Response to Collin Kelly’s Post “More than this: A larger place at the poetry table”

August 24th, 2010 § 1

I read with great inter­est Collin Kelly’s post More than this: A larger place at the poetry table and tried to leave this as a com­ment, but I am guess­ing it was too long because I kept get­ting an error mes­sage, so I am post­ing it here. The part of the post I wanted to respond to was this:

So, I have ques­tions for all of you who read this blog: How we can get back to the plea­sure of the art rather than the jock­ey­ing for posi­tion, awards and writ­ing per­sonal attacks mas­querad­ing as “lit­er­ary crit­i­cism?” How do we set a larger place at the poetry table for those work­ing out­side the acad­emy? How do we make the art of poetry inter­est­ing and com­pelling to the next gen­er­a­tion that doesn’t want an MFA or teach­ing gig? How do we take the insu­lar and make it open?

Even­tu­ally, I think I need to turn this into a larger post, but for now I will just leave the com­ment as I orig­i­nally wrote it:

As an aca­d­e­mic – I teach at a large com­mu­nity col­lege in NYC, where I coör­di­nate our Cre­ative Writ­ing Project, in which capac­ity I have attended AWP for the last cou­ple of years – and a poet with a book (three, if you count my trans­la­tions), but with­out an MFA, and as some­one involved with a local poetry group, I con­fess I find the table metaphor prob­lem­atic. Not because I think it is inac­cu­rate per se, but because I think the notion that there is only one table that needs some­how to be enlarged is itself part of the prob­lem. I think it actu­ally allows what some­one upthread didn’t quite call the “pro­fes­sion­al­iza­tion” of the poet that is one result of the pro­lif­er­a­tion of MFA pro­grams to frame the prob­lem rather than cre­at­ing a frame through which to cri­tique “pro­fes­sion­al­iza­tion.” (And I guess I want to be clear that I mean “pro­fes­sion­al­iza­tion” as a descrip­tive and not a crit­i­cal term.)

There is no way around the fact that, as MFA pro­grams have pro­lif­er­ated, that pro­lif­er­a­tion has cre­ated a com­mu­nity of poets that needs to per­pet­u­ate itself, through pub­li­ca­tion, through jobs, through get­ting reviewed and so on; and there is also no way around the fact that, if you are not a part of this com­mu­nity, it can be very hard to get for your work the kind of atten­tion that peo­ple within the com­mu­nity are able to get for theirs – inde­pen­dently of the work’s qual­ity. More­over, I think the degree to which this pro­lif­er­a­tion has been national, to the degree that there is a national orga­ni­za­tion that embod­ies this pro­lif­er­a­tion – by which I do not mean to deny at all that AWP has made seri­ous efforts to reach out to non-MFA, non-academically affil­i­ated, etc. writ­ers – to the degree, in other words, that the job of a poet as defined by this com­mu­nity (as opposed to sim­ply being a poet, about which more in a moment) has become one with a national stage, I think the dynamic Collin points to is inevitable. Of course there will be a hier­ar­chy within the com­mu­nity of poets play­ing on this stage; of course there will be pol­i­tics and turf bat­tles. Why should the pro­fes­sion of poet be dif­fer­ent than any other profession?

I do not mean by this to bash MFA pro­grams or MFA grad­u­ates; I think the peo­ple who say that the land­scape of poetry in the United States has, over­all, been enor­mously enriched by them are speak­ing the truth – though I know there are ways to qual­ify that state­ment; but when I was in my twen­ties and just begin­ning to think seri­ously that I might be a poet, I read a quote by Robert Bly (I think it was, and I know I am para­phras­ing) who said that no poet should be pub­lished before the age of 30 or so. At the time, impa­tient to pub­lish as I was, I thought this was utter crap, but when I look back on my life as a writer, I am in a way very grate­ful that I didn’t pub­lish my first book until I was 44. It’s not just that my poetry was, by that time, truly ready for pub­li­ca­tion, for a pub­lic, in the deep­est and most lit­eral sense of that word, but I myself was also ready for that pub­lic in a way I could not have been 20 or even 10 years ear­lier. I remem­ber the moment I wrote in my jour­nal – I was 21 or 22 – the words “I am a poet.” It was one of the scari­est moments in my life, because I felt like I was com­mit­ting myself to a way of life, of see­ing and being in the world, not a job.

