1998-2008 Ten Years Back in the USA

2008 marks ten years since I returned to the USA from living overseas. The anniversary of my return was in March but I have just been thinking about that time in my life now for some reason?

In 1990 I graduated from college and I floundered around a little and then decided to become a Lay Missionary with the Franciscan Mission Service in 1993. "missionary" is a charged word so I usually use volunteer which is really what I did. I worked in the men's prison of San Sebastian in Cochabamba and in every book of poetry I write that place is part of the story. The prison is still there the same I guess and it was formative for me. Men and their families living in wooden boxes in the worst conditions- but overcoming that to have some hope.

Bolivia is a great place. For a morning person like me Bolivia is the best the people get up early and go to bed early and the days are filled with activity and action. I learned to be poet in Bolivia working with the inmates for whom poetry was really important quotes from Vallejo and Neruda came off their lips like sports scores. I could see how poetry could transform a place and it has stayed with me. My entire life now hinges on Bolivia- before Bolivia I was one person and after I changed into the person I am now. After three years in Bolivia I went to Brazil to work- not as a volunteer but as as a business person.

Brazil is everything Bolivia is not. Bolivia is austerely beautiful and conservative, Brazil is sumptuous and outrageous, Bolivia is Indigenous, Brazil is Polyglot. But I fell in love with Brazil and of course I met Traudi there. I spent most of the time from 1994 when I arrived in Bolivia and 2003 working or living with Latin America. I have travelled or lived in over 22 nations and the truth is I feel more at home there than here. After I left Brazil in 1998 I continued to work with South America and to translate poetry and to engage with that world.

So now in 2008 ten years removed from my return in an election year I wonder about the reality of our lives? The truth is that I have allot less when I lived in Bolivia and Brazil and I was happier. Simplicity does often breed contentment and that was true for me. Waltraud my wife an I have committed to return to Brazil to live and when that days comes it will be returning home for me- as much as my return to the US in 1998 was a return home then...

calm before the storm

The Internet and the Blogs are filled with tumult and terror over the state 0f the world's economy. These fears do not bother many poets because they dont work in the economy but this terror is real. The truth is however that it has been many years since Americans have had to worry about the state of the economy but like a house that has been eaten by termites America is weaker and we are wondering.

One of my friends who also happens to be a poet Mark Tardi is leaving Chicago to work in Lodz, Poland for a year as a Fulbright Scholar. In Chicago we become immune to thinking of Poland as a foreign land since there are so many Poles here but Lodz has a history worth repeating. It was a great center of Yiddish learning and during World War 2 it was home to the Lodz Ghetto one of the worst Ghettoes in the Nazi system. Today Lodz is a cultural capital in the new Poland.

I think that this is what makes Chicago different than New York. In New York the predominant groups are Jews, Italians & Puerto Ricans. These are all outward looking groups with a history of commerce and expansiveness. In Chicago the predominant groups are Poles/Slavs, Irish, Germans, Blacks and Mexicans. What all the Chicago groups have in common is hard work and strong spirituality. It makes the two cities feel different. Chicago is a stay at home city, New York is a go out city. Chicago is a city of Home owners, New York a city of renters.

This also applies to our Presidential Election. Barack Obama is a Chicagoan. He chose to live here and Chicago for all its culture and dynamism is a really big small town this informs allot of what he believes in. John McCain is a hero but he is not REALLY from Arizona like Barry Goldwater was he is from the Navy.

Kay Ryan is Poet Laureate

Kay Ryan is the new Poet Laureate of the United States. To listen to the few critics left in poetry she is an innovator but can any poet who is a follower of Ted Kooser be an innovator? I realize that the post of Poet Laureate does not mean much but when you think about the many poets in the United States of her age that could be chosen as Poet Laureate you wonder if the goal of the Library of Congress's goal is to put us all asleep.

Is Obama a Soft Liberal? or is he Ronald Reagan on the Left?

http://michellemalkin.com/2008/07/16/educating-the-ignorant-kumbaya-

Unlike many on the Left I like to read Right Wing Blogposts- just so I can get mad at them. Michelle Malkin is one of my favorites because she is so ridiculous. She is a Philippine-American, whose parents are immigrants. Yet she had argued that the interning of Japanese Americans was justified during World War 2 and she has also argued for deportations of millions of illegals. I am just glad Michelle's parents got in before their daughter discovered native ism .

Right Wing pundits almost always avail themselves of all liberal society she went to Oberlin College- and married outside her Religion but her Right wing bonafides are perfect.. She makes money feeding the Right Wing hate machine and making those less 'educated' than her feel better about their odd ideas.

The latest diatribe from Ms. Malkin is posted above. She asserts that Barack Obama is some sort of Lefty Social Worker and that he believes that if we just talk to Osama Bin Laden or if the 'terrorists' can just come to America all would be well. She asserts that Obama is a Kumbaya singing dope who is wandering down the garden path and will be taken advantage of by the big bad terrorists.

The truth is that the dope is Mr Toughness in the White House who has kept us 'safe' for the past 7 years.

