Banning Alexie?

"I BEGAN READING, AND I started to cross out sections that I didn't want him to read," she said. "Soon I thought, 'Wait, this is not appropriate; he is not reading this.' "

The "she" is Antioch, Illinois parent Jennifer Andersen, the "he" is her 14-year old son, and the book is Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, last year's winner of the National Book Award for Young Adult Fiction. As it happens, The Absolutely True Diary is also a recent addition to the Antioch High School's curriculum for incoming freshmen.

Andersen, who is quoted in a Chicago Times article, claims the book does not meet community standards and wants it removed from the curriculum. She and other parents have complained about vulgar language and overt sexuality in Alexie's short novel, arguing the book's content is at variance with what should be condoned in high school.

Andersen, who is clearly well-meaning, falls into the trap that plagues many parents, lawmakers, and even other students--she assumes that teaching a text is the same as condoning the content of that text.

For example, one of her complaints is that the book contains curse words that would not be allowed in the halls of the school. And so, by having students read this book and these words, the school is, in effect, putting its stamp of approval on those words.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Teaching is not endorsing.

In fact, some of the best teaching arises out of difficult material--material the teacher and student find objectionable, complex, and problematic. In truth, you actually want your child to work through potentially inappropriate material, and ideally, that will happen in a sound educational environment. This is because you want your kids--and other kids--to have good reading and interpretation skills. You want them not to misread. You want them armed with the ability to know the difference between advocating and expressing.

Sure, I think it's probably not a good idea to have high school freshmen reading Tropic of Cancer, but it's a great idea for students to read Alexie's novel--written for and about young kids--in high school.

Back to this notion of community standards. Education is not a strip club, it's not church, it's not the public pool. Education is about ideas, and it's about acquiring skills and abilities that make young people smarter and more capable older people. I'm fascinated by the fact that the parents ignore the theme of the book, whose message is entirely positive and totally in line with community standards (whatever that might mean) and focus instead on language their kids probably use on a daily basis.

Americans have never been good readers; we often choose surface over substance. This is a fine example.

Ignore the message; kill the messenger.

Repeat the cycle.

It's refreshing, then, to read that Antioch school board President Wayne Sobczak thinks the book will get to stick around.

Good news for now, but what if they want to teach Huck Finn?

Reading the Burka

EARLIER TODAY, FRENCH PRESIDENT Nicolas Sarkozy dissed the burka.

In a policy speech before a parliamentary committee, Sarkozy argued that the burka devalues women and in so doing is, in essence, at variance with French values. "The burka is not a sign of religion," Sarkozy quipped. "It is a sign of subservience."

This notion of the burka as a symbol--as a loaded text--is something that had gone underexamined in Western culture. In truth, the burka doesn't cover the body much more than a traditional wedding dress and veil, but as symbols they do vastly different cultural work.

For Sarkozy, the experience of the individual woman wearing the burka is less important than what the burka indicates. The burka does not itself repress, Sarkozy might assert, but as a semiotic text it signifies repression. And, in a world that relies on symbols and symbolism, to symbolize is to be. So, even if a garment does not literally restrict--as a wedding gown might--if it signifies restriction, then it restricts. It is for this reason that he is considering banning the burka in France.

Typically, when we think of censoring clothing, it is because the item in question is too sexually explicit, too revealing, but in the case of the burka, its transgression lies in its extreme coverage. Not enough is revealed. It denies (or indicates denial); it restricts (or suggests restriction); it shames (or signifies shame). For Sarkozy, the burka also represents a lack of independence. It is, Sarkozy claims, a garment that embodies subservience.

The question is, why fight a garment and not the ideology that creates the garment?

Don't misunderstand. I'm no fan of the burka. But, the gesture feels empty. Perhaps this is because the push to ban the burka takes place in the same symbolic field as the burka itself. Put another way, if the burka's offense is symbolic, "banning" it is as well.

On the other hand, could such a decision backfire?

Mohammed Moussaoui, head of the French Council for the Muslim Religion, understands the power of semiotics and political symbolism. For him, such a decision will lead to "stigmatising Islam"--a fascinating choice of words, given "stigma's" roots in Christianity. The stigmata--the holes in the recently crucified hands of Jesus Christ--served as a symbol not simply that Christ died but that he was resurrected. Religious symbols beget religious symbols.

