ABlog

I was going to write about June, about June Jordan, I wanted to write about what it’s like to watch, to watch your contemporaries complete themselves in death so there will be no more, no more words, so every word becomes so much more valuable than when it was just an ongoing stream (it flows say the students and that’s how it is, the writing seems to flow until, one day, it suddenly completes itself like a tap turning off—“your love is like a faucet, it turns off and on” goes that song Billie sings--and there will be no more).

I saw it happen with Audre too and I wanted to write about what it was like to read June’s whole entire book, Directed by Desire, published by Copper Canyon Press (a press that would not even consider my manuscript because, they said, they simply could not consider any unsolicited manuscripts given funding cuts and constraints, but I’m glad they were there to publish June’s complete), to get to know June Jordan in a whole different way, because when she was living it wasn’t somehow necessary to know her that well. (I have seen this happen now with Audre, as I said, and with Gloria Anzaldúa, and why--is it only coincidence--with all these women of color?)

I wanted to write, wanted to have some energy to write, wanted to have some sort of edge, some analytic ability left to write with but McCain—Senator McCain took it all.

I don’t know quite what to say about the fact that I love June Jordan’s private lyrical poems or even her private political poems, I love her so much more when she’s writing close to home. And I can’t separate, I can’t separate the voice from my own past, from seeing her once at was it the Manhattan Theater Club, someplace in Manhattan thirty years ago perched on a stool reading in a little space; and then, a long time later, though it wasn’t a lot of years, hearing of her in the ways one dreads being spoken of oneself—the snickers about her insistence on that word bisexual, the wrath because she dared to write angrily about what was being done to the Palestinians.

I can hear her voice when I read some of the poems and does this impede dispassionate reading?

I read the poems and see how what’s going on now is only what’s been going on all along and that is so moving, so harrowing.

She didn’t stop.

And what would she have to say about the fact that former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey has invited current Arizona Senator John McCain to deliver the commencement speech at the New School? And what should I say about it, given that I find, finally, after getting to the end of all 629 pages (more, counting the index) of Directed by Desire, that I feel angry at history, almost, on her behalf—because hearing her leaflets delivered in the form of poems is so much better than actual leaflets, but her voice when she feels like she can stick close to home, when she can be intimate and angry, funny, or even just political-polemical right at home, is so much better so much deeper so much more surprising and unsettling (and that’s for me such an essential quality of true poetry, as in “a poem should either sing/or be unsettling”) than when she feels compelled to pack her bags and go on yet another solidarity jaunt.

I mean, I was there too in Nicaragua in the eighties and her poems from then and there are accurate enough but there’s something, finally, generic about the outrage. It’s in the poems of the moment, and the poems of metaphysical investigation that perforce depart from the personal moment, and in the shamelessly lyrical playing-with-language poems that she really convinces you nobody else could or should be writing this.

So, I wrote in my journal: “Directed is a mountain—600+ pages. There’s wonderful, wonderful stuff in it, but I did feel so exasperated, finally, every time she’d go off to another part of the world either physically or in her head, and write about another self-determination effort. Of course it was important that she went to extend solidarity, but did she have to speak it in the form of poems? It occurs to me that she was cursed with having a poetic voice that was heard. It occurs to me that I am like an [abandoned] nuclear testing range, or like the DMZ between North and South Korea: by being devastated (i.e. rendered virtually inaudible), I’m preserved, my words allowed to luxuriate: wild, free, prolific.”

So, I meant to write about the poems that stuck to and with me, like “Fragments from a Parable,” “Winter Honey,” or the funny one about no fried chicken that I can’t identify/locate from the table of contents so I guess maybe there’s no chicken in the title. I meant to say something about the virtues of raggedness overall, I mean that the book projects the absolute sense of an author being ready to try anything, and not that this impedes in any way the proceedings of a singular voice, but just that there’s absolutely no careerist sense of everything having to look presentable, everything having to be guaranteed to look presentable in advance, the way the career poets all do it now.

(But was she a career poet—the demand of a people or movements for her lines notwithstanding?)

