Generosity

I don't think "an economy of false scarcity" and "a zero-sum game" are the same concepts, but they seem to overlap. The former, I gather, is both an economic and an anthropological concept. The latter is a game-theory concept. As you've already gathered or know, the former means there's enough or more than enough but someone has a stake in pretending there's not--and in enforcing circumstances that make for scarcity. The latter means that in "the game," there must be a total winner and a total loser; a win/win situation isn't possible, nor is it possible for one of the "players" to become a spectator and enjoy the achievement of the other player.

I was thinking about this topic both in terms of academics and the world of poetry today, as well as life in general.

As you might imagine (if you're not an academic), academics can be at least as insecure as the next person. So sometimes if a fellow academic has some success, that's seen as taking something away from another academic; there's only so much success to go around (the insecure person fears). I think it's more than mere envy or insecurity. I think maybe they the person believes there's only so much to go around, when in fact there's so much work to do in academia, so many possibilities, that abundance reigns. After all, new literature gets published and republished every day, so in the field of English, there's no end of work to do in terms of interpretation, editing, theorizing, thinking about teaching X or Y, and so on. The reservoir is always full.

Generosity is rather toward the other end of a spectrum from zero-sum thinking, insecure thinking, time-wasting, fake-competition thinking. Sometimes generosity's driven by less than noble intentions, of course; it is faux generosity. It gives to get. But real generosity fuels itself. Since I'm older, I now, by definition, have younger colleagues. It's not so much that I get great satisfaction from providing some assistance or advice, or an avenue for publication, or whatever; it's that the generosity seems like part of a process that's working well. I feel as if I'm part of the rhythm of how things should work, partly because it's so simple to be of basic help. It takes a while to get to the point of expecting nothing in return--literally not even a "thank you." You just just sort of throw your wee grain of generosity into the mix of things and know it will at least do no harm and probably do some good. If nothing comes of it, what have you lost? If the person is "ungrateful," so what? Maybe they fear they're in a game in which they owe you something, and they don't like that game, so maybe their response is understandable.

In the world of poetry and art in general, whole systems are built upon an economy of false scarcity. There are just a few elite publishers of poetry, for example (Knopf being the prime example), a few elite writers' conferences (Bread Loaf, for example, and even at Bread Loaf, there's this hideous pecking-order, I've heard), a few big awards, an Academy of American Poets with a static number of slots, and so on. At the same time, there's always been a sense in which there are too many poets, too much poetry being produced. The systems that can admit only so many poets and poetry depend upon scarcity.

Unless you're compulsive and believe you have to read all the poetry, how can this scarcity really be so? What if everyone in the U.S. (for example) wrote a poem tomorrow? What would be the harm? There's a good chance some good might come of it and an excellent chance almost everything else the people would do would be more harmful. But if, somehow, a person gets invested in faux scarcity or zero-sum thinking, then productivity, abundance, generosity, exuberance, and diversity all become threats. Someone has to lose! The basic fear (besides thinking that someone else is going to take all the peanuts), I think, is of a loss of control.

Of course, like everyone else, I have my regrets about giving X to Y in life and remember that Y probably took advantage of me. But I have almost no regrets about being generous--providing assistance or advice if asked, providing a bit of an opportunity, an opening, an avenue. Answering a question; giving a tip; saving somebody from some unnecessary grief I had to go through when I was in the same spot. As I mentioned, it usually feels as if it's the way things should work. It feels deeply practical; forget altruism. Yes, it's a tough, competitive world out there, and no amount of generosity will likely change that soon, but by the same token, there's nothing really preventing a person from being generous within that person's powers (however meager they may be), genuine personal limits, and sphere. That is, there's only so much I can do, but at least I can do that, and withholding it doesn't mean I'll "have more" (as the zero-sum logic would dictate).

--Which is one of the reasons I enjoy teaching poetry-writing. The more poets, the better, as far as I'm concerned. The more readers of poetry, the better. No need to create false scarcity; it's not a zero-sum game. If some writer who took a class from me publishes a book (let's say), that simply does not take anything away from me or anyone else. I've neither won nor lost. I just get to be a spectator and enjoy the person's achievement. I "win" (falsely) only if I indulge myself by taking some credit for the publication. ("You know, that person took a class from me once.") I lose only if I imagine that the person's achievement somehow limits me, but it doesn't limit me, so there's no reason to "go there."

Marcus Aurelius: 7:73: "When you have done a good act and another has fared well by it, why seek a third reward besides these, as fools do, be it the reputation for having done a good act or getting something in return?" Translated by Jacob Needleman and John P. Piazza. Tarcher Cornerstone Editions/Penguin, 2008, p. 59.

I suspect generosity is a renewable source of energy.

Iron and Irony

Apparently the etymology of "iron" goes back through the Celtic language to an early time in what we now call England or Britain and is linked to the word iren, with an accent on the e. Irony, on the other hand, is of Greek origin: ‘.

On the surface, however, it does look as if iron is embedded in irony. Extrapolated from this etymologically ironic situation, one could, I suppose, manufacture other outcomes from other metals. That is, one kind of irony comes in the form of unintended consequences--a twist of fate.

A goldy, therefore, might be a surprisingly wonderful outcome, an unknotting of fate. A leady would be a disappointment--heavy, sure, but nothing like irony.

A silvery would be less then wonderful but still satisfactory. "You know, I have to say that the end result was at least silveric if not entirely goldic."

What would a steely be, as a noun? Would it be an extremely strong version of an irony? I think so. "Oh, how steelic that was," we'd say, "almost too ironic to bear."

A tinny would be a cheapened outcome or situation, I assume--as a sequel in Hollywood is almost always a cheapening of the original. "I found Big Explosion II to be a tinnic version of the original. Big Explosion I was explosive and big in such an original way."

A coppery, as a noun, would be a softening of a situation, an easing of tensions. "The diplomatic talks were regarded as copperic by all parties involved."

We run into some syllabic complexity with an aluminumy, which would be a lightening of a situation, perhaps almost a giddiness. "He won the lottery--how aluminic!" If the giddiness occurred in a play, it would be dramatic aluminy, which I don't think Aristotle covered in the Poetics, ironically enough.

Is Our President a War-Criminal? Sullivan Thinks So

Conservative columnist Andrew Sullivan now seems to think that the President of the United States is a war-criminal:

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/03/the-war-crimina.html

Colleen McElroy

Thanks to a colleague of mine who invited her, poet Colleen McElroy read at my campus on Friday. What a wonderful 50 minutes. She's not just a fine poet but a real pro at reading, providing just enough background to each poem and, in cases where none is needed, none. She has a fabulous sense of humor and a warm sense of self-irony. She also loves movies from the 1940s, so I felt immediately that she and I shared at least one wave-length.

Chiefly she read poems from her new book, Sleeping with the Moon, published by the University of Illinois in 2007.

In addition to being a poet and having been a professor, she is also a trained linguist and a professional collector of stories and folklore--worldwide, from Madagascar to Tibet to Cuba. She reminded us that, sadly, languages are becoming extinct worldwide as quickly as species of animals and plants.

In addition to the systematic reading she has done as a professor, linguist, collector, and editor, McElroy clearly does the kind of indiscriminate, voracious, and impulsive reading that many poets do. There's a certain kind of poet who finds almost anything and anyone interesting and therefore almost any kind of reading interesting. Part of the impulse springs, I think, from finding even commonplace utterances or texts full of possibilities, and another part springs, perhaps, from a stubborn refusal to let go of that readiness one has in childhood to find the world fascinating. It's not so much that one remains childish or naive; in fact, McElroy is, I assure you, quite the opposite of that. She has lived and learned. It's really more of a tenaciousness, a refusal to agree to be bored by what other people find boring or to agree to ignore what other people ignore. In some ways, poets like McElroy use reading to forage, scavenge, rummage, and detect.

Not surprisingly, then, when a student asked for advice for young writers, McElroy's first word was "Read." But she didn't follow that up with "read poetry" or "read the classics." She said something like "read anything and everything, and read all the time [when you're not writing]." She also advised keeping a journal at the ready, and she advised a colleague of mine to keep a journal in almost every part of the house--what a great idea. A kitchen journal, a bedroom journal, a living-room journal, etc.

