BOOKS / Nina Herencia : Are We Hearing You Well, Mariann?

Are we hearing you well, Mariann?
New poetry and drawings from the Wizard

By Nina Herencia / The Rag Blog / November 6, 2013

Mariann Wizard has published two books this month; the second one, Hempseed Food: The REAL Secret Ingredient for Health & Happiness, will be reviewed soon in The Rag Blog. Mariann will launch Hempseed officially on Saturday, November 9, 7-9 p.m., at Austin's Brave New Books, 1904 Guadalupe, and promises to read a bit from Didn't You Hear Me the First Time? as well at that event.

Wizard will also be on Rag Radio, Friday, November 15, from 2-3 p.m., on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin and streamed live. She will be joined on that show by fellow former staffer from the original Rag, Doyle Nieman, now a member of the Maryland State Assembly.

[Didn't You Hear Me the First Time? and End Games. Poetry and drawings by Mariann Garner-Wizard. (2013: Dharma Wizard Books. Paperback; 42 pp; $10. Available at. www.Lulu.com, Amazon.com, and local bookstores.]

AREQUIPA, Peru -- From outside the U.S., more in times of premonition than confirmed crude realities (I'm writing this just after September 11, a date which for North and South America has only sobering connotations!), it is unlikely to expect a woman’s poetic voice arising from the center of global power.

Surely, this is due more to the muffling of real people’s voices than their absence, or to the lack of channels to share them all the way here. Or perhaps it is our own outsider expectations, accustomed as we are to simulated voices, or those supplanted by artificial mechanical devices, or trained with ulterior motives. Hardly ever do we hear common people’s spontaneous expressions that resonate with ordinary folks.

Poetry seems no match for a system glowing pompously (from the outside) like an efficient machine, reputedly based on science (not necessarily constructive), unforgiving of imperfection, lack of success, frailty... Not being able to measure up, most of the world can only retreat to a safe distance, and perhaps wonder.

And in the face of insecurities, limitations, shortcomings of the common human condition, poetry comes in handy, as much as family, to shield and nourish. That is why voices from the U.S., walking on foot, unveiling their own suffering, longings, and concerns, reaching out to tune in with feelings, to extend the sense of family all over the world, surprise us!

Because poetry’s natural existence is roaming loose in streets and plazas, in abandoned and forgotten corners, perhaps humming pained lullabies, its harvesters, poets, in heroic persistence, bring forth a product that resonates universally with common people. Mariann Garner-Wizard’s poetry represents creation in times of war and peace, bonanza and crisis, excess accumulation and hovering cataclysm. Her life has surfed the waters of her times, keeping a compass of the heart balanced by a good political sense. (Of course I have my own biases, but she has asked me to read her poems, and react to them. What an honor!)

Her poetry first surprised me in my Austin walk while I was there doing graduate work; a poem about education, I remember. Its magical dimension rose to a level recognizable in any language, in any culture. Anyone from Asia, Europe, or Africa, or we in Latin America, would have gotten her meaning immediately!

Fortunate to have met her personally, and through her quite a few of her peer generation and family, I felt in their company in an oasis of solidarity, sensitivity, and world concern. Wizard’s poetry conveys thoughts and feelings about our times, about people and nature that are recognizable and reconcilable with/by most people in the world.

A short roaming through Mariann’s poetry garden, to view and smell the aroma of her flower creations: poems that go from the personal private (welcome that!) to non-private but personal bonds with neighbors and family. Her inspecting gaze fans from past virtues, now fading away, as in a poem to her beloved former mother-in-law, Zula Vizard, to visions of a future already here, as in "Grand Central Station," where all of the human family knows each other and even speaks each other’s languages.

Introspective personal poems touch the passing of time in one’s own life, a feeling of "Deep Water" running, in realization of the end of life's proximity...; and the existential need to start paddling, left or right! (Don’t we all empathize!)

One of my favorite poems visits the past and makes it forever present. "García Lorca’s Grave" makes Mariann, for me, a natural member of the International Brigade of Poets! I could not hold myself back from sharing it with friends during the recent 70th momentous commemoration of García Lorca’s death. In it, she combines rhymes and associations that we all have -- rain in Spain, for whom the bells toll -- and turns the flowery-innocent and literary into committed political speech.

“As long as there are mass graves, you will find the poets in them.” But their voice, she says, “the people’s voice...will not be silenced in the common grave.”

In "Egypt-Land 1 (18 February 2011)" she conveys her sensitivity to international struggles with allusions to her own social history, the breaking of political bondage and desire for liberation now! Recognizing the eternal true voice of the Sphinx, it is all about people, it closes with a subtle haiku image of the movement of history itself: "Ripples spread in sand as in water; dunes shift slowly, then all at once."

From world and historical awareness, she turns to view the internal crisis in the U.S. with a critical yet good-humored tone. In "Like Wheel of Fortune’s Before & After: Fiscal Cliff Dwellers -- a Meditation on Mesa Verde and the Ongoing Crisis," Mariann reflects on the dilemma of the life style of the U..S as symbolized by Wall Street:

Life on the cliff face keeps men on their toes;
there is nothing certain, that's just how it goes.
You know it's called "Wall Street," so what did you think?
There's a top, and a bottom, and always, the brink!

In another poem she offers recommendations on living in times of fear and how to "Be Safe." In another, perceptive of entanglements that tie people to serve and be served in the system, she still reacts with a woman’s pain: “It’s in these times I still miss you!” Here are intimate reflections about the world, complex and often ambiguous, declared at the kitchen table, with or without company.

Her political awareness, never divorced from the intimate and personal, comes out expressly in "Didn't You Hear Us the First Time?," signed meaningfully on U.S. Independence Day, July 4, 2013. In it, she reiterates her generation’s pronouncements, a still-relevant and vibrant 70s call echoed in the book's title:

We're getting tired of fighting the same battles
over and over again,
winning, and having victory
snatched from our grasp;
tired, but nobody's quitting;
it's too important and besides
what else would we be doing?
Taking some fantasy cruise
on a Carnival death ship?

(Believe It Or Not: it's cheaper to live on cruise ships than in retirement homes!)

Who the hell listens to all those conversations they're recording,
and who reads all our so-called private mail?
Is that the career of the future?
... they didn't hear us the first time.

It is hard to choose a favorite and hard to not copy them fully for readers to savor, relish, and ruminate upon. "In His Eye Is On the White Tail Deer," she returns again to the seemingly ordinary: homelessness, hunger, and a deer hunt ban. In prosperous Austin, often a youth-glorifying city that in rapid development has lost some of its depth, as in her poem, man and nature are prey of the same captors.

Through her we look into hidden corners, under highway bridges, along city-bounded creeks and in nature’s hideaways, to view the lives of the poor and of animals, each prisoners of irrational cruelty.

The city’s trajectory, combining the natural with the metaphoric, is also seen in other poems. Having lived there, I understand Mariann's agony over Texas' near-record drought and unusually abrasive heat. She transforms that into a parable of climate change harshness, with the connotation that it is literally "man"-caused, opposed to the resistant feminine.

The extreme drought, the exacting heat and lack of surface water, cannot bend the stubbornly fertile (an intellectual fertility, in Mariann's case!) woman who remains underground. Obviously, she does not just talk about nature’s trials but woman’s resonance with nature, and the feminine fortitude residing within the earth’s bosom. Her message: no matter how much longing, yearning, suffering, grieving, languishing, and moping take place in the drought, life will be salvaged.

