Robert Knox's Blog, page 35

The Garden of Verse: 'My America' Is a State of Mind

Reading the November 2016 Verse-Virtual poems in a post-election frame of mind (the most neutral description I can come up with for the state of "Twilight Zone" shock and desperation so many of us are feeling), the theme of "my America" either lying within or mounting a podium in many of these adds an even sharper edge of appreciation for them.             Donna Hilbert remembers "the way things used to be" in our America for a working woman in her poem "Consciousness Raising." She writes of returning from sales calls back to the office where Hustler
fold-outs plastered the phone bank,
where my boss drank gin
from a flask at his desk
and daily asked
for a quickie in the showroom..."

           Steve Klepetar's "How Fascism Comes to America" marches to a powerful beat, the driving rhythm of the poem's refrains matching the urgency of the subject. The poem's free, wide-ranging imagery further accents the ominous lock-step of its message. I'm particularly struck by the prophetic tone of these lines: It comes waving flags and singing songs.
It rises from hills and towns;
pours from the sky in torrents of rain.
It hides in plain sight. I have seen it
on the riverbanks parading beneath willows
and pine. I have seen its bonfires everywhere.   

           The same ominous term appears in the title of Joan Mazza's "What did you do when Fascism came to America?" Good poems often rescue the minute particulars of human lives. This poem answers the title's question with facts both concrete and emotive:I punched out little fishes and flowers in cardstock,glued them to contrasting cardstock, added glitter,
and words like Peace in sparkly script.
...While my stomach
churned and twisted into knots, while people
protested and shouted, I read Spirals in Time,
learned of the imaginary museum of all possible
shells, wished for a calcified cave I could move into.
That cave or its equivalent, real or imaginary, may start looking good to many of us.
            Another America, the America of immigrant experience, is glimsped in Michael Minsassian's "Waking Up in America,"  a place where dreams are filtered through memories. The poet writes of an uncle: his stories crowded with chance meetings
with beautiful women, dead Persian poets,
and philosophers who blossom like flowers" and the color of the swimming pool in a backyard six thousand miles away from his birthplace.  
           Thomas Erickson's "Blue," a poem about a black and white America puts the notion of two countries in stark terms. We all know that experience isn't, as we say in other contexts, all 'black and white.' But in our contemporary America it seems the public sphere so often is: I go to the jail and
pass by the white jailers
to talk to my black client
about the charge of the black
on black crime brought by
the white DA before we go
in front of the white judge
and eventually the white
jurors who live in their white
enclaves leading their white
lives and afterwards I’ll
talk to his black family
about the time he will serve...  I was recently one of those white jurors on an all-white jury hearing evidence in a black-on-black crime case, with white judge and attorneys, and frankly found it hard to be sure that justice could be color blind.           My notion of America isn't black and white, but vigorously pluralistic and multicultural. Yet as the results from the election indicate, those of us who live on the coasts may not have a very clear picture of the rest of the country.            See http://www.verse-virtual.com/poems-an... for these poems and others.  

The Garden of History: What the Classic Theories Tell Us About Why Democracies Fail

