Concerning Craft: Dylan Bargteil

Posted on February 14, 2012 by

The “Concerning Craft” series introduces Little Patuxent Review contributors, showcases their work and draws back the curtain to reveal a little of what went into producing it.

Dylan Bargteil

Dylan Bargteil, engaging his senses

Please meet Dylan Bargteil. Dylan is an undergraduate physics and math major at University of Maryland. He is Editor-in-Chief of the University’s literary journal Stylus and also an avid musician. He is interested in exploring community building, alternative methods of art distribution and display and motives for creativity and learning.

Here’s the poem by Dylan we published in the Winter 2012 Social Justice issue:

A Brown Spot

My best friend was a mortar man. Now he’s a machine gunner.
The United States Marine Corps killed 1,400 pigs this year.
They shoot the pigs with shotguns and rifles
to train infantry in triage. I imagine that means
trying to hold the pig’s guts in, trying to stop the blood
like plugging a hole in a dam with your finger.
My friend said maybe he learned something from it, he doesn’t know.

I had a dream that he was out on patrol and was shot
in the belly by a sniper. I dreamed his skin—
a plastic bag from a grocer, broken open
from the weight of the fruit inside. The plums tumbling
out. My hand instinctively reaches for them falling through
the air. They bruise so easily.

And here’s what Dylan shared with us about writing that poem:

My work is driven by sensory obsession. My primary approach to writing poetry is to engage as much as I can with how sounds and pacing work on my organs. I test out words by mouthing them to measure the contact between my tongue and hard palate, comparing “scratch” with “rake,” because I want the reader to experience an accurate tactile sensation. Pungencies like the smell of a pickle, the feel of greasy soot on the fingers and the burn of ice ground into a cheek occupy my head until I pull them out with the right transcription. I try for line breaks that move readers from expectation to realization with the subtle surprise of  their own dreams or the exact, skipping precision of cooking breakfast in the 15 minutes before they are late to work.

“A Brown Spot” came about as the result of an obsession with the slow elastic rip of plastic grocery bags. It sickened me. I kept thinking about my skin ripping the same way, as it sometimes does around my fingernails. The whole second strophe came together in my mind once I decided what I was actually going to write about, but I hadn’t yet determined the language. I was very particular with the words.

Shooting my character in the stomach was chosen because of the stomach’s vulnerability and tenderness, but the word that best reflects those attributes is “belly.” I “dreamed his skin” rather than imagined it to avoid resonance with the imagining in the first strophe and lend my character sympathy through the positive connotation of dreams or dreaming. Another sympathetic measure comes with the bag being “broken open,” which tempers the violence possible with ripping and tearing. The plum, with its deeply red interior and ripe softness, and the muted sound of the word is the appropriate symbol. The pairing with “tumbling” serves to further mute the plum, since the “um” sound is relatively louder in the second occurrence. In addition, the formation of the “t” in the mouth mirrors an ejection, creating the necessity for the plums to move “out[ward].”

The line break before “out” helps visually create the space that the plums traverse. The line break at “falling through” serves not only to further create space but also to open other possibilities on the next line for the reader (e.g., “the bag,” “my mind”) before they are closed by the quiet shock of settling on one, which I associate with dreams. Similarly, the break at “broken open” fits with the stutters, skips and slowdowns of a dream by delaying the realization of what comes next.

I do not make these careful choices with the goal of the reader recognizing them and thinking that I made the right choices but rather with the goal of the reader never seeing these seams. I want readers to have as natural an experience as possible so that they can feel as though the poem really happened to them in its fullness.

Note: If you missed hearing Dylan read at our recent launch event, you can still catch him on March 3 in Bethesda, MD at our Writer’s Center Social Justice presentation.

Posted in Craft, Essays, Literary Journals, Maryland, Poetry, Readings, Social Justice, Stylus, University of Maryland, Writers, Writing | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

An “Excellent” Experiment

Posted on February 8, 2012 by

For my 2011-12 learning improvement project at Howard Community College, I wanted to go textless in my creative writing class. I knew that I could post materials for theory, genres and writing elements in our online supplemental classroom. But what should I do about providing my students with the necessary models of creative writing?

HCC VanAmburg Class Students

HCC creative writing students with individual copies of the LPR Make Believe issue. (Photo: Kate Chisolm)

I could (and did) link to appropriate websites, but this presented difficulties. First, I taught in a traditional classroom where only the instructor’s station was connected to the Internet. To read as a class, we would need a projection screen. Second, some of the linked works were as remote to my students as those in the text had been. I needed something current and local.

