I am pleased to write that my book manuscript “Asylum Seeker” will be published in 2018 by Poetry Press at Press Americana. The book will be the third in a trilogy: Americana that won the 2013 Press Americana Prize; Body Politic that was published by Prolific Press in January 2017; and now “Asylum Seeker.” Press Americana is a non-profit organization “dedicated to education and the belief in the power of American Studies scholarship and creative writing to enact positive social change.”
 
Other books include Gival Press Poetry Prize 2008 winner Voyeur and my first book, The Apple in the Monkey Tree, published in 2007 by Codhill Press. In December 2016 my book-length manuscript “Minds of Europe: A Genealogy to the Fat Man” was a shortlisted finalist in the Beverly Prize in the UK, and my manuscript “Storage Shed” was chosen as a finalist in the 2016 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Contest. 

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​During an interview of Noam Chomsky by Ralph Nader for Truth Dig, Chomsky reported that movements take time to gain momentum, suggesting that we need to be patient but active. He noted the Vietnam War resistance movement that took from 1962- 68 to gain enough steam to be effective.
 
However, it has been 15 years since 9/11 and eight since the crash of the economy and five since Occupy. These two shocks of aggression bringing fear and the final act of the coup d’état by the finance seem to have most Americans traumatized.
 
The mirror test to detect life in the politically minded shows lots of steam leaking from the pressure cooker valve called social media. Little of the steam that the mirror needs to indicate life in a movement is from the body politic in the street. Yet we have indigenous people who have been marginalized resisting alone. Should we be ashamed? Do they want our help physically there? Will a call to the Obama White House change anything?
 
The Sioux at Standing Rock is merely one of many groups needing help with resistance. Is it a beginning, a foothold?

​​In a commercial culture it shouldn’t surprise anyone that what we call commercials dominate the art world. We have commercial galleries for commercial art, and so for the poetic we have jingles and advertising campaigns. While the arts attempted to reach the masses that were not interested or interested as a weekend hobby, popular art or people’s poetry was quickly appropriated by commercial interests for capitalism. How can a hobbyist compete or garner respect from paid professional commercial creative writers? Literary poets and artists have remained in the situation in which W.B. Yeats found himself and called, in his notebooks, “the crass commercial world that had imposed its values on all aspects of life outside the ‘toy Noah’s Ark’” upon which artists seek survival.
 
The arts have even found defeat in universities and art schools that now call themselves schools or art and design. The tag on is more than that; it is an insurance policy for survival. Business minded parents of students will be attracted to the school because of the word “design” as will funding and grants. If the schools were left to the arts merely, they would close or be subject to a small faithful and focused group of students and a faculty less concerned with the house in the suburbs and retirement. While these schools would create a small counter culture of knowers and intelligentsia, fewer (if that is possible) would understand the work produced by graduates than viewers and readers do today. That audience would have been what Yeats called a “toy Noah’s Ark,” a make believe culture.
 
As it is, commercial art and poetry by commercial creative writers embedded in capitalism’s ideology, hold more sway, are more effective and dominate the everyday life of Western / global culture. If language grows thin as it is adopted by foreign tongues in foreign lands, poetry in English is cheese cloth, open to the simplest verse as slogan. Add to thin language due to little shared culture, a lack of liberal arts as common ground that would make up at least topics important enough to the culture that ongoing discussion could ensue. Due to specialization early in education, especially among the lower classes, the West is in possession of a thin language and little in the way of common ground. The ground that is available to all is rationality to the point of scientism, the belief that scientific metaphors may be applied to every problem and aspect of life, so that the humanities become what Guyatri Spivak calls “disc jockeys for an advanced technology.”

 In the YouTube video talk titled “The Method of Slavoj Zizek’s Madness: Analysis” Paul Taylor reminds us by way of unpacking Starbucks and Nike’s Tiger Woods ad campaigns how the “act now” ideology works in our culture for emergency aid or ongoing annual aid charity events. The West is always attempting to repair not only natural disasters but the systemic, objective violence that its policies and actions (just do it) cause. Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus clearly explains Taylor’s point. In his understanding he refers to history and a storm blowing “from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them.  The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.” The West uses systemic violence with a promise of a better life for the few while the rest of the population can never cash in their I Owe You. For Benjamin systemic or objective violence is an attempt at order within a society, but with every problem “solved” another is born from the solution.
 
For someone living in the United States the systemic violence is more complicated. Here the mythology of “rugged individualism” (the self-made man) permeates the culture’s psyche and its value system encouraged by social authority in capital interests and supported by the government. When the system violates people in the States, their frames of mind are to blame themselves. To them, systemic (objective) violence is interpolated as subjective violence. On its surface the blaming may even appear narcissistic and arrogant to take on that pose. However, they blame themselves to such an extent as to often visit violence upon themselves as punishment, or using the values of the system that has told them that they are worthless on themselves, they unable to see the forest for the tree.
 
An example of how objective and subjective violence plays out can be seen in the movie “Spotlight.” The victims of the systemic abuse by priests go on to blame themselves for their shame and the damage done to them: Alcohol, drugs, suicide are subjective violence responding to objective violence. When Robby the editor at Spotlight recognizes his part in the objective violence and how systemic the cruelty is, he is humbled, has learned something late in life. He might have done something sooner, but through willed-ignorance and the encouragement from the system causing the objective violence, he went along.