NaPoWriMo -- not quite in the spirit here.

A Freud erasure: page 248 "Mourning and Melancholia" 2018...

Three of my poems in Empty Mirror

Happy day: Empty Mirror has published three poems.

It includes my poem for Vito Acconci. It's also by him, being largely his words from a talk he gave at MoMA a few years ago.

RIP Vito. And thank you, Denise Enck.

You’re alone in a room you have nothing

for (and by) Vito Acconci

When I started out as a poet
didn’t want abstraction
abstraction used
by religion
politics
didn’t want any of that.....

Considering Translation and Cultural Appropriation because of my class on Plagiarism

Brings us to Nietzsche in The Gay Science: 

One can gauge the degree of the historical sense an age possesses by the manner in which it translates texts and by the manner in which it seeks to incorporate past epochs and books into its own being. Corneille’s Frenchmen — and even those of the Revolution — took hold of Roman antiquity in a manner that we — thanks to our more refined sense of history — would no longer have the courage to employ. And then Roman antiquity itself: how violently, and at the same time how naively, it pressed its hand upon everything good and sublime in the older periods of ancient Greece! Consider how the Romans translated this material to suit their own age … Horace, off and on, translated Alcaeus or Archilochus; Propertius translated Callimachus and Philetas …. How little concern these translators had for this or that experience by the actual creator who had imbued his poems with symbols of such experiences! As poets, they were averse to the antiquarian inquisitive spirit that precedes the historical sense. As poets they did not recognize the existence of the purely personal images and names of anything that served as the national costume or mask of a city … and therefore immediately replaced all this by present realities and by things Roman. … These poet translators did not know the pleasure of the historical sense; anything past and alien was an irritant to them, and as Romans they considered it to be nothing but a stimulus for yet another Roman conquest. In those days, indeed, to translate meant to conquer….”

Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Problem of Translation” in Theories of Translation, 68–69. Quoted in this essay by V. Joshua Adams on NonSite.org. 

And "Dear Ivanka" (or #dearIvanka) -- written when I was wondering why anyone considered the first daughter as a possible progressive in the cavern of our ugly ugly present administration

Super cool Rise Up Review published my "Dear Ivanka" poem, which begins with a quotation from Albert Woodfox and the lines:

How long and deeply I dreamed of being

a white lady. How distinctly I wanted 

to be tall and blonde like a pageant winner....

Another poem from April made it into Matter

(Oh the implications of this title.)Here is something from poem-a-day 2017, revised and in the world -- about family, politics, and family politics. It's called "Some Curses."

On summer barbecue nights, family nights

when the grandfather raised his voice

called damnation, was he saying damn nation?....

Oh good: a Mourning and Melancholia erasure is up on GlitterMOB.

20 April 2017 made it to GlitterMOB.

Erasure: 21 April: Final page of M&M

One of last year's NaPoWriMo pieces published.

Did you know there were many nudist resorts in Palm Springs? Now you do.

If I could, I would change the second two lines of this poem pretty specifically.

But since it's on the fabulous Juked, I must have done something right. Here is "Palm Springs." 

What to do with Poetry Month? Erasures, Dear Hillary, and more, I guess. No rules.

My First Revolutionary

My first revolutionary was Mario Savio. I was fifteen, it was 1977, and we met in a book that was lying around the house I grew up in in Houston.

[I met all my revolutionaries in books, which might hint that I’ve never been arrested.] [Never.]

Mario was dark and handsome and a leader of Berkeley’s FSM, or Free Speech Movement. A bright son of Italian immigrants, his first arrest was at a 1964 protest against the San Francisco Hotel Association, which only hired blacks for menial jobs. He spent that summer in the south registering black voters and returned to learn that his university was banning political speech on campus. It seems hard to believe now—or maybe not. (Though I’m not one to believe that trigger warnings are another kind of ban, they did come to mind.)

Anyway. On one December afternoon in 1964, Savio found himself in the middle of a protest about this speech ban, the ouster of a few students, and the disbanding of a few groups. So, after considerately imploring his listeners not to harass the union workers then painting the administration building and not joining their strike, he jumped on to a car and made a speech, a speech printed in that book in my mother’s house in 1977, a speech now featured on AP history tests. Today I found his words spliced into a Linkin Park song called “Wretches and Kings,” and some Bernie-or-busters are enjoying the video of the speech that’s here on YouTube, with a Marxist analogy that all can understand, claiming Berkeley’s board were the factory managers, its faculty were the employees, and the students were the raw materials being processed. Savio knew that no student wants to turn into a product, and he said so beautifully from the top of a car:

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!

How can a sixteen year old gal not love a guy like that? I love him still. This semester, I assigned Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” as a text in a freshman comp class and saw what I’d never quite realized. You’ll see it for yourself:

If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go...perchance it will wear smooth - certainly the machine will wear out... If it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.

I guess Savio had been flipping through his Thoreau that semester.

            Mario Savio ended up as a university “lecturer”—basically an adjunct, like me, and died at 53 in 1996. 

30

And April 2: Erasures: even though I've learned that Donald Trump signs all his mail in gold sharpies

This was also April 1: Can't make up this mind

Poetry Mons Begins

Some years

Didn’t want any more surprises

on the couch

with dog

a three-word Moroccan spice

spring

came today it was just a click like

the future’s snapped fingers

like how she does she does some years

like she didn’t want to miss poetry

month either                   party girl

meanwhile today’s code continues

shredding yesterday’s careful knit

someone has to be

be the last to know

decipher one long walk

city swanning until he stepped

on the trick door in the sidewalk

and dropped quick, scraped leg,

rust spot on the corduroys and

clambering up, brushing and

why did you laugh, he said

but I had waited and waited.

New Poem on Word Riot

I've got a new poem up on Word Riot. Thanks to the editors and to David Letterman.