Speaking Truth to Power

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A few years ago, shortly after George Floyd’s murder by the Minnesota police, my late brother, Danny, asked me if I believed in critical race theory. He wasn’t particularly interested in my answer; he was just trying to goad me as he’d done all our lives, making fun of my favorite baseball players when we were kids, dissing the few rock stars I admired that he didn’t like when we were teens, and later tuning into our political differences as he sunk deeper and deeper into the influence of Fox News.

“I don’t call it critical race theory,” I told him. “I call it truth.”

I earnestly began to explain why I thought it was so important that we learn a true accounting of our history–the good, the bad, and the ugly–rather than a white-centered version that discounted or trivialized the experience of black people in the US. He didn’t really listen. I would have liked to chalk that up to ADHD rather than to our past history, except that he kept interrupting me with sound bites he’d clearly heard on TV that had little to do with the points I was trying to make.

Not so different from the sound clips from news pundits about a recent assassination of a right wing leader that Jon Stewart used in his “government-approved monologue” recorded after Jimmy Kimmel’s firing.

Just to be clear, I don’t condone political violence. No matter who does it to whom, and no matter what the underlying motivations might be.

But I also don’t condone this administration’s vilifying those that oppose their policies. I don’t condone their outright lying, or–as they would call it–“alternative facts.” I don’t condone their attempts to simply remove information that doesn’t speak to their political agenda, such as scrubbing DEI from government websites, removing the mention of slavery from national parks, and targeting exhibits at the National Museum of African American History, just to name a few of many examples.

While I agree that those grieving the dead should be respected, I don’t condone the administration’s and right-wing news media’s sanctification of the recently assassinated MAGA influencer after they ignored they ignored the assassination of Minnesota State House Speaker, Melissa Horton, for whom the flag was not lowered.

Narih Lee, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Sadly, this is the first time in my life that I feel I need to choose my words very carefully. The freedom of the press and the freedom to express our opinions that our (quite conservative) teachers taught us about so proudly in elementary school is at risk. Even though Jimmy Kimmel has now been reinstated on some, but not all, of the ABC-affiliate stations, others who commented with concern about some of the things this leader said about black people, Jews, LGBTQ, women and other marginalized groups permanently lost their jobs.

But as writers and as human beings, our moral imperative is to speak truth to power, no matter how much we might dislike being goaded, or cowed, or threatened to stay quiet. Coming out of Rosh Hashanah, I realize this one of the things I need to do more of in the New Year.

Poet Ilya Kaminsky nails it here:

WE LIVED HAPPILY DURING THE WAR
And when they bombed other people’s houses, we
protested
but not enough, we opposed them but not
enough. I was
in my bed, around my bed America
was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house.
I took a chair outside and watched the sun.
In the sixth month
of a disastrous reign in the house of money
in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money,
our great country of money, we (forgive us)
lived happily during the war.
#art for change

 

Leaning Into the Light

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I spent a couple of days this week playing tourist in Philadelphia. A highlight was the Barnes Foundation, where one person’s awe-inspiring collection of impressionist, post-impressionist, Greek, Egyptian, African, and early American art is crowded together in a fairly random way in 23 compelling rooms.

  Notable was the number of paintings by Cezanne and Renoir. There were at least one or two, if not more, works by these artists in every room. In fact, there were so many paintings by Renoir, I found myself wondering how he ever had time to create all of these in addition to the many I’d seen at other museums in the world.

Back in my teenage and early adult years in New York City, where I spent many hours wandering the halls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art with friends, learning from several who were serious visual artists, I, along with them, was a bit disdainful of Renoir. Too romanticized, we agreed. Too much focus on what’s pretty. But looking at Renoir’s paintings in these unsettled times gave me a new layer of appreciation. He’s zeroing in on gratitude, I thought. On what’s good in the world. He’s leaning into the light.

And, indeed, it was the way light shone so brilliantly through the canvas that kept my eyes drawn to his work. Unfortunately, the pictures I took (below) don’t really show how brilliant the light was and how much it warmed the colors.

Later that evening, I was invited by an old friend to attend a different arts-oriented event celebrating the city’s community leaders. This was organized and sponsored by Philadelphia Legacies, whose mission is to uplift the work of individuals who are giving back to the city. Among them were Rev. Dr. Respie M. Warren, a woman who has dedicated her life to bridging the gap between deaf and hearing communities; Georgie Woods, an influential media figure and civil rights activist; and Wilson Goode, first African American mayor of Philadelphia, who has continued his work as a change-maker through mentoring children impacted by incarceration. Local artists were commissioned to make portraits of these and other community leaders (media and social change pioneer, Tiffany Bacon; and Tennis Hall of Fame inductee and President of Black Women in Sports, Traci Green) so that residents of the city would learn about these people in their community and be inspired by them.

