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Charles Olson – Poem (“Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 27 [withheld]”)
I come back to the geography of it,
the land falling off to the left
where my father shot his scabby golf
and the rest of us played baseball
into the summer darkness until no flies
could be seen and we came home
to our various piazzas where the women
buzzed
To the left the land fell to the city,
to the right, it fell to the sea
I was so young my first memory
is of a tent spread to feed lobsters
to Rexall conventioneers, and my father,
a man for kicks, came out of the tent roaring
with a bread-knife in his teeth to take care of
the druggist they’d told him had made a pass at
my mother, she laughing, so sure, as round
as her face, Hines pink and apple,
under one of those frame hats women then
This, is no bare incoming
of novel abstract form, this
is no welter or the forms
of those events, this,
Greeks, is the stopping
of the battle
It is the imposing
of all those antecedent predecessions, the precessions
of me, the generation of those facts
which are my words, it is coming
from all that I no longer am, yet am,
the slow westward motion of
more than I am
There is no strict personal order
for my inheritance.
No Greek will be able
to discriminate my body.
An American
is a complex of occasions,
themselves a geometry
of spatial nature.
I have this sense,
that I am one
with my skin
Plus this—plus this:
that forever the geography
which leans in
on me I compell
backwards I compell Gloucester
to yield, to
change
Polis
is this
The Editors – Pre-Mature, Again. . .
There was a moment in the early days of the Second World War when American veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (that ragtag assembly of American communists and socialists best understood through George Orwell’s HOMAGE TO CATALONIA) itching to fight against Hitler and his proxies once again, found that many of their U.S. Army files were stamped with three mysterious initials: PAF.
Eventually it became clear. PAF meant “Pre-Mature Anti-Fascist.” Which begs the question of whether it is ever the right moment to *be* a fascist, or a wrong moment to be against one. Could one be a pre-mature anti-child-molester, for example? Or a pre-mature opponent of human slavery?
Clearly not. And so we wonder how our ally Pakistan sheltered the nation’s nemesis without our notice. Or how the Northern Alliance once fought *with* the Soviets, but then turned *against* the Taliban and became our nation’s new old friends. And all this says nothing about those perfectly-on-time anti-communists in Central America once called “the moral equivalent of our founding fathers,” by a man, later president, who went from leftish union activist to corporate song-and-dance man to the Great Republican Hope in the course of a relatively few years.
Do these contradictions matter? Yes, we think they do.
We need to see more evidence that our nation believes in some consistent human ideals, and will act on them with some consistency over time.
We wish to believe that we stand for something that is neither fashionable nor perishable like a quart of milk. Something it is never too early nor too late to believe in – and, perhaps, in the darkest moments, to fight for.
The Editors – The End of bin Laden
A few of us – very few – knew who Osama bin Laden was before September 11, 2001. In those olden days, in fact, some policy and terror wonks knew him as “UBL,” back when we translated the first vowel of his name further back in our collective throats.
Either way, we take the word of our leaders that the man is dead. We do not shed a tear, but we do not pump our fists and bang our chests either.
We note that there is a superficial world of symbols, brands and public gestures that seems to approximate the real world, but not quite exactly. In this surface drama approximating life, the locus of evil has been slain. But on the true surface of the Earth, something smaller has happened: one man has been shot and his corpse fed to the sharks. His ideas, his images, his brand all remain. Some might argue that they are diminished by his death; some might argue that they are enhanced. But they remain and can only be adequately fought with a collective will for our nation to attend to its own shared needs for community, decency and genuine mutual regard.
We do not love our enemies, nor do we love to see them suffer and die. We must direct our public energies to much greater needs and more worthy ideas.
The Editors – France, Again
Following French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s initial and semi-disastrous decisions to support the Egyptian and Tunisian governments against their democratic rebels, Sarkozy has recently embraced a new form of French diplomacy: supporting revolutionaries. Most notably, Sarkozy’s decision to close Libya’s embassy in France and open on reserved for the Opposition Government and Rebels has drawn international attention as a refreshingly humanitarian and ideologically sound action on the part of the French. This has buoyed the popularity of the French president, too often referred to as President Bling-Bling by his vast legion of detractors. There is nothing new in the New Sarkozy, though, just as there is nothing new in the New France.
From the establishment of the French Empire in 1804 and its dismantlement at the hands of the Sixth Coalition in 1814, France has lived up to its imperial ambitions in matters both military and diplomatic. Although this hunger for empire and influence in fact had predated the French Empire with the ambitions of the revolutionary leaders of the French Republic and earlier kinds, never before had there been a gathering of political power in Paris than in the era of the Napoleonic Empire.
It had in its possession dozens of small client states throughout Europe with whom it could maintain trade and military pacts while it continued to retain an intercontinental colonial empire which provided the Mother country with luxuries at low prices. All nations within the French orbit, whether they be allies, protectorates, mandates or simply leery friends, the French would follow a pattern that has suddenly thrust itself back into our own age.
All the way up through the 1950’s and the presidency of Charles de Gaul, this dream of empire and the greater “Francosphere” had been artfully executed by endorsing groups of rebels and political revolutionaries, especially during the era of the Empire. More than half of the Confederation of the Rhine – a group of puppet states under Napoleon’s control where western Germany stands today – had come into being due to political revolutionaries who owed their victory to the French; and across Italy, the Italian Republic, followed by the Italian Kingdom, owed both of their existences to France’s interference, the first to the French Republic, the second to the French Empire. Most famously, the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, a protectorate in modern-day Poland, saw Napoleon and the French as liberators, and became his greatest ally during the invasion of, and the retreat from, Russia.
The French have never truly let go of their dream of le Monde Francais,with parades – more than one of which the American Word editors have enjoyed personally – every summer on Bastille Day, with Legionnaires and troops from across the French-speaking world pouring across Les Invalides to the tumultuous cry of “Vive la France!” When we observe the actions of Sarkozy and this new form of French Diplomacy acknowledging the Opposition Government and Rebels of Libya and North Africa, there is not a doubt that this ‘humanitarian’ diplomacy is a self-serving, centuries-old imperial inclination. It is deeper than the surface, but in its depths lay ancient ambitions.
Randall Bloom – Poem (“The Night Before”)
The night before
The war began,
We began
With nothing else.
We began as
An open hand,
Like an open book,
Beginning, for example, with
The letter A:
An arrowhead, and
The letter I: watching
The sky,
Thinking the thoughts
Of the first man alive.
The.American.Word. 