Dana Gioia: There are so many problems facing the arts today that it’s hard to give just one. Let me pick two.

The first is the fact that we live in a world of non-stop, commercial, mass, electronic entertainment; hundreds of TV stations; millions of internet sites; hundreds of thousands of films and video games. And you can actually be connected to an electronic device from the moment you get up, until the moment you fall asleep.

And I think it has the tendency—I’m saying this as somebody who likes to watch television, likes to go to the movies, likes all of these things—that if left unchecked, unbalanced in life, it breeds a kind of semi-comatose relationship to reality. You’re always being lulled into a vague sense of comfort. Even if you sit at one side and make cynical comments at your television, you’re still watching it.

It’s hard, in a world like that, for someone to achieve the interiority of existence, to develop an inner-life—of sufficient depth, of sufficient strength—and to understand your destiny.

The second thing is that the only force in our society that’s strong enough to compete with the mass of electronic media is the educational system. I see the American educational system in rather dire straits. Talking about the arts, the arts have been systematically removed from most of our schools. Unless you grow up in an affluent community, you’re not likely to have the arts in your education. Not only are we not developing an audience for the arts—that’s one thing—but more importantly: the new generation of Americans are not receiving those spurs to personal growth that the arts create.

The purpose of arts education is not to create more artists. It’s not to create more audiences. The purpose of arts education is to create a complete human being who can lead a productive life in a free society. You can’t do that just through academics and athletics. There are certain things that you can only learn in stories, in songs, that you can only see in images.

When you take this out of a kid’s education, you impoverish their possibilities, both individually and socially. It’s as important to educate a child’s, or an adolescent’s, emotions as it is their mind. And when you take this out of the education of 60 million American kids, and you focus on developing low-level work skills, I think you have, in the offing, a cultural, educational, economic, and political disaster.

How can the arts survive?

If the arts are going to thrive, if the arts are going to survive, it’s going to be because people recognize why they’re important. We need people in our society who can articulate a better case for their importance. One of the problems right now is that the artists and the intellectuals of today are more comfortable talking to each other than they are to a mixed audience. In fact, in many of these areas, they look down on people who can actually address an audience. I think it’s actually more difficult to talk to a mixed audience than it is to a specialized audience, because, suddenly, you have all these competing value systems, competing claims, and you have to make a larger and more inclusive case for the importance of what you’re doing. But if artists and intellectuals do not get better at conversing with our society, I do believe that we’re going to see our society, our culture, becoming dumber and dumber.

There’s also something else that’s part of this that nobody mentions. One of the biggest problems about living in this kind of electronic culture is that we live almost entirely in the present moment. We’ve lost almost all of our connections with the past. And then we take the present moment and narrow it down into that part of the present moment which is capable of being turned into entertainment. I worry about our society that, first of all, sees so little of the current world, and sees virtually nothing of the past. This is not healthy for society.

How can we cultivate more respect for the arts?

The way one gets greater respect for the arts is not through intellectual argumentation. It’s through experience. To have sat in a concert hall and have been moved to the deepest center of your humanity; to go to a museum and be simply ravished by what you see; to go walk down a street in a city with great architecture and see how powerfully design and architecture mold human behavior for the better. Those are the kinds of experiences that I think are transformational.

The trouble is: if kids don’t get them growing up, it’s increasingly unlikely that they’ll look for them as adults. If we create kids who are essentially lulled into a kind of comfortable, stress-free existence by being mildly entertained all the time, I don’t think that we’re going to have the heroes, the saints, the reformers that our society needs. Nor will we have the decent, everyday people our society needs.

….
from poets.org

This is the first in the series of issues on the theme “The City.” Poets featured here question the city’s walls, shake up the brick and mortar icons of superpowers, trans-posit the ironies and dilemmas of life onto the surrounding cityscape. Included, also, is art based on our theme.

In future issues, we will explore this theme further: marketplaces, old and new, souls lost in the hustle and bustle, cities of fantasy, cities in despair, border cities, forgotten cities, cities under siege. We hope to see deeper, darker, brighter and larger truths emerge from this mosaic of city poems.

