Alexis de Tocqueville had a bad experience at Niagara Falls. Crawling onto a ledge behind the cataract, pressing his face against the cliff as the river fell from above, it was hard to breathe. The wind blew hard in the narrow passage between the sheet of water and the cliff. Sometimes “the blinding torrent of water” hit his face and the air felt thin. It was night and the darkness was “deep and terrifying” and meant that he couldn’t see the bottom of the chasm below him. The flickering moonlight was just enough, he said, to illuminate the “vast chaos that surrounds you” (when an entire river passes over your head) before leaving you again “to the darkness and din of the falls.” On his spit of rock, the iridescence of the falls and also the steam rising in a cloud from the abyss “envelop[ed] everything in a suspect white light.” A nocturnal rainbow above the mist looked like any other rainbow except that it was perfectly white. I know of one other vision of a nocturnal rainbow from the 1830s and it is equally frightening: the narrator of Edgar Allen Poe’s story “Berenice” becomes obsessed with his beloved’s teeth which appear to him, even in her absence, as a “white and ghastly spectrum,” overreaching “the wide horizon as the rainbow.” They are not unlike the all-consuming white spectrum that Tocqueville sees across the maw of the Niagara cataract.

“I assure you,” Tocqueville writes home to a friend, “that there was nothing at all amusing about the spectacle before us.” Needless to say, most travelers to America in the nineteenth century responded differently to Niagara Falls. The Irish poet Thomas Moore said the sublime view from below produced a sense of “delicious absorption” in nature that brought him closer to God, but it is just the feeling of absorption that Tocqueville feared. It is not hard to see that Tocqueville’s experience behind the “torrent” of the falls recalled to him his darkest feelings about the “democratic torrent” of the times that seemed to be “[sweeping] everything along in its course” in ways that aristocrats like himself could no longer resist. It was too hard to hold one’s ground when the progress of democracy was “universal” in its sway and when a “single current” of public opinion and thought “command[ed] the human spirit.” “Immersed in a rapidly flowing stream,” he writes in Democracy in America, “we stubbornly fix our eyes on the few pieces of debris still visible from the shore, while the current carries us away and propels us backward into the abyss.” In a democratic culture, claims to social or political distinctions are left behind as the landmarks of a shattered past while the individuals that survive it are “beaten onwards by the heady current which rolls all things in its course.” In America, the culture of sameness and “common obscurity” could seem as suffocating to Tocqueville as the “humid obscurity” that scared him from within the enveloping mist of the falls.

Tocqueville’s visit to Niagara inspires the climactic scene in Peter Carey’s remarkable novel, Parrot and Olivier in America, modeled on Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont’s travels in America in 1831. Like Tocqueville, Olivier de Clarel de Barfleur de Garmont goes first to Albany for a Fourth of July celebration and then to see the falls, except here they are Kaaterskill Falls in the Catskills, if only because they give Olivier the chance to remark, too, on the artist Thomas Cole who painted them around that time. Carey’s novel is deeply concerned with the possibilities for art in a democracy and also with the visual expressions of democracy that emerged within the new markets for art that supported them (but more on this in a moment). In Albany, Olivier finds, as Tocqueville might say, the “image of democracy itself” in the Independence Day parade of printers, mechanics, carpenters and other members of the trades and associations of the city bearing the badges of their professions. It lacks the martial “splendor, imperium,gloire” that would distinguish a procession in France and, to be honest, for an aristocrat, a float as big as an opera stage with a printing press turning off copies of theDeclaration—an eagle soaring on top of the whole insipid business—finally seems unthinkable. But, in the public reading of the Declaration and the return of a nation to the moment of its birth, “there was something deeply felt and truly great” and Olivier wonders if it might be possible to live his life “completely careless of how democracy might harm [him]”—to give way, that is, to the progress the parade represents and just be “one of the rivulets—nay, streams—that make the river of the people roar” (349-350). If only, Olivier says, the celebrations had stopped there: a lawyer steps up to deliver a Fourth of July oration and Olivier’s response is just the same as Tocqueville’s in Albany, since Carey takes his language directly from Tocqueville’s letters as they appear in George Wilson Pierson’s 1938 Tocqueville and Beaumont in America. The lawyer’s boorish, bombastic “harangue,” rehearsing the history of every single country in the world (which he names) in order to place America at the center of the world, makes clear that the revolution and “ascent of the majority” the day marks also marked, maybe most of all, an aesthetic revolution in the history of taste. “What makes democracy bearable?” Olivier asks (351)—and then travels on to the falls.

Olivier de Garmont is born in 1805 into a family of Norman nobles who manage to survive the French Revolution, though with varying degrees of depression and perversity after the Terror; the guillotine “cast[s] its diamond light” on the superannuated scenes of Olivier’s childhood at the Château de Barfleur (16). His mother keeps the desiccated corpses of family pigeons killed by peasants and sings laments for her lost king; Olivier, hearing them, gains a primal sickening knowledge of his mother’s attachments and the obscenity of the Revolution (which exasperates his asthma). When the Bourbons are restored to the throne, the family recovers some of its status, but after the July Revolution of 1830, Olivier, now a young lawyer at Versailles, is caught between loyalty to his family and to King Louis-Philippe, who has bourgeois sympathies and tenuous claims to the throne. The kings who follow upon Napoleon’s 1815 defeat are pitiable in the novel; royalty becomes showy and flagrant as it becomes merely symbolic. Charles X is “pigheaded,” believing that he can secure his power by restricting the rights of his citizens. But when he is overthrown in 1830, he sneaks past Olivier and the royalists who are defending his palace and slinks out of Paris “mud-smeared like so much shameful shit across the royal escutcheons” (84). Olivier, now under suspicion by the liberal government, leaves for the United States to conduct an official study of its famous penal system, just as Tocqueville and Beaumont did. Drawn to the lectures of François Guizot, who argued that the progress of democracy was irresistible and could not be turned back, Olivier wonders whether he will “drown swimming against the tide of history” or whether an aristocrat’s distinctive forms of understanding and belief can be made relevant to the present age (71). Could a democracy tolerate him?

In America, Olivier falls in love with Amelia Godefroy, the daughter of a governor of the Wethersfield Penitentiary in Connecticut, and it is at the insistence of Amelia’s father that he goes to Kaaterskill Falls. Neither Tocqueville nor Beaumont fell in love in 1831 (frustrated by the chastity of American women, they had no love affairs either), so Amelia is one of Carey’s many inventions. But Tocqueville does love Connecticut as much as Olivier because, for both—historical actor and character—the towns of the state represent model units of local self-governance. Run by their town meetings and voluntary associations, they show Tocqueville democracy at its most vital and quaint, perhaps because the stakes remain small enough to be particular, and aristocrats like to be particular. In the novel, the people of Wethersfield move to build roads and raise taxes for the school, but they also deliberate on whether to patent a Wethersfield onion, and the participatory nature of it all (or else the onion) brings tears to Olivier’s eyes. If “the great lava flow of democracy came inexorably toward us,” and if we went with the flow, then maybe the future could feel as careless as the Godefroy onion fields growing half-wildly in the deep alluvial soil of the Connecticut valley. “Your town meeting rather shook me to my bones,” Olivier tells Amelia. “I am still reverberating” (262). But he blushes and knows when he says it that he is talking as much about her effect on him as the meeting’s. It becomes increasingly obvious that the irresistible power of democracy—even the unsettling way it creates a “restlessness of spirit” and social activity and a craving for continual excitement—feels a lot like falling in love. “I thought, Miss Godefroy. Restlessness of spirit” (215).

It is only when Olivier stands on a bridge of rock behind Kaaterskill Falls, where Amelia’s father had brought him (crying into his ear, “Now you are American”), that falling in love, with democracy or Amelia, seems more like a self-annihilating plunge—a falling away into “a terrifying and foreign obscurity” (354). Olivier’s asthma returns: “There was no air in America,” he says, “only this great suffocating mass which would wash me clear away. I pressed my mouth against the rock behind me, and so could almost breathe” (354). At the falls, he remembers the July Revolution, just as Tocqueville did at Niagara Falls, when visions of the civil war at home seemed to slide, as Tocqueville writes, “between me and my surroundings,” so that only his attachments to an aristocracy that has outlived its use seem to save him from giving way to the “mass.” Olivier tells us that the trip to Kaaterskill Falls gives Mr. Godefroy a new excuse to praise the artist Thomas Cole, who had painted them, and whose picture Autumn on the Hudson hangs ostentatiously in the Godefroy foyer. So we come to picture the waterfall that sickens Olivier as if it were a Thomas Cole painting and then wonder whether—in the face of such a garish picture—we should be horrified too. Kaaterskill Falls are the beginning of the end of Olivier’s engagement to Amelia. He couldn’t bring her home to his mother. She loves “innovation” too much. She incorrectly uses the dewhen she addresses him as “de Garmont.”

So who, in Parrot and Olivier in America, is Parrot? Olivier’s friend Thomas Blacqueville, another Norman aristocrat, is set to travel with him to America, but the great ingenuity of Carey’s novel is to kill off his Beaumont before they set sail. Instead, Olivier (really a composite of Tocqueville and Beaumont) is accompanied by John Larrit, a.k.a. Parrot, an irreverent English engraver twenty-four years his senior whose first-person narration of the journey alternates with Olivier’s own. Olivier has bad handwriting, as Tocqueville did—Leo Damrosch tells us that Tocqueville called his illegible scrawl crottes de lapin (“rabbit turds”)—so Parrot acts as Olivier’s secretary, but also spies on him and reports back to the Comtesse, his Maman. Parrot has a history we learn slowly: when his father, a journeyman printer, is arrested for forging banknotes, Parrot (then orphaned at twelve) finds himself in the hands of a counter-revolutionary Frenchman (and the Comtesse’s lover), the Marquis de Tilbot, who abandons him on board a ship of convicts bound for Australia. Years later Tilbot returns for Parrot, who joins him on an expedition to engrave Australian plants for the Empress Josephine, and then follows him to Paris where he lives as his servant and trades in botanicals. By the time Parrot leaves for America with Olivier, we know that this bawdy, cocky mimic (“Parrot”), with his broguey idiom, is capable of illustrating whatever he sees as he sees it and will give us a fair account of the aristocrat he serves.

For Parrot, Olivier is Lord Migraine and Little Pintle d’Pantedly, who is fatefully unadapted to the energies of America, where people can start over as quickly as they can burn their homes and collect insurance on them. For Olivier, Parrot is a presumptuous copyist who thinks his time is his own (“His time? This was a very modern concept he had learned” [319].) Coming to terms with America is also Olivier’s way of learning to live with Parrot, who he comes to love a little too, and with a new set of relations defined by what we do, not what we are. There are no masters in America, just “bosses,” and sometimes they and their “help” shoot the breeze. If all this “malodorous égalité” depresses Olivier “awfully,” it is because he believes it is the opposite of his liberty to resist it and also because the restless, agitated society around him feels always, tyrannically, the same (199). “Variety is vanishing from the human species,” Tocqueville writes; he also means that democracy takes us beyond a political society, defined by its differences in opinion and thought, toward a commercial society that acknowledges only the differences a market can make. But, in the novel, Parrot finds his freedom in the market, where he eventually sells his engravings to great success and buys a house with his mistress on the Hudson. An undiscriminating public is less threatening for the artist who aims to please it.

Often Olivier and Parrot clash for aesthetic reasons; they can never agree on what constitutes art when they see it, since Olivier is never convinced that a democracy can produce it. Art in a democracy, says Olivier, “suit[s] the tastes of the market, which is filled with its own doubt and self-importance and ignorance, its own ability to be tricked and titillated by every bauble” (379). By the end of the novel, Parrot shows us how easily art in America accommodates itself to commercialism; art becomes a way of living, but its professionalism is never far from hucksterism and debasing forms of trade. Scenes of his mistress, Mathilde, painting portraits are also scenes of prostitution (her clients “ask her price” and then she sets out to “do” them). In New York, Parrot becomes the business partner of Algernon Watkins, an English artist who was also a forger during the French Revolution, by printing and marketing the pictures he engraves. Watkins is a fictionalized John James Audubon and his goal is to make the greatest book of life-size colored bird prints the world has ever seen. But really, Carey has divided the historical figure of Audubon between Watkins and Parrot, the artist and entrepreneur, since Audubon was both. Audubon’s The Birds of America was as much a marketing phenomenon as an event in the history of engraving, and Parrot’s prospectus for Watkins’ book of the same name reproduces Audubon’s pitch and secures his same subscriptions from European royalty. Audubon applied glazes to his birds to intensify the brilliance of the variegated colors of paint which he densely layered for a dazzling, animating effect. Parrot’s birds have a similar gloss, and the sample he proudly shows Olivier reminds the aristocrat of the surface splendor and glare of Thomas Cole’s painting. “It was nothing much more than a circus bird,” Olivier says, “but [Parrot] stood before me full of hope, like a boy in a fairy story, off to make his fortune in the world” (327).

But it is finally Mathilde’s later pictures that baffle Olivier most: abstracted landscapes made of colors and glazes she paints for pleasure, not business, and that experiment with the “luminous mystery of New York light” (376). “The paintings are awful,” Olivier says (377). Like luminist paintings of the mid-nineteenth century (by John Frederick Kensett or Sanford Robinson Gifford), Mathilde’s effort to “[paint] only the light” of a broad open space (246)—to create, that is, the effect of a diffused atmosphere—may feel to Olivier like being bathed in the all-enveloping iridescent haze of Kaaterskill Falls. The abstract paintings, which depict nothing in particular (“They are not exactly paintings”), may be the aesthetic correlative of the generalizing potential of democracy to softly permeate the total world around you (377). For Parrot they are the sign of the future of art, a lustrous, radiant vision of the New York horizon Mathilde sees from her house on the Hudson; but Olivier is near-sighted and can’t make them out. His myopia is a constant source of slapstick ridicule in the novel—he really can’tsee—and modeled on (what else?) Tocqueville’s own legendary near-sightedness that Beaumont describes during their travels in America: “He is very nearsighted, so when he came to what he thought was quite a narrow river, he did not hesitate to swim across. But he was wrong: in fact, the river was so wide that he was dead tired by the time he made it to the other bank.” The horizon is always receding and because Tocqueville misjudges the distance he would have to go to get there, he comes “close to drowning.”

Mathilde’s paintings are also a sign of American exceptionalism, since she tries to paint “New York” light; but Olivier says, “the same sun shines on everything” (377). Parrot believes that America is a place of progress that has superseded the antiquated world of France they left behind and that Olivier will retreat to in the end. Parrot has the last words of the novel, and they are canny because we learn, finally, that this story of democracy and progress is merely his own since he has written the whole of it (of course! Olivier doesn’t write because his handwriting is bad). Parrot looks into the future and says, in his final dedication to Olivier, that his fears have been “phantoms”: “Look,” he says, “it is daylight . . . There is no tyranny in America, nor ever could be. The great ignoramus will not be elected. The illiterate will never rule” (381). Still, as readers living now in the future he prognosticates, we are not so sure that the “great ignoramus” has not been elected, or won’t be, and anyway, Parrot is just a parrot. Parrot’s insistence on America’s democracy can never be final, because we know we’ve lost the sense of difference that Olivier made.

Further Reading:

Peter Carey draws on George Wilson Pierson’sTocqueville and Beaumont in America (New York, 1938). For more on Tocqueville and Beaumont’s American travels, including their letters, travel notebooks and sketches from 1831, see Olivier Zunz, ed., Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont in America: Their Friendship and Their Travels, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Charlottesville, 2010). Tocqueville famously describes his experience of democracy in Democracy in America(1835-1840); for critical views, see Sheldon S. Wolin,Tocqueville Between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life (Princeton, 2001) and Leo Damrosch, Tocqueville’s Discovery of America (New York, 2010). On John James Audubon as an engraver and entrepreneur, see Annette Blaugrund and Theodore E. Stebbins Jr., eds., John James Audubon: The Watercolors for The Birds of America (New York, 1993) and Richard Rhodes, John James Audubon: The Making of an American (New York, 2004).

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Elisa Tamarkin is associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author ofAnglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (2008).

 

Kyle Roberts’s Evangelical Gotham persuasively demonstrates that American evangelicals shaped the development of New York City, even as New York City shaped the development of American evangelicalism. Arguing against an older body of literature that Roberts claims focuses too much on the rural—think open-air camp meetings, portable pulpits, and people fainting under the stars—Roberts contends that New York City was at least as important as Cane Ridge in the growth of American evangelicalism.

What Roberts understands by “evangelicalism” is a distinctly modern form of religion, at the “heart of [which]… is an inherent tension between individual-focused conversion and community-based activism” (4). Roberts downplays differences between evangelicals, suggesting instead that New Yorkers were united by the “basic principles of individual conversion and community activism” rather than fixated on “the theological distinctions that divided them” (116). It is the tension between individualism and communalism that Roberts connects to the city itself, as he argues that the dislocations faced by many New Yorkers (the crossings and dwellings, in Thomas Tweed’s conception) made them long for a faith that could help them to both find “community amid overwhelming anonymity” as well as navigate the demands of an individualistic culture that seemed to reward self-directed strivers. Says Roberts, “Evangelicalism provided a very useful religion for New Yorkers…. [It] served as a resource for the dislocated, provided a moral code, and drove community and city growth” (7).

Roberts plays out this argument about the usefulness of evangelicalism chronologically, in three parts bookended by the Revolution and Civil War. He explains that this periodization corresponds to three modes of being evangelical: 1) an inward mode, focused on one’s own conversion, as a post-revolutionary generation crossed into the city and sought to dwell within it; 2) an outward mode after the War of 1812, focused on others’ conversions, as reformers ventured into hospitals, almshouses, brothels, and tenements, and then wrote and published voluminously about their experiences; and 3) a renewed withdrawal after the Panic of 1837, when New York evangelicals, like the rest of the nation, felt unsettled and ill at ease, retreating into antebellum domesticity rather than acknowledge their complicity in the sin of slavery. The chronological division is clear, though it could have used more engagement with the turning points themselves—what were evangelicals’ lives like during the War of 1812, for instance?—and a bit more messiness than the periodization allows.

Roberts takes care to show the spatial transformations occurring alongside this chronology. He shows how evangelicals made sacred space in the city out of old rigging lofts and schoolhouses, barns and grocery stores, docks and ships. Over the course of the book, we see these ad hoc worship spaces transform into grander venues as evangelicals gain influence and money, such as in the consecration of the Broadway Tabernacle out of a large theater. Roberts also shows how evangelical churches, including Broadway Tabernacle, were undone by disagreements over slavery, and how Manhattan’s sacred landscape exhibited its own form of (genteel, white) flight in the years leading up to the Civil War, when a number of evangelical churches moved uptown as the downtown population of Jews, Catholics, and African Americans surged.

Roberts supports his chronology with images and maps throughout, showing the location and changing building style of churches over time. (To take just one example, the incongruously enormous steeple of St. Paul’s Methodist Episcopal Church perfectly proves his point about the increasing influence and monetary means of evangelicals over the period under study [245].) Roberts also provides rich quantitative data, particularly in the appendix, showing rates of congregational growth relative to population growth that illustrates his claim that “evangelical congregations emerged from the margins to the center of the urban spiritual marketplace in the generation following the American Revolution” (264). Roberts concludes the appendix with a statement that will resonate with readers familiar with the work of Jon Butler, Nathan Hatch, and John Wigger: “Much like the rest of the country, New Yorkers were more fully churched on the eve of the Civil War than they were on the eve of the American Revolution” (277).

Roberts not only gives us maps and numbers; vibrant characters also populate the pages of Evangelical Gotham. Readers will not easily forget Michael Floy Jr. and his coat with three pockets (for different kinds of reading material), who published only one evangelical tract in his lifetime, but whose lifetime of reading Roberts analyzes to great effect. Roberts also engages with the lives of reformers like Ezra Stiles Ely and Phoebe Palmer. Their stories parallel those of the churches that moved uptown; Roberts notes how Ely ended up in a “plush” pulpit after laboring among the impoverished, sick, and dying at the almshouse and hospital, and how Palmer retreated into genteel domesticity and the promise of perfectibility rather than engage with the pressing issues of slavery and mass immigration.

Roberts’s argument that evangelical religion was useful to New Yorkers like Floy, Ely, and Palmer, all of whom sought communal bonds in an individualistic world, emphasizes rational choice and voluntary commitment. Throughout, he draws on a “spiritual marketplace” model, emphasizing the voluntary nature of evangelicalism, and the active and free decisions that ordinary New Yorkers made to convert and to order their own and their neighbors’ lives around a reforming faith.

But other scholars are pushing back against the spiritual marketplace model as insufficiently attuned to power dynamics and constraints. In Conceived in Doubt: Religion and Politics in the New American Nation, for instance, Amanda Porterfield emphasizes Americans’ fear, doubt, and uncertainty after they decided to cast off the monarchy, which made them skittish about deistic and freethinking ideas that seemed to threaten social chaos. Evangelicals stepped into the breach with a message of order and control. In Secularism in Antebellum America, meanwhile, John Lardas Modern explores how evangelicals, through control of print media and saturation of the market, so profoundly—and often invisibly—shaped the conditions of the choices individuals made that they were never unmediated or entirely free.

Though Roberts certainly shows the ambivalences at play in New Yorkers’ evangelicalism, one misses some of the power dynamics that are so visible in Porterfield’s and Modern’s work. To be sure, we see class tensions in Evangelical Gotham, particularly in the often snarky responses Ely gets to his mission and the ways in which the woman he tries to reform, Caroline, manipulates his attentions to her own ends. We also see New York evangelicals gaining control of print media, though unlike Modern, Roberts does not theorize what this dominance means as New York publishers essentially become the advertising agencies of nineteenth-century evangelicalism. In a section on the imposition of a grid structure on the city, Roberts also nods to scholarship on how grids enabled surveillance. Nevertheless, he explains that although “Evangelicalism has rightly been critiqued for incorporating elements of social control within its practices,” it is “important to remember that evangelicals held themselves to these standards” (90 and 297n29).

Roberts is right to reject too-simplistic social control arguments, but there remains to be explored the differences between New York City evangelicals holding themselves to these standards, holding others to them, and being held to them. Though Roberts discusses the creation of African American evangelical churches and the appeal of evangelicalism to the socially marginalized, his narrative is primarily about the growth of white middle class evangelicalism in New York City. Might evangelicalism have been a “useful religion” for these New Yorkers not just because it helped the dislocated to feel located, but also because it empowered them as key actors in the creation of a national white Protestant power structure seeking to impose moral order in the face of disorder that was read in both religious and racialized terms?

More explicitly addressing this question would help Roberts’s book connect not only to Porterfield’s and Modern’s work, but also to literature on religion and whiteness, such as Edward Blum and Paul Harvey’s The Color of Christ, which argues that the proliferation of tracts and other publications—many originating from the New York publishing houses Roberts writes about—helped to spread the white Christ far and wide, even as the white man was becoming empowered as a voting citizen. 

But “race” is treated, in Evangelical Gotham, as belonging primarily to African Americans; in the section on “Race and Gender” in the appendix, those terms refer to “African American women and men and white women” (272). Yet white men are raced and gendered people too, and white Protestant evangelicals, in particular, constructed their racial and gender identities against the disorderly people they were trying to save—Catholic immigrants of questionable whiteness (the familiar nineteenth-century images of the Irish as barely human come to mind), Jews (also of questionable whiteness in the nineteenth century), African Americans, and Chinese. Descriptions of the “dark underbelly” of New York in the penny press racialize gamblers and prostitutes, dancers and opium smokers, who appear in lurid light as dark or reddened shadows writhing in the flames of their hellish reveries. Evangelicals themselves also contributed to the construction of urban spaces as antithetical to religion. In his popular Life in New York, editor of the New York Observer Samuel Irenaeus Prime, an Old School Presbyterian trained at Princeton Theological Seminary, tried to persuade young people to stay on their farms and villages rather than seek their fortunes in the city. Even as New York was becoming an evangelical power center, it nevertheless also remained a foil against which ministers committed to the New England ideal of village life—homogenously white and Protestant—could rant and rail. Thus Gotham both spread white evangelical power through the proliferation of tracts and support of urban reform and mission societies, and also served as a foil in the construction of the white evangelical as one who remained pure despite the temptations of the mixed city.

All of this is to simply suggest how many rich avenues of inquiry Evangelical Gotham raises.  Roberts convinces that without Gotham, evangelicalism in America would not have developed into the powerhouse it became over the course of the nineteenth century; putting his work in deeper conversation with this other literature would help us to better understand the nature of its power, even as Roberts’s careful excavation helps us to better understand its primary home in Gotham.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 17.4 (Summer, 2017).

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Kathryn Gin Lum is assistant professor of Religious Studies, in collaboration with the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and History (by courtesy), at Stanford University. She is the author of Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction (2014) and co-editor, with Paul Harvey, of the Oxford Handbook of Religion and Race in American History (forthcoming, Oxford University Press, 2018). She is currently working on a book tentatively titled The Heathen World and America’s Humanitarian Impulse (under contract with Harvard University Press).

[The Historical Cast]

Reverend John Eliot (1604-1690)—Known as the Apostle to the Indians, Eliot helped found thirteen towns for “Praying Indians” and printed the Indian Bible. The conversion and protection of the Indians near Massachusetts Bay became his life’s work.

John Sassamon (c.1625-1675)—Massachusett Indian and translator for Eliot. He served as an interpreter and soldier for the puritan colonists in the Pequot War, attended Harvard, translated the entire Bible into Algonquian with Eliot, and became a Christian minister. His murder, allegedly at the order of the Indian Sachem Philip, precipitated King Philip’s War.

Robert Boyle (1627-1691)—Considered by many to be the founder of modern chemistry, he is best known today for Boyle’s Law of Gasses. A wealthy and influential man who helped found The Royal Society, Boyle was also a devoted Christian who became president of The Corporation for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England, which funded Eliot’s mission.

[Eliot, of Sassamon]

‘God first put into my heart a compassion over their poor Souls, and a desire to teach them to know Christ, and to bring them into his Kingdom. Then presently I found out (by God’s wise providence) a pregnant witted young man, who had been a Servant in an English house, who pretty well understood our Language, better than he could speak it, and well understood his own Language, and hath a clear pronunciation: Him I made my Interpreter. By his help I translated the Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, and many Texts of Scripture. Also I compiled both Exhortations and Prayers by his help.’ He is well-used— he sees words
in the air of it. To change one or some is simple, he says: breathe
words in, to the meaning (keeping that inside lungs)
and the tune another language likes
(keeping that simply singing)
—this divergent mix enters unto
some obscure process
of organic formation—
and press that out his mouth! This air
then fills the air. You will notice Sassamon’s position,
in interpreting, is always upwind. This air, these two languages in two forms moves toward a third. By example, as I understand it, a body mass of understood English words (approaches unto in the air) a larger more firm (though airie) space of Massachusett “understanding” (itself as a form). All this, he sees within his visual consciousness.

The known words drift toward the understanding and, as tide to a shore, form to its shape. This formation appears to him as the words interpreted. The sounds interpreted. Though in a way other than letters. More, I deduce, like an air-made landscape or map of meaning.

Thus, many scenes of desired interpretation have been given over for bad weather, winds, etc. He likes nothing better than a most gentle and constant zephyr. A still day tends to infuriate as a stubborn mule would. Airy tempests (as can sometimes favor our new coast) put a cold stop to any adventure, even within a good wigwam. These acting, I deduce, like a disappearing of ink or rather a constant hand scraping the slate. Firesmoke is not unpleasant to this miraculous conversation of currents.

As I have my Light Appearing More and More Towards the Perfect Day, he says, so he can hope for air appearing more and more towards the perfect translation of that, the Bible of our Massachusett language.

He looks to books because they affect not the air, but also they have none. A thing he desires and fears.

I am working to proceed with his ideas, being as they are a cause or by-product of his particular genius, and only know to start here: Breath indeed is the prayer of a new creature.

[Logic Primer]

[Eliot]

And these Indians, ‘musical sounds they also have, and perfect Harmony, but they differ from us in sound.

There be four several sorts of Sounds or Tones uttered by Mankind.
1. Articulation in Speech.
2. Laughter.
3. Laetation and Joy: of which kind of sounds our Music and Song is made.
4. Ululation, Howling, Yelling, or Mourning: and of that kind of sound is their Music and Song made.’

And I only mourn. As we work, my children,
my wife and children, die.
One by one they fall, they go, they rise.
I see them like trees. In their absence
from the field around me,
the field of vision
I labor in, I set my mind
to a new frame: making the firebrand

God’s own hand from hip to toe
showing me to know Him in this burning
numb forerunner of heaven. A missive

only into mine own mind—the seal
inward for no man to see
or them to feel though I am struck

to the ground by it, such is His call
that our eyes cannot look upon Him.
This feeble wheel of mine feels

afire from His mere token & reminder: ‘Up,
and be doing, and the Lord will be with thee.’

To take that next step & taste the light
wrought across my very eyes
by the Lord’s electric storm

down my right side shaking even
my teeth. My comings & goings
secretly mapped—a geography

of sensation I inwardly diagram
by loving attention—grown of
a sort of metallic hum of empty

 

what is not as once there. The new clear space
hardly innominate. Gone. But what was that space
before their passed presences? Any blank
is God. They were all there once. One by one until but Anne and the one boy. Gone. Space, their presence in it, their absence from it, Godspace. Until but the one boy—Joseph, like a holy but half-used father to me. Oh Anne. She will not return to me, but I will go unto her. ‘My desire was that they should serve God on earth; but if God will choose rather to have them serve him in heaven, I have nothing to object against it, his will be done
to take my family to himself’ and I
will bear the metal tooth
gnashing time about me, the work
unfinished, the field wide open and white
but a want of workers.
We must finish.

[Sassamon]

One word becomes another by suffocation across whatever is the virgin, inviolable concept. One wallowing becomes another wallowing—the way men will die the same but make different noises to do it. Guttural resistant clicks or that nice rounded resignation, blood and meaning pool in the throat
to push out pure air. We take
one step back
and lay a little word
to each thing. Suffocating.
When summer runs long
I hide on the island for days to gather distance
and then swim into it crying out like an English woman dying just to live in one real moment of silence. Finding great relief each year in my surprise that this simple and deliberate mechanism remains effective.
I swim ashore and return to work. The work.

[Eliot, to the Corporation
for the Propagation of the Gospel]

I have sent the commissioners of the colony ‘my requests for some help of some great charges this year; but they are pleased to answer me with silence, as it is wont to be … and my humble request is that it may be paid, and then I shall be out of debt; but if it should be refused, than my hands are tied, I can do little; yet I am resolved through the grace of Christ, I will never give over the work so long as I have legs to go. I am at a dead lift in the work; if the Lord stir up the hearts of men to help me, blessed be his name, and blessed be they that help me; if no man help me. … There be many things lie before me, wherein I might promote the work, and fix the hearts of the Indians, but I cannot come at them for want of means. … Messengers and instruments look for their pay, and if that fail, the whole moves very heavily and will quickly stand still. … My humble request unto yourselves the honorable corporation is, that you would put me into such an order or way, that I may know where to pay such instruments as I set on work. If instruments fail, the work will fail. Instruments are the wheels of our motion, and if they want oil they will soon want power of motion. I could employ a great revenue in promoting the work.’

[Robert Boyle,
scientist and president of the Corporation,
a personal note to Eliot]

Honorable Reverend in Christ— As we both seek the improvement of souls by our clear faculties I fear lest our conversation become dull mortal money matters. Your work is the only answer of truth—and by that I proceed. You shall be supported. I enclose humble notes toward my latest work, A General History of Air, building from and toward fresh experiments, as I know our godly educated ministers of New England to be interested what experience and experiment can deduce of God’s many gifts to us… I hope these notes may also serve the learned notions of your once savage translator…

[Sassamon]

I swim toward the point, which is to remain underwater. The point is to remain. To remain separate from my self: if you find heaven under there, you will first experience it in fleeting only ached moments. But you can train yourself slow to remain longer without which keeps you out of heaven. And, like the grampus, you need only rise briefly into hell for a breath. And with keeping the ears out of the air. Just lungs lifting upward, eyes closed.

[Boyle]

‘Wherefore the Air, being a Body so important in our Speculations of Nature, and so necessary to the Continuance of our Lives, I could not but think it deserv’d, that we should solicitously inquire, whether it may or may not be produc’d by Art; for if it can be so by any, not very uneasily practicable ways, the Discovery may not only help us to explicate some difficult Phenomena of Nature, but may afford us, among several other Uses, that of enabling us to supply diverse, if not also submarine Navigators with fresh Air produced under Water, and thereby lengthen their staying in Places, where the Continuance of it may be of great Use both speculative and practical.’ ‘I shall offer to your Consideration the Accidents that often happen to Men, by the mere Air, as Convulsions, Cramps, Blastings, Lameness, Colds, many of which indure a Man’s Life-time; and which (with many bitter Infirmities that sometimes seize upon a Man, while standing, walking, or lying in the Air) are rarely or never felt or discerned at the Instant of their Approach or Insults upon a Man.’

[Logic Primer]

[Sassamon, of Printing the Bible]

These pages indeed require a new attempt at binding by us.
We have not made something
this big, never yet everything.
The binding inlightens the Word
into word order, His order, Ordo Salutis. The Old Testament three years in the press my arm forcing the devil’s arm over and down pressing paper ink metal for three years. We have smoothed over the imposing stone with our endless literal sweat. Our bled letter’d fingertips. The inkballs making ink seemingly from their swinging through air I see the entire Bible writ there in reversed letters.

At night my eyes close backward
on verse I sleep
outside myself for looking back
down upon p & q
upon me as I hope the Lord
reads what’s impressed
into my very vision.

Hand-justified, writ out from one pen each letter set after getting clean in my ear air eye as Eliot reads aloud.

I dream: inside shut covers the volume of it is His eternal void & ocean the words swim meaning endlessly and then—we open it—and His divine direction falls the words to our senses.

To see the tongue done and bound like this as in billable columns—one two three four to find it thus arranged four frozen waterfalls of eternally.

Imagine our earth thus pressed
if each holy page contains eternities
is the book shut then
rejoicing or otherwise?
Ink sewing itself into the rag’d paper, pulped
from what people have worn about
are these imprints a worldly making
of the inbetween subterraneal and heavenly—
type form, tympan—
the captured air words of just above
our heads grabbed down and pressed
to paper—as retrieved
saints to the gravestone,
what limited immortalization
we are capable of with this press
taking language of all God’s intermediaries
we have deduced
and designed to our own designs
this bookblock as the
compressed aviary for captured
prophets— yet most sense not
the tension in binding these pages.

Like a native tongue (to your mouth)
laid out babbling from God’s beginning of time
even running past you to Revelation—such a totality of noise.
And where do we stand?
Between the last page of Jude and the first of Revelation!
We are right now two inches of un-inked paper. Good luck and God bide you.

We do indeed need two praying hands to hold it—such divine design.

It looks lovely.
I want to breathe it.

[Boyle, to John Eliot]

‘I waited this day upon the King with your translation of the Bible.’

 

---

Statement of Poetic Research

My first book of poems, Puritan Spectacle, used the language and oomph of puritan conversion narratives to write “American common prayers” for Big Macs, cheerleaders, mall food courts, interstate highways, etc. The idea was to find real meaning in our factual (not imagined) landscape. I picture my works of poetry and history as think tanks on America: get all the brightest voices and minds together (in the case of Bright Advent, from seventeenth-century Massachusetts), give them some excellent materials to interact with, and stand back. Then jump in and edit them. Then stand back again.

I completed the research for Bright Advent during a creative research fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society. I’d been working for some time on a book-length treatment of the events and people involved in the lead-up to King Philip’s War: the seventeenth-century translation of the entire Bible into Algonquian; the Reverend John Eliot and his Indian translator John Sassamon; the Praying Indian towns; and the puritan (and Indian) conversion narrative. The rough “plot” of this book of poetry was in place when I began my formal research; however, the project was full of gaps, both historical and literary.

For example, Sassamon’s apparent genius as a linguist and translator had emerged, in the imaginative space of my pages, as a sort of gift for visualizing language that occurs in the very air around his head. I enjoyed this conceit, and it was generating great “scenes,” but it remained unconnected to anything in the larger book. One of the great discoveries for my research, then, was that scientist Robert Boyle served as the president of the Corporation for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England (the main funding agency for Eliot’s mission and translation work). Among Boyle’s many works (we know him best for his Law of Gases) is the posthumous collection of his ongoing investigation, A General History of Air. We also have—and I read in the archives—some of his communications with Eliot during the time period on which I was focusing.

This connection between a historical fact—Boyle’s experiments on the properties of air—and my imagined cause for another historical fact—John Sassamon’s gift for translating “in the air”—illustrates the serendipity of creative research. Poets often find that historical and imagined material stitch together with uncanny, synergistic ease to reveal “truths,” in sum, that are greater than their parts.

In addition to my introduction to Boyle’s work on air, my research also introduced me to many of the items that appear in the pages presented here: the mechanisms of colonial printing (which I was able to both read about and observe); the feel and heft of an actual copy of the “Indian Bible”; the fact that Eliot suffered from paralyzing bouts of sciatic pain; and, of course, a wealth of stunning source material that I use in this manuscript as part of the “voice” of my “characters.” Readers will note how the source material from my research influenced the look of my work on the page as lyric verse lines mingle with prose chunks. This pressure on formal arrangement, in many ways, was the most profound effect of the historical source on this manuscript: to coax my pages away from being verse that happened to have history in it; to permit the historical record to build a version of its own truth with poetry.

 

AFRICA from the beſt AUTHORITIES

Where Africa’s coast slips into oceans
And seas, its outline is lightly shadowed.
From there words bristle, rough stubble, no,

More like a halo radiating names—Thomas,
Lucia, Christopher, Stephens—saints
And people some thought important

Enough to warrant namesakes along
That shore. Researching the American
Colonization of Liberia

In the American Antiquarian
Society’s reading room, looking
For western views of the continent

For context, I’ve been looking at old maps
Of Africa all day. This map keeps drawing
Me back with its claim of “AFRICA

From the beſt AUTHORITIES” and all
Those names—less divine light and more
Like a ruff, the fashionable starched collar

Of Queen Elizabeth’s time, circumscribing
Africa. The hinterland, the interior, wasn’t
Safe from the cartographer’s hand—hardly

A blank spot on the continent—borders drawn,
Rivers traced and lakes laid down. Clumps of neat
Lollipop trees with shade under them represent

Forests while snaking rows of comma strokes
Denote mountains. The names of peoples and kingdoms
Crisscross the land (I’m loath to say like welts left

Across a slave’s back by an overseer’s whip because
It’s too easy, though I see the damage done
By each hand) and words almost get lost—

MOROCCO, EGYPT, NUBIA, ABYSSINIA,
ZAHARA or the DESART, Tombuctoo,
N  E  G  R  O  L  A  N  D, DAHOMY, B E N I N,

Biafara, LOWER ETHIOPIA, A Savage People,
CAFFRARIA, Men Eaters, Gold Mines, Hottentots,
And places and peoples I don’t know. Commodities

Line the coast past Sierra Leone: Grain Coaft, Ivory Coaft,
And on this map the cartographer wrote Gold Coast as Goad Coaft,
Next to its neighbor, Slave Coaft. All of this ringed by

Those names in English and Arabic and various Romance
Languages like a wedding band from an ill-intentioned man.

Schieffelin Bros. Exports & Imports

2010 [1]

My dusky ear hears a similarity between Schieffelin
and shuffling, the sound of steam engines
and many wings rustling when a murmuration
of starlings takes flight all together

like a coffle—that word came to English in the eighteenth century
from the Arabic word for “caravan” and even though it rhymes
with “awful” it seems a euphemistic way to describe stolen
manpower, muscle and motor skills mustered (in a coffle)

to usher in the prosperity of a nation.
In the nineteenth century, before starlings arrived,
the proliferation of steam engines and mechanization
precedes the rising wave of industrialization.

1851 [2]

Henry, the older Schieffelin brother, entered the business first
—moved commodities and goods from one place

to another, across waters and borders—helped
the American Colonization Society export American-born

negroes to Liberia. And for his efforts and money Henry
has a namesake town—Schieffelinville—in Liberia still on the maps.

1890 [3]

As the story goes, younger brother Eugene, a charter member
of the American Acclimatization Society, got the bright idea to import
every bird that left Shakespeare’s quill to fill this land with their songs
and perhaps cultivate another great bard.

And as for Eugene’s legacy, for plaguing this land
with starlings, his name has lately come up
in environmentalist circles—a newer movement
more concerned with impact than importing.

1957 [4]

Besides being prolific, starlings are proficient mimics
of other birds’ songs. The sounds of starlings like a fog of hornets
or a stinging cloud of starlings, say, or swarm of negroes

like those dreaded Africanized bees that threaten
the Americas; you hear about them on the news
when there’s no blood to lead and scant terrorists’ chatter.

1816 [5]

The society saw the Americo-Africans,
good Christians, as a civilizing force
to make the “blighted dark continent” brighter.

1847 [6]

When independence came the Liberians based their constitution
on the founding fathers’ frame—a likeness similar
to daguerreotypes like the ones Augustus Washington,
a black daguerreotypist, made in his Hartford, Connecticut studio.

1859 [7]

Washington mastered this mid-century art
and made a living and name for himself
producing framed likenesses “correct and beautiful.”

Rich and poor sat for this working artist;—
he even photographed John Brown
before immigrating to Liberia in 1853.

Nineteenth Century [8]

The Schieffelin brothers, apropos
of their urges, made their fortunes
in shipping and pharmaceuticals
(exporting negroes and importing

starlings only hobbies) while all
around them the Second Great
Awakening and improvement
movements changed the face of the nation.

1872 [9]

Folks like Allen Yancy and Sandy Gannoway,
recently freed negroes from Milledgeville, Georgia,
and thereabouts decided that one morning they
would awaken in Philadelphia, Liberia

—just four degrees off the equator,
so no twilight before the sun broke
the darkness like a lightning bolt
or liberty in their new home.

2002 [10]

Though not necessarily in daguerreotypes,
in some art fish represent sex and birds freedom.

And who don’t love catfish like Black men love
their cars: Firebirds and Thunderbirds, even Skylarks,

Impulses, and Pulsars—myths, birds, urges, and stars.

1849 [11]

This world we traverse
slowly wobbles under stars
on its axis like a top,

and polaris hangs marking always
celestial north dropping a plumb line
for us to follow making our movements

if not our positions true.

circa 450 BCE [12]

One of Zeno’s paradoxes wrangles with only ever
making it halfway because of halving
all the way and never quite
getting there.

This brings to mind, as paradoxes will,
never being met halfway and not making half an effort
or maybe the effort’s half-assed
or half-hearted and half-headed.

2011 [13]

I wonder how long
you have to claim a home
before you can comfortably feel
xenophobic.

November 16, 1872 [1]

A baby stretches
out of sleep, dawn
unfurls slowly. The sun
rises, a sigh you’re not
surprised by when you
hear it from your lips.
Dawn is different
everywhere. Allen
Yancy, Sandy Gannoway
and their families are in
Savannah this fall morning
boarding a boat
while their kinfolk
and old neighbors
wake to the rooster’s crow
back in Milledgeville.

On the steamer San Salvador,
they’re heading north—what
used to be freedom, heading
to New York, farther north
than they’ve ever gone,
and the Atlantic Ocean,
as far as they can see
on their right, nestles its
breath in their nostrils
till they can’t smell
Georgia anymore.

A Freedman Speaks of His Fellow, or From Milledgeville to New Philadelphia, 1872

Sandy Gannoway gone away from here.
That old negro headed across the water
with his old lady, son, and daughter-

in-law. This his home near seventy-two years;
—now he going off to Liberia, Land
of the Free? But he been free since Sherman

came through trailing a crowd of us contraband,
us negroes now freedmen—free to stay or wander.
Guess this place more than Sandy could bear.

Thinks he’ll realize the promise of freedom over there.
Sandy Gannoway gone away from here
leaving this freedom to us new freedmen

back here to work and fight, to make a stand or falter.
That new freedman’s headed across the water
to go be free in what they call our fatherland.

---

 

 

 

Sean Hill
Statement of Poetic Research
Daylight Breaks Again Suddenly Upon the Darkness: Revelations in the Library

As a child I was curious about objects of the past, those things put aside, the tools no longer used. My great-grandfather’s Polaroid model 95A with bellows that collapsed like an accordion, my great-grandmother’s treadle Singer sewing machine and my great-uncle’s rusty anvil and plough first drew me into wondering how they worked and then into wondering about how they were used and how the people who used them lived—what we now call material culture. This was the kind of history that interested me.

But when it came to poetry, like many young poets, my first poems focused on myself. It was this exploration of my personal identity that ultimately led me to an exploration of the past. I’d brought several poems about my relationship with my father to a creative writing workshop, and a female classmate challenged me to write about the women in my family. That challenge and my response led to a sea change in my poetry. After an informal interview with my grandmother, I used her oral history to craft a sonnet sequence based on her life. Those sonnets whetted my appetite for history and using historical material—the details that had fascinated me as a child—in poetry. I began to focus on not only my family’s stories but also the stories and history of the black community in Milledgeville, Georgia, my hometown. This led me to invent a character, Silas Wright, in order to explore the history of Milledgeville in persona poems—poems in which Silas or one of his contemporaries is the speaker. I intentionally made Silas a generation older than my grandmother so that I would have to dig deeper into the history. In addition to talking to older members of my community, I read local history books and local newspaper articles from the 1800s and early 1900s. I continued to hone my craft, experimenting with poetic forms, voice, and associative imagery. As a result of learning more about Milledgeville and about craft, I wrote my first book, Blood Ties & Brown Liquor.

While reading James Bonner’s Milledgeville: Georgia’s Antebellum Capitalfor Blood Ties & Brown Liquor, I came across mention of two black men who snagged my imagination. They were Sandy Gannoway, an elderly man from Milledgeville, and Allen Yancy, a young man from the neighboring town of Sparta, Georgia. In late 1872 each of them, along with their families, became part of the 150 people from central Georgia immigrating to Liberia. I wondered about their motivations to emigrate after Emancipation and during Reconstruction. And I wondered about Sandy Gannoway’s decision to return to Milledgeville so quickly, in early 1874. But that wasn’t a part of Silas Wright’s story or my vision for Blood Ties & Brown Liquor.

It was also around this time that I was introduced to the poetry of C.P. Cavafy. His poem “Kaisarion” affirmed my belief in the possibilities of exploring history with poetry. In “Kaisarion” the speaker, whom I closely identified with, gives the reader his motivation for reading a history text late one night. “Partly to throw light on a certain period, / partly to kill an hour or two,” is the insouciantly ambivalent reason given for opening the book. But it is the speaker’s serendipitous finding of “a brief / insignificant mention of King Kaisarion” which commands his attention, as Cavafy writes in the third stanza:

And there you were with your indefinable charm.
Because we know
so little about you from history,
I could fashion you more freely in my mind.
I made you good-looking and sensitive.
My art gives your face
a dreamy, an appealing beauty.
And so completely did I imagine you
that late last night,
as my lamp went out—I let it go out on purpose—
it seemed you came into my room,
it seemed you stood there in front of me, looking just as you would have
in conquered Alexandria,
pale and weary, ideal in your grief,
still hoping they might take pity on you,
those scum who whispered: “Too many Caesars.”

The scant historical information he has about Kaisarion grants the speaker liberty to flesh out the skeletal image he gets from history. The speaker experiences an epiphanic moment when the lamp goes out and Kaisarion appears. In the dim history and the darkness of his room the poet’s imagination can throw light on and evoke this historical figure. The poet’s revelation about who Kaisarion is brings this ancient royal personage of minor status to life again. I consider this poem a found ars poetica that applies to my own poetic projects. It articulates my process, at least in part. When I’m writing and revivifying history with my poetry, I feel like a conduit between the past and the present.

I carried Sandy Gannoway and Allen Yancy around with me for a number of years with the intention of someday researching Liberia, the American Colonization Society, and these men’s experiences. After Blood Ties & Brown Liquor found a home at the University of Georgia Press, I took stock of the poems that I’d written outside of the project and found the beginnings of my second manuscript, Dangerous Goods. Between starting Blood Ties & Brown Liquor and getting it published I’d moved from the Deep South to the Upper Midwest. The poems that I’d written exploring my new home, Bemidji, Minnesota, formed the germ of this new book. I began to wonder more about Allen Yancy and Sandy Gannoway; I thought that their leaving the South for a new country might be similar, in a way, to my move to Minnesota, which felt like a different country to me. Their story and the story of Liberia fit in well with the themes of my new manuscript.

Bonner’s brief mention of Allen Yancy and Sandy Gannoway in the context of what was happening in Milledgeville after the Civil War led me to articles in the Milledgeville newspaper, The Union Recorder. But I didn’t know very much about Liberia, the American Colonization Society, or immigration, particularly during the Reconstruction era. These were the things I was interested in researching when I went to the American Antiquarian Society in March 2010. I learned from my experience doing research for Blood Ties & Brown Liquor that period newspapers give one a window into the everyday world of an era—from the things found to be newsworthy to what was on sale at the local dry goods store. Primary documents are also invaluable sources of language and textural details for poems.

Part of what I do is attempt to imagine the physical reality of places in the past; those details help me understand and imagine people’s experience. For example, since I’ve moved to northern Minnesota, I’ve noticed the atmospheric differences ten or fifteen degrees in latitude make not just in temperature but in the quality and amount of sunlight. But I hadn’t thought about the simple and obvious fact of light in Liberia until one day in my AAS reading, I came across this passage about the equatorial sunlight and twilight in Liberia: The Americo-African Republic by Thomas McCants Stewart:

The Americo-African Republic lies wholly within the tropics, and is very near the equator. Its southern extremity is only four degrees north of that great belt, and its northern limit seven degrees. The days and nights are practically equal. There is no twilight. Darkness follows fast behind the setting sun; and the daylight breaks again suddenly upon the darkness.

Stewart, an African American lawyer from South Carolina, immigrated to Liberia in 1883 where he taught at Liberia College for a couple of years before returning to the United States. His observations will help me imagine my way into Gannoway’s and Yancy’s reality.

I also spent time simply looking at all of the maps of Africa in the AAS holdings in an attempt to better understand the world in which Gannoway and Yancy lived. When I was working on Blood Ties & Brown Liquor, I found a large map of Milledgeville from 1908 at the Milledgeville courthouse, a copy of which I hung on my wall. I looked at it every day, several times a day. It was invaluable not only in showing me how the reality of Milledgeville had changed and grown since 1908, but it also revealed what the cartographer of the time perceived as relevant to this representation of Milledgeville. It made me rethink Milledgeville and the past a little more. With this experience in mind, I looked at those maps of Africa to see what cartographers and explorers and would-be explorers saw and represented and expected to see. The poem “AFRICA from the beftAUTHORITIES” is based on my encounter with one of those maps.

While “AFRICA from the beft AUTHORITIES” came out of poring over maps, another poem was sparked by one of those serendipitous finds that sometimes occur with research. I stumbled onto the mention in an acknowledgments page of a Henry M. Schieffelin, a benefactor of Liberia and member of the American Colonization Society. I immediately wondered if he was connected to another minor historic figure I had written about in another poem—Eugene Schieffelin. This other Schieffelin, a charter member of the American Acclimatization Society, was responsible for introducing the European Starling to this continent. That bird is now considered by many to be a pest—a non-native invasive species. The AAS staff was able to track down the Schieffelin family tree and confirm that Henry was Eugene’s older brother. I was fascinated by their involvements with, in the case of Eugene, bringing starlings to the United States, and in the case of Henry, colonizing Africa with American-born folks of African descent. Their motivations, the ways they supposed they were improving the United States with their actions, inspired the meditative poem “Schieffelin Bros. Exports & Imports.”

I spent some time digging into issues of the American Colonization Society’s publication The African Repository and found the narrative of Sandy Gannoway and Allen Yancy’s trip to Liberia. Reading that account, I felt I’d found my people—my ancestors, in a way. Though as far as I know I’m not related to any of the folks that left Georgia on that “expedition,” I did feel an affinity for them. I have a sense of what leaving could mean—the feelings and emotions tangled up with putting distance between yourself and what you’ve known as home.

I went to the AAS interested in immigration to Liberia during the Reconstruction era—curious about the choice between the recent freedom of most Black Americans here or the different freedom there. I was also looking for a broader historical context, startling images, texture, details, and language—delicious, chewy language—all of which I found. But my findings kindled a desire for more. This is an ongoing project; I’ve taken what I have found and crafted some poems, but I’m still learning how to use this particular historical material. And there is so much more. While I was at the AAS, Professor Ezra Greenspan, Ph.D., a fellow, introduced me to a successful African American daguerreotypist named Augustus Washington, who immigrated to Liberia in 1853. Given my fondness for photography and framing the world, Washington is definitely a figure of interest. Poetry is an empathic art. And the leaps of empathy and understanding necessary to render the psychologically plausible in a poem require me to know more and more clearly the motivations of the figures and characters I write about. I need to do my best to comprehend their circumstances and the decisions they made in those circumstances. My current manuscript, Dangerous Goods, includes the poems published here in Common-place. But I’ll continue to write poems about Liberia, and those future poems will find a place in my next project.

Further reading:

For a brief discussion of the “emigration pattern of blacks” from Milledgeville following the Civil War and mentions of Sandy Gannoway and Allen Yancy, see James Bonner, Milledgeville: Georgia’s Antebellum Capital(Athens, Ga., 1978). See also The Union Recorder, June 11, 1873 for “Letter from Liberia by Allen Yancy” and February 18, 1874, for “Sandy Gannoway, a freedman, of this county … ” an announcement of Sandy Gannoway’s return from Liberia.

The translation of C.P. Cavafy’s poem, “Kaisarion” used above can be found in its entirety in C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems, trans. by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, ed. George Savidis (Princeton, 1992).

The December 1872 issue of the American Colonization Society publication,The African Repository, features the narrative of the Society’s fall expedition—the one that conveyed Sandy Gannoway, Allen Yancy, and their fellow central Georgians to Liberia.

Liberia: The Americo-African Republic by Thomas McCants Stewart provides a fascinating firsthand account of Liberia in the 1880s.

Find a discussion of Augustus Washington and his works as well as examples at the National Portrait Gallery Website devoted to him: “A Durable Memento: Portraits by Augustus Washington, African American Daguerreotypist.”

Information About Going to Liberia, with Things Every Emigrant Ought to Know (Washington, 1852), published by the American Colonization Society, provides a helpful perspective on Liberia and the emigrant experience.

For discussions of the establishment of the American Colonization Society and the founding of Liberia, see Eric Burin’s Slavery and the Peculiar Solution: A History of the American Colonization Society (Gainesville, Fla., 2005) and The American Colonization Society and the Creation of the Liberian State: A Historical Perspective, 1822-1900 by Amos J. Beyan (Lanham, Md., 1991) and Allan Yarema’s The American Colonization Society: An Avenue to Freedom? (Lanham, Md., 2006). See also Slaves No More: Letters from Liberia 1833 – 1869, edited by Bell I. Wiley (Lexington, Ky., 1980).

The preface to Peter J. Murdza Jr.’s Immigrants to Liberia 1865 to 1904: An Alphabetical Listing (Newark, Del., 1975) provided interesting statistical and demographic insight into ACS-sponsored immigration to Liberia after the Civil War and on into the early twentieth century. The listing also proved to be a useful tool for locating specific individual emigrants and emigrant families.

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Ghosted Mirror of the double layer             they used to place the reflective material directly against the clear glass        off-set        in accelerated tangent of the splintered           and drifted           in which something shifts from one            to what opened            a door             most ghosts are like water          colorless and clear          if you look at a mirror edge on               there is someone at the door              as you stood at the mirror and adjusted your hair              the door reflected there swung back                             while the one behind you stayed shut Ghost Stories Edith Wharton      standing at the open window      said a woman is a mansion      and half the rooms unentered                and lost                 in the rooms                it’s the soul that splits                into times you don’t recognize            that the soul squanders            or is squandered             by curtains she couldn’t sleep for the terror                    of knowing there was a book of ghost stories downstairs in the library          would burn all morning         all her own, like James’, are relentlessly ambiguous one believer             and one in his bones               transparent as lightning              against a garden that swerves       as a child        she lay dying        as a woman        full of trees        it is always love that steps into absence            in the hall, decked out in the palest of cream, of ecru, of ivory, of bone The Ghost Dance Emile Berliner, one of the first developers of the gramophone, recorded numerous Arapaho, Commanche, and Caddo ghost dances, as well as a Paiute gambling song, and published them in July, 1894.         When from the door I saw him coming The Ghost Dance dates to 1888, when, based on a vision he had during a solar eclipse, the Paiute mystic Wovoka claimed the earth would soon end, and therefore inherited, especially through dancing, in which one dies for a minute         Then saw I                the many plainly Wovoka’s vision of non-violent resistance was shared by Tolstoy: To you can no damage be, who turns again         And saw that they, in numbers entering The ghost dances were recorded by the ethnologist James Mooney, who may in some cases also have played them. Tolstoy published The Kingdom of God is Within You in 1894, in which the other cheek in which one sees the Ghost Dance movement largely died out after Wounded Knee (December 29, 1890) in which some had believed the Ghost Dance shirt is impervious to bullets a rag flies around the sun at specific intervals Thomas Edison filmed a Sioux ghost dance on September 24, 1894—or more precisely, he filmed a dance that featured true ghost dance costumes, but the documentation carefully states that it is not an authentic ghost dance bending as the light will not It is 1894, and the gramophone is being sold in a shop in Baltimore. In fact, by fall, they will have sold over 1000 playing machines and some 25,000 records       ashless        the voices; we have come no closer that blank that stills and faces fast              in which they turn and slowly halt and latch you in the glance. The dance, brief and the ghost lived within            whatever we were was photographed with the lights out. Crowds The man simply walked through her she said                  she saw him coming and felt at an intersection                        standing on a corner                          a man slipped over traffic, a woman      sensed his fingers      “inside my chest”      a caress of which I think he was completely unaware           he never even saw me          until he passed and then was scared.       And silently         trailing through me         Will you ever be a sound in an empty house              an inexplicable mark that, washed off, grows dark   Statement of Poetic Research Cole Swensen Research has been at the core of my poetic work for the past 15 years—largely because it gives me the chance to pursue questions of language while I pursue a subject in the world at large that interests me. As far as questions of language go, one that’s always in my mind is how poetic language differs from all other uses of language—what can poetic language do that other language can’t? And what can poetic language do for a research project? For one, it has qualities, such as greater ambiguity, more flexible syntax, and a focus on image, that can evoke things that cannot be said, and so can point to aspects of a subject that can’t be stated. I thought about these aspects of language very much in this current project on ghosts because ghosts are themselves so ambiguous, so difficult to talk about. Even for people who’ve seen them, they resist description, and certainly resist explanation. So I wondered whether poetic language could address aspects of ghosts and ghostliness that more direct language could not. I wanted to explore ghosts first from a sense of their communal basis, the sense of their being a sort of communal hallucination, even though they’re almost always experienced individually—and what does the individual experience of a communal creation say about isolation? What do ghosts in general say about isolation and about our inability to share some of the deepest of our problematic emotions, such as grief and guilt? In doing the research, I used two sources: interviews with people I ran across in my everyday life, and ghost stories that I found in books. I was curious to see what the differences in these two different narrative structures would be—the first is the narrative of experience, while the second is the narrative of invention, and the ghosts we invent through literature can be and are sculpted to serve certain social functions. I found that the ghost stories I encountered in books routinely had a shape curving from a beginning through rising tension to a resolution, be it good or bad, and that the ghosts that drive them have a moral role and purpose. On the other hand, the ghosts actually experienced by the people I talked to had no message, no moral point, and no role in anything but their own movements and gestures, and their sightings were simply that: fleeting glimpses without narrative arc or dramatic development. Ghosts actually encountered seemed to be ends in themselves, and this very refusal to mean anything beyond themselves perhaps incites the people who see them to create the meanings that the ghosts themselves can’t provide. This has an echo, above all, in language, those series of articulations uttered out of immediate experience that, over millennia, have been made to mean more than themselves.   Cole Swensen is the author of 13 volumes of poetry, most recently Ours (2008) andGreensward (2010). A volume of critical essays, Noise That Stays Noise, is due out from the University of Michigan in the fall of 2011, and Gravesend will be published by the University of California in 2012. A 2007 Guggenheim Fellow, Swensen co-edited the recent Norton anthology American Hybrid and teaches at the Iowa Writers Workshop.

 

Mile 98
087° 5’ 13” W

McEwen Bridge: washed away in the 1948 flood: two opposing pilings now
Old Gordon’s Ferry Bridge: built 1896, washed away in the 1902 flood
Gordon’s Chickasaw Ferry: had a handcrank
Natchez Trace ford: crossable in the dry season

black-blue-blush the fisher otter drops splashless beneath it   (into the floodflow)

morning light rumours   in the hornbeams so then too greeny   blowsy-breasted wood-pewees     fleshing air

nests lichen grass and   spider silk

the river crested 5:47 am seeped into the local     blazed fields

there were no more birds than usual I think   the day the bright lazy day	river 9.7 feet too high   saucebottle floated by         errant	the farmhands building a wall of sand near the thin bottomless keelboat     on the shore in the evening     limping by into aftermath     (there for 100 years)
skip to the torrential humid   twilight skip to the dumbfounded night skip to the viperish   starfall turned in the sky crickets laughed with throbbing hum cicada the smirking   syncopation between the two	the farmhands had built a pyre     burned the keelboat I’m in with the flames now and the loss I should have walked   there into their bustling bag—     filling       and said stop	the farmhands had raving   eyes of undertakers whose fingerbones had already broken
		instead   slept to the spill
downstreaming into the Tennessee see less than ten, no see even less stars through the leaves   the sophist tuliptree drooping into floriferous crowblack   sleep—	eyes in a gooseleafed bed seesawing while they burned   more wood and in the barn horses haunched in their stalls

Mile 99
087° 15’ 51” W

End of Shelby Bend/Old Church’s Bend

and I went sucking into the patchwork     birds, crested while they sung in the beeches     hung over the river	no one remembers   the rationale of the names   of these places, I was finally     in the sun-honeyed detour   of the last twenty miles of history	on the aerial map faint wagon tracks     ended at the shores
	shores. What can be said about this analogy? I see   the cobble of my life     versus the loud welcome of the future?   I want to ping solemnly into the sixpenny leaves   with the northern flickers unable to dust out the mites? this is the sum—
at the known sturgeon hole   dropping bait into a black green window into the current	where you reflected a combination of happy and sad     returned	sublime is a delicately braided explanation       in the genes
to tackle it   to demand more from it be the outsider   you needed to un-bend	a bethlehem cloud formed far away (thunder behind its threat) your stomach was speaking its own needs   you wanted to slay every impulse     you hesitated       you insisted
	this is the sum
you could not pull from the hole	ancient & bottomfeeder   & bony plates & scutes & spaded snout to stir up silt   & barbells	roe on a plate & isinglass in a bottle   & oil burning in the steamboat

—you packed it up you figured (the disclosure) was the effort after the experience the eastern shadows along the banks

the distant smoke venting from a smokehouse on Good Samaritan Ridge you saw Church Bluff

turning throne-gold that evening Hicks Bluff purplingyou saw straight whispy lines in the sky

lancing like every pink cardinal you enforced it: no shoals at mile ninety-nine—

 

Mile 100
87° 42’ 30” W

Rough shoals

Remains of an incomplete lock built by the Duck River Slack-Water Navigation Company, which sought to “mortgage upon the works of the Company— upon the negroes now owned, and upon those it designs purchasing with the larger portion of funds arising from the sale of the Bonds. It will, if desired, stipulate in the mortgage, when the work is completed, to sell the negroes, under the supervision of an Agent … and with the proceeds buy up the same amount of Bonds loaned it, and deliver them to be cancelled; until which time the State shall retain her lien on the Works, Stock and Negroes of the Company, which now owns, and has engaged on the works, eighty-two able-bodied negro men, together with four women, cooks.”

Rock wall (2’ high) no record

Was this an operation?
so stacked the rocks
like a child, that sort of
unskill,

it looked
without exactness,
without purpose.
Balancing had swerved.

Another kind of beauty
was master here, slave
breath burning back over.
At the sight of it
my fortunes orbited or twisted,
devaluing. The master would

drive a whale into a brook
and not say sorry.

Fatigue mattered
over fidelity—

wall

was cipher.

Site of McGraw’s Ferry; no record other than named on map

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 Statement of Poetic Research

Richard Greenfield
Writing Duck River Latitudes

The province of the poem is the world.
When the sun rises, it rises in the poem
and when it sets darkness comes down
and the poem is dark…

—William Carlos Williams, Paterson, Book II

August of 2010: I am standing on Kettle Mills Bridge, a single lane spanning the narrow of the Duck River. Forty feet below, three indistinct turtles lie in the sun on a log stranded on a shoal. An uprooted tree hangs in the trusses of the steel bridge—at road level—its roots feeding on the wet air above the water, its limbs still holding green leaves two months after the spring flood. I slide down the embankment next to the river and step into the black silt and find the empty shell of a river mollusk, hollow and black, formed in automatic calciferous layers, in the deep of the river. In the deep of the river(Genesis) I imagined it scraped its pallid tongue like a tiny spume, unnerved, awake, waiting for me on the bottom. It will not be entirely forgotten by me, even as I return it to the murk. It is made again here, in my writing. I’mwriting the river. I am constructing a landscape.

 

I conceived of the series of poems as a lyric travelogue, in which, mile by mile, the speaker positions himself on a raft floating on the Duck River, or on its banks, or beneath its surface, or no more than a quarter of a mile from the river. The longest river in the state of Tennessee, the Duck is prone to severe periodical flooding. In the language of a brochure, It is the most biologically diverse river in the United States—home to unique species of mussels and fish. South of the Cumberland Plateau, its water irrigates the rich bottomland farms of Middle Tennessee, etc. Early white settlers of the Cumberland drove out the Chickasaw and established large plantations. Near the small community of Williamsport, one large oxbow of the river forms what is known as Greenfield Bend.

