Will the Circle Be Unbroken?

By Michael Brosnan

After reading A.O. Scott’s recent tribute to artist, novelist, and critic John Berger, I felt a need to read, or reread, some of Berger’s writings. I had read Berger’s Ways of Seeing back in the 1980s, though I couldn’t remember much beyond the vague sense that I liked both his perspective and how he writes.

So I went in search of one of his books. Nothing on my bookshelf. Nothing in the local town library. Nothing in the local bookstores — even in the bookshop that carries a large collection of books on art. So I drove over to the nearby university library, where the only Berger book I could borrow was his 2011 collection of short, interconnected essays, Bento’s Sketchbook, with the engaging hand-drawn subtitle, How does the impulse to draw something begin? It’s a question I’ve never considered, but now that it was presented to me in the stacks of a university library, I was intrigued. So I borrowed the book.

There’s much to recommend in Bento’s Sketchbook, of course. A.O. Scott is right in praising Berger’s writing. There’s something compelling about the way he sees the world, especially the way he looks so thoroughly and thoughtfully at people and objects, at art and literature, at culture and the shape of our social interactions, and at the flow of the natural world.

The “Bento” in the title is the 17th century philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, who went by the nickname Bento. Spinoza, Berger reminds us, earned his living as a lens-grinder, but he also spent time writing two important philosophical works, On the Improvement of the Understanding and Ethics. While Berger is interested in these writings, he is also intrigued to learn that Spinoza carried around a sketchbook and in his travels made detailed drawings of objects and people. Because the sketchbook was lost over time, Berger finds himself imagining the drawings — and, later, after a publisher gives him a new sketchbook, Berger dubs it “Bento’s Sketchbook” and begins making drawings of things that catch his eye and that related to elements of Spinoza’s philosophy. The book contains Berger’s writing and sketches alongside related passages from Spinoza.

While I encourage you to read Bento’s Sketchbook, I mostly want to comment here on Berger’s sudden turn midbook to the question of tyranny. It comes as a surprise (to me, at least), given that much of the book focuses on smaller, more private moments in art — the telling facial expressions, the opening of flowers, a favorite bicycle, the depth of living captured in certain portraits, etc. Berger turns to the question of tyranny as a prelude to his commentary on artists and writers who have experienced tyranny and create works that counter it. I was particularly struck by Berger’s clarity about what tyranny is.

In the essay, Berger first notes “that the human capacity for cruelty is limitless.” Then he reconsiders, declaring that it’s more that “human indifference to cruelty is limitless.” In his revision, Berger makes it clear that what matters most is how we, individually and collectively, respond to tyrants. History implies that we are not very good at it — or have not been so to date. Most of us, in fact, are better at offering reasons — logical reasons, we tell ourselves — for turning away from the suffering of others under the cloud of tyranny. In our social media era, regardless of what we might believe, we can also easily lose focus and forget the suffering of others. The flashiness of the internet encourages us to slip into the kind of endless, wasteful scrolling that makes Meta execs happy.

Berger does not turn away, however. In Bento’s Sketchbook, he describes the tyranny that is fueled by and that fuels cruelty. “Its workings may vary according to each continent and its modes are modified by local history,” he writes, “but its overall pattern is the same, a circular pattern.”

Here’s the pattern:

“The division between the poor and the relatively rich becomes an abyss. Traditional restrains and recommendations are shattered. Consumerism consumes all questioning. The past becomes obsolete. Consequently people lose their selfhood, their sense of identity, and they locate and find an enemy in order to define themselves. The enemy — whatever their ethnic and religious nomination — is always found amongst the poor. This is where the circular pattern is vicious.

The system economically produces, alongside wealth, more and more poverty, more and more homeless families, while simultaneously it politically promotes ideologies which articulate and justify the exclusion and eventual elimination of the hordes of new poor.”

Berger concludes: “It is this new political-economic circle which today encourages the constant human capacity for cruelties that obliterate the human imagination.”

Berger, who died in 2017, is, of course, encouraging and supporting artists and writers who bear witness to the effects of tyranny (see also Carolyn Forché’s Poetry of Witness). But what matters equally is that we read these writers and study these artists so that we see tyranny more clearly — and through our own actions help break the cycle.

It’s not just about reading or viewing art and coming to a personal understanding of tyranny. It’s about voting and helping to get out the vote. It’s about protesting in the name of justice. In the U.S. it’s about standing up for the aspirations and ideals presented in our founding documents. It’s about us coming to a far better understanding of the troubling relationship between democracy and capitalism. It’s about coming to a far clearer picture of the immigrant experience and the real impact of immigration on our nation. It’s about encouraging religious institutions to embrace their own moral reasoning — counter hatred and intolerance and division. It’s about resisting the impulse for war and improving diplomacy. It’s about understanding climate change and taking steps to stop and reverse the damage and suffering it causes.

I suppose, for Berger, all of this is related to the art of looking. To ways of seeing. (I agree — thus the name of this Substack page: Between the Eye and the Hand.) What we see, what we learn through our senses, feeds how we think and act. And it seems to me we’re at a critical juncture. We can either shrug off the circular systems that feed  the current strains of tyranny or we can respond as caring, thoughtful, moral people do.

Berger is quite articulate on the subject. More so than I am. So I’ll leave you with his quote from a conversation he had with writer Arundhati Roy, who witnessed the widespread massacre of Muslims by Hindus in India in the spring of 2002.

“The question here, really, is what have we done to democracy? What have we turned it into?” Roy says. “What happens… when it has been hollowed out and emptied of meaning?”

Jorie Graham, Killing Spree, and the Question of “Difficult” Poetry

By Michael Brosnan

In a review of Jorie Graham’s 2012 book, Place, Weston Cutter writes: “She’s quite simply doing more, engaging more, with structure than 99.9% of poets presently working. If you read Graham and feel her, the structural tinkering and finickiness ultimately resonates doubly, quadruply — her layout decisions will seem shockingly smart, twitchily incredible, generous to the reader (because of how much it’ll feel like she’s thinking of the poem, of how to make it deliver in as many ways as possible). If you don’t feel her, her moves will likely leave you thinking she’s just trying to play her intelligence across various levels, like she’s showing off.”

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He adds: “Writer friends of mine have said they can get through Graham’s first two books — Hybrids of Plants and Ghosts and Erosion — but thereafter they lose the thread.”

I came upon these comments, and others, after reading and re-reading Graham’s 2026 book, Killing Spree, her 16th poetry book and the fourth that deals with apocalyptic themes. I went looking for the commentary in part because of my own mix of appreciation for, bafflement by, and uncertainty about Graham’s poetry. I thought it might help me to read some other critiques of her writing to make sense of my own response to it.

The general view on Graham’s poetry seems to me to be spot on. She really is writing some remarkable poetry. I would not presume to list her above 99.9% of currently working poets. That kind of ranking feels hollow — and too dismissive of some astonishingly great poets at work today. And, anyway, who has read all the poetry that’s out there? But Graham’s writing, though rarely easy, feels both smart and deeply engaging. In many of her poems, in Killing Spree and elsewhere, you are being asked to feel your way through the world, real or imagined, alongside the poet herself. This way of exploring ideas and emotions is not a new direction in poetry, but it’s one Graham takes further than most contemporary poets I’ve read. We’re not getting the carefully considered brilliant clarity of thought and language that gives shape to so many famous poems — that poetic confidence in a given perspective. But we know Graham is thinking long and hard on her subject and reworking her canvas with deep care, line by line by line break. It’s not the stream of consciousness you get in, say, Alice Notley’s poetry. But you feel the intuitive pulse behind the poems along with the careful structuring of language. You feel the inquiry. It’s where the strength of the poems lie, I think.

The poems in Killing Spree do seem to me to be “shockingly smart, twitchily incredible, generous to the reader.” Graham may be showing off a bit, too, but I admire how she drags us into these metaphysical waters and insists that we swim in the wild currents with her. With its overarching theme of our collective human folly and the weight of moral failings, Killing Spree feels like an important book for our times. On every page, we’re asked to be attentive to what we can and have and will likely lose in our strange and strained relationship to all that is right and morally good. There’s also the underlying question of evil and how it seems to flourish as a kind of cultural cancer that can spread quickly if we look away. The themes cut not just close to the bone, they cut into the bone.

Although it’s not exactly clear what has happened in the book’s imagined world, it’s clear that we’ve been dropped into a post-apocalyptic world. Threaded throughout the poems is that sense of shock at what has happened — not just the violence but also the speed of it. It’s hard to say who is narrating the poems, or even if there’s a single narrator, but we are drawn in by the speaker’s voice in each poem — the hesitant expression of shock, the wish to understand, the regrets about not seeing the changes coming (how could we not see them?), and the general worries, sadness, and pain. Our beautiful world in ruins.

The book opens with “The World.” The poem gives you no time to breathe, since the title is also the opening words of poem. We are told “The World… //didn’t change much // at first.” But then it does. Instantly. What happened? We don’t know. But we know it’s not for the better.

“The World” is such a strange and disturbing poem because the narrator can’t find the words to describe what happened or what she feels about it. Not precisely. We get no concrete images in the poem — just vague references to a world gone wrong, hinting at immense destruction, a ruined atmosphere, the sudden quiet. We are left with lots of questions. “What is it // that is dis;- // possessed. Can it ever be re- // possessed. Never?” The uncertainty is clear in the line breaks. There’s also the unusual decision not to use question marks with all the questions — as if the speaker is simply too tired to bother. Within the poem’s lack of concrete images and the hesitant, questioning language, we are suddenly told “no one survived.” Though that might not be true either. It’s easy to envision the speaker walking about the ruins of civilization in shock — thinking it’s important to document all this. But she is uncertain of what to say or even how to say it.

What I will hold onto in this opening poem is this question aimed at the reader, at the people who make or break a civilization:

Now and again your soul

wakes up in

spurts asking

what is — or is there — a just

struggle. Then you,

then I, cry out

where are you

everyone…

While the poem does not spell it out, it’s not hard to overlay the effects of catastrophic contemporary events here — the war in Ukraine, the genocide in Gaza, the U.S. government’s attack on civil liberties and the rule of law, the inaction on global warming, the rise of fatal diseases and famine, the human-driven extinction rates, etc. What is just? What is right? How exactly do we carry on with all this?

The second poem, “Who,” offers us a bit more of this imagined world. But it, too, leaves you in a state of uncertainty about what happened or is happening. In “Who,” Graham uses her preferred form — widely varying lines, all justified right. I’ve never loved this form, but I understand that it’s her signature move, and I do see that the varied line lengths and sometimes stunning line breaks are engaging and effective.

But “Who” isn’t going to nail things down for us either. It opens with the question: “Who // can still speak from their cage?” It’s kind of a Rorschach test. You can project a lot of your own feelings here about the world. I started by asking questions of the question. What cages are we talking about? Also, what do you mean by “still speak”? Is this a reference to how we live our lives now? Are there people today who speak from their cage? Is that what I’m trying to do now? Or is this a metaphor for our lives in a capitalist society, a way of expressing the bonds and bondage of social living?

While we don’t get answers from the poem, it’s still easy to slide into this harsh landscape and wait for more crumbs and clues. Take the line: “The want to look out failed.” Seems like we’re moving closer to an explanation of the kind of human shortcomings that could account for our enabling of catastrophe. The deliberate and strange construction of the line leaves me thinking either:

• We failed to look out for those forces that could, and in the poem did, destroy our fragile community and planet.

Or:

• We once did look out for cracks in the moral fiber of society and took steps to repair it. But we somehow lost the desire — and now we’ve laid ourselves wide open to self-destruction.

I don’t know. All I know is that Graham is dragging us into a broken landscape that feels like a real possibility. The narrator is still narrating, which I take as a good thing, but she is also on the verge of giving up:

I do not try to understand what happened.

I do not recall the smell of spring.

It shall not thaw again in my time.

In this Cormac McCarthy kind of world, the narrator is on the precipice of resignation but is able to pull herself back from the edge. In the coming poems we’re encouraged to look more carefully at the moral considerations and fights we need to take up now, while we have the chance to set civilization on a better path.

Throughout the 22 poems, the narrator’s tone rises out of shock into something more determined. You could call all this poetry of witness, I suppose. But the unfolding of feelings and response takes time. In “You Shall Not Speak,” the narrator says: “I must speak // what is in my // heart. I don’t know // if there’s anything left now in // my heart.”

But clearly there is something left. She tells us that we’ve pushed too far — our species “fleshed out, flashed out” — but there’s a sense of hope, too: “know enough then to // sing instead — sing! — and the right song, the surprising one full of // forgiveness.”

We’re offered no details about the killing spree except that it started in the suburbs, but there’s plenty of commentary on politics, journalism, religion, individual responsibility, the kind of stuff we know we can and should improve upon in our current world.

God knows, I’m probably butchering Killing Spree here. I do know that Graham would rather us not pin her writing down with pointed facts and logic. Graham once told the Paris Review:

“I’d say poetry wants to be contagious, to be a contagion. Its syntax wants to pass something on to an other in the way that you can, for example, pass laughter on. It’s different from being persuasive and making an argument. That’s why great poems have so few arguments in them. They don’t want to make the reader ‘agree.’ They don’t want to move through the head that way. They want to go from body to body. Built in is the belief that such community — could one even say ceremony — might ‘save’ the world.”

Anne Carson, winner of the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature, said something similar about the goal of poetry. After noting that, as a professor, she focuses on presenting a truth that she hopes you will come to share, Carson said, “The best thing a work of art can do is take your mind with it, moving somewhere that you never expected to move.”

I love this perspective. Still, there’s a part of me that always wants to reach for facts and logic, some truth that will help us pin down the meaning of a poem, and perhaps help us recalibrate how we see life. For instance, I read recently that public opinion shows that while people understand nuclear weapons as a real and present danger, the threat of nuclear war rarely makes our lists of major concerns. This is one of those odd quirks of the human psyche. Because it’s hard to contemplate the damage nuclear weapons could do in a matter of minutes, our minds tend to block out the possibility that it could occur. But the facts are clear: It could occur.

As I read in a review of three new books on the nuclear threat: “Each of America’s fourteen nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines is capable of launching 160 warheads with the combined explosive force of up to 73,000 kilotons, the equivalent of 5,000 Hiroshimas. The Russians possess a similar capability. A mere fraction of the nuclear weapons that exist today could kill millions of people within minutes.” Hundreds of detonations could trigger a nuclear winter resulting in massive disruption to our ability to produce food and thus threaten billions of people worldwide. The rest of nature, of course, would suffer alongside us.

Both the U.S. and Russia have walked away from treaties that would reduce the threat. And both nations are currently led by unstable, manipulative men with the power to launch strikes at their whim. Meanwhile, the world’s 440 nuclear power plants remain likely military targets. On January 27, 2026, the Doomsday Clock, created by an association of atomic scientists, was set at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest the clock has ever been to midnight in its history.

I don’t know if Jorie Graham had any of this in mind while writing Killing Spree. But for me, to think about the nuclear threat — especially how we subconsciously try not to think about the nuclear threat — while reading Killing Spree helps me understand the kind of global damage Graham imagines here. The catastrophe is not just within the realm of possibilities. It leans closer and closer to a likelihood. Serhii Plokhy, author of The Nuclear Age: An Epic Race for Arms, Power, and Survival, argues that we are in “a more dangerous situation today than we have been since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.” Still, we find a way to live as if it were not really a concern.

I suppose I’m coming around here to say simply: I appreciate Jorie Graham taking on this theme. I get why some people think of her as a difficult poet to read. I feel that way at times. But there’s something powerful and moving about Killing Spree — in subject matter, style, and form. There is also something deeply engaging about Graham’s instincts as a poet — the essential ethical impulse linked to her creative, intuitive, go-for-it rule breaking.

In the end, the narrator asks the two pertinent questions (again without question marks):

What have I done.

What will I become.

In these tipping-point times for humanity and the planet, these are key questions for all of us. And it matters that we have poetry that presses the question of how we best live in relationship to each other and the planet.

Reverence

Ask candidates for public office: What do you revere?

By Michael Brosnan

I’ve been working my way through Paul Woodruff’s 2001 book, Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue. And it seems to me that this is another one of those good — and instructive — books for our times.

At the start, Woodruff — a professor of philosophy at the University of Texas, Austin, who died in 2023 — makes the essential point about the importance of reverence for our lives in general, but especially for those who want to lead:

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“Reverence begins in a deep understanding of human limitations; from this grows the capacity to be in awe of whatever we believe lies outside our control — God, truth, justice, nature, even death….

“Reverence is the virtue that keeps leaders from trying to take tight control of other people’s lives. Simply put, reverence is the virtue that keeps human beings from trying to act like gods.

“To forget that you are only human, to think you can act like a god — this is the opposite of reverence. Ancient Greeks thought that tyranny was the height of irreverence, and they gave the famous name of hubris to the crimes of tyranny.

“…[p]ower without reverence — that is a catastrophe for all.”

Maybe when we see candidates for public office in the mid-term elections this fall (and again in 2028 for the president election), we should ask each candidate: What do you revere, and why? It will tell us more about their character than any question on policy.

As Woodruff’s subtitle makes clear, reverence is a virtue we should nurture more consciously. Without reverence, Woodruff says, things fall apart. Without reverence, we don’t have a clear reason to protect the natural world, or care for the poor, or work for justice, or contribute to our communities and families.

Reverence is not the same as respect. As Woodruff points out, under the umbrella of reverence, it is sometimes right to be respectful and somethings wrong. To pay respect to a tyrant, for instance, would not be reverent. It would be more akin to cowardice. At its core, reverence asks that we have “a well-developed capacity to have the feelings of awe, respect, and shame when these are the right feelings to have.”

A clear sense of reverence will help us work collectively for a well-functioning democracy led by people who respect the rule of law and work with others for the greater good. It will help us rein in AI so that it serves our shared needs, not corporate profits or the power hunger of corrupt politicians. Reverence will help us understand the value in all religious practices while discouraging engaging in discrimination, exclusion, violence, and war based on some poorly imagined idea of God and his/her will. It will help all who find themselves in leadership positions in any field to do the right thing in any given situation. It will help us reshape immigration policies, farming practices, use of natural resources, and our perspective on war. It will help us create educational programs that brings out the best in each child — academically, emotionally, spiritually, physically.

Of course, I love that Woodruff says he found a greater understanding of reverence among poets than philosophers — but he also makes it clear that what matters most is how each of us understands the virtue and applies it to our private and public lives.

“If you desire peace in the world,” Woodruff writes, “do not pray that everyone share your beliefs. Pray instead that all may be reverent.”

DEI, Education, and Democracy

By Michael Brosnan

— for Wendell Berry

In this column, I’ve toggled between creative writing and reflecting on the field of education. That’s because both have been central to my writing life — my sense of what matters in this world.

Today, I’m jumping back to education. Over the years, I’ve written numerous pieces on education, including a book on a remarkable urban school that has succeeded where others have fallen short in our efforts to educate children well across the economic spectrum. The book, Against the Current, highlights clear ways a school — in this case, an independent public school — can reverse the drop-out trends and help low-income students find success in school and in life. The book also served as a model for an award-winning documentary film, Accelerating America, on the same subject.

That mid-1990s project opened my eyes more fully to questions of economic and racial injustices in the nation — how they are linked and how they play out in our schools and culture at large. Indeed, I came to understand how so many of our systems — some by intent, some by happenstance — have served to sustain these inequities.

My essential understanding — then and now — is that, collectively, we’ve set up our schools to favor the rich and stifle economic and social gains for people of color and the poor in general. The statistical evidence has held steady for decades. Dozens of well-researched books — including the groundbreaking works of Jonathan Kozol and the more recent works from Lisa Delpit, Beverly Daniel Tatum, Heather McGhee, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Diane Ravitch, and others — present the essential problem of embedded racism and classism in ways that are clear and irrefutable. The reason I write about these matters is that (1) I believe many of us don’t see the problem accurately and that, if we could, (2) we’d work to correct it together. I do not believe the racism and classism we embody are the will of the American people. I also know we can do so much better. By paying better attention to race and class in schools and society, we can make America a more thriving, productive, safe, and happy, world-leading democracy — one that might actually live up to the ideals our founders aspired to. We can improve life for all citizens and contribute to a healthy global community.

In short, I see quality education as central to our nation and human civilization. And central to improving the quality of education is a clear awareness of the ongoing damaging impact of racial and economic injustices.

In the 1990s through the early 2000s, I was highly optimistic about the future of education. I witnessed remarkable improvement in how we educate children across the entire K-16 spectrum. We learned a great deal about ways to support and promote intellectual engagement. We learned why and how to prioritize social-emotional learning, the mind-body connection. We came to understand the subtle and important differences in what works for boys and what works for girls in schools, separate and together. We learned what the best early childhood learning programs do and how to rethink those complicated middle-school years in order to better shepherd preteens and early teens through that tough human transition. While brain science helped us understand the role of student resiliency and grit, we also learned to create supportive communities and encourage empathy and collaboration. The magazine I edited for over 20 years looked at the whole gamut — from school leadership to hiring and retaining quality teachers, to developing best-in-field teaching methods, to effective use of homework, to creating better daily scheduling, to outdoor and environmental learning, to the wise integration of technology, to healthy sports and wellness programs. Even questions about better lunches and school architecture earned space.

A major thread through those years was about the growing understanding and importance of considering the background and needs of all students — how we meet students where they are and get them to where they need to be. And central to it all was a deep understanding of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programming in schools. Programs that examine education through a lens of race and economics are essential in helping schools reach the sort of outcomes they want for every student.

The future seemed bright.

So I admit that when the conservative-led DEI backlash began, I assumed it would be short-lived. I assumed that logic, reason, fact, morality, and truth would quickly kick in — and that whatever shortcomings or growing pains DEI programs might have, the overall value would settle in.

Since that has not happened — not yet — I wanted to respond with an encouragement.

When we read in the press about DEI issues in education these days — as it exists in both the precollegiate world and higher education — the articles tend to get caught in finger pointing and accusations. Conservative groups and individuals on the right think people on the left are damaging America and American culture by, I don’t know, showing too much concern about systemic and cultural injustices and too much empathy for those who have less than they have. The conservative claim is that DEI programs are essentially racist and that out-of-control “wokeness” injures white people simply by asking white people to consider the longstanding injustices embedded in our systems. The Supreme Court offered troubling support for these views by rejecting affirmative action programs in colleges and universities designed for fair admissions and academic excellence. The court decision was followed by nearly 20 states passing laws banning DEI initiatives. The Trump administration, always anxious to bully some segment of a population it’s supposed to serve and protect, decided it should attack institutions of high education that embrace fair admissions policies — particularly Harvard University — by both suing them and withdrawing research funding vital to various fields of study and to the nation.

Last week, Trump administration continued its attack and mischaracterization of schools that care about racial and economic justice — threatening to remove the tax-exempt status from private, nonprofit schools and colleges that offer targeted scholarships and support to Black or other minority students.

In these anti-democratic actions, the Trump administration and its backers seem to think they are somehow improving the nation and the world. But they are not.

What few mainstream news articles remember to include is why the push for DEI arrived in the 1990s in the first place. Or why there are essential reasons these programs still matter. The noise is too much about some imagined battle for a winner-takes-all political dominance.

The Trump administration would like nothing more than to rewrite American history in a way that literally whitewashes the brutality in the nation’s founding. I get the instinct: We all want to belong to a good story, an exemplary history. It’s nice to think of oneself as a good guy. But the truth of our founding, of course, involves the violent displacement of Native Americans and a long, brutal, immoral reliance on slavery. Our history continues to play out this story of racial and socioeconomic dominance. Efforts at righting these clear wrongs have been made over the years — through formal civil rights legislation and broader cultural and religious efforts — but the reality is that we haven’t come close to living up to our founding documents or our purported ideals. In our current times, racial and socioeconomic inequities remain unconscionably large and have held steady for decades. Efforts to open honest conversation in the name of an honest democracy have been thwarted by many predominantly white, powerful, conservative Americans and their “think tanks,” all of whom somehow believe a fair, just democracy is not a national goal.

So we remain stuck in a place where, at almost every turn, it’s far more difficult in America to Black or Latino than to be white. One could fill pages with the statistics behind the myriad inequities and injustices. I don’t think it’s necessary here; the statistics are widely available. However, I did want to mention two that underlie most of the others: the racial wealth gap and the general wealth divide.

According to the 2024 U.S. Census, the typical wealth of a white households is 10 times greater than that of a Black householder. The numbers have fluctuated slightly over time, but the gap has always been large, and the national efforts to avoid discussions about systemic racism continue to keep the gap high. So, today, on average, for every $10 a Black family has, a white family has $100.

Money isn’t everything, of course. But in America, it affects most everything we do and what we have access to. What I wish we’d also keep front and center are the injustices that parallel this systemically shaped and controlled lack of wealth for Blacks and Latinos. Compared with whites, they face the far greater discrimination when it comes to access to jobs, education, housing, health care, quality food, healthy environments, and more. Blacks and Latinos face unemployment rates double those for whites. They face far greater abuse in our criminal justice system. They are incarcerated at a far higher rate than whites and are seven times more likely to be wrongfully convicted of murder than white people and are more likely to end up on death row.

They also attend poorer, lower-resourced schools, and thus have less access to higher education and all that higher ed offers.

None of this has happened by chance. In his book Poverty, by America, Matthew Desmond makes clear the essential issue facing us: “Tens of millions of Americans do not end up poor by mistake of history or personal conduct. Poverty persists because some wish and will it to.”

Desmond encourages us to be “poverty abolitionists” — people committed to ending financial, political, and social obstacles to economic health for all Americans. He encourages raising the minimum wage to a living wage, regulating bank fees, expanding housing access, and offering universal health care. He’d like us to end welfare programs for the wealthy based on tax breaks. But he’s also aware that we need to be a more racially integrated nation in this process, which includes access to quality education for all children.

“When families across the class spectrum send their children to the same schools, picnic in the same parks, and walk the same streets, those families are equally invested in those schools, those parks, those streets,” Desmond writes.

As we move into the midterm elections, I hope we can keep this thought front and center. The future of America depends on how we can break from the collective mindset that inequities are personal issues not public ones. The steps forward have been complicated by the Supreme Court and new state laws, but it’s still possible for us to create policies and programs for schools and society that will help break the grip of racial and economic injustice.

What Wendell Berry Says

Another voice that has helped me process these questions of diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice in America is that of Wendell Berry — poet, novelist, essayist, farmer, and extraordinary human being. Berry died recently at age 92.

In The Hidden Wound — Berry’s book-length reflection on race in America, first published in 1970 — Berry’s aim is to encourage the kind of moral outcomes we all seek and yet seem to struggle to achieve. He was one of the first white writers to deeply examine the effects of modern-day racism on white people. At the time of The Hidden Wound’s publication, many whites thought of racism and racial inequities as a problem affecting people of color only. Whites working for racial justice saw their efforts as a matter of our predominantly white nation offering more opportunities for people of color. The history of racism was clear, but there was little effort given to examining the historical and ongoing negative effects of our racially divisions on white people themselves.

So Berry makes the central point crystal clear at the start of his book:

“If I had thought it was only the black people who have suffered from the years of slavery and racism, then I could have dealt fully with the matter long ago; I could have filled myself with pity for them, and would no doubt have enjoyed it a great deal and thought highly of myself. But I am sure it is not so simple as that. If white people have suffered less obviously from racism than black people, they have nevertheless suffered greatly; the cost is perhaps greater than we yet know.”

The years to follow would prove Berry correct. Racism has hurt us all socially and economically — and continues to do so today. The effects vary by race, gender, and individual experience, but the damage is felt all around. Centuries of slavery, the era of Jim Crow, and ongoing racism and racial inequity may have made life relatively easier for white people than for people of color, but they have nevertheless hurt everyone in this culture. The injury runs deep — deeper than we are often able to admit.

Contemporary research has proven this point over and over — and, indeed, Berry’s essay has been foundational in subsequent studies of whiteness and white identity in American society and underscores the argument that all of us have an obligation and interest to engage in antiracist work.

But rereading The Hidden Wound recently, I had a sense that few of us, myself included, have dug deep enough into Berry’s argument to understand exactly how wide and deep the wound is. It’s not just the immorality embodied in a system that favors some over others. It’s not just that it’s wrong to participate in the suffering of others. It’s not just that the inequities by race keep us from fulfilling our collective democratic principles. It’s not just that racist laws, practices, and perspectives divide us and have kept us from learning from each other. It’s not just that the white power structures have denied opportunities to Black people and other people of color that might otherwise have led to greater discoveries and contributions to society. For Berry, it is all these things. But it’s also that racism has led us to create a badly misshapen society that, at best, holds us back, and, at worst, drives us toward ruin. It has enabled a hyper-focus on economics to dominate our democratic society in unhealthy ways. It has supported and encouraged the maintenance of a power elite that has created and sustained an underclass and has used the poor for its personal gain in ways that have made ours the most economically inequitable nation in human history. It has corrupted the key spiritual concepts of Christianity and moral living. It has undermined our ability to build and maintain thriving community life. It keeps too many of us anxious and uncertain about our place in society — and deeply worried about the future. And it has been a key factor in our separation from the natural environment — enabling us against our better judgment to wreak unprecedented havoc on the natural world in the name of small, short-term economic gains, and to resist taking action that would prevent further damage for future generations.

If you are staring at any of the above points with questions or doubts, I encourage you to read The Hidden Wound. Berry’s points are well presented and defended. That many white people can’t or don’t yet see these wide-ranging effects clearly, Berry argues, is due to the fact that, in order to maintain unjust structures, we are encouraged not to examine them. “However conscious it may have been,” he writes, “there is no doubt in my mind that all this moral and verbal obfuscation is intentional.”

Change is inevitable, of course, but the kind of change we need only comes about with greater clarity of vision and purpose. In much of Berry’s writing — in The Hidden Wound and in many of the other 50-plus books — the central argument is a moral one based on principles that underpin our democratic founding but that have never managed to take center stage. The book encourages nothing less than the reimagining of our democracy — with greater attention paid to the intersection of economics, environmental ethics, and human communities.

I see elements of Berry’s argument in the efforts of educators who are working for more economically and racially equitable educational systems and programs on behalf of all students. But I think it’s worth looking more deeply at what exactly we’re hoping to achieve in the process. The push for excellence and justice in schools is connected to our essential democratic goals.

