Kathleen Parker

Jose Antonio Vargas

Franz Wright

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Why Poetry Doesn't Matter--Yet Another Example...

Above is a cartoon I sketched in 2004 on Franz Wright, who actually paid me $10 for a copy of it in person at the Emerson Umbrella for the Arts (ah, but not for my arts!) building when he saw me with signs and flyers protesting his scheduled reading at Concord Poetry Center.  He chuckled and never did comment on it.  

          I thought I should post it here for the record, since Wright just croaked.  "Award-winning poet" Michael Dickman presented his blind-poet accolade write-up in Time magazine (6/1/15).  "Award-winning" poets like Dickman and Wright of course rarely, if ever, possess the individuality to question and challenge the academic/literary established order machine handing out the prizes and accolades.   Dickman, in a typical outpouring of hyperbolic lit-dysentery, states "Franz Wright was a haunted and passionate poet, creator of some of the most devastatingly beautiful and dangerous poems written in English in the past 50 years."  Sadly, MFA poesy students will likely swallow the shit without questioning it.  And Dickman evidently needs a dictionary to look up the term "dangerous."  

          "The hole he leaves in contemporary American poetry will not, as Wright once wrote, be 'scarlessly closing like water' anytime soon," concludes Dickman as if somehow making an objective statement, which sums up the entire canon-making machinery, which inevitably performs its hocus-pocus and voila subjective becomes objective.  Just swallow and say ahh, just like Dickman has been doing all his life right up the ladder to the safe penning of a Time mag obit hagiography.  Dickman, by the way, briefly responded to my critique of his hagiography (see below for correspondence).  I'd mistakenly written that Charles Wright, current Lit-Innocuity-in-Chief aka Poet Laureataster of the US Congress, was Franz Wright's father.  In fact, the two are not related.  Sadly, that was all Dickman had to say.  

          Regarding my Concord protest, Franz Wright, of course, unsurprisingly, did not give a damn about it, and I doubt he possessed the capacity to understand the cartoon he'd purchased.  The protest concerned, not just him, but also the Concord Poetry Center, who's director, Joan Houlihan, had aberrantly stipulated that if I stood before her center in protest, she would not permit me to teach a workshop on dissident poetry and poets.  Where most poetasters like Wright would probably have said, well, ok, I won't protest, I certainly did not.  Below is the letter I wrote to Wright, who never responded...

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                                                                                                      October 17, 2004

Franz Wright, Pulitzer Poet

74 Parmenter Rd.

Waltham, MA 02453

Dear Franz Wright:

We met Saturday night quite briefly (see my poem on that encounter).  I was/am the lone poet protester of Concord (I spent a day in a Concord jail for protesting the absence of free speech at Walden Pond several years ago).  Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all dialogue, rather than chuckle at each other?  Wouldn’t it be nice (generous) if the academic lit journals, workshops, classes and poetry centers opened their scope to other possibilities and even manifested CURIOSITY?  Yes, I am aware that you are not an academic… but I suspect, if you are not already, you shall soon be with workshop opportunities, adjunct courses, and offers of tenure from the nation’s poetry department heads.  

Anyhow, enclosed is a copy of the literary journal I created as a result of academic corruption at Fitchburg State College (MA).  I was a professor there (5 years) and am now a blacklisted unemployed professor with a PhD… for whatever that is worth.  

Enclosed also is a self-published chapbook (who else would ever publish such a thing?) of my poetry and especially my literary manifesto.  The latter is what I’d really like you to examine.  Over 40 academic journals have rejected it.  I thought it might be interesting if you simply contemplated for a moment how impossible it is for a dissident poet to find a publisher in today’s society.  Indeed, recently reading Solzhenitsyn’s The Oak and the Calf, I could not help but compare America’s Academic-controlled literary scene (the Academic/Literary Industrial Complex) with that of the Soviet Writer’s Union.  

Thank you for helping to support The American Dissident with your $10 contribution.  

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From: todslone@hotmail.com

To: mdickman@princeton.edu

CC: lewiscenter@princeton.edu

Subject: Adjudicated: Insufficiently Deferent

Date: Wed, 3 Jun 2015 11:16:51 -0400

To Michael Dickman, (Academic) Lecturer in Creative Writing, Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University:

Yesterday, I read your obit on Franz Wright, while waiting for my car inspection at Toyota.  My comments with its regard, including a cartoon I’d sketched on Wright ages ago, have just been posted on my blog site here:  wwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com.  Why not take a gander.  After all, as I've always said, curiosity did not kill the cat, careerism did that.  

