Derek Walcott

Photo by Eamonn McCabe of one of my favs, Derek Walcott, from a feature in the October 4, 2008 Guardian.

Carbon in Oz

Oz = Australia, for those of you who don't have Australian friends who use the slang term. I first encountered "Oz" in an email from SourceWatch editor Bob Burton (bio) who hails from Hobart, the capital of Tasmania and home of the prize-winning poet Kathryn Lomer (pictured above) . To see how the internet distracts for one's intended post, go to bottom of this entry to read more about her. And I've also got a brief mention of some news on ethnic journalism from Dan Kennedy.

But back to what I want to write about: carbon in Oz. While Al Gore got most of the attention in this country regarding his July 17 proposal that the U.S. commit to producing 100 percent of its electricity from renewable energy and other clean sources within 10 years, Oz had its own debate last week, as I learned while compiling the Saturday feed for NewsTrust.

Australia just presented its attempt at a nationwide scheme to cut greenhouse-gas emissions by 60% by 2050: Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Greenpaper by the Australian Department of Climate Change. The Sydney Morning Herald's Stephanie Peatling, in "The Missing Numbers in the Emissions Equation," does a pretty good job of pointing out the weaknesses of the working paper on cutting carbon emission. I recommend her piece as part of a series of articles the paper has published from all points of view this week--the government, scientists, business. You might also want to check out the opinion piece from The Australian by its national affairs correspondent Jennifer Hewett, "Carbon Play an Act of
Belief."

The Canberra Times chief political correspondent, Phillip Coorey has a piece dated 7/23/07 (due to international time zone differences, perhaps) "Union wants money, jobs for carbon reduction," which raises a point I believe I saw mentiioned by Gore at Netsroots Nation, as covered on C-SPAN. When asked about mountaintop removal, he said he was agin it and that a portion of the revenue from any carbon tax should go to displaced coal miners. I'll try to find it.
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By the way, for those of you interested in ethnic reporting, Dan Kennedy sent me the article he wrote for Commonwealth Magazine about the New England Ethnic Newswire. For another source, see New America Media. My favorite writer found though Dan's articles is Aswini Anburajan who blogs at Feet in Two Worlds. Here's the July 21 piece in the aftermath of Postville.
http://thepoliticalcarnival.blogspot.com/


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How I distracted myself from carbon footprints by researching Kathryn Lomer:

• [1] the prize she won for her second book recored @ 4:39 p.m.


• [2] a review of the second book (not third as he states,at least according to the intro...) @ 4:50


• [3] a good review of the first poetry collection. The more I read, the more I think she deserves a first-rate article on Wikipedia, rather than a stub. @ 5:11


• [4] an interview w. a good quotation about what she likes best about writing here, although the quilt image is overused, however true. @ 6:17
  

You become interested in everything, or everything becomes interesting – I’m not sure which. And you can create something from all those otherwise useless odds and ends you accumulate in life - memories, experiences, overheard conversations, dreams, anecdotes; it’s a bit like making a quilt from leftover scraps of material.

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Heather McHugh at VA Festival of the Book

Photograph of Heather McHugh (email) from the University of Washington in Seattle, where she is a professor in the English Department.

McHugh read from her poems at UVa Harrison Institute / Small Special Collections and then attended the beginning of a reception at the Colonnade Club. Both locales are on the central grounds.

The Academy of American Poets has a recording of her reading "What He Thought" on April 21, 1992 at the French Institute/Alliance Francaise in NYC, along with a slightly diffent version of the text, as it was published in Hinge & Sign: Poems 1968-1993 (Wesleyan University Press, 1994).

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Later in the evening, I got to hear Charles Wright reading along with Poet Laureate Charles Simic.

Split This Rock Poetry Festival

Sonia Sanchez at Bus Boys and Poets, and Martin Espada, Ethelbert Miller, Naomi Shihab Nye (pictured above) and Alix Olson at Bell Multicultural High School. Quite the lineup. I walked over to the latter w. Steve, who lives in the city. Interestingly he was talking about a poet who's work impressed him and it turned out to be Diane Gilliam. Adrianne Rich could not attend but sent a letter and a poem. Sam Hammill had had a series of minor heart attacks, so likewise.

This one by Naomi Shihab Nye earned a standing ovation:

Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport

After learning my flight was detained 4 hours, I heard the announcement: If
anyone in the vicinity of gate 4-A understands any Arabic, Please come to the
gate immediately.

Well — one pauses these days. Gate 4-A was my own gate. I went there.

An older woman in full traditional Palestinian dress,
just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly. "Help,"
said the flight service person. "Talk to her. What is her problem? We told her
the flight was going to be four hours late and she did this."

I put my arm around her and spoke to her haltingly. "Shu dow-a, shu- biduck
habibti, stani stani schway, min fadlick, Sho bit se-wee?"

The minute she heard any words she knew — however poorly used – She
stopped crying.

She thought our flight had been cancelled entirely. She needed to be in El Paso
for some major medical treatment the Following day. I said "No, no, we’re fine,
you’ll get there, just late, Who is picking you up? Let’s call him and tell him."

We called her son and I spoke with him in English.
I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and would ride next to her — SouthWest.

She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it.

Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and found
out of course they had ten shared friends!

Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian Poets I
know and let them chat with her. This all took up about 2 hours.

She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life. Answering questions.

Soon after, she pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies — little powdered
sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts — out of her bag and was
offering them to all the women at the gate.

To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a Sacrament.
The traveler from Argentina, the traveler from California, the lovely woman from
Laredo — we were all covered with the same
powdered sugar. And smiling. There are no better cookies.

And then the airline broke out the free (non-alcoholic beverages from huge
coolers and the two little girls for our flight--one African
American, one Mexican American — ran around serving us all Apple Juice and
Llemonade and they were covered with powdered sugar too.

And I noticed my new best friend — by now we were holding hands – had a
potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing, with green furry
leaves. Ah, an old country traveling tradition: always carry a plant. Always
stay rooted to somewhere.

And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought, "This is the
world I want to live in. The shared world."

Not a single person in this gate — once the crying of confusion stopped – was
apprehensive about any other person.

They took to the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women too.
This can still happen anywhere.

Not everything is lost.

~




And this one by Martín Espada is the title poem from a collection of the same name:


Imagine the Angels of Bread

This is the year that squatters evict landlords,
gazing like admirals from the rail
of the roofdeck
or levitating hands in praise
of steam in the shower;
this is the year
that shawled refugees deport judges
who stare at the floor
and their swollen feet
as files are stamped
with their destination;
this is the year that police revolvers,
stove-hot, blister the fingers
of raging cops,
and nightsticks splinter
in their palms;
this is the year
that darkskinned men
lynched a century ago
return to sip coffee quietly
with the apologizing descendants
of their executioners.

This is the year that those
who swim the border's undertow
and shiver in boxcars
are greeted with trumpets and drums
at the first railroad crossing
on the other side;
this is the year that the hands
pulling tomatoes from the vine
uproot the deed to the earth that sprouts the vine,
the hands canning tomatoes
are named in the will
that owns the bedlam of the cannery;
this is the year that the eyes
stinging from the poison that purifies toilets
awaken at last to the sight
of a rooster-loud hillside,
pilgrimage of immigrant birth;
this is the year that cockroaches
become extinct, that no doctor
finds a roach embedded
in the ear of an infant;
this is the year that the food stamps
of adolescent mothers
are auctioned like gold doubloons,
and no coin is given to buy machetes
for the next bouquet of severed heads
in coffee plantation country.

If the abolition of slave-manacles
began as a vision of hands without manacles,
then this is the year;
if the shutdown of extermination camps
began as imagination of a land
without barbed wire or the crematorium,
then this is the year;
if every rebellion begins with the idea
that conquerors on horseback
are not many-legged gods, that they too drown
if plunged in the river,
then this is the year.

So may every humiliated mouth,
teeth like desecrated headstones,
fill with the angels of bread.

The Paintings of e.e. cummings

Sound #5 by e.e. cummings from Suny Brockport

NPR's site has a slide show , which accompanied a story today on the poet's paintings at SUNY Brockport. The college is asking wealthy supporters to "adopt" one of its 72 pieces by cummings so that it can be restored after being turned down three times for a grant from the National Foundation for the Arts. There's also a longer piece that was published in October 2007 in the Wall Street Journal, as well as an online gallery of all the works at the College's website. The National Academy of Poets has an exhibit including a biography, some of the poems and helpful links.



suppose... (VIII)

suppose
Life is an old man carrying flowers on his head.
young death sits in a cafe
smiling, a pierce of money held between
his thumb and first finger

(i say "will he buy flowers" to you
and "Death is young
life wears velour trousers

life totters, life has a beard" i
say to you who are silent.--"Do you see
Life? he is there and here,or that, or this
or nothing or an old man 3 thirds
asleep, on his head
flowers, always crying
to nobody something about les
roses les bluets
yes,
will He buy?
Les belles bottes--oh hear
, pas cheres")

and my love slowly answered I think so. But
I think I see someone else

there is a lady, whose name is Afterwards
she is sitting beside young death, is slender;
likes flowers.


Although cummings considered himself more of an artist than a poet initially, according to the WSJ piece, the paintings, while interesting, don't have the energy of the poems.

Claudia Emerson Wins Pulitzer

The photograph of Claudia Emerson by her husband, technical designer and musician Kent Ippolito, appeared in Blackbird, VCU's online magazine of literature and art.

