Where Pennsylvania Pours into Delaware

Delaware’s border with Pennsylvania is unique because it is the only border between states that is an arc of a circle. When established by the famed Mason and Dixon, that border proved to be imprecise and had to undergo various minor adjustments over the centuries. Today, in that thicket of roads and neighborhoods that dot the region, the border between Delaware and Pennsylvania is largely invisible unless you can find those old marker stones, or by today’s standards, encounter the welcoming signs along the roads and highways between the states, or detect the subtle differences in road paving. However, it is a border that’s definite enough, for example, to place the esteemed American artist Andrew Wyeth as a Pennsylvania artist and not a Delaware artist even though he has some connections to Delaware. These are the kinds of connections that pour down the Brandywine River from its sources in Pennsylvania to its terminus in Wilmington, Delaware.

A story of this small but significant river is the subject of Delaware author Henry Seidel Canby’s The Brandywine, originally published by Farrar & Rinehart in 1941, and more recently by Schiffer Publishing Ltd. It is a nice complement to Canby’s earlier book about Wilmington, The Age of Confidence, which was the subject of an earlier post.

Initially, Canby’s The Brandywine was part of the series “The Rivers of America,” edited by Stephen Vincent Benét and Carl Carmer. In the book Canby reiterates the early Dutch and Swedish history of Wilmington in the context of the Brandywine, when it was a little explored river that the local Lenapi called the Wawaset. It was not until the English, led largely by William Penn and the Quakers who more extensively explored the river, realized its potential as an energy source for milling and manufacture and drove out the indigenous Lenapi, the latter being more extensively covered by Delaware historian Clinton Weslager’s book Red Men on the Brandywine (Hambleton, 1953).

However, the early Swedes contributed an item that was first introduced in early Wilmington, in the settlement they called New Sweden, which was the log cabin and which later became an American icon. Another American icon first introduced in Wilmington, when it had been developed by the English into a town filled with mills designed to convert grain into flour, was the vehicle used for transporting grain and flour to and from the various mills along the lower Brandywine. The icon, known as the Conestoga wagon, was later referred to as the “prairie schooner,” which helped to drive American expansionism westward. The confluence of the Brandywine with Wilmington in those early days that spanned Delaware as a British colony and as the first of our United States resulted in other firsts, like the earliest use of steam power for manufacture in the country. During the final years of the British colony, during the American Revolution, and in the earliest years of the republic, Wilmington’s relationship to the Brandywine led the region to become among the more important centers for manufacture, milling and transportation in the thirteen new and independent states.

Canby, in The Brandywine, covers all aspects of the river’s history from a recounting of the confused gallantry of the Battle of the Brandywine during the American Revolution, fraught with its treachery by secret loyalists, poor intelligence gathering, and Quaker equivocation under the guise of pacifism. He covers the rise of early duPont manufacturing, which coincided with an influx of French into Wilmington giving the name to Wilmington’s French Street. The French influence also provided Wilmington a sophisticated cosmopolitan flavor, which against the backdrop of Quaker austerity, made Wilmington culturally unique for a time in comparison to other nearby cities like Philadelphia and Baltimore.

Henry Seidel Canby, being among the foremost literary critics of his day, addresses the literature of the Brandywine, during which he recognizes Poe as one who was certainly acquainted with the Brandywine, especially with regard to his relationship to John Lofland, who wrote stories that took place along the river’s shores. Canby does not take too seriously Lofland’s stories, Ono-keo-co, or the Bandit of the Brandywine and Manitoo, the Indian Beauty of the Brandywine, and Wild Harry of Wilmington. He considers both as “claptrap” designed for popular consumption though retaining reality of background. In higher regard, as candidates for serious Brandywine literature, are works by George Lippard, who was born at Chester Springs, and Bayard Taylor, who was born near Kennett Square and whose works appeared after those of Lofland and Lippard. Lippard’s novel, Blanche of the Brandywine; or September the Eleventh 1777, published in 1846, is almost impossible to find. Taylor’s novel The Story of Kennett was first published by Putnam in 1866 and again by the same publisher in 1903 accompanied by photographs from the region. Canby also speculates that the woodland in the Brandywine valley may have been the inspiration for Howard Pyle’s novel The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood.

