The Truly & Exceptionally Ecstasy-Inducing Good News, 4.29.2017

Last September, Brendan, and Jen, friends whom I had in Social Justice class years ago at SLU, told me that he had been diagnosed with malignant metastatic melanoma.  The other day, Jen sent me the following text: “We just found out that Brendan’s full body CT scan done on Tuesday was normal—so no signs of cancer 12 weeks into treatment and 6 months after his surgery!”

after diana di prima

I am full of things beginning

Look at all these names carved in this big old beech tree!

Where the grooves sprout clean shoots

Let it begin

I read the clarity of the sky and her haze

The way it hangs on the trees that bear my name

The milky dust that waits out the blue

Let it begin

The tulips will open!  

Golden Parade

Missouri Sweet

Her Victory

Let it begin

All the trees bear tags that each hold

A variation of the benediction  

In loving memory of our mother

Let it begin

Common witch hazel grows

The grass is ripe

With cardinal conditions

Let it begin

We talk our way down St. Felix Street

Attributes of banners and deer

Coronets at our feet

Let it begin

My son watches the dancers

Being fit for spring’s costumes

The pins are tucked slowly

Let it begin

The Endless Net

Ten years ago, I read Eliot Weinberger’s anthology, World Beat: International Poetry Now (New Directions, 2006). Looking back, I’m grateful, because that volume (re)introduced me to Israeli Aharon Shabtai, Iraqi Dunya Mikhail, and Chilean Nicanor Parra, all of whom I have read over and over since then. I encourage anyone to read Mikhail’s “The War Works Hard,” Shabtai’s “As We Were Marching,” and Parra’s “Seven Voluntary Labors and One Seditious Act.”  In his introduction, Weinberger offers a sobering yet hopeful case for us engaging poets outside the U.S.: “All translation sends the essential message that one’s own culture is not enough, and that the way to avoid intellectual stagnation is to learn from other ways of thinking about, perceiving, luxuriating and despairing in the world. This book appears at a moment when the United States is particularly self-absorbed. Less than a fifth of its citizens have passports; a third of its high school students can find the Pacific Ocean on a world map; its rulers dream without embarrassment of a global empire. Poetry, though not the salvation of the world, presents a small alternate model: an endless net of individual dialogues between writers, and between writers and readers, regardless of governments, nations, and communal identities. Its books are a way out of one’s world and a way into the world at large.” Twenty years ago, I received a doctorate from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. I rarely read theologians these days, and I eagerly take joy and refuge in the poets. Weinberger’s books helped facilitate this shift for me.

Eliot Weinberger

Reading Leads to Writing

1.

Yesterday I was rereading Chilean poet Nicanor Parra’s After-Dinner Declarations, which I first read in 2013, and came across this page with my scribbles:

When I moved to Atlanta as a teenager, my mother looked at a home just inside the perimeter that once belonged to Maya Angelou. 

We did not live there. Mom chose instead to move us into a townhouse in Sandy Springs to avoid to traffic on Ashford-Dunwoody. 

I could not pass the house in Dunwoody without thinking of Dr. Angelou-- her work as poet, novelist, activist; her uncredited turn as a dancer in Porgy and Bess; the bliss she found in the glitches of it all. 

Every time we drove by, I wondered what it would have been to have cooked in her kitchen, to have been a teenager within the energy of those walls. 

I have this quote tacked above my desk: 

"Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told, 'I'm with you kid. Let's go.’” 

Some favorite quotes

Most quotes I save from the books I read are lines that I think are clever or touched me in some way, so the following is a sample of the random quotes that spoke to me for whatever reason:

• "...you feel lost, sick at heart before such unmasked hatred, not so much because it threatens you as because it shows humans in such an inhuman light. You see a kind of insanity, something so obscene the very obscenity of it terrifies you." John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me
• "As one comes back to the books after years of absence they pour out, even against our expectation, the same store of energy and heat, so that we want more than anything to idle in the warmth as in the sun beating down from the red orchard wall." Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader
• "Mr. Tupman had saved the lives of immeasurable unoffending birds by receiving a portion of the charge in his left arm." Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers
• "By telling stories, you objectify your own experience." Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
• "And now I felt that it was not enough; I tired of the routine of eight years in one afternoon." Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
• "I felt as if I'd stepped on the place where the last stair ought to have been, but wasn't." P.G. Wodehouse, Carry On, Jeeves

The Good News of Resistance, 4.22.2017

1.

A while back, I was sitting outside at RISE with a young Irish-Jewish American friend who asked me, when I showed her a particular chapter in Dear Layla Welcome to Palestine, “Who is Abbie Hoffman?”  It was a pleasure to send her such excerpts from his autobiography:

“Later, when I, as well as others, marched on Washington or Chicago, we carried with us the lessons that the local power structures had fought us tooth and nail—that racism was ingrained in the system. We also realized that the lessons came in spite of our formal education. (My critique of democracy begins and ends with this point. Kids must be educated to disrespect authority or else democracy is a farce.)”

“There are lots of secret rules by which power maintains itself. Only when you challenge it, force the crisis, do you discover the true nature of society. And only at the time it chooses to teach you. Occasionally you can use your intellect to guess at the plan, but in general the secrets of power are taught in darkened police cells, back alleys, and on the street. I learned them there.”

“By 1970, my ‘plan’ to stop the war was to disrupt life on the home front. I did not see going to jail as the best use of my time.”

2.

Clara  Bingham has done a riveting oral history of many of Abbie Hoffman’s peers  from the Sixties, focusing in particular on the year 1969-1970 in Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year  America Lost Its Mind and Found Its Soul.  Here’s her thesis: “Whether rebelling against the draft, the atrocities of the war, police and FBI repression, the conformity of the 1950s, the sexist, racist establishment, or all of the above, the movement in the final years of the sixties threatened the entire power structure of American society and transformed the country.”  Bingham’s book will remind baby boomers and instruct their grandchildren as to how people’s experiences then may still speak to the wars being waged in our name today.