The Best American Poetry

Mind the gap: be is not the apostle of seem or so it seems

William Hazlitt said that “man is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be”. Well, yes.

This interesting gap in our fundamental condition came to mind the other day as I was riding the 11 line up from République, after an evening of beery political speculation with Dominique, Karine’s brother-in-law, Fifi’s husband.

Reasonably honest and quite generous himself, Dominique is always shocked but never surprised by the dishonesty and selfishness of others. This is why, at an early age, his nervously petit bourgeois family, not unnaturally, pushed him to take a tenured job in the national police. They had hopes that economic security and a relentlessly hostile environment would demonstrate beyond rational doubt that humans are une pourriture (trash), thus curbing his tendency to soft-headedness.

However, even after nearly 40 years of daily ducking in the sewer of human vice and folly, Candide’s flame burns on brightly in Dominique. For him, every brazen lie, each cruel betrayal, every mealy-mouthed excuse, each petty meanness, is just a slip up due to treatable imperfection in human genetics and/or social organization.

Dominique is good company – especially when somebody has just taken into his head to crush as many people as possible with a 12-wheeler, cut the throat of an elderly priest, or, on some sort of principle or another, shoot down the entire congregation in a black church.

Rattling along the tunnel, I was thinking about the is and ought trope, gazing around the carriage, unfocused and slightly drunk. I saw this poem by one Marie Volta 49 ans, Paris:

Elle dit, apportant du mimosa: /(She says, bringing him some mimosa,

"Voici un bouquet de soleil." /(“Here’s a bouquet of sun.”

Il dit, respirant le mimosa : /(He says, breathing the mimosa in,

"Même le soleil n'a pas ce parfum-là." : /(“Even the sun does not have such perfume.”

I was naturally struck by the gap between my experience of the poem and my inability to express it in my mother tongue. It’s a crappy translation.

Maybe highlighting the is-ought gap is what the client relations department of the RATP –  the Paris public transport service provider – has been seeking. Marie Volta is one of 10 runners-up in the organization’s annual poetry contest.

Whatever may be the RATP motive, it is true that, more than 15 years ago, poems started popping up in the cheaper advertising spaces in the trains.

In the beginning, it is also true that I was bowled over by it. The poems were of such good taste – covering a such broad range of styles, periods, sensibilities, cultures and languages and appearing in the métros with what seemed to me to be a preternatural appropriateness – that I became anxious to see what would happen next, as if all these clever words were a sort of adventure story.

I am not ashamed to say that I discovered the world-renowned Saint Jean Perse in the métro as well as reminded to think again of the nature of Emily Dickinson’s genius, among other things.

La Vie est bien foutue – Life has its own coherence – as only humans can say.

One day, my best American pal, Bill, and I were scratching our balls and grunting together, whiling away yet another afternoon.

Our scratching and grunting having been until that same day not unsatisfactory, I took it into my head to ask Bill to dinner chez moi.

He grunted, can he bring his chérie, I counter-grunted, man, ‘course.

So it was that I met Audrey, an entirely entire person, and one visibly attached to Bill, a fellow male I pretty much weekly scratched and grunted with.

As we drank the aperitif, Karine and I kept looking back and forth between Bill & Audrey. Since she and I are better described by the Eagles’ tune “Fast Lane” than even the tepidest dithyramb, we were struck dumb, thus forced to watch and listen as this love paraded.

O! did Bill love Audrey. O! did Audrey love Bill.

This love was as a great universal gravity, perfectly settling, perfectly balancing, being as it must be forever and ever, amen.

As dinner progressed, it began to dawn on me that the RATP poetry picker might very well be Audrey.

But I could not for the life of me utter a word, bring the supposition to a question. On the contrary, in the measure of the possible, I pushed it away and avoided it.

All was in those moments perfect and I feared breaking it.

Meaning well, or at least meaning to keep the table talk going, Karine discretely mouthed and winked,

- Are you a Man?

-- Ay, and a bold one, that dare look on that/Which might appall the devil

- What, quite unmanned in folly?

Thus, I did not tell Audrey that every day her choices showed me how it could ought to be, how be was the apostle of seem.

Or that I thought that this epistemologically false metaphysical truth made me more human at moments when I felt my humanity was roughly handled by crowds, dirt, discourtesy and routinized boredom.

I said none of it. Not even that she had empowered me to discover St Jean Perse and rediscover Emily Dickinson.

Later that same year, Audrey left Bill.

Likeliest of all, I now think, seem is the slave of be and has always been, always will be; not even Dominique’s good humor or Audrey’s perfection change that.

It’s the gap between them I well-advised to mind.

Bill told me he had no argument to stop her going out the door. Not even the energy to feel misunderstood or hard done by. So he just threw down his hands, limply said goodbye. He didn’t even cry, even when he told me all the whys and wherefores.

Bill is now dead. Long before he went, he told me further that he would never love anyone else. As far as I know, he never did.

I met Audrey quite by accident. At the coffee shop where we went to chat, she told me the same in respect to Bill. As far as I know, she never did.

July Market Report [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

My husband’s recent diagnosis of celiac disease came as a complete shock to both of us. He had been experiencing many months of debilitating symptoms that had been attributed variously to chemotherapy, post-surgery recovery, and an intractable infection. Doctors told us that his symptoms would wax and wane and that he might just have to live with them. 

Finally, and almost as an afterthought, his oncologist Dr. Dean Bajorin ordered the simple blood test for celiac (“highly unlikely, but we may as well be sure.”). Within a week we had a preliminary diagnosis, within two, it was confirmed by a biopsy.

Continue reading . . . 

Day 5: In Praise of Philip Dacey [by Lisa Vihos]

I knew before I started blogging for BAP this week that I wanted to end my gig with some words for the man who got me back on the path to poetry, Philip Dacey. Phil passed away earlier this month, on July 7. It was a sad day for poetry. We lost one of the great ones.

I am, with Stacey's permission, reprinting a piece I wrote that day for the Stoneboat blog. It doesn't tell you everything Philip ever did, where he taught, who he knew, or even the names of all his books.It is just my personal response to him, his poetry, and his generosity. He taught me a lot, even from a distance. And, he still will, I think, even though he has moved on. That's what poets do, here or not here. Teach us with their words. 

Listen to the voice

of each dead poet

as if it were yours.

It is.

  

        --Philip Dacey

        From Mosquito Operas, 2010 

 

The sad news came today that a poet and good friend to Stoneboat, Philip Dacey, has died after a long illness. I only met Philip in person on one occasion, and that was at the Great Lakes Writers Festival at Lakeland College back in 2007. At the time, I had not tried to write a poem for many years. I was on major hiatus as far as poetry was concerned. But meeting Philip and hearing his work, I was impressed by his poems and by his welcoming nature. He was not snobbish about poetry. He did not make it seem like an enterprise for only some special sect of people. He helped me see that poetry is there for anyone who wants to partake of it. He was a true mentor in that regard.

Later on, when we became email correspondents, he wrote to me often about "the vineyard." This was the place that he designated as the ground where all poetry comes from, and he believed that anyone who was willing to do the work of caring for the roots, fertilizing the soil, and tending to the vines would be able to enjoy the wine, eventually. He never said it was easy, but he also did not say it was impossible. The work was there to be done, if one so wished to engage in the endeavor. He always made poetry look like a vocation worth having.

Philip was clearly generous with his time and talent. He did not make distinctions, I think, between "high end" and "low end." For example, when we were in the process of devising our first issue of Stoneboat, I wrote to him and asked if he would be so kind as to send us some poems. He immediately sent six. He did not say, "Oh, you are below me, little upstart literary journal." He simply sent some work. It was quite a boost to my editorial ego to be given the opportunity to select three poems from a repeat Pushcart Prize-winning poet and include them in our debut effort.

Many years later, when Stoneboat celebrated its fifth anniversary, he submitted some poems to us without being asked. We were so happy to include them. His presence in our anniversary issue reminded us of how we had grown. Philip seemed to take pleasure in reminding poets (and editors) about what they were doing right. This kind of encouragement was part of his generosity of spirit.

