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.

---

 

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

---

 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.

---

 

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.

---

 

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

---

 

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.

---

 

 

 

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

---

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.

---

 

 

Statement of poetic research

One day I decided to rewrite the complete works of Emily Dickinson in “plain speech.” She wrote, in an almost foreign English, 1,789 poems about life, death, and who and what she wanted to have sex with. If she was worried about death, I said that she was worried about death. If, for example, she wanted to have sex with the idea of “sex” itself, I simply restated that and called this “translation.”

I was in a seminar on Dickinson’s poetry in which our discussions of, and reading about, her creative work placed an inordinate emphasis on her biography. Each poem was consistently “unlocked” by the time in which she wrote it—who she had a crush on at the time, which one of her relatives had died most recently, and so on. The minutiae unearthed and recorded by the Dickinson biography industry had became the most important part of every poem—despite the fact that we actually had the poems to read. There was no real harm in it, but we treated the poems more like souvenirs than reading experiences. It was as if the poetry were something the facts of her life had produced, and we, her newly instated audience, having a sort of memoir-driven discussion relatable to our lives, were making ourselves the facts of her new life and its heirs.

I started by jotting down notes in the margin, applying a Cliff’s-Notes-esque reading. Paraphrase is also an act of translation. So I was translating the poems from one history and language to ours.

 

(#s correspond to the R. W. Franklin edition of The Poems of Emily Dickinson)

900. I rented one of my vital organs from the hospital and now I have to give it back.

901. The relationship between the soul and the body is tentative.

902. The relationship between the body and the soul is tentative.

903. Escapism is what makes life worth living.

904. I like to believe that walking under ladders is unlucky because approaching life with a consistent sense of logic is too heartbreaking.

905. By dissecting a bird you can locate its vocal cords.

906. Even though we live in the same city, we’re in a long distance relationship.

907. I’m glad I’m dead, but I hope death isn’t death.

908. Worms can’t wait to eat us. Actually, they can wait. And they are.

909. If you wanted to have sex with a bee, I would dress up in a bee costume, Sue.

910. Once you find something, you’ll probably lose it. And then go on an epic exploration looking for a mythical blanket. And then you’ll probably not find the magic blanket. And then you’ll probably realize that your whole life is a sham.

911. You know it’s cold outside when people start dying of overexposure.

912. Things exist no matter where you go.

913. Matter contains potential energy.

914. I was lost, and then I saw a family living in a house. Everyone appeared to be so comfortable and at home there that I felt even worse about being lost. I tried to join them, but they closed the door before I could get inside. I just wanted to live with them. I don’t know why they wouldn’t let me live with them.

915. It’s autumn, and I don’t know what to do.

916. Who lives in this mushroom?

917. Ghosts like to haunt familiar places. They’re not that into travel.

918. The fact that I’m alive and that other people are alive is very disorienting.

919. I want to be so famous it physically crushes me.

920. I prefer scars to jewelry.

921. I hope it snows so that all the zombie-children can have a snowball fight.

922. I like sunlight unless I’m hungover.

923. I have a small crush on the man who delivers ice to our house. I hope he notices when I’m dead and feels a little sad about it.

924. I better be immortal. Otherwise, I’ll be really sad.

925. I don’t care if someone kills me as long as they’re attractive.

926. I walk funny.

927. Dying’s worse than not dying. Just so you know.

928. Nature is only important if humans say it is.

929. Would you still love me if I were a zombie? Would you give me a big sloppy kiss on my rotting-flesh-zombie-mouth?

930. Poets die. Poems, on the other hand, corrode slowly.

931. If the oceans wanted to take over the world again, there’s not much stopping them.

932. If God didn’t survive on a steady diet of human souls, he would probably kill all of us immediately.

933. I guess maybe Heaven isn’t a prison.

934. My friends died and now I don’t know where they are. Maybe Vegas.

935. I guess it’s autumn now. Summer is a sneaky little bitch.

936. I guess it’s nighttime now. Daylight is a sneaky little bitch.

937. You either become a man by going through puberty and gradually aging into adulthood, or you can just skip all of that and go ahead and die.

