"The Italian Americans": Cultivating a Nation

            Public television in Boston (WGBH) broadcast "The Italian Americans" this week (first screened a year ago), a historical account beginning with the arrival of some 4 million immigrants in the early decades of the 20th century and carrying through to the place and prominence of Italian Americans in America today.  When I tuned in Thursday night, actor Stanley Tucci was narrating the film's account of the Sacco and Vanzetti case.

            In this segment (Episode two) of the documentary, historians and other sources make very clear how the case was seen, and was long remembered, through Italian American eyes: as an attack on them. 

            "Up until the 1960s," one of the episode's authorities tells us, "every Italian family heard the story at the dinner table... If you stepped out line, this is what they would do to you."

            What American justice in the state of Massachusetts did to Sacco and Vanzetti was an "appalling" miscarriage of justice overseen by a bigoted judge before a prejudiced jury, the show tells us. Historian Bruce Watson paraphrases the words of one of the jurymen (in fact the foreman) who said "they should all be hanged," whether or not they were guilty of the crime they were accused of -- simply because of who "they" were: political radicals, foreigners, Italians.

            The trial was framed in a way that made the defendants appear like dangerous criminals. They were shackled together and walked from a local lockup to the courthouse in Dedham each day surrounded by a phalanx of armed plain clothes police. Once inside the courtroom, they were made to sit inside a metal cage.  

            Judge Webster Thayer made clear (in rulings inside, and statements outside, the courthouse) his vicious hatred for the political movement Sacco and Vanzetti represented -- the radical pro-labor, anti-capitalist attack on his America's Guilded Age status quo, a time of domination by the very rich over an oppressed mass of underpaid industrial laborers and farmers; a time of ever-increasing gap between the very rich and the working poor. (Sound familiar?)

            The trial wasn't about the crime Sacco and Vanzetti were accused of (the robbery of a shoe factory payroll and murder of two guards), the show's experts tell us, it was about anarchism. Once the information came out in court that both men were professed anarchists, "it was all about anarchism."

            The political background for this scapegoating of two self-proclaimed radicals in order to put the Italian anarchist movement on trial was a string of attempted bombings (including a few bombs that actually went off) for which historian believe anarchists were almost certainly responsible. Those bombs were acts of violent revenge against the American political, economic and judicial system that had targeted the movement's leaders during World war I, shut down its publications, and deported high-profile spokesmen such as Emma Goldman and Luigi Galleani.

            Much as acts of terrorism do today, the bombings scared Americans, a fear whipped up by newspapers and politicians into an all-pervading threat that justified the targeting of ethnic minorities perceived to be "others" and hostile to the political status quo.

            But Sacco and Vanzetti were not being tried for bombings. No one was ever put on trial for the bombings that so terrified Americans during the Red Scare of 1918-19. They were arrested without any evidence to connect them to the Braintree robbery-murder; but simply because a local police chief believed the crime must be the work of the political radicals he hated. Once it became known in the Dedham courtroom where they were being tried in 1921 that they were anarchists, nothing else really mattered.

            "The trial was about anarchists," said author Bruce Watson (his book "Sacco and Vanzetti: The men, the murders, and the judgment of mankind" was published in 2007). "And Italian anarchists made it all the better."

            Watson also describes how Vanzetti, the more "cerebral" of the defendants, put this case in his address to the court before sentencing. While denying any guilt for the crime for which he was tried, Vanzetti stated, "...my conviction is I have suffered for things that I am guilty of. I am suffering because I am a radical and indeed I am a radical; I have suffered because I am an Italian and indeed I am an Italian...[yet] if you could execute me two times, and if I could be reborn two other times, I would live again to do what I have done already."  

            "The Italian Americans" makes a final connection between the anti-immigrant (and anti-Italian) racism that condemned Sacco and Vanzetti by pointing out that in 1924 Calvin Coolidge signed a law setting a quota specifically for Italian immigrants.

            At the signing Coolidge said, "It is clear that certain groups of people will not mix or blend."

            As the whole of "The Italian Americans" demonstrates, it is hard to imagine a more erroneous, short-sighted (and bigoted) prediction.

            Yet it seems to me that similar things are being said about other groups today.

The Garden of Images that Endure in the Mind: Word Pictures in January's Verse-Virtual

             Some of the great word pictures offered us by poets in the January issue of Verse-Virtual make me think of the old Reader's Digest encouragement "Toward more picturesque speech."

In his poem "Continental Drift," John Kropf's cleverly written and sharp-eyed depiction of the big players in the dance of the continents includes this take on "rough and ready" North America

"cracking the whip of his Aleutian braid

and coiling the overgrown prehensile tail

of Mexico in the warm waters below..."

