My new book, Gold Star Road, is now available from Barrow Street Press (www.barrowstreet.org), from Amazon, or from Small Press Distribution (www.spdbooks.org).

Here are two poems from Gold Star Road, followed by links to others from the book that appear elsewhere on the web, and jacket blurbs from poets Molly Peacock, Linda McCarriston, Afaa Michael Weaver, and D. Nurkse.


BOSNIA AFTERMATH
for Sara Terry

A trout on a river-bank
knows where the river is;

a fox in a trap
knows the time,

but a man or woman
only knows the story

hope tells, or fear,
and often chooses wrong.

No ant will enter
another’s hill,

no bee another’s hive,
and a rook, atop

a dead oak,
knows which side it’s on,

but a man or woman,
led by liars,

will discuss, calmly,
who should dig the pit

and if it is a better
lesson to slaughter

the neighbors’ babies
first or afterward.

A squirrel burrows deep
in a hollow trunk;

the bear returns
to her darkened cave,

but a man or woman,
gorged on blood,

deep in history, asleep,
dreams peace

and waking, says
peace is a dream.

A rabbit may cower,
but only so long;

the common sparrow
knows the seasons,

but a man or woman
only wants a song, a poem,

a religion to profess
that no one who has known

goodness even once
is ever wholly lost.


VOCATION

Because I was born into ongoing falsehood,
I have had to learn to think in metaphors,
to lash together what could be found on
each small island of that barren archipelago,

to learn what would float, to find what would
carry me. It is only when I am tired I pity the
various people I have been or, worse, deny them.
I have not met anyone who is entirely who

he thinks he is, nor people anywhere so strange
they did not, somehow, move me. When death comes
I have left instructions for my friends to put me
back in the thesaurus with my ancestors.


http://www.bu.edu/agni/poetry/print/2006/64%20-%20Hoffman-pantoum.html

http://www.americanpopularculture.com/review_americana/fall_2006/hoffman.htm

http://www.versedaily.org/2005/refugee.shtml

Hoffman's poems tap into moments when civilization dissolves, not superficially, but at its emotional roots. Simply reading this book becomes an engaged, passionate experience. Time and again through the poet's weary irony comes the bite of life. He makes the world seem, in the words of Wislawa Szymborska, whom he quotes: "just a room away." - Molly Peacock

Hoffman is the poet traveling our nightmare of now, our descent into a lack of love for one another, but along the way he finds etchings of hope on the walls amid all the signs of a falling away from a center that has forgotten how to hold. - Afaa Michael Weaver

Poetry should be beautiful and dangerous, unforgettable, transformational, meaningful across academic and social borders. This is. - Linda McCarriston

Hoffman is a rarity among American poets; his premise is dialogic, his canvas vast, his stance self-questioning. This new book is breakthrough work; poetry of hard-earned grounding, profound integrity, and scalding, visionary intensity. - D. Nurkse

I have wanted for some time to bring the attention of my students and colleagues to the well-documented fact that powerful political forces use the wealth at their disposal to shape our aesthetics. The trouble is that when one begins to speak at a forum or in a classroom about this, especially when you say CIA in the same breath with painting and poetry, you meet with eye-rolling and often ridicule. "What are you, a conspiracy theorist?" Well, there's no theory about it. It's all been well-documented in Frances Stonor Saunders exhaustively researched The Cultural Cold War: the CIA and the World of Arts & Letters, first published in England by Granta Books under the far better title: Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War.

In gathering up some reviews to post here, I came across Lyle Daggett's response to the book over at his blog A Burning Patience, so why not start there (http://aburningpatience.blogspot.com/2007/06/my-computer-is-back.html) and then have a look below at my gathering of reviews.

But my question is this: Does anyone really think that this clandestine funding and shaping of the artistic culture to political ends has ceased? In the era of The Military Commissions Act and the Patriot Act?

We need to ask ourselves where our aesthetic standards come from. How do we as writers and artists decide what is worthwhile doing? Are we thinking for ourselves, or are we just delivering product because we have intuited, via our ambitions, what "the market," skewed by political agendas, will reward?

Here is a good synopsis and discussion of the book by James Petras, followed by reviews from a variety of political points of view:

The CIA and the Cultural Cold War Revisited
James Petras

Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War
(London: Granta Books), £20.

This book provides a detailed account of the ways in which the CIA penetrated and influenced a vast array of cultural organizations, through its front groups and via friendly philanthropic organizations like the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. The author, Frances Stonor Saunders, details how and why the CIA ran cultural congresses, mounted exhibits, and organized concerts. The CIA also published and translated well-known authors who toed the Washington line, sponsored abstract art to counteract art with any social content and, throughout the world, subsidized journals that criticized Marxism, communism, and revolutionary politics and apologized for, or ignored, violent and destructive imperialist U.S. policies. The CIA was able to harness some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom in the West in service of these policies, to the extent that some intellectuals were directly on the CIA payroll. Many were knowingly involved with CIA "projects," and others drifted in and out of its orbit, claiming ignorance of the CIA connection after their CIA sponsors were publicly exposed during the late 1960s and the Vietnam war, after the turn of the political tide to the left.

U.S. and European anticommunist publications receiving direct or indirect funding included Partisan Review, Kenyon Review, New Leader, Encounter and many others. Among the intellectuals who were funded and promoted by the CIA were Irving Kristol, Melvin Lasky, Isaiah Berlin, Stephen Spender, Sidney Hook, Daniel Bell, Dwight MacDonald, Robert Lowell, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, and numerous others in the United States and Europe. In Europe, the CIA was particularly interested in and promoted the "Democratic Left" and ex-leftists, including Ignacio Silone, Stephen Spender, Arthur Koestler, Raymond Aron, Anthony Crosland, Michael Josselson, and George Orwell.

The CIA, under the prodding of Sidney Hook and Melvin Lasky, was instrumental in funding the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a kind of cultural NATO that grouped together all sorts of "anti-Stalinist" leftists and rightists. They were completely free to defend Western cultural and political values, attack "Stalinist totalitarianism" and to tiptoe gently around U.S. racism and imperialism. Occasionally, a piece marginally critical of U.S. mass society was printed in the CIA-subsidized journals.

What was particularly bizarre about this collection of CIA-funded intellectuals was not only their political partisanship, but their pretense that they were disinterested seekers of truth, iconoclastic humanists, free-spirited intellectuals, or artists for art's sake, who counterposed themselves to the corrupted "committed" house "hacks" of the Stalinist apparatus.

It is impossible to believe their claims of ignorance of CIA ties. How could they ignore the absence in the journals of any basic criticism of the numerous lynchings throughout the southern United States during the whole period? How could they ignore the absence, during their cultural congresses, of criticism of U.S. imperialist intervention in Guatemala, Iran, Greece, and Korea that led to millions of deaths? How could they ignore the gross apologies of every imperialist crime of their day in the journals in which they wrote? They were all soldiers: some glib, vitriolic, crude, and polemical, like Hook and Lasky; others elegant essayists like Stephen Spender or self-righteous informers like George Orwell. Saunders portrays the WASP Ivy League elite at the CIA holding the strings, and the vitriolic Jewish ex-leftists snarling at leftist dissidents. When the truth came out in the late 1960s and New York, Paris, and London "intellectuals" feigned indignation at having been used, the CIA retaliated. Tom Braden, who directed the International Organizations Branch of the CIA, blew their cover by detailing how they all had to have known who paid their salaries and stipends (397-404).

According to Braden, the CIA financed their "literary froth," as CIA hardliner Cord Meyer called the anti-Stalinist intellectual exercises of Hook, Kristol, and Lasky. Regarding the most prestigious and best-known publications of the self-styled "Democratic Left" (Encounter, New Leader, Partisan Review), Braden wrote that the money for them came from the CIA and that "an agent became the editor of Encounter" (398). By 1953, Braden wrote, "we were operating or influencing international organizations in every field" (398).

Saunders' book provides useful information about several important questions regarding the ways in which CIA intellectual operatives defended U.S. imperialist interests on cultural fronts. It also initiates an important discussion of the long-term consequences of the ideological and artistic positions defended by CIA intellectuals.

Saunders refutes the claims (made by Hook, Kristol, and Lasky) that the CIA and its friendly foundations provided aid with no strings attached. She demonstrates that "the individuals and institutions subsidized by the CIA were expected to perform as part ... of a propaganda war." The most effective propaganda was defined by the CIA as the kind where "the subject moves in the direction you desire for reasons which he believes to be his own." While the CIA allowed their assets on the "Democratic Left" to prattle occasionally about social reform, it was the "anti-Stalinist" polemics and literary diatribes against Western Marxists and Soviet writers and artists that they were most interested in, funded most generously, and promoted with the greatest visibility. Braden referred to this as the "convergence" between the CIA and the European "Democratic Left" in the fight against communism. The collaboration between the "Democratic Left" and the CIA included strike-breaking in France, informing on Stalinists (Orwell and Hook), and covert smear campaigns to prevent leftist artists from receiving recognition (including Pablo Neruda's bid for a Nobel Prize in 1964 [351]).

