We need to be challenged

Thursday, cold and damp. Maybe a light dusting of non-sticking snow over the low lands tonight, if the forecasters are correct. I suppose that also means an early wake up tomorrow morning, just in case conditions are worse than predicted and college open/delay/closure decisions need to be made.

Thursday's are good days for poetry. Poetry can serve as that little extra spark of creative energy necessary to push through the last of a very dense (in both schedule and intensity) week. So I reach for my copy of the Poetry Foundation, pulling it down off the bookmark shelf of my Web browser, to see what I can find.

What will it be? A seasonal poem, something topical, or just a serendipitous discovery not tethered to any taxonomic association I would pre-generate? The latter, as it turns out. An essay, not a poem, on race in America, today's featured offering on the Poetry Foundation Web site.

Writing Like a White Guy, by Jaswinder Bolina is a calmly powerful article on the challenges we face even acknowledging and talking about race, about what makes this challenge different in America in particular, and the many subtle ways being Other affects every aspect of daily life. Bolina eloquently address the fallacy of being "color blind" as well as the ways earnest intelligent people showcase their own biases in their conversations. If you read only one essay, article, paper, or book this year on the subject of race in America, I encourage you to make it this one. Let me tempt you with a short excerpt:

If the racial Other aspires to equal footing on the socioeconomic playing field, he is tasked with forcing his way out of the categorical cul-de-sac that his name and appearance otherwise squeeze him into. We call the process by which he does this “assimilation.” Though the Latin root here—shared with the other word “similar”—implies that the process is one of becoming absorbed or incorporated, it is a process that relies first on the negation of one identity in order to adopt another. In this sense, assimilation is a destructive rather than constructive process. It isn’t a come-as-you-are proposition, a simple matter of being integrated into the American milieu because there exists a standing invitation to do so.

Our cultural myth versus the realities of living in our cultural "melting pot." This stuff isn't easy, no matter how much everyone wishes it could be. Bruce Cockburn, in his song Maybe The Poet, observes:

Maybe the poet is gay
But he'll be heard anyway

Maybe the poet is drugged
But he won't stay under the rug

Maybe the voice of the spirit
In which case you'd better hear it

Maybe he's a woman
Who can touch you where you're human

Male female slave or free
Peaceful or disorderly
Maybe you and he will not agree
But you need him to show you new ways to see

Don't let the system fool you
All it wants to do is rule you
Pay attention to the poet
You need him and you know it

We do need the honest author, the challenging poet, the writers and speakers who can take us outside of our carefully crafted and earnestly guarded Usual, Normal, Comfortable, Self.

So here I am on a cold bleak Thursday morning, still working through a densely packed work week, seeking a little creative stimulation in the form of poetry and, instead, finding it in an essay. We live in a rich, if complicated, world these days. I hope you are taking full advantage of the wonderful resources at your finger tips.

As I finish up this post this morning Marco Benevento is playing (Chalaza) on the iPod. Almost everything on this album challenges me as a listener. The musicians seem to run all over the place, maybe in the spirit of Ornette Coleman in the late fifties, early sixties. It certainly isn't a tune, and it isn't in any way melodic or fathomably structured. It could be warm up exercises for a virtuoso xylophonist. And yet... it remains compelling. This music lives within a tension between what I appreciate musically and what I enjoy listening to.

Today's playlist pulled two tracks from my past, as disconnected from each other as two tracks could possibly be. The latter track was only half finished by the time I pulled into a parking spot on campus. In its original (vinyl) format, this track was the entirety of the second side of an LP (long play, for those who only know albums as historical objects) record.

- Heart: Crazy On You
- Mike Oldfield: Tubular Bells, Side 2