Walt Whitman At Bear Mountain  

           Neither on horseback nor seated

           But like himself, squarely on two feet

                     Louis Simpson, Walt Whitman at Bear Mountain

When W Averill Harriman diverted a statue of Walt Whitman called “Open Road: Afoot and Lighthearted” to an out of the way outcropping of rock in upstate New York in 1940, he said he thought Whitman would’ve wanted it there -- to breathe  ‘the fresh air of the mountains’ -- instead of asphyxiated by the fumes of a million cars a year on Long Island.

To look at the poem written about the statue by Pulitzer Prize winning poet (and long-time Long Island resident) Louis Simpson and published in 1960, there’s certainly logic to Harriman’s point of view.

In his poem, Simpson decries the corrosion of the American myth of the open road. “The Open Road leads to the used car lot,” decries the Jamaican-born poet in one his most famously anti-material progress utterances.  “all the realtors, pickpockets, salesmen and the actors performing their official scenarios…turned a deaf ear, for they had contracted American dreams.”

Yet Simpson offers some hope of redemption in the very loneliness of the statueplaced in an out of the way place and viewed by few. “All that grave weight of America/Cancelled! Like Greece and Rome./The future in ruins!...

The man who keeps a store on a lonely road,

The housewife who knows she is dumb,

And the earth, are relieved!’

The statue – and its placement – support that redemptive hope.  Entitled “The Open Road: Afoot and Lighthearted,” portrays Whitman without regard to placement on highway or outcrop of glacial rock – America’s visionary poet is in full stride, hat in hand, one hand thrust confidently forward and his eyes fixed firmly on a distant destination.

Originally designed with Central Park or Battery Park in mind, but rejected by the New York City Parks Commission, the statue was the handiwork of sculptor Jo Davidson (1883-1952). It was not the only statue of a beloved literary figure sculpted by the man. Over his long career, the New York-born man was tapped to portray many of them – including Carl Sandburg  Arthur Conan Doyle, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling,  Rabindrinath Tagore and J.M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan.

But Whitman may very well have been the most well-known work of his, at least when it was first exhibited at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. According to one newspaper account, so many visitors reportedly tried to shake the statue’s hand at its location in front of the ‘perisphere’ in Flushing that the soft bronze hand was bent out of shape – and a new one, made of harder material, had to be put on the statue.

After the World’s Fair, the statue faced a new hazard, at least to Harriman’s way of thinking. It seems the influential Robert Moses was intent on having the figure of Walt placed along Grand Central Parkway – but Harriman would have none of it. Instead, the future New York governor succeeded in having placed upstate.

In choosing the spot, Harriman said he was seeking a location visitors have to hike to. “Fifty years ago the rocky hills and lakes seemed of little or no value, but they appealed to my mother and father and it was here they made their home,” he said at the dedication ceremony. He cited his father’s promotion of roads, rather ironically, and proclaimed that whoever should see the statue of Whitman would have to ‘come here by foot.”

That having been said, he set old Walt atop an outcropping of granite, with a sign which reads: “presented to the Palisades Interstate Park Commission by William Averell Harriman in behalf of his brother and sisters as a memorial to their mother Mary Williamson Harriman on the thirtieth Anniversary of her gift to the State of ten thousand acres of land and one million dollars to establish the Bear Mountain – Harriman section of the Palisades Interstate Park.”

While the site today does receive considerably more attention than in 1940 – a park museum and zoo is located very close to the statue – it may be argued that William Averill Harriman succeeded in giving the ‘afoot and lighthearted’ Walt Whitman an appropriate ‘road less traveled’ to call home.  

Or as Louis Simpson put it, a spot where one may imagine an America beyond the ‘used car parking lot, ‘the castles, the prisons, the cathedrals/unbuilding, and roses/blossoming from the stones.”

(nb For those whose 'Long Island Pride' is put off by Harriman’s insistence that the statue not be located on its byways, there is this to consider. Seventeen years later, as the sitting governor of  New York State,it was William Averill Harriman who accepted the petition of local residents to have the Whitman Birthplace designated as a state historic site. )

DJUNA & ZADEL: BENEATH SOME HARD, CAPRICIOUS STAR

DJUNA & ZADEL: BENEATH SOME HARD, CAPRICIOUS STAR

The old maps show that back in the 19^th century, across the road from Anna Heck's drug store at the corner of Half Hollow Road and Hart Place in Dix Hills, Long Island, was a place belonging to someone named Mrs. Gustavsen.

