Archive for June, 2008
Michael Marcinkowski
From Peter O’Leary: Poetry of the 1970s, Day 3
Friday the 13th of the Poetry of the 1970s began much the same as the previous day: up early – the birds of Maine with their dawn chorus – searching for breakfast and then striding through the lovely piney woods. Even without the sleep I needed, I was feeling oddly refreshed.
And the morning started strong. I opted for the panel with the provocative title, “The Avant-Garde, Language, and Opposition,” with two papers by two thinkers whose work I admire both from the Pacific Northwest: Jeanne Heaving from Seattle, and Miriam Nichols from Vancouver. Check out these paper titles: “Marking the Avant Garde” and “Writing Opposition: Determinate Negation and the Imago Mundi.” Nice.
D.A. Powell
Poets Laureate
Travis Nichols’ post on the current conjecture over who will or should be the next Poet Laureate of Britain contained a wonderfully sad story involving John McCain, Robert Pinksy, Charles Simic and an unfortunately bright-but-not-bright-enough man who wanted to illustrate McCain’s ignorance but instead illustrated his own (sidenote: I don’t see what this man’s being from Tennessee had to do with anything—the author of the original article could just have easily said that the man was from the US). The punchline was this: we live in a country where even somebody who seems to care about poetry enough to ask a trivia question about it (let’s call him “man from US”) doesn’t know who the Poet Laureate is. As for McCain, I think that a correct answer on his part—or even an answer on his part—would only have hurt him amongst his supporters; so, in essence, he gave the correct answer as far as likely McCain voters might be concerned.
Lucia Perillo
Why are poets aligned with the left?
I have pondered over this question, and was reminded again about it when the Harriet bloggers had a phone conference recently, and some kind of anti-Bush or anti-war entendre that was uttered by someone produced among us a knowing chuckle.
Mark Nowak
Zimbabwe
The news from Zimbabwe is terrifying and rapidly escalating. Two days ago, opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai withdrew from the run-off elections. I read this morning that Tsvangirai has now sought refuge in the Dutch embassy in Harare and that Britain will lead a campaign to declare that Mugabe is no longer the leader of Zimbabwe. But what else will be done, or not be done, by the rest of the world this time?
I had wanted to write yesterday about how, amidst what is occurring and what we can only hope may and may not yet occur in Zimbabwe, labor groups were still pushing unique cultural aesthetics to address the current situation–how the TUC assembled photos of 2,000 trade unionists (mine, you’ll find, as part of one eye) for a massive Chuck Close-esque banner to be used at protests today in London; how, on the way to my poetry workshops at Education MN, I want to inform all teachers about teachers murdered in the days leading up to the Zimbabwe elections; how, here at the Harriet blog, we can maybe listen to at least one poet from Zimbabwe speak, Comrade Fatso’s “What’s up guys…? (Click on the link in the top left corner to hear him read the poem.)
D.A. Powell
New Bat City
The latest issue of Bat City Review is in stores. Edited by graduate students from the UT Austin program, the magazine features beautiful artwork and high-quality fiction. But the reason I bought it, and the reason I recommend it, is the outstanding quality of the poetry.
Larissa Szporluk
Linh Dinh
Pride of the State
To follow up on Travis Nichols’ post, “Think of the Stamps!“, I want to point out that Wales already has a female poet laureate, Gwyneth Lewis, the author of this protest against the Welsh Rugby Union:
A Wooden Spoon for the WRU
(A druid speaks)
I have consulted the mistletoe,
stared at starling footprints in snow:
the time is ripe for your overthrow.
I give you a spoon I shaped of ash
because you didn’t nurture the flash
of play but thought, maybe, of cash.
Here’s a dip I turned from oak
but look, in your hands, it slips into smoke.
You’ve made our last Grand Slam a joke.
Actual rugby can never redeem
your backroom moves of dodge and scheme.
It’s you who need to raise your game.
How can a committee always outlive
coaches, players? It’s hard to forgive
shadowy men with hands like sieves.
Here’s the last spoon, I carved it from gall:
it’s you, not the team, who have dropped the ball.
Hang this up, with shame, in your hall.
Mark Nowak
Late-Late-Fordist Poetics
When I was invited to be a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota this past spring, English Department Chair Paula Rabinowitz asked that one of the classes I teach be a senior seminar based, loosely, on the “poetry dialogues” I’d been facilitating between Ford workers at the closing St. Paul Assembly plant here in Minnesota and autoworkers at downsizing Ford plants in Port Elizabeth and Pretoria, South Africa.
As I planned the syllabus, I went back over the central points I forwarded in my critique of MFA-land, “Neoliberalism, Collective Action, and the American MFA Industry” as well as the propositions I’d made for alternative models: the CP’s John Reed Clubs, the “Talleres de Poesia” of the Sandinistas, the Johnson-Forest Tendency (C.L.R. James, Grace Lee (Boggs), and Raya Dunayevskaya), and others. The eventual syllabus included some of this work, additional readings such as Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and June Jordan’s Poetry for the People, visits from St. Paul Ford worker-poets, and films such as Roger and Me and Travis Wilkerson’s extraordinary An Injury to One (I’d also wanted to show Jeremy Deller’s Battle of Orgreave but couldn’t get it in my hands in time).
The final charge on the syllabus was that students had to organize, facilitate, and document (preferably using iMovie or GarageBand or digital photography with accompanying sound files, etc.) work- and/or community-based “poetry dialogues.” Additionally, I promised students that since they would be leading workplace poetry workshops, I would as well (I’m still working on editing footage from mine, with clerical workers from AFSCME 3800 who went on strike against the University in fall 2007 and read their poems to the University community at the “Late American Poetics and the Politics of Exception” symposium).
Daisy Fried
Good Doggerel
Sacco and Vanzetti in handcuffs
I forget where online I found this, but I saved it in a computer file some months ago and only just came across it again. I suppose it wouldn’t charm me so much if it weren’t for who wrote it–it charms me and gives me a little twinge…
To babies we will their mothers’ love,
To youngsters we will the sun above.
To spooners who wont to tryst the night,
We give the moon and stars that shine so bright.
–Sacco and Vanzetti
Alan Gilbert
The Beats in India
In December of 1998, I spent close to a month in India with my partner at the time and an older friend. This friend had lived in India in the ’70s for a couple years, and worked with peasants in small villages and for a brief period with Mother Theresa in Kolkata. She hadn’t been back, and was treating her visit decades later as a spiritual journey. I was approaching it as I had previous trips of this sort: as a way—I hoped—of increasing experience, knowledge, political awareness, empathy.
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