A ribbon around the heart of the world

By Ted Burke
(There is something greater than politics, and that is service, and such is our luck that the service that needs to be provided for an embattled American Public has to be administered through political institutions; I believe in the line that goes that what used to be an occasional (good)hunch or inspiration gradually becomes a working part of the mind, and that we can collectively view what needs to be done and elect a leader who can forge our path through the proverbial dark forest and into the light. Obama, I think, is that man, not to put too partisan a face on the matter. Not that either party is blameless in our national and international pickle; that's besides the point at this juncture. What is obvious is that if Obama gets elected by anything resembling the margins have him at, there will be a mandate (from Heaven?) to change the way things are done in our ostensible democracy. I can't believe that we're just changing seats on the Titantic, since without the hope that things get better after a time of struggle , I'd have no reason to get out of bed, to work, to even bother doing the things I do. Why bother, if all is for naught? Hope is the watchword, and that idea is created by the quality of the acts you perform and the responsibililty you take for your conditions. Achieving that, little by measurable little, is the source of all genuine happinessFor me it comes down to the simple notion that one does the best they can do in the circumstances they find themselves in, making note that what limits their ability to be proactive in specific personal affairs and public doings isn't a dead end of possibility.

Situations vary grately, and one acts in good faith that most others in the world they know are likewise operating under the assumption that it's a better life if we try to improve circumstances, right injustices, provide comfort and crucial help to the needy than it is to shut down, horde, be a mean spirited miser. Disappointment is unavoidable, and I've said for the last two years that I am guardedly optimistic about the eventual revival of both or national spirit and our economy.

I do believe that all boats can rise on a rising tide. I am not a Polly Anna, and cyncism is my native expression and view, but I am aware that I cannot let it overtake what's left of my humanity. The meaning of life , it stands to reason, is what one creates through meaningful actions that one takes responsibility for. I'm not the smartest bear in the woods, but I do think the culture can be made to turn to something fairer, more just , kinder with enough determination and hard work. But that's done a day at a time.

).

The white people
have gone crazy
in the back seats
of All American cars
looking for the sex life
that fell between the cracks,
meanwhile screaming the rudeness
of Romantic love
that finds them
hung-over in court
too early in the morning
of a business day
where they'll tell the Judge
that it's only rock and roll
and that there was something in the way
the singer dropped his "g's
and a manner
worth noting when the guitarist
grabbed his whammy bar
and that all they did was taking
Creeley freely and pile into
the four-wheeled remains of a rumored prosperity
and drove into
the running gag reflex of the night, down a blvd.
filled brand names and bored cops,
cruising to get "some", to find "it"
and where "it" lived,
a slobbering example
of failed bonding
locked into habits
where even as their language of outrage
is bought
and shredded
in magazines
whose pages stick together
just as they did
in the parking lot after last call,
harassing the cocktail staff
that's going home,
they'll stick to principals
familiar and vague,
like that song whose words you never memorized
but tried to sing anyway, with a hushed secret at the core of the chorus
Saying that love is somewhere
just around one of these thousands
of and that it'll shake your hand
if you drive long and far and often enough,
if you've the gas
to complete the journey, the journey
Celine dreamed of while lying in bed,
staring at ceilings, concluding
that his language of outrage could only
describe the surface details of wrong turns,
that it had been bought and sold in a tradition
of literature that speculates about how wonderful
our lives might have been
if only the dream hadn't ended
when we opened our eyes,

Our eyes are constantly
getting used to the dark
absorbs every inch of brick
in parking lots
behind buildings and under bedrooms
of others who've made
their peace with
the sameness of the night,
the radio blares
more guitar solos
emerging from the
static of stadium
drums and strumming,
crazed cadenzas
whose neurotic notes scurry
and cleave to a neuron receptor
and keys a change
in the brains chemical balance that changes
the language of what the nights' really been about,