Today, thanks in great part to the preservation efforts of the Bancrofts, whose contribution Canby also acknowledges, the Brandywine’s natural beauty is still with us to enjoy, as well as all those gentle ghosts, conjured by Lofland, Lippard and Taylor, and others, who still haunt it through the pages of their surviving literature.

A City of Ghosts

Several months ago the publisher of a local online literary magazine asked if I might consider producing a site map of places of literary interest. Initially I thought this might be a good idea. Because I had been developing a keen curiosity about the legacy of Wilmington’s history of jazz, and because I felt that literature and jazz seem to go well together because, at least, their histories were contemporary, I considered doing a site map that contained both.

I began by listing locations, first the homes where different authors, poets, and musicians had lived. Then I listed other locations like schools, clubs and other places of business like bookstores. After listing about a couple dozen sites, it dawned on me how unviable a site map of this type would be.

Site maps are made for tourists or interested persons as a tool, but I found there would be little or nothing to actually see. The home of jazz great Clifford Brown is still a vacant lot. The home of Alice Dunbar-Nelson had been replaced with an office building. I-95 runs through the block where the Wertenbakers had grown up. Ellerslie, where F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald had lived, had been torn down decades ago. A plaque installed on the former home of James Whaler, Wilmington’s most successful 20th century poet, had been removed by the owner. The Wilmington location of Friends’ School, where nearly all successful early 20th century Wilmington authors had at attended least in part, had decades ago moved to an affluent suburb, leaving its former Wilmington location still a largely vacant lot. Many famous clubs, like the Club Baby Grand and The Spot, that made Wilmington’s jazz history so notable, have become the victims of “urban renewal.” The very street on which Daisy Winchester had her speakeasy doesn’t even exist anymore. For those few places that Wilmington’s literati frequented, the most well known –– if indeed “well known” is even applicable –– was the Greenwood Book Store, but I challenge anyone to tell me where it had been located.

In 1934 Wilmington author Henry Seidel Canby published The Age of Confidence (Farrar & Rinehart). In it Canby examines life in Wilmington during the turn of the 20th century. Locally, one can tell by his name he’s a part of a large and old family in Wilmington. Canby should know. In the book he gives thorough perspective on subjects still relevant today: family life, lifestyle, religion and literature and pop culture. Yet there’s a bigger story. It’s the story of a city at a turning point in history. It is a comment on the Progressive Era because he examines the age before it. It was an age of laissez faire, those values and sentiment still imbibing those flavors from old southern chivalry, steeped in the works of Walter Scott, Fenimore Cooper, Hawthorne, and Ulysses Grant’s Memoirs. There’s little of Whitman and Poe if anything at all. Certainly there was a boho somewhere lurking in some cultural crevice of Wilmington reading Poe and Whitman, but for the majority who had ushered in the 20th century it was an “age of confidence.”

Canby wrote The Age of Confidence at a time after The Progressive Age had fallen into the pit of The Great War, and after the tawdry age of The Roaring 20s. The Great Depression was obstructing the careers of many emerging literati who first flourished thanks to the cultural boost provided by the Progressive Era.

At the onset of The Great Depression many Wilmington literati moved to New York City to continue their careers, surviving with pop novels and journalism. Canby never forgot his roots even though he was one who went to New York and found success. He founded The Saturday Review of Literature, which could be found on most newsstands. He wrote books about Thoreau and Whitman and was considered among the most preeminent of reviewers and cultural commentators toward the middle of the 20th century, and he was the father of Wilmington’s literati. His house is now someone’s personal property, unless its been turned into an apartment house, in which case it’s someone’s private property. The house belonging to Christopher Ward is nearby, but Ward did not leave Wilmington. He remained to write histories in retirement. Ward’s fiction was beginning to wither into the throes of the Depression. Wilmington poet James Whaler went away and became a professor, which is a profession that occupied Canby for many years. Even Canby’s wife, who is loosely portrayed in Canby’s only novel, Our House (1919, MacMillan) was a successful poet, having her work published in Scribner’s, The New Yorker, and The Saturday Review of Literature. Marion Canby’s poetry is collected in High Mowing (1932 Houghton Mifflin).

