The cartoon below was sketched in 2012.
Showing posts with label PEN America. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PEN America. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 11, 2021
Sunday, October 11, 2015
Friday, October 9, 2015
Joshua Wolf Shenk, Black Mountain Institute
.......................................................
Sent Oct. 7, 2015
To Joshua Wolf Shenk,
As a new board member of PEN, might you actually be open to criticism against PEN? Probably not. If so, please do read my two essays on PEN:
http://globalfreepress.org/contributors/usa/g-tod-slone/3415-pen-an-ethical-consideration
http://globalfreepress.org/contributors/usa/g-tod-slone/3825-pen-an-ethical-consideration-part-ii
Also, check out the front cover of The American Dissident which featured PEN associates as wielders, not of pens or swords, but of cocktails:
http://theamericandissident.org/orgs/pen_new_england.html
Yes, I know, I’m a nobody and you’re an everybody. I’m a go-against-the-grain, you’re a ladder climber. Any possibility of “getting together”? Likely not!
In any event, your P&W interview will probably inspire me to satirize you in a new P. Maudit cartoon, which will then be published in a forthcoming issue of The American Dissident. After all, what other literary journal would publish such satire? The answer to that question sums up the sad state of American literature today.
That said, why not get your University of Nevada, Las Vegas library to subscribe and be the only institution in Nevada to do so? After all, where else might we’re-doing-such-a-great-job writers, poets, and professors find satire with their regard???
PS: SILENCE is always the best response of those in power--political, literary, cultural, academic et al --when criticized with the sledgehammer of truth.
Friday, October 24, 2014
Suzanne Nossel and Frank Bidart
Issue #28 Fall/Winter 2014-15
EDITORIAL
Entartete Kunst et al
This issue’s front cover features a handful of established-order cogs and is the fifth in a series, Entartete Kunst. From the established-order point of view, clearly the cover would be dismissed as “depraved art.” Would PEN America: Journal for Writers & Readers, Agni, Ploughshares, Poetry magazine, Poets & Writers, Rattle, American Poet Magazine, etc. have published the cover somewhere in their pages? Of course not! Why not? Fear of inconvenient truths! Criticism against The American Dissident is published in each issue. What’s the big deal? In fact, I encourage it! But not the editors of those magazines!
Featured are Academy of American Poets former chancellor Frank Bidart (center) receiving PEN’s literary award for established-order poetry, Chair of PEN’s Literary Awards (Poetry Society of America’s queen bee) Alice Quinn (left), PEN Executive Director Suzanne Nossel, Poesy Judge Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Poesy Judge Peg Boyers, Poesy Judge Toi Derrricotte, and Poesy Idolater Hollywood starlet James Franco. I’d written a long email to Nossel, who remained silent. Then I wrote another long email to her. She responded though rather vacuously and very briefly. Then I wrote several more emails to her, posing questions. She did not respond to them. Why is PEN so un-responsive and so apathetic to the concerns of an unconnected citizen? For the correspondence, see below. For my two-part essay critical of PEN, see http://www.globalfreepress.org/contributors/usa/g-tod-slone?start=18 and http://www.globalfreepress.org/contributors/usa/g-tod-slone/3825-pen-an-ethical-consideration-part-ii.
.......................................
To Suzanne Nossel, Executive Director, PEN America: Please allow me to pose a few questions pertinent to free expression in America:
1. Is there a reason why PEN America is indifferent to the fact that I, a poet, was permanently banned from commenting on the Academy of American Poets website in 2007? Is it not somewhat hypocritical to state on your website, “PEN America/ Free Expression, Literature,” while simultaneously awarding a poet, Frank Bidart, who proved entirely indifferent to my complaint of the censorship (removal!) of my free expression by the Academy of American Poets when he was one of its active chancellors? For the transcript of my censored comments, see http://theamericandissident.org/orgs/academy_american_poets_
transcript.html.
