The Poet is Full of Rage and Hate - WARNING racist epithet included

2007-04-27T04:34:00.000+09:00

The Poet is Full of Rage and Hate - WARNING racist epithet included

I set up a Google alert for [poem "Virginia Tech"] and, at first, was disappointed with the results. Then I got something interesting, a link to this page:

http://www.martinirepublic.com/item/nikki-at-25/

It's about some extremely angry poetry written the years of youth, poetry by Nikki Giovanni, sometime professor to the infamous Cho.

The page originally hosted the text of a poem called THE TRUE IMPORTANCE OF PRESENT DIALOG, BLACK VS. NEGRO, of which the site now says:

"Ms. Giovanni’s early poems are a point of reference for rage at a youthful age. The implied lesson here is that an honored poet can also produce very angry text at a young age."

They've taken down the text of the poem for the moment, because apparently some people have been using the page to disrespect Ms. Giovanni. But they still provide a link to the text, for those who are interested.

The page further says:

"Readers when reading these poems should be very careful not to jump to conclusions about the relationship between angry text and actions. There are angry textual rages published everywhere in America, each and every day. Our task as humans is to examine rage with as much humanity as we can possibly bring to it."

I thought that was an interesting comment. I've written some fairly extreme stuff in my time, but I haven't get gone Glock-crazy.

The text of the page also
says:

""Nikki Giovanni, prof at Virginia Tech, said of her former student, Cho Seung Hui, a 23-year-old : “I’ve taught troubled youngsters. I’ve taught crazy people. It was the meanness that bothered me. It was a, really, mean streak.” ""

The page is comment-capable, and a lot of people have added comments, if you'd like to take a look.

I clicked a link on the page and got to the following page:

http://www.aavw.org/special_features/pofidr_poetry_giovanni.html

This includes the texts of the poems FROM A LOGICAL POINT OF VIEW and THE TRUE IMPORT OF PRESENT DIALOGUE, BLACK VS. NEGRO (FOR PEPE, WHO WILL ULTIMATELY JUDGE OUR EFFORTS).

Here is an excerpt from the unexpurgated text:

Nigger
Can you kill
Can you kill
Can a nigger kill
Can a nigger kill a honkie
Can a nigger kill the Man
Can you kill nigger
Huh? nigger can you
kill
Do you know how to draw blood
Can you poison
Can you stab-a-Jew
Can you kill huh? nigger
Can you kill
Can you run a protestant down with your
'68 El Dorado
(that's all they're good for anyway)
Can you kill
Can you piss on a blond head
Can you cut it

The site bears a log saying "Free Speech Online Blue Ribbon Campaign."

The homepage for the site which features the excerpt above is the following:

http://www.aavw.org/special_features/homepage_pofidr_poetry.html

It features poems by a number of poets, one bearing the name Muhammad Ali. When I was a kid there was a boxer by that name.

What you see on the page is a short poem which uses the voice of the boxer, and which quite possibly includes words that he actually spoke, but I have no idea if this is:

(a) an actual poem that the real Muhammad Ali put together himself;

(b) a poem that someone put together by building it from words spoken by Ali; or,

(c) A poem written by a poet who is using Ali as a persona to speak through.

Anyway, I thought it was an interesting little poem, and I saved a copy to keep.

The direct link to the page is:

http://www.aavw.org/special_features/pofidr_poetry_alipoetry.html

And part of what we see on the page is this:

Actually, there seem to be two poems on the page, both bearing the heading MUHAMMAD ALI. The second is shorter than the first, consting of just these three lines:

"" "Keep asking me, no matter how long
On the war in Viet Nam, I sing this song
I ain't got no qurrel with them Viet Cong." ""

The longer poem enlarges on this theme, and ends by Ali saying he'd rather go to jail and spend his time watching "television fed" than being with "you white folks," in Vietnam, and dead.

I had planned to delete my Google alert for ["Virginia Tech" poem], but, seeing as how it has led me to what is, for me, a very interesting exploration of the Internet, I think I'll keep it.

A Poem About Virginia Tech

2007-04-27T03:05:00.000+09:00

A Poem About Virginia Tech

Virginia Tech massacre and gun control
The argument is made that if even one student at Virginia Tech had been in possession of a concealed weapon then the massacre could have been prevented.

This Virginia Tech poem SAVING VIRGINIA poem is part of the Genghis Lotus Poetry Collection, a selection of poems free to read online.

The collection includes school poems, city poems, nature poems, war poems, cancer poems, death poems, and, additionally, other poems, assorted poems on various topics and themes, this being one of those other poems.

The Genghis Lotus poems are hosted at two locations, genghislotus.com and zenvirus.com/genghis-lotus/. Webmaster for both sites is poet Hugh Cook, born in Britain, educated in New Zealand, and the author of, amongst other works, the fantasy series Chronicles of an Age of Darkness.

SAVING VIRGINIA

The truth is that one concealed weapon
(Licensed, of course, and legal)
Will take down the meanest killer born.
As the wisdom of the Framers of the Constitution puts it,
"Recognizing that safety lies in firepower, the State
Will never constrain the liberties of the People
To hold arms in their possession
And to carry them,
Openly or concealed."
Some examples follow
To illustrate the wisdom of the Framers.
The Constitution that the Framers made
Is, and always will be,
The Ultimate Wisdom.
If this were not so
I would not have told you so.

The family feeding problems
Of Caliban Cain Virginia,
His wife and seven kids,
Were resolved when the voices broadcasting to his brain from Upper Egypt
Asked him the vital question:
What would Jesus do?
He did it,
And there were many, many, many flowers at the funeral.

Colonel Excalibur Plato Virginia's tottering marriage was saved,
Thank God and mercy,
When he with a little whiskey in him
Mistook his wife for a burglar,
And shot the bad-tempered bitch
Five times in the back of the head
In self-defense.

Saint Virginia Daycare Center was saved
When little Miss Muffit,
Age five,
Pulled out her Glock
And wasted the drunken psycho with the beer bottle grin.
(And, into the bargain, offed little Billy Bison,
Age four and three quarters,
With whom she had never got on.)
Mrs President, one day, perhaps?

Virginia Veterans Restcare was saved
When Scraw Burke McScree,
Age 85,
Heavily into the Alzheimer's zone,
Cranked his vintage Browning out
And launched one, two, three, four, five, six, seven bullets
Into the seriously scary girl scout
Who had blundered into his haywire
When she came round selling cookies.
Great work, McScree!
(But a bit of a pity about the doctor and the nurse.)

Virginia Tech was spared a second carnage
When plucky Harrietta saved the day.
This cherry Mayflower virgin,
Miss Harrietta Lucinda Potter-Brown,
Saw the danger posed by the queer Jew writer,
Screwball student poet of extremely oddball verses.
Her alarms fell on deaf ears, but she
Solved his problem quite without publicity,
Up close and personal in a mode of wetwork.
So that was the end of Allen Ginsberg,
Not one of us, no way,
A nutso weirdo, but stopped before he started.
Congratulations, Miss Harrietta!
This year's Nobel Peacemaker Prize
Is on its way!

Our lesson done, sweet children, gather round
And let us sing our praise song:
God Bless America.

********************
********************

What follows is a sampling of some (not all, of course) of the "shot dead" search results for Google News as found when the time in Japan was about 1630 on Monday 23 April 2007. The search was for "shot dead" excluding any page which made any reference to Virginia Tech.

[*] 2 shot dead at Laguna Beach resort
Los Angeles Times, CA - 25 minutes ago
Authorities are looking into several possibilities, including whether the woman shot the man — perhaps during the confrontation with police. ...

[*] Man shot dead on North Side; police seek 3 involved in fight
Columbus Dispatch, OH - 3 hours ago
A shooting at a North Side apartment complex early yesterday left one man dead and the police looking for three people. ...

[*] Woman shot dead in her car in North Las Vegas alley
KSBY, CA - 12 hours ago
LAS VEGAS North Las Vegas police say they found a woman shot dead in her car in an alley early this morning. Police responded at about 6:30 this

[*] KARE Teen Shot Dead On St. Paul Bus
WCCO, MN - 17 hours ago
(AP) St. Paul A teenager was shot to death on a Metro Transit bus in downtown St. Paul around midnight Saturday night, police said. ...
Bus Shooting Victim's Family Speaks FOX 9 News
all 18 news articles »

[*] Two shot dead at NASA
Melbourne Herald Sun, Australia - Apr 21, 2007
A NASA contract worker took a handgun inside an office building at Johnson Space Centre in Houston yesterday and fatally shot a hostage before killing ...

[*] Man Shot Dead Outside Club
Boston Channel.com, MA - Apr 21, 2007
While they were sitting in a vehicle, someone shot at them, police said. A bullet grazed the driver's arm and killed the passenger.

Copyright © 2007 Hugh Cook

Poetry About Virginia Tech

The Poet is Full of Rage and Hate - WARNING racist epithet included

A Poem About Virginia Tech