Again, let me be clear about some­thing: I am not char­ac­ter­iz­ing in one broad stroke all the peo­ple who have MFAs as career-oriented writer drones. My point is less about the indi­vid­u­als who get MFAs – who will or will not be “good” poets, what­ever the hell that means – than about what the pro­fes­sion­al­iza­tion of the poet does cul­tur­ally to what peo­ple think it means to be a poet. That is one of the con­ver­sa­tions we need to have in order, I think, to get back to the plea­sures of the art.

The Controversy Over Park51 (Cordoba House) Was Manufactured by Fox

August 23rd, 2010 § 2

Or at least that’s what Frank Rich, cit­ing Salon’s Justin Elliott, wrote in his August 22 op-ed col­umn, “How Fox Betrayed Petraeus.” (You can find links if you click through to the whole column.)

We owe thanks to Justin Elliott of Salon for the sin­gle most reveal­ing account of this controversy’s evo­lu­tion. He reports that there was zero reac­tion to the “ground zero mosque” from the front-line right or any­one else except mar­ginal blog­gers when The Times first reported on the Park51 plans in a lengthy front-page arti­cle on Dec. 9, 2009. The sole excep­tion came some two weeks later at Fox News, where Laura Ingra­ham, fill­ing in on “The O’Reilly Fac­tor,” inter­viewed Daisy Khan, the wife of the project’s orga­nizer, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. Ingra­ham gave the plans her bless­ing. “I can’t find many peo­ple who really have a prob­lem with it,” she said. “I like what you’re try­ing to do.”

As well Ingra­ham might. Rauf is no ter­ror­ist. He has been repeat­edly sent on speak­ing tours by the Bush and Obama State Depart­ments alike to pro­mote tol­er­ance in Arab and Mus­lim nations. As Jef­frey Gold­berg of The Atlantic reported last week, Rauf gave a mov­ing eulogy at a memo­r­ial ser­vice for Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Jour­nal reporter mur­dered by Islamist ter­ror­ists in Pak­istan, at the Man­hat­tan syn­a­gogue B’nai Jeshu­run. Pearl’s father was in atten­dance. The Park51 board is chock-full of Chris­tians and Jews. Per­haps the most threat­en­ing thing about this fledg­ling multi-use com­mu­nity cen­ter, an unabashed imi­ta­tor of the ven­er­a­ble (and Jew­ish) 92nd Street Y uptown, is its poten­tial to spawn yet another cov­eted, impossible-to-get-into Man­hat­tan pri­vate preschool.

In the five months after The Times’s ini­tial account there were no news­pa­per arti­cles on the project at all. It was only in May of this year that the Rupert Mur­doch axis of dem­a­goguery revved up, jet­ti­son­ing Ingraham’s benign take for a New York Post jihad. The paper’s inspi­ra­tion was a rabidly anti-Islam blog­ger best known for claim­ing that Obama was Mal­colm X’s ille­git­i­mate son. Soon the rest of the Mur­doch empire and its polit­i­cal allies piled on, pro­mot­ing the incen­di­ary libel that the “rad­i­cal Islamists” behind the “ground zero mosque” were tan­ta­mount either to neo-Nazis in Skokie (accord­ing to a Wall Street Jour­nal colum­nist) or actual Nazis (per Newt Gingrich).

I haven’t yet had a chance to read Elliot’s piece, but I will.

