Poetry and Populism

If Walt Whitman lived today, what song would he hear America singing? In his day he must have heard the agony of the lash and sound of sweet chariots coming. He had an ear for the suffering as he tended to war-wounded and he heard the rattle of gold amassed during the Gilded Age. 

He knew the commonweal. Untamed himself, he sounded his own barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. Whitman contained multitudes. He gave voice to the working man, to each leaf of grass, to this cradle of democracy endlessly rocking.

The decline of our country can be marked by the radical change of what we used to call the masses. In Depression days after the 1929 Crash, the rural poor seemed aligned with an urban working class. They may have been largely uneducated, racist and Bible-thumpers, but they understood exploitation and bank foreclosures. And they understood that their staunchest friend was the federal government.

In addition, they could smell a demagogue when Huey Long was renounced as he tried to establish a mobocracy in Louisiana.

Credit the Republican Party with dumbing down the underclass, keeping their collective minds off their own well-being and turning their animosity against the single institution which has always benefited them the most, the government in Washington, where any semblance of a safety net was given birth.

Informed populism scares corporate America; but an aggrieved, ill-informed and misled populace is a grave danger to the very welfare of the masses and to democracy itself.

Would Whitman be mourning that our fearful ship is done, as he grieved over the loss of, Oh captain, my captain, Abraham Lincoln? Would he further write that the lilac last in the courtyard bloomed? Or could he find the cadence that beats jubilant our feet. He wrote that the future is our masterpiece as yet unwritten.

As Eliot wrote: There will be time for you and me to drop a question on our plates / a time for a hundred visions and revisions. / There will be a time for us to wonder and to dare.

To answer the tragedy unfolding in the fields and the streets where we now shackle the huddled masses, I turn to Stevens' line, After the final No, there comes a Yes. 

The Rectangle and the Round

 A baseball is exactly like an orange except one gets crushed and the other squeezed and the one is filled with cork and the other with pulp but otherwise they are identical in size and shape and every other way except for the rind in the orange and the yarn in the other covered in cowhide and stitched and if you threw the orange to a batter you'd get juiced, pulped and pitted and I don't imagine the orange would curve or sink or flutter like a knuckleball but otherwise they are indistinguishable in the dusk with the light behind them.

If you stick a band-aid on the orange, it might fetch triple figures and become a museum piece as a decontextualized construction demonstrating the use of two disparate objects in juxtaposition causing a shift in our way of seeing and our conception of space.

The distinction between art and life has been closed. Pause is music. Sitting in a chair can be a dance and a clothesline is sculpture. Baseballs and oranges have a kind of beauty but beautiful is no longer the operative word in Art. We are suspicious of prettified images. Poetry is criticized for being too poetic. The pendulum has long since swung away from ornamental, classical forms. Museums might as well remove their walls... Chris Burden's installation of Urban Lights adorn the entrance to the L.A. County Museum of Art and in the rear is a 340-ton boulder, Levitated Mass.

It is enough to have our perceptions rattled. A bandaged orange forces us to see the imagined wound, the confluence of round and rectangle shapes and the natural and man-made incongruities. After being saturated with objects online, in magazines and on our tables every waking hour the effect is to grab us by the collar and LOOK but look with different eyes. The art is in the experience of looking. For a brief moment the orange and the viewer may be transformed.

Better yet consider a blue, orange and red Band-Aid. Or if the orange were a rectangle and the Band-Aid round it would alter our senses even further. If you showed a straw coming out of an orange-colored baseball as a source of Vitamin C it could also take its place on a gallery wall in exhibition and shift our perceptions and maybe that's the name of the game.

Now consider sharp rustbelt Pennsylvania poking into amorphous Ohio; the rectilinear against roly-poly Ohio, beginning and ending with O. Sparks fly or at least rust.

Hi diddle-diddle, see cow jump over moon or the long arm of ICE coming out of the Oval and stabbing its victims. Art and life,

both tumultuous. 

   

Fourth of July

Ironic to be celebrating the founding of our country when in reality we are bearing witness to an extended deathbed scene. Hour by hour the precepts which bound our nation are being overturned. Absent is the legislative branch. Usurped is the Justice department. Bought is the judiciary. Mocked is the Constitution and its amendments. In less than six months, we have descended into quasi-monarchy. Threatened is dissent and betrayed is the populist constituency which gave him their votes.

This is the day to be cherished, flawed as it is when Thomas Jefferson declared that all propertied white men are created equal. The rest of you guys, get over there. And you too, wives, sisters and daughters. You may be equal but we plantation owners are more equal. After all, there is cotton to be picked, stolen land to be tilled, bales to lift and barges to tote.