In Wilmington we had, at one time in the 1920s, more than a half dozen successful novelists living in or near Wilmington, including F. Scott Fitzgerald. All but Fitzgerald are now ghosts gathering dust on those library shelves where their work might be found.

The Progressive Era ended with the World War and the Bolshevik Revolution, but two aspects of its legacy continued in the 1920s. The first, which didn’t work, was Prohibition, and which helped launched the “Lost Generation.” The other was Women’s Suffrage, which did work. By the time Canby wrote The Age of Confidence, Delaware Avenue in Wilmington, where he and Christopher Ward had lived, was a ghost of its former self. While others of Wilmington’s literati ––Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Charles and Peyton Wertenbaker, Anne Parrish and James Whaler –– left town, Canby’s book was no more than a reminder of a city that once was, and was filling up with ghosts.

As the 1930s developed, however, the power of the music being made on Wilmington’s eastside ushered in a new cultural era. Jazz was being heard and played and attracting the attention of the jazz world. Great jazz artists from Wilmington like Betty Roché, Clifford Brown and Lem Winchester would be propelled into the “big time.” This time it was not The Great Depression that ended an era, but some racist and faulty idea called “urban renewal.” The wholesale destruction of an entire section of
Wilmington nearly destroyed our city’s jazz community.

Here are the ghosts I still see in Wilmington, when I see someone carrying a case for a musical instrument, or a familiar figure standing on a doorstep in a building no longer there, or in a plate glass window where once a jazz club or bookstore or gallery once stood. This vision of ghosts is superimposed upon all the amnesia inflicted by those politicians and developers who think as little about how the changes they’re making of our city today will affect us all tomorrow as they think little about how the contribution from the past still haunts Wilmington. Then again, maybe I’m the only one who is haunted, but I’d rather be haunted than drowning in a sea of ignorance and amnesia.

Occupy Wall Street: the Space in the Spandrels

We hear quite a bit about the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon in terms of a space: “opening a space for a conversation about the economy,” for example.

Everyone who has been trying to raise the alarm in the space of rational argument about the wholesale transfer of wealth and power upward in America for the last thirty years has failed to be heard. And now some hippies show up in a park beating on drums and everyone is talking about economic justice. How did they do that?

Many are puzzled about this term space. Spacey is how some have stereotyped the partisans of this movement. Maybe a way to understand this space is in terms of a spandrel.

A spandrel is an architectural term. An architect constructs a building with a combination of straight lines and curves, which don’t really mix that well, so he or she ends up with leftover space. What spans the space between, say, the curve of an arch and the square that boxes it in is a spandrel. It wasn’t exactly planned; it’s just an unavoidable feature of the structure. (Spandrels also exist in evolutionary biology: features that arise as side effects of adaptive processes and are accidentally useful in sustaining life, a thought that may pertain to my theme).*

photo by Einar Einarsson Kvaran aka Carptrash 19:35, 23 October 2006 (UTC) These spandrel figures representing Astronomy (left) and Sculpture (right) were created by Bela Pratt for the Library of Congress Building around 1896.

Society, too, has a structure. It is constructed not of pillars, lintels, and arches but of culture, politics, the economy, and just about anything that relates people to one another. Some voices among the Occupiers suggest that those of us who have challenged the elite in the past are even part of this structure.

And that makes us defensive. After all, we’ve organized, struggled, and even thrown our bodies under the machine. We got the tread marks to prove it. But maybe it’s true that we are part of the structure, at least in the sense that society bears the marks of treading over us, too.

The structure we live in has been imprinted with adaptations that thwart whatever we do to oppose it, be it educating, organizing, writing poetry, or, for that matter, waging armed insurrection. A well-cited example is how the “commons,” those spaces where citizens could pass out flyers, rally, or put up a picket line, have shrunk as shopping malls have privatized the spaces between shops. But it is not merely the physical space that is disappearing. Just ten years ago tens of millions of folks rallied in the commons against the impending invasion of Iraq to no avail. All the political structures that might previously have been compelled to respond to protests on this scale had adapted, with the obvious help of corporate treasure, so they felt no need to respond. It was as if the space where those multitudes marched had been rendered space no more.

