Fan­tasy On Trial (Again) | CarnalNation

December 19th, 2009 § 0

Fan­tasy On Trial (Again) | CarnalNation

Read this post; it’s scary. Here’s an excerpt:

The pro­se­cu­tion tried to get me to say that most peo­ple who fan­ta­size are sick, which I wouldn’t. They tried to get me to say that people’s fan­ta­sies indi­cate what they want to do in real life, which I wouldn’t. They tried to get me to say that Mr. Jones’ calls and emails were typi­cal groo­ming beha­vior. I poin­ted out the fun­da­men­tal flaws in their rea­so­ning: he had met “Missy” in a cha­troom for adults, not for fans of Miley Cyrus or the Jonas Brothers. And after a thou­sand emails and phone calls, he never said anything like, “Let’s meet. We’ll have a great time. When are you free? I’ll send you money for a bus ticket.”

There were plenty of ques­tions about me: my cam­paign against the con­cept of “sex addic­tion”; my obser­va­tions that Ame­rica is panic­ked over highly dis­tor­ted esti­ma­tes of how many pre­da­tors troll for kids online (I quo­ted scien­ti­fic stu­dies, inc­lu­ding the latest one from Har­vard); whether or not I belie­ved it was OK for adults and 14-year-olds to have sex (which I wouldn’t ans­wer, not wan­ting to obs­cure the fact that there was no 14-year-old in this case), and many, many more. That’s how I spent yes­ter­day afternoon.

This mor­ning, the jury gave their ver­dict. After­wards, in pri­vate con­ver­sa­tions, they told Mr. Jones’ law­yer that I was clearly an expert, warm and per­sua­sive, and that they had lear­ned a great deal from me about psycho­logy and sexua­lity. They said they were trou­bled by the flaws I had poin­ted out in the prosecution’s case, and they laughed at the D.A.’s ina­bi­lity to rattle or insult me. Seve­ral said if they were ever in trou­ble, they hoped they’d be repre­sen­ted in court as well as Mr. Jones had been.

But they found him guilty. They were afraid to believe him.

Why I Hate Gra­ding Papers — Part 2

December 19th, 2009 § 1

One word: pla­gia­rism. I spend a great deal of time at the begin­ning of the semes­ter, on the first day actually, tal­king about it, explai­ning it and making sure my stu­dents unders­tand my policy, which is: If I catch you will­fully trying to fool me by pas­sing off someone else’s work as your own, you will fail for the semes­ter, no second chan­ces. I lec­ture in exc­ru­cia­ting detail – with more than a few exam­ples of stu­dents who were pas­sing (one was even get­ting an A) whom I fai­led because I caught them will­fully pla­gia­ri­zing – about why I take it per­so­nally when someone tried to do this: because it means that he or she thinks either that I am stu­pid, that I won’t know the dif­fe­rence bet­ween her or his wri­ting, which I have been rea­ding all semes­ter, and the professional-grade wri­ting that stu­dents ine­vi­tably hand in when they pla­gia­rize, or that I don’t care enough about my job actually to pay atten­tion to the work that stu­dents hand in. I repeat this war­ning seve­ral times during the semes­ter, with a shor­ter ver­sion of the same lec­ture, espe­cially when I assign any paper that invol­ves even the sma­llest amount of research. I even tell my stu­dents how I am going to catch them. Most pla­gia­rism these days invol­ves stu­dents cut­ting and pas­ting stuff from the web, and if it’s on the web, I tell them, Goo­gle can find it. “Please,” I ask them, “don’t put me in the posi­tion of having to fail you. If you are having pro­blems with an assign­ment, come talk to me. As long as you are someone who has been coming to class and doing the work – even if you’ve been get­ting D’s – I’d rather work something out (an exten­sion, wha­te­ver) to make it pos­si­ble for you to do the work than to fail you for plagiarism.”

Ine­vi­tably, though, there are stu­dents who don’t believe me or who think they are smar­ter than I am, and this semes­ter is no excep­tion. I have caught three pla­gia­rists in my Tech­ni­cal Wri­ting class, and it’s really pis­sing me off. First, the assign­ment they pla­gia­ri­zed – wri­ting a set of ins­truc­tions, a desc­rip­tion and a pro­cess analy­sis – while not neces­sa­rily easy, is not hard to do well on if you take the time to do it right. Second, two of the stu­dents were clearly pas­sing; one of them was on his way to get­ting a B. (The other would have ended up with a D+ or a C, depen­ding on how he did on his final paper.) Third, the remai­ning pla­gia­rist does not have English as his first lan­guage, and so the work he’s been han­ding me has not only been sprin­kled with the kinds of gram­ma­ti­cal errors one would expect from someone wri­ting in his second lan­guage; even when his wri­ting was gram­ma­ti­cal, it had a slight “accent” that betra­yed his country of ori­gin. So what did he hand me? A gram­ma­ti­cally per­fect desc­rip­tion of a light bulb, as if I wouldn’t notice the difference.

All three of them are going to fail for the semester.

And now that I have ven­ted, I am going to bed. I need the sleep.

Why I Hate Gra­ding Papers

December 17th, 2009 § 2

Edi­ted because of pri­vacy issues.

