Democracy Democracy: Toilet Paper and Mud Wrestling

This is kind of a cool thing for a poet; the word “democracy” is trending on my blog stats.  I rarely look at these things, but last week with a little too much time on my hands, I clicked on “keyword activity” on my blog stats and up popped the the D word.  So on the day President Obama will make his annual State of the Union address, let me address the word democracy.

It wasn’t just my (relentless) absent-mindedness that lead me to title two of my poems Democracy.  It was like going shopping with a friend where you both fall in love with the same dress, both purchase it, and promise to never wear the matchy matchy frocks to the same party.  It helps to seal this bargain if you live in different cities, states or countries. 

I wrote the following two poems 10 years apart and honestly thought they would never wind up in the universe, let alone the same classrooms.  But this is the age of the Internet and geez-o-man, a poet can’t get away with anything these days.

First let me say, I am a big proponent of democracy.  Unlike the review of the following poem that I read on some online forum, I do NOT believe that democracy means stealing toilet paper.  (Oh how I hope that was just a discussion starter).  Rather, I think it means that, despite our differences, we have the ability to get together as a community and see how we can make toilet paper available to all instead of a small minority hoarding all the toilet paper for themselves.  Toilet paper is a double ply metaphor in the US with its two ruling parties.

Originally performed at the 1996 National Poetry Slam, this poem was first published in Chicks Up Front (Cleveland State University Press).  I wrote this poem reflecting on my time as the Public Information Officer at the Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority.  Let me tell you, people in that organization deserve purple hearts for how they get beat up on a daily basis just trying to make democracy work.  Of course, as in any profession, a few of the executives, workers, and residents become crooks, stealing what they can for themselves, hang the needs of others.  But most are wearily trying to divide a miniature cupcake 57 different ways.

Democracy (1)

My office is government issue.

The basics, one metal desk, one chair,

a stack of folders,

four rubber stamps and loose paper in need of baling wire, or a match...

A gray office beside a multicolored room full of folks waiting on

government basics.

Thump.

Thump.

A large woman thumps, thumps. 

Thumps past my office.

Thump. Thump,

down the hall to the ladies room.

Sounds of water running followed by

the swing of the squeaky door,

it slaps against the wall

oozing toward a bumpy close.

Thump.  Thump.

I look up as she passes again.

Dark hallway.

Dark clothing.

Dark hands.

White toilet paper.

Thump. Thump.

I watch after her passing.

Thump. Thump.

She stole the toilet paper.

Also government issue,

two rolls per day.

Issued by

the same government that

murders mountains of forests for the

confusion of paper it takes to

purchase a pencil through

proper procurement procedures.

The same government that

offers tax abated housing to

for profit football teams and

levies income tax on where's-the-profit

unemployment compensation.

The same government that

issues food stamps for

koolaid, popsicles and tater tots

but not for toilet paper,

like it's some privilege

that poor folks don't need.

That same government issues us

two rolls per day,

93% of the days since our last 7% cut.

Two rolls.

I rub at the crow's feet which are deepening into my mother's face

and listen to her leaving.

She stole the toilet paper.

The clock silently mouths

that it's just 3:05.

I wait for a moment, reluctant to go

once more against the mountain,

knowing the thin air

makes me lightheaded.

Finally I move.

"Ma'am, did you take our toilet paper?"

She looks straight ahead,

the two rolls propped on knees flung wide.

She is slow to acknowledge my presence,

slow looking up at the self-conscious stand

I have taken beside her over-filled chair.

In a glance

she reminds me that I am too tall,

too thin, too well-dressed,

and too goddamned white.

"I need it," she replies.

And that need, I know,

is not entirely selfish,

that need embraces the needs

of her children,

her grandchildren,

maybe a neighbor.

But it does not embrace the needs

of her neighbors with whom

she shares this waiting room.

"I have to ask for it back," I say,

citing the needs of the others.

Reluctant herself,

she complies.

Practically speaking,

she is a republican.

I retreat to return the basics

to the necessary place,

dizzy with

democracy.

©1995 Sara Holbrook, Chicks Up Front (Cleveland State University Press)

This next poem I wrote to introduce a chapter on writing poetry in social studies class in my first professional book for teachers.  It has since appeared in a couple of anthologies, and my newest book High Impact Writing Clinics (Corwin, 2013), which also contains, among its 600 power point slides, one devoted to this poem along with a recording of me reading it.

Democracy (2)                      

Not a flagpole, pointing heavenward

with shining surety.

Not

any one set of colors

jerked cleanly up and down.

Not golden crusted apple pie.

Not

a grey pin-striped uniform.

Not

anybody’s mom.

            No.

If there is a metaphor

for democracy

it is a mud wrestling match,

grit in the eyes

feet a flying—

your ear in my teeth.

