FREE LIBRARY READING WITH TAIJE SILVERMAN

I will be reading with Taije Silverman in the Monday Poets Reading Series at the Free Library (1901 Vine Street, Philadelphia, between 19th and 20th Streets on the Parkway) on Monday, 7 December, 6:30 p.m.

Click here for the 2009-2010 Free Library Reading Series program.

On Taije Silverman:

Taije Silverman’s poems have been published in Ploughshares, Poetry, Shenandoah, The Antioch Review, Five Points, Prairie Schooner, Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, and elsewhere. Her translations from the Italian of poems by Paolo Valesio are forthcoming in Pleiades, and her work has won two first place prizes from the Academy of American Poets, including the Anaïs Nin Prize, judged by Stephen Dunn. Currently teaching at Ursinus College, she was the 2005-2007 Poetry Fellow at Emory University. She lives in Philadelphia.

Information here on Silverman's Houses are Fields.

PHILLIES-YANKEES WORLD SERIES 1950/2009

2009 World Series: Déjà vu all over again? Let’s hope not!

It’s been 59 years since the last Phillies-Yankees World Series. In 1950 and 2009, the Phillies triumphed over the Dodgers (Brooklyn/Los Angeles) for the National League Pennant. 59 years later, union tactics show little difference. In 1950, the Philadelphia Hotel Association and the AFL-CIO unions threatened to strike on the eve of the World Series, and in 2009, SEPTA is doing the same. In 1950, Phillies outfielder Dick Sisler predicted the Phillies would win the World Series in 6 games. This year, Phillies shortstop Jimmy Rollins predicts the Fightin’ Phils will win in 5. In 1950, the Bronx Bombers swept the Whiz Kids 1-0, 2-1, 3-2, and 5-2.

Let’s hope that’s where the parallels between 1950 and 2009 end and the parallels between 2008 and 2009 begin.

Some differences between the 1950 and 2009 World Series:

For starters, the series now begins nearly a month later. In 1950, Game 1 was played on October 4. In 2009, Game 1 will be played on October 28.

1950 ticket prices for Game 1 at Shibe Park: $8.75 for box seats, $6.50 for reserved seats, and $1.00 for general admission. 2009 ticket prices on StubHub for Game 1 at Yankee Stadium start at $300 for obstructed-view seats.

In 1950, the Phillies lost Curt Simmons, one of their ace pitchers, to Pennsylvania National Guard duty in mid-September. He missed the World Series. Luckily, there won’t be any 2009 Phillies reporting to overseas duty.

In 1950, the Whiz Kids went 91-63 to the Bronx Bombers 98-56. But the Phillies finished 16 games out of first place (81-73) in 1949 and didn’t break .500 in 1948, when they finished 25.5 games out of first place with a record of 66-88. The betting odds favored the Yankees at 5 to 16 to win the 1950 World Series.

Unlike 1950, there’s nothing “Gee Whiz” about the ballclub’s recent history. If anything, the 2009 defending champions of baseball are the Wisened Kids. The Phillies finished first in their division in 2008 with a 92-70 record and won the World Series, and in 2007, they finished first in their division with a record of 89-73.

The 1950 World Series was the fourth to be televised. In a New York Times article entitled “Kinks in TV Kick Up for World Series,” columnist Jack Gould writes of the television fiasco that included a 20-minute blackout. “While viewers were watching the preliminaries attendant to the Yankees-Phillies contest,” Gould writes, “they were suddenly regaled on the sound channel with all the subtle and dramatic nuances of ‘Our Gal Sunday,’ a soap opera.” There were some bright spots: “The placement of a camera so that there was a direct, downward view of first base was very effective. In all, five cameras were in use at Shibe Park and the variety of ‘shots’ reflected careful preparation.”

The downward view of first base seems to have been replaced by other camera angles, and while a diamond is still a diamond, I’m guessing there will be more than five cameras covering all the facets of Yankee Stadium during Game 1 of the World Series.

