Carl Phillips Jackson Poetry Prize

 

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Above is the back cover of issue #42 of The American Dissident.  It features the Jackson Poetry Prize recipient (see last paragraph of the editorial with its regard).  Below is the editorial for that issue.  I post this today because I am in the midst of writing an essay on the new Jackson Poetry Prize winner, 

Sonia Sanchez.  

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The American Dissident’s prime purpose is NOT poetry for the sake of poetry, nor is it to help spread poetry as a form of intellectual entertainment—a highbrow game of words.  Its prime purpose is to serve as a rare—very, very rare—platform for hardcore criticism against the academic/literary establishment—friend of the chambers of commerce—, including Poets & Writers magazine, Poetry magazine (run by Poetry Foundation and its $200 million Eli Lilly drug—money donation), the Academy of American Poets, laureate and inaugural icons, Pulitzer Prize, Guggenheim, MacArthur Foundation, the nation’s college English departments, etc.  When poetry fails to question and challenge that which promotes it, then it becomes a palatable part of the ruling-class machine of castration, cooptation, and corralling…  

Editorial

A Metastasizing Cancer

But you can’t turn literature into a business.  But without business, there won’t be any more literature.

—A Business Affair (1994 film)

 

The front cover of this issue features the Freedom Forum Institute… with a touch of satire, of course. For the critical essay I wrote on that organization, “The Fake (Free) Expression Institute,” see www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm?frm=190705&sec_id=190705.  The Institute constitutes a pro-censorship organization, backed by the Democrat Party.  To proclaim an opinion as “misinformation” and thus eliminate it constitutes an egregious act of censorship, a shallow justification for the reduction of freedom of expression.  Democrat-Party-aligned Big Tech (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Google) have radically increased de-platforming. The former President of the United States has been censored, as have critics of autocrat-vaccine mandates, critics of Critical Race Theory, critics of Black Lives Matter, critics of the Hunter/Joe Biden scandal, etc. Communism and socialism do NOT embrace freedom of expression! Autocrats do NOT embrace freedom of expression! White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki declared in typical hack-circular reasoning:  

Our view continues to be though that every platform, whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, any other platform that is disseminating information to millions of Americans has a responsibility to crack down on disinformation.

“Crack down on disinformation” is, of course, simply a convenient euphemistic term for censorship! Psaki fails to address the fundamental problem with Democrat-Party encouragement for increased censorship: the politically-tainted subjectivity inherently involved in determining what is and what is not “disinformation.”  Roman poet Juvenal evoked another fundamental problem:  Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?  In essence, who will watch over the gatekeepers of information?  

Psaki’s statement incarnates the metastasizing cancer in the heart of freedom of expression, the very fundament of democracy.  Power elites like her hate freedom of expression with a passion and always have and always will!  

The back cover of this issue illustrates the sad state of establishment poetry in America. The verse spewed by poet Carl Phillips in the aquarelle somehow earned him the Jackson Poetry Prize ($75,000).  In elite poetry circles, innocuity rules!  Why?  Because innocuity evidently does not threaten elites at the academic/literary helm.  It assures absence of accountability…