If you think writing novels is a mug’s game, try poetry.

Few people read poetry. And the few who do, usually don’t pay for it. The poor poets often must resort to publishing their stuff in pathetic little pamphlets called chapbooks, put out by companies with names like Green Booger Press.

The New Yorker publishes a few poems in each issue, but they’re by the luminaries. People like W.D. Snodgrass, whose name is a poem in itself. But I’m betting no more than 5% of the persons within the sound of my voice have ever heard of Mr. Snodgrass.

After a girl broke my heart in college, I wrote a poem. It started “Littlegirl, littlelegs” and went downhill from there. It was so bad, I cringe every time I remember it. I don’t think I ever tried to write another poem after that.

So who cares about poetry and poets? Let ‘em flip burgers, right?

Well, no. Poetry may not be doing so well on the printed page, but it’s all around us.

Take headlines. When I was a working journalist, it dawned that writing a good “head” actually was writing poetry. You use as few words as possible to convey as much meaning as possible; and try to grab the reader’s attention while you’re at it. If that isn’t poetry, what is? Two famous headlines (both in Variety decades ago) come to mind: The one about how Ma-and-Pa-Kettle-type movies failed in small towns (”Hix Nix Stix Pix”); and the one about the great stock market crash (”Wall Street Lays an Egg”).

Take song lyrics — poetry of course, sometimes extraordinary poetry (Bob Dylan comes to mind). The best pop-music poetry these days is to be found in rap/hip-hop. I don’t listen to it much but I ought to. Its energy and inventiveness are impressive.

What about spoken-word and “slams”? I don’t attend many poetry slams either but I ought to. A talented “slammer” generates electricity, adding vocal and physical energy to the work itself.

Reading between the lines, you can probably sense eat-my-spinach guilt over not paying poetry enough respect. To remedy this, I’ve taken the following steps:

• I try to read the “Poet’s Choice” column in The Washington Post Book World. The current poet-in-charge is U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky. Frankly, I don’t like Pinsky’s poem choices or exegeses (look it up) as much as those of previous authors of this column, Edward Hirsch and, especially, Robert Hass. Good ol’ Google, though, tells me the columns of those two worthies are available in book form. If you’re interested, Google “poet’s choice.”

• I subscribed to Poetry Magazine. I did this because (a) this is where to read What’s Hot in poetry, which I felt I ought to know in case someone wanted to talk about poetry at a cocktail party (that hasn’t happened yet); and (b) the sub was cheap. What’s Hot in poetry turns out to be a mixed bag; the magazines are sitting in a stack, mostly unread. But I’ll get around to them.

• I swallow hard and try to listen to Garrison Keillor’s “Writer’s Almanac” on NPR. Garrison, whom I knew personally a lifetime ago, finishes each segment with a poem. Gotta hand it to Garrison, though: He’s a pretty good reader of poems. Not all readers are, including many who read their own work. Listening to a poet reading his own stuff with flat affect is one of the most uncomfortable experiences known to man.

You can raise your own PQ (poetry quotient) by doing these things and more. For instance, a number of websites will put a poem a day in your inbox, including the Library of Congress (www.loc.gov/poetry/180/), Poetry Daily (www.poems.com/), the Academy of American Poets (www.poets.org/poemADay.php) and the Knopf/Borzoi Poetry Center Online (www.randomhouse.com/knopf/poetry/poemaday/).

Why not start reading more poetry today? After all, poets are the real writers, the writers’ writers. They wring more out of language than us novelists for sure. They deserve to eat too.

Frank Joseph
www.tolovemercy.com

P.S. You can find me among the poets Monday, March 5, 7 p.m. I’m appearing with poet E. Louise Beach at “Café Muse” at the Friendship Heights Village Center. “Café Muse” is a monthly event cosponsored by WordWorksDC (www.wordworksdc.com) and the village of Friendship Heights MD. The Village Center is in the vest-pocket park at Friendship Blvd. and N. Park Ave., off Wisconsin Ave. a few blocks north of the D.C. Line. A map is at (www.friendshipheightsmd.gov/AboutCommty.html).

P.P.S. Larry Janowski is a real poet. Larry has risen from a lowly station — he was my copyboy at The AP while in college — to his present eminence as a Franciscan friar. He’s the only monk, and only published poet, I know. His new book “BrotherKeeper” is real good poetry. Buy it at www.angelfire.com/poetry/puddinheadpress/Brother.html

I just withdrew a post.

