The poetry corner is now open on the northeast corner of the park. It is a public, democratic site. Anyone can organize a reading or event there as long as it is done through consensus with those present. This is leaderless movement. We would like to be the community we seek. Please respect everyone through the use of a vote. Ask for permission from others to speak. Listen to one another. Let everyone’s voice be heard. In doing so, we’ll perform not only poetry but true, participatory democracy.

Future plans include on-site writing workshops and a poetry reading this Friday. Find more information here.

Describing the turbines as protruding like “homeless bits of aeroplane,” she can’t understand why nobody in the Assembly isn’t preventing the “vandalism of the countryside”. This is about to disfigure Wales, she said. If we are blessed with an attribute that is as sought after and has value in all things – from our well-being, health and quality of life – why destroy it for something as ineffective as wind power? It is not as if there are not other alternatives such as tidal power and solar power. Wind farms are subsidy-driven and are quick to put up. But the visual cost of the plans far outweigh any benefits from wind power; we simply shouldn’t have wind farms. I am working on a poem about the issue now. The trouble is that a poem is not the type of thing one should write in anger, otherwise it comes out as a rant.

Read the full article here

and Part II (NOW with Stewart rapping!):

I was going to tell people to read the Poetic Labor Project blog;

I was going to say more on Tillie Olsen’s “I Want You Women Up North To Know” and how much I disliked, no, hated the new biography;

I was going to say something more about U Sam Oeur’s “Working at the Douglass Corporation” and teaching it with Walt Whitman earlier this month and what they both say, together, about working in America;

I was going to say “spend some time this May Day at one of the finest global working class news aggregators out there, Labourstart”;

I was going to write something about how little we’ve heard about young writers and youth poetry this month and then go on to say that this, really, is the new working class poetry, and that you have to absolutely have to go out and see Louder than a Bomb (and I was going to write something, too, about hosting Kevin Coval and his performance at Busboys & Poets with the DC Youth Slam Team — and thanks to Sarah Browning and the good folks at Split This Rock, and get your proposals in people because I want to see you there!);

I was going to write something about the Poets Strike again (version 3.0?) and the email I got from Jennifer Karmin and her thoughts on Eileen’s piece and mine;

I was going to talk about the unemployment rate (9.2%) and the conversations I’ve been having with people with low paying service jobs who really, really want to organize their workplaces;

I was going to write something about how I haven’t heard from anyone yet about the May 9 meet-up at Barnes & Noble in Union Square and how I’m serious, really, writing people, let’s meet and see if we can’t reproduce what we did at the Borders store in Minneapolis and organize, as poets and workers working together, a union drive;

I was going to write about the new working [class] reading series, May 6 in Cali-;

I was going to write about the Chicago Poetry for Labor event curated by John Keene;

And I wanted to write, in all seriousness, why does poetry get a month and workers get only one day?

Happy May Day!

Whoa!

Take a slow ride east of Madison into Milwaukee and make your way to 720 East Locust Street. There you’ll find Woodland Pattern, a marvelous modern bookstore and the cultural heart of the city’s intellectual life (www.woodlandpattern.org). On my first visit, I met poet Karl Gartung (Now That Memory Has Become So Important), whose knowledge of poetry is so subtle and vast, he was even savvy about what was going on in my neglected region, and pointed out an original copy of Leland Hickman’s Great Slave Suite (see Tiresias, Nightboat & Otis Books). Not only did Karl know more about poetry than I had forgotten, he was and, for a generation, has been a union man and an activist—presently a shop steward with The Teamsters. Karl and his wife, quilter and dollmaker Anne Kingsbury, became my friends instantly, if over a very long distance and many years. As much as I loathed the dolls of my childhood, I couldn’t help but purchase one of Anne’s fantastic and legendary dolls. We met again in St. Louis for the 1999 Dual Muse conference at the University of Washington. Later, I traveled east to help celebrate Woodland Pattern’s 25th anniversary. I recently caught up with Anne, its current director, explaining that I’d been following the headlines and wanted to know how things were really going in Wisconsin.

Anne filled my ears with the bad news: Woodland Pattern was virtually running on prayers—facing a 16% budget cut, the staff and community supporters scrambling to raise the thousands of dollars needed to make it through the rest of the year, fighting despair over the possibility of having to end their fine programs—featuring such important voices as Clayton Eshleman and Ron Padgett. Governor Scott Walker and the Department of Public Instruction are gutting millions in funds for libraries and student education. A cultural activist in her own right, Anne was in the middle of sending out an alert letter detailing Walker’s proposed 2011-2013 state budget which reduces the budget of the Wisconsin Arts Board by 73 percent! But Anne had an even scarier story—that Wisconsin’s genuine grassroots movement, led by ordinary working people, is being infiltrated by destructive forces. While union rights, education and the arts are being assaulted on the surface, the right to peaceful protest is being assaulted underground. The move is on to stymie recall efforts. The ugly subterfuge, trickery and demonizing used to devastate the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) is being used against sincere and honest protesters in Milwaukee. What has been identified as a true grassroots movement by the people of Wisconsin is now being undermined by “outsiders” (akin to the strikebreakers and COINTELPRO of old) brought in to demonize the strong and corrupt the weak-willed, tempting and tricking movement organizers into making fatal errors—errors that will ultimately be used to discredit the movement in the media and public forums.

Outrage and indignation aside, our conversation turned to our inner lives. Anne, Karl and I consider ourselves artists above all other concerns. Anne mentioned a dream of Karl’s in which she was nude, hip-length braids flowing as she walked alongside a pond—a beautifully simple image, peacefully erotic on its own, suggesting the idyllic moment sought at the end of a stressful journey. And being an artist or poet or writer these days, is extremely stressful for those of us who rely on bookstores to sell our books, libraries to supplement our education, universities and colleges to nourish our communities with presentations of contemporary voices in open forums—sanctuaries in which the minds of all nations should be able to flourish without fear. We believe our work is important to the lives of our communities; certainly, it is at the center of our very small, individual universes. And it is tough to focus on one’s art when one’s world is so well along in its descent into an irreversible madness and the inevitable death of all dreams.

One very recent book that I’m digging my way through, Workers Across the Americas: The Transnational Turn in Labor History, addresses one of the central roots of my working-class writing projects: transnationalism. Culled together by Leon Fink, editor of Labor: Studies in Working Class History of the Americas, Workers Across the Americas groups twenty essays into seven key themes: the challenge of transnational labor history, labor and empire, indigenous peoples and labor systems, international feminism and reproductive labor, labor recruitment and immigration control, transnational labor politics, and labor internationalism. The volume includes essays by historians like Aviva Chomsky, whose Linked Labor Histories: New England, Colombia, and the Making of a Global Working Class is (to me) essential reading on the transnational working-class, and John Flores, whose work on “municipal socialism” couldn’t be more timely during the current wave of attacks on public sector unions. Historians like Premilla Nadasen, Camille Guérin-Gonzales, and Nelson Lichtenstein provide compelling introductions to the sections.

Later in June, I’m going to be heading to Venezuela for the 2011 World Poetry Festival. And while I’m incredibly excited to read in Caracas and smaller towns in the countryside—and to meet poets from countries around the world – I’m equally excited to experience the ways in which writers and workers are co-negotiating the Bolivarian revolution. Books like Workers Across the Americas help prepare me… as a poet. They allow me to create and imagine frameworks for processing the incredibly complex cultural and political geographies (and the incredibly complex global working-class lives) that poetry, for me, must engage.

About a decade ago, I founded a small Marxist organization in the CLR James/Correspondence Publishing Committee model, the URWW (Union of Radical Workers and Writers), that put on the first national bookstore workers organizing conference (“Resist Retail Nihilism”) and eventually helped unionize one of the only unionized Borders Bookstores in the country. Stacy Szymaszek and a co-worker from Woodland Pattern drove up from Milwaukee for the conference; others involved in the early IWW/Borders organizing drives took the Amtrak up from Chicago; workers like Emmanuel Ortiz from the now-defunct Resource Center of the Americas bookstore, another unionized shop, took the bus down Lake Street; workers from the local info-shops (May Day, Arise) biked over; and workers from the unionized Borders store in Ann Arbor, who had just been on strike, joined by phone. In the weeks before the conference, we tried to hand out fliers to some Barnes & Noble workers in the ‘burbs next to the Dress Barn, but one young worker got scared, ran and told the manager, and security escorted us off the premises.

We spent the entire Resist Retail Nihilism day – as poets and bookstore workers and trade unionists in other fields (slaughterhouse and grocery store organizers from the UFCW, activist labor historians, communication workers & newspaper guild rank & filers, etc.) – talking about the low wage service sector and that old Lenin question, What is to be done? Then, like all good trade unionists, we went bowling and beer drinking at night.

Around that time, we spent many hours standing on the streets with (and for) the workers at the Minneapolis Borders Bookstore, who were engaged in a series of creative tactics – which I documented in my MFA industry essay, recently republished here – that eventually resulted in a union contract (the store was closed by Borders, Inc., shortly afterward: hmmm…). And we held several well-publicized leafleting sessions where we asked locals to come down and help with our campaigns to decrease Borders sales by boycotts, employee buy-in days, etc.

But guess who was largely missing from the protests and street actions? Writers.

Despite a huge community of poets and writers in the Twin Cities, the struggle of booksellers and bookstore workers at one of the largest bookstores in town seemed to be off the radar of 99% of the local writers. A few showed up – but by and large, the groups of writers I’d see out at local poetry events and cafes and literary parties never came to stand on the picket lines. “I’m going to the open mic tonight,” one told me, and “there’s a reading at the Loft from the Jerome grant winners, so…” trailed off another when I asked him to show up. I was even the chair of the Political Issues Committee of the National Writers Union local at the time and the most I could muster from them was a resolution of support (which I had to write myself) – not a single NWU member would show up at the Borders pickets, either.

So the idea of poets showing up, as poets, to an action that is “non-poem” is something that hasn’t historically worked that well, in my experiences — though I’d absolutely love to be proven wrong. Too often, it simply turns into another “poetic” activity… a chance to read a protest poem, a chance to perform an aesthetic action with a political purpose, etc.

Perhaps, instead of a day of not writing poems and talking about why they are not writing, poets should write something (and not poems, either, but blog posts or open letters or essays or op-eds—we are writers, after all) about the struggles of workers in late April and the first day of May, 2011. The topics are almost limitless: the Bahrain government arresting doctors who treat protestors, the sixth anniversary of the collapse of the Spectrum sweater factory in Bangladesh which killed 64 workers and left 80 injured, a possible general strike in Kenya, a strike over rising gasoline prices in Lebanon, teachers in Pakistan staging a sit-in for higher pay, the end of collective bargaining for city workers in Oklahoma, an organizing drive at Target stores in New York, etc.

But, thinking back on the URWW days, what I’m really itching for is another small organization (or, many small organizations) that could take up another political cause and work on it, as poets and workers combined, over the long haul. Maybe a group of poets working together with workers on a union organizing drive (surely there’s a handful of Barnes & Noble workers in almost every city across the US who think their wages & benefits aren’t doing the job)? What about a national, 3-4 year B&N organizing drive, with writers – aka, we whose books sometimes make it to the storage rooms and shelves of B&N – taking an early lead in the organizing drive? I’m reading at the Union Square B&N on May 9, 7pm — anyone interested in helping me begin an on-going dialogue with bookstore workers at that store before or after the event?

What I’ve learned from my time in movements like these is that the one-hit action usually doesn’t do much. Maybe it raises awareness for a second. Maybe it makes someone on the street stop and think about poetry and culture and a living wage campaign for a second. But then that second is gone. The people on the street have their 15 seconds of aesthetics and social protest fame, then dip into the corner Starbucks for a $5 Venti Mocha served by a single mom or single dad without health care coverage.

If we are going to call a strike, let’s dig in. Let’s make a renewed (or brand new) effort to connect as writers with workers, with organizing drives, with strikes from the local to global scales. Let’s put our words and the bodies that speak them to work and on the line in an on-going, organized, long-term way. “We can turn the faucet off,” Myles writes. “The question is why would we do it. To just do something else, to call that a political thing.” Let’s do something else; let’s do a political thing and let’s keep doing it, and often. And now.

During the two days of discussion, I found I was asking myself a series of questions on that Archibald MacLeish quandry of “Poetry and Journalism,” questions for which I wish I had more answers. But the one question I kept returning to was this one:

Why don’t I know more about the lives of the working poor and the unemployed in every city and town that houses an MFA program in the United States?

With the drastic growth of the creative writing/MFA industry in the past 50 years, do I know more or less about people, about wealth and poverty, about the true costs of the current economic collapse, about the lives of Dollar General workers, about what it’s like to live at the minimum wage, about what it’s like to be a 45 year old gas station cashier down the road from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, to be a 37 year old mother of two working in the kitchen where the guests of the creative writing program at my alma mater (Bowling Green State University) eat lunch with faculty and grad students before their class visits, to be the maybe 55 year old Philadelphia man who emptied out the trash cans in the room before my reading last night at Temple University…

Or, for example, with all the writers in all the university and college programs out there, why hasn’t there already been a creative writing version of The Philosopher Kings?

To me, as I sat among the labor journalists and listened to the news that has rabidly stayed news for working people– since at least the time of Engles’s The Conditions of the Working Class in England and long, long before that – I found myself wishing for more from poetry. I wanted more New Labor Journalism in it, fewer attempts to slay Oedipus, less worry about whether Conceptualism or New Formalism was the next kingpin. In fact, in two days of conversations with the young labor journalists, I didn’t hear a single word about sub-genrefication, i.e., the seemingly insatiable urge to dissect and over-analyze the field by sub-genre (or attempt to create “new” ones). It simply wasn’t the most urgent need of these beat writers and investigative journalists covering the economic collapse and its effect on working (or no longer working) people. In fact, it didn’t even make their AP Top 25.

Maybe, in the end, I wanted to hear in poetry now the “varied carols” of post-Fannie Mae and post-Freddie Mac America singing, and not only America, but much, much more. The mechanics (at JiffyLube), the shoemakers (at the Foot Locker in the mall and the Nike factories in China), and all the rest, “Singing, with open mouths, their strong melodious songs.”

Because I prefer a Socratic approach over info-dump lecturing, I like to ask why there might be a perceived need for feminist poetry presses. Last fall, one of my students — a talented writer and a huge Bukowski fan — responded, “Because some women just really hate men.”

Uh, no. Thanks for playing, and thanks for the joke (I think it was a joke?) but that’s not correct. It is a teachable moment, though — a chance to ask “Okay, so what does feminism really mean?” The F-word, unfortunately, has been so deliberately maligned and misused that many of my students each quarter, men and women alike, have a skewed and inaccurate view of what it really means. To resort to a simple dictionary definition, all feminism is is a doctrine that advocates equal rights for women. Or as bell hooks puts it: “A movement to end sexist oppression.”

Mission-driven presses seem a valid and necessary way to advance this movement and to progress toward the worthwhile goal of gender equality in literary publishing, a goal which VIDA’s recent report on “The Count” inarguably indicates has not yet been met.