    
        The 2016 election raises a question political philosophers have been asking since ancient Athens: whether it's possible for a democracy to sustain itself over the long run. We tend to think that 227 years of Constitutional government means we're a solid gold success in the democracy business and will never go bankrupt. As systems of government go, we've surely had a good run, but in human society as in other fields of human endeavor, past performance is no guarantee of future success.             Nor can we run the clock from the beginning of The United States of America, because the Constitutional framers never intended us to be a democracy. The consensus of the framers, as is clear from the beliefs of James Madison and the others was, one, democracy was inherently unstable and would lead to 'mob role' that in turn would produce tyranny; and two, that political partisanship, or "parties" as we know them, is bad for self-government.            Before Washington's first term was over, the Constitutional system of government had already given rise to parties -- Jefferson and friends on one side, Hamilton on the other. In fact, an interesting irony, Hamilton's (and John Adams's) gang, known as Federalists, began defaming Jefferson's followers as "Democrats," a slur word used to caricature opponents as believers in the outrageous idea that "everyone" should be able to vote. Giving the franchise to all -- all adult white males, that is -- would inevitably lead to pandering, demagoguery, vote-buying, uninformed voting, the election of unsuitable candidates, and (ultimately) mob rule. If you had no qualification for voting, how would you get informed, thoughtful, responsible decisions at the polls? No qualifications, no quality.            Jefferson and friends did not seek universal male suffrage. They did not call themselves democrats; they called themselves "Republicans." The term meant a government chosen by an electorate who would put the "res publica" -- public matters, from the Latin -- ahead of personal gain or private interests. But history shows that your enemies get to name you (as in "Obamacare").            Universal male suffrage, supported by people who came to adopt the term "democracy" for the belief that the right to vote should be extended to all adult males, and no longer reserved for property owners, did not arrive until the Jacksonian wing of Jefferson's party gained control of their movement. The power of newly enfranchised voters succeeded in electing Andrew Jackson President in 1828 over John Quincy Adams, the last gasp of the old Federalist party.             It is fair to say that Jackson's "common man" supporters were not qualified to participate in political decision-making in the sense the Constitutional framers themselves were. They had not studied the Classical thinkers of Ancient Greece and Roman times and the Enlightenment political theorists of England and France. The US Constitution is an 18th century document, the product of an era when educated men studied Greek and Roman history and read the founders of western traditions of thought, Plato,Aristotle, Cicero, and the Roman Stoics.             For Western civilization Plato wrote the book on political philosophy. It's called "The Republic." His spokesman, Socrates, analyzes all of the known systems of the Greek city states, plus examples from the rest of the world his time had knowledge of, and discovered flaws in them all. The one-man rule of kingship suffers from the weaknesses of any imperfect human being and the contingencies of succession. Rule by a monied class, called Oligarchy, breaks down as power corrupts and declines into decadence. Democracy, a natural stage in political development, falls into chaos as ordinary, unphilosophical passion-driven men place their own interests and desires over the good of the whole, fragmenting the state. The 'mob' of uneducated, uncultivated ordinary men is easily swayed by the demagogue's appeals to the lower passions of their undisciplined nature. They give power to the demagogue, turning him into a tyrant, and we are back to one-man rule.            This fear is directly responsible for one of the arcane features of the US Constitution that plagues us still, namely the Electoral College. Since the framers feared a pure democratic expression of will for the chief executive would not lead to the best choices, the Constitution placed several filters for voters to pass through. The first is that we would not vote as a nation, but as states (we are still, anachronistically, the 'United States'). Even then we do not vote directly for our state's choice for President. We vote for 'electors.' These would be wise people who would meet with wise colleagues from other states and collectively choose a President. There was no 'George Washington' on your ballot when you voted for Prez in 1788.             The practice of voting for a set of electors who favored a particular candidate for that office came after Washington's eight years in office. By then the groundwork for the party system had emerged, Adams heading one group that favored a strong central government, Jefferson leading those who favored restraining federal power. Strictly pledged support for a particular party's candidate came still later, tied to the 'Jacksonian democracy' movement that significantly broadened the voter base.             The electorate was broadened further when former slaves, male adults, were granted the right to vote by the 15th Amendment and women by the 19th Amendment. The voting age was lowered to 18 in the sixties. But even then no one in America has ever gone to the polls to vote directly for President. We're still stuck with voting for "electors" in a system that gives disproportionate power to smaller states, as it was always intended to do. Hence, the system can give the victory to a candidate who receives fewer votes than a rival, but wins more electors by victors by small pluralities in more states.             In terms familiar to students of political philosophy Americans last week elected a demagogue who manipulated their passions and resentments and appealed to their lower natures, just as Plato and the traditional school of political philosophy suggested would happen. Arguably it's happened before. Universal suffrage has put poor choices in the White House; voters did not know much about Warren G. Harding, but 1920 was a Republican year so he was elected. Voters were exposed to large doses of George W. Bush in mass-media 2000, but they voted for him anyway.            But how is that the American system of government has survived so long without suffering the breakdown into tyranny foreseen by the classical theory. Philosopher Cornell West provided a theoretical answer in a timely essay published recently in the Boston Globe during the latter stages of the campaign. He cited American philosopher John Dewey, of the 'pragmatist school,' who replied to Plato's critique of democracy and developed arguments for how American democracy could avoid the pitfalls the ancients foresaw. Here's West's summary of Dewey's position:             "For over a century, the best response to Plato’s critique of democracy has been John Dewey’s claim that precious and fragile democratic experiments must put a premium on democratic statecraft (public accountability, protection of rights and liberties, as well as personal responsibility, embedded in a fair rule of law) and especially on democratic soulcraft (integrity, empathy, and a mature sense of history)."            And while Plato argued that the lower elements of human nature -- "hedonism and narcissism, mendacity and venality" -- would destroy democracy, Dewey proposed democracies could fight back by "robust democratic education" and "courageous exemplars." These exemplars would rise from a political environment fertilized by what West called "the spread of critical intelligence, moral compassion, and historical humility."            Here's the link to West's op-ed: www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2016/11/0...            West links his thinking in other ways to the philosophical tradition. Since Plato's great work "The Republic" sought to establish the ideal state, what system of government did he ultimately favor? In brief, a small group of qualified counselors would train and choose rulers who could be trusted to govern from what Greek philosophers called the rational part of the human soul. This theory has been called rule by "the philosopher king."            Interestingly, West's prescription for a better future for American democracy relies on superior individuals as well. While our current politics exposed our 'spiritual bankruptcy' in our leadership and values, he proposed a solution. Here's the quote:            "Instead we need a democratic soulcraft of wisdom, justice, and peace — the dreams of courageous freedom fighters like Martin Luther King Jr., Abraham Joshua Heschel, Edward Said, and Dorothy Day."            An interesting list, far from mainstream party politics. Only the first name is widely familiar. Heschel was a Polish-born American rabbi, who left Europe in 1940 and found inspiration in the Hebrew prophets to advocate for civil rights and against the Vietnam war. Said, a Palestinian and Columbia University professor, was an influential critic of Western colonialism and of Israel. Day, an American convert to Catholicism, helped found the Catholic Worker Movement that used nonviolent direct action to improve the lives of the poor. 
            And remember West's list of essential democratic virtues:  
Critical intelligence. Moral compassion. Historical humility.
            Do any of these terms make you think of the new President-elect? Or the likely leaders of both houses of Congress?             Lacking such virtues, and such exemplars, in our elected leaders we may be headed into the destabilizing times predicted for us by classical political theory. We will find out soon. If he follows the classic pattern, American democracy's newly elected demagogue will seek to consolidate all government power in his own hands.
            Let's hope there something the philosophers missed.

The Garden of Verse:What They're Saying About America

            Writing on this day (and night) of awe and trembling as American voters are on the brink of making a choice that could lead to their country on a downward spiral of destruction and despair, blighting their own lives and those of their children and grandchildren... I could go on. ("Don't! Don't! Please!")            Writers in the current, November 2016, edition of Verse-Virtual offer poetic affirmations or denigrations about the state of the nation (or perhaps their own emotional state), plus memories, dreams, and fantasies on the suggested theme of "My America."            The poem that got under my skin is "Outside the Trump Rally" by Joel Johnson, a work of imagination that appears to recount the experience of what, a generation or two ago, was called 'the forgotten man.' Hard laboring, and hard living, it evokes the life of the drifter who finds some reason to wind up "outside" a Trump Rally. Here's a taste: 
I’ve picked up garbage and dropped off mulch. I’ve done a little plumbing, a little wiring and so much roofing I can barely close my eyes without slipping down the pitch of a split-level.
            Things deteriorate quickly after pay day, the poem's speaker confides, in a tone of neither bragging or complaining:  
I’ve slept in corn fields, wheat fields, peanut fields and clover, beneath tractor-trailers, under overpasses, inside dumpsters..."             See http://www.verse-virtual.com/joel-f-j... for the rest.
           Bill Glose writes about a piece of his America, the Chesapeake Bay:
Wind sighs  through sawgrass, carries the scent of salt  and pine. Clouds tumble overhead, bits of fluff that frolic through  an amber sky
He imagines the first European explorer to arrive here, John Smith (a familiar anti-hero), asking himself whether he wants to conquer and 'civilize' this land. Better maybe to leave it as a green, untamed Eden. [See http://www.verse-virtual.com/bill-glo...]
             Another kind of first moment in America is found in Margaret Hasse's "Norwegian Grandmother's Song." The speaker recalls her immigrant experience: "By water I came to this country,
by train I went to its prairie."             She recalls her tower of strength husband, a homestead, "daughters we had, sons we had," and the song that contains all the memories. [See http://www.verse-virtual.com/margaret...]
            Something of unspoiled (or pre-colonized) America shows up in Kate Sontag's poem "Berkshire Territorial." Something big: an ursine encounter. Bears too have their America. American as this rocky
terrain blasted to build our home, solitary forager  among the lost timbers of her childhood, on a good
day, neighbors click the camera as she knocks down  a birdfeeder here, a gas grill there.
[See http://www.verse-virtual.com/kate-son...]
           The most universally American poem in the issue may be "If You Visit Our Country," by Dick Allen, a poem packed with all the sights, observations, transactions big and small we know we've seen somewhere, if not everywhere... But  this poem catches them in their moment -- the moment, so to speak, when they grow a tongue.
The world will be blinking lights Racing toward you or away, your headlights
Picking up old things along the highway:  pensive
And dilapidated barns, abandoned railroad stations,
The culverts, junkyards, flagpoles of America
That never left the Thirties—the small-town bank
Closed for the Depression, then reopened.  Someone Is always starting out or starting over; someone
In jeans and open shirt has seen her name in lights
Or told a cowlicked boyfriend he can bank
Upon the future....
[for the rest: http://www.verse-virtual.com/dick-all...]
My poems about my America, a couple of blunt rants about what what I like and what I don't like about this dear old home of ours, can be found here:http://www.verse-virtual.com/kate-son...
Hang tight. I fear we're in for a ride.

