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Criticize This
Journal!
Unlike most journals, The AD not only brooks but encourages criticism. Anyone critiqued
on this site or in the journal should respond!
The AD will publish the response!
Intellectual Corruption
Illustrated...
Academy of American Poets
Adjunct Advocate
Alehouse Press
Alternate Press Review
Bennett College
Briar
Cliff Review
Chronicle of Higher Ed
Concord Cultural Council
Concord Poetry Center
Concord Journal
Contemporary Poetry Review
Creeley Award
Davenport University
Divide
Elmira College
Festival
International de la
Poésie de
Trois-Rivières
Fight
Them Bastards
Fitchburg State College
Foetry.com
Georgia
Review
Grambling State Univ.
Martha's Vineyard Reg. HS
Mass. Cultural Council
NewPages.com
New York
Quarterly
Pulitzer Prize
Pushcart Prize
Stone Soup Poets
Univ of Massachusetts
Walden Pond State Reserv.
Writers-at-Large
Photo
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FOCUS of
The American Dissident
Dissidence,
Literature & Democracy
N. B.: For another slant on the focus of
The American Dissident, read
"The
Cold Passion for Truth Hunts in No Pack: the Case for Parrhesiastic
Poetry, Writing, and Art.
.................................................
Concord, Massachusetts, 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 my attempts to interest local organizations and my arrest and
incarceration due to a minor dispute with a free-speech hating Walden Pond State
Reservation park ranger).
.......................................
The American Dissident provides
what the academic/literary established order egregiously fails to provide:
a forum for vigorous debate, cornerstone of democracy. What that order
tends to offer is a hierarchy of set icons and a more or less inflexible
sycophantic road map for reaching 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 because he has no other way of affirming the truth he stands
for. His actions simply articulate his dignity as a citizen, regardless of the
cost. You do not become a 'dissident' just because you decide one day to
take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense
of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You
are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict
with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being
branded an enemy of society."
The American Dissident despises orthodoxy, leftist or conservative. It
serves, amongst other things, as public record for the surprisingly frequent
mendacious and/or illogical, if not absurd, statements made, amongst others, by
poets, academics, educationists, artists, writers, literary editors, publishers,
cultural council members, and journalists. In general these partisans of
the Academic/Literary Industrial Complex status-quo, established-order
intellectual autocracy (see
PoetrySociety) tend to be cowardly, herd-like in behavior and thought,
and bare at least partial responsibility for the increasing corporate
co-optation of the arts, literature, media, and democracy in America. We rapidly
approach Orwell's
1984...
It
is certainly not the intention of
The American Dissident to defame or slander anyone, despite the assertion
of
English Professor Phil Hey (Briar Cliff Review, Briar Cliff University):
"You slander good people who—believe it or not—are actually working to make the
world a better place." Sadly, Hey and, no doubt, numerous other professors
are teaching the aberrant idea of equating valid criticism with slander.
It forms part of the happy-face fascist indoctrination of students throughout
corporate America today.
Contrary to Hey's
assertion, Bunnin and Beren (Writer’s Legal Companion) note that “A truth
statement, no matter how damaging, can’t be libelous.” (continue) |
 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)
Experiments
in Free Speech
The American Dissident
encourages poets and writers to actively perform experiments...
(continue)
Literary
Autocracy/Corruption
Corruption of the thinking processes—refusal or inability to
respond to criticism with logic—is rampant today. Yet few
even take the time to notice it, 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 is disgraceful and rampant. The Foundation for
Individual Rights in Education (thefire.org) bears witness.
Professors dare not "go upright and vital, and speak the rude
truth in all ways" (Emerson). Instead, most turn a blind eye.
With that regard, read the
News-Star (Monroe, LA)
op-ed summarizing my
experiences in higher education which have 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. Did the
Thoreau Society, Thoreau Institute, Emerson Umbrella for the
Arts, Concord Poetry Center, or
Concord Journal give a damn? (continue)
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New On
This Site
Creeley
Award protest and broadside
Censors:
Academy of
American Poets
(National Poetry Month sponsor),
Chronicle of
Higher Education
(Art & Letters),
Newpages.com,
Poetry Foundation ,
Poetry Society of
America,
Poets
& Writers, Inc.
New
Reviews:
Best American Poetry
2007,
Prairie Schooner,
Raritan, Beloit
Poetry
Journal,
Corporate Crooks,
New
England Review,
Academe (Bulletin of
AAUP),
The
Republic of
Poetry
(Martín
Espada),
The
American Poetry
Review (Reviewed by
Mather
Schneider),
Donatello’s
Version
(James Scully)
New Satirical Cartoons:
Rogues of the
Month
John Amen, Ed. Pedestal magazine
2/08, GSU Professor Encarna Abella
9/07, AAP Chancellor Gary Snyder,
8/07 AAP Christine Klocek-Lim,
7/07
Prof. Carey Nelson, 7/07
Other Items:
—Censorship by Le
Devoir (Montréal)
—Alehouse
Press, Where "Good Taste"
precludes good
ideas and reason
—Censorship by
Academy of American
Poets
—Censorship by
NewPages.com
—Jay
Parini,
"The Model
Graduation
Speaker." Read this disturbingly lame
article by a purported foremost poet
—Review.
Tales of the Out & the Gone,
short
stories
by Amiri Baraka
—Editor interviewed 4/16/07
www.poesy.org/interviews.htm
or
Interview and
Responses.
—Review.
Rattle
—Lettre
de Gaston Bellemare
—News-Star
(Monroe, LA) OpEd
—Essays by
Robert Green Ingersoll,
Varlan Shalamov,
Vaclav Havel
—Manuscript Excerpts
—Open Letters to Thoreau
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