We tend to expect a lot of pretense from poetry: fancy language that makes for unreadable lines. Pieces of writing so pseudo-intellectual or obtuse that they can only be qualified as Machiavellian ploys to satisfy the author’s ego.
The world is shrinking every day. Information travels at the speed of thought, we can share ideas, funny pictures, recipes or new music easier than ever and the walls between cultures that were once impenetrable have now become translucent. We are supposed to be closer to one another than at any other time in human history.
I feel as if I am a passenger in a speeding car and the driver is some other version of myself, one who does not care or who is oblivious of consequence while the passenger is wondering where the car is going in hidden emotion.
No Ledge Left To Love confronts the problems of actuality, sex and meaning. The poems in the book value sex as the necessary destructive means to liberation from anxiety, and more specifically, to modern anxiety, sex having become the true playground for self-creation. The book is an embracing of self-conscious identity in the face of causality.
Don’t just donate your money, but your time and your talent as well. Get in the area and engage in politics until you recognize yourself in your leadership. Be good to people and fight for the people who can’t fight for themselves.
Unlikely Stories turned 20 years old on July 1, 2018. The 20th Anniversary Issue was released on July 4, 2018 and included more than a hundred authors and artists.
To set the process in motion I decide, arbitrarily, to use the three lines on page 62 as a post-snippet. Then, I begin at the bottom of page 61 and, working my way up to the title, arrive at the following poem:
a limited domain is inscribed with or without fuzzy boundaries. domains may be limited in sememe, space, and/or time. example: everglades bounded by hydrology, ecosystem. for example (below): everglades younger than writing, than human inscription.
We can’t give in to the sheer volume of problems. The people who want to stifle our voices want us to be overwhelmed and checked out so that we don’t engage in our communities and vote in these crucial elections.
It was recently discovered that 22% of Millennials in the US either haven’t heard of, or aren’t sure if they’ve heard of the Holocaust... That same study found that 11% of ALL US ADULTS fell into these categories.
A big reason there are fewer bigots in the military than in the civilian world is that prejudice does not stand well under contact. It’s hard to hate or stereotype a people if you are constantly confronted with their reality. When you eat together, laugh together, work together, and yes, sometimes suffer together, it becomes near impossible to create a false or hateful image of them.
The current warming of Earth manifest in the Arctic Sea, the melting of polar ice sheets, penetration of snow storms into mid-latitudes, permafrost thaw, hurricanes and wildfires and the rise in extreme weather events, manifesting a shift in state of the atmosphere-ocean system, constitutes an existential threat to humanity and much of nature.
We have to work together, side by side in pursuit of a common goal. That doesn’t mean we never have to disagree. It doesn’t mean we don’t have our issues or qualms: This isn’t kumbaya, this is survival.
While the territory this book takes us through is dark, a lot can be learned, including about contemporary groups like the KKK and the NRA, as well as the militarization of the culture (from pioneers to commandos) and the repression of people of color and the poor. Dunbar-Ortiz gives this difficult, at times abhorrent history a crisp and light touch, including personal anecdotes and well-chosen cultural references.
Many people in this country have been conditioned to believe that racism is an American-made product and that something can only be racist if it's filled with or inspired by hatred. That's not the case. Subconscious bias is a massive part of racism.
my side of the paradigm is built for comfort not for speed. willie dixon & werner heisenberg put me wise to this ride. an observation deck where i can kick or scrutinize questions that are supposed to be asked but aren't necessary, no matter how you spill the ink or beans.
Now cannot be the time for passivity; love is kind, but it is also fierce. As we go forward we can’t get lost in the weeds arguing with people about the very basics of human decency. People know right from wrong, and if they want so badly to hurt other people we know exactly where they stand.
Traditionally political and economic negotiations aim at a compromise. Unfortunately, no negotiation is possible with the basic laws of physics and chemistry and with processes in the atmosphere-ocean-cryosphere system.
This was my second year in education, and I now realized how uneducated and uninformed the educators were about the plutocracy. This is the same plutocracy responsible for Governor Scott Walker’s Act 10 which attacked and stripped down the rights and benefits of teachers and other public-sector workers, firefighters and police excluded.
To recreate being a certain age in a certain era takes great skill: getting your facts straight, your feelings appropriate to the time, maybe going back to your own memory but still keeping the perspectives of the characters, which are not necessarily your own.
