theexternalist.com

Jennifer Bartlett–talented poet and tireless disability rights advocate–responded to our call for reflections on Old Year/New Year:

A life-changing incident for me has been teaching poetry to adults at United Cerebral Palsy.  My students range from people who merely use wheelchairs to people who cannot move nor speak.  Many have intellectual and emotional difficulties.  My students have helped me reassess what it means to be human and have pushed me into new realms of relating to people and teaching.  As to be expected, my classes have gone far off the track of poetry.  I have learned of my students’ capabilities and biographies.  I have learned of their frustration with a society and system that has clearly left them behind.  They vote.  They are political.  They are self-advocates.  And yet, there is so much work to be done that no one knows where to begin.

I urge Obama to follow through on his promises to people with disabilities.  For starters, many of my students simply don’t have electric wheelchairs.  These are people who cannot move.  How are they supposed to access their right to freedom without a simple thing like an automatic wheelchair?  These chairs are about $7,000 and my students depend on Medicaid to pay for them.  Not getting off to a good start, the governor of New York, who is BLIND for goodness sake, is cutting the exact funding to make this happen.  Then, there are issues of education, jobs, and respect, but a mere wheelchair might be a good place to begin.

Jennifer Bartlett’s poetry collection, Derivative of the Moving Image (UNM Press, 2007) can be purchased from UNM Press’ web site.

Lois’ response to our call for reflections on the turning of 2008 into 2009:

2008 was a watershed year both publicly and privately.  The Main Event, of course, was the election, not only a huge relief but also a nearly transcendent experience.  JFK’s election in 1960 was the first time I ever realized I could disagree with a parent (I was entering teenage), and the post-Watergate rejection of Nixon redirected my path away from young adult cynicism/hedonism.  So, for a third (and hopefully not last) time, Presidential politics have restored my faith in the American Experiment.  So many new immigrants (my own forebears, I am sure) can see only the material possibilities We the US offers, and of course, survival precedes philosophy as existence precedes essence.  But the idea of this country, expressed in its most vital words and enacted, is most precious to me.

Also precious in 2008 to me were my developing grandchildren, a 3-year old boy and now 1-year old girl, plus their aunt’s (my younger daughter’s) wedding and the expectation of her little boy for January, 2009.  Most people reading this online are so much younger than I.  I find the experience of being older and now a grandmother makes one see things more as part of a continuum.  Think of the tunnels that two facing mirrors create.  Or think of the wonderful image of The Julia Set in which all parts are the same but of different orders of magnitude.  So that when I think of my life, experiences & expectations, I feel they could be anyone’s, and theirs, mine.  I feel a distance from myself which makes me feel closer to others.  2008, with its economic and historical spasms, is a part of a larger continuum.  My 92-year old uncle chides/reassures me, “I’ve seen it all before.”  I hope my hopes for 2009 echo yours and that our voices will be heard.

Lois Bassen won a Mary Roberts Rinehart Fellowship for an alternative history novel, German Sabbath, about the successful assassination of Adolf Hitler on the day after the Night of the Long Knives, June 30, 1934, and has been published in many lit magazines (Kenyon Review, American Scholar, etc.) and online (Minnetonka, Conteonline, The Externalist, etc.).  A Vassar grad, she has been married for 41 years, has two adult daughters (a doctor and a teacher), and recently moved from NYC to Rhode Island.  A prizewinning, produced, and published playwright (Samuel French, MONTH BEFORE THE MOON, NEXT OF KIN at New York’s ATA, 2 other plays in Ohio, one in NC), and commissioned co-author of a memoir.

Ken’s response to our call for reflections on the turning of the new year:

2008 was scary.  Most of the year I was biting my nails (OK, I do this anyway) over primaries and then the general election.  I invested a lot of hope in Obama.  When Election Day came and Stan and I saw Pennsylvania turn blue followed a half hour later by Ohio, we were screaming and laughing and my eyes filled up.  Finally, freedom from the eight-year nightmare some refer to as the Bush “administration.”  At work the next day, many of us bleary from having stayed up deep into the night, people were embracing and celebrating.  Those were sweet hours.  But life goes on–the job doesn’t wait around, groceries need to be bought (if you can afford them) and the gaping mouths of credit card bills need to be fed.

The Monkees had a song out in the eighties called “That was Then, This is Now” (Micky on lead).  I still have great hope that Obama will be an agent for change, though my faith has been somewhat damaged by his choosing of homophobe Rick Warren to give the prayer invocation for his inaugural and some of his Cabinet picks don’t suggest much in the way of change.  But some do–imagine having scientists in positions of authority to tackle global warming instead of political hacks.  What a concept!  That makes me hope that the Duh Days/Daze of the Bush “administration” are fading.

Of course, my relief that Obama won was coupled with sadness over Prop 8 pro-hate amendment passing in California.  Putting basic human rights up for vote is a stinky idea.  Gee, what if slavery were put up for a vote in Mississippi in 1860.  Wonder how that would’ve turned out.  Perhaps the California judges can intervene.  The road ahead is long, dusty, and full of deep pot holes.  But we will keep walking.  It would be helpful if President-Elect Obama would live up to his campaign promises regarding gay rights: end Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell and end DOMA.  And while he’s at it, he could sign the UN declaration to decriminalize homosexuality around the globe.  Naturally, Bush wouldn’t sign on (can’t help but remember John Dryden’s poem “Mac Flecknoe” where the boob Shadwell “never deviates into sense”).  In The Wizard of Oz, the Scarecrow says he thinks it will get darker before it gets lighter.  So do I.

