s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] > Books: history‎ (17)

‘Eventually the facts of his life faded into obscurity. But people like James Strang never really vanish. When the time is right, they reappear, wearing a new guise, exploiting new fears, offering new dreams of salvation. Americans are fixated on such figures, especially in periods of profound social and economic upheaval.’

‘It’s not a transferable part of who I am. Nor is it alterable. So much of a poet’s formation has to do with rootedness, not just in a place but in a past. For good and ill, I’m constructed by that past, from the journey of those events and the struggle of that history. There’s no way of unwriting that and none of unliving it.’

‘Can a single writer challenge a collective past? My answer is simple. Not only can, but should. Poetry should be scrubbed, abraded, cleared, and restated with the old wash stones of argument and resistance. It should happen every generation.’

‘First, with Irsh men, by numerous foreign invasions, and, second, exclusively as women, by nationalism, a male preserve. As an icon of the long-suffering nation, the Irish woman becomes “Mother Ireland,” a static and silent object distanced from her actual, decidedly unromantic self.’

‘ I always thought ordinary life was worth writing about, and that included my own…the subjects of the Irish poem back then were often landscapes or historical events or political memory. I was a woman in a house in the suburbs, married with two small children. It was a life lived by many women around me, but it was still not named in Irish poetry.’

‘Language. At first this was what I lacked. Not just the historic speech of the country. I lacked that too, but so did others. This was a deeper loss; I returned to find that my vocabulary of belonging was missing. The street names, the meeting places – it was not just that I did not know them. It was something more. I had never known them. I had lost not only a place but the past that goes with it and, with it, the clues from which to construct my present self.’

‘Don’t patronize the chain bookstores. Every time I see some author scheduled to read and sign his books at a chain bookstore, I feel like telling him he’s stabbing the independent bookstores in the back.’

‘Work with animals is a source of suffering to all of us. We treat them like babies who cannot speak. The more time passes, the more I'm sorry about it. We shouldn't have done it…We did not learn enough from this mission to justify the death of the dog.’

‘When the Indian Wars began to go cold, the theft of land and tribal sovereignty bureaucratic, they came for Indian children, forcing them into boarding schools, where if they did not die of what they called consumption even while they regularly were starved; if they were not buried in duty, training for agricultural or industrial labor, or indentured servitude; were they not buried in children’s cemeteries, or in unmarked graves, not lost somewhere between the school and home having run away, unburied, unfound, lost to time, or lost between exile and refuge, between school, tribal homelands, reservation, and city; if they made it through routine beatings and rape, if they survived, made lives and families and homes, it was because of this and only this: Such Indian children were made to carry more than they were made to carry.’

‘They would just trade one type of shackles for another, trade physical ones that wrapped around wrists and ankles for the invisible ones that wrapped around the mind.’

’It is not a gift from the millionaires of France to the millionaires of America, but a gift of the whole people of France to the whole people of America.’

‘What had been for the others a place
of trials and uncertainties has become for them a place
of recollection, a pivot of the connections that identify
them with their history.

‘‘Through style, the creative effort reconstructs the world, and always with the same slight distortion that is the mark of both art and protest…Art is an impossible demand given expression and form.’

‘the plague will continue to crawl out of the woodwork—out of bedrooms, cellars, trunks, handkerchiefs and old papers—as long as human subjects do not question the cruelty and injustice of their social arrangements. We are all accountable for the ills of the world.’

‘Hot air came rushing in—hordes of starving people swarming into a palace after the dictator has fled: forcing the great doors and, overrunning the palace, mad with anger and delight, grabbing riches that had originally been plundered from the people, from them’

’Just when you think your informants are about to tell you something, they go off on a tangent, recounting anecdotes of no direct relevance...the ethnologist begins to think sincere attempts to discover truths about a society and culture are being deliberately obstructed…For them, it’s the normal way of talking about the subject. We may think they’re digressing, but in their minds they aren’t at all. And what we find logical can be totally irrational to them.’

‘The boat in the bay floated silently as the rain beat down. It was like a memorial to the victims of a disaster that had been wrought by humans, and yet was more terrible than humans could imagine.’

‘According to the South Korean Red Cross, in the thirty years leading up to 2018, 132,123 people had registered to meet their North Korean families. Of those, 75,234 have died and only 56,890 are still living, with more than 85 percent of whom are over the age of 70.’