Word Cloud: MIGRANT

Posted on March 4, 2016 by wordcloud9

Word Cloud Resized

by Nona Blyth Cloud

“Poetry is a call to action and it also is action. Sometimes we say, “This tragedy, it happened far away. I don’t know what to do. I’m concerned but I’m just dangling in space.” A poem can lead you through that, and it is made of action because you’re giving your whole life to it in that moment. And then the poem — you give it to everyone. Not that we’re going to change somebody’s mind — no, we’re going to change that small, three-minute moment.
And someone will listen. That’s the best we can do.”
……………………………………..— Juan Felipe Herrera 

Juan Felipe Herrera (1948 – ), the first Latino Poet Laureate of the United States and son of Mexican immigrants, grew up in the migrant fields of California.

mi·grant – ˈmīɡrənt/

adjective — 1. migrating, especially of people; migratory.
noun — 2. a person or animal that migrates.
3. Also called migrant worker,  a person who moves from place to place to get work, especially a farm laborer who harvests crops seasonally.

The bland descriptions in the dictionary leave out the long hours of back-breaking work under blazing summer sun, the exposure to poisonous chemicals, the unrelenting poverty where everything people with steady work can take for granted is uncertain and hard to come by.

Juan Felipe Herrera has never forgotten. Instead, he has brought it with him unto a national stage where he can share all that it has taught him. It’s been a long journey, another kind of migration.

Exiles

and I heard an unending scream piercing nature.
    — from the diary of Edvard Munch, 1892

At the greyhound bus stations, at airports, at silent wharfs
the bodies exit the crafts. Women, men, children; cast out
from the new paradise.

They are not there in the homeland, in Argentina, not there
in Santiago, Chile; never there in Montevideo, Uruguay,
and they are not here

in America

They are in exile: a slow scream across a yellow bridge
the jaws stretched, widening, the eyes multiplied into blood
orbits, torn, whirling, spilling between two slopes; the sea, black,
swallowing all prayers, shadeless. Only tall faceless figures
of pain flutter across the bridge. They pace in charred suits,
the hands lift, point and ache and fly at sunset as cold dark
birds. They will hover over the dead ones: a family shattered
by military, buried by hunger, asleep now with the eyes burning
echoes calling Joaquín, María, Andrea, Joaquín, Joaquín, Andrea

en exilio

From here we see them, we the ones from here, not there or across,
only here, without the bridge, without the arms as blue liquid
quenching the secret thirst of unmarked graves, without
our flesh journeying refuge or pilgrimage; not passengers
on imaginary ships sailing between reef and sky, we that die
here awake on Harrison Street, on Excelsior Avenue clutching
the tenderness of chrome radios, whispering to the saints
in supermarkets, motionless in the chasm of playgrounds,
searching at 9 a.m. from our third floor cells, bowing mute,
shoving the curtains with trembling speckled brown hands. Alone,
we look out to the wires, the summer, to the newspaper wound

in knots as matches for tenements. We that look out from
our miniature vestibules, peering out from our old clothes,
the father’s well-sewn plaid shirt pocket, an old woman’s
oversized wool sweater peering out from the makeshift kitchen.
We peer out to the streets, to the parades, we the ones from here
not there or across, from here, only here. Where is our exile?
Who has taken it?

Mexican tile

Since his appointment as Poet Laureate last June, Herrera has spent much of his time traveling across the country for readings and events. He frequently gives away his personal copies of his books to students who can’t afford to buy them, then has to hunt up new copies for his next reading.

He writes new poems on whatever comes to hand, saying that paper bags and pieces of cardboard boxes have opened him up creatively. “Poems come to me in a big chariot, so I have to write them fast.”

Of his most recent collection, Notes on the Assemblage, he says, “I just put together what was on my table, and those were the poems.”  It contains works in both English and Spanish, which are not always translated. “I thought it added a nice question to the book. It added another layer. Like, ‘What is this doing here?’ I like that — I like an artwork to pose questions.”

