On+The+Outskirts

ON THE OUTSKIRTS **   "We are of course a nation of differences. Those differences don’t make us weak. They’re the source of our strength." -Jimmy Carter
 * 

 “When one of my parents or the emigrant villagers said, ‘Feeding girls is feeding cowbirds,’ I would thrash on the floor and scream so hard I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t stop. ‘What’s the matter with her?’ ‘I don’t know. Bad, I guess. You know how girls are. ‘There’s no profit in rais ing girls. Better to raise geese than girls.’” -from Maxine Hong Kingston's //The Woman Warrior//, p. 46 “You need to come to the United States to meet Hispanics (my point). What Hispanic immigrants learn within the United States is to view themselves in a new way, as belonging to Latin America entire – precisely at the moment they no longer do.” From Richard Rodriguez’s //Brown//

[|Paul Chan] [|http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/26/080526fa_fact_tomkins

 Her Kind I have gone out, a possessed witch, haunting the black air, braver at night; dreaming evil, I have done my hitch over the plain houses, light by light: lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind. A woman like that is not a woman, quite. I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods, filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves, closets, silks, innumerable goods; fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves: whining, rearranging the disaligned. A woman like that is misunderstood. I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver, waved my nude arms at villages going by, learning the last bright routes, survivor where your flames still bite my thigh and my ribs crack where your wheels wind. A woman like that is not ashamed to die. I have been her kind. -Anne Sexton

From Allen Ginsberg's HOWL For Carl Solomon

I I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machin- ery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene- ment roofs illuminated, who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war, who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull, who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn- ing their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall, who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York, who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, al- cohol and cock and endless balls, incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo- tionless world of Time between,

On the Outskirts reflection

Next Page: Our American Dreams