McElroy writes and reads poetry with great care; the poems are filled with precise, evocative imagery, and there is an easy but by no means careless voice in them all.

A poetry reading on a Friday afternoon: what a fine way to end a work-week.

Two, Four, Six, Eight . . .

Vaguely, I remember our high-school's cheerleaders leading a cheer that began as follows:

Two, four, six, eight.
Who do we appreciate?

Somehow, it made sense back then, partly, I suspect, because I was on the football field (or the sidelines thereof) or the basketball court (or the bench next to it), and I regarded all cheers as background noise, which makes "sense" because it just has to be noise.

Now, of course, I realize that the first line has nothing to do with the second line, that we're dealing with some inexpensive word-play, and that, because I'm an accursed lifelong student of English, I think the second line should be "Whom do we appreciate?" Accursed is just the term for this condition. Those former cheerleaders probably have their feet up and are appreciating a glass of wine, watching a movie, and not thinking or blogging about subjective v. objective forms of a word.

Nor can I remember whom, exactly, our cheerleaders did appreciate, although I certainly still appreciate the energy they threw into their organized optimism. (When I was a sophomore, I ended up one night, after an athletic contest, in a car full of senior [wow!] cheerleaders--a Ford Mustang, no less--and the young women had a bottle of blackberry wine with them. I appreciate my dim memories of that evening as well.)

In any event, I thought of the cheer when I thought of Adelaide Crapsey [no jokes, please] (1878-1914), inventor of America's very rough counterpart to the haiku, the cinquain, which is a five-line poem in which line one has two syllables, line two has four, line three has six, line four has eight, and line five has two. So the form is both incremental and circular, in my assessment. Subsequently, those attempting, unwisely (in my opinion), to improve upon Ms. Crapsey's invented form, have tried to dictate not just syllables but parts of speech, so that a noun should go here and a verb there, or whatever. Nonsense. The simple elegance of 2-4-6-8-2 endures.

My cinquain this evening concerns cities, which depend for their existence upon convincing large numbers of people that they should live in cities. If people who live in cities (large or small) woke up one day and truly realized that they live in a crowded, dirty, noisy, over-priced place, and if they decided t do something about it, they'd leave, go to the dwindling countryside, and--start another city. Oh, well.

I do find it amusing when people positively swoon at the mention of this or that city--NYC, London, Paris, Rio, L.A. An individual's sense of identity and importance gets entangled with the mythologizing of urbanity, of the central market-place, of the alleged hub of civilization. (If we ponder that metaphor just a bit, we might speculate that the more interesting part of the wheel--the outside, where the rubber meets the road--is analogous to villages and small towns, far from the hub.)

I am as guilty as the next person, whoever he or she is, of a robotic acceptance of the notion that city = good. I've convinced myself I'm fond of San Francisco and Stockholm, for example. I also find it amusing when one city's residents pretend to be better than another city's residents. Seattle v. Tacoma. S.F. v. Oakland. Philly v. Pittsburgh. Rome v. Naples. Whatever! It's all just streets and sidewalks, sewers and towers, cars and dog shit, "bistros" and homeless shelters, retail and wholesale, smog and bad water. The bigger the city, the smaller the living-space for twice (at minimum) the rent/lease/mortgage. ("But the restaurants! The nightlife! The museums!" Uh-huh.)

Cinquain: Urbanity

City
will always tell
you that it’s grand, sophis-
ticated, as you stand over
sewers.

Two, four, six, eight. Whom do we appreciate? Adelaide Crapsey.

In Praise of Agatha and LT

In addition to reading some poetry while we were at the (Washington) coast, I read an Agatha Christie novel, There Is a Tide, more recently known as Taken at the Flood. It's taken (so to speak) me decades to warm up to her books, and I still don't like them all, but I'm now very fond of the Poirot books. The Clocks is my favorite. There Is a Tide is a terrific Poirot book, too--and it's also a very good novel of manners--the crime and detection aside.

