POETS ON THE GREAT RECESSION

FEATURED POETS

2012-02-14T09:58:00.000-08:00

Over time, this blog will feature poets presenting the ways they have been affected by the Great Recession, and how such has affected (or not) their poetry.

Here are the participating poets listed in alphabetical order of last name; the list will be updated over time as more poets participate. Click on the poet's name to read their contribution. Also next to the poets' names will be the months their entries were posted; this should allow readers over time to determine new entries since their last visits (the date of this "Home" post also is updated whenever there's a new contribution):

Anonymous November 2011
("Neither of my books accepted for publication in 2008 will be issued....I have more than ten unpublished manuscripts.")

Alan Baker November 2011
("England's lamentable slaverie // the kettle’s boiled")

Ed Baker November 2011
("which recession goes with which poem? I just don't know. I'm still trying to figure out what the hell Language Poetry is!")

Lawren Bale December 2011
("How have we come to a juncture in history where a few bond traders can systematically bankrupt whole nations?")

Danny P. Barbare January 2012
("Reciting my poetry as I work as a janitor. Poetry about work.")

Michelle Bautista November 2011
("...it's important for me to be present, forgiving, truthful, and loving.")

John Bloomberg-Rissman November 2011
("The lower the level of education, the more likely a voter is to take seriously racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-science, religiously fanatical, etc etc candidates.")

Susan Briante November 2011
("... a new confessional—an economic confessional. What’s in your bank account, Poet? Who paid for your down payment? What do you owe? ...we have to locate our place in an economic continuum before we can honestly define our needs, understand the needs of others, activate our sympathies, act for change.")

Linda M. Crate February 2012
("broken dreams litter the ground / obliterating the vision of my own")

Mary Krane Derr December 2011
("I morbidly wonder how I will lug around my laptop and journals and protect them from the snow and rain if I ever become homeless.")

Lisa M. Drago January 2012
(" This recession has inspired me to start writing poetry for the first time in over 25 years.")

Liam Duffy November 2011
("...my recession experience is that of the Irish narrative returning to emigration. The youth of whole villages has disappeared.")

Adam Fieled November 2011
("...two things that have always disturbed me about the American psyche: the juvenile competitiveness which is never far from the surface, and the sense that intellectuality is not valued on any level.")

Robert Gibbons January 2012
("people are coming out of port authority / like water; see them in a place / that will spit them out like a cough; people / are walking into nowhere; into a place / as tall as steal")

Ed Go January 2012
("'It takes a certain kind of person to be an activist'")

Howie Good January 2012
("...utterly ineffective our so-called 'leaders' have been in addressing the economic suffering engulfing the country.")

Anne Gorrick November 2011
("The Great Recession set up a situation where I can say 'yes' to many, many things that make my own work bigger.")

j/j hastain November 2011
("This is a pledge to ever couple with and to never cripple.")

Michael Helsem December 2011
("...something i had not been used to seeing: ... an air of brokenness.")

Lori M. Izykowski January 2012
("Insidious Recession // Quietly invading, present without presence.")

Karen Llagas November 2011
("Let no one say / it’s just about the money, / that slender, / grief-stricken thing, / so thirsty for company")

Annmarie Lockhart November 2011
("...the idea that books can be a luxury instead of a necessity saddens me.")

Marie Marshall December 2011
("The recession has driven me (back) into the arms of Emma Goldman and Durruti, back to Revolutionary Barcelona in 1936, back to the political works of Bakunin, but also to the words of Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr, and even those of Thomas Jefferson,...")

Karla Linn Merrifield January 2012
("I make a last call for action / on Facebook and LinkedIn: Submit now. // Time is of the essence to the movement / as time always is. I channel // Ginsberg to howl, Ferlinghetti to roller- / coaster us into archetypal dream. // I implore Snyder to bow / from his mountainside, embracing // us in spirit in these pages. / We shall Occupy the Universe ...")

Faith Pascua November 2011
("Mommy, you are not an ATM...")

David S. Pointer January 2012
("The current recession just drives home to me that most Americans don't know what happened to political poetry.")

JP Reese January 2012
("I have never written more poetry or with as much power as I have in the last two years. The acceptance of possibly losing just about everything in the material world has concentrated my vision.")

g emil reutter November 2011
("Young mothers watch the old folks / purchase one meal at a time, learning / how it is done.")

Barbara Jane Reyes November 2011
("...surviving this recession as an artist requires that artists do away with a sense of entitlement...")

Sarah Sarai January 2012
("When a Wedgwood saucer is held to light / to see its roses bloom, a foreclosure gets its wings.")

Jared Schickling (with Alec Maslowski) November 2011
("My art becomes life, stains; “consequences” aside, they’ve proven extremely adept. Hell, successful. Thus my slurp has been unaffected by this “recession” ")

Ray Sharp January 2012
("If corporations are people / and loves are lives that are born and die, / we were downgraded to junk bond status / ... / I gave you 99 percent of my heart, / more than I could afford, and still / we ended up bankrupt.")

Hal Sirowitz January 2012
("It doesn’t cost much to be creative. Ted Berrigan said if you’re a writer and the choice is between buying a book or a meal, always go for the book.")

Leny M. Strobel November 2011
("Decolonization is not just for the post-colonial subject anymore.")

Chris Stroffolino November 2011
("Congress Should Enact Legislation for Publicly Financed Elections And Reverse the Effects of the Unconstitutional Citizens United SCOTUS decision by passing an amendment to prohibit any private financing of elections and ELIMINATE "PERSONHOOD" LEGAL STATUS FOR CORPORATIONS, and restore the 14th Amendment to its original purpose.")

Eileen R. Tabios November 2011
("Gold for Poetry....I consider Poetry to be priceless.")

Dee Thompson November 2011
("Who is not comforted by eggs and cheese?")

Elizabeth Treadwell November 2011
("male dominance obscures / the true contributions of men.")

Erin Virgil November 2011
("Babies never made me sad before.")

Harriet Zinnes November 2011
("There are no outcasts in history. / We are all in its throes.")

We are always looking for more poets to participate in this project. The Call for Participation is HERE; Participants are asked simply to answer the following three questions:

What is (part of) your Great Recession experience?
How has the Great Recession affected your poetry?
Please share a poem(s) addressing your Great Recession experience.

If you are a poet who would like to participate, feel free to email me at GalateaTen@aol.com

My Curator's Statement is my own participation in this project, HERE.

Eileen R. Tabios
Curator, Poet, M.B.A.

'

LINDA M. CRATE

2012-02-13T11:03:00.000-08:00

WHAT IS (PART OF) YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE?

It's made me hopeful that things will one day change, however, it comes with the grim realization that my dreams and reality aren't working in co-existence. The debt seems to go up while opportunities are lost and the rich squander money that poor and middle class could only ever imagine in their finest dreams. Perhaps, it's time we take a leaf out of the book of those involved in the "Tea Party" scandal.

***

HOW HAS THE GREAT RECESSION AFFECTED YOUR POETRY?

Since it's harder to find work, it's given me an opportunity to produce a lot more poetry and other outlets of writing and artistic ability than I'd be able to entertain otherwise.

***

PLEASE SHARE A POEM(S) ADDRESSING YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE:

entropy

broken dreams litter the ground
obliterating the vision of my own —
I watch despair engulf the arms
of those too weak to beat it off,
debt increases and prices too while
wages lessen or remain the same —
my rose tinted glasses are broken
as entropy reigns, I wonder if this
monarch will ever be dethroned.

invisible

poet by day, janitor by night —
thoughts sometimes dance
across my mind for another
story or poem or novel idea;
they come unbidden when I’m
vacuuming the floor or dusting
the shelves or emptying trash,
I wonder if any of it matters —
will any of this be remembered
after I am buried beneath dust,
or will I be forgotten like the
rest only remembered by daisies.

lack of experience

they always want someone
with more experience, whether
it’s a receptionist or something
more; as if the only thing I’m
capable of is reminding them that
they were once young, like I can’t
be trusted to operate anything
that isn’t a cell phone or computer —
they give me that stuffy, insincere
smile and I know it’s over before
it’s even begun, and yet I cannot
melt into the floor like I’d wish
to — I wonder if I’ll ever get a job
if I can’t ascertain any knowledge.

trapped

phone call after phone call,
application after application —
interview after interview;
yet nothing ever changes only
the day, dreams are broken
and I feel even my hope can
dwindle from time to time;
I hope one day I can take these
broken wings and somehow
fly into a land of opportunity.

Apology

If I can’t afford you a proper
burial, please accept these
paper flowers; I don’t have
but a dollar in my pocket and
a mind full of dreams that
have yet to come to fruition.

***

ABOUT THE POET:

Linda Crate is a Pennsylvanian native born in Pittsburgh yet raised in the rural town of Conneautville. Her poems have been previously published in Magic Cat Press, Black-Listed Magazine, Bigger Stones, Vintage Poetry, The Stellar Showcase Journal, Ides of March, The Blinking Cursor, The Diversified Arts Project, The Railroad Poetry Project, Skive, The Scarlet Sound, Speech Therapy, Itasca Illinois & Willowtree Dreams, Dead Snakes, The Camel Saloon, Write From Wrong, Moon Washed Kisses, The Wilderness Interface Zone, Samizdat Literary Magazine, and Danse Macabre. Her short stories have been published in Carnage Conservatory, Daily Love, Circus of the Damned, and Linguistic Erosion.

DANNY P. BARBARE

2012-01-31T17:35:00.000-08:00

WHAT IS (PART OF) YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE?

Living from pay check to pay check. Not being able to take a vacation.

***

HOW HAS YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE AFFECTED YOUR POETRY?

Reciting my poetry as I work as a janitor. Poetry about work. Trying to always be positive during negative times.

***

PLEASE SHARE A POEM(S) ADDRESSING YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE:

My '89 Mercury

Power fluid bottle, brake, nickels, dimes
And pennies on the floorboard and empty soda
Cups. The front passenger door won’t
Open and the back left window will
Not roll down. The car drinks gas and
Sometimes
Leaks oil. But the insurance and
Taxes are cheap and the radio still
Plays and the car rides smooth,
Luxury style. But mostly, the ’89 Mercury still
Gets me where I’m going around town.

***

ABOUT THE POET:

Danny P. Barbare is taking a few classes at Greenville Technical College. His poetry has appeared locally, nationally, and abroad. His '89 Mercury is still doing fine, besides getting the occasional sharps in the tires which has been a problem lately. He keeps taking different directions just to avoid them. Somewhat superstitious.

HAL SIROWITZ

2012-01-26T11:08:00.000-08:00

WHAT IS (PART OF) YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE?

The recession has affected me, making me think more about expenses. I’ve always had two lives – writer and school teacher – so I wouldn’t put any pressure on myself to make money through my writing. The royalties I made I saved for my retirement. Though, the one thing I’ve learned from the recession is that you can never save enough money for the future. I have to be careful not to go into my retirement savings.

***

HOW HAS YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE AFFECTED YOUR POETRY?

It doesn’t cost much to be creative. Ted Berrigan said if you’re a writer and the choice is between buying a book or a meal, always go for the book. I still try to live that way, having a library that rivals any local one in terms of poetry books.

***

PLEASE SHARE A POEM(S) ADDRESSING YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE:

Economic Blues

They say money makes
the world go round, father said,

but the world could revolve
by itself. It’s moved by its

repulsion and attraction to the sun -
like your mother liking me on one day,

disliking me the next - or something
like that. Don’t quote me. I could

never keep my eyes open in science class.
But in economics class I stayed wide awake.

Even if I didn’t have any money, it was
fun pretending to spend it. FDR was

my hero. He spent the government’s money
on public works. If you’re going to spend

someone else’s money, it’s better to do it
publicly. If you spend it on yourself,

you’re liable to go to jail.

***

ABOUT THE POET:

Hal Sirowitz's poetry is featured in an article in The Hollins Critic.

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KARLA LINN MERRIFIELD

2012-01-23T17:38:00.000-08:00

WHAT IS (PART OF) YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE?

While I have been only modestly financially scared by the recession, as an empath, I feel the horror of it deeply and that experience of horror has stemmed largely from the visual assault of its impact. Living in Florida, I see the recession everywhere I turn. There’s the roadside scene of yet another house in foreclosure. Another glimpse of an unfinished development, its condos enmeshed in vines growing out of unframed windows. And there to the left, another line forming at the food shelf as the doors open for the day. It’s unending. And what the eye sees, the heart feels with an enduring pain. For the first time in my writing life of nearly 50 years, I was moved to take action. That action ended up being Liberty’s Vigil, The Occupy Anthology: 99 Poets among the 99%, which I co-edited with activist-poet Dwain Wilder – a labor of love that just this month came to fruition with its publication by FootHills Publishing.

***

HOW HAS YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE AFFECTED YOUR POETRY?

I’ve long been a plein-air poet who prefers whenever possible to write in the company of non-human nature. The recession and its dire impact on the people of this country, both the poor and the middle class, stranger and so many, many friends, has made my desire to commune with the simpler beings that are trees, birds, etc., an imperative for my soul’s sake. I am more and more often desperate to escape the latest recession news story or Facebook testimony of financial loss…and find a time and place in the wilds to heal so I can continue writing both “nature” poetry and political poetry.

Karla’s photograph of a burrowing owl in Far Tortuga.

***

PLEASE SHARE A POEM(S) ADDRESSING YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE:

Scherzi Sequence: Accessorize
the Tent I Occupy

After eons of reptiles,
my good taste leans toward limbic.

Nylon walls & dome do make
a cave for slithering dreams.

I invite snakes inside.
I eat with them off the floor.

I occupy this shelter,
half-human, half-tortoise.

After eons of rodents,
I still nest in marsh mouse fur.

My cot & sleeping bag
do comfort armadillos.

I envision the soft pillow
world of artful owls.

The wild motif serves its purpose:
I am animal.

Vigil

I count sheep at midnight.
Recite poems at 1 a.m.
Fret about my to-do list at 2.
Agonize at 3 over the book
that’s going to die of disinterest.
Clock clicks 4:
the wide-awake litany
of hydrofracking, censorship,
the brutality of greed, poverty,
the brutality of…
the brutality of….
By 5? Atomize. Wait.

Inconspicuous, I feel
normal. I am anything but.
It won’t be long now.
Another sleepless night will end.
Daylight comes to their crosshairs.

Occupy Fort Myers Quincouplets,
Reversed for the Cause into Hopelets

[Curator's Note: Click on image to see larger image]

Letter from the Editor

I make a last call for action
on Facebook and LinkedIn: Submit now.

Time is of the essence to the movement
as time always is. I channel

Ginsberg to howl, Ferlinghetti to roller-
coaster us into archetypal dream.

I implore Snyder to bow
from his mountainside, embracing

us in spirit in these pages.
We shall Occupy the Universe

with peace & love & unity & truth & courage &….
We continue to believe in better things.

We even put it in writing
into a protest anthology

so the beat & the vigil go on.
Out of many voices – 99 – one.

I part my lips. You follow suit.
We kiss the book.

The 99% Guarantee

Strictly blue collar, luckily
unionized, I labor as Editor #13.

My job order for this shift
is to ensure something specific

but utterly preposterous is written.
The next poem rolling along

the conveyor belt to my station opens
           There once was a doggie named Shelby

           whom Occupy Denver elected their leader.
           She sits. She stay. She shakes paws

           with City Council pols, the police chief,
           and pees on their plush wool carpet.

           Don’t sic ‘em, lick ‘em, atta girl.
For a protest lyric it will do.

I stamp it factory-approved.
Another one gets shipped off

to the warehouse of quirky odes
for the revolution to Occupy.

***

ABOUT THE POET:

Award-winning poet, National Park Artist-in-Residence, and assistant editor and book reviewer of The Centrifugal Eye, Karla Linn Merrifield has had work published in dozens of journals and anthologies. She has six books to her credit, including Godwit: Poems of Canada, which received the 2009 Andrew Eiseman Writers Award for Poetry, and her new chapbook, The Urn, from Finishing Line Press. Forthcoming from Salmon Press is her full-length collection Athabaskan Fractal and Other Poems of the Far North. And from Finishing Line Press Merrifield’s The Ice Decides: Poems of Antarctica. She just completed co-editing the newly released Liberty’s Vigil, The Occupy Anthology: 99 Poets among the 99%. You can read more about her and sample her poems and photographs at http://karlalinn.blogspot.com.

‘

HOWIE GOOD

2012-01-22T07:58:00.000-08:00

WHAT IS (PART OF) YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE?

My disillusionment with the political process has deepened as I have seen how utterly ineffective our so-called "leaders" have been in addressing the economic suffering engulfing the country. I haven't been downsized or dispossessed, but life seems more anxious and uncertain than ever before.

***

HOW HAS YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE AFFECTED YOUR POETRY?

My poetry has always had a political dimension. That dimension has become more pronounced in the past few years. It's included starting cur.ren.cy, a digital zine, with Dale Wisely and F. John Sharp, that publishes poetry and short prose about the current hard times.

***

PLEASE SHARE A POEM(S) ADDRESSING YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE:

LOVE DURING THE GREAT RECESSION

Everybody I know says the same thing,
We don’t make anything in this country anymore.

They say our politics are broken.
They say the Dream is finished, it’s dead.

I requested you in lieu of flowers.

***

ABOUT THE POET:

Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of the new poetry collection, Dreaming in Red, from Right Hand Pointing. All proceeds from the sale of the book go to a crisis center, which you can read about here: https://sites.google.com/site/rhplanding/howie-good-dreaming-in-red

'

JP REESE

2012-01-19T04:19:00.000-08:00

WHAT IS (PART OF) YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE?

Four years ago, I came home from my part-time job as an adjunct professor in the middle of a weekday afternoon, and my husband of four years was sitting outside on the back patio smoking a Marlboro. He had just lost his job of eight years as an architect with a local Dallas firm. They were downsizing in the blackening economy that had begun to gather as stories on the nightly news like sullen thunderheads. Soon enough, for sale signs began to dot our neighborhood and many others like it. Many houses stand vacant now, their yards bedraggled, their windows smudged and empty. Our home is only a year or so away from the same fate.

We were lucky in that we had some savings to fall back on, but each year that money disappears into a mortgage we can no longer afford on our current salaries and to pay off credit card bills left over from the thoughtless years of acquisition that dog us still. Today, my husband sells cars on commission for less than half his old salary. All the full time jobs at the college where I still work as a part-time adjunct are gulped down by PhD's who can't find a position at a more prestigious college or university. We're pretty much in the shitter financially, and our future prospects look dim. Of course, we can't afford health insurance.

***

HOW HAS THE GREAT RECESSION AFFECTED YOUR POETRY?

The worst that will happen? We will shortly lose our house when our savings finally run out, sell our possessions (except for books), and move into an apartment. The best that has happened? I covet few material comforts these days and have learned to appreciate what is truly important, and it isn't a new car every three years; it certainly isn't a house with a pool, a new cashmere sweater, or the latest cell phone. What is important is to know that my own worth as a wife, a mother, a friend, a teacher, and finally, as a respected writer, is not tied into some cultural construct that depends on envisioning myself as member of a moneyed class. I am free to simply be me.

I have never written more poetry or with as much power as I have in the last two years. The acceptance of possibly losing just about everything in the material world has concentrated my vision in amazing ways and inspired me to reach a level of creativity I hadn't known was possible in my more comfortable, upper-middle-class days. My first chapbook has just been accepted for publication, and I have had more journal acceptances in the last two years than rejections. There is joy even in loss.

This blossoming of my creative side does not mean I'm not afraid for the world my sons will inherit. I am. It doesn't mean I don't care about class inequity in this increasingly lopsided society. I do. But sinking into genteel poverty has encouraged me to live a more vivid, satisfying life of the mind, with poetry as its end product, and I can't help but find some solace in that unanticipated and happy outcome.

***

PLEASE SHARE A POEM(S) ADDRESSING YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE:

"Number Five," painting by Lisa Cardenas

2008, What I Wanted

I wanted it to be 2007, before my husband lost
his white collar and our nest egg broke its shell against
the blind windows of Wall Street. I wanted not to feel
the clench in my guts every time the bills came due.
I wanted to believe my son, almost grown, would head
to college and enjoy the life my parents provided me.
It is 2011. My son works overnights. Mornings at seven,
I hear him climb the stairs toward his day's rest.
If I am quick, I may catch a trace of his boy's smile,
testing itself against an older, stranger's face.