Church in Florida to Host “International Burn the Quran Day” to Commemorate the September 11 Attacks

August 20th, 2010 § 2

The poet Kazim Ali posted this to his Face­book page, say­ing that he thought it “had to be a myth,” and that is what it sounds like at first, but the Dove World Out­reach Cen­ter is indeed invit­ing peo­ple to burn a Quran on Sep­tem­ber 11, 2010. It’s easy to dis­miss this as quack­ery, as not worth giv­ing the atten­tion that it got through CNN’s cov­er­age, but the truth is that if we don’t pay atten­tion to it, if we don’t call it out for what it is – and it’s grat­i­fy­ing to see that the Face­book page protest­ing the event has close to twice as many fans as the Face­book page announc­ing the event – it will spread. More than that, though, it will become – it already has become, actu­ally, and this is kind of fright­en­ing – part of the way per­cep­tions of Islam are framed by our national rhetoric. Here’s the video:

Rick Sanchez, I think, proves him­self to be a par­tic­u­larly inept inter­viewer here – I don’t watch him, so I don’t know if he’s usu­ally bet­ter than this – but one of the things that dis­turbs me about the way he tries to respond to Terry Jones, Dove World Outreach’s pas­tor, is his but-there–are–moderate-muslims-out-there tone, as if those “mod­er­ate Muslims” – and more about that phrase in a moment – are some­how the excep­tion to the rule. Or as if they are, you know, out there, but really well hid­den, and so you have to know the secret code or some­thing to get them to reveal them­selves. Equally trou­bling to me, though, is the way the phrase “mod­er­ate Mus­lims” has taken on the same descrip­tive weight and author­ity as, say, Ortho­dox Jew or Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian, as if “mod­er­ate” were some­how actu­ally a sect of Islam. Well-meaning as it may be, the phrase actu­ally con­tributes to rather than decon­structs the way in which Islam is being defined as a pro­foundly hos­tile theologically-informed, we-want-to-rule-the-world polit­i­cal stance towards the West, broadly speak­ing, and the United States in par­tic­u­lar, rather than as a reli­gion. This is to me – and I’d be inter­ested to hear what other peo­ple think of this – very sim­i­lar to the way in which the anti­se­mitic rhetoric of Europe framed Judaism from the 18th cen­tury, and cer­tainly the 19th cen­tury on, and it is cer­tainly one of the under­ly­ing assump­tions – i.e., that the Jews want to rule the world – of the “World Zion­ist Con­spir­acy” theories.

It’s also worth not­ing that Jones and his group also declared August 2 “No Homo Mayor” day, a day to protest Gainesville’s openly gay mayor. Both groups – Mus­lims and homo­sex­u­als – are god­less accord­ing to Jones, a logic sim­i­lar to the one that cre­ated the asso­ci­a­tion between being Jew­ish and homo­sex­u­al­ity, to men­tion being com­mu­nist, Jew­ish and homo­sex­ual, that was an impor­tant point of anti­se­mitic rhetoric in this coun­try dur­ing 50s, 60s and even 70s.

It’s easy to dis­miss Terry Jones and his church as a bunch of nuts, espe­cially when his argu­ments for why Islam is a devil’s reli­gion, as quoted in the text accom­pa­ny­ing the Rick Sanchez video, include doozies like this:

“I mean ask your­self, have you ever really seen a really happy Mus­lim? As they’re on the way to Mecca? As they gather together in the mosque on the floor? Does it look like a real reli­gion of joy?” Jones asks in one of his YouTube posts.

“No, to me it looks like a reli­gion of the devil.”

The prob­lem is that Jones and com­pany are only giv­ing expres­sion to the log­i­cal con­clu­sion of what an awful lot of peo­ple in the United State., con­sciously or not, already believe. The term Islam­o­pho­bia may be rel­a­tively new, but the (often racial­ized and racial­iz­ing) hatred of Mus­lims has a long his­tory in this coun­try – and that is some­thing I will per­haps write about in another post – a his­tory that pre­dates the Sep­tem­ber 11th attacks not by decades, but by cen­turies, and its assump­tions, its images, its rhetoric is/has been as much a part of our cul­ture as the assump­tions, images, rhetoric of, say, racism.

