The Best American Poetry

Dmitri Alexandrovich Prigov---Soviet Texts (Terence Winch)

Dmitri Alexandrovich Prigov  (1940–2007) died of a heart attack on the Moscow metro  at age 66.  An artist of incisive comic genius with a taste for the bizarre, he would no doubt have found the circumstances of his death somewhat amusing. As Soviet Texts, an excellent new collection of his work translated and edited by poet Simon Schuchat (with Ainsley Morse) and published by Ugly Duckling Presse, makes clear, Prigov’s central literary mission was the dismantling of the language of officialdom. He is a satirist, a parodist, whose writing is a mocking commentary on the political misuses and other abuses of language. [photo left: D.A. Prigov]

The lead-off piece in Soviet Texts is entitled “Under Me,” and it sets the tone for the entire collection.  A long list-poem offering “a procession of details, elements, events, which took place ‘under me,’” it showcases Prigov’s absurd, expansive, comprehensive knowledge of history, art, and culture (not to mention sports and porn):

            And Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Kim Basinger, Michael Jackson appeared under me

            Tarantino, Platini, van Basten, Wim Wenders also appeared under me.

            Jeff Koons appeared under me, too

            And Ciccolina appeared under me

            And Ravi Shankar appeared under me

            Mike Tyson, Schumacher, Agassi, Magic Johnson appeared under me, too

In “Description of Objects,” Prigov takes aim at the deadly form and diction of Soviet propaganda in a series of pieces each beginning with “Comrades!” and proceeding to offer ridiculous definitions of everything from eggs to apes. Authoritative nonsense and faux logic lead to the final conclusion of every description: “For the reasons indicated above, its actual existence is considered unlikely.” In the brilliant mock-heroic “Moscow and the Muscovites,” one of my favorites, Prigov takes on inflated, nationalistic jargon, exposing its ludicrousness along the way: “Moscow is everywhere—its peoples are all over/ And where Moscow’s not—there’s only emptiness.” “Twenty Stories about Stalin” are scripture-like parables about Uncle Joe that are ultimately anti-hagiographic.

Also a prolific visual artist, Prigov clearly deserves the wider appreciation that this book will certainly bring him. As Simon Schuchat [photo right] notes in the frontmatter: “While Prigov’s writing is very definitely of the Soviet and post-Soviet world, it is also fully equal to, and sometimes consonant with, contemporaneous avant-garde writing elsewhere in the world.”   

Soviet Texts thrums with Prigov’s subversive sense of humor, almost making one hungry for something irony-free.  Though I don’t think you find that in his writing,  I thought these lines from “Terrorism with a Human Face” came closest, and could even serve as his epitaph:

            When the years have passed and the currently wild

            People have forgotten many things

            Fear of me will tear through all of Great Russia

            For what I wrote! But it was the truth, after all!

Book Jackets on Display

 

Some beautiful art owes its birth to commercial necessity -- the book jacket, for example. The Association of University Presses is displaying 49 of their best covers from 2019 at a virtual trade show. Here's an example: Drohan DiSanto’s design for John Brenkman’s Mood and Trope (University of Chicago Press). And here's a link to the other covers, some of them very striking, from such book designers as Edward Carson,Tim Jones, and Scott Levine on books published by McGill-Queen's University Press, Harvard University Press, and Cornell University Press, respectively.

https://design.up.hcommons.org/2020-book-jackets-and-covers-selections/

 

Julius Jaffe: The Analects (4) (by Mitch Sisskind)

JUDGMENT

Seeing that Herman Fishman was

about to step on an ant, Julius Jaffe

urgently intervened to let the ant pass.

He said, "When a judgment against a

man has been rendered in the Upper

World, he is always given the opportunity

to soften that judgment through some

seemingly insignificant action."

Herman Fishman said, "Has a judgment

been rendered against me in the Upper

World?"

Julius Jaffe replied, "Oy. Bite your tongue."

RABBI RABINOWITZ

 

As he was studying Torah late one night

Lilith (feh) appeared in Julius Jaffe’s room

in the Rienzi Hotel. After she appeared

again the following night, Julius Jaffe met

with Rabbi Rabinowitz.

Rabbi Rabinowitz said, “Oy vey. Did

any words come out of her mouth?” Julius

Jaffe replied, “She cast her gaze around the

room and with wicked laughter she said,

‘And the appearance of the vision that I saw

was like the vision that I saw when I came

to destroy the city.’” (Ezekiel 43:3)

Then Rabbi Rabinowitz wept and quoted the

Zohar: “We see that all the nations have risen,

and Israel is lower than all of them. This is

because the Above sent the Shekinah away
from Him and took the slave woman Lilith in
her place. Who is this slave woman? At first
she sat behind the grinding mill, and now
she has inherited the place of her mistress."

Rabbi Rabinowitz explained, “As He consorts

with Lilith above, the Shekinah consorts with

Samael below, and so it will be until Moshiach.”

He continued, “With Lilith He does not pour out

his seed. But listen to this wonderful miracle. At

Shabbat, when a righteous Jew and his soulmate

intimately embrace, He and the Shekinah are

reunited, whereupon He pours out his seed which

pours down Light upon the world.”

He went on, “However, when a Jew lives alone

in a dark space Lilith arrives to seduce him and

wickedly laughs in the lewd triumph of her

usurping the place of the Jew’s soulmate in the

Jew’s bed just as she has usurped the place of the

Shekinah with God in the Upper World. Feh!”

ESTHER TABACHNIK

 

They were walking. Julius Jaffe said,

"I will marry Esther Tabachnik."

He continued, in the name of Rabbi

Rabinowitz, "A man alone in a room,

Lilith (feh) plagues him in the midnight

hour.

He went on, "But Esther Tabachnik,
'her price is above rubies. The heart
of her husband doth safely trust in her.
She will do him good and not evil all
the days of her life.'" (Proverbs 31:10-12)

Herman Fishman said, "Kinehora."

 

JERRY CHAIMOVICH & RAV ASHLAG

 

Herman Fishman asked, "Why are the
wicked so strong? 'I saw under the sun,
in the place of justice, that wickedness
was there, and in the place of righteousness,
that wickedness was there.'" (Eccl. 3:16)

Julius Jaffe replied, "'The righteous and
the wicked God will judge.'" (Eccl. 3:17)

He explained, "No act of righteousness
goes unnoticed by YHVH. Even Jerry
Chaimovich once, perhaps, left a ten
dollar tip at the old Fritzl's restaurant
on State Street. Therefore Jerry
Chaimovich is rewarded in this world
with money, big cars, and also the
companionship of beautiful women."

He continued, "But because his righteous
action has already been fully compensated,
Jerry Chaimovich will partake of nothing
in the Upper World! But in the Upper World
Rav Ashlag is rewarded beyond all imagining!"

 

THE MAN

"And a certain man found him,

and, behold, he was wandering

in the field, and the man asked

him, 'What seekest thou?'"

(Bereshis 37:15)

Herman Fishman asked, "Who

is the man that found Joseph

wandering in the field?"

He continued, "Rashi tells us

that the man was the angel

Gabriel, as it is written, 'Yea,

while I was speaking in prayer,

the man Gabriel whom I had

seen in the vision at the beginning,

and being caused to fly swiftly,

approached close to me at the

time of the evening offering."

(Daniel 9:21)

But Julius Jaffe answeed, "No,

the man was Bobby Minkus."

Herman Fishman inquired, "Bobby

Minkus?" Julius Jaffe replied, "That

is to say, his soul."

 

SOULMATE

"When a soul issues forth from
the treasury of souls in malchut,
it emerges as male and female,
and after it has descended to
the physical world they separate
and each goes its own way --
the male part manifests in a male

body and the female part in a
female body But if a person has
merit through worthy behavior,

they will join together again as
one in spirit and in body." -- Zohar

Herman Fishman asked, "Esther Tabachnik,

the woman you will marry, is she your soulmate?"