Accor­ding to one of my stu­dents, in a paper he wrote meant to talk about the dif­fe­rent approaches to his­tory in Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men and Island, edi­ted by Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim and Judy Yung, China has his­to­ri­cally been infu­sed with a “racial ideo­logy of male mas­cu­li­nity” and that is why so many “Chi­nese Ame­ri­cans believe in racial ine­qua­lity.” I wish I could quote the entire two sen­ten­ces for you; they are truly pre­cious. It’s not just the poor qua­lity of this wri­ting per se that gets to me, though, it’s that phra­ses like “racial ideo­logy of male mas­cu­li­nity” appear all over the essays I have been get­ting from far too many of the stu­dents in the lite­ra­ture class I have been teaching – as if the stu­dents were choo­sing one word from column A, two from column B, etc. in order to come up with a sen­tence that sounds so inte­llec­tually pro­found that I won’t notice it doesn’t really mean anything. It is depres­sing and debi­li­ta­ting when the papers han­ded in by my fresh­man com­po­si­tion stu­dents are, in many ways, bet­ter writ­ten than the ones han­ded in by the stu­dents in an advan­ced lite­ra­ture class.

Where I’ve Been and Where I’m Going, Part 1

November 9th, 2009 § 0

I’m not sure what I feel like wri­ting about tonight, just that I feel like wri­ting. It was a hec­tic day. I woke up early to get a little bit of work done on my Shah­na­meh intro­duc­tion – nothing new, mostly typing up notes I took while I was in DC last Wed­nes­day – and then, after I drop­ped my son off at school and came back here to make myself break­fast, I rushed out to school to get some paper­work and emai­ling done before my first class of the day, Asian Ame­ri­can Lite­ra­ture. I gave my stu­dents the assign­ment for The Joy Luck Club, which most of them have not yet finished rea­ding. That’s okay, though, since they will have two class periods to work through the short essay ques­tions in groups before they go home to write the assign­ment up. If they don’t finish the book during that time, it’s their own fault.

Teaching Asian Ame­ri­can Lite­ra­ture has been inte­res­ting. First, it’s not my field, which has meant that I’ve had to learn not just about the three eth­nic Asian com­mu­ni­ties whose lite­ra­ture we will be rea­ding – Chi­nese Ame­ri­can, Fili­pino Ame­ri­can and Ira­nian Ame­ri­can – but also about the field of eth­nic Ame­ri­can lite­ra­ture in gene­ral. It’s nice, for a change, to be teaching something that teaches me something, but that is not actually what inte­rests me tonight, sit­ting here in my office while my son goes to sleep and my wife takes a sho­wer. The fact that I am teaching a course that is not in my field has star­ted me thin­king about just what, pre­ci­sely, my field is. Because it’s been some time since I’ve felt like I have one.

In terms of cre­den­tials, my field is Teaching English to Spea­kers of Other Lan­gua­ges. That’s what it says on my Master’s Degree, and that cre­den­tial is lar­gely why I was hired by the college where I now teach. Indeed, I spent my first five to seven years there doing almost nothing else but the work of the ESL pro­gram that the ins­ti­tu­tion was in the pro­cess of buil­ding. I loved the work, though I have not taught ESL clas­ses for some time now and don’t plan to any­time in the near future. Indeed, if I were to be com­ple­tely honest, I think going into TESOL was, in the first place, a way for me to avoid the fact that what I really wan­ted to do was write.

I finished my TESOL MA in 1987, three years after I gra­dua­ted from Stony Brook Uni­ver­sity with a dou­ble major in English and Lin­guis­tics. In Fall 1984, right after my senior year, I enro­lled in the Crea­tive Wri­ting MA at Syra­cuse Uni­ver­sity – this was before they had an MFA – where I stu­died with Tess Gallagher, Phi­lip Booth and Hay­den Carruth. I las­ted just one year. I was 22 at the time, and I was sure that wri­ting poetry was what I wan­ted to do with my life. I figu­red I’d make my living as a teacher, but it was as a wri­ter that I inten­ded to leave my mark. I t was not long before cir­cums­tan­ces at Syra­cuse cons­pi­red to make me rea­lize how young I was, and how arrogant.

It was Phi­lip Booth who sat me down towards the end of the Spring 1985 semes­ter and told me that, while I cer­tainly knew how to handle a line of verse, and while I also very clearly knew my way around a sen­tence, there was not yet a real cen­ter to my work, no set of con­cerns out of which my poetry grew. That absence, he sug­ges­ted, would make it very hard to write the the­sis – a book of poetry – that I would have to write in my second year. What I nee­ded, he said, was to live a little bit and there was just no get­ting around the fact that living would take time. So why didn’t I take some time away from school, he offe­red, and see what that did to my wri­ting. Mr. Booth’s words – I never got to the point where I felt com­for­ta­ble calling him Phi­lip – meant a great deal to me, and if I had to say now what I lear­ned from them it would be that you don’t have to go to school to become a writer.

So I went to my gra­duate advi­sor and told him I wan­ted to take a year off from school to work on my wri­ting. I was not expec­ting his res­ponse. “If you want to go com­mune with your muse,” he snee­red at me (and, yes, it was a sneer), “that’s your busi­ness, but you came to school – or at least I assume you came to school – to learn something and that’s not going to hap­pen sit­ting alone beneath a tree trying to cap­ture the wind in a song!” This was during what I have heard peo­ple refer to as The Theory Wars, when lite­rary theo­rists and crea­tive wri­ting faculty were, quite lite­rally, at war with each other over the legi­ti­macy of their dif­fe­rent pur­suits. My gra­duate advi­sor was clearly in the theo­rists’ camp, and I guess I have him to thank that not only did I take time off from Syra­cuse, but also that I never went back. I think I have led a much more inte­res­ting life than if I’d sta­yed at Syra­cuse and got­ten my MA, though it is also true that if I’d known then what I know now about aca­de­mia, and if I’d known then that I would end up as an aca­de­mic, I might have made very dif­fe­rent choices.

