Orange: the color of emergency: Trump’s Mein Kampf has successfully launched. Here come the Nazis, the pedophiles, the “benevolent white supremacists,” the wife rapists, men who like their women bruised, the gay bashers who are secret homosexuals. Yes, Nazism has always had to do with violent and non-consensual sex.Orange prison uniforms for asylum seekers kept hungry and in cramped dirty quarters. Little babies ripped from their mothers (Reference: see Sophie’s Choice). One thousand five hundred border babies lost, no one knows where they are, probably in human trafficking (see paragraph 1).For you and me, orange uniforms? There is no surety that says no, even if you support the Nazis. One day, a Nazi pal will turn you in as gay or part black or disloyal, and there you go to the camps, to the beautiful BASF or DOW or Monsanto chemical gas (Reference: see This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski).Here will be the reliable cadres of orange prisoners: mentally ill people, all disabled people for that matter, gays and trans, commies (and who’s to say that you are not), latinxs, blacks, and uppity women (whom we will keep in the Frauenblock for fun). And you, if you slip up. Or if somebody wants your job. Or just for fun. Oh, and Jews, perhaps after a reprieve, but always, ultimately Jews. (Reference: See Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz).Examples:In 1921, a poet dreaming of his wife and Addis Ababa is brought before the firing squad and shot.During World War II in Stalingrad, a clownish writer accused of espionage dies of starvation trying to eat his prison mattress.Poets who died in the camps: Anica Černej Grażyna Chrostowska Robert Desnos Benjamin Fondane Pavel Friedmann Peter Hammerschlag Jakob van Hoddis Noor Inayat Khan Max Jacob Itzhak Katzenelson Peter Kien Gertrud Kolmar Igor S. Korntayer Henryka Łazowertówna Yechiel Lerer Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger Erich Mühsam Arno Nadel Sarah Powell Moriz Seeler Augustyn Suski David Vogel Ilse WeberHere in the U.S., it will be me – I will be called a Democrat and hauled to a dark site to be waterboarded, not because I have any information (I don’t), just for stupid sadistic fun. There will be a picture of Ivanka Trump on the wall and my torturers will force me to genuflect and pray to her. I mumble lines from my poetry, proud that they have burned me, proud that I have told the truth. Then come the rats . . . .
1. He has his doctor brag about his genes. 2. He mocks a reporter with ankylosing spondylitis (ableism). 3. He lies and repeats his simple, outrageous lies until, like advertising, they seem true (see Joseph Goebbels). 4. He approves of Nazis and white supremacists. 5. He cultivates Nazis and white supremacists for his base. 6. He hates immigrants. 7. He thinks African nations are “shit holes.” 8. He spoke of “my African American” on the campaign trail. 9. He calls Mexicans rapists, as Hitler called Jews. 10. His wife Ivana said he enjoyed reading Mein Kampf. 11. He enjoys the company of dictators. 12. He emulates dictators. 13. He wants to shut down the free press. 14. He calls for the arrest and imprisonment of political opponents. 15. He wants to replace the FBI and CIA with agents loyal to him (see also Stalin). 16. Members of his own party fear him. 17. Loyalty to Trump, rather than agreement on policy, is the criterion for Republican candidate election today. 18. He encourages police brutality. 19. He reduces women to objects for male use. 20. Like a true fascist, he has consolidated his alliance with business and the oligarchy through tax breaks and other financial incentives. 21. He sets up concentration camps. 22. He separates families and puts them in concentration camps. 23. He hires Nazis. 24. He wants you to “sit up and pay attention” when he speaks. 25. He will likely succeed if you do not act now (see history).
Nazis are stupid. They hate facts and logical arguments. They also hate literature, the arts, and science except as it pertains to weaponry. So the good news is that we are smarter than them. The bad news is that they are unimaginably brutal. Believe them when they say they want to have slaves, arrest opponents, and shut down the press, and never for a moment think that this cannot happen here.
Like a Chinese-Polish American cross between Rod Serling and Emily Dickinson, Thaddeus Rutkowski invites you to the portals of mind and matter in Border Crossings. In this first collection of poems, the fiction writer and performance artist presents carefully sculpted, deceptively simple verses of immediate interest to the reader, typically with an understated but potent twist. Whether at the boundaries between cultures, the edges of human interiority, or the trespasses of racism, trapdoors usually closed shut are pried open in Border Crossings. “Light and Shadow,” among the poems opening the book, describes the poet’s initial conflict moving in and out of hidden places: My father opens a trapdoor and leads me down concrete stairs . . . I don’t want to stay. Spiders scrunch in the corners, and pieces of copper tubing— . . . litter the floor.
