[On the anniversary today of the Hiroshima holocaust I thought to post a poem of mine written some fifteen years after the event & later performed with the Japanese novelist Oda Makoto and composer Charlie Morrow under the auspices of the Bread & Puppet Theater. The event, “Auschwitz/Hiroshima,” was a dirge for the murders by fire that marked our time and too many times before & after. The Jigoku Zoshi is a Japanese scroll of hells that dates back to the twelfth century.]
The Truth Is: “No kidding?” “No.” “Come on! That can't be true!” “No kidding.”
“What Indians?” is my too-often unspoken response to people who ask “When do the Indians dance?” Like other colonized Indigenous peoples, cultures, and communities throughout the world, Native Americans have experienced and endured identities imposed on them by colonial powers, most of which originated in Europe.
Peter Cook and Kenny Lerner of the Flying Words project performing ASL poetry (Jessica Munyon)
for Joseph Castronovo & Edward S. Klima, in memoriam
[The great breakthrough resulting from a new signing poetry in Deaf Culture has been to call into question a poetics in which orality & sounding are assumed to be the foundational bases of all poetic expression. That revelation goes back three decades & more, recently & notably presented in Signing the Body Poetic: Essays on American Sign Language Literature, ed. by Dirksen L. Bauman, Jennifer L. Nelson, & Heidi M. Rose (University of California Press, 2006).
[The following is an early announcement of a work now in progress: the latest expanded & revised edition of Technicians of the Sacred that the University of California Press will be publishing in 2017, almost in time for the fiftieth anniversary of the original publication in 1968. As I launch into the work I’m posting my proposals for the book as an indication of what’s in store & in the hope, as with other assemblages of mine, that others will come forward with suggestions for materials relevant as texts & commentaries that fall along the lines of those in
Poems and poetics