Play About Iraq War Divides a Connecticut School - New York Times

Play About Iraq War Divides a Connecticut School - New York Times

Natalie Kropf, 18, Seth Koproski, 17, Devon Fontaine, 16, and James Presson, 16, are students at Wilton High School in Wilton, Connecticut. Timothy H. Canty is the principal at Wilton High. These are a few principal players in an off stage drama about an on stage drams, "Voices in Conflict."

Wilton students in an advanced acting class were taking on the challenge of creating an original play about the war in Iraq. Last week, principal Timothy H. Canty canceled a play to be put on by the school's advanced theater class citing questions of political balance and context. Efforts were made to make some concessions in the script by the students. Even the thought of doing the performance off campus at night was out. Students say Canty had indicated that the material was too inflammatory, and that only someone who had actually served in the war could understand the experience. “He told us the student body is unprepared to hear about the war from students, and we aren’t prepared to answer questions from the audience and it wasn’t our place to tell them what soldiers were thinking,” said Sarah Anderson, a 17-year-old senior.

Two things come to my mind about this story....

• From a purely artistic point of view, principal Timothy Canty is way out of line. I'd have to give him my tops of 5 thumbs down for censorship of a piece of creative work by students that no doubt took significant commitment on their part. Perhaps (and sadly) their greatest learning experience from all this is the distaste for censorship in art when they could have been taking away more positive life experiences.
• Outside my artistic mode, I have to again give Mr. Canty my maximum 5 thumbs down for like many, sticking there head in the sand (I had another place in mind) with respect (and I emphasise the "R" word here) to treating these students in such a demeaning manner. Students like Natalie Kropf are old enough to be serving in Iraq, and of course many other students are not far behind. Why hide in the safety of comfort and pretend this war in not in the room. It is a fucking elephant he wants to pretend it is not there. Gives these students a lot of credit for wanting to undertake this and ask the hard questions that too many adults in this country are afraid to ask. Maybe if people had asked more questions earlier and engaged in meaningful dialogue there would not be 3234 U.S. serviceman dead and we would not have spent $410 billion plus on a war the has no end in sight. A war that has left deep divisions and civil-war strife between the Iraqi people themselves. Give these you people a little respect. We ask them to fight our wars, don't talk down to them like we know what we are doing. If we did, things would be a lot different after four years.

Friday Morning

from today's journal....

Bitterness hammered
Tenderizing flesh
Otherwise toughened to edges
Beyond customary contortion

Quiet settled
On black on blue on black
On pink slivers that wink
Through the sting involuntarily

Everywhere I go...

"Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me."

~Sigmund Freud

What constitutes poetry anyway...

"A Poetries Symposium" April 5-7 at the University of Iowa hopes to expand the public understanding of what constitutes poetry.

"Poetries" will encourage participants to think of poetry as a wide range of cultural and language phenomena, not just the masterpieces one might study in English class. Poetic texts exist in unexpected places:

• like greeting cards
• scrapbooks,
• on posters
• or in messages read at weddings

" Such poetry has value, even if it wouldn't make a poetry anthology or a discussion of great art," said Mike Chasar, a UI graduate student in English and co-organizer of the event.

More information and event schedule here

Congress Can Make This The Last Anniversary

Congress Can Make This The Last Anniversary


"As we mark the fourth anniversary of the most insane military misadventure in American history--yes, even worse than James K. Polk's invasion of Mexico for the purpose of spreading slavery--there is now more than enough blame to go around for the death and destruction that has not merely killed thousands of Americans but that has left hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis dead, emptied the US and Iraqi treasuries into the pockets of unscrupulous contractors and corrupt politicians, and done severe harm to the reputation of the United States as an honest player on the world stage." (read the entire commentary)

Small Knots

Some time back, on one of my Wednesday Poet Series features, I highlighted a North Western poet by the name of Kelli Russell Agodon. This past week, I’ve been reading her book Small Knots published in 2004 by Cherry Grove Collections out of Cincinnati, Ohio. Her poetry is intricately layered and stirring.

A few of my favorites from the book are:

Fifty-Six Knots, which touches me with iconic references to the Rosary and the way she has woven the lives of women together, and counting, and Hail Marys bleeding from the walls. Collection plates filling with broken rosaries and the suffered woman in the corner who unties each knot, allowing the beads to fall, baptizing the marble floors…. can you not hear that sound?

If you look closely at the poem on the page, it is constructed of 4 sever line stanzas. Each has a center justified fourth line creating a pattern as though it were strung together. Genius!

Vacationing With Sylvia Plath: Each of four stanzas begins by asking, Maybe if….
A poet’s contemplation that asks aloud and sort of comes back to me as an internalized echo. If the clouds didn’t look like tombstones… if the ocean didn’t seem so final… if I had a chocolate bar between breakdowns… these all grow in crescendo and the final stanza so strong that I won’t repeat it. You need to read it yourself.

It’s Easy to wake up in someone’s poem… (I love titles that become the first line)
Couplets that capture snippets of life around us. Real people you feel you must know being pulled into the page, their lives blots if ink… and in the same way you see how people awake one morning and presto! They become poems.

These are just three… The book is a real treat to read. Kelli is not so mundane as to write simply assessable work, but something that is just over the line and will likely appeal as well to those who like something just a bit more conceptual without going overboard.

Happy St Patrick's Day

To All........