2. Is there a reason why PEN America is indifferent to the fact that I, a poet, was permanently banned without warning or possibility of due process from my very neighborhood library, Sturgis Library, one of the very oldest in the country? My speech crime was one of simple written criticism regarding the library’s own written policy that “libraries should provide materials and information presenting all points of view”. The permanent banning of my point of view and that of those published in The American Dissident prove that hypocrisy. In fact, is there a reason why PEN New England will not even respond to my correspondence with that regard? Does it consider me, like Sturgis Library and the Academy, a persona non grata in America because I dare express my points of view, as opposed to some party-line, pre-approved points of view? Could the answer to these questions simply be that some “free expression,” although protected by the First Amendment, is simply not condoned or defended by PEN America? That of course is something for you to contemplate. It is evident that the academic/literary established order does not approve of “free expression” that criticizes it, its icons (Bidart et al), and its firm control over literature in America. It is also oddly evident that PEN America seems to favor awarding prizes to those attached to that anti-free-expression established-order. Again, this is something for you to contemplate.
Finally, why is criticism like that included in this very letter, for example, kept out, amongst others, of PEN America Journal, Poetry Magazine, and the American Library Association’s American Libraries Magazine? [No response]
.......................................................................................
To Suzanne Nossel: Well, I doubt you’ll respond. After all, what could you possibly write in your defense… of apathy and bourgeois elitism? Hopefully, you’ve not become so high and mighty that you won’t even be able to focus on anything this lowly plebe has to write here… hopefully. Thus, I simply continue this dialogue de sourds. Currently, I’m sketching the next front cover of The American Dissident, #28, which will feature Frank Bidart, you, and other literary elitists (Quinn et al) involved in your Literary Awards (the images of you on Google portray a NY West Side Vanity Fair cocktail-party socialite… how odd for the head of PEN America!) Regarding the awards, you state: “The PEN Literary Awards bring together writers, editors, and members of the literary community to celebrate the ultimate fruit of free expression: great literature.” But what about those writers and editors NOT of the “literary community,” as you term the closed community of mostly established-order academics and their poet/writer acolytes. How to become a member of that community? Well, the response is obvious: play the game of see-no-evil, hear-no-evil PC-expression-only. The “ultimate fruit of free expression,” as you term it, is certainly not academically-approved, promoted, and designated “great literature.” The “ultimate fruit” is rather literature scorned by the elites because it dares criticize the elites. Far more often than not, “great literature” as you term it, is a subjective—not an objective—term. Far more often than not, that so-called “great literature” is innocuous, hardly at all threatening to the power structure, which designates it “great.” You seem quite confused pairing “free expression” with so-called “great literature.” Have you read The Oak and the Calf? If you haven’t, do so! But one would certainly expect that you have read it, considering your position. In any case, if you recall, Solzhenitsyn’s book depicts the literary scene under the Stalinist dictatorship. Sadly, that scene is a mirror of today’s literary scene in America. Of course, Americans are rarely arrested for writing (three cops showed up to escort me out of the library one week after my published writing, but I was not arrested). Instead, they are ostracized into oblivion, that is, if the established order feels offended by the writing. Why does PEN America not focus on that? Why does it not support the few American writers who dare criticize the academics and writers who control the literary scene in America, including the pompous chancellors of the Academy of American Poets (Bidart et al) and the one-percenters of the Poetry Foundation? The answer of course is that PEN has become an integral part of that scene. In essence, the scorners of free expression (academics and literati) have infiltrated and taken control of PEN America… unless, of course, it was always thus. In essence, if that were not true, why would your publication, PEN America Journal, not even respond to, let alone publish, the highly caustic article I wrote on PEN and submitted to it (See http://www.globalfreepress.org/sections/free-speech/3415-pen-an-ethical-consideration). The following is a pertinent quote from The Oak and the Calf to back the above contention:
The shrill, vainglorious literature of the establishment—with its dozen fat magazines, its two literary newspapers, its innumerable anthologies, its novels between hard covers, its collected works, its annual prizes, its adaptations for radio of impossibly tedious originals—I had once and for all recognized as unreal, and I did not waste my time or exasperate myself by trying to keep up with it. I knew without looking that there could be nothing of merit in all this. Not because no talent could emerge there—no doubt it sometimes did, but there it perished too. For it was a barren field, that which they sowed. I knew that in such a field nothing could grow to maturity. When they first came to literature they had, all of them—the social novelists, the bombastic playwrights, the civic poets, and needless to say the journalists and critics—joined in an undertaking never, whatever the subject, whatever the issue, to mention the essential truth, the truth that leaps to the eye within no help from literature. This solemn pledge to abstain from truth was called socialist realism. Even writers of love poems, even those lyric poets who had sought sanctuary in nature or in elegant romanticism, were all fatally flawed because they dared not touch the important truths.