It includes some extremely astute observations about post-WW II England, its economy, the status and self-doubt of men who did not go to war (some farmers were exempt, for instance), and the views of women who did serve (as nurses, for example), who had "seen the world," and who returned with ambitions to be more than housewives and to live somewhere besides a cozy village. In the book, there's also a sense in which England no longer knows who or what it is when it isn't fighting the Germans anymore.

Christie's novels tend to develop a bit slowly during the first 30-40 pages, but one's patience is usually rewarded because her plotting is superb, deceptively tight, and she works well with an ensemble cast. There Is a Tide turns out to be a gem, and the bonus is that I secured an older, very pulpy paperback with a lurid cover--my favorite. Hats off to Agatha and Hercules.

As if reading Agatha Christie novels weren't sufficiently nerdy, I now rush to heap praise on LibraryThing, a site on which one catalogues all one's books, "tags" them, ranks them, reviews them, and on which one may join groups based on authors, genres, topics, periods and eras of literature, and so on. It's just too much fun. One may instantly generate "author clouds"--the more books you have by an author, the large the font is for that author's name in the cloud. One may also generate a photo-collage of one's authors. I was explaining all this to some people at a restaurant, for some inexplicable reason, their eyes got glassy. ("Check, please!") Gee, I wonder why.

There's a group on LT called The Black Orchid: A Nero Wolfe Group, dedicated (obviously) to Rex Stout's famous detective, and the conversational threads on there are hilarious--for their minutiae, their passion for Wolfe and Archie, their discussions of food, orchids, and NYC, and all manner of things, with wildly circuitous detours. I also started several groups--one called Working Class, one called The Harlem Renaissance, and one called Karl Shapiro and Company--all about mid-20th century poetry. --Also one on Robinson Jeffers and one on Langston Hughes. The latter two have yet to "take off," as it were.

It's astonishing (perhaps it shouldn't be) how much bibliophiles from every culture on the planet have in common. There are versions of LT in numerous nations and languages, but they are also linked to the main (U.S.) LT site, so I can (for example) get to the Swedish site via a group called (with typical Swedish obviousness) Swedish Thing. The conversational threads on that group-site are few, measured, deliberate, serious--and of few words, whereas Americans and Brits do tend to go on a bit (like some bloggers).

It's too bad (or maybe not) that bibliophiles don't have more political clout. --Which makes me think of one of my very favorite droll bumper-stickers: I PLAY THE BAGPIPES, AND I VOTE. Bag-pipe players and bibliophiles--political forces with which to be reckoned. Something arcane this way comes. Mere eccentricity is loosed upon the world, the ink-dimmed tide is loosed, and what rough first edition, its hour come round at last, falls off the shelf in Toledo to be read?

Triangle Shirtwaist Factory

Today is an anniversary of the Traingle Shirtwaist Factory fire, a tragedy in general and, more particularly, a tragedy in the history of labor and of women's labor. Another blogger alerted her readers to the annivrsary, and she included a fine poem she wrote that evokes the infamous fire. Here's the link to poet Karen J. Weyant's site:



http://thescrapperpoet.blogspot.com/

I think you'll really enjoy the poem.

More Poet's Political Questions

Some more political questions from a poet's point of view:

1. Because reporters don't seem to ask good questions anymore, why don't they ask candidates who their favorite poets are? Sure, it's irrelevant to the election, but so are most of the other questions. I figure Obama would answer straight-up. I think there's a 35% chance he'd say Langston Hughes, chiefyy for the sense of humor, not necessarily for the ethnicity. I figure the Clintons (plural) would stall, consult their team, do some polling, and then (if it were today) name a poet from Pennsylvania. I figure John McCain would get angry and hell at the reporter, "What kind of question is that?! Shut up!"

2. Why doesn't Ralph Nader run for mayor of a city first? Why does he always have to start at the top? How about mayor of Toledo? What if we made Ralph activist-poet-laureate?

3. Will the Dems manage to lose what most political scientists view as the easiest election to win in decades? Or should I ask, How will the Dems lose . . . .?

4. If "gay marriage" is, as some allege, a "threat" to heterosexual marriages [I still don't get how it could be a threat, and I'm still in search of one good example of such a threat], does it then follow, logically, that gay divorce would be a threat to traditional divorce and therefore an aid to traditional marriage, meaning we should make gay marriage legal so that gay divorce would be legal?