When I have this conversation with my students — with anyone really — questions arise along the lines of whether or not having a book out on a self-declared feminist press signals to some readers that perhaps your poems are “pretty good,” but only “for a girl,” and whether or not publishing as a self-identified member of any particular group, especially an under-represented one, does some kind of damage to the readers’ reception of — or creates some kind of bias regarding — the manuscript itself? I’ve asked myself questions like these countless times before, and here this month already Barbara Jane Reyes and Bhanu Kapil and Rigoberto González have posted thought-provokingly about writing, reading, reviewing and participating as a member of a particular community.

Kwame Dawes discusses, too, the question of “the desire not to be known as some kind of hyphenated writer” in relation to “race in writing among people of color.” His contemplation of those issues got me asking those questions about feminism and “women’s writing” all over again. As he mentions, even if you do not publish with presses or journals whose mission it is to promote writers from a particular community, some observers will still imply that “if the poet were not black, they might never have gotten into the anthology, the course syllabi, the university position, the festival list, the reading series, etc.”

Not to try to pose an equivalency between race and gender, but this analysis in turn made me think of Elisa Gabbert’s recent post, “Boys’ Club  Manifesto,” wherein she discusses similarly how “I’ve had men, not just any men but my friends, tell me to my face that it’s easier for me to get published because I’m a woman and because I’m attractive. People will publish me in their magazines because they need token women, and people will ask me to read in their series so they can have a cute girl in the lineup. This idea that it’s easier for women to succeed in male-dominated industries is pervasive and illogical.”

So what do you think, Harriet bloggers and readers: are mission-driven presses that focus on producing and distributing work by members of under-represented groups necessary and desirable? Why or why not? Do you read a book from one of these presses differently than you would any other collection?

While I’m at it — because I do believe mission-driven presses are necessary and desirable — I’m going to take a page from the Amber Tamblyn playbook and promote a contest that I consider valuable and important: The Gatewood Prize from Switchback Books! [Full disclosure: both Switchback and Dancing Girl Press have published my poetry (and my poetry co-written with Gabbert). Even if they hadn’t, I’d still admire and advocate them here and elsewhere, because I’m a feminist like that.]

You can get all the details here, but highlights include the reading period (from April 1 through June 1, 2011) and this year’s judge (Harryette Mullen).  Good luck, ladies.

For the past ten years I have reflected on the question of a retirement plan. It is predicated on the gamble that we will live well into our retirement years, and we will live long enough for it to mature in such a way that it can make our lives comfortable when we are older.

I have reflected on how much the body of a black man living in a world in which the old patterns of racism have changed only in such a way that it becomes harder to articulate its presence and persistence, is at great risk in this environment.

That body, left unchecked, begins to internalize the frustrations and silences of the anger that comes from seeing these patterns persist, and that body can break down from stress and all the attendant ailments that come from such stress, and that body begins to reveal the cynicism implicit in that dream of healthy a retirement.

For the past few years, I have felt as if I have been fighting systems, fighting attitudes, fighting longstanding prejudices and patterns, and my body has begun to feel the fatigue of doing so.

When I work out, I think of myself trying to sweat out of me the corrosive chemicals of frustration, impatience and despair that I carry—I am trying to make real that myth of a retirement plan. Thankfully though, there are comforts and pleasures that help offset the annoyances.

Art does this, even art that howls out with the transformative lament of the blues. And friends, co-conspirators, those who seem able to understand the subtle patterns that operate in systemic ways in our world, they become comforts and offer relief and hope.

But today, while at a street festival on Manning Avenue on the south side of Sumter, South Carolina, the town where we first settled nineteen years ago, the town in which two of my three children were born; while standing in a crowded street filled with African American folks and feeling as if I were in Jamaica, I remembered the people who have always made this place livable for me while working at this university

From those first days in Sumter, it is the African American people working as custodians, administrative assistants, managers of offices, cafeteria workers, painters, technicians, administrators—the people who literally keep the university running; it is those folk who have become my friends, who have covered me, who have had my back even when I had no idea that they are doing so—they are the ones who have made it livable.

You see, one of the rarely discussed facts about many Southern universities is that while the faculty ranks, the student population, and the upper administration are predominantly white, the staff of the university are overwhelmingly African American. And I made a decision very early on in my career as a professor, to position myself as a member of the staff of the university. And the friendships I have made as part of the staff have made things livable.

Because it is these folks who have stopped me to talk to me about my poetry, to discuss something they read by me in the papers, to whisper some key information about some trifling policy being used to undermine me, to discuss children and raising them, to ask about my books, to ask about my travels, to give me a smile when I came to them in a pickle needing a favor, to straighten me out about policy, to make me feel as if I was there doing this work not for myself, but for them. It is they who have made me feel as if they see me as valuable to a community–a community that wants me to speak to it, to carry its thoughts through my art.

I imagine that my university is proud of me, happy to have me be a successful writer, but I don’t imagine that the university regards me, as a poet, as a necessary part of its articulation of itself, as a voice for that community. Indeed, I have come to the conclusion that my university actually does not understand the role of the artist in community. And if it does, it certainly does not understand itself to be a community. My value is superficial and can be defined around how much fame I bring to the school.

But in this small area of the community of the African American staff at my university, a massive thing has taken place, something that has made me consider my art as an important part of the community.

I thought about this a lot today, about how often I have been saved by the laughter we have had in corridors, by the nod of understanding across a street, by the surprise of finding out that they have been watching me, keeping an eye on me, following me, and covering my back all this time. They know what I go through, and they speak of how proud they are of what I do and who I am.

You see, there are many things I have learned in this South Carolina, but the one that will always make me understand why I can continue to be a poet who wants to speak poems that are close to the ground, is that African Americans in my state, enact their resistance through the quiet conspiracy of love, affirmation, and support while the world rails around all of us.

My family laughed about this as we drove through the sun washed back roads of Sumter, along the narrow winding road through tobacco land, heading back to Columbia. My eldest, a freshman at the university, chuckled, “It’s true, it’s true, they look after me, make sure I am doing fine…” she said.

This gave me so much peace, so much peace. And peace is what I need to cultivate as I continue the battle to find language to speak what is true about the world in which I live, the language to push for the changes that need to happen in some many ways in my world. I will always be grateful for my crew.

I spent the last few days at the Latino Literary Imagination Conference at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, among a community of humanities scholars who have been steps ahead of what the 2010 census revealed: that Latinos are the largest minority in the United States, that soon we will be the majority. Latino intellectuals and artists soldier on, unfazed by attempts at erasure, censure, denial, dismissal, token nods of acceptance and approval disguised as kindness, progress or hard-won seats at the master’s table. We’ll take those, but know that we know what’s up. And we move forward with the confidence that our growing numbers will eventually tip the cultural and political scales in our favor. May not happen in my lifetime, but it will happen, and the best we can do is leave an indelible footprint in the era of transition, so that those that come after can look back and see that we were doing something beautiful and meaningful.

One of the highlights of the conference was the tribute to Nuyorican Poets Café founders Miguel Algarín and Piri Thomas. Emcee extraordinaire Jive Poetic kicked things off introducing Algarín himself, who demonstrated why he was the master of the stage, how the performance is half the passion, the other half is the loaded word that flies on the strength of pride, history, politics, and community. Two Chicano legends stopped by, Jimmy Santiago Baca and Guillermo Gómez Peña, as well as two highly-regarded Nuyorican scene regulars, Willie Perdomo and Caridad de la Luz (aka La Bruja), who never ceases to dazzle me with her extraordinary voice. Don’t believe me? Check it out.