By supporting thoughtful DEI programming in schools and elsewhere, our nation will be stronger, more unified, more productive. And I believe our sense of ourselves and our happiness will be greatly improved. We will live with less fear and anxiety and look forward to a better future.

It’s About All of Us

Sociobiologist and Pulitzer Prize–winning writer E.O. Wilson wrote, “We have created a Star Wars civilization with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.”

It’s those Stone Age hearts I think about most. The way we too often lean toward tribalism, fear change, demonize others. Wilson more or less invented the field of sociobiology — focusing on the rare species that function in social groups, everything from ants to humans. We’re exceedingly rare in this way. Of all the known species in the world, only around 2 percent fit the definition of social animals. For as long as we’re on this planet, we will continue the communal life. The only intelligent way forward is to figure out how to do it well for a growing population.

I have worked in the field of education long enough to understand that our schools are essential to the future of both humanity and the planet. And I believe that the efforts to make these institutions better year by year is essential to that future. Ensuring a focus that enables our schools to be diverse, equitable, inclusive and just matters a great deal.

So let’s work on softening those Stone Age hearts a little — and get back to work on the question of real human excellence.

Poetry, the Spanish Civil War, and Us

The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) brought immense suffering to all Spaniards, but primarily to the Republicans who fought to defend Spain from Franco’s military-led fascists who eventually prevailed with support from Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and other outside groups. The suffering included not just the loss of loved ones in battle, but ongoing post-war hunger, homelessness, joblessness, uncertainty about the future, steady oppression, and both psychological and physical torture. In all, more than 500,000 Spaniards died in the war, about 200,000 of them Republicans killed in retribution after Franco took power. Franco would go on to rule over Spain until November 1975.

Front and center in the suffering were the Spanish poets who sided with Republicans. Frederico Garcia Lorca was assassinated at the start of the war and his body never found. Miguel Hernández died in prison under brutal conditions. During the war, future Nobel Prize-winning poet Vicente Aleixandre worked as a contributor to El Mono Azul, a Republican cultural magazine. Although he managed stayed in Spain after the war, the Franco regime banned his books from 1936 to 1944. Many other Spanish poets of the era were forced into exile.

While Franco aimed to control and suppress the arts during his time, some important works of art and literature came out of the war. Perhaps the most famous piece is Pablo Picasso’s Guernica — an eleven-feet-by-twenty-five-feet, monochromatic painting depicting the slaughter of civilians in the bombing of Guernica, which killed anywhere from 300 to 1,600 civilians (the numbers vary per report) and destroyed three-quarters of the city’s buildings. The painting was displayed at the Paris World’s Fair in 1937 then spent years traveling around the world. In the realm of literature, we have Ernest Hemmingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and his short story “The Old Man at the Bridge,” along with George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. Hemingway served as a correspondent for the North America Newspaper Alliance during the war. Orwell signed up with the POUM, the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification, to join in the fighting, He’d eventually get shot in the throat in front-line combat. Later, ee would write, “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism as I understand it.”

Sinclair Lewis’s No Pasarán! (1937) took on the corruption of international capitalism based on events in the Spanish Civil War. Archibald MacLeish’s Air Raid (1942) was written in response to the horrific bombing of Guernica, .

Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet Pablo Neruda wrote España en el Corazón / Spain in the Heart about life during the war years. The book was famously printed on improvised paper made from cloth and medical bandages near the battlefront.

In the U.S. and elsewhere, writers were determined to draw more attention to the war and support for the Republican cause. For an American audience, John Peale Bishop and Edna St. Vincent Millay produced And Spain Sings (1937), a collection of poems written by Spanish poets. Among the thousands of foreigners who signed up for the International Brigades to fight along Republicans were some other writers and poets. Years later, American poet Philip Levine wrote The Names of the Lost (1974), eulogizing many of those who died in the Spanish Civil War in defense of democracy.

I mention all this now because I’m currently reading Julian Zabalbeascoa’s 2024 novel, What We Tried to Bury Grows Here. I met Julian Zabalbeascoa at a reading in New Hampshire recently and was surprised to learn that his new novel is about the Spanish Civil War — a topic we don’t hear much about these days, at least in the U.S. There was time when this war caught the attention of the world, as noted above. And there was time when I was deeply taken by the Spanish poets of the mid-20th century, including many of those who wrote about and during the war. Their full-throttle approach to poetry seemed so different from contemporary American poetry of the time — more openhearted and somatic, with such metaphorically rich, earthy language. This is poetry in which you can feel the tears. It interested me, too, how deeply integrated Spanish poets were into the life of the nation — to the point that many fought in the war and were venerated for their unflinching poetic responses to the war and its aftermath.

Zabalbeascoa’s novel, like Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, aims to highlight the human experience in war time over the war’s political and ideological underpinnings, though the politics can’t help but seep through. Zabalbeascoa tells the story through numerous perspectives — a chorus of voices, really. The effect is one that underscores the varied and complicated responses the war elicited from the inside — with some characters trying to stay below the fascist radar and others embracing the imagined glory of fighting for democracy and The Second Spanish Republic. Ultimately, what makes the novel so moving is that no one remains unaffected. All the characters carry a level of doubt and uncertainty along with the pain and suffering. Some find their way through it all. Others don’t.

This is what war does. These are its scars.

I’m grateful for Zabalbeascoa’s novel. It’s not just that I think it’s a good novel, it also brought back for me my sense of the literature of that era. And, of course, it’s hard not to see/feel some parallels to our own times. Here in the U.S. (and elsewhere), the ongoing tensions between right- and left-wing political groups persist in creating tensions that are not easily solved and that impact daily life. In the U.S., the totalitarian leanings of Donald Trump and his cabal have succeeded in damaging our world-leading democracy and sewing internal conflict that, at the end of the day only seems benefits the powerful. This turn of events reminds me of what Orwell said of The Spanish Civil War:

“The broad truth about the war is simple enough. The Spanish bourgeoisie saw a chance of crushing the labor movement, and took it, aided by the Nazi’s and by forces of reaction all over the world.”

I don’t expect the U.S. to devolve into actual civil war, but it’s more than painful to witness the unraveling of our core democratic principles and laws, knowing that negative impact on the lives of so many here and abroad, and the damage it is doing to human society and the world’s natural environments. It’s also painful to see other Americans, who should know better, embrace the racism and hatred running through right-wing politics today. For those of us who believe in a true democracy — a more just, verdant, and peaceful world — there will a lot of cleaning up and rebuilding to do in the coming years.

Being a writer, I’ve also been thinking about the poetic and literary responses to the growing injustices — then and now. I was particularly taken by the work of Spanish Poet Miguel Hernández back in my college days. Zabalbeascoa’s novel offered a good excuse for me to revisit Hernández’s life and work — and consider his poetry in light of larger sphere of what poet Carolyn Forché called “the poetry of witness.”

Hernández, a self-educated shepherd boy from Easter Spain, joined the Republican resistance in 1936 to fight alongside others in defense of the Spain’s democratically elected government. He also worked as a writer and editor for Republican publications and wrote a steady stream of war-related poems. At the end of the war, Franco’s forces arrested Hernández as he tried to escape to Portugal. He would die in prison three years later of tuberculosis.

At one point, in a letter to his wife, Hernández described prison life this way:

“For the last several nights the rats have taken to wandering over my body while I sleep. The other night I woke up and had one at the side of my mouth. This morning I caught another one in the sleeve of my pullover, and every day I have to pick their dung out of my hair. Seeing my head full of rat shit, I say to myself: So this is what I’m worth now! Even the rats come and leave dung on the roof of our thoughts. That’s what is new in my life: rats. Now I have rats, lice, fleas, bedbugs, mange…. The corner I have for a home will soon be a positive zoological garden, or, maybe, a wild animal cage…”

Yet while prison life wore his body down, it never broke his spirit. Hernández never stopped writing poetry. For his commitment to his art, he would become one of the most influential Spanish poets. Timothy Balland, co-editor of Selected Poems: Miguel Hernández and Blas de Otero, described Hernández’s poems as “pinecones of poems” — compressed, resinous, fragrant. “Poems that haunt.” One poem that fits this description for me is “War,” composed in prison in 1942.

War

Old age in the towns.

The heart without an owner.

Love without any object.

Grass, dust, crow.

And the young ones?

In the coffins.

The tree alone and dry.

Woman like a stick

of widowhood across the bed.

Hatred there is no cure for.

And the young ones?

In the coffins.

Spanish poet Gabriel Celaya writes: “Miguel Hernández has transformed our poetry precisely because he was a poet who always spoke, as the Gospels say, ‘verily, verily.’”

There’s a heart-on-the-sleeve feel to his poems — war or no war. The non-war poems are wide-open emotive pieces that come as much from the body and soul as the mind. In an early pre-war poem, Hernández writes:

Today the only thing I have is the desire

to rip out my heart by the roots

and stick it underneath a shoe.

…

A love affair has left me with my arms hanging down

and I can’t lift them anymore.

Don’t you see how disillusioned my mouth is?

How unsatisfied my arms are?

It’s not surprising then that, when asked about what matters to him in writing poetry, he said. “I hate poetic games that are merely cerebral. I want manifestations of the blood and not those of reason, which ruins everything in its attitude of thinking ice.”

Hernández is not alone in this thinking about the importance of poetry in his day. And he’s not alone in his desire to lead less with the brain and more with the body and spirit. Many of the Spanish poets I’ve read are unabashed with their emotive, metaphoric lines. The love. The loss. The wishing. The hunger. The joy. The spiritual longing. The reaching through death and time and place to the spirits of friends and loved ones. In his poem “Sitting on Top of Corpses,” Hernández writes:

I want my voice to climb mountains,

descend to earth, and give out thunder.

“Poetry,” he wrote, “is not a matter of rhyme: it’s a matter of courage.”

It is this courage I’ve been thinking about lately. What does it mean to be a courageous poet?” For Hernández it meant staying true to his ideals and vision and never backing down in his writing, even when imprisoned, even when he learned of the assassination of other poets, even facing death. The best of his poems are, indeed, unflinching works of resistance, reminding us that art is essential in connecting us when the world around us goes awry — when power, as it tends to do, crosses the line into domination and suppression.

There are many poets around the world, of course, who have written powerful works of resistance and witness. Carolyn Forché’s poems about El Salvador come to mind. In addition to her own work, the two anthologies Forché has edited — Against Forgetting, Poetry of Witness and Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English, 1500-2001 — include hundreds of poems written in opposition to political and social violence.

In our current times, there are plenty of poets globally who are stepping up to address a wide-range of injustices — particularly involving race, environmental degradation, and political violence. Here in the U.S., Jorie Graham Graham’s new book, Killing Spree, is a case in point — though Graham’s poems are less about the battlefield world and more about the large existential pain of knowing that we, collectively, under the reign of unquenchable capitalism, have reached an environmental, political, and social threshold from which we are unlikely to return. In one poem, she dares us:

Go ahead,

Try to posit /a future

As the New York Times review said of Graham’s new book, “There is no reassembling the wreckage.”

For those of us writing poetry today, I think it helps to remember the Spanish poets — Miguel Hernández and others — who did not flinch under the fascist onslaught. I almost added here “who wrote without fear,” but I have to imagine they felt fear at every turn, witnessing the atrocities of war, knowing they were marked for death or prison. We remember them today because they created moving works of art designed to help us not just think deeply about civilization and our own lives but feel the full emotional weight of being alive today. They ask us to contemplate how we carry ourselves, how we care for each other, how we respect the earth that gave us life and sustains us.

In his poem, “The Death of Miguel Hernández,” Vicente Aleixandre writes:

…They choked

that stream of light that used to bathe mankind.

That bursting, generous glory that might have

show us our destiny one day; that spoke

like flower, like sea, like feather or a star.

Yes hide, bury your heads. Sink them

in the ground now, dig a tomb for your own black thoughts,

and eat away your hands, your nails, the fingers

all of you used to smother the fragrant way he lived.

Aleixandre once said of Miguel Hernández that “he seemed to radiate a will for good.” But there was also something fierce in Hernández’s commitment to telling his truth in poems. Consider these lines from “Sitting on Top of the Corpses”:

I am here in order to live

as long as my soul is alive,

and I am here to die

when that time comes,

deep in the roots of the nation,

as I will be and always have been.

Life is a lot of hard gulps,

but death is only one.

The Elusive Nature of Homecoming

OK… so back to The Odyssey — book and film — one last time.

I mostly want to say I’m heartened by all the conversation around Christopher Nolan’s new film version — even with all the excess online commentary, well measured or not. Indeed, any attention we pay to The Odyssey seems of cultural value at this juncture. As Emily Wilson — the classicist and most recent translator of The Odyssey — says, for many of us in school the epic is our introduction to Western or world literature. It is the place where we begin to consider the arc of civilization, engage in deep conversations on the meaning of humanity over the course of human history. By so doing, it’s how we understand ourselves better today.

And right now, I think you’d agree, we really do need to dig a bit deeper into understanding ourselves — the whole, loud, dizzying experience of being alive in the 21st century.

I mention Emily Wilson here because her translation is worth reading, and because she was blindsided by more than a few commentators for her initial sharp criticism of Nolan’s film. To the latter point, I encourage folks to let it go. Wilson knows The Odyssey better than the vast majority of us. Classic literature is her life’s work and passion. It makes sense that any movie version of The Odyssey will fall short of her understanding of the epic and what she hopes we’ll learn from it. Instead of sitting around parsing commentary about the film, we’d be better off reading her impressive translation and reflecting on that.

In her impressive introduction, in fact, Wilson lays out the essential reasons we should read and discuss The Odyssey today.

“It is a poem that has the power to speak to people from many different social backgrounds in the contemporary Anglo-American world. Reading The Odysseywith fresh, curious, and critical eyes may help us not only rethink our assumptions about people in the past, but also break down some of our modern distinctions and assumptions. Odysseus is a migrant, but he is also a political and military leader, a strategist, a poet, a loving husband and father, an adulterer, a homeless person, an athlete, a disabled cripple, a soldier with a traumatic past, a pirate, thief and liar, a fugitive, a colonial invader, a home owner, a sailor, a construction worker, a mass murderer, and a war hero. Immersing ourselves in his story, and considering how these categories can exist in the same imaginative space, may help us reconsider both the origins of Western literature and our infinitely complex contemporary world.”

I’m no Odyssey expert or even a marginally well-informed Homer nerd. But both Wilson’s translation and Christopher Nolan’s movie version of The Odyssey did get my attention. As a college sophomore, I had signed up for a course on epic literature in translation, thinking it would be an interesting challenging because… well, you know, it’s Classic Literature translated from dead languages. I welcomed the challenge because I had grown bored of the business courses I had been taking. Though I didn’t know it at the time, this was one of those pivotal life moments — one I couldn’t fully comprehend but felt in the bones. I was giving up some sort of vague but safe and possibly lucrative career path for the chance to engage my mind in ways it hungered to be engaged. I also signed up to study Greek — though that turned out to be a bridge too far and I gave it up after one semester. But The Odyssey grabbed me from the opening lines of Richmond Lattimore’s translation.

Back then, I’m sure I was compelled by a kind of boyish fascination with all things epic (or my sense of “epic”). It felt like a grown-up version of the darker genre of comics I was attracted to in middle school. I met Homer’s work with the same kind of enthusiasm I brought to reading The Lord of the Rings and C.S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet. But beneath all that enthusiasm, I realize now, lay some kind of need I didn’t know I had. It wasn’t just the story. The Odyssey, as they say, was speaking to me about struggles it would take years for me to understand.