Little Patuxent Review provided an affordable and interesting solution. The publishers of LPR offered a student rate, and the Chair of the English and World Languages Division subsidized that with student fees. My students would have access to all that a text could offer at no cost beyond registration.

But would they enjoy this experience? Certainly, the journal was personal. In November, poets from the 2011 Maryland Writers’ Association anthology Life in Me Like Grass On Fire had read to an HCC audience that included my class. LPR Co-publisher Mike Clark and Editor Laura Shovan were among the presenters. Later in the semester, Co-publisher Tim Singleton gave a talk on the short, sweet topics of Twitter and haiku. How often do students get to meet those so closely involved with the publications that they read?

HCC VanAmburg Class Students

Looks like they like it! ( Photo: Kate Chisolm)

Anecdotally, I knew that my students enjoyed my experiment; I hoped that an end-of-semester survey would validate this. I had planned for students to complete surveys in the last week of class, but things got busy and only 10 of 19 participated. Statistically, the number may be too small for accuracy. Nevertheless, all 10 revealed that they had “very much” appreciated the absence of a book cost. When asked how much they missed a formal text, seven had circled “not at all.” All 10 indicated that creative writing concepts were well presented; most indicated that LPR provided “excellent” examples of creative works that had inspired their own growth as writers.

For my part, I remained enthusiastic about this project throughout the fall semester and am happily repeating it this spring, determined to collect more complete data and confident that the data will be equally positive.

Posted in Columbia MD, Creative Writing, Howard Community College, Literary Journals, LPR in the Classroom, Poetry, Prose, Teaching | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

On Being Invisible: Our Elderly

Posted on January 31, 2012 by

This essay is part of a series inspired by our Winter 2012 Social Justice issue. The first one was posted September 2011, and all feature people who have helped make marginalized segments of our world more visible to mainstream America through poetry, prose and visual art.

Compared to others in the developed world, the United States is a young nation. Only 13 percent of us were over the age of 65 in 2010. And only 15 percent of those lived with their children, compared to 65 percent in Japan and 39 percent in Italy. Thus most of us have little day-to-day contact with the demographic that will–sooner or later–include each of us. That the elderly remain invisible to many is not only their loss but also ours.

IM and mother

My mother and me, drinking champagne at her 90th birthday party in Ellicott City, MD (Photo: David Cash)

IM and mother in Altach

My mother and me, a tad younger, in Altach, Austria (Photo: Viktors Jurģis, my father)

When my mother moved from Michigan to Maryland to live with me at age 83, it was a revelation. I already knew that she was smart and strong. (Any survivor of two world wars ravaging her homeland, Latvia, was that by definition.) What I didn’t know was how funny and fun-loving she could be once the burden of starting over in a strange land was lifted. The smiling lady who emerged was one that I recognized from old photographs of us as war refugees in Austria. I also didn’t know how hard it was to grow old and face death–my mother did “not go gentle into that good night”–and how much I would miss her once she was gone.

When I heard that Christopher Kennedy, renowned poet and son-in-law of a Latvian childhood friend, had lost his mother as well, I asked him to switch subjects for the essay he had agreed to post here. He was kind enough to go from addressing audacity, the theme of our upcoming issue, to the elderly. Not unrelated topics, as it turns out.

Chris, who heads the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Syracuse University and has authored poetry collections such as Encouragement for a Man Falling to His Death, winner of the 2007 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, was granted a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, which he is using to produce a major work about his late mother’s struggle with Alzheimer’s disease. Here’s what he said about her final years:

My mother passed away two months ago. Her heart stopped in her sleep. She was 95 years old and had been suffering from Alzheimer’s for the last three years of her life. She was, by any standard, an elderly person, but those last three years, difficult and troubling to be sure, allowed her to transcend the limitations age imposed on her.

By that I mean her proclivity toward time travel, which allowed her to experience the present populated with characters from her past. I was at various points her brother Tom, just home from reconnaissance over Anzio; her brother Joe, the star athlete; and her father William, the deputy sheriff. My job was to be a good character actor, slipping in and out of my roles as fluidly as she slipped from 2009 to 1945.

