May 6th, 2011 / 9:39 am
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Kenneth Goldsmith and Michelle Obama to lead a poetry workshop for children

“An Evening of Poetry”

Event Continues Arts Education Series at the White House on May 11th

The President and Mrs. Obama will host a celebration of American poetry and prose by welcoming accomplished poets, musicians and artists as well as students from across the country to the White House next week. Participants include Elizabeth Alexander, Billy Collins, Common, Rita Dove, Kenneth Goldsmith, Alison Knowles, Aimee Mann and Jill Scott who will read, sing, and showcase the impact of poetry on American culture. The President will make opening remarks at this event held in the East Room, which will be pooled press and streamed live on www.whitehouse.gov starting at 7:00 p.m. ET.

Find out more over at Jacket 2. (Thanks to Kent Johnson for the tip!)

33 Comments

  1. Kent Johnson

      If he shows up in the costume above, we might be able to forgive him.
      Or, perhaps, if he asks the kids at the White House workshop to write a poem imagining themselves under drone missile attack.
      The avant-garde: It’s come a long way…

  2. Blake Butler

      when i saw the title on twitter i crossed my fingers this was a jimmy chen post

  3. cdamson

      What’s everyone doing up so early?

  4. Kent Johnson
  5. deadgod

      because goldman sachs got away with it, and there are still kidnapees in guantanamo and americans are still occupying ‘afghanistan’ and bombing ‘pakistan’, obama is unfavorably comparable to hitler

      temporarily inameliorable conditions must not be accepted, because the only time frame for virtue is now; obama has not waved his magic wand and made the power of the powerful impotent because obama is just like hitler

      the facts that energy corporations still control energy policy, insurance, pharmaceutical, and medical-supply companies still control health care, budget cuts are gutting education, the environment, and safe workplaces and products, and employee self-protection has been rendered quaint, all prove that obama is as much a murderer as hitler

      let’s face it: obama is hitler

  6. Linh Dinh
  7. Linh Dinh
  8. Linh Dinh

      Got his name wrong. I meant Ubama Bosh.

  9. reynard

      kenny g’s leveling up

  10. STaugustine

      “If this is Obama pacified, I hate to see him riled up, but of course he
      doesn’t get riled up. Suave, articulate and personable, Obama is proving
      to be just as deadly as Bush, but clearly more cynical. A great, loyal
      tool of the establishment, Obama has dampened protest from American
      liberals…”

      Some of us clearly aren’t availing ourselves of the bloody Kool Aid. Thankgawd.
      There’s “hope” yet….

  11. STaugustine

      Deaders, you’re as smart as they come, around these parts, but you plug your ears and sing La La La when someone makes an irrefutable (data-based) point about the Regime(s) you feel an inexplicable soft spot for. No head-of-state (or State) needs to kill 6 million Jews and 5 million non-Jews in order to earn a comparison to Uncle Addy (or his State); a few blitzkriegs and a self-granted mandate to spy-on-and-suppress domestic dissent will do the trick. Jeffrey Dahmer didn’t achieve Ed Gein’s nipple count, but it’s the essence of the vocation, not its spectacular stats, that could reasonably earn the former comparisons to the latter. Also: even Hitler had to start somewhere.

      Expecting early-to-mid 20th century Teutonic (post-Prussian) Fascism to be the model that the 21st century iteration of Empire would draw on, for strength, strikes me as slightly romantic of you. Of course it will come back slicker; of course it will be “kinder, gentler” this time. It has to key itself to whatever wavelength Das Volk are tuned to and *Of course* it’s far more cost-effective to seduce rather than bully; to encourage the masses to self-censor and self-surveil; to keep the nasty stuff off-screen and make the propaganda sexy, exciting and really, really fun. Christ, what could Hitler have done with a show like “24” or a movie like “Iron Man”… or X-Boxes to keep the Hitler Youth busy? And what a super-clever mindfuck if your Hitler “looks” like a “Jew” (read: Muslim) and even has a “Jewish-sounding” name? Eh? Who was i
      t, said, “To destroy the opposition, one must lead it,” ? He knew his business.

      Obama isn’t Hitler because Hitler is obsolete: you can’t get very far, nowadays, being “anti-Semitic” and too excitable (look at what happened to Howard Dean). But all those dead kids in Iraq/Libya/Afghanistan (and so on) probably don’t give a shit whether the guy who gave the order to blow their fucking heads off (one approval-rating-point for every hundred heads?) had a mustache or not. According to domestic “News” standards, any slaughter of more than a half-dozen people is a “mass murder”, no? Does this not apply “over there”…?

      I think Obama has more than earned his wings.

  12. marshall

      illuminati

  13. Jhon Baker

      Well damn, if they’re not going to invite me I won’t go.

  14. STaugustine

      Beautifully cogent piece here:

      http://linhdinhphotos.blogspot.com/2011/05/bin-laden-vindicator.html

      “This week, our government decided, finally, to kill off the Bin Laden
      apparition. Since the United States had supposedly been after him since
      1998, you would think they’d hang on to their man a bit longer after
      they got him, if they got him, but within hours of finding her public
      enemy number one, America got rid of Bin Laden!

      Hey, if you can’t
      show me something, maybe you don’t have it, especially since you are a
      chronic liar and in the cloak and dagger business. For most
      English-language trials since the disappearance of William Harrison in
      1660, there has been the principle of no corpse, no murder, but here you
      actually have an open admission of murder, widely broadcast, but no
      corpse, which is tantamount to destruction of evidence, whatever it was.

      So
      the CIA is basically saying to us, The dog ate my cadaver. Frankly,
      this farce was so crudely put together, the explanation so ridiculous,
      that our overlords must think most of us are morons, brainwashed as we
      are by cradle-to-grave propaganda delivered via print or pixels. I hate
      to think they might be right.”

  15. deadgod

      Steven, you were right to mock the pejoration “conspiracy theory” on another thread. Allowing for a catholic meaning of “conspiracy” (‘plan, not made explicit to “outsiders”, coordinating action of more than one agent’), “conspiracy theory” is a pretty large subcategory of pattern recognition, which itself describes much of “thought”. Whether it’s supposing the existence of ‘the Japanese nation’ (by one who’s never been to Japan) or guessing at the strategy of a team from its performance in a game, much inference about human life is ‘conspiracy theorizing’.

      But, as you know, when people say “conspiracy theory”, they mean, not ‘inference or abstraction of multiagent planning’, but rather: a) the perception of a nefarious concealment of such a thing, b) which perception is unsubstantiated by empirical experience or and/or logical consistency.

      That the Gulf of Tonkin resolution was a lie used to manipulate many Congresspeople and most American voters is a “conspiracy theory”, but one so supported by evidence and logical consistency of explanation as to be, to me, anyway, practically a demonstrated fact. The concert of action in this case is not unsubstantiated, magically ‘perceived’, paranoid, crazy – in fact, public knowledge about the Tonkin resolution is so substantial as to render not understanding that the lie has been demonstrated is “conspiracy theorizing” ha ha.

      [very slow computer (?); will continue discussion in another box]

  16. deadgod

      On the other hand, there’s the “conspiracy theory” that Obama was actually born in Kenya. Every attempt to meet this “theory” with evidence of Obama’s Hawaiian birth or to debunk the pieces of ‘evidence’ his Mombasa (or Nairobi, or etc.) birth is folded into the narrative of a huge but perfectly opaque “conspiracy” – one that that particular “theorist” has penetrated, eh, ‘logically’. There’s no document or methodological critique that’ll cause this “theorist” – who is no phantom of my paranoic imagination – to see how irrational her or his commitment is.

      Well, what you call ‘irrefutable data’ is, in my view, often a scattershot of uncontroversial facts webbed into a constellation of willed and not difficultly refuted interpretation. “Blitzkrieg”?? Even as a provocative bit of explosive hyperbole, that wording makes it sound like you accept the neo-con perspective of their disastrously bungled military joy-stick twiddling.

      Of course “Obama isn’t Hitler”, but any person in the world could be a “slick” version of Their puppet, and that person’s identity would make perfect sense – aha! – but They can’t fool me!

  17. deadgod

      More serious to me (than calling the Afghanistan ‘surge’ and drone attacks in Pakistan a “blitzkrieg”) is your simplistic conception of power. “Hegemony” and “empire” are useful terms – when they’re used with a sense of the divisions within, say, “America” (or “the Pentagon”), the multiple locations and rivalrous interests of accumulation (and other kinds of political-economic authority), and the self-determinative efficacy of resistance. But simply to say “Empire” and “Hegemony” as shorthand for Them – that, to me, is magical thinking.

      I don’t think you are “cynical” – I think you’re committed to a tidy mechanical view of geopolitics that works to the extent that its premises select and test “data” in accordance with the suitability of possible ‘givens’ (and their tests) not so much to verifying, but rather to celebrating your premises. If this circularity is “cynical”, it’s a cynicism without skepticism.

