A Journal of Literature, Democracy & Dissidence
Contact: G. Tod Slone, Founding Editor (1998)
1837 Main Street, Concord, Massachusetts 01742
A 501(c)3 Nonprofit Providing an Unusual Forum for Vigorous Debate, Cornerstone of Democracy

Truth, Wisdom, and Protest in Poetry and Writing in the Spirit of Revolutionary Patriots

Improving America through Free and Open Criticism of All American Institutions and Icons

CALL FOR MANUSCRIPTS: Read guidelines and Focus first! Poems and essays (1,000-word max) written on the edge in English, Spanish, or French with a dash of  personal RISK, and stemming from EXPERIENCE, CONFLICT with power, and/or INVOLVEMENT. 
Issue #19.  Expect it by mid July!    Updated 06/29/09. 

Unequal Opportunity. The National Endowment for the Arts, Concord Cultural Council, and Massachusetts Cultural Council refuse to accord The American Dissident equal opportunity for public funding.  The CCC (i.e., Kathleen Kennedy & Elizabeth Harvey) enacted a provision to exclude projects arbitrarily deemed to be of a "political nature," thus automatically eliminating AD funding requests.  Censorship by Academy of American Poets, Inside Higher Ed, New Pages, etc.

Read and criticize the latest American Dissident blog entry: "Conversations with Professor Pseudo, PhD."  On the right is the Caricature of the Month.  Other such caricatures are posted on The American Dissident blog and under the rubric Lit Toons. 

     Every writer knows damn well what things he or she shouldn't write about... and sadly almost every writer lacks the courage to write about those things.  Writers tend to excel in the art of rationalizing cowardice and inaction.  Indeed, shallow recognition, publications, prizes, laurels, and general career "success," for most writers, have become far more important than risky truth telling.  One could at least comprehend the lack of courage on the part of American writers, if America were under a regime of gulags and informers.  The lack of courage can, however, be explained if the demands of the academic/literary established order and the parallels between it and the Stalinist regime are considered (read Solzhenitsyn's The Oak and the Calf).  In any case, The American Dissident continues its search for unique writers who actually dare RISK.  
          It has been an eye-opener to observe how little academics, poets, and artists care and know about free speech and vigorous debate, cornerstones of democracy. Thus, the intent of The American Dissident is educational, while its very purpose is to promote democracy's cornerstones.  The journal, created in 1998 as a result of the editor’s confrontation with academic corruption at Fitchburg State College (MA), highlights literature that is critical of the established-order machine, as opposed to inoffensive diversion and cleverness. "Let your life be a counterfriction to stop the machine," had advised Thoreau.  An integral part of that machine is censorship.  The Academy of American Poets and Inside Higher Ed censored the editor, though he'd made no threats or used four-letter words.  He did however make the “wrong” remarks.  American Association of University President Cary Nelson and PEN New England (“defending free expression everywhere”) proved indifferent to those instances of censorship, as did all of the tenured-professor chancellors of the Academy. In America, censorship thrives and wears many masks. 

          Sadly, the literary machine is conducted by the large sums of MONEY distributed by the National Endowment for the Arts, state cultural councils, universities, corporations, and private foundations. Normally and logically, this money does not end up in the pockets of those creating literature (and art) that questions and challenges the machine, whose cogs and partisans tend to restrict debate and speech to requisite bourgeois taste and aesthetics. The American Dissident highlights players and proponents of the machine as often possessing a severe deficiency in logical argumentation and a definite distaste for debate.  So many of them seem oblivious to the fact that the Supreme Court in 1949 (Terminello vs. Chicago) argued that "[A] function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute.  It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger. Speech is often provocative and challenging.  It may strike at prejudices and preconceptions and have profound unsettling effects as it presses for acceptance of an idea.  That is why freedom of speech, though not absolute… is nevertheless protected against censorship or punishment..."  Sadly, PC runs counter to that argument.

The AD FOCUS  Unlike most literary journals, The American Dissident not only brooks but encourages criticism.  It is open to changing its statements and ideas, though only in the face of cogent logic and/or fact.  Anyone critiqued on this site or in the hardcopy journal should respond.  The American Dissident will publish the response on this website (see Negative Criticism of The American Dissident and Editor.  Try being original, however, and refrain from ad hominem rhetoric.

Concord (MA), home of revolutionary patriots and writers Thoreau and Emerson, has not exactly been a welcoming town for The American Dissident or its editor (See Concord Battles for accounts of attempts to interest local organizations and the editor's arrest and incarceration as a result of protest at Walden Pond State Reservation). 

