Wednesday, May 1, 2019

The desire to impeach President Trump should be distinguished from the desirability of impeaching him. The only impeachment that has a chance of winning happens on Election Day, 2020; and as impatient as many people might be for that day to arrive post-haste, I am afraid that we must endure this imposter for another year and a half, during which he will no doubt cause permanent damage to the democratic process (such as it is) in the United States. If those who favor immediate impeachment have their way, they will only play into Trump’s hands, for I am certain he regards formal impeachment as his best means of rallying support. This is not to say that subpoenas should not be issued at a record pace. His financial affairs, especially involving the issue of emoluments, deserve extended congressional scrutiny, and I only wish that Congress was not in recess as the GOP holds its nominating convention in the last week of August, 2020.

Recent polls indicate that a majority of Americans plan to vote against Trump, but if he can convince a significant number of them not to vote at all, then he could well win another close election. The three states that decided the 2016 election had exceptionally small margins of victory for Trump, and those states are exactly where it will play out again. The Democrats must win Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania in order to win the White House in 2020. If the upcoming presidential election depends on winning Ohio, then I assure you that Trump will indeed triumph again, even as George W. Bush secured re-election by winning that state in 2004. Ohio was almost as dubious in 2004, as Florida was four years earlier; but all that mattered was how the game played out in Ohio, and it was not in John Kerry’s favor.

Trump has long been regarded as the first “reality TV” president, but the 2020 presidential election brings to mind not “The Apprentice,” but rather an earlier prototype: “Survivor.” Just as Trump whittled away the GOP competition in mid-decade, he no doubt sees a similar set-up already in motion. A huge field of Democratic candidates has landed on the “island,” and Trump knows that his reelection depends on the Democratic party voters booting candidates off the island in a manner that leaves both party loyalists and independent voters deciding not to vote at all in November, 2020, instead of holding their noses and voting for someone they dislike.

Joe Biden, for example, is someone I intensely dislike. His entry into the race is not surprising. He’s a professional politician, and he wants his deathbed scene to be one in which he is assured by his family that he would have made a great president. I would just as soon not ever had him serve as a senator or vice-president. He is kind of political operative who epitomizes what Mike Davis calls the “barren marriage” of the working-class and the Democratic Party. If Obama proved to be as disappointing as a president, in direct ratio to the excitement he provoked as a candidate, then that disparity is precisely the reason that Biden is the probably the worst possible choice for the Democratic Party. Biden played a significant role in taming candidate Obama in the transition period to office-holder, and for nudging Obama in the wrong direction Biden should be allocated nothing less than our heart-felt opprobrium.

Since the election is a matter of the Electoral College outcome, one has to ask oneself if a left-wing candidate can secure at least 270 votes in the Electoral College. Two of the poet-bloggers I read on a regular basis (Brooks Roddan and Ron Silliman) have already announced that they favor Bernie Sanders, and I concede that I lean that way myself. However, I fear that Sanders will prove to be an even more inept administrator of his presidential duties than Jimmy Carter, and that his failure to bring about much needed reform will leave the electorate vulnerable to the machination of a variation of Ronald Reagan in 2024.

I have a hunch that Elizabeth Warren would actually prove to be much better at executing the office of the President of the United States, and that she would have a superior chance of being reelected in 2024. As such, I remain unwilling to endorse Sanders at this point. I would first like to see several debates in which no more than five Democratic candidates are given an opportunity to confront each others on policy preferences (for instance, let “Medicare for All” begin its first incremental growth by covering all children under the age of eight). There should be at least two sets of these five candidates on stage on any one occasion, and at least two of the candidates should be women. If Biden were one of the five, I would prefer to see Warren, Gillibrand, and Klobuchar on stage with him, with Pete Buttigieg being the fifth candidate. Biden deserves to learn what it feels like to be marginalized, and let it start with the debates.

I found the disposable camera, that had this particular shot in it, in a box I was going through as part of the sorting I am doing for my literary archive. At first I thought that I was up in Idyllwild, at Sabrina’s cabin, the one inhabited by Velcro, a cat whose size required a door entrance large enough to also permit a full-grown raccoon to get in the cabin. The roll of film also included some shots of the stone backdrop of the grotto’s waterfall, without any creek flow off of its orchid-like lip.

However, this particular part of that sequence of images was taken in our current residence, earlier this decade.

Wednesday, April 24, 2019

https://www.poeticdiversity.org/main/index.php?fbclid=IwAR1t1dAmKj7NkBhLzU4pYDn9JJvvwwfP-cNB_-gP74DIPE52vNTdKsMRyAA

Vol. 16, No. 1 (April, 2019)
POETIC DIVERSITY
Edited by Marie C. Lecrivain

Featuring Rich Follett, Dan Rachel Jimenez, Terry McCarty, Simon Perchik, Kevin Ridgeway, Opalina Salas, Annette Marie Smith, Jan Steckel, Lois Michal Unger, Amy Uyematsu, and Viola Weinberg.

http://calibanonline.com/CO35/

ISSUE NO. 35 of CALIBAN
Edited by Lawrence R. Smith

CALIBAN features Ray Gonzalez, Will Alexander, Ivan Arguelles, Jim Grabill, Doren Robbins, Sheila E. Murphy, Simon Perchik, Lawrence R. Smith, D,E, Steward, Dan Raphael, John M. Bennett, and Wayne Hogan.

“It all falls upward, every drop a rival.
We gather to bear witness
To the gravity of rain.”
— Lawrence R. Smith

Monday, April 22, 2019

In the backyard of the house in southern San Diego my brother and I sold a couple years ago to raise money for the ongoing care of our 97 year old mother (needless to say, no inheritance heading our way), there were two storage sheds that had not been opened for a while. Pine needles had gathered around the handles. In the late afternoon of an overcast winter day, I took photographs with my flip phone.

Easter Sunday, April 21, 2019

The first article in the LA Times on the whitewashed mural of the 1984 Women’s Marathon in Los Angeles did not mention the artist’s name until the end of the second paragraph, and then did not once mention her by name in the remainder of the article. This attack on a work of art that honors one of the important milestones (26 of them, in fact) in women’s athletics deserved a more comprehensive article than was first posted in this city’s major newspaper.

Here’s the link to the most recent iteration:

https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-historic-olympic-mural-whitewashed-20190419-story.html

I am pleased that the first two words are: “Judy Baca…”

I remain skeptical about the denial of CalTrans that it was responsible for the mural’s obliteration. I look forward to immediate action on their part to restore the mural, as well as to cooperate with SPARC in preventing such atrocities in the future.

Thursday, April 11, 2019

I would like to call attention to a pair of upcoming literary events. On Saturday, April 13, Aleida Rodriguez is reading at Beyond Baroque, in Venice, California. On Thursday, April 18, at 4 p.m., Cherrie Moraga will be giving the annual Helena Maria Viramontes lecture at CSULLB at the University Theater at 4:00 p.m. Rodriguez was the first editor and publisher to publish Moraga’s poetry, though at the time she was still using her birth name (Lawrence). By chance, my poetry also appears in that issue of rara avis magazine.

Among the younger writers for whom the poetry of Rodriguez and the plays of Moraga provide the context of continuity, Monica Teresa Ortiz has had a chapbook published recently that deserves your attention. Autobiography of a Semiromantic Anarchist, which was the winner of the Host Publications Chapbook Prize, consists of two sections of prose poems, “the waiting room” and “sanctuary.” While each of these titles emphasizes the spatial setting, it is the temporal factor in this collection of poetry that proves to be the most revealing.

Ortiz regards herself as the Nintendo Generation, those born in or after the video game “Donkey Kong” debuted in 1981. Although I doubt she has any interest in pursuing the topic, I believe she could write a intriguing personal essay on the topic. As someone born at the start of the Baby Boom generation, I can vouch for how her descriptive term is an accurate delineation of a cultural shift that became best known as the Millennial Generation, after first being dubbed “Gen X.”