Wilson Goode (seated) looks at his portrait created by artist Oranda Curry Johnson

One might think of my trip to the Barnes Foundation and time at the Philadelphia Legacies dinner as two separate events in my day, and it’s certainly true that there was a huge difference in the style and ambiance of the art itself and the general demeanor of both events. But I found it inspirational to think of these as examples of the many ways that art can lean into the light and change lives by inspiring people to be their best selves, whether it’s used to remind us to seek gratitude in the small pleasures of daily life, or to take larger, braver steps toward making the type of world we want to see. #artforchange

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Chainsaws Gone Wild

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Photo by haemd: https://art.ngfiles.com/medium_views/ 6994000/6994772_2373943_haemd_ chainsawman.88461deeb7794d08f5f 382a77717451f.webp?f1756587284

Last fall, I was outside with my grandchild, Manu, when he heard a motorized noise and asked me what it was.

It didn’t exactly sound like a lawn mower, or a weed whacker. “Maybe it’s a chainsaw,” I said.

“Let’s go see it.”

He got in the stroller and we took off in search of the noise, taking a few wrong turns before we found the perpetrator–a very scary industrial-size leaf-blower, sucking up everything around it.

“I want to go home!” Manu shouted as soon as he realized what it was. He’s always hated leaf blowers.

At the time I didn’t find this incident particularly significant, except that Manu wouldn’t let go of his desire to see a chainsaw. In fact, for nearly a year after, every time he heard any kind of motor after that, he asked me if it was a chainsaw, even if the lawn mower, or the motorcycle, or the helicopter was clearly in sight. And he also asked me–often–to tell him the story of “Manu and the Chainsaw,” where I’d recount the chainsaw-turned-leaf-blower-search” in detail, embellishing shaggy dog style with my purplest toddler-appropriate prose.

The story always ended like this: Manu was very, very sad that he didn’t see a chainsaw, but Grandma said, ‘That’s okay, Manu. We’ll get to see a chainsaw some day.’

Last week, two houses down from his, the neighbors were cutting up a dead tree. Manu stood mesmerized, holding my hand at the edge of the grass, a little scared, a little awed, as the neighbors ran the chainsaw over and over through the dead wood.

***

I’ve been thinking a lot about this story, and its relationship to how we deal with things we anticipate once we see them.

Especially things that are unpleasant.

For months, we’ve been told fascism is coming, hovering at the edges of our democracy, eating away at it in small bites. We’ve been told that if we don’t turn the tides in three months, six months, nine months, or by the mid-terms at the latest, we’ll be doomed.

But fascism is here. Because ICE is here: Masked thugs over-running our communities, lawlessly breaking car windows, pushing their way into houses, taking undocumented people who have been here for years, as well as people with legal status, green card holders and even U.S. citizens.

In other words, kidnapping.

We may not have personally seen ICE yet; those of us who are privileged may feel like we still have time because in our day-to-day lives, everything is normal. We still wake up in the morning, work, exercise, garden, parent, make dinner, watch our daily TV shows. If we don’t pay attention to the news, we can live happily in a pretend world where nothing has changed.

On Labor Day, I went to a rally in support of a local farmworker who is one of over 2500+ victims taken by ICE in Massachusetts alone. An organizer who spoke said she was in the car accompanying this man to a court hearing when three cars surrounded them, threatening a head-on collision if they didn’t stop. Six men surrounded the car, pointed a gun at her face, and dragged him out.

This man’s only crimes: a broken tail light and wanting a better future for his family.

The whole incident took two minutes.

This man was following government protocols. He was on his way to a court hearing. If the government wanted to get rid of him so badly, they could do that through due process. But due process is no longer a given in our fascist state.

I’m pretty sure Manu had no idea what a chainsaw was when he first asked to see one. And while he’s now seen one in action, I’m still pretty sure he has no idea what a chainsaw can do when used inappropriately. If his parents, and I, and the other caring adults in his life have our way, he’ll never find out about the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

But too many of the authorities in our country–ICE, CBP, and any police department that cooperates with them–are chainsaws out of control.

Meanwhile, like my grandchild, too many of us are just standing at the edge of the sidewalk gaping. Not because we’re bad people, because we just don’t know what else to do.