I am not an alarmist, though I do think there is a com­par­i­son to be made between the way in which anti­se­mitic rhetoric was deployed so as to make the Nazi’s cam­paign against the Jews and the way Islam­o­pho­bic rhetoric has been more and more mak­ing its way into our pub­lic dis­course. Indeed, I think this com­par­i­son would prob­a­bly work with the rhetoric of any geno­ci­dal cam­paign, though I do not think and I am not imply­ing that this is the begin­ning of some kind of anti-Muslim gov­ern­ment action. Rather, I think, plain and sim­ple, that those com­par­isons should make clear to us how imper­a­tive it is not to let the actions and the rhetoric of peo­ple like Terry Jones go unanswered.

The Politics of Education

August 16th, 2010 § 1

This is from the “Read­ings” sec­tion in the August 2010 issue of Harper’s, and I have been read­ing it over try­ing to decide what fright­ens me most about it.

The con­tent of edu­ca­tion is always, always, polit­i­cal and there will always be some­one some­where who thinks her or his per­spec­tive has been left out of what chil­dren are taught, to their detri­ment as indi­vid­u­als and to the detri­ment of soci­ety as a whole. Inde­pen­dently of that, thought, I am a big believer in try­ing to find as many ways as pos­si­ble to include as many per­spec­tives as pos­si­ble in the class­room, not to make the point that they are all equally valid, but to make the point that the more informed we are about those per­spec­tives, even the ones that have been shown to be invalid, the more respon­si­ble and account­able we are likely to be in our own per­spec­tives. The pro­posed changes to his­tory and social stud­ies cur­ricu­lum recorded here, made by Texas State Board of Edu­ca­tion mem­ber Don McEl­roy – and if you have not read about the Texas text book con­tro­versy ear­lier this year, here’s a Wash­ing­ton Post arti­cle that gives a taste of it – are prob­lem­atic on their face because they so clearly favor an overtly con­ser­v­a­tive polit­i­cal agenda, but three things stuck out to me in particular:

  • Remov­ing dis­cus­sion of pro­pa­ganda as one of the rea­sons that the United States entered World War I so fal­si­fies what goes on when any nation decides to go to war – and I am obvi­ously talk­ing here about the gov­ern­ment pro­pa­ganda directed at that nation’s pub­lic to gar­ner sup­port for the war – that it trans­forms what­ever lessons are taught in the con­text of this cur­ricu­lum change from edu­ca­tion into propaganda.
  • The third para­graph down about “efforts by glob­al­ist orga­ni­za­tions to usurp the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion tran­si­tion­ing from U.S. sov­er­eignty to global gov­er­nance” is fright­en­ing not only because it sug­gests that the U.S. has, and should have, an agenda to become, essen­tially, the gov­er­nor of the world, but also because it is so badly writ­ten – unless I have read it wrong; and I have read it over more than a few times now – that it gram­mat­i­cally attrib­utes “threats to indi­vid­ual free­dom and lib­erty” not to the sup­posed “efforts by glob­al­ist orga­ni­za­tions,” but to the Con­sti­tu­tion itself.
  • Cur­ricu­lum guide­lines that com­pare his­tor­i­cal fig­ures to fic­tional char­ac­ters as if those fic­tional char­ac­ters were real – and remem­ber these are his­tory and social stud­ies, not lit­er­a­ture guide­lines – sound like some­thing out of Orwell’s 1984 or some other dystopian novel. That Mr. McEl­roy and who­ever advised him could not find an exam­ple of real life opti­mistic immi­grants to com­pare with Upton Sin­clair, Susan B. Anthony, Ida B. Wells and W.E.B. Du Bois seems to me say more about the canyon-wide gaps in their edu­ca­tion than these pro­posed changes could ever say about the osten­si­ble lib­eral bias in edu­ca­tion that they are sup­posed to correct.

I don’t know if these pro­posed changes passed, but that they should have been put for­ward as seri­ous and sub­stan­tive, that they should have been taken seri­ously at all, really scares me.

