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From the Preface of Triumvirate of the Monkeys
(One of my new poetry chapbooks)
(One of my new poetry chapbooks)
Estoit-il lors temps de moy
taire ?
—François Villon
A triumvirate
is a political
regime dominated by three powerful people.
For the title of this collection of poetry, I thus chose to depict the
three infamous see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil monkeys as a sort of
omnipotent intellectual triumvirate reigning, as unwritten rule of law, over the
firmly entrenched Academic/Literary Established Order in America. The god-like figure of intellectual
corruption standing behind the triumvirate, William Bulger, was former
president of the Massachusetts State Senate. then University of Massachusetts,
where he was forced to resign, though had overwhelming support from the faculty.
He’d refused to testify in a 2003 Congressional hearing about communications he’d
had with his brother, Whitey, mass-murderer, Boston crime boss (today serving a
life-sentence in prison). From political hack to university hack has become Massachusetts
in a nutshell. As for the three monkeys,
I chose Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets Anne Waldman, Poet Laureate
of the USA Natasha Trethewey, and Obama’s PC-Inaugural Poet Richard
Blanco. Of course, many others could
have illustrated them, including Robert Pinsky, Gary Snyder, Ferlinghetti, Maya
Angelou, Andre Dubus III, Billy Collins, John Ashbury, Mark Doty, Nikki
Giovanni, Louise Gluck, Martín Espada, C. D.
Wright, and Franz Wright.
Much of my
creative criticism has been directed against the triumvirate, though the latter
is essentially impervious to such criticism.
Why therefore bother? In early 2010, an anonymous
personage, pseudonym’ing as Mr. Spock, posed that question on The American Dissident blog site:
If
you really disdain the academy, then why this blog and journal that seem to be
obsessed by it and its petty squabbles? How can you afford to spend so much
energy on your bitterness? I grant that I'm not responding to your arguments
but I don't understand, from a mental health standpoint, how you can go on
making them and making them.
In
the above message, four derogatory terms are used with my regard—disdain, obsessed, bitterness, and petty
squabbles. The “academy,” or as I term it the Academic/Literary
Established Order, represents the very core of the nation’s intellect. So, why shouldn’t I be interested in it? In fact, why are so few poets and artists interested
in how it tends to scorn FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION and VIGOROUS DEBATE, preferring
instead speech codes, collegiality, cronyism, and resultant toadyism?
What
I disdain is not the “academy” per
se, but rather its cogs—professors, poets, deans, librarians, publishers, cultural
apparatchiks, etc.—who disdain debate
and freedom of speech. If the majority
of those cogs were open to those cornerstones of democracy, I would not have
any disdain. As for the ivory tower, the Foundation for
Individual Rights in Education notes that about 60% of universities possess
policies that seriously restrict freedom of speech. Even in the institutions
not possessing such policies, many professors clearly do not appreciate the
First Amendment. Speak the PC-party
line, or keep your mouth shut constitutes their prevailing rule of order.
Moreover,
it is not a question of obsessed, but
rather one of creative impulse. In
essence, provoking academics and poets often provides me with interesting
material. If writing poetry and drawing
satirical cartoons from such material constitute obsession, then any interest can be subjectively deemed thusly. I mentioned this to the anonymity in question, but he or she remained
silent. Epithets serve to divert attention away from uncomfortable truths. It is likely the anonymity was an academic
and/or poet, who did not possess the courage to do as I do and thus felt
compelled to dismiss what I do as disdain,
obsessed, and bitterness. Standing up and speaking openly, not behind
closed doors as most professors tend to do, enables me to maintain a certain
human dignity that so many willingly sacrifice for career, fame, and
money.
How
to explain to poets why I chose to stand up and read poems critical of the poetry-event
organizers, who in 2001 paid me $800 and provided a hotel room gratis for 10
days as an invited poet in Canada? Of
course, I was never invited back. But I
kept my dignity, while sacrificing who knows how much money. If I had been a nice smiley-face poet, I
probably would have been invited back every year like many of the other smiley-face
poets. That’s about $10,000 or more
since 2001! But the 149 other remunerated
poets at the Festival International de la Poésie de Trois-Rivières would not
understand. Evidently, the anonymity would
not understand. So, I suggested he or
she consider moving to Saudi Arabia and perhaps adorning a burqa. From my
perspective, the time I spend denouncing intellectual fraud is well spent. But
from the “cog” perspective, it could only be perceived as a sign of bitterness. The important question regarding these things
is why so many citizens—the vast majority—, from
a mental health standpoint, do not give a damn about intellectual
corruption and tend to dismiss anybody who does as bitter. Most citizens seem to prefer Stepford-wife positivism, censorship,
self-censorship, and authoritarianism to the First Amendment. That certainly
reflects my experiences testing the waters of democracy.
Finally,
at the end of this collection are poems written during my two-month winter stint
teaching English on the USS Boone, a military frigate, which sailed from
Norfolk, VA to Columbia, then back and dumping me off at Panama City. I’d also done a stint several years earlier
on the battleship USS Bataan. Those two
experiences were unique. Once I was a tenure-track
professor at corrupt Fitchburg State University (MA). If I’d succeeded in getting tenure, I’d
probably be writing dull articles on geolinguistics today and wouldn’t have
gotten to do stints at sea, nor in Louisiana, North Carolina, and Martha’s
Vineyard Island. BTW, Estoit-il lors
temps de moy taire is a refrain from a poem written in 1463, “Ballade du
Guichetier Garnier.” Imagine, a lone poet stood up for
Freedom of Speech in the darkness of the Middle Ages. “Should I have kept my mouth shut?” he wrote
over and again. Most say, yes. Villon
and I say, no.
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