Robert Knox's Blog, page 46

Winter's Garden: Cats and Other Domestic Creatures in December's Verse-Virtual

All of a sudden people are becoming very up front about their cats. In his poem "Litter Box," Jefferson Carter compares his conduct to the self-indulgent behavior of the characters "in the new Italian movie":
I don’t whine
about my latest chore, cleaning
the litter box four or five times
a day.  I can imagine one
of those histrionic Italian husbands
fuming, yearning for his mistress
as he kneels by the reeking box,
scooping cat feces & urinous clots
of litter into a plastic bag.
Oh, those "urinous clots," a detail that surely rings true to cat owners. We have seen those "histrionic" husbands in foreign films as well. Although this poem should probably be seen as a comment on domesticity since it begins with a wife (and an ex-wife, talk about doubling down) asking the litter-box cleaning husband if he has ever been unfaithful, the tone of the whole piece and its knowing, self-mocking imagery leave me positively light-hearted. The language is just so fine.              Turns out, as we learn in the final stanza, the poet "loves" the cat: 
Most nights
he snuggles under the comforter,
buzzing between me & my wife like a
space heater I need to repair.
            Comparing the cat at the end with another difficult domestic task which the poet is probably putting off wraps the poem up like a present rediscovered under the tree on a raw, ugly morning three days after Christmas. Worried wives and histrionic husbands are, of course, another story.  (You can read the entire poem here: http://www.verse-virtual.com/jefferso...)
            The poem "Overgrowth" by Jeffrey Winter also teaches me a lesson about my own world. He writes about the differences between his mother and himself in their approach to gardening. While the poet, "a young man," believes in "discipline and ruthless pruning," his mother, "an old woman"...
longs to see the things
she has loved grow wild out in her yard,
consuming the scenery, obliterating limits,
filling with greedy leaves every spare inch
of what is left of the world.
            Greedy leaves? Chewing the scenery? Established plants pouring over the conventional limits of walkways, sidewalks, patios, and new, young plants struggling for light, water and air beneath their undisciplined, self-indulgent neighbors -- well, I know whose garden that reminds me of. I'm with the poet's mother.             I think we should note, however, that when a mother longs to see the things "she has loved grow wild," those objects of her nurturing include her son. As a parent as well as a gardener, I'm with Mom here again.                          Ken Slaughter's "tanka" poems intrigue me and make wish to know more about the form. Is the syllable pattern fixed? The orthodox definition of syllables per line I found online (5.7.5.7.7) doesn't apply to this poem ("a backpack") but the poem completely works for me.
a backpack
with my life story inside
the truth
I twist and bend
just to get it in
The poems says so much in its few words. The telling gesture -- that twist and bend -- rings true for any backpacker, but stands for so much more. That's the way we do it on life's journey: we pick up our burden and go. But nobody's "life story" fits that easily in the places where we try to put it.                  I find some strong sensual imagery in the poet's other December tanka too. The "smell of dust," for instance when the poet's son looks for his baseball glove
as I search for something
to say to my ex-wife
And this evocation of a universal childhood moment:
my mother’s voice
when the streetlights come on
calling me home  

Many more presents under the tree in December's Verse-Virtual. Here are a few:
          Trish Hopkinson's "Memory Therapy" treats a deep subject ("Growing up poor is tough") with spare, unsentimental, convincing language. It feels like an insider's look. I love the concluding image: ...memories are survival, the umbrella covering my brain,
an inflatable raft for my soul.
Adults float like fallen limbs.
Kids, they swim.
          In Kenneth Pobo's  "Even in Death," a poem about a gardener saying goodbye to the plants that have companioned his summer (I do that too), the poet sees the vines he's cut down turn into a nest of snakes and then a "hundred wounded clotheslines holding the tears of August." Great multi-layered image: vines, snakes, clotheslines. We can read these changes in our own way.And the beautiful turn in his poem "Following Directions" from minor shortcomings such as algebra and problems following directions, to the stuff that matters, beautifully expressed here:
You came without directions,
love.  Me too.
Our blossoms always come
as a surprise.
          The six poems from Frederick Pollack's "Untitled," all make demands and reward attention. I found them alternately sad, satirical, wry, reflective, philosophical, abstract, and on the mark. I will say that the poet has a very articulate cat (compare to Jefferson Carter's aging cat above), who is given the whole of poem 7 to sum up the case for the prosecution (or is it defense?):
You too have lived indoors,
for outside there are cancers, dogs, and cars;
have felt, when you allowed yourself to feel,
the love that feeds you, watches while you eat,
cleans up your mess,..." 
           Barbara Crooker's "In Paris" offers a lot of on-the-spot imagery (and a fair amount of French) that suggests the magic so many people, Americans among them, feel for that city of beauty and art. The incantation that breaks out near the end --
Praise the small cage of the elevator
that carries us to our chambre.  Praise my four-
chambered heart, still beating; praise your gall
bladder, unremoved.
-- though it celebrates blessings everywhere, feels particularly fitting here as it covers a lot of ground in a few words. (All of these poems and many more are on http://www.verse-virtual.com/current-...)