938. Death is a commie.

939. The only good things that exist in life don’t exist.

940. How often do you have sex and where can I go in order to watch you have it, Sue?

941. This guy probably drowned himself. I wonder what it was like. I wonder if he’d mind if I took his hat. Probably not.

942. Now that you’re my slave, you don’t get two weeks paid vacation.

943. I’m really upset that my slave got away, because you can’t buy them anymore.

944. Nature’s kind of gaudy.

945. If someone’s trying to kill you, the best thing to do is hide until they give up, and then give yourself away. That way you’re the one in control.

946. Dying is only unfortunate if you have friends. Luckily, I don’t have any. Take that, death.

947. I put my money in a savings account, so it could earn interest.

948. God lets it all hang out in spring.

949. Death always ruins a party.

950. It’s been two years and the raspberry bushes I planted in the backyard haven’t produced any fruit. Come on.

951. If nobody loves you, you should probably just go ahead and die already. Thanks, Sue.

952. It’s more noble to die at sea than to go on a cruise.

953. God likes it when people make castles, because he enjoys making ruins.

954. If you want my V-card, you have to give me yours.

955. I sing when I’m scared.

956. Everyone’s beautiful. It just takes a lot more effort to see the beauty in certain people who aren’t as attractive as the people who are actually beautiful.

957. People should be allowed to hate their jobs and not get shit about it.

958. It’s spring. There are daffodils. Someone is sexually reproducing at this very moment.

959. My dead mother finds me embarrassing.

960. My heart isn’t good at long-range planning.

961. Dying people are pretty laid-back.

962. Society distracts me from my precious hallucinations.

963. It’s hard to control nature. Nature or human nature will eventually destroy us.

964. Zombies get no respect.

965. I can’t find Heaven. I couldn’t find it in Connecticut, so it must be in Maine, or else Canada. I hear that Hell is located somewhere in the Midwest.

966. Death is good because it cheers up people who really wanted certain people dead and who can now move on with their lives, happily ever after.

967. Two lovers are dying of cold. The first lover says to the second: I think this is it. We’re goners. The second one replies: No big deal, now we get to go to Heaven. So they did. And their friends slowly joined them, one by one. (I’m not very good at telling jokes.)

968. Fame is nice but is also limited by the short span of human existence. I’m sorry, famous people.

969. God’s kind of like an old aunt who wears a lot of rhinestones and hugs you a little too hard. It’s difficult to get away from her. Sometimes I wish I could go to the beach and be by myself. But it doesn’t really matter where you go, she’ll follow you there, because she’s creepy like that.

970. Mountains are like really old fat people.

971. Peace and God are great, but I don’t actually believe in any of that crap.

972. You either get into heaven or you don’t. It doesn’t really matter what you do. It’s all politics.

973. When I die and death tells me I have to stay dead, I’m going to be like, “No thanks,” and see what happens.

974. This entire town was on fire, so I called the fire department, and they told me it was just the sunset.

975. Someone died and I’m sad about that. Based on how sad I am, he was probably the most important person to ever have existed.

976. I don’t know where they put the month of May now that it’s over. Though they might’ve put it somewhere about eleven months in the future.

977. I wish I was good at something like climbing mountains, so I could feel like I was better than other people.

978. You have to believe in things that don’t exist, like yourself.

979. Bees have a really good sense of style.

980. Love is important because it encourages sexual reproduction and a general resistance to the natural human urge for death. Except if it’s with Sue.

981. The Virgin Mary has enough magic up her sleeves to cure cancer. She’s just a lazy witch.

982. I want to help people so I can feel good. I’ll start with myself.

983. Hurry up. I want to have weird sex with you.

984. I can’t get any satisfaction, and I prefer it that way.

985. When I lie down on the grass, the grass is probably screaming silently to itself.

986. I’ll have sex with you unless you’re scary.

987. I wish I was as sexy and as dead as my ex-girlfriend.

988. Death wanted to have sex, but everyone turned him down, so he gave up trying. He’s not looking so good these days. He kind of let himself go.