5. In the 2004 election, the GOPers allegedly used ballot initiatives on gay marriage to get out (so to speak) the vote on their behalf, in Ohio, for example. What ballot initiatives are they planning this Fall?

6. Instead of sending all taxpayers (in certain brackets) a $600 refund, why doesn't the government "bundle" that money and give it to the people who can't make their house payments?

7. What is one success Bush has had? I thought about this question hard, and I came up with the following: he has given a lot of money for AIDS relief in Africa (even though he insists on so-called abstinence programs). That's a good thing. I'm even willing to take the Iraq war off the table and say that people can agree to disagree about that. But leaving that off the table, what remains? Economy = bad. Environment = bad. Eroded civil liberties = bad (in my opinion). Foreign policy [even excepting Iraq] = bad. Support for veterans = bad. Energy = bad. Response to disasters [Katrina] = bad. Speeches = bad. Appointments = bad (strictly from a competence-angle). Polar bears = bad. Immigration = no policy one way or the other; a zero. Closing gap between rich and poor = bad. But I suppose some people want that gap to widen--I mean, seriously, from some kind of effed up philosophical point of view.

8. Would anyone be in favor of electing Obama, Clinton, and McCain and giving them each roughly 16 months in office? I guess we'd simply draw straws to see who started first. Or we could give each one 8 months and then hold a referendum to see if we wanted that person to continue. Why wait four years to see how bad things can get? Society moves at a much faster pace than it did in, say, 1808, so should we speed up the presidential cycle?

9. Did you get the sense, as I did when I watched Obama giving his speech on race, that he was thinking, "I can't believe I have to explain such simple things to [white] people"? I thought it was a great speech, but I did sense an understandable weariness on his part. A kind of "I thought we covered this already in high school history" feeling.

10. Is Obama essentially doing to the Clintons what Bill Clinton did to Bush I and Bob Dole? Hoisted on his [Bill's] own . . . ?

11. Who would be in favor of a heavy tax on presidential campaigns? Not on the people who give money, mind you, but on the candidates' campaign-machines. I'd put the money directly into Medicare, Social Security, and/or homeless programs. That way, society would benefit from each campaign, no matter what. And we'd take the money from them right away, before they spent it on attack-ads or whatever. Right off the top.

12. Does Congress matter anymore? Is it even logistically possible for any Congress to say No to any president at this point? Are we pretty much working with elected dictators at this point?

Ashbery, Dunn, and Kunitz

At the beach on the Washington coast, I read three books of poetry by three venerable poets: Where Shall I Wander [no question mark] by John Ashbery; The Insistence of Beauty, by Stephen Dunn; and a later Selected Poems (circa 1995) by Stanley Kunitz.

Although Ashbery is of the New York School and bears some relation to L*A*N*G*U*A*G*E* poets, he's pretty much a school unto himself, drawing on a vast range of diction, creating expressionistic collages of language, infusing his poems with allusions and droll linguistic wit, and almost never, it seems, being interested in straightforward rhetoric, accessible narrative, or otherwise conventionally representational poetry. I've always found his poems to be amusing and extremely clever, but I don't like them as much as many of my cohorts do. I tire of them quickly, and I do get the sense that sometimes he's just effing around--that one could take out a couple lines and replace them with other lines, give the poem to someone, and not have that person catch the switch. (I can't imagine doing that [and getting away with it] to poems by Housman, Hopkins, Dickinson, or Auden, for instance, but I think it would work with some of Ashbery's poems.) As linguistically rich and surprising as his poems are, there is nonetheless something insular or insulated about the work. I start to yearn for poetry that's more sanguine, robust, and grounded, less academic, upper-middle-class, and enervated. Ennui abounds. A lot of his poems sound like J. Alfred Prufrock on roids or Franz Kafka on laughing gas. But Ashbery's an extremely famous, celebrated poet, so I think I'm in the minority in my view; also, Ashbery's ear for all the odd phrases we're flooded with each day is extraordinary; out of nowhere will come a line like, "Attention shoppers."

