The Word Gets Around

An Interview With Pete Seeger From The Sun’s Archives

We know that the big job is to save the world, but where do you start? I’m convinced that if we are unable to work in our home communities, the job is not going to be done. The world is going to be saved by people who fight for their homes, whether they’re fighting for the block where they live in the city or a stretch of mountain or river. But unless they can fight within their own communities, I think they’re kidding themselves.

Beautiful Trouble

Subtitled A Toolbox for Revolution, the anthology Beautiful Trouble offers advice on how to plan and execute successful protest actions. Coeditors Andrew Boyd and Dave Oswald Mitchell have assembled the wisdom of many activists and troublemakers like themselves into a book about what works and what doesn’t, how to recruit people and keep them engaged, and where to direct efforts for the greatest impact.

In The Quiet Room

There is nothing to remember. Pale flesh and coarse, dark hair and a mountain of a belly. Hands that lingered too long. A weight that wouldn’t move. No, nothing to remember.

Imaginary Friends

As a child I had imaginary friends. So did my daughter. Is it possible that my daughter’s imaginary friends were the children of mine?

I Sang For Everybody

Pete Seeger’s Testimony Before The House Un-American Activities Committee

Mr. Seeger: I feel that in my whole life I have never done anything of any conspiratorial nature, and I resent very much and very deeply the implication of being called before this committee: that in some way, because my opinions may be different from yours, or yours, Mr. Willis, or yours, Mr. Scherer, that I am any less of an American than anybody else. I love my country very deeply, sir.

In The Twelve Years Since You Died

In the twelve years since you died, I moved eleven times and saw five therapists. I hiked in the Grand Canyon, backpacked through Europe, and drank wine in the high, open window of a Montreal hostel. I took a train alone from Toronto to Vancouver, sleeping upright in my seat for three nights. I graduated from college. I fell in love. I hung your portrait above my desk.

Stethoscope

I am always asking doctors about their medical equipment, so I know that the stethoscope was popularized not because it improved a doctor’s ability to hear a heartbeat — although it had that effect, too — but because in nineteenth-century France it was considered improper to put one’s ear to a man’s chest or, especially, a woman’s bosom. The amplified heartbeat was secondary to the stethoscope’s main function, decorum.

Cold Spell

Fourth day / of snow / freezing rain / huge / avalanches / of wind

Selected Poems

— from “Song for Picking Up” | Every time that something falls / someone is consigned to pick it up.