DISQUS

A good, declarative, personal-historical poem. God bless her.

Oh that Ella song is so, so good. Great litany.

It just pains me that the continuing civil rights abuses that you draw attention to are not somehow front page news. The world of Mississippi that you paint is the same world of Katrina and its aftermath. Why is the story of the APA and Mississippi bigotry not equally as important as failed terrorist attacks? Osama Bin Laden and the white patriarchs in Mississippi and other Southern locales in the 60s and 70s who escaped prosecution for killing civil rights workers have 2 things in common: they both still have not been brought to justice and they both seem to have been forgotten in mainstream national news. So thank you for your reporting.

Congratulations on your new blog-design. It is clear, classic, and swell and that was just the design. Your persistance in following various stories of Mississippi injustice is always extremely instructive to me.

Sometime I would love it if you would answer these questions, genuine questions: why do you capitalize the first letter of each line in most of the recent free verse poems that I have seen? If you were to gather your recent poems, say after 1997, into a collection, where would "Winter. 1969" go?



The central wonder of "Winter. 1969" lies in the way the poem moves back and forth through time and space from the seemingly simple vantage points of the hospital window and, presumably, the father's eyes.



The movement becomes radical--swooping--until "Tonight" when we are grounded momentarily before being literally cast up and out into a skyline, into a sky, that is at once "beautiful" and melancholy, like shattered coal (and from coal there sometimes comes diamonds, yes?).



In addition to coal-like, the word "bituminous" brings "bits" to my mind and the poem's closure performs a final troubling act of temporal and spatial movement: rupture. Remembrance and premonition are the opposite of nostalgia and fortune-telling in this poem.



About "My voice soon among them": the speaker of the poem projects himself into the premonition and remembrance that the poet makes the father have. [My italics.] These reversals are complicated. They make this poem share in the theme of proxy--speaking for, by, and with a beloved--that your other poems (apparently) from this period engage. And birth (the poet-speakers and his sisters) somehow mitigates injury and death (obliquely referenced in the words "there in Korea." The Korean War was an American-Asiatic war that we should not soon forget as we contemplate the connection between the debacles in Vietnam and Iraq.



Most importantly, your poem performs all these things with a clear sense of phrasing--the fluid language of an epistle. All the temporal and spatial figures make sense.



You have wonderful friends. Brandon and Jesse seem like wonderful people.

...whoops: I psychoanalytically misspelled "Gorjus" and made it "Gorgus"...the sounds and the senses got the best of me. My observations still stand.

I could sure do with one of these every week or at least twice a month.



You are one of the poets who I go to when I want both the thingness and the emotional possibility of the world rendered without clutter, without the pandering for or to "innovation" or "experimentation" without academese or ghettoese or the trappings of some poetic clique's current fancy.



Your poems--be they ekphratic, like this poem that burrows into an photographic image to tease even deeper human potential; or filial, like your poems from some years ago about your father, grandparents, and music--are marvels...



...marvels of phrasing, scene-setting, physical action and psychological restraint. They do not prophetize (my coinage) or push towards a cloying sense of sycophantically-longed for ridiculous "greatness." The language is deeply social yet surely not as "high-minded" as our one great social contemporary poet today (Anne Winters).



We both share this instinct for near documentary, psychography, and ekphrasis in our poems. I am so happy to find that your ekphratic investigation extends to photographs as well as music.



Of course, the poem's first title nicely steals words from the beaten car's tags in the Mann's black and white photograph: "Gorgus." In both the photograph and your poem this particular orthography is something more than a neat, wry linguistic corruption...



...a subtle wink towards the politics that make the "mispelling" of "gorgeous" hold the satirical force of both a class and a gender critique.



"Gorgus" is just too close (to my ear and my consciousness) to "Gorgon," the Greek-mythic female creature who, I like to say, was abused enough by the "gods" to be blighted with a body that killed against even her own wishes.



Of course, the manner of death that a gaze at the Gorgon (or Gorgons in some myths) afforded the unlucky scopophiliac involved the ultimate visual horror (and the greatest visual pleasure): to have movement stolen from us; to be made still; to be turned to stone; to be stilled and stolen; captured.



The myth of the Gorgon is probably an early (very early) commentary on the visual politics of painting and photography--and especially photography because "realism" is so deeply implicated in the medium itself.



