Disqus - Latest Comments for Jonathan David Jackson

Re: Mob Rule Central

Jonathan David Jackson — Fri, 08 Apr 2005 17:03:30 -0000

Your blogs's sense of social justice has fiercely expanded. Soon I will comment on your remarkable poem from some months back.

Re: DEFEND FREE SPEECH AT HARVARD!

Jonathan David Jackson — Tue, 12 Apr 2005 10:18:13 -0000

Letter while maroon'd in "office hours" to which only few come: The objection to demonstrations seems a trifle counter to the spirit of a university where debate--even the most searing--is supposedly welcomed and fostered as a means to explore vital topics. Exploration is even more important than knowledge (what a heretical statement...such an axiom only mildly signals my disagreement with the Enlightenment era concepts that still ground academies).

The patrician class has a way of octopussying the world, to say nothing of their stomping grounds (Harvard being an essentially high-patrician enclave to which even the maids who serve meals (meaning all "minorities") may brainwash themselves into believing that they've arrived). (Cue "The Jeffersons" theme song.)

If you go to the protest, please try not to get arrested; nowadays, it's not so much a badge of protest-experience than a pain in the a**.

Besides, the world needs you for your up coming job (hint hint prayer prayer).

Re: New Poetry Chapbook: We All Sell The Shadow, by Jonathan David Jackson

Jonathan David Jackson — Wed, 13 Apr 2005 11:09:22 -0000

Sweet Benjamin,

You are one of the hearts in my body going thump, thump, thump.

Thank you so much for being in my life/our life/the life and for your generosity, high intelligence, sense of social purpose and rich understanding of what family *really* means.

Much love,

Jonathan

Re: Last Week Was An Interesting Week

Jonathan David Jackson — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 09:20:45 -0000

I tell you Ben, your commitment to finding the truth and practicing a fierce form of anti-racism is remarkable. Your father was a beautiful man. His eyes are full of good-naturedness and warmth in the photograph. He looks genuinely pleased. Turns out white ink does not print out on black card stock paper. Everything saturates together. But I'm not a symbolism-whore.

I read your blog every day, man, even when I don't comment. Each leg of the journey is delicious.

Re: St. Petersburg Police Bind Hands And Feet Of 5-Year-Old African-American Girl

Jonathan David Jackson — Sat, 23 Apr 2005 11:56:15 -0000

Most importantly, it seems that K-12 teachers are less likely to actually listen to young black inner city (and rural) students because that have already pathologized them as incorrigibly misbehaved.

Often when a child radically resists direction it's because she or he 1) fulfills the quiet expectation of rebellion that everyone already seems to have for them; 2) or she or he is NOT being listened to, or dialogued with: just told what to do.

Now, be ous voices "sweet" and nice-nasty like many white parents and educators ("now put the glass down junior") or snap-vernacular-biting and signifiying like some black parents and educators, it's still TELLING a child what to do.

Socrates all but invented a form of education called padeia built on dialogical interaction--intensive questioning and answering. In the METAPHYSICS, Aristotle said that WONDER is the entrance way to philosophy. We are better off opening up avenues to wonder in children and young adults.

Patience, however challenging, is important too.

But Benjamin it is also about the media's love to see black pathology and how operative racism is in almost every part of American life.

Even with the college students I teach (who have the gall to call themselves "kids" when they are in fact young adults) I find that if I dialogue with them and ask them WHY they do what they do that sometimes I get them to understand different approaches.

Re: I’m Ambivalent About Posting Photos

Jonathan David Jackson — Sat, 23 Apr 2005 12:10:13 -0000

You know, Benjamin, it seems to me that this story is also about a knee-jerk, centuries-old fear of BLACK RAGE or the presumption of BLACK RAGE.

I'm currently teaching a course in INTRODUCTION TO AFRICANA STUDIES and the white students (the class is mostly white) will accept nothing less than cool, detached rhetoric. We are now moving into a unit on racism, slavery and political economy. I produce commentaries that explain elements of my pedagogy. This shows them the design behind my performative pedagogy. I want them to get a radical, bird's eye view of a teaching practice in motion.

However, these commentaries also give me a chance to formally address matters that arise in lecture/discussions and video screenings.

Here's what my latest commentary on the role of BLACK RAGE said (and I often think of the role of beligerence and biting nastiness in our developmental process when we are not being listened as children or as adults):

QUOTE

Two classes ago in a lecture/discussion in the spring 2005 AFR 200 course I pointed out that, as Peter Kolchin (author of AMERICAN SLAVERY) points out, most of the "founding fathers" were slave owners.

I then pointed out that even a few black American scholars, judges and attorneys seem to have overlooked the stinging hypocrisy of the "original framers" of our nation. To postulate an originalist view of the constitution—or to postulate that we consider law and social value according to the mores present when the constitution was written by the primarily British American male slave holders who wrote it—is to tacitly, if not explicitly, endorse the well-documented racism and sexism of the so called "founding fathers."

I also argued that we do much worse when we make veiled excuses—however well intentioned we may think we are being—and utter things like "but it was just the way it was back then." Such comments are indeed excuses and I reminded the class that abolitionists and early feminists were doing work at the same time that the “founding fathers” were reaping the benefits of slavery too.

I then went back to the issue of Clarence Thomas and deliberately slipped into black American street vernacular to underscore that social and political outrage cannot be divorced from cool, scholarly understanding. We need both and my aim was to get you to re-think the manner in which I began the discussion: cool, detached argumentation is not the only mode of rhetoric that we will need to get us through this challenging unit on racism, slavery and political economy.