But we remain where we are,
white heterosexual males bond
by nothing more than
the chain sawing motion
of jaws lifting and falling
on the pillows and
sofa cushions in
desert motels
in time to the pans of a camera
on the silent television
where it's nothing but a wall full
of clocks telling
the time in
three separate
time zones while
temperatures are mentioned where
anger and rain mix in the fields
and valleys of economies
based on pride,
some abstract grip on selflessness that
needs no sleep
as do the bodies in this room,
dead to the world when the
engine blew, when the gas ran out, when
the last drop in whatever bottle of
cartoon labeled beer vanished on the
buds of a tongue
whose thirst could not be slaked by?
promise of fortune or even
water, pure and free of lies,

We sleep in shifts until
our time here runs
out on us,
until the phone that rings
everyday for twenty minutes on end
stops finally and leaves
the house quiet
from stairway to attic to porch,
with only the whir of the
refrigerator engine
starting up
and filling the stale,
stale air that
used to carry
mean jazz, drum boogie,
scratched riffs of declarative guitars,
the frets of God announcing
a life worth inventing in the notes
that passed through the room,
the boredom,
we realize in frozen moments
that any excuse for getting
out of the house
is a magic trick
that's performed after
they've shown you
where they've hidden the mirror,
"language is the house
where man lives",
let us say
that this life is
like being a fish
that cannot describe the water it swims in,
endlessly at 3AM
when only the coffee at
the 7-11 has the
aroma of anything
real enough to make
us think of getting
out of town
with one suitcase
and a bus fare,
next to a god-damned big car,
five shoulders
to the wheel
and no one able to drive
between towns , from carnival to still spot
where ever we could
pitch tents and trailers
and set up Ferris wheels that
would rattle against a
large scowling moon
hovering over
Modesto and Turlock
on dry August nights
when dollars are
grimy with mung from
many a farmer's and mechanic's hand,
power chords slice through
the speakers, destroy the cracked dashboard,
your face is slapped
with a power
not your own,
it comes down to something
that's a secret
that even The Judge won't cop to it
before he lowers his voice,

"The beat goes on,
the beat goes on,
the beat goes on,
the beat goes on…"

We can do better
this far away
from our past,
we have something
we've turned toward,
a light in eyes, a sun
that shines a light
those blades of
grass and long
stemmed flowers lean toward
even when clouds
and the stammer of fire eating transistors
sizzling from car windows distort the
image in the minds' eye,
I see a city where we come
and plant our feet on lawns
where we can sit
and plant in turn
new seeds, ideas
of a future worth having,

let's lean into the sun,
into the sun,
ride bicycles into the sun
on the road that becomes
a ribbon around the
heart of the world

On Slam Poetry

By Ted Burke

Slam poetry gets tedious quickly, the reason for which is that it's a style that knows one style, one attack, one speed, which is staccato, in your face, and angry. This isn't to say that there isn't a good slam poet here and there, but so much of what gets called poetry in these settings (that I've seen anyway) is an unfocused rant declaring independence in what sounds little more than a string of bumper sticker and T shirt slogans focused on a particular audience who are in the early stages of developing their poetry taste. It's the conformity of non conforming, rebels gathered together in the same room, aggressively agreeing with each other.
The in-your-face style and anger dominate , yes, and serve the purpose of drawing attention and making the speaker's agitation obvious, but with respect to the crucial matters slammers say they're dealing with, whether social justice, racism, rape, the performance style wearies the observer who isn't part of the mosh pit mentality that makes up a slam community . The injustices one tries to expose and address and the humanity they try to reclaim is more than obscured by the fidgeting exclamations coming from performers uttering their slogans at unnaturally high levels of throat stripping volume. The issues you bring up are reduced to an equivalent selection of talking points the RNC fashions when they sick their attacks on Democrats. At any point, the central theme of slam poetry is me and my anger and my right to express myself and you're not going to tell me what to do , man... It's a kiddie thing.