Monster, monstrosity, action, stillness...



The poem mitigates these resonances by beginning, I feel, where the photograph--the scene-stiller--left off: by restoring action to the interpretative world drawn up by both image and poem.



You begin by unpacking what really might be going on--quite subtly--in this active, oddly--no, beautifully--caring exchange between the two white girls (blonde even through the black and white image) so touched, it would seem, by disadvantage.



And this final observation is to me how this image has everything to do with your social activism.



What a blessing to have you as my friend.



PS: I finally finished my website's basic design. Funny how I went back to the original template. I'm glad I saved it.

Dear Donnie Williams:



I ordered two copies of your book from amazon.com. Sincere congratulations on its publication. Twenty years is not too long to work on something worth while.



May God continue to bless you.



JDJ

Beautiful, charged painting. I'm so sorry that you're getting spam.

Dreadful and I'm not surprised.

We should all be so lucky to have someone in our corners after we pass on that believes it getting the story of our significance *right*. Well done, Benjamin, as usual but this time with a difference.

Mr. Rahim speaks a kind of truth that is tragically left out of mainstream media discourse about the storm--even the most liberal discourse. His invocation of the spirit at the same time that he examines issues of race and class and money and power in the wake of the storm--which, for some reason, I hate to personify as "Katrina" just as I hate the buzzword "9/11" because they seem to so easily become marketing or political slogans--his multivalent invocations are particularly revelatory.



You know, saying that his comments buck even the most liberal views of the storm makes me think of your earlier post where you articulate a disillusionment with the two reigning political parties.



When the entire system is so complexly and deeply flawed, what does one do or continue to do?



I also found his discussion of the way petty crimes blight black people in the wake of the storm pretty insightful too.

I'm sorry...I should have typed out the URL here:



http://www.sevenstories.com/Book/index.cfm?GCOI...

Your post and blessed hosting of the event reminds me of a terrific book by a terrific scholar that many people have railed against. Click on the URL.

Brandon: I spell my name "Jonathan" (as the post clearly conveyed) and I can assure you that I read Sherman's essay quite carefully (I actually read it in CounterPunch before Benjamin posted an excerpt from it) and I responded to his identification of the peace movement as predominately white. Perhaps it is the same imprecision that leads you to misspell my name that makes you not see how measured my words actually were.

I guess my only problem with Sherman's CounterPunch article (a great publication by the way) is the identification of the peace movement as "predominately white" and the manner in which the author's very writing narrows the pitch of his message to apparently privileged white peace movers who must now bring their attention to downtrodden blacks.



What peace movement is predominately white and where? Just because Steven Sherman hasn't interacted with a lot of blacks for peace (or other non-whites, for that matter) does not mean that blacks and indeed many nonwhites are not actively thinking, writing, and working for peace. And, in consideration of the fact that whites in many major cities are becoming voting minorities as latino/a and hispanic populations rise, it is incredibly important that we interrogate the problems inherent in dichotomous discourses of "majority/minority."



Nor are the black poor of New Orleans without agency (meaning, the power to act). While they may not be economically powerfull, it is imperative that we consider their power to vote, and their power on a number of spiritual and intellectual levels.



Ben, that's why your own posts on the FRAUD of the black Republican-turned mayor were so apt. There may be people who are actually afraid of those poor New Orleans blacks' power--the same power that put that fraud of a black mayor into office in the hope that he would do something, anything, for them--the hope that as a black person he would somehow empathize with the blistering, entangled racism and classicism that informs so much of everything Southern-style. Exposing the complexity of simultaneous power and powerlessness...that's what I got from those recent posts on the New Orleans mayor, the walking "race-card."



There is a quiet undercurrent of "saviorism" (to coin a term) in Sherman's otherwise strong and well-meaning rhetoric. In truth, blacks' commitment to peace in the face of racism and violence has defined peace movements in so many ways in 20th century America:



Baynard Rustin developed concepts of peaceful activism from satyagraha and applied them to his early socialist and anti-racist activities. Ella Baker and Martin Luther King, Jr. then further refined satyagraha for the civil rights movement and, of course, King was killed at the height of his agitation against the Vietnam war. Many of the agitation protest strategies employed by peace movers everywhere are constructed in the spirit of the kinds of protests that these black women and men designed. We must not forget how black workers essential contributions inform peace movements.



