The Garden of Verse: A Warm Poetic Harvest in a Chilly Winter Month

          Weather's fine. Weather's foul. It's winter time in the city -- and the country, and the suburbs, and everywhere else. Though, I'm told, the temps are pleasantly warm in Sri Lanka, as they are in Cancun on the Mexican coast. 

            Thankfully up here in the north, we have poetry to keep us warm.  

            Here are my thoughts on some of the many fine poems I admired in the February issue of Verse-Virtual. http://www.verse-virtual.com/poems-and-articles.html

            Judy Kronenfeld's poem "Ex-New Yorker Remembers Her Natural Landscape" is a pleasure trip from its perfect title onward -- the 'natural landscape' of the urban childhood lives on in the heart and senses. I love the epithets that introduce successive stanzas on the city's various characteristics: Fortress City, Tree-house city, Infinite city, Intimate city, Vertiginous city. And the rich imagery that follows from the title metaphor, in lines such as lines:

"and far below, five o’clock tides
of dusky forests surge forward,
each tree moated by its inner
silence"

            A truly evocative poem.

            Robert Wexelblatt's "Mrs. Podolski’s Critique of Judgment" is a superb rendering of a worldly woman's skeptical view of the deeds of men and women, particularly of men in this poem. The poem suggests that human beings make up, and remake, our notions of right and wrong as we go along through the life, so that the ethical may in fact be situational. So many pleasingly voiced concrete particulars illustrate the unfolding argument, starting right from the top:

"Certainty’s the clothesline on which we pin
the wash of our unmentionable doubt;
the dubious laundry we take in to make
believe we’re sure of what we’re sure about."

            Dewitt Clinton's poem titled, in part, "is it Possible to Write an After After?," asks that question following the mention of poems by David Graham and Robert Bly (good company, for sure). For me, the poem raises the probably unanswerable question of the relationship between time and permanence, a question poets (Shakespeare comes to mind) and philosophers have long asked. I take the poem's answer from these memorable lines. "... oh, and who

Can ever remember the time we crossed
The cold Atlantic and dined under new
Stars, and then I take a picture of you,
looking so longingly to Lady Liberty.
Don’t you remember that? And then,
Soon, we can’t even see land as we’re
So far away, we can’t see anything but
Waves, waves, way too many waves."

            Yes, I think, we do remember. Despite the waves.

            Barbara Crooker's wise and finely observed ekphrastic poem "Books," begins with "a world where books were scarce. Where copying was done by human hand" and describes the image of a saint holding such a book. But then the poem steps away and turns its attention to what philosophers call 'the sensuous immediate' of a blackbird's song: "its clear six notes the only sound.
They pierce me like nails.  He might be saying
Listen, listen, listen."

            This is not a poem about what poetry is, but what poets do. The bird's call is a reminder:

"my job is to pay attention."

            Of the three vivid, wintry poems from Steve Klepetar, I particularly enjoyed "Acting Normal," a poem that attributes an uncanny importance to the nonhuman actors in the world drama of which we're a part -- but only a part. And we don't necessarily know where the play is going.

            Blue jays (the poem tells us) "are everywhere." More disturbing, perhaps is the information "that here
in Berkshire county there are thousands
of bears, that any time you’re in the woods,
you’re not too far from one." This piece of information leads to the superbly ominous (yet also somehow humorous) final two sentences. Rather than offering a spoiler quote here, I urge everyone to read the poem.

            Another pleasingly wintry poem -- and urban poem -- is Robert Johnson's "FEBRUARY IN THE CITY," evoking

"a day so harsh and beautiful" and delivering a strong and paradoxical conclusion. Again, please read it for yourself.

            In J.R. Sonche's poem "TWO PORTRAITS BY MATHEW BRADY" the visual subject is a famous photographer's take on two famous poets. The poem points out, in detail, how thoroughly the portrait of Walt Whitman captures the relaxed, natural, open-hearted everyman -- certainly one side of the poet's self-image. But gender, this poem shrewdly notices, is a tricky matter for the all-encompassing Whitman.