Falling as it does on a Friday, means we have an extra day to buy a mattress, set off senseless firecrackers frightening pets, igniting fires and causing Ukrainian refugees to deal with episodes of post-traumatic stress syndrome. 

Otherwise, happy 4^th of July. If backyard BBQs and picnics are the signifiers, count me in. Any excuse for eating and drinking with friends will do just fine. It’s the next best thing to Thanksgiving.

This is no year for fireworks. The country is already combusting. Let this 4th of July be a time to revisit and redress the omissions and injustices baked into our document's yeast. 

Three of our first five presidents died on this day. If they could be brought back, they would shudder to see how the birth of this nation has been subverted. How a home-grown despotism has replaced the monarchy they rebelled against.

The legacy of Independence Day is still aspirational. The heirs of Thomas Jefferson's 230 slaves have been emancipated on paper but not yet freed from economic suppression, disenfranchisement and daily indignities, Now, that festering worm of racism in the minds of the dominant class is directed against asylum-seekers of color whose ancestors once occupied this land.

The temptation is to buy that mattress and sleep for the next three years, but we may wake up in a state of shame, dependence and decay with our former document in tatters. Better yet, let that mattress spring us to action.

Walking the Walk

At age fifteen, I ran from one apartment house to another dodging superintendents while distributing leaflets against the Taft-Hartley Bill and campaigning for the Progressive Party in the 1948 election. A year later I stood tall at the Paul Robeson concert in Peekskill, N.Y. 

In the 60's I was out there in front of defense plants in silent vigils or at demonstrations protesting the Vietnam war and the draft. Before that the issue was fair housing.

These days, I just talk the talk.

For over fifty years as a pharmacist, I was on my feet all day, sometimes eating lunch on the run. I rarely sat down, performing miracle healings eight hours a day. (Hold down the applause). 

The problem with being 92 is that my architecture and entrails are also 92, beyond their shelf-life and out of warranty. Back at my 88th birthday I felt like I was 60 years into my 20s, racing around as caregiver for Peggy. Then, halfway to 89, just after Peggy died my ambulation hit the wall. People don't stroll much in L.A. anyway. One might get arrested for vagrancy. 

Up until about a year ago, I walked about ten blocks every day. Janice, my daughter dear, saw to it. She didn’t take any of my guff. I didn’t know I had any guff. In fact, I don’t even know what guff is except that I had it now and then, in resistance.

When I say ten blocks, I mean five blocks and back and with my walker. In effect, I was rolling; I could barely keep up with myself when the incline was downhill. I might even have passed Sisyphus.

We took the same route every day, so I became acquainted with the sidewalk. It is a topographical adventure negotiating the reptilian roots and fissures. Levels change every few steps as if I was walking on the roof of an underground civilization bulging here and caving in there.  

My next move was to a park where the path was level. It is a passing parade with kids climbing trees, elbow by elbow. There goes a frisbee into the mouth of an Irish setter. I greet joggers and dog-walkers but pass unnoticed to most whose world is in their mobile phone. I'm also passed by women of color pushing strollers with white skin babies. Ball games and picnics are my distractions along with deep whiffs of pine needles and freshly mowed grass.  

That was then. Nowadays my arthritic ankle and knee along with some autoimmune disorder and balance issues makes walking more challenging.

At this point I pause, leave my keyboard and head for my favorite park to test myself. I walk the equivalent of about three blocks keeping pace with the snails. I can hear my several joints screaming as I put weight on them. It is bone on bone without any cushion from cartilage. I can still make some poetic leaps and jump to conclusions but, I suppose, that doesn't count.

Metaphorically, walking the walk stands in opposition to talking the talk. Action vs. lip-service. However, when I’m not grimacing, the two are complementary and each can be transformational. My imagination gets ignited as I mosey along. Poems get born. Walking can be an interrogation into shuttered regions. Any day now I may come up with the meaning of life. Until then I’ll keep meandering through the thickets and dunes of my inscape.

Joe Whose Coat Had Many Colors

When Joseph and Mary got to the inn 

God forgot to make reservations 

and there was no room except in the manger. 

That's what happens without Planned Parenthood

and Joe Biden out of office.

If the Big, Beautiful swindle bill gets through 

it may rouse Joe the Plumber.

Whatcha know, Joe? Do you still no nothin?

Eighty years ago, Jo Stafford addressed G.I. Joe 

as she sang You Belong To Me. 

After the good war was over Joe McCarthy 

in his drunken stupor thought he saw Joe Stalin 

in every movie studio, every barber shop, 

and the bottom of every bottle he drank. 

Senator Joe was born with Joseph Conrad's

Heart of Darkness. 

Joe DiMaggio and Joe Louis would have been next. 

Even Trader Joe could have been a traitor. 

It took Joseph Welch to ask if he had even an ounce of decency. 

How many cups of Joe will it take 

to wake America to the needs of the average Joe?

Joseph Campbell found heroes with a thousand faces

as he breathed new life into the archetypes.

Maybe the greatest Joe of them all was Joe Green.

Not Mean Joe Green, the football player 

whom I wouldn't want my sister to marry if I had one 

but Guiseppe Verdi, aka Joe Green,

composer of twenty-eight operas

including Aida to whose theme we dutifully marched

entering the auditorium at P.S. 99

with Joseph Koplowitz in front of me

and Josephine Palmeri behind. 

 

From My Pleasure to No Worries

The devolution from an expression of delight to two negatives traces our decline as a culture.

No worries? Bad enough the singular worry. Why would I worry? I came to this restaurant filled with gratitude for being alive, in good health with loving family and friends and now you are telling me not to worry. All I requested was a napkin or was it some bread and in return I’m told not to worry. Could it be there is a table across the room next to a suicide bomber which is the one to start worrying?

No Worries has me yearning for those good old days of No Problem, at least it wasn’t plural. When did You’re Welcome get dropped? Granted that didn’t make much sense but a welcome is better than a warning of impending peril.

Don’t mention it or Not at all, had a good run. I want to petition for the return of, My Pleasure or Happy to Oblige. With it might come the restoration of civil discourse and the end of road rage, incivility and vilifying public figures.

When I do a favor for a friend, I really do take pleasure for the opportunity to express my gratitude for their friendship. Is this now subversive in our country where empathy has been relegated to the sucker file and self-aggrandizement is declared a virtue?   

But what if I want to worry? It's like my right not to Have a Nice Day. Even with my napkin and bread the planet is being choked with foul air and homeless people are begging for shelter. There are currently 43 million displaced persons in the world through war or famine. Equatorial regions have been rendered non-arable from global warming.  No worries indeed!

Maybe the servers are talking to themselves trying to make it through another day. Returning to my salad, I'm eating undocumented greens picked, prepared and served with an illegal smile. No Worries has become a mantra against being snatched up by masked men before the next shift. 

We live in an age of obliquity. Not only deviating from moral rectitude but also a time of indirectness. Can I get you a drink? I’m Good. I didn’t ask whether you’ve behaved yourself today or whether you are an ethical person or a good for nothing. I merely asked whether you would care for a drink.

Maybe all this is a form of poetry. It was Emily Dickinson who said to tell it slant. No Worries, No Problem, no really. I'm Good.

That Old Divide

Here we are living through the epilogue of the Civil War. The simmering embers of that conflict were never doused, never confronted and never resolved. Slavery was replaced by a virulent racism, lynchings, segregation and a persistent sickness in the soul of America. Even antebellum misogyny is having a revival.

Now, that inhumanity has been rekindled. The hoods of the Klan have been replaced by the masks of ICE agents. A mindless nativism is sweeping the country against people of color.

The degradation of human bondage which served to divide the underclass in 1860 continues today with misdirection of the aggrieved masses to vent their loathing against asylum-seekers. The malice of the administration toward immigrants serves the MAGA constituency not one bit.

There have been 16,000 books written about Lincoln and that war between the states. I’m currently reading two of them. Michael Shaara’s 1975 book, The Killer Angels is considered a classic as it profiles some of the officer combatants and brings them to life on the page. Particularly fascinating are their blunders, their arrogance and in one instance how the southern general, James Longstreet, saw the light in the aftermath and espoused the northern cause.

The other book I started I am unlikely to finish, since it is 725 pages. I was startled to learn that Jefferson Davis's wife, Verina, was opposed to slavery and regarded by some in the Confederacy, as being mulatto or creole. When Davis was jailed for two years after the Union victory, Varina moved to NYC where she worked as a columnist for Joseph Pulitzer’s newspaper, The New York World. It was Pulitzer who got Davis out of prison.

This book is called Lincoln vs Davis by Nigel Hamilton. Much is made about these two men and their wives. If Davis’s wife had abolitionist sympathies, Mary Todd Lincoln had siblings fighting for the Confederate cause.

We may have forgotten how families were ripped apart not unlike today. However, since the MAGA control of the federal government. the matter of state’s rights is now reversed. Instead of importing human labor in chains, we are exporting millions of laborers in shackles. Working people of the old Confederate states are once more being misled by the old fallen angels well-practiced in moral vacuity.