. . . Spiders notwithstanding, the poet finds himself liking the smell of horsehair cement in the cellar and wanting to stay there. The rest of the volume’s poems proceed to traverse borders to the secret and unknown. As Rutkowski comes to love cellars, so he comes to love spiders. The collection reveals the rurally reared poet’s childlike fascination with spiders, bees, flies, rodents, raptors, tree frogs, and other animalia of crevices and corners. There is both a love for the honest presence of nature’s smallest and a vampire’s interest in “little lives”: I can see and hear it now, the crazy path of flight at blinding speed, the inevitable, the unavoidable, hitting, when the crazy fly comes into contact with the eye, with the bed, buzzing around upside down, for the crazy fly has no great sense of equilibrium. And:. . . I stand back while a hyper bird perches on a jumbo stalk so another can feed on the multi seeds next to the mad mud hole. Perhaps these innocent animals offer a kind of escape from other, more malevolent creatures. From “Party Animals”: I throw a party . . . Another guest sayshe killed peoplewho looked like mewhen he was in Vietnam. The kindness of nature juxtaposes vividly with the descriptions of rednecks and racists literally at the poet’s door; the conjunction is reminiscent of Viktor Frankl seeing hope and life in a sparrow perched outside his Auschwitz barracks window. The violent racists cross borders in threatening trespass and are held back spiritually by the poet’s integrity and wit, with the help of small loving lives. As a veteran performance poet and ranter, Rutkowski routinely crosses audience boundaries with épater-le-bourgeoisie material. A common edgy theme is sex, delivered with deadpan. From “Nine Rules for No Sex”: No kissing with a cold sore. No kissing with a sore throat. No thoughtless pressing, rubbing or brushing.
No fingering with long nails. No fingering with hangnails. No foolish fingering . . . .
The motion is sometimes toward stand-up comedy, as in “Anarchist Manifesto” ( “I believe in anarchy, / but not if everybody goes wild.”) The same wry humor obtains as the poet finds his Asian roots in food and found poems; “Found Poem, Hong Kong Museum”: When you are finished tilling the soil, spading seedlings, weeding, winnowing, hulling, grinding and pounding,
you may enjoy the silky yellow rice, the dry sticky rice, the rat’s tooth rice, the little flowery waist rice, and the yellow husk full brow rice. The poet encourages forays into the unknown, but with realism and caveats. Despite the “disappointing” toilet facilities of foreign places, and the shock of strange invertebrate foods, Rutkowski reminds us in the poem, “Border Crossing,” that “it’s the people we want to see.” And cautions his reader:
So let’s think twice before we cross the twenty yards of no-man’s-land. I know you want to get there as fast as we can. Larissa Shmailo is a poet, novelist, translator, editor, and critic.
I am the daughter of a family persecuted by Stalin and interred in concentration camps by Hitler. But most Americans know nothing of these things and do not heed the warning signs of authoritarianism all around them. First, it lies and erodes freedom, and then - quite suddenly - starts to arrest the opposition: intellectuals, minorities, disabled people, the press. Just by way of saying, fight now while you can.
READING, COMPILATION and RECEPTION for WHITE RABBIT'S SPECIAL ISSUE dedicated to JOHN ASHBERY and COLETTE INEZ edited by Dorothy Friedman August. Sunday May 20 2:30 - 5 pm Bowery Poetry Club 308 Bowery Readers and contributors include: Anne Waldman, John Godfrey, Stephen Paul Miller, David Lehman, Vincent Katz, Mark Statman, Charles Bernstein, Ann Lauterbach, Ron Kolm, Bruce Andrews, Sharon Mesmer, Tom Savage, Barbara Henning, Michael Malinowitz, Max Blagg, Colette Inez, Gary Azon, Shalom Neuman, George Wallace, Jill Hoffman, Don Yorty Larissa Shmailo, Jerome Sala, Neddi Heller, Anthony Haden-Guest, Anton Yakovlev, Carol Wierzbicki, Amy Barone and others.
I am thrilled that our panel "Contemporary Russian Poetry in Search of a Global Poetics" has been accepted for the 50th ASEEES (Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies) Conference this December. I will be speaking on the experimental poetry of Alexander Skidan. My co-panelists are Eugene Ostashevsky, Evgeny Pavlov, Olga Sokolova, and Vladimir Feshchenko. So honored!