Ortiz’s score of prose poems in this chapbook most directly reflect the “survival” aspect of video games, which feature a narrative that tests the ability of a protagonist to withstand the sudden imposition of a hostile environment. Eros and Thanatos grapple like sweaty wrestlers in her poetry. “We fuck under the conditions of economic collapse and climate change.” While most of her generation cohort expresses its “outrage if (they) can be clever in under 240 characters,” Ortiz has chosen the less visible social medium of prose poetry. Autobiography of a Semiromantic Anarchist deserves to be retweeted about until the crisis she speaks of becomes the topic of urgent, massive action. In particular, I would call your attention to the final note in the post-script to the main portion of her book: “But I already told you: a queer futurity is the best bomb shelter we could build.” By that, I assume she means that there would be no bombs being built that we would need.a shelter from. In Ortiz’s writing, readers can find a worthy successor to the unwavering challenge posed by Don Gordon’s poetry of protest.

The L.A. Times Book Fair will feature many of the best known fiction writers and poets in the United States, including Joyce Carol Oates and T.C. Boyle. The one panel I wish I could find the time to attend features Lynell George and William Deverell, and I would urge you to try to get a ticket to the panel, if you are planning to spend time at the Festival this year.

Of the poets who are scheduled to read, my favorite is Rae Armantrout, and I am delighted to see that she was accorded a slot on the poetry stage. Other poets include Terrance Hayes, Kathy Fagan, Laura-Anne Bosselaar, Lynne Thompson, Ilya Kaminsky, Robin Coste Lewis, Carl Philips, Marilyn Chin, Brendan Constantine, Charles Harper Webb, Carol Muske-Dukes, Sonia Greenfield, Michelle Bitting, Claudia Keelan, Chase Twichell, Elena Karina Byrne, Kim Dower, Victoria Chang, and Kevin Prufar.

It’s an odd list of prominent figures, in which something is definitely “off.” I can’t really imagine an anthology that would be able to make this assemblage a cohesive ensemble. This line-up is the kind of thing that gives “eclectic” a bad name. I am quite certain I’m not alone in being able to think of two or three dozen poets in Los Angeles whose combined readings would make for a more interesting program, one in which a stronger influence of the past century’s avant-garde poets would be more audible.

Perhaps the problem is the time allotment for each poet. Once a decision is made in which each poet is asked to read for a brief time, a festival presentation will accelerate towards a “talent show” compendium. Why not instead give each poet at least a half-hour, which would include a three-minute introduction by another poet, and make the entire afternoon of poetry no longer than three to four hours? A program that started with Robin Coste Lewis, and then presented Terrance Hayes, Lynne Thompson, Michelle Bitting, Rae Armantrout, Marilyn Chin, Kathy Fagan, and finished with Carl Phillips would be much closer to being a delectable festival’s outpouring than the “eat and run” quality of the current surplus. A follow-up afternoon that began Carol Muske-Dukes, and then featured Kim Dower, Victoria Chang, Brendan Constantine, Elena Karina Byrne, Charles Harper Webb, Laura-Ann Bosselaar, and Claudia Keelan would be more than worth attending, too. A selective tightening up of the scheduled program would boost the overall timbre of its contiguity.

As it stands, though, I will be elsewhere next weekend. Aleida Rodriguez, one of the poets I published in MOMENTUM magazine in the mid-1970s, was awarded a COLA grant in 2018, and is giving a featured reading at Beyond Baroque on Saturday evening. One can hardly blame me for wanting to spend time at a place where I have read or lectured over a score of times. I’ve never been asked to read, even briefly, at the LA Times Book Festival, in large part because I haven’t had a book out that’s been available for Small World Books to sell at its nearby booth after the reading. Having a book come out this past fall, however, doesn’t seem to have made much difference.

I’ll grant you that HEADWATERS OF NIRVANA hasn’t met with the same acclaim that its forerunner of a bilingual edition in Mexico received, in which both translators wrote substantial comments on my poetry as an introduction or back cover material. I remain a distinctive outsider in the United States. In Mexico, PRUEBAS OCULTAS was listed by a panel of poet-critics as one of the two dozen best books of poetry published in mid-decade.

In contrast, not one of the above poets in this year’s LA Times festival knows more than a small fraction of my poetry, or would be able to assess in a meaningful, accurate way the literary worth of my poetry. Now while that is a justifiable reason for leaving me out, I suspect that it is also one that would not be admitted by some of these poets without nonplussed hesitation, or awkward, unconvincing denials.