So this is kind of cool. I have been enter­ing my books into Sente, a really fine bib­li­og­ra­phy soft­ware pack­age if you’re on a Mac, and I came across these two books of poetry that I took from my grandmother’s library, Cups of Illu­sion and The Upward Pass, both by Henry Bel­la­mann, best known for the novel King’s Row, which he pub­lished in 1940 and which was made into a movie in 1942. Any­way, what drew my atten­tion was the fact that Bel­la­mann inscribed the books of poetry to my grand­mother, call­ing her his “dear lit­tle friend” in Cups of Illu­sion and “good friend” in The Upward Pass. My grand­mother once hinted to me that there was a story from the time she was a girl about her and a writer – though she never actu­ally told me the story; she tended to be very secre­tive about her past – and now, of course, I am won­der­ing what that story might be. In 1928, the year Bel­la­mann inscribed The Upward Pass, he also pub­lished Crescendo, about a man in love with two women. I some­how doubt that was the story my grand­mother never told me, that she was one of the women in the novel, but it is fun to think about.

Not much else to say about this. Just that I think it’s kind of cool. Here is a poem from Cups of Illu­sion that I opened to at random:

August Gar­dens

Falling petals and dusty leaves
And droop­ing flower heads
Beneath unpity­ing skies
Unpromis­ing of cloud or change–
Yet some faint life still moves
In your pale veins;
Some dumb, unknow­ing courage
Meets each day’s mock­ing sun.

How you keep faith with wind and rain!

I watch you in your silence,
Touch your curled ten­drils,
While my eyes
Search Heaven for promise
Or for change.

Can you know in your dim nerves
The touch of one who waits like you
And still keeps faith with God
As you keep faith with wind and rain?

And here is one from The Upward Pass:

The Gulf Stream

They say a tropic river threads the seas
Bear­ing the strangest things to north­ern lands:
Ver­mil­ion fish, like flow­ers, with sil­ver bands,
And bronze sea­weed from scar­let coral keys.
Green birds that mock the moon from tall palm trees
Where ghost-gray mon­keys hang by cun­ning hands,
Fol­low the thin­ning blue to north­ern sands,
And there among the black pines scream and freeze.

The while this ardent cur­rent chills and fades,
Splen­dors of ice drift slowly south, each one
A frozen torch of bore­alic fire,
Each one a spec­tral ship with rain­bow sails,
Sink­ing and fad­ing as it nears the sun
In this relent­less river of desire.

I am late pub­li­ciz­ing the fact that three of my poems, “Like This,” “Free Rad­i­cals” and “Empty Rhetoric” were pub­lished on Poets for Liv­ing Waters. Here is “Free Radicals:”

Row­boats on the pond:
ran­dom par­ti­cles
danc­ing to laws
they couldn’t name
even if the god
that doesn’t exist
descended this moment
and him­self com­manded
them to speak

—and our son, sleep­ing,
nes­tles fur­ther back
in his stroller, ani­mals,
no doubt, track­ing with him
through his dreams
the mud of the day
we’ve just lived;
and when he wakes
he’ll read the story
back to us,
the nar­ra­tive com­po­nents
bounc­ing off each other
like these ves­sels
would do on the water
if all at once their pilots slept

—which, if we’re hon­est about it,
is how we got here,
bumped and bonded,
released from our rage
into this hope, this boy,
this: his own life.

Sub­mis­sion guide­lines asked for, along with three poems and a bio, a state­ment if you wanted to make one. Here is mine, cor­rected for the spac­ing errors that appear on the site:

Tikkun olam, a con­cept that is cen­tral to Jew­ish spir­i­tu­al­ity, means, lit­er­ally, the fix­ing of the world, and it refers to a reli­gious duty Jews are sup­posed to con­sider our­selves oblig­ated to per­form. In one strand of Jew­ish mys­ti­cal tra­di­tion, tikkun olam means the task of gath­er­ing the frag­ments of the shat­tered divine, the pieces of him­self [sic] that the god of the Hebrew Bible gave up in cre­at­ing the world so that the world could live and grow, and then using them to recon­struct the orig­i­nal god­head. On a more mun­dane, though no less sig­nif­i­cant level, tikkun olam is rep­re­sented by such things as the strug­gle for social jus­tice. For me, writ­ing poetry is also a form of tikkun olam. As Sam Hamill has writ­ten, “The first duty of the writer is the rec­ti­fi­ca­tion of names,” and he quotes Kung-fu Tze [Con­fu­cius], “All wis­dom is rooted in learn­ing to call things by the right name.” Find­ing my way through lan­guage to a fin­ished poem is the act of find­ing that name, whether it is the name of the way things were, the way things are or the way things might be. Poetry’s response to dis­as­ters like the BP oil spill, it seems to me, needs to encom­pass all three of those possibilities.

The Poets for Liv­ing Waters mis­sion state­ment is also worth reading:

Poets for Liv­ing Waters is a poetry action in response to the BP Gulf oil dis­as­ter of April 20, 2010, one of the most pro­found man-made eco­log­i­cal cat­a­stro­phes in his­tory. For­mer US poet lau­re­ate Robert Pin­sky describes the pop­u­lar­ity of poetry after 9/11 as a turn away from the disaster’s over­whelm­ing enor­mity to a more man­age­able indi­vid­ual scale. As we con­front the mag­ni­tude of this recent tragedy, such a return may well aid us.

The first law of ecol­ogy states that every­thing is con­nected to every­thing else.  An appre­ci­a­tion of this sys­temic con­nec­tiv­ity sug­gests a wide range of poetry will offer a mean­ing­ful response to the cur­rent crisis, including work that harkens back to Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina and the ongo­ing regional effects.

This online peri­od­i­cal is the first in a planned series of actions.  Further actions will include a print anthol­ogy and a pub­lic read­ing in Wash­ing­ton DC.

The dis­cus­sion in this Nice Guy™ thread over at Alas reminded me of some­one I had not thought about in a very long time, a woman – I’ll call her Kim – with whom I was close friends in col­lege, whom I lost as a friend after she decided to marry a man I was con­vinced was no good for her, not because I dropped her as a friend, but because she dropped me. We’d been class­mates, but not more than that, in sixth grade and had not seen each other until we met again as Eng­lish majors dur­ing our sopho­more year in col­lege. I have no mem­ory of how we became close friends, but we did, quickly, and, even­tu­ally, I wanted very much to turn that friend­ship into some­thing more.

I don’t remem­ber if I ever told Kim how I felt. I do remem­ber, how­ever, very clearly when she told me how she felt about me. We were at a beach not far from cam­pus and she had just come out of the water and plopped down on her stom­ach. We started talk­ing, most prob­a­bly about some­thing we were read­ing for class, when sud­denly Kim sat up and faced me. “You know, Richard,” she said, “you’re like a brother to me.” I don’t remem­ber what, if any­thing, I said in response, though it was cer­tainly not what I wanted to hear. Still, our friend­ship was far more impor­tant to me than the pos­si­bil­ity of a sex­ual rela­tion­ship which might end up not work­ing out, so I swal­lowed my dis­ap­point­ment and accepted her, and loved her, as the inti­mate friend I assumed she was say­ing was the only thing she ever wanted to be to me.

Before Kim met the man she mar­ried, she had one boyfriend that I remem­ber, a guy I thought was a jerk long before they became a cou­ple, not so much because he was arro­gant, though he was, but because he epit­o­mized that arro­gance, at least this is how I remem­ber feel­ing about it back then, by braid­ing and bead­ing his hair in imi­ta­tion of Bo Derek’s hair­style in the movie 10. The semes­ter Kim went out with him, she also moved to a dorm across cam­pus nearer to where he lived. In fact, she might have done that to be closer to him, but I am not sure. Once – and this is what con­firmed him in my mind not just as a jerk but as a true ass­hole – he came back with her to her old dorm room to pick up some things. I walked by the open door on my way to leave a note on another friend’s door down the hall, saw them out of the cor­ner of my eye as I passed and fig­ured I would pop in to say hello on my way back. At first, I didn’t think they’d seen me, but then, when I was still just a cou­ple of doors down from where they were, I heard him say, “See, I told you that once you moved across cam­pus, he’d for­get about you.” I put the note on my other friend’s door and hur­ried back, but by the time I got there, Kim and her boyfriend were gone.