989. Sometimes I forget that air exists.

990. Woodpeckers burrow holes into trees in order to eat insects that live inside of them.

991. Trying is more important than succeeding unless it isn’t.

992. I didn’t see her for three weeks and then I found out she was dead. I hate the 19th century.

993. Dead famous people don’t care when famous people die.

994. This guy I know shot himself in the head.

995. I don’t care about things because I care about things that don’t exist.

996. I’ve never lived so good as I have since I became a zombie.

997. People who are in Heaven are generally happier than people who go to Hell.

998. Happiness is nice, but I still want to suffer at least a little bit.

999. Spring isn’t spring unless I’m getting laid.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 12.4.5 (September, 2012).

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Paul Legault is the co-founder of the translation press Telephone Books and the author of three books of poetry: The Madeleine Poems (2010), The Other Poems (2011), and The Emily Dickinson Reader (2012). He’s here.

Statement of Poetic Research

My first real awakening to the poetic pursuit that has filled the last ten years of my writing life occurred outside of my graduate work, outside of any class. I picked up a copy of Thomas Hariot’s A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia. Certainly, the language triggered in my ear a visceral reaction to an unexpected music, foreign and familiar at once. But what struck me most in reading this first book describing the world known as America was the simple but difficult fact of witnessing a text in direct relation to that which was unknown. For the first time I began to understand that the work of poetry is not only a concern with the beautiful, and the complexities therein, but is also epistemological. Hariot’s language describes what it also feared: wilderness and bewilderment. The catalog of resources became not simply a store of colonial enticement, but became for me the nervous and emotional categorization of a new world whose deeper resources lurked more darkly in the woods. The language hesitated in front of the very thing it named; it changed the way I thought about poetry. 

It also resulted in a series of poems, “Hariot’s Round,” which mimicked that language, put that older tongue into the poem’s speaking voice. I began to sense that a mode of language opened up a mode of perception, and in ways to me still quite miraculous, to learn to sing in that language isn’t simply the post-modern gesture of appropriation, but more fundamentally, is the ongoing availability to see and think with eyes other than one’s own. My poems began to be populated: Mary Rowlandson, Samuel Sewall, William Byrd II, Thomas Morton, Edward Taylor, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jones Very, just to name a few. A poem didn’t just open for me the fact of the historical. The poem became the unexpected ground in which history could be entered, could be brought into proximity, not to consider objectively the facts, but the opposite, to confound them back into experience. 

This poem, “Conscious Allegory,” comes directly out of my recent teaching of John Keats and Emily Dickinson. When asked who she read by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Emily Dickinson, in part, replies: “You inquire my Books—For Poets—I have Keats— . . .” I became curious, to put it mildly, to discover in what ways Dickinson’s reading of Keats could be felt within her own work. Such a question feels as if it should be the stuff of an essay, but I didn’t want to discover the connection so as to explain the connection.; I wasn’t seeking an argument or a conclusion; I wanted to discover the thick of that influence, and the only honest way I know to do that is to attempt to write a poem. Such a poem, in a strange way, seems to write itself. That is, I guess, the poem puts itself into conversation with the work that engenders it, and does so by including within itself the words or work it wants to enter into. Poetry is paradoxical in just this way (or in this way among many ways): if poetry wants to forge a path through the woods, it must first create the forest; if poetry wants to bridge a gap, it must create the distance it crosses. The reader familiar with Keats and Dickinson will note dozens of overlaps—from Keats’s editing of Endymion’s typesetting to his definition of negative capability, from Dickinson’s shock at her friends’ marrying themselves away to her Master Letters. The effort isn’t conclusion; the hope is complicity. What end does it come to? Well, in the poem, none at all. It begins where it ends in part to put into question the space the poem opens within itself. I don’t mean the formal effort to be coy, though I see it can be accused of that. I mean to posit the poem in the curious reality the imagination opens, seeing that the work of imagination is one of the complex links forged between Keats and Dickinson. Imagination creates a world that exists by not existing—but it’s not that simple. There is no world but this one to imagine. And so imagination as a poetic act calls into question the ways in which beauty, desire, thought interact to posit the world as real. That’s no answer, I know. I hope it is a question.

