obituary – Hank Kalet

Another anti-imperial voice lost

Chalmers Johnson, the historian and political scientist/economist, died Saturday. His death, an obvious personal loss for his family and friends, is also a blow to what is left of the American anti-imperial cause.

Johnson, in his most recent work, has demonstrated the designs on international power that drive our foreign policy. Basically, his work — along with books by historians like Andrew Bacevich — make it clear that we no longer rely on our military for defense, but use it offensively to project power and impose our will on distant nations and have been for decades.

It already has resulted in blowback (the title of one of his books) and will again. And when that blowback occurs, it will give the national security state all the justification it needs to shred the Bill of Rights.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

In memoriam, Howard Zinn

I read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States about two decades ago and it transformed my way of reading history, helping to shift my view away from the great men and standard narratives of the history books we had in school and toward a narrative of average people battling elites, fighting for change and to make the dream we have long talked about into a reality.

Like Studs Terkel, he was a radical interested in speaking for those whose voices are all too often silenced.

Through four presidential elections and three wars, I found his voice a necessary tonic — especially at a time when progressives have ceded their activism during Democratic presidential administrations, as too many have now.

Zinn’s people-centric approach informs my poetry — I tend to write narratives about people we normally ignore or forget about and I try to make connections between the big issues (Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.) and the people caught in the whirlwind.

I didn’t know Zinn, but I felt like I did and I am better for it and I hope the world is, as well.

Some people writing about Zinn:

Daniel Ellsberg

Matt Rothschild in The Progressive

David Zirin in The Nation
And, of course, Zinn in his own words.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

RIP, Jack Wiler, a unique voice

Jack Wiler had a way with words.

The poet, whom I met a couple of years ago when he read at the South Brunswick Poetry series (he read again last year), was a poet who used his gifts with the language to understand and make us understand the illness — AIDS — that ultimately took his life.

His sensibility was by turns raw and angry, and tender and spiritual and savvy. His book, Fun Being Me, should be a must read for New Jersey poetry afficionados.

Check out one of his poems here.

Here is the info on the memorial services:

Saturday, Oct. 24, 2 p.m.-6 p.m. at the Greenfields Fire Hall, 31 Budd Blvd., West Deptford, NJ 08096.

I wish I could be there, but I just can’t — too many memorials already this weekend.

So, RIP, Mr. Wiler.

Permanent nod — elegy for Jim Carroll

There was always something regal and elegant about Jim Carroll, something that belied his drug-addicted youth, that seemed to set him apart from his time.

Carroll died Friday — a shock, really, given that he was just 60 and had produced some great recent writing.

I met him once, briefly, after a poetry reading he gave at Rutgers. I got there at the end and he signed the flier — a slip of paper I still have tucked away in a photo album with the other autographs I’d collected during my younger days.

I first read Carroll’s work in 1980, when I was at Penn. State. I was at sea, so to speak, lacking real direction but developing what might be described as a bohemian bent. I was into rock — mostly punk and what is now called classic rock — and was just discovering that literature, and poetry in particular, was something worth reading outside of class.

I gobbled up books — Kerouac and Ginsberg, Hemingway, a collection of postmodern Americans and Jim Carroll’s Basketball Diaries. The Diaries were an accidental find, a small pocket-sized book discovered in a bookstore as I rummaged the shelves. I’d been listening to Catholic Boy, Carroll’s first album almost continuously after first hearing its single (if you can call it that), “People Who Died,” on Vin Scelsa’s show on WNEW. The album was a revelation for me — poetic lyrics set atop those driving punk guitars — that led me toward Television, Patti Smith and many of the other New York bands of the 1970s (I’ve always been more of a New York punk than a London banger).

The book was raw and yet also art, a contrivance in the best sort of way. It was a young teen describing the darker side of New York City in the 1960s in a stylized voice that helped define a particular strain of writing that would follow.

I was taken by the book, as I said, and have been reading his poetry since then. I remainin awe of a poetic sensibility that was so fully developed at such a young age and that managed to grow and the spread into other art forms (I mentioned rock, but there also were the spoken word discs, the prose explorations and the diaries).

In the end, it is that divine scream of an album — Catholic Boy — that stands as his best work, and as the piece of his muse that helped ingite my own poetic explorations.

Thanks, Jim. Rest in Peace.

Death of an icon, whose image lives on

An icon of the 1970s has died.

Farrah Fawcett, whose poster graced the walls of millions of teenaged boys in teh mid-1970s, died this morning after a long battle with cancer.

Farrah was, for most men my age (I’m 46), our first celebrity crush. We had our poster (see on left) on our walls, watched Charlie’s Angels religiously and wondered what it would have been like to have been Tom Bosley.

Her post-Angels career was less than stellar, except for her role The Burning Bed, a shockingly well-acted performance as a battered wife. There were some other interesting roles, but her star faded again and she essentially disappeared.

In many ways, her trajectory matched her sex-symbol predecessors, most of whom had less acting talent but whose bombshell looks — which began as their entree into the limelight — ended up being the albatross that stalled their careers.

And yet, the bathing suit poster stands alongside the handful of iconic images of the pinup genre, permanently etched into our cultural memories in a way that few other sex-symbol images have been and, perhaps, few ever will be again.