Must History be Repeated?

 

”From 1920 to 1938, the NAACP flew a banner outside its New York City office with the words, ‘A Man Was Lynched Yesterday.’ The words would have been jarring to passersby, but that was the point. It was a provocative graphic statement—something to stop the busy onlookers of Fifth Avenue in their tracks. The stark symbol meant to force the viewer into confronting the reality of the racial violence happening in America.” (source)

This week in Minneapolis: Protest and Death

Another death in Minneapolis this week as everyone knows. The provocative agents of our horrendous federal government are assuming more and more power with less and less restraint. Our leaders from Washington are reneging on commitment to the traditional American legal system. The goon squads can go wherever they like and murder whomever they wish, and they wear masks so that they are not held accountable: no masks is the legal norm. Comparisons with historic precedents (especially the early days of Nazi Germany) are too grim to think about.

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Noval Noir’s memorial portrat of Renee Nicole Good

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A Quote from an Interview with Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey

I’m sure you’ve heard that a judge has said that ICE has violated nearly 100 court orders since its crackdown began in Minneapolis, which makes me wonder if you think you can enforce any agreement with Homan and the federal government? That’s the most dangerous question that anybody can ask because we are in a world of hurt that goes way beyond any individual safety if we are talking about a federal government completely ignoring court orders. This is a foundational principle of our Republic. The battlefield that we fight on as municipalities and cities around the country isn’t one of warfare. It’s one of the law. The battlefield that we are going to win on is the law, and a precondition of that necessary fight is that once the law has been determined and a court order comes down, it’s going to be followed. This is something that I get really intense and really pissed off about. This is not optional. You follow the law. We should have everybody, Democrats and Republicans, losing it. It should be deeply concerning, not from an ideological perspective but from an American one. (New York Times interview by Lulu Garcia-Navarro)

Previous Outrages, Commemorated in Murals

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Minneapolis, 2020 (source)

Horror Show in Minneapolis

Signs and Marches

Artists’ Visions

Sources of this Art in Minneapolis

It’s very wrong of me not to credit each art work and photo, but I don’t have time and I want to share these important insights. Here are the sources:

https://www.fastcompany.com/91481771/minneapolis-protest-art

https://www.uuworld.org/articles/ice-march-photos-unitarian-universalism

https://www.fastcompany.com/91480108/these-clever-anti-ice-signs-are-taking-over-minneapolis

https://illoz.com/edel/news/9186

https://mspmag.com/arts-and-culture/protest-art-anti-ice/

Food Poems

I never read poetry. But the other night, I decided to look on the site of the Poetry Foundation for poems from the magazine Poetry. I found two enjoyable poems about food. I’ll tell  you about one of them now, and maybe about the other one another time.

I was amused by some of the stanzas in a very long poem titled “Grapes,” which was published in April of 1927. The author is Ellen Glines, who published a number of poems there between 1924 and 1930, and that’s all I know about her — one or two mentions in an internet search yield very little other information. Here are a few lines from the poem.

Strange, the things that folks will eat,

Costly, exotic, piquant, sweet:

Truffles, snails, and nectarines,

Cashews, palm-hearts, madelines;

Pies of squash, mince, custard, apple;

Haggis; Philadelphia scrapple;

Syrupy kumquats stewed in crocks;

Bonbons from a tinselled box-

Sugared violets, nougat, divinity,

Hand-dipped chocolates to infinity!

Ripe olives, blutwurst, marzipan,

Sweet potatoes out of a can;

Anchovies, reed-birds, Camembert,

Stuffed celery, alligator-pear,

Rainbow ices in fancy shapes!

Nobody seems to care for grapes.

As I said, these are only a few of the lines from the poem, in which the author expresses her regret that “grapes” she had grown are not wanted by anyone. I take these grapes to be a metaphor for her poetry, which was evidently not particularly popular. The poem ends by saying that some day she thinks there will be a demand, but by then, she won’t want to sell grapes any more. As always when I interpret a poem I doubt my own ability to read poetry. Maybe the poem means something entirely different. The author is so incredibly obscure that no one seems ever to have published any other opinion, though.

I looked at a few of the other poems that Ellen Grimes published in Poetry Magazine. They didn’t seem to share the humor and light touch of the list of world foods that I quoted. In fact, they seemed a bit melodramatic and heavy to me. Maybe that’s why she’s so thoroughly forgotten.

Saint Paul, Minnesota: Poetry on the Sidewalk

Sidewalk poem that I photographed in Saint Paul in October, 2012. (Photo © 2023)

As I thought about my own encounters with poetry, I remembered a great poetry place: St. Paul, Minnesota, where I visited family (who were there temporarily) in 2012. A very special contest has been held in St. Paul every year since 2008: the Sidewalk Poetry Contest. Every year the winners' poems are embossed in the sidewalk blocks as they are repaired by the city. By now, around 1200 poems have appeared on the sidewalks of St. Paul.

A St. Paul sidewalk poem, embossed in concrete. (source)

"The submissions featured from this year’s [2023] contest encompass the diversity of St. Paul,
with poems in English, Hmong, Somali and Dakota." (source)

Review © 2023 mae sander

Magazine cover and verse from the Poetry Foundation website.