With activities and movement curtailed during the pandemic, many of us are spending our quarantine-in-place time learning or practicing new skills—with bread baking as a popular choice. This idea and a recent Twitter thread from Heather Christle about “poems in the form of instructions” have inspired the HOW TO Poetry and Prose Series. What have you learned how to do? What do you already know how to do?What would you like to learn how to do? Your answers can range from the practical (how to fix a leaky faucet) to the abstract (how to heal a country). If you’re looking for inspiration, here’s a link to “How To” poems from other authors.

PROMPT: Tell us how to do something (nothing R-rated or X-rated, please)—it could be something you’ve learned, imagined, or wish for—in a poem (any reasonable length) or prose piece (300 words or fewer—this word limit also…

“Simone de Beauvoir had introduced me to Jean Genet and Jean-Paul Sartre, whom I had interviewed. But she hesitated about being interviewed herself: ‘Why should we talk about me? Don’t you think I’ve done enough in my three books of memoirs?” It took several letters and conversations to convince her otherwise, and then only on the condition “that it wouldn’t be too long.’  The interview took place in Miss de Beauvoir’s studio on the rue Schoëlcher in Montparnasse, a five-minute walk from Sartre’s apartment. We worked in a large, sunny room which serves as her study and sitting room. Shelves are crammed with surprisingly uninteresting books. ‘The best ones,’ she told me, ‘are in the hands of my friends and never come back.’ The tables are covered with colorful objects brought back from her travels, but the only valuable work in the room is a lamp made for her by…

How to Write a Poem
by Robert Okaji

Learn to curse in three languages. When midday
yawns stack high and your eyelids flutter, fire up

the chain saw; there’s always something to dismember.
Make it new. Fear no bridges. Accelerate through

curves, and look twice before leaping over fires,
much less into them. Read bones, read leaves, read

the dust on shelves and commit to memory a thousand
discarded lines. Next, torch them. Take more than you

need, buy books, scratch notes in the dirt and watch
them scatter down nameless alleys at the evening’s first

gusts. Gather words and courtesies. Guard them carefully.
Play with others, observe birds, insects and neighbors,

but covet your minutes alone and handle with bare hands
only those snakes you know. Mourn the kindling you create

and toast each new moon as if it might be the last one
to tug your personal tides…

“I could wallow in nostalgia about my days with the Weather Underground in the early 1970s: at Coney Island with Bernardine Dohrn, eating Bill Ayers’ soufflés and Jeff Jones’ homemade breads and the thrill of having my left earlobe pieced by my wife, Eleanor, who was having the time of her life as a fugitive. But nostalgia would serve no purpose other than self-indulgence. Better to focus on the publication of Prairie Fire, 45 years ago, arguably as significant a manifesto as ‘The Port Huron Statement’ (1962) that helped to launch Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the mass organization Weatherman destroyed—with help from Progressive Labor (PL), the faction that urged members to go to factories and organize workers. The Port Huron Statement emphasized moral values, love, and honesty and expressed the desire for democratic social change. Prairie Fire (1974), the political statement of the Weather Underground, reverberated with…

“Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land appeared at a pivotal political and cultural moment in the United States fifty years ago. 1965 saw the murder of Malcolm X, the eruption of the Watts uprising, a great escalation of direct U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, the issuing of the Moynihan Report, the Selma to Montgomery Civil Rights marches, the passage of the Voting Rights Act, and the founding of the Black Arts Repertory Theater and School in Harlem, to name only a relative few of the major events that year. While the term ‘Black Power’ would not be popularized until the following year, the Black Power and Black Arts movements were clearly in formation by 1965. It was this milieu of social turmoil and the continuing, though uncertain, transformation of the racial regime of the United States that made it possible for Brown’s book, a sort of bildungsroman of…

The corner of Second Avenue and St. Mark’s Place in 1968.

“St. Marks Place—the three blocks of East Eighth Street that run from Astor Place to Tompkins Square Park—has become a symbol of the East Village. Head shops serve as a reminder of the street’s hippie heyday, while stalwart Federal mansions remain a link to the area’s more distant—and upscale—past. If something has happened in the East Village in the last two centuries, there’s a good chance St. Marks Place has played a role. Yet the street has never been a perfect microcosm of the East Village; those mansions were an anomaly, and the hippies were, too. St. Marks is the most famous street in the East Village, but is it a part of the ‘real’ neighborhood at all? The farmland that today comprises St. Marks Place was originally owned by Dutch Director General Peter Stuyvesant, who bought the bouwerij

amazon: Silence

“On August 29, 1952, David Tudor walked onto the stage of the Maverick Concert Hall, near Woodstock, New York, sat down at the piano, and, for four and a half minutes, made no sound. He was performing ‘4’33”,’ a conceptual work by John Cage. It has been called the ‘silent piece,’ but its purpose is to make people listen. ‘There’s no such thing as silence,’ Cage said, recalling the première. ‘You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering the roof, and during the third people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.’ Indeed, some listeners didn’t care for the experiment, although they saved their loudest protests for the question-and-answer session afterward. Someone reportedly hollered, ‘Good people of Woodstock, let’s drive these people out of town!’ Even Cage’s mother had her doubts. At a…

Members of the Black Panthers lined up at a Free Huey (Newton) rally in DeFremery Park in Oakland.

“The status quo — hallowed by hate, sanctioned by Jim Crow — was beginning to crack. Behind the scenes, J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation was keeping watch. In 1967, the FBI quietly unleashed a covert surveillance operation targeting “subversive” civil rights groups and Black leaders, including the Black Panther Party, Martin Luther King Jr., Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and many others. The objective, according to an FBI memo: to ‘expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize’ the radical fight for Black rights — and Black power. Details of that sabotage plaster internal FBI records, with thousands of pages scattered across a medley of databases. Now, the UC Berkeley Library is working to put those pieces together. In May, just before the movement for Black lives cascaded over the planet, the…

  . .   Good Morning!

______________________________

Welcome to The Coffee Shop, just for you early risers
on Monday mornings. This is an Open Thread forum,
so if you have an off-topic opinion burning a hole in
your brainpan, feel free to add a comment.

______________________________

Throw your dreams into space like a kite,
and you do not know what it will bring back,
a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.

– Anaïs Nin

“Mémoires (Memories) is an artist’s book made by the Danish artist Asger Jorn in collaboration with the French artist and theorist Guy Debord. Printed in 1959, it is the second of two collaborative books by the two men whilst they were both members of the Situationist International. The book is a work of psychogeography, detailing a period in Debord’s life when he was in the process of leaving the Lettrists, setting up Lettrism International, and showing his ‘first masterpiece’, Hurlements en Faveur de Sade (Howling in Favour of Sade), a film devoid of imagery that played white when people were talking on the soundtrack and black during the lengthy silences between. Credited to Guy-Ernest Debord, with structures portantes (‘load-bearing structures’) by Asger Jorn, the book contains 64 pages divided into three sections. The first section is called ‘June 1952’, and starts…