How’s your cultural literacy?

Delving my pile of reading one night I passed from Heaney to Meeker:

from “In the Attic” by Seamus Heaney

Like Jim Hawkins aloft in the crosstrees
Of Hispaniola, nothing underneath him
But still green water and clean bottom sand,

The ship aground, the canted mast far out
Above a seafloor where striped fish pass in shoals –
And when they’ve passed, the face of Israel Hands

That rose in the shrouds before Jim shot him dead
Appears to rise again … “But he was dead enough,”
the story says, “being both shot and drowned.”

source: The New Yorker February 9 & 16, 2009

The dunes rose steeply at the back of the cottage with their endless waves of white sand; the paths twisted and climbed through the stunted sprawling pines, half buried in sand – pines that could be climbed, and that, if you sort of squinted your eyes, became very like the crow’s nest of a sailing ship such as the one Jim Hawkins had sailed on. He could imagine his tormenters, in gay pirate costumes (but none so gay as his), toppling one after the other into the sea after some particularly deadly encounter with his trusty blade.

source: Better Angel a novel by Richard Meeker

The Meeker novel was originally published in 1933. I was reading an Alyson Publications paperback reissue. According to the introduction “Better Angel is possibly the first novel published in America to show male homosexuality in a positive light …” The excerpt above is from when the hero was a boy.

I didn’t remember who Jim Hawkins was until I got to the second passage. Oh yeah. Him.

Sambo unexpectedly in the pile of reading

When I was a kid for a treat my mother would take our family to Sambo’s, a diner not unlike Lyon’s or Denny’s. I remember the art on the walls, menus, and placemats told the Sambo story, not quite so I understood it, but colorfully enough that I was fascinated by particular scenes – the boy in the turban, the tigers. At some point I heard the Sambo story was considered racist. Why? The boy seemed clever and resourceful and won out over scary tigers. Was it mainly the illustrations in the original storybook, The Story of Little Black Sambo by Helen Bannerman, that created the problem? Bannerman was British and may have intended the story to be about dark-skinned South Asians; tigers live in Indian, not Africa, after all. David Pilgrim in an essay about “The Picaninny Caricature” says Bannerman’s Sambo “is very dark, has a broad nose, and the stereotypical exaggerated red lips and rolling eyes found in black caricatures,” which he sees as a clearly African rather than South Asian lampoon. Besides the illustrations, the names Bannerman chose for her characters suggest racist stereotypes. “At the time that the book was originally published Sambo was an established anti-black epithet, a generic degrading reference.” And there’s nothing flattering about Sambo’s parents’ names – Mumbo and Jumbo.

Pilgrim doesn’t think Helen Bannerman meant to be malicious. But her work was much pirated and imitated – and itself subject to lampoon and caricature – and non-Bannerman versions took the Sambo story into clearly ugly territory, reinforcing hateful attitudes about African Americans. Says David Pilgrim, “By the 1960s the book was seen as a remnant of a racist past.”

The Sambo’s restaurant chain is no more. At its height in the 70s, according to Wikipedia, there were 1200 Sambo’s restaurants. Controversy over the name as well as some sort of “corporate level decisions … led to Sambo's … demise.” The first Sambo’s still exists in Santa Barbara, California.

Sambo popped his head up one night recently. I was reading a little of this and a little of that, as I do. In his book on the Moon’s origins, The Big Splat, Dana Mackenzie says back in the early days of the solar system the Moon and the Earth orbited quite close to each other, they spun a lot quicker, and they hadn’t yet cooled into hard globes. They were, in other words, “whirling around each other like the tigers in an Indian folktale who chased each other around a tree until they melted into butter.” Oh, I said to myself, Mackenzie’s talking about the Sambo story.

In Ellen Conroy Kennedy’s The Negritude Poets the Sambo story comes up in a very different context. Kennedy says two women were getting to know each other “at the Dakar Festival, in April 1966.” Both women were American. One woman had a son, “a beautiful child of about five or six, [who] had been playing tiger, and growling, ‘Watch out! Watch out! I’m going to eat you up!’ [The white woman said] in surprise, ‘Hey, that’s what the tiger said to Sambo! And he said, “Oh, please, Mister Tiger, don’t eat me up, and I’ll give you my fine green umbrella! …”’ [ellipsis in original] Suddenly the boy’s mother, who was black, turned on the other woman and gave her a furious tongue-lashing. Hearing the word ‘Sambo,’ she thought the stranger had meant to insult her child.” The white woman, shocked at this reaction, reports the incident to her friend, the poet Edouart J. Maunick. “[S]he burst into uncontrollable sobs trying to explain what had happened. Maunick was much moved.”

