Tuesday, May 22, 2007

 

The Republic of Poetry: Martín Espada's Hampshire College Commencement Address

Martín Espada gave me permission to post here the commencement address he gave Saturday at Hampshire College. Lucky, lucky grads - they've received a manifesto for living, for creating the new world.


THE REPUBLIC OF POETRY: HAMPSHIRE COLLEGE COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS

Martín Espada
May 19, 2007

To the graduates, their families, the faculty and staff of Hampshire College: Congratulations. I would particularly like to salute the Baldwin Scholars graduating today. James Baldwin delivered the commencement address here at Hampshire twenty-one years ago. That day, he said: “The reality in which we live is a reality we have made, and it’s time, my children, to begin the act of creation all over again.”

In that spirit, I welcome you to the Republic of Poetry. The Republic of Poetry is a state of mind. It is a place where creativity meets community, where the imagination serves humanity. The Republic of Poetry is a republic of justice, because the practice of justice is the highest form of human expression. This goes beyond the tired idea of “poetic justice,” because all justice is poetic.

In the words of Walter Lowenfels, “everyone is a poet, a creator, somewhere, somehow…It’s in the sense of helping to create a new society that we are poets in whatever we do. And it is our gesture against death. We know we are immortal because we know the society we are helping to build is our singing tomorrow.”

You, the graduates of Hampshire, are the poets of this republic. I do not mean that you must act like a stereotypical poet. You do not have to borrow money from your friends and pretend to be in a coma the next time you see them. You do not have to wear a coat three sizes too large so you can shoplift books. You do not have to drink until you lose control of your bladder. You do not have burst into tears at the sight of a mayonnaise jar because you love the letter M. You do not have to lock yourself in the bathroom and refuse to come out because your haiku is too short. You do not have to speak in riddles like Woody Allen’s fictional poet, Sean O’Shawn, considered “the most incomprehensible and hence the finest poet of his time.”

I know you can build your own Republic of Poetry, because I have seen it. I saw it in Chile, where the citizens overcame seventeen years of military dictatorship to rebuild their democracy, ultimately electing a socialist woman president. (If the people of Chile can survive nearly two decades of General Augusto Pinochet and take their democracy back, then we can take our democracy back too.)

Chile is a nation of poets, and in Chile poetry is inseparable from the struggle for democracy. When I visited Isla Negra and the home of the great poet Pablo Neruda, I remembered an incident that took place there after the military coup of September 11, 1973 (the first 9/11). I wrote a poem about it called, “The Soldiers in the Garden.”

After the coup,
the soldiers appeared
in Neruda's garden one night,
raising lanterns to interrogate the trees,
cursing at the rocks that tripped them.
From the bedroom window
they could have been
the conquistadores of drowned galleons,
back from the sea to finish
plundering the coast.

The poet was dying;
cancer flashed through his body
and left him rolling in the bed to kill the flames.
Still, when the lieutenant stormed upstairs,
Neruda faced him and said:
There is only one danger for you here: poetry.
The lieutenant brought his helmet to his chest,
apologized to señor Neruda
and squeezed himself back down the stairs.
The lanterns dissolved one by one from the trees.

For thirty years
we have been searching
for another incantation
to make the soldiers
vanish from the garden.

In the Republic of Poetry there is no war, because phrases like “weapons of mass destruction,” “shock and awe,” “collateral damage” and “surge” are nothing but clichés, bad poetry by bad poets, and no one believes them. They bleed language of its meaning, drain the blood from words. You, the next generation, must reconcile language with meaning, restore the blood to words, and end this war.

At the beginning of the last century, governments used other words to justify and celebrate war. There was the Latin phrase: Dulce et Decorum est Pro Patria Mori (how sweet and decorous it is to die for one’s country). The poet Wilfred Owen, who died at age twenty-four in the First World War, knew better. Here he describes the effects of poison gas at the front:

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

You must always call “the old Lie” by its name. If you do, then you will build this republic on the highest ground. Remember: Your language is powerful precisely because it is not the language of power.

The Republic of Poetry has no borders. In this republic no human being is illegal. In this republic no one is thrown on the other side of the fence after building the fence. Every time the fence goes up, you must tear it down.