So, even if in your town, you only see white peace workers at your meetings, their activities contain the presence of black cultural workers as well as many different people all over the world who have sacrificed so much for peace.



The first step for any progressive movement is not to ever think that it is "predominately anything" but to reconceive of their movement as stretching beyond the bounds of people who individual workers within specific locales see in their day-to-day activities. Fundamentally, there is a level of consciousness-raising that is necessary within us as well as outside of us so that we interrogate the silent colorlines that inform our quotidian social realities and make us think that our movements can be defined within majority/minority polarities.

Well, the images sure pack a wallop. Who is "Bitch, PhD"? I didn't catch the reference? Saddest of all in Cindy-news: the president seemed so relaxed and comfortable when speaking about the war; his supercilious posture made me disbelieve his statements that he understand what grieving parents feel.



Without putting his own life on the line in the past as a combat fighter or publically encouraging any member of his family to serve, how can he truly empathize?



Well-done on these urgent and very graphic posts, Ben.

A related problem in the complex nest of covert voting disenfranchisement concerns the manner in which this country is mired in "two-partyism": as a life-long independent voter, I am barred from voting in most elections. This continues to baffle me.

I love the clear, careful reasoning as you build this case against a closet (or not so closet) bigot and expose the true complexity of these issues. I also admire the primary source documents that you post on the site. This essay is definitely one of your most insightful.

I am looking forward to obtaining this book. Congratulations on its publication.

Is that what your blog looks like when you're typing? You writing has never been on the fringe to me. Most importantly, the reporter's highlighting of the blog foregrounds the dogged manner in which you have following this story, a tale told in movies, books and I bet a video game yet still no substantive justice. Bigots and their followers are like stone. Your blog has always had a critical social and artistic importance. Such importance is the only good thing about a public voice in an age where rosie.com exists.

Dear Benjamin,



Truly, was not our teacher, Allen Grossman right?



The most important work of poetry, to channel his phraseology, is to bring to mind the image of persons.



Once, Benjamin, you revealed to me the force of a word--PROXY.



Your poems after, say, 1997 revolve around the whole idea of speaking for the Other; speaking for those charged to speak for others; and speaking to evoke the lost other in his or her absence.



In this poem, set against the very old pastoral backdrop of spring--and a late spring too, and a chilly one; chilly enough for coats!--you illuminate the presence of your grandmother while she is in the midst of illuminating the presence of her other, Sol.



Sol is a figure, a part for a whole, a newspaper so telling of a certain kind of urban cultural milieu.



What does it mean for the grandmother to speak for him and by extension and then for the poet, the grandson, to enfigure them all? It means that spring is here in the awakening of realities that can only be expressed like this.



The plural subjective reference--we--takes us into the journey. I become a part of the family who witnesses a diminishing landscape of genealogy. I become the child who accompanies his mother on a visit into the very heart of family.



Quietly, then, you evoke the deliciousness of being an outsider for the two women: two generations talk in ways that perhaps only the elements can understand.



This is a beautiful poem and it stands among the many that you have written recently and that deserve to be collected now into a whole.



~



...Proxy, memory, an ethos illuminated and remembered...



...Countless visits and quests into the real heart of family, both biological and of the other heart, meaning friends: Frankie Newton and otherwise...



Love,



Jonathan

Beautifully articulated.



Why not work on three roughly 150 word, book-length memoirs--creative nonfiction--or 3, both personal and analytical long publishable essays that consolidate aspects of your blog-posts:



1) One essay could be about an under-recognized Jewish American experience so beautifully expressed in this post and exemplified by your mother's teaching.



2) Another would be about the journey to discover the cultural links between your father's legacy and Frankie Newton's. May I suggest simply fleshing out each of your posts: walk us through the journey of rediscovering things about your father and the parallel discovery of the world of Frankie Newton. What's so evocative about these posts is that they record the STEPS in a quest.



3) The other essay would be about your personal, and by extension, your sociopolitical, experience of Gertrude Stein's legacy. You see Benjamin, you've gotten far enough away from the academese to really talk now about what her work truly means to you and to use the lush, richly textured rhetoric of personal yet fiercely analytical writing so well represented by your blog. Stein's whole ethos actually escapsulates life-choices that have much to teach us about unacknowledged realms of the Jewish American experience. We deeply need voices of popular literary nonfiction that does not rehearse tired identity politics, name dropping and fake fetishizing theory but that rather truly gets at the specific human relevance of the subject. Looking at the making of Stein as a particular kind of American--expatriate and otherwise--seems apt. Poetry becomes, then, one of the sites in which you speak about unexpected life-choices and the necessaries inherent in them. A short, personal yet analytical exploration would galvanize the spirit.