I definitely get the picture from this poem. 

Stuart Kurtz takes on a phenomenon many of us (such as me) may never have heard of, the "Dazzle Ship": ship hulls painted in camouflage designs to confuse an enemy. His poem imagines opportunities for painters such as "Arrangement in Grey and Grey, No. 1,

Commandeered by Whistler and his mother."

              And ahoy there, here’s the U.S.S. Narkeeta sailing by with "blips" and "dots" favored by the pointilist Seurat.

Frederick Pollack offers us sharp commentary and elegant phrasing in poems such as this month's "Line from Orwell" -- and also, contra the golden-oldie pop song, a rose garden.
The poet recalls a youthful walk in a rose garden sustained by "rich ladies," discovering

"....how an adult enjoys,

coolly, on a hazy summer day,

the soft toys

of others"

before concluding his poem with that borrowed line from Orwell, both for its ironic commentary on what goes before and for its still remarkable self. Go read the poem [http://www.verse-virtual.com/frederick-pollack-2016-january.html], I won't spoil the impact here.

Lex Runciman's " Lace, Red Cup, a Rise of Buttons" provides speech for a great picture. The poem's meditation on this work gets so far inside the painter Vasquez's head that when he steps outside to look at the stars in the pre-dawn sky, we are led unobtrusively to share his thoughts: 
"lead white, he thinks, azurite blue."

Kenneth Salzmann's "1969" -- a poem that begins 
"If fifty thousand candles can be

the waxy, whispered remains of dead boys

in a cold, November rain..." 
-- may not paint a pretty picture, but it draws a powerful meaning from its Arlington National Cemetery setting. And the poem is beautifully crafted around syntactically paired conditional clauses.

Trish Hopkinson's poem "Dis-ease" -- its title depicted in lines such as "we wait... with wet

and tilting eyes, with steaming breath, with chests

collapsing, lifting, in apprehension" -- is enhanced by her son's drawing of a bent figure whose life is draining out of him. It's the key in the figure's back, suggesting the time limit on bodily health, that gets to me.

And Neil Ellman's poems attempt the challenge of finding human words for abstract pictures. In the poem "Green Un-Square Twist" on a work by painter Ron Davis, the poet delves into an image of a three-dimensional "un-circle" around a green center to draw the meaning that we 
"un-human as we are

without a sense

of hope in grass

and trees

see no reason

to evolve."

Happily we see before us many reasons to believe that V-V's poets are continuing to evolve. 
(See these poems and many others at http://www.verse-virtual.com/current-poetry.html)

The Garden of Cultural Cachet: Turandot, a fairy tale night at the opera

    

        I've long thought this opera has a fairy tale plot. So I was happy to find a reviewer of the Metropolitan Opera's current production of "Turandot" who agreed with me, calling it a fairy tale with a dark secret at the center.

            Many folk tales have the notion of fatal choice -- the lady or the tiger -- on which both your happiness and your future hang. In some mythical long ago Chinese empire, the emperor's daughter, the Princess Turandot, has placed her suitors in this interesting, high-risk position: you either win your suit or have your head cut off. The way you win is by answering three riddles correctly. It's like being granted three death-wishes. You know you're in a fairy tale world when everything comes in threes.

            As a dynastic marriage strategy goes, a riddle contest is ridiculous. The only suitors with a chance would be Jeopardy contestant types. Instead, "Turandot" gives us traditional hopefuls such as the Prince of Persia, who sure enough fails the test and for whose ritualized execution the whole city of Peking watching as the first act gets underway.

            Comparison to the plot of "Frozen" can also be made. Turandot is an ice maiden, afraid of her own power, though in this case that power turns out to be the ordinary magic of love and passion. The true challenge our hero has to face (after answering the riddles) is to melt the ice, break the dam, let the natural emotion flow. Our heroic tenor, called Calaf, not only has to play her game, he has to win her love.  

            All I can say, after laying out this fantastical plot is that the music, singing, and dramatic intensity maintained at an operatic fever pitch (with only rare comic releases) makes this Puccini opera one of the most compelling theatrical experiences of any sort that I've experienced. I've seen it before -- but not at the Met.  

            Going to the Metropolitan Opera is not something we get to do often; that's one of the reasons we went. The other is I wanted to see a Turandot at the Met. (La Boehme and some other classics were also being offered this year: meat for the Puccini lover's soul.) The experience did not disappoint. The house was full, the kind of special excitement you seek from a special night was in the air; the Lincoln Center opera house with its plunging vertical architecture, glass walls, and giant chandeliers hanging like diamond necklace draped on the throat of heaven (or on Aphrodite or Andromeda of some other constellated divinity), still holds its visual and atmospheric magic. It was also heartening to find that the crowd consisted not only of the typical aging classical music demographic, but also young couples, married, dating, shacked up, whatever, and groups of friends. No obvious riddles were being posed.

            Since the Met needs a reason to revive classic operas, even those with the popularity and prestige of Puccini's, the production we saw was originally designed by Franco Zeffirelli 30 years ago. The sets were dazzling, literally. So much light was poured on and poured of the silvery imperial court of the second act you almost had to squint to keep your eyes glued to the stage where the riddling contest takes place... after the emperor himself tries in vain to dissuade Calaf from going through with his challenge.

            The downside of a Zeffirelli set design is the thirty-five minute intermission between acts, accompanied by a behind-the-curtain score of carpenters knocking down one version of imperial China and building up a new one.

            It's hard to convey what makes all this work, as it so devastatingly does for those of us who eat it up. I lack the background to describe how the composer's music manages to sound, or rather feel, Chinese without imitating any Asian melodies, and yet still flow from the expanded orchestra like the lushly late romantic bel canto opera it is. It's a music that keeps the cherry trees, pagodas and pristine mountain lakes of its fantasy world in view, while filling the stage-side table with red wine, fettucini, and bellissima.

            Some of the opera's musical high points flow from character development beyond its fairy tale plot. The second soprano role, the peasant girl Liu, explains to Calaf that she has cared for his aging exiled father (like Antigone leading blinded Oedipus from cursed Thebes) because "seigneur, you looked at me once." The evening's first show-stopping aria: Anita Hartig's performance was majorly heart-breaking: pause for lusty group opera-scream. Calaf, blinded by Turandot, is not looking at her now. Still, in what to my ears is an equally moving aria (possibly the most sorrowfully moving proud-man music in the whole Puccini repertoire) he begs Liu to continue caring for his poor last-legs father, if she can possibly bear to, to ease the burden "of one who no longer smiles."

            This is a stop and beat your breast moment as well, but most productions play right through it, as did this one.

            Then we have Liu's two third-act high self-abegnation arias, almost back to back, first in response to Turandot's demand to know how she can bear the suffering in behalf of Calaf. They are torturing her for his secret. The answer, she tells the princess, in a yet another plot pre-figuration, is love. Then her death song (after stabbing herself to keep from spilling Calaf's secret),  followed immediately by Calaf's too-little, too-late lamentation, which is still a heart-grabber in a lower-key funereal tone perfectly judged for effect.

            The character of Liu soaks up the story's pathos, and it's almost hard to see how Turandot can reclaim center stage until Liu leaves it by dying. She's the morally deserving lady. Turandot is a monster, though soprano Nina Stemme humanizes her by a powerful, emotionally convincing performance of her twisted post-traumatic suffering from her country's long-ago conquest and the rape-murder of an ancestral queen. 
             Liu's death at the hands of Turandot's psychosis gives Calaf the psychological power to confront her. "Principessa del morte," he names her accusingly.Turando melts, as the plot requires. We all celebrate the happy ending, all of China, the princess's beleguered emperor-father, the relieved courtiers. After all, they can stop beheading royal suitors. Turandot has surrendered to love.

            I've surrendered to the music. We're left with the show's majestic celestial-salute-theme to the emperor, heaven's son, music more transcendent than any mortal monarch ever deserved.

            I bestow it on the Met. And on Puccini.

A Garden of Marys: Wollstoncraft, Shelley, 'Romantic Outlaws'

            They lived ridiculously eventful lives, these two Marys (and their men), the romance and the suffering running neck and neck, the latter perhaps winning out when you take the shortness of their lifespans into the reckoning.

            Mary Wollstonecraft, (1759 –1797) probably the first "serious" female English writer in modern history, wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), at a time when a woman could not put her name to anything that appeared in print except for nursery tales and gothic romances intended exclusively for children or female readers. In it she argued that women should be educated just as men are for the same useful and intellectual tasks, and that they should be given the same opportunities to play useful roles in society. Also (a revolutionary notion for the time), women should be allowed to own property and conduct their own business and monetary affairs. Under English law women had no property rights; all they 'owned' was actually the property of their husbands or fathers. She further contended that women should have the right to vote and hold office, and that their ideas should be accorded the same reception as would be given to a man's.

            Listen seriously to a woman? It was to titter.

