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The ULA Monday Report!
This week's report by FDW (Frank Walsh)
GETTING OFF ON
THE LEFT FOOT
WHILE MEANING
TO BE MEAN
[This first paragraphed is hoist and then splices from a column,
UNEXPECT THE EXPECTED, published as of today, Monday, at
Mike Palecek’s new e-zine, NewAmericanDream.net Check it as the
whole site is an underground artist’s delight!]
Suffice to say that the politics that informed Obama’s choice of
Inaugural poet is understandable if one cares to look into it, at
the same time, if the discerning independent “underground”
littérateur looks into the proclamation recorded in Alexander’s
Wiki entry which incidentally is backed by such “company men”
as Rita Dove and Jay Parini as well as claimed by the
sycophantic Poetry Foundation that, “Her selection affirms
poetry’s central position in the soul of our country” all I can say
is beware of the Establishment and Academies putting the people’
s soul any where but certainly the center of what is actually their
status quo, controlling interests of the peoples’ perception,
foundation grants, and NEA funding.
However you cut it and with the whole stunt sanctioned by
“heavy weights” of the Lit Establishment savants and insipid
elites at least Obama especially with his complicated while at the
same time “no brainer” adulation of one of the greatest
American writer of periodic- prose of all time, Abe Lincoln,
sports, I think in most sensible sense, an intellectual and hearty
desire to engage political and social phenomenon on a level that
is more than skin deep. Why because he is not only not stupid he
is attuned even while it appears his ear is been got by the neo-
liberal run -around tautology.
When one and all were to realize that this poem is no more than
anything else constructed by number and importantly not then
by syllable neither , to understand one must become familiar with
having read all of Chas. Olsen’s essays on Shakespeare’s plays’
prosody where the matter of “count” and the Projective “the
syllable as the smallest unit of poetic energy” put forth by
Creeley and himself. It would then seem simply if not “plain”
critically honest to say that Alexander’s “Sing Song Preyed Upon
The Daze” is a poem “painted by number” and to see it for that
and then further to see the underlying “code” that at the same
time that it has been stylized to cover-up for reasons that become
obvious when one reflects after the fact upon the feelings of
inadequacy and puzzlement of sensible readers/writers which
were also pretty obvious on the play of facial expressions on the
new Presidents countenance as evidenced by the video snippets
taken while Obama attended to the airing of the thing. Not by
way of excuse but to the degree his choice of Inaugural poet was
a political one, he can not be blamed for the poem as it did it’s
job and nothing more like any dutiful MFA candidate’s
assignment yet in the bigger picture-- a picture that would take
into account the Academic and Corporate Literary
Establishment, the real existence of the Cultural Underground
especially as applies to the struggle and resistance of its writers
and poets, and the battle for access and independent disposition
toward the people on whose behalf we write and read-- “Praise
Song For The Day” and Alexander’s rendition of it was a
blunder on the scope of Bush’s blunder of the Katrina
catastrophe.
Praise song for the day.
Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching
each others' eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. All about us is
noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our
ancestors on our tongues. Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole
in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair.
Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden
spoons on an oil drum with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.
A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky; A teacher says, "Take out your
pencils. Begin."
We encounter each other in words, Words spiny or smooth, whispered or
declaimed; Words to consider, reconsider.
We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of someone and
then others who said, "I need to see what's on the other side; I know
there's something better down the road."
We need to find a place where we are safe; We walk into that which we
cannot yet see.
Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead
who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,
picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering
edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.
Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day. Praise song for every
hand-lettered sign; The figuring it out at kitchen tables.
Some live by "Love thy neighbor as thy self."
Others by "first do no harm," or "take no more than you need."
What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national.
Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt
grievance.
In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any
sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp -- praise song for walking forward
in that light.
It is in these failures and deliberations that have happened
because while devices in a successful poem appear and can be
pointed to as being in fact poetic devices even poetic license, in a
piece that is not a poem at all show up as non-equators, mixed
metaphors, abstractions and misdirections, as they do here, so
that one sees the same old same old attempt of the Establishment
to maintain the status quo, maintain a stranglehold on access,
money and power to the effect that the average American is left
with a poem and view of the poet as a lackey, esoteric geek who
they don’t understand, who projects the attitude that they and
their words are beyond if not above them. Worse, the System
and the Kapitalist Market Mainstream wishes us and the
ignorant masses to keep our place in their scheme of things while
perception therefore memory and ultimately history is
manipulated to foot the bill.
