The newest episode of PoemTalk is being released today. Elizabeth Willis, Julia Bloch, Jessica Lowenthal and I talk for about 25 minutes about Erica Hunt's marvelous poem, "The Voice of No," from her mid-90s book Arcade. Erica is the executive director of the 21st Century Foundation. "In recent years, 21CF has taken a leadership role in promoting new models of Black philanthropy that support donors who want to develop the skills, commitment and imagination to address pressing issues impacting Black communities."
The poem ends with a horrible flood, to which the response from "us" (all of us, including the poem's speaker) is insufficient. The drowner is handed a ladder to paddle. The poem was written a decade before Katrina but since Erica and her foundation have been very involved in that and similar recoveries, we couldn't help but talk about the politics of nature during our PoemTalk session.
Go here for more on this PoemTalk. There you'll see a link to the text of the poem, to a recording of Hunt reading the poem, and to the PoemTalk discussion, of course.
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
