And Consequently Meant for Publication

Back in 1921, Dorothy Parker was reviewing Broadway plays.  She panned a musical called The Right Girl, for (among other offenses) featuring "a song which exploits the rhyme:

I wouldn't give five cents
For a marriage license."

I'd thought rhymes like this were an innovation of rap; I guess it's worth knowing that they were sung on the legitimate stage a century ago.

Last night I went to a poetry slam at a local venue, mainly because a friend wanted to go, under the impression that it was going to focus on work by LGBTQ youth, which sounded interesting.  It turned out he was wrong -- the youth slam had taken place elsewhere, earlier in the evening -- and he decided not to go anyway.  Though I've been to numerous poetry readings, professional and amateur, I don't think I've ever actually attended a poetry slam before, so I paid the $5 cover.  (The event was a benefit for undocumented youth, so I don't regret the money I spent.)  I don't like the idea of poetry slams, which seem to be an attempt to win an audience for poetry by foregrounding the worst kinds of macho poetasting, combined with competition: poetry reading as pro-wrestling.  That's a doubly toxic cocktail as far as I'm concerned.  I have watched a video of a West Coast semiprofessional slam, which confirmed my bad impression.  But hey, give the kids a chance.

In a way it was reassuring: bad poetry is forever.  (Or as Christ might have said, the bad poets you will always have with you, and they'll be first in line for the open mike.)  First up was an avowed straight white boy who announced that he usually writes depressing stuff, but had decided to give the audience a break by reading something humorous.  He then warned about content, the poem was about sexual objectification, but it was a joke, right?  He was right: it was a bad joke, the content could have come straight from some asshole's Twitter feed, and you don't get a pass for sexist objectification just because you know what you're doing and admit it in advance.  I was depressed; maybe some of what he thought was his "depressing" stuff would actually have been funny.  But, happily, he did only the one.

Next up was another skinny white boy.  He did two rapid-fire raps of no distinction, and wanted to do a third but the MCs called time on him.  (I must give the organizers credit: the event was well-arranged, and it seemed they were not going to allow the great pitfall of many open mikes: the poet who bogarts the mike to read one dreadful screed after another.)   He surrended the stage readily, to his credit.

Next was a young woman in a buzzcut whose poem, she informed us, was about "trans identity."  (I'm referring to her as "she" because she didn't specify a pronoun, and it wasn't clear whether the poem was about herself -- she left that vague.)  The poem was undistinguished, and could have been written by any of the myriad poet-wannabes I've heard at open mikes over the past five decades.  One innovation: she read the text from her phone.

Finally (for me) a "proud bisexual" male poet took the stage.  His contribution was also a collection of cliches; sincere and well-meant, no doubt, and well-done for what it was, but basically it was MFA fodder.  No doubt he'll go far.  Next up after him was an acquaintance of mine, a local politician around 50 whom I've known since he was in college.  That confirmed my feeling that maybe I should have signed up to read myself -- I could have read a poem from my tablet, since I have most of my work on this blog.  But I had other things to do with the evening, and scooted out, freeing my seat for someone else.

I gather there will be another slam in a month, so maybe I'll sign up for that one.  I would not spend any time introducing my poem, as the other readers felt compelled to do.  That's another cliche of poetry readings that is still evidently with us.  (I began that post with an explanation, because the poem included has confused many people over the years.  It's atypical of my poetry posts here.)  One that wasn't in evidence last night was audience members chattering while the poets read: the audience was quiet and attentive, which was gratifying and a nice change from what I've observed in the past.

So, I'm venting.  But on the whole I was relieved to find that the college poetry scene has not changed, that Sturgeon's Law still applies.  I don't think I've succumbed to old-person nostalgia (which as Adrienne Rich said is just amnesia in reverse), since as I say, only the styles of body ornamentation have changed since the 70s.  Maybe if I'd stayed longer someone would have provided the surprise and revelation that you get when a really good poet, something with something of their own to say, takes the stage.  If I go to another of these, I'll stay for the duration and find out.

A Brief for the Prosecution

An old friend, a poet herself, linked today to this poem.  Just the part of it that showed in the preview pressed certain buttons in me.  After acknowledging "Sorrow everywhere.  Slaughter everywhere", the poet declared "But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants."  No no no, I thought.  Not today, not this week, not this year, not this century, I will not let this one pass unchallenged.  So I took a deep breath and commented: "'Defense' of what? I'm sorry, but that thing is vile."

(And that was before I'd read the lines "If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down / we should give thanks that the end had magnitude", which confirmed my contempt for the performance: if the locomotive of the Lord runs us down, there's no magnitude in our end, we're just one more caterpillar on the tracks.) 

The person who'd posted the poem on his tumblr (not the poet himself, who died in 2012), replied in a few minutes:

The poem isn't a defense but a kind of preparation. I don't think it is vile. It admits the world is filled with horrors but says we cannot give ourselves over that entirely, that we have to live and love despite ourselves, despite the awfulness in the world.

I'm not sure what "a kind of preparation" is supposed to mean, but his response strikes me as the lowest kind of apologetics.  (Where, after all, does "the awfulness in the world" come from?  Who fills the world with horrors?  That's why I object to the bit about "the locomotive of the Lord" -- it appears that the poet accepted exactly the kind of theodicy I have no use for.)  I also think he's misreading the poem in terms of his own preconceptions -- what Walter Kaufmann called the exegetical fallacy, reading your beliefs into a text and getting them back endowed with its authority.  I replied:

If it's not a defense, it needs a different title. But what struck me as vile was the line "we enjoy ourselves because that's what God wants." Which god? According to every orthodox theology I know of, and most non-orthodox ones besides, suffering is something that God wants, either because we've brought it on ourselves or because God wants to test us, or because God works in mysterious ways, or other such nonsense. If I want to read good poetry about human suffering, I'll read the Book of Job. Or Marge Piercy, who's written some good poetry on this subject over the years.

To which he replied,

Okay, be angry and carry on. Jack Gilbert is one of the great poets of the 20th Century, and this poem is one of his most beloved. But no one is forcing anyone to read it. --- shared it as many people have today.

Great poets have been known to write great garbage.  They are not above criticism, and indeed it's all the more important to criticize them when they say something stupid or evil.

I confess I'd never heard of Jack Gilbert before today. According to his obituary in the New York Times, "Brief for the Defense" (quoted in its entirety there) is one of his best-known poems.  Because I haven't read anything else by him, and I'm not going to start now, I have no context for the statements in this poem, though I find it hard to imagine what context could make them anything but malignant.

Then my poet friend chimed in:

My only comment is to note that the word "risk" is in this poem for a reason.

That's exactly the kind of use of words like "risk" I object to.  (It reminds me of "intervention," which also sets off alarms for me.)  Of course the word is in the poem for a reason; I just don't think it's a good reason.  I think it's posturing, preaching to the choir: like Marilynne Robinson daringly declaring herself a liberal and a Christian, like Greg Louganis telling gay audiences that he knows It's not a choice, like Barack Obama telling his fans that if Wall Street wants a fight, that's a fight he's willing to have, like black conservatives denouncing the Civil Rights Movement in front of white Republican audiences.  Risk without cost, risk without risk.

And what kind of "risk" is involved in "delight"?  I speculate it's the "risk" that it won't last forever but will pass.  Maybe that really does deter some people.  But that delight will pass is not a risk, it's a certainty.  I see the wish to escape transience as one of the main impulses (and errors) behind much religion, born of a wish to achieve bliss that will never end.  I understand that wish -- how could I not? -- but it's never going to be fulfilled.

I'm not surprised that the poem is well-loved by the kind of people who sentimentalize the smiles and laughter of the destitute from a safe distance, admiring and praising the big smile of your ragged shoeshine boy before you go back to your comfortable hotel room and, ultimately, to your suburb.

I was amused by her friend's dismissive "be angry and carry on" -- as if anger were a bad thing.  But then a lot of people think it is.  (At least, other people's anger is a bad thing; their own is worn with pride.)

Of course I wasn't forced to read the poem.  But I respect my friend, which means I take what she puts on Facebook more seriously than I do what many other people I know post.  (Except for the cat-related material.)  I'm not saying she should not have posted the poem, but having seen it and read it, I won't be told I should not respond to it.  (And to be fair to her, let me stress that it was not she but her friend who got all spitty about my reaction.)