Of course, this was the upside. My first experience of her dementia, which I knew to be more than a “senior moment,” was when I was summoned to her assisted living facility. I was told that she had a vitamin deficiency and was dehydrated. I drove her to the ER. On the way, she told me very emphatically that she was not pregnant.

As she was 92 at the time, I had no reason to doubt her. But there was no irony in her voice; in fact, she was trembling. I began to ask questions about her concerns, and it became clear that she thought she was a teenager and I was driving her to the hospital to have the baby. She told me again that she couldn’t be pregnant. “I’ve never even dated,” she insisted. I wrote the following prose poem about the incident:

Memory Unit: Pregnancy Scare

On the way to the hospital, my 92 year-old mother tells me she can’t be pregnant. I’ve never even dated, she says. I don’t know what to say. I explain that she’s deficient. Vitamin B. Precautionary measures. But when I check her in, the woman at the desk says she’ll need to go to the fifth floor, the psych ward, where she spent a few weeks the year before. The doctor asks her to disrobe, and she tells him she’s not pregnant. He seems impatient, unwilling to humor her. I tell her it’s all right. No one thinks you’re pregnant, I say. The doctor excuses himself. He’s red-faced, impatient. A nurse appears with a hospital gown, tells my mother to put it on. Why? my mother asks, near tears. I take the gown from the nurse and set it down on the metal table next to where my mother sits. She’ll be fine, I say. The nurse seems about to speak, then thinks better of it. She looks at the doctor. They leave the two of us alone. Now what? my mother asks. I don’t know, I say. She says, the least you could do is ask me to dance.

Christopher Kennedy

Christopher Kennedy with his mother and father in a suburb of Syracuse, NY

I knew in that moment that my mother, as I had known her, was gone. Over the next three years, I learned about numerous other selves contained within her. I found out about the good speller, the shy teenager, the waitress, the bride, the young mother, the victim, the widow, the grandmother, among many other facets of the woman who gave me life. I gained a perspective on the elderly that I would never have had were it not for my mother’s illness. Interacting with those various selves gave me the opportunity to know more about my mother even as she lost more and more of the world around her.

A few days after my mother died, I prepared for her calling hours by helping to put together a photo collage. As I sifted through old pictures, I was struck by how happy she seemed. Whether it was walking down the street with her waitress friends or walking down the aisle with my father, there was a subtle joy that I had failed to see when she was alive. It occurred to me that I hadn’t been able to properly perceive her until I saw all those different selves, clustered together, smiling back at me, forcing me to acknowledge the depth of her person and the richness of her life.

Though my own mother remained as sharp as the proverbial tack until her death at age 91, medications administered to ease her pain took their toll. She became uncontrollably agitated at the hospital, and orderlies subdued her by strapping her into a straightjacket–baby blue, patterned with small pink flowers. It was a terrible time for both of us, but I still smile when I recall an incident that occurred after she was admitted to the ER for the last time. Lying there, doped up on OxyContin, plastered with Fentanyl patches, battered and bruised from a fall, she reached up and smartly slapped the face of a male nurse who had lifted her gown to assess the extent of her injuries. “How dare you!” she said.

Our elderly have fascinating stories to tell, and the telling benefits everyone. Whether through journal therapy, literary publications like Persimmon Tree or Passager that are set aside for seniors or more mainstream outlets, the more experienced among us can share their wit and wisdom and gain a greater sense of self-worth in the process.

And lest it be said that those substantially over 65 cannot compete with their younger counterparts, nationally acclaimed novelist Pauls Toutonghi, who worked with me in writing the original “On Being Invisible” piece, compiled what could be construed as an answer to The New Yorker’s “20 under 40″: his own “8 over 80,” part of “In Praise of Older Men (and Women) Writers.” Not to steal his thunder, but here’s the list:

I’m sure somewhere there are comparable lists of poets and visual artists.

Note: Since this piece was completed, another mother’s life was lost: this time, the mother of our Communications Coordinator, Eva Quintos Tennant. Emedita “Medy” Esguerra Quintos was born in Cotabato City in the Philippines in 1931 and died January 23 in a retirement community in Silver Spring, Maryland. She raised four children and touched countless lives as a physician, both in the Philippines and the United States. Defying a terminal cancer diagnosis since 1966 and fighting the effects of a recent, debilitating stroke, her final accomplishments, as itemized in Eva’s eulogy, included learning how to use Skype as well as trouncing the competition at Bingo and Mahjong.

