If we look at the ancient texts, Ambition is a negative trait, looked down upon. But then those were different times. If the ancient era placed more importance on the concepts of Virtue and Vice (which were so clearly demarcated), the mantra of the modern times is ‘Money is power’. There is hardly a day in our lives when we do not encounter ourselves getting attracted to money or susceptible to this temptation. Games, lotteries, gambling, even TV shows which entail money are the most popular.

This is not to say that there is no place for Virtue in the modern society, although surely with the passage of time, the concept of Virtue has been few fine-tuned. Money is important and if you got it you give it to charity, be philanthropic, and so be virtuous. So does it mean that Ambition is fine as long as you are able to compensate by being charitable? Is being rich (materialistically) a bad thing after all? In any case not all get it by crook. Also, does it mean that working for accumulating more wealth was frowned upon in the olden days? Surely even then there was no asking for sitting idle as opposed to working (for money?). Because languishing around would make one diseased.

The basics have always remained the same. The greed of it was wrong then and so is it now. WORK is and should be the mantra.

As long as we do our work, which is worship (clichéd, but so are all adages), everything should be going in order. Being sincere at work or whatever we do and are fit for, and then basking in the glory of what we EARNED would not be avarice even in modern times. But slogging beyond the capacity, just so there is more, is wrong. It was wrong then, so is it now. Or thinking of vicious ways to make quick bucks is again wrong. To reach the acme of our potential is good—that is what could be termed ambition. To dream of materialism hoping that somehow your potential will be doubled, is a slippery idea again. We simply need to keep working. With it the potential will automatically unfold. And the returns will also come by. You will be surprised. It is all about focus, which is—your deed.

In the end it is all about balancing. The problem arises, only when we focus on the result whereas the contemplation should be action all the way. With this focus, we augment our Karma. Satisfaction should be with what is offered in the result and aspiration/ambition for the next day’s work. And thus, not only will we live fully on the superficial side but also within, consequently living wholesomely. Trust me, the shine of that gold never dims.

Striving for that gold. . .
Yours,
Manjit

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Getting older isn't easy. Our current cultural obsession with youth has turned aging itself into a disease, a form of leprosy that leaves many people increasingly feeling isolated, ostracized and irrelevant.

It doesn't have to be that way. When I was in my 50s, I co-wrote a book with Peter Knudtson called The Wisdom of the Elders, which examined the role of older people in different societies. We looked at the traditional knowledge of elders and compared it with modern science. We concluded that the two are not incompatible, but rather complementary. Elders in all societies have a largely untapped depth of knowledge and understanding of the world - knowledge that we could use as we rush headlong into the future.

Of course, the irony is that today I find myself an elder, yet I don't feel all that wise. I spent the first half of my life trying to understand our world and the second half trying to protect it. Sometimes I feel like I've done neither job particularly well. But then, there's still time - time for both me and for the planet.

That's one of the most important things I have learned over the years - there's still time. The earth has a remarkable capacity to heal and, had you asked my 20 years ago if we could have maintained our current levels of population growth and resource extraction for this long, I would have thought it impossible. Today, when I look at the explosion in demand for energy, steel and other resources in places like China, my mind boggles once again. For how long can the earth sustain such pressure?

No one knows. But one thing is for certain - we cannot continue on this relentless march for growth without eventually confronting the biological limits of the planet itself. The question is, will we have turned around enough by then? Will we learn to live within the planet's limits before we reach them?

In a society where growth is considered the goal in itself, rather than a means to an end, asking these sorts of questions can actually be considered subversive. Indeed, over the years, people have called me "Dr. Doom" or versions thereof, more times than I can count. It surprises me still that this "elder" can get the pundits all in a tizzy by simply pointing out obvious problems with our current economic system.

I'm a journalist and a scientist at heart. I certainly don't pretend to have all the answers, but I have no shortage of questions. In my role as a broadcaster I have interviewed hundreds of scientists from dozens of disciplines. I've seen first hand the kind of devastation that environmental degradation can cause - from the deforestation in the Amazon to the shrinking and increasingly toxic Aral Sea.
People often ask what drives me. Well, those interviews, my travels, my reading of science journals, taking part in analyses like the UN's Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, and especially my children and grandchildren - they are what drives me.

I'm no longer a working scientist. But it's from the scientists who actually work on these issues that I get my sense of urgency. When atmospheric scientists tell me that if we don't dramatically reduce our heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions, entire countries will disappear under water, I sit up. And when biologists tell me that species extinction has become a crisis, I pay attention.
But you don't have to listen to me. Listen to them.

Originally published on March 31, 2006.

Dr. David Takayoshi Suzuki is distinguished Canadian geneticist who has attained prominence as a science broadcaster and an environmental activist. He is also a co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation.

⁽⁰⁾

One small red onion, diced
½ tea spoon black pepper
1 table spoon olive oil
2 table spoons fresh green coriander/parsley finely chopped
Salt as per taste

Mix all the ingredients and serve. Always make it fresh, few minutes before serving.

