WATCH THE VIDEO:

Fairly Unbalanced: Writing Political Satire in the 21st Century
June 14, 2009

Jimmy Tingle, comedian
Elizabeth Searle, co-vice chair, PEN New England
Percival Everett, writer
Baron Wormser, former Maine Poet Laureate
Lise Haines, writer
Teddy Sherrill, former director of advertising, Harvard Lampoon
Richard Hoffman, writer and chair of PEN New England

PEN New England and Cambridge Forum present a discussion of the power and the pitfalls of writing in the age of Jon Stewart and Al Franken.

PEN also presents the 2009 Vasyl Stus Freedom to Write Award to Nurmuhemmet Yasin, whose satirical story "Wild Pigeon" Chinese authorities considered critical of their presence in the Xinjiang Uighur Region. After a closed trial in 2005 at which he was denied a lawyer, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison. The award is named in honor of Vasyl Stus, the leading Ukrainian poet of his generation and the last poet to die in a Soviet gulag, and is awarded to Yasin in absentia.

PEN New England is one of five regional branches of PEN America Center, which in turn is part of International PEN, the only worldwide organization of writing professionals and the world's first human rights organization. PEN's mission is to promote literacy and a culture of literature, and to defend free expression everywhere.

Below are my remarks at Don't Close the Books! Rally at Massachusetts Statehouse, prior to Massachusetts Book Awards November 4, 2009. The rally was to protest and attempt to reverse the decision by Governor Patrick to severely cut funding for libraries across the state. Several people asked me for a copy so I thought it easiest to post it here. For more information about this event, and to lend your support to our public libraries, visit The Massachusetts Library Association.

Good morning. I am here today as an author and a teacher of writing and literature, but mainly as Chair of PEN New England, our local chapter of PEN, an international organization founded by writers, and also the oldest human rights organization in the world. I am here because, in addition to all the many services libraries provide, they are also the guardians and exemplars of certain values, and chief among them, as it is for PEN, is intellectual freedom, freedom of expression. Censorship is anathema because it inhibits knowledge and debate, it constrains the discourse not only horizontally, among the living, but our all-important discourse with the writers and thinkers of the past. Any restriction that diminishes access to the resources libraries provide is a form of censorship, no matter the professed reason for that restriction. Even if the stated reason is a recession, or an ailing budget. Intent is irrelevant here. Restriction equals censorship.

Another related value libraries hold dear is that of privacy, the privacy to think one’s thoughts, to ask one’s questions, to seek out information and opinions. It was only a few years ago that the US Bureau of Homeland Security, with no regard for the confidentiality that is a cornerstone of intellectual freedom, sought to determine what books, articles, and internet sites had been accessed by persons they deemed “of interest.” And it was the loud and strong stand of the American Library Association that led the resistance to that infringement of civil rights. Recently one of the writers PEN has sought to defend, currently imprisoned by the Chinese government, was convicted on the basis of information provided by Yahoo, for whom global market share would seem to be a value that trumps privacy. When the chips are down, I trust my public library to safeguard my intellectual freedom before I trust Comcast, Hotmail, Gmail, or Verizon.

Because, at PEN, we are devoted to fostering the discourse that literature represents, because we believe that a multiplicity of worldviews is essential to resisting what George Orwell called “Groupthink”, we are committed to spreading literacy, which is not a simple question of being able to read or being unable to read. In our work with children, with highschool students, with prisoners, we see clearly that literacy is a process by which, once able to read and write, an individual becomes increasingly able to interact with complex texts and, thereby, to acquire knowledge and understanding and the ability to take part in the larger conversation from which they would otherwise remain excluded. Libraries are the centers of that literacy effort. No literate person setting foot in a library is not returned to a state of intellectual curiosity, a state both humbling and exciting: look — and in a library you can SEE it as you cannot see digitized texts arrayed in cyberspace — look at all there is to learn and understand, riches greater than one life can gather and spend. This understanding, so clearly apprehended in this sacred space, is our greatest safeguard against the intellectual intolerance that history tells us precedes a society’s descent into violence and totalitarianism.

Libraries represent our commitment to learning, and in their democratic access to a treasury of intellectual and cultural capital, they are our real common-wealth, not merely a symbol of it, but the embodiment of that ideal and its daily continuance. Public libraries level the playing field. Our public libraries make available the conversations of the past — the enthusiasms, arguments, warnings, discoveries — to people who would otherwise have no context for understanding the issues of our day. Without our libraries an ahistorical view of the world prevails in which our troubles have never been faced by human beings before, in which we are isolated from one another’s concerns, and in which the civic matters that affect us are decided by the loudest voices and catchiest slogans.

It’s a truism that libraries are institutions charged with preserving and transmitting the records of humankind on behalf of future generations, but it’s important to understand that that rhetorical term “future generations” really means our kids. When we close libraries, or cut their hours, or their staffs, or their budgets, we are really ripping off our kids. I can’t imagine my boyhood without the refuge, the promise, the renewal that was mine at the library. Nothing in my boyhood, not athletics, not school subjects, not my religious upbringing was so empowering. I understood very early, with the help of a friendly librarian — have I mentioned that librarians are also educators? — that there was no question I had about the world or anything in it that I could not set about answering with the help of those alphabetized drawers full of cards. It had been ordered and cross-referenced in such a way that even the act of tracking down the information was rewarding. I think that I also learned that my education, my entertainment, and my direction were my own to seek; they were not something that anyone could either give me or withhold.

