Wednesday, May 1, 2024

Publishing Karpa Talesman: A Long Journey to a New World


 What a blessing, it turns out, to be born on Earth where – at least in some places, at some times – concepts of justice, fairness, and protection of the weak are honored in both law and practice. What a joy, the novel’s hero Karpa – returned to his former existence as Copper Drey – discovers, to be home again. Life on Earth, with all its flaws and disappointments, is still worth living.

            This book has turned out to be a kind of life’s work. Though I only began it until well into middle life, it was the first of my efforts I judged worthy of a serious push for publication. And, remarkably, I found a literary agent willing to take it on, for a short time. His efforts failed, fortunately, in retrospect, because the manuscript I gave him proved to be only a first shot at the bull's eye. 

I went on to other projects, and my next effort to achieve publication was undertaken in behalf of the history-based novel Suosso’s Lane, which tells the story of the Sacco and Vanzetti case and wraps an invented tale about a contemporary search for ‘lost evidence’ around it. Though the effort succeeded, that book’s publisher turned out to be a very poor choice, and only my own speaking efforts generated sales.

            Some time after my Suosso’s Lane, tour of Eastern Mass. libraries, while I flirted with other projects, something caused me to take another look at Karpa. What the book needed, I decided then, was second storyline – not a subplot, so much as a focus on the ongoing, but deeply fractured life on Earth (not Urth, where Karpa struggled to stay alive) endured by Karpa/Copper’s wife and daughter. I had to show why Karpa’s efforts and, it was to be hoped, the ultimately successful conclusion of his mission, mattered to people – real people, potential readers, and not simply people like me who enjoyed the head games my narrative voice was indulging in.

            So I added these back-on-Earth encounters, developed the characters of Copper’s wife and daughter as they struggle with what’s happened to their husband and father on top of what’s destroying the coherence of their world, and upped the ante on the long odds against Copper/Karpa’s successful retrieval of the wisdom needed to allow Earth to right itself. Then, satisfied with these improvements, I wondered what I should do with the new MS. I had tried hard to find to find an agent for Suosso’s Lane – a story with an attractive hook: a genuine tale of injustice committed by the strong against the weak – but in the end failed and was left with an uncomfortable bond with an ill-fitting publisher.

            Maybe this time, I told myself, I should focus directly on finding an appropriate publisher.

            Searching for a publisher, in case you’ve never tried it, is a lot worse than, say, looking for a job. Other distractions took precedence. A novel based on working for a local newspaper. A novel about young people fresh out of college and sharing a house. A novel about a would-be dictator trying to take over the country.

            Then one day, reading a writing/publishing industry mag, I came across an ad by a publisher seeking entries for manuscripts in various genres: mystery, adventure, women’s fiction. Oh, I thought, and here’s an interesting genre: speculative fiction. Well, said self to self, I think I have one of those.

            I’ll just give the MS quick brush-up and proof-read, I told myself. If you’ve ever sat down with a book length MS to proofread, you may think it’s going to take a couple of hours, but it ends up taking a couple of weeks. Or months.

            Eventually, I traveled to the ends of the Urth with Karpa sufficiently comfortably (and often) to judge the novel MS was ready for prime time consideration. Months after I submitted the MS, the publisher called me up to say that my novel had won the competition, if it was still available for publication. I did not pretend that other publishers had been food-fighting over the right to publish it. 

           Shortly after publication rights were secured, Covid walked among us. The world seemed to stop turning. (Maybe Copper/Karpa should have been dispatched to the stars again to see what was up.)

           I cannot say how happy I am that my speculative fiction travel narrative has finally seen the light of day. 

           It's almost enough to make me want to write another one. 

 

Thursday, April 4, 2024

Karpa Talesman -- My New Novel! -- Just Launched Last Week

  


My newly published novel Karpa Talesman – just out a week ago (March 2024) – is the winner of the Prophecy Creek Award for Speculative Fiction. Speculative fiction, sometimes called a “super genre” is a literary approach to storytelling that makes use of the themes and devises of the sci-fi, fantasy and even fairytale genres to tell a deeper story about life in troubling times.

The seeds of Karpa Talesman were planted in an experience of serious illness, a complex surgery, and the hallucinatory dreams planted by the anesthesia needed for the surgery addressing two types of life-threatening cancer.

The idea for the book blossomed during my recovery, while I split my time between freelance newspaper work and following the fictional trails where these dreams led me. Years of writing, and deep revisions, followed.