And the future?

The future belongs the muckers

still willing to get their hands

dirty,

who roll up their sleeves

to show their colors.

©2005 Sara Holbrook, Practical Poetry (Heinemann)

So, what do I really think about democracy?

Democracy is constantly evolving.  Stay tuned.

Voices in the Virtual Silence

It wasn't on the calendar in advance. No prior knowledge on my part. But as the weather cooled and the travel escalated, I kind of withdrew from my blog and facebook. Virtual silence. I've been lurking around, reading, an occasional comment, but I was putting my creative energy into other buckets. And then came the holidays and family and ahhhhhh relaxing.

The first week after the new year Michael and I flew to Aiken, South Carolina for the first school/teacher visit of the year. What a great way to come back into the world, not the virtual world, the real one. Real kids. Real classrooms. Real words put on paper. Thank you Beth and Sue and Joanne for all your hard work in putting the visit together.




Sad. Shy. Proud. Crazy. Here kids acted out an emotion before they wrote to put their movements into words, focusing on the motions of emotion.

Days like we had in Aiken, surrounded by a tumble of kids and ideas are what I need to feed my spirit and enable me to be strong and hopeful in the face of societal tragedies like what happened in Arizona.

Today we pack and get ready for our big trip to Hong Kong, Bali and Jakarta. Two big cities with paradise sandwiched in between. More excited writers and a vibrant green respite to do some of my own writing in Bali.

HONG KONG! See you soon!

Fierce

Fierce
is a 3 lb 8 oz dog
who
shivering with righteous fury,
tethered by a thread,
ears at attention,
chin extended into
a relentless chain of scalp-tightening yelps,
stands up to the back side of
an overstuffed cable man,
head under the tent of his truck,
before returning home to
release one more
harbored huff of indignation
as she settles in
by the heat hole with her
stuffed bear.

Not sure.

I found this embedded on a friend's blog, so I did what all good researchers do, I copped the URL. Yesterday was a good day for a melt down. I wasn't in school and I had the time to fully appreciate the pressure of having three books due by year's end. Today was a great day for a recovery -- a full day at my desk to put ideas in documents and chapters in folders. How long will my productive recovery period last? Not sure.

The book on vocabulary development, High Definition is the closest I ever want to get to a dissertation. Too close, as a matter of fact. Lots of research, lots of URLs, piles of books, three years of classroom student samples, even index cards. Yes, I come from that generation of small white cards sorted by topic. On a good day, I think like stacks of little index cards. On a bad day, the cards are all airborne and refuse to be corralled. This is a real image in my mind. Putting ideas in little stacks. What images come to the minds of kids whose hands guide controllers and keyboards instead of pens? Not sure.

Exchanged email with an old friend (we are of course not old, there have just been a lot of years since we met) who commented that my blog really put my life out there. Another friend once observed that for some people their life is an open book, mine (because of all the books of poetry) is like a billboard. Is that too much or just enough? Not sure.

I exchanged a couple of emails with an artist friend who is illustrating two of the new books and currently working on Zombies! Evacuate the School. I told her that my insecurities were barking yesterday. She told me that sometimes hers "meow and growl and beat on the door with fists." Producing art of the written or drawn kind is a constant struggle with the critical internal voices that push you to do better one minute and trip you up the next. Will I ever be able to quiet them? Seems like I should have mastered that by now, but at this point . . . not sure.

Then, I hit save on the poetry chapter of the vocab book and with a few spare minutes before bed, I found this little video which makes me wonder all over again if any of this has any practical value. Maybe I should be investing more of my time on facebook and less on writing? I'm not sure.

Time for bed.

Breaking the Ice

I haven't been blogging -- obviously, the last blog has a picture of a blizzard and birds who can't believe their luck are breakfasting on swiped grass seed from the front lawn. I've been form Istanbul to Iowa and various stops in between since last writing. I always have more excuses for not writing than for eating unhealthy foods and I've been delving into both of those pass times shamelessly. Although not writing here, I do have three manuscripts in process -- and a fourth that is only in an infant stage.

More than Just Friends -- this book now has a cover, see above. The photo was shot by my friend Steve Smith, now of Mexico when he and his wife were living in Morocco. These were the same two that we visited in Croatia in December of 2006 when and where I actually wrote two of the sonnets in the book. Allan Wolf and I are anxiously awaiting layouts of the book to see what was done with the photos inside of the book.

I am also working on a manuscript of poems for primary folks and this week I am visiting Mentor High School to write definition poems with the tenth grade for a teacher professional book -- working from a vocabulary list from Lord of the Flies.