Either way, Moussaoui knows that a public policy outlawing clothes sends a message not just about the garment but about values. Sarkozy knows he can't outlaw Islam (or the radical factions of it), so perhaps he can do the next best thing--take away some of its semiotic power.

How the Questions Surrounding Sonia Sotomayor Can Be Answered Via Literary Studies

TWO MAIN ARGUMENTS HAVE framed the predictably combustible conversations surrounding Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court—her ethnicity and her stance on interpreting the constitution. Both, critics and supporters claim, will affect how she adjudicates and, perhaps, how good her decisions are.

Law and literature enjoy a great deal of overlap, though rarely does one affect the public function of the other. In the case of Sotomayor's confirmation hearings, though, two of the most important recent issues in the world of literary studies actually shed light on the hot-button issues surrounding Judge Sotomayor's accomplishments and abilities.

First is the sticky notion of interpretation. Sotomayor is accused of being a fluid or liberal interpreter of the law, as opposed to someone like Antonin Scalia, who advocates for a conservative or "literal" approach to the constitution. For him, judges should look through history to the "original intent" of the founding fathers and, based on the intentions of the authors of the constitution, adjudicate appropriately. Judge Scalia has long defended "textualism" and "originalism," just as many literary scholars have championed what we might call "authorial intent." All of these terms get at the same thing--figuring out what the author of the document initially intended.


In the law, as in literature, such a project is nearly impossible.

We barely know our own motivations on a day-to-day basis, so it's neither plausable nor tenable to base one's approach to legal or literary texts on what we think the author may have intended 200+ years ago. Such approaches assume a fixed and static textuality and a fixed and static culture. The law, like literature, changes over time. So rather than try to get inside the head of a long-dead author (who does not himself change), it is better to look not at the author but at the text. Instead of asking what the author meant, we should be asking "what work does the text do?" It is this latter question that opens up people-centered documents like the constitution and novels to the beauty of human change.

What work a text does is also linked to questions of ethnicity.

Judge Sotomayor has been criticized for acting as a "Latina judge," much the way writers like Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Sandra Cisneros and other authors have been critiqued for writing from a decidedly ethnic perspective. But, opening the literary canon was good for literary studies, just as opening the judicial canon will be good for the law.

We want our literature to reflect our diversity, so we should also want the body ruling on our laws to reflect that pluralism as well. The great mistake conservative commentators make is assuming that Anglo males do not adjudicate from a position of race or ethnicity. They most certainly do; the reality is, though, that such a position often merges seamlessly with the hegemonic values that have aggressively shaped our culture for the past three centuries.

With a new millennium, a new president, and an evolving cultural ethos, it's time for the law to take a page from its literary brother. Both our country and our legal system will be the better for it.

KINDNESS, APPARENTLY, IS IN. At least according to today's New York Times, which charts a spike of niceness on the big board of contemporary culture. I would agree. I was puzzling over a post for today on the dramatic increase in the frequency and eagerness with which people hold open doors, when I came across today's story in the Sunday Style section.

Sure, crankiness is still as prevalent as exhaust, but, for whatever reason, more and more people seem to be nicer. I think this is nice. But I'm curious why this is the case. Why now when so many things are going wrong?

My hunch is that the social contract becomes more important as legal and cultural covenants blur. Clear demarcations in culture, class, ethics, and morality lend themselves to organized behavior. Everyone knows what to expect from everyone else. Kindness isn't needed because order exists instead.

But, order's stock is plummeting.

The world is in flux. America, known for its ability to black and white itself into tedium, is going gray. Hazy beyond recognition are the lines between public and private, right and wrong, legal and illegal, ethical and unethical, the virtual and the real. Forget video games and chatrooms and cell phones. Contemporary cultural enmeshment is forcing us to redefine and rethink every form of information and identity. For example, people are now announcing divorces on Facebook, effectively doing away with the discreet conversation. The State of California keeps reversing itself on whether certain humans can or cannot marry, suggesting that the most sacred, most fundamental issues of morality can be inverted from one day to the next. Authors and publishers continue to pass off fiction as autobiography, and the most popular (and sometimes the most entertaining) television is a form of reality that is not really even real--nor is it fake.