Would you not agree that poetry to supposed to motivate emotions?
First, I would say that poetry is not supposed to do anything other than be a poem, to paraphrase Archibald MacLeish. You can't write a poem with it in mind that your successfully living up to a strict set of requirements; not and remain an interesting poet.I would say that emotions are what motivates the writing of poems in many instances, not the other way around as you perhaps mistakenly phrased it. An emotion, a mood, a thought comes prior to the writing, which is the poet's attempt to frame their experience , their perception. Some might argue that slam poets take the emotional subjects and seek to make the audience feel something beyond the page and podium from where the poet recites, but often as not the feeling is like getting hit by a car over and over again.

Emotions are fluid , mercurial, gracing and cursing us with an infinite stream of sensation sublime, miserable and limitless variations in between, and the poet who seeks to do justice to the nuance of the feeling and their perception of it would attempt to find a language and the phrases that would get that fleet sensation across to an empathetic reader. In your face is fine if that's what is called for, but the constant barrage of anger, drum line pieces of rage, anger and pain makes one assume that perhaps some writers are cultivating their pain , refusing to allow their wounds to heal in some productive way, or that they pursue new miserable experiences for the sake of having something else to fit into their templates.

Anger dominates the idiom, and even it doesn't the pace has one speed, rapid, frenzied. It becomes monotonous; the real test of how good individual poems are is how they survive committed to the page, where the rhythms , cadences, pauses and euphonious effects resound in some idiosyncratic way in the reader's private sense of music. It should be, I dare say, something akin to a composition from which there are firm cues and structures that survive as literary art separate from the the author's / reader's projectile recitation. Even in the gentler, kinder, more ecstatic moods slammers might attempt, there is a feeling of wanting the experience to be over with. Rather than do justice to an experience, an idea, an emotional complex, too many slammers sound as if they prefer the crowd pleasing line, the cutting analogy than the sustained mood, which makes me think that the concern is less art than it is acquiring bragging rights. It's a tradition related to toasting, hip hop and such, and while it's a tradition of it's own making and standards, it's cursed with a monolithic ally monotonous style that seems more like the way Detroit used to think about the way they made and sold cars; the packaging was more important than what was under the hood.

"HOWL": Keep Howling, Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl" is  over a half century old now, and it will do us no harm to review the first stanzas yet again, for the are as vatic, volcanic and visionary as they were when they first saw print in 1955.The transcendent beauty of a inflamed mind that's suddenly and completely found an articulation for the unspeakable has never been captured better. "Howl" was the perfect bit of literary insanity to appear in a decade where America had collectively laid down and played dead:  

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves

through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated

who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,

who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,

who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York.

who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night

with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,

incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,

Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,

who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,

who sank, all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox...  

(c)Copyright 2005 The Estate of Allen Ginsberg.

"Howl" is one of the most important and influential poems of the 20th century, and it simultaneously invigorated free verse with the range of its rage and honesty, and spawned a generation of imitators who composed indulgent and lazy lines that were more pose than poetry. This is a poem that speaks from the middle of the century with a voice gorged with collective anxiety and spiritual hunger for an element that would counter technologized conformity and the loss of authenticity. Its long, Bible-cadenced lines have resonated into the century following its debut, and it's likely that succeeding generations of disaffected yearners will find the poem's scalar cry appealing for the way it touches on those soul-demolishing duties that are difficult to identify, impossible to purge yourself of. The real paradox of "Howl" is that it's a poem, a great poem that addressed the great unwashed elements of American culture and their plight outside the mainstream which is now very much part of the Establishment it railed against and, in some sense, sought to disassemble.   