I learned a lot from Philip over the years, even though our only contact was via email. It was Philip who told me that a poem could be just as fictional as any story. In other words, that a poem could tell a story that was not necessarily true. That was a new one for me! He also taught me that the "negative spaces" of a poem—what is not said in words—are as important, maybe more important, than the text. He got me to think about how creating a poem is like carving a sculpture, releasing the poem from its block of marble. He also admonished me to always take criticism as a kind of "structural stress test." To look at the suggestion, weigh its merit, and make a decision based on what felt right to me, the poet.

Philip taught me not to worry about rejections from editors. He said, "I get them still, all the time. No editor is obliged to take my work." He taught me to roll with the punches and keep trying. I remember one of his favorite encouraging phrases was "Go, go, go!" I use it now myself when I feel excited about what a fellow poet is up to. Philip taught me to be excited about the success of others, not envious. He taught me to trust my own voice, and to feel confident in what makes me unique as a writer. Keep doing the work. Visit the vineyard.

As for his poems, I was always so enamored of the way he could make use of forms (sonnets, triolets, pantoums, and more) and make them very readable, using common language, but taking its use to new heights. Together with David Jauss, he created the book Strong Measures (HarperCollins, 1986). This is a book that explains many, many poetic forms by providing real-life manifestations of these forms from poets across the spectrum. It remains a great repository of helpful examples to both the budding and the seasoned poet.

My favorite Dacey collections are all the ones I have read: The Boy Under the Bed, The Deathbed Playboy, Vertebrae Rosaries, Night Shift at the Crucifix Factory, Mosquito Operas, and Gimme Five. I must admit, I have not read his collections of poems about Walt Whitman or Gerard Manley Hopkins, but I'm quite sure I would love those, too. There are fourteen books in all, and I know now that I need to fill in the ones I have missed.

In one of his last emails to me at the end of April, he told me he was weakening, and that walking was getting hard. He wrote, "[I'm] working on three posthumous collections—last poems, selected poems, and selected essays." I was very sad knowing that he was preparing to go. But this is what happens, right? Philip knew he was dying, and he knew he wanted to leave us gifts to continue to inspire us.

And so, we have things to look forward to. There is much to learn from the life and poetry of Philip Dacey. He may be gone from this physical plane, but his poems will nourish the vineyard that all of us will be invited to visit for a long, long time to come. 

Let me end with one of his:

Reading a Book of Poems by a Friend Newly Dead

I think these words are still warm.
Bend close—there is a breath
coming from them. See
how the lines rise and fall, pulse,

how he is slow to leave these poems,
in which he has lived for many years.
In time he will turn them completely
over to us for safekeeping, but not yet.

I face this book as I often faced him.
He could be hiding behind it, wearing it
like a mask before he slips from the words
into the spaces between the lines

and then into the margins. Now this book
has a new life as a handshake, a long one,
so long it becomes instead a handclasp,
though the flesh is papery, dry.

And lines keep revealing themselves
to be a goodbye wave, each a rehearsal
more for our sake than his. It is not
his fault that we missed the gesture.

I am afraid to put this book down,
afraid to close it. I did not know
a book could be raw, skinned, as it were.
Afraid to touch it. Afraid not to.

                                --Philip Dacey
                                  In Stoneboat, 5.1, fall 2014

Day 4: The Question of Maps [by Lisa Vihos]

I've been thinking a lot about maps lately. Have you noticed that you can't find them in gas stations anymore? Now that we are fully in the era of GPS and Siri telling us that in a quarter mile, we need to turn left, hard copy maps are becoming obsolete. I find this extremely depressing.

Before I go on a car trip, I love to spread out a map and get a bird's eye picture of my upcoming journey. I love selecting a route that will be slower but more interesting than the interstate. Who wants to rely on the 4-G network in the middle of nowhere? What happens if Siri decides to take a nap? Then what?

A paper map will never fail you.

Check the glove compartment of your car. If you are over 50, I bet you have a whole pile of maps stuffed in there, representing all the different states you have ever driven through. And then there are those special maps that have received a lot of wear and tear, whose folds are so stressed, they have worn clear through. You can no longer see certain junctions or towns, because they have gotten lost in the crease that is not there anymore.

I love maps. Maybe it's because when I was in elementary school, we had this map-reading series that everyone worked through at his or her own pace. It was akin to the SRA reading resource. Does anyone out there remember that? In the series I am remembering, map skills were presented in booklets and each booklet was associated with a different color. As you mastered each level, you moved up through the color ranks. You started with common, every day colors like red and blue. But then, as the maps got more complex and the questions more nuanced, you moved up to aqua, silver, lavender, and black. You know, like getting a black belt in karate, but in map reading.

Yes. I love maps. And it's not that I shun the convenience of the Internet. I love that Google Earth allows me to see an aerial view of the place in Malawi where I am headed to build the reading garden. I can literally see the trees on the grounds of the Teacher Training College. Come to think of it, that is not a map as much as it is a bird's eye view of reality. Okay, well, how about the map I found on the Facebook page of my guest house in Malawi, showing me the roads I will be traversing in just about a week from now. How cool is that?

GPS is great, but having a map gives context. You can see where you are going in relation to a much larger world. That fact alone makes maps extremely valuable.

My advice to you?

Hang onto your paper maps. As they become obsolete, they may be worth a lot of money one day. In fact, they may themselves become currency. As for digital maps and mapping, beware the dark side. Is it good that our phones can always locate us? Maybe. Maybe not. Here is a poem that I found last weekend at Brigit Rest that speaks to that question.

Dragons Be Here

Once upon a time a map was
a story, a story was a map
and time and space and
history and place were one.

Then boundaries appeared and
with them, exactitude: maps became
clocks, ways of being more and
more certain of the ends of things.

But the world itself is not a map.
Every instant something changes. No
map can be perfect for long. We
had to solve that problem: now

no river can meander, no tree be cut
unmapped. Now, every instant, we
redraw to increasing perfection
a map with no names or stories,

a purposeful map, a map with no
unknowns nor any hesitancies, 
a pinpoint map, an omniscient map
that even maps you there

reading these words, even maps
the hairs on your arms as you read
this: inside the tip of each bomb
we are drawing the perfect map.

            -- Patricia Monaghan, from Homefront, 2005

 

Prior to 1960, Malawi was called Nyasaland, and the lake
running along its eastern edge was Lake Nyasa.
Now, it is Lake Malawi.

Day 3: How It Came to Be that the Poet Proposed to Build a Reading Garden on the Other Side of the World [by Lisa Vihos]

Once upon a time, a group of graduate students from Malawi, Africa, came to study early grade reading instruction at Lakeland University, a small liberal arts institution nestled in the corn fields of Wisconsin.

They were all teachers of teachers in Malawi, and they worked hard at their graduate studies, learning new strategies to support those who are charged with teaching the youngest of the young to read.

The graduate students learned about phonemic awareness, scaffolding, differentiated instruction, ongoing assessment, and more.

Malawi is famous for being recognized as the warm heart of Africa.

It is also a very poor country with per capita earnings of the equivalent of $800 a year.

In Malawi, there are often more than 100 children sitting under a tree waiting to learn.  

The beleaguered teacher, full of hope and good intention, has few practical strategies to engage such a large group of learners and no print resources to share.

The teacher may have nothing more than a piece of chalk, a wall, and the sound of his or her own voice.

 

And so, the graduate students dreamed of text-rich learning environments.

They dreamed of incorporating reading across the curriculum, in all subject areas.

They dreamed of older students writing stories that younger students could read.

They dreamed of developing ways to engage parents in children's learning.

They were determined to return home and put their M.Ed. degrees to good use.

They were determined to be agents of change.

One day, early in their time in Wisconsin, they visited a place called Bookworm Gardens.

 

Bookworm Gardens is an inspiring outdoor learning-scape where children's literature is brought to life through interactive, multi-themed displays presented in a magical garden setting.

Upon experiencing Bookworm Gardens, the graduate students said, We wish someday we might have a place like this in Malawi.

They had a friend at Lakeland, a poet. Her name, Lisa.

It was part of Lisa's job in the Advancement Office to write a blog about the graduate students to report on their activities in Wisconsin.