"He looks like a grandfather, Walt does. Better than that, Walt looks like a grandmother, even with the beard, a grandmother, kindly and wise."

            As the poem points out, Brady's portrait of Nathaniel Hawthorne gives a very different impression.

              Kate Sontag's "Recognition Scene" is another poem with a shrewd title. A dramatic high point in classical literature, the recognition scene for the donor of the "bulky blue coat" in this poem comes in the supermarket:

"You want to apologize to its wearer, pushing
            her grocery cart past the dairy section,
 for the tiny hole in the left pocket revealing a wintery
            tuft of polyester fill, the linty purple socks you threw
last minute into the duffle along with wrinkled flannel
            shirts and a pilled bathrobe long overdue for Goodwill."

            The poem mines the rich detail and consequent reflection caused by this encounter, in which the self discovers in the stranger wearing her coat a 'secret' double. Again, the last lines in this well wrought poem repay a reading.

              A lot of nourishment in February's issue for a winter month whose best feature is its brevity.

Sonya Meyerson-Knox of Jewish Voice For Peace on "Weaponizing Antisemitism" the smear campaign against Ilhan Omar

The Garden of Prose: My Second Novel Wins a Prize and Finds a Publisher!

   

       My novel "Karpa Talesman" has won a competition and found a publisher in Hidden River Arts, a regional arts organization based in Philadelphia. 

          The organization chose my book as a winner in one of its literary competitions. Here's the announcement in the March-April issue of Poets &Writers Magazine: 
 

Hidden River Arts

Prophecy Creek Book Award in Speculative Fiction

Robert Knox of Quincy, Massachusetts, won the 2018 Prophecy Creek Book Award in Speculative Fiction for "Karpa Talesman." He received $1,000, and his book will be published by Hidden River Publishing. The editors judged. The annual award is given for a book-length work of speculative fiction.

Hidden River Arts, P.O. Box 63927, Philadelphia, PA 19147. (610) 764-0813. Debra Leigh Scott, Founding Director.

hiddenriverarts@gmail.com

hiddenriverarts.com

          Poets & Writers Magazine is the 'industry journal' for creative writers. I've been hoping to see my name in its pages for years. 
          Hidden River Arts has over the past half year announced 
winners in a range of literary genres.
                Speculative fiction is a publishing category encompassing literary fiction that employs elements of science fiction or fantasy, or simply imagines events in a world that resembles -- but is clearly not -- our own. 
          I don't have a publication date yet for the new book, and publication is sometimes a lengthy process. I'll share it when I do (no surprise there). But I couldn't wait to share the news of the announcement.

          
           Here's a brief summary of the premise of "Karpa Talesman," a story that takes place partly in a world much like good old earth, and mostly in the imagined sister-world of urth, which resembles our planet at earlier stages of the development of civilization:

          At a time when Planet Earth appears to be running out of time itself -- hours disappear and trees aren't where you found them yesterday -- the scientists of the Dream Project are looking to send the right somebody to another world. They're hoping that an off-world point of view might give them a perspective on the problem.

          Entomologist Sheena Drey, whose own work has been rendered meaningless by the disturbing changes in her planet's eccentric timeline behavior, discovers that the last gasp planet-saving project is setting up a lab in her building in the MIT neighborhood of Cambridge. She then learns that her husband Copper, a part-time college teacher and 'dreamer,' has volunteered for the project and is lying in an induced coma-like state in the project's lab.

          The project's drugs have transported the dreaming Copper to a different existence in a different world, where he struggles to cope with an alien way of life and the radical solitude caused by the lingering intimation that he is living the wrong life in the wrong place. On 'urth,' a planet at a technically lower stage of development, Copper becomes Karpa Talesman, eventually turning his experiences with brutal slavers, back magic, rival dukes, assassins sent from his own world, a powerful shaman, Homeric bards and sophists-for-hire into the stories he shares with the co-inhabitants of his multiverse 'dream.' But have the 'wizeguys' or gods of this world planted in his mind the clue that will help save his own planet?...

