Prison/Culture

Edited by Sharon Bliss, Kevin Chen, Steve Dickison

Over two million individuals are behind bars in U.S. prisons, living in isolation from their families and their communities. Prison/Culture investigates the culture of incarceration as an integral part of the American experience through a compilation of stunning and often heartrending art by inmates, as well as artists on the outside, such as Sandow Birk and Keith Antar Mason, who address incarceration, criminal profiling, wrongful conviction, prison labor, and the death penalty. The book also includes essays on prisons and prison art by Angela Davis and Mike Davis, and poetry by Amiri Baraka, Ericka Huggins, Luis Rodriguez, Sesshu Foster, and more.

http://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100483990

I hope this finds you well, and that you’ll forgive the impersonal
nature of this note. I’m writing to you in rabble-rouser mode, to ask
if you’d be willing to endorse the call for an academic and cultural
boycott of Israel. After years of being appalled and enraged in
silence, I was moved to speak out by last year’s attack on Gaza (you
know the details, I’m sure: more than 1,400 dead, nearly a quarter of
them children, another 5,000 injured…) and joined the call for a
boycott. There is a lot of room for differences of opinion on this,
but it’s all too clear that over the last two decades, things have
only gotten worse. When I was in Israel and Palestine in the mid-90s,
apartheid felt like an apt metaphor. Now it feels like an
understatement.

In the absence of any real pressure, the occupation will go on and on.
Just before Christmas, President Obama quietly pledged $30 billion in
military aid to Israel. In this country at least, it appears to be up
to us. Our silence achieves nothing, but by taking a public,
principled stand, we can change the discourse and, eventually, the
political reality. Since the US campaign began last year, more than
500 scholars, writers and artists have joined the call for a boycott,
divestment and sanctions. If you have any questions about the
specifics of the campaign or the reasoning behind it, I’d be glad to
try to answer them and can point you to more resources online. (Here’s
an essay by the Israeli scholar Neve Gordon that ran in The Guardian
last summer: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/aug/21/israel-international-boycott)

If you’re willing to add your name to the list of endorsers, you can
email uscom4acbi@gmail.com. And of course, please do whatever you can
to spread the word.

Many thanks, and all best wishes for the new year,
Ben Ehrenreich

http://www.amazon.com/Footnotes-Gaza-Graphic-Joe-Sacco/dp/0805073477

Haha! Just this second, really just this moment, a squirrel jumped onto the balcony and looked at me out of the one eye on the side of his head. He was surprised to me see me. There was a little dried out avocado lying on the balcony. He just grabbed it in his teeth and left.

Back to the question.

It depends on your interests. Here’s my theory:
I think of publication as a discourse, a dialogue. You enter it as a writer when you publish. Some professors, and some agents of the writing bizness, might suggest that a publication is a product, a commodity—you produce it, other people consume it. They might suggest that’s basically all there is to the exchange. I would disagree. Poems are fundamental in that way, and the monetary aspect of the exchange is non-existent. In poetry it’s all, entirely, about something more fundamentally personal and human.
1. What mags or journals publish writers you would like to be in dialogue with, see your work in dialogue with? Who’s addressing the human issues (which might be bicycling, it might be anything), and making points that your work might contribute to? Which mags or journals publish interesting writers saying something interesting—or useful?
2. What are your goals or objects for the piece? Mags and journals have discrete purposes and utility. They might focus on academic-literary material (publish or perish, university journals for example, read by students and academics), they might be local/regional, serving some sector in the area (newsletters for groups like the Sierra Club, or “Brooklyn & Boyle”), they might be buddhist, feminist, cultural, political, issue-oriented, etc., and how do you see your work covalent, or contributing to that type of thematic discourse?
3. What axes do you grind, or aesthetics do you promote as a writer, or as a person? Literary publications almost always promote certain aesthetics based on generally consensual assumptions of some usually undefined aesthetic “school”, or by generation—writers of a certain time, or region/area, or academic lifestyle, or ethnicity(s). Needless to say that most “mainstream” publications that I publish in are 90% white (and sometimes non-whites published in these publications are foreign nationals, sometimes in translation), while journals which publish lots of non-white writers are those that identify an explicit need to do so (in ’09, I published pieces in Asian American and Latino journals, including the bilingual English/Spanish journal, Mandorla)—which function as a kind of affirmative action in democratic cultural representation. Just as mags and journals have thematic niches, they develop aesthetic ones as well. Again the question there is, how do you see your own writing covalent or contributing to the discourse and dialogue being developed around particular aesthetics by specific mags or journals?