I know she even­tu­ally broke up with that guy – it’s funny, I remem­ber his name, first and last – and that she, too, decided he was a jerk; and I have mem­o­ries of going to at least one clas­si­cal music con­cert with her dur­ing our senior year (if I remem­ber cor­rectly, she played the vio­lin) and of there being that night what I thought might have been some sex­ual ten­sion between us, though noth­ing came of it. Indeed, I didn’t even real­ize it might have been sex­ual ten­sion until the fol­low­ing day, and then it con­fused me because it was so at odds with the sub­stance of our friend­ship; and I remem­ber how ambi­tious she was as an aspir­ing jour­nal­ist and how much I respected the integrity of her pol­i­tics and her belief that she could make a real dif­fer­ence in the world. Mostly, though, I remem­ber how much I liked being with her. Just being with her. She laughed a lot, and I don’t think there was any­thing we could not talk about. Her friend­ship enriched my life, plain and sim­ple. It made me happy, and I was deeply grate­ful for that.

Then, in our senior year, a speaker came to cam­pus, a man who’d writ­ten a tremen­dously pop­u­lar book on “how to woo and win a woman.” The school news­pa­per assigned Kim to cover his talk, and when she did – at least this is my mem­ory of the story she told me the next day – she asked him dur­ing the Q&A about some­thing that, if true, would call into ques­tion the valid­ity of his claim to be the kind of man who could write the kind of book he’d writ­ten and be taken seri­ously. His response, in front of the entire audi­ence, was to invite her out to din­ner that night with the rest of the press, where he promised he would answer her ques­tion. At the din­ner, he offered to give her an exclu­sive, pri­vate inter­view back in his hotel room. She went with him. At some point, if I remem­ber cor­rectly what she told me, I guess it became clear to her that he was inter­ested in giv­ing her a good deal more than an inter­view and she asked him to take her home, or to call a taxi. He refused and she ended up hav­ing sex with him that night.

When she told me this, I was, for obvi­ous rea­sons, hor­ri­fied, and I told her so, and I pleaded with her not to see him again. Even if she did not think that what he did was date rape, I said – because she didn’t – a man who behaved like that was not some­one she ought to trust; but she did not lis­ten to me, and she started going out with him. This inevitably meant that she and I saw less of each other, though we still talked on the phone pretty fre­quently, and then, after what seems in my rec­ol­lec­tion to have been a very short while, and I mean a very short while, she told me he’d pro­posed mar­riage and that she was think­ing of accept­ing. I asked her if she loved him, and while she did not say no, she very point­edly did not say yes. I don’t know how much time passed before she agreed to be his wife, but she did finally do so, and that was the end of our friend­ship. I remem­ber try­ing to call her, to write her, but she did not respond at all. I was not sur­prised not to be invited to the wed­ding. Sev­eral years after we grad­u­ated, I was talk­ing with some­one who had also been her friend when we were in col­lege, and he said that she’d told him she wanted to cut out of her life com­pletely any­one she’d known dur­ing her col­lege years. She didn’t, or wouldn’t, tell him why.