Julius Jaffe wept and said, "No, I have not

that merit. Our sages teach that rejoining

one's soulmate is a greater miracle than

the parting of the Red Sea."

He continued, "But an unmarried man's life

is wasted. He cannot make progress toward

completion of his tikkun, the rectification of

his soul that he is in the world to perform."

He went on, "In fact, the more incompatible a

man and his wife are, the greater is their opportunity

for spiritual work, kinehora,"

MONEY

Shinderman said, "Oy, I had

a big year but I had to give

half of it back in taxes."

Julius Jaffe said, "In this

world good fortune comes

with a price."

He continued, "Money is the

easiest way to pay. But if

you wish to pay differently,

your wish will be granted."

 

APOSEMATISM

Julius Jaffe said, "The serpent in

the Garden was of course very

beautiful, but the Golden Calf

was more beautiful by far."

He continued, "The Golden Calf

was an irresistibly beautiful woman.

She sang and danced, lewdly shaking

her behind."

He went on, "It is the intention of

YHVH that irresistible beauty in

a woman should be a warning to

us, as beauty in a colorful insect or

fish is a warning.This is aposematism."

Herman Fishman said, "Yet the sages

tell us that, compared to Eve, Sarah

was like a monkey."

Julius Jaffe answered, "'Who is this that

darkeneth counsel by words without

knowledge?'" (Job 38:2)

He continued, "'Canst thou lift up thy

voice to the clouds, that abundance

of water may cover thee? Canst thou

send forth lightnings, that they may

say unto thee, Here we are?'"

(Job 38:34-35)

 

AKEIDAH (BINDING): THE BINDING OF ISAAC

Herman Fishman asked, "Why did God instruct
Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, his son."

Julius Jaffe replied, "The Torah says, 'God tested
Abraham." (Bereshis 22:1) And God did not
instruct Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. God said,
'Offer him.' on a mountain" (22:2)

Herman Fishman said, "But you're splitting hairs."

Julius Jaffe replied, "Oy, not if you're Isaac." He
continued, "So much can be said about these
verses that for the moment I will make only
a few observations."

He went on, "We read, 'Abraham rose early
in the morning and saddled his donkey.' (22:3)
In biblical Hebrew, 'donkey' is a homonym
for a word meaning 'physical matter.' So this
passage suggests that Abraham was grounded
in physicality when he departed for the
mountain with Isaac and two young men,
one of whom might have been his son Ishmael."

Julius Jaffe continued, "Later we read, 'On the
third day Abraham lifted up his eyes and saw
the mountain afar off. Then he said to the
young men, Stay here with the donkey, while
the lad and I will go yonder.'" (22:5)

He went on, "Why the donkey again? There
is a commentary in which Abraham takes
Isaac aside and asks, 'My son, do you see a
great cloud at the top of the mountain, or
a pillar of fire?' Isaac replies, 'Yes, I see that'
and Abraham says, "I see that also.'"

Julius Jaffe continued, "Then Abraham asks
the two young men if they see anything on
the mountain. When they say they do not,
Abraham tells them, 'Very well, the donkey
doesn't see anything either. So you will please
stay here with the donkey.'"

He went on, "In other words, Abraham and
his son were detaching from the physical
realm which the donkey represents."

Herman Fishman asked, "Are donkeys
present elsewhere in the Torah, with
similar meanings?"

Julius Jaffe answered him, "I believe there
are a few. But more often there are camels."

Herman Fishman concluded, "Surely there
is more to the story of the binding of Isaac
than first meets the eye."

Julius Jaffe wept and said, "Oy vey, yes, yes,
there is much more."

Damaged Heritage Part 5: "Over time, the white Southern mouse ate the elephant." [by J. Chester Johnson]

(Ed note: This is the fifth and final excerpt from Damaged Heritage: The Elaine Race Massacre and A Story of Reconciliation by J. Chester Johnson. Follow these links for excerpts one, two, three, and four.) 

The Elaine May Massacre Memorial, dedicated September, 2019. Photo © David Gruol

Within a few years following Freedom Summer, Richard M. Nixon exploited a political opportunity to harvest white Southern votes for the Republican Party through a strategy that leveraged the region’s racism, fundamentalist religions, and conservative policies to inure to his benefit and for future Republican politicians, who maintained the strategy with some variation from time to time. The strategy gave respect to the white Southerner, and that respect compounded a Republican hold on the solid South. In fact, many would say it has all gone too far and too long. One can surely now make an argument that this strategy, first formulated by Nixon and endorsed with little qualification by Republicans then and later, and even further inculcated by Trumpism, has over time actually come to mean much of Republicanism with its own not-too-subtle racism, its exclusionary, nativist tendencies, and its wide and various attempts at voter suppression, having their very roots in white Southern political practices. Indeed, Republicans from the rest of the country  frequently looked south for guidance. Over time, the white Southern mouse ate the elephant.

So much to be repudiated and dismissed by the white South coalesced in the Freedom Summer moment; “nerve-racking” for many, the white Southerner was now convinced that the “new day” exalted characteristics reminiscent of the frightful history of a hundred years earlier. The Republican Party’s Southern strategy relied on this fear for anticipated real and imagined adjustments to a preferred style of life. For some white Southerners, a recollection of Reconstruction had even been evoked.

Freedom Summer held firmly to its Northern mission, joining the phalanx of individuals who assaulted Mississippi’s social and racial fabric. Some have called this nexus the fulcrum or lever of the Civil Rights Movement, for the combination of the maneuvers set much of an activist nation against the white South, and the ramifications would be felt for another fifty years. Freedom Summer illuminated and foretold unprecedented change for the region, change I recognized then to be inevitable, but change that, for some very explicable reasons, most white Southerners were in no frame of mind to make. Even at that age, I realized in every ounce of my bones that this was a revolution, a second Civil War, if you will, that the white South could not prevent, and yet, in so many respects, the white South would not, could not apprehend that inevitability, that justified inevitability. Little did they know or expect that very shortly, they would be dealing with the greatest codification of emancipative legislation and administrative procedures for the actual freeing of African-Americans since the advent of slavery. 

Within a few years, the South saw its local public school systems completely integrated. Moreover, the country witnessed, after the Selma march to Montgomery, the protection of the blacks’ right to vote, which would have considerable influence, especially in places where blacks matched or outnumbered whites. Fair housing, an aggressive affirmative action initiative to make up for past grievances, and equal employment opportunities, among other programs, became realities. To confirm that these inordinate legislative and administrative efforts weren’t frittered away, an elaborate enforcement system by the federal government came into existence to protect the interests and rights of African-Americans. Most of these actions were specifically targeted with the white South in mind.

When I left Harvard in the fall of 1964, I went south for a learning experience as part of the broader and more personal understanding of the country’s Racial Revolution. By the time I left Arkansas for New York City in early 1968, my views on both race and the liberation of African-Americans had crystallized more fully. I came back to the South after Freedom Summer mainly as a student although I had my inclinations and underlying suppositions. Still, to speak on the subject then would have probably been to posit a series of interrogatories about the situation and the black struggle. By 1968, as I left Arkansas, I had a firm grasp of myself in the context of race and the black liberation movement. In about eighteen months and after the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., I returned once again to southeast Arkansas, but this time, I put my more congealed and codified views about race and black liberation to work by teaching, before integration of the local public education system, sixth through the twelfth grades at Drew School, the all African-American public school in Monticello. 

Confessions of a Mask [by David Lehman]

These are the confessions of a mask.
I looked in the mirror and saw a ghost.
Of all lost causes I miss this one the most.
These are the questions you must not ask.

