Terror and the New Hedonism

Terror and the New Hedonism The Guardian reports today (4 Nov.) that “terror is the new normal,” so New Yorkers act “preternaturally calm” in the wake of the recent truck attack that left 8 dead in TriBeCa on Halloween (31), and along the afflicted bike path downtown are seen “cyclists back out with a vengeance.” Yes, maybe terror has struck so frequently of late that human beings just roll with its punches and quickly resume living as they had. But this account doesn’t distinguish between radical, ideologically driven acts of terror, like the one in NYC on Tuesday, and less explicable attacks like two of the worst, the Oklahoma City bombing and the sniper assault in Las Vegas last month, both carried out by domestic white men with Christian backgrounds. Our President quickly condemned to death the Isis adherent who struck in NYC, while deferring any comment about the Vegas sniper and even declaring it too soon even to discuss the role played by his firearms, adapted to fire like machine guns. But that act of mass murder, which killed 58 and wounded around 600 others, nevertheless adds to the mounting sense of terror and horror inflicted on the vulnerable public. Thus, the recent truck assault in NYC, reported on soon afterward and causing 8 deaths, six of them inflicted on foreign nationals, had less impact than the rush of live coverage of the Las Vegas shooting with its mass casualties. And I say that sitting just 2 miles north of the TriBeCa bike path where the truck driver ran down his victims. So, yes, part of the rapid resumption of daily life in NYC, including the annual Halloween parade a few hours after the truck assault, might reflect a sense that terror is the new normal, but other reasons might be identified. One is that much of Manhattan has become the playground of the affluent, and the bike path that now encircles the island is one of the public facilities for living a pleasurable semi-suburban life in the middle of Gotham, America’s “safest big city,” as its mayor described it today. Closely related to this view of the recreational city is the emergence of a new hedonism. The affluent and their adherents throng our major cities’ restaurants, sports clubs, entertainment venues, and recreation centers, living a life of pleasure while ignoring those without the disposable income to play along with them. When an act of terror occurs, the new hedonists resist feeling terrified or recover quickly to resume their pleasures. While terror might not be “the new normal,” it might help to desensitize our response to violent death and suffering inflicted by terrorists, and the new hedonism might help to welcome us back to the urban playground.

President Obama: Public Intellectual

President Obama: Public Intellectual

The November 5 issue of The New York Review leads off with the first of a two-part conversation between Marilynne Robinson, the distinguished novelist and theologian, and President Obama. The setting is Des Moines, September 2015. The subject is American citizenship and the role of Christian thought in a democracy, now fraught subjects because of growing sectarianism and exclusiveness in this country. 

               As the President and Ms. Robinson converse, they sound earnest and thoughtful. Robinson speaks of “a terrible darkening of the national outlook” as a result of growing “in-group” distrust of “the other,” while Mr. Obama looks at the longer term: “I’m always trying to push a little more optimism,” and to allay her discouragement, he says, “Well, we go through these moments.” He shows an easy familiarity with Robinson’s writing, suggesting that the characters in her novels show that it’s not “easy for them to be good Christians.”

               Early in their conversation, it becomes clear that both the writer and the politician, who is also a good writer, share a Midwestern low-Protestant background, so that that when she describes her upbringing in Idaho, he says it “sounded really familiar to me when I think about my grandparents who grew up in Kansas.” They share a “sense of homespun virtues.” This Obama is one that is often obscured by the snide, bigoted rejection of him as nonnative, Muslim, and black. But he is after all half-white and a Protestant. When he reads Robinson’s novel Gilead, he recognizes that she is “thinking about American democracy, or, for that matter, Christianity …” and treating “the issue of ‘the other.’”

