Dailies 3/24/18

~TRIBRACH~

Poetry Diary: March For Our Lives

Rachel Eliza Griffiths – 26

Your names toll in my dreams.
I pick up tinsel in the street. A nameless god
streaks my hand with blood. I look at the lighted trees
in windows & the spindles of pine tremble

–

Read rest of poem  – found at 

The Poetry Foundation’s anthology of Poems of Protest, Resistance, and Empowerment

“Truth Coming Out of Her Well,” by Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1896.

 

Martin Espada – Heal the Cracks in the Bell of the World

                    For the community of Newtown, Connecticut,
where twenty students and six educators lost their
lives to a gunman at Sandy Hook Elementary
School, December 14, 2012

 

Now the bells speak with their tongues of bronze.
Now the bells open their mouths of bronze to say:
Listen to the bells a world away. Listen to the bell in the ruins
of a city where children gathered copper shells like beach glass,

–

Read rest of poem 

Matthew Buckley Smith – Creed for Atheists

***Let us not speak of God
As if He were the nightmare of a naughty child,
***Or a white lie for a widow,

–

Read rest of poem 

Travis Cebula – Catalyst for Ordination #1 

it has been said
that in a vacuum—
which is to say,

–

Read rest of poem 

“Vivas to those who have failed: for they become the river.”

Posting this in honor of May Day/International Worker’s Day. Found via The Poetry Foundation’s list of Poems of Protest, Resistance, and Empowerment.

Vivas To Those Who Have Failed: The Paterson Silk Strike, 1913

Martín Espada

Vivas to those who have fail’d!
And to those whose war-vessels sank in the sea!
And to those themselves who sank in the sea!
And to all generals that lost engagements, and all overcome heroes!
And the numberless unknown heroes equal to the greatest heroes known!
—Walt Whitman

 

 –

I. The Red Flag

 –

The newspapers said the strikers would hoist

the red flag of anarchy over the silk mills

of Paterson. At the strike meeting, a dyers’ helper

from Naples rose as if from the steam of his labor,

lifted up  his hand and said here is the red flag:

brightly stained with dye for the silk of bow ties

and scarves, the skin and fingernails boiled away

for six dollars a week in the dye house.

–

Read rest of poem 

Read more about the Paterson silk strike 

Rules for Captain Ahab’s Provincetown Poetry Workshop

BY MARTÍN ESPADA

1.   Ye shall be free to write a poem on any subject, as long as it’s the White Whale.
2.   A gold doubloon shall be granted to the first among ye who in a poem sights the White Whale.
3.   The Call Me Ishmael Award shall be given to the best poem about the White Whale, with publication in The White Whale Review.

–

 Read rest of poem at Poetry Foundation

Martin Espada’s tribute to his father

 

See more photos by Frank Espada at frankespada.com

Mad Love

by Martin Espada

No one wants to look at pictures of Puerto Ricans, Frank. – Cornell Capa

My brother said: They harvested his corneas. I imagined
the tweezers lifting the corneas from my father’s eyes,
delicate as the wings of butterflies mounted under glass.
I imagined the transplant, stitches finer than hair,
eyes fluttering awake to the brilliance of an open window.

–

Read rest of poem, plus more about Espada’s father, a community organizer and photographer, at PBS (scroll down)

Read a transcript of the PBS interview here.  Quote:

The poetry about my father is both elegiac and documentary. Poets often in these situations perform the function of preachers, right? People expect you to say something meaningful in this age where language has become divorced from meaning and we live in a time of hyper-euphemism.

The over-reaction of Fox News to a “Literature of 9/11” class

Oldish, but interesting news–earlier this week, while doing research on the poetry of Jihad, I ran across some articles about a controversial class called “Literature of 9/11” that was taught last semester at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The conservative press, predictably, had a field day with it after a Freshman blogged in The College Fix that “None of the readings assigned in the freshman seminar present the Sept. 11 attacks from the perspective of those who died or from American families who lost loved ones.” -Alec Dent, August 28, 2015: UNC’s ‘Literature of 9/11’ course sympathizes with terrorists, paints U.S. as imperialistic.  

According to Media Matters, in Fox News Fooled By College Freshman Blogger In Attack On 9/11 Literature Course -Pam Vogel, September 1, 2015, this wasn’t true.

Vogel includes a list of what was actually taught (and bless her, she actually includes links to the poems–something most news articles don’t do.)Here’s the actual break-down of what was taught in the course.  Check it out to judge how diverse it actually was.

Vogel also includes excerpts of what journalists on Fox News said about the poetry in the course, including Lisa Kennedy Montgomery’s “comic take on what a poem written by a Guantanamo detainee might sound like…[she] stated that ‘most of this writing would make great lining for the bottom of my parrot’s cage.'”  The video can be found here.  

Here’s the satirical poem Kennedy created and read:  

I hope that Obama shuts this prison

cause I don’t have a pot to piz’in

get me out of this gutter

so I can go back to Cutter

and get back to full-time terrorizm

Those interested in actual poems by detainees can find them in  Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak, one of the books taught in the UNC class.

Excerpts, some on audio, can be found here.  They’re pretty moving.

The other poetry book in the course was Sand Opera by Philip Metres. Here’s the Amazon description:

Sand Opera emerges from the dizzying position of being named but unheard as an Arab American and out of the parallel sense of seeing Arabs named and silenced since 9/11. Polyvocal poems, arias, and redacted text speak for the unheard. Philip Metres exposes our common humanity while investigating the dehumanizing perils of war and its lasting effect on our culture.

And also taught was  “First Writing Since” by Suheir Hammad, who Vogel describes as “a Palestinian-American who writes about her brother in the U.S. military and her experience narrowly avoiding the World Trade Center on 9/11.” It begins

1. there have been no words.
i have not written one word.
no poetry in the ashes south of canal street.
no prose in the refrigerated trucks driving debris and dna.
not one word.

today is a week, and seven is of heavens, gods, science.
evident out my kitchen window is an abstract reality.
sky where once was steel.
smoke where once was flesh.

fire in the city air and i feared for my sister’s life in a way never
before. and then, and now, i fear for the rest of us.

–

Read rest of poem

Plus

Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100

Martín Espada, 1957

for the 43 members of Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local 100, working at the Windows on the World restaurant, who lost their lives in the attack on the World Trade Center

Alabanza. Praise the cook with the shaven head
and a tattoo on his shoulder that said Oye,
a blue-eyed Puerto Rican with people from Fajardo,
the harbor of pirates centuries ago.
Praise the lighthouse in Fajardo, candle
glimmering white to worship the dark saint of the sea.
Alabanza. Praise the cook’s yellow Pirates cap

–

Read rest of poem at Poets.org

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