I googled Kim’s name today and was sur­prised to dis­cover, given her one-time desire to be a writer, that she has almost no online pres­ence. There are a cou­ple of ref­er­ences to her and her hus­band, recent enough that I assume they are still mar­ried, and a cou­ple of scanned arti­cles she wrote for our col­lege news­pa­per back when we were under­grad­u­ates. I read them wist­fully, remem­ber­ing the strength of her voice and of her char­ac­ter. I hope – despite every­thing that what I have writ­ten here implies about the man she mar­ried, because I would wish her noth­ing less – that her mar­riage has been a good one, happy and chal­leng­ing in all the right ways, and most of all lov­ing; and I hope that she has found ways of mak­ing her life as mean­ing­ful as she once thought being a jour­nal­ist would make it; mostly, though, I wish there was a way I could find out if those hopes are true, because I never had the chance to say good­bye to her, to grieve the loss of her as a friend, and I guess I would also like the oppor­tu­nity to tell her that a part of me still misses her.

Jack­son Heights Poetry Fes­ti­val Workshop

Writ­ing the Scary Stuff

Free Event (Part of June in Jack­son Heights)
Leader: Richard Jef­frey Newman

All writ­ers face the prob­lem of writ­ing about what scares them. It might be fright­en­ing because it is embar­rass­ing or shame­ful, because it feels too per­sonal, because it might offend loved ones. It might be fright­en­ing because it vio­lates reli­gious or other moral/ethical taboos, because it human­izes or makes com­pre­hen­si­ble that which many believe should remain beyond com­pre­hen­sion, because it gives voice to peo­ple or ideas that have been silenced. What­ever the source of the fear, we should not allow it to dic­tate what we can and can­not write. In this work­shop, we will prac­tice some strate­gies for deal­ing with mate­r­ial that fright­ens us.

I am very pleased that my poem, “Not Silenced, But Need­ing,” is in the new issue of diode. It’s a really good look­ing issue and it’s the first poem I have pub­lished that is not a trans­la­tion in a long time. I am hop­ing it’s the begin­ning of a trend, since one of my sum­mer projects is to work on the poems I have in my files and start sub­mit­ting them. I have enough poems to make a book; I just don’t know if the poems I have make a book, if you know what I mean.

The poems are from The Silence of Men. Here they are:

Light

In the dream, my life was smoke: I couldn’t breathe.
So I ran, unwrap­ping myself down the beach
till your skin, the ocean, lapped at my knees.
I dove in. Your voice was a cur­rent,
a melody gath­er­ing words to itself
for us to sing, and we sang them,
and they swirled around us, iri­des­cent fish
bring­ing light to the world you were for me;

and then I was water, a river
wash­ing the night from your flesh,
and I cra­dled your body ris­ing in me
till you were clean, glow­ing,
and when you sur­faced, glis­ten­ing,
there was not an inch of you I didn’t cling to.

Ethics Of The Fathers

Moses received the Torah from Sinai
and passed it on to Joshua, who gave
it in his turn to The Elders, and love
or duty, or maybe both, explain why
we still hand it down, even if we die
doing so. The Church burned us alive,
the Romans did worse…but you who give
your­selves to goy­ishe women, you lie
with their gods as well, and so we cast you out.
The rabbi paused, whis­pered Come back, and left
the stage. No applause. Behind me, a man laughed.
Beside me, a woman squirmed in her seat.

In love, my love, I’ve given myself to you,
nei­ther god nor god­dess, and not a Jew.

After Drought

Knees rooted in the bed on either side
of your belly, my body’s a stalk of wheat
bent in sum­mer wind, a bam­boo shoot
ris­ing, an orchid, and then all at once a cloud
swelling, a swal­low sculpt­ing air, a freed
white dove. You pull me down, but you are hot
beneath me, and the gust that is my own heat
lifts me away: I’m not ready. Out­side,
foot­steps, voices. Two men. Gig­gling, we pull
the sheet around us till they pass, but if some­one
does see, what will they have seen? A cou­ple
mak­ing love. No. More than that: They will
have seen the com­ing of the rain; they will
have seen us bathe in it, and they will say Amen.