It’s Good to Remember Our History

August 15th, 2010 § 1

From an August 11th arti­cle by Jonathan D. Sarna pub­lished on The Jew­ish Daily Forward’s web­site:

When New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg stood on Gov­er­nors Island, in sight of the Statue of Lib­erty, and force­fully defended the right of Mus­lims to build a com­mu­nity cen­ter and mosque two blocks from Ground Zero, he expressly made a point of dis­tanc­ing him­self from an ear­lier leader of the city: Peter Stuyvesant, who under­stood the rela­tion­ship between reli­gion and state alto­gether dif­fer­ently than Bloomberg does.

As gov­er­nor of what was then called New Ams­ter­dam, from 1647 – 1664, Stuyvesant worked to enforce Calvin­ist ortho­doxy. He objected to pub­lic wor­ship for Luther­ans, fought Catholi­cism and threat­ened those who har­bored Quak­ers with fines and impris­on­ment. One might eas­ily imag­ine how he would have treated Muslims.

When Jew­ish refugees arrived in his city, in 1654, Stuyvesant was deter­mined to bar them com­pletely. Jews, he com­plained, were “deceit­ful,” “very repug­nant” and “hate­ful ene­mies and blas­phe­mers of the name of Christ.” He wanted them sent elsewhere.

Stuyvesant’s supe­ri­ors in Hol­land over­ruled him, cit­ing eco­nomic and polit­i­cal con­sid­er­a­tions. He con­tin­ued, how­ever, to restrict Jews to the prac­tice of their reli­gion “in all quiet­ness” and “within their houses.” Being as sus­pi­cious of all Jews as some today are of all Mus­lims, he never allowed them to build a syn­a­gogue of their own.

It was not until the early 1700s that Jews won the right to wor­ship in pub­lic in New York City. In Con­necti­cut that right was not granted until 1843, and the reac­tion of The New Haven Reg­is­ter, which “viewed the syn­a­gogue as a pub­lic defeat for Chris­ten­dom,” is instructive:

“The Jews…,” the paper thun­dered, “have out­flanked us here, and effected a foot­ing in the very cen­tre of our own fortress. Strange as it may sound, it is nev­er­the­less true that a Jew­ish syn­a­gogue has been estab­lished in this city — and their place of wor­ship (in Grand Street, over the store of Heller and Man­del­baum) was ded­i­cated on Fri­day after­noon. Yale Col­lege divin­ity deserves a Court-martial for bad generalship.”

It took an act of Con­gress, signed by Pres­i­dent Franklin Pierce, for Jews to be able to wor­ship in pub­lic in Wash­ing­ton, DC, where some con­tended that the Reli­gious Cor­po­ra­tion Act granted the right to pur­chase real estate only to Chris­t­ian churches; and just in case you think that Jews no longer run into such prob­lems in the United States, Sarna cites a case from 1999 in which “oppo­nents of a new Ortho­dox syn­a­gogue seek­ing to build in New Rochelle, N.Y. [used] warn­ings [about] ‘rats,’ ‘traf­fic’ and ‘creep­ing com­mer­cial­iza­tion’ [to hide their] real fear, [which was] that ‘the iden­tity of the neigh­bor­hood would change.’”

Mus­lims have been wor­ship­ing in pub­lic near Ground Zero for three decades. The Cor­doba House com­mu­nity cen­ter will not, in other words, be bring­ing some­thing entirely new to the area. Rather, it will pro­vide much needed space for a com­mu­nity that already exists there – not to men­tion the much needed space it will pro­vide for Mus­lims and peo­ple of other faiths to inter­act. The sim­i­lar­i­ties between much of the rhetoric being employed to argue against the build­ing of Cor­doba House and The New Haven Register’s The Jews have out­flanked us ought to dis­turb us all.