Dunn's poetry is quite clear and grounded, and his voice is interesting. This particular book is a bit too insular for me--not in the way Ashbery's is, however. The book seems centered on Dunn's own immediate experience, including such things as romantic break-ups. I found myself wanting a broader range of experience represented, and sometimes things got predictable. In a poem apparently about a new lover, he speaks of the woman's former lover and brings in the old reference to three people (figuratively) being in the bed. That idea seems worn out. "Grudges" is an intriguing, well crafted villanelle, modified, about 9/11. It doesn't quite capture the global nature of the mess we're in, however. For me, it personalized 9/11 a bit too much--shrank the event. There's more than a grudge involved when planes get flown into towers and the U.S. invades a country for trumped up reasons--at a cost of a trillion dollars. Like Ashbery, however, Dunn is a venerable, much celebrated poet--of the plainer style.

I read Kunitz's book third and was glad to do so, for I felt as if earth, sky, water, air, fish, ordinary folk, fire, wood, recognizable landscapes, and less preciously rendered experiences were suddenly let back into the room. Things had gotten a bit stuffy with Ashbery and Dunn. As much as I enjoyed Ashbery's rare, relentless cleverness and Dunn's spare, self-grounded work, I was really hungry and thirsty for the kind of poetry Kunitz writes, so the order of the reading worked out beautifully.

Anyway, props to these three veterans of American poetry. Solid books, established reputations.

Dig It

One doesn't hear the term "dig it" much any longer, in the colloquial sense of "enjoy it." I have not pursued any research on the etymology of this connotation, but I suspect that it may have originated in African American vernacular expression, gotten absorbed into the broader popular culture (including the "Beat Generation"), and then lasted a while--into the 1970s, perhaps even the 1980s? When people use the term now, they tend to use it derisively, gently mocking how out of date it is. In the 1990s, there was a quasi-Hip-Hop group called Diggable Planets, which produced some very intriguing music and lyrics. But that group, too, was deploying the term wryly.

I have a good friend, a longtime friend, who works at Microsoft now. He's one of the funniest people I've ever met, and among his schticks is a faux-hip one, in which the persona goes around saying, "Hey, I can dig that!" He happens to be a fabulous musician, so ironically, when it comes to music, he can play things that are genuinely diggable, even as, in one of his comic personae, he mocks the "cool" white bourgeois dude who's tragi-comically "hip."

I do wonder the extent to which "dig" is filially linked to the term "groove." One gets in the groove or finds something groovy, just as one digs or digs into an experience, but can one dig a groove? Hmmm. Perhaps one shouldn't use "one" when writing about "dig"--speaking of tragi-comically [un]-hip.

"Can you dig it?" is a rhetorical expression, although I believe in a tune by the group Chicago ("Saturday in the Park," if memory serves), the question is not treated thusly. "Can you dig it?" is followed by "Yes, I can." Chicago produced a great sound there for a while, but even from the beginning, the group was a bit nerdy. Nerd rock.

Anyway, here is a wee riff on the term "dig it":


Imperative Mood

When he said, “Dig the well,”
He wasn’t speaking Jazz or Beat
Or asking you to move your feet.
He meant shovel, and he meant hole.

The water-witching’s done, son.
Find that water-table,
If you’re able.
Dig the well good. Get it done.

It is not to my credit that I couldn't resist writing "Dig the well good." It amuses me, but I do apologize. Can you dig it? Don't answer that.

Obama's Speech

Luckily, I had the time to watch all of Barack Obama's speech about his pastor in particular and "race" in general today. Especially for a politician, Obama came perilously close not just to telling the truth but to indulging in complexity--two things we've come not to expect or accept from our political speakers.

Although the facts show I'm a privileged white male, I'm in the "minority" on a couple of issues. First, I didn't find the Reverend Wright's excerpted comments offensive or even incorrect. "G.D. America" was a bit over the top, theologically, only because I reckon it's G.'s decision whether to D. anyone or anything. But even that phrase wasn't over the top if you place it in the context of prophetic preaching. Look at the Books of Isaiah and Jeremiah, for example: preaching that calls down the thunder and makes the Reverend Wright seem mild, no offense to him intended.