Finally, unlike your journal, The American Dissident will publish the harshest criticism received because it really does believe in free expression… and vigorous debate, democracy‘s cornerstones.
......................................................
George—I am on vacation right now. We are happy to read and absorb your comments, no matter how critical. I am sorry to hear you have found your voice stifled in certain settings and glad to know you've created your own outlet. Best wishes, Suzanne
...............................
From: todslone@hotmail.com
To: snossel@pen.org
Subject: RE: Free Expression... or rather Expression Innocuous to the Party
Date: Tue, 5 Aug 2014 19:10:43 -0400
Hi Suzanne,
Well, your response is really a non-response. After all, you did not respond to one point made in those two emails I sent. What might "read and absorb" really mean? Perhaps when you return from your vacation (how not to think of Obama), you'll respond to the various points and questions I made in those two emails. BUT I certainly will not be holding my breath. I've been "dealing" with PEN's deaf ears for well over a decade now, which is why it will be highlighted in the next front cover of The American Dissident. It is likely PEN personnel are simply far too busy with their cocktail parties with rich and famous writers to be bothered contemplating any criticism regarding PEN. Bonnes vacances a toue (accent aigu)!
Sincerely,
G. Tod
To Suzanne Nossel, CEO of PEN:
Well, I expect you’re back from vacation now. In any case, you, Frank Bidart, Peg Boyers, Toi Derricotte, Alice Quinn, James Franco, and Rowan Ricardo Phillips in the context of the PEN Literary Awards have been satirized as elitist literati on the front cover of issue #28 of The American Dissident, A Journal of Literature, Democracy, and Dissidence, which was just published and distributed. You can examine the cover on the AD blog site here: wwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com.
The journal is a 501 c3 nonprofit and is unable to obtain any public funding whatsoever from the NEA, Massachusetts Cultural Council, etc., etc. The journal incarnates an enemy of the people… in the Soviet sense. The front-cover aquarelle is #6 in my Entartete Kunst series. As you hopefully know, “entartete kunst” was art deemed depraved by the Nazis and thus removed from the public eye and/or destroyed. For PC-America today, entartete kunst include any art critical of the academic/literary established order (PEN et al) and its diverse cogs, apparatchiks, and icons. Get my drift?
Question: Why won’t PEN America Journal publish any criticism of PEN? Is that not oddly perverted? After all, isn’t PEN supposed to be devoted to FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION?
Answer:
Question: Why won’t PEN New England respond to my efforts to re-obtain my civil rights and Freedom of Expression with impunity in New England? What is wrong with Karen Wulf? Usually, cronyism and inability to brook criticism explain such silence.
Answer:
Thank you for your attention and hopeful input and feedback.
...................................
To Susan Nossel, Exec. Dir., PEN America:
Unlike Deborah Eisenberg and other PEN dignitaries, who seem appallingly blind to the Islamic threat to freedom of speech and democracy in general, I applaud your decision to award Charlie Hebdo the Freedom of Expression Courage award. Perhaps as someone who promotes that award, however, you should have put down your cocktail for a moment and manifested the courage to respond to the aquarelle satire (see attached) I created on PEN and sent to you. In fact, you should have distributed it to other PEN elites. As you know, it became the front cover of issue #28 of The American Dissident. Was that depiction over the PEN red line of acceptable satire? Perhaps you ought to have also asked PEN New England’s Karen Wulf why she refuses to this day to respond to my requests for help to regain my civil rights here in Barnstable County on Cape Cod. Am I simply insufficiently PC for Wulf? "Defending freedom of expression" is supposed to be her and your mantra! You should have also distributed to PEN elites, rather than completely ignore, my caustic essay, “PEN: An Ethical Consideration” (see http://www.globalfreepress.org/sections/free-speech/3415-pen-an-ethical-consideration. And how to explain Professor Emeritus Fred Marchant on PEN New England's board of directors, who essentially banned The American Dissident from his Suffolk University Poetry Center? Is he afraid his students might notice my satirical work on him and PEN? What has professor emeritus come to mean today in America, if not professor conventionality and conformity, hardly at all professor temerity and individuality? Finally, is PEN really so high and mighty as to be above criticism? Well, uh, you actually did respond to all of my concerns back in August:
George - I am on vacation right now. We are happy to read and absorb your comments, no matter how critical. I am sorry to hear you have found your voice stifled in certain settings and glad to know you've created your own outlet. Best wishes, Suzanne
Yes, so sorry...
From: todslone@hotmail.com
To: snossel@pen.org
CC: journal@pen.org; dmoran@pen.org; arielle@pen.org; deji@pen.org; kglennbass@pen.org; editor.camelsaloon@gmail.com; sturgislibrary@comcast.net
Subject: Free Expression... or rather Expression Innocuous to the Party
Date: Sat, 2 Aug 2014 10:20:07 -0400
1. Is there a reason why PEN America is indifferent to the fact that I, a poet, was permanently banned from commenting on the Academy of American Poets website in 2007? Is it not somewhat hypocritical to state on your website, “PEN America/ Free Expression, Literature,” while simultaneously awarding a poet, Frank Bidart, who proved entirely indifferent to my complaint of the censorship (removal!) of my free expression by the Academy of American Poets when he was one of its active chancellors? For the transcript of my censored comments, see http://theamericandissident.org/orgs/academy_american_poets_
transcript.html.
2. Is there a reason why PEN America is indifferent to the fact that I, a poet, was permanently banned without warning or possibility of due process from my very neighborhood library, Sturgis Library, one of the very oldest in the country? My speech crime was one of simple written criticism regarding the library’s own written policy that “libraries should provide materials and information presenting all points of view”. The permanent banning of my point of view and that of those published in The American Dissident prove that hypocrisy. In fact, is there a reason why PEN New England will not even respond to my correspondence with that regard? Does it consider me, like Sturgis Library and the Academy, a persona non grata in America because I dare express my points of view, as opposed to some party-line, pre-approved points of view? Could the answer to these questions simply be that some “free expression,” although protected by the First Amendment, is simply not condoned or defended by PEN America? That of course is something for you to contemplate. It is evident that the academic/literary established order does not approve of “free expression” that criticizes it, its icons (Bidart et al), and its firm control over literature in America. It is also oddly evident that PEN America seems to favor awarding prizes to those attached to that anti-free-expression established-order. Again, this is something for you to contemplate.
Finally, why is criticism like that included in this very letter, for example, kept out, amongst others, of PEN America Journal, Poetry Magazine, and the American Library Association’s American Libraries Magazine? [No response]
.......................................................................................
From: todslone@hotmail.com
To: snossel@pen.org
CC: journal@pen.org; dmoran@pen.org; arielle@pen.org; deji@pen.org; kglennbass@pen.org; editor.camelsaloon@gmail.com; sturgislibrary@comcast.net
Subject: RE: Free Expression... or rather Expression Innocuous to the Party
Date: Mon, 4 Aug 2014 11:33:28 -0400
The shrill, vainglorious literature of the establishment—with its dozen fat magazines, its two literary newspapers, its innumerable anthologies, its novels between hard covers, its collected works, its annual prizes, its adaptations for radio of impossibly tedious originals—I had once and for all recognized as unreal, and I did not waste my time or exasperate myself by trying to keep up with it. I knew without looking that there could be nothing of merit in all this. Not because no talent could emerge there—no doubt it sometimes did, but there it perished too. For it was a barren field, that which they sowed. I knew that in such a field nothing could grow to maturity. When they first came to literature they had, all of them—the social novelists, the bombastic playwrights, the civic poets, and needless to say the journalists and critics—joined in an undertaking never, whatever the subject, whatever the issue, to mention the essential truth, the truth that leaps to the eye within no help from literature. This solemn pledge to abstain from truth was called socialist realism. Even writers of love poems, even those lyric poets who had sought sanctuary in nature or in elegant romanticism, were all fatally flawed because they dared not touch the important truths.
Finally, unlike your journal, The American Dissident will publish the harshest criticism received because it really does believe in free expression… and vigorous debate, democracy‘s cornerstones.
......................................................
From: snossel@PEN.org
To: todslone@hotmail.com
CC: Journal@Pen.org; dmoran@PEN.org; Arielle@PEN.org; Deji@PEN.org; kglennbass@PEN.org; editor.camelsaloon@gmail.com; sturgislibrary@comcast.net
Date: Mon, 4 Aug 2014 17:19:16 -0400
Subject: Re: Free Expression... or rather Expression Innocuous to the Party
...............................
From: todslone@hotmail.com
To: snossel@pen.org
Subject: RE: Free Expression... or rather Expression Innocuous to the Party
Date: Tue, 5 Aug 2014 19:10:43 -0400
Hi Suzanne,
Well, your response is really a non-response. After all, you did not respond to one point made in those two emails I sent. What might "read and absorb" really mean? Perhaps when you return from your vacation (how not to think of Obama), you'll respond to the various points and questions I made in those two emails. BUT I certainly will not be holding my breath. I've been "dealing" with PEN's deaf ears for well over a decade now, which is why it will be highlighted in the next front cover of The American Dissident. It is likely PEN personnel are simply far too busy with their cocktail parties with rich and famous writers to be bothered contemplating any criticism regarding PEN. Bonnes vacances a toue (accent aigu)!
Sincerely,
G. Tod
From: todslone@hotmail.com
To: snossel@pen.org
CC: fbidart@wellesley.edu; pboyers@skidmore.edu; writecen@pitt.edu; rowan.phillips@stonybrook.edu; journal@pen.org; dmoran@pen.org; arielle@pen.org; deji@pen.org; kglennbass@pen.org; pen-newengland@mit.edu; kwulf@mit.edu
Subject: Suzanne Nossel et al satirized by P. Maudit
Date: Fri, 24 Oct 2014 16:32:21 -0400
To Suzanne Nossel, CEO of PEN:
Well, I expect you’re back from vacation now. In any case, you, Frank Bidart, Peg Boyers, Toi Derricotte, Alice Quinn, James Franco, and Rowan Ricardo Phillips in the context of the PEN Literary Awards have been satirized as elitist literati on the front cover of issue #28 of The American Dissident, A Journal of Literature, Democracy, and Dissidence, which was just published and distributed. You can examine the cover on the AD blog site here: wwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com.
The journal is a 501 c3 nonprofit and is unable to obtain any public funding whatsoever from the NEA, Massachusetts Cultural Council, etc., etc. The journal incarnates an enemy of the people… in the Soviet sense. The front-cover aquarelle is #6 in my Entartete Kunst series. As you hopefully know, “entartete kunst” was art deemed depraved by the Nazis and thus removed from the public eye and/or destroyed. For PC-America today, entartete kunst include any art critical of the academic/literary established order (PEN et al) and its diverse cogs, apparatchiks, and icons. Get my drift?