Killing Rage

August 11th, 2010 § 1

I should be plan­ning my classes. School starts in a cou­ple of weeks and I am in the mid­dle of set­ting up a long and com­plex assign­ment for the tech­ni­cal writ­ing class I will teach start­ing in Sep­tem­ber. On top of that, I need to write a new syl­labus for my intro­duc­tory cre­ative writ­ing course and for the three sec­tions of fresh­man com­po­si­tion in front of which I will be stand­ing start­ing on Sep­tem­ber 1st. Or I should be work­ing on the intro­duc­tion to my next book of trans­la­tions, which I still have some hope of fin­ish­ing this week, because that will allow me to get back to work on the Frag­ments of Evolv­ing Man­hood pieces I have been writ­ing and on the poems wait­ing in the blue folder on my desk for me to revise so I can start sub­mit­ting them to jour­nals. Instead of work­ing on either of those two projects, how­ever, I am writ­ing a blog post about some­thing I have not been able to get out of my head since I read about it in The New York Times this past Fri­day: the story of Omar S. Thorn­ton, who killed him­self after killing eight peo­ple in Man­ches­ter, Connecticut.

Thorn­ton drove a truck deliv­er­ing beers for Hart­ford Dis­trib­u­tors. He’d been called into a dis­ci­pli­nary hear­ing on the morn­ing of the shoot­ing, Tues­day, August 3rd, after hav­ing been accused by com­pany offi­cials of steal­ing beers; they offered him a choice between resign­ing or being fired. Instead, he opened fire. When he was done shoot­ing, eight peo­ple were dead, two were wounded, and he placed a call to 911 because he wanted “to tell my story, so you can play it back.” He’d been, he said, racially harassed at his work­place to such an extent that he had no choice but “to take [things] into my own hands and han­dle the prob­lem.” Accord­ing to Thornton’s girl­friend and her mother, this harass­ment included things like some­one draw­ing a hangman’s noose on the bath­room wall.

Com­pany offi­cials deny the charges of racism, which it is likely they would do even if the charges were true, and an offi­cial with the Team­sters union said that Thorn­ton had never filed any com­plaint, which only mean no one offi­cially knew about the prob­lem, if there was one; but let’s assume for the moment that the report of the hangman’s noose is false, that racism on the job was not a prob­lem that Thorn­ton had. That doesn’t mean, of course, Thorn­ton was not expe­ri­enc­ing racism in his daily life. Indeed, it would have been remark­able, more than remark­able in fact – it would have been mirac­u­lous – if he had not been expe­ri­enc­ing racism in his daily life since he was old enough to know what racism was; and so, while noth­ing jus­ti­fies the mur­ders he com­mit­ted, and while it is true that if he had not killed him­self, given the clear fact of his guilt, he would have deserved to be pun­ished to the full extent of the law (though, for me, such pun­ish­ment would stop short of the death penalty), there is no rea­son to doubt that Thorn­ton was telling the truth when he said that the anger moti­vat­ing his killing of those eight peo­ple was rooted in his expe­ri­ence of racism.

There is, how­ever, a dif­fi­culty in acknowl­edg­ing that truth; in its impli­ca­tion that Thorn­ton might also have been a vic­tim, it seems to place him and his vic­tims on the same level, as if he were not respon­si­ble for his own actions. More, because racism is such a com­plex issue, to acknowl­edge that racism might have played had a role in shap­ing Thornton’s state of mind such that he was able to kill eight peo­ple in cold blood is to risk eclips­ing the far more sim­ple fact that he actu­ally killed those eight peo­ple, that they no longer exist because of him; and since I do not want to lose sight of the fact that those eight peo­ple are gone, I would like every­one read­ing this post to pause here and go read “Remem­ber­ing Lives Lost in a Ware­house Ram­page,” an arti­cle in The New York Times by Patrick McGee­han that memo­ri­al­izes their lives. » Read the rest of this entry «

A Bit of Literary History on my Bookshelves

August 4th, 2010 § 0

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.

Three Poems Up on Poets for Living Waters

August 3rd, 2010 § 0

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.