  Here's the short take on the book that resulted:

  Planet Earth appears to be running out of the dimension of time itself. Children go to school in the morning, but in the blink of an eye the day is over, and they are lining up to take the bus home. Scientist Sheena Drey takes her daughter to the park, but darkness arrives before they can find their favorite tree.  Convinced that the multiverse contains infinite worlds similar to Earth, scientists of the Dream Project send gifted “dreamers” to search for a universe where the solution to the problem can be found. Sheena is shocked to learn that her husband, Copper, a self-described 'dreamer,' has volunteered for the project and is lying in an induced coma-like state in the project's lab.

       Where Copper's dreams take him, the planet where he no longer knows himself, and his inward – and outward – journey to find his way back to the world  and the family – he left behind is my novel's through-story. Copper's journey, experienced by the dream-self known as Karpa Talesman, becomes an exploration of primitive and advanced civilizations that provide the wisdom and the clues that will ultimately enable Earth to save itself.

        "Karpa Talesman" received advance praise from novelist Patry Francis, author of The Orphans of Race Point” and All the Children are Home:Whether he’s writing a historical as he did with Suosso’s Lane, or veering into science fiction as he does with in his bold new novel, Bob Knox has a unique ability to tap into the zeitgeist of the time, to show us not only who we are, but who we might become. I loved this book for its prescience and originality, the sheer fun of playing with language, but most of all for the compassion and wisdom that floods a dark world with light."

                        The book is available as a paperback Amazon.com. 
       
        Here's the link   Karpa Talesman

Please take a look at Karpa Talesman!


Monday, December 11, 2023

Still Eager to Hear About Sacco and Vanzetti, at Whitman Public Library


The program room at Whitman, Mass. Public Library filled steadily, until more chairs had to be separated from a file a pile in the far corner of the room and placed on the floor to accommodate the audience for what librarian Barbara Bryant called "the best-attended author talk we have ever had!"

The talk about Sacco and Vanzetti was her idea, her invitation. I hadn't given a talk about the two Italian immigrants falsely accused of murder and robbery back in 1920, and ultimately executed by the state of Massachusetts seven years later despite worldwide protests -- for half a dozen years. I gave a bunch of them, mostly in libraries, after the publication of my novel based on the case, "Suosso's Lane."

The audience that filled the Whitman library program room was almost uniformly of an age to know that we're all part of history now. 

This talk was about the facts of the case, not directly about my book. The book is fact-based, but goes beyond the historical record to invent a contemporary (wholly fictional) investigation to turn up some new evidence about the old case. Those talks were fun, but a little fraught -- I was hoping back then to sell books.

To prepare for this talk, I had to go back to my notes and printouts for those talks from seven years ago and reacquaint myself with what I used to know well enough to share by memory with an audience, Facts, dates, places, names were particularly important, indeed essential, because this was a talk about the case, its history, rather than about the book. 

Here's what I told them, the good people of Whitman, about the Sacco-Vanzetti case, the international affair that exposed America's prejudice against immigrants, particularly those from Italy.


Long Ago in Braintree... The Crime That Began the Sacco-Vanzetti Case Took Place 100 Years Ago

By Robert Knox

These are difficult days in American politics – perhaps difficult days in America, period. But times were tough a hundred years ago as well, especially for immigrants and for civil liberties – i.e. constitutional protection of free speech and other basic rights.

A little more than a hundred years ago, on April 15, 1920, the crime took place that began the notorious Sacco and Vanzetti case – an American scandal of injustice that became an international cause – in which two Italian immigrants who professed anarchist beliefs were accused without a shred of real evidence of committing a heinous crime, tried in a prejudiced courtroom, convicted by a nativist jury – that is to say, all male American citizens in a time when only men could vote – and eventually executed 7 years later, by which time their case had become an international cause de celebre. (They were famous names worldwide, everybody knew about the case; everybody worldwide knew they were victims of injustice.)


Immigration, always an essential part of the American story, looked a lot different in the early 20th century. Immigrants came from Europe – not from Mexico, Central America, Asia, the Caribbean, Africa or the Middle East, as they do today. They came at first from England, Scotland, Ireland, Germany, Scandinavia, mostly northern European countries. But from around 1880 and into the 1920’s, in greater numbers than had ever been seen, they came from southern and eastern Europe. From Poland, Russia, the Balkans, Portugal, Turkey, and – the single greatest number – from Italy. For those who came from Italy, the cause was almost always purely economic. Disasters weakened the economic base of Southern Italy: drought, crop disease, the collapse of traditional fisheries and the lumber industry. At the same time advances in maritime transportation made it easier, and less expensive, to cross the ocean. Many Italian men crossed the ocean to work in seasonal industries and then return home with their earnings year after year. But many others, including women and children –whole families – chose to come and stay.