The American Dissident provides what the academic/literary established-order milieu egregiously fails to provide:  a forum for vigorous debate, cornerstone of democracy.  What that milieu tends to offer is a hierarchy of set icons and a more or less inflexible sycophantic road map to its summit.  It firmly discourages any questioning and challenging of that map, its hierarchy, or its designated canon.  It is much like... the Vatican. 

In America, citizens have been accorded free speech and expression with legal impunity, except under certain restricted circumstances.  Yet the large majority of citizens fear exercising that right for all sorts of reasons (excuses), thus avoid doing so.  Poets and professors, for the most part, also fear doing so.  For most, it is as if that right doesn’t even exist. 

The dissident, however, makes it a point to exercise that freedom, especially when such might be considered risky... not necessarily to life, but perhaps to career and any number of other things.  Those who dare not will inevitably view the dissident in a negative light, and label him confrontational, egotistical, offensive, rude, bitter, etc. 

Czech playwright Vàclav Havel wrote: "The dissident does not operate in the realm of genuine power at all. He is not seeking power. He has no desire for office and does not gather votes. He does not attempt to charm the public, he offers nothing and promises nothing. He can offer, if anything, only his own skin—and he offers it solely (continue)

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N.B.:  For another slant on The American Dissident focus, read "The Cold Passion for Truth Hunts in No Pack:  the Case for Parrhesiastic Poetry, Writing & Art"."

Milieu littéraire québécois La corruption sévit au milieu littéraire québécois.  À titre d’exemple, citons le Festival International de la Poésie de Trois-Rivières et… (à suivre)

The Academy of American Poets
National Poetry Month highlighted safe poems by safe unquestioning and unchallenging poets for high school and college kids. The Academy, its sponsor, "banned" the editor permanently from participating in its online forums.  What surprised in our democracy was the number of professors, poets, and other "learned" citizens who clearly favored censorship, though would never have the guts to outright make that declaration.  For the censored transcript et al, continue.

Literary Autocracy & Corruption
Corruption of the thinking processes—refusal or inability to respond to criticism with logical argumentation—was rampant today.  Yet few even took the time to notice, let alone decry it.  The American Dissident makes it a point to do so.  Negative critique of the journal... (continue)

Academic Autocracy & Corruption
Disregard for free speech and expression in academe was disgraceful and rampant. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (www.thefire.org) noted the "incidence of unconstitutional speech codes is significantly higher at public universities (77%) than at private universities (67%), which is striking in light of the fact that public universities, as government entities, are obligated to uphold the guarantees of the First Amendment." Professors dared not "go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways" (Emerson). They were trained like that in graduate school.  Instead, most learned how to wittily turn a blind eye.  Read the op-ed summarizing my experiences in higher education which had always (not just sometimes) backed the above assertions.  (continue) 

Concord, Walden & Thoreau
For protesting the absence of free speech at Walden Pond, I was arrested and incarcerated in Concord.  Did the Thoreau Society, Thoreau Institute, Emerson Umbrella for the Arts, Concord Poetry Center, or  Concord Journal give a damn? (continue)  

Testing the Waters of Democracy
Censorship and/or Disdain for Vigorous Debate
The Rule, Hardly the Exception

Accounts of the editor being banned (Academy of American Poets), censored (Inside Higher Ed), filtered out (New Pages), prohibited (Watertown Free Public Library), purposefully ignored (PEN New England), etc.

Academy of American Poets
American Library Association
Adjunct Advocate
Alehouse Press
Alternate Press Review
Bennett College
Briar Cliff Review
Chronicle of Higher Education
City Lights Book Store
Concord Cultural Council
Concord Poetry Center
Concord Journal
Contemporary Poetry Review
Robert Creeley Award
Davenport University
Divide

Elmira College

Festival International de la Poésie de Trois-Rivières
Fitchburg State College
Foetry.com
Georgia Review
Grambling State Univ.

InsideHigherEd.com
Library Journal
Martha's Vineyard Regional High School

Mass. Cultural Council
National Endowment for the  Arts
NewPages.com

News-Star
New York Quarterly
Pen New England

Poetry Foundation
Pulitzer Prize
Pushcart Prize
Stone Soup Poets

University of Massachusetts

Walden Pond State Reservation
Watertown Free Public Library
Writers-at-Large