• The worst Terror attacks occurred when Mr Toughness- George W Bush was President. These terror attacks continued in Spain and Bali all under the watchful eye of W. No Democrat or Leftist allowed these attacks to happen W did. If George Bush and Condoleeza Rice had just taken the Intelligence seriouslyit might not have happened.
• When the attacks occurred the entire world was on our side. We had a moment when we could have rolled back the appeal of Militant Islamic Fundamentalism. But our government under Mr Toughness chose instead of trying to gather the nations together to oppose the real threat of Islamic Terrorism chose instead to Invade Iraq. Saddam Hussein was a bad man, but he was no worse than Robert Mugabe or Sudan's president Umar Hassan Ahmad al-BASHIR but we did not invade those nations. We chose to invade an Arab country, occupy that country, and then proceeded to run the most bumbling occupation of that country. This caused our reputation in the world to drop to new lows and to give Islamic Terrorists their best recruiting tool.
• Along with the above failures, George W Bush continued to support his oil friends and oil magnates around the world. W did not prepare us for terrorist attacks by removing their funding source, which is predominantly Western capital buying oil. That money is used to finance terrorism. He in fact continued to support regimes that support terrorism like Saudi Arabia and that use our money to finance their groups. W's level of incompetence led us to the mess we are in now.
• Finally, most in the Republicans power structure are not concerned with American interests. They are concerned with the interests of multi-national corporations. Tom Friedman in his book The World is Flat talks about the two classes of people one of those being the globalized class and the other those left behind. The Right in the USA is the Trojan horse for the globalized class. They use 'moral' issues and patriotism to create a great diversion for the middle class in America- so while we are worrying about the Flag or Gay Marriage- they are taking care of their friends and continuing to destroy American freedoms and American jobs. This great game of evasion and delusion is central to their project.

Barack Obama scares the Right in so many ways. Barack Obama is the Left's version of Ronald Reagan. Before 1980 no one would have ever thought that we would "de regulate" our economy it was too radical. We have now reaped what was sewn then with the Airline industry for example. Before 1980 Religion was a private matter in the USA and no one would have believed that one's 'relationship' with Jesus would be a campaign issue. The agenda of the Right was made palatable by Ronald Reagan.

The Right knows that Barack Obama can do this for Progressive Issues. A person with Obama's skills just might win the war of ideas with militant Islam and change the global debate. A person with Obama's skills just might convince Americans that we can solve social problems together as a people and deliver health care security to everyone thus taking away a major issue from the Right? A person like Obama just might be able to assert that we have more in common than we have that separates us and that the old wedge issues don't work anymore?

So it is not about Kumbaya-it is about Ronald Reagan and the fact that the Democrats in 2008 have found their Reagan the realignment has begun.

Obama? ignorant and soft? Or the True Realist?

http://michellemalkin.com/2008/07/16/educating-the-ignorant-kumbaya-candidate/

Stopping you in your Tracks

One of the most valid critiques of Language Poetry and much of Post-Language poetry is that it is about nothing. Or more directly it is about a crazy Marxist theory that has become uninteresting, didactic and authoritarian.

While I do not concur with this critique always- I often find myself wanting more meat and less foam in my poetry and so much of the Avant Garde is foam. It is nice sometimes to see that a poetry has more to it then just irony and theory.

I wrote on this blog that the greatest poets of my generation are women. But this might also be said for the generation right before mine. Poets like Alice Notley and Barbara Guest are certainly as great as their male contemporaries and someone who I think ranks with the most important poets of current times is Harryette Mullen.

I have read poems here and there before but I bought Recyclopedia which is a collection of three books, Trimmings, S*Perm**K*T and Muse and Drudge and brought it with me on a recent retreat to New Mexico. I brought allot of poetry with me- Dante in Italian, St John of the Cross, Julianna Spahr, Jennifer Moxley, Simone Muench and some others but Mullen's book rose to the top like a Gnocchi in boiling water just asking to be read.

"two shapely legs stretch then run. Sheer magic, a box div
ided. One saw a woman cut in half, waving incredible feet"

P 10 Trimmings

lines like this just wait in the woods for you and then jump you leaving you injured and bleeding in the same way that one feels when they have been violated. The lines are lyrical but they are also innovative. There is something there but there is also-- not.

slandered and absurdly slurred
wife divorced has-been
last man on earth hauls ass to the ash can
his penis flightier than his word

come on! Could you emasculate and then challenge in any other way than poetry? The work is so clean and so challenging. Mullen does not wait for you to figure it out-- she draws you in slowly and then puts the ice pick right into your forehead.

I began to bring this book with me to prayers with the monks and after the psalms and the magnificats I read them- aloud in the monastery's chapel and they melded well with David and John' Gospel because they are also truth not facts.

What is Wrong With AWP??

AWP the annual meeting of poets, writers and the writing programs seems to be off the rails in their panel decision making.

AWP benefits from the explosion of Creative Writing Programs. It is a good place to meet and network and occasionally to see friends. One of the areas that many attendees cannot understand is how they decide on panels?

Next year's AWP is here in Chicago and I was on two panel proposals. The first was co-sponsored by the Poetry Center of Chicago's director Francesco Levato and included John Tipton (Chicago Poetry Project), Paul Hoover (Long time Famous Chicago poet), Larry Sawyer, (Animates the Myopic Series, & Simone Muench a very well known Chicago area poet. I am frankly flumuxed at why this panel was rejected? AWP is happening in Chicago and this panel on Chicago poetry seemed perfect for the event.

What is wrong with AWP??

The second panel proposal I was on included poets Eileen Tabios, Sheila Murphy and Catherine Daly and it was focused on Poets and work. Our goal with this panel was to talk about what it means to be a poet and not to be an academic but rather to be working in other fields but still engaged with poetry. Again, I am flumuxed at this panel's rejection. Most MFA students will never get jobs in Academia so why not examine the world as it is??

I have to say that the rejection of these panels and the Chicago poets who were involved with them does not send a message of inclusion. I have to say that there are allot of Chicago poets who are dismayed at the rejection of the Chicago: The Intersection of Innovation panel that Francesco Levato proposed. It makes me wonder why they are coming to Chicago?

Another beef I have with AWP is there complete lack of outreach to the Chicago literary community. Who is on the organizing committee? I don't know one poet in Chicago who is involved in the planning and I know allot of Chicago poets. I know at least 25 or 30 Chicago area poets who would be good contacts for them. I for one work in Event Management and would be willing to help free of charge to help them with their efforts.

I also think that AWP'sof exclusion of poets and writers who are not academics is narrow minded. Most MFA graduates will work outside academia. I think that what is called for is an organization that is focused on poets and writers and not writing programs. Most writing programs are cash cows for Universities but they need to realize that writing is bigger than what they are doing.

I would be interested inhearing from people whose panels were accepted. I have been told about many other panels that have real merit that were also rejected.

Who makes these decisions?

Who is a man behind the curtain?

Chicago Anguish-Chicago Baseball

Forget about poetry and politics. Forget about other things it is mid July and Chicago matters in Baseball.

To be a Chicago baseball fan is to share a collective anguish.

Cubs fans are rich and tragic. They are kind of like a beautiful young woman who get cancer at 25 and dies unfulfilled.

Sox fans are less rich and more angry. They are kind of like a fine cabinetmaker who had had a hand chopped off and wonders what might have been?

Only once have our two tragedies met in the World Series, 1906 102 years ago. That is so long ago that Los Angeles had only 67,000 residents and Model T cars were the latest technology to be developed.

Having said all of this it is July 7th and our two anguished teams are in first place. Each day all of us- fans of the north and south open our papers and see that we are still on top.

Chicago our great city is the best in many things. You can keep New York or Los Angeles-- if you dont know the corner of Clark and Addison or 35th and Shields you do not know what anguish feels like. New Yorkers swagger, Los Angelinos coif Chicagoans are filled with dread that we are not good enough because of our two baseball tragedies.

Boston, New York--- maybe only Brooklynites could understand the way we both feel.
and we hate each other also by the way. The hatred between Cubs and Sox fans is old and deep but like an abusive couple we understand each other and when it is cold and dark in February we react the same way- yearning for sun and baseball.

We are the teams of Ron Santo and Minnie Minoso of Ernie Banks and Luke Appling.

We are the city of mud and muck and home made mountains of architecture. But we are still in first place. Could it be? Could we play each other in October. I have been graced with a World Series in my lifetime for my team in 2005. But it would be something to play THEM in a World Series. To have the whole thing to ourselves-- Cubs-Sox World Series, President Obama......

Nelson Algren is slapping Richard Daley somewhere and Ida B Wells is giving Marshall Field what for....

Could the Tragic Cubs win?
Will they Beat us?

Anguish will not allow such speculation.

Independence Day

The Fourth of July has always been a strange day for me. I have had some major things happen to me on that day.

In 1994 I was living in Cochabamba and July 4th was the first day I began work in the Prison of San Sebastian. This was a transformative place for me in life and it was my own declaration of independence.

But by the far the best 4ths I have ever had were spent in Pinzolo-val Genova the hometown of my Grandfather celebrating with the Grinders.
When Michelle Obama talks about being able to take care of a family on a working class income she is talking about a certain kind of person- someone like my Grandfather Rinaldo Vanzo.

He immigrated to New York in 1920 and worked on Houston Street as a Grinder- that is he sharpened knives. Most of the Molete in the USA came from one place, val Rendena in Trento. This valley was famous for two things Knife Grinders and Catholic Missionaries.

In the town of Pinzolo the entire tourist infrastructure was built by returning Molete who made their money in Detroit or New York or Chicago and today companies like Cozzini in Chicago are traded on the New York Stock Exchange. Pinzolo today has a monument to the grinders who returned to Italy after years away and introduced so much to that region of Italy. They also gave so much to their adopted nations.

These grinders went to the US, Australia, South America and Canada and they would return to Italy and gather on July 4th to eat Polenta of course. They all were from the same towns but they spoke english with accents from Boston, New York, Chicago, New Orleans and Australia.
As a child I was amazed by these men (they were all men). I was amazed by their optimism and their solidness. There was nothing weak or flaccid about them. For me they will always be America.

My grandfather spoke Italian, German, Yiddish and Hungarian and his clients were European, Asian and African American. the grinders did not care as long as they could sharpen your knives, and supply you with cutting tools. They also grew to understand that every person's culture was special and had value. I grew up eating Jewish Deli and Tub Butter, Hungarian pancakes and the best fried Chicken all gifts from my Grandfather's clients. All were treated with respect and were valued by him.

When my grandfather died in 1980 he was a wealthy man- not just in money but in friends and family. The attendees of his funeral were a United Nations of restaurant owners and people whose faces were as different as the colors of the world. He is buried in North Arlington, New Jersey his coffin faces New York and he has a great view of the city he loved and where he made his fortune.

