Tell Us What You Really Think, Camille

“The exhausted poststructuralism pervading American universities is abject philistinism masquerading as advanced thought. Everywhere, young scholars labor in bondage to a corrupt and incestuous academic establishment. But these ‘mind-forg'd manacles’ (in William Blake's phrase) can be broken in an instant. All it takes is the will to be free.”

—Camille Paglia, from “Scholars in Bondage”

Consumerism and Sexual Violence

Hill, Spectatorship, and Tragedy

“It is a fatuous thing, appropriating someone else’s suffering as if it were your own. As if your feelings and reactions to it, your peripheral involvement in it, were somehow the most engrossing fact about the tragedy.” From a meditation in The Jesuit Post on Geoffrey Hill's “September Song” in the wake of the marathon attacks.

Reading for the One Fund Boston, May 2nd

The Boston literary community comes together to support those most affected by the marathon attack. Join us on Thursday May 2 at 6:00 pm for a reading by Robert Pinsky, former U.S. Poet Laureate; Sue Miller, best-selling author of While I Was Gone and The Lake Shore Limited; Fanny Howe, award-winning poet, fiction writer, and essayist; author and AGNI editor Sven Birkerts; and acclaimed poet Jill McDonough—with more authors to be named soon.

A donation of $10 is suggested at the door. Our fundraising goal is $5,000 and the audience is encouraged to give generously. All proceeds from this event go to the One Fund Boston (onefundboston.org) in support of those most affected by the marathon attack.

The reading takes place at Emmanuel Church, 15 Newbury St.

This event is sponsored by Boston Review, AGNI, Ploughshares, Grub Street, the Woodberry Poetry Room, Consequence, the Mass Cultural Council, Suffolk University Poetry Center, the Mass Poetry Festival, Harvard Bookstore, Black Ocean, Aforementioned Productions, and the Boston Poetry Union.

RSVP on Facebook: http://on.fb.me/180cbki

the Reaction to a Poem for Dzhokhar

So, Amanda Palmer wrote a poem for Dzhokhar. Is it a good poem? That's almost beside the point. It's a controversial topic, no matter what she says (unless she thanks first responders and law enforcement while sending condolences to the victims). And it's an exercise in negative capability. She turns her process of understanding the marathon bombings into confessional art. Typical for Palmer.

Salon is not amused. Mary Elizabeth Williams—who possibly had never heard of Amanda Palmer before writing this article—thinks Palmer's surprise at the reaction to the poem “seems a tad disingenuous, self-pitying and, well, trollish,” and that the poem itself is “not an invitation to conversation. It’s a plea for validation.” Gawker, displaying its usual understatement and depth, thinks it is “the worst poem of all time.”

Now let's be honest: the quality of the poem is never beside the point. A great poem on the same subject, with a multitude of the same insights, would deflect some of this. This is a crappy poem. I've read poems that were much worse, and in published books. Not a joke. I have almost certainly written worse poems too.

That being said—this seems like a case of protest-too-much. On Facebook one friend says, “I have to wonder at the fact that women, by and large, are the targets of the you're-too-self-centered critique.” What do you think?

This Video is NSFW

David Ortiz, Unofficial Mayor of Boston

Lockdown, Yeats, Machado

Yesterday was the very definition of uncanny. Everything the same, everything different. I kept thinking of Yeats, “changed, changed utterly: a terrible beauty is born.” Not my favorite of his works and not a parallel to Boston—almost the inverse. My wife and I live a block from the police station in Brighton, close to Watertown: like Yeats, “I have passed with a nod of the head / Or polite meaningless words” many officers who were on the scene last night. Now that we have been through all this, with a suspect in custody, and we consider what the next steps should be—public safety, civil rights, due process—these lines seem apt:

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?

Over the last few months I have been translating my way through Antonio Machado, and this morning I sat down with “La vida hoy tiene ritmo…” As is often the case with great writers, there were unexpected echoes in the poem. Thought I would share this (very) rough version of one stanza: 

The wind carries a dream of flowers.
Young sap boils in new branches.
Wings and fronds tremble,
and the sagittal eye of the eagle
cannot find its prey… dreaming fields shudder
and the sun vibrates like a harp.