A review: White Blight by Athena Farrokhzad, translated by Jennifer Hayashida

A review: White Blight

by Athena Farrokhzad
translated by Jennifer Hayashida
published by Argos Books
http://argosbooks.org

Athena Farrokhzad's White Blight startled me from the moment it slipped out of the envelope and onto my kitchen table. It is silver.

It looks like a gorgeous piece of metal.
It reflects everything.

The design is smart and stinging.

The whole damn thing is redacted.

Every line is white type etched in black.

I sat down to take a first look at it. I just wanted to leaf through it, but I read the book to the end.

It scared the hell out of me. It is very good.

I didn’t look inside the book again for weeks.

Exile. Racism. No home; the here-home.

Holding the separate parts of yourself in your teeth, wondering what you can spit out or keep. The killing of the parents to make oneself whole. Love of family and their inescapable press.

Farrokhzad’s lines ring these truths in a new way.

“My mother said: Do not bury me here

Bury me where the veneer of civilization has peeled

Spit out my language, return the milk to me”

How much must the poet risk?

Farrokhzad shows us: The mother takes her fucking milk back.

White Blight fulfills beautifully the open promise, what I think of as the existential lie of poetry: that you can tell all the truth. This is how a hopeless person reads a poem and believes it. I believe everything here and I love it.

White Blight followed me around my apartment. It was in the living room; it was in the kitchen. Then it was on the bookcase beside my bed. Gleaming in the light. Daring me again to read it again. The lines were singing in my head.

“My father said: There were those who were executed at dawn before sleep cleared

My mother said: There were those who had to pay for the bullets

to bury their daughters”

“My uncle said: Is there a puddle where war has not washed its bloody hands”

“My brother said: Some day I want to die in a country

where people can pronounce my name”

“My father said: We are still there, even if time has separated us from the place”

The white type peers out of the black background and I am careful, almost like I have to find the words or pull them out – I work a little harder to see and it brings me in, like reading invisible ink.

What is the tool she uses to etch these lines in the dark? It cuts close.

The kid is applying to college

My kid is working on her college applications. This is what I hear:

What do you think of this?

Don’t sit too far away. Sit right here.

Give me space. Just let me write.

Read this right now - I need feedback.

I’m hungry.

Not now; I can feed myself.

Read this right now. What do you think of this?

Be quiet, I am trying to work.

Where are you going? Sit right here.

I open a little piece of chocolate wrapped in foil and even it offers a platitude for my improvement.

Are we supposed to be gathering points for pretending to continuously improve ourselves?

I only want the chocolate, no redemption.

When I was a waitress for a time, I had a rule: always be visibly bleeding.

A split lip, a bitten finger. Something to get me fired. It never worked.

When I worked with race horses, I was always bleeding. Pinched skin, busted toes, horses rearing up and pulling me with them, frozen bucket handles leaving my fingers raw. 

I loved those damn horses.

Seventeen years I’ve been wrangling and feeding this beast, bleeding.

Be quiet, I am trying to work.

Sit right here.

I’m hungry; not now.

Give me space; just let me write.

Sit right here.

Where are you going?

For your consideration: a panel of editors

Here is an article on getting published in literary journals and what editors are looking for. I wrote this after attending a Straw Dog Writers Guild panel discussion with four editors of journals, all with international audiences and contributors, that are all published in western Massachusetts.
It was first published in The Recorder.

