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| These Poems Kill Fascists against a background of Chicago and Lake Michigan, in a haze of smoke from Canadian wildfires. 16 July 2026. Taken by me. |
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Some time ago, on a bright spring day, I was privileged to join my very cool and amazing friend Thom Woodruff, aka Thom the Poet, and another great guy whose name I have unfortunately forgotten, in a generative poetry workshop at LazyDaze, a laid back coffee shop in South Austin, Texas. We took turns coming up with prompts from printed materials Thom had brought and writing to them. Slightly stoned from the chemicals in my delicious coffee and relaxed because Thom has always been very complimentary about my poetry, I wrote seven poems, four of which have something to offer, in my opinion. It was a productive and pleasurable afternoon, and on my way out, the manager or proprietor complimented my T-shirt, which came from the launch party of 2% Milk and was black with, on the back, a white cartoon of a smoking baby getting a tattoo. I never felt so cool. |
Since then, I have published two of the LazyDaze poems in anthologies friendly to anti-fascism. This is the second. I just now realized I never blogged about the first in all the confusion of moving, so that will come next. The prompt for the one in These Poems kill Fascists was “We Have an Issue,” which is also the name of the poem. |
This is another Fin Hall anthology, published by his press, Likeablotfromtheblue. You can just see its logo, a blue blot, on the lower lefthand corner of the book in the photo. I’m grateful to Fin Hall for producing this anthology, which is timely, and for selecting “We Have an Issue,” which I believe is different from most of the poems in the volume because it is in the voice of a fascist gang. |
I’m pairing this post with a note on Frank Becker (b. 1944), another composer who studied with my father at Oberlin. While many of the other students of his whom I’m featuring carried on lengthy correspondences with Dad, Becker seems to have written only one letter over the years. But as with several of the other students, I believe I sometimes hear Dad’s sense of drama in Becker’s pieces. Like Maslanka, Becker won prestigious awards and composed full-time. Like Reichert and Dad, he has worked in commercial as well as art music. While he deploys a full panoply of postmodern styles in his music, including pastiche, minimalism, and experimental techniques, he is comfortable incorporating these into a style familiar from many contemporary soundtracks. This is evident in his 2020: A Symphonic Poem in Five Movements, a programmatic piece that tells the story of the COVID-19 pandemic. |
The third movement scherzo of this work, “Hail to the . . . ?” “paints a portrait of a confused leader as the virus continues to spread out of control.” Although I was pleased to perceive a thread of continuity between Dad’s and Becker’s scherzando writing, I am afraid the movement may be too kind to $trumpet for my liking. Despite the movement’s quote from the “Ride of the Walkyries,” it seems to tell a story of a pompous bumbler up against a deadly force beyond his control, rather than the story of malevolent, fascism that I believe would more accurately characterize Trump and his mishandling of the pandemic. |
Regardless, fascism is part of the story of the pandemic, just as it is part of the story of climate change and why we don’t do much about it despite phenomena like the air quality you can observe in the photograph above. And just as the poems in These Poems Kill Fascism represent a healthily eclectic responses to fascism, Becker’s use of an accessible commercial style in telling his story of the pandemic may well be useful in encouraging reflection on how we have gone wrong and are taking our world down with us. Go have a listen. It may be your cup of anti-fascist tea. |
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