Art Judges Economy, Not Vice Versa

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Art Judges Economy, Not Vice Versa
   
   

Part of the ideal in creating an economy is to figure out how to optimize growth and production and decrease scarcity, while at the same time distributing goods in beneficial ways. Furthermore, with the absence of tyranny, everyone would get good food, a good place to stay, access to health care, access to the lands of the country, and so forth. So any command aspects of the economy would only be to serve the greater good, as would any and all self-interest aspects.

What happens when some people, our infirm for instance, cannot participate in the machinery of the economic system? More generally, what happens with those who are unable, such that common interest collides with self interest? The idea is to return to the ideal and say that “everyone would get good food, a good place to stay, access to health care, access to the lands of the country, and so forth.” That is where the re-creation or evolution of the economic system pivots, where at all times it is in service to a representative government, an ideal that should remain what we are continuously striving to perfect, no matter how entrenched our imperfect system gets.

Those unable or less able to participate in what has been set up to benefit us all, still should participate fully in the benefits. We just have a hard time getting a system going that works like that, as we continuously compromise ourselves to the imperfect system. There is no good reason, other than some ultimate benefit to everyone, that Bill Gates should have more money and access to the good life, than any other single one of us. He may be a good person, but he is not billions of times better as a person than someone who is unable to do works such as he has done. The bottom line, as it were, is that we would value each citizen equally and fully, and to be continuously questioning how we can change our economic system such that it serves each and all of us better.

The same thing that happens with those who are either unable or less able to participate in an economic system that pivots on self interest, is what happens with those attending to the arts and spiritual aspects of life. They are either sidelined or not in the game. The strength of an economy is measured by what the bean counters can attend to. Yet art and spirituality cannot be effectively measured this way. Where is the evidence that Frida Kahlo’s paintings are worthy of anything more or other than a place on a rich person’s wall? There may be none, but they are far more and otherwise worthy. That our bean-counting market system makes little or less room for the theologians and artists among us, does not mean that they should not be part of the “everyone” who “would get good food, a good place to stay, access to health care, access to the lands of the country, and so forth,” or be the beneficiaries of what might be considered the charity of the more “fortunate”.

Nor does it mean that we should align with bean counters who only wonder if people would be more productive and earn more money if and how they are spiritual and enjoy which types of art. It is only one aspect of art, of Frida Kahlo’s works, that somehow they would make anyone a more productive employee. Art is not for the economy’s sake. Art is in no way in service to the market system. One of its functions is to be there to expose the economy for its faults. Who’s judging who? Art judges economy, not vice versa.

The manufacturing tycoon’s money is merely his, because the rest of us say he can have it, and only for as long as the rest of say he can have it. It may be a game of Monopoly we’ve decided to play, but Monopoly is only a game, and a person’s net value is not ultimately measured in how she plays such a game, or even her interest in it. Any money we say that the tycoon must give over to art or spirituality, that part that we say that he cannot have, is not his. That’s our money in a representative government—just as in a monarchy we would say he is rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.

We get the bean counters, who want artists and theologians to justify themselves to the economy, when their justification is to the greater citizenry, to humanity as a whole, to humanity through time, and any life or spirituality that may be transcendent of that. It is part of being human to create good art, bad art, and everything in between. It is a sick, lopsided society that, when the economy is failing, the artists and theologians are made to suffer disproportionately.

Yes, there is a case for bad art. For instance, Samina Malik, who was jailed in the UK for writing a bad poem, and then rightly let go. The creative process is so misunderstood, the political machinery in its ignorance had her incarcerated for a time.

Let’s look at another case of poetry, one that may or may not be good, depending on what you as an individual think of it. After then-poet laureate of New Jersey Amiri Baraka recited his poem Somebody Blew Up America, the state decided to no longer have a poet laureate, to completely do away with the position. The challenge to the political establishment was too great.

A benefit from art and spirituality is that they challenge the status quo of the money machine, which can lead to an industrial machine, a science machine, a technology machine, to the point of being a threat. Laws are created to prevent such threats, and artists and spiritual activists throughout time, up to and including today, are imprisoned, some tortured, and some even killed for their expressions.

Arts and humanities show us more of what it means to be human. At a basic level, an artist may simply be displaying what it is like to be another person. Culturally broader art steps outside the established modes of thinking and being, to display wider possibilities than are available in society. When it is not pointing directly to the outcomes of greed and the plight of those left outside the machinery, it can be bringing us beauty to consider, or even ugliness, other ways of seeing the world and our place in it, that are not part of the paradigm needed to produce goods and make profits.

I have news for you atheists: there may be a god. You don’t know. You have decided. That there is no room for god in commerce, is a great pull to atheism. Atheists have selected to believe that which is available within the limitations of commerce and industry. When we check out at a store, the cashier says, “Thank you” to us, not “Thank you and god bless”–heaven forbid. Or how about, “Thank you, you are loved”?

There are fully other sides to being human, than those fostered by the economy left to itself as a system, a system bent on growing and absorbing each of us. There are aspects to being human that an economy given full power would not allow us to participate in, or even hint at. Art so threatens. Spirituality brings morals and ethics that threaten. These parts of us are transcendent of the social and economic systems that we have chosen for ourselves.

We need to interject, to say that everyone gets to participate in art and spirituality, just as “everyone would get good food, a good place to stay, access to health care, access to the lands of the country, and so forth.” We are all not only above the law, but above the economy.
   

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The Pee in the Pool of On Line Poetry, by Terreson

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Editor’s note:

You’re a poet or you’d like to be, and you’re at home or maybe work, with your computer.    Wouldn’t it be great to write a poem and post it into a forum for others like yourself to read and give feedback on, maybe spiff up some of your work, get it ready to submit somewhere, learn a few things or a few things more, find some creative, inspiring people?

The forum conversations could tend along the lines of the letters between poet Hart Crane and the editor of Poetry, Harriet Monroe.    Within the recent article in the New York Review of Books, A Great American Visionary, Colm Tóibín discusses the give and take between Monroe and Crane after he submitted his poem “At Melville’s Tomb” to her.    Here is the end of that discussion:

Monroe had commented as well on the opening of the last stanza:

          Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive
          No farther tides….

“Nor do compass, quadrant and sextant,” she wrote, “contrive tides, they merely record them, I believe.”

“Hasn’t it often occurred,” Crane replied,

that instruments originally invented for record and computation have inadvertently so extended the concepts of the entity they were invented to measure (concepts of space, etc.) in the mind and imagination that employed them, that they may metaphorically be said to have extended the original boundaries of the entity measured?

In the same letter, he quoted from Blake and T.S. Eliot to show how the language of the poetry he wrote and admired did not simply ignore logic, it sought to find a logic deeply embedded in metaphor and suggestion.

Wouldn’t it be great to be a modern-day Hart Crane and find a Harriet Monroe to discuss such matters of creativity with? To this end, there is an article here at Clattery MacHinery on Poetry called 25 Online Poetry Forums and Workshops where you can click and explore select poetry forums.    To this same end, you could explore “The IBPC Boards” on the sidebar of The InterBoard Poetry Community web site to see where you might belong and how the conversations tend.    What a perfect place, the internet, where from the comfort of your own home, from wherever the creative urge strikes, you may share your poetry, and enter discussions on poetry with like-minded people.    Maybe, however, you cannot, or it is just not that easy.    Maybe there are community tendencies or social constrictions that would discourage you, and you would give up on this idea.    Maybe on line poetry has grown so large, that it is time for it to look at itself, like any legitimate field must.

