Before the reading, I picked up a copy of Phantom Noise by Brian Turner. It wasn’t that I necessarily had a preference, merely that I was in a bookstore and they had a copy of one of his books and not one by Nikki Finney.
I am always unsure about poetry and politics. I think we desperately need political poetry, for the sake of both our inter/national political discourse and for the sake of poetry (which must be engaged to be vibrant; though that is not to say that all poetry needs to be engaged, merely that if there is no engaged poetry or very little, poetry becomes too disconnected from the life of the people and risks becoming little more than a pretty art for the wealthy and comfortable).
This one was originally scheduled for October 30, but that pesky hurricane postponed that, of course. I can only imagine they worked hard to get this rescheduled so as to at least take place before the election, but nothing could help the comparatively sparse crowd that we can surely blame on the new date.
Nikki Finney was relatively quiet. Whether she is naturally restrained, or felt constrained by the garrulous Brian Turner and the too intrusive host/moderator, Alice Quinn.
Alice Quinn is executive director of the Poetry Society of America, she a wonderful and erudite speaker on poetry, but I frankly did not attend to hear to her speak. I just didn’t. But she really seemed to want to speak.
I rarely ask questions during this things, but this time I did. My question was about success – that if there is a purpose to political poetry beyond aesthetics, how is success judged. And Quinn asked who I wanted to answer this, seemingly thinking maybe she was the intended recipient.
Oh, hell no. I came to hear Nikke Finney and Brian Turner read poetry and speak about their work and the night’s theme, politics and political poetry. I would happily attend a future lecture by Alice Quinn, but that’s not what this was.
Turner was a very open and talkative man. He knew my old boss, Congresswoman Grace Napolitano, on account of her work with veterans and on PTSD and mental health issues. He gave me his email address and told me to send him my address and he would send me copies of his first book, Here, Bullet – one for me and one for her. Well, I couldn’t have that happen, so I bought two copies, in addition to Phantom Noise, and asked him to sign one for her. He asked me to offer her his assistance, any time, any place. Once he found out I worked for union, he made the same offer to me.
I enjoyed Phantom Noise more than I expected. It’s very much about the experience of coming home from Iraq and the ongoing trauma of PTSD, which I don’t always feel makes for very good poetry. Phantom Noise is a bit of an exception (or perhaps, I just haven’t read enough in the genre to understand how good things have gotten, poetry-wise, even if its mere existence is a reminder of how bad things still are and can be for veterans). It does tend to be a bit much. Too many poems about bloody memories interrupting ordinary, man-woman relations.
He did ask me how I read books of poetry, whether I skipped around or read them front to back like a novel. I told him, like a novel. Perhaps his work is better read in a different fashion and he realized that. In bunches, too much. His own reading style was very conversational and dialogical in between the poems, as if he knew the importance of the spaces between poems (and not just within a poem).
Anyway… super excited about Kay Ryan coming up. Saw her read as Poet Laureate and saw her once when I was still living in California.
I figured we would still be counting the votes needed for victory (Florida, naturally, is another cock up, thanks to Rick Scott and his merry band of garden gnomes, including Will Weatherford, John Thrasher, and assorted other embarrassments), but this thing was called freaking early.
In case you’re wondering, I took this picture outside the White House around 11:15 pm.
So, you’re sitting at home on Tuesday, wondering what to watch.
I know you say, I’ll watch election returns.
Cool!
Except, wait! I’m not going to stay up all freaking night for results in places like Colorado and Nevada to come in!
I just wish there were some, I don’t know, bellwethers, on the east coast that would tell me what’s happening before, say 3am.
As it happens, there are. And I can help you find them.
Is Obama going to win? Look for Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia.
A win in Virginia suggests Obama is on track to win. Things could still go wrong, but you can go to bed feeling pretty comfortable that you know who won.
Florida? If Obama wins Florida, that’s it. He won. He’ll probably get 315+ EVs (electoral votes – 270 are needed to win).
