Don Share

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Editorial - Issue #35

The Silence…

Of the Poets, Professors, and Free-Speech Advocates

 What you find is that there’s never just one cockroach in the kitchen.

—Warren Buffet

The SILENCE is deafening. The SILENCE is foretelling. The SILENCE is Orwellian. Poetry Foundation and its Poetry magazine are highlighted on this issue’s front cover.  Send a critique, as I’ve done, to its editor, Don Share… and SILENCE. Ask the Foundation, as I’ve done, why it refuses to list The American Dissident with the other poetry magazines listed… and SILENCE. The SILENCE is incarnate in “post-truth,” word of the year for Oxford Dictionary. Dolores Granger brought that to my attention, while a Wall Street Journal editorial had brought it to hers, noting the term indicates “a time in which truth becomes unimportant or irrelevant.” And that of course explains… the SILENCE.  Post-truthers hate truth.  Ideology hates truth. 

    Interesting things, perhaps even unimaginable ones, can occur when one openly criticizes the feeding apparatus of a post-truther and tests the waters of democracy. Imagine, for example, that Quillette, a conservative magazine, banned me from its “free-speech platform”! (See cartoon on page 5.) Perhaps it should be the poet’s prime job to speak the rude truth that will shake and break the fragile backbones and egos of editors, poets, professors, cultural-council apparatchiks, and journalists. If one pushes an ideology, which inevitably conflicts with truth, the best response to such truth is always… SILENCE.  

     Still it is perhaps surprising that so few intellectuals, even purported free-speech proponents, will respond to uncomfortable criticism.  National Coalition Against Censorship is a pitiful example, refusing to address criticism. Why?  Does its SILENCE indicate the criticism to be on target… or the critic to be a mere plebe and thus unworthy of response… or perhaps both? Recall the Charlie Hebdo massacre over three years ago.  Today, that liberal magazine is located in a secret “bunker.” One to two million dollars per year is spent on security, which the magazine, not the government, has to pay. Seven Hebdo journalists died, while others were wounded… by Muslim assassins. And what about the Pulse Nightclub massacre by a Muslim extremist in Florida and the Muslim would-be butchers at the Garland, TX Draw Muhammad contest? But for the ideologues at NCAC, Islam somehow is not a threat to free speech. One journalist, Fabrice Nicolino, wounded at the Hebdo massacre, recently said, “Chez moi, où je suis connu, des voisins d’extrême gauche ne veulent plus me dire bonjour, car ils ne sont surtout pas Charlie.” (Where I live, where I’m known, my extreme leftist neighbors will no longer say hello to me.)  Why not?  Well, because Hebdo criticized Muslims… just like it did everyone else.   

      Inside Higher Ed is yet another sad example (see last issue’s front cover). I’ve questioned its editors on a number of occasions. Their response? SILENCE! Poets & Writers magazine is equally pitiful. I dared criticize its front-page story, “Ten Poets Who Will Change the World.” Was it a farce? Well, if you know poets, you know damn well it wasn’t. So, I wrote an essay (see p27) and sketched cartoons for six of those world-changing bards and sent them to the editors, the 10 poets, and even some of the latter’s academic colleagues.  SILENCE!  

    Most recently, I wrote a counter-essay regarding a piece published by a Bridgewater State University professor in Bridgewater Review and sent it to the editors, the author, and even the student journalists of the university newspaper, The Comment. SILENCE! Then I drew a cartoon on some of the characters, including the university president and shot it out to the targets.  SILENCE! The literary letters section at the end of this issue includes other instances of SILENCE, as modus operandi of those who hate free debate…   

n another note, George Carlin once said, “Government wants to control information and control language because that's the way you control thought, and basically that's the game they're in.” With that regard, poets, writers, editors and journalists, who quote someone who said SHIT-HOLE, should write SHIT-HOLE, not s-hole. The same goes for NIGGER and any of the other vocabulary on the forbidden list from BITCH to SPIC to CRACKER. And why isn’t NAZI on that list?  Isn’t it highly insulting to call any white person, who disagrees with PC-Antifa, a Nazi? Writing the n-word or b-word does not automatically give someone the moral high-ground. Instead, it gives a person the low-ground of a common self-censoring conformist. Saul Alinsky perhaps was on target: “He who controls the language controls the masses.” Do you want to be part of the masses or a staunch individual? Clearly, an army of Alinsky acolytes have been toiling away at controlling the language in the universities. When one writes s-hole or n-word, then clearly one is being controlled and needs to contemplate those who seek to control and pressure.  Faceless bureaucrats! Faceless academics! Faceless SJWs! Well, I for one will fight against control by them. And if that means they’ll call me a racist, islamophobe, homophobe, or sexist, so what!!! My ma taught me, sticks and stones…  What the hell are the mothers teaching their kids today?

Natasha Trethewey

Don Share

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EditThe Silence…

Of the Poets, Professors, and Free-Speech Advocates

 What you find is that there’s never just one cockroach in the kitchen.

—Warren Buffet

The SILENCE is deafening. The SILENCE is foretelling. The SILENCE is Orwellian. Poetry Foundation and its Poetry magazine are highlighted on this issue’s front cover.  Send a critique, as I’ve done, to its editor, Don Share… and SILENCE. Ask the Foundation, as I’ve done, why it refuses to list The American Dissident with the other poetry magazines listed… and SILENCE. The SILENCE is incarnate in “post-truth,” word of the year for Oxford Dictionary. Dolores Granger brought that to my attention, while a Wall Street Journal editorial had brought it to hers, noting the term indicates “a time in which truth becomes unimportant or irrelevant.” And that of course explains… the SILENCE.  Post-truthers hate truth.  Ideology hates truth. 

    Interesting things, perhaps even unimaginable ones, can occur when one openly criticizes the feeding apparatus of a post-truther and tests the waters of democracy. Imagine, for example, that Quillette, a conservative magazine, banned me from its “free-speech platform”! (See cartoon on page 5.) Perhaps it should be the poet’s prime job to speak the rude truth that will shake and break the fragile backbones and egos of editors, poets, professors, cultural-council apparatchiks, and journalists. If one pushes an ideology, which inevitably conflicts with truth, the best response to such truth is always… SILENCE.  

     Still it is perhaps surprising that so few intellectuals, even purported free-speech proponents, will respond to uncomfortable criticism.  National Coalition Against Censorship is a pitiful example, refusing to address criticism. Why?  Does its SILENCE indicate the criticism to be on target… or the critic to be a mere plebe and thus unworthy of response… or perhaps both? Recall the Charlie Hebdo massacre over three years ago.  Today, that liberal magazine is located in a secret “bunker.” One to two million dollars per year is spent on security, which the magazine, not the government, has to pay. Seven Hebdo journalists died, while others were wounded… by Muslim assassins. And what about the Pulse Nightclub massacre by a Muslim extremist in Florida and the Muslim would-be butchers at the Garland, TX Draw Muhammad contest? But for the ideologues at NCAC, Islam somehow is not a threat to free speech. One journalist, Fabrice Nicolino, wounded at the Hebdo massacre, recently said, “Chez moi, où je suis connu, des voisins d’extrême gauche ne veulent plus me dire bonjour, car ils ne sont surtout pas Charlie.” (Where I live, where I’m known, my extreme leftist neighbors will no longer say hello to me.)  Why not?  Well, because Hebdo criticized Muslims… just like it did everyone else.   

     Inside Higher Ed is yet another sad example (see last issue’s front cover). I’ve questioned its editors on a number of occasions. Their response? SILENCE! Poets & Writers magazine is equally pitiful. I dared criticize its front-page story, “Ten Poets Who Will Change the World.” Was it a farce? Well, if you know poets, you know damn well it wasn’t. So, I wrote an essay (see p27) and sketched cartoons for six of those world-changing bards and sent them to the editors, the 10 poets, and even some of the latter’s academic colleagues.  SILENCE!  

    Most recently, I wrote a counter-essay regarding a piece published by a Bridgewater State University professor in Bridgewater Review and sent it to the editors, the author, and even the student journalists of the university newspaper, The Comment. SILENCE! Then I drew a cartoon on some of the characters, including the university president and shot it out to the targets.  SILENCE! The literary letters section at the end of this issue includes other instances of SILENCE, as modus operandi of those who hate free debate…   

      On another note, George Carlin once said, “Government wants to control information and control language because that's the way you control thought, and basically that's the game they're in.” With that regard, poets, writers, editors and journalists, who quote someone who said SHIT-HOLE, should write SHIT-HOLE, not s-hole. The same goes for NIGGER and any of the other vocabulary on the forbidden list from BITCH to SPIC to CRACKER. And why isn’t NAZI on that list?  Isn’t it highly insulting to call any white person, who disagrees with PC-Antifa, a Nazi? Writing the n-word or b-word does not automatically give someone the moral high-ground. Instead, it gives a person the low-ground of a common self-censoring conformist. Saul Alinsky perhaps was on target: “He who controls the language controls the masses.” Do you want to be part of the masses or a staunch individual? Clearly, an army of Alinsky acolytes have been toiling away at controlling the language in the universities. When one writes s-hole or n-word, then clearly one is being controlled and needs to contemplate those who seek to control and pressure.  Faceless bureaucrats! Faceless academics! Faceless SJWs! Well, I for one will fight against control by them. And if that means they’ll call me a racist, islamophobe, homophobe, or sexist, so what!!! My ma taught me, sticks and stones…  What the hell are the mothers teaching their kids today?

