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.) 

(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.)

    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.

   (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.

    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.