Palestinian Transfer
Of olive groves spread out across soft hills the people despair: everything here has been marked, and everything marked is lost.
Transfer isn’t necessarily a dramatic event.
The telephone just keeps ringing and ringing. Something like a stethescope against the breast. Clinical.
In this way three children break an afternoon curfew and are mortally wounded.
The current situation calls for a swift and speedy effort to control all forces: not only as freedom struggling with its conqueror, refusing its reification and its perverted image, but as the being of groves spread across the hills, raising their fruits like tiny fists, by some unimaginable patience holding back the punch that would provoke the conqueror further.
The ruined, arid land, the neglected trees, testify that promises nourished from afar didn’t create an organism strong enough to withstand the assorted - well, you know all that already. Like a stethescope against the chest.
To show how and why a non-violent person, like myself, becomes violent. Not that I have become violent.
Uneasy rapprochment, for the sake of others. That explains the contradictory character certain states of mind are charged with, a clap of thunder when no storm is visible.
As for the psycho-social trance I would like to say one last thing about Steven Biko.
Festering wounds ask questions of their father. Like a refrigerator that groans from its own inner cold. The telephone just keeps ringing and ringing.
The 36
It was while the army demolished a neighboring house, belonging to the family of a militant from Islamic Jihad, that the wall fell on the Makadmah family.
Opposition came swiftly from the 36 hidden justices.
There they are, you will have to go a long way around if you want to avoid them.
I would like to stroll within range of your rifle. I’m that angry.
Then an explosion, and the wall fell on the assembled family.
The name might be derived from a root meaning “to come” or “be present”: or possibly from another one meaning “to bruise”.
The last child the father and his neighbors found, scratched but alive.
Beauty is enhanced by this single moment of peace, and his hand which clutches the rubber ball, and Being never at any time running its course with a cause and effect coherence.
That our predicates do not contain untruths but are simply claims gone unfulfilled in our contemporaries and in ourselves. Being-in-the-thick-of-it.
When the building came down I felt a disconnect, a complete loss of apperception, as well as a completely leveled perception of things.
Mountains of night creep away without ever again yielding to barest day.
With ambulances blocked from reaching the scene, Mrs. Makadmah, 41, died while neighbors were carrying her to a clinic.
Her name might be derived from a root meaning “to come” or “be present”, or possibly from another one meaning, “to bruise”.
Expect no trial.
Except in every single action we are engaged in.
Possibly mixed among our neighbors, the 36, hidden and just.
Concentrated within themselves they go unrecognized by their fellow men.
Mrs. Makadmah was known as an excellent cook who often made cakes and cookies for her children.
The Israeli Army expressed regret.
Click Here to Receive 50% Off Home Delivery of The New York Times.
Essential Services
Essential services in several critical areas, including health, education, water, electricity and law enforcement could no longer be provided.
What good would running to the Occupied Territories have done, what good running away ?
The bridge, much like the airport, the border crossing or any other entry point, is a place of enduring humiliations - homologue to the denial of history.
The fiancee arrived, surrounded by her brothers and sisters, all seven of them.
This quarter 17 killings were carried out that were almost certainly assassinations.
My grandmother and grandfather go to the rail of the boardwalk and look down at the beach.
If you throw even a cursory glance at the past you will observe that in the continuum of colonial control apartheid and peace have never been coextensive.
After his village was razed the Leper approached the soldier cradling his Uzi.
The ocean is becoming rough; my grandmother observes that the waves come slowly, drawing their strength from far back.
With pious and gentle resignation the persecuted ones suffered such intolerance (though later, in the Warsaw Ghetto…)
If the Law is texture, that texture must have changed. Been smoothed out by its “triumphs”.
To cope with interruptions and delays all schools in the West Bank begin to make up classes, when possible, during off days and holidays, as if by the sheer quantity of hours the circumstance could be overwhelmed.
The power of redemption seems to be built into the clockwork of life.
Out of stasis and paralysis, symptomatic of ghettos in general, I decided to run there and not to run there.
A stone roars like a bird Slaughtered
Tahseen Alkhateeb writes from Amman.
Not genocide, not ethnic cleansing: a name has yet to be conceived for what is undergone in these curfewed quarters.
Certainly not “The Question of Settlements”.
The Argentines speak of “the annhiliated” but that isn’t it either.
Redemption and its blasted clockwork.
Penelope
She set up a great loom in the main hall, started to weave a fabric with a very fine thread. And every night, when the wooers had fallen asleep, she would unthread that day’s work.
Penelope transfers her strength to the medium of her subjective expression, in order to then subordinate herself to that medium, more than subjective, in the act of destructive defiance.
On the other side: only eight outposts established since 1996 have been completely dismantled. Many see this expansion as positive.
Weaving done in oneself insures that one won’t spill a drop of another. Then one undoes one’s own weaving. This is not just a ruse.
The awesome power of sacrifice. I tracked its meaning, never examining the sources of power that allowed me to make my own tracks, and thus, erasing them in the process.
Every day I would weave my father-in-law’s shroud, and every night by torchlight I would unweave that same web.
At least let her finish her weaving before you possess her. No. The bulldozer kept coming.
I’m no expert but I think I see a problem here.
If Palestine is Penelope, Penelope has already waited more than 54 years.
Preoccupation
The first haiku’s task is to achieve exemption from someone in purdah walking on your street.
The second haiku’s task is to achieve exemption from someone in a tallis walking on your street.
The real haiku has no task.
Redemption and its blasted clockwork.
Odysseus
Other tales there are to tell, almost as sad, said Odysseus.
Words gather inside those exiled from space, those receding into time. Treat the person in whom they gather as if that person were their own sick child. Like parents made magically young in the tending.
You seek a homecoming as sweet as honey, since once every soul and soul-root had its special place in the pleroma. All instantiations of the return prove false. All fixed images of home prove idol.
Yet contagious as laughter or yawning there remains an unfathomable quality that frees language from something like description. Which remains undescribed, tantalizing.
Every day I would weave at the great loom; every night I would tear my work to shreds.
