Who am I? Hint: I've just come from an ATM machine and was mugged by a big, scary Obama supporter...
here are some scary new poems of mine in Turntable and Blue Light; it’s a good-looking issue with new stuff by Amy King and others — thanks to Arielle Guy for publishing them.
Some of the poems are connected to recent work that appeared in Exquisite Corpse.
Happy Halloween everyone!
Reports out of the McCain campaign this weekend that Sarah Palin is “going rogue” in some of her appearances, contradicting the party line on various issues, basically starting to distance herself from the sinking ticket and look out for numero uno. In honor of this, and having (finally) received my voter registration card from the state of New York, I thought I’d “go rogue” myself with a few thoughts that might otherwise seem a bit premature.
Assuming Obama’s lead holds between now and election day, it’s more a matter of how many electoral votes he’s able to swipe and how large of a “mandate” he’s able to draw from that than actually winning or losing at this point. Yes, yes, there’s the so-called “Bradley Effect,” and I’m the last one to want to count any chickens before they vote, but let’s pretend this happens and imagine what an Obama administration — with control of both houses — would look like.
There will be an enormous mess to clean up, perhaps the biggest one in U.S. history. When the market collapsed in 1987, there weren’t two wars simultaneously being fought, with other potential conflicts brewing on the horizon. This October is shaping up to be remarkably similar to that one, with about a 22-25% decline in stock prices. It took years for the economy to fight its way back. It’s not even clear what should or can be done, though at least in this case Obama definitely has a mandate to go in and try — whether that means restoring basic protections like Glass-Steagall, passing new laws, making some fairly fundamental changes to the way Wall St. operates, etc. — after all, his surge in the polls coincided with the recent panic.
On the war front he faces a trickier challenge. Let’s assume he sticks to his plan — a fairly speedy pull-out in Iraq and the diverting of resources and personnel to Afghanistan. He’ll need political cover, because even though we’ve been in Iraq longer than WWII, the right will scream that he’s accepting “defeat.” This is where a figure like Colin Powell will come in handy, and I’m convinced that Powell will take a large role in the Obama cabinet providing such cover. Gen. Petraeus will need to be on board, too. Even then, it won’t be easy — Democratic presidents are always vulnerable to charges of being soft, and feel the need to over-compensate with tough rhetoric. This may be the most difficult and divisive area for Obama to wade into, but wade he must.
A host of other issues — the alternative fuel, energy independence project he’s touted, the health care plan, education, etc. — will require political unity among Dems (not always a guarantee) and enough votes in both houses. They will also require money. It’s not at all clear where we’ll be able to find the money, given that the right is already screaming about taxes and socialism, especially since eight years of Bush have eroded the tax base and made everyone believe that taxes should always only go down, not up. If people start to see that some tax increases are necessary to pay for these projects, and go along with them for the good of the country — fine. I think it’s possible, but it will take shrewd PR, with all the forcefulness but none of the lies that accompanied the Gulf War rollout. If not, support and votes will disappear, and we’ll be stuck with a milder version of the ineffective dithering we have now.
Finally, let’s remember that in two short years, mid-term elections come up. You can bet that the right is already trying to figure out what went wrong this time, and will emerge with a new-old message and plenty of straw men to argue with, starting with the president himself. It will be a tough fight to maintain control of both houses. Four years from now, another presidential election. Sarah Palin will have four more years of “executive experience,” fighting oil companies on behalf of Alaskans and keeping an eye on Putin. She will also, presumably, master the art of the unscripted interview.
I have a lot of hope for an Obama presidency — much more than I ever did for Clinton. But the challenges will be the greatest of any president during my lifetime. And if Palin “rears her head” in 2012… let’s just say I’m keeping my passport up to date.
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What is “madness”? How have we defined it over the years, and how has society chosen to deal with those it defines as “mad”? In the H.H. Richardson Complex in Buffalo just blocks from our house, we have a living document of how a previous era chose to approach these questions.
The building itself is remarkable. Both the impetus to build it and the concept behind it were born of the “moral movement” in relation to treating madness that took root throughout Europe and spread to the U.S. during the 19th Century. The idea was to provide the mad with spacious grounds in which to wander and exercise, give them well-lit and ventilated shelter, and generally avoid the overcrowding and inhumane treatment in “prison-style” asylums of previous eras. Richardson — at the time an unknown architect — was awarded the design, and Frederick Olmsted (also responsible for Central Park in NY, Delaware Park here in Buffalo) worked on the landscape and grounds, which initially covered some 900 acres but now have mostly been divvied up with Buffalo State.
When it opened in 1880, it only housed a few hundred patients; part of the idea of the curved corridors (see the pictures) was to discourage administrators from shoving beds and patients into them. The building was designed to capture maximum light in all the wards, with common areas for patients to gather in. Olmsted even thought of tilting the buildings in relation to the avenue, so it wouldn’t look so imposingly “asylumlike” from outside — this is also the idea behind the way the buildings gradually get smaller and “retreat” the further they are from the central towers; from above, it’s said the complex resembles a “flock of geese.” Despite the effort to avoid overcrowding, the asylum housed over 3,600 patients post WWII. Beds were shoved close together in areas that were meant for common space.
It still operated as an asylum till the mid-1970s, and the tower building still housed administrative offices till the mid-90s. As noted in the photos, the hospital scene from The Natural was filmed in one of the wards. I was unable to find a satisfactory site on the complex, but here are some great photos of the inside of the buildings. We only got to see the more preserved Building Ten.
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ONE MORE THING…
happy anniversary to my lovely wife. To repeat the question I asked this morning: are you better off today than you were four years ago?
Thanks to Jerrold Shiroma at Duration Press for easing me through the word press backup. Hopefully those nasty hackers will bother me no more.
My blog is under attack by a hacker — nothing personal, I’m assured, just something endemic to Wordpress. I’ve got to upgrade and try to stamp out these suckers, but for now it takes the form of attacking and inserting spam code into the most recent post. Stay tuned, hopefully I will get this fixed.
By the way, it’s not contagious.
This is a scream… Bruce Andrews will be at UB this week to visit my poetics class and give a reading.
This is a little chap book of mine that Roger Snell recently published through his Sardines Press. It’s got a few short poems in it that came out of a “translation” project that was assigned to us way back in the early days of workshop at Texas State. Though some of the poems share titles with Creeley’s, they are not “translations” in the sense of sitting down with the actual poems and chiseling out new versions, or interpreting them somehow — I guess I have to clarify that, since people have asked me. I was just reading a lot of Creeley at the time — still am, actually — and writing poems that I thought responded to some of the principles and ideas about sound, break, and attention that I discovered in them.
Here’s one:
Let’s build it out of
Mr. Gibson’s guts, cut out
summer to make room for
cancer, a house
half-finished
awaits in the sun.
I only recently discovered there is a poem by Creeley called “The Turn” (though given his concerns, it’s not terribly surprising). It’s in his book Words, which I recently found a copy of at the wonderful local bookstore Rustbelt. Also, this essay on Creeley by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, to which Roger alerted me during my visit to SF in August, brought some of these issues to light and life in a new way…
All this to say there is no particular claim for originality here, but these poems at that time were an important step for me. My thanks to Roger for showing an interest in the work and bringing it out in this lovely form. The books are small, hand-sewn, with covers using a gocco (”go-co”) press and a design hand-drawn by Roger. (That’s Asha’s paw flashing across the top of the image.)
There are a limited number of these babies left, and I’m offering them for sale to those who might also have an interest. All proceeds will go to support upcoming issues of kadar koli and habenicht press.
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