Ed Bennett wrote:

Not since the Nixon Administration have I felt this utter lack of ability to change the world around me.  I have never doubted in democracy but sometimes this government “of, by and for” the people can be co-opted.  I lost friends in the devastation of 9/11/01 and since that time we’ve fallen into two wars, a lack of respect globally, trashing the Geneva Convention and government-sanctioned torture.  In the rest of the world that’s going to hell in a hand basket, we cast a blind eye.  Domestically, we ignored oversight, created monstrously convoulted and toxic financial vehicles allowing our Government and private sector financial institutions to stand like Sampson between the pillars of the pagan temple.  In the ensuing chaos, incompetent management asks for a bailout because if they fail they take us all down with them.  2008 was the year of the financial hostage.

2009 will be a bittersweet year.  We’ll probably spend all of it and a good part of the next picking up the pieces of our international and domestic excess.  In other words, “we the people” need to clean up the mess.  The difference between next year and this is that there is no more feeling of hopelessness.  Yes, the problems are staggering and we are but a collection of Davids faced with the aftermath of Goliath’s ruin.  I expect to work in 2009–work painfully hard.  After 8 years of looking at a succession of political train wrecks from a mountaintop, we’ll all need to go into the valley to dig out the debris.  Fortunately, I feel that the new leadership has a shovel in hand and is ready to work as well.

Ed Bennett is a Telecommunications Engineer living in Las Vegas.  Originally from New York City, his work has appeared in the Manhattan Quarterly, the Patterson Literary Review, New Verse News, the Externalist, VIIMMAG — Las Vegas Poetry and Culture and the spring 2009 edition of Philadelphia Poets.

Thomas Sullivan wrote:

2009 is bringing us more than a new President and a new party in power.  It’s ushering in the end of an outdated way of people interacting.  Everywhere you look the Archie Bunker types spouting divisive old ideologies are being shown the door — on November 4th the ignorance industry announced massive layoffs.  Those who benefit most from divisive economics and tell us that the unregulated private market solves everything are being disproven by the reality of our economy.  Hatemongers who fear the decline of white, Christian America are being quieted by the fact that white, Christian guys screwed the economy up and are now begging for help from a mixed-race president (George Wallace eat your heart out).  The guys shouting “Obama’s a terrorist” at McCain rallies are being laughed at as modern-day extras on Deliverance II: Journey Down the River of Debt.

Simply, 2008 will go down as the year that race-hate, militarism, and division stopped working as a marketing strategy in America.  We are joining a world that already understands the power of the common good and the danger of unbridled self-interest.  Start flashing your devil horns like a pimply teenager at a rock concert, cuz it’s time for the peaceful and caring to rock!!!!!!

Dan Coshnear responded to our call for reflections on the turning of the year:

In 1972 I handed out flyers for McGovern with my mother.  I knew the issues fairly well for a nine year old –Viet Nam, taxes, pro choice vs. pro life.  One candidate was stirring racial fear and hatred and the other, in my mind, had a view toward basic fairness, righting the ship.  And that year, with my mother I watched on TV as the states turned colors – the color of a Nixon landslide.  I haven’t quite recovered.  My grievance with this country goes so deep that even today, even with all the hope inspired by the election of an African American to the highest office, I feel a revulsion to the American flag.  There is that for which it stands, and that for which it has so often – through my whole lifetime – been used.  Yes, politics is corrupted by money and special interests and we’re all corrupted by the corporate sponsored media; but there were so many flags on cars and lawns as the bombs dropped over Fallujah, it sickened me.  I’m not over it.

So on the subject of 2008, I have felt glimmers, wee stirrings of hope, but within me also incredible resistance to those stirrings.  And the post election cabinet selections have not been inspiring.  Who can give back seven years to the innocent men held, tortured at Guantanamo?  Who will bring Aristide back to Haiti and what sort of explanation or compensation could ever begin to ameliorate the suffering we’ve caused in the poorest country in the hemisphere?  Desmond Tutu said the first act of our new president ought to be an apology on behalf of the American people to the people of Iraq.  What a world that would be.  I want to hug it.

Ed Zahniser responded to our request for reflections on the turning of the year:

I would title the Year 2008 as “The Year of the Being Reminded.”  It reminded me how important our democratic republic’s institutions are, that we do have the opportunity to elect new leaders who we think and hope will alter present policies that not only bring and have brought disaster but that promise far worse future disasters.  It reminded me how much of our tacit wealth in financial instruments and even real property is illusory as soon as there is general agreement–even unsought agreement–that we have been involved in a vast shell game.  It also reminded me that none of this can ruin my enjoyment of family, friends, the freshness of grandkids, or the great, relatively ready access we have to poems, books of poetry, and communities of poets and writers–whose values embed more deeply in the fundamentals of being human on a glorious planet.  And it reminded me that we must be more generous with the many, many people in our community, county, state, nation, and world who can’t satisfy basic human needs and don’t enjoy basic human rights.  It reminded me–through a visit to Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon–how many good folks labor at great sacrifice for no monetary reward to keep poetry and other literary writing before a public of readers.

Ed Zahniser’s poems, stories, and interviews have been published in over 80 magazines in the United States and United Kingdom, three books, and two chapbooks.  His most recent book of poems is Mall-hopping iwth the Great I AM.  He is the poetry editor of the Good News Paper quarterly tabloid magazine and a past poetry editor of Wilderness Magazine, the Antietam Review, and Artz & Kulchur of the Mountain State.  Ed lives in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, with his wife Christine Duewel.