My guiding light, said Penelope, is the Israelites: they waited two millenia.
Under the name Reb Areb the poet Jabes offers: “Jewish solidarity is the impossible passion one stranger can feel for another.”
Penelope, calm and straightforward: “death will surely come to the suitors.”
He stripped off his rags and revealed himself as who he really was: a seed in the celestial granary, the perfect tension between particularism and universality, the voluptuous pleasure of silence fusing with anger.
Penelope one’s waiting, Odysseus one’s wandering.
Odysseus always no more than Penelope at her loom, weaving the future.
He her thought now, she thinks, in one guise or another, for more than two millenia.
[Here's a poem I wrote several years ago, probably about 1997, that appeared in my book Gulf, and which seems more relevant in the aftermath of the "war" than during it. I'm not sure that it expresses anything more than a mood, but it's a bad mood! My father never brought back shoes from the war.]
(It is nothing like revolution, it is more like de-
volution.) (Rabbits in the patch dying
from artificially induced suffocation for law and limp
order.) (Shore leave or compromise, all
the same in the hyperbolic star of an
infant with nipple needs.) (They keep the borg
tape-mouthed, wrists cuffed in the
closet.)
1. And fomented emigration
to the city births an anemia, crock issues won't
desist; able and willing (presaging a
deformity / of country codes) valors and
creativity - take it to the mountains, and sleep
on soles. 2. Hiccough under prose, slack averting
of the verbatim, shy guy slumping
in a corner, hair greasy, attitude unadjus-
ted to society, puns. 3. It's all just a loose-
lipped (we'll weep about it later) calibration
of poetry; two socks mismatched, and the
strumming of a lyre. 4. Marks the air before his fore-
head with an index finger, shaping a
colon, paratactic similitude of cogent theorem,
puns. 5. No panic attacks, the mind stays easy,
strays free in Symbolist "white space," re-
turns, always, to the assurance of mean-
ings - policies that park. 6. Pun only semi-in-
flectional, not "intended" (but indented) streams like
shit of meaning. 7. So that the sun settles
in its pocket. 8. Strategies to choose from
are presented by court ardor - the mayor resents but
greets the categorical crowd of half-
baked, irresolute plangent reformers. 9. Sum-
mer and evenings, by the ocean, face
blended with the winds and palms of some stereo-
typic entrapment - there is little here
that speaks. 10. The position is empty / of a grown
man without envy. 11. The party dances
on, without him, crass comedic urges that he
has, connections still being made
in the lights of syntax that is sobriety; the pairing
of lovers slalom forth on the "accurate
impulses" of undebatable relevance. 12 Watch-
ing from the gables and attics, children with pro-
lix complaints and commitments; suburbs
are theory of the wide-eyed preter-adolescent, stuck in
shoes Papa brought back from the war.
[Daniel Cohn-Bendit is the present-day Green politician who became known as spokesperson and leader of the May 68 revolutionary activities in Paris. Hugh MacDiarmid is the famous Scottish-nationalist, Marxist poet who early in his career created "Synthetic Scots."]
On the occasion of his candidature in Glasgow
University Rectorial Election, 1968
No man or group of men has any right
To force another man or other groups of men
To do anything he or they do not wish to do.
There is no right to govern without
The consent of the governed. Consent is not only
Important in itself, and as a nidus for freedom
And its attendant spontaneity (clearly valuable
As the opposed sense of frustration is detrimental)
But the sole
Basis of political obligation. There is nothing
Supplemental to or coequal with consent itself
And even if we had not the lessons of all history
-The endless evidence of 'man's inhumanity to man'
And overwhelming proof that all power debases
And that no man is good enough to have it
Or can exercise it without doing far more harm than good -
The contention is utterly indefensible - sheer humbug! mortmain!
That 'so long as the exercise of certain powers is good in itself
Or a means to the good... these powers are right
Whether or not anyone is of the opinion that they are,'
The time-dishonoured formula that attempts to conceal or excuse
All the hellish wrong of human history,
The fraud and loss inherent in all Government,
That age-long monstrous distortion of the faculties of man
It is the great historical task of the working-class
To eliminate today, no matter at what cost,
That human life, no longer wrenched hideously awry,
May spring up at last in its proper form.
[This is the second of the Shufu interview plays posted here -- a short explanation of what these are have already been posted as a preface to the first play, "Interview with a Civilian".]
"Interview with an Expert"
A TV Studio
November 2002
Two people sitting.
INTERVIEWER
Hi Akie
Nice to meet you.
EXPERT
Nice to meet you too
INTERVIEWER
Your clothes is very nice
EXPERT
Thank you
INTERVIEWER
How do you feel
Today
EXPERT
I’m a little nervous
It is my first time
To be on
Such a big program
INTERVIEWER
No don’t worry about
Camera
EXPERT
Okay
INTERVIEWER
You spend
Your house
Pause.
Thinking.
Make yourself at home
EXPERT
Oh! Okay
The EXPERT relaxes.
INTERVIEWER
So
Mmmm
Now
EXPERT
What time
What time
What time
Does this program start?
INTERVIEWER
Thirty seconds
I’m nervous
EXPERT
Don’t worry about it
INTERVIEWER
Start. Okay.
Pause.
THEY wait.
The "Camera" starts.
Hello this is Kyoka
I introduce audience Akie
Akie is specialist in
Pause.
Arab region
THEY laugh.
This time
We think about
The United States versus Iraq
So Akie
What do you think about president Hussein
EXPERT
President Hussein
INTERVIEWER
Do you think he is
Hero in Iraq
EXPERT
I guess he is hero in Iraq
But
Iraq
Pause.
I don’t many things in Iraq
I saw
I watched TV about Iraq
Many Iraqis
Agree with his policy
And
Beat.
It is my opinion
We should know
We should know
Many politician policy
United States policy
And Iraq’s policy
And third government policy
What should I say
Third world world policy
President Hussein is a little bit
Pause.
Despotic
He seems des
He seems despotic o me but
I guess he
He had anything
So Iraqis
Agree with him.
I guess
INTERVIEWER
So
Do you think Iraqis need
Strong leader like President Hussein
Because so many Arab countries
Eehhhhh…
Doesn’t have
Doesn’t have
Natural resources
And ah…
In the future
They don’t have oil
Iraq
Doesn’t have
Sea
And…
They want to
EXPERT
Yeah
INTERVIEWER
Need
The sea
EXPERT
Yeah
Iraq is not an affluent
Beat.
Not rich country
Want strange leader
I guess
So
For example
In North Korea
In Afghanastan
In Afghanastan
It’s different I guess
He is terrorist
Osama Bin Ladin
If these country have many food
or many
Looking up in dictionary.
Or many resources
Resources
They won’t they don’t have
Weapons
Which can kill many people
For example biological weapons or nuclear weapons
But they want to
Food or money or anything
But they cannot have them
So they
They run
They use armed force
To rich country or
They want to get them
So they use armed force
Against another country
So they need
They need
Strange hero
INTERVIEWER
When Iraq attacked Kuwait
Beat.
Iraq
Iraq’s religion
Is different between
Different than Kuwait
EXPERT
Ohhhhhhh…
INTERVIEWER
What do you think
This point?
Pause.
INTERVIEWER
So
Some Islam religion
ehhh…
Islam religion
Doesn’t agree
Another religion
So somethings
They attack
Some
Country for example
Beat.
Somalia
And
Bosnia
THEY laugh.
I’m sorry
EXPERT
I guess
I guess
Iraq attacked Kuwait
Because they don’t
Many oils
Because they want
To get
A lot of money so
Every want to get
Many money and grow up
In strange country
Strange country
Expand their country
I guess Iraq want to
Get sea
For oil
INTERVIEWER
So Iraq get natural power
They want to get more natural resources
EXPERT
To build up national strength
Iraq attack Kuwait and get seat
And they want to build up
National strength
INTERVIEWER
Okay.
Wjay do you think of
The U.S.’ policy to Iraq?
EXPERT
I disagree
I disagree the United States and its support
Will attack Iraq
INTERVIEWER
Why
Do you agree
EXPERT
Disagree
INTERVIEWER
-Disagree with US policy
EXPERT
Because
Because using armed force
Pause.
It’s my opinion
I guess using arm force
Give birth to terrorism
INTERVIEWER
Hmmmm…
EXPERT
I guess
People in
People in
The world
Every people in the world
Have a
Have a
Have plenty of food
Or everything
If every people in the world
Have plenty of food and everything
We will
We won’t
We won’t have war
Beat.
INTERVIEWER
Hm!?
EXPERT
If every people
Of the world
Have plenty of food and everything-
INTERVIEWER
-Oh-okay-
THEY laugh
EXPERT
We won’t have war
INTERVIEWER
I think so
What do you think?
Few Arab countries agree with the U.S,
Policy
Why did they agree with the U.S. policy
EXPERT
Because they
They want to
They want to
Another oil field
INTERVIEWER
I’m sorry
What do you mean?
EXPERT
If one of them
They have-
INTERVIEWER
They want
The United States’ money
EXPERT
Mmmm…
Yes
I agree with your opinion
INTERVIEWER
The last question
Do you think the U.S. government like to interfere
In other countries
EXPERT
Yes I think so that
INTERVIEWER
Why do you think so?
Pause.
EXPERT
The United States
We need
We need leader
But the United States
A little bit
Pause.
A little bit
The United States interferes too much
I guess
But too much
What should I say?
I wish we have another way
Out of using armed force
I don’t know that because
I am not genius
But we have another way
I believe
INTERVIEWER
Thank you
EXPERT
Your welcome
[This is not technically a "poem" but a theater piece in verse-like format. Madelyn Kent has been creating a series of "interviews" with her collaborators -- female Japanese students of English -- by asking them to research topics and speak about them, recording their words with some of the grammatical eccentricities intact. These plays are performed in a very slow, suspended pace that resembles butoh in its stillness, but also, to my mind, parts of that Werner Herzog film Heart of Glass for which the actors were all hypnotized.]
"Interview with a Civilian"
April 9, 2003
CIVILIAN
I think
His action
Was
mmm...
Pause.
Too soon
He should have
Waited until
The rest of the world
Support
The United States
Before he acted
He he
Pause.
With military action
STATIC/NOISE.
I’m
An Iranian
Living in
Morocco
I was born in Iran
And my family
Was
Kinda rich
And
We
Beat.
My family was living happily
And enjoying
Enjoying
Beat.
That
Our country is
Was getting modern
STATIC/NOISE
My father
Was
My father owned company of carpet
Pause.
And
But
Revolution
Beat.
Came
Beat.
And
Beat.
Hands.
That circumstances were changed
Beat.
And
People hated
People suddenly
Showed hatred
For
Beat.
Something related to America
Or Western country
And our family was seen
Beat.
As enemy
And when
At that time I was sixteen
And it’s good time
And my father said it’s good time to go
Abroad to study
So I went to Britain to study
Beat.
I’ve never gone back
To Iran
Yet
Beat.
But someday I will go back to Iran
I want to go back
STATIC/NOISE
Now I teach
I teach
Hand out.
At school
And
I also
Some volunteer work
In Morocco
STATIC/NOISE
Our students
Are
mmm...
thinking about Bush as a
Pause.
Selfish leader
And he is
Beat.
Arrogant
Beat.
One of my student
Is thirteen and
She
She came from
mmm...
Lebanon
And her father was
Soldiers, soldier
A soldier
And was killed in the war
She said
She hated President Bush
And she said
Wanted to show the real vision
Of the war
Because she thought
President Bush has never
Has never known
Beat.
How
It was like
In
The battlefield
STATIC/NOISE
I think
There must have been something
Hands crossed
That
Beat.
Hands together.
He felt he was weakling
And felt
Inferior to other people
Because
We see
He just want
To show his
Beat.
Power?
And
Pause
And he really we think he really wants
To win
Just not only for the war
But everything
Pause.
I think
Including his life
mmm...
He
mmm...
Beat.
He
I think he
He has never
Thought
That
But other people see he
Wants to be
Someone who
Knows
Who knows everything about the world
mmm...
and he thinks
he knows everything
STATIC/NOISE
I wish
I wish
That
All the country
Which
Countries which
Has have
Weapons and
I mean nuclear or some other weapons
I want those countries
Get together
And talk
STATIC/NOISE
I hope
My country
Iran
Has
Some main role
To lead the region
And
Beat.
Maintain
The situation
I mean I think
mmm... (head side)
I don’t think it’s getting better
Now
Because the war happened
And we see
I mean the Arab’s see
Our people has
Been
Have been
Discriminated
Looked down
And some people feel
Humiliated
Those feelings
(Hands)
could
motivate
some people
act
act wrong things
like terrorist attacks
STATIC/NOISE
Maybe it’s difficult
To ("verb")
Democracy in my country
I think
We going to happen
But United States shouldn’t
Shouldn’t do
Shouldn’t force their way
To us
But we should take time to
(Hand pats)
bring bring
about
Beat.
We have to
We have to
Step
By ourselves
We have to learn
Step by step
STATIC/NOISE
I don’t want people
To become
Like America
We are not America
So we
We should
We should make
Our own style
Of democracy
Pause.
I want
I want to
Help
People
Who want
More
Information
Pause.
And I just
What could I do
I can’t
(nod)
providing
Beat.
The
Information that people
Don’t know yet
Beat.
People don’t know
The outside of the world
There
STATIC/NOISE
I miss
I miss about
Market
Crowded market
Beat.
I touched that
Grains
That
(Hands)
is in
sack
many many
there were many many sacks
In the street
and there were
small birds
gathering the grains
and
Beat.
I
I want
I want to buy some
Candy
It smells like
Mildew (thinking)
And
Tumeric
Pause.
The birds
It looked like
Pause.
Sparrows
But they were not beautiful
Beat.
They
Looked
They looked
(looking up)
mmm...
Their feathers looked
Dry
Ruffled
I saw
The
A bird
It was
Beat.
Really
Hard
Hard to
Beat.
Concentrated
In
Picking
One grain that
It might like
And
Beat.
It was
It was
It was
Small and
Messy
But I couldn’t
But I couldn’t
Help watching
It
(hands together, namaste)
and then it
jumped in
the sack
so I felt
I felt
(Hand on heart)
I felt good.
Why should we listen to Hans Blix
and all those other foreign pricks:
the faggot French who swallow snails
and kiss the cheeks of other males:
the Germans with their Nazi past
and leather pants and cars that last
longer than ours: the ungrateful Chinks
we let make all our clothes; those finks
should back us in whatever task--
we shouldn't even have to ask:
and as for creepy munchkin Putin...
a slimy asshole-- no disputing!?
We saved those Russians from the reds--
they owe support. Those wimpish heads
of tiny states without the power
to have a radio in the shower
should fall in line behind George Bush
and join with him and Blair to push
the sword of truth through Saddam's guts
(no need for any ifs or buts)
we'll even do it without the backing
of UN cowards and their quacking--
remember how we thrashed the Nips
and fried them like potato chips?
God's on our side, he's white and Yankee
he'd drop the bombs, he'd drive a tank: we
know he's stronger than their Allah
as is our righteousness and valor!
We'll clip Mohammed's ears and pecker
And then move on to napalm Mecca.
Tom Raworth is a British poet. His most recent book of poems is Tottering State. He submitted Listen Up to the PoetsfortheWar.org website, hoping to sneak it past the censors. To date, they have not published the poem. However, late word comes that the site's proprietor, Charles Weatherford, has offered him a position as an "organizer" in their movement. (Counterpunch)
Cars passing their messages along country crossroads
to populaces cement-networked on flatness,
giant white mist on earth
and a Wichita Eagle-Beacon headlines
"Kennedy Urges Cong Get Chair in Negotiations"
The War is gone,
Language emerging on the motel news stand,
the right magic
Formula, the language known
in the back of the mind before, now in black print
daily consciousness
Eagle News Services Saigon-
Headline Surrounded Vietcong Charge Into Fire Fight
the suffering not yet ended
for others
The last spasms of the dragon of pain
shoot thru the muscles
a crackling around the eyeballs
of a sensitive yellow boy by a muddy wall
Continued from page one area
after the Marines killed 256 Vietcong captured 31
ten day operation Harvest Moon last December
Language language
U.S. Military Spokesmen
Language language
Cong death toll
has soared to 100 in First Air Cavalry
Division's Sector of
Language language
Operation White Wing near Bong Son
Some of the
Language language
Communist
Language language soldiers
charged so desperately
they were struck with six or seven bullets before they fell
Language Language M 60 Machine Guns
Language language in La Drang Valley
the terrain is rougher infested with leeches and scorpions
The war was over several hours ago!
Oh at last again the radio opens
blue Invitations!
Angelic Dylan singing across the nation
"When all your children start to resent you
Won't you come see me, O~een Jane?"
His youthful voice making glad
the brown endless meadows
His tenderness penetrating aether,
soft prayer on the airwaves,
Language language, and sweet music too
even unto thee,
hairy flatness!
even unto thee
despairing Burns!
Future speeding on swift wheels
straight to the heart of Wichita!
Now radio voices cry population hunger world
of unhappy people
waiting for Man to be born
O man in America!
you certainly smell good
the radio says
passing mysterious families of winking towers
grouped round a quonset-hut on a hillock-
feed storage or military fear factory here?
Sensitive City, Ooh! Hamburger & Skelley's Gas
lights feed man and machine,
Kansas Electric Substation aluminum robot
signals thru thin antennae towers
above the empty football field
at Sunday dusk
to a solitary derrick that pumps oil from the unconscious
working night & day
& factory gas-flares edge a huge golf course
where tired businessmen can come and play-
Cloverleaf, Merging Traffic East Wichita turnoff
McConnell Airforce Base
nourishing the city-
Lights rising in the suburbs
Supermarket Texaco brilliance starred
over streetlamp vertebrae on Kellogg,
green jeweled traffic lights
confronting the windshield,
Centertown ganglion entered!
Crowds of autos moving with their lightshine,
signbulbs winking in the driver's eyeball-
The human nest collected, neon lit,
and sunburst signed
for business as usual, except on the Lord's Day-
Redeemer Lutheran's three crosses lit on the lawn
reminder of our sins
and Titsworth offers insurance on Hydraulic
by De Voors Guard's Mortuary for outmoded bodies
of the human vehicle
which no Titsworth of insurance will customize for resale-
So home, traveler, past the newspaper language factory
under Union Station railroad bridge on Douglas
to the center of the Vortex, calmly returned
to Hotel Eaton-
Carry Nation began the war on Vietnam here
with an angry smashing ax
attacking Wine-
Here fifty years ago, by her violence
began a vortex of hatred that defoliated the Mekong Delta-
Proud Wichita! vain Wichita
cast the first stone!-
That murdered my mother
who died of the communist anticommunist psychosis
in the madhouse one decade long ago
complaining about wires of masscommunication in her head
and phantom political voices in the air
besmirching her girlish character.
Many another has suffered death and madness
in the Vortex from Hydraulic
to the end of 17th-enough!
The war is over now-
Except for the souls
held prisoner in Niggertown
still pining for love of your tender white bodies O children of Wichita!
February 14, 1966
April Fool’s Day
As we thumb through the world news pages
We feel like we're back in the middle ages
Some Christian soldiers with God on their side
Now have the whole world terrified
Our young men and women in uniform
Was it for this that they were born?
They are beautiful strong and brave
They should be at work or in school not trying to save
The reputations of a few old men
Whose arrogance goes back to when
The federal government took Indian lands away
And put the people on reservations to live out their days
The Indians are a great warrior race
And many still serve in the military today
But once again they have been betrayed
As the U.S. Armed Forces penetrate
The sovereign nation of Iraq
In an unprecedented, unprovoked attack
“The outcome is certain,” the President said
I wonder what put that in his head
No outcome is certain, this we know
Except that the ranks of Al Quaeda will grow
With the pain and suffering of ancient Baghdad
Loss is the lifeblood of jihad
While generals scratch their heads and think
In Basra there’s no fresh water to drink
“We didn’t plan in our war-game drills
for irregular enemies,” General Wallace spills
We thought we’d be welcomed with open arms
As liberators removing the people from harm’s
Way when in fact since 12 years ago
They’ve mourned their war dead and suffered under embargo
Meanwhile where are the WMD’s we went to war about?
We know they exist without a doubt
Why? Because Saddam made ‘em
With stuff he got from Rummy and Reagan
Bush Younger thought he could get carte blanche
From the UN Security Council to launch
An all out attack but this miscalculation
Has led to America’s isolation
Having squandered the whole world’s sympathy
After 9-11 we are now seen on TV
From Kamchatka to Madagascar
As a dangerously out-of-control aggressor
So much for diplomacy, Mr. Powell
Should throw in the proverbial towel
While he still has a shred of credibility
Meanwhile if we love life and liberty
There is something each of us must do
Sooner or later you’ll say so too
War may be short, occupation, long
And bitter and bloody and totally wrong
As we see all this happening before our eyes
It is not too early to organize
To bring our young men and women back
U.S.A. out of Iraq!
--Kit Robinson
*****
Thing
We love our cat
for her self
regard is assiduous
and bland,
for she sits in the small
patch of sun on our rug
and licks her claws
from all angles
and it is far
superior
to "balanced reporting"
though, of course,
it is also
the very same thing.
--Rae Armantrout
Here's another bit of the poem -- almost done. When I have the whole thing formatted I'll create another entry with the entire thing. I start this with an excerpt since initially it doesn't seem to do much with the site, but clearly the long passages of looking at the sky, revelling in erotic bodily pleasure, etc., play the non-abstracted self against the seemeingly otherworldly machinations of the Congress. The rhetoric still seems too self-consciously Whitmanesque to me
"I lift my voice aloud,
make Mantra of American language now,
I here declare the end of the War!
Ancient days' Illusion!-
and pronounce words beginning my own millennium.
Let the States tremble,
let the Nation weep,
let Congress legislate its own delight
let the President execute his own desire-
this Act done by my own voice,
nameless Mystery- "
...
I'm an old man now, and a lonesome man in Kansas
but not afraid
to speak my lonesomeness in a car,
because not only my lonesomeness
it's Ours, all over America,
O tender fellows-
& spoken lonesomeness is Prophecy
in the moon 100 years ago or in
the middle of Kansas now.
It's not the vast plains mute our mouths
that fill at midnite with ecstatic language
when our trembling bodies hold each other
breast to breast on a mattress-
Not the empty sky that hides
the feeling from our faces
nor our skirts and trousers that conceal
the bodylove emanating in a glow of beloved skin,
white smooth abdomen down to the hair
between our Legs,
It's not a God that bore us that forbid
our Being, like a sunny rose
all red with naked joy
between our eyes & bellies, yes
All we do is for this frightened thing
we call Love, want and lack-
fear that we aren't the one whose body could be
beloved of all the brides of Kansas City,
kissed all over by every boy of Wichita-
O but how many in their solitude weep aloud like me-
On the bridge over Republican River
almost in tears to know
how to speak the right language-
on the frosty broad road
uphill between highway embankments
I search for the language
that is also yours-
almost all our language has been taxed by war.
Radio antennae high tension
wires ranging from Junction City across the plains-
highway cloverleaf sunk in a vast meadow
lanes curving past Abilene
to Denver filled with old
heroes of love-
to Wichita where McClure's mind
burst into animal beauty
drunk, getting laid in a car
in a neon misted street
15 years ago-
to Independence where the old man's still alive
who loosed the bomb that's slaved all human consciousness
and made the body universe a place of fear-
Now, speeding along the empty plain,
no giant demon machine
visible on the horizon
but tiny human trees and wooden houses at the sky's edge
I claim my birthright!
reborn forever as long as Man
in Kansas or other universe-Joy
reborn after the vast sadness of War Gods!