(First published in Wilderness House Literary Review, January 1, 2012. Forthcoming in my chapbook, Final Notes from Naked Mannekin Press, 2012)

***

ABOUT THE POET:

JP Reese has work published or forthcoming in over forty print and online journals. Reese is a poetry editor for Connotation Press: An Online Artifact (connotationpress.com) and THIS Literary Magazine (thiszine.org). Reese's chapbook, Final Notes, will be published by Naked Mannekin Press in 2012. Her published work can be read at Entropy: A Measure of Uncertainty (http://www.tumblr.com/blog/jpreese).

'

ROBERT GIBBONS

2012-01-17T05:06:00.000-08:00

WHAT IS (PART OF) YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE?

I am not sure if I have had a great recession experience. I have always been limited in the area of finances. Due to my limitation I have learned how to live within my means and sometimes this is difficult because there are certain occasions when I would like to go a poetry reading and the reading has a minimum and then they ask for a donation. So now I am more selective in the readings I go to and I do the research. I want to go out and support other artists in the poetic community but sometimes it can become costly. So I just do not attend readings as much as I used to when I first started out as a performing poet.

***

HOW HAS THE GREAT RECESSION AFFECTED YOUR POETRY?

I think the recession has affected my poetry immensely. I have always been sensitive to the conditions of others but the present economy has escalated that pain even further. I find myself being more careful in spending and being more considerate of the ones who are less fortunate. I went to a dinner party one night and the tab was so expensive I began to cry. I could pay my share but I just felt like me being a part of this was somehow not right. So I observe the pain of others more closely. I live within my limitations and I do overlook the less fortunate.

***

PLEASE SHARE A POEM(S) REFLECTING YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE:

Mean Streets
(for Piri Thomas)

people are coming out of port authority
like water; see them in a place
that will spit them out like a cough; people
are walking into nowhere; into a place
as tall as steal; as the New York Times
building; people will crowd this corner;
stores of big watches and comedy clubs;
they come because they are attracted to
the lights; they are attracted to Frank O’Hara
idea of a walk; they are attracted to BBQ’s
and ten dollar shoes; just to say they bought
it; they are attracted to the idea of a marquis;
the little lights bulbs encircling the sign;
they find themselves stranded on the corner
with a suitcase and cell phone; they find
themselves with a pretzel and a hotdog;
with a newspaper and disappointment
they find themselves stranded like
a shish kabob and a bun; in the middle
of this endless parade; without float
or hope; an illusion as back door theater;
they will never be invited; they catch
a train bound for Brooklyn; in these
few streets that once held their dreams;
not long ago they can’t afford the subway
peanuts; a few streets of African men
carrying signs of tour buses; but even
they can’t understand; they only under
stand one thing; it is as urgent as their
red vest; they will never be accepted;
they will never be asked to diversify;
they may be a target; because of their
table full of off brand bags; they too
are rebels against the system; a system
that will never respect them; for now
they are traffic tickets; a summons
and violations; too these few streets
that held their dreams; they are another
collection for the IRS and they will run
you over if you get in their way; these
few streets will take your picture; plaster
it all over the blotter; so you might as well
hold yourself down; in hells’ kitchen;
walk away from fifteen minutes;
it is a waste of time; you can’t afford me;
anyway. I am expensive; if I were you
I would find a diner; with a special;
a spaghetti or eggplant; cause those
fifteen dollars at Manhattan Plaza
no. your money will not save you

***

ABOUT THE POET:

Robert Gibbons is originally from Belle Glade (Palm Beach County), Florida. An honors graduate of Glades Central High School, Robert matriculated to Florida A&M University in Tallahassee, Florida, where he received the B.S. in History in 1989. Robert has taught in the Palm Beach County School District; the Prince George’s County School District; the Fairfax County School District; and now works as an English Specialist for the Renaissance Charter High School of Innovation of East Harlem (Manhattan), New York City.

He moved to New York City in the summer of 2007 in search of his muse-Langston Hughes. Robert has featured in many venues around New York City, as well as in Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Florida. He most recently has offered his poetic performances in such places as: Cornelia Street Café; the Church of the Village; the Saturn Series; Perch Café; Barnes and Nobles Brooklyn; the Saturn Series; Stark Performances; Otto’s Shrunken Head; Poets on White; Nomad’s Choir; Taza de Café and many others. Moreover, Robert has been published in Uphook Press; Three Rooms Press; Stain Sheets; Brownstone Anthology; Dinner with the Muse; Cartier Street Review; Nomad’s Choir; Palm Beach Post; and recently was produced on a CD called Brain Ampin through Hydrogen Jukebox, a poetry series produced through the Cornelia Street Café. Additionally, Robert has taken classes with Cave Canem and the 92Y and has studied under master poets such as: Cornelius Eady, Marilyn Nelson, KImiko Hahn, Nathalie Handal, and Linda Susan Jackson.

'

DAVID S. POINTER

2012-01-16T16:43:00.000-08:00

WHAT IS (PART OF) YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE? / HOW HAS THE GREAT RECESSION AFFECTED YOUR POETRY

The questions give me considerable trouble because my experiences didn't really start or end with the recent downturn that affected the middle class. I started writing political poems for publication in 1990. Most American poets had gone to sleep by this time. Most had been school trained to accept beauty, trivia and mythology as that which would flow from the barrel of an ink pen. I elected to write for the underground and focus on truth, politics, social justice and similar topics.

The current recession just drives home to me that most Americans don't know what happened to political poetry. They don't know that Ed Guest was the last major political poet in the major newspapers. The don't realize that advertisers worked to get the political poetry out of the public view. Later, they would get the political poetry out of the alternative weekly papers and so on. Eventually, it would become nearly extinct to the popular culture masses. Each year after 2000 though as more poetry editors found themselves excluded from participation in the economic system—the poetry doors of inclusion started to open. They would publish more and more serious issue poems and give them equal billing in the small presses alongside the aforementioned trivia, beauty and mythology.

***

PLEASE SHARE A POEM(S) ADDRESSING YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE:

Birth of a Political Poet

I read the MFA candidates
lemon drop dahlia, and baby
duck petunia poetry, and praised
those Lasik surgeons enhancing
the illusion goggle worldview
of so many renowned ‘writers,’
but somehow in all of this pulp, I
found the moneychangers mirage
starting a bardly itch amongst
molecules of my own interatomic,
ink pen bonds, flowing for truth

***

ABOUT THE POET:

David S. Pointer was the son of a piano playing bank robber who died when David was 3 years old. David later served in the Marine military police.

'

ED GO

2012-01-10T07:33:00.000-08:00

WHAT IS (PART OF) YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE?

Ed Go at Occupy Wall Street

MY HYPOCRISY

We accuse others as if it’s a bad thing, as if we are not so ourselves, but it is among the most human of attributes. I manifested mine recently on Black Friday—outwardly critical of the consumerist phenomenon, yet taking part; shopping at a major retail chain I got well over $200 worth of clothing for less than $70. The next day was Small Business Saturday—an idea I support in spirit—but I can’t afford small business prices, at least not while the big businesses are offering the same at a third of the cost. My hypocrisy—I constantly struggle with it—the product of my humanity.

Recently, accusations of hypocrisy have been aimed at ows protesters: it’s been said that you can’t oppose corporate America while you’re using a cell phone. This misses the point entirely. It’s not corporations that the movement is protesting; it’s corporate personhood. It’s not the exorbitant salaries of the average CEO; it’s the disproportionate salary of the average worker, who makes less than the cost of living. This disproportionateness is not a natural occurrence; it is a carefully constructed social system engineered by the wealthy in order to hoard wealth at the expense of working people.

Hypocrisy is ubiquitous—we all share in it, even as we reverse-hoard it in accusations of the other.

In A Small Place Jamaica Kincaid writes about the condition of her country of origin, Antigua, and does not hold back on placing the blame on you (it’s written in 2nd person), a white tourist from “North America (or, worse, Europe)”; when discussing this book with my students, the class was always divided: some hated her, decrying her for writing a book—which they viewed as a capitalist venture (She did it for the money!)—and for not being an activist (Has she given any money? Has she returned?); others came to her defense, proclaiming the act of writing her contribution (She brings attention to the situation.) We would then discuss the value of knowledge and whether simply knowing is enough. Does one have to be active in order to be an activist? I admitted my quandary: I watch the news and say, What the hell is going on in the world? Something’s gotta be done! Then I crack a beer and change the channel—American Idol is on (I’m rooting for the Asian chick, but I know she won’t win).

“It takes a certain kind of person to be an activist,” one of my students said during a class discussion of Kincaid, and I remembered when I was a student and had written a paper on America’s foremost political prisoner Leonard Peltier; discussing my paper with one of my classmates, he started talking at length about Peter Matthiessen’s In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, and at some point my expression must have revealed my drifting thoughts because he stopped and said, “. . . and you don’t care.” “Of course I care,” I protested. “I wrote a whole paper about it. What was done to this man was wrong beyond belief; it’s a travesty, and a demonstration of our so-called ‘justice’ system at it’s worst!” He came back at me, “Then why aren’t you down at the jailhouse with a sign—” “Oh, I don’t want to get involved. . .”

This is my struggle, and I do not run from it. But lately I have been moved to become more active. Those who know me know that shit’s gotta be pretty goddamn fucked up for me to get active about anything. And it is. I live in a city where the mayor—one of the richest men in the country—makes no effort at hiding his hypocrisy; everything he’s done in office has been to the benefit of the 1%. But that’s politics, and it’s to be expected. I do not fault him or any other politician for what is simply a manifestation of their humanness. As the Occupy movement struggles to forge a better future for our country and our world, my struggle continues to be with myself. I am in full support of the Revolution and will do what I can to further the cause—but what it is I can do is yet to be determined. Right now, I am writing about it. For now, perhaps knowing is enough—knowing is an action of a sort; it’s fruit is awareness, which produces motive, which leads to activity, the occupation of the activist. I think I’m on my way, but as I write the last sentence of this piece I struggle with what I will do next: I’ve lost interest in what’s on and I’m thirsty and my ass is uncomfortable, but I’ve got a nice couch and beer in the fridge and there’s always something else on—the biggest determining factor of my next action could be whether I can find the remote.

***

HOW HAS THE GREAT RECESSION AFFECTED YOUR POETRY?

How now affects my writing? I never know—not until ages have passed. Not until the wages of the moment have been spent, and the cold vision across the chasm of memory crystallizes. I am still waiting to discover how the world around me affected the writing of my first poem, written in class in Red Hill Elementary School, Honolulu Hawaii circa 1980/81—something about happiness and friendship, 5th grade stuff, sunrises or sunsets, the naive pre-dawn/adolescent nonwakening waiting to fall back in on itself . . . a reminder of what I once had, and will again. . . .

***

PLEASE SHARE A POEM(S) ADDRESSING YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE

government cheese

bellatrix lestrange arranged to have us boiled in oil
but we found ways to find ourselves stuck in bed instead
a dream came wooden beams we toiled & hoped someday
would someday be someday as paper gave way to plastic
& plastic back to paper & money in the plastic

as rats we are to plastered & night comes & we wick our
candle dripping back of careful squandered brick foundations
templed as the trailer on cinderblocked foundation
too hot the one too cold the win to wasted too move deathward
& someday came someday when someday turned to sunday

apricots tupperwared visions in our cupboards
fucked till raw meat burned & called it bend of broker
& pretended not to hear us screaming con los pobres
de la tierra cast my luck none knowing where is where
or how or when when what it is or even whying whofor

american

shakin bakin like mom used to do
stove top stead of potatoes
leftovers foilwrapped at lunch
brought aahhhs that couldnt be traded
(my father being from some “3rd world” we never
       threw away after a meal
[i learned that in the lunch room]) one time
i puked cuz that little fag toby
was blithering his idiocy all over his apple & sister
margaret mary cursed me for spewing
but he got away with his drooling
i got the cake with the ruler         [the principle
force of the matter]        & they get the cake & the file to break
to a bailout & we with our
twoallbeefpattiesspecialsaucelettucecheesepicklesonionsonasesameseedbunkeepitreel

at a party my friends brought whiskey & wine
while some brought brie & tequila
some brought fruit trays
& some brought mushrooms
I brought pop tarts & boones

***

ABOUT THE POET:

Ed Go is a former school bus driver, exterminator, garbage man, phonebook deliverer and lead singer in a punk-folk band. His poetry and fiction has appeared in various online and print journals including Underground Voices, Bastards and Whores, Boston Poet Journal: Bad-Ass edition, Breadcrumbs Scabs, the bad futurist, In Between Altered States, and others. He currently writes and lives in New York, where he teaches and co-edits the Other Rooms Online Poetry Journal for Other Rooms Press, which he co-founded in 2007.

'

RAY SHARP

2012-01-10T06:05:00.000-08:00

WHAT IS (PART OF) YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE?

As a planner in local public health in rural Michigan, I see unmet individual and family needs multiplying, while limited resources are divided among the many. We are used to hardship and deprivation in rural America, and here in Houghton County, Michigan, times have been tough since the copper mines closed in 1968.

In one sense, here in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, we always have hard times. We are far from the state's centers of industry, commerce and political power, a nine-hour drive from Detroit, and the capital, Lansing, up north on the shore of Lake Superior. Our population, school enrollments, tax revenues and employment all have declined gradually since the copper mining industry left in 1968 after a prolonged strike over wages and working conditions. Now, much of the economy depends on tourism and the low-wage jobs in hotels, restaurants, bars and retail,sectors which have been very slow during the last few years.

In the local public health sector, many of our programs and services are income-dependent, like nutrition programs and free immunizations for low-income children and families. Our caseloads are skyrocketing as people lose jobs or have to make do on part-time wages. But, conversely, state and federal funding is reduced, and within our agency, so we have had to reduce our nursing staff and salaries were cut by 6 to 10 percent.

***

HOW HAS THE GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE AFFECTED YOUR POETRY?

My own depression obeys no season, it is chronic and everlasting. It ebbs with the tides, it waxes with the moon.

***

PLEASE SHARE A POEM(S) ADDRESSING YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE:

Occupied By Love

We are the 99 percent
who occupy the centers of commerce
and convention with no capital, save
our love-me-tender for illegal tender,
squatting in tents of passion,
bumming kisses, protesting the inequities –
I do protest too much — of love.
We invested our hearts’ savings
but the bubble collapsed,
leaving me alone in the shanty town
of my great depression, lining up
at the soup kitchen of despair
where loneliness is ladled into tin cups,
a thin and scalding broth.
If corporations are people
and loves are lives that are born and die,
we were downgraded to junk bond status
and pepper sprayed with stinging words
that left us red-eyed and wheezy.
I gave you 99 percent of my heart,
more than I could afford, and still
we ended up bankrupt.

***

ABOUT THE POET:

Ray Sharp lives in the rural, rugged and remote Western Upper Peninsula region of Michigan, a land of deep snow, cold lakes and buggy summers. He enjoys running in the woods during the brief Michigan Upper Peninsula summers, and many of his poem ideas come from his treks in nature. His first book of poems, Dark Hills of Just-Lived Moments, to be published in 2012, is a lyrical journey through the seasons.

LISA M. DRAGO

2012-01-09T05:24:00.000-08:00

WHAT IS (PART OF) YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE?

Materially, I've been living a simple life for many years. I work part-time and don't have a home or credit cards. This has protected me from the most painful parts of the Great Recession: job loss, home foreclosure, depleted investments in stocks, 401k, etc. However, as a sensitive soul, my heart aches to see all the pain and suffering endured by average working people and families. I wonder where our country is headed, how to wake people up to what really matters in life - such as love, service, friendship, compassion and sharing. The greed of the super-rich cannot continue unchecked. My feeling is that, in some way, 2012 will be a turning point.

***

HOW HAS THE GREAT RECESSION AFFECTED YOUR POETRY?

This recession has inspired me to start writing poetry for the first time in over 25 years. I took a poetry workshop four months ago and have felt motivated to keep putting words on paper. My usual genre is nonfiction spiritual-type writing as found on my blog (written with my husband), Soaring with God. In many ways, I am quite surprised, but also very excited, to be writing poetry. I don't put pressure on myself; I simply write what and when I feel inspired.

***

PLEASE SHARE A POEM(S) ADDRESSING YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE:

Aches

It pains me to live
In a nation of greed
And exploitation
Imprisoned by
Oh so many
Deified masters
Of manipulation

We place no value
On youthful education
Yet extol virtues of college
And fancy vacations
Endless incantations
To the money-god

More and more
Bigger and better
Procuration
All this to benefit
The super-rich
While millions
In our population
Suffer hunger
Lose their homes
Refuse adulation

Lack of moderation
Spirals into pain
My broken heart
Dreams daily
Of peace and justice
True mediation

There seems no end
To these tribulations
I pray for wisdom
And patience and hope
A world of brotherhood
Mutual appreciation

Jan. 23, 2012 Note: Here's another poem. My husband and I went to eat at the Silver Diner (in Virginia Beach) this weekend - only to find it closed for business.

Silver Diner

I'm shocked to see
You've closed your doors
Weren't you here to stay?

With your 1950's decor
Playing the Beatles and Elvis
On the table jukebox

Yummy sliders, milkshakes,
And the world's best
Chocolate cake

Saddened is what I am
By your demise
No more food, fun, laughter

How many others will be forced
your way?

***

ABOUT THE POET:

Lisa M. Drago works as a fitness instructor, personal trainer and yoga teacher in Norfolk, VA. She serves as Treasurer for Hampton Roads Writers (http://www.hamptonroadswriters.org), a non-profit literary group that promotes the craft of writing and the love of reading/literature. She is enjoying her new journey into the world of poetry.

'

SARAH SARAI

2012-01-06T05:34:00.000-08:00

WHAT IS (PART OF) YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE?

Everything Tastes Better with Two Forks and Whipped Cream

A greater mystery than faith, than love, is money, in my life at least. So the Great or Most Recent Recession hasn't depleted me of accumulated wealth because I had none and neither had I a clue as to how to garner—to “attract” as we new agers like to think we are capable of doing—money. No depletion. Great enervation. Much better than enervation would be innovation.

I freelance as a copyeditor, mostly medical, in ad agencies, a job title I migrated to when I accepted the fact that I couldn't reliably support myself as an adjunct professor.

In the corporate terrain—and nearly all advertising agencies are subsumed by greater, international corporations and accumulations of ad agencies (weird but true)—financial decisions are fickle and self-serving, which is to say they are, repeat, corporate in its most malign manifestation.

Management will proclaim, Cut back on freelancers (and don’t hire any more temps), although that line in the budget is minimal. But it is a decision which sounds good to capitalists who want for themselves and want to want nothing. It serves the money accumulators, while creating stress for the editors on staff. They work long and longer hours without any freelancers to help with overflow.

One of the more amusing corporate decisions came down three or four years ago, at one of the great lead-ins to the great recession. The CEO of American Express announced his pay cut of around five percent, which is the equivalent of you or me mistaking dropping a few pennies on the street. A CEO's pay cut means nothing, a nothing mocked at by his private elevator, jet, various houses, remarkable perks, payouts, parachutes.

The CEO of American Express took an (approximately) five percent cut while the wages of the temps were cut by approximately fifteen percent. Now that cut meant something. I know, because over five years, I was hired two or three times a year, along with a team, each member, like myself, in the arts—playwrights of note, lighting specialist hired by theaters around the country, vocalists, writers. Ironically, or cruelly, we were hired to copy edit and proofread the SEC filings which are, in spirit and fact, justifications, er, uh, “explanations” for the benefits and salaries of the board members of American Express (or any corporation).

***

HOW HAS YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE AFFECTED YOUR POETRY? / PLEASE SHARE A SAMPLE POEM(S) ADDRESSING (IN PART) ADOPTION:

Before the great recession hit I wrote this playful poem (published by Pool Poetry, #8):

Commerce for the Good of the Peoples

At the shop of good moral character
you bought five grams of valor and
a strong chin

For your love, essence of steadfast heart
in a vial

Good gosh, that's pricey stuff

You speculated over glasses
Horn of Africa-rimmed so you could
spot a swarthy pirate, yo-ho

For your love you thought, Titanium frames!
because

You passed on the steady gaze for its claim on
concentration
There's only so much
good moral character a person can stand
in a day
You and your love pledged to
utilize purchases
soon as you were home and
would have but for a stop
for wines and tidbits,
brandy and later a few tokes
from that joint
in the car ashtray

Anyway
your love left her steadfast heart
in the Audi whilst the cat ate
your strong chin (at least you
brought your purchase into the house)

You and your love split the valor
Everything's better with two forks and whipped cream

In the midst of the great recession I finished the following poem:

Ambivalent Queen

The parade of vanities is everything hoped for
and nothing gained. A few chipped teapots
won't win you out of hock.