Continue reading →

Posted in Immigration, Mexico, Poetry, Terrorism, United States, Word Cloud | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Word Cloud: MIGRANT

Word Cloud: CALL-AND-RESPONSE

Posted on February 26, 2016 by wordcloud9

Word Cloud Resized

by Nona Blyth Cloud

Call-and-response is one of the most ancient forms of human expression  — in music, it is a phrase played by a musician or a group of musicians which is answered by another musician or group of musicians.

It is also part of prayer in many religious traditions, and often used at political rallies, before going into battle, or at sporting events to build the enthusiasm and commitment of the participants or onlookers.

The  response can be an echo of the original phrase, a variation on it or a chanted answer.

Call-and-response is a part of many African cultures, and the African variants came to the Americas with the captives brought across the Atlantic and sold into slavery. It is a frequent component of African American music, from spirituals to blues, from jazz through rock-n-roll to hip-hop.

Poetry and music are close kin, and often entwined – lyrics partnered with music. So it is not surprising that poets engage in call-and-response. A painting opens a dialogue in the poet’s imagination, a passage written by one writer becomes the inspiration for the work of another, sometimes spinning in a new direction, sometimes continuing on the same line as the initial work.

African Single Border

 

…

In the case of The Mothers by Robin Coste Lewis, it is a “conversation” she is having with Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000), responding to this Brooks poem:

kitchenette building

by Gwendolyn Brooks

We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan,
Grayed in, and gray. “Dream” makes a giddy sound, not strong
Like “rent,” “feeding a wife,” “satisfying a man.”

But could a dream send up through onion fumes
Its white and violet, fight with fried potatoes
And yesterday’s garbage ripening in the hall,
Flutter, or sing an aria down these rooms

Even if we were willing to let it in,
Had time to warm it, keep it very clean,
Anticipate a message, let it begin?

We wonder. But not well! not for a minute!
Since Number Five is out of the bathroom now,
We think of lukewarm water, hope to get in it.

 African Single Border

 …

The Mothers

by Robin Coste Lewis

for and after Gwendolyn Brooks
for and after the Kitchenette Building

We meet – sometimes – between the dry hours,
Between clefts in the involuntary plan,
Refusing to think of rent or food – how
Civic the slick to satisfied from man.

And democratic. A Lucky Strike each, we
Sponge each other off, while what’s grayed
In and gray slinks ashamed down the drain.
No need to articulate great restraint,

No need to see each other’s mouth lip
The obvious. Giddy. Fingers garnished
With fumes of onions and garlic, I slip
Back into my shift then watch her hands – wordless –

Reattach her stockings to the martyred
Rubber moons wavering at her garter.

Continue reading →

Posted in Music, Photography, Poetry, Word Cloud | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Word Cloud: CALL-AND-RESPONSE

virtue signalling Trumpites don’t care if politics, like pro wrestling, is sport or entertainment

Posted on February 25, 2016 by ann li-summers

150916091641-trump-wrestling-exlarge-169_1_By ann summers

Do voters subscribe easily to Personality Cults? And can one base entire political candidacies on them as signalling and identify them by their discourse?

Are they examples of pro-/con- discourse games as the Democratic candidates spar towards Philly and opportunistic mischief-makers try to drive wedges into party solidarity? Can the GOP as a recent op-ed in WaPo pleaded resist the tRump candidacy?

Lillseeitwhenibelieveit.jpgike the term “stochastic terrorism”(sic) making random acts of violence sound more social-scientistic and hence predictable due to propaganda effects, have we yet reached the limits of neologisms during this election season? Probably not until we get this season’s “Joe the (non-) Plumber”.

