There is nothing nice about homelessness. Socially, it is the experience of a human being who -- because of physical, mental, or social circumstances ends up excluded from the regular give and take, the ordinary relationships, that make up our experience. Homelessness, as we visualize it in the big cities, is a man or a woman sleeping on steam grates, a person who sits in a subway car and so is rancid that most passengers crowd into neighboring crowds rather than admit the smell and odor during their commute. Homelessness revolts: Not only in its emotional response of revolt-ing, but also in its challenge to our bourgeoise notions of propriety. We can see a homeless person, but that "seeing" challenges our entire notion of our self and of our presence. We have to look -- as much as we have to look away. But homelessness is not static. It is a progression. A person does not become homeless by sudden chance (unless they are in a war zone or they experience a calamity: But in that case, a person is not "homeless". They are without a home, for sure. But in most cases they still have the social fabric and connections supporting them that allow them to rebuild). Rather homelessness is gradual. It comes from choices that individuals make in reaction to others — and in reaction to themselves.
The poems that are collected here were written during my studies of community economic development and public finance at the Bloustein School and at the Fels Institute. During that period (from 2007 to 2011), I read deeply into what academics viewed as the origins and source of poverty and what their proposed solutions were. During that period, I also moved my family to inner city Trenton. For about 8 months we lived in the depth of the inner city, where I observed homelessness among "the poor" and experienced the community of the inner city (of being a part of the excluded). The inner city in its actuality, in its red-lined separation, is not like many academics describe. Externally, it has a compelling dissheveledness about it, but internally the ties between individuals in the community (and the pressures of daily living) compel them to "survive" together. The experience of the inner city is much like that of the experience of living in a rural area in the mid-West. Regardless of the inner cohesiveness of social interaction, outside pressures became more and more palpable the longer we stayed there. Somehow, the observation that people "from Trenton" were poor (and outcast) began applying to my family. It was as if, regardless of who we were as individuals, by virtue of where we lived, we were becoming a part of the caste of those "from Trenton." Individuals from other inner city areas experience the same thing. And financially it made a difference too. Credit and loans became harder to obtain, and when we left, our cable company and the utilities demanded deposits from us as we moved from Trenton to the Princeton area. Engraved in the system was a tacit understanding that people don't move from Trenton to Princeton -- and, if they do, they don't deserve too. This is the real statement of red-lining. And it is the real judgment of what homelessness is.
The poems then reflect on different tranches of the homelessness experience. Like tranches of those very mortgage-backed securities that gutted entire communities during the financial crisis of 2007/2008, these poems provide a view from my mind's eye into (and on to) the experience of homelessness in its complete diversity -- from the young boy in Philadelphia throwing up in a public restroom to the lady in Trenton who slept in the bus shelter (if you could even call it that) during the winter ... each poem is about an instance of homelessness in America that I observed as a passerby. Hopefully these poems are as real to you as I experienced them. Of course, they aren't poems of pleasure, but if they move your consciousness to awareness (and maybe even to action - to a certain level of greater understanding and maybe, even, kindness) then maybe we can work toward creating a better, more socially inclusive, world.
Chicago, September 2016
No comments:
Post a Comment