Once whispering sweet somethings from its enjambed arch,
that Rolex with diamond fittings
now whimpers from back of the shop,

circumspect in entitlement everyone (everyone) enjoys.
What does it mean to enjoy, and is it a variable of
entitlement, an actuarial curse?

A professor stared at her breasts and to her protest said,
But you’re not wearing a bra.
Life is brutish, nasty and short-haired as

a cat’s accordion, a lyrical magnificence of purring.
Faith’s is an illogical residence, mapped by
the golden thread winding north of pawn shop and parade.

Insincerity's basic to this plaything.
When a Wedgwood saucer is held to light
to see its roses bloom, a foreclosure gets its wings.

***

ABOUT THE POET:

Sarah Sarai's poems are in Boston Review, Minnesota Review, Threepenny Review and others; in Say It Outloud: Poems About James Brown (Whirlwind Press); in her collection, The Future Is Happy (BlazeVOX [books], reviewed on Galatea Resurrects. She is a co-facilitator of Occupy Language; presented a manifesto in the Tendencies series in honor of Eve Sedgwick at CUNY; featured in the Mary: A Literary Quarterly benefit for the Ali Forney Center for homeless GLBT youth. Her MFA in creative writing is from Sarah Lawrence College. Find links to her poems, short stories (Fairy Tale Review, Tampa Review, The Writing Disorder and others) and interviews at http://my3000lovingarms.blogspot.com/p/about-me.html.

'

LORI M. IZYKOWSKI

2012-01-05T09:39:00.000-08:00

WHAT IS (PART OF) YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE?

Living paycheck to paycheck again at middle-age (partly due to divorce, partly to recession), seems to be my most significant experience.

***

HOW HAS THE GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE AFFECTED YOUR POETRY (OR NOT)?

Probably not; fairly new to the poetry thing, although maybe there is an added edge to some of it, since the financial struggle is daily and stressful.

***

PLEASE SHARE A POEM(S) ADDRESSING YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE:

Insidious Recession

Quietly invading, present without presence.
Drawing back, falling away.
Coming…sneakily, meanly.
Going away…slowly, painfully.
Insidious recession.
Like watching grass
grow…or die.
Waves at the shore,
eroding, encroaching.
The green of life…
it moves, changes hands,
goes away from some, goes to others, endless
cycles of more and less, less and more. An
ebb and flow of the lifeblood, pulsating from hand
to hand, a stent here, a dam there, and still it moves.

***

ABOUT THE POET:

Lori M. Izykowski is an 8-5er raising an almost 17 y.o. daughter living in Fredericksburg, VA. "I use my blog and poetry as cathartic instruments whenever I’m struggling with something. I submit irregularly to Vox Poetica (editor Annmarie Lockhart)."

'

ANNMARIE LOCKHART

2012-01-03T06:21:00.000-08:00

WHAT IS (PART OF) YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE?

As a writer/editor/publisher, I find the Great Recession has given artists more time for their art but more angst about their self-reliance. I also find the work of selling books has gotten a bit more challenging as people are reluctant to spend what money they have on luxuries. And the idea that books can be a luxury instead of a necessity saddens me. But the reality is grim across the board.

Annmarie Lockhart with one of the anthologies she published at unbound CONTENT in 2011.

***

HOW HAS YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE AFFECTED YOUR POETRY?

The Great Recession has affected my poetry by rendering my scope somewhat smaller. In poetry as in other areas of living, lushness seems to have given way to spareness. I find language and theme to be more pointed and tightly focused, less broad and sweeping, more internal and detailed. I see these effects in the work of other writers as well.

***

PLEASE SHARE A POEM(S) ADDRESSING YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE:

Here is a poem I wrote inspired by your call for writing on the subject of the Great Recession:

Always Another Setback

recession
depression
famine
these become entwined
on some molecular level
with words and heredity
carrying their own DNA
phenotype expression
for a writer whose lines
extend back from Jersey
to Queens, Counties Cork
and Kilkenny, and Dublin
honoring muses named
Addiction
Prohibition
Blight

***

ABOUT THE POET:

Annmarie Lockhart is the founding editor of vox poetica, an online literary salon dedicated to bringing poetry into the everyday, and the founder of unbound CONTENT, an independent press for a boundless age. A lifelong resident of Bergen County, NJ, she lives, works, and writes 2 miles east of the hospital where she was born. You can find her words at fine journals online and in print.

MICHAEL HELSEM

2011-12-31T05:01:00.000-08:00

WHAT IS (PART OF) YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE?

I work at a second-hand bookstore, & i have seen the volume of things people bring to us literally double. (This has not been accompanied by any increase in staff; on the contrary, when workers leave, they have not been replaced.) And something i had not been used to seeing: though there has always been a small number who seemed truly desperate for cash, now among them are some with an air of brokenness, who are grateful for any offer we make, however small.

***

HOW HAS YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE AFFECTED YOUR POETRY?

In my writing i tend to resist, for the most part, sheer topicality. Nevertheless, the closed-up businesses which surround me have crept into my images & finally acquired the status of permanent characters in my story.

Photo of Michael Helsem by J. R. Compton

***

PLEASE SHARE A POEM(S) ADDRESSING YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE:

"Not Going to Rehab" (Pessoa XXVII.)

Radint waialand lion dreams, the unsurpassed [past]
dynamic intensity of the corrections field today.
Soundbyte ricochet. Shoemaker's cloven last.
Sometimes i feel like a stowaway
on the Titanic, looking out late if ever
on the iceberg rushing up. Black night now
crossing Pineland, swerving. The toxic river
shines. Waialand. Record turnout. Flow
my tears the policeman's beard is have to, none
of the above. Through all corrosive fates
set the controls for the heart of the sun
baby, this is the last of all blind dates
and this we keep with the grizzly of a market bear
and there is more than fear to fear

"Persistent Cough" (Pessoa XVI.)

Raise paisley hymns that miss the point
the future of a land that might have been.
Creative tortures never disappoint.

When it comes, as it must, in unsuspected mien;
when it comes, oh lord, the majesty that was
at best, half-dreamt: and seldom now recalled,
so we will go down damned at the stringent pass.
Begin today to learn & not be galled.

Warming by noon, my mind's blue plates staved in
by tenderness, a boon beyond enjoying.
Our fortress is our grief. Our medicine [sin]
to put an end to readier destroying.

And ours is for tomorrow to reprove,
when these brisk eidolons no longer move.

"Super Fat Tuesday" (Pessoa II.)

Bring the waking dream severe delight
and closed eyes fled from out this severed scene (seen)
will rise and gather sustenance from insight.
Our Rubicon has not yet flown. Take sunscreen
into the valley (which is a state of being);
take ammo of truth (all you believe, is lies).
There's Aceldama beyond all dime foreseeing
and i did not invent these trilobite eyes,
up a creek and cased in concrete dreadnought:
i drove through, and took all night. You see,
i only found out late.
Ignore this rot.
The Way Through came in a dream, and said to me,
"Only lately forgotten, nor buried deep,
are those we've wronged, and this is why we weep."

***

ABOUT THE POET:

"M.H. was born in Dallas in 1958. Shortly afterwards, fish fell from the sky."

Blog presence at http://graywyvern.blogspot.com & Amazon presence at http://tinyurl.com/82xo6mq

'

MARY KRANE DERR

2011-12-19T11:20:00.000-08:00

WHAT IS (PART OF) YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE?

Hard times without discernible end? Hard work that stingily, precariously gives back rent food lights if that much? That’s always felt like business-though systematically unjust business- as usual to me. The Great Recession simply brings it to-or unmasks it in-quarters where it has been little felt or recognized before.

Although I got an education on scholarship, I have lived almost all my life as a (by US standards) low-income person in and around a majority Black, majority poor urban community. I have multiple disabilities that are immiscible with something the Social Security Administration calls “substantial gainful activity.”

Before the current downturn, I already had learned how to wear the same winter coat for a decade, string along hospital billing systems, educate and entertain a child at little to no cost, tell which furniture is safe to fetch from the dumpster and which only brings trouble home, live in an apartment and yet grow sizeable amounts of fresh organic vegetables, have confidence that needed public benefits are one’s right not one’s shame.

The shame goes instead on this economic setup and what it does to millions, billions, especially the global poor whose poverty is beyond what I can ever truly fathom as an American with degrees, a heated apartment in winter, pounds of food in her pantry, a spouse with a job and a lifesaving health plan, and two instances in her life (so far) of ability to travel to another continent and read her poetry there.

***

HOW HAS THE GREAT RECESSION AFFECTED YOUR POETRY?

I persist in writing poetry, though, as usual, I must set aside a lot of my energy for whatever paid gigs I can find. I morbidly wonder how I will lug around my laptop and journals and protect them from the snow and rain if I ever become homeless.

One thing the recession has changed for me personally: I despair even more that I will ever find a publisher for the chapbooks I have completed, or the full length collection I have almost finished. So many poets, so many presses, so many cutbacks. Maybe I should post my work to friends on Facebook and call it a day?

***

PLEASE SHARE A POEM(S) ADDRESSING YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE:

THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS, SINGLE MOM EDITION

For S.

Haha! I love it, how my son
saw an ornament on his grandma’s shelf
and asked, “Hey! Who’s that? Is it
that red guy from Christmas, what’s
that red guy’s name?” Believe me
I never want him
to learn any more about Santa than that!

Those "lots of" train sets. Those candy canes.
My son told me “please-thank” already for. Me.
Myself. I, I am the one
who bought them
through my swollen feet,
my ringing headache
from ringing up highend crowds
of $50 wine bottle drinkers,
so-classy folks, how they
push at and curse me, throw and
thrash tantrums worse than my son’s.

Reporting live here
from just about my last nerve:
last thing I want
my son to believe
is that gifts all get here
from some old white dude
in a loud red suit
who breaks and enters,
breaks and enters
all the damned night long,
that’s a Class 3 Felony,
multiple counts.

Caption by Mary Krane Derr: "The Theotokos or Bearer of the Divine is an icon of Mary pregnant with or breastfeeding/cuddling Jesus. This 18th century Russian icon shows the many varieties of Theotokos in the world. Giving credit for Christmas where it is due: to a woman's love and labor."

***

ABOUT THE POET:

Mary Krane Derr is a poet, writer, musician, eco-activist, and human rights advocate from Chicago. Her poetry has been nominated for a Best of the Web Award, Best American Poetry, and Best Spiritual Writing. She was featured at India’s 2011 Kritya International Poetry Festival. She has contributed to literary magazines in the U.S., Ireland, Great Britain, and India as well as anthologies like Hunger Enough: Living Spiritually in a Consumer Society (Pudding House).

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LAWREN BALE

2011-12-10T07:57:00.000-08:00

WHAT IS (PART OF) YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE?

In so many ways, this is a re-run of the Great Depression that shaped my parent’s generation, and the one before that, which scarred my grandfather’s youth. We ought to call it what it is, “The Great Depression – A Sequel.” Look for the next exciting chapter reappearing soon, as long as we line up to follow the antiquated philosophies of Adam Smith.

There is plenty of blame to go around, but I’d look to the economists of London, Harvard, Chicago, Wharton and Princeton who conjure up their “scientific” pronouncements, while celebrating the impoverished individualism of Ayn Rand and streamlined marketplace capitalism.

I remember when we were supposed to support the Cold War, “better dead than red,” because Marxism was evil economic determinism? And now, the so-called leaders of our world pander their brands of Economic Determinism (any less evil?) as if it were scientific certainty, too vital to question, too rational to fail. How have we come to a juncture in history where a few bond traders can systematically bankrupt whole nations? Clearly, our contemporary economic order does not create actual wealth. It generates an endless cycle of selfish avarice, usury and greed; unemployment, foreclosures, impoverishment; and that means homeless hungry children. It produces a new class of super-rich aristocrats, who are gleefully killing our planet. Laughing all the way to their bankrupting banks. I honestly believe that as long as one child is hungry, as long as one child goes without medical attention, as long as one child is deprived of a good education, no one should be a millionaire, let alone a multi-billionaire. Tax the sons-a-bitches.

I guess you could say I am heartbroken and angry about The Depression.

***

HOW HAS THE GREAT RECESSION AFFECTED YOUR POETRY? / PLEASE SHARE A POEM(S) ADDRESSING YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE:

Cast Adrift

In these dark times
Does the muse elude your senses?
Do you yearn for an open highway
Or the quick fix of your video?
Can you still nurture mindfulness
Or calmly letting go? and in flowing
Can you halt the constant chatter
The canned laughter of the construction cranes
Those insistent cultural voices
Their constraints
Calling in the night
Like a dream from your childhood
Reawakening
Without the protection and security
Of a guiding light

In which direction is this world really turning?
With the missing feet of the murdered
Running in the billions,
And agent orange, supposedly tamed
Renamed Round Up, commonly available
Every garden a green house of death . . .
In water tables, ozone layers
Acid rain, and crack

If our species is somehow able to survive
What will our progeny say?
As we leave them a heritage of orange county Disney style
Fantasylands, become a major growth . . . a cancer
A construction, cum service industry . . .
Carved out of the ruined map of myth and natural process
Scraped and pushed into antiseptic parks of amusement
Exquisitely childish escape in the realm of the homeless

What's left of the wild, the natural and free . . .
Must each generation mold it all
To mirror their collective dreams of greed
An' thereby invite, indeed, guaranteeing these disasters
Like the downtrodden, brokenhearted souls
Wharehoused in our broken inner cities?

Street Heroes

Broken souls these
women and men who've given
up their hearts as whores
or tarts of the night,
and can no more see
they've been forgiven.

With their tote bags and tattered clothing
their rags, probably once so fine
as yours (or mine).
Their mis shapen faces
mirror the ravaged inner city,
ashen and discolored. No, not a pretty sight.
no wonder we can't look them in the eye.

Broken and vagrant
what have they lost
or gained?

They awaken in a morning damp
and cold on back streets or
under bridges, shake the dust
off their clothes, scratch for chiggers
and start off into the sun
rising to drink another day
of darkness . . .

These heroes of our cities
are survivors
we call 'em losers
outsiders, we'd rather ignore them,
but they keep the city soul
alive

Cheating Death

Don’t kid yourself, when we fall prey to fear and anger
When we turn away from life’s gift
When we acquiesce to mere cultural norms, and the
Cow dung of conventional wisdom
We let loose primordial cinders, pumped through hell’s gate
Amplified in the Santa Anna winds of mythical exactness
Stunted, pigmified, pickled in recursive ignorance

When we allow them to instill their gluttony in our children
Their self-indulgent resignation, what celebrates aggression
In social choreographies of orchestrated hostility and violence
Reciprocal envy and hate. Belligerence condoned and admired
Avarice, usury and greed commended – neigh encouraged
As their cosmological prescription for economic growth . . .

What about life in resurrection, renewal and redemption
What about justice, reincarnation and life in death, Abraxas
What about sleep without dreams, which I will embrace
As surely as I treasure and celebrate this Existenz
Floating through the space/time continuum

Together with the elements and every living creature
Each of us a vital receptor slash storehouse of meaning
Each an angel, returning it’s bundled messages
On cosmic feedback loops, returning packets of love
Our gifts tagged and flowing back through
Manifest paths of understanding and compassion

Within this Global Cell, every form of life
A mental system, cheating death
Instructing the whole of the living
Broadcasting multiple bits of crucial information
Coded, de-coded, re-coded wisdom what goes beyond
Returning the fullness of living-knowing-being

Our thoughts and actions, our hates and fears
Our unconscious desires, all messages returning
On countless loops of information
Etched engraved in multiple channels of praise
And condemnation, the continuum’s bequest

Proceeding from life and affirmation
Closing in on our ever receding horizons
Preparing the way, returning their goodness to life
Across a flat curved arc of eternity

***

ABOUT THE POET:

Born and raised in rural California, Lawren Bale lives in Narberth, Pennsylvania with his wife Martina and their ten-year-old daughter, Annabelle Jean Elisabeth. Before settling down in the Delaware Valley some twenty-seven years ago, Bale worked and studied in Honolulu, Hawaii; Bangkok, Thailand; Kyoto, Japan; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and Frankfurt, Germany. Bale’s poetry reflects his wide flung travels and his formal studies of religion, culture and epistemology.

Lawren Bale and his family. Photo Courtesy of Donald D Groff

MARIE MARSHALL

2011-12-02T13:04:00.000-08:00

WHAT IS (PART OF) YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE? / HOW HAS YOUR EXPERIENCE AFFECTED YOUR POETRY?

"I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things." Emma Goldman

Materially the recession has not affected me greatly—I am middle class, whether I like that or not, and although I work in the public sector there have been no rumbles about my job disappearing. However the received news surrounding this issue has highlighted my distrust of and distaste for the political and corporate classes. It has re-awakened my personal political activism and I have written and argued much from an anarchist viewpoint, stressing the need for mutual aid in the tradition of Petr Kropotkin, the social value of work as an alternative to the monetary value, the necessity to liberate democracy from systems in which power devolves upwards at the scrawling of an 'X' and to devolve power downwards to its lowest possible level (see Murray Bookchin on 'Libertarian Municipalism'). The recession has driven me (back) into the arms of Emma Goldman and Durruti, back to Revolutionary Barcelona in 1936, back to the political works of Bakunin, but also to the words of Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr, and even those of Thomas Jefferson, as I consider how the great movements of working people have been systematically destroyed. As another contributor to these Recession poems has said, working people now live in occupied territory. In the past, working people lined up to be imprisoned, exiled, and hung, for daring to struggle for their dignity. It has now been stripped from them again by a spiteful system that is dying but won't lie down. Our great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers spin in their graves.

Having said that I do not write agitprop poetry. It is as though I compartmentalise very tightly. However, this year I did write a series of very short pieces entitled 'I am an American'. They used public domain images by Dorothea Lange taken from early-mid twentieth century America, and drew on the idea of the migrant worker in the 1930s and the displaced 'enemy aliens' in World War 2. I used these as a metaphor for today's disadvantaged. I used the phrase 'I am an American' because despite the wealth of the United States it is a country of profound inequalities against which its cherished notions of freedom are impotent. I ask the question: Is 'freedom' what we like to think it is? I think I was saying that when it comes to inequality and to empty notions of freedom, we are all 'Americans' in that respect, products of a failed revolution that promised liberty but delivered the concentration of private wealth into the hands of the very few.

***

PLEASE SHARE A POEM(S) ADDRESSING YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE:

I am an American

I am an American
I’m an American coupe
an American coupe in the sunshine
in the sunshine with California plates
and I’m going to get towed…

I am an American 2

I am an American
I’m an American store
an American store selling potatoes
selling Johnny Appleseed
and I’ve been sold…

I am an American 3

I am an American
I’m an American corner
an American corner in your town
in your town in the sunshine
and tomorrow you’ll stand here…

I am an American 4

I am an American
I’m an American window
a window with ghosts of gables
gables in borrowed sunlight
and tomorrow week the clock will still tick…
and it won’t matter a damn.

I am an American 5

I am an American.
There are times when we are all American
– like when we’re short on shoe leather
and long on irony.

I am an American 6

I am an American
I’m a pea-picker
my name is the miles I’ve walked
my name is the horizons in my eyes
you don’t need a real name
to pick peas

(Photographs by Dorothea Lange and are in public domain. Where the poet has added words directly onto the image, copyright in this form are by Marie Marshall with photographs by Dorothea Lange.)

***

ABOUT THE POET:

One drop of blood in the pool
and all the little fishes sing.
(Carmina Piranha, Marie Marshall)

Marie Marshall, otherwise in Gaelic Mairi bheag nan oran (Little Mary of the songs): reclusive, agoraphobic, middle-aged, dysmorphic, gay, awkward, Anglo-Scottish poet and writer. Would prefer to be introduced by a paraphrase of Balthus’ famous telegram: NO BIOGRAPHY. BEGIN: MARIE MARSHALL IS A POET OF WHOM NOTHING IS KNOWN. NOW LET US READ THE POEMS, but life isn’t that simple. Started writing poetry in 2005 and since then has had upwards of one hundred and seventy poems published, including one on the wall of a café in Wales and one etched into an African drum in the New Orleans Museum of Art. Associate Editor of Sonnetto Poesia and Canadian Zen Haiku magazine, also of the forthcoming anthology of modern sonnets The Phoenix Rising From Its Ashes. Editor of the zen space, an on-line showcase for haiku and related writing. Her macabre short stories have become a regular feature of the Winter Words literary festival in Scotland where they have been read aloud by professional actors. MM rejects all the Chinese walls of poetry that divide formal from free, product from process, whatever from whatever. Her first collection of poems, Naked in the Sea, was published in 2010.

'

g emil reutter

2011-11-28T08:01:00.000-08:00

WHAT IS (PART OF) YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE?