Some things I’ve been read­ing when I should’ve been grad­ing papers or doing other work:

• A Tough Patron and an Old Ide­ol­ogy Give Women a Lift in Bul­gar­ian Pol­i­tics, by Dan Bilef­sky, The New York Times: What’s most inter­est­ing in this arti­cle about how Bul­gar­ian Prime Min­is­ter Boiko M. Borisov has been appoint­ing women to polit­i­cal offices are the expla­na­tions peo­ple give for why he is doing so and why women are needed in pol­i­tics. Boiko says, for exam­ple, “Women are more dili­gent than men, and they don’t take long lunches or got to the bar,” and also, “Women have stronger char­ac­ters than men because when they say no they mean no, and they are less cor­rupt­ible.” Oth­ers sug­gest that women are less cor­rupt­ible because they have more to lose, and oth­ers talk about the fact that while Bul­garia “never had a fem­i­nist move­ment” but that dur­ing “Com­mu­nism women in Bul­garia were rep­re­sented in almost every walk of life, from plant man­agers to medicine.”
• An inter­est­ing piece in The Lede about the pol­i­tics behind Iran’s cap­ture and the tele­vised con­fes­sion of Abdol­malek Rigi, leader of Jun­dal­lah, a mil­i­tant group that claims to be defend­ing Sunni Mus­lims in Iran’s south­east and has killed hun­dreds of Iran­ian sol­diers and civil­ians since 2003. For some related arti­cles in the news try here, here and here.
• In I Was the One Read­ing Andrew Mar­vell. You Were …, also in the Times, Alan Feuer turns some of the “Missed Con­nec­tions” post­ings on newyork​.craigslist​.org into found poems.
• I appre­ci­ated “Thoughts on the ‘hookup cul­ture,’ or what I learned from my high school diary, a guest post on Fem­i­niste by Nona Willis Aronowitz. One of my favorite bits: “We need to admit as a cul­ture that teens are sex­ual beings, and that more often than not, sex­ual matu­rity has a com­pletely dif­fer­ent time­line than emo­tional maturity.”
• Before I became a trans­la­tor, I was work­ing on what might have become a book explor­ing male het­ero­sex­u­al­ity and pornog­ra­phy, of course, was one of the things I was research­ing. At the time, I was very dis­ap­pointed at the nar­row­ness and often impov­er­ished nature of the dis­course I found not only about the rep­re­sen­ta­tion of men in het­ero­sex­ual video pornog­ra­phy (which was what I was look­ing at) but also in pornog­ra­phy that was touted as pro­gres­sive and even fem­i­nist. Per­haps one day I will return to that project, but in the mean time I have been enjoy­ing Male Sub­mis­sion Art, the mis­sion of which is to “show­case beau­ti­ful imagery where men and other male-identified peo­ple are sub­mis­sive sub­jects. We aim to chal­lenge stereo­types of the ‘pathetic’ sub­mis­sive man.” The images are often very cool, and what I like about the analy­sis is that its core tenet seems to be that for a man to “sub­mit” (what­ever that word might mean in any given con­text) is not, by def­i­n­i­tion, for him to unman him­self or to be unmanned by the one he is sub­mit­ting to (what­ever to “unman” might mean in any given con­text). Leav­ing aside the ques­tion of whether the par­tic­u­lar sex­u­al­ity expressed by the site is one’s cup of tea or not, it is – for me, any­way – a new, inter­est­ing and inter­est­ingly sub­ver­sive way of try­ing to trans­form what we mean when we say the words “man­hood” or “masculinity.”
• It’s odd, and maybe a bit arro­gant sound­ing, to include some­thing that I’ve writ­ten in this list, but I’ve recently been putting together my appli­ca­tion for pro­mo­tion to full pro­fes­sor, which involved going through the two books of trans­la­tions that I’ve pub­lished. As I did so, I was reminded of how won­der­ful a poet Saadi was. (One of these days I have to add my work to the Wikipde­dia entry on him.) So these words may be mine, but they are some­one else’s work. It’s from Selec­tions from Saadi’s Gulis­tan:

The best thing for an igno­rant man is to be silent, and if he under­stands that, and prac­tices it, he will no longer be ignorant.

