(Ed Coletti's) NO MONEY IN POETRY

Saturday, April 06, 2013

Proust Questionnaire Redux/Breakfast/Ed Coletti Radio Broadcast/Emily's "Funeral"/3 Poems by Ed Coletti (Triolets)

Do The Interactive Proust Questionnaire click here/now!

Answer questions about your favorite historical figure, your hero, your greatest fear, etc, etc. Then you can compare yourself with other respondents! I came out closest to Jane Goodall! Go figure!

click here/now!

Comment or Read Comments Here on any of the above or below. If you do not have a Google account, log in under "Name/URL," (it's easy). Just the name (don't worry about the URL). Actual name is best, but use what you like. Or email me at edcoletti@sbcglobal.net, and I can post it.

Ed Coletti On KRCB Word Temple Show Reading of February 20, 2013. Click Here to listen.

(Photo of Ed Coletti and Charles Wolski in NYC Dec. 2013)

Example of a Spontaneous Emily Dickinson "Big Read" Event

During early March, Poet Larry Robinson circulated the Emily Dickinson poem "I felt a Funeral in my Brain," and I, in turn asked Larry a question about it. The following enlightening email conversation ensued among Larry Robinson, Ed Coletti, David Beckman, and Katherine
Hastings. I hope that you find it as interesting, fun, and joy-provoking as we did.

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading - treading - till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through -

And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum -
Kept beating - beating - till I thought
My mind was going numb -

And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space - began to toll,

As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race,
Wrecked, solitary, here -

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down -
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing - then -

- Emily Dickinson

Thanks, Larry. I'd forgotten - what a remarkably great poem! I have some difficulty at the line "-till it seemed that Sense was breaking through-"

What do you make of it? I'd never really studied the poem much. I'll also pass this along to Beckman, Hastings, and Joyce.

I share your struggle with that line; it's like a koan, isn't it?

Larry

Yes, great poem. Thanks for the query, Ed. A quick check yields many meanings for “sense,” including “apprehension” and “discernment.” I suspect Dickinson had one of these, or another, such meaning in mind (It’d be fun to see which meaning was most current in her time).

I don’t use my OED a lot these days (micrographic, and getting really heard to read even with the provided magnifying glass).
I used to subscribe to it online...does anyone? It would probably give good answers.

David

This poem isn't addressing the funeral of a person, it is addressing the decreasing mental capacity in the speaker's brain — a mental breakdown, a descent into madness. That's why reason, or "Sense was breaking through". Re-read the poem with this in mind and all the metaphors start clicking.

Thanks for sending Emily out, Larry!

Yes, indeed that works for me!

This has been fun!

Thanks,

Ed

Yep, ditto. Nice insight, Katherine.

D.

Thanks for sending the question around, Ed. It's always good to take a deeper look at deeper, more complex poetry! ;-)

k

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3 More Ed Coletti Triolets

Triolet On Stockton

The bankrupted City of Stockton, “C” “A”
Lies dying in San Joaquin’s Delta.
Each Fat City house turned empty crate
The bankrupted City of Stockton, “C” “A”
Where mortgages domino day by day
No one benefits as all the wealth of
The bankrupted City of Stockton, “C” “A”
Lies dying in San Joaquin’s Delta.

Triolet On a Partial Line
From “Norwegian Wood”
By The Beatles

Or should I say “she once had me”?
Possession is nine-tenths of law.
Almost nothing accrues for free.
Or should I say “she once had me”?
Today, tomorrow, yesterday,
Continuum both once and yore.
Or should I say “she once had me?”
Possession is nine-tenths of law.

Triolet From a Line Within “Ohio” By
Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young

Should have been done long ago,
Delay proves always fatal.
No excuse for status quo,
Should have been done long ago.
Vain war impacts Ohio.
Kids now scarce years post natal.
Should have been done long ago,
Delay proves always fatal.

