So, was it good for you?

(Cross-posted at Progressive Wednesday.)

The good governor of Oregon has done it again, thank goodness. To shed light on the inadequacies of food stamps, Gov. Kulongoski (or “The Ku-Man,” as I like to call him) is lived for a week off $21, “the same amount that the state’s average food stamp recipient spends weekly on groceries.”

According to the Associated Press:

Kulongoski is taking the weeklong challenge to raise awareness about the difficulty of feeding a family on a food stamp budget.

How’d “The Ku-Man” do?

At the check-out counter, Kulongoski’s purchases totaled $21.97, forcing him to give back one of the Cup O’Noodles and two bananas, for a final cost of $20.97 for 19 items.

After the hour-long shopping trip, Kulongoski said he was mindful that his week on food stamps will be finite and that thousands of others aren’t so lucky.

“I don’t care what they call it, if this is what it takes to get the word out,” Kulongoski said, in response to questions about whether the food stamp challenge was no more than a publicity stunt. “This is an issue every citizen in this state should be aware of.”

So what are the national facts about food stamps?

• There is an 8-step process to get approved for the Food Stamp Program.
• In 2005, 25.7 million people received food stamps each month. To put that in perspective, that’s 6 million more people than live in all of New York.
• 40% of food stamp recipients live in households with an income. They work, people. They work. In fact, only 15% of all households receiving food stamps collected TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families), sometimes incorrectly referred to as “welfare.”
• In 2005, 54% of the households receiving food stamps contained children.

This, of course, raises the larger problem of poverty in America. Simply put, it’s hard to pursue happiness when you’re dirt poor. And according to the U.S. Census Bureau: “The number of people below the official poverty thresholds numbered 35.9 million in 2003, or 1.3 million more than in 2002.” Imagine if every single person in California lived in poverty. I think we’d do something about it. I think we’d stop ignoring it.

I came to know the poetry of Lucille Clifton when I first started writing during high school. I came to truly appreciate the poetry of Lucille Clifton only recently.

Why? I don’t know for sure, but I think Clifton’s work benefits from a reader who has a better understanding of suffering, which is also to say, a reader who has a better understanding of joy. When I was in high school, I thought suffering was not getting to play street hockey, and I thought joy was, well, was getting to play street hockey.

Then, I thought, Why doesn’t she capitalize? And now I like to think of Clifton’s poems as little mirrors of our own lives and, at the same time, as little windows into the lives of others. Clifton manages to teach without preaching: she illuminates.

And if it’s a resume you want, well, a resume she’s got: umpteen books of poetry and nonfiction, as well as 16 books for children; two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships; two Pulitzer Prize nominations; and (get this) an Emmy.

But these accolades don’t do justice to Clifton’s work, work grounded so deeply in real experience that we can’t help but nod as we let her words whirl around in our heads.

Enjoy.

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WON’T YOU CELEBRATE WITH ME

.

won’t you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.

I’m in love with the United States Postal Service. I’m amazed that I can drop a postcard of a cow wearing galoshes in the mail up in my corner of Western New York, and two days later, my grandmother in Tampa can read about the wet weather she’s missing. I think the Postal Service is egalitarian in its current format: it essentially costs all citizens the same amount of cabbage to stamp a letter, regardless of their income or locale.

But the USPS is about to do something that will severely undercut the little guys and gals, particularly those who are independent publishers. As independent publishers ourselves, we feel a comraderie with the privately owned magazines and journals we subscribe to and read: Paste, Sojourners, The Nation, Utne Reader, and Consumer Reports, amongst others. So that’s why we’re going to ask you to take a minute or two and take some important action.

To quote The Nation:

America’s founders understood the First Amendment would be worth little without a postal system that encouraged broad public participation in America’s “marketplace of ideas.” Thomas Jefferson called for a postal service that allowed ideas to “penetrate the whole mass of the people.” Along with James Madison, he paved the way for a system that gave low-cost mailing incentives to small publications of information and ideas.

We seek to protect this. The USPS is upping their rates on July 15th. This, on its own, might not be a problem, but the mega media conglomerates, like Time-Warner and Hearst, are being given a hefty break. Smaller publications are going to take it on the chin for the big-wigs, potentially shutting down hundreds or thousands of “lesser” journals and magazines. This is impacting magazines on the left and right (and the middle). That’s why the National Review, American Spectator and American Conservative are all protesting this postal hike too.