Another poem also talks about extreme heat in Texas, drought plus huge wildfires in areas bigger than some cooler, non-wild states (i.e., Massachusetts). It likens the fires to deer ticks jumping out of control, or "a coyote looking for lunch in Prairiedog Town," resolving when the state’s contending rigid ideological-religious bands agree, in mea culpa unison with a phrase of local culinary fame (meat), that they must have done something "real bad" for Texas to be this "well done." ("Bien cocido.")

The personal religious, with its conservative dissonances, also emerges coupled with Mariann's political side in "I’m Not Down with Jesus Anymore," as a lapsed Methodist-Jew-Buddhist looks at Jesus and his Father as portrayed by the conservative establishment. In response to this established Jesus Christ who seems to no longer love his brother, she movingly posits the feminine in a simple question: "Can you imagine how that hurts His Mother?"

In "People are Praying," the constructive advocacy of a stubborn activist, a woman at that, insists:

We can only change the future.
We change it by changing ourselves.
We are the change we seek, all of us, all together,
none unvalued, none forgotten, none unseen.

As a teacher of introductory sociology in a community college, I cherish another poem particularly, "Hiatus." This one embraces the new generation rising, rolling massively in the face of no political alternatives (tellingly, this does not just happen in the U.S., but across the world), with love from the generation that cried before: Didn’t you hear us the first time?

Clearly Mariann’s poem speaks for those who welcome this promising new movement, featuring within it values of solidarity and communion with nature. The stage is ready for them, lit by the clear yearning, seemingly most specifically of mothers, blessing the new actors. Swept and clean, the stage awaits their gifts!

Lightly as snowflakes, deeper than earthquakes,
firmly they step to the fore;
unafraid of each other, knowing Earth as their mother,
occupying tomorrow's far shore.

Another poem I shared with a friend whose backyard faces a greenbelt reserve in Austin, amazed that the poet could decipher so well our enthralled witnessing of co-travelers in life some late afternoons. "The Deer Sleep Here":

What ancient instinct leads them here,
relict, remnant, ruminant mass?
Water whispering underground,
"This too shall pass. This too shall pass."

Her closing poem, "After Armageddon," signals for me a hopeful new beginning. It is an impatient but not unkind push of the fundamentalist Christians populating the Texas cultural landscape to complete their transition upwards, after the prophesied destruction that they seem to so anticipate. Prediction or prophecy of another monumental cycle presided over by Mother Earth, the cataclysm signals getting back to basics, once more:

Tribes will meet again by the rivers,
at solstice or equinox,
to trade, to laugh, to court, to mourn,
to dance the Long Dance.
Herds and flocks and packs of beasts, birds, and butterflies
will move freely again on the land, tracing ancient migrations,
patterning the earth with a web of wonder and
finding no fences…

...another cycle monumental in our eyes,
yet barely touching Mother-Goddess' crust.
After Armageddon,
things can get back to normal around here.

Even if I missed a few of Mariann's subtle meanings, in part due to specific cultural contents that escape me and in part because I would need to live through her experiences myself, I cried in my first reading, amazed and delighted at her play of words, of images, her humor, intelligence, and compassion. She is a voice of her generation in Austin and more; a woman’s voice expressing in poetry the passion for life that is indeed political.

Engaged always in the extraordinary and the transcendental -- her friendships with and support of writers and political activists for years attests it -- she remains faithful to principle in the very center of a system overextending its dominion. That her tribe remains loving, seeing, and speaking is something that we all, in the wider world, want to sense in the United States!

[Cristina Herencia is a Peruvian social psychologist and activist who works in interdisciplinary social sciences, specializing in issues of gender and identity among Andean indigenous peoples and the effect of globalization on native peoples and cultures.]

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VERSE / Larry Piltz : Spurred by Love

Lonesome cowboy, Kiev, Ukraine, 2009. Photo by Phil Douglis / PBase.

Spurred by Love

[For Buck Ramsey, Cowboy Poet Laureate]

On his last mount
the cowboy cries
a lonesome roller
and practitioner
of the riding
roping arts
also known
as its poet
laureate supreme
one late night
saying goodbye
please stay
won't you
please

sobbing alone
one more time
to bay at the soul
of the lifeless moon
alone by the range
in the kitchen
of his exile
from the life
he'd loved
for an accident
thrown by life
from his horse
into the irony
of being the iconic
sad troubadour
of all the cowboys
lonesome yet
for a while
with no end
in sight
and poetry
to write

Larry Piltz / The Rag Blog
Indian Cove
Austin, Texas
July 17, 2013

[Larry Piltz is an Austin-based writer, poet, and musician. Find more articles and poetry by Larry Piltz on The Rag Blog.]

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BOOKS / Mariann G. Wizard : Steve Russell's 'Wicked Dew'

A chapbook review:
Steve Russell's 'Wicked Dew'

By Mariann G. Wizard / The Rag Blog / January 9, 2013

[Wicked Dew, by Steve Russell. (2012: Dog Iron Press, Georgetown, TX.); Paperback; 88 pp; $7.75.]

I've known Steve Russell since sometime in 1968 when he started showing up at The Rag office, a tall, gangly, very young Vietnam-era vet going to UT Austin on the GI Bill. Although Steve is incredibly bright and witty, and I've always enjoyed his prose contributions to The Rag and now The Rag Blog, I was nervous about reviewing his first book of poetry, Wicked Dew.

Steve is a Native American writer, and all of the previously published works in this collection have appeared in the Native press, where he is a regular contributor of weighty essays as well as occasional poetry. The book in fact won the 2008 Poetry First Book Award of the Native Writers Circle of the Americas (NWCA), and would have been published as part of the award; unfortunately, NWCA lost publication funding and the book is only now seeing the light of day.

I worried I might not be the right person to review poems that would obviously, just from these facts, be deeply rooted in Steve's experience as a Native American. My mostly Scotch-Irish parentage undeniably has Native ancestors as well, but in my generation, and even in my folks', as Russell writes in "Blood Quantum," the "thin red line" of Native genes became gray oblivion.

My unfamiliarity with contemporary Native American literature (these days, honestly, with literature in general!) added to my concern. Would this blue-eyed daughter of "the flood of European blood" really get it?

I needn't have worried, and neither should other poetry lovers. While a deeper knowledge of Native American literature would no doubt add to the grasp and enjoyment of these 37 poems, most transcend ethnic or tribal viewpoints, offering windows into the transformation of a poor "halfbreed" Oklahoma dropout into a multifaceted human rights activist and whole human being, rooted in and proud of his heritage.

"Heritage" for Steve is, I think, not just who someone's ancestors were or what they did, but what a person makes of it. He writes his own history, and defines his own family, too.

