Xavier Review 35:2

R XAVIEREVIEW 35.2, Fall 2015

XAVIER REVIEW

Xavier Review, a journal of literature and culture, is published twice a year. Š Xavier University of Louisiana.

Ralph Adamo Editor Katheryn Laborde Managing Editor Thomas Bonner, Jr. Editor Emeritus Violet Bryan, Biljana Obradovic, James Shade, Robin Vander, Mark Whitaker, Nicole Pepinster Greene Contributing Editors

Editors, Xavier University Studies, 1961-1971: Rainulf A. Stelzman, Hamilton P. Avegno, Leon Baisier Editors, Xavier Review, n.s.: Charles Fort, 1980-1982 Thomas Bonner, Jr., 1982-2002 Richard Collins, 2000-2007 Nicole Pepinster Greene, 2007-2011 Managing Editor: Robert Skinner, 1989-2010

Unsolicited manuscripts may be submitted in typescript or by email attachment with a brief letter of submission and a self-addressed envelope for reply to the Editors, Xavier Review, Box 89, Xavier University of Louisiana, New Orleans, LA 70125. Essays should conform to the MLA Handbook for Writers with parenthetical citations and a list of Works Cited.

Manuscripts accepted for publication will be requested as electronic files. Subscriptions are $20 for individuals, $25 for institutions. Editorial inquiries may be addressed to Ralph Adamo at radamo@xula.edu. All other inquiries may be addressed to Katheryn Laborde at klaborde@xula.edu. Xavier Review is indexed in the MLA International Bibliography and the Index of American Periodical Verse, as well as other indices.

Current support comes from Xavier University, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Commission for Catholic Missions.

Sources of previous support include the Louisiana Division of the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation, and the Ford Foundation. http://www.xula.edu/review ISSN 0887-6681

Editor’s Note

Since I’ve had the privilege of editing Xavier Review beginning with

Volume 31, each issue has been special to me, deeply personal whether or not I knew the writers published. Even so, this one exceeds that extraordinary norm, including as it does work by and words about so many people who have been part of my life and whose writing rises to every superlative.

I am excited to be the first editor of a professional literary magazine to publish the work of Rowena (Maxie) De Shields, a name I am certain readers will come to know, awaiting her new work with great anticipation. The story we have is one that Maxie produced early in her college career; by the end she had taken a minor in creative writing to compliment her primary studies in bio-chemistry. Upon graduation in 2015 (from Xavier University), she entered the Faulkner Festival’s national competition for short fiction and was a finalist.

Alvin Aubert was a Louisiana-born poet of exceptional sensibility.

Recently deceased, he is an author whose work is archived in Xavier’s library; Xavier English professor Ronald Dorris not only writes about Aubert here and elsewhere, but was his friend. I first encountered Aubert’s work fortyplus years ago in the LSU Press anthology Southern Writing in the Sixties, where his memorable poem “Nat Turner in the Clearing” became part of my education in the terrible history of slavery. I had the good fortune to travel with him from New Orleans to Middlebury, Vermont in 1968, where we were both invited to The Breadloaf Writer’s Conference. Al was a thoughtful, sometimes tense traveling companion, amused (I can see now in extreme retrospect) by his young fellow traveler’s earnest naiveté. Ron Dorris’s discussion of his contribution as a writer, his thinking on writing and a range of other subjects is only the latest chapter in a revival that should grow. The magazine is deeply indebted to Xavier University librarian-archivist Eric Joseph for his assistance in securing photographs of Aubert.

That anthology where I encountered Aubert was co-edited by John William iii

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Corrington, himself a poet, novelist, screenwriter and short story master.

Corrington, whose collected poems are also examined in this issue (by one of Corrington’s old students, the underground writer Michael Presti) is another late poet whose work deserves a thorough revival. Corrington’s widow and screenwriting/mystery writing partner, Joyce, has made the poems public in a handsome demand edition, and for additional connectivity, Joyce Corrington taught Chemistry at Xavier in the 1960s and early 70s. In addition, writer Louis Gallo offers a personal reflection on Corrington and his poetry.

Award-winning poet Brad Richard, longtime Lusher School creative writing teacher, former NOCCA creative writing teacher and one of NOCCA’s earliest graduates, contributes an omnibus review of books of poetry published locally or written by poets with local connections in the past year, an overdue feature of this magazine and—given the extraordinary amount of poetry production and publication going on in our area these days—one that is hard to keep up with. We are grateful to Brad for taking on and so handsomely fulfilling this task. We are grateful too to writer Tom Andes, an accomplished fiction writer and secret poet, for taking on the task of reviewing a complicated and very ambitious new anthology of contemporary poetry, Hick Poetics, published by Lost Roads, the press founded in the late ‘70s by Frank Stanford and C.D. Wright, and since turned over to new hands. Andes weaves his way through the poems with grace and understanding and offers the reader welcome ways to see what is happening in the broader world (outside of cities mostly) of American poetry.

I am very grateful to the poets who contributed to our celebrating of the publication finally of a collected volume of Frank Stanford’s poems, and the accompanying volume, Hidden Water (whose existence sort of calls into question the word ‘collected.’) For the basic review of What About This: The Collected Poems of Frank Stanford, Xavier Review is indebted to Matthew Henriksen, a fine young poet who has made it his business to promote Stanford’s work, notably through a conference he organized in 2010 and a lengthy section in the annual literary magazine Fulcrum (Volume 7, 2011), where Henriksen wrote about Stanford’s poems and stories and reproduced a selection that included work previously unpublished. Here he updates the iv

review he wrote initially for The Northwest Arkansas Times, allowing us to re-use the very best of the book’s reviews I have seen. Further enriching this undertaking, the great neo-formalist poet, R.S. ‘Sam’ Gwynn approaches publication of Stanford’s work not only as one who knew the published work well, but also one who knew the man, and was even in the position of being his teacher and employer in the land surveying trade. Frank and Sam knew one another from the 1969 writer’s workshop at the University of Arkansas (Frank’s only foray into the academics of poem writing, something he seemed to leave behind gratefully, once poets like Allen Ginsberg and Alan Dugan declared him a major new voice in American poetry). Sam’s memoir here of the summer Frank worked for him is a major new part of the on-going effort to piece together a comprehensive biography. (It should be noted that Sam, and many of the others who knew Frank from his days in Fayetteville, like poet Leon Strokesbury who edited the 1991 selected volume of Frank’s poems, were interviewed extensively by Adam Walton, whose master’s thesis on Stanford, “Toward Innumerable Futures”—the best so far of the academic pieces—can be found at the Lund University website.) My own brief review of the Third Man Books’ companion to the collected, Hidden Water: From the Frank Stanford Archives, rounds out our overview.

As it happens, we are also publishing an exceptionally rich variety of new poems in this issue, most of them with no local connections, but many directed to us by poet Kathleen Balma, to whom we are indebted. Among our homegrown finds are the poems of Ryan Burgess, a young New Orleans teacher who was raised in Fayetteville, Arkansas, final home of the legendary poet Frank Stanford; Ryan grew up on Stanford’s poems, though readers will see that her own tough, lyrical voice transcends the influence. We are graced as well by new work by one of the country’s leading poets, Rodney Jones, who has long seemed to me to be the other great southern poet of Frank Stanford’s generation (which is close to saying simply ‘the other great poet’). Jones’ work defies simple categorization, but through his keen narrative sense and his sublime lyrical instincts he may, more than anyone else writing, be said to embody and extend the ancient traditions of poetry in English.

Among other reviews, we are fortunate to have Tom Bonner’s reading v

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of Fatima’s Shaik’s new collection of short stories, published proudly by this university’s press. Shaik is one of America’s great short story writers and we are eager to have that be known more widely than it is now. One of the most controversial books of the year, one that has started many important discussions, is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, and Xavier Review is fortunate to have playwright and Xavier professor James Shade weigh and analyze Coates’s message to his son and America.

Xavier Review is also quite proud to showcase new work by New Orleans artist Robert Landry, who doesn’t live here anymore. This self-contained tale from his own family history is a chapter in a graphic novel that occupies Landry’s imagination these days, and we are privileged to be able to take this peek, gladly anticipating the larger work to come.

While it arrived too late for this issue, look for a review of an ambitious new anthology next time, Down to the Dark River (edited by Philip Kolin and Jack Bedell, Univeristy of Louisiana Press) in which a hundred poets from all over the country, including Pulitzer Prize winners with local connections like Yusef Komunyakaa and Natashia Threthewey, try to come to terms with their own experience or imagination of the nation’s great river, the Mississippi.

Since he retired a couple of years ago as Head of the Xavier University Library (and Managing Editor of both Xavier Review and XR Press, Robert Skinner has returned to his passion for creating noir literature. The seventh in a series of Wesley Farrell novels has just been published, bringing back as well businessman Marcel Aristide and police detective Israel Daggett, with race persisting as a theme. Like his other novels, conflicts and action are set in New Orleans but against the later backdrop of WWII. We also look forward to reviewing exciting new books by Richard Collins, Randy Fertel and Michael Allen Zell in our next volume year.

Finally, Xavier Review mourns the passing of the powerful novelists Ruth Rendell and Henning Mankell, among the greatest humanist chroniclers of the 20th (and 21st) century, as well as the extraordinary poet C.K. Williams.

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Xavier Review 35.2, Fall 2015 Editor’s Note — iii Rowena De Shields Mother Moon’s Lament — 11 Ronald Dorris Alvin Aubert: Romantic Appeal, Disillusionment, and Hard Work — 21 Alvin Aubert Three Poems — 34 Rodney Jones Three Poems — 37 Kathleen Balma Two Poems — 42 Gregory Lawless Five Poems — 44 Brad Richard Ten Years Later: Six Collections of Poetry and a Wealth of Omissions — 49 Susannah M. Wilson In Love with Her Hair — 62 George Elliot Clarke Three Poems — 70 Claude Wilkinson Two Poems — 78 Michael Presti A review of Collected Poems of John William Corrington — 80 John William Corrington Four Poems — 88 vii

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Louis Gallo A Prolegonmnon To and Call For Further Critical Reception of the Poetry of the Late New Orleans Poet John William Corrington—Plus a Brief Personal Reminiscence — 98 Tom Andes A review of Hick Poetics — 107 Charlotte Mears Raisins the Cat — 115 Laurie Filipelli Me, and the Me You Draw — 116 Julia Story Two Poems — 118 Don Lago The Fingerprint of Space — 120 Simon Perchik L2 — 135 A. Loudermilk Two Poems — 136 Brett Evans When In Wien — 138 Robert Landry from Almeda & Joe — 140 Joel Dailey Two Poems — 148 Thomas Bonner Jr. A review of Fatima Shaik’s What Went Missing and What Got Found. — 150 James Shade A review of Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me — 153

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Matthew Henriksen A review of What About This? Collected Poems of Frank Stanford — 157 R.S. (Sam) Gwynn A Brief Survey of Frank Stanford — 165 Ralph Adamo A review of Hidden Water: From the Frank Stanford Archives — 171 Ralph Adamo A review of Please Forward — 174 Ryan Burgess Five Poems — 177 Salgado Maranhão Earth Without Name — 184 translation by Alexis Levitin Contributors — 192

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Rowena De Shields

Mother Moon’s Lament

Coming. Going. Split into two neat sections, divided by a clean white

line. Clearly defined, simple: unlike his job (in which he is caught between two positions and paychecks), his relationship (stuck between the demands of his pseudo-wife-longtime- lover-child-bearer), or even where he’ll find the remote (jammed between the couch cushions). He likes driving, because he can split his mind like two (like the highway), and travel along the Going Road. Going to a new office, going to his wedding, and finding the remote where it needs to be, on the tye-dye end table beside the couch. He hates that damned end table.

“Daaaad! Sticky! Sticky!” He can feel gummy fingers pulling at the wisps of hair around his ears, and briefly wonders if Eugenie is wearing her seatbelt. One quick look in the mirror confirms she isn’t: it’s twisted all around her back, hanging over the side of the seat like a sleeping snake. The girl’s tugging at her slumping hat - mussing the dark brown hair plastered to her wet brow - and her little eyes are squinched towards him. The reflected visage reminds him of the talking flowers from her favorite TV show: she’s all sunny and bright with her droopy petal-like hat and her nubby face. Cute.

“Just sit on your skirt and be still, dearest.” Ulyssia (his pseudo-wifelongtime- lover-child-bearer) admonishes. Out of the corner of his eye he can see her admiring the clash of her maroon pedicure against teal flip-flops.

She’d been doing so for the past week, ever since she’d gotten it in preparation for their trip.

“It’s mauve, dearest, not red. Only rich women have nails this color!”

She’d said that, proudly wiggling her feet at him. He hadn’t felt rich when he’d had to pay for the paint covering those stubbly, stumpy toes, right into the narrow hands of some stringy- haired bimbo. Not at all.

“Daaaddy! I spilled my Slurp-slurp! Sticky!” Eugenie’s voice twists up like a screw, spiraling its way into his ears. It’s like the bluntest hammers 11

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and the softest blue sky all at once and he loves it. Even though looking back probably means witnessing sticky spilled drink (all over the seats, terrible to clean up), Ulyssia’s reprimands (“You never shoulda got it for her! You knew she was gonna spill it!”) and more of Eugenie’s squeals, he can’t help it. She’s just as pretty as before, even with a lapful of blue slush and a bluetinted smile and watery looking eyes. His flower girl, dyed all indigo.

“Ohhh, don’t you smile at her - she’ll never know she’s done wrong then!”

Ulyssia is frowning, reaching over her seat with a paper napkin. “Lift your leg, ‘Genie. I gotta clean up that mess,” He can see her freckled shoulder in the mirror, and watches it expand into her upper back as she stretches towards Eugenie. She’s wearing her bathing suit, and fat is bulging slightly around its straps. The old fabric shines faintly green. He remembers when it was inky-black and unstrained by her girth, back when she would try to hide the straggles of pubic hair peeping from the bottoms. He recalls those times before and shortly after Eugenie’s birth.

“That’s it, love, just lift up your leg for mama.” She’s cleaning the slush from Eugenie, licking her fingers and trying to swipe the stick off the other’s face. He wonders if they should stop on the roadside, but he doesn’t want to turn off the air conditioning (it’ll take forever to start up again) or leave the dividing lines. The sooner they get to the beach, the sooner he can watch Eugenie chase waves, pitter along the sand, and throw the sea’s calcified backwash back into its mouth. She loves shells, and will spend the better part of a day smoothing her fingers along their lines and pink insides, ignoring the crash of the sea completely. She’ll garble her thoughts into their curves, listen to their quiet, foamy moans, laugh. But then, her face will become stormy and she’ll toss them back into the water, shrug, and dig for a new one. He never did understand that.

Ulyssia lays a plump hand across the wheel, interrupting his sea-beaten dream. The sight of it makes him thinking of the creeping fat underneath her swimsuit - bubbling, ugly, and indecent - lurking beneath the thin greenishblack fabric. Still, he’s glad to let Ulyssia go to pot: she’s given him Eugenie, who’ll last much longer than a swimsuit body, or any kind of sexual attraction.

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“‘Genie’s getting peckish, darling. We’d better stop somewhere,” Her fingers are tapping against the wheel and her eyes are already suggesting a greasy burger. He can already see her lips shaping around one, her fingers sliding the sopping remains of yellow fries in food-dotted ketchup. Pale eyes narrow when he pulls the car into a sit-down restaurant instead.

“Forks?” ‘Genie’s tinny little voice is tentative and lovely, distracting the woman from her hunger. Ulyssia’s eyes widen again as she reaches back to fix Eugenie’s hat. She makes it so it doesn’t slump back over the girl’s face, but so it reveals the sweaty parting of hair it previously covered. Now she looks like a half-boiled egg.

“Yes, there will be forks. Buckle up, before someone sees you undone and tries to arrest us,” her round fingertips are dancing expertly, pulling the younger’s skirts around skinny legs. She’s mumbling about the slush stains still on her clothes and teeth, but doesn’t look like she’s apt to change either.

“You’re work, lemme tell you….”

“Smoking place?” Ulyssia brightens at the question. She likes the smell of smoke, always has. When she was pregnant she smoked enough to color Eugenie darker-skinned and darker-haired than either of them. Since then, she’d quit. He hasn’t, so when he lights up she will loiter by him, pretending to fix whatever, smooth his shirt, watch TV: anything to stay around. During their post-coital lounges, he likes to blow smoke into her mouth and caress her wrinkled, blubbery belly. Estimate how many days she could go without eating and still live.

“Lets go, lets go, lets gooooo!” He can see Eugenie’s reflection kicking the back of his pseudo-wife-longtime-lover-child-bearer’s seat. Ulyssia’s mauve toes are curling in irritation, creating an audible scrunch against her sandals. He opens the car door and hurries to help the youngest out.

This place is okay, for a roadside restaurant. Its dirt pull-in is dotted with weathered picnic tables and yard decorations. The inside of it reminds him of limp vegetables: everything that should’ve been upright is stooped, vaguely greenish, and bland. As they sit down behind a linoleum tabletop, he contents himself in watching Eugenie ‘read’ from one of the crowded menus. She ‘reads’ to him, the musty air and her burgerholic mother, who is 13

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attentively whispering pronunciations into her ear.

“That one!” a nubby finger stabs towards the menu.

“It’s too much for you, ‘Genie. Try this one. Cheee-see Ferr-ii-eees.

Cheesy fries.” “That one!”

“Fine. Case-a-dee-ya. Quesadilla.” Ulyssia’s pulpy chin settles on her slightly less- pulpy fist and an eyebrow lowers as Eugenie struggles to form the word. “Told her she couldn’t say it,” she remarks, looking at him down the table. “Now say: hot dog.” The other isn’t listening, though; she’s too busy tearing her napkin into tiny, irretrievable bits - over the table, under the table, between the cushions of the booth.

Then the waiter comes over. He is tired and fragile looking, with hair reminiscent of the flops of paper napkin in Eugenie’s hands. He casts Eugenie an odd look before staring up and out the window, far past the eyes of the patrons or the road’s decisive lines.

“The special of the day is the Cheeseburger melt—” “Cheeseburger?” Squelch. Ulyssia’s toes are moving against the rubber soles of her sandals again. “Can I get it without the cheese? I’m lactose. So is he.” She waves vaguely in his direction before returning her attention to the paper-haired waiter. He shrugs at her and looks across the table, making real eye contact for the first time.

“Well we have the normal burger available too,” He is waved off aggressively as the woman bares her pill-like teeth and pokes her bottom lip to the side.

“But then it wouldn’t be a special, and that means no discount. We’ll have two cheeseburger melts without cheese for me and him, and she’ll have—” “Casey-dee-ya!” Ulyssia narrows her eyes but smiles sweetly at Eugenie and then the waiter.

“She’ll just have some cheesy fries, please.” Broader smile. The server only lifts his eyebrows and takes the order down before walking back to the kitchen. He can hear his voice yelling back the orders to the cook. ‘And a Cheeseburger melt without cheese! Get that?’

“Pretty good service, huh?” He doesn’t care for the waiter, or the droopy atmosphere, but it smells good and he is glad she has put some pants on over 14

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bathing suit. Even if her largish arms are still out. Currently they’re lying in fleshy puddles on the table—Eugenie is trying to salt and pepper them.

“Daaaa.” Her little eyes are lolling about like candy marbles, and the spit on her teeth makes them glisten like sea-polished glass. He knows they’re the odd family out, even here, among the camera-toting, sandal-wearing tourists and the leathery-skinned, busted-kneed bikers. They always are the odd family out. It could be Ulyssia, sitting quietly in her bathing suit top and cutoffs, staring out the window. Her fingers are propping her chin and the middle one has a giant fake gem, colored a mottled grey green. Her earrings are bright red, dangling against her jaw and twittering with every slight movement. He figures she’s pretty, with nice hair, and a nice face lined with small crinkles at the corners. Or maybe him. But he doesn’t like to think they’re staring at his precious Eugenie, that she’s the one that sets them apart.

“Here’s your burgers, and, uh, cheesy fries.” His pseudo-wife-longtimelover- child-bearer looks on disapprovingly as the waiter places the dishes all wrong, but he makes her wait to fix them. They’re already weird, they shouldn’t be rude too. Once the waiter walks away her plump fingers are pulling the biggest, greasiest burger towards herself, and her teeth are cleaving into it.

“Pretty good burger, huh?” He hasn’t even touched it. His has melted cheese clinging to the patty, and he’s not hungry. He’s still thinking about those coming and going lines, thinking about when he’ll be on the other side of them once more: coming away from the sea, away from the vaguelygreenish swimsuit, the papery-haired waiter, and the spotty linoleum table.

Soon, the car won’t be crowded by his and Eugenie’s and Ulyssia’s breath.

It will just be his own.

The bottom of the plate scrapes as the cheeseburger is pushed into his line of vision. Ulyssia smiles over it at him, before reaching to steal a fry. “I tried scraping the cheese off it,” All the removed cheese is lying in a yellow puddle on his napkin. The glob makes his stomach churn. “You’re wellycome, Mister,” She winks and turns to scoop the limp fries from around Eugenie’s plate.

“Eugenie, let me put this extra cheese on your fries,” The yellow mass gradually slides off the napkin at her prodding, revealing the grease stain 15

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underneath.

II. “Wooo! Now this is what I call luxury!” Ulyssia’s large voice crowds the hotel lobby. It’s a small office with reupholstered chairs, a coffee bar shoved into the corner, and imitation seascapes. Its singular window opens up to the blue pool outside, and the room smells faintly of chlorine. He thinks she’s right: it is quite nice. The front desk attendant smiles while handing Ulyssia the keys.

“The pool is right out front. There’s no lifeguard on duty, so…” Her gaze trails towards Eugenie, and she colors when her mother catches it.

“Thanks, but no thanks. We’ve been wanting to swim in the ocean,” Her arms stretch out, revealing the red stripes her too-tight swimsuit has left on her shoulders. He thinks she looks silly, like a ruffled piñata, hanging loud and all out in the open. The receptionist laughs politely and looks pointedly towards the door, probably afraid to face the roiling mass of exuberance before her.

“We have complimentary doughnuts and coffee at eight every morn—” “Com-plee-men-ta-ry doughnuts!” Ulyssia reaches down to adjust her flip flop, drawing attention to her mauve pedicure. “This place is real high class!”

“Well, we do try. The maids usually come around at about nine—” “Maids too? Can you believe this Eugenie?” She tickles the other’s belly, and laughs at her breaths coming in little titters. “You’ll have someone cleaning up after you other than your old ma’am for once, like a real princess.” The attendant smiles tiredly and runs a finger over the counter. He looks away as she hurriedly wipes the clinging dust off on her skirt.

“And that’s about it. I hope you have a lovely time,” Ulyssia looks like she’s about to say something else, but a sunburnt man comes in looking angry and wild-eyed. She turns to usher Eugenie out, and while they’re walking to their room with the luggage, he can hear his curses through the larger window.

“Your filthy maids took my stuff! I had my camera right on top-” his attention is diverted by Ulyssia scolding Eugenie for something, right before the man explodes into showers of expletives. Poor attendant lady.

“Well here it is, home for the next few days. Our home by the sea!” This 16

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room smells like chlorine too, and is a near imitation of the office - without the coffee bar and loud tourism brochures. The two beds are along one wall, with a television across from them. A set of chairs and a table are near the window, the bathroom is straight back. Its door doesn’t shut quite right, and he hopes that Eugenie will not barge in on him using it. “I think it’s just darling. Don’t you, princess ‘Genie?” The younger’s eyes widen and she sniggers after a few moments of silence. He doesn’t know if she’s laughing at her new title or some joke only she gets. She does that sometimes. Ulyssia doesn’t seem to know or care for the difference, and chuckles all the same, sparkly-eyed and breathy-mouthed just like her daughter.

“I think we can go, since we’ve put all our stuff down. Can’t we?” his child-bearer looks towards him hopefully, in a facsimile of childishness that would’ve been endearing if not for her gut and crinkly-ish face. She brightens when he nods, returning to the adult, bossy-ish Ulyssia - to his immediate relief.

The beach is pretty nice, with stubbly yellowish sand, lots of people and vaguely greenish water. He’s delighted to see that its shore is dotted with white shells: plenty for Eugenie to talk to. They walked to the beach with the girl swinging between them, Ulyssia singing while ‘Genie garbled along, and it was lovely. The sun was mostly shining, the sky was mostly blue, and everybody seemed mostly happy. Once they found a clear spot, they settled, laid the towels down and let themselves breathe: they’d finally made it. Between he and Ulyssia, about fifteen minutes were spent trying to persuade Eugenie to sit on the towels with them. But she’s comfortable in the sand beside them, contently plucking the ends of her skirt, mumbling about “sea jellies” and digging for shells. He thinks she makes an adorable picture.

The roar of the sea is calming, and helps blur the coming and going lines in his head. He lays down beside his almost-wife, hearing but not seeing her fussing, and rolls his eyes up to the mostly-blue sky above. It’s comforting, and familiar - that constant you never really notice, until it it’s gone. Its breadth and shine reminds him of his grandmother, with her pipes and hugs and cakes, and makes him wish that he had noticed her more for what she was, when she was. He wishes Eugenie could have met her, that they could’ve played on the beach together and talked to the shells, the sky, and one another. That 17

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would’ve made this moment perfecter than perfect.

“You sleep?” Ulyssia’s cleavage is spilling out over his face. If he were a younger, less tired man, it would’ve made him excited. Now, he stifles a yawn and makes eye contact with her, shaking his head. “You can go to sleep if you want to,” Her fingers are carding through his hair, up and through the strands. His eyes drift close, and his senses begin to dull with sleep.

Behind his lids the crashing waves and Eugenie’s shrieks are faint, comforting mumbles. He imagines a big ship for his girl coming to shore, festooned with shells and talking blossoms, stopping for her squinty-eyed, flower-like face. It’s waiting for her to board, beckoning with bright words and loud colors, piled with people like her, lively clowns, and love, love, love. He and Ulyssia watch from the shore as it leaves, waving and dancing and crying, happy-yet-sad in remembrance: ready for her to go, but wanting her to stay. The colorless grandmother-sky watches from above as their tears crystallize into the grains of sand beneath their feet. Then dream Ulyssia turns to him and asks: “You sleep?”

III. That night Eugenie falls asleep in the chair, watching TV. Walking towards her, he catches a glimpse of someone removing their clothes on the screen.

It’s muted, and the figure screams silently before disappearing in a flash of black as he switches the television off. He hopes Eugenie hasn’t seen anything too graphic. Her head is leaning over the chair’s arm, and her hair looks like baby bulbs of cotton, sticking all over. Squinty eyes are shut, and the mouth is slack, moistened by small beads of sweat pearling along her upper lip. He is struck by the beauty of his child, and the thought that there is a God that made her so perfect: from the dribble on her chin, to the sweaty parting of her hair, to the slush stains on her teeth.

In order to still the hands that long to hold her, wake her, give everything he doesn’t have to her, he stuffs a cigarette into his mouth and holds onto his sleeves. Ulyssia’s outside, so he moves join her. She’s sitting on the curb in front of the motel room, still in her bathing suit even though he can see the 18

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goose-pimples peppering her nape. When she hears him coming, she shifts slightly over; her feet are illuminated by glowing ash.

“Our fourteenth year, innit?” He only shrugs. He’s not sure how many years it has been and he doesn’t care and he thought she quit smoking and she looks nice against the pitch with smoke curling from her lungs into her gentle face.

“I like to act like it’s something new every year. To get Eugenie excited, you know?” He nods, and watches her take another drag from her cigarette.

He appreciates that about Ulyssia - she makes everything new, even when they’ve taken the same vacation to the same place every year in the same car, stopping at the same places, eating the same stale complimentary doughnuts and drinking the same nasty coffee. He loves that about her, because without that (without her) his life would be… he doesn’t know what it would be.

Ulyssia mottles life all together in her way, like spoiled tye-dye, or something.

Things are just different with her, more interesting, more weird, less certain.

What would his life be? Decisive, maybe. Like those lines. Did he really want that?

“I can’t believe it’s been fourteen years since we first came here, that summer when it was so hot. The year Eugenie was born smiling and pooping all over. When we were still skinny.” She chuckles, but it sounds metallic and jarring, like rocks in a can. Her eyes are more crinkly at the corners than usual, and her mouth is twitching around its cigarette. Shaking hands reach up to shake the ash off the tip.

“I’m sorry about her, that she’s not quite right.” It’s a familiar conversation that he’s too tired to hear, too tired not to hear. The one thing that Ulyssia always rehashes, never makes new or exciting. “I did too much of everything with her. Smoked too much, got around too much, ate all wrong! Did everything too much, ‘cept worry.” She’s crying the same stale tears from fourteen years ago, when Eugenie first came here, squinty-eyed and different. He takes Ulyssia’s cig out of her really-shaking hands. He doesn’t want her to burn all of her pretty hair off: it’s the one part of her (other than her tears) that hasn’t changed in their fourteen years together.

“I’m not even sure if she’s yours, or whatever. You’re so smart and good19

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haired, and good and she’s not quite right - and I got about too, too much.”

Tears are springing from her eyes like little eggs from a spawning frog. He remembers seeing the process on television, and calling Eugenie. She’d liked seeing the gelatinous eggs floating in the water, away from their parents to settle in the fine leaves, with their little yolky eensy- baby frogs. He doesn’t remember where Ulyssia was, then, but she’s here now, still spawning greysorrow-tear-eggs. The scene is familiar, crystallized, and her sorrow is infinitely more beautiful than it was that first year, when he’d thrown suitcases, and lamps, and tried to hit her for “doing everything too much.” For making his daughter far- eyed, stumpy, and slow.

Now, he forgives her. She’s like some kind of dewy-eyed Madonna: doomed to sacrifice her child to ignorance, and ridicule, and everything else.

He forgave her because she had given him a beautiful child with a nubby face, a pixie laugh, an indigo-flower smile - a vivaciousness for life in whatever form it came. He can’t let her be sad for that, so he grasps her hand tight, and moves to stomp out his cigarette. Turning to face her, he admires her paunchy silhouette against the moon glow and the swirling cigarette ash and the light pollution. She is sublimely beautiful. And still crying a little, sniffing trails of snot back into her nose.

