XR44-final-text

R XAVIEREVIEW 44-1&2, Fall 2024

XAVIER REVIEW P

R

E

S

S

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

Ralph Adamo Editor Katheryn Laborde Managing Editor Thomas Bonner, Jr. Editor Emeritus Jason Todd Associate Editor Thomas Bonner, Jr., Biljana Obradovic, James Shade, Oliver Hennessey Robin Vander, Mark Whitaker, Nicole Pepinster Greene, Jeremy Tuman, Bill Lavender Contributing Editors Bill Lavender Graphic Design Editors, Xavier University Studies, 1961-1971 Rainulf A. Stelzman, Hamilton P. Avegno, Leon Baisier Editors, Xavier Review 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.

Xavier Review is supported by the Xavier University Endowment for the Humanities. www.xavierreview.com www.xula.edu/review ISSN 0887-6681

Editor’s Note

Once again, it is my pleasure to introduce an exciting and varied

edition of Xavier Review, one that defies the usual categories of literary journal publication. You will find poems of many different kinds, a story, two memorial essays, reviews of both classic and new works of literature, personal memoirs, and a chapter from a forthcoming book that begins the story of a New Orleans organization that connects fatherless boys with mentors. I am grateful to all of these writers, for taking a chance on us, and also—in several cases—for undertaking work on our behalf. (Thank you, Dennis and Grace.) I am especially grateful to our editor emeritus, Thomas Bonner Jr, for his involvement in the issue. And finally, Xavier Review and the entire literary community owe a debt of gratitude to Anthony Dimatteo for bringing the work of poet Sharon Bourke to our attention. While Bourke’s poetry has been neglected for decades—and while she also produced a vivid body of graphic art along the way—we expect to see a resurgence of enthusiasm for this mid-century poet’s work.

Finally, in addition to the two poets memorialized in this issue, Martha McFerran and John Sinclair, we have lost another poet (and novelist and painter) with strong ties to New Orleans, John Stoss. You can read about him on the website of his publisher, Lavender Ink, which published his collected poems, Nobody Loves Me.

iv

Xavier Review 44 1&2, Fall 2024 Editor’s Note — iv Anthony Dimatteo Introducing the Poet, Sharon Bourke — 9

Sharon Bourke

Six Poems — 12

Livio Farallo home from learning — 21 Marjorie Maddox Lone Boat on the Lake at Dawn — 22 Barbara Crooker Summer, and the Syllables Simmer — 24 John Kucera Placebo — 25 William Heath The Curse of Rafinesque — 26 Daniel Edward Moore I am Whatever’s Distant — 30 Jeff Fearnside Higgs Boson — 31 Dennis Formento The Saturation Job in Jazz, Blues and the Delta: Thoughts On the Poetry Of John Sinclair — 33 Dennis Formento This morning I went hungry — 50 Joel Savishinsky Two Poems — 51 George Guida Four Poems — 54

v

Charlotte Innes Three Poems — 61 Thomas Bonner Jr. Two Poems — 66 Heather Ostman Seeing Is Knowing: Vision Technologies and Kate Chopin’s Short Fiction — 68 Kelly Talbot Transformation Incantation — 93 Grace Bauer A Circling Variety of Lives: On the Inimitable Martha McFerren — 94 Dewayne Keirn Jag — 102 Rodger Kamenetz After Fireflies — 109 Chanel Hoyos Michita — 112 Jeremy Tuman Potatox Revisited: Everette Maddox Returns to Tuscaloosa — 113 Barbara Crooker Summer, and the Syllables Simmer — 132 Stephen Gibson Two Poems — 133 TJ Beitelman Two Poems — 135 Jason Todd A Sense of Place: A Review of The American Daughters (One World, 2024) — 143

vi

Richard Godden Four Poems — 148 Kathleen McCann Three Poems — 155 Vincent A. Cellucci what happens to a dream quarantined — 158 Mark Statman Three Poems — 161 Sonny Lee with Jason Otis Son of a Saint — 168 Contributors — 182

vii

Anthony Dimatteo Introducing the Poet, Sharon Bourke

Ms. Bourke and I met some dozen years ago at a poetry reading in a

Long Island library. Prior to the reading, I sat in the library’s small recital room alone, hoping for fit audience though few, at least someone beyond the host of the series, my friend, the poet Mankh, who had invited me to be a featured reader. More than a few people arrived, perhaps some wandering in by accident or to take a donut. When I turned around, there she was, walking with cane in hand, Sharon Bourke. She sat down directly behind me. I strained my neck to thank her for coming. Little did I know then that I would be looking back on her poetry for the rest of my life, walking “along the spiral path,” to use the title of her unpublished manuscript.

She turned down my invitation to sign up for the open reading held after I read. She said she felt too weak, in her mid-eighties at the time. When I offered to read some of her poems for her, she laughed and rolled her eyes as if to say why would anyone do that. Had she some poems with her? Reluctantly she pulled a folded typed sheaf out of her bag, handing it to me. “Pick one of these if you like,“ she said. I began thumbing through when the host commenced the reading, introducing me. Instead of reading my own poems, I decided to begin by reading a poem or two from Sharon as a way of thanking her for coming. At random the page I pulled out bore the poem “An Unexpected Visit with Souls.” “A lucky grab,” I said, “so close to Halloween.” Then for the first time I entered that first stanza: No doubt because I want you back I feel you in the coolness of the air and hear you in the rain, a song touched by the darkness — music of metamorphosis, earth and ocean, 9

synapses and storms in each droplet of you now.

I came to a long full stop as if a canyon had opened up before my eyes out of nowhere. I felt visited by a presence. The poem’s title proved eerily prophetic. A bit breathless, I read three or four more of her poems. After a long silence, I said, “Sharon, these are amazing,” and the room erupted with applause. She raised her hand to reveal herself and bowed her head, thanking us. Then I had the fate of reading my poems after hers. In this foreword too, I want to get off the stage quickly so her readers can enter the stunning zone of her work.

After the reading, we lunched together, and again she stunned me into silence. She told me her poems were first published by Poetry Magazine some fifty years ago. Though she had written hundreds since then, only a very few poems had been published and in much smaller venues.

That revelation began what has become a personal mission for me, nudging and helping her get a book of poems published. I promised I would hound her to put one together. Over the next half dozen years or so, through phone calls and emails, she did, sending me little by little what formed into a manuscript. An accomplished artist, Sharon also shared several graphic designs for a frontispiece. We voted for one as frontispiece.

What we have in your hands now, fellow reader, is a small sample of a lifetime’s worth of wisdom put into her craft and developed out of it. And it’s more than that if we take into account what she has written about her experience writing these poems. In her own words, her poetry is, “something deeper within me that seemed to be growing on its own.”

Her manuscript’s first poem indicates the autonomy of her verse and the process she underwent to achieve it, hoping, “for ink to fly clumsily / and register beauty by chance.”

That Ms. Bourke’s poems have their own beauty, no one can doubt.

The ink—and the mind spilling it—has settled into work that clearly makes 10

a permanent contribution to American literature, and I dare say the world in view of what the poet says about her work in her manuscript’s last poem “Acceptance.” She hopes her poetry is, “a small song / traveling across continents.” Another poem in that manuscript indicates the independence of poetry and the experience it offers her readers: On your figure another figure dances turning with a sumptuous curve.

That’s the first stanza in the poem “Figure Upon Figure,” prompted by a work of her friend, a professional photographer—“from a photograph

by Omar Kharem,” Sharon specifies in her note.

We might as well take this poem as something of her ars poetica, the poet’s indication of the dance or transit in a circle of creation that all the arts share. Her manuscript’s overall organization readily implies that dance figures an interchange or intercourse of inner and outer realms, subject and object, accounting not just for artistic creation but all creation. That’s one of the underlying reasons why the manuscript is organized into three parts. Their titles—Our Selves and Fellow Creatures; War; Land, Sea, Mystical Precincts—indicate how all life connects, what makes it divide, and how everywhere in the cincture of the earth, a mystery abides. Enjoy these six poems and your journey into her poetry’s spiral path.

11

Sharon Bourke

Six Poems An Unexpected Visit With Souls No doubt because I want you back, I feel you in the coolness of the air and hear you in the rain that gently sprays my windows with a song touched by the darkness — music of metamorphosis in each droplet of you now, earth and ocean, synapses and storms.

If I were to rise and go outside, you would awaken me from my dream, and shower me with the reality of your far mystery, but . . . instead I lie here, clinging to soft, familiar cloudlets of you.

You are my weather through which I wander, the atmosphere here in my brain.

12

Breathing Again After War It was another war, of course, not this one—or two, or four.

Amid the rubble, flowers began to grow, grey, on spindly stems, with pale mauve streaks on their leaves and the merest hints of green.

In a dense, not quite fog-like mist borne by gentle streams of air, illusions ran rampant, imagined music, optimistic visions that tricked the heart.

Nothing to buy, nothing to sell, little to eat as yet.

Silence, save shuffling footsteps.

Hallucinations, hollow pain.

Two people with the strength to stroll along walked by, ignoring the weather, a woman clutching the arm of a cloud, instead of the arm of a man.

A soldier in tatters guarded a station where trains no longer stopped.

They will come once more,

13

he will be there on the job, but for now, no one acknowledges him.

Another soldier, in khaki, wearing a helmet, leaned against the remains of a tree.

He held in his hand, as if expecting someone (mirages abounding), a bouquet of rain.

14

Lion Resting Lion with pensive eyes, how deeply you are lost in thought, as if the sun had sent you musing on life and made you wonder at things you never considered before, the nature of shadows and how they move across the sands, of birds and how they fly in thousands on high, invisible winds.

Your body lies completely limp, heavy bones and whiplike tail flung about then resting, looking as if detached from you.

Only your hooded eyes remain alive with observation.

What you see reminds you of songs in a language in your breast, words that flow to your brow, your limbs, to the grizzled tresses of your mane.

You languish in a pocket of the desert, asking unanswerable things.

Where does your Gypsy wander on these cold and empty nights?

Where does her music travel without any lions to hear it?

What had the moon been thinking when it looked at you both and smiled?

15

People in the Tree She comes at a certain hour when sunset’s ruddiness has gone and a mysterious half-light clings close to earth, as if a scrim had been let down.

The woman is seated as in times before, on a bough, one arm resting by her side, the other supporting a large basket of leaves on her head.

Near her, barely visible, stands a gaunt old man, back bent.

He has gathered the recent sorrows of souls, unburdening them, giving them peace.

The people in the tree pose there, immobile, until the fullness of night takes hold.

Will they stay until dawn, but invisibly?

Are they ever meant to be glimpsed?

Only an intermittent light of fireflies, warm yellow candles on wings, animates the darkness now, embellishing in silence this passage of time.

16

I Am Looking I am looking for a way to move my hand, looking for the wind.

I am looking for lines to form pathways through blue-grey rain, for clouds to spill down their fullness when nudged by a single breeze, for ink to fly clumsily and register beauty by chance.

I am looking for wonders from a paper mill, leaves the color of sand.

17

Eyes In a life of hardship Dave’s approach was to work hard, hide his weaknesses, and stay out of trouble.

Gradually his health grew poor, complexion grey, gaze watery, as if his eyes were filled with permanent tears that never fell but welled to the brink and stopped.

When he spoke, even when he laughed his raspy laugh and slapped his knee with the humor of it all, his eyes dully shone, as if he were looking nowhere, and not laughing at all.

18

Some Words About My Life

I was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., on September 25, 1929, and was in

effect an only child, my one sibling having been born in 1935 in a Brooklyn hospital where he lived for less than a day.

My mother was of Caribbean heritage, the only one of her 11 siblings to be born in the United States. The rest were mostly born on the island of Nevis, plus one in Trinidad. My father’s family came from Savannah, Georgia, but he was born in Arkansas, as I assume the family was migrating North in 1905. My mother was reared in a house in downtown Brooklyn, and my father first in the Bronx, then in Harlem.

I grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn and was from birth a quiet, reticent soul, the youngest among a great horde of happy, energetic playmates. I was the observer among them, always in the background but welcomed.

New York City public schools provided my education, where in grammar school I began writing plays, imitating fairy tales but casting them in dialogue. Inspired by Catullus, I began writing poems in junior high school and continued to do so throughout my adulthood.

I earned a B.A. at Hunter College’s Manhattan campus and after an interval traveling and working as a civilian in the US Air Force in Germany after World War II, I studied for two years at Columbia University but did not complete my Anthropology thesis and hence did not earn a Master’s degree. By then I had decided that literature was what I wanted to do, not as a student but as a practitioner. I avoided formal academic studies in English or Comparative Literature, or Creative Writing because poetry was a very personal pursuit, something deeper within me that seemed to be growing on its own.

I left my parent’s home at about 19 years of age and have supported myself ever since, at clerical jobs in publishing or in socially related work such as at the United Nations Security Council; a grants-making

19

organization to help support neighborhood self-help organizations; and the Institute of the Black World in Atlanta, Georgia.

Throughout my years of employment I took periods of time off between jobs to write and study drawing, painting, and printmaking as a second calling.

My first published poems appeared in Poetry magazine in September, 1960 and January, 1963, under Henry Rago, editor.

Photo which accompanied Over the subsequent years I have had poems Bourke’s first appearance in published in Understanding the New Black Poetry magazine in 1961.

Poetry, by Stephen Henderson; Celebrations, A New Anthology of Black American Poetry, Arnold Adoff, editor; Children of Promise: African American Art and Literature for Young People, Charles Sullivan, editor; Songs of Seasoned Women, Patti Tana, editor; Toward Forgiveness, Gayl Teller, editor; and Temba Tupu! (Walking Naked): Africana Women’s Poetic Self-Portrait, Nagueyalti Warren, editor.

Two of my artworks have appeared as cover art for volumes of poetry by other poets, and I have exhibited paintings, fine-art prints, and digital art through membership in the Long Island Black Artists Association, the East End Arts Council, and the Graphic Eye Gallery, an artists’ co-op organization formerly in Port Washington, Long Island.

Since 1993 I have lived a somewhat reclusive life in Central Isip, N.Y., where I read scholarly books in black history from the 15th century onward, plus cultural studies, and sociology, and continue to create art.

—Sharon Bourke

20

Livio Farallo

home from learning a beckoning bell: the wide ancient of my name stretches for a brother, stretches an anvil for a hammer. a country gone by in several lines is a ring minus a widowed finger; it is my hand spilled in wide-opening eyes, clenched in a riot’s disarray. kissed and lost, unalive, a balloon skipping over drafts is all the oversimplification i can stand. what goes into not forgetting, to illustrate the vastness of memory? the color elephant is the size of gray.

21

Marjorie Maddox

Lone Boat on the Lake at Dawn Not still, but still a still point among two diving loons and one blackbird flecked with red and barely balancing atop the tallest pine this side of the lake.

Even morning is relative: shadows undulating with waves slight as breath, amber almost out of reach but ebbing closer, the way I hear you inside, stirring, deciding whether to rise and recognize, off to the side of our vast bodies of deep and shallow waters, the one small, lone boat, green maybe—or gray— floating a stranger whose face, even now, I cannot see 22

but who may be looking out at us, two different points of still before each of us cast our lines of sight, reel in the morning that soon, in the limited minutes of beginnings, will be moving, moving, moving.

23

Barbara Crooker

Summer, and the Syllables Simmer Too hot for clothes. Too humid for my hair, which springs into frizz. Too hard on my pale skin, which sizzles and burns. But oh, those sweet nights, glittery with fireflies’ morse-coding love letters on the grass. The music of katydids and cicadas, the scent of a fresh-mowed lawn.

An icy martini, olives bobbing in the waves, each sip lessening my grip, letting me remember happier times. I know you’re not sitting here next to me, but I sense your closeness. Tell me what it’s like, over there, in the world of pure light.

Tell me how to go on.

24

John Kucera

Placebo When you grow tired of a marriage place the smooth placebo moon against the tongue.

When you grow tired of appeasing, swallow the moon. Let your expectations fall. Let the tides of endorphins rise.

You didn’t just imagine it.

The slender moon visible in the western sky just after sunset can make you believe anything. Can make you believe you too can arouse oceans and circle planets.

That your body too will soon wax imperturbable and full.

25

William Heath

The Curse of Rafinesque Make it new. –Ezra Pound

Constantinus Rafinesque, born near Istanbul, as a young man leaves Palermo for Philadelphia.

Short, corpulent, with an outsized head, thin refined hands, dark penetrating eyes, tangled black hair to his shoulders—he is convinced the Americas abound with new species that he will discover and name.

Part idiot savant, part autodidact, Rafinesque is hired by Horace Holley, president of Transylvania, to teach natural history, botany, foreign languages.

Named for an early Kentucky land company, under Holley the college’s reputation rises, draws many students from the Old South.

Holley’s wife Sarah takes a special interest in Rafinesque, whose slovenly appearance cries out for a mother’s care. She feeds him, washes his clothes, struggles to comb his unruly hair. At the Holleys’ frequent parties, when he not moping in a corner, Rafinesque enthralls with tales of botanizing.

26

Hardships are formidable: gnats dance before his eyes, ticks stick to his skin, ants crawl his ears, mosquitoes bite, wasps sting, knee-deep in swamp mud, dangers of poisonous snakes, trees toppling in thunderstorms, flash floods, a black bear attacks in a canebrake.

Yet he loves to explore this new world: clear skies, a bracing breeze, breathing pure country air, a draught of cool water from the brook. Each species he names a small conquest over Nature’s bounty.

He feels religious wandering in God’s wide temple not made by hands.

To some he is the best field botanist of his time, collecting specimens of fish, snakes, lizards, frogs, bats, insects, and plants that he swears are unique.

To others he is absolutely delusional, many of his so-called discoveries bogus, claims extravagant, findings trash.

Audubon recalls how Rafinesque arrives at his door in a long yellow coat stained with plant juice, huge pockets stuffed with specimens he insists are not merely new species, but a new genus. That night his naked guest smashes his best violin swatting an open-window invasion of bats.

27

Rafinesque is fascinated by aboriginal peoples of the Americas, he collects vocabularies, copies Maya glyphs, argues that a comparative study of languages will reveal where the Indians come from, when and how they migrate and disperse across two continents.

Once again his passion for novelty creates controversy. His translation from the original tablets (now lost) of the Wolum Olum, the Delaware text of their sacred origin legend, creation and flood myths, is accepted for years before declared an elaborate hoax.

A few years earlier the Angel Moroni gives Joseph Smith—from golden plates (now lost)—a translation of a sacred epic, The Book of Mormon. Yet Rafinesque does anticipate later language studies, his two-volume work on Native American use of medicinal plants is now invaluable.

Thanks to President Holley, Transylvania becomes a college where reason is favored over revelation, students are trained to lead good, useful, happy lives.

These liberal positions are anathema, orthodox protestant clergy fear Holley esteems Socrates over Jesus.

28

A nasty rumor to discredit Holley suggests Rafinesque is having an affair with his wife, causes the offended botanist to leave in 1826, putting his curse on Holley, the college, consigning them to divine justice.

Holley resigns the next year, dies shortly afterwards of yellow fever.

In 1828 Old Morrison—Gideon’s Shryock’s celebrated Greek Revival building, the heart of the Transylvania campus, its pediment supported by six strong Doric columns— burns to the ground. Rafinesque credits his curse, predicts I might yet live to see my mature insanity become wisdom.

When Rafinesque dies in Philadelphia, the landlord refuses to release the body, planning to sell it to recoup back rent, his friends lower the corpse by ropes out a window, bury it in a cemetery.

Years later the college moves the remains to a crypt under Old Morrison.

Rafinesque’s curse lives on: Old Morrison burns down two more times. In 1961 a college coed, Betty Gail Brown is strangled with her own bra in a car parked a few yards from Rafinesque’s tomb.

In spite of multiple confessions, no conviction, her murder still unsolved.

29

Daniel Edward Moore

I am Whatever’s Distant But before measuring the space between emptiness and echo, a drop of blood in the book of blame will give you something real to hold, until the starfish of my hand breaks on waves of grief. This will not deter us from letting the sand in both our mouths praise the broken glass. Pretty feet are always the first to feel what’s left behind. In the gospel of the rusty tweezer’s sermon on the wound, closer please is translated, spare me amputation’s song. Come, be soft and explosive. Lite the velvet fuse.

30

Jeff Fearnside

Higgs Boson We’ve found you, elusive god particle, zipping around our huge underground rink for subatomic skaters colliding with each other.

You were the one who wasn’t spinning, wearing either a straight or wavy skirt; we haven’t yet stripped you of that.

Oh, but how we’ve gaped at you in our minds.

Your flirtatiously reticent mass hints at future destruction of the universe, suggests it may be inherently as unstable as the humans who inhabit it.

Or it might collapse upon itself until it can contract no more and in another Big Bang expand again, repeated cosmic death and orgasm, an eternity of universes.

I’ve heard that story before: Vishnu asleep on the serpent Endless floating on the Milky Ocean, four blue arms relaxed, dreaming the universe: a lotus growing from his navel.

On the lotus sits Brahma, the creator.

31

Brahma opens his eyes, and a world comes into being…

Brahma closes his eyes, and a world goes out of being.

All the while Brahmas and lotuses fall and rise in the cosmic empire of the eternal dream of eternal slumber.

The latest science and age-old metaphor are not so far apart.

They are two cutting edges on the same blade of all that is known and all that is not known.

Italicized lines from Joseph Campbell’s retelling of a story in the Upanishads.

32

Dennis Formento

The Saturation Job in Jazz, Blues and the Delta: Thoughts On the Poetry Of John Sinclair “I thought John’s poetry was real. I wasn’t necessarily a jazz fan then, but I quickly got into John’s rhythmical readings. I also noticed that I was learning a lot about Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Sun Ra, and so much more. His poetry had a beat that swung, mixed with the history of jazz. I also learned that John had a whole collection of Blues poems. As kindred spirits in poetry and music, we began a relationship that has lasted for 40 years.

I found that the more I heard John’s poetry and saw him perform it, the more I learned and the more I dug into the beat that he changed.”

—Poet M.L. Liebler, Ridgeway Press, publisher of John Sinclair’s Collected Poems.

“PRIMARY DOCUMENTS. And to hook on here is a lifetime of assiduity. Best thing to do is to dig one thing or place or man until you yourself know more abt that than is possible to any other man.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s Barbed Wire or Pemmican or Paterson or Iowa. But exhaust it. Saturate it. Beat it. And then U KNOW everything else very fast: one saturation job (it might take 14 years).

And you’re in, forever.”

—Charles Olson, A Bibliography on America for Ed Dorn

A song can lead you to poetry can lead you to history and myth—a

poem like John Sinclair’s “21 Days in Jail,” his retelling of the arrest of two musicians in Mississippi, through the actual words of one of the men 33

in that jail—Robert Lockwood, Jr., who spent three weeks in the slammer in Sardis for vagrancy, along with the legendary bluesman, Rice Miller.

Miller was known as Sonny Boy Williamson, the first of two musicians who went by that name.

They’d been arrested while playing blues on the street, and, having awakened in a cell on the first morning, they opened the windows on the second floor of the jailhouse and began to play. The full story is recounted in Lockwood’s words, the tempo and rhythm of the telling conveys with warmth and courage how he and Sonny Boy made over one thousand dollars in three weeks (and a lot more for the sheriff, unfortunately) by playing the blues in a Mississippi jailhouse. The story in Lockwood’s own telling dictates the rhythm and tone of Sinclair’s retelling, scored with

John Sinclair (l) with Amiri Baraka and Ammiel Alcalay

34

line-breaks in precise keeping with John’s recitation.

* Like “The House of the Rising Sun” can set you off looking for the original house in three or four locations in the French Quarter, you can be a pilgrim to the haunts and burial sites of the men and women of the first generation of blues, leaving Detroit, like John did with a buddy, and kneel at the gravesite of the original Sonny Boy Williamson. Sinclair and his friend, John Hall, found Rice Miller buried in a grave at the Whitfield Baptist Church, near Tutwiler, MS. Sinclair put the location in his poem, “Decoration Day,” in the volume, Fattening Frogs for Snakes: Delta Sound Suite, published here in New Orleans on my own Surregional Press in 2002. Using the text of Robert Palmer’s seminal Deep Blues, John mined poetry from stories like that, stories about the musicians from the earliest practitioners to the mid-century giants, Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters.

* In an email, George Tysh of the Detroit Artists’ Workshop, wrote: The young writers in the Artists Workshop community shared an intense interest in Olson’s “Projective Verse” essay, in particular its citation of (poet Robert) Creeley’s “FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT,” a notion that John applied to a vast range of poetic, cultural and political activities. John’s early poems reflected a reading of Olson (whose concept of polis involved the grounding of cultural life in a specific place/community), Creeley and (poet and writer Amiri) Baraka, then expanded into the MC5 activities and White Panther Party, and eventually flowered in the later breakthrough poems that captured the tone and energy of the blues without simply inheriting the AAB form (re: Creeley above on form and content). What I’m getting at is that I don’t think of John’s cultural, political and poetic projects as disparate, but rather connected in a lifelong flow. I love the final phase of his poetics.

Open form, which could include historical texts, letters, translations, songs, ideograms, and in the hands of Sinclair’s hero, Ed Sanders, Egyptian

35

hieroglyphs— any form one wanted to employ, had been practiced since the early decades of the twentieth century by Ezra Pound, whose Cantos began the trend. His contemporaries William Carlos Williams and Muriel Rukeyser continued this practice, as did later poets of the “projective verse,” conceptualized by Charles Olson. Form, in the case of John Sinclair’s work, could be conceived to include his work as poet, broadcaster, agitator, band manager, and walking encyclopedia of African American music.

Poet, provocateur and musician (The Fugs), Ed Sanders wrote in his introduction to always know: a book of monk (Trembling Pillow Press): “These poems are a big work that places Sinclair on the path of Olson and other bards who have undertaken long sequences that include personal history as well as the history of a culture and civilization.” Sanders, as an acolyte of Olson and founder of the poetic/satirical folk-rock-punk prototype Fugs, was a fellow traveler on John’s path. They remained lifelong friends. That “personal history… of a culture and civilization,” exactly fits Sanders’s own use of the saturation job,” like in his poetry sequences, “Melville’s Father,” Egyptian Hieroglyphics: A Study of Rebels in Ancient Egypt, and the poetic chronology 1968, which traces, in a September ‘68 passage, the Fugs attempted photo-op drive (to find “a column of Soviet tanks”) into Czechoslovakia.

Olson was a particular favorite poet of Sinclair’s. Olson broke with his own master, Pound, after meeting with him in a Washington, D.C. mental hospital, where the elder poet was confined after his scurrilous radio broadcasts for the Italian government during World War II. Nevertheless, Olson continued to use this method of transforming historical and mythic texts into modern literature, producing his massive Maximus Poems in six volumes before his death in 1970. It was he who conceived of the “saturation job”—that one should study, as much as one can, the work of one writer, one concept, one place, to know more about the subject than anyone alive—and produce poetry imbued with those facts and that spirit. The notion of place and history fascinated John and the Artists’ 36

Workshop people. But whereas Olson’s place, his polis, was Gloucester, Massachusetts, where he lived his last decade, and his concept was the notion of democracy and of the mythic dimensions of modern life, John Sinclair’s “saturation job” included the blues of the Mississippi Delta, the breakthrough music of Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Sun Ra. As for his places— Fattening Frogs for Snakes: Delta Sound Suite was set on the Mississippi Delta and the path the blues took up to Chicago, Detroit, and points between, in the years from 1910 to 1965.

New York City was the place of much of the modern jazz he delighted in. And it was always the struggle for freedom stemming from liberatory writers like Baraka and Malcolm X that animated the lives of the Artists’ Workshop—the poets, dancers, filmmakers, visual artists and “fire music” jazz performers. And later, John learned an awful lot about the modern brass bands, New Orleans r & b and Mardi Gras Indians, and through them, the less-known cultural relationships between African Americans and the native Chahtah people of Bulbancha, the place called New Orleans. One regret I have is that John didn’t produce a volume of poetry specifically about New Orleans music and its culture.

The “Blues People” in the late Amiri Baraka’s words— made blues the music of their Friday night fish fries and Saturday night dances during dangerous times in the South, the Artists’ Workshop and Sinclair made modern jazz of the free variety and blues-inspired hard rock music the sound of their revolution. They dropped out to create a new world. That same Amiri Baraka wrote the introduction to Fattening Frogs for Snakes, and he had this to say about John Sinclair: “What it is, is that JS, from way back, has been in the real world. And for bunches of white guys, certainly those who qualify as Straight Up Americans, that’s a trip not usually bothered with.” John bothered with it, all right, creating the WPP with the MC-5, linking arms with the Black Panthers, introducing rock audiences to avant-garde jazz by pairing the 5 with the Sun Ra Arkestra, expanding the Ann Arbor Blues Festival in 1972, eschewing the suburban class he

37

was raised to be a member of, and smoking weed every chance he got.

* The myth that appears in John’s poetry is made from the lives of the musicians themselves, like in contemporary use of the word, in which myth is the size of a human being in memory. A myth is a huge presence, or else a complete falsehood. What true myth in Fattening Frogs for Snakes comes with the appearance of a certain trickster god in “Cross Road Blues,” when Tommy Johnson explains to his brother LeDell how he learned to play—by going out to a crossroad in the middle of the night: “If you want to learn how to play/anything you wanna play,” you have to go to a junction out of town, and ‘round about midnight, sit down with your guitar.

A big black man will walk up there & take your guitar, & tune it.

And then he’ll play a piece & hand it back to you.

That’s the way I learned how to play anything I want.”

In the poem’s coda, John credits Robert Palmer, musicologist, reed player & rock critic for The New York Times, with identifying this mystery man: Legba, “a Yoruba trickster god,” who cleared the path for other spirits to come through the veil and reach people on earth.

I maintain that “myth” in Fattening Frogs appears in the story of Robert Johnson’s death, the cinematic “Hellhound on My Trail.” Johnson was poisoned by a jealous husband, the owner of a juke joint Johnson

38

performed in, during the opening of a gig there. he could see that hell hound that he had that song about, hell hound on my trail got to keep moving but he couldn’t move his hand or get up off the ground, … poison eating away his life, staring up into the drooling jaws of the dreadful hell hound standing dead up over him blood dripping from its eyes, its foul breath in his face— Robert Johnson on his way to the spirit world, catch that Greyhound bus & gone.

That gruesome ending even employs that familiar American bus line as a mythic mode of transportation.

* The message and meaning the artist wishes to convey, in poetry, takes whatever shape and size the idea requires— “form is never more than an extension of content,” be the content quotations of Delta blues musicians or as in Olson’s case, a ship’s log book or ancient Sumerian text. But on a wider scale—if your content, your message was to attack racism at its core, or that “music is revolution,” those too could find their forms in large scale, public action—festivals, exhibits, demonstrations, support of campaigns against war and for African-American freedom. The Artists’ Workshop

39

soon gave birth to the Rainbow People’s Party, the MC-5, a proto-punk group which John managed for two years, and the White Panther Party (WPP), an underground organization whose first plank on its ten-point program was total support of the 10 Point Program of the Black Panther Party. The campaign to free him from a ten-year sentence ostensibly for possession of marijuana, but certainly propelled by his political activities, resulted in a huge concert in December 1971, at the Crisler Arena in Ann Arbor where Ginsberg and Sanders, Bobby Seale, Rennie Davis, and other “movement heavies” joined Mitch Ryder, proto-punk band The Up, Phil Ochs, avant-garde jazz artists Archie Shepp and Roswell Rudd, and finally, John Lennon with Yoko Ono and The Plastic Ono Lower East Side Band, to raise funds for his defense. Four days later while legislators were actually moving on a bill to decriminalize marijuana, a sobbing John Sinclair was released to his jubilant wife and daughters.

* After publishing This is Our Music and Fire Music: A Record, John stopped writing poetry for over twenty years. The first few were taken up by activities of the WPP, the MC-5 and Iggy and the Stooges, another early punk prototype band from Detroit. The Stooges and the 5 were frequent openers for national and international touring acts like the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Cream and Blood Sweat and Tears. John once revealed to me that early in their breakout career, BS&T naively scheduled a gig with the Stooges and were virtually run off the stage by the wild and massively confrontational performance of Iggy Stooge and company. It had something to do with the noise of culinary blender being run through massive Marshall amps.

As John had put it to me in an interview with Mesechabe: the Journal of Surregionalism in 1993, he and other young people were out looking for “beatnikery” in Detroit, and finding a few hip-looking people, differentlooking people, he thought he had found it. The Detroit Artists’ Workshop was the result of that search, a place where Black and white, male and

40

female artists could create a new aesthetic, all their own. Free jazz, loud rock ‘n’ roll, stuff the radio stations wouldn’t play, poetry the universities didn’t teach. Art that birthed the aesthetics of the psychedelic posters of Gary Grimshaw and other new art of the 1960s.

For John, one of the end results of his first poetic period was his 1965 collection of poems in homage to John Coltrane, the ground-breaking tenor saxophonist whom he heard perform live in August of that year. Megan Burns’s Trembling Pillow Press brought out the definitive edition of Song of Praise: Homage to John Coltrane in 2011. His love of the music and the musicians who created it is overwhelming to read:

we wanted them to love us as a first term. to know that we knew, & would tell them with our eyes, & our pumping feet. would sit & stare

at the bandstand or at each other, & grin. or get up from the chair & walk smack into a pole after 45 minutes of Elvin Jones

Jones was the drummer in Trane’s “classic quartet,” and he must have taken their heads off that day at the downbeat Jazz Festival, in 1965, where a critic noticed a group of young people “dressed as railroadmen or lumberjacks, with beards and wild eyes, (who) could be seen bobbing and chuckling aloud” the astounding performance—those were John and his friends, who arrived in Chicago down to their last dimes, to see Trane, Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor and other avant-gardists outperform musicians Sinclair felt were “mediocrities” in comparison, who afraid to make anything original, falling back upon the music of other people to make their own playing listenable.

The book describes, in terms akin to the bop poetics of Jack Kerouac, 41

a major inspiration to John, how: the music moves inside my self I mean I feel saxophones inside my meat, a force inside that meat to sing pure electricity. (“Consequences”) The spirituality of Coltrane’s music, and that of other free jazz explorers, was reflected in John’s poetry of the time. Seeing human existence in much the same way as the Catholic-Buddhist Jack Kerouac, human flesh was the spiritual meat that made the music, embodied it, or as Roosevelt Sykes, “The Honey Dripper,” puts it in John’s poem, “Doctor Blues:” “God gives every man a talent… can’t nobody give it:”

You have to work hard.

It will come to you.

It’s there for you.

Lots of folks got talent; but do better sleeping than another fellow can do it woke.

(from Fattening Frogs for Snakes: Delta Sound Suite, 2002) The book for Trane is another saturation job, and before that, there was a previous effort, not recorded in poetry, which John undertook when studying sax player Charlie “Bird” Parker. As he told me one day in his apartment on North Rampart Street, he wanted to understand the progression of Bird’s solo playing. So, buying or borrowing all the records 42

that Bird had played on in his career, he arranged them in order—not in order of release, but in order of the recording of each individual number.

Having done so, he re-recorded them on reel-to-reel tape—in those days before digital production, even before cassette tapes, you had to play a record into a tape machine and take the sound right out of the air. John did this, hours of arranging and taping, and then listening, until he felt he understood the trajectory of Charlie Parker’s playing from the time of his first recordings until his untimely end.

Megan Burns also brought out Sinclair’s always know: a book of monk, and the title alone suggests the close of an intimate letter, written by a lover to a lover of music.

Love is a spiritual feeling. To bluesman Sunnyland Slim, blues and gospel were deeply related, as he said to writer Jack Vaughn, which John relayed in “Sunnyland Train,” “if its touching to the people it puts soul to the public just like when youre playing the blues right blues & gospel like two trains runnin side by side.” (“Sunnyland Train,” Fattening Frogs for Snakes)

* Other important influences on Sinclair were Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Kerouac went so far in his interest in the spontaneity of jazz

43

improvisation as to base both his poetry and prose on jazz; his “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” so thoroughly influenced Allen Ginsberg that in retelling many times how he composed his epoch-making poem, “Howl,” he overemphasized the importance of the first draft to fit Kerouac’s “essentials.” Later, Allen found his guru, Kagyu Buddhist Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, whose basic adage about poetry composition was “first thought, best thought.” John’s mystical experience of jazz as described in Song of Praise compares to Ginsberg’s reading of the visionary, William Blake, and yet no two poets of the open form generations could have been much different in application: Allen’s raw, direct, satirical, raunchy; John’s steady, balanced between altruistic love and the passion of revolution.

* He was a perfectionist about the book we published together—his daughter Celia did the typesetting and layout—she and I really had to exercise patience while waiting for John to finish the latest round of indexing— yeah, he insisted on indexing references to people and places in Fattening Frogs for Snakes, something unheard of in poetry publishing— and I got accustomed to hearing him grumble over the phone, “Well, I’m CIRCLING AROUND THE PILE” when I’d call to see how the LATEST revision of the book was coming along. Every new reference required a new re-pagination, which Celia Sinclair heartfully fulfilled. He had so many irons to burnish— articles he was writing for various magazines to keep mind and body together, gigs and tours he needed to schedule, all that. Staying alive.

He was remarkably precise in his wording and word placement, and once explained to me his choice of very clear American English as his written lingo by saying, “My mother was an English teacher. I HAD to get it straight!” But I think it went a little deeper than that, the choice of specifically American had to include African American usage as a fuller realization of what American speech is. And his admiration of poets like Robert Creeley, the Harvard educated genius, affected John’s approach, I

44

think, with its focus on syntax, short lines, and a jazz-influenced rhythm that wasn’t so much funky or scat-like as staccato and precise, like Thelonious Monk’s piano. I’m not sure about anyone else whose playing I would compare it to, but it sure could be Charlie Parker’s. And he kept it simple, direct, because he wasn’t interested in the obscurantism popular in the workshops of the academy, reading for people in tweed coats, whom he’d call “squares.” His poetry lived in coffeehouses, galleries and bars (although he didn’t drink alcohol) & on stages of poetry festivals for the people. Where people who needed it could get it, people who hadn’t heard their world described in a poem.

* I learned a lot from him in terms of delivering on stage with a band, although it took me a long time to develop my own vocal approach.

The human voice— your “poet’s voice,” it’s yours, you were born with it. And there are some poets whose voices, actual physical voices, rather than identity as a writer, are synonymous to me with the poetry itself, and there are examples everywhere, writers whose speech rhythms so exactly match the pace and structure of their lines that I can’t help but hear them speaking when I read their work. A couple of names come to mind: Robert Creeley, Amiri Baraka, or locally, Kalamu ya Salaam and Martha McFerren, whose ironic drawl just left the planet.

John Sinclair’s voice stands out for anyone familiar with his radio work in Detroit and New Orleans, and on line with Radio Free Amsterdam. His poetry followed the lead of Olson, who emphasized breath and voice and the physical presence inside the poem. John’s line breaks and cadences exactly fit his delivery, and it’s impossible for me to read his work even silently without hearing his ol’ bear growl.

In re-reading his work in May, I realized something that should have been obvious: the lines on the page in Fattening Frogs for Snakes exactly matched the cadences on his recordings. Why hadn’t I noticed that before? My own first encounter with John’s poetry was We Just Change

45

the Beat, a 1988 production of Ridgeway Press in Michigan, picked up in a used-book shop in New Orleans. This is just prose, I thought—reading a lot like a journalist’s recap of the lives of blues musicians in the early part of the past century. Fascinating stuff though— for sure, like George Tysh wrote, John would not need to imitate the AABA rhyme scheme of blues songs. After hearing him perform his poems unaccompanied at Ahmos zu-Bolton’s Copastetic Bookstore on Marigny Street a couple of years later in 1993, I got another take. It took a while to see that the lines were a graph of his delivery, and the delivery transformed the words of a story-teller or journalist into cadenced and carefully enunciated poems.

* On May 17, 2024, a month and a half after John’s death in Detroit on the second of April, six poets and Carlo Ditta’s blues-rock group and the storied Treme Brass Band, put on a tribute to Sinclair at Zeitgeist Theater in Arabi, LA. Valentine Pierce, Megan Burns, Bill Lavender, Chuck Perkins, Timeless*** and WWOZ dj David Kunian, and I read and performed selections from John’s work. Valentine said that what drew her to Sinclair’s poetry was “that it was bluesy and down to earth.”

She chose to read “The Screamers” and “Everything Happens to Me,” bookends from early and late eras of the Sinclair career. “stagger down overgrown sidewalks of memory. giving hand & giggling. (earth angel, how I long for you. where you been, all these years? (“the screamers” from We Just Change the Beat, selected poems, 1988, Ridgeway Press)

46

And a poem I have to quote in its entirety, coda to a great man’s life: “all my life I’ve paid & paid, until my dues card is punched up on all 4 sides, a child of relative privilege who chose to ‘take the way of the lowest’— beatnik dope fiend, poet provocateur, race traitor & renegade, living from mouth to mouth and euro to euro sleeping on the couches & extra beds of my friends, a man without a country & a post office box in new orleans for a permanent address, a pre-paid Vodaphone & a laptop computer, one suitcase stuffed with clothing & a bag full of manuscripts & hand-burnt cds—

47

to keep my head straight & my heart right to keep up my travels & carry on the struggle into another new year taking my little verses & great big world outlook everywhere people will have me (“everything happens to me,” from Va Tutto Bene: It’s All Good, Stampa Alternativa/Nuovi Equilibri, Viterbo 2006) The Treme Brass Band followed with a second line out the theater and down the street, to the crossroad at North Villere, where I thought I saw Robert Johnson waiting, pouring rum for Legba—then rounded the corner, and the Treme turned back to St. Claude Avenue, playing “I’ll Fly Away.”

48

Partial Bibliography of Writings by John Sinclair Poetry and Prose: This Is Our Music (Artists’ Workshop Press, 1965; BookBeat,1998) FIRE MUSIC: a record (Artists’ Workshop Press, 1966) Meditations: A Suite for John Coltrane (Artists’ Workshop Press) We Just Change the Beat: Selected Poems (Ridgeway Press, 1988) thelonious: a book of monk—volume one (private edition, 1991) Fattening Frogs for Snakes: Delta Sound Suite (Surregional Press, 2002) Va Tutto Bene/It’s All Good, (Stampa Alternativa/Nuovi Equilibri, 2006) It’s All Good: A John Sinclair Reader (London, Headpress, 2008) Song of Praise: Homage To John Coltrane (Trembling Pillow Press, 2011) always know: a book of monk (Trembling Pillow Press, 2020) Collected Poems 1964-2024, (Ridgeway Press, 2024) Partial Discography: The Delta Sound: Okra Tone/Rooster Blues Records, 2002, with the Blues Scholars (Fattening Frogs for Snakes, Vol. 1.)

Country Blues (No Cover Records, 2005) with the Blues Scholars (Fattening Frogs for Snakes, Vol. 2) SONG OF PRAISE: Homage to John Coltrane, (MoSound Records, 2012) Don’t Start Me to Talking (Big Chief/Hill Country Records, 2007) with the Blues Scholars, (Fattening Frogs for Snakes, Vol.3 Natural From Our Hearts (MoSound Records, 2012) with the Blues Scholars (Fattening Frogs for Snakes, Vol. 4)

49

Dennis Formento

This morning I went hungry remembering a dream is like pealing back meat from a Christmas tree because you are so hungry to get to the heart of it—if the meat is choice then you get something out or go hungry again.

This morning I went away hungry, I had two solid dreams but can’t recall— Black sweat—bipedalling through meat— sometimes you have to activate the jumbling of language to reach the garbled and strangulated logic of the dream— the dream is not enterprise— it is something beyond your own frozen consciousness of daily light, pounding of river waves so intent— rough sewage—the hand-to-eye motion of the pen, eye to hand has the immediacy of dream.

Liberates the mind from the keys, square field of light and spikey fingers.

Do you remember lighting a match to melt coagulated ink from the tip of those cheap Bic pens?

Loosens the flow but melts the plastic barrel near the tip. The end of that honey-flow.

50

Joel Savishinsky

Two Poems Failure: Shipboard Meeting, Singapore Harbor 1994 Failure is not an option, the voyage’s leader announced, failing to explain why, mistaking an oracle for a proof. Engines half-dead, our broken-down, under-powered, over-age vessel had barely raised enough steam to limp to the entrance of Singapore harbor from the South China Sea. Without a berth or proper permits, we stopped at the edge of the shipping lane, waiting for the authorities to deliver us from our self-appointed fate.

For nine days we lay at anchor in sight of shore, passengers without a port. Staring over the rail, the silence of alienation broken only by foghorns, the low chime of bells on buoys tolling the hours, and the anvil chorus of blows hammering our souls from below decks, where the crew tried to pack the boilers. Despite our citizenships, we were still literally at sea, though rich in warm quarters, ample food, and useless passports, left to choose between the lifeboat or the kitchen, a game or a sleep, narrow righteousness or the pleasures of fire.

51

Two weeks before, making way up the Mekong towards Phnom Penh, we had passed the small boats of stateless Vietnamese families rafted together in mid-stream, their sampan sails pinned like stars against the sky, while young couples lay on our deckchairs, napping or necking, twined in each other’s arms in the pose of drowned lovers embracing their destiny. Off to starboard, the refugees — the incidentals of madmen, fanatics and power-brokers, the people intent at all costs on making a more perfect union or a more perfect poem — were themselves more adrift than they themselves knew.

They would not be in view or alongside our ship a fortnight later to hear or understand the sad sub-text of the dean’s harangue, that not being allowed to fail makes success a species of slavery, all effort a form of bondage, and failure itself no longer contingent but an orphaned figure who, after staring endlessly at its own nightmare, has cast itself in shame upon the waters.

52

The Home Library Before he left behind the last stage of Europe’s Middle Age, Erasmus wrote “my home is where my library is.” Meaning, I trust, that if they burn it, the words are still in my head. If time bludgeons memory, I will carry its texts in my heart to pump me full of life each day, black blood sanctifying every sacrifice of quotes, concision and conversation, every dose of folly, doubt and humor. Let us be sure never to be sure, to know in some private prelude to love, dissent and execution, that we will spill flagons of ink laced with regret and our former teachers’ firm convictions.

53

George Guida

Four Poems Vincerò Even with the accent on the wrong syllable, I will win. No. I will be victorious. over someone who wants to kill me for not answering her questions.

But really, Vincerei.

I would win if winning were worthwhile.

Ma chi vince? Who wins in love?

I smile at Liù. She dies.

If I had smiled at you, se ti avessi sorriso what would you have done?

A dramatic hypothetical, so she thought to ask a dagger to teach her what love should be.

54

At that point we were winning Vincevamo, my long-lost father and I. How he got lost, who knows?

Io non so. Nessuno sa.

We only sing Nessun’ dorma but everybody sleeps through the second act.

The Principessa would have won, vincerebbe, if by dawn she had learned my name, which, since it’s foreign here, she can’t pronounce correctly.

If she had been Persian, like me, had spoken Farsi, avesse parlatola, I would already be no more, or else we would not have needed riddles to love.

We could have been married ci potremmo stati sposati like ordinary people who want sometimes to kill each other, sometimes, vincere, to win.

55

I am Filled with Love for Something It’s spring again and early rain is battling hyacinths for my mood.

It’s clear from the smile I feel like confectioner’s sugar on postpastry lips that I can love. I wouldn’t say love the world, unless I could cover my eyes with daffodils and have one mating cardinal perch on each earlobe.

Gushing about nature makes sense from the distance of a page, but this is a draft of feeling I’m not yet ready to revise.

If I were AI, I could use as example the pond newly thawed.

But even Thoreau had his reservations, as I have mine for Easter brunch on this ascendant day of hymns and vigils.

I do love rebirth, but to take the myth literally would ruin the mood.

From her window bed my white-muzzled dachsund tracks a squirrel.

Does she long for it or just the idea that it shakes its tail for her?

56

Punim What a question you are.

What a creative process.

Say these words, oh, my beauty.

Oh, my voh-dee-oh-doh.

My jazz. Jus’ ask me.

Don’t you like it?

Tell me. Elide my schnoz, if you like.

Was there something else?

I thought I heard a squeak.

There’s a mouse the size of mine in the cupboard. Cup. Board. What words!

What a sound!

What a smell!

What a sight!

Speak.

So you’re asking to see my identification. Here it is.

I took this one on a cliff.

The air behind me looks like everyone we know.

57

Listen to the scent touch leaves.

What’s concrete is what the mirror lies about, what tastes like fingers singing to mouth, eyes, nose.

I’m painting an eyebrow and letting it suggest my subject wears a beard.

In answer to your gaze.

58

Inkling It hits you from nowhere, the thing you believe predicts that the cousin who shows up unannounced and the difficult question he asks were something somehow some force foretold in fragments.

Maybe instead you can inkle, actively pursue the verb, even if sources dispute its origin.

Some say it grew from doubt, not knowing what came next.

So really it came from desire It wraps itself around your fear like the linen trimming tape that inkle also is. Someone in Ireland might call you an inkle-weaver, someone who takes great care to decorate your doubt, your fear, your hope, transforming it into safe space where you and things to come can gather to act as though you can predict the future and thereby defy its arrival.

59

You may whisper or hint to yourself when you grow old that what’s to come is not as bad as what you suspect, but remember, as far as we know the verb has nothing to do with the noun.

60

Charlotte Innes

Three Poems Later You’ll notice the urge to stop, to listen for birds, look out for skunks and possums—are there any?

You’ll find that small things matter, a child’s delight in crackling leaves, and how that takes you back to the aftermath of trees on fire, fire igniting life in seeds, the thin white stems of sprouts that push through ashen soil towards the light, the damp they need to grow and breathe.

Maybe you’ll long for what you maybe had, a love who burrows through your darkest thoughts to a tenderness he knows is hidden there, a drop of water moistening stone.

You’ll know by then that water’s always moving and why you often thought you might have drowned.

You might not know, even by the end, if there’s a stone you might have rolled away beyond these dried-up marks you dribble across the page, this little, trying to be large.

61

Poem with a Cactus in It The first living creature to share my home sat for twenty years on a tray of stones from California beaches, parks throughout the West. Rarely watered, sometimes fed, a barely noticed feature of my indoor landscape, the cactus, losing its first stem, growing new ones, living on, till leaks and mold from heavy rain forced me out for four months to a room with much less light.

Anxiety bloomed. And when I could, I nudged my cactus along the floor to sunlit patches as if to draw more warmth inside, a sort of ritual I’ve retained. Now I’m home, June gloom persists and scaffolding surrounds the building, criss-crossing windows, blocking light, as workers seek out cracks to patch. And so, midmorning, when June clouds slide away, I carry my cactus through the living room to the first sunlit window. Midafternoon, the kitchen’s glowing, and there my cactus goes.

Before I moved, I thought I saw on the stump of the cactus’ second stem, that I’d cut back some years ago because I thought it dead, a small green bump, so small I wasn’t sure.

62

Then weeks went by and the bump grew, green and fresh, its little spikes still soft and furry.

I long for it to live, I’m not sure why.

I find myself reviewing losses, calmly counting them, as if I were a seamstress counting buttons to complete a garment, the sort of losses everybody has, deaths of people and cats, broken friendships.

Old pain slips through at times, prickly, harsh.

I follow it because it often takes me to a place like the rough old scaffolding where I set my cactus Sundays to catch the sun.

63

The Man With the Military Cap –after “Promenade,” a painting by Annie Clavel

Maybe he knows what’s in the air. Or is it the girl he sees, waving from a topmost branch, her arms held high, as if to celebrate success, yet wary.

Of course, she must be in despair for the dying trees, their leaves gone blackish-blue like thunderclouds. Or she’s signaling her sister, dangling from a tree still green, though edged with mold, oddly topped by a crucifix. Their attempt to stop the creeping dark?

Don’t climb! Go back! the older girl appears to shout, also eying her father. Ancient, bent, frail, he clutches the branch she’s sitting on, as if to save her.

Beyond the trees, the man with the military cap feels sure the father’s weight will break it. Snap! he almost hears, imagines a thud. Maybe it’s time. He’s already seen the roots beneath the soil, their soft red or amber like old silk, beginning to blacken, under attack from a creature black and hungry as a black-horned beetle.

It’s like a massive hemodialysis machine, sucking up the sap, sending back an army, larvae boring into trunks and branches to hatch and eat until the trees collapse. The man keeps walking.

The girl, watching, sees him gazing raptly towards a green hill far away. She fears that she, her father, her sister will soon grow dark and hollow, unless they leave, go look for green. Follow the man with the military cap?

64

She squints a bit. Elbows bent, right foot forward, he’s almost marching. He must be fleeing the trees, they are so black, so rank. And yet, chest out, a glint of something at his neck, he seems triumphant. He has to know.

He must know everything. The girl descends. Uneasy.

65

Thomas Bonner Jr.

Two Poems Its Way Music slipped through the door as moonlight found its way onto the green pillow.

Still, she barely heard the guitar from downstairs, but she felt the blue Moon almost like ice water.

66

A Vessel Beside the Rio Grande Maria searched for clay and climbed rocks for ash.

She pounded, mixing water until thick.

Then shaping wet earth, she created space, painting a universe along its high walls.

Fire in the horno finished a vessel with life beyond bread.

67

Heather Ostman

Seeing Is Knowing: Vision Technologies and Kate Chopin’s Short Fiction1 On a very warm summery Louisiana day, Kate Chopin’s best-known protagonist, Edna Pontellier, stares out at the sea, and after some prompting from her friend Madame Ratignolle, she recalls the origins of her childhood dreams. She remembers when she felt free among the tall Kentucky grass: “First of all,” she tells her friend, the sight of the water stretching so far away, those motionless sails against the blue sky, made a delicious picture that I just wanted to sit and look at. The hot wind beating in my face made me think—without any connection that I can trace—of a summer day in Kentucky, of a meadow that seemed as big as the ocean to the very little girl walking through the grass, which was higher than her waist. She threw out her arms as if swimming when she walked, beating the tall grass as one strikes out in the water. Oh, I see the connection now!”

“Where were you going that day in Kentucky, walking through the grass?”

“I don’t remember now. I was just walking diagonally across a big field. My sun-bonnet obstructed the view. I could see only the stretch of green before me, and I felt as if I must walk on forever, without coming to the end of it.” (Chopin, The Awakening 896)

This scene from The Awakening (1899) links Edna’s physical sight with her self-reflective insight. She connects the vision of the sea to the memory of the sight of the green grass, an expanse not unlike the far reach of the water before her. Of course, as many Chopin scholars will tell you, this is not just an important memory that points to Edna’s quest for autonomy and freedom, but the foreshadowing of her death, when she intentionally swims out into the sea until exhaustion takes over at the end 1

All references to Kate Chopin’s stories and novels are drawn from The Complete Works of Kate Chopin, edited by Per Seyersted.

68

of the novel. Whether a reader recognizes the foreshadowing of Edna’s suicide or not, the shift from literal sight to insight is apparent; Chopin relies on her readers’ ability to identify physical sight as a metaphor for perceiving truth. Other stories, notably “The Blind Man,” “The Recovery, and “Two Portraits,” similarly demonstrate not only the depths of Chopin’s investment in the metaphor of sight, but these stories push the basis of the metaphor further, as the author leverages metaphors of vision technologies newly available in the nineteenth century. Chopin’s fascination with these technologies were a direct outgrowth of her interest in the “new sciences” of the day, especially the work of Charles Darwin. Tracing preliminary elements in the stories, “The Blind Man” and “The Recovery,” this essay then turns to “Two Portraits,” which features the effects the stereoscope, a popular vision technological “toy” at the time, used by Chopin to lead the reader into seeing beyond the “images” on the pages of the short story itself, an aesthetic move that aligns the author with proto-modernist sensibilities—and a clear shift away from local color conventions, with which she had been previously associated.

From Local Color to the “New Sciences” and the Search for Truth Known early in her career as a local color author, Chopin was aware of the subgenre’s emphasis on realistic portraits that idealized southern life. A paradoxical intention during the post-bellum literary period, “truth” was produced through a particular lens by local color writers who rendered southern stories “realistically,” with close attention to dialect and character types—depictions that were central to reshaping the “idea” of the South during the post-Civil War era. In this way, local color’s notion of “truth” leaned in the direction of realism with the purpose of producing nostalgia or a quaint ideal, even a somewhat exotic but nonthreatening picture, of the American South—in direct opposition to its economic collapse that

69

followed in the wake of the Civil War: [T]he hallmarks of local color were manifestly realistic: an accurate attention to detail, an emphasis on landscape, carefully created characters, provincial customs, and the peculiarities of local speech (dialect). But what also characterized local color was its interest in difference: not simply “realistic” portraits but portraits of some “other” places and experience, a role that the South—with its lively frontier humor traditions, racialized family structures, slaveholding rebel past, and renewed attractiveness both to tourists and investors— played like a natural. (Ewell and Menke xxxviii)

Chopin’s use of local color conventions enabled her to render many of her characters in realistic terms, often appealing to northern market sensibilities. She certainly was aware of racial divisions. In fact, as Bonnie James Shaker has argued, Chopin was adept at leveraging market expectations in her presentation of many of her Creole and Cajun characters who would have been of mixed ethnicity in real life as white characters.

Particularly in her stories that appeared in Youth’s Companion, Chopin reshapes “non-Louisianians’ general understanding of the Creole and Cajun as mixed-race people into ‘purely’ white folks. . . . Creoles [appear] as the descendants of exclusively white French aristocracy and, metaphorically speaking, Cajuns as their ‘country cousins,’ reserving racial otherness for African Americans and Native Americans” (Shaker xii). Chopin’s lengthy publication history with Youth’s Companion had established her as a writer for young people and solidified her reputation as a local color author, but also showed her to be an astute reader of her audience’s sensibilities: in these stories, realism could be leveraged to convey a particular truth.

Still, despite local color’s emphasis on idealized southern characters and an idyllic southern landscape, Chopin’s other fiction often deviated from these conventions of fiction. Her willingness to explore “truth” subverted her allegiance to the subgenre, and her regard for authenticity— beyond the conventions of local color’s idealism—can be seen, for example, in her admiration for the French writer Émile Zola (1840-1902).

70

Actually, Chopin appeared to disapprove of his style, but this disregard seems to be second to her appreciation for his authenticity and his ability to “see” the truth in all its complicated human nuances. Chopin scholar Bernard Koloski notes the critical misconception that Chopin did not like Zola’s work—an opinion attributed to a review she wrote on Lourdes (1894) in which she claimed that Zola’s novel was, while not a “failure . . . more than two-thirds of the time swamped beneath prosaic data, offensive and nauseous description and rampant sentimentality” (Chopin, “Emile Zola’s ‘Lourdes’” 697). And yet, Koloski continues, her review shows how closely she had read Zola and how deeply she trusted the “validity of his insights,” evidenced in her readings of some of his early RougonMacquart novels (1871-1893) (7). In Chopin’s same review of Lourdes, she compares the value of Zola’s insights and revelations of truth to the ability to see, and more relevant to this study, to the kaleidoscope, another popular vision technology of the time: I once heard a devotee of impressionism admit, in looking at a picture

by Monet, that, while he himself had never seen in nature the peculiar yellows and reds therein depicted, he was convinced that Monet had painted them because he saw them and because they were true.

With something of a kindred faith in the sincerity of all Mons. Zola’s work, I am yet not at all times ready to admit its truth, which is only equivalent to saying that our points of view differ, that truth rests upon a shifting basis and is apt to be kaleidoscopic. (697)

Here, although Chopin admits to viewing the world differently, she claims that Zola’s assertions of truth are valuable, even if they do not precisely reflect her own perspective. However, truth itself, she continues, paradoxically “rests upon a shifting basis,” and therefore allows for the “kaleidoscopic” variations of perception (697). Koloski suggests that Chopin’s comparison to the kaleidoscope “emphasizes the centrality of vision for Kate Chopin, the importance of seeing the truth. She could offer no higher praise to Zola than that his vision is truthful, even if she is sensitive to patterns created by aspects of the truth different from those”

71

he perceives (8). Truth, then, Chopin seems to think, is not as elusive as much as it is subject to perception and variability. The metaphor of the kaleidoscope enables Chopin to compare vision and knowing to the multiplicity of ways of doing both. In other words, the metaphor of vision technology, here the kaleidoscope, provided her a way to not only express the “seeing” of “truth,” but it also offered a means for expressing how one knows or understands its multiplicity.

Edna’s vision of herself, enabled by the sea, is an expression of her shifting perception and kaleidoscopic sense of truth that summer at Grand Isle; a similar expression appears in other Chopin short stories, as well.

In Chopin’s undated allegoric story, “Emancipation: A Life Fable,”2 the animal who is born into captivity, opens “his eyes upon Life,” and he is aware of his cage and the “Unknown” that exists beyond it (37). At first what the animal sees frightens him, and then it frees him: the Truth remains the same, but the animal’s perception shifts and liberates him. Madame Célestin’s “brown eyes,” in “Madame Célestin’s Divorce” (originally published in Bayou Folk, 1893), inspire love and hope in Lawyer Paxton, especially after she goes to “see” the bishop about getting a divorce from her wayward husband (278). Madame Célestin’s marriage never changes, but her perception changes multiple times, and unlike the animal in “Emancipation,” she rejects the opportunity to leave and be free. In “Lilacs” (written in 1894, but published in the New Orleans Times Democrat in 1896), after the Mother Superior returns Adrienne’s gifts and prohibits her from her annual retreat at the convent, Adrienne “turned to look back at the imposing façade of the convent, hoping to see a familiar face, or a hand, even, giving a faint token that she was still cherished by some one [sic] faithful heart. But she saw only the polished windows looking down at her like so many cold and glittering and reproachful eyes” (365).

Adrienne only “sees” her rejection in the return of her gifts and in the icy 2

“Emancipation,” Per Seyersted tells us, was written in late 1869 or early 1870; it appears in his own text, Kate Chopin: an Important Author Reconsidered. Missouri Historical Society, 1963. iii The stereoscope will be discussed more fully further in this essay.

72

reflection of the windows, but she does not literally see Sister Agathe’s sobbing on the inside of the convent.

The “cold and glittering and reproachful” eyes of the convent windows that reflect only one side of Adrienne’s story and obscure another point to Chopin as an author who understood the multiplicity of perspectives in human experience. She renders the sight in these stories’ characters’ eyes as opportunities to see beyond the surface of things and to perceive the shifting “truth,” sometimes for the benefit of the characters themselves and sometimes for the readers. While several of Chopin’s characters “see” truth, as noted above, vision technologies of the nineteenth century provided a unique palette for Chopin’s depictions of human lives, one from which she drew figurative language, but also one from which she borrowed scientific explorations of sight, testing the limits of what readers themselves could imaginatively “see” in linguistic representation.

Sight, Knowledge, and the Short Fiction Chopin was not alone in her fascination with and her aesthetic use of vision technologies. Advancements in this area extended to science and art, as new scientific breakthroughs in the studies of vision emerged through the nineteenth century. Especially toward the end of the century and into the early years of the twentieth century, when Chopin was writing her short stories, studies in vision had advanced in leaps and bounds. The panorama, the dissolving view, the kaleidoscope, and the stereoscope were among the innovations that characterized the shape of vision technologies of the time. Photography, in particular, formed a central development in science and art, both providing opportunities to study the properties of human sight and light with the presumption of “authenticity” as well as a challenge to claims of veracity.

Chopin was fascinated by the “new sciences” of her day, and by the time she had started writing professionally in the 1880s, she had

73

drifted completely away from Catholicism, which found itself at odds with modernity in the late nineteenth century. Mary E. Papke notes that Chopin’s “education” in literature and science started well before her widowhood: “By then she had read widely in science, philosophy, and literature, works which influenced not only her private philosophy but also the public expression of the same through her fiction” (23). Chopin read with interest Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), as well as the work of Thomas Huxley and Herbert Spencer (Toth 152). In fact, as Bert Bender has noted, Chopin did not find Darwin’s theses objectionable, and her “fiction is an extended and darkening meditation on the meaning of human life and love in the light of Darwinian thought” (459). The influence of science extends to her depictions of sight in her stories, and the proliferation studies in vision and vision technologies would have certainly reached Chopin’s notice.

Similar to the ways she drew from the new sciences and Darwinian influence, Chopin drew from the scientific advances in the area of vision for aesthetic purposes.

By the time Kate Chopin’s literary career had launched in the 1880s, the nineteenth-century’s scientists and artists had made significant advances in vision technologies that affected cultural constructions and interpretations of sight. As a result, blindness also took on new significance during the nineteenth century, particularly in its connection to literacy, which saw new developments in the kinds of material texts that were produced for people who did not have the ability to see. Blindness and visual impairment had increased during the nineteenth century with infectious diseases and injuries affecting eyes caused by industrialization and warfare. With these increases, ophthalmology as a medical discipline also developed, but the discipline tended to reduce people with blindness to the identification of their diagnosis (Tilley 4-5). Still, blindness, as understood within a range of sensory hierarchy, was undergoing a change in the way it was perceived.

While people with blindness were historically often depicted by writers as suspicious and fear-provoking, the emergence of the awareness of their 74

intellectual competencies and abilities associated with the sense of touch began to challenge the privilege placed upon the sense of vision and its presumed relationship to knowledge.

New developments in the understanding of vision influenced the ways nineteenth-century writers, such as Kate Chopin, constructed sight and blindness within their stories. The conception of blindness as a disability developed in the nineteenth century, “arising from concern about the role that people with visual impairments could play in a newly industrialised society, and shaped by its increasing medicalization” (Tilley 7). Certainly, Chopin and her contemporaries had inherited a rich literary tradition that presented multitudes of blind characters through time: Oedipus, King Lear, Edward Rochester, and Romney Leigh—to name a few. One of the greatest contemporary influences on Chopin’s development as an author, though, was the French author Guy de Maupassant, whose work she had translated. His own 1882 story, “The Blind Man,” dramatizes humanity’s cruelty through the depiction of a family and community’s treatment of a peasant who is blind. The story opens with a meditation on pleasant sensory experiences: the warmth of sunshine, the colors of the natural world—all denied, the narrator explains, to people who are blind and “sit in doorways, impassive in their eternal darkness, remain as calm as ever in the midst of this fresh gaiety, and, not understanding what is taking place around them” (Maupassant). Here, Maupassant draws upon a common association between sight and knowledge; people with blindness in this story do not engage in the other sensory experiences offered in life because they are not aware of them (read: they do not see them). But Maupassant uses this commonplace presumption to build his ironic ending. Once the blind man’s farming parents have died, his care passes to his sister’s family, who treats him as a mendicant, although the narrator explains that his mother also used to treat him “unkindly” because “in country places useless persons are considered a nuisance, and the peasants would be glad to kill the infirm of their species, as poultry do” (Maupassant). The blind man is both an outsider and a dependent within his own family, and yet 75

within the previous sentence, the narrator equates not the blind man but his family with animality. They are compared to poultry, not him.

The man’s blindness invites increasing violence and cruelty from his sister’s family, and eventually he dies from “furious, pitiless hatred,” freezing to death as a result of human rejection, antagonism, and neglect.

The blind man’s eyes, which are earlier described as “white” and appearing “like wafers” do not register emotion or reaction from the insults. In death, he is buried by “white flakes” that eventually cover him so much that he disappears from sight. A week later crows peck out his eyes with “voracious beaks” and his death is a “relief” to everyone else (Maupassant).

“The Blind Man” invites multiple readings, but important to this study is how the man’s blindness is constructed as a disability; as a result, he is rejected and he is described as lingering in doorways, oblivious to the joys of ordinary life. But there is little joy anywhere beyond the first paragraph. The depiction of blind man’s life is an expression of the severity and meaninglessness of human cruelty. Other people who have access to visual joys only turn their eyes in hate toward a man who does not physically see what they see, but instead, his white “wafer” eyes reflect nothing, not even the effects of their cruelty. His death is a relief to the people who knew him, because it releases them from their daily exercise of pointless violence and rejection, a practice that reduces the peasants to animals, as the narrator reminds his reader, not the blind man. He in fact lives and dies in their midst, registering nothing. Blindness, then, is not only rendered as physical, but instead Maupassant uses the absence of sight to reveal “truth”—in its cynical proto-modern emptiness.

Chopin employs a similar irony in her own story with the same title, “The Blind Man,” which she published in Vogue in 1897. Like Maupassant, she constructs blindness by drawing on conventional biases, connecting the physical disability to the presumption of a lack of knowledge to use the blind character as an ironic device. In a nod to Maupassant, Chopin depicts a man who is also ignorant of all around him, as he walks down the street, but worse, the narrator tells us, he is also “stupid” (518). Although 76

he is not exactly a beggar, Chopin’s blind man is similarly dependent on other people’s charity as he tries to sell pencils; no one buys them, but he feels his way up and down sidewalks, while his stomach rumbles and the sun bears down on him (518). Unlike the blind man in Maupassant’s story, Chopin’s character earns an occasional stranger’s impotent pity: “A kind-hearted woman who saw him from an upper window felt sorry for him, and wished that he would cross over into the shade” (519). Wishing and helping are not the same thing, obviously, and Chopin renders the sympathizer as complacent and not actually compassionate, “kind-hearted” as she may be. Children harass the blind man and a police officer yanks him out of the way, but when a well-known, rich man is killed by one of the “monster electric cars,” Chopin saves her irony for the reader. She does not reveal the victim’s identity until after she has built up the suspense: the crowd magically appears, rushing to the scene of the accident; their earlier apathy is jolted by the “horror” of the “dead and mangled figure of one of the wealthiest, most useful and most influential men of the town.” Then the narrator’s gaze returns to the figure of the blind man, who has continued walking, oblivious to the death and to his townspeople’s concern (519).

In a departure from Maupassant, Chopin uses the figure of the blind man to reveal the complacency of the audience by depicting the hypocrisy of the fictional townspeople, who rush to help a rich and “useful” man who is ironically on his way to vacation but do nothing to help a poor man who is blind. The audience’s anticipated response to the presumed victim—the blind man—reveals its own impotent pity. To execute this ironic twist, Chopin’s use of blindness is similar to Maupassant’s use in that she constructs blindness as physical disability, and certainly as a cause of marginalization from society. In this story, like her French counterpart’s, blindness is equated with the lack of knowledge, but the figure of the blind man in both stories also functions as a mirror; other people’s lack of humanity is reflected in their treatment of the blind characters. In Maupassant’s story, the reflection is that of the fictional townspeople, but in Chopin’s story, the reflection is more direct, a challenge to her readers 77

to discern the truth themselves. Still, both stories echo nineteenth-century ophthalmology: the identities of the two blind characters are reduced to their visual impairments, their humanity ignored. This reduction reiterates the two stories’ similar indictments of human depravity and apathy, and the more relevant point here is what appears to be Chopin’s intention: to manipulate her audience and enable them to reckon with their own presumptions and ignorance.

Chopin’s construction of sight and blindness and a presumed relationship to knowledge and ignorance has precedent in a slightly earlier story, “The Recovery,” which was published in Vogue in 1896. In this short story, a thirty-five-year-old woman’s sight is restored by “one of those seeming miracles of science” after fifteen years of “darkness” (480). Chopin’s reference to science’s miracles hearkens to the advances in studies of vision and vision technologies during the nineteenth century.

Despite her wonder at seeing the world around her—the interior of her own home, as it were—the woman is shocked by her aged visage in the mirror; she mistakes the image at first for her mother. The narrator assures the reader that the woman is still reasonably attractive, but “Only God knows what she saw” (481).

What exactly did she see? Clearly the narrator appears to suggest that it was something she or the reader could not see, but the eyes of the woman, with newly regained sight, tell a different story: The eyes, above all, seemed to speak to her. Afflicted as they had been, they alone belonged to that old, other self that had somewhere vanished. She questioned, she challenged them. And while she looked down into their depths she drew into her soul all the crushing weight of the accumulated wisdom of years.

“They lied; they all lied to me,” she said, half aloud, never taking her eyes from those others. (481)

Her “old, other self” is part reference to her former youth, but also is part reference to her former trust. The woman believes her family and her betrothed have deceived her about her appearance. In a turn from the 78

construction of blindness in “The Blind Man,” Chopin’s blind character in this story is more fully depicted as human, especially as her sight is medically restored, and not as a social outcast. But the woman ironically finds truth, solace, and clarity in her voluntary return to “darkness.” In other words, she discovers the delusions of her youth once she regains the ability to physically see; the scientific miracle that has restored her physical sight has enabled her access to truth, and although she recognizes that she was blind and deluded for those fifteen years, she wishes to return to “darkness” to be able “to think” (483). The restoration of her sight had both “robbed her of her illusions” and “stolen away her youth,” but vanity does not seem to be the sole concern here. Mark Paterson has written about the fascination readers and writers with vision have had for people with blindness and what they can “see.” In a broad study of western literature, he links this fascination to “philosophical speculations and early psychological inquiry, early ophthalmic interventions, and public interest in narratives of recovery from blindness,” which extend to what people with blindness actually “feel” (Paterson 185). In this Chopin story, age and insight shape the mirror image; the woman becomes able to see who she is and who the people around her are. The return to “darkness” provides her the ironic illusion of her former blind condition, a solitariness where she now retreats to be able to contemplate the new truth of her existence. In this Chopin story, physical blindness enables a space of contemplation, whereas “the sight of things confuses” the woman (482-3). In this depiction, Chopin draws unintended effects of contemporary vision technologies: the seeds of doubt and illusion. For the formerly blind main character, sight is untrustworthy, confusing, but truth—in darkness or in light—is unstable, subject to revision, depending on the point of view—not unlike the “kaleidoscopic” truth Chopin associates with Zola’s rendering of the “truth.” Further, in “The Recovery,” the mirror effects a cognitive dissonance similar to the effects of the stereoscope: the mirror’s “true” image does not align with the mental image the woman had of her own appearance, and the effect of the new “true” image of herself and of the people in her life is jarring to 79

her. But the new image replaces any illusion she may have had, because it is perceived to be an authentic rendering of her appearance. This story and “The Blind Man” demonstrate Chopin’s awareness of the growing cultural fascination with sight, blindness, and vision technologies and her willingness to use these elements metaphorically in her fiction. However, neither story creates the same effect as the stereoscopic rendering of the two portraits of a woman named Alberta, in the story titled “Two Portraits.”

Although “The Recovery” and “The Blind Man” confront readers with bleak reality and challenge presumptions of “truth” through depictions of sight and/or blindness, “Two Portraits” not only imitates the effect of the stereoscope, it does so in ways that anticipate Modernist approaches to meaning-making.

Nineteenth-Century Vision Technologies As mentioned earlier, the invention of the stereoscope was one of many technological vision innovations developed in the nineteenth century.

New vision technologies proliferated during this era: one discovery led to another; one invention led to another. Victorian Thomas Carlyle brought the term “visuality” into existence during the 1830s—part of the visual discourses that developed through the century and enabled the expression of the multiplicity of visual experience. Before the nineteenth century, perception of spatio-temporal events, as Jonathan Potter has noted, had been articulated mostly through images, but during the century, visual technologies enabled new ways of seeing. These new technologies and the new visual experiences that emerged in turn enriched the capacity of texts and images to influence how those new ways of seeing were perceived and expressed, and Potter adds, the circular process fostered by these new scientific advances “constitute[d] an unprecedented cultural coupling of the technological with the imaginative” (2-3). The expanding studies of vision prompted researchers’ fascination with—to use Jutte Schickore’s

80

term—“optical toys of all kinds,” including the kaleidoscope, thaumatrope, and microphotograph, among others (383).

Key here is the notion of “optical toys,” indicative of a level of play and experimentation within the overlapping areas of aesthetics and science. Curiosity and amusement perpetuated the development of such vision technologies, so that writers, like Chopin herself, drew from the possibilities of perception and metaphor they offered. One such nineteenthcentury writer was Lewis Carroll, whose works famously reflected his interest in photography and presented references to visual technologies like the telescope, the microscope, the mirror, the stereoscope, the glass prism, and related to photography, the chemicals that caused shrinking or enlarging. All of these visually-based technologies were frequently written about during the nineteenth century, and available to readers through the popular periodical press, as well as fictional and nonfictional books.

Carroll’s fictional work, “Photography Extraordinary,” first published in his serial publication Misch Masch, which he distributed to friends and family members (1855-1862), “realises a fluidity between the visual and the textual, and the technological and the imaginative, that was recurrent in nineteenth-century culture,” and, Potter continues, “Indeed, questions about the relationship between the technological and the psychological, between artistic creation and cultural production, strike at the core of nineteenth-century culture and echo deep into the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries” (4-5).

These vision technologies opened up new ways of seeing—and therefore knowing, insofar as they also prompted challenges to what was considered to be—reliably—known. The notion of illusion often went hand in hand with the play of new technology. Just prior to the nineteenth century, for example, the painter Robert Barker created the panorama. The word “panorama” drew from Greek words “pan,” which means “all,” and “horama,” which means “see,” and the term speaks to the spanning view provided in a panoramic image. Initially, the static panorama presented an image from a 360-degree canvas, which surrounded a platform within a 81

circular-shaped room. The effect was an intended illusion for viewers, who were surrounded by a continuous view of a space, such as the Colosseum, and provided detailed images, as might have been viewed had the audience been standing in the actual space (Potter 21).

Other attempts at altering the view perceived by human sight extended from the panoramic, such as aerostatic vision, which gave the viewer an elevated view, as if one was in a hot air balloon (Potter 47). Similarly, the “dissolving view” developed, the term coined by art critic John Eagles in 1842 during the Royal Academy of Arts exhibition, when he described J.M.W. Turner’s work. The visual notion of a dissolving view lent itself as a metaphor in politics, but also history, literature and art, as Potter notes, “in which transience and insubstantiality are combined with a subversion of teleological cause and effect” (69, 75).

Similarly, the kaleidoscope, noted earlier, invented by David Brewster, a celebrated physicist who had made a name for himself in the area of optics, expanded the possibilities for play and curiosity. Brewster introduced the kaleidoscope in 1817 and it also quickly became very popular. Essentially a vision toy, the kaleidoscope was celebrated for its “infinite variety of beautiful forms” and its capacity for creating order from chaos. The projected image within a kaleidoscope is comprised of fragments. The invention lent itself, like other vision technologies, to metaphor, and unlike Chopin’s appreciative metaphor for Zola’s work, it was often compared to “a kind of ordered chaos” (Potter 119-120). Despite this comparison, even the perception of chaos was illusory, as it was an orchestrated fragmentation of image and color reorganized through the lens of the kaleidoscope.

The advent of photography and the invention of the stereoscope further developed the conceptual and illusory possibilities derived through vision technologies. Photography had a profound effect on the way human beings conceived of seeing. Beyond other art forms, photography offered new ways of expressing the experience of real life, as it also challenged the conception of what appeared to be real. The photograph existed after an 82

event or a moment had passed; “it is,” as Philip Brookman remarks, “no longer ‘real’—yet its connection to the authenticity of that moment and to time passing gives it a representational authority that fuses its function as evidence with its aesthetic character as art” (24). This presumed authority pointed to the intersectionality enabled by photography: a crossroads between the static and the fluid, between matter and mind, and science and art. Within this intersectionality, photography also presented a narrative quality: “Photographs exhibited many of the traits of printed text: a linguistic, narrative structure and, in time, a reproducibility that made images persuasive. They represented the solidity of time and space: the way things look and therefore the way they are. At the same time, photography is a malleable process, which easily manipulates how things are represented. It speaks both truth and fiction” (Brookman 37). The paradox of photography compounded the illusory qualities exhibited by other vision technologies. Both truth and fiction, it was neither as well: a single, manipulated image, created from a particular moment in time that had already passed.

By the 1850s, artists were experimenting with the illusion of movement through the medium of photography. For instance, French photographer André-Adolphe Eugène Disdéri created the image of living things (people and animals) engaged with each other and moving at the same time, and Antoine Claudet, another French photographer, produced serial self-portrait photographs that created the illusion of movement (Brookman 78). Other photographic innovations evolved during this time, but the stereoscope, developed by Charles Wheatstone, had a profound effect on the illusion of multiple dimensions produced using photography.

English scientist Charles Wheatstone (1802-1875) developed the stereoscope in the 1830s, and among the vision technologies invented during the nineteenth century, few had such a lasting impact on vision researchers and visual artists. The stereoscope enabled binocular vision produced by the convergence of two dissimilar images presented to each eye; the effect of the projection was depth. While binocular equipment 83

had already been invented before the stereoscope, Wheatstone was able to manipulate the retina of each eye with his instrument. With the use of two dissimilar images viewed through the stereoscope, Wheatstone enabled the exploration of the relationship between the two images through the effect of depth (Wade 265-266). Artists such as Eadward Muybridge drew from Wheatstone’s scientific work and experimented with photography and movement. Famously, Muybridge photographed horses, capturing revolutionary information about the animal’s gait and movement through time, and making an important contribution to the development of motion pictures. His experimentation impacted the arts as much as the sciences. For instance, American painter Thomas Eakin used Muybridge’s advances to paint A May Morning in the Park,1879-80, which is among the earliest examples of representing an accurate image of horses’ movement (Brookman 78, 88).

By the 1850s, the stereoscope was more popularly used as a vision toy, and it was introduced to thousands of homes. As a home-based entertainment, the stereoscope featured a psychological element to its viewers: “It was a technology of the imagination that facilitated, articulated, and even helped conceptualise the fantasies of the observer. It also held deep symbolic resonances with ideas surrounding psychological dualism and self-doubling” (Potter 146). The stereoscope produced the illusion of three dimensions, despite the viewer’s awareness of the flat cards inside that enabled the vision experience. The image was convincingly realistic, so that the stereoscope inspired conversations within philosophical and scientific circles about authenticity; this is where the stereoscope amplified the questions of reality and the lapse of time that stemmed from photography. The stereoscope produced the image of something that did not appear to be from its two-dimensional origins on the flat cards, but instead seemed to have substance and density in three dimensions. In fact, at times, in more popular descriptions of the stereoscope, observers made connections to supernatural phenomena; the machine at times emerged in the popular imagination “as a link between modern optics 84

and ‘necromancy,’ . . . placed on a fluctuating epistemological border between the supernatural and the natural, between rational and irrational, and between science and religion” (Potter 150-151). As a cultural Catholic her entire life, Chopin was well acquainted with the language of miracles and supernatural phenomena; her interest in natural sciences offered her a space to challenge and reconsider presumptions of faith and doctrine, and the discourse of vision technologies gave her a language to express the tensions between religion and science in her work. Artistically, the discourse of vision technology enabled Chopin to engage Modernist techniques insofar as she created the effect of the stereoscope.

Vision Technologies and Proto-modernism Despite Chopin’s early notoriety as a local color author, several scholars have addressed the Modernist components in selected Chopin texts in more recent years. Notably, Michael T. Gilmore has compared elements in The Awakening and Impressionism, and Emily Riser has examined the proto-modernist components in the novel as an expression of discontent and culture in the late nineteenth century. Alice Horner has extended these studies to the examination of multiple Chopin short stories that feature contradiction, ambivalence, and disillusion—elements that later emerge in Modernist literature of the next century. Additionally, Susan Lohafer has traced preclosure points in the plots of several short stories, including “Athénäise” (1896) and “Aunt Lympy’s Interference” (1897), to demonstrate Chopin’s experimentation with metanarratives (158-167).

Lohafer argues that the metanarratives form “tellable units” that present as independent “stories” within the broader narratives in these stories.

Within the short stories, preclosure points identify the metanarratives within them; they are often marked by the multiplicity of choices that present to characters—choices that usually inspire ambivalence in the characters and result in uncertainty or lack of resolution, qualities that

85

were more characteristic of later Modernist texts.

Demonstrative of Chopin’s emergent Modernist sensibilities is the narrative, “Two Portraits” (written in 1895, but published later in Daniel S. Rankin’s 1932 Kate Chopin and Her Creole Stories). “Two Portraits” appears among a collection of Chopin short fiction that fall into a category Janet Beer has noted as “brief fictional pieces which are at first sight on the margins of consideration for the title of ‘story,’” but convey a typical Chopin narrative stance characterized by “the absence of authorial moral comment and judgement” such as is seen in The Awakening (66). In “Two Portraits,” Chopin experiments with narrative form through the juxtaposition of two character sketches of the same woman, Alberta.

Read together, the two portraits imitate the illusory optical effects of the stereoscope. In this short piece, which was also named “The Wanton and the Nun,” she presents young Alberta, first as a wanton woman. Part I is a sketch that depicts a girl who was subject to abuse—physical, sexual, and emotional. As a young girl, Alberta’s mother dies “very suddenly; a self-inflicted death, she heard people say” (463). Then she goes to live with a man and a woman. The violence stops and she is “met with more kindness and indulgence than she had ever known,” but Alberta also learns a lot—presumably about the ways of the world: She did not lack for instruction in the wiles—the ways of stirring a man’s desire and holding it. Yet she did not need instruction—the secret was in her blood and looked out of her passionate, wanton eyes and showed in every motion of her seductive body. (463)

The implication of part I is that she becomes a prostitute. Her capriciousness enables her to manipulate men, and when she is not able to exert her influence on men, like a “smooth-faced boy” she cares for, she “frets and she fumes and rages” because, the narrator explains, “Alberta does not know shame or reserve” (463). Part I ends with a warning that she should mind herself, because she drinks wine and carries a knife now.

Part II of this narrative depicts the same woman, Alberta, as “The Nun.”

86

In this second section, Alberta enters a convent at a young age, instead of a brothel, where “an overpowering impulse toward the purely spiritual possessed itself of her” and “whose atmosphere of chastity, poverty and obedience penetrates to the soul through benumbed senses” (464). In the first part of “Two Portraits,” she and everyone around her are aware of her beautiful body, but in Part II, she is humble and unaware of how beautiful she is. Whereas the first depiction of Alberta shows her to be passionate and sensual, in this depiction, she is religious and experiences mystical ecstasy, which takes on passionate and sensual dimensions—not unlike the female mystics of the Middle Ages. Similarly, she receives divine visions and, the narrator explains, “it is said that certain afflicted persons have been helped by her prayers. And others having abounding faith, have been cured of bodily ailments by the touch of her beautiful hands” (466).

The juxtaposition of the two depictions challenge the reader from drawing reductive conclusions, which might happen if the two portraits were presented separately and not in the same story. Beer identifies this challenge in terms of Chopin’s refusal to deliver overdetermined morals: “The moral, if it exists, may be the reverse of that first expected, or the ambiguities of Chopin’s language may prevent the reader from drawing any simple or straightforward conclusion from the narrative. . . . [I] indeed, the very imminence of the ending alerts us to the dangers of reading the whole text as if closed” (67). “Two Portraits” resists offering its readers a moral, as it depicts dual images of a prostitute and a nun—in that order.

Read as two portraits without a narrative arc, they are directly linked through the opening paragraph of Part I, as it is identical to the opening paragraph of Part II. Both first paragraphs, one describing Alberta the “Wanton” in the first section and the other describing Alberta the “Nun” in the second, read: Alberta having looked not very long into life, had not looked very far. She put out her hands to touch things that pleased her, and her lips to kiss them. Her eyes were deep brown wells that were drinking, drinking impressions and treasuring them in her soul. They were

87

mysterious eyes and love looked out of them. (462, 464)

The repetition of the opening paragraph in each part signals to the reader that the character of Alberta is the same in both sections. The juxtaposition of the two depictions of similar physical characteristics and emotional responses within different contexts suggests a stereoscopic rendering of Alberta’s character. With the same language in the first paragraph of both parts, the development of the parts reflects two different ways of viewing the same character—similar to the two lenses in a stereoscope that view slightly different images. The effect in the stereoscope was a three-dimensional image that appeared to be real, and thus Chopin insists that her readers perceive more than the two portraits. The author’s dual depiction of Alberta imitates the physical experience of the stereoscope and effects the notion of psychological dualism. If the two sketches are read independently of one another, the reader receives two distinct images of Alberta. But read as two parts of a singular piece, the outcome of Chopin’s depiction is a third depiction of Alberta—this one, however, is achieved in the reader’s imagination, as the mind erects meaning from the two depictions, seeing a third version of Alberta. Similarities between the two portraits in terms of Alberta’s beauty, sensuality, and expressions of love dissolve distinctions between the two very different portraits of this same woman. The binocular vision of Alberta produces a kind of irony: the overlaps of passion and sensuality in both depictions—of the Wanton and of the Nun—effect a wry comparison in the imagination of the reader. The resulting binocular image of Alberta is an imaginary illusion that merges the wanton and the nun, suggesting—heretically and amusingly—they have much in common.

“Two Portraits” draws from contemporary vision discourse to fully achieve its stereoscopic effect and more distinctly aligns Chopin with French Impressionist contemporaries than writers such as Maupassant.

This story’s rendering of the two portraits at once imitates the physical experience of the stereoscope, emphasizing the “language” of sight. For

88

instance, the first paragraph in Parts I and II present allusions to optics with terms such as “looked,” “Her eyes,” and “mysterious eyes” from which love “looked out” (462, 464). But the story also echoes certain French Impressionist painters’ fascinations with similar scientific innovations during the same century. The Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne recognized the profound shift binocular vision offered Impressionism: The [European]w impressionists were among the first groups of artists to break away from the dictates of perspective and the imitative function of art. They recognized that space on the canvas was illusory; thus, they strove to express inner rather than outer reality, the ideal rather than the real. This dissatisfaction with the canvas as a “window” and awareness of the gap between reality and illusion became more acute with Cezanne and, later, the cubists. (Layer)

Additionally, Paul Bantjes and others have observed that Cézanne’s works reveal his interest in binocular vision and his awareness of an emergent language stemming from “stereo photographers” (Bantjes 262).

Cézanne’s and his colleagues’ appreciation for the interior life and the value of space, as well as the contrasts between the perception of what was real and what was illusion, parallel the narrative play Chopin executed in multiple short stories, and particularly in “Two Portraits,” as she used studies in vision and technologies as aesthetics and as ways to explore the distinction between what appears to be real and illusion.

While Chopin was not visiting France during the period when she wrote and therefore was not moving within Impressionist circles in Europe, for five months during the year 1872, the Impressionist Edward Degas lived in proximity to Chopin and her family in New Orleans and moved within her circles. He was, as Christopher Benfey has pointed out in his 1997 study, Degas in New Orleans: Encounters in the Creole World of Kate Chopin and George Washington Cable, the only well-known Impressionist to visit the United States and paint. Chopin’s husband Oscar opened his cotton business next to the firm that belonged to Degas’s mother’s family on Carondelet Street (Benfey 16-17). Like Chopin, he too perceived blindness 89

and sight as aesthetically valuable. In a painting of Degas’s cousin Estelle De Gas, who was blind, he does not paint her reclining “seductively,” but in a gesture that recalls Mark Paterson’s claim regarding sighted writers’ interest in the feelings and perceptions of people with blindness, Degas paints her taking “the radical step of turning the woman’s gaze inward.

He tries to paint what it feels like to be Estelle, looking out and seeing nothing” (Benfey 96-97).

Regardless of how much contact Chopin had with Degas or what she knew of Cézanne’s serious interest in stereoscopic vision and representation, she certainly perceived the ways the modern era was encroaching on art and literature. Aesthetically speaking, her apparent interest in contemporary studies in vision and vision technologies aligned her work more closely at times with certain French Impressionist painters.

Degas’s presence around Carondelet Street in New Orleans and other local areas might have reiterated what Chopin surely already knew: that the modern era was nearly upon them. The emergence of nineteenth-century studies in vision and vision technologies—along with the surge in physical blindness and new cultural perceptions of “visuality”—offered a palette to a writer like Kate Chopin who used metaphoric constructions of sight, blindness, and vision technologies to speak to her own visions of human behaviors, longings, and losses. She drew from these emergent studies to develop characters that reflected the ambiguities and uncertainties of life, leaving readers on their own to discern meaning and truth, in anticipation of the Modernist movement to come.

90

Works Cited Bantjes, Rod. “‘Perspectives bâtardes’: Stereoscopy, Cézanne, and the Metapictorial Logic of Spatial Construction.” History of Photography, vol.

41, no. 3, 2017, 262-285.

Beer, Janet. Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Studies in Short Fiction. 1997. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Bender, Bert. “The Teeth of Desire: The Awakening and The Descent of Man.” American Literature, vol. 63, no. 3, Sept. 1991, pp. 459-473.

Brookman, Philip. Helios: Eadward Muybridge in a Time of Change. Steidl/ Corcoran Gallery of Art, 2010.

Chopin, Kate. The Complete Works of Kate Chopin, edited by Per Seyersted, Louisiana State UP, 1969.

—-. “The Blind Man.” Seyersted, pp. 518-519.

—-. “Emancipation: A Life Fable.” Seyersted, pp. 37-8.

—-. “Emile Zola’s ‘Lourdes.’ Seyersted, pp. 697-699.

—-. “Lilacs.” Seyersted, pp. 355-365.

—-. “Madame Célestin’s Divorce.” Seyersted, pp. 276-279.

—-. “Old Aunt Peggy.” Seyersted, pp.193.

—-. “The Recovery.” Seyersted, pp. 480-483.

—-. “A Vocation and a Voice.” Seyersted, pp. 520-546.

Ewell, Barbara C. “Regions of the Spirit: Nature vs. Dogma in Chopin’s Religious Vision.” Performance of a Lifetime: A Festschrift Honoring Dorothy Harrell Brown Essays on Women, Religion, and the Renaissance, Loyola UP, 1997, pp. 102-116.

Ewell, Barbara C., and Pamela Glenn Menke. Introduction. Southern Local Color: Stories of Region, Race, and Gender, edited by Barbara C. Ewell and Pamela Glenn Menke, U of Georgia P, 2002, pp. xiii-lxvi. de Maupassant, Guy. “The Blind Man,” Literature Network, accessed 9 Sept.

2020.

Horner, Avril. “Kate Chopin, Choice and Modernism.” The Cambridge Companion to Kate Chopin, edited by Janet Beer, Cambridge UP, 2008, pp. 132-146.

Koloski, Bernard. Kate Chopin: a Study of the Short Fiction. Twayne Publishers, 1996.

Layer, Harold A. “Stereoscopy: Where Did It Come From and Where Will It Lead?” Exposure, Vol. 17, No. 3, Fall 1979, pp. 34-48, 2011, online.sfsu.edu/ hl/stereo.html, accessed 15 Oct. 2020.

91

Lohafer, Susan. “Kate Chopin and the Future of Short Fiction Studies.”

Awakenings: the Story of the Kate Chopin Revival, edited by Bernard Koloski, Louisiana State UP, 2012, pp.157-172.

Lundie, Catherine. “‘One need not be a chamber to be haunted—’: American Women’s Supernatural Fiction,” Canadian Review of American Studies, Special Issue 2, vol. 22, 1992, pp. 239-278, 2011, utpjournals.press/doi/ abs/10.318/CRAS-022s-02-05, accessed 16 Oct. 2020.

Papke, Mary E. Verging on the Abyss: the Social Fiction of Kate Chopin and Edith Wharton. Greenwood Press, 1990.

Paterson, Mark. Seeing with the Hands: Blindness, Vision, and Touch After Descartes, Edinburgh UP, 2016.

Potter, Jonathan. Discourses of Vision in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

Schickore, Jutta. The Microscope and the Eye: a History of Reflections, 17401870. U of Chicago P, 2007.

Shaker, Bonnie James. Coloring Locals: Racial Formation in Kate Chopin’s Youth Companion Stories. U of Iowa P, 2003.

Tilley, Heather. Blindness and Writing: from Wordsworth to Gissing. Cambridge UP, 2017.

Toth, Emily. Kate Chopin. 1990. Rpt. U of Texas P, 1993.

Wade, Nicolas J. “Guest Editorial,” Perception, vol. 31, 2002, pp. 265-272.

92

Kelly Talbot

Transformation Incantation Fluttering in the dust, the sparrows call for change.

Colors have been erased from the vast void stretching beyond that which we perceive.

I thirst for some nameless essence, an element like fire, like sky, like wheat, yet more precious. Little songs along the way, shared with my smaller brothers, I, featherless yet the same, flitting through the surface, ask Aquarius to pour orbs upon our day.

93

Grace Bauer

A Circling Variety of Lives: On the Inimitable Martha McFerren You know you’re occupying A circling variety of lives —Martha McFerren

Like many poets and writers across the country, I was saddened to

hear of the death of Martha McFerren this past April (2024). Though she had been in poor health off and on for many years, she always seemed to rally—and regale us with tales of her tribulations with typical humor, always finding something slightly absurd to focus on even in the midst of her suffering. (See “Ten Weeks Without Underwear,” if you’re looking for a prime example). The last communication I received from her was a response to one of my Facebook posts from Budapest just a week before she died: “Recognize some of your locations from watching FBI International on PBS,” she wrote. “Yes, I’m a Philistine, but one who can recognize a bridge.”

Martha McFerren was born and raised in east Texas, a landscape and culture often featured in her poems. She earned a B.S. and M.L.S. from North Texas State University and moved to New Orleans in the mid-1970s, around the same time I arrived, to take a position with the Jefferson Parish Public Libraries. I met her at the poet Lee Grue’s house at one of the meetings of the New Orleans Poetry Forum, where we were both newcomers. With her flaming red hair and thick Texas drawl, she made an immediate impression. Not to mention her distinctive poems, and a collection of Native American jewelry—both of which I envied, having a bit of Philistine in me, as well.

Martha and I both continued to attend Poetry Forum workshops off and

94

on for several years, and when the infamous Maple Leaf Reading Series began in 1979 (then hosted by another New Orleans’ original, Everette Maddox) we regularly attended those as well, so I read, or heard, many of the poems in her first three books as they were developing. When Maxine Cassin published Martha’s first book, Delusions of a Popular Mind, in 1983, we all joined her in celebrating the achievement, certain this was only the beginning of her publishing career. Delusions was followed by Get Me Out of Her, which came out in 1984, the year I left New Orleans to pursue an MFA at UMass, and then Contours for Ritual (1988).

Many of the poems in these books were laugh-out-loud funny—and Martha was not afraid to laugh at herself, as well as others. In “A Face Like a Key” she celebrated her “wonderful legs” and “breasts to give a ceramic’s master an / ecstasy of fingers,” but lamented the fact that her face only sees and speaks, “not much else.” Before she’d ever published a book, she wrote a poem “For My First Biographer,” in which she described herself as a “poet of the caftan and heavy earring school” who believed her muse was “male, and a killer” and who refused to write about topics other women of her generation—too often, in her estimation—sometimes addressed, though she did address the dilemmas women faced. In “I’m The Only One In Our Little Crowd Who Isn’t Married Yet” she catalogued a list of friends who had tied the knot, some less happily than others, and concluded by telling one of them that “you can have a man who / keeps you comfortable or / you can have a man who / goes down on you / but you can’t have both.” I’m not sure how often folks from east Texas use the word chutzpah, but these poems had it in spades.

When not writing in a more personal “I” voice, Martha told the stories of women (sometimes famous, sometimes obscure) who either had, or were trying, to escape limits placed on them, mostly due to their gender.

We find many of these women literally on the road—like “the accessory” in “Sex and Violence,” who tells us “since I’ve been / driving, nothing much / happens, except I’m / driving” or the speaker in “Adrenalin Run” who might travel “the full length of the country” “running on coffee and 95

Loretta Lynn.” Or, a personal favorite, the title poem of Women In Cars, where the speaker assures us “More women have done this / than you’d imagine,” and then goes on to describe herself riding in a car with a boy named Frank Fallis when she suddenly feels compelled to strip out of her clothes. “You can ride hours like that,” she tells us, “with the wind and the bugs . . . and some Wilson Pickett.”

Martha often referenced women from popular culture, history, and literary sources: the Brontes, Edith Piaf, Bette Davis, Alice Liddell, Daisy Miller, Nefertiti, Mable Normand, Mary Queen of Scott’s, Raquel Welch, to name just a few, but also women most of us have never heard of: Sally Harper, Cynthia Ann Parker, Diamond Bessie, Helen Spence.

The common denominator was that they were all women who had defied social expectations or been hampered, sometimes destroyed, by them.

While the poems are often hilarious, they usually have serious points to make, as the best humor usually does. And Martha was equally adept at a more serious, even somber, tone.

I recall her bringing sections of her long poem “Mountain Soprano” to Poetry Forum workshops. Informed by her knowledge of Appalachian history and culture, Scots-Irish music, and traditional women’s crafts and handiwork, this multi-sectioned rhymed and metered poem tells the tale of a “Lady anonymous,” from an early daguerreotype, who may or may not be one of the speaker’s own female ancestors: She sits on a pattern called Temperance Tree I’ve forgotten her name. She looks like me . . .

As the poem progresses “she” becomes many women “who learned to cherish what she (sic) could have,” accepting the loss of dreams, children, possibilities, and expressing herself as best she can though her handiwork and the music she makes on a homemade dulcimer: using a feather to work her songs 96

into a unit made double-strong: rags of prophecy, fire and hunger, all herself—grown a legend younger As she was writing the poem, Martha was well aware that its sensibility and formal constraints were out of fashion, and she expressed doubts that anyone would ever want to publish it (“who am I,” I recall her joking, “Stephen Vincent Benet?”), but she felt compelled to keep writing that narrative. The poem ends with a couplet that might be the titular singer or the poet herself, or maybe both: I’m never what I was supposed to be Lift me up, song: this once, I’m free.

Contours for Ritual is the book where Martha “entered her megalithic stage,” as she put it, and archeology and mythology come more to the forefront in her poems. Inspired by trips to Ireland, England and Scotland, as well as her extensive reading, Martha explores cave art, dolmens, stone circles, and other ancient sites and artifacts. Her tone is an interesting combination of respect, maybe even reverence, tempered by her dubious nature, and her own mishaps while traveling. In “The Saga Continues,” she tells us how she “fell off Dun Aengus / in the Aran Islands” bragging that “it takes real style / to bust your butt / on a Neolithic ring fort.” She is genuinely fascinated by the artifacts and whatever it was that compelled humans to create them, but also aware that she is, like it or not, a tourist— one of those “Americans / who’ve turned their island into a theme park” by making a pilgrimage to see them. She (accompanied by her intrepid husband, Dennis Wall) will go to great lengths to find an obscure stone she’s read about, but worries that “Maybe there’s nothing there / if you don’t believe it.”

Contours also includes an “Update for That Biographer” she addressed in her first book, admitting that said biographer (and the recognition she 97

or he would represent) is something she still hopes for, even as she has abandoned the “caftan and heavy earrings” of earlier years for “tweed and glasses.” Another such poem, “Biographer, Where Are You?” appears in Women In Cars, as does “How To Get Published,” which looks at “po-biz” more than poetry itself. “Yes, if I’d gone to Iowa” she writes, “I wouldn’t be here now, / threatened and unpublished.”

Martha had, by this time, earned an MFA from Warren Wilson’s lowresidency program, received fellowships from Yaddo and an NEA, and garnered the respect, even love, of the New Orleans’ poetry community, but she expressed frustration over not gaining wider recognition for her work. Meanwhile, I was moving—from New Orleans to Massachusetts, from Massachusetts to Virginia, from Virginia to Nebraska—pursuing an academic career, publishing several chapbooks, but still trying to get my own first book taken. I was stuck in the limbo of being a frequent finalist in book competitions—for two different manuscripts—so from where I stood, Martha’s level of success was something to envy, not complain about. But she was several years older than me and felt that my teaching in an actual Creative Writing Program at the University of Nebraska gave me a kind of cache she lacked. After Women In Cars won the Collette Inez Prize from Helicon Nine Editions in Kansas City, Martha was invited there to read, so I also arranged for her to come to Lincoln (a quick plane ride away) as part of our Visiting Writers Series. Finally, in 1996, John Travis of Portals Press published my book The Women At the Well, and I came back to New Orleans for a book launch. In between the infrequent visits, Martha would send me long letters now and then and I would sometimes call to chat (our phone conversations often interrupted by the violent coughing fits she was long prone to).

Martha’s frustration, complicated by increasing health issues and the disastrous effects of Hurricane Katrina, accounted for the nearly twentyyear gap between books, though I know she continued to write throughout these difficult times. Archeology At Midnight was finally published in 2011. In the opening poem, she tells us: 98

Always I’ve dreamed of archeology, the pots and beads that decorate death; the gold. Poor health, an inability to master languages, and general sloth all kept me back.

Archeology revisits and expands upon previous subject matters—travel (more of England but also Greece) mythologies, escaping women, and, in many poems—like the series of “midnight” sonnets woven throughout the book—employs the traditional forms she had explored in earlier work.

Of course, there is also the kind of humor you would expect from Martha.

In the above mentioned “Ten Weeks Without Underwear” she tells us this gives “A whole new meaning / for Rear Windows.” In a more serious poem, she describes herself as a “dream packer” filling suitcases even in her sleep. “Fleeing appeals to me,” she writes, though she admits she is prone to leaving behind things like underwear and socks or her mother’s jewelry in favor of books, which she finds more precious, calling them “rooms that can’t be packed.”

Martha had told me how eager she was to have this book published.

She was cognizant of her age and her precarious health, not to mention the crazy state of the world she was living in, and she sometimes wondered how many poems she still had in her. In “Harassed By the Dark Ages,” she laments a series of “apocalyptic jimjams,” including “a freaking hurricane / and flood” and begs for “no more anthrax, no more crazy bombers / until my newest book’s released.” She tells us, if there is another storm, her manuscript is “stowed in Box 13 / at Regions Bank.”

As it turned out, Martha still had more poems in her, though it was another decade before The McFerren Plot” was published in 2021. During that decade, Martha was hospitalized numerous times—for falls, lung infections, and other ailments. She began walking with a cane, then a 99

walker, and eventually used a wheelchair for more demanding outings— always taken care of by her beloved husband Dennis, who she said was “one of my better delusions.” She remained a voracious reader, admitting in “The Sidhe” that “I’ve lived through books, wanting to reinvent / the old mythologies . . . “or, perhaps, the dreamtime / of the small, dark people living / in earthen burrows . . .” In “Dear Steve” (dedicated to her close friend and fellow poet, Steve Schwartz), she writes, “Maybe I should just give up on poems.” But, of course, she did not.

Two poems that stand out to me in this collection address family stories I had never heard Martha talk (or write) about in the more than forty years I knew her. In the villanelle “There/Not There” she writes of an older brother who died when he was six months old and how his absence haunted her life. She wonders if “He might have taken some of mama’s flack” and if her parents “might have traded me to get him back.” In the prose poem (an anomaly for Martha) “Mr. Brummett” she addresses another kind of haunting—this one a long-held suspicion that her mother was harboring secrets that had scarred her psyche. Finally, in a “true screamer” of an argument, her mother admits, at the age of eighty-six, that the titular Mr. Brummett (the stepfather her mother always referred to as such) had sexually abused her from an early age. Though her mother swore her to secrecy, Martha tells “anyone who showed the faintest interest in the story,” wondering if the telling was “my way of freeing her or getting even with her.” Some might find the tone of this piece “insensitive” (a criticism Martha had thumbed her nose at early on), and thus, disturbing, but it was in her nature to see a kind of absurdity in any human situation.

In the title (and final) poem in this collection, Martha even makes fun of her own death and her long-held dream of poetic immortality.

The “plot” may be a piece of ground in a Shreveport cemetery, but it is also a novelistic view of her life. Maybe, she writes (ever hopeful; ever tongue-in-cheek) “critics / in ages to come . . . will bewail my / lack of recognition . . . and come on pilgrimage / to weep at my tomb.” “I could put Shreveport on the map,” she jokes in the final stanza. Well, stranger 100

things have happened.

In “Any Poem Is Violent” Martha recalls a critic who panned her first book, saying “hysteria looms.” “Screw him,” she writes, still holding a grudge. But revisiting all her books in the process of writing this piece, I’ve come to see the “hysterical” criticism as ironically apt. The word goes back to the ancient Greeks and a belief that the womb could wander around the body causing an array of maladies, both physical and mental, in women.

(Thus, the term hysterectomy). In the 18th and 19th Century, women were commonly diagnosed with this condition, which included many symptoms and behaviors. A Planned Parenthood website says, “Basically, anything a woman did that wasn’t viewed as acceptable behavior was considered hysteria.” Of course, in modern parlance the word is also used to mean funny. Miriam Webster’s online dictionary lists antic, comedic, farcical, droll, and hilarious as some possible synonyms. Also chucklesome and killing—which I’m sure would have cracked Martha up. The various meanings of the word strike me as relevant to Martha’s body of work— which is full of women testing the bounds of “acceptable behavior” and is often antic, comedic, droll, and hilarious as hell.

Martha McFerren was a Southern Gothic stand-up comedian of a poet, an eclectic and irreverent archeologist of the odd and quirky, of the myriad things—both weird and wonderful—that humans have done, since time immemorial, to try to make sense of their lives, or to leave a mark proclaiming I was here. I’m not quite the biographer of Martha’s dreams, but I had the privilege of being her friend, and a fan of her poems, for many years. If you knew her, you undoubtedly have some favorite Martha stories; if you know her work, you surely have your favorite Martha poems. If you have not yet had the pleasure, dear Reader, I urge you to hasten forthwith to delve into the poems of this true original. As the jacket copy on The McFerren Plot warns: “Hang on to your hats and your keys.” And enjoy the ride.

101

Dewayne Keirn

Jag

Beppe had the scrawny look of a stray dog and slightly bulging eyes

that suggested hyperthyroidism, and he moved slowly as if bartending required serious thought. Whether he thought much or not I can’t say, but he never failed to put an extra jigger of Scotch whisky in my highballs, and I kept returning for a stiff drink in the Napoli Bar in San Francisco’s Barbary Coast.

That is how I came to know Claude Baffier. He came in on a slow, midweek night and, after a drink, he asked where he could meet girls.

Beppe glanced over the unoccupied tables and shrugged. “Here,” he said, “on weekends.”

Claude was leaving when he turned and asked if a bartending job was open. Beppe said “no” and began wiping the bar.

I’d detected a French accent and spoke up, saying I knew a Frenchman who owned some apartments and needed a handyman. Claude got the job.

The first time he came back, I think it was to thank me. He saw though that it was a place where he could meet girls and he too began to drop in at the Napoli Bar. I was a freelance journalist and I came to know Claude the way I usually get to know people, by observation and fact gleaning. Information that ultimately tells everything and nothing. With Claude, many facts varied according to the person he was speaking to.

Claude had large hands that could nimbly extract a Gauloise cigarette from a full pack. His nose was crooked from not being reset by a competent medic after a fight. The scar, a larval-white Z on the right cheek, had a different explanation for each questioner. It was attributed to a juvenile street fight, to hand-to-hand combat with Arab insurgents, to a jealous fille de joie, or some such explanation of the moment. Because of his evasiveness, I concluded that it had something to do with a crime that

102

landed him in the French Foreign Legion in lieu of serving time in prison. What is certain is that this veteran of the Algerian War, tanned and toughened by the Saharan sun and sand, was attractive to women.

He could enter on a lively night and approach a table with a couple of women and in the course of the night arrange a date. Often though he was content to sit at the bar and talk. The usual stuff. What we did, what we wanted to do. Rarely his past, rarer still the Algerian War. About the Vietnam War, he would say, “Dan, you can never win it,” as if I was personally responsible for its prosecution. I was tempted to say the French had failed to build the Panama Canal, but we Americans built it, but I never did. He had begun to confide in me a love affair and I didn’t want to offend his French pride.

The affair began in my presence, while I sat nursing a highball, no wiser than the fly that had entered the bar and was buzzing about. That night a middle-aged Frenchman with a younger-looking wife came in. Soon Claude was having a gabfest with them in French. To my ear the words flowed swiftly and awesomely, as the tide beneath the Golden Gate. I listened intently for words I understood. I learned that Monsieur taught French Literature at Berkeley and that Madame owned Atelier Contemporain, a gallery selling contemporary French paintings, on Nob Hill.

I learned about the affair a couple of weeks later, after Claude had introduced me to Pernod, ostensibly to familiarize me with a distinctive French drink. I think his real purpose was to prove himself a better consumer of alcohol than me. I was lucky that he didn’t want to prove himself a better fighter. “Daniel Rousselot,” he’d said, “you have a French name and don’t know squat French.”

He then ordered a bottle of Pernod and two shot glasses and filled the glasses. It smelled like licorice. “Drink it neat,” he said, and then downed a shot as readily as water. I swallowed half of mine, the sweetish, rubberish taste going down the throat like heat. I looked him in the eyes and saw an avid, amused gaze. I swallowed the rest.

He refilled the glasses and gulped his down. We eyed one another. He 103

intended to drink me under the table and I resolved to prove my drinking capacity. I suddenly wanted to see Claude on the floor. To greet him on his next visit to the bar with a victor’s amused gaze.

The night became blurry. Beppe hovered in my face, saying, “Enough, enough.” I pushed him away and held my shot glass out for more Pernod.

I have the blur of a taxi ride, of Claude helping me up the stairs to my apartment. Claude won, but he had the grace not to step over me and leave me lying on the floor.

To my astonishment I was now Claude’s “Mon ami.” I’d taken the dare and proved my fortitude. Something in his mind like fighting until unconscious or dead. Grit in the guts against overwhelming odds. Now that I was an “ami,” he confided in me that he was having an affair with madame, the Atelier Contemporain owner. Her name was Hélène.

So, you are suffering from ennui, was my first thought, that he was bored with picking up women in bars. And maybe he was. But as week followed week and he came to the bar less often, I longed for him to bring Hélène. I wanted to observe her magic. I’d only seen her that night with her husband. I remembered her as in her late thirties, vivacious and attractive in the way of beautiful women on the cusp of middle age and gaining weight. Her husband was heavy set, middle-aged and garrulous.

“Bring her in,” I’d say. “I want to see this French Legionnaire tamer.”

“Mon ami, I’m not tamed.”

“Tamed,” I’d say, “I want to see what I missed the night she was here.”

“Maybe soon.”

Soon never came. What came were men wearing yellow fezzes with black tassels. They staggered in boisterously, soused and gleeful like football fans celebrating their team’s win, only it turned out they were celebrating being away from their spouses. They took tables and ordered beer. Then four or five of them put money in a juke box and approached women, sitting at a table with their dates, to dance. The women said they didn’t want to dance and the men persisted. One woman’s date stood up and asked the revelers what they didn’t understand about no. A burly reveler 104

pushed him into his chair and he bounced back up with clenched fists.

Beppe got between them and the burly man roughly shoved him aside.

Claude leaped from a sitting position on his stool, socked the big man in the face with his right, then his left struck hard in the guts, knocking the wind out of him. The man’s eyes bulged. They looked sightless, the way eye-buttons look stuck on a snowman. Claude followed with an uppercut.

The man tottered backwards and fell. A stout man among those who were insisting on a dance, shouted, “Let’s get him,” and charged Claude. Claude gave him a one, two to the face, knocking him back onto a table.

“Please gentlemen, please gentlemen,” Beppe shouted, hands raised, palms out in a gesture for calmness.

A tall man staggered forward from the knot of revelers, his hands straightening the fez on his head and saying, “Easy Jake. Easy Clyde.

These women told you to lay off.”

The burly one rose from the floor, holding his abdomen and sucking air into his lungs. The other man leaned on the table, wiping a bloody nose, smearing blood on his hand and upper lip.

“They didn’t mean to upset you,” the tall man said. “No harm in partying, is there?”

“We are civilized here,” Beppe said, handing the bloody-nosed man a bar-wipe cloth.

“Let’s go back to the Chi-Chi Club,” someone shouted. Then a chant began, “The ChiChi Club. The Chi-Chi Club.”

The tall man leaned toward Beppe and flashed a hundred-dollar bill.

“Will this cover our expenses here at your joint?”

Beppe reached for the bill in the slow manner of a chess player considering where to place a chess piece. “Sure does,” he said.

The fezzed men hustled out, stumbling and boisterous.

“Are they a Barbary gang?” Claude asked.

“Conventioneers out for a good time,” Beppe said, raising his hand in a 105

mano cornuto, the horned hand gesture. “The Fraternal Oder of Elamites.”

I nicknamed Claude “Jag” after that night, for the swift leap from his stool. Claude, once he knew I meant it for jaguar, took pride in it.

Perhaps I should have thought of an epithet for his success in love.

The extent of it was made clear when he took me to see the apartment that Hélène had rented. Window curtains, cushions, lampshades, the counterpane on the bed, were bright reds or soft pinks. A blue-white marbled shower for two. Paintings of the French Riviera studded the walls. It made a nice lovers’ nest, although I had trouble picturing Jag in such a feminine nest. It was the pride in which he showed me through the apartment that resolved my bewilderment—it was an ego trip. His disfigured face and legionnaire combat experience testified to a life of hardship. And now he was showing off his good fortune, beaming the smile of a lottery winner.

Jag came into the bar less often and I missed our conversations. Beppe was remarkably monosyllabic for a bartender. He went about his business methodically, saying little.

Happy customers didn’t come in alone. Lone customers were lonely, bellyaching about their screwed-up lives. So I looked forward to Jag’s irregular visits.

Perhaps Hélène’s husband had been making random checks on the bar or had hired a private eye. One night Jag hadn’t had time to finish his first drink when Beppe’s face went stone cold. I followed his gaze to the entrance.

“Jag,” I said, “trouble just came in.”

The professor strode up to Jag and unleashed a spiel. French may be a language for lovers. At that moment it was the language of rage. I looked at his coat for the bulge of a shoulder holster, his pockets for the hint of a pistol or knife.

Jag was still and calm. Like a Jaguar ready for springing, I thought.

Then the professor hit Jag smack in the face. Jag was off the stool now, backing up and hands raised. The professor swung in mad fury, left, 106

right, left, right, left, right, and Jag dodged or blocked them.

My eyelids batted in disbelief. Jag wasn’t hitting back.

“Stop it, stop it,” Beppe barked. “Stop it, stop it.”

Seeing that Jag wasn’t going to fight, I gave the professor’s shoulder a shove. “Stop hitting him,” I said, and he turned on me. “Do you want to fight me?” he said, panting, his face twisted in anger.

“I’m a newsman. I’ll write an article, Professor Caught in Barbary Coast Brawl.”

That activated his reasoning gray cells. An article like that wouldn’t be good career publicity. Suddenly he seemed lost, eyes darting round the room, like he expected to see Hélène.

Jag spoke. They talked.

I stood by, listening, thinking I should be embarrassed for trying to make out what they were saying, but actually regretting that I had flunked high school French.

The professor left, the victor, I suppose, as far as the fight went. But what about Hélène?

Soon Jag and I were hunched over our drinks and I was watching Jag out of the corner of my eye, wondering. Finally, I said, “You didn’t live up to your nickname tonight. He’s flabby and he was punching wild. You could’ve made fast work of him. What gives?”

He was silent.

“He gave you a good bruise on your cheek. You must think you deserve it.”

“I deserved none of it.”

“No? She’s his wife.”

Jag didn’t reply.

“Well then, are you going to hang onto her?”

“Dan, the marriage can’t be put back. Remember the egg and all the king’s horses.”

“You mean the nursery rhyme, Humpty Dumpty?”

“Like that. Broke, broke, broke.”

107

“Does the professor believe that?”

Jag shrugged.

“All right, Jag. Why didn’t you fight? I don’t get it.”

“France awarded him the Médaille de la Résistance. Hélène told me things he did. Brave things. For that I respect him.”

I laughed. “Then why did you take his wife?”

“She told me the night after I’d showed you the apartment.”

Still I laughed, respect taking on permutations that I’d never suspected.

I would never have guessed on my own that a Résistance medal for bravery against the Nazis could have prevented Claude from defending himself against an irate husband.

An expression grew on Jag like he wanted to hit me.

“You’re a splendid legionnaire,” I said, and patted him on the back.

A magazine back east offered me a job and I lost contact with Jag. At first I wondered how the relationship with Hélène had gone. Then I forgot them. Twenty-odd years later I was in Charleston covering a strike of women hospital workers and took the opportunity to see the French Quarter.

I was strolling down East Bay St. when a rotund woman stepping out of a restaurant stumbled into me. A bent-nosed man, exiting the restaurant behind her, grabbed and steadied her. She apologized with an expression of concern. And I mumbled, “No harm done. Accidents happen.”

They walked arm in arm down the street while I tried to recall where I had seen the man’s face before. Then it came to me, Jag. I started after them. He hailed a taxi and eased the woman into the cab and got in beside her. The cab went on and I lost sight of them. I stood there, mulling over a surprise greater than seeing Jag. That woman was Hélène.

108

Rodger Kamenetz

After Fireflies —Dawson Creek, Baton Rouge, Summer 1993

Nothing says twilight in early June like an empty field in Baton Rouge by a creek with a ragged bank of blackberry briars my daughters running towards small lights blinking on.

Nothing attracts me more than to hear their voices in memory though forgetting dims them almost to nothing, like a poem half-forgotten when all thought tangles to a briar lost in its own thorns.

Blackberries urgently picked stuffed in their mouths, purple smears on their lips the girls running, laughing with black juice on their tongues.

Blackberry says “blackberry” all evening but words taste mute and acrid after they burst their skins.

109

My daughters of the field undid the dark.

Their voices like firefly light—sweet, self-contained and luminescent.

They ran towards light that lingers like tiny licks of paint electric-green on darkening air.

Then my girls grew away one way.

In another they stay in that field as long as I can remember.

Those days I taught blackberry poems to young poets who all along were searching for each other as fireflies do— by light of their own light & I was like the darkness for their love.

Of all the blackberry poets I taught Sylvia Plath was the only one who made her body a blackberry... tender in “blood sisterhood” to sweeten and to rot.

The men were all blackberry hunters Tongued them in joy, gathered them in pails, but at the end of the line Plath saw a horror bush of blackberries gone to flies “Hanging their blue green bellies 110

and their wing panes in a Chinese screen.”

Her words still carry light.

May fireflies alight again in my cupped hands one night until the dark release them though only in the dark can you really find them.

111

Chanel Hoyos

Michita With celestial corneas but irises deep in dirt, sight frail to read but fit to scold. submerged in deep chesterfields of fuzzed pillows and recycled table cloth– dented to touch inner wooden planks and yet her couch never breaks.

I sit next to michita and she pats my lap, pointing out my young age, but I wasn’t 9 she grasps the loose skin of my hand, hovering it like an inca tern with a tough grip leaving a blushed bruise that pricked when she held my fingers to her wrinkly forehead.

Your hands are too large for a nine year old she tells me…but it’s been a decade since I was 9 .

Michita held my frail hands for hours, through the times we watched her telenovelas, It used up my young time, 9 year olds had better things to do, but it was I who held her frail and cold hand last.

112

Jeremy Tuman

Potatox Revisited: Everette Maddox Returns to Tuscaloosa

I n the summer of 1985 my family and I moved to Tuscaloosa,

Alabama, where my father, Myron, had taken a teaching job in the English department at the University of Alabama. We had begun in New Orleans, where Myron earned a PhD in literature at Tulane around the time I was born. Eight years later, we moved to Los Angeles, where Myron had a postdoctoral position at U.S.C., then to Morgantown, West Virginia where he shifted his focus to composition studies. Tuscaloosa was our fourth stop. I was thirteen.

I traveled separately from the rest, wearing a gray t-shirt with a crimson BAMA logo and a pair of cutoff Levis, in a U-haul with a family friend driving. We moved into a house on a shady street, in a neighborhood situated along a wide bluff about a quarter mile from the Black Warrior River. In one direction our street ran down a hill, by a reservoir, and into a corner of the campus, and “the Strip” was just a few blocks away in the other direction. Just beyond our house in the back were thick woods, sliced-through with narrow roads that wound around houses situated on a slope that descended toward the river. Our neighbors on one side were a poetry professor with a young family, and on the other, a young man who had already been in school for several years, who would later be the subject of newspaper articles about how long he’d been a student. When I became a student at Alabama, this man was well known as the host of wild, themed parties that would go on for days around that same neighborhood, including one called “The Drums Never Stop!”

We arrived in August. I met one girl around my age who lived nearby, and then two weeks later my mother dropped me off in front of Central High School, West Campus. I walked through the front doors knowing almost no one. The school was huge, and the maze of people seemed

113

impenetrable. I’d left behind friends and made new ones twice before.

Doing so was a survival skill. I went to work, and some weeks or months later I had made a small group of friends, centered around two boys who lived nearby whose parents were also affiliated with the university, fellow travelers, and a few other misfits from school. We snuck booze and cigs in the woods. New Order and R.E.M formed the background. We fared well enough in school. We went to football games on Fridays and high school parties.

It was during these early months in Tuscaloosa that a family friend, Richard Dempsey, whom we knew as Richie, once came for a visit and stayed the night. He and Myron and my uncle had played softball together in New Orleans, in a field by the Tulane library. My mother took us to the games, my two younger sisters and I, along with another family, the Bates. We’d also visited Richie at his family’s house in Pittsburgh, and he and Myron and I had gone to Pirates games together. He was a baseball fanatic and loved the “Bucs.”

On this occasion, Richie brought a friend with him to visit us in Tuscaloosa, a poet named Everette Maddox.

On Saturday midday, I entered the living room to find Richie and Maddox seated there conversing with Myron and my mother. I was introduced. I said hello, chatted for a few minutes, then left. I had plans.

I don’t recall what they were, but my friends were everything at the time, so they were likely involved. It was an Alabama football gameday, and sometimes we’d just wander the campus and take in the activity. The games weren’t as attended as they would become years later. This was before upper decks were added to the stadium, and the bigger games were still held in Birmingham.

The meeting was so brief and took place so long ago that my memory of it is vague and now tinged by what I’ve since learned about Maddox. I recall that he was dressed in a coat and tie, which had a distinctly 1970s feel, something about the collar of the shirt, the tie, the color brown. He stood when we were introduced. He had a dark beard and I recall thinking 114

that he looked like what I imagined a poet would look like. He was slight of build, and when he sat he sunk deeply into our cushy, white-and-red paisley sofa. He had a calm, quiet demeanor.

These same attributes have been noted by many people who have written about him over the years. His look, style, and manner emerge again and again as defining characteristics. Equally recalled are his wit, intelligence, humor, and encyclopedic literary knowledge. He didn’t speak much upon our meeting. I do not recall anything that was said beyond hello. But the image of him sitting cross-legged on our paisley living-room couch remains in my mind.

For years afterwards, I thought I had a neat, little story about an obscure, but beloved and highly regarded poet who once spent a night at my house when I was in high school. It was only by coincidence that I came to realize, years later, that I’d had the story wrong all along. It wasn’t that Everette Maddox once stayed at my house. It was that my family and I had come to occupy his former residence, purely by chance, and that only through his random connection to Richie, through the Maple Leaf bar in New Orleans, and Richie’s connection to Myron, did he have the opportunity to return to that house, one of great significance in his life, in what I believe to have been his final visit to Tuscaloosa.

* In 2023 I had been teaching at Xavier for fifteen years. I had worked with Ralph Adamo the entire time and had published a few pieces in the journal he edits, the Xavier Review. I knew of his connection to Maddox and had mentioned the 1985 visit to him, but I hadn’t put the pieces together yet. The key that unlocked the story was something that came out in the Review, volume 42, issue 2, an excerpt from a never-completed book about Maddox’s time in Tuscaloosa, called “Everette Hawthorne Maddox: A Memoir and Notes toward a Biography,” by a man named Alexander Sartwell. Sartwell, who died in 2011, had known Maddox well during their time together in Tuscaloosa, as students at the university. As

115

I read his account, I was gobsmacked, struck by the familiarity of what he described, as if hit by a lightning bolt.

In section II of the memoir, Sartwell describes his place of residence in 1971, the Tuscaloosa neighborhood around Caplewood and Reed Street, the same one where I’d lived for one year in 1985 and ’86. He recounts how he lived in a brick apartment building with screened porches, and that Maddox, whom everyone knew as Rhette, rented an upstairs room in a house nearby, at 425 Caplewood. He notes that this was Maddox’s residence from 1971-1974, and writes that Maddox would “refer to” the oak trees that lined the blocks of the neighborhood in his poem “Shades Mountain” which was published in the New Yorker in 1971.

I was floored. Up until that point I had not realized that Maddox and I had once lived in the same neighborhood. I was also amazed at Sartwell’s descriptions of the place, and how they transported me back to that time in my life. Beyond the one year that I lived there with my family, I had also spent time there in college, as it became the locale of escapades such as those wild weekend parties.

Sartwell continues that “a watershed moment in Rhette’s life” occurred while Maddox lived in the house at 425 Caplewood, in October of 1971, when his poem “Shades Mountain” was published in the New Yorker. He tells a story of how he surprised Maddox with a copy of the magazine one evening, when Maddox had been agitated that it hadn’t appeared yet, worried that it might not: “He jumped up, yelling ‘Jumping Jehosaphats!

King of Judah! It’s here! It’s here!’ over and over.” Sartwell tries to get him to take the copy, but he refuses, taking only the table of contents page, saying “This will give me proof. Let the bastards go buy it to read it.”

He says that Maddox went all over town getting people to sign the page and that people bought “the emerging poet” so many drinks at the Chukker that he had to be carried home.

I couldn’t believe the connections between Maddox’s story and my own, the neighborhood, the trees, the drinking at the Chukker, even the poem itself. Sartwell notes that the poem recounts a trip Maddox had taken 116

with a friend to Birmingham in his green Triumph sports car. I thought of one of my friends, who lived nearby on Sherwood Drive, who had a red, 1960s Volkswagen Karmann Ghia, that we once drove to Birmingham, three of us, one squeezed under the glass in the tiny backseat. He had been a little older and the first to get his permit, which might have been all he had at the time.

Maddox lived in that house until November of 1974. Sartwell writes that it was during those years that Maddox “had the greatest impact on the poetry life of the University.” Then, after a semester residency as a “Poetin-the-Schools” in Fayetteville, North Carolina, while still working on his never-completed PhD, he got married and took another apartment for a short time. In the fall of 1975, he was hired into the English department of Xavier University of Louisiana and moved to New Orleans.

* Richie had been asking after me.

In another coincidence, the man who had brought Maddox to our house was still in contact with my uncle Daniel, and had been asking about me around the time I’d read the Sartwell piece, in the summer of 2023. Great, let’s have lunch, I said to Dan. I said I’d love to see Richie and mentioned I’d like to ask him about Maddox.

A couple weeks later, as I pulled up to the restaurant, I recognized Richie right away, sitting on a bench out front, though I hadn’t seen him in at least twenty-five years. He wore a light-blue-and-white-striped buttondown shirt, with an undershirt, tucked into khaki pants.

Dan soon arrived and the three of us went in and took a table. It was an informal place, near the City Park campus of Delgado Community College, the kind of place where sandwiches came with potato chips on the side, not in a bag but just on the plate.

“So I hear you’re interested in hearing about my friend Everette,” Richie said after we’d placed our orders. “He was a friend, and such a smart man, could recite Shakespeare, knew so much about so many poets and

117

writers. But he was troubled. I would try to tell him, if he could just slow down a little, you know? Go a little easier. But he couldn’t, or wouldn’t.”

“How’d you meet?” I asked.

“Just at the bar. He was down on his luck and needed a place to stay, so I let him stay at my place. He stayed with me from time to time. He had other friends, a lot of friends at the bar.”

I asked Richie how the trip to Tuscaloosa came about. The answer was that when he had mentioned to Maddox that he had a friend who had recently moved there, Maddox had asked Richie to bring him there. That was it. Myron had moved there and he knew Richie. Maddox found out and asked Richie to bring him there.

If that revelation hit me as almost mundane, what Richie said next left me reeling: When they had arrived at our house on Caplewood, Maddox had said to him, “This is the house.”

This is the house? I thought, what house? Sartwell had described a place at 425 Caplewood. We had lived at 24. I couldn’t quite place where 425 was, but because of the hundred-number difference I had assumed it to have been farther down, past Reed Street, on the curvy part headed toward University Boulevard.

My assumption dissolved there in the restaurant in a disorienting moment, as it dawned on me that the house numbers had changed in the time between when he had lived there and when I had. It was the same house, the exact same house! The intense intuition of proximity I had felt when reading Sartwell made complete sense now. I had thought I had been near where Maddox had been. But, no. He had returned to, had been delivered to, exactly where he had been before, to where he had begun, to where “Shades Mountain” and all it represented to him had occurred, and I had only happened to have been there to greet him, at age thirteen, knowing nearly nothing, but on the verge of finding out much.

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

“The house he had lived in?” I asked, to be certain.

“Yes,” Richie said. “He had lived in that same house that you and 118

your parents lived in. At least that was what he told me.”

“Wow,” I said. “That must have been quite a surprise.”

For the house to have been the same house was an uncanny wrinkle of the universe that felt like it had been waiting for the right moment to reveal itself to me.

“What else do you remember from the trip?” I asked.

“Well, we had wanted to go to an Alabama football game, but the tickets were expensive and neither of us had any money. The next day, I told him, we have to get back because he had his thing at the Leaf in the afternoon.”

“So that was it, you drove back?”

“Well, I went to wake him up in the morning, and he started screaming like he was terrified or something. I said, Everette, what’s wrong? What’s the matter? And when he finally became fully awake and calmed down, he told me that I had looked just like the angel of death, and that he thought I was coming to take him.”

I didn’t know how to respond to this. After a moment I asked, “What do you suppose that was about?”

“I’m not sure,” Richie said. “I guess he had been dreaming or something, maybe he didn’t know where he was. I don’t know.”

Richie’s voice trailed off on this long-forgotten moment.

I thought about the basement of that house, where my own bedroom had been. It was partially sunken, with narrow windows at the tops of the walls that, from the outside, appear to sit right at ground level. Maybe the morning light in those windows had cast Richie into silhouette as he woke Maddox. We had millipedes down there that startled the hell out of me when I first saw them. It had an earthy smell. I got my first electric guitar when I lived down there, a Harmony that came with a plastic amp with a five-inch speaker, and a curly cable.

Iced tea refills had come and gone. Lunch was ending.

“Did you take any other trips together?” I asked.

“We went to Baton Rouge a couple times for L.S.U. football games. I 119

remember once we were driving back at night on highway 61, going past the big refinery near LaPlace, the way the lights were and all the towers around there. He looks over at me and says, ‘We’re in hell!’”

