Here is a Squawkbox conundrum. Some people have posted comments that I can see in the Squawbox management tool but which do not seem to be appearing in the comments section. Henry Gould's showed for a while, then disappeared, making him fear the worst. Here is his comment as it shows in the Squawbox tool:

 

I appreciate Ron's hard work in parlaying so much conference information.

 

My immediate reaction is that there ought to be a gathering under the heading "Poetry and Self-Righteousness".

 

The difficulty with these literary interest groups made up of like-minded people is that, on some level, the judgement has already been made on the facts of history & politics & contemporary reality. Because minds have already been made up, the main work of poetry - which is to explore & weigh & present phenomena without jumping to quick conclusions - has been avoided. I realize that several differing viewpoints have been presented, re "hermeticism/race" etc., but all of them are developed under an umbrella of general like-mindedness.

 

You might learn more about the relation between poetry & politics by hosting a conference including both pro- & anti-"Bush etc." parties, and insisting that the participants try to come to some mutually-agreed-upon conclusions (even if the conclusion is that opinions differ mightily) about what poetry is & does in the context of political realities.

 

In this context, I'd like to point to a historical parallel which took place in London around 1850. A group of literary figures who opposed the Crimean War gathered in a downtown hotel to discuss "Poetry & Empire". Many substantial & weighty aesthetic & political issues were chewed over. A group of pro-imperialist poets tried to crash the party, but were successfully restrained. After 3 days of intense dialogue, the Association of Anti-Crimean War Poets issued a major manifesto, which basically stated that there were many avenues which literary persons could follow in opposing the War; it suggested what some of these ideas were; and concluded that, while styles & techniques & political viewpoints differed in many ways, everyone agreed that poetry & literature could have a decisive impact on the cultural climate relating to the war issue. The conference was followed by a large banquet at Pierre's Fish & Chips Shop somewhere southeast of Saville Row, I believe.

 

Also missing is post by Kathy Lou Schultz on my “hotbed of leftism” comment that I don't think ever showed up:

 

"Nebraska" is often used as the punchline to refer to a place that is simultaneously banal and completely unimaginable—other—and therefore hilarious. For example, when I first went to New York City when I was 18, McDonalds was running a TV commercial that ended "even here in Kearney, Nebraska." Even here in this unimaginable, hilarious place at the end of the earth. But in ignorance the TV announcer pronounced the name of the town as KEAR-ney, instead of how it is actually pronounced, CAR-ney. I know this because Kearney, Nebraska is my hometown.

 

When I read Ron’s blog and see the phrase "that hotbed of leftism" in relation to "Nebraska," I hear the laughter of irony. At times this laughter of irony feels like it is coming from the mouths of those laughing at my parents, seeing them as those poor, stupid, uneducated Midwesterners who do poor, stupid, uneducated things like supporting the Gulf War (I and II).

 

Let me stop here to say that Ron has never given me any indication that he thinks that my parents and me, or people like us, are poor, stupid, or uneducated, and I’m not pointing a finger at him personally. Rather, I’m making an observation about how "leftism" or "activism" are configured.

 

It is very easy for leftists on the coasts to project an idea of the hopeless "them," the people who believe CNN, who think ransacking one of the poorest countries in the world is good for democracy, etc. "They," in this case, often takes the face of an imagined, let us say, schoolteacher from Nebraska. This is where I quibble.

 

"Those people" in Nebraska worked hard from the grassroots to oppose and prevent the first Gulf War before it started. Schoolteachers, preachers, farmers. The same folks are currently working in solidarity at Whiteclay with Native Americans, working to expose how the control of the meat packing industry by agri-business exploits both Mexican workers brought up to work in the plants and Nebraska farmers who can’t make a profit because of a corporate monopoly on the industry, and on many other issues that lefties would care about if they knew about them.

 

At the retreat I brought up my experience of organizing during the first Gulf War as evidence of real grassroots opposition to U.S. policies like blowing up the Middle East to stabilize it. Evidence of opposition from Middle America (look on the map: Kearney, Nebraska, it’s as middle America as it gets).

 

 Sometimes I’m profoundly saddened by my experiences as an organizer in Nebraska: if even those people who are supposedly the bedrock of the Republican Party came out by the hundreds to oppose the war, why couldn’t we stop it? But in the long view I know that each intention does ripple outward.

 

I think about a Mennonite farmer I know, now old enough to have been a conscientious objector during WWII. He has driven in a caravan to Latin American to take school supplies to children, he does not stand up in his small community to say the Pledge of Allegiance because he doesn’t believe in it, and he has actively protested each act of U.S. aggression. He has lived his faith. Each intention ripples outward.

 

 

Actually, Kathy, my father comes from Kennewick, Washington, part of the southeastern corner of that state and a region with more than a few parallels I suspect to life in Nebraska. Indeed, I have cousins & uncles & aunts still there, where the family business is a seed & gardening store called Farmers Exchange and whose motto is "seed, feed, and farm needs." Nowadays I'm told it does more of its business supplying gardening equipment for the engineers who work at the Hanford Nuclear Reactor. Like Michael Amnasan, I was born in Pasco, the next town over. The third city in the "Tri-City" configuration (separated by the conjunction of the Snake & Columbia rivers), Richland is famous for commemorating the bombing of Nagasaki (the bomb was constructed at Hanford) by calling its high school team "The Bombers." Now I haven't lived in Kennewick since 1947, but whatever sense of irony I may have about "prairie populism" – a long tradition that predates most of imported forms of leftist thinking – is double-sided at minimum. Indeed, the first night of the retreat, I read a poem that alluded to my father's own experience in Nagasaki, a month after the bomb was dropped. My father worked as a cop, a roofer, a milkman & an electrician before being burned to death as the result of an explosion in a paper recycling plant in August, 1965. He was 38 years old.