vol. 2 issue 46
Greetings,
This issue, podcast, and video features what is more a word concert than an interview. It’s a conversation between myself and the poet, author, policy analyst, Fulbright scholar, and celebrated Washington, DC resident, E. Ethelbert Miller.
Among Ethel’s most recent works is an essay entitled, If You Don’t Know Me by Now.
It explores how in our riven nation we might find the strength to love. It begins:
We uproot the past looking for historical clarity. Unfortunately, the future often wears a mask. We are no longer protesting like this is the Sixties. The motion of history has taken us somewhere else. “Where are we?” is as difficult to utter as “Once upon a time.”
It is from this “neither one nor the other” place that Miller and I begin an examination of democracy in this moment in time. The result is a string of riffs that hang together as a novel way of seeing America with our ears, a synesthetic approach to policymaking and to working with the future that Miller describes in practical ways. And if that sounds bonkers, consider how censorship from authorities and corporate news media alike are already forcing us to find reliable ways of learning and knowing so we can act in our own best interests.
Our conversation starts with a look at what literary activism is, before ranging over how poetry provides an effective way of looking at policy and policymaking, to considering how the existence of Trump – a man who fused with his technology (Twitter) – is a message from the future, to the ways in which language is no longer apt enough to contain our experiences of now and what is to come. A discussion about the relevance – or lack thereof – of works by George Orwell, James Baldwin, August Wilson, Toni Morrison, and Ta-Nahisi Coates is probably one unlike you’ve ever heard, as is the indictment of the news media and the impulse we have for storytelling. All of it within the context of whether it is possible to heal ourselves and our nation enough to carry on as a democracy.
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