Everything written below is by Terreson.

–Clattery MacHinery on Poetry

 

 

 

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Dear Reader,

Are poetry boards good for poetry?

I wonder if anyone else has wondered about something: are online poetry boards good for poetry?    A subset of questions might run something like this.    Do the boards benefit poets, the new and inexperienced especially who, in most cases, are grappling with the vital stuff of finding an authentic voice, gaining confidence in themselves, working through the canon, trying to figure out if they have something essential to say, and all at the same time?    Do the boards, viewed as communities, engender poetry whose language is also authentic or do they falsify the poetry experience?    Another question comes to mind.    Is even the notion of an online poetry community good for poetry?    And maybe one last question.    What impact on poets, and on poetry itself, do the parameters, the rules of conduct and the by-laws, of many boards have?

I think it possible that the poetry board experience falsifies poetry and renders it inauthentic, which is a peculiar thing to have to say about online sites many poets, new and experienced, flock to both in order to improve their skills and to find like-minded people who are devoted to the art in the first place.    In the history of poetry, and with rare exception, no such community of poets and their critics has ever produced first-rate poems.    To the extent poetry is a community it is more like an unendowed college, with each collegian operating in tandem and usually alone.    Simply put poetry has always had the features of a cottage industry standing outside notions of community.    A notable exception might be Mallarme’s famous Tuesday nights in Paris when fellow Symbolists gathered at his home to read their poems to each other.    Even here, however, I am not aware that those poets engaged in analysis, criticism, parsing and such.    Certainly they were motivated to create a, then, radically new aesthetic, a defined program in which they each had a vital interest.    But whether or not community, in and of itself, is beneficial or harmful to poetry is a larger question, looking almost existential actually, and best left to individual poets to sort through.    The smaller, more manageable question might again be this:    generally speaking, are public poetry boards operationally designed in such a way that they kill the art by falsifying the experience or do they benefit the art?

Here is some of what I’ve come to suspect, and drawing on nearly ten years of participating in various online poetry communities, both on the boards and in the chat rooms.
 
Terreson
 

 

 

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The Pee in the Pool of On Line Poetry: Are poetry boards good for poetry?

 

Notions of Community.

Boards and rooms tend to place first emphasis on community cohesion, with poetry, poetry-related conversation, and the free exchange of ideas viewed as secondary.    It is interesting to view a poem allowed in the name of free speech that expresses violence, threats of violence, bigotry, and sexism.    Then to notice how the exchange of views in heated debate is closely monitored by moderators, often admonished, sometimes deleted from a forum as inflammatory.    The contradiction is interesting.    What it signifies is that a particular board’s community cohesion, and its culture, is an animal in its own right and takes precedence over the artistic project(s).    The mantra frequently expressed is: ’be nice.’    The suspicion, however, is that what actually matters, and in top down fashion, is the board’s culture and not the poetry or the exchange over ideas concerning poetry.    So the question becomes: does such a culture falsify the poetry experience?    Does it tell the online poet, say, that parenthetical bitch language in a poem is okay, whereas honesty in critical discussion is not?    My sense is that the free exchange of ideas is viewed as dangerous to community, but that poetry is not, since, it honestly doesn’t matter.
 

Poet/Critic Dialogue.

Rarely, if ever, is the meaningful dialogue allowed between the posting poet and the posting critic.    Board guidelines tend to explicitly discourage the exchange.    Poets are even told to thank the critic no matter what has been offered in the way of critical response.    The password defining the parameters of the poet to critic relationship is “don’t crit the critter.”    It is a rule, an effective gag order, that causes the head to wag and wobble, and one again I believe designed more for the sake of community cohesion than for the sake of the poet and poetry.    The unfortunate consequence is that poet is put at the disadvantage, while critic is allowed to say practically anything with impunity, no matter how uncomprehending, or even biased.

Common sense suggests that the critic is no more likely to know the nature of good poetry than is the poet.    I know of no case in the history of literary criticism where a school of thought has not been superseded eventually by another or taken to task for what it failed to understand.    And the suspicion becomes twofold: comments on a poem are often made only to satisfy a required number of commentaries in order to get a poem posted, and critics can, often do, comment in a compensatory, self-serving fashion, or with a bias that frequently disenables their perspective.    Add to this the extent to which online critics often do not bother to ground themselves in both the canon of poetry and critical theory, and, again, question of motivation comes into play.

Why then should a commentator be given a license the posting poet is not allowed?    It was Auden who divided the world into two camps.    The prolific and the devourer.    In the first camp he put poets along with farmers.    In the second he put professional critics along with politicians.    This rather begs the further question: if poetry boards sanction the frequently inept critic for whom are the boards meant?    Are poets, the bread and butter of poetry boards, also its fodder?    If so, here again there appears to be a falsification of the poetry experience online that is not healthy, especially for the new poet.
 

Poetry Board as Workshop.

Then there is the proposition that poetry boards are intended to function as workshops.    I am satisfied that, by and large, the public boards fail in this function.    First, emphasis is placed on production and not on refinement.    Here too the system of criticism contributes by its own lack of authenticity, by its lack of in-depth reading, and by its lack of sincerity.    And, secondly, the sheer size of many boards is neither conducive to meaningful exchange nor to the kind of developed relationships between poets that can best benefit artistic growth.    Having been a member of a small, private board for nearly two years where the members have had the chance to follow each other’s progress and where, because of the shared history, each other’s poetry is followed, commented on, entered into with greater comprehension, I am convinced of the failure of the larger boards to function as workshops in a meaningful sense of the office.
 

The Insincere Reader.

Participating members can also contribute to the falsifying of poetry.    While I’ve met many poets, new and old, clearly devoted to the discipline for its own sake, and who have both the instinct and the hunger for authentic poetry, two contrary salients stand out.    First, there are the scores of posted responses to poems entirely lacking in sincerity.    They tend to be complimentary and generic.    Recently I was reminded how Donald Hall once decried America’s growing number of “McPoets,” products of false praise and encouragement without the supporting evidence of talent and ability.    If poetry is to be taken seriously the inflationary effect of the unwarranted compliment becomes a serious problem.
 

Anti-intellectual Element.

Then there is the anti-intellectual element on poetry boards.    If, as Yeats thought, poetry is to speak to the whole body and to the whole of the human experience, then it must speak to the whole soma, to the senses, to the ear, to the groin as much as to the head.    In brief: poetry must be as much a felt experience as the felt experience thought about.    And yet there are those, none too few, who would disallow from the boards exchanges in poetics, prosody, and critical thinking.    This is not a good sign.    It does not bode well for poetry.       

 

 

 

Interboard Understanding.

There also seems to be a collusion between public poetry boards that speaks to something resembling a backroom politicians’ understanding.    On many boards, at least, members are not allowed to raise questions about other boards and, by extension, about the design and the parameters of the online poetry board system in general.    Again, the head is made to wag and wobble.    The circumstance speaks to a cartel of shared interests among board administrators.    It too suggests a culture that has less to do with poets and poetry and more to do with safe-guarding its own green zone, what again must end up falsifying the poetry experience on line.

