World Class Poetry Blog

“A Labor Day Rosary”: A Different Kind Of Religious Poem
8 April 2008, the poet @ 2:55 pm

One can hardly call “A Labor Day Rosary” by Jeff Rath a religious poem. But then one can hardly say it isn’t, either. The poem, in its simple brilliance, merges the lines between the political and the religious. In America, the two are inextricably intertwined. The Religious Right has its political heroes; so, too, does the religiously liberal (and liberally religious) have theirs. To be sure, there are two Christianities in America - the one that crucifies Adam Smith on the cross of economic policy, and the one that magnifies Karl Marx in the light of the City of God. The fight for America’s soul lies in the grasp of these two warring factions.

Of course, one need not be religious to believe in Smith’s capitalism any more than one need be religious to adhere to a belief in Marxism. But Marxists tend to get a bad rap, deservedly or no. Because of Marx’s own religious atheism, it is assumed that all Marxists are atheists, but that is no more true than to say that all capitalists are Christian. Ayn Rand was one of the most staunch defenders of free market economic policies and she was as atheist as any socialist ever was. How then should we reconcile the religious with extreme political views?

You will see upon reading “A Labor Day Rosary” that one need not such a reconciliation where Jeff Rath is concerned. The content of the poem is not that religious (or is it?). But Catholics and other mainstream Christians will assuredly recognize the form. Written as a creed, following the same pattern as the Nicene Creed and the liturgical Prayers of the People, the poem makes its mark as a statement. A bold religious and political statement. Agree or disagree, you can’t ignore it. The political and the religious are intrinsically connected and Jeff Rath’s “A Labor Day Rosary” proves it:

A Labor Day Rosary

I
The Investor’s Creed
I believe in Capitalism,
creator of all profit here on earth,
and in Dow Jones, his only son,
our one true god,
who was conceived by greed,
born of the wealthy,
suffered under the Fair Wage Act,
crashed on Black Friday in ‘29,
was dead and buried, but rose again,
ascending to Wall Street,
and sitteth on the Governing Board
of the Stock Exchange,
from thence He shall come
to judge the rich and the poor
by different standards.
I believe in survival of the richest,
the legacy of the Robber Barons,
the Miracle of Compound Interest,
and in forgiving no debt,
no matter how small,
also in the resurrection of tax breaks,
and loopholes for the top two percent,
and in my wealth everlasting.

-Amen

II
Prayers Of The Workers
O lord, let me collapse
beneath the weight of all my debts
upon the rolling mill floor,
let great flaming slabs
of iron and steel
be dragged back and forth across my body
until my bones are crushed to dust,
until my dirt-stained flesh
is burnt to a fine white ash.

II
O mighty god of industry,
I beseech you,
in the sacred name of management:
take back the forty-hour work week,
lift from these burdened shoulders
the yoke of holiday pay,
time-and-a-half, medical plans,
workman’s compensation,
and all those other profit-robbing perks
our misguided forbears
extorted from the owners
through strikes and collective bargaining.

IV
Grant me the serenity
to swallow company policy
no matter how arbitrary,
the courage to support company decisions,
huge bonuses for management,
never-ending worker give-backs,
and the wisdom to realize
that any trouble from labor
will leave the company no choice
but to send my job overseas.

V
Hail, Big Bill Hayward, the IWW is with thee.
Blessed art thou among workers,
and blessed be the fruits of our labor.
Blessed Eugene Debs,
pray for us workers,
now and in the ever-increasing hours of our bondage
until we are robbed of all dignity
and driven early to our anonymous graves.

VI
Father of all that is profitable,
and therefore good,
I wish to confess my sins:
I have offered up my youth,
my health and my sweat,
I have sacrificed body parts -
even my children and my dreams -
upon the altar of the company’s goals.
But I have not done so with true humility,
with absolute acceptance of the bottom line.
I have harbored thoughts of resentment, Father,
and disillusionment.
Please forgive these hands and this heart,
and my misguided belief
that there should also be
a feeling of some personal value
in performing the work I do.

