Denmark Vesey: Tom Sleigh 2008 $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award Winner vs. Lil Wayne

Friday, May 15, 2009

Tom Sleigh 2008 $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award Winner vs. Lil Wayne

Blueprint
by Tom Sleigh

I had a blueprint
of history
in my head —

it was a history of the martyrs
of love, the fools
of tyrants, the tyrants
themselves weeping
at the fate of their own soldiers —

a sentimental blueprint,
lacking depth —
a ruled axis X and Y
whose illusions
were bearable . . .
then unbearable . . .

La La
by D'Wayne Carter

See my style it varies, like drugs in an alley
My leather so soft my paint prettier than Halle
Wittier than comedy, nigga write a parody
But I ain't tellin' jokes... apparently

A parent, yeah my daughter be the twinkle of my eye
You hurt her you kill me and n*gga I ain't 'bout to die

See y'all are at ground, and my daughter is my sky
I swear I look in her face and I just want to break out and fly

4 tears in my face and you ain't never heard me cry
I'm richer than all y'all I got a bank full of pride

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

"There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."

The founders of the American state understood that the proper functioning of a democracy required an educated electorate. It is this understanding that justifies a system of public education and that led slaveholders to resist the spread of literacy among their chattels. But the meaning of "educated" has changed beyond recognition in two hundred years. Reading, writing, and arithmetic are no longer sufficient to decide on public policy. Now we need quantum mechanics and molecular biology. The knowledge required for political rationality, once available to the masses, is now in the possession of a specially educated elite, a situation that creates a series of tensions and contradictions in the operation of representative democracy.

Margaret Sanger. Woman, Morality, and Birth Control. New York: New York Publishing Company, 1922. P

Lord Bertrand Russell, The Impact of Science On Society (Routledge Press: New York, 1951).

"At present the population of the world is increasing at about 58,000 per diem. War, so far, has had no very great effect on this increase, which continued throughout each of the world wars.. War has hitherto been disappointing in this respect, but perhaps bacteriological war may prove effective. If a Black Death could spread throughout the world once in every generation, survivors could procreate freely without making the world too full. The state of affairs might be unpleasant, but what of it?"