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<a href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/'>
Silliman's Blog
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<p class='description'><span>A weblog focused on contemporary poetry and poetics.</span></p>
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Showing posts with label <b>political poetry</b>. <a href="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/">Show all posts</a>
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<div class='status-msg-hidden'>Showing posts with label <b>political poetry</b>. <a href="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/">Show all posts</a></div>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Wednesday, January 11, 2017</span></h2>

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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Tuesday, January 15, 2013</span></h2>

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<span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%;">The next time a poet is
selected to perform a poem at a presidential inauguration on strictly literary
grounds will be the first. The carping after Richard Blanco&#8217;s selection tells
me more about those who complain than it does about Blanco. The same was true
for those who bemoaned and belittled Elizabeth Alexander, Miller Williams, Maya
Angelou, James Dickey &amp;, I dare say, Robert Frost. One might make the case
that Frost was selected for his pre-eminence as an American icon of poetry, but
one should keep in mind that JFK was a president who understood the value &#8211; in his
idyllic pre-Fox News single term &#8211; of positioning himself as an intellectual,
garnering a Pulitzer for a ghost-written volume of pop history &amp; preferring
in his own time to read James Bond novels. Ian Fleming may qualify as a
heavyweight alongside whatever the Bushies read, but when Kennedy got together
with Marilyn Monroe, it wasn&#8217;t the president who was the serious reader in the
room. And there never has been a white male inaugural poet who wasn&#8217;t selected
at least partly as a play on the regional card to boot: New England, Georgia,
Arkansas. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%;">I don&#8217;t know what anyone
expects from an inaugural poem &#8211; the entire premise seems utterly cringe-worthy
to me &#8211; but signaling a broader inclusiveness in the American project is hardly
a bad idea unless you&#8217;re one of the old white guys for whose vote Mitt Romney
was campaigning. &nbsp;Since the resulting
poems tend toward flarf, perhaps the ideal might be some carved-up-blend of K
Silem Mohammad, Judy Grahn &amp; Simon Ortiz. In a sense, Blanco may just be
the gluten-free lo-cal version of that. It might be more fun to imagine the
field day Rush &amp; O&#8217;Reilly would have had close-reading &#8220;Europe&#8221; had John
Ashbery been selected, but really is it any different? With the exception of
LBJ, every Democratic president for the past half century has used the occasion
to signal that poetry is inside the tent, just as every Republican has spoken
far louder through its absence.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Friday, January 13, 2012</span></h2>

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<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><a href="http://farm1.staticflickr.com/27/50099618_16d78278c0_o.jpg"><span style="font-family:&quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;;color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1; mso-themetint:242;mso-no-proof:yes;text-decoration:none;text-underline:none"><img border="0" height="392" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh4.googleusercontent.com/proxy/ea19uaRqljcCankm5TQj37PyoUPQwgiwgGYSfTrIFCgdhn9SazatZ5w5MW4BuFRnOhIPs2IcR6GpXoSbqqWk1kjiMao0s_EyE2kD7bEh%3Ds0-d" width="578"></span></a><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;;color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242"><br> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal"><span style="font-size:8.0pt; line-height:115%;font-family:&quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;;color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor: text1;mso-themetint:242">A gathering in New Jersey for the journal </span></i><span class="GramE"><span style="font-size:8.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:&quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242">Others</span></span><span style="font-size:8.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:&quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242"> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">in 1916.<br> Alfred Kreymborg, front row, second from the left, in front of Marcel Duchamp &amp; left of WCW (holding cat).<br> Duchamp has his arm looped with Walter Conrad Arensberg, Man Ray folding his arms<span class="GramE">,</span><br> Maxwell Bodenheim on the far right. </i></span><span style="font-family:&quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;;color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242">One day last year, I was driving in the rain through southern Chester County when I happened to pass </span><a href="http://www.bookbarn.com/"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:&quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242">Baldwin&#8217;s Book Barn</span></a><span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:&quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242">, one of the quirkier book establishments hereabouts. While Baldwin&#8217;s is on the web these days, it appears <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">in situ </i>to have largely managed not only to have ignored the digital age, but even the world after the Second World War, when paperbacks took over publishing.