Dissenters, Deserters, and Objectors to America's Wars
a little rant, about something that’s none of my business.
The months reading/writing about the “Vietnam years” made me feel more strongly than ever about trends I’m seeing in some of these newer veterans’ groups — stuff I keep TRYING, in good journalistic fashion, to shut my mouth about so that I can just watch it happen in real time. It’s about the perpetual dance between dissenting veterans and groups of the sectarian left, for whom the latter are sort of a dream date.
Katherine McNamara started crashing people’s expectations early – peeling off to Paris in the middle of a Cornell history Ph.D. and learning she was a poet, striking out for Alaska just as the oil boom was ending; founding one of the first prestigious literary magazines published entirely on the Internet. And ever since we metContinue reading “always with the unoccupied space: thank you, Katherine McNamara!”
Academically trained in German language and literature at Colby (BA), Tufts (MA), and Harvard (ABD), Maria Luisa Arroyo (www.marialuisaarroyo.com) is an educator, a single parent, a 2004 Massachusetts Cultural Council poetry grant recipient, a 2008 Massachusetts Unsung Heroine, a visual artist, and a self-taught poet. Her collections of poems include Gathering Words/Recogiendo Palabras (Bilingual Press,Continue reading “and because it's still Poetry Friday”
Academically trained in German language and literature at Colby (BA), Tufts (MA), and Harvard (ABD), Maria Luisa Arroyo (www.marialuisaarroyo.com) is an educator, a single parent, a 2004 Massachusetts Cultural Council poetry grant recipient, a 2008 Massachusetts Unsung Heroine, a visual artist, and a self-taught poet. Her collections of poems include Gathering Words/Recogiendo Palabras (Bilingual Press,Continue reading “and because it's still Poetry Friday”
Images found this week at the Swarthmore College Peace Collection, now in dim photocopies. I’ll scan both as soon as I can, and provide substitutes in the meantime: #1: June 30, 1966. A room at NY Community Church on 35th Street, filled to bursting for a press conference. To the left of the table, aContinue reading “two pictures, old hope”
cause that’s how it feels sometimes. The Author to her Book Thou ill-form’d offspring of my feeble brain, Who after birth did’st by my side remain, Till snatcht from thence by friends, less wise than true, Who thee abroad expos’d to public view, Made thee in rags, halting to th’ press to trudge, Where errorsContinue reading “poetry friday a day early”
A month or so since I posted and I’m still speechless. More soon, I promise. Meanwhile, there are all sorts of important things to say on the sixth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, but for now I think I’ll just let a poet say it, again. In 2003 I quoted Yeats, but now let’sContinue reading “six years on, we are all conscientious objectors”
More flotsam from my life-on-Mars phase: I didn’t know this video existed, until now. I wish I had a clip of Ochs’ performance at the first Winter Soldier (two years later than this TV appearance) but this is good enough for now. Knowing that the vets in Detroit heard Ochs’ anthem, just before four daysContinue reading “call it love or call it reason”
So I’ve been of late calling myself “Billy Pilgrim,” when people ask me how I am; digging tenaciously through those mad years we call “the Vietnam era,” which I subtitle as “When Everything Blew Up and Everything Grew.” What, she’s not done yet? Not yet, not when I spent nearly three weeks with the likesContinue reading “can you hear me major tom?”
I loved this poem long before the author became one of my book’s guys (“i sing of olaf,” The Enormous Room et al.). I once asked my students, as their midterm, to explain to me how someone can write a love poem without ever using the word. Can you tell me? somewhere i have neverContinue reading “my only valentine's day poem”
I Ain't Marching Anymore