A lone man talking to myself, no house in the brown vastness to hear,
imaging the throng of Selves
that make this nation one body of Prophecy
languaged by Declaration as Pursuit of
Happiness!
I call all Powers of imagination
to my side in this auto to make Prophecy,
all Lords
of human kingdoms to come
Shambu Bharti Baba naked covered with ash
Khaki Baba fat-bellied mad with the dogs
Dehorahava Baba who moans Oh how wounded, How wounded
Sitaram Onkar Das Thakur who commands
give up your desire
Satyananda who raises two thumbs in tranquillity
Kali Pada Guha Roy whose yoga drops before the void
Shivananda who touches the breast and says OM
Srimata Krishnaji of Brindaban who says take for your guru
William Blake the invisible father of English visions
Sri Ramakrishna master of ecstasy eyes
half closed who only cries for his mother
Chaitanya arms upraised singing & dancing his own praise
merciful Chango judging our bodies
Durga-Ma covered with blood
destroyer of battlefield illusions
million-faced Tathagata gone past suffering
Preserver Harekrishna returning in the age of pain
Sacred Heart my Christ acceptable
Allah the Compassionate One
Jaweh Righteous One
all Knowledge-Princes of Earth-man, all
ancient Seraphim of heavenly Desire, Devas, yogis
& holymen I chant to-
Come to my lone presence
into this Vortex named Kansas,
I lift my voice aloud,
make Mantra of American language now,
I here declare the end of the War!
Ancient days' Illusion!-
and pronounce words beginning my own millennium.
Let the States tremble,
let the Nation weep,
let Congress legislate its own delight
let the President execute his own desire-
this Act done by my own voice,
nameless Mystery-
published to my own senses,
blissfully received by my own form
approved with pleasure by my sensations
manifestation of my very thought
accomplished in my own imagination
all realms within my consciousness fulfilled
60 miles from Wichita
near El Dorado,
The Golden One,
in chill earthly mist
houseless brown farmland plains rolling heavenward
in every direction
one midwinter afternoon Sunday called the day of the Lord-
Pure Spring Water gathered in one tower
where Florence is
set on a hill,
stop for tea & gas
Three five zero zero is numerals
Headline language poetry, nine decades after Democratic Vistas
and the Prophecy of the Good Gray Poet
Our nation "of the fabled damned"
or else . . .
Language, language
Ezra Pound the Chinese Written Character for truth
defined as man standing by his word
Word picture: forked creature
Man
standing by a box, birds flying out
representing mouth speech
Ham Steak please waitress, in the warm café.
Different from a bad guess.
The war is language,
language abused
for Advertisement,
language used
like magic for power on the planet:
Black Magic language,
formulas for reality-
Communism is a 9 letter word
used by inferior magicians with
the wrong alchemical formula for transforming earth into gold
-funky warlocks operating on guesswork,
handmedown mandrake terminology
that never worked in 1956
for gray-domed Dulles,
brooding over at State,
that never worked for Ike who knelt to take
the magic wafer in his mouth
from Dulles' hand
inside the church in Washington:
Communion of bum magicians
congress of failures from Kansas & Missouri
working with the wrong equations
Sorcerer's Apprentices who lost control
of the simplest broomstick in the world:
Language
O longhaired magician come home take care of your dumb helper
before the radiation deluge floods your livingroom,
your magic errandboy's
just made a bad guess again
that's lasted a whole decade.
N B C B S U P A P I N S L I F E
Time Mutual presents
World's Largest Camp Comedy:
Magic In Vietnam-
reality turned inside out
changing its sex in the Mass Media
for 30 days, TV den and bedroom farce
Flashing pictures Senate Foreign Relations Committee room
Generals faces flashing on and off screen
mouthing language
State Secretary speaking nothing but language
McNamara declining to speak public language
The President talking language,
Senators reinterpreting language
General Taylor Limited Objectives
Owls from Pennsylvania
Clark's Face Open Ended
Dove's Apocalypse
Morse's hairy ears
Stennis orating in Mississippi
half billion chinamen crowding into the
polling booth,
Clean shaven Gen. Gavin's image
imagining Enclaves
Tactical Bombing the magic formula for
a silver haired Symington:
Ancient Chinese apothegm:
Old in vain.
Hawks swooping thru the newspapers
talons visible
wings outspread in the giant updraft of hot air
loosing their dry screech in the skies
over the Capitol
Napalm and black clouds emerging in newsprint
Flesh soft as a Kansas girl's
ripped open by metal explosion-
three five zero zero on the other side of the planet
caught in barbed wire, fire ball
bullet shock, bayonet electricity
bomb blast terrific in skull & belly, shrapneled throbbing meat
While this American nation argues war:
conflicting language, language
proliferating in airwaves
filling the farmhouse ear, filling
the City Manager's head in his oaken office
the professor's head in his bed at midnight
the pupil's head at the movies
blond haired, his heart throbbing with desire
for the girlish image bodied on the screen:
or smoking cigarettes
and watching Captain Kangaroo
that fabled damned of nations
prophecy come true-
Though the highway's straight,
dipping downward through low hills,
rising narrow on the far horizon
black cows browse in caked fields
ponds in the hollows lie frozen
quietness.
Is this the land that started war on China?
This be the soil that thought Cold War for decades?
Are these nervous naked trees & farmhouses
the vortex
of oriental anxiety molecules
that've imagined American Foreign Policy
and magick'd up paranoia in Peking
and curtains of living blood
surrounding far Saigon?
Are these the towns where the language emerged
from the mouths here
that makes a Hell of riots in Dominica
sustains the aging tyranny of Chiang in silent Taipeh city
Paid for the lost French war in Algeria
overthrew the Guatemalan polis in '54
maintaining United Fruit's banana greed
another thirteen years
for the secret prestige of the Dulles family lawfirm?