"The Wind Speaks Up" and Other Poems To Order in the Garden of Verse

            There's a certain satisfaction in writing to order.             Here's my first attempt at a "ghazal," a form that is variously attributed to Arabic poetry, or Persian, or Urdu literature, depending on what reference source you look at. I can't even find the online source I relied on six months ago when I decided to learn what this term meant. (Can it be that people are rewriting the Internet when we're not looking?)            The notion I gathered then was that the form consisted of couplets, two-line stanzas in each of which the same phrase appears as a refrain.             The point, as I recall, was to build a structural unifying element into a poem that was allowed to range widely in subject matter. That is, your first couplet and your second couplet may not appear to be on the same subject, yet both will include the same refrain. Oh, also a minimium of five couplets. So, a relatively short poem may ensue, or a relatively long one.             When I searched today for a simple definition of ghazal, every discussion I found offered some other fillip. For example, a ghazal begins with "a rhyme followed by a refrain." What exactly does that mean?            I did however find this intriguing statement: While rooted in seventh-century Arabia, the form gained prominence in the thirteenth and fourteenth century thanks to such Persian poets as Rumiand Hafiz. Since I have long wished to have something in common with Rumi -- what poet does not? -- I am cheered by the idea that a connection might be found in the achievement of the ghazal.            In any event I came up the refrain "the wind speaks up" and placed it in the second line of each couplet. My understanding is that the refrain might appear anywhere within that line -- start, middle, or end -- but in my wind-speaking poem I have placed it at the end of the second line of each couplet, while varying the lead-in word or phrase. That way while the repetition brings a sense of resolution to each couplet's thought, a little variety helps keep us on our toes.             This technique (repetition, with slight variation) is also clearly visible in song-writing. We know where the verse is ending, but each time (or from time to time) the song gets there by a somewhat different path.             I also mined the refrain for the title of the poem. When a poetry journal accepted this poem, its editors suggested a slight title change, which I saw as an improvement and happily adopted.             Here's the beginning of "The Wind Speaks Up":
All day so quiet I can hear the pages turning Rumble of a distant train, till the wind speaks up
The guitars of the mind let the season unwind Rapture of the sacred heart when the wind speaks up
             You cand read the rest of this short poem in the recently published third issue of the highly attractive South Florida Poetry Journal. Here's the link:            http://www.southfloridapoetryjournal....
            Two other recent publications in visually attractive journals have points of origin in a structural or thematic "prompt."             Postcard Poems and Prose last week published in its striking "postcard style" layout a poem that was based on a painting... after another poet had written a very good poem on that very work of art. In short, a twice-removed "response" poem.             The poem, titled "Rain. Steam. Speed" responds to a painting of a locomotive by Turner. You can read it here:            https://postcardpoemsandprose.wordpre...            To read the poem by Sonia Greenfield that gave me this subject idea, go to: http://www.verse-virtual.com/sonia-gr...                        Finally, last month an anthology consisting entirely of poems responding to the wondrous photographs of the artist Beth Moon published my poem "Rilke's Bayon: Everywhere," based on her photo of a bayon tree. In fact, the anthology published a half dozen poems responding to that photo. Here's a link to the page:            http://www.poemeleon.org/rilkes-bayon            This entire publication is a beautiful piece of work filled with Moon's unearthly photos of uniquely amazing creations of planet Earth. If you wish to see the book, titled  "Over the Moon: Birds, Beasts, and Trees," from the beginning here's the link:  http://www.poemeleon.org/over-the-moo...

The Garden of History: After Paying a Visit to the West Bridgewater Connection, 'Suosso's Lane' Moves on to Pilgrim Hall

 