“Wow,” I said, knowing the place he was referring to, seeing it through Maddox’s eyes. Of course, I thought, how else to describe it.

“He was a good man, a real mensch. I miss him.”

We paid the check and walked out into the bright noontime sun. I asked Richie if it was okay if I write about what we had talked about, and he said it was. I asked if he would want to read it before it was published.

He said he wasn’t worried about that, but that he would like to read it.

We made plans to meet up again, the three of us, and tried a few times.

Richie said he knew a place that made a great shrimp po-boy, but after a few postponements we stopped trying.

* In October of 2023, I had occasion to visit Tuscaloosa, for an event to mark the 20th year since the closing of the Chukker, the storied downtown dive bar that had served multiple generations. The Chukker’s reputation was well established by Maddox’s time as a haven for bikers, artists, longhairs, and freaks of all ilk. The anti-war movement met there, and according to Sartwell, he and Maddox were present one night after the killing of students at Kent State. The suggestion was made to burn Dressler Hall, and later someone carried it out. Maddox was the one who inquired which building on campus should be “sacrificed to the cause.”

Later when he discovered the Maple Leaf in New Orleans, he noted how it reminded him of the Chukker.

By the time my friends and I got there, the Chukker had become known as a music venue. Long before I was old enough to get in, I heard about shows there. The Replacements was one. A year or two before I turned twenty-one, I got tired of waiting and started jumping the back fence into the courtyard to see bands. I’d go in the back door and straight to the front of the stage. I saw the A-Bones that way. Other bands from that

120

time include Southern Culture on the Skids, Flat Duo Jets, Pylon, Love Tractor, Smugglers, Mortals, Gibson Brothers, ‘68 Comeback, Hillbilly Frankenstein, Antiseen, Phantom Surfers. There were local heroes as well, like Club Wig and the Storm Orphans, bands I’d heard on college radio in high school. When I was finally able to walk in the front door, I had a band of my own, the Cunning Runts. We drew our inspiration from punk rock, but we were rooted in psychedelic mayhem, weirdness, and noise. The Butthole Surfers were our favorite band. We’d travel to see them and would follow them city to city. In this way, we were connected to the hippies, Maddox and his cohort, similar to how the music scenes in Athens and Austin were connected to the hippies of those places, and their music, each successive generation simultaneously rejecting the rock of their predecessors and regurgitating the most experimental strains of it. In this way hippies haunt college towns. Under the veil of experimentation, Maddox and his friends had created an absurdist alter-ego, a poet named Buck Potatox. (Fellow Potatoxian Fred Kasten is a longtime radio host in New Orleans.) Under the muse of this same multi-colored gauze, my friends and I created the Cunning Runts. For our first show we covered ourselves in Woolite and played under a blacklight to appear glowing. Our music consisted of songs of a sort, layered with good amounts of noise, feedback generated by my guitar and RAT distortion pedal. We rarely played without a strobe light or blacklight or both. We weren’t much for rehearsing, recording, or touring, but our home base was the Chukker, and it was on the strength of our shows there that we were invited to perform at the Chukker Weekender, 2023, to mark twenty years since its closing.

The bar itself had long since been razed. The entire block had been part of a downtown revival and looked nothing like it once did. The event was held at a brewery near Central High School, what used to be the East Campus (which also had been leveled, then rebuilt on the same site). It was Friday and there was a football game. I reunited with my former bandmates and several friends who had traveled to be there, and with many others over the weekend. I had left Tuscaloosa in January of 1994.

121

Some attendees I’d seen in recent years, but others not in thirty. My sister came, and so did our friend Richard Bates, whom we’d known since our original New Orleans days and had visited us in Tuscaloosa several times.

Richard was one of the only people I knew of my age who knew who Everette Maddox was. In fact it had been Richard’s enthusiasm for Maddox in high school that had made me think my encounter with him had been something significant. He stayed at your house, brah? That’s awesome!

I recall Richard saying. Richard’s enthusiasm for Maddox was genuine; he loved the poems. He could recite lines and would do so at an instant.

Richard’s father, Randolph, whom we knew as Randy, had been at Tulane with Myron and had played in those softball games when we were kids. Randy had also served as my mentor in creative writing when I returned to New Orleans in 2005 to attend U.N.O. Richard had had his own encounter with Maddox, as a kid, while walking with Randy in the Carrollton neighborhood that became Maddox’s home. Randy knew Maddox from the Maple Leaf and from teaching together in a poetry-in-the-schools program. Randy recounts the sidewalk meeting in a wonderful essay (called “Even Odd: On Everette Maddox’s Teaching” in the anthology Umpteen Ways of Looking at Possum) and recalls how Richard ended up with his collections of Maddox’s poetry in his bedroom, where I remember encountering them on visits. There was a coolness to the little books, a bohemian edge, the photo of the bearded author, the titles, the fonts, the words themselves, that somehow fit into an underground aesthetic I imagined myself to be cultivating.

The Runts played on Friday night to an enthusiastic crowd. We were introduced by the former owner of a record store, the record store back then, who had been the first person to place into my hands recordings by the Butthole Surfers, the Angry Samoans, the Circle Jerks, all around the time I first rode a skateboard from Caplewood to the Strip.

“I’ve known these guys since they were little skater punks, and now they’re old!” is how he put it, insulting, but fitting the tenor of the weekend.

122

On Saturday, my sister, Richard, and I drove past the old house. I had this essay in mind and wanted to get a picture. I’d searched some family photos for ones from the time, but had come up empty. There may have been a missing book or box. My parents had moved several times. We’d lived there only a short time, besides.

The yard and porch bore the signs of student occupants, as did all of the nearby houses. The oak trees were gone from the slice nearest the street.

There’d been two, I thought, and another by the neighbors. Now bright sun hit the small front yard. We stopped and got out, and talked of where our bedrooms had been, where the side entrance had been. The dormer window on the second floor that faced the street looked the same, the one Sartwell describes as the location of Maddox’s desk and typewriter, and the only un-cluttered area of the room.

In “Shades Mountain” Maddox writes “I have sat alone in a room at night / with one lamp, hearing outside / huge trees shake in the belligerent wind,.”

The lines evoke memories of my years there in that house and around that neighborhood, not just in the size of the trees and ferocity of southern storms, but in a certain feeling of possibility, of hope, of a future to be discovered. The wind may blow and rip us to shreds, as Maddox writes, but we’d still make plans to meet up later. A night might be spent alone, with a book and a lamp and the wind outside, a necessary and fulfilling experience, and the next night there’d be drinks with friends, in a room, or a bar, or outside by the riverbank. The world was open.

Sartwell says the poem is about a trip Maddox had taken to Birmingham with his good friend and former student Bob Woolfe. I thought about other road trips Maddox had taken, which had an air of spontaneity to them.

The one from New Orleans to Tuscaloosa with Richie in 1985. Another one that my colleague David Lanoue once mentioned. After the Maple Leaf had closed one night, Maddox had proposed a trip to the beach in Mississippi with David and another man, but when they reached the car, in the moments the man took in fumbling for his keys and trying to get 123

it started, David thought better of it. “I want to live, I decided,” is what he’d told me.

I thought about a road trip of my own, one night after the Chukker had closed, never a good time to decide anything, especially not to travel across state lines. A friend and I drove to Philadelphia, Mississippi, a two-hour trip on state highways, to gamble at a casino there. We must have been feeling lucky. He ended up winning a few hundred dollars playing twentyone and roulette, but we got pulled over on the way home. Somehow we didn’t go to jail. The weak casino drinks had actually sobered us up by midmorning. His winnings covered the fine for speeding.

There’s another Maddox poem, “Seven Million Of The Most Amazing Things I Ever Saw,” about being on Highway 43 in Alabama, “between Tuscaloosa and Mobile,” stopping to take a leak, and seeing the stars in the sky. The short poem goes on to compare that sight to the beauty of an unnamed woman’s breasts. I first read it in Richard’s bedroom, in highschool days. I’d been on that road, in that same frame of mind, out there, young, intoxicated, looking up at that same sky, lost in it.

After Caplewood, we drove toward the river, winding slowly through the neighborhoods, identifying houses and their former occupants, the family whose daughter used to babysit the girls, a kid I went to school with who played football but was cool, my friend with the Karmann. A small bridge from my neighborhood to his was now blocked off, the way in and out now rearranged. The river was at the bottom of the hill. That never changed.

Richard asked to see a location from my novel, Stereo Killer, where I’d set a scene in which the characters swim across the river. The book was fiction, I reminded him. That scene was an amalgam of a few different places where we’d swam. There were a few spots along the river, rope swings and spots carved into the woods that seemed to have been made by teenagers, for teenagers. The place where we’d swam across was a different part, outside of town, past where Holt lock and dam turned the river into a lake. I pulled the car off the river road around where I’d remembered an 124

access point, but nothing looked familiar. There was a shabby apartment complex, and a few people watched us from their balcony, as I pulled up to where a fence separated the back of the lot from the woods.

“We might have hopped the fence, or something. I’m not sure. There’s trails and stuff back there, but we should probably get going.”

Richard concurred: “The neighborhood has been alerted to our presence.”

We visited a few other spots, including an antiques mall where our friend sold vintage clothes, jewelry, and records, before returning to the concert venue for the second night of music. A band called the Irascibles played the kind of music that very cool kids might have listened to in the days when Everette Maddox was an undergrad. The singer was Tim Parrish, who had taught me fiction writing at Alabama. Tim was from Louisiana, and his band the Lower Chakras I had known since high school. Richard had turned me on to them.

On Sunday morning we had eggs and biscuits at a breakfast place adorned wall-to-wall with Crimson Tide memorabilia, and then we returned to New Orleans.

* Maddox had been taught poetry, called “verse writing” at the time, by a man named Dr. August Mason, who was hired onto the Alabama faculty in 1936. Classes were held in Morgan Hall, the same building where Myron would later have an office, and where I would take classes from teachers such as James Burke, Pat Herman, and Richard Rand, who once hosted Jacques Derrida on campus.

After Alabama, I spent ten years in New York and San Francisco, playing music, working in service. Needing a change, keeping a deal I’d made with myself, I dusted off the degree, applied to graduate schools, and was accepted into two: Alabama and the University of New Orleans. I returned to New Orleans in 2005, two weeks before Hurricane Katrina. We completed that first semester online, then resumed in-person in 2006. With

125

a backdrop of the earliest days of the rebirth of the city, I studied creative nonfiction under Randy Bates and trained and worked as a composition teacher. Randy’s workshops instilled in students his own deep care with and attention to written language, the kind found in the best essayists, as well as the sort of openness to the experiences of others, to hearing them, to listening, needed to be a writer.

Randy had known Everette Maddox in the early 80s, and had on several occasions observed him as a teacher. He writes of these experiences in an essay in the Umpteen collection. They had been trained together to teach “poetry-in-the-schools,” a public-school program, and later Maddox had been a guest in a Tulane continuing education course that Randy moderated.

He recalls Maddox’s way with the class as “immediate, funny, and very natural.” He quotes a former student of Maddox’s, who describes Maddox’s approach as simple and direct: “There was a wonderful quietness about him, but he knew when to be loud . . . His classes were mostly quiet listening, then writing. Afterwards he’d leave quietly, no fanfare.”

In Randy’s classes I worked on essays that would eventually be rewritten into Stereo Killer, as well as some other Katrina-related pieces based on interviews I’d done in that first semester in 2005. It was through one of those pieces that I met Nicole Greene, chair of English at Xavier and editor of the Journal of College Writing, who accepted it for publication in that journal. My emerging resume of a few classes taught at U.N.O. along with that essay, was enough to get me hired at Xavier in 2008, as a full-time composition instructor on a three-year appointment.

There I met Thomas Bonner, Jr., whom I knew as Tom, who had recently retired but was serving as Professor Emeritus, teaching one class, and keeping hours in an office just down from mine. Though I didn’t know any of this at the time, Tom had started at Xavier in the mid-1970s, and was serving as a young chair of the department when there was a sudden departure over the summer, leaving the department in need of a creative writing teacher. With no M.F.A.-granting institutions nearby, Tom called the chair at Alabama and was given the name Everette Maddox. Tom 126

recounts this time in an essay that appears in the Umpteen anthology, and also adds a few details to another piece in the same book. He recalls how he’d been impressed that Maddox had been in the New Yorker, as most poets would start off in smaller literary journals. He says he liked the way Maddox used the word “career” as a verb in the poem. He says that Maddox presented himself well, with a look that reminded him of Edgar Allen Poe, and got along with other teachers and with students.

He recalls that things had begun well enough, but that they took a turn around the time of his divorce. He writes that Maddox had a habit of carrying a glass of scotch with him around campus, which was “a bit uncomfortable.” No one confronted him, Tom recalls, but he had come to believe that word had gotten back to the dean, who was a nun. When Maddox went to apologize, he found only the dean’s administrative assistant, to whom he offered a sincere apology on bended knee.

In the end, “No one had reported the scotch incident,” Bonner notes, but “the cumulative effect of this behavior suggested that he would not continue to do well academically.” He goes on to speak highly of Maddox as a poet and chronicler of the city and the times, concluding, “His life in New Orleans suggested the romantic image of a poet who has failed to cope with the traffic of his surroundings, but who has found in truth and beauty a power that, as he distilled it, could sustain others but not himself.”

Xavier Review Press had published Maddox’s first chapbook, called The Thirteen Original Poems, in 1976. His wife, Celia, drew the cover art, which included figures Maddox claimed as ancestors, including Col. Jon Hathorn, originally of Gloucestershire, England, who presided over the Salem witch trials.

Tom and I would converse often. He had studied at Tulane with my father, and he never failed to ask about Myron and to send along his regards. He once told me that he’d considered Myron among the strongest of Tulane grads and had followed his academic career. Tom also still worked as editor of the Review (which he had helped found) and we worked together on essays published there, including one in particular 127

on Jesmyn Ward. He was supportive of my writing, and when I told him of my plans to write this piece, his response was that the story sounded interesting and that he’d always thought the Review should contain some nonfiction in each issue.

Just down the hall in the other direction was the office of Ralph Adamo.

By 2023 Ralph had been serving as editor of the Review for several years.

Ralph had been a friend of Maddox and has contributed as much as anyone to the curation of his work and furthering of his legacy. Ralph and I both taught in the composition program, in the trenches, as they say, and we were often assigned basic-level writing classes to teach. Many of our conversations revolved around this challenging work, as we each sought help from the other in trying to reach students unaccustomed to taking care with language. Ralph is an accomplished poet with a long record of publications, and a following around New Orleans and beyond. There was a degree of irony to his being charged with teaching at the basic level, but there was also a purity to it, an egalitarian approach, a people’s teacher, in the same way Bates and Maddox came at it. I considered it a strength of the department that we had experienced teachers in these courses. David Lanoue was another senior faculty member who never shied away from teaching in the trenches. Teachers of these courses needed to meet the students where they were and engage honestly and humbly with them in learning to use the language. These teachers were often possessed of the most humble relationship with language, almost a form of awe, as well as the sharpest skills in applying it, always with precise revision, of course.

When I told Ralph the story about Maddox that I intended to write up, he said that he did remember Richard Dempsey from the Maple Leaf.

He said that he did not know that Maddox liked football, but that he did like Richard quite a lot and appreciated his company.

It was Ralph who introduced me to New Orleans poet Skye Jackson, and it was my work in the composition program that allowed me to get to know her when she began teaching at Xavier. She represents the next cohort of M.F.A.-holding writing teachers there. She asked questions

128

often throughout the first year, which told me how much she cared about her students and their learning. She wants them to care about writing the way she does.

Skye also represents an emergent generation of New Orleans poets, steeped in the scene that Maddox helped foster, taught by poets who had encountered him when they were young. I asked her if she ever read at the Maple Leaf, and she said she had, but not since grad school at U.N.O. Her first book will be published by Regalo Press in the spring of 2025, and of late she has participated in a range of readings and events, including as a writer-in-residence aboard a cruise ship, in Baton Rouge at an event hosted by the state Poet Laureate, and on Fox 8 News promoting National Poetry Month.

Everyone who teaches at Xavier is charged with fulfilling the mission of the school, to contribute to a more just and humane society, through the education of African American students. Everyone engages with this concept at some level, on their own terms, and the idea can strike one in different ways at different points of a career. Maddox taught there for a short time, but even he would have given thought to what such an idea meant, in practice, even he, maybe especially he, must have considered what justice had to do with the teaching of writing.

I’ve “engaged” with the mission in various ways over the years, teaching first-year students, bringing them into the community. The way I’ve come at it has shifted over time, moving in phases, as I continue to encounter newer generations of young people. I’ve slowed down, doubled back, recalibrated, lost my way, been bored, lost hope, lost sight, then, found something to reset me, to refocus me, to allow me to come at it once again. Extenuating factors come in and out of play as years go by, children, parents, their lives, one’s own in there somewhere. If we’re lucky we find something to rekindle us, something to keep burning on, a purpose, maybe a moment from the past that comes to gain new meaning and push us forward just a little further.

Maddox was not suited for a life in academia, despite having trained and spent his formative years in it. He skewed heavily toward the poet

129

end of scholar-poet. He missed out on the cyclical travails of that life. He found his travails elsewhere.

After Xavier he held a few other temporary positions, but more notably settled into his role of uptown bard, co-founder and host of the Sunday reading series the Maple Leaf, which still goes on as of the time of this writing. Many have noted his manner as a host, warm, gracious, welcoming, sharp, witty, commanding. It’s no wonder that he was so beloved. He possessed the perfect combination of attributes to become a New Orleans legend—a scotch-sipping, Joyce-quoting, lovelorn poet, with a familiar, bearded face, waiting to greet you with a witty quip, inside your favorite oak-and-beer-smelling uptown bar.

Some have compared his poetry to jazz, and the way he lived to that of some of the jazz legends. Situated as he was in the city, such comparisons are apt, just as they are impossible not to attempt to draw. Like the jazzman from the well-known Dixieland song, he did indeed ramble in and out of town. But in the places where he began, one is much more likely to encounter examples of a different musical archetype: the bluesman, traveling town to town, along the highways, bringing a measure of relief, of joy, to others, to help ease their pain, while unable to escape his own.

* Alexander Sartwell makes no mention of his friend’s return to Tuscaloosa in 1985. He likely did not know. The visit was too brief. In Umpteen Ways, this time period is described in a chronology of Maddox’s life with the following sentence: “Homelessness and unemployment become permanent conditions.” Ralph Adamo acknowledged that it was not a good time for Maddox, although the tone of the written accounts of these years vary, and Maddox was still writing poems, among his best according to some. These were the ones famously written onto bar napkins and coasters, dropped into a brown paper K&B grocery bag behind the bar of the Leaf, the “archives” as Maddox called it, the ones Ralph later helped edit and publish in American Waste.

In 1988, a collection of Maddox’s poems called Bar Scotch was published by Pirogue Press, an imprint started by one of the owners of the

130

Maple Leaf. A series of readings was organized, and Maddox traveled to Fort Walton and to Montgomery with Bill Roberts and poet Julie Kane, a trip she memorably chronicles in an essay in Umpteen. Maddox’s health was not good. He ate almost nothing. His throat was swollen shut by what would soon be diagnosed as an inoperable tumor.

No mention is made of any trip to Tuscaloosa by any chronicler of those years that I’ve yet encountered. The trip may well have been cooked up one night around closing time and executed without the knowledge of anyone but the participants. If anyone else even knew, they’ve likely long forgotten it or are themselves gone. Yet for Maddox, it must have been important. He saw a chance to go back to Tuscaloosa and he took it. He couldn’t have known that he’d be returning to the same house where he’d lived. He must have been moved, in some way, stirred inside, to arrive there. For someone whose life and poetic voice were consumed with a constant tension between hope, beauty, humor and truth on one side, and darkness, despair, destruction, and the family fate of early death on the other, the return, for one night, to his graduate-school apartment must have meant something to him. Maybe it reminded him of the wind in the trees that he’d written about, or brought him back to some fleeting feeling of youth from long ago.

Maddox died in February of 1989, at age forty-four. Around five hundred people, many from Alabama, attended his funeral and “second line,” which wound through the Carrollton neighborhood, making stops at Carrollton Station and the Maple Leaf, led by the Riverside Ramblers brass band.

Three months later I graduated from Central High in Tuscaloosa.

After the ceremony, I celebrated with friends at a party on Reed Street, listening to Love and Rockets sing “So Alive.”

131

Barbara Crooker

Summer, and the Syllables Simmer Too hot for clothes. Too humid for my hair, which springs into frizz. Too hard on my pale skin, which sizzles and burns. But oh, those sweet nights, glittery with fireflies’ morse-coding love letters on the grass. The music of katydids and cicadas, the scent of a fresh-mowed lawn.

An icy martini, olives bobbing in the waves, each sip lessening my grip, letting me remember happier times. I know you’re not sitting here next to me, but I sense your closeness. Tell me what it’s like, over there, in the world of pure light.

Tell me how to go on.

132

Stephen Gibson

Two Poems An Edo Period Print at St. Petersburg’s Museum of Fine Arts The print’s about class and, in a way, class warfare and not just about women with sticks and baskets, as a mom walks through puddles with her daughter.

Seashell Gathering at the Ebb Tide is one print in a set

by Utagawa Kuniyoshi, showing the women gather seashells, one kneeling in mud as a clam’s piss jets in bubbles to the surface as her friend watches her.

Kuniyoshi’s series was commissioned by Edo elect upper class to commemorate a group get-together where they’d composed verse mocking this subject and wanted their verse illustrated by a print maker.

The museum note says Kuniyoshi’s genius is more how he focuses on the pleasures of the commoners, one, who’s catching an octopus, another, a flounder.

133

Colorized Albumin Print of Geisha, c. 1880 —St. Petersburg Museum of Fine Arts, Fl.

The photo shows how cultivated they all are, musical, as they’ve been arranged into two rows for this photo, which will show to everyone not simply how beautiful the women are, but also how much these women know: three women in the back row play shamisen (its animal skin cover is usually made of domestic cat even though dog is sometimes used but considered inferior material), the plucked three-stringed instrument being like a banjo, also having a long neck, but unfettered; that fourth girl, with no instrument, doesn’t look happy having to pose: the photographer had four geisha in the front row kneel, with two playing tsudzumi (hand drums), one, the taiko (also a drum), and another, a fue (flute made of bamboo).

Only the fourth geisha, back, makes eye contact with you.

134

TJ Beitelman

Two Poems Poetry Makes Nothing Happen 1.

Watch me write a poem to all the once young and decorated poets! I can name some of them, for reference: Brian Henry, Matthew Rohrer, Chelsey Minnis, Catherine Wagner, Natasha Trethewey. Or maybe I shouldn’t name them, shouldn’t mention the trivia I used to know about them. Good God Almighty, I knew things about them, didn’t I? Christ—and why? I never knew them.

But here’s a matching test I could’ve aced at one (more desperate) time in my life: ___ Henry ___ Rohrer ___ Minnis joint in D.C. ___ Wagner jacket ___ Trethewey

a. former college cheerleader b. once married to somebody with two MFAs c. once ran out on the check at an Ethiopian d. asked not to be blurbed on her/his first book e. hasn’t read much Byron

These days I don’t exactly remember who was who.

And in the grand scheme, I’m sure they’re all fine, fine folks. I wish them nothing but the best.

135

Godspeed Cathy, Brian, and the rest. Wherever you are, whatever became of you. May you still be blurbed with all the proper adjectives: true, necessary, important. [Except for those of you who never wanted blurbs in the first place (wink, wink!)]

But then we’re all just poets. Or were. More or less, we decorate(d) ourselves.

Here’s the thing: Today all it does is rain outside this sad café.

Gary, the paraplegic guy stationed perpetually by the counter won’t shut the fuck up, singing along to—Jesus, God—“Wooly Bully.” (Watch it now, watch it! Here he comes!) Earlier today, I forgot and greeted him with a jocular pat on the knee.

I wasn’t thinking. It was stone. Petrified, heavy.

Of course he never looked up. He wasn’t looking my way. My dumb, numb pat didn’t exist.

So then.

In the face of all this facelessness, I want to know what prize I get for writing Coffee Shop Poem № 1,000,000,001. Yes, I cherish my creamy yellow bowl of organic blend, Oldies blasting on the radio.

I’ve found a place where I can sit all day and stare at people. And think. I think, I am. You might say all of that is prize enough and then some. Still.

I can’t help telling myself it’s a tragedy no one knows I’m here.

2.

Ringo says Shea Stadium in ’65 was an asylum.

136

John went mad, he says. Banging the keyboard with his elbows. Everyone was mad. Even the thick-necked cops. There were buttons, almost identical: I LOVE JOHN; I LOVE RINGO. Girls squeezing their pretty heads in their hands, working up to giant, manic bursts of aspiration: PAUL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

GEORGE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Paul can’t hear you, dear.

Neither can George. They’ll never know. It’s all just rain into the ocean.

3.

The kicker? Ringo couldn’t even hear his rap-tap-tap.

They all played like shit. It was just a big excuse for 66,000 people to bubble over, dash one by one, between a gauntlet of dozens of New York City’s Finest and a series of strategically placed barricades. So, then, the middle-aged Colombian guy who sets up his guitar at the coffee shop this morning, he must know exactly what I’m talking about. He sings things nobody’s ever heard—obscure Spanish folk songs. In Spanish. The long line of Unitarians frets over the merits of lemon-poppy seed versus those of biscotti. Only one woman listens to the songs, and she spends her time between numbers trying to alleviate all that ills Colombia: Don’t you think— I’ve heard Colombia is very beautiful—don’t you think if Colombians could understand what they have, they could oust the drug lords 137

and end the civil war? They could have eco-tourism instead.

Lots of richpeople could come and spend their money and then the Colombian people wouldn’t stand for the violence because they’d know tourists don’t want to come to a dangerous place. She says this as he tunes his guitar. He smiles, tells her he doesn’t understand the language very well. She starts in with her pidgin Spanish. He has a set to play. Ah, he finally says, peace very hard. No. Never peace. He smiles again, a thank you, then he strums the neck with vigor, launches full-bore into “The Girl from Ipanema” as the whole world seems to prick its ears.

138

Why It’s Not Sad That Poetry Makes Nothing Happen 1.

It’s because duality of thought can bring a civilization to its knees. Right is left, left is right. It’s because there are so many kinds of sad things. Any ignored Colombian folk singer could not be any higher than #26,874 on any list of sad things. My father used to tell me that the monsters in the monster flicks went out after for coffee; the Colombian guy does that, I’m here to tell you. Except he doesn’t have very far to go. And, plus, he’s Colombian, so maybe he’s tired of coffee.

Maybe he goes for chicken salad and sweet tea. I don’t know if he’s alone or not. Either way, he’s happy. The annoying pseudo geopolitical wonk, she’s a happily married mother of two grown children. She has appeared previously in a poem by Tony Hoagland and two by Dean Young. She likes gardening and has no pertinent thoughts on the future of Latin America or the rift between the world’s haves and have-nots.

Also let me flatly reject any notion that the last poem was meant to evoke further reflection, however oblique, on John Lennon’s untimely death. And I’ll go on record as saying Yoko was a seminal creative force in the Beatles’

139

later work.

2.

OK—the Yoko thing was just a fib, to see if you’re paying attention. But all the rest is true, and it’s proof-positive that happiness is mainly context: So what if anyone’s listening?

First of all, there’s the sweet promise of chicken salad afterwards: creamy with solid chunks of real breast meat. But even that’s not the main thing. What is the main thing? I’ve got to be honest here—I’m surprised you’ve lasted this long. This is just a poem. A long one at that.

I guess now I’ll have to think a main thing up.

How about this: I went to an art show once and this one artist filmed herself just standing there for many minutes at a time. I was onto her right away, but everybody else kept watching. I wanted to watch, but I also wanted to be the first to walk away, the first to say, I know this trick. There’s nothing to it. She stands forever.

Or maybe at the end she falls down.

It’s a shell game just the same.

Was it me who said happiness is context? I didn’t mean that exactly. I meant to say that poetry is context and that perhaps sadness is context. I think I was confused—or maybe I had too much faith that, knowing the coordinates of sadness and 140

poetry, happiness was a variable I could solve for. And wouldn’t that be just the place to end a poem: knowing the coordinates of sadness and poetry, happiness was a variable I could solve for…

3.

But that would be sad—or else it easily could be construed as such—because you know the rest: the artist falls, fails. Then there’d have to be another poem disavowing the melancholia of its predecessor and who knows if that one would be sad or not— or could be construed as such—and I don’t have to tell you that we’d be right back where we started: spinning our wheels. So, no, I won’t end there.

But where did we start, now that you mention it?

Ah, duality. I wonder what I meant by that.

Maybe this: that not everything is what it seems.

Hence, Yoko and her bad rap. (We all know The Beatles needed busting up.) Hence, chickensalad-eating Colombians who sing folk songs into the ether. And, of course, the crazy wonk who is not a wonk, who has inhabited other poems—she, too, is proof. Proof of what? Proof of everything. She is and she isn’t as stupid as she seems.

Now, with all that said, I’ll say this too: The Wooly Bully regular with the dead stumps for legs, he played himself. Whatever he does later, he won’t get up and walk off into the sunset. I told you at the start: Poems can’t make stuff like that happen— 141

[Okay. Christ, who am I kidding?

Yes! This poem is exactly that kind of poem. What other kind of poem could it be? You know the trick as well as me: at the end of a poem like this, just when no one’s paying attention—precisely because no one’s paying attention— Wooly Bully Greg pushes his dead weight up from the chair, grinning his yes-to-life, surging skyward, to somehow, someway waltz his impossible rumba.]

142

Jason Todd

A Sense of Place: A Review of The American Daughters (One World, 2024)

Maurice Carlos Ruffin is a New Orleans writer: not just a writer

from New Orleans, but a writer who loves New Orleans, and a writer who understands New Orleans. Ruffin’s Instagram feed is full of photos taken throughout the city; his short story collection, The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You (One World, 2021) was chosen for the 2023 One Book One New Orleans literacy program; there is a plaque on the table of the Orange Couch, a coffee shop in the Marigny, proudly identifying the table at which he wrote his first novel, We Cast a Shadow (One World, 2019).

Beyond simple public demonstrations, in his writing Ruffin explores the complexities of the city he so clearly adores. The short stories in The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You don’t hesitate to reveal the crueler aspects of contemporary life in the city, and Ruffin has also written quite honestly about the trauma of living in New Orleans and the trauma of returning here.

It’s evident to any reader that Ruffin’s writing has a strong sense of place. In interviews, he has explained that in his earlier writing, he may have focused too much on place, obsessing over the minutiae of wellworn clichés. The more practiced Ruffin we now see in print understands the importance of both the obvious details of a place and the less obvious geography of place — the ways the physical embodies the communal. In the short stories in The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You, Ruffin moves the reader through the known and unknown streets of New Orleans in a way few writers today can. Taken together, the book offers a contemporary portrait of a city that everyone seems to know and few people seem to understand. From the lingering remnants of Hurricane Katrina to sidewalk hustlers servicing convention goers, Ruffin shines a spotlight on the people and the place without hesitation, regret, or judgment. Even in his 143

first novel, set in a dystopian near-future place known only as The City, we see the past and the present of New Orleans, a place of potential and a place of failure, a place like no other.

Perhaps then it is no surprise that for his second novel, Ruffin has chosen to explore the brutal history of New Orleans and its involvement in the Transatlantic Slave Trade while also giving a story full of hope. In The American Daughters (One World, 2024), Ruffin conjures up a pre-war New Orleans that mirrors the one he showed us in The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You, one that is both beautiful and cruel, one that offers both freedom and bondage, one that must be appreciated even in spite of its flaws and failures.

Set in the years before and during the American Civil War, Ruffin’s novel tells the story of Ady, also known as Adebimpe, also known as Antoinette Marianne du Marche, a young woman born into enslavement.

In many ways, the novel follows the well-established pattern of such narratives. Ady, as a child, and her mother Sanite are placed by their enslaver, John du Marche, a landowner and politician, at his townhouse in New Orleans, where Sanite instills in her daughter a sense of pride and defiance even as she is subjected to the physical, emotional, and sexual abuse the plantation economy engendered and encouraged. As a young girl, Ady sees her newborn brother, the result of rape, taken away in the middle of the night to be sold. Soon after, mother and daughter escape New Orleans only to be captured and placed at du Marche’s plantation, where Ady watches her mother die from Yellow Fever. After she is returned to the townhouse and used by du Marche as a replacement for her mother, the role of mentor is filled by Lenore, a free woman of color who owns the Mockingbird Inn, and who, Ady eventually learns, is a member of a spy ring who call themselves the Daughters. Ady’s sense of self and morality continues to develop as she aids the Daughters and the Union army by providing information she gleans from du Marche while cleaning his office and serving his guests.

Readers familiar with Ruffin’s previous work may be surprised by the 144

tonal shift with his latest novel. Gone is the neurotically energetic sarcasm of the unnamed narrator of We Cast a Shadow. The American Daughters is a more grounded and reflective novel, one that begs the reader’s attention through thoughtful consideration instead of satirical extremes. Some might assume that the historical nature of the narrative itself compelled the change of narrative voice. Should the story of an enslaved woman be told with the same comic tone as the story of a man living in an absurd dystopian future? Perhaps not. But the tonal shift is not unprecedented for Ruffin, who has demonstrated such range in his short fiction. In The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You, while many of the stories, such as “Ghetto University,” embody the satirical and ironic, others, in particular the final story, “Before I Let You Go,” offers a slower and more nuanced look at the same struggles, the same search for happiness in a society designed to withhold that happiness. With Ruffin, the theme remains the same even as the tone and the genre change.

But with The American Daughters, Ruffin hasn’t abandoned his love speculative fiction in order to delve into the realm of historical fiction. As we have seen with many of the great dystopian critiques, Ruffin frames the narrative of Ady within the context scholarly research. Throughout the novel, the narrative is disrupted by documents that call into question the authorship and authenticity of the story of “Ady, known here as Antoinette Marianne du Marche,” documents that ultimately remind the reader of the speculative nature of all fiction, be it dystopian, historical, or contemporary. Each can, in its own way, Ruffin seems to want to remind us, fill us with hope even while documenting the struggle.

Throughout Ady’s struggles, she witnesses the potential for freedom.

But it is important to note that it is a particular kind of freedom, a freedom only made possible by the community, by collaboration with others within a defined space. When Ady is young, Sanite tells her stories about the village where she grew up, the way they supported each other from birth to death and even after death. As they race through the swamps of Louisiana, Sanite explains how she hopes to reach one of the local tribes who were 145

known to help those fleeing enslavement, since as she says, “Everybody out here lived mixed together.” After losing her mother and much of her hope, Ady discovers the Mockingbird Inn, an integrated establishment owned by Lenore, a free woman of color. Here Ady sees in full force how the community supports its members, as Lenore and the women who work at the inn stand off against a group of bounty hunters.

There is a certain importance of place in The American Daughters — not just the prominence of city of New Orleans but in the need of the characters to carve out a sense of safety and freedom. Sanite had this with the village where she was raised. Lenore has it with the Mockingbird Inn. The place, wherever it may be, creates the connection with others that allows the community to grow and to thrive even when under threat. Ady is constantly in search of a safe space of her own, and when she finds it, when she becomes a member of that community, she learns to fight for it.

The fight Ady joins is a mythical one, an imaginary one, a fight rooted in but separate from the known history. Again, Ruffin reminds us repeatedly that this is the case. Between the chapters of the “narrative,” we are presented with the archival documents, some of which may be real.

In doing so, Ruffin reminds us that although Ady’s story is purported to be a true story, we can never know the true story, as it has been passed through too many hands. A community has created the story we see before us, changing it over the years and turning it into legend, into myth.

It is difficult to ignore the fact that Ruffin wrote this novel only a few years after the statues memorializing Confederate soldiers and officers were removed from public display throughout the city of New Orleans, monuments that were erected (public spaces taken away from the community) in an effort to promote the myth of the Lost Cause, the false narrative that still over a century later attempts to portray the Confederacy as a band of heroic freedom fighters. In a speech given following the removal of the final statue, then mayor Mitch Landrieu framed the removal of these statues as an effort to correct that false narrative and as an opportunity for the community of New Orleans to redefine itself in 146

the 21st century.

Perhaps in The American Daughters Ruffin has given us a false narrative to oppose that of the Lost Cause, one to foster a true narrative of hope.

147

Richard Godden

Four Poems An Anathema The stones curse, laid down on unconsidered ground.

At the last, we have you under us.

The trees curse: shades from the elm, the ash, the chestnut, cast no shadow.

At the last, you join us in the infancy of coal that none shall burn.

The birds would curse, were they not afflicted with song.

At the last, broken sonographs for whistle, chirr, plutt fall to your fossil-ears.

The air curses: exhale; inhale: again, exhale; inhale: again.

At the last, I corpse you.

The light curses: after the leaves and the seas and the flickering.

At the last, I fell, matt flat as the skin once on your backs.

The winds curse: across, across, across; never hither or yon.

At the last, dis spirited, melt, burn, drown.

The waters curse: staled by the dreg of your dregs, you drowned us.

At the last, we swim in you, urinous.

Language curses: please hold; all our operatives are currently….

At the last, weather wipes signage from the walls.

148

The cursers curse the cursers for their tongues: after the production of nonproduction; after the sixth great extinction; after words, no thing is animate, each thing particular, all things empty.

The earth curses: anthropobscene.

At the last, anthropabbreviate.

149

Death Poems and Dementia Scratches

Dementia Scratches

Death Poems

One side of the room gone before you reach the far edge of the lost word.

A life in the day of ash—a penny for them, lifted and flaming.

Start. Start again. Start worse. Syllabification bifurcates. Furk. Kruf.

Syntactically ill-suited, poor Henry erred, ‘At last, the great un…’

An indefinite article punning, stammers ‘a’ towards ‘ah …. ah’ known thing: happenstance happens and whole caboodles conclude—melt, burn, drown.

150

Made definite, ‘the’ grips for a moment, till ‘t’ ‘he’ gapes: mind the gripe.

Sing-song-sounds whistle in a drowning lung, nursery rhymes and garden games ‘Singin in the rain,’ hummed, prelude to vacancy, lets him leave his hat.

A penultimate breath feathers exquisitely prior to corpsing.

The mind’s cloth’d ear strains for an echo of one hand’s clap at the edge of sound.

The mind’s eye turns out to watch what its body does falling through bare light.

Your last, ‘It hurts’ (twice) Splits ‘It—I … i … t … t … t ouch’ — the slighter hurt.

151

Mud on a box; mud in a box; box into mud; geology lite.

Note: “Since the sixteenth century, death-poems in haiku form have been written by Japanese from all levels of society … In addition to leaving a will, a tradition of writing ‘a farewell poem to life’ took root and became widespread” (Joel Hoffman, Japanese Death Poems, Written by Zen Monks and Haiku Poets on the Verge of Death).

152

After Images from Capa Only the dead get feet, or those on route, the rest just float, particularly the rich.

Note Kelly (Gene), the song and song man, how, begloved at each extremity, he hangs footless and fancy, curved in the air, as if he had no century. Or Cooper on a log, gun-hand cocked higher than noon, to cast a fly across Sun Valley; pure twinkle no toe (and ditto as to century).

The rich, whose wars poor men fight, are pleased to exit through the corpus-mysticum.

The poor, as corpses more pedestrian, quit, heel over tit, into the variant ditch.

In Normandy and Vietnam, he looked his fill, and wound their feet around the world.

Born in Budapest (1913), Robert Capa photographed wars and luminaries. He died, stepping on a landmine in Vietnam, while on an assignment for Life (1954).

153

Premature Epitaph Don’t let me die among the dead — the old ones who fish through the reflection of their town to catch in glimpses how they used to be but weren’t. Who walk so they can walk again, two steps to a paving stone; each crack (arse oubliette) … tourette’s the only balm… a trip (slit slip) towards the oldest voice — the voice under the voices that lament, a hole inscribed, “I have nothing to say.”

That said: “It hurts”: breathe out. Breathe out, “It hurts.”

Synapses snap: foreshortened neurons snatch at whim, pushing against a shrunken room.

The matron’s grace, ‘She might have said, perhaps, “The time?...The time?”’ misses her point. She worked to scan from epigraph to epitaph in epigram: “It hurts.” (A vixen chews the barely born under a nameless stone and saturated sky). It hurts. Breathe out.

She made a life apt to its last remark taken with her to its appointed dark.

154

Kathleen McCann

Three Poems Petition And after each day’s mumbled requests, spoken in the roots of back alley vines and trendy neighborhoods, also, we ask only that you hear us.

We, who walk this earth or climb through oil, grease, and fractious streets ask that you forgive, and pardon our groping ways, remembering you school the lame, the dumb, the sightless.

155

Trust Not the kind that means money in the bank, nor the sure fit, firm grip, or certainty that you locked the door behind.

The pauper’s trust—a field of reeds that know wind’s vicissitudes, cut-throat lash, and remain.

156

Home Odysseus was away so long that the sea and the wind feared he would never return.

There is nothing that wishes to remain among the absent—leaf, thought, sorrow, heart.

All matter stands still for that open door.

157

Vincent A. Cellucci

what happens to a dream quarantined more sore than awake I unwillingly rise for one of the only things still worth getting out of bed for when you are sheltering in place: words in my head I tell my radiant partner all temptation and mane as I hoist myself up she stirs yet still guards the unconscious sequence projected on the backs of her eyelids the last thing I saw was an empty alley day residue of what I see every day now on our twice daily walks around a once again medieval city two stone edifices now three-story residential and in between paved by gray so neutral and stepped on it’s usually reserved for bathmats but written in some

158

botanical calligraphy the belgians and dutch long ago have mastered cursive and letterforms from branches and vines on the opposing brick walls like bookends I read: in the field of all that could be obliterated or possible which I attributed to an eileen myles line and now think of duncan’s influence but what it means to me is the only meaning I came to confront this morning like a lack of immunity and even that embryo needs not to be fertilized I came to twist and splinter words form new shoots and tendrils to keep reaching further my bonsai graffiti —burgeoning like the banners of tehran— gathering and spreading across that alley to other 159

alleys and onto the faces of other buildings even skyscrapers whole cities and their entire population more than this horticulture could ever handle more than this virus or its obliterative nucleic mutants currently terrifying us into submission with the possible

160

Mark Statman

Three Poems bread earth fire wine what to do with a wind the size of a house spinning fans over head swaying hammock and cicadas birds what’s temptation without a scorecard the spiders of time a snaking drama here come the forget-menots raging disorder pale sky love of moontime collapses into chinese lanterns and welcome mats jujitsu semaphores I want to matter on a matter scale elemental tables set with candles roses the air fills with jackhammer shotgun grasp of longing

161

where the nopales meet horizon the sun eclipses roosters without effect the night geckos sing they warm the cool air what else takes flight in the rain airplanes moths there’s a bird in that tree finding sap and dust a piece of some other puzzle solved like a hummingbird and hurricane

162

east west carpenter bees have left sawdust on my desk and small wasps paper nests in the palm leaves overhead daylight changes the shadows of the corn in the fields and the yellow red flowers in the trees the dark mountains wispy clouds an ox and goat in rhythm groan random musical notes from the capilla a few fields away all practice for the rising tide our attachment to life to its dark words its tricky intimacy isn’t quite life itself thoughts resound re-

163

echo reclaim how this is still all there is how always still something more

164

earthly paradises another one over there in the distance beyond the mountains of San Pablo Cuatro Venados the morning’s a little hazy from the fireworks for the birthday of the Virgin Soledad or maybe it was another young woman her quinceañera last night all night until dawn fireworks bands playing though not las mañanitas the happy birthday song instead it was music interspersed with explosions crowing roosters stunned into waking cohetes and horns and me awake thinking of those paradises of memory those beaches forests cities all before

165

dawn always quiet silent and it’s here too where under all the talk and song cars truck horns announcements for bread goods for the home brooms and washtubs soap straw hoses and more trucks riding in ready to take away iron and machines scrap metal waste water it’s formidable that silence we can ride it as wave or downhill run paradise intimations of unexpected loves unexpected happiness of the a million times yes to the world peculiar forever percussion on the page always changing the poem’s telling sometimes sweet sometimes harsh expulsion and 166

question of who it is who’ll eat the fruit that ends this all

167

Sonny Lee with Jason Otis

Son of a Saint

I met Sonny Lee on a Saturday night in early 2015. That morning,

my wife and I had been offered tickets to a Carnival ball by some friends who were unable to attend. We didn’t want to go. We had two young kids at that point and were solidly in a homebody phase, but we talked ourselves into it. Neither of us had ever attended a Carnival ball, much less a bal masqué as this one would be. So we summoned our courage, scrounged up attire that would be sufficiently formal, and set off into the night, swinging by a costume shop for a couple of masks on the way.

The event was held in the big banquet hall of a downtown hotel, and Sonny happened to be seated next to me at our assigned table. We introduced ourselves and soon he was telling my wife and me about the nonprofit he’d started four years prior, an organization devoted to the fatherless boys of New Orleans called Son of a Saint, its name referencing Sonny’s relationship with his own father, Bivian Lee Jr., who played for the New Orleans Saints in the 70s and died unexpectedly in 1984 at age 36, three days after Sonny’s third birthday.

“How can I help?” I asked.

It’s a well-documented problem. Boys from fatherless homes are strong candidates for a range of bad outcomes: more likely to be murdered, more likely to be incarcerated, more likely to develop a drug or alcohol addiction.

And it’s a self-perpetuating problem, as fatherless boys are more likely to become the fathers of the next generation of fatherless boys.

When a father leaves, he leaves a void. Sonny’s solution, oversimplified, is to fill the void by filling the void. Boys taken into the organization are paired with a volunteer mentor, someone willing to devote a lot of time and attention to his mentee—keep in touch, check in with his teachers, form a relationship with his mother or guardian, attend his games, do things with him, play video games, grab a bite to eat, take him to a Pelicans

168

game, and so on.

The mentor-mentee relationship is central to the program, but it’s supplemented in many different ways—group activities, volunteering, travel, tutoring, cultural events, mental health services, yoga, and other classes, from cooking to how to tie a necktie. And there’s a physical location, the Son of a Saint Clubhouse, where many of the program activities happen but which also serves as a place where boys can go to be with their “brothers,” the other members of the organization, to hang out, do homework, shoot hoops, whatever.

Not long after we met at the ball, Sonny and I were meeting again, first at a coffee shop, then a bar, then at the Clubhouse, which at the time was the other half of the Mid-City double he was living in, talking about the state of the organization, his vision for it, the challenges it faced, and how I might be able to contribute. I’d been a writer all my professional life, first for newspapers then advertising agencies. We decided that I’d volunteer in that capacity, assisting with communications, marketing, and advertising.

I put together a “leave behind,” a kind of brochure to distribute at speaking engagements and other events. There were billboards, newspaper ads, a radio spot, an annual report. Before long I’d recruited a few volunteer coders and designers to build a new website, and sonofasaint.org became the focus of my contribution over the next several years, maintaining it, updating its content, and expanding it as new sections and capabilities were needed. This was not my forte, but I figured things out as I went, learning enough to make it work. It was a beautiful site, from the outside.

On the inside it had gradually devolved into a cobbled-together house of cards, a morass of CSS and HTML that only one person in the world knew how to manage.

By 2023 Son of a Saint had grown into a prominent and wellestablished organization. The few dozen faces on our website’s original “Mentees” page were now a few hundred. The Clubhouse was now a dazzling, 16,000-square-foot building a mile from that rented double I’d 169

first visited. It was time for a new website, and so my high-maintenance, temperamental site was put out to pasture, replaced by one that could be managed easily by anyone with a username and password. If I were going to continue to contribute to the organization in a meaningful way, I’d need to find something else. It was around this time that Sonny and I started talking about telling the story.

Published here is the first chapter of a work in progress, Sonny’s story from his point of view, conveyed to me through countless conversations, emails, text messages, and voice memos, supplemented by other conversations with close family members, friends, and colleagues.

Is it the story of Sonny Lee or the story of Son of a Saint? The more I learned, the more clearly I understood that it’s both; you can’t tell one without telling the other. In many ways, the organization is Sonny’s autobiography, existing in perfect congruence with his life experience, like a tree that’s the mirror image of its root system below.

—Jason Otis

Chapter 1: Fathers The story of Bivian Lee Jr. began on August 23, 1948 in a small town in Central Texas.

From a very young age, the only child of Bivian and Mamie Lee was known for an abundance of energy. This may have been less noteworthy in a different setting, but Bivian Jr.’s vigor and volume were conspicuous throughout his home and hometown.

My grandparents were down-to-earth people living a modest life.

Bivian Sr. worked for the phone company. Mamie was a schoolteacher and choir director. And Bastrop, Texas, was home to just a few thousand residents who enjoyed the tranquility of their sleepy town. The nights were quiet, and the days were, too, since a good percentage of the population spent business hours 30 miles up the road in Austin, working

170

at the University of Texas, or in state government, or for or one of the agricultural and petrochemical corporations headquartered in the state capital in the 1950s.

When Bivian Jr. made his entrance on this peaceful scene and got his legs under him…I’m not going to say he was like a bull in a china shop, but let’s just say he wasn’t entirely unlike a bull in a china shop. From the moment he could walk, he ran. And crashed into things. This remained true, more or less, as he grew from toddler to kid to teenager, always one of the fastest, biggest, and boldest. In other words, my father stood out.

When the occasional teacher in grammar school would describe him as “bad,” my grandfather, in his patient, gentle way, would guide them toward a different word he believed to be more accurate: mischievous.

According to Bivian Sr., the childhood misdeeds that prompted those teachers to put my dad in the “bad” category were garden variety little boy things. Maybe he’d talk too much or too loud, disrupt a lesson, or roughhouse with other boys on the schoolyard at recess. Certainly not “model citizen” behaviors, but there was never any cruelty, or an intention to cause pain or injury. It was just an abundance of energy.

Before long, that abundance of energy was unleashed on sports fields and courts across Central Texas. Any sport my father had the opportunity to play, he played it. By the time he entered high school, he was ready to dominate. As a standout point guard for the Emile High basketball team, he led a fast-paced offense, culminating in a senior season where he averaged 15 points per game, and basketball wasn’t even his sport. His true love was football. At Emile, he played both ways, starting quarterback on offense, starting cornerback on defense. He accepted an athletic scholarship from a nearby HBCU, Prairie View A&M, and he didn’t slow down.

At Prairie View, he was a four-year starter at both quarterback and defensive back. By the time he played his last game as a senior in 1970, he held the school record for most career interceptions, most career interceptions returned for a touchdown, and longest interception returned for a touchdown. More than 50 years later, those records still stand.

171

In 1971, the New Orleans Saints selected Bivian Lee Jr. in the third round of the NFL draft, 52 spots after fellow Saints rookie Archie Manning.

He moved from Texas to Louisiana. He was named starting cornerback heading into his sophomore season and stayed atop the depth chart the rest of his time with the Saints. He led the team in interceptions in 1972 and was tied for the lead the next season. ### Cynthia Guillaume was born August 14, 1949. Long before she became my mother, she was a kid growing up in New Orleans, the third of five children and the first of two girls. The Guillaumes lived in Pontchartrain Park, a residential community situated near Lake Pontchartrain at the edge of the city’s Gentilly neighborhood. Although the violence and injustice of Jim Crow simmered across New Orleans during the early years of her life, my mom remembers a mostly idyllic childhood. This was partially due to where she lived.

Pontchartrain Park was planned and built over the first half of the 1950s, one of the first subdivisions in the nation developed by and for the Black middle class. Covering nearly 200 acres, with more than a thousand homes encircling a large park and golf course1, along with playgrounds and picnic areas, tennis courts, a baseball field, Pontchartrain Park gave Black parents the opportunity to provide the kind of childhood parents want for their kids.

My mom loved growing up in Pontchartrain Park. When she wasn’t in school or church, studying, doing chores, or helping with her younger siblings, she was trying to keep up with her older brothers. Alfred Jr. and Rhaoul were all about sports, all the sports, football, basketball, baseball, tennis, you name it, and so my mom was, too. Sometimes they’d let her 1

Pontchartrain Park was modeled after Gentilly Woods, an adjacent subdivision that had been built a few years prior and marketed to middle-class white families. The completion of Pontchartrain Park created a literal, side-by-side manifestation of “separate but equal” a year after Brown v. Board of Education.

172

play, but usually they’d tell her to get lost, and she’d go off to find one of the many girls her age who lived in the neighborhood or, failing that, would return home and settle for playing with her younger siblings.

My mother’s parents, my grandparents, Alfred and Trena Guillaume, were wonderful people, devoted to their family, loved by their friends. They were “life of the party” types, fun to talk to, easy to laugh with, skilled and enthusiastic dancers. And if there were a piano in the room, Grandma Trena would make it sing! She’d earned her bachelor’s degree in music at Xavier University in New Orleans and then studied education, which resulted in a long career teaching music. In every church she joined, she became the organist, eventually if not immediately.

Grandma Trena adored, and was adored by, her five kids, but as a mother she was not the easiest to please. She had high standards and made sure the kids were aware of them. The house was always immaculately clean, and it didn’t end there. Her children were expected to strive for perfection in all aspects of life, from personal appearance to behavior to schoolwork2.

As the eldest daughter, my mother shouldered more than her fair share of these expectations. She didn’t buckle under the weight, but she also didn’t buck against it. She was a people pleaser for most of her young life, and her mother was the person she wanted to please most. It wasn’t hard to do; she just had to go with the flow. She knew how her mother wanted her to dress, so she dressed that way. She knew how her mother wanted her to behave, so she behaved that way. Simple enough.