These are the oaks that once stood here.
And shall the earth be all of paradise
That we will know? Roll the dice;
These are the nights when praise turns into fear.

These are the memories of a man without a past.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Therefore, let us sport us while we may.
These are the reveries of a man who climbed the mast.

These are the reasons the student failed the course.
Some mute inglorious Milton
Against windmills did go tilting.
These are the seasons of a girl and her horse.

These are the days of sunlight and high skies.
Did she put on his knowledge with his power?
Unseal the earth and lift love in her shower.
These are the ways the humble man is wise.

These are the questions you must not ask.
Was it a vision or a waking dream?
Let be be finale of seem.
These are the confessions of a mask.

From New and Selected Poems by David Lehman (Scribner, 2013) First published on Slate, June 28, 2005. 
https://slate.com/culture/2005/06/confessions-of-a-mask.html

Comment on the poem:

John Ashbery gave me the title. He had always liked it, he said, alerting me to Yukio Mishima's second novel, Confessions of a Mask, in which life is not a cabaret but a masquerade, with everyone wearing (metaphoric) masks either as a cover, an effort to be seen as conforming to some social norm, or as a false personality, contrived in line with Erving Goffman's theory in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. I liked the title independent of its source and was as turned on by the A-B-B-A stanza as by the impulse to weave in lines lifted from Thomas Gray, Keats, Yeats, Frost, Wallace Stevens, and Hart Crane. The echoes seemed to reinforce a feeling of inevitability. -- DL

"Young Dancers Dancing" by Eric Fischl [from Drive-By-Art organized by Warren Neidich]

Coming May 9 & 10: "Drive by Art" in the South Fork [The Hamptons, Sag Harbor, Wainscott et al]

Drive-By-Art (Public Art in This Moment of Social Distancing)

Organized by Warren Neidich

DATES:

May 9th and 10th , 2020 -- 12 - 5 pm

(Rain dates May 16th /17th )

LOCATION:

South Fork, Long Island including Southampton, Watermill, Bridgehampton, Sagaponack, Wainscott, East Hampton, Sag Harbor, North Haven

FEATURING: Eric Fischl, Young Dancers Dancing, 2017, Bronze [above]

Damaged Heritage Part Four: "Violence itself became part of the economic enterprise . . ." [by J. Chester Johnson]

(Ed note: This is the fourth in a series of excerpts from Damaged Heritage: The Elaine Race Massacre and A Story of Reconciliation by J. Chester Johnson. Follow these links for parts one, two, and three.)

Federal troops impounding African-Americans during the Elaine Race Massacre. Courtesy of the Arkansas State Archives.

As I followed my own nose through numerous peregrinations with Little Car, I let myself wander over some of the South’s, the white South’s traits. For instance, the physicality of the South and its racism had walked hand in hand through history. The rest of America had granted to the South the close connection that has existed between these two unmistakable features. This muscularity of the South has been prominently displayed in white Southern literature through characters like Popeye in Faulkner’s Sanctuary  or in James Dickey’s poetry and in his popular novel, Deliverance. The rest of the country often looked askance upon the South for its obsession with physicality, a quality many white Southerners felt comfortable exhibiting for all to see, ranging from racial beatings to football as a violent religion or to beauty pageants as an obverse reflection of the region’s devotion to muscularity. 

I ascribe the reason for this avowed bedevilment with the physical to the land, the soil of the South. Both Southern blacks and whites have articulated their own special attachments to the land there. One can, of course, say the love of land has been primordial, displayed over an endless array of cultures and places since the beginning of time, but it was mostly a different combination in the South at play. To the white Southern landowner, the land and black labor were joined; they were inseparable, and to work the land was, historically speaking, to work the blacks. Violence itself became part of the economic enterprise for many white planters – not for all, but for far too many. Also associated with this nexus between the land and the economics of physicality for the white Southern agrarian was the procreation by birth of slave assets, often through the white owners’ own seed. So, a culture evolved out of Southern agrarian economics tying physicality, if not violent physicality, to the land. Part of the Southern damaged heritage claimed a comfort with physicality that other parts of the country did not experience nor absorb to a corresponding degree. 

Violence sanctioned by and incorporated into an economic system takes on an authority and cultural acceptance for leisure, pleasure, and social contract purposes. The apparatus in support of the positive function of violence, as historically viewed by many white Southerners, meant the South would feel more aligned with physicality, even for casual expressions. This historic proclivity toward violence was employed for multiple generations to control blacks. So, why wouldn’t violence again be applied during the Civil Rights Movement to attempt to do the same? Subtle and not-so-subtle threats of violence, spoken and unspoken, came at blacks generally and black activists more particularly during the Civil Rights Movement, stressing death and harm if African-Americans didn’t stay in their accustomed place with visions of past brutalities permeating even random discussions about race. The Civil Rights Movement acknowledged that white Southern males simply wouldn’t give up the use of violent threats, for why wouldn’t white Southerners think their use could work again? The tactics needed to be a little different and applied a little differently – more public displays for a broader audience but at least as frightening. 

The Clue in the Embers [by Martina Marietta]

for David Lehman

 (1) A lady inquires about a common acquaintance by her maiden name.

(2) The lost pencil was a present from the brother-in-law with whom he later quarreled.

(3) In the New Testament we read of women as "the weaker vessel."

(4) In dreams embarking on a journey represents dying.

(5) A broken arm coincides with the breaking of a marital vow.

(6) "One half of me is yours; the other half yours, --
       Mine own I would say. . . "

(7)" In his great career, he has punished many authors."

(8) The primitive man (Urmensch) became the clock-man (Uhrmensch) because it was time for lunch

(9) "Do all Italian women dance so well?" "No, just the better part of them" (the bona parte).

(10) "He treated me famillionairely."

Author's note: which of these ten is a quote or paraphrase from Freud? -- MM

Hello from a Distance [by Cara Benson]

The author encounters a chorus of clacking wood frogs in a vernal pool. Photo © Cara Benson

I already live in the middle of nowhere. I say “already” because before non-essential workers were told to stay at home, I not only already worked here but spent much of my time in its vicinity. I live on a mountain, so to go somewhere means to really go somewhere. I suppose some would call it a hill, but there is a USGS bench mark dating from 1925 embedded in a stone in my driveway. The gold-colored emblem reads 1439 feet above sea level. Not high country by most standards, but I can say that I didn’t make it home one night last winter because of the slope of the road in weather. It snows up here when it’s rain in the valley. And blooms at this elevation run about two weeks behind those even halfway down to the flat. Hill enough. Culturally, it’s the kind of region where I’d heard words like “these parts” and “stick to themselves” the few times I did cross paths with locals. Truth is, I can get in my car and drive to a market in about 20 minutes. For city dwellers or suburbanites, though, you would feel isolated at my place, and you’d be right. 

As far as I’m concerned, I am unbelievably lucky to live here. Privileged, even, and in  more ways than one (see: work from home, for starters). In terms of shelter-in-place and #stayhome #savelives in specific, I’ve got it damn good. I can leave the house every day and run into nary a human at an unsafe distance, if I see anyone else out and about, at all. And shall I tell you now that my home is a former church, replete with high ceilings and two floors at 1400 sq ft each? My shelter is nothing but wide open space with windows onto the woods and fields surrounding it. The cooped up feeling that apartment dwellers or entire families suddenly home 24-7 in small-roomed houses are suffering from isn’t an issue for me. 

Which isn’t to say that I’m unaffected by COVID-19. I miss humans terribly. I am alone in this huge home (save two cats who would be pissed if they understood what I just wrote). Like many of us, I am grieving, and outraged, and, frankly, struggling to stay above depression. This contraction of living is particularly painful, coming as it has right as rising spring began its pull on my biology. Add to that an eagerness to contribute that’s been necessarily muted. Other than donating $15 when I can or checking in on a friend, as an unessential worker my best offer to society, I’m told, is to stay home, especially because I can. So, like many, I am. 

I do, however, go for daily walks. In fact, that’s another “already.” I was already a walker. Hiking mountains, trekking in woods, or bopping even trotting along a tree-lined roadside, it’s always been crucial for my psyche, as well as my body, to get out and move (another privilege, I realize).  Sometimes existential, others material, worries lurk and surge more than I typically care to admit. But then, isn’t that what it means to be human – to be both privy to and racked by self-consciousness? Which ultimately means that we live with an awareness of our death. Even worse, though, is to feel that we’ve lived all wrong on the way to that end. Maybe that’s another “already” the virus is exacerbating: the thought that we’re wasting our lives (and also the knowledge we’re wasting others’). 

Trout lily leaf encountered during a daily walk through the forest. Photo © Cara Benson

Whatever their source, the worries, I need to walk away from them at least once every day. Or to try to. Of course my anxieties and mental tics accompany me, but putting one foot in front of the other, over and over, helps me to walk my way out of ill thinking, like shedding muddy clothes across the floor to the shower. I walk and talk, mutter and hum, swing my arms, stumble, curse at roots, then gasp at a flash of unexpectedly fluffy expanse of the upturned tails of deer dashing through the woods, my approach having flushed them out. Or a chorus of clacking wood frogs in a vernal pool calls me to the edge of the soup with its rotting logs and prickling sticks clumped in defense. At once their racket cuts out. The frogs freeze, as if they’re holding their breath – and I find that I am! My head racket has been shocked into what’s in front of me, the sensory stimulation triggering my animal impulses and curiosity. 

That’s about all I’m good for, these days: foraging on foot, nosing into pockets of forest that hold intricate evidence of life beyond the confines of my solitary imagining. Yes, that seems about right. It’s my imagination that’s tanked. At this point in the pandemic (day ???), I am able to “get my head around” exactly nothing. I have no brilliant macro take nor supposition that doesn’t feel off. I’ve been struggling to read anything other than what might be called story, and the smaller the better. Please, no overarching metaphors or symbols for what’s happening. The virus unraveling our already frayed safety net is real enough without it. (I realize that’s a metaphor. Also, that I’ve already used them. I’m allowing myself the contradictions – better that than pints of ice cream.)

Pillows and cradles in the earth of uncultivated forest. Mating pairs of Canadian geese floating on an isolated pond. Moss covered stones big enough for me to hug. Shelf lichen. Great Horned Owls hooting. Trout lily leaves poking up out of the leaf covered forest floor. Walking among them is what’s saving me. That awareness put me in a mind that maybe describing what these walks reveal could be of use – something I can contribute safely. I’m calling these my daily dispatches from a distance, though they won’t be quite that frequent. It’s the idea of dailiness that interests me. Time as our dream, a malleable recurring dream (did it again). The repetition that alters with each visitation. See you next time.  

Cara Benson's writing has been published in The New York Times, Boston Review, Best American Poetry, The Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. Kevin Young chose her poem Banking for the Best American Poetry 2011. A recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, she lives in upstate New York. www.carabensonwriter.com  

Damaged Heritage Part 3: "A Multitude of Challenges and Storms . . ." [by J. Chester Johnson]

(Ed note: This is the third in a series of excerpts from Damaged Heritage: The Elaine Race Massacre and A Story of Reconciliation by J. Chester Johnson. Find part one here and part two here.) 

On author’s second birthday, portrait of Lonnie Birch, author’s grandfather, who participated in the Elaine Race Massacre.

For over three years and a half years, I returned to live in the South, but in an increasingly different white South, one that constantly felt itself under growing and unsympathetic threats on manifold sides, a white South that recognized its many vulnerabilities but did not have an inkling how to combat or address them except through either outright surrender, which was unlikely and not part of the white South’s DNA, or perilous anger that frequently translated into unencumbered demagoguery and violence, the residual legacy of the region’s damaged heritage. 

My mother had purchased a small Plymouth Valiant for me to trek back and forth between Cambridge and southeast Arkansas, but I would now employ it to travel roads, byways, and highways to towns and cities in the region of the South, hearing reactions to Freedom Summer, the incipient Racial Revolution, and how blacks and whites responded to the historical dictates that a people, African-Americans, would now be free, even in the American South with its codified Jim Crow regimens and habituations. I worked at a carpet mill and at organizing periodic pulpwood, hardwood, and pine timber cuttings off the family’s tree farm. Now and then, I attended classes at the University of Arkansas until I accumulated enough course work, together with my Harvard credits, to graduate. 

Notwithstanding the seemingly hodge-podge nature of the exploration, I now conclude that this period probably constituted one of the most, if not the most, important and formative times of my life. While painful and uncertain to be sure, I learned about individual and societal adaption and reconciliation and forces affecting racial accord and discord I may not have acquired in any other way. It was filled with a multitude of challenges and storms, a journey that many friends and family members did not understand nor condone, a journey that eventually took its course change for north toward home, to New York City. 

On occasion, I’ve used the phrase in this book, “north toward home,” the title for a book written by Willie Morris. However, I’m using the phrase differently than he did. . .That past I inherited informs and continues to shape parts of me. Nevertheless, it does not lessen the force I see as an obligation to examine and thereafter describe my own individual propositions on a region of the nation that has uniquely suffered, a suffering of its own making, yes, but a suffering also from external defeat, international economic dynamics, and conducive soil over which the region’s races have had little control. I faced the fact decades ago that this individual view, my individual view, could happen, blossom, and be harvested only outside the place of my birth and breeding, a place I cannot deny nor from which I can fully distance myself; for so much of what I’ve had to say about these matters embodies my own journey of “north toward home”.   

My attention to race during those years back in the South after Freedom Summer ultimately evolved into a series of compositions on elements of the subject, both in expository and poetic forms. Several of these pieces are now contained in the J. Chester Johnson Collection at the Civil Rights Archives of Queens College in New York City, which is the alma mater of Andrew Goodman, one of the three civil rights workers martyred by white supremacists near Philadelphia, Mississippi at the beginning of Freedom Summer. 

On the Sixth of May, Freud's birthday (and that of Willie Mays) [by David Lehman & Kathleen Heil]

Freud visited the United States in December 1929

(1) To investigate the spate of suicides following the stock market crash in October

(2) To meet with his American editor, Maxwell Perkins.

(3) To give the celebrated Kramden lectures at Princeton.

(4) Freud never visited the United States

(5) Do you mean Lucien Freud?

This one didn't make it into the published version of "Freud Quiz." But the following one did -- and triggered a response from Kathleen Heil in 2008:

February 23, 2008

Freud Quiz #5

What is the "compulsion to repeat"?

(a) the impulse to keep doing the thing that scares you -- in an effort to master the fear

(b) the wish to make the same mistake twice, and be forgiven 

(c) the reason why Hitler copied Napoleon’s disastrous invasion of Russia

(d) the need to repeat the same futile action and the madness of expecting a different result

(e) the rhetorical strategy of using the same word (or an anagram of it) in every sentence of a paragraph

-- DL

The Compulsion to Repeat

(after reading David Lehman's Freud Quiz #5)

I'm going to begin by repeating a phrase
oft repeated
and despised by those like me who dislike
repetition for impression
a friend of mine
a poet
made a quiz about Freud:
what is the compulsion to repeat
to do the thing that scares you
over again and be
forgiven
or should we ask Hitler about Napoleon
and Russians about the madness of repeating the same futile action in hopes of expecting a different
result repeat it
in repeating your quiz, David
I pretend to make a poem
because
pretender
in Spanish is a lovely way to say
you tried, didn't you
implied, the failure being the outcome of your compulsion,
also to woo, court,
pretender
try it is better than our word to be
repeated repeat try
in a rhetorical strategy
to be better than pretending
to repeat what almost was
yet another attempt
to try and get
that Spaniard to pretend.