Edouard Maunick wrote a poem in response, “Letter to Ellen Conroy Kennedy.” Yes, the white woman was the editor/translator herself. Maunick offers solace and a philosophical shake of the head at the legacy of painful words. “The byword is despair / sign and symbol of / a terrible divide / the war of words / the war of roots and branches / lies heavy in a stranger’s mouth / despite her uncontrary mind …”

a found poem by Kent Mannis

can a profit business
use voluntaries
people from a non profit organization
for a set price
for each voluntaries,
in other word a profit business
for stadium stand
using voluntaries people thought
a non profit organization
an classify them
as non employees.

….

No, Kent did not write the above. He works for an internet company that provides employment law compliance information to employers. So he gets questions, some straightforward (“Do I have to pay my employees overtime on a federal holiday?”), some less so … The one above – Kent broke it into lines – has, as one of Kent’s colleagues said, “a certain beauty.”

Even if I didn’t hear stories nearly every day from Kent about this or that employment law topic he’s had to confront, I think I’d find this one funny. It has that flavor of language that ought to resolve into meaning, that you feel is surely about to, that if you only held it on your tongue a bit longer you’d be able to name, and yet …

a senryu by Kent Mannis

bumper to bumper
rolling a joint on College
such concentration

word of the day: plantigrade

[S]aid Snuffer gruffly, “but let me tell you one thing, never cross a bear. A crossed bear is a cross bear and beware of him.” Paying no attention to the mirth of the outlaws, Snuffer went calmly on with his recital. “I am as you have probably noticed, a plantigrade, carnivorous animal, though I much prefer fruit, vegetables, fish and honey.”

definition: walking on the whole sole of the foot, as humans, and bears.

source: Ojo in Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson

I am reading through Ruth Plumly Thompson’s contributions to the Oz series for the first time in chronological order. On the whole I’m enjoying the experience. In Ojo in Oz Thompson gives Ojo his biggest role since his first appearance in Baum’s The Patchwork Girl of Oz.

Notes toward an autobiography by others, part 11

Reading Daniel Allex Cox’s Shuck, a novel about a rentboy in New York City who wants to be a writer, I came across a couple quotes that read like I could’ve said them:

“I spent hours in Barnes and Noble, nosing out which magazines felt empty without my writing.”

“I’m doing my best to stay positive, but I have to tell you that trying to get published … feels like buying raffle tickets for a prize that’s already been given out by a church that’s already burned down.”

I used to flip through piles of literary magazines in the bookstore trying to figure out which wanted me. Editors often complain that the poetry they receive is nothing like anything they’ve published before, thus surely the poet has not read an issue of their magazine. If they got an amazing poem that was nothing like anything they’d published before it would be an automatic discard? Because what you want to publish is what you’ve already published?

I give editors the benefit of the doubt – maybe what they really mean is they get a lot of poetry they can’t stand and if the poets would only read their amazing magazine the poets would know not to send them that crap! Yeah? What this means is you send them poems that sound as much like what they’ve published as you can find in your oeuvre … or you send them what you’ve got that’s ready and hope they find a place for that amazing poem that isn’t exactly what they’ve already published. Usually I fail to meet their needs. Which are mysterious, anyway.

As to the second quote, that there is no prize, not really. It’s all smoking ruins. Well. I don’t know. When a poem does land somewhere, it’s sweet. It’s ephemeral. Does anybody read it? The rewards of publication don’t quite match the effort. I’m not compiling a resume, don’t intend to teach, so have no need to publish to get and keep my professorship. Part of what tempts me about self-publication is the feedback. If you sell a copy you know right away. If you give a copy away you know who you handed it to or you write the letter to the stranger you admire and include your book and hope they read it. If there’s any response at all you don’t have to rely on some far off publisher to let you know.

Sadly, I am no better at being a publisher than I am at battering down the doors of the magazines. I did a couple chapbooks fifteen or twenty years ago and sold them to friends and co-workers. Haven’t tried that in ages, though.

My poetry career creeps along. But I continue to write. And I continue to find value in my writing. And there the rewards are.

Last few years I’ve only managed to get work out a few times. I sent to two places this month. One has rejected me. The other always takes a long time to reply.

hurts

Darryl … called me a year or two later and said … I had wounded him terribly by making him doubt his sexuality. I guess he was clueless enough to think maybe he was gay just because I said so, and then when he found out he wasn’t I turned into a demon bitch in his mind. It was one of those phone calls that make[s] you realize someone has been relentlessly seething about something you don’t even remember.