Only about 80 e-mail recipients saw it, which is just as well. I can’t stop those 80 from reading it, but I wish they wouldn’t; or, if they do, I wish they’d cut me some slack on it. After my wife Carol read it and raised dozens of points against it, I realized I hadn’t thought it through.

That’s the trouble with shooting off your mouth. It’s fun, but it can get you in trouble.

The posting was yet another in my on-again-off-again musings about race relations in America. I’m speaking again on this topic on Friday (see below). I’d planned to give more or less the same presentation I’d made previously at Chicago Sinai Congregation and the Washington Ethical Society, but now I have to make some changes. My thinking has been evolving, due to several factors:

• I’d advocated a “National Time of Acknowledgment and Atonement” (”A Modest Proposal,” Nov. 17, 2006, http://tolovemercy.com/frank_joseph_blog/page/2/) in which Americans black and white, would attempt to understand how slavery still affects us today, and in particular try to put themselves in the shoes of others.

• As if they’d heard me, the Virginia General Assembly passed a resolution expressing “profound regret” for the Old Dominion’s role in slavery. The Maryland Legislature is considering a similar resolution.

• I posted in this space a counter-proposal from Maria Markham Thompson, my nephew Michael’s wife (”Show Us the Money”, Feb. 10, 2007, http://tolovemercy.com/frank_joseph_blog/), advocating practical economic measures to close the divide between black Americans and the rest of American society.

• Maybe a dozen people praised Maria’s proposals, saying she should send them to the presidential candidates and op-ed pages. But a friend I’ll call “Bill” responded in a rage. I think he took Maria’s proposals as just more affirmative action (although I don’t think Maria was saying that at all). As a white man approaching 60, “Bill” feels he has been victimized unfairly by affirmative action. “Bill” and I e-mailed back and forth, me trying to mollify him, him just getting madder and madder.

Out of all this, I’d had a new thought. In many ways, American society these days is two societies, black and white. That doesn’t seem to me like a good thing for any of us, black or white. But here’s the new thought: Back in the ’40s and ’50s, this wasn’t the case. Blacks by and large wanted to be a part of the broader American culture, not separate from it, despite discrimination and segregation far, far more crushing than anything today. There was no call for a national self-examination over slavery, that I’m aware of anyway, despite the fact that the actual slave experience was still fresh in some minds.

I spouted off. I theorized that Dr. King’s movement had raised hopes that were dashed by his assassination; that black culture was weakened by the misguided welfare reforms of the Johnson administration; that in the wake of Dr. King’s asssassination, new leaders emerged who pointed black Americans down a separatist path; and then somehow the whole thing went blooey, ideals went sour, and now some blacks today are glorifying “gangsta” values.

I speculated that the so-called Revolution of Rising Expectations was at work. This is a sociological/political notion that says revolutions don’t occur among the downtrodden; revolutions only begin when the downtrodden start seeing some hope.

I sided with “Bill” against affirmative action, which I oppose on the principle of Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right. I’m sticking with what I wrote about affirmative action: “Affirmative action, in my opinion, is reverse discrimination, a zero-sum game that takes from whites to give to blacks. It seems inherently unfair, and even seems (to this non-lawyer) unconstitutional. It may be a necessary evil to correct an even more unfair situation, but I’ve never liked it as a solution and I’d welcome its [replacement with something fairer].”

Above, I deplored the glorification by some blacks of “gangsta” values. Well, guess what: So do many blacks. I got a powerful demonstration of this yesterday, when I appeared with four black authors at Karibu Books in Iverson Mall and heard it from their own mouths, as well as from others in the all (except my wife Carol) black audience. And I deplore a lot of value-glorification associated more with whites than with blacks in today’s society (cf. Britney Spears). Is this a black problem, a white problem, a problem of all society, or what?

I finished by saying some presumptuous things about the black middle class and the trickle-down benefits that may flow from its recent, growing successes. But my wife Carol pointed out that the black middle class is walking a fine line, faulted by less-fortunate blacks for being ‘too white,’ yet still facing discrimination from mainstream white society.

I don’t apologize for trying to discuss these issues – I wish more persons were doing just that – but I see that the subject is way too big for me to handle. Every time I write, I infuriate someone; my friend “Bill,” for example, now says he is no longer my friend. And the more I write, the further I seem to get from answers.