We know them when we see them tweeting from places like Malheur Wildlife Refuge – the often tweetable rhetorical memes now called “virtue signalling” that comprise a regular feature of the Trump campaign’s recent successes. As Trump said a couple of days ago “I love the poorly educated”. So now virtue signalling is the pejorative euphemism for the DBAD comment. image20160225-20311-17ma08g

Trump supporters, like WWE audiences, don’t care whether politics and its actors, like pro wrestling, is sport or entertainment (see teflon St. Ronnie). Trumpian audiences just want to have fun, and participate however vicariously in the spectacle of excess that is US electoral politics. Like the gimmick of miked-up player-referee discourse in MacMahon’s late XFL football, Trump’s rhetoric is that of a squared circle on Monday Raw. Continue reading →

Posted in 2016 Election, Blogs, Celebrity, Conservatives, Democracy, Fascists/Corporatists, Free Speech, Humor, Libertarians, Media, Neoconservatives, Neoliberals, Politics, Presidential Elections, Progressives, Propaganda, Richard Nixon, RNC, Ronald Reagan, Society, Sports, Television, Trolls, Uncategorized, United States | Tagged , | 5 Comments

College continues to suffer the RWNJ objections to ‘anti-American’ campuses due to a ‘disbelief that liberalism still survives.’

Posted on February 23, 2016 by ann li-summers

522_image010

By ann summers

There are cyclical media stories over decades about business and medical graduate school programs wanting student recruits who have had a liberal education. The problem represents a continuing crisis of retraining and adapting higher education to not simply the needs of a labor market but what remains a conservatively simplistic and mechanistic view of college curriculum rooted in misunderstanding of what liberal education actually means in the 21st Century. Conservatives’ inability to distinguish between the figurative and literal meanings of the concept of liberal or even liberalism continues to be a tragedy of the common(sic).

There are of course many reasons for that call, ranging from cultural literacy to critical thinking skills. They appear as cyclical (actually often decanal) calls for management leadership roles making design (deployed as management control of marketing via styling) more important than engineering in business when developing capitalist products. The auto industry still suffers from this superficiality in its rebadging strategies. Unfortunately the benefits at the ivory tower’s parapets always depends on the utilities based in the foundation and pleas to maintain the humanties(sic) should not be “unexpected”.

seven_liberal_arts.gif
Liberal arts is the term given to an education based on classical antiquity. It is meant to be a practical education which develops mental capacity. It was designed in the late medieval period (12th/13th centuries) using ideas from Ancient Greek and Roman culture. The students were meant to be young gentlemen(sic), that is, from respectable and important families. In modern times, liberal arts colleges educate both sexes, and a wider range of people.
The seven liberal arts were taught in two groups: the trivium and the quadrivium:
Trivium = Grammar, Dialectic (logic), Rhetoric.    
Quadrivium = Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy, Music.

?

51BEppmVM2L._AC_UL320_SR214_320__1_.jpg
…..if it only weren’t about status & credential acquisition and ROI

And yet those same graduate programs that try to make a demand for broader undergraduate education require some pre-professional internship or work experience. As though theory and practice were so easy to dichotomize like Mind and Body.

academic-landscape-time-lapse-4-638_1_.jpg
“Universities are necessarily liberal, Michael Bérubé asserts, as independent intellectual inquiry is fundamental to democracy. Moreover, the authoritarian right’s outraged objections to ‘anti-American’ campuses are a testament to their ‘disbelief that liberalism still survives.’”

The United States built its educational system around the oldest and deepest stratum of the liberal arts, giving the liberal arts a place in higher education that European universities had not emphasized for centuries.

A reference for this observation is the American Council of Learned Societies report on “Liberal Arts in American Higher Education.”

The philosopher, Martha Nussbaum, of the University of Chicago, writes: “Unlike virtually every nation in the world, we have a liberal arts model of university education.”

51p5TXHkYoL._SX331_BO1_204_203_200__1_.jpg

In this line, the three major United States military academies have defined liberal education as “essential to ethical responsibility.” The Air Force Academy has ninety hours of general education. West Point is essentially a liberal arts college  www.ramapo.edu/…

There has unfortunately been a steady decline in rationalizing the need for such curricula in higher education. This may actually get worse as the public community college and its more vocational degree offerings becomes the standard for undergraduate education.