As an observer I watch as prices in the supermarket rise without notice from the media, see the young people search for jobs, one turned away after another. Seniors shop one meal at a time, skimp on prescriptions, watch the young mothers walking kids hoping for a better place, see the abandoned factories, empty strip centers and emergency wards full of people who can’t afford a doctors visit. It is the stark reality of the great recession felt by the people everyday as the politicians in Washington play fiddles.

***

HOW HAS THE GREAT RECESSION AFFECTED YOUR POETRY? / PLEASE SHARE A POEM(S) ADDRESSING YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE:

Dissipation

Empty sidewalks, broken alley lights
Grates, bars, locks, empty places
16 year old mothers, missing fathers
Churches of darkened windows
Under EL screech, slide, rhythm of trains
Faces of working girls, addicts, dirty faces
Of children with no where to go, of
Jobless whose hope dissipated long ago
Limestone stalactites drip from rusty
Under grade bridges, remnants of cars
Line the curb, shadows omnipresent
Rescue not an option in this place of
Invisible walls.

"Door closed"

Something Wrong Here?

smoke stacks
water towers
in sky scape
antennas and dishes
bracketed to
old brick, aged metal

smoke doesn’t flow
from stacks
water doesn’t drain
from towers
factories, warehouses
long gone

they stand
to transmit signals
far and wide
while on ground level
quiet abounds
only ghosts travel
inside windowless buildings
that once were
America.

Recession*

The dog walkers who met at
the pavilion are no longer
here. Ducks are looking
thinner, breadcrumbs do not
fall to the ground.
Birds peck in search
of insects or a worm, fishermen
drop lines for trout that don’t
bite.

The night is quiet, the cicadas have gone.
Humidity is low, hum of air conditioners
no longer fills the air. Thunderstorm
passes leaving quiet behind, that dead
quiet in the middle of a storm, yet
it has passed.

Young mothers watch the old folks
purchase one meal at a time, learning
how it is done. Few purchase bottled
water anymore, the tap is just fine. There
are no lines at the pharmacy. Pork roll,
spam, hot dogs are in demand.

*(From the collection, Carvings)

***

ABOUT THE POET:

g emil reutter lives and writes in the Fox Chase neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pa. He founded The Fox Chase Review and The Fox Chase Reading Series in 2007. You can visit him at www.gemilreutter-author.com

'

JARED SCHICKLING

2011-11-24T10:48:00.000-08:00

WHAT IS (PART OF) YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE?

After quitting Paris Island in 1996, taking a nap, and waking up in Long Island on 9-11, I realized that the people of which I was a part were poorly equipped to handle, even understand, the exigencies of the world and planet upon which we live. Americans tend to live upon the world, and are seemingly unaware of the planet they’re on. I am aware of the problem with this generality (“American”) but I am talking about a gross systemic relation, rather than its aesthetic valuation. We live as a dream and slurp our news from a crock of shit and you really have to dig to scratch the surfaces. As an American, I am not exceptional; I suppose that, and I hate to admit this, like everyone else who grows up here, it took me a while to remember it.

“Cows in the Field”—photograph by Alec Maslowski

***

HOW HAS THE GREAT RECESSION AFFECTED YOUR POETRY?

Like any laborer worth his salt I’ve attempted to cultivate my own situations in which I might quit anything and everything without consequence. My art becomes life, stains; “consequences” aside, they’ve proven extremely adept. Hell, successful. Thus my slurp has been unaffected by this “recession” you refer to. The fact that we suffer in silence is at least a meaningful currency, sans coasters, for we are used to it.

What I mean is, there are several thousands of us on the Niagara Frontier who look at the Erie Canal from what was once the widest bridge in the world. Have we seen what gets trapped in this leg of the Canal? Acreage, rusty, an agricultural engineering marvel draining a prehistoric puddle of its fruit picked and packed here, a heavily fertilized contract with eventualities and elsewhere, just east of the toxic nightmares across from Canada—feed corn and the species problem, simplified. South of us Erie County sprawls around Buffalo, where the Canal ended.

Nothing is bleak about its stained signs.

“butterflies”—photograph by Alec Maslowski

***

PLEASE SHARE A POEM(S) ADDRESSING YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE.

                                                                                                         17-18
                             to cultured inurement a catastrophic event
                                                                                                and old news

A. that they should do more as it tries to hammer out a draft raised the possibility of a range of actions, including but not limited to B. inherent limitations in terms of protections C. hopes to see a serious draft by Thursday or D. to approve this draft it E. would soon attack, to support and clean the city, your protective shield stay away, about thirty kilometers, outside your city they have F. been fighting in that direction for several days, television claimed they were in control of it, but journalists at the gates of the city saw G. no evidence it had fallen, hearing some say, telling others, they were fighting inside H. there was no way to confirm that claim, heavy bombardments there Wednesday I. thousands of forces gathered late outside, Wednesday, with dozens of heavy artillery, radar control weapons systems and about a dozen tanks, weapons J. carried by what appears jubilant and confident K. with white pickups covered in dirt for camouflage purposes snipers were positioned in various parts of the city, excellent vision L. and if it is taken by force, it will give access to what leads to the heart of the opposition M. it was bombing its way into the city, Wednesday N. if all (there) are dead by the end of the day they’ll call it a cowardly, murderous attack, people are not safe, it’s amazing this is happening, adding that two O. people killed, fifteen injured, and one very critically P. forces not yet able to get in described it, a forty-six year-old engineer and member of the local opposition, a rebel fighter with no weapons, fighting with whatever arms Q. are found, or captured R. the best we have, grenade launchers S. the journalist there has not been able to confirm the account but a second witness also said the city has come under sustained attack, on Wednesday T. meanwhile four journalists, covering the conflict, are reported missing U. Wednesday, the editor says they received, second-hand, news that some of the team was swept up, by forces near the city, who’d say V. that there’s nothing to say about them, who said W. that if they have picked them up X. then they should have been brought back Y. the battle, to recapture the rebellious territory, came on the day we considered closing the air, Wednesday Z. ends with no agreement on a draft

there are plenty of others to offer u2, we could repeat these here, the largest Moon in twenty-five years or so and visible on Saturday or the Gulf disaster from last year, or the way even this story has changed, where “spill” becomes an operative word, of which I prefer to Katrinas, Dubyas, a form of Exodus through Egypt perhaps like one of the Four Fukushima Reactors, my sister’s New International Version predicting Haiti’d turn out like China the Orientalist, come to blame the Currency, explains a trace of the Zombie away to a Pharmakon of leaves, the locations like a symbol would just have to show itself, and even though the Japanese can still gather in their peaceful breadlines, or relinquish it in the oceans, having experience with this sort of Thing

***

ABOUT THE POET & ARTIST:

Jared Schickling lives in upstate New York.

Alec Maslowski is a visual artist and musician living in upstate New York.

'

LIAM DUFFY

2011-11-21T12:33:00.000-08:00

WHAT IS (PART OF) YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE?

A major part of my recession experience is that of the Irish narrative returning to emigration. The youth of whole villages has disappeared and I know it is becoming easier to count the friends who have left rather than those who have stayed. The direness of the situation is amplified by the trend for those who leave to be those with skills and abilities; this leaves the country with diminished opportunities to get back on its feet.

A fountain in the square of Liam Duffy's home town, Galway. Around it written in chalk are the names of over a hundred people who have emigrated. A student activist group called Free Education for Everyone or FEE, in which the poet is involved, collected the names and wrote them out as an act of remembrance to highlight the lack of opportunities in Ireland, particularly for young people.

***

HOW HAS THE GREAT RECESSION AFFECTED YOUR POETRY?

My writing has become more critical of the elements of society that brought about this crisis and how they depict themselves as being innately present and necessary in society. But it has also turned its focus on the parts of society that exist despite crisis and also against the crisis--the day to day processes we engage in to get the most out of life.

***

PLEASE SHARE A POEM(S) ADDRESSING YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE:

Deflation

Even the devil's redundant-

the wind cries:

the tea is cold.

Burnt toast

And greasy frys-

even the devil's redundant,

his knife's coated

in butter and crumbs-

his tea cold.

Sales of slippers have doubled,

he read in the newspapers-

even the devil's redundant

so the church closed;

he could sleep in Sundays-

the tea gone cold

before it’s even poured

the heat stolen by leaky windows-

even the devil's redundant

and his tea has gone cold.

("Deflation" first appeared in A Hudson View, Spring 2010)

***

ABOUT THE POET:

Liam Duffy is a poet who grew up and studied in Galway. He is now compiling an Artistic Atlas of Galway, studying Urban studies and working towards his first collection of poetry. He has recently been published on the Upstart blog, the GloomCupboard and has work forthcoming in the special Irish issue of the U.S. magazine Prairie Schooner, and has also read at the West Cork Literary Festival in Ireland as part of a reading dubbed: "Irish Poets: A New Generation."

'

FAITH PASCUA

2011-11-20T12:10:00.000-08:00

WHAT IS (PART OF) YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE?

My Great Recession experience has everything to do with my future. As a conscience youth and an upcoming teacher, I believe that people are so job security- and money-wary that they are only in survival mode. Teaching guidance to my students, I see they only know that money will make you live comfortably. But really it should be about moral values. In this economy I believe that’s what we need.

***

HOW HAS THE GREAT RECESSION AFFECTED YOUR POETRY?

How the GR has affected my poetry is by me living in a neighborhood with the least income families, in a school in the middle of what feels like a third world (I'm calling it urban Honolulu)--it's all I know. To live being compassionate about people struggles, including mine and my families’. And by writing my community into awareness.

Faith and her Mommy, with their two dogs (left) Bruno and (right) Pacman!

***

PLEASE SHARE A POEM(S) ADDRESSING YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE:

My GR poem talks about my mother going through layoffs at work, telling her I love her regardless.

"Mommy"

At night in my house when everyone should be sleeping eyes close minds

drifting towards wonderland,

She’s still awake in the living room flipping through memories of

what used to be,

Crying wishing her storied scrapbook past was reality again.

She reminisces over pages of smiles; compiled accomplishments enough

to fill miles of trophy cases.

She was the original dust buster dirt devil housekeeper winner of the

2006 Housekeeper of the Year award.

She remembers wanting to vacuum the red carpet something majestic;

Floors so shiny, you could see your inner child in the reflection. She

idolizes perfection

That hotel was her home away from home, her fortress of solitude and

it has been for over 16 years.

She cleans hotel rooms; finds the history in dirty laundry, closet

skeletons and linens.

Knows what happens in a honeymoon suite, and is capable to clean the

fuck out of them

She knows that business trips are filled with more personal endeavors

anyway,

Seeing infidelity with the mistake of forgetting the do not disturb

sign on the doorknob; she has seen it all.

Until last fall when my brother and I watched her crumble under the

fall of the economy,

The uncertainty placed her waiting by the phone.

She’s on call for work now. Today she’s number 4 but they didn’t

even make it to 3…

This job is her first baby, 16 years in the making,

At first this job was just to pay the bills, just for now, just until…

It became her passion, found sanctuary in her pink flowered uniform,

and comfort gelled shoes

She’s my mother, sobbing solo under the single light in the living

room,

Resisting to open her scrapbook, trying not to find a reason to be

angry at the super natural because she’s losing faith. Like a

flickering candle…

When she thinks no one is around she still tries her uniform on, this

is her battle suit;

Her idle hands turn to iron and from wonder woman to wondering woman

she feels like she lost her super powers.

My mother is an aglet, found at the tip of shoelaces,

She’s capable of keeping your sole in place,

She will tell you she loves you by just being there… but she’s forgotten.

Her paycheck is the only way she remembers her value,

That coming home without one renders her useless.

Mommy, you are not an ATM, not an automated teller machine,

Worth is not measured in money; Your amount balance will never be zero to me.

See no one remembers what an aglet is…

No one cares about the life of the housekeeper who cleaned their hotel

room.

But mom, you are more than a source of income

You’re my monster in the closet inspector, and the detector of sorrow

and sobbing anywhere

When the shake of the money problem earthquake leaves our home, I want

you to know

I love you more than a full-time laid off housekeeper, but my full

time mother. Assuring you that even if your Faith fades away, your faith will be here.

***

ABOUT THE POET:

Faith Pascua, 17 years old, is a high school senior in Honolulu, Hawai’i. The Youth Speaks Hawaii 2010 Grand Slam Champion, she is a student teacher. She also can be seen and heard presenting her poem "Mommy" for YouthSpeaksHawaii over HERE.

'

CHRIS STROFFOLINO

2011-11-15T23:40:00.000-08:00

WHAT IS (PART OF) YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE?

I prefer the terms "depression" or "meltdown"--

and here's my essay "Corporate Personhood and The Case For Reparations in 2012"

The core of the Occupy Wall Street and 99% Movement is expressed in the proposed demands #1 and #2 at http://atung.net/2011/10/17/the-99-declaration/

which are essentially the same as proposed demands #3 and #8 at http://coupmedia.org/occupywallstreet/occupy-wall-street-official-demands-2009. Another version of this demand exists at Dylan Ratigan’s www.getmoneyout.com. In short:

Congress Should Enact Legislation for Publicly Financed Elections And Reverse the Effects of the Unconstitutional Citizens United SCOTUS decision by passing an amendment to prohibit any private financing of elections and ELIMINATE "PERSONHOOD" LEGAL STATUS FOR CORPORATIONS, and restore the 14th Amendment to its original purpose.

Read more HERE.

And another essay "Why I Support Occupy Oakland’s Direct Action of 11/2/11":

In a statement released on 11/3/11, Occupy Oakland explains their logic for peacefully taking over 520 16th St, before being brutally raided by Oakland police, for the second time in two weeks. “ All across the US thousands upon thousands of commercial and residential spaces sit empty while more and more people are forced to sleep in the streets, or driven deep into poverty while trying to pay their rent despite unemployment or poverty wages.” One of these empty buildings had housed The Traveler’s Aid Society, a non-for-profit organization that provided services to the homeless but, due to cuts in government funding, lost its lease. “Given that Occupy Oakland feeds hundreds of people every day, provides them with places to sleep and equipment for doing so, involves them in maintenance of the camp (if they so choose),” on November 2nd, 2011, they decided to secure use of this building to provide the same services, at much cheaper cost to the city

Read more HERE.

***

HOW HAS THE GREAT RECESSION AFFECTED YOUR POETRY?

I'm primarily doing music and political essays these days, trying to speak more common languages without losing any intensity....

***

PLEASE SHARE A POEM(S) ADDRESSING YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE:

Here's a link to a song/video about wall-street

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lolqyPYB1c

and on HMOs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xoB2IcfFts

***

ABOUT THE POET:

Chris Stroffolino lives in Oakland.

'

ED BAKER

2011-11-14T12:31:00.000-08:00

WHAT IS (PART OF) YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE?

part of my "great recession" experience is in regards to that rather long 1980's recession .. I bought $10,000 worth of AT&T (before the split-up), WGL, Mobil Oil (before the merger), Squibb, Pan Am (my only "turkey") & one share of Berkshire Hathaway ,... now?

after re-investing all dividends, distributions and PAYING the taxes on the cap gains I am one of the very few Multi-Gazillionaire Minor American Poets !

"My “zing” will cost you, big time, Charlie!", art by Ed Baker

***

HOW HAS THE GREAT RECESSION AFFECTED YOUR POETRY?

which recession goes with which poem ? I just don't know. I'm still trying to figure out what the hell Language Poetry is !

***

PLEASE SHARE A POEM(S) ADDRESSING YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE:

money money money        money money        money      mon
neu money money money money        money-money
Money Honey?      money money money money money mo
money.      "All you think about is ..... SEX !"

now? off to the grocery to buy some "day old" bread (at 1/2 price)
to use for Turkey Stiffing... I already got the turkey       at a sale Fifty-Eight cents a pound.

only need 5 days to thaw it out... I got 10 until T-Day. and you know that
a frozen turkey is fresher than a fresh turkey. frozen turkeys are frozen within 5 hours of slaughter
where as the "fresh" birds by the time they get to the grocer are at least 3 weeks old !

actually, at any price, next to hamburger turkeys are the worst garbage one can eat in or out of

              "Poets on/In The Great Recessional Crowd"

***

ABOUT THE POET:

Ed Baker's got "3,221 books published & not one via a 'vanity press'. most recent: She Intrudes (Lillieput, et al), Stone Girl E-pic, (and forthcoming in Sunfish) nearly 1/2 of ARS POETIC HER"

'

ADAM FIELED

2011-11-13T10:49:00.000-08:00

WHAT IS (PART OF) YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE?

My feeling about the Great Recession is that it has highlighted for me two things that have always disturbed me about the American psyche: the juvenile competitiveness which is never far from the surface, and the sense that intellectuality is not valued on any level. The American media continue to represent the illusions necessary to move commodities, and refuse to acknowledge that the Great Recession is a reality. To the extent that jobs are being lost and my sector is being affected, I have noticed the polarizing nature of the Recession— that the “Occupy” movements are pulling people closer together, while weakened resources pull other social contexts apart. Living in Philly, I’ve noticed the overall morale of the city deteriorate. People go out less, and have less time for each other. Until material circumstances improve, that will probably be the case in American urban centers indefinitely.

The Schuylkill River and Center City Philly where Adam Fieled lives

***

HOW HAS THE GREAT RECESSION AFFECTED YOUR POETRY?

The Great Recession has put me in the position of seeing levels of density and depth rather than anything crystalline. Times like these are fraught with complex realities and multiple meanings, and the poems I’ve written in the last few years reflect this. It’s also the cases that in times like these, identities have to multiply: people have more tasks, and less leisure time. Hence, I’ve found myself writing from many positions where identities are concerned, rather than sticking with a lyric “I” or the disjunctive version of the same thing.

***

PLEASE SHARE A POEM(S) ADDRESSING YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE:

This is a poem I wrote as an allegory. It’s meant to reflect an artist’s relationship to politics and political power, among other things:

#1345

Two hedgerows with a little path

between— to walk in the path like

some do, as if no other viable route

exists, to make Gods of hedgerows

that make your life tiny, is a sin of

some significance in a world where

hedgerows can be approached from

any side— I said this to a man who

bore seeds to an open space, and he

nodded to someone else and whistled

an old waltz to himself in annoyance.

***

ABOUT THE POET:

Adam Fieled is a poet based in Philadelphia. He has released five print books: "Opera Bufa" (Otoliths, 2007), "When You Bit..." (Otoliths, 2008), "Chimes" (Blazevox, 2009), "Apparition Poems" (Blazevox, 2010), and "Equations" (blue & yellow dog press, 2011), as well as e-books like "Beams" (Blazevox, 2007), "Disturb the Universe: The Collected Essays of Adam Fieled" (Argotist e-books, 2010), and "Mother Earth" (Argotist e-books, 2011). He has work in Jacket, Cordite, Pennsound, Poetry Salzburg Review, the Argotist, Great Works, Tears in the Fence, Upstairs at Duroc, and in the & Now Awards Anthology from Lake Forest College Press. A magna cum laude graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, he also holds an MFA from New England College and an MA from Temple University.

'

EILEEN R. TABIOS

2011-11-12T08:51:00.000-08:00

WHAT IS (PART OF) YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE?

The Gray Air of the Great Recession

There is no "Other" in this Great Recession. Everyone's recession story is one's story. And its pollution is graying the air even for those not (YET) on the front lines of the recession's impact. To witness is also to experience.

For nearly three decades, I've usually had at least a dozen cans of tuna in the house. In 27 years or so, I can recall only one exception when this wasn't the case -- it was an unsettling feeling. And I don't even like tuna.

It began when my husband and I were newbie-workers fresh out of our universities. We were living in New York City, one of the world's highest rental markets, beset with student loans and living paycheck to paycheck. Then came one night -- it was a Thursday. He was due to be paid the following day. But we had that Thursday dinner still to eat, and we were out of money. Sure, we could have put something on a credit card but our budget was so tight (I fondly recall his hand-written Excel-type spreadsheets on our budget. Somehow, our revenues and costs never ever -- not once! -- lined up with his budget calculations!) we knew that once we began putting unexpected costs on our credit cards we'd start sliding down a slippery slope.

So off we went to the kitchen to forage for dinner. Bareness. Bare refrigerator (well, there were a few bottles of condiments). Bare cupboards. Bare bare bare. Then, Ahoy! The hubby spied in some dim recess of a deep corner a tiny can! He reached in. And, voila! a can of tuna! Thursday dinner was "tuna salad" -- tuna mixed with mayonnaise.

Since that dark evening, we've always had at least a dozen cans of tuna in the house. The world feels askew when such is not the case.