“She’s not lactose like us either. An’ her teeth are shaped different.” He lays his head on hers, breathing in her flighty scent. “She’s stocky too - she doesn’t got our long builds. And she got darker eyes—” “I always figured she had eyes like my grandmother, actually. Same shade of brown.” He looks down at her after he speaks, draws her closer and kisses her brow. Her lips are parted in surprise, and some of her sorrow-spores trail in. The others fall around the ash in front of them, landing silently as Eugenie’s snores emanate through the open window.

20

Ronald Dorris

Alvin Aubert: Romantic Appeal, Disillusionment, and Hard Work

Alvin Aubert (March 12, 1930-January 7, 2014) was born in Lutcher,

Louisiana in St. James Parish. After his 17th birthday, he entered the army, where he completed a G.E.D. Following discharge from the army in 1954, Aubert applied for admission to Xavier University, but was not accepted because a high school diploma was requested. In 1959 he earned a B.A. in English from Southern University, Baton Rouge. Earning a M.A. from the University of Michigan, Aubert returned to Southern and taught there in the department of English from 1960 until 1970, before branching out at interval to other universities for an academic career lasting until 1993. In addition to other writings, he is the author of six books of poetry, the genre for which he wanted to be noted. I accept his signature to be a statement he wrote in one of his journals in 1978: “I will be in language when I am gone in the flesh.”1 In 1985 when my first poem was published, I received in care of the post office in my town a note addressed from Alvin Aubert: “I read and enjoyed your poem “When the Kildee Bird Sings” in Genetic Dancing. I know something about the killdee, being a native of Lutcher, Louisiana…I hope you get this note. I have no specific address for you.”2 From that moment onward, we remained in touch. In 1997 while riding down River Road along the Mississippi River, Aubert pointed out, to me and Richard Wright scholar Jerry Ward, Jr., where he had spent the first seventeen years of his life. I asked him would he consider donating his papers to the Archives at Xavier University of Louisiana, venturing that someday I might be able to write about him. Shortly thereafter, Aubert donated to the Xavier Archives not only his papers, but also the papers of the journal he founded—Obsidian, as well as 2,500 books on African American history and culture from his private library. At that time, his gift marked the largest number of books Xavier had received from one donor. In 2001 when Xavier hosted in New Orleans the 21

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annual meeting of the College Language Association (CLA), the University presented Aubert with their inaugural Activist for the Humanities Award.

This presentation centers on Aubert’s introduction and contribution to promotion of African American history and culture by way of poetry. In journals filled from 1963-1994, he cataloged personal development and perspective. The spotlight will be placed on recordings in journals from 1963-1978, which reveal Aubert’s address on aspects of leadership, history, individualism, poetry as sculpture, his sense of self as a teacher, and quality as non-negotiable. During that period, Aubert was in touch with a number of contemporaries whose respective work was among what now scholars are examining as writings after “separate but equal,” given on May 17, 1954 the United States Supreme Court’s overturned in Brown v. Board of EducationTopeka, KS what had been legally mandated segregation since Plessy v.

Ferguson (1896) between people politically defined as black and white.

Additionally, Aubert was in touch with a number of contemporaries involved in the Black Arts Movement, and the search for new aesthetic directions.

Last but not least, Aubert’s position on writings by people of African descent echoes respective points of view among proponents who had contributed to and shaped the New Negro Movement that evolved during the 1920s.

Alvin Aubert has recorded that initially he began to try his hand at writing when he was on his first tour of military duty during the 1947-48 year. This constituted “mainly prose, of indeterminate genre, interspersed with a few poems. Again, mercifully, everything I wrote was lost. Not until 1955 when I began studying literature in college [Southern University] did I find out about the traditional technical and formalistic requirements of imaginative writing that an inspiring writer needs to know.”3 Aubert informs that in the 1960s Southern began offering courses in African American history and culture, and he was allowed to teach the course in African American literature: “At the age of thirty-seven not only had I not had a course in African American literature, but as a student I had never been encouraged to read any works by African American writers, except for W.E.B. Du Bois’s essay “On the Wings of Atalanta.”4 Aubert’s inaugural Journal 1963 opens with five brief statements entered in 1962. One of these 22

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informs, “The desire to write first came to me cloaked in its romantic appeal.

There then followed a brief spell of disillusionment. The final, and I hope lasting appeal was that of hard work—the challenge of trying to do something well that in my intention is well worth doing.”5 In an entry dated in 1962, Aubert issued what can be regarded as his position statement relative to the literature of people of African descent: “A Negro literature would have to be a folk literature, for the “folk is all we’ve got.”6 Nine years later, in the opening statement of Journal 1972 Aubert posits a prerequisite before anyone simply jumps up claiming to lead others, even in a conceivable cultural arts movement: Any black person who aspires to the leadership of black people in any way must first ascertain the identity of the people he proposes to lead. He looks to their culture: the various ways in which they have met their various human needs, physical and physical [and psychical], and the resultant institutions, modes of behavior, artifacts, etc. The prospective leader then attempts to determine the extent to which the expressive forms still reflect the essential needs of his people. Those that do so reflect his people’s needs, the leader will recognize and affirm as values.7 (J 1/30/72, p. 1).

Aubert’s reflection on leadership trailed an extensive and involved Civil Rights Movement that had evolved in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s. Martin Luther King, Jr. was recognized worldwide as leader of the movement. Aubert’s stance on a prospective leader relative to the needs of a people parallels King’s stance on leadership. King said: Ultimately, a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus….I would rather be a man of conviction than a man of conformity. Occasionally in life one develops a conviction so precious and meaningful that he will stand on it till the end….I am concerned that Negroes achieve full status as citizens and as human beings in the United States. But I am also concerned about our moral uprightness and the health of our souls…Humanity is waiting for something other than blind imitation of the past. If we want truly to advance a step further, if we want to turn over a new leaf and really set a new man afoot, we 23

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must begin to turn mankind away from the long and desolate night of violence…A dark, desperate, confused, and sin-sick world waits for this new kind of man and this new kind of power.8

Aubert’s reflection on leadership, conjoined with his call for a Negro literature to be a folk literature, echoes what Alain Locke had called for central to creative output in the 1920s, during the New Negro Movement and which, in the 1960s, began to be referred to as the Harlem Renaissance Movement. In the face of ongoing discrimination directed against people of African descent, Locke sanctioned that in addition to drawing from the folk among other avenues for creative output, proponents should also turn to Africa as a base and to draw inspiration.

Locke was the first African American in the United States to serve as a Rhodes Scholar. In 1918 he was awarded by Harvard University in the discipline of Philosophy the Ph.D, and would go on to lead the Philosophy department at Howard University. As an experiment in cultural democracy, he later would express that the New Negro movement was short-lived. One can look to his perspective to see similar concern that Aubert later would address. A number of scholars accept the movement as having evolved from 1923-1929. At the thirty-fifth annual conclave of Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity on December 28, 1949 at Rankin Memorial Chapel, Howard University, Locke delivered a speech titled “Frontiers of Culture.” Here he provides a critique of the New Negro movement and an offering for the future. He declares that having signed the New Negro’s birth certificate, he assumed some right to participate in its post-mortem findings. Locke claims that two childish maladies of the spirit killed the New Negro movement—exhibitionism and racial chauvinism: Once the movement took on public momentum and offered that irresistible American lure of a vogue of success, a ready means of quick recognition, an easy, cheap road to vicarious compensation, this dangerous infection was on. True, it was a typically American misapprehension, a characteristic American popular abuse but it brought about lamentably a Negro-American tragedy of the first magnitude….The substance of Negro life was emphasized, not 24

Ronald Dorris

its complexion. Similarly, it was not promulgated as a movement for cliques and coteries or for the parasitic elite but a movement for folk culture and folk representation, eventually even for folk participation. Ultimately, it was hoped, it would be for, by and of the people. It was democratically open to all who might be interested on the basis of collaboration and mutual understanding.

Some of the most effective and welcomed spokesmen were not Negro. Negro self-expression, moreover, was expected to include the saving salt of self-criticism. It was never intended that so vital a movement should be plagued with profiteering parasites almost to the point of losing decent public presentability. And above all, it was realized that no considerable creative advance could carry the dead weight of those hangers-on whose participation was merely in terms of keeping up with the cultural Joneses.9

Alvin Aubert stood on the stage of cultural and intellectual history poised between a New Negro Movement in the 1920s, and the Black Arts Movement that began to evolve in the 1960s. In New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement, editors Lisa Gail Collins and Margo Natalie Crawford have assembled material that focuses on the movement from 1965-1976. Initially, they point out how Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones) credited Larry Neal posthumously as “spiritual leader” of the Black Arts Movement. Jones and Neal edited Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Poetry (1968), a work regarded by a number of proponents as the signature work of the movement. Published four years later was Black Aesthetic (1972), edited by Addison Gayle, Jr. Collins and Crawford posit that in addition to promotion of the Black Arts Movement, “Neal also called for new aesthetic standards that would inspire and value art that reflected “black realities,” affirmed black culture, spoke to the masses of black people, and aligned itself with liberation struggles throughout the world.”10 As with contributors during the New Negro Movement, a number of writers contributing to the Black Arts Movement focused on leadership relative to history. Aubert did not accept that history should evolve on the written page simply from a writer of history who had been designated to write “their” sense of history, given a title bestowed upon them as historiographer 25

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by some government or agency in search of an “official” copy of historical development. Aubert offers commentary declaring that in order to lead oneself, an individual/a people must know their history and the history of others: “In the main, America has never paid very much attention to its history. The nation’s historians have recorded it, interpreted it, but its implications, even at its least spectacular, has for the most part gone unheeded. Also, one senses that the historians of America has been more concerned with historiography than with history.”11 In a journal entry which he labels “History as Judgment,” Aubert reflects on how people in the past saw history as judgment, and therefore were cognizant that they were not divorced from history: A concern with history is not only a concern with the past, it I a concern with the future as well, and, needless to say, with the present. There was in earlier times a concern—more than a concern, a consciousness on the part of human being of history as judgment. People were aware of the fact that their actions in the present would be judged by the future; which is to say, that people in the future—for whom the present is ‘history’—would pass judgment on them in terms of their deeds. If we allow ourselves, in this present, to lose that valuable consciousness—historical consciousness in its essential sense—we allow ourselves a license, a licentiousness, humanity can ill afford. We could, for example, send millions of our fellow human beings to the gas chambers with a reckless unaccountability to future judgment, to history, and with no doubt a conviction in the rightness of our actions.12 (8/12/78, p. 37)

In terms of embedding leadership within the respective history of a particular people, Aubert admits that he arrived at this stance later than earlier in his development, years later looking back on how his position gradually had evolved: When I spoke of late arrivings I had in mind African Americans generally, not just poets. For example, I was in my early thirties, not yet thinking of myself as a poet, when I first heard of Nat Turner. And I was consciously older when I learned about Port 26

Ronald Dorris

Hudson, the Civil War Rebel stronghold some fifty miles upriver from my hometown…I had known earlier of figures like Booker T. Washington and Madam C. J. Walker. I learned about them from a book long since lost that my aunt retrieved from the loft of my grandfather’s house in the 1940s. She passed the book on to me with the injunction that I not take it out of the house. I think she was afraid it might get us into trouble with the white people we lived among on the river road in Lutcher. And this despite the fact that it featured “safe” African American role models, no Nat Turners, Frederick Douglasses or Harriet Tubmans among them, as I recall. Such absent figures as these constituted the missing pages of history I referred to.”13

Extending his focus on leadership conjoined with history, Aubert turned his attention toward individualism, and subsequently to identity and rebirth.

He declares: “ON INDIVIDUALISM—Before you can be yourself you have to have a self to be.”14 A notation in the journal encourages the reader to skip from page 1 to page 20: “After all, individualism is not, has never been, a natural state of being—not only is it not natural, it isn’t social. Consider all the men it has driven insane.”15 After this statement, one is instructed to return to page 1 of the Journal where the second statement informs: “From the myths that civilize, to the lies that enslave—Here’s but a short way16.”

Intermingling reflection on leadership, history and individualism, Aubert turned his attention toward what he referred to as reflection on poetry as sculpture: “The poet makes a human imprint in language as the sculptor does in space through form. This supports the existence of language as a plasticity, as a malleable mass. The poet’s instruments, his chisel and mallet, are intellect, and sensibility.”17 (p. 32A).

Aubert’s address of the poet’s human imprint in language parallels what psychiatrist Frantz Fanon announces in Black Skin White Masks: “A man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language. What we are getting at becomes plain: Mastery of language affords remarkable power.”18 Aubert further reflects on poetry as sculpture in his attempt to offer additional explanation: 27

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WORK(S) OF ART—we might benefit from the explanation of this phrase. The work of art: the object created; the work that art does; the work done by the artist in producing the art object .”19 He viewed the artist in the process of sculpting a work of art as wedged between chaos and order: “The hunger for order and the distrust of order: out of this paradox comes works of art. For the order that is regarded by the artist as unobtainable in life, whose achievement may not even be desired—given what is suspected of the idea of order carried to its logical conclusion: tyranny—the artist embraces and offers as surrogate, the work of art.”20

Relative to poetry as sculpture, sound as a medium was central in Aubert’s development as a poet. Reflexively, he was conscious of developing his voice to be heard by himself, by others hearing him, and by himself hearing how others heard him. In one of the five entries dated 1962 in Journal 1963, Aubert says, “We must strive to make of the poem a living thing upon the page (even more living in the voice when rendered vocally) to take its place among other living things.”21 Years later in an interview, he was asked if he had seen himself over the years as having interrogated a private voice—a voice that turns inward and makes use of metaphors and similes to present what is pulled out? Or a public voice—the voice of direct use of language that indicts. He responded: Now as to voice. I’ve always meant to steer clear of dichotomies of the kind implicit in the printing of private and public voices. I like to think that in my own poems the personae always speaks in a unified voice, aimed more at reconciling opposites, and I don’t think I ever allow them to resort deliberately or consciously to propagandistic rhetoric. I doubt that I would have been very good at it, although I appreciate other poets who do it well…and others…who have done it well but have also done it not so well.”22

In his journals, having given ongoing address to leadership, history, individualism, and poetry as sculpture, eventually Aubert turned his attention to addressing teaching. As with his writing, he was teaching during a period after the United States Supreme Court legally dismantled “separate but equal.”

Two years later the international stage witnessed convening of the Bandung 28

Ronald Dorris

conference. Representatives from twenty-nine free and independent nations in Africa and Asia gathered in Bandung, Indonesia to discuss “racialism and colonialism.” From Brown to Bandung, men and women focused on human rights on the forward march with their own signatures to inscribe self as subject into the annals of posterity. Some writers began to produce work that features writing that projects the subjective as opposed to the objective trail to produce their art. This stance among such writers was twofold. One aim was to shake off a claim advanced by the West that that art as subject is propaganda, and certainly art emanating from a colonized people that an oppressor attempts to socially control as object. The other aim called for a nationalistic embrace of art as a measure for liberation from oppression.23 Aubert declares that “Many Black writers since the 50s have insisted too much on themselves and the world—these two element alone—as the provenance of their writings.”24 A month later Aubert drafted another statement under the heading SOME BLACK POETS: “They address themselves too much to the affairs of the world. My advice to them would be to get inside themselves more and there they will find the matters that, in the long run (and we need the long run), will make the essential difference for our people.

War is not progress; prayers come after war.”25 Aubert embraced that artists should never settle for less: Quality is Non-Negotiable. I am interested in what other Black poets are doing primarily because they are Black poets, not because of any preconceived notion of what they should be doing.

I do not expect to find a tag of blackness in every poem a Black poet writes, not even in every other poem; I do however expect to find quality in every poem. And when the two coincide—quality (which is non-negotiable) and ethnic or racial representativeness— my rejoicing is special, for I recognize immediately that I am presented with a notable achievement. Being Black in the U.S.A. (in the world, perhaps) is quite an ordinary phenomenon, yet it is extraordinary; it partakes of imminence as well as of the transcendent; it is ordinary in a most unique sense, in that it is simply is being human, extraordinary in the sense that any radical, intense human experience (such as the particularly historical 29

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agony of Blackness in the U.S.A.) is capable of enabling to the extent of transcendency.26

In addressing himself as a teacher, Aubert was entering his seventeenth year in the profession. Since 1960, so much had changed. He states: As a teacher I often feel like a freak. My students, the students I have in my classes, seem quite awed by knowledge, or by some human’s [possession of it. They seem not to know what it’s for.

They have been told—in some way the information has been communicated to them that something called knowledge is going to transform them into saleable commodities, without realizing that in order to become that they would have to become machines.

At any rate, that seems to be what they expect, and I go off talking instead about the transforming power of the imagination. As today in considering the white sun and silvery trees of William Carlos Williams’ “Danse Russe,” and Keats’s at the end of his life wanting to be absorbed into “the artifice of eternity.”27

Instead of relying solely on a classroom setting where interest might not be forthcoming, Aubert gave thought relative to inspiration for an artist being generated elsewhere: “Writer needs a motivation other than the hope of someday being studied in lit. classes or written about for academic journals—a motivation closer to home. What will it be? (p. 32)28 Aubert next turned attention to institutional drawback relative to education: our children are speaking in tongues sentences broke down, the verb can no longer hold. The bondage of the paragraph is loosed in the world. Surely long sleep is upon us. The long sleep—29

Throughout his teaching career, Aubert remained immersed in addressing aspects of cultural and intellectual history, the impact of ideas on life individually and collectively. Throughout his reading and writing, he dwelled on how one’s life can be overshadowed by those who attempt to control others with ideas, and how the potential victim could come up with their own ideas to offset adversaries. Aubert worked steadily at crafting poetry to see if his 30

Ronald Dorris

immersion in this art form could serve as a base to enlighten and to educate others. Embracing the creative act as a spiritual bond, he labored so that resultant exchange would not be divorced from others who might become inspired and, as is said often on the continent of Africa, to remain one with the people.

It is a formidable challenge to believe that we can capture the life and work of an individual. Often I am reminded of the question posed by Black Elk when there was a request that he sit and allow the story of his life to be recorded into a talking machine. Black Elk asked, “…for what is one man that he should make much of his winters, even when they bend him like a heavy snow?”30 Relative to the question, Aubert provides insight into his own journey: AN EXTREMELY PERSONAL ADMISSION I have come a long way.

I have traveled far out.

Coming and going are the same road.

My discovery.

What all my life I have feared to declare I own outright.

But I shall not tell What it is. It is enough That I have told myself.31

For those who will pay homage to the gift that he brought so that we each might sit in communion one with the other to teach in order that we may learn, respectfully may his request forever be honored: Say something insightful About me When I am dead.

Look into my soul.

Please?32 31

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(Endnotes) 1

Alvin Aubert Papers Box 41, Journal November 3 0 November 1977 to 20 April 1978, p. 25 (hereafter referred to as AAP and Box number).

2 Alvin Aubert to Ronald Dorris, 25 June 1985, Ronald Dorris collection.

3 Joyce Nakamura, “Alvin Aubert,” Contemporary Authors Autobiographical Series 20 (1994), Gale : University of Michigan, 23.

4 Nakamura, 25.

5 AAP, Box 41, Journal 1963, p. 1.

6 AAP, Box 41, Journal 1963, p. 15.

7 AAP, Box 41, Commonplace Book/Closed January 30, 1972, p. 1.

8 The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., Clayborne Carson, editor, (New York: Warner Books, Inc., 1998), 331-332.

9 Leonard Harris, The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Renaissance and Beyond, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 232-233.

10 Lisa Gail Collins and Margo Natalie Crawford, editors, New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement, (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 8.

11 AAP, Box 41, Commonplace Book/Closed January 30, 1972, p. 2.

12 AAP, Box 41, Journal April 21, 1978 to October 26, 1979, p. 37.

13 Ronald Dorris, “An Interview with Alvin Aubert,” Xavier Review 21.1 (2001): 13-14.

14 AAP, Box 41, Commonplace Book/Closed January 30, 1972, p. 1.

15 AAP, Box 41, Commonplace Book/Closed January 30, 1972, p. 20.

16 AAP, Box 41, Commonplace Book/Closed January 30, 1972, p. 1.

17 AAP, Box 41, Journal 1977-78, (entry recorded 1/3/77), p. 32-A. 18 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 18.

19 AAP, Box 41, Journal 1977-78, p. 32-A. 20 AAP Box 41, Journal 1977-78, p. 32.

21 AAP Box 41, Commonplace Book/Closed January 30, 1972, p. 3.

22 Dorris/Aubert, XR 21.2 (2001): 14.

23 Ronald Dorris, “The Word Made Flesh: African American Writing after Separate but Equal,”’ The Griot: The Journal of African American Studies 24:2 (Fall 2005): 24.

24 AAP Box 41, Journal April 21, 1978 to October 26, 1979, p. 36.

25 AAP Box 41, April 21, 1978 to October 26, 1979., p. 41.

26 AAP Box 41, Journal 1977-78, (entry recorded 12/9/77), p. 10.

27 AAP Box 41, Journal November 30, 1977-to April 20, 1978, p. 1.

28 AAP Box 41, Journal November 30, 1977 to April 20, 1978, p. 32.

29 AAP Box 41, Journal November 30, 1977 to April 20, 1978, p.8.

32

30 Black Elk Speaks, as told through John G. Neihardt, (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1932), 1.

31 AAP Box 41, Journal November 30, 1977 to April 20, 1978, p. 81.

32 AAP Box 41, Journal February 6, 1976 to May 23, 1977, n.p.

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Alvin Aubert

Three Poems Getting at the Beatles / Installment 1 in a rare photograph in a book the beatle from liverpool sits across a table from a black porter on a train the beatle has a camera he wants a shot of the red cap for his personal picture book we must keep in mind that this is a photograph of a beatle from liverpool sitting across a table from a black porter on train and not the real thing. or is it the lack porter posing in photogenic dignity across from the beatle possible singing within who wants a photograph being taken of himself sitting and singing within who wants a photograph being taken of himself sitting and singing within across a table on a train from a beatle from liverpool photographing him?

34

One more time Within the black hive to-night There swarm a million bees —Jean Toomer, Cane

you should have, Jean, stopped them. those strange bees you saw going in and out the moon. you lying flat on your back, spine sucked by old bitch earth. you should have plucked their looney wings from space. fell them from that fantastic height. nipped that mysterious drill. still. i wonder, whatever harsh master they danced to—what might he have done taking me through them by surprise a raw handed strappling twelve in the raspish milk-sticky shade leaves of a neighbor’s fig tree. in heat for the cool interior of the fig. soft seed succulent and sacramental on the young tongue. jean, you should have iced them jazzy bees.

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Nat Turner in the Clearing Ashes, Lord— But warm still from the fire that cheered us, Lighted us in this clearing where it seems Scarcely an hour ago we feasted on Burnt pig from our tormentor’s unwilling Bounty and charted the high purpose you Word had launched us on. And now, my comrades Dead, or taken; your servant, pressed by the Blood-drenched yelps of hounds, forsaken, save for The stillness of the word that persists quivering And breath-moist on his tongue; and these faint coals Soon to be rushed to dying flow by the Indifferent winds of miscarriage —What now, My Lord? A priestess once, they say, could write On leaves, unlock the time-bound spell of deeds Undone. I let fall upon these pale remains Your breath-moist word, preempt the winds, and give Them now their one last glow, that some dark child In time to come might pass this way and, in This clearing, read and know.

Alvin Aubert’s poems from his South Louisiana: New & Selected Poems (Lunchroom Press, 1985)

36

Rodney Jones

Three Poems District Clean world of the twilight field as the lights come on. The grass freshly mown, the pathways between bases raked. At the concession stand behind home plate, snow cones are being served: red, purple, orange, and green.

Sounds of fungoes popping flies, crisp snap of grounders against gloves.

Pitchers warming up, the thunk and thud of fastballs, the arcs of Cedrick Mack’s curves.

Clean world, dry county.

But the man named Moon who will announce the action on the p.a. from the booth above the concession stand is high on Dexedrine, and the man named Cloud prays for sportsmanship and good, clean competition with malt liquor on his breath.

The storm that two hours ago turned the sky above the water tank black and green has passed east. Planed smooth by auctions and benefit dinners and advertisements on fence boards, the field is like the night. The night is waited-for and legendary.

Cars beyond the fence purr like kittens drinking from a dish. Fathers on the hoods smoke and laugh. Mothers sway in the bleachers in the colors of their affiliations. New hairdos, purses, and shoes. The youngest hold infants. The

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oldest puff menthol cigarettes and carry smut books in straw bags.

Every boy on the field and in the two dugouts is an all-star and was the pitcher on his local team, but here similarities end. Except for brothers and cousins, no two players from Cold Springs resemble each other. The batboy was a blue-baby. The second basemen throws with two good fingers and a nub.

Tarrant City players on the whole look older and, clearly, drawn from a larger pool. Except for three lean and spidery gymnasts, and one thick, broadshouldered boy they call the Doorman, they are uniformly tall and well-formed.

Several already speak in deep voices and have either begun to shave or are attempting to grow mustaches or goatees. The one who resembles a young Karl Marx carries in his gym bag a picture of a naked Italian woman. In six years, he will die half way around the world in a grove of bamboo with the same picture in his pocket.

If you said later, this was the year of the Bay of Pigs, three months after the Freedom-Riders, someone would say, Mack Mack pitched four no-hitters, Dudley Mann set a record with eleven homeruns, Chalmers hit .721.

The prime distinction between the people in the world, talent, matters here more than any other status. And still some rumor about the Cold Springs pitcher springs up on the Tarrant City side. And runs south and eddies in narrow human weirs.

Until the negro question is duly asked, and settled with birth certificate, plates of barbeque, introductions to mama, and “Heavens no.”

Before the chants begin as always, “Mack Mack. Mack Mack. Mack Mack.”

Before the umpire dusts off the plate, rolls his wheelchair behind the catcher, and calls “Play Ball.”

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Rodney Jones

A Free Throw in Eighth Grade Year of the change, year of the dragon, Brown slept through numbers, slept through words, woke on the bus, a Beatnik, and bopped to the house, hands lifted to chest, limpwristed like Maynard G. Krebbs, and read The Decatur Daily.

Bull Connor, George Wallace, Medgar Evers.

Dark days settling with the light; one night he grew nine inches and the next day announced in Civics Class, “I am a communist.�

His face broke out, his set shot grew a jump shot.

His pet of the month was a dream of marching with King.

Standing at the foul line, he dribbled four times. His nickname echoed back: COACH IS HOT PLAYERS COOLER SINK IT SINK IT MARTIN LUTHER. 39

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Crunch-time stream of puberty drama: Brown: “I will ask Jamequa Hodge to the hop.�

The ball rolling on the rim: yes or no?

The young crow with broken wing he found under the pear tree raised in a box, fed to health and named Zachariah (because it was black) flew off to be with the other crows sometimes, came back, shat on his head and did not appear to love him.

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Rodney Jones

Hope Came and surrounded the trailer at the end of the Corn Road the trailer behind the sawmill with cars and men with guns, whereon the megaphone police began as he’d been taught to speak on dire occasions —gently and with sweet reason— to heal the hurt inside the trailer lay down the rifle come out and let them go the minutes then you think you’re in a corner but you’re not and love and Jesus two little cotton headed boys and the girl still in diapers no matter what you think Letitia’s done and then his mother came she said you always been a good boy Bruce and Brother Latham too after six hours a bald coach a favorite cousin told a joke until the husband said Letitia bring the children to the door one by one and give them out to your mama but him still pilled up drunk the light no matter what would happen was starting in the east like a diesel in January everyone crying to stay calm the beacon still coming on going off in the tower on the mountain.

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Kathleen Balma

Two Poems Homage to the Twelve Steps 1.

We saw that we were flowerless through every season, that our yards had become unmanageable.

2. We came to believe that flower slayers such as ourselves might be poor with plants, but still handy.

3. We made a decision to turn our tills and scythes over to Todd, as we understood Todd was God in the gardening business.

4. We made a searching and tearless onion inventory of our shelves.

5. We admitted to Todd and to ourselves, over a plate of green beans, the neglected state of our lawns.

6. We were entirely ready to let Todd disprove those leaflets from his competitors.

7. We humbly asked Todd to remove our grass clippings.

8. We made a list of all flora we had harmed and became willing to make a fence for them all.

9. We made dirt our friend, weather permitting, except when to dig holes would injure moles or other rodents.

10. We continued herbal inventory, and when there was none, Todd recommended it.

11. We sought, through pear and fermentation, to improve our culinary impact with grog as we understood grog, landscaping only for knowledge of Todd’s bill and the power to pay it off.

12. Having had a botanical awakening as a result of these steps, we tried every day to carry the vegetable surplus to storage, and practice canning in all our spare time.

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Tiny Studies (Particle 14) Assignment: survival, your own or someone else’s

A+

Because of you a ball of cosmos burst, confettied.

A

Because of you a speck of light outran the sky.

A-

Your building block experiment went microbe.

B+

You helped an ancient runt escape the tar.

B

You birthed the mutant we now call pusillus.

B-

With you in charge, the damselfly flew on.

C+

You were immune to germ-infested blankets.

C

Because of you a dodo has been cloned.

C-

Conjoined no more, two infants have your kidneys.

D+

Your stem cells sealed a slit in someone’s spine.

D

Because of you the children ate their grub worms.

D-

You were among us for a time, but then

F

you died.

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Gregory Lawless

Five Poems I Was on the Metro For Matthew Lippmann

But I didn’t know where I was going. I asked and nobody told me a thing. They just looked. So I balled up my fist and said, Listen. This is America. Then I waved it around, threatening to hit people in the face with America. People were afraid of it, the greatest country on Earth, and they were afraid of me because America was mine and largely a weapon. Ladies gave me money I didn’t understand and walked away. Business guys held their briefcases in front of their crotches and whistled like poisoned birds.

That’s right, I said, stumbling doorward, shaking my big beautiful fist one last time before stuffing it in my pocket, next to a map I would never read. America, I said, is coming with me.

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Lace For Lauren Haldeman

Is the first ingredient in gutters and nightingales. It takes a famous guide to float from the source of lace all the way to the ocean. Put a sprig of lace in your salad. Splice it to a reel of assassination footage and hold it up to the light. You open the style guide to find out how many commas are in lace. There are four. Following a week of surgery, the patient is laced together and warned not to dream. His eyes are better but his heart is bad. Lace makes the kids at the elementary school finally stand in a straight line. Death has nothing to do with lace but the end of it. I wave to you from the cresting motion sickness of lace, myself an undulation and a cure for angles. Try lace for headaches and tie it to a finger to remember this is a finger.