The public “commenting period” ends on April 23. Time is of the essence. Since you read this site, we know you believe your news and information shouldn’t only come from media titans. Since you value information and news from independent and smaller magazines, let’s all take some action.

Congress and the public weren’t let in on these under-the-table deals. Go to the Free Press website by clicking this sentence, and protest. Tell Congress to step in and stop this deal from being done. The odds are against us. But at Progressive Wednesday we don’t believe in odds: we believe in action.

Photo by this stamp collector.

When I was an undergraduate English major at SUNY Geneseo, I started becoming a poet, and I was transformed by the work of William Matthews. My junior year, I started writing the campus newspaper, The Lamron, and shortly after I started, National Poetry Month rolled around and I successfully pitched a series of articles highlighting poets I loved.

I did a little Internet hunting, and dug up the office phone number for Mr. Matthews. I hemmed and hawed about dialing, and I foolishly decided to focus instead on reading the crap I was assigned — The Last of the Mohicans, the poetry of H.D., and Shakespeare’s Henry V. (Yes, some of Shakespeare’s plays are like flaming piles of rhino dung left on the doorsteps of our minds.)

So I never called him that April. William Matthews died seven months later.

But, thank goodness, his work lives on. You can find a lot of his work on the Internet, including the entire collection Rising and Falling. I won’t bother writing a brief bio of Matthews, other than to say he wrote 11 books of poems, all of which I recommend. If you only read one, check out Blues If You Want.

Below you’ll find one of my favorite poems, a poem that closes with a truth that I rely on more often than not. Enjoy.

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HOMER’S SEEING-EYE DOG

.

Most of the time he worked, a sort of sleep
with a purpose, so far as I could tell.
How he got from the dark of sleep
to the dark of waking up I’ll never know;
the lax sprawl sleep allowed him
began to set from the edges in,
like a custard, and then he was awake,
me too, of course, wriggling my ears
while he unlocked his bladder and stream
of dopey wake-up jokes. The one
about the wine-dark pee I hated instantly.
I stood at the ready, like a god
in an epic, but there was never much
to do. Oh now and then I’d make a sure
intervention, save a life, whatever.
But my exploits don’t interest you
and of his life all I can say is that
when he’d poured out his work
the best of it was gone and then he died.
He was a great man and I loved him.
Not a whimper about his sex life –
how I detest your prurience –
but here’s a farewell literary tip:
I myself am the model for Penelope.
Don’t snicker, you hairless moron,
I know so well what faithful means
there’s not even a word for it in Dog,
I just embody it. I think you bipeds
have a catchphrase for it: “To thine own self
be true, . . .” though like a blind man’s shadow,
the second half is only there for those who know
it’s missing. Merely a dog, I’ll tell you
what it is: ” . . . as if you had a choice.”

http://sixeyes.blogspot.com/2004_06_01_archive.html

This comes to us from Sojourners:

More than 155,000 women have done military service in Iraq and Afghanistan. More than 16,000 of those women are single mothers, according to the Pentagon.

I’m not really sure what else to say.

There are many poets who I think are good. Fewer that I think are great. A handful, if that, that I’m in awe of. Mary Oliver falls into that last category, and she’s easily one of my favorite five.

I first came to know Oliver’s poems as an undergrad at Ohio University, when I hear her read her work. I was hooked. There have been days in my life when I honestly don’t know what I would have done without her glorious depictions of the natural world and the wisdom she shares. And I don’t know anyone who can write about the natural world head-on and avoid sentimentality. Oliver doesn’t romanticize; she paints nature clearly, full of loss and hope, two emotions more closely paired than we probably realize. A Poetry Handbook, one of her books of nonfiction, made me believe in a life as a writer.

Oliver has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, an American Academy of Arts & Letters Award, a Lannan Literary Award, the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Prize and Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Simply put: she’s the shit.

So this Monday, this first day of the work-week, a day that can make us all a little more weary and worn than normal, let me share with you one of my favorite poems ever written: “In Blackwater Woods.” I’ll write nothing more about the piece other than to say this: I wish, one day, to ink something this pitch-perfect.

Enjoy.

.

IN BLACKWATER WOODS

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.