If poets are discouraged from raising questions and challenging precepts in their own community how then can they be expected to see to one of poetry’s cardinal responsibilities, that of breaking taboo and challenging clichés in behavior, perception, and language?    Viewed from a certain standpoint, vital poetry keeps as a danger to the community, be the township bureaucratic, corporate, or domestic.    And I am persuaded that as much is expected of poetry by the many townships.    So what is to be made of a circumstance in which poetry’s own township displays the bunker mentality?   
 

Board Administrations.

I’ve saved the most serious question for last: does the poetry board infrastructure of moderators and site administrators benefit the poet and create a free range environment encouraging poetry?    Closest to the point, does it actually engender the community the system is designed to keep in place?    Here my question is rhetorical as I am persuaded the answer is no.    I have spent some few years as both a board moderator and as a poetry chat room host.    I am settled in the opinion that the greatest danger to poetry on line is the governing system of board moderators and site administrators, which system proves the Orwellian insight.    All animals are created equal, some more than others.    An insight that cannot be more abhorrent to artists in general, poets in particular, whose vocation requires they be slightly anarchistic, certainly free wheeling and passionate in their convictions, if they are to keep creative in their artistic personalities.

I’ve heard all the arguments for the necessity of the governance, which is what it is.    The salient of which might be that the system safeguards public poetry boards from so-called trollers.    The history of the system suggests that the abuses meted out by moderators and site administrators with the tools to delete posts and ban members rather outweigh the safeguards.    A poetry board’s rules and by-laws is often a matter of subjective interpretation, something that fundamentally comes into play.

On a member’s side of the divide, it is clear that moderators are allowed more liberties than they are.    And among members it is generally recognized that a moderator’s own poem should not be taken too closely to account, that a deferential comment, even if falsely given, is best.    (And I guess I must wonder how the circumstance affects the inexperienced poet who perhaps notices the insincere comment on a moderator‘s poem, often praising it without warrant.)    It is also clear that to question a moderator brings down on the member the approbation of other staff moderators, that to criticize a moderator’s poem can result in the same.    When this happens there is an unmistakable closing-of-ranks, and the divide that all too many members know becomes sharper, more well defined, and sends out a certain other, Orwellian message.    Of all the online poetry board features, the politics infused into the environment by the two-tiered system of moderators/site administrators and members may just be the most pernicious, may be what falsifies the online poetry experience the most, at least when the experience is viewed as an artistic project.

The on line poetry experience is not limited to the posting, public airing of a poem.    Nor is it limited to the poet/critic exchange.    To say it again, at its best it is a free range environment, call it a Montessori school yard.    As the system stands I think it possible it is not just a failure, but a betrayal of the instinct for poetry.    Back in 1991 Robert Bly put together a collection of essays on American poetry: “American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity.”    The collection includes an interview with Bly, conducted by Wayne Dodd.    From the interview:

“Dodd: ‘It may also be that poets will be afraid to risk doing the really different thing, that might seem to be profoundly true to them nonetheless, for fear of being accused of peeing on the floor.’

Bly: ‘Oh, indeed!    That’s right!    I’m sure that the reviewers of Pound’s early work, which had a lot of freaky originality, accused him constantly of being poorly house-trained.    What would originality look like today? . . . It’s possible that originality comes when the man or woman disobeys the collective.    The cause of tameness is fear.    The collective says: “If you do your training well and become a nice boy or girl we will love you.”    We want that.    So a terrible fear comes.    It is a fear that we will lose the love of the collective.    I have felt that intensely.    What the collective offers is not even love, that is what is so horrible, but a kind of absence of loneliness.    Its companionship is ambiguous, like mother love.’”

In my view the collective Bly speaks of and the poetry board culture I draw attention to, at least as it perpetuates itself with an eye to its own maintenance, bear a certain family resemblance.
 

 

 

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Terreson is an itinerant poet, sometime novelist, short fiction writer, and essayist.    Originally from Florida he presently lives in Louisiana where he assists in research into honey bee genomics.    He welcomes your comments at terecone {at} aol {dot} com.
 

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Life and Death from Beijing: a Poetry Sequence by Luisetta Mudie and Dreamer Fei

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Editor’s note:

The title of this post derives from one of the most important memoirs of the last century, Life and Death in Shanghai by Nien Cheng, which came out in 1987.   She recounts in that book her imprisonment by the Red Guard during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Politically speaking, her work represents what many of us would know about China during that time period.

Shortly after that book’s publication, the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 took place in Beijing, in which upwards of 3,000 protesters, were killed or injured on orders from the Chinese goverment.   These protesters, many of them students, were by and large calling for democracy.

Here we are, approximately two decades later again, and it is the year of the Beijing Olympic Games.   Before the world supports, boycotts, or protests these games, or decides which grounds they will do this on; as events surrounding these issues surface through the media, we in the West may want to take a look at the heart of China, via the heart of one Chinese man, a poet.   Media can blind us to a fact we well know, that a big part of China’s heart is in poetry, and we need this information.

Everything written below here is either written or translated by Luisetta Mudie, who begins with a letter to you, her reader.

–Clattery MacHinery on Poetry

 

 

 

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Dear Reader,

A journalist friend of mine who is also a poet recently went back to China after 18 years in the US.   He was on the Square the night of the Tiananmen massacre.   Below are some prose reflections on his trip, but also some poems of his and mine relating to Tiananmen, to China, and about his son, who holds his sense of the future.

The prose and the poems were written by him in Chinese and rendered by me in English.   There may be other poems written by me at the same time, or in answer to his poems, as we had an ongoing poetic dialogue.   Chronologically, the poem sequence came before the prose, and is the culmination of a three-year dialogue between us, in which the poet is trying to move beyond both the concrete horrors of his student past, and, crucially, the numinous might-have-beens which haunt his generation.

It took those of his generation far longer to give up their longing for the idealized figures common to passionate young souls than it did for most of us, because those figures were made godlike and ultimately untouchable by the massacre that followed their emergence on the Square.   This passion that should have carried them into human life was forced instead into a twilight world of denial and strange attraction by the deaths that night in Beijing, and the government’s largely successful attempts to rewrite history.

But if we have the inclination, a poetic bent towards shade as well as light, those too-good angelic figures will show their true nature, which is also daimonic, and lead us into realms proper to poetry.

He would rather use his pen-name, Dreamer Fei, to avoid being identified.

Warmly,

Luisetta Mudie
Radio Free Asia
RFA Unplugged
 

 

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by Dreamer Fei
 

The Road Home
 

The giant Boeing 747 whistles through the thick dark cloud and white smog above the city, and touches down in a drastic way, reminding me that I am home again, after 18 hours of flight and 18 years of nostalgia.

It is about an hour’s drive from the airport to my parents’ apartment.   My cousin wanted to pick me up at the airport and show off his new Toyota Camry, but I declined.   I want to relax on the long journey home to adjust to the reverse culture shock of re-entry.   I have been warned about it by many overseas Chinese.   I get a cab; it costs 10 bucks.   I doze off as it snakes through the city traffic.

I was born and grew up in China.   Even after 18 years in America, I still eat Chinese food at least once a day.   Reading Chinese books is one of my favorite pastimes.   China is remote for me, yet it has continued to haunt my dreams.

I was a college student in 1989 and an eyewitness to the shootings and killings that night along Changan Avenue.   I was almost shot when I tried to persuade the soldiers not to fire on us.   I fled the country shortly after the tragedy.   But the tear gas, tanks, and crushed bodies permeated my dreams.   In one scene, I try to hold a fellow student crushed by a tank, and realize his two legs are gone, with only blood gushing from his body.   Such scenes are rewound and played again, night after night.   No time for healing after such an event.

It has been 18 years since I set foot in my hometown.   The cab brakes a bit and I wake up.   We are on the freeway.   Surprisingly, it has 12 lanes and is as good as any interstate in the U.S., if not better.   It is even more surprising that, along the freeway, you can see signs for W-Mart, Cosco, McDonalds, KFC, and Domino’s Pizza as well as Starbucks Coffee and IKEA, not to mention a Mobil gas station every 10 miles.

Am I in China? Did I take the right flight? In the days that follow, there are even more surprises in store.
 

Day one:   Environment Day

The drum beats.   Firecrackers plus the loudspeakers are deafening.   In the unsettled dust and smoke caused by the fireworks, hundreds of retired women dance cheerfully.   The government is holding Environment Day celebrations in a local park.   Government officials take turns giving the usual long speeches, talking about how environment protection is vitally important.   Everyone is a bit bored until, at the end of the ceremony, environmental officials and local primary school students release several hundred doves into the air, in a “back to the wild” gesture.

These doves fly high in the foggy sky for about 10 minutes before landing next to a huge pigeon coop to get their food on a cart in a corner of the same park.   The cart is owned by a farmer who makes a living by hiring out his doves for exactly this sort of stunt around the area.

It would be unfair to say that local governments don’t take environmental issues seriously.   In some areas, protecting the environment is more than a public show or a ceremony, because officials could lose their jobs if an environmental disaster happens.   A big chemical group in my hometown, funded by the government, planned to spend three billion yuan (around US$40 million) to tackle air pollution problems by reducing chemical waste and planting trees.   The river in my hometown—a mid-size city—used to be dirty and filled with industrial waste and dead animals.   In my memory, the color of the river was the same black as Chinese calligrapher’s ink.

But now, the river glitters on a sunny day (not that you get very many of them) and there are many weeping willows along the banks.   Several public parks have been built along the river as well; you can even see water lilies in one while standing under the traditional Chinese pavilions.   Along the newly built main avenue in the south side of the city, there are lawns with green grass, where huge plastic elephants and giraffes stand.

The locals say these projects are all done for the sake of face and to show off to top officials and tourists.   But hey, trees and grass are good, a glittering river is better than a dark one, and the “face” of the city really looks better than before.
 

Day Two:   Where is my old neighborhood?

One of the things that surprises me the most, is that I get lost when trying to find my own home, even though my folks still live in the same neighborhood I grew up in.   Now, most of the shabby old shacks that the poorer residents used to live in have been demolished, and the area is filled with high-rise buildings and commercial complexes.   Many of my old neighbors live in two-, three- or even four-bedroomed apartments with hardwood floors and all the modern utilities like refrigerators and washing machines.   These were luxuries for most Chinese 20 years ago.

“Life is good!” my old classmate tells me.   He now works at a law firm and bought a big condo two years ago.   He couldn’t afford the half a million yuan (U.S.$60,000) condo on his own, but his parents and his wife’s parents helped with the downpayment.   “Property prices are skyrocketing now.   If we hadn’t bought it, pretty soon we wouldn’t have been able to afford it at all.   And without that condo, my wife wouldn’t marry me,” he jokes.   I can feel his confidence about his future, though; he makes around 5,000 RMB (US$600) per month now.   “The monthly mortgage payment will remain the same, but our income will grow steadily,” he says.

But not everyone is as lucky and confident as my old classmate.   One day, as I am buying a pot of tall bamboos for my father in a farmer’s market, the old saleswoman asks me why I am buying it.   I tell her that my parents have moved into a new apartment and need some plants there.   She says she envies them.   She tells me that she used to have an old-style house in the downtown area where everybody knew everybody.   Now she has moved to the outskirts of the city.   “I miss the old neighborhood.   Sometimes I go back to see the old neighbors who live in the high-rise buildings and chat with them.”   Tears start from her eyes.   I ask why she doesn’t return.   She says the compensation she received when her old home was demolished for development wasn’t enough to afford a place there.   I don’t know what to say to her.

This city used to have many state-owned enterprises (SOEs), but since the early 90s, most SOEs have gone bankrupt, and thousands of workers have lost their jobs, many forced into early retirement.   The city is clearly divided into haves and have-nots, and in recent years, the gap between them has widened.   When you go to a luxury store, you can see Burberry shirts and golf clubs at prices higher than in London or New York.   Mercedes and BMWs prowl the streets, but in the farmer’s market, customers are haggling over a penny.   There are restaurants where you can spend US$100 per person for a seafood buffet, but you can also have a feast for only US$1 in a roadside vendor’s stand.
 

Day three:   Is social harmony possible?

In front of the gates of the city government, hundreds of tricycle taxis stage a quiet demonstration; they have signs on their tricycles saying “Legalize the tricycle!” “we want to survive!” “We want to pay taxes!”.   Since the systemic reforms and privatisation of the SOEs, strikes and demonstrations like this have been happening quite often in this city.   Some unemployed workers have managed to get some compensation due to the attention paid to the strikes and demonstrations, but it is barely enough to get them by, meaning they won’t be starving, but not enough to support their family, or pay for their kids to go to school, or for medical expenses like the occasional hospital visit.   Thus, some of the unemployed workers have made new jobs for themselves by using tricycles to taxi people around the city.   This has found favor with other people on a low income, especially the elderly, because they are cheaper than the bus and more convenient.   But now the cab drivers have had their noses put out of joint, and have complained to the police.   Others complain that the city’s 3,000 tricyle rickshaws are blocking traffic in the downtown area.   The police are always fining them, but they carry on with their business afterwards.

“They shouldn’t be legalized.   Shame on the city for letting them loose!” said the driver of one cab I rode in.

“We should be legalized.   We need to eat! It is better than stealing!” a tricycle-man told me while I took a ride with him.

I found out later that this saga has already dragged on for more than a year.   “The city government has a dilemma,” an old classmate who works for the municipality told me.   “If we legalize the tricycles, then more tricyclers will come out to make money, and we will get more complaints from taxi drivers, and traffic will be worse; but at the same time, we are under pressure to find those unemployed workers jobs.   If we ban all the tricycles, they will come to us for jobs.   Now what we do, we keep our eyes half open on this issue, which means we do nothing at this point, we only contain the amount of tricycles.”

One sunny afternoon, I take a walk into a riverside park.   I see the big rally going on.   Hundreds of old men and women all wearing Mao suits are listening to an old man’s speech.   He says:   “Our representatives went to Beijing to petition and they handed over the paperwork.   Now they are back; let us welcome them!” People burst into applause, welcoming the petitioners home as heroes.   Later I found out that the man giving the speech was a former Party secretary at a big factory who led the workers and cadres to complain about corruption on the part of the factory manager and asked for more compensation.   It seems to me that they are able to take a swipe at social injustice, including Communist Party officials without fear.

This is a surprise for me.   As a young student, I always admired Hyde Park in London where people can voice whatever opinions they want, and here they are having a public rally on such a sensitive issue; in China!   Even though the mass media are tightly controlled, people really do have some personal freedom now.   They can talk about politics and even say “President Hu Jintao sucks” in a restaurant, teahouse or even in the office.   Nobody holds you responsible or reports you to the police for that, because people just don’t care much about politics any more.
 

Day four:   The way back

My cousin insists on driving me to airport.   He says:   “You are impressed by too many good things.   I will show you something on the way back.”   We take a detour instead of the highway.

The road is dusty and bumpy, and the buildings and factories are the old ones I recognize from 20 years ago.   They are exactly the same, which is a shock.   I just can’t piece the two pictures together.

Now I have seen the good, the bad and the ugly side of China.   I don’t know where it is heading.   China is changing drastically, and it’s impossible to say whether for the better or the worse.
 

 

~~~~~
 

 

 

~~~~~
 

 

Poem Sequence

 

 

June 4, 2006

by Dreamer Fei
 

Tomorrow we will rise like the sun
 

Your images have floated outside my window
in I don’t know how many dreams,
suspended in endless youth.

Hand in hand, you stand, staring.
I push open the window, call softly:
Are you hungry? Cold?
Eyes look back like dark tunnels,
unknowing. The mouths make no sound.

They follow me, these eyes,

as shade follows shadow—
without name.
 

I know I should find your graves;

pay my respects to your families.
My son bounces along beside me,

fists full of yellow flowers—

but I don’t know where to find them.

You seem to ask how I could have fallen so,
from the night we drank, smoked, and sang the same song,

hand-in-hand on the Square.
 

It is the years that have fallen, I reply,
garlanded in mourning flowers, now rotting.

Wait for me, I say, follow me!
We’ll go see the world
or maybe our families will intermarry.

You kept me company for years

until one day on the June grass
you sat down and said:
Tomorrow we will rise like the sun
and scatter warmth on the green earth.

Don’t forget to bring your child.

Bring the future

and we’ll set off together
on the long road home.
 

 

~~~~~

 

June 4, 2004

by Luisetta Mudie

for the survivors of Tiananmen Square
 

The Price of the Asking
 

First love: the quavering call
to the cosmos,
the soul in ashes shudders in desire,
yet still imprisoned
by grammar.

Fresh loves succeed, first love gone by.
It’s you, of course, and you too—
love as the answer!

Fresh loves mature, no longer enough.
We ask again, work, drink, smoke,
take the veils of flesh, or words.

And all the time the forgotten soul
is waiting, knowing that the first love
is always, always
a question

for which the price of the asking
is life’s deepest response,

the price of the answer
the soul’s great work,

the price of the loving
a self given up to the whole story.
 

 

 

~~~~~

 

February 13, 2005

by Dreamer Fei

to Christopher, at one year old
 

Midnight Sun
 

Nestled in the crook of my arm, you sleep,
Fingers hooked around my shirt-button.
I carry you like a stringed instrument,
whose milky chords permeate the night.

Since you were born, I have held
The light of your arriving cry that night
When your first ray of life broke through
Big snows and winter dark, guiding

My soul-ship in its wandering ways,
A song thrummed from a well-earthed string.
So many days and nights lie before you,
My son! Ready to ensnare your heart

As you grow through wind and storm,
A far cry from tonight’s soft moonlight. Here,
Now, I am mindful of your spring fragility:
That I will be gone before you fully bloom.

What dream will sustain you, or what path
Your feet will take, I cannot know.
Soon, all that time will be as tonight, when I
Stand at the doorway, watch you on the way

to your heart’s home.
 

 

~~~~~

 

July 2004

by Luisetta Mudie
 

I have followed you
 

To a small island near the courtyards
of the Huangpu Military Academy
where the river sleeps its long siesta

Mud-sluggish down past Tiger’s Gate,
bathing the estuary in oblivion—memories
of shame and gunfire are left for humans

To where a northern township lies
battered in a sea of bitter dust, the earth
and its people tortured by history

Along the sand of a Delaware beach,
voice crackling across microwaves—the cry
of lonely ghosts swept away by the wind

Out on the dark wings of memory to a night
that changed the world’s dream forever,
leaving us to pick up lost echoes of love

With the hot closeness of words in the throat,
words fought for, bought and paid for, picked
up by the roadside and between train carriages

Into poems as unanswerable as the weather
at the rain-soaked borders of sea-country,
poems that promise the storm but can never hold it

And there I saw you first, still see you, happy
on a boat in yellow, fish held high in the sea-sway,
your brave and careful eyes asking one question. When?
 

 

~~~~~

 

2005

by Dreamer Fei
 

How I wish
 

I could rock you to sleep
like carrying a baby, telling stories
under unknown stars

I could guide and protect you
wipe away tears
bring back a smile

Or one Saturday at the piano
I could just hear you
then read you my poems
with the sun streaming through the window

We could stand, hands idly linking
in the front garden, watching the children
Or later, in the back, watch the sun sleep
and the night fall, and come gently to each
other in the flesh

We could explore the whole world then
sail the impossible blue

Later still, when the deadline is near,
we could say together in fragile voices
that we are not sure if there’s a paradise ahead of us
but didn’t we just live one on earth?

Strangely, it’s already enough, my love
with the present to share and a future out there
We have the dream fulfilled and beyond the dream’s scope
poetry, imagination and a growing passion

Now I know that a bittersweet teardrop
can serve to moisten a dry old heart

Dissolve me; make a better man
 

 

~~~~~

 

 

~~~~~

Today is World Samina Malik Day: Terrorize your lyrics

_____

   

A reminder about December 6th, World Samina Malik Day. It is after 11:00pm here on East Coast USA, which means that it is already December 6th in half the world. I greet you in freedom, and with poetic license to do so–for now. Yet, this is the day Samina will be sentenced for writing poetry, no matter how lenient or harsh. Sentenced.

She is an online poet. Her being found guilty convicts us all, every poet who has ever imagined and wrote outside the bounds of the politically correct. Every poet.

Last month, she was found guilty of a “lesser charge” of “possessing documents likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism.” What she downloaded, however, are documents likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of lyricism. In fact, she did not only think about committing lyricism, she did it.

After work tomorrow, which here will be after she is sentenced, I will dress like her (which for me will mean looking like an aging ninja in jeans). I will download The Koran, to align myself with Muslim thought, and consider myself a brother born foreign. Links are available here: Wikipedia: The Qur’an. I will visit Islamic forums and blogs, and download the al Qaeda manual. Links to some Islamic sites can be found at the bottom here: World Samina Malik Day.

I will surf and muse from there. I will look for the taboo, the non-PC. I will look into beheading, and surf and muse from there, to Torture, Al-Qaeda Style, and beyond. All this in preparation for an act of lyricism, to be a lyrical terrorist, to be a poet.

Please join me, where horror and political protest merge into the ears of those who would be politically correct, where terror enters lyricism, where Lyrical Babe became Lyrical Terrorist. Let’s do her taboo. You may.