The Garden of Song: Christmas in Medieval England

What do we think of celebrating "Christmas in Medieval England"?
          Judged by the concert program of that title performed last weekend by the Boston-based vocal group Blue Heron, it was simply divine. Led Scott Metcalfe the highly-regarded Boston based vocal group performed English church music likely sung in the 14th and 15th centuries. 
        Oh, happy medieval English ears!
        Performing with virtually no instrumental accompaniment -- a very quiet harp is heard (if just) is some of the pieces -- the voices of a small number of singers fill air with the beauty and volume we might have expected from a heavenly choir. After the voices, the significant instrument is the hall itself, given the tremendous acoustic value of old wood and cathedral ceilings. Like its medieval forbears, the First Congregational Church of Cambridge, where concert was held, has both qualities.
            It's hard to get over how much beautiful sound these voices produce. The ensemble in this performance appeared to number about a dozen (eleven were named in the program), and included two female vocalists, only one named in the program. (When we first heard them a few years back, the singers were all men, as if the group was making some sort of point about the range and value of male s voices.) But often the songs were sung by only three or four singers, sometimes a half dozen, and a couple times by the full group. If you closed your eyes you'd swear a whole chorus was filling the cathedral.
          In his notes on this year's program Metcalfe tells us that the medieval period's 'Christmas season' music -- a season consisting of church calendar season Advent, the feasts of Christmas and of Mary, a series of saints days, epiphany, and all the way through to Candlemas (the 40th day after Christmas) on Feb. 2 -- was both liturgical and popular. The official liturgy was "embellished and expanded," Metcalfe writes, and included "carols" that were "popular in character" if not popular music in our sense of the term. 
          Fifteenth century English music, he writes, developed its own repertoire of "carols" outside the liturgy. He puts this number at 130. (Who knew?) We're not of course talking about carols that developed after the middle of that century, and up to the popular music genre of our time: their number is legion. 
          I can't say that many of the "polyphonic carols" (Metcalfe's phrase again) are familiar today. But a few links between the chant-rooted music of the early church, sung entirely in Latin, and the semi-popular carols of this concert's medieval program and the Christmas music heard today are worth noting. The lyrics of some of these carols are a mishmash of Latin, Middle English, and something close to modern English. 
           The most familiar tune to modern ears may be the song that began the concert, its lyrics sung here totally in Latin, its title given as "Veni, Veni, Emanuel!" We know it today as "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel." (The Hebrew word is translated as "God is with us" or "with God.") Anne pointed out to me that another Hebrew word survives in the last stanza: "Veni, veni, Adonai." Adonai is a Hebrew word for "the Lord." The song's words as sung in this version also include references to captive Israel, the Rod of Jesse, and the Key of David. 
            Performed in Latin by Blue Heron, the piece was transporting and passionate. Most of us will be happy if we get the opportunity this season to give it a go in English.
            Another song  rendered in early 15th century English here, "There Is No Rose of Swych Vertu" is familiar to our ears because of its appearance in Benjamin Britten's "Ceremony of Carols." It's a praise-Mary song. The lyrics as rendered here begin with the first-line title, then"as is the rose that bare Jhesu." This is English with only a few 'ye olde' spellings, the two-line verses followed by a Latin cap: res miranda ('miraculous things,' literally) in the first verse. You can see the language community blending their Latin, Fremch and vernacular English together.
             The third of these generally familiar songs is one made popular by 'ye olde English Christmas' entertainments such as The Christmas Revels and anyone else recording or performing music of this period. It's begins with the chanted refrain "Nowel, Nowel, Nowel!" It's the happy shout-song of the season, sung in an English of common words with old-time spelling. "Deme" for instance instead of "deem" (meaning 'judge').
            So while the Puritans who founded Massachusetts did not celebrate Christmas, as is endlessly pointed out in these parts, in the country they came from it was "one of the most glorious feast days of the Christian year," as Metcalfe tells us. Blue Heron's concerts savor of the old-time

glory.