There's no farmhouse there anymore, or anything else to indicate that this corner of the suburban world of Long Island holds a place of some significance in American literary history.

Yet it does. That farmhouse figured prominently in the childhood experiences of Djuna Barnes, an iconic literary figures of today’s LGBT communities, an exotic expatriate 20s who consorted with Gertrude Stein, Charles Henri Ford, and later ee cummings.

Mrs. Gustavsen, it turns out, was Djuna Barnes’ grandmother. Zadel Barnes Gustafson – a woman whose utopian and experimental ideas about sexuality and relationships - enacted, at least in part, in that very farmhouse -- proved so pivotal in shaping Djuna's life.

In fact, biographers state in no uncertain terms that the boundaries of Barnes' romantic and emotional relationships were profoundly influenced by the experiences she had living in Zadel’s farmhouse in Dix Hills -- the period of her pre-teen and teenage years -- providing her with a profoundly conflicted view of the world which included both a broader than normal concept of the range of acceptable human behavior and a negativity and pessimism about that range.

It was in that farmhouse that Barnes (1892-1982), whose writings like Nightwood and Book of Repulsive Women have become staple reading for the cogniscenti not only because of their 'modernist' trappings but because of their focus on lesbian sexuality, fell under the sway of her paternal grandmother. Zadel Barnes Gustafson (1841-1917).

Zadel, it turns out, was a suffragist, spiritualist and temperance advocate who wrote for Harpers Magazine and other publications in the 1870s, including such crusading articles as 'Why Is There A Woman Question?"

"The Barnes Family is distinctive for its longstanding tendency to select unconventional  names and for a particularly high rate of solitary life and divorce, much before this became commonplace," notes the Univ of Md Archives. "The family even had a divorce in the seventeenth century."

Zadel’s life was colorful, no doubt about it. Married first to her Latin teacher and then to a Swede named Axel Gustafson, she was an ardent unionist during the Civil War and an early supporter of women’s suffrage. She had a literary salon in London where she consorted with Oscar Wilde, Victoria Woodhull and others.

Returning to the US sans Axel Gustafson, Zadel was soon part and parcel of an experimental open relationship household both at Storm King (an area in New York popular among Bohemians of the time ) and in the farmhouse in Dix Hills -- described as freethinking rural utopian scheme.

She brought along her son Wald – a composer, libertine and sporadic worker – and his children, including Djuna, who she ‘home schooled,’ conducting 'educational seances' and summoning the spirits of her favorite authors, including Oscar Wilde and Jack London, as teaching aids.

On the home front Zadel, wrote Djuna, 'believed in free love --everybody screwing each other.'  "They often slept in the same bed together," notes Susan Ware in A Biographical Dictionary of Notable American Women. "Barnes later suggested that she associated her grandmother with her attraction to women."

Zadel also manipulated the romantic relationships of her son and grandchildren -- and notably cajoled Djuna at the age of 17 into marrying the brother Wald’s second wife, a soap salesman named Percy Faulkner. Djuna left him after two months.

Eventually in 1912, Djuna moved out, with her mother and her brothers, relocating to the Bronx and then to Greenwich Village.

But the die was cast -- her life in Greenwich Village, in Paris, and eventually as a recluse living with the likes of ee cummings in Patchin Place in NYC, was inalterably shaped by Zadel Barnes Gustafson. So was her literary output.

In the poems from "The Book of Repulsive Women," Djuna’s mixed feelings about the scope and nature of the intimacies in her life are made manifest.

Originally published in a landmark chapbook series by Bruno of Greenwich Village in 1915, the volume of poetry presents portraits of women of the period - a mother, a prostitute, cabaret dancer and others - which critic Douglas Messerli explains were ‘'dominated  by a seething beat of sexuality and vice, whipped up into a delicious sense of perversity by Barnes' art."

What Messerli does not mention is a palpable sense of disallusionment, ennui and even contempt - beyond what is found in other modernist writing of the era.

from SEEN FROM THE EL

So she stands - nude - stretching dully

Two amber combs loll through her hair

A vague molested carpet pitches

Down the dusty length of stair

She does not see she does not care

It's always there.