In this republic, there is no official language, because all languages are poetic. En la República de la Poesía se habla español. Listen to the voice of Jorge the church janitor, an immigrant from Honduras, in this poem I wrote for him:

No one asks
where I am from,
I must be
from the country of janitors,
I have always mopped this floor.
Honduras, you are a squatter's camp
outside the city
of their understanding.

No one can speak
my name,
I host the fiesta
of the bathroom,
stirring the toilet
like a punchbowl.
The Spanish music of my name
is lost
when the guests complain
about toilet paper.

What they say
must be true:
I am smart,
but I have a bad attitude.

No one knows
that I quit tonight,
maybe the mop
will push on without me,
sniffing along the floor
like a crazy squid
with stringy gray tentacles.
They will call it Jorge.

This little drama did not take place at a church in Alabama. This took place at a church in that bastion of liberalism, Harvard Square. We must keep our own churches, and houses, clean. Speaking of which, let us thank the janitors of Hampshire College.

In the Republic of Poetry, everyone has shoes. Here we have Jack Agüeros and his “Psalm for Distribution:”

Lord,
on 8th Street
between 6th Avenue and Broadway
there are enough shoe stores
with enough shoes
to make me wonder
why there are shoeless people
on the earth.

Lord,
You have to fire the Angel
in charge of distribution.

You, the next generation, have to fire the Angel in charge of distribution. To accomplish this, you may have to fire the president, or a senator, or a governor; you have that right in a democracy. However, they are also representatives of a larger economic system. You must radically transform that system so that everyone has shoes, so that everyone has the opportunity to realize his or her full human—that is to say, poetic— potential. Walter Lowenfels sums it up: “When the tragedy of the world market no longer dominates our existence, new gradations of being in love with being here will emerge.”

Any republic should be measured by the way it treats its most vulnerable people. Make sure that compassion is the guiding principle of your republic, the pulse of your poetry. Walt Whitman, the bard of prisoners, prostitutes, and slaves, insists that, “whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to/ his own funeral dressed in his shroud.”

To dwell in the Republic of Poetry you must continue to read and ask questions. You graduate today, but in fact, you should never stop being a student, never stop asking, doubting, dissenting, or the republic dies. This was never more true than today, in the age of the Illiterate Presidency.

In the Republic of Poetry your vote counts, because the voting machines actually work. In this republic your dollars pay for schools and hospitals instead of bullets and bombs, because every poem by our greatest poets is scientific proof that living is better than dying.

Now, for those graduates who think there are no more assignments, I have news: The Republic of Poetry is hard work. Poets re-write what they have already re-written, and stay up all night to do it. We are insomniac zombies. In fact, I am presently working on a screenplay called, “Night of the Living Dead Poets’ Society.”

Such will be the case for you, too, if you want to live in a more democratic—and thus, poetic—world. Marge Piercy captures the joy of sitting through one more meeting with yet another committee:

This is true virtue: to sit here and stay awake,
to listen, to argue, to wade on through the muck
wrestling to some momentary small agreement
like a pinhead pearl prized from a dragon-head oyster.
I believe in this democracy as I believe
there is blood in my veins, but oh, oh, in me

lurks a tyrant with a double-bladed ax who longs
to swing it wide and shining, who longs to stand
and shriek, You Shall Do as I Say, pig-bastards.
No more committees but only picnics and orgies
and dances. I have spoken. So be it forevermore.

In the Republic of Poetry, the poet is the true self, whoever that may be. The poet within us rebels against conformity, decorum and obedience, saying the unsayable before the moment passes. I give you Julia de Burgos, who confronts herself—the false self—in this poem:

Who rises in my verses is not your voice. It is my voice,
because you are the dressing and the essence is me;
and the most profound abyss is spread between us.

You, honey of courtesan hypocrisies; not me;
in all my poems I undress my heart.

You are like your world, selfish; not me,
who gambles everything betting on what I am.

(…)

You curl your hair and paint yourself; not me;
the wind curls my hair; the sun paints me.

(…)

You in yourself have no say; everyone governs you;
your husband, your parents, your family,
the priest, the dressmaker, the theatre, the dance hall,
the auto, the fine furnishings, the feast, champagne,
heaven and hell, and the social “what will they say.”