That's always a difficult question in a place like Facebook.  On one hand, you've got people who have conniptions at seeing anything they dislike.  On the other, you've got people who think that freedom of expression means no one is entitled to disagree with anything they post.  My friend is a librarian as well as a poet, and committed as most librarians are to freedom of expression, even when it's offensive or disturbing or unpleasant.  Most of what I disagree with on Facebook I don't respond to.  When I do comment, I do so carefully and I hope thoughtfully.  Often I decide not to comment after all, and cancel what I began to write; sometimes I bring my complaints here.

According to my friend's friend, it would seem that "Brief for the Defense" is being used to express the feelings of a lot of people lately; perhaps because of Robin Williams's suicide, because of the summary execution by police of a young black man in St. Louis and the subsequent repression of community objections to the slaying, perhaps because of the latest Israeli blitzkrieg in Gaza, perhaps because of the renewed civil war in Iraq, perhaps the combination of all these things and so much more.  It was because of all these things and more that I found the poem a wrong-headed statement, and chose to say so.

I suspect that my reaction to this poem and all that it represents is a matter of temperament.  I would prefer that there's no god, No One out there, rather than Someone watching the world and doing nothing about it except shedding great salt tears.  I know that there are many who'd disagree with me, and I suppose "Brief for the Defense" speaks to them.

It's probably not out of place to add that I agree with part of the poem, the idea that people somehow find reasons to go on living and celebrating their lives in the face of the horrors they suffer.  Where I differ is in the poet's declaration that God wants them to do so.  I don't believe in gods, but if they exist, their wishes don't determine what I think or do.  If we "risk delight," it's not because of the gods, but despite them.  (The "risk," if any, in most theologies would be that the gods don't want us to be happy, and will punish us for daring to be so.  Compare C. S. Lewis's very orthodox claim that Yahweh makes people suffer because they've had it too easy, and "The creature's illusion of self-sufficiency must, for the creature's sake, be shattered.")  It would be altogether right to go on living in flat defiance of their wishes, and to curse them and the locomotive they rode in on.

'Cause He's the One

Though the election is now behind us, the Cute Obama Pictures juggernaut grinds on.  It won't end until all resistance has been crushed, and every knee is bowed and every tongue has confessed that he is Lord.

I mean, c'mon, would a war criminal allow a picture like this to be released?

Sure he would, and he did.  But it's so cute!  You have to be a total hater not to love him.

Then there was this one, which came my way from my liberal law-professor friend:

This is a really vile distortion of the history of the Civil Rights Movement, and of race in America.  Rosa Parks "sat" -- that is, she refused to move to the back of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama -- as a first step to break through Jim Crow segregation, and the ensuing bus boycott was for all African-Americans, not just to give Martin Luther King a leg up.  The Civil Rights Movement itself didn't just consist of a few charismatic individuals: there were thousands of courageous people who put their lives on the line in that cause.  This is important to stress because of the American tendency to ignore or vilify organization and solidarity in favor of the Hero who smashes injustice single-handed, and then passes the torch to his or her successor.

Likewise, Martin Luther King was a spokesman for a movement much greater than he, and without which he'd have been nothing.  Sometimes he had to run just to keep up with it himself.  No doubt he was interested in African-Americans' being elected to political office, and he wouldn't have objected to an African-American president, though it's fair to wonder what he'd have thought about the African-American president we in fact got, who used the occasion of winning a wholly unmerited Nobel Peace Prize to jeer at everything King stood for.  (Very neatly, and savagely, dissected here.)

As for Barack Obama, well, he doesn't really give a damn about anyone else's children, leaving aside his penchant for killing them.  (And cheering on other leaders who kill them.)  I've always been critical of the tendency to turn him into a Civil Rights hero, because although he stands on that movement's shoulders he clearly views it as his footstool, to be used for his own advancement and then tossed aside.  As Shirley Sherrod, whom he fired in a vain attempt to appease the racist Republican right, tells it (via):

[Ta-Nehisi Coates] asked [Shirley] Sherrod if she thought the president had a grasp of the specific history of the region and of the fights waged and the sacrifices made in order to make his political journey possible. “I don’t think he does,” Sherrod said. “When he called me [shortly after the incident], he kept saying he understood our struggle and all we’d fought for. He said, ‘Read my book and you’ll see.’ But I had read his book.” ...

In her new memoir, The Courage to Hope, she writes about a different kind of tears: when she discussed her firing with her family, her mother, who’d spent her life facing down racism at its most lethal, simply wept. “What will my babies say?,” Sherrod cried to her husband, referring to their four small granddaughters. “How can I explain to my children that I got fired by the first black president?”