During those peak decades, 1880-1920, national prejudices grew as numbers of immigrants did. Some towns or companies made it clear when they were hiring more workers that they did not intend to hire Italians.

Two immigrants: Bartolomeo Vanzetti arrived in America in 1908 as a young man of 20 to “put an ocean between my mother’s death” and the rest of his life, he said…. Unlike most, he did not come for economic reasons. His father was a wealthy farmer in northern Piemonte Italy (in Villafilletto) who wanted Bartolomeo to learn to run his businesses. He sent him to the city to learn to be a pastry chef and help the family business that way. Bartolomeo found pastry-making to be factory work, piece-work, a miserable business in conditions that nearly killed him. He became seriously ill with a breathing difficulty, was sent home, where his mother devoted herself to nursing him back to health. Then she developed cancer and died after months of suffering. Her devoted son thought that her efforts to save him weakened her. Wishing to separate his future from a painful past – he had a deep relationship with his mother, but a poor one with his father, he decided to go to America, which he thought of as “the land of the free.” No big divides between social classes; no oppressive national church.

Vanzetti was not an anarchist when he arrived. His life in the US led him to that philosophy. He later told reporter about the early years, “I was a Dago to be worked to death [a pejorative]…. We lived in a shanty, where the Italians work and live like a beast…” Like other day laborers, he is forced to follow the availability of work, a trade he called “pick and shovel.” After five years mostly in New York, rumors of work brought him to Mass., and eventually to Plymouth, where he boarded with the Brini family who came from his region in Italy, and who lived in North Plymouth, the immigrant section of town. [this is how I got interested in the story...working for community newspaper publisher based in Plymouth] He became close to the family’s children. He called Beltrando Brini his “spiritual son.” Recorded interviews collected and published later show V. to be kind, courteous to women, gentle and loving to children; V was a talker, a thinker, a dreamer, a reader. Among the books he owned was “the life of Jesus Christ” by Ernest Renan. Anarchism became his religion; its ideals gave meaning to his life… Among his jobs was working on repairs to Plymouth harbor.

Nicola Sacco was born in the town of Toremaggiore (SE of Italy) and emigrated to US in 1908 at age 17. He loved machinery. He emigrated with his brother Sabino, and when his brother returned to Italy in 1909 and he was left alone in the United States, he began to take lessons on shoe-trimming and became an excellent shoe trimmer. He was a skilled worker; made a good living. He married his wife Rosa, when he was 21, she 17, and first child was born in 1913.

He found settled work in a shoe factory in StoughtonMassachusetts; he developed a strong relationship with the owner, the son of an Irish immigrant. He made a good living because he was so good at what he did. A shoe trimmer is piece work. He could make a day’s pay in a few hours. He was also attracted to the cause of labor, and participated in strikes. …Sacco helped with the defense of Arturo Giovannitti, an Italian labor organizer -- one of the principal organizers of the famous 1912 Lawrence textile strike -- an Italian immigrant who had been arrested on a dubious murder charge.  It was one of his first radical activities.


A definition: The word “anarchy” means ‘no authority.’ [From the Greek: ‘a’ means not; archon is a ruler] It doesn’t mean chaos. It means living with no governing state, no political or “established” religious institutions. No rich; no poor… V. called anarchy “the beautiful idea.” People, he believed, would live happily and survive materially by forming voluntary cooperatives. Sharing resources. Recognizing the needs of others as important as one’s own.

For anarchists like V and S and for many other social critics, the fundamental issue in this stage of western civilization was “rich versus poor”. …today we call that “the distribution of wealth.”

Believing that workers were oppressed by the capitalist system, by the owning of property, anarchists like Sacco and Vanzetti – both became disciples of the anarchist theorist Luigi Galleani (V. called him my ‘master’) – supported and took part in strikes. Though he did not work there, Vanzetti took part in the 1916 strike against the Plymouth Cordage Company, a large ropemaking business. WWI created a great demand for American resources such as cordage, but war-driven inflation ate up workers’ earnings.

When America joined the war in 1917 (3 yrs after it began), the act forced political radicals to choose: participate or not? Anarchists opposed all war; they opposed the draft; they opposed governments.

