Egyptian Democracy

We are all watching the leaderless mass revolt (leaderless, at least, for the moment; all revolts need a crystalized set of goals, embodied in a charismatic person or, if not, in a coalition of practical, at times ruthless, minor leaders) against the long regime of President Murabak in Egypt. No one can support sham elections or rule by coercion, and although Murabak has been, from what I've read, fairly moderate in his dealings with the rest of the region, including Israel, he has remained dictatorial in his control of the nation. Thus, sad to say, he is not the worst head of state, but still not what one would call good.

Free elections are necessary for legitimacy, so the people are justified in their revolt.

Now I'll probably get myself into trouble. Democracy is the great dream of humankind, and one which has not been realized in the world, neither in the United States nor elsewhere, despite what any nationalist politician might claim. It is still only partly achieved, hundreds of years after its modern conception. It is always in danger of destruction by the selfish, tribal, and violent aspects of our selves. Many will be appalled by this assessment of this nation and the state of democracy. My desire, natural and ordinary, not unlike any person really, is to be proud of my country and culture, and to an extent I am proud of our achievements; but this pride is hugely tempered by the difficult, shameful facts of our society — the way people are treated, measured by the dollar, shunned and left helpless, homeless, bankrupt, in chains — and as well by my suspicion of that which is too cheaply sold, as the exceptional greatness of our society is today.

Democracy, to my mind, is not equivalent to free elections. That is lower-case democracy, still unrealized in so much of the world, still a righteous goal. No, true Democracy is the realization of humanist values. It is the placement of personhood unabashedly and unreservedly at the center of our moral apparatus, with social structures that defend and enforce the concomitant values, those which we in America often call freedoms or rights. It is about values foremost, and not government, which is why it is so difficult to achieve, why there can be so much and so great confusion, and why in America we have elections (and we could have better elections) but still work toward Democracy.

The result of the current uprising in Egypt will lead, very likely, to the freest elections in that Republic's history (though it opens other opportunities for dictatorship; time will tell), and its government will then become mostly legitimate in its representation of the people. But it will not bring Democracy to Egypt, as many are claiming. It will not relieve the atrocious injustice women face in that culture, where, the World Health Organization reports, 91% of women face genital mutilation. It will probably not lead to more freedom of religion, or of speech, since so many in this revolt desire a more strictly religious state, and since religion — by placing a distant, arbitrary taskmaster god or prophet at the center of morality — almost necessarily infringes upon human value and dignity. An election does not resolve these.

Egypt is not alone, of course. Democracy does not exist in any nation yet, not completely. It may nowhere be close by, and so remains the project first and foremost at hand for all people: a society that prioritizes and protects the equal inherent value of human persons, regardless of their gender, religion, race, or views. That aims for Justice, not fairness. Elections alone do not bring it about, because that is only the process of selecting a government, although it is essential, although it might be an absolute precondition.

So, I hope that Egypt finds its way to free and open elections, to a government that is more legitimate in its representation of the people — but I also hope that the people of Egypt do not stop the project of Democracy with those elections.

“Idol” by Daniel E. Pritchard

“broad haunches of gold”?

from Little Star, Issue 2

The bulbous neck and pacified stare
twist off broad haunches of gold.
Its hooves tear at the pedestal below.
And it is because the chance is so rare
to look upon a god’s face,
even of shofars, even of melted tefillin and jewelry,
all the keepsakes that were carried
through desert purgation. Nothing
but silent landscape and prayer.

The splintered axel of our machine
breathing kicks and lurches darkly.
It brays in the shuddering trap
of twilight. And we are alone
clenching through the fire and the cold
as some human disease remands us,
tossing us into unremitting folds
of sand and salt and blood
in a mute landscape made vast

by tufts of sallow grass
low and sheathed in the wind.
Speech dries up like a cistern
at the first uncertain taste.
The heart, and whatever mystery,
hardens in its mold.
Back and forth through the camp.
Brother and friend and neighbor.
And you must not bow.

--

Katherine A. Evans on Salman Rushdie

A book like Luka and the Fire of Life, the latest novel from Salman Rushdie, warrants a personal response. It is tempting (perhaps even easy) to write about the literary elements of such a book: Rushdie’s puns and allusions, his vivid language, his forays into the world of magical realism. But Rushdie has always been known as much for his personal and political life as he is for his writing, and Luka and the Fire of Life, though not explicitly autobiographical, is a personal book — a gift to his youngest son, Milan, and a meditation on the relationship between fathers and their children.