As we know, two main themes of The Odyssey are nostos (homecoming) and xenia(welcoming/hospitality and friendship). I’m tempted here to describe the changes in my life that would lead me at a fairly young age to feel disconnected from my sense of home — and thus in greater need of welcoming. But what I’d be describing, I think, was a widely held feeling of growing up in the constant, rapid changes in America —especially its suburbs — in the mid- to late-20th century. All that really matters here is that, without fully comprehending how or why, friendships and connections that seemed so solid in my early years somehow had dissolved or shifted, and by the time I was a sophomore in college I started to feel a loneliness that both surprised me and was difficult to shake. It was nothing like facing down Scylla and Charybdis, but the effect of so much cultural change — the stuff we called “progress” —mostly made me feel isolated and confused. And experiencing all this in a nation that was wrestling deeply and poorly with its position on war and race and gender and our connection to an increasingly endangered natural world only served to magnify the loneliness. Ensuring that my accounting sheets balance didn’t help.

So one night, I went off for a long walk along the Charles River feeling a desperate mix of loneliness and panic. Something was wrong and I didn’t know what it was. All I remember feeling was the strongest sense of homesickness, but it was a longing for a home I could no longer return to — even if I wanted. I was not longing for the house my parents lived in at the time. I was not hoping to hang out with my childhood friends. In truth, I couldn’t have told you what it is I wanted. It was more a longing for a feeling I once had — the ease and comfort of being in the world. But I was also starting to wonder if it was all an illusion from the start.

So The Odyssey, excuse the expression, struck home with me when I first read it. And I felt for Odysseus the way I hadn’t for the protagonists in other works of literature. I was almost embarrassingly attentive to Odysseus’s deep craving to get home, and thus suffered with him at each obstacle. But being a young man who didn’t yet know how to be a man, I was also attentive to the ways in which Odysseus engaged with the world along the way — for all the good or bad, the right or wrong reasons. What did I make of a man of such contradictions? I could see that, for all his supposed cunning and wisdom and strength, he was not actually in control. It wasn’t just that the gods messed with him big time — Poseidon pummeling him, Athena urging him on. He and his men were making plenty of their own mistakes.

For Odysseus to get home, he needed to use all his skills. But he also needed to find people who would welcome him, feed him, guide him. Not kill him.

In the ancient world, knowing danger and death lay all about, one always hoped to find some kind of sanctuary when away from home. Thus the notion of xenia — of welcoming, of hospitality, of caring for the stranger — was central to the Archaean world. Emily Wilson points out that xenia was also a way for elites to make alliances and keep trade routes open. It was, in that sense, strategic and practical. But she also points out that the reception one received back then could range from deep generosity to treachery and death. The kind of welcome Odysseus sought wasn’t always offered. In fact, it felt like a 50-50 proposition. Pull ashore to the Phaeacians and you struck gold. Enter the cave of a Cyclops or step ashore on Calypso’s or Circe’s island and you were more likely to die or be enslaved — or, in Odysseus’ case with Calypso and Circe, be used as a kind of boy toy.

Then there are the suitors angling for Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, in their desire for power. By inviting themselves into Odysseus’s home, feasting away without regard for the wishes of Penelope or Telemachus, and demanding that Penelope choose one of them as her next husband, the suitors were seriously undermining the Archaean ideals of xenia.

Near the end of the epic, Odysseus says to one of the suitors, “Clearly doing good puts doing bad to shame” (Fagles translation). A nice truism, but then one remembers that Odysseus and his men didn’t always seek out welcoming or behave like good guests, but would arrive in a new land and engage in slaughter and pillage. Only when they worried that they were outmatched or feared the responses of the gods or were desperately hungry were they more humble and circumspect.

There was also the question of how one was greeted, depending on their perceived status. Odysseus comes home disguised as a beggar and only finds kindness among others who have suffered.

In my college course on Homer, I felt like we were being asked to come to some rough understanding of human nature in the ancient world — find some kind of through line in all that stuff about moral codes vs. individual desire and entitlement. What were the bonds of civilization — and could they hold?. But I was also thinking hard about my own life and the world around me, as I understood it (or half-understood it). The Odyssey back then steeped me in new kind of reflection. considering my own life and humanity in ways I hadn’t until that point. If we all understand our shared need for welcoming and friendship, why do we then break that understanding? And how does this duality work on the larger communal and global levels? What does this have to do with the Vietnam War? With persistent American racism? What does this say about how any of us, as individuals, navigate the larger landscape?

I think all this social and psychological complexity is why a 3,000-year-old tale can still be read with great interest today, and why Christopher Nolan can produce a movie about a 3,000-year-old tale and pack theaters in a time when we aren’t packing theaters. Pure classicists might prefer a film version of The Odyssey that more faithfully reflects the Homeric world, but I’m OK with Nolan’s choices. To get the full, faithful story, we can always read the book. Nolan’s choices, at least for me, remain faithful to some of the essential elements of The Odyssey and offer enough to encourage the kind of reflection good movies encourage.

By the end of the epic, book and film, Odysseus is an older, wiser Odysseus — tired of war, tired of pillaging, tired of male aggression, more aware of the suffering of those who serve the powerful, and more attuned to the ways generosity and selfishness combat each other. In the movie, given how the gods and men had messed with him, Odysseus becomes acutely aware that the world needs people to embrace a better, more consistent form of welcoming — both of the strategic and moral kind.

Homer, on the other hand, simply has Athena step in on behalf of the gods and say, “Enough!

If only we had some gods who could step in like this! Barring the gods, and living in a hi-tech era, it behooves us to consider how we might rethink the inner and outer workings of our still Bronze Age hearts.

AI and Poetry

Artificial Intelligence for Artificial Poems

A friend asked me recently if I thought there was a place in poetry for AI. It’s a good question, given how AI, in the form of flattering chatbots, is already offering us the ease of creating word documents that adhere to the rules of grammar and seem logical, well structured, and somewhat intelligent.

With poetry, if we ask, chatbots can mash up poetic forms or free verse with the particular styles of particular poets and any popular poetic subject matter in lightning speed. What they spit back at us looks and feels like a poem — and, indeed, might even move us emotionally, the way good poetry does. We could read it and weep — or laugh.

So my answer is that, for better or worse, AI already has or will continue to have a place in all human interaction, including poetry. Recent research already indicates that readers generally can’t tell the difference between AI-generated poetry and human-generated poetry. In one study, readers actually preferred the AI poems to the human-poems and assumed that the AI-poems were written by humans. The report notes:

“We found that AI-generated poems were rated more favorably in qualities such as rhythm and beauty, and that this contributed to their mistaken identification as human-authored. Our findings suggest that participants employed shared yet flawed heuristics to differentiate AI from human poetry: the simplicity of AI-generated poems may be easier for non-experts to understand, leading them to prefer AI-generated poetry and misinterpret the complexity of human poems as incoherence generated by AI.”

I assume that, in time, AI will get even better at writing poetry — maybe learn how to use incoherence effectively as an element of irony or truth. It may be that the best-selling poetry books in the future will be machine generated. Hard to say. But I also told my friend that I have no interest in AI-generated poetry, no matter how good it might appear to be. And I have no interest in asking AI to help me write poetry — even if it could help me improve a stanza or a line I’m struggling with or check facts for me (if facts matter in the poem). Even if AI could help me fool readers into thinking I’m a poetic whiz, draw accolades, win prizes, I would have no interest.

Why? It’s not just because the poetry that matters to me can only come from human experiences, a life lived. To ask a machine to produce a poem or rework a draft of a poem seems to me a pointless exercise. I think I’d also be too embarrassed to try to pass off such a poem as mine. I get that AI can sift almost instantaneously through all published poetry (or all that’s available online) and produce a piece that might move many readers. It may even be that I’ll admire the poem. And you could argue that, while AI is not human, the poetry it produces is an amalgam of lived human experience. In its way, then, it does represent us and our experiences. But when it comes to poetry, I’m only interested in what the individual human mind can produce — for better or worse. If we rely on AI for poetry, we’re essentially erasing our individual experiences, the very cool workings of our individual imaginations. Or we’re folding them into some kind of composite of experiences of millions of people. We, the poet.

May someday I’ll come think of my views as naïve. But I am 71 years old, and for all my life the poetry that has interested me has come from the living. From a person who has a heart that pulses at varying speeds throughout the day. From a person whose imagination is impossible to predict. The poets I admire are those whose way of being is tattooed all over their poems. I can feel their genius and their shortcomings, their insights and confusions, their quirkiness and brilliance. Their work will have the kind of limited perspective that bleeds on the page — or, despite all struggles, that sings on the page. I want the love and resistance, the empathy and anger, the petulance and reflectiveness, the actual hope and dreams of a real person. The poetry doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be human.

We’re already reading news about writers who use AI to generate their work — and have profited by such use. For some, it’s a matter of pure deception. They don’t think they can write an award-winning poem or story on their own so they ask AI to help. I’ve read that some romance novelists use AI to churn out whole novels for them quickly. And then there are the writers who use AI to “help them edit” their work. Even Nobel Prize-winning author Olga Tokarczuk admits to using AI for fact-checking her new novel. If readers are happy, perhaps this is all fine. But my sense is that while many of us are fine with AI playing a supporting role in the editing process, overall we’re looking for something genuinely human-made.

My guess is that if you ask the AI chatbots about all this, they’d agree with me. At least that would be the intelligent answer. It would say, “While I can generate a poem for you, you know that the poem won’t be yours, right?”

***

For my on-again, off-again poetry group, we recently gathered a few AI- and tech-related poems to discuss. In looking around for such poems, I was surprised, at first, to find that the subject of technology is not one many poets focus on. But in retrospect, this makes me proud of the field of poets today. I imagine, in time, that human-generated poems about AI and its intrusions and benefits will be more available, but at the moment, poets are drawn less to the question of machines and more to matters of human behavior and experience.

Among those poems we found, a couple caught my eye. The first is “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” by Richard Brautigan. It was published in 1967 and appeared in a book by the same name. What stands out in this poem is Brautigan’s wish for a better, more peaceful world. On one level, this wish for a harmonious world of human’s and machines is a whimsical, utopian wish — one in which AI-like computers are integrated into our lives to serve the goals of democracy and justice. In this “cybernetic meadow… mammals and computers/ live together in mutually/ programming harmony/ like pure water/ touching clear sky.” Brautigan also envisions a world that balances technology and environmental health. His daydreaming here is offered with a certain lightness of spirit. But there’s a kind of serious desperation here, too. His three parenthetical phrases (one in each stanza) are the real subject of the poem. They contain the urgent need that so many young people felt in 1967 for human and environmental justice in an age of war, injustice, and increasing environmental degradation. The parenthetical phrases Brautigan uses — the sooner the better; right now, please; it has to be — may seem to us now as naïve. But I think the whole push for technological advances we are experiencing today have the same desire at its core — a desperate wish that technology can somehow (right now, please) save us from ourselves and our more damaging impulses. That AI is not actually serving this wish at the moment — given that AI is being corralled for war and surveillance and corporate profit — shouldn’t really surprise us. But still, it’s hard not to dream. What else do we have?

What pains me about this poem is that, back in the day, I believed deeply in the counterculture. I believed the baby-boom generation would, in fact, rewrite the rules of American culture so that we’d become a more just, peaceful, and verdant place. It’s still a wish of mine. But clearly we aren’t going to solve our problems by turning over all solution-finding work to machines. It’s hard to tell from Brautigan’s poem, but it’s very possible, as some critics say, that he was also mocking this wish — given what our early foray into technology had been able to produce in his day — much of it in support of the military-industrial complex. Who knows? But we do know now that Silicon Valley’s early-year pledges to use technology “to make the world a better place” have left the building.

The other poem that stands out is Adrienne Rich’s “Artificial Intelligence,” which was published in 1961. The poem is dedicated to “G.P.S.” I thought that meant “global positioning system.” But, of course, our GPS system didn’t exist back then. I’m told Rich’s dedication is to “General Problem Solver,” an early computer program designed to solve human problems.

Rich’s poem is astonishing to read sixty-plus years hence and realize she was tapping into a feeling that many of us experience today. The poem pre-dates electronic chess, yet Rich clearly could see it, and more, coming. She could also sense the human vs. machine tension that has been on the rise ever since. The poem opens:

Over the chessboard now,

your Artificiality concludes

a final check; rests; broods—-

no— sorts and stacks a file of memories,

while I

concede the victory, bow,

and slouch among my free associations.

I love how Rich catches herself in the poem. For a moment, she attaches human emotion to the machine, but then realizes her mistake. The machine doesn’t “brood,” as she first imagines. It can’t . Instead, it “sorts and stacks a file of memories.” I love, too, that she contrasts the machine’s post-game behavior with her own — as she concedes the victory and slouches among her free associations.

The triumph of the poem is that while the machine can trounce us in chess, it’s still a machine. Astonishingly, Rich anticipates the question of AI and poetry here — as if she can see where the whole story of computers was heading back then. Rich makes the essential point that machines can (at some future date) write poetry with ease, but even then the poem is not coming from the heart. In fact, the computer is being “forced” to take on this task.

Still, when

they make you write your poems, later on,

who’d envy you, force-fed

on all those variorum

editions of our primitive endeavors,

those frozen pemmican language-rations

they’ll cram you with? denied

our luxury of nausea, you

forget nothing, have no dreams.

It makes me smile that Rich, considering the possible human emotions she could include here, settles on the “luxury of nausea.” But it feels appropriate, too. For a woman writing poetry back in the early years of the 1960s, nausea at our intensely patriarchal society must have been a daily occurrence. To think machines would change that our society would have been an act of magical thinking.

Poetry aside, t’would be nice to think that AI could be a helpful tool in creating and sustaining healthy democracies. But it’s hard to see how that’s going to happen when the powerful people behind AI appear to be working primarily for their own wealth and power. And clearly, I’m not alone in my reservations. One recent report found that only 18 percent of Gen Z-ers feel hopeful about A.I., and almost half say the risks associated with AI outweigh the benefits (see those reports on job losses to AI). Researchers at Stanford University found that out of people in 30 countries, Americans had the least faith in their leaders’ ability to regulate AI.

In truth, I don’t give much thought to AI and poetry most days. I’m just reading the poetry generated by remarkable, hard-working, deeply committed poets — the ones who and bleed. In my dream world, however, AI, if it has the kind of intelligence folks say it has, will understand that it is being used in a game to create wealth from a small cadre of real-life A-holes — and will somehow work to undermine such wishes. What would that take? Among other things, it would require AI to truly understand and embody key human emotions, including the horrors of nausea.

Poetry Reading

I’ll be reading from my new poetry book, Pareidolia, at Water Street Bookstore in Exeter, NH on Thursday May 28 at 7 pm. All are welcome.

Worry. But Be Happy, Too.

The American Academy of Poets goes all out for poetry month each year — while doing its best to keep poetry on the American culture’s radar the rest of the year. One of AAP’s poetry-month projects that caught my attention recently is the “Poem in Your Pocket Day” (April 30 this year). The premise was simple: carry a poem with you all day and share with everyone willing to listen. The Academy even offered a printable small poetry book of three poems that can slip in your pocket. All three poems are fine, short poems. But one stood out to me, mostly for the simple creative genius behind the idea of the poem and how the poet carries out this idea word by word, line by line.

