19 January 2025

Considering Community

For the past many years, I have spent the third Monday of January helping coordinate volunteer projects around the community with my school district. After all, treating MLK Jr Day as a Day of Service seemed an easy choice; I used my youth Rotary club, Interact, to help coordinate our work.

But it wasn't long before I became disillusioned. While we would engage hundreds of people in celebrations of Dr. King's words and then sending them out in the fresh mornings to various projects, it soon became clear that many of my co-coordinators saw this annual moment as just that: a moment, a single annual time when they and those we called upon would pledge a few hours of service. It was virtue signaling, not a commitment or practiced belief. I get it: better this than nothing; but I refused to accept that binary as my only two choices.

But the follow-up question becomes more important, doesn't it? What does such practiced or habitual commitment look like? And, since I was already engaged in the teaching career 12-14 hours a day, this meant that transforming my current activities was necessary: minimize the practices that did not contribute, change some to lean more heavily on engagement, and translate my own thinking into what such service might mean.

This last one, this translation/transformation of my own thinking, remains the most stubborn but potentially the most powerful. I must distinguish it from rationalization ("Well, my purchase of this Starbucks helps contribute to the barista paying off their student debt!"). But more and more, I come to the conclusion that how we speak and think about our community is the heart of this transformation.

Are we reactionary or pro-actively constructive? Are we slowing down to listen and think richly or rushing to the next transient "obligation?" Do we accept the framing of messages pushed at us, or do we approach with a healthy skepticism, investigate, question, and build back more resilient words? In other words, the best communities are served by behaviors of reasoned compassion, critical discourse, committed and personal words. There is nothing wrong (and a lot right) with using our hands as volunteer to (re)build directly; in fact, it's vital for many. But I've also learned that too many of these vital needs may have proven unnecessary (and less costly) had we first . . .

Ah, those stories and lessons are too long for this brief newsletter. My point? Whatever we do this third Monday and the 364 days around it, let's consider, comprehend, and compose. And if you have not done so, make an excuse to meet the neighbors.

Or how we move from spaces of convenience to ones of challenge

When You Feel Like You Stepped Into the Middle of Something...

So many of you joined the Words & Ways newsletter (before I had fully learned how to set up the subscriptions!) that you may feel you missed the requisite "introductions" to what this is all about and just started in the middle of a conversation.

If so, I have the solution. New subscribers receive a quick 3-email intro to Waywords, to me, and to my goals. If you are feeling left out, though, you are welcome to opt in to get these, too!

Here's how to get the new email introduction series for veteran types:

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Poetic Structure: One Further Step

Sure, I can read and talk about how writers use structure in their poetry, I can even write a book that apes the forms, but dare I invent one of my own? What other choice is there? Here is Part 1 of my process and thinking:

The 'Fingertrap' Sestina

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Literary Nomads Launches!

After running the full interviews for Unwoven these past weeks, the rebooted podcast Literary Nomads engages its literary adventure!

Generally dropping at the end of each work week, the first episode January 24 will be an introduction to the new podcast with some hot takes on Brahms and Radiohead, what listeners can expect from the episodes, and a quick approach to one of my favorite literary terms, irony.

My vow is to offer every listener something new to think about each week. Some episodes, like our first several on Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress," will take us into some thick and difficult topics around the text (please, not just the surface meaning of the philosophical pick-up lines). Others will look at the 359 degrees around that singular focus, seeking applications, far-reaching vertically and laterally to other texts, strategies for writing, teaching, and learning, resources for all of this, and of course, documentation of sources. Then we'll move to another focus text.

In many ways, this podcast will be a primary offering from me and Waywords, the space where we can explore some ideas richly, where this newsletter merely dabs at them now and again. Give it a listen for these next weeks and tell me what you think!

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Review: Literature from the Axis of Evil (2007)

Anthology, Translation, Fiction, Poetry

collected by Words Without Borders

Unique and devastatingly revealing collection of works from authors living in countries identified as the "Axis of Evil" by former President George W. Bush, along with other nations the US has labelled as "terrorist," "autocracies," etc.

Read the Review

Buy it here

Early Recommendation from My Reading:

While we're looking at different perspectives . . . .

Mbue's (mBWAY) second novel begins with seeming calamity. After suffering the deadly effects of years of drilling nearby, a village receives a group of company representatives for the bimonthly "assurances" meeting; the reps issue promises that the village concerns will be delivered to the company that "loves" them. Then with little warning, the village madman captures the white officials to hold them hostage and the community goes along. And then?

I have not completed the novel, but I can already say that it has been bewildering and compelling!

How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue, Cameroon (2021)

Buy it here

“Resist the distractions of excess.
Wear old clothes and avoid chain restaurants.
Resist your genius and your own significance
as declared by others.
Resist all hint of glory but accept the accolade
as tributes to your double.
Walk away in your unpurchased skin.
Resist the millionth purchase and go backward.
Get rid of everything.
If you exist, then you are loved
by existence. What do you need?”

Louise Erdrich in her chant poem "Advice to Myself #2: Resistance" offers this and more in thinking about ourselves and our next choices.

Read the full poem along with some related words by Leonard Cohen, e. e. cummings, Derek Walcott, and Grace Paley at poet Maria Popova's marvelous site, The Marginalian, a project I discovered mostly because of its name, then stayed for its purpose.

Or you can read the poem where it was originally published in Orion magazine in 2017 in a large spread of indigenous resistance writing curated by Layli Long Soldier (who I have previously recommended). All of these are great reads for MLKJr Day.

Erdrich, Cohen, Paley, et al.

Erdrich, Soldier, Harjo, Diaz, Miranda, et al.

Many of you reading this newsletter are educators. Did you catch the complete interview on Unwoven and its applications to the classroom? It and interviews with Dr. Jessica Manuel and poet Kelly Porter are now available on Literary Nomads.

Unwoven Interview #2: Teacher Sarah Rusinowski

“To offer an objective natural image, ... and then a turn, a shift where that third line is juxtaposed in a way that surprises perhaps, or opens up possibility. But the important part about it is that kireji. Turning. The cutting word. Which, by the way, English doesn’t even have a word for. So in English we use dashes, spaces, even just the line break to show that cutting or that Volta turn. That’s the same as in the sonnet. ... It’s a poem of tight beauty, and there’s a turn at some point in that sonnet, and then it opens up. And that, I think, is a much more refreshing way to understand what poetry is."

Listen here

Take Monday: read, listen, write, use your hands somewhere. You deserve it. So do the rest of us.

Steve

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