You could add more things of your choice like diced cucumbers or diced green peppers. Enjoy!

⁽⁰⁾

So does the notion of a being
When the aggregates are present.
—Buddha

I have been fooled once, and I’ll be damned if I will be fooled again! Einstein is supposed to have made an epochal discovery. I am respectful and interested, but also skeptical. There is no reason to suppose that Einstein’s relativity is anything final, [no more] than Newton’s Principia. The danger is dogmatic thought; it plays the devil with religion, and science is not immune from it.
—Alfred North Whitehead

Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.
—Henry David Thoreau

The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.
—Marcus Aurelius

⁽⁰⁾

On the way to the ballot box, in the center of Tel-Aviv, I could not detect the slightest sign that this was election day. Generally, elections in Israel are a passionate affair. Posters everywhere, thousands of slogan-covered cars rushing around ferrying voters to the ballot stations, a lot of noise.

This time - nothing. An eerie silence. Less than two thirds of the registered citizens did actually take the trouble to vote. Politicians of all stripes are detested, democracy despised among the young, whole sectors estranged. Those who decided not to vote, but at the last moment relented, voted for the Pensioners' List, which jumped from nothing to an astonishing seven seats.
This was a real protest vote. Even young people told themselves: Instead of throwing our vote away, let's do them a favor. Old people, sick people (including the terminally ill), handicapped people and the entire health and education systems were the victims of the Thatcherite economic policies of Netanyahu, backed by Sharon, which Shimon Peres (of all people) called "swinish".

That vote was a curiosity. But what happened in the main arena?

At the beginning of the campaign I wrote that the whole of the political system was moving to the left.

Many thought that that was wishful thinking, sadly removed from reality. Now it has actually happened.

The main result of these elections is that the hold of the nationalistic-religious bloc, which has dominated Israel for more than a generation, has been broken. All those who announced that the Left is dead and that Israel is condemned to right-wing rule for a long, long time have been proved wrong.

All the right-wing parties together won 32* seats, the religious parties 19. With 51 of the 120 seats in the Knesset, the rightist-religious wing cannot block all moves towards peace any more.

This is a turning point. The dream of a Greater Israel, stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, is dead.

Significantly, the "National Union", the party that is completely identified with the settlers, has won only 9 seats - more or less like last time. After all the heart-rending drama of the destruction of the Gaza settlements, the settlers remain as unpopular as ever. They have lost the decisive battle for public opinion.

Netanyahu declared that the elections were going to be a "national referendum" on the withdrawal from the West Bank. Well. It was - and the public overwhelmingly voted "Yes".

The main victim is Netanyahu himself. The Likud has collapsed. For the first time since its founding by Ariel Sharon in 1973, it has been subjected to the humiliation of being the fifth (!) party in the Knesset.

The heartfelt joy about this rout of the Right is tempered by a very dangerous development: the rise of Avigdor Lieberman's "Israel our Home" party, a mutation of the Right with openly fascist tendencies.

Lieberman, an immigrant from the former Soviet Union and himself a settler, draws his main strength from the "Russian" community, which is almost uniformly extremely nationalistic. He calls for the expulsion of all Arabs (a fifth of Israel's population), ostensibly in a swap of territories, but the message is clear. There are also the usual hallmarks of such a party: the cult of the Leader, a call for "law and order", intense hatred for "the enemy" both within and without. This man got 12 seats and has overtaken Netanyahu. His main slogan "Da Lieberman" ("Yes Lieberman" in Russian) reminds one of similar historical salutes.

For those who are interested: the fascist group that called for my murder as part of their election program has failed to attain the 2% necessary to gain entry into the Knesset. But, of course, an assassin does not need 2% to follow such a call. (I would like to use this occasion to express my heartfelt thanks to all those around the world who expressed their solidarity.)

The joyful scenes at the Labor Party's Headquarters may seem at first glance exaggerated. After all, the party got only 20 seats, as against 19 last time (to which must be added the three of the small party led by Amir Peretz at the time). But the numbers do not tell the whole story.

First of all, the political implications are far-reaching. In parliament, it is not only the raw numbers which count, but also their location on the political map. In the next Knesset, any coalition without the Labor Party has become impractical, if not completely impossible. Amir Peretz is going to be the most important person in the next cabinet, after Ehud Olmert.

But there is more to it than that. Peretz, the first "oriental" Jewish leader of any major Israeli party, has overcome the historic rejection of Labor by the immigrants from Muslim countries and their offspring. He has destroyed the established equation of Oriental = poor = Right as against Ashkenazi = well-to-do = Left.

This has not yet found its full expression in the voting. The increase in Oriental voters for Labor has been only incremental. But no one who has seen how Peretz was received in the open markets, until now fortresses of the Likud, can have any doubt that something fundamental has changed.

And most important, when Peretz arrived on the scene, hardly three months ago, Labor was a walking corpse. Now it is alive, vibrant, hungry for action. It's called leadership, and it's there. Peretz is on his way to being a viable candidate for Prime Minister in the next elections. Until then, he certainly will have a major impact both on social affairs and the peace process.

That is, of course, the main question: Can the next government bring us closer to peace?

Kadima has won the elections, but is not happy. When it was founded by Sharon, it expected 45 seats. The sky was the limit. Now it has to be satisfied with a measly 28 seats, enough to head the government but not enough to dictate policy.

In his victory speech, Olmert called on Mahmoud Abbas to make peace. But this is an empty gesture. No Palestinian could possibly accept the terms Olmert has in mind. So, if the Palestinians don't show that they are "partners", Olmert wants to "establish Israel's permanent borders unilaterally", meaning that he wants to annex something between 15% and 50% of the West Bank.

It is doubtful whether Peretz can impose another policy. Possibly, the whole question will be postponed, under the pretext that the social crisis has to be addressed first. In the meantime, the fight against the Palestinians will go on.

It is up to the peace movement to change this. The elections show that Israeli public opinion wants an end to the conflict, that it rejects the dreams of the settlers and their allies, that it seeks a solution. We have contributed to this change. Now it is our job to show that Olmert's unilateral peace is no peace at all and will not lead to a solution.

On our election day, the new Palestinian government was confirmed by its Parliament. With this government we can and must negotiate. At the moment, the majority in Israel is not yet ready for that. But the election results show that we are on the way.

Originally published in Gush Shalom

⁽⁰⁾

English professor Alison Calder and history professor Robert Wardhaugh have brought together responses to this question from a variety of theoretical approaches, including feminism, post-structuralism, and new historicism.

The introduction includes an informative overview of what have now become traditional literary and historical surveys as well as more recent works that challenge many of the assumptions of their predecessors. The current collection attempts to move beyond most of these views as well as incorporate more recent materials by taking the position that “on the plains, geography, history, and culture are inextricably linked” (p. 4) and that traditional conceptions of space and time need to be restructured in order to appreciate the implications of these links. Although the editors’ rather vague use of the terms “space” and “time” leaves something to be desired, it does not prevent the connotations of these two inextricably related terms being worked out in some insightful ways in the essays that follow.

Contributors whose first field of studies was not necessarily literary often approached the question “When is the prairie?” from illuminating perspectives, notably in the anchoring essays. Frances W. Kaye’s opening contribution interweaves the new ecologies and economies of the North American Plains with an analysis of the creative ethical and economic choices made by the protagonists of Sharon Batula’s The fourth archangel into an enlightening and stimulating geographical tapestry. The style and content of her essay radically reorient and revitalize our traditional perceptions of the plains. Historian Cam McEachern’s closing piece incorporates Alfred J. Ostheimer’s Alberta mountaineering memoirs as a classic example of early liberalism and “liberal time” into his study of the Athabasca River as a boundary of the same liberal time that defined mid-twentieth century economic development in Alberta. In between these, geographer Sarah Payne contrasts Willa Cather’s Red Cloud, Nebraska with Margaret Laurence’s Neepawa, Manitoba, drawing some interesting conclusions on the divergent aspects of literary tourism in these two locations.

Not all of the essays are immediately engaging, but most repay the reader’s effort. Claire Omhovère opens her essay on Thomas Wharton’s Icefields with almost impenetrable theoretical jargon, although she eventually achieves a lucid and enlightening discussion of deep time as represented by glacial transformations. S. Leigh Matthews makes an important case about the reconstruction of British pioneer woman immigrants in women’s memoirs. Unfortunately, the slender examples she uses buckle under the theoretical weight they are expected to support. And while Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson asserts the presence of prairie space in her study of Gail Anderson-Dargatz’s The cure for death by lightning, her analysis of this space is subordinated to her focus on the post-modern qualities of the text and the physical and psychological sufferings of the central character.

Two essays explore the influence of the prairie on elements of genre. In “Documents in the Postmodern Long Prairie Poem” Dennis Cooley sees the inclusion of documents as a defining feature of the prairie postmodern poem, pulled as it is between the two poles of referentiality and intertextuality. Nina van Gessel argues that Carol Shields’ The stone diaries deconstructs the traditional (male) genre of autobiography by laying bare the process and the problems inherent in creating a text in this genre, drawing some interesting parallels between it and the cracks, fissures, and convolutions of ubiquitous prairie limestone.

Both Robert Morton Brown and Debra Dudek extend the boundaries of modernism and postmodernism in different directions. Brown brilliantly reconfigures the traditional view of Kroetsch’s postmodernism, arguing that it was homegrown and first evidenced in The words of my roaring as a reaction to the myth-making aspects of William Aberhart’s prairie populism. Dudek, on the other hand, extends the boundaries of modernism into the 1970s, arguing that Lawrence’s Manawaka novels “contribute to a revisionist Canadian Literary modernism” (p. 247).

Regrettably, Aboriginal writers and scholars are conspicuous by their absence; the editors note that they received no proposals on Aboriginal texts in response to their call for papers. Many other significant aspects of prairie history, culture, and literature are absent as well, although this is not necessarily the fault of the editors. Whether the strategies employed by the current essays in this volume have furthered the possibility of new directions in prairie studies remains to be seen. Nevertheless, this book offers some insightful and creatively different ways of reweaving the fabric of prairie experience

Originally published in Canadian Ethnic Studies 37.2 (2005): 127-128.

History, literature, and the writing of the Canadian prairies
Ed. Alison Calder and Robert Wardhaugh
Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2005. 310 pp. $24.95 sc.

Dr. N. Querengesser is a professor of the English at Concordia University College of Alberta, Edmonton, AB

⁽⁰⁾

There has always been for me an incessant daydreaming about the different aspects of rhyme, rhythm, the origins of words (real or imaginary). So I guess that is the source of my being a writer and a poet.

That's the why?
Yes, that's the why

And the when?
Ah, the when, well, it's hard to say. Writing begins in reading, no?, and I began reading very seriously at the same time I got involved with visual art, when I was in junior high school. I was living in New York, where there was an enormous potential to see painting, Abstract Expressionist painting and the work that came after, Pop Art,and also theater, music. So that's when I first imagined some possibility of making art myself. I met Susan in high school, in February 1968. ’68 was a very interesting year, perhaps now we can say even a famous year. I was a senior at the Bronx High School of Science and Susan went to Music and Art. We would go to art galleries together and museum shows. Susan's parents were artists; my parents, well, my father was a businessman, we were not an arts-oriented family. And then I went to college and, you know, studied and read, and this is when I did my earliest work that directly relates to what I do now. At college I edited a couple of literary magazines, I did theater, too, a sort of experimental theater, and that was more visible than writing. But I guess writing was always in the back of my mind.

Why do you consider poetry important?
Poetry is not important. That's why it matters.

Which poets do you admire? How do you feel they relate to your own writing and life?
I admire many poets whom I do not like and like many poets whom I don't admire. It's a complex question, but then this is always my problem, so many apparently simple things seem complex to me. There are many poets that are, in some aspects of their lives or thought, not very admirable but who are still great poets; the most famous example would be Ezra Pound, but he’s hardly alone.

Among my contemporaries, there's a large number of poets whose work I read with great attention and appreciation. And while, of course, I like specific poems and specific poets very much, I am perhaps most interested in the relationship among them, in the matrix of work and in the field of activity that is created through not just production but also exchange. I think of poetry as a conversation, not just expressing an isolated voice but placing voice in the service of voices, voices that are in dialogue with one another. Poets exist within constellations. To understand what the achievement of any one of us is, you have to read through the field, to know not only the social and historical contexts but also the different approaches taken by each poet. It diminishes or trivialize any one poet if you read her or him in isolation.

My work is informed by such radical modernist poets as Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Reznikofff, and Laura Riding. And the New American Poetry generation – Jackson Mac Low, Robert Creeley, Larry Eigner, Barbara Guest, Jack Spicer, Hannah Weiner, James Schuyler, Charles Olson, and many others. I could give you a list that would go on and on, the list could also be found by looking at the poets that I’ve written about or who I teach. But, to come back to this: the poets with whom I am engaged form a series of interconnected ensembles. And, for the most part, these poets were (and are) working outside of the mainstream, outside of Official Verse Culture. I continually learn from the way these poets rethink the relationship of representation to language, meaning to expression, voice to voices, not assuming that these things are unified but actually thinking of them as if they were in conflict … dialectically.

What is a day in your life like?
It's not like much. It's like very little. Once in a while there is flickering, and then there's a kind of blank, and then it continues on. Actually, my life these days is much too busy, possessed by things that I must do, deadlines, responsibilities. And too much anxiety about not getting things done or things not going (or being done) right. It's not my imagination of how I would be living, and not much like how I lived when I was younger, when I had more time to stretch, more time to drift, more openness.

You regret that?
No, I wouldn’t switch. Time is not reversible (Arakawa and Gins notwithstanding). And besides, I like the things I do. It’s almost as if it’s too much of a good thing. (There is no failure like success.) And poetry is still a place for turning things, anxieties and responsibilities, around, from the purposeful and the productive, into a kind of purposeless non-functional space, which I think is the basis of poetry.

What do you do for a living? (How do you obtain money?)
I'm a professor of English, although I try to teach English not as a limit but as the host language, and to include literature not originally written in English too. I teach 20th century poetry and poetics. I started teaching only when I was about 40; before that I was a freelance medical writer, though most of my energy went into poetry and poetry-related activities. Teaching came after.

That's not usual here . . .
It's unusual in the U.S. as well. Most professors, anyway those teaching in a graduate program, have PhDs, while I only have my undergraduate degree (in Philosophy). But it's possible in the United States because there are so many universities that occasionally one or another will go out on a limb. And anyway my circumstance is not very typical. I like to think, though, after directing 25 or so dissertations, and serving on another 15 committees, that I have earned an unofficial doctorate. One of the great things about the Poetics Program at Buffalo was that none of us in the core faculty had a Ph.D. in English: Susan Howe, Bob Creeley, and I never having pursued doctorates, Dennis Tedlock got his Ph.D. in anthropology, and Raymond Federman got his in French.

