Joel Calahan
From Sarah Palin’s tome on the fugitive lifestyle, a chapter epigram attributed to John Wooden:
Our land is everything to us… I will tell you one of the things we remember on our land. We remember our grandfathers paid for it–with their lives.
Confused why the legendary UCLA basketball coach would be writing about his ancestors sacrificing their lives for land?
From the article “Back on the War Ponies,” by John Wooden Legs, which appeared in the anthology, We Are the People: Voices from the Other Side of American History, edited by Nathaniel May, Clint Willis, and James W. Loewen:
Our land is everything to us. It is the only place in the world where Cheyennes talk the Cheyenne language to each other. It is the only place where Cheyennes remember the same things together. I will tell you one of the things we remember on our land. We remember our grandfathers paid for it–with their life. My people and the Sioux defeated General Custer at the Little Big Horn.
And that’s why you should always read to the end of the person’s name.
(via Huffington Post)
Joshua Baldwin
The Articulate Face Bradley Pendulum. Fist Press, $30.00 (222p) ISBN 000-0-000000-00-9
In this generous collection of his signature ‘mirage poems’, Pendulum mixes Post newspaper text with auto-mechanic trade jargon pulled from “various rain gutters”, bloating these pages with choked-up meditations on interstate love and cease-fire. Frightened with despair over an empty helium tank, Pendulum depicts a nation left speechless: “If I could see anything in the tunnel I would tell you, but there is nothing” is the phrase repeated at the center of a poem about drunks asleep after a morning game of skittles. This is America observed from a homespun gas scooter—whose saddles are overburdened with tax forms, fish garbage, and red tea bags—hyperactively screeching into the next neighborhood. The process of mass-produced sauerkraut plant giving way to artisan pickle farm giving way to “battery dump” seems to be chief among The Articulate Face’s concerns. Pendulum, holding up high a fistful of cheap medicine, offers a vision of the country that is somewhere about five degrees to the right of William S. Burroughs’ Nova Police trilogy, and belongs on the shelf of any poetry reader especially interested in bureaucratic dissolution. Others might steer clear.
Oren Izenberg
I am soon going to be part of a conversation about poetry, poetry scholarship and the question of fair use. The conversation is not entirely theoretical– which is to say it is aimed less at thinking through the conceptual gamesmanship of something like Day in its various iterations (though this is obviously not totally irrelevant); and more at the idea of formulating “best practices” as they might be (quite differently) understood by critics and makers, makers and remakers. Full disclosure: At the moment, I’m less inclined to be concerned about representing the perspective of the inheritors of rights than about representing the concerns of those trying to figure out what rights in their own work are possible and appropriate to assert in our newish technological moment, as well as the concerns of those (scholars and critics of contemporary poetry, for example,) who would like to do things with words that they did not make. (I am, in principle, open to persuasion on this point, as on many others).
The writers and readers of DE are scholars, teachers, poets, poet-scholar-teachers, editors, publishers, editor-publishers and things that from a long way off look like flies. I imagine that they will have thoughts– perhaps even different thoughts!– on what concerns might be brought to the table in such a conversation. Would they care to let me know what they are?