She overheard them talk about how much they admired Bookworm Gardens.

She filed this knowledge away in the back of her head.

One day, Lisa woke up and discovered she no longer worked at the University.

She was cast into the world to find a job that would earn her keep. But she didn't want just any job. She wanted to do a job that would make the world a better place.

 

Lisa had the good fortune to be reminded by an old friend of an opportunity offered annually through her undergraduate alma mater, Vassar College.

The opportunity is called the Time-Out Grant. Each year, one alumnus or alumna of Vassar is chosen to work on a project that takes the person outside of his or her comfort zone, to do something risky and amazing, something that could not happen without the support of the grant.

Lisa had applied for this grant 15 years earlier, asking for time-out to write a novel. Her project was not terribly risky, and you are correct, she did not get the grant.

 

Before she could even dream of writing a proposal to build a reading garden on the other side of the world, she knew she needed to ensure that her idea had legs.

She thought maybe her friends would say, Oh, what a lovely idea, Lisa, but it could never happen.

Instead, her faculty colleague who had been to Malawi many times said YES!

Her Malawian friends who knew they would be responsible to care for the garden over time said YES!

With all their help and guidance, she devised a proposal to build a place like Bookworm Gardens in Malawi, in the capital city of Lilongwe.

The exact location for the garden is the Lilongwe Teacher Training College and demonstration school.

Every day, many children and adults come to this location to learn.

Lisa did her research, wrote her proposal, and got two letters of recommendation.

She sent her idea to the Time-Out Grant committee.

Three and a half months later, the call came.

You, Lisa, are the 2016 recipient of the Vassar College Time-Out Grant! Congratulations!

And so, soon enough, Lisa will make her first reconnaissance trip to Lilongwe in order to begin the Malawi Children's Reading Garden. 

 

At this point, a good storyteller would normally say, the end.

But in this instance, as you can understand, the storyteller can only say,

the beginning

 

Day 2: It's Never Too Late to Meet the Goddess [by Lisa Vihos]

My room at Brigit Rest was once someone's office and it was full of books. There were books of poetry, theology, and folklore from many places around the world. I found one book with stories from Africa and checked it out in case I might find a story from Malawi. No such luck, but still. Lots and lots of stories explaining why things are the way they are.  

And then there were books by Patricia Monaghan, who co-founded Black Earth Institute and helped to create Brigit Rest. There were two boxes of books under the desk, one marked "Books in which Patricia appears," and the other marked "Books by Patricia." I was especially interested in that box. It contained The New Book of Goddesses and Heroines, a treasure trove of goddess stories from cultures all over the world. Published in 1981, there had apparently never been anything like it before. That is the year I graduated from Vassar. I wish I had known of this book then. It might have helped me a lot.  

In the same box were various collections of Patricia's poetry including Homefront, Seasons of the Witch, and Dancing with Chaos. A memoir travelogue, The Red-Haired God Rising from the Bog: The Landscape of Celtic Myth and Spirit, and a how-to book, Magical Gardens.

I opened that last one to a random page and found this: "Abuk, mother goddess of the African Dinka people, lived in a magical garden, where plants spoke to her and told her how to tend and harvest them."

That got my attention, seeing as how I am on my way to Malawi to build a children's reading garden. [In a future post, I will tell you the story of how the idea for this garden came to be.] I scribbled some notes about how to create a garden filled with meaning. I am open to all information on this matter. My intention for this garden in Malawi is that it be designed and built to reflect what the children, parents, and teachers in that place want it to be. 

And if this garden is magical, it will be that way because we listened to what the ground there told us to do. If it makes reading a more enjoyable and meaningful experience for children and families, my work will have been done. I don't have to know everything, or even anything in particular. I just have to listen, and to bring people together who can do the work. Fortunately, there are quite a few people there who are also committed to making this garden happen. Together, we'll figure it all out.

That is the spirit I will go with, trusting that the right information and people will come forward at the right time.  The Goddess is going with me. I think so. I feel like she found me while I was sleeping with all those books at Brigit Rest. Now she is watching over me and the garden that is yet to come.

Day 1: To Heaven and Back Again [by Lisa Vihos]

I'm in need of grounding myself this morning. This past weekend, I participated in a writers' retreat at Black Earth Institute in Black Earth, Wisconsin. Founded in 2004 by Michael McDermott and his late wife, the poet Patricia Monaghan, Black Earth promotes thinking and creating across realms—including the environment, social justice, and spirituality. The institute is tucked into the side of a hill in a rambling house with a rambling, multi-tiered garden surrounding it. The physical place is called Brigit Rest, and I found it to be an earthly paradise in Wisconsin's driftless area.

Brigit Rest gets its name from the Celtic goddess and Christian saint of the 5^th century. Perhaps it's because Michael is an Irishman, or because the bookshelves are full of books about Celtic lore, or maybe it's just because there's so much green everywhere, but I felt transported to the land of Céad Mile Fáilte, Gaelic for "a hundred thousand welcomes." Brigit Rest is a very welcoming place.

The retreat was organized by my friend and fellow poet, Sarah Sadie Busse. The other writers present were Cris Carusi, Marnie Bullock Dresser, Margaret Rozga, Wendy Vardaman, and yours truly. We didn't have a preconceived plan. We talked when we wanted to talk. The rest of the time, we worked on whatever we'd brought to work on. Thanks to our hosts, Michael and Charlene, we ate really well, enjoying fresh food from the garden all weekend.

Sarah created a good frame for our time together by reminding us of the five keys to writing that are ours for the taking, or rather, the embracing: space, time, community, courage, and permission.

As we wrote, ate, shared, read, and wrote some more, we realized we all struggle to find time to focus on writing. All the responsibilities of life pull us in many directions, so whether we write poems, plays, novels, short stories, blog posts, or articles, we can't always find the time we need. But we agreed that focus is necessary and encouraged each other to do that. We also talked about the urge to do more collaboratively, to work with others to combine word and image, or word and action. There's so much to do. It's good to take stock with friends from time to time and acknowledge the many ways that our work unfolds into the world.

I'd like to stay connected to the magic of Brigit Rest. In the weeks and months ahead, I'll find myself walking far on this earth. In fact, I'll go all the way to Malawi, Africa, where I'm going to start the process of planning and building a children's reading garden with the help of friends there. More on this in the days to come.

As I go, I'll keep a little sliver of Brigit Rest in my back pocket, a reminder of all the ways that we inspire each other, all the ways this world can be both heaven and earth at the same time. Despite all the roadblocks and pitfalls out there, and we know they are out there, my time at Brigit Rest reminded me that the world is lush and nourishing, always a poem in the making.

 

Tales of the Nineties: Family Feuds [by Alan Ziegler]

    

    In mid-March 1996, Erin and I whisper-argue in the bedroom while my father lies on the sofa bed in the living room watching Family Feud. I would appreciate the irony if my father wasn’t having surgery in the morning for advanced colon cancer.

    The surgeon is a rotund, jolly fellow around 60, rated by New York Magazine as one of the best. He put my father at ease during the office visit, which is not easy for a doctor to do. The last thing the surgeon said was, “You’ll be dancing the tarantella in six weeks.”

    I leave Erin in the bedroom, hoping my father hasn’t overheard our quibbling. My father’s hospital pajamas are in a plastic supermarket bag, his blue slacks draped over a chair. He is wearing baggy boxer shorts and a white T-shirt. He is engrossed in The Feud.

    “So that’s the guy who replaced Richard Dawson?” I ask as I sit on the edge of the bed.

    “Yeah—a few years ago. They canned him—this is a rerun. It’s a shame. I liked him.”

    I can tell that my father was rooting for this boyish man who landed a dream job. We watch as he schmoozes with a boisterous, healthy-looking family, then smiles sweetly as mom, dad, and adult children jump up and down, hugging in celebration of a “good answer.” I like the new—now fired—host. What a rough day it must have been when he was let go, though not as rough as being told you have cancer—even if the surgeon is also a good schmoozer.