Steve Russell

Here are no paeans to Native purity or essential nobility. Only the lovely "Haiku for Walela" hearkens back before the European flood hit the Western hemisphere. One rather cynical poem, "Teach Me," begins, "Teach me, White Father, so I may understand. I understand slavery..." Slavery -- although not of the lifelong variety -- was commonly practiced among Native tribes long before there was any European contact. Of these critical looks at Native political correctness, the most powerful is "How to Succeed as an Indian Poet":

Don't say 'hunger.'
Write of the plump red strawberries
grown by Cherokees
in the Cookson Hills,
rather than rodents fried in lard,
garnished with herbs from the bar ditch,
government commodities on the side...
In "Probably Wolf Clan," "Indistinguishable Color," "Blood Quantum," and other poems, Russell mourns the ongoing loss of Native identity and weighs his own. The question of who is "red" enough to be a "real Indian" has parallels in other discussions: is Barack Obama a "real black man?" What does it mean to be "Hispanic" or "Latino?" And for goodness sake, what in the world is "white?" "When I'm Old" begins:

And when I am very old
will the drums outrun my feet?
Will the sweetgrass be just another smoke, and the sage a burning weed?
Does White Buffalo Calf Woman return for the civilized Indians?
A few selections distill the "wicked dew" of the title and cover illustration, inking the perfidy of European America in its true colors of bitterness and gall. "Bison Bones" excoriates oblivious conquerors who do not even know what they desecrate:

Were Dallas Texans born with neckties on
to be served in deep carpet
by smiling brown faces
where dishes disappear silently
and condiments come in tiny sealed jars
to dine on bison bones?
In other poems, Russell celebrates Native cultural values. "Disruption, Spring 1997," based on news accounts of an Albuquerque school girl not allowed to graduate wearing a traditional shawl by her grandmother, tells of family pride in the girl's achievement. Poems for two of Steve's (non-simultaneous) wives and one titled "Lust" are lit from within by wise acceptance of what-it-is. Another, "Cherokee Love," begins:

There is no love in Cherokee.
No falling in or falling out,
no marry now or live in doubt,
no changing weather love in Cherokee...
Some selections are rooted in Steve's activism as part of Austin's late 1960s-early 1970s anti-war movement. "Jailpoem 2," from 1970, was clearly written following angry protests of the U.S. invasion of Cambodia and massacres of students at Kent State and Jackson State. Steve became a leader in the Austin chapter of Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

Steve Russell, front with VVAW flag, participates in a demonstration by Vietnam Veterans Against the War on the University of Texas Campus at Austin in the late Sixties. Photo from Mariann Wizard's files.
"At the Vietnam Veterans Memorial" alternates flashbacks of a Southeast Asian village, a horse cavalry massacre in an Arapaho village, and tears for the fallen soldiers memorialized on the Wall. "Seeing Off the Troop Train" contrasts his youthful desire for heroic action with his grandmother's wisdom and his own fears as a father:

Twenty-eight years later, my son is a volunteer soldier.
Nobody elected Bush or his crew of 20th century retreads.
Granma is not here to say 'We got no business over there!'
But I hear her anyway.
Not everything is equally successful. "Not Juan Valdez," a clever idea, is marred by Spanish spelling errors and the misplacement of Colombia's iconic coffee grower to the Mexican state of Chiapas. Not Juan Valdez, indeed; this one confuses the reader and thus loses points.

A few poems with long, complex lines push against the borders of the printed page, seeming to demand spoken performance and perhaps hand drum punctuation, but add to the depth of the collection overall.

Wicked Dew charts a vision of optimism, traditional values, and endurance in selections such as "Indian Lawyer's Creed" and "A Matter of Faith." "To My Grandfather," the initial poem in the collection, is perhaps the most revealing of these:

I told him I wanted to be like Mickey Mantle,
who escaped the poverty of rural Oklahoma,
and appeared to own New York,
a grand place located near Oz...

I left Oklahoma
and as the years accumulate
Oklahoma almost leaves me.
The road home is distant and dusty and even more unlikely
than the road here...

I have seen New York.
And Oz.
And College...
And although I still cannot tie a necktie, Grampa,
I have taken your name...

and I want you to know
I am still playing batter.
Retired from a first career as an Austin and then Travis County, Texas, trial judge, and a second as a professor of criminal justice in San Antonio and later at Indiana University, and with a book of essays also just out (Ceremonies of Innocence: Essays from the Indian Wars, 2012, Dog Iron Press), Steve Russell bats close to a thousand with this collection of verse.

[Mariann G. Wizard, a Sixties radical activist and contributor to The Rag, Austin's underground newspaper from the 60s and 70s, is a poet, a professional science writer specializing in natural health therapies, and a regular contributor to The Rag Blog. Read more poetry and articles by Mariann G. Wizard on The Rag Blog.]

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VERSE / Alyce Guynn : Pale Mornings

Photo by Kelly Rossiter / treehugger.
Pale Mornings

     Brass buttons, green silks and silver shoes
     warm evenings, pale mornings, bottle of blues
          "Brass Buttons," Gram Parsons


She removes her precious memories
from the store room of her heart
unwraps the protective tissue paper
shielding them from today’s
enlightened air, amorphous moisture
and lays them out, not only for reminiscing
but also, examination

Like the yellowed silk of yesterday’s finery
the treasured recollections reveal
the wear and tear of time

     It was a dream much too real
     to be leaned against too long

She has curated these memories
catalogued them, carefully preserved
in papyrus of the everlasting now
protected from the inherent vandalism
of close scrutiny

     Gram Parsons wrote
     “Brass Buttons” when he was 18

The eternal second guessing:
too much purple? Did they drink
too deeply from the bottle of blues?

     Gram Parsons died way too young
     he never knew how famous
     he would become

Pretty pictures of the past
too precious to be pixilated
too fragile to be framed

Like yesterday’s satin doll
edged in tatting and lace
ivory slowly shading to yellow
unable to retain its glow

     The bearded man from five blocks down
     suggesting Billy Gibbons
     always waves when I drive by
     the one-finger, Texas two-lane wave

Here in the eternal now
witness to her agony
rumpled and tousled
she leans over her shadow
observing self

It always slew her
each time she let herself
revisit his eyes
the look landing on her
an echoing thud of knowing
seeing behind her lids
where all her yearning hid out
like the Younger brothers
in the Missouri hills

With doleful acceptance
but no regrets
she steps inside her past
profound and magical in its excess
shimmering, incandescent
memories not to be squandered
brought out on rare occasions
carefully shared with trusted few
not to be profaned by parading
sheltered from indiscriminate scorn

     And all the while
     I think she knew

© Alyce Guynn
The Rag Blog
December 2012
Austin, Texas

[Alyce Guynn’s poetry appears in Feeding the Crow and Deal Me In, a book of her love poems illustrated by Jesse "Guitar" Taylor. A former reporter for the Austin American-Statesman in the ‘60s, Alyce never wrote for The Rag, but read it regularly. Alyce also works as an antitrust investigator.]

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VERSE / Margery Parsons : Surfing in Gaza

Surfer in Gaza. Image from Common Dreams.
Surfing in Gaza

The children of Gaza
packed in camps
like anchovies in tin
go down to the beach
to swim, and to surf.
There is nothing timid about the way they take the waves
on their boards
home-made with scraps and stuff
and candlewax
because surfboard wax
like a million other dangerous things
can’t get in
to Gaza.
They struggle to stand up
fierce and brave
tasting a bit of freedom
with the salt spray.
Their faces turned towards the sun
and their proud bodies jeweled with water say
despite the guns, the bombs, the shelling
every night and day,
we are human
we are unbeaten.

Margery Parsons
The Rag Blog
November 2012

[Margery Parsons has been writing poetry since she was nine years old and has been a revolutionary since the 60s. She is a proud mom and a serious music lover who works in the arts.]

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VERSE / Don Paul : Word Passed Down through Forbidden Radio

Don Paul and Chuck Kinder at Stanford, January 2002. Photo by April Smith.
Word Passed Down
through Forbidden Radio

for Chuck Kinder and John Sinclair on their birthdays, October 2012

The voices beside your pillow, friends past midnight,
Wailing from the River, whistling through the Gaps,
Bring tales and tones so pure and sexual they lift you like a knife.
Their guitars and drums like Indians, slaves and Gospels freed,
Raise heroes from the outlaw, racing in the streets,
All they say truer than what's on your parents' new TV.