This is not meant to guilt-trip. If I knew what to do, I would happily end this post by saying so. I do believe, however, that acknowledging the reality of what’s happening is an important first step. And that art and activism; connection, community, and kindness all have a role in bringing about the world we want to see. Let’s hope it will ultimately be enough. #artforchange

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Art for Change

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Next week, I’ll be launching a month-long series of social media posts on the theme of Art for Change. I’ll be spotlighting various artists and artistic projects, posting questions for us to contemplate in our own creative journeys, and offering thoughts in text and short videos on issues related to writing in dark times. I hope you’ll stay tuned and tell others who might be interested. (People can follow me on Substack, Facebook, or Instagram.)

But today, I want to write about joy.

We could think of joy as the flip side of darkness, but I think it’s more integrated than that. As I walked through the woods early this morning, contemplating my Elul challenges this year (Elul is the month before Jewish New Year, where it’s traditional to do an extensive “soul-accounting” of places where you’ve “missed the mark” and then work on setting new intentions and forgiving both yourself and others you may have inadvertently wronged), I had an insight that the biggest challenge for me would be figuring out how to simultaneously hold onto the joy and gratitude of being alive without abandoning my responsibility to do as much as I can to work for a more just, equitable and humane world.

As beloved Charlotte’s Web author E.B. White articulated so perfectly,

“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”

I got some inspiration from the offerings of our local biennial Art in the Orchard show, which I went to this past Monday. So many of this year’s works evoked fantasy or whimsy, and many of the artists said in their statements that the darkness of the times inspired them to look even more purposefully for a way to showcase joy. Maybe we need a little bit of magical thinking, like imagining this sleeping dragon playing with a fairy, rather than breathing fire, as explained in the artist’s statement below the photo. (All the pictures are mine.)

And I loved these playful caterpillars–and these rocks, dancing for joy.

 

And here’s another image worth holding onto: the phoenix rising again!

My first question (a bonus before we get to the campaign): How do you manage to balance the heaviness and the joy? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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Or one of my favorites–the phoenix rising again.

Re-Claiming Voice

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A few years ago, I started to lose my singing voice. It was a long, slow process where first occasionally, and then more and more often, I’d find myself in mid-song and unable to reach the next set of notes, my voice unraveling into some gravelly, raspy shadow of itself.

When the issue first started, I could usually get some semblance of my voice back by drinking some water and singing more softly, but it got to the point where I could barely get through a line without croaking. And while I’ve never been a diva singer or even a karaoke regular, singing has always been extremely important to me. I mourned the loss of my ability to sing as an inevitable consequence of aging, exacerbated by vocal disuse (I’d abandoned weekly singing in various choruses when the pandemic started in 2020) and felt so sad that I’d ever again be able to feel the ecstasy and musical rush I got from singing in harmony with others.

I tried to console myself with reminders to feel grateful that compared to all the aging ailments I could have, this one didn’t significantly threaten my health or functionality, but I couldn’t quite let go of the grief. Mental health is also important, and while it’s not my “art,” the way writing might be, singing is a key piece in my creative and emotional expression toolkit that keeps me balanced and happy.

For more than a year, I didn’t do anything other than complain about my loss. Then, I did something that felt really risky: I took voice lessons. I’d never had a voice lesson in my life, because I never really considered myself a singer. But I thought if I could just take a few lessons, I’d learn to do some exercises that might help restore at least some of my voice, kind of like vocal PT.

Of course, it wasn’t that simple–or that quick–but a year later, I have nearly my entire voice back–including some notes that have always been hard to reach. It’s such a thrill to practice with karaoke sound tracks on YouTube. And last week, for the first time in years, I went to a community sing, and instead of feeling frustrated and shut down, I was euphoric.

In addition to now thinking about re-joining a chorus sometime soon, I’m also thinking about the metaphor of finding voice. We writers talk all the time about the importance of establishing a credible and consistent voice, and how that voice functions to engage a reader and drive a piece forward. But voice does more than that. Writer Meg Rosoff says, voice is “about finding out who you are.” In addition, she makes the following three important points.

  1. You need confidence and self-knowledge to speak in your own Voice.
  2. The only real block to writing truthfully is being unable to access what is in your head and heart.
  3. A distinctive voice will not just help you write well. It will help you do anything at all well. (https://www.megrosoff.co.uk/blog/2011/11/14/how-to-find-a-voice)

Not singing, but one of the first times I publicly used my voice, reading poetry at age 22 at Eric’s Backroom in New York City, Photo by Lew Holzman

I’m thinking about this third point as I consider another aspect of voice: the need to raise our collective voices against injustice. And I hope that this mini-miracle of re-claiming my literal voice will help me believe in the much bigger miracle: that our voices matter and can–and will–make a difference, whether we use them for activism, writing, or singing.