Only truly great pieces of writing do that, and regardless of what one thinks of the later Ginsberg work where he abandoned Blake an visions and allegory in favor of a relentless and largely inane species of self-reporting, "Howl" is the inspired and wonderfully sustained work of a young in full control of the language and rhetoric he was using. It's a masterpiece by every criteria, and it remains a powerful indictment against repression, censorship, the closing off of the soul against experience and vision. Even as its been absorbed into the American canon, it continues to transgress against expectations of conservative decorum and other constructions of serene and apathetic community relations; it continues to howl, quite literally, over the fifty years since it's publications. In the increasingly control-freak environment of that pits paranoid nationalism against civil liberties , "Howl" and it's piercing message is perhaps more relevant than ever.

The fact that one still finds room to discuss the poem's politics and philosophical biases seriously attests to the quality and originality of Ginsberg's writing; mere political tracts, like Baraka's "Someone Blew Up America", will grind you down with polemic and are rapidly, gratefully forgotten. Ginsberg was among the very few American poets who broke through the larger culture because he was, to coin a phrase, the right man at the right time. The conformity of the fifties, the anti-communist paranoia was sufficiently alienating enough for enough citizens to rebel and push against the barriers of a socially enforced tranquility. The fact that he was, at the time, especially potent in is writing (as well as being a brilliant self-promoter of himself and his friends) doubtlessly aided him in the ascendancy. These days, it's Billy Collins who has the amazing fame and fortune, writing smaller, more conventional, masterfully composed epiphanies of an everyday America that may exists only in the imagination; he is exactly the right poet to come along at time when millions of citizens are weary of nonconformists and their rights. This isn't to suggest a cyclical theory of recent history, but I do find the positions of both poets ironic, if unintentionally polar."Howl", poem, vision, political screed, confession and testament in one, is read and debated over and over again, its choicest lines cited, each quote resonating and stinging as great work ought to. A great poem. 

There is an unfortunate hip cache that has formed around this poem and all things Beat in general--needless to say, both he and Kerouac became iconic and brand names, products to be sold with other units from the store shelves of corporate America these once-young men belittled and disowned--but a reading of "Howl", a verbal exclaiming of it's wonderfully and brilliantly reaching imagery makes all such commercial aberrations vanish from our concern. The integrity of Ginsberg’s masterpiece is intact, and it still manages to strike a center in the soul that avoids the intellect all together and makes one wish to take a deeper breath and blow a long, bopping solo on the first saxophone some angel hipster might hand them.

Oops, there I go again, seduced by Ginsberg's muse and speaking in images that cannot be verified or affirmed by proper critical tools. Just as well, for "Howl" is anything but proper. It is rude, joyous, rambunctious, and full of itself and in love with the world that seeks to shun its premises and assumptions. Much of great American poetry is like that, and Ginsberg's poem is still with us, an exhortation to not let the dull grind of conformity murder the spirit by the inch.Allen Ginsberg himself succumbed a little to his reputation and began to consider his every journal entry, seemingly, as credible poems in their own write, with the reader interested in the crafted music of words brought together left out in the cold as the poet's late publications concentrated more on the accumulated inanity of relentless self reporting. But he did write "Howl", and for this poem, along with "Kaddish" and "Super Market in California" (among others) his greatness is assured.

The real paradox of "Howl" is that it's a poem, a great poem that addressed the great unwashed elements of American culture and their plight outside the mainstream which is now very much part of the Establishment it railed against and, in some sense, sought to disassemble.Only truly great pieces of writing do that, and regardless of what one thinks of the later Ginsberg work where he abandoned Blakean visions and allegory in favor of a relentless and largely inane species of self-reporting , "Howl" is the inspired and wonderfully sustained work of a young in full control of the language and rhetoric he was using. It's a masterpiece by every criteria, and it remains a powerful indictment of repression, censorship, the closing off of the soul against experience and vision. ven as its been absorbed into the American canon, it continues to transgress against expectations of conservative decorum and other constructions of serene and apathetic community relations; it continues to howl, quite literally, over the fifty years since it's publications.