Baca and I were the only non-stage poets, which made for an interesting pause among the parade of young, energetic spoken-word poets that took to the mic. (Special shout out to Elisabet Velásquez, who impressed the fuck out of me, and to Sean Battle, a young African American poet who will be pursuing his MFA in the fall at Rutgers-Newark.) But all was game in the celebratory spirit of the night. But make no mistake: we may have been coming together beneath the umbrella term Latino, but each poet brought his or her homeland, ethnicity, language and music to the tribute. Situating the self within artistic expression is a good way to achieve orientation, direction, visibility and verve. Hence the power and continuing relevance of places like the Nuyorican Poets Café.

Though the vibe of the evening was justifiably Nuyorican, that there was also a Chicano presence was important, since by 2025, Mexicans will outnumber Puerto Ricans in NYC. That doesn’t mean Mexicans will displace or replace Puerto Ricans, that simply means these two communities will be thriving together into the new millennium. So it’s essential to acknowledge and work together. The NPC has also been steps ahead on this issue as well: a few years ago, Nuyorican legend Tato Laviera brought a group of young Mexican and Chicano poets from the South Texas Valley to read their work on the stage. He had been mentoring these young people, many of them with heartbreaking stories, many of them the children of undocumented aliens, or themselves undocumented aliens.

I was invited to read at that event also, and I remember feeling so fortunate to be there, with Tato, while he was still healthy, with these young people who had the fire in them–the same fire I saw in the young people at the tribute for Algarín and Thomas.

Well, that was kind of strange? I didn’t get all high an mighty. I guess I was humbled by it all. Sometimes we just need to shut the hell up and listen to the young people for guidance.

If I could distill his talk down two words, they would be, “practice generosity.” This is similar to what I was told by Eileen Tabios many years ago. To promote yourself, promote others (and let’s face it, we do have to promote ourselves in order to move our books).

Thank you also, Gillian Conoley, for addressing my question regarding women of color publishing venues. I have to tell you though, I’m actually averse to conference. Not that issues do not need to be discussed; you are right, they do. Like-minded folks need to get together and action plan, right? Perhaps it’s more accurate to say I am averse to conference culture, when the conference becomes thought of as the activism, when it is an annual convergence of speakers of academese, for the benefit of themselves, and from which folks come away immediately empowered feeling and energized. Then, momentum falls away after everyone travels home, back to their routines, families, and work. Until the next year. This is not concrete enough for me, and I don’t feel like it’s a good use of my energy, time, and funds.

Rather than just kvetch about non-activism, let me offer up some suggestions, taking Rigoberto’s advice, things I’ve been doing my best to enact, to practice generosity:

Adding to his point about reading a lot of books, I think we have to be not shy or reticent about putting our ideas out there. We’re schooled (formally or informally) in poetry and poetics, so we should be able to articulate our thoughts on specific works and movements. So how about this: write articles, papers, essays, interviews, reviews of books written by members of your many and expanding community/ies. Seek publication for these (what good are they, sitting in your hard drive?). I tend to blog about what I’m reading; some of this is decent first draft which ultimately gets crafted into a review. Now, some folks can only write reviews about books they like. I think this is legit; getting caught up in the damaged egos, hurt feelings, all the drama and politics of “negative reviews” sucks. Hell hath no fury like a poet scorned.

Publicize and attend literary events that are not your own, encourage others to as well. Write about these events (not what you wore to the event, not what you ate before the event), and post videos and/or photos from these events on your blog, FB, on Flickr and YouTube. I am interested in documentation, which becomes a pretty valuable resource for teaching and otherwise. I can’t tell you how bummed I was, when teaching Nuyorican poetry last semester, not to be able to access any video of Miguel Piñero performing, “The Book of Genesis According to St. Miguelito,” or “A Lower East Side Poem.” (I ended up showing a clip of “A Lower East Side Poem,” performed by actors and the poets Miguel Algarín, Pedro Pietri, and Amiri Baraka, in the Piñero movie, starring Benjamin Bratt.)

Curate and host events that do not feature you. Feature folks other than your friends. Give emerging writers the opportunity to read alongside established ones.

Edit publications featuring writers who are not you, and instead, actively go after those whose works interest and/or challenge you. Again, take a chance and include emerging writers, and feature them alongside established ones.

Lead/conduct/teach local, affordable community writing workshops. Don’t just teach those who are admitted into the MFA programs at which you teach (and here, I am NOT saying it’s bad to teach in MFA programs).

Share publishing, reading/performance, and funding opportunities with other writers and artists. Why hoard these unless you have problems with artists who are not you gettin’ some shine. Please get over it.

Course adoption! Teach the work of your communities’ writers and artists. If you can, bring them into your classrooms. Encourage your students to get out of the classroom and attend their events; offer extra credit if you have to and can. In the very least, bring the artist into e-dialogue with your students (I Skyped with two of Oliver de la Paz’s classes last semester, and I thought that was a good alternative to travel, and the least I could do as he’d assigned my book Diwata to what looked like well over 50 students, many with very thoughtful questions. And! That’s a healthy number of book sales).

That said, I think we also have to remember the importance of the gift economy in “po-biz” practice, what kind of work are we willing to do for currency that is not dollars. I think the items above are a kind of currency that can really take us a long way.

“The love of form is the acceptance of mortality.” – Charles Simic

Once again it is April, the month poetry creeps out of its hole and into the public arena with somewhat more insistence than it does during the other eleven months. It gets in the news. It even becomes news. But, in spite of what Ezra Pound said, “Poetry is news that stays news[,]” it really can’t hold its own against the big guns: CNN, Fox, Al Jazeera, The BBC, etc. It remains private discourse artificially raised to the level of public discourse by having its own special month. Normally that isn’t an issue.

But one of the reasons that these thoughts now come time mind is that this, by anyone’s standards, has been a bad year. The world, whether on its own, or with the help of the human race, has behaved horribly and many have faced (are facing) intolerable suffering or death because of it. It is at times like these that one feels one’s private life most hollow and inconsequential. This puts poets in a bind, since it is that very thing, private experience, that is traditionally the stuff of lyric poetry.

Here’s the rub: when our consciousness of our own imminent demise – that most private of private experiences – is viewed vicariously and incessantly through the deaths of masses of others, we become numb to what is at the very center of self-knowledge. Death, to rephrase someone who was in the business, becomes statistical. This is how television works, how the internet works, how, in fact, the information age, social networking and, in general, the digitalization of everything works – by robbing us of our most intimate possession and replacing it with a communal one, a one-death-fits-all scenario, ersatz termination in ersatz catastrophes. It is a question of scale.

What tests us as poets is the disparity that is created between what is ours and the banal diffusion of death as information, death made massively public and impersonal, death presented along side (or as a form of) entertainment. Watch the eyes and facial muscles of your newscaster as she segues between death tolls, stock gains and then on to cricket.

“Honey, come quickly, there’s something terrible happening in Japan.” “I can’t right now, I writing a poem about something terrible that is happening in me.” As a poet, what am I more responsible to, a city washed out to sea, or some private concern that I am trying through my craft and my “love of form” to go public with – because isn’t that what we do when we write a poem, try to match our own predicament to the universal one.

This paradigm comes up with crystalline precision in one of Álvaro de Campos’s great poems “The Tobacco Shop.”

Today I’m torn between the loyalty I owe

To the outward reality of the Tobacco Shop across the street

And to the inward reality of my feeling that everything’s a dream.

W.H, Auden eventually denounced what is arguably one of his greatest poems, “Spain, 1937” because he concluded, in Edward Mendelson’s words, that he had failed “in an effort to join private emotion to a public myth of meliorative history.”  “September I, 1939” was worthy, in the eyes of its author, of similar damnation. In Early Auden, Mendelson tells us that some years after he wrote the latter he concluded that it was “infected with an incurable dishonesty.” Mendelson’s response goes right to the point; “infection, like that of his other large public poems, was its implicit claim to have joined the realm of the private will to that of the public good, when in fact the union had been made through force of rhetoric alone.” “No real meeting” in Auden’s words, only “vain fornications of fancy.” Both poems were dropped from the last “Collected Poems” compiled before his death in 1973. The poet’s final word.