North Carolina? Yeah, go to sleep. Obama’s getting 325+ EVs (and he’s also winning Florida). And if Romney wins North Carolina, but it’s close, then that’s probably the equivalent to Obama winning Virginia, which is the say, maybe he doesn’t get 330 EVs, but a reasonably 285+ is in the cards. You can post on Facebook something like, ‘Man, Romney could barely seal the deal in North Carolina. Game over. No way he’s winning Ohio or Wisconsin. Better luck in 2016 with Chris Christie, my GOP’er friends.’
But what could tell if you Romney’s winning? You could look for a 5 point for Romney in Florida, but I’m going to suggest looking at Pennsylvania. Not for a Romney win, but for Romney coming close. If Romney comes with 2 points of Obama in Pennsylvania, you can tell your Facebook friends, ‘I don’t know. Look at those numbers out of Pennsylvania. I think maybe non-college whites are breaking for Romney by a bigger than expected margin. This is going to be a long night for Obama.’ When you drop phrases like ‘non-college whites,’ your friends will be, like, whoa, that dude is smart! S/he must read, like, newspapers.’
DCU – as in DC United. As in that travesty Saturday night.
Leaving aside that phantom goal that the Red Bulls scored, there was no reason it should have been allowed to reach that point.
We were pressing and keeping possession throughout the first half while the Red Bulls were more or less content to fight for a draw and try and win this thing at home. But we were just… disconnected.
Players like Nick DeLeon, Andy Najar, and even Branco Boskovic were playing good long and cross field balls to Lionard Pajoy and Chris Pontius.
Pajoy was tending to play the center right channel, between the right sided central defender and the right full back – or at least, that was where he was picking up the long balls sent his way. But when he got those very well placed passes, he had almost no help. No runners from the midfield anywhere near enough to help, forcing him to try and make something out of nothing with at least two defenders on him.
Chris Pontius found himself in the similar situation, except that he was forced to play pretty wide on the left (Nick DeLeon on the right could pinch in a bit more because Andy Najar was playing right back and using his stamina and pace to cover the outside brilliantly, but Pontius, the most important offensive player, had no such luxury and spent most of the match way too far from goal) and so he was too far to even think about shooting.
Pontius missed a PK near the end of the first half, leaving the teams to go into half time scoreless and with DC United having a nasty taste in the mouth after the miss.
We finally scored a goal when, finally, a midfield player bundled into the box to push a loose ball over the line.
Yes, Red Bull struck back, but it should never have come to that. We should have had other goals.
Then, Andy Najar made a bad tackle, earning a yellow, and then compounded it by throwing the ball at the ref, getting himself a second yellow and an ejection.
There was plenty of bad refereeing (though not Najar’s red – he 100% deserved it), but we are close to digging our own grave.
The one good tactical decision was to play Najar at outside back, where his youth and pace let him cover his defensive duties, while also giving him time to play some lovely, accurate long passes and providing a outlet for players on the right. But he’s going to be suspended for the second, deciding game.
It should have been obvious that Pajoy needed help, but I didn’t see any tactical changes or substitutions to help bring Pontius closer goal or to push Boskovic closer to Pajoy.
If we do eke out a win and move on in the playoffs, my bet is that it comes from the work of Perry Kitchen. A defensive midfielder for DC, when we were down a man and needed a goal, he pushed higher up and showed some amazing footwork to hold possession and look for little seams at the edges of the box, skills I didn’t realize he had.
But let’s be honest, unless we can goad Rafa Marquez into getting a red card and making the Red Bulls play a man down, the combined artistry of Thierry Henry and Tim Cahill feeding Kenny Cooper will cut us down before the first half is over.
I wanted to buy tickets for my father-in-law and I to see tonight’s playoff game against the Red Bulls, but my computer (this was yesterday; I was at work) was not letting me do it.
I called DC United and left a message and got a personal call back from a fellow named James. He walked me through everything and when I still struggled (the trouble was, as it turned out, the office server wasn’t letting me get into Ticketmaster which… I probably shouldn’t be buying tickets at work anyway), he called back in response to my email and even gave me his direct number. And all this, even though I was upfront about intending to get the cheapest available tickets (he even told me which ones those were).
The game isn’t until tonight, but the folks who run the team are pretty awesome.
the coffee philosopher 