Wri­ting and Pain; Com­mu­nity and Hope

November 6th, 2009 § 3

I haven’t been wri­ting and it hurts; it’s a tight­ness in my chest and a twist in my gut, and there is a part of me that wants to scream. Well, maybe not scream, but at least to grunt, let out some exc­la­ma­tion of frus­tra­tion that I have not been making poems, and I have not been wor­king – or only recently star­ted wor­king again – on the fore­word I need to write for the trans­la­tion of the begin­ning of Shah­na­meh that has been sit­ting on my desk more or less com­ple­ted for the last cou­ple of months. The other day, while I was wai­ting in a hotel lobby in Washing­ton DC for a friend to call, I was able to get just a little bit of work done on that intro­duc­tion, but it wasn’t wri­ting. I was taking notes on a book that has been sit­ting on my shelf for at least a month wai­ting for me to read it. It’s an inter­li­brary loan, and I am sure it is very, very over­due. (I find it funny that they abbre­viate inter­li­brary loan ILL; whe­ne­ver I get an email telling me that a book I have reques­ted has arri­ved, the sub­ject hea­ding is something like “Your ILL Request,” and it just makes me smile. I have a strange sense of humor that way.) Any­way, I was taking notes on this book and just that little bit of work made me so happy. Because it was my work, not for school, not to make money, but just the work that I do, or one kind of work that I do, to make my life mea­ning­ful, to make mea­ning­ful and beau­ti­ful things to send out into the world.

The book is called Fer­dowsi: A Cri­ti­cal Bio­graphy, and it’s by A. Sha­pur Shah­bazi. Fer­dowsi is the pen name of the poet who wrote Shah­na­meh, an epic poem of about 50,000 cou­plets that tells the story of pre-Islamic Iran, from the nation’s mytho­poe­tic begin­nings to the moment right before the Arab Mus­lim con­quest in the 7th cen­tury CE. Shah­na­meh is often called Iran’s natio­nal epic, and for good rea­son. Not only do the sto­ries in the poem still reso­nate in Ira­nian cul­ture, in ways that few poems or poets do in the West, but as the Ger­man scho­lar B. Spu­ler puts it in the excerpt of his work that Shah­bazi uses as an epi­graph to the book:

In the last analy­sis it was The Shah-nama […] that became the miles­tone for the self-affirmation of the Ira­nian iden­tity. [T]he impor­tance of the poems of Fer­dowsi (and sub­se­quently of later poets) for the pre­ser­va­tion of the Ira­nian cha­rac­ter can in no way be ove­res­ti­ma­ted. They pro­vi­ded the entire Ira­nian folk – nobles, towns­peo­ple, arti­sans and pea­sants – with that “Ira­nian­ness” which des­pite all social dif­fe­ren­ces uni­ted them, per­fectly mirro­red their image, and allo­wed them to iden­tify them­sel­ves as fully and totally Iranian.

The book is called “a cri­ti­cal bio­graphy,” at least in part because Shah­bazi arri­ves at his unders­tan­ding of Ferdowsi’s life through a cri­ti­cal rea­ding of Shah­na­meh. The poet left no note­books, no memoir and the infor­ma­tion that we have about his life from outside the epic, as Shah­bazi shows, is enti­rely apocryphal. Indeed, an inte­res­ting ques­tion rai­sed by this book, though I doubt Shah­bazi inten­ded this to be the case, is whether and why we ought to pre­fer a truth­ful accoun­ting of a great writer’s life to the myths and legends that grow up around him, espe­cially when the work he is famous for is as impor­tant to a nation’s cul­tu­ral iden­tity as Shah­na­meh.

So, for exam­ple, the tra­di­tio­nal story of the poem’s com­po­si­tion has the pea­sant Fer­dowsi labo­ring for 25 years to write the poem, hoping to earn from it a dowry for his daugh­ter. When, through the good offi­ces of an inter­me­diary, he pre­sents the poem to Sul­tan Mah­mud of Gazna, howe­ver, the intermediary’s ene­mies among the Sultan’s advi­sers con­vince the ruler that the poem really is not worth all that much, espe­cially since Fer­dowsi is a Shiite and the­re­fore a here­tic. Taking his advi­sers’ advice, the Sul­tan pays Fer­dowsi only 50,000 pie­ces of sil­ver, not gold, an amount which Fer­dowsi sees as an insult. So, ins­tead of taking the pay­ment for him­self, he divi­des the money bet­ween two peo­ple who have ser­ved him. He then flees to another ruler’s court, where he attacks the Sul­tan in a satire of which only a small num­ber of lines sur­vive. Even­tually, he returns home, though he con­ti­nues to live in cons­tant fear of the Sultan.

One day, something hap­pens in Mahmud’s court that reveals to him the great­ness of Ferdowsi’s poem, and he repents of his ear­lier to deci­sion to under­pay the man. So the Sul­tan sends along with a sui­ta­ble apo­logy, 60,000 gold coins, a 10,000 coin inc­rease over the amount Fer­dowsi had ori­gi­nally expec­ted. Just as the cou­riers arrive with the money, howe­ver, Ferdowsi’s corpse is being carried out of his house so he can be buried. Ferdwosi’s daugh­ter, accor­ding to this story, refu­ses the Sultan’s money, and so it is used to repair a local hostelry.