If you are a writer who aims to get published, then it is likely you know what it feels like to work up the courage to send out a piece of fiction, an essay or poem to a journal in the hopes that it will be selected. And it is likely you have asked yourself: what are the editors looking for?
The Straw Dog Writers Guild recently put on an event at the Lilly Library in Florence that gets to the heart of this question. On a Saturday morning this fall, the guild gathered editors from four well-known journals published in western Massachusetts. The editors shared their insights and anecdotes on what they are looking for and what it is like to put out a journal.
The editors were Diana Babineau, managing editor of The Common; Emily Wojcik, managing editor of The Massachusetts Review; Elizabeth MacDuffie, editor of Meat for Tea: The Valley Review, and Lori Desrosiers, managing editor and publisher of Naugatuck River Review.
The room was packed to capacity.
The most important piece of advice, repeated by each editor with emphasis, is to read the journals you are thinking of sending your work. Become familiar with what they choose to publish, the style, tone, subject matter.
“Reading an issue is crucial,” said Wojcik. She said The Massachusetts Review, which has been publishing since 1959, is committed to publishing emerging writers next to established writers. She said the journal is looking for pieces of writing that have “real interest in the world beyond the self.”
MacDuffie said Meat for Tea is about to turn 10 and that it was founded with something of a punk-rock sensibility, while setting the bar high for quality. The journal, published quarterly, is not academically affiliated. “Art that offends no one … that’s not worth a damn,” said MacDuffie. She said the journal likes to feature artists and writers in the Pioneer Valley, but publishes work from around the world, from emerging and well-known artists.
Babineau described The Common as a print and online literary magazine, publishing high quality literature examining ideas of place. It was founded in 2010 and makes its home at Amherst College. The magazine also considers “global histories and works in translation.” The Common publishes in print twice a year, in the fall and spring, and publishes new work online four times per week.
Desrosiers started Naugatuck River Review “on a whim” and said it is a journal of “compressed narrative, strong emotion ... and great quality” poetry. The journal is published twice a year. She is also an editor for Word Peace, an online literary journal devoted to social justice. According to its website, wordpeace.co, Word Peace is looking for “... work that asks for positive change and is forward thinking. We publish writing that takes a stand against corruption and greed, brutality, genocide, and oligarchy.”
Reading the journals themselves is the best way to get a sense of the sort of writing editors are choosing to publish. Along with this basic idea of acquainting yourself with the journal, Desrosiers adds, “For goodness sake, read the (submission) guidelines on any journal.” These vary. Some publications accept submissions electronically only, while a few still accept hard copies in the mail. But don’t get this wrong because it will likely mean that your submission will never get read.
On the topic of what they are looking for, MacDuffie, whose journal accepts work in many genres, including visual art and recipes, almost begs the audience “ send me more essays … give me a well-crafted essay, please.”
Wojcik of the Mass Review seconds that, “we have a dearth of nonfiction; we’re always looking for nonfiction ...”
Desrosiers, nodding, adds, “Word Peace is looking for nonfiction, especially essays.”
When asked how important the cover letter is, the editors agreed that it isn’t all that important. Don’t send in your resume, they add, but do mention if the journal has published your work previously.
On the topic of feedback, there is a range of interaction between writers and editors, depending on the journal. According to Babineau, The Common editors will sometimes work with a writer when they think a piece is nearly ready for publication, but could be improved, while Meat for Tea does not alter work. MacDuffie said she either accepts the work or rejects it.
Another way to get to know the work published in local journals is to attend public events they host. Each of these journals hosts readings to celebrate their publications. The Common also records podcasts available on its website. The Naugatuck River Review hosts a contest every year and holds public readings. Meat for Tea hosts quarterly cirques to mark the launch of each issue. These are multi-artform evenings including short films, a gallery of visual art, spoken word and music at Sonelab in Easthampton. The Massachusetts Review publishes a blog and videos and is accepting submission of longer form fiction and nonfiction for its Working Titles ebook project.
All of the journals have Facebook pages.
To learn more about Straw Dog Writers Guild, go to:
www.strawdogwriters.org/


http://www.recorder.com/home/19687929-95/for-your-consideration-a-panel-of-editors

We Have Sacrificed Our Liberty to the Surveillance State

(This post appeared in The Recorder and the Huffington Post on Nov. 20, 2014)

What are we so afraid of?

It's easy to sound crazy when you start to talk about the United States' sweeping surveillance program. It could be a conspiracy theorist's fantasy. But in 2013 former NSA analyst Edward Snowden brought this system and its abuses to the attention of journalists, and now we all know it's real.

"I discovered that there were programs of mass surveillance that were happening beyond any possible statutory authority. ... These were things that never should have happened," Snowden tells Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig in an interview from Oct. 20.