In a New York Times article (September 29, 1950), the reporter writes that “If the Phillies win the pennant, citizens of Philadelphia may be able to see the games on television in the city parks and squares. Mayor Bernard Samuel said today he has asked each Councilman to suggest places in each district where the sets could be installed. The sets would be furnished by Philco Corporation.” I’ve heard of gas stations and convenience stores running extension cords out into parking lots for homeless people to watch “big games,” and I wonder if there are any outdoor venues like this in Philadelphia for the 2009 World Series.

The 1950 World Series was the first after 1947, the year Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball, without a single African American on either team. As Marion E. Jackson wrote for a 1950 article in the Atlanta Daily Record, “To date only three of eight National League clubs have Negro players while the American League has only one member with race players.” Although there are no longer baseball teams without African American players, the number of African American baseball players has decreased in recent years. According to a Washington Post article (April 16, 2009), “The percentage of black players in the major leagues increased to 10.2 percent last year, the first rise since the 1995 season. The sport had reached an all-time low of 8.2 percent in 2007, according to Richard Lapchick, director of the University of Central Florida's Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports.”

Here are some links to newspaper articles on the Whiz Kids and the 1950 World Series:

Yankees Arrival at 30th Street Station for 1950 World Series

Miracle in Philadelphia, by Arthur Daley

Phillies Fans, 1950

Phils to Oppose Cocky Yanks in Series Opener

And click here for a link to baseballrecordings.com and the Delaware County String Band's 1953 recording of “The Fightin’ Phils."

GO PHILS!

ANTHOLOGY OF ARS POETICA

Press release for poem, home: An Anthology of Ars Poetica, which will be published next month by Paper Kite Press:

The title says it all (well, almost all, the rest of the story is at the website that houses the full project). Includes poems by: Kelli Russell Agodon, Flor Aguilera, Karren L. Alenier, Sandra Alland, C. J. Allen, Ivan Arguelles, Anny Ballardini, Gary Barwin, Annette Basalyga, Rick Benjamin, John M. Bennett, Maxianne Berger, F .J. Bergmann, Cliff Bernier, Gregory Betts, Celia Bland, Dean Blehert, Helen Boettcher, Peter Boyle, Allen Braden, Therese L. Broderick, Mary Buchinger, Ana Buigues, Mike Burwell, Mairéad Byrne, Nick Carbó, Cathy Carlisi, Wendy Taylor Carlisle, James Cervantes, Joel Chace, Ellen Cole, Ed Coletti, Jennifer Compton, Anne Coray, Alison Croggon, Del Ray Cross, Craig Czury, Yoko Danno, Lucille Lang Day, Denise Duhamel, Patrick Dunagan, Riccardo Duranti, Paul Dutton, Susanne Dyckman, Lynnell Edwards, Dan Featherston, Annie Finch, Thomas Fink, Alan Halsey, Sharon Harris, Lola Haskins, Nellie Hill, Nathan Hoks, Paul Hoover, Mikhail Horowitz, Ray Hsu, Halvard Johnson, Jill Jones, Adrianne Kalfopoulou, Bhanu Kapil, W. B. Keckler, Karl Kempton, Kit Kennedy, Tracy Koretsky, Greg Kosmicki, Gary Leising, Amy Lemmon, Lyn Lifshin, Diane Lockward, Rupert Mallin, Dr. Pamela McClure, Dr. D. H. Melhem, Hillary Mellon, Paul Mitchell, Carley Moore, Daniel Thomas Moran, Maggie Morley, Richard Newman, Angela O'Donnell, Shin Yu Pai, Helen Pavlin, Jonathan Penton, Alice Pero, Patrick Phillips, Paul Pines, Kevin Prufer, Chelsea Rathburn, Susan Rich, Cynthia Ris, Kim Roberts, Jay Rogoff, Kate Schapira, Barry Schwabsky, Derek Sheffield, Shoshauna Shy, Sue Stanford, Lucien Suel, Rod Summers, Eileen Tabios, Elaine Terranova, Heather Thomas, David Tipton, Juanita Torrence-Thompson, William Trowbridge, Priscilla Uppal, Katherine Varnes, Jeanne Wagner, Amy Watkins, Scott Watson, Melissa Weinstein, Carol Clark Williams, Jacquie Williams, Ernie Wormwood, Mark Young, and Andrena Zawinski.