Also, take a look at my 5 New Jazz Poems at the valuable Jerry Jazz Musician site. Once you find the poems, please comment on the poems at the site

Thursday, January 03, 2013

Why Books?/Coletti "Coltrane, Dig?" and "Bodies" a Painting/Amy Trussell & Krista Brown/

Happy New Year 2012 from Ed Coletti at No Money in Poetry

The unadmitted reason why traditional readers

are hostile to e-books is that we still hold the

superstitious idea that a book is like a soul, and

that every soul should have its own body.

Adam Kirsch in Poetry November 2012

I like and respect Kirsch's quotation with the

possible exception of the word "superstitious." -ejc

Painting "Bodies" (Acrylic December 2012) also by Ed Coletti (more images of coletti paintings)

Coltrane, Dig?

I suppose what it is with trane and me is

he takes all the time he wants to take

even outside of time, sidereal time,

stardust time, bessie blue time,

through-and-through-him time,

trancey groove time, even arranged time.

The duke laying down stevie blocks,

trane ain’t gonna be no mortar here

he gonna weave a kinda mesh

round duke’s work, trane lacing

duke’s solidity with blue spirit,

blues spirit. duke hears it, stays

near it, layin’ stevie blocks

now playing trane blocks, the duke

in-spired, layin’ down trane blocks.

Then comes slo-trane’s pleasing

molasses blue invention and

no one makes new like coltrane,

the original organic cat and not such

a stranger-in-a-not-so-strange-land,

he resonates—that’s it—we get trane,

that why trane — is — trane.

you hear a bass soloing, wherever

that bass is echoing, whoever

that bass, he echoing trane

that what jazz all about.

If the drum set belong to tootie heath or to

philly joe jones, it don’t matter. they both

coltrane without his horn, c’est la vie, man,

trane be something else, something like

deity ethereal night, man. I mean you take

nancy, you give her a lavender face

so she be nancy with the laughing face.

what you got be only coltrane stirring

something delicious in his pot,

coltrane doing nancy, no need explaining

her gleeful countenance, you dig?

trane, hey, he got no need to wreck the show.

- ed coletti

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Qatari poet Mohamed Ibn Al Ajami’s crime consisted of reciting a poem extolling the courage and values of the popular uprisings in Tunisia. For that he's been sentenced to life in prison.

Please join with a remarkable list of prominent poets from around the world and urge the court in Qatar to reconsider.

POETS MUST HELP POETS! ONE OF THE MOST SIGNIFICANT FREE SPEECH ACTIONS ORGANIZED BY POETS IN MANY YEARS!

Please join Alice Walker, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, Marcia Lynx Qualey, Sam Hamill, Philip Levine, Naomi Shihab Nye, Carolyn Forché, Martin Espada, Chris Abani, Jerome Rothenberg, Pina Piccolo, Pilar Rodriguez Aranda, Nana Nestoros, Jack Hirschman, Patricia Smith, Paul Polansky, Ron Silliman, Menka Shivdasani, Karam Youssef, PEN America Center, Michael Rothenberg and Terri Carrion, co-founders of 100 Thousand Poets for Change, Rootsaction.org, Code Pink and Split This Rock, and many more of our friends in this global campaign to free the Qatari poet Mohamed Ibn Al Ajami, sentenced to life imprisonment for reciting a poem! Sign this petition and send a letter the Qatar Embassy! We can do this!

http://act.rootsaction.org/o/6503/t/0/blastContent.jsp?email_blast_KEY=136398

"Poetry Moonspell" by Krista Brown

Moonspell

There seems to be little territory to stand on

anymore, only several inches of water

running through the canal streets

of this nearly abandoned heart

housed in the city that was almost

sucked down as the next Atlantis,

drenched in toxicity,

blue gas flames shooting from

the top of the water.

We were hip deep in despair

but the temple priestess said

the ocean goddess has given us a gift.

So I looked in the palette and saw

the woman of the tide pool and starfish

that are open wherever they end up

in this earth and sky running with river,

oceans, blood, oil paint.

Go to the blood bank and let them

tap my heart, feeling back to the time

of my own transfusion,

how light I felt the next day

standing next to the sea of the outpost,

moon in the sky like a tugboat.

Some liquid part flowing through me

was once filtered through another’s center.

Look at the fishes’ perseverance

and intelligence as it whips upstream

to find its pool of re-creation,

the flesh medicine for our sad restless brains.

And there are the elephants

who sensed a tsunami before it came,

and bowed down to lift people

and carry them back up into the jungle.

Scientists say we are not that different

in our chromosomes from eels and butterflies

so maybe there is hope for us.

Fluttering in the chest as my offspring plays guitar.

A coastguard or fireman rushes into the

double doors on the news

carrying a perfect baby to safety

and the moon card turns over in endless sky.

Trust instinct, trust the inner pull

toward illuminated mystery

even in times of shipwreck.

-Amy Trussell

Saturday, August 18, 2012

Review of Katherine Hastings' Cloud Fire/ 3 More Coletti Poems/James Joyce Reading "Finnegan's Wake"/

Katherine Hastings' Cloud Fire (reviewed by Ed Coletti)

Katherine Hastings’ curiously named publisher, Spuyten Duyvil in New York City, actually provides me an apt leaping off point for her incredible achievement Cloud Fire.

“Spuyten Duyvil” derives from the New York Dutch and their “spewing devil” where “spui” and “spuit” involve the gushing forth of water. However, while we have so much of water here, it is the fog-shrouded California Pacific, much better painted by a gentle sorcerer stirring rather than a fearsome devil spewing—less gushing, more being.

Still, lest I forget, the book’s title contains both clouds and fire,

My city whose hair is a cloud fire

This theme of “hair” continues into the poem “Lonadier Rampant. A poet “too near the bridge,” does jump, and Hastings, after painting Lynn Lonadier crash from a cliff into the sea, then has her beloved San Francisco sing a final lullaby,

Lonadier Your hair/Will be the last of you/To hit the sea/The city that saved you again and again/Rising swiftly/To still you/To sleep.

It is the City-By-The-Bay, shrouded and elevated by fog that provides Katherine Hastings (also the painter of her book’s cover) her magical palette. She becomes the Whitman of clouds, singing of clouds

Fog-mantle on the breast of meadow/where voices from the emerald womb—feathered throats and bud bloom—sing through

I don’t employ the word “masterpiece” frequently, and never casually. However, in the case of Hastings long opening poem, “Clouds,” I have no choice. In it, I feel the spirit and depth of Hart Crane’s “Bridge”

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest/The seagull's wings shall dip and pivot him,/Shedding white rings of tumult, building high/Over the chained bay waters Liberty—

And Hastings on “flight,”

We do this like children or angels living/on the ledges of waves and lips, downy/wings so white they hum every color./Bees rolling in a white rose.

Cloud Fire works best read in one sweeping panorama from front to back. Hastings begins in clouds, opens into complex life experiences and wraps up in a final poem also title “Clouds” where, “In fog you are everywhere/and nowhere.” Amidst the clouds and between them, the book exposes both the grime and glimmer of earth below as in this from “ O’Sidhe of Greenwich Street,”

...With one hand she catches a dove,/breathes it back to flight, with the other/turns the sizzling knob.

Were I to give you my reader only one bit of advice today, it would be to buy this book now. Then take it home and read it through from beginning to end, and over and over. It’s that good!

Cloud Fire at Amazon

3 More Ed Coletti Poems

A Trio of Triolets (tree-oh-lays)

Figuring that probably 95% of serious poets writing today eschew traditional poetic forms for free verse, I surmise that the poets who do at least occasionally try formal verse paradoxically could be termed today's "rebels."

I liken the "restriction" of such forms to swaddling a baby. The resulting security is a benefit. "Restricting" myself to a poetic vessel seems to free the soul to pour its contents into the container in a way that is different from an uncontained beginning. I've chosen the triolet which issues from 13th century France, is similar to the rondeau, was briefly popularized by Robert Bridges at the turn of the 20th century, and which can lend itself nicely to humor.

Triolet On Time

"For boys add to their woe by sitting still"

Was the best line of my youthful poem.

Now age and illness ask again why will

Such boys add to their woe by sitting still?

You’d think of this they’d had their awful fill

And, dreaming dreams of life they’d finally sow them.

"For boys add to their woe by sitting still"

Was the best line of my youthful poem.

Published at The New Formalist September 2012

Triolet Of The Critical Loser

“Stick to painting, I don’t like your poems,”

Averred Cowboy Bob who I’d beaten in chess.

Perhaps he feared lofty emotions,

“Stick to painting, I don’t like your poems,”

More difficult work beyond his knowing.

Give him Kipling, McKuen, Edgar Guest,

“Stick to painting, I don’t like your poems,”

Averred Cowboy Bob who I’d beaten in chess.

Triolet From A Line By Eric Clapton

My darling you look wonderful tonight.

Your short silver hair, shining opal eyes,

When I see you smiling everything feels right.

My darling you look wonderful tonight.

Thought of your passing’s a terrible fright,

Loss of part of me, joy and wisdom dies.

My darling you look wonderful tonight.

Your short silver hair, shining opal eyes.

James Joyce Reading Anna Livia Plurabelle Section from Finnegan's Wake

Tuesday, July 03, 2012

2 Ed Coletti Poems/Of Podiums/Norman Ball "Being Difficult"/Tribute to Lilliput Review/Norman Ball Being Difficult/

Poets. How often do you feel this way?

2 Ed Coletti Poems

The Oblong Root

for Adelaide O’Connor Ehret

Going deaf, neither she

nor her hearing daughter

recognize the assertive

unconscious voice

exchanging “Pablo Neruda”

for “oblong root” or perhaps

for the medulla oblongata

center of so much involuntary

assertiveness, her very breathing,

the beating of her great heart,

that fountain enabling her daughter,

these words that must mean

something greater than their sounds.

When it comes to shapes oblong,

poets prefer oval over rhomboid.

Because both lampreys and hagfish

possess a fully developed medulla

oblongata, half a billion years of

evolution formed this mother-wisdom

this connection between a great poet

and that most essential ancient

ancestor of her own brain

eventually bestowing the gift

of words on her daughter

who told mother that she’d won

a prize now confused with an oblong root.

This sound the mother hazily heard

might have been the swishing of

a weed growing in dry rocky

pasture land outside Stoneham

near the marble quarry

or vibration off a German yellow sugar beet.

The very pith of plants also referred to

as their “medulla” Yet mathematicians

know the oblong root as an algebraic square.

All such fugues episodically

musically create all richness

all story all myth all family.

Even entire geographies as they exist

for midwestern endodontists who

in 2012 AD estimated

the typical cost of a root canal

in Oblong, Illinois to be

nineteen hundred-thirty-four dollars.

But, in terms of preference,

when it comes to oblong contours

almost all poets and loving mothers

choosing the egg-shape over rhombus,

realize how one thing always leads to another,

even and perhaps especially, this.

loosening its hold on the clowns

yes it’s gone gone gone

gone gone away.

— Allen Ginsberg

such presentation as clowns make

ejecting from their tiny cars

like so many spermatazoan pilots

beating each other with

styrofoam clubs,

punches and judies

posed ponderous

play at love and pain

yesterday and today

lament their passing

enjoy their farcical pageantry

relate to Emmett Kelly’s tears

open hearts to take a whack

at each decade each life,

and it was as it happened

but memory’s perspective

gives moments their due

in such a big top’s

insanely frightful review.

(Published in Spillway June 2012)

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"Being Difficult" Selections from the Essay on Poetic Obscurity and Other Good Stuff by Norman Ball (see biography by pressing the "full article" link just below.

These selections are from the full article which previously appeared in Rattle.

"The message to poets is, beware the kindness of strangers. Those who would rescue a poem from 'incomprehensibility' may actually be advancing death-by explication. Poetic logic is its own animal existing outside the bounds of relatable (i.e. conversational) understanding. I'm guilty of offering dubious assistance in some of your prior efforts. But I find myself developing a comfort level with your opacity...For me, part of the fascination of your poetry lies in its willful inaccessiblity. I'm convinced you've constructed more here than a good game of hide-and seek..."

"For too many readers, difficulty is a tiresome abomination, a code to be cracked. They want their literary merit fed to them in bite-sized morsels."

"The Internet, for all its salutary effects on artistic collaboration and community, beckons with an immediacy that can be the undoing of careful composition. In the penchant for immediacy, difficulty suffers...the technology itself tempts at rushing a poem out there before its time."

" 'The Wasteland' gives up nothing over bagels and coffee. Lovers rarely discuss it in bed. Yet it feels like a poem, filling us with the overwhelming sense we are experiencing something. There is no paragraphed synopsis to render this experience. This is as it should be."

Now, enjoy the full article

Just 3 Reasons Why I Love Lilliput Review and

Why Everyone Should Subscribe

standing ovation
for the penniless poet:
a short walk to their cars

Mike Dillon
Indianola, WA

While you were onstage reading another poem

A man carrying a garbage bag in the rain
performed the stations of the cross
and moved his lips in silent prayer.

Kyle Vaughn
Dallas, TX

Advice to the Aspiring Artist

Maintain a
distance.

Maintain a
great distance.

Run for
the hills.

John Bennett
Ellensburg, WA

Saturday, June 02, 2012

Serfs of Psychiatry/Who To Impress/Vera Pavlova/

Review: Serfs of Psychiatry (Finishing Line Press 2012) by Gil Fagiani

Of course, Gil Fagiani’s chapbook Serfs of Psychiatry (Finishing Line Press 2012) reminds me of Vilma Ginzberg’s Snake Pit which I published over my Round Barn Press imprint during 2010. Each covers the terrors abundant in mental asylums. Both institutions are located in the State of New York. Each lays out the horrific scene. However, Ginzberg is more therapeutic in her approach. Fagiani simply puts the Inferno right in your face, as in the vernacular of simply “making it real.”

The differences are those of time and place. Vilma came 20 years before Gil. Conditions, back then, while certainly horrendous enough, pale in comparison to what they’ve become. Ginzberg’s institution may be viewed as a harbinger of Fagiani’s. As to place, she was “upstate” in Rockland State Hospital while he labored down the City in Bronx State Hospital.

When, 10 years after he’d worked there, Fagiani visited “the asylum” he found in “The Geometry of Misery,” that “All the people were the same.//There was the dwarf/with the non-stop laugh/who drank coffee all day/and raced around/who is without legs now/and sits slumped in a wheelchair.”

In a powerful prose poem he recalls “Marty” who “...had big breasts and/bitty balls and would pop his cork by laying on his belly/and kicking himself in the butt with the back of his feet.” and who would say “ ‘sweet juice’ and smile sometimes after he/washed down his meds with an extra cup of cherry/Kool-Aid. Otherwise the only sound that would come/out of his mouth was something that sounded like/ ‘ah-coo-cha-la’ which one nurse said was shim talk for/ ‘I’ll cut your head off.’ ‘Ah-coo-cha-la’ was Marty’s/ war cry...”

Fagiani also pays deep attention to staff members working and retired like Miss Hunter, found dead, "her stroke-stiffened head/purple as an eggplant." The story of her life is discovered in her possessions, evidence plenty enough to inspire a novelist and tenderly cataloged by the poet include "a framed certificate of appreciation/signed by the governor,/a large print bible/an electric broiler/two auburn hair extensions,/a wig cleaning kit,/a chrome cocktail shaker,/two packs of Gypsy Good Time/playing cards,/and a book on how to interpret dreams/for love and money."

This is gritty and nicely-crafted work culminates in a complex poem about paranoia and suicidal ideations ironically titled "My Wife Accused Me of Having Another Woman." Throughout Serfs of Psychiatry, Gil Fagiani never goes out of his way to spare himself. Highly recommended. Go to Finishing Line Press to order.