    I think about how, in the next few weeks—whether my father makes it through or not—the surgeon and host will move on: the surgeon telling others they’ll be dancing the tarantella, and the host smiling boyishly on the set of a new game show. But tonight, as I sit on the edge of the sofa bed with my cancer-ridden father while my wife fumes at me from the bedroom and my father’s wife is long dead, I am grateful for the company of the sweet ex-host and the jolly surgeon. 

    By the Fourth of July, I will read in the obituaries that the surgeon died of a massive heart attack and the host hung himself with bed sheets in a closet of a psychiatric ward.

    Though he will never dance the tarantella, my father will live to mourn them both.

Lisa Vihos, Guest Author July 25-29

This week we welcome back Lisa Vihos as our guest blogger. Lisa's poems have appeared in numerous journals both print and online. Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, her third chapbook, This Particular Heaven, will appear in 2017 from Aldrich Press. She is the Poetry and Arts Editor of Stoneboat Literary Journal and the Sheboygan, Wisconsin organizer for 100 Thousand Poets for Change. She recently was the recipient of a Time-Out Grant from her undergraduate alma mater, Vassar College. In the coming year, she will be planning and building a children's reading garden to support literacy in Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi. 

Welcome back, Lisa.

sdl

 

Paris 2016 Catacombs Conference confirms felines for EDS role

Decision follows tests and requests from OES

The catacombs of Paris are not, strictly speaking, a cemetery. They are a designated bone storage area (DBSA), a discrete recycling yard created by the ancien régime and improved upon by during and after the Revolution to clear out the cemetery of the Saints-innocents, which has become contemporary Les Halles.

Noisome and somber, sacred and sacrilegious, the Innocents sponsored a peccant popular life in and around its open graves, family tombs and public charnel houses. The Danse macabre – the Dance of Death – is not a figment of historical imagination, it’s a real dance.

An estimated two million skeletal remains – individuals and families, working folk, men & women, nobles, bourgeois, vagrants, travelers, dead in the ordinary, uselessly gasping, way, felled by plague or in an evil moment, at home or in a public place, were laid, first, in the ground for decomposition, then stacked in bone-houses from the 900s to 1775.

The success of the Innocents project meant that it was extended to most other Paris intramuros cemeteries.

Today, there are about six million remains in the Catacombs. The bureaucratic orderliness, greeting-card signage, the barred pathways, the dankness and ill-starred six million number makes them an ideal place to contemplate modern modes of dusty death.

There’s a “wishing-well” quality to them, too, seasoned, as they are, with a big pinch of real history and pathos – the catacombs are an ideal oeuvre of the imagination. After all, the damp, narrow tunnels medieval mines, the limestone pits from which Notre Dame and other medieval monuments were dug. If you care to look, down here on the walls, you can see the scrape marks from the hand chisels that broke out the great building blocks; you can see the same marks on the unworked stone above ground.

When I am finally run mad, I shall try to match the building blocks with the holes they were dug from. Karine says the catacombs are where her acquaintance with cats began.

And how, otherwise, do we explain the cats sitting and flitting in the shadowed balconies and byways, if not by continual stirring of a cat vat deep in the belly of the catacombs?

“It’s only logical,” Karine says and flops down across from me, eyes reddened, little tears running down her cheeks.

“Human beings are just not capable of being a dominant species.” She waves her hand, dismissing the other patrons on the terrace. She explains that she was lewdly goosed three times between Bastille and Michel Bizot. Five stations.

“Cats will be ideal as dominant species,” she cries defiantly. “They all have claws. They are never afraid to use them.”

She hisses and scratches the air in front of my face with her long, fake “American” nails, “Just you try and pat a dumb cat that doesn’t want your dumb rubs, will you?”

I wince, jerk away. She laughs.

“Also.” She roughly slaps her tears away. “Cats don’t cry…” She sniffles.

She cocks an eyebrow, stares me down. “Have you ever seen an old cat cry?”

I vigorously shake my head, “No. Never.”

“Well, they don’t. Cry, I mean. Even if they wanted, and they never will, they don’t even have tear ducts.”

Karine shifts gears and returns to the catacombs.

She explains that the Intergalactic Cat Assembly at the Catacombs (ICAC), decided in 1992 to go ahead with a previous request from the Extraterrestrial Organization for Higher-Order Being (EOHOB) to become the Earth Dominant Species (EDS).

EOHOB had been early alarmed by a long-running megalomaniacal trend among the place-holding hominids – for example, the brutes began styling themselves “homo sapiens” (“wise men”) even as they indiscriminately eliminated bigger-brained hominids. As a result of this sinister development, the Organization had sponsored a series of Earth Animal Conversations (EAC) over the last 1000 years to decide on a potential replacement species, culminating in the 1992 Catacombs decision to make a change. The decision was confirmed earlier this year at a Special Conference on Earth Dominant Species by delegates from the EOHOB, ICAC and EAC meeting in joint session.

Supported on the dais by Canine Union President Calypso, Mimi, Feline Secretary for Earth Affairs, stated that during discussions she had been convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that Cat EDS would be for the best for Earth, “… given that, even being the best OS (Other Species) friend of a hominid did not exclude torture, murder and careless abandonment.” In addition, the Chief Cat concluded, global warming meant that, “… ecological-niche-wise, the Earth would soon be more suitable to cats than hominids.”

A large range of tests with digital equipment, especially including keyboards, have shown that cat physiology is compatible with emerging hominid technology. Scientists say that only minimal adjustment to current stuff need be made during a mercifully short conversion period.

“Et voilà.” Karine grins, places her long index finger with its opalescent American nail the length of my nose. “Today même, leurs petites claws can push et pluck any bouton you can push ou pluck, mon Tracy.

“Et les chats, mon Tracy, they are not looking for the porno channel or Donald Trump’s philosophy of female companionship or for some girls to put in black bags so they can better admire their asses or secret penis enlargement… or somebody to blow up or shoot up… Non. Non, mon Tracy, the cats, when they are not minding their own little businesses, they are looking for birds and mice and catnip! That is their mischief, the cats. It is not so bad, I think, for mischief?”

She pauses, takes a breath.

“I am all for it, mon Tracy. I am a traitor to your species! Mais, oui! Didn’t your feu Mohammed Ali say it quite well: ‘No cat never dry hump me in no metro’…”

State of the Art by David Lehman [Review by Lynn Domina]

David Lehman’s The State of the Art: A Chronicle of American Poetry, 1988-2014 collects the introductions he’s written to introduce the individual volumes of The Best American Poetry series over the last twenty-five years. Taken together, these brief essays—for they are much more broadly conceived than the word “introduction” would indicate—trace the controversies and other points of attention within the American poetry world over the last quarter century. Often as I read, I thought, oh, I’m glad we’re through that phase—the theory wars that not only pitted scholars against each other but also unnecessarily pitted scholars against creative writers (as if many of us don’t fill both roles), the flurry of trash-talking reviews by William Logan, the perennial complaint that there’s too much bad poetry because of MFA programs or slam poetry events or the ease of online publishing (a discussion we’re, alas, not yet through having). More often, though, I found myself glad to be a poet in our time when there’s so much vibrant poetry being written by so many different writers, and when there’s such energetic conversation occurring in libraries and cafes and bars and, yes, universities, about our art.

Too often, introductions to anthologies are written as if they are formal necessities or polite niceties that no one actually reads. Continue reading . . . 

"Lesbian" Corn poem by Elaine Equi; Dramatic reading by Nicole Santalucia

For several years I've been announcing the first corn sighting of the season. This year, the corn has been late to market because of the drought we're experiencing in the Finger Lakes. I was thrilled to find sweet corn from Romulus, NY at the Triphammer Mall farmers market last Friday. The first corn always reminds me of  one of my favorite poems, "Lesbian Corn," by Elaine Equi. We're presenting here in a dramatic reading by Nicole Santalucia.

Lesbian Corn

In summer
I strip away
your pale kimono.
Your tousled hair too,
comes off in my hands
leaving you
completely naked.
All ears and
tiny yellow teeth.

by Elaine Equi from Surface Tension (Coffee House Press, Sept 1989)

Elaine Equi is the author of many collections of poetry including, Voice-Over, which won the San Francisco State Poetry Award; Ripple Effect: New & Selected Poems, which was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Award and on the short list for The Griffin Poetry Prize; Click and Clone; and most recently, Sentences and Rain. Widely published and anthologized, her work has appeared in The Nation, Poetry, The New Yorker, and several editions of The Best American Poetry. In addition to The New School, she teaches at New York University.

Nicole Santalucia is the author of Because I Did Not Die (Bordighera Press, 2015). She is a recipient of the Ruby Irene Poetry Chapbook Prize from Arcadia Magazine for Driving Yourself to Jail in July and the 2015 Edna St. Vincent Millay Poetry Prize from The Tishman Review. She received her M.F.A. from The New School University and her Ph.D. in English from Binghamton University. Santalucia teaches poetry at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania and brings poetry workshops into the Cumberland County Prison.

-- sdh

A Riot of Bloom starring David Lehman

Directed by Stacey Lehman

On the Water, Finally [by Cate Marvin]

(Ed note: I read this post by Cate Marvin on facebook and thought it too much fun not to share. Cate generously agreed to let me post it here. Cate is the author of three books of poems, the most recent of which is Oracle (Norton, 2015). She recently relocated from Maplewood, New Jersey, to Portland, Maine, and will serve as a visiting professor at Colby College during the academic year of 2016-2017.)

Cate Marvin. photo (c) Joe Dupont

July 17, 2016 -- When I first started dating Joe Dupont and told my friends he ran a kayaking business (he takes people on sea kayak excursions on Casco Bay, from Peaks, an island off of Portland, Maine) I did not regard it as a virtue. It sounded cool, but the thought that I might one day be expected to go kayaking haunted me. I could only imagine the humiliation. My perfect girlfriend status would be instantly shot to hell.

All my life, I've been nonathletic. Make that anti-athletic. Throughout elementary, junior and high school, I was always the last picked for teams. I had poor coordination, no stamina, and I also did not give a shit. Over the years, I came to regard myself as weak and physically inept. I used to joke that I got most of my exercise from lifting a glass of wine. (STILL TRUE.)

So when I first told close friends like Erin Belieu about Joe's profession and they would say, "That's so cool! You can go kayaking!" I concluded that, sadly, they had failed to understand my most quintessential self: Not only do I not do outdoor sports, I do not do sports. Period. (And if you don't like it, you are welcome to go do your sports stuff and leave me the F alone with my books, thank you very much.)

To his credit, Joe never pressured me. But I knew the day would come. For you see, Joe had agreeably attended not just a few, but several poetry readings with me. He had already made noticeable efforts toward understanding my world and my profession. He read my poems. He even sat in on one of my classes. Early on, the extent of my reciprocity amounted to admiring how colorful his kayaks looked in his snow-filled backyard over winter break.

I came up to Peaks Island a little over a week ago, and my seven year old daughter Lucia and I aren’t just staying for the summer this time around. We have moved to Portland because Joe and I are getting married this coming October. The shit is real. Mention has been made not only of kayaking, but of camping, and – god help me – the possibility of a WHITE WATER RAFTING trip. It’s a wonder I can sleep at night.

Last summer, Joe took Lucia and me out in a double-kayak (all three of us in one boat). He was apparently surprised to discover I was nowhere as weak as I'd professed. I attributed the fact that this brief trip was uneventful, and even enjoyable (if only for the novelty), to Joe being in the kayak and preventing my total and complete demise on Casco Bay.

Then yesterday Joe suggested we spend some time in the afternoon paddling, mentioning oh so casually that I would be IN MY OWN BOAT. Frankly, there was no way I could figure out how to avoid this without being a total jerk. I can't say I was looking forward to it.

Here's the crazy thing: IT WAS SO MUCH FUN. It was beautiful on the water, and I found I could actually move the boat without any serious problem, and even felt comfortable (note: the conditions were exceedingly mild) . . . we paddled to Little Diamond Island, where we stopped for an hour. Lucia and I swam in the super cold and utterly clear water and pretended we were "Mommy Dolphin and Baby Dolphin," and that our home was a bunch of rocks covered with seaweed; we collected snails and tiny hermit crabs and placed them in shallow pools of sea water to study them beneath the sun. (When I asked Lucia what snails eat, she told me, "That's easy. They eat allergy off the ground.")

When we paddled back to Peaks, I was actually sorry the trip was over.

My point: Do this kayaking thing. ASAP. I honestly regret I didn't do it last summer. Instead I spent that July and August inside a very hot house cooking and folding laundry (and reading too, so it wasn't all bad) . . .

Attention Fellow Pale Weaklings: You too might enjoy this outdoor activity.*

That said, I can promise you I will never ski.

(ed note: The next time you visit Maine you can book a kayak trip by calling Joe Dupont at 207-420-0333. sdl)

 

Romulus and Remus (for Paul Violi) [by David Lehman]

Look for Remus in the index of a book

And you are bound to get “See Romulus”

Which is perfectly logical but makes me wonder

About indexes, or indices, and why I prefer the former

As the plural except in a financial context, and how

An index to a book that may not exist may imply

A whole biography, as my friend Paul Violi

Showed in his poem “Index.” My late friend

Paul Violi, whom I still see in the street

Sometimes, walking along at an unhurried pace

So if I walk fast I will catch up to him at the corner

Before the light turns green.

IM Paul Viioli, 20 July 1944 -- April 2, 2011)

Aphrodisiacal Nomenclatures: Dante Di Stefano Reviews Catherine Bowman’s Can I Finish, Please?

Can I Finish, Please?
Catherine Bowman
Four Way Books, 2016

Catherine Bowman’s newest collection, Can I Finish, Please?, continues to deliver the wicked, opulent, dazzling, and savory poems that have been the hallmark of her first four books. Throughout Can I Finish, Please?, Bowman fashions the makeshift apparatus of desire from unfurling alfalfa and orchard grass song, from wild ancient apple trees, tethered forepaws, and never ending rivers, from tamarind, fennel, mole negro, chicory, coriander, and bouquets of unimaginable flowers. Bowman articulates, in poem after poem, a ravenous desire to know and to be known, to be the swimmer who drifts and drowns and resuscitates herself even as she distils the ocean in a drop of rain.  These poems coast over lacustrine wetlands, prairies, spiritual geographies and sediments, leading us to “what was never lost/ where the future becomes the past.” For Bowman, the eternal present of the lyric provides the irrevocable dwelling place where future braids together with past.  

Can I Finish, Please? divides its eternal present into three sections. The long poem, “Beds,” dominates the first section with its lush exploration of amorous relationships and physical states of being. Beds, in this poem, are holsters, altars, chasms, cradles, mandalas, primal thrones, conjuror’s tables. The poem consists of an aphoristic barrage of exquisite imagery. For example, Bowman enumerates:

            This peephole. This lifeboat.
                        This tented field.
                                    Aperture.  

            Soaked by lunar vendetta,
                        bare-ankled, bare-chested,
                                    bare-throated, unshod,

            bare-backed,
                        this breeding ground,
                                    this Venus spread,

            this birthing rack
                        you die into each night.
                                    This job.

            This hatchery.
                        This giant cypress,
                                    a rookery for tears,

            for joy. This forcing bed
                        for hard labor, playtime,
                                    the work of dreams.

            Bed of geraniums and lily
                        and owls, proud owls.
                                    Where you are always called back—

            this wallow of red clover
                        to foal and cast
                                    out spirits.

            This urine- and rose-soaked
                        heptachord. This seawall
                                    for the mother

            of all-consuming storms.

Here, as everywhere in this collection, Bowman’s finely calibrated, ornate, diction creates an experience that is at once ethereal and earthy, simultaneously peephole and tented field, a rookery for tears and joy. If the first section of this book concerns itself, primarily, with social and linguistic couplings and uncoupling, then the second section concerns itself with exploring the intertwining of the feminine and the imagination.  The section begins with “The Frida Kahlo Tree: A Fable,” in which the artist transforms into a tree, whose magnifying-glass heart burns free her wandering selves, allowing her to feel, after work and at home, intermittent perpetual blossoms. Bowman rounds out this section with an aubade, another fable, and the remarkable, “For the Lost Women in Prisons: A Texas Two-Step.” Some of the most interesting poems in this section, however, are Bowman’s flower poems: “Twat Flower,” “Gag Flower,” “Hobo Flower,” “Thumbscrew Flower,” “Dog Flower,” et cetera. “Slit Flower” provides a characteristic example:

            self writ lo
            wife trolls
            wells for it
            slower lift
            wolf liter
            fowl tower

While not all of the flower poems consist entirely of anagrams, all of these poems share with “Slit Flower” a cheeky exuberance.