Use the finger to remember this is lace and the knot is a message that cuts off circulation.

Your cat will play with lace, biting and tearing it like lace is the enemy. Watch him carefully. Your cat is no fool.

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Discovery Have you seen this show?

The one about the Locksmith Monster?

From Lake Champagne?

The one with the boy with the head that exploded but he’s fine?

The dog that went to sea?

The dog on the island that built the village but he left?

The spaceship that mucks around in the sun?

How they make air out of mud?

The orange diamonds?

Africa?

The famous scientist?

Who invented science?

You know?

What’s his name?

You try to change the subject, but every subject is the same.

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Gregory Lawless

Delivery Truck When it’s time to die, or be born, or live forever: The Delivery Truck.

I don’t see it, so, go ahead, finish your tea.

I’ve been thinking that death is like a sleeping bag that zips up but not down.

Reading the tree-fort manual, I get hung up on the word rung and can go no further.

Every ladder rung, it seems, is the aftermath of ring: something struck and made to sing.

These are the things we must climb to paint trim or clear the gutters.

There’s a part of the brain that waits for you to come to a certain line in Keats before it simulates orgasm then tells your lungs to melt.

Nothing focuses the mind like the sudden news that you won’t die for a long, long time.

The Delivery Truck’s the color of firework ice cream, all starry and vague.

If you remember anything I’ve said, remember this: Avoid Keats like the plague.

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Memory Fragment Take a basket

of starlings

make sure

they’re asleep

we need bird dreams to work

for this

set them

floating

on the lake

any lake

which lake isn’t

the point

think of your ancestors

then clap your hands

to wake them

up

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Ten Years Later: Six Collections of Poetry and a Wealth of Omissions Books discussed in this review: History and Other Poems, Brenda Marie Osbey (Time Being Books, St. Louis, 2012, $15.95, 79 pages) Megan’s Guitar, Darrell Bourque (University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press, 2013, $10.00, 87 pages) if you abandon me, comment je vas faire (Yellow Flag Press, The Louisiana Series of Cajun and Creole Poetry, 2014, limited edition, 22 pages) Upriver, Sara Slaughter (Press Street Press, New Orleans, 2014, $10.00, 21 pages) The Crying Buck, Donney Rose (Left Turn Press, Geismar, LA, 2015, $12.00, 38 pages) Becoming Black, FreeQuency (self-published, 2015, http://www.freequencyspeaks. com, $10.00, 52 pages)

W

hen I started planning this review, I had no idea how I would go about it or where it might lead me. Poetry in Louisiana ten years since Katrina and the federal flood: that’s a lot of ground to cover, and it turned out to be even more than I imagined. Where to start? What would I absolutely have to cover, at peril of neglecting, well, anything (and anyone) at all? How to convey, for someone not familiar with it, the wide range of poetry rooted in this place? The history is rich, and the present is fascinatingly complex. For as long as I have lived and written here, I am still learning and discovering; now, the further in I’ve gone, the more certain I’ve been that the whole task was impossible. So I resigned myself to failure and kept going.

In one respect, I am, and we are, incredibly fortunate: I am happy to report that there’s a wealth of contemporary poetry being written, published, taught, and performed in Louisiana. Many poets live here, and many important small publishers are located here, putting out work by regional writers and ones from, literally, around the globe. With respect to the that latter point, the work that Trembling Pillow Press, under publisher Megan Burns, or Lavender Ink and its several imprints, under publisher Bill Lavender, are 49

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doing keeps Louisiana vitally, dynamically connected to writing everywhere.

A prime example is Andy Young’s All Night It Is Morning (Dialogos Book, New Orleans, 2014), with its dual focus on Egypt and New Orleans. Young, furthermore, is one of the editors, along with her husband, Khaled Hegazzi, of Meena, an Arabic-English literary journal whose sister cities are the ports of New Orleans and Alexandria, Egypt. I find it fascinating to consider these present-day connections between one part of the African continent and an outlier city in the so-called New World, as I also have at hand Brenda Marie Osbey’s History, which deals with the slave trade and its long consequences.

All of this reminds me of how much really is, or can be, at stake in poetry. We are imaginatively responding to the world we happened to end up in, with all its horror, beauty, and comedy. We do our best, and we often fail—as I will, I promise you, fail in this review. So much good poetry! How could I succeed?

There are a couple of ways in which I did not want to fail, however, and they ended up informing how I selected the handful of the books I’ll be presenting here. First, I wanted to promote a little of that wealth we have, some of which I wasn’t even aware of until I started looking for it. If I didn’t know it existed, I’ll bet you didn’t, either, and I hope you’ll read it and seek out more by these and other writers. Second, I wanted to include books that would, to the extent I could manage, exemplify a range of voices and experiences that together offer a sense of poetry as something very much alive and active in Louisiana, in many different ways. My decisions weren’t easy, and I hope that at least some of what got left out is suggested by what I’ve selected to bring together.

History is where the present starts, isn’t it? In Louisiana, at least, we cannot avoid it, in our lives any less than in our poetry. As I write, heated discussions are taking place online and in city council meetings about the fate of monuments to the Confederacy and the end of Reconstruction, while we also prepare for events to commemorate the ten-year anniversary of hurricane Katrina and the federal flood. Faulkner put it best, in Requiem for a Nun: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” That’s a fact of life here; sometimes it takes the form of traditions we love, at others (and sometimes 50

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simultaneously), it bears the form of old wrongs that we keep reliving.

Brenda Marie Osbey’s collection History takes us through the history of slavery (arguably the foundational fact of the United States and much of the so-called New World) and its present consequences. Osbey is a former Poet Laureate of Louisiana, and is currently Distinguished Visiting Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University. Deeply researched, with an extensive glossary and notes, and deeply felt, the book strives to maintain an intimate tone, through linked and shifting voices, as it makes its way back through the past. The narration is mostly first person plural, a we that is sometimes all who have inherited and need to understand this history, and sometimes an i and a beloved. The trope of lover and beloved is crucial: there’s a complicated romance at work in this monde créole, at the heart of which lie the tangled desires of individual slaves, masters, producers of commodities, and governments. We are all implicated in these desires—who has never loved the sweetness derived from sugarcane? Who has never physically desired another human? Or simply “to live in desire/ to live one’s own desire—/ and neither consolation nor despair—” But as soon we touch, once we try to realize our desire, history impinges: history there— fruit left on a sill deep into summer— my grandmother’s clean cool and perfect hands on my cheeks and i held between her knees looking up brown hands folded across her skirted lap her own so cool and perfect hands— roof-tile slate grey eyes full of memory and of longing— i long for you now— your face across generations desire

This is from “Canne à Sucre: a Slave-Song Suite,” one of the strongest sections of the book. Richly detailed and beautifully voiced, it also maintains a purposeful ambiguity, never specifically locating where or precisely when these events take place, the only clues being the presence of sugarcane and 51

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the fact that the speakers sometimes use French and Spanish. This could be St. Domingue, but it could also be one of many other colonial territories.

The ambiguity of time, and the speakers’ intense sense of the past, is further unsettling, suggesting that what appears to be the deep past could be much closer, could touch the present.

Further unsettling is the shift of speaker in the next section, “DOM-TOM Primer,” where the narration is taken up by the French administrators of the “outer territories,” who explain their “humanitarian” intentions toward their native and slave populations: “yes, to really humanize them/ a good fucking is what is needed./ and all the while we’re fucking them/ we’re giving them lessons in civilization.” Of course, it’s the reader who is getting the real lesson here in the brutality of civilization, and it’s a short step from this to Christopher Columbus, whose voice the book takes up in its penultimate section, “Regarding the Intermediate Travels of Cristóval Colón.” Osbey renders Colón as a somewhat naïve, grandiose old man, reflecting on his exploits, narcissistically consumed by both his accomplishments and his unfulfilled desire to reach the Indies. The second half of this section takes on the voices of the Guanahani, the natives of the first island Columbus came to in the Bahamas. The last speaker is a warrior queen, defiantly “sitting squatting waiting the stranger’s return.” As the book returns in its final section, which is the title poem, to the speaker from the very beginning, it’s hard not to feel that she might long to have that warrior queen’s fierceness, rather than feeling, after her long history lesson, that “nowhere is there satisfaction to be had/ and the whole of history seems designed to render me sad/ disconsolate/ broken-hearted/ and plain-old down.” The reader more than sympathizes.

Darrell Bourque has been writing poetry from and about Acadiana for a long time now; like Osbey, he has also served as Louisiana’s Poet Laureate.

That landscape and its people, though not his only subjects, provide the material he returns to most often. His most recent full length collection, Megan’s Guitar, divides into three sections: “Acadie Tropicale,” a gathering of memory poems, personal narratives, and ekphrastic meditations; “Megan’s Guitar,” a triptych with the title piece, a three-part ekphrastic poem, at its center; and “Acadie du Nord,” a retelling of the Acadian narrative from their 52

Brad Richard

settlement among the Mi’kmaq in Nova Scotia to their expulsion by the British to their new home in Louisiana. The historical poems tell a fascinating story, one that readers outside of Louisiana know, if they know it at all, from Longfellow’s “Evangeline.” (Bourque includes a poem called “Evangeline Speaks”; she doesn’t exactly hold up the ideals of Longfellow’s long-suffering romanticized heroine.) Many of the book’s real treasures, however, are in the first part. Bourque can masterfully pull together an evocative set of images in such a way that, without developing any argument, simply focusing his attention on this and this and this, we end knowing that we’ve learned something amazing. Sometimes he manages this by setting up a kind of thesis in the opening, as in “The Wash House,” which begins “Time collapsed in my grandmother’s wash house.” It collapsed, we learn, because this was where she kept everything that was waiting for further use, from food she had canned to cloth scraps that she would re-use to make “aprons and skirts & shirts and quilts.” But there were also “along the door jambs/ spring frogs and lizards imprinted like intaglio,/ little signs right where the door had slammed them in.” These items in the wash house inventory are not what the grandmother would have been likely to include, but the reader is glad to find them, if only to wonder: what in the world are they signs of? The poem doesn’t say, which opens up all kinds of possibilities. I like seeing them as whimsical memento mori, but I’m also intrigued by the juxtaposed violence of these smashed little bodies with the delicate precision of “intaglio.” At any rate, the poem finally ends by imagining how “[s]omeone connected to everything here saw” all of it, in its present state and as what it would all become, but ends with the image of “smaller basins of heated water for her hair.” I didn’t expect that, and yet it’s exactly right: this is the wash house, and her hair is among the things she would have washed there. Still, it’s such an intimate thing, a reminder of the grandmother as a person, a body, unlike anything else in the poem, that it suddenly makes the whole catalogue quite moving, even those crushed frogs and lizards that she probably never noticed.

Bourque’s most recent publication is a chapbook called If You Abandon Me, Comment je vas faire: An Amédé Ardoin Songbook. Ardoin (18981942) was an extraordinary and very influential early zydeco player, with a 53

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trademark high wailing voice, full of piercing emotion. Trust me, you don’t need to know any French to fully understand the pain in his saddest songs: just listen. Little biographical information exists about Ardoin, who died in a mental hospital in Pineville; earlier in his life, he apparently suffered a horrible beating and he may have been poisoned. It’s a tragic and compelling story about art, work, money, loneliness, and madness. In telling it, Bourque makes a wise and artful decision: the first fourteen of the sequence’s fifteen poems (all loosely metered, unrhymed sonnets) are in the voices of other people who knew Ardoin, most based on real people, some imagined by the poet. The final, fifteenth poem is the tour de force of the set: a poem, in Cajun French, presented as a song by Ardoin. The effect is more haunting than I can convey in this brief space—so please, seek out this little marvel and read it.

Chapbooks, at their best, are little marvels, but I can imagine many readers wondering why they even exist. Why publish a little booklet when you can publish a full-sized paperweight of paper? I’ll first note that some of my most prized objects in my library are chapbooks, because most publishers who produce them take pride in making them special—indeed, more special than most “normal” books. I have some printed on a letterpress, several that are bound with hand-stitching, one oversized beauty with a rivet-bound vinyl cover. All of this also makes reading the chapbook a special experience: the object makes you want to hold it and open it up.

Chapbooks, however, don’t usually receive reviews, and I would like to make a small gesture toward correcting that by highlighting three other local chapbooks. The first at hand is Upriver: Poems, linked prose poems by Sara Slaughter with gorgeous woodcuts by Layla Ardalan. It’s part of a series produced by Press Street, the decade-old visual art and literature collective that has been a huge part of the post-Katrina artistic resurgence in New Orleans.

Upriver declares itself to be poems, but it’s also a sort of hybrid text that makes new an old genre, the character sketch, while lyrically sketching out another character, the landscape of and surrounding New Orleans. The character is Roosevelt, a man of indeterminate age who lives in the Irish Channel, used to work in a lumberyard, and has found work (it seems temporary, as do most things in Roosevelt’s life) as a seafood inspector for the National Oceanic 54

Brad Richard

and Atmospheric Administration. We know him almost entirely through his sense of smell.

Roosevelt’s training for his job disorders his sense of self—“Maybe the tests were for memory, for how things were. Others kept swearing they were being honest to god fucked with.”—and brings out the poet in him. One stink calls up another ambiguous scent; the lake’s “half sulfur, half molasses” smell he tries to block by recirculating the air in his car recirculates the memory of the family car from his childhood, on their way to church camp, “the last quarter-mile of the drive smelling like French toast.” Somewhat adrift in his life (his new job “might be just fine for a while”), he’s anchored through every perception to his past, to what he’s lost, and to what he wants but never seems to seek. Right now, though, he doesn’t need to seek, just smell, remember, categorize, compare. This olfactory epistemologist could be a figure in a Wallace Stevens poem, and even though I worry about how things will fare for him (the book’s final image is of an abandoned flannel couch “that smells of all the season’s rain” and sits on a pile of gravel that mysteriously grows higher day by day), I loved every minute I spent smelling through his nose.

Donney Rose’s The Crying Buck is another exceptionally beautiful literary object. Published by Next Left Press in Ascension, LA, this handmade gem was designed by the press’s editor, Geoff Munsterman, an important member of the local scene, both as a poet (his debut, Because the Stars Shine Through It, came out from Lavender Ink in 2013) and lately as a publisher and designer.

Left Press’ mission is to publish “imperfect, handmade chapbooks… that reflect the content of the poetry as well as the personality of the poet,” with profits going to the poets “because we’re poets.” Collaborative and cooperative ventures like Left Press and Press Street are vital; not only do they support local writers through publication, they and the non-profits they’re part of are also deeply involved in their communities, offering workshops, hosting readings, and nurturing a literary community. Along with educational endeavors like Forward Arts in Baton Rouge (which Donney Rose co-directs with Chancelier Skidmore) and Big Class in New Orleans, both of which provide support and teaching in literacy and writing for young people, these ventures ensure that a wide range of voices are encouraged and promoted.

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Donney Rose may describe his own poetic voice in the final strophe of the last poem in The Crying Buck, “Black Boy Soul Music”: Black boy soul music sounds like if a heart breaks in a war zone and there’s no one around does it actually shatter it does all the time but Black boy soul music knows you’re not really listening wants to change the melody wants a different harmony wants some kinda harmony

It’s a voice perfectly in control of every syllable, every hook and anaphora, every emotional and rhetorical torque. This highly controlled voice is also vulnerable; it wants to be hopeful, but it knows too much. It does some of the grimmest, and most insightful, humor I’ve read in a long time. In some poems, I hear the voice of an introvert compelled to become an extrovert because he had to be heard (Rose is a highly regarded performance poet).

These poems have things to say, but most of all, they want to us to see, feel, and think about things as they actually are, without the distortions of anyone’s agenda or bias.

The Crying Buck is full of incredibly quotable moments; I’ll offer one short poem in full and urge you to read the whole chapbook.

King Kong’s Fear Your tears bring the nooses out bring the bloodhounds out bring the mob out bring the pink slips out bring the precinct line up bring the shears out

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My penis comes from a lineage of severed penises stuffed into mouths like mine while limbs like mine swung lifeless behind your tears When you cry wolf whole villages of me become bones licked clean we do not share twin plights we never have we never will

Becoming Black, by FreeQuency (the publishing and performance name of Mwende Katwiwa, aka FreeQ tha Mighty), is another beautiful Geoff Munsterman production. A self-published work, it is available through her website, www.FreeQuencySpeaks.com. Framed by her understanding, as an American daughter of African immigrants, of W.E.B. DuBois’s “double consciousness,” Becoming Black explores every facet of her awareness of being black in a society defined by whiteness. These are direct, sometimes didactic poems, their lesson being both what the speaker has learned and what she wants us to pay attention to in the world. The titles say a lot, especially with their contrasted pairings, reminiscent of Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and Experience”: “too black,” “not black enough”; “my father’s lesson,” “my father’s joke”; “when the little white girl called me and Mo niggers,” “when my white co-worker in college called me a nigger [parts I, II, III]”. At the heart of the book is “the seven deadly American sins—a tribute to Trayvon Martin,” a powerful poem that reminds us of the life-and-death significance of race in 21st century America. About midway through, the poem’s speaker says “it’s funny/ how some things are so/ Black and white/ while others/ taste just like the rainbow,” then goes on to connect primary colors to elements of Martin’s murder (red for his blood on the sidewalk, green for grass stains on 57

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his pants), then to “white// for the privilege Zimmerman wore”, then and Black?

Black is just another name for numbers one through six of America’s seven deadly sins the seventh was ever believing we would find justice

And this brings us full circle to Brenda Marie Osbey’s History.

I was joking with a friend that I feel like I’ve covered so little of what I originally planned to, I’ll have to stand on Claiborne Ave with a sign saying “I’M SORRY I DIDN’T WRITE ABOUT YOUR BOOK.” My guilt (which is truly only half in jest) tells me a few things. It confirms what I said at the start, that right here where we live, there is a wealth of poetry deserving of our attention. But if it’s going to get our attention these days, generally the poet has to work for it, by giving readings and signings and participating in festivals and doing workshops. All of that is rewarding, but it’s also hard, mostly unpaid work. So, as my friend suggested, what we also need are more reviewers and advocates for poetry.

I hope the resource list appended here will prove useful for potential reviewers and for anyone hungry for more local poetry, or more information about Louisiana literature. (It is limited; if you see omissions that should be corrected, please email me at richard.brad@gmail.com.) Let other readers know what’s out there, what got under your skin, for better or worse.

“Goodreads” is fine for what it is (that is, yet another one of Jeff Bezos’s many libertarian limbs), but why not step up and write something worth submitting to an actual literary journal, online or in print? Or why not start a poetry-reviewing blog? Poets and their readers will be grateful. We need to find one another.

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Louisiana Poetry: A Selected Resource List

General Reference and History: N.O. Lit: 200 Years of New Orleans Literature, ed. Nancy Dixon (Lavender Ink, 2013) The Booklover’s Guide to New Orleans, Susan Larson (LSU Press, 2013)

Website: Louisiana Poetry Project, http://louisianapoetryproject.org/

Communities: Places where readers and writers connect in various ways.

Ashé Cultural Center, 1712 Oretha Castle Haley Blvd, New Orleans, www.ashecac.org Black Star Books and Caffe, 800 Belleville St., New Orleans, www.facebook.com/ BlackStarCaffe/ Blood Jet Poetry Series, BJ’s in the Bywater, 4301 Burgundy, New Orleans, http://bloodjetpoetry.blogspot.com/ Community Book Center, 2523 Bayou Road, New Orleans, www.communitybookcenter. com Maple Leaf Bar Poetry Series, 8136 Oak St., New Orleans, every Sunday at 3 PM, http://www.mapleleafbar.com/poetry-maple-leaf-bar-new-orleans Press Street, www.press-street.org Team Slam New Orleans, https://www.facebook.com/TeamSNO And this list would be very incomplete without Mark Folse’s amazing Odd Words, a frequently updated listing of literary events in New Orleans, on Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/pages/Odd-Words/, and at http://toulousestreet.net/.

Publishers: Black Widow Press Lavender Ink Louisiana State University Press Next Left Press Portals Press Press Street Press Trembling Pillow Press University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press 59

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Journals: Bayou, www.bayoumagazine.org New Orleans Review, www.neworleansreview.org Quaint, A Quarterly Women’s Magazine, www.quaintmagazine.com Louisiana Literature, www.louisianaliterature.org The Southern Review, www.thesouthernreview.org Xavier Review, www.xavierreviewpress.edu

Books (Note: this is a very selective list of one book per writer.)

Ever, Ralph Adamo (Lavender Ink, 2014) Bone-Hollow, True: New and Selected Poems (Texas Review Press, 2013), Jack Bedell In Ordinary Light: New and Selected Poems, Darrell Bourque (University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press, 2010) The Secret Brain: Poems 1995-2012, David Brinks (Black Widow Press, 2012) Commitment, Megan Burns (Lavender Ink, 2015) A Ship on the Line, Vincent Cellucci and Christopher Shipman (Unlikely Books, 2014) Roach Opera, Christian Champagne (Portals Press, 2007) Breach, Nicole Cooley (LSU Press, 2010) Night Bus to the Afterlife, Peter Cooley (Carnegie Mellon, 2014) Industrial Loop, Joel Dailey (Lavender Ink, 2015) The Lily Will, Melissa Dickey (Rescue Press, 2011) I Love This American Way of Life, Brett Evans (Trembling Pillow Press, 2013) Amber Porch Light, Gina Ferrara (WordTech, 2013) Cineplex, Dennis Formento (Paper Press, 2014) A Swarm of Bees in High Court, Tonya M. Foster (Belladonna*, 2015) Downtown, Lee Meitzen Grue (Trembling Pillow Press, 2011) Pop Corpse!, Laura Glenum (Action Books, 2013) Beauty Eating Beauty, Nancy Harris (Portals Press, 2013) Eldest Daughter, Ava Leavell Haymon (LSU Press, 2013) Skinny, Carolyn Hembree (Kore Press, 2012) Paper Bullets, Julie Kane (White Violet Press, 2013) Memory Wing, Bill Lavender (Black Widow Press, 2011) Bone River, Benjamin Lowenkron (Ampersand Books, 2014) Human Crutches, Damon Ferrell Marbut (BareBackPress, 2014) Coronary, Benjamin Morris (Fitzgeral Letterpress, New Orleans, 2011; limited edition) Enduring Freedom, Laura Mullen (Otis Books/Seismicity Editions, 2012) Because the Stars Shine Through It, Geoff Munsterman (Lavender Ink, 2013) 60

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City without People: The Katrina Poems, Niyi Osundare (Black Widow Press, 2011) How Fire Is a Story, Waiting, Melinda Palacio (Tia Chicha Press, 2012) Hurricane Party, Alison Pelegrin (University of Akron Press, 2011) Geometry of the Heart, Valentine Pierce (Portals Press, 2007) Nights Reading: Richard Burton’s Thousand and One, Marthe Reed (Lavender Ink, 2014) Motion Studies, Brad Richard (The Word Works, 2011) Second Line Home, Mona Lisa Saloy (Truman State University Press, 2014) Song of Praise, John Sinclair (Trembling Pillow Press, 2011) upBEAT, DOWNbeat, Chacelier “Xero” Skidmore (Next Left Press, 2015) Rough Day, Ed Skoog (Copper Canyon Press, 2013) To the Heart of the World, Andy Stallings (Rescue Press, 2014) Mere NOLA, Chris Sullivan (Lavender Ink, 2011) Aesthesia Balderdash, Kim Vodicka (Trembling Pillow Press, 2012) The Katrina Paper: A Book of Trauma and Recovery, Jerry Ward (UNO Press, 2008) Clarity Speaks of a Crystal Sea, Afton Wilky (Film Forum Press, 2014) Green Zone New Orleans, Mark Yakich (Press Street, 2008) —assembled by Brad Richard

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Susannah M. Wilson

In Love with Her Hair

Who does that blond woman think she is, I would ask myself, Sunday

after Sunday, sitting in my pew near the back of the sanctuary. That woman, her blond hair down to her elbows! Does she attend my 11:30 Mass so she can shine among our gray-haired parishioners? Sometimes, I felt then, worshipping at St. James Episcopal was not as satisfying as it might be.

I don’t know her name. Since my husband, Tom, died, two years ago, I haven’t been active in the parish. I now wear my hair brunette, but it’s infuriating to think that when I met Tom, my own hair was the same shade as that woman’s. Tom loved the way I would let a front strand swing out like a curtain to touch his arm.

For a long time, I never glimpsed her entire face, though I recognized her old-style, movie-star glamour. From behind or in profile, she appears to be 25, but I was convinced she is at least 50. There was something about her obvious self-satisfaction, her proud grace, that tormented me. That is, until several months ago. I confess that my own skin has a certain ripe quality.

“Aunt Isabella,” my nieces once said to me, looking at an old snapshot, “you used to be pretty!”

Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid:…

I love my traditional old church, the statues of the saints in their niches, the damask altar cloth, the candles with flames quivering like beacons. On the carved wooden crucifix, Christ’s garment is brushed with gold, Florentine style. In this worshipful setting, the blond woman often remains on her knees after the service. Is she mourning a deceased spouse, or is she the widow parishioners call “the southern planter” because she has buried three husbands?

She’s not so inwardly focused, however, that she doesn’t readjust her 62

jacket after everyone has passed the peace, when we greet each other in the name of the Lord. She wears one blue skirt as if she were followed by a runway spotlight. What is so wonderful about that skirt on her, I’d like to know? Well, I should talk. Sometimes I slide to the edge of my seat to pray instead of kneeling, rather than spoil the creases in my good pants.

And to all thy people give thy heavenly grace…

I wondered if my negative thoughts were conveyed from where I sit, twenty rows behind her. Once, as we both approached the red door at the church entrance, her hand made a small brushing motion, as if dismissing me. Recalling the incident afterwards made me heavy, almost sick in my stomach. Driving back to my house in the city’s Midtown, I felt a shadow on my heart, which I couldn’t explain.

Now, however, those old patterns belong to a previous chapter in my life.

Several months ago, I arranged for an ancient black oak in the front yard to be removed. Its shade obscured my view when I backed down the driveway, and I was afraid of being hit from behind—or that the tree might collapse onto the drive.

So the oak came down, leaving a raw, smoothly planed stump surrounded by snowy sawdust. I had always experienced the tall tree as a presence above my head. But I gave the oak extra water when its large, papery leaves littered the lawn for two Julys past. The felling, I discovered, revealed a hole at the core. After the first phase, the tree man agreed to come back the following week to split the rings into firewood.

That day, I found a dead opossum lying on his side in the driveway.

His prehensile tail, a sickly pink, was curled, and his teeth were frozen in a wicked little grin. Perhaps the tree man had run over the creature. Surely, I thought, this opossum wasn’t meant for me. What could it have been trying to tell me, I wondered. I could hardly wait to ask the yard man to dispose of the loathsome symbol.

Recently, after withdrawing from social activities for a while, I felt ready to venture down my driveway and out into the wider world. One evening 63

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my friend George and I were on our way to dinner. Of course, George can’t hold a candle to Tom—his warmth, his humor, our closeness. George was driving that night; I would be paying for dinner, since he is always short of cash. As irritating as this arrangement is, a woman in my situation—no longer young—can’t be too particular about her escorts. George is trim and distinguished-looking, and I’m never ashamed to be seen with him. He moves like silk on the dance floor. When we are dancing together, I amaze myself.

George is so discreet that few people suspect his relationship with Sam. I try not to think about the two of them together. And then Corky, another of their friends, was always part of the picture. On that subject, I once did George a terrible wrong, which I trusted would never come to light. Certainly, I never planned to tell him, although I occasionally revisited this decision.

That night, just as we passed a strip of shops on a tense city thoroughfare, I heard behind us a stuttering squeal of brakes. Then came a crash, a highpitched wall of sound. High hell. The noise, like a menacing wave, enveloped me from behind. People blocks away must surely have heard it. Despite our seat belts, the impact flung us forward, then hurled us backwards. Our seats collapsed, and we found ourselves lying on our backs like crash dummies, still strapped in.

“George! Are you all right?” I asked.

George felt his arms and legs. “I think so. Are you?”

“My neck! So this is what they mean when they talk about whiplash!”

“What happened to our glasses?”

“I don’t know.” How could I read the newspaper without my glasses, I wondered.

I rolled down the window—miraculously, the mechanism worked perfectly—aware that each sound around us seemed heightened and distinct.

From the driver of the other car, loud, prolonged groans bloomed out. I could also hear the same four-beat measure coming from some nearby bar. I wished intensely that I could erase everything that had just happened.

“Thank God, you were driving your sedan, George!” From the front seat, I couldn’t tell what had happened to the back of his car. I wasn’t sure my neck would work.

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We struggled to adjust our seats, and soon revolving blue lights flashed in the side mirror. George, moving carefully, got out to talk to the officer. I remained in the car. My hands kept jerking as if I were hammering chords upon an invisible keyboard. Cars peeled off around us, stopping for the light ahead, speeding off again. As I sat there, I realized that something had happened to the rear-view mirror. I kept glancing up, expecting it to materialize. Everything— the car interior, the street, the rushing traffic—seemed unfamiliar.

A young man peered in. “I saw what happened from that restaurant. I’m an intern at the hospital,” he said. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

“Please help us find our glasses,” I said.

He searched the floor, then got into the back seat and came up with both pairs.

“Thank you,” I said, hoping I wouldn’t cry. “It was very kind of you to interrupt your dinner.”

I sensed the commotion of an ambulance behind us, retrieving the other driver. In a few minutes, the paramedics strapped me onto a stretcher and rolled me toward another vehicle’s flashing red lights. George rode to the emergency room in the police car.

I remember that night as a confusing jumble of questions and beeping machines and medical tests. George’s Buick was totalled. The driver who ran into us, a man in his eighties, I learned, owned an antique green Comet. To my mind, we might as well have been hit by an actual comet.

The hospital released me the next morning, and I was given a soft neck collar that encouraged me to face straight ahead. George and I took a taxi home. He half-heartedly offered to stay with me, but I was glad to be alone.