My sources for the poem are a number of local and historical maps of the river overlain with a Google Earth map to provide longitude and latitude and estimates of mile markers from a USGA survey topographic map. For example, at mile 98 (98 miles from the Duck’s confluence with the Tennessee River), at 087° 5’ 13&rdqo; W, is an area with many historical crossings (bridges and fords) of the Natchez Trace used variously over the last 200 years. Through research in the Tennessee State Library I found historical accounts of a ford near the Natchez Trace which was crossable in the dry season, long before the ferries and bridges were to be built. Writing the “Mile 98&rdqo; section of the series, I wanted to invoke violent oppositions of birth and death, use and waste, drought and flood, heat and cold, or past and present. The poem cycles from morning to night and from spring to late summer, spanning at the same time both the 1902 and 1948 floods. I used early accounts of native flora to influence my selection of local species (hornbeams and tuliptrees) as well as field guides (otters and arcing pewees) and archived advertisements for keelboat services that were common on the river in the 1890s. I used notes from my last three summer experiences along the river. For example, in the summer of 2008, near mile 98, I noted “a capped whiskey bottle floating down the river” (the “saucebottle” in the poem). There was an account in a Columbia, Tennessee, newspaper of the 1948 flood. In the article, men were filling sandbags just south of the Natchez Trace section of the Duck River, the same “mile 98” area of focus. Of course, the infamous flood of spring 2010, the dreaded “hundred-year flood,” was covered by many news sources, but then there is the immediate experience, too, of seeing the tree hung in the truss of a bridge. And then there is the history of my family, whose last name imprints the community’s locales with their long history in the area: Greenfield Bend Road, Greenfield Bend Cemetery, Greenfield Bend Church.

 

A short history of the Greenfields of Greenfield Bend: In 1812 my great great grandfather, Dr. Gerrard Greenfield, arrived here and established a large plantation. He and his sons cut down acres of woods and built a massive mansion with scores of slaves brought with him from his native Calvert County, Maryland. They filled the house with furniture from the plantation home he had sold in Maryland. And like Lear, when he died, he divided the plantation between two sons and a daughter. The eldest, James, continued living in his father’s home, while Thomas Gerrard Truman (known as Tom) built his own much more modest plantation home closer to the river in what some consider to be the richest farmland of the state. The daughter, Jane, married soon after, and she and her husband built a plantation home on the high bluffs to the east, farthest from the river and fertile soil. Between the three plantations, the Greenfields enslaved over two hundred men and women. When the Civil War erupted, James and Jane signed loyalty oaths to the Union. Tom supplied local guerillas allied with the Confederacy. Toward the end of the war, the Union Army, informed of this, burned his plantation and set his slaves free. Tom moved to Lawrence County, and the farm went into neglect, so Jane and James sued Tom for ownership of his lands, litigation lasting twenty years. Eventually, Tom lost his land. His eldest son, Gabriel Gerrard Greenfield, my great-grandfather, married young to a Mormon woman, survived a Mormon-hating mob who burned down his house. When he was 28, in 1896, he died of typhoid (the same year Tom died), survived by his wife Louella and two sons, Gabe and Walter. Gabe was my grandfather. Less than a year old, his mother left him (and his brother) to be raised by her father because her new husband would not accept her infant sons. Gabe was in his twenties when he met my grandmother, Agnes, who was 14 when they married and had her first of seven sons. The seventh son was my father, Robert. By the time my father was born, they had finally left “the Bend,” as it had come to be known among my family, moving one county south to a farm high in the hills near the Elk River.

 

In the sequence of poems, the speaker dwells in all times at once, as if he sees the past, present, and the future all at once. My goal is to conflate all of time, all of history, not in a relativist way but in a manner suggestive of simultaneity and duration. I view the poem as a meditation on the passage of time, the recovery of time, and the imaginative projection of unknown time at once (there is much I don’t know, and there is much I will never know). The form, a kind of patterning spread of relatively similar small-sized stanzas that can be read both vertically and horizontally on the page, tries to enact this sense of time. In some ways I am indebted to poet Charles Olson (also a noted scholar of history) for locating the page as a “field” of time(s). His notion of what he terms “projective verse” necessitates open-ended writing where each poem determines its own needs. Assuming that the page is an energy or thought “field” within which the poem is composed (a field composition), and assuming that “form,” as Robert Creeley says, is “never more than an extension of content,” then my hope is that the poem enacts the simultaneity of time and the wreckage of the flood that scatters the contents of flooded homes on the surface of the river.

In the white space, memory loss, erasure, and repression of undesirable, irreconcilable history is silence, nothingness, whiteness, the unspoken, the null. Thus, here is a poem that is only a title: “Site of McGraw’s Ferry; no record other than named on map.” Connection (connecting)—writing— begins within flimsy hypotheses— the empty jars that have filled a hutch. Of course there is the “blood-delight” in finding communion with those who were you before you were you. But we in the now are only blanks, temporary beings washed down the river in a flood of time. We in the now live within the difficulty of holding the past together. I have tried to find the ghost frequencies, to tune in to these people, and I always predict failure in finding the truth. Such is the definition of historiography. In such erasures, I prophesy and project a history I know is as true as fiction. This is the case of the “Rock wall (2’ high) no record” poem— wall whose source or function is now lost in time. I project the poetic purpose of the wall, stones stacked by

…a child, that sort of
unskill,

it looked
without exactness,
without purpose.
Balancing had swerved.

William Carlos Williams finds in Paterson, “Stones invent nothing, only a man invents.” This is the divide between object and subject, between interpreted and interpreting. Sometimes, I insist on the “—the subject, the witness, the center.” Other times the object is to be simply received, such as in the “Mile 100” poem and its focus on an “incomplete lock.” Here the poem is no more than the historical document itself—the text of an application for a grant from the state to complete the lock. One sees the outcome in the fact of the incomplete lock on the river. This evidences the poem has the capacity to absorb these sources without lyric interpretively framing time.

 

Growing up, I never knew any of the Bend’s history. My father himself knew little— only fragments or vague accounts that his own mother had told him. My father wasn’t a talker—even less so about his childhood. His father had died while he was in the eighth grade, and he dropped out to work on the farm, never returning to school. His childhood had been difficult and he had spent his life regretting his origins. Perhaps for this reason I felt the subject was off-limits.

The accident of a job landed me a few hundred miles from my family’s roots. In 2005, having recently finished a Ph.D., I was hired by a small liberal arts college in Tennessee to teach creative writing and composition. I had grown up in the West, in California and Washington, and had spent my entire adult life living in the West. After my father died in the spring of 2007, I felt ready to investigate origins. I knew my father had been born near Prospect, Tennessee, in Giles County. I looked for my father’s farm on Google Maps—to visit the farm?— to understand something about my father I had never understood before?— I’m not sure I know. I could see, against brilliant high-res greens, a dirt road named “Greenfield Road,” and several farms. A week later I returned to the search, this time trying Google Maps for “Greenfield Road.” One of the hits was for “Greenfield Bend Road,” in a community in Maury County to the north. I would later find a birth certificate for my grandfather showing he had been born in Greenfield Bend, and I instinctively knew then that this place was rooted in the history of my family, or at least, my family was rooted in the history of this place. On my journey to my father’s birthplace, I visited the Maury County archives and began researching and in less than a few hours had located historical records of the Greenfields—an article here, a local historical reference there. Over the next three summers, I would return to the Maury County Archives and the Tennessee State Library, opening jars. This past summer, I found a record that T.G.T. had been charged with the crime of rape. Though the record was erroneously noted by the county archivist as coming from the chancery court records, I tracked down the chancery court file anyway, to see what might be there. The file was stored at the State Library in Nashville, so I drove north, along the Williamsport Highway and crossed the Duck River and then drove north along the Natchez Trace National Scenic Parkway, following its natural undulations toward Nashville.

At the library, I loaded the sprockets of the fiche and scrolled to the catalog number. There I discovered over ninety pages of letters, court transcripts, and ledgers belonging to the Greenfields, spanning 1850-1870: all of the names of slaves, and the Christian names they had bestowed on their very livestock, and every piece of furniture listed—listed in this order—all of the unconscionable belongings of their world listed there for me to transcribe, to absorb into my project and my self, this census of bondage written in a fine cursive scrawl on onion-leaf, both sides, both slants of hand, every page a palimpsest. I could see through it.

 

Once, when I was sixteen in the bed of my parents between my brother and father, listening to the thrum of winter rain on the tin patio roof outside, what did I think? I want to know now. The room was dark except for the street light seeping between two houses on the next street over, a pocket of yellow over the face of my father who drew on cigarettes with his eyes closed. We were there because he wanted us there—so we were quiet, listening too, and warm at the arms where we touched. I heard the mumbling of the neighbor’s bedroom TV through the duplex wall. And only there was where he would softly speak of his childhood on a farm in the hills of Tennessee. I heard but I heard nothing, nothing of the particular rain of thenas it pattered against the barn’s roof above the loft where he hid from his father and his work, where he hid his first cigarette from his father and hid his resentment, how the low grunts of the horse in the stalls and the circling flies would separate through the high shoring, becoming poverty and abundance at once. I see. And I see none of it.

 

This article originally appeared in January 2011.

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A Letter to Jefferson from Monticello

Westward the course of empire makes its way. —Bishop George Berkeley

                    I

I climbed through what remains of your oak forest
& passed again our gated family graveyard

(Granddaddy’s stone & Bennett Taylor’s
& Cornelia J.’s & all the Marthas—)

& up the leafy slope to Monticello
& slunk into your study filled with pedestals,

translations of the Bible, Livy, Herodotus,
porcelain head of Voltaire as inkwell, plans for

an ornamental farm, Nouvelle Maison Carrée,
feeling that Rome might yet exist, forum, project

of appropriation: your America.

O hypocrite—you make me tired.
Like Whitman, you contradict yourself.

                    II

Images: you, lofty, curious,
child of a mapmaker & New World aristocrat

in your one-room schoolhouse on the Randolph land grant,
learning Latin in a wilderness.

Writing that in sixteen generations
the “aboriginal” Native Americans

would be like the Britons after Caesar
& produce “their own Cicero.”

Defending America’s greatness
from French snobbery with a moose.

Nine generations later
very few of us read Cicero,

moose reclaim New England after heavy farming,
& your house is a museum, whose enormous gift shop

sells your profile cast in crumbly chocolate,
versions of your favorite peony

& umbrellas with your signature…

Here’s your garden:
marrow peas asparagus

& nubbed beginnings
of the scarlet runner bean.

I still hear schoolchildren asking
why you needed slaves to grow them.

O great rhetorician, tell me: What should I say?

                    III

I wait
where your publics did
in the balconied front hall, your wonder cabinet.

Re-creations of buffalo-skin & beaded dress,
relics of tribal peoples
you courted Roman-style, with coins.

As tourists shuffle
off to the last buses, I hear other silence:

Behind this great hall and upstairs
a dome room and wasp-filled cuddy,
the cramped quarters of your grandchildren

who inherited your debt.

                    IV

Families are still stories: Now we look
for them with DNA. DNA would have
fascinated you: It is

symmetrical, almost rational,
the way you thought America’s rivers would be
when you sent Lewis & Clark west

to collect & cross the continent, to gather birds & roots
& pipes & pelts & herbs & a ram’s skull that hangs here,
& dialects of tribal languages, which they

subsequently lost.

We haven’t found those dialects.
We have found DNA:
& tests of it suggest (though cannot fully prove)

that you had two families:
legitimate & illegitimate,
two rivers proceeding out from you—

remembered unevenly,
like names that have been saved and those
that have been lost.

Your family

made of structured absence.

Some people in your
white family this makes furious.
Others simply wonder what a family is.

The word, like freedom, shifts
beneath us, recombinant, reforming.
Our country argues now about it.

We can’t decide what it should mean.

                    V

Looking at the buffalo robe that is a Shawnee map

I think about asymmetry,

the ever-presence of a story we can’t tell / won’t see.

All stories contain opposites:

If only you look at DNA, you do not

see the whole buffalo: country: self.

Whatever frame you look through

changes what you see.

(I admire your 17^th century micrometer, your telescope.)

We saved your hand-cast silver spectacles,

but I don’t know how to see you despite

wanting to, also because of

your fractured families.

You disappear behind

your multitude of portraits.

                    VI

So much (I think) of what we love about America
is hybrid like a fiddle, like rock ‘n’ roll, which holds

African and English rhythms meeting
near a river that in the 1800s you

called the Cherokee Tainisee—
“beautiful & navigable,”

you said. Aesthetic, practical.

A complex way of being, a difficult pose to hold.
I wondered driving down here

listening to True Colors & the Christian station,
how to feed body & soul. Cherries bloom

at Shadwell, near the ex-grounds of Lego

(all the lost plantations

where our many families lived)—

                    VII

In this house museum I get special permission
to touch your bedspread, peer into your Virgil, hunt as if
for clues.

It all only looks still
but was always unfinished. You designed

porches & dumbwaiters, elaborate passages
like those beneath the Coliseum

where the Roman slaves died
in the Panis et Circenses. Your craft:

Keeping people hidden. I ask you:

Must beauty do this?
On what must beauty rest?