Kathleen Ignatius [i.e. Kathleen Heil]
Madrid, Spain
5 marzo

Eyesight [poem by A. R. Ammons]

Hand printed from hand set type by Larch Tree Press of Ithaca, NY in March, 2010.

The drawings is © 2010 by James Tyler

--sdl

"Most every small town in the South had their peckerwoods. . . " [by J. Chester Johnson]

(ed note: This is the second in a series of excerpts from  from Damaged Heritage: The Elaine Race Massacre and A Story of Reconciliation by J. Chester Johnson. Find part one here.) 

White men from neighboring communities and states began to arrive to assist white posses in onslaughts against African-American sharecroppers in Phillips County, Arkansas. Courtesy of the Arkansas State Archives.

Late on June 21, 1964, the day that Andrew Goodman arrived in Mississippi as one of the Northern students participating in Freedom Summer, he, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner were murdered.  The manner by which James Chaney, a 21-year old black Mississippian, was killed differed from the deaths of Goodman and Schwerner who were white and who received close range gunshots. While Chaney had also been shot, his skull was crushed. Over time, I decided that this contrastive and particularly savage treatment of Chaney had its idiosyncratic and perverse reason. Of course, the additional, special violence meted out to James Chaney could be simply a demonstration of the flagrant anger that those white Southerners held for black Mississippians, especially those who aligned themselves with Northern students engaging in the summer invasion. On the other hand, one can imagine the high dudgeon those white supremacists harbored for the white students, Goodman and Schwerner, who were set on amending the racial fabric of Mississippi.

Rather, I decided that those who murdered the three civil rights workers meant to send a message, a singularly harsh message, to black Mississippians, a message that echoed the fiendish manner Emmett Till had also been murdered outside Money, Mississippi nearly a decade earlier. Till, only fourteen at the time, was also shot, but first was brutalized callously and mercilessly by having his skull crushed, apparently through repeated blows, probably with the butt handle of a pistol, before being shot. I do not believe that the parallel way these two young African-Americans, Till and Chaney, died was coincidental or accidental, for the similarity meant to convey a message and a warning.

In small towns, blacks had always shared with each other bits of knowledge and experience about racist firebrands to be avoided. And now, following Freedom Summer, the caution would be redoubled for African-Americans to give local “peckerwoods” a lot of space and to try to stay away from confronting them. Blacks and whites together recognized the peckerwoods, those of the same ilk that tore fourteen-year old Emmett Till apart before shooting him and those who murdered Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner. Most every small town in the South had their peckerwoods, the pitiless whites, who seemed to be authorized to enforce violently, if necessary, racial codes and who always seemed, especially to blacks, to be on some kind of prowl. Southern blacks now had real and special incentives for walking on the other side of the street from a gathering of peckerwoods and for letting them take a favored parking space, as white law enforcement officers in small Southern towns often gave peckerwoods a long leash from the law. With blacks threatening advancement everywhere in the South, peckerwoods had reason to lash out at close reminders of those threats. So, blacks woke up cautious and slept cautiously.  

Squibs 416-418 [by Alan Ziegler]

416: I was drowning in memories when my life flashed behind my eyes. Voila: this book.

417: This is about how our miniature dachshund Latte might have saved my eyesight:

    November 2014, I am awakened at 3 a.m. on my knees, stunned, pain ascending, blood. I’ve fallen out of bed. I’ve crashed my head into the corner of the side table. Erin tends to the cut near my eye and declares, “You need stitches.” We make sure Latte’s water dish is full and leave her with the usual “Watch the house.” The emergency room at St. Luke’s is relatively calm. The intern confirms I don’t have a concussion and stitches me up (after first getting permission from a resident). He is about to release me when he glances at my paperwork. “At your age, protocol calls for a CAT-scan in case something got shaken loose. It’s up to you. I’m pretty sure we won’t find anything.”

    The CAT-scan confirms my brain is intact, but a suggestion of a shadow hints at a pituitary tumor. “Only way you can tell for sure is with an MRI,” the intern says. “Don’t lose any sleep over it—they’re almost always benign—but do call your doctor soon.” The prospect of an MRI terrifies me. Take Xanax, a friend advises, but that is another of my fears. Turns out the two work nicely in tandem, especially with the Beatles piped in and Erin holding my foot.

    The MRI confirms what the CAT scan suspected, and my internist refers me to Dr. S. at Langone, a specialist in skull-base tumor surgery who, research reveals, is “world-renowned,” “a pioneer,” and a New York Magazine “Best Doctor” (I always wanted one of those).  Dr. S. and I admire each other’s fountain pens, then he shows Erin and me the image of my brain laid bare, pointing to a white mass. “Is that my pituitary?” I ask. “No,” he says, “that’s the tumor enveloping your pituitary.” He points to where it wraps around my carotid artery, and to the short—but safe, for now—distance between the tumor and my optic chiasm.

    The benign tumor will keep growing slowly, so no need to do the surgery—which has risks—until it almost abuts the optic chiasm. “What about the carotid artery?” I ask, imagining a tiny snake suffocating me at the source. “The carotid adjusts,” Dr. S. explains. Erin and I feel total confidence in Dr. S, and we like him, a gentle spirit harboring great power.

    After several MRI follow-ups over two years (Xanax, Beatles, foot-holding), Dr. S. points to the tumor encroaching on the optic chiasm. “Now we know what it’s trying to do,” he says, and we schedule surgery for September 18, 2017. Two weeks before the surgery, on a blustery Friday evening, we walk with Latte along the West Harlem Pier, where we come across what may be saddest Bingo game ever: a Parks volunteer calling numbers to two players. It is our humanitarian duty to play, and, before long, I forget my pituitary and focus on G-55. BINGO!—give that man a straw hat.

    There will be another surgeon involved, Dr. L., an otolaryngologist specializing in endoscopic transnasal skull base surgery, including “the management of cerebrospinal fluid leaks.” Our visit to Dr. L. is assuring—he smiles easily, keeps up with my banter, and precisely explains how he will create the pathway for Dr. C. by removing part of my septum. He assures me that we have way more septum than we need. (The septum, like the carotid, adjusts.) Oh, and about the possible spinal leakage. If it happens—as it sometimes does—he will be the one to patch it. “We’ve teamed up on far more complex procedures.” (When Erin said earlier to Dr. S., “So this one is easy for you,” he rejected easy: “One must stay humble.”)

   I recommend being the first surgery of the day. The 5:30 a.m. cab ride with Erin from 125th and Riverside, down the FDR—especially on the verge of the autumnal equinox—is lovely. I have not taken any preemptive Xanax, but passing the 59th Street (groovy) Bridge induces a sweet flashback of Beatles and foot-holding as we pass through the United Nations Tunnel.   

    My biggest anticipatory fear has been the possibility I could be rendered unconscious and never wake up (what could that possibly feel like?). Waiting for the wheel chair, I tell Erin I am still in control—we could still leave and get breakfast and come back another time. Instead, I am being wheeled, my life, perhaps for the rest of my life, in the passive voice. I am handed off to an OR nurse and parked outside the OR door. “We’re waiting for the surgeon.” I distract myself by imagining that the last words I will hear, cutting through the dark tunnel as I approach the golden light will be: “On my count…” “No, on my count!” “Why is it always on your count?” “Because I’m always the first to say, On MY count!!” “Damn, now see what you’ve done?!” (Now, I must make it through.)

