The San Francisco-Chicago Local

California has always been a strange idea for me. I have lived in the tropics and the snowbelt but I have never been able to understand the allure of the Golden State.

It always seemed so fascile to me. Be it the Beats or the pace of life which is so slow or the lack of a hard edge California always seemed alien to me.

Some of the Poets I most admire, Robert Duncan for example are essentially California writers and I wish that Chicago- my hometown had the kind of literary infrastructure that San Francisco does. San Francisco has two of the greatest Chicago poets Paul Hoover and Maxine Chernoff as well as Kevin Killian and Dodie Bellamy...

I have been to San Francisco many times but over the past weekend I was able to steal a free Saturday afternoon and so I made a pilgrimage to City Lights Bookstore and then to Caffe Trieste. Lawrence Ferlinghetti's father is from the same valley as my mother, the Valle Sabbia north of Brescia and I also love Ferlinghetti because he nurtured Kerouac and Thomas Merton two writers that were important to me in my youth. I felt it a priority to spend some money there.

To be able for the first time to enter City Lights was a kind of pilgrimage to a great font of our poetic lives. I have to say that while it was a great thrill to go there and to buy Judith Goldman's new book of poetry DeathStar Rico-chet which I am enjoying and will review here shortly-- I could not get away from the feeling that all of this was artiface.

I have always been attracted to places with grit and edge; Rome, Sao Paulo, Chicago, New York, Istanbul and Hanoi. I have never been attracted to places like San Francisco which I put in the category with Florence, Rio, Hong Kong, St Petersburg and Sydney. All the cities in the second category are great cities as is San Francisco but they are places where polish is always over substance and where the hard and the broken are not seen.

I realize what I am writing is unfair. But it is just a sense of a place. San Francisco is a city of a sense. It would be impossible to write a book like Bellow's Augie March or any of Faulkner's books there but we did get cannery row out of San Francisco.... So I digress-- I guess I missed the red brick buildings and bungalows of Chicago when I was there and like an alien I was soothed to know that winter is coming and that my face will freeze soon and that is part of not living in San Francisco.

The Concentration Camp in My Past

As a child growing up in the USA I was never far from the history of my mother's family. They are what can best be described as an interesting lot. They owned a hotel in the Italian town of Vestone called Locanda Italia.

The hotel and its fabulous restaurant was in our family for a very long time from 1580 until 1975. It endured allot of things- my great great great grandfather fleeing to fight with Garibaldi's Cacciatori delle Alpe, the Burning of our town by Napoleone, and the shelling by the Austrians in World War I. I grew up on their great dishes that older people in Vestone still talk about, Polenta and Rabbit, Stracciatella soup, Grostoli, and Risotto alla Funghi.

Our family during that great World War 2 was divided. Some Fascists some Socialists, some just not interested but the war was everywhere. My Zio Luigi was a Red Cross worker, after the Italian surrender in 1943 he fled to the mountains and lived in a cave for two years to avoid being deported as a forced laborer in Germany, my Zio Fausto who was an Italian soldier in Albania was interned by the Germans- and almost died of repeated beatings and starvation. Over 400 men from our town were murdered in Russia after the surrender and their memory is remembered in the name of our Piazza Nikolwjewka.

Right in the midst of this little town that I still to this day call my place of origin was a Concentration camp.

Vestone is 25 miles north of Brescia in a V shaped valley. It is a beautiful place but it was not so for the 5500 Slovenians, Jews and Croatians who were interned in our town. My grandmother told me that during the war the SS requisitioned our hotel- and they ran the camp after the Italians who had opened it were arrested-like all Italians because the king deposed Mussolini. We did not have guests we had Germans. She also told me that the mountains were filled with my male relatives hiding from the Nazis and the Brigate Nere-- my grandmother was the only person to talk about the camp to me my other relatives did not.

She is a formidable woman who did what she could but each day. She said they would march the people down through the Piazza in front of the church to trucks parked where today the condo

we still own sits.

Where did they go?? My Nonna did not know?

I dont know anything more about this camp. What I know about are my relatives who hid at a terrible time and the fact that on the Simon Weisenthal List VESTONE our town is listed as a camp site- from a time and a war that seems so far away... I often wonder when I walk the same route what people thought?? on both sides and why there is nothing written about it...

The Passion of Santa Teresa d'Avila and Joshua Corey

http://www.actionyes.org/issue6/corey/corey1.html

"I want to pursue an intuition about the baroque as a mode of American poetry—a mode of early modernity particularly well adapted to a postmodern era which has seen an acceleration of the modern tendency to break down experience into fragments. It is peculiarly well-suited to a poetics of resistance—not in a nostalgic re-creation of some lost lifeworld, but through a radical materialism that paradoxically creates a new aperture for subjective, even spiritual, experience."

This is a quote from an essay on Actionyes (See link) by Joshua Corey who among many things is a neighbor here in Chicago and his essay-- caused me to want to blog on a Sunday morning when I should have been at Mass. The essay caused a flood of reactions and thoughts and since I am not a rational academic I just vomited my ideas on the page hoping for a discussion with my poetic betters........

The essay he wrote is provocative and needs to be addresses as the seminal work that it is in the debate on whether poetry can transform. To look towards it as a way to reconstruct the Passionate (in the Medieval Sense of the Passion Play) is worth spending volumes on. Joshua Corey has ripped open a wound in poetry here that needs to be filled with salt. Also- since Josh and I are neighbors I expect a call so we can argue and discuss in person.....

One of the problems with After-Postmodern poetry (Which I define as anything after Language Poetry) is that Passion is removed from the work and irony is the center of the work. A piece of art like the Ecstasy of St Teresa of Avila which I think is the Baroque's crowd symbol extraordinaire-- is impossible today because we have moved into a world of irony where art is to criticize but never to construct. The kind of sublime spiritual has appeared only in a few places in our times and mostly on the margins.

The Catholic Baroque was in fact a response to the rationalism of the Protestant Reformation. This debate between Passion and Reason is the key debate from Luther until Freud discovered the subconscious. Catholics do not have the luxury of deconstruction we dwell in a world of accumulation and layering. To remove one piece destroys the whole. Our age is more like the Radicals of Menno Simons who want to remove until we get to the bone....

When we look at a Neo-baroque project as a possible way out of the irony filled modes we live in today questions becomes vexing.

How do we avoid the Romantic Fascism that filled so much of 19th Century German Thought? (FICHTE for Example)

How do we reintroduce passion into an artform that has been cleansed of this sense for so long?
(and not be made fun of alla Charles Bernstein)

Much of the Modern and Post Modern world has been based in revolution versus a kind of reaction. So you have for Marxism which wants to base everything in the material and
Reaction which wished to hark back to an idealized past.... the results of all these ideas has been death... almost every tragedy in the 20th century was part of this debate,

Armenian Genocide, Spanish Civil War, Holocaust, Russian Revolution/Stalinism, WWI & II, Rwanda, Bosnia, Latin American Dirty Wars, and on and on are all based in Revanchist, Reaction, and Revolution.