His story is lost in today's America because there were no wedge issues for him. He did not hate anyone and he only wanted to partake in what everyone else was doing. He was without bigotries or elitism. When Michelle Obama talks about the solidness of her father I think of my grandfather Rinaldo Vanzo for whom I am named and look for the America where someone like him can be more while taking everyone with him. That is why we need a change in America- so the next wave of Rinaldo Vanzo's can build their lives and enjoy what America really is about.

Comfortable Poetics

Early this year I went to a play by Carla Harryman at the U of Chicago. The event was like most other poetic events- lots of piercings, tweed, and odd handbags and glasses.

I went with Garin Cycholl who is a fine poet and someone who writes and risks. One of the things I love about Garin's work- and our press Cracked Slab Books is doing his newest book Rafetown Georgics-is that the work is both opaque and subject driven. It has history and is concerned about big things.

The Harryman play itself was interesting except that one of the 'actors' gave his lines to an audience member to read creating a kind of farce that destroyed the tension of the play. The lack of seriousness on the part of this 'actor' has caused me to think for a long time about seriousness and comfort and our poetry. I kept thinking "how dare this child desecrate what is happening here" yet this is part now of our poetic landscape.

There are many great poets writing today who write innovative things and do it well. Having said that the depth of their risk and the degree of their comfort makes the work less compelling. I see it here in Chicago allot. You have poets who are living the poetic lifestyle and writing good work. But something is not right and then you find out- oh they have a trust fund or some other thing removes the real risk. Their writing of poetry is a fashion and later in life they will move onto something else they are not that invested in the work.

I think that there has been a profound division in poetry between risk and comfort. I think that this began in the 1960's and 1970's as a reaction to the Beats and other poets who took politics and injustice as themes. There has been allot of talk here in Chicago recently about Language Poetry because a few Chicagoans ventured to Maine to a conference on the 1970's. I have always thought that Language Poetry while aesthetically very interesting is a poetry of comfort. I mean by this that it is a kind of inside joke that subverts via language but in the end is so opaque that college professors and cognoscenti are the only ones engaged with its nuance.

This is not to dismiss innovative modes of poetry, collage and parataxis are really important to me as a poet- but I have always wondered if Language was a reaction to the 1960's when everything was political?

Pound wanted to write history. Duncan wrote a kind of poetic theology. I always wondered what was the 'big' thing that Language and by inference the entire Post Language poetic landscape wants to write?

Is it irony? Is that the big thing?

I know many readers of this blog have sat through sheer opaqueness in a poetry reading. Once I sat through an entire poem using Marxism and Buddhism as its base using innovative modes. After a while the poem became so much of an inside baseball exercise that I did not know what to make of it? I read it and read it again. and again... nothing. Just artifice and inside jokes and little snickers- on the whole not satisfying it was kind of like he wrote the poem for his friends and the rest of us were just out of luck.

Does anyone else wonder if all this poetry is just opaque to protect the poet from having to deal with society? I am often drawn back to Akhmatova's life thinking about what a poet is supposed to be. There is an image of Akhmatova writing to Stalin to achieve the release of her husband and son. Stalin- this is Stalin- is moved and releases them for a time. The power of who Akhmatova was for that society moved him to act. I also think about Celan and his work and its quiet- turbulent challenge to the world around him. The fact that Celan of all poets of the past century tore open the carcass of the world and laid bare the entrails.

I know that it is passe to want poetry to be heroic or have a big project. But, there is still something compelling about big ideas and big artistic desires. There is a reason that when I drive to work each day and pass Frank Lloyd Wright's home that the street is a better place for having that building rather than say a Popeye's Chicken or a gas station.

Silliman's Blog and Poetic Specialization

In my most recent post on the Irascible Poet I miss spoke- i said that Ron Silliman lives in the non-poetry world- and he corrected me that he lives in the non academic world.

This prompted me to think about the reason that we all read Ron's blog. Ron Silliman and his blog is a phenomenon in poetry. He mentioned a post once here on the Irascible poet and within five hours I had 4000 visits so of course Ron's work has influence.

But why?

There are two reasons I think that Silliman's Blog does well. Ron's blog is in many ways an echo of older ways of doing poetry.

Most of our poets and poetries today are created in academia. This creates in many poets a hot house effect. There is little real risk involved in the work it is written to satisfy an academic discussion rather than an artistic one. Few poets make their living writing poetry. This makes for a narrow discussion in the poetic marketplace.

In the past however poets and poetry were in dialogue with art and artists in general. All one has to do is remember that at the Cedar bar in New York in the 1950's Pollock and Creeley were sitting at the same tables. Frank O' Hara was an art critic, there were many others. This sense that poets were part of a larger artistic movement was important and is lost as most poets specialize to fit into the world as it exists today. We dont see many collaborations anymore film and visual art are not in dialogue with poetry as was the case in the past.

On Silliman's blog this type of dialogue continues. It is interesting because on most blogs you get bits and pieces. Poets put up their own poetry or their own readings but on Ron's blog we get film and art reviews. We get commentary about a very large range of subjects, including Baseball which is appreciated. There are of course criticisms of this blog. Ron tends to favor certain types of poets and his asthetic is not always the most interesting but at least there is the kind of cross pollination that is lacking in other venues.

I think the reason for the success of the Blog is that it is not specialized. I exist as Ron does in two worlds- one poetic and one in business (the publishing events business in my case)- this changes the way one views both worlds since they are so different. But in some ways not being an academic frees one to partake in other artforms and to absorb more of the world without the need to exist in academia for one's bread. This freedom lets Ron be more critical and more open that would normally be possible. I find that this lack of control on his part makes the blog work. I also think that the lack of poet speak makes a difference.

I was told once that the difference between Olson, Duncan, and O'Hara and today's poets is that they were public intellectuals. This, I think is the issue at hand. Most poets today are specialists they do one thing well and they understand how to function in a specific environment. That was not true about Olson or Duncan or O'Hara and it is not true about Silliman's Blog.

My questions about Language Poetry and Flarf and other movements are basically focused on the idea of the public intellectual and this dialogue. I wonder if these movements are simply an easy retreat into the academic bosom as not to be challenged by larger forces? Perhaps that is the critique? Do we retreat into our own epistemological system or do we engage with the world as poets?

Is what we are doing small or is it big? Do we exist among other artists? Or do we exist within the academy?

The Magisterium of Poetry

Saturday night talking with poet friends about a conference they just attended in Orono, Maine about the poetry of the 1970's I began to think about the magisterium of poetry. There is in poetry a group of poets who define meaning because they have time to do so. The tell us what to believe and in many ways they function like the Magisterium in Rome.

I have felt for a long time that poetry has been moving away from art and toward a kind of conciliar structure. This of course has always been true in art and poetry but it seems poetry in many ways has become that in spades. Poetry is a rarified world that is not open to market forces or to popular forces. In the past poetry and writing in general was a marginal exercise. Poets were either bon vivants or prophetic figures and they looked for an audience- not just an audience of friends and colleagues.

I remember once in an 19th and 20th century philosophy class I asked this question "Professor after all this Philosophy and all these great thinkers the Germans supported Hitler wasn't all this for naught?" The ideas did not matter that came out of the philosopher's mouths but they had absolutely no effect on the society. All the great philosophy had no impact because power mattered and ideas were crushed.

I often feel this way about poetry.

It is true that in America poetry does not have a strong prophetic history. But I cannot help but ask the question what has Language Poetry or Flarf brought to the essential dialogues? In talking to these friends one thing that comes out is the sense that Langpo with its Marxist roots is a closed system- kind of like a birdcage that the canaries know. My question is does this system do anything more than it pretends to do?

I have always been attracted to poets who want to do big things. Poets who define culture and who walk on a big stage. There are many poets whose work creates a world that is larger than the parameters of the Buffalo list or Barrett Watten's living room. Many of these poets are what would be termed Avant Garde- at least at their times but they are concerned with something more. It is not fashionable to talk about big things but if poetry does not strive for this what are we doing wasting our time?

I realize that in some way I am a heretic.

There is a poetic magisterium which defines-- but perhaps poetry in the American idiom needs to think about a bigger stage? The Flarfists have done some interesting things- but I don't see any of them going to jail for their poetic challenge. The Language Poets are allot like Conservatives- they are harkening back I almost feel like the current langpo progenitors would be really comfortable hanging out with the late William F Buckley.

I think about poets of my generation- Jennifer Moxley, Chris Glomski, Garin Cycholl, Lisa Jarnot, Catherine Daly and others and I get the sense that they are truly post modern in the sense that they conglomerate Langpo with older forms and deep reading to make something new. But I also wonder if something new is possible? Is prophetic possible?

Maybe the sing songy poetry of Charles Bernstein's Girly Man is all we have left? My New York Times keeps shrinking- Chicago might be a NO newspaper town- and books are to be digitized. So maybe poetry is a farce? But then I think about great poetic prophets like Celan, Robert Duncan or Osip Mandelstahm and I am satiated a little bit.

Most conferences are attended by people who dont work for a living in the non-poetry world. Ron Silliman mused about these conferences and cannot attend them since he like many of us lives in the non-poetry world. I think in the end that we can do allot of navel gazing but that poetry should be prophetic- the way St Francis was prophetic- and all too often this is snickered about; but if poetry does not have a prophetic role then what role does it have?

No one reads poetry for entertainment.

Iowa is what a University is to Me

Please Consider donating to the Iowa Red Cross. Eastern Iowa has been devastated particularly Cedar Rapids and Iowa City.

http://grantwood-redcross.org/menus/index.html?main-menu.htm&2

Like most Chicagoans when I arrived in Iowa City in the fall of 1985 I though I knew everything. I did not and I learned that Iowans are a different breed, rural, liberal, open minded and loyal. If any group of people can overcome these flood waters they are Iowa Hawkeyes. Watching the University of Iowa, my Alma mater being engulfed in floodwater's I was overcome by a deep sadness.

For me the University of Iowa will always immediately lead me back to the fall of 1985 when I first arrived there as a freshman. That fall of 1985 so many things that have become central to my life entered my understanding. I first fell in love with Thomas Merton, I learned about him from Professor David Klemm's classes. Merton in the Seven Storey Mountain talks about autumn on a college campus where all the classes look great and all is possible. That was certainly true for me. In my freshman year David Hamilton gave me a love for Ezra Pound, Lane Davis taught me to love politics. A simple art appreciation class taught me to love Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock.