          After that, pretty much everything I can think of to happen, happens. 

           I can't wait until I can share the whole thing.

The Garden of History: Emerson and Thoreau, Michelle Obama and Higher Law, and How to Get Rid of the Great Pretender

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Henry David Thoreau 

When civil law doesn’t work, and enormously disastrous consequences are in the offing, it’s time to turn to higher law.

     “When they go low, we go high” — or so Michelle Obama famously said.

It’s a great credo — or, as we say today, ‘sound bite’ — but so far we haven’t done it. Not really.

They go low, and we just shake a finger and say “naughty, naughty.”

      What do we mean by going ‘high’?

      How about “higher law”?

      The phrase, and the concept behind it, has an age-old weight and credibility in the history of American political thought. In particular, it was responsible for organizing and motivating the radical Abolitionist movement in 19th century America that led ultimately to the end of slavery.

      The abolition of slavery in America is generally regarded as a positive step unless, of course, you were raised white in Virginia, and quite likely in any of the other states of the Old Confederacy, as recent events suggest. I’m not quite sure why these states were permitted to rejoin the USA with full rights and status. I think their membership in the union should have been conditional on good behavior. Considering what’s gone on in many of these places since 1865, I believe they would probably still be on probation today.

     But let’s “go high” — as the former First Lady suggests — and look at the historical circumstances surrounding the emergence of the theory of “higher law.”

     African slavery was the great Constitutional crisis between the era War of Independence and the founding of the United States and the era of the industrial crises and wars of the 20th century. The USA survived it only by an enormous national cost in spilled blood and good luck. In the hands of any 19th century President other than Abraham Lincoln, the country would not have survived it intact.

     In that time of crisis America’s leading thinkers made appeal to the concept of “higher law” to justify that opposition to slavery that included evading, ignoring and systematic disobedience to national law.

     Faced with The Fugitive Slave Act (an essential piece of the sectional Great Compromise of 1850) America’s first original intellectual and cultural figures embraced the notion of a moral law that transcended civil laws.

     Ralph Waldo Emerson, still the most influential thinker produced by American culture (Thomas Jefferson and other members of the ‘founding generation’ were products of the flowering of European thought know as the Enlightenment), contended that Americans, like members of the civilizations that came before, had a right to “an original relationship with the universe… There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.”

[See http://transcendentalism-legacy.tamu.edu/authors/emerson/nature.html]

     As slavery became the wedge issue of the mid-19th century sectional crisis, and Abolition the moral crusade of his own home state of Massachusetts, Emerson was forced to consider whether citizens were obliged to follow the dictates of civil law when the morally repulsive Fugitive Slave Act became the law of the land.      
     The law gave white people in any state of the union the right to imprison any black person they suspected of having once been a slave — and either return them to their owner or make their own claim of ownership. Courts were empowered to ratify the claim, with blacks given only minimal opportunities to prove that they were free ‘persons.’

     Slave catchers, or mere criminals, moved north in droves to hunt for African Americans.

     In Massachusetts white Americans rallied against the law, mobbing slave catchers and freeing their captives by force. Abolitionists such as Henry David Thoreau hid fugitives in their own homes and helped them reach the next safe house in an underground passageway to Canada, now the only place where they could be safe.

     Once the most famous politician of his day, Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster was driven from office for his support of the Great Compromise, and replaced by the abolitionist Charles Sumner.

     The Fugitive Slave Law caused Emerson to formulate a justification for disobeying civil law by appealing to what he called “higher law” — a universal moral law in tune with ‘nature’ rather than temporal politics — with the right to nullify civil laws that contradicted it.

     He wrote: “An immoral law makes it a man’s duty to break it at every hazard.”