Is that breadth of necessary humanistic knowledge met by the cafeteria menu-selection of college courses in general education? Does that grouping of courses sometimes called a core curriculum in undergraduate education and accompanied by some departmental or divisional major make a good undergraduate degree even when a student is forced to take the courses? Are they sufficient in the 21st Century to address the critical thinking about the serious divisions between the 1% and the 99%?

Or does it really create an undergraduate culture of passive-aggressive attendees of “boring courses”. And then there are the “Mickey Mouse” or “gut” courses often part of that seemingly random liberal arts requirement.

liberal_arts_1_.jpg

The problem of course is to actually address the interdisciplinary goals and objectives of a Western philosophical approach to the Liberal Arts. Unfortunately, the mania of testing and k-12 factory-banking models of education are often challenged by the material realities of race and class as well as the absurdities of cultural micro-aggression in the violence of education. Recent events at Yale and U of Missouri are interesting examples of this. Thankfully there is no such thing (yet) as conservative(sic) arts even if there are conservative colleges that might cynically do their best to kill the liberal arts.

Ultimately the timing and programming of courses taken as credit-hours and the menu-driven cafeteria curriculum makes an integrating and synthesized education process that meets the objectives of the Liberal Arts largely tokenistic and haphazard and makes a college experience seem mechanical and rote.

Often students enter college with the course menu configured as a prix fixe, and any “elective” course remotely unrelated to the major is superfluous and wasteful or an inconvenience brought on by scheduling or the lottery of classes closed by sometimes arbitrary prerequisites or credit-hour seniority in registration.

slide_10_1_.jpg

It’s time yet again to revisit those notions and to remind ourselves or perhaps our children and grandchildren of the foundational terms of a lifelong learning for which college education is designed to facilitate a communitarian discourse constructed on reproducible and reflective sets of critical practices.

​The Unexpected Schools Championing the Liberal Arts
Military academies and chef schools say the humanities are essential to their graduates’ success.

liberal-arts-fig1_1_.jpg
 Seven liberal arts

As mainstream universities and colleges cut liberal-arts courses and programs in favor of more vocational disciplines, and the number of students majoring in the humanities continues to decline, 

unexpected types of institutions are expanding their requirements in the liberal arts with the conviction that these courses teach the kinds of skills employers say they want, and leaders need: critical thinking, problem-solving, teamwork, and communication. 

 

Continue reading →

Posted in Art, Conservatives, Dept. of Education, Education, Education Policy, History, information Technology, Internet, Liberals, Libertarians, Logic, Media, Music, Neoconservatives, Neoliberals, Philosophy, Progressives, Renaissance, States, Technology, Uncategorized, United States | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Word Cloud: BELLTONGUE

Posted on February 19, 2016 by wordcloud9

Word Cloud Resized

by Nona Blyth Cloud

A human being is made up of all the experiences of a lifetime — sometimes a few carelessly spoken words, long forgotten by the speaker, can change the course of the hearer’s life forever.

I do not know if this was the case with poet Robert Hayden (1913-1980), but for a small boy in a poor neighborhood to be so near-blind that he must wear “coke-bottle” glasses which prevented him from joining in active play, I can imagine that he carried scars from the unthinking cruelty of children toward anyone who is “different.”

Add that he was raised, not by his parents who had split up after his birth, but by a couple who frequently quarreled, and his name was changed from Asa Bundy Sheffey to Robert Hayden. His adoptive mother did fight for his right to attend classes for the partially sighted, but poverty limited the resources available to him. He learned to read holding books inches from his face.

A picture emerges of a lonely child, who finds his friends in books, which is fertile ground for development of a depth of imagination and a love of words.

