I flew to Ohio yesterday, to give a talk at Kenyon College. What a great group of people – particularly the kids (several of whom, it turns out, are devoted to the site). Hung out with all the poli-sci jocks in the college bar afterwards. Then had to pull an all-nighter for a big piece for the Sunday Times. And now – in the wee hours – my Internet connection appears to be down and I don’t have the energy to fix it. I want to figure out what I think of Bush’s Middle East statement yesterday, but I can’t get a transcript and I don’t want to rely on clips or paraphrases. I should be back in DC by this afternoon for a react. Meanwhile, here’s Paul Begala and more on that bloody poem. Oh, and check out the book club selection for this month, will you? I think it’s our most challenging pick yet.
BEGALA AWARD NOMINEE: “By the way, let me also take up for my colleagues in the Clinton administration. It turns out we were the most ethical administration in history.” – Yes, it’s Paul Begala! Interviewed on Buzzflash.com. The rest of the interview has some real beauts as well.
THAT POEM: Curiouser and curiouser. Emails are running clearly in favor of the view that the Frank Bidart poem I linked to yesterday is, in fact, a condemnation of the World Trade Center bombers. But I’m still not completely sure. Take another look, if you still give a damn. Here are two readers’
letters weighing in on opposite sides:
Amazingly (to me) this is the poem I first heard read by Bidart at St. Paul’s in Boston in November. Thirty or 40 of us poets were asked to read something (anything, really, I suspect) about Sept. 11, and there was Frank, who prefaced his reading of this ugly little piece of fractured free verse by saying, “Some people are made very angry by this poem.” That was it–that was all. Nada. No more explanation, then just the poem.I was stunned, and turned to a fellow poet in the audience and said, “Am I going nuts or was that thing Bidart just read a curse on the dead of the towers?” She allowed as how that was impossible. I remain convinced Bidart was having it both ways. I.e., why aren’t “we” (the evil West) able to use moral imagination to feel what the bombers felt? See what I mean? Clever.
Now here’s another letter from someone at the same event!:
I wanted to throw in my two cents’ worth on Frank Bidart’ s poem, of which I was unaware until you linked to it this morning. I see that others have written to you in the meantime to point out that the poem should be understood as the curse that it purports to be, and that it makes a good deal more sense that this curse is directed at the terrorists (or the fundamentalist mentality) and their “rectitude.” I know Mr. Bidart faintly, and his poems generally are as far from any kind of simplistic political oratory as it is possible to be. If the genesis of the poem is of any relevance, a colleague of Mr. Bidart tells me that the poem was written within a month or so after September 11. He was prevailed upon to read the poem at a college roundtable discussion of the attacks, which he did only with the greatest reluctance-he seemed genuinely taken aback by the anger that the events of September 11 had aroused in him and that found voice in his poem.
I recommend Mr. Bidart’s work to you-his first three books are now collected in a volume called “In the Western Night” and another volume, “Desire,” has also appeared-the poems are often intense and sometimes dismayingly graphic, but they are consistently rewarding.
I think I’ll stick to prose in future. But, Mr. Bidart, if you’re out there and have caught wind of this, would you write me to let me know? Or are we all too post-modern to care what the poet actually meant?
The Dish 