Question: Why won’t PEN America Journal publish any criticism of PEN? Is that not oddly perverted? After all, isn’t PEN supposed to be devoted to FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION?
Answer:
Question: Why won’t PEN New England respond to my efforts to re-obtain my civil rights and Freedom of Expression with impunity in New England? What is wrong with Karen Wulf? Usually, cronyism and inability to brook criticism explain such silence.
Answer:
Thank you for your attention and hopeful input and feedback.
From: todslone@hotmail.com
To: snossel@pen.org
CC: glenn.greenwald@theintercept.com; kwulf@mit.edu; fmarchant@suffolk.edu; editor.camelsaloon@gmail.com
Subject: PEN... not at all like Charlie Hebdo
Date: Tue, 28 Apr 2015 20:10:47 -0400
To Susan Nossel, Exec. Dir., PEN America:
Unlike Deborah Eisenberg and other PEN dignitaries, who seem appallingly blind to the Islamic threat to freedom of speech and democracy in general, I applaud your decision to award Charlie Hebdo the Freedom of Expression Courage award. Perhaps as someone who promotes that award, however, you should have put down your cocktail for a moment and manifested the courage to respond to the aquarelle satire (see attached) I created on PEN and sent to you. In fact, you should have distributed it to other PEN elites. As you know, it became the front cover of issue #28 of The American Dissident. Was that depiction over the PEN red line of acceptable satire? Perhaps you ought to have also asked PEN New England’s Karen Wulf why she refuses to this day to respond to my requests for help to regain my civil rights here in Barnstable County on Cape Cod. Am I simply insufficiently PC for Wulf? "Defending freedom of expression" is supposed to be her and your mantra! You should have also distributed to PEN elites, rather than completely ignore, my caustic essay, “PEN: An Ethical Consideration” (see http://www.globalfreepress.org/sections/free-speech/3415-pen-an-ethical-consideration. And how to explain Professor Emeritus Fred Marchant on PEN New England's board of directors, who essentially banned The American Dissident from his Suffolk University Poetry Center? Is he afraid his students might notice my satirical work on him and PEN? What has professor emeritus come to mean today in America, if not professor conventionality and conformity, hardly at all professor temerity and individuality? Finally, is PEN really so high and mighty as to be above criticism? Well, uh, you actually did respond to all of my concerns back in August:
George - I am on vacation right now. We are happy to read and absorb your comments, no matter how critical. I am sorry to hear you have found your voice stifled in certain settings and glad to know you've created your own outlet. Best wishes, Suzanne
Yes, so sorry...
......................................
From: George Slone
Sent: Sunday, April 10, 2016 11:58 AM
To: snossel@pen.org
Cc: antonio@pen.org; arielle@pen.org; shreya@pen.org; kdkarlekar@pen.org; mmark@pen.org; laura@pen.org
Subject: PEN HYPOCRISY
To Susan Nossel, Exec. Dir., PEN:
You never did get back to me after that vacation of yours almost two years ago! Again, my question is quite simple: how do you manage to thrive in hypocrisy? How do organizations like PEN simultaneously boast to be free-speech advocates, while viscerally rejecting free-speech criticism with their regard? Why will you NOT post negative criticism of PEN on PEN’s website like this email and that of the front cover of The American Dissident featuring you, PEN, and that hypocrisy? Did you even bother to look at the cover I sent?