The Garden of History (Once Again): Litltle Sympathy for Immigrant Laborers

 
            Bill Bryson, one of America's premier nonfiction writers, begins his account of the Sacco-Vanzetti case in his recent book "One Summer: America 1927" (Anchor Books, 2013) by noting the absurd way that the profiling of immigrants with unpopular political opinions resulted in the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti for the payroll robbery of a shoe factory in Braintree and the killing of two men.             As Bryson tells it, "Chief Michael Stewart of the Bridgewater Police decided, for reasons unattached to the evidence that the culprits were Italian anarchists. He discovered that a man of radical sympathies lived near where the get-away car was found and for that reason made him the chief suspect. As 'The New Yorker' archly noted, Stewart concluded 'that after a hold-up and murder, the murderer would naturally abandon the car practically in his own front yard.'"             This is a good beginning. But after pointing out the farcical basis for fingering two Italian immigrants with radical political views for a gangland crime most likely the work of professionals, Bryson somehow works himself around to the conclusion that the two men were "probably guilty."            It's an astonishing misjudgment, given that Bryson also tells his readers that the prosecution's case against Sacco and Vanzetti in their 1921 trial, based on shaky eye-witness testimony and a dearth of physical evidence, "was pretty dubious." Bryson later notes that the celebrated American law professor (and later Supreme Court Justice) Felix Frankfurter "systematically and persuasively demolished" the prosecution's case in a widely read national magazine piece.            But when he writes about the end of case in 1927 -- now an international cause inspiring massive demonstrations, mountains of petitions, worldwide protests and pleas for clemency by everyone from the Pope to the Harvard Law School faculty -- Bryson seeks to minimize the case's importance while evincing more sympathy for the ordinary American's annoyance at the all international attention given to the case than for immigrant Italian laborers who worked long hours in appalling conditions for miserable wages and yet somehow failed to learn English. In the minds of native speakers, he writes, Sacco and Vanzetti's failure to speak fluent English despite having lived in the US for a decade confirmed the stereotype that Italians were either stupid or lazy. Bryson does not challenge that view.             And he is guilty of at least one incredible "howler" -- the scholar's term for an egregious error of fact.             With the execution two weeks away, Bryson writes, Massachusetts Governor Alvan Fuller granted a brief stay of execution to allow "the condemned men's defense team -- which was essentially the lone, harried lawyer Fred Moore -- twelve days to find a court prepared to grant a retrial to hear new evidence."            How wrong is this? Fred Moore had officially withdrawn from the case three years before (and ceased acting for the defense the year before that) after Sacco refused to speak to him any longer. In 1927 Sacco and Vanzetti's defense was led by the prestigious William G. Thompson, widely regarded as Boston's top lawyer, a thoroughly Brahmin establishment figure who took Sacco and Vanzetti's case because the obvious flaws in their trial offended his sense of justice (and after the defense committee raised his $25,000 fee).             And defense counsel Fred Moore was never a "lone" anything. An active Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee raised funds first to hire both Moore (a California labor attorney who proved a poor choice to command respect in a Massachusetts courtroom) and a team of assistant attorneys. The Defense Committee later provided funds for Thompson, his assistants, and other expenses. No "lone, harried" defender, but a team of lawyers chased US Supreme Court justices around the county looking to convince a judge to hear their pleas for a new trial and save their clients' lives. Bryson dismisses this effort as if it were a Keystone Cops episode.             His ignorance of who was representing Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927 is not a minor point.             The international clamor for "justice for Sacco and Vanzetti" was a top-of-the-page headline story in the summer of 1927, regarded as a moral crusade by millions from Boston society figures (some of whom regularly visited Vanzetti), to well-known writers and intellectuals  (John Dos Passos, Katherine Anne Porter, Edna St. Vincent Millay), and worker organizations across the political spectrum. Petitions demanding a new trial were signed by the graduating classes of all the Ivy League universities. Poet Millay carried a sign at the Statehouse and was arrested with hundreds of others on the weekend before the Aug. 22 executions.             Any source account of the famous case's last year consulted by an author planning to write about it would necessarily include both Thompson's name and the efforts by him and his assistants to convince the governor, the governor's special commission, the state's courts, and eventually federal justices to hear their pleas for a new trial. That Bryson doesn't know who represented the defendants -- and contents himself with a slighting and wholly inaccurate reference to a supposed one-man "defense team" -- undermines the credibility of his account of the final days of Sacco and Vanzetti.             Further, both the tone and content of his discussion of the end of the case reveals a slapdash approach more interested in siding with the American-born majority's view that the defendants got what they deserved than in historical accuracy or depth.             In his s account of the case's final months Bryson tells us that Massachusetts Governor Alvan T. Fuller, who "appears to have been a thoroughly decent man," sought to grant the defendants clemency but couldn't find a reason to do it. To other commentators, Fuller appears in a considerably different light: a political opportunist who was seeking the Republican nomination for President, tested the wind on which decision would win him more favor, and concluded that most voters wanted to see these Italian radicals dead.             Bryson tells us that Fuller "read every word of the transcript" and yet failed to find evidence of the prejudice and partiality that Frankfurter and so many other students of the case found there. He tells us that Fuller visited the prisoners and spoke to Sacco for five minutes (another error, since Sacco refused to see him) and to Vanzetti for much longer. As Bryson notes, correctly, Fuller was greatly impressed by Vanzetti; yet somehow that impression did not carry the day once the wealthy governor returned to the company of his own kind.              Here's an excerpt from Bruce Watson's book "Sacco and Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind" (Penguin, 2007). When (Watson writes) attorney Gardner Jackson told Fuller that sixteen witnesses swore that Vanzetti had sold them eels on the date the state accused him of taking part in another crime, "Fuller answered, 'Oh Mr. Jackson, those are Italians. You can't accept any of their words.'"            So Bryson, who increasingly takes on the role of establishment apologist as his account of the case draws to a close, finds Governor Fuller "a thoroughly decent man." By his own words Fuller shows himself to be, like most of his WASP establishment contemporaries, a man of his times and class: a thoroughly decent bigot.             Italians, plus some non-Italians, also testified that they saw Vanzetti in Plymouth on the day of the Braintree robbery and murders. Their testimony was discounted. Bryson is apparently all right with that because when he sums up the question of the defendants' innocence of guilt, he reports only views that incline toward their guilt. He writes that Harvard President Lawrence Lowell, the head of the three-man commission appointed by Fuller to review the trial and an open believer in the 'racial' superiority of WASPs to immigrants -- as any serious research into the case would show: he was vice president of the Immigrant Restriction League -- hoped to find the men innocent "but had been persuaded of their guilt by the evidence."             