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FOCUS
For more recent additions
to this website, including experiments in free speech
effected on various college and university English
departments, as well as cartoons critical of the
established order, check out
the latest
AD BLOG.
Readers are encouraged to comment and, no matter how
damning, comments will not be censored (i.e., moderated, in
today's PC-euphemistic verb).
Proponents of the
academic/literary established order (i.e., the very
large majority of professors, poets, and writers) are
characterized by a variety of troubling traits,
including scorn for vigorous debate, cornerstone of
democracy; rejection of
no-hands-barred criticism; quickness to censor; little
respect, if any at all, for the First Amendment; use of
ad hominem instead of point-by-point, logical
counter-argumentation; hyperbole; self-vaunting;
backslapping; and bland sameness, if not outright
mimicry. Examine the front covers adorning the
many literary journals exposed on NewPages which, by the
way, blacklists The American Dissident and no
doubt other literary journals (see the editor's
cartoon and correspondence with Casey and
Denise Hill). Also, examine the nation's
universities and colleges and observe the uncanny
sameness of course offerings, job announcements, and of
course directors of institutional diversity (see
cartoon). What strikes me more than anything
else regarding those literary journals is the overwhelming aseptic banality, though always
in beautiful colors and adroit technical design.
One would be hard-pressed to find just one cover photo
or drawing that might be considered, even remotely, provocative.
The
adjectives used to describe those journals are repeated
over and again on NewPages to the point where a thinking
person would have to assume that "brilliant," for
example, was just an elitist synonym for upper-class
pedestrian. “The
oldest, boldest, and most distinguished monthly for and
about poetry in the English-speaking world,” notes, for
example, NewPages regarding Poetry Magazine. Hyperbole?
You bet! "The oldest, bourgeois" would be more
like it! But “boldest”? I’ve looked through a
number of issues of Poetry. Bold is the furthest
thing that would come to mind. John Ashbery's
brief statement about his life as a poet featured on the
back cover of the March 2009 issue sums it up much
better.
“living is a meatloaf sandwich.” One might add
"And Poetry magazine is the crust."
The absolute lack of
accountability in American letters saddens me. At
times, I despair. Why bother? What the hell am I doing
in the poetry business anyhow? I don’t even like poetry, at
least not the kind of stuff I see in those journals.
On another note, every writer knows damn well what 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. Shallow recognition, publications,
prizes, laurels, and general career "success," for most,
have become far more important than risky truth telling.
One could comprehend the lack of courage on the part of
American writers, if the country were under a regime of
gulags, informers, and little Caesar executioners.
It can, however,
be explained if the demands of the academic/literary
established order and the parallels between it and the
Stalinist regime are examined. Consider, for
example, the following passage from Solzhenitsyn's
The Oak and the Calf :
The shrill, vainglorious
literature of the establishment—with its dozen fat
magazines, its two literary newspapers, its innumerable
anthologies, its novels between hard covers, its collected
works, its annual prizes, its adaptations for radio of
impossibly tedious originals—I had once and for all
recognized as unreal, and I did not waste my time or
exasperate myself by trying to keep up with it. I knew
without looking that there could be nothing of merit in all
this. Not because no talent could emerge there—no doubt it
sometimes did, but there it perished too. For it was a
barren field, that which they sowed. I knew that in such a
field nothing could grow to maturity. When they first came
to literature they had, all of them—the social novelists,
the bombastic playwrights, the civic poets, and needless to
say the journalists and critics—joined in an undertaking
never, whatever the subject, whatever the issue, to mention
the essential truth, the truth that leaps to the eye within
no help from literature. This solemn pledge to abstain from
truth was called socialist realism. Even writers of love
poems, even those lyric poets who had sought sanctuary in
nature or in elegant romanticism, were all fatally flawed
because they dared not touch the important truths. I was in
such a hurry because in my fifth decade I was bursting with
all that remained to be written, and because falsehood stood
only too firmly on its feet of clay—or rather its feet of
reinforced concrete.
It has been an eye-opener to observe how little academics,
poets, and artists care or are even aware of the
legislation and various pertinent court cases regarding 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, for example, censored me and
banned me from participating in its online forums, though
I'd made no threats or even used four-letter words.
I did however
make the “wrong” remarks. See the entire
transcript of my
censored comments). As for Inside Higher Ed, my
comments have been censored a dozen times. Should
an academic newspaper be in the business of censorship.
Of course not! For some of my censored comments, a
cartoon, and correspondence with Doug Lederman, the
journal's editor, see
InsideHigherEd.
Interestingly,
or rather revealingly, Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University
Professors, Karen Wulf, director of PEN New England (“defending free expression everywhere”),
and Gary Snyder, Zen/Beatnik
tenured professor chancellor of the Academy of American
Poets proved indifferent
to those instances of censorship. For satirical cartoons
on those less-than-laudatory citizens, see
AAUP,
PEN, and
Beatniks. In America,
censorship thrives and wears many masks and usually a suit and
tie and speaks very politely.
Sadly, the literary
established-order 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
anodyne 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..."
[This discourse continues on the
Focus
page. 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". ] |
Testing the Waters
of Democracy→
Censorship and
general disdain
for vigorous debate seem to have become the rule, not the
exception. Dismissing disturbing criticism and the critic
with denigrating epithets has become an alarmingly common practice
amongst the educated (e.g., poets, professors, journalists).
Dismissing disturbing criticism under the guise that the critic
has failed to express it in some undefined correct tone has also
become common practice.
To stand alone
as an individual expressing overtly ones own ideas and
opinions demands a certain degree of courage when those ideas
and opinions question and challenge business as usual. Alone, one does
not have a support group to bolster morale, which forcibly takes
a beating upon discovery of how most purportedly educated people
react to such questioning and challenging. Alone, however,
one does not have to worry about offending a support group's
particular stance. Alone, one may
speak the rude truth.
The links
on the
right-hand column
constitute a list of "cases" that sadly support the editor's hypothesis
that most poets and academics viscerally disdain criticism,
cannot deal with criticism, and react to criticism with an
uncanny inability—and
absence of concern—for
formulating cogent counter-argumentation. Instead, the reaction
tends almost always to be deafening
silence or, at best, immature name calling and/or
outright censorship.
The "cases" are
presented not in a display of base egotism, but rather to serve
as concrete examples of what occurs when one does buck the
system and otherwise go against the established-order grain.
By the way, conflict with power has always stoked the editor's
flames of creativity. Question and challenge, then write! Question and challenge, then write! That has been my
modus operandi for over two decades now.
The "cases"
include accounts of the
editor being banned (Academy of American Poets), censored
(Inside Higher Ed and AAP), filtered out (New Pages, Poets &
Writers, Poetry Foundation, Arts & Letters), prohibited
(Watertown Free Public Library), arrested and incarcerated
(Walden Pond State Reservation), purposefully ignored (PEN New
England, Concord Festival of Authors, Massachusetts Poetry
Festival, Concord Museum, Thoreau Institute, and many, many
universities and colleges), rendered politically ineligible
(Concord Cultural Council) and low-budget ineligible
(Massachusetts Cultural Council), deemed "low" and "poor"
(National Endowment for the Arts), etc.
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Freedom of Expression Grievances
(See summary)
Academy of American Poets
American Library Association
Adjunct Advocate
Alehouse Press
Alternate Press Review
The Beatniks
Bennett College
Briar
Cliff Review
Chronicle of Higher Education
City Lights Book Store
Concord Cultural Council
Concord Festival of Authors
Concord Poetry Center
Concord Journal
Contemporary Poetry Review
Robert
Creeley Award
Davenport University
Divide
Elmira College
Emerson Umbrella for the Arts
Festival
International de la Poésie de
Trois-Rivières
Fitchburg State College
Foetry
Georgia
Review
Grambling State University
The Hippies
InsideHigherEd
Library Journal
Martha's Vineyard Regional High School
Massachusetts Cultural Council
Massachusetts Poetry Festival
National Endowment for
the Arts
NewPages
News-Star
New York
Quarterly
Pen New England
Poetry Foundation
Poets House
Poetry Society of America
Poets
& Writers
Pulitzer Prize
Pushcart Prize
Stone Soup Poets
Sturgis Library
Suffolk University Poetry
Center
Yarmouth Port Library
Tufts University Experimental College
University of Massachusetts
Walden Pond State Reservation
Watertown Free Public Library
Writers-at-Large
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