Edited by Jennifer Hill and Dan Waber

EMERGENCY READING ON PENNSOUND

PennSound recordings of reading with Patrick Pritchett at Kelly Writers House.

READING WITH PATRICK PRITCHETT AT KELLY WRITERS HOUSE

Poetry Reading by Patrick Pritchett & Dan Featherston presented by the Emergency Poetry Series

Tuesday, September 15, 6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

Patrick Pritchett is the author of Burn: Doxology for Joan of Arc and the chapbooks Reside, Lives of the Poets and Antiphonal. His poems have appeared in New American Writing, Hambone, Shiny, Bombay Gin, New Review of Literature, Colorado Review and The Modern Review, among others. Articles and reviews on modern and contemporary poetry have been featured in American Book Review, Rain Taxi, English Language Notes and Jacket. Scholarly work has been published in Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place and Ronald Johnson: Life and Works. A former story analyst and script editor in the film business, where he worked for James Cameron, Kathryn Bigelow, and HBO, Pritchett has taught modern literature and creative writing at the University of Colorado-Boulder, Naropa University, and Boston University. Currently he is a Lecturer in the History and Literature Program at Harvard University.

Dan Featherston is the author of The Radiant World (BlazeVox, 2009), The Clock Maker's Memoir (Cuneiform Press, 2007), United States (Factory School, 2005), and Into the Earth (Quarry Press, 2005), as well as several chapbooks. His poetry has appeared in such journals as Aufgabe, Kiosk, Mandorla, New American Writing, and Sulfur. Scholarly works have appeared most recently in Modernism/Modernity, Chicago Review, and Charles Olson: A Poet's Prose. While living in Tucson, Arizona, Featherston help found POG, a collective of artists and scholars engaged with avant-garde work in a variety of media, and from 2001 to 2004, he edited A.BACUS, a journal of poetry and translation. Featherston has taught composition, literature, and creative writing at a number of colleges and universities, and he is currently a lecturer in the English department at Temple University. He lives in Philadelphia with Rachel McCrystal and their companion animals Fredo, Mazzy, and Itze.

PEACE ON A ON PENNSOUND

My PEACE ON A reading from The Clock Maker's Memoir is now available on PennSound.

ONLINE MEMORY: NSA PUBLISHES TORTURE ARCHIVE

From today's updates at the National Security Archive:

CIA Inspector General Report
Exposes Torture as U.S. Policy

What were they hiding?
A side-by-side comparison of the Bush and Obama
versions of the CIA Inspector General report

Posted - August 25, 2009
Washington D.C., August 25, 2009 - Today, the National Security Archive posted a side-by-side comparison of two very different versions of a 2004 report on the CIA's "Counterterrorism Detention and Interrogation Activities" by Agency Inspector General John Helgerson. Yesterday, the Obama administration released new portions of the report including considerably more information about the use of torture and other illegal practices by CIA interrogators than a version of the report declassified by the Bush administration in 2008. The report was first posted on the Web yesterday by the Washington Independent.

New revelations include:

Details on a number of “specific unauthorized or undocumented torture techniques” not mentioned in the 2008 release, including the use of guns, drills, threats, smoke, extreme cold, stress positions, “stiff brush and shackles,” mock executions and “hard takedown.” The Bush administration censured almost all portions of the document pertaining to specific torture techniques, save for a few references to waterboarding that omitted nearly all other contextual information.
A look at the legal reasoning behind the Agency’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” and the development of Agency guidance on capture, detention and interrogation.
A brief discussion of the history of CIA interrogation, including the "resurgence of interest in teaching interrogation techniques" in the early 1980s "as one of several methods to foster foreign liaison relationships."
The conclusion that, while CIA interrogations had produced useful intelligence, the “effectiveness of particular interrogation techniques in eliciting information that might not otherwise have been obtained” is not “so easily measured.”
The National Security Archive also announced today the publication of the Torture Archive -- more than 83,000 pages of primary source documents (and thousands more to come) related to the detention and interrogation of individuals by the United States, in connection with the conduct of hostilities in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as in the broader context of the "global war on terror." The goal of the Torture Archive is to become the online institutional memory for essential evidence on torture in U.S. policy.

NSA Torture Archive