i saw grace

many years ago (i'm guessing when i was about 20 give or take) at fordham university. she was giving a reading. a friend had turned me on to her poetry and after that i was gone! i wasn't expecting what i heard. for some reason or another, i thought ms paley was going to have a soft, quiet gentle voice. it was anything BUT that

ms paley's works moved me. it's been years since i've read her. i know what i'll be doing for the rest of the week

Remembering Grace Paley (1922-2007)

By Thulani Davis, Women's Voices for Change.
When the writer and activist Grace Paley died this week at the age of 84, we were left much poorer in a world already running short of honest and fearless souls.

Spotting Grace Paley anywhere -- at a march, or on the street in Greenwich Village, and particularly in the crowded rooms of New York literary soirees -- was like coming upon a sunny isle of sanity in a world gone mad with hasty, hardened greetings, glittering costumes, and too much patience with the intolerable.
To see Grace was to come upon a complete human being, so fully herself and at home with herself as to be easily noticed in crowds of people ambitious for any sign of accomplishment. When Grace Paley died on August 22 at the age of 84, the writer and activist left us all much poorer in a world already running short of honest and fearless souls.
She taught many of us, particularly women, what it means to be writer and citizen. As a writer, she taught the value of lives that often go unremarked, and as a "somewhat combative pacifist and cooperative anarchist" she showed that embodying citizenship fully is liberating.
Born Grace Goodside, the third child of dissident Jewish immigrants who fled czarist rule in Russia, her childhood was steeped in political debate. She viewed dissidence as a part of citizenship, not as alienation from it.
She was married twice -- first to Jess Paley, a film cameraman, and, in 1972, to playwright Robert Nichols, who survives her, along with her children Nora Paley, Danny Paley and three grandchildren.
Having started writing as a poet, studying at Hunter College and with W. H. Auden at the New School, she brought economy and an acute ear to her fiction. In a 1986 interview, she described the switch to fiction:.......

roses are red, violets are blue

if you have darker skin, well then f**k you!


or so it would seem.

Culture of Fear: Poetry Professor Becomes Terror Suspect

By Kazim Ali, New America Media. Posted April 24, 2007.
A poetry professor in a small college in the Northeast decides to recycle old manuscripts and becomes an object of suspicion.

On April 19, after a day of teaching classes at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania, I went out to my car and grabbed a box of old poetry manuscripts from the front seat of my little white Beetle, carried it across the street and put it next to the trashcan outside Wright Hall. The poems were from poetry contests I had been judging and the box was heavy. I had previously left my recycling boxes there and they were always picked up and taken away by the trash department.
A young man from ROTC was watching me as I got into my car and drove away. I thought he was looking at my car, which has black flower decals and sometimes inspires strange looks. I later discovered that I, in my dark skin, am sometimes not even a person to the people who look at me. Instead, in spite of my peacefulness, my committed opposition to all aggression and war, I am a threat by my very existence, a threat just living in the world as a Muslim body.
Upon my departure, he called the local police department and told them a man of Middle Eastern descent driving a heavily decaled white Beetle with out of state plates and no campus parking sticker had just placed a box next to the trash can.............