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Today's
Stories
January 3 / 4, 2004
Glen Martin
Jesus
vs. the Beast of the Apocalypse
January 2, 2004
Stan Cox
Red Alert
2016
Dave Lindorff
Beef, the Meat of Republicans
Jackie Corr
Rule and Ruin: Wall Street and Montana
Norman Solomon
George Will's Ethics: None of Our Business?
David Vest
As the Top Wobbleth
January 1, 2004
Randall Robinson
Honor
Haiti, Honor Ourselves
David Krieger
Looking
Back on 2003
Robert Fisk
War Takes an Inhuman Twist: Roadkill Bombs
Stan Goff
War,
Race and Elections
Hammond Guthrie
2003 Almaniac
Website of the Day
Embody Bags
December 31, 2003
Ray McGovern
Don't
Be Fooled Again: This Isn't an Independent Investigation
Kurt Nimmo
Manufacturing Hysteria
Robert Fisk
The Occupation is Damned
Mike Whitney
Mad Cows and Downer George
Alexander Cockburn
A Great Year Ebbed, Another Ahead
December 30, 2003
Michael Neumann
Criticism
of Israel is Not Anti-Semitism
Annie Higgins
When
They Bombed the Hometown of the Virgin Mary
Alan Farago
Bush Bros. Wrecking Co.: Time Runs Out for the Everglades
Dan Bacher
Creatures from the Blacklight Lagoon: From Glofish to Frankenfish
Jeffrey St. Clair
Hard
Time on the Killing Floor: Inside Big Meat
Willie Nelson
Whatever Happened to Peace on Earth?
December 29, 2003
Mark Hand
The Washington
Post in the Dock?
David Lindorff
The
Bush Election Strategy
Phillip Cryan
Interested Blindness: Media Omissions in Colombia's War
Richard Trainor
Catellus Development: the Next Octopus?
Uri Avnery
Israel's
Conscientious Objectors
December 27 / 28, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
A
Journey Into Rupert Murdoch's Soul
Kathy Kelly
Christmas Day in Baghdad: A Better World
Saul Landau
Iraq
at the End of the Year
Dave Zirin
A Linebacker for Peace & Justice: an Interview with David
Meggysey
Robert Fisk
Iraq
Through the American Looking Glass
Scott Burchill
The Bad Guys We Once Thought Good: Where Are They Now?
Chris Floyd
Bush's Iraq Plan is Right on Course: Saddam 2.0
Brian J. Foley
Don't Tread on Me: Act Now to Save the Constitution
Seth Sandronsky
Feedlot Sweatshops: Mad Cows and the Market
Susan Davis
Lord
of the (Cash Register) Rings
Ron Jacobs
Cratched Does California
Adam Engel
Crumblecake and Fish
Norman Solomon
The Unpardonable Lenny Bruce
Poets' Basement
Cullen and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Activism Through Music
December 26, 2003
Gary Leupp
Bush
Doings: Doing the Language
December 25, 2003
Diane Christian
The
Christmas Story
Elaine Cassel
This
Christmas, the World is Too Much With Us
Susan Davis
Jinglebells, Hold the Schlock
Kristen Ess
Bethlehem Celebrates Christmas, While Rafah Counts the Dead
Francis Boyle
Oh Little Town of Bethlehem
Alexander Cockburn
The
Magnificient 9
Guthrie / Albert
Another Colorful Season
December 24, 2003
M. Shahid Alam
The Semantics
of Empire
William S. Lind
Marley's
List for Santa in Wartime
Josh Frank
Iraqi
Oil: First Come, First Serve
Cpt. Paul Watson
The
Mad Cowboy Was Right
Robert Lopez
Nuance
and Innuendo in the War on Iraq
December 23, 2003
Brian J. Foley
Duck
and Cover-up
Will Youmans
Sharon's
Ultimatum
Michael Donnelly
Here
They Come Again: Another Big Green Fiasco
Uri Avnery
Sharon's
Speech: the Decoded Version
December 22, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Pray
to Play: Bush's Faith-Based National Parks
Patrick Gavin
What Would Lincoln Do?
Marjorie Cohn
How to
Try Saddam: Searching for a Just Venue
Kathy Kelly
The
Two Troublemakers: "Guilty of Being Palestinians in Iraq"
December 20 / 21, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
How
to Kill Saddam
Saul Landau
Bush Tries Farce as Cuba Policy
Rafael Hernandez
Empire and Resistance: an Interview with Tariq Ali
David Vest
Our Ass and Saddam's Hole
Kurt Nimmo
Bush
Gets Serious About Killing Iraqis
Greg Weiher
Lessons from the Israeli School on How to Win Friends in the
Islamic World
Christopher Brauchli
Arrest, Smear, Slink Away: Dr. Lee and Cpt. Yee
Carol Norris
Cheers of a Clown: Saddam and the Gloating Bush
Bruce Jackson
The Nameless and the Detained: Bush's Disappeared
Juliana Fredman
A Sealed Laboratory of Repression
Mickey Z.
Holiday Spirit at the UN
Ron Jacobs
In the Wake of Rebellion: The Prisoner's Rights Movement and
Latino Prisoners
Josh Frank
Sen. Max Baucus: the Slick Swindler
John L. Hess
Slow Train to the Plane
Adam Engel
Black is Indeed Beautiful
Ben Tripp
The Relevance of Art in Times of Crisis
Michael Neumann
Rhythm and Race
Poets' Basement
Cullen, Engel, Albert & Guthrie
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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Weekend
Edition
January 3 / 4, 2004
Penetrating
the Particular
Poet
Carl Rakosi Turns 100
By STANDARD SCHAEFER
On December 12th, 2003 the Beyond Baroque Literary
Center in Venice, California hosted a one-hundredth birthday
celebration for poet Carl Rakosi, one of the founding members
of the Objectivist School of American poetry. Rakosi was born
on November 6, 1903 in Berlin to Hungarian parents. "There
were no books in our house," he said, "That didn't
bother me because I didn't know I was missing anything, until
one day I discovered the public library on the other side of
town. The library now became my secret home and my secret vice...."
The Objectivist movement is often considered
to have begun in 1931 and included, among others, George Oppen,
William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and Louis Zukovsky. The
Objectivists who were almost all immigrants felt cut off from
the traditions of their new, adopted culture. They naturally
inclined towards writing from experience, from the real, from
expediency, and out of sense of necessity. As Rakosi once wrote,
"Lay down your book, and match wits/against this bird/before
they sink you like the quips of Jesus."
Immune from the fashionable nostalgia
for a lost America in so much poetry from that time, immune from
its myths of alleged equality, Rakosi gradually drew more and
more from his European immigrant background. He did this, however,
not as a way of retreating into a literary, spiritual realm,
nor to pepper his work with Gnostic allusions and imposing mythical
knowledge. He used them to illuminate the core of the experiences
he wanted to capture-the Great Depression, dockworkers, "sobbing
hooligans" and the social inequality that he knew first
hand as Jew and a communist. He wanted to get to roots of things.
As he once put it, "I penetrate the particular/the way
an owl waits/for a kangaroo rat."
Rakosi himself remains to this day more
interested in the real relationships between people. He early
on abandoned an academic career repulsed by its institutional
nature. Many Objectivists rejected professionalism and institutionalism
in favor of jobs that involved real relationships, real effects-none
probably more than Rakosi left the English Department for social
work. Describing his feelings for the position he held at the
University of Texas, he wrote "I felt the need to protect
my time and resources for writing by work that was less compelling,
less absorbing ... and got myself a job . . . teaching freshman
composition to engineering students. . . . The work was easier
all right.... but now it was the young prigs in the department
I couldn't stand. They acted as if they had brought Oxford to
Austin, . . . and were so affected and British high-toned that
I felt nauseated and was faced with having to spend the rest
of my life with clones. I could see too that what I would be
doing as a professor would be so specialized and of so little
value except in English departments. . ."
Earlier at the University of Wisconsin
as an undergraduate, he had found his fellow students, the home-grown
Americans, something of a problem:
"The University had some ten thousand
students, mostly from Wisconsin farms and small towns, blond
young Babbitts, their hair cropped close. Time was suspended
for these boys and girls from the country while they looked each
other over and saw that they were comely, and flirted and horsed
around. And the big events were football and the Big Ten pennant
ahead, and standing guard was a smugness hard to imagine these
days, though Nancy Reagan comes pretty close to it."
He preferred social work, took a Master
of Social Work degree from the University of Pennsylvania and
shortly thereafter married Leah Jaffe in 1939. He thrived in
being able to help people. In the sixties, he decided that he
could not be both poet and social worker. For 25 years he wrote
nothing.
Rakosi explained:
"I fell in love with social work
and that was my undoing as a poet, in a sense. . . I had become
convinced by 1935 that capitalism was incapable of providing
jobs and justice to people and that the system had to be changed,
that there was no other way . . . it seemed like half the country
was out of work and ready to explode, the unemployed organizing
and storming the relief offices, when true-blue Americans who
had never thought much beyond the morning news and football became
radicalized. The stakes had become too high to do nothingI took
very literally the basic Marxian ideas about literature having
to be an instrument for social change, for expressing the needs
and desires of large masses of people. And believing that, I
couldn't write poetry, because the poetry that I could write
could not achieve those endsmy Marxist thinking had made me lose
respect for poetry itself. So there was nothing to hold me back
from ending the problem by stopping to write. I did that. I also
stopped reading poetry."
Rakosi told me that he did not really
return to writing until he retired from social work and practicing
psychotherapy. He sent a poem to Paul Vangelisti and I when
we edited an issue of Ribot magazine that featured poets
over 60 and under 30. In it, he addressed contemporary politics.
It ends with the lines, "Moderns prophets should be sent
back to the Old Testament, where they belong. What we need in
this world are workable proposals."
The birthday celebration at Beyond Baroque
was one of the most well-attended events there I've ever seen.
Poets ranging from their 70s to their 20s were there to pay
tribute. Readers included the host and organizer Jen Hofer,
Jerome Rothenberg, Tom Delvaney, and Paul Vangelisti. But the
show belonged to the man himself. Rakosi read several poems
from various periods of his work but ended with his most recent.
The last piece was one he introduced as a series of epigrams
of the sort that would be on tombstones. It was not morose in
the least. The inscriptions were funny and I suspect he had
borrowed many of them. I remember him reading one as "I
told you I was sick". None of them seemed to be about him
or his old age. There was nothing self-involved or melancholy.
His tombstone poem was not meant as a farewell to the earth,
but perhaps to people he had known, and not specific people,
either. It was as if in reflecting on his age, he had written
a series of jokes that served to remind us quite profoundly about
the way we relate to one another, our mutual dependencies, our
occasional lapses, our inadvertent cruelties.
As soon as he finished, people surrounded
him trying to shake his hand and get him to sign a new publication
of his collected poems. I did not get to speak to him. I left
out the back thinking about the one time I had gotten to speak
to him at 1995 event at Sun and Moon Books. At that time, I
was struck by what was clearly a joy of being around people.
I was a twenty-seven year old brat much the corn-fed type he
described at the University of Wisconsin, except I wanted him
to tell me about the Communist Party and revolution. He endured
me easily, candidly saying that he had gone to some rallies and
so forth, but hardly had much to report. I wanted to know about
his years as a psychotherapist and I told them that I had recently
read that working-class people do not respond as well to psychodynamic
therapy as wealthier people. Since he had chosen to devote his
life to providing affordable therapy to working-class people,
I wanted to know whether or not he would agree. "I don't
know," he said, "maybe rich people's therapist's talk
differently to them. All I can tell is the people really just
need someone to pay attention."
I remember thinking at the time of his
curious use of the phrase "the people". It sounded
so anachronistic, but in light of all this reading and his response
to the crowd, I realized that this man believed in one thing,
the real relations between "people". As I left the
celebration, I got in the car thinking of this early poem of
his which he had named "The People":
O
you in whom distrust lies under
like a gallstone
and desire grows up aching
like a sharp tooth,
courage rises over all
because it is your heart
and knows no high airs or aloofness.
When I was young
and my moods stood between us,
you made me feel lonely.
now I plant myself
in the middle of the street
and swear I shall never leave you,
for you stand between me and my moods.
Standard Schaefer is an editor of the New Review of Literature
and a poet. He can be reached at ssschaefer@earthlink.net
Weekend
Edition Features for Dec. 27 / 28, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
A
Journey Into Rupert Murdoch's Soul
Kathy Kelly
Christmas Day in Baghdad: A Better World
Saul Landau
Iraq
at the End of the Year
Dave Zirin
A Linebacker for Peace & Justice: an Interview with David
Meggysey
Robert Fisk
Iraq
Through the American Looking Glass
Scott Burchill
The Bad Guys We Once Thought Good: Where Are They Now?
Chris Floyd
Bush's Iraq Plan is Right on Course: Saddam 2.0
Brian J. Foley
Don't Tread on Me: Act Now to Save the Constitution
Seth Sandronsky
Feedlot Sweatshops: Mad Cows and the Market
Susan Davis
Lord
of the (Cash Register) Rings
Ron Jacobs
Cratched Does California
Adam Engel
Crumblecake and Fish
Norman Solomon
The Unpardonable Lenny Bruce
Poets' Basement
Cullen and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Activism Through Music
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