Wow, did I really say McCain was running a brilliant campaign back in November? Jesus, how did I miss that gaffe in the October edit of a column I basically wrote in late August? Maybe pundits just aren’t meant to work four times a year. Such infrequency turns the political mind that is sharply attuned to all the fine degrees of sewage which pour out of the television and internet every day into that same sloppy sludge. Punditry really only works best when anger is freshly stoked at all times, like the crisp, stinging heat devils generated by flowing lava which manage to stay above the violent morass below. (Notice the hot air metaphor please…)

This is as close to an apology as I’m going to make for being a lemming idiot. But hey, back in August McCain held a slim lead in most polls and Plain, I mean Palin, looked as if her gleaming eyes and homecoming queen smile could steamroll any subpoena or public relations gaffe. God bless Tina Fey, but I never thought for a moment she had what it took to prevent the Karl Rovification of the campaign. I didn’t dare make a call.

But it turns out the enmity between McCain and Rove makes Clinton/Obama look like a sidewalk dustup next to a rugby scrum. There was no virtuoso of spin in McCain’s army, and we can see clearly now that even Rove’s presence could not have helped whoever the GOP candidate would have been in the wake of the collapsing economy. A forty percent plunge in the Dow Jones average had enough juice to drive a nail into a presidential and legislative coffin for a party that four years ago believed it was on the verge of a “New Deal” like domination of the political landscape.

So now the USA has elected its very first president whose most notable accomplishments came under the job description “community organizer” or what many conservatives sneeringly refer to as an “activist” (why, was there anything else special about our first Hawaiian president?) By the time you read this, barring some catastrophe, he will have been sworn in. It’s clear though, from the nation’s primary disseminators of status quo; that a conspiracy of the elite against Obama is simply not in the cards. His surrounding himself with Republicans and Reagan Democratic war hawks has garnered him praise as “pragmatic” from a wide range of voices, from as far right as the Wall Street Journal to as far left as The Nation.

To be sure, Obama makes a lot of Americans, of both stripes, very nervous.

For the left, a moderate candidate derided as a “radical”, a “terrorist” and a “socialist” by Fox News, has been doing nothing but tacking hard right ever since clinching the nomination, and this never sits well with the Nader or Kucinich contingents. Hannity and Limbaugh on the other hand, will never part with their newly, and forever bruised white pride. Of course, the issue of the 44th president’s race will remain an issue for a large percentage of Americans (not just white) who would never, ever admit it to anyone, and frequently themselves.

Yet what Obama does with his Presidency can do much to undermine the old segregationist urge, and it is just this course that makes a different faction on the right (quite rightly) also nervous; the possibility that Obama will somehow, against all odds and expectations (sound familiar?) turn out to revitalize the American working class, which is exactly what the folks over at the WSJ, or the Times, Time or Newsweek for that matter DO NOT want: the second coming of FDR.

While this will be hard to do without Big Labors co-operation (the original instrument of Roosevelt’s leveraging of the GOP) rapidly changing economic conditions might well send old line stalwarts like the UAW and the Teamsters down the path of the dinosaur. But collective bargaining was never Obama’s thing anyway. Grassroots organizing is what the tall thin man from Illinois brings to the process. Organizing and connecting techno tribes with collective bargaining, with media purveyors, with activists…pull enough of those together and sooner or later it includes someone you talk to frequently.

The ability to build up people’s role in a society, first with a political campaign, and then with big (if unsexy) political ideas (say like universal healthcare; the electric car, or sustained micro-subsidies for co-operative infrastructure models) is what can render the issue of racial prejudice as shallow as the melatonin which symbolizes the prejudice Obama also manages to inspire.

Of course, there’s no guarantee Obama will choose this path. If he turns into Bill Clinton on us (what the WSJ, the Times, Time, Newsweek and all the tabloids really want) then the Republican backlash will not take long to seize on every mistake, every gaffe and a condescending “I Told You So” rhetorical tsunami, vanguarded no doubt by the aforementioned Messrs. Hannity and Limbaugh, possibly limiting Obama’s presidency to one term.

Thankfully we are still in a moment where anything is possible. If Obama is lying in wait with a big idea that can help transform our country, he’s probably making all the right moves by comforting the powers-that-be with his cabinet picks (however much difficulty they have of sticking.)

We are the fortunate (or possibly unfortunate) recipients of the Chinese curse “may you live in interesting times.” Regardless of where we are a year from now, or two or three or four years from now, the hemorrhaging economy and the sense that history can flash at any moment are going to keep things reeeaaallly interesting…perhaps too much so.

Debbie Kirk and Paul Corman-Roberts will appear Thursday, February 26th on the Drinks With Tony show; Pirate Cat Radio, at 87.9 FM in San Francisco or live streaming at this link right here.

The show starts at 4 pm, but will also be archived at Drinks With Tony.

We’ll be sure to dish on the small press (not) but perhaps some blazing hot spoken word will be more in order.

As long as there are young people, there will always be an ear available to a sad old poet like me.

The Poetry Warrior is a promising young ‘zine from a promising young “player on the scene.” Don’t just read my poem while you’re there.

But make sure you read it:

LADYBUG

Ladybug I watched you maimed
in the desert of
this vast synthetic kingdom
by an all terrain stroller

Bittersweet because you
somehow
prefer it this way.

THE SECRETS OF FALLING
By LaDonna Witmer
2007, This Blank Page Productions
124 pages, $12.99
(www.ladonnawitmer.com)

Poets are, as close to definition as possible, obsessed with themselves and death. All of the sex and drugs that get involved are merely byproducts of the twin disciplines of narcissism and morbidity. Of course not every poet gets tied up with sex and drugs, but whatever it is that comes out, the self and the grim reaper remain the core sources (and of course we don’t really write about those types of poets in these pages.)

While this doesn’t play out so well as a lifestyle choice in the mainstream of life, or literature and the arts for that matter, the straight world has a curious way of being slightly more tolerant of excessive or eccentric behavior in poets; a pass for being so obsessed if you will, in exchange for mining these depths for nuggets of brilliant enlightenment that will produce resonant truths that ultimately, allow the average reader or audience member quick access to the self-obsession “drug” without having to pay the consequences of addiction.

San Francisco poet LaDonna Witmer is very smart about this dynamic in her poem collection “The Secrets of Falling” (This Blank Page productions, 2007).

“I am both who you I want you to see
and who I really am
and sometimes those two
trip over each other so often
they are impossible to disentangle.”

* from “The Everyday Show”

While Witmer references Death intermittently in the collection, she uses it mostly as a storefront prop to dress up the much more real issue of identity and identity deconstruction and reconstruction. And this is not to say that significant “others” don’t wind up getting entangled in this mesh:

“at first glance
it would seem
we are becoming
mirror images
latin on one arm
blood on the other.
(you wear your scar
to the right.)

we are not identical
yet. “

* From “SWF”

Witmer’s prose can get a bit clunky at times (see 4th verse above) but unlike most poets who dress their work up in lacey black, she has a wonderful knack for cutting through the bullshit of the bleak vagaries of shoe gazing and pulling out the glorious little shining insights:

“Sometimes I think about
hurting myself
just so you’ll pay me attention.
Today it was the stairs and a
tumbledown vision. You
wouldn’t question the sincerity
of my fall.

You already know I am the clumsiest
lover. Heat seeking lips
fumbling for purchase
on a place that exists somewhere
that is else. Somewhere that is
no longer here.
Sometimes I think although
you love me better
I love you harder. “

* From “Lovesong”

It’s no accident that Witmer hearkens back to the spare brilliance of Sylvia Plath (and there is a tribute poem to “Sylvia” in the book) but very successfully builds upon the Plath legacy (since Sylvia is the seminal godmother of this genre of poetry) by updating the inherent relationship politics (“Newlyweds”) and identity issues (“Alter Ego.”) At the same time, Witmer adds a lyricism that is not typical in Plath, giving the poems the feeling of a conversation instead of a meditation.

Of course, Plath did not have a book that carried the multi-media production values the co-operatively published “Secrets…” has. The design of Kathy Azada using stark and alluring photographs with a mixture of black and white font (sometimes in the same poem further adding to the sense of dialogue with the self or “another” as in “Pretty. Good. Girl.”) This adds depth to the gothic feel of the collection, though in my opinion the font is too small; this may have been necessary to keep some of Witmer’s longer pieces within the necessary parameters of the design.

“The Secrets of Falling” ultimately succeeds in transcending the cliche’ ghetto of “confessional” poetry because LaDonna Witmer does not flinch from revealing the core tenets which make poetry so vital to its advocates.