If the learn­ing you pos­sess is less than per­fect,
keep your tongue tucked safely in your mouth.
Empty words dis­grace the one who speaks them,
like serv­ing a wal­nut shell with­out a nut.
A fool was try­ing hard to teach his ass
to talk. A wise man watch­ing him observed,
“Aren’t you afraid of what they’ll say
when they find out what you’re doing? This beast
will never learn the trick of human speech.
Bet­ter you should learn the gift of silence.“
A man who does not think before he speaks
will almost always use the words fool­ishly.
If you will not take the time a wise man takes
to speak wisely, prac­tice an animal’s silence.

• The Year of the Drone: A blog with an inter­ac­tive map and analy­sis of US drone attacks in Pakistan.
• Ethics and Aes­thet­ics: An brief, inter­est­ing post by Malachi Black on The Best Amer­i­can Poetry.

Laid up with gout today, and for the past four days – the most seri­ous attack I’ve had in a while; I could barely walk on Thurs­day and Fri­day – but today is the first day my head feels clear enough that I can get some work done. I’ve been watch­ing TV and read­ing to dis­tract myself, and so this seemed like a per­fect time to start a “What I’m Read­ing” series of posts, which I’ve been want­ing to do for a while.

1. Via Fate­meh Fakhraie: Why Tay­lor Swift Offends Lit­tle Mon­sters, Fem­i­nists, and Weirdos. I don’t know Tay­lor Swift’s music – or, if I do, because I’ve heard it on the radio, I don’t know that I know it – but I enjoyed this analy­sis of her image and music.
2. From Crit­i­cal Mass: The Blog of the National Book Crit­ics Cir­cle Board of Direc­tors, which is doing a series called “30 Books in 30 Days,” each day given over to an NBCC award nom­i­nee, this brief review of a biog­ra­phy of John Cheever made me want to read Cheever’s work again for the first time in a long time.
3. Also from Crit­i­cal Mass, this take on Louise Gluck’s new book, A Vil­lage Life. I have always liked Gluck’s work.
4. I’d never heard of the poet Eleanor Ross Tay­lor, till I read this – yet one more from Crit­i­cal Mass–appre­ci­a­tion of Cap­tive Voices: New and Selected Poems, 1960 – 2008. She sounds like some­one I could learn some­thing from, not to men­tion I enjoyed the poems quoted in the piece. Now all I need is a semes­ter with the time to do noth­ing but read.
5. New York Times writer Kather­ine Bou­ton reviews two books about Mary Anning, The Fos­sil Hunter: Dinosaurs, Evo­lu­tion and the Woman Whose Dis­cov­er­ies Changed the World, by Shel­ley Emling and Remark­able Crea­tures, by Tracy Cheva­lier. The first is a biog­ra­phy, the sec­ond is a novel. Here is Bouton’s lead: “Mary Anning was one of the few women to make a suc­cess in pale­on­tol­ogy and one of the fewer still whose suc­cess was not linked to that of a pale­on­tol­o­gist spouse (or any spouse: she was sin­gle). She made five major fos­sil dis­cov­er­ies from 1811 to her death in 1847 and many lesser ones. Why then is she best known as the inspi­ra­tion for the tongue twister “She sells seashells by the seashore?”
6. In the same issue of the Times, Denise Grady writes about the eth­i­cal issues that arise when doc­tors take cells from patients and then use those cells in research and, some­times, in com­mer­cial ven­tures that make a whole lot of money. “A Last­ing Gift to Med­i­cine That Wasn’t Really a Gift” is a response to The Immor­tal Life of Hen­ri­ette Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot. Hen­ri­etta Lacks was an African-American woman who died of cer­vi­cal can­cer in the 1950s, and Skloot’s book is an attempt to come to terms with both sides of an issue mired in ques­tions of race, class, med­ical ethics and more: Lacks’ can­cer cells, which were taken for analy­sis, went on to become a main­stay of mod­ern med­ical research, being used in devel­op­ing the first polio vac­cine and in the devel­op­ment of drugs for dis­eases includ­ing Parkinson’s leukemia and the flu, and they not inci­den­tally have made some peo­ple in the med­ical field very, very rich. Lacks’ fam­ily, who can’t even afford their own health insur­ance, has never seen a dime of that money. The story is not as sim­ple a one of exploita­tion as that out­line would sug­gest, which is why Skloot’s book sounds like it is worth read­ing, but so is Grady’s opin­ion piece.
7. Due in 2013, the fifth edi­tion of the Diag­nos­tic and Sta­tis­ti­cal Man­ual of Men­tal Dis­or­ders, will con­tain some sig­nif­i­cant revi­sions that could result, accord­ing to Times reporter, Bene­dict Carey, in “fewer chil­dren [get­ting] a diag­no­sis of bipo­lar dis­or­der[,] ‘[b]inge eat­ing dis­or­der’ and ‘hyper­sex­u­al­ity’ [becom­ing] part of every­day lan­guage” and a sig­nif­i­cant change in the way many men­tal dis­or­ders are diag­nosed and treated. This book is used to define the line between the so-called nor­mal and the so-called abnor­mal; changes in it could have a pro­found impact, there­fore, on soci­ety. It is, there­fore, worth pay­ing atten­tion to.
8. If any of you, like me, have gout, you want to know about Gout­Pal, the only infor­ma­tional site about gout that I have found – and it’s got a ton of infor­ma­tion – that is not also try­ing to sell you some­thing. I have glanced through it a cou­ple of times, and I am begin­ning to real­ize that I need to read it. If you have gout, you prob­a­bly should too.
9. An opin­ion piece on Tehran Bureau that’s worth read­ing about how to under­stand what hap­pened in terms of the Green Move­ment in Iran on Feb­ru­ary 11^th: Were the Greens Defeated?
10. Also from Tehran Bureau: Why North Tehra­nis Don’t Revolt: Why some peo­ple who clearly see the régime as “them,” don’t see the oppo­si­tion as “us,” or at least not enough of an “us” that they are will­ing to risk join­ing the protests.

