The Garden of Verse: More Poems Blooming, So Quickly in May

            As the month advances I discover more poetic flowers blooming in the May's Verse-Virtual.com, the online poetry journal:
            The poetry of great truths in J.C. Elkin's moving and formally appealing poem "Keening for Eve" found in lines such as:

"...if progress can ever describe modern deaths as acceptable third world reality.
Caesar, Robespierre, Frankenstein’s Shelley lost moms. Stonewall Jackson, too.
And half a million more this year will die in every locality."

          Mary Shelley's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft (just to mention one such death), was probably the first successful professional author in the English language, and certainly one of the first feminists, her early death an incredible loss.  

           Elkin's poem "Almost Fledglings" about two baby birds blown from their nest draws on the truth that we feel the little tragedies that cross our path just as we do the big ones -- and sometimes even more deeply.

. "...one is white as an angel, skim milk shades drawn over eyes. The other, purpling,
inflates – deflates, an avian respirator." Beautiful writing puts a face on an ordinary disaster.

David Chorlton's poem "Lyric Botany" imagining "the namers of flowers" is a thorough pleasure, with its elegant allusions to an imaginary etymology. The poem's language is a joy:

"Their work
is to cross-breed language

so that beavertail lives in earth
as it does in water,

plant alliteration
or roadsides with the brittlebush,
and experiment with consonants
until fleabane and madrone grow
from the alphabet's old loam."

His poem "Nyctophobia" (an "irrational fear of night" a new word for me) gives us the poetry of the horror film. The elegance of the language here has the quality of a guilty pleasure as we sense a shudder of truth in the poem's description of 'the mechanical night':

"even the mechanical night
is a low hum
along the freeways, broken
by emergencies,
spinning lights
and insomnia running out
of control."

The entire beautifully packaged group of DeWitt Clinton's poems illustrates the available range of working on a theme such as flowers, or gardens, or spring. Along with their perfectly chosen illustrations and title allusions to the poems of Su Tung Po the group captures the wonder of an everyday world it's easy to lose sight of.

          The poem titled "In a Waiting Room Overlooking the Lake, I See a Bouquet of May Flowers, and Read Su Tung P’o’s 'Begonias'" seems to me to capture the eternal flicker in the temporal flow as the poet recalls bringing home a yellow hibiscus and leaving in wrapped in a plastic bag to protect against frost.

"Alone on the porch next to the snow
Shovel, rusting table and chairs,
the raccoons pause before the light
surprises them with blooms and eyes."

         The image of the summer-bloomer next to the snow shovel is practically a poem in itself. (And I admit being partial to the mention of this flower since I still have the yellow hibiscus I bought last year, keeping inside all winter and still hesitating over when it will be safe enough to put outdoors again.)

           Clinton's poem" After a Long Run Along the Lakefront,

I Try to Nap with Lu Yu’s “Phoenix Hairpins” speaks to this eternal longing as well.

"Daylilies have opened in our village
Soothing what I can’t do myself.

I’d like to be here
When there’s no more time
To let this ink seep into something
That you might want
As something precious, forever.​"

I love Barbara Crooker's personifications of flowers. Don't we all do this sometimes? See others -- or ourselves? -- in plants and other elements of nature, despite having been taught that anthropomorphizing was some sort of sin against reason. "The Hour of Peonies," a praise song for this showy favorite of gardeners, embraces the sensuality of this flower, comparing them to Renoir's fleshy bathers:

"And so are these flowers,
an exuberance of cream, pink, raspberry, not a shrinking violet among them.
They splurge, they don’t hold back, they spend it all."

          I like the other poems in this group too, as I also like their subjects. The big costume-party iris, a ballet in a flower, rising from a plant that works all year to give us one week of beautiful performance: "and sometimes we awaken [the poem notes]
from the dull green stalk of habit."

          And this inspired description of a dianthus:

"My mother comes back as a dianthus,
only this time, she’s happy, smelling like cloves,
fringed and candy-striped with a ring of deep rose
that bleeds into the outer petals."

            And of the Rosa Multiflora:

"Now they ramble unchecked, grow in waste areas, weeds, pests, nuisances.
In June, thousands and thousands of white blossoms light
my back path."

           I share this experience of the wild rose. I can't get rid of them; and then I don't want to.

           That's spring for you, too.

It's beautiful because it keeps moving,

but why does it have to move so fast?