            Wollstonecraft's analysis of the economic, domestic, public and private lives of women, and the oppressions that attended all of these, either ridiculed or ignored in her own times and for generations afterwards, anticipated almost exactlty the arguments that would be made by the feminist movement of the early 1970s.      

            When she was rediscovered. She was almost 200 years ahead of her time.

            Wollstonecraft also modeled the kind of lives women should lead so that they would not be entirely dependent on men by supporting herself as a writer. She wrote childen's stories that provided models for intellectually active and enterprising lives, a history and defense of the French Revolution, a few novels, a travel book filled with topical observations, and many book reviews and other magazine pieces.

            And her own society, which is to say the 1 percent of class-bound England's population that mattered, made Wollstonecraft suffer for every word she published. Maddeningly. This makes for some painful moments in "Romantic Outlaws" (published last year) by Charlotte Gordon and subtitled "the extraordinary lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley."

            While Wollstonecraft did not go mad, she did make two attempts to kill herself after she was abandoned by the man who fathered her first child and who she believed loved her, a hope in which she was deeply disappointed. Recovering, Wollstonecraft resurrected her literary career, inventing the personal travel memoir, the least explicitly political of her books but perhaps most successful in leading readers' thoughts outside the conventional ruts they had been trodding for centuries.

            She took back her personal and social life as well, attending parties and salons, making new women friends, influencing other writers of both genders, and establishing a close and 'equal' friendship with a man, "radical" political theorist Richard Godwin, who eventually became her husband and the father of her second child.

            This child was Mary Godwin, who would become Mary Shelley, probably only England's second writer on serious political and social themes, and a novelist who invented one of English literature's most enduring genres, the dystopian 'horror' story, as the author of "Frankenstein."

            And then, as if life didn't sin enough not only against female intellectuals, but women generally in the benighted centuries before the invention of antibiotics, after giving birth to daughter Mary (in the first year of her marriage) Wollstonecraft suffered a fatal infection from the unwashed hands of the surgeon who was cutting the afterbirth out of her weakened body and died nine days later.

            As author Gordon frankly states, no one one had any idea of the existence of killing "germs." The idea would have been considered "quite mad."

            Unfortunately for her reputation, Wollstonecraft's cotnributions as feminist theorist and writer were overshadowed by the perverse interest defenders of the status quo took in her personal life, abetted by a tell-all memoir by her widower husband, the rather tone-deaf radical theorist Godwin.The sexually inexperienced Wollstonecraft (as Gordon tells us) had earlier pursued some sort of relationship to a married artist named Fuseli, who befriended but then dropped her. Worse, she had an affair with an American (Gilbert Imlay) in Paris during the dangerous days of the French Revolution, her first sexual relationship, and bore his child. Imlay's rejection of her led to the two suicide attempts.

            Godwin, regarded as the leading radical thinker of his day because of his defense in his books of liberty and equality as absolute rights prior to and more important than society's claims, proved stiff, formal, and hypocritically conventional in his own life. His ideas attracted many followers, including the Romantic poet Percy Shelley, a then young and unknown poet in love with liberty, anarchism, and "free love." Godwin, in need of money and more interested in Shelley's status as the first son of a wealthy family, gave him the run of the house, but was shocked -- shocked and and appalled -- when his daughter, Mary, ran away with him to the continent.

            Mary Godwin, who became Mary Shelley when she married the poet a couple years later, was deeply influenced by the heroic and trail-blazing life led by her mother. This is Gordon's thesis for her book. The connections between their lives are in fact remarkable. Mary Godwin sought to live the ideals of freedom and independence proclaimed by both her parents (at least in their books). Shelley, though already married, appeared to be the embodiment of that ideal.

            But idols, particularly the male ones, have clay feet. I have long hungered to know the details of the Mary Godwin-poet Shelley connection, and I fully recommend this book's account of their lives as a cure for that appetite. The poet Shelley, who wrote "Prometheus Unbound," an epic of the salvation of mankind, could not save himself from the consequences of a thrill-seeking, forever-young nature. If we wish to believe that too much innocence, unseasoned tidealism, reckless self-indulgence, and unrestrained youthful energy are likely to lead to -- suffering, losses, bankruptcy, and early death -- you'll find plenty of evidence not only in Shelley's life but in that of his friend-and-rival Byron to back up that conviction. (The third member of the famous troika of  romantic poets dying young, Keats, simply suffered from tuberculosis, a disease his time had no cure for.)

            On the other hand, these are also the kind of people whose stories we desire to hear. In another context, a book about the Greek myth, I remember reading the author's conclusion that when mortals become involved with the gods, things are likely to end badly, and it's the people who pay the costs. Yet when people avoid the gods completely, well, these people have no good stories to offer.

            Just to focus on Mary Shelley -- whose life had perhaps too many brushes with divinity -- she was only 19 when she began work on "Frankenstein," one of the seminal classics of modern fiction and a truly "romantic" work since the monster is after all a loving, tender-hearted creature until he is cruelly rejected by his creator-father. There's society for you; or -- in Mary's case -- fathers, since her father refused to have anything to do with her after she ran off with a married man.

            A generation later, Mary Shelley's talent received no more recognition than her mother's had. If anything, English society had regressed since Wollstonecraft's day in reaction to the dangers posed by the French Revolution to autocratic, class-ridden England. She ended up surviving and raising her son decently more because of her skills as domestic finance manager than a scholar and creative writer (she was both). Her novels were ignored or reviled, and her reputation permanently blackened by her youthful elopement with Shelley.

            She also lost -- not only Shelley, at age 30, to an unschooled pursuit of sailing -- but three of their children, all in early childhood. The details of these losses are indeed hard to bear.

            But like her mother, Mary Shelley is one of the heroes of English literature, both for what she produced herself and mid-wived for others. She wrote almost all the literary profiles in one of England's first multi-volume encyclopedias. And her reconstructive editing and recovery of her husband's scattered writings is a major reason why we know of and celebrate the poetry (as many of us do) of Shelley today.  

Poetry's Garden Blooms Anew: Guns, Mammograms and a Million True and Timeless Things

I have a political poem on the gun violence issue in the current edition of Verse-Virtual (January 2016, I'm practicing writing this date). There's a notion spread widely by gun advocates that "a good guy with a gun" is the best answer to the epidemic of domestic shooting massacres that our politically benighted country has fallen victim to in recent years. The notion that armed citizens will effectively intervene and "take out" would be-killers, thereby saving lives, has spread on social media (where else?). The lesson: Be armed and ready whenever you're out in public. Some 'stories' supporting this legend are bespoken by believers. When investigated by neutral sources these fables turn out to be exaggerations, elaborations, or mere fabrications. Real life is not a computer game. Real life is not an action-hero vehicle.

            In pursuing the theme of "newness" in the January issue of VV, that traditional month for 'new' starts and fresh perspectives, I took an approach entirely new for me in confronting this legend of the well-armed vigilante stepping between the 'bad guys' and their victims... and wrote a Country & Western pop song lyric titled From the Mythical Annals of 'Good Guy with a Gun.'

            Here's the beginning:

I will stand my ground
You can't push me around
If I meet a nutjob gunning for my crew
I am ready to do what I must do
Bang, Mr. Nutty, that's the end of you...

            I'm kind of hoping that some members of the gun-rights crowd may miss the irony here and  spread this lyric around where it may be seen by eyes that will not miss the irony.

            My two other poems in this issue deal with other aspects of "newness."

            A poem titled "Always a First Time" treats what happens when a man goes to the X-ray department for a mammogram. (Folks, they they tell me it's not a first time for them.)   

            My third poem, this month's formal venture, addresses a new state of affairs in global politics in which an enemy striking terror in everyone's hearts (ISIS) is being confronted primarily by a people without a country, the Syrian Kurds. 

            Altogether, January's Verse-Virtual features work by 77 poets. Among the many, many topics of mind and matter nimbly and insightfully addressed are these reflections on subjects both new and old:

            The power of memory in poet Herb Guggenheim's tender sonnet about an early meeting, “What I Remember.”

            The memory of place in Karen Paul Holmes's “Seagull Morning, Lake Chatuge,” inviting us to join the birds in "their ancestral reel through crisp Appalachian air."

            The persistence of remembered loss and pain in Sydney Lea's "Fathomless."

            The shelf-life of "Newness" itself is addressed by Robert Wexelblatt's rhymed lyric, a poem that asks when a year is no longer new and answers, "Oh, months and months before its end."

            The truth that love is not in a hurry in Tom Montag's "Woman with her Sister at the Clinic," as the poet observes the woman unloading "the wheelchair from the trunk of the car."

            A world still whole (or more whole?) even in the absence of human presence in Penny Harter’s "Mid-January Dream of the World Without Us." 

            A deep, perhaps eternal contest between love and fear in Laurie Kolp's "Outside the Holy Fortress."

            These poems and many other weighings of time and place, here today and gone tomorrow, can be found at http://www.verse-virtual.com/current-poetry.html. It's not only a new year at Verse-Virtual, it's a new month.