Anyway, here I am, no blog in hand, no argument to be made, more confused than ever, and what’s worse, slicing up the humble pie, eating (Jim) crow. Anyone want to help me figure this stuff out before Friday?

Frank Joseph
www.tolovemercy.com

P.S. For a good time, click on http://krmlradio.com this Tuesday at 1:30 Eastern time, click on “Listen Now,” download the applet, and wait 15 minutes to hear my dulcet tones.

P.P.S. And if you’re near the State Department (2300 E St. NW, Washington DC) at noon this Friday, come hear me at BUMED (I still don’t know what BUMED stands for). For exact location, e-mail or call me (301-656-8753/301-996-0450).

Last fall I put out a post with the subject line “Trashed by freshmen” which evoked a storm of reaction. My post recounted my experience addressing freshmen at Rich East High School in Park Forest IL, where I was graduated more than four decades earlier. For the next month, this space was devoted to the brilliant, heartfelt and astonishingly varied responses from you all.

I had my own reaction to your reaction. I formulated a modest proposal for a “National Time of Acknowledgment and Atonement,” in which America — and individual Americans, black and white — would acknowledge the malign after-effects of slavery, seek to put themselves in the shoes of the other, and work toward reconciliation (Nov. 17, 2006, “A Modest Proposal,” http://tolovemercy.com/frank_joseph_blog/page/2/). I offered this proposal twice in public — at Chicago Sinai Congregation and at the Washington Ethical Society — and will offer it again Friday, Feb. 23, in a Black History Month-related event (details below).

My proposal evoked a counter-proposal from Maria Markham Thompson. Maria is married to Michael Thompson, my nephew, so that makes her my relative somehow — daughter-in-law-in-law? She is a banker in Baltimore, a former vice president of research for a stock brokerage in Baltimore, and the former Maryland state official in charge of financing public water projects.

She is also black. Her family comes from the Islands, though, so her family tradition — while also one of past enslavement — is not the same as that of blacks enslaved out of Africa and brought to the U.S. Add to this Maria’s family tradition of immigration: Her people immigrated voluntarily to the U.S. Yet I think it’s safe to say she feels herself to be at least a sharer in American black culture, for whatever that means.

Maria is a strong feminist; a mother; and a Jew — again voluntarily, as a convert, but surely one of the more passionate Jews I know. I think all these elements are at play in the counter-proposal she offers. It is so well thought out, so principled, and in such contrast to my approach, that I am compelled herewith to share it with you. Here it is, unedited except for style.

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From my bi-lingual and almost dual life, I am well aware of how much whites and blacks hear the same information and process it very differently.  White people have the luxury of thinking of not trying to filter everything through “did this just happen to me because I’m black or is there substance to what is being said?”  So I’m going to be very direct and honest.

Again we are speaking past each other. Slavery is not the issue. I speak as someone who would not accept reparations from the U.S. for anything happening before 1917, when my family arrived in the U.S. The British at least gave us the provisioning grounds when slavery ended in 1833. (My family kept the land for a long time, sold  some of it to Rockefeller in the 1960s for resorts, and continue to fight over the rest.)

That being said, the vestiges of overt and lawful racism from 1863 (Emancipation Proclamation) through 1965 (Civil Rights Act) are still major problems and barriers for blacks in America. Lack of access to decent education has kept the community down for six consecutive generations. Denial of equal access to mortgages and insurance, or being overcharged for what we got, meant that we did not participate in much of the post-World War II home building boom and rising property values that have given a great deal of wealth to working and middle class whites. The result is that in this generation, we do not have the same level of assets for starting businesses or educating our children.

I am personally a terrible example of black American progress. My family came here way ahead of the native black population. First, they had their psychological well-being and self-esteem intact since they were not at the mercy of Jim Crow laws, the Ku Klux Klan and America’s institutional racism. They had educations that were at least equivalent to a high school diploma. They also arrive at least at the journeyman level in their trades. (My grandfather was actually a master carpenter; my father was a merchant seaman when he arrived just in time to fight World War II — not his Plan A, but wrong ship, wrong port [San Francisco] wrong day [December 7, 1941].) We had a history of being entrepreneurs and a community that banded together to build capital for the whole. We knew about and used banks and brokerage firms when most blacks did not, and many could not, because of the segregated societies in which they lived and the unwillingness of the institutions to provide any services at all.