Second, I'd prefer to retire the word "race" as it applies to categories of people, simply because there is no basis for this categorization in science. However, I understand the argument that because racism is alive and well, we might as well keep "race" in play. It's just that I'm persuaded by the human-genome project and its apparent discovery that our entire gene-pool may be traced back to what we might call Eastern Africa. That's where the "race" began. The stuff about Caucasians, "Orientals," Anglo-Saxons, "whites," "blacks," and "Negroes" is just invented nonsense. But I'm willing to defer to those who want to keep "race" in the lexicon for strategic and tactical purposes. Recently, scientists have found three or four genes that control skin-color--but they control skin-color, not "race."

Because I teach African American literature, I talk every day--or every M-W-F--about what Obama talked about--just not as eloquently. Or more accurately, my students and I talk about such topics--the complexities of spirituality and race, class and race, how a sense of "whiteness" depends on a complicated view of "blackness," how white folks are privileged to be "tired of talking about race," whereas black folks have to think about the topic all the time, and so on.

Of course, the mainstream commercial media and right-wing hucksters smell blood, ratings, and money in the water, so they'll continue to "harpoon" Obama--David Gergen's phrase. A moderate Republican, Gergen liked Obama's speech but allowed as how, in his opinion, the right would relentlessly attack now, no matter what Obama said. To his credit, Gergen seemed disgusted by the predictable harpooning.

Having read the works of Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, George Schuyler, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, Amiri Baraka, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Iceberg Slim, Chester Himes, Rudolph Fisher, Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and W.E.B. DuBois, among others, I would have regarded the Reverend Wright's comments as unremarkable. The media ginned up the controversy, as far as I'm concerned, and as far as I'm concerned, I'm constantly amazed that African Americans aren't more angry, dispirited, and incensed. I can't think of another ethnic group from which fate and history have exacted more suffering and asked more resilience and patience. That Obama was so resilient, patient, articulate, and nuanced today impressed me, even if, in my opinion, there was no controversy to begin with. No offense to the Reverend Wright, but his righteous indignation and its targets are not news, nor should they be. That they are news may mean that the U.S. is a bit more "static" than Obama's speech allowed. To me, white privilege looks as implacable and immovable as ever, but I'm willing to follow the lead of Obama's speech and think the best I can of this society. And Obama, in the words of Langston Hughes, let everyone know that he is "still here." (Hughes's "Still Here" is one of my favorite poems, incidentally.) To his credit, Obama expects more from his nation than I do; he is more optimistic than I. Good for him. Good, I hope, for us, too.

Fiction v. Poetry

I sent off sample chapters of not one but two novels I've finally completed. I'd sent a rare double-query to an agent, and the agency wants to have a look at both books, which are quite different from each other. All prayers, good thoughts, and karmic vibrations are welcome, of course.

For me, fiction is hard labor. There's just no two ways around it, as my mother used to say. Poetry is work, certainly, but I feel as if I have some control; even if a poem is turning out badly, I can recognize as much and quickly start again or revise or put the poem on hiatus. With fiction, I can write chapters and chapters, drafts and drafts, and still not know quite what I have. I'm much more comfortable with nonfiction prose--reviews, essays, textbooks, journalism, scholarship.

I've met quite a few writers whom I regard as "pure" fiction-writers; they really seem to know their way around fictional narrative writing. Many of them look at poetry and shake their heads; they don't even attempt it. One fiction-writer I know flatly says, "I don't know anything about poetry."

Quite a few poets are once-only novelists: Karl Shapiro published one novel, Edsel (great title); James Dickey published one (yes, that famous one on which they based a Burt Reynolds movie: "Aintree?! You can't get there from here, boy!"); and Richard Hugo published one--a mystery novel called Death and the Good Life (great title). I think Rita Dove has published only one novel.

At the moment, the most prolific double-genre writer that comes to mind is Robert Penn Warren (All the King's Men, World Enough and Time, much poetry). I think Stephen Dobyns started as a poet and became a rather prolific mystery-writer. The fiction-machine, Joyce Carol Oates, writes plays, but I don't think she writes poetry. John Updike writes relatively light poetry. I remember reading his volume, Midpoint, about 30 years ago--or more.

