Evie Shockley, author of the wonderful collection The New Black, is reading in Princeton next week (Feb. 11). I’ll have a story on her later in the week, but here is a taste of her work from the American Academy of Poets.
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Categories, hierarchies and poetry
I’ve been reading an early book of poems by Martha Collins over the last few months, taking in a few pages at a time between the grading of papers, the reading of material I’ve assigned to my students and some history and fiction. Some Things Words Can Do — a collection that is actually two collections (STWCD and A History of Small Life on a Windy Planet) — is both an exploration of the uses of language (I’m playing around with a response poem now) and of the violence that seems endemic to our world. It is a work at once playful and angry, contemplative and very contemporary.
And it is a fine precursor to, though not quite as strong as, two of the books that follow — Blue Front (a major focus of my master’s thesis) and White Papers. Both of these latter books, her most recent, focus on race. Blue Front looks at how racial hierarchies and definitions often give to those who define themselves as above racial categories (i.e., whites) permission to do violence to protect these hierarchies, essentially asking questions about both contemporary and historical complicity in these crimes. White Papers, less successful artistically, explores what I’ll call the negative definition — the notion that assigning racial categories and hierarchies to the other (i.e., black Americans) also assigns them, implicitly to the majority.
If I were designing a literature class today that was designed as a response to the bubbling up of long-suppressed racial resentment and anger — brought to the surface by events in Ferguson, Staten Island, Cleveland and elsewhere — I would assign Collins’ work, along with some of the materials we have been reading in my composition class this semester (Ta-Nesi Coates’ “The Case for Reparations,” the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Countee Cullen, Gary Soto, Claude McKay, Daniel Okita, recent op-eds on privilege by Tal Fortang and Charles Blow that take opposing points of view) and poetry by Evie Shockley, Robert Hayden’s “Middle Passage” and poems from American Journal, essays on writing by Cathy Park Hong and Jaswinder Bolina (both of which explore questions of exclusion), and some short fiction.
Anyway, this post moved in a very different direction than I intended. My original thought was just to introduce Collins so that I could link to today’s American Academy of Poets “Poem-a-Day” — “Animal / Anima” (it will appear in a future Collins collection).
Census reports food stamp use remains above pre-recession levels
The U.S. Census Bureau issued a report today that found that one in five children received food stamps in 2014 — despite an apparent economic recovery. As the Census Bureau reported in a press release announcing its latest report, Families and Living Arrangements:
The rate of children living with married parents who receive food stamps has doubled since 2007. In 2014, an estimated 16 million children, or about one in five, received food stamp assistance compared with the roughly 9 million children, or one in eight, that received this form of assistance prior to the recession.
What does this mean, given that the economy has been growing in recent years? Well, based on interviews I’ve done over the last several years on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — i.e., food stamps — the oft-touted recovery has not made its way to lower-wage workers. And while the unemployment rate has been falling, the so-called “participation rate,” or those who are working or actively looking for work remains at an approximately 35-year low. While some of that can be explained by retiring baby boomers — a federal report says about half of the 3.1 percent drop in participation since 2007 can be explained by retirements — not all of it can.
We remain mired in a period of wage stagnation for large swaths of workers, as Market Realist points out:
While hiring has picked up speed, wages continue to stay tepid. Private sector jobs have increased by 10.5% since the US economy exited the recession caused by the 2008 US financial (XLF) crisis in 2010. In contrast, average real wages grew by a meager 0.7% between 2009 and 2014.
This is why we continue to hear stories about families making use of SNAP — along with food pantries and soup kitchens — who never thought they would need to rely on the safety net before. Of course, our response to this has not been to admit that more need means more SNAP benefits being issued. Rather, we cut SNAP in 2014 and the GOP continues to push for more drastic cuts to the program.
This is absurd. There is no doubt that high SNAP enrollment is a bad sign, but cutting just to keep numbers down is foolish. We need to do things to get people off SNAP — create jobs, increase the minimum wage to the $15 an hour range, provide paid sick leave and family leave, etc. Basically, if we want to end reliance on emergency food systems we have to end the economic emergency that exists for so many. We need to make the economy work for everyone.