&#185; The Book Barn claims to have 200,000 books somewhat anarchically shelved in its rambling establishment, perhaps 99% of which are hard cover. I always need the map they hand out at the counter to find my way to the poetry section &amp; this time returned with a signed copy of Alfred Kreymborg&#8217;s </span><a href="http://bit.ly/yv2Ara"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height: 115%;font-family:&quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;;color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1; mso-themetint:242">The Little World: 1914 and After</span></i></a><i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height: 115%;font-family:&quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;;color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1; mso-themetint:242">, </span></i><span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%; font-family:&quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;;color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint: 242">published by Coward McCann in 1932 for the price of a paperback. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoListBulletCxSpFirst" style="margin-top:12.0pt;margin-right:0in; margin-bottom:10.0pt;margin-left:0in;mso-add-space:auto;text-indent:0in; mso-list:none;tab-stops:.5in"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%; font-family:&quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;">In 1932, </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Kreymborg"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:&quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;;color:#0D0D0D; mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242">Kreymborg</span></a><span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:&quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;"> would have been 49, publishing for over 20 years &amp; widely known as an editor with some serious (if waning) avant-garde cred. The first literary figure to become a regular at Alfred Stieglitz&#8217; 291 gallery, Kreymborg and Man Ray brought out a magazine called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">The Glebe </i>in 1913 &amp; &#8217;14, the fifth issue of which was Ezra Pound&#8217;s anthology of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Des <span class="SpellE">Imagistes</span>. </i>While the younger Man Ray (the imaginatively reinvented Emmanuel <span class="SpellE">Radnitzky</span> of New Jersey) went on to establish himself primarily as a visual artist in Paris, Kreymborg stayed literary, editing a series of magazines and anthologies. Two years prior to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">The Little World, </i>Coward McCann had published Kreymborg&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Lyric America: An Anthology of American Poetry (1630 &#8211; 1930), </i>which, while aimed at the general reader, included not one, but three sections of its final age cohort of poets, those born from the mid-1880s &amp; after, one large one focused on modernists (Amy Lowell, Sandburg, Sherwood Anderson, Lola Ridge, Pound, H.D., Williams, Walter Conrad Arensberg, Stevens, Loy, Moore, Hartley, Cummings, Eliot &amp; even Haniel Long among others now forgotten), the second focused on formalists (DuBose Heyward, Aiken, Ransom, Allen Tate, Merrill Moore, Robert Penn Warren &amp; George Dillon, but also Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, Fenton Johnson, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes &amp; <span class="SpellE">Countee</span> Cullen&#178;) &amp; finally a third group of more eclectic or relaxed quietists&#179; (MacLeish, <span class="SpellE">Tristram</span> Coffin, Dorothy Parker, Mark Van <span class="SpellE">Doren</span>, Robert Silliman <span class="SpellE">Hillyer</span>, Edmund Wilson, Malcolm Cowley, Stephen Vincent Benét, Babette Deutsch, Louise Bogan, Kenneth Fearing, Horace Gregory, Stanley Kunitz, Stanley Burnshaw &amp;, last but not least, Hart Crane), hybridism <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">avant la <span class="SpellE">lettre</span></i>. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoListBulletCxSpMiddle" style="margin-top:12.0pt;margin-right:0in; margin-bottom:10.0pt;margin-left:0in;mso-add-space:auto;text-indent:0in; mso-list:none;tab-stops:.5in"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%; font-family:&quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;;color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint: 242">The work I&#8217;d seen of Kreymborg&#8217;s earlier anthologies, mostly compilations of poetry published in his journal </span><a href="http://pippoetry.blogspot.com/2009/04/issue-of-others-dedicated-to-spectric.html"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height: 115%;font-family:&quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;;color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1; mso-themetint:242">Others</span></i></a><i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:&quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242">, </span></i><span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:&quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242">had led me to pigeonhole him as a later, lesser imagist, although already by the 1930 anthology Kreymborg&#8217;s selection of his work own suggests a gradual move away from the modernist group &#8211; where he positioned his work in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Lyric America </i>&#8211; toward the third tendency. By the end of his career, Kreymborg was giving readings accompanying <span class="GramE">himself</span> on the <span class="SpellE">mandolute</span>, a larger version of the mandolin, anticipating by a few decades Robert Bly&#8217;s similarly folksy performance style. I wasn&#8217;t prepared for the work that forms the dominant strain of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">The Little World, </i>political doggerel &#8211; think of deadline poet </span><a href="http://www.thenation.com/authors/calvin-trillin"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:&quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;;color:#0D0D0D; mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242">Calvin Trillin</span></a><span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:&quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;"> &#8211; presented in imagist format. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Sunday, October 30, 2011</span></h2>

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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Saturday, July 23, 2011</span></h2>

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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Friday, January 23, 2009</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>There were three instances of poetry during the inauguration of Barack Obama: the anointed <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/20/us/politics/20text-poem.html?_r=1"><span style='color:black'>inaugural poem</span></a> by <a href="http://www.elizabethalexander.net/home.html"><span style='color:black'>Elizabeth Alexander</span></a>, and then two different parts of the <a href="//www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pEH37JIgBU"><span style='color:black'>closing benediction</span></a> by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Lowery"><span style='color:black'>Rev. Joseph Lowery</span></a>: the opening, which quoted, sans attribution, James Weldon Johnson&#8217;s great &#8220;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lift_Every_Voice_and_Sing"><span style='color:black'>Lift Every Voice and Sing</span></a>,&#8221; sometimes referred to as the &#8220;Negro National Anthem,&#8221; and then again at the end, when Lowery, the 87-year-old civil rights hero who co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with his friend &amp; collaborator, Martin Luther King, in 1957, pulled a moment seemingly out of the history both of the black church and do-wop <span class=SpellE>dee</span> jays&#185;, with <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black'>we</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black'> ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around ... when yellow will be mellow ... when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right.</span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>It&#8217;s conceivable that this also is a quote, from the work of Muhammad Ali. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>At the one inaugural party we attended later in the day &#8211; really more of a &#8220;Get <span class=SpellE>outa</span> town, George Bush&#8221; affair &#8211; I found that the suburban progressives of Chester County had not recognized the Johnson quote and were divided on <span class=SpellE>Lowery&#8217;s</span> later contribution, depending on whether or not they thought that humor was appropriate for an inauguration. (It was my favorite moment of the whole inauguration, if that tells you anything.) One school counselor told me that her high school only gets one &#8220;news&#8221; channel, Fox, and that Fox&#8217;s Talking Heads chatted over Alexander, making the poem impossible to hear. Others who had heard it found the poem &#8220;nice,&#8221; but uninspiring. I was repeatedly asked who Alexander was, answering that she&#8217;d taught with Obama at the </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceType><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>University</span></st1:PlaceType><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> of </span><st1:PlaceName><span   class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Chicago</span></span></st1:PlaceName></st1:place><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>,  that</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> she&#8217;d gotten her Ph.D. at Penn, but that I didn&#8217;t think she&#8217;d been chosen for her writing. Her poem has gotten several reviews (<a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/us_elections/article5555612.ece"><span style='color:black'>here</span></a>, <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/inauguration/la-na-inaug-poet21-2009jan21,0,5929443.story"><span style='color:black'>here</span></a>, <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/20/parsing-the-poem/?ref=opinion"><span style='color:black'>here</span></a>, <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/jan/21/elizabeth-alexander-obama-inauguration-praise-song"><span style='color:black'>here</span></a> and <a href="http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/blog/?p=2699"><span style='color:black'>here</span></a>), mostly negative. No matter, the forthcoming book version of the poem is already <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jan/21/obama-poet-alexander-bestseller"><span style='color:black'>atop Amazon&#8217;s best-seller list</span></a>.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>One of my sons, tho, who has heard quite a bit more poetry than most of my suburban friends, was more interested in <a href="//www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKhOt_JBgxY"><span style='color:black'>Alexander&#8217;s stilted delivery</span></a> which paused. <span class=GramE>After.</span> <span class=GramE>Every.</span> <span class=GramE>Word. </span> He wanted to know if Alexander had had a stroke. I had to explain to him that there is a kind of poetry in which writers do read. Like. That. It&#8217;s intended, I added, to underscore the thoughtfulness and urgency of the poem. &#8220;Shouldn&#8217;t the text do that?&#8221; he asked. I didn&#8217;t have an answer for that, at least beyond my Cheshire-like grin. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#185; One can almost hear Jerry <span class=SpellE>Blavat</span>, &#8220;the <span class=SpellE>Geator</span> with the <span class=SpellE>Heator</span>, the Boss with the Hot Sauce,&#8221; saying these lines. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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          <div class="date-outer">
        
<h2 class='date-header'><span>Sunday, December 29, 2002</span></h2>

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<div class='post-body entry-content' id='post-body-86652937' itemprop='description articleBody'>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">It was a bad dream that we
were at war. I was involved with a company that held some support function, not
involved directly in the fighting. But then I was near the front lines at
night, crouching in a field of stones near barbed-wire. To our left were some
buildings. Behind me, &#8220;our side&#8221; sent missiles into the distance &#8211; explosions
briefly illumined the horizon. The &#8220;other side&#8221; sent their missiles in our
direction. We watched them sail overhead, some further, some closer. Then I
remember watching one the way, as a boy, I would watch a fly ball coming in my
own direction, aware of just how little time remained before it arrived,
realizing it would be very close, so close that I could not tell which way to
duck. Something struck me at the base of my neck. &#8220;I&#8217;m hit!&#8221; I shouted. But
there was no damage. I can still move. There&#8217;s no blood, no pain.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Then a large airplane
appeared overhead. &#8220;There they are,&#8221; someone shouted, as though we&#8217;d expected
this. The plane&#8217;s belly opened and a missile rocketed down into the complex of
buildings just on the far side of the barbed wire. An explosion went up on its
far side. In its windows now, I could see a young man in his twenties,
surrounded by small children. Their aspect looked &#8220;vaguely Asian.&#8221; He opened
the window to let some of the smoke billow out. &#8220;Get out&#8221; I yelled as did the
others I heard around me. &#8220;No,&#8221; he hollered in return. Then the fire reached a
flashpoint &amp; they all disappeared.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">I woke, feeling ragged after
a night such as that, &amp; went down to my study. At first, I read through the
latest issue of </span><st1:city><st1:place><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Overland</span></i></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">, an Australian journal the likes of which we no
longer possess here in the U.S. of A. It&#8217;s a <span class="GramE">quarterly,</span>
devoted in large part to politics, but with a healthy dose of fiction, cultural
criticism and, in the brief period I&#8217;ve read it, poetry. The poetry editor is,
or has been, </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Pam Brown</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">, a fine poet herself and a woman at ease with all
modes of post-avant writing. This is her last issue in this capacity &#8211; she has
a &#8220;farewell&#8221; note, as in fact does Ian <span class="SpellE">Syson</span>,
editor-in-chief, who is himself stepping down. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">What I read this early in
the morning is a &#8220;lecture&#8221; by Bob Ellis on &#8220;The Age of Spin,&#8221; focusing on
Australia&#8217;s culpability in the broader, US-led assault of Islamic peoples, on
the use of such terms as &#8220;weapons of mass destruction&#8221; and the convenient ways
in which we defined them, or &#8220;chemical weapons&#8221; &amp; the relationship of that
concept, say, to the cocktail </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">admin</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">istered to
prisoners at execution. &#8220;We live in Orwellian times,&#8221; Ellis concludes. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">His essay reminds me of my
dream, or of the sour way I characterized the Bush </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">admin</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">istration at a Christmas party the other day &#8211; &#8220;taking the neo- out of
neo-fascist.&#8221; My own sense of depression at the state of the American polis
seems limitless these days. Even as I&#8217;ve lived long enough to know that things
will eventually swing &#8220;back&#8221; again from the current reactionary state of
affairs, I have to recognize that each swing of the pendulum over the past 30
years has always been part of a larger rightward course. Bill Clinton was in
many respects a Nixon Republican when it came to domestic policy &#8211; and that was
the &#8220;progressive&#8221; portion of his platform. &#8220;When does it become </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Germany</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Arial;">? Will we recognize when it&#8217;s 1933? When do we have
to choose exile?&#8221; a friend asked at dinner last night. She&#8217;s an official in the
Democratic Party, her husband a well-placed corporate lawyer. They have a son
about to graduate college &#8211; these are not &#8220;kids&#8221; posing such questions.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I thumb through the
remainder of </span><st1:city><st1:place><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Overland</span></i></st1:place></st1:city><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">. </span></i><span style="font-family: Arial;">It&#8217;s the &#8220;bumper summer&#8221; issue &#8211; but I have to
remember that it <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is</i> summer there
right now. The issue is rich &amp; I only touch on a few pieces at the moment.
It has, for example, some fine poems by one Eric Beach, whose work I know not
at all, plus a good deal of other poetry. There are several reviews of poetry
and a large essay by John Kinsella &#8211; listed on the masthead as a correspondent
&#8211; on the shifting relations between the city and &#8220;the bush&#8221; that touches on the
relation of urban poetics to those of rural communities, citing everyone from
Wordsworth to Les Murray. <span class="SpellE">Kinsella&#8217;s</span> essay touches on
the work of Dorothy <span class="SpellE">Hewett</span>, an Australian poet,
playwright &amp; essayist who passed away earlier this year. That is her image
on the cover of </span><st1:city><st1:place><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Overland</span></i></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">, looking quite grand at the age of 79 &#8211; her life and
work <span class="GramE">are</span> the subject of three other pieces in the
issue. I make a mental note to look for her poems.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<st1:city><st1:place><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Overland</span></i></st1:place></st1:city><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"> </span></i><span style="font-family: Arial;">makes me realize just how much we lack a magazine of its
obvious impact in the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">United States</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Arial;">. The tendency toward weeklies in the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">U.S.</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Arial;"> bespeaks our restlessness &amp; the progressive
journals range between silent (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
American Prospect</i>, to pick one) to reactionary (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Nation</i>) when it comes to their general approaches to literature
&amp; the radical idea that it might be incorporated into the American
experience. The great irony of a weekly in the age of the <span class="GramE">internet,</span>
is that it will always be &#8220;out of date&#8221; whenever it arrives. Instead, what we
get are publications like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Atlantic</i>,
so poorly conceived &amp; edited that they serve as their own parody, issue
after issue. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">So, looking for respite, I
pick up Niedecker&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2002_09_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%2382269629">Collected
Works</a></i> &amp; find myself immediately at this juncture:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">J.F. Kennedy after the </span></i></b><st1:place><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Bay of
 Pigs</span></i></b></st1:place><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">To stand up<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">black-marked</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> tulip<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">not</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">
snapped by the storm<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">&#8220;I&#8217;ve been duped by the
experts&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">&#8211; <span class="GramE">and</span>
walk<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">the</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> South
Lawn<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Thirty-odd years later,
there is still debate as to whether or not Kennedy was, in fact, &#8220;duped by the
experts&#8221; &#8211; the implications concerning his hold on the executive branch are,
after all, damning &#8211; or merely used this explanation to distance himself from
the political fallout that attended the Bay of Pigs fiasco. So here is
Niedecker using a natural image &#8211; the tulip &#8211; as a metaphor for political
activity. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">But I don&#8217;t think of
Niedecker as a &#8220;political poet,&#8221; and on the facing page starts one of her
longest poems, &#8220;Wintergreen Ridge,&#8221; which includes an account of a visit from
Basil Bunting:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; tab-stops: .4in .8in 1.2in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>When visited<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; tab-stops: .4in .8in 1.2in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span class="GramE">by</span> the
poet<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; tab-stops: .4in .8in 1.2in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; tab-stops: .4in .8in 1.2in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">From </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Newcastle</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> on </span><st1:place><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Tyne</span></st1:place><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; tab-stops: .4in .8in 1.2in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>I neglected to ask<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; tab-stops: .4in .8in 1.2in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span class="GramE">what</span> wild
plants<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; tab-stops: .4in .8in 1.2in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; tab-stops: .4in .8in 1.2in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">have</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> you there<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; tab-stops: .4in .8in 1.2in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span class="GramE">how</span> dark<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span class="GramE">how</span>
inconsiderate<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; tab-stops: .4in .8in 1.2in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">of</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> me<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Well I see at this point<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; tab-stops: .4in .8in 1.2in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span class="GramE">no</span> pelting
of police<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">with</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> flowers<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">There is no escaping it.*
Even a poet as removed from the daily life of cities as Niedecker,
Objectivism&#8217;s one true &#8220;poet of the bush,&#8221; cannot get away from the politics of
the 1960s as they enveloped the nation. Any more than we can the misdeeds of
our own &#8220;elected&#8221; officials at the cusp of 2003. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">* &#8220;What
Western peoples might find strange, Kawhlānī tribesmen taken for
granted, namely, that politics and poetics are inseparable.&#8221;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Stephen C. Caton, in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/5350.html">&#8220;Peaks of Yemen
I Summon&#8221;: Poetry as Cultural Practice in a North <span class="SpellE">Yemini</span>
Tribe</a> </i>(University of California Press, 1990): p. 155.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /><img alt="" src="file%3A///Users/Lynn/Desktop/silliman2a.jpg" / /><img alt="" src="file%3A///Users/Lynn/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/moz-screenshot.png" / /><span style="color: #990000; font-weight: bold;">RON SILLIMAN</span> has written and edited 40 books, and had his poetry and criticism translated into 16 languages. Silliman was a 2012 Kelly Writers House Fellow, the 2010 recipient of the Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation, a 2003 Literary Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2002 Fellow of the Pennsylvania Arts Council, and a 1998 Pew Fellow in the Arts. Silliman has a plaque in the walk dedicated to poetry in his home town of Berkeley and a sculpture in the Transit Center of Bury, Lancaster, a part of the Irwell Sculpture Trail. He lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />(c) 2002-2019 by Ron Silliman.
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_WidgetManager._RegisterWidget('_BlogView', new _WidgetInfo('Blog1', 'main', document.getElementById('Blog1'), {'cmtInteractionsEnabled': false, 'navMessage': 'Showing posts with label \x3cb\x3epolitical poetry\x3c/b\x3e. \x3ca href\x3d\x22https://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/\x22\x3eShow all posts\x3c/a\x3e', 'lightboxEnabled': true, 'lightboxModuleUrl': 'https://www.blogger.com/static/v1/jsbin/4152225668-lbx.js', 'lightboxCssUrl': 'https://www.blogger.com/static/v1/v-css/368954415-lightbox_bundle.css'}, 'displayModeFull'));
_WidgetManager._RegisterWidget('_TextView', new _WidgetInfo('Text4', 'sidebar', document.getElementById('Text4'), {}, 'displayModeFull'));
_WidgetManager._RegisterWidget('_TextListView', new _WidgetInfo('TextList1', 'sidebar', document.getElementById('TextList1'), {}, 'displayModeFull'));
_WidgetManager._RegisterWidget('_LinkListView', new _WidgetInfo('LinkList1', 'sidebar', document.getElementById('LinkList1'), {}, 'displayModeFull'));
_WidgetManager._RegisterWidget('_TextView', new _WidgetInfo('Text1', 'sidebar', document.getElementById('Text1'), {}, 'displayModeFull'));
_WidgetManager._RegisterWidget('_TextView', new _WidgetInfo('Text3', 'sidebar', document.getElementById('Text3'), {}, 'displayModeFull'));
_WidgetManager._RegisterWidget('_ImageView', new _WidgetInfo('Image1', 'sidebar', document.getElementById('Image1'), {'resize': false}, 'displayModeFull'));
_WidgetManager._RegisterWidget('_TextView', new _WidgetInfo('Text2', 'sidebar', document.getElementById('Text2'), {}, 'displayModeFull'));
</script>
</body>
</html>