If you’re an Asian Amer­i­can poet, you should con­sider apply­ing for this retreat. Kundi­man does great work. Here’s a basic description:

In order to help men­tor the next gen­er­a­tion of Asian-American poets, Kundi­man is spon­sor­ing an annual Poetry Retreat at Ford­ham Uni­ver­sity. Dur­ing the Retreat, nation­ally renowned Asian Amer­i­can poets will con­duct work­shops with fel­lows. Read­ings, writ­ing cir­cles and infor­mal social gath­er­ings will also be sched­uled. Through this Retreat, Kundi­man hopes to pro­vide a safe and instruc­tive envi­ron­ment that iden­ti­fies and addresses the unique chal­lenges faced by emerg­ing Asian Amer­i­can poets. This 6-day Retreat will take place from Tues­day to Sun­day. Work­shops will not exceed eight students.

Read the rest here.

Writ­ing in the Jan­u­ary issue of Harper’s Mag­a­zine, Joshua Cohen wrote this at the end of his review of Laor’s book:

It often seems that the Israeli-Palestinian con­flict is just […] a tex­tual prob­lem. If so, then the mud­dle of mean­ing that must be ana­lyzed lies in pars­ing not Pales­tin­ian from Israeli, but “Israeli” from “Jew.” Only once those epi­thets have been dis­sev­ered can some sort of dia­logue begin, between two polit­i­cal enti­ties and not between two (or three) reli­gions or Peo­ples. Until then, “Israel” will con­tinue to be vil­i­fied as a word that means some­thing other than what it should, while all crit­ics of Israel will be accused of anti-Semitism.

It is not clear to me from the review how much of this is Cohen, how much of this is Laor and how much of it is Cohen putting into his own words what he agrees with in Laor’s book, but any book that leads to this kind of think­ing, to ask­ing these kinds of ques­tions, whether I ulti­mately agree with the book or not, is a book worth read­ing. Now, if there were only 36 hours or more in a day. Sigh.