Maybe I should admit at this point that when I began first publishing in mags and journals I answered probably none of these questions. Instead, in practice, I proceeded haphazardly. Here’s my actual practice:
1. I gave away my work in bulk, sometimes entire notebooks, to friends who expressed an interest (otherwise I usually threw them away). In high school, it was one of these friends who was working on a Little Tokyo community journal, Gidra, who published some of my first pieces.
2. For a few years, as I accumulated more and more actual typewritten manuscripts (I used to buy portable manual typewriters at yard sales for $15 or $20 and then literally wear them out) I would gather manila envelopes of pieces and, going through the Dustbooks (Paradise CA) Directory of Small Press/Magazine Editors & Publishers, which is organized alphabetically, I sent work to random mags starting with “A” and working my way to “Z”—and then backwards from “Z.” Starting with “A” resulted, for example, of a poem in “Poetry Australia” in 1977. Usually I heard nothing back; occasionally I received (sometimes years later) two copies of an issue in which some piece of mine appeared.
3. I had always read small press books, not only because that’s where most of the poetry in America and the world is published, but because I felt (and later confirmed), that that’s where the freshest, sharpest edge of innovation in writing is published first. I started looking for mags and journals that published those kinds of writers and started targeting those publications to send my work. After a few years, I stopped using the Dustbooks directory.
4. Now I’m back to square one again, as I mostly focus on book publication, and lately only send out poems and other pieces of writing to friends, or others, who personally ask me for my work. I’m always glad to do that. In some way, those friends and editors who ask me for work are answering those three questions above.

So, the short answer is what axe (I’m thinking of Kafka’s famous axe) do you want to swing?

My view of the field is—maybe like most people’s—partial, stale, provincial to an extent, unsystematic. I am a supporter via donations of Small Press Distribution in Berkeley, which periodically sends me their catalogue, and if I’m in a good bookstore I sometimes look at the journals and mags, but although the Internet is at my fingertips I never browse it for on-line journals. Not sure why, but I don’t read for pleasure on-line, only for research.

What mags and journals have I enjoyed, lately? Bomb, the Journal of Protest and Aesthetics, Sickly Season (www.sicklyseason.com), Orion, Mandorla, Xcp: Cross Cultural Poetics and its on-line co-publication xcp: streetnotes (http://xcp.bfn.org/streetnotes.html), McSweeney’s, Hyphen, Poetry Flash, www.molossus.wordpress.com (Molossus), High Country News, Polygon (my daughter co-founded it with her friends, http://www.polygonzine.blogspot.com), Amerasia Journal, Sierra, and random others; most of those I actually subscribe to, among others. I used to collect piles of mags I never read, New Yorker, Fence, NACLA Report on the Americas. Now I just get the odd issue, including recycling my mom’s subscription to the L.A. Times, reading the news a couple days late.

One off the top? Check out Mark Nowak’s Cross Cultural Poetics or on-line to xcp:streetnotes.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/indepth_coverage/entertainment/poetry/video.html

I met Dennis Brutus in L.A. in the 80s—he was followed everywhere by a camera crew. He spoke of his anti-apartheid activism, read poems from jail. I took him to a reading, and was working at a couple readings he gave around L.A. against U.S. military intervention in Central America. Ever the firm anti-imperialist, later I bumped into him again on a bus in Nicaragua.

http://main.wgbh.org/ton/programs/1741_01.html

http://www.amazon.com/Poetry-Protest-Dennis-Brutus-Reader/dp/1931859221

Dennis Brutus, Poet, Dies at 85

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: December 27, 2009

Meridith Kohut for The New York Times

NEW YORK (AP) — South African poet and former political prisoner Dennis Brutus, who fought apartheid in words and deeds and remained an activist well after the fall of his country’s racist system, has died. He was 85.

Brutus’ publisher, Chicago-based Haymarket Books, said the writer died in his sleep at his home in Cape Town on Saturday. He had been battling prostate cancer, according to Patrick Bond, who directs the Center for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, where Brutus was an honorary professor.

Brutus was an anti-apartheid activist jailed at Robben Island with Nelson Mandela in the mid-1960s. He helped persuade Olympic officials to ban South Africa from competition from 1964 until apartheid ended nearly 30 years later.

Born in 1924 in what was then Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, Brutus was the son of South African teachers who moved back to their native country when he was still a boy. He majored in English at Fort Hare University, which he attended on full scholarship, and taught at several South African high schools.

By his early 20s, he was politically involved and helped create the South African Sports Association, formed in protest against the official white sports association. Arrested in 1963, Brutus fled the country when released on bail, but was captured and nearly killed when shot as he attempted to escape police custody in Johannesburg and forced to wait for an ambulance that would accept blacks. Brutus was sentenced to 18 months at Robben Island.

His books ”Sirens, Knuckles, Boots” and ”Letters to Martha and Other Poems from a South African Prison” were published while he was in jail. He was confined, but unbeaten, writing in the poem ”Somehow We Survive” that ”All our land is scarred with terror/rendered unlovely and unlovable/sundered are we and all our passionate surrender/but somehow tenderness survives.” In ”Prayer,” written after he left prison, he proclaims, ”Uphold — frustrate me if need be/so that I mould my energy/for that one swift inerrable soar.”