Somehow these Occupiers have found the spandrels.

This is important to me as a poet, because I have been thinking for some time that arguing has not been able break the spell that fear and powerlessness has on our society. I have been thinking that only poetry could counter this spell, working in the space of the heart rather than the brain. I may have found this space in the spandrels.

What happens in these spandrels?

Well, for one thing, people give testimony about what the economic collapse has meant to them and their families. It’s about a middle class Puerto Rican family living the American Dream, father a physician, daughters with degrees and 100,000-dollar debts, losing the home they had lived in for forty years when pop is fired. It’s about a single mother of two offered a four-dollar-per hour job. About an autoworker with twelve-years seniority whose plant has just been raised to the ground. Black, brown, white, and up to now, unheard. You can see some of this testimony in Dana Garrett’s video of the October 15 Occupy Delaware rally in Rodney Square.

For another thing, there is a democratic process with no leaders. Rallies are called General Assemblies. You’re lucky if there is a PA system. Sometimes they use a “human megaphone,” whereby a speaker utters information or speeches in three- to five-word segments that are then repeated by the crowd nearby. Totally ad hoc conveners follow a simple process of proposals, clarifications, concerns, amendments, straw polls, and votes. We old radicals, trade unionists, and peaceniks stand aside as this newer world’s in birth.

It has a kind of poetry of its own, scribbled in the spandrels of the system. There is a kind of faith that ninety-nine percent of the people really can and do count.

So what is the role of the poet in this? Occupy Delaware has an Arts, Culture & Education Committee. In its Face Book discussion group the committee mentions education about the banking crisis and injustices by corporations and the use of art to engage supporters and to educate people about Occupy Delaware.

Now, programmatic poetry is problematic to poets of the highly crafted poem, poetry composed and read in contemplation, poetry like that of Dylan Thomas, which I love. Perhaps the distinction between programmatic and contemplative poetry is the same as that posed by the late revolutionary poet, Tom McGrath regarding Tactical and Strategic Poetry. Tactical Poetry is tied to “some immediate thing” like a “strike.” Strategic poetry, on the other hand, is “a poetry in which the writer trusts himself enough to write about whatever comes along, with the assumption that what he is doing will be, in the long run, useful, consciousness raising or enriching.” To me, that means writers of tactical poems will be writing under a deadline, bringing whatever poetic gifts they have to the immediate task, trusting that an accessible message gains profundity in its timeliness, and, as McGrath warns, facing the fact that eventually “the events they were about have moved out from under them.” Sic transit gloria.

My own attempt at a tactical poem, “Global Solidarity” can be read here or heard at about 5:26 in Dana Garrett’s video, above. Almost immediately after is a stirring poem called “Freedom Fighter,” by Red Lip Poetry Salon’s Amy Eyre.

In the architecture of manipulation, exploitation, and violence, there are spandrels, the left over spaces. There find the poet’s workshop and stage.

*See David M Buss et al., “Adaptations, Exaptations, and Spandrels,” American Psychologist 53:5, 1998, pp. 533-48, cited in Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times, p. 227.

The Man Who Was an Early Mentor for Clifford Brown

My friend Ken Anderson has been on me for some time about Sam Wooding, who for a time taught band at Wilmington's Howard High School in the 1940s. Before desegregation began its long process of integrating Wilmington's public schools, Howard High School was the all Black high school in northern New Castle county. Howard High School produced a number of well known and talented musicians, the major figures being Clifford Brown, Lem Winchester and Gerald Price. Clifford Brown had gone to Howard High School in the 1940s and he and my friend, Ken Anderson, were in the Howard High School band together and Sam Wooding was their band teacher. Ken was given the tuba to play and strongly suggests that Wooding may have given Clifford Brown the trumpet. However, Brownie had already adopted the trumpet on his own after giving the trombone a whirl, and probably picked up his first chops under Wooding's tutelage. So who was Sam Wooding?