   

_____

   

   

_____

   

   

_____

   

World Samina Malik Day December 6th

_____

   

        I remember this sister from another forum

        I’m sure she is sorry for what has happend and didnt mean any harm by it

        May Allaah help her, prison is a horrible place

                –Niqaabis
                IslamicAwakening.com
   

_____

   

Samina Malik became the first woman convicted under Great Britain’s Terrorism Act. She wrote poetry about terrorist acts, such as how to behead. She downloaded files, such as the one called How To Win Hand-to-hand Fighting, a manual for a sniper rifle, and the (relatively useless) Mujahideen Poison Handbook by Abdel Azez. Such downloading the folks at Scotland Yard consider “a serious criminal offense.” (See Sean O’Neill’s article in The Times: Poetic shop assistant guilty of building library of terror.)

Writing is not doing. A writer needs to be able to write whatever comes to her. No matter what real terrorist activity Samina Malik may, may not, or may some day be into, her writing is not, and must not be considered terrorist activity.

Every poet, in pursuit of the creative, has to be able to explore and fail, just as people who sing most often cannot carry the tune. And we cannot be out giving poetry licenses to people before they can participate in such activity. Each one of us must have poetic license.

Samina Malik was affected by the videos of beheading that were on the web, and decided to try her hand at the horror genre. A writer needs to be able to research, and explore sensitive territory, such as the info she downloaded–even live it to some degree, vis a vis Jack Kerouac. Period. And whether she is imprisoned for it or not, the next writer will do the same, whether he is imprisoned for it or not, and then the next.

I wonder, following her notoriety, how many others have gone looking to explore that “terrorist” information–and if they are poets, how much bad poetry will come from it. I went looking to download it myself, and could not find the links, otherwise I would share them with you.

[Edited in Nov 26: al Qaeda manual. Thanks to and note: ian.]

If a link appears on my monitor, here in my home, just as if it appears on a bookshelf, here in my home, I will open it, as I should be free to do. My judgment, nobody else’s. Period. Imprison me if you want, but another good citizen will follow me in turn, and you can imprison her too, and the next.

Instead of prosecuting and imprisoning her, we should celebrate a World Samina Malik Day, when we all dress up as her, or as close to it as we can, and download the information she did, the jihad encyclopedia, the poisons handbook, the sniper and hand-to-hand combat manuals–and then write on it. She is due to be sentenced on December 6th. This should be the day. If we cannot find the material for download that she did, note both the failed beheading scene, how hand-to-hand combat is won creatively, and the impending beheading at the end of this scene in Steven Seagal’s Out for Justice (WARNING: FOUL LANGUAGE):

Out for Justice: Bar Scene (‘Anybody seen Richie?’):

Or find something that works even better for you, The Godfather maybe, some documentary, something with violence or horror.

Let’s also make her rich with a Samina Malik line of clothing. She represents the average person’s freedom on this shared Earth of ours.

Just as most every other poet who has tried his or her hand at erotica, war poetry, love poetry, and the horror genre, and has then written in support of Samina Malik, I too was affected by a killing and wrote a syllabic sonnet sequence about it. It is here: Saint Anselm and the Murder of Addie Hall in New Orleans on October 5, 2006. (Also, see Hari Kunzru’s article for The Guardian: Terror stricken. And read Noorjehan Barmania’s ‘I have much in common with Samina Malik’.)

I wish I knew more about how Wilfred Owen’s poetry was brought out at Ms. Malik’s trial, but he is a poet who was able to cast killing into poetry, a difficult thing to do. Like Malik’s, my stab at it doesn’t approach Owen’s:
   

.
   

by Wilfred Owen
   

Parable of the Old Men and the Young
   

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretched forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son. . . .
   

.
   

Even though Malik basically failed at it, some positives are that she cast the poem onto the page with care for line breaks, and made her writing very understandable. She’s sort of an advanced beginner like many of us, and I would encourage her to continue writing. Furthermore, the matter-of-factness has her readership recall terrorist activity so much so, that she got convicted as if she really were a terrorist.
   

.
   

recast from excerpts found on the web
   

by Samina Malik
   

How to Behead
   

Hold him
Tie the arms behind his back
And bandage his legs together
Just by the ankles
Blindfold the punk
So that he won’t hesitate as much
For on seeing the sharp pointy knife
He’ll begin to shake
And continuously scream like an eedyat
And jiggle like a jelly
Trust me–this will sure get you angry
It’s better to have at least two or three brothers by your side
Who can hold the fool
Because as soon as the warm sharp knife
Touches his naked flesh
He’ll come to know what’ll happen
It’s not as messy or as hard as some may think,
It’s all about the flow of the wrist.
No doubt that the punk will twitch and scream
But ignore the donkey’s ass
And continue to slice back and forth
You’ll feel the knife hit the wind and food pipe
But don’t stop
Continue with all your might.
About now you should feel the knife vibrate,
You can feel the warm heat being given off,
But this is due to the friction being caused.
   

.
   

Tomorrow, let’s all go and kill someone with her poems. We’ll print them out, and drop them onto people’s heads from rooftops. We’ll roll them into balls and throw them at passersby. We’ll roll them into tubesticks and hit people we approach over the head with them. We’ll get bad breath and recite them.

There are criticisms that her writing is not really poetry, that its main purpose is to incite terrorist activity. Can we call instructions for beheading poetry at all? Here is a poem, written by Harry Mathews, published by the Boston Review, and anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2002, wherein the instructions are how to make eggs, no metaphor, no symbols, no mystic “aha” experience: Butter and Eggs.

If there can be a poem about how to make eggs, then there can be a poem about how to kill. Indeed, there are many movies and many novels out there that instruct viewers on different ways people can be brought to death. We must keep our poets free. We must not silence them, either by cutting out their tongues, by killing them, nor by capturing them for imprisonment.

There is another side to this also, and that is Samina Malik: impressionable daughter of Great Britain. It’s a little late to be raising children, exposing them to world violence and such, telling them that Bush and Blair are criminals and should be hung like Hussein, and then telling them it’s not okay to write about it when they become young adults, that they will be jailed for it.

   

   

_____
   

On November 16th, the BBC radio program, World Have Your Say, discussed Samina Malik’s situation in terms of a thought crime. That segment begins 12:17 into the show and features Baroness Mary Warnock and Gore Vidal, along with several bloggers: BBC: WHYS: Bangladesh, thought crimes, the dollar (mp3) (while available).
   