Shah­bazi shows that this story is com­ple­tely false. It is now gene­rally accep­ted, he points out, that Fer­dowsi was not a pea­sant, was never in Sul­tan Mahmud’s court and never had a daugh­ter. Yet which story is bet­ter, which one should be the story about Fer­dowsi that gets told? The one I have just told you, or the truth: that Fer­dowsi was a mem­ber of the lan­ded gentry, that he com­po­sed the Shah­na­meh while living on his own income, that he had a son who died at a young age. It’s easy enough to say that what really mat­ters is the truth, but the les­sons in the apocryphal story are also truths that are impor­tant to tell and the way that Fer­dowsi and his daugh­ter behave when con­fron­ted with the dif­fe­rent pay­ments from the Sul­tan embody values it is worth emu­la­ting, or at least hono­ring. I’m not sug­ges­ting that we should accept fal­sehoods as his­tory, but one of the things I like about Shahbazai’s book is how the fal­sehoods become part of the his­tory, part of Ferdowsi’s bio­graphy, even as he (Shah­bazi) claims to be arri­ving at as accu­rate a fac­tual bio­graphy of Fer­dowsi as can be glea­ned from the text of the Shah­na­meh itself.

But I star­ted wri­ting about how pain­ful it is to be not to be wri­ting, which is iro­nic, of course, because I am wri­ting this blog post, and I will admit that sit­ting here in my bed, half lis­te­ning to the TV pro­gram my son is watching in the next room, pec­king away at these keys is making me feel bet­ter. Except that my foot is star­ting to hurt with the onset of another gout attack. I’ve been in the middle of one now for a cou­ple of days, the result of having lost a decent amount of weight in a short period of time because of a liver deto­xi­fi­ca­tion regi­men my doc­tor put me on. The pain is star­ting to dis­tract me and so I have lost track of where I wan­ted to take this blog post next, but it does make me think about the degree to which wri­ting seems to reduce the pain. Or, since I am sure it does not actually reduce it, the way wri­ting is able to take my mind away from the pain, and so I am won­de­ring about the con­nec­tion bet­ween the pain I feel when I am not wri­ting, the pain of my gout, and the way wri­ting seems to alle­viate both.

I think it was in Elaine Scarry’s book The Body In Pain that I read about how peo­ple expe­rience pain as something alien, something other, something not of the body. Which is iro­nic, of course, since it is the body that is in pain. The pre­po­si­tion is sig­ni­fi­cant. Metapho­ri­cally, it sug­gests that pain is something phy­si­cal we can be in, like a lake, or a car, or the world; and yet, if Scarry is correct, and if I unders­tand her – or my memory of what she wrote – correctly, we expe­rience pain as something inside of us that we need to get out of us, something that can­not be inte­gra­ted into who we are. It can be for­ced on us, as in tor­ture – and the first part of Scarry’s book is a dis­cus­sion of tor­ture – but it is not something that we can inte­grate, that we can make a part of our­sel­ves, the way we make plea­su­ra­ble sen­sa­tions wel­come within us, make them part of who we are in the world.

Lan­guage (I think this is Scarry too) is not just the one way we can give pain mea­ning – lan­guage, after all, is how we give everything mea­ning – but it is the only way we can make the rea­lity of our pain com­prehen­si­ble to someone else. Indeed, perhaps on some level we need to make our pain com­prehen­si­ble in ways that we don’t need to do with our plea­su­res. After all, it is – at least for me – per­fectly pos­si­ble to keep one’s plea­su­res enti­rely pri­vate, not to name them, and still find them immen­sely satisf­ying. It is not that way with pain. To deal with pain, espe­cially but not only emo­tio­nal and psycho­lo­gi­cal pain, I need com­mu­nity; I need to be able to tell someone, and while I some­ti­mes may be the only one I tell by wri­ting about it, that is never an enti­rely satis­fac­tory solu­tion. I need to know there is someone else who unders­tands me or who has at least tried to unders­tand me.

And so I won­der about the degree to which com­mu­nity, the human need for com­mu­nity and com­mu­ni­ca­tion, is roo­ted in pain, and I won­der if the pain I feel when I don’t write is my body remin­ding me to reach out, that I need to reach out. Because that is what I do when I write. No mat­ter how deeply inter­nal and per­so­nal and inte­rior the moti­va­tion to write may be, no mat­ter how soli­tary the act of wri­ting is, everything I write is also an invi­ta­tion to com­mu­nity the goal of which is not so dif­fe­rent from the way Spu­ler desc­ri­bes the Shah­na­meh as being “the miles­tone for the self-affirmation of the Ira­nian iden­tity.” Some­ti­mes, espe­cially when I feel like no one reads what I write, that thought fills me with a deep sad­ness, because I know I will keep wri­ting any­way, even if no one else ever reads a word I put down on the page. Now, though, I am filled ins­tead with a giddy hope­ful­ness, and that makes me happy.

Sarah Palin, Poet

July 28th, 2009 § 0

I think this speaks for itself: http://​www​.tonightshow​with​co​na​no​brien​.com/​v​i​d​e​o​/​c​l​i​p​s​/​s​h​a​t​n​e​r​-​d​o​e​s​-​p​a​l​i​n​-​0​7​2​7​0​9​/​1​1​3​9​6​65/. (I am sorry, but I don’t know how to embed this video from the NBC website.)