The final section of Can I Finish, Please? manifests the same exuberance as the previous two sections, but the poems here have a more narrative bent. The poem, “June 30, 2013” towers in the midst of this last group of poems. In this poem, Bowman details a ferry ride to Provincetown, Massachusetts; her poem, of course, directly addresses James Schuyler’s “June 30, 1974,” boldly starting with the same lines: “Let me tell you/ that this weekend Sunday morning…” Bowman pays homage to Schuyler while also delivering a wry and loving portrait of this minor voyage, where “all is possibility/ past and present merge.” Like the flowers at the end of her poem “The Arrangement,” each of Catherine Bowman’s poems in Can I Finish, Please? are: “stuck in their aphrodisiacal nomenclature, all spread open—/their unbearable fragility, their excruciating/ brilliance revealed, exposed.” This aphrodisiacal nomenclature reminds one of Blake’s famous statement: “The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way.” Catherine Bowman sees the world both ways and renders it in all of its dumb greenness, in all of its unbearable fragility, and in all of its excruciating brilliance.

Dante Di Stefano’s collection of poetry, Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight, is forthcoming from Brighthorse Books. His poetry and essays have appeared in The Writer's Chronicle, Obsidian, Shenandoah, Brilliant Corners, The Los Angeles Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, and elsewhere.

On Michel Houellebecq's "Submission" [by David Lehman]

Michel Houellebecq

It could be because I have read the work of too many self-absorbed novelists who favor such sentences as these: "The next day I got up early and shut myself in the bathroom. I took a long shower. I dried my hair carefully, worrying that the hotel hair dryer, which blew violently, would give it the wrong wave." If this is the sort of thing you hate, read on for a recommended alternative.

Michel Houellebecq's new novel Submission, translated from the French by Paris Review editor Lorin Stein, and officially published this week by Farrar Straus and Giroux, comes as refreshment because it is about the great world outside and beyond the self -- the world of history in the making, as Hobbes might depict it if he were around. It is a world of wars and surrogates or warnings of war: threats, pronouncements, failed diplomacy, mob behavior, and murderous violence of an infinitely greater magnitude than that of a hotel hair dryer.

A moment ago I said that Submission came as refreshment to one who is tired of memoirs by individuals who have never done anything memorable. But while refreshing in this sense, the new novel is terrifying. It is a vision of the future that defies the policemen of political correctness. It dares to spin out a plausible scenario extrapolated from the acts and proclamations of ISIS, Al Queda, the Ayatollah, and terrorist entities whether organized or consisting of indoctrinated loners.

Some novels are like the needless elaboration of a Facebook entry. Not Houellebecq's. Submission is a work of invention and speculation. What happens if, in the next decade, the political alignments in France evolve to the point that the nominee of a Muslim political party wins the presidency? Is "Eurabia" the future of Europe? The vision of "submission" that is central to Islam informs this first-person narrative in which, inevitably, a proud people submits to fanatic religious dogma, women submit to men, and "submission" represents an impulse and a drive that would have merited Freud's attention. It is a fact sometimes neglected by commentators that Sharia represents a triumphant form of patriarchy -- a fact Houellebecq goes to town with.

Francois, the narrator, is a tenured professor, a scholar whose lifework centers upon J. K. Huymans, the late nineteenth-century author of A Rebours, a book that has been aptly called the "breviary of the Decadence." The conduct of university administrators, professors, and intellectuals is expertly skewered by the skeptical, world-weary Francois: "Over the course of the twentieth century, plenty of intellectuals had supported Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot and had never been taken to task. For the French, an intellectual didn't have to be responsible. That wasn't his job."

The prose, always good enough to sustain the reader's attention, sometimes rises to eloquence: "We feel nostalgia for a place simply because we've lived there; whether we live well or badly scarcely matters. The past is always beautiful. So, for that matter, is the future. Only the present hurts, and we carry it around like an abscess of suffering, our companion between two infinities of happiness and peace."

Effortlessly provocative, informed as much by resignation as by ire, Submission may just be the most important novel published in the United States this year..

-- David Lehman [originally posted 10/23/15]

On leaving, Austerlitz, destiny, prophecy & the Great Wheel

When I get to sobbing out “Look at me, curse you all!”, when I get all squinty about the eyes, when I get to reproaching life’s way in the grayness of the long-drawn shadows of sleepless dawns, I scratch the itch to go walking.

When I get like this, then, I get in a train at Gare  d’Austerlitz and go to a town called Figeac, a formerly-hopping burg on the river Lot, in the Midi.

In the Midi, the noon-time sun hangs lovingly above you.

At Austerlitz, the Holy Roman Empire finally faded into historical night. The battle was Napoléon’s riskiest and most successful – there, the bravado of the French line put the guineas of Pitt at nought (at least, for a while) and the Russkies and Prusskies to flight.

Figeac, then. Jean-François Champollion, who translated the Rosetta stone, was from Figeac – there’s a copy of the stone in the central square. On the one side, classic Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphs and Coptic script are set side by side. On the other, I don’t know. However, the Rosetta stone text turns around the cosmological concept of Phanes – birth, origination, recurrence, the legitimacy of Pharaoh Ptolemy V Epiphanes and so forth.

A glance around Figeac’s empty public square makes one thing apparent. The heavy, timeless ether of the place surely enabled Champollion to spend years of this all-too-short life figuring out the signifying concordances of written Copt, Greek and Egyptian.

Champollion’s achievement lends a certain air of cosmic moment to an otherwise unprepossessing destination, just as the realization that Weevil & Orville Wright found enough ether in Dayton, Ohio’s stiflingly humid air to imagine, then, by golly, to put wheels on, a flying machine, somehow changes the perceived nature of even Dayton, Ohio.

Also about Figeac.

There is a green grocer off the main square who sells absolutely every type of dried fruit a perverted sweet-hog could possibly dream up.

The full-bosomed, sweat-slick ladies who systematically shovel more than you’ve asked for into white paper bags keep the implicit promise of their smirking presences, too. If a fruit isn’t naturally sweet enough to send a body into diabetic shock at first gob-full, the ordinary sweet-hog may rest assured that there will be enough coarse sugar on it to bring it up to true terminal snuff.  

Karine comes with me to Austerlitz. She’s relieved to be rid of me, but still kindly. She holds my hand and chatters amiably as we walk over a higgledy-piggedly parking area and into what seems to be a back entrance but isn’t and find ourselves in a vast, echoing hall.

Broken in two/I know that you’re on to me/

that I only come home when I am so all alone/

that I can believe

Come to me now/lay your hand over me/

even if it’s a lie/saying we’ll be all right/

And I shall believe

 sings Sheryl Crow from some loudspeaker somewhere.

One thing that has always struck me about my adopted country is the number of clairvoyants, mediums, marabouts, astrologers, magnetizers and black and white magicians, among other ancient professions, that persist here.

Easily as many as the Bay Area.

Such persistence may astonish those who have heard the bold claim that France is cartesienne. This is because when one who has only been exposed to book-learning thinks of Descartes, he or she usually thinks of “reason”. But this is to rien comprendre. What people actually mean by “Cartesian” is “logical”, even when they think “reason”.

So, if you believe black magic works, it is only logical – “cartesien” – to try it out. With so much potential added-value involved, fool if you don’t at least try, too.

As Karine & I join the milling crowd of Austerlitz gare, any number of famous professors of magic are handing out flimsy little prospectuses that promise the return of the loved one and the defeat of the enemy. As a plus, effective love philters are also available.

When we reach the right platform, Karine pecks me on the cheek. I squeeze her hand. She looks into my face, says, “Adieu, mon Tracy.”

