Burn Atlanta and March to the Sea- Barack!

Tonight while having coffee with my soon to be Poland bound friend Mark Tardi he said what I think is the biggest question for our President- why are we consulting the losers and letting them make policy in the healthcare debate?



It seems to many of us that a victory in the electoral college, a majority in the House and a large majority in the Senate means nothing in the face of Fox News- the crazies- and the screamers.



Who by the way are being paid/motivated by corporate interests to oppose change.



It is the special interests who are trying to change the results of an election by deceit.



Why is it that Liberals cannot speak the truth- every Conservative issue position of the past 40 years. The Liberal answer has been right and the Conservative one has been wrong so why not just say the truth that these people do not get to stand in the way of progress?



Look at The Record


1) Social Security and Unemployment Insurance: In 1933 and throughout the 30's and 40's Conservatives opposed these programs because they put 'undue' burdens on business. Progressives passed these laws and in the end America is a better place for it. They did not listen to the opponents of these policies, they passed them and made America better. Can you imagine America today without these programs.



2) Medicare: In 1964 Conservatives lead by Ronald Reagan opposed Medicare. Can you imagine an America today where the elderly would have to pay to their healthcare? The average cost for a private plan would be over $12000 a year would seniors prefer that? The Conservatives were wrong on that issue as well.



3) Isolationism: It was Conservatives lead by right wingers like Robert Taft and Charles Lindbergh who opposed American involvement in World War 2 in Europe and Japan during the 1940's if Liberals had listened to them Nazism and Japanese Militarism would have won World War 2. Roosevelt invented Lend Lease to circumvent Isolationists and he was right Roosevelt made America better. Again the Conservatives were wrong.



4) Racial Justice: Conservatives, especially those in the South who are the Grandparents of today's Southern Republicans were opposed to Racial Justice. Conservative thinkers as grand as William F Buckley and Ronald Reagan argued that the Federal Government had no right to "impose" Racial Justice on the United States they favored separate but equal. Lyndon Johnson and John Kennedy fought these people along with true racists like George Wallace and Bull Connor. Lyndon Johnson did the right thing and forced through Civil Rights laws that were opposed by a Majority of the US population but he did it because it was the right thing to do. Should he have consulted Bull Connor or George Wallace and sought common ground? Oh and by the way it was Conservatives that opposed the North in the Civil War because the Federal Government was imposing on states rights. Lincoln did not consult with Jefferson Davis he burned Atlanta and Marched to the sea .



5) Unionization: Before the 1930's most Americans worked 6 days a week. They had no pensions, no health insurance and they could be fired at any time for any reason. It was Liberals and the Labor acts of the 1930's opposed by Conservatives that made these things and the middle class possible. Since the 1980's Conservatives have dismantled these laws and our national standard of living has fallen. The Liberals were right and they should have stood with their labor supporters instead they abandoned them.



6) Internal Improvements: In every instance from the canals of the 1840's, Land Grant Colleges of the 1850's, Intercontinental Railroads of the 1860's, Dams in the South and West in the 1930's (that made the Sunbelt possible by the way), National Parks, Environmental Rules, Food Safety Rules and on and on Conservative opposed all of these things. Advocates did not consult their opponents and today America is a better place for having all these progressive things in place.



If all these issues had been handled the way President Obama has conducted this debate where would be be today?



The facts are....

• Conservatives lost an election by a huge margin.


• Conservatives created the worst economic shock in 50 years because of their policies of deregulation and untethered corporate greed.


• Conservatives have opposed every major improvement in this country for the past 50 years. So why are they right on healthcare when they were wrong on everything else?

President Obama do what history calls for.

Burn Atlanta and March to the Sea.

The Hung Generation

It is funny how HBO series have defined recent generational moods. During the 1990's it was a juxtopostion of The Sopranos and Sex in the City. Two stories that were less than 10 miles apart but were two sides of a world that today seems very far away. For the Sex in the City women everything could be solved by having a Cosmo and a pedicure. They lived the life of the unreal that many were living in the 1990's as we consumed ourselves into debt buying granite countertops and Manolo Blanik shoes. It was the decade of the celebrity chef and the .com boom and bloggers becoming millionares.

Opposed to that world was the Sopranos. The Sopranos best encapsulates the last 25 years of the 20th century and the first half of this decade. The Sopranos live in the suburbs. They live respectable lives while they steal, murder and cheat. This suburban disconnection is what also has defined our world. The respectable men of Goldman Sachs and Citibank are little more than Ivy League versions of Tony Soprano.

The Sopranos and the Wall Street version continue their impunity. The Sex in the City girls still have their devotees but no one has every explained to me how they pay for all that stuff they have and how will they do it now with no credit?

No now we come to live in the Great Recession and again HBO had produced a show that defines a Zeitgeist.

Hung which airs of Sunday nights is a great encapsulation of America as it is today. First off it is based in Detroit, Michigan. The opening begins with the main star, Ray, walking through the destitute streets of Detroit. Ray is a character that is defined by the disappointment of Generation X. He is a failed sports star who is now teaching High School in the same place he grew up. He is living in a tent behind his burned home (that he inherited from his parents no less). His old home is juxtoposed next to a Mc Mansion which is the Tyrannasaur of the age just past.

Ray decides with a woman he met at a class, Tanya, to sell his best 'asset' he becomes a Happiness Consultant which is a euphamism for Prostitute. The most telling interaction in the show is between Ray and his Exwife Jessica who has left him for Ronnie the rich dermatologist.
The thing about hung that defines our age is the changability of the characters. Within two episodes Ronnie goes from being rich to poorer but still with the appearance of richness which is where America now sits.....

Just Haven't Felt Like Writing

I just have not felt like writing. The energy to create has been sapped from me and to press the keys of the computer feels like lifting 500 lbs of iron.

At the same time as out hopeful president was inaugurated I lost my job.

I have been looking ever since trying to figure out what I am going to do? 2000 resumes later I am still trying to figure.