Posted in Aging, Alzheimer's Disease, Austria, Blogs, Christopher Kennedy, Death, Ellicott City MD, Essays, Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, Latvia, Literary Journals, Maryland, Michigan, Mothers, NEA Fellowship, Novels, Pauls Toutonghi, Poetry, Poets, Prose Poem, Refugees, Republic of the Philippines, Syracuse NY, Syracuse University, Writers, Writing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 9 Comments

LPR Nominates Six for Pushcart Prizes

Posted on January 26, 2012 by
Tara Hart

Tara Hart's poem, first published in the LPR Spirituality issue, appears in the current Pushcart Prize anthology

As a young publication, Little Patuxent Review is more about publishing emerging writers and artists than about winning prizes. Still, toward the end of 2010, one of our contributing editors, Susan Thornton Hobby, nominated Tara Hart’s poem “Patronized,” which appeared in our Summer 2010 Spirituality issue, for a Pushcart Prize and--saints alive!–it won one. Tara’s 20-line poem consequently took its place in the 600-page tome, The Pushcart Prize XXXVI: Best of the Small Presses (2012 Edition).

Emboldened by our success, outgoing editor, Michael R. Clark, and our new editor, Laura Shovan, each nominated three pieces from our Winter and Summer 2011 issues, respectively. We are thus represented by Casey Cooke’s short story “Without,” Ann Eichler Kolakowski’s poem “Unmaking” and Gabriel Welsch’s poem “The Story of a River” from the Winter 2011 Water issue as well as Erin Christian’s short story “God Bless You With Rainbows,” Derrick Weston Brown’s poem “Touched” and Susan Thornton Hobby’s poem “Girl Queen of the Animals” from the Summer 2011 Make Believe issue.

Each year, most of the writers and many of the presses are new to the series. Therefore, we believe that each LPR-nominated piece has a good chance to win a prize and make its way into the next anthology. That each author has a good chance to follow in the footsteps of Raymond Carver, Tim O’Brien, Jayne Anne Phillips, Charles Baxter, Andre Dubus, Susan Minot, Mona Simpson, John Irving and Rick Moody, each of whom first gained notice through the Pushcart series. And that Little Patuxent Review can again join the hundreds of outstanding presses represented in each annual Pushcart publication.

Note: If you’d like a look at some of the contributors eligible for future LPR Pushcart nominations, join us this Saturday, January 28, at 2:00 pm at Oliver’s Carriage House in Columbia, MD for the launch reading of the Winter 2012 Social Justice issue.

Posted in Contests, Poetry, Pushcart Prize, Readings, Short Fiction, Videos, Writing | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Book Review: JoAnn Balingit’s Forage

Posted on January 23, 2012 by
JoAnn Balingit

JoAnn Balingit, Delaware's Poet Laureate

Like many Poetry Friday regulars, I often assign myself a blog project for National Poetry Month. In 2010, I took readers on virtual road trip around the United States, profiling each state’s poet laureate. (I made it as far as Idaho, 43rd state.) Naturally, the tour started in Delaware, the first state to sign the US Constitution. That was my introduction to Delaware poet laureate, JoAnn Balingit. My NPM post includes a sample of one of Balingit’s works and a link to the rest of it. In 2012, her poem “Advisory” opens the Little Patuxent Review Social Justice issue.

Balingit’s latest chapbook Forage was the winner of the 2011 Whitebird Prize. The first section examines Balingit’s bi-cultural heritage. Her mother was born in the Midwest and, at age 19, married a 49-year-old immigrant from the Philippines.

“History Textbook, America” is one of the many standout poems. Balingit recalls finding scant mention of her father’s country of origin in history textbooks. That moment becomes a jumping-off point. The poet meditates on all that we lose when we emigrate, including a brother that she did not know her father had. Just days after her father died, “some man we didn’t know / called up. This is his brother, one more shock, / phoning for him.” The uncle does not have a chance to speak his name before the phone and, therefore, the family connection breaks: “a dial tone erased the Philippines.” The poem expresses our tenuous connection to others and to history.

Balingit’s mother speaks in “My Mother Explains My Father to Her Girls.” The poem describes growing up in the Midwest with a sense of connection to the Philippines. When the sun was setting on the family’s home, “his sky rose story-book, crammed with color.” The speaker’s future husband is “a man / from the islands with the climate of heaven…who grew up wearing hand-woven linen.” He wafts into her life, his voice, “fine as a line cast over water, / land and sink without a ripple.” A strong sense of longing pervades this poem, not only between the lovers but also in Balingit’s desire to understand her parents. Falling in love is beautifully described in the context of her father’s foreignness:

…You know
at dusk how sky melts with ocean into one
aqua plane from your toes
to the world’s curve you can’t tell

where you are from anything? So I fell
into your father’s voice—
…He glowed
like the boss’s mahogany.