Sam Wooding was born in Philadelphia on June 17, 1895. In the 1920s he formed a jazz band, performed some vaudeville gigs as well as a few venues in Harlem, notably at Small's Paradise. Soon he realized he could make more money for himself and his band, The Chocolate Dandies, by touring Europe during the 1920s. Among the early jazz greats in The Chocolate Dandies were Doc Cheatham, Tommy Ladnier and Gene Sedric. He recorded some sides for Parlophone and Pathé, and performed in clubs throughout Europe. One song he recorded, "J'ai Deux Amours," was heard by Josephine Baker, who made it one of her signature songs. There is also strong conjecture that the German composer Kurt Weill was influenced by Sam Wooding. The music Weill composed for The Three Penny Opera and other collaborations with Bertolt Brecht contains musical forms reminiscent to those heard from Wooding's arrangements.

In 1927, Wooding and The Chocolate Dandies toured South America and had some momentous gigs in Buenos Aires. One could contend that their influence there had some affect upon Argentina's tango musicians because tango music later merged with big band music, particularly during the Peronist era. Wooding's Chocolate Dandies returned to Europe for a spell in the late 1920s into the early 1930s, but the rise of Nazism eventually drove them out of Europe. The band eventually disbanded after returning to the United States in 1932, but not after reforming for a few years during which Sidney Bechet was a member.

Sam Wooding returned to school after leaving the music industry. He earned a Master's Degree from the University of Pennsylvania, which eventually brought him to a teaching position at Howard High School in Wilmington sometime after 1942 by best estimation. He evidently remained at Howard through at least the late 1940s, leaving his mark upon some later notable musicians like Clifford Brown, which is where we began.

Sam Wooding moved in and out of the music industry afterwards until he died on August 1, 1985.

Levine gets the Butt of Sack

Philip Levine, dubbed a “proletariat poet,” is the new Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress. There is perhaps a subtle political message in his appointment. Perhaps it means that someone, at least, is thinking about the equity in sweat that creates all wealth rather than the equity in credit default swaps that destroys it.

Early laureates Allen Tate (1943) and Robert Penn Warren (1944) both espoused the conservative Western canon and promoted the apolitical New Criticism. Louise Bogan (1945), poetry critic for The New Yorker, broke the gender barrier, but gently. Robert Hayden (1976) broke the color barrier, also gently.

Some appointments have supported free thought, at least in foreign despotisms. Joseph Brodsky, for example, had been expelled from the Soviet Union for alleged “social parasitism” in 1972. He emigrated to the U.S., won the 1987 Nobel Prize, and was appointed in 1991.

Levine’s elevation comes a little late for him; he’s 82. His experience in the Detroit factories goes back to the late ‘30s and Word War II period, and his descriptions of factory life sometimes seem in period-appropriate sepia tones. A while back, I picked up his What Work Is (1991) on a remaindered table for four bucks. Presumably, sales have picked up since the new honor.  

Still, there is an intergenerational bond that makes Levine’s poetry resonate. When I began working at Chrysler, which employed me for three decades, I met folks who had been around for the great sit-down strikes of ’37, three decades before. And check out the overhead chain conveyer in Diego Rivera’s 1933 “Detroit Industry.” You’ll see the same design in today’s auto plants. Plus ça change. More importantly, Levine has a sense of what motivates workers beyond the money. No matter how lousy the job, work gives folks a sense of being.

Take his “Fear and Fame,” the opening poem in said What Work Is. It’s about a man who mixes a metal plating—or “pickling”—solution. We see him suiting up in protective gear, remembering the pedigree of the secret recipe he learned from the former pickling master (now “off to the bars on Vernor Highway/to drink himself to death”), descending into a pit where he mixed hydrochloric acid and other noxious potions, climbing out, undressing, observing his work mates at their jobs, and then suiting up again

. . . for the second time that night, stiffened

by the knowledge that to descend and rise up

from the other world merely once in eight hours is half

what it takes to be known among women and men.

The poem puts labor back into its human dimension, rescues it from what Marx called the “fetishism of commodities” behind which human relationships and creative sweat hide when goods are exchanged.

As a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, Levine was an early product of what has been called “The Program Era” (See Mark McGurl's book of that name, reflected on by my colleague Steven Leech in “Casualties from the Fast Track”). This era is characterized by MFA programs and writers retreats, generally under the sway, critics claim, of mainstream publishers and academia. Many, if not most of the U. S. Poet Laureates reflect this establishmentarian bias. All the same, some, like Levine’s Iowa Workshop mentor Robert Lowell, were great.

Anyway, I can relate to Levine. For one, I took poetry writing under his classmate, the late W.D. Snodgrass, at the University of Delaware. Even better, Robert Lowell judged an Academy of American Poets Prize I won at UD in 1963. But it’s more than the indirect personal connections; it’s his ambivalence. Elizabeth Lund, in her August 11 article in the Christian Science monitor, quotes Levine reflecting on the relationship between his factory work and his career:

It took me a long time to be able to write about it without snarling or snapping. I had to temper the violence I felt toward those who maimed and cheated me with a tenderness toward those who had touched and blessed me.

Sometimes I feel like I should have waited until time tempered me before I wrote Autoplant: a Poetic Monologue, since I felt more “maimed and cheated” then, while now that Chrysler is shut down, I feel more “touched and blessed.” But, as I said in the in-text fiction disclaimer, “if the shoe fits, it’s your own damn fault.

Still, Levine’s latest honor is an opportunity to build momentum for transformative working class poetry. Hey, everybody, I’m an autoworker poet, look over here! Oh, well.

Next April, I’m hoping to bring poet Jim Daniels to Delaware. Raised in an autoworker family in Warren, Michigan, Daniels worked a short time in the auto plants and now has taught several decades at Carnegie Mellon.  He has never stopped writing about the social, spiritual, political, and economic lives of workers, including, most recently, professors. See his Having a Little Talk with Capital P Poetry.

A few years back, I saw Philip Levine at the University of Delaware. In the copy of Selected Poems I bought, he wrote, “for Phillip from Philip, with hope for our poems.”

Well, congrats, Philip, with hope for more working class poets.

Note: a “butt of sack” (cask of sherry) was the traditional pay for the British Poet Laureate.

More on the Search for Delaware artist William D. White

In February I posted a short article about the former Delaware artist William D. White. Since then there has been some movement in the effort by Delaware artist Nancy Carol Willis and myself to revive the life and work of this important yet largely little known artist. Two significant events have been the publication of an article in the latest issue of The Broadkill Review, published in Milton, Delaware, about the life and career of William D. White, which includes a wide selection of his art work. The article was published with the aim of finding more of White's work as well as to disseminate information about him. In order to supplement the information and display of White's art in The Broadkill Review, Nancy Carol Willis has designed a new website containing not only all the information in that article but additional materials including some that has since surfaced. The website is: www.williamdwhite.com.
The accompanying photo is the only known photograph of William D. White. In it he is standing in front of the mural he had painted while a member of Delaware's Federal Artists' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) during the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The photograph was published in 1936 in the Wilmington Sunday Star. The mural survives. It was originally painted for the U.S. Post Office in Dover, Delaware. The building now belongs to the Wesley United Methodist Church in Dover and can be viewed by the public, though folks at the the church should be consulted to be sure the building is not being used at the time of your visit. Other original examples of White's art can be found at Buena Vista Conference Center in New Castle County. Another of White's painting can be viewed at the Willard Hall Building on the campus of the University of Delaware.
The website that Nancy Carol Willis designed makes it easy for any one to post comments. It is our hope that comments might include information about where more of White's artwork can be found, with the further hope that one day we might be able to stage a larger public retrospective of this important Delaware artist's work.