Sacco, who supported strikes by his physical presence – strikes were often street battles – also became a disciple of Galleani. He began attending weekly meetings of an anarchist group in 1913 and subscribed to Cronaca Sovversiva (“Subversive Chronicles”), as did Vanzetti, an anarchist newspaper published by Galleani in Italian. He became a devotee of Galleani and in the next several years wrote for the paper, donated and solicited funds for anarchist activities, as well as support his family.

So the two men have much in common, a world view, an allegiance to the views of a powerful theorist, or ideologue in Galleani. A strong commitment to social change. They’re the kind of people the business and political establishment hate and fear. They want change. As anarchists see it (or ‘radicals’ generally), the ‘establishment’ hates change; it wants to preserve the status quo. The owners and the politicians are rich; they don’t care if you’re poor.

The two meet at activities held in opposition to the war. Then, in 1917, both join a group of men leaving home to travel to Mexico and live under pseudonyms in order to avoid the draft. 

The Mexico experiment lasts a few months. No jobs; no money. Then both men go ‘home.’ Sacco returns to his young family, in Stoughton, Massachusetts, where he worked for a shoemaker, who valued him so highly he gave him management responsibilities and paid him to keep an eye on the factory after hours. Vanzetti goes back to Plymouth; has to find a new place to board, the Brini family doesn’t have room for him any more. He boards with a widow a few streets over in North Plymouth. He also finds a new to make a living; selling fish, door to door, among the immigrant community. 

OK, now comes the heavy political stuff.

During a period of anti-radical and anti-foreigner hysteria known as “The Red Scare,” [ask yourself if this was in your American History class] a well-organized criminal gang carried out a brazen daylight robbery in Braintree, Mass. The robbers stole a shoe factory payroll and shot and killed the paymaster and his guard at point-blank range.

We'll come back to the crime, but first we have to talk about the Red Scare of 1919–1920 — a time of national paranoia in which thousands of immigrants were detained without due process of law.

After the US entered World War I in 1917, Congress passed laws to suppress all criticism of government’s decision to join the ongoing European slaughter or any means the government chose  (such as the draft) to conduct the war. Anti-war critics were prosecuted, the non-citizens among them deported to their native countries. (For comparison, imagine that response to war protests and criticism of the government during the Vietnam War era.)

When Galleani was deported to Italy, some of his followers ‘declared war’ on the government – arguing that the government had already been making war on them --  on the institutions that suppressed their publications, broke up rallies of war critics, and used the courts to suppress their First Amendment freedoms of expression. In response, these followers – some of them members of the same ‘gruppo’ that Sacco and Vanzetti belonged to -- sent bombs through the mail and placed them at the homes of their ‘enemies’ in government and big business. These "Anarchist Fighters" were self-declared enemies of the state.

In his recent book “American Midnight,” historian Adam Hochschild detailed the US government’s outrageous violations of war critics’ Constitutional rights – and the rights of Americans in general. Thousands of immigrants were rounded up in mass raids, declared ‘disloyal’ and sentenced to deportation before a single federal judge stepped in to overturn decisions made without due process of law. 

His legally prescribed role was to make sure "due process" had been followed before he approved the deportation orders. He refused: due process had not been followed.  

A crackdown on labor organization was taking place as well: Union meetings were broken up by local and government police; speakers, and simple participants, dragged off to jail… A lawless war was declared on members of the most active labor organization of the time, the IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World, known as Wobblies. Private industry, especially 'big business' supported the war. There was lots of money to be made from it. Organized labor -- unions -- cut into their profits. Now that the US was at war, big business wanted union organizers to be seen as traitors.  

Wartime deportations included the nation's most famous critics of capitalism, among them Emma Goldman, a Russian immigrant, radical, anarchist, and America’s most popular lecturer. She traveled whole country, drawing audiences everywhere and speaking on a wide range of social and political subjects. 

Eugene V. Debs, not an immigrant but a Socialist party candidate who received almost a million votes for President in 1912, was jailed for opposing the decision to go to war.

Mobs of what were called “Super-Americans” physically attacked and broke up meetings of war critics, draft critics, and labor organizers. Enforcing wartime restrictions on freedom of speech and assembly required the creation of the first federal police force, called the Radical Division of the Department of Justice; it later became the Investigation Bureau; finally the FBI, its principal duty from the very beginning being to ferret out and suppress 'subversion' by labor organizers or 'radical' critics of the status quo. J. Edgar Hoover, in his 20s was there from the Red Scare to the Civil Rights era when his agents were harassing leaders such MLK.