Something Auden says in The Dyer’s Hand pertains directly: “What makes it difficult for a poet not to tell lies is that, in poetry, all facts and all beliefs cease to be true or false and become interesting possibilities.” In the case of “Spain, 1937” it was the “the conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder” which raked his poetic skin like a thorn.  In “September I, 1939” it was, the rhetorical lie embedded in the statement “we must love each other or die.” One wonders of both poems if the problem was with generalization, the traditional carburetor of the lyric engine (albeit, in its loftier form of epiphany), or rather the quality and character of the content, the “interesting possibilities” that led to those generalizations. The question Auden leaves us with is: how [or should we] make the news of the day suitable material for lyric expression. Can we say anything useful? I mean this in the broadest terms of provoking a more powerful effect in the reader by taking public information and putting through the private sieve of formal re-creation; or, on the other hand, to play on some other famous Auden lines, is poetry confined to the valley of its making where it makes nothing happen. If it leaves that valley it turns quickly rhetorical.

NOTHING HAPPENING has been interpreted in many ways, both filling the cup and draining it. Don Share takes up the issue in a 2009 blog entitled “Poetry makes nothing happen… or does it?” He leads us to both the origin of the statement and provides us with a gloss of what Anela Leighton has to say on the same. Shore concludes that for Auden “the job of the poet is not what he called, at about this time, a ‘crusader’ – but to make poems happen,” there-by upending Auden’s orginal statement, and removing one edge from what I believe to be a double-edged challenge.

William H. Pritchard, reviewing Frank Kermode’s History and Value in 1988 for the New York Times tells us that Kermode makes a case for disregarding Auden’s strictures against his own work.

‘Auden notoriously rewrote or suppressed certain of his poems because he thought they said untrue or silly things, and Mr. Kermode is at his most effective in showing why he admires and why we should admire, no matter what Auden thought about them, such discarded poems as the opening ”Prologue” to ”Look, Stranger!” (”O Love, the interest itself in thoughtless Heaven”) or ”Spain, 1937,” which he claims… is the best political poem since Marvell’s ”Horatian Ode…” Yet even Orwell, who rightly scoffed at Auden’s line about ”the conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder” (Orwell had fought in Spain, and so didn’t want to hear about ”necessary” murders), called ”Spain” ”one of the few decent things that have been written about the Spanish war.” By directing our attention to the poem’s effects of ”magniloquence and wit,” Mr. Kermode shows us why this is so.’

Perhaps they are right and as readers we should take their advice. But neither Pritchard nor Kermode addresses the dilemma of the poet himself struggling between public and private realms of thought. Once more,  Auden proves to be his own harshest critic. “The most painful of all experiences to a poet is to find that a poem of his which he knows to be a forgery has pleased the public and got into the anthologies.  For all he knows or cares, the poem may be quite good, but that is not the point; he should not have written it.” (The Dyer’s Hand.)

Auden was caught between his role as a very public poet, the spokesperson of the left for a generation under threat during of Europe’s slide toward fascism and war, and his private version of himself as kind of Kierkegaardian figure enmeshed in an inner battle between truth to self and the obligation to conform to the ideological precepts of the various vanguards of the day. Later her traded Freudianism and socialism for Christianity. To the end he needed some form of over-arching system to wrestle with, to galvanize his own thinking. Unlike Cavafy, one of his heroes, he never managed to create, to his own satisfaction, a public persona that would willingly bend to his inner poem-making self.

Could it be that April is less about the reading public and more a wake-up call to poets themselves, to remain private? To be citizens who happen to write, not for the good of the world, but for the good of themselves. And let the world read it as it may.

notes:

1. I came across the quote from Charles Simic in Howard French’s profile on his Flickr Photostream. I knew about French’s incredible portfolio, but was reminded of it while looking for material in another Flickr colleague’s list of contacts, Teresa Teixeira’s to be precise. French is more known for his work as a journalist.
2. The translation of Álvaro de Campos’s lines was done by Richard Zenith (Pessoa & Co., Grove Press, 1998).
3. Don Share’s blog can be found on Harriet at [http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2009/11/poetry-makes-nothing-happen-or-does-it/]

Rachel Zucker asks, “Is it more important to you that your poems be timeless or timely and why?”

Even as I suspected this question of positing a false dichotomy, my mind couldn’t help but slice it into two dichotomous halves.

One half I contemplated in political terms (maybe partly inspired by Mark Nowak’s piece). I am in a book club that reads both “timeless” “classics” and “contemporary” “bestsellers”—categories which, of course, can and do overlap—and we just finished Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. At one point, Mitchell has a minor character write in his notebook:

Exposition: the workings of the actual past + the virtual past may be illustrated by an event well known to collective history, such as the sinking of the Titanic. The disaster as it actually occurred descends into obscurity as its eyewitnesses die off, documents perish + the wreck of the ship dissolves in its Atlantic grave. Yet a virtual sinking of the Titanic, created from reworked memories, papers, hearsay, fiction—in short, belief—grows ever truer. The actual past is brittle, ever-dimming + ever more problematic to access + reconstruct: in contrast, the virtual past is malleable, ever-brightening + ever more difficult to circumvent/expose as fraudulent. The present presses the virtual past into its own service, to lend credence to its mythologies + legitimacy to the imposition of will. Power seeks + is the right to “landscape” the virtual past. (He who pays the historian calls the tune.)

Harmless case of the virtual past in point: One of my poetry students recently sent me a poem that described young poets attempting to avoid being too selfish or narrow with the image of “sea birds flying/ over the Titanic’s flaming metallic hulk, / half-submerged like an Oreo floating in milk.”

The other half of the question I contemplated in personal terms. In Todd Haynes’ recent film I’m Not There, six characters represent different facets of Bob Dylan’s life and work; one of them, played by Ben Whishaw (aka the actor who plays John Keats in Bright Star) offers “seven simple rules of going into hiding,” the sixth and seventh of which are “never do anything the person standing in front of you cannot understand” and “never create anything, it will be misinterpreted, it will chain you and follow you for the rest of your life.”

Maybe regardless of what you write, you are doomed—if intelligibility is your primary goal—to be misunderstood, and this misunderstanding is, at best, your version of immortality, if you should be so lucky.

The lyric poem itself—with its assertion of the private experience of a perceiving “I”—can be profoundly egalitarian and democratic, suggesting as it does that everybody’s experiences (not just those of gods, kings, heroes, elites) matter and have value, and that this value can be both timely and timeless. And all poets get thrown out of the Republic by Plato, no matter what they’re writing. But the overtly political and/or didactic poem can be successful as well—topical yet classic simultaneously—as plenty of examples by Naomi Shihab Nye, Adrienne Rich, Allen Ginsberg, Audre Lorde, Langston Hughes, Wilfred Owen and many more attest.

So I guess my answer is—as it almost always is—that I want to read and write both. Sometimes I want to listen to Riot Grrrl anthems in which Kathleen Hanna isn’t aiming—nor should she be—for subtlety. Other times I want to listen to quiet singer-songwriter stuff where, say, Elliott Smith isn’t aiming—nor should he be—for ideological clarity. Both can move me to tears, to thought, to action. Both can last and last and last.

p.s. And speaking of timely, Emily Warn, I like what you’re doing in response to the O fashion spread featuring poets. What’s been interesting to me in terms of the critical reaction to that aspect of the poetry issue of the magazine is that I’m not sure most people taking offense to it realize that Oprah’s “using” poets to “sell” poetry/fashion is not some exceptional or desperation move. In most issues, she does a fashion spread along those lines where she has real-life attractive, professional women (social workers, teachers, doctors and so forth) doing the same thing: modeling pricey pieces of clothing that are not theirs. Typically, these women are far more diverse—in terms of age, race, and size—than the models you see in other fashion and women’s magazines. So I’m not totally sure how David Orr, for example, was able to withstand all the O fashion spreads until now, and why he only recently felt compelled to call this approach to fashion “apocalyptic.”