There were similar expectations as she grew from a child to a teenager to a young woman. She would keep her bedroom tidy. She would perform well in school. She would assist in the preparation of family meals. She would help take care of her younger siblings, Warmoth and Teresita. She did all of it without complaint.

There were also expectations for her future, like the one about who 2

The insistence on academic achievement didn’t end with high school, either. All five of the Guillaume children received degrees from my grandmother’s alma mater, Xavier University.

173

she would marry. This expectation was clear, even if it was never openly stated: my mother would marry a nice, local, Catholic boy, and they’d have a big traditional New Orleans wedding at St. Raymond, the family’s church on Paris Avenue in Gentilly. This expectation was not far-fetched.

There was no shortage of boys who fit the description. My mom knew a bunch of them during her teenage years and early 20s, and she dated her fair share, though none she felt strongly enough about to consider as a potential husband. But, given that she was a Catholic school girl herself, and given the circles she ran in, it seemed inevitable that sooner or later the right guy would come along at the right time, she’d marry him in a big traditional New Orleans wedding at St. Raymond, and once again her Grandma Trena would be right. My mother wasn’t even opposed to the idea. It was more like she was just waiting for it to happen. Soon enough someone would propose, and once again she’d go with the flow.

Then she went to a party. ### It was a house party. The kind people have in their 20s. Spur of the moment. Invite a few friends, and they invite a few of their friends. We’ll make a few things to eat. Bring a bottle of whatever you like. On the radio?

It was 1973, so Al Green is probably in heavy rotation, likely along with Stevie Wonder, some Staples Singers, maybe a little Jackson 5.

This particular party was at the home of the girlfriend of one of my mother’s ex-boyfriends. My mom and the ex (Larry) had remained friends, and then she eventually became friends with Larry’s new girlfriend.

Even though she was single at the time, and even though the vibe at the party would be casual and friendly, my mom wouldn’t have gone alone.

She roped her little sister in, and Cynthia and Teresita set out into the unseasonably chilly spring evening. They arrived right on time (punctuality being another of Grandma Trena’s expectations) and had a good time.

Well, Teresita had a good time, and Cynthia did, too, initially, but then the party began to grow a little stale. After a few hours, my mom was no

174

longer feeling it. There was a big card game going on in the kitchen that was getting a lot of attention, but it didn’t interest my mom. She tapped lil sis on the shoulder.

“Ready to go?”

“Already?” Teresita didn’t hide her disappointment.

“Come on,” my mom pleaded, whispering to avoid offending the hosts. “I’m bored.”

“Bored or boring?” Teresita whispered back, the kind of shot that a sister can get away with.

After more whispered debate, Teresita relented, though she insisted on making the rounds to say her goodbyes as my mom retrieved their jackets from the bedroom and waited. Finally Teresita appeared in the front hallway, ready to go. They yelled a final goodbye to Larry, who waved from his chair at the card table. The doorbell rang as they made their way down the hallway, and Larry shouted for them to get the door.

“Hey, y’all let in whoever that is!”

“Got it!” Teresita yelled back over her shoulder.

My mom reached the door first and pulled it open. Two men were standing there, but my mom was immediately focused on one of them, a man she’d never seen before. She stared up at him, eyes wide. He was tall, a giant, she said, towering over her even though he was outside on the stoop, a step down. His eyes were just as wide as hers.

“It was a moment,” my mom told me. “A long moment. Then he said, ‘Are you leaving?’ I said yes. And he said, ‘Can you stay?’ I looked at my sister and said, ‘Let’s stay.’ But by then she was ready to go. She said, ‘I’m going.’ And I said, ‘Okay, let’s go.’ Then I said, ‘No, let’s stay.’ And I talked her into staying. I didn’t even know who he was. But we went back in, and I sat back down. And then he came and sat next to me and we talked. And that was my husband.” ### Of course it wasn’t that simple. Remember Grandma Trena’s

175

expectations for her eldest daughter? A big, traditional, Catholic wedding to a New Orleans boy. Well, Bivian Lee, Jr. wasn’t a Catholic boy from New Orleans; he was a Baptist boy from Texas. And those weren’t his only imperfections. It turned out he had been married before3, which meant he couldn’t be married at St. Raymond or any other Catholic church building, for that matter, due to Vatican policy at the time.

You better believe there was some anti-Bivian sentiment running through the Guillaume family during these days. My mom felt the pressure even in the early stages of the relationship.

“What are you doing with this guy?”

“A football player?”

“You know there’s other fish in the sea, right?”

“The Saints can’t even win a game!”

My mother knew what she wanted, and for the first time in her life she stood her ground. She didn’t bend. She didn’t go with the flow. She didn’t sacrifice her happiness in order to please someone else, not even Grandma Trena.

“My mother couldn’t believe it,” she said. “She was like ‘Austin, Texas? Do you even know anyone from Austin, Texas?’ And I said, ‘I do now.’

“To me it felt like a fairytale. My mother had a different view, at least early on. When she found out we couldn’t get married in the church, she almost had a stroke! And that shocked me, too, because I’m a very Catholic person. But that’s how much I loved him. I just had to have this man as my husband. We were married a little less than a year after we met.”

Bivian and Cynthia Lee said “I do” at the municipal courthouse in downtown New Orleans on May 11, 1974. My mother’s entire family was there, but the only member of the Lee side family in attendance was the 3

While at Prairie View A&M, my father married his college girlfriend after learning she was pregnant. The short marriage ended in annulment after it came to light that the pregnancy had been fabricated, a misguided attempt to save what had been a failing relationship.

176

groom himself. He was an only child, his mother had died about a year before he and my mom met, and his father was sick at the time of the wedding and unable to travel.

Still, to my mom it was the perfect wedding, in that it served its purpose of making her man her husband. And if I’ve led you to believe that there was a tense or uncomfortable scene at the courthouse that day, nothing could be further from the truth. It was a joyful event for all in attendance. By that time, my father had won over every member of the Guillaume family.

“People were drawn to him the same way I was, I guess,” my mom said. “First, he was beautiful. And you never saw a man so big who was so controlled, handled himself so well. He was so respectful, and something about him was just classy.”

A few months after the wedding, Grandma Trena announced she’d be hosting a party in honor of the bride and groom. There would be food and drink, music, and dancing, and too many friends and family members to count. If her first daughter couldn’t have the big, traditional wedding, she’d have the reception.

The party was held in the ballroom of a big downtown hotel. Initially it was something my mother tolerated, helping with the planning, the invitations, the set up, but all along thinking she didn’t need it. This event was more for her mother than for her, she thought. But as the day of the party approached, she found herself getting excited. Her father-in-law was well enough to travel at this point, so he flew in from Austin. Affirmative RSVPs had come in from nearly everyone who’d been invited. People were eager to support her and my dad, to celebrate their marriage. The band played “Here Comes the Bride” as she made her grand entrance, on her new husband’s arm, in her new gown from Maison Blanche, and she realized how happy she was that her mother had insisted on this.

My mom remembers that by the end of the night she’d lost her voice from talking, she could barely walk from all the dancing, and her cheeks were sore from all the smiling. She and my dad were staying the night 177

in the hotel, and it was well past midnight by the time they made it up to their room. After getting ready for bed in the bathroom, my mother came out to find my dad curled up on the floor, sobbing. She went to him, asked him what was wrong. What was wrong was his mother wasn’t there.

He’d lost his mother to cancer two years before but, until that moment, he’d kept his feelings about the loss mostly hidden. My mom knew he was mourning, of course, but she hadn’t appreciated the full depth of his grief until that night. The presence of his father, the beauty of the event, the love that was in the room, not to mention the open bar, all of it had conspired to bring his emotions to the surface. Surely they were there during the reception, but the distractions of general revelry and social interaction at the party had held them at bay. Afterwards, in the solitude of the dark hotel room, there was nothing to do with the emotions but to feel them.

“He was crying his eyes out,” my mom said. “I was like ‘What’s the matter, honey?’ He said ‘My mom. I miss my mom.’ And he couldn’t stop crying, so I just stayed with him, held him. He had never spoken like this before, or shown this much emotion, and I was so touched by his love for his mom. And he said, ‘I’m so tired of feeling like I’m alone in life.’ You know, his mother gone, not seeing his dad all that much, no brothers or sisters, no real extended family. I just kept saying ‘You’re not alone anymore.’” ### My father was drafted by the New Orleans Saints and never played a game for another NFL team, but his relationship with the Saints wasn’t always great. The primary reason: he wanted a shot at quarterback4. It had been his position throughout high school and college, and he considered himself as much a quarterback as a cornerback. But the Saints saw him as a 4

You might be inclined to point out the obvious here: that he was on the same Saints roster as second overall draft pick and future NFL Hall of Famer Archie Manning. In my dad’s defense, he wasn’t asking to be named starting quarterback. He just wanted a chance.

178

defensive player only. They were willing to use him as quarterback on the scout team, when he’d help the defense prepare by playing the role of the next opponent’s quarterback, but wouldn’t give him a shot with the Saints’ offense. My dad believed his race to be the root of the reluctance5, and the issue soured his relationship with the organization. When he became a free agent after five years with the Saints, it was time to go.

My dad loved the idea of living in Southern California, so when an offer came in from the Los Angeles Rams he jumped at it. My mother resigned from her teaching job, and the Lees moved to Los Angeles in the summer of 1976. Unfortunately my dad’s stint with the Rams was short, lasting through training camp and the preseason, but not through the final round of roster cuts. It would be the end of his NFL career.

“Our time in L.A. was very short,” my mom said. “We got cut. So we had to move.”

Free of the demands of the football life for the first time since they’d known each other, my parents took a little time to travel, see family, and reconnect with friends. Friends like Billy Newsome, who was a Saints defensive end for a couple of the years my dad was there. They’d been fast friends in New Orleans but hadn’t seen each other since Billy signed with the New York Jets in 1974. My parents visited Billy in Denver, where he was living at the time.

“We fell in love with Denver,” my mom said. “We thought it was a beautiful place. We ended up buying a house there.”

Life after football began in Denver. My dad got a job in sales, and my mom went to work in the finance department at Martin Marietta (before it 5

If you wanted to argue against that assertion, the evidence wouldn’t be on your side.

In a league that’s been mostly Black for decades, the quarterback position has always been disproportionately white. The Saints, for example, wouldn’t have a Black starting quarterback until Jeff Blake got the nod in 2000, a quarter-century after my dad left the team. And it wasn’t until 2017 that all 32 NFL teams could say they’d had a Black starting quarterback at some point. (The milestone was achieved when the New York Giants named Geno Smith starter in replacement of Eli Manning. Smith started in a week 13 loss to the Oakland Raiders. Manning was reinstated the following week.)

179

became Lockheed Martin). And they started our family. Denver is where my older sister Tamica and I were born, her in 1979 and me in ‘81.

They lived in Denver for eight years. My dad would have been happy to stay, but my mom was homesick and, with two young kids, wanted to live close to family again. They moved back to New Orleans in January 1984. My dad would not live to see 1985. ### I turned three years old on November 9, 1984. My mom and dad threw a party for me that day at the new house they’d just bought in New Orleans East. Late that night, my mom was awakened by a loud thump.

She found my dad on the floor of the kitchen. He was conscious but disoriented. She grabbed the phone and started to dial her younger brother Warmoth who lived nearby, to ask if he’d come over to be at the house with my sister and me so my mom could take my dad to the hospital. But my dad stopped her. He said he was fine and didn’t want to be a bother to Warmoth, who was surely sleeping. My mom relented, planning to make a doctor’s appointment for him on Monday. Throughout the weekend he said he felt good. Normal. Then came Sunday night.

Sunday night, my dad began feeling sick again and seemed to be having trouble breathing. My mom wanted to take him to the hospital, but my dad resisted again. He said he just needed some fresh air. He went outside into the yard. My mom followed him. There was a chill in the air that night and she worried he’d be cold. He asked her to grab his robe from inside the house. As she returned with the robe, he was coming back in. My mom said she gave him the strangest look. He said “Oh!” as if surprised by something. Then he lifted his arms, said “Oh my God!” and crumbled to the floor. He was 36 years old.

“He loved his kids so much. He and Sonny had this thing where, when his dad was getting home from work, Sonny would hide and daddy had to find him. That was the first thing he would do when he walked through the door, he’d yell ‘Where’s my son?’ And Sonny, it was just the biggest thing

180

for him. He was just a little boy, but he’d know when it was getting to be that time of the day. He’d stop what he was doing and say ‘My daddy’s coming home. I gotta go hide.’ And telling him and Tamica their daddy was gone, it was the hardest thing I ever had to do. I just cried and cried.

We went up to my bed, and I told them Daddy’s dead. But, you know, they don’t understand that.

“And every day after that, it would come that time of day, and here would come Sonny trying to hide and waiting for his dad to come home and look for him. ‘Where’s Daddy?’ he’d say. ‘Where’s Daddy?’”

The only memory I have of my father is the moment of his death.

I’d just turned three, but I guess a few core memories were locked in by the trauma of the night. There’s my dad on the floor at the bottom of the stairs, his face illuminated by the lamp we had there, his eyes wide open as he took his last breath. There’s my uncle Warmoth ushering my sister and me into my mother’s bedroom, and the absolute chaos that followed, sounds of screaming and crying, anguish and upheaval coming through the closed door.

My mother never remarried.

181

Contributors Grace Bauer has published six books of poems—most recently Unholy Heart: New and Selected Poems (Backwaters Press). She also co-edited the anthologies Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse and Umpteen Ways of Looking at a Possum: Critical & Creative Responses to Everette Maddox. Her poems, essays, stories, and reviews have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals. Grace was active in the New Orleans’ poetry community in the late 70’s and early 80’s. After living and teaching in Lincoln, NE for more than 25 years, she recently returned to her native Pennsylvania. She lives and writes in Philadelphia.

TJ Beitelman is the author of three poetry collections, most recently This Is the Story of His Life, which was published by Black Lawrence Press.

He can be found online at tjbman.me.

Thomas Bonner, Jr’s most recent book of poetry is Bagatelles. He has poems in Parterre: New and Collected Poetry and Prose and in literary magazines, including War, Literature and the Arts and The Cresset. He edited Xavier Review for many years and has books on Kate Chopin and William Faulkner. He lives in River Ridge, Louisiana and travels frequently to New Mexico.

Vincent A. Cellucci wrote Absence Like Sun (Lavender Ink, 2019) and An Easy Place / To Die (CityLit Press, 2011). He edited Fuck Poems an exceptional anthology (Lavender Ink, 2012). He also has three collaborative titles: come back river (Finishing Line Press, 2014); _a ship on the line (Unlikely Books, 2014), which was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award; and the most recently released, ~getting away with everything (Unlikely Books, 2021)—the latter two with the poet, Christopher Shipman. Vincent performed Diamonds in Dystopia, an interactive poetry web app at SXSW in 2017, and the poem was anthologized in Best American Experimental Writing 2018. He works at the TU Delft Library.

182

Barbara Crooker is author of ten full-length books of poetry, including Some Glad Morning, Pitt Poetry Series, longlisted for the Julie Suk award from Jacar Press, The Book of Kells, which won the Best Poetry Book of 2019 Award from Poetry by the Sea, and Slow Wreckage (Grayson Books, 2024). Her other awards include: Grammy Spoken Word Finalist, the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, others.

Livio Farallo is co-editor of Slipstream and Professor of Biology at Niagara County Community College in Sanborn, New York. His work has appeared or, is forthcoming, in The Cardiff Review, The Cordite Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, The Blotter, Triggerfish, Stone of Madness, Misfit and elsewhere.

Jeff Fearnside is the author of two full-length books and two chapbooks of prose and poetry, most recently Ships in the Desert (SFWP, 2022).

His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Paris Review, Story Magazine, The Pinch, Los Angeles Review, and Forest Under Story: Creative Inquiry in an OldGrowth Forest (University of Washington Press, 2016). He has taught writing and literature in Kazakhstan and at various institutions in the U.S., currently the Honors College at Oregon State University and the MFA in Writing Program at OSU–Cascades.

Dennis Formento, born in New Orleans, from Metairie, LA, now lives in Slidell, LA, near Bayou Bonfouca (Chatah, “river home.”)

His books include Looking for An Out Place (FootHills Publishing, 2010,) Cineplex (Paper Press, 2014,) Spirit Vessels (FootHills Publishing, 2018.) Phaeton’s Wheels (Lavender Ink, 2024,) won the Pirate’s Alley publication prize in September 2023. He edited Mesechabe: The Journal of Surregionalism, 1991-2001. Dennis has collaborated with musicians in New Orleans including his own Frank Zappatistas free jazz/free verse project, and in Italy with renowned “avant-folk” group, Duo Bottasso. He

183

has organized readings for the world-wide poetry network, 100,000 Poets for Change, since 2011, and hosts the monthly “Poetry and Espresso” readings at Roots Plants + Coffee in Slidell.

Stephen Gibson is the author of eight poetry collections: Frida Kahlo in Fort Lauderdale ( 2024 Able Muse Press), Self-Portrait in a DoorLength Mirror (2017 Miller Williams Prize winner, University of Arkansas Press, selected by Billy Collins), The Garden of Earthly Delights Book of Ghazals (2016 Texas Review Press), Rorschach Art Too (2014 Donald Justice Prize Winner, Story Line Press; 2021 Legacy Title Red Hen Press), Paradise (2011 Miller Williams Prize finalist, University of Arkansas Press), Frescoes (2010 Idaho Book Prize, Lost Horse Press), Masaccio’s Expulsion (2008 MARGIE/Intuit House Book Prize), and Rorschach Art (2001 Red Hen Press).

Richard Godden is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. His critical study, Fictions of Finance at the End of an American Century: Punctuating Capital (Oxford University Press: 2023), is the final volume of a quartet in which he sought to understand the relation between labor, language and the political economy of capital.

The poems here are part of a planned collection in which he pursues linked issues (Walking the Ruins).

George Guida is the author of ten books, including the novels The Uniform (Guernica Editions, 2024) and Posts from Suburbia (Encircle Publications, 2022); and The Pope Stories and Other Tales of Troubled Times (Bordighera Press, 2012), as well as the poetry collections Zen of Pop (Long Sky Media, 2020), New York and Other Lovers (Encircle Publications, 2020), The Sleeping Gulf (Bordighera, 2016), and Pugilistic (WordTech Editions, 2015). He curates the Finger Lakes Arts Series in Dansville, New York and teaches writing and literature at New York City College of Technology.

184

William Heath has published three poetry books: The Walking Man, Steel Valley Elegy, and Going Places (Alms for Oblivion, is forthcoming); two chapbooks: Night Moves in Ohio and Leaving Seville; three novels: The Children Bob Moses Led (winner of the Hackney Award), Devil Dancer, and Blacksnake’s Path; a work of history, William Wells and the Struggle for the Old Northwest (winner of two Spur Awards and the Oliver Hazard Perry Award); and a collection of interviews, Conversations with Robert Stone. He lives in Annapolis. www.williamheathbooks.com Chanel Hoyos is an undergraduate student at Palm Beach Atlantic and is studying Creative Writing and Psychology. Based in West Palm Beach Florida but her heart belongs to her home country Peru. Her poetry has been previously published by The Living Waters Review. Chanel works part-time at a small local flower shop and volunteers weekly at a homeless placement shelter. Chanel enjoys drawing and writing poetry in her free time and hopes to graduate from PBA with a Master’s in Psychology– aiming to work as a Behavioral Support Crisis Intervention Specialist in Immigration.

Charlotte Innes is the author of a book of poems, Descanso Drive (Kelsay Books, 2017) and three poetry chapbooks, most recently Twenty Pandemicals (Kelsay Books, 2021). Her poems have appeared in many publications in the U.S. and the U.K. including Agenda (online), The High Window, The Hudson Review, Rattle, The Sewanee Review, Tampa Review and Valparaiso Poetry Review. Her poetry has also appeared in several anthologies, including The Best American Spiritual Writing for 2006 (Houghton Mifflin, 2006). A former newspaper reporter, freelance writer and teacher, she has written on books and the arts for various publications, including The Nation and the Los Angeles Times. Originally from England, Charlotte Innes now lives in Los Angeles.

Rodger Kamenetz is the author of fifteen books of poetry and prose. He taught a long time at LSU where he helped found the MFA in Creative

185

Writing and the Jewish Studies Minor. He lives in New Orleans with novelist and painter Moira Crone.

Dewayne Keirn lives in northwest Arkansas and writes fiction and poetry.

He has been published in Mid/South Anthology, Sin Fronteras: Writers Without Borders, Crosswinds Poetry Journal, Xavier Review, and Ozarks Watch Magazine.

John Kucera was educated at Carlow University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His work has appeared in The Broadway Ghost Society, The Sandy River Review, Connections Magazine, Friends Journal and Asimov’s Science Fiction and Fact magazine. He lives in Arizona, where he writes and teaches.

Bivian “Sonny” Lee III leads Son of a Saint, the organization he founded with a mission of transforming the lives of fatherless boys in New Orleans.

From starting with a few boys in 2011, he has grown the organization to serve a current membership of more than 350 with an annual budget topping $5 million. He’s a graduate of St. Augustine High School and the University of New Orleans and earned a graduate degree in nonprofit administration from the University of Notre Dame. In 2023, Sonny was New Orleans Magazine’s Kingfish Honoree and was named Outstanding Social Entrepreneur of the Year by Tulane University. His nonprofit work has been highlighted by CNN, NPR, and Al Jazeera America, along with numerous local media outlets.

Commonwealth University English professor emerita, Marjorie Maddox has published 17 collections of poetry—including How Can I Look It Up When I Don’t Know How It’s Spelled? (Kelsay), Seeing Things (Wildhouse), and the Shanti Arts ekphrastic collaborations Heart Speaks, Is Spoken For, Small Earthly Space, and In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind. She also has published the story collection What She Was Saying (Fomite) and 4 children’s books. Co-editor of Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets

186

on Pennsylvania and the forthcoming Keystone Poetry (PSU Press) and assistant editor of Presence, she hosts Poetry Moment at WPSU-FM. www.marjoriemaddox.com Kate McCann lives and writes in Venice, Fl., after having retired and moved from Massachusetts. She has new poems forthcoming in Cottonwood; Poem; and Old Red Kimono. Recently she finished work on her fourth full-length collection of poems, Nothing Vanishes.

Daniel Edward Moore lives in Washington on Whidbey Island. His work has recently appeared in North American Review and his work is forthcoming in Drunk Monkeys, The Orchards Poetry Journal, Ballast Journal and The Chiron Review. His book, Waxing the Dents, is from Brick Road Poetry Press.

Heather Ostman is Professor of English, Director of the Humanities Institute, and Humanities Curriculum Chair at SUNY Westchester Community College in Valhalla, NY. She is the author or editor of ten books, including Kate Chopin and the City: the New Orleans Stories (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). She is also the president of the Kate Chopin International Society (www.katechopin.org).

Jason Otis has 25 years of experience as a writer, in journalism and advertising. His work has received numerous honors, from ADDYs to HSMAIs, and even a nod from the Mississippi Press Association for “Best Sports Story of the Year.” His fiction has placed in literary magazines and writing competitions including the Esthetic Apostle, the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, and the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society’s Faulkner-Wisdom Award. Jason is a New Orleans native, a graduate of Ben Franklin High School and Millsaps College. www.jasonotis.me Joel Savishinsky is a retired anthropologist and gerontologist. His Breaking the Watch: The Meanings of Retirement in America, won the Gerontological Society of America’s book-of-the-year prize. A Pushcart Prize nominee, 187

and California State Poetry Society, LIGHT Magazine and Cirque Journal award winner, his poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in Atlanta Review, Beyond Words, California Quarterly, The Examined Life Journal, The New York Times, SLANT, and Windfall. His collection Our Aching Bones, Our Breaking Hearts: Poems on Aging, was published in 2023. He lives in Seattle, helping to raise five grandchildren, and considers himself a recovering academic and unrepentant activist. savishin@gmail. com https://www.ithaca.edu/faculty/savishin Mark Statman has written fourteen books. Among them are the poetry collections Volverse/Volver (Lavender Ink, 2025), Hechizo (Lavender Ink, 2022), Exile Home (Lavender Ink, 2019), That Train Again (Lavender Ink, 2015), A Map of the Winds (Lavender Ink, 2013) and Tourist at a Miracle (Hanging Loose, 2010). His translations include Never Made in America: Selected Poetry of Martín Barea Mattos (Diálogos, 2017), Black Tulips: The Selected Poems of José María Hinojosa (University of New Orleans Press, 2012), and, with Pablo Medina, a translation of Federico García Lorca’s Poet in New York (Grove 2008). In 2023, Subpress International published a chapbook of his selected poems, Chicatanas, which was simultaneously published in Spanish with a translation by Efraín Velasco. Statman’s poetry, essays, and translations have appeared in twenty-seven anthologies, as well as such publications as New American Writing, Tin House, Tupelo Quarterly, Hanging Loose, Ping Pong, Xavier Review, and American Poetry Review. A recipient of awards from the NEA and the National Writers Project, he is Emeritus Professor of Literary Studies at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, The New School, and lives in San Pedro Ixtlahuaca and Oaxaca de Juárez, MX. He is a dual national of Mexico and the United States.

Kelly Talbot has edited books and other content for 20 years for Wiley, Macmillan, Oxford, Pearson Education, and other publishers. His writing

188

has appeared in dozens of magazines and anthologies. He divides his time between Indianapolis, Indiana, and Timisoara, Romania.

Jason S. Todd is the Director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching & Faculty Development at Xavier University of Louisiana. Todd completed his Ph.D. at the University of Southern Mississippi in 2006 and his undergraduate studies at Webster University in 1996. His short stories and articles have appeared in journals such as Southern Literary Journal, Southern California Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Fiction Weekly, and Xavier Review. He teaches courses on American literature, comics and graphic novels, and genre fiction.

Jeremy Tuman teaches composition, literature, and creative writing at Xavier University of Louisiana. He is a contributing editor at Xavier Review. His writing has appeared in The Rumpus, New Orleans Review, and Room 220. His debut novel, Stereo Killer, appeared in 2019 and is based on his experiences in the garage-punk underground. He plays, writes, and sings in the band The Stundials.

189

Read back issues of Xavier Review online for no charge at

xavierreview.com Order these Xavier Review Press books from Amazon or your favorite bookseller:

Freedom Knows My Name

poetry by Kelly Harris-DeBerry.

Parterre: New and Collected Poetry and Prose

by Thomas Bonner, Jr.

Liebestraum: Prose and Poems from a Fortunate Life nonfiction, poetry, and fiction, by Randy Bates.

Go Home and Cry for Yourselves short stories by Tom Fitts.

Percival Everett: Writing Other/Wise

edited by Keith B. Mitchell and Robin G. Vander.

The Shy Mirror

poetry by Gordon Robert Sabatier.

What Went Missing and What Got Found short stories by Fatima Shaik.

The Book of Incurable Dreams poetry and fiction by Tom Holmes.

Troubling Accents

poetry by R. Flowers Rivera.

XAVIER REVIEW P

R

E

S

S