The combined stress of job search and watching our president become embroiled in Neo-Fascist media tactics has sapped my desire to write.

Usually I am best as a poet/writer when my life is chock full of activity. Let me work for 12 hours a day and I will turn out poems and novellas. Give me large blocks of anguish time and I do nothing.

My life now is a slow, depressing burn.

It is not that bad things happen-- it is that nothing happens. Days become the same with no differences.

I don't have the energy to be Irascible either. I just find what most poets are doing laughable and irrelevant.

The only post I recently from a poet that was spot on was from Maxine Chernoff about the budget cuts in the Cal State system. The fact that during this time of Recession we are cutting funding to a system like the Cal State System which is usually the entry point for first time college attendees shows how short sighted we are today.

I have to say that I am tired of President Obama being so 'nice'. I believe in him but I do not understand why the people who caused all this pain are being coddled? Why can't we say the truth? I am tired of the lack of truth. We need to do something to end the Las Vegas mentality. Why aren't the people from Goldman Sachs in jail? We need to demand change. But I am afraid that the neo fascists are stronger than our lovely- idealistic president.

I have spent allot of time this summer with Albert Camus. He does feed the soul and this quote from his Notebooks 1951-1959 from Ivan R Dee Press ends the book.

"I sometimes accuse myself of being incapable of love. Maybe this is true, but I have been able to select a few people and to keep for them, faithfully the best of me no matter what they do"

It makes me wonder what it means to keep the best of yourself?

I ask this question allot?

Watching the Recession from my Window

Today, Friday July 31st 2009 I watched the Great Recession from my window. At about 1230 PM two police cars arrived. In the building across the street they entered and they removed children from their mother because she was being evicted- from what I understand she had not paid the rent- that is what the super said to me.

The cops called the woman's ex husband who had to come to get the kids. In the middle of the street there was allot of screaming and yelling. The police drew their guns. The woman was arrested for hitting one of the cops. The father left with the screaming kids. The last word I heard from the woman's mouth was

"I have been looking for work for seven months"

A Call to Action: Poets and the Great Recession

http://www.poetsagainstthewar.org/worldpoets.asp

In 2003 amid the hysteria of the Bush war machine poet Sam Hamill created Poets Against the War. In a sea of jingoism and Goebbelssque hysteria Sam and many other poets were a voice of reason and sense. If they had been listened to so much of our current pain and suffering would not have happened; if they had listened to Sam there would be 100,000 more Iraqis alive and 6,000 live American soldiers and our economy would not have become bankrupt.

What Sam did mattered. While Dana Gioia and his Right Wing Cronies were trying to use poetry to legitimate the Bush/Cheney Regime, Sam Hamill was America's poet laureate. There have been other times in American literary history where Poetry and Prose was a mirror on the lives of people and where the poetry defined an era. Just think about the Leaves of Grass, The Wasteland, Grapes of Wrath, A Streetcar Names Desire, On the Road, The Ugly American, and many other books have defined eras and were penned within the epoch of the events that were occurring.

In Latin America this type of writing is central to the literary landscape. Writers like Eduardo Galleano (The Open Veins of Latin America), Ernesto Cardenal, Octavio Paz, Laura Solorzano, Mario Vargas Llosa and many others of all political colors bring the urgency of now and the urgency of telling the story to an audience with vigor and art. During great upheavals in American history there have been writers and poets who did what Sam Hamill did and tried to make sense of the turmoil and disaster befalling the Republic. Unfortunately those type of writers and poets are few and far between today.

Most poets that I know fall into one of three categories; Independently Wealthy, Academics, and Poets who Work In Full Time non-Academic jobs. By far the most dominant groups of these three in "experimental poetryland" are the Academics. They have the time and the resources to publish and to write. There are many non-academics of great influence, Ron Silliman comes to front of mind. But for the majority of poets who are influential the writing is an interior exploration or an artistic pursuit separated from politics and the everyday.

No poet has come forward the way Sam Hamill has to write about and mobilize people about the Great Recession that we are now mired in. I have seen a few blog posts from people like Maxine Chernoff lamenting the complete destruction of California's educational system but no poet has come out to write about the collapse of the American economy.

It makes me wonder is it the fact that most influential poets are academics and thus are not effected? Are just the education budget cuts important?

Is it that many poets live in urban enclaves or college towns and so the the pain and dislocation I see around me is not part of their lives? Why is it that I don't read or see anything about outrage that is the Global economic collapse on the many blogs I read? I think that it bears reflecting on this fact; if you read poetry blogs and poetry online journals it is business as usual and why that is?

I would like to ask poets and other writers who read my blog to email me stories, poems or essays on this Great Recession. Post them in comments or email them to me and I will try to set up something so that somewhere on the web the poets and writers who are enduring this period of destruction can give voice to this generation's collapse perhaps in the spirit of Grapes of Wrath or The Wasteland.

Why Bad People Hate Obama

On Sunday Traudi and I went to see my grandmother who is 95 at her nursing home. When we came out someone had written over my Obama 08 sticker on my car "Stupid Nigger". This was quite a shock because even in Republican DuPage county where my Grandmother's facility is located Illinois is mostly for Obama. The vandalism and its intent to shock really effected me and it caused me to pause.

I have heard all kinds of vitriol about President Obama and not just from the Fox News crowd. The reality is that an entire segment of our population hates President Obama for what he stands for and his race is just added wood on that fire.

There is a whole social class of people who really believe that they have worked hard and that they dont owe anything to anyone. My cousin Gregory has this mindset as does my Aunt Bonnie and Uncle Chuck. They believe that what Obama is doing is "socialism" because he wants a modicum of real equality in our society. What these people want to do is eat at the trough and fill their bellies while the nation declines.

