Poem of the Week: Papermill

PAPERMILL 

By Joseph Kalar

Not to be believed, this blunt savage wind
Blowing in chill empty rooms, this tornado
Surging and bellying across the oily floor
Pushing men out in streams before it;
Not to be believed, this dry fall
Of unseen fog drying the oil
And emptying the jiggling greasecups;
Not to be believed, this unseen hand
Weaving a filmy rust of spiderwebs
Over these turbines and grinding gears,
These snarling chippers and pounding jordans;
These fingers placed to lips saying shshsh:
Keep silent, keep silent, keep silent;
Not to be believed hardly, this clammy silence
Where once feet stamped over the oily floor,
Dinnerpails clattered, voices rose and fell
In laughter, curses, and songs. Now the guts
Of this mill have ceased and red changes to black,
Steam is cold water, silence is rust, and quiet
Spells hunger. Look at these men, now,
Standing before the iron gates, mumbling,
"Who could believe it? Who could believe it?"

 

1931
from Papermill: Poems 1927-1936 (2006)

[I'd never heard of Joseph Kalar before I found this poem posted on Facebook by MN labor organizer Alan Maki. I first thought it was a poem of the collapse of the Rust Belt, but it turns out that the mill closing he describes happened during the early days of the Great Depression--kind of a trial run for the '70s. And the present day...]

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Poem of the Week: On Living

ON LIVING

by Nâzım Hikmet

(translated by Mutlu Konuk and Randy Blasing)

I

Living is no laughing matter:
           you must live with great seriousness
                     like a squirrel, for example--
      I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
                     I mean living must be your whole occupation.
Living is no laughing matter:
           you must take it seriously,
           so much so and to such a degree
      that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,
                                                   your back to the wall,
      or else in a laboratory
            in your white coat and safety glasses,
            you can die for people--
      even for people whose faces you've never seen,
      even though you know living
            is the most real, the most beautiful thing.
I mean, you must take living so seriously
      that even at seventy, for example, you'll plant olive trees--
      and not for your children, either,
      but because although you fear death you don't believe it,
      because living, I mean, weighs heavier.


II

Let's say you're seriously ill, need surgery--
which is to say we might not get
                          from the white table.
Even though it's impossible not to feel sad
                          about going a little too soon,
we'll still laugh at the jokes being told,
we'll look out the window to see it's raining,
or still wait anxiously
                           for the latest newscast ...
Let's say we're at the front--
        for something worth fighting for, say.
There, in the first offensive, on that very day,
        we might fall on our face, dead.
We'll know this with a curious anger,
        but we'll still worry ourselves to death
        about the outcome of the war, which could last years.
Let's say we're in prison
and close to fifty,
and we have eighteen more years, say,
                            before the iron doors will open.
We'll still live with the outside,
with its people and animals, struggle and wind--
                            I mean with the outside beyond the walls.
I mean, however and wherever we are,
        we must live as if we will never die.


III

This earth will grow cold,
a star among stars
                and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet--
        I mean this, our great earth.
This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
        in pitch-black space ...
You must grieve for this right now
--you have to feel this sorrow now--
for the world must be loved this much
                              if you're going to say "I lived"...


February, 1948

[Nizam Hikmet is considered--and not just by me--among the greatest communist poets ever. That reference in the second stanza, framed hypothetically, to being the slammer at 50, with 18 years to serve--Hikmet wrote this in a Turkish prison in the tenth year of a 28 year sentence for inciting revolt in the armed forces. Sailors had been found reading and discussing his poetry.  
The watercolor is a self-portrait drawn in prison.]

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A Crackerjack Election Overview

[With a month to go, even folks who weren't bored by the election to start with are now barely able to suppress a yawn. In part this is due to the spectacular ineptitude of the Romney campaign, which keeps shooting itself in various tender metaphorical body parts, with the result that even media efforts to gin up horse race fever are falling flat. 

To help FotM readers step back and think about what's going on, here is a great overview of the 2012 Presidential election. Part of its usefulness lies in the fact that my friend Mirk wrote it as a primer for folks in Norway, where it is being published in the magazine Rødt!, published by the Red Party there. The step back it provides can be useful for us in a whole 'nother way. ]

 

 

 

 

 by Judith "Mirk" Mirkinson

Yes, it’s election time again: time to elect the president. Every four years Americans are told this is the pinnacle of our democracy, NO! The pinnacle of world democracy! The pundits will be pontificating, the billions will be flowing and the candidates will be slogging it out, drowning us with style over substance. 

 

The US presidential elections are now endless affairs and handled almost like the World Cup or a baseball championship. The economy’s down; that means Romney is up. Romney refuses to release his tax returns: now Obama is up. Every little quote is analyzed, every stupid mistake made bigger. Sound bites abound -it doesn’t matter whether what a candidate says is actually true – people just have to listen. And after awhile people begin to believe what they hear, no matter where the real truth lies. 

 

People have a stake in believing it all and believing that voting every four years for one of the two major parties can make a difference. It’s essential that the electorate think they have a choice and a real voice in what kind of government we will have.

The New York Times, always attempting to bring more gravitas to the charade, laments: “The real issues will not be talked about, no solutions are being offered.” But the show goes on.

It’s not what one has to offer, it’s about how bad the other person is,

As the Republican speaker of the house John Boehner put it recently:

The American people probably aren’t going to fall in love with Mitt Romney. I’ll tell you this: 95 percent of the people that show up to vote in November are going to show up in that voting booth, and they are going to vote for or against Barack Obama.  

The pols and polls keep saying it’s going to be a close race. It seems rather unbelievable, given the incredible excitement generated by Barack Obama only four years ago. One would think that Obama would continue to be the most ideal choice for the corporate ruling class. In reality, he’s a right to middle of the road Democrat who’s presided over a war and militarized security state. At the same time, he’s young, he’s charismatic and he speaks of the future and an America that cares for all the people. As the first African American president he presents an America that has overcome its history – one that is perfect for the U.S. in this new, more complex world we live in. 

 

It’s another ” demonstration election” – a concept perfected in America and now exported all over the world. Choosing among a limited range of options creates the illusion of democracy, and the illusion of real choice. No longer can the US support

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Poem of the Week: Old Lem

OLD LEM 

Sterling Brown

 

I talked to old Lem

and old Lem said:

          “They weigh the cotton

          They store the corn

                We only good enough

                To work the rows;

          They run the commissary

          They keep the books

                We gotta be grateful

                For being cheated;

          Whippersnapper clerks

          Call us out of our name

                We got to say mister

                To spindling boys

          They make our figgers

          Turn somersets

          We buck in the middle

                Say, “Thankyuh, sah.”

                They don’t come by ones

                They don’t come by twos

                But they come by tens.

          “They got the judges

          They got the lawyers

          They got the jury-rolls

          They got the law

                They don’t come by ones

          They got the sheriffs

          They got the deputies

                       They don’t come by twos

          They got the shotguns

          They got the rope

                We git the justice

                In the end

                       And they come by tens.

          “Their fists stay closed

          Their eyes look straight

                Our hands stay open

                Our eyes must fall

                       They don’t come by ones

          They got the manhood

          They got the courage

                       They don’t come by twos

                We got to slink around

                Hangtailed hounds.

          They burn us when we dogs

          They burn us when we men

                       They come by tens . . .

          “I had a buddy

          Six foot of man

          Muscled up perfect

          Game to the heart

                       They don’t come by ones

          Outworked and outfought

          Any man or two men

                       They don’t come by twos

          He spoke out of turn

          At the commissary

          They gave him a day

          To git out the county

          He didn’t take it.

          He said ‘Come and get me.’

          They came and got him

                       And they came by tens.

          He stayed in the county—

          He lays there dead.

                       They don’t come by ones

                       They don’t come by twos

                       But they come by tens.”

    [I chose this relatively well-known poem by Sterling Brown as a followup to last week's "Dead Man Blues" by Lucy Smith. It, too, is a grim and pessimistic look at how the oppression of the Black Nation was maintained in the days before the Civil Rights Movement, and at the double-barreled use of the state and vigilante terror.]

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PotW: Dead Man Blues

DEAD MAN BLUES

by Lucy Smith

Down in the lonesome death cell
A black man sits and sings.
The key he sings is minor
For Sorrow plucks the strings.

       Wish I had died in my cradle, 
       Wish I had never been born;
       For I'm to hang in the morning,
       Hung in the cold, grey morn.

       Here in the valley of the shadow
       From death there's no escape
       I was the nearest black man
       When that white gal hollered rape

Down in the lonesome death cell
He sits and stares at his shoes.
Sorrow plucks the guitar strings
As he sings the Dead Man Blues.

from:

No Middle Ground

(Philadelphia, 1952)

[This reminds me of the work of the great Sterling Brown, "Break Of Day," say.
Seems grim? This is why the Civil Rights Movement erupted.]

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PotW: What Kind of War?

WHAT KIND OF WAR?

by Larry Rottman

Ask what kind of war it is
where you can be pinned down
all day in a muddy rice paddy
while your buddies are being shot
and a close-support Phantom jet
who has been napalming the enemy
wraps itself around a tree and explodes
and you cheer inside?

from:

Winning Hearts and Minds:

War Poems by Vietnam Veterans

(Brooklyn, NY, 1972)

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PotM: In the great snowfall before the bomb

In the great snowfall before the bomb

by Lorine Niedecker

In the great snowfall before the bomb
colored yule tree lights
windows, the only glow for contemplation
along this road

 I worked the print shop
right down among em
the folk from whom all poetry flows
and dreadfully much else.

 I was Blondie
I carried my bundles of hog feeder price lists
down by Larry the Lug,
I'd never get anywhere
because I'd never had suction,
pull, you know, favor, drag,
well-oiled protection.

I heard their rehashed radio barbs—
more barbarous among hirelings
as higher-ups grow more corrupt.
But what vitality! The women hold jobs—
clean house, cook, raise children,
bowl and go to church.

What would they say if they knew
I sit for two months on six lines
of poetry?

[This is the poem that made me a Lorine Niedecker fan. She was an Objectivist poet (NOT the Ayn Rand bullshit, but a Reddish school of Modernist poetry which fell into obscurity during the McCarthy era) who lived and worked in rural Wisconsin. 

An article by Elizabeth Willis is a good introduction to her, but there's a lot more on the Internet about her life and her poetry. (Some of the articles mention that she worked for Hoard's Dairyman, which she refers to in this poem, but few of those commenting seem to understand the central role this weekly publication played for North American dairy farmers throughout the 20th century.)

It's a short poem, but a rich one, touching on the Bomb, the lives of working people--including the work itself, women's role in society and the weird distance the lone artist must feel in larger communities.]

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