The poem turns when the mother acknowledges the relationship will end in disaster, particularly for her daughters: “I know his silence / branded you as a vine over time will tunnel / the bark of a tree.” The speaker’s final request is that her daughters preserve some part of their father as they mature.

Even poems that don’t deal specifically with Balingit’s family history, such as “Never-Never Land,” refer to her background. “Never-Never Land” is subtitled “after Malay proverbs.” A list of folktale-like what-ifs, “where cats have horns / where turtles climb trees,” evolves into a real world indictment of the current global recession, “where the rich fall down / and the poor rise up like dough in earthenware.” There is a hint of anger in this poem, “the smell of fine clothing / graces an open fire” developing the title into an ironic statement about modern society.

The section closes with a series of poems that cross from imaginative into playfully surreal, including the flash piece, “The Pitch,” and the poem “My Life as the Fugitive, Tijuana.” Although several poems, including “Story I Learn at Forty-nine,” deal with family secrets and hidden stories, the theme is given a wild treatment in the final poem of this section, “Circus.” The speaker knows there are things she has not been told about her own history. Her reaction is both powerful and indicative of the strangeness of families.

I swallow my mother
like a sword in flames
and dare the lioness of her death to wake
me.

The duality of Balingit’s family has echoes in the second part of Forage. It opens with a series of nature meditations, of which “The Blue Spotted Salamander” is one of the strongest. In this section, animals, plants and rivers represent our wild selves, the part of humanity momentarily forgotten in the hum of technology but always available to an attentive mind. In “My Teenager Listens to his iPod as I Drive Back Roads to the Bus Stop,” nature symbolizes what the mother attends to and her child’s self-absorption:

If I take this curve slowly
we will hear the creek consulting on a fawn
that has shrunken to an acorn of thought
tossed in the roadside chicory.

Balingit's new poetry collection

Balingit expresses a longing for the days when, as parents, we constantly interpret and open the world for our young children. The speaker here wants to engage her silent teen in the natural world because that is what captures her own imagination.

At just 38 pages long, there is much to explore in Forage. Even the cover–the title is subtly separated into two parts and can be read as either “forage” or “for age”–plays with one of Balingit’s central metaphors. Landscape, whether it is a roadside creek or the colorful Philippine sunset, accompanies us through the stages and discoveries of life.

Note: JoAnn Balingit will be a reader at the LPR Social Justice launch event, held on January 28.

Posted in Blog Posts, Book Reviews, Delaware, Families, Fathers, Immigrants, Mothers, National Poetry Month, Nature, Parents, Personal History, Poet Laureate, Poetry, Poets, Readings, Republic of the Philippines, Social Justice, Writing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Meet the Neighbors: Enoch Pratt Free Library

Posted on January 19, 2012 by

A journal like Little Patuxent Review requires a vibrant literary and artistic community to thrive–and even survive. In appreciation of the cultural entities around us, we present “Meet the Neighbors,” where we provide you with some personal introductions.

Recently, Little Patuxent Review partnered with Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, MD to put on a poetry contest like no other: the winning poem will not only be published in LPR and featured in a CityLit Festival reading but also enlarged dramatically for display in the library’s Cathedral Street windows. Last week, Lisa Greenhouse, a librarian involved in the poetry contest, gave LPR Editor Laura Shovan and Communications Coordinator Eva Quintos Tennant such a great tour of the Pratt that I thought you’d like a look around with her as well. So, please meet Lisa and see what she has to say:

Lisa Greenhouse

Lisa Greenhouse

The Enoch Pratt Free Library’s Central facility is both the hub of an excellent urban public library system and the Maryland State Library Resource Center, a rich resource for all the libraries and library patrons of Maryland. It is an especially attractive destination if you care about poetry.

The Humanities Department should be the poetry-lover’s first stop. A walk through the long stacks (or guidance of a librarian) will reveal works of poetry representing all times and places, from Homer and Sappho in Greek to Derek Walcott and Anne Carson. The collection is strong in American, African-American and local poetry.