Now, I have not been totally pleased with President Obama. The lack of investigations of the Bush administration really bothers me. George Bush and Dick Cheney should be in jail right now for their crimes. I am also not happy with his stance on torture and labor unions he needs to do more. But he is trying. He has put forth a moral argument that everyone in America deserves health care, something that is a right in most rich countries. The Right is frothing at the mouth and we his supporters are not out there for his plan enough. The truth is if you really want to reduce healthcare then it needs to be Single Payer but lets give him a chance.

In the end there is a whole population of White middle and upper middle class people who hate what President Obama stands for and calling him "Stupid Nigger" makes them feel good I guess? But to see such hatred played out on my car was a shock- but it has not changed my opinion.

Edgy Post Avant Poetry? You Gotta Know Where the Edge is to be Edgy

http://adamfieled.blogspot.com/2009/06/anything-with-edge-rethinking-post.html

Adam Fieled, on his blog has really opened an issue I think is essential for poetry as an art form today. Can "post avant, experimental, Post Language, Flarf, Conceptualist" poetry be edgy?

In Kenneth Rexroth's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Rexroth Autobiographical Novel he shares with us his life . Rexroth experiences everything the IWW, the Bughouse Square Socialists, The Beats, Helping Japanese Internees, Thomas Merton's Trappists, SF Rennaissance poets, Various painters, and more. Rexroth is cutting edge because he is living on the edge without comfort. The edge is a place where he lived. The writing did not need much for that life to come out and become central to the work.

The kind of diverse formation that Rexroth had also informed other writers like Witold Gombrowitz the great Polish diarist. He lived in poverty and exile but who was committed to the work and to pushing boundaries. It did not matter to Gombrowitz that he was poor, alone and far from home he lived on the edge and it filled his work.

The reason contemporary so much of Post Avant writing is not edgy is that poets do not know where the edge is located. Poets writing today lived lives of comfort on a set formative track that I like to call the Poetry Industrial Complex.

Poets go to grad school where they make connections and they never have even seen the edge much less lived it. They write clever blogs and they are published by their friends who also were formed by the Poetry Industrial Complex. Most of these poets live very comfortable lives and anything edgy they write is mostly artifice. How could the cutting edge come from that formation? Out of the Poetry Industrial Complex and its formation some interesting Conceptual Poetry and Flarf have developed but the work is hardly edgy.

Poets who write edgy work are pushed to the margins by those formed by the Poetic Industrial Complex. he poets of the Poetry Industrial Complex prefer to exist within their sealed Tupperware world where they only breathe their own air. This air does not allow for truly edgy poetry.

All is not lost however there are many poets writing Post Avant who are edgy- they just are not as well known or many times in New York...

Here are some suggestions for edgy work ...

• In Chicago there is a slam poet Kevin Coval whose work has the "slam" aesthetic but is also challenging and you can feel edgy truth in the writing.


• Another is Mark Nowak whose work is both edgy and well done and actually working class which is a place most Post Avant poets have only read about in books.


• Chicago poet (But now in Poland) Mark Tardi has all the Poetry Industrial Complex bonafides but he is a poet of hard edges without sentiment.
• Jesse Seldess poetry is filled with the disturbing world of for example Alzheimers yet his work is not read widely yet.
  
• A couple of well formed edgy poets are Harryette Mullins and Ed Roberson's whose work is well read. Maybe someone ought to send a pallet of their books to President Obama so when he picks a poet to write a poem for the inauguration he gets something stomach able.


• Garin Cycholl whose geographic/historical poetry weds a poetry of place with a true avant garde sense in ways that have not been seen since Charles Olson's Maximus is very edgy.


• Jen Hofer has all the Poetry Industrial Complex formation but none of the artifice pushes boundaries from a life lived on the edge. She is also a great bridge to Latin American writing.
• Speaking of poets on the edge there are so many global poets whose work is filled with edginess- Virna Teixiera, Sergio Medeiros, and Maria Esther Maciel in Brazil, Giovanna Frene and Marco Giovenale in Italy, Haydar Ergodian in Turkey, Dunia Mikhail in Iraq, Laura Solorzano, in Mexico and many others.

Their books are all available... So go buy them and break the tupperware seal of your mind.

The End of Tiger's Stadium-The End of General Motors

When my family immigrated to America from Italy they went to three places- Newark, NJ, Chicago, IL and Detroit, Michigan. The result of these movements were that we were divided in our Baseball loyalties. Some of us loved the Dodgers (Then Mets), Yankees, Tigers or White Sox.

So these teams were always real to me because of family get togethers. We liked to rib each other and rarely were my White Sox on top and so I had to sit and listen to the others. My Detroit relatives always talked about the Tigers. Willie Horton, Al Kaline, Sparky Anderson, Alan Trammell and all the rest. Hell they even had Denny Mc Clain who was a South Sider but played in Detroit. Detroit was rough when I was a kid. Nothing like Chicago or New York which still pulsed. But there was something about the Tigers- that I hated and still do to this day.

Today, Tigers Stadium, at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull is being torn down. Along with her sisters Comiskey Park, Cleveland Memorial Stadium, Forbes Field, and Ebbets Field she represented something that has been lost amid our iPods and blogs- Depth. Some people want to put Wrigley and Fenway in that category but they have always been and remain parks for the Gentry.

There was a time in America when solid people made solid things. These were the kind of people who filled Tigers Stadium, Comiskey Park and the rest. They were not corporate and they were not office workers and this made their collective souls different from other places. The end of Tigers Stadium is the last link from that America to ours and it is sad to think that it moves into history.

America has become like Phoenix- everything is new and clean and antiseptic. You are more apt to find an office with a Zen Fountain then you are to find a person who is the member of an industrial union or works with his or her hands. As we watch Tigers Stadium fall to the wrecker's ball we look at General Motors and by analogy an America that is gone forever.

The reason that no one cares about General Motors dieing is because so few of us know anyone who make things.

General Motors, Tigers Stadium demolished....

