9 to 5 Poet

In Ripton, Vt., officials used a poetry class as punishment.  Apparently, a group of 25 teenagers broke into Robert Frost’s summer house last December and trashed it through partying.  So, they had to do community service and take a poetry class taught by Jay Parini, a biographer of Frost and professor at Middlebury College.

I don’t know where I fall on this. It’s apt punishment, especially since I would guess that these kids may not have known whose house they were trashing.  And according to the NY Times article, the instructor used the following Frost line as a governing principle in his class:  “Unless you are educated in metaphor, you are not safe to be let loose in the world.”  So, it would be a good class.

But, poetry is already seen as punishment by many children (and adults) and this only solidifies the claim. Of course, how we teach poetry in elementary, middle, and secondary schools has much to do with it. I became a poet despite, not because, of my eighth grade teacher’s forced memorization of “Road Not Taken” and “In Flanders Fields.” This short article in the NY Times in someways reinforces that belief.  We already hate poetry, and now we can use it as a punishment, and oh how sweet, the kids may get something valuable out of it.  Thank God it’s not us! 

Meanwhile, I’m looking at Parini’s background and thinking, hmm, what can I break into to get a class with him?  Does that mean that I’m a masochist?

I was really struck this morning by this article in the LA Times.  It describes how in Pakistan, as in many other countries throughout the world, poetry is taken very seriously. In fact, the people who are working for freedom often write or recite poetry in order to get their ideas across to the people.

In both Western  and non-Western poetry, there is a strong tradition of poets inspiring (and being inspired by) political movements.  Often, these writers then end up becoming involved in the political movment they have immortalized in verse.  I’m thinking about Allen Ginsberg protesting nuclear war through poetry or dissident writers in China. 

But I think in recent years, at least in the United States, it seems that artists can be inspired by and write about politics, but not get involved.  I’m wondering if that’s healthy for the arts and healthy for political movements. It’s not like I want to inspire revolution through writing or anything, but I just think that artists and writers have a responsibility for both words and action.  Or, come to think about it, so do all citizens. 

I just finished reading Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace…One School at a Time (337 pgs) by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. I was smart enough to read this book for double purposes: a book club at work and my March review for Uptown Neighborhood News. Which I have to write tomorrow. And will post a link to, once its available online.

Since I don’t want to squander my enthusiasm for this book before the review, let me just give a brief recommendation. If you are interested in the humane solutions to the real roots of terrorism or if you care about human rights issues around the world or if you want to learn more about Pakistani and Afghani culture, read this book. Also, if you want to feel like a lazy slob who could do more good in the world, read this book.

Total For 2008: 1496 pages
Genres: Memoir (1), Essay (1), Graphic Novel (1), Non-Fiction (2), Poetry (1)

My husband encouraged me to read the graphic novel Shooting War by Anthony Lappe & Dan Goldman (192 pages). So I read a little every night before going to bed. This was not a bright idea, because I got horribly vivid dreams about the Iraq War.

Let me back up — Shooting War works on the premise that it is now 2011. The Iraq War hasn’t stopped, John McCain is president, and one videoblogger is sent to cover the war for a CNN/Fox-News-type network, after a brief brush with a sort of morbid fame. Said videoblogger gets mired in the complexities and lies of the war, all while trying to rediscover his journalistic integrity.

What’s scary about this is that it doesn’t feel science-fiction-y in the least. The predictions are scarily authentic and the politics, while extremely left-leaning, show awareness of the multitudes of gray areas in this war.

I would highly recommend this book, if you like political writing or graphic novels.

Total For 2008: 823 pages
Genres: Memoir (1), Essay (1), Graphic Novel (1)

I just started reading Break, Blow, Burn by Camille Paglia, and I am already in love with it. Paglia is just one of those personalities that you love and hate, like the smart and pretty best friend who gets all the attention, and you want to just despise her, but you can’t. Because she’s pretty and brilliant. Whenever I read Paglia’s prose, I’m prone to fits of envy and laughing.

Here are two examples.

From the introduction: “During the past quarter century, humanistic principles and honest practical criticism could reliably more be found among low-paid adjuncts faithfully teaching service courses at community colleges than among the vain, showy professoriat of the elite schools.”

As a former adjunct wage slave and someone who probably will never rise to the level of professoriat… Amen!

And from her explication of “Daddy,” which I flipped to first, naturally: “If Plath has no literary successors, she certainly has her peers — but they are in popular music. I nominate Sylvia Plath as the first female rocker. … The nihilistic wipeout of the last line of “Daddy” is also in the fractious rock spirit: it parallels the smashing or burning of guitars by the Yardbirds, the Who, Jimi Hendrix, the peak of expressiveness being a destruction of the instrument — in the case of the poet herself.”

I mean, can’t you imagine it? Plath on a stage, burning her guitar? I’m sure I’ll be quoting liberally from this book in the next few weeks. So, if I start mentioning Freudian phallic imagery and sadomasochism, you know now why.

Post Script: I typed in Google Images “Rockstar Poet” to find a picture to go along with this, and found this website. I also found this site, when typing in Camille Paglia.

I give up. No pictures for this post.