At age 23, he became a researcher for the Federal Writers Project, and spent his time there researching black American history and folk life, which became recurring themes in his poetry. In 1940, he married Erma Morris, and converted to his wife’s religion — the Baha’i faith — shortly after their marriage. This also greatly influenced his work, and he helped to publicize the little-known religion. However, his reputation as a writer is based much more on his poems about the African-American experience, both historically and personally.

Robert Hayden

Hayden wrote: “I have said many, many times no place is home. Therefore, in a sense because I don’t have a home anywhere, in a sense everyplace is home.” His view of the world was that of the dispossessed outsider, but it gave him a rare empathy with the subjects of his poems.


The Ballad of Nat Turner

Then fled, O brethren, the wicked juba
 …..and wandered wandered far
from curfew joys in the Dismal’s night.
……Fool of St. Elmo’s fire

In scary night I wandered, praying,
……Lord God my harshener,
   speak to me now or let me die;
……speak, Lord, to this mourner.

And came at length to livid trees   
……where Ibo warriors
hung shadowless, turning in wind   
……that moaned like Africa,

Their belltongue bodies dead, their eyes
   ……alive with the anger deep
in my own heart. Is this the sign,
   ……the sign forepromised me?

The spirits vanished. Afraid and lonely   
……I wandered on in blackness.
Speak to me now or let me die.
……Die, whispered the blackness.

And wild things gasped and scuffled in
……the night; seething shapes
of evil frolicked upon the air.
……I reeled with fear, I prayed.

Sudden brightness clove the preying
……darkness, brightness that was
itself a golden darkness, brightness
……so bright that it was darkness.

And there were angels, their faces hidden
……from me, angels at war
with one another, angels in dazzling   
……combat. And oh the splendor,

The fearful splendor of that warring.
……Hide me, I cried to rock and bramble.
Hide me, the rock, the bramble cried. . . . 
  ……How tell you of that holy battle?

The shock of wing on wing and sword   
……on sword was the tumult of   
a taken city burning. I cannot
……say how long they strove,

For the wheel in a turning wheel which is time   
……in eternity had ceased
its whirling, and owl and moccasin,
……panther and nameless beast

And I were held like creatures fixed   
……in flaming, in fiery amber.
But I saw I saw oh many of   
……those mighty beings waver,

Waver and fall, go streaking down
……into swamp water, and the water   
hissed and steamed and bubbled and locked   
……shuddering shuddering over

The fallen and soon was motionless.   
……Then that massive light
began a-folding slowly in
……upon itself, and I

Beheld the conqueror faces and, lo,   
……they were like mine, I saw
they were like mine and in joy and terror   
……wept, praising praising Jehovah.

Oh praised my honer, harshener
……till a sleep came over me,
a sleep heavy as death. And when
……I awoke at last free

And purified, I rose and prayed
……and returned after a time
to the blazing fields, to the humbleness.   
……And bided my time.

Nat Turner marker

(“honer” is a fine-grained hard stone for sharpening blades)

Continue reading →

Posted in Baha’i, Civil War, Poetry, Racism, United States, Word Cloud | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Tennessee Sheriff proves beyond all shadow of doubt that Beyoncé is a stochastic terrorist

Posted on February 18, 2016 by ann li-summers

 

By ann summers

 

Another minor public official in Tennessee has decided to support the Bundystani Soverign Citizen wardlordism using county sheriffs as the dupes of anti-government libertarianism. Now the false equivalence of RWNJ sovereignty protests applies where not only is the Federal BLM (Bureau of Land Management) the enemy, but #BLM (BlackLivesMatter) is also the enemy as a matter of “perverse brilliance” .

But the real problem is that one could use the line of argument to prove a pseudo-concept since one Tennessee sheriff is claiming that Beyoncé and CBS are stochastic terrorists.