The CIA, as the arm of the U.S. government most concerned with fighting the cultural Cold War, focused on Europe in the period immediately following the Second World War. Having experienced almost two decades of capitalist war, depression, and postwar occupation, the overwhelming majority of European intellectuals and trade unionists were anti-capitalist and particularly critical of the hegemonic pretensions of the United States. To counter the appeal of communism and the growth of the European Communist Parties (particularly in France and Italy), the CIA devised a two-tier program. On the one hand, as Saunders argues, certain European authors were promoted as part of an explicitly "anticommunist program." The CIA cultural commissar's criteria for "suitable texts" included "whatever critiques of Soviet foreign policy and Communism as a form of government we find to be objective (sic) and convincingly written and timely." The CIA was especially keen on publishing disillusioned ex-communists like Silone, Koestler, and Gide. The CIA promoted anticommunist writers by funding lavish conferences in Paris, Berlin, and Bellagio (overlooking Lake Como), where objective social scientists and philosophers like Isaiah Berlin, Daniel Bell, and Czeslow Milosz preached their values (and the virtues of Western freedom and intellectual independence, within the anticommunist and pro-Washington parameters defined by their CIA paymasters). None of these prestigious intellectuals dared to raise any doubts or questions regarding U.S. support of the mass killing in colonial Indochina and Algeria, the witch hunt of U.S. intellectuals or the paramilitary (Ku Klux Klan) lynchings in the southern United States. Such banal concerns would only "play into the hands of the Communists," according to Sidney Hook, Melvin Lasky, and the Partisan Review crowd, who eagerly sought funds for their quasi-bankrupt literary operation. Many of the so-called prestigious anticommunist literary and political journals would long have gone out of business were it not for CIA subsidies, which bought thousands of copies that it later distributed free.

The second cultural track on which the CIA operated was much more subtle. Here, it promoted symphonies, art exhibits, ballet, theater groups, and well-known jazz and opera performers with the explicit aim of neutralizing anti-imperialist sentiment in Europe and creating an appreciation of U.S. culture and government. The idea behind this policy was to showcase U.S. culture, in order to gain cultural hegemony to support its military-economic empire. The CIA was especially keen on sending black artists to Europe — particularly singers (like Marion Anderson), writers, and musicians (such as Louis Armstrong) — to neutralize European hostility toward Washington's racist domestic policies. If black intellectuals didn't stick to the U.S. artistic script and wandered into explicit criticism, they were banished from the list, as was the case with writer Richard Wright.

The degree of CIA political control over the intellectual agenda of these seemingly nonpolitical artistic activities was clearly demonstrated by the reaction of the editors of Encounter (Lasky and Kristol, among others) with regard to an article submitted by Dwight MacDonald. MacDonald, a maverick anarchist intellectual, was a long-time collaborator with the CIA-run Congress for Cultural Freedom and Encounter. In 1958, he wrote an article for Encounter entitled "America America," in which he expressed his revulsion for U.S. mass culture, its crude materialism, and lack of civility. It was a rebuttal of the American values that were prime propaganda material in the CIA's and Encounter's cultural war against communism. MacDonald's attack of the "decadent American imperium" was too much for the CIA and its intellectual operatives in Encounter. As Braden, in his guidelines to the intellectuals, stated "organizations receiving CIA funds should not be required to support every aspect of U.S. policy," but invariably there was a cut-off point — particularly where U.S. foreign policy was concerned (314). Despite the fact that MacDonald was a former editor of Encounter, the article was rejected. The pious claims of Cold War writers like Nicola Chiaromonte, writing in the second issue of Encounter, that "[t]he duty that no intellectual can shirk without degrading himself is the duty to expose fictions and to refuse to call 'useful lies,' truths," certainly did not apply to Encounter and its distinguished list of contributors when it came to dealing with the 'useful lies' of the West.

One of the most important and fascinating discussions in Saunders' book is about the fact that CIA and its allies in the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) poured vast sums of money into promoting Abstract Expressionist (AE) painting and painters as an antidote to art with a social content. In promoting AE, the CIA fought off the right-wing in Congress. What the CIA saw in AE was an "anti-Communist ideology, the ideology of freedom, of free enterprise. Non-figurative and politically silent it was the very antithesis of socialist realism" (254). They viewed AE as the true expression of the national will. To bypass right-wing criticism, the CIA turned to the private sector (namely MOMA and its co-founder, Nelson Rockefeller, who referred to AE as "free enterprise painting.") Many directors at MOMA had longstanding links to the CIA and were more than willing to lend a hand in promoting AE as a weapon in the cultural Cold War. Heavily funded exhibits of AE were organized all over Europe; art critics were mobilized, and art magazines churned out articles full of lavish praise. The combined economic resources of MOMA and the CIA-run Fairfield Foundation ensured the collaboration of Europe's most prestigious galleries which, in turn, were able to influence aesthetics across Europe.

AE as "free art" ideology (George Kennan, 272) was used to attack politically committed artists in Europe. The Congress for Cultural Freedom (the CIA front) threw its weight behind abstract painting, over representational or realist aesthetics, in an explicit political act. Commenting on the political role of AE, Saunders points out: "One of the extraordinary features of the role that American painting played in the cultural Cold War is not the fact that it became part of the enterprise, but that a movement which so deliberately declared itself to be apolitical could become so intensely politicized" (275). The CIA associated apolitical artists and art with freedom. This was directed toward neutralizing the artists on the European left. The irony, of course, was that the apolitical posturing was only for left-wing consumption.

Nevertheless, the CIA and its cultural organizations were able to profoundly shape the postwar view of art. Many prestigious writers, poets, artists, and musicians proclaimed their independence from politics and declared their belief in art for art's sake. The dogma of the free artist or intellectual, as someone disconnected from political engagement, gained ascendancy and is pervasive to this day.

While Saunders has presented a superbly detailed account of the links between the CIA and Western artists and intellectuals, she leaves unexplored the structural reasons for the necessity of CIA deception and control over dissent. Her discussion is framed largely in the context of political competition and conflict with Soviet communism. There is no serious attempt to locate the CIA's cultural Cold War in the context of class warfare, indigenous third world revolutions, and independent Marxist challenges to U.S. imperialist economic domination. This leads Saunders to selectively praise some CIA ventures at the expense of others, some operatives over others. Rather than see the CIA's cultural war as part of an imperialist system, Saunders tends to be critical of its deceptive and distinct reactive nature. The U.S.-NATO cultural conquest of Eastern Europe and the ex-USSR should quickly dispel any notion that the cultural war was a defensive action.

The very origins of the cultural Cold War were rooted in class warfare. Early on, the CIA and its U.S. AFL-CIO operatives Irving Brown and Jay Lovestone (ex-communists) poured millions of dollars into subverting militant trade unions and breaking strikes through the funding of social democratic unions (94). The Congress for Cultural Freedom and its enlightened intellectuals were funded by the same CIA operatives who hired Marseilles gangsters to break the dockworkers' strikes in 1948.

After the Second World War, with the discrediting in Western Europe of the old right (compromised by its links to the fascists and a weak capitalist system), the CIA realized that, in order to undermine the anti-NATO trade unionists and intellectuals, it needed to find (or invent) a Democratic Left to engage in ideological warfare. A special sector of the CIA was set up to circumvent right-wing Congressional objections. The Democratic Left was essentially used to combat the radical left and to provide an ideological gloss on U.S. hegemony in Europe. At no point were the ideological pugilists of the democratic left in any position to shape the strategic policies and interests of the United States. Their job was not to question or demand, but to serve the empire in the name of "Western democratic values." Only when massive opposition to the Vietnam War surfaced in the United States and Europe, and their CIA covers were blown, did many of the CIA-promoted and -financed intellectuals jump ship and begin to criticize U.S. foreign policy. For example, after spending most of his career on the CIA payroll, Stephen Spender became a critic of U.S. Vietnam policy, as did some of the editors of Partisan Review. They all claimed innocence, but few critics believed that a love affair with so many journals and convention junkets, so long and deeply involved, could transpire without some degree of knowledge.

The CIA's involvement in the cultural life of the United States, Europe, and elsewhere had important long-term consequences. Many intellectuals were rewarded with prestige, public recognition, and research funds precisely for operating within the ideological blinders set by the Agency. Some of the biggest names in philosophy, political ethics, sociology, and art, who gained visibility from CIA-funded conferences and journals, went on to establish the norms and standards for promotion of the new generation, based on the political parameters established by the CIA. Not merit nor skill, but politics — the Washington line — defined "truth" and "excellence" and future chairs in prestigious academic settings, foundations, and museums.

The U.S. and European Democratic Left's anti-Stalinist rhetorical ejaculations, and their proclamations of faith in democratic values and freedom, were a useful ideological cover for the heinous crimes of the West. Once again, in NATO's recent war against Yugoslavia, many Democratic Left intellectuals have lined up with the West and the KLA in its bloody purge of tens of thousands of Serbs and the murder of scores of innocent civilians. If anti-Stalinism was the opium of the Democratic Left during the Cold War, human rights interventionism has the same narcotizing effect today, and deludes contemporary Democratic Leftists.

The CIA's cultural campaigns created the prototype for today's seemingly apolitical intellectuals, academics, and artists who are divorced from popular struggles and whose worth rises with their distance from the working classes and their proximity to prestigious foundations. The CIA role model of the successful professional is the ideological gatekeeper, excluding critical intellectuals who write about class struggle, class exploitation and U.S. imperialism, "ideological" not "objective" categories, or so they are told.