–Amen

Poetry need not be all neat and clean, nor easily definable. Even religious poetry. For the crux of all religions is to define the relationships between Man and God and between Man and Man. Some religions place more emphasis on the former while others stress the latter. Even within the same religion, religious thinkers may put more weight on the horizontal than the vertical, or vice-versa. At any rate, religious poetry has one obligation: To capture the spirit of its author within the definitions of one of these categories. Jeff Rath’s “A Labor Day Rosary” does that perfectly.

“A Labor Day Rosary” is one poem in the collection of poems titled The Waiting Room at the End of the World by Jeff Rath. Read a review here.

An Ode To Alexander Hamilton
1 April 2008, the poet @ 10:06 am

Today is the first day of National Poetry Month. It’s also April Fool’s Day. How fitting then that we should honor the biggest fool in our nation’s history with a poem. I wrote this at 5 a.m. when I couldn’t sleep.

An Ode To Alexander Hamilton

We all get what we deserve one way or another,
But you, you bastard, weren’t worth the bother;
Your Mercantile philosophy
Was a tasteless recipe
That became the Master Plan
For this Leviathan.
It all just makes me wonder,
Why separate ourselves from that asshole over yonder?

The NaPoWriMo Blues
I’d love to participate in National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo), but I don’t like to publish my own poems on this blog. I certainly wouldn’t want to do it every day for a month (besides, I’m currently working on another project that I don’t want to abandon until it is finished - and it is almost finished!) What I may do instead (and I won’t decide for sure until probably tonight or tomorrow) is post a religious poem from the past or present every day for the month of April.

So why religious poems? Well, for starters, religious poetry doesn’t get much mention in this culture any more. And secondly, I am hosting a tribute to religious poetry on April 13 in Enola, Pa. at St. Michael’s Reformed Episcopal Church. The featured poet is Carol Clark Williams, the poet laureate of York, Pa. I figured it might be good to make my blogging efforts coincide with that. I have some ideas regarding that.

If you’d like to see a tribute to religious poetry then I encourage you to make recommendations about poems you’d like to see me post or you can submit your own. If I like your religious poem (and it can be any religion) then I’ll post it on this blog in the Month of April, the cruelest month. To submit your poem, leave a comment on this or any other blog post with your poem included. If I like the poem I’ll copy and paste it as a blog post; if I don’t I’ll just delete it.

Why Obama Is Better For Conservatives Than McCain
30 March 2008, the poet @ 9:38 pm

Remember George Carlin’s comedy act, “The Seven Words You Can’t Say On TV?” It was very funny. Well, Bob Harris has penned the “The Seven Deadly Words of Book Reviewing,” only it’s not so funny. It’s tragic. And true. By the way, “penned” didn’t make the list, but it did get an honorable mention.

And now for something completely different (thanks to Monty Python):

This isn’t a political blog, but I found this on The Huffington Post and had to say something. Robert S. McElvaine suggests four ways for the Democratic rivals Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to reach a modus vevendi (a disagreement to agree; I mean, an agreement to disagree, or whatever) while keeping the gun pointed at warmonger John McCain. Here are the four points:

Each campaign continues to raise huge amounts of money; they should make an agreement to turn over either a set amount or an agreed percentage (perhaps 20%) of what they raise to a joint Democratic campaign group with people from both campaigns that will produce commercials and other efforts to educate the public about Mr. McCain while the struggle for the Democratic nomination continues.

You know, this is actually a novel idea. It would be such a fresh approach to modern politics that every news network in the world would provide the Democratic Party with endless commentary and free publicity. The focus would be taken off the fight for the most powerful minority in the world to actually beating up on the guy they want to lose in November. Why didn’t they think of that?

Ms. Clinton and Mr. Obama should agree that at the end of each commercial against the other that their campaigns produce for the rest of the nominating contest, after they have attacked the other Democrat, they will expand the closing tagline to say: “I’m [Hillary Clinton/Barack Obama] and I approve this message — and I also approve of [Barack Obama/Hillary Clinton] much more than John McCain.”

