Thomas R. Smith

Reckoning with "Wrecking Ball"

2012-03-29T23:46:54Z

Regular readers of this blog will have noted my fascination with the music of Bruce Springsteen. I confess to being a long-term convert, from at least the time of catching his Born to Run tour in the intimate venue of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis in 1975. Who knows exactly why we bond with certain artists the way we do? Evidently at some point in our life we're more susceptible to being deeply influenced by a particular artist's work. For my part, having coming of age during the social, political, and cultural firestorm of the Sixties, I've never quite gotten over the sense of a world ending, that the America I'd inherited, and its promise, was irreparably broken by the betrayal of our national dreams, a betrayal enacted in the Vietnam War and the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Jr. Bruce Springsteen explicitly addressed a kindred sense of brokenness in his speech inducting Jackson Browne into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004. Waxing theological, Springsteen remarked, ". . . our job here on earth, the way we regain our divinity, our sacredness, and our general good standing is by reconstructing love and creating love out of the broken pieces we've been given."

To put it in Robert Frost's terms, Bruce Springsteen's work is very much concerned with the question of "what to make of a diminished thing," a question facing my generation in the wake of the cyclonic Sixties. It's important to note here that in his 2004 speech, Springsteen blames not only our political leaders but our "fall from Eden" for the incompleteness of our lives and our failure to truly love each other here on earth. That Ecclesiastes-like recognition saturates Springsteen's new album, Wrecking Ball, its considerable political rage notwithstanding.

Long-term Springsteen fans have had to deal with a certain ongoing disappointment factor, chiefly because early in his career Springsteen set an impossibly high bar with a string of brilliant albums that he himself could hardly hope to match. Just as Bob Dylan has never again approached the heights of Blonde on Blonde, so nothing of Springsteen's later opus has come close to Darkness on the Edge of Town, not even his excellent The Rising in 2002, his best work of the new millennium until Wrecking Ball.

How good is Wrecking Ball? Good enough, I think, to satisfy many of us who have continued, incorrigibly, to dream of a return to the peaks of Springsteen's handful of classics. Musically Wrecking Ball is all over the Americana map; most of the styles and genres Springsteen has explored, since and including the original E Street Band sound, are represented, as well as a few new ones. Wrecking Ball can be seen as a career retrospective, and maybe an element of musical self-portraiture is intended. Some artists' development is additive rather than linear, their art more and more inclusive and summary of their past efforts. Wrecking Ball is also one of Springsteen's more artfully constructed albums, and in fact needs to be heard whole in order to work its full magic on the listener. A pair of songs familiar from live performance on previous tours, "Wrecking Ball" and "Land of Hope and Dreams," serve as emotional anchors, their very familiarity punching up the overall impact of the sequence into which they're effectively fitted.

Much has appropriately been made of the political content of Wrecking Ball; at the same time Rolling Stone's David Fricke has found Wrecking Ball "boldly apolitical." He's right in the sense that Springsteen's criticisms of predatory capitalism don't side explicitly with Democrats; by implication, both parties come in for blame for the shambles of the American political and economic systems, of which there is plenty of evidence on Wrecking Ball, though no naming of names.

Springsteen has stressed, at least as much as the political, the spiritual element which takes over Wrecking Ball midway through. Yes, without question this is the album where Springsteen wears his religious heart on his sleeve. That spirituality manifests most obviously in multiple references to Jesus and in the gospel-based "Rocky Ground," but also in the weirder, more shadowy references to the dead and the afterlife that almost shamanistically underlace Springsteen's fairly conventional Catholicism. The resurrection that Springsteen envisions in "We Are Alive" resonates less with the orthodox Christian view than with indigenous ancestral views of the soul's survival after death. Springsteen's position, also strongly influenced by the black gospel tradition, ultimately comes out in the wash as deeply pan-American.

I would add to the political and the spiritual a third thematic thread I see throughout Wrecking Ball: a personal reckoning with the inevitability of death. Springsteen is 62 and, though a demonstrably fit 62, understandably conscious of what he calls in the title song "burning down the clock." In the past few years, the E Street Band has sustained mortality's sting in the deaths of organist Danny Federici and saxophonist Clarence Clemons, and those losses also give Wrecking Ball a psychic weight, though often subliminally rather than overtly.

At least one reviewer has disparaged "Land of Hope and Dreams" as a political "stump speech," without taking into account that this song had already been a concert staple circa 1999 before the Bush presidency and the so-called War on Terror. Far from a statement on the post-9/11 milieu, "Land of Hope and Dreams" may best be heard in its original historical context of Y2K anxiety and the heightened sense of mortality it provoked in Baby Boomers watching the century (and millennium) of their youth and glory pass into history. "Land of Hope and Dreams" still seems to me at core an unsettled acknowledgment of Boomers' passage toward the Great Unknown, though it works on other levels as well:

Grab your ticket and your suitcase

Thunder's rolling down this track

You don't know where you're going now

But you know you won't be back

Springsteen's achievement on Wrecking Ball is to bind these three major themes into a whole that is, if not seamless, at least magnetically coherent. Its arc, from reflecting economically besieged lives in the current recession to affirming historic struggles for economic justice, is finally transcendent. While its initial spur and focus is the present cycle of hard times, the eternal finally overrides the temporal and topical, not by excluding them but by folding them into its total vision. Springsteen's acknowledgment that "hard times come and hard times go, just to come again" is key to this perspective. He channels the outrage of which the Occupy Wall Street movement is the latest mass manifestation, yet knows and affirms that all human events take place within a vast, enveloping, mysterious, cyclical timelessness.

The political commentary for which Wrecking Ball has drawn so much critical attention is certainly present, then, but it is not all of Wrecking Ball or even its most important part. On Wrecking Ball, Springsteen gathers these concerns, both personal and societal, and lifts them to another level of understanding at which we recognize the struggle of our nation and times as part of the story of a larger, more gradual movement toward justice, security and dignity despite essentially flawed human governance and our limited time on earth.

The form of the music is a message in itself. Its variety says that the single-minded focus of youth gives way to what Yeats would call a "many-mindedness" of experience. The past is past; Danny Federici and Clarence Clemons are gone, and the music the old E Street Band made lives on only in recordings and in heart's memory. Wrecking Ball is the sound of the mature, seasoned Springsteen -- the realist Springsteen as opposed to the romantic Springsteen -- symbolically bringing on the "wrecking ball" to his own past, which cannot stand in the place of the present. Be open, the new music says, to the new music. Every moment we are passing through a place to which "we won't be coming back," and to live is to accept with hope and trust what life offers next, an act of spirit that some Springsteen fans may find challenging. I know I do.

Over four decades, Springsteen's audience has indeed followed him to many places "we won't be coming back" to. We have all had to say good-bye to many past selves. On Wrecking Ball, perhaps more than any other of his albums so far, Springsteen pays tribute to those past incarnations, not only his own but his bands', with full knowledge that the "train" is moving on and we're all on board. Best to enjoy this moment of life and its own unique music, in the case of Wrecking Ball a truly inclusive revival Springsteen has rousted together to inspire us to action and console us when the inevitable losses occur. The music is exhilarating, capable of buoying us on its inexorable, joyful journey whether or not we pay attention to the lyrics. And speaking of lyrics, while the traditional folk-gospel tune, "This Train," Springsteen's inspiration for "Land of Hope and Dreams," may in its original version exclude "the hopeless sinner," Springsteen's train does not. "This train carries saints and sinners . . . All aboard." There is room for us all on the train of his music.

No doubt Springsteen in his current incarnation as angry avatar of the 99% is riding the energy of the Occupy movement. Certainly it is the 99% who have made Wrecking Ball a #1 hit its first week on the charts, and not the spiteful 1% Springsteen-haters whose fulminations poison some web discussions of this sweeping album. We're poised at the edge of a genuine, wide-spread social uprising, a wave of which the Occupy movement is only the merest tip. That wave has also helped to lift Springsteen's boat. We can count as a small victory in that struggle that one of our great artists of conscience and consciousness appears to be sailing into another of his periods of popularity, still hard, amazingly, still hungry.

Occupy 2012: The Year the World Doesn't End

2012-01-05T18:51:56Z

When I started this web site a couple of years ago, I imagined myself blithely blogging away every month or two in a kind of on-line newsletter. In practice, I've fallen far short of that intention, the present moment being a case in point.

Life, as John Lennon told us, is what happens while you're busy making other plans. My best intentions for adding substantially to this web site (and other plans as well) were pleasurably thwarted on October 6 when the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer won the Nobel Prize for literature. How, you might ask, does that affect www.thomasrsmithpoet.com?

Well, about ten years ago the Minnesota poet Robert Bly, my mentor and a great friend of Tranströmer, offered me the job of editing an American edition of a volume of his and Tranströmer's letters which had been (I'm not exaggerating) a bestseller in Sweden. I gladly accepted that commission and produced an expanded version of the letters (titled in English, in the Swedish edition, Air Mail) for the American poetry audience. Unfortunately, publishers showed a near-complete lack of enthusiasm for the resulting volume, which then lay dormant in my files until Tranströmer's Nobel was announced this fall.

Almost instantly, American interest in both Tranströmer and Bly flared back to life, as well as interest in the book I had edited. I am now very happy to report that the prestigious small press publisher Graywolf plans to release (perhaps yet this year) the American Air Mail. This fall and winter my busy-ness in tying up the many loose ends for this project has precluded my added anything of substance to the present blog posts.

Of course I will use this space to announce developments on Air Mail, and once that book is squared away, get back to serious blog scribbling.

Until then, let me wish you all the best in 2012, which I'm fairly sure is not the year the world will end. However, if we have anything to say about it in Wisconsin, it will be the year the Scott Walker reign of greed and folly ends in our state and we get back to some form of more balanced government that represents all of the people, not just the 1%.

As you know, throughout our country the 99% are rising up, and, with my friend the marvelous fiction writer Marie Sheppard Williams, I'm glad to be able to say I've "lived to see the revolution." My motto for the coming year (which I'm sure I'm not the first or only to have conceived) is Occupy 2012. Let's really make this country our country again, friends, and make it work for all of us instead of only the rich and powerful few. In Wisconsin, as I write, we're fast approaching the January 17th deadline to turn in petitions to recall Walker, and I'm hopeful there will be many more than enough signatures to set the recall process in motion. (Wisconsin friends: If you haven't signed the petition yet, you still have a chance to do so in the coming week!)

Meanwhile, I'll leave you with a song for the new year and in fact any time during it. I've long been fascinated with Robert Burns's "Auld Lang Syne," and wondered what the other verses that we don't sing on New Year's Eve are about. The original Scots lyrics are opaque to English speakers, and the "standard" translations one finds on-line tend not to scan or rhyme. So my mission was to re-translate "Auld Lang Syne" (which phrase the Milwaukee poet Susan Firer has nicely rendered as "Old Long Since") in a more sing-able version. That meant veering from some literal meanings while keeping Burns's intent overall. I believe the present lyric achieves the goals of being coherent, true to the spirit of the original, and singer-friendly.

It was a revelation to discover that "Auld Lang Syne" is not really a "New Year" song per se; rather it is a nostalgic drinking song that memorializes "old acquaintance" whatever the time of year, whenever, presumably, two old friends meet to lift a "cup of kindness" (and other liquids) in tribute to the distances they've traveled sometimes together and sometimes apart. Sing, enjoy, remember and recall!

AULD LANG SYNE

Adapted from the Robert Burns original by Thomas R. Smith

1. We two have rambled in the hills

And pulled the daisies fine

But we've wandered many a weary way

Since the days of auld lang syne

CHORUS

For auld lang syne, my dear

For auld lang syne

We'll take a cup of kindness yet

For auld lang syne

2. We two have paddled in the stream

Till morning sun rose high

But seas between us wild have raged

Since the days of auld lang syne

Chorus

3. Give me your hand, my trusty friend

And I will give you mine

And we'll drink a toast to friendship now

And in days of auld lang syne

Chorus

4. Should old acquaintance

Be forgot and never brought to mind

Should old acquaintance be forgot

And the days of auld lang syne

Chorus

Day of the Sunderers

2011-06-30T18:11:10Z

    Richard Louv, in his important new book The Nature Principle, exhaustively documents recent research on the positive effects of outdoor environments on human health. Louv arrays an impressive number of studies and figures to confirm what many of us have always known experientially: Nature is good for us. For those who need ammunition for the argument, Louv is their man.
    In his chapter on the connection between nature and mental health, Louv quotes a researcher named Glenn Albrecht of Perth, Australia, who has coined the term solastalgia (combining root words for solace and pain), meaning "the pain experienced when there is recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault." I would define the feeling Albrecht's neologism describes as the pain of the threat to one's sense of home, whether external or internal. Albrecht's coinage proceeds from his study of communities in New South Wales affected by strip mining, but the wider applicability of his term -- from natural disaster to full-scale war -- should be evident.
    The concept of "solastalgia" is appropriate to discussions of the right wing assaults on labor and other rights of working people we've witnessed since the 2010 elections. Solastalgia is plainly a motivating factor, for instance, in the enormous protests and passionate grassroots resistance to the radical administration and policies of Governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin.
    I became acutely aware of the right wing erosion of what I'd thought stable features of American democracy when the US Supreme Court, overturning the popular vote, handed the presidency to George W. Bush in the disputed 2000 election. I'm neither politically naive nor inactive, but I'd been lulled by the relative peace and prosperity of the Clinton era, in retrospect a lapse with severe consequences. Since that time, my life has never been entirely free of the uneasiness and outright pain of this thing called solastalgia.
    Wisconsin, I think, suffers a particularly bad case of solastalgia; I don't doubt that even on the right, some who approve Walker's agenda worry over the field of contention to which our generally peace-loving state has descended. Traditionally, Wisconsin has distinguished itself in maintaining a healthy balance between the conservative stability of its farming culture and the progressive legacy of its politics, coming together to create conditions for opportunity backed by a commitment to the general good. Progressives such as Bob La Follette, William Proxmire, Gaylord Nelson, and Russ Feingold have devoted careers to ensuring a high quality of life not only for Wisconsinites but for all Americans. Now all that is suddenly in danger.
    No wonder we experience the assault of Walker as an existential threat to the secure ground -- historical and spiritual -- of the Wisconsin home we've known all our lives. If Wisconsin can be stripped of the social and political progress of the past hundred years, for which we've been justly proud, then what place is safe for our most forward-looking dreams?
    Our country becomes increasingly subject to solastalgia as we watch the Republicans attempt to dismantle the social and economic safeguards of the New Deal, as has been their intention for decades. The agendas of right wing ideologues like Scott Walker and Paul Ryan are more than political in their implications; they also undermine the sense of our identity as persons secure in a known system in a known place. These radical agendas to weaken or abolish the New Deal safety net undermine the foundations of our mental health.
    The sad truth is that we have foolishly entrusted our health to people who do not care about our health. It's as if, sick, our instincts served us so poorly that we went to an anti-doctor, an outright poisoner, instead of a healer. Scott Walker is exactly the wrong kind of person to put in charge of the health of the tolerant, easy-going state of Wisconsin. He cares nothing for the bonds of affection that join us as citizens, and displays little understanding of the importance of the social contract, imperfect as it is, that has kept our elderly and poor from dying on the streets. Instead he hangs out his watch repair shingle, and then "repairs" the pocket watch of Wisconsin (which was not broken) with a sledgehammer.
    D. H. Lawrence wrote about Walker's kind in a wonderfully strange late poem, "Walk Warily." He says:

     Walk warily, walk warily, be careful what you say:
     because now the Sunderers are hovering round,
     the Dividers are close upon us. . . .

Isn't Lawrence also talking about George W. Bush, who told us he would be a "uniter"? That should have put us on notice, because you could see in George Bush's face that if he said something, the opposite was true. The same goes for Scott Walker. He is, like Bush, a Divider, a Sunderer. Sunderers, says Lawrence, wield "the knife-edge cleavage of the lightning / cleaving, cleaving." The only thing Sunderer politicians know how to do is cut. As to creating true wealth (or, for that matter, jobs), they haven't a clue. Lawrence laments:

     Lo, we are in the midst of the Sunderers
     the Cleavers, that cleave us forever apart from one another
     and separate heart from heart, and cut away all caresses. . . .

When a society is attacked by the Sunderers, even Lincoln's "better angels" can be hard to summon, for, as the poem concludes,

     It is the day of the Sunderers
     and the angels are standing back.

This is what Rimbaud meant by "the time of the assassins." This was Whitman's meaning when he wrote, "Let sympathy pass, a stranger, to other shores!" Rimbaud and Whitman both wrote in the 19th century. Lawrence's poem dates to the late 1920s, as the beast of fascism began its rise in Europe.
    Let's not pretend we weren't warned.