I wanted to sit in my wing chair opposite Tom’s and be quiet within myself. I found Tom’s favorite recording of sacred choral music and sat for quite a while listening to the clear voices that transported me to my pew in the church on a candlelit Christmas Eve. Before long, I had lost myself in the singers’ soaring bell tones. That morning, a rectangular patch of sunlight on a corner of the Oushak lengthened and crept toward me. The sun intensified the carpet’s warm colors, and I experienced a sense of calm, away from the darkness. Almost erasing the memory of a troubling past incident.

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The day after the wreck, I called the hospital and learned that the other driver was in the intensive care unit. On a trip to the grocery store, I kept glancing in the rear-view mirror, steeled for the sound of a crash. Dread from behind. I understood that I had narrowly avoided stepping into a gaping canyon.

George would never admit that we might have lost our lives, or worse, if we had been riding in a smaller car.

At home, I placed the bag of groceries near the patio window. Outside, perched with impunity on my wrought-iron table, a stray cat made eye contact through the glass as he gulped something down. To my horror, I saw a few blue feathers at his feet. It was then that Corky and the worrisome incident came forward. A guilty conscience, they say, hears footsteps everywhere.

Apparently even on the patio.

George dropped by a few nights later with Mongolian beef from a local restaurant. I rather dreaded his coming, for my secret had taken on a certain insistence. George was looking for another car and complaining about the insurance settlement.

“Just be grateful to your old car,” I told him, over drinks in the library.

“Don’t you recognize that we’ve received a knock at the door?”

“Isabella, you’re over the top with this. You may believe in that hoo-ha, but I don’t!”

We tried to talk about a party for Corky, who would soon be leaving for Europe.

“He wouldn’t even notice if I didn’t show up,” George said.

“Oh, he’d notice,” I said.

My fingertips cradled the sweating highball glass. I was poised to leap, not knowing where I would land, but I had to set the record straight. (“And from whom no secrets are hid,” as the prayer reminded me.) Yes, my transgression was known. Perhaps confessing what I had done would help me scrub the boards and clear the deck.

I put my drink down. “What would you do, George, if you had betrayed a friend?”

“I would never do that!”

“Well, there’s something I need to tell you.” This was awful!

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“Okay, I’ll listen.” George was relaxing in Tom’s wing chair. One wellshod foot was swinging over the leg he had propped on the leather ottoman.

Why did he insist on taking Tom’s chair, I wondered, when he could have sat on the sofa?

“Remember the party in Boca Raton?” I picked the drink up, then put it down again. “And how it killed you that Corky found out about what happened?”

George’s foot slowed. “Yes?” Why had it pained me, on that dreadful evening, to see George making a fool of himself over some pretty young boy? Did I half-glimpse George and the boy in that dark corridor? Or did I imagine all that—it was past midnight, and other people stood talking in the hallway. But Sam must have picked up on something, and a few minutes later, George spun backward from the force of Sam’s slap. I could almost feel that stinging jolt on my own cheek.

I’ve never forgotten the hot embarrassment of a roomful of people.

Corky, I should add, was somewhere else that weekend. But there I was, taking a back seat to Sam, George’s partner, and his incessant talk about his work as an electrical engineer. “I’m very much into valves,” Sam actually said to me once. And Corky, always George’s favorite. George would drop anything—even the trip to Savannah we planned—if Corky asked for a favor.

And the vapid, pretty boy, with his blond, carefully tousled hair! I’ll bet that haircut cost as much as a dinner at Chez Suzanne! And oh, George wasn’t Tom, my love, and no one else ever would be.

“What about Corky?” George wanted to know.

I hesitated, but I knew I needed to do the right thing. “I told him about the slap. He sensed something amiss between you and Sam, and I blurted the whole thing out.” I could feel my voice slipping.

“It was you!”

We sat in silence for a while.

“It was you!” George said again. “How could you reveal a thing like that to someone who meant so much to me!”

A slap, I know, is the worst personal insult. “I didn’t mean to do it, George.

I hope… we can get past this.”

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“You’re another Benedict Arnold!” George set both feet on the floor.

“Well, Isabella, I’ve got to get used to this, to knowing this.” He stood up. “I don’t believe I’ll have dinner, after all. I’ll just leave the takeout with you.”

I leaned on the chair arm as I got to my feet. I had never entertained the possibility that George would walk out of my life. We had been friends for twenty years. “Please don’t go, George,” I said. Beyond his retreating shoulder, I stared into the dining room. Two placemats on the mahogany table, a bowl of hydrangeas from the garden, candles ready to be lit in brass stands.

George strode out, leaving the front door ajar. I had hoped he would speak those words of forgiveness I so needed to hear. I had tried to do the right thing, and he, after receiving my heavy truth, had not understood—which I should have foreseen. I had lost George because of the truth! I could see, ahead of me, a span of colorless years. Oh, Tom, I thought, how could you leave me?

The following Sunday, I backed out of the driveway wearing my collar.

Rounding the corner on my street, I saw a “Missing Cat” poster tacked to a telephone pole. The poster read, “Our much-loved cat, Edward. Reward for return.” And yes, I recognized from the photograph the uncanny, challenging gaze of the cat I had seen earlier, camped on my patio table. I had taken him for a fighter, but it seemed he wasn’t a stray.

At St. James, I slipped into a seat closer to the front than usual. At the passing of the peace, people around me shook hands. We Episcopalians were still pressing the flesh, confident that God’s grace was sufficient to ward off the flu. I found myself moving along my pew toward the center aisle, stumbling on the kneeling bench unfolded before a young couple. They stepped into the aisle to let me out, and I walked toward the front. Walked, in fact, toward the blond woman, for she was there. I stepped into the vacant pew behind her and waited for her to turn around. Until then, I had never had an opportunity to scrutinize her face at close range. To my surprise, I found that the fine lines in her forehead and around her eyes placed her closer to my own age than I had expected.

“The peace of the Lord be with you,” I said.

Astounded, she echoed my greeting. Her cool, manicured hand gripped my hand firmly, and I saw a certain comprehension in her eyes. It wasn’t 68

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malice. Both of us held our glasses in our left hand, a mutual vanity. The blues of her blazer and her skirt weren’t precisely compatible, but no matter.

During the Mass, the sanctus bell reverberated, magical and majestic.

These grand, joyful tones buoyed me, and I had an apprehension of something brilliant and ineffable. It came and went in a flash.

O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us.

O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us.

O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world, grant us thy peace.

Two days later, I paid a surprise visit to my hairdresser. I didn’t want to wait until my regular appointment. “Cut it short,” I told her. “Short all around, short around the ears. Let my ears show.” Enough of this hair. I wanted things clean and clear. Perhaps this new look would help me listen with my heart.

Afterwards, I drove up my driveway, possum-free, with a lighter head.

The yard was still in disarray, for I was waiting for the tree man to return.

Like giant Lifesavers, ring-shaped sections of the fallen trunk lay about the grass, waiting, too. The lawn around the stump would become greener and lusher with more sun.

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George Elliot Clarke

Three Poems Discourse of Ferdinand of Aragon “An Exhortation to Liberate Spain from the Black Plague” I can’t see how we can’t blindly murder all Moriscos— to erase their taint from Iberia— all their ilk— so that Africa herself sues for Mercy lest all sable leather go extinct.

Speculation? No. Speculation cuts down bankers like dry trees!

It’s Reason—Lightning—that overawes the Moors: It’s black-ink Policy that pledges their Extermination— for they cramp our markets, encumber blanching ladies with bastards, scoff at our “Crucifix” Faith.

So, cleanse em from Spain!

Let bloodbaths scour their very trace.

Priests who spark fire from horse hooves, 70

these men—no slipshod cavalry— dwindle Negroes down to bite-size Pygmies, just right for hogs to gobble.

The dark monkeys won’t even know their Rout until they’re floating in their own viscera.

As a whip must be thick, never hollow, to break a man, without itself breaking, so must our troops scourge the Moors, exercise holy—and unholy—Cruelty, to stanch the Kingdom of their stain.

Now, mow down the blacks like rank weeds, hack em like brambles, or dead vegetation, and then make bonfires of their already charred-looking, charcoal flesh.

It’s not gold we seek, but public Health— to erect Good Government by cutting black throats.

Someone’s gotta purge niggers: Us! A whipped man flees to the fields at sight of the overseer, 71

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and so shall Moriscos disperse once we demonstrate the Terror of white skin!

Be unflagging and prompt in Torture!

Tardiness speeds to Tiredness.

Assail Africa herself— so her ebon coat turns ivory with snow— a tumult of snow— and all her children fall frigid with Death.

Africa should be a precinct of ants.

The very Mediterranean should whimper where it touches on Morocco!

Drown darkies in ditches and depths of waves.

No wasted Butchery, please!

Expense? Zero!

The Church funds this Genocide.

[Cambridge (Massachusetts) 13 mars mmxiv]

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Frederick Douglass Lauds the War Our darkling striplings, as martyrs, must hurl their brawn at cannon— lest our Freedom sound as hollow as Queen Victoria cast in bronze.

I don’t cringe to thrust every black son into War’s awful crimson, or the Gospels are ripped up, the Constitution left a rag.

Negroes must gusto into battle, be cocksure, gunpowder saints— and scythe down Dixie, axing every spindly, horseback Sadist.

Let iron be blessed as it crushes a Reb’s gaunt chest.

Let lead—that arrogant ore— drill holes in every Reb and then one more.

Shower down now incinerating shot: Unfurl corpses where once stood men; paint stubborn fumes over the sun; watch blood spew up from throats and necks like so many sudden, miniature volcanoes; spy flying, chopped, lopped bones, battered, scattered, doubly bloody, plopping in a cascade of limbs.

Let the guns hail out hellos and farewells, 73

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and brave fellas mint their medals in mud as gilt as urine, or don halos of maggots.

Lincoln’s Mancipation Proclamation is nothing, unless it’s the lumbering of soldiers longside mumbling guns, cumbersome, and cannon chucking bombs.

Our Cap’n can’t be Presidential, adamant, less weapons blast, recoil, then blast again.

Plus those slain slaves rotting at Harper’s Ferry demand our teeth chew up Confederate flesh.

It’s time for corpses to pile up in a black clutter.

Now, the South must feel a strident smashing— as when a hand slaps dead a fly.

Lincoln should always sit discontented in a theatre: He should perch restless at every recital, every play.

Our proscenium stage is War! Let us see front-page tombs for whole armies, The South’s lads’ so cannon-splintered, latrines serve for their graves.

[Berlin (Germany) 11 mars mmxiii] 74

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Gospel of Nanny-of-the-Maroons Backra slurps when he sups poisons steeped in his cups.

While the moon, a scythe, gleams, Backra scrambles and screams, Dies, rickety, fallow, in a wrecked house. Shallow pits, soon hid by brambles, swallow lily fam’lies.

Lanterns—lamps—beckon us— dusky face and tresses— to take blades and skewer vermin, til they’re fewer.

As prolific as flames, we sear overseers, frames and flesh. Their treasures melt, while our machetes pelt.

Scamps and scolds, now corpses and rust, sprawl in red grass.

Pale men pile up in scores— as pissed-on carcasses.

Conch shells bray, toast our ears: A Brit goes to a hearse.

Am I a “knotty head,” a bitch? I like foes dead.

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I’m macho and happy.

Bold, I shake my nappy consciousness and skull— black intellectual— in guerrilla theatre, percussive in metre, as I slash, slice, and slay— unapologetically— fair folks dropping, pell-mell, sinkin through shit to Hell.

But I’m untouchable as shadow—and skilful at scalpin: The white foe flowers, blushed, in a meadow, and we Maroons joke as they become detritus, impending Emptiness.

Do I give a rat’s ass?

They chained us; us they whipped; from Africa, they shipped our kin to serve their needs.

And yet black babies bleed.

Dissidents in taverns, dissenters in caverns, come hissing, rampaging, in green dusk, campaigning, 76

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reeking of musk, to play spectres, and coldly slay, and vanish like blizzards— or rank-and-file lizards— after ruining Planters, slaughtering sire and nurse, and, gay at Destruction, pound homes down to flat ruins, until Jamaica’s felt articulate Tumult.

Our formidable fight is to slay all flesh white, to free our black souls, then live, governed by Sistren.

[Ottawa (Ontario) 1 mars mmxiv]

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Claude Wilkinson

Two Poems Farmer, Springfield, Connecticut, 1945 after a photograph by Gordon Parks

Much as how I remember my father, this farmer seems tired, even weary perhaps, after a short step, mopping his brow in a pose that looks like crying or prayer.

His halted mares, one starred, satin black, and to her far side, scarcely there, a white harness mate slightly bowed, pause in harmony on rough fescue.

Behind his team, whiffletree unhitched, their wagon is silent and still, waiting for loads or to be unloaded.

Above the low horizon, we can see three leafing crowns of trees spaced like Easter crosses, and oh, what delicate cirrus clouds fill the perfect, impenetrable ceiling.

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New England Countryside, 1949 after a photograph by Gordon Parks

A mise en scène of plump Holsteins is herded to a weathered barn for milking or evening by one who has guided this routine at least a thousand times, so much so that his head is down, on other things, as he follows over rocky outcroppings through the ramshackle gap.

The farmer’s nonchalant form, even somewhat distant and clouded, shows the paunch of his dungarees, his knee-high rubbers in stride.

Just as well though, as the cows too look sleepy or distracted and have paused to mull an off plumb doorway they must’ve often passed before.

Across horizon and middle ground, a pallor of ephemeral mist shrouds all but ragged crests of the highest trees, then gives way to the foreground’s untenable weeds.

Still, amid all this ruggedness, there is a crude scallop edging the barn roof’s overhang like a sign of amazing grace.

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Michael Presti

A review of Collected Poems of John William Corrington (Joyce H. Corrington, 2012)

In her critical introduction and reminiscence (“No Cross, No Crown”)

to John William Corrington’s Collected Poems, Jo LeCoeur writes:

During our years at Loyola (he had hired me as an assistant professor in 1967), he spoke of working for a voiceless style, the author refined out, disappearing, not in the Browning sense behind characters, but behind an invisible style. He had by then stopped writing poetry, and I assumed that he was referring to the fiction he was then writing. But now, reading letters he wrote Bukowski in the early 1960s when poetry was his art, I find Corrington referring to himself in the third person as one who cannot be found in his poems. “When you read the poem, he is gone… Like [James] Joyce used to say, he tries to be ‘above, beyond, behind the work, refined out of existence’” (September, 1961).

Corrington distinguishes here between the poetic voice and his personal voice. As one who knew Bill Corrington as mentor and friend during that same period, I can almost understand his desire for the work to transcend his personal voice. He wrote from deeply-held moral(/religious) and philosophical concerns, and to pay too much attention to himself or to a personal vision would amount to a willful demotion of those (what he considered objective) concerns. He saw himself as less important than they. Even so, while he labored to reduce the influence of his voice, he was not successful and it is never entirely silent. With a little effort, he can be found there well enough.

Always in mind of classical literary and religious traditions—Greek and Roman predominantly, those of the Western Tradition—and the inflections given these by Renaissance intellectual and artistic developments in Europe, 80

Corrington studded much of his poetry with references to authors, characters, events (historical, fictional), ideas, and beliefs across the range of recorded human history. Even a sad but common occasion (“A Puppy Dying in the Road”) can become a source of connection to the ancients: We have no ceremonies for the beast who steps into our ways and dies as sure as if it cursed Olympus or let its vagrant tail brush the Ark.

In the elegiac “For the Army of Northern Virginia: 1861-1961,” Corrington begins with an epigraph from the correspondence of the infamous General Nathan Bedford Forrest, who describes, for all his racist brutality, perhaps unintentionally, the premonitory effects of the War for future generations (“Cant you come up and take a hand this fite will do to hand down to your childrens children”), and continues Amidst a nation’s crumbling dreams, The fall of antique eagles, They lived an inexorable legend In this land to match Thermopolae, The Alamo, The Hundred Days.

comparing our national epic conflict with watershed antecedents: Roman (the “antique eagles,” the aquila of the Imperium, here doubling as the symbol of a an untenable, outmoded union and a despotic North), Greek, Texican, European.

But this is less about the political, moral and economic sources of the Civil War and more an sorrowful song for those who fought it: From fields and Forrests they sprang Like rough flowers seeded in unmapped Hamlets, country towns, to grow and Blossum in a leaden rain—[…]

Remembers how they unmade Genesis, Rewrote in fire and steel The Seven Days….

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Corrington believed war proves the great refiner of human character in those who fight heroically and honorably (“They lived an inexorable legend”), because war is an unavoidable manifestation of nature as it is expressed in the human, and the combatants like “rough flowers seeded… to grow and/ Blossum in a leaden rain—….” His sympathies—historically knowledgeable, complex and ambivalent on the subject of war itself—were almost always on the side of those who fight with honor without denying the cost of the the terrible conflict: Doomed at last, they left behind A people desolate, its soul in ruin— Not from defeat But for an army lost.

Yet children of the sun, They found the sun— And rose to breathe the bright enduring air Of myth beyond the snow, beyond the mud, The death— To leave behind this cratered earth, This empty fortress, This cold harbor, To march forever in the nearest star— While we still battle in the wilderness.

“For the Army of Northern Virginia: 1861-1961” is perhaps one of the very best examples of Corrington’s formal style, but I think many of the poems which address what he considered his personal traditions are the ones in which his voice recedes behind overdescription and overformality—the subject is more important than the poet or his personal expression, after all—and are perhaps the most self-consciously “poetic” of the collection, and less satisfying because of it. As “A Fable” concludes Inch by slippery inch of it, Absorbed in every twist and convolution, Intent on knowing what it really was.

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But, as he noted intimate detail, Began to know the thing he’d cut apart, An unexpected languor bathed his eye In fairy-wonders, toadstools, praying hands, And children laughing, playing in a wood.

Amazed, he sensed that something had gone wrong; His breath grew chill, his fingers turned to sand, His own unhoused entrails in his hand.

We understand this to be both a pastiche of a much older style and an illustration of the concept that a reduction to constituent parts, however useful for an understanding of mechanism, destroys comprehension of the living whole. The irony for the surgeon is self-dissection and death.

It’s in the more casual, apparently informal work—signaled by open metrics and little or no punctuation—that his keeness of diction and lyrical, rather than formulaic, repetition and feeling for oppositions shine through to an altogether cosmic sense of loss and disappointment. “Viva Zapata” begins so long did we tend crumbling flocks where mountains lean above like grim sombreros so long dream a flood of priceless wine and wake to the liquor of our sweat

We read the repetition of “so long” to mean eons-long and also as “goodbye” to the hopes that anything will change, because it never has: so long in the gulf tide did we fish hair crisp with salt legs like flaking pillars so long the soldiers blooming in our streets 83

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so long did bayonets lunge out of the purchased air and sun dribble crimson on the gravel of our ways so long

Corrington embedded quiet dialectical oppositions in his work freely.

Here, the underlying contrasts—low-high, soft-hard, friable-solid, light-dark, dreaming-wakefulness, dry-wet, night-day—describe the natural cycles and forces impinging on everyday human existence throughout history. Under the oppression of life under these, Corrington would argue, we are all peasants.

And the vanity of progressive efforts and revolutionary action, naturally attractive to the downtrodden, will always prove futile, because the state of the world prevails relentlessly. The poem concludes: to build with stone and learned that rock is moved by justice no less nor more than shame and we scratch the soil in his memory bring forth fresh stone in his name through the thunderous ages emiliano lies burning in the lava of his dream the clouds are scattered banners and the drums are grass

Corrington’s pessimism and sorrow, informed by his belief that the human is capable of only relative progress in the contingencies of his own violent nature and an indifferent universe (“…that rock is moved/by justice/no less nor more than shame”) and in strongly rendered transitions (from “so long dream a flood” to “in the lava of his dream,” for instance), is palpable. Heaven’s not

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for Earth, but Earth does an excellent job of Hell.

The early “On War” works this conviction through a more direct, declarative style: war is a metropolis of corpses a democracy of stiffs and the gladiators gun and hunch in alien towns under a bloated sun a crusty moon ripe in scarlet smoke not like back home[…] the death of more than men the death of loves and toleration the purge of sense a last mistake we make slouching through somebody elses mud thinking red and ugly like back home

Signs of civilization (“metropolis,” “democracy”) are contrasted with the rotting things of war (“corpses,” “stiffs”) and sit “under” the natural world (“sun,” moon”) which have taken on the “bloated, “crusty” and “ripe” qualities of death and decomposition. But “not like back home”… or not yet. There’s an inexorable pull to the grisly force of “slouching through somebody/elses mud”—the enjambement telling the “red and ugly” truth “like back home,” something that can no longer be denied.

In the deceptively casual, late work, “A Former Poet Decides to Tell the Truth,” a faux confession and abbreviated manifesto of sorts, Corrington introduces the body of the poem with epigraphs by John Ciardi (“A poet lies his way to the truth.”), and the Napoleonic diplomat, Bishop Talleyrand de Perigord (“The purpose of language, Monsieur, is to conceal the truth.”). These 85

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describe two modes of deception, the first through the poet’s deliberate art, the second intrinsic to the nature of language, its raison d’être, especially in politics. The poet/poem begins in a stanza of apparently direct commentary on the two: And that is true. For if we did not lie and blurted everything right out, ten lines would tell it all:

and a stanza break from “ten lines would tell it all”—hyperbole of course, a species of lie—to the for instance, a rather generic and deliberately flat example (but which might serve as an embryonic narrative to an ur-poet): A soldier got pissed off and said Youall can fight without me and see how well you do.

His best friend died, he cried, went back to tear the city down.

And did.

And died.

And a stanza break to a citation of source, a return to the poet’s commentary, and more lies: That’s half of Homer with two lines to spare.

“That’s half of Homer” is a barefaced approximation, richly alliterative, an index of the poet’s preference for artifice over accuracy, and another falsehood.

Also, “Homer,” in our current understanding, was not likely an individual, but rather the mythological metonymic to the collective voice of the Homeridae, a guild of rhapsodes. And since we have “two lines to spare,” the poet a witty unrhymed couplet to complete the ten, disguised as a comment suggesting that “ten lines would tell it all” was, in fact, an error of the poem-in-progress,

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another winking nod to dishonesty.

Then, reflecting the aesthetic choices of both Homer and Corrington, we take a sharp emotive turn away from the lightness of the emaciated synopsis and commentary to a rationale for enduring art: All that got left out was pity and terror, an old man’s prayer, a prophetess’ dying cries—

These seem crucial dramatic obscurities, referred to in passing, perhaps characters and their specific episodes known well to Homer’s audience— Chryses’s appeal to Agamemnon to return his kidnapped daughter, Chryseis?; Cassandra’s murder by Clytemnestra and Aegisthus?—which antedate and follow the main action, but which are present throughout The Iliad in spirit.

The poem concludes directly: and the concealment and the lies.

To return to that correspondence with Bukowski: as one who knew Bill Corrington as mentor and friend during the period 1968-1977, I believe he achieved only a superficial detachment from his poetry, more a subtle recession into the work rather than a true disappearance of the author. His distinctive voice—allusive, ironic, pessimistic, sensitive to diction yet, at its best, plain with declarative force and tension—is very much in evidence across the more than 250 poems in the collection. Subjectively, I can still hear the pressure, cadence and timbre of his speaking voice throughout, his work lit from within by my memories of him. This volume is an invaluable addition to the literature of the South. All praise and gratitude must go out to his beloved Joyce for holding fast to him and bringing him together with us.

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John William Corrington

Four Poems Take a Letter Where is the weeping prince nowadays?

Overextended his resources, banked on the Market of Magnanimity; got nailed for it?

Dropping porcelain tears still in the Static epic of middle-aged art, Into flat martinis, cups of thin tea, Trays of ices carefully prepared and aptly placed For business reasons.

For business reasons that we stay indoors When gladiators are abroad, no matter what They wear or say, no matter what their cause.

This we understand, and prudently contain Errant prophets by massed regiments of Eyebrows askance, whispering campaigns, Rotary devices, and economic bludgeons That can be wielded from a safe distance.

(Statisticians even suggest that we can breed out revolution and unrest if the contraceptive has a golden base) But what we have learned, 88

Learned while fighting For what we prefer to life, Is that revolt need not be violent, Can be a courteous demon beneath the skin; All enemies do not announce themselves, And a single can be worse than double cross.

So fear men with run over heels who don’t care, Men who prefer last year’s Fords, Read carefully, And can conceive a social debt That Haig and Haig on rocks will not discharge.

We had a close call, remember that: Remember too that profits are deceptive; Those derived from altars and the vested interest Are never worth the risk that they incur.

But that is past: the world has been bought off, Convinced until next time that a cross of gold Has its stylish side, That any return worth seeing will be advertised Through the usual channels, That love and passion are safer on the screen, That their future is assured.

We’ll give them the business—as usual.

By the way, Where is the weeping prince nowadays?

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The Garden of Delight of Hieronymus Bosch A Commentary (from the triptych in the Escurial)

Do you see that orgy of color Backed by a faint white, rheumy and Undistinguished, middleaged colors Conceived in a distempered eye, Abused, spread thin, and left to rot On shattered pilings Outside the juncture of what we call Standard Time?

Call it a show of meaty evil setting Teeth on edge with brushes’ force— Framed specter pointing out the Same old misconceptions, entanglements, Pratfalls, Analogous to what is in the heart.

Some of the lovers are wounded, of course, But none seem to really mind the Incidental agony of being Spitted, roasted, quartered, disemboweled; In fact that seems to be a Convention of the age: each lover bearing His cross as standard consequence incurred For an affection of the glands.

And who can say but what the gilded monsters, Rather than the punishing instrumentalities 90

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That they appear, Are not, in fact, trying desperately to Purge the place before the Queen of Hearts Arrives, or the Old Man sends his Son. There must be a tall unpainted wind Mustering its strength behind the Fleshtowers there: About to topple the ungainly pair Posing limbs intertwined and upsidedown, About to freeze the dallying troupe Bathing in whatever the pool holds, or, Foreparts interlocked within a paper heart, Ignoring the owl’s prodigious question; A wind to snap the griffin’s spine, To drop innocuous leaves unseasonably: Anything to stop the horror, and to spirit them, Airborne fishes, monsters, lovers—all, To a destiny they must expect somehow, Beyond the grasp of the startled deer and The normal bronzeyed turtles who are Sick of the singing, the shameful athletics, The painted kisses, and the howling fun— Who want none of it, And who know that everything would be just fine— If earth would quench this Awful valentine.

And to your right, ladies and gentlemen, Is Bosch’s conception of hell.

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History i see history has a change of underwear a black shirt a red shirt old shirts new shirts that keep being the same shirt and every time it changes peasants and storekeepers go to hell children are bombed into shrill smoke cities begin to boil I see history is a chance on an indian blanket some custer always grabbing the stakes i see life within history is a risky job in a psychopaths rumpus room is see history is about to brush us off like dust from a shiny nosecone

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i wish frederick the great had been something his mother ate i wish ivan the terrible had been even worse i wish napoleon had scratched a big hole in his chest I wish lavousier had poured phlogiston back in the horse i wish marx had been a card like his gruesome greatgrandsons i wish richard the lionhearted had had a pussy for a heart i wish rockefeller had been born in persia with a foot growing out of his ear i wish battista and castro had been a pair of middleaged bats at a higbee basement sale but wishes are winded horses ordure from a feary head and history with a patch over one cracked marble eye stands on a barrel of nuclear 93

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pickles a fife in one hand a hot poker in the other threatening roasted millennium howling the great year ignoring smoky the bear

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Old Man Among His Flowers When I was young it was Thermopolae, the Alamo’s stark cry, Pickett’s men at the high water mark, lives lost like poker chips at the edge of dark on a steamboat table tossed by a lacy arm. Why not, why not?

Bleeding was living; no cross, no crown, no guts, no glory, no pain, no gain.

Drink like a fool, drive like a fool, let every extra dawn be a surprise.

Stranger, I used to mutter as night faded and liquored sleep came on like an Asian dawn, Go tell the Spartans Leonidas and his men still wait in Bossier City according to your word, like blossoms caught in a Spring rain.

No crown, no glory, no gain.

Not that I am afraid.

Better say the years, l ike plans and women best laid, 95

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somehow have strayed.

The fun of fear and violence is gone.

I am too old to understand what fearing means.

To leave these daisies and the slopes I’ve tended, shepherd of being in the sun, is not to step beyond something I own.

Just bright measures of the blessed earth I will surely call to in the last short precious dawn, life draining like a garden hose, as Stephen seeking in the streets of Dublin after Mollie’s song, must have cried out across the dry steppes of the seventeenth of June, Bloom, Bloom.

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Notes “Garden of Delight, The,” The Forum (Houston, Texas), Vol. 3, No. 3, Fall 1959. 19.

“Old Man Among His Flowers,” Pegasus (Centenary College, Shreveport, Louisiana), 1989. 44; The Southern Review (Baton Rouge, Louisiana), Vol. 25, No. 3, Summer 1989. 595; Legal Studies Forum (College of Law West Virginia University, Morgantown, West Virginia), Vol. XXVII, No. 2, 2003. 551f.

“Take a Letter,” The Mill (Houston, Texas), Fall 1957. 4; Legal Studies Forum (College of Law West Virginia University, Morgantown, West Virginia), Vol. XXVII, No. The 548f.

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Louis Gallo

A Prolegonmnon To and Call For Further Critical Reception of the Poetry of the Late New Orleans Poet John William Corrington—Plus a Brief Personal Reminiscence Work reference: John William Corrington, The Collected Poems (edited and published

by Joyce Corrington)

This is neither a pipe (though Bill smoked one) nor a critical piece

(though I have published my share of them).

I don’t pretend to have read the entirety of Bill’s Collected Poems. I am dipping into them right now, and what I have read convinces me that he is one of the great unrecognized poets of our time. And I do plan to scrutinize them all soon enough.

Nor do I know all the facts about Bill’s bio beyond what I’ve gathered along the way and what I’ve heard and my own conversations with the man way back in the mid- to late seventies when I knew him.

But here are some basics. Bill and the late Miller Williams once taught at Loyola University in New Orleans, where they founded The New Orleans Review, which still flourishes to this day. From what I gather both poets resigned their positions after conflict with the administration. Bill went on to publish a few more novels and collections of short stories (the shorts have been widely published in little magazines). His mid-1960s novel The Upper Hand caught the attention of Hollywood’s Roger Corman who then sought out Bill for scriptwriting gigs. Bill and his wife Joyce wound up as head writers for the soap opera Search for Tomorrow, and the creators of another, Texas.

