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	<title>Oakland Writer, Poet and Editor Paul Corman-Roberts Blog &#187; Political Literature</title>
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		<title>Interview With Oakland Political Poet Lenore Weiss</title>
		<link>http://paulcormanroberts.com/2009/08/11/interview-with-oakland-political-poet-lenore-weiss/</link>
		<comments>http://paulcormanroberts.com/2009/08/11/interview-with-oakland-political-poet-lenore-weiss/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 11 Aug 2009 22:35:06 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Paul Corman-Roberts</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Full of Crow]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Lenore Weiss]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Paul Corman-Roberts]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Poetry]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Political Literature]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Technology]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Walter Lowenfels]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[PCR:  How defined do you think is the line between technology connecting people and alternately alienating them?

LW:  I’m on the side of connection because you know technology is just a tool after all, which like anything else, can be used or not used for enlightened purposes – bombs over Baghdad or solar roofs over Miami. Similar questions were asked about television and I think the real danger, or the real question is: who controls those tools?  When the internet first came on the scene a lot of people from the 60’s really gravitated toward that, particularly because the idea of communicating…the potential of that type of communicating…I can remember for the first time talking in real time over a monitor to someone across town and that just blew me away.

PCR:  But how do you manage to keep technology in service of the human without the lapsing of the human into the service of the technology?  Or is a little bit of both needed to balance out the process?

LW: Walter (Lowenfels) wrote a little book called, "The Revolution is to be Human." In the final analysis, I believe that's the real revolution. Unless we can continue to evolve our consciousness, humankind may very well be doomed to destroy ourselves and this planet. But I'm an optimist. 

PCR:  In your essay “The Empty Nestrance,” your initial meeting with Lowenfels makes it sounds like he flagged you down on the edges of a seminar hall while you prowled the grounds impatiently. How was it that he became aware of you? It seems he had a notion of who you were.

LW: My anti(Vietnam) war poem had appeared in "Dialog" magazine which was published under the auspices of the CPUSA's Cultural Commission.  This is how Walter first became aware of me.  He was an expatriate who had been in Europe around the same times as Hemingway and Stein.  When he came back, he put together this anthology about the war in Vietnam (The Writing on the Wall: 108 American Poems of Protest Doubleday &#038; Company, Inc., 1969)  and he wrote extensively about the “White Poetry Mafia” because at that time, black poets were getting no exposure. Walter would take authors like Ishmael Reed and Clarence Major under his wing, and I was going to visit him and his wife Lillian every weekend and he was the first person to publish a poem of mine.

I have a long history of wonderful teachers in how I came to writing.  My father was born in Hungary and my mother was born in the US of Hungarian immigrants, and they both loved poetry. My mother would read poetry to us every evening.  She loved Longfellow, and my father really enjoyed the work of Sandor Petofi who was one of the truly great national Hungarian poets; Petofi in particular because he wrote of the need for Hungarian liberation from the Hapsburg empire in the mid 19th Century.  Those were some of my very first influences.  My father was in the Communist Party, not when he was raising us, so I was not a red diaper baby in that sense, but those influences were very much around me. I’m a 60’s person, so I grew up with my ears open to what was happening in the U.S. at that time. 

When I got my masters at SF State I became very friendly with William Dickey. At the time he was the head of the Department and also charged with setting up the school's computer lab.  Bill worked with me on my Master’s Thesis, and then we’d hang out at his house and he would read my tarot, and we’d have a drink and such. He was my daughters godfather, we were quite close. He, like myself and Lowenfels, had a great interest in the relationship between language and technology, and its impact on writing. This is where he and I really connected.  We corresponded across the Bay about this subject for years. We both felt that as writers it would be a mistake to ignore the enormous impact that technology was and continues to have on language, and how we relate to each other through that electronic stratosphere.  I’ve been involved with technology all my working life, and I think it has impacted our generation and our age more than anything else, and thus our communications and our relationships.

Now after years of sitting behind a computer screen, I'm becoming increasingly bombarded by information via these low-resolution screens that are unable to communicate the richness and complexity of experience. I'm hoping to write about that subject more. But it's still a part of my paying attention to the relationship between technology and language.

]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Full of Crow Press&#8217; Prate Interview Series has just published my first interview (as an interviewer) right here:</p>
<p><a href="http://fullofcrow.com/prate/2009/08/lenore-weiss/#more-68">http://fullofcrow.com/prate/2009/08/lenore-weiss/#more-68</a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
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