Here's Marysville-
a black railroad engine in the children's park,
at rest-
and the Track Crossing
with Cotton Belt flatcars
carrying autos west from Dallas
Delaware & Hudson gondolas filled with power stuff-
a line of boxcars far east as the eye can see
carrying battle goods to cross the Rockies
into the hands of rich longshoremen loading
ships on the Pacific-
Oakland Army Terminal lights
blue illumined all night now-
Crash of couplings and the great American train
moves on carrying its cushioned load of metal doom
Union Pacific linked together with your Hoosier Line
followed by passive Wabash
rolling behind
all Erie carrying cargo in the rear,
Central Georgia's rust colored truck proclaiming
The Right Way, concluding
the awesome poem writ by the train
across northern Kansas,
land which gave right of way
to the massing of metal meant for explosion
in Indochina-
Passing thru Waterville,
Electronic machinery in the bus humming prophecy-
paper signs blowing in cold wind,
mid-Sunday afternoon's silence in town
under frost-gray sky
that covers the horizon-
That the rest of earth is unseen,
an outer universe invisible,
Unknown except thru
language
airprint
magic images
or prophecy of the secret
heart the same
in Waterville as Saigon one human form:
When a woman's heart bursts in Waterville
a woman screams equal in Hanoi-
On to Wichita to prophesy! O frightful Bard!
into the heart of the Vortex
where anxiety rings
the University with millionaire pressure,
lonely crank telephone voices sighing in dread,
and students waken trembling in their beds
with dreams of a new truth warm as meat,
little girls suspecting their elders of murder
committed by remote control machinery,
boys with sexual bellies aroused
chilled in the heart by the mailman
with a letter from an aging white haired General
Director of selection for service in Deathwar
all this black language
writ by machine!
O hopeless Fathers and Teachers
in Hué do you know
the same woe too?
I've scanned in a few poems from this anthology, just out from Three Squares Press, edited by Mark Higgins, Stephen Pender and Darren Wershler-Henry. I tried to keep the selection very small since I don't want to traipse on their copyrights, but there's a lot of good stuff in there. As a teaser, I've only taken an excerpt from one of the longer poems, by Marion Quednau -- never heard of her before, but she's in B.C. Here's a full list of authors. Darren has already posted his contribution, a collaboration with Bill Kennedy, elsewhere on Circulars.
Daphne Marlatt
NOT IN OUR NAME
thirty-five thousand hearts
mob the streets here
throbbing
STOP
MAD COWBOY
DISEASE
two million feet beat
NO NO in London
streets/
STOP
mad love for
ammunitions this
dis-
ease unease high moral
wartalk (on our
behalf) BLU bomb DU anti-
tank weapons talk
hi-tech attack talk
no
heart for a river of refugees’
thirst hunger tiny organs
born with holes malformed
irradiated earth Iraq
a human dump
centuries from now
Wakefield Brewster
NORTH/SOUTH 49
Manifest Manifesto
My chest gets blessed yo
When I pull a test blow
Of some new herbals like verbals mix with verbalistics fix lyrical empirical intrinsic forensic ballistics
Call da P0-lice
I rob rhymed your mind blind
Brung da tongue
Twist out ya tongue now it's mine
Like nothing is belonging to one or even many does anybody have?
A second question about the mental suggestion causing social indigestion
There is something that moves us
Proves and improves us
Containing prophecy and philosophy
Silence and cacophony
You will know the sleep of soma when comes to coffin thee
There's da rippin fabric trippin find da spot commence da slippin
I took a deep dive into a shallow black whole
I carried pain like a residential school soul
And then found the key to da secret of time
Between midnight and 11:59:59
'Tis in here we bear witness to da bedlam of mad, mad dimensions
Where justice beats down truth with a gavel into gravel
And the futile defense of a true mastermind is foiled
I leave contractor's condo developments despoiled
As my own designs are tin
Foiled
In
Their
In
Timate
In
Fancy
Da matriarch
Da matriarch
Why is it dat she doan run tings?
When my goddamned fool-stupid bleeding heart sings?
For out of da blue rains sheets of murder
Death wets de earth and paints it red
And up springs a sadness both mean and green
I scorch the land wit a fiery hue
Eat da blackest seeds of a white-hot fruit
Then crouch and slouch as I sleep on da couch-again
There has to be more than this
Living in paradoxical dualities and trialities
Looking for salvation in someone
Not da one
Myself
I'm a failure as a millionaire
And a well-accomplished human
I picked out den kicked out my mental slavery shackles
I built my blast shield outta thirty snake rattles
Sticks and stones encased my bones
I became hard like a lover's face
Saw four rooms become four walls
Felt da lack of cleanliness like public bathroom stalls
I'm gonna jack-in den black-in da box
Leave it splintered and splintering
This denizen pigpen
And it's so true I so do know who
Da swine really be
Tellin us all dat we can't be free
Enslavement by pavement
They talk it
We walk it
I travel on a surface of gears and cogs
May I warp and bend the threads and spokes until they all look like hideous starfish
I'll make dem all know who I be
By fucking up their technology
I'm a flow em den show em
Dat no tech tree can wreck me
Doan try to inspec me
Goan never disec me
Stop shining your demon beacon light into my soul
Doan study me like I be in a Petrie dish fish
Bowl em down and split em like pins
Dis here is where da revolution begins
And where we start clockin wins
Like Megatron
Rejuvenate
And mediate the ones who claim to openly debate
For their language is straight ahead complicated and confusing
So they can simultaneously have your brain and pocketbook losing
The only means to make you count in this world
But on my first test blow
The truth was unfurled
To me the friendly stranger
Is like their baby in a manger
Blessed I see is da chest in me
I-
Am walking, talking danger
Cause while dey feel dey got me on my belly snake slinking
I'm hidin back in da black like my namesake-
Thinking
Steve Venright
BORDER DISSOLUTION
The guy at the customs booth on the American side of the bridge asked us where we lived.
"Turrawna," we chimed proudly
"What is the purpose of your visit?" he inquired.
"We're just comm' over to shoot a few people then going right back," I replied.
'Are you bringing over any citrus fruit or pornographic literature?"
