The Mirror Crack’d (By A Spear): Sex, Love & War At The Unitarian Universalist Society

This Sunday, PoemAlley and participants from the regional poetry community share their thoughts on gender relations, inequality and related topics clustering about that all-too ubiquitous (yet fatalistically under-examined) institution of organized mass violence, which has become the roaring hearth of American society over the last twelve years.

Part of the Unitarian Universalist Society in Stamford’s series of lay-led summer services, "Sex, Love & War" will be hosted by Ralph Nazareth and feature readings from himself and fourteen other poets, including Robin Kurtz, Lisa Labazzo,  Bob Sanders and Ronna Schenkerman, with guest readings by Neil Silberblatt (organizer of the popular state-wide Voices of Poetry series), Middlebury-based poetry therapist Marianela Medrano and Jane Wickham.

In sympathy with the issues raised by such cases as Lynddie England's haunting, romantically-entangled stint at Abu Ghraib, as well as the more recent focus on the prevalence of rape and sexual assault in the military, this Sunday’s presentation will use a combination of music, words and video, both during and in the UU Social Room afterwards, to suggest how war distorts love and loyalty and how sex and masculine identity are mis-defined to validate endless armed conflict as normative.

While the 2012 documentary, The Invisible War (see trailer below under "Additional Information")  is laudable for campaigning against widespread sexual abuse within the American armed services, the question lingers as to how realistic it is to implement reform without first acknowledging such conduct as a byproduct of a belligerent foreign policy and the overtones of martial authoritarianism and privilege that permeate domestic entertainment, sports and culture--ranging from interrogation via sexual degradation at Guantanamo, the rape of an unconscious teen by Steubenville High football team members, jingoistic films (click here for a recent critique of Zero Dark Thirty), the "doing the Lynndie" photo craze following the aformentioned England 2004 scandal, not to mention the misogynistic half-time mascot theatrics seen in college and professional sports:

On the hopeful side, if the supposedly universal allure of conflict and power seem a timeless head-scratcher rooted inviolably in our nature or genes, maybe it only seems that way due to a lack of honesty to investigate its origins, because the toddlers from this 2010 Yale study of innate empathy sure don’t have trouble defying it:

Where:
Unitarian Universalist Society in Stamford
20 Forest Street (right across from the Avon Theatre)

When:

10 AM, Sunday, July 28, 2013

Contact:

203-348-0708/www.uusis.org

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Additional Information:

War and Sex: ABrief History of Men's Urge for Battle

John V. H. Dippel
Prometheus Books, 2010

The People's History of World War II
Marc Favreau, editor

The New Press, 2011

On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society
Dave Grossman
Back Bay Books, 2009

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined 

Steven Pinker

Viking Adult, 2011

Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World
Malcolm Potts and Thomas Hayden
BenBella Books, 2010

Invisible War (2012) trailer:

Like A Tree That’s Planted By The Water

Open Mic at Barnes & Noble welcomes award-winning poet Neil Silberblatt this Monday evening as guest reader. First drawn to the form as a student of Frank McCourt (Pulitzer Prize-winner, Angela’s Ashes), who taught English at Stuyvesant High School in New York at the time, Neil began writing his own work while attending Cornell University.

Now a New Milford resident, Neil travels around Connecticut coordinating Voices of Poetry, a multi-venue poetry and music program that has been hosted by the Minor Memorial Library in Roxbury, Gunn Memorial Library in Washington, Wooster School in Danbury and the New Britain Museum of American Art.

A contributor to VerseWisconsin, the Naugatuck River Review and other literary publications, it was from Hennen’s Observer that Neil received a nomination for the Pushcart Award, as well as the Grand Prize in its Open Community Poetry Contest for “Madison Avenue” (click here to read its efficient and unflinching commentary on how financialized trade breeds inequality and consumer narcissism). You can get a live feel for his timely social insight from this April reading held at the Hartford Public Library last April:

So Far, So Good, Neil’s 2012 collection (Lulu), will be followed later this year by Present Tense.