I was very blessed to be a freshman in Iowa City.

Many of my friends went to Ivy league schools and I got into a few of them myself but when I visited Iowa with my parents I fell for the place. There was something about the whole thing- it looked like a University. There was a spirit to the place and this filled everything. In the end I enjoyed every moment at Iowa. The crisp air and the football weekends and the art and the poetry readings all made my life fuller that it might have been otherwise.

I was living in Bolivia in 1995. While walking down the Paseo in Cochabamba on a cold June day in my old Iowa Champion sweatshirt an old man come running out of a cafe. He came up to me and in perfectly inflected Iowa English he said, 'Go Hawks'. Martin, a local Iowa graduate, and I became friends he was a 1937 graduate and he played on the Basketball team. Martin worked as a medical doctor in Bolivia and he never returned to the campus after he moved back to Bolivia. His first question to me was "is the Pentacrest still the same?"

So watching the waters rise made me think about where I have been in the 19 years since I graduated. Taking with me what I learned in that place and remaining always loyal and indebted to the University of Iowa. I also remember all the fun including some great football which is as much a part of Iowa City as the Writers Workshop or the Pentacrest. Iowa for me was what a University should be. Safe and challenging, open and tough, and mind expanding.

I have already sent my donation to her recovery....

Returning After Retreat

Spending a week with the Monks of Christ in the Desert was a great experience for me as a poet and a person. There is something about silence and simplicity that makes one go to the roots of what is going on inside.

The monks of this very international group live a life that is very old. While they are Benedictines (5th Century) they are also tied to the Egyptian Desert Fathers of the 3rd Century and back to a time when men and women took asceticism very seriously.

Today what is revered is 'success' but to these monks and to others what is revered is practice and being in communion.
It was a pleasure to partake in their live's and to understand how far we live from these ideals. I often think about the great ascetics, John the Baptist, Buddha, Gandhi, Jesus, the Yogiis and Zen masters and wonder what motivates them? And do I possibly have any of their strength?

So as I begin my day at work I think of the Wisdom of the Desert.

If Barack Obama is Al Smith- Then is John Mc Cain Herbert Hoover?

In the New Republic, John Judis argues that Barack Obama is more like Al Smith than John F Kennedy and that he will lose the presidency. This begs the question if Obama is like Al Smith than is John McCain Herbert Hoover?

Most Americans forget that until John Kennedy's election Catholics were reviled in this country. In fact according to a Gallup Poll Taken in 1955 45% of Americans said they would never vote for a Catholic. In the same poll only 22% said they would never vote for a Jew. In fact today almost 30% of Americans have a negative view of Catholics.

Anti-Catholic Bigotry is in the words of Arthur Schlesinger America's oldest hatred. and Al Smith who was a successful governor of New York and a great leader was nominated in 1928 to be the Democratic Nominee a Catholic and the son of immigrants.

Smith Faced train stations surrounded with Burning Crosses, he suffered from editorials that excoriated not only his Catholicism but the fact that his four grandparents, one Italian, One Irish, One German and One English were all Immigrants and Catholics. Ministers preached against him and he lost the presidency to Hoover.

While Hoover never uttered a bigoted word his supporters did. He was supported by bigots of the first order and he never challenged them.

Is John Mc Cain going to be that man this year?

Is he going to allow the grandchildren of the Klansman, the Reverend Hagee's of the world to use the kind of racist rants and quiet bigotry to destroy Obama so that he can be president?

Republicans have been winking at these people for 40 years and making Abraham Lincoln turn over in his grave.

This is the question.

The Republicans have become masters at the silent ascent. Ronald Reagan began his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Why would you start a campaign in the place where the three civil rights workers were killed in 1962?

Silent ascent.

Republicans have also used other hot button words to separate Urban Catholics from others by using language like "changing neighborhoods" and Busing to win elections where their goal is to simply gain power.

Silent Ascent.

When Republicans talk about "socialized medicine" or other issues what they are say is you are not like "them". Is John McCain going to be like Hoover? Is he going to allow the bigots and bloggers to convince America that Obama is crazy black muslim from Chicago?

This is the only way that Mc Cain can win this year and I am sure he wants to win by any means necessary so get ready to relive 1928 all over again.

Unless America has grown tired of silent ascents?

Christ in the Desert Day 2

Christ in the Desert Day 2

Well I have survived since three o'clock on Sunday without speaking. I have gotten allot of writing done and I have talked to myself.

I was always attracted as a younger man by the romance of religious life. There was something romantic about people like St Francis or St Francis Xavier or the Jesuit Reductions or Thomas Merton. Something about being so separate and prophetic. It was a romantic notion then as now.

My personal interest in religious life wavered in the face of my own weakness and all of the unfortunate baggage that has been created by scandal and human weakness. But having said that there is still something great about it all.

Being here with the monks I cannot help but think of what monks have given to humanity. Forget about the saints for the moment and think about this fact monks were the ones during the entire period from the fall of Rome until the birth of printing that saved the written word. In the year 600 only 3000 people in Western Europe could read or write according to historian Warren Treadgold of those 1/2 were Monks and Nuns. We owe monks quite allot. The Arabs learned about Western knowledge from Greek and Syrian monks so we all owe monks many of the books we currently read and for our history.

