Read my latest flash, Venison, at 52|250.

It can be fun to talk in terms of high theory about whether the author matters or to go back and forth about the appropriateness of interpreting words on the basis of external biographical information. Whole nights can disappear into discussions of ideals. If we stick to poetry in these poetry-marginalizing days, we can even pretend that no one gets hurt (except perhaps the poets).

Sometimes, however, this discussion takes on a heavy public relevance. Is the value of rhetoric about hope and change altered when it is penned by a man who thinks that mimicking sexual assault against a woman is hilarious? It may be impossible to know exactly how much of the hope-and-change talk in Obama’s campaign speeches came from Jon Favreau and how much came from other staff or from the candidate himself. Given, however, that Obama has shown no indication that he is going to fire Favreau from his new position as White House director of speechwriting, I’m not sure it matters very much.

When men who think this behavior is acceptable speak about change and hope, those words have limited meanings. “Hope” excludes the right of women to hope to be seen as equals and to see a reduction in sexualized degradations. “Change” excludes any alteration in the situation of women in this country and around the world who face street harassment and the threat of sexualized violence.

What Favreau did was not as bad as raping a real woman, obviously. The trouble is that it contributes to a culture that allows men to rape. Whatever writers like Anne Schroeder Mullins of the Politico may think, that is not “a minor offense” and apologizing privately to Clinton does nothing to change it.

Courtesy of the AP (who forces their reporters to listen to this garbage so we don’t have to) comes a prime example of doublthink from the departing “president”:

The president said that while it’s true that Saddam was not connected to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the decision to oust him cannot be viewed in isolation.

“In a world where terrorists armed with boxcutters had just killed nearly 3,000 people, America had to decide whether we could tolerate a sworn enemy that acted belligerently, that supported terror and that intelligence agencies around the world believed had weapons of mass destruction,” Bush said, referring to intelligence reports that later proved false.

So to recap: Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 but 9/11 meant we had to attack Iraq. I suppose I should just go tell every publisher who rejected my writing this year that, even though their rejection had nothing to do with the state of the economy, they should accept my work now or else I’ll bomb them, since in a world in which the economy can collapse overnight we cannot risk allowing the poetry market to freeze up. Or something.

Inaugural Poet?

Over on the WomPo mailing list (where the Festival of Women’s Poetry was put together), there has been some discussion, following the story of Obama being seen with a book by Derek Walcott, as to which poet we would like to see read at the inauguration. My vote is for Adrienne Rich not only because of her social conscience and the skill of her work but also because her selection would represent a pledge to reverse the political situation that led her to decline the National Medal of Arts. Going back to the state of things during the last Democratic administration will not satisfy me or most progressives.

Prophetic?

I sure hope so (actually, I’d like to see us out of Iraq sooner), but I doubt it. Remember, doubt is not the enemy, especially when it’s applied to people in power. If more people had doubted the Bush administration’s stories about WMD, we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in now.

Publishing

I have two poems in the second issue of Makeout Creek.

Recently, Robert Pinsky wrote the following in the Boston Globe:

WALT WHITMAN’S poem celebrating Election Day calls our “quadrennial choosing” a more spectacular and powerful show than national scenic marvels such as Yosemite, Niagara Falls or the “spasmic geyserloops” of Yellowstone.

The poem is not wet or glibly sunny. Whitman chooses to speak of voting day not as beautiful or sacred but as “powerful.” He compares it not to forest glades or meadows but to the fluid, dynamic energy of rivers, geysers and waterfalls and to the immense scale of mountains and prairies.

The trouble with both Pinsky‘s gloss and Whitman’s poem, however, is that they seem to treat the power displayed by elections as some free-floating thing. The good and the imperfect alike arise like natural phenomena; “the darker odds, the dross” may be named but little interrogated, though Pinsky does give some of the historical background as to what they might have been Whitman wrote his poem.

As I recently learned from Ginger Strand‘s “Faux Falls” in The Future of Nature: Writing on a Human Ecology from Orion Magazine, Niagara Falls is now turned on for the tourist season, the flow tightly controlled through human engineering. Even so is the flow of all that power on election day directed by the mass media: by the donations that allow political ads to be bought and by the narratives that increasingly-pressed-for-time-and-resources newsrooms present. How many candidates in the presidential primaries never really got a hearing because they were stamped also-ran from the start (to say nothing of third party candidates)?

Election day is indeed a powerful, even awe-inspiring spectacle but to stop there and not interrogate the forces directing that power puts us all at their mercy.