Over the course of this month on Harriet, I’m sure there will be many different poetics espoused, decried, and cited. So I’m adding this one to the mix: “commands given and misunderstood.” Except a poetics of exile, a poetics of non-arrival can never form an ontology. That’s the beauty of it. To embrace it is to lose it, and to lose it is to come closer to a non-existent home. Listening to public radio this past Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, I had forgotten that King gave his famous “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech the night before he was assassinated, and in it more or less predicts his own death. (Here’s the relevant section on YouTube.) Yet I know the speech, I know that King was assassinated, and I know why he was in Memphis more than four decades before the latest assault on public sector unions in Wisconsin, Ohio, Maine, etc., which Mark Nowak has already so forcefully and articulately addressed in his initial Harriet post.

King understood an ethics of exile (and his language was among the most significant poetry of the twentieth-century) even if his goal was to lead enslaved people out of exile. That’s the onto-political dilemma, really.

By the spring of ’82, PATCO workers had long since been fired and were “selling bathroom fixtures/in Long Beach, Calif., pipefitting in Drexel Hill, Pa.,/baking in Honolulu…” and various other jobs at drastically reduced salaries (if they had found jobs at all). But this annihilation of the striking PATCO union members was not nearly enough for our dear Mount Rushmore-worthy Prez. The Gipper also wanted – like his pal Maggie Thatcher’s vindictiveness with the UK miners – to propel into action an economic and political juggernaut (aka, neoliberalism) that could rip and shred the social fabric much easier without resistance from trade unions. And so, as we hear at the end of “Capitalization,” a detailed questionnaire was sent to the home of each former striking PATCO worker:

In recent weeks, the Tea Partiers and the Grand Old Partiers (GOP) around the country have seemingly Apple X’d and Apple V’d the question again, only this time shifting the final phrase of that infamous American question from its original HUAC version (“the Communist Party”) through the Reagan-Afrika Bambaataa cut and paste 2.0 era version (“PATCO”) to this new Shepard Fairey-era 3.0 operating system phrase (“a public sector union”). The purge emerged (how’s that for rhyme, poets?) in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by the Wisconsin Republican Party for the records of University of Wisconsin professor William Cronon (you can read a recent Guardian overview of the story here if you’re not familiar with the details; see also UW emeritus prof Stanley Kutler’s “Who says it’s not about destroying unions?”). Last week, the red scare tactics expanded to neighboring states. As Steven Greenhouse wrote in the New York Times, “A conservative research group in Michigan has issued a far-reaching public records request to the labor studies departments at three public universities in the state, seeking any emails involving the Wisconsin labor turmoil.” [Aside: “turmoil”? C’mon NYTimes editors, you are charging us to read your online stories now!—you can do better than “turmoil” to describe 100,000 people protesting inside and outside the Madison capitol, no?]

Greenhouse’s article goes on to describe how the group, the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, which describes itself as “a nonpartisan research and educational institution” that receives money from numerous conservative foundations, asked professors from the University of Michigan, Michigan State, and Wayne State University “for any e-mails mentioning ‘Scott Walker,’ ‘Madison,’ ‘Wisconsin,’ or ‘Rachel Maddow’.” [Note: I have made these four phrases the sole tags for this Poetry Foundation post.] Greenhouse also notes that several professors who received these requests said it “appeared to be an attempt to intimidate or embarrass professors who are sympathetic to organized labor.”

But this is a poetry blog… What does this have to do with poetry?

Well, if you’re someone that needs an even more direct connection to poetry – besides the fact that politically active poets also teach at these institutions (Khaled Mattawa at Michigan and his ongoing presence and voice on Libya is just one example) – one of those FOIA requests went to a friend of many who will be reading this, M.L. Liebler at Wayne State University (where he teaches both poetry and labor history courses). Liebler is editor of the new anthology Working Words: Punching the Clock and Kicking out the Jams, which features an intro by Michael Moore, a Flint native who I’m guessing the fellow Michiganites at the Mackinaw Center for Public Policy don’t quite see eye to eye with.

When I interviewed Peter Rachleff, a labor activist and professor from one of Wisconsin’s neighboring states (Minnesota), he summarized what we’re seeing in Wisconsin and Michigan like this:

Now, in the space of a month, the dots are again being connected.  Right-wing — and economically elite — social and political forces want to take away public sector unions’ rights to collective bargaining, teachers’ tenure protections, and public employees’ rights to free speech.  This is a power grab, an attempt to pull tighter the reins of economic, political, social, cultural, and intellectual power.  They want to suppress labor education programs, independent historical scholarship, and free speech, from the halls of academia to your neighborhood elementary school, from your workplace to your public square.

I’ll end my return to the Harriet blog with the warning of a poet, Langston Hughes, and one of the quotes I most often repeat these days at my readings and talks (from his essay “My Adventures as a Social Poet”): “I have never known the police of any country to show an interest in lyric poetry as such. But when poems stop talking about the moon and begin to mention poverty, trade unions, color lines, and colonies, somebody tells the police.”

And, if in old skool Harriet style, you want to comment on this post, feel free to post one on the link to this article on my Facebook page. Because the issue, to me, demands discussion; because, as Rachleff said when we spoke, Such an attack demands a unified response.  We are all at risk.

Ah, Harriet. How much I missed thee. Though I must confess I hesitated, partly because I don’t blog, tweet, Facebook, or whatever the kids are doing these days, simply because I value my privacy. Not that I know how much privacy I have anymore. I’m still shocked when my brother, who lives in Mexico, tells me over Skype that my eleven-year-old niece found another podcast of me on YouTube. (How droll!) I’m more outraged about how unflattering I look on video than anything else and my first response is: “I look fatter, shorter and more disabled than I really am!”I like to think that I can control the intensity of the unflattering revelations I release into the world because I deal with language, not photographs, videos or even audio. But the technology has taken over, and half the time I can’t even tell I’m being filmed or recorded. Though even email gets me into trouble when someone points out how I contradicted myself because–[insert FWD message here]–“You see? back then you said this!” Wow, what ever happened to complexity? Most unfortunate.

One of the reasons I’m so closed off is that I always imagined that instead of putting my anxieties, wonders, insights and observations willy-nilly all over the Internet, I should save them for the poetry, the story, the essay, or for occasions like this, when I can keep myself from making impulsive statements I might later regret. Like I said, at least the semblance of control is important. I can already imagine a few Facebook fiends or poet bloggers getting all defensive, but I’m not going to turn this into a fight about whether or not others should temper their cyber personas–that’s their business. Instead, I’m making this about me. (Now there’s something these folks might relate to.)

Why do I participate? Well, is there really a choice in the age of Google, when a web presence is de rigueur, when the easiest manner to gauge such intangibles as visibility, productivity, or–egads!–desirability is to consult Wikipedia? They got the 411, baby, like it or not. And I’ve consulted the site to check out a few names, I will not lie, and cringe at how one’s attempt at self-promotion and self-aggrandizing is immediately apparent. My brother read my WikiPage and he was all upset that it mentioned that our parents were deceased. “That’s personal,” he said. True, but then, I have written about it so it’s not necessarily a secret.