Read The City Issue 

About the Editor:

Shadab Zeest Hashmi grew up in the Pakistani border town of Peshawar during the time of the USSR-Afghan war. She was educated at Kinnaird (Pakistan) and Reed College and received her MFA from Warren Wilson in 2009. Her book on the civilization of Al Andalus Baker of Tarifa is the winner of the 2011 San Diego Book Award for poetry. Her work has appeared in Poetry International, Nimrod, The Bitter Oleander, Journal of Postcolonial Writings, The Cortland Review, South Asian Review, Vallum and other places. She has been nominated for a Pushcart prize and is currently a writer-in-residence at San Diego State University.

Let the train be there.

Let it be the right train.

Let there be a seat.

Let these things be unsaid.

Movement is relative:

a plane forms a contrail like a mower

on a Saturday morning, like memory,

or time. A finch is a common bird,

it will nest anywhere—

between morning sleep, no

alarm, awake to sun on granite

ledge, snails in the hedges

alone, and theBostonof

sweet buns, bums

and business suits, spicy

sausage and onions,

spring sun and sin

on the Common in June.

There’s no such thing

as a trip to nowhere.

If a clock is time, what is a map?

How to know if it’s you or the other person.

Let sunset be graffiti in chain link.

Let a triple-decker be the color of birth.

Let the price be mercy—

A wrong turn can be meditation.

A coin can be the whole fountain.

Green

It hits her like a slap, a stone, stars, stinging;

it hits her like a bounced check, addition,

fees, a broken sofa spring, feathers escaping,

a necessity; it hits her like hunger, a house

with no furniture, the family car towed

out of town, the family cat taken

to the farm. (She believed in the farm

for years.) Hits her like a stiff hug, a half

kiss, a cold cheek, a hey, how are you long lost,

on the street, at the T, in a bar; hits her

like the first beetle on the basil,

the snow pea gone to seed, purple peppers,

wine to vinegar, a lump in the breast,

a second read on the x-ray. It hits her

like a moving van in front of the house,

everything on the lawn, a double mattress

strapped to the back, two bikes, redwood lawn chairs

wrapped in blue. Everything fits, hits

like a flat tire, alone, fifteen bucks

to the freeway bandit to switchout the spare.

Hits her like static, bad shocks, the needle on E,

the next exit57 miles. It hits like loving

Elvis, like knowing all the words. Like green,

like gone, like leaving, like left.

Victoria Bosch Murray’s poetry has appeared in American Poetry Journal, Field, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Inch, Salamander,Tar River Poetry, The Cortland Review, and elsewhere. Her chapbook of poems, On the Hood of Someone Else’s Car, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2010. She is a contributing editor at Salamander and has an M.F.A in poetry from Warren Wilson College. 

Quiet

calling the hawk

over sleeping construction sites

searching frozen trucks     dozers for food

Half finished houses

sitting in acetylene sun

wind shredding surveyor flags

Coyotes

standing at attention

on naked medians

Blocks of vacant lots

PVC pipe protruding from graded earth:

waving hands

sawed off before they could signal

help

Plastic wrappers

scratching cement slabs

In the deserted distance

a nail gun shooting

silence

CITY OF FORGETTING

“Bin Laden was shot today,”
a high-ranking Marine smiles,
“They wrapped his torso in bacon before tossing it

into a sea of bloodsucking bottom-dwellers–”

In Los Angeles, a child is going to bed hungry
the open sore of street gone gangrenous

Across town
bloated suits sit down to gorge themselves on gourmet meals
sizzling short sales
fat trimmed from corpses still warm from Afghanistan

Anyone who has been outside the meat locker knows
they are serving up the past
medium-rare

Slaughter isn’t cheap-
the butcher must be paid his fair market share of amputated limbs from body farms
carving out 99% of hides left hanging from hooks
over factory floors