    The OR nurse notices I am still wearing my wedding ring. I tell her we weren’t able to get it off (after thirty years) and I signed a waiver allowing them to cut it off during surgery if my hand swells. She insists that we remove the ring now: “We wouldn’t want to pause the surgery to cut off your ring.” Then comes a scramble for the right equipment: folks in scrubs being sent off in search of a mini-saw and tiny pliers, followed by several minutes of drilling and pulling, which draws a small crowd, including Dr. S., who smiles when the hallway procedure is successful and the excised gold is whisked away in a jar.

    The surgery starts late and takes longer than expected due to a minor cerebrospinal fluid leak, patched by Dr. Lebowitz with fat from my belly. Erin and my sister get progressively more nervous. Then an aide brings in my severed wedding ring—with no explanation—and they start to panic, until the sublime Dr. S. appears to tell them all’s well, he got it all and my carotid and optic chiasm are unscathed.

    The United Nations has just started their session, leaving the area around the hospital in perpetual gridlock. It takes Erin hours to get home to feed Latte. I remember that exactly 57 years ago, driving on the way home from a ballgame, we passed under the U.N. Tunnel and I was awed by the notion that Castro, Khrushchev, and Eisenhower were above us. Of course I was oblivious to the thousands in surrounding hospital rooms.

    After three days in intensive care, being intensively cared for and monitored by an array of kind and capable nurses and doctors, including 48 hours supine because of the spinal leakage, I am released and reunited with Erin and Latte. Which gets me to how Latte might have saved my eyesight.

    Mine was an “incidental” diagnosis, common in pituitary tumors. If I hadn’t fallen out of bed and banged my head, eventually I would have experienced vision problems, and, if I got diagnosed in time, required even more of Dr. S’s considerable talent. This was the fifth or sixth time I’d fallen out of bed in the last few years. But I never needed a trip to the Emergency Room. I attributed the falls to Latte—nine pounds of horizontaldachshund-length nudging me to the edge, so one false step in a dream and over I’d go. Could Latte have been trying to nudge me to a CAT scan? I know of no evidence of dogs being able to sniff benign pituitary tumors, but I have not fallen out of bed since that night.

418: If I am able to maintain this snail’s pace, I am comforted to know I will never run out of things to write.

"After Freedom Summer": from Damaged Heritage: The Elain Race Massacre and A Story of Reconciliation [by J. Chester Johnson]

For the next five days, you, the reader, will be given excerpts from my latest nonfiction book, Damaged Heritage: The Elaine Race Massacre and A Story of Reconciliation, which will be published May 5th by Pegasus. The excerpts could have come from five, ad hoc selections, which illustrate the major components of my book; still, at the end of that exercise, you may know a little about the arc of Damaged Heritage, but you would know neither the degree of depth of the areas evaluated in the book nor much more about any particular subject area that the book explores than you did beforehand. For excerpts to employ from Damaged Heritage, I settled on a part of the book that dwells with Freedom Summer of 1964, a major, effective catalyst for the American Civil Rights Movement, 1950-1970. When I now mention Freedom Summer, I frequently receive blank stares in return, but hopefully, these few excerpts, provided for the next five days, will help refresh corroded memories and appreciation for a significant moment in time, which continues to influence, even today, American political and racial life.

Most of the first eighteen years of my life were spent in southeast Arkansas along the Mississippi River Delta. In the fall of 1964, immediately following Freedom Summer, I departed Harvard College, as a member of the Class of 1966, to experience, for the next three and a half years, the Racial Revolution occurring in the American South.

From Chapter 6, “After Freedom Summer”:

During the summer of 1964, known among civil rights workers as Freedom Summer, I sat in Quincy House along the Charles River at Harvard University. I frequently sat that summer in the same place re-reading newspaper articles about the remarkable events, remarkable in their turbulence and impact for anyone participating or observing near and far the Racial Revolution of the American South. I watched the unfolding from a Massachusetts perch. 

In June and July that summer, hundreds of mostly white northern students descended on the State of Mississippi to register black voters, to upset the State’s racial norms, to open schools and political operations – all this cumulatively designated as Freedom Summer. While the target of this northern advance was the institutionalized racism arrogated by the State as a whole, the geographic area holding the most promise, northwest Mississippi, would be given most attention, where freedom workers expected staunch resistance, the area of the State conventionally known as the Mississippi River Delta, where blacks often outnumbered whites, the sister locale across the Great Muddy from the counties of Phillips, Desha, Drew, and all the rest in southeast Arkansas. No wonder, then, that I dwelt repeatedly on reported newspaper accounts originating some 1,500 miles away.  

Shortly after this initiative began, three civil rights workers associated with Freedom Summer were murdered near Philadelphia, Mississippi in Neshoba County; as a result, over two hundred federal investigators and other personnel  flooded the county and surrounding area to find the bodies of the three: James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner – a search that the nation followed with intensity and sympathetic anger.

Then, toward the end of July, seminal civil rights legislation was enacted into law by Congress and the president around the same time that the Harlem race riots erupted as a harbinger of internal combustions and infernos for succeeding summers when ghetto riots spread like viral wildfires through American cities, one after another. In the summer of 1964, the United States embarked on a racial reckoning, a battle beginning with the South as the target but flaring into a national outrage for racial grievances everywhere. With black and white players frequently bearing a Southern accent, one heard ancient outcries for – and against – rectitude.

Still Time to Watch NYCB Digital Spring Season: BALLO DELLA REGINA & AFTER THE RAIN PAS DE DEUX [by Stacey Lehman]

In an ordinary year, my sister Amy and I would have been poring over the New York City Ballet catalogue in March to select which ballets to see in the coming month. We've been regulars for decades, and going to the ballet with Amy is one of the sisterly activities that I look forward to with much pleasure. A few years ago Amy gave me her collection of ballet programs, some dating back to the 1970s, and I can get lost in the memories aroused by going through them.

The virus intervened and, here we are, the 2020 season cancelled. But thanks to the creativity and resourcefulness -- and, yes, desperation -- of the NYCB leadership, the company has launched a digital spring season, for which it is sharing videos of recorded performances. A new program is announced every Monday and the programs go live on Tuesdays and Fridays with each remaining available for 72 hours. 

Which means you have until tomorrow night to catch Friday's program (see above). Now is not the time to hesitate, and here's why: even if you've seen these programs live, as I have, you have much to gain from watching the videos. I've watched Friday's program three times. The first time I did so unselfconsciously, with no expectation other than to assess whether the experience would be enjoyable on its own terms. The second time it was to pay close attention to the choreography and the talent of the individual dancers and to be more attentive to my response. The third time I got to deepen my understanding of why I was so moved by the performances. (I don't know why it delighted me so much to observe the geometric shapes created by the intersecting arms of the corps at around the 14:30 mark. And Anthony Huxley's seemingly effortless jumps and turns left me breathless. His landings are as quiet as a cat's.) Obviously a live performance does not allow for such a deep dive into a ballet and one's reaction to it. 

For the third viewing of Ballo De Regina, I pulled down from my bookshelves "Dancing for Balanchine" the memoir by the prima ballerina Merrill Ashley, on whom George Balanchine created Ballo in 1977. She likens the ballet to champagne, so the next time I watch it I'm going to pour myself a glass. (Couldn't do that in the theater!) With Ashley's book in my lap, I could pause the video at any time to read Ashley's accounting of how she and George Balanchine, along with her partner Robert Weiss, worked in close collaboration over the course of a week to complete the early versions of the ballet. Most fascinating is how she breaks down certain of the steps to their component parts. For one who is, as I am, passionate about ballet but not a trained dancer, and lacking the specialized vocabulary of dance, I recommend reading these passages and studying the accompanying illustrations. I can look forward to the next live performance knowing I'll have a greater appreciation of what I'll see. 