The Iro­nies of Get­ting My Second Book Of Poetry Published

July 21st, 2009 § 1

Two days ago, I recei­ved a let­ter from Milk­weed Edi­tions rejec­ting my second book of poems, which is called All That Strug­gled In You Not To Drown. In explai­ning his deci­sion, the edi­tor wrote, “Although I recog­nize here an ori­gi­nal and com­pe­lling per­sona, I felt that the pre­pon­de­rance of first-person poems with an auto­bio­graphi­cal slant limi­ted the poten­tial appeal.” In other words, if I unders­tand him correctly, he thinks that the first-person narra­ti­ves domi­na­ting the book will make it hard both to sell and to get a decent level of cri­ti­cal atten­tion. Whether or not that is true, his per­cep­tion of the manusc­ript is accu­rate – it is made up almost enti­rely of first-person narra­ti­ves – and, given that accu­racy, if he can­not find within his own aesthe­tic sense and/or his sense of where poetry is these days and/or his sense of the mar­ket enough enthu­siasm for publishing my book, I think his rejec­tion is a fair and rea­so­na­ble one. It’s also iro­nic, because Cavan­Kerry Press, publisher of my first book of poems, The Silence Of Men, rejec­ted All That Strug­gled In You Not To Drown because there was not enough of an auto­bio­graphi­cal slant. “I’ve seen this a lot,” CKP’s publisher told me. “A poet whose first book is deeply per­so­nal will often write a second book that is just the oppo­site. You’ve writ­ten a good book; it’s just too imper­so­nal for our list.” This rejec­tion (more irony here) also seems to me to have been fair and rea­so­na­ble. For while All That Strug­gled In You Not To Drown is, to me, deeply per­so­nal and auto­bio­graphi­cal, it pos­ses­ses and explo­res those cha­rac­te­ris­tics dif­fe­rently than The Silence Of Men does, and if CKP’s list is slan­ted towards the kinds of poems that are in The Silence Of Men, then it makes sense that CKP would also reject my second book.

I have a lot of res­pect for the work that small press edi­tors and publishers do, not just because it is so often un– or under­paid work – which it is, and which is something that any wri­ter who deals with them needs to unders­tand and appre­ciate – but also because publishing books requi­res a com­mit­ment to unders­tan­ding, arti­cu­la­ting and either impli­citly or expli­citly defen­ding one’s own aesthe­tic sense in a highly satu­ra­ted and com­pe­ti­tive mar­ket­place. Espe­cially when it comes to poetry. Some­ti­mes it seems to me that ever­yone and her or his aunt or uncle in the Uni­ted Sta­tes thinks that he or she is a poet whose work the world abso­lu­tely must have bet­ween the covers of a book or bur­ned onto a CD or DVD. More to the point – at least in my expe­rience – more than a few of the peo­ple who think this way haven’t read (or at least write like they haven’t read) a sin­gle book of con­tem­po­rary poetry. To be a small press edi­tor and/or publisher in this kind of envi­ron­ment is to sub­mit one­self to a mind-numbing ons­laught of lan­guage, which takes a level of com­mit­ment that most lite­rary peo­ple I know, inc­lu­ding myself, can­not and will not make; and that com­mit­ment ought to com­mand our res­pect, even when it means that a given publisher deci­des not to publish a book we have written.

Please don’t misun­ders­tand me. I think anyone who wants to write poetry should write poetry. The impulse towards poe­tic expres­sion is a power­ful one; wit­ness the way peo­ple turn to poetry in times of dif­fi­culty, from per­so­nal tra­ge­dies like the death of a loved one to natio­nal tra­ge­dies like the Sep­tem­ber 11th attacks. Moreo­ver, the good that poetry does for the peo­ple who write it, and for the peo­ple who read it, wha­te­ver kind of poetry it is, is not something that can be mea­su­red by either the dollars and cents that a publisher com­mits to put­ting a book out or the unpaid hours that the poet sweats through trying to make her or his lines bes­peak the par­ti­cu­lar expe­rience he or she wants to com­mu­ni­cate. Still, there is a dif­fe­rence – actually, there are pro­bably many dif­fe­ren­ces – bet­ween being someone who wri­tes poems and someone who wants to publish books of poetry, not the least of which is that once you decide you want to publish books of poetry, you have made the deci­sion to treat your work as a com­mo­dity. You have ente­red, whether you like it or not, the world of (usually very small) busi­ness; and so I have to con­fess that the let­ter from Milk­weed Edi­tions is one I should never have recei­ved. Ins­tead, I should have writ­ten to them and with­drawn All That Strug­gled In You Not To Drown from con­si­de­ra­tion because a third press had already agreed to publish it.

I didn’t con­tact Milk­weed because I’d allo­wed my record-keeping to become sloppy and so I’d actually for­got­ten I’d sub­mit­ted the book to them; and so I am relie­ved that Milk­weed rejec­ted my book, since it means I do not have to deal with the awk­ward­ness of having to choose bet­ween two very fine publishers. The world of small pres­ses is not like the world of com­mer­cial publishers, where the bid­ding war that can result from having more than one edi­tor eager to publish your book can be a very good thing. There is not enough money in the small press world to make such a bid­ding war pos­si­ble. I may have only a ver­bal com­mit­ment from the press that has accep­ted All That Strug­gled In You Not To Drown–which is why I am not naming that press in this post; our agree­ment will not be offi­cial until I have a con­tract, and a lot can hap­pen bet­ween a handshake and a con­tract – but pre­ci­sely because of the aesthe­tic and other kinds of un– or under­paid edi­to­rial com­mit­ments I was tal­king about above, the ver­bal com­mit­ment I have with this press means something to me, and so it is a com­mit­ment that I want, all else being equal, to honor. If all goes accor­ding to plan, I will be very proud to publish my book with this press, as I would have been proud to publish with Milk­weed, or with Cavan­Kerry Press. But here’s the final irony: The press that accep­ted my book did so for pre­ci­sely the rea­sons that Milk­weed rejec­ted it, because of “the pre­pon­de­rance of first-person poems with an auto­bio­graphi­cal slant,” which the edi­tor feels will help to gar­ner All That Strug­gled In You Not To Drown some serious cri­ti­cal atten­tion, while at the same time making the book something that peo­ple will want to buy. Go figure.