     Though never as famous in his own time, Emerson’s Concord, Mass. neighbor, friend, and one-time disciple Henry David Thoreau had written his own defense of higher law back in the 1840s titled “Resistance to Civil Government.”

     Republished, after his death, under the title “Civil Disobedience,” Thoreau’s essay inspired a movement that eventually earned Thoreau international fame. Gandhi drew on it. So did Martin Luther King.

     Thoreau famously refused to pay his poll tax one year in protest of America’s immoral land-grab Mexican War and subsequent expansion of slavery into newly seized territory. He was, Thoreau argued, obeying a moral law that has a higher claim on human beings than federal or state civil laws.

     This symbolic action — someone else quickly paid Thoreau’s tax and he was out of jail the next morning — attracted little notice. But when the slavery crisis peaked in 1850, his claim that obedience to moral law transcended the obligation to obey to an unjust civil law was widely repeated.

     The phrase and concept of a “higher law” justifying opposition to slavery received national attention in the Senate’s debate on the Fugitive Slave Law when New York Senator William Seward (later Lincoln’s Secretary of State) declared his belief in “a higher law than the Constitution.”

     The Abolitionists’ crusade to end slavery and the widespread Northern opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act helped bring on the crisis of 1860 and the Civil War. Lincoln was not an Abolitionist, but he and his newly formed Republican Party opposed the expansion of slavery to any new American territory.

      The no longer ‘united ‘states paid a huge price for slavery’s end in the wartime deaths and maimings of hundreds of thousands of soldiers. But how to weigh that cost against the price paid by the millions of African lives sentenced to slavery, for which no real restitution has ever been made?

     Now, we may ask, what does the philosophy of a higher moral law counsel for today’s Americans at a time when its civilly chosen chief executive profanes the office of President every time he opens his lying, bigoted mouth.

     Here’s a suggestion: ignore him.

     We do not currently, until the time of the current Pretender’s removal, have a true President of United States.

      Obedience to higher law says that desk is empty.

      Therefore, no one elected to federal office, employed by the federal government, or counted in the US census as a citizen of the United States should be obliged to obey any order or decision or command issued by the current Pretender to the office of President.

     The Pretender claimed the office after a fraudulent election, marred by blatant interference by a foreign hostile government, whose hindquarters the Pretender patently sniffs before betraying his country’s interests; and by brazen attempts at voter suppression by partisan politicians working openly for the interests of the Pretender’s party.

     Therefore, no citizen or resident of United States need obey the authority of a Pretender who, while incorrectly recognized by fawning civil authorities as the country’s President, fails the test of legitimacy according to the moral law.

     Stop worrying about whether the Pretender will declare a phony ‘national emergency’ to build a wall nobody who live s anywhere near the Southern border desires.

     Regardless of the Pretender’s self-serving, self-enriching bombastic bleatings, federal employees should continue to show up for work and do their jobs, the federal treasury should continue to pay them.

     Congressional enactments must go into effect directly without executive approval, because we have no legitimate executive to approve them.

     Stop listening to anything the Pretender says.

     All you need to know of the Pretender’s recent public statement is that a careful analysis by the New York Times concluded that the Pretender made nine factual claims, of which five were demonstrably false, two wholly misleading, and only two of them accurate.

     A national figure who speaks truth only two out of nine times fails the standard of the moral law, or any other standard of honesty (or competence) you can think of.

     So let us make it clear: Generals, chiefs of staff, cabinet ministers, and other department heads — If the Pretender gives you an order, do not follow it.

     This is especially the case if the order involves the use of military force.

     No illegitimate Pretender who lies all the time and cannot face facts if he finds them disagreeable can be permitted to make war, especially in the nuclear age. And not even little wars in which tiny nations are humiliated for the sake of publicity photos.

     Finally — and equally important to all of the above — if you are the owner of a new media outlet, do not report anything the Pretender says. It is more than likely a lie, or an ignorant prejudice, or a self-serving distraction from an important, though inconvenient truth. Since nothing the Pretender says can be taken at face value, it is against the moral law for news media to spread lies, bigotry and ignorance among the people of this once great land.

