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book awards
2/28/2010
Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award to D. A. Powell
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D. A. Powell has won the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for fourth collection of poetry, Chronic, published by Graywolf Press. The Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award is given annually by Claremont Graduate University to honor work by a midcareer poet. The panel of final judges for the 2010 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Awards were Ted Genoways, Linda Gregerson, Paul Muldoon, Carl Phillips, and Charles Harper Webb. "D. A. Powell is one of the major poets of our time, and it’s wonderful to have the Kingsley Tufts Award recognize that", announced Graywolf Press senior editor Jeffrey Shotts. "Considering that Powell was selected by such a diverse committee of esteemed poets, that makes it all the sweeter."
[dogs and boys can treat
you like trash. and dogs do love trash]
dogs and boys can treat you like trash. and dogs do love
trash
to nuzzle their muzzles. they slather with tongues that
smell like their nuts
but the boys are fickle when they lick you. they stick you with
twigs
and roll you over like roaches. then off with another:
those sluts
with their asses so tight you couldn't get them to budge for a turd
so unlike the dogs: who will turn in a circle showing & showing
their butts
a dog on a leash: a friend in the world. he'll crawl into
bed on all fours
and curl up at your toes. he'll give you his nose.
he'll slobber on cuts
a dog is not fragile; he's fixed. but a boy:
cannot give you his love
he closes his eyes to your kisses. he hisses.
a boy is a putz
with a sponge for a brain. and a mop for a heart: he'll
soak up your love
if you let him and leave you as dry as a cork.
he'll punch out your guts
when a boy goes away: to another boy's arms.
what else can you do
but lie down with the dogs. with the hounds with the curs.
with the mutts
- a poem by D. A. Powell published in the Boston Review.
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progressive books
2/24/2010
The banks have had nine months to creatively increase the real cost of borrowing: Robert Manning on Credit Card Nation
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Just as we demand credit card users to act responsibly, we demand that credit card companies act responsibly too - President Obama's words on May 22, 2009 before signing the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act (CARD).
The CARD Act finally took effect on Monday, Feburary 22. It prohibits some of the worst industry practices including billing systems that generate finance charges on paid-off balances, some retroactive interest-rate increases and unrestricted marketing to consumers under the age of 21. But in the nine months since May, credit card companies have found new ways to increase their profits from consumer borrowing despite the CARD Act including annual fees, cutting credit limits, hiking interest rates and various hidden charges. On Tuesday, Robert Manning discussed the CARD act on DemocracyNow!. Robert Manning is the author of Credit Card Nation: The Consequences of America’s Addiction to Credit. and the founder of the Responsible Debt Relief Institute.
This would have been a great bill when it was first discussed about seven or eight years ago, but in the depths of this recession and the fact that there is no usury law and there are not any fee caps, and the fact that the banks had nine months to creatively increase the real cost of borrowing,... most Americans...are going to be shocked at how limited the help is, offered by the CARD Act...It’s one thing to be able to be told how long it’s going to take you to pay off your bill. It’s another thing to find out that your interest rate’s been doubled from 15 percent to 29.9 percent...[and] it’s happened already in the nine months preceding the implementation of the act...This is a fee-driven industry now. The effort to disconnect risk and lending and transfer that risk to investors means that banks make more and more of their money...in late and penalty over-limit fees. Banks are going to be charging annual fees....Any benefit that you get is going to come with a fee.
- Robert Manning, speaking on DemocracyNow!.
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progressive books
2/9/2010
Robert McChesney and John Nichols the history and necessity of government subsides for US journalism
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Discussing their new book, The Death and Life of American Journalism, Robert McChesney and John Nichols relate how for the first hundred years of American history, it was understood that the duty of a democratic state was to see to the existence of an independent, uncensored journalism. Journalism was seen as a public good. The government helped American journalism by the granting of subsidies. There was no assumption that independent journalism would be provided for by market forces.
There are two great components of free press in the United States in our tradition. The first great component is the one we all know about, that government shouldn’t censor content, it shouldn’t regulate journalists, it shouldn’t prohibit anyone from entering doing media, like any of us. And that should never be compromised.
