Why would a country devote so much time and energy and people power in faraway places like Iraq and Afghanistan when it's left so many of its own great cities to crumble? Why so much effort to "win the hearts and minds" of inhabitants of distant lands, and so little effort to help its own struggling inhabitants?
Those are my framing questions as I take up Mark C. Durfee's Stink: Poetry and Prose of Detroit (2009). Mark writes from the heart of Detroit. He is has seen Detroit and many other American places with his own eyes; aside from military service and four years of wandering, he has chosen to remain in Detroit for much of his life, even though the city is down to some 750,000 people -- from a high of 1.9 million in the 1950s ("CAN IT BE SO?").
The mix of prose and poetry in Stink is very effective. This is not a Chamber of Commerce sponsored book by any means. Mark's work bears witness to Detroit realities: pervasive municipal corruption, neglect, abandonment, implosion. Senseless violence, furtive police responses (at best), prejudice cutting in all directions.
Stink: Poetry and Prose of Detroit is the very model of a jeremiad for Detroit, for urban dwellers, for humanity at large. Yet Mark also holds out hope for people power, for those who can topple the corrupt and usher in better things, a more civil kind of status quo, a real civil society.
Stink is a reminder that we have as a society been drifting off course. Toward Iraq and Afghanistan (and to Vietnam before them, and to the ever-sprawling suburbs), and away from our deepest problems.
For more, see:
Stink: Poetry and Prose of Detroit is the very model of a jeremiad for Detroit, for urban dwellers, for humanity at large. Yet Mark also holds out hope for people power, for those who can topple the corrupt and usher in better things, a more civil kind of status quo, a real civil society.
Stink is a reminder that we have as a society been drifting off course. Toward Iraq and Afghanistan (and to Vietnam before them, and to the ever-sprawling suburbs), and away from our deepest problems.
For more, see:
Today's Rune: Defense. On Labor Day (Monday), HBO will air The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant, a documentary set in Ohio but obviously pertinent to Detroit and the rest of the USA, too. 9 p.m. Detroit time, 9/7/2009.
4 comments:
Erik, Our very own Walking Man. Makes me proud! Also, a perfect review by you!
Yes, it's the real stuff for sure.
"Why would a country devote so much time and energy and people power in faraway places like Iraq and Afghanistan when it's left so many of its own great cities to crumble?"
Isn't it funny-- historians ask the same thing about Rome.
You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing -- that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.
Richard Feynman (1918 - 1988)
Educator and physicist
Thank you for that Erik.
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