In times like these, when almost nothing is certain--will we be married tomorrow or not? Will our banking system exist or not? Will we have a house or not?--manners often replace morality. One of the great ironies of the polis is that in times of extremis, the invisibility of the social contract provides an ordering mechanism that other more concretized systems do not.

In other words, being nice makes us feel grounded. It restores order. It calms and soothes. It reassures. Our economy may sink into a recessional morass, but you might get the thank you wave for letting some schmo squeeze into the lane in front of you.

It's really not a bad trade-off.

The Topps Obama Trading Cards

IT WAS WITH A mixture of fear and anticipation that I opened up the new Topps Obama trading cards. I was excited because I thought there might be some images of him wrestling with Hillary Clinton or dunking over George Stephanopolous.

Imagine my disappointment when the most action-packed card was not him decking John Edwards or tripping Bill Bradley, but the moment just after David Axelrod told yet another knock-knock joke. It was worse than all those football cards of offensive linemen in the three-point stance.

I wouldn't even need doubles to trade that card.

Another letdown was the sheer number of ties in the Obama trading cards. No one wears ties on baseball or basketball cards. Can you get excited as a collector when the star on the cards never seems to change his white collared shirt? It seems unlikely?

Wait, when did this post become an Andy Rooney routine?

Regardless, I was also hoping for some super cool stats on the back, like the number of direct hits during debates, or the number of times the word "change" was uttered during stump speeches. No such luck.

The truth is, the Topps corporation should market these as the Obama inaction cards. Sure, they feature heart-stopping images of the president waving, explaining a complicated point, and pretending to listen to John McCain, but a man can only take so much.

Sadly, these cards would feel more edgy, more active if they were candidate Obama cards rather than President Obama cards. It's sort of like capturing Manny Ramirez eating at Cheesecake Factory in November--the good stuff has already passed.

My suggestion to Topps is that they start working on the Supreme Court Judge Confirmation Hearings cards and the Republicans Who Switch Party cards. Throw in some stickers of recently outed and divorced politicians, and you've got something I'd actually trade for.

My Favorite Recent Books of Poems: Two by Brian Clements

I CHEAT.

FOR THE final National Poetry Month post about my favorite recent books of poems, I'm going to exercise editorial control.

I'm going to live on the edge.

I will write about one author but two books:
Disappointed Psalms & And How to End It, both published in 2008 by Brian Clements.

Though the books are distinct collections, a number of correspondences and cross references makes them feel like poetic patches cut from the same quilt. Small but provocative, both books pose provocative questions about the relationship between belief, the cosmos, and current American social and political crises.

What makes these collections particularly useful, though, is that the poems are wonderfully short and diverse. Clements tricks out And How to End It with prose poems, questions and answers, aphorisms, Whitmanesque catalogs, and short intense lyrics. Sometimes, a combination of each of these:

I have heard that the signs say one thing and the stars say another.

Who are you going to believe?

I have heard that a shotgun blast at point blank range you cannot survive.

That, on the wall behind you, your shadow-form imprints in droplets as numerous as stars in the galaxy.

That the shadow-form, too, cannot survive. (from And How to End It)

Of course, these poems ask more questions than they answer. Part of their effectiveness lies in their refusal to close, to sum up. At times, they feel like American versions of Roberto Juarroz pieces--short, philosophical, open-ended.

This is especially the case for Disappointed Psalms, whose poems confront "god" and the idea of god on nearly every page. This beautifully executed volume by Meritage Press actually reads like a postmodern book of psalms, a manual for the disaffected and disenfranchised, the questioner and the doubter, the believer and the believed.

When taken together, these books show a poetic range that is impressive as well as a vision of language's ability to understand its own limits. The universe may be infinite; words not so much. How the latter makes sense of the former, though, is for Clements, the space where poetry happens.

Ask A Poet

TWR TEAMS UP WITH Kristen Hoggatt, whose advice column, "Ask A Poet," is both smart and funny. In the spirit of National Poetry Month, we asked her why a poet makes a good advice columnist.