Sometimes terse, other times dense and lyrical, his poems were political, but also emotional and highly personal. Forced to leave the country in 1966, he longed for home in the 1975 poem ”Sequence for South Africa,” writing that the ‘’secret is clamping down/holding the lid of awareness tight shut,” until ‘’some thoughtless questioner/pries the sealed lid loose.”

Brutus emigrated to the United States in 1971, but his legal troubles did not end. The Reagan administration, which began in 1981, changed the policy on political refugees, making it more difficult for them to remain in the U.S. Brutus fought deportation for two years before an immigration judge granted asylum.

Brutus taught literature and African studies at Northwestern University and the University of Pittsburgh, a distinctive figure in old age with his flowing white hair and beard, engaged in protests against world financial organizations and in calls for stronger action against global warming.

Over the years, he completed more than a dozen collections of poetry, including ”A Simple Lust,” ”Stubborn Hope” and ”Salutes and Censures.” In 2006, Haymarket published a compilation of his work, ”Poetry and Protest.” His work was banned for years in South Africa, but one book, ”Thoughts Abroad,” slipped through; it was published in 1970 under the pseudonym John Bruin.

He received numerous honorary prizes, including a lifetime achievement award from South Africa’s Department of Arts and Culture. But in 2007 he rejected induction into the South Africa Sports Hall of Fame, stating, ”It is incompatible to have those who championed racist sport alongside its genuine victims. It’s time — indeed long past time — for sports truth, apologies and reconciliation.”

Brutus remained engaged and became passionate about climate change in recent years.

In an open letter dated Dec. 10 about this month’s U.N. climate change conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, he warned against ”brokering a deal that allows the corporations and the oil giants to continue to abuse the earth.

”Better that there is no deal, so that ordinary citizens can make their choices and voices heard, against the marketing excesses for the rich allowing some to gorge themselves while others starve.”

He was honored with the Peace Award of the War Resisters League in New York City in September. Unable to attend the event, he sent a recording of his poem ”Gull,” which reads in part, ”Gull gliding against gray-silver autumn sky sees a vast miasma of greed slowly encompass our entire planet cries out to unheeding stars to whom wails of children rise in shrill unending caterwauls.”

He is survived by a wife, eight children and many other relatives.

——–

AP writer Michelle Faul contributed to this story from Johannesburg. http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/12/27/us/AP-US-Obit-Brutus.html

on meridian
the hawk atop a parked car
looks on as i go

one of the best movies i saw in 2009, and to date the best L.A. movie i’ve ever seen—better than chinatown, better than kiss me deadly (filmed also on bunker hill a few years earlier in 1955), better than blade runner, better than rebel without a cause (filmed in 1955). kent mckenzie made it 1958 – 1960 and charles burnett helped rescue it. check out this scene where the principals roar thru the third street tunnel and emerge downtown—

Look around you. People are in trouble.

What kind of hat is that?

Two guys both wearing fedoras. One of ‘em, sunglasses perched on the brim, striped polo shirt, big watch, tattoos the length of his right arm, wide leather wristband, he tries to run down gate 69A, but immediately saunters back somewhat downcast. Is he plain luny? That plane boarded some time ago.

He approaches the Continental clerk with his sharp pinkish bony face, gesticulating, complaining. How many times a day does she face guys like this? She, late-middle-aged Filipina, remains calm, face to the monitor, hands on the keyboard. “I can’t do anything about that,” she says.

He jerks his hand backwards as if he’s about to smack her, but he’s pointing his thumb over his shoulder, glowering at her and glowering all around. She doesn’t have to take that. She leaves. He leans his elbows on the counter—takes out his cell phone (that implement of last resort, it has replaced the cigarette of generations past as the accessory to posturing)—makes a call. Or do people in situations like this merely purport to make calls? Are there really all these people on the other end waiting around to take their calls, when the multitudes have these idle moments?

Are they calling one another in airports like this, each of the many thousands of them, milling about big noisy echoey transit centers and waiting rooms across the nation, throughout the states, in the cities, sending out phone calls at random moments that are picked up by others in similar places, or waiting in dental offices, on the street corner, or mom at home? Are they call calling mom? Or their girlfriend, “Girlfriend, you never have anything better to do, girlfriend, they have screwed me over again at the airport, I have missed my flight, again!”? Nations within nations, calling fretfully, to say they missed their flight, again?

They have been abused by the transportation system!

They have missed their connections, they’re gonna have to start the ticketing and boarding process all over!

The man in the fedora with the black band strides off purposefully, still talking (as if), cell phone clapped to his ear.