As much as one wants to get people to stop using a pseudo-concept that leads ultimately to eroding the First Amendment much like Citizens United and corporate speech (the MIC as a “lone wolf” corporate citizen), the neologism has become pernicious on the left to attack RW media while ignoring the concurrent cover it provides for censorship of the left by even more powerful forces. It is now a kind of virtue signalling and a proxy term for what in the literature are called propaganda effects in the often debunked “hypodermic model of communication”.

Every killing by one person upon one other person is in fact a “lone wolf killing”, just like every mass killing by one person could be a crime against humanity.

Every LEO who violates their illseeitwhenibelieveit.jpgconstitutional duty in an unlawful death of a civilian acted as a “lone wolf”.

However short-sighted, a meme has arisen to account for so-called random terroristic acts, as though individual agency is any more or less fear-producing with rationalizing, scientistic classifications.

A Tennessee sheriff suggested Tuesday that an alleged rise in violence against police officers is directly related to Beyoncé’s controversial Super Bowl halftime performance and new music video…

On Monday, there were reports of eight shots fired outside the home of Rutherford County Sheriff Robert Arnold.

During a news conference about the incident Tuesday, Arnold floated the possibility that Beyoncé’s politically charged performances of late may have instigated the shooter in a time when police shootings across the country are closely watched.

“With everything that’s happened since the Super Bowl, and with law enforcement as a whole. I think we’ve lost five to seven officers, five deputies, sheriffs since the Super Bowl,” Arnold told reporters. “Here’s another target on law enforcement.”

Could it be that LEOs just want Beyoncé in their jails with cuffs on. Music rather than poverty causes crime because terrorism.

 

Posted in Civil Liberties, Conservatives, Constitutional Law, Democracy, DHS, Equal Rights, Fascism, Fascists/Corporatists, Free Speech, Government, information Technology, Internet, Justice, Law Enforcement, Liberals, Libertarians, Local Government, Logic, Media, Murder, Music, Nazis/Nazism, Neoconservatives, North Carolina, Progressives, Propaganda, Rock and Roll, Short Video, State Government, Tea Party, Television, Tennessee, Terrorism, Terrorists, Treason, Uncategorized, United States | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Tennessee Sheriff proves beyond all shadow of doubt that Beyoncé is a stochastic terrorist

U.S. Supreme Court: The Shape of One’s Soul and the Color of One’s Conscience

Posted on February 17, 2016 by wordcloud9

by Nona Blyth Cloud

(Column originally published at Morning Open Thread on Daily Kos)

supreme-justices-2015

Justice Antonin Scalia (front row, second from left) is dead.

I assume that the President will do his job and nominate a new Justice. Then the great battle will begin between the Senate and the President over majority control of the Supreme Court. That it will be long and ugly is certain. What the outcome will be is not.

Almost 10% of the Federal District Court Judgeships are vacant, many because the Republican-dominated Senate has tied up the President’s nominees, derailing the consent process.

 

President Obama has appointed 132 female judges – more than any President to date. But to obtain true gender diversity, the number of women in the federal judiciary, including the Supreme Court, must be increased. 

  • Thirty-three percent of active United States district (or trial) court judges are women. But there are still 6 district courts around the country where there has never been a female judge.

For women of color, the numbers are even smaller.

  • There are 81 women of color serving as active federal judges across the country, including 42 African-American women, 26 Hispanic women, 10 Asian-American women, one Native American woman, one woman of Hispanic and Asian descent, and one woman of Hispanic and African-American descent.
  • There are only 12 women of color on the U.S. courts of appeals.  Five of those women sit on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, two sit on the DC Circuit, and one woman of color sits on each of the First, Fourth, Sixth, Seventh Circuits and Federal Circuit. Therefore, there are seven federal courts of appeals without a single active minority woman judge.

There are 66 vacancies on the federal district and appellate courts, and two of those vacancies are in courts where there has never been a female judge. Additionally, twenty-one of the vacancies are for seats formerly held by female judges.

 

But trying to get any worthy candidate through this confirmation process may be like trying to “pass a camel through the eye of a needle.”