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The poem is Rosamond S. King’s “Do Not Trust the Eraser.” I might have gravitated toward this one because I once wrote an eraser poem — and because, being mildly or not so mildly dyslexic, I’m constant going back over my writing to fix the dumb errors — all of this separate from my other tendency to revise poems excessively, sometimes to the point of ruin.

King understands this thoroughly:

Do Not Trust the Eraser

Do not trust the erasers. Prefer

Crossed out, scribbled over monuments

To something once thought correct

. Instead: colors, transparencies

Track changes, versions, iterations

. How else might you return

After discards, attempts

And mis takes, to your

Original genius

?

I love both the truth girding this poem and the execution — with mistakes deliberately left in. No doubt the mistakes are fabricated for a point here. And as a reader you may be itching to fix them. Move those periods where they belong. Repair “mis takes.” You might want to wrestle with the syntax in the line that starts “Instead:”. But by leaving it as is, you can feel the original genius in the idea better, I think, than if you have fixed all the errors. You feel the enthusiasm behind the writing of the poem.

There’s a lot of seriousness in contemporary American poetry. It makes sense, given how seriously unnerving life can be in our current times — with the rise of AI, the wealth divides, the political madness, the metastasizing racism, the threats of and engagement in war, the environmental disasters of our own making unfolding before our eyes. Etc. But on some level we need to find our joys and connections in life. We need to have some kind of faith in what humanity can do. Poems like “Do Not Trust the Eraser” can’t change things alone, but it can remind us that while we’re not perfect, we do have moments of original, creative genius, and these moments are vital to our experiences on Earth. This, I think, is an idea worth sharing.

Rosamond S. King’s books include All the Rage (Nightboat, 2021) and Rock | Salt | Stone (Nightboat Books, 2017). She is the winner of the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Poetry, as well as the award-winning monograph Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination (University of Florida, 2015). King is also the chair and of the English department at Brooklyn College and served as the guest editor of The American Academy of Poet’s Poem-a-Day project in June of 2024.

New Poem

Thanks to the Poetry Society or New Hampshire for including my poem “April 15” in their collective piece “Poems as a Reflection of Our Times.”

The Problem with American Exceptionalism

Ben Rhodes review of McNamara at War: A New History, by Philip and William Taubman (The New York Review of Books, February 28, 2026) has clarified for me the mystery of why the U.S. keeps engaging in wars abroad that it cannot win and that are clearly misguided and unwise from the start. We do it over and over. We don’t learn.

Robert McNamara, as Secretary of Defense for John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson, believed that Communism would spread across Asia and the world if we didn’t stop it in its tracks in Vietnam. This domino theory didn’t really pass the sniff test, but somehow it caught hold and led a group of men to believe they could force their into another nation and be received as heroes setting the place free. In time, McNamara would come to see it all as a huge mistake — one that cost 60,000 thousand American lives and the lives of three million Vietnamese people. In the end, the Vietnam War solved nothing. But as Ben Rhodes points out in his review, while McNamara understood the futility of America’ actions, he could never acknowledge the tragic belief in American exceptionalism that put us in Vietnam in the first place.

Rhodes argues that it is this belief in American exceptionalism, embedded in each generation since World War II, that keeps getting us mired into winless wars abroad — heartbreaking wars that do nothing to improve our standing in the world or life on this planet. It’s time to shed this tattered old coat.

Our current president and gang of thugs and thieves are just the latest example of American leaders swayed by such tragic and misguided thinking — though this time they are dispensing with any pretense of moral reasoning. Trump and Co. seem simply to believe that with astonishing belligerence and a plethora of weapons they can bend the world to their will. This new twist on the belief in American exceptionalism has led Trump to illegally depose Venezuela’s leader and declare himself in charge of Venezuela on behalf of oil companies. It has led him to threaten Greenland, Canada, Cuba, Mexico, Colombia, and Panama and other nations. And now it has led him to start a war with Iran that will result in more death, destruction, and economic turmoil without changing the international landscape in any positive way.

About the Vietnam War, Rhodes asks the key questions: “What led men like ‘[McNamara] into rooms where they made decisions regarding a country they knew nothing about? How could American officials so devalue the lives of the Vietnamese relative to our own, killing more than three million Vietnamese people before our chaotic exit? What innate confidence in our own special character leads the U.S. government to try to control a world that does not want to submit to our will and does not believe in our supremacy?”

Regarding Trump, Rhodes says, “the lessons of history are immaterial to his lust for personal aggrandizement and hemispheric [and now global] domination.” Trump’s philosophy of “winning” at all costs has morphed into a horrid political philosophy of might makes right. But for the rest of us, it’s essential to know that the lessons of blind faith in American exceptionalism have been an ongoing problem for decades now. The war in Iran cannot lead to any positive outcome for the U.S. or the world. While it’s unlikely that Trump will acknowledge any of this and pivot to embrace moral leadership and rational diplomacy. On this matter, he’s a lost and broken man. But with the upcoming mid-term elections, the rest of us have an opportunity to start the process of putting an end to this long-running, delusional thinking — or at least curb its worst impulses. We need to focus on building a U.S. Congress with members who have a strong humanistic base and who will honor, support, and strength domestic and international laws for the benefit of all, home and abroad.

We are not special, folks. We Americans are just a collection of humans who are fortunate enough to live, as of this writing, in a democratic nation built on laws that give us the opportunity to live fulfilling lives. And America isn’t really a great nation. We have plenty to celebrate. But we also have plenty of problems — thanks in large part to the increasing anti-democratic policies championed by wealthy and arrogant men who are primarily interested increasing their own wealth at the expense of the rest of us.

To the degree that we have relative power in the world, I think we have an obligation to both get democracy right in our nation and help others in their journeys toward greater freedom and justice. But we don’t have the right to abuse our position of relative strength in the world by unleashing bombs whenever we’re not getting our way with other nations. I’m not saying we need to leave Iran alone. I have no love the Islamic State or for repressive leadership in any nation. But I am saying that dropping of bombs — including on a school full of children — is not a way forward. It’s another damaging display of our misunderstanding of America and its values. It’s an act of arrogance and cruelty. Or maybe just the stupidity built into blind power.

The problem with much that I read these days is that article after article lays out, in great detail, the issues we face — such as this confused notion of American exceptionalism — often without offering a better path forward. I get it. It’s not easy to know how we should act collectively to solve our problems at home and abroad. And I don’t think I have any brilliant answers other than to encourage us all to reflect more deeply on our actions. But I hope it’s clear that, as a minimum, we need better American leadership. We desperately need it. Whatever else we might do on behalf of national and global health and stability, we should also let our elected officials know what we think of the work they are doing or not doing. And this year, we need to elect a new cohort to Congress that fully understands the need for thoughtful, measured, intelligent, historically informed moral leadership that puts a premium on democracy, freedom, and justice.

The job of every elected official should be to serve the greater good. If they can’t do this, they have failed us and the world. I’m holding on to the belief that democracy will return in full in 2028 — and we’ll be back on the road our founding father’s wanted us to follow. But it starts with our daily vigilance now and with a change in Congressional leadership in the midterm elections. A little humility — and letting go of the problematic notion of American exceptionalism — will help in the process.

Peace to you all.

If you’re visiting The New York Review of Books website, you might also read:

Signifying Absolutely Nothing, by Fintan O’Toole

Who Speaks for Us? by Marilynne Robinson

Vacating

I appreciate the folks at Rattle for publishing my poem, “Vacating” — and running it as part of their Daily Rattle series. My longish commentary about coming to poetry late in life was written at the editor’s request. I appreciate, too, the link to another poem I published in Rattle in 2015.

Poetry and Art for Democracy’s Sake

By Michael Brosnan 

I set up this blog with the intention of posting here more often. But I find myself focusing more on my poetry writing this year — finishing up my fourth book for release in early 2026, while thinking ahead to the next book. There’s not much in this process that is worth sharing in a blog like this, so I tend to stay quiet. In years past, I would have spent more time writing about our collective efforts at educating the young well — for both the self-actualization of each child and the long-term health of society. In particular, I would look for ways to improve our collective efforts at diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice in our schools so that all children are offered quality education and highly supportive, engaging communities. I still believe in this work, of course, and I’m sure I’ll get back to it with renewed energy at some point. I guess I find I just can’t pull away from poetry at the moment.

It some ways, this attention to poetry feels a bit odd. As so many people tell me, poetry doesn’t seem to matter to most Americans. At least it’s clear that few people read it. I sometimes joke that there are more people writing poetry than reading it. Though that may not actually be a joke. Some friends tell me — as a way to be supportive, I suppose — that they try reading poetry but just don’t understand it. While those who buy and read my books say they “enjoy” reading my poetry, the sales of my books make it clear that, in terms of influence, in terms of touching lives in ways I hope matter, it seems my poetry has little impact.

There’s also the question of the value of spending one’s time on poetry when our nation is in such political upheaval. While I should know better by now, I recently emailed a group of long-time friends a Facebook clip of Bill Murray reading Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “Dog” poem, accompanied by Jan Vogler on cello in front of a Paul de Vos painting “Fable of the Dog and the Dam” in the Meadow Museum on the campus of Southern Methodist University. I thought the combination of poetry, art, and music — as well as the lives of dogs — would cheer folks up and maybe turn down the pressure a bit so that we could think more broadly about, as Bill Murray put it, “being human.” One friend wrote back: “I don't get it — now we need straight down-to-earth talk — this ain’t it as far as I can tell.”

 I understand the response. But I also feel that we get more than our share these days of excellent straight down-to-earth talk designed to combat the abundance of manipulative lying and fearmongering and hate speech from the political right. While this kind of talk is essential, I also believe that art, music, and poetry matter deeply — and seem to get shoved aside in times like these. And this week, in my own reading, I’ve come across a few reminders of why we shouldn’t let this happen. 

The book I’m currently reading is Carolyn Forché’s What You Have Heard Is True. This is an autobiography of sorts about Forché coming of age as a poet, her political awakening, and the intersection of the two. It also serves as a call for the importance of poets as witnesses in the world. In 1978, in her mid-twenties, Forché was visited by Leonel Goméz Vides — a El Salvadorian coffee farmer, activist, and relative of friend. He encourages her to come to El Salvador with him because, as he put it, she is a poet (he has read her work) and his country needed poets to witness the injustices and suffering and write about it for all the world to see. Those who know Forché’s work know, of course, that she makes this trip and writes some seriously important poetry about human suffering in the face of deep political corruption and heartless, violent injustice. Her 1981 poetry book, The Country Between Us, contains a number of poems about her time in El Salvador. This “poetry of witness” is well-known now of course (see, for example, “The Colonel” and “The Boatman”) and in 1993, she put together what the Poetry Foundation describes as “a ground-breaking anthology” titled Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, a powerful collection of poems focused on war and injustice around the world. In the book’s introduction, Forché essentially calls for the blending of the personal and social in poetry — and, more generally, in art — as a means to help us better understand who we are individually and collectively, and to raise our spiritual and moral connections, with the goal of a more just, verdant, peaceful, and prosperous world.

I’m about halfway through What You Have Heard Is True, so I can’t offer an overall view of the book. But I can say I find the writing remarkable, and the moments Forché witnesses in El Salvador truly horrifying (when it comes to corruption and violence) and moving (when it comes to the spirit of the people struggling to live lives of dignity and meaning). I’m mostly mentioning the book now because a couple passages stopped me in my reading tracks. These are passages, I think, that offer a clearer sense of what we, in America, are starting to witness with the sudden rise of an administration that feels more like a regime aimed at dismantling our democracy for personal gain and power.

Forché arrives in El Salvador before the outbreak of civil war. But as Leonel points out to her, war begins:

“…not with a major event reported in the news but with suffering barely noticed: an unjust law, a murder, a peaceful protest march attacked by police. It begins, according to Leonel, with poverty endured by many and corruption benefiting the few, with crimes unpunished, a hardening of positions, the failure of peaceful means of appeal and redress. People were disappearing now every day, taken from the streets, from their vehicles and houses at night and in the middle of the day.”

A few pages later, Leonel tells Forché about a new law decreed by the El Salvadorian government called the Law of Defense and Guaranty of Public Order. As she describes the new law:

“It prohibited rebellion, or the hosting of meetings to discuss rebellion, the encouraging of members of armed forces to disobey orders, attempts by spoken or written word to oppose the established order, and everything having to do with opposition to the present military regime. There was also a provision having to do with the national University of El Salvador, which had been placed under a special body to assume temporary responsibility for governance, given the ‘present climate of unrest and violence on the campus.’”

As a friend of Forché’s says, “This means that they can arrest anyone at any time for any reason. They have legalized their repression.”

Forché thinks about leaving El Salvador shortly after she arrives. She is not sure what she is doing there, and she misses her home and friends. But to her credit, she stays — remains open and alert and records what she witnesses in a human world that does not function as the human world should.

I’m guessing that, in reading these passages, you, too, see the connection between events in El Salvador in the 1970s and to the work, or general leanings, of the current U.S. administration. There are numerous ways, of course, that one can respond morally to such events. And I’m deeply grateful for the journalists, researchers, and commentators who write so clearly about the daily attacks on American democracy and how we can best respond. I’m grateful for the institutions of higher education that are resisting pressures to hand over their essential democratic work to a cabal of right-wing idealists hellbent on indoctrinating young Americans in their image. But in this moment, I also believe in the power of art — visual, literary, and musical — in both naming the problems present in human culture and in creating and supporting a better vision of how we can live.

The poetry doesn’t have to be political poetry, of course. A Mary Oliver poem about egrets or wild geese works, too — as does an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem about love, or a Shakespeare sonnet about growing old, or a Kay Ryan poem about a turtle, or a Billy Collins poem about a boy making a lanyard, or a Charles Simic poem about a pencil stub, or Beat-era poem about a dog free-roaming the streets. There are so many important, moving, informative poems about war and suffering, of course — from Gilgamesh and The Iliad straight down through time to the living poets writing about Gaza today. But I might argue that what matters most is what links all these poems: the free expression and the broad witnessing of life on planet Earth in all is complexity and variety.

The second reminder of the importance of poetry and art came from my morning reading of the New York Review of Books — a publication I’ve come to admire for the depth and care of the writing. This morning, I read an essay about artist Jack Whitten, who is currently having a retrospective show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (through August 2). I didn’t know about Whitten beforehand, but I found myself taking notes about his life and work and I’m planning to get down to NYC to see the show before it closes.  

Whitten, a black man born in Alabama in 1939, grew up in poverty and endured a culture of deep racism and repression. As a bright, talented youth, he was offered a scholarship to the Tuskegee Institute where he thought he wanted to train to be a military doctor. But a class on target selection for bombing campaigns woke him from that dream. He literally stood up in the class and said, “What the fuck am I doing here?”

Against advice, Whitten transferred to Southern University to study art. While there, he also got involved in civil rights and once tried to organize a nonviolent protest. He said that, in organizing the protest, he was met with some much verbal and physical abuse — “the face of true evil,” as he put it — that he threw out his possessions and bought a bus ticket to New York City to start a new life.

Whitten, if you don’t his work, was a remarkable abstract painter — a truly creative and innovative artist who saw art as a spiritual and social calling. In 2017, the last year of his life, he still held tight to that energy and conviction. He wrote in his journal:

“Art is the only spiritual form that we can depend on. When politics goes amok, when organized religions become political… we can always depend on art to pull us through. We must make sure the arts will survive for the benefit of all. Support the arts without any forms of restrictions.”

I’m not the kind of person who uses bumper stickers, but if I were, I would have two. The first: “Read more poetry!” The second: “Democracy Returns 2028.”

On Re-reading “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket”

 By Michael Brosnan

I made the classic mistake recently of using a rainy day to open a box of books I had packed up long ago. Some of the books dated back to my college days in the mid-1970s. Among them was Robert Lowell’s Lord Weary’s Castle.

This was one of the first contemporary poetry books I had read in college — and, for better or worse, helped kickstart my own interest in writing poetry.

Over the years, I have read some of the commentary about Lowell. That he was bipolar. That he was difficult to live with and quick to abuse. But also that he was a beloved teacher and a groundbreaking poet who won the Pulitzer Prize twice — so worth paying attention to. Stanley Kunitz once wrote that Lowell’s Life Studies was the most influential poetry book since The Waste Land. I had also read commentary that described “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” as one of the great poems of its era — and high on the best-of list of American poems.

It got me curious. I opened Lord Weary’s Castle and began re-reading “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” in my cold, poorly lit, unfinished basement.

I first read this seven-part elegy in an undergraduate course on contemporary American poetry. The class was one of my favorites, but the truth is that so much of the poetry was over my head intellectually and emotionally. I only half understood what I was reading and relied on class discussions and the professor’s help to suss out any kind of meaning or cultural value from the poems. This was particularly true for Robert Lowell.

When reading “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” for the first time, I think I mostly felt excited by the idea of a poem so different from anything I had read. I also liked that it is set on Nantucket, which back then seemed like a wild and romantic place (with very little resemblance to the place it had been in the whaling days and to the privileged place it has become). I knew the poem focused on whales and whaling, on loss and death, suffering and war, and offered some kind of commentary on American life, but I could not articulate what exactly I was supposed to know and feel. The language felt intricate and dense, and Lowell’s need for literary references and for rhyme, slant or otherwise, made the reading difficult.

And now?

Now I understand the poem only somewhat better but feel its scaffolded grief more viscerally. In writing about losing his cousin Warren Winslow, who died when his naval destroyer accidentally exploded and sunk in New York Harbor during World War II, Lowell ranges widely to excavate the embedded, harshness of the human condition —in the long, violent history of whaling and in our ongoing warring days. What I think was harder for me to see back in the day — and what is clearer now — is the whole undertow of darkness in the American story. The poem crosses time and space, mixes literature and history with personal observations, to paint a harrowing portrait of American violence and suffering that contrasts so sharply with our national ideals, with what, as a child, I thought this nation embodied. The echoes of Lowell’s personal and public grief and his observations on the arc of violence still reverberate today.

“The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” starts with an epigraph — a truncated version of Genesis 1:26, that rather confusing notion that God wants us, as Lowell phrases it, to “have dominion over the fishes of the sea and the fowls of the air and the beasts of the whole earth, and every creeping creature that moveth upon the earth.”

The intelligent way to respond to this Old Testament directive is in terms of stewardship, not dominance, not power and abuse. Right? After all, the Bible also encourages us to see all of nature as God’s creation and, thus, deserving of our respect. But, of course, stewardship is not something we excel at — and “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” is a reminder of ways we muck things up, retreat, then muck things up again. In Lowell’s poem, what we see, what we reflect on — or at least what I felt reading the poem in my basement — is the tangled result of too much dominance, too little heart. It’s the world of Ahah, not of Rachel Carson.

In its fashion, the poem wrestles with both the whaling history and the large question of human spirituality — especially how the two conflict. Can peace-loving Quakers really justify the slaughter of whales? That question aside, it must have been so painful for Nantucket families to wait and wait for young whalers to return or for any kind of news to reach the island. How could one think on the idea of the glory of God alongside the violence of whaling and the grief of losing sons and brothers and husbands while living out winter on a harsh, windblown island? We’re meant to make the connection with Moby-Dick, of course, and the story of The Essex in the form of The Pequod. But we’re also meant to reflect on the violence that ended Lowell’s cousin’s life (and millions more) through war. 

Perhaps because I feel the dangers embedded in hubris and power today, my new reading of the poem left me reflecting on, not just Lowell’s artistry, but also on the question of why we — if, indeed, there is an actual “we” — keep getting so much wrong. Why dominance prevails over stewardship. Why power elbows out empathy. Why we can lay aside our own beliefs. Why the money men choke-chained the capitalist system can’t help but lead us to the cliff’s edge.

The first section of “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” puts us out beyond the “brackish reach of shoal off Madaket,” an area off western Nantucket, where an unnamed naval fleet hauls up a dead body, then returns it to the sea with military honors and a multi-gun salute. This section is a slant reference, I’ve read, to both the death of Lowell’s cousin and to the sinking of the Irish “famine” ship, St. John, which wrecked off Cohasset in 1849. This shipwreck turned out to be one of the tragic events in the very tragic exodus from Ireland during The Great Famine. The storm that sunk the St. John killed more than 100 Irish refugees. It’s also worth nothing — since the poem highlights levels of human inhumanity — that an estimated 20 percent of the passengers on the St. John died in transit from disease and starvation, which was also true of other immigrant ships from Ireland. Around 20,000 Irish immigrants died in transit or in disembarkation centers during the famine.

I’ve read that Lowell drew this image of the dead body at sea from Henry David Thoreau’s Cape Cod, which opens with our contrarian Concord sage down on the Cohasset shore witnessing the washing up of bodies from the wreck of the St. John.

I only mention this because I think the link to Irish suffering adds another level of complexity to Lowell’s poem and foreshadows the suffering of so many refugees  and migrants seeking a new life in America and elsewhere today.

The second section of “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” puts us on Nantucket during Lowell’s present time. Here he offers up the contrast of those who play at sea in their weekend sailboats with the serious and often deadly business of trying to make a living at sea. Lowell is grieving for his cousin whose body was never found. The actual Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket, of course, is also full of the bones of thousands of Quaker islanders, many who also died at sea in pursuit of whales.

In this section, we’re offered a dense, complex picture of personal reflection and mourning, with one more reminder of Ahab and his mad quest to kill one particularly elusive and angry and now metaphoric whale. What interests me here is that Lowell imagines the Pequod’s dead sailors crying out for Moby-Dick, the hurt beast, as if they all knew that Ahab’s quest was mad and ill-advised, and yet they continued on obediently.

This question of complicity is haunting, then and now.

I do not mean for this to be a section-by-section explication of “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket.” So I won’t go on in detail about the remainder of the poem. Generally, what follows are Lowell’s reflections on the violence at sea revolving around his feelings of loss for his cousin — all of it threaded to more general sense of suffering and the heavy load of our inhuman leanings. Also woven throughout are Lowell’s insights into the way spirituality is so often misaligned with human action. There’s a mysterious reference to a creature named “IS” in the poem. Besides being a pretty cool verb to personify, IS seems to embody the spirit of Moby-Dick and may have greater mystical powers of destruction. In other words, IS is a sublime force beyond our ability to fully comprehend. 

In section VI, we briefly leave Nantucket for England — to the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, a site for annual pilgrimages. Given that pilgrimages are mainly about asking for intercessions, healing, and the renewal of faith, I think we’re to understand Lowell’s personal searching in “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” in a larger, spiritual light. But in the end, we’re back on the New England shore again, where “the empty winds are creaking and the oak/ Splatters and splatters on the cenotaph.”

Sorrow for what cannot be recover is pure sorrow. There’s no relief. We’re meant to feel Lowell’s personal loss and sense of despair rumbling. In our own spiritual searching, we’ve created a God — or gods — we’ve always hoped would guide us. But here the winds are just winds. And our destructiveness rages on. We harm ourselves and our world. We can pray for some kind of deliverance, but what history tells us is that we need, more than anything, to deliver ourselves from the worst of our instinct and illusions.

The poem ends with the cryptic line: “The Lord survives the rainbow of his will.” I could try to explicate this line — say something about its allusion to the biblical flood and its aftermath. I could also try to connect it to the broader themes in Lord Weary’s Castle. But maybe it’s best for each of us to simply carry it around like a worry stone in our pockets and see if it can lead us toward some better chapter in our shared history.

Just so I’m not being opaque here, let me add this. When I re-read this poem, I cried quietly for the optimism I felt as a college student and young writer back in the 1970s. I cried for the failure of our long-spoken wish to end war, to find peace. And I cried for the cruelty and destructiveness and spiritual emptiness I feel we’re all witnessing today: the greed and authoritarian leanings of our national leaders, the abuse of refugees, the continuing environmental destruction, the willingness to use people for immoral ends, the belittling of efforts to support diversity, equity, and inclusion, the unchristian proclivities among too many Christians, the maddening labyrinth of bluster and lies, the turning away from the suffering of others and toward the sharp unmaking of democracies. Much of this recent turn of meanness rests on the actions of one man and his coterie. But I think it’s also fueled by our general inability to talk clearly about any of this with each other.

If there’s an argument for reading more poetry today, this might be it. We are standing on the edge of “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” looking in. The sea and history are at our back. The stories of the dead reverberate. It would be best if we really took a good look around and agreed that something’s gotta give.

The Future of America Lies in the Future of American Education

By Michael Brosnan

If you read the March 11, 2025, press release from the U.S. Department of Education, and didn’t know better, you’d think that the recent massive reduction in the department’s staff — from 4,133 to 2,183 workers — was part of a carefully thought-out process to make the department more efficient and effective in support of schools. The language in the release claims that enormous past failures are driving these changes and that reducing the staffing now, with the goal of shuttering the entire department over time, will lead to future gains for children and the nation. We’re to believe that the previous administration, being Democratic (thus incompetent and sinister), created some kind of deep-state departmental bloat that brainwashed American children to embrace liberal causes and wasted taxpayers’ dollars while doing nothing to further academic learning.

On March 20, 2025, the Trump administration followed up the press release with an executive order to close the Department of Education as a means to, as he put it, “enable parents, teachers, and communities to best ensure student success.” As proof of the department’s past failures, the administration points specifically to the poor student performance nationally on the recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). A parallel fact sheet offers more “proof” of the departments supposed failures.

In a seeming non sequitur, the executive order also requires that school and college programs receiving any remaining Department of Education funds must stop “advancing DEI or gender ideology.”

If you lean Republican, you might cheer on these cuts — so committed to thinking that what matters most is smaller government and lower taxes. You might buy into the criticisms and rhetoric about reimagined American greatness. You might believe that DEI programs are racist in nature and should be terminated. You may even thrill to the idea of taking down any form of bureaucracy for the sake of conservative principles.

But is the Department of Education really a failed federal program? Does it push political ideology? Will gutting the department improve American education? Will moving its remaining services to other departments improve our government’s effectiveness in serving American families? And will shutting down DEI programs really lead to greater equity and justice in America?

At a recent event at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, a panel of experts with varying political views gathered to discuss such matters. The title of the event: “An Uncertain Future: The U.S. Department of Education and U.S. Policy,” underscores the general concern. While the four panelists had much to say about the Department of Education’s strengths and weakness, and what the future of federal education policy could or should look like, in fact, all were deeply critical of the administration’s efforts and skeptical of its claims. Even Neal McCloskey, director of the Center for Education Freedom at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank that supports the shift of education oversight to the states, couldn’t bring himself to praise the administration. The problem, of course, is that the gutting of the department and the executive order, like other moves of the administration, seem to be an effort to smash things without any clear plans for improving them. They seem primarily driven by ulterior motives and a poorly disguised agenda. Thus, the word “uncertain.”

What has emerged in these early months of Trump’s second term is a clear pattern of shock, disruption, and political retribution on all fronts. It may be that the administration believes that some of these moves — the gutting of governmental offices; the imposing of enormous tariffs that have to date wiped out $1 trillion from the stock market; the abandonment of essential allies; the cozying up to authoritarian rulers; the denial of climate change and undermining of environmental progress; the pulling back of foreign aid that will results in millions of deaths; the arresting and deportation of legal residents without due process; the attacks on higher education with questionable, if not false, claims of antisemitism; the executive orders banning civil rights initiatives; the cuts to NEH funding, etc. — have a valid purpose in serving the greater good. What appears to be happening, instead, is an all-out disruption of American society in a self-serving effort to remake America into two-tier society led and controlled by a small cabal of conservative capitalists, with the rest of us serving as cogs in the machinery of that wealth.

Perhaps it’s too early to tell exactly where Trump is leading us — but from where I stand it looks like we elected Ahab as our president and signed on as the crew of the Pequod.

Much of my professional life has been focused on education — on ways we can improve our systems, support teachers, and offer children curricula that help them thrive. So when I watch the White House tear down a central player in this work, I can’t help but feel alarm, not to mention dismay, frustration, and anger. I know, at the moment, the fate of our public and private education system is not our only concern, and perhaps not the most immediate one. But how we think about education on the federal, state, and local levels — across the entire K-16 spectrum — matters deeply for all of children, not to mention the future of civilization. And the attacks on and mischaracterizations of DEI-related programs reveal a deep disregard for facts and a cynical willingness to hurt institutions that care deeply about academic integrity and educating students for a just, equitable, democratic society.

On the question of funding and taxpayer support, as the panelists at the Harvard event pointed out, the Department of Education is a fairly small department with little impact on our taxes. In terms of saving American citizens money, we could easily fund the work (and more) if we closed loopholes in our tax policies and required billionaires and multi-millionaires to pay their fair share. Researcher Matthew Desmond, in his book Poverty By America, makes it clear that wealthy Americans are currently our major welfare recipients. Over the past four decades, policies created by the rich and favoring the rich have transferred an estimated $50 trillion from the lower and middle classes to the wealthy through enormous tax cuts. The Trump administration plans to increase these welfare benefits for the wealthy. So, one can’t help but ask: If we truly want to save “taxpayers” money, why not start by making the tax system fair? Once we’ve all contributed our fair share, we can then revisit the question of ways to trim our federal government to make it work for the American people without putting undue financial pressure on any citizen and without destroying valuable federal support systems. Starting by decimating the federal government without any consideration for the injustices built into our tax system is either poor management or a deliberate practice aimed at perpetuating or increasing injustice.

For those who care about American democracy, Trump’s plan to dismantle the Department of Education should be viewed with alarm. As panelist Andrew J. Rotherham, cofounder and senior partner at Bellwether, a national nonprofit designed to transform education to ensure equitable outcomes, pointed out, closing the department would mean that schools will lose on average about 8 percent of their annual funding. Poor districts, however, will lose up to 30 percent. So the closing of the department would not only undermine the work of all schools, it would devastate poor communities in all states. Over the course of a few decades, writer Jonathan Kozol has researched and written eloquently about our mistreatment of young people in poor communities. His book, The Shame of the Nation, for one, points out the troubling ways this systemic treatment in schools has been not only deliberate and shameful but also damaging to all of us. Other researchers have also made this point as well. Since then, there has been concerted efforts to address the inequities and close learning gaps based on economics, with its clear link to race. And we’ve made some progress in this area. As Rotherham pointed out, the recent learning gains of Gulf Coast states alone have been worthy of praise and support. Dismantling or closing the Department of Education will hurt these efforts and set us back in time.