Her response:

In his essay “The Poet and the Audience,” poet Michael Ryan asserts that the poet was traditionally the central figure of a tribe, the “shaman-healer.” Because she was much closer to the gods, her “divine madness” kept the tribe together through her songs and chants. I don’t assume all readers are in the same metaphorical “tribe,” that all look to the same poet for guidance, which is why I use multiple poetic voices to give advice. The other poets have already done all the work, and being a devoted poet myself, I have studied them and continue to study them every day. I know where to look.

But before this gets too dry, let me take Ryan’s essay one step further: The poet, being much closer to the gods, is most likely always right, meaning, of course, that one should always listen to her — and “the poet” is a flexible term, a transcendent state that could also be called the speaker of a poem. Frank O’Hara was a poet, but he also drank too much, so one likely should not have listened to everything he said. But one should listen to what his speaker says in “Ave Maria”:

Mothers of America
let your kids go to the movies!

Please enjoy the rest of Poetry Month responsibly. • 27 April 2009

To visit Hoggat's site or to ask the poet a question, just go to The Smart Set

My Favorite Recent Books of Poems: D. A. Powell's Cocktails

when he comes he is neither sun nor shade: a china doll
a perfect orb. when he comes he speaks upon the sea

when he speaks his voice is an island to rest upon. he sings
[he sings like france joli: come to me, and I will comfort you. when he
comes]

when he comes I receive him in my apartment: messy, yes
but he blinds himself for my sake [no he wouldn't trip, would he?]

AND SO BEGINS "[when he comes he is neither sun nor shade: a china doll]," my favorite poem from my favorite book of poems of 2004--D. A. Powell's Cocktails.

Powell's poetry pulls from so many genres, it's impossible to classify, and this book is a perfect example of that proficiency, though the Graywolf blurb on the back does a pretty good job: "These poems, both harrowing and beautiful, strive toward redemption and light within the transformative and often conflicting worlds of the cocktail lounge, the cinema, and the Gospels." If the book sounds like a poetic version of a Matthew Barney exhibit, that may not be totally off base.

Divided into three parts, the book explores the three topics mentioned above. The most poignant interplay happens between the first and third branches of this trinity--the cocktail and gospel poems. The former deploys the denotative power of both standard cocktails and the less fizzy but still powerful AIDS cocktail to make a statement about love, bodies, medication, and intoxication. Interestingly enough, the last section from which the opening poem comes, navigates in the same frothy confluence.

Nowhere in contemporary poetry--not Billy Collins, not Charles Wright, not Bob Hickok--is there a poet who merges popular culture, humor, and the contemplative tradition better than Powell:

you'd want to go to the reunion: see
who got heavy. who got bald. see

who has KS lesions on the face and listen
to the same old tunes: there'll be a dj sure as anything

you'd want to show off your boyfriend who's spare
as a girlscout cookie.

The lightness of these poems, their wit, doesn't really bring levity. Like Donne, wit means weirdness, discordance, and inappropriate juxtapositions. In all good poetry, such wit isn't about levity but gravity. We may think we're being served a light spritzer, but we're imbibing heavier stuff.

And oh how we love the strong stuff on our tongues. Powell knows this, and so mouths and swallowing and digesting and drinking and consuming consume the poems.

But, cocktails are also about mixing. Powell's many tastes blend deliciously in this book. As fun and as oddly juxtaposed as these pieces might be, they are almost always also about sustenance and rejuvenation, as in the astonishing closing couplets of "[when he comes . . ."

I am not special: have stolen fought. have been unkind
when I await him in the dark I'm not without lascivious thoughts

and yet he comes to me in dreams: "I would not let you marry."
He says: "for I did love you so and kept you for my own."

his breath is a little sour. his clothes a bit dingy
he is not golden and robed in light and he smells a bit

but he comes. and the furnace grows dim the devil and his neighbors
and traffic along market street: all go silent. the disease

and all he has given me he takes back. laying his sturdy bones
on top of me: a cloak an ache a thief in the night. he comes.

My Favorite Recent Books of Poems: Human Dark with Sugar

NEXT TIME THE WAITRESS asks you if you want sugar with your Human Dark, say yes. You won't be disappointed.

That would probably be a better last line for this review than a first line. It has a kind of salutary ring to it; it signs off more than it turns on.