      T. b. c., I’m sure.

  18. deadgod

      Hey, if you can’t show me something, maybe you don’t have it[.]

      The Obama administration is actually saying ‘we’ve looked at a recent history of volatility, of what we think is a pattern of hysterical overreaction, and decided to dump the body of bin Laden where its grave can’t be a pilgrim magnet, and to conceal direct photographic evidence of his death to forestall reaction’.

      (- reactions like those in response to the thin edge of the world-historical wedge of religious warfare: newspaper cartoons.)

      Sure, the American government is dishonest and corrupt, but that’s no argument for congratulating oneself cradle-to-grave for embracing the farce of crudely evidence-free ‘explanations’ that fail even the tests of plausibility that those ‘explanations’ pretend to impose on rival accounts. Bin Laden died years ago? – or he’s still alive? – well, tu habeas corpus.

      Hey, in whichever direction my eyes are pointed, maybe everything behind me doesn’t exist.

      Cogency fail.

  19. STaugustine

      This is the silliest thing (I’ve ever seen that) you’ve written, Deaders. You’ve turned yourself into an unpaid propagandist for the “likes” in it.

  20. STaugustine

      Semantic-tap-dancing won’t undo those many deaths or make post-2001 North America any less of a police state.

  21. STaugustine

      Semantic-tap-dancing won’t undo those many deaths or make post-2001 North America any less of a police state.

  22. STaugustine

      Don’t make me use the s-word (the off-rhyme for “shock-and-awe man”), DG. This isn’t a “birther” chat. BO’s place of birth is of no interest to me.

      ” “Blitzkrieg”?? Even as a provocative bit of explosive hyperbole, that
      wording makes it sound like you accept the neo-con perspective of their
      disastrously bungled military joy-stick twiddling.”

      You’d like the definition of “blitzkrieg” to hinge on whether or not the effort was “bungled”? I define the concept by the number/ tonnage of bombs dropped. The coiner of the term “Shock and Awe” obviously had a less delicate sensibility than yours.

      Your attempt to dilute the seriousness of the destruction and killing by cartoonifying it with “joy-stick twiddling” is the most “neo-con” gambit in this thread.

      Sheer luck on your part that you’re on the geographical safe-side of the “joy-stick-twiddling” divide, no?

  23. STaugustine

      http://thinkfree.freedomblogging.com/2011/03/27/obama-earns-peace-prize-by-bombing-his-sixth-country/4051/

      “Turns out Obama is as much a warmonger as his predecessor. The Nobel
      Peace Prize winner is now running three wars as well as a concentration
      camp in Cuba and its military tribunals. While he ended torture, he has
      reserved the right to use extraordinary rendition so he can turn terror
      suspects over to other countries who will then do the torturing for us.

      In fact, Obama has now ordered military strikes in six different
      countries: Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, all
      predominantly Muslim countries. No wonder the Muslim world hates us.
      It’s because we keep bombing them.

      In a recent Zogby survey, 85 percent of Arabs expressed an
      unfavorable opinion toward the United States, eclipsing the 83 percent
      negative opinion in the final year of the Bush administration. This
      despite Obama’s “attempts” to reach out to the Muslim world.

      Of course, the political show here in the United States is fun to watch as liberals try to rationalize away long-held beliefs.

      Ironically, Obama, who said he would end the wars in Iraq and
      Afghanistan but has yet to deliver on that campaign promise, entered
      this war with even less authority to conduct it than Bush did when he
      went into Iraq and Afghanistan.

      Unlike Obama, Bush actually sought and received congressional approval for his actions.

      Nor can Obama claim ignorance. In 2007,
      he told the Boston Globe, “The president does not have power under the
      Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation
      that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the
      nation.”

      Also in 2007, Vice President Joe Biden, then a U.S. Senator, said
      that if Bush “takes this nation to war in Iran without congressional
      approval, I will make it my business to impeach him.”

      Clearly, Obama knows his limits under the Constitution and simply
      chose to ignore the law, which is puzzling given that the Congress would
      have likely approved the use of force in Libya. However, members of
      Congress would have likely asked questions for which Obama has
      demonstrated he has no answers. Questions, for example, concerning the
      mission’s objective and how and when it will end.

      Obama tried to justify his decision by claiming the United Nations gave him authority to attack.

      “The writ of the international community must be enforced,” he said in announcing the military attack.

      However, the U.N. has no authority to authorize the president to take
      military action. The Constitution is clear that only Congress can
      declare war.”