_____

   

Some musical terrorists:
   

Killing an Arab, by The Cure:

   

Murder by Numbers, by The Police:

   

Cop Killer, by Ice T & Body Count (WARNING: FOUL LANGUAGE):

   

_____

   

155 blog posts on Samina Malik’s conviction:
   

جبهة التهييس الشعبية: في قضية سمينة مالك: عاجل لخدامين السيادة

مدونه الشاعر …ترحب بكم: سميه… كتبت شعر .. تبقى إرهابيه … وتخش السجن…..وتحيا الحريه الغربيه … posted by mohammed alsha3r

Ace of Spades HQ: British Law Convicts For Mere Possession of Records posted by Gabriel Malor

AcidDrip: Freedom to offend is part of freedom of speech

AcidDrip: “Lyrical Terrorist”–Samina Malik found Guilty

Alabama-Democrat: The Brits And Freedom posted by Altoid

Ben Aldin: Britain is no longer a free society

American Blog: The Age Of Thought Crime Has Begun posted by Ken

Anglofille: i am not a terrorist, just a writer

Behemoth Conspiracy: ‘Young Muslims ‘criminalised for harbouring silly thoughts…” posted by BTB

Rosie Bell: The Terrible Lyricist

Bibliobibuli: Britain’s Thought Police posted by Sharon Bakar

Bibliobibuli: Convicted . . . For Writing Poetry? posted by Sharon Bakar

Big Brother State: Poet Found Guilty of Terrorism posted by Winston Smith

Yahya Birt: Thought Crime comes to Britain

The Book Bitches: Guilty! . . . Er, for writing poetry? posted by Harlot

Book Blog: Is Writing Bad Poetry a Terrorist Act? posted by Keir Graff

Bookninja: Poetry as terror threat posted by George

Books Inq.: We link . . . posted by Frank Wilson

C L O S E R: Poetic (in)justice? posted by Martijn

C L O S E R: Terrorize your lyrics–Suspended sentence for Samina Malik posted by Martijn

The Chalybeate: Samina Malik posted by Moses

Chesler Chronicles: The Lyrical Terrorist Insists that her Poems are Meaningless posted by Phyllis Chesler

Chihuahuas Bite: From London to Salem . . . a journey of justice posted by Warrior Dog

Church of Virus: ‘Lyrical terrorist’ sentenced over extremist poetry posted by Blunderov

Circle of 13: “the inner monologue is in peril” posted by Augustine Touloupis

Citizen Sane: “Lyrical terrorist”? More like terrible lyricist.

Hugh Cook–Cancer Patient: Fascist British state hauls cute girl creative writer into court

Counterbalance: The lit life in los angeles: A New Twist on What Your Books Say About You posted by Callie Miller

Geoff Coupe’s Blog: The Mugwump Youth

Current: ‘Lyrical Terrorist’ Spared Jail posted by richjm

Dave’s Part: The Lyrical Terrorist versus Sturmgeist89 posted by David Osler

Deborama: Victim of laws against thoughts posted by Deb

Voyou Desoeuvre: Support Samina Malik

Done With Mirrors: Sad, Vicious, and Stupid: But is it criminal? posted by Callimachus

Done With Mirrors: Terror Poet Girl posted by Callimachus

The Dragon’s List Kung Fu Community: Tried for writing poetry posted by john100

Dublin Opinion: ‘You have been in many respects a complete enigma to me.’ posted by Conor McCabe

Edshugeo The GodMoor: Guilty Of Owning Manuals?

Edshugeo The GodMoor: Happy Samina Malik Day!

email blog: Free Samina Malik

EURSOC: Lyrical Terrorism: Self-censorship, Islamists and the art world

ex-lion tamer: a real life poetic terrorist?

FictionBitch: The Terrorism of Intellectual Repression posted by Elizabeth Baines

Free Samina Malik by Nawara Negm

Good Ol’ Boy: Lyrical Terrorist

GotPoetry.com News: Suspended Sentence for the ‘Lyrical Terrorist’ posted by Robert Verkaik

GotPoetry.com News: Update on The Lyrical Terrorist posted by chameleon (D.P.)

Great War Fiction: No Worse than Owen? posted by George Simmers

El Gringo Rumbero: Justice for Samina Malik!

The Guardian: Comment is free: An attack on liberty posted by Inayat Bunglawala

The Guardian: theblogbooks: Terrible poet, laughable terrorist posted by Shirley Dent

The Guardian: Comment is free: Don’t even think about it posted by Inayat Bunglawala

Herald Sun Blog: Gangsta in a hijab posted by Andrew Bolt

Heresy Corner: All the nice girls love Osama posted by Heresiarch

Heresy Corner: Why Free Speech Matters posted by Heresiarch

Helmintholog: A very quick further note on censorship posted by Andrew Brown

Hitchens Watch: With a legal system this effective, why should England tremble? posted by Christopher Hitchens

Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain: The crime of rhyme: the extraordinary case of Samina Malik post by Fahad Ansari

Hoff Limits: Talking with the lawman about poetry posted by Mike Hoffman

Hunting Monsters: Samina Malik Day: December 6th posted by ian

Hunting Monsters: Thoughtcrime or Lolcrime? posted by ian

Rupa Huq’s home on the web: Dubious Distinction

I Hate All of You: Thought Crimes posted by Hitler616

Index Research: Fox News: Guilty of Incitement to Terrorism? posted by Sarah Meyer

IndyBlogs: Minority Report: Thought crime coming to a town near you posted by Jerome Taylor

Islam in Europe: UK: ‘Young Muslims are being convicted of thought crimes’ posted by Esther

IslamicAwakening.com: 1st Sister Convicted Under Terrorism Act posted by Umm

Islamics: Gillian Gibbons and Samina Malik posted by Shukran

Islamophobia Watch: The lyrical non-terrorist posted by Martin Sullivan

Islamophobia Watch: Woman nicknamed ‘lyrical terrorist’ escapes jail sentence posted by Martin Sullivan in UK

Jangliss: “From Homer to 50 Cent, lonely and frustrated . . .” posted by John Angliss

Jdude–The Unstoppable Madman: Free speech

Late Arrival: The study of inference–Or how I learned to love the Romans posted by Daniel Snell

Lead Acetate: Potential versus kinetic ideas posted by E.M.

The Legal Satyricon: The “Lyrical Terrorist” posted by Prof. Marc J. Randazza

Liberal Review: The ‘Lyrical Terrorist’ Is Not a Terrorist posted by Rob Knight

Londonist: Bad Poetry Not a (Punishable) Offence posted by Julie PH

Look High and Low: No-one is safe posted by Mark

Clattery MacHinery on Poetry: Today is World Samina Malik Day: Terrorize your lyrics

Mac Uaid: Lyrical Terrorist and the right to be offensive posted by Liam Mac Uaid

The Mail: Free speech is for nasty people, not nice ones posted by Peter Hitchens

MakeHeadline.com: [wvns] British Muslim Found “Guilty” of Poetry posted by amirza

La Mancha: I wonder how many Italians own Nazi paraphernalia posted by Carlos

Manifesto Club campaign: Free the ‘lyrical terrorist’ post by Josie Appleton

Masopher’s Mind: There is no reason we can’t be civil, is there? post by Masochist

The memoirs of Lord Snooty: Lyrical Terrorists posted by Cheese Messiah

Dave Miller Art Blog: Lyrical Terrorist

Dave Miller Art Blog: samina malik day december 6th

Monkeyboy: Lyrical Terrorism posted by Jack

MPACUK: ‘Lyrical Terrorist’ found guilty posted by Dr Diavolo

Muslamics: Muslim Poetess Arrested for Extremist Poetry posted by Yesi King

Nation of Shopkeepers: What exactly is a terrorist document? posted by Harry Haddock

Natural yogurt: Free Samina Malik The days tick by . . . posted by Stephen Clynes

Natural yogurt: Fantasy or reality? posted by Stephen Clynes

Neil’s Site: Islamic Demonstrations

Newswatch: ‘Lyrical Terrorist’ spared jail posted by Newsjunky

November 30: When poems are against the law posted by Kathleen

Obsolete: From lyrical to physical. posted by septicisle

The Pamphleteer: On Lyrical Terrorism posted by Finnieston Crane

paxil online: Today is World Samina Malik Day: Terrorize your lyrics « Clattery MacHinery on Poetry posted by usu