The Attack on Civil Society: How Poets Respond

Reprinted in slightly revised form from The Broadkill Review, Vol. 5 No. 2

Civil society is bizarrely heterogeneous, comprising everything from the Pagans Motorcycle Club to the now defunct non-profit ACORN to unions to poets. Nevertheless, it is the chorus of Liberty and Democracy and it is under attack, one voice at a time. Permit me to summarize a couple of the more recent examples, provide a little philosophical entertainment, and humbly suggest a role for poets.

The first is the November 2006 killing of Iraq War vet and Pagan member Derek Hale by Wilmington, Delaware Police.  Investigating alleged drug dealing by the Pagans, a swat-type team of cops arrived at the home of a Pagan friend of Derek’s and found him sitting on the steps. Derek, for whom police had no arrest warrant, rose. Before he could comply with orders to take both hands out of his pockets, he was tased repeatedly. Then, as he lay on his side paralyzed and vomiting, and as a mother and her two children also on the steps looked on in horror, a policeman fired three fatal  .40-caliber rounds into his chest. According to Attorney General Beau Biden’s report exonerating police, Derek was shot as he "continued to keep a hand in his pocket as if holding a weapon and was turning in a threatening manner toward an officer armed with an empty Taser."

Let’s not forget that folks have a right freely to associate with the Pagans, in spite of how they may offend middle-class sensibilities. I worked side-by-side with several Pagans at Chrysler and even considered a few my friends because they did their jobs, shared our collective burdens, and could be relied on for the union cause. I described the spiritual travails of an imaginary biker in my Autoplant: a Poetic Monologue, and I did not stint in describing the less savory activities of some bikers.

The second event was the destruction of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), the nation-wide non-profit that specialized in empowering the poor through such activities as credit advocacy and voter registration. Readers may remember how several Federal Prosecutors were fired because they resisted Bush administration pressure to concoct bogus charges of voting fraud against the group.

However, it is easer to destroy a reputation than to prove an accusation. Thus, in 2009, a group of right wing operatives with hidden cameras began trolling ACORN offices to see if they could trick ACORN workers into seeming to wink at illegal activities. Highly edited videos of these visits were widely disseminated on-line and on Fox News, and in short order foundation funding dried up, and Congress—Democrats and Republicans cravenly alike—stripped ACORN of federal contracts. Subsequent investigations by several state’s attorneys and the federal GAO found no wrongdoing by ACORN regarding the insinuations of the video. A Federal court voided the stripping of ACORN’s funding as an unconstitutional “bill of attainder.” But all that was too late. By November of 2010, ACORN was bankrupt and dead.

Also too late for Derek Hale, in December of 2010, Wilmington settled a wrongful-death lawsuit with Derek’s widow for $875,000. While Wilmington Police did not admit culpability, the deal certainly made their case look bad, as Wilmington News Journal editorialist Ron Williams demonstrated witheringly in recent columns.

Ironically, joining the ACLU in Derek’s widow’s case was Thomas Neuberger, leader of the Rutherford Institute, a Christian right-leaning civil liberties organization. Additionally, one of the most eloquent advocates in Derek Hale’s case is William Norman Grigg, who blogs at LewRockwell.com, a Ron Paul-type libertarian web site. Grigg ties the killing of Derek Hale to what he refers to as the “unitary, militarized, Homeland Security apparatus,” a component in the right-wing narrative that sees a slippery slope toward federal encroachments on state’s rights and the eventual deployment of UN forces in the USA.

It is well known how the corporate elite funds the right. Paradoxically, not only did the right defend the proletarian Derek Hale, but its very emblem is Joe the Plumber, leading a working-class charge against immigrants, gays, unions, affirmative action, taxes, Muslims, Big Government, and the latté-sipping elite who evince moral superiority to the proles but know nothing of their burdens.

No telling how much the involvement of Beau Biden, son of U.S. Vice-President Joe, had to do with tempering the voices of outrage over Derek Hale’s death. When Joe was a senator, he was able to sell Delaware on his proto-Patriot Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 and his Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005, which latter was to make the world safe from bad loans.