Stacks of tuna in Eileen Tabios' pantry

By such a standard, we're not as hard-hit as many relatives and friends. The stack of tuna cans is still there within a cupboard, its presence a comforting metaphor for some margin of protection against global food calamity.

We don't necessarily eat a lot of tuna. Once a year, we check the expiration dates on the cans and, before the cans expire, donate them to the local food pantry. But we always immediately replenish our own stock. We are comforted by their presence in our home.

I used to joke a lot about the presence of tuna in our lives. I used to joke that our down-to-one-can-of-tuna experience was our "Great Depression" or World War II experience in terms of its food-related impact on our lives. I know of relatives, for instance, whose WWII experience can be encapsulated in the ever-present cans of SPAM in their cupboards. But I used to make these jokes before the onset of the Great Recession. I don't joke about tuna anymore. But whereas, before, I disliked it, nowadays, I loathe it.

*

I have an M.B.A. in economics and international business from one of the world's leading graduate schools of business, New York University. For nearly ten years, I worked as a banker in New York City for three of the world's biggest banks.

My banking specialty was "project finance" by which the merits of a financial transaction depended solely on the merits of the underlying project. My projects ranged over energy, mining, transportation or waste disposal infrastructure, among others. I had to evaluate each of those projects on their individual financial viability (e.g., will the project generate enough revenues to cover its costs and how would I structure protections against unforeseen revenue losses or increased costs?). My analysis was not solely financial or economic; I also evaluated such factors as political stability, oceanic weather, and currency risks. I even had to evaluate Force Majeure -- "Acts of God" -- and determine how to protect projects against such elements as hurricanes, typhoons, and other metaphorical acts of an enraged god. It was important to get the analysis correct because the sole source of loan repayment was the project; that is, there was supposed to be no recourse to the project's sponsor even if that sponsor may be one of the healthiest, biggest corporations in the world. I was trained not only to analyze fully a situation, but to create structures that would minimize risk. By the time I ended my banking career, I was mostly focused on trying to fix transactions which were not structured well by their original bankers.

When I apply this "structured finance" analytical perspective to Wall Street, I am not surprised at how many financial institutions got into trouble. One of the basic flaws in Wall Street was the structure of upfront bonuses and compensations for deals that may last years or decades. This engendered a lot of deals that may be fine for the short-term period during which the institution can book its profit and the banker gets paid, but which may not work out in the long-term. The institutions should parcel out its accounting and banker compensation to make the risks match the rewards of their transactions (that'd be Project Finance 101, yo). Human nature and capitalism being what it is, if rewards matched risks, less lousy transactions could have been done that, together, came to adversely effect the overall financial system.

Relatedly, as regards Washington, politicians should have structured bail-outs to match the policies they sought to effectuate. For example, if a political goal was to get the banks lending again, the monies should have been provided under that proviso instead of giving it away in trust that banks would change their stripes and manifest social policy. (As I write this, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that more than than half of $4 billion in federal funds disbursed in 2011 to spur small-business lending by community banks was used to repay bailout funds that the banks received under the government's Troubled Asset Relief Program.)

Lost in political binary-thinking of raising taxes or cutting spending is that probably all debt has to be restructured. Yes, this would REQUIRE certain lenders to take a haircut on their loan amounts. (By the way, such a haircut is de facto a tax on the higher-income folks because, simplistically, the rich own the banks.) But let nobody raise the moral hazard issue here; it wasn't raised when the bank bailouts occurred.

*

While I'm appalled at bankers' irresponsibilities and the stupidity of policy-makers in control of hard-earned tax monies, I must also ask: before the Great Recession, how many of those faced with the choice of disliked tuna or a restaurant meal would have opted not to use the credit card? Blame Wall Street, yes. Blame Washington, yes. But also blame Main Street -- individuals made decisions, too, to over-leverage themselves. (I implicate myself: though I may have made the wise decision years ago as regards the tuna, I've taken advantage of debt-availability elsewhere in other matters.)

*

I'm a newbie orphan-advocate as a result of adopting two children who previously were living in orphanages. A few months ago, our family hosted a fund-raiser for raising attention to the adoption availability of older children living in orphanages. But while those funds would finance the program, the program is reliant on finding families interested in adoption. Because of adoption costs -- as well as the costs of raising children -- adoption interest has dropped. According to Adoptive Families, the average cost of adoption, as reported in its adoption cost survey (2009-2010) was around $30,000. Meanwhile, CNN Money reports that the cost of raising children has risen 40% over the past ten years.

*

I'm also a poetry publisher through Meritage Press which I founded in 2001. Poetry has never been a huge money-making industry, so to speak, and poetry-publishing has often been subsidized or "non-profit" as a result. Nonetheless, my Income Statement as a poet (which encompasses my revenues and expenses at Meritage Press), shows the following:

2010 Revenues: $6,287.86
2009 Revenues: $2,754.42
2008 Revenues: $9,117.92

The impact of the Great Recession is partly reflected in the great drop of revenues from 2008 to 2009 (e.g., I sold less books). I implemented several acts to raise revenue, and I did so successfully for the following year of 2010. But the costs of improving sales outweighed the benefits and I ended 2010 at a loss.

Sadly, the Great Recession has resulted in me publishing less books at Meritage Press (I've published as much as five books a year but, for 2011, I will have published just one). In addition, I've switched more to print-on-demand so that I do not incur huge upfront inventory costs. In the future, I will be joining the latest Gold Rush by selling gold in order to raise money for poetry publishing. Initially, I was only going to sell off primarily broken pieces of metal but have decided to add other gold jewelry as well as silver jewelry to the pile:

A recent addition to the pile (which I suspect will keep growing) is an old charm necklace:

I'd been planning on keeping that necklace which, while I hadn't worn such in two decades, once meant a lot to me during my high school days. But, nowadays, sentiment can be a luxury. And I am lucky: I am not, after all, selling gold for food.

Gold for Poetry. Ultimately, I don't mind: I consider Poetry to be priceless.

***

HOW HAS THE GREAT RECESSION AFFECTED YOUR POETRY?

I don't intentionally write poems related to the Great Recession. But it does creep without conscious intent into some poems (see below). This would make sense given "Babaylan Poetics," which is partly to say, a poetics of interconnectedness.

For (too) many artists, economic pressures can dampen the ability to continue making art. I don't wish to have the recession affect my commitment to writing/making poems. Poetry and art, unlike how many people -- and unfortunately that includes (would-be) educators or those setting education policy -- believe and enact, is not a luxury. For me to sacrifice poetry to economic pressures would be among the greatest blows that could be inflicted by the Great Recession -- and I will battle against it. The issue here is not one of writing poems but of losing identity...

***

PLEASE SHARE A POEM(S) ADDRESSING YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE:

While, as a poet, I try to be open to everything, I am only human and can't help privileging some matters over others in terms of interest. I do not find the recession interesting enough to consciously write about it. But as proof that the Poem often transcends the poet's intention, the recession nonetheless has sneaked into my poems.

For example, my poem "The Blue Mule: An Ado(a)ption Triptych" was not intended to relate to the recession. The poem was partly commissioned on the theme of "blue mule," was partly intended to address an adoption experience (not mine but an imagined one), and is available HERE where it was first published by Sugar Mule. Notwithstanding what the poem was supposed to be "about," there is the recession rearing its ugly head in the beginning of its Part 2. The recession is there, graying the air.

***

ABOUT THE POET:

Eileen R. Tabios has created 19 print, 4 electronic and 1 CD poetry collections, an art-essay collection, a poetry essay/interview anthology, a short story book and a collection of novels. Her body of work is unique for melding ekphrasis with transcolonialism. Her poems have been translated into Spanish, Italian, Tagalog, Japanese, Portuguese, Polish, Greek, computer-generated hybrid languages, Paintings, Video, Drawings, Visual Poetry, Mixed Media Collages, Kali Martial Arts, Music, Modern Dance and Sculpture. As part of her poetry-as-performance approach, she blogs as the "Chatelaine", and edits Galatea Resurrects (A Poetry Engagement), a popular poetry review journal. She also founded Meritage Press, a multi-disciplinary literary and arts press based in San Francisco & St. Helena.

Recent books include THE THORN ROSARY: Selected Prose Poems and New (1998-2010) and SILK EGG: Collected Novels (2009-2009). Forthcoming is her collaborative poetry/poetics collection with j/j hastain, the relational elations of ORPHANED ALGEBRA (Marsh Hawk Press, Spring 2012).

She has decided to curate an inter(net)national project of "POETS ON_____", of which POETS ON THE GREAT RECESSION is the second. The first was POETS ON ADOPTION.

She has an M.B.A. in economics and international business from New York University Graduate School of Business. She likes to joke that she thought that in order to be a poet she first had to be a (British) banker, like T.S. Eliot. More information about the poet is HERE.

'

SUSAN BRIANTE

2011-11-11T09:45:00.000-08:00

WHAT IS (PART OF) YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE?

It has been the constant sensation that things (literally) don’t add up. Expenses have moved so far out of the range of normal and salaries have stagnated for so long that your income can put you in the middle class—and yet the expenses of medical care, home ownership, child rearing, and/or retirement (just to name a few) make you economically vulnerable, force you to make impossible choices, or both.

And so our whole notion of working class/middle class/upper class has become destabilized.

To me the fact that many of us don’t actually know where we fall within the spectrum of the lower 99 percent signals a kind of economic dysmorphia that keeps us from understanding how we are both victims and beneficiaries of late capitalism. Without that knowledge, it may be impossible to imagine solutions to our current problems.

***

HOW HAS THE GREAT RECESSION AFFECTED YOUR POETRY?

Even before the Great Recession, I was working on Utopia Minus, a book that takes its inspiration from “found monuments:” abandoned commercial properties, the remains of a bull-dozed apartment complex, the ruins of economic boom and bust.

The opening poem from that book, “The End of Another Creature,” contains the lines “The Market migrates; the Market scatters across the Metroplex./ The Market dreams…” I was responding to the constant personification of the market in the news media: “the market reacts,” “the market sheds gains,” etc. I wanted to explore that personification further. Who would the Market be? I imagined this bumbling baby-boomer and turned him into the central character for the chapbook, The Market is a Parasite that Looks Like a Nest. I don’t think the market is bumbling, but in a post-boomer generation, you grow up with the rhetoric of idealism, the War on Poverty, for example. To see how far we've come from that idealism to this radical inequality suggests an impotency as well as irresponsibility that was appropriate for the character I created.

As the recession cut deeper, I looked for a way to demonstrate how the stock market seemed to lord over us all, whether we were invested or not. I began recording the closing number of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Then I plugged that number into search engines: Google, Project Gutenberg, Bartlett's, even an e-version of Paradise Lost. I let those searches lead me to texts and let those texts exert their influence over a series of poems much in the same way the closing number of the Dow exerts an influence over our lives. I am finishing a full-length manuscript from this project under the working title $INDU or Ghost Numbers.

At a time when people are in the streets standing up against the economic system, it’s important to question poetry’s role in this movement/moment. What can poetry do? Sometimes I want to call for a new confessional—an economic confessional. What’s in your bank account, Poet? Who paid for your down payment? What do you owe? It’s not about getting at any kind of smug epiphany or feeling sorry for ourselves, but we have to locate our place in an economic continuum before we can honestly define our needs, understand the needs of others, activate our sympathies, act for change.

***

PLEASE SHARE A POEM(S) ADDRESSING YOUR EXPERIENCE:

From Utopia Minus:

3000 BLOCK KINGS LN—DEMOLISHED APARTMENT COMPLEX

             central set of 8 steps to the courtyard,
             small rock garden,
             kidney-shaped pool, 8-feet deep,
             blue flox, purple crepe myrtle,
             white plastic laundry basket
             in a parking lot beyond cyclone fence
             Apartments for Rent
             1-3 Months Free Arignon Realty,
             railroad ties, cracked foundation,
             It’s all George’s fault in black spray-paint,
             and black-eyed Susans
             to which I feel no relation

From The Market is a Parasite that Looks like a Nest

The Market scowls,
crosses the street against traffic, settles, hovers
over a spread-sheet with his administrative assistant
as if it were an infant, sleeps in another bed
after 3 ½ years of marriage,
can only sleep on half of the bed
after 43 years of marriage, sees a coffin
in shop window, grows nostalgic
for shop windows on crowded city streets
where men made picture frames, repaired
television sets, piled tools in doorways, nursed
machines to roast and grind coffee,
a press to print newspaper. The Market wants to apprentice,
cannot apprentice, looks like a nest in a tree. The Market
is the parasite that looks like a nest in a tree, howls
through the ventilation system, hairless, blind, a newborn
calf sleeping on your chest, the curdling Market
whose milk has come in.

"Sprawl"--photo came from a random google image search and later used on the cover of Susan's chapbook, The Market is a Parasite That Looks Like A Nest

From $INDU or Ghost Numbers :

OCTOBER 15—THE DOW JONES CLOSES UP 10062

I thought if I wrote it all down, if I tracked it, if I consulted tickers and windows, measured blood flow, read the rise and fall of my accounts, the tarnish of leaves,

I would see the world differently

a veil would tear, a web would sparkle dew strung, rope bridge
between dead-living-unborn

a newspaper would curl at the bottom of the driveway, inverted pyramids of morning,
to capture the innocuous day

I thought I could feel these numbers in my hands like Whitman at the rail of a ferry
gauging the vibrations of an entire nation

networks of pop and ping, 40 years of economics.

The Dow rose above 10,000.
My dog scratched his ear. Numbers lay down in their ledgers.
Rains cleared, but the cold arrived. The unborn kept their distance.
A lamp buzzed on its timer.
I made a dinner of brown rice, buttercup squash and kale.

some [thing event] or my body in its [suchness]

(Poem first appeared in the journal 1913)

***

ABOUT THE POET:

Poet, translator and essayist, Susan Briante is the author of two collections of poetry: Utopia Minus (Ahsahta Press 2011) and Pioneers in the Study of Motion (Ahsahta Press 2007). Of her most recent collection, Publisher’s Weekly writes: “this book finds an urgent language for the world in which we live.” Briante’s poetry has appeared most recently in Canteen, Third Coast, and 1913. She has also published a series of essays on the relationship between place and cultural memory some of which can be found in Creative NonFiction, Rethinking History and The Believer. She is an assistant professor of creative writing and literature at The University of Texas at Dallas.

'

KAREN LLAGAS

2011-11-10T18:20:00.000-08:00

WHAT IS (PART OF) YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE?

I have to go back to another earlier economic downturn to answer more precisely. 2003: I was in my mid-20s, and had already sunk a few years as an analyst for companies like Bear Stearns and Wells Fargo. My last “full time job” was in a small HR [human resources] consulting firm that eventually got bought by another giant financial services company. From a funky warehouse space in San Francisco’s Portrero Hill, the company moved to 2nd and Market...

Simply put, at some point, getting up to take the 8 AM express bus downtown to sit in a gray cubicle all day filled me with nothing but dread. At that time, I had only been writing for a couple of years and also wanted to start taking myself ‘more seriously’ as a writer. So I quit, with no definite plans than to substitute teach and get odd office jobs off of Craigslist. Despite a weak job market, I eked out a very modest living for the next couple of years until I started establishing more stable and fulfilling freelance work doing medical and legal translation, research, consulting for small local businesses, teaching Tagalog and in poetry-in-the-schools.

I prefaced with all of that because I honestly think I would have been more adversely affected in this current recession, as a poet and a freelancer, if I didn’t have those years when I had to teach myself to use all possible resources I have so I could have both a livelihood and a creative life. That meant learning when to choose time over money and vice versa. That meant sitting down and taking stock of what I could really do that people would pay for (working with languages and numbers, yes; writing poems full time, no, not directly at least). That meant dividing my brain and days into compartments so I could be focused and able to work on several very different projects at once, including working on poems.

It continues to be a dynamic, exhilarating, often chaotic way to support myself, but maybe that has also made my profession(s) more recession-resilient over time. And it’s been a useful training on trust, foolishness and calculated recklessness—something hopefully transferrable to poetry. I don’t think I’d ever want to work a 9-5 again.

***

HOW HAS THE GREAT RECESSION AFFECTED YOUR POETRY?

Every day, I encounter small-mid size businesses hurting badly, friends who’d been laid off and unable to find new work, schools that ran out of money to spend on arts education. In my translation work: patients who are very sick and running out of health care coverage, families and elderly people lining up for food stamps and cash aid, Filipinos promised work here that disappeared once they’ve arrived, and now face immigration issues—it is almost inevitable that my creative work will be influenced by this recession in particular, and the role of economics in our lives, in general. I’ve been circling around poems and writing that explore ‘work’ for some time now, and I have a couple of new poems on the subject which I hope will evolve into a bigger body of work.

~

I’ve to include here that when I visited Manila last May (2011), I felt over there a lot more financial optimism and economic activity than I’ve seen here in the U.S. for years—as in people continually spending money on food, goods, each other (I had many gracious hosts). As in shopping places, bars, restaurants filled to capacity on many late random weeknights, sky-high condos being squeezed into already packed cities. It stuck with me and I finally heard a commentary about it on NPR some weeks ago—countries in Asia experiencing these vibrant new economies, and the long term social effects that are yet to be seen (there are now restaurants and malls that open specifically all night, and some only at night, for instance, to accommodate call center workers in night shifts)

Come November 5th, Bank Transfer Day, I knew I wanted to do something, to participate in a concrete albeit small way, somehow—but I’ve come to know the employees of the neighborhood big bank I wanted to move my money out from. So some kind of guilt, or something, prevented me from doing it in person. When I called the 888 number to do it over the phone, a call center in Manila took the call. I couldn’t do it, at least for a few days. I thought of the relative economic prosperity there compared to the relative economic misery over here, and felt that no one answer will ever be very simple. (I still moved funds to a SF credit union in the end.)

Karen Llagas sharing poems at a reading

***

PLEASE SHARE A POEM(S) ADDRESSING YOUR EXPERIENCE

Below is a poem in progress, a couple of years old now—

Lament in a Boardroom

            Look for me under your bootsoles...
            ~Whitman

For those who did, I’m not talking to
or about you. No, this is about those
who’ve looked along the wisps
of two hundred dollar hair trims.

For us whose here and now
is a loyal wife who packs
her husband’s bags
while he paces the bedroom,
always in heat. (Honey I have desires
only the future can fulfill)

For us who have nothing left
to say about grace,
except that it can’t be graphed—

            And to desire—we
couldn’t look you in the eye,
but we’d be happy to collect your tatters.

Here are pictures
of babies, nephews, cream-
colored shores.

Let no one say
it’s just about the money,
that slender,
grief-stricken thing,
so thirsty for company,

oh how you kept me
glued to my seat all those years
I should have been collecting
the dirt under my shoes.
I can still hear your soft voice—

(The world? Someone else
will say goodbye to it.)

***

ABOUT THE POET:

Karen Llagas is the recipient of the second Filamore Tabios, Sr. Memorial Poetry Prize, and her first collection of poetry, Archipelago Dust, was published by Meritage Press in 2010. She has an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers and a BA in Economics from Ateneo de Manila. Also a recipient of a Hedgebrook residency and a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, she lives in San Francisco where she works as a Tagalog interpreter & instructor, and a poet-teacher with the California Poets in the Schools (CPITS).

'

DEE THOMPSON

2011-11-09T17:07:00.000-08:00

WHAT IS (PART OF) YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE?

The Great Recession

Steadily employed for more than twenty-four years.
Then one day, my supervisor called me into her office.
I was laid off.
Let go, downsized, RIF’d.
It all means the same thing.
Kicked off the Cube Farm.
Funny how those dusty rose plastic walls that felt so confining suddenly
seemed so comforting, as I took a last look at them,
and hugged my banker’s box to my chest.

Terror. Shock. Cautious optimism. Crushing disappointment.
I had to make myself take a shower.
I scanned the want ads online, every day.
I pondered how to fix chicken yet another way.
I lived lifetimes of anxiety in an hour.

I became a part of the quiet crowd haunting the unemployment office.
One day I was told, no more benefits.
I emailed every recruiter I knew and said OK, I will take ANYTHING…
that doesn’t involve illegal activity or nudity.

Contract assignments came and went.
It’s a buyer’s market I was told, again and again.

Year one, we didn’t buy new clothes or eat out much.
Year two, we didn’t get the car fixed or go on vacation.
Heading into year three of uncertainty,
I prayed, please let me keep the house…

Finally, two years down the road, a real permanent job, but only part time,
And making far less money, but still -
To have somewhere to go, every day, a reason to bathe?
Priceless.

The front patio at Dee's house, for which she "prayed, please let me keep the house...", with "my flowers I put out there every summer. I like it because it looks peaceful."

***

HOW HAS THE GREAT RECESSION AFFECTED YOUR POETRY?

The recession hasn't affected my poetry negatively, since I now have more time to write since I'm not working full-time.

***

PLEASE SHARE A POEM(S) ADDRESSING YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE:

[Note: The recipe within this poem is a real recipe.]

Frittata

Who is not comforted by eggs and cheese?
The following should be cooked on a Sunday night,
When food is about comfort.

Take an onion and chop it up fine.
Throw it in a pan of butter, salt, and pepper.
Saute away, til it’s translucent and soft.
Smile as the delicious smell wafts through the house.

Heat the oven to Hi broil. Crack open the door.

Look in your fridge for veggies on the verge
Of rubber horror.
Open the veggie drawer.
Pick and choose.
What to use?

Mushrooms – yes.
Ham or turkey lunchmeat – yes.
Cauliflower and carrots – no.
Broccoli? No!
Lettuce – don’t even think it.
See a beer?
Drink it.

Chop. Throw it all in with the onions.
Add some garlic powder, seasoning salt, a drop of Tabasco.
Hum your favorite song.
How did that tune go?

Pull out the eggs. Crack four in a bowl and beat them
with a fork, until foamy and subdued.
Eyeball the simmering veggie mixture. Inhale.
Smile.
Throw in another egg. Pour it over all.
Cook over low medium as the mixture sets.
Don’t walk away and forget.

Open the fridge.
Look for cheese. Not feta. Not blue.
Almost any other kind will do.
Preferably grated.
Place the skillet into the oven and watch.
AVOID RUBBER TEXTURE.
Pull it out –
before you really think it’s done.

Cover everything liberally with cheese.
Abundant cheese.
Amen.
Put the skillet back under the broiler, briefly.
Stand and watch.

Pull it out and serve it on paper plates, with a dill pickle garnish, if you must.

Put on a bathrobe and fuzzy slippers before eating.

Frittata. Free-TAH-tah. Savor the sound.

It’s a one dish meal
that
heals.

***

ABOUT THE POET:

Dee Thompson was born in Augusta, Georgia and raised primarily in Knoxville, Tennessee. She has been writing for more than twenty-five years and her first published poem appeared in a national magazine at the age of thirteen. Dee holds a degree in Drama from the University of Georgia and a master’s degree in Creative Writing from the University of Tennessee. She is a published author of three books: a personal memoir Adopting Alesia, a children’s book, Jack’s New Family, and a juvenile adventure e- book The Warrior's Box. One of her essays appeared in the award winning book Call Me Okaasan, [Edited by Suzanne Kamata.] She also has an essay in Snowflakes: A Flurry of Adoption Stories [Editor Teresa Kelleher], and her poetry appears regularly on the Vox Poetica website. Additionally, Dee has been a daily blogger for more than six years and her blog [The Crab Chronicles] has a wide readership. Dee lives with her son and her mother in Atlanta, and enjoys gardening, cooking, knitting, reading, and movies.

'

BARBARA JANE REYES

2011-11-08T09:45:00.000-08:00

WHAT IS (PART OF) YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE? / HOW HAS IT AFFECTED YOUR POETRY?

I have three jobs.

I am an adjunct professor, and this semester, I teach two classes: Filipino Literature in the Yuchengco Philippine Studies Program at University of San Francisco, and MFA workshop at Mills College. I teach two late afternoons/evenings a week. Next semester, I will teach at San Francisco State University and USF. These positions are offered to me, and I can’t say no. Discussing Filipino literature with young folks and teaching poetry workshop are a joy to me.

I have a M-F, 9-5 job, a non-profit, public health job where I’ve been for over 11 years. I worked elsewhere before this, and have worked full time while in college and in grad school. Balancing poetry and economics has always been a part of my life. I am an administrator, auditor, paper monkey in a fluorescent cubicle.

The benefits of a full time job are a decent salary and, yes, benefits -- health insurance and a 401(K), which I have not looked at since before the recession, since I withdrew all kinds of money from it to make a down payment on my home.

I bought before the housing bubble burst. It was my mom’s insistence and expectation that, upon finishing grad school, I buy myself a home. She helped me out immensely.

I am a poet. I make very little money as a poet; honoraria and royalties are insignificant to my annual income, and this is fine. I am married to a poet, who, like me, also has a job outside of the arts. We’ve just bought a Prius, because it made more sense to do this, rather than continue to succumb to the increasing costs of gas, and for regular and costly auto repairs on the old hooptie.

We have been able to contribute to our favorite non-profits arts orgs.

We’re doing better than alright; our life is stable, safe, comfortable, quiet.

In order for us to do better than alright, I have three jobs, and this is not a complaint. Sometimes, I feel like I’m being greedy, given the nation’s unemployment rate, and that many have been out of work for a long time, something I just could not bear.

We live in Oakland, where the world has just witnessed the OPD brutalize thousands of peaceful Occupy Oakland protestors. Now that Occupy Everywhere is happening, now that a general strike has been called, I am torn, wanting to support, needing to work.

I don’t want Poetry to get lost in all of this.

I don’t have an answer yet, where my own poetry fits. I write when I can, and submit to publications when I can. In lieu of expensive travel, I Skype to talk poetics with classes who are reading my books.

I try my best to open up venues and opportunities for writers and artists as a working board member and readings/workshop series curator for PAWA (Philippine American Writers and Artists), as co-editor of Doveglion Press, as a letter of recommendation writer, book blurber, book reviewer. It’s challenging to have artists constantly asking for, demanding, or expecting stuff from me, and posturing when I don’t have the time or energy to take something new on.

I believe that surviving this recession as an artist requires that artists do away with a sense of entitlement, and that we not treat one another merely as resources/contacts.

I continue to believe in gift economy, e-publication, and digital print, and am thinking about zero capital models, whatever means of mutual support and reciprocity for artists, in order to keep Poetry in the world.

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PLEASE SHARE A POEM(S) ADDRESSING YOUR EXPERIENCE:

I will pass on the poem, since I don't think I have anything specifically related.

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ABOUT THE POET:

Barbara Jane Reyes is the author of Gravities of Center, Poeta en San Francisco, and Diwata. She teaches Philippine Studies at University of San Franciso, and Filipino American Literature at San Francisco State University. Find her online at http://www.barbarajanereyes.com/

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ELIZABETH TREADWELL

2011-11-07T12:25:00.000-08:00

WHAT IS (PART OF) YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE? / HOW HAS IT AFFECTED YOUR POETRY? / PLEASE SHARE A POEM(S) ADDRESSING YOUR EXPERIENCE:

Hi Eileen, This is a not-quite-poem/hardly essay that I wrote in some frustration last year as a stay-at-home/underemployed (ha!) mom, after turning down an invitation to the Women's Innovative Poetry & Cross-Genre Work Festival. Thanks for creating this space. Elizabeth

homebody:
on not going to the conference in London

I’m tired of talking about women.
I’d rather talk about men.
How they are coddled creatively.
Their absurd, obtuse visions.

And, more sympathetically, how
male dominance obscures
the true contributions of men
as well as women.

Also I don’t have enough money,
and even less affiliation.

And I have two girl babies
who need me closer to home
these years.

And I love them.

1/19/10

Elizabeth Treadwell with her daughters

***

ABOUT THE POET:

Elizabeth Treadwell's books include LILYFOIL + 3 (O Books, 2004) and Birds & Fancies (Shearsman, 2007). Virginia or the mud-flap girl is forthcoming from Dusie Books in 2012. She is online at elizabethtreadwell.com.

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ERIN VIRGIL

2011-11-06T22:16:00.000-08:00

WHAT IS (PART OF) YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE?

I'm looking at people differently, trying to have more compassion when someone is unkind in the grocery store; maybe this is a hard trip, full of difficult decisions. Feeling blessed for having food stamps while I'm unemployed; making fancy dinners is now a routine, it never was before. I'm writing differently too; having to take on more & more awful technical and bland article writing jobs to pay the bills, which will be going up (heat in winter in the Rocky Mountains is tricky; we collect a lot of firewood too). Technical writing feels more like long division than actual writing, so I keep my real notebook close at hand throughout. Oh yes I should mention I've been without a real job, that you go to every day, for two years and change. I finished my MFA last December, am around $80 grand in debt and have just applied to an art education BA program, because it seems like federal aid to students is about to implode and this may be my last chance to take more classes. And I do need them, to drag my life's work of collage and book making somewhere else, out of boxes to a more joyful place, a high school classroom maybe. And also, I'm desperate for health insurance, like some fifty million other Americans.

“corporate personhood,” 2011 gouache painting by Erin Virgil

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HOW HAS THE GREAT RECESSION AFFECTED YOUR POETRY?

It's affected my poethics more than my poems. I was just in Washington DC visiting an old friend, and we passed by and talked with many people camped out, Occupying. I wanted to embrace everyone there, for being so brave—I can't stay out in a public place overnight, old neurosis and flashbacks return quickly: run-ins with authority, juvenile offenses, etc—I really feel that people standing up and shouting, especially across generations and other social boundaries, is the crucial path out of this corporate owned hell we're in. A nice older lady in our co-op yesterday: "It's going to be just like the French Revolution, I can't wait!" Writing is important too; letters to the editor are still extremely useful mind openers, and so are poems. I just haven't written that many yet, maybe because I've been so weighted down with technical writing junk jobs.

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PLEASE SHARE A POEM(S) ADDRESSING YOUR EXPERIENCE:

I wrote this one a few weeks ago:

Yellow aspen

are the only visible evidence of the month.
    September.
The heat and exhaust are the same
as they were before Solstice
fear & worry lines all around the grocery store
    no aisle without a pursed mouth.
Afraid of the transition, not the end. The lessening, what will
    be lost, caught on a nail and abandoned.
On the sidewalk a woman with a basket rushes by:
relief when it’s empty. This is a new reckoning. Babies never made me sad before.
    Scarcity means less things and more time to miss them.
    September means ‘seventh month’ of the Roman calendar
which further confuses the chronology this afternoon.

I want to report that as the aspens slowly went bare
the people too, changed gradually
gracefully.

Calming pushing back
against all that is unnatural.

***

ABOUT THE POET:

Erin Virgil is a poet and collage artist living in northern Colorado. She's got one book ("Poems, Volume one") published and available at Amazon, and has a little blog too, http://emvlovely.wordpress.com.

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ANNE GORRICK

2011-11-05T08:02:00.000-07:00

WHAT IS (PART OF) YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE?

There was a lucky part of the Great Recession; it made the poetry part of my life much bigger. In 2009, a notice went around work (I work at middle-sized public university in financial aid and do all sorts of financial literacy counseling for student borrowers in order to keep the default rate low) that asked people to volunteer to reduce their work hours as a way to save the campus money. I’ve always been good about living below my means and socking away money into my retirement, so I raised my hand to participate. I now work a four-day workweek (in exchange for a 20% pay cut), and get to keep my health benefits (which is important as my husband is self-employed). I don’t save extra retirement money anymore (which is somewhat worrisome), but it seems like an okay swap for now.

I worked this new schedule in 2009 and 2010. When my assistant had to take a medical leave in 2010, I went back to five days for a while, but now it’s back. It’s been a fluid win-win for my workplace and me all around.

I now have three uninterrupted days in a row every week to go down any poetic or artistic rabbit hole I choose.

The schedule leaves me with time to pursue all my “poetic feast” activities (the idea being that if we all add something to our poetic world, to our poetic feast, we have all sorts of amazing and delicious things to dine on – Reb Livingston is just one of the many generous poetry people who teaches this by her example). So I can curate a reading series; co-curate an electronic journal; and co-edit (with Deborah Poe and Sam Truitt) an anthology-in-progress of local innovative poetry. I’ve also been working on a longterm collaboration with the architect and visual poet Scott Helmes, and finally got around to making a blogged archive of my visual art. I am also President of Century House Historical Society, home to the Widow Jane Mine in Rosendale, NY, where we have all sorts of arts programming in this natural amphitheater space (including 21 years of the “Subterranean Poetry Festival”).

And of course, there are my own poetic and visual adventures: poetry, artist’s book and object making, encaustic painting, printmaking...

The Great Recession set up a situation where I can say “yes” to many, many things that make my own work bigger.

Detail from an "Untitled BookBoxObject"; more info HERE

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HOW HAS THE GREAT RECESSION AFFECTED YOUR POETRY?

"We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave ....You can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark —that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
- Hunter Thompson

I live near the Hudson River and have spent a ridiculous amount of time trolling its shores, collecting all sorts of things it tumbles and spits out. Hundreds of broken blue insulator pieces, pieces of dishes, odd glass. My best find ever was a single porcelain doll’s arm that I wore on a chain for many years. I also spent many summers on the Jersey Shore doing the same thing: searching for the beautifully seaworn and broken.

This rogue financial wave that broke over all of us left a flamboyant and appalling wreckage that we can play with in our work. I am definitely exploring new things, shaped by new tools since the Great Recession. Its wave washed in, and now I’m faced with all this incomprehensible flotsam that bobs around the internet and I’m making found-object art out of it. I know the Flarf folks have been doing this for years, but now I’m compelled to work with it too, spurred on by my friend Lynn Behrendt’s honest and challenging work with these materials.

***

PLEASE SHARE A POEM(S) ADDRESSING YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE:

Elvis was an electric zoo, burnt belly fat

(after my poem “Ella Etruscan Olives Burnt and Sien(n)a” – as suggested by Google)

Moss enchanted language tombs
The gods wear jewelry on their museum visits
What were their origins?
What was their outlook on the afterlife?
Oracle ointment, pentacost, Orientalizing periods

How many calories are in New York?

The tongue offers a sugared money, a sienna-ed sun
Indifference burned and smelled like antifreeze
Angulate tortoises, blistered lips
Peace bruised sin in the dictionary
This shocking story was shattered and soggy with virgin swimmings
And since you can’t escape me, do I ever cross your mind?
And since I am dead I can take off my head
My name in math, in nougatine
Nouvelle vague, a bias generator
Birds mimic the sympathetic nervous system
Matter is classified as a pair of boots
Her fact practice, shards of vinyl spirits donate their bones

The day passed like a chapter summary
Only steers and queers come from Texas
Only straight girls wear dresses
Only one state has no McDonalds
Only one state has no national park
Only stupid cows text and drive
Time became stale with stunt bikes
There are online stuttering activities in maroon
Morale-grey, cyber-November is the color of noodles

Nightingales weep at the consequence of meaning
How do I capitalize the moon?
How can I keep from singing? Or slapping?
How can I get taller? Or make more money?
How clean is my house? How could my hair grow faster?
Could my saucepans bring on menopause?
Black sunburned purple yellow
Closed, washed out, blurry, watering, beyond seeing, bleeding
Are your eyes too small for contacts? Can your eyes be transplanted to a friend?
Pawn stars, recruited and funky, be my escape

Facebook is a tickfree field

When bored or reading, dieting, ovulating, raining, running
the weather is thirsty for Adderall
When they are caught, they are thrown away
Do our jobs reminisce over us after we’re gone?
These lines should be caged at night
Flying dramawiki noble masters made of meat
Eggmen tucked into cannons
Zombie imitators are also sons of god

Charming gardeners of the underworld
Are thongs comfortable? Are the seasons capitalized?
Are the Poughkeepsie Tapes real? Are the Knicks in the playoffs?
Are the colon and the large intestine the same thing?
Coyotes are moving to Winnipeg

                  Starfish
                  Stars from hottest to coolest
                  Star Trek uniforms
                  Starling eggs
                  Stains

Starless and sunless ballrooms, and their failed light

Smoothing methods, statistical manifold, sampling theorem
This is a notational form of decay
He subtracts from her surface brightness
Optic citation, meridian, her belly her skin
On Monday or in Monday grammar
Throw best price thresher shark
The miles are threadless, thrillist
Let’s throw knives and throw pillows at her cancer
Struggle tabs, her blood was silver
Sloe slip rings, sliding doors, slant drilling
Dressed in slats, strangle wisteria
What materials are your fingernails made of?
Widows weaving wreathes, wattle whistle, wide brimmed
She said, “Money is like us”
Mooncake phases, a sonata, a palace filled with chattal
Swoon, sow, sorrow
Two slowniks sewn together – what is their moonsign compatibility?
Snow White, her salted lovesickness, wings and roots
Curating Tanya’s disasterous electric circuits
A taxidermied alchemist teaching lesson in Go
Bourbon under the stars
A halophile is responsible for spoiling juices
Egyptian agriculture, washing pictures, Moses wasps

                  A traveller’s anthology
                  A god
                  A history
                  A novel
                  A river

Turner painted the water in our bodies as
porcelain graphite castles
There is an ossification in Bone Lick Park
An ivory orchard full of oracles, possibly tucked in
Wig runescape, cracked wasabi, glass powder
The rain on your skin and you do it anyway
This song is sick and this why you are fat
It might be that I’m holding your hand but holding it a little too loose
Fossils and towels, the smell of shade
A town called Alice or Panic
A cocktail of sand, brainticket black, pineal gland
Lightheaded, sequential type unconnected, sensebowl
Surroundsushi, superfood suppression
Both atomic bombs, 4 years on an island, his wife, a tornado, rabies
Neverland necrotizes, an unmediated decay
The 10 commandments or 10 things I hate about you or 10 ragas to a disco beat
10 raw eggs, 10 raw potatoes with a longjaw mud snapper
Linseed oil and lemon bars and lettuce wraps

There are some letters spacing out in every word
There is a white heart whispered in every story
Name when all the continents were together
Name when you die
Name when I arrive
Name when a bowl is not microwave safe

A billion Chinese jump and one body part is injured – which one?
Lemons, white rice, pebbles and moss, cherries, onions
Her arms amputated around me
Heavy weak numb tired tingly on fire, like home
They are asleep, they are burning,
Something is stuck in my throat, in my eye
Somebody is stuck in my chest, is crawling on my skin, is staring at me, is biting me
The structure of falling asleep, in my rearview seas

***

ABOUT THE POET:

Photo by Elizabeth Bryant

Anne Gorrick is the author of I-Formation (Book One) (Shearman Books, 2010), the forthcoming I-Formation (Book Two), and Kyotologic (also from Shearsman Books, 2008). She collaborated with artist Cynthia Winika to produce a limited edition artists’ book, “Swans, the ice,” she said, funded by the Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, NY and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Images of her visual art can be found at www.theropedanceraccompaniesherself.blogspot.com

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ALAN BAKER

2011-11-04T07:33:00.000-07:00

WHAT IS (PART OF) YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE?

On a dark, snowy morning in 1985 I stood on a picket line in solidarity with the miners of Wolstanton Colliery, Staffordshire. By then, the strike was crumbling, and the miners and their various groups of local supporters were helpless to stop the trucks rolling into the colliery. I had spent the previous year, in London and Staffordshire giving miners accommodation in my flat in London and organising food deliveries to the communities around Wolstanton after I moved there. As day broke, the shift of strike-breakers had passed through the lines and the crowd drifted away. As I looked back I saw a group of three miners warming their hands at a brazier before they also wandered away. The final defeat of the National Union of Mineworkers happened just a month or so later.

On a late summer morning in 2008, I sat at my desk at work watching the cars on the busy road outside our office, while the newsfeed on my screen flashed up the unimaginable amounts of money that Prime Minister Gordon Brown was handing over to the the privately-owned, failed banks. Twenty billion? Forty? Eighty billion. The figures kept rising. It seemed unreal. But I remember thinking "this money's got to come from somewhere". Now we know it's coming from schools, hospitals, museums, libraries—you name it—even from small poetry publishers.

Since the defeat of organized labour in the form of its most powerful union, Britain has been governed by the right; by Conservatives, and the neo-conservative New Labour. Of course, in the period since 1985, there have been things to celebrate and be encouraged by—the recent student protests, for example, and the current occupation of financial districts around the world. Nevertheless, for me, and many like me, living in Britain since the defeat of the miners has been like living in occupied territory. So, the world hasn't felt much different since 2008. The process of dismantling of the Welfare State had begun, and now that process has accelerated. Along with friends who work in the public sector (I'm in the private sector) I've been on demonstrations and marches, my daughter, a university student, took part in the recent student protests (and the teenage son of one friend was kettled and beaten by police in London). A younger generation has been politicized, and a sense of solidarity has been created.

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HOW HAS THE GREAT RECESSION AFFECTED YOUR POETRY?

