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Pick Up the Phone!
Just finished reading Adrienne Rich’s excellent new collection, Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth (if you know of a better book title from the past year, I’d like to hear about it). Here’s an insightful review that gets to the heart of what makes this book, and Rich’s work overall, continually powerful and refreshing. Her sympathies reach far beyond feminism or politics in the narrow sense, and in the process produce a kind of poetry that seems to move beyond the subjective/objective, interior/exterior dichotomy by bearing witness to our historical/existential moment.Read More
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A Brief Meditation on the “Masterpiece”
Around Christmas my daughter and I fell to arguing about the idea of a “masterpiece.” Having taught “masterpiece” courses, I felt obliged to defend the idea, although the longer we talked the more uncertain I felt about the notion. Then last night I was finishing up the South African writer Breyten Breytenbach’s Judas Eye and Self-Portrait/Deathwatch, an extraordinary selection of prison poetry and subsequent prose pieces.Read More
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Essential Breath
Fiona Sampson’s review of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s The Butterfly’s Burden, is — according to Laila Lalami — the first review of this copious collection since the book’s release in the U.S. over a year ago by Copper Canyon Press. (The fact that such an important book would have to be republished in England before a major news outlet would acknowledge its existence makes one wonder if the Israel Lobby doesn’t influence more than U.S.Read More
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Support for Taslima Nasrin
“Activists, journalists, students, writers, leaders. People from all walks of life collect to advocate [Taslima Nasrin’s] right to free speech and expression.” And as you can see in this photograph by Shailendra Pandey, attacks on free speech can still — somewhere in the world — bring people into the streets.Read More
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Regarding Our Disappearing Rights
Danny Glover on rescuing the Constitution… Help Put This Ad on Fox “News” ************* Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues, speaks about Guantanamo and the current constitutional crisis.Read More
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Big Brother is Reading Your Poetry
Click the title above for the story. And yes, I know. “This is happening in Israel, not the U.S.,” you’ll say. Hmm.Read More
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Chilean TV interview with Adrienne Rich
Here is just one of the remarkable comments Rich makes here: “It’s in the writing of a poem that you find out what you’re not saying, and it’s in the writing of a poem that you find what you’re still having to push up against or what you’re still having to rethink, to re-imagine….”Read More
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Thought Police?
Remember when Bush’s press secretary Ari Fleischer issued the following warning? “[Such statements are] reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do. This is not a time for remarks like that….” This in response, by the way, to a statement by television’s Bill Maher that the 9/11 hijackers “were not cowards.” Well, the House of Representatives has gone dear old Ari one better: its recently passed H.R. 1955 seeks to criminalize certain kinds of thought.Read More
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Poundacious
“‘WHANG—Boom—Boom—cast delicacy to the winds.’ Thus Ezra Pound in a letter to his father, urging the old man to help promote his first published collection.” In a related story, this squib from Bill Knott’s blog: PENNY WISE well alrightI grant youhe was a fascistahem antisemitism theer war and allI’m not defending thembut at leastyou’ve got to admitat least hemade the quatrains run on timeRead More
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Contemplating the Completion of the Coup Currently in Progress
Some Advice to Those Who Will Serve Time in Prisonby Nazim Hikmet Translated by Mutlu Konuk and Randy Blasing If instead of being hanged by the neck you’re thrown inside for not giving up hopein the world, your country, and people, if you do ten or fifteen years apart from the time you have left,you won’t say, “Better I had swung from the end of a rope like a flag”—you’ll put your foot down and live.It may not be a pleasure exactly,but it’s your solemn duty to live one more day to spite the enemy.Part of you may live alone inside, like a stone at the bottom of a…Read More