And while we are engaged in this sweeping surveillance program, the press is suffering an unusual degree of suppression. With more whistleblowers prosecuted under the 1917 Espionage Act during the Obama administration than under all previous administrations combined, journalists face charges for not revealing sources. When Snowden went to the press he engaged a constitutionally protected check on his own judgment by asking journalists to look at the information and to use it wisely.

So maybe now what seems crazy is so few people are talking about it.

Why? Maybe some liberals are reluctant to criticize the Obama administration for fear of sounding like right-wing racists. But where are conservatives on First and Fourth Amendment freedoms and overreach of government? Conserving the Constitution is perhaps the most patriotic act, but they seem reluctant to defend these basic rights. Or maybe it's because the surveillance apparatus is so complex, it's hard to know how to respond. Some seem resigned to it. Some say, "What harm does it do to be watched, if I'm not doing anything wrong?"

If the police walked uninvited through your door to go through your papers, read your mail, take notes on everything you own, listen to your kids' phone calls, you would make a fuss, I wager, even if you weren't doing anything wrong. Now, it seems, asserting privacy as a right is akin to an admission of guilt. It hasn't always been so.

Snowden says to Lessig:

"... This is one of the reasons we have the prohibition against unreasonable seizure. We don't say: the police can go and search through all of our houses, take everything that they want, but then simply not use it. Or just make a note of everything that's in our house but not take it because it's that - that reduction in our liberty, that reduction in our freedom, that reduction in our power relative to our state that is the real concern."

We must re-assert our right to privacy.

It's not OK for our government to monitor us, collect our personal email and texts, to track us. It infuses us with an insidious fear of reprisal, inhibits critique, stifles creative work and causes us to restrict ourselves at the edges of what we dare think and say to one another. Why are we now ceding this hard-won freedom to an unchecked security force? This reduction of our power relative to the state is a signal that our democracy is in peril.

We have permitted these broad constitutional violations under the guise of keeping us safe. But have terror attacks been prevented by this surveillance? In fact, it has been said that the sheer quantity of information swept up hampers true, specific investigation of very real threats.

It is "... a system whose reach is unlimited, but whose safeguards are not," Laura Poitras quotes Snowden in her documentary Citizenfour.

The balance has shifted and the few in control have much to lose. The government now has an irresistible power. There are billions of dollars to be made in security contracts, campaign donations from security firms and rotating lobbying jobs. But this is also true: We have an obligation to govern our government.

"Snowden did what he did because he recognized the NSA's surveillance programs for what they are: dangerous, unconstitutional activity. This wholesale invasion of Americans' and foreign citizens' privacy does not contribute to our security; it puts in danger the very liberties we're trying to protect," Daniel Ellsberg wrote in the Guardian in June of 2013.

"The question of whistle-blowing -- when to stand up -- is really one of 'Do these checks and balances still function?' It's about allowing the public a chance to participate in democratic processes in order to play their part in determining the outcome," Snowden tells Lessig.

Constant surveillance without accountability is a thunderous breach of our Constitution and the natural rights it seeks to protect. Freedoms of privacy, speech, of the press and association must be articulated and exercised. It is impossible for a free-thinking, democratic society to function without them.

"I took an oath at the Central Intelligence Agency," Snowden says to Lessig, "that oath was to, to protect the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic. And that's important to remember, because that's critical to the quality of our governance, if you only look outward we have this sort of inevitable slide, this inevitable slow corrosion where generation after generation we lose a little bit of our freedom, a little bit of our liberty that we inherited."

Citizenship confers responsibility. Our checks and balances have been broken. No one is holding our security machine accountable. It's going to have to be us. We mustn't look away. We have to rein in these programs, establish transparency and elect ethical, technologically literate representatives.

Ellsberg wrote:

"... with Edward Snowden having put his life on the line to get this information out, quite possibly inspiring others with similar knowledge, conscience and patriotism to show comparable civil courage -- in the public, in Congress, in the executive branch itself -- I see the unexpected possibility of a way up and out of the abyss."

This is possible only if we awake and demand it.