After the government suppressed Galleani's network, destroyed his printing press, burned his writings and tried and deported the maestro himself back to Italy, his followers decided they had to fight back. Going underground, hiding their identities, they formed the "Anarchist Fighters" and mailed bombs to the houses of federal judges, police chiefs and prominent capitalists, "terrorist" style, in revenge for the 'war' the American government had been waging on them. Famously, June 2, 1919, bombings in major cities such as Washington DC and Boston shook the nation. Top of the page was the bomb that exploded on the front steps of the Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s house in DC, destroying most of the house but not harming the family. Other buildings were destroyed, but almost no one was seriously hurt, except for the anarchist who blew himself up when the bomb he was planting at Palmer's house went off prematurely. Remarkably, we know his name, Carlo Valdinocci, an Anarchist Fighter and follower of Galleani. Sacco and Vanzetti would have known him.

            These bombings lead to the "Palmer raids," as they are known, in late 1919, when federal agents and vigilantes conduct major raids in big cities rounding up supposed radicals and thousands of immigrants – lots of Russians, since after the Russian Revolution ‘communism’ is now perceived as a major threat. Detainees are roughed up and kept in poor conditions. Congress passes a law making it illegal to be a member of an anarchist organization.

            Federal agents declare they will find those responsible for the bombings, but get nowhere. After almost a year, the feds arrest Andrea Salsedo, a member of the Galleani network; a printer, he made the leaflets denouncing the government the ‘Anarchist Fighters’ include in their bombs. He’s questioned, tortured, and held without charges in police office building in New York City. He smuggles out a letter to Vanzetti, asking for help, and Vanzetti heads to New York, though it's unclear what he can hope to accomplish. But before he can get to see him, Salsedo dies falling out a window of a police building. The cops say it was a suicide; other anarchists say he was pushed. 

             But the crackdown on 'radicals' following the Anarchist Fighters' bombings creates the hostile law-enforcement atmosphere in which any critic of the government, the war, or wartime profiteering by Big Business is treated. This politically tense atmosphere may explain why local and state police in Massachusetts tried hard to convince themselves that 'radicals' might be responsible for a shoe factory robbery in Braintree.  

The Crime: 

In a well-planned criminal enterprise, a gang carried out a brazen daylight robbery in Braintree, Mass., on April 15, 1920. The robbers stole a shoe factory payroll and shot and killed the paymaster and his guard at point-blank range.

Some days later, in a completely unrelated matter, members of Sacco and Vanzetti's "Gruppo" decided that in view of the government's sweeping attack on radicals and immigrants following the Anarchist Fighters' bombings, they should hide evidence linking them to Galleani, such as copies of his journal "Cronaca Sovversiva." …The Gruppo decides to send some of its members to collect anarchist lit from other members and hide it. Sacco and Vanzetti and two other group members decide to retrieve a comrade’s car left at the home of a mechanic in Bridgewater. Police have staked out the car, on the grounds that that Bridgewater is somewhat near Braintree (not really) and since some anarchists have taken to planting bombs, maybe they also commit robberies -- a notion that, a century later, makes no more sense now than it did at the time. Cops tell the mechanic to call them at once if anybody comes for the car. 

Four Gruppo members, two riding a motorcycle, arrive at the Bridgewater mechanic's home one evening to retrieve the car, which they plan to use to round up anarchist literature from other group members. The mechanic stalls, then tells the visitors that the car isn't ready to drive yet. His visitors shrug, decide it's now too late to make their rounds without a car. The two guys get back on the bike for the ride home. Sacco and Vanzetti take off on foot to the nearest streetcar stop. Meanwhile the mechanic's wife has called the Bridgewater police to say four "foreign" guys came looking for the car.

State police put out the word to local cops to look for foreign-looking guys leaving Bridgewater. Streetcars are stopped, and two men with foreign accents are taken off a streetcar at gunpoint, hauled to a police station and interrogated. After the two men freely admit to being anarchists, Sacco and Vanzetti are charged with robbery and murder, despite any evidence linking them to the crime. They were charged, police would later say, because they lied about what they were doing on the night of their arrest. They said they were visiting a friend. And because they were carrying weapons. Quick fact check: This is America! lots of people carry weapons – it’s legal. Vanzetti told the police they were carrying guns "because there were a lot of dangerous people around." Clearly, though, they came under suspicion largely because they were friends of another anarchist who owned the car. It’s hard to find a clearer case of “guilt by association.”

The Trial

Since police and prosecutors lacked any substantial evidence against the two radicals, both of whom had witnesses for their whereabouts on the date of the crime, they went about creating it. Among the many shoe factory workers who managed split-second glimpses of the crime from factory windows, the state found a few whom they could pressure, or threaten, into testifying that they recognized the defendants. In the best of circumstances eye-witness testimony to the brief, violent or otherwise criminal acts of strangers is highly unreliable. The overwhelming majority of factory workers interviewed either said the accused were not the robbers, or they could not make an identification based on what they had seen.

When the case went to trial, ballistic experts disagreed over whether a bullet removed from one of the victim’s body could have been fired by Sacco’s gun. Recent re-examinations of both the ballistics and autopsy evidence suggest that the state fired a bullet from Sacco’s gun and subbed it for one of the bullets surgically removed from a victim’s body. Since the state failed to maintain a secure chain of evidence, the case’s physical evidence was contaminated.

The trial’s native-born, male jurors were themselves hardly unbiased. After the trial, the jury foreman said he didn’t care whether the defendants were guilty or not, saying “they should hang them all.” It was clear who was meant by this ‘them’ — foreigners with political beliefs that native-born citizens found threatening.

And trial judge Webster Thayer made his own bias clear in a widely reported comment to a college classmate, at an alumni reunion, after passing sentence: “Did you see what I did to those anarchist bastards?”

The defendants' attorney, a respected labor lawyer naturally appealed, beginning a legal process that lasted seven years. Appeal hearings were delayed, postponed, rescheduled for a host of reasons -- so-called prosecution witnesses had left the state and needed to be tracked down. Expert witnesses were ill and could not attend until recovery. The judge was ill for a year. The appeals court judge was ill, and then needed a vacation. When the state's supreme judiciary court finally rejected the defense's appeal, only then could Webster Thayer pronounce sentence: death in the electric chair.  

The sentencing brought widespread public protests, both in this country and abroad, to a boil. A typical newspaper headline from 1927 captured the universality of working class and progressive condemnation of the court's decision: 

"Protests and demonstrations and strikes all over the United States, in Germany, England Australia, Switzerland, Paraguay, Mexico, on every continent except Antarctica."

In Paris, a protest gathering drew a reported one million people. 

A who’s who of prominent figures from different walks of life expressed support for Sacco and Vanzetti either publicly or privately. Writers Dorothy Parker and Edna St. Vincent Millay


showed up to demonstrations. Benito Mussolini, then prime minister of Italy, explored potential avenues for requesting a commutation of the sentence. Various others, from Albert Einstein to George Bernard Shaw to Marie Curie, signed petitions directed toward Massachusetts Governor Alvan T. Fuller or U.S. President Calvin Coolidge.

The defendants' attorneys made a final appeal for clemency to the governor of the state. Unhappily, the overseas attention paid to the case may have worked against the defendants. Governor Alvan Fuller, a Republican, visited them in prison while weighing an appeal and was impressed by Vanzetti's personality, remarking: “what an attractive men.” 

Vanzetti had used jail time to improve his English. He wrote letters to supporters, and a few memoirs. Fuller said he considered granting a pardon but, one associate explained, "He felt that worldwide interest in the case proved that there was a conspiracy against the United States."

Their execution, after several stays of execution by Fuller kept the case on the front pages in the summer of 1927, drew international outrage, including violent demonstrations in France and in some other European countries. Thousands of people gathered the night of the execution, Aug. 23, 1927, many of them on the Boston Common, in a vigil…dispersing after midnight in sorrow after word passed that the men were dead.


The executions also led to a huge public funeral march through the city of Boston regarded as the largest public gathering in the city until the Red Sox World Series victory parade in 2004, with the crowd estimated by newspapers at 200,000.

FINAL WORDS

I will give the last words to the two principals in this story:

"At his trial Sacco said that life in the U.S. is good for people with money but it’s not good for the working and the laboring class, and at his sentencing, he said, 'I know this sentencing will be between two classes, the rich class and the working class, and there will always be collision between one and the other.'"

Vanzetti said their deaths would be a worthy sacrifice. He said he mkight have spent his life talking to sad men on street corners, winning no change or improvements: a failure.

But “Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life can we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man’s understanding of man as we now do by dying. Our words, our lives, our pains—nothing! The taking of our lives—lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish peddler—all! That last moment belongs to us—that agony is our triumph.”