Literary Influence in Chicago?

http://newcity.com/2009/06/03/lit-50-who-really-books-in-chicago/

It was a pleasure to be chosen by New City Chicago as one of the 50 most influential literary figures in Chicago and hell to be on a list with Oprah is always good. Cracked Slab Books has tried over the past three years to publish poets we care about and do something for our local community. Chicago gets short shrift in America's literary scene mostly because all the money is in New York and at Universities while in Chicago we have no money for literary pursuits (excluding the Poetry Foundation).

The Modern Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago

If you grew up in the Midwest Chicago will always be a comfortable city. Unlike New York Chicago is a city where the country and the city flow together almost seamlessly. The streets continue out into the suburbs and the flat Midwestern plains are not far away from the artificial mountains that sit at the middle of our metropolis. Everything about Chicago is comfortable, except the weather.

Until recently the special exhibitions and permanent collections of Chicago's Museum's were not especially provocative. One can become exhausted in museums such as the Metropolitan in New York or the Tate in London but our museum's never gave the visitor that sense of being overwhelmed until now.

The Modern Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago is a masterpiece created for Chicago by Italian architect Renzo Piano. The juxtaposition of this new wing (It is almost the same size as the old museum) with the staid and terminally Midwestern be aux arts building that is joins is jarring and overwhelming.

Most Chicagoans view the Art Institute in the same way they view Comiskey Park or Wrigley Field. They know what they are going to get and it is 'nice' in a Midwestern way. The Modern Wing changes everything. The old standards are no longer in the Art Institute. The room of armor, the Chagall Windows, the small galleries filled with Cezannes and Monets are a thing of the past now and this is a welcome change.

The first thing you notice in the Modern Wing is the quality of the light. Unlike the older sections of the Art Institute the Modern Wing is filled with natural light. A kind of atrium joins the Museum to the city and the street. Out of every window you can see the 360 degree panorama of the city. On one side you have the many famous buildings of the Michigan Av Streetwall, on the other the Wing is joined to Millenium Park by a wonderful over the street footbridge and on the other side you can see the water and the lake.

The gallery spaces are not only filled with some of the most important works of art of the past 100 years (Modern beginning in 1915)- But the galleries are so open and light filled that you can actually enjoy the paintings in many different settings. I especially liked the design and furniture rooms which are filled with drawings and models of famous buildings and design pieces.
There are whole rooms filled with installations and rooms for films. In the end the whole museum allows you to get a sense of art since 1915 that in the old museum seemed an afterthought in relation to the Art Institute's enormous French Impressionist collection.

Another aspect of the museum that is interesting are the public spaces. The Terzo Piano restaurant sits on the roof and has easily the best views of the downtown. A garden is still under construction but it melds well with the Lurie Shoulder Garden in Millennium Park.

The thing that the Modern Wing does most effectively is remove provincialism from the Art Institute. For many of us who grew up on the Art Institute it always seemed that we were in Bertha Honore Palmer's Salon in the pre-Modern Wing museum .

That stodginess has been eliminated. The only criticism that I have is that to get from the lobby to the pedestrian bridge there are only down escalators creating a line at the only Elevator but this is a traffic issue and does not take away from Piano's triumph.

Modern Wing at the Art Institute of Chicago

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/14/arts/design/14inst.html

Flarf- Conceptual Poetry and CNBC

Since so many people around the world are going through the Great Recession with me it has become a kind of group experience. No matter what happens in my day the reality of the Great Recession is right there like a muscle pull always reminding you of what might be.

I have had time however to think about the situation we as a world find ourselves in and something has become clear to me. The reason we are in this situation is because of elites and their domination of the conversation.

I often watch CNBC during the day. This is just to avoid TV shows with Depends ads. As you listen to the business leaders on the screen it becomes very clear that none of them are in danger of losing anything. They all went to the best schools, they all come from the best places and when this is over they will still be on top. It is kind of like watching a poetry panel with Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten and Michael Palmer their place is secure and they have no fear.

The result is that the realities of life and the fear of many of us are abstractions to them. All of the TV personalities also live in a dream world. They all speak the same language and talk about the same things. The millions of people who have lost so much are simply not real to them. The result of all of this is that when this is over the Elites will be on top and the rest of us will be left with the scraps on the floor.

One respite in this sea of stress and vexation for me are pod casts. I especially like New York’s WNYC they have great conversations especially the Leonard Lopate show. I downloaded a poetry reading the other day that was held at the Whitney- advertised as a “poetry war” between Flarfists and Conceptualists.

Here is the URL to listen to the reading

http://blogs.wnyc.org/culture/2009/05/13/talk-to-me-flarf-vs-conceptual-writing/

I was interested because most podcasts about poetry suck. So I put this one on my ipod and went to the gym. I thought perhaps it would motivate me to write? The poets who read were Christian Bök, Nada Gordon, Kenneth Goldsmith, Sharon Mesmer, K. Silem Mohammad, Kim Rosenfield, Gary Sullivan, and Darren Wershler

Kenneth Goldsmith who was the empresario of this event at the very fancy NY Whitney Museum set up some faux war between the Conceptualists and the Flarfists which is as relevant to our current world situation about as much as a war between Dungeons and Dragons Devotees and those who prefer Mist on Playstation.

It became clear as this podcast played on that what caused the economic meltdown- the elites serving elites and ignoring the effects of their work on society as a whole-- is also true in poetry. Goldsmith talked about ‘that in poetry there still is an avant garde’ and that these two groups are totally separate from the ‘mainstream’ poets who are getting published in the New Yorker.

Is he really serious?

Do people still worry about that? The way I look at it at least the New Yorker Poet gets a check with which he or she can buy some beer.

The reading began with someone bleating sounds then Christian Bok read his elitist drivel. Nada Gordon’s poem on why she loves men is sort of funny at the beginning but then you begin to think if a man wrote that poem using the same tone about women he would probably be called violent and misogynistic.