PenShells: Witnessing posted by Bren101

thepeoplesvoice.org: ‘Lyrical terrorist’ convicted over hate records

www.PetitionOnline.com: Free Samina Malik

Poetry & Poets in Rags: News at Eleven (Back Page): I think I might be in trouble. posted by Rus Bowden

Poetry & Poets in Rags: News at Eleven: [Samina Malik] told the court posted by Rus Bowden

Poetry & Poets in Rags: November 20th forum announcement posted by Rus Bowden

Poetry & Poets in Rags: November 27th forum announcement posted by Rus Bowden

The Political News You Need to Know: Today is World Samina Malik Day: Terrorize your lyrics

Praxis: Thoughtcrime in the U.K.

prisonlawinsideout: ‘Lyrical terrorist’ sentenced over extremist poetry posted by John Hirst Hull

Probablyblonde: The mad woman in the bedroom

Probablyblonde: Thoughtcrime and lyrical terrorism

Rachel from north London: The Lyrical Terrorist

Ramblings of the Bearded One: Guilty of writing dodgy poetry posted by Kim Ayres

Random Comments from South London: Lyrical terrorist gets suspended sentence posted by secretlondon

readership: Lyrical Terrorist posted by Бронза

Reasonable Mahmoud: The Stench Of Hypocrisy . . . posted by Avenger

Penny Red: Thoughts on Lyrical Terrorism.

Red Pepper: Thoughtcrime and Samina Malik posted by Neruda

resak11’s weblog: Lyrical terrorist sentenced for poetry Guardian Unlimited

Rule 9: World Samina Malik Day December 6th ~9 posted by Rus Bowden

Sawtul Islam: Where are you oh Hakam?!

The Sharp Side: Lyrical terrorism posted by Ellis

The Soul of Man Under Capitalism: Thought Crimes posted by V

The Spectator: Free speech and the ‘lyrical terrorist’ posted by Ron Liddle

SportsBikes.net: Prosecutor will not charge teacher for Columbine blog posting posted by 750rider

The state we’re in: Thought crime

Strange Stuff: Lyrical Terrorism posted by Chris

Strange Stuff: Lyrical? Terrorist? posted by Chris

Subjects Are Silly: “Lyrical Terrorism” and the theory of Free Rights posted by Chelsea

sweetbands: England from the Blogosphere: World Samina Malik Day December 6th posted by Kurt Torres

Telegraph: The curious case of the lyrical terrorist posted by Ceri Radford

Ten Percent: War Crimes Vs. Thoughtcrime posted by RickB

This Guy is Teaching Abroad: Be Careful What You Read and Say posted by Guy Courchesne

Through The Scary Door: The lyrical terrorist goes down posted by Roobin

Times Online: Don’t ban the lyricist posted by Shirley Dent

Times Online: Faith Central: Lyrical terrorist defended posted by Libby Purves

Times Online: Muslims ‘criminalised for silly thoughts’ posted by Sean O’Neill: Crime and Security Editor

Jonathan Turley: British Convict “Lyrical Terrorist”–Muslim Who Merely Wrote About Beheadings

UncommonSense: British woman convicted of writing terrorist poetry

The Waters: World Samina Malik Day December 6th

Westolowski: OK. Poetry still sucks. But rap sucks worse.

ChristopherWhite.info: Crimes against literature?

Who Knows Where Thoughts Come From?: The Blair Ditch Project posted by Ian

Why Dont You Blog?: Crime, Confusion and the Littlejohn Idiocy posted by TW

Wild Poetry Forum: World Samina Malik Day December 6th

World Have Your Say (BBC): 16 Nov 07 posted by Peter

World Politics Review: World Samina Malik Day December 6th

Tim Worstall: What a Wonderful Country

Wrath of Mjolnir: Free Speech?

A Writer’s Life: Wait posted by John Siddique

WSP 400: Samina Malik posted by Jessica Posner

Your Society: The Terrible Lyricist – is She also a Lyrical Terrorist? posted by Gregers Friisberg

zidouta.com: Ready Made Terrorism posted by Herman van Iperen

   

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Vodpod videos no longer available.

   

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Taslima Nasreen: Women’s Rights vs the Holy Hell

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Taslima Nasreen, International Women’s Day, March 8, 2007,
Women’s Rights, the Veil and Islamic and Religious Laws

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Taslima Nasreen or Nasrin was born in Mymensingh in what then was known as East Pakistan. Read more about this poet, writer, physician, radical feminist, human rights activist, and secular humanist here:

Family Security Matters: Taslima Nasreen: A Woman of Moral Substance

Here is an excerpt from that article:

The life of Taslima should be protected. If India fails to protect her and panders to its Muslim community by not punishing imams who incite hate, then Islamist bigotry and intolerance will have destroyed its secular ideals as surely as they have already destroyed those of Pakistan and Bangladesh.

That article also links to several Taslima resources, including an excerpt, which is essentially poetry, from her book Nirbachito Kalam which is here:

Digital Freedom Network: In Their Own Words: Nirbachit Kalam

Here is the first section:

I am alive. I also tell the half naked woman cooking her rice on a makeshift fire on the footpath, keep alive. I tell the anxious woman with a heavily made-up face sitting on the park bench, keep alive. I tell the sad woman arrayed in her fineries in the air-conditioned mansion, keep alive. I tell the innocent bride of the drunkard who returns home late at night, keep alive. Keep alive, woman; woman, live. Live abundantly.

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Here is a link to her web site:

Taslima Nasreen/Nasrin

There, you will find links to her biography, her books and reviews, along with her banned books, articles by and about her, and more.

The link there to her poetry, translated into English, is here:

Poetry

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Sources say writer and journalist Fessehaye “Joshua” Yohannes has died in detention

Complete story:

Reporters Without Borders: Sources say writer and journalist Fessehaye “Joshua” Yohannes has died in detention

Excerpts:

“Credible Eritrean sources in Asmara and abroad have told Reporters Without Borders that poet and playwright Fessehaye “Joshua” Yohannes, who was a journalist with the now-banned weekly Setit, died in detention on 11 January.”

[He had been Eritrea’s most prominent journalist.]

“Fessehaye was paralysed in one hand and had been walking with difficulty for years. He reportedly succumbed to the extremely harsh conditions in which he had been held since his arrest in September 2001. After being held at an Asmara police station and an underground prison and after spells in the Halibet and Sembel hospitals in Asmara, he was reportedly taken to a prison camp at Eiraeiro, in the Northern Red Sea desert province.”

“Fessehaye surrendered to the police during the week of 18-23 September 2001, after around 10 other journalists and many members of the political opposition had been arbitrarily arrested and the privately-owned press had been “suspended” by the authorities. Ten detained journalists were transferred to undisclosed locations in April 2002, after going on hunger strike to demand the right to appear in court.

“Their hands permanently manacled, the detainees at Eiraeiro are just given just bread, lentils, spinach or potatoes to eat. Their hair and beards are shaved once a month. All they have for beds are just two sheets. They sleep on the ground. Any contact with other prisoners or with guards is absolutely forbidden.”
 
 

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from Alenalki.net: remembering Joshua:

 
 

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