How do we create poetry?? That matters that is political that is both open to real history and tradition and revolutionary at the same time?? Read this essay above and think about this does it work for us?? can we use this??? I am spending the day thinking about this.... so provoked...




"The work of these poets hints at a continuing role for both major modes of the baroque in our poetry—a dialectic of destruction and construction that keeps us in touch with the body of the word, and reminds us of the possibilities of spirit."

What Makes Me Want to Vomit

Someone on a Blog recently commented on my comment that allot of what Fence Magazine and Editor Rebecca Wolfe does makes me want to Vomit.

Of course in poetryland expressing a strong opinion is always suspect. For an opinionated person like me to express what I really feel about a poet or editor breaks the social contract of friends helping friends to write poetry that no one reads and has been written primarily for other poets. It destroys the great vanity exercise that so much of poetry has become and makes me into a jerk or worse yet gets me excluded from the social scene.


So I thought I would list ten things that make me Vomit just so I am clear with my so small blog audience- and I am clear while I am being commented on;


Vomit # 1 : I want to vomit when I have to endure poetry written about nothing but with technical skill that has been created simply for artifice.


Vomit #2: I want to vomit when poets who are independently wealthy pretend to be Marxists if there was revolution they would be the first to be executed.


Vomit #3: I want to vomit when Poets tell me how hard they work and they have an academic job at some cushy university. The real hard workers in academia are the adjuncts and lecturers.


Vomit #4: I want to vomit when presses that are vanity exercises continue to publish their friends and exclude new voices.


Vomit # 5 Once in my life I want to see a poet who does not have the pedigree getting published in a sexy journal? Where are the Jack Kerouac's, William Carlos Williams or James Baldwin's?


Vomit # 6 The complete lack of diversity of experience in poetry- where are the workers, mothers, doctors, and other poets who live life outside poetryland?


Vomit # 7 The refusal of poets to engage in politics and critique our system but the openness to remain parochial and stay within poetryland only.


Vomit # 8 The complete ignorance of the global poetry scene.


Vomit # 9 The fact that many poets read nothing but their own work or their friends where is the intellectual curiosity?


Vomit # 10 That poets do not create something new but rather want to copy others to get published by their friends.


These things make me want to vomit

A Veronese Dinner I Will Always Remember

September 11th 2001 will always be a day I remember. From 1999-2003 I worked for a publisher and one of my territories was Italy. Since my parents are Italian this was a pleasure and I was able to spend most weekends when I was in Italy with my family which was great because I was able to spend time with my Aunts and Uncles (Zii) who were quite old and quite dear.

On September 11th 2001 I had just finished a wonderful weekend with relative in Padenghe a fabulous town overlooking Lake Garda where my cousins live. It was a great day and I was in Milan making a presentation to a group of Italian leathergoods manufacturers. When we walked outside in front of the Duomo we saw on the video screens the burning towers. All I could think about was Traudi, my wife who worked in New York at that time and I could not get a hold of her. It took days to know what happened and it was very upsetting to think that she might be dead. As we were driving in the Car with my friend and agent Claudio Cottone I kept hearing the same Italian word Crollatto.
Collapse. It was a day that no one will forget.

That evening we had to go to Verona to make another presentation and we decided to go out to dinner. We had a great dinner --yet all was melancholy-- but if you have to eat anyway why not something good.

At the end of a fabulous dinner (Risotto with Funghi Porcini, Veal Chop with Radicchio and Funghi,Val Policella, Grappa, and Cafe) the owner came out of the kitchen and he looked at me and said "you may speak Italian with a Bresciano accent" which is my mother's region, "but you stand like an American" " then he said we are all Americans today-- I hope you enjoyed my food, don't worry about the bill, and then he said we will see each other again" And in the subtle Northern Italian way he affirmed me in a time of pain. A simple gesture that I will not forget.

I think that is was fitting that I would experience September 11th in the land of my Mother's family- a place so dear to me. So many people go to Italia and love the colored Italy of Tuscany or Naples but I like the working Italy of Brescia, Verona, Milan and Vicenza, the Italy of the hard nosed hardworking people of the North-- where kindnesses are genuine.

In the end that feeling from that dinner in Verona are from a time as remote as the Borgia Popes from today. George Bush decided that having the world respect and care for Americans would hurt his political chances and so he threw that all away. The America of the Marshall Plan, Berlin Airlift, Peace Corp and all the rest has been murdered by George Bush and his friends- we are now like every other empire but with a lost soul. When I go to Italia now I have to feel ashamed of our ignorance and stupidity and I pray that someday I will again have a feeling like the one I had from a genuinely kind man in Verona on September 11th 2001.

Two Books that Changed my Life

In the fall of 1985 I was a freshman at the University of Iowa and I read two books that changed my life. In many ways these books were tandem in history and they have always been in tandem for me as a poet and a person. It is the 50th anniversary of the publication of On the Road by Jack Kerouac and next year will be 6o years since the Publication of The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton.

Kerouac's work gets dismissed often today because it is such a male book. We have become a feminised literary scene where expressions of maleness are treated as odd or oppressive. There is nothing female about Kerouac and this has elicited negative responses but like Merton's book and the Confessions of St Augustine Kerouac's journey is one that is taken by a man into his soul and he comes out as a new creation. In reading Kerouac I realized that I could fuse my Catholic self with my poet self with my child of immigrants self and make myself something new.

While it might seem strange Thomas Merton is doing the same thing. Merton unlike Kerouac is fancy people. Child of intellectuals- bon vivant- who chooses the most austere order in the Catholic Church. His book the Seven Storey Mountain is viewed today as naive but in many ways it encapsulates a Catholic sense that comes out in other writers as diverse as Flannery O'Connor, Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh. The romantic allure of ruined monasteries, Rome and monasticism that makes the hokus pocus of Catholicism seem romantic and real. Merton's book is again a male book but one where instead of going on the Road like Kerouac he goes into himself and contemplates.

As a 40 year old poet and professional I often go back to these books as pure mind candy. I have moved on from much of them but they remain lodestars for me and they allowed me to remain what I am a Catholic, a Poet and a questor. When I moved to South America these were two of the books I brought along and they sit with Motorcycle Diaries by Ernesto Guevara as the greatest inheritors of Augustine's Confessions as books of journey and questing for more than the ordinary.

Time more time for Poetry

Today driving to work (it takes about an hour) I was listening to Francine Prose talking about Novels and writing on the Bob Edward's Show. It was nice to hear that someone is making money from their creativity.

I usually get up very early, like 330 AM I sit and breathe then I eat breakfast, I write, and then I work out . I am at my desk at 7 AM for work.

I have always been jealous of MFAer Pro Poets because they get so much free time. It is true that because I work in Business (I am Director of Events for a Business Publisher) I make allot more money than they do but time is always missing. I talked once to Ron Silliman about this he is another poet/business person and he feels that being outside of Po-Biz gives him more freedom I am not always sure that this is true.

I am always stealing time- like I am right now blogging- on airplanes or in hotel rooms or early in the morning to work on poetry or essays to remain engaged with the poetic and to listen for the still small voice and to create good work.

Mark Tardi always says that 'in the end the work will stand up or it wont. " I am not so sure about that? So many poets have either family money or academic insider status that their work is published more readily than work of others.

There is allot of great poetry out there but having the time to do the political work of po biz helps so much. How else does anyone explain Fence? A perfect example of the poetic dilettante magazine that caters to this world of MFAers, Pro-Poets and Biz Poets who are good at playing the game. Rebecca Wolf is a great marketer and I wish my company would hire her but as a poet/publisher not so much.

So time remains a constraint. I worked for my Dad for three years and I had allot more time to do stuff but most of it was the kind of Po Biz political stuff that really has nothing to do with poetry and much more to do with Socializing- I have ended this trend in my life. In the end I look at poets with whom I am friends who are committed to the Work of poetry and wonder why they are not recognized as readily and I wonder if the work really matters?

It is funny too because now that I own a book press people are NICER than before I get readings more easily and I get called for stuff but I doubt it is because of the WORK. In the end I wonder if those of us with less time on our hands are any less productive than the MFAer Pro Poets?

The Poet it seems in Capital Letters is dying. I look at the generation before me, Duncan, Notley, Silliman, Bernstein, and the Generation before that, Creeley, Olson, Waldman, and I wonder do any of us measure up to them? Find me a poet who is as good as Alice Notley? Or are we all made up phenomenons coming from Blogs and Websites? Who has the range of great poets from America's past, not even talking about non American poets who blow away our poetry easily.

I know who I like, Peter Gizzi is a master, Liz Willis too, Lisa Jarnot makes me proud to have been born in 1967, Chris Glomski makes me proud to have gone to Iowa with him at the same time even though we were not friends then, is their any poet more real than Joe Ahearn, Joshua Clover is a Villagevoiceesque poet but you know I cannot put his books down and I have come after much vomiting to love Joyelle Mc Sweeney's verseplay. I know that I have come to enjoy Simone Muench's tight lines and Mark Tardi's darkness-

Time- Time- Time

- if I only had more of it--- maybe I could get up at 2 AM??

il Purgatorio

purgatory that place between heaven and hell where one is purged is the place where White Sox fans now dwell. I imagine this is what Cubs fans felt like two years ago- and I don't like it.

The Cubs, the embodiment of evil is the Postmodern World to paraphrase Ronald Reagan are in First Place. They seem to know how to play ball and for someone whose heart and blood in Black this is Purgatory.

In Chicago you can tell allot about a person on which baseball team they support. Cubs fans are attractive optimists, Sox fans are unattractive pessimists. Sox fans have anger under the surface, Cub fans have hope under the surface.

It separates us.

Quietly however I hope the Cubs win (while I will be rooting for their adversaries at every chance) because I am tired of the of the HBO specials and the celebrities and that aweful GO CUBS GO Song that makes me want to vomit. The loveable loser thing is disgusting and makes this White Sox fan sick.

In the end there are a few Cubs fans I respect- Like Mark Tardi and you have to respect a Southside Cubs fan; but in the end some of my deepest sports joys have come at the Cubs expense, Bartman, 1984 against the Padres (Still have my Padres Hat) it is pure joy for me but it is less joyful because I know what a World Series Champion feels like and maybe-just maybe Mark ought to have that pleasure once in his life as well....

Go Cardinals!!

Intellectualism

As we enter August it signals the end of the summer and the beginning of fall. When August arrives I always think of fall at College that sense of wonder and possibility that Thomas Merton called the scent of October.

I have been fortunate to know many great intellectuals, Brian Clements, Robert Creeley, Simone Muench, and Elizabeth Willis and what makes these people different from us mere mortals is that their minds are vexed and question while remaining open to what could be.

I was watching recently a show on Mark Rothko and here again do we see this openness. It is this openness that challenges and also causes revilement from the society. Our society hates thinkers we love money men and in the end we
stop listening.

America's Violent Temper

America celebrates its birthday tomorrow. You know "We Hold These Truths to be Self Evident that all men are created equal".

The other night went to a reading at a really cool loft- lina vitkauskas read- she is so great a real poet's poet. before her some blonde woman read some syrupy-didactic poetry- it was dreadfully banal the kind of soft mushy liberal poetry that I hate with no snap and no tension just sweet mushy bread pudding. Get thee to a workshop immediately!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I was thinking about what she said however about "peace" and "love" (YUK) and I kept thinking that is really not what America is about. America is about violently creative people who are self destructive and who in the end force our society to change. Violence not Peace is what has made America, America.

This is central to our national character. Think about it- Faulkner, Hemingway, Pollock, Plath, Sexton, Merton, Dean, Brando, and on and on they represent a violent self destruction that makes America- America.

Got some Brazilian relatives staying with me this month and I always like to compare Brazil with the USA. Both big countries with histories of slavery and immigration. Brazilians are huge nationalists like Americans but the difference is the creative violence. There is lots of senseless violence in both the USA and Brazil- but creative violence is really an American thing.

It is not PC today to talk this way- most of our academic types have bought into a kind of mediocre multi-culturalism that thinks about feelings and forgets about deep meaning. But would you rather go in your bed? Or in a speeding car like Jackson Pollock- 200% alive?

Why Did I wait for Summer?

Having known the sheer joy of winning a World Series makes the situation with my beloved White Sox even worse. If I were a fan of the woebegotten Cubs and I could understand this blundering mess but these are the White Sox. Most of the players were on our Championship team and we got swept- in the Cell- by the Cubs.

Most people outside Chicago do not understand the difference between Cubs Fans and Sox Fans. If you are an optimist you are a Cubs fan- wait till next year fun in the Sun- clean sidewalks. If you are a Sox fan you are pessimist, after my leg is chopped off in the smelter I will have a beer and get liver cancer and then go home to my little house. Sox fans however have something that Cubs fans do not they are really thick skinned and thick bodied. I wish in my heart I could be one of the pretty people at the shrine in Lakeview but I am too dark and too thick for that.

I have to say that I looked forward to this season- a year away from our championship- we won 90 games last year and looked good in spring training. But why do I waste my time watching this team? Why do I listen on the radio and why do I continue? Because of Luke Appling. Luke Appling, the greatest White Sox shortstop ever- from a franchise that produced Chico Charesequel, Luis Aparicio and Ozzie Guillen was the only reason Sox fans went to Comiskey Park in the 1930's and 40's. He played his hardest everyday for a terrible team. In the end it is because Sox fans are stoic and we like our pain quiet that I remain loyal and I think of Luke Appling hitting 388 for a team in 4th place. I think of my first game- meeting Bill Veeck and
I abide in my fandom.

Misogyny and Manliness

Being masculine is not something that is held up as a virtue today.

The reality is that being masculine has become a parody of itself. A parody of Iron John or ESPN or male bonding and as far away from the kind of thing that truly is masculine.

In feminist circles there has been a rediscovery of the Goddess. The Goddess is an essential human thing that has been ignored or crushed by our society in the west for a long time. It comes out of course in the person of say Mary the Virgin or Shakespeare but in the end it is the Feminist scholars who have resurrected this reality for us.

But among men and in discussing the spirituality of Masculinity we get mostly garbage. A few attempts have been made. Robert Bly and his Iron John tried but became parody. On the right there is allot of talk about Masculinity but it usually ends up in Misogyny or ourright woman hatred. So where we we go to reclaim our Mithras as the Women are reclaiming their Cybele or Isis?

In my life I have had great Male role models who were masculine but never misogynists and who have been guides for me. I think that we as men need to look to models like the ones I have seen.

I am working on a new book of poems that are about and around Leni Reifenstahl and her work. Nazism is the best manifestation of Misogyny and Homo Erotic Manlove that has ever existed. Reifenstahl is the best example of this aesthetic. What becomes evident in her work is that the men are masculine but never caring, they are models but never warm. Reifenstahl's men are to real males as drag queens are to real women, they are in fact false parodies.

This is kind of like the masculinists I see today in our world. Some Harvard professor wrote a book Manliness- it made me sick. When I think I masculiness I think about the soldiers of World War I and in particular my Great Grandfather Emanuele Guerra. He was an Alpino and Italian mountain soldier and after he was captured by the Austrians he was put in a cement cell where one of his hands froze off. I also think about someone like Vladimir Horowitz a craftsman who was fine in all he did. Husbandry, Craft, Stoicism, Solidity these are male virtues that are in fact the opposite of the parody. In the end the parody is oppression. The doltish stupid beer swilling woman hater at hooters is wrong and we Males have allowed it to florish because we are weak and because we refuse to be uncomfortable.

Evil

After a reading last night by Mark Tardi and Stefania Heim a bunch of us went out and one of the myriad of discussions was about evil- and can it exist? Simone Muench asserted that to have evil you need a God creation and you need to have the kind of world-view that allows for mysticism and the spiritual as active forces.

I may be very Medieval but I think that evil and good are tied together in the same way that flesh is filled with cells. It may sound very Gnostic but
without the Ascetic imperative all of life becomes weakness. While I myself am a very bad ascetic- in fact I can be a glutton-it is the imperative of the ascetic that stands in the face of evil and makes things clean.

I have always been moved by the Desert Fathers and Mothers of the 2nd and 3rd Centuries in Egypt. Antony of the Desert who was one of the first Monks talks about going to one's Cell an wrestling with evil and that in that silence we face God and are purified. The kind of asceticism that Antony felt was important is not valued in American culture. We are good at 'playing' buddhist or listening to the lauds in our homes but we are not very good and denying the flesh
to purge ourselves and see what could be gained from a lack of softness. We are in fact a soft people. Our religion, the Evangelical variety or banal Catholic is a religion of the soft and the accomodated.

It is out of the Ascetic Imperative before evil that greatness arises. In the 2-3rd Centuries the Monks of the Desert stood silently against Rome and persecution with this asceticism. In the 12th and 13th centuries, the Kabbalists, the Sufis and the Franciscans all with the same motives but different expressions stood against evil and created out of a hard time glories. These ascetic
responses are remembered but who today remembers the exploits of Crusaders or Saracens? But everyone knows who Isaac Luria, St Francis or Rumi are. In the 19th century in America the Shakers, the Abolitionists, the Knights of Labor and more stood in ascetic witness against evil and made a change. And in our times Martin King, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Charles De Foucould, Mother Teresa, did the same. Asceticism before evil.

It was argued that Evil may be the result of brain dysfunction.

I am not so sure that we can let those who allow systemic evil and who take advantage of their lack of empathy off that easily. Can we dismiss the Genocide in Darfur as the result of brain problems or trauma done to the perpetrators? I think in the end without Evil there is no place for Metanoia.

That is the key is it not?

Metanoia, a profound change of heart, is essential for any prophetic voice before evil. All too often banality and vapidity are accepted. We do not challenge people to have a Metanoia. Gandhi was the biggest proponent of this he said that if one faces evil and creates a tension with evil and forces evil to look at itself good has won. What Gandhi wanted was to create in his oppressors a change of heart without evil Gandhi's project was a fools errand but it worked how do we explain that?

The End of the Sopranos

David Chase the creator of the Soprano's was born David De Cesare-he felt it was neccessary to succeed in Hollywood not to have an Italian name.

I mention this because this Sunday is the last new episode of the Sopranos. It immediately becomes a hacknied thing when Italian Americans complain about our portrayal in American culture. The fact that two supreme court justices, CEOs, Poets, Artists, Singers and Authors are all Italian Americans is lost to most Americans.

Most Americans want to think of us as Don Corleones. The reality is that there are people you can be bigoted against in American society without any consequences. If you created a TV series about New York Jews who were money grubbing Shylocks the outrage would be loud and the series would be off the air.

If you created a series about African Americans that played on those stereotypes again there would be outrage.

But do a series on Italian American mobsters in New Jersey- no problem. Stereotype Catholics, Mormons, Arabs, Evangelical Christians, Rural People, Working Class People not a problem. If you did the same things to other groups you are a Bigot- but you stereotype these people and make millions.

HBO seems to have a penchant for this. After the Soprano's they are debuting the new season of Big Love- which promotes the stereotype of the another group, Mormons as polygamists. The fact that the Mormon church has not had polygamy since 1890 should not get in the way of a good story.

I have to say that I have enjoyed and been engrossed by the various Mafia movies. The issue is not freedom of expression or the need to tell that story which is part of our history. The issue is the cost of stereotypes for groups that are not protected by our new political correctness.

America has become a victim society. We have affirmative action for all kinds of groups and reasons. We treat the descendants of Slaves- who deserve reparations for true oppression-with rich white women as oppressed groups. While other groups who have also been oppressed are taken advantage of over and over again is this justice?

Should not we be honest with ourselves? If we like stereotypes- and want to use them for profit should we not be free to use them all? Why all the political correctness?

Follow the money.

Sexy Poets

At a recent gathering at my house Chicago Poet Daniel Borzutky mentioned that Andersonville- a Chicago neighborhood is full- of Sexy poets. I began to think about this stable of sexy bards......

Robyn Schiff, Nick Twemblow, Jen Scappettone, Chicu Reddy, Suzanne Buffam are all part of this sexy scene

Finding sexy poets is difficult in America- many american poets are socially awkward or are simply losers who use poetry as a social shield against the reality that no one really cares what they think or do. No body gets all hot and bothered about Ron Silliman or Gertrude Stein- they just do not elicit the hormonal response.

The conventional sexy poet can become boring quickly and most of them have names like Cate, Rodrigo or Joshua. I prefer poets who have a little damage to them and a bit more flesh. There are whole anthologies of Sexy Poets- like Legitimate Dangers, no ugly fat poets in that book. As a fat ugly poet I felt descriminated against but I ate Veal and liked it.......

In the end the sexy poet's are the belle's of the ball- especially in poet-land where so many poets are awkward and odd. Chicago is blessed however to add to the sexy list above

many other sexy poets, Simone Muench, southern fried sexy, Chris Glomski, sexissimo, Bill Allegrezza sheer Italian passionman.

So come to Chicago and see the Sexy poets....

The Challenge of Freedom and the Ignorance of Reality

I have never supported the Iraq war or our current president's policies but I also have never supported those who assert that the problem in the world is the United States or its view of freedom. So I get to be hated by both sides which is a nice place to be in life.

The reality is that many on the Left are naive and stupid believing that there is a moral equality between Islam, even moderate Islam and the West.

I know that it is not politically correct to say these things but there is so much revisionism going on and self flagillation that it is important to state simple facts.

I recently watched a show on PBS about the Inquisition where the screenwriters tried to assert that the rule of the Moors in Spain was benign and delightful. Sure their rule was more benign then the rule of the Nazis but it was not in anyway akin to liberal democracy or a free society.

Jews and Christians still had to pay the head tax, Churches and Synagogues were still siezed in many cities and converted to Mosques. Facts are facts.

In the West we decided a long time ago after much struggle that Religion is a private matter. That the Church should not have governmental authority, and that one's relationship with God is a personal matter that should help a culture but not decide what culture is to be.

So when I read a book like Marina Nemat's Prisoner of Tehran- and listen to the many criticisms of her especially on Islamic sites and magazines my blood boils. Ms Nemat is an Iranian Catholic who complained as a 16 year old student that her math and science classes were replaced by Koranic studies and propaganda.

She was thrown in prison, raped, forced to marry a man who 'saved' her from death forced to convert to Islam and then after two years of horror let go. She eventually immigrated to Canada and wrote a moving story that everyone should read. When one talks of Women's rights here is what we really should be talking about. Her story would be sad if it were simply an isolated case but this is not so.

In Iran, Saudi Arabia and many other Islamic nations her story of torture for speaking out on simple things is normal. There is a distain among Muslims in many nations for the idea that Religion and Ideas are personal and are not the business of the state. In Saudi Arabia a Philipina woman was raped, and thrown in prison for three years for simply making the sign of the cross in her room alone while praying the Rosary- she was turned in by her employer.

I am not arguing here that Islam is evil, it is not, but what I am arguing for is Thomas Jefferson's idea that religion should not have the right to compel people. Just like the Catholic Church (My Church) had no right to torture and kill in Spain in the 15th century- no state should have the right to compel people with torture, rape and death. Freedom, even if your nations has allot of oil should be universal. What George Bush's foreign policy has done is to destroy this simple argument. We as as nation are no longer able to make this argument because we tortured people. We should stand forcefully for what we are- Free People.

The City Visible-Chicago Poetry for the New Century

Chicago, my hometown, is known for allot of things.

It is perhaps the most Roman Catholic city in America. At one time everyone in the Chicago area identified themselves by their parish, even if they were not Catholic. This sense remains the case but less so but of course when Pope John Paul II died it was normal to see every Polish, Irish, Italian and Mexican tavern in the city with the Pope's picture, often over the bar, and the funeral Mass on the TV.

Chicago is also known for its tribalism, its racism and is roughness but it is also known for having the greatest symphony in the world, seven great universities, the best Hot Dogs anywhere, two great Baseball teams (One I love and one I hate) and the best architecture outside of Italy or France. Chicago is a great place and when I returned home four years ago I was instantly satiated.

Poetry has also been a great gift from Chicago. Some bad poetry has come out of Chicago for example the uninspired slam scene which is vapid and uninteresting but some really great poets as well have been formed here- Sandberg, Anania, Hoover, Monroe, Mac Low, Carroll and Chernoff are all Chicagoans and poets who have made the world better and have busted through.

Cracked Slab Books (www.crackedslab.com) is the press that I own with my friend and partner in crime William Allegrezza (it is appropriate that two Italian Americans run a Poetry Press in Chicago LOL) and we have just come out with our Anthology, The City Visible, Chicago Poetry for the New Century. This anthology is the record of a poetic conversation in Chicago from 2000-2006 between many groups in this city who are writing with experimental modes. We wanted to create an anthology that focused on experimental poets and poets who use international influences in their writing but who live or work in this- the most American city.

I am very proud of this book. It brings together very diverse voices, groups, religions, races and styles and makes poetry new again- which unfortunately our friends at the Poetry Foundation have forgotten about as they promote Kay Ryan and Philip Larkin-- in our anthology however is poetry, cut from the bone like meat in our long closed stockyards. Tonight is our second reading- at Powells north on Lincoln at 7 PM- if you come and read this on the Irascible Poet I owe you a beer--- Chicago Style

An Elemental Thing

Los Angeles, May 3, 2007

I am in LA for work and I picked up Eliot Weinberger's new book An Elemental Thing for the trip. As I write this I am a fan of Weinberger but this book is really something. What he has done is to take a whole slew of very interesting subjects and to do essays on them that are readable, intellectual and fascinating.

All to often essays and essayists are boring self absorbed

morons who would rather talk about something arcane like what kind of makeup Truman Capote wore or the quality of Fenway Park Green. Weinberger is a serious essayist and I would argue that he is a true heir of essayists like Viktor Shklovsky who fuse the avant garde with everyday to make something truly amazing.

There are many essays in the work that are gripping one is about the Nazca lines of Peru. As many know I lived in the Andes and that idea of spiritual geography is so interesting. The idea that the lines, coupled with Huacas (Sacred stones and piles) are so interesting. He also talks about the Andean writing system Quippus which were bundles of knotted cords used to record history and money. This essay alone makes the book worth reading but there is much more.

His essay on the Mandaeans is so interesting. He deconstructs this Middle Eastern sect and shows the world that irony and scholarship are possible. He also wrote a bio essay of Muhammed which is in many ways better written than most translations of the Quran.

The last words of this book are "wonder alone in the vastness of the world" that is what Weinberger has done and his work will remain seminal and we can only hope for more books and more writing to satiate our dry literary world.

A Continuing Echo

Two Weeks after returning from Istanbul I cannot get the echo of the Call to Prayer out of my head. I cannot get the image of the bearded men in the pantaloons in Fatih and their veiled wives out of my mind.

I want to be a liberal- I want to be open minded but for a Christian, even a Liberal One Istanbul is a place that makes one wonder and think about his/her place in the world.

I keep thinking about the panels in Hagia Sophia, where each the panel crosses were removed

with at chisel systematically, I keep thinking about the icons and mosaics of St Savior in Chora with their smashed faces and desecrated bodies and I ask myself what is it that makes us one?