K Silem Mohammed’s reworked Sonnets are clever but he lost me when he said that he was the smartest man in the room. The poetry does not sound that different than many other experimental poets work? It must be the marketing that makes it better? Or am I missing something? Or is it because allot of it comes from New York and San Francisco?

The Podcast played and it became interesting to see how close its tone was to CNBC and the talking heads there. You had all the inside jokes and special words, which are also central to the elites on CNBC and secret codes (Flarf, NASDAQ). The separation from reality and the affinity with fine things and aversion to the ordinary the sense of being set apart from the masses. The elitism in this poetry reading oozed over the airwaves. This group of poets- who are mostly college professors- continued to ply their elitism not realizing how cliché they have become.

I have been spending allot of time lately reading through the 1930’s. In the Autumn of 2006 issue of Chicago Review Kenneth Rexroth was profiled and I have come to appreciate him more and more. In a letter to Jonathan Williams in 1951 he said that following about poets that I think applies

“keep away from dilettantes, potters and weavers, get your nose in the sweaty armpits of real people”

Maybe these folks need to get out of the Whitney....

The Duty of Delight: The Diaries of Dorothy Day

In the middle of the 20th Century self described Catholic writers, poets and activists mattered to global discourse. Today most Catholic poets and writers try to play down that part of their lives because many times the Church makes being faithful and thoughtful impossible.

In these days when Catholics are arguing whether it is acceptable for Barack Obama, the President of the United States to speak at Notre Dame. We look at a near past where intellectual discourse was welcomed within Catholic institutions.

The pre-Vatican II Church was more dogmatic and has been rightfully vilified as close minded in many things but it was also far more open than today's Church to debate. Within the same Church at the same time Dorothy Day and William F Buckley wrote, spoke and both were viewed as good Catholics.

During the period from 1930-1980 important Catholic intellectuals, activists, poets and writers like; John Courtney Murray SJ who with Reinhold Niebuhr defined a theology for the nuclear age; Flannery O'Connor, Jack Kerouac, Thomas Merton, Walker Percy, William F Buckley, Malcolm Muggeridge, William Everson, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Francois Mauriac, and Jacques Maritain all wrote important literature . These thinkers were not just read by a small ghetto of conservatives but often graced the cover of Time Magazine.

Catholics were also central in social change globally. Ernesto Cardinal in Nicaragua, Dom Helder Camara in Brazil, Cesar Chavez in the USA, Charles De Foucould in France, Pope John XXIII, Lech Walesa, Pope John Paul II, were all witnesses for peace and justice and among all of these great figures perhaps the most interesting and important for American Lay Catholics was Dorothy Day of New York.

In The Duty of Delight, The Edited Diaries of Dorothy Day, from Marquette University Press, Robert Ellsberg a long time editor for Orbis Books and friend of Dorothy's gives us 5 decades of her inner most thoughts. In this volume we get to experience the Depression in New York- and realize how our current economic situation is similar. Day also lets us see what it meant in Catholic parlance for a Lay Woman to start an organization with the word Catholic in the title. Along with Paul Elie's 'The Life You Save May Be Your Own.' Robert Ellsberg's Duty of Delight revives a lost world. A world that we are not likely to see again in our age of narrowcasting and Facebook.

The Catholic Worker, Dorothy Day's organization was uncompromising. Founded with her friend French philosopher Peter Maurin the Worker believed in the corporal works of mercy (See Matthew 25) were central. The Worker also believed in Labor Unions, Pacifism, and apostolic poverty which flumuxed Marxists and Conservatives alike. Dorothy Day was a radical the way St Francis was a radical and this upset everyone. She believed that the reason that there was war and poverty is because we failed to love as Jesus loved. Day was arrested in her life hundreds of times protesting war and poverty. She believed as well that the urine caked Bowery bum was the image of Christ and she lived accordingly. The Catholic Worker newspaper is still published over 70 years later and over 100 Catholic Worker houses exist today.

In a May 1973 entry in the diary she defined her creed;

" I am dogmatic, I believe in the Divinity of Christ, Christ as God, and Redeemer, Saviour, True God and True Man. I believe in a Heaven and Hell, Resurrection of the Body, Life Everlasting. I believe with St Augustine that we are all members or potential members of the Mystical Body of Christ,. In other words we are all members of one another and that if the health of one member suffers the health of the whole body is lowered. I also believe with the IWW (Early 20th Century Marxist Organization) that an injury to one is an injury to all" (TDD: P 531)

The Catholic Worker was listed in 1957 along with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference by J Edgar Hoover as Communist Front organizations. The FBI director wanted to arrest Dorothy Day and Martin Luther King as subversives. I guess Dorothy would have thought it good company. In the Duty of Delight Day's reflections on her many friends important people like Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, Thomas Merton and Cesar Chavez are shared. But she also introduces activist priests, sisters and lay people who today are not remembered.

The book ends with Dorothy Day's death in 1980. 1980 was a perfect time for her to leave us. Soon after her death a campaign to marginalize the kind of activism promoted by Vatican II, Pope John XXIII, and his encyclical Pacem in Terris, and the Catholic Worker was begun by Right Wing groups and the Church Magisterium.

Today most of the important Catholic thinkers and activists of Day's time are not highlighted in Catholic media or in Catholic parishes. On many Catholics sites every major Catholic thinker and activist of the 20th Century from Day to Merton to Murray to John XXIII will not be mentioned because of some concern about "Doctrinal Purity". In fact the website Catholic Culture (Right Wing) Says of the Catholic Worker website "This site has articles which distort the Church's social teaching by promoting a radical pacifism." As if Jesus was something other than a pacifist? It seems to me that Dorothy Day would have laughed at that.

In the end The Duty of Delight edited by Robert Ellsberg shares with the world the inner life of an extraordinary woman. While the Church continues to canonize people for creating new novenas or devotions Dorothy Day's "cause" for sainthood is stalled in Rome. Could it be that she is already a saint and we should not bother with the paperwork?

Cook County: Barack Obama's America

It has been 100 days since Barack Obama was inaugurated and I have watched over the past few days ad nauseam reflections on what the Obama Presidency Means. I have not heard the obvious- America is becoming more like Cook County.

While to many in the South and West the idea of Chicago Politics seems alien and filled with strange names and ideas the basics of Chicago politics now define America. In Chicagoland as 0ur region is called there are Democrats and Republicans but they seem to agree on most issues.

• Government exists to provide services.
• Politics is a place where government, business elites and Labor cut up a pie.
• The job of public servants is to make sure that the garbage is picked up and the streets are clean and things run well.
• Graft is tolerated as long as these things get done.

Quality of life is central to what drives Chicago politics. Anyone who comes here in the summer will be dazzled by the parks, flowers and beaches. Chicago is about quality of life and this means higher taxes and graft and city workers- but also the fact that the parks, libraries, and alleys run well makes a difference for average Chicagoans.

In the end what matters in Chicago are public spaces and this seems to matter to Barack Obama.

Since Ronald Reagan was elected public spaces have been derided as wasteful. The Conservative movement has been about the private. Government should leaves me alone. I should be able to make as much money as possible. My neighborhood is gated and the parks and pools are private and public spaces are neglected. Our ideal has been Scottsdale or Plano Texas not Chicago or New York.

I will never forget when I lived in Dallas and I went to the main library. It was filled with homeless men and was shabby and dirty. Compare that to the Harold Washington Library Center in Chicago- which is a palace- and you can see the difference between a Cook County vision and the Conservative vision of America. Sure the Cook County vision is not always graft free but there are great services. In Conservative America you get no services in fact you get what you pay for.

This sense of the public being important is why President Obama is supporting Green Energy, High Speed Rail and national health care. He cares more about public spaces. Many on the right especially in the South will find these ideas very alien. I will never forget again when I lived in Dallas all my colleagues who would go to Chicago for vacations in the summer. They would laud the parks and the culture but they did not want to pay for them in Dallas. In the end will America want to pay for what President Obama is proposing? It will mean less gated communities and less granite countertops but more public wealth.

It is true that entrepenurial America has given us Microsoft, Apple, Wall Street Titans and alike but has that really bettered the lives of the average American? In Chicago- my hometown- a Middle Class person can live, buy a house, go to a nice library, go to great parks and museums all for a moderate price. It is true our taxes are higher and our corruption and graft more evident but would I trade my lifestyle in Chicago for a much cheaper but more culturally meagre life in Texas?

I made a choice to return here.

So as President Obama brings some good Cook County to America. We can hope he can teach Washington DC to do better. If D.C.'s streets are clear of snow two hours after a storm we will know that Chicago style has come to America.

Giuliana's 39th Birthday

Today is my sister Giuliana's 39th Birthday.

I come from a family of magisterial women of which she is the latest.

My Great- Great Grandmother, Matilde has been dead since 1933 but her personality and things about her are still part of our lives. She was a titled woman and her strength is still with us.


My Great Grandmother Lucia, who I knew was the kind of person that everyone respected and who did for everyone and was held in esteem. She ran a business and took care of everyone but never in a soft way.

My Grandmother Matilde is a strong 95 year old who survived and thrived through World War, Depression and immigration. She gave us a template of what a strong woman is supposed to be. My Nonna Matilde and her sisters Gina and Dolores are the strongest people I have ever known.

My mother Lucetta comes from this same line. She is strong and forceful and in a take no prisoners style is able to manage everything in way that most are not.

In the end all of these women have always been the iron center of our lives and my sister, who turns 39 today carries this mantle.

Giuliana my sister is the mother of two great kids, Chiara and Luca. She is not only a great mom, wife and professional. She is also the kind of woman who is able to juggle and manage everything while remaining what is important the iron center of her family.

Softness has never been revered in my family. I wrote once that the women of my family are beautiful the way a sheer cliff in the Alps in beautiful and my sister comes from that genre of women.

So- on her 39th Birthday the last Birthday of her youth Giuliana- we celebrate.

Immortal Cupboard: Lorine Niedecker Film Review

http://cccook.wordpress.com/

On Friday night at Loyola University here in Chicago the new film project Immortal Cupboard by filmmaker Cathy Cook was screened. I must give the proviso that I have never had much affection for Niedecker but she is an important poet especially for a whole generation of Gen X poets who are my contemporaries. There are many midwestern poets who have been profoundly influenced by LN and Woodland Pattern, Milwaukee's great bookstore did a seminal conference a few years ago so she is in vogue at the moment.

The film Immortal Cupboard is at the same time innovative and conservative. It has lots of rich images and has a kind of post-modern Voices and Visions feel. If you have ever seen that PBS series there are lots of boots crunching snow and poems superimposed over lovely images of place. We are lead to understand the importance of her home and her ambient to her writing and this is important.

This film takes the genre a little further and also brings into play a sense of place for Ft Atkinson the Wisconsin town that Niedecker called home. The years she spent in Ft Atkinson are strongly described. The area where this film is weakest is in her intimate poetic relations. There are lots of images of her letters and poetry but there is little controversial here. Niedecker's real victimization by Louis Zukofsky is all but ignored. The fact that Zukofsky forced Niedecker to have an Abortion is not mentioned and I cannot but imagine that this caused pain to Niedecker?

The rejection of her poems as too personal for Zukofsky also must have stung but this is not mentioned?

I was also disappointed by the coverage of her relationship with Cid Corman and Objectivist poets. Her time in New York is described but not developed. I think that this weakness ignores her real community which was poets and letters. I also think that the coverage of her marriages is given short shrift

On the whole the film comes across as a meditation. It reminds me a little bit of the film A Great Silence about the Carthusian Monks. It is a homage to a fine poet and a great voice of the Midwest. But the omissions are glaring and I don't know if that will effect the validity of the film as scholarship?