Some complained that he had sold out. Well, the money was extraordinary and who wouldn’t? The Corrington’s even had a massive Xerox machine in 98

their house at such a time when no one had copy machines at home. I saw the thing. It was behemoth.

Bill continued to write poetry and essays, many of which were published all over the place, again, in literary or university magazines. But no major publisher ever recognized him as one of this country’s finest poets. Nor did the anthologies—Norton, Bedford, or any other collection sold as text books—pick him up. This I cannot understand. His intellectual weight equaled or excelled most American poets who acquired fame and hopefully some fortune. His eloquence is non pareil. The poems are often breathtaking.

Even if you read Bill only for radiant images and explosions of rhetoric, you can’t go wrong. And I speak here merely of the poetry, not the prose which I am less able to assess at the time of this writing. (His Collected Fiction is also available on demand from Amazon; it supplements an earlier Collected Stories from the University of Illinois Press.)

This is not a book review. This is a cry for anthologists and publishers to take notice! Shortly I shall provide you readers with some excerpts from the poems and you can decide for yourselves what to make of this treasure trove.

But let’s get personal. I always manage to offend someone when I get personal, but I hope not at this juncture. I knew Bill between 1975 and 1978 when I returned to New Orleans after a doctoral stint in the vast soybean fields of the Midwest. I founded a literary magazine called The Barataria Review, which lasted four issues. I knew I wanted something by Bill in the first issue and he provided an excerpt from his still unpublished novel, The Disintegrator, a strange and dazzling work. He actually gave me a copy of the entire manuscript of the novel, and I shall soon donate it to the Historic New Orleans Collection of Royal Street, where, if you like, you can read it.

I also organized some literary readings around town and invited Bill to read at the then newly opened Freeman-Anacker Art Gallery. Lots of people came and Bill proved a superb reader and entertainer. Finally, for a while I hosted a literary interview radio program called “Midnight Oil” out of UNO, and, if I recall correctly, Bill was one of my first guests. I still have the audio cassettes of that interview but no machine to replay them since such recorders have gone extinct.

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Bill Corrington was an arrogant man. Most people would regard arrogance as a character flaw, but I do not, provided you have something to be arrogant about. The arrogance I have encountered among lawyers, for instance, and pedants repels because most of that ilk don’t know what they’re talking about and prove insufferable. But Bill effused intelligence and passion like radiation, and I, as interlocutor, could only hope to absorb specks of it. When he spoke, you listened, you went mute, you paid homage. Over the course of our conversations I learned much about, well, everything. He had a passion for the LSU theological historian Eric Voegelin (I think he published essays on the man) and I wanted to learn more about Voegelin’s worldview without having to plough through Israel and Revelation and subsequent massive volumes. Bill taught me, though, regretfully, after so many years I have forgotten most of the details. No matter—I knew it then. When it counted.

What amazed me most, I think, was that Bill at forty years old returned to school, to law school! He passed the bar and became an official lawyer.

I still have some divorce papers he handled for me, signed by him as my attorney. I visited him once in the law offices and what I saw has stayed with me like some eternal Polaroid in the brain: Bill slouched back on his swivel chair his legs propped up on his desk, as if he didn’t have a care in the world.

The desk was empty. He wore heavy cowboy boots and looked totally out of place. I had seen him in many guises—the professor, the public reader, the family man… but in this particular guise my instant take was that of a Deep South redneck. And he seemed to relish that image. Who could have known exactly how accomplished and widely published and intellectual he really was? Bill did not stick with the law. I like to think that not the law itself but his colleagues nauseated him.

Once Ralph Adamo and I visited him at his home uptown on Valence Street. We stood in a dimly lit, spacious kitchen, and my Polaroid here is Bill reaching for a glass of bourbon and offering us shots. But mainly Bill proceeded to elocute, on history, philosophy, literature, whatever—he could glide from one subject to another without transition, without hesitation. I could never figure out if he were a raging right-wing zealot or some sort of bizarre leftist anarchist. He probably transcended any such categorizations 100

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altogether. My remembrance of the afternoon is of Ralph and me standing in that kitchen, listening, maybe sipping some of the bourbon.

I repeat, I have done no research on these matters beyond some slight help from the editor of this journal. I rely strictly on my memory, never a smart move, and the impressions glued in my brain. I do not want critical or historical commentary to intrude upon my reading of Bill’s poetry. I want the pure experience, virginal, the earliest homo sapien tasting the first apple.

Having read a number of the poems I tried to engage myself in the antecedent routine. What poets does he resemble? The first two that came to mind are Conrad Aiken and the late Galway Kinnell of The Book of Nightmares. But without the ponderousness of Aiken or the rawness of Kinnell.

I also tasted some continental surrealist poets in the broth. The poems are intellectually mountainous, difficult (one could spend an entire essay explicating “The Anatomy of Love”), often surreal and exploding with fabulous rhetoric and imagery. Perhaps they are not meant to be “understood” but rather absorbed. After reading a Corrington poem, you want to try to write one of your own. But back to comparison/contrast: I don’t see Eliot, Yeats, Stevens, well, maybe a splotch of Stevens. Maybe some of the later Lowell?

I find much similarity between some of Adamo’s poetry and Corrington’s but I don’t know who influenced whom here or if the similarities are in sui generis respective of themselves. Harold Bloom claims for literature to be great it must be original, not imitative, however accomplished the imitations.

I believe this is the case with Corrington poetry. Perhaps he was and still is way beyond his time; perhaps some Eliot will come along to resurrect him as the original Eliot resurrected John Donne.

Bill’s best poems are long, multi-sectioned, meditations in free verse with staggered typography. Surrealism and stream-of-consciousness prevail. When he attempts to follow the rules to produce a conventional iambic pentametered poems with rhyme, which he does often enough, the poem fall flat in my opinion. One also finds an occasional Bukowski type hit, which for me doesn’t resonate. (By the way, Bill and Bukowski corresponded frequently, no love lost, and you can still buy the book devoted to their exchanges.) So where do we pigeon-hole him in the canon? First, he isn’t in the canon because no 101

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one has yet had the wisdom to so honor him; second, I don’t know where to pigeon-hole him. I also see some urban New York school type flow, some Frank O’Hara maybe, or Ashbery. But not much. Hell, Bill was an original, period. And the more I think about it the less certain I am that his greatest poems can be interpreted in any logical manner without causing damage in the process.

And alas, Bill passed young, at 56, of a sudden heart attack. But he accomplished more in those few years than most other people in five or six lifetimes.

Now, I promised a sort of collection of splendid, often rhapsodic images, and I will proceed to that now. Caution: these are some of my favorites, and they may not work for you. Perhaps you can discover such nuggets of your own. Again, I make no attempt to explicate or explain or rationalize the poems themselves; I leave that to the future exegetes and hermeneutists (and the latter would prove, I believe, the best avenue for exploration. But here is my selection of superb excerpts and images with some bracketed minor commentary from me: from “The Anatomy of Love”: … a sanctified slut, a woman dissolved in her loss…. … an old woman pawing trough the charnelhouse of cobwebbed yesterdays. [ah, the verb “pawing,” le mot juste—LG] from “Death and Transfiguration”: I saw this cat shed its tomorrows in hot drops its insouciant guts waffled into wrathful 102

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paving stones… from the “Communique” series [one of my favorites—you dive in, become a Fellini movie, however clichéd that sounds—maybe Jordorowsky as well for its more horrific splices. Once could if need be “interpret” this poem that defies interpretation, but a better way to read it is to absorb it or let it absorb you] …there is no hope of peace in Tennessee We are not yet downright enough to live within the sheathe of love— nor yet enough deserter to glamorize our tongue and quaking thighs.

Who will lyricize our blunders? [lyricize… perfect] Dreams of an aria tilted to summer, an alphabet breathing plans: are you praying?

(She is lying on a low couch with diaphanous silken hangings all around. Nearby is a sleeping jaguar. No one interrupts her. There are no philosophers in the courtyard…. … it might have been in a frisky bloom of a girl (so much for the My-O-My)…[could this be a reference to the My-O-My Pretty Boys Club of New Orleans?] from “A Christmas Carol”: I cried all night in the flophouse bed and dreamed of 103

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glazed fruit and angels. but next morning I junked eternity and stole a buck from the drunk sleeping next to me. [And here we see Bill in his Bukowski mode, though not saying he imitated in any way—just another mode for Bill] from “A Memo from Lilith”: The cost of estrangement is immense.

Your later women, natural as dust and flushed with little sins, are dull as holidays spent underground. [one of my favorite poems, and eminently rational] from “Pastoral”: and the miraculous sea wove its breath among parvenu leaves… from “Woman in a Field”: Neither time nor the malaise of want… from “A Trip to Omaha”: and finally thinking dying is a bitch and perhaps the goddess 104

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of

love [This one Everette Maddox might have written, but no chance of that] from “Future Shock”: what I’ve not finished saying and you’ve misunderstood will be nothing I’ve forgotten from “Maginficat’: they will send you to a home mary for girls who have tummy trouble…

mary if they find where the holy ghost hangs out they’ll make him come and help you bear your cross

and

from “The Poetics” to serve as herald for the soul’s new way; to heighten, discipline, embody 105

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those staggering mists hoicked from within; to shape a shriek—or sigh— into a voice. [wow, this is a great one—a glimpse into Bill Corrington’s, not Aristotle’s, poetics]

Well, that’s enough for now. This could go on and on, and you could compile your own list and it would certainly differ. But I hope this sampler compels your sweet tooth.

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A review of Hick Poetics (Lost Roads Publishers, edited by Shelly Taylor and Abraham Smith)

A

merican poetry lends itself to sharp dichotomies, if not warring factions. Consider the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets’ assault on sense and meaning, and their concomitant shoring up of academic power during the 1970s. Consider the distinction between experimentalism and accessibility David Lehman proposed in his foreword to Best American Poetry 2006, in the middle of a decade that saw champions of accessibility like Billy Collins and then-NEA chair Dana Gioia lamenting the loss of poetry’s broad cultural appeal and using their positions to advocate for the virtues of plainspoken American verse. Consider, for that matter, the recent pushback against the implicit racism in the avant-garde, much of which has happened—as so much does in the world of contemporary poetry—online. What’s at stake for the poet? Does she seek to connect, or does she write to please herself, creating language puzzles not for the sake of self-expression, but rather as their own ends? Has the shrinking audience for contemporary poetry caused it to become more hermetic, or has insularity led to a diminishing market share?

Considering the popularity of MFA programs, is it accurate to say poetry’s market share is shrinking? How do questions of context, of culture, and of institutional power, affect the aesthetic choices poets make?

Hick Poetics, edited by Shelly Taylor and Abraham Smith, out this year from Lost Roads, proposes a different dichotomy, one that more closely resembles the way we map politics, which is to say, between the urban and the rural. Formally adventurous—sometimes difficult—without sacrificing accessibility, the anthology offers a new way to consider the distinctions that define contemporary poetry, and it contains work by widely recognized poets, as well as relative unknowns. Though it might benefit from a stronger 107

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introduction to better contextualize the poets who appear between its covers, it affirms the breadth of work being produced by poets in the United States who—for one reason or another—find themselves working outside urban spaces, and it testifies to the legacy of Lost Roads, one of the great American small presses.

Even a cursory glance at the anthology suggests the diversity of its contents: from Jim Harrison’s short lyric poems, to Tim Earley’s prose blocks, to giovanni singleton’s concrete poem in the shape of a cow, the poems herein run the gamut from lyric poetry to experimental forms. If anything, they seem united by what contributor Ada Limón calls—in her introduction to her own work—their wildness: “there’s little else that ignites language like wild things,” Limón writes, sounding a clarion call for an anthology that celebrates the rural in all its forms, including the pastoral. The reader recognizes blighted Southern and Midwestern (and sometimes, Californian and Northeastern) settings. Consider Ashley Capps’ “Jewelweed”: Red haw hog apple much-branched shrubs and small trees we discovered a row of old theater seats red velvet and smoked and followed all day through binoculars birds that shone like earrings.

Such was the cinematic effect we loaded those seats up cursing and dragging delivered them slantwise onto the porch.

The unconventional lineation creates a sense of discovery, the halting lines the effect of watching a broken movie reel, yet the positioning of those theater seats complicates that “cinematic effect.” If the movies are culturally sanctioned fantasies, here, the audience for those fantasies, the culturally (and perhaps economically) impoverished teens in Capps’ poem, controls the vantage from which it absorbs those cues. The speaker seems to be gloating: 108

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“Such / was the cinematic effect.” In similar fashion, Limón’s “Field Bling” weds pop culture to the pastoral. The speaker watches fireflies at the edge of a field: I call them field bling.

I call them fancy creepies.

It’s been a long time since I’ve wanted to die, it makes me feel like taking off my skin suit and seeing how my light flies all on its own, neon and bouncy like a wannabe star.

The introduction of a popular lexicon—words like bling, creepies, and wannabe—into the pastoral setting undercuts the seriousness of the conceit, artfully juxtaposing the familiar with the unfamiliar, and leaving the reader with a sense of the speaker’s vulnerability. The landscape’s wildness seems a corollary to a richer, more dangerous interior wildness. Such collisions between high and low culture—and between interior and exterior wildness— constitute a hallmark of the anthology.

Some of the finest poems in the book deal with the realities of rural America at the dawn of the 21st century. In “There can be no pastoral as long as there is a slaughterhouse,” Gabriel Gudding writes, When you consume the muscles of animals your anus is a tunnel to the slaughterhouse.

If you eat any part of an animal your rectum is an atrium to the slaughterhouses.

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The frontier has long since been tamed, the West won, and what unsettled spaces remain, remain unsettled because they have a relationship to global capitalism. A fine manifesto for vegetarianism, in an anthology that purports to celebrate the rural, Gudding’s poem constitutes a double whammy, suggesting (with its title) the futility of the project, while at the same time brimming over with indignation at the way rural spaces—not to mention the people (and the animals) who populate them—disappear from the imagination. Many of the other poems in the anthology concern themselves with place, gently or forcefully puncturing expectations of a “rural” poetics. In “Would it help if I romanticized it?” Juliana Spahr writes, I lie on my back at night the grass looks itchy, at best damp, at worst contaminated with the detritus that haunts the modern median strip.

The night is cold.

I lie instead on the sidewalk which at least holds some of the day’s sun in it.

The poem amounts to a meditation on the difference between urban and rural spaces and the way we inhabit them. In a nation abandoning its countryside, many “rural” spaces resemble suburban sprawl. Spahr’s poetic imagination occupies this liminal space, the median between these worlds.

Not that there’s any shortage of pastoral poetry in the anthology, either.

In the prose blocks excerpted from Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery—its title cribbed from rediscovered English poet John Clare’s 1820 book of the same name—like a Hoover vacuum cleaner, Tim Earley sucks up every stray referent to the South one might encounter in popular culture and reassembles them into postmodern collages that seem contemporary yet as old as the hills. Imposing as his prose blocks are, his short lyrics give his voice space to resonate on the page. “Rusty Poem” begins, Give me your sandwich, Rusty, before I thrapple your joy.

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with your string of soup cans, your tired dog, your face.

Who is speaking? What does thrapple mean, and did Earley encounter the word as part of some rural lexicon, or did he invent it? Clare makes an interesting point of reference for Earley’s work, and for the anthology as a whole: a laborer who exploited rural dialect and fell out of repute for more than a century, he seems a spiritual father to many of the poets here (and until recently, his obscurity presumably flattered contemporary American poetry’s more hermetic tendencies). One finds other spiritual forefathers. Johnny Cash seems an inevitable touchstone, and in “exodus,” giovanni singleton connects her work to the often-neglected African American avant-garde tradition: we me and t. monk too fold up our chairs, go inside our cranial houses this earthen soul, a flock of birds

These lines appear opposite a column of Arabic letters on a sheet that resembles a page from a workbook. Existing at the opposite end of the formal spectrum from Ada Limón’s lyric poems, singleton’s “exodus” nevertheless falls under the umbrella of a “hick” poetics.

What unifies the poems in this anthology besides the wildness Limón identifies? The introduction each poet has written to his or her work provides an “in,” though some of those introductions read like poems (and sometimes like manifestoes) themselves. Nevertheless, they ground the reader, highlighting the political urgency behind the poems, and behind the anthology. Maurice Manning writes, Yet I have also long observed that my particular branch of rural culture is greatly threatened, because the land itself is undergoing ruin from coal companies, pipeline builders, chemical waste dumps, and factory farming. It’s as if industrial America has 111

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decided to use rural America as the place to conduct its dirtiest business…. Even the sorest hillbilly knows that, and we have a heap of old songs and ballads to prove it.

Manning touches upon several of the concerns that seem foremost in the minds of the anthologizers, especially the concern for the ruthlessly exploited rural American landscape and for the people who live there. Yet in Manning’s formulation, out of ruin comes voice: song. Similarly, contributor Carolyn Hembree traces her muse to the way people around her used language when she was growing up in Tennessee: “I was bewitched by another kind of language: the strangely modulated, archaic speech of the surrounding ‘hill folk,’ dialects and idiolects that pervade my poetry to this day.” The contributors to Hick Poetics reclaim those lost voices, for posterity’s sake, perhaps, or because vernacular language constitutes one of Limón’s “wild things.” Whatever the rationale, it’s a political project, one that runs counter to a poetic practice that seeks to preserve poetry as high art. The anthology therefore reveals a deeply democratic impulse.

At 390 pages, Hick Poetics promises all but the most closed-minded reader something. While dipping in at random offers pleasure, a certain logic dictates reading straight through: because the contributors are presented alphabetically, different poets bump up against one another in striking ways.

Many of the poems are great, some are exceptional, the rest merely good, yet hardly any lack interest. The anthology attempts to take the pejorative out of the word hick, perhaps reclaiming it, after the fashion of feminists who have reclaimed the words slut or cunt, or African American artists reclaiming the n-word. Yet while we might associate the word hick with whiteness, the anthology includes an admirable diversity of voices, including African American, Latino and Latina (including current U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera), and indigenous poets. Undoubtedly, it could cast a wider net.

Nevertheless, it challenges our notion of rural spaces as white, achieving a radical redefinition of rural culture. Considering the fact many of the poets in the anthology have ties to universities and MFA programs, one might worry the project smacks of appropriation. Yet rather than blanketing rural spaces 112

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in whiteness, the anthology illuminates the complexities of that culture.

Undoubtedly, the diverse class backgrounds of the contributors help; some of them belong to a generation when academia was still a means of upward mobility. As a result, one cannot read any two or three poems from the book without gaining a deeper appreciation for the complexities of rural American culture, and its poetry.

If anything, the book might benefit from a more substantial introduction.

Apart from the rural settings of their poems or their rural backgrounds, for instance, what do Lisa D. Chavez, a straightforward (and excellent) lyric poet, and Tim Earley share? In terms of poetic movements, do established poets like Forrest Gander or Dara Wier lead to younger poets like Mara Vahratian?

None of the contributors are Lost Roads authors, yet many find themselves positioned at the intersection of the rural and the avant-garde, terrain Lost Roads has been mapping for decades. Looming behind them, one hears echoes of Frank Stanford, the legendary co-founder of Lost Roads, a prolific wunderkind of an American poet who took his own life at 29, and whose work has been undergoing rediscovery. Stanford helped bring into being a school of American poetry that combines surrealism, Dadaism, and some of the techniques of the 1970s avant-garde, with a rich, concrete verse rooted in the American vernacular. Or as contributor Michael Sikkema would have it, describing what he seeks in his own work, “poetics of radical vernacular.” As magnificent as the anthology is, a stronger introduction might more explicitly connect these poems to that tradition; the reader would be better served for it.

Yet Taylor and Smith’s refusal to tell us how to read the anthology reflects that same democratic impulse, and it reveals their concern with institutional power. Just as Lost Roads has nurtured poetry that is not exclusively of the academy, the editors abdicate their role as teachers. America’s rural spaces are being abandoned, the people in them ruthlessly exploited. Now seems the time to listen to that “radical vernacular.” Yet while poets like Gander might hold positions of power, among the younger poets in the anthology, the rural seems a place apart not just from the city, but also from the exclusionary practices of high culture. Of Fayetteville, Arkansas, in his self-introduction, Matthew Henriksen writes, 113

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A flock of city poets have landed here. We read Frank Stanford and Alice Notley and Paul Celan until three AM. We hardly hear the echoing yelps of universities who hire only book prizewinning PhDs and publishing houses who outsource their printing to Mexico.

The new pastoral resembles the old. Yet if the diversity of work collected in this anthology demonstrates one thing, the cutting edge is always reactionary, the avant-garde grounded in obscurantism. The world Hick Poetics reveals seems at once timeless, and of our moment.

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Charlotte Mears

Raisins the Cat I step out the front door and find red feathers beautifully arranged at my feet. I admire their juxtaposition— a gift Raisins has left for me, his instinctual mark he has succeeded and devoured the main portion of his catch.

On second thought, they’re not entirely a gift at all really.

By leaving only feathers he’s announced his frustration he has no one to hunt for and feed but me who, somehow he gathers, won’t eat the bird he has snared.

Or since he can’t procreate (I took care of that promptly) his wires snipped, he needs to eat and eat the real thing now and then to fill the hole of his disconnection.

I have watched the precision with which Raisins prepares for his lunge— By the unpruned mass of holly and buckthorn where unsuspecting ground-feeding birds burrow.

Slunk low and noiseless to the ideal distance between him and bird Raisins idles alert, still as a statue, a perfect mold of himself.

Sometimes I find only a gray gizzard at the door, his leaving of what is distasteful, unlike we humans who toss out perfectly fine food by the tons— Raisins is clean, has good taste, and is intelligent.

I do think of the precarious life of birds who are his prey and pray for the day Raisins will be old and slow.

Until such time, I strive to accept his borrowed apology with its final, tiny inaccuracy: “Forgive me, they were delicious, so sweet, and so cold.”

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Laurie Filipelli

Me, and the Me You Draw I am only some soup at the side of the road Chilled and thumb-swollen only a daughter Below the bridge writing For a good time call God

But I have no number near home just goats without much pattern in rain resting on the neighbor’s porch in sun the yard to the side of the house in cold right here near the hedges but today I see them any old place and not at all

First there’s summer then I think to scrawl— (my knees are round I can feel my arms coming out of my torso sprouting from my neck small dots on my face meant to be freckles meant to be bites my heart a balloon with a snowflake attached behind me trees block the actual trees)

I visit my father on another floor everyday a new face mask a cascade of crumbs from passing nurses 116

Whitman, dear Whitman tell me it’s luck a foldout table with rolled out coins the thermometer’s beep through a quilt-block of darkness

To the cemetery hill my toe stops cling (my monkey arms make motion lines unstuffed from gloves

my hands let go)

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Julia Story

Two Poems The Romantics I can’t see all of human experience in a bird’s nest and if I were to describe something as “Romantic,” most likely what I mean is “damp.” Beauty is less important to me as I age and the jagged coastline of my heart stretches out into a long thin line: more surface area where birds can rest, where anything can rest. When I was married I fantasized about calling the numbers on For Rent signs; “One BR w/W/D all utilities incl” was a dark magical wood.

The still and empty windows; the dream of scratched blank wooden floors and appliances that were mine, mine, mine; a view through trees for no face but mine. Now my head is filled with as many empty houses as I dream as I creak around their closets, dangerous balconies, the dark tragic corners of their basements. There is even one cathedral. I don’t worship there, but sometimes I go inside to listen to the rain, the grass flattening on the hill, the bloodthirsty wind.

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Of Use It was dark and I tripped on the dog stairs on the way to the bathroom. The dog needs stairs to get on the bed because her legs are so short. I was in the basement and saw the rain hit the grass in the dark through the window, lit up by headlights.

I was at worm level. As a woman, I am closer to being an animal than a man is.

The dog moved over in the bed so I could get back in. Closer to animals, I am more prone to Satan. I am more easily seduced by the things that cast shadows. It’s how you know I’m not dead. A long time ago, and maybe even now, the gods did horrible things because they could. But even in the journey through purgatory there is day and night, friendly dead orators, mountainside rest, brooks, insane skies, green angels, fields of gentle monsters with stories. And within the owl is the process to make its pellet, a capsule of the stuff it doesn’t need: a little package of bones and fur that must be of some use to something. In the morning I was still underground but could leave if I wanted, could walk the sidewalks where most people seemed to be pregnant. The guy still had my coffee. I could stand for a long time and watch a horse in a field above ground.

There was ground in the place I asked for, and in its way, it needed me.

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Don Lago

The Fingerprint of Space

I am walking on Mars.

That’s one small step for a man—and my foot leaves a slight footprint in the black sand. Mars is black: black sand, black pebbles, black rocks, black boulders. I am walking among volcanic rocks about three to four million years old. There are only a few boulders; most rocks are the size of soccer balls or smaller. Many rocks are pitted, both from their volcanic gas-bubble birth and from being sandblasted by the wind. The wind has carved out fluting, little groves in the rocks, slightly surrealistic groves and fins, all of which are aligned in the direction of the prevailing winds. Entire rocks have been shaped by the wind, their sharp edges melting away into more aerodynamic shapes. The hill on which I am standing, a hill the size of a football field, has no protection from the often-intense wind, and the wind has plenty of sand ammunition to pick up and throw at the hill. Rocks on the hilltop and ridgelines have the most fluting. The rocks erode into black sand that is larger and heavier than normal sand.

A few miles to the south is a long ridge that is even more remarkable for its ventifacts—the geological name for rocks that have been sculpted by sandblasting. Dr. Robert P. Sharp, a Caltech geologist who was a pioneer of Mars geology beginning with the Mariner missions in the mid-1960s, named this ridge Ventifact Ridge.

Looking off to the east I see steep hills full of weird shapes and colors, mostly tan and gold but with patches of green, orange, red, pink, and purple.

Small stones bearing these colors have washed down the hills and piled up at the base of the black hill where I am standing, creating a zone where a rainbow of rocks mixes with black rocks.

I wander around the hill, studying the distribution and shapes of the rocks.

I find where two tall rocks seem to have funneled the wind onto a third rock just beyond them, creating on it a bull’s-eye cavity several inches deep. I 120

am looking at a mosaic of small black rocks—and suddenly one of the rocks seems to move. I focus on it, and sure enough: it is moving, walking along, twirling its antennas. It’s a beetle, as black as the rocks beneath it, but with little orange stripes on its side. It is almost the only living thing I’ve seen on Mars, except for some golden wildflowers.

Actually, I am walking on Mars Hill, which is located in Death Valley.

Though Mars Hill rises a hundred feet or so above the basin of Death Valley, it is still below sea level. It is a few miles away from Badwater, the lowest point in the Western Hemisphere.

Mars Hill was named in 1983 by a group of astronomical artists who came to Death Valley to seek out landscapes that looked like alien planets.

Astronomical artists—or space artists—are the artists who paint other worlds for NASA publications and walls, planetarium shows, astronomy magazines, and science fiction movies and book covers. Astronomical art is a tricky business, for institutions like NASA expect scientific accuracy, yet there is often very little science to go on. The pioneer of astronomical art, Chesley Bonestell, started painting the planets in the 1940s, well before the Space Age, before humans had gotten a close look at the planets. Even through the world’s best telescopes Mars remained a vague blur of colors, so vague that people were still free to imagine a Mars full of jungles or canals. Bonestell had to rely on scientific theory, and use lots of imagination to project theory into detailed images. Bonestell had the advantage of being trained as an architectural artist, which requires translating mere blueprints into I-wantto-buy-this-house details. Often Bonestell was prophetically accurate, but sometimes he was way off, sometimes because scientific theory wasn’t nearly imaginative enough.

By the 1980s astronomical artists had the advantage of seeing two decades of planetary images taken by spacecraft, but even then they had to make bold projections, translating orbital images into the scenes an astronaut would see while standing on a planetary surface. A handful of astronomical artists, who had always aspired to be astronauts, decided that they needed to find an alien planet to stand on and study and paint. They headed for Death Valley.

Death Valley has a wide mix of weird landscapes: badlands, salt flats, 121

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alluvial fans, sand dunes, slot canyons, and volcanic craters and flows. At Ubehebe Crater, artist Rick Sternbach—who recently had helped create the images in the first Star Trek movie and who would soon be a mainstay on the renewed Star Trek TV series—donned a homemade spacesuit and posed in front of the crater, and artist Mike Carroll turned the crater, its exact colors and contours, into a volcanic crater on Io, Jupiter’s volcanically active moon.

The artists wandered through the badlands area, including a landscape called the Artists Palette, with its streaks of odd colors: green, orange, red, pink, and purple. As the artists were heading down the steep Artists Drive, they saw right in front of them a long black hill littered with volcanic rocks. “Suddenly the caravan halted,” remembered Andrew Chaikin in his book A Passion for Mars, “car doors flew open, and out spilled a gaggle of—well, you could call them prospectors, but not like the ones who steered their wagon trains into this desolate country over a century before…They converged on a broad hillside covered with dark, pitted rocks perched on fine sand. After scrambling up the slope, cameras in hand, they set about documenting what they saw…

For them this was a spectacular find, because it was a dead ringer for the rock-strewn Utopia plains, the place on Mars where Viking 2 had landed.”

Artist Don Davis was especially pleased. A decade before, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which runs the unmanned planetary exploration program, had commissioned Davis to paint a mural of the Martian surface, but the Viking landings on Mars in 1976 had rendered his mural obsolete.

Now he would use his Mars Hill photos to paint a new, accurate panorama.

He would draw a grid over his photos and transfer their details directly onto canvas, and add some further Mars-like details.

It was not artistic license that prompted the artists to see a Martian landscape in Death Valley and call it Mars Hill. When the Viking landers sent back their first images from the Martian surface, Viking mission geologists instantly thought of the volcanic landscapes of the American Southwest.

Since the Jet Propulsion Laboratory is located in Pasadena, California, many of its scientists were well-acquainted with southwestern landscapes. This included Robert P. Sharp, a leading geologist of both Mars and Death Valley; for his book Geology Underfoot in Death Valley and Owens Valley, Sharp 122

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coined the name ‘Ventifact Ridge’ for the hill three miles south of Mars Hill.

A few years after the artists discovered Mars Hill, a Public Broadcasting Service film crew landed there. They brought one leg of a mock Martian lander, and they filmed an astronaut climbing down the ladder on this leg and taking the first footsteps onto Mars.

In 1992 a genuine Mars rover landed on Mars Hill, or at least the test model of a Mars rover. The rover was intended for a Russian Mars mission called ‘Mars 96’, and it was being tested here through the sponsorship of the Planetary Society, the space-promotion organization founded by Carl Sagan.

In 1979 Sagan had come to Death Valley, though not Mars Hill, with a fullscale working model of a Viking lander, and he pretended he was on Mars for about ten minutes of a Mars-themed episode of his Cosmos series. The Death Valley sequence ended with Sagan showing off a prototype of a Mars rover climbing through a narrow, rough canyon.

The Russian rover was four feet long, three feet high, weighed about 150 pounds, and had six wheels. Already the origin of the name ‘Mars Hill’ was being exaggerated: the Planetary Society press release for the tests said: “Mars Hill was named by scientists with NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory because of its strong similarity to the Viking landing sites on Mars.” Today some people may try to tell you that Mars Hill got its name because the NASA Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, were tested there. Perhaps the Russian Mars rover flunked its tests, for it was replaced by less ambitious landing devices, and even those never made it to Mars, for the Mars 96 launch rocket misfired and its spacecraft burned up in Earth’s atmosphere.

It seemed that the Mars crews had forgotten a bit of their hardware, for as I wandered around Mars Hill I found a bolt driven fast into the ground.

I also noticed a much older human artifact, though at first I assumed it was created by desert bighorn sheep. There was a faint trail cutting across the hill. Later on I asked a park ranger about the trail, and he said it couldn’t have been made by bighorn sheep, for there weren’t any in the badlands area, which was devoid of food. He thought it was likely a human trail. I returned to Mars Hill and studied the alignment of the trail, and it seemed to be aimed straight for the Furnace Creek oasis where the Timbisha Shoshones had lived 123

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for many centuries. This trail had recorded centuries of searching for food, or seasonal migrations into the mountains.

A Death Valley park ranger took a photograph of Mars Hill, gave it a reddish tint, showed it in his evening program alongside a Viking photo of the Martian surface, and asked the audience if they could tell which was which. Though many in the audience had driven right past Mars Hill only hours before, they could only guess.

I looked at the colorful rocks that had washed down the slopes from Artists Drive. The Artists Drive road follows a drainage that aims straight at Mars Hill, and heavy rains send rock debris flowing into Mars Hill, wrapping itself around Mars Hill, leaving Mars Hill an island of black rocks amid a mosaic of colored rocks. When I had been here a couple of months before, it was only a week after an inch of rain had fallen in one day—half of Death Valley’s average annual rainfall in one day. In over a century of weather monitoring in Death Valley, this was the 10th highest rainfall ever recorded.

The drainages in the Artists Drive area had flooded, washing dirt and rock over the road. A week later Artists Drive was still closed, and I could see a truck and plow working to clear it. The flood had cut new gullies and deposited new rocks around Mars Hill. Just beyond Mars Hill the Artists Drive slope flattens out into the salt basin, and the flows of colored rocks lose momentum and soon fade out.

As I looked up the Artists Drive slope I saw another large ridge of volcanic rocks just like Mars Hill. These volcanic layers had once rested atop the Artists Drive layers of rock, but they had slouched off. Further south, the Black Mountains were still capped by this layer of lava. The lava flows that formed Mars Hill had also pumped up a rich supply of borates, which were one day mined by humans, giving rise to a famous symbol of the American West, the 20-mule-team borax wagons.

In a section of Mars Hill that had a few more wildflowers than the rest, I saw other signs of life. I saw ants carrying flower seeds back to their nest.

This ant colony was very modest in size, but I was amazed that they could find enough food here to keep them going. When the brief wildflower season was over, what was left to eat? I also saw a caterpillar scooting along. He 124

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seemed to be having trouble on the steep, sandy slope, for he continued flopping over. An ant started touching him, perhaps testing his food potential, and the caterpillar flinched with each touch. Then the caterpillar headed for a half-eaten flower stalk. The caterpillar was a living Mars rover.

I am walking in the footsteps of an astronaut who got stranded on Mars.

He was one of two astronauts on the first manned mission to Mars, but as their spacecraft approached Mars it was nearly struck by an asteroid, a flaming asteroid at that, and to avoid it they had to prematurely fire their retrorockets, which exhausted their fuel, forcing them to make a crash landing.

They landed in a zone of grey hills, badly eroded, no green in sight. One of the astronauts was killed, but luckily their pet monkey, dressed in her own cute little spacesuit, survived.

I am walking over the grey hills where the astronaut, Commander Kit Draper, wandered about, stunned and lost. I recognize the ridgelines he climbed, the gullies he followed. I stir up the same dust he stirred. But I fail to see the flaming rocks he found. Fortunately he found a cave, full of strange, colorful mineral formations, in which to take shelter. Day after day, as his supply of oxygen, water, and food dwindled, he tried to figure out how to survive. If only his companion had survived, there wouldn’t have been any problem. His companion was Adam West, who only the next year would be starring in the TV series Batman. Batman would have known exactly what to do. Batman certainly wouldn’t have fallen off cliffs like clumsy Draper.

Draper survived only because Mona the monkey figured out where to find water and food.

The most remarkable thing about the 1964 movie Robinson Crusoe on Mars is that they selected Death Valley for their Martian landscape. This was a year before the Mariner 4 spacecraft gave humans their first good (if flyby) look at the Martian surface. The popular image of Mars was still that of Percival Lowell and H. G. Wells, an image of an old, canal-building civilization. It was still the green fields of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Ray Bradbury. Scientists too were expecting Mars to have Earth-like features, maybe oceans, probably green plants. Even scientists were shocked when 125

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Mariner 4 revealed a moonlike world, desolate, grey, dry, lifeless, loaded with craters that couldn’t have changed much in billions of years. Robinson Crusoe on Mars had won its bet, its prophecy that Mars was really like Death Valley.

The movie had even colored the Death Valley sky red or orange. Chesley Bonestell had colored the Martian sky blue. Don Davis in his JPL mural had colored the Martian sky blue. Even when Viking scientists received the first imaging data from Mars, they insisted on trying to color the sky blue, until they noticed that this distorted the known colors on the Viking lander.

Most of Robinson Crusoe on Mars was filmed in the badlands around Zabriskie Point, an area of severely eroded hills, grey and golden. The red sky was added in the studio. The cave shelter was in the studio. Commander Draper briefly visits other Death Valley locations: the Natural Bridge; the Devil’s Golf Course, an area of chaotic salt formations; and Ubehebe Crater, which the movie shows having a volcanic eruption, reflecting then-current theories that Mars was volcanically active.

Robinson Crusoe on Mars could have used more inspiration for its own title, which gives away the whole idea. But compared with the science fiction fare of the time, it was a relatively sophisticated story. There were no bugeyed monsters, no ray-gun battles, no blondes screaming for rescue. It was about survival in an alien world, including psychological survival. Draper becomes so lonely that he talks to the cave just to hear his own echo, and he has a nightmare in which his dead colleague, Adam West, comes to visit him. At least Draper has the monkey to talk to. The script also tried to keep the science fairly sophisticated, with some lapses. Unlike all those planets where Captain Kirk and friends have no trouble breathing, Draper finds the Martian atmosphere too thin and noxious to breathe. He carries his oxygen tank everywhere, and discovers how to extract oxygen from sulfurous rocks.

When Draper encounters Friday, an alien who has escaped from a slave mining crew visiting Mars, Friday doesn’t even speak English, until Draper teaches him. Eventually, an Earth spaceship arrives and rescues Draper and Friday.

The film crew stayed at Furnace Creek Ranch, and one night the actors who played Draper and Friday walked up the hill to the fancier Furnace Creek Inn, where there was fine dining and live music and dancing. Afterward, as 126

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Draper and Friday headed home, they were amazed by the sky. “I’d never seen the sky so full of stars in my life,” recalled Draper, actor Paul Mantee.

“It was one of those incredible, incredible skies. And we stopped for awhile, and we just sat there leaning against a tree.” Did they see Mars in the sky?

Did they see Mars as a giant Death Valley? With grey Death Valley dust still impaled under their fingernails, did they perceive the whole universe as a giant Death Valley?

I am walking over the severely eroded, grey and golden badlands hills where four astronauts had crash landed. They were the crew of Arrow One, the first manned flight into space. Something had gone badly wrong with their spacecraft, and they were forced to make an emergency landing on an uncharted asteroid. Amazingly, the asteroid’s air was good to breathe. But it was a hot, dry environment, and they were seriously low on water. They set out to search for water.

I stir up the same dust the astronauts had stirred. The scene is unearthly.

I am traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. I see a ticking clock. I see a door. You unlock this door with the key of imagination. You’re moving into a land of both shadow and substance. I’ve just crossed over into—the Twilight Zone.

The astronauts couldn’t find any water, and they were getting desperate.

One astronaut had died from his injuries in the crash, or so it seemed. Then another astronaut died, or so Officer Corey claimed. It turned out that Corey had left Pierson to die and stolen his water. When Colonel Donlin discovered this, Corey killed Donlin and stole his water. Corey staggered through the unearthly desert. Then he crested a hill. He saw power lines, a highway, and a road sign with the distance to Reno, Nevada. They had been on Earth all along! They had been in Death Valley.

Rod Serling, the creator of The Twilight Zone, seems to have felt some affinity for Death Valley, for several of its first episodes were shot in or near Death Valley. “I Shot an Arrow into the Air” was the 15th episode, filmed in 1959 in the Zabriskie Point badlands, the same place where Robinson Crusoe on Mars would be filmed a few years later. This was the spaceflight-innocent 127

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era when many science fiction stories, including Twilight Zone episodes, ended with the punch line: And they called that planet—Earth!

I am walking through tall sand dunes, out of which a few gnarly bushes protrude. It was from these sand dunes that the first astronauts on Mars spotted a ruined dome in the distance, the ruins of a great Martian civilization.

These astronauts weren’t supposed to land on Mars. They were heading for the moon when their rocket went berserk, accelerating and knocking them unconscious. When they awoke they found they were close to Mars, so they decided they might as well go check it out. There were five astronauts, or as the movie trailer said: “Four Men and a Girl”. The girl was actually a brilliant rocket scientist, but this was 1950. On the whole, Rocketship X-M was one of the first serious attempts to portray the look and logistics of spaceflight, a major advance over fantasies like Flash Gordon. It was also one of the Atomic Age’s first cautionary tales, for it turned out that the Martians had destroyed their civilization in an atomic war and they were now stone-age mutants.

The Rocketship X-M astronauts land in the Zabriskie Point badlands and wander around it quite a bit. Then they wander through the Mesquite Flat sand dunes near Stovepipe Wells. In the sand they find half-buried Martian statues and machinery, highly radioactive.

Rocketship X-M was filmed in black and white until they land on Mars, and then it’s done in sepia color, with everything light red, including the astronauts. Rocketship X-M colored Mars red a quarter of a century before NASA scientists reluctantly did do, and it was prophetic in portraying Mars as a desert. Rocketship X-M probably influenced Rod Serling and the creators of Robinson Crusoe on Mars to land their own wayward spaceships in the Zabriskie Point badlands.

The musical score for Rocketship X-M was composed by Ferde Grofé, best known for his “Grand Canyon Suite.” But only the previous year, in 1949, for the centennial of the trek of the Death Valley 49ers, Ferde Grofé had composed a “Death Valley Suite,” which was given its world premiere performance outdoors in Death Valley, only a stone’s throw from where parts of Rocketship X-M was soon filmed. Perhaps a careful student of music could 128

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recognize some of Grofé’s Death Valley motifs in the score for Rocketship X-M. One of the Rocketship X-M astronauts was played by Noah Beery, Jr., who ten years before had starred in 20 Mule Team, filmed in Death Valley.

I am walking down a little canyon on an alien planet. The hills above me are full of unearthly colors: green, orange, red, pink, purple. Far down the slope below me is a long, black hill, covered with volcanic rocks and sand.

I am looking for the tracks of an android who passed this way. He was on an important mission when he was attacked by little aliens with lighted eyes, wearing robes with big hoods. They dragged him off to their crawling machine, where he was reunited with the also-captured android with whom he had landed on this planet. They had landed among tall sand dunes, which prompted the second android to declare: “What a desolate place this is.”

They landed on this planet because they had fled a spaceship that was under attack by an imperial warship, and because this planet was the home of Obiwan Kenobi. By chance, they came into the possession of Luke Skywalker.

Various scenes from the original Star Wars movie were filmed in Death Valley. Most of it was filmed in the Tunisian desert, but to finish it off they stayed closer to Hollywood. The scene where R2D2 and C3PO have landed in the sand dunes and go separate ways was filmed in the Mesquite Flat sand dunes, where the Rocketship X-M crew found Martian ruins. The scene where R2D2 is rolling down a canyon and is captured was filmed at Artists Palette, up the road from Mars Hill, where a real interplanetary android would be tested fifteen years later. The scene where Luke, R2D2, and C3PO are attacked by the sand people was filmed in next-door Desolation Canyon; the mammoth-like banta was actually an elephant from the San Diego Zoo, dressed up in a huge costume. The scene where Luke Skywalker and Obiwan Kenobi stand on a peak and look down on the spaceport, where they will go into a bar and meet Hans Solo, is the view of Furnace Creek Ranch from Dante’s View; today park rangers derive a mischievous pleasure from quoting Obi-wan Kenobi as he looks toward park headquarters and says: “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.” For Star Wars: The Return of the Jedi, the palace of Jabba the Hutt was projected onto an image 129

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of Twenty Mule Team Canyon.

Death Valley was the perfect image of an exotic, unearthly, alien planet.

The exotic is what tourists come to Death Valley to find. They are looking for extremes. They want to stand in the lowest spot in the Western Hemisphere, at 282 feet below sea level. Some tourists even want to experience extreme heat, for in 1913 Death Valley had reached the highest temperature humans had ever recorded, 134 degrees Fahrenheit, exceeded only once since then, by two degrees, in the Libyan desert. For many visitors, especially Europeans, whose experience of wild nature is defined mainly by the Alps, the mere idea of a desert is exotic; rock is supposed to be clothed in green, not stark naked.

The desert is forbidden, mysterious, surrealistic. Even for those who already know deserts, Death Valley is extreme. The name says it all: Death Valley is not for humans, not for life of any kind.

Many tourists come to Death Valley with an image of it being only a wideopen, grey valley, and they are surprised to discover all the exotic landscapes it contains. There are the badlands around Zabriskie Point, eroded into sharp ridges and gullies, almost entirely devoid of life, but not of colors. There are the oddly colored ridges at Artists Palette. There are narrow, sinuous slot canyons. There are massive alluvial fans pouring out of the side canyons and out of every crease in the mountains. There are huge sand dunes that the wind turns into sandstorms. There are volcanic features like Ubehebe Crater and Mars Hill. There are salt flats like Badwater, and places where the salt refuses to remain flat, like the Devil’s Golf Course. There are exotic minerals like borax leaking from mountains. There are strangely eroded rock formations. There are fault lines and earthquake scars. There is a playa where rocks move mysteriously, leaving long, curving tracks.

Though humans travel through Death Valley in metal cocoons full of human comfort, human temperatures, and human music, they can’t stop Death Valley from invading their space. Their shoes get coated with salt, sand, cinders, and minerals, which climb into their vehicles and begin chewing away on human-made materials. Sand storms pit their windshields and paint.

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out of their bodies. Death Valley dust fills their fingernails, ears, and nostrils, climbs into bed with them, and gives them dreams of wind and desolation.

In the evening, humans huddle in the tiny human spaces in the vast inhuman valley. They huddle in cocoons of light amid a vast darkness. They huddle with glasses of water amid the deep dryness. They huddle over food amid the tables of rocks. They talk about all the exotic things they have seen; they examine digital photos; they write messages to Vermont, to Florida, to Paris, messages on the backs of desert images: You wouldn’t believe what we saw today. This is the strangest place.

Yet Death Valley really isn’t so strange. There really isn’t anything exotic about it. Death Valley is quite normal—for Mars. Mars is full of Death Valley landscapes, full of Mars Hills. Death Valley is quite normal for the solar system, for the universe. The universe is full of Death Valley planets, planets of deserts, planets of heat, planets of craters and badlands and rubble and sand, planets without water, planets without life.

The tourists who come to Death Valley are really seeing the normal state of matter, a tiny speck of the true, vast, desolate face of the universe.

They are peeking out of the window of their tiny Earth house and seeing the landscape that surrounds them for billions of light-years. The universe has a genius for desolation, for producing Death Valley planets, a power that could not be resisted even on Earth. Death Valley is a birthmark, a navel, which testifies that Earth was born from a womb of desolation. Death Valley is the fingerprint of space. Space had reached out with an anti-Sistine-Chapel hand and touched Earth, leaving its whorls in the shape of sand dunes, badlands, craters, and earthquake scars; in the shape of the whole mountain-cupped valley. In Death Valley space blows its deeply empty breath onto humans and sucks the water from them, leaving them dizzy, ill, sometimes dead. In Death Valley Mars blows its sand into human eyes and gives them dreams of desolation.

It is Earth that is strange. Almost everything about Earth is exotic. Earth is a tiny Furnace Creek oasis in a vast desert. It isn’t the heat, the dryness, the sand, or the bare rock that is strange; it is the glasses of water that humans drink. It isn’t the shapes of the badlands, the slot canyons, or the salt 131

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formations that are strange; it is the shapes of trees, the shapes of grapes on the breakfast buffet, the shapes of coyotes running through the dark; the shapes of humans silhouetted against the stars. Strangeness isn’t anything humans see; it is the eyes that are doing the seeing. It isn’t the wind or the silence or the echoes in slot canyons; it is human voices. It isn’t anything about Mars Hill itself; it is the faint trail of direction-conscious beings across Mars Hill.

It isn’t the wind-carved black rocks; it is the blackness—the blackness of rocks and the blackness of space—that sprouted legs and antennas and began searching its way across the oblivious blackness of Mars Hill. It isn’t the fact that wildflowers could grow on Mars Hill; it is the fact that wildflowers can grow anywhere in the universe. It isn’t the pulse of geological time; it is how this pulse has echoed itself into heartbeats and brainbeats. It’s not strange that humans die of heatstroke and melt back into chaos, for death is the overwhelming normality of the universe. The strangest thing of all is that humans are amazed by oddly shaped and oddly colored rocks, or by a little spring of water in the desert, but they are not constantly amazed by the shapes of their own hands, by the reflections of their own faces.

It is Earth that is the Twilight Zone. It is Earth that has crossed over into another dimension. Everyday reality on Earth is paranormal. All clocks and all doors are paranormal. All human shadows are black monoliths sending a signal that the universe has become alive. R2D2 and C3PO, walking and talking and joking, aren’t nearly as amazing as Luke Skywalker, his every cell already vibrant with The Force that had rebelled against the chaos and darkness that ruled the universe, a rebellion that succeeded only in a few tiny, isolated spots. And they called that planet—Earth!

I am strolling on the Racetrack playa, a dry lakebed that is famous for its mysterious “strolling” rocks. Their tracks curve this way and that, even a bit like question marks.

“Playas are among the flattest and smoothest landforms on earth,” wrote Robert Sharp. In 1968, the year Sharp retired from nearly two decades as the chair of the Caltech geology department, years in which he interpreted images from Mars and brought Caltech to the forefront of planetary geology, 132

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Sharp began the most systematic study of the strolling rocks yet undertaken.

It was the first long-term study, lasting seven years. Sharp identified thirty rocks that had tracks indicating recent motion; he placed metal stakes to mark their locations and began monitoring their movements, trying to correlate movements with a rock’s size or shape or location, with the seasons or storm patterns. It was Sharp who started the tradition of giving the rocks female names; the first, Mary Ann, was named for the wife of a geology graduate student. The leading theory, then and now, is that when the flat, smooth playa is wet or icy from a storm, the winds racing down from the nearby mountains can propel the rocks along, even rocks weighing dozens of pounds, even moving them half a mile. The strolling rocks are yet another Twilight Zone phenomenon on the planet that should have been named Water.

As a geology graduate student Robert Sharp saw the power of the water planet, especially the power of water to move rocks. In 1937 he went on a Caltech expedition down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, making a close study of the nearly two-billion-year-old rocks at the bottom of the canyon. At the end of his career, after all his other geological adventures, even after being the first human to expertly study Martian landforms, including water-carved landforms, Sharp said that his Grand Canyon adventure was still his favorite. Sharp saw the power that cut away a mile of rock and rolled rocks a hundred miles downstream, rolled them into pebbles and into sand.

He saw the power that had piled up seashells and sand and mud into over a mile of rock. He saw the massive cliffs built of ancient life forms, bodies through which this very river water had flowed a third of a billion years before, bodies through which the water within himself had once flowed. The massive, endless flowing of water on Earth had now flowed into Robert Sharp’s brain and taken the form of fascination, of curiosity. The unstoppable momentum of the Colorado River flowed through his life and energized his searching for water power on a Death Valley playa and on the surface of Mars.

The momentum of Earth’s water became the flight of rockets, fire-waves leaping from the ocean shore, spacecraft reaching across space to Mars and landing upon it. The spacecraft bore all the rounded, well-polished marks of the water planet. The ancient flowing of rivers had become the flowing 133

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of electrons through wires and circuits; it became the stream of images of dryness streaming back to Earth. The water planet was reaching out and touching Mars, touching it with the fingerprint of water, the fingerprint of Earth, the fingerprint of life. The water planet was reaching out of its solitude, its Robinson Crusoe loneliness, to try to find even a trace of itself.

I stared at the mysterious rocks. These rocks were world-famous, showing up in TV documentaries, stories in major magazine, millions of postcards, and on the cover of Robert Sharp’s book. Moving rocks were right out of the Twilight Zone. But they aren’t nearly as strange as the moving rocks called planets, which moved not only through space but into other dimensions, mostly dimensions of lava and sand, but sometimes into the dimension of life.

Notes Andrew Chaikin, A Passion for Mars: Intrepid Explorers of the Red Planet (New York: Abrams, 2009) p.111.

Paul Mantee, DVD Special Features commentary, Robinson Crusoe on Mars, Paramount Studios, 1964/ 2007.

Robert P. Sharp, Geology Underfoot in Death Valley and Owens Valley (Missoula, Montana: Mountain Press, 1997). p 162.

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L2 How can it lose! this stairwell held gently the way each step comes loose and your heart reaches across, covers the dirt, the flowers, the eyebrows —it’s snowing under her legs that are not yet evening held back as a banister not meant to last, staggering alongside her footsteps that no longer have a mouth somewhere to somewhere.

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A. Loudermilk

Two Poems Between Encores How—at such heights—we’ll never know —tethered then: escape velocity then: landfall again on a platinum wave. If the next song is her last we’ll just die so don’t hush us in the midst of metaphors for singers and similar instruments— reaching into a spin and waking up years later with nothing but pitch, edgy as a sugar cube, ancient as the vertical hold on mom and dad’s first TV or similar mating calls. No—teaching myself piano isn’t singing, never singing. If her next song’s her last we’ll die—well, grieve—really grieve; then home to our redacted patter and coffeepot, coffeepot.

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Mr. Splitfoot He’s no ghost. He’s just two girls who can’t sleep in a haunted house. “Do as I do,” one says, snapping her fingers twice. So twice the other cracks a toe sounding off like an echo in the walls or better yet like a man buried in the cellar knocking at his own skull with the handle of the knife that cut his throat.

Mr. Splitfoot? No not really—he’s just two clever girls who wear their hair the same way. They know how to make a noise everybody wants to hear. Sounding off no and yes and dates and the unknown ages of neighbors and every correct number is the right answer to a bigger question. According to their mother’s signed affidavit the whole house shook and she doesn’t even believe in this kind of thing.

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Brett Evans

When In Wien (two postcards from the City of Dreams) for Mr. G

{ Donau } I always thought of myself as the shoaly part by the side of the river, living in another language fragrant & bright. So far from The Department for Check Dams and Avalanche Barricades. The shady part is where the song or was it the breeze slight ripple along.

In the morning snake bacon shandies let us power us home.

In another country you become a dog [body language, planet cue] you get the sense for instance 138

that there’s the hut where the seeds of Lisi’s terrasse tomatoes come from __________ You learn how to lean, sniff, and indicate thanks. ________ In the grass by the Fool’s Tower among the sway of subway straps avoiding the walking Nordic poles. ____ tipplered—can still end up in the Mariahilfer basement McDonald’s damentoilette not for “these guys” speaking in thumb ________ You can ride the subway, in fact, for half fare and rock the chic of a muzzle & always always find your new way home 139

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Robert Landry

Maxine was seven when Irene died.

Years later, she said ‘I thought that was what was supposed to happen.

When you’re seven, your mother dies.

I didn’t know any better.’

So Joe was a widower, with four children: Bobby, Maxine, Gloria and the baby, Wayne. The war had started the year before.

Joe was a crane operator at a shipyard in New Orleans.

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from Almeda & Joe

There, he met a woman.

Her name was Almeda.

Her family ran a small carnival that moved around, landing in New Orleans at the start of the war.

People were taking jobs that contributed to the war effort.

At the shipyard, she was a riveter. He saw her there, attractive and athletic, in her little overalls and bandana.

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He started courting her. She had a daughter named Rose from a previous marriage.

Did she tell him she was widowed? Divorced? Whatever the stories they told each other, they hit it off. They got married. He was 34, she was 23.

She moved into the house on Barataria Boulevard in Marrero, a stepmother to a family of four plus Rose. Joe’s mother-in-law, who had been minding the kids, moved out.

Grandma Crochet had other relatives in Loreauville who needed her.

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Almeda was bored ... out of her job, cooking and cleaning while Joe went back to the shipyard and his buddies.

She wanted to go places, do things. Joe relented, and Almeda went back to work. They would drive in to the shipyard together.

But that didn’t entirely cure her restless nature.

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They got in the habit of stopping somewhere for a few drinks after a hard day at the shipyard. One night at a bar, she got too friendly with some guy.

Joe laid him out, and then he went after Almeda.

He broke her jaw.

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They wired her jaw, and she had to go back home. Her behavior became erratic. She would often leave the kids in the house, just take off.

Then she found out she was pregnant.

The situation got worse. One night, Almeda stepped in front of Joe’s car as he came down the drive after work. He barely stopped in time.

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Finally, Almeda played her last card.

She admitted to Joe that Rose’s father was still alive, in fact she was still married to him and another man besides.

This train of events didn’t change Joe’s intention of keeping her home. It was too late anyway.

Deana was born soon after.

How much of it was true? It must have been convincing. Joe filed for an annulment, and Almeda left. Maxine, Gloria and the others did not see their half-sister again until she was a teenager.

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Joe became desperate after that, unable to cope. He started drinking heavily as work continued and the war dragged on.

He found out there was a $10,000 life insurance policy on all military men. It must have been enough to make him make up his mind to do something, or maybe he just got drunk. One day in February 1945 he enlisted in the Navy ...

For more on the story of Almeda and Joe, see the editor’s notes.

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Joel Dailey

Two Poems In Defense of Poultry Who can imagine Life without hand sanitizer?

Shovel ready on a planet with no plan Frivolity Shebang Reality has hair Minutes away it’s perfunctory Cleancut & mechanically inclined It’s not one thing it’s the Many, the Mania At the beach house Debbie zips up the hazmat suit, tosses the dildo out the window After kissing Katie & imagining she was President Obama, Ridge backs away For once Kiki has nothing to say Attached to the fridge: “Tobias dispatched Pegleg Nina heard the voices & with Oaxaca in mind Kiki took the coop & flew”

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JLO Booty Battle for Dick Armey

A foreign accent everyone stares at Whereas spanks a supermodel with a grammar text, eyebrow hairs plucked After looking both ways orange John Boehner pops more orange pills Whereas Art imitates John Wayne Bobbit, John Wayne Gacy, even the John Wayne “That’ll be the day…”

Winds light & variable now There is no sense of Urgency, no suicide Cajun seasoning mind drool Who will have the last name first Heap heavy sitcom Whereas Josh Earnest gives superb blurb 1 out of every 3 empty the bladder or the inbox first Happen it will hands down Upside to downslide Gridlock raises its vampire stake, Metaphor’s Honda broke down country road Whereas Sergio Leone Pickle in a Pouch

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Thomas Bonner Jr.

A review of Fatima Shaik’s What Went Missing and What Got Found.

(Xavier Review Press. 2015. 216 pages. $16.00)

New Orleans is more a collection of characters than a place. Its smells,

humidity, clouds, foliage, waterways, cuisines, religions, and architecture also have their distinctions, which writers from Lafcadio Hearn to Tom Piazza have explored. The great mix of people in the city, however, generates the peculiar and attractive nature of New Orleans, and Fatima Shaik is the latest writer to capture the characters in its neighborhoods. She joins among others William Faulkner, whose New Orleans Sketches and other works captured people in and about the French Quarter during the 1920s. Although intensely locally centered , What Went Missing and What Got Found, as a collection of stories, extends a wider tradition in American letters found in charactervoiced works like Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio.

Since the flood after Hurricane Katrina, the world has come to know the Ninth Ward in New Orleans almost intimately. Its French Quarter has always been celebrated, and after the flood its nearby neighborhood Treme has traveled to the public via a television series. Shaik focuses on characters largely from the Seventh Ward, which lies toward Lake Pontchartrain from the French Quarter and Treme and is bounded roughly by four streets: Esplanade, St. Claude, Elysian Fields, and Broad. Its current population—that of a small town—numbers about 12,000. Many of its residents are Afro-Creole, whose families have lived there for generations. In many ways the Seventh Ward is a metaphor for the entire city because of the close alignments of race, class, commerce, and crime. Even before flood waters affected the neighborhood in 2005, it was showing decadence, often associated with age, much like the Compson home in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Street crime has 150

increased in recent years. Accordingly, the neighborhood like Shaik’s fiction has a sense of menace.