What evidence was that? The evidence that, as Bryson points out in earlier pages, had been "demolished" by Frankfurter and other critics.             Speaking in his own voice, Bryson then adds, "A dispassionate examination of the record indicates that the jury [was] not obviously bigoted and that Justice Thayer, whatever his beliefs outside the court, conducted a fair trial." In fact, even a superficial examination of the record indicates that Judge Thayer always ruled in favor of the prosecution, always ruled against Defense, and allowed prosecutor Frederick Katzmann to "badger the witness" (as courtroom dramas have trained us to say) to his heart's content. Thayer's "outside the court" statements include his famous remark to a Dartmouth classmate, "Did you see what I did to those anarchist bastards?"            As for that fair-minded jury, Bryson's own earlier pages on the case include the statement by the jury's foreman in response to a question of the defendant's possible innocence,"Damn them, they ought to hang anyway." This attitude should not be surprising given the government campaign (known to history as "The Red Scare"), backed by big business and their newspapers, to scare Americans into believing that political radicals posed a serious threat to the stability of their country. In truth, it would have been hard to find a jury of native-born citizens who did not harbor prejudice against any defendant who was an immigrant and a radical, especially an Italian one. Sacco and Vanzetti's jury of "peers" included no Italians, no women, no minorities of any sort.             Bryson follows this judgment with the wholly inaccurate claim that historian Paul Avrich, in his highly regarded 1991 book "Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background," states that Sacco and Vanzetti were "almost certainly involved" in the Braintree robbery-murder. Bryson writes:             "In his 1991 book, historian Paul Avrich asked rhetorically whether Vanzetti could have been involved in the South Braintree holdup, and wrote: 'Though the evidence is far from satisfactory, the answer almost certainly is yes. The same holds true for Sacco.'"            The actual quote (page 150) is this:            "Was Vanzetti himself involved in the conspiracy? Though the evidence is far from satisfactory, the answer almost certainly is yes. The same holds true for Sacco.'"            The "conspiracy" Avrich refers to is not the Braintree holdup but a series of bombings (mostly in 1918-19) widely attributed to anarchists. Anyone looking at the quote on the page will come to the same conclusion. The sentence that Bryson twists to his own purpose directly follows Avrich's lengthy account of how Italian anarchists turned to the use of bombs to strike back at the government and big business establishment that was persecuting them and, they believed, oppressing the poor. The "conspiracy" included planting a bomb at the home of the US Attorney General, an act that precipitated massive arrests of immigrants and deportations and -- many historians have argued -- the framing of known anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti for the Braintree crime.             Those bombings, for whom no one was ever put on trial, and the Braintree shoe factory robbery-murder are entirely different cases. The only thing that puts the cases together is the government's improbable theory that anarchists were responsible for both. Avrich may believe that Vanzetti and Sacco were "almost certainly" involved in some unspecified way in an anarchist bombing conspiracy. He clearly does believe that they were members of the same network as the anarchist figures he fingers as the principal conspirators (Carlo Valdinoci and Mario Budo). But when it comes to whether the two bore any guilt for the Braintree crime, Avrich states that his book "makes no pretense of settling the issue of whether Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty of the crimes for which they were executed" (page 5). He explicitly states that the case against them "remains unproved... nor can their innocence be established beyond any shadow of doubt."              It's hard for me to believe that an author of Bryson's stature could have bollixed this up so badly unless, perhaps, he was working from notes made by others. The representation of a respected historian's judgment about one matter as his judgment on a distinctly different matter is not merely sloppiness, it's the kind of academic wrongdoing that gets you kicked out of graduate school. In my opinion, it destroys Bryson's credibility as a commentator on the case.             The bombings Avrich writes about are an indisputably relevant concern for anyone seeking to understand not only the "background" of the Sacco-Vanzetti case, but the tenor of American society and politics in the early decades of the 20th century. Given this atmosphere of fear and loathing, Sacco and Vanzetti's jurors might have reasoned that if you believe the same things as the criminals who planted bombs at people's homes then you deserve to die, whether or not you are guilty of the different crime for which you are now accused.             But that is not how the American justice system works.             You are tried for the charge you have been accused of, not for other actions you may have taken or for the company that you kept.              The research by Avrich (and others) showing that Sacco and Vanzetti were not as "innocent" as many of their defenders made them out to be -- they were not saints or "pacifists," or merely philosophical anarchists -- has led some commentators such as Bryson to swing the other way and conclude, well if anarchists used bombs, and Sacco and Vanzetti were anarchists, they "probably" killed people and robbed a workers' payroll.            That's not a logical inference. It's a theory for which there is no reliable evidence. It was put to trial and found wanting by any "fair-minded" student of that trial with the possible exception of Bill Bryson.              Whether misled by careless research errors or not, Bryson's account puts a sympathetic gloss on nativist American prejudice against foreigners, lynch mob justice, judicial bigotry, a fear-mongering abuse of state power, and a plutocratic defense of the status quo.            That sympathy for the devils we know may have lead to his errors and omissions. He states that Boston quietly shrugged off the executions ("city life returned to normal"), apparently unaware that the Boston funeral for Sacco and Vanzetti on August 27, 1927 attracted tens of thousands and was probably the biggest public gathering the city had ever seen up to that date. Likely he has never seen the newsreel footage of the funeral march, because the FBI suppressed it, telling theaters not to show it.              Other researchers into the case believe that the state's prosecution of Sacco and Vanzetti amounts to exactly that "substantial edifice of conspiracy" -- Bryson's derisive term -- since instances of coerced testimony and suppressed evidence are on record. And to allegations of manufactured evidence explored in books such as "Postmortem: New Evidence in the Case of Sacco and Vanzetti" (1985) by William Young and David E. Kaiser, a book referenced in Bryson's bibliography but not in his account.            Unfortunately, Bryson's treatment of the Sacco-Vanzetti case does not evince a similar sympathy with the millions of immigrants who "teemed" into the US in the first decades of the 20th century or with the oppressive conditions endured by laborers both foreign and native-born even in "prosperous" 1927. The systematic disregard of the miseries of American workers by the happy few (a theme echoed in our own day) turned Sacco, Vanzetti, and many others into political radicals. And that deep divide between rich and poor explains the passion and energy that transformed two anarchists into international symbols of the tyranny of the strong over the weak.             Unlike that era's muckrakers who exposed the misery and neglect suffered by the poor, Bryson's judgment on Sacco and Vanzetti comforts the comfortable and afflicts the afflicted.