In the increasingly control-freak environment of that pits paranoid nationalism against civil liberties , "Howl" and it's piercing message is perhaps more relevant than ever.The fact that one still finds room to discuss the poem's politics and philosophical biases seriously attests to the quality and originality of Ginsberg's writing; mere political tracts, like Baraka's "Someone Blew Up America", will grind you down with polemic and are rapidly, gratefully forgotten. "Howl", poem, vision, political screed, confession and testament in one, is read and debated over and over again, its choicest lines cited, each quote resonating and stinging as great work ought to. A great poem.

Critical Obscurantism

Bob Dylan mania is upon us like so much hard wind blowing off an hot and angry sea, and the scrutiny, in the form of documentaries and a wave of yet more books on the songwriter , focuses almost exclusively on six years in the Sixties. Critic David Greenberg wrote a fine essay in 2005 why Dylan's later work, much of it as brilliant as anything he created earlier, is mostly ignored by cultural historians who want to make a case for greatness. Read it here at Slate.

History is not just written by the victor, but also by those who live the longest, and in that sense it's small wonder that Dylan's dynamic six years in the Sixties, spanning the albums Another Side of Bob Dylan through John Wesley Harding are the ones that are poured over again and again. For otherwise bright and brilliant literary commentators and keen minds like Todd Gitlin and especially Greil Marcus, Dylan's career is ceases to be about the way he fused separate musical traditions or broadened the scope of how song lyrics could address experience and more about the good old days when things were smoking.

Marcus, who above all others is the most chronic of the prolix Dylan obsessionists, has adapted Dylan's poetic tricks of not saying what he means, offering allusion, metaphor and other bridges to nowhere as he discusses the work. Rather, he discusses everything that is around the work, seemingly to create historical context and situate the words of "Desolation Row" or "Like a Rolling Stone" in relation to leftist politics, Hegelian zeitgeist, and counter cultural virtues, but that is abandoned quickly enough as Marcus's endless stream of essays become, suddenly, the equivalent of a forced tour of the old neighborhood.

As well as he writes and as keen as he can sometimes be as an commentator, there's something like Granpa Simpson in how Marcus talks about Dylan; there is a propensity for anecdote, political aphorism, mentions of high and mass culture icons, a cursory reference to seminal past avant gard movements, and then....vapor!, nothing at all, a sudden halt or a radical change in direction. Marcus perhaps wants to lead the pack in this industry of Sixty-something Dylan critics by molding his remarks in the cryptic diffusion that has always characterized Dylan's lyrics and is hopeful, perhaps, that yet another generation of furious scribblers will fill their hard drives with essays trying to parse what it was Greil Marcus was trying to get across about Dylan's deep-imagery before he was distracted. It's an intriguing idea that so much of the commentary rising from the bright , the brilliant and acerbic, in the guise of Marcus, Christopher Ricks , Gitlin and endless others, become fuzzy, drifting and vague at the center of their commentaries when Dylan and his art are the subject.It might be that to say what you think, or at least make what you mean clear, would blow their game altogether.

Some blues harmonica

By Ted Burke

Faulkner goes down the rabbit hole

By Ted Burke

Catherine Pierce wants to get to the initial ache of teen sexual arousal with her poem "Reading Faulkner at Age Seventeen, You Forsee Your Reckoning". One can, if they wish, outline what they recognize from the novel under the narrator's young scrutiny, but that is the least interesting thing one can parse. I rather enjoy the idea that the book is the seduction, that thing one gives them self over to when one's present tense is, for the moment, too inane and ill-winded to remain in. This seems like advertising in one sense, that a few words describing a place with the right words might make you want to max out your credit cards and take a trip to someplace you’ve never been—suggestive selling indeed. But here we deal with a life that is just coming into its own and is hungry for the kinds of experience that they may someday use as that raw material from which to write stories like Faulkner—teenagers reading anything that makes sense in the moment or seems to give voice to emotions they didn’t know they were experiencing; this poem is about the spark of awakening, the sudden jab of metaphorical daylight in a personality that had been, shall we suggest, slumbering and ambling and otherwise getting along with the comforts of their parents’ home and their friends’ conformity. Bang, you read the passage, and then there’s a word, an adjective that takes you at once into the world you’re encountering only on paper;

The harvest moon hangs heavy,
a gourd. Your desires heave inside you
like a blood wave. Ignore the cat

pulling on your trousers. Ignore
the cicadas bossing you from the elms.