The hummingbird gracing the cover of this collection of stories suggests the civil virtues of good, determination, adaptability, and beauty found in many of Shaik’s characters, although her fiction is not without its antithetical characters, like “’the Jamaican’” in “The Prayers of the Sycophant.” In “Charity Begins at Home,” a Flannery O’Connor-like title, Mama and Papa by way of their daughter’s narrative offer a view of traditional life at home with loss and promise in a comedy of manners. In “Life Is for the Living,” Thomas is an eccentric who has lunch in the graveyard while contemplating intersections of past and present, a complement to Jan Villarrubia’s play Odd Fellows Rest. The title character of “Achille’s Jass” is an ageing musician whose popularity is declining, but whose playing conveys his dreams, the narrative evoking Emile Rhys’ portraits of jazz musicians. In “Leo Walks Home,” the title character, who suffered from polio as a child and still has difficulty walking, finds redemption from his early life as an outsider.

Among these carefully constructed stories, readers will enjoy “Bird Whistle” with its tensions between tradition and change, “The One that Did Not Get Away” with the motif of a man’s scar, and “Maurice in New York City” with the conflicting cultures of New Orleans and New York. Shaik’s expertise in narrative technique is clearly on display in this collection of stories as she works with linked narratives, time shifts, multiple points of view, and imagery from Nature and cuisine.

The closing three stories of this collection dramatize life during Hurricane Katrina and the flood in its aftermath from the Ninth Ward to the Seventh. For readers who did not experience these catastrophes, the stories offer a “You are there” sense of immediacy. For people who were affected by these life changing events, the stories may evoke troubling responses, as ten years for many people may still be too close to look back comfortably and profitably.

“The Hotels,“ longest of the Katrina related stories, has settings like the Superdome full of evacuees that were flashed via television across the world.

“The Value of a Life” begins with “I spotted the body that had washed up against the bottom of the fence” (183). Finally, the title story moves from the 151

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mud dissolving into dust to the dance floor of a surviving bar.

Shaik captures her own New Orleans and the city that many of us know with its dialects, Roman Catholic imagery, musical traditions, and culinary conventions; but she also sees what lies beneath the sheets of the tourist hotels and behind the Greek-Revival homes on the storied avenues and streets. A native of New Orleans, she first published her writing at Xavier University before going to the Northeast to finish her undergraduate and graduate studies.

Like the narrator of her title story, who returns from Washington, D.C. to New Orleans, she returns frequently from New York City, where she has lived as a writer and teacher for many years. Fatima Shaik has been and continues to be an authentic voice.

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James Shade

A review of Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (Speigel and Grau, New York; 152 pages; $24.00)

T

he first surprise in reading Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new book, is its length. The hardcover copy clocks in at 152 pages, a relatively short work to have the imprimatur of Toni Morrison, no less, on the front cover (“This is required reading”). But a manifesto needn’t be a tome.

Coates, of course, is the incisive essayist for The Atlantic. His essay “The Case for Reparations,” became a signature piece of work that transcended mere reportage and became a work of popular literature that infiltrated the punditocracy and—in this case—expanded the dialogue on race nationally.

Between the World and Me is written in the form of a series of letters to his son, Samori, who is named after Samori Toure, the founder of the Wassalou Empire in West Africa. Naming one’s son after a monarch is usually an expression of optimism about the future. But Coates is most assuredly not optimistic here.

In the past few years, the number of enthusiasts—fans really—of Coates work has grown considerably. Stephen Crockett, a blogger and columnist for The Root.com, compared Coates’ devotees to the “Beyhive,” that vast, fanatical collective of fans of singer/ entertainer/ pop culture hyphenate Beyoncé. This comparison isn’t entirely facetious; anyone with the temerity to publicly criticize her Bey-ness risks having The Beyhive rain down its wrath on Black Twitter and other social media.

The book’s back cover is full of early 19th century era newspaper headlines and public notices warning of escaped “colored people” and solicitations for “kidnappers and slave catchers.” This is entirely appropriate as Coates 153

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frames his letter in the context of racially divisive events both historically distant and recent. The deaths of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, among others, weigh heavily here and Coates, the father, tells his son what he can expect from the world.

There seems to be an almost perverse fascination with Coates within the literati. This may be because his writing style is dry and rather matter of fact.

The term “dry” as used here, doesn’t mean Coates lacks passion or humor; simply that Coates doesn’t lapse into the nationalistic rhetoric that seems to be the default position for far too many public arguments about race in the current discourse.

Contrarily, Coates doesn’t offer any soothing balm for differences between Whites and African Americans. In Coates’ world view, Blacks readers already know there aren’t any easy answers. White people, on the other hand, are looking for the Kumbaya-type, we can work it out solutions where they have to do relatively little work or self-examination and at little cost to them.

Coates doesn’t write to make white people comfortable. Between the World and Me is a mediation on the value Black bodies and, by extension, Black lives have to America. In his estimation they are, more often than not, mere grist for the mill.

The Black church has always been the emotional bulwark of African American progress. Even for those who claim no affinity to any particular congregation or denomination, having some sort of inner spiritual life and the underlying assumption of a moral order to the universe is assumed to be a given for any Black public figure. However, Coates is an atheist. This informs the urgency and (apparent) pessimism of his observations. There isn’t —or may not be—an eternally peaceful afterlife for the oppressed; therefore the time for “discussions” and “Meaningful dialogue” has passed, the racial crisis facing this country must be dealt with now.

This sense of urgency and despair is most apparent when he writes about the killing of his friend Prince Carmen Jones by a Maryland state trooper: “I…went to the service on Howard’s campus…What I remember is all the people who spoke of Prince’s religious zeal, his abiding faith that Jesus was with him…I heard several people ask for forgiveness for the officer 154

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who’d shot Prince down…I only vaguely recall my impressions of all this.

But I know that I have always felt great distance from the grieving rituals of my people, and I must have felt it powerfully then. The need to forgive the officer would not have moved me, because I knew, even then, in some inchoate form, I knew that Prince was not killed by a single officer so much as he was murdered by his country and all the fears that have marked it from birth… For the crime of destroying the body of Prince Jones, I did not believe in forgiveness. When the assembled mourners bowed their heads in prayer, I was divided from them because I believed the void would not answer back.”

Much of Coates racial and socio- political world view was shaped by his years attending Howard University. Howard occupies a special place in African American social mythology; many people, even many who never attended the school refer to it as “The Black Harvard.” Some of this is as much Black social mythology and canny self-promotion on the part of the university as anything else and in the present day real world, Howard has endured a number of financial and administrative challenges in its attempts to maintain its status as the nation’s most highly regarded historically Black university. But the mythology of Howard as “The Mecca” persists and it was that, as much as anything , that drew Coates to it.

“I was admitted to Howard University, but formed and shaped by The Mecca. These institutions are related, but not the same. Howard University is an institution of higher learning…The Mecca is a machine, crafted to capture and concentrate the dark energy of all African people and inject into the student body…And whereas most other historically Black schools were scattered like forts in the great wilderness of the old Confederacy, Howard was in Washington D.C.—Chocolate City—and thus in proximity to both federal power and Black power…overlaying all of this was the history of Howard itself. I knew that I was literally walking in the footsteps of all the Toni Morrisons and Zora Neale Hurstons, of all the Sterling Browns and Kenneth Clarks, who’d come before.”

Like many Black writers before him, Coates had to become an expatriate of sorts and travel abroad, to gain a different perspective on his life and his country. It also allowed him the time and space to reflect on the murder (for 155

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indeed, that is what it was) of his friend and what it meant for himself and his son. If Prince Jones, a graduate of a top Texas magnet school, a man of cosmopolitan tastes and restless intellect, could be tragically summed up by a trigger happy, ass covering cop in two word, “Black man,� could the United States of America ever truly be a home for Coates’ son? Watching him wrestle with this questions and the possibilities, is what makes Between the World and Me and engrossing and necessary read. Incidentally, Samori Toure, the deposed monarch Coates named his son after, died in a French prison.

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Matthew Henriksen

A review of What About This? Collected Poems of Frank Stanford (Copper Canyon, 2015)

Legendary poet Frank Stanford left behind a personal biography nearly

as surreal as his creative work.

Born in 1948 on the Mississippi side of the Delta and soon adopted, Stanford never knew his biological parents. He learned of his adoption in his teenage years, following the death of his adoptive father. Between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-nine he published seven books of poetry, including a four-hundred-page epic, to enthusiastic acclaim among his fellow poets. Then in 1978, after a confrontation with the two women he loved, he took his own life with three shots from a .22 caliber handgun to his heart.

Two more books of poetry, Crib Death and You, were released posthumously in 1978 and 1979. A collection of his short fiction, Conditions Uncertain and Likely to Pass Away, appeared in 1990. A slim volume of his selected poems, The Light the Dead See, emerged from the University of Arkansas Press in 1991. Since then, his work has remained, for the most part, consigned to rare book rooms and special collections libraries.

Stanford published prolifically in prominent literary journals and was acknowledged as one of the most talented and uniquely inventive poets of his emerging generation. After his death, however, with his literary estate split, a rift between Stanford’s widow, the painter Ginny Stanford, and the poet C.D. Wright left the majority of Stanford’s work inaccessible to all but adequately determined seekers.

Despite years of obscurity, the number of Stanford’s determined readers has increased. Forrest Gander, Adele Kellenberg Seaver Professor of Literary Arts and Comparative Literature at Brown University, attributes the continued readership to Stanford’s place in poetry’s long tradition of idiosyncratic 157

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visionaries. Likening Stanford to French Symbolist Arthur Rimbaud and English Romantic John Keats, Gander claims, “Stanford came on with an energy like Rimbaud’s. He knew early how, like Rimbaud, like Keats, not to try to write like anyone else.” Their impassioned, individualistic mentalities left both poets with enduring legacies, despite their careers as poets ending, as Stanford’s did, before they were well into their thirties.

The title poem of Stanford’s first poetry collection, The Singing Knives, demonstrates the wild and fluid frenzy of his expression. The poem presents the voice of an adolescent whose knife-throwing friend has snuck him out at night to use as a target: The mosquitoes drew blood I looked on the ground I saw the shadows coming like gars Swimming under me at night I saw the red moon too I wished I was running a trot line I wished I was in a fight I wished I was fanning myself in church But there was a heart on the fan with a switchblade through it

Seeing the knives’ shadows as gars embodies Stanford’s adherence to immediacy of experience. The boy’s perspective dominates the scene and allows the reader access into the boy’s physical and emotional circumstances.

Stanford’s champions point out the humanity underlying the violence and intensity of his poetry. Dean Young, William Livingston Chair of Poetry at the University of Texas, says, “Stanford’s work has a directness that doesn’t rob it of strangeness nor poetic power.”

Nearly thirty-seven years after Stanford’s death, Copper Canyon Press, the largest poetry-only publisher in the United States, released What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford in April of this year.

The book spans nearly 800 pages, includes all the books published in his lifetime (with only one book, his epic, represented in excerpts), the two posthumously published books, and an extensive selection of unpublished 158

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manuscripts, uncollected poems, drafts, and fragments from papers at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.

The collection not only brings Stanford’s difficult-to-find and costprohibitive books together into one volume. Copper Canyon’s visibility and distribution affords Stanford’s poetry an audience vaster than the readerships he enjoyed during his career.

Poets familiar with Stanford’s work have long pined for the emergence of such a collection. Many of them believe that its affect on those unfamiliar with Stanford’s work is practically inevitable. “I’m hoping that What About This will confirm what many poets of my generation have known,” says Young, who wrote the introduction, “that Stanford was an amazing power, fiercely prolific and assured in his personal mythology and craft.”

The book’s editor, Michael Wiegers, who also serves as Executive Editor at Copper Canyon, emphasizes Stanford’s “sheer volume of writing” as setting Stanford apart from most other poets. “It’s remarkable to see how much he wrote and how he tried things out,” says Wiegers. “There’s a fearlessness to his writing that is uncommon nowadays.”

In “Lullaby to a Child Who They Say Will Not Live through the Night,” Stanford employs a style liberated of conventional poetics to empathize almost viscerally with a dying child: I take a bath in a grave with no soap and keep the secret of the fingernails and vortices of dirt a pelt is taken by the sound of a lantern going out and I tremble with the channel cat black as soot I pass out on funeral jazz and slow water rag I betroth myself to the tension of the raccoon’s approach flexing my eyes with the dark and I swear on my life I will prowl this black island until I can return your dirty kiss lightning’s flesh and thunder’s hurt

The poem, from his long out-of-print collection Field Talk, is among the hundreds of pages of poetry in What About This that have until now been available only in hard-to-find early editions fetching hundreds of dollars each.

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Bill Willett of Mountain Home, a lifelong friend of Stanford’s and one the most ardent promoters of his poetry today, claims that Stanford would have been “quite satisfied” with the book’s presentation of his writing. “The collection of his works together shows the magnitude of the writing Frank did in a short amount of time.”

What About This also includes several hundred pages of previously uncollected and unpublished poetry. Though he died before the age of thirty, Stanford left behind so much enticing material that a second volume from his unpublished papers is emerging later this year. Musician and producer Jack White, of White Stripes fame, released Hidden Water: From the Frank Stanford Archives in July from Third Man Books, the publishing arm of his record label.

After remaining mostly out-of-print for over thirty years, Stanford suddenly has two massive collection appearing on major presses in one year.

Chet Weise of Third Man Books justifies the second book as a testament to Stanford’s vast output, as well as his unique process as an artist. Weise explains, “Seeing the drafts and Stanford’s editorial moves, what he added, or left out, even how he types (often every inch of a page is filled with type) really illuminates Stanford as a poet and as a human.”

Stanford is rumored to have started writing sophisticated poetry at a very young age, but for certain he was writing poetry while in high school at Subiaco Academy, in part under the tutelage of his English teacher, Father Nicholas Fuhrmann. However, like Rimbaud and Keats before him, Stanford followed his own voracious path of reading, writing, and experiencing the sensory world.

His passion was matched by an intense focus and dedication, claims Willett, who roomed with Stanford in college and later worked with him on surveying jobs. Willett describes Stanford’s work habits, whether writing or surveying, as “diligent, systematic, efficient, and fast without leaving anything behind.”

Writing poetry, however, claimed an astonishing volume of energy. “When he started writing poetry he was on a roll,” Willett explains. “Three or four days with maybe a catnap, just enough time for the coffee or bourbon to wear 160

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off, and then he’d go right back to it.”

Stanford’s passion and dedication met with his prodigious talent, which other writers, even those further along in their careers, found magnetic. While studying at the University of Arkansas, Stanford took a creative writing workshop with James Whitehead, the poet and legendary teacher who cofounded the Programs in Creative Writing and Translation at the University of Arkansas. Stunned by Stanford’s skill, Whitehead moved Stanford into the graduate workshops, where he left a significant mark on his older peers.

Stanford, however, soon left school entirely, writing and publishing in a steady stream and supporting himself as an unlicensed surveyor.

Well before entering the University of Arkansas, Stanford began composing his stream-of-consciousness epic The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You. The poem follows his alter ego, Francis Gildart, a boy in the last throws of his adolescence, carousing with a variety of characters, mostly African-American, hanging among the levee camps on the outskirts of Memphis. As surreal as the characters seem, with names like Charlie B. Lemon and Baby Gauge, Stanford took the majority of setting and characters from his actual experiences. His adoptive father, a civil engineer who operated the levees, took an apparently progressive attitude towards race relations for the time.

The book, layered with north Delta dialect and superstition, departs again and again on dream-like thought sequences in which unpredictable imagery continually startles the imagination and overwhelms it with visceral beauty.

The natural landscape and the voices of the people seem to physically rise out of book.

“He enjoyed the rural people,” Willett says of Stanford’s affinity to his childhood surroundings. “They were real. They inspired him. The poetry he wrote came from what he felt about them. He transmitted that feeling through his poetry, which was enhanced by the people and the land.”

He also engaged passionately in social concerns. The epic largely follows Francis Gildart joining a group of Freedom Riders in the midst of the Civil Rights area. At one point, he catches a hand grenade thrown into the bus and dispatches it back into a crowd of angry bigots without looking back.

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Though his imagery is often unabashedly violent, crude, and sexual, connecting with human beings in their individual beauty extends throughout all of Stanford’s writing. For Stanford, virtue did not end with an aesthetic philosophy. Reading through Stanford’s published and unpublished work showed Wiegers “the fierce and deep moral conviction he brought to confronting racism and injustice on an intimate, personal, and daily scale.”

In his posthumously-released Crib Death, Stanford’s poem “Terrorism” fuses his personal intensity with a vision of righteousness: Mother, when you beat out my quilt tomorrow, Remember the down in the sunlight, Because I did not sleep there.

Remember, come evening, the last hatch of mayflies, Because I won’t.

They are evil, Mother, and I am Going to take it all out, in one motion, The way you taught me to clean a fish, Until all that is left is the memory of their voice, And I will work that dark loose From the backbone with my thumb.

Mother, the sad dance on fire.

For Wiegers, the humanity of Stanford’s vision coupled with his inventive artistry establishes him not merely as a poet’s poet but as a writer who might interest anyone: “For people new to the work I’m hoping to show what an authentic American voice might sound like.”

Gander claims that the release of What About This is well-timed: “James Laughlin, the famous editor of New Directions Publishers, always claimed that great work was thirty to forty years ahead of its audience. That’s the case with Stanford.”

Citing the many isolating and exclusive movements in poetry over the last thirty years, Gander asserts that readers “might be ready for something raw, visionary, and scratched up by the briary world” of Stanford’s intenselyfelt rural Arkansas.

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their immediate surrounding, such as Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and William Faulkner, Stanford taps into universal sentiments that make him accessible to readers with little knowledge of the state.

To perceive Stanford merely as a gifted detailer of his surroundings and transcriber of the vernacular, however, is an oversight.

Willett explains that What About This “shows the breadth of Frank’s knowledge and grasp of the grassroots delta and also of everything from Renaissance art to Bergman and Fellini.”

After paging through the collection of poetry, which Willett knows intimately, he points out that “Frank’s boyhood friend, Bobo, catching catfish in the Bayou in one poem and an Ingmar Bergman film on the screen in another shows his scope.”

As roommates at several locations in their college days and beyond, Stanford and Willett, each time they moved, would build bookshelves for Stanford’s immense collections of books, containing everything from William Faulkner to Bertrand Russell, from Medieval mystery plays to Andre Breton.

He also immersed himself in European art house cinema and had an extensive record collection, ranging from classical and opera to traditional blues and free jazz.

As a long-time editor, Wiegers, sees the rare synthesis of an extensive knowledge of literature and a deep connection to locality in Stanford’s poetry.

“Among other things he brings poetry from other languages into a southern tradition,” Wiegers says. “I note that because he is melding a love of language with a love of place and love of tradition. For all his wildness and abandon he was clearly aware and reverential of the tradition—but he makes it new.”

Forrest Gander notes the same synthesis and the resulting inspiration, and perhaps sense of responsibility, that Stanford found there: “He took the landscape that he knew—rural Mississippi and Arkansas—and his experience—as a land surveyor and as an exhaustive reader of international literature in translation—and he turned both faucets on full blast and refused to sleep.”

The poetry is indeed written exhaustively, and has an unrelenting energy that might, most importantly, catch the attention of younger readers and help 163

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them potentially seek their own voices as writers.

Gander explains, “His work appeals most, perhaps, to readers in their twenties who identify with the explosive urgency, the humor, and the dreaminess of his poems.”

Dara Wier, Professor of Poetry at the University of Massachusetts, describes the instructive encounters her students have had with Stanford’s poetry over the years. “Every year there are two or three poets who discover Frank Stanford’s poems for themselves for the first time,” Wier explains.

“Their work pauses while they take in his powerful registers and his passionate visions. Then their work starts up again, more urgent, more full of brave announcements and address, less fearful and less tentatively distancing.”

The poems teach young poets how to invite humanity into their own poetry. “I love how his poems get under their skin,” she says, “and give them ideas about what it is that makes poetry so essential to us in our critical conditions and longing.”

Stanford’s ability to describe raw experience with a voice that strikes so many with its honesty and intimacy may also appeal to those living outside of literature entirely.

Describing his late friend’s miraculous creative process, Willett finds a metaphor that is aptly simple and revealing: “He takes something that’s essentially a handful of dirt and turns it into a sculpture.”

Recently Willett visited his son, who is incarcerated in the Arkansas Department of Corrections in Calico Rock. Responding to a sample of Stanford’s poetry Willett had given him, his son replied, “Frank Stanford doesn’t write poetry. He paints it.”

One of Willett’s hopes for the re-emergence of Stanford’s poetry is that it might “show young people there is beauty in almost anything,” Willett continues, “He could take crude elements and make them beautiful.”

This review originally appeared, in slightly different form, in The Northwest Arkansas Times, and is reused with permission.

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A Brief Survey of Frank Stanford

That Frank Stanford supported himself in his last years as a land

surveyor is part of his biography and his legend, which constantly overlap.

Frank’s adoptive father, Albert Franklin Stanford, was a civil engineer who worked out of the levee camps that figure so prominently in Frank’s poetry. I know little about Frank’s intimate relationship with his stepfather, but Frank originally enrolled at the University of Arkansas with the aim of becoming an engineer. After Mr. Stanford’s death, when apparently Frank learned the facts about his parentage, he switched to English; he had been writing poems since childhood. When Frank became a land surveyor, it seems typical to me that he did so with no formal training and that the work he did was technically illegal. I do not know for a fact that his work led to legal problems that may have contributed to his suicide, but I have my suspicions. I knew his business partner, Don Kemp, and, indeed, it was I who introduced Frank to him and to working on a land surveying party.

As my own history as a surveying party chief is part of the story, let me begin with a little personal history. Beginning in the spring of my 9th grade year, I began working part-time for W. T. Combs, Sr., a civil engineer in Leaksville (now Eden), North Carolina. Mr. Combs was then in his late 60s and was semi-retired; he did occasional work as city engineer and on private jobs. My Uncle Harold had worked for him years before, and he was a wellknown local “character” who was not known to suffer fools gladly. When, on my first day of work, he handed me a “brush hook” (bushaxe) and told me to “cut a line” between two points, I attempted to use it as a sort of plow, literally scratching a furrow in the pine needles while his young grandson kept me on line. “No, no,” he said, taking the tool from me and demonstrating how he wanted the small brush chopped down so that we could measure the boundaries of the lot. It is safe to say that I came to my first job with a tabula rasa, but fearing Mr. Combs’s scorn and vocabulary, I learned quickly. That summer, 165

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short a man for larger jobs, he hired my best friend, Archer Joyce, and both of us worked for him after school when football season was over and during three summers. When I graduated from high school, I took a better-paying summer job in a cotton mill, but Archer stayed on, working for Mr. Combs’s designated successor, Bob McHenry. Archer became a successful architect, and I, after briefly considering majoring in civil engineering, moved toward the liberal arts. The last time I saw Mr. Combs was in 1969, the summer between undergraduate and graduate school, taking a drive with him in his ancient green Plymouth station wagon to inspect his latest, and last, large project, a subdivision built around a golf course. “Sammy,” he said, “never get involved with a goddamned golf course designer!” That didn’t seem very likely to happen in the Arkansas M.F.A. program, but I knew what he meant—engineering and art can be unhappy partners.

I made enough money, with my first wife’s income, to get by during my first year in grad school, but as the summer of 1970 neared it was clear that I’d have to find temporary work. The only large employer of unskilled labor in the area was the Purina poultry plant in nearby Springdale. Though I’d heard horror stories about the job (which mainly involved cutting the throats of live chickens and turkeys propelled by some kind of overhead conveyor), the pay and hours sounded good enough, and I figured it couldn’t be worse than 40 hours a week in the grime, lint, and humidity of the Spray Cotton Mill. On the drive back to Fayetteville, silently dreading Monday’s approach, I had a revelation about an alternative that turned out to save me from a lifelong aversion to poultry products. I passed a man peering through a theodolite and had a revelation: I could do that! I made a u-turn and introduced myself to Don Kemp, a stocky man in his 30s wearing a tan nylon jumpsuit, and I was hired as a rod- and chain-man on the spot. When I got home, I was able to tell my wife that I was now an “associate” of Kemp, Christner, & Associates, P.C.E. Now Mr. Combs had been extremely protective of the “instrument,” i.e., the transit and dumpy level, and generally kept Archer and myself at arm’s length; I had never actually seen a theodolite, but I managed to convince Kemp (we always used his last name) that I was familiar with all the tools of the trade (watching Mr. Combs use transit and level was good training, and 166

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he grudgingly gave me a couple of rudimentary lessons). After a couple of weeks cutting brush and chaining distances, I found myself, after a worthless fellow employee’s firing, promoted to “party chief,” a position that put me in charge of a party of three, sometimes four, doing property surveys and fieldwork on larger projects, including the layout of a new subdivision (streets, lots, topography, sewer) that I visited recently; it looked somewhat the worse for 45 years’ wear, but so do I. Working for Kemp and Herb Christner was like being part of a family, a seriously dysfunctional one. The two partners rarely spoke, and Herb, who was the certified engineer, kept an ivory-handled Colt revolver (he claimed it had belonged to Wild Bill Hickok) in his desk drawer. I never saw Kemp in the field again after that first day, and, indeed, his appearances in the office grew increasingly rare as summer wore on. Though we were paid regularly (by Herb), the supporting cast of the field party—maybe some preferred Purina— was always changing. And that is how Frank Stanford came to work for us.

In late June, in the midst of the aforesaid subdivision project, we found ourselves shorthanded again; the work involved lots of slogging through the sticky red mud of the just-bulldozed streets, and the weather was mercilessly hot and humid. I had known Frank from the previous year’s poetry workshops with Jim Whitehead, and we had spent a few evenings “hanging out.” Frank was just back from the notorious Hollins College writing conference, which he left with an agreement (with Irv Broughton) to publish his first book, but was out of a job. I recommended him to Kemp and Herb, and he was hired, working full-time through the rest of the summer and into the fall semester on Saturdays when there were small jobs to do. I knew nothing of Frank’s familial connection with engineering, but I liked him and suspected, from the familiarity with nature in his poems, that he could tell a brush hook from a handsaw. He knew nothing about the rudiments of rodding and chaining, but it doesn’t take a genius to hold a pole or stretch a tape.

I forget most of the daily details, but there are two from that period that I vividly recall. The main street of the subdivision was a long uphill curve, and the top of the curve was about a quarter mile long. To establish the line of the street-to-be involved a lot of brush cutting, which took up most of a 167

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long, hot morning. Without going into the technical details, let’s just say that we were all “bushed” by the time it came for me to set up the transit and “turn the angle” of the curve. By the time I backsighted and turned the cross-hairs on Frank for the long “shot,” I could see him sitting motionless far down in the woods, his red and white line-rod leaning against a tree. I yelled my head off trying to rouse him, but naught availed. Finally, in a bit of a temper, I marched off downhill through the brush line, finding at its end, Frank seemingly mesmerized by a swinging plumb bob he had tied to a sassafras branch. Even yelling from a close distance didn’t work, so I had to shake him out of his reverie, put the rod in his hand, and stalk back off to the transit station. The ride back to the office that day was quiet.

The other event happened near the end of the same job. We had finally made it to the top of that hill and were cutting brush when Frank suddenly, to the astonishment of his fellow workers (if not to me, exactly), began to run amok with a machete, lopping the heads off everything botanical in sight, all the while yelling, “I am superior! I am superior!” I believe we called it a day at that point, with another quiet ride back to the office. I told this story to Leon Stokesbury, who used it in his memorable poem, “A Few Words for Frank Stanford: 1948-1978.” I don’t know now if the embellishments in it are Leon’s or my own, but they ring true for me. And for Frank.

When the fall semester began, I resumed teaching my two comp classes and drawing a regular salary. Frank grew distant from the poetry workshop, spending most of his time in the cabin on Mt. Sequoyah, where he lived with Linda Mencin, who would become his first wife. Linda was employed in some kind of social work, and Frank wrote, seemingly around the clock. He told me once that he and Linda could easily subsist on less than $2 a day-two Banquet frozen dinners and a can of ready-made biscuits—and I suspect this was true.

During this period Frank broke, in some cases painfully, with many friends in the writing program, but I kept up with him because we would occasionally do small surveying jobs on weekends. The big break came following one of those periodic week-long visits to the writing program by a Famous Poet, in this case a spiteful alcoholic who held in disdain everything in Arkansas with the sole exception of Frank, whom he named as the Anointed One. The 168

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last day we worked together, or were supposed to work, was the following Saturday, when the office had promised a couple of farmers, after several delays, to stake a fence line between their properties. Frank didn’t show up, and I couldn’t rouse him by telephone, so I called Leon in as emergency help.

We showed up a little late for the farmers, who had probably expected us at dawn, but we completed the job in a few hours. Leon later told me that the opportunity simply “to get out of his head for a while” may have kept him from going crazy, so disturbing had the Famous Poet’s visit been to almost everyone. I would love to go back and see how straight that fence turned out, but I still lack the courage.

About that time, Kemp and Christner dissolved their partnership, and the next three summers I worked for engineers in Springdale and Rogers and even later in Austin, finding the jobs hard and underpaid but certainly less stressful than either teaching or working for K&C. I saw Frank on a few occasions in the spring of 1971, but then years passed until I met him for the last time. This must have been in the fall of 1977, when I combined a trip to the SCMLA in Hot Springs with a visit to Fayetteville to read in the new student union from my first chapbook, titled Bearing & Distance in memory of Mr. Combs. I was with my present wife, Donna, who was prominently pregnant at the time, and Frank was with C. D. Wright, whom I had never met. We talked briefly in a distantly friendly way, and he may have told me that he was working for Kemp again. Anyway, that was that, and neither he nor Wright came to the reading. I knew nothing of his marriage to Ginny Stanford and the complicates that would lead, in June of the next year, to his suicide, which would be committed with a .22 target pistol Frank had apparently taken from Kemp’s desk.

Ironies abound. Donna and I were in Houston to hear Leon give a reading from his first book, Often in Different Landscapes. We were in the bar of Leon’s hotel when a call came; it turned out to be from Jim Whitehead, who told him of Frank’s death.1 We were, as Leon and I have said many times, mildly abashed. Actually, not mildly at all. Leon flew back to Fayetteville, where he had resumed graduate studies, and took part in the events of his poem, how “It fell to us [he and Jim] to clean the sick mess up”; Leon edited 169

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the first major selection of Frank’s poems. I mentioned at the beginning that Frank’s work for Kemp was illegal. As far as I can tell, Frank did all the surveying work and may have even drawn up the “plats” of surveys, adding the license stamp of his absentee partner at the end. Land surveying can be a tricky matter legally; misplaced boundaries can lead to court, and property owners can be notoriously stingy over one foot one way or the other. Kemp was something of a shady operator who had larger aspirations. He had once been Washington County surveyor and had run unsuccessfully for county judge.