This always touches me. I don’t want to be hers, actually. Certainly, the very idea repels me; her too, I guess – what we own, we love, but we never do own what we love.

It’s her emotion that touches me. Hers is so fine it can resolve a real-life dilemma into an untrue word and make it ring right in the soul.

I wave my hand, a bit lamely, very close to my chest, say, “Mais. A bientôt, Bébé.”

She ain’t my baby, either, but that’s all right. It’s the emotion. I believe.

The train to Figeac is an old beat up inter-cities job and it’s a mostly hot six or seven-hour trip. I turn abruptly away from Karine to walk up the platform, to find a likely-looking car and a seat.

And no sooner do I feel that she has also walked off than a short, skinny, impossibly wrinkled African man springs up at my side.

He’s form-molded into a long yellow boubou and wearing one of those Muslim-style kippas, white, with a little lacework around the edges. Just for the deviltry of it, I think.

It’s a Marabout, a saint, a magician – what I call the characters who hang around here trying to cadge money by traditional means. In fact, some of his flimsy prospectuses have fallen and scatter beneath our feet.

I try to read them: Professeur Ssss… Somebobombuko? Msuboko? Ngumkoko? – I can’t make out the name.

Somebobbuko grabs my arm, growls:

Les trompettes claironnent/Le moment est venu/Celui qui y montera/ descendra dans la douleur – “The trump sounds/the moment is come/who goes arrives in pain.”

– Quoi?

I try to pull the guy’s hand off my arm and can’t.

He’s strong. His fingers are long and fierce, experienced in clinging tight, like raven claws.

– “What is it? What do you want?”

I want to check my wallet but am afraid to. It may mean allowing myself to fall into the magician’s embrace.

He smells old, foreign.

I turn towards the man, catch Karine out of the corner of my eye.

She is passing in front of the Relais news kiosk. She is just now turning to look back at me.

She sees the scene and promptly swivels around, fixes on me and the sticky Marabout, who is repeating, “The trump sounds/the moment is come/who goes arrives in pain.” – Squeezing my arm hard, harder.

– “Putain! Lâchez-moi!” I cry.

I manage to pry his claw off. I stumble back into some travelers stalking up the platform.

Quick as lightning, the magician seizes my hand, keeps me from falling. Steadies me.

“Sir,” he whispers in my ear in soft, sweet West African English. “How now then? Do not go, Sir.” He backs away, never letting my hand free, however. He smiles broadly. “The Great Wheel shall turn if ye do.”

– “What?” I say, “Who are you? What do you want?”

“O! I am a great friend, Sir. A great friend. Do not board this train, Sir. Or, if you do, Sir, the Great Wheel shall turn. Things will never then be the same again, Friend.”

– “And won’t the Great Wheel turn if I don’t get on this train?”

The Marabout cocks his head, as if listening to another voice.

He takes my hand in both of his, gentle now. He studies the question in my eyes.

Says he, “If the right hand turns what to the left is destined, then the turning shall not be the same, in time or in space, indeed, in life, Friend.”

Something makes me look away from him: there is Karine, coming towards us.

– “I don’t know if one way or another way will – shall? – go for me or against me,” I tell the man. “I don’t know and you can’t tell me. Let your Great Wheel turn. I’ll turn with it.”

He smiles broadly again, shows his long yellow teeth.

– “Go away.”

The Marabout is turning on his heel just as Karine fills my sight. When I turn back to him, the he is gone.

More and more people are flooding onto the narrow platform; I am a lone snag in a strong current. Karine steps in front of me. She spreads out her fingers and lays the whole of her hand on my beating heart, leans to me, looking up sidelong into my face, trying to see me.

– “You don’t have to go, you know.”

“O, but I want to,” I say, “I want the Great Wheel to turn.”

–  “It won’t turn the way you want it to. I want it to.”

“Does it ever turn the way somebody wants it to? Does it ever, Bébé? What do you want, Karine? Can you even know, mon amie?”

– “No. It doesn’t. Dunno. Non.”

“The more risk, the more life, then.”

I touch her cheek, that I love.

The imminent departure announcement.

Without ado, I swing up on the high step of the car behind me. I jump inside. The heavy door crashes shut – thunk.

The train jerks down the quai and out of Austerlitz.

Discoveries from The Yearbook V [by M. Fitzgerald]

Simeon’s Osby’s name, on the other hand, brought up a wealth of intriguing information from the genealogical site. He was born on May 15 1909. In the 1920 census, he is listed as the oldest of four children, living at 1501 S. 17^th Street; in the census ten years later, he is still living at home with both parents and three more siblings.

Apart from a hiatus in 1926 when Simeon seems to have left school and worked as a porter, he continues to be listed in the City Directory as a student living at home through 1928 when he graduated from Springfield High with my father.

In 1929 he is shown living at home, but working in some unspecified capacity for a local company.

In 1931, he is still listed in the Directory as living with his parents, but is also a student at the University of Illinois Champaign.

According to the City Directory, Simeon remains a student at Champaign through 1934, the height of the depression. He does not appear to have graduated when he returns to live in Springfield, working as a case aid worker in the Surviving Bureau of Transients from then until he is enlisted into the Army as a Private at the end of December 1943. There are no details in the genealogical site about where and how he served during the War: he is discharged in October 1946, around the same time that my father was discharged from the Navy.

In the 1940 census, Simeon Osby is still living in Springfield, and married to Annabel, a teacher whose birthplace is Tennessee. No maiden name is given for her. No children are listed, and no address is provided in the City Directory.

But in the 1950 census his 58 year-old mother Virgie is living with them.

In 1948, Simeon is editor of the Capitol City News, and his wife is a stenographer at the University of Illinois Division of Services for Crippled Children. By 1951 when Simeon is again in the army at the outbreak of the Korean War, Annabel has been promoted to secretary and by 1955 she is the chief clerk in the same Division, and Simeon is working at the Chicago Defender. His mother Virgie is still living with them, and works as a maid.

I could find no census information for 1960 or 1970, but Simeon Buckner Osby is still working at the Defender in 1976, when he is among fifty journalist, the only one mentioned by the Edwardsville Intelligencer paper specifically as black, and present at a meeting to discuss some proposed cuts to benefit. He stands to speak against the proposal.

Simeon died on July 14, 1993, eight years after my father. He is buried in Camp Butler, Springfield’s military cemetery. His wife had died five years earlier, and she too is buried at Camp Butler.

His father is also buried at Camp Butler. But Simeon’s mother Virgie, who had lived with her son and daughter-in-law for so many years, who in 1955 was still alive and working as a maid, is not buried with her husband, and I was unable to trace a date of death or burial site for her.

The final intriguing information garnered in the genealogical site was that Simeon is listed as Simeon Buckner Osby Jr. in the Ninth Edition of Who’s Who among African Americans (1996/97).

That tidbit launched me into deeper research.

I knew nothing about The Chicago Defender: I had not ever even heard the name before the genealogical site revealed that Simeon worked at the paper. When I saw it, I first wondered whether it was or was not strange that an African American man in mid-century American would find employment as a journalist on a paper. How did a black person then write for any newspaper? Weren’t newspapers written by and for the white middle class and the white intelligentsia?

Was there such a strong policy of non-discrimination in the newspaper world after the war, that he could be employed? Or was it a muck-racking rag that ‘even’ a black person could write for?

I wondered whether he had to commute to Chicago regularly. I wondered what kind of things he wrote about: from the only snippet of information the genealogical site showed, in 1976 he seemed to have been involved in some kind of political journalism. Is that how he started his journalistic career? Was that the kind of writing he would have done for the Capitol City News where he was working in 1948? From the sound of it, the Capitol City News must have been the paper that reported on the goings on in Illinois State legislation.

                                                *****

I remembered that Simeon Osby’s father worked at the State Capitol Building and

I returned to the genealogy, saw in the records how Osby Senior had been born in Springfield in 1880 from parents who had migrated from Virginia and Georgia after the Civil War; in all probability freed slaves.

I saw how Osby Senior had been honorably discharged from the army in 1906, after serving in either the Philippine-American War of 1899 or the Boxer Rebellion of 1902.