"No sir, we just have some raw beets and a copy of the Surrealist Manifesto."
He jutted his crocodiian head a little closer and I halted my reflex to close the window using the automatic button.
"Is that the First or Second manifesto?" he demanded.
"The First," I lied, remembering the ideological rescissions Aragon and Sadoul were forced to make when Communist Parry officials objected to aspects of the Second Manifesto during their visit to Moscow
This seemed to satisfy our sombre interrogator, but it was evident he had at least one more good question for us.
"Do either of you have any narcotic substances in your possession?"
"No, indeed," asserted my companion.
"Thanks anyway-feeling kinda shitty today" he confided. "Okay you folks have a nice visit."
"Don't you want to check our trunk?" I offered.
"No, not right now"
At last we were on our way again to the symposium on consciousness and the brain. We weren't really going to shoot anyone, of course, but felt it best to conceal the true nature of our visit. Even a former president and his wife thought it was okay to have a brain-in fact they dedicated a whole decade to the thing. But the subject of consciousness, we knew, was another matter entirely
RM Vaughan
DESERT STORM II: ORIGINAL MOTION PICTURE SOUNDTRACK
1. God Bless America
Celine Dion with The Boys Choir of Harlem. Arranged by David Foster
2. Boom! There it iz! Stealthy Style
LL Cool J and Lil' Kim and Lil Bow Wow
3. 1991 (we gonna party like it's)
Prince and the New Power Generation
4. Savin' Da World Bitch at a Time
Tony Bennett and 50 Cent. Recorded live at the Aspen Music Festival
5. The Charge of the Light Brigade
The Boston Pops Orchestra. Narrated by Kevin Costner
6. Ahab The Arab (Bag-da-dad remix)
Ray Stevens. Remixed by Moby
7. Putting Out Fires With Gasoline
Kid Rock and Pamela Anderson
8. Axes To Axis
Nickleback with James Brown
9. Sultans of Schwing! (Love Theme from Desert Storm II)
Academy of St. Martin in the Fields.
10. That's What Friends Are For (USA-UK mix)
Oprab Winfrey and Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York.
Arranged by Quincy Jones.
11. 'Round Midnight At The Oasis
Mariah Carey and Winton Marsalis
12. Over There/I'll Be Seeing You/New York, New York Medley
Liza Minnelli (featuring The New York City Fire Fighters Choir)
13. God Bless America Muthaf**kah!
Celine Dion and Missy "Misdemeanor" Elliott
nasser hussain
MERICA
A merica,
BEmerica.
And whamerica,
bamerica,
thankyouma'america.
C.I.A.merica
videocamericas
Chegueveramerica.
For shamerica,
playmerica
gaymerica!
O say can you seemerica
the eternal flamerica:
for J.F.Kmerica
the kkkmerica
blamericas
saddamerica.
Such monomaniamerica-
no cure for amnesiamerica,
forevermerica and evermerica, amen.
Margaret Atwood
BACKDROP ADDRESSES COWBOY
Starspangled cowboy
sauntering out of the almost-
silly West, on your face
a porcelain grin,
tugging a papier-mache cactus
on wheels behind you with a string,
you are innocent as a bathtub
full of bullets.
Your righteous eyes, your laconic
trigger-fingers
people the streets with villains:
as you move, the air in front of you
blossoms with targets
and you leave behind you a heroic
trail of desolation:
beer bottles
slaughtered by the side
of the road, bird-
skulls bleaching in the sunset.
I ought to be watching
from behind a cliff or a cardboard storefront
when the shooting starts, hands clasped
in admiration,
but I am elsewhere.
Then what about me
what about the I
confronting you on that border
you are always trying to cross?
I am the horizon
you ride towards, the thing you can never lasso
I am also what surrounds you:
my brain
scattered with your
tincans, bones, empty shells,
the litter of your invasions.
I am the space you desecrate
as you pass through.
Marion Quednau
from THE RED HORSE MEETS THE NELSON MASS
This September just passed
a clutch of old friends dropped by, unannounced,
masquerading as limpid newscasters
out of sync with raucous foreign voices,
and I fell prey to equally moribund
habits: saw pale, pleading omens-comets' tails
and plummeted birds with red wings-
heard a slavish sound like the long-promised
gnashing of lions' teeth, woke up nights
weeping like an old woman,
lacrimosa.
Now it is Thanksgiving;
there are plainly no pilgrims
on our high plateau, and I have greater presence
of mind. The devout
are mostly on roads leading to and from
Macedonia, Uzbekistan
and that clever, shifting place
called Hell, that even the Pope
won't confess to being more likely a threat
these days than a mood already arrived.
Yes, some actually died, their paper planes
and mothers, brothers, fathers, gone to ashes,
but many more
have been frightened to death
and are still among the living,
now bombing
all manner of ancient metaphor
on the Afghan desert, where people thin
as rakes are hiding in slant tents
and honeycombed caves, the proverbial
bushes still burning as brightly
on the charred horizon as in arch parables
sworn by lean-mouthed prophets.
As I wrote earlier, I'm not able to convert my scan of Wichita Vortex Sutra into HTML and post to this blog.
Formatting it even as much as I have is pretty tedious and I'm only getting about 3 pages of the poem done at a time before getting bleary-eyed. Here is an HTML version in a separate section of arras if the first pages of part II, and here is a nice printable .pdf version.
I'll make an effort to get the rest of it up in a 2 more installations, and then do the whole thing as one entry. Enjoy.
Thanks to the idiots at Microsoft, I'm not able to convert my scan of Wichita Vortex Sutra into HTML and post to this blog. The special Word coding -- more complicated with every new version and requiring a special degree to figure out -- gets in the way of the blog formatting.
I'll put an HTML version on a separate page of the site, and here is a nice printable .pdf version. Please don't tell Harper Perennial I'm putting these up. If you find any typos, please email them to me and I'll make corrections. The much longer part II of this poem is on the way.
Ginsberg's poem has been referenced frequently elsewhere on this site, especially in the comments section to Barrett Watten's War = Language piece, where David Perry has posted many lines from the poem already.