               I look forward to the continuation of this conversation in the next issue of The New York Review, and I heartily recommend this first part for two reasons. One is that it shows we have a President as conversant with the writing and ideas of his time as any president of France. Our Obama is an articulate public intellectual. And second, the conversational form allows him to be both professorial and empathic in talking with another prominent public intellectual, Marilynne Robinson. (Her initials, by the way, match those of Mrs. Obama, née Michelle Robinson.) As chief executive, President Obama sometimes falters by sounding too professorial, intellectually detached, pensive as Hamlet. But in conversation with an intellectual equal, President Obama reveals a compelling grasp of significant issues in our troubled republic and in doing so, deserves our attention.

New Poems Online

If you are still following me, I apologize for a long absence from this blog. I have read, by the way, that the blog is obsolete, superseded by social media. Do you agree? In any case, a new poetry chapbook of mine, Bleak Splendor, is soon to be released by Muddy River Books, in Brookline, MA, and two of the poems included are now up at Five Willows Literary Review:

http://fivewillowspoetry.blogspot.com/2015/10/two-new-poems-from-george-held_14.html

Another pair of poems is at Literary Matters: 

http://alscw.org/PDFs/Literary%20Matters_7.4.pdf

on pages 34 and 36 of this pdf publication. Please check them out.

The New Devil's Dictionary

Here's a link to new work of mine at Five Willows Literary Review: http://fivewillowspoetry.blogspot.com/2014/08/george-held-definitions.html

Debby Mayer is a Hudson, NY, novelist and journalist, whose memoir, RIPTIDES & SOLACES UNFORESEEN, I have reviewed at http://www.whlreview.com/no-9.1/review/GeorgeHeld.pdf. I hope you'll check it out and consider reading this remarkable book about the death, from brain cancer, of her longtime partner, Dan Zinkus.

Jeremy Lin Comes Out

Jeremy Lin Comes Out

Houston, May 2, 2013. In the wake of Jason Collins’ recent revelation in SI that he’s gay, Jeremy Lin told Houston sports radio KROK that “I’m tired of being in the closet and want the world to know that I am an NBA point guard, a Harvard man, and I’m Taiwanese.”

With these words Lin revealed that he is the first major-sport professional who is Taiwanese. So far, the response from other pro athletes has been positive. Charles Barkley, the former NBA All-Star, said, “I support the brother for his candor. It’s about time we had a new cause to lend our support to.”

Keyshawn Johnson, the NFL star who retired to become a sports commentator, added, “Jason who?”

Boomer Esiason, the NFL quarterback who is a professional Norwegian, chimed in: “Now Taiwanese boys and girls with athletic ambition will have a role model. But how long will it be before the NFL admits Taiwanese into the locker room?”

Lin’s announcement rocked Houston like a Roger Clemens fart, and the Texas sporting intelligentsia bombarded local talk radio with speculations about who might be the next jock to come out of what closet.

Among the nominees were Dallas QB Tony Romo who might reveal that his family name used to be Homo, NY Knicks marksman Carmelo Anthony who might admit he’s a secret member of Opus Dei, and Alabama coach Bear Bryant who might confess that he’s really alive.

The New Pope Finds His Footing

Please check out my new poem at New Verse News: http://newversenews.blogspot.com/2013/03/getting-off-on-right-foot.html

Passover & Easter greetings to those who celebrate.

George

Early last year I had occasion to read three debut poetry books, each by a woman whose work I was encountering for the first time. Their books made such a strong impression on me that I wrote an essay about them. I now want to share it on my blog and hope you will send it to others who might enjoy it. (The review of Kris Bigalk's Repeat the Flesh in Numbers will appear in Mindy Kronenberg's Book/Mark.)

Luckily, I will be reading with one of these poets, Eileen Hennessy, on Saturday, 16 February, 12 noon, at the Yippee Museum Café, 9 Bleecker St. Please come.
 
 
 
 3 Poets

 

In 1977 Robert Altman made a thoughtful movie called 3 Women, the idea for which came to him in a dream. Two of the women live in the same apartment and the third, who is married, lives in the same building, and their relationships shift during the movie. Today, it would probably seem inappropriate to use that title, and this film would be unlikely to become the cult movie it has, many women having firmly established themselves as independent agents beyond the scope of Altman’s treatment.

These thoughts arose after I’d finished reading three extraordinary first books of poetry, each by a woman of independent spirit and highly personal style. In ascending order of age, they are Kris Bigalk, Katrinka Moore, and Eileen Hennessy. Bigalk, a mother and teacher from Minnesota, has recently published her first poetry collection, Repeat the Flesh in Numbers (NYQ Books, 2012), a book primarily about a sensuous woman’s flesh and spirit that might be just “a woman’s book” in the hands of a more conventional writer. While Bigalk does address conventional subjects like marriage, family, and sex, she has a strongly idiosyncratic take that can result in memorable poems. “Exegenesis,” for example, might be the best poem ever written on menstruation: “I bleed / without permission, / without injury. / I bleed prophetic, a / waterfall, a flag, / a protest, an insistence / on rest.”

I mention that Bigalk is a mother because, among other subjects, her poems convincingly treat pregnancy, birth, and mothering, but do so in an idiosyncratic way. Thus we have the macabre “Dr. Barbie’s Abortion Clinic,” which conjures various taboo Barbie dolls, like “Morning-Sickness Barbie,” “Single-Mom Barbie,” and “Leaky Saggy Breast Barbie.” The poem concludes:

                       

Step-Mom Trophy Wife Barbie –

                        that’s the kind of thing

                        a little girl should really

                        set her sights on.

             

Bigalk’s iconoclasm also takes on the biblical origin story by positing Eve as precursor to Adam, in “Apocryphon of Eve.” The first person/Person begins, “There was no rib that begat me” and adds that “There was no snake, no forbidden fruit,” and “There was no thirst for the knowledge of good and evil”; there was just love for “Adam’s body, the way it fit into /

mine. . . .” Only later, at Abel’s grave, did this sensuous woman understand what a disappointment she was to the Lord. Thus the poem subtly contests traditional views of Eve and woman and ends without resolution of the eternal question of our earthly purpose, if any.

If Bigalk sees the flesh repeat in numbers, they are the ones inscribed in our DNA. The first two poems in this volume, including the title poem, recognize that “in / the end cells practice themselves / to ruin, to death, to dissolution,” signifying that we are “the imperfect, the mortal,” but she sees her decline giving way to her son’s rise; not consolation but continuity. A strong, wise poet/mother, Kris Bigalk tells both her story and the history of humankind.

 
 
 
 

In Thief (BlazeVOX, 2009), Katrinka Moore uses the page as a locus for text as well as visual art, including reproduced images from paintings and drawings, examples of book-making art, and collage. Indeed, the book itself exemplifies the art of fine bookmaking, and Moore proceeds by way of esthetic juxtaposition and collage, pasting together disparate elements to make a collaborative yet new work of art. In this she brings to mind two predecessor artists, Susan Howe (b. 1937), an experimental poet, and Joseph Cornell (1903-1972), maker of small magical boxed assemblages of photos and bric-a-brac from his era.

Indeed, the title poem, “Thief,” mentions “cigar-box drawers” found in a roll-top desk and assembles such various items as “a framed topography of the moon” and “frayed postcards, tangled filigree chain,” and speaks in direct address to Archilochos, the ancient Greek poet. The facing page is an illustration of a topographical map with an insert of a pair of cranes from Hokusai’s Thirty-six views of Mount Fuji. The juxtaposition of prose poem (“Thief”) with an illustration on the facing page is characteristic of the way Moore works in this book. So are the sentence fragments that infuse her poem, one of which says, “Sings a string of words under her breath,” which is probably an example of her work’s self-referential quality. Another sentence fragment here is “Forager,” an apt describer of Moore the thief, who forages through and pilfers literary, cartographical, and visual documents to create her hybrid forms.

On the one hand, she will quote from Shakespeare in “Skimble, Scamble,” while on the other, she imports Into “Aeschylus in the Bronx” quotations “from Ted Hughes’s translation of the Oresteia and writing by students at the Bronx High School for Contemporary Arts”: “Jacqui in her skin tight dress is a cute / Clytemnestra but she’s pissed and whacks / Adinson/Agamemnon on the side of his head.” Later, in a girl named Jelani’s words, “Agamemnon sacrifices his precious daughter Iphigenia so Clytemnestra kills him . . . ,” and Aliya sings Clytemnestra’s welcome song:

 

                        Look at you now,

                        You low life son of a b—.

                        Now you laying there bled,

                        Still full of it.

                        Baby, you dead.        

 

That the left-hand margin and the bottom of the page reveal the lines of a page of notebook paper—on which the text has crookedly been pasted—both suggests the off-kilter nature of Moore’s project and reinforces the debt her tour de force owes to her students. The resulting poem is both tragic and comical, reenacting Aeschylus’ great drama in Hughes’s serious translation of it, and drawing on the Bronx students’ savvy handling of that drama, without condescension on Moore’s part. Her postmodern sensibility has deconstructed a classic yet has made it new, in Pound’s words, through an unlikely commingling and juxtaposition of sources.

 

The title of Eileen Hennessy’s This Country of Gale-Force Winds (NYQ Books, 2011) looks back to her parents’ Ireland and at her native Long Island, both places well known for stormy winds. Symbolically, her gales might evoke blowhards, authority figures, and the winds of change. “Cemetery, summer afternoon” in just ten lines characterizes her poetry, referring to both “country” and a coming storm: “This is no country / for plastic wreaths. // Along the

horizon, bridges of lightning bolted / to the charcoal sky. / Between two tombs, a man jerks off.”

The allusion to W.B. Yeats’s “That is no country for old men” (“Sailing to Byzantium”) speaks of Hennessy’s absorption in Irish poetry, while the last line carries the candor of Yeats’s Crazy Jane, a keen observer of uncensored reality. Hennessy combines both Crazy Jane’s peasant wisdom and the poet’s ability to juxtapose it with the pretensions (“tombs”) of polite society. The word-play (“lightning bolted to”) and the surprising incongruity in this poem’s ending also typify Hennessy’s fierce attention to language and rejection of conventional expectations.

When she ends “Crossing,” about a cross-country train ride, and tries “to measure how much farther I must travel,” she concludes, “I have not come all this country alone / for nothing.” Here her plain-spokenness, as it often does, sounds depths of theme and practice for this poet who rejects qualifiers in choosing the exact word every time. Despite the formality of her poetic line, she writes in free verse and eschews fixed forms.

Hennessy’s poems often address objects, like boxcars, or animals, like lobsters, hares, a worm—entities that can be only observed but cannot talk back. Yet she exploits such entities expertly to reveal some larger truth. In “Then the worm turns,” for instance, she says she once “smashed a worm,” yet “still shudder[s]” with guilt, for etymologically wyrm meant “worm, serpent, dragon,” that is, it was once deemed of equal value with other denizens of the earth itself. In the end, she’s aware, the worms will “have a party on my dock. / It will not be my party, yet / I will be guest and host.” That we will be food for worms has been a subject for writers since time immemorial, but Hennessy’s originality lies in her beginning with the introduction of worms into her compost pile and the confession of her careless stomping of a worm. From using and killing them, she arrives at an awareness of the ultimate role these “rulers // of death, decay, transformation” play in composting our bodies.

The one poem here that spans more than a single page, “Incandescence,” is arguably her most memorable, possibly because it is the only poem here that addresses another human being with whom Hennessy’s speaker has a personal relationship. He’s her lover, whose visit interrupts the narrator’s reading of a scene of multiple shipboard rapes by pirates of “their booty.” The ensuing sex between lover/pirate and speaker/booty conjures memories of other marauders and their captive women until her imagination takes over and calls up “my unit of female partisans” gang-raping her lover, with her “perhaps” penetrating his penis with “the long nicked blade / of my knife.” At poem’s end, after her female cohort wears the man out sexually, “tiring of you, I order you taken / to the woods and shot.”

The cold eye that Hennessy casts on life and death might seem distant from the warmth Kris Bigalk brings to her poems or the charged invention Katrina Moore brings to hers, yet that eye gleams with the passion and searing intensity of a woman who speaks for centuries of oppressed Irish women whose bodies belonged to the men who owned them. Did such a woman, she asks in “This is how her body,” after having borne endless “heirs,” “dare to dream / her body whole again, entire, unbreached?” If not, Hennessy has, rejecting the malarkey of female idealization in favor self-realization, seeing the body as

 

                        Not the gate of heaven, not house of gold,

                        not star of the sea. Not idol.

 
 

                        Not work of art. Just body.

                        Just self. For herself.

A Scream

MOMA isn’t the first institution to turn Edvard Munch’s THE SCREAM into kitsch. Maybe it was kitsch to start with, but at least Munch was trying to create an image of genuine terror in the early 1890’s, when he painted it. One evening the sky turned “blood red,” Munch wrote, and “I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.” In fact, the evenings did look red at that time because of ash from the volcano Krakatoa, which had recently undergone a huge eruption. Was Munch also perhaps thinking of his sister Laura Catherine, at that time hospitalized for manic depression? And then, oddly, a photo of the Sandy Hook shooter, Adam Lanza, made him look like the model for that painting.

Now on display at MOMA, The Scream has been turned into a commercial image reproduced on all matter of objects for sale in the museum shop: notepads, pens, tote bags, iPhone covers—you name it. The image of The Scream on whatever utensil or knickknack you desire.

What idiot would buy such a bastardized version of this masterwork? The same sort who would buy similar images of a Rembrandt self-portrait or the Mona Lisa or any other facsimile of great art for sale in museums worldwide. The version now on view at MOMA is the one for which, early in 2012, a collector paid just short of $120 million, the highest price ever for a painting sold at auction.

Poem Set to Music

The composer David Morneau has set to music my poem "Brand Name," which draws its them from Shakespeare's Sonnet 153. Here is the link:

Click here: Cupid's Song by David Morneau on SoundCloud - Create, record and share your sounds for free

Prescient

Going thru some old poems, I came across "Defeat," which I finished on 6 July 2010. It has a concatenation of names and events that seem especially ironic at this moment:

                                                            Defeat

We are in this to win.

            --General David Petraeus, on assuming command in Afghanistan

 

The general says we will win in Afghanistan

The president says we will plug the leak in the Gulf

The governor says we will close the budget deficit

 

Senators say we must reduce Social Security

Al Gore says we must reduce CO2 emissions

And switch to renewable energy

 

And in every case we know in our hearts

That we are headed for defeat—in the war,

In the Gulf, in the economy, in the environment . . .

 

 

                                                        The New Verse News

Reflections on 9/11

 

            9/11 this year falls on a Tuesday for the first time since the day of infamy in 2001, 11 years ago. “7 come 11” the well-known dice roller’s prayer goes. My prayer is for no copycat to make 9/11/2012 infamous.

I reread my poem “That Tuesday Night,” which was published in the anthology AN EYE FOR AN EYE MAKES THE WHOLE WORLD BLIND: POETS ON 9/11, and thought about what has changed since 9/11/2001:

 

That Tuesday Night

 

That Tuesday night, after the towers

burned & fell down-

town, after watching them crumble—

unlike the one Paul Newman

saved in Towering Inferno—

from the plaza in front of Rosenthal

Library, after walking home

from the subway in the yellow

summer twilight, gagging

on the acrid air and looking

at the thick sooty column rising

downtown where the towers

had loomed Gargantuan on the skyline

for over three decades,

I went to wash my face,

as though cold water and soap

would wake me from this dream

of violence and violation,

and saw that man in the mirror,

red-rimmed eyes, yes, but

the same sagging sixty-five-

year-old skin, the same thinning,

graying hair above the same lined

forehead, and I knew that he

was lucky to have lived

to sixty-five—too young for WW II

and Korea, too old for Viet Nam—

lucky to have lived his soft

American life without much fear

from abroad, except spotting airplanes

as a kid and catching a breath or two

as JFK stood down the Russians in ’62,

and in the glare of the bathroom light,

the sirens screaming just up the street

at St. Vincent’s, I knew nothing

could ever make me

safe again.

 

For one thing, St. Vincent’s Hospital, which gave Edna Millay her middle name for having been born there, no longer exists. 16 stories high, the hospital gave up the ghost two years ago and is now being dismantled brick by brick to make way for a billionaire realtor’s 30 stories of luxury condos. There goes the neighborhood.

Worse, if a similar catastrophe occurred downtown, there’s no hospital nearby to treat victims as St. Vincent’s did. How will Villagers survive an infarct or a hemorrhage?

The view has changed. I can now look downtown from Greenwich Village and see the very high tower of a new building at the WTC site being clad in stainless steel. And I wonder who would feel comfortable working daily on the top 30 or 40 floors.

Periodically, police helicopters hover over the West Village. I wonder if they are up there because Code Red has been declared, or are they overhead just to remind us of the War on Terror and keep us scared, like the subway signs that warn us backpacks and shoulder bags might be searched at any time, like the soldiers in camouflage with German shepherds on leash who patrol Penn Station, like the announcements to say something if you see something . . . suspicious.

I end the poem wondering about ever feeling safe again. Actually, I didn’t feel safe before 9/11 and had warned Cheryl, now my wife, about the likelihood of a terrorist attack, most likely, I thought, in the subway. Though Cheryl and I never mentioned 9/11, it was likely factored into our motivation to marry on 5/15/2002, legalizing a long-committed relationship.

On the original 9/11, we were out of touch until that evening: I was at Queens College and she, I thought, was at her office in SoHo. Subway service was suspended and phones were down, so I remained on campus watching TV replay the scene some students and I had watched from the library plaza: the burning towers falling. When the trains began to run again in late afternoon, I returned to Manhattan and went to Cheryl’s apartment. My knock on the door woke her up. She had pulled an all-nighter at work and gone to bed at 8:45 AM, just before the first plane plowed into the towers. She still didn’t know what had happened. I told her to sit down and I turned on the TV so she could see for herself the live coverage of the devastation a mile away.

It’s been a few years since we rehearsed our plans for getting in touch if we happen to be at different places, and if we survive, during the next calamity. But I am probably no safer, just inured to our dangerous times.

"Apologies to the Sikhs" (New Poem)

http://newversenews.blogspot.com/2012/08/apologies-to-sikhs.html

Please click above to read my latest poem online, and share.

Our Perishing Republic

The news being dominated by Penn St. and Aurora, I’ve been thinking how common the course of cruelty and violence is in America these days, though much of it flows unreported, in families, schools, and the workplace. Sandusky and the Aurora gunman both sought out innocent victims and imposed unspeakable but all too common abuse upon them. Meantime, men in authority dither or connive: Coach Paterno stands accused of having sacrificed Jerry’s victims on the altar of gridiron self-aggrandizement, while neither Obama nor Romney will even mention guns in their tut-tutting about the Aurora massacre, and we must suppose that the next “national tragedy” will unfold soon enough. The father of a boy killed at Columbine, with the ironic name of Mauser (a major German weapons manufacturer), told Chris Matthews last night that the American people have given up on gun control, because the NRA and its lobbyists have worn them out promoting the idea that the Constitution grants our citizens the unassailable right to own ammo and firearms, even assault rifles with 100-round magazines—“for deer hunting,” says Senator Rob Johnson (R – WI), with a twinkle in his eye. And I think of Jeffers’ “Shine, Perishing Republic”: “While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire, / And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens . . . // But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thickening center; corruption / Never has been        compulsory. . . .”