A Cam­paign Ad From Iran’s Election

June 18th, 2009 § 0

Got this from Andrew Sulli­van, where it is attri­bu­ted to Karroubi, one of the oppo­si­tion can­di­da­tes in Iran’s recent election:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEfk1lDImMI&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]

Here’s the translation:

1 (Girl in street): Defen­ding civil rights
2 (Boy next to old man): Coun­ter­ba­lan­cing poverty/deprivation
3 (Boy pushing away dona­tion box): Natio­na­li­zing oil income
4 (Man stan­ding on roof­top): Redu­cing ten­sion in inter­na­tio­nal affairs
5 (Boy sit­ting next to sate­llite dishes): Free access to infor­ma­tion
6 (Girl sit­ting besi­des her mother): Sup­por­ting sin­gle mothers
7 (Girl with cast): Knock down vio­lence against women
8 (Boy): Edu­ca­tion for all
9 (Boy infront of man loc­king car): Inc­rea­sing public safety
10 (Girl on roof­top): Eth­nic and reli­gious mino­rity rights
11 (Man on roof­top): Sup­por­ting NGOs
12 (Girl in front of wall): Public invol­ve­ment
13 (Boy and girl): We have come for change
14: Change for Iran

Now, a cam­paign ad is a cam­paign ad, and it’s very easy to be cyni­cal about them. Just ima­gine for a minute, though, in the con­text of Iran, how chutz­pa­dik–it’s a Yid­dish word mea­ning auda­cious, ballsy, and it’s the only one that fit my res­ponse to seeing the ad – it was for an Ira­nian poli­ti­cian to say he wants to accom­plish these things; and notice as well the pro­mi­nence given to two issues rela­ted spe­ci­fi­cally to women’s status.

Obama’s Now­ruz Mes­sage to Iran: The Poetry of the Poli­tics and the Poli­tics in the Poetry

March 23rd, 2009 § 5

So I thought I was going to start my series on clas­si­cal Ira­nian poetry with Shah­na­meh, Iran’s natio­nal epic, because it is what I am wor­king on right now, but Pre­si­dent Obama’s video­ta­ped Now­ruz mes­sage to Iran, in which he quo­tes the 13th cen­tury poet Sa’di, has for­ced me to change my plans. Those lines, The chil­dren of Adam are limbs to each other/having been crea­ted of one essence, are among the most famous lines of poetry in the world, though few in the Uni­ted Sta­tes have ever heard them. They are insc­ri­bed on the wall of the Hall of Nations in the UN buil­ding in New York City, and the sen­ti­ment they express, which you find throughout Gulis­tan, the book from which they are excerp­ted, hel­ped in 16th cen­tury to catalyze a sea change in the way Chris­tian Europe vie­wed Mus­lims and Isla­mic cul­ture, from one that was gover­ned by the mutual hatred of the Cru­sa­des to one that accep­ted as real the pos­si­bi­lity that Mus­lims were no less human, and belie­ved in huma­nis­tic values no less strongly, than the Chris­tian Euro­peans themselves.

Before I talk about the lines Obama quo­ted, howe­ver (I will have more to say about Sa’di and the rest of his work in another post) I want to ack­now­ledge the impor­tance of the mes­sage itself, not just because he sent it – and if you don’t know much about US-Iranian rela­tions beyond the facts of what we called the hos­tage cri­sis and the after­math of the Isla­mic Revo­lu­tion, you might not rea­lize just how sig­ni­fi­cant the sim­ple fact of sen­ding such a mes­sage is – but also because of how he said what he said. First, the message:

I am going to assume that most of what I have to say about this has already been said elsewhere on the web, but since it sets a con­text for tal­king about the poetry that Pre­si­dent Obama quo­ted, I want to say it any­way. First, note that he says he wants to speak directly to the lea­ders and peo­ple of the Isla­mic Repu­blic of Iran, sig­na­ling that he con­si­ders the country’s current lea­dership legi­ti­mate and they are the peo­ple with whom he needs to talk about resol­ving the dif­fe­ren­ces bet­ween our two nations. Note as well, howe­ver, that he has cho­sen to send this mes­sage on the occa­sion of Now­ruz (also here and here), the Ira­nian New Year, a holi­day that is dis­tinctly not Mus­lim – it is Zoroas­trian and the­re­fore roo­ted in the tra­di­tions of pre-Islamic Iran – and that the Isla­mic Repu­blic has on occa­sion sug­ges­ted it would like to replace with an Isla­mic holi­day. Indeed, the Isla­mic Repu­blic acti­vely pur­sues the dele­gi­ti­mi­zing of Iran’s pre-Islamic past on a num­ber of fronts, one of which was an attempt after the 1979 revo­lu­tion to disc­re­dit Fer­dowsi, the author of Shah­na­meh and Shah­na­meh itself.