     The moral law clearly requires expelling the Pretender by turning you back upon him.

     All the Pretender craves is attention. Drive him from our midst by ignoring him.

     The only attention the moral law recognizes for conduct such as the pretender’s is psychiatric or criminal.

     Let only those authorities willing to behave in keeping with higher law deal with the Pretender.

     Do this, Americans, and he will soon be gone.

     We may take him down by consistently “going higher.” The only question is whether we as nation can find the moral fortitude to do it.

The Garden of Cinematic Art: The Lives of Those Condemned to the 'Chaotic Hell' of Capernaum

             A thin, undersized boy of -- possibly -- twelve does chores for his family. Bargaining with street merchants, stretching a little money, knowing his way around. The street is a densely crowded shantytown of ad-hoc markets. A "slum." We have already been shown an airplane view of this district. It looks like a refugee camp for people fleeing a war zone. Those black circles on all the flat roots, turn out, when we get closer to them to be automobile tires laid on top of tarpaulins to keep the rain out, and perhaps the sun off, the flat roofs.

            The boy drags his purchases into a deteriorating building and up a narrow stairway. His second floor apartment is flooded. His mother, in a state of near derangement, anger and despair, is trying to soak up water while swearing at the landlord. This happens whenever he takes a shower, she complains, but he won't fixing the leaky pipes. The family can't demand anything of him him, however, since they're living on his sufferance, can't pay rent and are afraid he'll throw them out.

            The boy's family has nothing. No money, power, well-connected friends, education, or viable connections to a civil society. Their children don't have birth certificates. Nobody has a job.

            But they do have six or seven children (the parents don't seem sure). The father, who's only seen sitting on the couch, protests that he has no idea how any of this has happened to him.

            Zain, the streetwise 12 year-old, is the eldest. When he notices that his sister closest in age has spotted a sheet (the children don't have a bed; they sleep on a sheet on the floor) with blood, he helps her hide the evidence of menstruation from her parents. Who, he warns her, will 'sell' her to a neighborhood loser who lusts for her once they find out she's now 'a woman,' even though she's only eleven.

            As it turns out, Zain, who loves his sister more than anyone in his world, has good reason for his fears.

            This is not the Middle Ages. This film is not set in one of the world's poorest, most backward countries.

            This is, we are told, Lebanon, and the slum or shantytown whose rooftops we have glimpsed from above is in Beirut.

            Oddly, we have been to this city seven times and never glimpsed anything remotely resembling the images we are seeing on the screen.

            How well hidden are the lives of the poor. 

            

The most important thing I can tell you about this movies is that you must see it. 

          What else I can tell you without spoiling too much, and because you will find this information prominently in any newspaper or online review, is the movie centers on Zain's subsequent struggle to maintain a caring, wholly committed custody of one-year-old baby who has been separated from his mother -- for reasons I won't go into here.

            But know that the baby is Ethiopian. 

            Yes, although the version of Lebanon we are seeing here does not seem terribly inviting, people come from other countries, such as Ethiopia, to seek work in this country of crowded avenues, luxury hotels, lovely beaches, and exquisite restaurants (none of which are featured in this film). They come from the Philippines and South Asia as well. And sometimes, to use the smear-word American politics has bequeathed to the world, they are "illegals." 

            Also, not included in the tally above, Lebanon is also the host country for millions of Palestinian (since the late 1940s) and Syrian (from the start of the civil war) refugees. 

             Know also that both the boy who plays Zain, and the toddler who is far too infantile to know that he is 'performing' are tremendous screen presences.

            And as tough their circumstances become, neither gives into them -- neither stops doing the best he can.

            And so while we root for Zain to survive, get by, figure things out, and find some sort of opportunity for a decent life -- not to mention 'justice' for what he and other children have suffered, we are also getting an unforgettable tour of life on the street in refugee-like conditions, revealed by a brilliant guide in a brilliant and positively riveting film.