So here’s where it stands: I have an author web site (but I refuse to place blurbs or book review excerpts on there because I blurb and review book and the cycle makes me uneasy), I have a faux Facebook profile and only two friends I instant message (one of them lives in Taiwan), I have a Fan Page on Facebook but I don’t control the posts, and I did edit something out of my WikiPage once because I thought it was a hurtful assessment of me as a professional–I wouldn’t have bothered, but one time an event organizer printed it out and distributed it to the audience, something I didn’t want to happen again. And I’ll take the disclosure a step further: that statement said that my work as a book critic was outshining my work as a creative writer. Maybe I should put it back in because maybe it’s true.

In any case, I suppose that one benefit to coming back to Harriet–speaking through the book critic identity I now embrace–is that I get to talk about books and poetry and politics, but through a measured and finite agreement. Please, Poetry Foundation gods, don’t hire me full-time! And then I’ll step back into the shadows and simply lurk. Well, I said I didn’t write on Facebook or blogs, I didn’t say I didn’t read them. Of course, I do. I like to be in the mix. I like to see how others comport themselves. I learn from the wise and the fools give me something to chuckle about at teatime.

So get ready, lovers and haters, I’m back. And just to end on a more celebratory note rather than a threatening one, I’d like to come full circle to Mr. Carl Phillips. Just a year ago I was sitting here griping about the lack of poets of color winners of the Yale Younger Prize, and a year later I’m gratified that his first choice–also the only Latino winner in the YYP’s 106-year history–is Eduardo C. Corral, some Xicano pocho from Arizona, of all places, currently the most embattled territory on American soil. Wow. A double-win for American poetry, and a double fuck-you to polite monochromacy.

Off for a stroll, what?

THOMAS JOHNSON: …Many people conceive of the conflict in Afghanistan as an insurgency-counterinsurgency. I conceive insurgency-counterinsurgency basically as an information war supported by military action or what people call military kinetics. So the message that this two sides are using to try to win the trust and confidence of the people — we like to say hearts and minds — but to win the hearts and minds of the people becomes an incredibly important weapon, if you will.

JEFFREY BROWN: And poetry is part of that?

THOMAS JOHNSON: Poetry is part of that. Afghanistan is basically an illiterate society. Before the war maybe 10 percent of the country was literate. The statistics now say maybe 23 percent, and parts of the south of Afghanistan, maybe 1 percent of the females are literate and maybe 5 percent of the males are literate. But Afghan history is very important from generation to generation, so the Afghans came up with a scheme to be able to transmit knowledge from father to son, from generation to generation, and poetry is a perfect means of doing that. The rhyme and rhythm makes it easy to memorize, much like advertisers do on Madison Avenue in the United States.

Recent coverage of the protests in Egypt and Tunisia has made some mention of poetry, but it’s been dwarfed by the emphasis on social media tools like Facebook and Twitter. As Johnson mentions, the tradition of poetry and song as political tools has been passed down through many Middle Eastern cultures for thousands of years, so even though poetry plays a much larger part in the “information war” in all of these conflicts than smartphones do, it doesn’t have the same novelty to hook Western reporters. But as these conflicts have also shown us, there is now a rapidly developing area where poetry and technology intersect.

JEFFREY BROWN: …Examples can be viewed on YouTube. Here a man sings a motivational chant for Taliban fighters glorifying the exploits of a warrior. Another chant tells of Malali, an Afghan woman war hero who fought against the British a century ago, encouraging people to join today’s war against foreigners. A third chant warns the death of a top Taliban commander killed by coalition forces in 2007.

So why, if it’s considered a known (even mundane) fact that poetry is the form of choice for spreading political messages, has it taken so long for the US to recognize that it’s ill-equipped for this style of conflict? Perhaps the media coverage itself is a good indicator; it wasn’t until the poetry was wrapped up in a story about something that played a major role in our own current cultural climate—gadgets, YouTube, Twitter, Bluetooth—that people began to take note of the importance of the underlying message. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the devaluing of poetry in one culture leads to the inability to recognize its significance in another.

THOMAS JOHNSON: Well, ideally you would think that we or our Afghan allies could put together information messages that are similar to what the Taliban are doing.

JEFFREY BROWN>: You mean counterpoetry?

THOMAS JOHNSON: Counternarratives, if you will. Counterpoetry. Exactly. And rather than some of the mundane information operations that I think we’re pursuing right now that don’t’ resonate with the people.

JEFFREY BROWN: Not to make light of it, but you’re suggesting we need better poetry or a better story?

THOMAS JOHNSON: Yeah, absolutely. This is a war of narratives. That’s an excellent way to put it. We’re in a battle over the story. So I think there’s much to be learned from the Taliban in how we approach conflicts like this in Afghanistan.

JEFFREY BROWN: And how far do you want to push this? Is the argument that unless we do a better job of countering the narrative through poetry and chant, we lose?

THOMAS JOHNSON: I think that if you buy this notion that this conflict is 95 percent information and 5 percent military actions, yeah, then I think that we cannot win this unless we have a story to be told.

BOOK Southern Africa has posted videos from a reading last week organized by South African PEN and Poetry International Web South Africa. Part of a protest reading that took place in 33 countries around the world, South African writers shared their own prison writing alongside English and Afrikaans translations of Liu’s “Charter 08″ and “You Wait for me with Dust.”

The final item on the programme was the reading of Xiaobo’s poem, “You Wait for Me with Dust”. First it was read in the original Mandarin by an anonymous, masked reader. This was a haunting encounter for those who imagined the solitude from which it was written. It was followed in English, read by Liesl Jobson, and an Afrikaans translation by Johann de Lange was read by Karin Schimke.

The reading was a call for free speech as Liu remains in prison despite the international attention his Nobel Peace Prize drew last year. In solidarity, SA PEN’s newly formed Writers in Prison Committee announced that they would begin efforts to bring attention to imprisoned writers throughout Africa.

Poet Suheir Hammad who “blends the stories and sounds of her Palestinian-American heritage with the vibrant language of Brooklyn” performed at TEDWomen in Washington DC in December. Hammad addressed the crowd of “confused, aspiring pacifists” and spoke of how poetry prepares you to confront “man’s creative violence” in her poems “What I Will” and “break (clustered).”

Political theater now plays out on more venues than just the floor of the Capitol, but verse still thrives on all of them. Harry Reid has been catching some flack for citing Nevada’s annual Cowboy Poetry Festival as a reason to preserve the budget for the National Endowment for the Humanities. While said flack has more to do with his misspeaking on how the “tens of thousands of people” who attend each year “would not exist” without the festival (and you could probably find at least a couple among them who would agree), the goofiness of the situation hasn’t stopped Reid’s opponents from seizing an opportunity to accuse him of privileging poetry over a balanced budget.

What’s especially odd, however, is that at least one chose to issue his critique of supporting poetry in the form of poetry. When Arizona Representative Jeff Flake couldn’t cross chambers to address Reid directly, he naturally took to Twitter:

Way out on the prairie, to a rustler named Harry / Bein’ broke ain’t no reason to sweat …
Just sit in yer’ barn, spin a rhythmic yarn / And you’ll pay down the national debt!

Via The Hill’s Twitter Room. Yes, Twitter Room.

“Fifty-thousand strong
we stand up and scream to save
sitting down to talk.”

On Montevidayo, former Wisconsin resident and Milwaukee poet Brenda Cardenas checks in from the protests, calling to mind the presence of other poets and activists whose historic efforts keep her and the other protesters going.

Carlos [Cortez] was there and is here. My grandpa was there and is here. Cesar Chavez, Joe Hill, and Mother Jones have been marching in Madison for weeks, sleeping on the marble floors of the Capitol and outside on its concrete steps when they were cast out… and they are here. Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and Ronnie Gilbert, Leadbelly and Victor Jara, the Coal Miner’s Daughters have been harmonizing with our chants all over Wisconsin, and they are here. Sonia Sanchez, Thomas McGrath, and Federico Garcia Lorca, Mahmoud Darwish, Pablo Neruda and Anna Akhmatova have been whispering in our ears, and they are here. MLK, Fanny Lou Hammer, Anna Mae Pictou Acquash, and Corky Gonzalez have passed through Teamsters, custodians and sewer workers; labor leaders, teachers and firemen; nurses, policemen and anarchists; veterans, students, and EMT’s; business owners, lawyers, and sanitation workers; bus and taxi drivers; clerks, artists and actors; singing grannies and babies dressed in diapers that read, “I poop on your bill!”; Lesbians for Labor and ministers; United Farm Workers and snowplow drivers; rainbow coalitions and farmers. They are taxpayers, they are citizens of the world, they are the bread of the earth, and they are here. The 14 Senators who fled so that the truth would be exposed are currently harbored in Carlos’ and my second home… and they are here—shape-shifters shaking the earth beneath Walker’s feet. In his dreams, he is falling like a cracked wall, its chinks chiseled open by the workers who have learned over many years of labor how to wield their tools.

“We also remember the art that challenged our assumptions; the scholarship that brought us closer to the events of our history; the poetry that we loved — or at least the poetry that we might recite to a girlfriend to seem deep. Of course, we still hum the great songs by the musicians in this room — songs that in many cases have been the soundtrack of our lives over decades.”

Full story at ABC news.

Natasha Trethewey and Evelyne Trouillot will keynote this week’s conference From Natural Events to Social Disasters in the Circum-Caribbean hosted by the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies at University of Texas, Austin. The conference will discuss the long-running injustices across the region that natural disasters of the past few years have suddenly exposed to a much wider audience. With a particular focus on cultural production, the conference asks not only about the consequences, but how one communicates them now that so much (often ill-informed) attention has resulted from these disasters.

From hurricanes to earthquakes to landslides, natural disasters have profoundly shaped the relationship between humans and the environment in the region. Not unlike the earthquakes that struck Nicaragua and Guatemala in the 1970s, the destruction brought to New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the earthquake that struck Haiti in 2010 revealed historical and ongoing forms of social inequality, environmental hazards, and political crisis that plague the circum-Caribbean region. This conference brings together scholars from multiple disciplines, artists, and activists who have been immersed in disaster relief and solidarity efforts. Hurricane Katrina and the earthquake in Haiti offer the most salient examples, and these two sites will serve as focal points for the conference.

Earlier this year, Trethewey released a memoir Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast about her family’s process to after the hurricane. In her Fresh Air interview, “she explains that both the identity and future of the Gulf region are directly linked to how the region’s past is remembered,” something that will likely be an important theme this week.

Shine, shine whom you shine on all of us
Shine, shine whom you shine wherever you go
No one can shine like you shine
You made people feel confused and lost
You made people feel happy and lost

6. John Tyler. Though his decision to annex Texas led to the Mexican-American War, Tyler had a poet’s sensibilities. After his first wife died early in his presidency, he courted the much younger Julia Gardener via verse. In a poem he wrote for her, he contemplated giving love a second chance:

“Shall I again that Harp unstring,
Which long hath been a useless thing,
Unheard in Lady’s bower?”

Tyler and Gardiner were married in 1844, in the first wedding for a sitting US president.

On any day, the Arab world’s greatest city staggers, its 18 million people joined by a million more from the countryside. Staccato horns bring a cadence to a rush hour that lasts all day, overwhelmed only by the din of one of the world’s most crowded cities. The assault on the senses that the city represents has long given rise to a nostalgia, the glimpses of an older, more rarefied capital captured in black-and-white Egyptian movies.

Tahrir is that, longing and novelty.

As the night unfolded, vendors ambled through peaceful streets, past couples holding hands and men still wearing bandages from their fight with government supporters trying to overrun the square. “Tea for an Egyptian pound!” one cried. Volunteers handed out bread sticks. “My man, eat it!” shouted Ahmed Khater, to a gesture of polite reluctance. “Just take one. We came for you.”

Down the street, men took their seats on the wet pavement, to a performance of colloquial poetry by a man in a wheelchair, speeches by a brawler draped in an Egyptian flag and slogans led by Mohammed Mahmoud, a 16-year-old with a knack for words.

“God reigns over the crisis, and that guy has the mind of a shoe,” he cried of President Hosni Mubarak as he stood under a drizzle. (It rhymes in Arabic.) “Oh Mubarak, you coward, we’re the people in the square” went another. (It rhymes, too.)

And over at the Daily Beast, Josh Dzieza explores the history of Egypt’s protest poetry:

The readings and poetic chants in Tunisia and Egypt are only the latest instance in a long history of political poetry in the Middle East, going back all the way to pre-Islamic times, when the sa-alik (roughly translated as “vagabond”) wrote about living outside the tribal system. In modern times, poetry has been a tool for creating a sense of political unity, giving voice to political aspirations, and excoriating governments and leaders. Maybe most surprising to an American used to poetry’s increasing confinement to college campuses, poetry is a tool for galvanizing people to political action.

Poetry magazine recently received this welcome dispatch from Chicago Review, with links to PDFs of knockouts from their latest number. From CR editor, V. Joshua Adams:

Readers of Harriet may be interested in two essays on contemporary poetry from the latest issue of Chicago Review (55:3—4). In “Apocalypticism: A Way Forward for Poetry,” Peter O’Leary extols the virtues of a vatic approach in a poetry world “filled with allergies to the spirit.” His essay begins with a discussion of the noteworthy magazine apex of the M, and praises apocalyptic tendencies in the work of Joseph Donahue and Pam Rehm. Meanwhile, Keith Tuma’s “After the Bubble” takes aim at the silence of poets (of all kinds) on the relation between their world and that of the university. Tuma looks to Stephen Rodefer and Kent Johnson as two potential alternatives to a pervasive “aesthetic of courtesy” that prevents contemporary poetry from giving an accurate account of itself.

These essays are part of a feature of ten essays dedicated to the work of critic Robert von Hallberg. The introduction to the feature is available online, too.

But in my own experience, poetic talent generally doesn’t make itself known either through agents, or through the efforts of the poets themselves: mostly you become aware of it by the stir the poems themselves create. So well-connected is the community of poets that you’re never more than two or three degrees of separation from Seamus Heaney. For a real new talent, even one casual appearance at the most obscure local workshop, or a single poem posted online, or sent to another poet, will be enough to link it to this network; you really have to work at being a recluse of a rare and dedicated variety to avoid being on the radar.

New media tools and blogs have helped a great deal, too, though Paterson does bemoan the “too many anonymous others which resemble farty wee boys’ gang-huts, and where membership is conditional on hating the right people.” Highlighting blogs and publishers that he considers “responsible and informative” in promoting new work, Paterson considers the Picador Prize an extension of the exposure process the network is already facilitating.

All the best efforts of other poets, however, can do little to sway an editor who’s too caught up in his own aesthetics or taste to give the new guys a chance, and this is where Paterson and his colleagues come in, taking great pains to do away with rigged selections, egos, and seemingly objective but diluted consensus-by-committee.

Well – with the best will in the world, there’s always a danger that an editor will end up with a list that reflects only their own narrow predilections, even though we’re all convinced we’re exercising our infinitely rich taste and discrimination. Everyone is their own blindspot. As the years go by, you take more and more advice from those whose opinion you trust (especially younger poets and critics; any middle-aged editor who doesn’t talk to poets in their 20s about the contemporaries they’re reading is in danger of publishing only young poets who sound like the now-middle-aged ones they grew up with).