 

…

Given the current climate of the Senate, I doubt that Ruth Bader Ginsburg would be confirmed now.

Continue reading →

Posted in Abraham Lincoln, American History, Barack Obama, George Washington, Illinois, SCOTUS, Senate | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Word Cloud: RIFT

Posted on February 12, 2016 by wordcloud9

Word Cloud Resized

by Nona Blyth Cloud

We sometimes forget how closely History is following behind us. Only 50 years ago, it was still illegal for people of different races to marry in 16 U.S. states, mostly in the South. It wasn’t until 1967 that the Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia that such laws were unconstitutional.

So when Canadian emigrant Eric Trethewey and Mississippian Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough met at Kentucky State College and fell in love, they had to cross the state line into Ohio to be married. He became a professor and author, she became a social worker. Their daughter Natasha was born in 1966 in Gulfport, Mississippi.

CovingtonKY_JARoeblingBridge Cincinnati

Miscegenation

by Natasha Trethewey
…
In 1965 my parents broke two laws of Mississippi;
they went to Ohio to marry, returned to Mississippi.
…
They crossed the river into Cincinnati, a city whose name
begins with a sound like sin, the sound of wrong—mis in Mississippi.
…
A year later they moved to Canada, followed a route the same
as slaves, the train slicing the white glaze of winter, leaving Mississippi.
…
Faulkner’s Joe Christmas was born in winter, like Jesus, given his name
for the day he was left at the orphanage, his race unknown in Mississippi.
…
My father was reading War and Peace when he gave me my name.
I was born near Easter, 1966, in Mississippi.
…
When I turned 33 my father said, It’s your Jesus year—you’re the same
age he was when he died. It was spring, the hills green in Mississippi.
…
I know more than Joe Christmas did. Natasha is a Russian name—
though I’m not; it means Christmas child, even in Mississippi.

The marriage didn’t last.

Six-year-old Natasha and her mother moved to Atlanta, but the little girl’s summers were split between visiting her father, who had moved to New Orleans, and her mother’s family in Mississippi. She was often treated as a white girl in her father’s company, but lived as a black child in the South the rest of the time.

black girls on the beach

History Lesson

I am four in this photograph, standing
on a wide strip of Mississippi beach,
my hands on the flowered hips
…
of a bright bikini. My toes dig in,
curl around wet sand. The sun cuts
the rippling Gulf in flashes with each
…
tidal rush. Minnows dart at my feet
glinting like switchblades. I am alone
except for my grandmother, other side
…
of the camera, telling me how to pose.
It is 1970, two years after they opened
the rest of this beach to us,
…
forty years since the photograph
where she stood on a narrow plot
of sand marked colored, smiling,
…
her hands on the flowered hips
of a cotton meal-sack dress.

mlk jr removing burnt cross from lawn

Incident

We tell the story every year—
how we peered from the windows, shades drawn—
though nothing really happened,
the charred grass now green again.
…
We peered from the windows, shades drawn,
at the cross trussed like a Christmas tree,
the charred grass still green. Then
we darkened our rooms, lit the hurricane lamps.
…
At the cross trussed like a Christmas tree,
a few men gathered, white as angels in their gowns.
We darkened our rooms and lit hurricane lamps,
the wicks trembling in their fonts of oil.
…
It seemed the angels had gathered, white men in their gowns.
When they were done, they left quietly. No one came.
The wicks trembled all night in their fonts of oil;
by morning the flames had all dimmed.
…
When they were done, the men left quietly. No one came.
Nothing really happened.
By morning all the flames had dimmed.
We tell the story every year.