I was going to do all that but then President Kerrey said to John McCain, why don’t you come to my school, the New School? Why don’t you give the commencement speech while also receiving an honorary degree? Why don’t we say that the reason for the honor is your courageous stand against torture, your speaking out on that subject and sponsoring a bill? Why don’t we ignore the rest of your record? Why don’t we ignore the fact that once your bill was passed, it was effectively rendered meaningless by President Bush who, upon signing, attached a statement saying he felt no need to abide by it? Why don’t we ignore the fact that seeing the two of us together, two Vietnam War vets, tends to direct attention back to our respective roles in that war—you as a political prisoner in North Vietnam, I as a war criminal whose command of troops that massacred a number of Vietnamese civilians was revealed in an article in the New York Times Magazine shortly after I assumed the presidency of the New School in 2000? Why don’t we ignore the fact that the committee that makes recommendations of candidates for the New School’s honorary degrees never even mentioned your name? Why don’t we ignore the fact that I am, in effect, ramming you down the throats of students, faculty, and staff, a great many of whom want nothing to do with you? Why don’t we ignore the fact that your appearance at the New School amounts to a sort of fancy product placement coup, allowing for all sorts of cute media commentary about your amazingly eclectic reach (from Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University to Hannah Arendt’s old stomping ground)? Why don’t we simply stonewall anyone who asks what was the quid pro quo for your “rebranding” opportunity?

Yes, John McCain is speaking at the New School in just under five weeks. June Jordan would have written a poem about it all, a poem that would have made a leaflet so far superior to any prose leaflet I can readily imagine.

I must become a menace to my enemies.

As for me, here’s what I wrote upon rising this morning:

• 
  SENATOR JOHN McCAIN (R-AZ)
  
  1. Strongly supports the Iraq war and, as public criticism mounts, continues to defend President Bush’s conduct of it
  2. During a current campaign swing through the Midwest to support local Republican candidates, helped the Bush administration set the stage for a possible war on Iran by uttering harsh rhetoric calling for international measures to discipline that country and praising President Bush for refusing to take the “military option off the table” (NPR, April 13, 2006). This came just days after a much-discussed Seymour Hersh article in the New Yorker that reports intensive planning within the Bush administration for a bombing campaign against Iran, possibly to include use of nuclear weapons.
  3. Vocally promoted unabashed American empire well before 9/11/01; for instance, during the 2000 campaign he called for the U.S. to launch pre-emptive attacks against so-called “rogue states” Iraq, North Korea, and Libya (Paul Krugman, New York Times Op-Ed, 3/13/06).
  4. Supports South Dakota’s new law completely banning abortion, a measure representing both a huge blow to women’s/human rights in South Dakota and an all-out attack on Roe v. Wade.
  5. Favors allowing schools to teach “intelligent design” alongside evolution (New York Times, 4/9/06).
  6. In the view of Jerry Falwell, is to be commended because he “is an advocate of the husband-female family, he does not support same-sex marriage” (New York Times, 4/9/06).
  7. Has recently “endorsed Bush tax cuts he once criticized as fiscally ruinous” (New York Times, 4/9/06). Voted to “extend tax cuts on dividends and capital gains, an action that will worsen the budget deficit while mainly benefiting people with very high incomes” (Paul Krugman, New York Times Op-Ed, 3/13/06).
  8. Consistently votes anti-labor; according to an AFL-CIO analysis of his positions on key labor-related issues, he voted “correctly” only 18% of the time over his total career (and only 14% in 2005).
  9. Is ranked third most conservative member of the Senate based on a statistical analysis of his voting record available at www.voteview.com.
  10. Sponsored high-profile anti-torture legislation, but saw it eviscerated by an amendment exempting the CIA from its provisions and a signing statement by President Bush. New York Times Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman observes, “President Bush, when signing the bill, appended a statement that in effect said that he was free to disregard the law whenever he chose. Mr. McCain protested, but there are apparently no hard feelings: at the recent Southern Republican Leadership Conference he effusively praised Mr. Bush” (3/13/06).
  11. Likes to cultivate “maverick” image; for example, by scheduling commencement appearances at both the New School and ultra-right-wing Liberty University. As reported in the Times, “he accepted the invitation to speak at the Liberty University commencement by Mr. Falwell, saying he saw no difference between that and accepting an invitation from Bob Kerrey, the former senator from Nebraska, to speak at the New School” (New York Times, 4/9/06).
  12. In his own words: “I think my voting record clearly indicates that on economic issues, national security issues, social issues—I’m pro-life—so I think I could make an argument I’ve had a pretty clear 20-some-year record basically being conservative” (New York Times, 4/9/06).
  
  Resources
  
  “McCain Emphasizing His Conservative Bona Fides,” Adam Nagourney, New York Times, Sunday, April 9, 2006, p. 33
  
  “The Right’s Man,” Paul Krugman, New York Times Op-Ed column, March 13, 2006
  
  AFL-CIO analysis of labor-related vote:
  http://www.aflcio.org/cgi-bin/member.pl?state=AZ&pg=2&id=6&year=05&congress=s
  
  McCain’s overall voting record: www.voteview.com
  
  Seymour Hersh article, “The Iran Plans,” originally published in the New Yorker, is available at: http://www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=10069&sectionID=67