Some Socialist Karen Brodine for Your Workday

Obscure discovery! "Canadian punk rock band Propagandhi once quoted Karen Brodine's poem 'Journal Entries' from her book Illegal Assembly [(Hanging Loose Press 1980)] in a song from their 1995 split with fellow Canadian punk group FYP." Don't know Karen Brodine? She was a founder of Kelsey St. Press, a "groundbreaking lesbian feminist poet, a founder of the Freedom Socialist Party and Radical Women in the San Francisco Bay Area," and author of four books. She died in 1987 of breast cancer; and Red Letter Press has since kept her work in print. We wrote about her a while back, too (David Buuck did, rather). Anyhow, at Socialism.com, a perruque for your workday in the shape of an excerpt from "Journal Entries":

It's like being sick all the time, I think, coming home from
      work,
sick in that low-grade continuous way that makes you forget
what it's like to be well. we have never in our lives known
what it is to be well. what if I were coming home, I think,
from doing work that I loved and that was for us all, what
if I looked at the houses and the air and the streets, knowing
they were in accord, not set against us, what if we knew the
      powers
of this country moved to provide for us and for all people --
how would that be -- how would we feel and think
and what would we create?

And more on Brodine into music:

Propagandhi, who are still recording albums and touring, "champion various radical left wing and anarchist causes and veganism, and have taken a vocal stance against human rights violations, sexism, racism, nationalism, homophobia, imperialism, capitalism and organized religion," making the coupling between their political punk and Karen's radical poetry a powerful synthesis.

Find video and lyrics for "Letter of Resignation" here.