The rest of LA

is left to lick foam from the mouths of returning soldiers-
swig human waste from water faucets

The orgy of knives and forks must go on stabbing choice cuts

Most of the preoccupied population would kill for a spoonful of freezer-burned gristle,
bellies inflated by hunger

Scarfing down bowls of bloodshot eyes mocking the gluttony of ignorance
no one would feed dogs

The drunken desperation to forget
drink and forget the city is eating its own flesh

Stuffing mouths so full no one can speak for themselves
deliriously swallowing
tongues

Ishmael von Heidrick-Barnes

Ishmael von Heidrick-Barnes is a native Southern California poet.  He as college degrees in Surgical Technology and Religion and Theology.  His poems have appeaered in numerous literary magazines and anthologies.  He has worked with world reknowned sculptor, Roger Rigorth, at LA’s ArtCorps and his work has been translated into several languages.  Ish (as he prefers to be called) is currently assistant editor of the Magee Park Poets Anthology. Currently Ish is writing a second CD of lyrics for opera singer Andrea Hoerken’s new group, Tender Art.

1.

Did the wall fall out of the sky?

 Did the wall have to come?

 What did the wall prevent?

 Was peace really threatened?

 Who is walled in?

 Who breaks off human contacts?

 Does the wall threaten anyone?

 Who is aggravating the situation?

 Is the wall a gymnastic apparatus?

2.

 Hagen Koch was drawing a new meridian, a new equator,

a new edge of the world.

The line he had painted was the line of the Berlin Wall.

3. 

 According to Ute, the Socialist Worker’s Paradise

wasn’t that bad.  There were libraries and swimming pools,

holiday resorts and good public transportation.

4. 

 These concrete slabs

formed the western face

of Grenzmauer 75.

5.

 The residents of Bernauerstrasse woke up to find

that the wall between their flats and the street outside—

the one they’d just repapared, the one with the window

with net curtains and flower boxes, the one with the front door

that jammed a little every day—yes, that wall—

had become the Wall.

The tenants of Bernauerstrasse saw their lives

stretch out before them, and they knew what they had to do.

6.

 There was a clock in Alexanderplatz called the Welt-Uhr,

the world clock,

which showed the time in all the capital cities of the world.

7.

 She was made to sit in pools of freezing water for hours,

for days, until she couldn’t even shiver anymore.

She was forced to crouch naked on a mirror and urinate,

while the guards stood over her and pointed and laughed.

8.

 The Wall

was aggravating

no one,

guaranteeing world peace,

and protecting

the socialist workers

against the neo-Hitlerites

in the West.

But still Peter Fechter made a dash for it across No Man’s Land and died in the sand rather than stay at home.

9.

 We have decided today (um) to implement a regulation

that allows every citizen of the German Democratic Republic (um)

to (um) leave the GDR through any of the border crossings.

10.

 In Which History Comes to an End

11.

 The Parthenon is dissolving into the atmosphere,

but preparations have been made for the conclusion of its story.

12.

 Victor Pawlowski lives happily after in Bernau,

the town outside Berlin for which Bernauerstrasse is named.

He is the proud owner of a building yard,

a huge silver Chrysler cruiser,

and U.S. patent number 6076675.

13.

 Some of them started with graffiti.

They created trompe l’oeil murals

that poked gaps in the structure

upon which they had been drawn.

14.

 Ute went to London, to make her fortune and see the world.

She found work as a pastry chef in a smart restaurant,

she worked hard, and she made good money.  She could buy

whatever she wanted, but she wasn’t happy.

15.

 The Wall can now be found in a bewildering array of locations:

the CIA headquarters in Washington, D.C.,

the campus of Honolulu Community College in Hawaii,

the urinals in the Main Street Station Hotel in Las Vegas.

16.

 After the Mauerspechte and the bulldozers

had done their work, there was nothing left of the Wall—

nothing apart from nothing, that is.

