I'm a sick girl. I've started listening to Christmas music already. There is a local station that plays it 24 hours a day starting yesterday. I can't help it. I love the Christmas season. We buy our tree the first Saturday after Thanksgiving and decorate. I already have tickets to the Nutcracker, reservations to make a gingerbread house at a local farm/bakery, an ornament for the ornament party, plans for an Island Country Christmas complete with free pony rides for the kids, a cookie exchange party, a holiday poets/writers party, and a mammogram scheduled. Okay, that last one doesn't fit, but it's on my December calendar.
What's interesting is that all this happens in the first two weeks of December, but from 17-31st, I have absolutely nothing planned except for our traditional Christmas eve & of course, Christmas with the fam.
What I want for Christmas? Snow. Or peace. Sadly, I think we have a better chance of getting snow.
But enough of this holiday talk as I know some of you still have pumpkins (and rotting pumpkins) on your doorstep.
Let's talk about something in the news that made my stomach twist this morning. Kramer from Seinfeld (aka Michael Richards) went off on some hecklers at the comedy club with a series of racial slurs and as the article called it "angry outbursts." Someone remind me what year it is. I don't know why I'm always so shocked about these types of things, but I am. It makes me crazy when people resort to slamming someone based on race. Honestly, we're all born into our own skin, deal with it.
I made the mistake of going to TMZ to see the video myself and it was actually worse than the article suggested. If I were in the audience I would have left. Even the so-called hecklers were saying "That's uncalled for." And it completely was. It was as if he'd forgotten his words and once he went down that racist road, he couldn't turn back. I think everyone knows when something isn't funny or right. I haven't seen that Borat movie, but what I'm believing more and more is that Americans have been taught to be too polite and need to speak up when something isn't right. Instead of not wanting to make someone feel uncomfortable, sometimes people don't say anything and I think that can ultimately been seen as "acceptance" or "approval."
As poets and writers I think we need to be the response. Not all the time, or in every poem, but we need to respond to whatever we feel isn't right. In our own gut, we know the issues that bother us and issues we want to change. Maybe this week, choose your favorite cause, passion, issue, and write about it...deeply. Marvin Bell said that anyone can write a poem that says "war is wrong," he looks at a poem as says, "Tell me something I don't know." Basically, change the reader.
I'm teaching a class in April called Not a Vacation Planet: Writing Poems that Matter. Do that this week, write a poem that matters. And if you get a good one, email it to me with a paragraph of why this poem matters to you, why it's important to the reader and I'll include it in the packet I'm handing out ot the class.
Until then, love your neighbor and your neighbor's neighbor, and the country or countries you think you hate.