So, I will begin this review with a personal confession: I love Rushdie, but I do not love, or play, video games.

Luka and the Fire of Life is the companion novel to Rushdie’s earlier young adult book, Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Haroun was written for Rushdie’s eldest son, Zafar, who, while Rushdie was at work on The Satanic Verses, requested that his father’s next book might be a novel for children. Haroun and the Sea of Stories was Rushdie’s first adventure in children’s writing and followed the young Haroun Khalifa on his adventure to save the voice of his story-telling father Rashid. With one question — “What’s the use of stories that aren’t even true?” — Rashid, the renowned Shah of Blah, the Ocean of Notions, finds all his story-telling powers dried up. To save him, Haroun visits the Earth’s second moon, to the source of all story-telling, and restores both his father’s genius and his family’s happiness. The novel, published in 1990, was the first novel Rushdie published after the fatwa, and his story emphasizes both the political and personal trials of this part of his life. [. . .]

Read the rest of Katherine's review at The Critical Flame!

Daniel E. Pritchard on Rae Armantrout's “Money Shot”

In an interview on PBS’s ArtsBeat, Armantrout describes her most common poetic structure to host Jeffrey Brown: “Many of my poems — not all of them — but many of them are written in separate sections that are divided perhaps by numbers or perhaps by asterisks, and they are separate moments or separate thoughts that are juxtaposed, and I'm interested in the juxtapositions and the kind of friction that bringing in material from diverse situations or disparate realms can create.”

There is not much prolonged argument in Armantrout, only suggestions of insight that the reader is left to realize: implications by juxtaposition. Those who read poems and wish to paraphrase their contents easily, who desire simple one-to-one lines of logic, will find much of frustration. Armantrout remains faithful to Williams’ dictum, “The poet thinks with his poem. In that lies his thought, and that in itself is the profundity.” The poems are not inaccessible, however — though they could be; in lesser hands, they would likely be opaque. But Armantrout’s deft touch allows disparate elements to cohere; or, not "cohere" exactly, but to create a space where insight foments [. . .]

--

Read the complete review at The Critical Flame!

Ailbhe Darcy on Ben Mazer's Poems

Ben Mazer, now in his forties, looks like a terribly serious man in his photographs. He wants us to take his poetry seriously too. He publishes rarely and gravely: the poems in Poems were amassed over a decade, and come to us in a slim volume of dark blue. No cover image, no author photograph, just a vaguely classical border and endorsements from serious men like John Ashbery and Philip Nikolayev. “I am a great admirer of Ben Mazer’s poetry,” says John Kinsella (gravely, I imagine), in chiselled white uppercase.

The poems themselves, particularly in the first half, rarely crack a laugh. One glorious exception — there are others — is “The Exile,” which begins with a breakfasting speaker, “nibbl[ing] at [his] ham” in what I take to be some mountainous Swiss village. It’s only at the poem’s end, when the speaker is “swept up in the exultation / of thousands of revelers’ descent to hell” that we realise we’re in Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, and it’s his own ham he’s nibbling. In general, what fun there is tends towards the familiarly postmodernist — ekphrasis, puns, allusions, multiplying doubles, folded-over time, a sense of belatedness and resignation — a familiarity that today risks boredom. But Mazer recognises that the lyric poem is more like a movie than like other literary forms — Poems opens by recalling Casablanca — and the collection is accordingly more like the delicious Last Year in Marienbad than, say, an irritating boxes-within-boxes novel.

[. . .]

Read the rest of Ailbhe Darcy's review at The Critical Flame!

U35 TONIGHT: Stephen Sturgeon & Joseph Spece

U35: Stephen Sturgeon
& Joseph Spece
Tonight! 7:00 pm
The Marliave (upstairs)
9 Bosworth Street
Downtown Crossing, Boston



Stephen Sturgeon is the editor of Fulcrum: an Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics. His first collection of poems, Trees of the Twentieth Century (Dark Sky Books) is scheduled to appear in Spring 2011. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Boston Review, Harvard Review, Jacket, Tuesday; an Art Project, Typo, and other journals.

Joseph Spece split his youth between Long Island, NY, and Massachusetts, and is a recent graduate of the writing program at Columbia University. His verse has appeared in Poetry, Western Humanities Review, Post Road, and Orion; his editing and reading credits include Columbia and The Paris Review. He was awarded a Ruth Lilly Fellowship by the Poetry Foundation in 2009.