Congratulations to the Virginia from Chatham, an assistant professor of English at the University of Mary Washington (UMW) who won the 2006 Pulitizer Prize for Poetry for her third collection, The Late Wife: Poems, published last year by LSU Press.

You can hear her read from the poems at UMW in September of 2005 and at at the Library of Congress, where she was awarded the Witter Bynner fellowship in 2005 by Poet Laureate Ted Kooser (also on the committee selecting the Pulitzer.) Emerson also spoke on the May 22 edition of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities radio progam, With Good Reason , about how she infuses her poems with childhood memories of growing up in Chatham. I set up an article on Emerson at Wikipedia.

Emerson received her MFA from UNC-G in 1991. Her mentor there, poet and fiction writer Fred Chappell, had this to say to Sean Olson who wrote an article for April 18 University News.

Claudia has always had a clarity about her work,not only in her work, but also in the way she goes about her work. I've always admired that clarity. She had a determination -not to win prizes- but to do the very best work she could, to achieve excellence.

Fred, with whom I studied at the Atlantic Center for the Arts ( the same place that I studied with Bill Stafford) reviewed The Late Wife for the Raleigh, NC. News and Observer on December 25, "Same Mine Yields Different Gems," which also includes a review of One Good Hand, by my SAWC cohort, Dana Wildsmith.

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Here are three of Emerson's her poems, used with her gracious permission, which were featured on Poems.com.

Aftermath

I think by now it is time for the second cutting.
I imagine the field, the one above the last

house we rented, has lain in convalescence
long enough. The hawk has taken back the air

above new grass, and the doe again can hide
her young. I can tell you now I crossed

that field, weeks before the first pass of the blade,
through grass and briars, fog — the night itself

to my thighs, my skirt pulled up that high.
I came to what had been our house and stood outside.

I saw her in it. She reminded me of me —
with her hair black and long as mine had been —

as she moved in and then away from the sharp
frame the window made of the darkness.

I confess that last house was the coldest
I kept. In it, I became formless as fog, crossing

the walls, formless as your breath as it rose
from your mouth to disappear in the air above you.

You see, aftermath is easier, opening
again the wound along its numb scar; it is the sentence

spoken the second time — truer, perhaps,
with the blunt edge of a practiced tongue.

The Spanish Lover

There were warnings: he had, at forty, never
married; he was too close to his mother,
calling her by her given name, Manuela,
ah, Manuela — like a lover; even her face

had bled, even the walls, giving birth to him;
she still had saved all of his baby teeth
except the one he had yet to lose, a small
eyetooth embedded, stubborn in the gum.

I would eat an artichoke down to its heart,
then feed the heart to him. It was enough
that he was not you — and utterly foreign,
related to no one. So it was not love.

So it ended badly, but to some relief.
I was again alone in my bed, but not
invisible as I had been to you —
and I had learned that when I drank sherry

I was drinking a chalk-white landscape, a distant
poor soil; that such vines have to suffer; and that
champagne can be kept effervescent by putting
a knife in the open mouth of the bottle.

Homecoming

The camera is trained on the door, no one
in the frame, only the dog sleeping. And then
finally, I see this was to surprise you,
filming your arrival, the dog's delight. Only now,
six years distant, can this seem scripted, meant:
the long, blank minutes she waited, absent
but there — behind the lens — as though she directs
me to notice the motion of her chest
in the rise and fall of the frame, and hear

to understand the one cough, nothing, the clearing
of her throat. Then, at last, you come home
to look into the camera she holds,
and past her into me — invisible, unimagined
other who joins her in seeing through our
transience the lasting of desire.

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Here are some links to other Emerson Poems online:

• The Bat , Blackbird, Volume 2, No. 1, (Spring, 2003)
• Frame, An Epistle, Poetry Magazine, July, 2003
• Pitching Horseshoes, Blackbird, Volume 2, No. 1, (Spring, 2003)
• Possessions, Blackbird, Volume 2, No. 1, (Spring, 2003)
• Surface Hunting, Blackbird, Volume 2, No. 1, (Spring, 2003)
• Second Bearing, 1919, Smartish Pace, 2004
• Bone, American Academy of Poets website
• Artifact, LSU Press site for The Late Wife

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Susan Settlemyre William has "An Interview with Claudia Emerson in Blackbird: An Online Journal of Literature and the Arts, Volume 1, No 2 published on December 16, 2002 Pinion, An Elegy. There's a link to the audio file at the bottom of the page.

She reviewed the book in the same issue.

Note: Here's a nice article that came out April 20 in the Richmond Times Dispatch by Michael Martz: "Pulitzer-winning poet from Chatham Virginia: Professor latest with ties to town to bask in literary glory."