Around the time that the banking bubble finally burst, provoking the current crisis, I had coincidentally entered a phase of using found text and borrowed language in my poetry, and, as the world around me became affected by the events following the crash of 2008, this was reflected in the language I used. Events also tend to influence what we read, as we turn to texts that may help make sense of our situation. Did I say 'what we read'? I meant what we read, watch and listen to, or overhear. These discourses, in turn, find their way into the poetry. The poetry I wrote at this time may be a reflection of how we can't escape the knowledge of events, and of the bigger political forces acting on us; they are on the airwaves and digital pathways, and intertwine with, and maybe define, our more personal thoughts and concerns. I didn't set out to 'include history' in my poems, but history and contemporary events became part of what they reflected.

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PLEASE SHARE A POEM(S) ADDRESSING YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE:

from EVERYDAY SONGS

**

possible worlds
revolve on the ring-road
between gear changes
and ferocious word-play

unprecedented steps
by the Bank of England
what time will I get home
to revive the economy

though he wonders
when he'll see
his family again, yet
the stars are grinning

in a speculative
but benevolent way,
watching his lonely progress
through the dancing traffic

**

roadworks on the M5
occasional sun,
the finance minister
being inflammatory

cows flashing
past, the day brightening,
thoughts straggling
the structure of the brain

how much petrol's left
and is desperately sorry
and happy by turns,
in limbo or the Elysian fields

in the green and pleasant
not one to spoil things,
but, of course,
there is no 'present moment'

**

the walkers are walking
their dogs in the dusk,
the park is a fair
field full of folk

and such is the irresistible
nature of truth,
that all it asks,
and all it wants

is the liberty of appearing,
in justice and plain dealing,
not king-waste and delusion,
England's lamentable slaverie

the kettle’s boiled,
the shops are open,
the street-lights are shining
in the english night

***

ABOUT THE POET:

Alan Baker was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1958, and now lives in Nottingham. He founded the poetry publisher Leafe Press in 2000, and is now co-editor, and editor of its associated webzine Litter. His translation of Yves Bonnefoy's Début et Fin de la Neige was published by Bamboo Books, California. His poetry is published on-line at Shearsman, Great Works, Shadowtrain, Stride and others. His most recent collection of poetry is Variations on Painting a Room: Poems 2000-2010 (Skysill Press, 2011).

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HARRIET ZINNES

2011-11-03T09:50:00.000-07:00

WHAT IS (PART OF) YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE?

All historical events have an impact on the financial world. What Guernica did to the economy certainly had an impact on today's Great Recession.

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HOW HAS THE GREAT RECESSION AFFECTED YOUR POETRY? / PLEASE SHARE A POEM(S) ADDRESSING YOUR EXPERIENCE:

Guernica

To back to 1937
when Picasso painted Guernica
is to go back in time,
but not in space,
not in touch,
not in sight,
not even in history.
Guernica is there.
It was and is,
and history is not over.

It is and begins.
Its waste lingers.
There are no outcasts in history.
We are all in its throes.

[First published in Colorado Review as well as in the poet's book, Light Light or the Curvature of the Earth (Marsh Hawk Press, New York).]

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ABOUT THE POET:

Harriet Zinnes is Professor Emerita of English of Queens College of the City University of New York. Her many books include Whither Nonstopping (poems), Drawing on the Wall (poems), My, Haven’t the Flowers Been? (poems), Entropisms (prose poems), Lover (short stories), The Radiant Absurdity of Desire (short stories), Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts (criticism), and Blood and Feathers (translations of the French poetry of Jacques Prévert). She is contributing editor of The Hollins Critic and a contributing writer as art critic of The New York Arts Magazine.

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ANONYMOUS

2011-11-03T03:43:00.000-07:00

WHAT IS (PART OF) YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE?

Neither of my books accepted for publication in 2008 will be issued. Three books I accepted for publication on my own press have yet to come out.

We are selling our books and CDs, and trying to sell collectibles and art and antiques. We have to sell our beautiful house -- the second in a row I've restored as GC [general contractor]. We sell as soon as I finish, not because we're upside down, but because we have to cash out our equity. I'm so tired.

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HOW HAS THE GREAT RECESSION AFFECTED YOUR POETRY?

I haven't written since this Spring. There seems to be no point; I have more than ten unpublished manuscripts. My husband stopped writing and publishing fiction. After his novel came out, I did the p.r., and couldn't get him a reading tour. I spend most of my time sleeping; I blame it on the cancer, but that's not true (although it is hard to come to terms with that in the poetry). I have to start medication again tomorrow, and I will go crazy again. When I was crazy on the medication in the Spring, I filled four notebooks with writing I have yet to transcribe. I did start to revise a lot of poems toward addressing cancer, and submit them to presses, but they were pretty soundly rejected. But now I have to be crazy and get the house ready to sell and find a job.

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PLEASE SHARE A POEM(S) ADDRESSING YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE:

I haven't written anything recently, and I have to fix my computer to access anything old. I'm using my husband's old laptop to type this. I missed BKS' California Telephone Book deadline, as well as the Dusie chapbook deadline. I didn't even finish August postcard poetry month.

***

ABOUT THE POET:

This Anonymous is author of eight books published on well known national and international presses. As editor and independent scholar, she's specialized in women's writing, technology and writing, and innovative poetry.

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JOHN BLOOMBERG-RISSMAN

2011-11-02T18:38:00.000-07:00

WHAT IS (PART OF) YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE?

“Hard Times in the Land of Plenty”

Source: YouTube/Sesame Street, New York Daily News, 4 Oct 011, where the caption reads: “Lily, the newest muppet on 'Sesame Street', comes from an impoverished family that is food insecure. Her character will be introduced in a primetime special.”

Once you have made yourself comfortable and visualized the flamingo, still your mind, soften your heart, melt your muscles. This is not an authoritative directive; for example, stop thinking!—lighten up!—relax! This is simply a very gentle suggestion, a reminder, if you will, to still your mind, heart, and body in the way that a plastic pink flamingo is still. Quite still. Once your restless totality quiets, and the flamingo is center stage, then quietly say, “Pink flamingo one.” If you begin to smile, that is great. (If you don’t, don’t worry about it.) Take a breath. Say out loud, “Pink flamingo two.” Again, take a breath. You should feel a little calmer. (If you don’t, don’t worry about it.) Now say, “Pink flamingo three,” and take another breath. Feel peace descend. Your job is off-shored; doesn’t matter. You go to college but get a job in retail for eight dollars an hour; doesn’t matter. Your house is foreclosed; doesn’t matter. “Pink flamingo four.” Worry fades away. Visualizing a plastic pink flamingo has a way of helping me let go of little irritations and complaints.
—Renée E D’Aoust, “American Flamingos & Road Kill: A Monologue in Six Parts”, at Drunken Boat 14

Dear Eileen, everything is connected to everything else: every bit of our history since we stumbled into agriculture, capitalism’s neoliberal / financialized stage (our epoch), income inequalities, poverty, immigration, all the wars that are being waged everywhere, a broken healthcare system, massive starvation in the South, ongoing planetary destruction, the list is nearly endless, I won’t try to be the least bit comprehensive, but I do want to include the 147 million orphans you speak so eloquently about. Their lives and fates are intertwined with all of the above and then some. I know you’re not asking for a polemic; the emphasis, as I take your first question, is on the word “your.” But if I wander a bit it’s because I am utterly certain that the Great Recession IS connected to everything else. Therefore so is my Recession experience.

But I promise to try to stay focused on my sense of the intent of your question.

I suppose my first “Great Recession” experience took place in 1980. It was the day after Reagan was elected. Burt Lipman, next to whom I worked at the time, turned to me and said (and this is an exact quote), “Now it begins: the rape of America.”

Burt was so right. I remember the bust of the 1980s, out of which we climbed via the looting of the Savings & Loans industry. Next came the downturn of the early 90s; the dot com bubble saved us that time. We were all going to be millionaires, remember those days? There was a recession when that bubble burst, from which nothing saved us. Our problems since then until the meltdown of 07/08 and forward you have called The Great Recession.

I only mention all this because I didn’t “need a weatherman” to have known this was coming for a long time. Tho of course I knew nothing of subprime mortgages (I thought subprime had something to do with the prime rate!), CDOs, etc. But it was obvious we were doing something unsustainable, that we were living in a house of cards: wages had been flat for 40 years, wealth was concentrating into fewer and fewer hands and … well, I could add and mix a million metaphors, but I’m guessing there’s no need to.

Attendant upon the foregoing is a sense of great anger and great sadness. We’ll be trapped in this mess for a long time. Not forever—neither Badiou nor Žižek would forgive me ;-) if I said forever, and I don’t believe in forever, myself; we’re not at the “end of history”, and this sense of horrid stasis-at-best is “just a buzz, some kind of temporary”; something unexpected will happen, and then, and then, … who knows? I have my own crazy ideas … some of them are even positive … but I know what they’re worth … Anyhow, things will change.

But even this other and hopefully better future won’t be particularly personal. It’ll affect all of us. Or those of our descendants living several generations from now.

But tho I will try to keep this writing as personal as I can, per my perception of your intent, it won’t get all that personal. Why? Because I’ve been lucky. The only way that I’ve been directly affected is that my partner in publishing has had to bow out, so we shut down Leafe Press. I still have a job (tho my benefits are getting worse). My kids have jobs. Their spouses have jobs. We all eat. We all sleep indoors …

So what I will talk about is my experience of how the Great Recession, or at least they way it’s being used (cf. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine), is affecting, and effectively destroying public higher education. I’ve worked in a public university system for 25 years, but I won’t just focus on my system, at least not at first, since what I know is true in much of the Western world.

First of all, universities are more and more putting their dollars and emphases on programs that generate revenue. I’ll give an example: certain industries, such as biotech, depend on universities to do the basic research. The universities, using essentially unpaid grad student labor, do this research, patent it, and then sell the patents to industry, which of course turn a profit on the whole transaction when they turn the basic patents into viable products. Then they send some of that money back into the university, so that the cycle will continue. But that’s not all; note that I said some of that money. I should have said “not enough”. Why? Because industry knows that the federal government and private foundations and student fees, etc, will cover the rest of the cost.

Now I could imagine someone saying that this is all very logical, but what they don’t consider is that this bodes very ill for funding adequately the parts of the university that don’t generate revenue. I sat next to a very successful investment banker at dinner a year or two ago (he ran a bank in NYC til he retired recently), and, because he had been called in by UC Davis to help them find ways to more fruitfully invest their capital, he was quite aware of this problem. He too was worried sick about the fate of the humanities and some of the social sciences.

Since that dinner, we have watched our fears play out in the closing of e.g. philosophy departments in the UK, the comp lit dept at SUNY Albany, etc. I have read official UC documents noting that revenue-generating departments and colleges will be privileged going forward over those that can’t show ROI.

Additionally, and now I’m speaking of the UCs in particular, I have watched the cost to students rise significantly. While it’s still cheaper to attend a UC than it is to attend a private, that’s only on paper. The privates have known for ages that students can’t pay $30-50-odd-thousand; very few people have that kind of money. So they have a long tradition of serious financial aid programs. Not so for public universities, the UCs included. To give just one example, it was cheaper for my officemate to send his son to Harvard than to Cal.

Now I’ll focus on something I know intimately: libraries. I’ve been a librarian for 25 years, and a collections librarian for the last 10 or so. I’m the librarian at UC Riverside responsible for the Humanities and Social Sciences collections at present. Though there was a recession at the turn of the millennium, the budget for humanities monographs was probably $500,000. My own budget for my own specialty disciplines (history, English, philosophy, religious studies, creative writing) was over $250,000.

A decade later, the monographic budget for ALL disciplines, including sciences and social sciences is not more more than the humanities budget used to be. In fact, the last few years it’s been less. The only reason it will be as much as it is this year is because the chancellor has mandated that it be so, even though the result will be a significant number of layoffs. So we may be able to buy books, but we won’t be able to process them in any timely fashion.

What does this mean? It means that we will no longer be able to build collections. We will no longer be able to buy a book “just in case” (meaning so that someone get it from the shelves because they read about it in another book, or can stumble across it serendipitously—and I doubt I have to explain what this means for collecting poetry); we now buy books on a “just in time” basis—meaning because someone has asked for a specific title.

In order to mitigate the effect of what to every librarian and student and researcher is a, shall I say, “less-than-ideal” situation, I have been very involved—in fact I’ve been the project manager—on something called Demand-Driven Acquisitions. This means that we will load lots and lots of records in our library catalog for stuff we don’t own, to help library users discover it. If it’s an e-book, they can just click the link and start using the book. But if it’s print, we’ll have to place an order and they’ll have to wait a week or two. Since we have to make sure that we don’t exceed our budget, we have to very carefully vet the titles that we choose to load. The standard way to do this is by publisher. You don’t need to be told that there will be lots of records for Stanford University Press, and Oxford University Press, and Routledge, etc,—the publishers which are important to academia and academic advancement—and very few if any for Action Books and Kelsey St and Meritage Press…

The other way that the UCs libraries have attempted to cope with diminished-and-unlikely-to-be-replaced resources is via what’s known as Shared Print. This is a systemwide effort in which I’ve also had involvement. The idea is that one or two campuses will buy a title, rather than five or seven or ten. I am trying desperately to get SPD as a whole picked up as a shared print project, so that at least one copy of every SPD title will be purchased. That’s not perfect, but it’s better than nothing. But in any case, shared print will result in a harder row to hoe for publishers, as well as the students and researchers who will have to borrow books held on other campuses.

So all in all one could say that the Great Recession is affecting the ability of the arts and humanities to sustain themselves, assuming that the university’s been a somewhat supportive player, in terms of teaching, research and purchasing of materials.

Why is this important? Why does this make me sad, why does this make me angry? Well, I saw a graphic in the NY Times a week or two ago. It linked education level to voting. The lower the level of education, the more likely a voter is to take seriously racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-science, religiously fanatical, etc etc candidates. Now, I’m not a strict believer in enlightenment-only values, and I know there are all kinds of problems with higher education, but I surely don’t want to live under the Taliban.

I hope that goes some way towards answering the question.

***

HOW HAS THE GREAT RECESSION AFFECTED YOUR POETRY?

I’ve been working on a long poem cycle called "Zeitgeist Spam." This poem is designed to “get it all in.” I think of it as an altar-piece or a fresco. The “panel” I started a year ago, in the midst of the recession and all its attendant ills, is called "In the House of the Hangman." The title derives from a Theodor Adorno quote that goes something like this: “In the house of the hangman, it is impolite to speak of the noose.” By the house of the hangman, he meant Germany, and by the noose, he meant the Nazi past. Well, it seemed and seems to me that we all live in the hangman’s house now. And I at least feel compelled to speak of the noose, which in this case is not the Nazi past, it’s the everything I mention above that’s connected to everything else. It’s the “postmodern condition”, I guess, which I interpret to mean something like end of, or at least the putting on hold of, what Ernst Bloch called hope.

So this is the “hell panel.” There’s a special focus on “the noose.” Why? I’ve been asked why I write about all this horrible stuff. The answer is really simple. I have grandchildren. I am afraid they will inherit a world much worse, much more difficult to live in, than the one in which I grew up. If they ever read my work, I want them to say, “Grandpa was paying attention. He was on the job.” I don’t want them to say, “What was he thinking … useless old man …”

But I don’t want them to think, “Wow, Grandpa didn’t have any fun,” either. So the challenge is to find a balance, and to not leave anything out.

***

PLEASE SHARE A POEM(S) ADDRESSING YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE:

From "In the House of the Hangman"

Can Europe be saved? No underlying goo will be found. Period. Any juicehead will get some nut shrinkage. Ironically, the corpse was deposited just across the road from where I once encountered a big, mysterious pile of dead carp. Large carp–the orange kind you find in garden pools, swimming around lazily. These had been dead for maybe a couple of weeks, and had lost their color, and most of the smell. I could see ambulance spelled backwards, I could see the eels spilling out of the horse’s head, we are seeing proposals for urban-scale fortresses made from freshwater injection wells, artificial troglodyte homesteads in Long Beach constructed with from rocks harvested from debris basins, crawling bagpipe-machines (actually built!) that walked around London powered by bike pumps and bleating like sheep, pollution-harvesting devices in the skies of southern California that will collect dust and carbon through electromagnetic attractors, future climate-prediction mechanisms and the networked sensorscapes that make them possible, synthetic orchards, mobile well heads, resistance-powered lamps in the chaparral monitoring seasonal windspeeds, “kit architectures” for unstable landscapes, “cloud dispensers” and other augmented climatologies, machine-cowboys overseeing herds of hydrotropic robots on the dry bed of Owens Lake, groundwater filtration interfaces for sites where the hills hit urban flatlands, open-source bio-fuel experimentation labs run by amateur genetic engineers, urban oxygen gardens, experimental greenhouses running test-climates for a future earth, a new studio for Ai Weiwei, and a dozen other projects, all of which will continue to be developed, tweaked, or abandoned etc. as the workshop moves on. “Go straddle a narwhal.” We're all forever indebted to a stranger for sharing that gem. Also, whaaat? He knows Pi to the 46th digit? This guy sounds awesome. Why was he the assistant manager of a Domino’s to begin with? You’re better off, man! Nobody wants to mix lava cake for some humorless jerk who spells narwhal “narwhale”. Necropastoral, eh? Contaminatory and ripe for contamination. Insane in the membrane which, famously, Death (and Art) can easily traverse (Hence, Eot in Arcadia Ego), like, like, fraud, counterfeit, ventriloquy, and necromancy – four of my fave genres! She walks into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs. A group of exobiologists wrangle half-heartedly in an empty Pret a Manger. Travelers will see stones in animal shapes. Losing it—the young woman was crying on the phone. She wanted her blurb back. She was saving it. They all passed out naked in the motel room. I Am One of an Infinite Number of Monkeys Named Shakespeare, or, to quote Gopal Balakrishnan on Alain Badiou’s The Century: History was never, then, the actual condition of the innovations associated with modernism and revolutionary politics, but merely the rhetoric of temporality deployed to protect a fragile, innovative present from a menacing past by enclosing it in an imaginary future. Another way to put that: a dark television is a lost opportunity, when you could stuff it with 77 million paintings. An Italian man shot in the head on New Year’s Eve sneezes out the bullet on 11 Jan. When the Immigrant first appears, there is an excess that seems to scumble beyond the light. Something intervenes where the self, itself, affixes itself. There is always something touching, something moving, but out of hand … In all cases, color begins in a matrix of information. But in one group of works, it goes directly to a printer where it is mixed on a fabric substrate in 3 successive passes. Nowhere in this procedure is there a reified screen image. What can be said to be at stake, rather, is the movement from pure quantity to the output of the printer without the mediation of design. 1 + 1 = 3: “The point is that abstraction, which never looks quite like itself, is always lacking (decorative, senseless) while also seeming to be ‘too much.’ It is the handmaiden of emptiness as well as the herald of excesses. And it is always the seeming-lacking that charges the feeling or presentiment – the vague expression of a judgment – that somehow, threateningly, there is too, uh … I dunno … too … well, fucked-up power relations. Doesn’t this crooked pathway of suspicions and avoidances bespeak a passage in the terrain that we presume to call the unconscious? And is ‘abstraction,’ then, a name for little traces of migrant affect?” It’s a blank swan thing. Here is Beatrix Potter, describing the action of a rolling pin on a kitten pudding: roly-poly, roly; roly, poly, roly … This is hardly language at all, and perhaps for that reason there is no latitude in its interpretation. So someone is named named One-Half-the-World’s-Population,-Approximately-3-Billion-People-on-Six-Continents,-Lives-or-Works-in-Buildings-Constructed-of-Dirt. Atmospheres include dankness, smoke, gas, and exhaust; Matter contains dust, puddles, mud, and debris; and Life includes weeds, insects, pigeons, and crowds. During the day, they’d give lectures on altered consciousness, the double kingdom, and the line. Ecclesiastes or Buddhist “only don't. as luminous shit. comet’s path of

If you feel no forget to get some

What then is poetry? have two questions:

FIRST. You me repeatedly

as you seem Sounds to me those of? Dark and to be “splendiferous” in your least?

What is (and painful), as you will force again:

“I have learned the measure of our cacophony What else
Could it be? What is the relationship between gushing-forth of love affairs and chemical spiritual discontent, but that is a present, and a true traveler’s curiosity you will have a you will have a for it.

And do shall swallow and expel as being … pure. Except densely detailed, thickly textured, richly imaged beautiful sunset melody on one cannot speak, thereof one (to be?) the measure of to do with once believed, The day I cease burning, the Absolute, you might want to

take (to be?) the us? the

Full disclosure: when I which
one is to amid the “only don't know” (as a are? The people wishing you something so seemingly usual simplifying “time” into visionary self—whatever Oh, Bite me, Tongue …

***

ABOUT THE POET:

John Bloomberg-Rissman is somewhere towards the middle of a project called Zeitgeist Spam. The first two volumes have been published: No Sounds of My Own Making, and Flux, Clot & Froth. The third section, In the House of the Hangman, is underway. In the House of the Hangman is a mashup. All sources have been documented, and citations will be included upon publication. In addition to his Zeitgeist Spam project, he has edited or co-edited two anthologies, 1000 Views of 'Girl Singing' and The Chained Hay(na)ku Project, and is at work on a third, a collaboration with Jerome Rothenberg. He blogs at Zeitgeist Spam.

'

LENY M. STROBEL

2011-11-02T09:17:00.000-07:00

WHAT IS (PART OF) YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE? / HOW HAS IT AFFECTED YOUR POETRY?

Ay, Ading! How do I begin to talk about the global recession?

Ah, for starters: this is the consequence of an economic concept conjured by the neoliberal assumptions of limitless economic hypergrowth and mobilized by the unholy trinity of the IMF, WB, and WTO whose failed policies have been put on steroids through structural adjustment programs imposed on the debtor countries. A circle of debt envelopes the global economy and no one is paying up. Decades ago there was a clamor to forgive the debts of the poorest countries in the world and only a handful got a reprieve. The engines of corporate capitalism and financial magicians thought that they could create something out of nothing, and now the house of cards that the global casino economy has become is crumbling.

The global recession: what is in recess? what is an economic recession? are there other kinds of recessions? is depression the synonym of recession in psychological terms?

Recess was my favorite subject in elementary school. Wasn’t it yours, too? That’s when we got to play outside, eat our baon or buy merienda from the sari-sari store, notice the cute boys, etc. Recess is fun.

Now we take a fun word and turn it into recession and suddenly it becomes a word that stirs up fear. Well, our economic myth has always capitalized on our fears to keep the profits flowing for the stakeholders, so why not manufacture fear, yes? It sells.

And it’s all about selling and buying—this global economy. Everything is a commodity. What I eat, what I wear, where I live, what I watch to entertain myself—are all global products.

I refuse to be commodified so I defy the words global recession! This phrase that conjures the worst scenario—the bleakness that is about to engulf us if we do not turn around from the wrong course we’ve been on for five centuries—feels to me like beating a dead horse.

The drums that beat about the end of the American dream, their rhythms getting faster, induce a sense of panic.

But there is an antidote to this toxic story. Yes, I said it: the architects of the global corporate economy unleashed toxins on the planet and now we are faced with the unintended consequences of our flawed assumptions about limitless resources, about the belief in an inanimate earth, about the belief in the magic of positive thinking (thank you, Barbara Ehrenreich). If you build it they will come. Well, China has just built the largest shopping mall on the planet in Guangdong and nobody came. In fact, they built 500 of them—all of them still waiting for their middle class to arrive to shop.

Why do I always get sidetracked? Oh, as I was thinking/saying…what I mean by antidote is this: what if I were an indigenous person living in the Sierra Madre mountains of Colombia who escaped the conquistadors and managed to live undisturbed for five hundred years, and therefore, had no concepts like global recession or have never heard of the American dream? How would such persons interpret the changes that they were noticing in their environment? The mountains no longer filled with snow in the winter and so their rivers have run dry affecting their vegetation and ultimately, their very way of life? These are the Kogi people. They saw that their Mother was getting sick and they were worried that their younger brothers (the modern ones) were doing things to the earth that were causing the illness, so they came out of hiding and began to have conversations with visitors from the outside (like BBC, Wade Davis of National Geographic, and other environmental groups that have now “found” them).

What about the Amazonian elder that David Suzuki brought to Seattle? David thought that the indigenous elder would be impressed by the tall skyscrapers and marvel at the wonders of his world; instead the elder said: oh my, how can mother nature replace what’s been used up to build this?

What about the indigenous woman leader from a Mindanao tribe who exclaimed at a symposium with the Fulbright teachers I brought with me from California in 2008: Please allow us to express our beauty! We do not need your versions of development and progress!

What about the women of Ladakh who lament that their sons and daughters have gone to the city to get an education; who would till the fields and tend to the animals when they are gone? And the kids who have gone to the city and learned to speak English say now their lives are all about money. If I don’t make money, I am nothing. (in Schooling the World, a videodocumentary).

Do you see why I don’t like the words global recession? I do not buy into the theoretical construct behind the word. It’s true that what we are witnessing today are human-made consequences of overdevelopment, mis-use of resources, endless wars, not only military but also “war on drugs, war on terror, war on poverty,” etc. Don’t even get me started on the concept of war.

Did you know that there is a connection between war and food? Ask Vandana Shiva (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flpFnfK_3Yo). That fertilizers that were used to make bombs used during World War 2 were later offered to industrial farmers?

I digress again. Back to global recession. So there is a recession if your assumption is that the global economy should stay on a linear growth path, or if the assumption is that the American lifestyle should go global because it is the best. We package it as “freedom” and seduce the world with commercials. It is the “end of history” theory rearing its head. Oh, if only we know of seven planets where we can migrate to.

We already know that we are almost out of solutions. Bailouts didn’t work. International accords don’t work especially when powerful countries like the U.S. refuse to sign protocols and agreements—whether it’s curbing carbon emissions (the Kyoto protocol) or making a stand against racial apartheid (at the Durban conference on Racism). We already know that tax cuts for the wealthy have not created jobs (it did, however, make plenty of profits that are stashed away in Swiss banks and off-shore banks, for the wealthy). Inconvenient truth, as Al Gore calls it.

"House of Grief" from Detroit's Art Walk

So yes, we are in the midst of an economic recession. But this simply means that we have exhausted the limits of the modernist story. It is time to revisit other stories that can disentangle us from the ravages of modernity.

Decolonization is not just for the post-colonial subject anymore. Decolonizing from the modern narratives of self that disassociated us from a participatory sense of place is the work of every modern self that has been colonized by the myth of the masterful bounded self that is separate from nature and non-human creatures and the spirit realms.

In a way, we are all relatives of the economic hit men of the past. Those economic hit men who have now confessed to their sins of selling the economic model and gospel of free trade to developing countries (e.g., John Perkins, David Korten) are calling for a different kind of story—The Great Turning, Revolution from the Heart of Nature, Another World is Possible, and more recently, Occupy Wall Street – these themes are the mantras of our time.

The onus is on us—those of who us in the U.S. We are the belly of the beast. China, India, Latin America and the rest of the world are all mimicking us now. They will become modern and surpass the U.S. consumption and materialism. They will buy stuff until they are sated and realize that they are still dissatisfied. We know. We’ve been there.

I’ve always intuited that the U.S. will turn to its spiritual resources when the hubris of materialism finally catches up with us. When we wake up and acknowledge the shadows of history that we have denied or repressed, we will search for ways to grieve and heal.

That is why I believe in Poets in the same way that I don’t believe in the global recession. This global recession can actually be good for the soul, you know? Maybe we will learn how to become more human. Kapwa we call it. (See HERE and HERE FOR “Kapwa.”) Kagandahang Loob – our inner gem/sacred self. Maybe there is still time to get to know the Earth as our relative.

There is still time to learn how to reclaim our animist senses so that we may see each other and all our relatives through the eye of the Sacred.

There is still time to embody what we know in our heads so that when that knowledge descends into our cells, it transforms us. Our fears are transformed.

The rage and anger that we see all around us are projections of that repressed fear. Fear is nothing but unreleased grief.

I want to be a Poet of Grief. I long to learn the language that releases this grief. I long to learn how to do rituals without words…only the movement of the body. I long to learn how to slow dance into this new awareness. I long to feel more deeply the sacred embrace of the Earth on my small body until a word like global recession withdraws its fangs and is alchemized into a meditation about the beauty of a different Story that is much more ancient than the modern one. One that sits well with my body and soul.

***

PLEASE SHARE A POEM(S) ADDRESSING YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE:

End of History

i am rehearsing
for the
future

when the old
is new
again.

i am bare-faced
claiming power
now

having learned how
to erase
history

nothing can kill me now.

***

ABOUT THE POET:

Leny M. Strobel is the editor of BABAYLAN:Filipinos and the Call of the Indigenous, as well as author of A BOOK OF HER OWN: Words and Images to Honor the Babaylan and COMING FULL CIRCLE: The Process of Decolonization Among Post-1965 Filipino Americans. The more time unfolds, the more she dances.

'

MICHELLE BAUTISTA

2011-11-01T20:07:00.000-07:00

WHAT IS (PART OF) YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE? /HOW HAS IT AFFECTED YOUR POETRY?

I work for a major California public university whose budget, like with other such schools, has been under much pressure...

I used to meet a lot of artists who were campus employees; we all seemed to gravitate here for the same reasons: it paid a decent wage plus it allowed for time to work on our art. You'd find artists in all corners. The academic culture of exploration and well-roundedness permeated even at the staffing level. I don't run into them as often due to my work, but they are still here.

But the projects to save money, become more and more efficient, as well as reducing the staff force, have added stress and work to those that remain. I find myself physically, mentally, and at times emotionally exhausted. At the same time, people are grateful to have a job that still pays for health benefits. I have to admit this past week was the first time in my 14 years here that I ever thought about leaving the university, maybe going to another campus, or maybe leaving it entirely. Though I wonder if it's really greener elsewhere.

In my time here I've had to look people in the eye and tell them, "We had to let you go." And yeah those people had kids and houses and problems. I've gotten promoted and demoted and reorganized. I do a lot of apologizing: to staff because I can't give them any more money, to my boss because we didn't have enough resources to finish on time, to customers because technology just doesn't work the way anyone really wants it to work. And I thank a lot of people, too, for their patience, for their hard work, for sticking around even though all I can give them is a thank you. I don't expect a thank you. And that's ok.

At the same time, both my husband and I are fortunate to still have decently paying jobs each with good health care coverage.

As for my writing/poetry, much of it got put on hiatus well before the crisis as I dealt with the personal crisis of infertility. 4 years of trying, 2 miscarriages later we finally got some answers to why and where to go from here. But not after rollercoasters of sadness and hope and a whole reworking of my own identity as a mother and aunt and how children fit in my life now and in the future. I actually have a blog I've never made public that I used as personal therapy. I didn't want to reveal this process before simply because they were other forms of grief and I needed to protect myself from being exposed. Even then, it took the 2nd miscarriage 3 years after the first to actually contextualize and articulate the grief I had experienced after the first miscarriage. It took 4 years for me to actually speak of this to anyone outside my sister and a few close friends.

Oh I know there's a world monetary crisis, and we aren't properly counting the numbers of people who are really unemployed and underemployed. I have not kept up on who's to blame. But I already went through a phase of blaming myself, and don't really have any more energy to blame anyone else.

What all of it makes me wonder is what is really necessary and what is really important? I think, oh we had wanted to buy a stand alone house to raise our children (whenever they may come), but at the same time, this condo is just fine. And it's a block away from my sister and her family. And we have a pool that I teach my nephew to swim in. And a short drive away I visit my parents and grandmother and their dog. And I still go to my local farmer's market, because I want to know who my dollar goes to even though it can be way more expensive than Safeway.

And yeah, there's a financial crisis yet I'm sure there will be millions of people still with cash running to buy the new iPhone model.

In the meantime, I'm working on a Tagalog/English children's book with an artist friend of mine that I hope to self publish to a kindle/ipad format. Because really, this next generation doesn't really use books. So how does that change what poetry looks like and how people interact with poetry or writing for that matter. While I lament the death of paper books, I find it all the more encouraging that literature whether bad/good/great is getting more and more accessible. Classic novels are free online. Books for $0.99.

I put my poetry on hold because I wanted to just fully experience what was going on. I refused an invite to the SF Intl book festival because I wasn't ready to participate. Though I'm happy they had a good turn out. And it looked like it was a lot of fun. I spent the weekend running errands with my sister and nephew, who calls me Anya and points to ants on the ground and I figure there will be another Int'l book fest to go to next year, but that my nephew won't show me the ants on the ground again.

I do know I will return to poetry because I can feel the poems in me. But for now much of my writing happens at work, picking the right phase to deliver bad news, find the correct tone to encourage people to have just a little bit more patience and to do it all without stepping on anyone's last frayed nerve including my own.

We soon embark on the what could possibly be the final tries at getting pregnant with invitro fertilization. And from what the last 4 years have taught me, it's important for me to be present, forgiving, truthful, and loving. And I'm hoping those things will get me through the Great Recession too.

"...a screen shot from a video of me and my nephew swimming. Abstract but with enough detail to show what I find important nowadays."

*

As I think about "recession poetics," I find myself worn out by work. I entered management without any kind of experience into a department already in the red at the start of all these cutbacks. Navigated the staff through two mergers, two staff cuts, and doubling of customers in an environment where the customers are all stressed out and critical about everything. While I've worked to integrate all the training I've gotten on how to be a good supervisor/manager, rumor has it people say I'm still underachieving of my potential. I really don't know what they want from me anymore.

I haven't felt this way about my work since 10 years ago. The growing fatigue waking up each morning. The Sunday dread wondering if I can make it through this week.

I find myself polishing up my resume I haven't touched for 2 years and talking with my husband about what if I quit and looking into some career counseling to see how I could take my skill sets out of the university. Or maybe we move out of the bay to some place with cheaper housing where I could quit and do what I love, whatever that was or be a stay at home mom. Why, in this recession, am I even thinking of quitting when there are alot of people who could use a job? I don't know but sometimes it even seems like a good idea.

But the practical side of me needs a plan, and worries about the credit card bills, and medical expenses. Maybe I can build a empire off of photo postcards on zazzle and building craft stuff to sell on etsy or be like my cousin flipping Russian dolls on eBay to sell to Kansas housewives who fill their kitchens with kitsch. Or would I actually finish writing all those books I wanted to write, need to write because I'm just too tired to do so now.

Maybe it is like the Joseph Campbell quote on my Facebook feed, it's time to let go of the life I planned to go live the life that's waiting for me.

***

PLEASE SHARE A POEM(S) ADDRESSING YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE:

I am sharing "How to Battle a Wind Goddess" from Kali's Blade as I find myself with this desire to fight and struggle, yet get tossed at every turn. I think I'm somewhere in the middle of this poem, not quite at the turning point, still finding a way to inhale, to breathe.

How to Battle a Wind Goddess

“Night, hush, wave, sea, foam. Touch, skin, eyes, mouth, bone. Own, him, her, not, mine. Heart, breathe, walk, us, home.”
-excerpt from performance “Before Their Words” by Maiana Minahal

She had stolen my love. By taking him away she had broken me in two.

In my rage I ran upon her with all my strength. But how do you battle the wind? Defeat a goddess?

To touch something that cannot be seen, to be tossed by her great force, yet capture nothing in my arms.

For hours upon hours we fought. When I trapped her in my cloth she carried me through the heavens. I hid amongst the bamboo learning

to bend and sway in her breeze. I screamed but she deafened me with her howls. She encircled me, crushing me in her tornado.

And then,

I swallowed her. Inhaled her, held her, drove her deep, deep, into my lungs, my pores. Til she infused my blood.

Where she became my flesh I became a wind goddess.

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ABOUT THE POET:

Michelle Bautista, author of Kali's Blade, has worked as a public servant for 14 years and comes from a family of public servants. Having graduated in the middle of the dot com boom, she passed over $80K jobs at consulting firms to take her first job for $34K a major public university. She now finds herself in a flurry of activity of budget cuts, re-orgs, hirings and firings ever wondering these days if she'll be next and if it's time for a career change. At the same time, she continues to believe in the mission of the university and the changes they are making.

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j/j hastain

2011-11-01T08:58:00.000-07:00

WHAT IS (PART OF) YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE? /HOW HAS IT AFFECTED YOUR POETRY?

When Eileen contacted me about this project I was very excited to participate. However I instantly experienced a struggle within myself regarding what writing is for to me and how that gesture (ephemeral activism in the shape of bridge) does not easily correlate with the quotidian or the day to day difficulties of physical reality. A long time ago I told a colleague who asked me why and what I write, that I do not write from my experiences--that that is not the purpose for me. That instead, I compose future spaces in the present, so that the intensities and variegations of future selves (mine and others’ nomadic vagaries) can be guaranteed to have embodiment space. For this reason it was difficult for me to engage by writing (which is ephemeral for me) questions that are so physical and realist. Regardless of that difficulty I have attempted a response to Eileen’s beautiful and opening inquiries, because the spaces of these questions are important and matter in the context of current socio-economic conversation.

All longings and hungers affect (intensify) my composition praxis (from when I was recently in Mexico working with La Casa De Immigrantes helping locals prepare to cross the border and the child asked me for some money and I gave the child everything I had--then had to busk in order to get some money to return back to my home, to my own experiences of homelessness). What is true across the board for me is that I believe that moments exist as physical realities so that we can find ways to nourish them. Yes—nourishment of physical moments by way of ephemeral inventions and intuitive sextants. I believe that this correlation is what form is for.

Regardless of exterior impacts it has always been the case that I feel enabled to engage________. The fact that matter is here, means I can gesticulate and extend. When I was homeless I scrolled my moans (cellular roots) into the dirt with my hands. I hid and slept in citrus groves where I embedded small, inked parchments into the fallen oranges. Although there was pain and difficulty (‘how will I eat tonight?’ or ‘where will I sleep since it is the 15th consecutive day of rain?’) there was never (for me) the feeling of impossibility. It is due to this I think, that I do not now (in the current privilege of my livelihood e.g.: I have a home, I can afford to pay my mortgage, I am married to my beloved and we both have ‘stable’ jobs, etc.) feel much different or set apart from how I felt during different eras (with different economic standings) of my embodiments.

I am saying that if it is important to me to water my plants with a wine glass, regardless of if I can afford to buy a wine glass or if I fashion something that is ‘wine glass’ to me out of detritus, I will have wine glass to water my plants. There is vigorousness to this. There is the assumption that the necessary extensions will be made. I am saying that regardless of the strictly physical qualities of my form (emaciation or emancipation) I vow to myself to exhibit and express in ways that allow me to evolve. I am aware that there is a certain stalwart alterity to this, but for me it feels essential in order for me to continue as planetary inhabitant in ways that feel fruitful enough for me to stay here. It is physically so easy to leave this place--to lubricate a sweet exit out of this plane…a few too many pills, a gun, a cliff. I am aware that for me to stay, I must be completely committed to staying. It is my own commitment to planarity that keeps me here.

Oh contemporaneous Rumi. This is an advocacy for bindery. For finding what it is that makes a me holy (vivified, unstoppable) and engaging that without distraction. This is a pledge to ever couple with and to never cripple. To keep my gestural allegiances poised toward selvage and ally-posterities and prospering (regardless of external influences), and to refuse to limit or squelch anything that could potentially illuminate or sustain.

I chant the following to myself to continually remind me:

If we bind by red we are holy. If we bind red we will suffer.

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PLEASE SHARE A POEM(S) ADDRESSING YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE:

Two "Cell Poems":

"countour heliums"

"if we bind by red"

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ABOUT THE POET

j/j hastain lives in Colorado, USA with xir beloved. j/j is the author of numerous full length, cross genre works as well as many chapbooks and artist’s books. j/j is an Elective Affinities participant, a member of Dusie kollektiv and a regular contributor to Sous Les Paves. j/j’s books have been finalists in the Kelsey Street, Grey Book Press, Sawtooth and Ahsahta book competitions. j/j’s manuscript extant shamanisms won the Pavement Saw poetry award. In 2011 j/j’s book we in my Trans was nominated for the Stonewall Book Award.

As a genderqueer writer maker of things, j/j’s books deal directly with the transgressive body, deviant gender, eros and identity construction as necessary compositional methods to living with empowerment in what can be a diminutive and polarizing world.

j/j is interested in expanding traditional notions of what activism is/ has been/ can be, and doing so via the reimagining of spaces. j/j believes in creating texts/ spaces that are inherently non-linear and a historical. Texts as spaces that have never been patriarchally controlled and cannot be patriarchally controlled. It is j/j’s hope that in these spaces there will be room to experience contemporary moments of truth, eros, convergence, conjunction and profoundly new types and sensations of equity.

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CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

2011-10-30T17:28:00.000-07:00

We are always looking for more poets who would like to share (part of) their experience with the GREAT RECESSION.

Over time, this blog will feature poets presenting the many varied face(t)s of their Great Recession experience, and how such has affected (or not) their poetry.

Participants are asked simply to answer the following three questions:

1) What is (part of) your Great Recession experience?

2) How has the Great Recession affected your poetry?

3) Please share a poem(s) addressing your Great Recession experience.

If you are a poet who would like to participate, feel free to email me at GalateaTen@aol.com

Eileen R. Tabios
Curator, Poet, M.B.A.

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