Hank Kalet

Michele Alexander, an activist on prison issues, meditates in the current issue of The Nation on the legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Her focus — on incarceration — has been too narrow, she says. She has not been “connecting the dots.” That, she says, has to change.

In my view, the most important lesson we can learn from Dr. King is not what he said at the March on Washington, but what he said and did after the march.

King, whose legacy has been narrowed by a mainstream political order to a single important speech, was more than just a civil rights leader. He was a committed radical, a critic and activist looking not only to end segregation, but to end racism, war and to drastically alter capitalism. He spoke out vociferously against the Vietnam War and stood with black trash haulers in Memphis who were fighting for better treatment and better wages. It was during a visit to Memphis, following one of his most blistering speeches, that he was assassinated.

That sense of justice, Alexander now realizes, means that she must move beyond the narrow lane in which she has been working and that she must become committed to every piece of the fight.

I am still committed to building a movement to end mass incarceration, but I will not do it with blinders on. If all we do is end mass incarceration, this movement will not have gone nearly far enough. A new system of racial and social control will simply be erected in its place, all because we did not do what Dr. King demanded we should: connect the dots between poverty, racism, militarism and materialism.

Here in New Jersey, our major cities are crumbling. Police are being laid off and the schools are a wreck. It is no accident that those cities are majority black and Latino. It is no accident that the major employers have left for the suburbs (or overseas). We encouraged businesses to flea the cities by providing subsidies in the form of both tax breaks and shiny new infrastructure in the new suburbs. And when the businesses fled, seeking better facilities and more space but also starving the cities of funding, we blamed the cities and left them to fester, leaving their residents to deal with failing schools and rising crime.

As the nation celebrated the 50th anniversary of King’s most famous speech, eliding the most radical parts of it and focusing on a very narrow definition of colorblindness as we patted ourselves on the back for the progress we’ve made, the president began consideration of another bombing campaign and the city of Trenton was in the throes of a murder spree.

We talked of King and equality, but we avoided real discussion of King’s larger vision, of his economic demands and his call to end our military addiction. King knew, as Alexander points out, that all of this is interrelated, and that we must take all of them on if we are to create a more just world.

Send me an e-mail.

The Marketplace on Route 27 in Franklin. Most of the aging shopping center is vacant.

shows that the top 1 percent of earners took more than one-fifth of the country’s total income in 2012, one of the highest levels recorded in the century that the government has collected the relevant data.

The top 10 percent of earners took more than half of all income. That is the highest recorded level ever.

The figures underscore that even after the recession the country remains in a kind of new Gilded Age, with income as concentrated as it was in the years that preceded the Great Depression, if not more so.

And yet, we’re still hearing from politicians like Michael Bloomberg and Chris Christie that it’s the rich who drive America’s economic bus. Even if they are right — and I don’t believe they are — our economy has not been set up to ensure that the rich doing the driving will let the rest of us on the bus.

And, every time someone proposes doing just that — whether it is the extension (forget expansion) of food stamps or a tax hike for the wealthy to pay for preschool for the poor — we’re told we can’t afford it. They are right. We — meaning the 99 percent who the bus passes by — can’t afford it. The 1 percent can, as the above referenced report shows. It’s time for them to pay their fair share.

Send me an e-mail.

Legal Services of New Jersey issued its annual poverty report, which found that more people in the state had trouble making ends meet in 2011 than at any time since the late 1950s.

The report‘s top findings were:

1. Record Poverty.
In 2011, poverty in New Jersey reached a record high not seen for the past 50 years. Census data going back to 1959 show that the official poverty rate of 10.4 percent in 2011 has not been surpassed in the last fifty years.
2. Nearly One-Third Face Significant Deprivation.
Using the Real Cost of Living, the portion of the state struggling to meet basic needs is dire — 31.5% were below 250% FPL in 2011. More than 2.7 million residents, or about 31.5 percent of the total population, were living in true or actual poverty in 2011; they were grappling to meet basic necessities.
3. Record Child Poverty.
Record number of children were living in poverty in 2011. About 780,000, or 38.5 percent of all children, were below 250% of FPL in 2011. Of these, 31.2 percent were below 200% of FPL and 14.7% were below 100% of FPL, all record highs for the state.
4. Extreme Poverty In Certain Municipalities.
Municipal poverty was highest in Camden, where 64.5 percent of the total population lived in households with incomes below 200 percent of FPL, followed by Passaic with a poverty rate of 59.5 percent, Lakewood at 55.9 percent, Paterson at 53.3 percent, Trenton at 51.5 percent, and Newark at 50.4 percent.
5. Child Poverty In Extreme Poverty Municipalities.
Child poverty rates were highest in Camden — 79 percent of all children were below 200 percent of the FPL in 2011. In another six places – Passaic, Lakewood, Paterson, Trenton, Newark, and Union City — more than 60 percent of children were below 200 percent of the FPL.
6. Continued High Unemployment.
In July 2013, the unemployment rate in New Jersey was 8.6 percent, substantially higher than the 4.6 percent at the onset of the Great Recession, and even higher than the current national average of 7.4 percent. The most recent data for July 2013 shows that New Jersey had the seventh highest unemployment rate in the nation.
7. Record Food Insecurity.
Food insecurity reached another all-time high in 2011. A sizeable portion of New Jersey households did not have enough food for all their members in 2011. Data from a three-year period (2009-11) show that 12.3 percent of New Jersey households were food insecure at some point during that period, and 4.5 percent had very low food security, meaning that the food intake of one or more household member was reduced or their eating pattern disrupted due to lack of resources. This represents a record high for the fifth consecutive year.
8. High Level of Medically Uninsured.
Working-age population below 200% FPL had very high rates of uninsurance in 2011. Working adults with low incomes were much more likely than either children or the elderly to be without health insurance coverage. In 2011, a sizeable proportion of working adults with incomes below 200 percent of the FPL were without health insurance — 41.7 percent of working adults below 50% FPL, 38.2 percent between 50-99% FPL, and 42.4 percent with incomes between 100-200% FPL.
9.Poverty Correlates with School Districts Needing Improvement.
School districts failing to make adequate progress were more likely to be located in high poverty areas. During 2011-12, 19 category “A” school districts (poorest in the state) were identified as needing improvement. The “J” districts (considered the most affluent in the state) did not have any schools identified as needing improvement. In addition, the number of “A” district schools needing improvement has increased significantly in the past three years. During the 2009-10 school year, 13 failing districts fell under the “A” classification. By 2011-12 school year, the number rose to 19, a 46 percent increase. In all three years, no “J” district schools were identified as needing improvement.