Or here, from the poem From Fifth Avenue Up: "Someday beneath some hard/Capricious star...We'll know you for the woman you are...With your legs half strangled/In your lace/You'd lip the world to madness/On your face."

Her prose possessed a similar duality. In Nightwood, Barnes examines with barely concealed venom and vindictiveness events in her relationship with her lesbian lover in Paris. In Lady’s Almanack, she alternately satirizes and celebrates the women around Natalie Barney, a lesbian leader in Paris. Her novel Ryder  and her verse drama, The Antiphon re-enact the ‘psychologically murderous’ upbringing she experienced – a deadly mix of freedom, license, and trauma.

Obsessed with a conflict between the ridiculous corruptions of the body and the severe weaknesses of the spirit, the author places herself, and her readers, ‘midway between redemption and damnation, ascending toward salvation, descending into the darkness of the unconscious and doom,’ according to one critic.

In no small measure, it was her time spent in the crucible of comfort and cruelty – trapped beneath some hard, capricious star of her grandmother’s conjuring -- in a long-gone farmhouse in Dix Hills, which led Djuna Barnes to this fate. 

Humanity is the only Holy Land: On The Poetry Of Naomi Shihab Nye

It was my pleasure to introduce Walt Whitman Birthplace’s 2013-14 poet in residence, Palestinian-American author Naomi Shihab Nye, in West Hills LI this weekend. Despite flying in from San Francisco and putting on a full-length master class, Nye, drawing on a seemingly inexhaustible reservoir of empathic charm and purposefulness — not to mention some terrific poetry — earned a rare standing ovation after her Saturday afternoon reading.

The setting — and the post as writer in residence at the Good Gray Poet’s birth home — was appropriate to Nye and her message.

Walt Whitman celebrated the twin-mantra of individuality and adhesive love, and saluted the people and nations of the world, expansively declaring  “Each of us inevitable/Each of us limitless/Each of us with his or her right upon the earth,/Each of us allowed the eternal purports of the earth/Each of us here as divinely as any is here…“

Naomi Shihab Nye proves to be a true child of Whitman, a poet who says “We start out as little disconnected bits of dust” and offers herself — through her work — as a kind of Human Bridge, “brokering empathy among cultures and understanding among nations.”

Those are the words of critic Samina Najmi, of Fresno State. Offering a smile or smiling back when smiled at. Whether it is making eye contact with someone at a cross-walk, or bonding with a baby she’s been asked to hold on an airplane; whether it is between pointing out the connections and commonalities between cultures or between individuals; Nye’s act of bridging puts into practice Walt’s dictum. She points the way for us to live a larger life than that offered through the mere exercise of consumption and self-interest.
To be fully individual and yet adhere to others.

How does she do this? Through what Najmi aptly describes as an Aesthetics of Smallness, focusing on kindness in a sometimes harsh and lonely world, brokering empathy, and invoking people to use our time well.

    ”I want to be famous to shuffling men
    who smile while crossing streets,
    sticky children in grocery lines,
    famous as the one who smiled back.”

Nye’s poetry, says Najmi, stresses human connections through attention to the small and ordinary — as opposed to the aesthetics of the sublime and the grandiose, or the  aesthetics of sensationalism, which underlies the ideology of headline news. These, as we all well know, are Mammon’s children.
Nye’s choice is a 21st century restatement of Walt’s adhesiveness — a connectedness and a universality recognizable in lifelong family associations and in momentary interactions, and in the workings of the natural world around us, right down to “the small toad that lives in cool mud at the base of the zinnias.”

Najmi calls it for what it is — a poetry which “articulates a countersublime of universal human connectivity for our times.”

At the heart of Nye’s ethos is a deep, deep human issue — Kindness, and how to BE kind in the world which confronts us. “I am looking for the human who admits his flaws/Who shocks the adversary/By being kinder not stronger,” she writes.

Nye’s is not the off-handed or easy kindness of someone in their comfort zone, someone who has not felt pain — it is a call to kindness among people who have suffered. “Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth,” she writes.

Nye’s prescription is to learn to swim in the eyes of kindness when they gaze in your direction, as she notes in a poem about a boy who “did not want to see the deep pools of his kind teacher’s eyes and fall into them. He didn’t know how to swim.”  

 “Pain and anguish are everywhere anyway. Might as well put them to good use,” she shrugs. “If we aren’t fragile, we don’t deserve the world.”

Through the natural act of kindness despite pain, she suggests, we may truly restore our capacity to hope. “Skin has hope, that’s what skin does. Heals over the scarred place, makes a road.” 

Naomi Shihab Nye is a writer who wears her poetry, like her heart, on her sleeve. Intensely observant poetry which confronts us with inescapable recognitions of human connectedness.

Poetry, which she insists is a best mechanism for the exercise of Whitman‘s adhesiveness, because it “slows us down — it teaches us to cherish small details. “

For the readers of a poem, they are offered the opportunity to  drop their troubles “into the lap of the storyteller,” were they become someone else’s troubles.


And for those of us who write poetry, the people who ‘hear the words under the words‘? Nye tells us quite clearly — we are obliged to answer those words.  “Otherwise it is just a world with a lot of rough edges, difficult to get through, and our pockets full of stones.”

In the end, Nye urges each of us to exercise our curiosity, cherish our connections, use our time wisely and outrace the loneliness which surrounds us — like the boy in another of her poems who believes that if he roller skates fast enough loneliness can’t catch up with him.

    A victory! To leave your loneliness
    panting behind you on some street corner
    while you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas,
    pink petals that have never felt loneliness,
    no matter how slowly they fell.”

The darkness around us is deep, says William Stafford — a mentor to Nye, and former poet in residence at the Whitman Birthplace. How is it we dare to even contemplate defiance such as this?

Because skin has hope.

Because Humanity is the only Holy Land. And our best revenge.

Because the exercise of adhesiveness can overcome terrible loneliness in a society that pushes us toward obsessive self-absorption in the name of individuality.

Because the best kind of famous is the kind where, if a sticky child in a grocery line or a shuffling old man at a crosswalk smiles at you, you smile back.

Naomi Shihab Nye is the award winning Palestinian American author and/or editor of more than 30 volumes. A self-described “wandering poet,” she has spent 37 years traveling the country and the world to lead writing workshops and inspiring students of all ages. Nye was born to a Palestinian father and an American mother and grew up in St. Louis, Jerusalem, and San Antonio. Drawing on her family heritage, the cultural diversity of her home in Texas, and her experiences traveling in Asia, Europe, Canada, Mexico, Central and South America and the Middle East, Nye uses her writing to attest to our shared humanity.

ADUPWE, Jayne Cortez

    Adupwe: Yoruba for ‘we are grateful to god’

With the death of Jayne Cortez as 2012 comes to an end, I find it my place to bid a fond Adupwe to an impassioned leader in a field of American culture which has not yet gotten its day in the sun as an American art form -- the world of jazz and the spoken word.

Her passing is a big loss.

Cortez (1936-2012), a native of Arizona and LA before becoming a NYC transplant, advanced a singularly authentic aesthetic tradition -- that of the spoken word/musical artist. It was a role that grew naturally from her experiences -- marriage to Ornette Coleman in the 1950s, central place in the Black Arts Movement in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and cultural ambassadorship to her own nation in later years, as a dual resident of New York and Senegal.

Hers was a voice of witness, praise and above all power. Her favorite targets? Racism, inequality, imperialism. Oppression, misogyny, corruption and the waste of human potential.

‘The ruling class’, she wrote in “There It Is,’ ‘will tell you there is no ruling class as they organize their supporters into white supremacist Ku Klux klan gangs/organize their police into killer cops/organize their propaganda into a device to ossify us.’

    My friend
    they don’t care
    if you’re an individualist
    a leftist a rightist
    a shithead or a snake
    They will try to exploit you
    absorb you confine you
    disconnect you isolate you
    or kill you
    And you will disappear into your own rage
    into your own insanity
    into your own poverty
    into a word a phrase a slogan a cartoon
    and then ashes

Cortez spoke out against co-optation, and the need for African-Americans to assert ownership of their own culture. In ’Taking the Blues Back Home,” a driving number she recorded with her group ‘The Firespitters,‘ she declared her intent to ‘take out of the mouth of the blues stealers, back to where the blues stealers won‘t go.’