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Review: Bob Dylan, crooner
The announcement sometime in the fall that Bob Dylan would be recording and releasing an album of standards recorded by Frank Sinatra — Shadows in the Night — was met by many with incredulity. Dylan, the craggy-voiced former folkie, had no business dabbling in the Great American Songbook, some said.
Others, like me, were intrigued. Dylan, after all, has spent more than 50 years deeply immersed in the American musical traditions, creating his own, to be sure, but also the traditions of others. He has covered folk, blues and country classics, forgotten masterpieces and the random ephemera that makes up the conversation that is our musical legacy.
That’s why the question for me was never, “what was Dylan thinking?” but “what took him so long?”
Dylan says as much in his interview with Robert Love in AARP The Magazine, when asked if his long-time fans should be surprised:
Well, they shouldn’t be surprised. There’s a lot of types of songs I’ve sung over the years, and they definitely have heard me sing standards before.
So, Shadows in the Night dropped today and, for my money, it is an album that fits neatly within Dylan’s late-career narrative, one that has focused on using, deconstructing and reconstructing American music history, making it his own and injecting a bit of the past into a present zeitgeist that has little patience for anything not of the moment. It is not, as might have been expected, an album steeped in irony or one recorded with a wink and Dylan’s tongue firmly in cheek.
The recordings are faithful, rather than pastiches of styles or older lyrics — and Dylan’s nearly spent voice is in surprisingly good form, its flaws (the limited range, the cracks) lending a warmth and sense of a weariness indicative of experience to songs (and a singer) that have lived a long, long time. Reviewing individual songs is unnecessary here — Shadows in the Night is best digested whole, its 10 songs working together, like a suite, its tempo consistent if muted and ruminative.
People interested in the long conversation that is American musical history should appreciate this album. People interested in the kind of recreation of the American Songbook recorded by Michael Buble or Rod Stewart (Rod’s voice may be up to the task, but his recordings made me wonder just how connected he was to the project or whether he actually understood the words he was singing) probably won’t.
As for skeptical Dylan fans, I say this: Relax, sit back and let Bobby take the wheel. I think you’ll be happy you did.
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Rambling thoughts on cheating
Read this quotation from The New York Times today from an ethicist discussing the Patriots, “deflate gate,” and cheating in sports:
“This kind of gamesmanship goes on all the time,” said Stephen Mosher, a professor at Ithaca College who studies sports ethics. “It’s certainly accepted as part of the culture that you game the system as much as you possibly can, and if you don’t get caught, it ain’t cheating.”
Interesting — and not just because it is about a sports issue in the news. Think about it: “if you don’t get caught, it ain’t cheating” could be our cultural mantra.
If you don’t get caught, you weren’t speeding.
If you don’t get caught, those short cuts you took on your taxes are perfectly OK.
If you don’t get caught, that she’d you built without your town’s approval is perfectly fine.
Perhaps this is not a problem. I’d like to think we’d be bothered by this, but I know we’re not — and I’m just as guilty of these small, seemingly meaningless infractions as anyone.
This raises a question: Does our complicity in these small violations preclude us from being critical of larger violations? Does the extra deduction we might take mean we should accept the larger, far more impactful liberties taken by those with power?
My answer is no, though I think it is difficult to draw a hard line separating what might be acceptable and what should not be. There are obvious no-nos: Chemical companies dumping waste into the environment (essentially cheating by passing the cost of disposal onto the larger society); or an elected official using his power to enrich himself. Cheating on a test or a paper — by stealing answers, say, or plagiarizing — is obviously wrong. But there is no prohibition — almost no prohibition — against seeking other advantages.
Other issues are not so clear cut. Base runners stealing signs from catchers remains acceptable; using a camera to do so is not. The effect is the same — stolen signs — but the means create the greater violation. I understand — and agree — that there is a difference, but exactly where the line is drawn is more difficult to explain.
But there is a line and, like the court’s response to pornography, we know it when we see it.