When I asked the filmmaker about these omissions she was clear that she chose to ignore these realities. How is it possible that a 30 year correspondence- and an intense romance that resulted in much pain and abuse for Niedecker is not explored fully? This is the Achilles heel of this film. It would be like ignoring Pound's Fascist period as unimportant.

As a work of art this film is beautiful but the omission of the Zukofsky effect makes it flawed and makes one wish someone would do a film on Niedecker's most important relationship. I would urge the Filmmaker- who said that work is still being created to rethink her omission of these painful realities and add them to her fine film and give us a picture of Niedecker which is three dimensional rather than two dimensional.

Four Essential Books for the Jobless Poet

It is obvious to those of us currently unemployed and suffering through the rot of our current decline that we are entering a new world.

The world that produced the American hubris of the past 40 years has ended Also much of the triumphalism of American poetry and letters of the past years has become passe or anachronistic and it seems we need something new.

I wrote a few months ago that it is impossible now to be ironic in the age of Obama. The spate of 'ironic' movements from Language Poetry to Flarf that have been energized by irony and a sort of intellectual snarkiness have become dated .

Being both a poet and an unemployed business professional has given me time to think about what that world might look like. I find that the ironic does not work in the bones anymore. I find myself looking for new and old ways. I want insights that feed the current situation.

Four books that I have recently read have given me some insight into what might be possible in a new world-view. America as a nation has become more serious and frankly more scared --we need to ask more questions.

I am not interested anymore in the commentary from the sidelines. I am however interested in commentary on where we are going and what we need to understand. I have found these books helpful.

MARCOM-The Mirror in the Well

Micheline Aharonian

Dalkey Archive Press

isbn: 978-1-56478-511-4

Micheline Aharonian begins her novella Marcom with quotes from the likes of Ovid, Buber, Anne Carson, Clarisse Lispector, Octavio Paz. It is this global literature sense that informs this book. I think that Marcom in many ways is the first book of our new literary world and I hope that poets and writers read it with interest because this book bears the future.

This book which is based on a love triangle and a zombie marriage and is the best estimation of our current American situation I have read. Marcom could be called a 'sex book' or a 'dirty book' but I think in many ways it has its antecedents in Tropic of Cancer. It uses great prose, almost poetic language, to define an era. I think that when the history of this period is written Aharonian's book will be listed as seminal- forgive the pun.

The lack of moorings for the characters in this book give us a sense of the world in which we live. It just loosens everything and we understand that the old world has passed away and we are now naked in the sun with no modesty and no covering.

The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation

Fanny Howe

Greywolf Press

isbn: 978-1555-975203

In contrast to the future that is displayed by Aharonian, Fanny Howe's Winter Sun tells us where we have been. Howe's collection of essays is a description of writing and poetry as a vocation which is something that is not really a truism for most poets and writers today.

In the past many writers lived the kind of lives that allowed them to live in a vocation the way that St Augustine was able to live a lifestyle rather than a job.

Howe creates for us meditations that are almost religious in scope and show to the poet or writer what makes the vocation we share different. The poet (and she is a poet) also in the process defines a generation. She defines what motivated a group of writers from the end of the great World War 2 until today and for this I think her book will stand up as a Dénouement for generation of poets and writers that we all have loved.

The Winter Sun needs to be read along with other great books of essays or diaries. It has echoes of Shklovsky, Camus and Stein. It defines and age for us that is remote and yet near.

the five seasons of love

Joao Almino

Host Publications

isbn:978-0-924047-51-0

One of the goals of Modernism was in Pound's phrase to "Make it New." No place in the world is more an embodiment of this mentality than Brasilia the faux city that was made to give Brazil a new capital. The city was built out of Oscar Niemeyer's vision of what a Modernist capital would look like and almost immediately the realities of the world smudged the clean rough edges.

Brazilian writer Joao Almino has been one of the most important chroniclers of this smudging. He has in his book the five season of love created a 'Romance' which is a the Brazilian word for novel. But in many ways this book is an Anti-Romance and a distopia. The love is cold and hard, the edges are rough and broken and this book deconstructs the Modernist's ideals to show us how empty we are. Ana/Diana from the five season of love embodies emptiness and questing of our time.

my vocabulary did this to me

The Collected Poetry if Jack Spicer

Edited by Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian

Wesleyan U Press

Isbn: 978-0-8195-6887-8

Contemporary poets have created a Pantheon of poetic God's. In this Pantheon are many poets whose work is so important that it dwarfs much of what is written today. In that pantheon one poet whose entire output is small has continued to be included, Jack Spicer. The volume of his Collected poetry masterfully assembled by Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian is less than 500 pages. It shows to contemporary poets and readers what a poet could be in mid 1950's America.

Ron Silliman, who has never preferred brevity to verbosity, said that this book is one of the most important books of poetry written in the past 50 years and I think he is correct. Here is a book that even an unemployed poet like myself can read and feel filled with the creativity and the sense of vocation. While Howe in her book gives us the Dénouement of this epoch here is the epoch is full flower as if we are seeing Solomon in all his splendor.

Out of destruction comes new life. When the old Roman Empire rotted away we got Hagia Sophia, Gregorian Chants, Gothic Architecture, Averroes, the Alhambra, and Rumi. These products of the rot lead to a new world. It appears that is what is happening here in our current Roman Empire. I have found meaning in these books and they have helped me to understand what is happening to our world both poetically and spiritually.

I do not think that when Augustine, Boethius or Cassiodorus were writing they realized that they were setting the stage for what was to come next. But I think that these books do something of what these late Antique/early Medieval authors did. They realize that we are entering something new and perhaps more simple. I think that this simplicity and coldness is going to be part of our future and I will return to these four books often for guidance on the way forward.

My Great Recession at Three Months

It has been three months since the Great Recession began for me.

No one seems to want to say the truth that those who were running the economy failed their corporations. In many cases those who failed are still employed while millions of hard working people are jobless.

