Aysha Pamukcu
Then ambivalence set in. I could sense the joviality and awe of the crowd giving way to hostility as we waited for the flaming effigy to topple. Given our troubled national history with burning effigies, a symbol that has ranged from radical political dissent to racial hatred, I wondered what “the Man” meant to burners. Who were we burning? Why were we doing it, chanting and running frenzied circles around its embers? Does the exhortation to “damn the Man” still have any real potency to us in 2009?
Megan Stacy
When I went to nursery school, I remember my mother folding my pancreatic enzymes, mixed with raspberry jam, between soft slices of bread, sparing me the long walk to the office for my medicine. I also remember three-hour car rides with my parents to spend 15 minutes with the most innovative doctors, crowded waiting rooms and watching a frustrated receptionist search for a translator to explain to an immigrant father that his son’s pulmonary function test might not be covered by his minimal insurance policy. By the age of six, I had a sense for health care in America.
Lauren Caldwell
Writing is empathic; that is part of the point. And moments of emotional stress, rupture, fragmentation, et cetera, are frequently the spark that makes good writing go. But it is necessary to let things take their course. All poems about breakups, if they are only poems about breakups, are the same poem. So stare at something else for a while.
Justin Curia
The Kings seemed to want to portray themselves as rebels, but they rebelled against imaginary authority of their own creation. Matthew’s throwing a fit over a drink lacking a straw befit these imaginary rebels, as did Caleb’s forcing his roadie to wait around awkwardly with a bottle of Gatorade while he whooped it up with the crowd. Whatever Caleb was gabbing about was lost in the symbolism of his hapless roadie, whose sole purpose seemed to be to wait around awkwardly holding a bottle that could have just as easily been set down on the stage by Caleb’s feet. Rebels don’t need straws, nor do they need errand boys to hold their drinks.
Lee Konstantinou
The term Realism uncomfortably conflates an epistemology with a genre. Genres have histories — they rise, they fall, sometimes they rise again — but epistemologies, though historically constrained, must by necessity claim to have an objective, if still contingent, character. Smith’s claim against lyrical Realism is based on an assessment of the failure of the literary marketplace to sustain multiple roads, but the particulars of her attack grow out of an assessment of the particular epistemic failures of focusing on deep subjectivity and hypercomplex personalities as the expense of the political, the existential, and other dimensions of the Real.