The singular lasting, damaging influence of the CIA's Congress of Cultural Freedom crowd was not their specific defenses of U.S. imperialist policies, but their success in imposing on subsequent generations of intellectuals the idea of excluding any sustained discussion of U.S. imperialism from the influential cultural and political media. The issue is not that today's intellectuals or artists may or may not take a progressive position on this or that issue. The problem is the pervasive belief among writers and artists that anti-imperialist social and political expressions should not appear in their music, paintings, and serious writing if they want their work to be considered of substantial artistic merit. The enduring political victory of the CIA was to convince intellectuals that serious and sustained political engagement on the left is incompatible with serious art and scholarship. Today at the opera, theater, and art galleries, as well as in the professional meetings of academics, the Cold War values of the CIA are visible and pervasive: who dares to undress the emperor?

http://www.counterpunch.org/brenner01112003.html

http://www.culturevulture.net/Books/CulturalColdWar.htm

http://www.bluegreenearth.us/archive/reviews/2001-2/saunders1.html

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/books/2000/0005.deneufville.html

After the recent suicides of poets Sarah Hannah and Liam Rector, I post this poem, by Brazil's Carlos Drummond de Andrade, with some urgency. And deep sadness.







DON'T KILL YOURSELF

Carlos Drummond de Andrade

Carlos, keep calm, love
is what you're seeing now:
today a kiss, tomorrow no kiss,
day after tomorrow's Sunday
and nobody knows what will happen
Monday.

It's useless to resist
or to commit suicide.
Don't kill yourself. Don't kill yourself!
Keep all of yourself for the nuptials
coming nobody knows when,
that is, if they ever come.

Love, Carlos, tellurian, spent the night with you,
and now your insides are raising an ineffable racket,
prayers,
victrolas,
saints crossing themselves,
ads for a better soap,
a racket of which nobody
knows the why or wherefore.

In the meantime you go on your way
vertical, melancholy.
You're the palm tree, you're the cry
nobody heard in the theatre
and all the lights went out.
Love in the dark, no, love
in the daylight, is always sad,
sad, Carlos, my boy,
but tell it to nobody,
nobody knows nor shall know.

(Translated by Elizabeth Bishop)

A while back I bookmarked this essay by Kathy Lou Schultz, but when I returned to it the URL had expired. I have found it elsehwere, however, and feature it here. It seems to me to be an authentic and honest grappling with the intractable issue of class as it pertains to writing, writers, MFA programs, and identity.

Here is Kathy Lou Schultz's web site:

http://www.english.upenn.edu/~klou/


And here is the essay:

"Talking Trash, Talking Class: What's a Working Class Poetic, and Where Would I Find One?"

by Kathy Lou Schultz

for my grandmothers: Donna Gene (Ewing) Manthey and
Christina Katherina (Sanders) Schultz


I've spent years trying to reconcile being a poet with being working class. Yet, walking home from work one day it occurred to me, such a reconciliation is not only improbable, it is also undesirable. My language comes out of, indeed is exalted toward, the space created where these two identities refuse to meld inside of me. In that messy, dangerous space the possibilities of language are expanded.

What does a "working class poem" look like?
How does it sound?
How does it behave?
What if I'm "too intellectual," "too confident," "too experimental," "too fragmented"?

Growing up working class has given me skills, perspectives, and knowledge which are a part of every decision I make. Growing up working class taught me how to survive. Growing up working class is part of my very breathing. How are "poetries of identity" created? How are they made normative? When I say "working class poem," "working class writer," what do you hear? Tillie Olson, Kevin Magee, Mike Amnasan, Karen Brodine, Rebecca Harding Davis, Meridel Le Sueur, Agnes Smedley, Dorothy Allison, Mike Davis, Carolyn Kay Steedman, Barbara Smith.

And who? Who does not survive in our language?

Anxiety is a sticky substance infused with fear. Dollar for dollar. Or, for instance, poverty. My own collusion in bourgeois appearances bleeding me dry. The need to be seen or recognized outweighing other emotional vaunts.

This is the most difficult essay I have ever not written, for as much time as I spend writing it, I spend more not writing it, carrying it around knotted and unruly.

•••

A discourse around class and poetics is lacking, if not invisible. While it is now possible to identify a trajectory of experimental women's writing, to inhabit a vocabulary of gender and sexuality, references to class often remain just that: mere codes. Several problematic issues arise both in the writing of, and writing about, what we might call "working class poetry."

First, the drive to create "poetries of identity" (a phrase I've been using for some time) tends to solidify normalizing tendencies in terms of form, style, and content, i.e. does a poem have to be narrative, "I"-based and "about" work in order to be considered "working class"? Furthermore, drawing a straight line between one's identity and one's poetics is problematic at best and confuses the biographical information about the poet with poetic works that genuinely seek to explore, unseat, complicate subjectivity.

The obvious point to be made is that identities are infinitely mediated and complex; coming from a particular class, race, gender is not--and should not be--the map through which one can trace a trajectory toward a particular type of poetic expression. That said, I still consider Lorine Niedecker (along with being a great Modernist, experimental, American, woman writer) to be a great working class writer. It is part of providing myself with a history.

Dear Hilda, Dear Wallace, Dear Michael, Dear Frederick

Dear Marianne, Dear ball and stick, Dear K, Dear K, Dear K, Dear K



A language of provisional objects

A language of hunger



The head of the hammer

flying off and cracking



Or a spade unable to overturn

the solid earth



Does the word "proletarian" refer?

See now, a figure described as my grandmother crossing a room



Replace "I" with "salt in a bag"

In the face of my parents' illiteracy

all the ravages

My anxieties race through me at a difference pace, clutching at my lungs, my throat, making it difficult to swallow or breathe. My childhood anxiety wasn't made up of monsters in the closet, or fear of the dark. My anxiety was tied to something which my parents could only haltingly save me from, something which they toiled vigorously to save the entire family from: poverty. The threat of falling into poverty, losing one's health, losing a job, that looms over the working class creates particular anxieties, mental health issues, and survival strategies. I learned to take care of myself early because it was required. During much of my childhood, my parents each worked two jobs, and I was often alone. Now in her fifties, my mother faces health problems which I can only attribute to years of overwork.

I took care of myself. I struggled. I got angry. Though the idea that I would go to college was with me from a young age, there was no such thing as a "college fund" to pay for it; my parents had no money to sent me to college. If I were to go, I had to figure out the way myself. And I did. I became an incredible over-achiever. I racked up academic awards, anxiety, and rage. I knew I must always do more, be better, to prove myself worthy. I took nothing for granted.

Education is like a religion for the working class. It's the "way out." Of course, at the present moment, that both is and isn't true. This news has reached even popular journals, such as Spin, which reports in its October 1997 article on "Sucker Ph.D.'s":

More than one third of all new history Ph.D.s will never find full-time teaching work, according to the American Historical Associations' own newsletter, paltry numbers given the mammoth amount of time you have to invest to discover your fate. Across all fields, 40,000-plus students will receive their doctorates this year. Few have illusions about what awaits them: a handful of good jobs, each sought by hundreds of applicants; university presses less and less willing to publish the academic books needed to gain tenure; protracted separations from loved ones. Grad school, an option nearly every halfway idealistic college student contemplates, has become an invitation to purgatory.

This brings me to the inevitable discussion of MFA programs. Camille Roy, in a recent discussion on the SUNY Buffalo Poetics ListServ interestingly points out that when she first came to the Bay Area, there were resources available in the community for writers to learn more about their craft, such as the free workshops offered by Bob Gluck through Small Press Traffic. Roy attributes the current institutionalization of such resources into university MFA programs, where people must pay for access, to dwindling funding for the arts.

This is a very difficult situation, and while it is true that few poor and working class people will apply themselves to a graduate program, such as an MFA, which virtually guarantees that they will not find a job, some institutions such as San Francisco State University are historically very working class. Like other working class folks, I worked full-time while completing my MFA in poetry at State. It took me five years to complete the three-year program, and during that time I endured a level of exhaustion and stress which had adverse effects on my health. (I was almost hospitalized in the middle of it in 1993.)

In addition, it must be pointed out that not everyone enters such a program with equal amounts of privilege, and completing a degree, while providing for the acquisition of particular cultural capital, is not a great leveler. Working class people are often worse off when graduating because of the massive student loan debts they carry with them.

So why did I do it? Because my working class heritage has imbued me with a stubbornness which allows one small part of myself to refuse to accept that I am not allowed to have what other people have just because they come from wealthy families and I don't. I wanted to learn. I wanted an intellectual community. I wanted a writing community. Are MFA programs the best answer to all of that? Certainly not, but I did gain some of what I wanted in all three of those areas. And I existed at State, much more than I did as an undergraduate at Columbia University and Oberlin College, because I could look around and see my experience reflected, and not feel so much the horrible grating of isolation.

the passage of place
in desire
a geometric development
heretofore opposed to wake
pronouncements and sedentary acts
the startling possibility of collectivity
when money has everything and nothing to do with it
"I'm just trying to get us both on the same page"

People assume they know who I am because I am white, because I am "educated," because I am reasonably articulate. But my efforts to be "good enough" have been too successful: they have helped to erase who I am. I pass so well, but you look through me, and what you do not see says so much.

My own writing comes out of those points of pressure and contradiction. The education which introduced me to Anne-Marie Albiach, Gertrude Stein, Maurice Blanchot, post-structuralism, and experimental narrative, also ensures that I am a stranger to my own family. I now speak at least two languages. I cannot forget, or erase, one in favor of the other in the difficult act of writing. Amphibious, we live in both worlds, but belong to neither.

Writing which brings to bear the full force of one's psychic, material (body and word) power is not sweet or delicate. It is not "safe." To fully inhabit the world of working class subjectivity in a poem requires that I withstand an incredible emotional pressure. I scratch away at the codes or placeholders which seem to want to denote class, and try to find what lies underneath. In the face of silence, only my stutter.