The Garden of History: Why anyone looking at the profiling of 'inferior races' in early 20th century America might wish to sing "I Pity the Poor Immigrant"

            It's both sad and astonishing that immigration -- and immigrants -- are currently being regarded as national problems by those seeking to slander certain nationalities and religions for political gain. And all the attention being paid to the demagogues spouting these views is appalling.             In Bill Bryson's "One Summer: America 1927," one of the country's best nonfiction writers reminds us how popular and influential racial theories such as the pseudo-science of eugenics were in this country ninety years ago. And who they were aimed at.             One of eugenics's leading lights, the highly respected 'scientist' Charles B. Davenport, "listed Poles, Irish, Italians, Serbians, Greeks, and 'Hebrews' as less intelligent and reliable, and more susceptible to depravity and crimes of violence, than people of sound Anglo-Saxon or Teutonic stock... They were creating an America that was 'darker in pigmentation, smaller in stature and more given to crimes... of assault, murder, rape and sex immorality.'"            What would America be today without Poles, Irish, Italians, 'Hebrews,' etc.? It wouldn't be America, for one thing.             Given the high number of new immigrants from southern and Eastern Europe during the first two decades of the 20th century, racial theorists argued that America's immigration policy amounted to "race suicide." The bible of this movement, Bryson writes, is "The Passing of the Great Race" by Madison Grant, which "took it as read that the only really good group of humans was what he called the 'Nordic race,' by which he meant essentially all northern Europeans except the Irish." People got worse, or "progressively more degenerate," as you moved South.             And eugencis held that introducing any genes from the so-called inferior races into society would taint the superior ones. He quotes Grant: "The cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew."             Other eugenics supporters included the president of Harvard, A. Lawrence Lowell, whose chaired the committee set up to look into the fairness of the Sacco-Vanzetti trial in 1927 and advised the governor to go ahead and kill them. Herbert Hoover, on the cusp of a spectacularly unsuccessful presidency, had it in for "black and Asian" laborers who suffered from what he termed "a low mental order."             No one today, perhaps, would regard these opinions as based on any sort of "science." When it comes to human beings, race is not a scientific term at all. We are all one species.             But these nutty ideas and horrendous prejudices disguised as science led to serious real-world consequences in the 1920s: the widespread practice of forced sterilization of people regarded as "defectives,"without consent and often without the victims' knowledge. And the adoption of a massively restrictive immigration policy that favored those from England, say, over all those other countries regarded as less 'white,' in the National Origins Act in 1924.             Attacks on immigrants, whether 'legal' or lacking officially required documents, have taken place in this country periodically whenever the numbers of new Americans appears to be on the rise, or when 'old' Americans grow frightened and insecure for one reason or another and decide to shut the door. Irish immigrants were hated, discriminated against and physically attacked because they were Catholics. Today some politicians wish to keep out all Muslims.             During the years before World War II, America's restrictive immigration policy kept refugees from European countries governed by Fascist regimes from finding safety and sanctuary here. Jews fleeing Hitler were turned back and sent to their deaths.             People don't leave their homes and their native countries, saying goodbye to all they've known and love, lightly or in the expectation of an easy life in a richer land.             They come because they have to, driven by dysfunctional governments, drug gangs, or the absence of any viable way to make a living. They emigrate for survival, as do Syrian refugees today, escaping a country where the government's barrel bombs and torturers, murderous fanatics such as ISIS, four years of war, and bombing raids by other nations including Russia, France and the US, have killed untold thousands.             Historically speaking, the worst and (and most gallingly ignorant) aspect of the present anti-immigrant movement, whipped up by demagogues playing on fears, is that immigration has always been the nation's strength, not its weakness. We should embrace those who seek to make a life in this country, not create impossible obstacles. Many native-born Americans are the descendants of people who came here 'without papers' (that's what WOPS means). Immigrants built this country -- literally, when it comes to the physical infrastructure of canals and bridges, railroads, subway tunnels and skyscrapers; but also socially and culturally, in the professions, the sciences, business, the arts. You can tell that by looking at the names in the phonebook; and at the lists of Nobel Prize winners and other rolls of honor.               If you're on Facebook, you have probably seen the cartoon of Indians giving a skeptical glance to a boatload of Pilgrims and asking for their documents.             We all came from somewhere else.