Sometimes magical but always sacred places, places of refuge and contemplation, of inspiration, of learning, libraries are, especially now, important troves of information. Research shows clearly that in times of recession, people need their libraries more than ever, for career research, educational opportunities, legal and financial information, job-hunting, and even, for some, a safe warm place on a winter’s day. This is no time to weaken our commitment to institutions at the heart of peoples’ aspirations. The public library is the very center of democracy. In a difficult time, our libraries are more essential than ever. Funding them adequately is both a practical and a moral necessity.

Thank you.

OK, now this is just for fun. you might get a charge out of our foolishness at Stonecoast as captured on these videos: me, novelist and playwright Mike Kimball, and poet and memoirist Debra Marquart making music at the "talent night." Have a look and a listen.

And wait — there's more!

My op-ed piece, written in my capacity as Chair of PEN New England, appeared in this Wednesday's Boston Globe. I reprint it here, but I have also added a link at the bottom directing you to PEN American Center's case file on this persecuted writer, with directions for expressing your outrage to the Chinese authorities.


Author’s pen is mightier than China’s sword

By Richard Hoffman | October 14, 2009

IMAGINE YOU are a popular, award-winning author whose poems and stories are widely-read, anthologized, and taught to schoolchildren. You have written a short story about a young pigeon, the son of a king, who is captured by humans and caged, and who by story’s end finds captivity so intolerable that he chooses to eat a poison strawberry rather than live such a life. You call the story “The Wild Pigeon.’’ It is published to acclaim.

But you are writing in a land where writers’ works come under constant scrutiny and where one morning there’s a knock at your door. You open it and are taken from your family, tried, and convicted without a jury or legal representation and sentenced to 10 years of hard labor for “inciting separatism.’’

This is no fable, Kafka-esque though it is. This is the story of Nurmuhemmet Yasin, a 34-year-old Uighur writer in northwestern China who was arrested in 2004. He is the recipient of this year’s Vasyl Stus Freedom to Write Award from PEN New England.

Until recently, many had never heard of the Uighurs, a Turkish people who live in an area of northwest China known to the Chinese as Xinjiang Province, an area formerly called East Turkistan. Seeking to exploit the region’s rich resources, Beijing has been increasing pressure on the region’s citizens to conform, resettling the province with ethnic Han Chinese in much the same way it has sought to undermine the autonomy of its neighbor to the south, Tibet.

Yasin’s “The Wild Pigeon’’ is clearly a political allegory, a short story about dignity, integrity, and pride in the face of cultural and territorial erasure. In the story, a mother explains to her son, “They want to change the character of our heritage . . . strip us of our memory and identity. Perhaps in the near future, they will build factories and high-rises here, and the smoke that comes from making products we don’t need will seep into the environment and poison our land and our water.’’

But whether or not we understand or even care about the situation of the Uighur minority in China, we should all concern ourselves with the plight of Yasin. Those who love stories and poems and plays and essays, who understand they are vital to all human cultures, must rise in defense of any author anywhere whose government violates the basic right of freedom of expression.

Yasin is one of more than three dozen writers held in prison by the Chinese authorities, according to PEN American Center. In addition, poets, playwrights, and novelists are imprisoned in Turkey, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Algeria, Cuba, Myanmar, and Iran for the crime of writing about how the world appears to them. In a world in which our destinies are intertwined, in which we need more desperately than ever to know one another, such censorship hurts us all.

Toward the end of “The Wild Pigeon,’’ the protagonist’s captors converse, as they watch the bird refuse food or water:

“Just let him go. To watch a pigeon die slowly like this is too pitiful.’’

“Setting him free does us no good. Nothing good will come of this.’’

“Nothing good will come of this in any event.’’

Readers and writers worldwide need to tell Chinese authorities that we have not forgotten Nurmuhemmet Yasin, that we are all watching.

Richard Hoffman is the chairman of PEN New England.

© Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

To take action on behalf of Nurmuhemmet Yasin, and on behalf of freedom-of-expression for writers everywhere, click here.

It's been a long time since I posted anything new here, but I have been recently showered with good fortune. Gold Star Road was selected this week for the Sheila Motton Award from the New England Poetry Club for best book of poetry published in the previous two years. Then, within hours, it was announced that I had received one of eight Brother Thomas Fellowships, a $15,000 award administered by The Boston Foundation. Needless to say, I am thrilled.

I also want to extend an invitation to any and all to join me in celebration of the publication of my story collection, Interference & Other Stories, on October 22, 2009, at GOOD FOOD CAFÉ, 2378 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02140. Click here for directions. There will be food and fun, door-prizes, and I will give a short reading. Porter Square Books will be there selling books.

This came to me from my friend Gene Bell-Villada. It was supposd to have been first published on the site Our Future Today, but I couldn't find it there, so I'm simply sharing it here.

Fascist America: Are We There Yet?

By Sara Robinson


All through the dark years of the Bush Administration, progressives
watched in horror as Constitutional protections vanished, nativist
rhetoric ratcheted up, hate speech turned into intimidation and
violence, and the president of the United States seized for himself
powers only demanded by history's worst dictators. With each new
outrage, the small handful of us who'd made ourselves experts on
right-wing culture and politics would hear once again from worried
readers: Is this it? Have we finally become a fascist state? Are we
there yet?

And every time this question got asked, people like Chip Berlet and
Dave Neiwert and Fred Clarkson and yours truly would look up from our
maps like a parent on a long drive, and smile a wan smile of
reassurance. "Wellll...we're on a bad road, and if we don't change
course, we could end up there soon enough. But there's also still
plenty of time and opportunity to turn back. Watch, but don't worry. As
bad as this looks: no -- we are not there yet."

In tracking the mileage on this trip to perdition, many of us relied on
the work of historian Robert Paxton, who is probably the world's
pre-eminent scholar on the subject of how countries turn fascist. In a
1998 paper published in The Journal of Modern History, Paxton argued
that the best way to recognize emerging fascist movements isn't by
their rhetoric, their politics, or their aesthetics. Rather, he said,
mature democracies turn fascist by a recognizable process, a set of
five stages that may be the most important family resemblance that
links all the whole motley collection of 20th Century fascisms
together. According to our reading of Paxton's stages, we weren't there
yet. There were certain signs -- one in particular -- we were keeping
an eye out for, and we just weren't seeing it.

And now we are. In fact, if you know what you're looking for, it's
suddenly everywhere. It's odd that I haven't been asked for quite a
while; but if you asked me today, I'd tell you that if we're not there
right now, we've certainly taken that last turn into the parking lot
and are now looking for a space. Either way, our fascist American
future now looms very large in the front windshield -- and those of us
who value American democracy need to understand how we got here, what's
changing now, and what's at stake in the very near future if these
people are allowed to win -- or even hold their ground.

What is fascism?

The word has been bandied about by so many people so wrongly for so
long that, as Paxton points out, "Everybody is somebody else's
fascist." Given that, I always like to start these conversations by
revisiting Paxton's essential definition of the term:


   "Fascism is a system of political authority and social order
intended to reinforce the unity, energy, and purity of communities in
which liberal democracy stands accused of producing division and
decline."

Elsewhere, he refines this further as

   "a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with
community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults
of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed
nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration
with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with
redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of
internal cleansing and external expansion."
.

Jonah Goldberg aside, that's a basic definition most legitimate
scholars in the field can agree on, and the one I'll be referring to
here.


From proto-fascism to the tipping point

According to Paxton, fascism unfolds in five stages. The first two are
pretty solidly behind us -- and the third should be of particular
interest to progressives right now.

In the first stage, a rural movement emerges to effect some kind of
nationalist renewal (what Roger Griffin calls "palingenesis" -- a
phoenix-like rebirth from the ashes). They come together to restore a
broken social order, always drawing on themes of unity, order, and
purity. Reason is rejected in favor of passionate emotion. The way the
organizing story is told varies from country to country; but it's
always rooted in the promise of restoring lost national pride by
resurrecting the culture's traditional myths and values, and purging
society of the toxic influence of the outsiders and intellectuals who
are blamed for their current misery.

Fascism only grows in the disturbed soil of a mature democracy in
crisis. Paxton suggests that the Ku Klux Klan, which formed in reaction
to post-Civil War Reconstruction, may in fact be the first
authentically fascist movement in modern times. Almost every major
country in Europe sprouted a proto-fascist movement in the wretched
years following WWI (when the Klan enjoyed a major resurgence here as
well) -- but most of them stalled either at this first stage, or the
next one.

As Rick Perlstein documented in his two books on Barry Goldwater and
Richard Nixon, modern American conservatism was built on these same
themes. From "Morning in America" to the Rapture-ready religious right
to the white nationalism promoted by the GOP through various gradients
of racist groups, it's easy to trace how American proto-fascism offered
redemption from the upheavals of the 1960s by promising to restore the
innocence of a traditional, white, Christian, male-dominated America.
This vision has been so thoroughly embraced that the entire Republican
party now openly defines itself along these lines. At this late stage,
it's blatantly racist, sexist, repressed, exclusionary, and permanently
addicted to the politics of fear and rage. Worse: it doesn't have a
moment's shame about any of it. No apologies, to anyone. These same
narrative threads have woven their way through every fascist movement
in history.

In the second stage, fascist movements take root, turn into real
political parties, and seize their seat at the table of power.
Interestingly, in every case Paxton cites, the political base came from
the rural, less-educated parts of the country; and almost all of them
came to power very specifically by offering themselves as informal goon
squads organized to intimidate farmworkers on behalf of the large
landowners. The KKK disenfranchised black sharecroppers and set itself
up as the enforcement wing of Jim Crow. The Italian Squadristi and the
German Brownshirts made their bones breaking up farmers' strikes. And
these days, GOP-sanctioned anti-immigrant groups make life hell for
Hispanic agricultural workers in the US. As violence against random
Hispanics (citizens and otherwise) increases, the right-wing goon
squads are getting basic training that, if the pattern holds, they may
eventually use to intimidate the rest of us.

