Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now

It seems serendipitous to me now that I began reading this new book, edited by Ohio Poet Laureate Amit Majmudar and published by Alfred A. Knopf, late last week, before the horrific happened in Charlottesville, where I lived for a few years after graduating from college.  Reading it has actually helped calm me down (as has listening to various opera scores) and the diverse poems, some short and others a little longer (almost all of them are one or two pages long) are written by an equally diverse group of poets including Alex Dimitrov, Juan Felipe Herrera, Richie Hofmann, Sharon Olds, Robert Pinsky, Solmaz Sharif, and Cody Walker.  The paperback is small (approximately 5" x  6"), slender, and $12.95 and I highly recommend it...as well as another book that took a long while to reach in the towering pile in my bedroom:

I read it only a month ago and it, too, seems to be extremely relevant though as you can see from the cover it refers to the terrorist attacks in Paris in November of 2015 (the book was published by Penguin in the fall of 2016).  Antoine Leriris's wife, Hélène, also mother of their seventeen-month-old son, was killed at the Bataclan Theater and three days later he posted an open letter on Facebook addressed to the killers.  The letter found a wide audience and helped many people who were desperate for a way to process what happened.  The book details Leiris's life as it unfolded over the days and weeks after the attacks, and is heartbreaking but ultimately wonderful and empowering, and worth quoting from here:

I will not give you the satisfaction of hating you.  That is what you want,

but to respond to your hate with anger would be to yield to the same

ignorance that made you what you are.  You want me to be scared, to see my 

fellow citizens through suspicious eyes, to sacrifice my freedom for security.  

You have failed.  I will not change...There are only two of us -- my son and

myself -- but we are stronger than all the armies of the world.     

Calvin Trillin has long been among my most favorite writers, and Jackson, 1964 (Random House, 2016) is eerily a contemporary read.  As a reviewer for the Minneapolis Star Tribune observed, the book is "modern and urgent...Essay after essay reminds us that the history of this struggle consists of events that easily could happen today."  Trillin's pieces, which originally appeared in The New Yorker, cover events not only in Jackson, Mississippi but Delaware, Louisiana, Wisconsin, Colorado, Utah, Alabama, Texas, South Carolina, New Jersey, Washington, Massachusetts, and New York.  Every single one is eye-opening.

Lastly, it seems apropos to read again, for the second time or the fiftieth time, the remarks of New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu in May of this year.

Travel can be another way to bear witness, so perhaps a visit to Charlottesville should be in your future?  As Heather Heyer posted on Facebook, "If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention."