Rodney Holman, poet and all around reneissance man, sent us this poem in honor of the election:
HOPE, ON THE WING by Rodney Holman
a poem-in-progress, inaugurating hope
Mine is a voice long thought to have been silenced.
Mine are the words which no longer echo in the skulls of our children.
Mine was a world, it is said, which has long since fallen to dust.
Mine are the forebears who long ago marched into the desert of nonexistence.
Or so it is said.
I have heard your disconsolate cries:
"We can no longer recite those primeval sounds
We cannot recollect an oral tradition--
The voices, the words, the deeds, the longings of our progenitors.
Unwritten, they were but spores on a passing wind,
Fleeting friends whose wake is our constant and only companion
Long dead and long gone and long lost to memory."
Take heart my friends
For we are perennials.
We are here today to hear anew.
Today we commit to recoup, recall, recount.
We converge here along an ancestral line of force--
This is an unbroken line.
Our heritage, our humanity, our democracy need not be lost:
This battered but enduring tradition is an inalienable feature of our
universe—
No matter how the strut of the tyrant or the grasp of the greedy may
suppress it
This tradition takes harbor in and re-emerges from within the soul.
Therein, we are made hopeful, we are emboldened, we are guided
We are reminded of who we are.
We hope and we dream because we must and because—yes—we can
There is much to communicate and much to redeem:
Look anew with your eyes and hearts then
Upon those standing next to you
Can you sense what is being transmitted from soul to soul?
It is unacceptable and un-American to stand mute and unfeeling
When a human soul cries out to you in longing:
"I followed the long string--the longing string
All along this Earth
I have sought your response.
Open
Open up
This outpouring must be received...
Will I hear nothing?
Come
Stand here
This artesian flow seeks its steward...
Will no one come?
This heart requires some encouragement
Though love flows from it daily.
This moist earth teems with seed-dreams
Yet to open.
I have waited a lifetime for this moment:
I can feel your heartbeats from here
I can see myself in your eyes
I can tell that my hope is yours."
As with any gift so freely offered...
Take it!
Take wing.
***
We're almost there, folks. Volunteer, phone bank, talk to your undecided friends. Travel, if you can. We're close to getting the change this country needs.
Friday, October 31, 2008
Monday, October 27, 2008
Concert Tomorrow in OHIO
Obama Rocks Concert Event!
If you’re going to be in central Ohio next Tuesday night, check out the Obama Rocks Concert at Fancyburg Park in Upper Arlington.
“Come listen to some of the greatest high school bands in the area play their favorite tune in support of Barack Obama! Come join the fun!”
Tuesday, October 28, 6:00 – 8:00 pm
Fancyburg Park
3375 Kioka Ave
Columbus, OH 43221
To RSVP, and for directions to the park:
http://my.barackobama.com/Wednesday, October 22, 2008
VA Update
One of our VA people sends this update:
An fundraising event in Middleburg, Virginia on Saturday October 18th netted a couple of thousand dollars to help set up an Obama office in Stafford, Virginia. Focusing on the Environment, it featured John Passacantando, Executive Director of Green Peace. Arts for Obama Virginia handled the arts component with music by Loudoun County's Midnight in the Sun.
Well done, folks, keep up the good work!
An fundraising event in Middleburg, Virginia on Saturday October 18th netted a couple of thousand dollars to help set up an Obama office in Stafford, Virginia. Focusing on the Environment, it featured John Passacantando, Executive Director of Green Peace. Arts for Obama Virginia handled the arts component with music by Loudoun County's Midnight in the Sun.
Well done, folks, keep up the good work!
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Virginia: Art Auction For Obama (Reston)
RESTON ART AUCTION FOR OBAMA!
When: Thursday, October 23, 7:00PM to 9:30PM.
Location: Hidden Creek Country Club, 1711 Clubhouse Road, Reston, VA 20190
Tickets: $50/person paid at the door (cash or check payable to Arts for Obama)
Join us for an auction of art from Reston's and other premier artists.
Some of the art is being uniquely created for this event, inspired by themes
from the campaign. There will be silent and live auctions.
Auctioneers: Delegate Ken Plum and Phil Tobey
Contributing artists to date:
Ann Barbieri, Joanne Bauer, Sarah Bayne, Brenda Belfield, P.Delia Chisholm, Andrea Cybyk, Laura Edwards, Judith Forst, Heidi Galvin, Sue Holland, Sharlene Howe, Jane Johnson, Joel Anne Lambert, Mary Ellen Mogee, Gennara Moore, Pam Tobey, and JoAnn Clayton Townsen
RSVP Required -- 350 lucky attendees only!
To RSVP, donate art, provide sponsorship, volunteer for the event, or for additional information e-mail restonarts4obama@gmail.com or call (703) 689-0496
Latest from Ohio
Obamaartsohio is live.
Send your email address to obamaartsohio@gmail.com to received up-to-the-minute information about creative opportunities to support Barack Obama all across Ohio from now until election day!
Early Voting
You can right now in Ohio at your county board of elections office, or an alternative site in Franklin, Hardin, Knox, Lucas, and Summit counties. Click the link below to the Ohio Secretary of State’s website to find your early voting location. Early voting saves the campaign precious time and money in these last crucial days, and it’s fun!
http://www.sos.state.oh.us/
Bama Bus/Stencil America
The Bama Bus and Stencil America will be in Ohio soon! Stay tuned for more information on this exciting opportunity to create your own Obama shirts and signs, and use you creativity to help encourage votes for Barack.
YOU are Obamaartsohio
If you are an artist or creative person in Ohio and are sponsoring an event/giving a performance/having a party/creating ANYTHING that encourages engagement in the most important election of our lives, share it with the rest of Ohio, America, and the world right here! Send us an email to obamaartsohio@gmail.com, and we will forward all the information to our database of artists and creative people all over Ohio. Obamaartsohio and our national blog, Arts and Creative Industries for Obama (www.obamaarts.blogspot.com) want to show the world what artists can do. After the election, we hope to continue to use our database to stay connected and continue working for the support artists and art educators deserve.Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Sarah Ruhl on Barack Obama
MacArthur Award winning playwright Sarah Ruhl (Euridice, The Clean House) sent us a letter to swing voters. We hope you enjoy it:
Letter to Swing Voters
I have loved Republicans. And I do love some Republicans. I have opened Christmas presents from Republicans, celebrated Seder with Republicans, sat at death beds with Republicans, argued with Republicans, and been comforted by Republicans. I am not a Republican. And that is why I wanted to write a letter to you, my Republican brethren, my Republican family, the family I have argued with over party mix, the family who I drive long distances to see, to sit on your lap, to ask for your advice, and now I ask you: is there a two percent chance you will vote for Barack Obama? If not, don’t bother to read this letter. But if there is a two percent chance, let me try to convince you.
The charges leveled against Barack Obama include the fact that he is a good speaker and a good writer. This troubles me. Leadership going back to Cicero has involved speaking, writing, thinking and persuading. We live in a dangerous world, a world in which we now need a thinker, a cogent speaker, and a leader who can inspire us to come together and face deep challenges. Our new president will do this, largely, through language—and hopefully, through language that reflects moral action. After all, leaders do not govern in pantomime. I believe that we even govern in poetry during specific times in history—in times that demand poetry rooted in the blood of action. JFK spoke in poetry in order to inspire a generation during the Civil Rights movement. Martin Luther King spoke in poetry to inspire us to the better angels of our nature. Lincoln spoke in poetry to end slavery and bring together the Union. I am afraid that the current political climate tells us: “We govern in sound bites, not poetry.” The reason? Because sound bites make us do nothing. Sound bites make us sit passively while politicians evade their reasons for going to war. If the sound bite is repeated often enough, and in response to the wrong questions, we sit back and do nothing, hypnotized. Political poetry, at its best, does not hypnotize. It inspires moral action from a place where deep thinking and deep feeling are married in the spoken word. It is only when we are inspired by the ideal of justice that words even begin to sound like poetry—otherwise, they sound like platitudes.
Whereas Barack Obama has language, and therefore thought at his disposal (because let’s be clear, thought and language are related), his opponents would govern in sound bites. “I’m a maverick.” “He’s a maverick.” And I’d like to note here that the first meaning of maverick was “an unbranded or orphaned animal, as a calf, traditionally belonging to the first person to claim or brand it”. I hesitate to suggest that our mavericks on the right are orphaned calves waiting to be branded and sold by their party, by the first person to give them a sellable brand. Still, I am tired of hearing McCain and Palin chirp, “I’m a maverick,” and, “he’s a maverick,” in response to all kinds of complicated questions as though that one word, “maverick,” clears up huge questions of affairs of state.
Perhaps I am biased. As a writer, and a playwright in particular, I believe that language reflects thought, and the potential for moral action. Language is not empty. Especially from the leader of the free world, language becomes a speech act. That is to say, language is how we pass laws, how we declare war, and language is how we persuade other leaders and the populace to hear our point of view and to act. We have not had sophisticated language coming from the White House for the past eight years, and I’m afraid we haven’t had sophisticated thinking either.
I believe that the people who have responded strongly to Barack Obama’s candidacy, including myself, have responded to him not merely because he is a good speaker but because there is something about his language, his writing and his speech, that feels authentic. It feels as though his language might actually reflect a real self, and a self that is capable of moral action, matching and extending his speech into the realm of historic deeds.
The next President will have to be a Roosevelt, a Truman, a Reagan, a JFK, a Lincoln all rolled into one. That is to say—we’ll need someone who can rally in times of economic crisis, end a complicated war, inspire people to hope, deflect dangers abroad, and bring together a polarized nation. Obama has been criticized for not being only one thing—not black, not white, not only from Hawaii or Chicago. I would argue that at precisely this time we desperately need a leader who is not only one thing. We need someone multi-faceted, with broad appeal. We don’t need a maverick if a maverick is an orphaned calf looking for a brand, nor do we need a maverick if a maverick is a fighter pilot with a streak of recklessness. And we certainly don’t need a maverick Vice- President, when simple-minded, vague, inarticulate solutions to complex problems could mean the death of the economy and the death of the nation. We need a sober thinker, speaker and leader who can sift through complex problems and persuade people to enact complex solutions. We need, we desperately need, Barack Obama.
Sincerely,
Sarah Ruhl
Sarah Ruhl is a playwright originally from Chicago. She is a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a MacArthur fellow, and lives in New York City.
Letter to Swing Voters
I have loved Republicans. And I do love some Republicans. I have opened Christmas presents from Republicans, celebrated Seder with Republicans, sat at death beds with Republicans, argued with Republicans, and been comforted by Republicans. I am not a Republican. And that is why I wanted to write a letter to you, my Republican brethren, my Republican family, the family I have argued with over party mix, the family who I drive long distances to see, to sit on your lap, to ask for your advice, and now I ask you: is there a two percent chance you will vote for Barack Obama? If not, don’t bother to read this letter. But if there is a two percent chance, let me try to convince you.
The charges leveled against Barack Obama include the fact that he is a good speaker and a good writer. This troubles me. Leadership going back to Cicero has involved speaking, writing, thinking and persuading. We live in a dangerous world, a world in which we now need a thinker, a cogent speaker, and a leader who can inspire us to come together and face deep challenges. Our new president will do this, largely, through language—and hopefully, through language that reflects moral action. After all, leaders do not govern in pantomime. I believe that we even govern in poetry during specific times in history—in times that demand poetry rooted in the blood of action. JFK spoke in poetry in order to inspire a generation during the Civil Rights movement. Martin Luther King spoke in poetry to inspire us to the better angels of our nature. Lincoln spoke in poetry to end slavery and bring together the Union. I am afraid that the current political climate tells us: “We govern in sound bites, not poetry.” The reason? Because sound bites make us do nothing. Sound bites make us sit passively while politicians evade their reasons for going to war. If the sound bite is repeated often enough, and in response to the wrong questions, we sit back and do nothing, hypnotized. Political poetry, at its best, does not hypnotize. It inspires moral action from a place where deep thinking and deep feeling are married in the spoken word. It is only when we are inspired by the ideal of justice that words even begin to sound like poetry—otherwise, they sound like platitudes.
Whereas Barack Obama has language, and therefore thought at his disposal (because let’s be clear, thought and language are related), his opponents would govern in sound bites. “I’m a maverick.” “He’s a maverick.” And I’d like to note here that the first meaning of maverick was “an unbranded or orphaned animal, as a calf, traditionally belonging to the first person to claim or brand it”. I hesitate to suggest that our mavericks on the right are orphaned calves waiting to be branded and sold by their party, by the first person to give them a sellable brand. Still, I am tired of hearing McCain and Palin chirp, “I’m a maverick,” and, “he’s a maverick,” in response to all kinds of complicated questions as though that one word, “maverick,” clears up huge questions of affairs of state.
Perhaps I am biased. As a writer, and a playwright in particular, I believe that language reflects thought, and the potential for moral action. Language is not empty. Especially from the leader of the free world, language becomes a speech act. That is to say, language is how we pass laws, how we declare war, and language is how we persuade other leaders and the populace to hear our point of view and to act. We have not had sophisticated language coming from the White House for the past eight years, and I’m afraid we haven’t had sophisticated thinking either.
I believe that the people who have responded strongly to Barack Obama’s candidacy, including myself, have responded to him not merely because he is a good speaker but because there is something about his language, his writing and his speech, that feels authentic. It feels as though his language might actually reflect a real self, and a self that is capable of moral action, matching and extending his speech into the realm of historic deeds.
The next President will have to be a Roosevelt, a Truman, a Reagan, a JFK, a Lincoln all rolled into one. That is to say—we’ll need someone who can rally in times of economic crisis, end a complicated war, inspire people to hope, deflect dangers abroad, and bring together a polarized nation. Obama has been criticized for not being only one thing—not black, not white, not only from Hawaii or Chicago. I would argue that at precisely this time we desperately need a leader who is not only one thing. We need someone multi-faceted, with broad appeal. We don’t need a maverick if a maverick is an orphaned calf looking for a brand, nor do we need a maverick if a maverick is a fighter pilot with a streak of recklessness. And we certainly don’t need a maverick Vice- President, when simple-minded, vague, inarticulate solutions to complex problems could mean the death of the economy and the death of the nation. We need a sober thinker, speaker and leader who can sift through complex problems and persuade people to enact complex solutions. We need, we desperately need, Barack Obama.
Sincerely,
Sarah Ruhl
Sarah Ruhl is a playwright originally from Chicago. She is a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a MacArthur fellow, and lives in New York City.
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