Richard Jeffrey Newman's Miscellany

From The Gig Academy, by Adrianna Kezar, Tom DePaola, and Daniel T. Scott:

Universities’ need for highly trained workers means that they must produce their own cheap workforce. For years, they have simultaneously expanded the number of doctoral degrees granted while constricting the number of stable academic jobs, creating a system in which low wages and precariousness are standard terms of employment…

Or, to put that another way:

Contingency pervades college work in ways that has [sic] universalized certain experiences of devaluation and vulnerability. This state of affairs ought not be perceived as normal, natural, or inevitable but as the product of institutional choice. (19-20)

I read Robert Hayden as a young, aspiring poet in the 1980s. I haven’t read him since. This piece by Edward Hirsch, On Robert Hayden’s “Middle Passage” – Michigan Quarterly Review, is a good reminder that he’d be worth reading again.

One more from Gray Latitudes, by Michelle K. Angwenyi, “I Hope You Can Dance Now:”

“I hope you continue to walk in your fields, and let what was lighter than memory do what your hands could not.”

@AkashicBooks

Via Book Post:

Artistically it is the one fundamental question for us today.—Art or Propaganda. Which? Is this more the generation of the prophet or that of the poet; shall our intellectual and cultural leadership preach and exhort or sing? I believe we are at that interesting moment when the prophet becomes the poet and when prophecy becomes the expressive song, the chant of fulfillment. We have had too many Jeremiahs, major and minor;—and too much of the drab wilderness. My chief objection to propaganda, apart from its besetting sin of monotony and disproportion, is that it perpetuates the position of group inferiority even in crying out against it. For it lives and speaks under the shadow of a dominant majority whom it harangues, cajoles, threatens, or supplicates. It is too extroverted for balance or poise or inner dignity and self-respect. Art in the best sense is rooted in self-expression and whether naive or sophisticated is self-contained. In our spiritual growth genius and talent must more and more choose the role of group expression, or even at times the role of free individualistic expression,—in a word must choose art and put aside propaganda.

Michelle K. Angwenyi, from Gray Latitudes:

“one thing stays the same: lined paper written over on both sides. folded, and re-folded, falling apart into history. still, something sutures, holds our life’s lines together.”

@AkashicBooks

I’m reading through my pile of literary journals. Aphorisms, even interesting ones, even profound ones, even ones strung together in a patterned order, are not poems.

Currently reading: The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief by James Wood 📚

I’ve decided to restart my newsletter and New Year’s Day seems an auspicious time to do so. The first issue of 2022 is now live.

More from Isele Magazine that is worth reading: Postpartum Interiorities - Ukamaka Olisakwe

I gave The Abundant Life an honest try. I just couldn’t get into it.

Going through old papers, I found this from when I was a first year student in Syracuse University’s creative writing MA. Strange to read myself from nearly forty years ago, but I can see in these lines the seeds of the poetry I write today.

Watkins Glen State Park

I am enjoying the work Isele Magazine (@iselemagazine) publishes. An Exquisite Creature - Sophie Kearing

Yes, it’s mine—whatever that means—and, yes, I am.

Doesn’t this cat look like it belongs in “Let This Be Your Last Battlefield” from the original Star Trek?

Watched Hanna and The Witcher. Liked them both well enough, but was disappointed that each ended up turning on “the evil father” trope. Not that there aren’t evil fathers, of course. It’s just, for me, a tired and overused device. I’d been hoping for something different.

I just found this video from 1989. I have the album this song is on and I think I might have been there for this performance. Brings back a lot of memories:

From Bitch, I am (not) a Mother! - Temi Chukwumah – Isele Magazine, well worth reading:

“This dream ends the same way, always. She was trapped in labour as Something split her in half, she screamed so much she burst her eardrums and before she got a chance to kill herself, Something killed her … every time. Then she wakes up nauseated and weak, afraid that Something followed her from her nightmares and crept into her real, waking life.”

Want to read: Original Light: New and Selected Poems, 1973-1983 by Albert Goldbarth 📚

I owned this in the 1980s when I first started taking myself seriously as an aspiring poet. I’m glad to have it again and I’m looking forward to reading it. He was an important early influence.

Scrolling through old photos, I found this poem. Sadly, I did not note who wrote it or where I found it, though it’s clearly by a Scottish poet. The point is I am so all in for the last three lines:

ach well
all livin language is sacred
fuck thi lohta thim

I read Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet many years ago and loved it. I am looking forward to reading it again. 📚

Apropos my post yesterday about change, my translation of a poem by the 13th century Iranian poet, Saadi of Shiraz.