While literacy is certainly an issue when discussing the "accessibility" of innovative works, I have sat with readers with high school educations and Ph.D.'s alike while they encountered similar challenges and delights in unlayering a poem. I refuse to assume or presume my audience–any audience–during my writing process. To assume that the "true" working class poem is only a narrative exposition of working class "experience," is to buy into normative reading patterns established by post-WWII academic poetries in the U.S. This assumption precludes the full possibilities of language, isolating working class poets to a particular kind of expressionism. It would be difficult to find a parallel prescription placed on the depiction of class in other art forms.

The difficulty in discussing class and poetics reflects the larger obfuscation of class within American culture. While Labor is becoming more visible as we near the end of the 20th century, and the intelligentsia faces a job market of dwindling opportunity and wealth is concentrated in the hands of an increasing few, the myth of a "classless" society persists. (Have you pulled yourself up by your own bootstraps lately?)

Too often, class is conflated with race in a fuzzy-headed analysis that fails to account for the conflicting privileges/oppressions of race and class. I continue to believe that it is extremely valuable for white working class people to speak out about their experiences and interrogate what it means to live simultaneously not only with racial privilege, but also under economic oppression. Exploring these kinds of contradictions is the only way that theory will catch up with praxis.

As someone both white and working class, I have often been painfully invisible, particularly in academic environments where it was much more comfortable for white academics to assume that I was "like them" despite evidence to the contrary. One woman at Oberlin repeatedly insisted to my face, "You're like me? your parents have money." The fact that I was not supported financially by my parents was a foreign concept to her, and far too many others. I had to insist on my own existence, insist on the right to my own experience, and avoid being put in the position of taking care of their feelings of guilt.

Writing is thievery, as in stealing time. I will forever be envious of those who are afforded the material conditions and privilege in which to write. Those whose parents paid for them to go to college. Those who grew up blissfully unaware of financial struggle. Those whose families are able to provide them with a crucial safety net in times of crisis. These people have the things that I always wanted, but will never have. I can't go back and change that. I can only fight to harness my fear and rage in a way which returns me to the page in a productive way as a poet who believes that issues of power and privilege are of vital importance.



This essay first appeared in tripwire: a journal of poetics, no. 1, Spring, 1998.

Kathy Lou Schultz was born in Burke, South Dakota and grew up in central Nebraska. She left Nebraska at age 18 to attend Columbia University in New York. She finished her B.A. at Oberlin College and earned an MFA at San Francisco State University. Her publications include Genealogy (a+bend press, 1999) and Re dress (San Francisco State University, 1994). She is a founding editor of Lipstick Eleven and Duck Press.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY JAMES BALDWIN

"Any honest examination of the national life proves how far we are from the standard of human freedom with which we began. The recovery of this standard demands of everyone who loves this country a hard look at himself, for the greatest achievements must begin somewhere, and they always begin with the person. If we are not capable of this examination, we may yet become one of the most distinguished and monumental failures in the history of nations. Words like "freedom," "justice," "democracy" are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply."

Sometimes, as a teacher, I feel like one of those honeybees who come back to the hive and do a little funky dance that tells the rest of the clan where the nectar is.

Lately, I have been browsing the Michigan Quarterly Review’s site where every issue since their first in 1962 has been archived. There’s a whole lot of nectar there. You can read every word of every issue, from Saul Bellow’s essay, “Where Do We Go from Here: The Future of Fiction” in their first issue, to works by Yevtushenko, C. K. Williams, Charles Simic, and Joyce Carol Oates in 1997, or more recent issues, including Winter 2007, with work by Nicholas Delbanco, Charles Baxter, and an interview with Arthur Miller.

Here’s the URL: http://quod.lib.umich.edu:80/m/mqr/index.html

This site seems to me to be the model for how a print magazine can best offer itself to readers and researchers, i.e. for free, and in celebration of its own inclusive aesthetic.

Along these lines, Ploughshares has been busy archiving the equally fine work of its past issues at http://www.pshares.org/issues/

Not since the episode of The Twilight Zone where Burgess Meredith survives a nuclear blast and has all the books of the world to himself has a reader’s fantasy so emphatically come true! Careful you don’t drop your glasses…

Anyway, that's the buzz. (Sorry.)

All depends on the skin.

All depends on the skin you’re living in.

All depends on the skin.



Sekou Sundiata: 1948 -- 2007




















July 21, 2007 — NEW YORK

Sekou Sundiata, a poet and performance artist whose work explored slavery, subjugation, and the tension between personal and national identity, especially as they inform the black experience in America, died Wednesday in Valhalla, N.Y. He was 58 and lived in Brooklyn.

The cause was heart failure, said his producer, Ann Rosenthal. At his death, Mr. Sundiata was a professor in the writing program of Eugene Lang College of New School University.

Mr. Sundiata's art, which defied easy classification, ranged from poems performed in the style of an oral epic to musical, dance and dramatic works infused with jazz, blues, funk, and Afro-Caribbean rhythms. In general, as he once said in a television interview, it entailed "the whole idea of text and noise, cadences and pauses."

His work was performed widely throughout the United States and abroad, staged by distinguished organizations like the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Spoleto Festival U.S.A.

Among Mr. Sundiata's most recent works was "the 51st (dream) state," an interlaced tapestry of poetry, music, dance, and videotaped interviews that explores what it means to be an American in the wake of the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

Mr. Sundiata was born Robert Franklin Feaster in Harlem on Aug. 22, 1948; he adopted the African name Sekou Sundiata in the late 1960s. He earned a bachelor's degree in English from City College of New York in 1972 and a master's degree in creative writing from the City University of New York in 1979.

Mr. Sundiata, who performed with the folk rock artist Ani DiFranco as part of her "Rhythm and News" tour in 2001, released several CDs of music and poetry, including "The Blue Oneness of Dreams" and "longstoryshort." His work was also featured on television, on the HBO series "Def Poetry" and the PBS series "The Language of Life."

© 2007, Chicago Tribune


Here is Sundiata’s page at the Academy of American Poets:

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5809

And here is the poet performing his “Bring On the Reparations”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWhnZPeW644

This is an NPR interview with the poet:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4561097

And, finally, Bill Moyers’ blog has a great clip of Sundiata performing:

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/blog/2007/07/remembering_sekou_sundiata.html

Philip Booth, a Shy Poet Rooted in New England Life, Dead at 81

by Roja Heydarpour

Philip Booth, a poet known for his explorations of existence and New England in an intense, sparse style, died on July 2 in Hanover, N.H. He was 81 and had split his time between Hanover and Castine, Me., for many years.

The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, said his daughter Carol Booth.

Mr. Booth wrote 10 books of poetry, including “The Islanders,” “Weathers and Edges,” “Letter From a Distant Land” and “Lifelines: Selected Poems 1950-1999.” He also wrote a book of essays about writing poetry called “Trying to Say It: Outlooks and Insights on How Poems Happen.” He received recognition and honors from many institutions, including Guggenheim, Rockefeller and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships.

The sense of privacy that made poetry lovers appreciate Mr. Booth’s work ultimately cost him fame. He spent hours upon hours writing and revising in his room, Ms. Booth said, drawing material from deeper and deeper within his emotional landscape. He rarely traveled on book tours or did readings for large groups.

Stephen Dunn, a former student of Mr. Booth’s and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, wrote in an e-mail message after Mr. Booth’s death, “Booth’s quest was to deepen as opposed to range widely, and in that sense he was a poet of consciousness, even when his subject seemed to be the dailiness of Castine or the vagaries of sailing.”

Philip Edmund Booth was born in Hanover and spent most of his life there and in Castine, the city where his mother grew up and where he first learned to sail. He served in the Army Air Forces during World War II and married Margaret Tillman in 1946.

In addition to his wife, of Hanover, and his daughter Carol, of Amherst, Mass., Mr. Booth is survived by two other daughters, Margot, of Austin, Tex., and Robin, of Rowe, Mass.; and a sister, Lee Klunder, of Hartland, Vt.

He received his bachelor’s degree in English at Dartmouth, where he studied under Robert Frost, and a master’s degree in English at Columbia University. He later taught English at Bowdoin College and Wellesley College in the 1950s but spent the majority of his career at Syracuse University, where he was a professor, a poet in residence and a co-founder of the graduate program in creative writing.

In a poem called “First Lesson,” Mr. Booth wrote to a daughter:

As you float now, where I held you

and let go, remember when fear

cramps your heart what I told you:

lie gently and wide to the light-year

stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.

***


Here is the entire poem quoted in the obit:


FIRST LESSON

Lie back daughter, let your head
be tipped back in the cup of my hand.
Gently, and I will hold you. Spread
your arms wide, lie out on the stream
and look high at the gulls. A dead-
man's float is face down. You will dive
and swim soon enough where this tidewater
ebbs to the sea. Daughter, believe
me, when you tire on the long thrash
to your island, lie up, and survive.
As you float now, where I held you
and let go, remember when fear
cramps your heart what I told you:
lie gently and wide to the light-year
stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.




TALK ABOUT WALKING

Where am I going? I'm going
out, out for a walk. I don't
know where except outside.
Outside argument, out beyond
wallpapered walls, outside
wherever it is where nobody
ever imagines. Beyond where
computers circumvent emotion,
where somebody shorted specs
for rivets for airframes on
today's flights. I'm taking off
on my own two feet. I'm going
to clear my head, to watch
mares'-tails instead of TV,
to listen to trees and silence,
to see if I can still breathe.
I'm going to be alone with
myself, to feel how it feels
to embrace what my feet
tell my head, what wind says
in my good ear. I mean to let
myself be embraced, to let go
feeling so centripetally old.
Do I know where I'm going?
I don't. How long or far
I have no idea. No map. I
said I was going to take
a walk. When I'll be back
I'm not going to say.