That’s from Jennifer Blowdryer’s autobiographical White Trash Debutante. Now and then I get to feeling guilty about some mean thing I did way back when and wondering how unhealed that person I wounded might still be. Other times I wonder if some other so-and-so who hurt me real bad ever realized he hurt me. How could he not! Then I wonder which events stuck in my head are ones that matter to other people. As age gathers the years into a fatter past and my brain’s capacity doesn’t commensurately enlarge, I note that recent events really can’t compete in emotional weight with childhood injustices. Why? Maybe those old hurts got the mental real estate and, boy, they ain’t giving it up. They’ve been revisited frequently so have an insurmountable statistical advantage over the newer tears. Not to say you can’t hurt me today like you hurt me yesterday. I don’t know. Don’t make that a goal, ‘K?

anthropodenial

Frans de Waal suggests that the continuing prohibition on anthropomorphizing chimpanzees smacks of something he calls anthropodenial, “a blindness to the humanlike characteristics of other animals, or the animal-like characteristics of ourselves,” a blindness that emerges from our subconscious need to promote human exceptionalism at all costs.

I’ve written before on this blog about what Andrew Westoll here calls “human exceptionalism.” I’ve not been sympathetic to the tendency.

Although I can’t quite say I’m fond of the particular coinage offered by Frans de Waal, it’s probably useful to have a pejorative to counter the pejorative. Denying that nonhuman beings have emotions is one of those thought games that, when imposed on the real world, has justified a lot of cruel behavior. The prohibition on anthropomorphism, it seems to me, is closely allied to the ranking of human races. They may seem like us, but it’s an illusion. Really, those creatures displaying human-like characteristics aren’t human. Therefore it is okay to treat them in a way we would never tolerate with other humans. See: chattel slavery. On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine, if you read up on torture, the dropping of the atom bomb, the factories of death in Germany or the neighbor-to-neighbor machete killings in Rwanda, what atrocity one could name that humans refrain from perpetrating on other humans.

quote source: The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary: a true story of resilience and recovery by Andrew Westoll

"my brother and his husband"

The Smith nuclear family and their spouses went out to dinner … It was a glorious evening, everyone talking, laughing, eating heartily, and enjoying being together. My sister and her husband lived in Japan at the time, my brother and his husband lived in Florida, and Jen and I were out in California, so it was rare that my mom could get all her kids together in one place.

This happy little family reunion is described in filmmaker Kevin Smith’s new memoir disguised as a self-help book, Tough Sh*t: life advice from a fat, lazy slob who did good. I’ve tried to think before about what it means to be gay and find that considered unremarkable, uncontroversial certainly, merely one aspect of the way one is identified in a crowd scene written by a non-gay person. Kevin Smith has a brother and that brother has a husband.

Now and then I read histories about gay people. The people who research and write such histories are faced with a difficult task. If Kevin Smith had written about his family getting together a hundred years ago, or fifty, or if he weren’t the type of writer he is, unashamed and cheerily confrontational, the brother’s husband might have gone unmentioned. That doesn’t mean the brother’s husband wouldn’t have been there, nor does it mean that the siblings would have considered the brother’s husband a stranger or even considered him unmentionable among themselves, but he would have been left out of the description and everyone would have understood that including him in the description would have required a dangerous explanation, putting information out that would implicate loved ones in criminal acts. Thus things that were actually taking place are left out of the written record, or, if written down, carefully guarded and destroyed should the possibility arise that they might be read by unsympathetic eyes. The historical record is an edited one, censored often by the actors themselves. The testimony of a primary source can be the closest we get to the truth, but that doesn’t mean it is the truth. Who kissed who, who fucked who, who lived a long and loving life together, these are stories we don’t get unfiltered.

Yes, he really meant husband.

But what did he mean by that?

pile of reading

Ishi: last of his tribe by Theodora Kroeber
Theodora Kroeber was the wife of Alfred Kroeber, the chairman of the Dept of Anthropology at the University of California when Ishi was found. In California you know Ishi. His story is taught in elementary school. Ishi was the last survivor of a small tribe of California Indians. They only made it as long as they had by living in hiding from the Whites. When Ishi found himself alone he no longer cared whether he lived or died, so he turned himself in. The Kroebers helped to find a place for Ishi in his last years. I didn’t think I’d read this book, a story-like biography of Ishi and his tribe in hiding, but once I started it it seemed familiar. I suspect I have read it, perhaps for school, or maybe I heard one of my grade school teachers read it aloud.

Neuromancer by William Gibson
I plucked this tattered copy of Neuromancer from the shelf thinking it would be a good thing to read on our Kauai trip. Turned out it requires a little more concentration than a casual bite, you gotta pay attention to the world Gibson creates. It’s one of the first cyberspace novels (pub. 1984) and some of the territory Gibson pioneers gets taken up by the Matrix movies, among other things.