 --

“Cohoes Falls” by Stephen Sturgeonfirst appeared in Dark Sky Magazine

My dream was called “The Invention of Society
in Cohoes, NY,” shale bed, parliament of paper mills

skidding ceremoniously into the Mohawk. To this day
my favorite vampire is the driveway of 24 Rose Court,

who scratched daily from onion paper legs a tonic
to thwart woolen summer thirst. As you listen now

my voice can be discovered in gray icicles fanging
Bedford Street, which reliably congregate into the form

of a mastodon’s skeleton, its wastewater translucence
like glassine. After cold fisticuffs when I was 8

with the chandelier, my mother dug crystal and wire
out of my hands, and dropped that garbage in an ashtray

while my conqueror slouched on the porch, drinking soup,
a rug draped on its baluster. Its knuckles had clinked “Our Town”

against my little nose. In another town minutes ago
I made 20 dollars on Sparks Street bumbling to my home,

because in the road I found it, and I make what I find.
You say what you hear, my house was called “Show Me the Way.”

Your Week in Daniel

Today: a new issue of The Critical Flame went live! We have essays on Moby-Dick (this year is the 150th anniversary of its publication), on the poetry of Ben Mazer and Rae Armantrout, on fiction by Salman Rushdie and Chuck Palahniuk, and on eco-language writing. Check it out. It's good. Promise.

Tomorrow: U35 Poetry @ The Marliave with Stephen Sturgeon (editor of Fulcrum) and 2009 Ruth Lilly Fellow Joseph Spece. Should be a full house and a fantastic reading, hope you can make it!

Also: my brief and rangy essay on Tun-Huang by Yasushi Inoue is up at The Quarterly Conversation.

Spaar on Not Defining Poetry

“I’m quite sure I can’t come up with a single definition of poetry either. But I suspect that the most resistant or wary readers of verse, even if they can’t say what poetry is, have written or received a poem—in a love letter, a diary, a condolence card, a Valentine, a school assignment—a bit of language written under especial duress or frustration or longing or sadness, language forged under pressure, perhaps at a Dickinsonian “White Heat,” words that came out not as prose but as something else,  something more … intense, musical, playful, figurative, compressed. Something urgently expressed, with something at stake in the telling.”

by Lisa Russ Spaar
from The Chronicle of Higher Education

DEP @ Dark Sky Magazine

I have a short essay on poverty and poetics in the January issue of Dark Sky Magazine: “Lucy puts the football down and then pulls it away at the last moment, leaving Charlie Brown sprawled across the lawn. Time after time, Charlie commits to the kick whole-heartedly, despite all evidence that the game is rigged. He’s going for the touchback. He throws himself into the task. Lucy cheats him. He tries again. Lucy pulls the ball away again. It’s downright sociopathic.

“Anyone who was a good, productive worker at the beginning of 2008, but finds themselves on unemployment today — that ‘pre-paid vacation for freeloaders,’ as Ronald Reagan so quaintly put it — probably feels a great deal of sympathy for poor Charlie. Those who side with Reagan probably find it funny. This football scene is a sort of paradigm for capitalism: a system of fairness, merit, and opportunity that easily, often, and by its own rules, implodes. When poor Charlie misses the ball during the homecoming game — again because Lucy pulls it away — it isn’t Lucy who gets the blame. [. . .]”


Read the rest at Dark Sky Magazine!

Groupon January 1st: $12 for One Year of Boston Review!

Head over to Groupon today for a special Boston Review offer! Just $12 for a whole year of the magazine. That's 75% off the newsstand price!

Groupon writes, “For 35 years, the nonpartisan Boston Review has stimulated readers with eye-opening essays on everything from politics and economics to arts and literature. Editors eschew polemic adherence to ideology in favor of tightly reasoned, thoroughly supported arguments from a diverse pool of perspectives. The independent, nonprofit institution thrives on its unique combination of in-depth political analysis and serious literary criticism, making mere political journals and literary quarterlies toss and turn all night with the nagging sense that something is missing. Respected intellectuals such as Lawrence Lessig and Pamela S. Karlan [as well as Eliot Spitzer, Elaine Scary, Stephen Burt, Nicholas Negroponte, Evgeny Morozov, David Kennedy, William Rankin, and others] pump in brainpower to light readers' rational discourse bulbs, and poetry and fiction contests finally reward subscribers for their lushly detailed meditations on truth, beauty, and the top 10 things truth does to keep its skin beautiful.”