An Altered State: Wisconsin, Spring 2011

2011-05-09T18:04:16Z

    1.
    Progressives knew that the state of Wisconsin was in for a rough ride when Scott Walker was elected Governor in November of last year. By the time he took office, he had already killed plans for developing high-speed rail by refusing over $800 million in federal funds offered to connect Madison and Milwaukee. Even at that time, Walker's beholdenness to the road-builders' lobby, who had backed his campaign, was well known.
    It seemed to many of us then that we must suffer four years of retrograde legislation, in which we'd have to watch our state slide backward out of the 21st century, with little means of recourse, given total Republican control of our state government and the seeming inability of large numbers of Wisconsin voters to connect their rage with its appropriate targets.
    "The voters have spoken," the Republicans trumpeted. Still many wondered if the November vote wasn't more a tantrum than any sort of coherent statement. This, of course, did not keep the right wing from declaring a mandate to advance their radical agenda.
    Just how radical that agenda was we discovered on Friday, February 11th, when the Governor, ringed by heavy hired security, announced his plan to strip public employee unions of collective bargaining rights in the name of "repairing" the state budget. The Governor declared flatly that there would be no room for negotiating with the unions. This absolute position quickly became the flash point for massive rallies in support of the unions, a show of solidarity I'm sure must have come as an unwelcome surprise to the Governor and his foot soldiers in the legislature.
    That this all began in earnest a little less than three months ago defies credibility. Since that time, we in Wisconsin have found ourselves in an altered state, barely recognizable from the one most of us have known all our lives. During a solid month of record turn-out demonstrations at the Capitol, around the state, and in fact nationwide, all 14 of our Democratic state senators fled to Illinois for a couple of weeks to delay passage of Walker's disastrous Budget Repair bill. These "Fabulous 14" crucially bought Wisconsinites time to examine the many controversial provisions of Walker's bill before the Republicans could railroad their budget package, in which many outrageously bad policies were hidden, without public debate.
    In March, much of the mobilized action against the Walker administration shifted to a statewide movement to recall vulnerable Republican state senators complicit in foisting Walker's policies on an unsuspecting public. At this writing, six districts have successfully filed recall petitions against Republican senators, as well as three against Democratic senators (for a perceived abdication of duty during their Illinois exile). The Budget Repair bill itself, shorn of many of its financial features down to its anti-union core, is tied up in legal challenges.
    While events run their course in the courts, polls, and ultimately in the lives of families and individuals threatened by the Republicans' destructive policies, we occupy what it would be a laughable understatement to call a "divided" state. More accurately, we live in a state in which the social fabric has been ripped down the center, badly damaged, a nightmare, a kind of low-level civil war.
    When we ask ourselves whether it had to be this way, the answer is, of course not. Arguably the kernel of the most sustained conflict has been Governor Walker's stubborn refusal to compromise. As it turned out, the public employee unions were entirely willing to make requested concessions in pay and benefit in doing their part to address budget shortfalls. But this wasn't good enough for Walker, who had by now painted himself and his fellow Republicans into a tight, non-negotiable corner.
    Finally, it wasn't about the budget at all, but about politics. The Republican leader of the Wisconsin state senate, Scott Fitzgerald, admitted as much, telling Fox News on March 9th: "If we win this battle, and the money is not there under the auspices of the unions, certainly what you're going to find is President Obama is going to have a much . . . more difficult time getting elected and winning the state of Wisconsin." Thus Governor Walker's partisan game plan stood starkly exposed: Break the unions--traditional Democratic Party supporters--and break the Democratic Party.
    Later, on April 14th, at House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearings in Washington, Walker, when questioned by US Representative Dennis Kucinich over how much money ending collective bargaining rights actually saves the state of Wisconsin, admitted: "It doesn't save any." During that hearing, Walker reportedly maintained a cocky, smirking demeanor, his typical affect. One might wonder if these matters are simply a game to him--indeed, his apparent lack of empathy for those whom his policies would injure, impoverish, or possibly even kill would seem to support such a conclusion.

    2.
    In these months of turmoil, I've often had occasion to invoke the Biblical saying, "Ye shall know them by their fruits." The fruits of Walker in his still-brief tenure are polarization, division, discord, conflict, fear, and hatred. All of these are, to one degree or another, intended consequences of the familiar divide-and-conquer strategy. Governor Walker's evident willingness to set neighbor against neighbor, family member against family member, private sector worker against public sector worker, and $25-thousand-a-year earner against $50-thousand-a-year earner is surely one of his more reprehensible sins.
    Still the Republicans' horrifying success in demonizing teachers and other public employees suggests a pathology extending far beyond any individual politician's personal hang-up. I believe it exposes a psychological weakness in the public psyche that cannot be addressed in exclusively political terms. An undermining of the American character has occurred since the Reagan era, which touted individual greed and conspicuous consumption over the common good and the frugality Jimmy Carter had recognized as necessary in a world increasingly threatened by scarcity. One needn't think hard to draw a direct line of connection between President Reagan's dismantling of Carter-era solar panels at the White House and Governor Walker's refusal of federal funds to develop high-speed rail. Both acts represent an appallingly short-sighted, even childish refusal to act on plainly evident facts (in this case, the predictable end of the oil economy).
    This matter of childishness may provide a key to the otherwise puzzlingly aberrant behavior of today's self-described "conservatives." Old adolescent resentments against teacher authority figures may be a psychological driver of the attack on teachers' unions and on education in general. An element of childish ingratitude must certainly power the poisonous hostility toward teachers and unions. This childishness coupled with an unseemly ignorance of history may explain as well the present inability of some of our fellow citizens to recognize and protect the rights that labor unions have gained for American workers, in both public and private sectors.
    For ingratitude, childishness and ignorance no one can top the Tea Party, whose attention and approval Governor Walker obviously craves. Almost every policy decision he puts forward is a transparent attempt to strengthen the extreme right-wing segment of his constituency (not least his Tea Party funders, the multi-billionaire Koch brothers). Like spoiled, self-centered children, this minority constituency vocally insists on lowering taxes at the expense of crucial social services, regardless of the harm to their most vulnerable neighbors.
    I hold the current vogue in Tea Party circles for libertarian novelist Ayn Rand as evidence of that regression. When I was in college in the 1960s, Rand's philosophy of radical self-interest enflamed undergraduates, most of who sensibly left Rand's tomes in the dumpster with their discarded dorm furniture. Wisconsin Republican congressman Paul Ryan's admiration for Rand might be charming in a precocious 13-year-old who knows nothing of life, but in an influential national legislator it is dangerous naiveté. Conservative columnist Michael Gerson admitted in a recent op-ed piece appearing in the Minneapolis StarTribune on April 24, "The appeal of Ayn Rand to conservatives is both considerable and inexplicable." He adds that Rand "cherished a particular disdain for Christianity." Conservative Christians, take note.

    3.
    In his book of social criticism, The Sibling Society, Robert Bly presciently warned that childishness would erode civilized standards hard-won over millennia of disciplined struggle. Republicans' increasing readiness to sacrifice democratic principles to money and power represents a giant step backward to a cruder stage of ethical development. The libertarian selfishness so enshrined by the American Right has been viewed by most (ironically labeled) "primitive" societies as immaturity best cured by initiation into an adult community identification. Scott Walker's crass Open for Business slogan now greeting travelers to Wisconsin dishonors the mature values championed by ethically aware Wisconsinites such as Fighting Bob La Follette, Gaylord Nelson, and Russ Feingold, among many others. In fact, it may be viewed as a symbolic slap in the face of our recent ancestors who worked, sacrificed, and sometimes died to create a more equitable, just society.
    These ruminations found a focus one day in mid-February when I traveled on an AFSCME-sponsored bus to one of the huge rallies in Madison. Our connecting point and base in Madison was the impressive Masonic temple a few blocks from the Capitol. Surrounded by labor supporters in that building's spacious auditorium, singing along with the great old union songs "Union Maid" and "Solidarity Forever," I vividly recalled my grandfather, Harry Smith, both a Mason and a union paper mill worker in my home town of Cornell, Wisconsin, and felt a sudden closeness to him, his life and concerns, like none I'd ever felt before.
    Being there in that place at that time, amid that up-welling of honest alarm and outrage, was deeply nourishing on an emotional level. I knew not a single soul among those thousands, yet had bonded with them in a powerful common purpose. It was as though, out of the fog of our prevalent societal selfishness and distraction, a sun-lit mountain peak had suddenly become visible. What I glimpsed that February day at the Madison Masonic temple was a standard of adulthood largely lost to us in a consumer society that encourages infantile self-preoccupation at the cost of a generative commitment to the common good.
    I believe that on the whole our grandparents' generation saw that mountain more clearly than we do. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., brought down while defending the Memphis sanitation workers' rights, even visited its summit. How far from that height, how lost in the fog is smiling Paul Ryan, making nice with his ingratiating good-boy act, while hawking his Rand-ian plan to remove that safeguard of old age, Medicare, thus placing seniors at the mercy of the health insurance corporations. How far from that height smirking, arrogant Scott Walker, in an unguarded moment discussing over the phone with a cunning David Koch impersonator ideas about discrediting the union cause by planting "troublemakers" in the Madison crowds. Are these not acts of profound ingratitude to all who fought and even gave their lives to free Americans from fear and want?
    Certainly in the pushback against Walker there are larger matters at stake than simply labor rights, important as they are. Walker's Budget Repair Bill is in sum a concentrated right-wing attack on the public sphere, from no-bid sales of municipal power plants to a catastrophic defunding of public education. The "Republican war against education," which Ruth Conniff writes about chillingly in the April Progressive, is an orchestrated, amply funded assault on one of the pillars of American democracy (and uncoincidentally, no small impetus for the turn-out for the Madison demonstrations).
    In fact, generalizing from Wisconsin to the nation as a whole, we could say that the sea-change of the past year has been the Republicans' abandonment of the formalities of bipartisan governing in favor of a nakedly eliminationist stance toward its old opponent. Egged on by the Tea Party, the Republicans have effectively declared war on the Democratic Party, foolishly seeking to destroy its base of support in dreams of permanent Republican rule. The Republican Party is hell-bent on a coordinated effort of unprecedented scale to dismantle the New Deal, in fact, as Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson has put it, to repeal the 20th century.
    With so much corporate money--loosed by the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling--mobilized to subvert fundamental democratic rights and institutions, let's hope that this winter's awakening of what Michael Moore called a "sleeping giant" is just that, a "Wisconsin Spring" echoing the Arab Spring that overthrew tyranny in Egypt and Tunisia. Let's hope that 2011 indeed turns out to be a year of national uprising against the less visible masters pulling the strings of Governor Walker and the other radical governors who would replace democratic rule with corporate rule. And finally we may hope to count among history's ironies this awakening as Walker's most lasting, if unintended, achievement.

A Poem for Wisconsin

2011-04-06T16:40:15Z

REAL MIDDLE CLASS

"We're actually talking to real people at real companies who are the real middle class. Not the tens of thousands of protesters that have been brought in, not only from around Wisconsin but from Nevada, Illinois, and New Jersey, increasingly coming in from other states . . . big union bosses from Washington sending in thugs."
--Gov. Scott Walker, March 15, 2011, Wausau, Wisconsin

So who were those people I met in Madison
the day we took the Square over a hundred-
thousand strong, stood in the snow and icy wind
slashing as budget cuts for the poor?
The nurse from Eau Claire.
The first-grade teacher from Appleton.
The fire-fighter from Waukesha.
The owner of the sign shop in Milwaukee,
there with AARP for his first demonstration ever.
The cop who came back to join the protesters
after his shift guarding the Capitol.
The corrections officer holding a sign that read
IF YOU HAVE TO CALL OUT THE NATIONAL GUARD
YOU'VE DONE SOMETHING WRONG.
The organic farmer passing out warm foil-wrapped yams.
 Unreal middle class?
And students, college and high school, more pseudo-
middle class apparently.
I wonder what "real" means to you, Governor Walker.
You thought that blogger was the "real" David Koch.
How is your grasp of reality?
Could it be a few dozen captive-audience workers
in Wausau or Hudson are more real to you than we are?
Speaking of real, you'd have planted phony protester provocateurs
to turn the demonstrations ugly if you could.
But the police and fire-fighters -- really real --
knew what might happen and did their best to make sure
it didn't. That warmed this old
Sixties protester's heart.
Among us "thugs," crowded together
in the March chill of Madison for foot-
freezing hours, a kindness prevailed, triumphed,
a decency in which you had no part.

(Note: Since I haven't yet found time to write an adequate commentary in this space regarding the recent political turmoil in my home state of Wisconsin, let this poem serve as a place-keeper. It first appeared on the wonderful Verse Wisconsin web site along with many other thoughtful and passionate poems inspired by the actions in defense of working families in Wisconsin. I recommend you visit Verse Wisconsin at www.versewisconsin.org, where you will also find a couple other new poems of mine in response to the current resistance. One of them, "To the New Student Protesters," is being presented as part of a group of 14 broadsides by Wisconsin poets to our heroic "Wisconsin 14" senators who temporarily left for Illinois in order to buy time for the public to learn more about the Governor's disastrous "budget repair" bill. Thanks, Wisconsin 14, from one of the "Poetry 14"!)

"The Promise": Springsteen's Lost Anthem for the Betrayed

2010-11-24T15:20:12Z

    Three decades ago, I entered into an engrossing correspondence with a petite middle-aged librarian named Suzy Shaw, sister of a friend who had connected us because of our mutual love of Bruce Springsteen's music.

   At the time our mostly epistolary friendship began, Suzy was living downriver from me in Lacrosse, Wisconsin, where she worked at the university. One brilliant fall afternoon my girlfriend (and future wife) Krista and I drove the scenic Mississippi River route to visit Suzy at her house near campus, where she amazed us with (these were pre-CD days) vinyl bootlegs of some unreleased Springsteen songs circulating among collectors.

   In the years to follow, in a fashion befitting the scholarly ardor with which she later distinguished herself in academia as an expert on comic book art in pop culture, Suzy sent me meticulously annotated cassette tapes of numerous Springsteen rarities, most (though not all) of which have since come to light as official archival releases.

   Among the tapes from Suzy, I have three different performances of a song called "The Promise." Long the El Dorado of Springsteen connoisseurs, "The Promise" ranks among Springsteen's best songs, and fans have perennially puzzled over why he left it off his album Darkness on the Edge of Town, for which it was originally recorded. Springsteen has said that, though the song was inspired by Greil Marcus's book on rock and roll, Mystery Train, he feared it would be construed as referring to a disastrous lawsuit by his former manager, which delayed a follow-up album to his break-out Born to Run for three years. (In fact, some of Springsteen's recent remarks confirm that it was about the lawsuit.)

   Suzy would be thrilled at this fall's release of The Promise, a collection of "lost" recordings from that unsettled between-albums period, the very title of which indicates a belated admission by Springsteen of the stature of his towering song.

   I say "would be thrilled" because, sadly, Suzy passed away in 2007 only a year after retiring. I sincerely hope she has some way of experiencing this new/old Springsteen music wherever she is, because The Promise represents the grand fulfillment of everything we listened for in those crackly vinyl bootlegs, the restoration of the lost in clear, powerful digital fidelity.

   As for the song itself, its official arrival on the American scene couldn't come at a more opportune moment. After a bruisingly vicious election season, in which an angry, stressed electorate has voted to empower the party that got us into our present military, economic, and political quagmires, Springsteen's unheard classic once more cycles round as a portrait of America as we are now. As my friend and fellow Springsteen fanatic Kevin Caldwell notes, like 1978's Darkness on the Edge of Town, The Promise arrives in the midst of a weakened Democratic presidency, in which the right wing is again pursuing full-throttle its familiar project of transferring wealth upward from the lower and middle classes to the rich.

   The narrator of "The Promise" is an ex-racer who drove a rebuilt Dodge Challenger -- the American dream of middle-class security? -- "but I needed money and so I sold it."

     I lived a secret I should have kept to myself
     But I got drunk one night and I told it

He holds down a "little job" he doesn't care much about, and despairingly watches friends still in the game striving against the odds. "Every day," he admits, "it just gets harder to live / This dream I'm believing in." He could be the protagonist of Springsteen's "Racing in the Streets" from the same period, which this song strongly resembles in its dirge-like majesty, though even farther down the road of betrayed dreams and economic collapse, by this point sans girl and car.

   In one of her letters, Suzy originally pointed out to me the haunting, almost shamanic dimension of the climactic stanza:

     I won big once and I hit the Coast
     But somehow I paid the big cost
     Inside I felt like I was carrying the broken spirits
     Of all the other ones who lost

Fighting his way out of childhood poverty in New Jersey, Springsteen must at times have felt similarly toward his struggling and scuffling brother musicians who didn't even "win big once" as his protagonist in "The Promise" did.

   In Springsteen's spiritual and political universe, no one makes it unless everyone does. As the late Senator Paul Wellstone liked to say, "We all do better when we all do better." In the absence of an external social safety net for all, certain strong souls tend to carry a train of others along with them, and Springsteen's song is an acknowledgment of that obligation some few feel. If we collectively allow our neighbors to suffer and fail, individuals of conscience have to assume a greater share of the pain as their moral, even religious duty.

    But the world exerts a fatal pressure and drag on anyone who commits to that burden, and here, stripped of literal correspondences to its author's own situation, we come to the core meaning and crux of Springsteen's song: no matter how spiritually compassionate his narrator is, he can humanly only carry so much before he begins to break under the weight. Individual strength eventually gives out under the strain of a collapsing social contract. Both as poetry and insight into the human heart, these lines stand with the finest in American popular song:

     When the promise is broken you go on living
     But it steals something from down in your soul
     Like when the truth is spoken and it don't make no difference
     Something in your heart goes cold

(The poet in me pauses here to praise the intricate rhyme/slant-rhyme sequence of BROKEN / LIVING / SOUL and SPOKEN / DIFFERENCE / COLD, which I admire immensely.)

   Poetics aside, this is a dead-on description of where we are now as a society, at a time when the right wing has grown increasingly emboldened in dismantling the safeguards against exploitation that made the American middle class dream possible. After eight years of Bush/Cheney, we seem to no longer care about the truth, or even to believe in it. So what if Vice President Cheney outed CIA operative Valerie Plame? "It don't make no difference" because something in the American heart has "gone cold." When the safety net is tattered-- "when the promise is broken" -- by strategic neglect and abuse, the community heart is damaged. The horizon of hope and promise becomes a wasteland of failure and alienation. Springsteen could already see this when he wrote "The Promise" in the late 1970s on the brink of the Reagan era. No artist, I think, has stated with more eloquence and economy our nation's unfolding tragedy.

   So what's left for the Challenger's ex-operator, who would carry the broken spirits safely past "the dead ends and all the bad scenes" of America? He is back on the "Thunder Road" of Springsteen's earlier song of that title, mourning the "lost lovers and all the fixed games," the lonely transience of "tires rushing by in the rain."

   Before his song dissolves into elegiac death-march, he grabs at a bit of loser's bravado, remembering an old friend and the vow they made:

   Billy and me, we'd always say. . .
   We were gonna take it all and throw it all away

Thus "The Promise" ends with the symbolic gesture of disdain for the world and its prizes we have often heard raised as a last defiant cry of those systematically dispossessed of everything but their pride. It is also, disastrously, the cry of the electorate in the 2010 midterms who took the decades of important work done by loyal public servants such as Senator Russ Feingold in Wisconsin and Representative Jim Oberstar in Minnesota and in a day "threw it all away."

* * *

   As noted above, it was deeply horrifying to watch Wisconsinites recklessly discard a true and dedicated friend. The nausea is more than doubled when we consider the unworthy opponent whose lucky punch took Feingold down, Ron Johnson, a plastics millionaire from Oshkosh with no governing experience. I don't doubt that many who swung the vote for Johnson did not understand what they were doing. How could they, when Johnson refused to reveals his plans as a senator? It was a classic case of voting, on the basis of emotion and disinformation, against the voters' own interests, for which we can predict buyer's remorse and increased economic hardship in the near future. Maybe sooner than we reckon, the familiar howl will go up as low-information voters realize that the new bosses are worse than the old bosses, and that the GOP "wave" is not going to change things for the better. The Tea Partiers too -- at least those not on Republican payrolls -- will come to recognize their betrayal.

   The protagonist of "The Promise" is a pure product of the system's betrayals of working people. Robert Reich, in his incisive book, Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future, writes of the "basic bargain" struck between business and labor, "giving workers a proportionate share of the fruits of economic growth." Reich demolishes the oft-mouthed Republican dogma that tax breaks for the rich will somehow create jobs. In fact, job creation is contingent on demand; when there is demand, jobs will appear to satisfy it. But over the past three decades, demand has diminished because American workers' share of the fruits of their productivity has steadily decreased while business owners take a steadily increasing share. In real wages (adjusted to cost of living), American workers are now making less than they did 30 years ago, while actually maintaining higher productivity. Meanwhile, CEO's take home three to four hundred times what their employees earn. Until both Democrats and Republicans are forced to deal with the widening income gap between the rich and everyone else, the American dream of middle-class security will continue to recede from our grasp, and the promise of "the basic bargain" broken again and again.

   Bruce Springsteen doesn't need me or Robert Reich to explain this to him. A recognition of growing social inequality has informed his music -- initially on a visceral and later on a more explicitly political level -- from the first. For the rest of us, Aftershock might be just the right antidote for the self-defeating nightmare of the 2010 midterms. It's clear that without addressing the inequality of rich and poor, we'll remain confused, ineffectual, and betrayed no matter how furious a tantrum we throw in the voting booth.

   Meanwhile, The Promise comes to fortuitously address the moment and salve some of its wounds in the same way Born in the USA did during the Reagan years and The Rising after the trauma of September 11, 2001. Springsteen's responses to current history have made him one of our more reliable soul-doctors, though obviously there's a limit to how far even the most heroic can carry those "broken spirits," now proliferating with frightening speed. "The Promise" bears witness to the inability of individuals detached from community to prevail against those who have rigged the system against them, while holding out a dim but persistent hope -- borne out in Springsteen's subsequent work -- for a resurgence of community united against those oppressing forces.

(Discographical note: The full-band version of the song "The Promise" on the new album The Promise is not one I've heard on Suzy's tapes. Inexplicably, it leaves out lyrics that immediately follow those quoted above ending "something in your heart turns cold":

     I followed that dream through the southwestern flats
     The dead ends and two-bit bars
     And when the promise was broken, I was far away from home
     Sleeping in the back seat of a borrowed car

A vital piece of the story is lost in dropping these lines. They are included in full on the more subdued version Springsteen recorded for 18 Tracks in the late 90s. Luckily, bootleg alternate versions of this fascinating song are available on the collector's market. Because of the plethora of recorded versions, it's almost impossible to nail down a definitive set of lyrics. In this essay I've mainly followed the most complete official version on 18 Tracks, despite minor inconsistencies with the newly released 70s version.)

(This essay is dedicated to the memory of Suzy Shaw Covey. In 1982 Suzy played organ on a one-off single hilariously and affectionately parodying 70s-era Springsteen under the name of "Bruce Springstone." You can listen to the "Bruce Springstone" version of "Meet the Flintstones" at http://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DLe2NYMfcvw0. Suzy once met Springsteen during the early 80s when Bruce was still greeting fans who persevered in waiting to see him after his shows. "My God, what did you say to him?" I asked. Suzy replied, "I knew I'd have only a moment, so I told him I'd noticed a change in the lyrics of 'The Price You Pay.' He smiled and said he appreciated my attention to his writing!" Suzy, this weird, sad fall, I'm listening for us both.)

Open Letter on the Eve of the Elections

2010-10-28T15:15:46Z

Dear Friend,

Today I passed a newsstand and saw the current Newsweek magazine, which parodies Shepard Fairey's famous Obama "Hope" portrait, depicting instead of the President the presumed next Speaker of the House, John Boehner.

For the corporate media, the elections have been a foregone conclusion. You've already heard it a hundred times: Democrats will forfeit the House and maybe even the Senate. Why? Because in their twenty-one months in power the Dems haven't succeeded in bringing the economy back to normal after a ruinous eight-year budget trashing by Bush-Cheney.

So the answer is to bring those people back?!

I'm deeply suspicious of the "enthusiasm gap" the media is touting so confidently, even smugly. Come election day, I believe that Democrats will surprise the nation with a higher level of turnout than the polls are predicting.

But if anyone reading this is really thinking of sitting out the election because of dissatisfaction with President Obama and the Democrats, consider what the next couple of years will be like if the Republicans regain control of Congress.

Remember that atrocious period in the late 90s when the Republicans were out to bring down President Clinton by any means possible? According to recent reports, something similar is in store for President Obama if the Republicans get their majority. Here's how Norm Ornstein lays it out in an October 13 Op Ed piece in Financial Times:

"[The first part of the plan] is to reverse the Obama health reform plan by cutting off funding on Medicare and trying to repeal key portions, including the cutbacks in spending required to make the bill fiscally sound. The second is to flood the White House with subpoenas to investigate scandals, whether real, exaggerated or imagined." ("Obama's Grim Future of Stalemate")

This is an agony our country absolutely doesn't need to be put through for a second time in twenty years, the spectacle of a vindictive opposition party trying to destroy a president. We have pressing work to do, not only to rescue our economy but our democracy too, under grave threat from the deluge of corporate money pouring into the current elections, thanks to the Supreme Court's profoundly anti-democratic decision in the Citizens United case.

As a writer for the Truthout web site has said, the current election is, more than the referendum on the Obama administration the Republicans have tried to make it, really a referendum on the call to abandon democracy altogether in favor of plutocratic rule by the highest bidder (not excluding, as we've seen, foreign governments).

The fact is that the Obama administration has made several moves in the right direction, if not far enough. Most economists agree that without the measures the administration took, we would be in a global depression, with unemployment rates nearer 25% than 10%. We didn't get into this mess overnight, and no one can get us out of it as soon as we'd all like. Eight years of reckless deficit spending by the Republicans on unnecessary wars got us in our present sorry state. Those same Republicans think the public with its short attention span has forgotten all that by now.

Here in Wisconsin, Senator Russ Feingold, one of our very best, is in the fight of his life against a patently unqualified rich man who has poured nine million dollars of his own money into buying Russ's Senate seat. This fight is mirrored in states and districts all across our country.

It is therefore incredibly important that no one sit on the sidelines this year. We all need to make our voices heard as forcefully as possible, now while there is still time to prevent the irreversible loss of representative government to government by corporation and shadowy, unidentified outside forces.

In grave concern,

Thomas

Politics and Poetry: Reading (and Weeping With) Uncle Dan

2010-06-21T15:21:03Z

    For many years now, my wife Krista and I have made a Saturday morning ritual of listening to Scott Simon's weekly interview with National Public Radio senior news analyst Daniel Schorr. In fact, the veteran reporter's matter-of-fact yet mellifluous vocal tones are by now so familiar as to have become at last familial. In our household Daniel Schorr is affectionately known as Uncle Dan.

   Dan Schorr is one of the last of the great old newsmen of the second half of the Twentieth Century. Beginning as a print reporter for the Christian Science Monitor post-WWII, he soon moved into broadcast journalism, eventually at NPR, where he's been a mainstay for the past twenty years. Oh, and have I mentioned that he is in his mid-90s and still working? He has become one of those elders, like Pete Seeger, to whom we look for clarity, perspective, the long view.

   No doubt for partly sentimental reasons, I've been slowly perusing Come to Think of It: Notes on the Turn of the Millennium (Viking, 2007), a compendium of Dan Schorr's NPR broadcast pieces. Pithy and succinct, most come in at little more than a page in length--Dan Schorr doesn't need much more than that to suggest a complexity far beyond the scale of his few minutes of air time.

   Schorr's moderately weighty tome covers the years 1990-2007. I'm still in the 1990s, a decade I badly need reminding of as I face the current one. It's all there, in holographic miniature, in Dan Schorr's deft sketches: Bill and Hillary Clinton, Bosnia, aborted health care reform, NAFTA, O. J. Simpson, the Oklahoma City bombing, Ken Starr, you name it. The whole catastrophe, as they say. And yet it was nothing compared with the nightmarish, mud-footed morass of war-mongering and corruption of the Bush-Cheney decade.

   The 90s stretch of Dan Schorr's book is proving an especially humbling, sobering read for me, because frankly I was asleep to many of the events of those years as chronicled in Schorr's broadcasts. I don't mean that I didn't know they were happening; I glancingly checked in with the news of the day. But oddly little of it touched me in a particularly deep or personal way. In effect I was insulated from the impact of events taking placing in corners of the world that were distant from my own.

   I don't think this was necessarily a matter of ego-absorption in the concerns of the self and to hell with everyone else. It is to some extent natural for humans to be wrapped up in our own concerns to the exclusion of others. And besides, after 1992, the good guys (sort of) were in control (sort of) for a while. I have, since that somnambulant decade, become often painfully aware of a general tendency on my part to be tough on Republican administrations while giving Democratic administrations an undeserved pass. Though I stand by criticisms I've leveled against the Nixon, Reagan and Bush regimes--collectively, it's a miracle the country has survived them--I have to admit that I've generally stayed more politically awake and civically active during times of Republican than Democratic administrations.

   Reagan and George W. Bush were both historical disasters for the American people, but Clinton--though not in the same class--wasn't so great either. Now that a year in the saddle has worn off some of the stardust, Obama doesn't appear quite the progressive savior we'd hoped for in 2008. This is not to say he isn't infinitely preferable to his predecessor, not to mention the current GOP, which has gone so far off the deep end it deserves to be called the Ridiculous Party. But in mid-2010 the Obama administration is looking a lot like a somewhat improved version of the Clinton administration.

   Of course this is not entirely Obama's fault; the problem is chronic and systemic. Dan Schorr's chronicle testifies again and again to the persistence of certain self-defeating cycles in American policy-making, as when, commenting on May 3, 1993, on Clinton's decision to enter the Bosnian conflict, he observes ". . . riding on it is the risk of American involvement in a foreign war that could stymie President Clinton's plans for American renewal as Vietnam undermined President Johnson's Great Society program." (p. 44) The stymiers have been especially busy in recent years.

   I admit to finding a certain grim amusement in listening to the Tea Party going on and on about President Obama's supposed "socialism," while, in fact, he is merely the latest in a line of private-sector corporatists, both Democrat and Republican, who have ruled overwhelmingly on behalf of moneyed interests. The return to Republican rule the Tea Partiers generally seem to crave would have tragic consequences for the shrinking middle class. Democrats, although part of the "corporatocracy," clearly care more about the middle and lower classes than do their Republican counterparts. On that recognition I have based my own long-term if wobbly support of the Dems.

   I suppose almost everyone becomes more complacent when Their Guy is in office. You just feel better overall when your party is in power; then all -- or at least more -- seems right with the world, and the pretense of Business-as-Usual can be maintained with less cognitive dissonance. When the Will of the People, as you approve it, is being carried out in Washington, it can appear that things are better than they actually are. You focus on the positive -- such as the euphoric absence, at the turn of the Millennium, of Y2K mayhem -- and tune out the negative -- for instance the fact that despite the presence of a strong environmental advocate like Al Gore, the Clinton administration did practically nothing to address climate change.

   As a struggling younger poet in the 80s and 90s, I seldom engaged the overtly political in my work. I preferred to keep my politics beneath the surface of my poems. I imagined that, with a little reflection, any perceptive reader could detect them, though I may have assumed wrongly.

   For better or worse, I became much more explicitly "political" both as a poet and as a citizen after the Supreme Court awarded the presidency to George W. Bush in 2000. Some readers still begrudge politics a place in poetry; I disagree. I've made room in both my recent collections, Waking Before Dawn (2007) and The Foot of the Rainbow (2010), for political utterance as a part of the sum total of human experience I try to bring into my work. In Waking Before Dawn, "August Stars," rooted in the dispiriting darkness of the Bush era, supplied the overarching metaphor for the whole book:

     A shooting star
     flares low
     on the horizon,
     sizzles out,
     a wish reserved
     for those awake
     on a troubled planet
     before dawn.

Returning to political consciousness during the direst moments of the Bush siege felt exactly like waking in shock at 4 a.m. to find the sky still black, though not without its guiding lights (Uncle Dan among them).

   The title of my new book, The Foot of the Rainbow, posits imagistically a cautious optimism for our new decade. In that collection, "Winter of 2007," based on the Mideastern ghazal form in which the poet addresses him- or herself by name, revolves around the recognition that "Thomas, you woke earlier than some, later than others." I'm not done with this subject, nor is it done with me. In an as yet unfinished poem, the following stanza reprises the theme of loss of consciousness during the Clinton era:

     In my forties, with America, I hit the snooze
     bar and went back to sleep. The President
     played saxophone, and life was good, that is
     if you didn't look too hard at the planet.

   These snippets of poetry don't begin to get at the real grief of our unconsciousness and its consequences. Since 2000, I've been acutely aware of a particular shame most of us must feel -- albeit on a subconscious level -- at our negligence in protecting the planet that is our sustenance and only home. I experience that shame anew with each photo coming out of the Gulf of Mexico these days. The eye of the pelican, staring out at us from oil-slicked feathers, is a blazing emblem of our collective failure and unwillingness to live appropriately on the earth.

   While it is painful to be awake, it is far more harmful for us to go on sleeping through the disasters of our age. As the poet William Stafford wrote, "It is important that awake people be awake."

   These days I'm trying to be more awake to our political system's betrayals and deceptions as a whole. I am determined not to minimize the Democratic Party's contribution to our present unsustainable position, though I still applaud wholeheartedly a few Democratic leaders of integrity such as Russell Feingold and David Obey, to name two of Wisconsin's finest. Along the way, I am reading with both pleasurable and painful recognition Daniel Schorr's reckoning with a decade in which I and so many others found it more convenient to reach over to steal another five minutes from the alarm clock than to rise to the urgent and exacting work of citizenship. Thanks for staying awake through the whole catastrophe, Uncle Dan.

(Note: I didn't intend this to be a eulogy, but a little over a month after I posted this entry, Daniel Schorr died on July 24 in Washington after a brief illness. In the media coverage of Dan Schorr's death, it's been frequently noted that he made Richard Nixon's notorious enemy list, a fact Dan discovered only while actually reading that list over the air during the Watergate hearings. He wrote, "I managed not to gasp. I broke into a big sweat. This was the most electrifying moment of my career." May we all live in such a way as to act as similar irritants to the tyrants and fascists of our time. Rest assured, Uncle Dan. Your voice will not be forgotten.)

Tiny Autobiography in Ten Books

2010-01-12T20:47:40Z

(Note: It's that listing time of year, and reading numerous other people's top 10 thises, thats, and whatevers inspired me to resurrect for this site a kind of top 10 of my own, written a couple of years ago for a book called Poet's Bookshelf II, in which an almost indecent number of poets comment on the 10 books that influenced them the most. That book was edited by Peter Davis and Tom Koontz and published by Barnwood Press in Seattle. Thanks to them for the occasion to write this piece and permission to reprint it.)

    1. Beat packet (1965) I grew up in a small paper mill town in northern Wisconsin, where modern poetry, as of mid-century, hadn't yet dared to tread. My high school poems were modeled on Edgar Allan Poe. But that changed fast when the English teacher of a friend who'd moved to Arizona loaned me a packet of books by the Beats, to whom this man boasted shirt-tail relations. They included Ginsberg's Howl, Corso's Gasoline, Ferlinghetti's Pictures of the Gone World, and Kerouac's On the Road, a veritable beatnik starter kit. I didn't understand these works, but I badly wanted access to the world of rebellious adult freedom they represented. After four decades, I still find the insistently drumming opening lines of Corso's "Spontaneous Requiem for the American Indian" compelling: "Wakonda! Talako! deathonic turkey gobbling in the softfootpatch night!" My friend's teacher, John Thomas Richards, also enclosed a spare copy of Rexroth's Thirty Spanish Poems of Love and Exile, the first volume of poetry I actually owned.

   2. Galway Kinnell, The Book of Nightmares (1971) Kinnell has said that his intent in this long-poem sequence was to approximate Rilke's feat in the Duino Elegies of reaching beyond personal knowledge into what might be called universal or intuitive knowledge. For my money, Kinnell's romantically existential long-poem always seemed more grounded in bodily reality, and thus more convincing, than Rilke's magnum opus. I'm indebted to Kinnell, throughout his work but especially in The Book of Nightmares, for the startling idea that by sheer, cumulative, rhythmic energy, the poem can sometimes thrust itself--and the poet along with it--into an unlearned knowledge. (Need I add that the birth section of "Lastness" is one of the most profoundly tender poems in the English language?)

   3. Pablo Neruda, Selected Poems, edited by Nathaniel Tarn (1972) Neruda had been only a rumor to me until this generous selection, translated by W. S. Merwin, Anthony Kerrigan, Alastair Reid and Nathaniel Tarn, arrived one day at the office of the college newspaper for which I was writing a weekly column. This was Whitman and Kinnell with something extra added--call it a mature surrealism with more gravitas and psychological texture than my beloved Beats could offer. I immediately stopped writing imitations of the Beats and began writing imitations of Neruda. There are single-translator volumes of Neruda I love better--those by Bly and Reid--but I can never forget the stupendous power of this first Chilean tidal wave's breaking.

   4. Robert Bly, Leaping Poetry (1976) I admired the decisive, even reckless, way Bly as mounted berserker swung his sword left and right, joyfully decapitating the academic empty suits of armor in this polemic tour de force. Most valuable to me perhaps of Bly's innumerable contributions to American poetry is his insistence on swift association and that the poem be able to "leap" freely between different areas in the psyche. After Leaping Poetry, I could no longer be content with writing poems that remained exclusively in either the outer world or the inner world. (As a companion to Leaping Poetry among Bly's own books of poems, I favor This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood, his most ecstatic leaping: ". . .the human face, fresh after love-making, more full of joy than a wagonload of hay." Yes.)

   5. Arthur Rimbaud, Collected Works, Selected Letters, translated by Wallace Fowlie (1978) I discovered Rimbaud at about the last possible moment for maximum effectiveness, the year I turned 30, bumming around Europe. Picking grapes in the Beaujolais, I observed how personally even the roughest French farm laborers owned this heroically alienated poet. Thus one of my first book purchases upon returning to the States was the Fowlie translation. I fell in love with Rimbaud's prose poems and wrote 200 of my own in a year. The energy of that love affair helped me break through some old writing limitations and widen the range of what I was able to say in a poem. A half-dozen of that prose poem vendange made it into my first collection, Keeping the Star. Six good poems out of 200 struck me at the time as a high success rate.

    6. Mary Oliver, Twelve Moons (1979) I have to admit that until this first free verse volume of Oliver's (she'd published two before it in stricter forms), I'd never read a "nature" poet who didn't to some extent bore me. Oliver managed to transcend the descriptive tedium I rightly or wrongly associated with standard bird-and-flower poetry. (I had yet to read Lawrence or Clare. . . .) In Twelve Moons, Oliver found the voice by which we now identify her, as her mentor James Wright found his distinctive voice in The Branch Will Not Break. In short lines untethered from iambic constraints, her poems, on wings of observation and imagination, took flight. Like a hawk lifting a mouse from the grass, Oliver elevated American nature poetry to new, astonished heights.

     7. R. H. Blyth, Haiku, 4 vols. (1981) I'd noticed this series on the bookshelves in many hippie houses of the 1960s, but didn't get around to reading them until the 80s. Besides constituting arguably the finest compendium of Japanese haiku in English, these four seasonally-themed volumes laid out a whole philosophy of life rooted in English expatriate Blyth's Zen practice. Blyth has a lot to say about these brief poems, in entertainingly pithy, frequently provocative tones reminiscent of Rexroth. To those who see in haiku nothing more than a Hallmark prettiness, Blyth says over and over with his bracing interpretive paragraphs, "Look again!" I treasure brevity and concision in poetry, which a long, delighted study of Blyth confirmed.

     8. Alden Nowlan, I Might Not Tell Everybody This (1989) At the end of my first visit to the Canadian Maritimes, after the other guests were gone, the lobster and fiddleheads eaten and the Molson drunk, my friend and host Allan Cooper said, "There's one more poem I want to read to you." In that empty late-night kitchen, I was devastated by Alden Nowlan's "He Sits Down on the Floor of a School for the Retarded." My hunger for more Nowan led ultimately to tracking down the dozen collections appearing during Nowlan's lifetime (1933-1983), from which I chose 94 for a US selection published by another Stateside Nowlan admirer, Robert Bly. We have everything to learn from Nowlan about writing clearly and honestly of human contradictions without resorting to the wretched excesses of confessionalism. While assembling the book, I experienced an uncanny sense of Nowlan's approving presence, and adopted him as a posthumous mentor. In I Might Not Tell Everybody This, his last volume, which Allan sent home with me, one no-holds-barred, go-for-broke poem follows another in stunning succession. Why has no American press picked up this masterpiece?

     9. William Stafford, The Way It Is (1998) When I was in my thirties, Stafford was a taste too subtle for my palate. A shame, because he seemed to visit the small college town where I lived every couple of years. I'm embarrassed to admit that, around 1980, spotting him at a local restaurant with one of my former English teachers and thinking, "Oh, Stafford is in town again," I blithely walked on. The irony is that I now revisit Stafford more frequently than almost any other American poet, for his intelligence and integrity, and yes, finally, for his subtlety. When conventional thinking threatens to constrict imagination in its strait-jacket, Stafford shows us again, reliably and without fanfare, how to wriggle free.

     10. Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (2000) I've been pressing this book on fellow poets since it was published in 2000, before the reign of Bush and his rapacious world-wreckers. Bate, who achieved fame in England as a Shakespeare scholar, has become one of our most vocal proponents of "eco-poetics." If the new millennium has produced an essential book for poets, this is it. Poetry, Bate argues persuasively, can be a place where we preserve some of the natural wildness and beauty being lost to human destructiveness and greed. Bate's love of literature and grief for the broken world warm and humanize what could otherwise have become a dry theoretical exercise. This book can send troubled poets into the 21st century with a renewed and clarified sense of mission.

     0. Bob Dylan, Bringing It All Back Home (1965) Memorizing and learning to sing "Mr. Tambourine Man" as a teenager taught me as much about poetry as a physical, musical, oral medium as any of the above books. I consider it a great inspired Beat poem on a par with anything by Ginsberg or Corso.

(A note on chronology: The parenthesized dates following titles indicate the approximate date of my encounters with them, not the years of their publication, though often the two coincide.)

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

2009-11-06T18:52:49Z

   When I first heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch a year and a half ago, I was incredulous: A floating mass of plastic garbage twice the size of Texas? How could that be?

    Yet the Co-op clerk had been so definite and specific that, upon arriving home from my shopping errands, I followed his suggestion to look it up online. I googled that unlikely phrase "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" and, with a jolt, found a hundred-thousand or more citations. It quickly became clear that my informant had not exaggerated. If anything, the extent of the Patch may be far greater than originally estimated.

   A Californian, Captain Charles Moore, discovered the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in 1997 on his way home from a sailing race. Moore was traveling by way of a 10 million-square-mile area known as the North Pacific Gyre where trade winds and circular currents concentrate in an unmoving mass the marine debris with which human beings world-wide are polluting the oceans.

   For the past year and a half, I've kept an eye out, mostly in vain, for mention of this horrendous phenomenon in the mainstream press. Finally that seems to be changing. Recently, a prominent story by Kitt Doucette, "An Ocean of Plastic," appeared in Rolling Stone, October 29, 2009. Doucette's article is, if not the first, then certainly one of the highest-profile pieces of reportage on the Garbage Patch yet to surface. We can be sure that it won't be the last, because, unfortunately, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is growing steadily. It is an environmental disaster of monumental proportions, a train-wreck occurring in slow motion, and bodes ominously for the survival of the oceans, ocean life, and, by extension, ourselves.

   Doucette vividly describes the Patch as "a swirling vortex of plastic soup, an immense, fetid swamp of debris where tiny bits of decaying plastic outweigh surface zooplankton--one of the most prolific and abundant organisms on the planet--by a ratio of six-to-one."

   The plastic, often broken down to particulate form, is especially bad news for the seabirds and fish that ingest it. According to the United Nations Environment Program, this toxic gruel is now killing at least 100,000 marine mammals and a million seabirds each year. It is also being consumed by the organisms lowest on the food chain, including zooplankton, upon which many larger ocean creatures feed. Obviously we human beings, farther up the food chain, are not immune to this accumulating toxicity. As Captain Moore says, chillingly, "We're putting everything in the ocean on a plastic diet."

   Around the time I first learned of the Patch, I wrote a poem about it. The fact that my poem appeared on the progressive poetry web site, New Verse News, the same week the Rolling Stone article hit the newsstands suggests to me some stirring in the zeitgeist toward wider recognition of the Patch. You can read the poem below.

   Meanwhile, it's time to ask ourselves some questions: Since the Great Pacific Garbage Patch was identified a dozen years ago, why aren't we more familiar with it? And if we know of it, why aren't we more concerned about it?

   As Americans, we have generally insulated ourselves from the disturbing implications of global awareness, despite the unprecedented global reach of our electronic media. A new poll by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, for example, indicates that the past three years have seen a serious drop in the percentage of Americans who believe in the scientific evidence for global warming. In fact, the numbers are down 20 percentage points from 2006, the year of Al Gore's wake-up call, An Inconvenient Truth.

   The sad truth of the matter is that too many of us have allowed the right wing to define climate change as a partisan issue, rather than a reality that touches every life on the planet irrespective of politics. We therefore find ourselves in a lose-lose situation in which the propagandists for big oil and coal have achieved the ignominious feat of turning the whole subject of climate change into a referendum on Al Gore's popularity rather than the reasoned weighing of scientific information it needs to be.

   Our national tendency to doubt anything that is not directly in front of our eyes may occasionally protect us from small-time fraud, but does not serve us well when it comes to the Big Picture. Just because we can't see something doesn't mean it's a hoax. Most of us will never see the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, but that makes it no less real. Climate change--which author and radio host Thom Hartmann says should be rightly be called "global climate deterioration"--is real, and humans have a hand in causing it. We need to look beyond our localities to see the effects our actions and decisions have on others, human and nonhuman, whose fate we inextricably share in an interconnected, interdependent world.

   The media must shoulder some of the blame, in distracting us with balloon boys, American idols, and the self-promoting antics of talk-show buffoons while the ice caps melt and the seas fill up with plastic. But responsibility lies with every one of us as well. Linked communications and economies have made us all global citizens, and we need to learn how to grow into our new role. One key to maturation as global citizens lies in better informing ourselves about the world beyond our immediate senses and borders.

   We are challenged, in a world of enormous events and forces, to again find in ourselves the capacity to believe in the cumulative effects of the many small actions we can take every day to turn this situation around. Those small actions may not amount to much in themselves, but together they can have large effects. Democracy itself is built by such small steps.

   Lists of steps we all can take personally to avoid polluting the oceans (including recycling, replacing single-use plastic bags with re-usable bags, and drinking from re-usable water bottles) can easily be found on numerous web sites. Beyond individual efforts, we must support valuable organizations like the Ocean Conservancy who work hard to clean up and prevent proliferation of marine debris (www.oceanconservancy.org). It's also crucial to encourage and support the efforts of those within our government trying to move toward environmentally sane policies. A wealth of information on the Garbage Patch and other marine debris can be found on the web site of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (www.marinedebris.noaa.gov).

          THE GREAT PACIFIC GARBAGE PATCH

     What are we, if not our dream of a better world?
     Feudal times have returned to mock us, the names
     of the new fiefdoms Halliburton and Exxon.