The result is that in my generation, all four of my father’s daughters have masters degrees; heck, my mom and her sister have masters, and my father’s two sons have each attended college, although I don’t think either finished their degrees. We are the exception, not the rule, because of advantages that make us — and many other West Indian families in America — exceptions, but not the rule for blacks as a group. Colin Powell and [the late Rep.] Shirley Chisolm [are] similar bad examples.

If you want serious change in America, then we need to fix the broken-down schools in predominantly black areas by putting in the additional classroom supports needed to make a difference for children who are not coming to school from preschool programs that prepared them for school. Create a Book-of-the-Month Club for them from infancy that sends two books per child per month into these homes, so that there is material there for cash- and time-strapped parents to read to them.

Change the school funding process so that it does not rely on property taxes. This is a national tragedy and continual problem for the development of good schools in predominantly black areas, where the value of the property is lower, so the taxes have to be higher (!) to get the same money. Augment teacher salaries for schools in “the ghetto.” In the rest of the world, we call this hazardous-duty or combat pay. Give Baltimore City and Washington, D.C., teachers a $20,000-a-year tax-free bonus for going into those schools; then you will have a good supply of teachers and can be a little more choosy about who is hired.

Right now if we walked into West Baltimore, I could show you why “sorry” won’t fix a damn thing. First, most people there who have jobs are taking a big cut in their earnings from cashing checks at liquor stores and buying money orders. There are no financial institutions, period.  And lack of experience in using the banks and checks we take for granted scares the hell out of folks who have heard all the bad about what can go wrong “if you let white people get a hand on your money.” Want to make a difference? Help the churches over there get some credit unions going. Better yet, use some of our economic clout to make the Community Reinvestment Act meaningful and tell [the big bank that Maria works for] it can’t have any new branches until they put some in places where there [are] none. Tell PNC and Mercantile [banks] the merger is off until there are branches in West Baltimore. Tell credit unions with community charters that they can either put branches in underserved areas, or pay taxes if they want to keep acting like banks.

There is no ready internet access in poor black communities. Most people do not have home computers, period, or ready access to one. They are cut off from getting information about opportunities to learn and earn. They are now a generation behind in learning to use computers, when and if they get one. You want to make a difference? Put “cyber cafes” in the basements of the churches, with broadband connections.

Fix the bus system so it gets people where they need to go — where the jobs are NOW, not where they were 50 years ago. Change the routes, add routes and direct more transit to get people to jobs in the suburbs. Run shuttle services in the suburbs to help people get the 2-to-3-mile distance from the last bus stop to the jobs.

Provide old cars to people who have none so that they can seek work wherever it is, not just where the buses go. (This has been done in great success in other places.) Equalize insurance rates across the state so that people in the inner city are not penalized for the fact that higher traffic volumes, and therefore more accidents, occur [with]in city boundaries than in suburbs.

Make more grant aid for colleges available to low-income students, regardless of race. These kids come out of school with debt up the wazoo, no cash to get an apartment, a car, or a working wardrobe, so we’re talking more debt and more debt and more debt. All of which kills their credit ratings and sets them 15-20 years behind their peers in building the wealth their families need for success.

Enforce the civil rights laws and ask companies like [the bank Maria works for] why Citibank, Chase and Wells Fargo can find “qualified” (how come we never need that adjective for white males?) minorities and women and [her bank] still claims that it can’t find anyone, therefore perpetuating patterns of discrimination in hiring and institutionalized discriminatory thinking. Make companies publish the hiring statistics for senior management, and refuse to do business with ones with poor hiring records.

For that matter, when it is time to vote a company’s proxy, look at who is on the board. If it’s still all 60+-year-old white men with the same token woman and token black who sits on every other board — vote NO to the entire slate, then send them a letter and tell them why.

Turn SCORE into SCORE PLUS — bring expertise and seed money so that businesses and jobs can be created by black people with good business ideas, but no homes to use as collateral or relatives with cash to invest.

Those are my modest proposals for undoing the cumulative effects of 400 years of slavery and 141 years of continued barriers to education and economic development. With more time to spend on it, I’m sure I can give you a few more.

I’m sorry, but we are way past needing an American Truth and Reconciliation Commission. That’s just more nice-sounding words to make liberals feel good about themselves and everyone else. When it comes to black advancement, I am not interested in sitting in a circle and singing Kum Ba Yah. Maybe you can get Jesse Jackson and the old guard to come to that party. For all of the above reasons, I do not have any intention of ever joining the NAACP, CORE or the Urban League. My generation wants to make it real: Show Us The MONEY!!

