I don’t post nearly as much personal content on this site as I used to, but from time to time I feel the need to veer off the poetry path. Now is one of those times. I feel like I’ve been watching my country slowly disintegrate since 2016, but I know that the underlying conditions that have led to today’s crises far predate the Trump administration. Overpolicing of Black communities — and in particular Black men — dates back hundreds of years. The Black Lives Matter movement dates back to the Obama administration, and the George Floyd protests make it clear that we still have a lot of work to do as a country. Trump’s not-so-tacit endorsements of white supremacist groups hasn’t helped, and neither has the continually growing wealth gap. The COVID-19 crisis and its resulting effects on the economy have created even more stresses for communities of color, who have been hardest hit by them.
Continue reading “Justice for George Floyd: What I Can Do to Help”#IndictBoston and more Ferguson links.
I’m so proud of my city for the impassioned, nonviolent protest that took place last night in the wake of the Ferguson ruling. If I were the fearless 19-year-old I used to be (and not in the
midst of moving house), I would have been on the streets with the rest of the crowd. Here’s a report from a friend who was there.
Last night, I joined over a thousand Bostonians calling for justice for Mike Brown. It was heartening to see so much of my city turn out, and when I got home and went on Twitter, the protest was still going strong. You can see some great pictures from the evening here and here.
One of the most powerful moments was when we marched to the South Bay House of Corrections and chanted to the incarcerated men, “We see you.” They stood at the windows waving, flipping their lights on and off, banging on the windows. One man used small pieces of paper to write “Mike” on his window.
This is what I’ve been reading:
-“If we were talking about the murder of my child, I would not be dignified. I would be naked and hideous with my grief. I would rage. If I were murdered in such a manner, I would want people…
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Resources in the USA and Canada for GLBT Folks and the People Who Love Them
My company’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) employee organization forwarded me this list, compiled by the Employee Assistance Trade Organization. These are organizations and hotlines that can help queer folk with all areas of our lives, including coming out, advocacy, workplace issues, healthcare access, legal problems, gay-friendly religious organizations, and violence recovery. I’ve added a couple of links to organizations in the Boston area as well.
Continue reading “Resources in the USA and Canada for GLBT Folks and the People Who Love Them”
Thirteen Years After 9-11-01, How Are We Supporting Our Troops?
Thirteen years ago, I was working for a travel company whose corporate culture trended heavily toward Nordic beauty standards and J Crew clothing — I didn’t exactly fit in. I had a nemesis coworker who was fond of practical jokes, so when she said that someone had just driven a plane into the Twin Towers I thought she was kidding. It became apparent very quickly that she wasn’t. I will always remember the tide of horror, sadness, and fear that rose in my chest as I stood with coworkers around a TV screen and watched the first tower come down. It was a distant precursor to what I would feel in April 2013 when two brothers set off homemade bombs at the finish line of the Boston Marathon.
Both of these events make me contemplate rage. Continue reading “Thirteen Years After 9-11-01, How Are We Supporting Our Troops?”
Verizon’s “All Kids Do It” Excuse For Throttling Isn’t Good Enough For FCC Chair
This is what happens without Net Neutrality.
The Poet According to Harper’s
This poet, first arrested by the implied promise of this passage (Buzzfeed headline: “How to become a Great Poet (TM) in three easy steps”), is struck by the subtle gendered irony contained therein.
We might say that three qualities are necessary to write superb lyric poetry. First, the writer must have something of a gift: she must be able to make music, command metaphors, compress sense, write melodiously when the situation demands and gratingly when need be. She must also have something to say. There must be some region of her experience that has transfixed her and that she feels compelled to put into words and illuminate. She must burn to attack some issue, must want to unbind a knot, tighten it, or maybe send a blade directly through its core.
Given these powers — the power of expression and the power to find a theme — the poet must add ambition. She must be willing to write for her readers. She must be willing to articulate the possibility that what is true for her is true for all. When these three qualities — lyric gift; a serious theme, passionately addressed; real ambition (which one might also call courage) — come together, the results can be luminous: one gets Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” or Plath’s “Daddy,” or Lowell’s “Sunday Morning” (or Wallace Stevens’s). But without that last ingredient, ambition, nothing great will come.
— “Poetry Slam: Or, the decline of American verse,” by Mark Edmundson, in Harper’s July 2013, p. 64. Full text behind a paywall here: http://harpers.org/archive/2013/07/poetry-slam/
Some relevant pieces of information about the text:
- A few years ago, Harper’s was one of the worst offenders on the VIDA list. It’s still not doing so well.