Ultimately,

the person who

you most need to impress

with the quality of your work

is yourself.

— Ed Coletti

15 Aphorisms from Vera Pavlova's

Heaven Is Not Verbose: A Notebook

(for full text, go to Poetry (April 2012)

Inspiration: when I have confidence in myself.
Pick a piece of wood floating in the river and follow it down the current with your glance, keeping the eyes constantly on it, without getting ahead of the current. This is the way poetry should be read: at the pace of a line.
How do I feel about people who do not understand my poetry? I understand them.
Being well-known means knowing almost nothing as to who knows you and what they might know about you.
Poetry begins when not only the reader but also the author starts wondering whether it is poetry.
I write to equalize the pressure from without and from within, to prevent being squashed (by misery) or being blown apart ( by happiness).
- Do you understand that understanding is impossible? - I do.
By giving my books as presents, I mark my territory.
Stravinsky: "I like writing music more than I like music."
A fisherman told me: "Writing poetry must be like digging for earthworms: you grab the critter by the end and pull. Pull too hard, and it'll break/ not hard enough, it'll get away."
From a letter of a young poet: "I write when I feel bad. When I feel fine, I don't write." With me, it's the opposite: when I write, I feel fine. I feel bad when I do not write.
An ideal poem: every line of it can serve as a title for a book.
Reader: Do you want me to recognize my everyday world in your poems? Poet: No, I want your world to seem unfamiliar to you, once you take your eyes off the text.
When a true poet dies, we realize that all his poems were about death.
Reader: Yevtushenko claims that in Russia a poet is something more than just a poet. Is that true? Poet: No, nothing can be more than a poet.
Comment or Read Comments Here on any of the above or below. If you do not have a Google account, log in under "Name/URL," (it's easy). Just the name (don't worry about the URL). Actual name is best, but use what you like. Or email me at edcoletti@sbcglobal.net, and I can post it.

Monday, April 09, 2012

Bennett On Corso/Rothenberg On KickStart/Vonnegut On Schoolbook Censorship/

Thanks to terrific Don Wentworth, editor of the Lilliput Review for the following from poet John Bennett on Issa's Untidy Hut

Rainy Day Rag Man
John Bennett

(for Gregory Corso 1930 - 2001)

He's barking at the moon. He's barking up the wrong tree. He's tangled up in blue. He's shoplifting dialects and dangling them with hangman's rope from his crash-pad ceiling. On come the black lights, the strobe lights, the bright lights, the stage lights--let there be light! he cries out, naked as a blue jay and flat-out on the shag rug, throwing darts at the ceiling.

He's seen rumors flying like wounded bats and false evidence stuck like gum to his shoe soles. He's seen dreams go up in smoke, grave conclusions dumped in body bags from hot-air balloons, fist-sized monkeys nailed to fence posts. He's grown gun-shy of false promise, mauled hope, pontifications and the fine-print of love. His soul is like an ironclad Merrimack sending volleys over the bow of a Nantucket schooner. The Lie is self--perpetrating, the dark stain is everywhere.

He's a rainy day rag man with a push-cart mind, a midnight tailor in the attic stitching pockets shut. He's the mutant love child of our unabashed sham.

He's the weather vane that tells how the wind blows, the dimpled vulva of the wicked queen, the death throe of our whacked self-importance as we prance around like wind-up toys with our chests puffed out. He's the last train to Brooklyn, the last prophet before Humpty-Dumpty takes the dive.

He has other names too if you're interested, but of course you're not, this being Sunday, a time for worship and contact sports.

-- John Bennett

Comment or Read Comments Here on any of the above or below. Log in under "Name/URL," (it's easy). Just the name (don't worry about the URL). Actual name is best, but use what you like. Or email me at edcoletti@sbcglobal.net, and I can post it.

Check this out from Michael Rothenberg and Terri Carrion who spearheaded the recent 100,000 Poets For Change and who are continuing the literally earth shaking effort. Go to the link 100 Thousand Poets for Change, Event.

Watch the exciting video there. Consider giving anything you can!