What do you enjoy reading? What do you read that is not "literature"?
I read the newspapers everyday, The New York Times. It's not a good way to start the day, it always puts me in a bad mood, and not just the news reported; the cultural coverage, especially regarding books, is quite irritating, as befits one of the leading organs of the Mediocracy. Apart from poetry, I read mostly philosophy and critical and political writing. I don't read novels very much, though there are some novelists that I read without fail (Lydia Davis, Peter Straub, Paul Auster, Federman); but then I guess novels are literature, aren't they? What can I be thinking? I end up reading a great deal that is immediately related to my work: essays and criticism about poetry, poetics, many magazines and books of poetry. I've just put together on a web site with which I'm involved (the Electronic Poetry Center) a long list of recommended reading for this past year. There's an enormous amount of very engaging work being written in poetry and in poetics, so I do tend to read more of that than other things. And I regret I can't keep up, there is so much more I want to read than I have the time for. I always feel with the books around me, and manuscripts, like the proverbial kid in the candy store who wants it all. Well also, not to forget, I read job-related documents of various sorts, applications, reviews, committee stuff, bureaucratic documents that can be very time consuming because it's necessary to read them in detail and to sometimes to write summaries …

And what do you read in holidays?
I don't really take holidays. I think Susan would agree with that! At the beach I read exactly the same things that I just mentioned to you. I enjoy reading what I read so I just wish I had more time. I always feel hounded by the fact that I don't have enough time. So “free time” allows me to catch up with things that I haven't gotten to, but often in quieter and more pleasant surroundings. If I had more time I would read perhaps more detective fiction, catch up on the Elmore Leonards I missed, reread all the James M. Cain and Jim Thompson and Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler. Or maybe just Poe and Borges would do it.

Do you know any poetry from Argentina?
I became informed about poetry from Argentina through Ernesto Livon Grossman, who sits here with us, across the table, at this remarkably charming cafe in Buenos Aires, where we have come every morning, for expresso and croissants, and to read the paper while sitting across from the park. In the early 1990s, Ernesto brought to Buffalo, and also to New York, Jorge Perednik, whose work I did not know until I was introduced to it at that time. And through that process, I read through the magazine Xul as best I could, since I can't read Spanish (much to my regret), but also with the help of some translations. Ernesto published for us a very important book of translations, The Xul Reader, where there is a strong selection of work from the magazine. That was very exciting for me, I felt a real connection between what the Xul review was doing to what I was doing with my friends in and around L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. So that was my primary introduction. But it's a very limited perspective mainly based on what has been translated. But then, on this trip, I am learning a great deal more, through reviews such as yours and tsé, tsé and also meeting so many poets here

Could you please tell us about your experience of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E as a person, as a poet, within the group of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, and in relation to other ways to think poetry? What changes and contradictions took place since the beginnings as an "avant- garde" group till the nowadays relative "acceptance" or "hegemony" of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E? (I guess I'm thinking mostly about two different positions, you as poet in a group, and you within a group in society, as forces or contradictions to face.)

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine came out of a collective exchange among a number of poets, perhaps 25 or 30, who, in the mid-70s, were actively writing letters, reading each other's work, talking to one another in person and on the phone, publishing magazines and books, and organizing readings and talks . L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E was a small part of that but it was the part in which some of us reflected critically and publicly on the activities in which we were engaged. There were many poets interested in this ongoing, multi-site conversation as a form of collective exchange. We shared a very strong dislike of the Official Verse Culture of that time, which seemed to favor poems so crippled by their formulas for personal epiphany that personal epiphany was shed at the starting line in favor of a highly mannered voicey voice "indicating" (like they used to say in Method Acting) rather than expressing the poet's feelings, the so-called feelings of the so-called poet. In contrast, we tried to focus our work more on an acknowledgement of the structures of language, forms, styles, and also the relationship of ideology to syntax, you might say, ideology to grammar, ideology to rhetoric, with the recognition that language is never neutral but also that language always has an unconscious or nonrational dimension to it.
So it was a very good time as a young poet to be involved with other people in this kind of exchange because Official Verse Culture was so complacent, so smug, and so very weak in its literary production. Our work took a certain alternative course that has its impact, even when we were just doing it on our own, on our own typewriters, never acknowledged in the mainstream, except perhaps to be attacked. And many of the individual poets, as you said, have continued to work in quite significant ways on their individual books and projects. Even now some of us continue to be in discussion. And of course there are generations of younger poets who, from my point of view, continue this exchange, but whose work, necessarily, is decisively different. I think the significance for that moment represented perhaps by L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E was that it really gave permission to do a wide range of non-traditional work, to tear off the mask of compulsory sincerity, of compulsory lyric, to do work that on the surface seemed not to make sense. I will always emphasize L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E's beef was not with meaning or expression but with false ideas of sense and false facades of sincerity that devalued the possibilities for new or unexpected forms of meaning, sense-making, and indeed sensation.

At the same time, the issue of acceptance is a complicated and complicating business and I don't want to ignore that. I have a very good job and I have a certain level of recognition for what I do. My own good fortune notwithstanding, I think that overall Official Verse Culture is more reactionary now than it was in the 1960s, when we had some breakthrough figures from the ranks of the alternative poets. And while some of the historical poets that some of us put forward, such as the ones that I mentioned in my earlier answer, have been more accepted, partly because of our efforts, Gertrude Stein being a very good example, I think that the reviewing practices in the nationally circulated publications (the Massed Media), and the prize-awarding practices in the United States are almost always (though not entirely!) reactionary (though my colleague Jim English would be quick to remind me that it's only complaints like this that give those prizes their primary cultural play and allow me to make remarks like this one). Anyway, I don’t think we have, quite, an hegemony. Official Verse Culture is still alive and kicking, even if bloated like a mule on hormones. The huge infusion of Ruth Lilly's money into the thoroughly corporate Poetry Foundation is a good example: the most money now being spent to promote poetry is done is such a manner as to undermine a good deal of the most engaging poetry being produced in the U.S. You won't likely see any of that Lilly money going to the Poetry Project in New York, presses like O Books or Factory School or Green Integer, or the EPC for that matter. Indeed the EPC, which many might see as a very established web site, has never been able to get any external funding, or even a dedicated graduate assistant from the university that hosts it, and has been specifically turned down by the big foundations because it features work that is not "accessible" to the public, despite its current stats of one million visits per year. It has a public all right, it's just not the right kind of public. And Sun & Moon/Green Integer has never been able to attract significant or private funding, despite its being a "major" press in every sense of the word. Nonetheless, you see a huge amount of activity in the United States and internationally that moves against the Lillyfication of poetry. But much of this activity doesn't quite come to the surface, to the degree that Green Integer and EPC do; but if you dig just a little bit, you can find it..And partly that’s because poetry is not a form of popular culture. Poetry is decisively unpopular, has a small scale. But its infrastructure is exhilaratingly tenacious.

And how do you relate to the fact that shape gets somehow old, inevitably?
I don't have any formula for what poem should be like. You can't say, a priori, what style a poem should have, what voice a poem should channel, whether it should be narrative or not narrative, lyric or not lyric, striated or smooth. It's not possible to prescribe because what's most interesting about poetry is how it responds to emerging circumstance and its local languages, local places; to the most local part of your mind; to the intersection of so many different, not necessarily definable, factors, which are specific for every poet and for every different point in time, and even for yourself as you move through time. So there is that provisionalty, that response to contingent circumstance, that seems to me what's innovative in poetry. Poetic innovation is pragmatic. Innovation is what lets you resolve emerging problems as they pop up, mostly unexpectedly and often unhappily. But better than innovation, call it ingenuity. It's not something rarified or, well, avant-garde. On the contrary, it's the absence of ingenuity that takes poetry out of everday life. Official Verse Culture, for example, in its refusal of new forms of poetry, clings to a past that has already passed by, making poetry something that resembles corpses in a museum. But when we are speaking of innovation, we are speaking of the basic condition of poetry. It comes down to the ability to stay attuned to, to stay in touch with, your responsiveness to the world you find yourself in.

I'll give you an analogy: When people disparage what they hear as nonsense or meaningless language they say, Oh that's just like children, it’s babble. It sounds as if, somehow, they have left their childhoods behind them. But for me, on the contrary, the people who say that have lost access to the sonic and acoustic potential within language, have lost touch with a part of themselves, and a part of the human world, that stays with us until the time that we die. The poetry of language, let’s call it, is not just for children. The loss, or denial, is not of childhood – we all grow up – but of what even little children know. Blame it in on your education, your rationality, your socialized mind. Maybe what is so frustrating about “difficult” poetry is that it is an unwelcome reminder of the loss of poetry in our everyday lives; the fact that we have too quickly and with too little thought turned the paradise of language into a game of cards.

In some of your articles you talk about being responsible in the writing as being conscious of the political consequences of the use of language. How do you see that responsibility in poetry? How do you see that responsibility in other discourses? What about the political leaders' discourses after Sept. 11, 2001, in your country?

“September 11,” like the Vietnam War when I was in college, makes me acutely aware of how language is used not to just express but also to manipulate emotions and values. In moments of crisis, where there is genuine trauma, as with September 11, but also with the war in Iraq and as in Vietnam, you see an acceleration in the manipulation of the public language by both the state and the mediocracy. At such time one comes face-to-face with how inadequate the language of the mass culture is, the reports and commentary on television and the newspapers. In such time, the necessity for poetry is all the more palpable – to deal with an ever more complex reality and in a more complex way. Yet the very complexity that prevents poetry from having a mass audience, from being popular, is at the heart of its political value, contradictory as that is to social realism or to populist idealism. Poetry is political to the degree that it refuses the language of Massed Culture and the Offiial Religions and Corporate State, while at the same time actively engaging political discourses. In this way, poetry might potentially interrogate the ideological presumptions of the dominant language. It becomes, by default, a place to reflect on the meaning of basic terms, including democracy, freedom, terrorism, God, truth, evil, and so on. The meaning of these terms cannot be assumed. So when you begin to interrogate these nouns, you open up into a no-noun space of poetry, where people say “I don't understand it” because they don't have the practice of listening to that which they don’t already know. Yet, without that kind of listening, politics is doomed. Poetry is not a form of macro politics, it’s not a form of direct political action, poetry doesn't’t change governments, poetry doesn't’t stop wars. It's a pre-requisite for political thinking but it's not sufficient form of action. Poetry is not the end of politics. It's the beginning of politics.

This idea of being responsible and conscious of the shape in writing makes me think of a new step from surrealism and automatic writing, I mean, I think surrealism may seen today a way to dig into the unconsciousness to bring things up to consciousness. What do you think about surrealism?

Surrealism is an important movement for everybody involved in a radical formal change within poetry. But I don't accept the idea that there's a surreality, a deeper reality, beyond everyday reality. Strange as my work sometimes is, I'm interested in a poetry of the everyday, of the daily, of the ordinary. Still, I think that the estrangement and displacement that you find in surrealist poetry is a very important. My poetics is in many ways contrary to surrealism but also very indebted to it. I'm less interested in the dream imagery, in the symbolism, in the illusion of depth, than in the syntactic openness and derangement … I feel more connected to Russian Futurism.

Romanticism had the idea of gathering poetry and critique, how do you see that relationship today?
There are many problems with the way in which Romantic Ideology governs the idea of sincerity, and by extension literary value, in contemporary poetry: The great poem as universal expression of man's feelings. I object to that on many grounds, including the very gendered terms that are then universalized. At the same time, the Romantic and Surrealist poets, if understood in a social and historical context, were doing crucial aesthetic and political work, which I relate to very profoundly. I think Blake in particular as an exemplary figure with his verbal-visual-visionary work. Blake remains the poet of the future. He manages to always be ahead of me, anyway. But I frequently return also to Byron and Shelley, Heine and Hölderlin.

And the critical dimension?
Coleridge’s poetics is crucial, and the German romantics as well … Really a model for the importance of poetics, for poetry as going beyond the production of poems to appreciate for their beauty. In the 1970s, however, it was necessary to contest not so much the radical thinking of Coleridge or Blake, but a Romantic Ideology that pitted thinking against feeling, intellect again the emotion; indeed poetics against poetry.

You've always worked with small and alternatives presses. Would you say more about what you think about the importance of the alternative presses?
The poem itself doesn’t exist outside of who produces it, what magazine it appears in, how the magazine circulates, who reads it, how they respond to it. All of these things are part of what the poem is. A poem isn't just some abstract letters on a page; it exists within its social environment. And not just the given historical world of jobs and states and family, but the ones we make through our writing, our publishing, our exchanges. The value of poetry is also the value of articulating specific, yet contestable, aesthetic values. And this is achieved by poets publishing their own work and the work of poets they believe in, by responding to the work they value, by organizing reading series and web sites and small presses in order to take control of every aspect of the means of production and reproduction.

Is there any other question you think should be included in this kind of interview?
Yes, but I prefer not to say. (Laughs)

Charles Bernstein is the author of Shadowtime, a libretto/ thought opera based on the work and life of the German philosopher, essayist, and cultural critic, Walter Benjamin. It was written for composer Brian Ferneyhough and had its premiere in May 2004 at the Munich Biennale, with subsequent productions at the Festival d’Automne in Paris, and the Lincoln Center Festival in New York.

Tess Crebbin in Music and Vision, says "Bernstein's libretto, plain and simple, is the finest contemporary libretto that I know of."

Reprinted with permission from Green Integer Review No. 1, Jan-Feb 2006
Buenos Aires, June 2005
Originally published in Plebella, No. 6, December 2005
in a Spanish translation by Romina Freschi

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There are literally hundreds of tulip varieties to choose from, grouped by flower form, height, and bloom time. Choosing which ones to grow is dependent on where you live, where you're planting, and the desired effect.

Tulip Types
Two of the common ways to group tulips is by bloom time and flower height. Tulips can be divided into early, mid, and late season flowering and by heights ranging from short (less than 8 inches tall), to medium (8 to 18 inches tall) and tall (greater than 18 inches tall). If you take both of these variables into consideration when designing a spring bulb garden, you can create a visually interesting display and a long season of bloom. Some examples of tulip varieties within these groups are listed below.

Early Tulips
Species Tulips: There are many different varieties of these delicate, very early bloomers. Most are 4 to 10 inches high and ideal for rock gardens or other intimate garden spaces.

Kaufmanniana: These low-growing (8 to 14 inches) species tulips, such as 'Waterlily', also perennialize easily in the garden and work well planted in containers and low-growing borders.

Fosteriana: Large and majestic are the terms used to describe these 14- to 16-inch-tall, bold-colored flowers, such as 'Red Emperor'.

Single Early: Solid colored, single flowers, such as 'Apricot Beauty', grow to 16 to 18 inches tall.

Midseason Tulips
Triumph: The large, 5-inch-diameter blooms on varieties such as 'Attila', are great for cutting. They grow 18 to 20 inches tall.

Fringed tulips, such as 'Swan Wings', feature distinctive fringe on the petal edges.

Darwin Hybrids: These large, classic tulips, such as 'Apeldoorn Elite', grow 20 to 24 inches tall.

Fringed: Featuring a fringe on the top cup of the flower, varieties such as 'Swan Wings' grow 18 to 20 inches tall.

Late Tulips
Double Late: Double-flowered varieties, such as 'Lilac Perfection', feature peony-shaped blooms on 16- to 18-inch-tall stems.

Lily-Flowered: Shapely, pointed petals give these flowers a graceful look. Most varieties grow 20 to 22 inches tall.

Parrot: Ruffled, curly petals in striking color combinations give parrot tulips a special appeal. They grow to 18 to 22 inches tall.

Design Ideas
For best impact, plant tulips in dense groups. Resist the temptation to plant tulips in a long, single row. They look best planted in informal groups of 5 to 11, or as a block of color with 20 or more bulbs planted just a few inches apart. Plant each variety in a block unto itself, positioned next to a contrasting or complementary color. Or combine several colors together and plant your own unique mix. Choose varieties with different flowering times to extend the bloom season.
Tulips look great planted in combination with annual and perennial flowers. Try planting tulips with annuals such as pansies, forget-me-nots, and allysum. Early flowering perennials such as bleeding heart (Dicentra), basket-of-gold (Aurinia), and columbine also match up well with tulips. Other spring flowering bulbs such as muscari, scilla, and fritillaries will add contrast and stretch the bloom season in the bulb bed.

Planting & Care
Purchase high-quality bulbs from a reputable seller. The larger the bulb size, the bigger and better the flower you'll get. Tulips are hardy in USDA zones 3 to 7. In warmer areas, you may need to chill the bulbs before planting, or choose specific varieties, such as the Darwin hybrids, that don't need a long winter dormancy before blooming. To chill tulip bulbs, refrigerate them for 8 weeks at 40 to 45 degrees F. Plant after Nov. 1, placing bulbs 6 to 8 inches deep in a lightly shady area so the bulbs remain as cool as possible. The best planting time varies from region to region. Check with your local cooperative extension for advice.

In zones 3-7, the most important consideration when planting tulips is drainage. Tulips prefer a sandy, well-drained soil. If your soil is wet and/or very heavy, add compost and peat moss. You can also mound the soil up into a raised bed, which will help the soil dry out and will also help raise the temperature of the soil. For everywhere else, choose a full-sun location with well-drained soil for best performance. Plant after the soil has cooled to 60 degrees F (or lower) at 6 inches deep--usually late fall. Cultivate the soil to a depth of one foot and work in some bulb fertilizer. Set the bulbs pointed-end-up about 4 to 6 inches deep (check planting instructions on the package to be sure). In cold winter areas, the planting area can be mulched with 4 to 6 inches of straw or hay for extra protection. Wait to mulch until the top several inches of soil have been frozen.

Tulips flower best the first spring after planting, so many gardeners replant tulips each fall, treating them as annuals. The small-flowered species tulips, such as Kaufmanniana, are an exception. These tulips will naturalize and flower as perennials for many years. Fertilizing all tulips once or twice a year, in fall or early spring, will encourage them to flower well for several years. If you want to try for a second year of bloom, cut back the tulip flower stalk after blooming, but leave the foliage to naturally yellow and die. The foliage will produce the food energy the plant needs to form the next year's flower.

Originally published in Dutch Gardens

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2. Bumptious
a) Naïve lad
b) Rustic bum
c) Offensively self-assertive
d) None of the above

3. Dappled
a) Mottled
b) Spotted with different tones
c) Both a & b
d) None of the above

4. Flirtable
a) Ready to flirt
b) Wanton
c) Open and accepting
d) None of the above

5. Glasnost
a) Soviet policy of openness
b) Communist policy of openness
c) An ideology
d) None of the above

6. Hasidism
a) Related to a Jewish sect
b) Related to Sufi sect
c) Related to a Christian sect
d) None of the above

7. Measly
a) Meager
b) Abundant
c) Related to a disease
d) None of the above

8. Patricide
a) Act of killing one’s own sister
b) Act of killing one’s own brother
c) Act of killing one’s own mother
d) None of the above

9. Sallow
a) Of a sickly yellowish color
b) Healthy
c) A type of arboreal bird
d) None of the above

10. Tamas (Sanskrit)
a) Darkness
b) Lightness
c) Anger and voilent
d) None of the above

Answers:
1. (a) 2. (c) 3. (c) 4. (a) 5 (b) 6 (c) 7 (a) 8 (d) 9. (a) 10 (a)

Your Score:
8-10 Excellent
5-7 Good
1-4 Need improvement

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