The thing that haunts me is that my people have done the same things. In Spain and Sicily we did the same things to Mosques and Synagogues but one some level most Christians don't care

because it is evil being done to another. In Mexico and Peru the same things.

This sense is the reason that most people in Europe in the 1930s and 40s said nothing about the holocaust- it did not effect them why should they risk? Why should they try to change and he hurt by courage?

I cannot believe that when Abraham was called by God (YHWH, ADONAI, ALLAH) 6000 years ago he meant for his children- as numerous as sands on a seashore- to be like this with one another. I have heard all the stories- Islam is a religion of war- Christians are Crusaders on balance we are equally flawed and sinful. But why is it that as we pray to same God we continue to commit atrocities?

Less than 10 years ago Orthodox Christians in Bosnia- murdered unobservant Muslims for revenge for a battle in 1389. In the Middle East in Lebanon and Cyprus Muslims and Christians continue to kill each other. In Iraq Shia and Sunni kill each other over a family dispute 1400 years ago. Why is it that Islam could produce a Sinan or a Rumi and Christianity a Dante or a St Francis and Judaism a Buber or a Heine but we continue to kill each other?

I go back to the smashed icons of Istanbul- and the desecrated mosques of Palermo and wonder?

That Intellectual Look

That Intellectual Look......

The other night at our local poetry group we were waiting for one of our members- Jen Scappettone to arrive and the group of us were watching Garin Cycholl's orgasmic MLB package.

When Jen entered the room she gave us "that intellectual look" you know the look? Like what the hell is this? This is a waste of time this is silly or worse unimportant. I really like Jen she is a great poet and great intellectual but she is the master of the intellectual look.... maybe we need to spend a few nights at the Cell..... or at Schallers???

But in the room were great poets and great Baseball fans.

I love poet ball fans,

Mark Tardi- the closest poetic equivilent of a wirey shortstop-

Mike Antonucci, a grizzled hard first baseman,

Garin Cycholl the poetic equivilent of Stan Musial,

Bill Allegrezza a graceful centerfielder,

Brian Clements a sure handed second baseman,

Joe Ahearn a powerful DH- poets all.

Oh and me, a broken toothed catcher......

I have never understood people who view Baseball as just a sport? What other sport has such characters? or Babe Ruth, what other sport has changed America- Jackie Robinson, what other sport gives you daily diversion and deep thinking? I get more often from a great ball game then from a group of poetic intellectuals reading their musings... baseball- a cool clean change. Poetry readings are less so... but I love them too.

I have to say that apart from getting married, and publishing my first book my greatest joy was watching my White Sox win the World Series. It is April, it is snowing in Chicago and yet there is a ball game on tonight the Sox are playing the Indians (I hate the Tribe)......... such joy.

Holy Thursday

Holy Thursday has always been an important holiday for me.

As a child we would spend it with the Vincentian Fathers in Lemont, Illinois. These wonderful wacky radical priests were my first introduction to feet washing and processions.

Later when I was in Bolivia I had the most moving Holy Thursday of my life when Father Benoit a Capuchin with whom I worked did the Mass for that day and asked each inmate in the jail where I worked to wash the feet of those around him. I always go to Mass on Holy Thursday and today was no exception- Traudi and I are in Istanbul on our 10^th anniversary trip. We ventured to the Beyoglu neighborhood here in the city to attend Mass in Turkish, Italian, English and Tagalog. Beyoglu is the only place in this city where one feels the fresh air of post modernity- in some areas like Fatih it is closer to the air of the Prophet than to the post modern world.

Being in Istanbul for the past week and being a Christian a sense of loss is everywhere. We have visited over 10 former Byzantine Churches including the Church of Churches, Hagia Sophia. The desecration of these great churches is jarring for any Christian and while I know that these things happened 500 years ago the melancholy of the desecration still sits on you darkly. I am sure the way Muslims feel when they enter the Alhambra which we desecrated 500 years ago. To stand in Hagia Sophia and know that the Eucharist will never be celebrated in that most Christian of spaces is a sadness that will stay with me.

Once on a business trip to Cordoba, Spain I escaped a day of trade shows and associations to visit the former great mosque of the city. I remember thinking what must it be like to enter the mosque- as a Muslim-and see it now changed into a Cathedral.

What it must be like to be cut off from the place for prayer and know that you are separated from the place by the violent act of force.

Istanbul, the former Constantinople will cause a feeling in your soul. Istanbul is a fabulous place- a place of legend and a place of ghosts. To be in Istanbul during Holy Week also makes one think about the future.

Touring former Churches with hoards of Spanish and Italian tourists who probably never enter Churches in their home nations and wondering how many of their fabulous edifices will be desecrated in the same ways in few years time when no one will attend Mass anymore in those nations?

In the end Istanbul is a city if ghosts and of memory and the fact that it is Holy Week and so few people here even think about remembering that fact in this the city consecrated to the Virgin Hodegetria is a thought for all of us in the West to ponder- Deo Gratia

The City of the World's Desire

Tomorrow Traudi and I will go to Istanbul (constantinople). It is a fullfillment of a long dream for me. The characters emitted by that city have made the world that today exists. Constantine the founder of the city changed the world by making Christianity a state religion. During a time when Western Europe was filled with barbarism and death it was in Constantinople, Cordova and Baghdad that learning continued.

I have always had a romantic tie to Byzantinism. My family is from Northern Italy and all you have to do is go to Venice, Ravenna or Aquilaea to see their glory. Today the city is Turkish and all that makes that culture great is there. I will be blogging from Istanbul and will let you know what it is like to stand before Hagia Sofia and proclaim Solomon I have Surpassed you.

EL-DE Haus-Kathe Kollwitz

http://www.museenkoeln.de/ns-dok_neu/

I was in Cologne last week for work. Amidst a week of very hard work there were a few respites. On Saturday I spent the day with Jesse Seldess-Chicago poet and new resident of Karlsruhe, Germany.

It turned out to be a moving afternoon.

Jesse and I are very different poets and people- he is thin and I am fat we do not share ethnicities or religions but we what we do share is recent memories of being American. Jesse's family were refugees from Germany in the 1930's my family from Italy in the 1950's so unlike many poets being American is important for us and also a point of pain and memories.

Most German cities look like 1950's suburbs. Most of the cities in Germany were destroyed by Allied bombs and this in obvious in Cologne. Jesse and I first visited the Kathe Kollwitz museum in Cologne. Kollwitz is one of my wife Waltraud's favorite artists and her images of family and anguish of the First World War are profound. She was declared Degenerate by Hitler and died, heartbroken in Germany in 1945. Her museum was profoundly personal with dark prints and drawings a welcome respite from the hyper materialism of modern Germany.

Jesse and I then decided to visit the EL-DE Haus Cologne's Nazi museum. I have visited concentration camps but I was very much moved by the EL DE haus because of its banality.

Unlike a camp out in the woods this house is right on a main street a building that could have been a post office or a bank. But when you enter you are transformed.