Megan Fairchild has stepped into Merrill Ashley's role in Ballo Della Regina and she is a wonder. (Hot tip: follow Fairchild on Instagram (@mfairchild17) to catch her series of interviews with friends and colleagues in the ballet world). She executes Balanchine's steps with razor-sharp precision and at warp speed yet paradoxically seems to take her time doing so. I challenge anyone to follow the progression of foot work during her solos. Ashley describes how the challenging steps became second nature to her, freeing her "to revel in the music and in Balanchine's 'fantastic' creativity." I suspect that Fairchild feels the same way. Once the formal elements are mastered, a dancer's intelligence and imagination take over and they are free to let loose, to make the ballet their own. 

A new program will be announced tomorrow. I can't wait. 

--sdl

J. Chester Johnson, Guest Author May 4-8

This week we welcome back poet and writer J. Chester Johnson as our guest author. Chester rew up one county removed from the Elaine Race Massacre site in southeast Arkansas along the Mississippi River Delta. He has written extensively on race and civil rights, composing the Litany for the national Day of Repentance (October 4, 2008) when the Episcopal Church formally apologized for its role in transatlantic slavery and related evils. At the height of the Civil Rights Movement and following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Johnson returned to the town of his youth to teach in the all African-American public school before integration of the local education system. Several of his writings are part of the J. Chester Johnson Collection in the Civil Rights Archives at Queens College (NYC), the alma mater of Andrew Goodman, one of three martyrs murdered by white supremacists in Mississippi during Freedom Summer. His three most recent books are St. Paul’s Chapel & Selected Shorter Poems (2010), Now And Then: Selected Longer Poems (2017), and Auden, the Psalms, and Me (2017), the story of the retranslation of the psalms in the Book of Common Prayer for which W. H. Auden (1968-1971) and Johnson (1971-1979) were the poets on the drafting committee; published in 1979, this version has become a standard. Johnson’s latest book, Damaged Heritage: The Elaine Race Massacre and A Story of Reconciliation, is being published this month (May, 2020) by Pegasus. He served as co-chair of the Elaine Massacre Memorial Committee. 

Find out more about Chester here.

Welcome back, Chester. 

-- sdl

"Genuine Fakes" [by Rosalind Kolnikov]

Word reaches us of a competition organized by the editors of "Rococo Theory." Contestants need to complete the following sentence using exactly fifty-nine words:

<< The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation. . . >

Remember that "Ponderousness is part of the phenomenological challenge of the text." 

The winner gets bragging rights and a genuine fake Omega (or, for a small additional fee, a genuine fake Rolex). 

Meet the Press: Free-Grace Press—A Conversation with Clifford Jackman

Dante Di Stefano: How did Free-Grace Press come into being?

Clifford Jackman: Free-Grace Press was created because we wanted to publish books that are about using the readers imagination. Our books are sculpted art / a  kinetic sculpture that you can carry around – an Artist's Book. We desire to recreate the joy of looking, feeling, reading, and using one’s imagination.

At our physical foundation is the genderless and often anonymous Pamphleteer publisher that was born slowly after the invention of the printing press for the masses. From Jane Anger (1589) to Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin (1776) we adore the brutal honesty and high art of Pamphleteering.

We believe those Pamphleteer times and today’s Internet (self-publishing) times are very similar.  The internet’s abandon and freedom is similar in spirit to the free-for-all that Pamphleteering was, and/or, is.

Another brick in our foundation is the Artist’s Book championed most recently by William Blake (1757-1872). His combination of drawings and paintings with text was groundbreaking. Since then artists and writers have carried on the tradition of an Artist’s Book through Dadaism, Surrealism, and Conceptualism. The respect Blake had for literary prose did not make it through to Conceptualism (1970’s). And that’s when aesthetics and philosophy dominated the Artist’s Book design so there were very few literary stories – just visual, conceptual, and philosophical stories. So at Free-Grace Press we aim to continue this tradition of the Artist’s Book.

DD: Tell us about the first book Free-Grace has published, The Worming of America by Autumn Leaf.

CJ: Well literally it’s an answer to another Pamphlet published in 1615. We published The Worming of America as a rebuttal to Joseph Swetnam’s pamphlet / novel published in 1615 titled, The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Forward, and Unconstant Women: or the Vanity of Them, Choose you Whether: With a Commendation of Wise, Virtuous and Honest Women: Pleasant for Married Men, Profitable for Young men, and Hurtful to None.

Genre-wise, it’s a blend of historical fiction, alternative history, and literary fiction. It’s a post-modern study or play on questions of femininity, debt, sin, and freedom.

The story is told by a first person narrator -  Autumn Leaf (aka Susan Hutchinson), and it transports readers to Colonial Boston(1650) where The Worming of America (WoA) explores oppression in a Puritanical time as seen through the eyes of Anne Hutchinson’s daughter. Autumn throughout her day investigates / debates, the English Civil War (royalty and/or white slavery), the Free-Grace Controversy, and how America unified for a militaristic revolution.

DD: Tell us about the books you’ve slated for publication in the next few years.

CJ: The second book Free-Grace Press is publishing in 2021 is, Mother’s Day in the Empire State, Or, An Answer to the Arraignment of Women. Mother’s Day, again is written in modern day prose. It’s about motherhood in contemporary Appalachian society. The author is a 50-year-old woman - Constance or Connie Munda - she is a single Mom in upstate New York and a Child Protection Services (CPS) officer. She investigates two mothers for child abuse on Mother's Day, one mother lives within poverty Appalachia, and the other lives within luxury Appalachia. The release date is Mother’s Day 2021, and it is 70,000 words. Thirty illustrations accompany the book. The narrator, Connie Munda, is the daughter again of an American heroine. She is the daughter of Anna Jarvis, the woman who started Mother's Day in 1906 - whose story is almost as compelling as Anne Hutchinson's story.

Our next third book will be the beginning of a trilogy called, Sagg;, Or Life in Free-Grace.  It's a modern-day analogy to Henry Thoreau’s Walden; Or Life in the Woods. All three will be in the epistolary novel form. These letters are written by Sam Kane, a 50-year-old man in modern day prose, and the launch dates are staggered yearly starting in the spring of 2022. Each novel within the trilogy will be approximately 70,000 words and will have again 30 Illustrations. The novels are called Sagg; Or Life in Free-Grace, because Sagg is a pond in Southampton, NY and Free-Grace is the root of Thoreau’s “Life in the Woods.” The narrator Sam Kane is a divorced dad from New Jersey who is writing letters to his son and daughter about his life and failed family in the epistolary novel form. It follows Walden’s chapter, subject, and topics, very closely, but the narrator / Sam Kane, is unaware his life going down the same path as Thoreau’s experiment in the woods.

DD: What kinds of books are you looking to publish going forward?

CJ: Well, the above 4 books should take us to 2024.  But during that time we’ll evolve into publishing more author’s work because we’re correlating a great design / publishing team for Free-Grace Press.

DD: Why should poets read a book like The Worming of America, or some of the other forthcoming Free-Grace titles?

CJ: Poets would like WoA because the prose is jazzy, rhythmic, and lyrical. The WoA prose also cares deeply about the reader and showers respect on all of five senses.  And more importantly WoA taps into the 6^th sense / the inner eye with its prose and illustrations. Tapping this extrasensory perception or sense - that we all have - is what the successful poet does and where the poets’ work should live. The poet would enjoy WoA because as publishers we too have tried to boil it all down to a metaphysical or transcendental truth.

DD: What small presses do you admire?

CJ: Presses we like are –

1 – Haymarket Books –

2 – Seven Stories Press

3 – Fine Art Gallery Presses - Davis Zwirner Books and Hauser and Wirth Publishers.

DD: Here is a brief excerpt from The Worming of America to end the interview.

1 – Chapter 14, Subchapter - Autumn Leaf , pg. 185.

