Poetry for Labor Event

Many, many thanks to everyone who came out to the Poetry for Labor reading and commemoration on Sunday, which was International Labor Day / May Day. As I noted in my original flyer, this year marked the 125th anniversary of the Haymarket Square Affair, one of the signal events in US and global labor history, which occurred in Chicago right near the site where we met to read and remember. As I noted in my brief and informal remarks that opened the event, the lives of the striking workers who were killed, the policemen who also died, and the accused bombers who were later hanged or murdered were not in vain. The incident and its aftermath led to many things we take for granted today, including the eight-hour workday, and helped to spark the union movement in this country and all over the globe.  As we find ourselves in another precarious moment in terms of labor and labor relations, with unions specifically under fire, an unemployment rate officially at 8.8% but higher and very high underemployment, and a skewed economic system that is rewarding a very few at the expense of billions of people, it's crucial that we not forget events like the Haymarket Square Affair, that we take time out to commemorate those who fought for what we have, and that we continue to fight for our own rights and for those who'll follow us.

I want to offer especial thanks to Jen Karmin and Laura Goldstein, who read, spoke, brought their incredible presences and commitments to the event, and to their affiliated organizations, the Red Rover Series and the Chicago Durutti Skool, who consponsored the event and put the word out about it.  Many thanks also to my partner C, whose support was invaluable, and whom I even convinced to read a poem (by Frank O'Hara: "A Step Away from Them," no less!), and to my cousin Raquel Stallworth and her husband Walter, who came out to show support. Raquel spoke eloquently about her experiences with the contemporary labor market, making personal, as Jen and Laura did, what can sometimes be discussed in abstractions (and thus, as too often happens in our corporate media, dismissed altogether or sensationalized).  Among the writers we read were Muriel Rukeyser, Charles Reznikoff, Rita Dove, Elizabeth Alexander, Carl Sandburg, Joy Harjo, John Ashbery, Martín Espada, Mark Nowak, and William Blake, and we read poetry and prose.  We talked about poetry as labor, the role of metaphor in the way those in power structure our society and capitalism's systems and how what operates in poetry might offer ways of understanding things better, working-class roots and ancestors, and so much more.

It was particularly encouraging to see that among the first people who arrived at the event were tourists from Norway, and a executive trainee (!) from the Basque country (as he put it) in Spain. Both had learned about the event online, and were determined to pay tribute to the site and to hear poetry. And they did stay and listen, which was wonderful.  We also had a sizable contingent of cyclists who, it turns out, were not only gathering at the Haymarket Memorial Sculpture to begin their tour of major local labor sites, but who also wanted to hear poetry. Rick B., one of the cyclists, also offered a brief and thorough recounting of the Haymarket Square Affair events, pointing out that the alley from which the bomb was thrown was still there, just behind us.

Below are some photos from the event. Many thanks again to C, who snapped some great ones!

The new plaque, dedicated April 30, 2011

During the reading

The visitors from Norway (they were there at 8:30 am!) and C

The Haymarket Memoria Sculpture, with our set up

Jen preparing to read

Laura reading Muriel Rukeyser's work

C reading

A poet and union member speaking

Rick B. of the cyclists' group

Me reading

Santorum Stupidity Over: Poem: Langston Hughes

This weekend brought news of a brouhaha involving the extreme right-wing, homophobic Republican former US Senator from Pennsylvania, Rick Santorum, he whose last name has, through the deft work of columnist and author Dan Savage, become a particularly vivid eponym. But our concern here isn't with the eponym and its figurative associations, apt as they are for Santorum, but with a bit of foolishness on his part. (C can probably already hear me pronouncing this word in the Deep South-fashion as "foolnish.") For Santorum selected a phrase that to him sounded just right for his potential Presidential campaign, Quixotic though we all know it will be--or Quayline, since he lacks even an iota of Don Quixote's sense and all of Dan Quayle's limitations; a phrase that, to his, or his campaign staff's ears, sounded just right: "Let America Be America Again."

As it turns out, the progressive website Think Progress saw this slogan and grasped that it came from Langston Hughes's (1902-1967) "Let America Be America Again," a pro-union, pro-immigrant, pro-equality--progressive!--poem he published in 1935, during the era of the Great Depression.  Hughes, as I need not tell anyone, was black, and gay, and a committed leftist. He was a cosmpolitan and an internationalist, a strong advocate of black consciousness and of Diasporism. He was the grandson of the abolitionist Charles Langston and a nephew of abolitionist and educator John Mercer Langston. He was even a correspondent for and member of Communist organizations, etc. All of this is searchable on Google, as is the slogan Santorum selected, which was, for those of us with even the slightest memory, already in the political air as Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry had not just sampled, but recited a selection of it in 2004. (How could anyone forget a Presidential candidate being able to quote a poem, especially one by Hughes?)

Nevertheless, Santorum went with the slogan. Until a Think Progress reporter, Lee Fang, asked him about the words and their background. This is how Gawker reported it:

"No I had nothing to do with that," he said. "I didn't know that. And the folks who worked on that slogan for me didn't inform me that it came from that, if it in fact came from that."

When he was later asked what it means to him, Santorum replied: "Well, I'm not too sure that's my campaign slogan, I think it's on a web site."

But he also used it in the official press release announcing his exploratory committee earlier this week....

Et cetera. Santorum isn't getting anywhere the White House, the Senate, or the Pennsylvania State House for that matter, but the flap did provoke the following question: can he read? Because if or his minions did even pass a cursory eye over the following poem, it would be evident what Hughes was arguing here. Some poems are admittedly difficult to grasp. I have written a few of those myself. Hughes has as well. But some do not, as Wallace Stevens wrote in his poem "Man Carrying Thing," "resist the intelligence / Almost successfully." Some are quite straightforward and evident even to the dullest of minds. A category that, as his past record would attest, includes Santorum.

Here is Hughes's poem in full, easy to grasp, and quite beautiful and moving, in my humble opinion. It shakes me up a bit every time I read it. More of our politicians need to read it, and recite it to themselves as they cut deals with plutocrats and carve what remains of our government and society up, what remains of our threadbare social safety net, for their friends and patrons.

LET AMERICA BE AMERICA AGAIN

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek--
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean--
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home--
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay--
Except the dream that's almost dead today.

O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose--
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!


O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again!

From The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Copyright © 1994 the Estate of Langston Hughes. Used with permission.