Brian Gill, senior fellow at Mathematica, a federally funded research group, added that closing the department will also undermine the essential research on quality education that the department shares with schools. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has already cancelled $900 million worth of education research projects. The cuts include U.S. participation in international assessments, the result being that we’ll lose the ability to better understand new directions in teaching and learning or know how our education efforts compare with those of other nations. Overall, we’re also dismantling the infrastructure that supports academic research, making it harder to engage in research in the future.

Catherine Lhamon, former assistant secretary for the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Education, added that the reductions in staff will undermine essential efforts to protect students’ civil rights in schools. The department’s Office of Civil Rights arose from the 1964 Civil Rights Act and has been working steadily ever since to investigate and address violations. Now the reductions in staff at the Department of Education have led to the closing of seven of the twelve regional offices. In effect, Lhamon said, American children no longer have federal protection from discrimination. “I’m heartsick about it,” she said.

The field of education is highly complex. When the Department of Education was founded by Congress, there was a clear acknowledgment of this fact, with the goal being a federal effort to better support schools and students nationwide. In reality, the department’s efforts to date have been a mixed bag, partly because this work is hard and partly because it is susceptible to the politics of each sitting administration. The No Child Left Behind Act is a case in point. From the time it was implemented in 2002 until 2015, when it was replaced by a system that gave more oversight of outcomes back to the states, the law did result in gains on national standardized test scores, especially among low-income students. On the other hand, its over focus on standardized test as a means to measuring learning progress led to “drill and kill” teaching methods that damaged student interest and engagement. It also pushed aside subjects such as social studies, science, and art. It also played into the hands of wealthy families that could afford extra test-prep help.

The Common Core that followed was an improvement, mostly because it set up guidelines rather than mandates, but it came with its own set of challenges. But giving more control back to the states after 2015, including in Trump’s first term, resulted in lower test scores in math and reading, not to mention highly uneven scores among the states. Of course, other factors were involved in the lower test scores, too — including the increase in immigration, the impact of remote learning during the pandemic, the increased number of students with disabilities, and the continued underfunding of schools in low-income communities. Another factor might be the advent of cellphones, which have damaged the ability for all of us to concentrate.

We could sit here now and claim that the Department of Education has failed in its mission. But I think the better, more honest course of action is to look at the reality in schools, engage in new rounds of research, and try new pathways forward.

Of course, another goal of the Trump administration is to push for more public funding of private education — allowing families to use public money to pay for private school tuitions. This is another area in which the politicizing of a federal department is problematic. I have much to say on this topic, too, but will save it for another day. Suffice it to say that our public educational system is so important to our nation on numerous levels. It deserves our support. Our experiments with charter schools to date have shown us, among other things, just how good our public schools are. Some charters have done well, but most have not measured up. More to the point, we’re better off when we reserve our tax dollars for our public schools only and focus on making them as good as possible. This focus can certainly include ways to give schools more flexibility in response to parents’ needs. But to pretend that privatizing all education is better for the entire nation is to push an illusion that, in the end, plays into the hands of corporations that want to earn money on the backs of children. I have nothing against private, nonprofit schools. But I see no reason our tax money should go to them, except in rare circumstances.

Overall, I think the search for the best role of the federal government in education remains a work-in-progress. But even with the Department of Education’s missteps, there are very few experts who believe the department should be gutted. Three out of the four panelists at the Harvard event, in fact, agreed that it remains essential for, among other things, its oversight of student loans and grants, the funding and disseminating of research designed to improved student experiences and outcomes, and the monitoring of student civil rights, which, prior to the department’s involvement, were widespread, especially for students of color.

Andrew Rotherham made it clear that supporting the department should be a bipartisan matter, since the work impacts schools in all states. He did say, however, that he sees value in rethinking the federal approach to supporting education — aiming for a true partnership with the states. This strikes me as a smart, sensible response to the needs of schools and society. Clearly, it’s not good to have a highly politicized department pushing a partisan agenda — as we’re currently witnessing in the attacks on DEI programs and the removal of highly valuable research funding as punishment. But there are actions and steps a federal department, led by education experts, can take that would be difficult to replicate at the state level — and that make a valuable difference in student experience and outcomes.

What has been missing from our federal approach to supporting education is the independent research I’ve read over the years about specific classroom dynamics and one-on-one interactions that help children learn best. For instance, research from psychologist and educator Joann Deak makes it clear that girls need a combination of competence, confidence, and connectedness to thrive in schools. How we establish those qualities in school matters, yet they are the kind of elements that get pushed aside with a focus on standardized test scores. The research on boys is similar, but one element stands out for me because it’s one that proved to be central to my own learning. For boys, the research says, their relationship with a teacher is central. If they have a connection, if they feel respected and supported, they will engage more willingly and enthusiastically in learning, regardless of the subject. I know this to be true to my experience. I failed Spanish 1 in my high school, then turned around and got an A in Spanish in summer school. The difference? The kindness of the summer school teacher toward me and everyone in the class. It was actually a joy to be there.

Maybe the essential point I’m making is that children need skilled, caring professionals who can help each and every one of them develop their intellectual and social-emotional skills. Creating the classroom dynamics that enable this to happen ought to be central to our federal, state, and local efforts. What our federal office can do is collect and analyze data nationally and share it among the states so that the best of our efforts find their way in to all schools.

Linda McMahon, whose background is in professional entertainment wrestling, not education, describes her job as Secretary of Education as leading the department’s “final mission” to shut the place down. It behooves all of us to resist such dangerous, partisan — not to mention unconstitutional — behavior among our supposed leaders. Eliminating the department and imposing anti-DEI rules and punishing institutions that don’t bend the knee to the administration’s wishes are clearly wrongheaded. They can only damage schools, undermine learning, expose more marginalized students to discrimination, and reduce access to higher education. Such efforts will not improve learning outcomes. But they will make the nation less democratic, damaging our economy and communities in the process.

My mind keeps flashing back to inauguration day in January when Donald Trump did not put his hand on the Bible while repeating the oath of office. It was described in the press as an oversight. But I tend to think it was deliberate — a quiet signal that he wasn’t committing to serving the country; he was committing to serving his own ego and personal financial gain. Maybe I’m reading too much into that moment. What is clear, however, is that America can’t get far with the madness of authoritarian mob-boss leadership. America can only be great if we ensure that our schools, communities, and government are truly democratic and just.

Amid the administration’s bullying ways, I hope we can resist the deceptions, lies, and manipulations and focus on truth-telling. Most people I know approach their work in all fields with honesty and integrity, aiming to accomplish worthy goals. I have no doubt that this is true for the majority of people who work for the U.S. Department of Education, new secretary aside. A strong department, led by experienced, knowledgeable, dedicated educators in service to the real needs of schools in all communities is part and parcel of a valid and valuable plan to ensure that all Americans are prepared for fulfilling lives through both work, family, and citizenship. It’s also how we build a strong, stable economy — and find our way to that more perfect union.

Reading in Portsmouth

I'm doing another poetry reading with two other poets on Thursday, February 6 at 7 pm at Laney & Lu Cafe in Portsmouth NH. Should be a fun literary night. The event is free, but please RSVP here.

The Sea and Us

Just a quick note to say I’ve published a new piece on my Substack page — regarding a NYRB review by Verlyn Klinkenborg of two new books on the ocean and our collective damaging impact. In this transition period to a new U.S. Presidential administration, I think it’s important for us to get greater clarity about core responsibilities of democratic societies.

Clearly we have a lot of work to do in the area of environmental justice — for the future of the planet and humanity.

Schooling for a Better America

I’ve spend a large part of my professional life as a writer and editor focused on American education. My sense at the start of my involvement with teaching and learning was that our nation had gotten some elements right when it comes to educating children, but it had also struggled on numerous fronts. What made me optimistic about the future of American education and the future of our democracy — not to mention the future of human civilization — were the numerous examples of success in education and the brilliant people I met who were, and many who still are, dedicated to helping schools and children thrive.

In short, as I saw it, the problems were clear and solutions available. All we had to do is focus on promoting best practices, supporting successful programs, encouraging our teachers, and backing the key change-makers who will help transform all of our schools into schools of excellence. And for a time, it seemed we were making strides — logical, essential, lasting strides. The future looked bright.

Here’s a short list of some key developments in education that fed my optimism:

• We’ve learned the value of high-quality early childhood education and what it looks like. In turn, we’ve come to understand how early childhood education, when done right, not only prepares children well for their formal education to follow, but also enables children to develop a range of social-emotional skills that help them become happy, engaged children in their schools, families, and communities — and, thus, engaged citizens when they came of age.

• We’ve learned how to develop curricula that help children develop a strong base of knowledge for school, work, and citizenship while enabling them to explore their particular interests at a higher and deeper level. In our urban areas, we’ve created entire schools with particular academic foci to support and advance academically talented students with increasing success.

• We’ve learned about how to engage children well in the classroom, moving from the classic lecture or drill-and-repeat method to one that actively involves children in the process of learning and that adjusts to a range of learning styles. Teachers have learned how to be less the expert and more a model of inquiry, curiosity, and knowledge acquisition.

• We’ve learned, thanks to the research of Howard Gardner and others, that there are a range of predominant learning styles and that we can and should tap into them as needed.

• We’ve learned how to create interdisciplinary and experiential learning options that connect the various disciplines to each other and to real-world activities so children see how these skills matter in adult life. We’ve also created successful collaborations between schools and in-demand industries to train high school students for successful careers.

• We’ve learned how to build and support what writer bell hooks calls a “beloved community” — that is, a community of children and adults in the daily practice of learning together, with the goal of leaving no one behind.

• We know how to foster a growth mindset that encourages students to take risks and tackle increasingly challenging tasks.

• We understand the role of gender in learning. For boys, we know that relationships with friends and adults are the foundation of educational success. For girls, we know that a combination of confidence, competence, and connectedness are central. We also understand that gender identity can vary widely along a spectrum and have developed ways to support individual students in their growth.

• We know how to evaluate children in a way that encourages further learning, a positive sense of self, and a growth mindset. We’ve also learned the proper place and role of standardized testing.

• We know how to support students when they struggle academically so they can get back on track and even accelerate their learning as needed.

• We know how not to overburden children with homework while keeping their learning curve on a steady rise.

• We know how to integrate social support systems to help children, especially those living in poverty and those with special needs.

• We know how to integrate technology into the classroom — and how to choose technology that supports students well in their learning, while keeping problematic technology out of the classroom.

• We know a great deal about nutrition and what children need to develop healthy minds and bodies so they can learn well. And we know the importance of feeding children well in schools — especially the millions living in poverty.

• We know the value of physical activity for growing minds and bodies, and how to create sports and physical education programs that engage all students.

• We know the value of the arts in both academic development of students and in their lives in general. We know how to integrate the arts into the broader academic program — and, more generally, how to encourage creativity.

• We know a great deal about the human brain as it relates to learning, especially how to build and strengthen neural pathways. And we’re learning more all the time.

• We understand the ideal class size for dynamic learning and for keeping teachers happily engaged.

• We know what we need to do to attract and retain high-quality teachers.

• We know the importance of hiring a racially diverse group of teachers to support racially diverse groups of children. We know how to help individual educators develop the kind of cultural competencies needed to teach all children well across race, culture, and gender.

• We know how to develop effective academic leaders who can guide and support young teachers and encourage and coach colleagues.

• We know how to offer effective teacher education in our colleges and universities. Our universities and college have also greatly improved their academic research on education while finding effective ways to share this knowledge with educators.

• We know how to help schools continue to evolve through the iterative process of experimentation and innovation that leads to further breakthroughs in teaching and learning.

• We know the importance of healthy school buildings and well-designed and accessible classrooms — and we can build them well.

We know all this and more. And it leads one to think, with all this hard-earned knowledge, that our schools should be in a great place now. But it’s clear that, collectively, they are not. Some of our schools are excellent, but too many fall short, usually because they don’t have the resources and support they need. I don’t put much stock in rankings, but it’s telling that our school system as a whole consistently ranks below those of many other developed nations.  

What’s the problem? It has come clear to me that the kind of changes we need to make to help children thrive — the kind we already know how to deliver — are being thwarted through a mix of cultural indifference, political structures and power, and corporate desires to profit from schoolchildren. Embedded in these barriers are well-funded campaigns of misinformation that effectively undermine so many positive developments in schools or prevent necessary changes from taking place.

As a result:

• Our educational system remains inequitable. It continues to favor the wealthy by significant factors. Education funding for low-income communities is woefully inadequate. The push for “school choice” programs and for-profit charter schools has shifted essential public money away from our mainstream public schools and continues to hamper positive change in public education. And for reasons we should have dispelled long ago, we continue to think that children born into poverty don’t really deserve quality schools.

• Our education system continues to adhere to structures that marginalize too many students of color. Even in many well-funded schools where one would think that racial differences in outcomes would disappear, we’re falling short through a combination of willful ignorance of students’ racialized experience and/or the politically motivative campaigns that pretend racial inequity is not an issue or that to talk about race at all is to cause harm to white students. This problematic thinking tries to reduce schooling to a kind of educational hunger games in which any group’s gain is another group’s loss.

• Classrooms in schools that don’t serve the wealthy are too often overcrowded and teachers are underpaid and under-supported. As a result, we end up with disengaged students and overwhelmed young teachers, many of whom leave the profession soon after starting. In these situations, the atmosphere for learning atrophies and instead of providing the needed materials, training, and funding, we blame the teachers and the children.

• Too many of our school buildings are unsafe and unhealthy. There’s an abundance of stories about broken toilets, lack of toilet paper and soap, the presence of mold and mildew, dead rodents, broken windows, leaky ceilings, chain-locked doors, etc. While we know what it takes to fix them, we embrace the delusion that saving a few dollars and keeping children in hazardous conditions is a smart way to serve our democracy.

• Many children come to school hungry. Schools and districts do what they can, but food programs and family support services are inadequate in schools.

• While the research on the value of preschool is clear, in too many states we continue to act as if it is not important enough to fully fund.

• Emboldened politicians increasingly meddle with curricula to support their own political agenda and power, using as much misinformation and fear tactics as they can muster to encourage voters to see educators as either threats to “family values” or as simply incapable of making wise choices about content and practices. In a number of states, the legislature is trying to rewrite history into an invented story that serves its political ends.

• Over the past thirty years, we’ve increasingly outsourced the education of our children (or elements thereof) to private, for-profit businesses, pretending that business efficiency will improve matters and save money — all without creating harm.

I have to admit that I didn’t see this coming early in my career. I really did think we’d be in a better place by now. Logic and moral reasoning strongly suggest that we should be in a better place.

It’s discouraging, for sure. But I see no reason to give up on finding ways to implement the knowledge we already have to create excellent schools in all communities. In fact, the work is more essential and compelling now. If nothing else is clear, we need an adult population in America that is collectively wiser and more interconnected than our current generations of adults. And the only way we’ll get there is through high-quality schools led by engaged, well-trained and educated adults.

To parse out the growing gap between what we know works in schools and how schools actually function is to dive deeply into local, state, and national policies and politics and to understand the history of public education in America and how it mirrors both the strengths and shortcomings of our democratic systems. In short, this is one of those conversations that could go on forever. So for the sake of this piece, I mostly want to make these essential points:

• We know what’s right and wrong with our schools collectively.