     The Hill!--the Hill!--shines beyond Highways' humming fins
     The Hill!--the Hill!--gives you Muddy Waters and Hazel Dickens
     The Hill!--the Hill!--is gained by going out past Main Street
     The Hill!--the Hill!--asks you to dance like one who can't be seen
               Ree-bel! Ree-bel!                Ree-bel! Ree-bel!

What is this America but promises
That those left out
May rise according to their worth?
What is it but best minds and hearts
In red jackets ripped apart?
What Wars and wars haunt Desks of Insurance agents?
What results are outright when the Road is open,
Fields are level, and choices abundant?
What more might happen to Motor Cities
After Bebop, Doowop, and John Coltrane chords--
Yes, chords from notes--
Joined with Highland melodies?
What more might you do with your pillows' pain,
Hungry ears' wound and bow?

John reached out to make Rock free as jazz.
John reached out to bring White into Black.
John reached out to smoke and drink and fuck
Upside-down or any other way he liked.
John risked his life for all he felt gave some light.
Chuck punched his way out of West Virginia parking-lots.
Chuck claimed seven Armed Robberies when age seventeen.
Chuck dove into Elizabethans, Matthew Arnold,
The Golden Bough, and McCluhan with the same drive.
Chuck brought friends West to share in edges' glow.

Decades pass. Partners split and losses wrench.
Knives of Indians and Blacks show up outside bars.
Water Follies lap against corpses found in the Ocean.
Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, a Bush and a Clinton
Are President. John and Chuck smoke and drink,
Teach, create, promote and inspire
More who listen and talk around their tables. They maintain
Forbidden radio.
They can be ignored but not stopped.
Their beards thin to catch light.

     What is that word abideth Night?
     What is that sound of Spirit bright?
     What holds the hand that grips your hand
     On what might have been your death-bed?
     What plays the horns of devotees who want to be
     For all time and a force for good?
     What is that force made strangers by your pillow friends?
     What is that word? That word is Love.

     Gather round the company,
          Share the love around.

     Bring on wine. Bring on Fats. Bring on Eric
     And thousands welcome gamblers and clowns.
     Bring on Jack, bring on herb.
     Bring on Aunt Tee, bring on Aunt Bea. Bring on
     Demons of basepaths and night-sweats. Bring on
     Mardi Gras Black Indians' gifts every year
     Of brilliance sewn into design.
     Bring on the giant night and whole works of sunsets over water.
     The word--the thing, the thing we know,
     Beyond our words, at last, that thing we heard
     So 'way back when, our out and light and balm,
     That thing is Love.

     Gods bless this merry company,
          Share the love around.

Don Paul
October 2012
New Orleans


Don Paul met Chuck Kinder when Don was the youngest winner of the Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford, 1971. He met John Sinclair in 1989 when they first performed together in Detroit. He moved to New Orleans in January 2006 to help with preserving a culture that lets Mardi Gras Indians flourish. Please go here for many albums and books. His performance at New Orleans' Cafe Istanbul of a poem "for and from Bob Kaufman" is here.

Chuck Kinder is the author of four acclaimed novels, Snakehunter, The Silver Ghost, Honeymooners, and The Last Mountain Dancer. He taught for 30 years at the University of Pittsburgh and became a beloved advisor to dozens of students who kept writing fiction after taking his class. He performs with the Deliberate Strangers in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Please go here.

John Sinclair is a poet, musicologist, and touring artist who has celebrated deep and lively alternatives for the Western world over more than 50 years. He was co-founder of the White Panther Party and the Ann Arbor Blues Festival and was manager of the MC-5. He was the subject of John Lennon's song "Ten for Two." He recently brought out an homage to John Coltrane as book and CD. Please go here for many links.

Barry Kaiser, John Sinclair, Don Paul, and Tom Worrell, March 2011, outside Louisiana Music Factory, New Orleans.
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VERSE / Larry Piltz : Hasan's Beard

Hasan's Beard

Not one to turn the other cheek
Hasan's Beard bristled at the charges.
Not guilty by reason of inanity!
Not even accessory after the fact.
Yet military justice had Hasan's Beard by the short ones
and Hasan's Beard would ultimately take it on the chin
in this enigmatic full-grown brush with the law
with the verdict-to-be not even a close shave
nor by a whisker but a shadow of a pretext.

This is a rash prosecution of ingrown justice
wrong in so many ways even on a follicular level
the trial more of a clip joint than a court of law.

They have not seen the last of Hasan's Beard
a growing problem
even after death.

Larry Piltz / The Rag Blog
August 22, 2012
Indian Cove
Austin

http://www.statesman.com/news/local/judge-orders-hasans-beard-shaved-before-court-martial-2422326.html

[Larry Piltz is an Austin-based writer, poet, and musician. Find more articles and poetry by Larry Piltz on The Rag Blog.]

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BOOKS / Mariann G. Wizard : 'Inside/Out': The Poetry of Marilyn Buck

'Inside/Out':
The poetry of Marilyn Buck
 
By Mariann G. Wizard / The Rag Blog / May 10, 2012

The Rag Blog's Mariann Wizard will join fellow poets Czarina Aggabao Thelen, Lilia Rosas, Jorge Renaud, Michelle Mejia, and Jane Madrigal (San Quilmas) at "Inside/Out: a Reading and Celebration of a new poetry book by former political prisoner Marilyn Buck," presented by Red Salmon Arts at 7 p.m., Wednesday, May 16, 2012, at Resistencia Book Store, 1801-A South First St., Austin.

[Inside/Out: Selected Poems by Marilyn Buck;  Foreword by David Meltzer (2012: City Lights Books, San Francisco); Paperback; 128 pp.; $13.95.]

Marilyn Buck's fellow poet and mentor David Meltzer writes that once when he was visiting her in Dublin Federal Correctional Center (prison), she expressed a desire to be known "not as a political prisoner poet, but simply as a poet."

For this collection, racing against uterine cancer until her death, she and a small group of now-surviving artistic and political friends (Meltzer, Felix Shafer, and Miranda Bergman, with poet Jack Hirschman and City Lights publisher Elaine Katzenberger) selected 63 poems that will give general poetry lovers their first real opportunity to savor her body of work.

Marilyn Buck was a Ragstaffer in Austin and Newsreel activist in San Francisco before becoming active in the Black Liberation movement. She died in August, 2010, in her 63rd year, after 25 years in federal prison and 19 days of freedom.

She began writing poetry in prison as one of the few means of self-expression open to her. As she wrote in her Master's thesis, On Becoming a Poet and Artist: Beyond Censorship to Re-Imagination (New College of California, Fall 1999, author's copy), "I was a censored person by virtue of being a political prisoner. Ironically, defiance of State censorship reduced me to self-censorship. Nevertheless, I needed to affirm myself... I turned to poetry, an art of speaking sparely, but flagrantly."

Buck's earlier collections (a chapbook, Rescue the Word [San Francisco and New York: Friends of Marilyn Buck, 2001], and a CD, Wild Poppies [San Francisco: Freedom Archives, 2004]), and other published works, while including poems that didn't spring from political or criminal convictions or fugitive experience, leaned heavily in that direction and by her choice.

While Inside/Out certainly doesn't slight her political and prison-related work, we may also see several other facets of a woman who was much more than a one-dimensional icon. In almost all, she preserves her hallmark "spare... but flagrant" style.

Some selections will be familiar to Buck's readers, and already beloved. "Clandestine Kisses" celebrates love against the rules with defiant elán. Like many of her poems, it summons a vision of irrepressible life finding a foothold in a world of steel and concrete.

"Woman with Cat and Iris" is another understated, sleight-of-hand creation: a tranquil Sunday morning illusion of normalcy dissolves in clanging steel doors and the shouts of guards, but the cat and flower linger, Cheshire-like, in the mind.

Marilyn wrote often about how the human mind can escape the sterility of prison, even for a moment; road maps, perhaps, for other prisoners, of whatever barred crucible, with "Gone" the most direct. "Night Showers," celebrating washing off the pain and grief of each day along with its grit and grime, and "Woman's Jazz Band Performs at Women's Theater" also mine this theme.

Incarceration is in large part a punishment because of its sensory deprivation. Deprivation from color, movement, textures, tastes, rain, the moon, etc., loom large in Buck's work, but as Meltzer notes, it also bursts with music.

The jazz cadences of her longer poems beg for a saxophone's honk and moan, a conga's quick counterpoint. The centrality of music and poetry in liberation struggles past and present, personal and political, is never lost on her. Here are a few lines from the previously unpublished "Reading Poetry":

Chao Ut reads Vietnamese poetry
I tell her she reads well
she smiles...

she reads another poem
                          it sounds like music, I say
       yes I'll read it again
                 the way we everyday talk
she reads
            do you hear?
                      yes, I say...

Or this, from "Boston Post Road Blues":

...I wait in the car's darkness I count
minutes and coins
            11:00 I step through blinking neon
             into the vacant booth drop coins
             and hear a click

the plum-colored voice
             Baby I'm here
trumpet notes tap along my spine
my delight a waterfall
             blues turn bold
                       intimate in the dark…

Buck had a dry, playful wit, well-known to friends but seldom given rein in her published work. It's nice to find it here in a few poems such as "Definition":

when I was much younger
than I am now
my mom told me
look out for tall dark strangers
I thought she meant
look for one

Many poems seen for the first time in this collection are intensely personal. "Our Giant" recalls the darker side of Marilyn's father. Louis Buck was defrocked as an Episcopal priest for opposing segregation. Crosses were burned on the family's lawn during Marilyn's childhood.

A courageous, outspoken crusader to the world, he was a controlling tyrant to his wife and children, demanding perfection, as he defined it, from each of them:

brooding Irish Atlas
props long-legged baby
in the window of a '47 car
(a car I remember better
than my father's sweet attentions)
the only clue left of kindness
             a bled-orange Kodacolor

a handsome rundown football player
like a thundering giant
he dangled our lives from his fingertips
            four morsels
we hovered over the chasm of his rage
our tears seasoned his wounds
swallowed whole
           we were regurgitated
                     each daybreak...

When Marilyn's increasing radicalism led to her involvement in Black Liberation groups embracing armed self-defense, their estrangement increased. After she became a fugitive from the law, she and her father had no contact for many years.

Yes Louis' uncompromising ideals and stubborn courage clearly informed much of her own conduct, including, some might say, the self-destructive parts. Their reconciliation before his death was extremely important to Marilyn. Here she expresses the terror, admiration, and eventual compassion he inspired:

...he was our giant, defrocked
he stomped in "jesus sandals"
stained the silken robes
           of rich men's hypocrisy
a jeremiah in farmboy overalls
           and starched Mexican wedding shirt

titanic storms flayed his flesh
too angry to leave this too-small world…

Her mother, Virginia, to whom the volume is dedicated, is also recalled in "Loss." Her death from the same type of cancer that would claim Marilyn was not only a grievous loss in itself, but a blow to the hope that Marilyn might survive to a healthy old age in freedom.

Virginia Buck defied (and eventually divorced) Louis, visiting as often as possible the daughter she "could not save... from vengeful-suited men nor from myself." Marilyn was not allowed to attend either parent's funeral, another deprivation that took a deep emotional toll.

Besides her poetry, much still uncollected, Marilyn Buck over time developed her ability to express herself "sparely yet flagrantly," making significant contributions to radical and liberation theory and discussion, contributing to numerous journals and publications.

She taught herself Spanish, and in 2008 City Lights published her translation of exiled Uruguayan poet Cristina Peri Rossi's collection, State of Exile, in a bilingual volume.

In prison, Marilyn became a certified literacy instructor and taught hundreds of women to read. She learned and taught yoga, became an advocate for women's healthcare, and organized AIDS education and prisoner fundraising activities. She mentored uncountable prisoners, prisoners' family members, and poets around the world. She was a voracious reader who maintained a vast and varied correspondence, including with my grateful self.

One fault with Inside/Out is that is doesn't tell when the poems were written, except those with dates in their titles. This would have been useful not only to academic readers but to friends and fellow poets who will long to know when such epic works as "Blake's Milton: Poetic Apocalypse" and "Revelation" were composed. Much longer than most of her other poems, these works blaze with intense visions wherein prison walls have neither substance nor meaning, such as these lines from "Revelation":

...Do you see demons and desolation, hear sounds
of screams, wailing? Or smell sulfur burn
behind your tongue – a taste of wormwood
and aloes? Or encounter the touch as a torch upon the skin?
           You imagine fire but it might be ice...

There are no apologies here, no appeals for special consideration. As she rejected white-skin privilege in life, binding herself to oppressed people in words and deeds, Marilyn Buck sought no deathbed, deus ex machina salvation from prison, cancer, or the condemnation of the self-righteous.

For those who loved and miss her, Inside/Out is a special gift, long dreamed-of. For those who don't know her, or who've had limited knowledge of her as person or poet, here she is at last free to speak outside State restraints. No more bars, shackles, solitary confinements, or super-max jails.

The last poem included is "The First Year You Learn to Wear the Robes":

his teacher told him on stepping into the Zen priesthood

to wrap one robe and then another, is not as simple as it looks
rather this is not a simple matter of getting dressed, not a covering
a process of finding oneself inside one's situation,
revelation

a prisoner must learn to wear robes of absence
prepared to live this day

In my heart, I see Buck's eager spirit wearing new robes now, a rebel angel inspiring poets and activists around the world to work compassionately yet relentlessly for justice, peace, and freedom. She lives this day, and tomorrow, in the words left behind.

[Mariann G. Wizard, a Sixties radical activist and contributor to The Rag, Austin's underground newspaper from the 60s and 70s, is a poet, a professional science writer specializing in natural health therapies, and a regular contributor to The Rag Blog. Read more poetry and articles by Mariann G. Wizard on The Rag Blog.]

Inset art above: Hand-rubbed woodcut print of Marilyn Buck by Chicana artist Jane Madrigal, from her forthcoming collaborative project/exhibition: "Revolutionary Women Woodcuts."

Read articles (and poems) by and about Marilyn Buck on The Rag Blog.

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VERSE / Mariann G. Wizard : Hiatus

Image from Dzinepress.
Hiatus

The plazas are empty, swept clean of debris,
smug analyses already written.
Elections are coming, everyone run to see:
is it Newton? or El Ron? or Mittens?

But out of the glare of the media stare,
the knowledge unerringly spreads:
the old ways are broken, the people have spoken,
and a new generation now treads
lightly as snowflakes, deeper than earthquakes,
firmly they step to the fore;
unafraid of each other, knowing Earth as their mother,
occupying tomorrow's far shore.

As spring comes around, let us welcome the sound
of our children all rising as one!
Step away from the past! Find a way that can last!
Our survival demands that we yearn
not for privileged wealth, but for happiness, health,
and a sense of creation and worth.
If no one is greedy, no one must be needy --
let a new age bring forth peace on earth!

The plazas are empty, swept clean of debris,
but the rising continues to roll.
When the people come out, and again raise a shout,
trust your kids, not some fake Fox News poll!

Mariann G. Wizard / The Rag Blog
February 14, 2012


[Mariann G. Wizard, a Sixties radical activist and contributor to The Rag, Austin's underground newspaper from the 60s and 70s, is a poet, a professional science writer specializing in natural health therapies, and a regular contributor to The Rag Blog. Read more poetry and articles by Mariann G. Wizard on The Rag Blog.]

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BOOKS / Mariann G. Wizard : Jonah Raskin's 'Rock 'n' Roll Women'

Portraits of a Generation:
Jonah Raskin's Rock 'n Roll Women

By Mariann G. Wizard / The Rag Blog / March 14, 2012

[Rock 'n' Roll Women: Portraits of a Generation, by Jonah Raskin (Santa Rosa, CA: McCaa Books, 2012); Paperback, 40 pp.]

Jonah Raskin's new poetry chapbook, Rock' n 'Roll Women: Portraits of a Generation, celebrates both rock and women equally and with great good will. Its 25 brief poems follow a simple formula like the guitar, bass, and drums of a rock trio: a woman (well, 24 women and one man), a rock artist from any era, and a moment in time defined by its soundtrack.

The poems were written for performance, accompanied by drums and/or stand-up bass, and reading them might seem a bit like reading CD liner notes, but they stand on their own nicely.

Of course Raskin isn't alone in being influenced, personally and artistically, by the musical revolution that rocked the world in the late 1950s and continues to roll across the galaxy today.

If you weren't alive before then, forgive me, but you just can't know how bloody bleak it was. Don't get me wrong, I still love a lot of Big Band-era music, classical stuff, C&W. But the thing is, every single bit of it was square, and we feared for a while that was all there was.

Yes, there was some jazz and some blues if you knew where to look, but you had to be some kind of egghead-kook to even look, and frankly, both genres can be awfully depressing, reflecting bittersweet, lost worlds of heroin and gin joints.

Folk music was a breath of fresh air in some ways from the pop pap of the post-World War II 40s and 50s, but at most a breath relived from second grade, before Sputnik went up and the system started shoving math and science down our throats while still jiving the campy campfire sounds of "Mairzy Doats."

Rock music is first, foremost, and always good time music, good times even in bad times, dancing to defy bad times, and power to the people always. The rise of rock coincided with, helped fuel, and was in turn fueled by the rise of a generation that couldn't stomach plastic-fantastic lies any longer, emphatically including young women who didn't really dig Doris Day or see themselves being Donna Reed.

(Women's) liberation is implicit in rock's hip-swinging beat. "Ladies," by definition, do not shake their booties or groove thangs, twist the night away, or get down or funky.

That Jonah celebrates just 24 rock 'n' roll women in this book is surely a testament to discretion; just as the 29 choice CDs he names -- admitting there are too many of the latter to list them all -- are only the tip of an iceberg of life-affirming music. Every woman who came of age when Beethoven was rolled over has her own internal rock soundtrack.

The one guy included, in "Mr Tommy & Mick Jagger," may not be the greatest example of American manhood, but I swear, I'd know this dude in any dancehall in the country, and Raskin is right, it "coulda been worse."

I have to give an appreciative nod to Jonah's restraint in not quoting from the rock lyrics that inspire and energize his verses; a constant temptation to me and one I seldom resist. At most, he uses a word or phrase ineluctably linked to a band or performer -- "boogie" and Creedence Clearwater; a piece of heart and Janis; Otis Redding and the end of a dock -- but mostly summons more subtle connections, the telling details of experience that make true songs:

Margaret & Pink Floyd

You, Margaret, cooked winter stew,
grew tarragon and didn't rue,
made tapes of Pink Floyd,
broke down dad's resistance,
reluctance to love, cut alternating
currents that drove him to extremes,
wild dreams,
acted out on crazy stage
your mother so kindly crafted,
Rock 'n' Roll woman.

Jonah has written six other books of poetry; American Scream, about Allen Ginsberg's epic poem "Howl"; and several other books, including Marijuanaland -- and is a regular contributor to The Rag Blog. Rock 'n' Roll Women's cover was designed by The Rag Blog's James Retherford.

[Mariann G. Wizard, a Sixties radical activist and contributor to The Rag, Austin's underground newspaper from the 60s and 70s, is a poet, a professional science writer specializing in natural health therapies, and a contributing editor to The Rag Blog. Read more articles and poetry by Mariann G. Wizard at The Rag Blog.]

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VERSE / Mariann G. Wizard : I'm Not Down With Jesus Anymore

"Republican Jesus." Painting by Brett Bretterson / Uncyclomedia Commons.

I'm Not Down With Jesus Anymore

a response to "The Response"


O I'm Not Down With Jesus Anymore –
They say He votes Republican and leads us into war,
and He will not heal anyone if they've been sick before –
No, I'm Not Down With Jesus Anymore!

I thought that I knew Jesus as a child –
He said he was a friend to all, so gentle and so mild,
and He held out His hand to me when I got kind of wild,
but that was before Jesus got so riled!

Now Jesus just seems angry all the time –
He hangs out with the big shots and overlooks their crimes,
and for the old and helpless, He hasn't got a dime –
it's their own fault if they're not in their prime!

Yeah, Jesus changed on his way to the top –
some say because his Daddy thought He was a flop,
He started acting less laid back and way more like a cop,
and now He's grown up, He's just like his Pop!

Jesus Christ no longer loves his brother –
can you imagine how that hurts His Mother?
And forget that Golden Rule of treating others
as you would like to be – that's just for losers, you schmuck!

I remember all the good times that we had –
like back when wearin' sandals was considered really rad,
or turnin' water into wine, man, that was super-bad!
But I'm not gonna let it make me sad.

We'll still be here if Jesus's new friends
decide that they don't need Him when they win –
when He sees them fill their bank accounts and commit their mortal sins –
He can join us at the barricades we tend!

But I'm Not Down With Jesus Anymore –
not if He votes Republican and still supports the war,
not if He won't heal anyone who has been sick before –
No, I'm Not Down With Jesus Anymore!

© mgw 8/25/11

Mariann G. Wizard / The Rag Blog


[Mariann G. Wizard, a Sixties radical activist and contributor to The Rag, Austin's underground newspaper from the 60s and 70s, is a poet, a professional science writer specializing in natural health therapies, and a regular contributor to The Rag Blog. Read more poetry and articles by Mariann G. Wizard on The Rag Blog.]

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VERSE / Felix Shafer : hey, marilyn

hey, marilyn


From august
through Black august
the drum beat us
all black and blue
and back again
where we live
inside shadows
with you

*

Here on the sad
fuming planet
comes a laughing ghost
beloved fugitive
our first anniversary
spun from these burning strands
our sensitive memory
of the afterlife without you
oh marilyn
a toast to your year
a salute to our tears
for the shadow of the panthers
cetewayo, shasha
smitty, dc and g (eronimo)*
now passing by

*

Here in my heart
a branch of middle summer
intermingles the past
with life's juggly light
flowing like fire
over the river wide
your red kite
tangled, unescaped
high among
the maple trees

We are your family
the red blood cells
in & out of prison cells
the red resistance cells
grouped by transience
side by side
overcoming
great misfortune
in the lonely outside

*

Last night I dreamed
of walking down storied halls
a familiar house
after the typhoon
people known by their resemblances
returned, some drained of smiles
some doing yoga
some replacing mislayed objects
overcome in bedrooms
A daring girl led me closer to the last window
beyond where I can see
There where the backyard
ought to be
was the outdoor visiting patio
of FCI Dublin

*

We come to recollect your absence
with ourselves
to feel your palm
resting on each hand
To receive your
loving encouragment
and your example:
That to live we must risk ourselves
for the uncertain future
with dignity

*

Marilyn because
you were charming
and unb0wed
because you had
miles of style and acres of smiles
because you were a generous
citizen of earth
sister and god mother
I am throwing open the door
to release the bars
to forget the cancer and the tears
so that I can see
your shining face

*

When it's quiet
when i lay deep down to sleep
i whisper kindness and
when I rise up
i sing of how
you wanted us to be happy and strong
when we were with you

Now a year after you have gone
I will We will


felix shafer 8.3.11

* Michael Cetewayo Tabor, Henry ShaSha Brown, Marc Smitty Smith, Don Cox and geronimo ji Jaga pratt are freedom fighters associated with the Black Panther Party & some with the Black Liberation Army who passed in the year since Marilyn died


Marilyn Buck -- political prisoner, acclaimed poet, former Austinite, and former original Ragstaffer -- was paroled last August after spending 30 years in federal prisons. But, after only 20 days of freedom, on August 3, 2010, Marilyn died of a virulent cancer.

Felix Shafer became an anti-imperialist/human rights activist while in high school during the late 1960's and has worked around prisons and political prisoners for over 30 years. He is a psychotherapist in San Francisco and can be reached at felixir999@gmail.com. Read Felix Shafer's three-part Rag Blog series, "Mourning for Marilyn Buck."





Why We Sing


By Mario Benedetti

If every hour comes with its death

if time is a den of thieves

the wind is no longer a good

and life is nothing more than a moving target
you might ask, why do we sing?
if our bravos are left without support

our homeland dies from sorrow

and the heart of man is smashed to pieces

even before the shame explodes
you might ask, why do we sing?

if we’re as far away as the horizon

and if over there were left the trees and the sky

if every night is always some sort of absence

and if every waking is a missed encounter
you might ask, why do we sing?
We sing because the river is calling

and when the river calls, the river calls

we sing because cruelty has no name

and destiny does have a name

we sing because the child and because all

and because someday and because the people

we sing because the survivors

and our dead want us to sing
we sing because to shout is not enough

and the crying and the cursing is not enough

we sing because we believe in people

and because we will defeat failure
we sing because the sun recognizes us

and because the fields smell of spring

and because in this stalk in that fruit

every question has its answer
we sing because it rains over the furrows

and we are the militants of life

and because we neither want nor can

allow the song to be turned to ashes.


Mario Benedetti (Sept. 14, 1920 - May 17, 2009) a Uruguayan poet, journalist, and novelist, was considered one of Latin America's most significant authors. Active in radical movements, he went into exile in 1973 when the military, backed by the U.S. CIA, took power. For 10 years, Benedetti lived in Argentina, Peru, Cuba, and post-Franco Spain. Mario Benedetti returned to Uruguay in 1983, yet lived for long periods in Madrid, Spain. Exile marked his life profoundly and one of his most important works is El Desexilio y Otras Conjeturas (Dis-exile And Other Conjectures, 1984). Marilyn Buck, who wrote about the internal exile of imprisonment, considered Mario Benedetti one of her favorite writers.

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VERSE / Mariann G. Wizard : Fire in the Hole

Cartoon by Dan Piraro / Bizarro.

Fire in the Hole

The powder keg is full
and the fuse is lit.

Daily before our eyes
men and women speak truth to power,
power crushes them,
they rise up again and again –

the powder keg is full
and the fuse is lit.

Daily before our eyes
spoiled executives flaunt
staggering profits while
staggering veterans beg for alms –

the powder keg is full
and the fuse is lit.

Daily before our eyes
arrogant legislators slash
funds for education while
prisons strain to contain more youths –

the powder keg is full
and the fuse is lit.

Daily before our eyes
scowling agents of morality
insert themselves into the
private cracks and crannies of our lives –

the powder keg is full
and the fuse is lit.

Daily before our eyes
decent working people,
having done the right thing all their lives,
find they have nothing to show for it –

the powder keg is full
and the fuse is lit.


The Mayan calendar ends in the year
twenty-twelve: an election year.
Some believe the world will end as well.
But if it continues, hear this:
the world of Obushma and Rottemney,
Bi(nLa)den and Palahuck,
Trumpette and Gingrinchvitis, is ending.
It ended, in fact, on Nine-One-One,
when the Twin Towers tumbled,
and the scraps of our freedom
were swapped for "security";
ended when the feds
bailed out "securities" firms that
bilked retirees' accounts;
ended when the promise of peace
became the reality of multi-war;
ended (finally?) when

before our eyes we saw
poor downtrodden camel-jockeys
stand up in the dust of centuries
and say "No more!"

Are we free people or slaves?
Will we be "Left Behind"?

The powder keg is full
and the fuse is lit.


Mariann G. Wizard / The Rag Blog
22 May 2011

[Mariann G. Wizard, a Sixties radical activist and contributor to The Rag, Austin's underground newspaper from the 60s and 70s, is a poet, a professional science writer specializing in natural health therapies, and a regular contributor to The Rag Blog. Read more poetry and articles by Mariann G. Wizard on The Rag Blog.]

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VERSE / Verandah Porche : REVOLUTION

Graphic from Rafftrax.

REVOLUTION

Lo, no virtue?

Root, unveil our novel It

O, live no rut. Rev unto oil.

Our violent into velour,

Rune to viol, ruin to love.


Verandah Porche / The Rag Blog
March 14, 2011

[Verandah Porche is a poet and writing partner in Guilford, Vermont. Read more of her work at verandahporche.com.]

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VERSE / Mariann G. Wizard : Egypt-Land

Image from Egypt Web.

Egypt-Land

"Freedom breeze, makes me feel fine;
blowin' through the jasmine in my mind!"1

Before Greece, you were the home of scholars.
Before Rome, you were an empire.
Before last week, you were slaves.

The birth of your society is shrouded in Time's burqua.
The birth of your revolution now reveals
        the best-kept secret of the Sphinx:
it's all about the people.

History is read from monuments of rulers and kings;
their grandiose self-glorifications dot every desert.
But this hasn't been the first time, has it? – that Egypt's
laborers have laid down their work, their very lives,
and stood up for change.

"Go down, Moses, go down to Egypt-Land;
go tell old Pharoah: let my people go!"2

The people of Tahrir Square are telling
Pharoah to go, with all his autocrats and aristocrats;
and leave Egypt to them, poor men and women;
o, the Sphinx is talking now!

The pyramid scheme is crumbling,
the lack of princely substance is seen by all.
The dance of the seven veils has been danced,
the veils cast aside, and stale promises with it.

        Ripples spread in sand
        as in water; dunes
        shift slowly, then all at once.