            "Suosso's Lane," a book named after a street in North Plymouth, has some considerable history in West Bridgewater. The prosecution theory, to use the word loosely, of how Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco were involved in the robbery of the shoe factory payroll in South Braintree Square and the killing of two payroll officials, goes back to a house in West Bridgewater that was rented to an Italian anarchist -- not Vanzetti, not Sacco, not anyone they were involved with.
            I spoke on the book at West Bridgewater library on Thursday, Oct. 27, and left that informative gathering with more local knowledge than I went in with. Apparently, the pleasure was mutual. "Your presentation was terrific," library director Ellen Snoeyenbos wrote me afterwards. "I couldn't have asked for a better event!"             I'm looking forward to speaking about "Suosso's Lane" again this week at Pilgrim Hall in Plymouth on Wednesday, Nov. 2, at 7 p.m.It's free. I hope to see some friendly faces there.             The house in West Bridgewater that played a crucial role in the notorious Sacco-Vanzetti case was known as Puffer's Place (after an original owner) and was rented in the spring of 1920 to Ferruccio Coacci, one of the many foreign radicals caught up in the Red Scare repression of 1918-1920 and scheduled for deportation to Italy. Bridgewater police chief Michael Stewart, who hated foreign radicals -- as law enforcement personnel and other Americans were then being encouraged to do by their government, their newspapers, and politicians -- was asked by federal officials to visit Coacci and remind him to report for deportation. Coacci alibied; he was perfectly content to return to Italy, he told police, but his wife was sick. A couple days later Stewart's men visited the house a second time and found not Coacci, but another Italian anarchist, Mario Buda, there. Buda, who went by an anglicized version of his name, Mike Boda, said he was sharing the rent with Coacci. Coacci and his recovered wife walked out of the story at this point by taking a boat back to Italy.            However, what happens next is that the car used by the Braintree payroll robbers is found abandoned in the woods in another part of Bridgewater, two miles away from Puffer's Place. Chief Stewart puts these two facts together -- in the one hand I have an anarchist, and in the other the car used in the crime (two miles away) -- and concludes, ah ha, anarchists must have committed that crime.            So now he is interested in 'Mike Boda.' He goes back to Puffer's Place and this time Buda, developing suspicions of his own, sees the police coming and climbs out a window in the back of the house to escape their attentions. However, he has already left his automobile to be repaired in the nearby shop of a mechanic named Simon Johnson.             (Last Thursday when I spoke on "Suosso's Lane" at the West Bridgewater Library, one of the men in attendance gave me a local place name for the location of Johnson's s garage. It remained in business there long afterwards.)            Chief Stewart, committed to his anarchist suspicions, learns of this and tells Johnson that if anyone comes for that car to call the police immediately. The police want to talk to him.             What happens next is what I call 'The Nightmare Scenario.'             Buda apparently attends a meeting of the anarchist gruppo that meets in East Boston. Sacco and Vanzetti attend this meeting regularly, and the group decides that any literature in the possession of their anarchist comrades should be collected and hidden somewhere so that the police do not find it and connect them to the bombings that took place a year ago. Sacco, who has already bought tickets for himself, his wife and son on a boat back to Italy because of a death in his family, and Vanzetti, who is staying with his friend in Stoughton to help him pack up his household, agree to go with Buda and a fourth anarchist to collect this anarchist literature.            Buda persuades them to meet him one night at Simon Johnson's house to retrieve his car and make the job easier to do. Buda arrives with another anarchist comrade, Ricardo Orciani, on the latter's motorbike. Sacco and Vanzetti, who lack any transport, take a streetcar that brings them to West Bridgewater and the the four men rendezvous at Johnson's house. The car mechanic stalls, while his wife slips out to call the police from a neighbor's house.             The anarchists grow nervous.            In "Suosso's Lane" I dramatize this encounter. When Johnson tries to talk Buda out of taking his car away, contending the vehicle has no plates, Sacco voices his suspicions over his wife's departure from the house.             He says the situations smells to him like "di trappola."            That's how it turns out.  Buda and Orciani ride away on the latter's motorbike, and the police never get their hands on either of them. Sacco and Vanzetti walk back to the streetcar stop and board a car to take them to Brockton, where they can catch a second streetcar to Stoughton. The police arrive at Johnson's house after the four men have departed, but hearing that two of the men were on foot, they call the Brockton police and ask them to stop the car from West Bridgewater and arrest "two foreigners." That's what happens. A Brockton officer arrives in time to stop the street car and finds Sacco and Vanzetti on board.             They are 'foreigners' to his eye. And that's why they're arrested.             And they are "indeed anarchists," as Vanzetti would later tell the court. That combination -- anarchist beliefs and Italian birth -- turns out to be enough to get them convicted, and eventually executed, after a trial widely regarded as a travesty of justice and still studied by trial lawyers today as a classical example of the problems with capital punishment.             I look forward to sharing 'the nightmare scenario' and other elements of "Suosso's Lane" on Wednesday evening at Pilgrim Hall.              

The Garden of History: After Paying a Visit to the West Bridgewater Connection, 'Suosso's Lane' Moves on Pilgrim Hall

 

