GLORIA PLASCENCIA, CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER
JB Kennedy is leafing through an unadulterated (early 1960s) copy of James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” which one of his longtime friends has just acquired for him. He holds the weathered volume as if it’s a precious artifact – which in some ways it is.
“When I had my bookstore,” he says, “I used to keep this under poetry. I had “The Warren Report” under fiction.”
Kennedy is clearly one of the South Bay’s esteemed poets – and gadflies. Asked to comment on the status of global affairs, he lowers his head for a moment and then replies:
“Insanity is an epidemic, across the world.”
He thinks for a moment, and then adds: “I’ll try to recite a little poem..” And he does.
“The time has come, the Prophet snarled/ to challenge customary things:/ Wars, the deep-blood agony fanaticism brings;/ the depraved emergence of raving clergies/ who issue orders for vicious murders;/ and shrill politicians hawking steep fears to fill the deep pockets of war profiteers./ In this demented, noxious age/ it’s essential that Prophets rage.”
That’s one of yours, right?
“That’s one of mine.”
Kennedy always has plenty to say about the people who purport to run our country.
“One thing that really bothers me is how the right wing fanatics scream about people being on the dole, and they say more and more people want to get on the dole and that’s what’s killing our democracy. But what they conveniently ignore is that the real dole goes to the multimillionaires. They rip off the government ten times what the people get.”
And right about now he gets going…
“The people with the one-tenth of one percent keep running everything because they have most of the money. We tolerate this system which permits and promotes this grotesque economic inequity. Twenty-five of these hedge fund managers – 25 of those guys! – have as much money as 440,000 families. I mean, my God! That’s crazy! It’s crazy!
“This system is rigged in favor of those people and they keep taking advantage of it. And that’s why poverty increases. We talk about a war on poverty; it’s actually a war on the poor!”
He hands me this short, pithy poem, which he recently composed:
“Capitol Punishment”
The arrogant, self-righteous fools
who convene
the House of Reprehensibles
in 2014.
JB Kennedy is still in fine form, and we should be grateful for that.
“A Life of Their Own”
The poets,
all of us,
we keep dying.
But the Poems
don’t follow us.
They keep flying.
Some of us are scattered;
some go into the ground;
and some consigned to urns.
But poems continue to matter.
They continue to sound.
Continue to burn.
– JB Kennedy