Nothing -

Yes, Laura,” I say. “My Nothing is a sleepy, subconscious scientific space — which mathematically is half your life. And, most important, this Nothing sleepy space you mock is a self-less space, it’s a free-grace space — a place to rest, a place of dreams. This Nothing is a blank piece of paper, perhaps a blank page inside a book?”

I continue, “What shall you do with this Nothing? Is Nothing in the Table of Contents? Is there an illustration of Nothing? Do you look up Nothing’s page number, excited and thrilled — turning the pages to witness Nothing and then you thumb your way to Nothing, and then your disappointed… wondering why is Nothing nothing? You turn the page hoping there is a back page for Nothing? Some small print, a clue, maybe even an address for Nothing? Could there be linear notes for Nothing? Cliff’s Notes for Nothing? Someone’s notes, not even a Penny-Saver coupon for Nothing?”

“But Nothing…  is nothing… and we think this is another nothing scam. We then pause and think with this thin piece of paper in between our fingers that is Nothing, we think about creating something out of this nothing. Is this the blank page for my greatest poem I will create? Is this blank page left for me to I draw out my masterpiece in charcoals? Or perhaps I just rip this blank page out, this Nothing, I will tear out and fold it up into an origami bird and/or a paper airplane and fly Nothing around? What a wonderful flying and chirping Nothing that would be!”

As I finish saying these words I pretend to be folding up a piece of paper and then I throw my imaginary hyper plane towards the Mayflower candle lamp variable and my class and I watch in amazement as it spins, and circles the Mayflower lamp before slowly flying, flapping, and floating out the door — Origin O.

I continue, “Nothing is that pause or breath between  words when singing or reading poetry… Nothing is the space between a painter’s strokes of paint that can be anything: a mountain or a mite, anything at all. This is Nothing — this is free-grace.”

---

Clifford Jackman is the Creative Director at Free-Grace Press.

Three Poems by Loren Goodman

from "The Common" (September 2016)

Bear Safety 

If you see a bear:

1.     Remain clam and avoid sudden movements.
2.     Back away slovenly. Avoid eye contact, and speak to the bear in a calm, high-pitched voice.

3.     Throw something onto the ground (like a camera) if the bear peruses you, as this may distract it and allow you to escape. If you don’t have a camera, buy one or two. No flash during the attack.

4.     Don’t throw your backpack down; it may protect your body if you’re attacked. Black bears don’t like packrats.

5.     Get into a vehicle or go inside. If you can get the engine to turn over, run over the bear at top speed. Notice the bumps. Don’t try to outrun the bear if it continues to peruse you—you can’t. Unless you’re in a Tesla or a house with no wheels.

6.     Lie face down on a beehive and place your hands behind your neck, with your arms around your head. If there is honey in the comb, lick it out. Stay silent and don’t move. Black bears balk at backsides.
7.     If attacked, roll with the bear’s blows and counterpunch before returning to your facedown, motionless position. Grab your ankles or someone else’s. Duck and cover.

8.     Fight back only as a last resort if the bear persists. You’ll have the best luck fighting back against a black bear. Memorize “FBA-BBBL” (Fighting Back Against Brown Bears is Bad Luck). If you can get to your feet, strike it as you slowly back away. Curse the bear as you strike it. If you happen to have a blunderbuss, chainsaw or taser, aim for the hairy space just below the heart.
9.     Once the bear leaves, stay quiet and motionless for at least two hundred minutes. Bears will often watch from a distance and return at the first sign of movement. And they’ll be pissed.

Tips: Black bears and grizzly bears are very different animals, with grizzlies being responsible for most bear-attack fatalities. Black bears are generally irresponsible, less likely to attack and more likely to go through your garbage. Learn and obey the rules and regulations of the wilderness and other areas you’re hiking in. Don’t get in a fight with the wilderness.

Warnings: Don’t climb a tree if you encounter a bear. Black bears can climb trees with their hands behind their backs. Furthermore, trees—having been so often chopped down by men and left alone by bears—tend to side with them.

About the Author

He divides his time between Athens and Sparta
She divides her time between time and space
He divides his time between multiplication and division
She divides her time between writing and revision
He divides his time between New and Old York
She divides her time between Attica and Albion
He divides his time between Missoula and Montana
She divides her time between Tulsa and Bartlesville
He divides his time between Tunis and Glasgow
She divides her time between Lockport and Princeton
He divides his time between her legs
She divides his time between the shadows of eggs
He divides his time between Zuunmod and Ulan Bataar
She dives into water at the darndest of times
He diversifies sock portfolios
She dines on deep-fried Rolos
He divides his time between Amherst and Mount Holyoke
She divides her time between albumin and yoke
He divides his time between Champaign and Lake Forest
She divides her time between refrain and chorus
He divides his time between Brahman and Atman
She divides her time between Bruce Wayne and Batman
He divides his time between Lawrence and Leavenworth
She divides her time between Lawrence and Welk
He divides his time between Seoul and Pyongyang
She divides her time between White and Black Elk
He divides his time between Mars and Venus
She divides her time between Paris and France
He divides his time with Napoleon’s penis
She divides her time with insensate romance
He divides his time between Cape Town and Lesotho
She divides her time between Zulu Natal
He divides his time with Sese Mubutu
She divides her time at the New York Freaks Ball
He divides his time between incense and peppermint
She divides her time between serving us all
He divides his time between Lucille Ball
She divides his time between lead and uranium
He divides his time between anus and perineum
She divides division with multiplication
He divines deities with human-like gods
She dines with knives shaped like nations
He finds apes in cocoons on Cape Cod
She divides her time between Dresden and Gehenna
He divides his time between Mecca and Jerusalem
She divides her time between Ferrara and Ravenna
He picks her up at a quarter of nine
She divides her time between lips and tongue
He divides his time between kindness and deprivation
She divides her time between dookie and dung
He multiplies his time between full time elation
She subtracts her time between New Rumley and Little Bighorn
He adds his time between Alhambra and Islamabad
She divides her time between opera and porn
He divides his time between Samaritan and Sinbad
She divides her time between Brie and Stilton
He divides his time between Paramus and Freehold
She divides her time between Quito and Rejkyavik
He divides his time between Marlboro and New Brunswick
She divides her time between Flatbush and Bushwick
He divides his time like a lovable noodnik
She divides her time between Athens and Ithaca
He divides his time between Christy, Agatha
She divides her time between fear and trembling
He divides his time between death and rebirth
She divides her time between San Francisco and St. Petersburg
He divides his time between Tijuana and Ensenada
She divides her time between YSL purses
He divides his time between two busty nurses
She divides her time between hysteria and idleness
He divides his time between joyful unbridledness
She divides her time between equality and quantity
He divides his time between Elijah Muhammad Ali
She divides her time with the help of a calculator
He divides his time like a boy in a bubble
She divides her time between velvet and cucumber
He divides his time between Barney and Rubble
She divides her time between Orson Welles
He divides his time in the Book of Kells
She divides her time between desire and depression
He divides his time between boring and beguiling
She divides her time between cure and infection
He divides his time between Prince Edward and Fire Island
She divides her time between navels and Naples
He divides his time between her and Anne of Green Gables
She divides her time between silence and outburst
He divides his time between reality and fables
And when at last they meet after all this time he
And she shall surely divide no wine before its time

The Power of Authority

Today I spoke to myself
With an authority reserved
For the wrongly imprisoned
And it worked: not only did
I begin to hear and see
Myself in a different light
My attorney called to say
That due to a breakthrough
In DNA-testing I have been
Declared innocent and will
Thus begin life again tomorrow
As a free man: all this from
Speaking with a certain
Kind of authority

Loren Goodman is the author of Famous Americans, Suppository Writing, and New Products. He divides his time.