            "Suosso's Lane," a book named after a street in North Plymouth, has some considerable history in West Bridgewater. The prosecution theory, to use the word loosely, of how Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco were involved in the robbery of the shoe factory payroll in South Braintree Square and the killing of two payroll officials, goes back to a house in West Bridgewater that was rented to an Italian anarchist -- not Vanzetti, not Sacco, not anyone they were involved with.             I spoke on the book at West Bridgewater library on Thursday, Oct. 27, and left that mutually informative gathering with more local knowledge than I went in with. Apparently, the pleasure was mutual. "Your presentation was terrific," library director Ellen Snoeyenbos wrote me afterwards. "I couldn't have asked for a better event!"             I'm looking forward to speaking about "Suosso's Lane" again this week at Pilgrim Hall in Plymouth on Wednesday, Nov. 2, at 7 p.m.It's free. I hope to see some familiar faces there.             The house in West Bridgewater that played a crucial role in the notorious Sacco-Vanzetti case was known as Puffer's Place (after an original owner) and was rented in the spring of 1920 to Ferruccio Coacci, one of the many foreign radicals caught up in the Red Scare repression of 1918-1920 and scheduled for deportation to Italy. Bridgewater police chief Michael Stewart, who hated foreign radicals -- as law enforcement personnel and other Americans were then being encouraged to do by their government, their newspapers, and politicians -- was asked by federal officials to visit Coacci and remind him to report for deportation. Coacci alibied; he was perfectly content to return to Italy, he told police, but his wife was sick. A couple days later Stewart's men visited the house a second time and found not Coacci, but another Italian anarchist, Mario Buda, there. Buda, who went by an anglicized version of his name, Mike Boda, said he was sharing the rent with Coacci. Coacci and his recovered wife walk out of the story at this point by taking a boat back to Italy.            However, what happens next is the car used by the Braintree payroll robbers is found abandoned in the woods in another part of Bridgewater, two miles away from Puffer's Place. Chief Stewart puts these two facts together -- in the one hand I have an anarchist, and in the other the car used in the crime (two miles away) -- and concludes, ah ha, anarchists must have committed that crime.            So now he is interested in 'Mike Boda.' He goes back to Puffer's Place and this time Buda, developing suspicions of  his own, sees the police coming and climbs out a window in the back of the house to escape their attentions. However, he has already left his automobile to be repaired in the nearby shop of a mechanic named Simon Johnson.             On Thursday when I spoke on "Suosso's Lane" at the West Bridgewater Library, one of the men in attendance gave me a local place name for the location of Johnson's s garage.            Chief Stewart, committed to his anarchist suspicions, learns of this and tells Johnson that if anyone comes for that car to call the police immediately. The police want to talk to him.             What happens next is what I call 'The Nightmare Scenario.'             Buda apparently attends a meeting of the anarchist gruppo that meets in East Boston. Sacco and Vanzetti attend this meeting, and the group decides that any literature in the possession of their anarchist comrades should be collected and hidden somewhere so that the police do not find it and connect them to the bombings that took place a year ago. Sacco, who has already bought tickets from himself, his wife and son on a boat back to Italy because of a death in his family, and Vanzetti, who is staying with his friend in Stoughton to help him pack up his household, agree to go with Buda and a fourth anarchist to collect this anarchist literature.            Buda persuades them to meet him one night at Simon Johnson's house to retrieve his car and make it easier to do this job. Buda arrives with another anarchist comrade, Ricardo Orciani, on the latter's motorbike. Sacco and Vanzedtti, who lack any transport, take a streetcar that brings to West Bridgewater. The four men rendezvous at Johnson's house. The car mechanic stalls, while his wife slips out to call the police from a neighbor's house.             The anarchists grow nervous.            In "Suosso's Lane" I dramatize the encounter. When Johnson tries to talk Buda out of taking his car away, contending the vehicle has no plates, Sacco voices his suspicions over his wife's departure from the house.             He says the situations smells to him like "di trappola."            That's how it turns out.  Buda and Orciani ride away on the latter's motorbike, and the police never get their hands on either of them. Sacco and Vanzetti walk back to the streetcar stop and board a car to take them to Brockton, where they can catch a second streetcar to Stoughton. The police arrive at Johnson's house after the four men have departed, but hearing that two of the men were on foot, they call the Brockton police and ask them to stop the car from West Bridgewater and arrest "two foreigners." That's what happens. A Brockton officer arrives in time to stop the street car and finds Sacco and Vanzetti on board.             They were are 'foreigners' to his eye. And that's why they're arrested.             And they are "indeed anarchists," as Vanzetti would later tell the court. That combination -- anarchist beliefs and Italian birth -- turns out to be enough to get them convicted, and eventually executed, after a trial widely regarded as a travesty of justice and still studied by trial lawyers as a classical example of the problems with capital punishment.             I look forward to sharing 'the nightmare scenario' and other elements of "Suosso's Lane" on Wednesday evening at Pilgrim Hall.              

Garden of Verse: Leaves Falling, Thoughts Opening, in October's Verse-Virtual

Poets in Verse-Virtual's October 2016 gave us many striking ways of looking at things -- big things, time and the river -- brought on perhaps by a nip in the autumn air.



Robin Dawn Hudechek's "I Was with You When You Slept (For Mary Magdalene)," dedicated to her mother, is written from the point of view of the woman who was not part of that famous Group of 12, and suffers slights from some of the male disciples simply because she is a woman. Written in a naturally elevated and powerful language such as this memorable, moving image,"I was with you when you closed your eyes,when the troubles of the earthlifted like wrinkles in the sand,"the poem paints a portrait of someone who knows how to love and endures such slights because of her love.  http://www.verse-virtual.com/robin-da...
Penny Harter's "Sister Death" offers an affecting, complex image as well. A mare, who follows her everywhere: "I feel her warm breath on my neck
and dream of bundled hay in a heated stall." What will happen if the poet forgets to toss the mare her lump of sugar? http://www.verse-virtual.com/penny-ha... and Death vie for attention in Myra Shapiro's "The Alteration of Love." The poem makes us see the 'alteration' of generations as well, when the lessons of her parents' lives (and deaths) cause the poet's eyes -- another arresting image - to 'haul up the sea.' http://www.verse-virtual.com/myra-sha...
Jim Lewis's timely "In Praise of Autumn" compares lives to seasons. The poem's lyrical diction fits its thoughts, especially when the poet imagines a divine collection of -- not leaves, but -- lives: "I will jump, exuberant
at the touch of his rake and broom
exactly as the autumn leaves
fly before my shepherding strokes" http://www.verse-virtual.com/jim-lewi...

Thoughts of divinity come from the sky and the mountains in the meteorological phenomenon called "altocumulus lenticularis, lens cloud," in Tricia Knoll's poem "The Flying Saucer." (See her marvelous accompanying photo above.) It causes a change in what the poet calls, in a fine phrase, "the felt unidentified."http://www.verse-virtual.com/tricia-k...
All of these poems, these themes, feel autumnal to me. The turn of the season naturally brings thoughts of the seasons in our own human lives. A moment of acceptance, of letting in, is summoned in Tom Montag's "Grey Evening in Oshkosh." Images such as "the sorrow-speckled river" in the early-ending day encourage us to yield up what remains. In his poem "Like the River" the sadness remains, but the meaning broadens, offering us the example of a river that flows endlessly and is still before us. And in a poem called "About Death" the poet finds a still a broader lesson in the stars, producing this amazing revision to received speech: "We think death is somewhere  we're going, not something we
already are." http://www.verse-virtual.com/tom-mont...

            William Greenfield's poem "The Ever-Shrinking Universe" finds joy in the rituals of a smaller range of outward experience, taking us along to a Hallmark, a JC Penny's, until finally another insightful way of seeing is offered us:  "So, we shrink
down, our world a snow globe." The poem ends with laughter.
http://www.verse-virtual.com/william-...

The Garden of History: Trials Go Bad and "Justice Goes Awry" in Unhappy Times

            Yesterday's front-page Boston Globe story on efforts to prove that Ethel Rosenberg was wrongly convicted and executed for spying for the Russians includes a reference by Michael Meeropol (Rosenberg's son) to Dukakis's proclamation on Sacco and Vanzetti:             Meeropol.. said they specifically are not seeking a presidential pardon. “A pardon is weird because it implies guilt,” he said. Rather, the brothers want a proclamation similar to one issued in 1977 by then Governor Michael Dukakis in the notorious Sacco and Vanzetti case. Dukakis declared the pair had been unjustly executed in 1927 for murders they did not commit, proclaiming “any stigma and disgrace should be forever removed” from their names and those of their descendants."            The Globe story also quotes this statement from Michael Meeropol on the proclamation:  “It would be a way of reminding people that every once in a while, our system of justice goes awry, especially in politically charged times."             This statement strikes me as a keeper, a truth that goes beyond the particulars of the Rosenberg case.                      Scholars and students of the case still disagree on whether the evidence the Meeropols have uncovered exonerates Ethel Rosenberg. But whether or not she was guilty of what the government accused her of doing, the charge hardly rises to a level deserving execution.            Why do governments choose to execute people? The reason seldom has much to do with the evidence for the charges against them. So why the need for the judicially sanctioned homicide called "execution"? To protect our secrets? Why do we have so many secrets? Did we kill the Rosenbergs to scare off other spies? To teach us all a lesson?             It is surely the case that the Soviet Union (like other autocratic regimes) executed people left and right with no regard, at the whim of its dictators, without regard to evidence or what American law calls "due process." But if we do the same thing to people such as the Rosenbergs for largely political reasons, how do we show that we are any better a totalitarian police state?             To the best of my understanding the trial of the Rosenbergs was a complicated espionage case oversimplified by America's hysterical fear of Communism during the McCarthy period.             According to Ron Radosh (co-author of the book "The Rosenberg File") Ethel Rosenberg assisted her husband's spy work by serving as a communication channel between him and Soviet agents. Radosh was interviewed by the "60 Minutes" staff as a rebuttal witness for that network news program's recent broadcast in which the Meeropols made their case for their mother's innocende. Here's a link to that show:www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-broth...            Here's some of what Radosh had to say:            The program’s producers and their staff worked extremely hard. Indeed, my segment was taped last winter, and they worked for months putting their report together. I and my associates... gave them a mountain of copies of KGB material from the Vassiliev files, specific KGB messages from the Venona decrypts, and answered many questions that they had. We left no stone unturned in giving them material that proved beyond any doubt that Ethel Rosenberg was indeed guilty of “conspiracy to commit espionage.”            While Radosh clearly believes in Ethel's guilt, his next comment sums up the most significant point about the case's lasting historical value: "None of us believed she should have been executed, and no one on the program, including myself, argued otherwise."            To read Radosh's detailed analysis of the "60 Minutes" show and his significant points of the legal evidence here's the link: http://freebeacon.com/issues/60-minut...            He concludes:             The Meeropols are given the last word. They say they were undoubtedly “damaged” by what their parents did, but are certain that Ethel Rosenberg was “killed for something she did not do.” True, she did not type any notes.             But the Rosenbergs were charged and found guilty of “conspiracy to commit espionage,” not treason as many people think was the case. In a conspiracy indictment, any party who was part of a conspiracy is as guilty as the main perpetrator. That means legally, Ethel—who in fact did many things for the network—was no less guilty than her husband.             Still, it seems an unnecessarily vengeful law that exposes someone to capital punishment for playing a decidedly secondary role in somebody else's espionage. Again, Ethel helped her husband, but in no way deserved execution.             Radosh also acknowledges the impact of the executions on the couple's two young sons: when you kill people's parents, you traumatize their children.             To me the value of looking once again at this 1951-1953 case seems to be the way it raises issues that currently bedevil American democracy: surveillance, secrecy, espionage, routine and systematic violations of individual privacy.            Why do we have so many "official" government secrets? So many weapons whose engineering we need to protect? So many enemies? So many spies of our own? Why do we continue to ape the practices of dictatorial, authoritarian and totalitarian governments?             So long as we have secrets we will have spies. And, inevitably, betrayals.             Another conclusion the case suggests that whether you are likely to believe or disbelieve that Rosenbergs were guilty, or framed, comes down to political loyalty: Which side are you on? People like myself who despise the McCarthy Era and the entire Cold War period of my childhood tend to believe that anybody accused of helping the Communists would find it hard to get a fair trial in the political climate of those times. And their supporters were probably being smeared. Because Joe McCarthy was the biggest liar in American politics before the emergence of the current demagogue in the campaign of 2016.             While I have not personally dug into the Rosenberg case, I have read widely about the 'notorious' Sacco-Vanzetti case, and I don't believe the state made any sort of a rational case for their guilt the crime for which they were tried: the robbery-murder of factory payroll in South Braintree Square.             As noted earlier, the Rosenbergs' sons are seeking from the President for their mother what then Governor Michael Dukakis gave to the defenders of Sacco and Vanzetti: a proclamation repudiating their guilt. And I certainly agree with their larger thesis that "politically charged times" tend to pervert American justice.             In times of stress governments have an observable tendency to reach and kill people for a host of political reasons: To demonstrate the seriousness of the threat; to reassure a threatened populace that he full weight of the law would fall on the enemies of public safety. To intimidate the perceived enemies. To make an example.             That tendency remains a weakness in our democratic system that we have to guard against.              In the desire to fulfill all the goals cited above, the state of Massachusetts (quite possibly encouraged by branches of the federal government) reached out in 1920 to kill anarchists.             In the post-World War I years of 1918-1920, times were tense. Returning soldiers faced unemployment. Crime increased. Prohibition created vast new criminal enterprises. The example of the Russian Revolution governments and corporate interests.             According the period's historians, some anarchists tied to the network inspired by Luigi Galleani declared war on the US government after Galleani was tried and deported to Italy because of his opposition to the draft and America's entry into World War I. This Italian-American anarchist movement was suppressed; their press shut down; their beliefs outlawed; their office raided; and associates of Galleani were also prosecuted and deported. Other members of the movement went underground and decided to strike back by planting bombs intended for officials or business leaders who played an active part in their persecution. They sent some bombs through the mail, although none reached their intended targets. Then they planted a bomb at the home of US Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer.             This was the political climate in which Sacco and Vanzetti were charged with a most unlikely crime: robbing a workers' payroll.             When anarchists turn to violence, history shows they have planted explosives or sought to assassinate heads of government. They do not become "ordinary criminals," steal money, rob banks or -- most unlikely of all -- steal workers' payrolls. American anarchists of the early 20th century regarded themselves as workers, and Sacco and Vanzetti were in fact workers all their shortened lives. Harming other workers by stealing the payrolls their families depended on is the last thing in the world they could imagine doing.             And the government's case against them was nothing more than a vengeful fantasy. An attempt to kill anarchists, any anarchists, to get back at the bombers.             But society cannot revisit a case in any more meaningful way than a governor's proclamation or change its mind about the fairness or truthfulness of a judicial proceeding when the defendants have been executed.             People shake their heads mutter that 'mistakes were made.'             That sad truth remains the biggest objection to the practice of capital punishment.            

