Open Letter to Henry David Thoreau #1

I've been writing a new Open Letter to Henry David Thoreau (#16).  When I was living in Concord, I managed to write 15 such letters and even managed to pass some of them through the approval process of the town apparatchiks, required for all posting on the bulletin board in the center of town.  A number of those letters are included in the book I wrote on my ten years in Concord, Transcendental Trinkets.  Now, since 2010, I've been living on Cape Cod, also in Massachusetts.  Below is the first such letter I wrote.  

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Open Letter to Henry David Thoreau #1

--The Concord Censorial Committee and Concord Poetry Center--

Dear Henry: This letter is addressed to you because you would understand it, whereas most of our fellow citizens of Concord would likely not.  You know what I’m talking about: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même marde.  Some say you repose incarcerated today behind the walls of the Concord Museum, while others believe you to be held hostage behind those of Thoreau Institute, in a display case at the Concord Free Public Library, or even recycled, uh, reincarnated into a tee shirt, coffee mug, and other trinkets sold at Shop at Walden, operated by the society named after you.  In Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, I’ve walked by your gravesite, grabbed the coins placed there, but intuitively know you do not repose there either.  Since I am thus uncertain of your whereabouts, I have decided to post this letter on the Concord Bulletin Board at the Milldam.  

     Interestingly, the Chamber of Commerce controls the town today and, of course, local business pillars control it. Thus, all such postings must be approved by censorial apparatchiks:  “messages containing obscenities or other inappropriate content, as determined by Town staff, will not be posted.”  Pre-approved speech is, of course, not free speech at all.  Well, hopefully, the committee will approve this letter and not determine it to contain “inappropriate content.”  By the way, Henry, I have greatly appreciated the dissident morsels dispersed throughout your journals. Your wonderful statement, “Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine,” in fact, helped spur me to create a literary journal here in Concord to provide a forum for examining the dark side of the academic/literary established order and to incite poets and other artists to, in the words of your friend Emerson, “go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.”  As poet-editor, I thus push myself periodically to go upright and vital, though to act and speak alone tend to be equated with antisocial behavior in these parts, as you well know. 

        A month ago, thus, I protested the opening of the Concord Poetry Center for three simple reasons. The first included what Emerson had declared:  “I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names.”  The Center had invited a badge and name to speak, Pulitzer Prize Franz Wright, son of Pulitzer Prize Charles Wright.  The Center is located in the building owned by the Town and named after Emerson himself, the Emerson Umbrella for the Arts.  Oddly—well, perhaps not—, its director, Richard Fahlander, could not comprehend my dissent at all.  In fact, he refused to respond to my letters of protest. The second reason concerned what the Center’s director Joan Houlihan had written me: 

The idea of your teaching a workshop or delivering a lecture on the art of literary protest or poetry protest, or simply protest (Concord is where it all started!) occurred to me even before you mentioned it, so, yes, it’s something I will consider as we progress (this is only our first event).  However, I must say I don’t favor having you teach at the center if you protest the reading.

     The third reason pertained to my endless curiosity with regards poets in America today.  Oddly, indeed, not a single poet, poetaster, or poetophile attending the event was able to comprehend the reasoning for my protest. The hubris manifested by the organizers was troubling:  how dare anyone criticize us!   

     What marked and saddened me most during the protest was the incuriosity of local poets, poetasters, and poetophiles.  How could they be so un-inquisitive?  Such lack of curiosity is indeed quite foreign to me.  I really cannot fathom it, Henry.  How could poets and artists have become so bourgeois in mind and attitude—so safe, so un-warring with corrupt society, so networking, so group thinking, and so salivating before prizes and prize-winners?  Money and careerism can only explain it.  Well, I’ve got to stop here, since town functionaries have stipulated that only one page is permitted.  I’ll write again in several weeks when they tear this letter down and toss it into the garbage bucket.  Best to you, Henry.

James H. Billington

Billington just croaked, which is why I've just posted this cartoon, sketched in 2014.  The elevating of poetasters like Charles Wright by government-appointed hacks like Billington evidently serves a purpose:  cooptation and castration of poetry.

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Ron Charles, Barbara J. King

Notes on Lapdog Hagiography and the Three Charlies

Fed, paid, and pampered by the very men

By whom his muse and morals had been mauled:

He had written much blank verse, and blanker prose,

And more of both than anybody knows. […]

—Lord Byron, “Laureate Southey’s Presumption”

What crap ye write on poesy, Ron Charles!  And they call you a journalist?  Your WaPo essay, “A Pair of U. S. Poets Laureate for the Price of One,” was absolutely mind-numbing.  How did you manage to question and challenge nothing at all?  Rather than journalism, that’s lapdog hagiography!  

You illustrate the fundamental problem with literature (and journalism) today in America:  the absence of hardcore questioning and challenging of celebrity literati and the academic/literary established-order machine that rewards their conformity, groupthink, banality, and general innocuity—the safe lubricant of literature-as-usual wrapped in a tube called BRILLIANT.  How can you and the two laureatasters idolized in your essay, Charles Wright and Charles Simic, be so blind as to what it takes to climb the literary ladder:  kowtowing, cronyism, backslapping, self-congratulating, and all those other dubious traits that should NOT be rewarded? 

One should expect wisdom from poets laureate.  Instead, we—or at least I—have come to expect banality and poesy-as-usual.  Your article clearly fails to manifest any wisdom at all.  Instead, all it presents is hot- air inanity (i.e., pomp).  

“The only rule for the poet laureate of the United States is that there are no rules,” you state either as a blatant ignoramus or a willful participant in that Congressional sham.  Rules, of course, do exist, especially Basic Rule #1:  see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.  The triumphirate of the monkeys is indeed the true credo of ladder-climbing poets laureate.  In fact, it is evidently yours too!  After all, how else can one rise to lit critic for the Washington Post… if not by not criticizing the diverse hands that feed you to keep your mouth shut?  

To back your first statement of “no rules,” you note, “So when retiring laureate Charles Wright decided he didn’t want to follow tradition by delivering a closing lecture this month, nobody called the Capitol Police. And besides, he had a better idea: a public conversation with his friend Charles Simic.”  Wow!  What courage!  What a fabulous illustration of the “no rules” observation!  

Awe-stricken you fawn:  “But it made the star-power of Thursday evening’s presentation at the Library of Congress all the more impressive. There was the 20th U.S. poet laureate sitting on stage with the 15th U.S. poet laureate, their Pulitzer Prizes tucked discreetly behind them.”  How nauseating!  With all the crap going on in America, they (and you) sit in pomp and circumstance in the court-jester limelight of an out-of-touch elitist utopic cocoon, o poetasters of the U. S. Congress!  Bravo!   And again, as a journalist, how can you not question and challenge the literary prizes like the Pulitzer?  Who were the judges behind the scenes who awarded the prizes?  What prejudices regarding poetry do they hold?  

And then things get oh-so exciting in your reportage when lit-hack host of the event Don Share, editor of multimillion-dollar Poetry Foundation’s Poetry Magazine, asks: “What the heck does the poet laureate do, anyway?”  Oh my, how did he get away with saying, “heck”?  And how can you not wonder aloud, what Poetry Foundation’s $200 million dollars can do and has done to the public face of poetry, including outright castration and overall high-brow bourgeois palatability?  

And then Wright unintentionally sums up the sad reality of the inanity illicited from Share’s question:  “You don’t do much.” And when Share pushes for a longer or better response, Wright adds “Every state has a poet laureate—snore—so you might as well have one for the whole shebang. It’s been fabulous. I mean, people bow to me as I go down the street.”  And you pump it all up by describing the response as “wry disregard for the position’s pomp,” as if somehow Wright in a position of pomp was not pompous, but rather noncoformist.  Insane!  How do you guys get away with it?  Both you and Share should have instead asked why so many Americans knee-jerk open wide and swallow the crap and actually “bow” to it?  In fact, why doesn’t Wright have the intelligence to wonder about that… and openly?  As for the laureateship, you note he simply said:  “What does it mean? You’re loved. What’s better than that?”  Well, I (and hopefully others who think for themselves) sure as hell do NOT love that embarrassing suckup.  

And how to explain Wright’s blather about his writing “private kind of poetry,” while climbing right to the top of the ladder of public kind of poetry and public recognition—anything but private?  Ah, a little self-slap on the back explains it:  “But the best of private poetry eventually becomes public knowledge.”  Yes, I see.  Sure, that makes sense.  What wisdom!  

Finally, at least Simic got it right when asked where poetry will likely be in 50 years:  “It probably won’t change at all: ‘I’m all alone; nobody loves me; it’s always raining.’”  Ah, again what wisdom!  And then Wright’s response to it:  “I’ve written that!”  And to top it all off, your conclusion:  “Two jokers, two brilliant poets.”  Ah, the hackneyed term “brilliant” to describe less than brilliant academic poetasters!  How original! But you did at least hit the bull’s eye with “jokers” as in court jesters… of the U. S. Congress.

Charles Wright