And fired not because she'd done anything wrong, mind you.  The basis for her ejection was a falsified videotape, edited by the unlamented Andrew Breitbart to make her look bad.  She was barely out the door when the hoax was exposed.  Her boss had the resources to see if she deserved to be dismissed, but he couldn't be bothered.

Meanwhile he's working to extend the War on Terror indefinitely, so that "our children can fly" predator drones, forever.  What's appalling about stuff like this is that Obama cultists aren't content merely to insist that Obama is preferable to, say, Mitt Romney: they feel that they must exalt him as a hero and very nearly a saint -- which he isn't.

Baby, It's Marginalized Outside

I'm working my way through a new book, SAFE SPACES: Making Schools and Communities Welcoming to LGBT Youth, by Annemarrie Vaccaro, Gerri August, and Megan S. Kennedy (Praeger, 2012). It will no doubt be useful to many people, but there's something about the book that bothers me.

In the introduction, the authors declare:

Safe Spaces is not merely a book about facts, figures, and statistics. It was born out of the real-life experiences of LGBT youth. In fact, Safe Spaces gives voice to a population that historically been marginalized. ... Safe Spaces is a cultural critique of sorts, one that exposes deeply entrenched marginalization of LGBT youth in America [6, 7].

I don't deny that this is a worthwhile project. What bothers me is that the authors seem to want to give the impression that they're doing something new. Just on my own bookshelves I have several books about LGBT youth, dating back to at least the late 1980s. Most are based on interviews, so as to 'give voice' to their subjects. There are many more than the ones I own, and that's not counting increasing numbers of works of fiction about the lives of LGBT youth; there's also plenty of material online written by young people, instead of being mediated through well-meaning adults.

In this light, it's hard for me to see how Safe Spaces could possibly expose "entrenched marginalization of LGBT youth". Such exposure and giving voice to youth began a couple of decades ago, so the real question for the authors to answer is what they have to add to the conversation. So far -- but I'm admittedly only about 25 pages in -- the answer appears to be "Nothing much." That's not necessarily a bad thing. Maybe books and articles on a certain subject have to reach a critical mass before they can have much social or institutional effect. What worries me is that the authors themselves seem to think they're breaking ground, coming to the rescue of kids who'd long been marginalized until SuperTeachers flew in. That belief gives the book a self-congratulatory tone, making it subtly more about the authors than about the kids, and it's that tone that I think makes it hard for me to read.

The reason I find this annoying is that it doesn't stand alone. Aside from gay youth, another issue that gets rediscovered regularly is People Who Have Sex with People of Their Own Gender Without Being Gay. (Yet another is Gay Men and Straight Women: Best Friends -- Or Are They?) This phenomenon was not unknown even before 1948, when the first Kinsey volume was published, and the AIDS epidemic brought it into new relief, giving us the construct of Men Who Have Sex With Men. It's not surprising that popular media, which are built on identifying or inventing new trends, should be ignorant of that history. But back in the early 90s a colleague handed me a copy of a professional journal article, I think aimed at college counselors, built on interviews with a half-dozen college students who reported homosexual contact ranging from pickups to affairs while refusing to think of themselves as anything but straight. Nowhere in the article was it mentioned that this was old news. Maybe the author felt it necessary to treat it as a revelation so that the article could pass as a contribution to the field -- but why didn't the editors of the journal recognize that it wasn't?

Similarly, perhaps Vaccaro, August, and Kennedy believed they needed to present their book as something new in order to get it published and make it look impressive on their c.v.'s -- they're all academics, and I know life is hard in the Ivory Tower. But if you distort history, you're not doing any favors to your students and their students after them. I've complained before about books written by respectable academics and published by mainstream houses which contain serious errors of fact, but then I've also argued that readers need to read everything critically, whether it's in print or on the Internet.

I also have strong reservations about the whole concept of safe space, which I've written about here before at length. If I go by the index, the authors of Safe Space don't bother to define their central term; that's not a trivial omission, since even professionals don't agree on its meaning or parameters. It looks like Safe Spaces is going to be a long hard slog, so I'd better get back to work on it. There'll be more to be said on this subject, unless I manage to procrastinate more effectively.