The Garden of the 'Deep': Three Seasonal Poems on Verse-Virtual

            Of the three poems of mine that went up on Verse-Virtual.com earlier this week, one of them, "Camp October," has a formal structure, not exactly a first for me, but a bit of a rarity.             We've spent a lot of our Octobers over the years in the Stockbridge summer home of Anne's parents, so that's where the title comes from. October also suggests some of the imagery, particularly the color 'red.' In this poem October, the month of seasonal transformation, stands for personal change and growth. And that in turn is where the poem's "lava lamp" comes from, a decorative toy device that in my day at least was always red (like turning leaves and early sunsets) and always changing shape.             "Summer camp," in contrast, stands for childhood and the possibilities of personal drama in this stage in life, which in my case were nil. The poem begins:I never went to summer camp
I honed a childhood in the lots
The moon, if it was there at all,
tied up other minds in knots            The rest of the poem is not about any specific thing, place, moment in time, or person, but about change and growth generally. It can be read pretty simply as a symbolic vessel: just add your own personal content. The great thing about tight poetic form is it tends to make things sound good.              The second poem of the three ("Call to Prayer") is simply a description of the fall of evening in a populated place. The concrete details all come from memories of night falling in Beirut. The temperature tends to be mild (not hot) when we're there, so we may be sitting on the balcony, or indoors with the windows open, when night comes on and can list to the progress of day's end: voices, children, cars, prayer.             The final poem "Into the Deep" is an attempt to find some words for the way people feel in our northern, temperate climate when the temperature drops and the sun sinks low. It's the "deep" season for me, because plants die, leaves drop, but life is preserved underground at the roots. The poem's concluding image of the ancient oak tree grinning at all the angst and running around on the surface (what fools these mortals be) was suggested by the tree stump we came across on a walk in the Blue Hills, the image seen in the photo at the bottom of the page.             If you have a chance please take a look at the poems at this link: http://www.verse-virtual.com/robert-c...

The Garden of Verse: Verse-Virtual's Decembrist Poets Contemplate the Holidays and Other Eternal Verities

 
            We are all Paris, at least some of time.             But what we really are in the hate-and-loathing days of the tediously prolonged pre-Presidential campaign season is fear.             Your know what I mean. You know who we're supposed to be afraid of... Actually, there's quite a list, and I have no intention of adding to it by my indulging my own hysteria about gun nuts. (Whoops, what did I just say?)             So perhaps that's why Joyce Brown's poem about different era in the December issue of Verse-Virtual got to me. Entitled "Fifties Christmas," the poem recalls a time when the mailman delivered three times a day and "snowmen wore woolly hats," and then turns a Christmas card greeting into a message that is still relevant, especially these days, in its formidable last line:             "Fear Not."
            (Novelist Marilynne Robinson, who writes about theological questions and the people who live them, raised this very point in a recent essay in The New York Review of Books entitled "Fear." She write that "contemporary America is full of fear," and that fear is not an appropriate state of mind for those who call themselves Christians and celebrate Christmas. You can read her essay at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/...)
           Dick Allen's poem "A Winter Morning" takes on the enduring characteristics of a fiercely dreamlike winter landscape and finds in these images a correspondence to our thoughts: 
"And our headlong dreamsspun into other dreams, or tiny breaksbetween the clouds. What we tried to meanis not what we became or could forsake."


         Robert Wexelblatt's "In December," connects the everyday wintry pictures to the big questions (and little ones) people ask this month, as both holidays and meteorological stresses roll in like the Polar Express:
"Once more the night will have worked its
lustration, as though every branch were fashioned
anew one second before dawn. Here’s your
world. We make no claim that it is other
than absurd, but here it is."


Karen Holmes' "How to Make Lemonade" provides these marvelously apt ingredients:
"Balance your glass on the window sill between past
and future, fill with sparrow song, gardenias,
stones from an icy stream."
Sonia Greenfield's "Cricket Chirping In a Scarecrow’s Belly" lets us into a world we'd otherwise never know. I have no trouble believing she's got it exactly right:
"Here’s the dickering: He’d empty his pockets for a train ticket
north, but the foal’s a pretty filly, his Dusty Rose. And the work
is never done. He re-stuffs the scarecrow when the horizon
halves the sun, after September’s heat combs the corn silk."

           You can find the rest of these poems, and many, many more in the December Verse-Virtual.com. The full link is http://www.verse-virtual.com/current-...
 

