First of the Year: 2010

This is the third volume of the First of the Year annual series. Contributors such as Armond White, Philip Levine, Charles O'Brien, Uri Avnery, Donna Gaines, Tom Smucker, Scott Spencer, and Amiri Baraka are back (and fractious as ever). And First's family of writers keeps growing. This volume includes vital new voices such as A. B. Spellman, Bernard Avishai, Rudolph Wurlitzer, and Diane di Prima.First never shies away from hot button issues Fredric Smoler, for example, offers a definitive consideration of America's recent history with torture. But First's approach to current political firestorms is often marked by a cool sense of the past. History is always in the mix when First writers examine the roots of Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin and contemporary right-wing pundits who falsely claim the mantle of Whittaker Chambers. First's refusal to toe "correct" lines is apparent in Benj DeMott's reconsideration of Chambers' work.The new volume is also marked by its cultivation of radical imaginations. The ideas of the Situationists and Cornelius Castoriadis are revived. A young historian, David Waldstreicher, recovers the radical, useable past in the 60s work of Staughton Lynd. Amiri Baraka evokes the felt quality of Jesse Jackson's 1988 campaign and another poet remembers (in verse) long-forgotten, extreme political acts of American Renaissance poets.A recent review of First of the Year: 2009 used a phrase of Kenneth Burke's "perspective by incongruity" to make sense of the method that shaped it. First is committed to thought-provoking incongruities. Faith that wonder is our best teacher informs this volume. First's music writing provides a high-low soundtrack of surprise. Beyond the section on Michael Jackson, there are serious responses to John Coltrane and Bach, World Saxophone Quartet and Mariah Carey, Sonny Rollins and Willie Mitchell. First's message is in

Benj DeMott is a member of First of the Month Writers' Collective. He lives with his wife and son, across the street from his brother in New York City

I: The Politics of Incongruity; Towards a Definition of Torture (and America); History in the Making; The Return of Staughton Lynd; "Shipwrecked on the Wrong Side of Tomorrow"; American Renaissance Criminals; Left Behind; "There's a New Left in Town"; Battles of Ajami; Nailing Avatar; From Hunger; The End of Sensitivity; Lover's Discourse; The Saddest Song Ever Sung; This Bit of Earth; All and Nothing; di Prima x 3; Homage to Guy Lombardo; Visiting Hours; 10 Song Demo; The Unknowable; On Hearing Sonny ("Newk") Rollins in the Park on a Hot Summer Night; Dear John Coltrane; Free at Last; Roundball Roundtable; WSQ Meets M'Boom; Snowblind; Why Murray the K Turned into Glenn Beck (and Dr. Dre); A Muy Macho Philly; II: Michael Jackson; 21st Century Renaissance; The Price; I Want to Be 10 Years Old and Sleep with Michael Jackson; On the Wisdom of Stopping When It's Enough; The Many Deaths of Michael Jackson; III: First Draft of History III; Indispensable Man; The Tone and the Music; Nationtime; His Cool World; Oybama; The Politics of Love; Who's to Blame II; Truth and Time; IV: Trips; Wurlitzer's World; Slow Fade; Between Illusion and Reality in the Dream Factory; Mike Leigh: Theatrical Neo-Realist; Rest Has Come to the Weary; Jesse Jackson and Black People; Justice; The Only World You Know; Iran ... or Persia?; The Future in the Past; Mystery & Anonymity; Memorial for Paine Day Banquet; The Radical Imagination of Cornelius Castoriadis; Autonomy or Barbarism; Bollinger's Whoppers