In addition to a March appearance at Curley’s, Neil has been the featured reader at Naugatuck Valley Community College’s Confluencia literary reading series in Waterbury and at the Wednesday Night Poetry Series in Bethel.

The choice between standing passive and standing firm in the piece below demonstrates historically how repeatedly both witnesses and perpetrators often enable one another in a cold dance of public atrocity.

Stand Your Ground

Stand your ground 
like a tree that’s planted by the water, 
near the banks 
of the North Canadian River 
this clear day in May, 
as you jostle with others 
for a good spot 
to take pictures 
of Laura and 
her 15 year old boy Lawrence* 
hanging from the bridge 
like strange fruit.Stand your ground 

by the large sycamore tree 
near City Hall in Waco 
on another day in May, 
as 17 year old Jesse,**
his body muscled
from hauling bales of hay
now naked and beaten,
baptized in coal oil,
hoisted like a flag
by his neck, and
lowered into the fire,
as the flames lick his skin
and his wordless screams fill thesmoke-filled
spring sky.
Stand your ground
near the noisy fairgrounds
by the silent railyard
as young Henry***
is placed upon a scaffold,
ten feet high,
and his body is caressed
by red hot iron brands
as kerosene is poured upon him,
and set alight,
as little ones eat fried dough
and wave banners.

Stand your ground
along an asphalt road
this dark night in June,
as James,+ his feet bound -
like a latter-day Saint Sebastian -
is driven across the back roads
of Jasper
greeting every rock
every stone
until his body
gives out.

Stand your ground
for this child,
          his skin,
          the color of
          the soil of those river banks
          the bark of that sycamore
          the lumber of that kerosene-soaked scaffold
          the dirt of that Jasper road
has not been the first
who has been laid low
for no reason.
Stand your ground 
though it quakes 
though it opens beneath you 
though it threatens to swallow you whole.

Stand your ground, 
like a tree that’s planted by the water; 
you shall not, 
no, you shall not be moved.

* - Laura Nelson was raped; she and her 15-year old son Lawrence were then hanged from a bridge over the North Canadian River on May 25, 1911. Hundreds of sightseers gathered on the bridge the following morning, and photographs of the hanging bodies were sold as postcards.

** - Jesse Washington was a 17-year old farmhand who was tortured and lynched on May 15, 1916 after he was found guilty in a one-hour long trial for the rape and murder of a wealthy 53-year-old white woman. Although Jesse signed a confession, he was by all accounts illiterate.

*** - 17-year old Henry Smith was tortured and murdered at a public, heavily attended lynching on February 1, 1893 at the Paris Fairgrounds in Paris, Texas. Six days later, Henry's stepson, William Butler, was also lynched due to suspicion that he had known, and not divulged, the whereabouts of Henry Smith after he had fled.

+ - James Byrd, Jr. was murdered by three white men in Jasper, Texas on June 7, 1998, when he was dragged behind a pick-up truck with a heavy logging chain wrapped around his ankles. Byrd was pulled along for about three miles as the truck swerved from side to side. Byrd - who reportedly remained conscious throughout most of the ordeal - was killed when his body hit the edge of a culvert, severing his right arm and head.

Hosted by Frank Chambers and PoemAlley's Nick Miele, the Barnes & Noble Open Mic Poetry program meets the second Monday of each month in the cookbook section on the main floor of the bookstore (located in the Stamford Down Center), beginning at 7:15 p.m.

For more information, contact:

Barnes & Noble

100 Greyrock Place Suite H009

Stamford, CT 06901

203-323-1248

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Of related interest:

Low-budget exploitation movie maestro Roger Corman is justifiably proud of The Intruder (AKA Shame), his 1962 adaptation of Charles Beaumont's intense novel dissecting the symbiotic dynamic animating power, bigotry and mass violence in a story of unreliable first appearances and unexpected sympathies in a Southern town adjusting to school desegregation: