the poets haven’t forgotten

Deep in our own pandemic, references to a similar event, the so-called Spanish Flu of 1918, will jump out at one, won’t they? 

Grace Marie Grafton devotes a poem to the California painter, Rex Slinkard (died 1918, age 31), “Death at an Early Age”: 

“he died … 

of what was called the Spanish Flu. 

… as his fever rose and

held him in fire, he asked to be carried

down to water. They say that he sang

next to the waves as he died.”

There’s a transgender aspect to the poem that also gives it a contemporary connection: 

“He imagined himself a woman …

… break[ing]

into shattered forms that walk together

near the surf …”

*

Lucille Lang Day, in her poem “Journeys,” briefly looks in on journeys of some in her family tree. Her grandmother on her mother’s side, for instance:

“… my mother’s

mother dies again of pneumonia

in Massachusetts in the flu epidemic

of 1918, and my mother comes over

mountains, rivers and plains 

to California …”

The “again” in the line above refers to the grandmother dying in Day’s imagination — once from the physical life, then again when her grandchild revisits her memory. 

*

sources:

Lens: poetry of art in California

by Grace Marie Grafton

2019. Unsolicited Press, Portland OR

Becoming an Ancestor

by Lucille Lang Day

2015. Cervena Barva Press, West Somerville MA

1961 agenda of Southern whites is the same as today’s

In Jeff Chang’s book-length essay on contemporary art and race, Who We Be, Chang quotes a pollster who illuminates a clash of cultures between whites and blacks in the south: 

 

In a 1961 study, Henry Allen Bullock argued that all consumers purchased things in order to have the security of ‘belonging,’ but that Blacks and whites had very different motivations. … 

Bullock illustrated his point by pointing to how Southern whites and Blacks that he interviewed completed the sentence ‘If I could change the world I would …’ The list of whites’ most frequent replies included: 

‘Make it so that people would not park in front of my driveway.’ 

‘Stop the neighbors’ children from cutting across my lawn.’ 

‘Destroy the United Nations.’  

‘Change the Supreme Court.’ 

But Blacks said: 

‘Make all people the same.’ 

‘Establish brotherhood.’ 

‘Do away with war.’ 

‘Break down segregation.’

I know who I want to bring home for dinner. 

source: 

Who We Be: the colorization of America

by Jeff Chang

2014. St Martin’s Press, New York

Title to Indian land, part two

I am looking at the spring 2020 statement describing the income on Indian land in which I inherited an interest. In Title to Indian land, part one I said at a glance the statements seem to add up to less than the postage on the envelope. 

Does a closer look bear that out? The spring 2020 statement has codes on it that I don’t understand (they probably just identify the tracts), but the accounting looks pretty simple. Let’s review the numbers in the CASH column. 

Nine transactions are listed. The first is CASH 0.10 … the second 0.01 … 

0.07

0.11

0.10

0.02

0.02

0.10

1.00

Out of that I could buy two Forever stamps. 

The largest numbers are cumulative. A beginning balance is listed as 44.39, an ending balance as 45.92. I don’t know how long that $45 has taken to accrue. Years? 

I’ve never seen a penny. Do they pay out when the accrual reaches a certain level? $50? $100? 

The money is meaningless. Clearly. If there is meaning in this ownership share it is as evidence of heritage. Which I like. 

name check

D. A. Powell has hit the big time. He’s won awards, been the subject of adoring essays, publishes in very competitive venues, goes on reading tours. That sounds like the big time to me.

I don’t know how many books he sells. I hope he sells some. Doug is a poet. Poetry sales can’t hope to match a mid-list mystery novel. In poetry the big time isn’t big money. Still, he’s been noticed. 

Doug found his feet as a poet in the Sonoma County poetry scene about the same time I did. He’s not much older than me, so we were peers. Weren’t we? Despite the smallness of the scene I don’t remember running into Doug much. I’m sure we had poet friends and acquaintances in common. 

It’s not easy to get around Sonoma County without a car. I didn’t have access to one, except when my mother would drive me somewhere — and, for a brief period, I got to use her old car after she bought a newer one. I was fortunate in that the Russian River Writers Guild based its reading series in Sebastopol, where I lived, and getting to it was a walk of about ten minutes. 

One of the organizers of the Russian River Writers Guild, Mo Hurley, has set up a blog for RRWG memorabilia. Going through a box of old papers last week I came across some copies of The Obligatory Hug, the RRWG newsletter. One of the Hugs wasn’t represented on the blog, so I snapped images of it and posted them.

In that Hug there’s a calendar of the reading series Doug Powell ran at a cafe in downtown Santa Rosa. I was never invited to read there, but many of the names are of people I knew well. I don’t remember if I ever attended. (See above about lack of transportation.) Since these poets would read in Sebastopol, maybe arranging to get to Santa Rosa didn’t seem necessary. 

