Hi, everybody. Welcome to the people for the American Way Book Club. We're thrilled to continue this virtual conversation series about big ideas with big thinkers who support the mission and values of People for the American Way. For those reasons, we are extremely lucky to be with somebody who has supported People for the American Way, with his work and with his words for many, many years, and is himself a poet, which is so fitting because April is National Poetry Month, so this episode has a p
oetry focus. We're very lucky to have a reading from Dr. Colin Greer, a bit about him before we jump into the conversation. Dr. Greer has been president of the New World Foundation since 1985, and he's been a longtime friend of mine and an ally of People for the American. In particular, Colin is one of the founding supporters of the Young Elected Officials Network or YEO. He has written briefing papers on philanthropy and government for first lady Hillary Clinton. He should tell you those storie
s sometimes. And education policy for the late, great Senator Paul Wellstone. He's published many award winning books and plays on education and politics and was a founding editor of Social Policy magazine as well as a longtime contributor at Parade magazine. The playwright a poet. He's recently published last fall, If But My Gaze Could Heal a book of poems If but My Gaze Could Heal and just this year, Defeat/No Surrender, both of which you can find online or in bookstores. He also shares his po
etry on medium and on and you instagram andyou can find him at justicepoetry.com. So thank you very much, Dr. Colin Greer, for being here with us. Good to see you. Good to see you. Svante. Yeah. So, I'm really thrilled and excited to get to a reading. You've agreed to read a few poems, which center actually around a theme which I'm excited to dive into. But I just have a few questions before we get into the reading. The first is about the foundation itself. For those who don't know about the New
World Foundation, can you tell us about its vision and the kind of work that it supports? Sure. I'll do it in a very summary fashion. For the last 40 years, we've dedicated ourselves to trying to help build and secure the infrastructure of what we call social movements. It's no accident when movements erupt, they come out of the fact that they're inspired by a moment, but there's an infrastructure ready to carry them. The classic, of course, is Rosa Parks sitting on that bus, and that night, 30
,000 circulars went out. 30,000 circulars didn't go out by accident. There was an infrastructure. And so, over the period of time, 40 years we've been trying to secure Infrastructure in a variety of imminent social movements from civil rights and civic participation to environmental work and increasingly into democratic protection work, starting with preemption and looking at the way in which that's being used and how we might intervene through the agency of community based organizations. And a
great many organizations that I know have benefited from the work of New World Foundation. Yeah, I should say the critical thing is consistent funding. The trouble with much of the funding for C3 groups on the ground is that it's seasonal around elections, and so staff goes up, staff goes down. But it's really important to build a secure and sustainable infrastructure, and that's hard to do. I think the political shift in the American South that you've seen in the last couple of decades, epitomi
zed of course, by Georgia can be traced back to New World's steady commitment and vision there. So I want to applaud you. Thank you. So, Poetry, you spent years on your Justice Poetry website, spent years thinking and writing about democracy, about the environment, about community building, about social change. How do you see the connection between your creative writing and your social change work? Does one feed the other, or are they part and parcel of the same idea? Well, Svante, they're part
and parcel of me. Yeah. I'm not sure there is a conceptual link between them that's firm. They're united through the fact that I think about these things and spend days talking to activists around the issues that I talked about. And so they come out for me frequently as poetry. They used to come out more frequently as nonfiction writing, but it felt to me more and more that our nonfiction writing on the progressive side of things doesn't really any longer have spirit and heart. It's very technic
al. It's very much focused on the moment, and often the moment is very compelling. But nevertheless, the driving vision has become something of a desert. And so for me, that desert is filled with poetry. Poetry. To pull a quote, you say poetry helps to push us to the edge of words and the collapse of barriers. Can you expand on that? Can you say a little bit more about that? Yeah, a little bit. So words are critical call for how we communicate our understanding and our dreams. At the same time,
they create totalities. Very easily we start to believe the word is the thing and the word is the person. Or using identity actually captures identity. So words are important, but they have a limitation in that they can cut off the internal conversation between what's easily called heart and mind. But more importantly, it's the passion and the spirit that drive commitment and inspiration. And words can activate it, but they can also limit it. And so being at the edge of words is, in fact, to und
o some boundaries and to open up space that the words prevent from flourishing. So how do you think, speaking of those boundaries, much traditional political advocacy comes in the form of more traditional prose. Op eds, essays, even just emails. What do you think poetry allows? To express that might be difficult to do in that more traditional advocacy prose form? Well, I think this is about timing. I think when you have social movements that are flourishing, particularly progressive social movem
ents, you have a flourishing of the arts, too. There's no civil rights movement without music and the great poets of the Harlem cultural moments, so they come together when they have been separated. The arts keeps the spirit alive, but ideally, they come together. Paul Robeson and also always echoed by Harry Belafonte, who talks about Robeson all the time, understood that the arts are a form of the activism that makes movements flourish. They don't cause them. They are a part of them. When movem
ents are in desert territory, like I said before, then the arts stimulate. They keep flowers growing, they keep the light open at the end of the tunnel, and that's critical. But they aren't in place of the inspiration that goes with movements. And frequently, when you have flourishing movements, just listen to Martin Luther King, you have poetry in the prose. Inspiration is poetic, and so separating them, I think, is dangerous. But writing analytic prose has tended to dominate and tended to crea
te a kind of technological elite that speaks to itself without concentration on the language, that speaks to other people who are doing the work in the field. And that may take the invention of new language. And there the arts, I think, Have a critical role to play. And just one last thought. The arts are also, to use a term that may be a little bit too flourishing. They're an epistemological endeavor. They're a way of looking at reality differently. They're testing reality differently. They're
trying to understand human experience differently, but they're another form of knowledge. I feel as somebody who's sitting right now in an office in Washington, DC. I want you to know that I feel particularly attacked when you say a technocratic elite speaks only to themselves, not to anybody in the field. As our work, I'm learning these last couple of months on a new job how often we're just on conference calls with each other. I was just going to say, talking about the moment, for example. Whe
n we talk about the moment, we rarely now talk about the fact that we live in an era where 40 years of austerity has created an environment that is devastating to working people, to the mental health of young people. And it's pushed us into a rhetorical mode. And in that rhetorical mode, inclusion politics have been separated from material politics. Wow. Okay, wait, I want to come back to that, because this actually directly ties to my next question. But then that bit about inclusion politics se
parating us from material politics, I want to put a bit of that because I pulled this quote. You actually quoted one of your columns, saying, in the Dark Times, will there be singing? Yes, there will be singing about the dark times. So first part of the question is that part of what you're doing with your poetry? Are you singing to us in the Dark Times? I happen to know that you think we are in particularly dark times. And then the second question I'd like to add is, could you expand on what you
just said about how an inclusion politics has become separated, and do you think it necessarily has to be? Do you think there's a way to have both at the same time, inclusion politics and the material politics? Well, let me answer that last part first because it's critical. Yes, I do. Absolutely do. There's no doubt in my mind about that. It's the journey of Martin Luther King to the poverty agenda. There's absolutely no separation. When there's a separation, we have troubles. That's the thing.
When we combine them, we win. Absolutely. When people feel that those two are in contest, then you have trouble. You can't carry a broad universal base on the Breck thing. I think two things about that one, yes. I think we're in darker times in a fashion that is shared by people who, for 30 years, let's say between 1945 and 1976, felt that the world was an open environment and it would get better and better. Those people are now in dark times. That promise has collapsed for them. But the truth
is, most people in the world have lived in dark times. Most of the time. Which is why we have song. It's why we have art. It's both a lament and a psalm. We are praising the fact that we can continue the struggle, and we lament that we keep hitting the wall as we feel we're making progress, forces of oligarchy and resistance grow because they don't like what we're doing. Their own greed factor, their own accumulation and protective factors trigger in. And they're very good at selling hate. But h
ate doesn't really work in poetry. You really need compassion and love and understanding and walking in other people's shoes. Same with the theater. You can have hate theater, but its moment is very quickly past. Real, deep theater is about showing life through other people's experience and trying to learn from it. That's interesting to say that. We're going to get to the readings in a minute. You say you can't build hate, but the selection of readings, is not, there's not hatred there, but it i
s complex. There are emotions towards some of the people that appear in these readings. And maybe it's actually about the path towards compassion towards people that you might otherwise not have. So I want to get to that. Before you do your readings, I actually want to read a little bit about this poem because I just love it. Even the title, which is Beauty, truth, truth, beauty. And should I mention, nothing You know it has this wonderful rhythm to it that I find very anyway, so the poem starts
, you're talking about the Komodo dragon headed towards extinction. And then it ends this way. At this point, the poet tries to staunch the bleeding, reject pessimism, resist the drive to punish, tell the hero you love her, make a date. I travel with a rose bush on the backseat. Each overnight I water the plant, heading home after 300 or 400 miles I wonder if the blossoms survive the bumps felt at home in my car. I don't know. I find it very beautiful. It's both sad right and a certain reading c
ould make you feel discouraged. But to me I find it very encouraging. How can poetry help us reject the pessimism? That could lead to less activism. Can it make us more resilient? Can it make our activism more sustainable? Preventing burnout? Yeah, I think can. I wouldn't want to put the burden of that on poetry. I think a good preacher can do that too. I think poetry can have a hand in that. And it's being honest about what you face and what it means to you to face it. We face real difficulty.
We face that we have been losing and fighting amongst ourselves and that gives tremendous advantage to people that want to use that. And so being honest about it, being open about it, lamenting the situation and then girding oneself, Gramsci called it the optimism of the will. You have to discipline the optimism of the will. You can have a pessimism of heart, but you need to translate that into the optimism of the will. And that takes discipline, it takes honesty with one self at least, and idea
lly in conversations with colleagues and allies who can share the honesty. And it's not about safe space. Friend. I'm happy about having safe spaces, but if safe translates into self censorship, not much use. Yeah, I hear that. Okay, so two last questions before we get into first is, why are you, you know we are really hoping to build the People for the American Way family. You could tell anybody you're watching. You personally. Why are you a supporter of People for the American Way? This goes b
ack a long way. As you said at the beginning, there are two early relationships. One is through the Young People's programs, the college program, YEOs. But before that, even my son, as an undergrad graduate, interned at People For during the book hearings. And that was a tremendous moment. And I came to Washington to watch him play in the baseball game between People for American Enterprise where Bill Bennett was on their team. And so it was quite a thing to cheer against those people. Sure. So
it goes back that far in that way in a sports event, the contest was both a happy one, but also metaphoric. It was symbolic of a struggle that has emerged over time. And so for me, people for as an anchor in that struggle, it's also the case that Clinton administration was heavily staffed by People for People, folks that came out of the organization. So I had relationships that mattered. And then, of course, the relationship with YEO became very rich and exciting. And New World Foundation learne
d a lot about fellowships and how to build fellowships and invest in young people and young leaders. So there's that trajectory and then there's the message. The original Norman Lear. And then evolutions of the idea that America is an experiment that rests on free speech and inclusion. And those have to have infrastructure anchors and one that speak or tries to speak both to the entertainment and news environment as well as the organizing environment is critical and there are few. So well said.
See, this is why we ask the board these questions. We're going to clip that and put it on the website. And then the last question. How would you, as Colin Greer, I was going to say newcomer to this country. You've been here longer than I've been alive. Immigrants. How would you define the American life? Well, I feel like it's entrapped in a cul de sac right now, but when I came here. And for many, many years thereafter, I felt an openness I didn't feel in Europe. I felt that the world embraced t
he people in it, that this country wanted to be an embrace. And it was a struggle. It was a vigilant and engaged struggle for many years. So I came here during the Vietnam war, civil rights movement activism, moving into environmental activism, moving into the nuclear freeze movement, moving into the anti apartheid movement. These were moments of embrace. These were periods when the country was alive. There was resistance, of course, but the country was alive to higher purpose. And democracy was
an open, evolving environment. It wasn't about those people that currently had it. It was about opening it up to people who should have it. And. That's still, for me, the case. But we're in a moment of enormous resistance to that. But we can't take the Fifth. We have to really be there. Vigilant and engaged. I love that. With that, I would like to invite Dr. Colin Greer, who has been so generous for this time, who has published two recent books of poetry. If but my gaze could heal one book and
the other defeat. No surrender. To share with us a few readings and these selections. I just love flying paper. Goons with Guns is a really interesting country club. Bigots. Another one. There's a couple of others, including Balance, which I hope we end with, or at least include that. This arrangement, too, we discussed before does really come from the general towards the very specific and speaks to the very complex emotions we could have towards very important relations. And I actually read a c
ouple of them two ways. Anyway, forgive me, I don't want to say too much. I don't know how much, I've never set up a poetry reading before. If this isn't obvious. Without giving too much away, I do want to say a couple of these could be read both as interpretations of the complex relationships we have to people we actually know and also parasocial relationships between institutions or politicians that may have let us down or we feel like should be there for us a little bit stronger. So anyway, w
ith that, Colin, I'd like to thank you for being here and invite you to read a handful of poems for us. Thanks very much, Svante. May I start with this new poem about Adam Smith? And then go into the other poems. Yes. Actually, I read this one this is about the invisible, yes, please. Yeah. The reason I say is because in a way, it's a transition, because it's about the material world we're living in and the unquestioned dominance of austerity politics. So that comes out of a view of the world th
at originates with the Enlightenment economists and Adam Smith among them. And so I'll read it because his invisible hand is what is behind much of how economics is understood nowadays. So it's called Imagine a hand. What if Adam Smith meant he could feel the fingers of an invisible hand picking his pockets? The unseen poor of a theft economy that puts gold in the purses of some they've taken from others. The invisible hand makes you fearful of the radiation of others. Frightened sunburn can be
contagious between mammals. Who are we when we're home? Adam might have wondered that. He could see the broken body under the gaslight glare. The man's belt no longer held up his pants. It took suspenders. This was an answer to a question had Adam hadn't asked. What did an economist to do with that? Imagine a hand. Of course, these all have. I guess thing I would add to what you said is that there's some sense that we are in the other even when the other is in opposition to us. There's some piec
e of that that we share that we could usefully pay attention to. Flying paper. Snow fell like origami breaking apart before landing. Foolish to try to catch one. Paper birds can't be shot. It peace. Tree flower. Sorry. Origami reminders of atomic storms. Why is the pamper one the pay? For shivers, a child's breath blowing under its wings. Teens at the border fly SOS on paper. Planes substituting for bottles. Guards drink beer out of cans, which they crush in a single fist. Then they wipe their m
ouths with paper litter. And the next one is called Souls in the Lower Circles. A quiet hiding like the shiny white under the bark of the plain tree, bears taking a hiding. Staying lost beats losing everything. The way wind whips the birch whose color is in its bark shedding in the shower sounds crystal beats facing yourself in a mirror when a quiet hiding makes greater sense than dignity. Burning off like fat in a skillet. Change is, after all, everybody's pseudonym, and inquisition is a cancel
reflex. We all have them. Reflexes doneage along the curbside of hell. Shaving in the shower sounds crystal. Yeah, just a great line. And it beats facing yourself in the mirror. Quiet. Hiding. Sorry. Thank you. Great. Thank you. Then the next one is a slightly longer poem called Goons with Guns, which you mentioned. Goons with guns glam up the ordinary so it's the best place to hide. untangle laces get a haircut, brush your teeth, gargle salt water. Don't invite strangers for pizza dinner. Don'
t drink rose don't volunteer. Don't Howl nor sing a song for yourself, don't drive a tank into town, don't ask where the flowers are gone nor wonder out loud what Jesus would have to have said to make love much to make much more of love. put a warm compress on your forehead. Get a haircut. Brush your teeth, gargle with saltwater. freedom's, double e pops the consonants into kneeling, to repent, to implore, to rearrange the letters the way a swan turns. Then call, shoot, rings out, snake eyes, do
uble o, license to kill. The consonants stack up on the edge. A leap from here can't be a metaphor. Why not promise the bullies they can be free of their compulsion? Ask the fat lady not to stop singing. It's not all over until she can be fat and free. Brush your teeth, gargle with salt water, what would Jesus Have had to say to make much more of love. Love. Then there's two more, right? So this one's called Country Club Bigots. She's in my arms on the bed, excited birds outside, soft porn spect
ators. Their whistle on the street would be offensive. Their pecking on wood by a neighbor would be intrusive. The odd one crashing into the glass could be a just dessert. Sirens declare it's noon. Other sirens register uncertain lives. The radio, which we forgot to turn off, reports from the Mexican border and Gaza. I imagine myself on a Southampton beach very soon, anxious. The country club bigots might be off their leashes. Then I feel her fingers. in my eyebrows, which curl quickly. And I'm
thinking perhaps the bigots are lying on beds, excited as birds, glad to be in a quiet hotel room. I love this version, as you say. My first imagery of the birds. So funny. To say they're whistling on the street would be rude. They're knocking on the wood would be intrusive. Very I mean, just but it's fun and funny and the way it ends. You know, Norman Lear has this saying, he would often say, just another version of you. That's all I am. That's all anybody is. See that person on the street? Tha
t's just another version of you. We're all in this theme. Anyway, I'm going to send him these, please. That's great. That's great. And so the last one I'm going to read, if I can find it, is the one that you like so much could balance, and it really brings things back home. Um, to what you see, what you don't see, what you resist, even though you see it. Balance. It was like the trial of God. When my father danced, I never believed he could. And he could. Every celebration, he would move effortl
ess, effortlessly, readying himself for soft shoe triumph. Looked to me like he would fall, melting prayers in my head. I was not a believer. He knew about balance. Alan Greer, author of If But My Gaze Could Heal and Defeat. No surrender. Both are out now. National Poetry Month is April, so this is the time to support poets, including Dr. Greer. Thank you so much for being here and supporting people for the American way. Thank you so much. And. And let's can we just take the aphorism of that tit
le? Defeat, no surrender. That's the message going forward. Defeat no surrender. Amen. Amen. Thank you very much. Thanks, Svante. Thank you.
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