In each poet’s assigned Library of Congress call-number area, you will find the poet’s works, essays, interviews, biographies and critical works. Anthologies gather the best poetry, new poets, world poets, love poetry or Sufi poetry. If you need to write a sonnet or a pantoum or revise your poem, manuals such as The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetics or The Poetry Home Repair Manual can help. If you can’t remember where a nagging line of poetry comes from, one of the Granger’s indexes to poetry can come to your rescue. If you need a book that the Pratt doesn’t own, we can find it for you. Librarians love questions: please ask us!

The Pratt Periodicals Department holds more than 30 current English-language poetry magazines in print form and many more in electronic databases. From the British title Ambit at the beginning of the alphabet to the Yale Review near the end, browsing the Pratt current collection is a great way for aspiring poets to familiarize themselves with the gamut of publication options. The Pratt how-to guide Submitting Poetry for Publication in Little Magazines links to the submission guidelines of many of the magazines in the Pratt current collection.

Enoch Pratt Poetry Contest

Little Patuxent Review partners with the Pratt to put on a poetry contest.

Down in the periodicals stacks, the Pratt’s retrospective collection includes a full run of Harriet Monroe’s seminal Poetry magazine–from 1912 to the present–and a full run–1889 to the present–of Poet Lore, the oldest continuously published poetry journal in the United States. Pratt staff will be happy to retrieve these and other older works for any customer who wishes to peruse them.

The Pratt, which sponsored a rap contest that Tupac Shakur won at age 14, has a long tradition of celebrating poetic talent. The annual CityLit Festival, which the Pratt presents in partnership with Gregg Wilhelm and the CityLit Project, always includes a poetry component—this year, appearances by Edward Hirsch and Thomas Lux. The Poetry and Conversation series, an engaging mix of reading and Q&A, was launched in January. Future guests include Clarinda Harriss and Bruce Sager and two married couples, Jane Satterfield and Ned Balbo and Virginia Crawford and Sam Schmidt. Sonia Sanchez will visit the library on April 25, and Harriss will conduct free poetry-writing workshops on the first three Wednesdays in April.

With its colorful programs and deep collections, the Pratt is a poet’s or poetry-lover’s paradise. Come see for yourself. If you care for the near and far places where poetry goes, you’ll find our tag line to be true: “Your journey starts here.”

Note: If you’re a Marylander, it’s not too late to enter the Pratt poetry contest. The contest closes February 21.

Posted in Baltimore, CityLit Festival, Contests, Enoch Pratt Free Library, Libraries, Maryland State Library Resource Center, Poetry, Readings, Workshops, Writing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Thoughts on Social Justice

Posted on January 17, 2012 by

On January 28, Little Patuxent Review will launch the Social Justice issue, guest-edited by poet Truth Thomas, at Oliver’s Carriage House in Columbia, MD. In celebration of the release, I was invited to share my thoughts on the upcoming issue and social justice.

MLK III at MLK Statue

Martin Luther King III (center) speaks at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial in observance of King's 83rd birthday anniversary on January 15, 2012. (Photo: AP)

I wrote this on January 16, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. King would have been 83 had he not died at the hand of an assassin on April 4, 1968. I remember this as if it were yesterday. I was 12 years old when he was killed, and I saw my home city of Washington, DC go up in flames. When I previewed the Social Justice issue, I felt something awaken in me that was distinctly different from what I had ever felt when reading any of the other issues. I was brought to tears and filled with a kind of acute empathy that comes from reading and seeing the extension of a collective history and presence that is closely aligned with my own experience.

My childhood in the Sixties, like that of many of my generation born in any major city in America, was overshadowed by the daily struggles for social justice that sent many into the streets, hospitals and jails. In Southeast Asia, young soldiers and innocent people alike were dying in horrible ways from bullets, bombs and Agent Orange. Soldiers–family members–were returning home, many damaged both mentally and physically. Some of them became homeless, others drug addicts and still others committed suicide.

I also remember watching the August 18, 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on my grandmother’s black-and-white television set and looking for my parents in that seemingly endless, indecipherable crowd. The energy was palatable even though I was separated from the crowd by miles and that TV screen.