            A few other considerations. As I learned from reading an interview, the part of Zain is played by 12 year-old also named Zain, who was in fact a Syrian refugee living Lebanon (as millions do), though his film character is Lebanese.

            It seems clear to me that director Nadine Labaki has clearly avoided any grounds for putting the blame for the poverty her film portrays on the presence of Syrian refugees. She also portrays Zain's family without any religious affiliation -- you can't blame his parents' hopeless, backward worldviews on either Islam or Christianity, both large presences in Lebanon, and Syria, and of course throughout the Middle East.

            It's also worth noting that many of the film's Lebanese characters behave in kind and responsible ways. The Ethiopian mother is more sinned against than sinning. And we are treated, near the end, to scenes of jails filled with the 'undocumented' nationals from many other countries.   

            The film left me pondering some wider questions. 

            What does it take for people born in impoverished circumstances (in poor countries, of course, but also in more prosperous ones such as the US) to survive? Does their life have to be so hard? 

             Should we still be in the business of discouraging them from moving about the world in hopes of a better chance at life. 

            And, possibly, deeper ones:

            What's wrong with the human race? Or with human societies? Or people, period?

The Garden of Verse: Watching 'the Wheels Go Round and Round' in the Trying Days of the Third Millennium

        I got around to the idea of New Year's resolutions a few days after the current annus novus -- or annus mirabilis (year of miracles) began. 
         And decided to use a small collection of marvelous statements of various levels of familiarity that were running in my head, or put on paper somewhere, as the key ingredients in a poem of resolutions to remind myself that a new number has actually appeared in the last column of humanity's bookkeeping. 
           I'm referencing Whitman, quoting Thoreau and critic Harold Bloom, and slightly misquoting from "Les Miserables" here, among the classics. And borrowing from John Lennon and the band Tears for Fears from among the pop moderns. 
           Everywhere we turn, we are living in a palace of wonders, of infinite dimensions. 
          And just because human beings are among these wonders, and wholly capable of appreciating the life that goes on both within us, and without us (borrowing again), doesn't mean we have the right to go around destroying things.  

My poem "Late Resolutions," posted below, appears along with two others, plus marvelous poems from some 30 other poets, in the latest edition of Verse-Virtual.com. 
Please take a look at the February issue at http://www.verse-virtual.com/poems-and-articles.html



Late Resolutions in the
Court of Naked Appeals (and Borrowed Quotes)

Given that:
"Master of the [Court]/ Isn't worth my spit!
Hypocrite and toady/ and inebriate!" (Apologies to "Les Miz")
That only the great poets wrestle
with what it means to be human: viz Whitman,
per Harold Bloom: "As Adam early in the morning,
Walt is the unfailing God-man, our androgyne." 
 
That our priorities may at times be reversed,
viz. Thoreau: ''Hardly a man takes a half-hour's nap after dinner,
but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks, 'What's the news?'''      
and yet what requires our greatest attention is that which is always before us.
 
And that contemplation of these homely universals 
may require a wide-angle lens,
viz. John Lennon: "I'm just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round.
I really love to watch them roll."
 
Resolved:
To take a walk outdoors everyday this winter,
even when it's sleeting gobshite.
 
To demonstrate in the court of Personal Appeals
my undying affections to those who continue
to bless both others and myself with displays of humanity and excellence, 
and to accept, with patience, that "everybody wants
to rule the world." (per Tears for Fears)
 
To look both ways before crossing the bridge of time
when we come to it, as we always will.
To hold the page when the language of music
takes hold of me and patiently turn each leaf of the score on cue.
To strive to be one of those who, after we give the
land back to the indigenous, they let stay.
 
To love 'nature,' whatever is meant by that most elastic
of terms, even when it can no longer love me back.
To love those who always have.
 
[More at http://www.verse-virtual.com/robert-knox-2019-february.html     ]