But, then again, I'm writing about Brenda Shaughnessy's smart collection of poems, Human Dark with Sugar, one of my favorite books of poems from last year. One reason I like this collection so much is because she turns everything around, yet it all makes sense.

For example, she begins her poem "Drift" with a line that could have come straight out of a TWR post: "I’ll go anywhere to leave you but come with me."

Wow. I say that to myself every day.

And yet, nothing happens.

The difference between Shaugnessy saying that to the reader and me saying that to me, is that in her world things do happen. The world's messiness a) opens up; b) feels less messy; and c) seems funny rather than threatening. That's pretty much a poetry trifecta.

See, for example, "First Date and Still Very, Very Lonely:"

Today

is a sacred day. A date day.
An exception to the usual
poor me, poor me!

I'm not poor and I'm not me.
I remember both
states as soon ago as last week.

The poetic persona has both fallen out of fashion and had a falling out with falling out of fashion. We are taught--or many assume we are taught--to read the "I" in contemporary American poetry as "the writer." We presume the confessions are not those of an invented persona but of the actual person. Troy Jollimore plays with this distinction, but Shaughnessy blurs it. She wants the reader to feel uneasy, to wonder if the laments and desperations of the speaker are "Brenda Shaughnessy's" or the hip construction that witty female poet named Brenda Shaughnessy invented.

The question is: do we care? And, who is this we anyway?

Around 4:30 am, when my 5-month old son woke up hungry, a very funny final line for this review came to me as I was stumbling to the bathroom. I was so pleased with myself because it worked as a closing sentiment, but it would also feel like an opening gambit. This morning though, when I awoke, it was gone--an experience Shaughnessy writes about in "Magician." Her final line in that poem speaks, I guess, to my 4:30 epiphany and, perhaps, to the question of persona vs. person: "Nothing ever really happens."

Or is it that everything always happens?

National Poetry Month: My Favorite Recent Books of Poems

NOW THAT APRIL IS National Poetry Month, April Fools Day
takes on an entirely new significance. In honor of this month and its poemtryness, TWR will devote all of its April posts to favorite recent books of poems.

"Recent" doesn't mean this year, but it does mean this millennium. Books could mean chapbooks; poems could mean prose poems. It will not mean song lyrics, nor will it mean quotes from Donald Rumsfeld.

It will include Tom Thomson in Purgatory, the beguiling book by 50's film star Troy Jollimore. Okay, he's not really a 50's film star, but he sure has the name of one. Between that moniker and the fact that the cover plugs an intro by Billy Collins, it seems impossible not to like the book.

In fact, it is impossible not to like this book.

Simply saying the poems in it are funny does the author a disservice, but the poems in this book are funny. Or, put more directly, the character of Tom Thomson is funny. Jollimore's project is a strange one in that his book is really two books. The first part, entitled "From the Boy Scout Manual," has great fun with the earnest manuals of the eras of 50's film stars, while the second, called "Tom Thomson in Purgatory," features series of sonnets written in what I will describe as "high slang." Take the opening two stanzas, for example, from "Tom Thomson in Vogue"

With Pyramids behind, and with a glass
of some bright liquid sharp with fissioning sheen
in hand, he small talk make with shiny babe
as Photo Man for Hot New Magazine

the shutter clicks, and captures cover shot.
His stock is rising. What's he saying though?
Ain't no one listening to a word -- and him,
he listening least of all. But cares he? No.

The off-rhyme and near-dialect remind, of course, of John Berryman and his Dream Songs, but Jollimore's persona is less dark than Berryman's, not as severely developed and more overtly playful. But, like The Dream Songs, the Thomson sonnets are, despite their humor, profoundly sad. It's that veiled sadness, squeezed into sublimated humor, that keeps the poems from being self-indulgent or self-mocking. What's fun about these pieces is how the poems become less about Thomson and more about the nameless speaker. Thomson is just a prop; the speaker is the real protagonist.

Jollimore is not as funny as Collins, but he's also not as silly, which should make these poems both accessible and rewarding for casual reader and the poetry devotee. Their engagement with popular culture will also please reader skeptical about poetry's "relevance."

Tom Thomson may be in purgatory, but readers of this book certainly won't be in hell.