Not in me, in me only my heart governs,
only my thought; who governs in me is me.

The Republic of Poetry is a place where, as Walt Whitman says, “your very flesh shall be a great poem.” It is a place where you are your own greatest creation, your own most inspired invention. It is a place where you make of your life an epic poem. You may discover that medicine is your poetry, or law is your poetry, or education is your poetry, or journalism is your poetry, or music is your poetry, or poetry is your poetry.

The Republic of Poetry is a place of miracles. You carry the engine of miracles with you everywhere, in your head, and don’t even realize it. Pablo Neruda fell down, hit his head, and had an epiphany:

How often in my mature years,
in travels, in love affairs,
I examined every hair,
every wrinkle on my brow,
without noticing the grandness
of my head,
boned
tower of thought,
tough coconut,
calcium dome
protecting
the clockworks,
thick wall
guarding
treasures infinitesimal,
arteries, incredible
circulations,
pulses of reason, veins of sleep,
gelatin of the soul,
all
the miniature ocean
you are,
proud crest
of the mind,
the wrinkled convolutions
of undersea mountains
and in them
will, the fish of movement,
the electric corolla
of stimulus,
the seaweed of memory.

You who believe in this republic will be accused of daydreaming and utopianism. To these crimes you must plead guilty as charged. Tell them: Yes! I did it! I was daydreaming of a more just world instead of something more age-appropriate and consumer-oriented, like a $200 pair of Nikes.

This is Eduardo Galeano on the subject of utopia: “She’s on the horizon…I go two steps closer, she moves two steps away. I walk ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps ahead. No matter how much I walk, I’ll never reach her. What good is utopia? That’s what: it’s good for walking.”

A century ago, when your father’s grandfather was a child, the eight-hour workday was utopian; the eradication of polio was utopian; the end of lynching and segregation in the South was utopian. The next generation writes the poetry of the impossible.

You will make the impossible possible. Yet, no change for the good ever happens without being imagined first. The last poem today is about the bread of the table, the bread of poetry, the bread of justice, the bread of this republic. It’s called, “Imagine the Angels of Bread:”

This is the year that squatters evict landlords,
gazing like admirals from the rail
of the roofdeck
or levitating hands in praise
of steam in the shower;
this is the year
that shawled refugees deport judges
who stare at the floor
and their swollen feet
as files are stamped
with their destination;
this is the year that police revolvers,
stove-hot, blister the fingers
of raging cops,
and nightsticks splinter
in their palms;
this is the year
that darkskinned men
lynched a century ago
return to sip coffee quietly
with the apologizing descendants
of their executioners.

This is the year that those
who swim the border's undertow
and shiver in boxcars
are greeted with trumpets and drums
at the first railroad crossing
on the other side;
this is the year that the hands
pulling tomatoes from the vine
uproot the deed to the earth that sprouts the vine,
the hands canning tomatoes
are named in the will
that owns the bedlam of the cannery;
this is the year that the eyes
stinging from the poison that purifies toilets
awaken at last to the sight
of a rooster-loud hillside,
pilgrimage of immigrant birth;
this is the year that cockroaches
become extinct, that no doctor
finds a roach embedded
in the ear of an infant;
this is the year that the food stamps
of adolescent mothers
are auctioned like gold doubloons,
and no coin is given to buy machetes
for the next bouquet of severed heads
in coffee plantation country.

If the abolition of slave-manacles
began as a vision of hands without manacles,
then this is the year;
if the shutdown of extermination camps
began as imagination of a land
without barbed wire or the crematorium,
then this is the year;
if every rebellion begins with the idea
that conquerors on horseback
are not many-legged gods, that they too drown
if plunged in the river,
then this is the year.

So may every humiliated mouth,
teeth like desecrated headstones,
fill with the angels of bread.


 

How can a man use "moon," "stars," and "the heart" and get away with it?

Go read Richard Jackson and find out. You'll have your own heart ripped out and restored. Here, in "Circumstances," for example:

It was one of those little folds in time
when the absurd moon could rise without a purpose.
We all knew where melancholy could lurk
in ravines, or even lie sprawled out by the side of the road.
We all knew we could have wilted with the day lilies.
And those nail heads of stars—who would be left
to hang their sorrows on them?
That's why Boris was back in our kitchen practicing ecstasy.

This in a poem about war -- always the stars, the moon, the heart to remind us: we keep loving, we keep daring to love. What other choice do we have?

I woke early this morning, took Jackson's latest book, Heartwall, into the garden, breathed the honeysuckle, read, and wrote a bit. That's why Boris was back in our kitchen practicing ecstasy.

Monday, May 21, 2007

 

Coldfront Magazine




My friend Scott Hightower pointed me in the direction of Coldfront Magazine, an online zine that specializes in poetry reviews.


Given the fact that print publications rarely review poetry these days, the online scene is fast becoming the most important scene. Check out Coldfront -- Scott has some good reviews there -- and consider writing a review for them.

Friday, May 18, 2007

 

Scott Reynolds Nelson, author of Steel Drivin' Man, May 22, Arts Club

Dear Friends,

Some of you know that my new day job is at the Arts Club of Washington, coordinating their new prize, the National Award for Arts Writing. The Club has chosen its first winning book, and the author is coming to town to give a reading. Steel Drivin’ Man: John Henry, The Untold Story of an American Legend is a beautifully written, heartbreaking book that tells the story of how American music was forged in part out of our shameful history of the exploitation and murder of Black workers. I hope you can join us for the presentation by the author, Scott Reynolds Nelson, on May 22. Details are below.

Best,Sarah
**

Reading (with music) by Scott Reynolds Nelson, winner of the Arts Club of Washington’s inaugural National Award for Arts Writing for Steel Drivin’ Man: John Henry, The Untold Story of an American Legend (Oxford University Press).

Tuesday, May 22, 7 pm
Arts Club of Washington
2017 I Street, NW
Washington, DC
Farragut West and Farragut North Metro
For more information: www.artsclubofwashington.org, award@artsclubofwashington.org, 202-331-7282 x 15.
Free and open to the public.

The National Award for Arts Writing is given annually by the Arts Club of Washington in recognition of excellence in writing about the arts for a broad audience. The substantial Award of $15,000 is the only one of its kind the country.

The ballad “John Henry” is the most recorded folk song in American history and John Henry –the mighty railroad man who could blast through rock faster than a steam drill – is a towering figure in our culture. In Steel Drivin’ Man, Scott Reynolds Nelson masterfully captures the life of the ballad, tracing the song’s evolution from work song through the blues to its place as the premiere American folk song; from the first printed score by blues legend W. C. Handy, to Carl Sandburg’s use of the ballad to become the first “folk singer,” to the upbeat version by Tennessee Ernie Ford.

The judges, Alan Cheuse, Rita Dove, and Joyce Carol Oates, wrote, “It is thrilling to follow the exegesis of the ‘John Henry’ lyrics through to the discovery of John Henry’s identity. Many disciplines are necessarily examined in the course of this detective tale: history of course, but also geology, forestry, engineering, anthropology, anatomy, sociology, law, music, literature, poetry, art and popular culture. Yet Mr. Nelson stirs the brew with the effortless touch of a master chef, deftly adding ingredients at just the right temperature (a dash here, a sprinkle there) to serve up a most enticing gumbo.”

Recounting a heartbreaking chapter in America’s post-Civil War history, Steel Drivin’ Man, as the rocker Bruce Springsteen says, “is a tribute and requiem to the real steel drivin’ men who built this country.”

Scott Reynolds Nelson is Legum Professor of History at the College of William and Mary. The author of Iron Confederacies: Southern Railways, Klan Violence, and Reconstruction, and coauthor, with Carol Sheriff, of A People At War: Civilians and Soldiers in America’s Civil War, he served as a consultant on the forthcoming PBS documentary on John Henry. Steel Drivin’ Man has also received a 2007 Merle Curti Prize from the Organization of American Historians and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Nonfiction, an award that recognizes books on race and culture.