The Wildflowers in Thomas Pynchon's Prose Garden: "Inherent Vice"

Everything in Thomas Pynchon's novel "Inherent Vice" (published in '09 and turned into a movie last year) happened too long ago.            The year is 1970, with frequent rearview mirror glances to to at least 1969. Nixon is in the White House, paranoia is striking deep, short-haired muscle-bound security types are rushing all around the place, real estate pressures (among so many other pressures) are destroying the scene, and everyone is so routinely lighting up exotic varieties of their favorite weed it's hard to believe anyone is ever really worried about getting busted. But they're all worried about something.             The place is some version of Los Angeles, a city I have never been to, but then I don't think anybody has ever been to Pynchon's version of this place and time. It's nothing but freeway, beach, bars, clubs, eateries, mansions and nuthouses. No old people, no children, no actual poor people. The closest we get to an 'ordinary' working person is a limo driver, and he's playing the angles like everybody else. The 'hero' is a PI, who displays a touching (and rare) concern for the well-being of others. The only 'straight' people are cops, and they're conspiring against one another. All the book's hippie characters act, talk, and think (if you can call it that) in ways incredibly naive, as if they're recently arrived on the planet, yet other aspects of their (mis)behavior have already achieved burn-out status.             In other words, little of what happens in "Inherent Vice" has much resemblance to the real world, at any time or in any place. For Thomas Pynchon, the standard furniture of storytelling -- nuanced characters we can identify with and connect to a sequence of credible events -- is so much stage design. A plot is just an excuse to make words.             And few writers can do that as well as Pynchon.             It took me a while to remember how to read a novel by Thomas Pynchon. Not only is Pynchon's fiction not about character development or plot, so many of his 'characters' are such 'head comic book' figures it's almost impossible to remember who's who and what's supposed to be going on in the story except for the most basic of premises: somebody disappeared. Our narrator is supposedly looking for him.             Instead of a novel about life in counter-culture California as the innocence is wearing off, what "Inherent Vice" is really offering is a vision of a TV, Hollywood, Pop Culture, Drug Culture larded alternate reality that flowers in Pynchon's mind when he thinks about that time and place. It's a thought dream, evoked by extravagant language.             But a Pynchon is also about the pleasure of reading beautifully constructed passages such as this one, in which the book's version of a film noir PI hero, called Doc, meditates on the banally evil heavies he sees popping up these days in the Los(t) Angeles landscape:             "Doc knew these people, he'd seen enough of them in the course of business.They went out to collect cash debts, they broke rib cages, they got people fired, they kept an unforgiving eye on anything that might become a threat. If everything in this dream of prerevolution was in fact doomed to end and the faithless money-driven world to reassert its control over all the lives it felt entitled to touch, fondle, and molest, it would be agents like these, dutiful and silent, out doing the shitwork, who'd make it happen."            In other words, corporate honchos and their security armies 'just doing their job.' They are glaring symptoms of our world's "inherent vice."            This passage, written in the same rolling-syntax style as Pynchon employs in the novel's meta-silly Head Comix scenes that stand in for human interchange, is more serious in tone than almost anything else in the book. But it suggests that the novel's vision doesn't really pertain to LA in 1970 as much as it does to our world, a time when the dream is indeed long over and the 'faithless money-driven world' has indeed reasserted itself with a vengeance. A world in which various government bodies, corporate entities, gangs and conspiracies of all sorts mixing public, private, technological and criminal facades "play with our world" (as Dylan's old song has it) "like [their] own private toy."            Pynchon's language is marvelous, funny, over-blown, wry, frequently on the edge of self-parody, or heavily over it. But the book's silly, burlesque of a Hollywood film noir convoluted detective story is, in the end, nothing but a cover story. And that beautiful private toy we all played with is broken.        

