Blog Archives

Rest in Peace, John Raines

11/21/2017

“In 1971 anti-war activist John Raines broke into a local FBI office, stole a cache of documents, and sent them to the press. That act of nonviolent resistance resulted in the exposure of ‘COINTELPRO.’” — ACLU

We never knew—and could not know—
The substance of COINTELPRO,
Except John Raines and his cohort
Acted, the truth to sift and sort
Whereby lies showed to come up short.

Breaking the law betimes required
We learned the government conspired
Against the common good, and even
Committed heinous deeds past thieving—
Now open wide the gates of heaven.

Murders committed “in my name,”
Efforts to fan crude hatred’s flame,
Cannot be undone by exposure
As though truth offered victims closure
By words of magical ambrosia—

Yet, in a world where crimes are done
We must rely, each everyone,
On those who risk, as did John Raines
And his cohort, to take the pains
To find the fact which truth explains.

The Death of a Good Man, Remembered

11/21/2017

(Harold Washington, 1922-1987)

A man so good as Harold Washington
Appears upon the scene with rarity,
A politician of integrity,
And where have all the years—now thirty—gone?

His opposition blocked him at each step,
As he strove to uphold the common good,
Mayor Washington—I never understood
How evil men connive, cabals to keep.

More of the common sort, run-of-the-mill,
Daleys we’ve had, with their quotidian graft
Helming the office, as it were a craft
For personal enrichment, private till.

What is the fallacy of education
To make the common man, the common run?
Why, like a shooting star, a Washington
To briefly lend the sky illumination?

Mayor Washington—sir—as a young man then
I basked briefly in your reflected glory,
Then suddenly—too soon—ended the story,
As heaven took you from the world of men.

Waiving the Right to Vote

11/13/2017

Because they had enough of it,
Responsibility,
They chose to make a chuff of it
So irresponsibly,
Electing as their “man in charge”
A bloke who liked to boast and barge,
Uncouth and spiteful, talking large
To wreck democracy.

The rule of law they waived anon—
A stolen top court seat
Was no concern to anyone,
Approving such a cheat.
More than a year passed: no one acted,
Or sought to have the choice retracted,
Though government was all impacted,
Its fragile structure beat.

The goons and thugs, supremacists
Crawled out from hidden holes,
And soon began to purge the lists,
Dismantling all controls,
Nazis considered “very fine,”
Traitorous deeds praised for benign,
As Christians did their Christ malign—
And soon they closed the polls.

C.K. Stead on Imagist Poetry

11/11/2017

“Imagist poetry developed as a way of presenting sharp visual perceptions in lines which preserved the emotional experience by a rigid exclusion of all elements of discourse… [o]r in the hands of lesser poets… became merely a technique for giving sequences of ineffectual prose the appearance of a kind of poetry.” (C.K. Stead, The New Poetic)

C.K. Stead on Poetic Greatness in 1909

11/11/2017

“Here then we have a sketch of what it was to be a great poet in 1909: a man who expressed a sound philosophy in verse. And a sound philosophy was, in the reigning literary circles of the time, a philosophy of irrational conservatism. The poet is ‘a man of the world’, ‘a normal and healthy man in close contact with realities’, with ‘a practical attitude of mind and a closeness to common life’. He is a good chap, and certainly not an artist, for the word artist bore ‘associations with foreigners and long-haired aesthetes’, and was out of favor.” (C.K. Stead, The New Poetic)

C.K. Stead on Early Twentieth-Century Literature

11/10/2017

“In English society during the early years of this century it was inevitable that any widely popular writer was either bad—that is, that he shared the ‘gigantic temperamental dullness’ of his audience—or that his works were in some way a compromise.” (C.K. Stead, The New Poetic)

C.K. Stead on William Butler Yeats

11/9/2017

“Yeats’s progress towards the goal of great poetry was perhaps the most patient, tenacious, and logical of any poet in our literature.” (C.K. Stead, The New Poetic)