But the second great tradition of the American free press tradition is that it’s the first duty of the state to make sure free press exists. And that part has been lost in the shuffle. One of the striking things we discovered, Amy and Juan, when we did our research is we reread all the First Amendment cases of the US Supreme Court in the last hundred years, all the freedom of the press cases. And what was striking in Hugo Black, in Potter Stewart, in all the great cases, was the assumption that it was the first duty of a democratic government to make sure a credible Fourth Estate exists. Otherwise the entire governance of the country will collapse. You cannot have a democracy and self-government and the rule of law.
Just start with the American tradition first, our own tradition in the first half of the nineteenth century. We wanted to compute, you know, this federal subsidy from the post office, which primarily was the distribution arm of newspapers—that’s 95 percent of its traffic—and the printing subsidies in the first half of the nineteenth century. How significant were they? And so, we actually went back and determined what percentage of GDP they were in the first half of the nineteenth century. If we had the same percentage of gross domestic product today, by the federal government as a subsidy to journalism, how much would the federal government pay? And it was $30 billion. I mean, it was such an enormous investment by the federal government to create a free press. It wasn’t just a piddly side thing; it was, after military, the largest expense of the federal government for the first seventy-five years of our history, into the Civil War period.
And then we went to look at other—you know, generally, when people ask about government subsidies, they think of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Pol Pot. They think of all these terrible dictatorships. We said, well, that’s not really the relevant comparison for the United States. We should look at other democracies. What are they doing in Europe and in Asia, and even in third world countries that are democracies? And what we discovered is, all of them, or almost all them, have significantly large public media, community media and journalism subsidies. They vary from country to country, but they’re all enormous compared to the United States. And if you look at northern Europe, for example, this average country up there in Scandinavia or Holland or Germany, in US terms, if you put it to per capita basis and put it in the United States, we’d have to spend between $20 and $35 billion a year to subsidize public media and journalism to be equal to those countries.
- two selections from a DemocracyNow! interview with Robert McChesney and John Nichols.
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book awards
2/5/2010
Of course, I’d forgotten she’d died: An extract from A Scattering by Christopher Reid, the 2009 Costa Book of the Year
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"My old, obscure life has gone. I am sort of famous. Radios have been broadcasting, and newspapers have retailed, in their different styles, the story of my book: a set of elegies on the death from cancer of my wife in 2005. What began as an intimate expression of love and grief has become a public parade. Bewildering.
How did Douglas Dunn, whose Elegies, poems about the death of his first wife, in 1985 won the first Whitbread Book of the Year — the Whitbread preceded and developed into the Costa — cope with this? Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters, also and perhaps not coincidentally about his dead wife, Sylvia Plath, was a later winner. Hughes had died by the time of his award: the ultimate evasive action. No local radio interviews for him!" - from
Christopher Reid on winning the Costa Award.
Late home one night, I found
she was not yet home herself.
So I got into bed and waited
under my blanket mound,
until I heard her come in
and hurry upstairs.
My back was to the door.
Without turning round,
I greeted her, but my voice
made only a hollow, parched-throated
k-, k-, k- sound,
which I could not convert into words
and which, anyway, lacked
the force to carry.
Nonplussed, but not distraught,
I listened to her undress,
then sidle along the far side
of our bed and lift the covers.
Of course, I’d forgotten she’d died.
Adjusting my arm for the usual
cuddle and caress,
I felt mattress and bedboards
welcome her weight
as she rolled and settled towards me,
but, before I caught her,
it was already too late
and she’d wisped clean away.
from A Scattering, by Christopher Reid.
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lit obits
1/30/2010
Tributes to People's Historian Howard Zinn, 1922 - 2010
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The best human being I've ever known. The best example of what a human can be, and can do with their life. - Daniel Ellsberg from A Memory of Howard
Howard Zinn broadened the battle when he claimed conventional U.S. texts and school courses failed by celebrating wars, legislation, Presidents, generals and captains of industry. He stood history back on its feet when he told on how masses of American women and men, people of color and poor whites built the country first as slaves and indentured servants, and then as mill hands, assembly line workers and maids. He further antagonized traditional scholars by rejoicing in the disobedience of slave rebels, union organizers and radical civil rights and anti-war agitators. He found dissidents to be America's real patriots and democrats -- not the George Washingtons, Thomas Jeffersons and Andrew Jacksons who talked of liberty while they traded in slaves, and sent posses after those who escaped.
