drew dellinger - planetize the movement

The Poetry Spot (PTM Newsletter, Feb. 2009)

I Walk Out Into the Country at Night

The moon is so high it is
Almost in the Great Bear.
I walk out of the city
Along the road to the West.
The damp wind ruffles my coat.
Dewy grass soaks my sandals.
Fishermen are singing
On the distant river.
Fox fires dance on the ruined tombs.
A chill rises and fills
Me with melancholy. I
Try to think of words that will
Capture the uncanny solitude.
I come home late. The night
Is half spent. I stand for a
Long while in the doorway.
My young son is still up, reading.
Suddenly he bursts out laughing,
And all the sadness of the
Twilight of my life is gone.

--Lu Yu

(From One Hundred Poems From the Chinese, Trans., Kenneth Rexroth. New Directions, 1971.)

Epiphanies (PTM Newsletter, Feb. 2009)

My definition of a writer: someone who is interested in everything.
--Susan Sontag

I think the artist has to be something like a whale swimming with his mouth wide open, absorbing everything until he has what he really needs.
--Romare Bearden

Each person has a literature inside them.
--Anna Deavere Smith

People change when they awaken to what is inside them already, and the art of change is to create the context for that transformation. That is done through stories, narratives, humor, the exploration of one's grief, but not by actually trying to change someone's views. That never works.
--Paul Hawken

Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness--and our ability to tell our own stories.
--Arundhati Roy

For the first 90 percent of this country's history (about 350 years) slavery or legal segregation was generally in place. Only for the last 10 percent or so of our entire history have we been free of slavery and legal segregation. Thus, racial oppression makes the United States very distinctive, for it is the only major Western country that was explicitly founded on racial oppression. Today, as in the past, this oppression is not a minor addition to U.S. society's structure, but rather is systemic across all major institutions.
--Joe R. Feagin, Systemic Racism

It is not a sign of weakness, but a sign of high maturity, to rise to the level of self-criticism.
--Martin Luther King Jr.

What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them.
--President Barack Obama, Inaugural Address, Jan. 20, 2009

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