14 students and three teachers probably woke up that Valentine’s Day thinking of chocolates and Valentine cards. Not a single one knowing they’d never get out of that day.
And now we have a person in Congress who’s saying it never happened. And nothing happens to her, the Truth Denier. She even stalks one of the teen-age survivors. Stalks him as he’s leaving class, yells at him as he’s walking along.
An adult is yelling at a teen-ager who survived a school massacre. And gets herself ELECTED TO CONGRESS. What is wrong with this picture?
No one knows the exact date when the Philippine Revolution began (Because it was a secret rebellion!). But the place has never been in doubt.
At some point in the last week of August 1896, Andres Bonifacio (a self-educated warehouse clerk, she posted some of his poetry a week or so ago) gathered his followers and led them in tearing up their cedulas. A cedula is a form of identification, issued by the Spanish colonial government. It was a document that formed the basis of tax collection.
Pugad Lawin was deep woods when Andres Bonifacio and a thousand followers (which is quite a large number, for a secret society, but was no match against the Spanish, who in the city of Manila alone numbered at least 10,000) gathered there. The rough translation of pugad lawin is ‘hawk’s nest.’ Today, it has been swallowed up by Metro-Manila, and lies in one of the most densely populated cities in Asia.
from the collection Cornucopia: New and Selected Poems (W. W. Norton, 2002)
And nothing, not even the girl you love
with the mole on her arm, will be left. Huge
trenches will be dug just beyond the stove
the whole northeast corridor will become
and the dead will be piled in each rude gouge,
even that girl whose left ear always sticks
slightly out beyond her hair. To fix
the names of who died on tape won’t be done
since they’ll dig quick to prevent disease. Nobody
likes to hear this kind of talk. I always
hated to hear it myself until I began
loving the mortar between blocks, that cruddy
pocked cement holding up buildings so a man
and a woman can embrace in the maze
of what they’ve built on the errors of their ways.
Molly Peacock is the author of How To Read a Poem and Start a Poetry Circle (1999) as well as a memoir, Paradise Piece by Piece (1998). Former President of the Poetry Society of America, she was one of the originators of Poetry in Motion, which placed poems on subways and buses. A more complete biography can be found on the Poetry Foundation website.
Next year, in 2020, the United States will celebrate the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment, and CALYX Press will turn forty-four years old. I don’t know if it’s a good or bad thing that Calyx has existed for nearly half the number of years that women have had the right to vote in this country, but “astonishing” seems like the right word for it either way.
In anticipation of the centennial, and in celebration of the labor and persistence that went into women’s suffrage, CALYX is open for a special extended submission period now through July 31, 2019. We are accepting poetry, fiction, and nonfiction on women’s participation in the political process, the myriad means through which women engage with and experience socio-political movements, and the ways full citizenship and access have been denied to different communities. Equal rights forwomen have had a long and fraught road, and our celebration of that first monumental victory in 1920 is tempered by the awareness that there is still so much progress to be made.
The first time self read The Crimson Petal and the White, by Michael Faber, was over a decade ago. She hadn’t much experience of London. Now, however, she knows London, knows its general geography, and enjoys passages like the following:
Since moving to the West End, Sugar has taken to crossing Hyde Park, over the Serpentine into Knightsbridge, and paying frequent visits to the two Georgian houses in Trevor Square, which may look like high-class brothels, but are in fact a public library.
— The Crimson Petal and the White, p. 35
Follow Sugar now into the great open space, the grandiose vacancy of Regent Street — admire those overtowering honeycombs of palatial buildings stretching into the fog of artificial infinity, those thousands of identically shaped windows tier upon tier; the glassy expanse of roadway swept clear of snow; all of it is a statement of intent: a declaration that in the bright future to come, places like St. Giles and Soho, with their narrow labyrinths and tilting hovels and clammy, crumbling nooks infested with human flotsam, will be swept away, to be replaced by a new London that looks entirely like Regent Street, airy, regular and clean.
— The Crimson Petal and the White, p. 43
Her last trip to London was at the tail-end of October 2017. She dropped by Hyde Park and saw:
1) the Serpentine
2) a fabulous Pavilion
The 2017 Serpentine Pavilion designed by architect Francis Kéré
Self hangs on to New Yorker issues she intends to re-read. Today, she’s re-reading Benjamin Wallace-Wells’ piece on Confederate monuments in Virginia.
This article is about crucial history:
In 1890, the city of Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy, installed a sixty-two-foot statue of Lee, the first of five statues that anchor Monument Avenue. When the statue of Lee was delivered, more than ten thousand citizens lined the streets to help pull it into place.
And also has this harrowing sentence:
In June, 2015, Dylann Roof, a twenty-one-year-old who had immersed himself in white-supremacist ideology, joined a Bible-study group in the basement of Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, in Charleston, South Carolina and, in the midst of the discussion, rose from his chair and massacred nine black congregants.
And this about General Lee:
In 1866, a man named Wesley Norris had described Lee’s reaction to an attempted escape: “Not satisfied with simply lacerating our naked flesh, Gen. Lee then ordered the overseer to thoroughly wash our backs with brine.”
And all this bitter history culminates in Charlottesville:
The liberal faction that had coalesced at the hearings of the monuments commission had, in a sense, been proved right: it had said that the monuments were symbols of white supremacy, and now white supremacists were coming to town to defend them.
As The Daily Post states: “Symbolism is uniquely human. We use symbols to represent intangible things like our beliefs and emotions, and to convert the abstract into something understandable.”
Here are a couple of symbols:
June 17, 2015, Action for Addressing Climate Change, South Bank, London: Groups from all over England came to speak to their MPs. Self was with Joan McGavin, from Southampton. Was lovely to see this red heart instead of the usual placards:
London, South Bank, Wednesday June 17, 2015
Next: On a pilgrimage to find Shadowhaunter haunts around London (You haven’t been following this blog very long if you don’t understand “Shadowhunters” LOL), self lands on Fleet Street, the street where all the English papers used to have their main offices:
Fleet Street, the Street of Journalists (Just steps away is St. Bride’s, where there’s a moving tribute to Foreign Correspondent Marie Colvin, killed in Hom, Syria, 2012)
Inside the Church of St. Bride’s, the walls are lined with photographs representing the Stations of the Cross:
Station of the Cross, St. Bride’s Church, off Fleet Street, London
