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About Street roots. (Portland, OR) 1998-current | View Entire Issue (Oct. 24, 2014)
8 f , r* Y street roots S ep t 26,2014 ? iVzT/z a new edition o f “The Impossible Will Take a Little While,” Paul Loeb wants people to know change is still on the way BY ROSETTE ROYALE Association and the History Channel, the book has been revised for a 2014 edition. n late May, poet, actress and civil rights Some book reissues lead to book tours activist Maya Angelou died. Her death for authors. Such was the case for Loeb, was met with grief, and her life, which also the author of “Soul of a Citizen;” As he began in the Jim Crow South, was seen as prepared for a journey to the East Coast an inspiration. Just about everything she earlier this summer, we chatted over the wrote touched on how when life (or racism phone about Obama and hope, McDonald’s or sexism or poverty or...) knocks you and Starbucks, pipelines and protests, and down, the only thing to do is get back up. the difference between then and now. This sentiment courses through perhaps her most well-known poem, “Still. I Rise.” Rosette Roy ale: The first edition of “The Here’s the first verse: Impossible Will Take a Little While” came out You may write me down in history in 2004. Why did you decide to put the book With your bitter, twisted lies, together? You may trod me in the very dirt But still, like dust, I rise. Paul Loeb: I think a lot of it had to do The full poem, with its mix of lyricism with the Iraq War, and the feeling that many and self-determination, shows up almost at people had put so much energy into trying the very end of a book edited by Paul Loeb, to prevent it and then it just went ahead “The Impossible Will Take a Little While: anyway. Then it sort of turned out to be the Perseverance and Hope in Troubled Times” disaster that a lot of people predicted. I (Basic Books, $18.99). A collection of (wondered), “Does trying to act for change, writings from more than 50 contemporary does it actually do any good? Is it figures — liberal writer and academic Cornel worthwhile? Should we continue?” So I West, former New Yorker journalist and thought: Who do I go to for sustenance? current environmental activist Bill And so I went through all my bookshelves, McKibben, National Book Award-winning which I have a lot, and made this huge pile local writer Sherman Alexie — the hook is of books on the floor: “Oh, here’s Nelson like Angelou’s poem, only writ large: It Mandela, here’s Alice Walker, here’s gives readers a sense that even when you’re Howard Zinn, here’s Terry Tempest faced with the insurmountable, the Williams.” Here are all these people who potential for success exists. And much like have inspired me, who kept me going. So the poem’s title, the book also continues to that was the start of the project Then I rise. Initially published in 2004, when it was named a top 10 political See MISSION IMPOSSIBLE, page 9 book by the American Book C O N T R IB U T IN G W R IT E R I ^ m^ n^ „ le ntle’ include, top to bottom, poet eChpreSidmt VaClavHaml- a n d ^ M
