The Mind-Body Problem Reviewed in Rattle: Poetry for the 21st Century

Check out this wonderful review of The Mind-Body Problem from the Rattle.com blog.

New Nation Column: "Whose Team Is It, Anyway?"

The Stupak-Pitts amendment bans abortions for women enrolled in federally-subsidized health insurance. Read Pollitt's thoughts here.

New Nation Column: "Working Women: Strength in Numbers"

An excerpt from Pollitt's column: "For the first time in our history, women are now 50 percent of the paid workforce...Some might be tempted to spin the magic 50 percent to suggest that feminism's job is done. First it was dead because it was a failure; now it's dead because it was such a success."

Read the whole article here.

Facebookers, Unite! Help MADRE Win the Causes Challenge

The Facebook Causes application is running a contest among its member do-good organizations. Every day, the group that has the most individual donors that day wins $1000; runner up gets $500. The grand winner – most individual donors by November 6 –wins, get this, $50,000! The runner-up gets $25,000 and the five next highest gets $10,000 each. Not too shabby!

Now here's the thing: MADRE, the women's rights organization, has joined the contest to raise funds for its work protecting women's rights workers in Afghanistan, where as I'm sure you know many have been threatened with death by the Taliban. MADRE needs your help to win one of these these generous prizes. Can you help? Yes, you can! The competition is for donors, not money totals, so all you need to do is go here and donate $10. In fact, you can donate $10 once a day every day from now till November 6th. If Madre wins even one day, it will get $1000, which is a significant amount. Today, October 15, by 3pm , would be a great time to donate, because with just a few more donors MADRE would beat an anti-choice group, Make Abortion UNTHINKABLE, for second place. That's $500 for women's rights, or $500 to take them away. Which should it be?

Please check this contest out, Facebookers, and be generous. Don't delay, because each day's mini-contest ends at 3 pm.

Read all about MADRE's work at www.madre.org.

New Nation Column: "German Party Politics: Color Them Blurry"

Read Pollitt's latest nation column about the September 29 German elections.

Nation Blog: "Berlin Postcard"

Katha Pollitt moved to Berlin six weeks ago. Read "Berlin Postcard" for an update on her life there.

Garrison Keillor Reads Yet Another Poem!

Today, he reads "Amor Fati."

Garrison Keillor Reads Another Poem from The Mind-Body Problem

Listen to Garrison Keillor read "Two Cats." Last week, he read "What I Understood."

The Progressive Reviews The Mind-Body Problem: "Gorgeous and tasty as a florentine cookie dipped in chocolate"

The Mind-Body Problem
Review by Matthew Rochschild
The Progressive, September 2009

You probably know Katha Pollitt from her incisive and unflinching columns in The Nation, which have helped many of us survive the last three decades of reaction. But she’s also a poet, and a wonderful one at that. She’s got a new collection out, The Mind-Body Problem, and you’ll find her in a wise and reflective, if existential and mostly cloudy, mood.

She conveys this in “What I Understood.” Even as a child, she writes, she already knew “there was no God and that I would die.” Then, through almost a Hobbesian lens, she writes:

the only thing I didn’t understand
was how in a world whose
predominant characteristics
are futility, cruelty, loneliness,
disappointment
people are saved every day
by a sparrow, a foghorn, a grass-
blade, a tablecloth.

She still doesn’t understand it, she confesses at the end.

Her weariness also shows in “Small Comfort.” Little things, like “coffee and cigarettes in a clean café” or “the laundry cool and crisp and folded away,” provide insufficient solace in a world where it is

. . too late to imagine
people would rather be happy than
suffering and inflicting suffering. We’re near
the end.

But even she can’t drop us there. “O before the end,” she allows,

let the last bus bring

lover to lover, let the starveling
dog turn the corner and lope
suddenly,
miraculously, down its own street,
home.

In a few other poems, she’s not so melancholy. She offers praise to “this marriage of friends and lovers made in a dark time,” and she does take pleasure in small comforts, writing that it is “possible to believe in a bearable sort of life.” I’m relieved to hear that.

Pollitt devotes a section of her book to debunking religion, which won’t surprise readers familiar with her courageous atheism. She calls this section “After the Bible,” and has some fun with it. She starts at the beginning, with “The Expulsion,” whose opening stanza sets the feminist tone:

Adam was happy—now he had
someone to blame
for everything: shipwrecks, Troy,
the gray face in the mirror.

The tree of knowledge, however, is “forlorn,” she writes, because, for a brief and vanished moment, it was “the center of attention.” She concludes this section, naturally, with “Rapture,” where

. . . Truth
blares from every station on the dial.

The last line of the poem stands as a final rebuke:

“God, it appears, is elsewhere, even
here.”

If you’re looking to Pollitt’s book for a translation of all her politics into poetry, you’re looking in the wrong place. For instance, there’s only one explicitly anti-war poem, and it’s not exactly to the barricades:

and what good are more poems

against war

the real subject of which
so often seems to be the poet’s superior

moral sensitivities? I could

be mailing myself to the moon

or marrying a pine tree,

and yet what can we do
but offer what we have?

This is Katha Pollitt the poet, at a critical distance from Katha Pollitt the columnist. I appreciate the candor. Most of all, I admire the beauty. Lines pop out, like “the world creaks on its hinges,” or:

culture is a kind of nature
a library of oak leaves.

Then there are entire poems, crystalline in their perfection, gorgeous and tasty as a florentine cookie dipped in chocolate. “Lilacs in September” is one. “The Heron in theMarsh” another. So, too, the final poem, “Lunaria,” which ends with this stanza, describing perhaps the poet herself:

A paper lantern
Lit within
And shining in
The fallen leaves.

Here is a poet fully in control of her artistic talents, someone who has taken the time, as she puts it,

wondering how to write
so that what she writes

stays written.

Pollitt on Polanski

Pollitt responds to the international film community's defense of Roman Polanski after his arrest in Switzerland this week. Read "Roman Polanski Has a Lot of Friends."

New Nation Column: Are You Happy?

Find out what Pollitt thinks about "expert" studies on the declining state of women's happiness here.

Pollitt's Poetry Featured on The Writer's Almanac With Garrison Keillor

"What I Understood," from The Mind-Body Problem, is featured on the homepage of The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor. Read it here.

New Nation Column: Kristof's Challenge

Read Pollitt's latest Subject to Debate column, a review of Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn's Half the Sky.

Highbrow + Brilliant: Katha Pollitt's Elegantly Provocative Poetry

New York Magazine gives Katha Pollitt the highest rating possible -- highbrow and brilliant -- for The Mind-Body Problem in this week's Approval Matrix.

"It's the mark of a good poem when you absolutely must pull it out of your bag in the middle of the street and start reading out loud to a friend."

Karen Pittelman gave The Mind-Body Problem an enthusiastic review on Feministing. Check it out.