         VIII

Nine generations later,
I live on a fault line.

I hike through redwood, sorrel, live oak—plants you’d love to name.

Berkeley, where I grew up, is utopian, too.

Many people there build experimental gardens

& devote their lives to cultivating

the best kind of tomato: Because one has to try

to make the world a better place.

& Berkeley is segregated.

Its promise is unhealed.

                              (O & this is also inheritance from you)—

              IX

California’s road map calls it

“geologically young and restless”—

it is literally in motion & in ten million years

will be someplace else.

Now it is coastlines, traintracks, mountains,

underfunded universities, overcrowded prisons,

factory farms, expensive cheese.

Pesticides & ocean, budget crises, artichokes.

I learned Latin there. I re-crossed the continent.

I stand in your mote-filled sunlight in my solitary fancy.

The doors close any moment.
Mr. Jefferson: You’ve also left me this.

I’ve never had to work in

any field except for gardens that I’ve planted.

I roam with a lion’s share of your uneven freedom.

I pass as a dreamer, recording names.

These are beautiful & come from many languages,

reminding me how in Rome columns rear & overlap:

Madrone: Eucalyptus: Manzanita:

Scars themselves—unsolved or healing.

O architect of hopes and lies,

brilliant, fascinating—

ambitious foundering father I revere & hate & see myself in.

Statement of Poetic Research

I have had the strange experience of coming of age as a white descendant of Thomas Jefferson just at a moment when Jefferson, always somewhat contested, became a more complex figure for us all. The news about the DNA evidence linking Jefferson’s family line to Sally Hemings’s came out just as I was studying rhetoric in college. The evidence was many things: to some people it was validation of a long-held family history; to others it was a pioneering use of new science to probe old mysteries. For me, it provoked a dramatic realignment of how I saw my own family, how I understood the ancestor I acknowledged but had not spent much time thinking about. The arrival of the DNA evidence coincided with a moment when I began to understand the tide of history itself as slippery and malleable, subject to multiple transformations. Like the chain of canonical authors in Harold Bloom’s seminal work of literary criticism, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, our own canons of personal knowledge can be reshuffled. I was discovering that the very facts by which we come to understand ourselves can be realigned, reframed, resettled. Family, history, ancestor, knowledge, truth, proof: all these words gained a new and challenging sense of provisionality.

Even for those not given to thinking in poetic forms, it is hard to miss the ways the figure of Thomas Jefferson can feel allegorical. Again and again he enacts the dramatic metaphor: at Monticello he had an inkwell in the shape of Voltaire’s head, suggesting his writing was formed in the ink of Voltaire’s brain. The very desk on which that inkwell might have rested—the desk on which he was said to have crafted the Declaration of Independence—was itself made by enslaved carpenters who were members of the Hemings family, men who were, in essence, already his wife’s unacknowledged family, her inheritance. Jefferson—the great-grandson of William Randolph, scion of one of Virginia’s most powerful families—sometimes avoided eating sugar, and bought maple syrup instead, in the hopes that doing so would hasten slavery’s demise. Jefferson once shipped a moose skeleton to France, directly to the naturalist Comte de Buffon, so that it could serve as a testament to American greatness. This was an earnest attempt to prove the American continent’s superiority by showing off the size of its mammals.

Despite having revered Jefferson as a child, I was coming to realize that Jefferson’s stories embodied not just mammoth acts but dramatic absences. Even for a keeper of many of his era’s best scientific instruments, only some volumes deserved to enumerated, only some fields were worthy of study. Jefferson, who only partially recorded the names of his enslaved population, donated all of his books to what would eventually become the Library of Congress as a way of settling his debts. Jefferson then bought many more books. When Jefferson died, he did not free his slaves, but left them (and the debt) to his children to settle. The catalog of books at the Library of Congress is a national treasure, while the records of where the enslaved men and women and children went after this auction is incomplete. Here is a fact that vibrates in my heart with every allegorical quiver: when Jefferson died, his personal debt was greater than the nation’s.

I can trace some of the stories that lead forward from Jefferson, that mark the paths where his story bleeds toward mine. Jefferson’s grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, lived until 1875 and spent his life literally settling Jefferson’s debt, before then losing a great deal more money by investing in Confederate bonds. My grandfather’s grandfather, Bennett Taylor, Thomas Jefferson Randolph’s grandson, fought in the Civil War and was captured at Pickett’s Charge, at Gettysburg. Bennett sits at a hinge in American history. There are as many generations between Thomas Jefferson and Bennett Taylor as there are between Bennett Taylor and me. But how was Jefferson’s debt my debt? How was his legacy my inheritance? And how is Jefferson’s legacy our broader inheritance? What did the presence of this newly validated set of family relations have to do with it?

When I teach poetry, I discuss with students ways that the uses of pronouns in poems can be slippery—the way an “I” can speak for a “we,” or a “you” can imply an “us,” or a poem about one event can resound beyond what is spoken. My challenge in this project was to marshal material that folds between “I” and “we,” between private history and public reckoning, between specific circumstance and allegorical resonance. After all, if Jefferson is a founding father, what does it mean to be his family? I spent two summers in archives looking at old wills, at elaborate family trees scratched in by distant and long dead Randolph and Taylor ancestors, at a commonplace book kept by Martha Jefferson Randolph. In residence at the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello, I hiked around the mountains with the gardener and the archaeologist looking at the grassy berms or wooded dells where they were excavating the remains of the dwellings of enslaved people. I held in my hand a few buttons that seemed to have come up from underneath a cellar, the small hooked nail that some young boy whose name we may never know might have surreptitiously made into a fishhook in the nailery. I heard the latest news on the Getting Word Project, the genealogical work to reconnect African American descendants to their ancestors who had been at Monticello.

There was a great deal of information about some things. At Monticello one can examine files on what Jefferson thought about sheep or wine or importing glass from England, and one can consult a bevy of talented librarians at work on multivolume editions of his letters. In fact, at times I would feel that there is almost too much information about Jefferson. I would go to my room at night overwhelmed, dizzy, feeling as if Jefferson was disguised behind the sheer magnitude of his artifacts. Turning up a Virginia Department of Transportation report about a freeway spur being built above the site of Wilton, a former Randolph plantation, I was struck that no one had a name to connect to any one of the human bones found in the unmarked burial site. When I found a will of an early Taylor ancestor that said that he was deeding “books, Negroes, and land” to his sons, I did not know what people had been so traded. All I could see in that document was something hauntingly telling—a sense that bodies and books had been seen as being of equal worth. For a writer, who reveres books, who was spending her days with written material, this was chilling. I felt the paradoxical position of being a writer who had inherited written proof of my own descent from Jefferson, my legitimacy. To put it allegorically: I had inherited the books, and the debt.

At each turn there was a dialogue between what was written and what was not; whose history was written and whose was not; what could be inferred through artifact and what must be inferred through margins. I felt the jaggedness of relation between what was seen and what remained tantalizingly invisible. And I felt the presence of secrets and powerful unknowns not only in written documents but within my family’s oral history, within its own understanding of itself. I talked to cousins. I looked at wills and letters and deeds. The poems began to form as a kind of shorthand. When something I learned felt most painful or quivering, I would hear a little song vibrating in my head. Auden once said of Yeats that “mad Ireland hurt him into poetry,” and it is possible that I began to think of this as poetry because there is a madness to this history, because it hurts to uncover.

Indeed, because so much of what I initially knew about my own history relied on dramatic and sometimes violent absences, I began to feel that looking closely at the absence was the center of the story. My challenge was to find a way of dramatizing this incompleteness. For indeed, part of what is haunting about Jefferson’s debt, and Jefferson’s drama, are the omissions in the record, the presence of all we still do not know. What is haunting about my family story is how much is still left out.

Who then is the “I,” the “we,” the “us,” the “they,” the “them”? What is the dialogue between the material in the archive and the material on the margins? To what extent are such absences themselves representative of wider absences in American history? What are the politics of cultural transmission, of historic survival? As I began to write, I found that the poetry suggested ways of exploring shards, of exploring their margins. In a piece of prose, a text occupies the page with its fullness. In poetry, the line breaks, and we are invited to make use of silence.

To some extent this is a specific story about my inheritance; yet I hope in its search through archives and imperfect family stories it provokes questions about how we inherit anything at all. When I ask my cousins, who are genealogists, about the names on our family tree, they know many facts about every one of the recorded ancestors. But when I ask them about how slavery was practiced by the Randolph-Taylor family (of which Jefferson was only one member) from 1680-1865, they know little. We have few records, few names. In my reckoning, I perch my speaker between the public and the domestic—at the space where family lore and torn attics themselves begin to constitute what we know as the archive. My poems retrace misremembered family stories even as they explore deeply flawed American ones. When I stumbled on those things that seemed to quiver, I wrote. I tried to follow them where they would lead. If they pointed toward something absent, I tried to walk up to the edge of that absence.

Ultimately, I came to feel that this work embodied the role of the poem. It is what the poem can offer that the report or essay might not. The poem uses its own incompleteness. It attempts to point not merely toward what has been said, what can be said, but toward the sources of its own silence, toward what has not been said, toward what cannot be said, and toward what may still need saying. It is my hope that these poems do justice to this difficult margin; that the poems grapple not only with historical mystery, but also record the strangeness of trying to encounter the past at all. In this gesture, I hope they move through my reckoning, and lean toward some lyric truth.

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Last Words of the Dying

VI

Listen! This’ll
hurt someone!

Do not disturb
my circles.

You can get more
with a kind word

and a gun—Lady,
you shot me!

…this is a mortal wound.
But how the devil

do you think
this could harm me?

That picture is awful
dusty.

Sources: Archimedes, Al Capone, Sam Cooke, Denis Diderot, R. Buss Dwyer, Alexander Hamilton, Jesse James
[All dead by suicide or murder]

VII

What’s that? Do I
look strange?

Come, come, no weakness;
let’s be a man to the last.

I must go in, the fog
is rising.

Sources: Lord Byron, Emily Dickinson, Robert Louis Stevenson

The Last Words of the Condemned

To Loved Ones

Y’all stick
together. In your hearts.

I’m going home
babe—out of here.

Keep me—the love
the closeness

given me.
Don’t waste any time

in mourning.

Sources: James Allen Red Dog, John Cockrum, Joe Hill, Kevin Watts, William James “Flip” Williams, Jr.

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Statement of Poetic Research

While watching Ken Burns’s television miniseries The Civil War, I was struck by the telling of Confederate General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson’s death from complications after being hit by friendly fire and having to undergo amputation of his arm. The documentary included Jackson’s final words: “Let us cross the river and rest under the shade of trees.” I was immediately charmed by this poetic utterance, and wrote it down in my little writer book. The documentary continued but, in my mind, the words were running on loop. I picked up my little book again and wrote, “Poems using last words.”

That is the romantic beginning for the poems from my chapbook Death Centos (Ugly Duckling Presse, forthcoming). Now, for the actual—and more tedious—beginnings. I had just finished the first year of my MFA at the California Institute of the Arts, and had taken a workshop on poetic form. Aside from the traditional, we also explored alternative forms. Though I had used collage in the past, it was in this course that I realized how much I loved working in the form. I had also recently read Christian Hawkey’s Ventrakl and fallen in love with his Trakl color centos (along with the whole of the book). With these poems I saw the power of weaving whole lines of thought, versus merely a cluster of words or a small phrase from each source, as can often be the case in collage.

The cento (pronounced sent-oh, as it is from the Latin word for a cloak made of several patches, versus the Italian word for “hundred,” which would be pronounced chent-oh) is an ancient form dating as far back as the second century. Just to show that I’ve read about the cento in sources other than Wikipedia, the Princeton Encylopedia of Poetry and Poetics defines a cento as the following: “A poetic composition made up of passages of some great poet of the past.” It goes on to state that since Hosidius Geta’s Medea, written in the second century, poets have been employing this form using works by Homer, Virgil, Cicero, Shakespeare, and others up to our modern era. The cento is a way to simultaneously pay homage to poets and the beauty in their writing, and also bastardize their works. In employing the cento form, we believe we are doing for the poet what she or he could not do her or himself, hoping to illuminate the poetry in some way not done in the original text. In a sense this is what my centos are doing with history and reality. I weave voices that are otherwise separated by time, space, history, and sense: Sam Cooke and Alexander Hamilton, Archimedes and Al Capone. These ostensibly are voices that would never have found one another save for in this manuscript—voices that one would think don’t have much to say to one another. But, as I hope these poems illustrate, even the most disparate sources of thought can and do say things to one another, and can even work together toward lyricism or another kind of beauty (and I use the term “beauty” loosely, for really anything that is captivating for any reason has a beauty, even if horrific). So I am bastardizing history in these poems for the sake of my defined beauty, and to examine death if only to allow me some agency in facing the terror of that unknown.

Now, to specifically reference Wikipedia, simply because I love this fact: there were people who created centos (patched cloaks) for Roman soldiers, and they were called centonarii. Whether or not this is true, I hope any writers of centos will take up the title.