It kills me to read that morons in Texas who choose school text books make their decisions on the basis of non-science and religion. Were their malice restricted to the children of Texas alone, that in itself would be criminal However, the Texas choices, for some reason or other, are observed by school districts around the country. The following letter from Kurt Vonnegut on a similar subject was sent in 1973. I owe its discovery to the wonderful blog Letters of Note (correspondence deserving of a wider audience)

In October of 1973, Bruce Severy — a 26-year-old English teacher at Drake High School, North Dakota — decided to use Kurt Vonnegut's novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, as a teaching aid in his classroom. The next month, on November 7th, the head of the school board, Charles McCarthy, demanded that all 32 copies be burned in the school's furnace as a result of its "obscene language." Other books soon met with the same fate.

On the 16th of November, Kurt Vonnegut sent McCarthy the following letter. He didn't receive a reply.

(Source: Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage; Image: Kurt Vonnegut, via Everything was Vonnegut.)

November 16, 1973

Dear Mr. McCarthy:

I am writing to you in your capacity as chairman of the Drake School Board. I am among those American writers whose books have been destroyed in the now famous furnace of your school.

Certain members of your community have suggested that my work is evil. This is extraordinarily insulting to me. The news from Drake indicates to me that books and writers are very unreal to you people. I am writing this letter to let you know how real I am.

I want you to know, too, that my publisher and I have done absolutely nothing to exploit the disgusting news from Drake. We are not clapping each other on the back, crowing about all the books we will sell because of the news. We have declined to go on television, have written no fiery letters to editorial pages, have granted no lengthy interviews. We are angered and sickened and saddened. And no copies of this letter have been sent to anybody else. You now hold the only copy in your hands. It is a strictly private letter from me to the people of Drake, who have done so much to damage my reputation in the eyes of their children and then in the eyes of the world. Do you have the courage and ordinary decency to show this letter to the people, or will it, too, be consigned to the fires of your furnace?

I gather from what I read in the papers and hear on television that you imagine me, and some other writers, too, as being sort of ratlike people who enjoy making money from poisoning the minds of young people. I am in fact a large, strong person, fifty-one years old, who did a lot of farm work as a boy, who is good with tools. I have raised six children, three my own and three adopted. They have all turned out well. Two of them are farmers. I am a combat infantry veteran from World War II, and hold a Purple Heart. I have earned whatever I own by hard work. I have never been arrested or sued for anything. I am so much trusted with young people and by young people that I have served on the faculties of the University of Iowa, Harvard, and the City College of New York. Every year I receive at least a dozen invitations to be commencement speaker at colleges and high schools. My books are probably more widely used in schools than those of any other living American fiction writer.

If you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are. It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life. Especially soldiers and hardworking men speak coarsely, and even our most sheltered children know that. And we all know, too, that those words really don’t damage children much. They didn’t damage us when we were young. It was evil deeds and lying that hurt us.

After I have said all this, I am sure you are still ready to respond, in effect, “Yes, yes–but it still remains our right and our responsibility to decide what books our children are going to be made to read in our community.” This is surely so. But it is also true that if you exercise that right and fulfill that responsibility in an ignorant, harsh, un-American manner, then people are entitled to call you bad citizens and fools. Even your own children are entitled to call you that.

I read in the newspaper that your community is mystified by the outcry from all over the country about what you have done. Well, you have discovered that Drake is a part of American civilization, and your fellow Americans can’t stand it that you have behaved in such an uncivilized way. Perhaps you will learn from this that books are sacred to free men for very good reasons, and that wars have been fought against nations which hate books and burn them. If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own.

If you and your board are now determined to show that you in fact have wisdom and maturity when you exercise your powers over the eduction of your young, then you should acknowledge that it was a rotten lesson you taught young people in a free society when you denounced and then burned books–books you hadn’t even read. You should also resolve to expose your children to all sorts of opinions and information, in order that they will be better equipped to make decisions and to survive.

Again: you have insulted me, and I am a good citizen, and I am very real.

Kurt Vonnegut

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