Monday, May 14, 2007

 

Rejected Letters to the Editor




Read mine, written to the Washington Post just after the Second Inauguration, January 2005, here: www.rejectedletterstotheeditor.com/war3.html. I was giving the Post a hard time for not quoting any protesters in a story about the clash between protesters and the "regular Americans" in town for the coronation parties. What a difference two years make -- who are the regular Americans now?
The site is dedicated to printing letters to the editor that weren't published by their intended venue. Check it out and send them one of yours! Guidelines are here: www.rejectedletterstotheeditor.com/submit3.html

 

Ishle Yi Park



Go to her website here: http://www.ishle.com/ and check out "Small Offerings" for a trio of lovely, powerful poems. I especially like Stars Ghazal.

Thursday, May 10, 2007

 

We Begin Here Tonight

We've just had a wonderful show on WPFW's "On the Margin" with Josephine Reed. Kathy Engel (left), the editor, with Kamal Boullata of "We Begin Here: Poems for Lebanon and Palestine" is in town for tonight's reading at Grace Church and was on the show with DC PAW's Events Coordinator Melissa Tuckey and the incomparable E. Ethelbert Miller. Kamal called in from Paris and Alexis De Veaux, Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz and I called in from our various US cities. A moving discussion and reading. Ethelbert read Ferlinghetti as well as his own work. I'm going to read June Jordan this evening -- she is such a role model of a poet-activist, citizen of the whole world.

I hope to see you there - 7 pm, Grace Church, Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown. Also reading are Wade Fletcher and Richard Schaaf. And a discussion follows with Jewish and Palestinian peace activists. We begin here.

Tuesday, May 08, 2007

 

Second Most Expensive War - Send the Bill to the Kids

According to today's Washington Post, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are about to become the second-costliest in US history, after the Second World War.

And this time, the war bill is going directly on the nation's credit card. Unlike his predecessors, Bush is financing a major conflict without raising taxes or making significant cuts in domestic programs. Instead, he has cut taxes and run up the national debt....

Like all debts, however, the bill for Iraq and Afghanistan will eventually come due. While it is unlikely to cause economic upheaval, such as the devastating inflation that followed the Vietnam War, economists foresee substantial increases in government spending to rebuild the nation's exhausted armed forces, care for its disabled veterans and cover rising interest payments.

In other words, our children will pay the price. Read the whole article here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/07/AR2007050701582.html

Friday, May 04, 2007

 

We Gotta Have It: Twenty Years of Seeing Black at the Movies




Poet and cultural critic Esther Iverem has been a mainstay of DC Poets Against the War from the very first day. Come celebrate the publication of a collection of her kick-ass film reviews, We Gotta Have It: Twenty Years of Seeing Black at the Movies next Saturday at Busboys & Poets (details below). And if you can't make it then, scroll down for other area dates or check http://www.seeingblack.com/ for more information. Congratulations, Esther!


**We Gotta Have It: Twenty Years of Seeing Black at the Movies, 1986-2006 By Esther Iverem

The year 2006 marked the twentieth anniversary of the "New Wave" in Black film, that upstart artistic movement beginning with Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It, which transformed Black images on the big and small screen, bringing a new generation's sensibility to national and global discourse about race, class, gender and culture. The book features more than 400 film reviews of productions during this period from a Black perspective, along with essays and interviews.

Esther Iverem, a former staff writer for The Washington Post, New York Newsday and the New York Times, is editor of SeeingBlack.com and a contributing film critic for BET.com and BlackAmericaWeb.com. She is a recipient of a National Arts Journalism Fellowship and a member of the Washington Area Film Critics Association. She is also the author of two books of poems, Living in Babylon and The Time: Portrait of a Journey Home.


"Esther Iverem, a veteran of the media wars, brings a voice that is deft, insightful and good-humored to the subject of African American culture. In this groundbreaking collection, spanning 20 years of Black film, she proves that we have our own way of seeing and appreciating the movies."--Tavis Smiley
May 12—Washington, DC
4-6 PM
Busboys and Poets, the Langston Room2021 14th St., NWWashington, DC 20009202-387-7638
www.busboysandpoets.com

(Tentative) May 17--Washington, DC
7 PM
TransAfrica Forum Writer’s CornerTransAfrica—Arthur Ashe Library1629 K Street, NW, Suite 1100Washington, DC 20006202.223.1960

June 20—Largo, MD
Prince George’s County Memorial LibraryLargo-Kettering Branch9601 Capital LaneLargo, MD 20774Tel: (301)336-4044TTY: (301) 808-2061

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