With his wife, he had faced one litigation in a land deal, and it was rumored that he had underworld connections and wished to hang with the Tysons as a big-shot wannabe. Whatever the case, in 1985 he too killed himself, using the same weapon as Frank.

Frank, of course, established his own posthumous boundaries as a poet; one of his books is titled Arkansas Bench Stone, a reference to a known point of elevation that topographic surveys are based on, and there are direct and indirect allusions to surveying in his poems, including such ancillary benefits as searching for ticks after a day in the woods. There may be something inherently poetic in land surveying, with its lines and measurements, and now, at roughly the same as age as Mr. Combs when I worked for him, I look at it with a certain nostalgia, especially recalling a rainy afternoon at the Kemp/Christner office (surveying work is notoriously dependent on good weather). While we waited for the sky to clear, Frank typed out a copy of a new poem on Herb’s IBM Selectric. I asked him for it, and he signed it and gave it to me; I kept it for many years before passing it on to Adam Walton, who has written a long biographical study of Frank and his work. So long ago, so many changes since. The steel chain and the transit and level have long been superceded by computerized devices that give instantaneous readouts of elevation, bearing, and distance, but the brush remains, still needing to be cleared away by hand before the shot can be taken.

1. Leon has read this and tells me my account of learning about Frank’s death is wrong. He had already returned to Fayetteville when Jim called him. Does this fact call into question my other memories? Nah. 170

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A review of Hidden Water: From the Frank Stanford Archives (Third Man Books, 2015)

Third Man Books—a recent outgrowth of Third Man Records—is a

fitting publisher for this handsome volume of Frank Stanford ephemera, arcana, and previously unavailable poetry, being to music production the same sort of independent visionary project that Stanford’s own Lost Roads Publishers was to poetry. While the big news of 2015 is the publication by Copper Canyon Press of Stanford’s collected poems (What About This, edited by Michael Wiegers), more than 600 pages of poetry including the complete contents of his seven published volumes and an additional 300 pages of poems never included in books, this extraordinary volume fleshes out a much more human portrait of the elusive poet, while not pretending to approach the status of biography. (The ‘collected’ omits Stanford’s gargantuan The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, while using passages from that epic as dividing diversions among sections; nowhere in either volume is it quite clarified how there came to be yet other ‘unpublished’ poems as found in Hidden Water, making the two books almost necessary companions.)

Edited by Third Man’s Chet Weise, along with Wiegers, Hidden Water, with its high quality production values and the warmth imparted by visions of the poet’s handwriting as well as photographs and sketches (mostly by his wife, the artist Ginny Stanford) of the poet—young, handsome, fierce, doomed—provides a singular kind of recognition of the fact that Stanford’s cult following—based not only on the often breathtaking poetry but on the compilation of legends and myths that have grown up around him, in part because of his dramatic suicide at 29—demands access finally to more than the poems so long out of print and barely in reach. Much of the audience for Frank Stanford’s work also craves connection to the magnetic personality 171

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of the poet himself, to his secret thought and quiet moments, to his life, not just his work. As someone who knew Frank, who has participated in keeping his poems in circulation and his story in print, I find Hidden Water both informative, and, for all of its revelations and exposures, tasteful.

Scholars and poets will particularly gravitate to the correspondence between Frank (often writing in big printed letters) and Allen Ginsberg, and Frank and Alan Dugan. Dugan and Ginsberg, two of the most accomplished and celebrated American poets of their time, both recognized and sought to nurture the poetic genius Stanford’s poems revealed. For his part, Sanford is chatty and solicitous in his, as well as careful to convey the rustic environment and country milieu in which he (really) lived and wrote. Stanford spent most of his creative time in Arkansas, sometimes working as a land surveyor, sometimes a fishing guide. That he emphasizes those aspects to his admiring seniors is not to suggest that they did not recognize that he had read poetry widely and deeply, especially the modern European poets, and was an aficionado of the great surrealist film makers. We also get to see poems in progress, lists of words, pages that frequently bear crossings out and the odd mundane note.

For his fans, the photographs alone are worth finding this book: we see Frank seated with small town friends like bar owner Sherman Morgan or Jimbo Reynolds, older black men to whom he gravitated in friendship, and Father Furhmann, a tough monk from the school at Subiaco Frank attended. Most striking are the individual portraits, in which his naturally smiling demeanor seems to belie his reputation as a poet of death and, alas, eventually of suicide.

While a fan might come to this book for the proximity to Stanford’s life, any serious reader will find the greater joy in these poems, from the long opening words of “The Mind Reader,” possibly an example of work done

by Stanford while still in high school (and as evocative a litany of surrealist images, mingled with autobiographical rural notations, as you’ll see anywhere), to small, exquisite poems like this one: “Watching a Woman Die” falling out of a tree at midnight I know paradise has never been lost 172

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and so it can never be regained the moon is a warm egg dropped by a girl in sandals running away from the United States Marines and the stars are all my sisters hiding in the dark bamboo of their mother’s belly only sixteen dressed in black falling out of a tree at midnight a rifle in my hands a bullet in my heart

The book, with its excellent editing and wonderful introduction by novelist Steve Stern, offers no explanation for why the poems in Hidden Water that are not in What About This are omitted from the ‘collected.’ Perhaps they are mostly earlier work. To complicate the distinction even more, some poems—notably “Lament of the Land Surveyor,” appear in both volumes.

However these decisions were made, this book, Hidden Water, deserves a wide audience and will, no doubt find a grateful one.

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Ralph Adamo

A review of Please Forward (UNO Press, 2015, 394 pages, paper)

Reading this book—having approached it warily, with misgivings,

almost with fear & loathing—I realized that I have been ducking, submerging, forgetting my own Katrina experiences and feelings for at least the past seven years, since things started to ‘normalize’ for me and mine, and since my daily movement around the city no longer brought me immediately and irrevocably past or through scenes of destruction and despair.

What editor Cynthia Joyce has done with this anthology of mostly short blogging pieces by nearly seventy-five individuals, covering a time from late August 2005 to September two years later, is nothing less than a gripping, front row view of the cataclysmic events, the personal responses and the inevitable (and sometimes horrific not-inevitable) outcomes of what we have come to simply call ‘Katrina.’

Because our children were then four-and-a-half and two-and-a-half, my wife and I took off on Saturday, with barely a change of clothes, planning to be gone two days, headed for the faculty club hotel on LSU’s campus, where I had stayed a few times as commuting adjunct faculty. Crowded in our small room, we watched the storm coverage through Sunday night and then the breaking news of the broken levees the next day. We knew then we were stuck where we were (until a few days later the administration of UNO commandeered our room for their headquarters, forcing us to join the rest of the evacuees seeking rental units in Baton Rouge.) My brother drove my mother and disabled sister through the chaos of the city a day or two later, arriving in Baton Rouge and joining other relatives staying with my saintly cousin Bill and his wife Christie; at one point, he had a household of more than thirty, including a roomful of elderly relations who sat through day after day of TV Land reruns from their middle years.

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Our lives as exiles lasted through Christmas, though I returned several times—to retrieve our cats (one dead already, the other soon to be a freakedout runaway once I got him back to BR); to meet with fellow public school teachers about restarting our school; to clean out our rotten refrigerator and assess the damage to our rented uptown digs, which mercifully had not flooded.

As someone who lived through that time with my focus almost entirely on my own family and our new challenges of unemployment and dislocation, I find Joyce’s book a real eye-opener, as well as a familiar and extremely painful series of reminders about what was then mostly in my peripheral vision. While there may be other books attempting to put Katrina in perspective, I would be surprised if there were a reading experience one could find that would be more compelling than this collection of writing performed in urgency and without guile or ulterior purpose. As it happens, every one of these bloggers can write; some are even well-known writers or communicators. Whether that skews these revelations of Katrina toward a more literate or self-conscious presentation is debatable; perhaps raw oral histories from persons with less education and sophistication might present an even more human and horrifying picture. But I tend to think we are lucky that so many good writers faced their demons on a daily basis, communicated their experiences and feelings using highly developed gifts of language, observation and analysis. Certainly not all are professional writers. A number are even medical personal, like then student Catherine Jones of the blog called Floodlines. Some voices we have come to expect and associate with the storm are not even present—Chris Rose, for instance—because they reached us through other media, other forums.

With the exception of a few emails, a few formal testimonies, these brief essays are all from eccentrically named blogs, many of them painstakingly resurrected by the editor from lost pathways of the internet.

The tones range widely, as they should. There is quiet reflection, spitting anger, and everything in between. Subjects too are all over the place, and include not only first-hand accounts of unfolding event, the coming of the storm among them, but every manner of aftermath—involving where to lay one’s head, how/where and what to eat, the perfidy of insurance companies, dilemmas and sorrows involving pets, the grim encounters with death in 175

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numerous incarnations, shades of realization about the inevitable (both welcome and unwelcome) changes Katrina has wrought.

For the sake of promoting this ambitious and, I’d say, necessary book, I’ll drop a few of the more familiar names: National Book Critics Circle Award winning biographer Blake Baily, Academy Award winning author and filmmaker William Joyce, poet-teacher Kalamu ya Salaam, entertainer Harry Shearer, author and New Yorker blogger Dan Baum, novelist Bill Loehfelm, saxophonist Steve Allen, The Lens journalist Karen Gadbois, community organizer Wade Rathke, Michael Tisserand who wrote Sugarcane Academy, and Michael Dardar, author of Istrouma: A Houma Manifesto. Many of the others are also decorated journalists, or familiar local citizens like Jeanne Nathan. Two, at least, are faculty at Xavier University—Theology professor Michael Homan, who has blogged for a decade about the aftermath and here reprises his powerful congressional testimony about the failures of insurance, and media artist Bart Everson, who delivers one of the book’s most galvanizing essays on the murder of his friend, filmmaker Helen Hill. (Hill is also eulogized profoundly by Phil Dyess-Nugent, in one of Please Forward’s longer pieces, a later entry from 2007.) Among the many other bloggers are voices and experiences and insights any reader will be glad to have encountered. This book not only reminds us vividly of the past but reminds us as well of how much of that past has never gone away, and about the human scale of what from the outside quickly came to be seen as an undifferentiated tragedy and disaster called Katrina.

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Five Poems Sorry My husband deals with our cat because he loves me. The cat is the only manifestation of the decisions I made without him. He can’t prove any bad thing but the cat. And the cat is dumb. This burns in him like a kind of infidelity to our democracy. A stepchild animal. I hear a story at school that some halfblind child stuck his hands down another child’s pants in the bathroom. A teacher looks at me expecting wisdom or camaraderie. I can’t be sure how she feels. Are we sorry for the half-blind child, the half-blind child’s fucked family life, the half-blind child’s fucked future. Are we sorry for the child who was molested by the half-blind child. Are we sorry for any of them. Are we sorry for something we’ve done. Are we sorry for not keeping watch. Are we sorry for failing here, or somewhere else. Are we sorry for our mothers who never taught us either. Are we at all or not at all. Are we coming to face it or not. Do you love me even though. Do you love me even though the extremities of myself, which are not and never will be me at all.

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Rituals I was born woman between two thick currents of ghosts The world thin beneath me made of crackling dust Women drawn crooked our bodies stiff or fuller We forget our bodies forget we made them forget bodies are variations of salt I want to be a man and go to war to be a man and go to war I put my apparitions at the feet of men I put my lips to the girth of men and heave I put my fingers to the men in the trees who rock birds and mountains steady to sleep

Paint on the face of men bows in the arms of men Floors and steps and stones beneath feet of men Men in my dreams Men giving me things Men swinging my hair wherever they wish Open the rib and the rib keeps opening

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with wind and breath

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Givens I couldn’t see the burst of fire just the trail of smoke.

It was like that with us.

I was squinting into milk of his night.

Positioned in the center of a tenderer meat. That’s what it’s like being a daughter.

What it’s like being a daughter

to always be almost there.

By now the horses have surely died in the field where I worked as a daughter painting fences and spraying weeds and occasionally being lifted upon a horse where I rode so slow you might call it swaying like a daughter.

They all told me I’d probably want more things later to protect myself from the world so when I want those things I can get them.

Like a daughter.

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Age of Insecurities

2008 I go camping with the band. They throw beer bottles into the fire instead of pitching a tent. The head banded ladies chop zucchini and potatoes. I can hear the water from the river and have to shit. I lie that I need cigarettes and leave. The hills are full of coyotes and I think about my father’s encounter with a wolf on a dirt road. Back at camp, empty of shit and drinking whiskey, I sing for the first time.

1995 Mom brings me a slice of American cheese to bed because I whisper to her I’m hungry. She’s twenty-five years old and her hair is the length of forever. She runs her nails up and down my arm until I pretend I’m asleep. She goes back outside to her guests and I hear them through the window saying my name.

2005 It is cold and I wake up in bloody sheets. My father burst through my bedroom door and I sense him scanning the room. Nobody is hidden, I think. My window is shut now, I know. We go to buy a Christmas tree and I spin around in the fake pine forest singing I’m a woman I’m a woman I’m a woman now.

1994 I’m standing in the bathroom and Mom and Dad get into the shower together.

They start giggling and I watch the curtain as they disappear.

2009 We’re in Sienna and I’m glad to be away from the villa for a few hours. I need to collect my thoughts because he won’t quit grazing my feet underneath the table, grabbing my leg on the train, and I’m getting nervous. I’m realizing I 180

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don’t even like him, or know him, or like him, and he keeps doing it anyway.

2003 I go back to the trailer park and all of my friends have belly button rings and flat stomachs. They walk around with their sports bras on and talk about cheerleading. I sit in a corner and wait.

2011 I’m homesick and the moon is low with fog. There are black cats, grey cats, disappearing to get somewhere. I no longer like the smell of the city. Inside the bar I don’t care who I’m with as long as I can hear the music. I drink and I sing and remember my friends who I love more than my friends who aren’t there.

2008 We’re in the woods singing Sublime in the back of a truck. Everyone takes their shirts off but me because I have a scar on my ribcage that I can’t get over. I am coming down from mushrooms and go from feeling big to small and then smaller smaller.

2000 My parents won’t let me shave my legs even though I’m on the basketball team. I know I’m the worst player, and my socks are too high, and I’m not cool. The boys from the trailer park who I have my first crushes on sit across the court from me drinking blue Gatorade and looking at me and laughing.

2012 I bargain with Jesus in bed after a night of whiskey and coke. The fall moon blows through my window. I decide to become a vegan and start to love myself again.

2004 I watch yellow pollen fall from big trees and the crooked man with his dog 181

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Star walk across the street. I don’t know if he’s blind or deaf or both. The morning is already hot. I start walking to the natural food store for berries and some muffins to eat by the pond with the geese. This is before we ever locked our door.

2007 I’m drinking Old Style in a broken down house we call the mansion. Someone up late mixing a track tells me to keep talking so they can play my voice backwards. I become silent and unsure. The night, outside, all stars and bugs.

She and I tiptoe barefoot through the field of broken glass to pee, whispering the whole way.

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Pull for Frank and I’m sorry

I went to the house where he shot himself so I could see how white it was on the outside.

It was hot and July and the breath of the dogwood.

My summers were cigarettes back then with my back bent over a lawn chair with the water hose.

Green onions split the dirt with scent.

I crawled in through that stuck window into the kitchen that gave birth to me.

I heard the birds swallowing worms in the branches outside and thought when I was younger, when I would touch the trigger.

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Salgado MaranhĂŁo

Earth Without Name translation by Alexis Levitin I. The solstice opened a path for the waters and, with them, the scent of firewood and thistles.

Blessed be the blossom of the chrysalis that gives fragrance to blood and this earth without name.

Here, a drum’s response healed the weeping of houses of mud in an abyss whipped by the winds.

And the night licked clean its carnivorous teeth.

II. There was a lightning flash rending the fields of a madman, in a time remembered in staccato; there was wandering 184

and a nucleus of blood amongst daggers.

Then came words sniffing at locks and keyholes, insoluble wrangling, and the creaking of the beds of lovers.

All engraved in a mirror without a face, gazing inward like the eyes of the blind.

III. Far off sleep the tears of sorrow-laden waterholes, hostage to the landscape of memory. Far off from me myself, drawn to dream and to desire; being just this ONE that survives: this Guaja Nago of thatched hut villages.

Knowing it just mine, the imprint of those yesterdays, untranslatable as never and the days that still remain.

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IV. The grain that tore me with words

came with a husk. And brought along a feverish heart to set the night aflame.

This grain gnawed at by delay crashing against bone

(and a face both denouncement and name.)

I cling to the pollen of that voice

that sings me into song and is my very map exposed.

The grain gnawed by the word came with its husk,

to the flatness of this earth I tread upon, this earth already passing me

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were roots, men slashed open the mornings with a machete and women washed cassava along with petticoats in the rivers from which we drank.

And a sun would consume the trees and caress the rain.

I gathered the gaze of those mornings in the features of lives without fingerprints.

In the place where my feet deciphered grammar and the word was hewn with an ax

VI. (There is a time to hone steel and hide it behind the door, for its gleam begs for darkness.

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rage in marinate: add salt and pepper to your taste.

And bile against the very self.

I’ve seen the thrust of a dagger slice through a bellowing heart.

I’ve seen men fighting mad.

And a scarlet moon

draining away from life.)

VII. For Marcelino Freire In crushed sugar cane there’s still A wisp of fire; in revenge an ascetic powder

still persists.

Pain polishes leather where a fist of fear exudes its poison.

Sooner or later

the siege recedes from all that is

soft or suffers 188

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versions of the soul in memory.

I will sing, visceral, beneath this wild fire, like one who has nothing but the earth and his teeth.

VIII. I’ll be invisible to the eyes of the shipwreck,

for a wind has blown me to the other bank.

Even so I sell myself bit by bit serving invention and revolt.

I’m a loner

my siege alive in naming.

In my salt hills, rivers, forests were asleep (buritis, babacus…)

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into verbal pastures come again: the manure of memory; the remains of feelings without an address.

IX. Even though all that remains is the breath of this hour And its yelping, even though the fetish of bloodied glory growls at us, rebellious love tames the anger

of the winds.

Things sniffed out by desire want to come to light to eat dreams alive.

There’s a clattering of lightning In the veins, scraps of iridescent heaven, seamless, before the convulsions of empty entrails and the traffic of the abyss.

Spawned from the cage of the breast reality devours concept.

Earth Without Name

X. Time that passed beyond time, 190

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wrote my name in the landscape

of beings that were me without my being.

I am the one who shares the dream blood of that river of remaindered ethnicities.

One had to anoint leathered flesh with herbs and stew oblivion over a low flame; one had to raise up fine words between desire and the street dogs on the corner.

I’ve watched the rain flowing from the roofs of old houses to grow where life is muddied earth.)

And wash clean the tongue of the dead who, coming back,

lash my lyre, in a time that has passed without me passing.

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Contributors Ralph Adamo edits Xavier Review. His most recent book is Ever: Poems 20002014 (Lavender Ink, 2014).

Tom Andes has published fiction in Witness, Natural Bridge, News from the Republic of Letters, the Akashic Books Mondays Are Murder Flash Fiction Blog, Best American Mystery Stories 2012, and elsewhere. His book reviews have appeared in publications including the Los Angeles Review of Books and The Rumpus. He lives in New Orleans.

Kathleen Balma is a Fulbright Fellow and Pushcart-Prize winning poet from the Ohio River Valley of Illinois. She began her arts education at Interlochen, Michigan, then earned advanced degrees from Southern Illinois University and Indiana University. An aficionada of Romance languages, she was an international student in Andalusia and Tuscany during her college years. She has also worked for extended periods in New South Wales, Western Australia, New England, and Madrid. She lives in Louisiana.

Thomas Bonner, Jr., Professor Emeritus at Xavier University of Louisiana, twice served as Distinguished Visiting Professor at the United States Air Force Academy. Having books and articles on Kate Chopin, William Faulkner, and other American writers, he has also written fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction for literary magazines and anthologies. He edited Xavier Review and its press for over 20 years.

Ryan Burgess lives in New Orleans with her husband and son. Her work has appeared in Heron Tree, Cannibal, Otis Nebula, Under The Gum Tree, and The New Orleans Review online, among others.

George Elliott Clarke is a prize-winning, Africadian (African-Canadian) poet of partial African-American and Native American heritage. He grew up in the original

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“Acadia”—Nova Scotia, but is the current 2015. A professor of English at the University of Toronto, he’s also taught at Duke and Harvard. He’s at work on a body of poems engaging with both the rhetoric of slavery and resistance to same.

Joel Dailey’s is the author of more than twenty books of poetry, the latest of which is Industrial Loop, from Lavender Ink. He is the founder and editor of Fell Swoop: the All-Bohemian Review.

Roweena De Shields majored in Biology at Xavier University of Louisiana, where she minored in creative writing and was a recipient of the Truman Capote Literary Trust Scholarship for Creative Writing. She began studies in Marine Environmental Management (with a focus in marine ecosystems and aquaculture) at University of York this Fall.

Ronald Dorris is a lifelong resident of Garyville, a small sugar cane town along the east bank of the Mississippi River, in St. John the Baptist Parish 35 miles west of New Orleans. He is the author of Cane: Jean Toomer’s Swan Song (1997). His creative works have been published in Quarterly West, Western Humanities Review, American Poetry Anthology,The Griot: Journal of African American Studies, Genetic Dancers, Langston Hughes Colloquy, and Network 2000: In the Spirit of the Harlem Renaissance. His scholarly works have been published in Africa, the United Kingdom, and the USA. Brett Evans is the author of T. Rex Parade (with Chris Shipman) and I Love This American Way of Life.

Laurie Filipelli is the author of a collection of poems, Elseplace, released by Brooklyn Arts Press in 2013. She earned her MFA from Indiana University and lives in Austin, Texas where she works as a freelance writer and writing coach.

Her poems and essays have recently appeared in Boat, So and So Magazine, The Pinch, apt, Salamander, The Rumpus, and Redheaded Stepchild.

Louis Gallo’s work has appeared or will shortly appear in Southern Literary Review, Fiction Fix, Glimmer Train, Hollins Critic, Rattle, Southern Quarterly,

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Litro, New Orleans Review, Xavier Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Texas Review, Baltimore Review, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, The Ledge, storySouth, Houston Literary Review, Tampa Review, Raving Dove, The Journal (Ohio), Greensboro Review,and many others.

Chapbooks include The Truth Change, The Abomination of Fascination and Status Updates. He is the founding editor of the now defunct journals, The Barataria Review and Books: A New Orleans Review. He teaches at Radford University in Radford, Virginia.

Poet, scholar, editor, and critic R.S. Gwynn was born in Eden, North Carolina and is the author of several collections of poetry, including No Word of Farewell: Selected Poems 1970–2000; The Narcissiad (1982), a book-length satirical poem; The Drive-In (1986), winner of the Breakthrough Award from the University of Missouri Press; and Dogwatch (Measure Press, 2014). Gwynn is also the editor of Poetry: A Pocket Anthology (2001) and New Expansive Poetry: Theory, Criticism, History (1999). He has also edited two volumes of the Dictionary of Literary Biography. His poetry has been featured in many anthologies and textbooks, including The Book of Forms (2000), The Made Thing: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern Poetry (2nd ed., 1999), and Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism (1996). Gwynn has taught at Lamar University since 1976.

He lives in Beaumont, Texas.

Matthew Henriksen is the author of two books of poetry, The Absence of Knowing and Ordinary Sun, both from Black Ocean. He co-edits the online poetry journal Typo and lives in the Arkansas Ozarks.

Dan Chiasson, writing in Poetry, called Rodney Jones “the best accessible poet writing in America.” His ten books include Salvation Blues, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Prize, Elegy for the Southern Drawl, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and Transparent Gestures, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared widely in leading magazines and in eight editions of The Best American Poetry.

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Contributors

Don Lago lives in a cabin in the pine forest outside Flagstaff, Arizona. His essays on nature and astronomy have been published in prominent literary reviews, including North American Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Gettysburg Review, and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, named a “notable essay” by Best American Essays, and been collected in Starchild: The Human Meanings of the Big Bang Cosmos. He is also a leading historian of the Grand Canyon and published two books on it from university presses.

Robert R. Landry is an artist and graphic designer from New Orleans. He has worked in newspapers for over 30 years as an art director, designer and illustrator.His work has been published in Gambit Weekly, The New Orleans Times Picayune, New Orleans Magazine, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat and the Los Angeles Business Journal. He was the design director for the Los Angeles Business Journal, an award winning weekly business newspaper, from 2006 to 2014, and is currently a visiting professor in the Communications Department at the University of Tampa. Almeda and Joe is part of a graphic novel which is scheduled to be completed in 2016. Growing up, Landry became aware of parts of the eventful life of his grandfather, Joe Lewis, from various family members.

He also knew that his brothers and cousins were unfamiliar with many of those events. Using his training as an artist and writer, he decided to put some of these recollections down for succeeding generations of the family in the form of a graphic novel. Almeda and Joe is the first part of a projected three-part project.

The full version of Almeda and Joe can be read online at cratermagazine.com.

The second part, “Joe,” has been published and will go online this fall. Robert is working on the third part.

Gregory Lawless is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the winner of the 2013 Orphic Prize for Poetry and the 2014 Red Mountain Poetry Prize.

He is the author of I Thought I Was New Here (BlazeVOX, 2009), Dreamburgh, Pennsylvania (Dream Horse Press, forthcoming) and Far Away (Red Mountain Press, 2015). His poems have appeared in Best of the Net, Verse Daily, Pleiades, The National Poetry Review, The Journal, Third Coast, The Cimarron

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Review, Sixth Finch, and others. He lives in Waltham, Massachusetts. He teaches writing at Suffolk University.

Alexis Levitin has translated thirty-eight books, including Clarice Lispector’s Soulstorm and Eugenio de Andrade’s Forbidden Words (both from New Directions). Books published in 2015 include: 28 Portuguese Poets, translated with Richard Zenith, (Dedalus Press, Dublin, Ireland), Destruction in the Afternoon by Santiago Vizcaino (Dialogos Books, New Orleans), Exemplary Tales by Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen (Tagus Press), and Salgado Maranhão’s Tiger Fur. He has been awarded three Fulbrights and two National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowships. He has held translation residencies at the Banff International Translation Center, The European Translators Collegium in Straelen, Germany (twice), and the Rockefeller Foundation Study Center at Bellagio.

A. Loudermilk has published two books of poems, with over sixty poems in reviews like Tin House, Smartish Pace, Gargoyle, and Salamander. He has also published fiction in Carolina Quarterly and Smallprint Magazine as well as essays in River Teeth, the Journal of International Women’s Studies, and the Writer’s Chronicle. He is originally from southern Illinois.

Salgado Maranhão is the best known poet of his generation in Brazil. Just this August, the Union of Brazilian Writers honored him with its poetry award for his retrospective collection A cor da palavra. In 2014, he won the Brazilian PEN Club prize for his book O mapa da tribo. In 2011 he won the poetry award from the Brazilian Academy of Letters for the above mentioned A cor da palavra, and in 1999 he won the prestigious Jabuti for Mural de ventos. At this stage he has won every major literary award available in Brazil. He has also collaborated extensively with well-known Brazilian musicians and composers and his work has appeared on a number of recordings.

Charlotte Mears received her B.A. in English from Hollins University, where she studied with R. H. W. Dillard and received her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Arkansas. There she studied closely with John Clellon Holmes,

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Contributors

James Whitehead, and Miller Williams. Mears has received ten awards for her poetry, published poems in a number of journals, taught literature and writing in seven colleges and universities, self-published two poetry books, Sweet Air and Winds of New York, and she currently lives in Terrytown, Louisiana.

Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, The Nation, Osiris, Poetry, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. His most recent collection is Almost Rain, published by River Otter Press (2013). For more information, free e-books and his essay titled “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” please visit his website at www.simonperchik.com.

Michael Presti has published poetry and fiction in Georgetown Quarterly, New Orleans Review, Barataria Review, Ellipsis, Lowlands Review, and Xavier Review.

From 1980 to 1990, he was Artist-in-Residence in Film Studies with the Creative Writing Program at New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts (NOCCA). In 1993 Portals Press published a collaborative novel written by Presti and Tom Whalen entitled The Camel’s Back, an SF fugue-pastiche on themes from Christopher Smart, Jonathan Swift, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Presti is an LCSW in private practice in New Orleans.

Brad Richard’s poetry collection Motion Studies won the 2010 Washington Prize from The Word Works, and will be forthcoming in 2011. He is also the author of the collection Habitations (Portals Press, New Orleans, 2000) and the limited edition chapbook The Men in the Dark (Lowlands Press, Stuttgart, Germany, 2004). He is a recipient of fellowships from the Surdna Foundation, the Louisiana Division of the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and poetry winner in the Poets & Writers’ 2002 Writers Exchange competition, he is chair of creative writing at Lusher Charter High school in New Orleans.

Julia Story is the author of Post Moxie (Sarabande Books), winner of the Ploughshares 2010 John C. Zacharis First Book Award and a chapbook, The Trapdoor (dancing girl press). Her recent work can be read at Sixth Finch, Salamander, and Pangyrus. She is a 2016 recipient of a Pushcart Prize and lives in Massachusetts and England.

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Claude Wilkinson is a critic, painter, and poet. His poetry collections include Reading the Earth, winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award, and Joy in the Morning, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

Susannah M. Wilson has written numerous articles for interior design magazines and was an editor of Southern Accents magazine for ten years. Her stories have appeared in Phoebe, George Mason University; The Windsor Review, University of Windsor; Prick of the Spindle, Pensacola, Fla.; The Chaffin Journal, Eastern Kentucky University; and Valley Voices, Mississippi Valley State University.

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New Releases from

XAVIER REVIEW Percival Everett: Writing Other/Wise Edited by Keith B. Mitchell and Robin G. Vander 978-1-883275-24-2 • 2014 • $30.00 Percival Everett: Writing Other/Wise (2014) presents eight original critical essays analyzing the fiction and poetry of contemporary American writer, Percival Everett and includes a special section highlighting Everett’s visual art.

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