***

And here is a poem heartbreaking in its irony, given Booth’s death from Alzheimer’s. Perhaps it was written when Booth first suspected the onset of his dementia?



LIKE A WOMAN

Like a woman
I loved, I say
words to the dark,
not to suffer.
Grown as I am,
I'm far from
immune: if I'm
in for it long
I want mind to
hold on, words in
my throat ready
to name it. Let
me keep fury
to stay against
pain; if it
is given me
to learn I mean
to know it all
the way, to bear
it like a woman.

***

Russell Astley’s critical essay on Booth in Patricia Eakin’s fine, now-defunct magazine, Frigate:

http://www.frigatezine.com/review/poetry/rpy02har.html


Booth’s page at The Academy of American Poets site:

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/175

For a couple of years during my twenties I carried a certain book with me nearly everywhere I went: The Orphic Voice by Elizabeth Sewell. I have no idea how I came to have it (I am an inveterate browser and believer in the serendipity of bookstores, especially sprawling used bookstores, and even then I am always drawn to the piles of books on tables that the staff has not yet had time to shelve) but it seemed to bless me. It seemed to say to me, as I read slowly, often only a paragraph or two at a time, that poetry was as important as I felt it to be, that making poems was tapping into something, a deep knowledge that, with skill, could be accessed, embodied and communicated, and that as a mode of discovery, it was as valuable as its more privileged sibling, science.

In fact, that’s not really what Sewell has to say in The Orphic Voice. Tracing the split between Science and Poetry to Francis Bacon, she argues that they are the same inquiry, carried out by the same human consciousness. We are in error if we fall into the “two cultures” trap. She traces that error to the fact that Bacon, as she writes, “was a poet who did not trust poetry.” Early in the book she cites an experiment in which scientists were asked to describe what poets do, and poets to describe what scientists are after. Of course neither recognized itself in the description of the other, although both thrilled to a common description of the work of discovering how the world might be ordered, how that order might be represented, and how that system of representation is itself a process of ordering. Orpheus sings the creation into a dynamic order. Linnaeus the first taxonomer writes his book in verse. The world is the product of similarities and differences, resemblances, metaphor. So is language, its mirror and mythology.

I can only scratch the surface here, and I only mean to recommend the book to anyone who suspects that poetry has an existential, organic function in the workings of consciousness.

Interestingly enough, Sewell herself was a political poet, and not only on occasion. She was active in the civil rights movement and wrote a powerful elegy for murdered activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. I was an undergraduate at Fordham University when she was there presiding over Bensalem, the Experimental College, founded in 1967, but I had no idea about her at all. Bensalem was in an apartment building across the street from the Rose Hill campus, and I often went there for political meetings or to drink red wine and get high. I was two or three years out of college when I came upon her book, and I don’t think I even made the connection to the bent and somewhat frail woman I sometimes saw on campus.

But enough: here are some excerpts from The Orphic Voice (long out of print, but still possible to track down at your local used bookstore perhaps, or else at a good academic library):

It is of the nature of mind and language together, that they form an instrument capable of an indefinite number of developments. It matters very little whether the particular devisors or users of the instrument saw, at the point in time when they flourished, its full implications.

We always say more than we know. This is one of the reasons for language's apparent imprecision. It is no reason for refusing language our confidence.

***

Modern thought supposes that human beings are capable of two sorts of thinking, the logical and the imaginative. We are endowed with the faculties of intellect and imagination — allied, since both are mental, but distinct in their methods and fields of operation. The intellect is the "mind," properly so-called, and its essential function is abstract and logical thought. The imagination is more closely knit with the body (witness its habit, in myth, of expressing all concepts in terms of bodies, of embodying its ideas, in fact, and the close connection of myth with rite or bodily action), and it operates in the more primitive forms of dreams, myth, ritual, and art.

Science and poetry, mathematics and words, intellect and imagination, mind and body: they are old, they are perfected and tidy, they are mistaken. If we can dispose of these recurring antitheses which the last 400 years have, with the best of intentions, bequeathed us, we can turn to bequests made on our behalf by other ancestors, for they are there and ready to help. We have given ourselves credit, as human beings, for rather more and rather less than we possess. The human organism, that body which has the gift of thought, does not have the choice of two kinds of thinking. It has only one, in which the organism as a whole is engaged all along the line. There has been no progression in history from one type of thought to another. We are merely learning to use what we have been given, which is all of a piece. This means too that we have to admit and affirm our solidarity with the thinking of the child and the savage. All thinking is of the same kind, and it is this we have to try to understand and to exercise.

***

In its beginnings, language is acknowledged by scholars to have been essentially figurative, imaginative, synthesizing, and mythological rather than analytical and logical. Schelling, for instance, says, “Is it not evident that there is poetry in the actual material formation of languages?” and other writers have said the same. Myth and metaphor, living instruments of a lively speech, are not ornaments and artifices tacked on to language but something in the stuff of language and hence of the mind itself. Language is poetry, and a poem is only the resources of language used to the full.

We have come to believe, however, that there is another kind of language, not figurative but literal or logical. It is widely accepted that with advancing civilization comes a progress from imaginative and mythological and poetic turns of speech toward the logical, precise, nonfigurative. Within our own culture, philosophers, logicians, and scientists seem to have striven for this for nearly 400 years, anxious to purify language, in the name of precision, from this very element of unclearness we have glimpsed already, from myth, metaphor, and poetry. Analytical thinking — logic and mathematics, in unison — has been set up as the model to which word-thought was to conform. Recent endeavors to develop languages which are mathematical structures of propositions are the outcome. This is a language-as-science, in its more or less extreme form.

***

The nature of language has been much studied. So has its history. We're after something else: not nature or history but something nearer what we mean by natural history, a dynamic inquiry into process, a natural history of mind and language. Language is to be conceived of not as an entity but as an activity; not in itself, for one must always avoid the metaphor of saying that language is alive, but in conjunction with a mind, with numbers and series of minds in time. Language utterances become events in this kind of thinking. Every poem and recounted myth and scientific hypothesis and theological statement and theory of politics or history and every philosophy become records of happenings at particular times, all of which, if they have any life in them at all, have the capacity to be taken further, in varying degrees, by other minds present and to come. This means giving up the right to abstract language into timeless pattern, and making the effort to grasp it not as a fixed phenomenon but as a moving event, language plus mind, subject to time and process and change — to try to think in biological terms, perhaps.

To further whet your appetite, here is the book’s Contents page:

Preface

Part I Introduction

Part II Bacon and Shakespeare: Postlogical Thinking

Part III Erasmus Darwin and Goethe: Linnaean and Ovidian Taxonomy

Part IV Wordsworth and Rilke: Toward a Biology of Thinking

Part V Working Poems for The Orphic Voice

Notes

Index


***

And so. Read The Orphic Voice. Go slowly. Think. Reflect. You may find there an old well-spring satisfying to your thirst.

Here is a link to some of Sewell’s poems:

http://www.questia.com/library/book/poems-1947-1961-by-elizabeth-sewell.jsp

And here is a reminiscence of Sewell which was published as an obituary. There’s a lot of mention of the philosopher Michael Polanyi in it. The Orphic Voice is dedicated to him:

On Reuniting Poetry and Science: A Memoir of Elizabeth Sewell, 1919-2001
by
David Schenck and Phil Mullins

(This essay is an obituary notice for Elizabeth Sewell, a long-time friend of Michael Polanyi and a well-known poet, novelist and critic.)

Elizabeth Sewell, internationally known poet, critic, novelist, and friend of Michael Polanyi died January 12, 2001, in Greensboro NC. She was 81. Sewell was born in India in 1919 of English parents and educated in England, taking her B.A. in Modern Languages from Cambridge University in 1942. She performed war service in the Ministry of Education in London from 1942-45, and then returned to Cambridge to complete her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees, also in Modern Languages. Sewell received from her family background and classical education a familiaritywith English literature, history, liturgy, and style that marked her entire life's work. She came to the UnitedStates in 1949, just after completing her graduate work. After many years of trans-Atlantic commuting, she became an American citizen in 1973.

Some readers will recall that Sewell was a participant in the 1991 Kent State Polanyi Centennial Conference where she enchanted the audience by reading a lengthy poem. She was delighted by the Kent State meeting where she renewed old friendships (some other earlier Polanyi-related conferences at Bowdoin and Dayton that she attended she reported were not so pleasant). After this 1991 gathering, she prepared and deposited in the University of Chicago Polanyi archives a 44 page memoir that comments on the ways in which Michael Polanyi's friendship contributed to her work as a poet. Becoming acquainted with Polanyi was altogether serendipity: Sewell met Magda Polanyi in thesummer of 1954 at an international conference at Alpback in Austria, where she was running a seminar on the modern European novel. Magda and John Polanyi showed up the first day in her seminar; although Mrs. Polanyi did not take the seminar, she one day invited Sewell to join her for conversation in a local cafe. Sewell described herself to Mrs. Polanyi as a poet who had woven together mathematics, logic, physics and poetry; she was now beginning to explore the connection between poetry and natural history and was soon to depart for a year at Fordham University. By chance, Sewell reports that she made a comment that ultimately led to her coming to Manchester University on a fellowship from 1955-57 and to her friendship with Michael Polanyi: “But as I look back I have a funny sense that I uttered a key word somewhere along the line,and that word was crystallography. Magda in response uttered two key words, keys to my life though neither of us knew that at the time. She said, "You must meet my husband," and "You must apply for a Simon Fellowship at Manchester University.”

Sewell applied for the Simon Fellowship after her year in New York and, with strong support from Michael Polanyi, received the award, although a poet had never previously been awarded this fellowship. She came toManchester, a city that she grew to love, in 1955, and eventually became a frequent guest at the Polanyi household. She was formally attached to the Philosophy Department and this was an uneasy marriage that contributed to her link to the Polanyi family. In Manchester, Sewell began work on The Orphic Voice, a work that was dedicated to Michael Polanyi and her most popular book in North America. Clearly, Sewell found in Polanyi's interests and his writing a kindred spirit. She describes her joy in first reading Science, Faith and Society: at finding “an unimpeachable scientific voice so friendly, as it seemed to me, to what I wasgroping after in this second attempt on my part to reunite the disciplines of science and poetry as I had tried to do with my first book, The Structure of Poetry, originally my dissertation which had aroused so much antagonism, at college and university level, atCambridge, that amnesiac place since poetry and science are its two great glories which it now determines to keep in total separation each from each.”

Sewell was in Manchester in the years just prior to the publication of Personal Knowledge. She is identified in the "Acknowledgments" as one of four people who read the whole manuscript and suggested improvements. In her memoir, she describes the process of reading and responding to several chapters of the manuscript. She was particularly appreciative of "Intellectual Passions," which she found aptly described her work as a poet: “Intellectual Passion was Michael's subject-matter but also that which he embodied superbly and communicated to us, and when my own work suddenly and decisively found its own method and metaphor, that kind of passion, known to me since my first such experience at Cambridge and then resting awhile as one pursued other paths, returned with vehemence, indeed almost one might say, obsession.”

Sewell was a visiting writer or professor at many colleges and universities in the United States including, in addition to Fordham, Vassar, Princeton, Bennett, California State, Tugaloo, Central Washington State, Hunter, California at Irvine, Trent, Notre Dame, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, LehighUniversity, Converse College, and University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She received honorarydegrees from many colleges and universities including Fordham University (1968) and the University ofNotre Dame (1984). In addition to the Simon Fellowship at Manchester University (1955-57), Sewell also held the Howard Research Fellowship at Ohio State University (1949-50), and was an Ashley Fellow at Trent University (1979), and a Presidential Scholar at Mercer University (1982). Sewell's major works include criticism —The Structure of Poetry (1951, l963), Paul Valéry: TheMind in the Mirror (1952), The Field of Nonsense (1952), The Orphic Voice: Poetry and Natural History(1960, 1972), and The Human Metaphor (1964); novels —The Dividing of Time (1952), The Singular Hope (1955), Now Bless Thyself (1962), and The Unlooked-For (1995); poetry-Poems, 1947-1961 (1962), Signs and Cities (1968), and Acquist (1984); essays — To Be a True Poem (1979); and a memoir — An Idea(1983).

In addition to these volumes, Sewell published dozens of short stories, essays, articles and poems in periodicals in the United States, Canada, England, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria and Russia. At her death, she left completed manuscripts on William Blake, and on the French reception of Lewis Carroll. Left incomplete was a translation and commentary project on Giordano Bruno and the Renaissance tradition of high magic. Her papers are on deposit with the Department of Special Collections of the Mugar Memorial Library at Boston University.

Phil Mullins (mullins@mwsc.edu) has been the editor of Tradition and Discovery since 1991. He tried on more than one occasion to get Elizabeth Sewell to publish something in TAD.

David Schenck was a friend of Elizabeth Sewell. He studied with Ruel Tyson and did a dissertation directed by Bill Poteat.

***

And then I checked my email and this poem arrived from Poetry International, a poem that speaks to this very subject (if it is a “subject”) — I told you I believe in serendipity!

THE FIRST NOISE

No, it is not the intonation
It is not the rhythm
Not even the meaning.
It is the word by itself
Mouthless.
And who would ever care about
What the poet says?

What matters is the ritual
The metaphor of what we’ve always been
The memory of the first vocal sound
“the secret language of the birds
of the first day”

Today’s man is out of tune
He has forgotten the words.
Someone stammers something
And everyone arrives, it’s the ritual
The transition
Memory,
the substitution,
The endless metaphor
What strange analogy is man?

The poet says nothing
But a living being comes out of his throat
Invisible, having only sound
And an ancient music.
We remember then the original sound
The first sound in the world
When the word became blood
And collective food.

With time came verses
But the birds no longer cared about it
The poet speaks, sings or prays
And wants to name the world
In all forms.
He invokes the spirits
And calls the other
“I will people myself with voices,” he says,
and turns to his metaphor which is of fire.

But the word keeps silent
The word is the grandfather of the species
The word is sense
It is power and walking stick.


© Álvaro Marín
© Translation: 2007, Nicolás Suescún

Poem of the Week:
http://colombia.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=9618

Álvaro Marín’s page:
http://colombia.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=9608

This poem, along with visual art by Lisa Sette, is the latest offering from Broadsided Press. (See links.)


The Car Covenant

O give us individual mobility and daily we will embrace death.
Give us miles to the gallon and things made small by moving swiftly away.
We will sacrifice certain teenagers to the oak tree.

Make the sunrise manifest in the sideview and the periphery a roar of shouldercorn.
Make our existence portable beyond the white picket fence with internal combustion.
Ours will be the Kerouac and the Conoco, those empty shells of orangegreen HoJos.

Give us eternal direction divided by nice green strips, the whirring sound of pistonbirth.
Make the miles a whetstone to our way, the highmetal quick to the skyheavy horizon.
We will aisle it with junk and liquid drug, with the sacrament of Big Mac and more gas.

Make us in you all ergonomic and airconditioned, arrive us deodored and relieved, ready
whenever to leave.
Take us fast into the samemore, diminish everything left behind us.
We will eat the doubleyellow in the blackscreennight.

We will go wakka wakka wakka,
O sing, wakka wakka wakka.


Poet Robert Strong lives north of the Adirondack park and bikes to work year round. He is editor of Joyful Noise: An Anthology of American Spiritual Poetry and author of Puritan Spectacle, from which this poem is adapted.

My friend the poet Mario Noel Rodriguez of El Salvador sent me the following statement, signed by many of Colombia’s writers, artists, and intellectuals, addressing the intractable bloody civil war there. I have brought it over into English as best I could, but I include the original also for those who can read Spanish.

For those who do not know about the recent history and present situation of Colombia, you’ll find the women’s commission report on the war here. It is clear why this conflict continues to rage out of control, not so clear how to stop it.

http://www.womenscommission.org/pdf/co_wl.pdf

CNN calls this “War Without End” — their site is a fine place to start to try to understand the complex issues that are driving the ongoing slaughter:

http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2000/colombia.noframes/

And so, here is the letter:

A LETTER FROM THE ARTISTS AND INTELLECTUALS
by La Paz of Colombia

Indignant and hurt by the war that devastates our country, by the continuation of paramilitary barbarism, by the infamy of clandestine cemeteries and schools of butchery, by a Law of Justice and Peace that is neither peace nor justice, but prizes and the pardon for the worse assassins in the history of Colombia, by laws that, in addition, hide the truth, the very principle and essence of justice; by the politicians throughout the country who sponsored the formation of those criminal groups, by the ruling corruption in the Colombian State; by three million displaced, the majority of them mothers and their children. By increasing social inequality, by the despoliation of the territory of the indigenous populations and the black communities, by increasing violations of sovereignty, by internal and external powers that profit from the business of the war, by kidnapping, and by the hundreds of thousands of innocent victims of the violence that has bathed the entire country in blood, and by the grief we feel for all those whom we have lost, the Colombian artists and intellectuals, reunited in Medellín in National Encuentro of Art and Poetry by La Paz of Colombia, want our voice heard in the middle of the roar of the war. Witnesses of this tragic historical moment, we propose the creation of a cultural movement ample and united in diversity, impelled by artists and intellectuals, who are the eyes, the ears and the critical reflection of our reality, that maintains bridges with other social movements that today show in the street their refusal of the war, the injustice, the social inequality, the privatization of public education, the exploitation of our natural patrimony and the Free Trade Agreement with the US. United, we will look for the truth, inseparable from justice. This kind of justice has never existed in the history of Colombia. We cannot find meaning in our lives if there is no memory, if there is no truth, if there is no justice — and if there are no reparations for the victims. A humanitarian agreement is the first and foremost condition for the ccreation of La Paz. As artists, writers and intellectuals we are called to resistance by the culture, by principles of tolerance and justice, by life itself. If the armies in struggle want La Paz, they must cease fire and accept an honest dialogue, facing the country and the international community. The indigenous territories must be respected and the displaced ones cannot continue carrying the burden of exile in a context of indolent indifference. We want the country to change; let this be pronounced from the factory, the office, the house, the school, the street and the fields. We pledge to make available all our capacities of thought and creativity to construct ways that allow us to surpass these times of barbarism. We know that it is possible.