     In the Pacific there's a floating mass of garbage
     twice the size of Texas. (Google it.) It's spreading,
     the first state of the country of the future.

     When did we become a trash island filling
     space between oceans? Was it when that foolish
     actor's voice filled the space between our ears?

     I felt sad hearing about Teddy Kennedy's brain
     cancer. In Nineteen-eighty the door was still
     open to a higher road we might have taken.

     We killed our King and dumped his wealth in the sea.
     Our talk became wind keening through the mouth
     of a plastic bottle washed up on the beach.

     Thomas, you cried listening to Al Gore's concession
     speech because it meant that the lovers in the song
     really were going to die hiding on the back streets.

A Note on the Poem: For those interested in such matters, I wrote this poem as a rough approximation of the Mideastern ghazal form, which allows for a high degree of leaping from one image to another while maintaining a basic underlying unity. The poem moves associatively through various images centering around waste, including America's wasted opportunity to elect Teddy Kennedy in 1980 rather than "that foolish actor" who instead became President. In fact, the poem was originally sparked by news of the late Senator Kennedy's illness, and, in the subterranean way these things have of circulating in the imagination and psyche, my recently acquired knowledge of the Garbage Patch lost no time in entering the poem. One might playfully envision this sort of poem as a constellation of related flotsam joined in some restless organizing "gyre" of the mind's ocean.

    I urge readers to visit the New Verse News web site at www.newversenews.com to browse their fine assortment of topical poems.

A Guide to the Health Care Labyrinth

2009-08-04T17:10:53Z

(Note: So what does health care reform have to do with poetry? Well, in one respect, everything. In the past month alone I've heard of four uninsured artists with medical emergencies holding benefits to raise money to pay gigantic hospital bills. Most of us, it's been noted, are only one bad day away from loss of job, medical care, home, and possibly life. Need I say more?)

Recently I had the edifying pleasure of helping sponsor a talk at our local public library by Kip Sullivan, a health care reform advocate from Minnesota. Kip has written the best guide I've found to the confusing labyrinth of health care policy and reform, The Health Care Mess: How We Got Into It and How We'll Get Out of It.

The Health Care Mess (AuthorHouse, 2006) is readily available from Amazon.com. It's the only volume to analyze the current situation (and how we got here) that seems to me rigorously thorough, logical, and independent-minded. Kip is a long-time community organizer who became fascinated with the subject of health care reform in the 1980s and subsequently educated himself on every facet of this perplexing issue. His expertise is so widely respected that he advises Minnesota legislators on health care policy and sits on the steering committee of the Minnesota chapter of Physicians for a National Health Plan.

Kip examines his subject from every conceivable angle, persuasively arguing and documenting each step along the way to his conclusions. In so doing, he makes a virtually unassailable argument for a single-payer (or, as he terms it, "Medicare for all") remedy for our sick health care system. One key point he makes is that a single-payer system for the US would save more than enough money on administrative costs alone to insure all of the approximately 47 million currently uninsured in our country. Kip is an econ major, and he knows his numbers. In the end, it's nearly impossible to come away from an attentive reading of Kip's book without being convinced of the fairness, efficacy and advantage of a universal single-payer system.

We have been told by the Wise Talking Heads of government and media that single-payer is "off the table." But since recent polls indicate that over 70% of Americans favor some sort of Medicare-like system, why should single-payer be so summarily dismissed from consideration? Some members of Congress even balk at the much more limited prospect of a public plan option as advanced by President Obama. What's their objection? What's to fear?

Underlying arguments to varying degrees disingenuous, the fear is basically that the health insurance industry will have to give up some of the enormous profits it pockets at the expense of the sick, the poor, and the economically depressed.

In fact, the Washington Post has reported that health care industry lobbyists are spending in the neighborhood of $1.4 million a day to try to derail the President's efforts, through direct lobbying of elected officials and an advertising scare campaign. About the latter, Wendell Potter, former CIGNA insurance Vice-President turned whistle-blower, said on the July 10th Bill Moyers' Journal on public TV:

". . .[the health care industry will] pull out all the stops they can . . . to try to scare people into thinking that embracing a public health insurance option would lead down the slippery slope toward socialism . . . putting a government bureaucrat between you and your doctor."

Never mind, said Potter, that we already have bureaucrats between us and our doctors. Those bureaucrats are beholden to the same profit-driven Wall Street investors who have brought the nation to the brink of fiscal collapse. Ultimately it's not a question of whether or not bureaucrats are involved, but rather of which bureaucrat: the bureaucrat whose job it is to maximize profits by minimizing or even denying care, or the bureaucrat in the nominal employ of "we the people"?

Speaking of Wall Street, our government has had few qualms about throwing a cool trillion or so in TARP funds to the financial geniuses who engineered the ongoing implosion of American capitalism. Nor have our politicians shown much reluctance to drive our ship of state onto the rocks of out-of-control war debt.

It speaks shamefully of our priorities as a nation that Congress is willing to drop this sort of cash into the military and banking troughs, and yet, for too many of our elected officials, including the so-called Blue Dog Democrats, a trillion dollars spread out over ten years to guarantee access to health care for all citizens is unaffordable.

Kip Sullivan is skeptical of Obama's "public option," primarily because of Washington's reluctance to be pinned down as to nuts-and-bolts details. A version of the public option unrecognizably watered down with concessions to the health care industry is doomed to fail. If Congress lies down in its usual compromising position, we may end up, for example, with toothless "cooperatives" powerless to bring down escalating health care costs, not to mention failing to cover our uninsured and underinsured millions.

According to Kip, if Congress were to return to the original vision of a public option as formulated by UC-Berkeley political scientist Jacob Hacker, a public plan might succeed. There is plenty of information on Hacker online; a good place to start is his article "Healthy Competition: How to Structure Public Health Insurance Plan Choice to Ensure Risk-Sharing, Cost Control, and Quality Improvement" at www.ourfuture.org/healthcare/hacker.

Kip Sullivan identifies the current struggle as a true test of our democracy. If public opinion prevails, we may see an end to the bankruptcies and homelessness resulting from medical catastrophes, not to mention the estimated 20,000 deaths in the US each year from treatable illnesses due to lack of access to health care. If, on the other hand, Congress betrays the public, as it may well do, what passes as "health care reform" could end up being just another big bail-out for an industry already parasitic on the body politic.

At least we can take encouragement from the fact that the majority of Americans now seem to realize that the present system is unsustainable and unacceptable for a modern democracy. We are the only developed country in the world in which loss of a job (and its attendant health care coverage) may amount to a death sentence. Will we be content to stand by and do nothing as the health care industry effectively decides who among us lives and who dies? As things stand now, we tacitly agree to let a certain number of our neighbors die each year in order to keep the health care industry fat; that is immoral, disgraceful, and unworthy of America. We must make a very audible outcry over this cruel and untenable state of affairs before Congress returns to take up health care reform again in September.

A Personal Note

2009-06-04T21:09:57Z

   When I first began writing poems, I thought of myself as a lyrical poet dedicated to vision, to breaking through the veil of the obvious and the habitual to another world. I still consider that to be one of poetry's primary errands, though not its only one.

   In my poems I have also placed a premium on truth, so far as I've been able to perceive and state it. Great poet-truthtellers such as Robert Bly, Alden Nowlan, and James Wright have been my models in this--though no good poet trades in lies.

   We seize the difficult around us according to our capacity for generating artistic harmony out of the discord of experience. The extent to which any individual poet does this seems to be largely a matter of temperament. Donald Hall says, "Energy arises from conflict." As I grow older, my capacity for engaging the dark things we must all encounter seems to increase, a good development, I think, from the standpoint of emotional survival.

   I titled my book of the Bush-Cheney years Waking Before Dawn because I wanted to give readers a sense of what it felt like to me to maintain some measure of moral awakeness during that sickeningly corrupt passage in our country's history. I don't want to claim any great political discernment on my part--like many others, I'd effectively fallen asleep during the relative security of the Clinton presidency. For me, as perhaps for you, the Supreme Court's assignment of the presidency to George W. Bush in 2000 was a huge wake-up call, signalling the end of an easy, illusory peace of mind.

    In the crucible of the 2000-2008 darkness, I began to forge a different sense of poetry's mission and my relationship to it. In addition to my earlier views of my craft, I now see writing poetry as an act of radical self-trust. I wrote a poem that touches on that idea, called "Commitments":

To what is true in all religion. To never
   argue about God (what He wants or intends,
   whose side He's on, whether He's a He,
   She or It). In this we are truly blind,
   before an infinitely complex elephant.

To take the side of human happiness
   against the powers of disaster,
   plague and war. Marie-Louise von Franz
   defined as "demonic" identification
   with natural forces that don't care about us.

To kindness as a way in this world, against
   cruelty. A woman I know, in a near-
   death experience, saw clearly that of all
   our acts, only the kindnesses, large
   and small, matter in eternity.

To earthly language in writing, against
   the temptations of academic head-
   tripping, the image always preferable
   to the abstraction that may merely
   deepen the reader's disembodiment.

To the indigenous belief that people
   become wiser after death, including our
   most bigoted and violent ancestors.
   (Including us, who to our descendants
   are sure to appear bigoted and violent.)

To the heart's intelligence above
   other authority, including and
   especially the hucksters of Holy Writ.
   To resist ideological strong-arming.
   To suspect systems and trust life.

To now.