Paxton wrote that succeeding at the second stage "depends on certain
relatively precise conditions: the weakness of a liberal state, whose
inadequacies condemn the nation to disorder, decline, or humiliation;
and political deadlock because the Right, the heir to power but unable
to continue to wield it alone, refuses to accept a growing Left as a
legitimate governing partner." He further noted that Hitler and
Mussolini both took power under these same circumstances: "deadlock of
constitutional government (produced in part by the polarization that
the fascists abetted); conservative leaders who felt threatened by the
loss of their capacity to keep the population under control at a moment
of massive popular mobilization; an advancing Left; and conservative
leaders who refused to work with that Left and who felt unable to
continue to govern against the Left without further reinforcement."

And more ominously: "The most important variables...are the
conservative elites' willingness to work with the fascists (along with
a reciprocal flexibility on the part of the fascist leaders) and the
depth of the crisis that induces them to cooperate."

That description sounds eerily like the dire straits our Congressional
Republicans find themselves in right now. Though the GOP has been
humiliated, rejected, and reduced to rump status by a series of epic
national catastrophes mostly of its own making, its leadership can't
even imagine governing cooperatively with the newly mobilized and
ascendant Democrats. Lacking legitimate routes back to power, their
last hope is to invest the hardcore remainder of their base with an
undeserved legitimacy, recruit them as shock troops, and overthrow
American democracy by force. If they can't win elections or policy
fights, they're more than willing to take it to the streets, and seize
power by bullying Americans into silence and complicity.

When that unholy alliance is made, the third stage -- the transition to
full-fledged government fascism -- begins.

The third stage: being there

All through the Bush years, progressive right-wing watchers refused to
call it "fascism" because, though we kept looking, we never saw clear
signs of a deliberate, committed institutional partnership forming
between America's conservative elites and its emerging homegrown
brownshirt horde. We caught tantalizing signs of brief flirtations --
passing political alliances, money passing hands, far-right moonbat
talking points flying out of the mouths of "mainstream" conservative
leaders. But it was all circumstantial, and fairly transitory. The two
sides kept a discreet distance from each other, at least in public.
What went on behind closed doors, we could only guess. They certainly
didn't act like a married couple.

Now, the guessing game is over. We know beyond doubt that the Teabag
movement was created out of whole cloth by astroturf groups like Dick
Armey's FreedomWorks and Tim Phillips' Americans for Prosperity, with
massive media help from FOX News. We see the Birther fracas -- the kind
of urban myth-making that should have never made it out of the pages of
the National Enquirer -- being openly ratified by Congressional
Republicans. We've seen Armey's own professionally-produced field
manual that carefully instructs conservative goon squads in the fine
art of disrupting the democratic governing process -- and the film of
public officials being terrorized and threatened to the point where
some of them required armed escorts to leave the building. We've seen
Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner applauding and promoting
a video of the disruptions and looking forward to "a long, hot August
for Democrats in Congress."

This is the sign we were waiting for -- the one that tells us that yes,
kids: we are there now. America's conservative elites have openly
thrown in with the country's legions of discontented far right thugs.
They have explicitly deputized them and empowered them to act as their
enforcement arm on America's streets, sanctioning the physical
harassment and intimidation of workers, liberals, and public officials
who won't do their political or economic bidding.

This is the catalyzing moment at which honest-to-Hitler fascism begins.
It's also our very last chance to stop it.

The fail-safe point

According to Paxton, the forging of this third-stage alliance is the
make-or-break moment -- and the worst part of it is that by the time
you've arrived at that point, it's probably too late to stop it. From
here, it escalates, as minor thuggery turns into beatings, killings,
and systematic tagging of certain groups for elimination, all directed
by people at the very top of the power structure. After Labor Day, when
Democratic senators and representatives go back to Washington, the mobs
now being created to harass them will remain to run the same tactics --
escalated and perfected with each new use -- against anyone in town
whose color, religion, or politics they don't like. In some places,
they're already making notes and taking names.

 

Where's the danger line? Paxton offers three quick questions that point
us straight at it:

   1. Are [neo- or protofascisms] becoming rooted as parties that
represent major interests and feelings and wield major influence on the
political scene?

   2. Is the economic or constitutional system in a state of blockage
apparently insoluble by existing authorities?

   3. Is a rapid political mobilization threatening to escape the
control of traditional elites, to the point where they would be tempted
to look for tough helpers in order to stay in charge?

By my reckoning, we're three for three. That's too close. Way too close.

The Road Ahead

History tells us that once this alliance catalyzes and makes a
successful bid for power, there's no way off this ride. As Dave Neiwert
wrote in his recent book, The Eliminationists, "if we can only identify
fascism in its mature form—the goose-stepping brownshirts, the
full-fledged use of violence and intimidation tactics, the mass
rallies—then it will be far too late to stop it." Paxton (who
presciently warned that "An authentic popular fascism in the United
States would be pious and anti-Black") agrees that if a
corporate/brownshirt alliance gets a toehold -- as ours is now
scrambling to do -- it can very quickly rise to power and destroy the
last vestiges of democratic government. Once they start racking up
wins, the country will be doomed to take the whole ugly trip through
the last two stages, with no turnoffs or pit stops between now and the
end.

What awaits us? In stage four, as the duo assumes full control of the
country, power struggles emerge between the brownshirt-bred party
faithful and the institutions of the conservative elites -- church,
military, professions, and business. The character of the regime is
determined by who gets the upper hand. If the party members (who gained
power through street thuggery) win, an authoritarian police state may
well follow. If the conservatives can get them back under control, a
more traditional theocracy, corporatocracy, or military regime can
re-emerge over time. But in neither case will the results resemble the
democracy that this alliance overthrew.