OK, now that’s a stupid idea. You only get so much time to present your message. Why would the candidates volunteer to give up some of that time to say “I like my opponent better than my other opponent?” We went from novel to ridiculous in a single bound. Well done, Stuporman.

The Democratic candidates should agree that during the remaining battles in their continuing civil war they will spend at least as much time in speeches contrasting themselves with Mr. McCain as they do contrasting themselves with each other. (Indeed, the Democratic candidate who focuses his or her fire almost exclusively on the “Bush-McCain” policies would very likely win more Democratic and independent support than the one who spends her or his time attacking the other Democrat.)

I don’t know about “as much time”, but the candidates should spend some time discussing the reasons voters should reject McCain. Of course, I can’t see Hillary doing that. She’s too focused on winning. I believe Barack Obama would be the more likely candidate to take periodic potshots at McCain and to create the image that he should be the one to represent the Democrats because he’s willing to fight McCain on ideology. And, really, that’s what this is all about. Ideology. There is a much sharper difference in ideology between Obama and McCain than there is between Clinton and McCain and that’s where the Illinois senator can capitalize. He is right on the three most important issues of today: War in Iraq, Ethics, and Energy. Those are also the three areas that McCain is wrong in (although he is most right on the ethics issue).

A final point in a Clinton-Obama modus vivendi would be much more difficult to achieve and may not be necessary if the first three points are agreed to: Each candidate could agree that when the nominee is chosen, he or she will pick the other as her or his running-mate and that the latter will accept.

Actually, I think such a move would kill the Obama campaign. There is way too much negative baggage with Clinton. The list is too long to mention. I’d end up still firing off my points on election day. While Obama is not the perfect candidate - for the Democrats or for the country - there is a lot less negative baggage that comes with him than with Clinton, or with McCain for that matter. In this case, experience is not what matters. What matters the most in this election year is ideology and vision. Neither McCain nor Clinton are showing much of either.

Agree with it or not, only Obama has a stark and distinctive voice in either category. His ideology is progressive and consistent. His vision is domestic, not foreign. Maybe you are not on board with that at all and you feel much more comfortable with a traditional Republican message (as I do), but you certainly won’t get that with McCain. And since McCain has bucked up to follow the Party line, which is decidedly anti-Republican having betrayed the principles that made the GOP strong in the first place, that makes Barack Obama’s non-interventionist ideology much more appealing to us conservative-leaning and libertarian independents. We may not like what we’ll get with him, but at least we’ll know what to expect.

Dilemma: How do you get that into a poem?

Poetry Potpourri, Volume 5
23 February 2008, the poet @ 6:53 pm

Here’s your chance to support freedom of speech.

Get published @ Teenypoet.

Ah, plagiarism.

Reginald Shepherd on New American Poets.

Slamming the Bluz in Charlotte.

Openness, inclusiveness. Is that possible in poetry?

“Outside the Flood Walls” by Edward Byrne.

Slam event: audience participation.

Veterans against the Iraq War.

Making sense of Mamet, the poet and the man.

Simic on time.

Read Ted Kooser’s penultimate column.

Classic Literature On YouTube, A Fellowship, Religion, And Politics
10 February 2008, the poet @ 11:06 pm

The Kenyon Review is extolling the new forms of literature. The interesting thing about these YouTube videos is that many of them are done by high school students while reading through literature in their classes. I remember reading Great Expectations for the first time. I don’t remember having exactly this reaction to it, but it is entertaining. The Mayor of Casterbridge is one of my all-time favorite classic novels. I found its YouTube version almost as funny as Great Expectations on YouTube. The latter actually uses real “actors,” as opposed to puppets.

From Poetry Foundation:

Five Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowships in the amount of  $15,000 will be awarded to young poets through a national competition sponsored by the Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry. Established in 1989 by the Indianapolis philanthropist Ruth Lilly, the fellowships are intended to encourage the further study and writing of poetry. Applicants must be us citizens between the age of twenty-one and thirty-one as of  March 31, 2008.