PEN of course is not at all alone. NCAC, Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, ACLUM, and American Library Association, for example, share in that egregious hypocrisy. How do the first two justify ignoring the Garland, TX near-massacre of free speech? Well, they do not even attempt to do so! After all, silence is the most effective weapon of hypocrites! How does the NCAC manage to include Islamophobia hysteria, but not Islam in its “15 Threats to Free Speech 2015”? See the essay I published with that regard here http://www.globalfreepress.org/contributors/usa/g-tod-slone/3936-15-threats-to-free-speech-2015-an-egregious-and-purposeful-omission . Go on, check it out, or do you only do that when it’s a question of rich and famous establishment writers like Rushdie or writers in foreign jails or writer murderers and rapists in American jails?
How do you manage to ignore HR 569, a bill that seeks to be the first anti-blasphemy law regarding Islam in America? Over 82 Democrat congressmen are co-sponsors of it. The front cover of the current issue of The American Dissident features the main sponsor next to three members of CAIR. Would PEN America Journal like to publish a picture of that front cover? Of course not! How does PEN manage to ignore Loretta Lynch’s anti-free-speech declaration that she’d look into the possibility of prosecuting blasphemers against Islam? Yes, that was her mind-boggling reaction to the San Bernardino Islamic massacre, as you might recall.
Is part of PEN Free Expression Coordinator Shreya Balhara’s job to free-expression coordinate all criticism of PEN into the garbage bucket, unless of course lodged by approved PEN members? Is part of Editor M Mark’s job to assure the absence of hardcore criticism vis-a-vis PEN in each issue of
PEN America Journal? Why the fear of such criticism? In every issue of The American Dissident, the harshest criticism lodged against me and the journal is not only published, but encouraged. What’s the big deal? I just cannot fathom your perspective.
Finally, I note that out of the 24 staff members listed on your site (http://www.pen.org/pen-staff-directory), only four are men. One or two are black. Is that called PEN diversity and inclusion or rather PEN sexism? [No response]
Saturday, August 2, 2014
Alice Quinn
The above aquarelle features Alice Quinn, PEN America's Chair of Literary Awards and Executive Director of Poetry Society of America, which is a members-only club, where only members select new members. Nothing like democracy, eh?! It's who you know, not what you know... per usual. Quinn, former Poetry Editor for the New Yorker, is depicted as an established-order puta. The depiction was of course influenced by a photograph taken by Walker Evans of Mexican prostitutes.
Friday, March 6, 2009
Nikki Giovanni
It is an easy thing for so-dubbed “internationally acclaimed writers” like Soyinka, Gordimer, and Coetzee, to decry the incarceration of writers abroad, but a very difficult one for them to decry the inherent corruption of the diverse hands feeding them cash, prizes and accolades here in the USA.—P. Maudit
Dear Pen Staff (Michael Roberts, Executive Director; M. Mark, Editor Pen America; Caro Llewellyn, PEN World Voices Festival Director; Stacy Leigh, Readers & Writers and Open Book Director; Anna Kushner, Freedom to Write Coordinator; Sarah Hoffman, Freedom to Write Associate; David Haglund, Managing Editor, PEN America; Alena Graedon, Executive Assistant; Nick Burd, Literary Awards Program Manager; Linda Morgan, Development Director; Larry Siems, Freedom to Write and International Programs Director; Stefanie Simons, Readers & Writers Associate; Jackson Taylor, Prison Writing Program Director; Elizabeth Weinstein, Public Programs Associate; Michael Welch, Planning and Finance Director):
Having just read an article by Chinese dissident Ma Jian, I thought of you and decided to write in the hope that perhaps one of you would actually respond… and not simply in the polite bureaucratic sense, as in an out of office autoreply. [Of course, not one of them would ever respond!]
“There is little need for literary censors these days,” noted Ma Jian, regarding China. “The writers have learnt to do a proficient job of censoring themselves.” With that regard, how not to think of America and her proficient self-censoring poets and writers? Why did PEN America seem to avoid that egregious reality? By pointing almost always to injustice abroad, it seemed to be acting as a propaganda arm of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. It possessed a Freedom to Write and International Programs Director, but not a Freedom to Write and National Programs Director.