Watch Lessig's interview with Snowden here.
http://youtu.be/o_Sr96TFQQE

See the documentary Citizenfour.

"In a democratic republic," Snowden reminds us, "the government draws its legitimacy from the consent of the people."

What are we so afraid of?

Review: Tempo Maps by Daniel Hales

Reading good poems is like being in a knife fight that ends with a kiss.

Daniel Hales’ new book Tempo Maps is an ambitious piece of work, an object worth pursuing. No matter which way you turn it, it delivers.

“… Love is air and electricity every day.

This is just.”

Tempo Maps opens at both ends. Read the poems each way and you hear them talking to each other. Good poetry has to be at least a little risky, should put you on edge. This whole book is pretty damned risky. There’s a CD of Hales reading the poems and music, songs with street noise, rain, birds and instrumental work mixed together. It doesn’t conform to the expectations of a book or music. This is a musician’s geography, the pin on the map is the microphone. It’s the soundtrack to You are Here, and stays with you everywhere.

“metered mail direct deposit preferred method of withdrawal sale

complete printing receipt prickers versus thorns soda versus pop”

So there’s reason to be nervous. 

When I went to a reading, Hales turned on the soundtrack. “Oh shit,” I thought, “this could be bad.”

Then I sat still and listened to what turned out to be the best reading I’d ever been to. The music is lovely and true. The rhythm is sometimes loping, sometimes precise and sharp  – but always trustworthy; the lines are beautiful, funny, both measured and melodic and they feel good on your tongue.
The more you pay attention, the more there is to see. It’s a book you can trust.

“For the last few years, mom’s started each phone call like this: how are you

doing: good?”

It still makes me nervous, scares me in the way good poetry is supposed to scare the hell out of you.

“Most of our brain is for forgetting, the gray poofy parts no one can explain.

Vast erasures half-hilled with the trills of common birds”

This is an unlikely book to get made because it defies category. It speaks to the dedication of a writer and musician with skill, guts and a vision, and it is evidence of the necessity of small presses like ixnay press willing to make original work -- weird, wonderful things -- come to life.

“The ghostly shiver in the guts

     is called butterflies past the ferris wheel”

Some lines I won’t quote because I like them too much. Get your own copy.

http://ixnaypress.com/books-chapbooks/tempo-maps/

Let's talk about surveillance

When I read "Fahrenheit 451" and "1984" in the 1980s they read as cautionary conspiracy theories.

Picking my daughter up from school now, she says "In 1984, it's like the NSA and the screens are our phones. They can hear and see everything we do."

"Yes." I hear myself saying it and I wonder how I let this happen.

On 9/11 she was 3. We were on our way home from a preschool open house at the Y, driving up into the gorgeous western Massachusetts hills on a sunny morning when I switched on the radio and heard the first tower was coming down.

I looked in the review mirror at this pigtailed little creature.
We will never be the same, I thought. Her world is different than the world I grew up in.

Some things must be said now more clearly than before. Our responsibility for our government has not diminished. In fact, we bear an ever increasing duty to steer it.

Our imaginative force and the duty to express it demand more of us.

Constant surveillance is not just. It is wrong. Living in a society governed by fear is wrong. It abdicates power to so few, and infantilizes the free intellect and rights of the people.

Our literature holds fast. Our kids aren't stupid. But freedom now, we must regularly stretch and exercise like a muscle or it's gone.

Ferguson to Foley: Will journalism keep its promise?

Around the world we see the press and its role under attack.That means it’s a bad time to be a journalist and one of the most important times.

In the U.S.there has been a drop in the number of local daily news outlets. Some municipalities, wealthy and poor, go entirely uncovered by reliable journalists. If you live in such a place, you may have no idea what is happening at your city council, in the schools, how your money is being spent.

Much has been written about the decline of newspapers. These pieces talk a lot about how hard it is to keep a newspaper in business and howto monetize the online product.

I haven’t seen as much about the damage this does to communities and the erosion of democracy.

Disenfranchised citizens are the prized possession of the powerful. Regardless of income, people who don’t keep up with local news, who don’t vote, don’t work to find and promote candidates they can support, don’t demand good policy and leadership from their elected officials – these people can’t keep a hand in piloting public policy. In this country, with a pervasive anti-intellectualism, speaking knowledgeably about or even questioning public policy can earn a person a reputation as bad company: no fun. I hear some people proudly, sort of defiantly announce that they don’t know anything about ______.It used to be that working class people, poor and struggling people kept up with the news and argued passionately about it. Now, that is seen as the arena of moneyed people who are intolerably out of touch and humorless. But maybe that is changing.

Money stress is exhausting and disenfranchising. Sometimes,the people involved in community projects look comfortably upper middle class,like they have the time and money to give back. Other people ask themselves: How can I attend community events when I can’t keep up with my bills or my kids’needs? And who will take care of the kids or work my second job so I can go?

In Ferguson, Missouri, and around the world,people are starting to pay much closer attention to their local governance. With Ferguson, rancid American racism has been getting a much needed lancing. People who have long been beat down, especially African American people, are getting together and are getting involved.

NPR’s Michel Martin moderated a forum there with the mayor and community members Aug. 28 and it was heated and lively. Michael Brown’s death, Eric Garner’s death – just two of the unarmed black men killed by white police this summer in America– maybe these horrifying and all-too-common incidents will help to wake us all up. Because we shouldn’t tolerate this. We should remember that no matter what color or religion we are, if our neighbors aren’t safe and free with a right to privacy and dignity, none of us are.

But even if we wake up, we can’t get involved if we don’t know what is happening locally, when elections are coming up, when the school board is meeting, what happened at the last town council meeting. We need good writing to give us background and context, and timely reporting to keep us up to date and keep officials accountable. Regional planning is closely related to quality of life. It deals with affordable transportation, housing, and public spaces where you would actually want to spend time. Good regional planning is a force for social justice. It says: we are all worth a beautiful place to spend our leisure time, a safe, healthy, inspiring place for children and adults to relax and meet their neighbors, a city you can walk in. But you can’t keep up with and participate in good regional planning if you don’t know what’s going on where you live.

Your ability to exercise your rights and responsibilities as a citizen erodes as your access to information diminishes. People in power know this very well. What we saw on the streets of Ferguson — if we watched the livestreams of journalists and dedicated citizens — was a systematized violation of U.S. Constitutional rights. From my apartment’s kitchen in Massachusetts,I watched and listened as police on the streets of Ferguson, broadcasting from booming PA systems, repeated the same illegal messages – do not stop on the sidewalk, do not congregate, we do not want you on the streets. I watched live as a police officer pulled a press badge off a journalist and threw it on the pavement,saying it was worthless, telling journalists to get to the designated “First Amendment area.”

“I thought the United States was the First Amendment area,” friends responded on social media. This sounds like a joke –but it is real.

Police officers aimed assault rifles at unarmed citizens and arrested and detained journalists without charging them. The only way we know this is because other people bothered to document it. The same police shot teargas night after night straight at people who were doing their civic duty – citizens protesting injustice committed by their government and journalists trying to get the story. This is your America, people.

A citizenry is only powerless if it refuses to pay attention and refuses to act. Many of us are discouraged and disconnected from our local government. But what our government does is never disconnected from us. From police policies to street paving, it all affects us, and we are paying the bill.

Journalists have a special responsibility to remember and carryout their adversarial relationship to those in power. What stories reporters seek out and how they ask questions should take into account the least powerful in a community, those without a platform for their own voices. Editors bear a different peculiar weight in telling the news. They assign stories and then choose where they run and how much ink or broadcast time stories get.Complacent, spineless editors don’t serve the citizens in their communities. And no matter how hard reporters push, editors are the gatekeepers for choosing which stories run.

James Foley risked his personal safety to tell the truth about people who were living and fighting in Syria and other conflict zones.These stories need to be told, and if journalists don’t do it, no one else will. He thought the risk was worth it, and many people have come forward since his death, civilians, colleagues and members of the U.S. armed forces, to say he was getting it right.

Will we?