"Patriot Week" At Anaheim Statium - Some Alterative Ideas

This 4th of July weekend The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim are at home playing the Baltimore Orioles. As part of the festivities, which the Angels' ownership has dubbed "Patriotic Week," this weekend's games will feature "flyovers" by a Blackhawk helicopter and C17 fighter jet. As a lifelong Angels fan (my grandfather took me to my first game when I was five-years old), I feel I must protest this coupling of U.S. military might and our national Independence day celebrations in such an exclusive manner.

A military is a necessary evil in this world today and the people who serve in this country's armed forces should be honored for their sacrifices. However, the coupling of the national past time with such deadly weapons of war reveals the worst aspects of our country, not the best.

Since the end of the second World War the United States has gone from being a flawed, yet highly honorable republic, which featured a moderate degree of democracy (for those whose skin was "white") to the most powerful nation earth. Along the way we have become at least a defacto empire; thru our many military bases scattered across the globe and our staggering wealth we at least indirectly control important aspects of the lives of much of the world's people.

Not surprisingly this situation has created much resentment around the world (how many people in the country with be comfortable with, say, Saudi or Japanese military bases in their hometowns?). As with empires throughout history, the maintaining of this power has become a given for us; we spend more money on military matters than the rest of the world's nations combined and to question this is to be labeled un-American, or at best a naive peacenik who doesn't understand real world power relationships.

What is seldom acknowledged by proponents of this permanent war state is how badly it has hollowed out this nation. It is not an accident that there never seems to be any money anymore to do things like fix roads, pay for education and health care, or any of the other things that are traditionally associated with a modern society--the military industrial complex sucks up everything in its path, which is almost everything.

It's of course not that simple. The rise of the military industrial complex has been accompanied by the development of a strangely American kind of crony capitalism (that is far too involved to go into in this little blog post), thru which the wealth of the nation is continually funneled up to the already wealthy under the guise of so-called free markets and patriotism (somewhere along the line the American right discovered that "Communism" and community have the root and therefore anything that is public based must be not only bad, but un-American).

All of this is my long-winded way of saying that the display of militarism that will occur at Anaheim Stadium this weekend is not only wrong-headed, but in its own small way adds fuel to the imperialist fires that are destroying not only this country, but the world at large.

So as an alternative I suggest ditching the Blackhawk and the C17 and instead have a giveaway, such as those for which baseball franchises are already famous. But instead of handing out souvenir bats or hats or t-shirts, how about celebrating the 4th of July with a giveaway that cuts to the heart of what's truly great about this country. Such as? Well, how about simply printed, inexpensive versions of Thomas Paine's Rights of Man. Or better yet, laminated copies of the Bill of Rights. If these items are a bit too heavy for a summer holiday, how about something like a Martin Luther King bobblehead doll?

OK, I'm kidding with these suggestions--but just a little. The military protects the United States, but it does not, or should not, represent who we are. This country is in in trouble. This world is in trouble. Among the first steps needed to take it back from the horrible powers that currently be is to keep the military hardware where it belongs--on standby in case of an emergency. It should be a symbol of what we do when we have no other choice, not who we are as a country.

Happy 4th and play ball!

Burning Shore Review -- Up and Running!

The first issue of the Burning Shore Review is now online. It features poetry by Ben Pleasants, Rose Hunter, Damion Hamilton, and Ryan Ritchie, along with a painting and photo from yours truly. We're still working out some rough edges and things will no doubt get more sophisticated in the future (I'm sure we'll soon outgrow the blogspot software we're using to start off with), but I think it's turned out pretty cool as it is.

I hope everyone gets the chance to give it a look. If you like what you see, please help us out by spreading the word.

Poets Role Call #2 - Lew Welch (1926-1971)

There are a great many poets whose works I enjoy. There are even more that I respect, despite the fact that their universes and mine don't ultimately overlap to a great degree. There are, however, very few poets who truly move me, whom I truly love. Lew Welch is one of the poets that exist this exclusive realm.

Who is Lew Welch? I suppose that I have to answer this question in a somewhat direct manner, because though time has treated his poems well (they are still as fresh as a cool spring rural Northern California dawn 1961), it has been far from as kind in keeping our memory of the man and his work front and center. To keep it very simple, Lew Welch was one of a group of poets who began finding their voices in the 1950s and who in body were centered in the Pacific Northwest of the United states.

This group, which also includes such luminaries as Gary Snyder, Joanne Kyger, and the late Philip Whalen is today often referred to as the 'Pacific Rim Poets," partially because they largely have turned their backs on European poetic traditions and instead look to American values born on the western frontier, Native American ecologies, and outward to the spiritual world of the East (Mahayana Buddhism, most often) in search of a truer, more meaningful version of what it means to be perched on one side of a vast blue ocean so unAtlantic-rim like in its eco-cultural concerns and needs ("America" moves in both directions, it is often forgotten--it's impossible to go back east if you've never before been there).

If I had to describe Welch as a person I suppose words like "wanderer" and "hermit" would first come to mind--for Welch's poetry conjures up extremely lucid images of a man who is far more at home living alone in a shack in the Sierra of Cascade woods than in anything even approaching town, let alone a city. To these terms I should probably also add words such as "simple" and especially "pure"--because I have never read an American poet of recent vintage whose verse is less affected by our burgeoning electronic suburban world.

In the poem "In Answer to a Question from P.W.", Welch offers up a nice summary of his defacto philosophy as it seems to be taking definite shape:


Going to Mexico by motorcycle would be the coolest, but
Thoreau warns against any undertaking that
requires new clothes
Walking is pure, but I haven't achieved simplicity yet.
I'll never willingly hitchhike again.*


Such a point of view not surprisingly leads Welch to become deeply connected to the world he wished only to walk thru, as exemplified by this passage from the long poem 'Wobbly Rock":


On a trail not far from here
Walking in meditation
We entered a dark grove
And I lost all separation in step with the
Eucalyptus as the trail walked back beneath me


Much of Welch's poetry, though, is that of the common place, or at least the common place of a lone poet surviving on little in order to be able to write his poetry. And much of Welch's work does constitute a somewhat sublimated struggle with his muse, the muse that drives him to become a strange low-key kind of American-Buddhist hero.


The hermit locks his door against the blizzard.
He keeps the cabin warm.

All winter long he sorts out what he has.
What was well started shall now be finished.
What was not, should be thrown away.

In spring he emerges with one garment
and a single book.

The cabin is very clean.


The previous lines were from the poem, "[The Image, As in Hexagram:]", but similar ones can be found in dozens of Welch's poems. They are typical, in other words, of his struggle--his version of the struggle of the lone artist to understand himself and the world thru himself.

Sadly (or at least I feel it to be sad), Welch chose to end this struggle before it appears to have been completed: in 1971 he famously walked into the woods near Gary Snyder's central California home with a pistol and was never hear from again.

Still, his poems, found in the wonderful Ring of Bone: Collected Poems 1950-1971, allow his journey to continue, in that it can be so easily transferred to his open-hearted readers, who have and will discover his poems, poems so pure that time is almost irrelevant in their reading. 1971 was truly a sad year for the flesh of Lew Welch, but not the spirit, say I, still deeply enamored, awed, and inspired by his work in the year 2009.

*All poems quoted from Ring of Bone: Collected Poems 1950-1971, Grey Fox Press, Bolinas, California, 1979

Burning Shore Review - A Heads Up

I just wanted to let everyone know that the Burning Shore Review, the literary journal of Burning Shore Press will be on-line sometime near the end of this month. I will be the co-editor, along with Ryan Ritchie, the Long Beach-based journalist and poet.

Originally the Review was going to be an old school paper and ink enterprise, but we've decided that though that format has much to offer, the lower costs, speed, and flexibility of the net ultimately makes it the better route.

Again, the first issue should be out shortly, and it's going to feature some great work by some great writers. I'll have more info and a link to the site posted here very soon.

Self Advert #22 - Ray Bradbury

For those interested, my review of We'll Always Have Paris, the latest book by Ray Bradbury has just been posted in the Guardian. I'm a long time fan of Bradbury, but have never had the chance to review his work before. I hope you get the chance to take a look.

YB - New Poetry Journal

Rose Hunter just launched her new on-line poetry journal. It's called YB and it's debut issue features some very nice work (some of which is by your truly, he says stroking his ego thusly). I hope everyone checks it out and bookmarks it--its future will no doubt be bright.

Poets Role Call #1 - George Seferis (1900-1971)

I am not of Greek ancestry. Nor do I understand Greek, ancient, modern, demotic or katharevousa. I am, though, a poet of place--I believe deeply that a poet's job is to relentlessly bore into his or her's home place, until the stones, the mountains, the coast, the buildings, the sky, are so well understood that they speak thru the poet. Few poets do this better than "modern" and contemporary Greek poets. Again, I don't know Greek. This means I'm having to read these great writers thru translation. No matter: the fact that the song of their land still pours thru one language removed just proves my point concerning the depth and breadth of their artistry.

Perhaps my favorite of these Greek poets is George Seferis (1900-1971). I don't take things like Nobel Prizes too seriously, but if there was ever a poet who attained this honor who truly deserved it it is this late master. I've often thought there are few jobs harder than being a modern Greek poet, who has to bear on his or her shoulders the weight of Homer, Hesiod ... an intellectual tradition that gos back at least to the mists between Mycenae and pre-classical Athens.

Seferis deals with this problem (like all exceptional people deal with their problems) head on. Homer and Hesiod and every poet ... playwright since their time, becomes a, well, Greek chorus to his exploration of what it mean to be Greek, to be a human being, in our transient age. In Mythhistorema he writes*:

I woke with this marble head in my hands;
it exhausts my elbows and I don't know where to put it
down.
It was falling into the dream as I was coming out of the
dream
so our life became one and it will be very difficult for it
to separate again.

This is the poetry of a courageous man, a man who will not allow himself to be buried under the alluvium of history, but instead let himself be nourished by it, demand that it be the fuel of the future.

Beyond this provocative stance concerning history, its Seferis' feeling of a timeless Greece as a living breathing entity that most draws me to than man's poetry. But as I write this I realize that I can't quote a single passage of his that is separate from the long hot wind of Greek history: his past is his future: Greece is Greece, be it the pain of Achilles or the pain of Seferis--they are one thru time, negating time ...

OK, I've lost track of myself a bit here; let me try a different track. Seferis was no mere product of Greek history. He was a diplomat, a traveler; he loved Henry Miller, he wrote haiku. Here are a couple of the latter (about women, because that's what I'm about too):

Meditative
her breasts heavy
in the looking glass.

Naked woman
the pomegranate that broke
was full of stars.

Fine, here it goes: what I love most about Seferis is that his Greece contains so much that is analogous to my Southern California. My land is one of burning sunshine, wine-dark seas and crumbling chaparral cliffs (what do they call these plant communities in Greece?). Add this to the gift given to me that is the Greece-based intellectual history of the Western world and where do I finally find myself sitting: square in the middle of some coastal Greek village, looking for meaning in a burning blue sky and Aristotle's brain, via Homer's heart. Now all I have to do is figure out how to sing all this in Chumash and I'll be well on my way home.

*All quotes from:

Collected Poems 1924-1955,
Princeton University Press, 1969.