Erotic religion: A Sermon On The Mound.

Interesting reading if you have some time on your hands.

The Poetry Of British Humor
(And Other Things)
9 February 2008, the poet @ 6:38 pm

Funny! Thanks to Edward Byrne, I came upon this treat from the early years of Hugh Laurie. It’s called “Poetry Prize.” British humor is fabulous!

For Barbie fans! A video clip (you’ll have to view it on Jezebel’s site) of Goth Barbie. Warning: Tell your little girls to leave the room. There is some objectionable material, but it is funny. Especially her unpublished poetry.I don’t usually get wrapped up into these silly gimmicks, but this one looked fun:

What British Romantic Poet are You? Your Result: You are John Keats!     Ars gratis artis! Keats had only one idea, but it was a good one: “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty.” Unlike the other British Romantics, he didn’t have a political agenda. He died at 26.
You are William Blake!
You are Samuel Coleridge!
You are George Gordon, Lord Byron!
You are William Wordsworth!
You are Percy Shelley!
What British Romantic Poet are You? Create MySpace Quizzes

Interesting! I’d have never guessed Keats. Coleridge is my favorite British Romantic. Blake is my least favorite. I like Keats, but I often can’t identify with him. And I DO have a political agenda.This is no joke. Political poetry identified. Finally, someone with enough time on his hands.

Split This Rock Poetry Festival - Good Cause Or Propaganda?
22 January 2008, the poet @ 11:39 pm

(Source) “Split this Rock calls poets to a greater role in public life and fosters a national community of activist poets. The festival will feature readings, workshops, panel discussions on poetry and social change, youth programming, films, parties, walking tours, and activism, while we debate and assess the public role of the poet and the poem in this time of crisis.”

I have mixed feelings about these kinds of mixture of poetry and politics. I’m not sure what the debate is about. My role as a poet is to write poetry. If I address a public issue or take a political stand then it’s no different than if I write about loving my wife or eating a bowl of chili. The impact my be stronger or weaker depending on how I express myself, but a poem is a poem.

The Split This Rock Poetry Festival does look like a grand event, though. What I can’t figure out is why it costs $75, $85 after March 10. What is the money going toward? Judging by the list of featured poets, it looks like the event will draw a crowd. I mean, there are some big names in there: Jimmy Santiago Baca, Robert Bly, Lucille Clifton, Mark Doty, Carolyn Forche, Sam Hamill, Galway Kinnell, Naomi Shihab Nye, Sharon Olds, Alicia Ostriker, and Sonia Sanchez. And those are just names that I recognize.

It’s not that I don’t think peace and justice are worthy causes, but whose definition of justice is being promoted here? Looking at the names again, I’d say it isn’t President Bush’s. And that’s the problem. I see this event as being a propaganda movement against the neo-conservative dominance of the past eight years. That puts poets like me in a rather precarious position.

On the one hand, I’m supportive of any movement that is against the Iraq War. Unfortunately, too many poets who involve themselves in these types of “witness and resistance” movements are anti-war in all its nuances. Extreme liberals, of which there are many in poetry circles, like extreme conservatives, only see one view: Theirs. One can hardly reason with minds that see the world through a single lens. That’s what makes cavorting with them a difficult decision.

I’d like to be able to attend a political rally that stands against unjust war yet affirms the necessity of just war. Unfortunately, if such a rally existed, it likely would not be hosted by poets. Is there a way to make sense of this?

Poetics Vs. Politics: I Just Have This To Say About That
15 January 2008, the poet @ 8:01 pm

Sharon Brogan posted a poem on her website and received some feedback. It’s an excellent poem. It grabs you right from the beginning:

Don’t those pollsters know
that married women
lie in the presence
of their husbands?

The poem doesn’t disappoint at all. Completely through to the end, I was on the edge of my seat awaiting the climax and the final sigh. It came. And I fell limp, out of breath.

