Sherry Chandler

eek! How could I have missed this feature at PBS: Poetry Everywhere.

One place they find it is at Wynton Marsalis’s keyboard. Wynton reads W. B. Yeats’s “The Wild Old Wicked Man.” He sees jazz in them thar words:

“Like all the greatest artists, Yeats never got locked into one time. Instead, he addresses all ages and times. In a few words, with intense lyricism like Lester Young’s or Miles Davis’s, Yeats captures how one thing leads to another thing leads to another thing, and the relationships between them. Like, ‘An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick.’ If you really let that into your mind, it’ll be a long time before you stop thinking about it.”

They found it at the Dodge Festival, where Tennessee poet Coleman Barks reads a translation of Rumi that brought tears to my eyes. Gotta love an accent like that doing a 13th century Persian poet. Sort of beats the hell out of “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.”

And speaking of Yale Younger Poets, here’s Adrienne Rich asking the question, “What Kind of Times Are These.”

Check it out.

At Corrente, FrenchDoc talks about an article by Bruce Western in the Boston Review. Bruce Western is the author of Punishment and Inequality in America (Russell Sage Foundation, 2007):

As he did in his book, Western then explains that mass incarceration corresponds to the mass deindustrialization of the United States (similar developments followed in Western Europe). Mass incarceration was then used as a tool of management of the consequences of this economic reality. Where Western Europe has welfare systems and extensive safety nets, the United States managed the dislocations brought about by the end of the industrial era in Western countries.

Incarceration has become the solution to all sorts of social ills beyond criminality: mental illness, drug use, urban housing management failures, economic policies that slashed spendings on social services, the end of industrial employment.

Culturally, this was reinforced by the conservative “tough on crime” rhetoric and the invention (not based on reality) of the “superpredator” (the young - implictly black - young criminal without a social conscience who could not be rehabilitated but could only be thrown in prison for as long as possible). The only functions of incarceration became deterrence (not working) and neutralization (as in crimes get committed in prison instead of outside). The policies of the war on drugs increased the length of time inmates spent in prison, especially mandatory minimum sentencing.

But it didn’t work, because, according to Western, mass incarceration is based on three fallacies:

• The fallacy of “us versus them”
• The fallacy of personal defect
• The fallacy of the free market

Read this excellent long post and the original Western article to learn more about why these ways of thinking are mistaken and what they’ve cost us.

Then re-read the Camayd-Freixas article about ICE’s determination to incarcerate rather than deport the illegal workers from Postville.