And in ‘There It Is,’ she explained pointedly that enfranchisement in 21rst century America is something a whole lot more than jumping into the homogenized practices of a bland white bourgeoisie -- it also means retaining aspects of one’s own earned culture, forged in chains:

    if we don't organize and unify and
    get the power to control our own lives    
    Then we will wear
    the exaggerated look of captivity
    the stylized look of submission
    the bizarre look of suicide
    the dehumanized look of fear
    and the decomposed look of repression

For all the seeming militancy of her work, Cortez was capable of expressing alarm at the potential for violence on both sides of the racial divide. Both the "bloodthirsty people/ brooding in North Dakota with grenades in their hands" and the disenfranchised impatient for equality, ‘brooding beyond the deadline’  and ready to flare into violence.

One of her strongest and most direct poems is on the subject of rape. ‘What was Inez Garcia supposed to do for the man who declared war on her body? The man who carved a combat zone between her breasts.'  Cortez asked in the poem ‘Rape.’ ‘Was she supposed to lick crabs from his hairy ass? Kiss every pimple on his butt? Blow hot breath on his big toe? Draw back the corners of her vagina and heehaw like a California burro?'

Instead Inez did what the defense department of any nation would do in time of war-- she fought back.  'She stood with a rifle in her hand … pumped lead into his three hundred pounds of shaking flesh. Sent it flying to the virgin of Guadalupe then celebrated the death of the dead racist punk. And what the fuck else were we supposed to do?”

That's the straight stuff, no punches pulled.

There was plenty for Cortez to praise, too.

Praise for jazz, for example, its rebellious metronome, its infatuation of the ears, its ability to reach to 'the love seat in her bones.' 

Praise for African traditions, too. In ‘Make Ifa’ she celebrated the spirituality of transplanted West African music/dance culture. Here she references widely, from more widely known forms like samba and conga to the more esoteric -- soca moca, jumbi, punti, ijubi -- all invoked as a way to connect to the Yoruba-based system of divination known as Ifa.

The dirt-poor matrix of Southern agricultural life was a touchstone to her, despite its failings -- as in this, from ‘In the Morning:’

    disguised in my mouth as a swampland
    nailed to my teeth like a rising sun
    you come out in the middle of fish-scales
    you bleed into gourds wrapped with red ants…
    you touch brown nipples into knives
    and somewhere stripped like a whirlwind
    stripped for the shrine room
    you sing to me through the side face of a black rooster

The duality of cities, New York City in particular, proved to be consistently fertile ground for Cortez. New York is a place of “blood, police and fried pies,’ “brown spit and soft tomatoes.” There is a resilient glamor to the rundown human denizens of the city, each the possessor of a ‘brain of hot sauce, tobacco teeth (and) mattress of bedbug tongue.’ A rude, bawdy and ingratiating creature, New York City calls seductively out for its people to join in: 'I am New York City,/ my skillet-head friend/my fat-bellied comrade/citizens, break wind with me!'

Harlem, she declares, is beautiful, despite the fact that it is “hidden by ravines of sweet oil/by temples of switch blades”

    beautiful in your sound of fertility
    beautiful in your turban of funeral crepe
    beautiful in your camouflage of grief
    in your solitude of bruises in
    your arson of alert
    beautiful

And in irrepressibly humorous fashion, she poked fun at the gritty pigeons of Manhattan, which “lounge on ledges and mutter profanity all day, will  fight for fucking space in the mating season, shit on air conditioners and wipe their asses on windows while big cockroaches suck soukrats in the dark.”

As her place in the literary world became more firmly established, Cortez proved herself not averse to taking a few shots at the establishment in that world, too, railing against the anemic poetry of the academic elite -- little more than a stuffed bird in a tropical forest, she delared -- an art that “will not strike lightning through any convoy of chickens.‘

Whatever the subject of Jayne Cortez’ pen -- and whatever the style -- it  was treated with an unflinching directness of language that was more than simply confrontational. It was a language grounded in the authenticity of a people who have knowingly or unknowingly heeded a dictum enunciated by Wm Burroughs, shown in the opening scene of the trailer to the Ornette Coleman bio-pic Made In America:  

‘Immortality to the people, every man a god,' says Burroughs. 'But how do you get to be a god? Well to put it applepie country simple, by doing your job and doing it well.‘

Cortez had a knack for putting it applepie country simple -- and that was part of why she did her job and did it well. Her contribution to the use of common, earthy language rivals that of Sandburg in his day -- and as an artist steeped in musical culture, she was an adept practitioner of the musical aesthetics which informed 20th century artists as diverse as Charlie Parker, Jackson Pollock, Thomas Hart Benton and Jack Kerouac.

Flow. Contour. Dimensionality. Trajectory. Inflection. Sense of naturally spontaneous expression. Pure joy in the visceral exploration of sound.

Over the course of her productive years, Jayne Cortez spoke out forcefully against racism, injustice, co-optation and misogyny. She also sang out in praise of the great body of culture that has been produced as part of the African diaspora. That she had the ability to do so in a manner that was so down to earth and musically engaging only served to reinforce the validity of her witness. That she had the ability to command wry humor in her poetry served only to further authenticate her praise.

Hers was the power of the connected mind -- at once grounded in the gutteral originality of the language of the common man and woman, and elevated by the clarity of her vision and the fierceness of her heart.

As Mark Statman once noted, Jayne Cortez’s world view was full of complexities -- harsh, bitter, serious and sometimes sardonic descriptions of a broke down existence that, for all its corruptions, disappointments, chaotics and violations, remains beautiful. 

“A natural response to what Cortez describes is to look away,” wrote Statman. “But Cortez demands the opposite: she wants us to look and to look hard.”

Sounds like he's talking about a carwreck. And where I come from, the natural response to a carwreck -- whether it is individuals on the highway or societies -- isn’t to look away, it’s to rubberneck.

Statman is nonetheless on point with his comment.

Cortez’ poetry has always called on her listeners to question ourselves -- our tendency to drive past society’s terrible wrecks with the smug detachment of complacent, voyeuristic Americans.

We ought to be looking, and looking hard. We ought to see, to feel and to understand.

Jayne Cortez reminded us of our social duty to do so, through a poetry of fierce honesty, directness of voice, impassioned performance, colorful personality and musical richness.

These few days after her passing I, for one, remain grateful to God -- and Jayne Cortez -- for that reminder.

Adupwe, Jayne Cortez.

POETS, KEEP ON CHIRPING

Three Rooms Press, which published Poppin Johnny for me two or three years ago, is at it again. Working with the fine translator Lina Sipitanou, they've come out with a bilingual collection of my poems, in Greek and English, entitled EOS: Abductor of Men (Bilingual Greek & English, Three Rooms Press 2012; http://threeroomspress.com/tag/eos-abductor-of-men/)

Here's a Youtube clip of me reading from the book, a poem 'Walk Into A Bakery Like It Is A Temple Of Gods,' at Le Poisson Rouge (formerly Village Gate) in Greenwich Village, last weekend.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=A9YszUBhsgU

Someone asked me to explain the book title. Eos is the Greek goddess of the dawn, and in certain versions of the legend, dawn steals young men away.  The possible connotations of that are interesting enough. I was also intrigued with the legend of Eos and Tithonus, for its quite singular meaning to me as a person who has devoted a large part of my life to the pursuit of poetry. Here's that story, which I picked up on a Florida gardening blog online. 

      In Greek mythology, Tithonus was a handsome mortal who fell in love with Eos, the goddess of the dawn. Eos realized that her beloved Tithonus was destined to age and die. She begged Zeus to grant her lover immortal life.

     Zeus was a jealous god, prone to acts of deception in order to seduce beautiful gods and mortals, and he was not pleased with Eos' infatuation with a rival. In a classic Devil's Bargain, he granted Eos's wish -- literally. He made Tithonus immortal, but did not grant him eternal youth.
     As Tithonus aged, he became increasingly debilitated and demented, eventually driving Eos to distraction with his constant babbling.
     In despair, she turned Tithonus into a grasshopper. In Greek mythology, the grasshopper is immortal. This myth also explains why grasshoppers chirp ceaselessly, like demented old men.

Hate to think of myself as a chirping old grasshopper poet. But those old Greeks were pretty smart. Guess I'll just keeping on chirping.

