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It’s all gonna change, one way or the other, today. With that said, it’ll be interesting in a few weeks, months, or (hopefully) years to look back on the beginning of 2008 and see the state of the union–not from the prostelitizing in the government halls–but from the perspective of some of our best writers.

A nice example of that viewpoint can be found over at Slate’s excerpts from State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America. I’m especially diggin Bagoberto Gilb’s take on the state of Iowa.

From the Milpas of Mexico to the Cornfields of Iowa
By Dagoberto Gilb

This is about the tortilla. This is about corn grown in Iowa. This is about the people who are in the campos of Iowa picking the vegetables and walking the cornfields. Those people are Mexican people. They are of the culture where hand-ground masa was first patted into tortillas and, because of that, it is said that the physical body of any Mexicano is at least half-corn. They are from the civilization that worshipped the corn plant as a god—in some regions, such as what became known as Guatemala, the God, the image of God—and they are from the soil and nation where this corn we all have learned to eat and to feed as grain for healthy livestock was first developed and harvested five thousand years ago. They are the people who now are driven here, because even corn, and the tortilla, is going up in price even more since the ’90s NAFTA treaty, and subsidized corn in the United States is cheaper to import, while its demand increases its value to the corporate farmers in Mexico. Because corn has become an ethanol fuel industry, its hybrid grain is even more highly sought.

But in Mexico, the ordinary milpas—cornfields—are shrinking in size, and those people who traditionally worked them can’t make enough to survive in their villages. So they are leaving, like animals in a drought, going to the big cities to find jobs, and they are crossing the border into the U.S. because that is where most jobs are. They come to Iowa because they will be hired and work in meat-packing plants cheaply, hard, and they work in the fields cheaply, and hard. And as they walk las milpas in Iowa to do as their culture has done for thousands of years, anti-immigration ideologues bash them for spoiling what they see as a field of dreams as clean and pure as Iowa butter, as nostalgic as baseball, as all-American as Kevin Costner.

Read the rest of the story here.

Time to give in to more election eve anxiety and post the funniest endorsement (short of Republican (self) parodies) for change I’ve seen.

Another day of on-again, off-again rain here in Oakland. I’m starting to think it’s just a physical manifestation of election anxiety, but that’s just me.

One happy diversion was the spontaneous geyser that erupted on the corner of 9th & Webster this morning. The fire hydrant remains a mystical well for me as it has served as wishing well, drinking fountain, communal shower, and spontaneous storm throughout my childhood. As such, it also has more than one name, Ive known it as the hydrant, la pompa, and the pump.

Seeing this badboy burst this morning let me get in touch with that little kid in me, and I was in full awe of la pompa’s power as cops and firefighters could barely control it and even the hard rain felt secondary.

Just a minute after I snapped the shot, they got the pump under control which led me to start cheering big time for both the 9-to-5 emergency service guys and for the City and its reaction to election anxiety.

My first official introduction to Bronx-born Studs Terkel was in Willie Perdomo’s VONA Poetry class two years back. Willie was constantly challenging us to view the creation of political poetry from as many vectors as possible and kept bringing in material that challenged the notion that there is only one way to write political poetry.

One example was Studs Terkel’s 1961 interview with Gwendolyn Brooks that was reprinted in Conversations with Gwendolyn Brooks. Studs’ admiration for Brooks is very present throughout the interview but more than anything, I really dig how he keeps asking her to read more poems, reads a few of her poems himself (“May I try reading this?”), and then brings in an outside recording of “Sir Patrick Spence” to broaden their conversation on the ballad form.

Man, I am so feelin’ this interview and Turkel’s reverence for the office of “poet,” how he feels it elevates and chronicles the people. Which is the cruz of Willie’s discussion: How do you stay true to your craft but still relate to those who you are writing about?

Gwendolyn Brooks’ response:

By the time I began to write Annie Allen I was very much impressed with the effectiveness of technique, and I wanted to write poetry that was honed to the last degree it could be. … I no longer feel that this is the proper attitude to have when you sit down to write poetry, but that’s how I felt then… I feel that my poems should be written more in the mood that I had when I wrote A Street in Bronzeville. I was just interested in putting people down on paper and, although it’s rougher than Anne Allen, I feel there’s more humanity in it.

That quest for “more humanity” seems to be one that Terkel also shared in. His list of oral histories is not only impressive but also takes an approach that honors the traditions of the griot while simultaneously predating the current trend of user-generated content that is driving Web 2.0 to replace the network news and local papers.

It’s looking like I’m going to have a lot of Studs Terkel to catch up on but this appraisal from the NY Times and this YouTube from UCTV seem like two great places to start.

He Gave Voice to Many, Among Them Himself
By Edward Rothstein

Mr. Terkel anticipated the academic movement of recent decades to tell history from below — not from the perspective of the makers of history but from the perspective of those who have been shaped by it. He once said he was interested in the masons who might have built the Chinese Wall, or the cooks in Caesar’s army. That is also one of oral history’s implicit ambitions: using a populist style to tell populist history. The oral historian does little more than hold up a mirror, just making sure the glass is clean. The practice claims to be self-effacing and world-revealing. How can a collection of interviews be anything else?

But if you look closely at these oral histories, you can never forget who has shaped them and to what end.

Full article can be found here.

Conversations with History: Studs Terkel

[you still have me trippin, pedro pietri. i am sure you are having a fun day today, fuckin with the saints and preachin to the demonios. en paz (y poesia) descanse, querido reverendo.]

Telephone Booth #898½

if you are
unable to erase it
it means that you
have not written down
anything to erase
& don’t have to fear
being quoted just
when you are about
to contradict what
you didn’t write down

© Pedro Pietri