Signed: Francisco Zumaqué (composer and musician), Vicky Hernandez (movie actress and TV), Nicholas Suescun (poet), Antonio Arnedo (composer and musician), Alvaro Miranda (poet), Santiago Garci'a (dramatist), Hollman Morris (journalist), Libardo Sarmiento (journalist), Jotamario Arbeláez (poet), Fernando Rendón (poet), Gabriel Frank Jaime (poet), Julian Malatesta (poet), Jorge Enrique Wineskin maker (journalist), Alvaro Marín (poet), Ricardo Camacho (dramatist), Hugo Jamioy Juagibioy (poet), White Marisol (journalist), Guillermo González Uribe (writer and publisher) Sergio de Zubiría (philosopher), Eduardo Go'mez (poet), Horacio Benavides (poet), Gustavo Tatis War (poet), Juan Carlos Moyano (director of theater and actor), Manuel Giraldo ˆMagil- (novelist), Fabio Martinez (writer), Patricia Ariza (actress), Diego Arango (painter), Jaime Barbini (dramatist), Pedro Badrán Padauí (writer), Ignacio Go'mez (journalist), Pedro Arturo Estrada (poet), Carlos Lozano (journalist), Noelle Schonwald (TV actress), Daniel Rocha (actor), Alberto Donadío (journalist and investigator), Silvia Galvis (journalist and novelist), Lucia González (director of the Museum of Antioquia), Constanza Vieira (journalist), Harold Kremer (narrative), Arming Orozco (poet), Lucia Estrada (poet), Andrea Cote (poet), Giovanny Go'mez (poet), Robinson Quintero (poet), Light Mery Giraldo (poet), Ramon Cote (poet), Fernando Linero (poet), Miguel Iriarte (poet), Tallulah Flórez (poet), Efraim Medina (writer), Federico the Distinguished Diaz (poet), Marine Light Aguirre (actress), Eva Durán (poet), Oscar Yearling calf (journalist), Ricardo Cuellar (poet), Darío Sanchez (poet), Berrío Morning call (poet), Jose Martinez (writer), Edgar Bastidas (writer), Jairo Ojeda (musical), Tatiana Mejía (poet), Ricardo Go'mez (musical), Amalia Lu Posso (writer), Julian Rodriguez (musical), Zabier Hernandez (poet), Gloria Chvatal (painter), Jorge Iván Grisales (actor), Ángela Garci'a (poet), Carlos Satizábal (actor), Haydé Marín (music), Marine Light Lopez (journalist), Winston Clubs (painter), Put Honorio (theater director), Catherine King (promotional cultural), Dark Frame (promotional cultural), Libardo Clubs (writer), Iván Cepeda (defending of DDHH), Hugo Ceballos (painter), Luis Galar (poet), Trimming Cajamarca (dramatist), Arming to Rodriguez Crossbowmen (poet), Gonzalo Márquez Christ (poet and publisher), Francisco Javier Buitrago (designer), Ana Milena Door (poet), Luisa Aguilar (poet), Fabio Garrido (singing of rock), Shelter Ines Osorio (poet), Winston Moral (poet), Nahum Múnera (actor), Alfredo Ortiz (promotional cultural), Rafael Field of broom of Andreis (poet) Pablo Mauricio Lopez (lawyer), Freddy Chicangana (poet), Edgar the Lozanos (poet), Ana Magdalena Renjifo (educational), Marleny Mejía Jaramillo (poet), Jairo Buitrago (writer), Jesus Gualdrón (university professor), Hernando Moral (composer), Hernando War (poet); Maria Isabel Borrero (designer), Irina Junieles (poet), Jácome Daisy (investigator), Jose Left, narrative Ignacio; Everardo Rendón (poet), Janeth Núñez Maroquín (poet), Víctor de Currea Soon (poet and doctor), Hildebrando Vélez (environmentalist), Carlos Fajardo (poet), Carlos Patiño (poet), Francisco Amín (investigator), Manuel Pachón (poet), Claudia Roa (translator), Gilberto Ávila Creek (musical), Matilde Eljach (educational college student), Javier Rodrizales (poet), Miguel Beltrán Angel (university professor), Estheiman Amaya Solano (journalist), Héctor Sands (manager), Mauricio the Vidals (poet), Miryam Montoya (poet), Augusto Field of broom (university professor), Hope Stolen Saravia (sociologist), Marta Renza (writer), Thorny Fabio (Lic. Literature), Castilian Abadio Green (poet), Luis Darío Bernal Pinilla (doctor), Omar Ardila (poet and ensayista), Carlos May (poet), Víctor Raul Jaramillo (poet), Olga Lucia Field of broom (cultural manager), Sophia Sophia (cantautora), Hernando Urriago (poet), Heraclio Ant Ordo'ñez (Distrital Committee of the Function and position of agent), Odilia Leon (Association of Women by La Paz of Colombia), Ana (Corporation of Colombo-Cuban Solidarity), Second Cardozo, Dark Diva (Committee of Political Prisoners), Luis Carlos Domínguez (lawyer), Crispín Otavo (indigenous leader), Manuel Aguirre (Aceu leader), Iván Mallet (poet), Jose G. Daniels (poet).

and here is the Spanish original:

Carta de los artistas e intelectuales por la paz de Colombia

Indignados y dolidos por la guerra que arrasa al país, por la continuación de la barbarie paramilitar, por la infamia de sus cementerios clandestinos y sus escuelas de descuartizamiento, por una Ley de Justicia y Paz que no es de paz ni de justicia, sino el premio y el perdón para los peores asesinos en la historia de Colombia y que, además, esconde la verdad, principio y esencia de la justicia; por los políticos de todo el país que patrocinaron la formación de esos grupos criminales, por la corrupción reinante en el Estado colombiano; por los tres millones de desplazados, la mayoría madres de familia y sus niños y niñas. Por la creciente desigualdad social, por el despojo del territorio de las poblaciones indígenas y de las comunidades negras, por la creciente violación de la soberanía, por los poderes internos y externos que se benefician del negocio de la guerra, por el secuestro, y sobre todo por los centenares de miles de víctimas inocentes de la violencia que ha bañado en sangre al país desde siempre, y por el dolor de todos los que han perdido a sus seres queridos, los artistas e intelectuales colombianos, reunidos en Medellín en el Encuentro Nacional de Arte y Poesía por la Paz de Colombia, queremos que nuestra voz se oiga en medio del estruendo de la guerra.

Testigos de este trágico momento histórico, proponemos la creación de un movimiento cultural amplio y unido en la diversidad, impulsado por artistas e intelectuales, que sea los ojos, los oídos y la reflexión crítica de nuestra realidad, y que tienda puentes con otros movimientos sociales que hoy manifiestan en la calle su inconformidad con la guerra, la inequidad, la desigualdad social, la privatización de la educación pública, la expoliación de nuestro patrimonio natural y el Tratado de Libre Comercio con Estados Unidos.

Todos juntos buscaremos la verdad, inseparable de la justicia. Justicia que, por lo demás, no ha existido en toda la historia de Colombia. No encontraremos sentido a nuestra vida si no hay memoria, si no hay verdad, si no hay justicia y si no hay reparación para las víctimas. Un acuerdo humanitario es el primer paso para la necesaria e inaplazable construcción de la paz.

Los artistas, escritores e intelectuales llamamos a conformar una resistencia por la cultura de la vida, la tolerancia y la justicia. Si los ejércitos en pugna quieren la paz, que detengan el fuego y acepten un diálogo honesto, de cara al país y a la comunidad internacional.

Los territorios indígenas deben ser respetados y los desplazados no pueden seguir arrastrando la crisis del destierro en un contexto de indolente indiferencia. Deseamos que el país se mueva, que se manifieste desde la fábrica, la oficina, la casa, la escuela, la calle y el campo. Y ponemos a disposición toda nuestra capacidad de pensamiento y creación para construir caminos que nos permitan superar estos tiempos de barbarie. Sabemos que es posible.

Fiman:

Francisco Zumaqué (compositor y músico), Vicky Hernández (actriz de cine y TV), Nicolás Suescun (poeta), Antonio Arnedo (compositor y músico), Álvaro Miranda (poeta), Santiago García (dramaturgo), Hollman Morris (periodista), Libardo Sarmiento (periodista), Jotamario Arbeláez (poeta), Fernando Rendón (poeta), Gabriel Jaime Franco (poeta), Julián Malatesta (poeta), Jorge Enrique Botero (periodista), Álvaro Marín (poeta), Ricardo Camacho (dramaturgo), Hugo Jamioy Juagibioy (poeta), Marisol Cano (periodista), Guillermo González Uribe (escritor y editor), Sergio de Zubiría (filósofo), Eduardo Gómez (poeta), Horacio Benavides (poeta), Gustavo Tatis Guerra (poeta), Juan Carlos Moyano (director de teatro y actor), Manuel Giraldo ˆMagil- (novelista), Fabio Martínez (escritor), Patricia Ariza (actriz), Diego Arango (pintor), Jaime Barbini (dramaturgo), Pedro Badrán Padauí (escritor), Ignacio Gómez (periodista), Pedro Arturo Estrada (poeta), Carlos Lozano (periodista), Noelle Schonwald (actriz de TV), Daniel Rocha (actor), Alberto Donadío (periodista e investigador), Silvia Galvis (periodista y novelista), Lucía González (directora del Museo de Antioquia), Constanza Vieira (periodista), Harold Kremer (narrador), Armando Orozco (poeta), Lucía Estrada (poeta), Andrea Cote (poeta), Giovanny Gómez (poeta), Robinson Quintero (poeta), Luz Mery Giraldo (poeta), Ramón Cote (poeta), Fernando Linero (poeta), Miguel Iriarte (poeta), Tallulah Flórez (poeta), Efraim Medina (escritor), Federico Díaz Granados (poeta), Luz Marina Aguirre (actriz), Eva Durán (poeta), Oscar Becerra (periodista), Ricardo Cuellar (poeta), Darío Sánchez (poeta), Diana Berrío (poeta), José Martínez (escritor), Edgar Bastidas (escritor), Jairo Ojeda (músico), Tatiana Mejía (poeta), Ricardo Gómez (músico), Amalia Lu Posso (escritora), Julián Rodríguez (músico), Zabier Hernández (poeta), Gloria Chvatal (pintora), Jorge Iván Grisales (actor), Ángela García (poeta), Carlos Satizábal (actor), Haydé Marín (música), Luz Marina López (periodista), Winston Porras (pintor), Honorio Posada (director de teatro), Catalina Rey (promotora cultural), Marco Prieto (promotor cultural), Libardo Porras (escritor), Iván Cepeda (defensor de DDHH), Hugo Ceballos (pintor), Luis Galar (poeta), Orlando Cajamarca (dramaturgo), Armando Rodríguez Ballesteros (poeta), Gonzalo Márquez Cristo (poeta y editor), Francisco Javier Buitrago (diseñador), Ana Milena Puerta (poeta), Luisa Aguilar (poeta), Fabio Garrido (cantante de rock), Amparo Inés Osorio (poeta), Winston Morales (poeta), Nahum Múnera (actor), Alfredo Ortiz (promotor cultural), Rafael Escobar de Andreis (poeta), Pablo Mauricio López (abogado), Freddy Chicangana (poeta), Edgar Lozano (poeta), Ana Magdalena Renjifo (docente), Marleny Mejía Jaramillo (poeta), Jairo Buitrago (escritor), Jesús Gualdrón (profesor universitario), Hernando Morales (compositor), Hernando Guerra (poeta); María Isabel Borrero (diseñadora), Irina Junieles (poeta), Margarita Jácome (investigadora), José Ignacio Izquierdo, narrador; Everardo Rendón (poeta), Janeth Núñez Maroquín (poeta), Víctor de Currea Luego (poeta y médico), Hildebrando Vélez (ambientalista), Carlos Fajardo (poeta), Carlos Patiño (poeta), Francisco Amín (investigador), Manuel Pachón (poeta), Claudia Roa (traductora), Gilberto Ávila Rivera (músico), Matilde Eljach (docente universitaria), Javier Rodrizales (poeta), Miguel Angel Beltrán (profesor universitario), Estheiman Amaya Solano (periodista), Héctor Arenas (gestor), Mauricio Vidales (poeta), Miryam Montoya (poeta), Augusto Escobar (profesor universitario), Esperanza Hurtado Saravia (socióloga), Marta Renza (escritora), Fabio Espinosa (Lic. Literatura), Abadio Green (poeta), Luis Darío Bernal Pinilla (médico), Omar Ardila (poeta y ensayista), Carlos Mayo (poeta), Víctor Raúl Jaramillo (poeta), Olga Lucía Escobar (gestora cultural), Sophia Sophia (cantautora), Hernando Urriago (poeta), Heraclio Hormiga Ordóñez (Comité Distrital de la Personería), Odilia León (Asociación de Mujeres por la Paz de Colombia), Ana Castellanos ( Corporación de Solidaridad Colombo-Cubana), Segundo Cardozo, Diva Prieto (Comité de Presos Políticos), Luis Carlos Domínguez (abogado), Crispín Otavo (dirigente indígena), Manuel Aguirre (dirigente Aceu), Iván Mazo (poeta), José G. Daniels (poeta).

Eduardo Galeano





Uruguayan essayist, journalist and historian.





Galeano's best-known works include the trilogy Memoria del fuego (1982-1986, Memory of Fire) and Las venas abiertas de América Latina (1971, The Open Veins of Latin America), which have been translated into some 20 languages. Galeano’s work transcends orthodox genres, and combines documentary, fiction, journalism, political analysis, and history. Among the writers at work now, he has most successfully integrated the aesthetic and the ethical, or in other words, the joyful and the political. His work is at once engaged, playful, and deeply respectful of the real wisdom of la gente, the people, the democracy in exile, if you will, that is our real homeland, no matter where we live in the capitalist economy, no matter where we have been born in the history of imperial greed. The author himself has denied that he is a historian: "I'm a writer obsessed with remembering, with remembering the past of America above all and above all that of Latin America, intimate land condemned to amnesia."

Here are some places to begin to learn about Galeano:

Writer Without Borders
By Scott Witmer

Eduardo Galeano disdains borders, both in life and in literature. Exiled from his native Uruguay after the 1973 military coup, he returned to Montevideo in 1985, where he continues to live and write. Galeano’s books subvert the distinctions between history, poetry, memoir, political analysis and cultural anthropology. With a graceful sense of craft, he uses “only words that really deserve to be there” to convey a humanely moral perspective on matters both personal and political. His writing honors the experiences of everyday life as a contrast to the mass media that “manipulates consciousness, conceals reality and stifles the creative imagination … in order to impose ways of life and patterns of consumption.” By multiplying seldom heard voices, Galeano refutes the official lies that pass for history—his work represents an eloquent, literary incarnation of social justice.

Witmer’s interview with Galeano

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/2699/

excerpts from the book Upside Down: A Primer For The Looking Glass World

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Eduardo_Galeano/Upside_Down.html

Galeano’s “Democracy Now” interview with Amy Goodman

http://www.democracynow.org/print.pl?sid=06/05/19/1324216

Eduardo Galeano: the open veins of McWorld an interview by Niels Boel

http://www.unesco.org/courier/2001_01/uk/dires.htm

another interview at Identity Theory

http://www.identitytheory.com/interviews/birnbaum174.php

More Herbert

Among the poems of Herbert I want to include here is this one, “Elegy for the Departure of Pen Ink and Lamp” which has at least the minor virtue of irony, given the fact that I am “blogging” it; on the other hand, maybe that fact belies the “dark” of Herbert’s ending. Here’s the poem:

ELEGY FOR THE DEPARTURE OF PEN INK AND LAMP

1
Truly my infidelity is great and hard to forgive
for I do not even remember the day or the hour
at which I abandoned you my childhood friends

first I address you humbly
pen with a wooden holder
painted or finely laquered

in a Jewish shop
— creaking steps a bell over the glass door —
I picked you out
in the shade of indolence
and before long you bore
on your body
my pensive toothmarks
traces of school’s angst

O silver nib
outlet of the critical mind
courier of consoling knowledge
— of the fact the earth is round
— of straight and parallel lines
in the shopkeeper’s box
you were a fish waiting forr me
amid a school of other fish
— I was amazed there were so many
objects ownerless and completely
mute —
then
forever mine
I put you piously in my mouth
and felt on my tongue
the long taste
of sorrel
and the moon

O ink
honorable Sir Encaustum
of a distinguished lineage
highborn
as the evening sky
slow to dry
deliberate
and very patient
we turned you
into a Sargasso Sea
drowning blotting paper
hair flies and curses
in your wise depths
to mask the odor
of a gentle volcano
the call of the abyss

who remembers you now
my fond fellows
you disappeared quietly
behind time’s last cataract
who remembersyou gratefully
in an era of harebrain ballpoints
of arrogant objects
without grace
name
or past

if I speak of you
I’d like to speak
as if I were hanging an ex voto
on a shattered altar


2
Light of my childhood
blessed lamp

sometimes I come upon
your dishonored body
in a secondhand store

yet once you were
a shining allegory

spirit stubbornly battling
aganst gnostic demons
given over to the eye
open
transparently plain

at the bottom of your reservoir
kerosene — elixir of primeval forests
a wick’s slippery snake
with a head of flames
slim maidenlike glass
and a silvery tin shield
like Selene at full moon

your princesssy moods
O beautiful and cruel
hysterics of a prima donna
not sufficiently applauded

hark
a cheerful aria
summer’s honey glow
above the glasss mouth
a fair braid of sunlight
and suddenly
dark basses
ravens and crows alight
invective and swearing
prophecies of destruction
a fury of smoke bombs

like a great playwright you knew the tides of passion
and the swamps of melancholy black towers of pride
blazing glow of fires rainbows the unleashed oceans

effortlessly you summoned out of nothingness
landscapes cities gone wild mirrored in water
at a sign from you the crazy prince of the island
and the balcony in Verona appeared obediently

I was devoted to you
O luminous initiation
lever of knowledge
under night’s hammers

and my other
flat head cast on the ceiling
looked down menacingly
as if from a box of angels
at the theater of the world
knotted
evil
cruel

I thought then
I should save
one
small
warm
true
thing
from the flood

yes so it might go on living
and we inside it as in a shell


3
I have never believed in the spirit of history
a puffed-up monster with a murderous eye
a dialectical beast kept on a torturer’s leash

or in you — four horsemen of the Apocalypse
Huns of progress galloping across the steppes of heaven and earth
destroying on your own way everything honorable old and defenseless

I wasted years learning history’s simplistic workings
the monotonous procession and the unequal struggle
between the thugs at the head of addled crowds
and a handful of the righteous and reasonable

not much is left
not much at all

objects
and compassion

lightly we leave the gardens of childhood the gardens of things
scattering manuscripts oil lamps dignity and pens on our flight
such is our deluded journey along the cliff side of nothingness

forgive me for my ingratitude O pen with your archaic nib
and you inkwell — you still contained so many good ideas
forgive me oil lamp — you die out like a deserted campsite

I paid for my betrayal
but then I didn’t know
you were gone forever

and that it would be
dark