DegreeLook up, the water is rising again; the ocher oceanis warmer today. The sea mists rise, form grey cloudsnamed Harvey and Irma and Jose and they reign, mad royalty, over earth. Hush: The brown waters rush into tributaries, to rivers, to the troubled chopped sea, where carbons heat the surface of salt; one degree, and it rises hotter, wetter, wilder, whipping wavesof wind, winding toward us, a Kitty, Leo, Marie; a child,looking at the sea, will die today, Noah, alee. Plate Histrionics He throws a gold-lamé wedding-set saucerat me, and spits, “There is no global warm-ing.” Today, Irma evacuates Sarasota as b-rother Harvey peers and jeers, Ozymandiu-s-like, Houston and Florida, look upon me. A-s th-ese li-nes are bro-ken, so the dream-s of cities, and those hamlets and towns a-way where we settled to breathe, hear our-selves think. Cat 5, there is no stronger. Anevil fidget spinner, Irma swirls out of a wethell, and I holler CLIMATE CHANGE. It is the imitation Wedgewood gravy boat, h-e throws that next, jjjjjjjust before she A Sonnet Affected by Climate Change The Earth is mud and shale gas, molten magma, metamorphic—Oh Sis, Oh Bro—and igneous, blast changing in its last tic,with a heady burst of ozone, all zones, a corpse that ends in water.Without us, climate will survive, change fast, outlast—Oh Daughter:The equatorial world endures, we fall, all bone, all copses sick. Paleoclimatology predicts our fate.Put the conundrum on another generation’s plate?No, it’s now: in Africa, desertification scorches,torches farmland. (HUNGER!!!!)And the people learn of a Great Satan, a nation that throws away food. Do you see that they will fight because they must?Whom will they trust? What is terror after you’ve watched your child die in the land’s rust?
As of today, Mitch McConnell will not permit legislation protecting the Mueller investigation to go forward. House Republicans are demanding former FBI Director James Comey's unredacted memos from Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein (evidence in a live investigation); Rosenstein's refusal may be cause for Trump firing him and installing someone who will fire or limit Mueller. In New York, the temporary Attorney General is recused from the Michael Cohen case and his term is up May 3; Trump may install someone who will impede the Cohen trial. The groundwork is being laid for a multilateral attack on justice; contact your legislators before the fix comes in.
Poetry Productive: Writing to Publish Eight sessions: Tuesdays 5:30 – 7:30 pm June 5, 12, 19, 26 July 10, 17, 24, 31 No class Independence holiday week. $400.00 212-712-9865 Class Description: Our focus in this workshop will be on writing to publish in journals, for chapbooks, or toward full-length manuscripts. Instructor Larissa Shmailo will share formal and experimental poetic techniques to add to your repertoire and help edit your poems. We will write in-class to evocative prompts and maintain a supportive atmosphere to encourage creative risk. Each class will include a discussion of where to publish your poems/books.
Location: Safe and comfortable home environment in accessible elevator and doorman building, near numerous bus and train lines.
Instructor: Larissa Shmailo is an award-winning poet, novelist, editor, translator, and critic. Her poetry collections are Medusa’s Country,#specialcharacters, In Paran, the chapbook A Cure for Suicide, and the e-book Fib Sequence; her latest novel is Patient Women. Shmailo’s work has appeared in Plume, the Brooklyn Rail, Fulcrum, the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, the Journal of Poetics Research, Drunken Boat, Barrow Street, and the anthologies Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters, Words for the Wedding, Contemporary Russian Poetry, Resist Much/Obey Little: Poems for the Inaugural, Verde que te quiero verde: Poems after Garcia Lorca, and many others. Shmailo is the original English-language translator of the world's first performance piece, Victory over the Sun by Alexei Kruchenych. Shmailo also edited the anthology Twenty-first Century Russian Poetry and has been a translator on the Russian Bible for the American Bible Society. Please see more about Shmailo at her website at www.larissashmailo.com and Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larissa_Shmailo. Call 212-712-9865 to register or for more information.
"Larissa Shmailo, in Medusa's Country, and Dean Kostos, in Pierced by Night-Colored Threads, engage in the dance of Eros and Thanatos. Jung and his archetypes populate the terrain of metaphor, loss, and regret. These brave poems risk articulating what society tends to silence. However, as Pluto is the ruler of the underworld, his name also means "The Rich One." Hence, there is richness to be found in exploring the dark and painful recesses of the unconscious."
I am honored to have a page at Eco-Poetry.org with three of my ecopoems: "Degree," "Plate Histrionics," and "A Sonnet Affected by Climate Change." Thanks to visionary editor Daniela Gioseffi!