Conscious Allegory

The first line of this poem ends right here.

The comma should be at soberly,

The next comma should follow quietly,

As I will demonstrate. Soberly, quietly,

He wrote down the first line of his poem:

The first line of this poem ends right here.

 

Beauty kept obliterating consideration

As the sun scathes the daisies at noon.

I mean, consideration kept wanting

Obliteration to arrive, as if I might say,

By example, the word matrimonially.

Some petals are for love me, and some

 

Speak more desperately other

Imperatives. Hands, cover my wounds.

But I have no hands, only these petals of

This poem’s second line concerning grammar

Is dry and without tone not on accident.

This poem circumvents that wandering

 

That happens against its own limit as if

By chance, but in this poem there are no

Accidents, no discoveries to be made,

No Cortez, no starry ken, no mask

By which I mean to say, no Magellan.

I have no petals, only these eyes that ask 

 

What is All? A syllable

That threatens to explode.

Ask a volcano, What is beautiful?

The smoke says what isn’t told.

But I digress as does the cloth

Of a transparent dress

 

When a woman suddenly turns

And turns again in a kind of indecision

The fabric follows late behind

The body making a choice.

How many doors in the absolute dark

Are open, and how many closed?

 

The rhetorical question never arrives

Dressed “in white.” I only put it on

Around my head to distract you

As when a child points up into the air

And says, The ash is falling, the ash is

Falling, and then I am the empty streets,

 

All of them empty, of Pompeii. 

I don’t mean to embarrass you

With my shy ways. I sit down 

At one table almost each day,

A sober, quiet, method or way

To return to the first point, a period

 

That tells the breath to end 

Because the music has ended.

I don’t need to wear a mask

To pretend the woman is naked

Underneath her dress. Poor daisy knows:

The first line of this poem ends here.

Mittimatalik (Pond Inlet)

I had been twice to Pond
before I learned you had
not only been there, but filmed it.
Of course I felt stupid, losing
the trail so clearly marked.

Each time we went, all hundred
of us plus the Russian crew, some
older one who saw the steep climb
from the beach, the long dirt road
to the store and cultural center
became visibly daunted and then
was offered a ride on a four-wheeler
by a passing elder.

Each time drugs were offered
by teenagers on the co-op steps
(coop, I kept seeing). I want to kill myself.
One of the black poems inked
on the porch rail. Once,

a whale (narwhale, beluga) rolled
in the tideline chip. Just spine
and gristle, but the rope
that tied it a brilliant yellow
and its lungs the lapis of Keats.

After throat singing and Arctic
games, I bought a copy
of your film. It is on the shelf
by my desk, still wrapped
two years later. There are
so many reasons I am
afraid to watch it.

On Beechy

The stones on the graves, like all the other stones, are fossils:
corals and crynoids from the old seas of an old climate. There is a lot to say
about Franklin, the man who ate his boots and whose grave

is not among these, is not yet known. And Lady Franklin,
who made sure his ghost was chased across the Arctic, his name
hove into news. On the point above Somerset House,

built and stocked should he return, ruining in Arctic time,
my favorite cairn: rocks topped by a steel plaque, metal etched
with a man in thick-framed glasses. Caricature of a scientist

from a time even stranger than Franklin’s, another lapsarian age.

Iron hoops that once ringed barrels of food and fuel
decorate the shore, circle stones. A ship’s mast points out
toward where they might have gone: horizon, heaven, hell.

We wander. We avoid what’s forbidden. We wonder
what’s in the brass tubes laid out like kindling. Someone
keeps watch for bears. Someone talks about history.

I pry a fossil from frozen mud. I don’t want to leave
anything of myself, but to take a mnemonic of what I’ve marked,
marred? That tribute feels right.

Thinking of Places I Have Begun to Know

Yearn, yearn
what bloom has gone
to paper now, brown?
What bulbil ready
on which stalk?

Campion, gather
your snow drift
Your loess-blanket

Which bay is iced?
Which glacier slows?

Leaves here, south burnish
Then an odd warmth
& grass sprouts

Which lead? Which polynya
What hunt now
at Pond, at Clyde?