 


Tuesday, December 5, 2023

Still Thankful: Seasonal Poems and a Time to Remember

 

My thanks to editor Jim Lewis for including two poems in the December issue of Verse-Virtual. The poems are a response to a seasonal request to poets to write a poem about what we're thankful for... Big question; so many, many answers.

Here's my poem --below the photo -- on gratitude for the beauty of the natural world.











Twilight in Paradise


We’ve been here before 
Not ‘here’ in the literal sense,
but such an evening path to Perfection
If you live on Perfection Road,
you know the signs.
The sorcery of twilight when an autumn afternoon
     nuzzles August balm
and then the light fades, so soon this time of year
And your street, your road,
each house after perfect house,
silence unbroken, no traffic finding this way,
    nor wandering through, confused,
the driver’s nose in a map… 

No motorcycles, power tools, radios
nothing at all to spoil a perfect silence,
smear with words 
the perfect end of a perfect day.
And not one perfect person,
old, young or in between
stepping out of doors 
to watch the sun set over Hillside Pond
or see the full moon rise above 
    Mount Blue,
the perfect place from which 
to watch the seething traffic back up on the way
to pop-idol stadium



                        



Monday, November 13, 2023

It's a Truly Seasonal Story... If Plants Could Talk

 Now that we're all in a November state of mind.... (chilly? holiday season? early dark?) ... my humorous short story "Reasoning with Azalea" is up online on Witcraft, a journal looking for ways to win a smile.

Yes, Azalea is a plant, but she does a pretty good job defending her point of view. If you click on the title, the whole piece comes up.

It's a two-minute read at most.

Here's the link Azalea

Here are the first few lines:

I know it’s cold, Azalea. 

I don’t like the cold either. 

But you’re not going to spend the winter indoors this year spooning with your buddy, electric heater. 

Not this year. 

He’ll miss me! You think you’re the reason he gets hot!






Tuesday, October 17, 2023

Poems in October: Seeing too much blood, too often

   


 This past summer has been a bit of a blood bath. Damage to my bladder from long-ago prostate cancer radiation treatments has left me seeing much more of my own blood, and on a regular basis, than I ever wished to. My journey back to status quo ante (a work in in progress) has included a lot of walking at a gentler pace.

     I am grateful to English poet Robert Nisbet, a frequent contributor to Verse-Virtual for his kind comments on my poems in the October issue of Verse-Virtual: "The problem with any poems about personal ailments is that they can so easily cloy, but the linguistic jauntiness of Bob Knox's first poem carries us over all of that risk. And his second poem has a real range and richness."

I have been a contributor to Verse-Virtual, a community of poets that publishes a monthly journal, since 2014 and a contributing editor since 2015.

Here are my two "bloody" poems from the October issue.

Red-Blooded American

Blood inside, blood outside, blood all over 
For days it rains red, 
messy, sleep-broken, unspeakable, red-basined days
The body on a short leash,
Punishment enough, I thought, for an eon of sins…

Then nothing: no flow, no stream, 
no whisper in the cistern of the soul
Just the pain of bone-dry efforts
Burn, burn, the smoke of effort,
no fire of release…
No higher expression 
of the body’s deepest need than this:
    Gotta pee! 

We struggle down to the ER, 
dedicated spouse now designated driver – 
     thank goodness! 
Or the impatient patient would have run the lights
through glorious, summer-green, upper-crust Milton,
     school-house of presidents,
to a season’s early end. 
Succumbing (notices would read) to a deadly combo
of scabs and plasma,
victim of broadly fired radioactive treatments 
performed in a prior day  
     by optimistic clinicians, slightly off-mark 
in a crowded neighborhood of organs. 

Somebody please, we beg the healers, 
free me from this inner strain. 
For I am bound upon a wheel of fire,
an old man in a rag of flesh, 
who does but slenderly understand what’s bloody up.
                        

Uphill

I walk slowly uphill.
It’s how I do everything.
Something has tipped the world off balance.
Now the sidewalk, the dirt road, the woodland path,
     is always trending up.
Strange… I remember thinking tasks completed, 
      gardens planted: 
‘All downhill from here.’

The world is green, a healthy color.
I dream of swapping flesh with the leaves 
that swarm the hillside,
     pirouetting in the devil-may-care late summer breeze.
But then, in autumn’s termination, all must wither and go under…
Well, yes, in the end, just a question of timing.

The great shade of the forest
stirs music in the minor key.
I will climb these heights, 
once more possess such sights 
in a theater of the heart. 

My feet regain the path,
reclaim their strength, their range of motion, 
renew my journey…
both up and down.
                        


And here's a link to the listing of all the poems and articles published in the October issue.

Monday, July 3, 2023

The Garden of Verse: Doors That Never Open, and The Gates Through Which All Pass


 










My two poems in the June 2023 issue of Verse-Virtual are both about unusual visits, going to places where I've never been or tend to avoid. 

"Other People’s Lives" tells of traveling to parts of the city in which my wife and I live in, Quincy Mass., to deliver notices of an upcoming community meeting, and discovering that some houses are built with front doors that are never meant to open. Here's the poem.

 

 Other People’s Lives


All the doors closed, locked, shut up tight.
No way in, no welcome mat.
The mailbox up and mailed itself somewhere else.
The front door an utter rampart:
No entry. No welcome. Nobody home to the likes of you.

Privacy protected.
Living in the hills.
I’m a mere stranger. Worse, afoot,
no doubt out to seek thrills.
Hence those locks:
The feverish encounter always pre-empted.

Walk your city’s hidden neighborhoods,
those unseen lanes and cul-de-sacs,
divorced from the city’s busy streets,
its commercial thoroughfares, numbered highways.
Quiet nooks, the street may not be, legally, ‘private’
but a taxpayer’s home is surely his, her, or their castle…
What is it like to put three-quarters of a million (probably more)
into a modest lot plus extra-large dwelling, 
outpost of well-protected privacy
smack up against a vast and wooded preserve,
     people-free at the busiest seasons,
on a narrow street most of us commoners will never find.

What is it like to hide away?
This house is “Protected," so saith the conspicuous advisory
on the never-used front door.
Protected in turn by all-weather storm door with its own 
     tight lock
from the interloper with the handbill declaring the invitation  
     to “community meeting” –
Offstage laughter indulged in silence: Community? Meeting?
… preventing said interloper, or any other physical entity that 
     can walk and chew gum
from approaching the double-locked barrier behind it.

The beast within howls his rage, his furious abandonment
when the interloper touches the impenetrable outer barrier,
that second skin of inviolability,
the offense wired directly into his self-devouring imprisonment 
     of canine sadness. 

Bark all you want, Wolfie,
No one is coming to reduce the terrible gnawing anxiety
of your endless hours of incarceration.

No toys out-of-doors, no sign any creature of flesh ever steps 
     through this parody of ingress,
the mocking shell of the conventional ‘Welcome’ baked into the 
     unyielding mat spread upon the doorstep,
the empty remembrance of that which we no longer 
     mean to offer.
Unpurposed now, its meaning fouled,
it braves the elements, impersonal, dysfunctional till the very 
      crack of doom. 

Speak not to us of common purpose, public space,
those challenges and opportunities that onetime fell to all, 
… the town meeting, the charity drive.
After all, who can you trust?
 
The state is me, moi, and mine own
And if he, or she – or (conceivably) some trace element of younger lives –
does not come home soon,
     I’m surely changing the locks. 
                        


The second poem, "Visiting Eternity" follow a rare visit to a place where nobody is worried about who may come to the door.  Here's the poem. 


Visiting Eternity


The parents are well. We know where to find them. 
Back to back on a stone we ran to ground (a year later)
in a busy corner of forever. 
It is, admittedly, a crowded neighborhood, 
though well-tended. 

The next search however proved a bear.
Don’t get excited to find a Goldberg,
their neighborhood is everywhere.
The wind passes the time among them,
the low boxwood, the hedges elbowing into remaining space
between one placement and the next,
row on row, eternity grew up around them.

No social classes, mind you, in this subterranean finality.
Room to move, though under.
If being head partner in the firm, you object to neighboring 
the treasurer of the local Communist club, 
union chapter, or simple laborer, self-employed accountant
or various women who got things done,
well, it’s a busy neighborhood,
something going every night.
 
The street signs hard to follow,
difficult sometimes to tell the people apart. 
All that may be left is a long stoney fez,
an elemental billboard for a few prosaic data points,
eternity’s stovepipe,
an ear to the wind –
Hard to imagine they are not overhearing our jokes
and errant philosophies,
observing our frustrations:
Reading us as we struggle to find that final 
     hiding place
in the hide-and-seek of time.

Who, we wonder, will come looking for us…?
You are not in the ground, dear ones, 
You are in our hearts and minds
This is our house of remembrance.


To find poems by the 48 poets represented in the June issue 

of Verse-Virtual, go to 

Verse-Virtual