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Intentions

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I have a great meditation app called Insight Timer. In addition to guided meditations of various time lengths from a wide range of practitioners, it also has breathwork, yoga, motivational courses, music, and occasional challenges to focus on an area that challenges us from being our calmest, happiest, and most productive selves.

Most recently, I’ve joined a 10-day “morning routine challenge,” where each day introduces a new tip for starting the morning in a more healthy and meaningful way than my current habit of lazing in bed skimming the news and doom-scrolling social media. It’s enough to feel like I’ve started any day on “the wrong side of the bed,” but somehow I can’t bring myself to stop.

Even worse, I usually ignore the daily poems (from Rattle, SWIMM, Only Poems, the Slowdown, and the Academy of American Poets) that pop into my inbox, opting instead for political pundits. True, I may not be awake enough to take a deep dive into the more difficult to decipher poetry, but wouldn’t it still be better to carry a few precious smidgeons of imagery and language into my day, rather than the reminders of all that’s going wrong in the world?

Interestingly enough, today’s morning routine challenge session was about setting intentions. Not a new topic for me, and likely familiar to many of us. But I still need to be reminded that an intention is not a to-do list (which I’m way better at); it’s a mindset, focused on the qualities we want to embody as we go about our day. Insight Timer asks me every day what my intention is, but since (other than during this morning routine challenge) I generally only use it before bedtime, I always ignore the question. Still it’s an important one. Today, I set the intention to be more balanced and focused, as I knew this mostly unscheduled day would offer many choices on how I might spend my time, all of which seem like high priority. And one of my challenges when projects pile up is not being able to focus on anything, because I’m too worried about the things I’m not doing.

Photo: D. Dina Friedman

I can’t yet say whether I’m meeting my intention as we close in on midday, although I can say that so far I’m not feeling as worried about all I won’t get done today. And perhaps I was a tad more mindful in focusing on the amazing sunlight and appreciating the cool breeze before the impending heat when I went for a walk earlier this morning at Amethyst Brook in Amherst, rather than thinking too much about all I needed to do when I got home. (One of my priorities is and will always be exercise–especially walking in nature.)

Even though I still haven’t made intention-setting a habit, I can see that this practice would be especially helpful to writers, musicians, artists, etc., because it can help focus our attention on process rather than on product. Instead of mentally beating ourselves up for not writing when we sit down to write, or writing something we think is “bad,” we can set an intention, for example, to simply be open to whatever sensory observation or language pops into our heads. I know that when I returned to playing piano after a many-decade hiatus, what got me through several months of frustration and the heavy weight of generational shame for not originally “making it” as a musician was the very specific intention I set to play without judgment. In fact, I made a deal with myself that whenever I started judging, I needed to close the piano lid and walk away.

However, whenever I walked away from the piano, I felt sad and disappointed because I had enjoyed playing. So, eventually, I was able to quiet my inner judge and simply be open to the moment, complete with all its bliss and all its flaws.

I hope we can all get to a place where our intention-setting leaves us more open to embracing the whole of ourselves–the creative places and the stuck ones.

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Protest Poems

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Today I woke up to some good news. Two more of my poems were today’s offerings on the Substack site Second Coming, a poem-a-day protest against the threats to our democracy by our current administration.

And last night, I went to hear a writing colleague, Bill Mailler read from his new book of social justice poetry, Trauma, Truth, and Outrage. Bill’s poems tend to be gut-punches. He doesn’t shy away from horror or attempt to beautify it through language. His work is like that sign our small group of witnesses illuminated at the border in 2020: Don’t Look Away.

 

 

 

What I liked most about Bill’s work were the questions relating to our human capacity for meanness, a key component of the poem, Meditations on My Whiteness, where he asks directly:

For what possible reason
could good or well-meaning people perpetuate or participate….

before offering a long lamentation of possibilities including:

because we are cowards and cannot acknowledge
the consequences of our actions?

because we teach our children to deny their natural empathy
for others, themselves, animals, and the earth itself? 

I also think constantly about the issue of human cruelty. Though my own work tends to take a less direct approach to writing about political issues, neither is wrong or right. They’re just different. The point, I think, is to enter the world through a lens of empathy, rather than simply ranting or trying to be prescriptive about what you think should be done. Poet Kwame Dawes talks eloquently about this issue in his own writing: When I write the poems about Haiti, people living with the disease, I’m not writing poems so that people will give.. but so the person who experiences when they read the poem, they’ll say to me… that’s it. That’s what I’ve been feeling but I didn’t know how to say it.