Continue reading →

Posted in Civil War, Constitutional Law, Louisiana, Mississippi, Poetry, Racism, Word Cloud | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Word Cloud: RIFT

A Balkanization too far: taking back The United Counties of America

Posted on February 7, 2016 by ann li-summers

By ann summers56889d6dc46188801c8b45b0_1_

Malheur Wildlife Refuge’s standoff even with its indicted malingerers demonstrates the abject FAIL of the Bundystani attempt to create a county-level bantustan near Burns, Oregon. However, chances are the armed farces now cruising Burns in their flag-flying pickup trucks have nothing better to do but plan the next poorly organized manipulation of RWNJ LoFos & ‘baggers looking for the next peckerwoodstock.

BURNS, OR - JANUARY 30: Anti-government protesters drive through town during a rally prior to a rolling vehicle protest by self-proclaimed patriots on January 30, 2016 in Burns, Oregon. Eight protestors who had been occupying the Malheur National Wildli
‘neck-mobiles parade around Burns Oregon in support of the Bundys

 

But if we’re wagering on the next such amalgamated attempt to privatize public land, foment racist secession, and threaten to discharge firearms, it could happen again in the West and with Lavoy Finicum’s death now even more cowboy-romanticized, but probably not with a community clearly opposed to outside agitation and lacking more significant local mass support. More likely it will happen in a red state with more sympathetic law enforcement and local government lined up rather than the Bundy expectation that what happens outside Vegas can happen again in Oregon.

Continue reading →

Posted in California, Civil Liberties, Conservatives, DHS, DOJ, environment, Fascism, Fascists/Corporatists, FBI, Federal Courts, Free Speech, Fundamentalism, Green, History, Humor, Law Enforcement, Liberals, Libertarians, Local Government, Media, Nazis, Nazis/Nazism, Oregon, Police, Progressives, Racism, Tea Party, Terrorism, Terrorists, Treason, Uncategorized, United States | Tagged , , , , , | 6 Comments

Word Cloud: KNOWLEDGE

Posted on February 5, 2016 by wordcloud9

Word Cloud Resized

by Nona Blyth Cloud

Rita Dove, United States Library of Congress Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, served two terms: 1993-94 and 1994-95. She has the distinction of being the first African-American, AND at age 40, the youngest poet to be appointed Poet Laureate by the Librarian of Congress.**

Rita Dove was a a National Merit Scholar, and received a Fulbright scholarship to study at the University of Tübingen in West Germany. Her verse-novel Thomas and Beulah (1986) won the Pulitzer Prize, and her poetry collection, On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Her photograph should be next to the definition of “overachiever” in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary.

She wastes not a single scrap of her education, or her personal history. From the Classics and Opera of  the European tradition to American Smooth ballroom dancing and writing lyrics to be set to music by John Williams; from the sensible coat of a woman who just wanted a seat on the bus that was a birth-spark for a movement to her mother’s first job, or her own attempt to bring Romance home from a department store, Rita Dove writes it all down.

Demeter’s Prayer to Hades

This alone is what I wish for you: knowledge.
To understand each desire has an edge,
to know we are responsible for the lives
we change. No faith comes without cost,
no one believes without dying.
Now for the first time
I see clearly the trail you planted,
what ground opened to waste,
though you dreamed a wealth
of flowers.
…………….There are no curses – only mirrors
held up to the souls of gods and mortals.
And so I give up this fate, too.
Believe in yourself,
go ahead — see where it gets you.

demeter-french 15th-16th century

She moves effortlessly from Greek Mythology to American Jazz legend Billie Holiday and Civil Rights icon Rosa Parks:

Canary

— for Michael S. Harper

Billie Holiday’s burned voice
had as many shadows as lights,
a mournful candelabra against a sleek piano,
the gardenia her signature under that ruined face.
…
(Now you’re cooking, drummer to bass, 
magic spoon, magic needle.
Take all day if you have to
with your mirror and your bracelet of song.)
Fact is, the invention of women under siege 
has been to sharpen love in the service of myth.
If you can’t be free, be a mystery.
…

billie-holiday

Continue reading →

Posted in Poetry, United States, Word Cloud | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Word Cloud: KNOWLEDGE