Yale’s Alexander (and University of Pennsylvania’s it turns out)
is after all the elite daughter of the former overlord of US Army
Affairs or some such and the sister of an important Obama
candidacy maven and transition-team advisor, Mark, or other,
whereas she, living the life of special privilege first in New York
City and then D.C. can not be held accountable for not at all
portraying and in turn advocating for the American worker, the
creative but resourceless and marginalized individual younger
student/artist/writer, the homeless, the sick and oppressed
without health insurance or a pot to piss in, the hungry, and
finally the segment in our citizenry that is imprisoned in a
holding cell, isolated and alienated, of one type or another
whether beneath a busted mortgage, by credit debt, by corrupt
Utility and a corrupt prison industrial military complex, since
she has no real idea of any of this through direct experience
herself. She can not be the “voice that is great within us” per
Whitman because she, her elite circles, her bosses, and their
agendas have no connection to us and are by default opposed to
us to their benefit.
Obama and especially in lieu his avowed if not naïve respect for
Lincoln so in turn when you look at as Obama probably wishes
he was more of a poetic writer the way honest Abe was and not
simply a writer like Lincoln in addition could be of most
excellent and admittedly admirable periodic- prose and a master
of rhetoric as our new President is --- indicative also as with
Lincoln of a great lawyer-- would have been better served as well
as the American people and the very resistance of the Literary
underground itself justified in their labours by having say Nikki
Giovanni instead because of her exercise of real poetic power and
the display she made of the social cultural efficacy of the true
American poet on the “occasion” of the student- body called
memorial at Virginia Tech a few short years ago.
This thought was affirmed and seconded but by anger and
repulsion at the fawning condescension toward the American
public so much in evidence in the presentation of “Praise Song
For The Day” which no amount of self-conscious blandishment
and ‘plain’ awfulness could mask.
At the same no one is saying here that the poem wasn’t
“good’’ because it was just right like the porridge in Goldilocks
and the Three Bears or wrong because it was safe and mediocre
and all so comfortable like the bourgeoisie gladness that arises
from indifference.
In this Alexander and her consumer product oriented tome
were very much like (though appreciatively less arrogant and
despicable) Reverend Warren’s earlier “Invocation” which asks
forgiveness of and for the “victims” of the Concerns they both
represent, in effect, from a general Notion of an All Powerful in
the face of perpetrated unpardonable intellectual, indigenous,
and physical destruction and death, the conspiracies convened to
alienate and incite division in the people, to suppress, censor, and
blacklist even the most natural critical thinking which might
happen to be against the grain for the purposes of a militaristic
conformity, to allow stealing and confiscation of the resource s
and inherent domain of the public for the sake of what profit a
“soul”. What a joke! What a relief it is for certain that a real poet
at least historic’ly is not concerned with the soul per se unless for
some special reason he or she has need to seek one out in the
heavens or the hells for advice or directions but instead is all
about “spirit” erring if not in fact sinning on the side of the chief
animal brain and the human -world beings.
Let’s take a gander at the guts and workings of this
Inaugural poem…
[The line-numbering referred to below is based on the format of
the poem as published on Mark’s Contemporary Poetry Blog.]
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhSa8fJqac4
First, off the first three lines set the conditions of going any
further by being terribly confusing where dependent
phrases/clauses and shady imagery are out of sorts with
themselves and each other to the affect they neutralize any
forward motion across the fields of the listeners’ imaginations:
Other than that individuals are counted on as faceless eponymous
either/ors greatly accumulating ambiguity to the overall
confusion and “softness”. Eaches, other, others’, or, ors, or nots,
yoked to emotion-neutral, though with plentiful feelings,
sentiments, stuff like “business” “speak” and or “speaking” but
no talking jibe parlance, nor seduction and communication from
the American street, and don’t forget “noise” and noise repeated
again but the repetition maybe takes the sting out and then there’
s music when people privately in public probably bang on things
with sticks, blow into other actual instruments, though, until
someone gets some skill ( a quality of work as opposed to mere
labor) with doing still will sound like “noise”. The cult of
personality is pragmatically one of the best substitutes for the
opium of the masses when freedom to recreate with natural highs
is pretty much frowned upon unless you can afford a prescription
if not for the most part illegal.