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The Following was sent to POETRY magazine et al.  

Response?  

ABSOLUT SILENCE!

From: George Slone

Sent: Thursday, April 12, 2018 9:37 AM

To: wbunn@coladv.com; scalderon@coladv.com; gcocking@coladv.com; cgillock@coladv.com; jguylay@coladv.com; info@poetryfoundation.org; natasha.trethewey@northwestern.edu; tapestryofvoices@yahoo.com; Doug holder; Rosalyn Becker; dsklar@endicott.edu; John Lauritsen; midcapecouncil2@gmail.com

Cc: chris.abani@northwestern.edu; amin.ahmad@northwestern.edu; e-biss@northwestern.edu; b-bouldrey@northwestern.edu; khbreen@northwestern.edu; j-bresland@northwestern.edu; meghan.costa@northwestern.edu; a-curdy@northwestern.edu; john-cutler@northwestern.edu; sarah.dimick@northwestern.edu; bedwards@northwestern.edu; rebecca-johnson-0@northwestern.edu; andrew.leong@northwestern.edu

Subject: Bunn, Bienen, Share, and Trethewey: THE SILENCE OF THE LITERATI

In Celebration of National Poetry Month:  A Criticism of National Poetry and the Silence of the Literati

To the Editor et al of Poetry Magazine and Managers et al of Poetry Foundation:
You have permission to publish the front cover of the current issue (#35) of The American Dissident in next issue of Poetry magazine.  It depicts the pitiful reality of the latter and poetry in general in today’s America via Share, Bunn III, Bienen, and Threthewey:  MONEY.  The front cover can be examined here:  

http://wwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com/2018/04/don-share.html.  As you know or ought to know, Poetry Foundation refuses to list The American Dissident with other magazines listed.  

Might one of you prove sufficiently curious to actually spend 30 seconds to examine the cover or are you all so intellectually buffered and restricted?  And of course I expect no response from any of you at all.  After all, your m.o. vis-a-vis hardcore criticism tends to be absolute silence, as in THE SILENCE OF THE LITERATI.  And of course that m.o. is quite difficult for me to comprehend, for unlike the bulk of poet editors and publishers, I not only brook criticism with my regard, but encourage it and publish the harshest with my regard in each and every issue of The American Dissident.  That is a rare, cogent expression of vigorous debate, cornerstone of democracy.  Sadly, that is NOT Poetry magazine, nor is it poetry in general today, where poets are absurdly deified to the point of THOU SHALT NOT CRITICIZE POET ICONS.  The higher the high-and-mighty literati get, the more intellectually corrupt they become and thus the more buffered from outside criticism they demand and succeed to be.

BTW, I have cc’d this email to a handful of Poet Laureate Trethewey’s Northwestern University English Department colleagues and hope that handful will send it to the other colleagues, though doubt wholeheartedly that any of those contacted professors will possess the intellectual independence to respond and do so.  A cartoon I drew on Trethewey in 2012 can be examined here:  

http://wwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com/2018/04/natasha-trethewey.html.

Go for it!  Curiosity didn’t kill the cat, academic entrenchment did that.  Finally, it is good when a poet laureate is a professor… for one reason:  his or her email is made publicly available by his or her university.   I could not locate Don Share’s email.  Will you please forward this letter to him.

Finally, intellectual corruption is rampant in the poetry milieu.  A poet plebe editor/publisher like me without connections cannot possibly obtain public money from the NEA or Mid-Cape Cultural Council, for example, nor will he ever be invited to speak at a poetry event like Harris Gardner’s Boston National Poetry Festival.  In fact, to speak “rude truth” a la Emerson today means risking permanent ostracizing by the poetry community.  My very neighborhood library, Sturgis Library, a proponent of National Poetry Month, for example, permanently banned me w/o warning or due process because I dared challenge the hypocrisy of Lucy Loomis, its director, in particular, with regards its collection development statement that “libraries should provide materials and information presenting all points of view.”  My point of view and the points of view published in The American Dissident have been permanently banned.  Do any of you care?  Of course not!  Why did I challenge Loomis?  Well, for one reason only:  Poetry magazine was the only poetry magazine on her shelves…  

Anne Waldman

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From the Preface of Triumvirate of the Monkeys
(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.