Anis Shivani’s debut book of poetry is My Tranquil War and Other Poems (May 2012).  His other books are The Fifth Lash and Other Stories (2012), Against the Workshop:  Provocations, Polemics, Controversies (2011), and Anatolia and Other Stories (2009).  His work appears in Georgia Review, Southwest Review, Threepenny Review, Boston Review, Iowa Review, Antioch Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere.

Umbrellas, because her pinky caught in one

once, in a typhoon. Motorcycles, ever since

her mother warned of the gap-toothed man

whose engine sputtered into town with his shiny

pots and pans, how he’d snatch her away

if she didn’t finish her greens. A jeepney

pours carbon monoxide through our window.

We inch our way, she unravels

her stories of the war, tells them as though

she were ten again, running through paddies

knee deep in mud and leeches, scattered

gunshot ringing the bowl of night. Huddled

in a shelter with her sisters, hunger’s tooth

in her belly, she fell asleep to a squalling

newborn, a teaspoon scraping a tin

of powdered milk, the sweetest

never to pass her lips.

Now she is silent, she who was once

all music, fervor and fire, who can’t recall

what she had for breakfast, or whose

bright-eyed boy played at her feet

this morning. Beyond the traffic,

the cracked plains stretch to the hills.

By Angela Narciso Torres

Angela Narciso Torres was born in Brooklyn and raised in Manila. Her poems

are available or forthcoming in Baltimore Review, Cimarron Review, Crab Orchard Review,

Cream City Review, North American Review, Rattle, and other publications. A Ragdale

artist fellowship recipient in 2010, she holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College

and co-edits RHINO. She lives in Chicago.

Michele Guieu was born in southern France, lived her teenage years in Senegal (Africa), travelled and moved quite a lot. She is a graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Paris (MA Graphic Design), Paris, France.

She has been a graphic designer for many years when she lived in Paris, where she worked for non-profit organizations and museums. She also exhibited her work in Paris and Copenhagen, before moving to the US in 2000.

Guieu recently had a solo exhibition at Art Produce Gallery in San Diego and participated in shows at the California Center for the Arts, the Oceanside Museum of Art and the William Cannon Art Gallery. She is a San Diego Art Prize 2009 nominee in the Emerging Artists Category. During the summer of 2010, She was invited to the “Summer Salon Series” at the San Diego Museum of Art.

Michele Guieu moved to the bay area in 2010.

www.micheleguieu.com

We had to soak a bowl of wheat or lentil
And swaddle them in a wet cloth for a week
And spread those sprouted grains of wheat in a
Beautifully shaped dish and let them grow to a weed
Then we would make little colored figurines
To represent us, so they could sit atop grass wheat
Then mother will go to “Charbagh” bazaar and buy
Beautiful little red fish to represent life
On the table we had hyacinth to freshen the room
Then came time to color eggs in those little pots
My mother would never forget to put
Open-paged Hafiz, on her chosen ghazal
While reciting the lines
Mother told us never sleep with old clothes
The night before uncle Norouz is coming
We were seven little dwarfs then

At the 13th day of Norouz
We had to throw those planted grains
In any river or running water we could see
To have old, sad roots taken away from us

by Brandon

Won’t you stay, beloved. Coals glowing, we abide
or in the river, flowing, we abide.

The hats lost in crosswinds, pulled below the currents,
sunburned faces above the surface showing, we abide.

So you’ve died and so will I, but
with you in memory growing, we abide.

Though the scales are rigged by lack of faith in
the weight of grass after mowing, we abide.

Skin scrapped onto boulders climbed, dust on books we read.
As we disintegrate, let go slowly of what we’re owing, we abide.

Brandon Cesmat’s writing appears in journals such as Perigee, Weber: the Contemporary West and Other Voices International. His most recent books are Light in All Directions (Poetic Matrix) and When Pigs Fall in Love (Caernarvon). He was the poetry editor for A Year in Ink, Vol. 5: San Diego Writers, Ink.  He teaches literature & writing at CSU San Marcos and conducts poem writing workshops for CPITS.