The Garden of Truth: Film Turns the Spotlight on Reporting

            I've never had any connection to the Boston Globe Spotlight team, and not very much to the big office building on Morrissey Boulevard where a good piece of the action takes place in the film ("Spotlight") named after the newspaper's reporting team. While working for fourteen years as a freelance reporter for the Globe, I've never been a staff member and always worked from home. And few reporters anywhere get to work with the freedom and support provided to the Globe team that investigated the story of how child abuse by Boston priests that was systematically covered up under the rug by Boston Catholic Church hierarchy.             The film, pretty much universally acclaimed, doesn't need another favorable review. But based on my own experience of how newspapers work, I can't help thinking it may be the best investigative "procedural" film ever made.             That term "procedural" is generally applied to films or TV shows about police investigations. I have no experience of police work and even as reporter when it came to police stories crime I did little more than speak to police chiefs. My idea of a "crime" story is somebody knocking down a building that should have been saved; or developing a property that should be preserved in its natural state. But how many times have you heard a police officer say, "It's not like in the movies"?             Newspaper work, at least some of time, is like what you see in "Spotlight."             We see reporters walking swiftly alongside nervous sources, trying to keep up while scribbling notes in an open notebook. The omission here is a shot of the reporter desolately staring at the notebook later, unable to make heads or tails of some notation she's sure is crucially important.             We see reporters connecting with sources, then carefully working up to voicing what must be some of the most sensitive questions in the world, desiring to be sensitive, but needing at some point to be direct and even blunt.             We see the actor portraying then-new editor Marty Baron dealing with initial resistance from a senior editorial team who knew the city, as he did not yet, to the idea of investigating the "system" of covering up sexual abuse of children by parish priests by transferring them, hiding them on sick leave, paying off families who make complaints, and exploiting their long-held faith in the Catholic church keep quiet about truths that wrecked lives.            We see the reporting team led by Walter Robinson committing to the story as they begin to connect dots, in part by following up leads their own paper had failed to pursue in the past. We see the actor playing reporter Matt Carroll (the only member of the team I ever worked with) pursuing a paper trail in an ill-lit basement library to find records that substantiated a pattern of parish transfers and leaves of absence, suggesting which priests the archdiocese was protecting and then returning -- as known child abusers -- to contact with children. From what I knew of Matt, he is that kind of determined digger.             Film is a dramatic medium. An investigation that took many months would not have "felt" dramatic in the way the concision of the film's artful storytelling creates a powerful experience for the movie's viewers.            I confess that the resultant Spotlight team story did not appear that important at the time. Didn't we already know that priests were abusing children? Well, we did know of a few instances, but before the team's work nobody really knew the full extent of the story. One of the film's most effective moments comes at the very end where successive otherwise blank screens list the names of the all the American dioceses, and then all the countries of the world, that discovered similar cover-ups of the same crimes against their own children, following the Globe's reports.             It was a story that had to be told.

November's Garden: After the Leaves Come Down

            After the leaves come down, it's time to appreciate what we have. Something new, something revealed, something gained when something old and beloved is lost to time: the product of the spinning earth.             Cleared views, brilliant sunsets, plenty of blue water.            The leaves don't come down all at once. Some trees and shrubs turn in stages, giving us the contrast of darker and lighter colors. Their numbers thin and we peer between half-bare branches at the shapes and colors revealed behind them.             When a young, enthusiastic maple tree, a volunteer that rose beneath the shelter of the big oak in our back garden, released is leaves last week, a new and brighter carpet covered one portion of the garden, a place that catches the angled rays of the morning sun. The sun on the leaves turn mid-morning a canary yellow.             After the leaves come down, we see more sunsets. Mainly, of course, because the suns sets so early that we are still out and about and struck by this amazing phenomenon when it takes control of our senses before we are done with doing things. Or we are stuck in traffic when a turn in the highway delivers a light show. If we are driving westward into the sun, sundown means we can see the road again, free of blinding light shining in our eyes; now the hills and trees before us are gilded by its light. When the leaf fall bares the branches more of the skyline opens for our inspection.             Last weekend we walked just far enough away from our neighborhood to climb a small rise in the neighboring town of Milton and gain a height from which to view the sunset. The western sky was a misty peach as the sun was setting, because while mostly cloudless the atmosphere was not really clear and water vapor (along with a dose of urban pollution) colored up in the slanting rays. But after the sun sank, the sky was back-lit by a stirring deep pink, nearly red, a rose-color deeper than the November roses currently still blooming in the front garden.             When the leaves come down, and most of the flowering plants in our garden have given up their blossoms for seed, it's time to visit the salt marshes by the shoreline at Wollaston Beach. If I haven't been there for a while, the wild outdoor atmosphere and the scent of the air makes feel that I'm stepping out of a personal closet and entering the world. You can't live on first impressions, not matter how stirring, but the experience of waking up the senses is inevitably worth the trip. Along with the clean air, and the nearness of the sea, the air holds hints of decay, the dry fragrance of dying leaves, the slight wet stink of a narrow path through tall grasses, with its muddy spots and the semi-land, semi-water landscape of the adjoining salt marsh never more than a few steps away.             Birds, squirrels, the scrape and crackle in the fallen leaves that signifies some creature at his daily pursuits, generally just out sight. Though last week I startled a rabbit whose white tail fled from me but on a parallel course, so every ten yards or so, I started him up again until he gained enough distance that our paths diverged.             The water was high in the marsh the last couple of weeks. At intervals the city decides -- at least I assume (and rather hope) that this is a conscious choice -- to open the flood gates a bit more and let the marsh fill with water from Quincy harbor to a height that nearly drowns the spartina grass. Against the blue of the sky and the blue of the water, the grasses show their own waves of golden tints of amber and ochre and saffron. Waves of color ripple in the salt marsh.             A special little transformation, courtesy of the lowering perspective of November sun.

Author Judy Campbell's review of "Suosso's Lane"

Judy Campbell's review of "Suosso's Lane." Judy is the author of "A Twisted Mission" and seven other books in the Olympia Brown mystery series:

"Suosso's Lane is a terrific book. I can't decide which I like best, the plot - or the writing itself. Bob Knox is a really fine writer...and a seasoned writer. this may be his first novel, but he is no stranger to the craft. It is not enough for him to belt out a story - which he can most assuredly do, but Bob carefully constructs each and every sentence so that it not only moves the story forward, but it is pleasing to the inner ear as the reader not only reads the words but hears their cadences. Well done...I give it 5 stars."