Non-transcendent cliché (as distinct from the transcendent cliché
of classic Chinese poetry of say the Tang Dynasty and so forth)
abound and are even embarrassingly mixed, as in lines 8-9.
Where even directions get confused where it implied that the
anonymous public is implied to being like the chicken crossing
the road?
No one is working evidentially since they are “repairing”, lines 3-
6 just like the neo-liberal right spends most of its time reforming,
we are, in the view of the poem, automatic’ly the little people who
need to be applauded when they put the square peg in the square
hole at the testing station…
Are we “repairing” to the “safe” place we need to find, line 11?
And who says we need to, who has created this need that is a
given? The poet, the Foundations and Grant committee orders or
what?
Line 7 is just simple put a lie and its element of pretend
importance and base sentiment is deployed in fact to persuade us
for the greater manipulation of us for our own good to follow and
which closes the poem with the drowning pool of light/ love. We
do in practice I assume “encounter” each other as the Navajo
and Hopi say with touch and like everything else by our senses ;
words are either this or that but at least considered or not rather
than considerate or not considerate and come on like second
thought and leave us to each other and ourselves once they have
been given up and received and gone beyond and their purpose
served us well:
Line 10, reduces us to mere dumb (and blind!) farm animals,
bumping into things that aren’t there, aspiring down the dirt
access road for the trough and bale of cotton/hay.
Stuff gets better because the “dead” (hey, the ancestors are fine
and accounted for on the tips of our tongues, line 2!) have built
bridges, train-tracks, etc. and even kinds of housing projects and
office towers that are clean enough for the “dead” to live in and
maybe us and them to work in keeping these digs clean but not to
stay in since somebody else maybe human maybe in-human
entities own them, lines 11and 12.
Labor, the division of labor, the “for struggle”, line 13, without
rest, however, as tables and chairs are for whipping up hand-
lettered signs (are these the other other side of the sign of Woody
Guthrie’s usually excluded stanza included in Pete Seegar’s
rendition of “This Land Is Your Land…” Sunday night before
the Inauguration at the Lincoln Memorial? ) and “figuring out”
where the next mortgage payment is going to come from.
Coupled with “love”, a nice fuzzy love at that for good measure,
the “pool of light” , lines 14-16 like a deus ex machina appears
out of nowhere unless we are seeing that the trickle down
economy is still operating it’s magic bullets and smoking guns.
There’s no other way of explaining the placement of this plain-
jane, bald-faced, cliché other than it is premeditated, and
directed by the mores of Controlling Interests.
Love and discriminations drawn by love through ideological love
which is compounded to the level of being absolutely rarified and
not defined until the incredulous “no need…” again who is
getting over with these needy qualifications, what man or
“edifice” behind the curtain (?) “… with no need to preempt
grievance…”, line 16, does it make sense “preempt grievance”
that is, is it ungrammatical, well if you see the complete nominal
case of say a phrase like “last-in last-out” you are on the right
track, I’d guess, or another nominal phrase as subject rather
than object. See, here!
A clever coda cranked out in such a manner to strain to become
a couplet one might assume mercifully ends what is already
mercifully a foreshortened tryst at something or other, line 17
and 18.
Relativism, “anything can be made, …” is made to, implied then
(?), is the “sentence begun” of the sort handed down to us as
punishment to be served, line 17 (?) relativism, is the answer to
every thing posited even hinted at here, relativism-- the bulwark
of the System and it’s followers defense mechanism played
against Truth and Beauty to keep the world flat and equal among
the have-nots.
In closing who would complain and about what exactly as
Elizabeth Alexander ends on a redundant note, following “for”
with “forward” where the sense would do greatly by at least
counting backwards but you know that the title of the piece is
always half the battle when its for an occasion where the much
maligned and after all most subversive of art forms is involved
and crucially given one of its few opportunities to shine for the
American masses.
===============================================
FDW (Frank Walsh) West Philadelphia, January 26, 2009.
Portions of this report were published concurrently at:
NewAmericanDream.net
===============================================
CLICK HERE TO READ THE PREVIOUS MONDAY REPORT!
GO HERE TO ENTER THE MONDAY REPORT BOX.
This week's report by FDW (Frank Walsh)
GETTING OFF ON
THE LEFT FOOT
WHILE MEANING
TO BE MEAN
[This first paragraphed is hoist and then splices from a column,
UNEXPECT THE EXPECTED, published as of today, Monday, at
Mike Palecek’s new e-zine, NewAmericanDream.net Check it as the
whole site is an underground artist’s delight!]
Suffice to say that the politics that informed Obama’s choice of
Inaugural poet is understandable if one cares to look into it, at
the same time, if the discerning independent “underground”
littérateur looks into the proclamation recorded in Alexander’s
Wiki entry which incidentally is backed by such “company men”
as Rita Dove and Jay Parini as well as claimed by the
sycophantic Poetry Foundation that, “Her selection affirms
poetry’s central position in the soul of our country” all I can say
is beware of the Establishment and Academies putting the people’
s soul any where but certainly the center of what is actually their
status quo, controlling interests of the peoples’ perception,
foundation grants, and NEA funding.
However you cut it and with the whole stunt sanctioned by
“heavy weights” of the Lit Establishment savants and insipid
elites at least Obama especially with his complicated while at the
same time “no brainer” adulation of one of the greatest
American writer of periodic- prose of all time, Abe Lincoln,
sports, I think in most sensible sense, an intellectual and hearty
desire to engage political and social phenomenon on a level that
is more than skin deep. Why because he is not only not stupid he
is attuned even while it appears his ear is been got by the neo-
liberal run -around tautology.
When one and all were to realize that this poem is no more than
anything else constructed by number and importantly not then
by syllable neither , to understand one must become familiar with
having read all of Chas. Olsen’s essays on Shakespeare’s plays’
prosody where the matter of “count” and the Projective “the
syllable as the smallest unit of poetic energy” put forth by
Creeley and himself. It would then seem simply if not “plain”
critically honest to say that Alexander’s “Sing Song Preyed Upon
The Daze” is a poem “painted by number” and to see it for that
and then further to see the underlying “code” that at the same
time that it has been stylized to cover-up for reasons that become
obvious when one reflects after the fact upon the feelings of
inadequacy and puzzlement of sensible readers/writers which
were also pretty obvious on the play of facial expressions on the
new Presidents countenance as evidenced by the video snippets
taken while Obama attended to the airing of the thing. Not by
way of excuse but to the degree his choice of Inaugural poet was
a political one, he can not be blamed for the poem as it did it’s
job and nothing more like any dutiful MFA candidate’s
assignment yet in the bigger picture-- a picture that would take
into account the Academic and Corporate Literary
Establishment, the real existence of the Cultural Underground
especially as applies to the struggle and resistance of its writers
and poets, and the battle for access and independent disposition
toward the people on whose behalf we write and read-- “Praise
Song For The Day” and Alexander’s rendition of it was a
blunder on the scope of Bush’s blunder of the Katrina
catastrophe.
Praise song for the day.
Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching
each others' eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. All about us is
noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our
ancestors on our tongues. Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole
in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair.
Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden
spoons on an oil drum with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.
A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky; A teacher says, "Take out your
pencils. Begin."
We encounter each other in words, Words spiny or smooth, whispered or
declaimed; Words to consider, reconsider.
We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of someone and
then others who said, "I need to see what's on the other side; I know
there's something better down the road."
We need to find a place where we are safe; We walk into that which we
cannot yet see.
Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead
who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,
picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering
edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.
Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day. Praise song for every
hand-lettered sign; The figuring it out at kitchen tables.
Some live by "Love thy neighbor as thy self."
Others by "first do no harm," or "take no more than you need."
What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national.
Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt
grievance.
In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any
sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp -- praise song for walking forward
in that light.
It is in these failures and deliberations that have happened
because while devices in a successful poem appear and can be
pointed to as being in fact poetic devices even poetic license, in a
piece that is not a poem at all show up as non-equators, mixed
metaphors, abstractions and misdirections, as they do here, so
that one sees the same old same old attempt of the Establishment
to maintain the status quo, maintain a stranglehold on access,
money and power to the effect that the average American is left
with a poem and view of the poet as a lackey, esoteric geek who
they don’t understand, who projects the attitude that they and
their words are beyond if not above them. Worse, the System
and the Kapitalist Market Mainstream wishes us and the
ignorant masses to keep our place in their scheme of things while
perception therefore memory and ultimately history is
manipulated to foot the bill.