  24. STaugustine
  25. Im-against-it

      No he actually has a point. You’re sounding more and more like someone who should have a thirty foot beard, living in a bomb shelter in Montana, and scanning CNN for hidden messages from outer space.

  26. Im-against-it

      No he actually has a point. You’re sounding more and more like someone who should have a thirty foot beard, living in a bomb shelter in Montana, and scanning CNN for hidden messages from outer space.

  27. STaugustine

      Wow… pretty fucking accurate! How did you…?

  28. deadgod

      The phrase “joy-stick twiddling” was supposed to be commensurate with the childishness of the neo-cons, not with the “seriousness” of bombing Iraqi infrastructure (and no few civilians) to smithereens. I didn’t suspect that the point would be shrunk to the propriety of that phrase.

      It’s fair enough to indicate the similarities of the run-over of Iraq to, say, those of Poland (by two neighbors) and France, but, again, how similar was the Invasion to Protect Israel to Hitler’s blitzkriegs?

      Was the Louvre looted by Frenchmen? Did Polish or French ethnic divisions result in intranational slaughter that beggared the total killed by the German/Russian or German invaders? (- excepting the case of French and Polish collaboration with the Nazi attempt to exterminate French and Polish Jews — unless you want to say that, grotesque as it was, Operation: Iraqi Freedom is actually that much like the Final Solution.) Was the resistance to Nazi occupation in Poland and France really that similar to ‘al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia’ (who eagerly target uncooperative compatriots)? Were fillled churches in Poland and France blown up on days of worship by Polish and French religious rivals?

      The word “blitzkrieg” vividly communicates the fact of tanks rolling as fast as they can, –


      but saying that the American military in Iraq killed, generally and as a whole, in the last eight years, in the indiscriminate – or war-criminally targeted – way that the Wehrmacht did in what the Germans called Blitzkrieg is birther talk, and blaming the destruction of Iraq by Iraqis (and Iran) completely and uniquely on something called “America” is religion.

  29. deadgod

      Power – on the scale we’re talking about – is never as simple as schoolyard Big Shot vs. each Smaller Fish — even schoolyards aren’t that simple. You’re using “Hegemony” and “Empire” carelessly, (I think) because those terms are often used carelessly to mean Evildoers – especially when Evildoers uniquely and completely = “America”.

      (I think I understand why Right has to be or to pretend to be stupid – it’s a subterranean bar of methodological rigor they or They slither over. In blaming the often-blameworthy actual-America, why can’t the Left more consistently employ a higher standard of critical thinking?)

      Meeting a serious reply with a lazy cry of ‘semantics’ is “semantic-tap-dancing”, and won’t convince anybody of one’s solidarity with the unjustifiably killed or with the cruelly immiserated living.

      “[P]ost-2001 North America” continues to be what it’s been for decades: a half-sincere (at best), botched democracy staggering towards being a real democracy (or not). Steven, have you ever been in a place like North Korea or Burma (Myanmar)?

  30. deadgod

      Power – on the scale we’re talking about – is never as simple as schoolyard Big Shot vs. each Smaller Fish — even schoolyards aren’t that simple. You’re using “Hegemony” and “Empire” carelessly, (I think) because those terms are often used carelessly to mean Evildoers – especially when Evildoers uniquely and completely = “America”.

      (I think I understand why Right has to be or to pretend to be stupid – it’s a subterranean bar of methodological rigor they or They slither over. In blaming the often-blameworthy actual-America, why can’t the Left more consistently employ a higher standard of critical thinking?)

      Meeting a serious reply with a lazy cry of ‘semantics’ is “semantic-tap-dancing”, and won’t convince anybody of one’s solidarity with the unjustifiably killed or with the cruelly immiserated living.

      “[P]ost-2001 North America” continues to be what it’s been for decades: a half-sincere (at best), botched democracy staggering towards being a real democracy (or not). Steven, have you ever been in a place like North Korea or Burma (Myanmar)?

  31. deadgod

      Ha ha – if that’s all the “Like”s my propaganda can pull, no wonder I’ve always had trouble getting the metro bus to my stop on time.

      Does Linh Dinh “have [bin Laden’s] body” or not?
      (I mean, photographically or via some other form of credible documentation.)

      – because her or his arguments against the offical narrative are a lot less reasonable than that narrative, in terms of what must be true in order for it to be disclosing the truth.

      – and losing in a cred skirmish to most official narratives is . . . – what is it?

  32. Anonymous

      tinyurl.com/297sxrk

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