- The author uses the feminine pronoun to refer to the hypothetical Great Poet.
- Three out of four of the examples of Great Poetry are by male authors.
- The author of the article is a man.
Since I’d rather be a Great Poet (TM) than a Women’s Studies professor, I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about these facts and whether or not they indicate that Harper’s Magazine has a long way to go before its head will be completely removed from its own posterior.
One Year After the Boston Marathon Bombing
Ever since moving to Boston in 1999, I’ve been keenly aware of the ways in which I am separate from the city’s mainstream culture. As a queer woman, as a poet, as a [insert any one of a variety of labels that apply to me], I’m used to feeling different, apart, separate. About this time last year though, an odd thing happened.
In the hours and the days following the Boston Marathon bombing, I began to feel like I was part of a unified whole. That the Boston portrayed in the national press, the Boston of skinny white women sporting Tiffany bracelets in the Back Bay, the Boston of drunken Red Sox fans on the Green Line, the Boston of disaffected immigrants in search of a reason for living — that all of these Bostons — was also the Boston that I know: the Boston of slam poets congregating at the Cantab in Cambridge, the Boston of nerds in black turtlenecks eating sushi and joking about obscure internet memes, the Boston of queers congregating in living rooms and church basements, the Boston of police brutality and entrenched segregation.
Continue reading “One Year After the Boston Marathon Bombing”
Transgender Day of Remembrance
Murdered for walking in public, or speaking, or wearing red lipstick.
NOTE: This poem was written for Transgender Day of Remembrance using Allen Ginsburg’s answer to haiku: the American Sentence.
In Memoriam: Trayvon Martin
I’ve been largely silent regarding the issue of Trayvon Martin’s death and Zimmerman’s acquittal. As a white woman living in Boston, I don’t see the ongoing effects of racism in the same way that I did when I was living on the north side of Poughkeepsie, or growing up in a housing project in Stamford. But racism still affects me and those I love. I’d like to take a moment to honor the friends and loved ones whom I know deal with racism on a daily basis — and the friends and loved ones I never met or never got to know well because of the racist and segregated society in which I live.
From a New York Times editorial published July 14, 2013:
While Mr. Zimmerman’s conviction might have provided an emotional catharsis, we would still be a country plagued by racism, which persists in ever more insidious forms despite the Supreme Court’s sanguine assessment that “things have changed dramatically,” as it said in last month’s ruling striking down the heart of the Voting Rights Act.
Facts about the Affordable Care Act (aka “Obamacare”)
The ACA (Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare) means the following:
- Insurance companies can no longer impose lifetime limits on the amount of care you receive.
- They can no longer discriminate against children with preexisting conditions.
- They can no longer drop your coverage if you get sick.
- They can no longer jack up your premiums without reason.
- They have to provide free preventive care like check-ups and mammograms
- Young adults under the age of 26 can stay on their parent’s health care plans
- Senior citizens save money on prescription drugs
Starting in 2014:
- Insurance companies will no longer be able to discriminate against anyone with a preexisting health condition
- They won’t be able to charge you more just because you’re a woman.
- They won’t be able to bill you into bankruptcy.
When Mitt Romney’s health insurance reform passed in Massachusetts, I was disgusted to discover that it included an individual mandate — in other words, that everyone in the state HAD to buy health insurance. At the time, I was self-employed and was barely able to pay my bills. Health insurance, especially in the days before the exchanges, was completely out of the question.
The health insurance mandate was one of the big reasons why I decided to take a full-time job with a larger company, but it wasn’t the only reason. The other big reason had to do with access to health care. During my years of self-employment, I paid for all of my health care out of pocket: visits to the doctor, prescription medication, diagnostic tests, and the rest. I’ve been living with a chronic illness since my late teens. And there were some things I just couldn’t afford, things that would have made it possible to manage my illness much more effectively. Toward the end of my years living uninsured, I could see myself getting sicker and sicker. I knew that I needed to have better access to health care; if I didn’t, I would become so sick that I wouldn’t be able to work at all.
What I find most disgusting about the national debate on health care is that the individual mandate — the very thing that Republicans and Tea Partiers wail and gnash their teeth about, the thing they decry as socialist government control — was their idea in the first place.
But what I find just as disgusting — flabbergasting, even — is the Left’s inability to effectively mobilize and stay on message around this issue. So that many of the people who most desperately need better health care coverage, the people who benefit most from the passage of the ACA, are the same people wailing and gnashing their teeth about it. Ah, well. Perhaps they’ll be happier in Canada.
Garden of Words 