New Book Review

I have a review of two fine chapbooks up at http://www.whlreview.com/no-7.2/reviews/GeorgeHeld.pdf

Please check it out. The same issue of WHLR has a review of my book AFTER SHAKESPEARE: SELECTED SONNETS, if you'd care to access it.

New Poem

Please check out my new poem at http://www.currencylit.com/

Update

The last three weeks have been busy for me as a poet. On April 15, I joined about two dozen other poets for the launch of TOKEN ENTRY: NEW YORK CITY SUBWAY POEMS at Manitoba’s in the East Village. I have two poems in this anthology, which also includes such poets as Grace Paley, Billy Collins, Langston Hughes, and Hart Crane:

http://www.amazon.com/Token-Entry-York-Subway-Poems/dp/0980191696

On April 28 I taught a haiku workshop at the 5^th Annual Suffolk County Community College Creative Writing Festival:

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150815892143501&set=oa.10150873232851154&type=1#!/photo.php?fbid=10150815892243501&set=oa.10

The online journal RIGHT HAND POINTING chose my poem “Reënactment” as one of 12 poems for its special issue devoted to poems of no more than 30 words:

https://sites.google.com/site/51rhpissue/george-held

EYE SOCKET, an online poetry journal out of Portland, OR, features four of my poems in its May issue:

http://eyesocketjournal.blogspot.com/

Please check out my work and leave a comment at the site.

Women Retaliate against VA Abortion Statute

          Washington, Mar. 3. Women members of the Virginia legislature have introduced a bill that would require men to undergo vasectomies upon reaching puberty. This law would seek to balance the pending legislation that requires women who desire an abortion to first have an intrusive sonogram of their uterus, a procedure that includes the introduction of a sonic wand into the birth canal.

          Maryellen Cox-Chambliss, one of the two female sponsors, says her bill will be more forgiving than the male-sponsored mandatory sonogram law: “After all,” she told the press, “our bill allows men an alternative to the vasectomy, and that is to undergo digital prostate massage as part of a monthly STD exam.”

          Men inside and outside Virginia have complained loudly about the unfairness of the women’s proposal. Guy Claiborne, a twelfth generation Virginian from Lynchburg, said that while the mandatory sonogram law is consonant with the hallowed tradition of introducing various objects into “the female vagina, men require personal control over the sanctity of their bodily orifices.”

          Gov. Bob McDonnell continues to say he is ready to sign a less-intrusive form of the mandatory sonogram bill into law “as soon as the lady folk stand down and give us a break so we can continue to bring progressive change to our great Commonwealth.”

          Ms. Cox-Chambliss accused the governor of grandstanding to secure the vice-presidential nomination at the GOP convention this summer. “It’s well known that most American men want to keep women in their place. But,” she warned, “a Santorum-McDonnell candidacy, with its harsh anti-feminist stance, would push the few thousand women who remain loyal to the Republican Party into the Democratic fold.”

          Sen. Mitch McConnell, a sworn foe of President Obama’s reelection, has urged Gov. McDonnell to back off the sonogram issue and advises advocates of the vasectomy or prostatic massage legislation to exclude white men over 65.

New Poem Online

Right Hand Pointing, an online poetry journal, has posted its latest issue today, March 1st. It includes a short poem of mine called "Prelude":
https://sites.google.com/site/49rhpissue/george-held

Review of my book AFTER SHAKESPEARE

I am pleased to report that the first review of my book AFTER SHAKESPEARE: SELECTED SONNETS (www.cervenabarvapress.com) is now at the PEDESTAL
MAGAZINE site: http://www.thepedestalmagazine.com/gallery.php?item=22102.
I hope you will give it a read.

The reviewer, Eric Greinke, is a well respected poet, editor, and critic. We have never met.