The Big Splat, or how our moon came to be by Dana Mackenzie
I bought this book when the author gave a talk at a local bookstore. My receipt was jammed in the book and I’m using it as a placemark. 2003. I stuck it on the shelf cuz in the talk Mackenzie pretty much answered the question about the moon’s origins, even showing some nifty animations of the proto-Earth being struck by a Mars-sized body, going all liquid, then coalescing into the Earth and Moon as we know them. Science books, especially astronomy books, often spend a lot of time on earlier theories, and The Big Splat is no exception. I bog down a bit in the review of Aristotle and Anaxagoras.

The Yellow Knight of Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson
I’ve read L. Frank Baum’s Oz books in order and more than once. They were all available to me as a kid. Not so Ruth Plumly Thompson’s 19 sequels. I became a collector just so I could read those out of print stories. Once I finally got them all in readable if often battered form, I lost interest in first editions and printing variants. I would still like to have copies that contain all the illustrations. The illustrations produced as separate glued-in color plates were too expensive, the publishers thought, to keep in late reprints. If you want those pictures you have to be ready to pay some high prices. I’m really not. Anyway, after I completed the Thompson set, reading them as I got them, basically in random order, I knew some day I would reread them all in the order they’d been written. But I long assumed that would be a rereading of the entire Oz series from the beginning. This spring I decided, since revisiting Baum wouldn’t tell me much I didn’t know, I would reread Thompson on her own. I’ve often liked Thompson’s writing and she deserved an independent evaluation. Yellow Knight features an original Thompson creation in the lead, Sir Hokus of Pokes, a King Arthur-type knight that she introduced in her very first Oz book, The Royal Book of Oz. With Yellow Knight Thompson gives Sir Hokus a back story.

The Hidden Europe: what Eastern Europeans can teach us by Francis Tapon
I saw Mr Tapon give a talk and slideshow at the Berkeley Library a few months ago. Eastern Europe hasn’t featured as one of my dream destinations. The dreariness of the communist legacy being one reason, the persistent homophobia being a strong current obstacle. But Tapon’s twitchy energy and the grand nature of his project (he visited all the countries in person, sometimes couchsurfing) intrigued me. So I put a reserve on one of the library copies of the book. At more than 700 pages it takes time to read; I’ve had to return the book to the library and get it out again. Right now I’m in the midst of his chapter on Hungary.

White Trash Debutante by Jennifer Blowdryer
Jennifer Blowdryer writes her autobiography. Jennifer takes her last name from her first punk rock band, The Blowdryers. Sounds like she formed the band for the most punk rock of reasons, boredom, alienation, not being good at anything she could stand to do, and a need to be the center of attention. I’ve heard her read from her writings and bought this at one of those readings, maybe even the one I asked her to do for Poetry & Pizza.

City of Concrete and Hope by Luke Warm Water
A chapbook of poems by a Lakota/Sioux poet living in Oakland. “My first year living / in the San Francisco bay area / knowing nobody / I ate my Thanksgiving meal with homeless / so I didn’t have to feel so alone”

The Negritude Poets: an anthology of translations from the French edited by Ellen Conroy Kennedy
I brought this anthology home from the library because it contains poems by Tchicaya U Tam’si, a poet who is now represented in my personal anthology by two poems copied out several years apart. U Tam’si’s poems don’t appear until page 200 but I didn’t jump ahead. I guess I wanted to build the suspense. Now that I’ve read this batch of U Tam’si I want to read more. While there are other poets of interest in the anthology U Tam’si is the one I had the most sympathy with. He’s more playful than most.

Legitimate Dangers: American poets of the new century edited by Michael Dumanis and Cate Marvin
My generation. Many of the poets in this 2006 anthology are younger than me – and all have published a book or two (or more). My poems wouldn’t seem out of place among these post-Surrealist, post-Language school works. I’ve gotten to page 79 (a little less than 400 to go). I haven’t yet marked anything for rereading.

a brain teaser

In her new book on dolphins Diana Reiss describes a scene she couldn’t explain:

I was often puzzled at the sight of a ring of river rocks encircling the central drain at the bottom of the pool. These smooth-surfaced eight- or nine-inch oval river rocks were stewn here and there on the bottom by divers so the dolphins could rub their bodies along them. … A quick investigation revealed that the divers weren’t responsible [for the rings.] How did the dolphins move these rocks?

Did the dolphins pick the stones up with their mouths? No, says Reiss. “If they used their mouths, the dolphins would injure their teeth.”

Perhaps a dolphin would push the stone along the floor of the pool with its nose (or, as the “nose” is called in dolphins, the rostrum, there being no “nose” to the dolphin snout)? Reiss dismisses that guess, too. “Pushing with their snouts, the dolphins would injure their rostrums.”

The dolphin researchers had to keep a sharp eye out to catch the dolphins at their task.

It’s a clever and elegant solution.

They saw the dolphin, Stormy, with a stone. “Stormy turned upside dow, placed the top of her head on a rock, sucked it onto her blowhole, then turned right-side up and swam away with it atop her head.”

As to why the rings, the dolphins never told. Art?

source: The Dolphin in the Mirror: exploring dolphin minds and saving dolphin lives by Diana Reiss

an interesting mistake

Scientific discoveries [Georges-Louis Leclerc Buffon] declared, are really quite easy to make, and will quickly perish unless they are explained with elegance and grace. That is because mere facts are not human achievements – they belong to the natural word and are therefore hors de l’homme, “outside of mankind.” Eloquence, by contrast, is the highest evidence of human agency and genius …

How closely did you read the above quote? Did you note the typo?

With “world” missing its el, the statement’s meanings struggle more than intended.

source: Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: translation and the meaning of everything by David Bellos

“saying the same thing”

[L]anguage [is] a rich, illogical, and complicated tool for making fine and often arbitrary distinctions – for discriminating, separating out, and saying the same thing in different ways.

source: Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: translation and the meaning of everything by David Bellos

“they can’t be anything else”

She … turned to me and said that by being in bed with me she was also doing something she had never done before, which was sleep with a man who was Chinese. I thought of telling her that I was helping her do something I had never done before, which was sleep with someone who was Chinese … A Chinese woman once told me that many people want to have an interracial relationship once, but few want to have more than one. Suppose, I told her, all your relationships are interracial, they can’t be anything else because of who your parents were. In my case, a mixture of Chinese and English. In her case, a mixture of Chinese and German.

source: My Symptoms, a collection of short stories by John Yau

The Gay Agenda: Killng and the Straitjacket

[T]hey want to win the right to mimic the institutional straitjacket of state-controlled marriage, and to openly join the armed forces in state-sanctioned killing.

That’s historian & playwright Martin Duberman in his recent Waiting to Land: a (mostly) political memoir, 1985-2008. The “they” would be “the national gay organizations [or] most gay people – who’ve expressed no wish for a radical analysis of class nor a radical alliance with straight left-wingers.” Or both, gay organizations and most gay people. Duberman does mean both, doesn’t he?

This formulation of the goals of marriage equality and of the eradication of sexual orientation discrimination in government employment (including the military, at last) is the bitterest and most sarcastic I’ve seen, though the critique is not unfamiliar. Or, rather, the “left-winger” opposition to the military and to the patriarchal family structure enforced by traditional marriage and family law is familiar. The critique is muddled.

When gay people marry legally are they “mimic[king] the institutional straitjacket of state-controlled marriage” or being bound by it? The language smacks of the old stereotype of a gay or lesbian couple having to sort by gender role. Which is the Man, which the Woman? Seems beneath a longtime gay activist, theorist and historian like Duberman. Same sex marriage is only possible where marriages are egalitarian. If one partner must be subjugated to the other, as has been the traditional assumption in patriarchal marriage (woman subjugated to the man), how would that be applied in a same sex household? Is this where the mimicking comes in?

As to the military, I may be a passivist, of all things. I can’t say as I approve of the armed forces, certainly not in the business of killing to enforce U.S. hegemony (or “interests,” as it’s so often put). But, as with that queer “mimic,” there’s a word in Duberman’s formulation that gets me, “openly.” Should we remove it, what do we have? “They want to win the right to … join the armed forces in state-sanctioned killing.” I’m not sure there’s any right currently to join the armed forces. Is there? If you don’t match what the military is looking for, physically, say, the military doesn’t have to take you. You’ve no right to be a soldier. Now let’s try the sentence another way: “They want to win the right to [live] openly [even in] the armed forces” where they are currently serving in secret. Gay people have always been in the armed forces (usually secretly), performing “state-sanctioned killing,” among other things. What Duberman would do is what, end state-sanctioned killing? And how does singling out gay careerists for career destruction serve this end? It’s always good to destroy a soldier’s career because soldiering is immoral and if this burden falls extra hard on gays, well, that’ll help the cause, because the no state-sanctioned killing cause needs soldiers and who better than the aggrieved gay (former) member of the armed services? That suggests it’s best when the state hurts people, we want the state to hurt people, for it is from encouraging the institution to hurt people that the opposition to the institution gains strength.

I wonder if that’s true.

Judging by the behavior of the civilian police in the smiting of the Occupy protesters, including gays and women hasn’t gentled paramilitary culture. So it would be silly of me to suggest that allowing gays to serve openly would serve any kind of peacenik purpose. I am angered by anti-gay military policies for two main reasons. The first would be those directly harmed by the policy, the people who are attacked by the institution for no reason other than prejudice and judeo-christian conventions, the blackmail power it gives to harassers (protest your treatment and you will be fingered as a lez and lose your career and your harasser will go unpunished), the culture of internal suspicion and spying. The second would be the legitimizing effect of military service. If gay people are honored as soldiers, their families honored, there will no longer be an honored place in the foundational institutions of the United States for the official designation of gays, lesbians, and bisexuals as inferior, substandard, suspect.

I don’t expect magic to come from that. If the draft came back I wouldn’t celebrate the fact that gays would be rounded up along with everyone else. They would be anyway, of course. As they always have. Sure, a few would get out of it by asserting their homosexuality, if homosexuality remained a disqualification for service. But if the military needs bodies, it takes them. Later, when you’re not needed, that’s when the anti-gay policy becomes convenient. You’re tossed out and denied benefits you’ve earned, your separation paperwork declares you unfit (even if you fought as well as anybody) - and civilian employers, unsurprisingly, have been known to discriminate against morally unfit people.

There is one other thing I’d like to mention. Though military service and marriage may or may not be the most important priorities for a gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender movement, they do seem to be the fights the right-wingers have been most eager to engage, partly as a money-raising tool. Not to fight these battles would be to abandon the field to the hating religionists. Would that be wise?

The Wizard of Oz did not run for president

From Debt: the first 5,000 years by David Graeber:

L. Frank Baum’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which appeared in 1900, is widely recognized to be a parable for the Populist campaign of William Jennings Bryan, who twice ran for president on the Free Silver platform – vowing to replace the gold standard with a bimetallic system that would allow the free creation of silver money alongside gold. … [O]ne of the main constituencies for the movement was debtors: particularly, Midwestern farm families such as Dorothy’s, who had been facing a massive wave of foreclosures during the severe recession of the 1890s. According to the Populist reading, the Wicked Witches of the East and West represent the East and West Coast bankers (promoters of and benefactors from the tight money supply), the Scarecrow represented the farmers (who didn’t have the brains to avoid the debt trap), the Tin Woodsman [sic] was the industrial proletariat (who didn’t have the heart to act in solidarity with the farmers), the Cowardly Lion represented the political class (who didn’t have the courage to intervene). The yellow brick road, silver slippers, emerald city, and hapless Wizard presumably speak for themselves. “Oz” is of course the standard abbreviation for “ounce.” As an attempt to create a new myth, Baum’s story was remarkably effective. As political propaganda, less so. William Jennings Bryan failed in three attempts to win the presidency, the silver standard was never adopted, and few nowadays even remember what The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was originally supposed to be about.

David Graeber follows up on this passage from the main text in the notes section at the back of the book:

Baum never admitted that the book had a political subtext, but even those who doubt he put one in intentionally … admit that such a meaning was quickly attributed to it – there were already explicit political references in the stage version of 1902, only two years after the book’s original publication.

Perhaps, the most incontrovertible piece of evidence for Wizard’s being a political allegory is this:

Dorothy represents Teddy Roosevelt, since syllabically, “dor-o-thee” is the same as “thee-o-dor,” only backwards.

In his bibliography David Graeber gives the following sources for the above:

Littlefield, Henry. 1963. “The Wizard of Oz: Parable on Populism.” American Quarterly 16 (1): 47-98.

Rockoff, Hugh. 1990. “The ‘Wizard of Oz’ as a Monetary Allegory.” Journal of Political Economy 98 (4): 739-760.

Parker, David B. 1994. “The Rise and Fall of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as a ‘Parable on Populism.’” Journal of the Georgia Association of Historians 14: 49-63.

Taylor, Quentin P. 2005. “Money and Politics in the Land of Oz.” The Independent Review 9 (3): 413-426.

I learned from Graeber’s Debt and I admire his devotion to tracking down this story – four sources! – but what I learned from Debt was not this nonsense about The Wizard of Oz. I was going to slap Graeber around myself but then I happened upon this passage in Paul R. Bienvenue’s The Book Collector’s Guide to L. Frank Baum and Oz:

The impact of [The Wizard of Oz] on American culture was felt almost immediately. The front page of The Syracuse Sunday Herald printed what may have been the first Wizard of Oz-inspired political cartoon on January 20, 1901 [four months after the book was published], and the story continues to be a favorite of cartoonists today. Critics were quick to ascribe symbolic and political meanings to the story : an early review revealed that ‘under the sweet simplicity of the tale for children is a satiric allegory on modern history for big people,’ with the Scarecrow, Tin Woodman, and Cowardly Lion representing Russia, Germany, and Great Britain. Over half a century later, the ‘Populist Parable’ theory of The Wizard of Oz, designed by Henry Littlefield as a simple tool for teaching high school American history, would become dogma to academics worldwide, in spite of later protestations from Littlefield himself that it had no basis in fact.

Paul Bienvenue’s sources:

The review that claimed the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion “were originally supposed to” represent European nations was published in The Beacon (Boston), Sept. 1900.

Littlefield, Henry M., “The Wizard of Allegory,” The Baum Bugle v. 36: 1, Spring 1992, p.24; see also Michael Gessel, “Tale of a Parable,” p. 19-23 of the same issue. The Baum Bugle is the official publication of the International Wizard of Oz Club. I’ve been a member myself since 1980.

Perhaps, Mr Graeber, L. Frank Baum never “admitted” he wrote a political allegory in The Wizard of Oz, not because he didn’t, but because as allegory it was meant to be broad and child-like. Check your paper today (if you still get a paper) and see if a political cartoonist hasn’t taken advantage of the simple allegorical possibilities of Brainless, Heartless, and Cowardly. Or the humbug wizard hiding behind a screen. What was the story originally supposed to be about? Not William Jennings Bryan.

Best Poems of 2003

Tachibana Akemi ….. 2 poems beginning “Happiness is”
Wakayama Bokusui ….. “Look at the mountain …”
Yosa Buson ….. 3 haiku
Chiyojo ….. 2 hokku
Billy Collins ….. The Best Cigarette & Budapest
Gregory Corso ….. Dialogue – 2 Dollmakers
Lucille Lang Day ….. from Field Notes: “Sea Slugs”
Jean Follain ….. October Thoughts
Jim Harrison & Ted Kooser ….. 10 poems from Braided Creek
Ozaki Hosai ….. “Carved into Buddha’s form …”
Kobayashi Issa ….. 7 haiku
Jakuren ….. “Loneliness has no special color …”
George Oppen ….. from Twenty-Six Fragments
Priest Saigyo ….. “At the roadside” & “The deep snow that” & “Ice wedged fast” & “In a hailstorm” & “Today again”
Senryu by anonymous poets ….. 5 senryu
Princess Shikishi ….. “Would there were other means of consolation …”
Fujiwara no Shunzei ….. One-Sided Love
Tanigawa Gan ….. Morning in a Foreign Land
Natsume Seibi ….. “Once when my five-year-old daughter was out playing …”
Shigeji Tsuboi ….. Balloon
Masaoka Shiki ….. 3 haiku
Ishikawa Takuboku ….. 2 haiku
a Tsukeai, an anonymous ‘linking’ poem ….. “I made her wet …”
John Yau ….. A Sheaf of Pleasant Voices
Ishihara Yoshiro ….. Song of the Ringing in the Ear
Kinoshita Yuji ….. Late Summer

Since 1989 I’ve been collecting poems. The best poems are the poems I like best, not just the poems I like, admire, think are done well, but the poems I want to spend time with and look forward to returning to because they strike something inside me that might, for all I know, be peculiar to me. Not so peculiar that someone else didn’t write the poem, but unique enough that just cuz I think it’s great it don’t mean everybody else will. So. The best poems are the ones that work best for me. No surprise, eh? It’s not like there’s objective criteria, you know.

With “The Best Poems of 2003” I am exposing the last of the contents of the looseleaf binder that I’ve been filling up for the last 12 years.

These are the other eleven:

The Best Poems of 2011

The Best Poems of 2010

The Best Poems of 2009

The Best Poems of 2008

The Best Poems of 2007

The Best Poems of 2006

The Best Poems of 2005

The Best Poems of 2004

The Best Poems of 2002

The Best Poems of 2001

The Best Poems of 2000

Best Poems of 2002

Anonymous ….. Li Sons D’un Cornet
Guillaume Apollinaire ….. There Is
Janine Canan ….. from Travels: “The crayfish has gotten huge”
Marc Cohen ….. Stairway Beach
Marceline Desbordes-Valmore ….. The Roses of Saadi
Emily Dickinson ….. “I reason, Earth is short” & “Is Bliss then, such Abyss” & “Dare you see a Soul at the White Heat?” & “We grow accustomed to the Dark”
Annie Dillard ….. The Hunter
words from the Hmong language …. txij txej, etc.
Marc Elihu Hofstadter ….. The Nap & Poetry & A Sunday Afternoon in January
Miroslav Holub ….. Interferon
Kobayashi Issa ….. 9 haiku
Valery Larbaud ….. The Gift of Himself
Salvador Diaz Miron ….. The Example
Pierre Reverdy ….. Air
Sappho ….. “heart” (a fragment)
Tristan Tzara ….. Epidermis of the Night-time Growth
John Updike ….. Dog’s Death
W. B. Yeats ….. He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

As I read a book of poems I keep placemarks handy. When I read a poem that really impresses me I pop in a placemark so I can easily find the poem for a revisit. If after rereading the poem several times it still strikes a personal chord, such that I don’t want to leave it behind, look forward to reading it again, and find the physical discomfort and hassle of copying the work out by hand a mild form of payment for something that will give me pleasure for years to come, the poem shows up in a list of “Best Poems” for whatever year I found it. I have filled a few looseleaf binders with these poems. The years 2000 through 2011 fill one such binder.