Yale’s Alexander (and University of Pennsylvania’s it turns out)
is after all the elite daughter of the former overlord of US Army
Affairs or some such and the sister of an important Obama
candidacy maven and transition-team advisor, Mark, or other,
whereas she, living the life of special privilege first in New York
City and then D.C. can not be held accountable for not at all
portraying and in turn advocating for the American worker, the
creative but resourceless and marginalized individual younger
student/artist/writer, the homeless, the sick and oppressed
without health insurance or a pot to piss in, the hungry, and
finally the segment in our citizenry that is imprisoned in a
holding cell, isolated and alienated, of one type or another
whether beneath a busted mortgage, by credit debt, by corrupt
Utility and a corrupt prison industrial military complex, since
she has no real idea of any of this through direct experience
herself. She can not be the “voice that is great within us” per
Whitman because she, her elite circles, her bosses, and their
agendas have no connection to us and are by default opposed to
us to their benefit.
Obama and especially in lieu his avowed if not naïve respect for
Lincoln so in turn when you look at as Obama probably wishes
he was more of a poetic writer the way honest Abe was and not
simply a writer like Lincoln in addition could be of most
excellent and admittedly admirable periodic- prose and a master
of rhetoric as our new President is --- indicative also as with
Lincoln of a great lawyer-- would have been better served as well
as the American people and the very resistance of the Literary
underground itself justified in their labours by having say Nikki
Giovanni instead because of her exercise of real poetic power and
the display she made of the social cultural efficacy of the true
American poet on the “occasion” of the student- body called
memorial at Virginia Tech a few short years ago.
This thought was affirmed and seconded but by anger and
repulsion at the fawning condescension toward the American
public so much in evidence in the presentation of “Praise Song
For The Day” which no amount of self-conscious blandishment
and ‘plain’ awfulness could mask.
At the same no one is saying here that the poem wasn’t
“good’’ because it was just right like the porridge in Goldilocks
and the Three Bears or wrong because it was safe and mediocre
and all so comfortable like the bourgeoisie gladness that arises
from indifference.
In this Alexander and her consumer product oriented tome
were very much like (though appreciatively less arrogant and
despicable) Reverend Warren’s earlier “Invocation” which asks
forgiveness of and for the “victims” of the Concerns they both
represent, in effect, from a general Notion of an All Powerful in
the face of perpetrated unpardonable intellectual, indigenous,
and physical destruction and death, the conspiracies convened to
alienate and incite division in the people, to suppress, censor, and
blacklist even the most natural critical thinking which might
happen to be against the grain for the purposes of a militaristic
conformity, to allow stealing and confiscation of the resource s
and inherent domain of the public for the sake of what profit a
“soul”. What a joke! What a relief it is for certain that a real poet
at least historic’ly is not concerned with the soul per se unless for
some special reason he or she has need to seek one out in the
heavens or the hells for advice or directions but instead is all
about “spirit” erring if not in fact sinning on the side of the chief
animal brain and the human -world beings.
Let’s take a gander at the guts and workings of this
Inaugural poem…
[The line-numbering referred to below is based on the format of
the poem as published on Mark’s Contemporary Poetry Blog.]
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhSa8fJqac4
First, off the first three lines set the conditions of going any
further by being terribly confusing where dependent
phrases/clauses and shady imagery are out of sorts with
themselves and each other to the affect they neutralize any
forward motion across the fields of the listeners’ imaginations:
Other than that individuals are counted on as faceless eponymous
either/ors greatly accumulating ambiguity to the overall
confusion and “softness”. Eaches, other, others’, or, ors, or nots,
yoked to emotion-neutral, though with plentiful feelings,
sentiments, stuff like “business” “speak” and or “speaking” but
no talking jibe parlance, nor seduction and communication from
the American street, and don’t forget “noise” and noise repeated
again but the repetition maybe takes the sting out and then there’
s music when people privately in public probably bang on things
with sticks, blow into other actual instruments, though, until
someone gets some skill ( a quality of work as opposed to mere
labor) with doing still will sound like “noise”. The cult of
personality is pragmatically one of the best substitutes for the
opium of the masses when freedom to recreate with natural highs
is pretty much frowned upon unless you can afford a prescription
if not for the most part illegal.