Paxton characterizes stage five as "radicalization or entropy."
Radicalization is likely if the new regime scores a big military
victory, which consolidates its power and whets its appetite for
expansion and large-scale social engineering. (See: Germany) In the
absence of a radicalizing event, entropy may set in, as the state gets
lost in its own purposes and degenerates into incoherence. (See: Italy)

It's so easy right now to look at the melee on the right and discount
it as pure political theater of the most absurdly ridiculous kind. It's
a freaking puppet show. These people can't be serious. Sure, they're
angry -- but they're also a minority, out of power and reduced to
throwing tantrums. Grown-ups need to worry about them about as much as
you'd worry about a furious five-year-old threatening to hold her
breath until she turned blue.

Unfortunately, all the noise and bluster actually obscures the danger.
These people are as serious as a lynch mob, and have already taken the
first steps toward becoming one. And they're going to walk taller and
louder and prouder now that their bumbling efforts at civil
disobedience are being committed with the full sanction and support of
the country's most powerful people, who are cynically using them in a
last-ditch effort to save their own places of profit and prestige.

We've arrived. We are now parked on the exact spot where our best
experts tell us full-blown fascism is born. Every day that the
conservatives in Congress, the right-wing talking heads, and their
noisy minions are allowed to hold up our ability to govern the country
is another day we're slowly creeping across the final line beyond
which, history tells us, no country has ever been able to return.

Two of my adaptations of Andrea Alciati's EMBLEMS are up, at AGNI. I'm making a little book of these that I'm calling Unreasonable Facsimiles: based on the ‘Emblems’ of Andrea Alciati

Alciati’s Emblematum Liber, first published in 1531, is an urbane collection of proverbs, riddles, and enigmatic emblems that is today most familiar to art historians because of their accompanying woodblocks. Alciati’s book, however, was enormously popular and influential in the Renaissance and gave rise to a school of “emblem poetry” that continued to be popular through the 19th century. I am most excited by the rhetorical strategies, the wit, and the ethical imagination at work in Alciati’s Emblems and the poems I have written so far in this series attempt to bring those qualities to bear on poems about our own times. Playful, enigmatic, epigrammatic, demotic, ironic, and succinct, the poems will comprise more of a series than a sequence. Alciati (sometimes referred to as Alciato) wrote 212 of these. I would like to compose twenty-five or thirty; I'm about halfway there.

In Dublin in 2008 I had the opportunity to spend an entire day at The National Library where they had mounted the greatest exhibit about a writer I have ever seen, devoted to the life and work of William Butler Yeats. Usually, at least in my experience, exhibits about writers tend to be disappointing: "Look, there's his chair! His desk, the couch he used to sprawl on to take naps, his dictionary, and ooo, ooo, come over here, there's a manuscript page under glass with a coffee ring on it!" It's all a bit like coming to the tomb on Easter morning and gawking, "Look, there's the rock, there's a piece of shroud, etc." But this exhibit, besides being comprehensive and deep in its considerations of Yeats and his times, and besides being organized like an excellent biography that is able to braid the chronology with the themes of each era of the poet's work, uses the resources of technology to the fullest to engage viewers and readers. I left feeling that I had been handling Yeats's manuscripts all day — and I had, albeit digitally.

I could go on and on: can't make out Yeats's handwriting? Click to the print version. Prefer to hear it? OK, then Seamus Heaney will say it for you. But I won't go on, because NOW THE WHOLE EXHIBIT IS ONLINE with the manuscripts, films, artifacts, and recordings available at your desk.

I share my birthday, May 6th, with one of my favorite poets, Randall Jarrell. Wood s Lot has a nice gathering of Jarrell material, from which this gem:




WELL WATER

Randall Jarrell

What a girl called "the dailiness of life"
(Adding an errand to your errand. Saying,
"Since you're up . . ." Making you a means to
A means to a means to) is well water
Pumped from an old well at the bottom of the world.
The pump you pump the water from is rusty
And hard to move and absurd, a squirrel-wheel
A sick squirrel turns slowly, through the sunny
Inexorable hours. And yet sometimes
The wheel turns of its own weight, the rusty
Pump pumps over your sweating face the clear
Water, cold, so cold! you cup your hands
And gulp from them the dailiness of life.

INERTIA 6 is up, containing new work by poets Jon Woodward, Pelle Lowe, Betsy Sholl, Cheryl Clark Vermeulen, Chad Arnold, Jon Woodward, Sue Nacey, Ken Buswell, and yours truly.

Also, 19 great short video readings from the Stonecoast MFA program's last residency, available on the program's YouTube channel.

Translation follow-up

Some weeks back I posted a report on my participation in the Simmons College Chinese Poetry Conference. Here is the translation of my poem that was begun there.

One must have a mind of winter

All morning the stores were packed with people saying to one another, "It's coming. It's coming." And now it's here, the first storm of the winter. And man oh man, it's coming. Coming and coming. Here's a recent poem of mine, published in Chautauqua's 25th Anniversary issue:

WINTER PSALM

Boston snowbound, Logan closed, snowplows
and salt-trucks flashing yellow, drifts
tall as a man some places, visibility poor,
I sit by the window and watch the snow

blow sideways north-northeast, hot cup
in hand, robe over pajamas.
You have made me to seek refuge
and charged me to care for my brothers.