The Best Poems of 2011

The Best Poems of 2010

The Best Poems of 2009

The Best Poems of 2008

The Best Poems of 2007

The Best Poems of 2006

The Best Poems of 2005

The Best Poems of 2004

The Best Poems of 2001

The Best Poems of 2000

Best Poems of 2001

Rafael Alberti ….. The Dead Angels
Yehuda Amichai ….. The Narrow Valley
Paul Celan ….. “Husks of the finite …”
Gunter Eich ….. A Mixture of Routes
an Eskimo song ….. The Word-Fisher
Edward Field ….. To My Country
Louise Gluck ….. Screened Porch
Thom Gunn ….. In the Post Office ….. A Young Novelist
Lyn Hejinian ….. from Nights
Brad Leithauser ….. On a Seaside Mountain
Richard McCann ….. Nights of 1990
Leslie Norris ….. The Pit Ponies
Marlene Pearson ….. To Document a 20-second Hug …
Julien Poirier ….. “Slow astronauts are obliged”
Joanna Sondheim ….. “breeze within”
Alfonso Quijada Urias ….. There’s an Orange Tree Out There
Victor Valle ….. Teofilo
Alice Walker ….. from African Images: “A strange noise!” & “The native women”
Ray A. Young Bear ….. Always Is He Criticized

I heard Louise Gluck read “Screened Porch” this spring. She read in UC Berkeley’s Lunch Poems series. I was only able to make half of her hour reading as it was on my lunch break and getting up the hill from the public library where I work took ten minutes hoofing. It was a little strange hearing her say words I’ve repeated to myself many times, as though she had snuck the poem out of a place I’d thought hidden.

The Best Poems of 2011

The Best Poems of 2010

The Best Poems of 2009

The Best Poems of 2008

The Best Poems of 2007

The Best Poems of 2006

The Best Poems of 2005

The Best Poems of 2004

The Best Poems of 2000

Best Poems of 2000

Anonymous ….. haiku
Gary Aspenberg ….. “Homeopathic Poem I”
Basho ….. haiku
Buson ….. haiku
Blaise Cendrars ….. “Fish Cove”
Chiyo-ni ….. haiku
Clark Coolidge ….. “Combed Through the Ballardian Perspex” and “The Image Links” and “On the Light”
Russell Edson ….. “For Many Years”
Jorie Graham ….. “Opulence"
Ha Jin ….. “A General’s Comments on a Politician”
Robert Hass ….. “Layover”
David Ignatow ….. “Circling the Silence” and “Staying Alive”
Ikkyu ….. “something in us always wants to cry out”
Robinson Jeffers ….. “Cremation”
Samuel Johnson ….. “asylum”
haiku ….. Joso
Anna Karnienska ….. “A Prayer That Will Be Answered”
Philip Levine ….. “The Mortal Words of Zweik”
Federico Garcia Lorca ….. “Rundown Church”
Bronislaw Maj ….. “A Leaf”
Czeslaw Milosz ….. “One Life”
Mo Fei ….. “Stuck in Place” and “Young Prophet”
Robert Morgan ….. “Bellrope”
Po Chu-i ….. “Evening Rain” and “Sick and Old, Same as Ever”
Lawrence Raab ….. “Sudden Appearance of a Monster at a Window”
Shang Qin ….. “Electric Lock”
a Southern Bushman song ….. “The Day We Die”
Wnag Ping ….. “Of Flesh and Spirit”
Yang Lian ….. “An Elegy for Poetry”
Zhang Zhen ….. “Deep into Smaland”
Zhen Danyi ….. “Poem”
Zou Jingzhi ….. “Old Bowl”

Listmania! Some people like lists. Me? Not a huge fan. Even when I’m sympathetic to the purposes of the lists. I’m exposing my “Best Poems” lists on the blog more because I have them than that I need to wave them around. I ought to be writing something about these. But I always feel like my expounding on poetry is redundant at best. If I think the poem is great stuff I should hand it to you and you would have opportunity to judge for yourself. On the other hand, why should you care what I think is good?

The above is the contents page for the poems I hand-copied from various sources in the year 2000. Occasionally I’ve told a poet about capturing his poem and tried to convey my reasons. I recall telling Robert Hass that I’d copied out “Layover.” It was at one of his readings. What was he supposed to say? I think he nodded, said, “Oh,” in that mild noncommittal way he has.

The Best Poems of 2011

The Best Poems of 2010

The Best Poems of 2009

The Best Poems of 2008

The Best Poems of 2007

The Best Poems of 2006

The Best Poems of 2005

The Best Poems of 2004