Non-transcendent cliché (as distinct from the transcendent cliché
of classic Chinese poetry of say the Tang Dynasty and so forth)
abound and are even embarrassingly mixed, as in lines 8-9.
Where even directions get confused where it implied that the
anonymous public is implied to being like the chicken crossing
the road?
No one is working evidentially since they are “repairing”, lines 3-
6 just like the neo-liberal right spends most of its time reforming,
we are, in the view of the poem, automatic’ly the little people who
need to be applauded when they put the square peg in the square
hole at the testing station…
Are we “repairing” to the “safe” place we need to find, line 11?
And who says we need to, who has created this need that is a
given? The poet, the Foundations and Grant committee orders or
what?
Line 7 is just simple put a lie and its element of pretend
importance and base sentiment is deployed in fact to persuade us
for the greater manipulation of us for our own good to follow and
which closes the poem with the drowning pool of light/ love. We
do in practice I assume “encounter” each other as the Navajo
and Hopi say with touch and like everything else by our senses ;
words are either this or that but at least considered or not rather
than considerate or not considerate and come on like second
thought and leave us to each other and ourselves once they have
been given up and received and gone beyond and their purpose
served us well:
Line 10, reduces us to mere dumb (and blind!) farm animals,
bumping into things that aren’t there, aspiring down the dirt
access road for the trough and bale of cotton/hay.
Stuff gets better because the “dead” (hey, the ancestors are fine
and accounted for on the tips of our tongues, line 2!) have built
bridges, train-tracks, etc. and even kinds of housing projects and
office towers that are clean enough for the “dead” to live in and
maybe us and them to work in keeping these digs clean but not to
stay in since somebody else maybe human maybe in-human
entities own them, lines 11and 12.
Labor, the division of labor, the “for struggle”, line 13, without
rest, however, as tables and chairs are for whipping up hand-
lettered signs (are these the other other side of the sign of Woody
Guthrie’s usually excluded stanza included in Pete Seegar’s
rendition of “This Land Is Your Land…” Sunday night before
the Inauguration at the Lincoln Memorial? ) and “figuring out”
where the next mortgage payment is going to come from.
Coupled with “love”, a nice fuzzy love at that for good measure,
the “pool of light” , lines 14-16 like a deus ex machina appears
out of nowhere unless we are seeing that the trickle down
economy is still operating it’s magic bullets and smoking guns.
There’s no other way of explaining the placement of this plain-
jane, bald-faced, cliché other than it is premeditated, and
directed by the mores of Controlling Interests.
Love and discriminations drawn by love through ideological love
which is compounded to the level of being absolutely rarified and
not defined until the incredulous “no need…” again who is
getting over with these needy qualifications, what man or
“edifice” behind the curtain (?) “… with no need to preempt
grievance…”, line 16, does it make sense “preempt grievance”
that is, is it ungrammatical, well if you see the complete nominal
case of say a phrase like “last-in last-out” you are on the right
track, I’d guess, or another nominal phrase as subject rather
than object. See, here!
A clever coda cranked out in such a manner to strain to become
a couplet one might assume mercifully ends what is already
mercifully a foreshortened tryst at something or other, line 17
and 18.
Relativism, “anything can be made, …” is made to, implied then
(?), is the “sentence begun” of the sort handed down to us as
punishment to be served, line 17 (?) relativism, is the answer to
every thing posited even hinted at here, relativism-- the bulwark
of the System and it’s followers defense mechanism played
against Truth and Beauty to keep the world flat and equal among
the have-nots.
In closing who would complain and about what exactly as
Elizabeth Alexander ends on a redundant note, following “for”
with “forward” where the sense would do greatly by at least
counting backwards but you know that the title of the piece is
always half the battle when its for an occasion where the much
maligned and after all most subversive of art forms is involved
and crucially given one of its few opportunities to shine for the
American masses.
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FDW (Frank Walsh) West Philadelphia, January 26, 2009.
Portions of this report were published concurrently at:
NewAmericanDream.net
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