A House Divided
On a railroad car in your America, I made the acquaintance of a man who sang a life-song with these lyrics: "Do whatever you can/ to avoid becoming a roofing man." I think maybe you'd deem his tenor elitist, or you'd hear him as falling off working-class key. He sang not from his heart but his pulsing imagination, where every roof is sloped like a spire and Sequoia tall. Who would wish for themselves, another, such a treacherous climb? In your America, a clay-colored colt stomps, its hooves cursing the barn's chronic lean. In your America, blood pulses within the fields, slow-poaching a mill saw's buried flesh. In my America, my father awakens again thankful that my face is not the face returning his glare from above eleven o'clock news murder headlines. In his imagination, the odds are just as convincing that I would be posted on a corner pushing powder instead of poems-- no reflection of him as a father nor me as a son. We were merely born in a city where the rues beyond our doors were the streets that shanghaied souls. To you, my America appears distant, if even real at all. While you are barely visible to me. Yet we continue stealing glances at each other from across the tattered hallways of this overgrown house we call a nation--every minute a new wall erected, a bedroom added beneath its leaking canopy of dreams. We hear the dripping, we feel drafts wrap cold fingers about our necks, but neither you or I trust each other to hold the ladder or to ascend.
Our People, Our Future: Richard Blanco on His Inaugural Poem
Poets.org: To prepare for your writing the inaugural poem, have you studied the inaugural poems by Robert Frost, Miller Williams, Maya Angelou or Elizabeth Alexander? Or, have you reached out to any of those poets (still living) for advice?
Richard Blanco: Yes, I have looked mostly at Angelou’s poem, and then Alexander’s poem, too. I see this position as not only being about writing my own poem for the nation, but also keeping a certain sense of continuity, and so their poems were some of the first places I went to—looking at how they quote/unquote solved the occasional poem.
But I also went back to a poem by a friend and colleague of mine, Nikki Moustaki, that has always stayed in my memory: “How To Write A Poem After September 11th,” which was published in the New York Times on its own page (and included in the anthology Poetry After 9/11: An Anthology of New York Poets, Melville House, 2002). It was also, in some sense, an occasional poem, and very inspiring to me.
And, I went back to some of my old favorites just for language, to reinspire myself. My Elizabeth Bishops and my Robert Frosts. So, the whole gang came out.
Poets.org: What is it about poetry that makes it the art form we turn to so often to mark or understand significant events?
Blanco: In terms of my personal aesthetic or take on poetry, I would say that poetry is the place we go to when we don’t have any more words: that place that is so emotionally centered. It is the place we go to when we have something that we can’t quite put a finger on, that we can’t explain away, that we can’t easily understand with the mind.
It’s the reason I come to poetry as well. As I love to say in my writing classes: If you sit down totally convinced of what the poem is going to be, don’t even sit down. Because writing a poem is a discovery process.
I’ve been working on a memoir, which is more about storytelling. I’ve learned to recognize that when I sit down to write a poem, I have something to figure out, and I have to do it on the page. And I hope that my inaugural poem will do that, in some ways, for the nation. That it will work towards making sense of—all the din of the day—all that we hear in the news.
via Poets.org
This admirable quote is actually by Marianne Williamson.
Happy Birthday to Nelson Mandela, and here are some of his actual words:
“It was during those long and lonely years that my hunger for the freedom of my own people became a hunger for the freedom of all people, white and black. I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed. A man who takes away another man’s freedom is a prisoner of hatred, he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness. I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else’s freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity.”
Cost of War to the United States | COSTOFWAR.COM
Total Cost of Wars Since 2001 = $1,353,371,461,120 and counting
Cost of War in Iraq = $805,319,837,945 and counting
Cost of War in Afghanistan = $548,051,915,410 and counting
Congress Set to Waste 57 Percent of Our Taxes
Congress will debate and vote on a bill — the so-called “Defense Appropriations Act” — that will make us less safe by dumping over $600 billion into preparations for war. Combined with military spending in other departments, this is 57% of all federal discretionary spending.
Included in the bill is $88 billion for continued war right now in Iraq and Afghanistan. Pretending those wars are over doesn’t stop the flow of funds — which are needed for such domestic human needs as education, healthcare, and clean energy.
Moving our representatives toward decent spending priorities is a long-term project. But should they pass this bill, we can at least force them to begin some military cuts. We can insist that they keep the bipartisan ban on military sponsorships of NASCAR and other sporting events — and vote for budget-cutting amendments being proposed by Rep. Barbara Lee.
You’ll remember that Barbara Lee was the only member of Congress who voted against the Sept 14, 2001, blank check to George Bush for endless military adventure known as the “2001 Authorization to Use Military Force.”
Please forward to everyone you know this recent comment from Rep. John Lewis, the legendary civil rights activist:
“War is obsolete. It cannot be used as a tool of our foreign policy. It’s barbaric. … If I had to do it all over again, I would have voted with Barbara Lee. It was raw courage on her part. So, because of that, I don’t vote for funding for war. I vote against preparation for the military. I will never again go down that road.”
Tell your Representative to support good amendments but reject the full bill.
Background:
Democracy Now: Rep. John Lewis, Civil Rights Icon, on the Struggle to Win–and Now Protect–Voting Rights in U.S.
Linda Bilmes (Boston Globe): Afghanistan Is Missing From the Campaign
11 Reasons Teachers Aren't Using Technology
Here are three:
- Consumerism: In many cases, teachers themselves have only used computers for entertainment and social interaction. Often, this comes from a consumerist mentality. Books, no matter how poor the quality, might be escapist, but they are seen as “good escape” because “at least people are reading.” This is because reading is viewed culturally as educational while all things techie tend to be viewed culturally as entertainment.
- Lack of Leadership: When principals worry more about managing liability than pushing for change, technology becomes an easy scapegoat. What if they break it? What if they see inappropriate sites? What if they bully one another on Facebook? It becomes a hassle and to a busy or worried administrator, it’s sometimes easier to create anti-technology policies in the name of safety.
- Inconsistent Paradigms: I see teachers who say, “What am I supposed to do with eight computers?” or “How should I manage multiple devices?” And yet, the same teachers will do learning centers or use eight sheets of chart paper and have kids work in groups. Teachers worry about off-task behavior online and yet kids pass notes frequently.
Ensuring that Somaliland’s oral tradition endures is one of the motivating factors behind the Hargeisa book fair, the brainchild of Jama Musse Jama, a senior analyst with a computer science company who lives in Pisa, Italy.
The event – now in its fifth year – celebrates not just literature but theatre, film and music, as well as showing off Somaliland’s local products from fruit to its version of Coca-Cola.
Gen X-ers on climate change: “Mehh.”
Zeitgeist
Zeitgeist is a German language expression literally translated: Zeit, time; Geist, spirit, meaning “the spirit of the age and its society.” The word zeitgeist describes the intellectual, cultural, ethical and political climate of an era or also a trend. In German, the word has more layers of meaning than the English translation, including the fact that Zeitgeist can only be observed for past events.
Origins
The concept of Zeitgeist goes back to Johann Gottfried Herder and other German Romantics such as Cornelius Jagdmann, but is best known in relation to Hegel’s philosophy of history. In 1769 Herder wrote a critique of the work Genius seculi by the philologist Christian Adolph Klotz and introduced the word Zeitgeist into German as a translation of genius seculi (Latin: genius - “guardian spirit” and saeculi - “of the century”).
The German Romantics, habitually tempted to reduce the past to essences, treated the Zeitgeist as a historical character in its own right, rather than a generalized description for an era.