How cruel. That could only be You out there
howling, cracking the trees, burying everything.
What could I possibly want from You
that would not undo the whole world as it is?


Hope the larder's full, the fire is warm, and you have a good book in your lap.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, during his speech at the opening ceremony for World Congress III against Sexual Exploitation of Children and Adolescents, in Riocentro, asked to stop hypocrisy. “Parents should be aware that giving sex education at home is as important as giving food and shelter”, stated he. The President also emphasized the importance of dealing with this issue in the curriculum of schools. “We have to stop the hypocrisy that prevents sexual exploitation from being properly dealt with and fought against.”

Here is an important link to the work of this international conference.

And here as well.

All that remains to be said is that there are only two nations which have yet to ratify the first unanimous human rights treaty in history, The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Those two countries? Somalia... and the U.S.

Why?

AUTUMN POOL by Bill Regan

Today I want to feature the painting and photography of Bill Regan, whose photo-collage was on the cover of my first poetry collection, Without Paradise. Here's Regan:

On Painting:

My work divides into two subject areas—my passion for the natural landscape and my deep ambivalence about what the human presence brings to it.

A nature subject chooses me. As I look at a wooded area or a stream, I am caught by a tree’s unusual form or the way the brook spills around and between a cluster of stones. The parts of the whole grip me. Taken together they produce a vast scene, but their power lies in the details, which register in our minds first and then are assembled into a whole. I like to stay with the pieces because, for me, they hold nature’s secrets.

More here.

Because it is painful to so many, because it is driven by unwarranted fear, because it is a festering sore at the psychic root of patriarchy, homophobia must not be allowed to hold sway unopposed. In response to California's Proposition 8, I offer this poem. While I am certain it is not, in generally understood literary terms, the best poem I've written, I'm also certain that I had to write it. I hope it articulates my outrage in a way that may be useful to others.

SOME VERSES VERSUS BIGOTRY

The bigots are building a ghetto again,
this time for the lovers they hate.
They want to change the constitution,
invoke the power of the state

to wall off anybody they find odd
with ready-made bricks of words
left over from invoking law and God
last time to keep out “the coloreds.”

Their hatred is what I’m afraid of,
not my gay sisters and brothers.
True and false are the two kinds of love
and there aren’t any others.

In my first book of poems, Without Paradise, there is a suite, "Six Paintings by Matisse" dedicated to the Portuguese poet Alberto de Lacerda, a friend who passed away last year in London. An experiment in ekphrasis, the poems are not so much about the paintings as they are about what the paintings called forth from me at the time; each invited my participation in a different way.

I've been able to find each of the images somewhere or another on the web, so I gather the images and poems together here for the first time — I hope you enjoy them.

La Desserte Rouge, 1908



Who is this figure, busy, always, with
preparations, amid blood-red illusions,
guardian of the bold or boring heart?
Lub-dub. Big deal. Sit down. The tongue!
Now there’s an organ fleshly, necessary
and orchestral as an artist’s eye. Look,
there, through the window in the thick wall:
the wobbling world like a liquid’s surface.
Now look at her: her look, meant to hide her,
gives her away — Mnemosyne, wise mother,
arranging the season’s fruits and flowers.


La Fenetre, 1916



Even as we have arranged it,
the world goes on without us,
lives, breathes, moves, and changes,

not only because it is green (a word
that, much like “light,” means more
than is ever intended) but because

what summons each new topography
from time’s fatigue, cruel as it is,
(no, not to show us, but we notice)

leaves beauty in its wake, light
through a green that froths and vanishes
over and over and over.


La Danse II, 1909-1910



So much illusion in even a single moment:
from childhood’s bedtime tigers in the curtains
to dead friends’ faces in the crowded street.
I wonder if we ever know what’s real.

What shall we do? Survivors, more and more
of what we call the world the world calls
memory. Each morning brings a simple story
that becomes incomprehensible by evening.

Is the danger real? Is death? Who wants to know?
Who wants to know if things are as they seem?
If the unmistakable angel came and offered you
lucidity, eternally, what would you do?

We dance! We choose, who know the cost of fact,
the grip of others’ hands and the abandon
only possible when we are held like this,
our links explicit, simple choreography

from childhood all we want or need although
we each, alone, know otherwise. It’s hard
to tell from here, from this one moment, if
the changing sky is growing bright or dimming,

so we dance to forget then turn and wheel
the other way toward remembering until
we know, together, it is time to turn again,
and someone stumbles, falls, becomes a story.


La Famille Du Peintre, 1913



No still life: he must live
with this arrangement of
the family furniture, and paint it.
The dead chose the fabric.

Did le Pere our painter pose them?
We stare through the proscenium.
Daughter, stage left, moves to foot:
feigning displeasure, “Papa, stop it!”
Madame, up right, with kerchief,
mutters, wishing to vanish, angered
by this trespass that, because she wed
Matisse, will go on forever,

while Masters Cain and Able,
in their prepubescence, slow
as red fish in a glass bowl,
contend, center, throughout.

The dead are in the pit, below
the angle of our vision, tuning.
Half our lives we wait and then
they’re awful anyway, off-key,

each in a different time.
But never mind. Before us the living
make believe and we believe in them.
Vague sounds of war and weeping, off.