Maria

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Wow, huh? Any thoughts?

Frank Joseph
www.tolovemercy.com

P.S. When I speak Friday, Feb. 23, I’ll be at least mindful — and possibly inclusive — of Maria’s counter-proposal. The event is at 12 noon at 2300 E St. NW, Washington DC, across street from the State Department. Copies of To Love Mercy will be available. I don’t have more details just yet, but I will soon. If you’d care to attend, send me an e-mail and I’ll get the details to you.

P.P.S. And if you’re near Iverson Mall, please come to Karibu Books next Saturday afternoon. I’m on a program called “Inde Pen” with other small-press and self-published authors. Date and details: Saturday, Feb. 17, 2-4 p.m., Karibu Books, Iverson Mall, 3817 Branch Ave., Hillcrest Heights MD.

Something truly extraordinary happened yesterday in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

It started to apologize.

The Virginia House of Delegates unanimously approved a resolution “expressing ‘profound regret’ for Virginia’s role in the slave trade,” according to today’s Washington Post. The Post article called it “a significant act of contrition by a body that used to start the day with a salute that symbolized the state’s Confederate heritage.”

The state Senate still must pass its own resolution and the Governor must sign; but the resolution before the state Senate “goes further than the House resolution in its condemnation of slavery” and is expected to pass, the Post says. And don’t forget, House passage was unanimous.

How far we have come in just a few weeks.

That’s when a southside Virginia delegate, Frank Hargrove (R-Hanover), said blacks should “get over” slavery and asked: “Are we going to force the Jews to apologize for killing Christ?”

As a Jew myself, I’m inclined to be charitable toward Del. Hargrove. He probably thought he was just being candid, like Sen. Joe Biden when he complimented Barack Obama for being a presentable black candidate. (Boy, Joe, me too — it’s about time.)

I’m grateful to Del. Hargrove too. I’ll betcha a nickel the Virginia Legislature wouldn’t even have considered these resolutions had he not, er, expressed himself. (Hargrove himself, his mouth washed out with soap, has introduced a separate resolution calling for Virginia to recognize June 19 as Juneteenth Day, the day the last slaves were freed in 1865. How can you help liking a guy like that?)

In the ’50s, the Virginia General Assembly responded to Brown v. Board of Education with a policy of “massive resistance,” closing numerous public schools rather than integrating them; from 1984-2001, it celebrated “Lee-Jackson-King Day” instead of Dr. King’s birthday; in 2002, the Republican leadership revived a pledge to the Virginia flag written by a Daughter of the Confederacy, though that ended two years later after Democrats refused to participate. Nobody’s perfect.

But Virginia also elected Doug Wilder, the nation’s first black governor, and now this. My hat is off to the Commonwealth, or anyway its House of Delegates. Their resolution is remarkably similar to the “national time of acknowledgment and atonement” I advocated in a posting last Nov. 17 (http://tolovemercy.com/frank_joseph_blog/page/2/).

I stand by what I advocated then, but I’ve had further thoughts about it too. One: This question of America at last metabolizing the indigestible lump that is its descended-from-slavery black population could be rendered more-or-less moot via intermarriage. I’ll go further and predict that this will more-or-less have occurred some time around the day I die. Based on the attitudes and behaviors of my 22-year-old son Sam and his friends, it already has occurred for his generation … more or less.

My other thought is economic. The “national time of acknowledgment and atonement” which I proposed focused on hearts, not pocketbooks; but Maria Thompson, my nephew Michael’s wife, wrote a brilliant response focusing on that other, critically important factor. She sent it after this blog’s race debate last fall had subsided, so I never got to share it with you all. Next time, I’m doing that.

Frank Joseph
www.tolovemercy.com

P.S. Local news flash: Mansionization under attack! Roger Berliner, my newly elected representative on the Montgomery County Council, has heeded an open letter I wrote and invited me and Carol along on a “mansionization tour” this Wednesday. I had challenged Berliner to keep his promise to put teeth into the anti-mansionization law now on our books (”Berliner Keep Your Promise,” Bethesda-Chevy Chase Gazette, Nov. 15, 2006, www.gazette.net/stories/111506/montlet165618_31961.shtml). I hope Berliner and the Council act before the last of my neighbors turns his rambler into a Ramada.