GW

A Broken Fiddle, A Broken Laugh & A Thousand Memories: Revisiting The Spoon River Anthology

In my naivete I used to think that the course of human history, at least during my lifetime, was more or less a straightline thing -- society was getting better and better, humanity was growing more tolerant and inclusive, we were leaving all the bad things behind, to be waved at through the rear view mirror, we were moving toward a bright and better future.

I thought America had made irreversible progress in protecting the rights and dignities of ordinary people -- workers, women, minorities, immigrants, the elderly and the infirm, all the downtrodden people who took it and took it hard in the 'bad old days.'

Whew! When I look at the politics of the day, and the pressures from the radical right to erode hard won achievements in human dignity, I'm increasingly struck by how little we have progressed, how much danger there is for hatred, ignorance, intolerance, greed and exploitation to return.

That and how much there is to learn from revisiting the literature of the muckrakers, activists and progressives of the early 1900s -- who fought the good fight against such things a century ago. People Like Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis, Frank Norris and Carl Sandburg. I mean they ought to be required reading for anyone presuming to hold the values of American citizenship dear.

And Edgar Lee Masters, whose Spoon River Anthology I recently picked up again after many years.

The man takes on some surprisingly contemporary issues head on. On page after page in the little midwestern town he created, we're confronted with unscrupulous bankers, influence-peddling politicians, rapacious corporations working hand in hand with judges, media moguls and flat-earth religious leaders to maintain the status quo of the 'Robber Baron" era -- ie, unharnessed economic and political domination by the rich and powerful. Coarse swaggering, abuse and corruption. Brutal subjugation of workers and the poor.

Masters gets mighty specific about it.

A woman is raped, and dies in a back alley abortion. Another women dies in childbirth because she's forced, against medical advice, to carry a baby to term.

Unregulated banks speculate wildly, ruining homeowners, businesses and small investors. Corporations buy or bully their way out of accidents in an unsafe workplace. Political, judicial and media institutions protect the interests of giant corporations and a tiny elite of the most wealthy people.

Sound familiar?

Interestingly, these themes come out in Spoon River Anthology through a patchwork kind of reading -- as if they are a series of 'depositions' to be matched up against each other.

Makes sense really. After all, Edgar Lee Masters was a career lawyer, and the son of a lawyer -- accustomed to taking depositions from witnesses, for all their lack of objectivity and self-serving nature -- and then stacking those depositions up against each other to see what patterns and truths emerge.

That's what I've been doing this week, examining the whole patchwork of dramatic monologues. It's startling to me how many of the issues Masters addresses are back in the national discourse -- the deleterious effects of materialism, capitalism, puritan zealotry, anti-rationalism, xenophobia and religious closemindedness.

Most of the characters in the collection are part victim and part perpetrator. That's a nuance which tends to confirm my sense that in an unhealthy society even the perpetrators are victims, forced by circumstances at least as much as their own weaknesses into becoming agents of its worst dynamics.

But some of the characters are unapologetic villains, like the banker Thomas Rhodes -- who even at death sneers at those he has ruled and rode over. The best he can offer the trampled down is an acknowledgement of how hard it is for 'small folk' to 'keep the soul from splitting.' Join the exploiters, he urges -- the ones who embrace corruption, 'seekers of earth's treasures, getters and hoarders of gold,' who are 'self contained, compact, harmonized, even to the end."
 
Masters does offer a glimpse of people who've managed to keep their souls together, however -- and who we might emulate. Like Lucinda Matlock, who is untouched by modern corruption and has conducted her life in accordance with a simpler and more innocent past. In her youth she went to dances, fell in love, married and had children. Over the course of her life, she spun, wove, kept house nursed the sick, made a garden, and for fun, she
    rambled over the fields where sang the larks,
   and by Spoon River gathered many a shell
   and many a flower and medicinal weed--
   shouting to the wooded hills, singing to the green valleys.

At the age of 96, she'd live enough, that's all, and passed to a sweet repose.
 
Hard to emulate her. But then there's Fiddler Jones, who, through his focus on his art rather than possessions, manages to remain untouched by his lack of material success, and is therefore able to retain a Whitmanesque conception -- he sees Original Grace, and the transcendental hum, all around him, in all things. 'The earth keeps some vibration of joy," he declares, 'there in your hearts, and that is you.'