What, shot, drapes
the snow-go,
the towed sledge?

Oh my holiday knowledge
My Augusts      Deep
in years but not broadened
to seasons I try

to picture it      Caribou
over the tracks of caribou
left last year that
I walked      Fox white
Ducks gone      And what remains
and so belongs

Things I think you’d hate about Provincetown in 2008

 

Portuguese families cashed out and moved to Truro.

Apples, chokecherries, peach plums, rose hips, blueberries ungathered. Fallen.

Not so sure about whale watching—you may have even liked it.

Condos on the edge of the quaking bog.

That so little’s changed (taffy, kites, summer’s ephemera).

That town hall still stands but this year’s town meeting will be in the basement of the high school annex, hall condemned and funds for repair uncertain.

Fast ferries.

Unsure about the old museum with its ½-scale model of the Rose Dorothea repurposed as the library; the old library a real estate office.

(Where did the art, the horse-drawn fire truck, the model of Harry Kemp’s dune shack go?)

Drag queens balanced on segues.

You’d love the West End Racing Club—Flyer in his eighties still teaching the kids to swim and sail, still terrifying in his blustered love.

Wired Puppy—fancy coffee sipped while blogging.

Maybe Ellie, who each night sings in the town square, linebacker shoulders, short skirt, heels.

My slant attention and squint questions.

Maybe me—childless (you were, too), paired to a woman twelve years older than me (thirty years between you and Miriam), calling this place home and yet so often afield (your ship not even housed here, but halfway north, in Maine).

Statement of poetic research

In the Wake of:

MacMillan Pier:

I’d worked on boats that docked there for years before thinking to ask who it was named for.

On the Display at the Museum:

Stuffed polar bears? A kayak? What did they have to do with this place, with what the town’s landmark tower was built to commemorate: the landing of the pilgrims?

Discovery:

Maybe it was Flyer (or Dan?) who told me about MacMillan. It started to come together. I was leaving Alaska, half returning. I was done with the manuscript of poems about explorers and ice. I was moving to California for a fellowship and my love was moving back to Cape Cod. How are distances bridged? How do you return to a place that once was home? I looked for role models I could fight with. Hello, Donald B. MacMillan.

Sleuthing:

I read all of Mac’s books. Hunted down his old National Geographic articles. Got into the museum archives to read his cranky letters about the proper management of collections. Tried to get to Bowdoin to visit the Peary/MacMillan museum (just a drive away but for some reason still unseen). Found a goal: go north.

A Plan is Hatched:

I pulled strings. I schemed. I got work on a boat in the Eastern Canadian Arctic.

Getting Hooked:

More than I ever expected, the landscape and history resonated. Deeply. There is nothing like the world above treeline–small flowers huddling together to create enough warmth to bloom, seasonally thawed ground soft/hard/rolling/mushy underfoot, horizon. And to come upon rings of lichen-covered stones that, centuries ago and then just decades ago, held down skin tents? Ancient foundations with old copper kettles and monofilament fishing line? To feel miles and hours and moods of looking suddenly collapse to a single, hot point: Bear. Musk ox. Walrus.

I am a slow writer. I know this now. A late bloomer. A deliberator. I hide under a rock and try and be the rock. Quiet. Spying can you teach a lot. I spy on myself. I try not to get caught. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle applies: the observer changes that which is observed. Observing changes what is observed.

After writing the poems of my second book, Approaching Ice, which investigated the romance of polar exploration as an armchair traveler, I wanted to write into the high latitudes differently. Living in Alaska made the Arctic less theoretical. More familiar and also more complex. It was no longer distance and discovery that moved me, but the concept of a storied land. A land beautiful and inhabited for millennia.

I wanted to be culpable, to find a way to look at place more deeply and with more at stake personally. The idea of investigating place through a conversation between two people (myself and MacMillan), two places (Provincetown, the Arctic), and two times and all the awarenesses of each (his, mine) began to develop. It would be an intimate dance, a wrestling match of cultures, a frustrated love song.

The fact that all our lives, here and there, are being affected by climate change and other human-sourced impacts was part of the draw. Cape Cod is low-lying and sandy. Sea level rise is on the minds of insurance underwriters. The Arctic is a place on the globe where temperatures are warming more than elsewhere. The most toxic lake in the world is on a remote island north of Norway–airborne mercury and organo-pollutants fall out across the north. What will happen when all the methane stored in permafrost is released? What will happen when ice no longer covers and so reflects light back from the ocean’s surface?

How does a poet write about highly politicized issues in a way that is integrated with both nature and culture? In a way that is seductive? In a way that isn’t didactic?

Donald B. MacMillan made thirty voyages to the Arctic. He almost went along with Peary when Peary made his dash for the pole. And he was born in Provincetown. A place with deep meaning for me. I was not born on Cape Cod. I wasn’t even born on the East Coast, but I came of age there, in a way. I moved east for love, stayed, and fell in love with the place, too.

What drew me to Provincetown was both its physical beauty and its culture. I even liked its tacky fringe. There were boats, artists, oddballs, writers, and secrets, which for me is an ideal mix. Queerness is the norm (although there a conservative countermelody can be heard on the wharf, in the schools, tossed from rolled-down windows of cars stopped in traffic), which allowed me to live without needing to consider sexuality, to defend it or figure out how it might or might not define me against. I can’t say strongly enough what a freedom this was and is.

MacMillan didn’t spend his whole youth in Provincetown. His father died in a fishing accident, leaving his mother to raise him. She couldn’t quite manage, so he left to live with relatives in Maine. As an adult, he returned. He married a woman thirty years his junior who, when she was growing up, “played MacMillan.” I haven’t yet figured out how to wrestle with that strangeness.

Mac, as people called him, built a schooner, the Bowdoin, and took it north. He brought Miriam. He brought color film. He brought boys in a floating classroom. He died near the time that I was born. We didn’t quite overlap, but it was close. I am not a continuation of him, and yet

I don’t know how the story will end, how the book these poems begin will shape its arc. I’m trying to hold off a bit. Next summer, I’m scheduled to work again in the Arctic, and for the first time part of the trip will be in Greenland. Mac spent a lot of time up there. How my trip will shape the way I see him and his trips, how I see the Arctic itself, how I interpret his interpretations of the land and people, is a blank on the map.

Meanwhile, things accrue. Home, I walk by Mac’s old house every once in a while. The broken antler on the strange orange elk mounted over the front door dangles for the fourth year, still not broken off. Would Mac have fixed it? Or would he not have noticed, too busy living again, from home, his time away?

I’m going to try and convince the owners to let me go through the house. Or maybe sit on the porch. Look out over what has changed, what hasn’t. Try and figure out how to celebrate, castigate, laugh and mourn at once.

Further Reading

Biographies of MacMillan range from the young-adult-appropriate Captain Mac: The Life of Donald Baxter MacMillan, Arctic Explorer, by Mary Morton Cowan (Honesdale, Pa., 2010) to Everett S. Allen’s hero-worship-esque Arctic Odyssey: The Life of Rear Admiral Donald B. MacMillan published by Dodd, Mead and Company (New York, 1962)–note the suspicious overlap of publishers between Allen and Miriam MacMillan. Miriam MacMillan, whom Donald married at age 60, wrote a fair amount for the general public, and one can sense the hand of Mac behind them: Etuk: The Eskimo Hunter, Dodd, Mead and Company (New York, 1950), Green Seas and White Ice: Far North with Captain Mac, Dodd, Mead and Company (New York, 1948). I had high hopes for juicy tidbits in Miriam’s I Married An Explorer (London, 1952), but alas. Samples of MacMillan’s own voice can be found in his two full-length autobiographical accounts of his explorations, both written fairly early in his career: Four Years in the White North (New York, 1918) and Etah and Beyond, or, Life Within Twelve Degrees of the Pole(Boston, 1927). I do wish he’d done more writing in his later years. Kah’da: Life of a North Greenland Eskimo Boy (New York, 1930) is a more romantic/fictionalized view of the North by MacMillan. Mac’s articles in National Geographic are also rich. One of my favorite moments is his explanation of why the musk ox rubs its hoof to its eye.