Officials with Legal Services said about a quarter of the state’s residents were considered poor in 2011″nearly 1 percent higher than the previous year and 3.8 percent more than pre-recession levels,” according to NJ.com.

“This is not just a one-year or five-year or 10-year variation,” said Melville D. Miller Jr., the president of LSNJ, which gives free legal help to low-income residents in civil cases. “This is the worst that it’s been since the 1960 Census.”

The numbers could get worse, LSNJ said (according to NJ.com):

The report warned Census figures for 2012 to be released this month may be higher. Those numbers are expected to show some of the impact from Hurricane Sandy, which took a bite out of the state’s economy and destroyed a large amount of affordable housing.

New Jersey is not alone, Miller said.

In 2011, the federal poverty rate was the largest it had been in 18 years, according to the Congressional Research Service.

“The Great Recession was the worst major economic event since the early ’30s,” Miller said. “It’s taken longer for the U.S. to come out of it.”

Send me an e-mail.

Writing is about more than just having an idea and putting words to paper. There are formal concerns to consider, as well, and I do not mean rhyme and meter or the intricacies of a sonnet.

Every piece of writing goes through a process; for the more experienced writers, that process can occur subconsciously — we all do the kinds of things I instruct my freshman composition students to do: brainstorm, organize, identify audience and purpose. Most of us in the writing business just do these things in our heads.

Yet sometimes we need to return to the basics. Sometimes, when writing an essay, I will need to pause and draft an outline to make sure I am following a logical plan; or when pulling together a long piece of reportage, I will need to list the important points I need to make to ensure I cover all of my bases.

The same goes for writing a poem. Often, poetry grows from an image or a stray thought, sometimes from something more deliberate, but it always follows the language and sometimes to unexpected ends. While this can lead to some marvelous and unexpected work, it also can lead the poet down a dead end, or allow the poet to fall into bad habits and ruts. I know that there are stock phrases and images I return to far too frequently, personal cliches I need to avoid. But how to do this?

A couple of years ago, as I was pursuing my master’s degree in fine arts at Fairleigh Dickinson University, my friend and mentor Renee Ashley issued a challenge. I was, as Bruce Springsteen might say, “stuck in the mud, somewhere in the swamps of Jersey.” Something drastic was needed to extricate the muse and Renee had a powerful prescription. It’s called the “rut buster” — that is the rated-G name; we called it something more colorful when she assigned it — and it truly did the trick.

This is how Renee describes its effect (this is from Adele Kenny’s blog, The Music in It):

It reminds the brain that there are other ways to work than the ones you fall into without resistance, ways to enlarge our possibilities for discovery while we’re writing. And when this becomes too easy, there are lots of great grammatical ways to crank up the stakes! It’s a sort of eye-opener for many.

The rut buster is a 10-line poem

— that uses NO abstract nouns
— that has at least one concrete noun in each line
— that does not have a narrative (a story line)
— and that has at least 3 sentence fragments

It is far more difficult to manage that it might seem. Read the post over at Adele’s blog — there is a full explanation, along with Renee’s bio and an example from yours truly.

The exercise has the effect of shaking the poet out of his or her comfort zone — I know that’s what it did for me — and placing craft issues front and center. The problem that a lot of young poets have is that they think all poetry is just feelings, that if you write honestly and openly you will produce a good poem (older poets like me run into other problems, like the rut). They need to be shown that mastering their craft is key to writing good poems. Poetry is about more than feeling. The good poet knows how to control the language to process very specific effects, to dole out information deliberately, to master pace and tone — all of the things that go into good writing.

The “Rut buster” puts that craft work front and center.   

Send me an e-mail.