Given the bad news about police assaults on Occupy encampments in Oakland and Portland, I was especially glad to find the Zuccotti Park site lively in today’s warm weather. Feeling a sense of reunion after my long weekend’s absence, I wended my way through the park from bottom to top (i.e. west to east), noting the frankly squalid vibe in some of the most crowded areas. With space at such a premium and tarps or tents leaving very little ground exposed, it appeared that the pileup of garbage and stray possessions was almost unavoidable. I was on my way to the library to hear Mike Zweig’s talk on his book about America as a working-class country. Before I arrived there, I met a reporter and cameraman for Reuters International television. I gave a quick interview (Don’t look at the camera! Try to include my questions in your answers!) and then was approached by a Lebanese man and woman who introduced themselves as actors and socially active people in their home country. I talked with them briefly; then the book talk started. In simplified terms well suited to the Human Mic’s phrase-by-phrase repetition, Mike broke down the concept of class stratification as having to do with not simply raw wealth, but the exercise of power; advocated for an absolute embrace of nonviolent tactics by OWS; and called on the movement to develop its strategic approaches to outwitting the machinations of the metaphorical “one percent.” “We have got to be a movement of people who join thought and action–not some people who think, and others who act, but people who do both, whose actions shape their thinking at the same time as their thinking shapes action.”
I stood on Broadway, with George at my side (George is a youngish man who frequently stands beside me holding one of his signs while I read; the signs are ingenious and change from day to day; the one today had a quote from Seamus Heaney, something about living beyond the mentality that seeks revenge). In front of us strode the very tall man with the loud angry voice who carries a big Chinese flag suspended from a broom handle (with the broom still attached at the bottom), and displays in his other hand copies of the China Daily. Today, he had embarked on a vendetta against a group of young anarchists who were displaying their pamphlets at a centrally located table. “They spit on China, but China is reality! They spit on reality! I happen to think China is very important!” “But we don’t spit on the Spanish Revolution!” one of them made the mistake of saying. In return for this sally, the very tall man approached the table and began to admonish them: “I’ll get to Spain tomorrow! I can only do one thing at a time. But China is real!” “That’s okay, go back to what you were doing,” the anarchists retorted.
In the midst of all, I read from the anthology For a Living: The Poetry of Work, edited by Nicholas Coles and Peter Oresick (University of Illinois Press, 1995). I started with excerpts from Judy Grahn’s “The Common Woman Poems” and two poems by Martín Espada, “Jorge the Church Janitor Finally Quits” and “Green and Red, Verde y Rojo.” I also read Campbell McGrath’s “Capitalist Poem #5,” David McKain’s “Door to Door for a Tenant’s Union,” Irene Willis’s “Easy Hours,” and my own “Sestina, Winchell’s Donut House” (based on my stint as night baker in a fried dough emporium on Hawthorne Boulevard in Portland, Oregon circa 1971-2). I finished with Cornelius Eady’s “Gratitude” (pages 141-146), a relatively long, subtly woven poem–noticeably more metaphorical and oblique than most of the pieces in this collection–about the work of being “36 years old,/a black, American poet,” which is the work of a “face/ defying/its gravity.” “I am a brick in a house/that is being built/around your house,” the speaker tells his opponents, “the bullies who need/the musty air of/the clubhouse//All to themselves.” Which surely ought to go on somebody’s sign, down at Zuccotti Park.
Just as I was about to head out, I saw George talking to another young man and the young man was looking slightly agitated, and I heard him say something about “buck naked.” I looked in the direction of his gaze and saw a topless woman standing on the retaining wall that separates the park from Liberty Street. I could mostly see her back, and a silhouette of one small, pointy-nippled breast. She was a very white girl, so thin I could see her ribs. She was holding a sign up high. Liking to see a naked female body as well as the next person, and in any event quite curious about this phenomenon of public nudity in the heart of our nation’s premier business district, I walked around the corner to get closer, only to run into a huge traffic jam of men. There must have been a few women in that crowd, but I didn’t see them, and the crush of guys looking kind of desperate somehow reminded me of the men I remember from my failed attempt at being a topless dancer, back there in Portland a year or two before I got the job in the Winchell’s. Only these guys looked more powerfully upset, like they’d seen a ghost. Like it was more than they could handle to have to be exposed to the sight of female genitalia on their lunch break. Now I could see that the woman was wearing a garter belt and stockings, but no underwear. I had the swift impression she was without pubic hair, but wasn’t close enough to be sure. Cops were hustling toward the scene of the crime, nervously admonishing everyone to keep moving, keep moving, keep the sidewalk clear. I got a glimpse of her sign–something about Siemens layoffs, and then the question: NOW ARE THEY GETTING READY TO SCREW ME? As I came parallel to her, she’d concluded her performance and was just wrapping herself in a long scarlet robe.