Followers

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

But do Presidents?

Reuters News Service reports that President Bush, today told a group of New York school children, "As yesterday's positive report card shows, childrens do learn when standards are high and results are measured." The gaff was part of remarks the President made while urging the extension of his education program, No Child Left Behind.

And yesterday, when the President was at the U.N. to deliver a major address, a draft of President Bush's speech to the U.N. General Assembly was posted online with phonetic spellings and other markings that weren't supposed to be seen by anyone outside the administration. [source]

Books On Trial



Last night I attended a event at the Kansas City Public Library in with authors Shirley & Wayne Wiegand presented a factual account of a historic 1940 incident in which Oklahoma County officials confiscated the entire contents of a local bookstore then put the proprietors and patrons of the store on trial not for anything they did, but for the contents of the books on their store shelves.

The story of their arrest, conviction and the battle for some three years to get their convictions overturned is an interesting and chilling one. The implications of this care are far reaching when considered against some of our government's actions today. Not only were these individuals victims of the governments fear of communists, but the basic fundamental rights of our constitution were victims as well.

I was especially surprised how significant racial overtones were in the prosecution of this case. I know Oklahoma is a southern state, but not the deep south, and none of the defendants were black. It was their association with civil rights issues that were paraded before the jury.

Over the next three years, the public outcry as news of this case spread throughout the U.S. ultimately sent this matter to a appellate court and the convictions were overturned. Libraries and Universities throughout the country cited that they were likely equally guilty based on the fact that many of the books the prosecution cited in their case were on their shelves as well. No evidence of any subversive or violent actions by the defendants to overthrow the government were ever presented. It was all purely based on the contents of the bookstore and the inflammatory suggestions that these individuals would dare suggest that blacks and whites have equal rights.

It is a story worth reading. The book: Books on Trial - Red Scare in the Heartland - authors Shirley & Wayne Wiegand

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

OMG!!!!

I missed Stick Poets 4th year anniversary! Sept 2, 2003 was the first post on this blog. Imagine that.


By the way, while you've been able to subscribe to e-mail feeds of Stick Poet Superhero for a long time, the new service I'm using now is so much better. It actually works! Over the past couple of years I've used two different services that ultimately had issues. The sad thing is that in giving them up, especially the oldest one, I lost a lot of subscribers. But of course they were no longer receiving their posts due to the problems which drove me to change.

I noticed the other day a bit of a spike in the number of people subscribing to Stick Poet posts and that's been encouraging. Slowly they are coming back.... and some new ones I hope!

If you haven't and would like to - it's easy, just add your e-mail to the subscribe box on the left sidebar and click. You will get an email that requires you to confirm and then after that, once a day you'll get all the posts for that day in one e-mail.

Poets will bare their souls, and everything else, tonight

Poets will bare their souls, and everything else, tonight: "The Poetry in the Raw event is a fundraiser to help several of the poets travel to Halifax, where they will compete against eight other teams in the National Slam Competition. It takes place next week at the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word. 'The readers will be disrobed and unfettered tonight,' promised shayne avec i grec, a former member of the team, who now acts as coach. He said the idea of stripping came from two previous events in which he decided to read in the buff -- and garnered a surprisingly keen audience." [full story]

ei: Arab poetry's sometimes subversive answer to "American Idol"

ei: Arab poetry's sometimes subversive answer to "American Idol":

"Perhaps the only thing that is as hard as translating Arab poetry to other languages is trying to explain to non-Arabs the extent of poetry's popularity, importance and Arabs' strong attachment to it. Whereas poetry in America has been largely reduced to a ceremonial eccentricity that survives thanks to grants and subsidies from fanatics who care about it too much, in the Arab world it remains amongst the most popular forms of both literature and entertainment. Whereas America's top poets may struggle to fill a small Barnes & Noble store for a reading, Palestine's Mahmoud Darwish has filled football stadiums with thousands of fans eager to hear his unique recital of his powerful poems. And while in America a good poetry collection can expect to sell some 2,000 copies, in the Arab world the poems of pre-Islamic era poets are still widely read today in their original words, as are those from the different Islamic eras leading to the present." [Full Story]

Bits from my Journal...

  • It (curling) is far more physical than one might imagine.
  • If boiled with water / The broth ascribes / to thinly veiled life / The taste of which fall flat
  • The presence of that hauntingly empty feeling with the close of baseball season, is setting in.
  • It is pretty much an established fact that I was small at birth... and that at some point when she (mom) was holding me I slid into the pocket of her robe.
  • ...A bronze vagina / commemorating all that is, / but purely ornamental
  • Like concrete in a sinus passage / my head is filled with reflective guilt

Monday, September 24, 2007

Zoom in before decide what it is

The more I look at people I believe that individually we are quite unique. However, by lumping us all together that uniqueness is replaced by a murky mass.

I think it really helps to bring things in tight and take a look before you zoom back out and look at the big picture. True in life as well as poetry.