La Conversation, 1909-1911



This is “intercourse” the way the word is
used in older texts we giggled at in school.
He is phallos, a fluted column, a pillar,
composed in blue and white pajamas, serious,

while, folded and dark, she holds herself
a little stiffly, as if she’s been interrupted
in her enjoyment of the morning’s solitude,
but listening nonetheless. If it isn’t obvious

from the sheer intensity of their locked gaze
in the electric blue interior, the iron restraint
on the sill of the warming world spells NOX,
and in its center familiar sleeping lovers lie,

turned from each other, curled, while outside,
day is already begun. They are discussing what to do,
where to go, how to get there, needs and wants,
love’s fierce and difficult engagement.


L'Atelier Rouge, 1911



Only a dead man,
only a dead man here,

an absence limned
by what can be said

to exist, a familiar
array of records and effects,

life death the way all
shadows are the sun: a

Matisse.


Of course, it occurs to me that the poems may suffer from this proximity to their inspirations, but so be it.

I want to write here about my participation in the 2nd Simmons International Chinese Poetry Festival, October 3-5, 2008 here in Boston. I was part of a panel on the process of translation with Michelle Yeh of UC Davis, perhaps the foremost translator of contemporary Chinese poetry, and Chinese poet Leung Ping Kwan. In attempting a translation of my poem, “Refugee” from Gold Star Road, a poem I chose for its supposed linguistic simplicity, the challenges of poetic translation soon became clear. Here’s the poem in its entirety for reference (it also appears here on Verse Daily):

REFUGEE

A man carries his door,
the door of his house,
because when the war is over
he is going home

where he will hang it
on its hinges
and lock it, tight,
while he tries to remember
the word for welcome.

If his house is gone
when he returns,
he will raise it from rubble
around this door.

If he cannot return,
the door will remember
the rest of the house
so he can build it
again, elsewhere.

And if he cannot go on,
his door can be a pallet
for his rest, a stretcher
to carry him, his shade
from sun, his shield.


In the very first line we encountered difficulty: it seems there is no single word for “carry” in Chinese, where the choice of verb depends upon how an item is carried --- on one’s back, over one’s head, with another person, under one’s arm, etc. and an equivalent for “transport” wouldn’t do it either since that verb suggests both a starting point and a destination, and of course the man carrying “the door of his house” has no destination, a state of affairs that I hope gathers heartbreaking force as the poem proceeds. After much delightful contention, and many questions put to me again and again, Michelle and Ping Kwan both seemed satisfied with their solution so we moved on – all this work of course was only to establish a first draft.

Another problem that emerged early on stems from the cultural differences that inhere in the word “door” as it is used in the poem. In much of China, the word for door does not have the same resonance it does in English, since many Chinese homes, especially outside the cities, have gated walls around them so that the door is not the barrier to outsiders, but the gate. Several lines “where he will hang it/on its hinges/and lock it, tight,/while he tries to remember/the word for welcome” presented us with a cross-cultural conundrum. Once again Michelle and Ping Kwan were able to resolve things to their satisfaction.

We proceeded like this --- the Chinese poets asking me questions and explaining the particular difficulty they were encountering, while I tried to shed light by paraphrasing, comparing, and, in my excitement, almost shouting out synonyms --- for a good hour and a half before there was a first draft. As I recall, the verb “raise” in line 12 was a problem. Jim Kates, president of the American Literary Translators Association, was walking around, sitting in from time to time at one or another of the tables where poems were struggling to cross from English to Chinese or from Chinese to English. He asked what verb Chinese Christians use when they speak of the Resurrection. Yes, I thought, yes, that is the felt sense of the verb “raise” at that point in the poem. Unfortunately, both Michelle and Ping Kwan shook their heads --- in Chinese that word would be far too weighty, with not a hint but instead a large dollop of Christian theology attached to it. Michele explained that it would upset the delicate balance between hope, denial, and futility that is part of both the refugee’s predicament and the poem’s coherence.

Looking back, I think it was at this point that I fully realized what an intimate exchange was going on. When you write a poem that seeks to be at once a complex act of witness, a capture and focusing of a complex situation, a set of related ideas about the situation, a sonic structure, and an emotional echo chamber, you work alone, things very gradually coming clear to you so that you go back to stanzas and replace a word with a better one, change the syntax to work against the constraint of the line, say the becoming poem out loud, listen to it, find something “off” and change it to something that at least at that moment seems better. In so doing you create a psychic space in which all those impulses, decisions, adjustments are the intricate features of something like a spider web in a dark corner of yourself. Now, while Michelle and Ping Kwan, refusing gists and approximations, labored with the same urgent, circumspect, and playful poetic intentions, I felt joined in that space which had been so private, and even without a knowledge of Chinese, I saw that the web they were spinning was as delicate and intricate as my own, with different but analogous considerations at every moment. I experienced this as intimacy.

The next morning, at the opening panel, we talked about the process of translation. Judging from the response of the gathered Chinese poets when Michelle read the translation, she and Ping Kwan had made a very compelling Chinese poem from mine.

In subsequent conference sessions, a number of Chinese poets including Wang Ao and Bei Ta, made reference to the poem and applied it to the situation in China today, especially to post-quake Szechuan province.

Several of the American writers spoke about gentrification and the displacement of the poor, especially in minority communities. What was most remarkable to me was the agreement and solidarity that emerged, the identification of an arrogant and insensible power that in the name of “progress” assumes the prerogative to destroy communities and replace them with a profit-seeking monoculture while preaching the benefits of a globalization that amounts to cultural genocide and the erasure of history. I felt called upon to read an earlier poem, from Without Paradise, written about 15 years ago. I include it here:

FROM A FRONT WINDOW

1.
There is the city of glass and money,
over there, but here it comes,
closer with every newspaper.
Unidentified lying spokesmen
interpret the same old photos:
the bloody feet of refugees,
the bloody hands of soldiers.
Here comes someone, not a neighbor,
with a clipboard and a calculator.
Where will we grow children and roses?
Where will we grow older?


2.
Because mothers still tell children
making ugly faces to be careful
or they will harden into one of them,
I am a little less afraid.

When fathers wipe their children’s dirty faces
with handkerchiefs that smell of sweat,
their children do not forget them
easily. I am a gladdened father
learning that, and a calmer son.


3.
And lovers’ bodies make a clumsy knot
just good enough to mend the net.


The theme of the conference, “Translation is a way for us to listen to each other” was realized in any number of ways beyond the act of translation itself, and those ways included a deep exchange of ideas about fairness and justice, an understanding of shared histories, the role of poets in the necessary dispraise of dehumanization and disrespect for life itself, and the need to restore our debased languages as a first step to extricate our communities from the sticky web of half-truths and fictional histories that cloak the designs of merciless predation across boundaries.

I want to thank Simmons College for the opportunity to “listen to each other” this conference provided, especially poet and Simmons professor Afaa Michael Weaver (who, I believe, is in China as I write this) and co-chair of the conference Michelle Yeh. I’m happy to hear that plans are already underway for the next conference, which I’ve pledged to help organize.

Resistance to further dehumanization depends upon such listening to each other.

Many people, fortunately or not, know Philip Larkin (1922-1985) from this single poem:

THIS BE THE VERSE

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.


Far fewer have had the pleasure of this crisp rejoinder from Charles Martin, from his STARTING FROM SLEEP, Overlook Press, Woodstock & New York, 2002. ISBN 1-58567-272-6

JUST A SMACK AT LARKIN

You brushed your teeth, you washed your face,
They tucked you in, your mum and dad;
They really weren’t all that bad,
They weren't always on your case;

They were as good as parents got,
Back then, and did the best they knew
With such a whining shit as you;
Were they appreciated? Not!

And you, who will not take a wife
Nor raise up kiddies of your own
Can do no more than bitch and moan!
Get over it, Phil—get a life!

What aristocratic writers take from nature gratis, the less privileged must pay for with their youth. Try and write a story about a young man — the son of a serf, a former grocer, choirboy, schoolboy and university student, raised on respect for rank, kissing priests' hands, worshipping the ideas of others, and giving thanks for every piece of bread, receiving frequent whippings, making the rounds as a tutor without galoshes, brawling, torturing animals, enjoying dinners at the houses of rich relatives, needlessly hypocritical before God and man merely to acknowledge his own insignificance — write about how this young man squeezes the slave out of himself drop by drop and how, on waking up one fine morning, he finds that the blood coursing through his veins is no longer the blood of a slave, but that of a real human being.
— Anton Chekhov


Chekhov was indeed the son of a grocer, and his grandfather was a serf who bought freedom from bondage for himself and his sons. When his father’s struggling store went belly-up, the family moved elsewhere to start over, but young Anton, then 16, stayed behind, supporting himself through odd jobs and tutoring, in order to finish his schooling.

While Chekhov may well have resented his father’s religiosity and autocratic parenting, one sees a continuation of his father’s commitment to freedom from bondage in his attempt to “squeeze the slave out of himself drop by drop.” It’s impossible not to see Chekhov himself in his enjoinder to himself to write this story of a “young man.” Did Chekhove ever write this story? Perhaps he wrote it in different ways several times, in stories and plays, but never as straightforwardly as he plans in the quotation above. It puts me in mind of Thoreau’s lines:

My life has been the tale I would have writ,
But I could not both live and utter it.

Or maybe it is the story of his father he has in mind, a story that would rectify his father’s failed quest, which ended in religious fanaticism and the bondage of debt.

There is a terrific compendium of his work, along with biographical information, links, and a forum at on-line literature.

Verse Daily featured my poem "An Old Story" earlier this month. It appears in the current issue of Cimarron Review.

Today's Boston Sunday Globe pointed me to John Curran's gathering of great diagrams from anthropology and other social sciences, to be found here. Among my favorites (and these really redirect the synapses, I'll tell you!) is the cartoon above, unattributed (Roz Chast?) that can only loosely be construed as a diagram but which has the added virtue of making me laugh like hell.

And finally, I have to make a movie recommendation here. Frozen River is the best drama of working-class life on the margins of poverty that I have ever seen. It is not merely the truth of a situation in which many find themselves at the bottom of a predatory economy, but also a celebration of the resourcefulness, the day to day improvisation and creativity such a life requires. The ethical judgments that people are forced to make are far more complex than the mere adherence to law that passes for morality among the comfortable.

The film is in theaters now. Just see it.