So my stay here is uneventful. The deep quiet is so disturbing. It is a good change though removing oneself from life and stopping. Too much of our lives is spent on chatter and noise and quiet and contemplation are needed. Having said that I will barely make it to Friday.... Peace

Ray

Retreat Christ in the Desert Day 1

Christ in the Desert-Abiquiu, New Mexico

Day One

June 2, 2008

When I decided to take a retreat after working long and hard on the event I manage I chose Christ in the Desert by chance. Sure my mom had been here once but I would have much preferred to go to Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky or Mepkin in South Carolina but they were full. So I chose this place.

I have to say to this point that my choice was good one. Christ in the Desert is a Black Benedictine Abbey. That is they are the OSB order as opposed to the Cistercians or Trappists which are also Benedictines but are a later reform. This Abbey is trying to live the rule of St Benedict and in our after post modern world that is a struggle.

This morning I arose at 330 AM (I normally get up at 4 AM so this is no big deal) and I walked in pitch darkness from the guest house to the abbey. The stars here are un blemished by lights and seem larger- I guess being at 6300 feet will do that to you. The weather has all the seasons in one day, 40 at night 95 during the day.

The monks here chant the whole office- this morning was from 400 AM until 830- quite allot of praying but I guess I need it. My life in Chicago is good but it is devoid of contemplation and quiet. There is something always ‘on’ ipod, work, Sox Game, Phone. Here there are no cell phone signals and you area cut off in a fabulous valley of red rocks and an adobe monastery.

I actually wrote this morning for three hours. I have not done that for a long time. Poetry tends to come in bursts for me and rarely in long stretches. It was nice to do that work and not think about other work.

I kind of view these monks like I view my poet friends who lead charmed lives (Simone Muench, Robert Archembeau, Joshua Clover, Peter Gizzi, Jennifer Moxley, are good examples) they sacrificed money and prestige to become poets and teachers and now they have time and perspective to be poets. Those of us who did not make that choice are of course green with envy which is of course deadly sin. They are in some ways like the monks here. These monks gave up the active life but they now live in community focused on what they love the most… I think all artists are in fact the descendants of Monks and their quest for quiet, devotion and focus.

So lets see what happens here.

Can I really make it for 5 days in silence…. Stay tuned

Nixonland and Obamanation

http://www.amazon.com/Nixonland-Rise-President-Fracturing-America/dp/0743243021

When Barack Obama gave his speech in Philadelphia on race he acknowledged something that only a Chicago based politician could have- that not all Working Class Whites are Racists and that they have often been used as whipping boys by Liberals and African American activists for their legitimate fears.

The fact that Obama admitted this and understands that the dialogue between "white ethnics" and African Americans is broken is as good a reason as any to elect him president. Because he can see both sides means maybe we can move beyond George Wallace and Stokely Carmichael.

My life (I was born in 1967) was punctuated by three events. These events hit me early in life but to this day they are viscerally part of me. The first was the 1967 Newark, NJ riots. My mother is from Belleville, NJ and when she was growing up it was a leafy suburb of Italians five miles from the nice middle class city of Newark. That is where they settled when they moved from Italy and I remember as a child the clean and safe two and three family houses and their patriotic and interesting occupants. It was an area in decline in the early 1970's but it was obvious it had been a nice place once.

My grandfather (also Ray) was a knife grinder or Moleta. He started out on a Brooklyn street sharpening knives and he built the American Grinding Company into a large business- when he died in 1980 he left a comfortable retirement for my grandmother and thousands came to his funeral. He spoke Italian, German, Yiddish, Hungarian and some Chinese and he knew every restaurant and butcher shop in Essex and Bergen counties he was a figure.

One of my earliest memories, I think I was four or five was going to visit a butcher shop that he did the knives for and asking him why every other building on the street, Springfield Avenue, was either burned, boarded up or an empty lot? He told me because "they" rioted a few years before an all the businesses were burned. For a five year old this was a strange idea? Why would people burn down the businesses of my Grandfather's friends?

Later in life we moved to Chicago. We had a family friend who lived in Chicago, in the Austin neighborhood. This lady was a nice Italian lady who knew my grandparents. But over a few months we stopped visiting her home and she moved away- losing the house she lived in for 30 years. According the my parents her neighborhood "changed" and "they" had changed it. This profound sense of loss and the resentment felt by people like my family is why for many years Democrats lost votes in our communities. It does not make it right but it is important to not discount its impact.

Finally when I was 8 in 1975 I sat in the living room with my Air Force Veteran father and watched as helicopters lifted off the rooftop of the American Embassy in Sai gon. My father had many friends who served in Viet Nam and who died there. This was the first time I ever saw horror on my father's face. The Vietman veterans I knew were all "ethnic" and they served out of honor and duty and our nation treated them like refuse when they returned. This too fueled resentment of "them".

In Nixonland, a book by Rick Perlstein the political attitudes of my "people" are chronicled. The real result of the 1960's, for all the good that was wrought was a fissure where people like my relatives- (my Grandfather was a delegate for Adlai Stevenson in 1956)- and my parents became Republicans. In 1980 the last year of my Grandfather's life his last political contribution was to Ronald Reagan.