Mariann G. Wizard / The Rag Blog
18 February 2011

1 apologies to Seals & Crofts, "Summer Breeze"
2 traditional Negro spiritual

The Rag Blog / Posted February 22, 2011

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Joshua Brown : Life During Wartime: Slay the Beast

CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE

Political cartoon and verse by Joshua Brown / The Rag Blog / February 20, 2011.The Rag Blog

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VERSE / Mike Davis : A R I Z O N A

Arizona's Sheriff Joe. Image from The News Junkie.

ARIZONA

1.

Cochise, son of the oak,
(Guchiish)
Arise
The desert cries for justice

(We must scalp Sheriff Joe)

Lt. Bascom hung your brother and nephews
Fed their eyes to the ravens
And their feet to the coyotes

Cochise of the lance
Call your blood, Mangus Colorado,
(Gandazislichiidn)
Tall as a mountain and unyielding

Johnson massacred 400 Apache women and children
So Mangus, in his grief,
made the white moon scream

Cochise, you craved peace,
But the invaders murdered your children
for gold, copper and real estate


(We must scalp Sheriff Joe)

2.

Arizona is one of God’s great poems
But the pale mad ants
Want only to spill water, asphalt, and hate

Cochise, brother to the Black man,
You defeated the slave owners’ invasion at Dragoon Mountain
But Lincoln sent no congratulations

Instead from Washington came soldiers,
Railroads, pox, and slander
Dams, jails, and ultimately Goldwater



Cochise, Last Poet of free people,
You asked these questions:
“Why do the Apache carry their lives on their fingernails?
Why is it that the Apaches wait to die?”

“Why shut me up on a reservation?
We will make peace; we will keep it faithfully.
But let us go around free as Americans do.
Let us go wherever we please."

3.

The Secretary of War replied:

“My dear Cochise,
your aboriginal freedom is a disease
that we will cure with gallows,
howitzers, and cheap whiskey

We’re coming to build fences,
make borders, dig holes
Put men’s sweat to work under the earth
Feeding bankers in distant cities

Your people are vagabonds
who drift like clouds in the sky
But the future is already written
In the Prospectus of the Arizona Copper Corporation

If you complain about the reservation,
your starving cattle and sick children
We’ll exile you to a land without mountains
Where, like the Jews, you’ll weep for centuries.”


4.

Great-great grandfather,

They say it has been forever
But your people know it’s only been a day
Since you came down from the Dragoon Mountains

Still, the sky has exploded
And the locusts have eaten our dreams

Syndicates took the ore
And then sold the dirt
To shriveled people craving heat

Millions of lights blind the valleys
The Land can no longer see
Or remember its name

The whites have a new God
Stranger than the last
Who goes by the name
‘No Trespass’

He wears guns to school
And wants to deport
all the children to Mexico

He’s chiseled off the First Commandment
from the church doors
And replaced it with the Second Amendment

5.

Cochise,

Robespierre of the saguaro

Your pony is ready,
Painted for war,

The young girls have finished
Your medicine shirt

Here’s your father’s talisman
Of lightning-struck oak

Cochise,

The people are chanting
And we must go

To take the scalp of Sheriff Joe Arpaio

Mike Davis / The Rag Blog
February 3, 2011

[Mike Davis is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside. An urban theorist and a social activist, Davis is the author of City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles.]

The Rag Blog

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Thorne Dreyer : Journalist, Author, and 'Investigative Poet' John Ross (1938-2011)

The late great John Ross.
Farewell to our great friend John Ross

See "Los Muertos," a poem by John Ross, Below.

By Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / January 18, 2011

Yesterday I received an email with the following message: “John Ross passed peacefully in the arms of his good friends Arminda and Kevin in Tzipijo, near Lake Patzcuaro, Michoacan, after a two-year lucha against liver cancer.” The message was sent from John's email address and included the above photo.

John Ross, who styled himself an "investigative poet," was a long-time contributor to and friend of The Rag Blog. He was a singular talent whose work was always enlightening and entertaining, every post a revelation. No one ever wrote about Mexico like John Ross did... or ever will again.

Ross, whose roots were in the old left politics of New York City and the beat poetry scene of San Francisco, visited Austin last March promoting his latest book, El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City, and reading his poetry at MonkeyWrench and Resistencia bookstores.

Our mutual friend Mike Davis, himself a noted author and educator, wrote about John and El Monstruo: “From a window of the aging Hotel Isabel, where he has lived for almost a quarter of a century, John Ross sings a lusty corrido about a great, betrayed city and its extraordinary procession of rulers, lovers and magicians.”

Indeed, everything John Ross ever wrote was a "lusty corrido," a vivid grito of protest and celebration.

The Rag Blog last heard from John late last year when he informed us he would be suspending his writing indefinitely due to the rigors of the latest round of chemotherapy to treat his advancing cancer of the liver, which had been in remission but had returned with a vengeance.

In my copy of El Monstruo, John Ross wrote, “To Thorne: Desde el corazon del Monstruo sigues en la lucha!”

[Thorne Dreyer, a pioneering '60s underground journalist, is a director of the New Journalism Project, Inc., editor of The Rag Blog, and host of Rag Radio.]

• Please read Frank Barnacke's lovely tribute to John Ross. Also read John's unforgettable dispatches from the heart of El Monstruo on The Rag Blog, and read John Ross in Obamalandia : Death Waltz Across Texas.

John Ross dies:
Opposing every war was his obsession

The American rebel journalist, poet, novelist and human shield, John Ross (New York, 1938), deacon of Mexico correspondents, died yesterday at 8:58 a.m. in Santiago Tzipijo, Michoacan, after battling for two years against liver cancer.

A wake is being held on the shores of Lake Patzcuaro. He will be cremated in Urapan and his ashes scattered in Mexico and in several cities in the U.S., according to his wishes.

Ross, whose last book is entitled El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City, arrived at Casa Santiago, on the shores of the lake, on Dec. 31 in a taxi, reports Kevin Quigley, who with his wife is owner of the guest house. Both were compadres of the New Yorker.

Two days earlier, friends of the journalist had retrieved his archives from the room he occupied in the hotel Isabel in Mexico City, where he had lived since the week following the earthquake of 1985. His files are to be temporarily stored at the Cemanahuac Educational Community in Cuernavaca.

John Ross was a man of the Left and one of his great obsessions was the struggle against wars of every type. His great labor as an independent journalist and correspondent was to participate in and cover the political and social events that happened here, to make them known in the United States. “He never quit telling the gringos what was happening in Mexico” ...

-- La Jornada / Mexico City / January 18, 2011
(Translated by Dick J. Reavis / The Rag Blog)

John Ross. Photo from Con Carlitos.


LOS MUERTOS

After they had waited on line

for nearly eight straight hours

to vote for the candidate of their choice,

The Dead were finally informed

that they were no longer inscribed

upon the precinct lists of the Republic.

But we have only come to exercise

our rights as responsible citizens

The Dead complained bitterly

for it seemed to them that the President

in the spirit of national unity

had called upon all the people

to cast their ballots

as is the democratic norm.

The official registrar

who was still quite alive

could only explain

the exclusion of the calacas

with platitudes about Morality.

Oh said The Dead and voted anyway.

But your votes are clearly illegal

winced the official Official,

they can't be counted in this election.

You have a point The Dead replied,

maybe they won't be counted now

but surely you will count them later.

© John Ross
When John Ross was 18, he was a young member of the Beat Generation, reading his poetry in Greenwich Village bars with the great bass player Charles Mingus. -- Beatitude Poetry

The Rag Blog

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