When I was in Iran this past sum­mer, to give you an exam­ple I saw with my own eyes, we visi­ted the ruins of Per­se­po­lis (also spe­lled Pers­po­lis, which is clo­ser to how the word is pro­noun­ced in Per­sian), which was built by Darius I in 518 CE and was the capi­tal of the Achae­me­nid Empire. One of the most remar­ka­ble things I lear­ned when we were there was that docu­ments found in the trea­sury indi­ca­ted that the ancient Ira­nian kings not only had something like what we would call wor­kers com­pen­sa­tion for their emplo­yees, but also poli­cies that per­mit­ted men to have paid leave from work when their wives were preg­nant so they could help out at home. On the wall of the buil­ding that was pro­bably the harem, howe­ver, and which is now a museum dis­pla­ying arti­facts found on the site, there is a proc­la­ma­tion issued by the govern­ment of Iran asser­ting that, while it is of course won­der­ful that peo­ple can come to see the great works God made it pos­si­ble for the ancient Ira­nian kings to pro­duce, we should not for­get that they were tyran­ni­cal des­pots who exploi­ted their peo­ple, the clear impli­ca­tion being and that it has only been through the Isla­mic Repu­blic that Ira­nians have found true free­dom. (Other evi­dence of the essen­tially humane nature of the ancient Ira­nian kings also exists, but since that is not the point of this post, I will allow the irony in what I have just writ­ten to speak for itself.)

Whether or not Per­si­dent Obama was aware of the irony of sen­ding his mes­sage to the Isla­mic Repu­blic on Now­ruz, I don’t know, but like most well-constructed iro­nies this one can be read two ways, either as evi­dence that he didn’t know what he was doing and that his mes­sage will the­re­fore fall on deaf ears, or that he knew pre­ci­sely what he was doing and was sen­ding the Isla­mic Repu­blic the mes­sage that while he intends to do busi­ness with them as the legi­ti­mate poli­ti­cal lea­ders of Iran, that does not mean he will kow­tow to the world view they would like to impose on the peo­ple of their nation. My own sense, though, is that it doesn’t mat­ter whether or not Obama and his peo­ple knew anything about what I have just writ­ten; the prac­ti­cal effect of his mes­sage, spe­ci­fi­cally his appeal to the com­mon humanty that binds us as the con­text within which to talk about the dif­fe­ren­ces bet­ween us, puts the Isla­mic Repu­blic on notice that they can­not depend on the US being an easy enemy any­more – by which I mean an enemy they can easily avoid tal­king to because we fit very neatly into the “enemy” slot in their rhe­to­ric, which is where the Bush admi­nis­tra­tion kept us firmly ens­con­ced for the eight years they were in power.

More to the point, Obama’s mes­sage, inc­lu­ding his brief quote from the poet Sa’di, had to have spo­ken very power­fully to the Ira­nian peo­ple, first because the mes­sage of sha­red huma­nity is one they have heard all too rarely from the US not only in the last eight years, but ever. From long before the US and Bri­tish spon­so­red coup in 1953 that unsea­ted Moham­mad Mos­sa­deq, the duly elec­ted prime minis­ter of Iran, so that they could reins­tate Shah Moham­mad Reza Pah­lavi (the NY Times report is here; and an alle­gedly une­di­ted ver­sion of the CIA report is here) – all pretty clearly in the inte­rest of retai­ning access to and con­trol over Iran’s oil – Ira­nians have seen their aspi­ra­tions for democ­racy thwar­ted time and time again by outside influen­ces. To the degree that Pre­si­dent Obama is seriously comm­nit­ted to enga­ging Iran on equal terms – by which I mean in a way that res­pects and honors the integrty of their much-much-older-than-ours cul­ture, his­tory and even their poli­tics (a sub­ject that is far more com­pli­ca­ted than almost any repor­ting I have ever seen done on the sub­ject here in the Sta­tes – and I am cer­tainly no expert) – and to the degree that he can demons­trate that com­mit­ment with conc­rete action, he is com­mit­ting the Uni­ted Sta­tes to a radi­cal change not only in the way we deal with Iran poli­ti­cally, but also in how we see Iran more broadly – since, after all, the way our media covers Iran will abso­lu­tely follow the stance our poli­ti­cal lea­ders take towards Iran. (As an aside: I was very sur­pri­sed by how many of the Ira­nians I met when I was there this past sum­mer think that the ave­rage Ame­ri­can thinks they are all some ver­sion of what is meant by the phrase “anti-American terro­rist.” They see how they and their country are por­tra­yed here; and they – not the govern­ment, but every­day peo­ple – des­pair of ever being seen by us on their own terms.)

The other rea­son that Obama’s use of lines by Sa’di would have reso­na­ted very power­fully with the Ira­nian peo­ple is the degree to which Sa’di and his work is loved and reve­red in Ira­nian cul­ture to this day. I will write more about Sa’di in a future post. For now, suf­fice it to say that his posi­tion in the Ira­nian lite­rary canon is not unlike Shakespeare’s place in our own. More to the point, Iran is a cul­ture that loves its poets and its poetry; it is hard for peo­ple in the US, where poetry is so little appre­cia­ted unless it is couched in the melo­dies of popu­lar song, to ima­gine the degree to which poetry is a living part of the cul­ture in Iran. One very rough ana­logy might be to think about someone like the early Bob Dylan and how popu­lar his songs were – and maybe still are – in pro­gres­sive circ­les and then expand that popu­la­rity to inc­lude pretty much the entire popu­la­tion of the Uni­ted Sta­tes, and not just because peo­ple liked his tunes, but because they iden­ti­fied with the way he spoke truth to power; and then ima­gine Bob Dylan’s words not just as part of every child’s schoo­ling, but as the pri­mary text used to teach peo­ple how to read English.