Last August, I wrote Pen New England, which chose not to respond. In vain, I’d brought to its attention the fact that here in Massachusetts, as a highly critical dissident author and publisher, I had been ostracized and was being punished. The Concord Cultural Council, for example, enacted—because of me—a new provision excluding from public funding any proposal it subjectively deemed to be of a “political nature.” The Massachusetts Cultural Council simply refused to respond to my questions. For example, why did it fund Agni, which was published by Boston University, a private institution with over one-billion dollars in its endowment fund, while refusing to accord any monies at all to The American Dissident, the journal I publish?
Also, in America, as I’m sure PEN was aware, writers could indeed be arrested and incarcerated. For example, I was arrested and incarcerated in Concord for a day, yet all I'd done was speak freely (www.theamericandissident.org/WaldenPondStateReservation.htm). Surely, other American writers, not of the "internationaly acclaimed" variety, had much more serious tales to divulge. Sadly, Pen of New England didn’t seem to give a damn about mine. What about PEN America?
On another—though really always the same—matter, as a rare dissident poet at the Festival International de la Poesie de Trois-Rivieres (Quebec) in 2001, I was highly critical of that festival’s management and had not been invited back since. Management oddly, or perhaps not, prohibited debate during the festival, while invited poets, both Canadian and international, lamely acquiesced. In the context of its Pen segment, I was even invited as a known dissident to read a translation of a Kenule Saro-Wiwa poem I’d prepared. Needless to say, I’d end up sending a complaint to Pen Quebec, which simply did not respond. In 2004, I mentioned this to Pen America, which responded with hollow empathy: “In general, we at the PEN America Center have no involvment [sic] with events that take place in Canada. It sounds like your experience has been unfortuanate [sic].”
I’d also asked how I might become a PEN member, so that I could help bring to light the rampant, though often subtle, censorship existent in America, thanks to its army of obsequious writers, academics, and other luminaries. PEN responded thusly: “Regrading [sic] your query about joining PEN, currently membership is by nomination (either internal or external) and is entirely voluntary.” Well, that didn't sound very democratic at all.
Being a harsh critic of poets, writers, editors and academics in America, I now found myself unable to find full-time employment as a professor of English. When employed at American colleges and universities, I tended to “go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways” (Emerson). For that, I now found myself at the end of the line. On another note, the Academy of American Poets, sponsor of National Poetry Month, censored and banned me from participating in its forums a year and a half ago. With that regard, I’d contacted each of its tenured-professor chancellors, each of whom evidently favored censorship (www.theamericandissident.org/AcademyAmericanPoets.htm). More recently, InsideHigherEd.com censored my comments.
Finally, Ma Jian wrote: “A savvy young Chinese writer who spoke in London recently was asked about his views on the Tiananmen massacre. He said with a self-satisfied smirk that he was asleep in bed when it took place, and that he never joined the marches because he found them exhausting. There is a word in Chinese that describes this attitude: xiaosa. It means imperturbable, detached, nonchalant. This carefree denial of the meaningful role of an artist in society is a blight that inflicts great numbers of China's unofficial cultural elite.”
Again, how not to think of America and her OFFICIAL cultural elite (e.g., multimillionaire Toni Morrison), funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and promoted by, amongst others, the Library of Congress and Academy of American Poets? Hopefully, Ma Jian would become aware of the hypocrisy here in America before some American university ended up purchasing his soul. Indeed, American universites were quite adept at the art of soul purchasing. Think of Beatniks Ginsberg and Snyder, as well as dissident foreigners Yevtushenko, Wole Soyinka, and Dennis Brutis. As for Nikki Giovanni, another PEN-favored writer, she made a blatantly racist statement, though of PC variety, that “Black students will inevitably run into some white classmates who are troubling because they often say stupid things, ask stupid questions and expect an answer.” I challenged her on it. She remained silent.
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