Why do I love the New York Times? Because, today, they published an excellent editorial from Donald Hall about voting. Sort of. It was really about the weather in New Hampshire and the snowfalls of his childhood. Sort of. It was really really about the noise that has been invading his state for a year and a half, the noise that is unnatural and will be leaving in 24 hours. It’s about how he’s craving the silence in his state. Sort of. It’s about all of these things.

What I love most about this editorial is not the sentiment. It’s kind of typical –a childhood recollection, a smattering of quiet political observations, a longing for the political process to be about community, and a communion with nature. Some of these are already Hall’s tropes. But it’s the fact that in 2008, we can be on the eve of an important primary, and the Times gives space to see what Donald Hall can say to us that makes us think about it in a different way. That’s the power of poetry. So, go read him pontificate.

Here are some pictures of a collage I made while listening to the Republican and Democratic presidential debates on Saturday night. (The bottom right picture is of my cat, Said, who is named after Edward Said, not the Lost character.) Yes, that’s exactly what I did on Saturday night. I listened to 10 politicians discuss their policy differences and played with magazine cut-outs, paper and paints. I think that’s why the paper is red and blue.

I’m torn (no pun intended) on what to do with all of the interesting things I’m learning about the presidential race. I’ve decided to volunteer more heavily with the Obama campaign, something that I started to do back in December. It’s exciting and fun and interesting, and I’m really enjoying being involved in the political process, for once in my adult life. For instance, we went to an awesome campaign rally in Minneapolis on Saturday and got to meet some very nice fellow supporters.

However, the campaign is quickly taking over my brain and I’m wondering whether or not it belongs on this blog. I thought about starting a new blog just for this section of my life, because (if we’re lucky and successful) I’ll be volunteering on this campaign almost all year. I’ve always envisioned this blog to be about my poetry and personal life, not my political practices. But now, they’re all coalescing together.

The larger question I’m asking myself is whether or not politics and poetry and real life mix. To be honest, I’ve always written political poetry. But it’s political ideology, not political reality. There’s something that seems sort of messy and mundane about who’s running for president, as opposed to the systems of our culture. The blog issue is just representative of the larger question. I could segregate the political stuff to a separate blog, so that I could see the easy division of these spheres of my life. (And also not annoy readers with any political polemic. I certainly don’t want to bore people with policy issues if they’re expecting free verse.) But the spheres aren’t that separate. It wouldn’t be authentic to separate them, because the I live it all together, which is why I was collaging while listening to debates. This is the shape of my life right now: poetry, real life, and politics, all smooshed into one.

Don’t worry, I won’t be writing sonnets about presidential politics. (There aren’t that many rhymes for mandates or ethics anyway.) I just want to be authentically representing what’s going on in my life. What’s going on in my life, right now, is that I’m participating in democracy. And it’s really fun!

WBAI, a peace and justice radio station in New York City, self-censored earlier this year when they determined they could not risk airing Allen Ginsberg’s landmark poem “Howl” on its 50th anniversary. They weren’t worried about listener complaint or backlash from a conservative audience. They were concerned about the exorbitant FCC fines for swearing on the air.

The New York Times ran a very interesting editorial in today’s paper about this radio station’s act, and put it into the larger context of swearing in radio and television. Personally, I feel that the FCC should be putting swearing into a larger context — if the swear is in an obviously literary work, like Ginsberg’s amazing poem, then it should relax. If someone is swearing out of a desire to shock or offend, then fine the *^&%! out of them.

I think this is especially funny, since a few weeks ago I lectured on Howl’s original censorship when it was published, 50 years earlier.

Today, I gave my swan song presentation at work today. For banned books week, I gave a half-hour presentation on the power dynamics of book censorship. We discussed the cycle of banning ideas we are afraid of, in order to avoid discussing the issues. I also suggested the 5 books that “The Man” doesn’t want you to read. They were:

1) Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
2) Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
3) Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
4) Howl by Allen Ginsberg
5) Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

At the end of the presentation, I played this video, which is a collage of post-WWII images set to a portion of “Howl.”

When the presentation was over, one of my students came to me and said that he felt bad that we were discriminating against the books. This made me miss teaching, just a little bit.

I just learned of an interesting company called Eco-Libris. Eco-Libris works like a carbon offsetting company. But rather than neutralizing your carbon footprint through planting trees, Eco-Libris neutralizes your paper usage from your book buying habit. See, publishing companies often use virgin paper for books, which causes deforestation. (Also, paper production companies can be incredibly huge polluters, another environmental concern.) At Eco-Libris’ site, you can pay $10 to plant ten trees, to offset the paper usage of 10 new books. The company works with a couple of non-profit planting partners to get the environmental action done. They are like middlemen in the process, connecting readers to eco-organizations.

When I look around my house, I see hundreds of books — and therefore hundreds of trees that have been chopped down to print those books. Honestly, I’ve never thought of the environmental impact of my book buying addiction. I like books and I like the ideas that they transmit. This site opened my eyes to another aspect of my environmental imapct on the world, and it isn’t pretty. Interestingly enough, even though they are a for-profit company, Eco-Libris’ blog promotes other ways to limit your paper usage while still enjoying books.