High school kids treat vocabulary lessons with same the gleeful anticipation that gets them jazzed before, say, a gritty dust storm. A storm that would be bad enough to get under your tank top but not bad enough to cancel school. In preparation for entering the storm, I took one of the words from the list and made a kind of monologue definition of it.

Hiatus

Excuse me. Do you mind?
Give me a break.
I am hiatus and I don't go with the flow.
I stop.
Like this.
Interrupting the current, I'll dam up your stream.
I'll be the chasm in your prairie.
I'm the off switch on your wall.
Got the picture? The picture with the hole in it?
That's me.
BTW, we're done.
I'm gone.
Break time.

All things considered, that one seemed appropriate to share here. Except, I'm not gone. I'm back. Hiatus is over. I hope.

Hideous

I was browsing blogs, putting off working on taxes and the evil treadmill and I came across this phrase: "Michael Vick and the hideous dog fighting scandal" and thought, great word! Hideous. You don't hear that word so much anymore. The irony here is that there's so much that is hideous in this world. But then the word implies feeling -- and aren't we beyond all that?

Special effects in horror movies have caused many to build up an immunity to blood and gore, maybe we don't need the word anymore. A head explodes, a hand's cut off, skin melts and the audience isn't even supposed to flinch. If we don't feel revulsion, what's the use in a word like hideous except to inject it into something relatively benign? Say, Cher's face.

So along comes real blood and gore. What's more hideous than war? I watched a clip from The Guardian about Iraq -- the U.S. soldiers are clearly being driven mad by their deployment, shooting at everyone/thing that moves. I would, too if snipers were shooting at me. There was a shot of an Iraqi man who'd had his feet blown off, sitting and screaming, frantically looking around for help, his feet, a hand out of the mess. Not reality T.V., but reality. It was too gruesome for the U.S. news. I put in a link to the video above, but brace yourself, it is indeed hideous. Are we too conditioned to horror to flinch, weep, scream?

Hideous: the word itself works on the psyche like a flesh eating disease, ripping away the protective layer to reveal raw emotion. It provokes bad images, but it is a good word. One we need to have in the pocket to pass around to remind us that somethings are beyond acceptable and refuse to be satisfied by a simple shrug.

To quote that AV sage Dr. Phil, you can't change what you don't acknowledge. Hideous is a word of acknowledgment, a feeling word not only standing up to the un-feeling, but backhanding it across its botoxed face.

Disesteem

Here's the sentence: "She was a woman to admire and to desire, but the message in her eye and her bearing was unmistakable: offend or disesteem her at your peril." I'm still reading Shantaram, written by Aussie Gregory David Roberts -- it's nine hundred pages and I'm not traveling with long stretches on airplanes and waiting areas to read. In fact, I think this is the longest stretch I have had in my writing career without travel. Ah, yes, travel. The part of the writing life that Annie Dilliard skipped over in her book. The part that for many of us keeps our computers and cars updated and our dogs in kibble. Well, anyway, I've been home and home means that the laundry calls out to me and the sun and the sidewalk, not to mention the dogs who are as I write this pulling at my chair leg and rolling around like animals, desperate to sniff their way around the block on the end of a leash. But, extra time on my hands also means that while I don't have as much time to read without interruption, I do have more time to contemplate what I'm reading, even to think about select words, like disesteem.

Not the same as disrespect. Not a loss of esteem, low esteem or lack of esteem. I love a good word choice! I was writing to someone a couple weeks ago and she used the word wretched in an email. This is a word more familiar than disesteem, but not really common in usage anymore. I decided that week I was in love with the word wretched. I don't feel wretched nor is my life wretched, I just like the word. Disesteem is more rare, its existence too wretched to earn a space in spell check, although it does own its own place in the dictionary. (Then again, how can anyone trust a spell check that wants to replace Annie Dilliard with Dullard.)

Choosing words is like shopping at the grocery. When you are in a hurry, you just run in and grab what you have always bought and race to the checkout line. But when you have extra time, you can read the packages, check the new products section, and taste the samples. Words like wretched and disesteem don't hang out with the hamburger, they are in the gourmet section of the dictionary. The area that takes some time to prepare, to present, and ultimately, to savor.

'Course the writer of this book was incarcerated during its writing, so presumably he had some time on his hands to shop for just the right word to describe this woman pulled from the shelf of his memory in his fictionalized autobiography (aren't all of our autobiographies, even the unpublished recollections, fictionalized? Really? Although it was responsible of him to make note). Incarceration of an adventurer may well be why the book is 900 pages and rich with detailed observations, painting a panoramic picture of India that no reader could possibly view with disesteem.

Word needed

If an anti-semite is one who hates, disrespects, discriminates against Jews, what's the word for one who hates Muslims? We need a word for that, a shaming, Mel Gibson condemning, horrifying word.

As Michael and I were traveling from Austin to Tucson, we had an ugly encounter with a Continental ticket agent named Russ (we think) in Austin. We were chuckling with him about the new security procedures when he said, "You know what everyone is saying, this could all be eliminated if we did one thing."

I'm thinking, what -- give grandmothers and poets a free pass? We both asked him "what" at the same time.

"Eliminate a religion," was his shocking reply. He was smug. Efficient. Snapping staplers and drawing out adhesive luggage strips.

Michael and I looked at each other, knowing that this bigot stood between us and our destination. I opted to not say anything to him, but go over his head and write to Continental (which I'm doing next with a link to this post.) I hope they find a way to eliminate his job. Not him, just him in that position of authority.

We need to find a way to live in this world without the need to eliminate anyone. What's word for that? I think it is Peace.

Q & A

What's with this word "counter-intuitive"? All of a sudden, it's all over the place. Apply it to Iraq, the schools, the environment -- everyone is explaining what might be best explained as illogical as counter intuitive.

So, yesterday (was it the day before?) I was listening to the radio and some young twenty something was explaining away all organized religion, with particular emphasis on Scientology, as being counter intuitive. Religion, in her mind, is just a bunch of stuff folks made up. She spoke with great certainty.

I think when I was 21 (or was it the year before) I used to be that certain. I remember when Katie was born, I argued with my mother-in-law that I would not have the baby baptised because it was a pagan ritual based on the premise that kids are born in sin and had to be cleansed. Rather, I took a more Wordsworthian Romantic approach, that children are born innocent and the world corrupted them, therefore I was rebelling against infant baptism. I was very certain.

It seems that the longer one lives on the planet, the less one knows for certain, that more questions than answers come with age.

Counter-intuitive.

Packing

I have trouble packing to go to Toledo. Tomorrow Michael (my partner in life and poetry) and I head to Bangkok, Vietnam and Sumatra. Here it is snowing, there it will be in the 90s. Guess I won't need those mittens. One day will be lost in transition. Someone will be living that day somewhere, but those of us on the plane will skip over it. I will be taking a laptop for communication, a great improvement over the telephone given the 13 hour time difference. But what else to take? My bedroom looks like hurricane central and my office is in little stacks. How many books do I need for such a long flight? That's the question most pressing today. I took four with me for an overnight to Toledo, I'll be gone two weeks. Exponentially, that's too many books to carry, but what if I run out of reading material? What if I am not in the mood to read the books I chose? I'm moody when it comes to books. Below is a partial list of books I've enjoyed reading so far this year:

And If I Perish by Evelyn Monahan, Rosemary Neidel-greenlee. This is the story of WWII nurses sent to the front lines in gingham and saddle shoes, landing on the beaches with soldiers in Africa. I read it with total fascination knowing my father had been tended by such brave women when he was a tank commander in Africa and Europe. The book is fascinating, the only mystery is how come it took so long to come about.

The Known World by Edward P. Jones. This is a work of fiction you would swear is fact, it is so well told with detailed flash forwards where we learn which character will ultimately have a grandchild who becomes a judge, which character will wind up free and living up north. Set in pre-civil war Virginia, it describes a community which was founded and functions on the backs of slaves – a time when even some freed blacks owned slaves, a fictional world so real as to now feel “known” by the reader.

The Center of Everything by Laura Moriarty. Loved the young adult voice in this book. The voice was a careful observer, not terribly judgmental, just watching and muddling through. If there is a female counterpart to Catcher in the Rye, this may be it. Book was given to me by a teacher at Colorado Academy when I was there and it made my trip home on the airplane fly by (did I just say that?). Evelyn’s two best friends fall in love with each other and make a life changing choice that leaves her alone with her dreams. At the end of the book, I wasn’t exactly sure where Evelyn would wind up, but I figured she would get to where she wanted to be. Over the course of 300 or so pages, she had really become somebody.

On the Death of Childhood and the Destruction of Public Schools : The Folly of Today's Education Policies and Practices by Gerald W. Bracey. This is a book every parent should read. While many of us wonder about the benefits of the recent testing craze, Bracey has the data to back up his belief that these tests (while a reality) are not doing our kids much good at all and in fact are helping to make them more docile and less curious. US students as it turns out read better than kids in other developed nations except Finland (which btw does not support retention as a motivational strategy). He points out that while our math scores may lag behind a few other countries, our scientists win more Nobel Prizes, a fact he accredits to an interactive educational system as opposed to one where kids are just on the receiving end of a fire hose of facts.

That’s it for now – I think I did a pretty good job of putting off the cyclone in the bedroom. Guess I have to face up to it now.

Today, Cleveland. Tomorrow, the inside of an airplane. Saturday missing in space. Sunday, Bangkok.

My latest title.