Constructions of masculinities in Islamic traditions, societies and cultures, with a specific focus on India and Pakistan between the 18th and the 21st century

August 3rd, 2010 § 1

This is the title of a PhD the­sis writ­ten by Dr. Aman­ul­lah De Sondy, who has just accepted a posi­tion at Ithaca Col­lege. Accord­ing to Joan McAlpine, who pro­filed Dr. De Sondy for The Sun­day Times, sev­eral lead­ing pub­lish­ers are com­pet­ing to buy the the­sis and pub­lish it as a book and, if they do, I think they should con­sider the title she sug­gested: Men, Sex and Islam. I, for one, am very inter­ested to read it. In McAlpine’s words:

It chal­lenges assump­tions about what it means to be a Mus­lim man. The Koran does not, says De Sondy, demand a bearded patri­arch with sev­eral wives and dozens of chil­dren. There are dys­func­tional fam­i­lies in Islamic tra­di­tion, he says, prophets with­out father fig­ures and revered holy men who led “effem­i­nate” lifestyles. Most con­tro­ver­sially, he chal­lenges homo­pho­bia in Islam. “Homo­sex­u­al­ity is not incom­pat­i­ble with Islam. The two can and have co-existed. The impor­tant thing is to link it with liv­ing a good life and cre­at­ing a good society.”

Later in the arti­cle, De Sondy is quoted as saying:

“In the 16th-century Pun­jab, there lived a Sufi  saint and poet called Shah Hus­sain who is greatly ven­er­ated. He fell in love with a Hindu boy. They lived together and are buried side by side in the same tomb. Pil­grims come to the tomb and shrine in Lahore dis­trict even today, but some peo­ple want to rewrite his­tory, say­ing the boy was in fact a girl.”

He also points to the pres­ence of “antin­o­mian Sufis in the Indian sub­con­ti­nent  — men who have pierced ears and dance in women’s clothing”.

In response to the story that De Sondy says most of the con­ser­v­a­tives who dis­agree with him use – that of God’s deci­sion to destroy the city of Sodom because of the sins of its inhab­i­tants – he says the story “is really about [God’s] dis­ap­proval of the rape of young boys that was hap­pen­ing in the place,” which is very dif­fer­ent from say­ing that God dis­ap­proves of homosexuality.

I am not a scholar of Islam, nor well-enough informed to know the com­plex­i­ties of what Islam has to say about homo­sex­u­al­ity, but I do know that schol­ar­ship like this, which at the very least high­lights the degree to which ideas about mas­culin­ity, man­hood and male sex­u­al­ity are con­tested ide­o­log­i­cal ter­ri­tory, show­ing that the tra­di­tional view is only one of the pos­si­bil­i­ties that exist, is very, very important.

The Anti-Defamation League Should Be Ashamed of Itself

August 2nd, 2010 § 0

I first read about the ADL’s state­ment sup­port­ing those who would stop the build­ing of Cor­doba House, a Mus­lim com­mu­nity cen­ter mod­eled on the YM/YWHA’s and CA’s you can find all over New York City over at The Debate Link. In read­ing the state­ment, I was struck by these two paragraphs:

How­ever, there are under­stand­ably strong pas­sions and keen sen­si­tiv­i­ties sur­round­ing the World Trade Cen­ter site.  We are ever mind­ful of the tragedy which befell our nation there, the pain we all still feel – and espe­cially the anguish of the fam­i­lies and friends of those who were killed on Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001.

The con­tro­versy which has emerged regard­ing the build­ing of an Islamic Cen­ter at this loca­tion is coun­ter­pro­duc­tive to the heal­ing process.  There­fore, under these unique cir­cum­stances, we believe the City of New York would be bet­ter served if an alter­na­tive loca­tion could be found.

These words raise, of course, the obvi­ous ques­tion: Sup­pose the build­ing at stake were a Jew­ish com­mu­nity cen­ter and sup­pose the peo­ple opposed it were doing so out of “strong pas­sions and keen sen­si­tiv­i­ties” that were anal­o­gous to what the peo­ple who oppose the Cor­doba House feel, would the ADL argue that such a build­ing in a such a place was “coun­ter­pro­duc­tive to the heal­ing process” and urge that the cen­ter be built else­where? More than that, though, I found myself won­der­ing about whose feel­ings the ADL is being so con­sid­er­ate of here. As Michael Bar­baro wrote on July 30th in an arti­cle on The New York Times web­site–the arti­cle was on the front page of the July 31st edi­tion of the paper – attribut­ing the point to Oz Sul­tan, Cor­doba House’s pro­gram­ming direc­tor, “He said that Mus­lims had also died on Sept. 11, either because they worked in the twin tow­ers, or responded to the scene.”