The poem was also published at New Verse News.

I love the defense that Brogan gives of her poetry at Watermark, her poetry blog. A snippet:

First, let me mention that (like many, if not most poets) I often write in a voice not my own; that neither the speaker nor the subject of my poem is necessarily me. Like a novelist, I am attempting to say truth with fiction, true fiction, as it were. I have found, through the years, that adherence to fact can actually impede the expression of truth.

These are the words of a true poet. Beginning poets often try to write in their own voice or seek to get an exact moment the way it really was, like a photograph. That’s not what poetry is all about.

Political poetry, particularly, is difficult to write. It is difficult because too often the poet is too close to the issue about which they are writing. The poem will usually come across as a rant or a whine. For most readers, such poems fail to speak to them directly. But a finely tuned poem with a message, even an unpopular one, can enlighten, educate, draw attention to, or shed light on a topic that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. That’s what I Just Have This To Say About That does.

Does it carry a popular message, or one that is pleasant to hear? No. Particularly among a certain group of people. Brogan says she has been accused of betraying women. I just love her response:

But the suggestion does raise the question — are there things that must not be said? Isn’t that how we got here to begin with, by being told that there are questions which must not be asked, things which must not be said? Isn’t this, at least in part, what art is for: to say what is not allowed, to uncover what is buried?

Absolutely. Poetry is where the woman can let her hair down. It is the place where the black man can be an unfettered black man. Where a plain white vanilla old man like me can get down and paint his neck red without embarrassment. I sure can’t do that at the Cowboy Church.

Poets are liars. Our profession is to defend the lie and to defend it heartily. Brogan does that well. If we can’t defend the lie when it counts then how in Hellfire and Fury will we ever be able to defend the Truth? I just had to say that.

This post was made possible by the encouragement of Billy the Blogging Poet.

Poetry Potpourri, Volume 2
12 January 2008, the poet @ 8:22 pm

Looking for a place to publish your chapbook? Try Shadowbox Press.

Talking Heads’ David Byrne discusses indie music and how artists can control their own destiny. Much of this applies to literary artists as well.

The new Lincoln? God, I hope not.

Billy’s crazy idea about paying people to read his blog. Will it work?

(Source) Dawson performed a poem about New Orleans, calling it “the vagina of America.”

Question: Is the poem the vagina, or is it New Orleans? I’d like to see it. The poem, I mean.

When I read this I thought gay poetry was illegal in the UK. It turns out that blasphemy is the culprit.

Soldier who fought in Afghanistan publishes a book of poems.

Today’s poem is by Li-Young Lee.

World War II veteran/poet kicks Caligula in the nuts while defending the Constitution.

Disclaimer: This is a poetry blog, not a political one. Although it’s hard to separate the two. When discussing politics on this blog, it is not intended to endorse a particular political point of view or candidate. It is simply to react to what someone else has done or said or to comment on some aspect of poetics. If I were to express a political point of view outside of the realm of poetry it would likely be from a libertarian POV. But since this is not a political blog, I’ll have to claim the Fifth. (of whiskey)

Poetically Good News And Congrats To Two Poets I Admire
2 December 2007, the poet @ 9:05 pm

(Source) MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Federal prosecutors have withdrawn a subpoena seeking the identities of thousands of people who bought used books through online retailer Amazon.com Inc., newly unsealed court records show.The withdrawal came after a judge ruled the customers have a First Amendment right to keep their reading habits from the government.

This is good news. If Civil Rights is to survive the 21st century, we’ll need more of these types of decisions. But we’ll also need legislators with balls. Let’s start with limiting the powers of the chief executive, which is an action that is long overdue. America doesn’t need a king.

OK, that’s enough of politics. Now, about poetry:

A poetic acquaintance of mine, Le Hinton, was recently featured in a Lancaster, Pa. newspaper. Congratulations Le.

Ron Silliman announced that someone clicked a link on his blog every 33 seconds in November. Read it and you’ll know why. It’ so easy to click. Congratulations to you too, Ron.