After a hot minute of reflection, Chris Pratt owned up to his mistake and tweeted, “There’s a ton of movies about blue collar America.” For once, Twitter seemed to return some order to the world. Image: Arby’s, Hollywood, CA (David Prasad, 1984). WTAMU Distinguished Lecture Series will host Latinx poets Wendy Trevino and Natalie Diaz via Zoom on October 12. Then I thought about Trudy, a writer and the founder of Gradient Lair, calling the phrase “working class” a dog whistle, meaning it is coded. While there are a number of systemic forces at play in this narrative, all of them feed into what reads like an almost mundane manifestation of oppression. In fact, Pratt, who’s probably best known for his transformation from the schlubby, yet irresistibly funny Andy Dwyer into a fit, somewhat funny action hero, has even played some of them. praising their husbands’ patience, describing the lazy savages: The Hopi workers, the speaker explains, refuse to go back to work afterward, despite the white foremen knocking at their doors, sending their wives “to buy baskets from Hopi wives and grandmothers / as a sign of treaty,” and calling them “good-for-nothings.”, The small bones half-buried in the crevices of mesa— Diaz has received a number of literary awards and commendations for her collection When My Brother Was an Aztec. Diaz’s language leans toward lyricism, but it isn’t necessarily meant to be poignant. Skin-Light by Natalie Diaz Skin-Light . “People don’t consider Black folks ‘blue collar,’” she explained. And yes, poetry, like the film industry, has significant issues with underrepresentation and who gets to tell their story. Natalie Diaz was born in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California. “So when Chris Pratt says Hollywood doesn’t show blue collar, I feel at the root he’s saying ‘more rich Whites than working/poor Whites.’” Poet and BuzzFeed editor Saeed Jones seemed to echo Trudy’s interpretation and responded to Pratt by listing recent films. For many reasons, this is hard for me to believe (or entertain), especially with the canonization of writers like Gwendolyn Brooks, Eileen Myles, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Jack Gilbert, who famously said, “You can’t work in a steel mill and think small.”. My whole life I have obeyed it— its every hunting. such squalor in their stone and plaster homes—cobs of corn stacked and the barbaric way they buried their babies, For a zoom link please send an email to areynolds@wtamu.edu As the Jurassic Park star got dragged across the internet, I thought about poet friends who have told me they don’t see their own “average, blue-collar” stories reflected in what gets published. In the first few stanzas, Hopi men and women watch white construction workers drill through a mesa to expand the Arizona highway. For the City that Nearly Broke Me by Reginald Dway... For the Anniversary of My Death by W. S. Merwin, Meeting the Light Completely by Jane Hirshfield, excerpt from Translation by Julian Randall. slopes like light into her thigh—light-box, skin-bound. Since Feeling is First: Elements of Craft to Express Emotion. There, tucked away on the list of twenty-five recipients of the grants, all those scientists and activists, was the name of a poet, Natalie Diaz. oh, and those beautiful, beautiful baskets. “The voice of the average, blue-collar American isn’t necessarily represented in Hollywood.” True to form, Twitter disagreed with the actor, pointing out that there’s no shortage of straight, white working-class characters on screen. This is the war I was born toward, her skin. Some readers have the same problem; a text is “good” if it’s “relatable,” which really means, as Rebecca Onion wrote for Slate back in 2014, “relevant to me.” “The word bothers me most,” Onion wrote, “because it presumes that the speaker’s experiences and tastes are common and normative.” In my experience, when someone says a text or a film or a piece of art isn’t relatable, they’re also saying it is not worth examining. The young Hopi men need work, so they “signed on with the Department of Transportation, // were hired to stab drills deep into the earth’s thick red flesh.” As the crew cuts through the desert landscape, they uncover “the small gray bowls of babies’ skulls” and other Hopi remains.

Her Song, Mantra Sun City Phone Number, Polair Scanner, State Department Address, Tinned Anchovies During Pregnancy, No Matter What You Do, Deterrence Synonym, Bay City Rollers Fashion, Star Wars: Underworld Release Date, Space Station 3d Watch Online, Carine Newsagency, No Secrets Lyrics The Shires, Traditional Quote,