in vivid language what Fredric Jameson called “cognitive mapping”-—a kind of “situational representation on the part of the individual subject to the vaster and properly unrepresentable totality.” To See the Earth travels to Russia, memorializes immigrant Arab American family life in a Brooklyn brownstone, witnesses to the violence visited upon people both at home and abroad, and carves out of such losses images of hope—the birthing not of a terrible beauty, but of the “dreaming disarmed body.”

"An emotionally and intellectually charged poetry of various and intricately formed voices--a poetry that speaks of and against the unprecedented, destructive horrors taking place throughout our world, a poetry which, simultaneously, speaks for the radical truths of the essential love that infuses the best of the art of American poetry in our time. ‘...do you speak speak’--Philip Metres's poetry speaks to us all, in ways critical, vital, profound, and brilliant."--Lawrence Joseph

Set in landscapes ranging from Russia to Kentucky, from Ephesus to the Murder Capital of the World (that’s Gary, Indiana!), from Cleveland to Hiroshima, Philip Metres’s superb poems explore the confusion and complexities that ordinary people face in talking to one another on this earth--in the slippery language of everyday speech, or across the secured borders of grammar and history. Words are not abstractions to Metres—-they’re as physical as fifty women making PEACE with their bodies, as mysterious as a bat soaring to unheard music, as illuminating as an ash tree “burning into its name.” Committed to an examination of both the public and the private life, these powerful poems echo in the mind long after the book is closed.--Maura Stanton

"Do our voyages, Auden once asked, “still promise the Juster Life”? Too many of us would answer this question in the negative—not so Philip Metres. His poems seek above all to traverse borders, not merely those between nations and cultures but also--and most importantly--between the self and history, between the personal and the political. Metres plays for high stakes, and he also knows that such ambition is pointless without the sure command of craft which he displays in abundance. To See the Earth is a debut of unusual distinction.” --David Wojahn

"The Empire in the Air" by Kevin Prufer

One of the curious things about this poem is the way in which a simile renders the poem so much less clear. As in Emily Dickinson, whose metaphors tend to offer at least two (often completely opposing) possibilities, Kevin Prufer describes a "fragile empire" to be "like a bomb" and then describes something that rather sounds that it could be nothing but a bomb. What is a fragile empire, indeed? And are we laughing and sipping our drinks as the clock ticks gently away?

"The Empire in the Air"


It was a fragile empire
with knobs and wires, like a bomb.
It lived in a blue suitcase in the airplane's belly.
It had a little screen that flashed the time
and the moments we had left, ticked them gently away.
We laughed and sipped our drinks
while the empire, wrapped in its inevitable wires,
imagined the airplane splitting like a milkweed pod,
the clothing that would burst from our broken suitcases
into the air.



Kevin Prufer

Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss

Just in case you needed any further evidence that the neocons were fatally misguided about Iraq, read the "lost [Bill] Kristol tapes," in which we find a good Arabic saying, "Rah el sani’, ija el ussta‘ — ‘Gone is the apprentice, in comes the master.’” Or, to quote Pete Townsend--"meet the new boss, [worse] than the old boss."

Saw Wai's Poetic Valentine Was a Slap in the Face to his Dear Leader

Poetry as news. Read on:

In case you've not yet heard: on January 22, 2008, in the country of Myanmar, a man named Saw Wai was jailed for writing a poem. The eight-line poem, "February 14," had been published the previous day in the popular Burmese weekly A Chit (or The Love Journal), and is about a man who learns the true meaning of love when his heart is broken by a fashion model. Because "February 14" looks the part of a saccharine
Valentine, Burmese government censors missed its hidden message: when read top-to-bottom, the first word of each line forms the phrase, "Power Crazy Senior General Than Shwe."

Senior General Than Shwe leads the military junta that has ruled Myanmar for almost twenty years. After seizing control of the Burmese government in 1988, the junta refused to relinquish power in 1990, when a democratic political party led by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi won a popular election by an enormous margin. Suu Kyi has been in a Burmese prison for twelve of the past eighteen years; Than Shwe has been the country's dictator for the past fifteen.

Saw Wai has been in prison, unable to see his family, for almost three weeks.

Than Shwe's junta has long detained critics and dissidents for indefinite periods of time. But their methods do not stop at imprisonment. There are many accounts, some first-hand, of jailed dissidents being tortured while imprisoned. And in September, 2007, Than Shwe's troops opened fire on a peaceful, pro-democracy demonstration and killed more than thirty people, including several Buddhist monks who were leading the protests. It is unclear what will happen to Saw Wai, but with each day he spends in prison, it becomes clearer that his message is true.

In response to Saw Wai's situation, I have edited a small, twelve-poet anthology of poems that each contain the phrase, "Power Crazy Senior General Than Shwe," in a manner that remains faithful to Saw Wai's poem. (The phrase is also the chapbook's title.) The anthology has been published in the online literary journal ANTI-, and may be freely downloaded and distributed. As the editor of ANTI-, Steven D. Schroeder, has written, "[this project] takes advantage of the fast turnaround time and unique presentation possibilities of the online format, and... stands against something that's clearly important and worth fighting."

Participating poets have remarkably different backgrounds, and hail from California, Indiana, Michigan, New York, Oregon, Virginia, Washington, and elsewhere; one poet has never before been published, while another has won the National Book Award (Phillippines) five times.

What unites these poets is the desire to speak and act against injustice. And sociable web media have allowed this to happen. I first heard about Saw Wai's jailing via another poet's blog, on January 24th; I immediately wrote and posted a poem-response on my blog, and began soliciting other bloggers I knew to do the same; I also contacted the editor of ANTI-, who had previously published my work in another venue, and proposed that I guest edit a small, chapbook-sized collection of such poetry. Via e-mail, listservs, blogs, and the like, the project was developed from conception to completion and publication in sixteen days. The speed of this
realization was essential to the project, for as I write this Saw Wai is sitting in a jail cell in Myanmar. And this project is first and foremost concerned with raising awareness of that fact.

With this in mind, I invite you to read and freely distribute the chapbook. Share it in any way you see fit. The sociable web carries with it the potential to speak across and through boundaries of all kinds, and though it remains to be seen whether our voices can penetrate the walls of Saw Wai's jail cell, we can at least allow Saw
Wai's voice to break through them, by speaking through us.

Thanks very much,
A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz

Suheir Hammad on Resisting the War

William Stafford & the Field Where the Battle Did Not Happen

(Untitled)

This is the field where the battle did not happen,
where the unknown soldier did not die.
This is the field where grass joined hands,
where no monument stands,
and the only heroic thing is the sky.

Birds fly here without any sound,
unfolding their wings across the open.
No people killed – or were killed – on this ground
hollowed by the neglect of an air so tame
that people celebrate it by forgetting its name.

by William Stafford