Category: Poetry

Happy Birthday Sam Hamill

I suppose if I stop and think about it I am the kind of person they like to call a "public intellectual" which means that people who don’t make their living in the academy have had the opportunity perhaps far too frequently to eat rubber chicken and listen to me.  I’ve spoken to Rotary Clubs; Lion’s Clubs; the Masonic Temple of Manhattan; a Texas Association of Ophthalmologists; bankers; lawyers; civic planners; museum curators; engineers; radio executives; rehabilitation counselors;  police groups; dog handlers; tourism experts; alumni associations of all kinds; I’ve spoken to jogging societies; church groups; politicians; taxi drivers; I’ve spoken to groups that are concerned with the art of public speaking; I’ve even spoken to a group of Austrian Dadaists who were assembled in a cave inside a mountain in the middle of the city of Graz.

For the most part I don’t really like the word "intellectual" as a marker of identity.  I remember when ex-Beatle John Lennon snarled to a Rolling Stone interviewer that he was too intellectual "even though I’m not really an intellectual."  I was 16 at the time Lennon said that, but I knew that I didn’t want to be part of a revolution that excluded dancing.  (And yes, I’d also heard that quip from Emma Goldman around that time…)

Still I think more and more of the price that we all pay in our contemporary and largely anti-intellectual culture if we don’t declare ourselves to be critically engaged with the honorable traditions of the Enlightenment.  In turn I believe that this means that here in America we must fight ardently for freedom in all its forms: social and economic freedom, freedom of expression, and yes, the freedom we call human rights.

I believe that we are losing the war in Iraq because we are largely perceived as a nation that is not fighting for freedom either domestically or internationally.

I’m not the first person to say this and I won’t be the last.  But I’m wagering that not one of the 11 GOP representatives who met privately with President Bush raised this essential point.  We are losing because of Guantanamo Bay and because of the prison scandals inside Iraq.  We are losing because we aren’t fighting for freedom.  We can’t even seem to deliver it here at home.  This is the most bitter pill of all: we are not fighting from a position of virtue as we did in the second world war.  History shows that nations that do not fight to protect human rights always lose.Hamill_2

Yesterday was the 75th birthday of my friend, the poet Sam Hamill who among other things has been one of the most ardent protestors of America’s military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Sam’s been involved with Poets Against War and he continues to travel widely and speak out about the injustices that are being committed in our nation’s good name.

Thank you Sam.  Peace!

S.K. 

Oh Dave. Thank you.

I am a
lucky poet to have a friend like Dave whose blog Into My Own has published
interviews and reviews of my work.  I
have given him some new poems to post during national poetry month and you can
visit his site and check out his terrific work on behalf of American poetry and
see my small contributions to Pegasus there as well. 

Here’s to
poetry month and to poetry readers and writers across the nation.

Thanks Dave!

S.K.

Tap, Tap

I walk with a guide dog for the blind most of the time. Some days I travel without him. I tap the pavement with a long white stick.

Once, in Dublin, Ireland, I worked my way through the long airport and swept my cane before me and a woman grabbed me by the arm without warning.

"Where do you want to go?" she asked. She was wearing serious perfume.

"I want to go to Paris," I said.

"Oh," she said, "that’s where I am going!"

"Ah," I said, "but I don’t want to go to Paris today."

"Why not?" she asked. She was still clutching my arm.

"Because Paris is the city for restlessness," I said, "and I am not restless."

We were standing in a crowded Irish airport and for a moment we were perfectly still.

"Today," I said, "I am headed for the sea where I will become actual, sharing the form of motion."

She let me go and walked away, lost in her own body of thought.

s.K.

On Being in Good Company

If you visit Lance Mannion’s blog you’ll see that Mr. Mannion has placed me in the company of the poet Tom Lux in the "personal poetry preference" department.  I am all agog and aquiver because I adore the poems of Tom Lux and I’m just sufficiently a kid-minstrel that I am unabashedly giddy with beanie rotating pleasure at being handed such a fine paper flower.

I am posting a poem I wrote about western New York State, a place that Lance Mannion knows well:

The Jazz From Cripple City


I saw tonight four men in wheelchairs eating

Flowers And laughing through the dusk

While in the public gardens

Forsythia leaned to the water.

O to bear up under such rollicking measures…
O to live in Baffalo, New York and eat civic plantings…

Yes I wasn’t alone before this poem began:

Yes, it’s true, I can’t see a thing.

A friend had to tell me about the men who ate from the rhododendrons.

Her description was full of detail, let us say, as

The courts are full of law,

As Doc Williams might have said.

But no one can describe the murmurous laughter that does not
Alter the case.  & the twilight full of sounds…

S.K.