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

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
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

The Daily Show
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Field Magazine: The Muriel Rukeyser Issue (Fall 2011)

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

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

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)

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.

Read more---

Occupy Wall Street Meets U.S. Militarism

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

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

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

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"

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.

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