This gets ahead of my own thought process in writing these poems, though. I was unaware that I was employing a variation on the age-old cento form, though the seeds had been planted by professors and poetic texts alike. Really I just wanted to weave these lines together and, if any last words were as beautiful as Stonewall Jackson’s, the poetry was waiting there for me. Then began the hours and hours of research, which often led me to unsavory websites, but, all the same, websites that purported to catalog people’s dying words (I have since found far more appropriate sources to appease the Ugly Duckling Presse editors and my conscience). I wrote down any and all that caught my attention, along with the person who spoke the words. The variation on modes of death was what struck me the most, and it was illustrated remarkably through these utterances—some were peaceful, others were uttered in moments of delirium, of anger.

I also frequently found the last words of people just before being executed. This presented a hodgepodge of people from an array of periods and walks of life: royalty, intellectuals, radicals, sociopaths, murderers. I did not quite know what to make of these phrases, as they did not “fit” with the others. They rather seemed to fit with each other. So when creating the chapbook of these poems, I split it into two sections: “Last Words of the Dying” and “Last Words of the Condemned.”

I have been making mixed tapes (now just “mixes”) since I was in middle school, and these poems allowed me to play in a way that felt undeniably similar. I put lines next to one another that seemed to hum more than when placed next to others. I shuffled them around, read, reread, shuffled some more. I had an incredible and instant agency with tone and meaning, and I would be lying if I didn’t say it was nothing short of a gleeful experience. This is not to say I was unaware of the gravity of it all, that these were the final sentences spoken by people before death. In writing poetry that one feels is revolutionary (and by revolutionary I mean within one’s own writing) it is thrilling, no matter how difficult the content. So my own personal history has played a role in these poems, beyond my aesthetic proclivities.

This was the case in writing the “Last Words of the Dying” section. There was ostensibly less at stake there—combination for poetry’s sake, an attempt to create vignettes in which the words potentially communicate and/or capture similar experiences of passing on. In “Last Words of the Condemned,” especially considering my personal objection to capital punishment, I wanted to have the words “say” more. I wanted to show that condemned deaths can be in turns terrifying and heart-wrenching, but mostly I hoped to illustrate the horror of any governmental or ruling body feeling it has the right to take a life. Each of these poems had a thesis, so to speak, and I often clustered lines together depending on whom the person about to be executed was addressing (“To the Public,” “To Loved Ones,”) or the subject they spoke on (“On God,” “On Innocence”).

Once I felt the chapbook was complete, I realized I had been essentially writing centos. The title Death Centos captures the content of the chapbook, but also my feeling about those who spoke these words, as the cento is defined as a form employing words of poets. In most cases the speaker was aware of impending death and spoke. It would be callow or even callous of me to assume that these are words of choice, but my hope is that there is potentially a quiet intent to convey something before death. My own quiet intent is to honor the tragedy, dignity, and/or atrocity of the deaths of those whose words I have used in these poetic texts. To plait a diverse group of voices in such a way is to play with the historical reality of their isolation from one another and with the poetic reality of their being marshaled together.

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“A garden of medicinal flowers…”

“Cake!”

Such answers help

insofar as how many days

were you a child? Or can you fix it

with your mind, since it did not happen

in your mind? “Time crashes

into words so often.”

•

An experienced fire scholar

observes we hold a species monopoly

over fire, fire

is a profoundly interactive technology, yet people

rarely burn as nature burns.

And out of the wilderburbs

we reinstated fire to remedy a longtime

fire famine. An expected major wind event

took place. Light ’em or fight ’em

and shoving biomass around, hazards

of reintroduction of the lost species of

fire resulted quickly

in a 14,000-acre black-and-silverscape

to anneal our eyes. The flicker

folding denuded understory, traversing undone

growth in its slight rise and curve whose carbon plateau

resists, the way we scanned our bodies to fix

I and got a Pleistocene, some shiny

seeps, “a tickle

at the back of the throat”

•

A come-home urge, a short-term

wedding ring or nerve tonic

of conversation in the car

•

Not unintimate

but a claw into the sector

•

In this area where quelling

worked or gracious

tissue has not surged back. To anneal

is to harden, and I was told

so many times to love the killed place

charred, the charnel

and charmed skeleton-of-ghosts place. Appeared moonlit

in daylight and its narrative

was goblin, homeless

burrow, carburetor. Intelligence instigated this

big elegy

•

Conscious

with its retardant like let’s live together. But cut by river, worn

by air, détourned by wind like I won’t disappear

if the line of wavy green in the non-shatter glass

maintains its vein

in tangibility. If adrenalin splits

chemicals with this sector. Immolated-to-the-

drop-off place that shimmeringly

waits

•

Snags, slash, deadfall, flesh of

charcoal flower burns its

urging off the tongue. Leaves a

husk-shape perfect, subject

to astonishing dispersal. So carve a channel

in your voice, go coursing

rockily

along the burned-up hologram of I

make a plan

•

The question had been as usual what is

ultimate? Cake of

burning shimmer in the

woods, your

question had been too much

of the wrong kind of fire and not enough of the right

kind. Apocalypse dryads

without new weeds or saplings to befriend, emollient

tar and failure

medicine. We come through

you, null

quadrant, in our vehicle. And fumes of wanting

to be otherwise escaped

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Frances Richard
Statement of Poetic Research

In summer 2010, my partner and I went camping in the Kaibab National Forest north of the Grand Canyon. Driving the forty-plus miles from our campsite to the North Rim, we passed through meadows and mixed-conifer forest; we knew that we were on a high plateau that plunges on three sides to the rift cut by the Colorado River, and in a vague, animal way we sensed those edges. But it was sunny, and all around us were grasses, wildflowers, fluttering aspen leaves, dense stands of pine. Arizona State Route 67 curves gently now and then. We rounded one of these bends and crossed into another landscape. Everything was burned—ground blackened, trees black and silver, trunks charred in eerie ranks on both sides of the road. It was like driving through a gelatin-silver print. We saw an information marker and pulled over in the remains of the Outlet Fire.

The Outlet Fire was set by Grand Canyon National Park fire management as a prescribed burn on April 25, 2000. Strong winds sprang up. The fire escaped, and when it was declared contained on June 15, almost 14,000 acres had been consumed. Conifers thrive on normal wildfire, with thousands of seedlings per acre germinating in burned land; combustible materials reduce to nutrients in soils, and this in turn supports biodiversity and carbon sequestration. The ferocity of the Outlet Fire, however, killed even fire-resistant Ponderosa pines. In places, it stopped only when the plateau dropped away beneath it.

“The total area of forest annually affected by fire currently is only about one-tenth of what it was prior to 1850, due to fire suppression,” explains Chad Hanson, director of the John Muir Project. Fire historian Stephen J. Pyne, of the School of Life Sciences at the University of Arizona, calls this state of affairs a “fire famine.” It was through Pyne that I encountered John Wesley Powell’s 1878 Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States. Powell named the Grand Canyon, and was the first white man to traverse it, by boat on the Colorado, during his 1869 Geographic Expedition. Traveling north of the Kaibab, he noted in the Report:

The protection of the forests of the entire Arid Region of the United States is reduced to one single problem: Can these forests be saved from fire?…Everywhere throughout the Rocky Mountain Region the explorer away from the beaten paths of civilization meets with great areas of dead forests; pines with naked arms and charred trunks attesting to the former presence of this great destroyer. The younger forests are everywhere beset with fallen timber, attesting to the rigor of the flames, and in seasons of great drought the mountaineer sees the heavens filled with clouds of smoke.

“Different people have created distinctive fire regimes, just as they have distinctive literatures and architecture,” Pyne writes. Powell’s Report sought to foster a new regime. His section on “Timber Lands” continues:

Only the white hunters of the region properly understand why these fires are set, it being usually attributed to a wanton desire on the part of the Indians to destroy that which is of value to the white man.

Powell (1834-1902) attended Oberlin, my alma mater. The college was a progressivist hotbed: a station on the Underground Railroad, the first institution of higher learning to consistently admit African Americans, the first to admit women. He stayed for periods with the Ute and Shivwit Paiute; he helped to establish the U.S. Bureau of Ethnology, and ran it for two decades. Should we receive his statement on native American burning practices as a plea for intercultural translation? If so, how to interpret its next sentence: “The fires can, then, be very greatly curtailed by the removal of the Indians”? As Pyne puts it, “Fire enters humanity’s moral universe.”

Something of this floated through our car window on the Kaibab. The poem “Outlet Fire” appears in a forthcoming collection titled Anarch. I was thinking, writing this book, about disasters natural and otherwise, and about the prefixes an- and arche-, one designating absence or denial, the other archetypal foundation. I was groping toward some method for absorbing 9/11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Hurricane Katrina, the Deepwater Horizon spill. The Outlet Fire, as an anarchic collaboration between federal agencies, history, weather systems, and dry tinder, seemed to belong to this topography.

The Outlet Fire was named for Outlet Canyon, a small side canyon branching toward the North Rim. But Google “outlet fire” and you will find discussions of faulty household wiring, pictures of soot and flame on plastic baseboard plates. Woodlands, of course, are power sources, and natural fire—as distinct from what Pyne terms “anthropogenic fire”—is often kindled by lightning. Domestic electricity and wildland conflagration arc to touch, too, because the provision of energy cannot be neutral, whether this means connecting war, climate change, and oil drilling to the little live port in the wall, or acknowledging that our “species monopoly over fire” does not (yet) alter the fact that ecosystems have evolved with fire, and require it. Mythemes of the west as an outlet—a wide-open space for outlawry and letting off steam—and of combustion as pure release flicker in the name. And on the long-haul drives of that camping trip, we were talking over what it means to live together.

How did the Chinese Zen master Yun Men (c. 864-949) get into this poem? The Blue Cliff Record, the compendium of koans, records that a monk asked, “What is talk that goes beyond the Buddhas and Patriarchs?” Yun Men yelled, “cake!” He meant rice-cake, but I somehow envision a petit four—ordinary, trivial, intricate and sweet. Another monk asks, “What is the Dharmakaya?” which in Sanskrit means the “body” of the Absolute. Yun Men answers, “flower hedge!” or “garden fence!” This sounds lovely, but the term he uses denotes, specifically, plantings around an outhouse—hence, perhaps, the occasional reference to these flowers as “medicinal.” (Yun Men is asked, “What is the Buddha?” “Dried shit-stick!”) Archival documents, and incinerated woods, and worry about the future, and poems are just different kinds of waste, perhaps. All liable to bloom.

I worried, with “Outlet Fire,” about nakedly indulging the pathetic fallacy. Research was a way to locate its argument beyond myself, in the grain of what occurred. But the point is that landscape and human fantasy co-create.

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The carte of all the coaſt of Virginia

To appease Fancy
I drew mythic beasts wallowing
In indulgent waters
But here everything is a myth alive,

The light that falls, Heavenly declaration,
Makes sweet earth Sovereign
& like the Picts of old
The people draw pictures on themselves

Ashamed not of nakedness—
Mapped from the eye of God
I meant to show it, the bow-shaped archipelago
Wokokan Croatoan, Paguiwac & Hatorask

Second-hand signs for tongues
Gone the way of runes—
That world, a book of wonder
Book of fright—

A Weroan or great Lorde of Virginia

Absolute symmetry of the body,
as “front” & “back.”
All the beauty of it.

No fact
Separate from the myth.
The birdfeather-plumed face

Half hides itself
In studying last year’s hunt
Unfolding on the plain below—

All the aiming & pursuing
Relives the past
Next to the river’s unpassing.

In the distance
The hunt is renewed.
All the hunters have drawn

Their bows
& the stag
Is leaping into the stag-sized trees

A cheiff Lorde of Roanoac

He has a natural dignity
& grace & needs nothing
To prove himself.

Adept at reading signs,
They need not our script.
This is a story

Of disappearance
Unaccompanied
By wonder.

What a wandering
In the black back-lit lines,
The empty white spaces.

The Marckes of Fundrye of the Chief mene of Virginia

They write marks on their backs
Signs by which they make
Known whose subjects they are
Alphabets made of arrows

With strange crossings—
The letters they carved into trees—
I willed them that if they happened
To be distressed they should carve

A cross over the letters
Every sign is a stranger now
No language have I left to speak
Of trees & men-bearing signs

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Jon Thompson
Statement of Poetic Research

I first came across Thomas Harriot’s strange and wonderful account, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1590), in the large, sepia-toned Dover edition—”The Complete 1590 Theodor de Bry Edition”—on the shelves of the university bookstore. It was a singular discovery. John White’s images—and the engravings that Theodor de Bry made of White’s work—capture the wonder of a sixteenth-century Elizabethan world encountering the “exoticism” of a very different New World civilization. While the intense realism of White’s work, almost dreamlike in its detailed rendering of the ordinary life of the Algonkians, first riveted me, I was ultimately drawn to the unknown questions surrounding John White’s work—who was he? Under what circumstances did he meet the Algonkians? What is the story of the individuals he represented? What became of his story? While I followed the story of his life and times (Lee Miller’s Roanoke was especially memorable), the historical record does not provide answers to these questions: gaps and blanks define his story. For me, poetry’s strength is not in laying out an historical record with a fully-realized narrative. Instead, it excels at thinking about gaps and silences—it excels, in other words, in registering a sense of the immediacy of experience, its felt richness, its always-already vanishing moment. In imaginatively engaging the past, poetry can interrogate the completeness of narrative, the completeness of our assumptions. Through its openness to multiple forms of intelligence, poetry can approach the silence of history and the specters who dwell there. Indeed, poetry has the power to give voice to some of their whisperings, however incomplete those transcriptions—translations—may be. John White is one of these voices.

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