Hugh Nicoll's Blog

This is an excerpt from Gabe Gudding’s interview at the Chicago PostModern Poetry site:

I woke up from my Fargo youth and realized there are people whose job it is to wait and wait and then lock people up when they get the chance to. Not saying rioting is good. But this realization shocked me and has never left me: there is a kind of person and a kind of bureaucratic force whose sole purpose is to suppress fun and joy in the name of safety and security – and I understand the occasional need for that – but what shocked me was the realization that this force is constantly creeping outward toward the more benign features of life and it bleeds into this desire to protect “decency,” such that everybody’s at some level a potential rioter. The osmotic pressure of this force is ever constant, and it must be opposed with a disciplined joy. Daniel Kharms was murdered by Stalin’s state apparatus. That’s one reason I work in prisons. Sure there are a lot of people in prisons who murdered and raped. But you can’t do bad unless it’s been done to you first. So all that Lutheranism rubbed off on me: I believe in the political force of love and forgiveness. There are three things, said Henry James, of importance: the first is to be kind, the second is to be kind, and the third is to be kind. I believe in the efficacy of rebellious joy and kindness in the face of pastors and police. This is not a wussy belief. “I have reason doubt the sword,” said Gandhi. Gandhi was not a wussy.

I’m going to have to share this with Miyashita-kun, one of my fourth-year students who will be struggling to finish his graduation thesis on James Baldwin over the next three weeks. The Stein-like repetition — “to be kind” “to be kind” “to be kind” — no matter how hard things may be, no matter how much injustice you may have suffered, is as Gabe suggests a mark of true toughness. Zukofsky’s articulate “uh”…