There is a divide in America between those who are incompetent (See Wall Street and Detroit) but who are taken care of with buyouts and employment contracts and the rest of us who get to see all we have worked for washed away because of their incompetence. Anyone reading this who has worked in a corporation knows what I am talking about.

I have some questions that I would like answered.

• Why is it that we are hurt and they are not?
• Why is it that the Union worker in Michigan or the middle manager on Wall Street is punished but the big wigs continue to have plenty of money?
• Why is it that we are all not a lot angrier?
• Why do we all continue to believe in a system that has failed most people?

In some ways the last three months have become monastic for me. I have tried to become as frugal as possible. I don't go out much so peripheral friends that I might see at a reading or a gallery opening are no more. Only a few good friends are left and I guess that is ok? I write alot more but it is darker and less interesting stuff I think?

I now have persistent worries. In my own family my brother in law lost his job recently. I worry about my niece and nephew and their family allot. Our situation is not good but we do not have children so survival is less complex than for my sister and her family.

I continue the daily ritual of applying for jobs- over 1200 of them since January. I have had four interviews so my batting average is obviously not that great. Employment reality is the plight of my social class- the manager class- we are falling and we don't know where the end is if ever. I returned to the USA in 1998 in the past four months all the growth in my retirement account has been eliminated. That means I essentially worked for 11 years for free even though I saved and invested.

The reality for me is that in a monastic way things are being stripped away. Things that I never needed are now gone and understanding what really matters has become central to survival. A focus on truth rather than facts is essential to survive all of this stress. I think about the Gospels allot especially the quote "look at the ravens neither do they sow or reap but the Lord God provides for them" but then I read Job and think perhaps that is what God has in mind for all of us?

What I have come to believe is that Generation X, my generation, bought into a fantasy. Our generation which has survived the .Com bubble, Housing Bubble and now we are surviving the Great Recession, were told that if we worked hard we too could be millionaires and have security. In reality our hard work gave security to our bosses while our generation is sinking. We all worked hard for nothing and our children will live more meagre lives because of our bosses gluttony. Gluttony is the problem and that is the reason all this pain has become reality.

The big lie is now obvious.

Our society chose to believe that we were all rugged individuals who owed nothing to our fellow citizens. We would take care of ourselves not depending on others, this is the biggest lie of them all.

Now the waste of the past twenty years has become obvious. The rich and powerful used the big lie to become even more rich and powerful and those of us in the middle gave away our youths for nothing.

It is time for a metanoia and that metanoia does not include Lexuses, granite counter tops, I pods or gourmet dinners.

A Metanoia is what we need.

The Lord's Supper 2009

As a Catholic Holy Week and the Triduum (Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Vigil) are the central holidays of our tradition. I for one love the drama of the Triduum.

I have written about this before but the most moving Holy Thursday I ever experienced was when I lived in Bolivia in 1995.
I worked in a men's prison in Cochabamba, Bolivia. The worker priest who I worked with Fr Benoit was doing the Holy Thursday Mass in the open courtyard of the jail. He decided that the congregants should wash the feet of the other inmates, especially focusing on those inmates that they most disliked.

I often think about Fr Benoit and that evening. Under a pouring rain thousands of desperate men washing the feet of others. Somehow it was the closest I have seen to the spirit of Jesus.
I have been to St Peter's in Rome and I have met saints and Popes but the simple act of washing feet in a prison in Cochabamba that was the true Metanoia moment.

During these tough times when many of us are watching our world melt it is important I think to remember what truly matters. I often think about sacrifice about St Francis, leaving his clothes in the Plaza and retreating to the mountains to rebuild God's temple. What quote did Francis use "look at the ravens neither do they sew or reap but the Lord God provides for them..."

So sacrifice puts our suffering in perspective. The three days of the Triduum show us that sacrifice and betrayal are part of our lives. This is not the plasticine life that we see on television but the life of service and sacrifice that was demonstrated by Fr Benoit to me in Bolivia years ago and by Francis 800 years ago.

Yet Easter is still to come and we need to remember that there is rebirth.

A Reading that Mattered: Raul Zurita in Chicago

Friday night at the Instituto Cervantes the Guild Complex presented a reading by Chilean poet Raul Zurita. This important poet's work has been masterfully translated by Chicago's own Daniel Borzutzky and the books are eagerly awaited.

Raul Zurita comes out of a poetic tradition of protest that includes among others, Nicanor Parra, Regis Bonvicino, Affonso Avila, Pablo Neruda, & Ernesto Cardenal.

His masterpiece 'Anteparaiso” ranks with Neruda's Canto General and Eduardo Galleano's work as the definitive postmodern epics of the Americas. If Walt Whitman has an heir it is Zurita and his work fills the room.

The fact that Daniel Borzutsky, a prominent member of our poetry community here is Chicago chose to translate Zurita's work bodes well for more of his work reaching a thoughtful audience in English in the US. Daniel is to be commended for his good work.

The reading on Friday was a tour de force. Zurita's words flowed out like honey on metal tiles. He brought before us the sheer depth and altitude of the Andes. I imagine this is what listening to Vallejo must have been like. I could not help but give Maestro Zurita a standing ovation. I was a bit dismayed that the entire room did not stand and cheer. I imagine that is because they do not understand Spanish (even though the translations were masterpieces in their own right). I for one was moved to my core.

Having spent allot of time translating Brazilian poets in my career I find that working in the Andean-Castillian idiom (rather than the Spanish Language) as it is expressed in Chile to be a challenge. Chile is kind of the New York Yankees of poetry scenes. With less than 14 million people Chile has produced Mistral (Nobel winner) Neruda (Nobel Winner) Parra and Zurita. Chile is a place where poetry has mattered for a long time and for Zurita to be so important in that sea of excellence expresses how important he is as a poet.

I am not sure if the attendees at the reading realized how important this reading was. I for one will not easily forget Raul Zurita's evening in Chicago.