Using a form of ironic commentary called “signifying” practiced in black American street culture, I postulated that the best way to understand Justice Thomas would be to identify him as the establishment's "pet"—or the "dawg" of power. He was a dawg in his adherence to originalist interpretations and his well-documented sexual harassment. (Dawg, as I said in class, often has a double reference: pet and sexual freak in black street parlance.) I said that Justice Thomas was so much of a “dawg” or pet of power, that he even does not need a leash; he comes inside the house of power when called.

During that class and another, two white students in the class (and I do realize that you are far more than just white students and that you have varied identities and even that you may not be comfortable with identifying as white) voiced concerns about “black anger” and the need for cool detached rhetoric.

I want you to all know that sometimes whites and blacks need to take the time to study and actually listen to some black Americans’ outrage as well as our cool detached scholarly rhetoric.

One of the reasons why many black Americans are still angry about American slavery is that most people in America do not know that the founding fathers themselves were slaveholding bigots and hypocrites (yes, I do use these words on purpose) despite the “founding fathers” many wonderful ideas. So deep is the extent of black shame and white guilt that we often cloak ideas that need to be addressed and diminish the ongoing legacy of slavery. Yes, I do mean BLACK SHAME and WHITE GUILT. Both are problems.

You must also not view Professor Manning Marable’s book How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America as an angry screed. It is NOT such a book. However, he is unsparing in his documentation of capitalist injustice and he does not try to sugarcoat his ideas to make either blacks or whites “feel good.” Sometimes we must feel bad to understand the reality of injustice and then actually work to do something about it.

We need to use ALL of the rhetorical tools available to draw awareness to these problems and questions—cool rhetoric AND hot rage—and we need to employ them often and sometimes at the same time. We cannot become robots bent only on making people feel comfortable about issues of injustice.

This is why I use MANY teaching tools:

o cool argumentation and counter argumentation

o street vernacular

o gestural examples

o in-class writing exercises

o open book exercises to get you to practice argumentation

o open discussions to gather personal as well as scholarly views

o and lots of discussion of key passages of text that involve reading the passages aloud in class

One matter that I left out was a proper definition of the “Constitution in Exile” debate.

The following link is to an article by Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University that addresses the “Constitution in Exile” debate:

The Unregulated Offensive

By JEFFREY ROSEN

New York Times Magazine, April 17, 2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/17/magazine/17CO...

END QUOTE

Re: I’m Ambivalent About Posting Photos

Jonathan David Jackson — Sat, 23 Apr 2005 19:29:50 -0000

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.

Re: Arresting Children Under 12 In Florida

Jonathan David Jackson — Wed, 27 Apr 2005 09:10:11 -0000

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.

Re: Mother’s Day and Yom Ha’shoah

Jonathan David Jackson — Mon, 09 May 2005 17:11:43 -0000

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.

Re: Festival Of Spring

Jonathan David Jackson — Mon, 09 May 2005 17:31:57 -0000

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

Re: Hey! My Blog Was Mentioned On ABC Local News In Mississippi

Jonathan David Jackson — Wed, 18 May 2005 04:40:23 -0000

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.

Re: Book Summary - Susan Orr-Klopfer, Where Rebels Roost: Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited

Jonathan David Jackson — Sat, 02 Jul 2005 15:09:09 -0000

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

Re: Products Of The Environment

Jonathan David Jackson — Wed, 13 Jul 2005 13:15:43 -0000

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.

Re: Born Again Jim Crow

Jonathan David Jackson — Mon, 08 Aug 2005 07:16:46 -0000

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.

Re: While I’m Mentioning Bitch PhD

Jonathan David Jackson — Thu, 11 Aug 2005 13:57:21 -0000

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.

Re: Read The Whole Thing

Jonathan David Jackson — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 05:38:37 -0000

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.

Re: Jonathan David Jackson Responds To Steven Sherman

Jonathan David Jackson — Sat, 17 Sep 2005 08:19:00 -0000

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.

Re: Prison Policy Initiative

Jonathan David Jackson — Mon, 17 Oct 2005 06:56:06 -0000

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.

Re: Prison Policy Initiative

Jonathan David Jackson — Mon, 17 Oct 2005 06:56:55 -0000

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

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

Re: Obligatory Listening - Malik Rahim and Scott Crow Talk About Common Ground

Jonathan David Jackson — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 13:13:16 -0000

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.

Re: Rosa Parks

Jonathan David Jackson — Sat, 29 Oct 2005 17:41:29 -0000

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.

Re: Four Black Students Suffer From Another Katrina Race-Related Injustice

Jonathan David Jackson — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 11:02:28 -0000

Dreadful and I'm not surprised.

Re: The New World

Jonathan David Jackson — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 14:41:10 -0000

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

Re: The Bus

Jonathan David Jackson — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 02:01:11 -0000

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

Re: Gorjus

Jonathan David Jackson — Sun, 11 Dec 2005 14:31:57 -0000

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.

Re: Gorjus

Jonathan David Jackson — Sun, 11 Dec 2005 14:33:24 -0000

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

Re: Winter. 1969

Jonathan David Jackson — Mon, 26 Dec 2005 19:35:21 -0000

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.

Re: Mother of Slain Civil Rights Worker Urges Senate to Pass Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act

Jonathan David Jackson — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 22:58:38 -0000

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.

Re: How Much Destruction of History is OK with You?

Jonathan David Jackson — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 17:58:30 -0000

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.

Re: Friday Random Ten

Jonathan David Jackson — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 22:01:43 -0000

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

Re: Poem

Jonathan David Jackson — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 10:48:28 -0000

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