·:[ Stephen Vincent ]:·
• • • • •

William Bennett - former Bush Cabinet Secretary of Education or was it Moral?s - yesterday, on his syndicated radio program -declared to abort Black babies would reduce the rate and cost of crime in the United States. Does not say this country - as it goes broke - needs to cut the industrial cost of prisons currently used to warehouse (concentrate) the country’s African-American and poor populations. Does not say he is a racist. Does not ask why there was not an abortionist before the birth of Tom DeLay, Donald Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, Paul Wolfolitz, Bill Frist, George Bush, Ken Lay, etc. - among those indicted for crimes, soon to be, or close to being so. Does not say he is an out-and-out racist. Does not say, George Bush I was with you - and I remain with you - when you ignored the white and poor blacks unable to evacuate New Orleans.
Does not say he read Jonathan Swift without irony but belief as to the necessity of certain kinds of solutions. Certainly indicates he read “Mein Killer” with a certain lust in his heart.

Yes, I (too) am enraged!

Ladybug, Ladybug
Fly Away Home
Your House is on Fire…

“Global Metaphors” is a new series here. What do I mean by a “Global Metaphor”? (Yeah, the phone has been ringing off the hook! Please email queries!) I mean any image with “global” resonance from anywhere about the globe. Which is to say, if I am not imposing too much here, the “gagged firebox” strikes me an emblem, or is it, “icon”, of the moment. I believe we are in a “state of global emergency” while at the same time many forces are at work to gag the alarm boxes. Take for example, those Generals lying through their teeth about the disaster going nowwhere but worse in Iraq. Or Bush going off to a fund raiser in the middle of the onset of Katrina. Civic “alarm boxes” appear - on some level - “gagged” everywhere.
But there is much more! Mirrored as one may find it in signage and collissions of objects and cirmcumstances. So there, I hope that’s enough to open possibilities. Either send me your best found images or found signage direct or direct me your Flicker or whatever service provider from which I can upload a URL (You, of course, maintain rights to your images) & right, don’t send real objects - keep those on your mantle, or wherever deserves fresh sculpture in your life.
Thanks. Stephen Vincent

Speaking of teaching, of which I am currently doing some at OLLI - SFSU’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, where I lead a lovely class of 10 so-called seniors, maybe better called “young at heart elders” - all over 50, one or two over 70 - but anyway a peripatetic class called, “Walking & Writing”, down in the lower Market area of San Francisco - the ten of us taking to the streets one morning a week, note and sketchbooks in hand (”Imagine that instead of a naked model in a drawing class, you have the City before, in and around you - go at it, with it, or however it arrives through your fingertips - words, images, conversations, involuntary thoughts, etc.), and it’s been a sheer delight - particularly in the bright autumnal weather of late, the sun angling wonderfully in both buildings and bodies. There I, surrounded by folks, gripping their journals and feverishly taking note of whatever crosses ear, eye, or nose. Yes, I tell them no talking for the first half hour. I personally been a hound for the signage, particularly on Market Street, of which is found in the previousl post. One question has been nagging me, of the last four lines here, were they product of a Creative Writing Degree, and which school or poet. I find’em pretty good.
If you can get outside, I recommend ‘peripatesis’ as a wonderful way to teach - specially if you and your students - we say “members” - are hyperactive!

“Materialize, act or”
World Savings
Money to Buy or Refi
Men Working Above
Fog lifts for Haight-Ashbury
Warming Gains Converts
Towers of Babble
Stay in Touch
Homeless 7 1/2 Months Pregnant
Just Trying to Get Through
The Chaos of Consciousness
Smarter on Drugs?
The Intelligence Explosion
Einstein’s Brains Come to Life
- And Go on A Rampage
Chocolate Bars from Around the World
Hospital Halts Organ Program
To Conserve Gas President
Calls for Less Driving
Try Our New Caramel Iced Latte
Slow Down Shape Up
Over Dump Expansion
Are You Prepared? 72Hours.Org
Almost Heaven
Expression Theater Presents
Dead Certain
Can You Hear Me Now? Good
It Might Be Three Days
Before Services
It’s Affordable It’s Effective
Advertise Here
Walk for Hope
Win the Ultimate baby Gap Shower
Every Epistle is a New Year
Closer to Truth
20 Years 6 Friends 1 Murder
Productivity Doesn’t
Require Proximity
It’s Time to Arrive
Before You Get There

1st & Market Street
San Francisco September 27, 2005

Politics as Usual:

To obscure light
To falsify the document

We are appreciative of nothing
We destroy at will

We honor God in our absence
We are day-to-day liars

There is nothing so remote in this world
That does not touch us

We are a crime unto everything
Love is not an answer

Shame on no cruelty
We are the inheritors

Blink and you who question us
Will be dead.

Brilliant Indian summer day in San Francisco. Parade route from Dolores Park over to and down Market, up Van Ness to Turk, West to Jefferson Park.
Definition of a Post-Modern Demonstration is Don’t listen to the speeches at the Start, Don’t Listen to Speeches at the Finish. Walk and enjoy the costumes, signage, other people’s conversatons, the drumming, the cat-calls in unison up and down the parade, salute the City. Of course, take umbrage at the Police with numerous surveillance cameras operating in full view - umbrage because the equipment was no doubt bought with Homeland Security Federal Grants to the local police - that’s Homeland Security, the Federal Agency that somehow could not use its surveillance equipment to see that a hurricane was coming dead on to the Gulf Coast.
One of my favorite signs:
Read Between the Pipelines
The weirdest:
Free Hinkley
The day’s tone: Unlike three years ago, in the build-up before the war, and the one in New York before the Republican convention, instead of an optimism that the demonstration might work to alter Administration policy, or produce a new Administration, one senses two things:
1. The built-up rage is much more focused on Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld - their lies, deception, and what many have become to openly declare as criminal behavior.
2. A deep sense of collective violation and lament- that we, the Republic, have been almost irreparably damaged by the behavior, decisions and consequences of this regime. A hopelessness - in the process of the Demo - negated to a degree by walking, walking between the speeches, between Start and Finish. Even as this so-called leadership begins to openly implode, there is fear that the damage and debts incurred may be ones from which it will take great leadership to recover. And. ‘pray tell us’, I suspect many of us are asking, where on the political horizon is such leadership?

No Place for a Poet at a Banquet of Shame
by Sharon Olds

Laura Bush
First Lady
The White House

Dear Mrs. Bush,

I am writing to let you know why I am not able to accept your kind
invitation to give a presentation at the National Book Festival on
September 24, or to attend your dinner at the Library of Congress or the
breakfast at the White House.

In one way, it’s a very appealing invitation. The idea of speaking at a
festival attended by 85,000 people is inspiring! The possibility of
finding new readers is exciting for a poet in personal terms, and in
terms of the desire that poetry serve its constituents–all of us who
need the pleasure, and the inner and outer news, it delivers.

And the concept of a community of readers and writers has long been dear
to my heart. As a professor of creative writing in the graduate school
of a major university, I have had the chance to be a part of some
magnificent outreach writing workshops in which our students have become
teachers. Over the years, they have taught in a variety of settings: a
women’s prison, several New York City public high schools, an oncology
ward for children. Our initial program, at a 900-bed state hospital for
the severely physically challenged, has been running now for twenty
years, creating along the way lasting friendships between young MFA
candidates and their students–long-term residents at the hospital who,
in their humor, courage and wisdom, become our teachers.

When you have witnessed someone nonspeaking and almost nonmoving spell
out, with a toe, on a big plastic alphabet chart, letter by letter, his
new poem, you have experienced, close up, the passion and essentialness
of writing. When you have held up a small cardboard alphabet card for a
writer who is completely nonspeaking and nonmoving (except for the
eyes), and pointed first to the A, then the B, then C, then D, until you
get to the first letter of the first word of the first line of the poem
she has been composing in her head all week, and she lifts her eyes when
that letter is touched to say yes, you feel with a fresh immediacy the
human drive for creation, self-expression, accuracy, honesty and
wit–and the importance of writing, which celebrates the value of each
person’s unique story and song.

So the prospect of a festival of books seemed wonderful to me. I thought
of the opportunity to talk about how to start up an outreach program. I
thought of the chance to sell some books, sign some books and meet some
of the citizens of Washington, DC. I thought that I could try to find a
way, even as your guest, with respect, to speak about my deep feeling
that we should not have invaded Iraq, and to declare my belief that the
wish to invade another culture and another country–with the resultant
loss of life and limb for our brave soldiers, and for the noncombatants
in their home terrain–did not come out of our democracy but was instead
a decision made “at the top” and forced on the people by distorted
language, and by untruths. I hoped to express the fear that we have
begun to live in the shadows of tyranny and religious chauvinism–the
opposites of the liberty, tolerance and diversity our nation aspires to.

I tried to see my way clear to attend the festival in order to bear
witness–as an American who loves her country and its principles and its
writing–against this undeclared and devastating war.

But I could not face the idea of breaking bread with you. I knew that if
I sat down to eat with you, it would feel to me as if I were condoning
what I see to be the wild, highhanded actions of the Bush
Administration.

What kept coming to the fore of my mind was that I would be taking food
from the hand of the First Lady who represents the Administration that
unleashed this war and that wills its continuation, even to the extent
of permitting “extraordinary rendition”: flying people to other
countries where they will be tortured for us.

So many Americans who had felt pride in our country now feel anguish and
shame, for the current regime of blood, wounds and fire. I thought of
the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of the
candles, and I could not stomach it.

Sincerely,

SHARON OLDS

(Sharon Olds has a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University and teaches creative writing at NYU.
Olds has been the recipient of many awards including the San Francisco Poetry Center Award, the
Lamont Poetry Prize, The National Books Critics Circle Award, and the T. S. Eliot Prize.)

Hurricane Rita is obviously gotten under the skin, definitely the media skin. So demonic are the portrayals of the Eye and the whirling about it - this lady can dance! - on some other level one would think we were re-experiencing Orwell’s “War of the Worlds” broadcast or the opening of “Alien” or whatever the name of that film. Wow. 36 or so more hours before landfall.
The Beatles song, “Lovely Rita”, keeps calming down my brain - tho the song as sung in 1968 (Sargeant Pepper?) kind of jacked me up at the time.
Then last night KPFA is playing someone’s version of Dylan’s “Stuck in Mobile (Alabama) with the x blues again. I suspect playing the song was brought on by imagining a mix of hurricane exit strategy routes and related anxieties about ending up in a dreadful place where you don’t stay for long or not at all.
This morning I found myself writing:
“Stuck in Mobile, Alabama.” After all these years I finally figured out, that is, heard the irony, the oxymoron - how that line will survive any hurricane, any tornado, no matter what disaster may encounter that town. It’s really only partly about Mobile, it’s really about being “stuck” in “mobile” - which is another way of saying, he’s “spinning his wheels.” But what a great leap of Dylan’s imagination to sieze on that relationship, just bumping those two words, Stuck, and, Mobile, together, forever. (This goes in the category of the “secrets of the immortality of certain poems/songs” ) Has anybody written a poem about “Slipping through Gibralter”? I guess that would be the flip side of “Stuck in Mobile.” Oh, enough of this.

I took this photo on Sunday afternoon during an Indian summer day stroll on the Embarcadero. The sight of the skulls, American flag, et al genuinely spooked me - I mean in that ominous way - like Ingmar Bergman’s “Seventh Seal” spooked one. The way an image of absolute terror can penetrate the most bucollic landscape with a message you don’t want to hear.
As if, perhaps, Seurat had suddenly decided to plant a skull in the middle of that famous painting of Sunday afternoon walkers in the afternoon sunshine along the Seine.
Sadly I think it’s this kind of time in the USA.

Welcome. I am still making home, or gettting comfortable at this (my) new blog site. I am waiting for the color blue to knock out the stark white boxes; and I waiting for my site meter so I can sense of everyone’s popularity!
And I am waiting for a sense of how to move with and on beyond the trauma of the Gulf Coast. It remains awesome - in spite of or re-enforced by the re-entriels - that this continuent has essentially lost a City - a major African-American- Carribean-Latin American- Mediterranean hub of American culture. (Let alone the cultural settings of the surrounding bayous and coastal regions of Mississippi and Alabama.). It’s got ‘major’ written all over it. The script that emerges will be robust, troubling and full of conflict - much of which many are already prophesying. The Flem Snopes’ are already - I imagine - envisioning New Orleans as a giant new Las Vegas with a fake Creole patina. And then what of the dispersal of a huge population in the rest of the country.
So much mushing around the consciousness of the country - while simultaneously the country leaks money and death and devastation into Iraq. We most desperately need real leadership and I sense we’re floundering in the deepest collective malaise that I can remember.

In the meantime there is poetry. Chris Murray (http://www.texfiles.blogspot.com/)has kindly put up one of my pieces from Sleeping With Sappho in comparison with an Ann Carson translation of the same piece.
O yes, klutzy slow learning me, is still trying to figure out links, and all the other detail work in terms of enhancing the hyper-flexibility of this new blog! Patience or come to my assistance.