The last thing I remember before coming to at Mt. Sinai was lying on my belly on the floor of my bedroom, surrounded by five cops, enormous from my vantage point. They talked among themselves and on their radios, ignoring me. Finally, they cuffed me behind my back; I begged them to tell me what I had done, but I was not worth a word.
Police created the modern concept of Identity through this assumption of universal guilt among the working class. One is a thief unless one can prove otherwise. Thievery is not merely punished; it is prevented by this pragmatic measure. Have your identity card or go to gaol.
I was the rabbit in that play, once, not that long ago. Since then I have travelled and crossed paths with these characters, in a dotted line from Baton Rouge, Louisiana to Coney Island, New York where I am currently writing these words in the poison gasses of my computer screen. If I were to borrow the Prince’s telescope I might still be able to see our paths entangled.
Joanne Kyger died yesterday, March 22, 2017. In 2003, I reviewed her 2002 book, As Ever, Selected Poems for the now-defunct nthposition. I place the review here.
{ The analogic is the dirty little secret of the digital. The analog is abject, tawdry, sleazy, as-if and nothing more. The fissured body is a wound sutured in silence or resulting in death. The digital is an application upon the body of the analogic. The digital functions as a gate against the analogic. The digital is the enclave of the rich; the finer the raster, the richer the enclave. }
In terms of confronting the man’s racism, of course, that question doesn’t really matter, but it nonetheless put me in mind of how easy it is for Jews, white or of color, to pass as not-Jewish until we either self-identify or are outed—a term I am using purposefully, since there are still places in the world, including the hallowed halls of American academia, where it is not always safe to be known publicly as a Jew.
Tensions have been high since the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers released a letter on November 25th, 2016 stating that it will close all lands north of the Cannonball River, which is where the Oceti Sakowin camp is located. The letter further stated that anyone on the property after Dec. 5 will be considered trespassing and may be subject to arrest. Many immediately feared the worst, as a number of the water protectors have had previous run-ins with the heavily militarized police force that is guarding the pipeline.
Living my life as a creative, intellectual black woman has me just one tripwire away from destroying the psyche of so many around me. This has always left me in a state of confusion. Confidence and strength—necessary lifelines in this skin—become a cumbersome Catch-22 in which many need me to play the jaded, angry black woman, standoffish queen, or paragon of ornamental virtue for everyone who needs a little authentic color in their life.
Carla Williams is back in the neighborhood where her parents were raised: the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. There, she's opened Material Life, a populist art gallery and/or high-end gift shop that focuses on affordable pieces by outstanding contemporary artists. Guest Editor Rosalyn Spencer interviewed her for this issue.
Even though he sold millions of copies of his 33 books, many critics have viewed Yerby as nothing more than a pulp novelist who wrote pot boilers for money and nothing more. Robert Bone famously called Yerby the “prince of pulpsters” (176). However, some challenge that view, commenting on Yerby’s subversive undertones and his rewriting of Southern Romances like Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind (1936).
Augusta Fells Savage, beaten as a child for sinning. Her sin? Sculpting clay animals. And still she worked. She worked to share her vision. Her vision took her to Rome and Paris and back again to teach, to create, to better, to live.
Perhaps, in a futile attempt to understand what happened there, I returned to Dhaka through Google’s Street View, walking through placid images of days less heavy with sadness. I walked to my house. To the homes of my loved ones. To school and the expat bars at which we would spend many weekend nights.
Black Lives Matter started the night George Zimmerman got away with killing Trayvon Martin. After hearing the verdict, Garza used the phrase “Black Lives Matter” in a Facebook post. “Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter, Black Lives Matter”
Solarpunk is a rebellion against the structural pessimism in our late visions of how the future will be. Not to say it replaces pessimism with Pollyanna-ish optimism, but with a cautious hopefulness and a daring to tease out the positive potentials in bad situations. Hope that perhaps the grounds of an apocalypse (revelation) might also contain the seeds of something better...
I woke up Sunday at 5:15 a.m. to police in full riot gear shouting from every direction, “Get out of your tent! Hands in the air!” More than 60 police officers, who had arrived in two buses, flooded a camp of more than 100 activists who had been occupying the railroad tracks leading to the Shell and Tesoro Oil refineries in Anacortes, Washington.
We read a fair amount of news, but it was three days before we learned that the anonymous whistleblower who released the Panama Papers had written a manifesto. So we decided to reproduce it here. We think you'll find it a solid piece of writing.
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