Ralph Abernathy (center facing, short sleeves), leader of the Poor People’s Campaign, near the grounds of the US Capitol Building on June 24, 1968. (Photo: AP)

After King was assassinated, my folks took my sister and me to Resurrection City, the encampment on the Mall for the Poor People’s Campaign. This was the last major project King envisioned before he died. It took the fight for social justice in America beyond sit-ins to a well-orchestrated, well-thought-out “live-in” for thousands of people of all colors, some with families and children, seeking to bring notice to the plight of the poor. Resurrection City, documented by photographers, was designed by DC architect John Wiebenson and his students at the University of Maryland to function as a self-sufficient community. The press called it disorganized and dirty. For those who had trekked for miles to get to the Mall and dealt with the rain and mud, it was the last hope.

Today, information on issues affecting the health and well-being of individuals and nations is easily accessible through millions more pathways than in those revolutionary times, when so much acceptable toxic behavior was unleashed behind the locked doors of homes, institutions, corporations and governments and disguised as normalcy. Movements coalesced despite the absence of Facebook and Twitter, though. Stories were–and still are–twisted to suit the teller, but there were no eyewitness video hounds to disprove them on TV or in newsprint.

Unlike many children today, I heard and listened to the news. I heard about the riots in Chicago, Berkley and LA. The protests, the horror of the fire-hosings, the tear-gassing, the beatings of college students, women, anyone in the way of a police baton. I remember the sight of unarmed, defenseless people with blood running down their faces.

I knew who the Black Panthers were: a progressive, demonized group dedicated to social justice and change. I knew who Angela Davis, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael, Huey P. Newton and many of the other game-changers in the constant fight for social justice were and met both Davis and Newton when I became an adult. I knew about SNCC, SDS and what those students risked to change the world.

I often wonder whether other children of my generation growing up in urban environments felt the same kind of constant, deep-seated tension that I did–a tension that eventually became my normal for many years–or whether that tension was peculiar to me because I was a budding poet, acutely aware of the chaos in the world around me.

Now, my generation and our elders are witnessing a world where our memory of place has been bulldozed, redesigned, re-purposed, and where, in some locales, the schisms of the past are no longer recognizable. While we have evolved ever so brilliantly with our 21st Century appendages that connect us at the speed of light to every corner of Earth, we cannot ignore the fact that many dwell in the most base level of humanity. Our top-rated entertainment is rooted in cruelty, torture, manipulation, debasement, greed and indifference. These are realities to many, who do not find them entertaining in the least.

Occupy DC

Occupy DC protesters in 2011 with the US Capitol Building in the background (Photo: AP)

Storyteller and mythologist Michael Meade talks about people having to be in the “right kind of trouble in order to change their lives.” In this first decade of the new millennium, we have “the right kind of trouble” all over the planet. The range is vast and crosses political, socio-economic, racial and religious boundaries. The tensions mirror those of the Sixties, and the gift–now as then–is that we poets, writers and artists can dive into this trouble eschewing shame to bear witness to the sorrow, rage and futility of perpetuating cultural evolution based on injustice. We are the witnesses for those whose ability to argue has been silenced and the advocates for what is intellectually promising, what is spiritually and physically sane.

The gift of this witnessing as reflected in the LPR Poets for Social Change panel discussion at the 2011 Baltimore Book Festival, the LPR blog series “On Being Invisible” and the pages of the upcoming issue of Little Patuxent Review speaks to the remarkable and horrendous aspects of humanity and covers a vast territory. There is the sexual, mental and physical exploitation of women and children, immigrant and migrant people and the irreparable consequences of war. There is the mis-education and disproportionate imprisonment of males of African descent and the resulting growth of the prison-industrial complex in America. There is the damage caused by corporate irresponsibility and greed and the man-made environmental catastrophes. There is the homelessness, invisibility, poverty, famine and, as Howard Nemerov says in his poem “Magnitudes,” “disasters drastically different from those we have to know about.”

If you are a thinking and feeling person, I hope you won’t put down the Social Justice issue without being filled, stirred, angered, saddened and perhaps moved to create some action–however small–of your own to teach, reach and empower those you touch to advocate for a more equitable social and cultural evolution for future generations.

We look forward to seeing you on January 28th  and welcome your comments once you have read the Winter 2012 Little Patuxent Review Social Justice issue.

Posted in Baltimore Book Festival, Black Panthers, Essays, Jr., March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Martin Luther King Jr., Occupy DC, Oppression, Poor People's Campaign, Poverty, Race Relations, Readings, Resurrection City, Social Justice, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee SNCC, Students for a Democratic Society SDS, The Sixties, Washington DC | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments