Winter Editorial

The new year finds us in a place which may be familiar to other countries like Argentina, Uganda or Europe of the 1930's but it is unfamiliar territory to us as Americans. With the rise to power through questionable means of blatant, uncouth, corporate thieves playing on racism and nationalism, the last illusions of legitimacy have vanished from our corrupted federal government. As I write this, the corporate and ideological extremists Trump has appointed are busy destroying and undermining the agencies they were chosen to "head" and to dismantle. What Trump's lunatic svengali, Steve Bannon describes as the "deconstruction of the Administrative State" is in reality an attempt to eliminate every obstacle to corporate profiteering including every worker safety, public health, civil right and environmental protection won in struggle over the last century.

The poems in this collection are responses to the frightening reality of empowered hate and unmitigated, myopic greed. Working people have always borne the brunt of systemic corruption and the avarice of the elite. We work ourselves to death, sacrificing our lives to pointless, often toxic monotony only to be discarded and scorned when we are no longer of use to them.

And yet, even in the face of the disastrous and seemingly overwhelming power aligned against us, we continue to hold on to our humanity, to resist misplaced anger, scape-goating and self-destruction. We continue to struggle for justice, for a civilization worthy of that name and for worker democracy.

The empowerment of illegitimate autocracy and arrogant idiocy has awakened a massive movement of citizen resistance which continues to grow. This movement did not magically appear out of the ether. Some of us have been active for decades but many of our less politicized brothers and sisters have had the luxury of illusion. Those illusions are now being stripped away, exposing the monstrosity of the corporate state for all to see. As more join in the effort to resist the worst of Trump's dangerous misleadership, a new movement is finding its feet. Is resistance enough? Is a return to less flagrant corporate leadership and the somnolence of middle-class illusions a worthy goal? The poem "Zombie Nation Awakes" asks this and demands more. The poem by Dana Stamps, II asks, "Should Poetry Matter More than it Does?" We firmly believe that, while poetry is no magical panacea, it has the power to inspire, empower, unite and to communicate important values and ideas.

That is what this journal exists to do. This may simultaneously be our most trying and most important moment. Culture shapes mindset. It is the internal program which defines the direction we go and the limits of what we can create. A commodified, alienating, militarized, misogynist, money and violence worshipping corporate culture brought us to this moment. We, as progressive working class poets, are a vital voice that must be heard if our humane working class culture of solidarity is to take hold, take pride and lead us to take what is rightfully ours. We need to expose more people to our work. Take this journal to your next meeting or demonstration. Pass around back issues. Leave them where others will find them.

This is our annual fund-drive issue and you will find a donation slip within. We are deeply thankful for the commitment of your contributions both of funds and of your writing. Together we must do everything we can to move beyond the insanity of this moment to a civilized, democratic future.