Now for that philosophical entertainment: Slavoj Žižek, the leftist Slovenian Philosopher, has some words on the European anti-immigrant movement that might shed light on the paradox cited above. Says Žižek,

[I]t’s absolutely crucial how this anti-immigrant explosion is linked to the withdrawal of leftist politics, especially in the matters of economy and so on. It is as if the left, being obsessed by the idea that we shouldn’t appear as reactionary in the economic sense, that is to say that “No, no, no, we are not the old trade union representatives of the working class, we are for postmodern digital capitalism” and so on. They don’t want to touch the working class or so-called lower ordinary people. And here right-wingers enter. Do you know, the horrible paradox is that, apart from some small leftist fringe parties, the only serious political force in Europe today which still is ready to appeal to the ordinary working people are the right-wing anti-immigrants? So you see, we, the leftists, we have no right, absolutely no right, to take this arrogant view of offended tolerant people who are horrored—no, we should ask the question, how we enabled what is going on. “Slavoj Zizek: Far Right and Anti-Immigrant Politicians on the Rise in Europe, Part II." Democracy Now with Amy Goodman. 18 October 2010. <http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2010/10/18/part_iislavoj_zizek_far_right_and_anti_immigrant_politicians_on_the_rise_in_europe>.

What happened to ACORN demonstrates a great deal about “how we enabled what is going on.” ACORN had attempted to be a transmission line between the power of corporate foundations and government to the people at the base. When that line was snapped, instead of uniting to defend ACORN, terrified liberal politicians and civil society thought only of securing their own teat on the increasingly stingy corporate-government sow. Repeatedly, when reactionaries have led the charge, liberals have led the retreat.

So now, in various ways, the onslaught against democracy, economic justice, and civil society continues. Shirley Sherrod, Planned Parenthood, NPR, and climate scientists have all been subjected to the same political warfare, a warfare that has escalated with the stripping of collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin and other states.

A soldier, Bradley Manning, who may or may not have had something to do with leaking a video to Wikileaks showing an American helicopter machine-gunning civilians in Iraq is treated like an Arab terrorism suspect. Arab terrorism suspects continue to be treated like non-persons at Guantanamo. American Muslims are vilified in McCarthyite hearings in Congress. The poison spreads and fear abounds.

So, what do we poets have to do with all this? Promote Solidarity.

We already do, of course. By our very nature, we are motivated by Solidarity, “the conviction of which” according to Joseph Conrad, “knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, [. . . ] the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men [and women] to each other, which binds together all humanity—the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.”

Beyond expressing that mutual resonance of human experience, poets are reluctant, justifiably, to prescribe solutions to social problems.  They also don’t like to take marching orders. But what’s wrong with suggesting that poets attune their antennae to the onslaught of repression creeping across civil society? To suggesting poets be more relevant to the nitty-gritty majority in our country, where ideas swirl in a messy, non-academic mix, where the social infrastructure is shredding, where prison is more likely than a diploma or a good job and where the repression that is overwhelming civil society is nothing new?

Tell you what I’ve been doing. I’ve been going to Solidarity with Wisconsin rallies armed with new-lyrics labor songs like “On Wisconsin” (Fight for workers’ rights).

When I was the featured poet for the April Second Saturday Poets, I put out a special invitation for other poets to join me reading works on the theme of Solidarity. I even wrote a bit of agitprop verse about it that some of you already saw.  It includes the lines,

Would you sing Solidarity in the Old Union Hall,

chicken dinners, picket lines, all for one and one for all?

Blood and sweat’s our gender, our race, of broken backs,

barricade of all nations, when capital attacks.

Pay your monthly dues and rise with the other guy.

Or would you, had you just one wish, if shared, lose one eye?

The rest of the poem was previously posted at the Broken Turtle Blog: Are You Stirred By Solidarity?

And on Friday, June 3, I’ll be sharing my verse in support of the 22^nd annual Soweto Festival, sponsored by the Delaware Committee for Racial Justice & Harmony and Delaware Artists for Racial Unity. I’ll be performing around 6 p.m. at the Artist’s Reception at the Gallery at Grace, Grace United Methodist Church, 900 N. Washington St., Wilmington, DE 19801. The affaire is a project of Delaware Pacem in Terris. See http://depaceminterris.pbworks.com.

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