----- Original Message -----
From: "Kenneth Wolman" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, December 01, 2008 9:41 PM
Subject: Re: 3 poems
> Frederick Pollack wrote:
>> Actually my rate has been slower than usual ... This is psychologically a
>> weird time to write; it was easier, in a way, under Bush, thinking that
>> everyone Out There was a fundamentalist, nationalist nut. Thinking No,
>> they're more complex and various than that, and that I myself (gasp)
>> might have to take some responsibility for how things turn out ... Apart
>> from bronchitis/flu, end of the semester, economic worries etc., this new
>> more complex perspective makes poetry more difficult. (Which is a good
>> thing, of course.) In "Linz" I was circling back to my native pessimism.
>> Hoping that history proves me wrong.
>
> If, as "Linz" suggests, it's Justice you want, you came to the wrong
> planet.
> What will GW's monument be? Not a Linz but maybe a tort,
> a chain of suits as empty as the 8-year effort to depose him.
>
> Whoever said Poetry Changes Nothing nailed it.
> If poetry had changed the last eight years, Bush,
> Rumsfeld, and the cardiac vampire would be in coffins
> filled with their native earth, stakes through their hearts,
> and Sam Hamill would be President.
>
> Up for dispute.
> What great moments of change we can believe it?
>
> 1. The abolition of slavery that drove it underground where it
> remains to this day?
> 2. The Pure Food and Drug Act that made Soylent Green marginally
> illegal?
> 3. The decision that hanging and electrocution are cruel and unusual,
> to be replaced by the humane euthanasia of lethal injection as
> though all life ended in an animal shelter?
>
> Now name your favorite lie:
>
> 1. Your 401(k) is still fully valued.
> 2. No one will be denied health care based on ability to pay.
> 3. No, babe, that isn't splooge on your dress, its rubber cement.
>
> Grant this much: the President-in-Waiting has defied radio hysterics,
> the natterers who promised a Commie Negroid empire
> presided over by Bill Ayers as the Emperor
> with the little beady rodent eyes,
> and Bernardine Dohrn as Principal Courtesan
> of this neue Ordnung.
>
> It's probably going to be much duller than that and
> in a year we who voted for him probably will hate his guts.
> When will be be out of Iraq?
> How many compromises will he have made
> to watered legislation to get anything through at all?
>
> In a sick way I feel like the kid who was abused
> by his jolly old uncle long ago:
> I cannot forget and I cannot forgive.
> Politics ended in June 1968
> when Sirhan popped a cap in RFK's head--
> RFK, the last politician I believed could effect
> (ready?) CHANGE!!
> I've never trusted a word from the rest of them:
> a drunk driver, a guileless fool, a Governor who
> would have hired Stevie Wonder as his driver,
> finally a whoremonger who married the true Messalina
> of the Washington courtesans.
>
> Is this the one at last I can believe?
> No.
> I voted by default for an Alfred Noyes character,
> The Highwayman, who rode by night
> up to the old inn door.
> Pray God there's no one lurking
> in the shadows.
>
> KW
>
> --
I can appreciate the emotion. But when cultural despair offers some slight
opening, one shouldn't reject it out of hand.
Simone Weil once wrote: The mistake of Marx and the other socialists was to
believe that by walking in a straight line one mounts into the sky. --- When
I read this, years ago, I felt it neatly encapsulated my objection to Weil,
and to all religion. To walk in a straight line - with whatever difficulty,
however comical one looks, and however soon one is interrupted - IS to mount
into the sky. And is the only way to get there.
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