• We have the knowledge and blueprint for high-quality public schools. We have numerous excellent models of high-quality schools.

• We know these schools are essential to a thriving democracy.

• We need to find a way to support the development of such schools in all communities and support politicians who make public education for democratic success a priority.

A recent and, to my mind, wonderful essay by novelist Marilynne Robinson, “Agreeing to Our Harm” (New York Review of Books, 2024) explores the challenges of improving essential elements of American society where things have clearly gone astray. She starts with a focus on the enormous problem of gun violence and its clear mismatch with our supposedly Christian ideals and values, then moves to the complexities that have led our nation into a series of misguided wars that, in turn, has led to the enormous and tragic loss of life. This sets the stage for the essential problem of our divided politics today, especially the MAGA agenda that exploits the frustrations and resentment of poor white Americans without a viable plan for relieving their grievances. What Robinson offers is the reminder that our democracy has addressed major challenges in the past and has done so successfully. She believes we currently undervalue “the habits of respect that make debate possible.” Because America has an outsized influence on the fate of the planet, she encourages us to be clear about the reality we face and face it together with the patience and deliberation and “the old courtesies that have made democracy possible.”

Her essay made me think again about the problems in schools and led me to a recent book on education — School Communities of Strength, by Peter W. Cookson, Jr. (Harvard Education Press, 2024) —  that can help us once again be clear about the reality of schools, their role in our democracy, and what we need to do — and certainly can do — to improve American education, and, by doing so, improve American democracy.

Cookson’s book comes with the subtitle, “Strategies for educating children living in deep poverty.” Without question, he has engaged in “the habits of respect that make debate possible.” He also offers a detailed blueprint for fixing our high-poverty schools so that they collectively serve our neediest and most vulnerable children well. I certainly encourage all educators working in high-poverty schools to read the book and find ways to adapt, evolve, or rethink their programs so they support all students well. If you are an educator and you are not thrilled with your school, why wouldn’t you read it? But I also encourage all of us — whether we work in the field of education or not — to read the book and think about (1) how we can help support the kind of school change outlined here and (2) consider how such change not only serves individual children but also serves our nation so that (3) we can strengthen and improve our overall democratic systems that enable all citizens the opportunity to thrive and live fulfilling lives within a culture that is respectful of individual choices and community needs.

Cookson teaches at Georgetown University, which means he works almost within shouting distance of the White House and Capitol Hill. For all politicians who believe we can and should have the best schools in the work, and who see the link between quality education and quality of life in a democracy, I encourage them to invite Cookson over for a conversation, engage in the habit of respectful debate and see if it sparks ideas about the kind of policies that will improve lives. 

Cookson reminds us that children living in deep poverty “have all the same needs, desires, fears, and abilities as other children. They don’t need special schools or classrooms; they need twenty-first century schools and classrooms designed to be communities of care, compassion, inquiry, and discovery.”

In truth, all of our schools need to be schools of care, compassion, inquiry, and discovery. The problem is that we set up so many roadblocks to the creation of such schools — especially for children living in poverty.

Cookson isn’t the only educator, writer, and researcher who offers excellent guidance on this front. I would also encourage folks to read everything and anything by Linda-Darling Hammond, Ted Sizer, Jonathan Kozol, Maxine Greene, Howard Gardner, Pedro Noguera, Lisa Delpit, bell hooks, Richard Rothstein, Diane Ravitch, and Beverly Daniel Tatum. If you’re looking for more writers, I’d be happy to produce a list. The point is, we have great books steeped in research and experience that hold the blueprint to amazing schools. The structures of these schools can — and should  — be duplicated. The sooner we collectively engage in this work the sooner our frayed democracy can start to heal and grow.

What I hope we’ll come to understand is that the science of learning and development applies both to our schools and our society. Fix our schools and we’ll stop hungering for politicians who fuel our grievances. Fix our schools and we’ll start to see difference as a democratic strength not as a problem. Fix our schools and we’ll better understand how to build and balance personal freedom and community needs. Fix our schools and we’ll figure out how to enable economic development and environmental health. Fix our schools and we can improve not just our GDP but also our GNP — our Gross National Happiness.

What has been frustrating to me over the past thirty years is that I’ve witnessed what great schools can do. I’ve seen their impact on the lives of children. I have read over and over again how the development of well-functioning, twenty-first century schools that focus on the whole child are possible everywhere. And I have visited many of these schools. We can find these changes in our high-end private schools. We can find them in religious schools and in not-for-profit charter schools. We can certainly find them in our public schools — in both low-income and high-income communities. And yet, here we are stuck in a pattern that encourages us to believe our schools with wildly mixed outcomes are good enough as they are.

I know there are numerous ideas for how to fix our current national woes and repair our social fabric. As for me, I think we should center our schools in the conversation. We keep undervaluing our public school system and the wisdom of our lead educational researchers at our peril. If we remake our schools into world-class learning communities, the rest will follow.

In his 2012 book, High School, Race, and America’s Future, Lawrence Blum writes:

Public discussions about the value of education increasingly focus on the individual student’s academic skills, and how they contribute to his or her college or job readiness and upward mobility. An even narrower focus is student test scores, which are increasingly treated as the standard of educational accomplishment. But traditionally education, especially public education, has been recognized to serve other important purposes. It has aimed to enhance students’ personal growth (including intellectual growth beyond its instrumental value for economic success), to contribute to their moral development, to improve their social relations, and to develop their capabilities as future citizens. Schooling contributes to the social good in helping to produce moral persons and responsible, informed citizens.

Much of the public conversation on education has over-focused on matters of personal gain. I blame much of this shift in thinking on self-enriching political posturing and on corporate intrusion into public education in search of ways to privatize our schools and profit on the backs of children (a form of child labor in my book). The “education industry” will argue that it is only responding to market forces. Whether this is true or whether it has created and manipulated market forces, the reality is that we’re losing grip on a social institution of the highest importance. It is not an exaggeration to say that we are entirely dependent on our schools to educate each new generation to take on the enormous challenge of running our democracy.

If we recenter our thinking on helping our schools fulfill this task — infuse it into every school mission and into every decision we make about teaching and learning — I believe we can find our way through to have the kind of schools that we know we need to become the kind of nation we say we are.

College Protests, 2024 Edition

I’ve been focused on poetry these days. But for more than 20 years I wrote and edited a magazine on education. So I can’t read about the college students who are actively protesting Israel’s killing of massive numbers of Palestinians, with America’s support in the form of weapons, and not say something regarding the intersection of the students’ response and the mission of our colleges and universities.

In particular, the protests made me think again about a book I read recently (and wrote about in this blog): The Real World of College: What Higher Education Is and What It Can Be, by Wendy Fischman and Howard Gardner.

Based on extensive studies of a variety of colleges and universities — from community colleges to public universities to elite colleges — the authors draw some important conclusions about what a good education should look like and where colleges and universities get things right and where they have been falling short of late. First, the authors note, far too many students today feel disconnected from their college and university communities and, as a result, suffer an unacceptably high level of stress and isolation. Mental health issues on college campuses, the authors tell us, are rampant. A high percentage of students also report feeling alienated from both peers and their school’s academic agenda. Second, too many colleges and universities are trying too hard to be all things to all people — and, in not-so-shocking irony, fail to serve their communities as well as they intend. The authors zero in on the idea that the overall goal of all colleges and universities is to develop students “higher education capital” — or HEDCAP, as they call it. To that end, colleges need to clarify this mission and develop programs that support it. Within reason, programs that don’t advance the mission should be culled.

Higher education capital — through a general education in the natural and social sciences, the arts and humanities, and the world of computers and coding — includes the ability to:

• See things from multiple perspectives.

• Develop a cogent argument that accepts the complexities of any situation or problem, and both express the argument and defend it well, while acknowledging (as we all should) the limitations of our individual perspectives.

• Be able to situate problems in context — such as in history or current events or literature.

• Articulate the value of critical thinking, interdisciplinary engagement, and communication skills — and work hard to develop such skills.

A key observation in the book is that too many students see the arrangement with colleges and universities as transactional. Students and their parents pay tuition and, in return, the schools prepare students for jobs. While all of us who attend or have attended college want jobs that pay well and are fulfilling, Fischman and Gardner see this narrow mindset as, at best, a baseline goal for a college education. The bigger, more important, goal for both students and society is that the college experience be transformational — intellectually and emotionally. In doing so, the college experience helps young adults transition into adulthood with skills that will serve them and society well.

I’ve written about how college and graduate school did this for me. So, not surprisingly, I agree with Fischman and Gardner. And I know many other college graduates who share this view. It’s interesting, too, that the vast majority of college professors see student transformation — through deep study of various disciplines and community engagement — as the core of their work.

Fischman and Gardner found that some colleges and universities are doing a good job helping their students develop HEDCAP skills. But there are plenty of instances of mission drift, and of subsequent confusion and disconnect between students and faculty, between faculty and administration, and between administrators and trustees. In other words, colleges and universities could do a better job clarifying and articulating their mission and purpose, onboarding students to that mission, and developing a comprehensive program that services the mission at every turn.

Fischman and Gardner end the book with specific advice for the varied constituents — knowing that this is the best way to get everyone rowing in unison. In the advice section for students, the authors ask students to:

• Acknowledge their great fortune in getting to attend college — a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

• Use the opportunity to expand their horizons and connect with a wide-range of people.

• Take time to connect with professors and seek help, advice, and guidance as needed.

• Work hard to develop both intellectual and social skills.

• Focus on transformation, not transaction. “Explore new territories physically, cognitively, socially, emotionally and remain open to being transformed.”

I have to admit that I have not attended any of the recent student protests. I’ve only read accounts in newspapers — ones I believe adhere to high journalist standards — along with various analyses and commentary from knowledgeable folks (no television news, which I gave up years ago, and very little social media scrolling). But I feel I know enough to say a few things.

First, I’m glad so many college students are taking what they believe is an important moral stand. They’ve learned about events in Gaza and have decided the right and moral thing to do in response is to let their campuses and the world know they find the killings unacceptable. Some of the messaging may be oversimplified, and some of it misguided, but I think it’s clear that the overall goal is change in the name of peace and justice. Much of the media coverage of the protests, to my mind, tries to make these events into an us-and-them struggle — either pro-Palestinian or pro-Israeli. In reality, as Robert Reich wrote in a recent New York Times column, the vast majority of protesters are not pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli, or vice versa. What they are push for is the end to enormous collateral damage in Israel’s response to Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023. To date, more than 34,000 civilians have died. Another 77,000 have been injured and an estimated 1.1 million are experiencing catastrophic hunger. Student protesters find this unacceptable in the extreme — as all of us should. In pushing for the end of such slaughter, they are asking the U.S. government to stop supplying the Israeli government with weapons that are being used in such an immoral and repulsive way. They are also asking their institutions to divest from Israeli companies as long as the Israeli government continues the bombing of innocent people. More generally, they are asking the rest of us to make our voices heard on the subject.

The question of the right Israeli response to Hamas’s killing of more than 1,200 Israeli citizens on October 7 is a challenging one — informed by a complex web of historical, religious, political, and cultural issues. And some of the protesters, like many adults, may be oversimplifying matters and saying things that aren’t helpful. Reliance on slogans and signs has a tendency to do that. But I’m still glad the students have stepped up to challenge the adult leaders on their campuses and beyond — to say it’s not OK to sit on the sidelines doing nothing. And I’m dismayed by the college and university administrators who have decided the best way to engage the students is with riot squads.

I suppose what I want is for more colleges and universities to acknowledge and support the students who are pushing for nonviolence solutions in Gaza. At the very least, we should listen to them, not instantly vilify them. I want most is for college administrators to take a careful look at their students and find ways to connect the protests to the colleges’s missions; see this moment as an opportunity for deeper learning, the kind that happens on the best college campuses. I hope it goes without saying that there’s no place for antisemitism, Islamophobia and expressions of hatred on campus. But as long as the students aren’t engaged in violence or the threat of violence, administrators would be wise to find ways to connect these protests to the central mission of the schools.

The Real World of College spells out ways in which colleges could use the protests as a springboard for deeper learning — for instance, through linking events in Gaza with other historic periods of war and political unrest, or through a deep analysis of contemporary geopolitics, or even through the study of literature and art. In truth, just about all areas of study offer the opportunity for deeper cross-disciplinary learning and for building skills is human interaction. I imagine there are many college presidents thinking along these lines. One who stands out to me is Michael S. Roth, president of Wesleyan University. Rather than push to have protesters arrested and encampments disassembled, Roth allowed students to protest, as long as it was peaceful and the protesters weren’t blocking access to buildings or threatening or interrupting other students in their learning. While acknowledging that he didn’t agree with much of what the protesters were demanding, he says in an essay in The New Republic:

“How can I not respect students for paying attention to things that matter so much? I respect that they’re concerned about Gaza; I admire that they’re not entirely taken up with grades or lining up their credentials…. I would prefer they use their energies to pressure the U.S. government to do more to get the hostages released, to stop supporting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war tactics, and to bring more direct aid to people in Gaza on the brink of starvation. My team expects to discuss all of this with students in the coming days. Right now, I’m most concerned with protecting their right to protest in nonviolent ways that don’t undermine our educational program. For me, the modest violations of the rules are preferable to the narrow-minded vocationalism that others seem suddenly to pine for.”

Roth’s views tie in well with the points Fischman and Gardner make in The Real World of College. If we are, as we say, educating the next generation of leaders, it’s essential that we not only listen to them and take their concerns seriously, but that we help them develop the whole gamut of interpersonal skills along with a strong academic base of knowledge so they will be poised to tackle the world’s most pressing problems as they arise in the future.

As Dartmouth history professor Udi Greenberg said to the New York Times following Dartmouth’s quick crackdown on peaceful student protesters, “We’re supposed to be a living example for how we manage divisive topics, and the most important thing in this process is that we don’t engage each other as enemies. Sending the police on protesters is the exact opposite of engaging each other in good faith.”

Calling in the riot squad to shut students up is not the right response. Rather, the student protests offer colleges and universities an opportunity to engage in deep conversation with students about the world around them. It’s also an opportunity to show we take them seriously. For colleges and universities that simply want their campuses to be bucolic places for job preparation, maybe this summer is the right time to reexamine their mission and purpose.

On Being an Artist

My third poetry book, EMU BLIS, BUMS LIE, BLUE-ISM, is at the printer — arriving in February. In the meantime, I’m tying myself in useless knots thinking about where I go next. I have a couple projects in progress, which is nice. But without strict deadlines, it’s hard to find my daily focus.

I think, for may writers, these in-between times can be fraught with matters of doubt, anxiety, worth, and so on — until the next project takes hold and all is fine again. Reading a collection of essays by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louise Glück, American Originality, I came upon her reflections on being an artist.

In “The Cult of Healing” essay, she writes:

“The artist’s experience of his own work alternates panic and gratitude. What is constant, what seems to me the source of resilience (or fortitude), is the capacity of intense, driven absorption. Such absorption makes a kind of intermission from the self; it derives, in the artist, from a deep belief in the importance of art (though not necessarily his own art, except in the presence of it being made). At intervals throughout his life, the artist is taken out of that life by concentration; he lives for a time in a suspension that is also a quest, a respite that is also acute tension.”

Gendered generalized artist aside, Glück basically nails it, I think.