Sul­tan was respond­ing to a state­ment made by Abra­ham Fox­man, ADL’s national direc­tor, to the effect that the peo­ple whose feel­ings his orga­ni­za­tion feels ought not to be hurt by the build­ing of cen­ter at its cur­rent loca­tion are the fam­i­lies of those who died in the Sep­tem­ber 11th attacks. Mr. Sultan’s response, of course, is pre­cisely to the point, and I don’t think there isn’t much else to add to that. I do find Foxman’s rea­son­ing, at least as it is quoted in Barbaro’s arti­cle, pro­foundly trou­bling, though:

Asked why the oppo­si­tion of the [Sep­tem­ber 11th vic­tims’] fam­i­lies was so piv­otal in the deci­sion, Mr. Fox­man, a Holo­caust sur­vivor, said they were enti­tled to their emotions.

“Sur­vivors of the Holo­caust are enti­tled to feel­ings that are irra­tional,” he said. Refer­ring to the loved ones of Sept. 11 vic­tims, he said, “Their anguish enti­tles them to posi­tions that oth­ers would cat­e­go­rize as irra­tional or bigoted.”

It’s hard for me to know where to begin tak­ing this apart. First, though, let me say that I do think Fox­man is right about this: peo­ple who have been through trauma are enti­tled to their feel­ings about things that may force them to return to or relive that trauma, and even when those feel­ings are irra­tional, the valid­ity of the feel­ings them­selves should not be ques­tioned, even when those feel­ings can rea­son­ably be cat­e­go­rized as “big­oted.” The rest of us, how­ever, should not be held hostage to the legit­i­macy of those feel­ings. More, pre­cisely because those feel­ings can be rea­son­ably cat­e­go­rized as big­oted, defer­ring to them in mat­ters of pub­lic pol­icy and dis­course can end up per­pet­u­at­ing that big­otry in con­crete ways. Wit­ness the ADL’s state­ment which, even grant­ing the most gen­er­ous pos­si­ble read­ing – and I am not sure what that would be – mar­gin­al­izes Mus­lims sim­ply for being Muslim.

Even more than that, though, I think it is cyn­i­cal beyond belief for Fox­man to enlist the moral author­ity that inevitably attaches to men­tion of Holo­caust sur­vivors, espe­cially because he is him­self a sur­vivor, to jus­tify the ADL’s posi­tion. It is insult­ing of my intel­li­gence; triv­i­al­iz­ing of the Holo­caust; it ren­ders Mus­lims invis­i­ble on all kinds of lev­els by equat­ing the Sep­tem­ber 11th vic­tims’ fam­i­lies with the Jews; and it is, fun­da­men­tally, more about guilt-tripping the peo­ple who want to build the Cor­doba House and their sup­port­ers than it is about a search for heal­ing and that can be noth­ing but, to use Foxman’s own word, counterproductive.

I have not been fol­low­ing the Cor­doba House issue very closely and so I have not read much about the ques­tions that have been raised about some of the sources for its fund­ing, but I would like to say this: even if it turned out that Cor­doba House were being funded with money that could be tied back to the same peo­ple who per­pe­trated the Sep­tem­ber 11th attacks, or some sim­i­larly objec­tion­able group, [ETA: the fact of that fund­ing would be the rea­son to pre­vent the build­ing of the Cor­doba House any­where in the United States; the fact of that fund­ing] would still not jus­tify the ADL’s posi­tion that would not jus­tify the ADL’s posi­tion. I hope that those ques­tions about fund­ing, if they have been legit­i­mately raised, are resolved pos­i­tively and that the Cor­doba House gets built. The con­tro­versy sur­round­ing it con­vinces me that we really, really need it.

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