We have to keep going back to it, after all, if we wish to maintain contact with the possible.
Category: landscape
A plan for social transformation
Martin Luther King, Jr., Day.
Annette Gordon-Reed in NYR, 2018.
Figures like King, Harriet Tubman, and Rosa Parks have now become “safe” in ways they never were when they were operating at the height of their powers. Stripped of their radicalism, they are welcomed as sources of inspiration in the curricula of almost every elementary school in the country.
[…]
King started to speak even more openly and insistently about the “second phase,” which would be a “struggle for ‘economic equality,’” with unions as the linchpin of this effort. King, along with his aide Bayard Rustin, had long thought that there should be a “‘convergence’ between unions and the civil rights movement.” Everything was at stake for King here: if the second phase of his plan for social transformation was successful, “everyone could have a well-paying job or a basic level of income, along with decent levels of health care, education, and housing.”
He soon found, however, that “union racial politics remained contradictory and complicated.” The same racism that permeated American society also had a firm grip on the union movement. As had been true throughout American history, many poor and working-class whites had no interest in solidarity with blacks against white elites.
[…]
With the Poor People’s Campaign, King hoped to reprise his triumphant 1963 March on Washington by leading thousands of poor people to the nation’s capital to demand a “radical redistribution of economic power.” The effort was fraught from the start, as his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, had neither the funds nor the infrastructure to organize the huge event he envisioned. The task was not only physically draining, it was psychologically difficult. For as King crisscrossed the country to promote the effort, “the right-wing hate campaign against him escalated.” While in Miami to speak to a group of ministers, King remained in the conference hotel because the police could not ensure his safety.
Signal, worthwhile and preferred–open source, end to end encryption, cryptographically secure.
AG2020_1880804a or a minutiae
we cheer him on,
winter softened in the tropic of his strength.
Patrick Kavanagh’s poem “Epic” has talismanic importance to older Irish poets who took from the following lines license to write about the minutiae of their own locales:
I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.To be from a small country and to write intimately about your own affairs is to risk making your poetry impenetrable, irrelevant, or both, even when writing in a global language like English. And yet to exclude your own affairs, to eliminate the parochial from your “epic” entirely risks self-censorship or a denial of one’s own truth.
An American poet can mention the film Predator, Henry Kissinger, or the town of Ferguson and an informed and cultured Irish person will know the references. Conversely, if an Irish poet chose to write about Wanderly Wagon, Pádraig Flynn, or the town of Granard even a cultured American reader, unless a specialist in Irish Studies, would be lost.
Patrick Cotter, Introduction, Poetry, September 2015
a calm, a weary happiness
Acceptance
Yesterday it was still January and I drove home
and the roads were wet and the fields were wet
and a palette knife
had spread a slab of dark blue forestry across the hill.
A splashed white van appeared from a side road
then turned off and I drove on into the drab morning
which was mudded and plain and there was a kind of weary happiness
that nothing was trying to be anything much and nothing
was being suggested. I don’t know how else to explain
the calm of this grey wetness with hardly a glimmer of light or life,
only my car tyres swishing the lying water,
and the crows balanced and rocking on the windy lines.
Acceptance, Kerry Hardie via poets.org poem-a-day
AG2025_1088656a or interrelation between self and other things
the interrelation between self and other things.
effort to resist dissolution of those bounds in erotic emotion.
undeniable evidence remains, in the preserved fragments of their verses, of a sensibility acutely tuned to the vulnerability of the physical body and of the emotions or spirit within it.
— Anne Carson
All this beauty is tinder.
Today ~ I found a squirrel ~ dreaming ~ the sleep of the young and unknowing ~ I pray for a world ~ scatter-starred with that kind ~ of tenderness ~ Nothing hears me ~ Let’s pretend
[…]
I write these words ~ a lifetime away ~ at the foot of the mountains ~ another sea ~ vaster galaxy ~ primordial and without memories
Dear Sister, Emma Trelles
All this beauty is tinder.
[…]
In Glitter Stucco and Dumpster Diving: Reflections on Building Production in the Vernacular City, the architect and urban planner John Chase describes LA as a city that follows no design or aesthetic ambition but insolently unspools from the desires of its people. LA has no Haussmann or Frederick Law Olmsted; it has Angelenos, and in the ‘mad and wonderful’ architecture of the city, with its stucco box houses alongside its faux Swiss chalets, its Tudor cottages, bungalows, faded pink apartment complexes and ancient auto repair shops, glittering strip malls and shabby hotels, there is a romantic stubbornness, at once dogged and extravagant, tender and brash.
[…]
Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, … A fawn stumbled out of the smoke, and a horse ran back into it to nudge two other horses onward, faster.
Under the Santa Anas, Anahid Nersessian
AG2025_DSF6022a evokes a thousand sympathies
Your speech evokes a thousand sympathies,
And all my being’s silent harmonies
Wake trembling into music.
Dreams, Amy Lowell
Newcleus, Jam On it. 1984.
AG2024_DSF6786a or a silence not silent
The ??launiu breeze lifts voices from the night.
Dogs curl under their houses. The city
burns to the shore, red with distant industry.
Awake, my baby’s eyes are two dark moons.
Even the dogs curl into sleep. Even the city.
We watch the headlights swipe past our window.
Awake, my baby’s eyes are two dark moons
or their eclipse—night opening to night.
Headlights skirt across our window
trailing the scent of gas. Sometime past 2am,
I feel eclipsed. Night reaches out to night
drawing me back to the hospital room,
the scent of my baby’s matted hair. Past 2am,
I held his tiny body and we floated in a silence
that whirred and pinged. In the dark hospital,
in my exhaustion, I heard singing emerge.
I held his tiny body, floating through a silence
not silent, but a greeting from this other land,
this one long night where we’d emerged.
He opened his eyes and his gaze was steady—
a greeting, a land. I began to weep. His body
against mine was too small for the weight
of his gaze, his steady eyes—a doorway
between our nights, and through it, voices.
Sleepless Pantoum, Laurel Nakanishi