An era of political paralysis- that currently damages our country still because of the profound fissure that the events that I felt as a small child millions of people who should be voting Democratic voted for Reagan and Bush and Bush. People who should be voting their interests voted against them because of "them" and our nation slowly shifted from the united nation of justice to the swing group-pressure group nation we live in today.

In Perlstein's book he masterfully tells us how the real and legitimate fears of people like my parents and grandparents were used by cynical politicians to win votes and divide America. The images of police dogs and marchers that morally convicted White America were replaced with "kill Whitey". "Whitey" moved away, voted Republican, and made sure that much of the progressivity of the 1960's was rolled back or destroyed. Good people whose gut would have supported progressive politics voted reactionary because they felt that Liberals sided with the rioters and not them.

This was Nixonland.

Nixonland however is ending. The America that I grew up in where fear of "them" can be used to divide people is coming to its end. Michelle Obama and I are not that far apart in age and I bet if Michelle's Dad and my Grandfather Ray has sat down for a shot and a beer they would have gotten along. But because politicians turned Michelle's father into "them" that never happened. This is not to say that racism is not a real problem- this is not to say that the rioters were not criminals- but what we need to ask is what did our republic benefit from these divisions? I cannot believe that every Black family that moved into Austin (chicago) or Newark, NJ was a problem? Yet the neighborhood in Newark where Philip Roth wrote his greatest works is today devoid of Jews because "they" moved in.

Nixonland is ending- and perhaps Obamanation is coming- is because Barack Obama understands this tension and he understands that we are all in this together. Unlike the Nixonland mentality he knows that we need to build something in unity because his very existence comes from this reality. So now we wait for the election. Will memories of riots, changing neighborhoods and resentments cause America to miss its chance to elect the person who could end the cycle?

The Republicans will continue to play these cards. As George Wallace said in 1963 "no one will ever out-ni***r me again. " But I hope that there are more people who were born to families like mine who is remember another slogan-

Yes We Can.

Reading Origen in Las Vegas

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origen

I have always been fascinated by the early Church. Easily the most interesting area for me is the birth of Monasticism in Egypt. The romantic stories of the Abbas in Egypt- Antony, Pachomius, Pambo and the great mothers like Mary of the Desert.

The Desert Fathers and Mothers are totally anathema to our current world which is based on things. When the Fathers said go to your cell and you will find what you are looking for he was challenging us to look to the gifts already recieved not to what dwells outside us. When the Desert Fathers looked as simplicity as the only way a Christian should live they were creating a paradigm that exists to this day- do you think God's will is served by Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day or Desmond Tutu? Or by Creflo Dollar, Pope Julius or EWTN.

The monastics of Egypt- the first Christian monks. The Monks of Egypt and Syria were influenced profoundly by many forces- the Jewish Therapeautae, the Persian Manichees whose faith is a fusion the Zoroastrian and Christian via their prophet Mani and a profound passage from St Luke. The monks of the Desert and their monastaries were radically "other" they chose to leave the world as they saw it for something better. So much of today's "christians" are not prophetic- no they are weak and vacillating. They are concerned with 'self help' instead of depth and in the end their religion is a parody.

St Luke 12 22 New Jerusalem Bible

Then he said to his disciples, 'That is why I am telling you not to worry about your life and what you are to eat, nor about your body and how you are to clothe it.23 For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing.24 Think of the ravens. They do not sow or reap; they have no storehouses and no barns; yet God feeds them. And how much more you are worth than the birds!25 Can any of you, however much you worry, add a single cubit to your span of life?26 If a very small thing is beyond your powers, why worry about the rest?27 Think how the flowers grow; they never have to spin or weave; yet, I assure you, not even Solomon in all his royal robes was clothed like one of them.28 Now if that is how God clothes a flower which is growing wild today and is thrown into the furnace tomorrow, how much more will he look after you, who have so little faith!29 But you must not set your hearts on things to eat and things to drink; nor must you worry.30 It is the gentiles of this world who set their hearts on all these things. Your Father well knows you need them.31 No; set your hearts on his kingdom, and these other things will be given you as well.32 'There is no need to be afraid, little flock, for it has pleased your Father to give you the kingdom. On almsgiving 33 'Sell your possessions and give to those in need. Get yourselves purses that do not wear out, treasure that will not fail you, in heaven where no thief can reach it and no moth destroy it.34 For wherever your treasure is, that is where your heart will be too.

I have always been enamoured of asceticism. But unlike Francis of Assisi who was also moved to change by this passage from Luke I am unable to be more than enamoured. The truth is that Asceticism is not easy in our world and so the irony that I am sitting poolside in Las Vegas after producing a trade show for dental industry suppliers is profound. The fact that I am reading Origen the great proto-monk of Egypt illustrates how profoundly twisted things are . I am here in the land of excess, a place modeled not on asceticism but on hedonism, and the irony continues.

I often wonder if all the hourding into barns and alike means anything? So you have money and comfort but the simple monks life would not destroy the planet.

I wonder if a lack of trial and hardship means one is lucky or one is weak because we do not face trials?

I think of the great renouncers- Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Origen, Paul, St Francis, and the lives they led and wonder why we continue to value what can be stolen from us. Wherever your treasure is that is where your heart is as well....

Exhaustion

Exhaustion is when you cannot stand anymore and your brain hurts. I have been working on the trade show I direct now for 8 days without rest and it makes me think about real workers- people like my grandparents who did this everyday.

Maybe we are too weak?