How in 1907 Osby Senior first appeared in the City Directory as an unmarried watchman living on Elliott Avenue in Springfield, and in 1912 he was first listed as married to Virgie, born in Kentucky in 1882.

The couple is living at 1501 S. 17^th Street. This is the same address where the growing family lives in the 1920 and the 1930 census. It is the home Osby Senior buys for $1500 in 1930.

In the yearly Springfield City Directory from where these facts are detailed, next to the name, for the Osby family too there is the bracketed (c): colored. Branded.

From 1917 until his death in 1939, Simeon Osby Senior worked as an elevator operator and eventually as supervisor of elevator operations at the State Capitol, when elevator mechanisms were powered either by hand cranks or by hydraulic steam pistons.

Local history does not record when the three elevators were put in the State Capitol building, although space was allowed for them at the time of construction in the last years of the eighteen hundreds; but it does record a huge investment in their upgrade in 1939, the year Osby Senior died. It seems plausible but not definitive that the original elevators were put in around the time when he started working as their operator. It is not clear whether the first elevators were hand cranked or hydraulically operated.

It is most likely that all seven children at some time or other would have gone to the Capitol: how often did he take some of them to ride the elevators? Was the chance to ride the elevators a bargaining chip for this father? You work hard and do well in school, and I’ll take you to ride the elevators.

How often while they were in the elevators, did this or that legislator smile and pat any of the kids on the cheek? Which legislator remembered their name, and knew Mr. Osby’s? Who became his friends and who just addressed him as ‘boy’? With whom did the invisible man trade conversation and information?

How much did he see, and share with his son as he got older, and how much did his eldest son want to know?

Even though Simeon started his work as a reporter for the Capital News in 1948, almost ten years after his father, supervisor of elevator operations at the Capitol, died, and after the War, perhaps all he had to do was remind legislators of the man who had worked there for more than twenty years on an ancient system needing daily maintenance, and information on legislative activities easily came his way.

                                                *****

The moment the results came up after I typed the name The Chicago Defender in the search engine, I could begin to forgive myself for my ignorance, and for the time I had thought I had been wasting, researching and wondering about these three peers of my father’s.

The Chicago Defender was second biggest African American paper in the US,

“Founded in 1905 by Robert Sengstacke Abbott.  Abbott published the first issue, a run of 300 copies, on May 6, 1905.  The Defender began as a four-page weekly handbill filled with local news and reproductions of clippings from other newspapers.  Abbott initially sold both subscriptions and advertising for the paper himself by going door-to-door throughout Chicago, Illinois.
Abbott used the Defender as a forum to attack racial injustice from the outset, and included a front-page heading on every issue that read, “American Race Justice Must Be Destroyed”.  The Defender was a leading advocate in the fight against racial, economic, and social discrimination.  It championed equal employment and fair housing for blacks, and boldly reported on lynchings, rapes, and black disfranchisement. What began as a four-page handbill had become by 1915 a popular local newspaper with a weekly circulation of 16,000.”  

Once I was scanning through the on-line archives, I saw that the newspaper had sections dedicated to news from Illinois cities, including Springfield. I saw that long before Simeon started writing for the paper in 1953, he was the frequent subject: the local news more often than not consisted of social announcements. From the paper I learnt the exact date when Simeon left to attend the University of Illinois in Champaign (September 14, 1929). I learnt that in 1933, he and a friend were refused admittance at the Empire Theater and brought suit against the owner for violation of the civil rights bill, and were refused a warrant for fear of race riots. I learnt that between 1933 and the breakout of the War, Simeon was either secretary, Vice-President or President of the Springfield branch of the NAAC. I learnt that in 1939, Simeon filed a complaint with Adjutant General Carlos Black and the State’s Attorney, because only whites were being sold seats in some reserved sections of the Renaissance-Shamrock basketball game. I learnt that in 1939 he ran in the race for mayor of Springfield, sponsored by the Chicago Defender.

 I knew I had to share my discoveries and I knew why: to give recognition to the hidden lives of Donald Hogan and Thelma Donnigan; to play some small role in honoring the career of Simeon Osby Jr., journalist and civil rights activist, who graduated high school with my father, Robert Fitzgerald, poet and translator.

http://www.blackpast.org/aah/chicago-defender-1905

Discoveries from The Yearbook IV [by M. Fitzgerald]

When it occurred to me that I could look up the names of Donald Hogan, Simeon Osby and Thelma Donnigan on the genealogical site I subscribe to, I hesitated for some time: although I had no qualms at all at the thought of spending weeks in a library looking up census information, newspapers, city Directories to find them, what information could emerge by merely typing in their names into a genealogical search engine seemed like an invasion.

Was it the speed at which information might be brought up?

Was it the sense that there surely was family, their families, who were pursuing the same genealogical research, and I would be in some ways trampling on their privacy? Before I had bought my own subscription, a friend had done some research on my family for me, and it had left me uneasy even while I encouraged her to find out all she could.

What was it that made me uneasy?

A sense that we are all now living in a fish bowl, a sense of the need for modesty, the thought that veils and curtains should be drawn somewhere. But I hate curtains except those that protect me from the strongest sun. I want light.

I wanted light on these three young African Americans who daily shared the High School ground my father walked on for three years. Who walked the city he walked in for the seventeen preceding years. I wanted the light cast by finding out about them to extend to illuminate our day.

Already, even before I typed one of the three names and the year of birth, already what I had found by paying close attention to the pages of The Capitoline, rippled into a greater consciousness of structured discrimination, and into a deeper understanding of today’s anger. Already there seemed to be a direct line, from the exclusion of the three faculty advisers for the Unity Reserves, from the segregation into the one club, from the small numbers graduating, to The Black Lives Matter movement.

Isn’t ninety years too long a time for racism and discrimination to persist and mutate? 1928 was long before Rosa Parks, Brown versus the Board of Education, Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement. Fifty years have passed since those landmark institutional changes.

And still the angry young, the frustrated old, rise up in protest.

In 1928, was the institution of Springfield High proud for accepting blacks, unaware that the de-facto segregation showed it was merely paying lip service to integration? Was my father conscious of the hypocrisy, or oblivious to it?

What did my own double-edged reaction 90 years later – that on the one hand I should be so angry that there were there were only three graduating African American students, and on the other hand that I should find myself considering, how many Springfield schools had even three black students -- what did that say?

Could I dare to think that the three young people who managed to graduate with my father in June 1928, were both tokens of our Caucasian hypocrisy, and also markers for some kind of progress? What does progress means in that kind of context?

                                                          *****

There are only four entries for Donald Hogan in the genealogical site I subscribe to: three of the entries are uploaded from the 1927 and 1928 Capitoline, and reiterate the information I already had, that he was a horn player, that he played in the orchestra, that he graduated in 1928. The fourth entry was a census that told me that he was born a week after my father, on October 19, 1910, in Springfield: like my father, he graduated high school before he turned eighteen. The entry also told me that he died in Chicago, Cook County, in August of 1986. Less than two years after my father. Nothing else.

            But there is nothing ordinary about one of the four entries for Thelma Donnigan: the first three are uploaded pages of the Yearbook, but the fourth is an entry from the Springfield City Directory for 1928.

A William and Anna Donnigan, are listed above Thelma’s name, and a son of the couple, Harold, is listed below hers, but the three of them live together at a different address from hers, and cannot be her parents or, it seems, any kind of relatives. There seems to be no record of any of her family in Springfield: Thelma Donnigan, student at Springfield High, lives at 1105 East Washington Avenue.

Alone.

Was she living with relatives who had completely different names?

Was she already living as a maid in the home of a white family? Did live-in maids list their names in city directories? Would a live-in maid have access to schooling?

Was she living with a man?

And then she is no longer in Springfield, but she is also not among the many Thelma Donnigans listed as living in any other part of the country. She vanishes from the records. Perhaps she disappears into the un-traceability of the married state.

What remains, a mark of shame as indelibly imprinted as any, on the society into which my father was born, and the dominant culture of which both he and I have been privileged beneficiaries, is a small, inconspicuous letter between brackets: (c).

Colored. Branded, like every other person of color in the City Directory for Springfield, Illinois in the year of the Lord 1928.