In other words, Doug and I never really hung out. As he began to make a name for himself in the national poetry scene, I took for granted that Doug had no memory of me. 

Besides the RRWG blog Mo has set up a memorial blog for Marianne Ware, another RRWG stalwart, a self-declared mother figure for SoCo writers, and an instructor at Santa Rosa’s community college. Marianne was a sweetheart, and a fine performer of her own, often hilarious, writing. 

Reading through reminiscences at the Ware blog, I was surprised to find myself name-checked. By D. A. Powell. 

[Marianne Ware, Doug writes, was o]ne of the first of many passionate and gifted poets I met in Sonoma County. Donna Champion brought me to the Russian River Writers Guild for a holiday party, and introduced me to Maureen Hurley, Glenn Ingersoll, Paul Mariah and Marianne. I was nervous & young, and whatever poem I shared with the group that night was, I'm sure, crap. But Marianne, a gracious and nurturing presence, smiled and told me how wonderful the poem was. 

Wait, I remember the poem now! It's in a drawer somewhere, if I haven't burned it. Yes, it truly was crap.

I remember reading a manifesto Doug wrote, championing a new poetics — Badism. Write crap! Don’t be ashamed. Own it. 

Maybe, by 2010 when he wrote the note about Marianne, Doug had eschewed his old Badism beliefs. After all, he’d hit the big time with good stuff!

source: http://marianneware.blogspot.com/2010/06/class-act.html

“the world everybody else lives in”

A poet’s perspective, according to Mary Ruefle:

There is a world which poets cannot seem to enter. It is the world everybody else lives in. And the only thing poets seem to have in common is their yearning to enter this world.

source: “Someone Reading a Book Is a Sign of Order in the World”

an essay by Mary Ruefle

The Planet on the Table: poets on the reading life

edited by Sharon Bryan and William Olsen

Sarabande Books, Louisville, KY

a continuity of taste

Mary Ruefle describes a continuity of taste:

I was … reading, for the first and last time in my life, my own private journals, which I began writing when I was sixteen and ceased to write when I was forty. As is my habit, I was copying selected passages from the [poet I was also reading at the time] into a notebook. Later that evening I began reading a journal I kept twenty years ago. In it, I was reading the notebooks of the [same] poet … and had copied into the journal by hand my favorite passage, which was identical with the passage I had copied earlier in the day, believing completely that I had never encountered it before.

In my Best Poems posts I list all the poems I copied out in my own hand over the previous year. Have I have copied out the same poem more than once? There are two occasions I have copied out the same poem in different translation. But I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about reading over my personal anthology and coming across the same exact poem in English — only a handful of years separating the duplicates. How did I not remember? Surely, the poem seemed awfully familiar.

Not that this was a problem. I mean, I liked it. I’ve wondered occasionally if I would copy out some poem in my personal anthology if I were to come upon it all unseen. In that case, the answer was clearly yes. 

source: “Someone Reading a Book Is a Sign of Order in the World”

an essay by Mary Ruefle

The Planet on the Table: poets on the reading life

edited by Sharon Bryan and William Olsen

Sarabande Books, Louisville, KY

be suspicious of your sources

I don’t recall having heard this before: 

[A] month or so after atom bombs annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the New York Times discounted the rumors that were terrifying the world.  

On September 12, 1945, the daily published a front-page story by its chief science reporter William L. Laurence, which challenged the alarmist notions head-on. There was no radioactivity whatsoever in those razed cities, the article assured one and all, it’s only ‘the Japanese continuing their propaganda …'   

That scoop won Laurence the Pulitzer Prize. 

Sometime later it came out that he was receiving two monthly paychecks: one from the New York Times, the other from the payroll of the US War Department.

The Wikipedia entry for William L. Laurence doesn’t tell the story quite that way. “For his 1945 coverage of the atomic bomb, beginning with [an] eyewitness account from Nagasaki, he won [the] Pulitzer Prize for Reporting in 1946.” 

Wikipedia goes on:

In 2004, journalists Amy Goodman and David Goodman called for the Pulitzer Board to strip Laurence and his paper, The New York Times, of his 1946 Pulitzer Prize. The journalists argued that at the time Laurence ‘was also on the payroll of War Department’ and that, after the atomic bombings, he ‘had a front-page story in the Times disputing the notion that radiation sickness was killing people.' They concluded that ‘his faithful parroting of the government line was crucial in launching a half-century of silence about the deadly lingering effects of the bomb.'

source:

Children of the Days: a calendar of human history

by Eduardo Galeano

translated by Mark Fried

Nation Books / Perseus Group, New York