- William Loren Katz from Changing History
He really conveyed to everyone he came into contact with that there was no more meaningful action than to be involved in struggle, no more fulfilling or important way of living one’s life than in struggle fighting for justice. And so many people, myself included, but, you know, millions of people around the world, countless number of people, they changed their lives by encountering Howard Zinn—Howard changed their lives—reading A People’s History of the United States, hearing one of his lectures, meeting him, hearing him on the radio, reading an article he wrote. He really inspired people to create the kinds of movements that brought about whatever rights, whatever freedoms, whatever liberties we have in this country. And that really is the legacy that it’s incumbent upon all of us to extend and keep alive and keep vibrant. - Anthony Arnov from DemocracyNow!.
Anyone who believes that the United States is immune to radical politics never attended a lecture by Howard Zinn...What matters is not who's sitting in the White House. What matters is who's sitting in!" he would say with a mischievous grin. - Dave Zirin from Howard Zinn: The Historian Who Made History
His writings have changed the consciousness of a generation, and helped open new paths to understanding and its crucial meaning for our lives. When action has been called for, one could always be confident that he would be on the front lines, an example and trustworthy guide.
- Noam Chomsky quoted by Mark Feeney and Bryan Marquard from Howard Zinn, historian who challenged status quo, dies at 87
No American historian has left a more lasting positive legacy on our understanding of the true nature of our country, mainly because his books reflect a soul possessed of limitless depth. Howard's People's History Of The United States will not be surpassed. As time goes on new chapters will be written in its spirit to extend its reach. - Harvey Wasserman from How the Great Howard Zinn Made All Our Lives Better
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progressive books
1/24/2010
Johann Hari on P. W. Singer's Wired For War
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If virtually no American forces had died in Vietnam, would the war have stopped when it did – or would the systematic slaughter of the Vietnamese people have continued for many more years? If "we" weren't losing anyone in Afghanistan or Iraq, would the call for an end to the killing be as loud? I'd like to think we are motivated primarily by compassion for civilians on the other side, but I doubt it. Take "us" safely out of the picture and we will be more willing to kill "them". - Johann Hari from The age of the killer robot is no longer a sci-fi fantasy.
The Nato forces now depend on a range of killer robots, largely designed by the British Ministry of Defence labs privatised by Tony Blair in 2001. Every time you hear about a "drone attack" against Afghanistan or Pakistan, that's an unmanned robot dropping bombs on human beings. Push a button and it flies away, kills, and comes home. Its robot-cousin on the battlefields below is called SWORDS: a human-sized robot that can see 360 degrees around it and fire its machine-guns at any target it "chooses". Fox News proudly calls it "the GI of the 21st century." And billions are being spent on the next generation of warbots, which will leave these models looking like the bulky box on which you used to play Pong.
At the moment, most are controlled by a soldier – often 7,500 miles away – with a control panel. But insurgents are always inventing new ways to block the signal from the control centre, which causes the robot to shut down and "die". So the military is building "autonomy" into the robots: if they lose contact, they start to make their own decisions, in line with a pre-determined code.
This is "one of the most fundamental changes in the history of human warfare," according to PW Singer, a former analyst for the Pentagon and the CIA, in his must-read book, Wired For War: The Robotics Revolution and Defence in the Twenty-First Century. Humans have been developing weapons that enabled us to kill at ever-greater distances and in ever-greater numbers for millennia, from the longbow to the cannon to the machine-gun to the nuclear bomb. But these robots mark a different stage.
