Still Disgusted
On hearing the news, I had to ask myself yet again, how many more fucking times does this need to happen? Omaha, Virginia Tech, and now this (with plenty of other less publicized shootings in between). Not only can the NRA go fuck itself for blocking sane gun control legislation, the Democrats can fuck themselves sideways for running away from the issue like the useless cowards that they are.
posted by Werner Herzog’s Bear at 6:25 PM
Yesterday was the anniversary of Chicago’s ‘St. Valentine’s Day Massacre’ on February 14, 1929, and today is the anniversary of the attempted assassination of President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the killing of Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak on February 15, 1933. These events led to one of the few gun control laws still on the books, the National Firearms Act of 1934. Our recent gun violence should also lead us to take action.
Today, as we grieve with the victims and families of this latest mass shooting, I call on college and university presidents across America to join with us in demanding that the presidential candidates – as well as the U.S. Congress and President George W. Bush – support meaningful action to prevent gun violence. Much more needs to be done to help make our schools and communities safer.
Statement Of Brady Campaign President Paul Helmke, On Northern Illinois University Shootings, February 15, 2008
I’ve been looking around in my usual haunts over the last few days in order to see if there’s going to be a response to the murders at NIU. Maybe folks are trying to be cautious and not take advantage of tragedy by using it for publicity, but so far the reaction has been remarkably low-key, if not invisible. Herzog’s Bear got it just right, I think.
This is the complete post but it’s worth a visit to the site to see the comments. One of the most striking argues that the problem is not too many guns but not enough guns. I heard something similar on Fox the other day. The idea is that these incidents could be prevented if we allowed people to carry concealed weapons.
The irrationality of that argument makes it almost impossible to refute, like trying to convince someone that they were not abducted by aliens. Even worse is the idea that we need these weapons as insurance against our own government. Insurgents, as recent history has shown, don’t need cheap handguns to fight.
In any case, even if we did have to fight our own government we would be silly to mount a violent campaign when a non-violent war would be so much more effective. Maybe one way to counter this silly self-defense notion is to read more about what happens when Americans do take up arms against their own government.
“Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman,” is Cathy Wilkerson’s remarkable memoir that tells this very story. It’s easy to forget that this romance of violent resistance was once a central story in progressive circles, just as it is a central story now in mainstream right wing circles. Wilkerson might be telling the right cautionary tale for our times.
Poetry Criticism: Poetry and Politics
To establish a platform for discussion—and inevitably to over-simplify, to establish a heuristic in what has become a huge body of discussion on the subject—I would argue that contemporary poets espouse three main views of the relationship of politics and poetry. One caveat: Any poem that takes itself seriously as poetry with complex interactions of prosody and lexicon will tend to address all three points of view, but I think the division of approaches is useful.
1. The Content View: One approach represents themes and positions as content in the poem in order to take a relevant political position. The writing process is instrumental to delivering this content or lexical view.
2. The Prosodic View: Another point of view argues that limiting technical mechanisms to representation, to narration and description concedes the most significant political issues of our time. To avoid ceding strategic ground to a political opposition, these poets use a more indirect approach to presenting political ideas by exploring the meaning embedded in prosody. We can call this alternately the rhetorical, non-lexical, or prosodic view.
3. The Non-political View: The third perspective is that poetry need not address quotidian issues of politics. Poetry is really about humanity’s relationship to nature, the universe and the individual’s most deeply felt personal realities that transcend mere politics.
James Sherry, AlYoung.org, February 9th, 2008
Here’s a great discussion I found on AlYoung.org about the aims and goals of poetry. It was organized by the Poetry Society of America in 2000, and features “Thomas Sayers Ellis, Marilyn Hacker, Erica Hunt and Ron Silliman.” James Sillman’s opening remarks are particularly engaging, touch (unknowingly) on the great divide in English Studies between Rhetoric and Composition and Literary Studies.
Sillman cites as an example of The Content View, Thomas Hardy’s WWI poem, “Channel Firing”: “All nations striving strong to make/ Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters/ They do no more for Christes sake/ Than you who are helpless in such matters.” It’s language that is “instrumental to the theme and transparent, a lens focusing the eye of the reader.” This is what Pierre Bourdieu called a popular ethos and its has long shaped composition courses.
And for The Prosodic View, Ron Silliman’s“Sunset Debris” 50 pages of questions with no answers. “Are we there yet? Do we need to bring sweaters? Where is the border between blue and green? Has the mail come? Have you come yet? Is it perfect bound? Do you prefer ballpoints? Do you know which insect you most resemble?” At the center is interpretation, “the writing process and the words themselves together create meaning.”
Here Sillman is in effect defining what Bourdieu called the formalist aesthetic; it’s shaped literary studies for a hundred years. (Sillman rejects the third position as obviously irrelevant to a discussion about poetry and politics, but I am not sure he was correct to do do.) As Sillman says towards the end of his introduction, “poetry contradicts business-as-usual expectations in a way that makes the very act of writing poetry political.”
-
-
Get my book at Southern Illinois University Press, Amazon, or Powell's Books.
The C.C.C.C webpage, A Taste for Language: Literacy, Class, and English Studies includes a short podcast interview with me along with links to these reviews:
... by Victor Villanueva in CCC 62.4 (June 2011)
... by Chanon Adsanatham in Teaching English in the Two-Year College 38.3 (March 2011)
... by Scott McLemee in Inside Higher Education (17 Feb 2010)Note: you need to be a member of NCTE, and a subscriber to the relevant journal, to read the reviews by Villanueva and Adsanatham; the review by McLemee is available to the general public.