The Garden of Words: Song Lyrics are 'Writing,' and We Remember the Words

            If song lyrics are a kind of literature, then the Nobel Prize Committee is right. Bob Dylan is a Nobel Prize quality songwriter. Frankly, measured against living American writers in any genre, whose voice has had a bigger impact?             Novelist Michael Chabon made the case a a few years ago in an essay published in "The New York Review of Books" that song lyrics are a kind of literature. Not the same kind as poetry, and they live harnessed to their music. But their own kind or category of literature. I thought that was a brilliant insight and still do. Has there really been a more influential American writer than Dylan in the last 50-plus years?            Chabon, the author of "Werewolves in Their Youth," "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay," and "The Yiddish Policeman's Union" -- to choose my three favorites out of more than a dozen works of fiction -- examines his own literary influences in the essay titled "Let It Rock." He recalls receiving a book of song lyrics from an English teacher, in which he was happy to find the printed lyrics by songwriters such as Dylan, Joanie Mitchell and others. From this anthology of influential songs by Sixties-type songwriters he learned that the first line of Dylan's fairly early lyrical ballad "Chimes of Freedom Flashing," a song whose lyrics I've wrestled with myself, was actually “far between sundown’s finish an’ midnight’s broken toll”....that is, not "broken toe," an image that had caused him some pondering. Now I kind of like "midnight's broken toe" -- you know, midnight stumbles out of bed and bumps into the china closet, causing a heavy earthen keepsake from an old potter friend's first year on the wheel to fall off the shelf and land right on the toe. Some late nights feel that way...               Let's be honest. Those of us who loved songs in our youth -- whether 'werewolvian' or Wordsworthian -- embraced what we were hearing even if we were not hearing it completely right.             Nevertheless, Chabon has a larger point to make: "Now when I think about [a teacher] and the book he gave me, back when he was trying to teach me how to be a poet, the question of whether or not Dylan’s lyrics are poetry feels irrelevant. Dylan’s lyrics are writing, and as writing they have influenced my own writing as much as if not more than the work of any poet," apart from a special few. "In fact, song lyrics in general have arguably mattered to and shaped me more, as a writer, than novels or short stories written by any but the most crucial of my literary heroes."            The key idea is that song lyrics are writing. They are a kind of literature that is not identical to poems written to be read by themselves, unaccompanied by the other elements songs are necessarily part of -- the music, and the act of singing.             I want to make two other borrowings from Chabon's marvelously predictive essay that bear on the question of whether the Nobel prize for "Literature" can reasonably be awarded to a songwriter. (If you want to read the entire essay here's the link: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2013/...)            He points out that song lyrics stripped of their aesthetic identity as songs and left naked on the page frequently fail to make the grade as poems:             "I saw that rock lyrics could not really be poetry because when you took away the melody, the instrumentation, and above all the voice of the singer, a song lyric just kind of huddled there on a page looking plucked and forlorn, like Foghorn Leghorn after a brush with the Tasmanian Devil."             A sentence, if I may put in my two cents here, that shows a novelist's flair for the kick in the pants life-giving image.             My last take-away from Chabon's essay involves an admission that many (if not all) of us given a youth in the era of classic rock or its succeeding decades will probably cop to: committing to memory many more song lyrics than lines of 'great' poetry.             "Song lyrics [Chabon writes] are part of my literary firmware, programmed permanently into my read-only memory.... Not just words: writing. Tropes and devices, rhetorical strategies, writerly techniques, entire structures of allusion and imagery: entire skeins of the synapses in my cerebral cortex by now are made up entirely of all this unforgettable literature."            This is simple truth. I can't remember my own poems nearly as well as I can summon lines and sometimes whole verses and choruses of the songs consumed by a youthful psyche. Memory is a talent of youth. Particularly exact memorization. Knowing all or most of the words of a song that stirred us, and may still do, is a function of hearing them over and over again. But what else have young people done since the dawn of electronic media but play (or wait for) their songs and listen to and dig them again and again? In the days when the transistor radio was your only personal app you waited for the Top 40 station to play your song yet again. Then you switched to the next top 40 station on the dial in the hope of catching it there.              In the digital age, you already 'possess' this song somewhere and you play it whenever you've got a spare minute. If you have a lot minutes you are free (as Spottify, for one, exults) to play it "again and again and again."             And since song lyrics in this age of the world have an especially strong appeal in our youth, those that have imprinted their strategies, techniques, allusions and imagery on the brains on those who read and/or write literature throughout our lives... are still around. When I think of the lyrics that "speak to me," I realize they began speaking to me more decades ago than I care to remember. For example:
"... Even when Germany fell to you hand, consider dear lady, consider dear man, you left them their pride and you left them your land,But what have you done for these ones?" ..."Break up, To make up, That's all we do/ ... That's a game for fools."..."Baby, baby, bay, where did our love go? .. . ..."..."... Is your money that good? Will it buy you forgiveness? Did you think that it could?"[And pretty much every other line in "Masters of War." Which, it pains to realize, is as completely relevant today as it ever was.] ..."Same as it ever was"..."You were talking while I hid
To the one who was the father of your kid
You probably didn’t think I did, but I heard
You say that love is just a four letter word"[as recorded by Joan Baez]... "All along the watchtower
Princes kept the view
While all the women came and went
Barefoot servants, too
Outside in the distance
A wildcat did growl
Two riders were approaching
The wind began to howl"(Preferably Hendrix version: If you've ever read any fantasy novels, that's what they all say, only they take hundreds of pages to get there.)..."My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums,should I leave them by your gate?Or, sad-eyed lady should I wait?"..."Your faith was strong but you needed proof. You saw her bathing on the roof.Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you..."..."I keep hearin' mother cryin'
I keep hearin' daddy through his grave
'Little girl, of all the daughters
You were born a woman
Not a slave'..."...
"He's the universal soldier/ and he really is to blame/ His orders come far away no more/ They come from him and yo and me/ and brothrs can't you see/' this is not the way we put an end to war." ....
"Got up some time in the afternoonAnd you didn't feel like much" [Judy Collins version]..."I am leaving/ I am leaving/but the boxer still remains." [Don't we all, though?]..."The dangling conversations and the superficial sighs..."...
"And take off your thirsty boots,and stay for a while/ your feet are hot and thirsty/ from a dusty mile." (I had no boots. I walked no dusty miles. Did Eric Anderson? But he wrote this song and something in me believed it was intrinsically true.)... "I'm so glad, I'm so gladI'm glad, I'm glad, I'm glad" ...
"To be where I'm going/In the sunshine of your love."...
"Come, hear Uncle John's Band/ by the riversideGot some things to think about/ here beside the rising tide..." ...There are scores and scores of these song lines, lyrical fragments,  including some I can't recall without a prompt, but often do return when some phrase, or image, or musical phrase starts them up inside my memory, brain, or whatever part of one's heart will always be "tangled up in blue." The first two or three notes will serve. The first two syllables uttered in a crooner's voice.             Chabon's most original point may be that these permanently imprinted influences serve the creator/thinker/feeler within you ("and without you") by demonstrating what language is capable of. So do poems, novels, short stories, essays and even the occasional column in a newspaper or magazine. To me this recognition puts an end to the argument over whether song lyrics belong to the category of written literature or not.             They obviously do, they are arrangements of words.         They get hold of some nexus of sense and sound; of brain cell and emotive response. And they don't let go.
[From the top: The songwriters of the lyrics above, in order: Buffie St. Marie; Stylistics; Supremes; Bob Dylan; Talking Heads; Dylan, Dylan, Dylan; Leonard Cohen; Laura Nyro; Buffie St.Marie; Judy Collins version of Leonard Cohen's song; Paul Simon, Paul Simon; Eric Anderson; Cream re-arrangement of Gospel song; Cream; Grateful Dead]

The Garden of the Trees: Catching the Leaves (and a Leaf) on a Favorite Fall Weekend

            Somewhere on one of the handful of woodlands trails Anne and I hiked in our three-day Columbus weekend in the Berkshires, I caught a leaf.             A breeze blows, and those autumn leaves at the very end of their seasonal tether come floating, swaying, riffling, picking up speed and pulling back, sometimes lurching off in new directions as currents of agitated molecules shove them this way and that -- just as they do in the cartoons -- and eventually landing.             This happened on a path in Williamstown; and I turned a palm up and extended my forearm a little ways in front of me, and kept walking without moving my hand, and one of the smaller, maple leaves detached itself from the consensus of a somewhat numerous squadron and landed squarely on my palm.            That's how you catch a leaf. It catches you. You can't really try to catch one. The mere motion of throwing yourself around, leaping after the flock, lurching one way or another in those last minute course-corrections in a futile attempt to respond to the many little twists and turns leaves experience from invisible, but commanding airflows -- your own motion, that is, creates another distortion in the airflow sending the leaves off course.            You push them away by seeking.             Just be there. If a leaf has your name on it, it will find you.             It may not happen at all. Wind currents are pretty erratic. The answer is not always blowing in the wind (regardless of the Nobel prizewinner's famous lyric). Still, when it does happen you can't help feeling a little bit, well, good about things. In the context of the religion of pagan nature worship it may perhaps feel a little bit like being -- to appropriate an idea from an entirely different religion -- "sealed in the Book of Life."               In Williamstown, in the Northern Berkshires, where this cheerful moment possibly took place, a series of walking paths in the woods and pasture land can be found directly behind the justly celebrated Clark Art Museum. The photo at the left is the Stone Seat, marking the favorite destination for a woodland walk by German-born, retired professor George Moritz Wahl, who died in 1923. His name is carved into the stone. I don't know anything more about the back story, but our trail guide calls the series of trails that lead to this site "Williamstown's favorite walk."             According to Williams College, numerous trails on Stone Hill can be combined for hikes ranging from 0.7 to 4.0 miles in length and offering the hiker "dense forests, massive rock outcroppings and, at the trail's end, "a great view" of the town of Williamstown and the Green Mountains of Vermont. Which I don't think we knew about because we certainly didn't find it.              We followed one of those busy trail maps complicated by numerous intersections of helpfully marked trails, arriving at the Stone Seat. Then started off in one direction, encountered a posted map, and reversed course back the other way. We followed a lovely quiet woodland course along leaf-filled paths, encountering not a soul while sending a score of tiny chipmunks racing to escape our ogre-ish presence.                We did bump into crowded parking lots and human multitudes in the retail streets around Williams College, one of the few such encounters on an otherwise subdued three-day October weekend in the Berkshires. Little traffic to speak of on Route 7, a road we've been locked up on during other Columbus Day weekends. Maybe everybody else knew the weather was going to be clouds the first day, followed by rain the second. The third day, the day we had to leave, was in true Berkshire fashion crystal clear and absolutely stunning.             Our next site, after leaving the college (and parents weekend?) crowd, proved to be one of the best rural picnic spots we've ever found. It was right on the farmyard of the Sheep Hill farm (farm photo below), now a preserve owned by a local conservation foundation. A picnic table is surrounded by the steeply graded pasture on one side, and a view of thickly wooded ridges (across Route 7) rising up to Mount Greylock, the highest point in the state.             We had the place completely to ourselves. No one else in sight. The 50-acre former dairy farm was purchased by the Williamstown Rural Lands Foundation in 2000. Art and Ella Rosenburg and their son moved here in 1933 and owned a milking herd for more than 50 years, according to the group (see http://wrlf.org/sheep-hill/).             The property was originally called Sunny Brook Farm, and the landscape named Sheep Hill because sheep were raised here in the late 19th century.            I took some photos of the strikingly furrowed tractor-cut patterns of the hayed meadow (above, left)The contours are more prominent and the gradient steeper than the camera is able to show. From a path along the top of the pasture I took photos of the foliage on the ridges, and one of the observation tower on top of Greylock.