Sherry Chandler

from the Chicago Tribune via Informed Comment, Blackwater case in Iraq puts U.S. officials in vise:

BAGHDAD - American officials scrambled to head off a potential crisis Monday after irate Iraqi authorities canceled the license of the controversial American security company Blackwater USA, whose guards were accused of shooting to death eight civilians while guarding a U.S. State Department motorcade.

The swift response to Sunday’s deaths marked Iraq’s boldest step against foreign security contractors who have long been accused of racing through Baghdad’s streets and firing without restraint at anyone they see as a threat.

It also cast a focus on the continued lack of control by American officials over heavily armed private security contractors, at least 20,000 of whom supplement the U.S.-led military forces that invaded Iraq in March 2003.

From Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson (North Atlantic Books, 1985), text taken from a footnote in Charles Bernstein’s A Poetics (Harvard, 1992):

She built a new poetic form from her fractured sense of being eternally on intellectual borders, where confident masculine voices buzzed an alluring and inaccessible discourse, backward through history into aboriginal anagogy. Pulling pieces of geometry, geology, alchemy, philosophy … and philology from alien territory, a “sheltered” woman audaciously invented a new grammar grounded in humility and hesitation. Hesitate from the Latin meaning to stick. Stammer. …The omniverous gatherer was equally able to reject. To find affirmation in renunciation and to be (herself) without. Outside authority, eccentric and unique. …Soul under stress, thread of connection broken, fusion of love and knowledge broken, visionary energy lost, Dickinson means this to be an ugly verse. First I find myself a Slave, next I understand my slavery, finally I re-discover myself at liberty inside the confines of known necessity.

I copy this here because it seems to affirm what I sensed in my study of poem #640 (I cannot live with you—), which was pretty much “I want this meal of love but to have it means I’m lost however I configure it and so I’ll do without, except for a nibble now and then.”