In fact, why not manifest unusual openness and expose your creative-writing students to it?  Pipe dream?  Most likely, and despite the following deceptive statement of implied inclusivity:  “The Lewis Center for the Arts is designed to put the creative and performing arts at the heart of the Princeton experience. This mission is based on the conviction that exposure to the arts, particularly to the experience of producing art, helps each of us to make sense of our lives and the lives of our neighbors.”

Ah, but which “creative and performing arts” are to be included… and which are to be excluded… in the name of inclusivity of course? Which poets are to be included and which shall be excluded?  Do you teach your students that?  Do you teach them to question and challenge the lit canon?  Do you teach them to wonder about the faceless judges concealed behind the scene who choose this poem but not that poem?  Do you teach them to wonder why those faceless Pulitzer judges chose Franz Wright?  Did they choose him because he was harshly critical with their regard?  

Finally, why not get Princeton to subscribe to The American Dissident (only $20/year) or better yet order copies for your students.  After all, where else might they read criticism of lit icons and their acolytes?  Where else might they be able to examine satirical cartoons, poems, and essays on those like Wright… and even you?  Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins, Buffalo, and a few other universities thankfully subscribe.  To date, only one professor has been willing to open up his classroom to opposing viewpoints and invite me to speak about The American Dissident.  Professor Dan Sklar (Endicott College) has been doing that for almost five years now.  For all student comments, see http://theamericandissident.org/students.html.

Thank you for your attention.

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From: mdickman@Princeton.EDU

To: todslone@hotmail.com

Subject: RE: Adjudicated: Insufficiently Deferent

Date: Wed, 3 Jun 2015 15:36:17 +0000

Mr. Slone, 

Charles Wright is not Franz Wright's father. 

Good luck,

Michael Dickman

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From: todslone@hotmail.com

To: mdickman@princeton.edu

Subject: Adjudicated: Insufficiently Deferent

Date: Wed, 3 Jun 2015 20:21:59 -0400

Michael,

I stand corrected!  I always thought he was the father.  Somebody must have told me that a while ago.  I shall note on my blog that I erred.  Now, too bad you are not OPEN to different viewpoints... too bad for your students.

G. Tod

Michael Cavna Dan Perkins

Inliers Who Somehow Think They’re Outliers

“Inliers” do not possess the basic courage and capablity for questioning and challenging the diverse hands feeding them. They write articles like “Tom Tomorrow: What does it mean when a true outlier is a Pulitzer Prize finalist?”  Michael Cavna, the Washington Post cartoon columnist who wrote that one, seems incapable of understanding the basic premise that “true outliers” can NOT become Pulitzer Prize finalists.  They can only do that if in fact they are “untrue outliers” who somehow think they are “true outliers,” kind of like Cavna himself.

The entire structure feeding the Cavnas and other “inliers” remains out of bounds for their critical thinking.  Now, for example, rather than trumpet the “string of honors,” as Cavna does regarding cartoonist Dan Perkins aka Tom November, why not actually think and wonder who might be the faceless judges of cartoonist propriety handing out those so-called “honors” and what might tick them off, and how and why do those cartoonists who receive the  so-called “honors” sufficiently self-censor themselves to be considered for them?  

How do the faceless judges keep cartoonists barking like little doggies for the little doggie biscuits held in their hands?  Where are the courageous cartoonists in America—you know, like the Charlie Hebdo martyrs of freedom of speech in France—, who bite those hands and satirize those faceless judges?  Well, you ain’t gonna find them even way at the bottom of the Pulitzer Prize list.  So-called “alternative or independent” cartoonists have really become nothing but second-tier established-order cartoonists desperate to climb the ladder to the first tier like, once upon a time, Gary Trudeau, now PC, Democrat-Party, anti-Charlie-Hebdo Islamist apologist.  

Cavna needs to define the term “outlier,” which for him, seems to mean not yet recognized by the established-order and he or she who sketches PC-acceptable themes, while barking to be recognized by that order.  Cavna-designated “outlier” Dan Perkins notes:  “It’s been gratifying to have the work recognized in the past couple of years.  I got the Herblock, I got a Society of Illustrators silver medal, and now this—it’s just nice to have these things.”  But why doesn’t Perkins have the capacity to ask himself what he’s probably been doing wrong to get recognized by a society of illustrators?  Perkins barks ravenously:  “Time is not my friend. How many more years will I be eligible [for the Pulitzer]? I don’t have that many more shots at it.  But even to have made it as a finalist— this is hugely significant for me. … I’ve been waiting for this for a long time.”  But when one barks ravenously, one cannot see or think clearly.  

Cavna exists in WaPo dreamlandia, ever barking for doggie bones.  The whole award-system structure serves a purpose:  to place those who do not have the courage to bite established-order hands in the limelight and to keep those who do bite those hands out of it.  Period.  Now, as a cartoonist, I shall have to satirize Cavna around that basic premise.  Do you think he will respond?  Would he publish the cartoon in his WaPo column?  In fact, will he simply censor this comment out of view from faithful WaPo readers?

Leonard Pitts, Jr.

Michael Dirda

Notes on Michael Dirda's Review of Ted Kooser's Splitting an Order

You need to write a book on how to get so excited over such a banal poem, “Painting the Barn,” by established-order ex-insurance executive, former poet laureate of the USA Ted Kooser, “the most [apart from Billy Collins] accessible and enjoyable major poet in America,” according to you.  Have you ever wondered what “major poet” implies besides linguistically deft?  Clearly, it implies a poet who never makes waves, never goes against the grain of literary established order, and thus never bucks the ivory-tower system.  Is that good?  Methinks not at all! 

Perhaps Kooser is “enjoyable” to you, but why should he be enjoyable to me and other individual thinkers?  Sure, hordes of academics could likely write 350-page dissertations on that poem, but does that make it great… or even simply good?  And isn’t great subjective?  Yet you and so many other established-order cogs would have people believe it is an objective term.  Now, what I look for in a poem is obviously NOT what you look for:  unusual wisdom, as opposed to sentimentality, for example, over a dead dog.  What you and other literati of the established-order do is promote the innocuous, like Ted Kooser, because the innocuous does not upset established-order literati.  It is really quite that simple.

Few poems contain unusual wisdom like, for example, Villon’s “Estoit-il lors temps de moy taire?,” Jeffers’ “Finally I say let demagogues and world-redeemers babble/ their emptiness/ To empty ears; twice duped is too much./ Walk on gaunt shores and avoid the people” and Neruda’s “Nací para golpear las puertas, para empuñar los golpes,/ para encender las últimas y arrinconadas sombras/en donde se alimenta la araña venenosa./ Serán nombrados.”    

What we need are poets with guts like Villon, who dared criticize the ruling Parisian theocrats during his time and risked death by hanging.  Where are those poets today in America who RISK in their poetry upsetting established-order apparatchiks, who promote coopted, innocuous poetry… and thus weaken literature, dulling its blade, rendering it palatable for the established order? 

Why not try being original and not push celebrity literati in your literati columns?  Why not seek out rare poets who really do RISK speaking rude truth in their verse—RISK not getting tenure, RISK not getting grants, RISK not getting invitations, RISK not getting awards, RISK not getting reviewed in your columns?  Nature and feelings are fine in poetry, BUT poetry should NOT be limited to those things.  “Such imagery from a vanishing America further enforces the overall autumnal quality of these recent poems,” you write regarding Kooser’s new book.  Wow.  “Overall autumnal quality”!  Now, that’s a good one!  What about overall RISK and bold TRUTH TELLING? 

“But if you reflexively dismiss modern verse as dauntingly esoteric or embarrassingly corny or tediously singsong, you need to try Ted Kooser,” you conclude.  Rather than “dauntingly esoteric,” I find modern verse devoid of any criticism at all of the academic/literary established order machinery, professors, and favored icons diligently working to keep poetry castrated. 

 

 

 

Claudia Emerson

Open Letter to the English Professors 
Of the University of Mary Washington

A satirical cartoon of one of your colleagues, Claudia Emerson, is up on The American Dissident blogsite:
http://wwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com/. Please inform Emerson, whose email address was not available to me. Experience tells me it is highly likely that you do not believe in vigorous debate, cornerstone of democracy, and do not give a damn about the value of criticism and free speech, preferring instead the establishment of speech restricting codes, zones, and policies. If, however, you prove to be quite extraordinary, consider subscribing to The American Dissident. Yale, Harvard, Buffalo, Wisconsin, Brown, Johns Hopkins, and other such universities are subscribers.

Your silence will simply imply that you, indeed, operate as yet another academic herd lead by business-minded (not democracy-minded) provosts, deans, and chairpersons. It will simply imply that you too fail to heed Thoreau and Emerson (“let your life be a counterfriction to stop the machine,” “go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways”).

America has truly taken the wrong pathway, educating so many, many of its citizens as unquestioning and unchallenging societal cogs driven not by principles, but instead by careerism. One day, perhaps in the near future, even our politicians will have a difficult time referring to the nation as a democracy, thanks in part to the nation's college and university professors.

See the blogsite for other experiments in free speech effected on faculty of other universities and colleges. Thank you for your attention.