I've published just one novel so far--a mystery novel that was, I found out later, a "police procedural"--because its detective is a sheriff. These other two novels have taken forever and a day to finish. Two long, strange writing-and-revision roads. Maybe they'll get published; maybe not. But it was good to get a yes to a query and fun to send them off--with the SASE, in which I expect to see them again, rejected but still my pals.

Greed Gone Wild, Lobbying Gone Looney

Maybe this is what the late 1920s felt like, financial "systems" (ha!) out of control, waves of foreclosures, no sensible planning on the part of private or governmental institutions, the never-free, loaded-dice "free market" cannibalizing itself.

What rational nation cuts taxes after hurling itself into an unnecessary five-year-plus war? Only George Herbert Hoover Bush would pull such a stunt, which enables the very rich to suck up loose cash but ruins the economy as a whole and devastates working people.

I was talking with a realtor today, who explained that after "the Fed" pumped a bunch of money into the banking system, with the idea of lowering interest-rates and getting the economy going, many makes raised interest-rates so that they would make money at both ends--from the Fed handout and from small investors (like home-buyers). Thus they stash a lot of cash, make the quarterly books look good, and raise the price of their stock. Meanwhile, the economy continues to slump, and the gap between rich and poor widens. Why wouldn't Congress (for example) regulate such behavior and instruct the banks that if they get an influx of cash for the government, the mustn't raise interest-rates? Congress/the Fed did step in to save Bear/Stearns--because they were afraid of a stock-crash. Save Bear/Stearns, but to hell with the working-class family in foreclosure. The realtor told me he has a client who can barely make house payments. He wants to negotiate a deal with the bank, but the bank won't negotiate with him unless he goes into foreclosure. It's in the bank's interest to see him fail, I guess. And the banks don't have to pay attention to Congress because banking-lobbyists own Congress.

Don't you just love the argument that lobbying, a synonym for bribery, is protected free speech? Checks, currency, and wire-transfers of money--from banking lobbyists to a congress-person's campaign, e.g.--do involve numbers and letters: texts, if you will. I will grant that technical point. But only amounts of symbolic stored energy are being expressed. No one is speaking, writing, performing, or peacefully protesting. They're just bribing.

I'm tempted to argue against lobbying and even to argue for outlawing it. I'd allow anybody to give any information they wanted to legislators. I just wouldn't allow any money to go from lobbyists and their employers to legislators. In fact, I'd require lobbyists to take a vow of poverty. Non-profit organizations would take care of their basic needs. Ideas, jokes, poems, riddles, statistics, reports, theories, draft-bills--yes to all of these. Money--no. It's not speech. It's money. Gifts--no. Favors--no. Maybe one batch of home-made cookies per year, that's it.

On second thought, however, I think I'd prefer to make lobbying not illegal but even more obviously crass and vividly bad for the common good. Like automobiles in NASCAR, legislators should have to wear patches and decals on their clothes representing every entity that's given them money. Failure to represent a lobbyist with a patch or decal would mean the legislator would have to give the money back--in a public ceremony.

And while I'm at it, let me say how disappointed I am in the Poetry Lobby. What are they doing? Why aren't they pushing the poetry-agenda more fiercely? Where are their offices, their newsletters, their think-tanks, their phony corporations, their email-alerts? I want Emily Dickinson's image to replace Jefferson's on the nickel, for instance. The Poetry Lobby could push for that. E.D. never owned slaves, and she wrote over a thousand great poems. TJ helped draft a few "founding" documents, but he's gotten enough press. He can give up the nickel.

I'd like a National Poet's Reserve. If you joined, you'd have to go to a workshop once a month and agree to be ready to be called up to active duty--for example, if the governor needed some sonnets written, or if an ailing poet needed some help with meals or errands. I'd like to see the U.S. step up poetry-exports, and I want NASA to send some poetry-satellites in orbit, so the spoken word could be broadcast around the globe more vigorously. I'd like to see the villanelle put on the Endangered Form-Poem list, and I want us to drill for poetry in Alaska. Poetry Lobby, where are you?