As I said in my intro­duc­tory post, I am not an expert on Ira­nian lite­ra­ture, and so I make no claim that what I have just told you about Sa’di is 100% accu­rate and up-to-date – indeed, it’s fas­ci­na­ting to learn the degree to which Sa’di’s repu­ta­tion has risen and fallen depen­ding on the poli­ti­cal cli­mate in Iran – but I think my ana­logy is gene­rally true. Moreo­ver, it is indis­pu­tably true that there is a long tra­di­tion in Iran, and other coun­tries in that region, such as Pakis­tan, of poets being the peo­ple who speak truth to power. In fact, the lines from Sa’di that Obama quo­ted, won­der­fully libe­ral and huma­nis­tic as they are, come from a story in Gulis­tan that is far more radi­cal, cer­tainly for the time it was writ­ten, than those two lines would sug­gest. Here is the full story, though I am now going to switch to my own trans­la­tion. It’s the tenth story in the first chap­ter, “Padeshahan” (“Kings”), in Gulis­tan. First, though, some vocabulary:

  • A dar­vish (der­vish in English) was a kind of wan­de­ring men­di­cant, and they were usually Sufi and con­si­de­red holy men.
  • The Pro­peht Yahia is John the Baptist.

Story 10

An Arab king who was noto­rious for his cruelty came on a pil­gri­mage to the cathe­dral mos­que of Damas­cus, where he offe­red the follo­wing pra­yer, clearly see­king God’s assis­tance in a mat­ter of some urgency:

“The dar­vish, poor, owning nothing, the man
whose money buys him anything he wants,
here, on this floor, ens­la­ved, we are equals.
Nonethe­less, the man who has the most
comes before You bea­ring the grea­ter need.”

When the king was done pra­ying, he noti­ced me immer­sed in my own pra­yers at the head of the prophet Yahia’s tomb. The monarch tur­ned to me, “I know that God favors you dar­vishes because you are pas­sio­nate in your worship and honest in the way you live your lives. I fear a power­ful enemy, but if you add your pra­yers to mine, I am sure that God will pro­tect me for your sake.”

Have mercy on the weak among your own peo­ple,” I replied, “and no one will be able to defeat you.”

To break each of a poor man’s ten fin­gers
just because you have the strength offends God.
Show com­pas­sion to those who fall before you,
and others will extend their hands when you are down.

The man who plants bad seed hallu­ci­na­tes
if he expects sweet fruit at har­vest time.
Take the cot­ton from your ears! Give
your peo­ple jus­tice before jus­tice finds you.

All men and women are to each other
the limbs of a sin­gle body, each of us drawn
from life’s shim­me­ring essence, God’s per­fect pearl;
and when this life we share wounds one of us,
all share the hurt as if it were our own.
You, who will not feel another’s pain,
you for­feit the right to be called human.

Because I plan to write more about Sa’di in a future post, I am going to let this story speak for itself, except for two things: First, given that Sa’di lived in a monarchy, con­si­der how much cou­rage it would take to say such things to a king who had the power of live and death over you. Second, con­si­der how radi­cal it would be in a monarchy to sug­gest to the king that he should rule as if he and the wea­kest of his sub­jects were actually part of the same body – the metaphor is a good deal more com­plext than you might think on a first rea­ding – and then con­si­der the ways in which that metaphor reso­na­tes today, not only in coun­tries like Iran, with govern­ments that are in many ways hos­tile to their own peo­ple, but even in our own nation, where our govern­ment is sup­po­sed to be “of the peo­ple, by the peo­ple and for the people.”

My next post, unless something else hap­pens to dis­tract me, will be about

Bet­ter Late Than Never Self-Promotion

March 15th, 2009 § 3

In Novem­ber of last year, I was inter­vie­wed by Marina Yoffe, foun­der and direc­tor of Jack­son Heights Poetry Fes­ti­val, an orga­ni­za­tion whose advi­sory board I sit on, and I never got around to pos­ting a link to the excerpts from the inter­view that JHPF put up on its web­site. There were, I think, bet­ter moments from the inter­view that they could have used, but I like this nonethe­less. Any­way, bet­ter late than never. So here ’tis:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8mpj0VkF84]

Here is the text of the two poems I read. (If I had a transc­ript of the inter­view itself, I would post that too, but I don’t.)

Melissa’s Story

The doc­tor gave ins­truc­tions like a spy:
Be there, seven pm, on the dot.
If you’re not, I’m gone. Don’t even think about
another appoint­ment. Got it?
That day,
of course, there was traf­fic, and the money
had to be in small, old bills. You will get
in my car as if we were lovers. At the spot,
you’ll step out first. Walk when and where I say.
Make a mis­take and I leave. Unders­tood?

I did. Somehow it went without a snag,
and there I was, legs open on a bed,
with a man crouched bet­ween them like a dog.

He reached into me and scra­ped away the life
I’d almost made, not yet mine to give.

///

The Silence Of Men

A man I’ve never drea­med before walks
into my apart­ment and sits in the green
chair where I do my wri­ting. He carries
in his left hand a large erect penis
which he pla­ces silently on the floor.
The pha­llus begins to waltz to music
I can­not hear, its scro­tum a skirt;
its tes­tic­les, legs cut off at the knees.

I want to know why this dis­fi­gu­red
manhood has been brought to me. I look up,
but my guest is gone. His organ, defla­ting
in short spasms like an old man coughing,
spreads itself in a pool of sha­llow blood.
The silence bet­ween us is the silence of men.

If you want to know more about my work, my web­site is www​.richardj​new​man​.com; and if you’d like to buy my book, you can find it on Ama­zon or Bar­nes & Noble, but I would ask that you either buy it directly from the dis­tri­bu­tor, UPNE, which directly helps my publisher, Cavan­Kerry Press, which is a fine small press that can use the help, or find an inde­pen­dent books­tore on indiebound

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