In the basement are the torture chambers and cell. There is a smell of death and pain and on the walls are written the sames and graffiti of prisoners on their way to death. I spied one

Guiseppe Longarotti- 16-5-1944- what did he do to get put in that cell?

The museum tracks Nazism in Cologne a nice rich city that over a 10 year period destroyed four synagogues- and expelled 17,000 of their neighbors for being Jews. In fact the very fairgrounds that I spent my week at were used as a staging area for the Ravensbruck camp. I kept thinking about all the faces and people who were killed by their neighbors and I cannot get their images out of my mind. But I have no right to be selfrightious. America has never dealt with our evils the way the Germans have. No American child learns that we killed millions of natives and enslaved millions of others.

But one thing that Jesse and I agree on is that what makes America unique has been broken by George Bush and his henchmen. America is unique because only here could we create such people as Mark Twain, William Faulkner and Walt Whitman. We have no right to judge the Germans because while they burned books and people in the 1930's we careen down a similar road having learned nothing from the EL-DE Haus

EL-DE Haus-Kathe Kollwitz

http://www.museenkoeln.de/ns-dok_neu/

I was in Cologne last week for work. Amidst a week of very hard work there were a few respites. On Saturday I spent the day with Jesse Seldess-Chicago poet and new resident of Karlsruhe, Germany.

It turned out to be a moving afternoon.

Jesse and I are very different poets and people- he is thin and I am fat we do not share ethnicities or religions but we what we do share is recent memories of being American. Jesse's family were refugees from Germany in the 1930's my family from Italy in the 1950's so unlike many poets being American is important for us and also a point of pain and memories.

Most German cities look like 1950's suburbs. Most of the cities in Germany were destroyed by Allied bombs and this in obvious in Cologne. Jesse and I first visited the Kathe Kollwitz museum in Cologne. Kollwitz is one of my wife Waltraud's favorite artists and her images of family and anguish of the First World War are profound. She was declared Degenerate by Hitler and died, heartbroken in Germany in 1945. Her museum was profoundly personal with dark prints and drawings a welcome respite from the hyper materialism of modern Germany.

Jesse and I then decided to visit the EL-DE Haus Cologne's Nazi museum. I have visited concentration camps but I was very much moved by the EL DE haus because of its banality.

Unlike a camp out in the woods this house is right on a main street a building that could have been a post office or a bank. But when you enter you are transformed.

In the basement are the torture chambers and cell. There is a smell of death and pain and on the walls are written the sames and graffiti of prisoners on their way to death. I spied one

Guiseppe Longarotti- 16-5-1944- what did he do to get put in that cell?

The museum tracks Nazism in Cologne a nice rich city that over a 10 year period destroyed four synagogues- and expelled 17,000 of their neighbors for being Jews. In fact the very fairgrounds that I spent my week at were used as a staging area for the Ravensbruck camp. I kept thinking about all the faces and people who were killed by their neighbors and I cannot get their images out of my mind. But I have no right to be selfrightious. America has never dealt with our evils the way the Germans have. No American child learns that we killed millions of natives and enslaved millions of others.

But one thing that Jesse and I agree on is that what makes America unique has been broken by George Bush and his henchmen. America is unique because only here could we create such people as Mark Twain, William Faulkner and Walt Whitman. We have no right to judge the Germans because while they burned books and people in the 1930's we careen down a similar road having learned nothing from the EL-DE Haus

The Fires of May 10th 1934

I picked up this book at Seminary Co-op. To say that it is fascinating and horrifying is to make a banal statement. In this work which has recently been translated into English Jean-Michel Palmier tells the world about the oppression of poets, writers and artists whose work truly mattered.

I often find the lack of political engagement among American poets disturbing. I want to scream

NO ONE CARES ABOUT YOUR PERSONAL BULL SHIT!!!!!!!!!!!! NO ONE CARES ABOUT YOUR VIEWS ON SOME OBSCURE SINGER OR ART PIECE!!!!!!!!!THERE ARE MORE IMPORTANT THINGS.

In reading this book you see what an engaged intellectual class means to a totalitarian. Alfred Rosenburg, one of Hitler's henchmen once said "Whenever I hear the world Culture I reach for my Revolver" would anyone want to shoot you for the poetry you write?

In Weimar in Exile there is a section I have just reached about the book burnings of May 10th 1934. The books that were burned were the finest works that Europe ever produced and the intellectual life that was crushed by Hitler has never returned to Germany. Weimar gave so much to the world. All I have to do is look out my window in Chicago at the buildings that Mies built here instead of Berlin to see what Germany lost.

America has never been an intellectual country. But it has been our intellectuals who have determined our fate. Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Gertrude Stein, Henry David Thoreau and the rest defined us as a nation and all their books have been banned and burned. Who are the intellectuals who oppose our current Fascism?

I look at the thinkers of Weimar and I wonder.

Red Light Banana Split

Red Light Banana Split

I don't ask complete strangers to pose for me
Husky is a term of endearment- what they really mean is fat.
A hologram of open oysters crushed on the rocks fed our need for speed.

Strippers do not Lap Dance for Homeless Guys. The money is not there
It is in Las Vegas and Halliburton.

George Oppen and Louis Zukofsky
Slapping Jack Kerouac until
He dies of bruises and hemotomas.

Katzen

a Franz Marc painting.
He died you know? In a trench wasted like
Surge troops - Walter Reed- with paintings
Still in his fingertips.

The easiest way to make money is to prostitute
But your flesh becomes raw- like chop meat
And when you do this to yourself
And no one wants to be with you
Again.

When the IED enters into the body it tears the flesh
And the helmet cannot be removed
It is fused to the bone
As we listen

Surge into life
Wonder what happened?
Kristalnacht
Yourself

The scab is ripped off
The irony of lists and filofax
Printemps
Primavera
Crucify your listenings

Caesar

The View from Our Window

I received an email from William Allegrezza that his Nonna, Mary, passed away at 96 this week.

Bill is a great friend, I always refer to him as my Uomo Di Fiducia or my man of trust.

One of the bonds I have with Bill is that we both have Nonna's and we are rooted in someway in Italianita' .

It is often a hackneyed thing to write about family. Very few writers or poets can do this well. But among Italians- be they Italians in Italia or Italians in the diaspora family and especially our matriarch's are central to our lives. I am convinced that this emphasis on Mama is very ancient.

Why is it that Latin nations have such a fixation on women- and yet they are macho cultures?

Why is it that Mary has chosen to appear in France, Italy, Spain and Mexico and her shrines are huge there but in northern Europe they prefer strong male images? I think it has something to do with the fact that we are all descendant's of female deities. It is not the warrior that feeds the Mediterranean sea with myths- it is the Goddesses Athena, Cybele, Artemis, Diana and Mary.

It is having the Goddess in our midst that creates the myth of the mother in the Italian and other Mediterranean mindset. So I grieve with Bill for his Nonna because I know that a woman of strength is unique and powerful and that a woman of strength who is the center of a family is something that our culture gave to the world from its inception.

The Image on this post is a photo I found on the internet of the view from the window of my family's hotel in Italy. It is the last image my Great Grandmother Lucia ever saw, it was the spot where my Nonna, Matilde who is 93, watched the men of Vestone being marched off to their deaths in Russia to fight for the Germans, it is the place where they also watched the arrival of the Americans and the murder of the collaborators in their midst and today it is a great place to have coffee or a glass of wine. When I think of Le Nonne I think about this spot- and I think about Bill's family and the pain of the loss of the central character in life's opera.

AWP and the Problem with Poetry

AWP happened this weekend. I chose not to attend and I read instead in Iowa City, at Prairie Lights with fellow Iowa Hawkeye and Chicago poet extraordinare Chris Glomski.

I have attended AWP twice once in Chicago and once in Austin Texas and each time I have come away with allot of cheap and great books and a sense that what is wrong with poetry is encapsulated by what is wrong with AWP.

Poetry is a lifestyle hoice.

To be a poet is the be inducted into a community that has at its center a love of language and a revulsion of ease and simple answers. Poets are those people who encapsulate what is to be critiqued and to be discussed and in Ezra's words make things new always.

AWP is the conference of writing programs. While I think that writing programs are important and needed I feel that one of the problems with poetry today is the standardization of poet's lives. Many poet's feel that the way to build a life as a poet is to get an MFA and then get a teaching job so that you have time to write. Arielle Greenberg in her seminal essay on this subject put it well - the MFA is where you obtain connections to get a good job and build a poetic network. How many poet's in writing programs are older? How many are working class? How many are non traditional? How many have actually lived as adults?

The trajectory of networking has nothing to do with poetry and has everything to do with money and power. Poetry requires risk and requires living in the world as it exists. Jen Scappettone told me once that you need to live your life and see where the poetry takes you- to live on the edge.

Nothing of the sort is happening at AWP. AWP is a place to make connections and to professionalize yourself. But being a 'professional' poet is ludacris unless you are Pablo Neruda. As poets retreat into academia and are published by ever smaller presses and websites they abrogate their prophetic role and retreat into hipsterdom.

In the end getting together with other poets for mutual strokes is ok- but it is not poetry. Poetry requires active engagement with language and with life. When I was in Iowa City this weekend after our reading I realized that in the end does poetry matter? Of course it does-- but another question is worth asking- if you were to be executed for being a poet would your work cause you to be killed? If it would not maybe you should rethink being a poet?

Fundamentalism and the Circle of Death

Infidel

Ayaan Hirsi Ali. In her book Infidel deconstructs fundamentalist Islam but you could in many ways Replace Islam with any number of Christianist fundamentalists and achieve the same result.

Quotes from Amazon.com

"when you meet the unbelievers, strike them in the neck" -- were direct quotations. "I hated to do it," she wrote, "because I knew that I would find bin Laden's quotations in there." And there were consequences: "The little shutter at the back of my mind, where I pushed all my dissonant thoughts, snapped open after the 9/11 attacks, and it refused to close again.
I found myself thinking that the Quran is not a holy document. It is a historical record, written by humans. . . . And it is a very tribal and Arab version of events. It spreads a culture that is brutal, bigoted, fixated on controlling women, and harsh in war."
That moment led Hirsi Ali to her most profound conclusion: that the mistreatment of women is not an incidental problem in the Muslim world, a side issue that can be dealt with once the more important political problems are out of the way. Rather, she believes that the enslavement of women lies at the heart of all of the most fanatical interpretations of Islam, creating "a culture that generates more backwardness with every generation."

We in the West should be clear about what we believe.

Infidel a word that has been used by Muslim and Christian to denote someone who is outside the community- in Christian the Koinonia, in Islam the Umma. Since the Hejira and the birth of Islam the Greco-Christian and Semito-Islamic worlds have been at odds.

It is intellectually dishonest to call one community better or smarter or more advanced than the other. While my ancestors were tattooing their skins blue and living in Feudalism the Islamic cities of Cordoba, Baghdad and Cairo were the centers of world culture. But later when Europe was developing the Enlightenment Islam went into decline. The debate between the Islamic and Christian worlds is long and bitter. Despite the best efforts of well meaning liberals Muslims and Christians have never lived together in peace and mutual respect. Not in Spain, not in Sicily and not in Anatolia in all of these places one ruled over the other with bare toleration never equality.

In Islamic nations Christians and Jews are treated as Djimmi’s and Christian nations like Armenia were eradicated in Christian ones like Spain Islamic culture was destroyed and the Muslims forced to immigrate or convert our history is long and acrimonious. It is not helpful to pretend that either group is better or worse both are equally guilty.

The fact is however that in one part of the world-until recently- Muslims, Christians and Jews and other groups did live in harmony; Europe and North America. The fact is that Liberal Democracies with a strong separation between Religion and State have proven good ways to keep Islamists and Christianist extremists at bay and allow for dialogue.

This sense of separation has been challenged of late by religionists on the Left and the Right. Be it Liberation Theology, Islamic Fundamentalism, Christian Fundamentalism or Hindu Fundamentalism the great Liberal secular consensus that was established in the American and French Revolutions and confirmed by men like Gandhi and many others has become a challenged doctrine.

There have been many reactions to reform movements that Ali wants so much for Islam.
In fact today’s fundamentalisms are responses to reform. Wahabi Islam began its life as a reaction to Sufism with its emphasis on tolerance. In fact before Wahabism was born the Sufis were quite powerful in Mecca and around the Islamic world. Wahabism made sure that this tolerance ended.

The same is true in Christianity. The Pentacostals and Fundamentalists that arose out of Reverend Darby and his group were created in reaction to the Social Gospel. Fundamentalism is born of intolerance.

In the middle of this century a Christian consensus developed with Protestants, Catholics and Orthodox working towards shared goals. This was best embodied by the Second Vatican Council and after words. The fact is however that quaint notions of peace and justice embodied by thinkers like Martin Buber, Thomas Merton, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Oscar Romero, and Dorothy Day are repugnant to the strain of religious believers embodied today by Islamic Fundamentalists and Christianist Fundamentalists who are in fact two sides of the same coin.

Questioning fundamentalism is not bigotry.

This is what all Fundamentalists do they demonize others saying if you disagree with them you are a bigot. If you want a dose of this turn on Fox News. The red herring that bigotry against ‘christians’ or ‘muslims’ comes from questioning particular beliefs or societal rules disarms those of us who believe in tolerance.

I think that it is important to say that I am a religious person but if I try to impose my particular religious beliefs as a national practice, if I demand that my particular views are embraces by society then I should be discriminated against because I am asking for something unreasonable.

This is the issue is it not? Tolerance is a fine value but Freedom is a better value. People should not have the right to oppress others even if the majority feel that their views are Godly whether they are Osama Bin Laden or Focus on the Family.