See yourself in this hot gold light.

You are the brother in love with Caddy.
You are the idiot son. Your mouth dumb.

Your mind lucent. Everything you want
sharp as the cat's bite at your ankle. You pull
your foot back. A yowl, pointed as teeth.

The moon is what will fall on you.

This works because what was being sought was a fast, hard and fleeting sensation that somehow one has received special knowledge from a voice speaking from across history, not just the page to the reader’s eye. There is that rush, that feeling of what’s described somehow being your own experience; defying logic, you assume there’s a link, a fatedness to the sensation that’s quite a bit more than momentary euphoria. But it is such that it comes in flashes, slices, bits and pieces of tactile things recalled from both real experience and the writer’s power to suggest imaginary people and their homes as though they lived across the way: what one assumes they are feeling as they lay the book down and become lost in the world that unfolds for them and which vanishes so rapidly is the recollection an old person who has their narrative in vivid fragments drawn over along decades. All this becomes the young reader’s domain, an intimate knowledge of a world that is yet become real for them; only living long enough can provide them with the actual feeling they think they’re feeling now.The taut images, the half-heard snatches of conversation, the close-up iconography of night images amount to an intriguing assemblage by the poet; I would complain a bit that there is too much dependence on the title to explain this otherwise curious string of associations and wish that we could see a reworking where the conceit is less mechanical, deus ex machina . But I do like the tone, the flow, and greatly appreciate the absence of pretention.

A message from MoveOn.org

A note received, a note worth passing on:



Dear MoveOn member,

If you're an Obama supporter, watching the polls or reading the news can feel pretty good right now. And we should feel good—progressives have worked hard to get this far!

But we can't listen to the pundits who say it's over. Can you share these "Top 5 reasons Obama supporters shouldn't rest easy" with your blog readers—and encourage them to volunteer for Obama between now and Election Day?

TOP 5 REASONS OBAMA SUPPORTERS SHOULDN'T REST EASY

1. The polls may be wrong. This is an unprecedented election. No one knows how racism may affect what voters tell pollsters—or what they do in the voting booth. And the polls are narrowing anyway. In the last few days, John McCain has gained ground in most national polls, as his campaign has gone even more negative.

2. Dirty tricks. Republicans are already illegally purging voters from the rolls in some states. They're whipping up hysteria over ACORN to justify more challenges to new voters. Misleading flyers about the voting process have started appearing in black neighborhoods. And of course, many counties still use unsecure voting machines.

3. October surprise. In politics, 15 days is a long time. The next McCain smear could dominate the news for a week. There could be a crisis with Iran, or Bin Laden could release another tape, or worse.

4. Those who forget history... In 2000, Al Gore won the popular vote after trailing by seven points in the final days of the race. In 1980, Reagan was eight points down in the polls in late October and came back to win. Races can shift—fast!

5. Landslide. Even with Barack Obama in the White House, passing universal health care and a new clean-energy policy is going to be hard. Insurance, drug and oil companies will fight us every step of the way. We need the kind of landslide that will give Barack a huge mandate.

If you agree that we shouldn't rest easy, please sign up to volunteer at your local Obama office by clicking here:

We're just two weeks away from turning the page on the Bush era—but we can't afford to take our eye off the prize. We've got to keep pushing until the very end.

By posting this Top 5 list on your blog and encouraging folks to volunteer for Obama (and signing up to volunteer yourself), you can make a big difference and help Obama win.

Thanks for all you do.

–Adam, Lenore, Adam G., Patrick S., and the rest of the team