The earlier technologies made it possible for humans to decide to kill in more "sophisticated" ways – but once you programme and unleash an autonomous robot, the war isn't fought by you any more: it's fought by the machine. The subject of warfare shifts. - Johann Hari from The Independent, The age of the killer robot is no longer a sci-fi fantasy
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progressive books
1/23/2010
Jamin Raskin on the Supreme Court campaign finance ruling which removes limits on corporate campaign spending
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We’ve had some terrible Supreme Court interventions against political democracy: Shaw v. Reno, striking down majority African American and Hispanic congressional districts; Bush v. Gore, intervening to stop the counting of ballots in Florida. But I would have to say that all of them pale compared to what we just saw yesterday, where the Supreme Court has overturned decades of Supreme Court precedent to declare that private, for-profit corporations have First Amendment rights of political expression, meaning that they can spend up to the heavens in order to have their way in politics. And this will open floodgates of millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars in federal, state and local elections, as Halliburton and Enron and Blackwater and Bank of America and Goldman Sachs can take money directly out of corporate treasuries and put them into our politics.
And I looked at just one corporation, Exxon Mobil, which is the biggest corporation in America. In 2008, they posted profits of $85 billion. And so, if they decided to spend, say, a modest ten percent of their profits in one year, $8.5 billion, that would be three times more than the Obama campaign, the McCain campaign and every candidate for House and Senate in the country spent in 2008. That’s one corporation. So think about the Fortune 500. They’re threatening a fundamental change in the character of American political democracy. - Jamin Raskin from a DemocracyNow! interview.
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book notes
1/16/2010
"Haitians have been punished ever since for claiming their freedom", Tracy Kidder and Peter Hallward on Haiti
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Haiti is a country created by former slaves, kidnapped West Africans, who, in 1804, when slavery still flourished in the United States and the Caribbean, threw off their cruel French masters and created their own republic. Haitians have been punished ever since for claiming their freedom: by the French who, in the 1820s, demanded and received payment from the Haitians for the slave colony, impoverishing the country for years to come; by an often brutal American occupation from 1915 to 1934; by indigenous misrule that the American government aided and abetted.
- from the New York Times, Country Without a Net, by Tracy Kidder.
The noble "international community" which is currently scrambling to send its "humanitarian aid" to Haiti is largely responsible for the extent of the suffering it now aims to reduce. Ever since the US invaded and occupied the country in 1915, every serious political attempt to allow Haiti's people to move (in former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide's phrase) "from absolute misery to a dignified poverty" has been violently and deliberately blocked by the US government and some of its allies.
Aristide's own government (elected by some 75% of the electorate) was the latest victim of such interference, when it was overthrown by an internationally sponsored coup in 2004 that killed several thousand people and left much of the population smouldering in resentment. The UN has subsequently maintained a large and enormously expensive stabilisation and pacification force in the country.
Haiti is now a country where, according to the best available study, around 75% of the population "lives on less than $2 per day, and 56% – four and a half million people – live on less than $1 per day". Decades of neoliberal "adjustment" and neo-imperial intervention have robbed its government of any significant capacity to invest in its people or to regulate its economy. Punitive international trade and financial arrangements ensure that such destitution and impotence will remain a structural fact of Haitian life for the foreseeable future.
It is this poverty and powerlessness that account for the full scale of the horror in Port-au-Prince today. Since the late 1970s, relentless neoliberal assault on Haiti's agrarian economy has forced tens of thousands of small farmers into overcrowded urban slums. Although there are no reliable statistics, hundreds of thousands of Port-au-Prince residents now live in desperately sub-standard informal housing, often perched precariously on the side of deforested ravines. The selection of the people living in such places and conditions is itself no more "natural" or accidental than the extent of the injuries they have suffered.
As Brian Concannon, the director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, points out: "Those people got there because they or their parents were intentionally pushed out of the countryside by aid and trade policies specifically designed to create a large captive and therefore exploitable labour force in the cities; by definition they are people who would not be able to afford to build earthquake resistant houses." Meanwhile the city's basic infrastructure – running water, electricity, roads, etc – remains woefully inadequate, often non-existent. The government's ability to mobilise any sort of disaster relief is next to nil.
- from the Guardian, Our role in Haiti's plight, by Peter Hallward.
January 17 2010: See also from Common Dreams, Why the US Owes Haiti Billions – The Briefest History by Bill Quigley.
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lit obits
1/2/2010
At 42, she was one of the best poets of her generation, Rachel Wetzsteon, 1967 - 2009
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"At 42, she was one of the best poets of her generation", writes Adam Kirsch in memory and admiration of Rachel Wetzsteon who took her own life on Christmas day, 2009.
"In a perfect world", Kirsch wrote earlier, "Rachel Wetzsteon would be one of the most popular poets of her generation. You would see people in the outdoor cafes along Upper Broadway reading copies of Sakura Park, her third collection, the way pilgrims to Greenwich Village carry Scott Fitzgerald or Edna St. Vincent Millay...Wetzsteon’s poems are odes to sharpened senses, to possibilities held open, and to the city whose own sharp openness seems like a standing invitation"
(Adam Kirsch, from a Contemporary Poetry Review of Sakura Park
by Rachel Wetzsteon).
Gold Leaves
Someone ought to write about (I thought
and therefore do) stage three of alchemy:
not inauspicious metal turned into
a gilded page, but that same page turned back
to basics when you step outside for air
and feel a radiance that was not there
the day before, your sidewalks lined with gold.
Five-Finger Exercise
When things get hot and heavy this weekend or one August
twenty years from now, and I start tapping hexameters
up and down the shoulder-blades of my beloved (insert
auspicious, trustworthy-sounding, stolid but fun name here
for I can conjure none), I hope I do it right,
never losing sight of the skin whose golden toughness
allows the counting, never moving my fingers so briskly
that I can't hear his breathing, and never forgetting, even
in the lonely heights of sublimest inspiration—
What is your substance?... O rose ... and grey and full of sleep—
to flip the warm flesh over and whisper, It had to be you.
- two poems by Rachel Wetzsteon published in The Corland Review.
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lit obits
12/27/2009
You have to decide which side you are on: there is always a side. Commitment does not exist in an abstraction; it exists in action: Dennis Brutus, 1924 - 2009
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For almost half a century Dennis Brutus was at the forefront of the campaign to bring down the apartheid system in South Africa, the place where he was born and which gave him the awareness of racism, poverty and injustice that has informed his work ever since. In 1963 Brutus was shot by the police in South Africa and later imprisoned for 18 months alongside Nelson Mandela on Robben Island. After being exiled from his homeland, Brutus became a prominent political organizer, who in 1970 led the successful campaign to expel apartheid South Africa from the Olympic Games. While working as a university lecturer in the US, he also became a pioneering advocate of postcolonial studies within academia, helping to introduce African literature as a category within the curriculum....
Without doubt, there is a certain Audenesque quality about Brutus's own poetry, in particular in his ability to move from personal feeling to the spirit of the collective - the shared hopes and fears of people who are usually on the receiving end of history. To use poetry as a means of fighting back against the forces of oppression and exploitation is for Brutus not just an intellectual choice but an existential cry from the heart for social change to come sooner rather than later:In the dark lanes of Soweto,
amid the mud, the slush, the squalor,
among the rusty tin shacks
the lust for freedom survives stubbornly
like a smoldering defiant flame
and the spirit of Steve Biko moves easily. Auden's poem "Spain 1937" is a particular point of reference in another poem by Brutus - "Love; he Struggle." When Auden writes "To-morrow he rediscovery of romantic love ... but to-day the struggle," Brutus paraphrases this radical postponement with his own dialectic of personal freedom and political necessity: Conched, contrapuntal our concord
Day's breath wracks our peace,
Our dreams disrupt in blustery discord
Buckling to winds' capricious buffet we desert our calms
- Ah love, unshoulder now my arms! Like the early Auden, Brutus also sees his role as that of a public poet, "the world's troubadour" as he describes himself, one who seeks to give a voice to those whom the system has silenced. There is therefore in Brutus's poetry an implicit sense of radical dialogue with people whose lives remain outside the focus of the established media. This is where the real struggle s taking place, and it is within this context of solidarity with the dispossessed that Brutus has always situated himself as a writer: An old black woman,
suffering,
tells me I have given her
"new images"
- a father bereaved
by radical heroism
finds consolation
in my verse.
then I know
these are those I write for
and my verse works.
- Ronal Paul, from a review of Poetry and Protest: A Dennis Brutus Reader that originally appeared in Socialism and Democracy, issue 21, and has been reprinted if full at AfricaResource.
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