And your words in this post about the perjorative perception of Yiddish resonated deeply with me because my own grandfather--who I only saw once in my life--on my mother's side, named Swifty, spoke and revered Yidish as well as Hebrew--it was a professional necessity in his dealings with Jewish American underground merchants in Philadelphia--legal or quasi-legal.

Sadly, "Anon" and "Marquita" seem to believe that violence and constraint deserves violence and constraint. Indeed, "Anon," is correct: a lot of inner city blacks AS WELL AS COUNTLESS MIDDLE CLASS OR EVEN RICH WHITE SUBURBAN YOUTHS WHO BUY EMIMEN'S MUSIC AND OTHER RAP implicitly if not explicitly glorify rap. (Where would the black (and fewer white) rappers be without the predominately white buying public?) But, when do we break the cycle of violence. Handcuffing a five-year old actually teaches them to go on being ANGRY and surly and rageful. These are in fact the images and messages that they're getting in so many places--from black and white producers alike...let's face it: all of the mass media and entertainment's hands are DIRTY. MTV, BET and VH1 promote the rap industry. And, for that matter, white-consumed rock music and heavy metal and grunge is equally as violent and look what's happening in white enclaves with shootings.



The problems are:



* the matching of violence with violence with young children; hence they learn and repeat such acts



* the disproportionate amount of Florida school handcuffings and police arrests that involve very young black children.



I actually respect these two anonymous posts (with the exception of the mean-spirited attack on your person...ad hominem attacks weren't even warranted in the school yard). I respect them because the reality is that MOST people in this country glorify and condone violence among *and* towards the supposedly pathological black inner city and rural poor.



...but have mercy: when your child has an EXTREME tandrum, see how it feels when SOME BODY ELSE--especially a cop--man handles them and shackles them.



About seven months ago I saw a white mother in the super market endure a ballistic-as-all-hell-tandrum by her toddler who knocked over food products in the aisle and kicked security. But the cops who came DID NOT hand cuff the child. What did they do? They ignored this child and waited with the patience of Jesus Christ and the priests of the temple for the child to calm down and realize that the earth does not revolve around him and eventually the child got it together and even helped to pick up the mess.



REGARDLESS OF RACE, THEY'RE CHILDREN.

Ben, I'm so honored to be in your life. Your blog entries are *hot*. Happy anniversary, by the way. The blog is far better than any I visit without exaggeration and far deeper and more varied than imagined over a year ago. I remember that striking post from your dear mother's home. I remember it well.



Passover makes me think of the black slave experience in contemporary Sudan. Thursday evening I met a terrific man named Simon Deng who works for a group called iAbolish [www.iabolish.com] (I actually introduced Mr. Deng before he spoke to the Amnesty International club here on campus). Mr. Deng (a former enslaved child in Sudan) spoke to me about Arab slavers who are still killing and enslaving black Africans today. This is form of genocide in the lush jungles of Southern Sudan is equally as disgusting as the problems of mass murder in the desert of Darfur. Mr. Deng was taken as a boy from his village of Tonga in Southern Sudan and brutally enslaved and scarred on all levels before he escaped with the aid of an international buy-back force of anti-slavers.



I have often thought of what it means to be a independent American voter who rejects all parties (and therefore often cannot vote in primaries and other such twisted affairs) and a socialist (for lack of a better word) but the more I learn about the virulent permutations of capitalism, the more I strengthen my intellectual and sociopolitical resolve.



THAT is why your posts on the election fraud are so important to me because that willful debacle equals $-fiending. Many of the guns used to gather slaves in Southern Sudan are German-made and this equals $-fiending. The UN fails to intervene in Sudanese slavery because of pressure by the Arab oil magnets and this equals $-fiending. Condi Rice is pet of power who goes inside the big house, unleashed, when she is called and that is an example of $-fiending too. But I digress, forgive me.



Passover made me think of this world problem.



I am with you in recognition of this crucial, crucial time of Jewish observance.