As many of us are staggering through these times with deep and heavy feelings about what’s happening in the world, reading a protest poem or a political piece of artful prose can help us feel less isolated as we try to make sense of our grief and uncover a path through it into some kind of meaningful action. That’s why when I’ve read my own protest poems at workshops or readings, even raw and unfinished generative responses to prompts, I often got more positive feedback than I expected because I was able to verbalize something that someone else had not yet been able to verbalize–touched a nerve, so to speak.

This isn’t to say writing protest poetry is easy. While I do believe that all attempts at creative expression should be acknowledged, respected, and validated, it’s difficult not to fall into ranting, generic abstractions, slogans, self-pitying, etc. And the problems with these pitfalls is that it becomes easier to lose the reader, who’s likely heard it all before and can gloss over or check out. Keeping empathy in the forefront can help. So can paying careful attention to language–using sensory details, fresh verbs, and unexpected metaphors. In prose, this might mean creating vivid scenes where the viewer can watch what’s happening to characters and form their own judgments.

What has made the process of writing protest poems and stories slightly easier for me in the past decade has been my being able to more fully integrate my life as a writer and an activist. While this wasn’t true in my earlier life, I now feel the fallout from political issues as viscerally as the other subjects I feel urged to write about. Allowing myself to deeply feel the horrors of all I read about in the news has certainly made it more difficult to maintain emotional balance, but I do think it’s necessary. We need, somehow, to find a path into a more deeply rooted empathy if we really want to break the pattern of ignoring atrocities–often done in our name by a system in which we are all still passively participating.

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Metaphors

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slowking4, CC BY-SA 2.5 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5>, via Wikimedia Commons

I finally dived into Ellen Bass’s Living Room Craft Talk Series (half-price sale ends today) and so far, I’m finding it well worth the value. Though I usually find it hard to focus when listening to online lectures, Ellen has a way of making you feel as if you are truly in her living room. But make sure to have a notebook at your side to jot down the countless gems of tips and inspirational tidbits, and be prepared to press pause to play things over. However, even if you miss stuff, Ellen has graciously included handouts of all the quotes from her lecture in their entirety, as well as the sources of the books they’re in, so you can read more of what grabs you most.

While I might have arrogantly thought that after a lifetime of writing poetry I knew everything I needed to know about metaphor, I was surprised how much I learned from Ellen’s examples of the different ways writers use metaphor. And while I often express things in metaphors in all sorts of writing–including even emails–I’m often not super conscious of when and how I’m using metaphors in my poems, and whether I’m milking their impact to the fullest.

So yesterday I reviewed all the poems in the packet Ellen used to supplement her lecture and highlighted all the metaphors. While on my first read I’d recognized the ones that stood out in the wow zone… (e.g. grief as a homeless dog from Denise Levertov’s Talking to Grief & hands that “fly up like two birds while I speak” from Tim Siebel’s Ode to my Hands) I was amazed at how many metaphors there were, and how smoothly they flowed through the poem… to the point where I barely noticed the comparisons.

This led me to thinking more about metaphor as a conscious tool, rather than a momentary flash of subconscious inspiration (which is where I probably get 90% of my metaphors). Ellen talks about the importance of really working metaphors… choosing where to insert them by creating little slits in a poem in places where the message/meaning/image can be unpacked to create more emotional resonance or exploration of nuance. So I looked at one of my poems in progress, surprised to discover that in this particular poem there were no metaphors–just a generative rehash of a difficult emotional situation broken up into lines and made to look like a poem. I wasn’t sure this poem would have legs for anyone but me, but I spent some time consciously inserting metaphors and detail… and lo and behold, something with perhaps a little more staying power began to emerge. I’m still not sure whether the poem will have enough meaning for others, but I do believe the details and the comparisons have the capacity to generate more places for others to connect.

I know that people have different degrees of tolerance for metaphors. There are some folks who can find meaning in an amorphous avante garde play and others who prefer more directness and clarity. So, it’s important to think about what our audience(s) might need and how we want them to respond to our writing, and then craft our metaphors with care. Ellen points out the importance of grasping for the unusual metaphor, rather than the expected one, but not so unusual that people can’t make the leap. But I also know that not only have metaphors improved my  writing by giving more life and possibility to images and details, they’ve also helped me communicate hard stuff to others through a story or image that’s more relatable than a common abstraction.

And I love how metaphors often take on more than I might have originally intended through the lens of a reader/listener’s interpretation, unveiling possibilities that neither of us might have previously considered.

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