Because of his musical talent, he's called on to play so often for the people that he never has a chance to prosper or fail according to society's terms -- and it doesn't bother him one bit.
    I ended up with a broken fiddle
   and a broken laugh and a thousand memories
   and not a single regret.

Finally, and almost as a call to arms, Masters tells us through the voice of Jim Brown that it's up to each individual to decide which side they're on. You're either 'for men or for money,' says Brown. You're either 'for the people or against them.'

I suppose my poetic temperament makes me more of a Fiddler Jones type, happy with a broken fiddle, a broken laugh and a thousand memories. But this week as the Republican Party prepares to offer its heart and soul to the very people who would return us to the dark ages of willful ignorance, unchecked capitalism, and back alley abortions, I'm thinking that for America in 2012, a healthy dose of 'which side are you on' progressivism may be just what the doctor ordered. 

 

CONNECTING THE BOP: The How And The Why Of America's Heartland Music

Wow what a treat to visit with fellow poets and painters at the Pollock-Krasner House in Springs, LI, to share a reading for Jackson Pollock. No threat of rain or summer heat could slow us down or keep us from sharing our Jackson Pollock related inspiration.

For me it was especially gratifying to ‘connect the bop‘ -- ie, relate  the swirling circular and hugely energetic Pollock canvases to Whitman, to Charlie Parker and the KC vortex, to the bop prosodists of the 50s, and to my own work.

The KC vortex which produced bebop jazz. of course, but also  Thomas Hart Benton, indisputably Pollock’s mentor and whose abstract ideas about rhythm on the canvas transcend the WPA figurative aspects of his work in a manner that profoundly inform his work .

Musically stated, there’s the structural thing -- improvising off and around and beyond and back to the core statement. Being able to jump into the conversation (musical or visual) from anywhere on the scale. Using your woodshed skills to blast out an extended and irrepressible improvisation which seems beyond deliberation, inspired, almost autonomic -- but at its core, is deeply schooled. Camouflaging the subject, circling around it and going tangentially away from and back to it with sculpted micro-flourishes, teasing it out of perceptual existence and back in again. A rhythmic and tonal explosion that never loses its deep reference to the form. And finding the resolution, the landing point. Getting it back there.

It’s the essential HOW of bop, whether its Parker, Pollock or the prosodic flights of Kerouac, O'Hara and the rest.

Then there's the WHY (as jazz musician Tony Scott, born Tony Sciacca in NJ testified, 'I studied the how AND the why' of bop).

The range of emotional statements that can be sustained is wide. Bending the voice of the man, through the plaintive protestations and sly subversions of blues and jazz musicians finding solace, kicks, competition and comradery in the midst of Jim Crow America. The frenzied search for articulation of Pollock. The vernacular longings and raw industrial energies and arguments of Thomas Hart Benton.

The rebelliousness of the Beats and the aesthetic nuancing of the New York School poets. Their playfulness too, and the joyousness and transcendental celebration of our own Walt.

That's right, Whitman -- who in 1879 visited the grass prairie of Kansas, confluence of cattlemen, homesteaders, and declared that a pure new and original American voice would emerge from it.
Whitman didn't mention the big muddy river rolling down from the north, or the irrepressible blues & jazz current that would sweep upstream from New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta. He couldn't know that there would be cross-country trains carrying  car after car of popping bi-coastal swing musicians, cats overnighting in what amounted to a free-for-all laboratory at 18th and Vine; a place to stretch their wings in time and space, to experiment with their music, to transform it into something new.

Whitman didn't know it would be bop. But Whitman got it right. All those elements thrown into the hot crucible of America’s midsection added dimension and gave moment to an emergent American voice Whitman predicted would come.

Okay, a lot of it came to a head here in the Big Apple -- jazz clubs, juke joints, painters studios and writers' pads. And further on out, to Jackson Pollock's bucolic retreat in Springs, a shingled house beside the sheltered salt marshes of Gardiner's Bay.

But the roots go way deeper than that, deep into midwestern soil.

(Thanks to Tim Sullivan, Ros Brenner and Helen Harrison for organizing the poetry reading at Pollock-Krasner House, and to fellow poets Lucas Hunt, Michelle Whittaker, Max Wheat and Claire Schulman for adding their voices in)