The Garden of Experience: Libraries and Book Clubs

My thanks to Carver Library, and librarian Amy Shepherdson, for hosting "Suosso's Lane" and me on a beautiful Saturday afternoon. We had a lively question and answer session after I finally finished talking. 
           And I met a couple of folks who had strong family memories of life on Suosso's Lane or elsewhere in the North Plymouth neighborhood. 
           One person told me about living across from the Amerigo Vespucci Hall on Suosso's Lane. This Italian-American clubhouse had a low a profile when I lived in Plymouth, but back in the day (Vanzetti's day) it housed the 1916 strike meeting when charismatic Italian anarchist Luigi Galleani came to address the Plymouth Cordage Company strikers.  
             As an American place name, the Vespucci Hall retains its status because of its connection to Vanzetti. If you Google it, you find Beltrando Brini's marvelous oral history recollection of Vanzetti and his family (from the book "Anarchist Voices") in which he states: 
"There was also a social hall on Suosso's Lane, the Amerigo Vespucci Hall, but that was for the general community, not for the anarchists." 
              (Just for you information, Google's second mention of the Suosso's Lane Vespucci Hall comes from an earlier post in this blog.)
              I want to say thanks also to the "men's" book club in Plymouth that invited me to sit in at their meeting last weekend to discuss "Suosso's Lane" (and fed me). I was very flattered that a group that tends toward serious nonfiction chose my novel -- 'historical fiction' as one of the members referred to it (the terms 'mystery' and 'potboiler' also came up) -- as its book for discussion. 
           Their questions were penetrating. "Do you also write poetry?" one of the group's good doctors asked.
           Bing! Bing! Bing! A little birdie comes down with an envelope, and cash is awarded. 
           Other questions: Did I have a role model for the character of Lavinia? No, I just knew I wanted her to be very smart, very articulate, and the proto-feminist of her era, which is to say a suffragist. Someone who could stand up to Vanzetti on intellectual grounds, while brushing off the snubs of her own old-line Plymouth community. 
           Members also shared with me their personal acquaintance with the Sacco-Vanzetti case, mostly dating from older family members -- the left-leaning intellectuals of earlier generations. How is it that members of earlier generations could proudly call themselves adherents to the socialist workers party or progressive labor or even the American Communist Party -- but since mid-20th century America it has not respectable and in fact materially dangerous to acknowledge any of these connections -- or even these once widely-shared beliefs?
           The answer in practical, historical terms, of course, is McCarthyism and is proscription of 'Communist' ideas (for instance, atheism). But McCarthyism is sixty-five years old (ready to sit in a rocker and collect Social Security), so can't we finally get past this mental straitjacket fitted over the American political mind?
            Other questions. My 21st century character Mill -- was he based on myself. Oh no, I hope not... But yeah, there's something to that idea. I have a guy increasingly obsessed with the Vanzetti story, his time in America, his particular 'once upon a time in America...' 
           (Digression warning: Myths, legends, and folk tales all happen in "the past." We romanticize the past; it's the place we go to 'romanticize.' We're more likely to be afraid of the future. If we have a place in the culture for "Angels in America," why can't we have a place, intellectually at least, for "Anarchists in America"?)
            So, yes, as a reporter and then just as a reader before I started writing a book based on the Vanzetti experience, I did grow increasingly fascinated by the vivid history of his life and times. 
            And I'm flattered, and happy, that others have found something to engage their attention and provide some storytelling pleasure in the book that derives my own attraction to a largely forgotten piece of local, and American, history.

     
            
             

The Garden of Local News: 'Why I Wrote This Book'

When I speak at libraries about "Suosso's Lane," I begin with a brief introduction connecting the novel to the infamous Sacco and Vanzetti case. (I'll be speaking at Carver Public Library, 2 Meadowbrook Way, Carver MA this Saturday, May 14, 1 p.m.)
To explain the origins of the case I read my account in “Suosso’s Lane” of the 1920 crime for which the two men, Italian immigrants and professed anarchists, were found guilty and later executed. The crime was sensational daylight robbery of a shoe factory payroll and the murder of two payroll officers planned and executed in the

way as a professional criminal gang would do it. The chief of the Massachusetts state police said as much to the prosecution after Sacco and Vanzetti were charged with the crime. You've got the wrong guys, he said. The state prosecutors responded by removing him from the case and putting it into the hands of a small town police chief whose theory that anarchists were responsible for the robbery led to the arrests.
           Next, I address the question that readers almost ask an author: Why did you write this book? A good question, requiring a somewhat lengthy answer. After an outrageously biased trial in 1921 Sacco and Vanzetti, both of whom had witnesses from their own immigrant community placing them elsewhere on the day of the crime — “the Italians?” the state's governor would later say, “you can't believe them” — were convicted of murder. Their defense raised money to pay for legal challenges, delaying their execution until 1927. By that time the case had become an international cause celebre. In Europe, everyone from Albert Einstein to the Pope signed petitions demanding a new trial or a pardon or the outright release of Sacco and Vanzetti. Their cause was taken up by worker movements worldwide and demonstrations in their behalf were held literally all over the world. American justice was widely condemned because of this case.
           I was aware of the Sacco-Vanzetti case in general terms when I moved to Plymouth MA, home of the Pilgrims, and began work as an editor and reporter for a community newspaper called the Old Colony Memorial. But I did not know that Bartolomeo Vanzetti lived in Plymouth at the time of his arrest. Plymouth is very conscious of its Pilgrim history, there are statues and memorials and plaques throughout the old town center, but it pays no attention whatsoever to one of the principals in the Trial of the Century 100 years ago. 
           As a reporter I knew that the Sacco-Vanzetti case had been a big deal everywhere and that many nonfiction books have been written about it. But ‘Vanzetti in Plymouth’ is the local angle — and I was a local reporter. Working on a local history project for my newspaper, I looked into what was known about Vanzetti’s life in Plymouth by  scanning through microfilmed editions of my own paper and other newspapers in the Plymouth library. (I do love libraries; I wouldn’t be speaking about this book if it wasn’t for libraries). 
          I also read the most influential books on the case. As I learned more I grew to believe that the story of Vanzetti’s life in Plymouth — he spent five years there — offered a multi-faceted opening into a bigger story of what life was like for the industrial working class in Plymouth, and the rest of America, a century ago, a story that later generations are forgetting. It's a story that raises raising enduring issues in American society and politics, such as immigration, the negative stereotyping of national (or ethnic and religious) groups as undesirable others, bias in the criminal justice system, and the growing gap between rich and poor.
           “Suosso’s Lane,” named for the street in North Plymouth where Vanzetti lived in an immigrant neighborhood of mostly factory workers, dramatizes Vanzetti’s life in America, his outrage over the injustices he saw inflicted upon the working poor, and his growing commitment to the revolutionary anarchist cause. But the novel goes beyond recreating the historical past to connect Vanzetti’s story, and his world,  to our own world by also telling a 21st century story (also set in Plymouth) of people dealing today with many of the same issues. Despised "outsider" immigrant groups. An economic system that shuts the door to the “American dream” by exploiting the working poor. The centralization of political and monetary power in the hands of a few.
          The main characters in the contemporary story are Mill Becker, a young history teacher in his first real academic job, who moves with his wife into the house on Suosso’s Lane where Vanzetti once lived. A nosy local reporter named Mo Jeter (whose working life, by the way, is a lot more “adventurous” than mine ever was), who is investigating a real cold case, the 60-year-old suspicious death of a Plymouth policeman. How can this death connect to Sacco-Vanzetti case? Well, that’s what fiction is for.
And finally Ike Murisi, a ‘new immigrant’ who works at a big box store (I’m not allowed to name for legal reasons) and discovers parallels to Vanzetti’s story in his own life. While Ike takes low-paying service job to cobble together a living for himself and his wife, the criminal justice system complicates his life, and self-serving politicians seek only to make things harder for people like him.
           “Suosso’s Lane” is a big book. A frankly ambitious novel. It took me years to bring it to publication and I couldn’t be happier to see it finally in print. It’s now available as both an ebook and a paperback from the publisher, Web-e-Books.com.
           

The Garden in May: A Little Light on the Situation

Lots of greens, different shades of green, and lots of other colors too. What makes the spring garden come alive? A little sunlight. 
            I keep waiting for this month to begin. In the Boston area, it has rained at least a measurable amount every day this month. And every day last week the temperature was below average for the month of May. On Friday, a northeaster 
gale blew off the sea, with intimidating sound effects. I kept thinking very loud, low-flying jets buzzing the house for some reason, probably because they know I don't like them. This was the shocking music of a heavy wind day in a winter storm; not of the end of the first week in May.
              No part of which is bothering the plants. They all needed the moisture. And how rugged are, for instance, tulips? The opened their mouths and showed their tonsils, and the cool damp weather keeps the blossoms from drying out. They couldn't be happier. Is that the secret of tulip-growing in Holland? The daffodils fared worse. A number tall skinny stems holding elaborate narcissus variety flower heads have been crimped and loll to one side or another.
             The tiny Labrador violets (third photo down), I'm happy to see, are making a comeback. They fit into spaces unclaimed by larger species. They have dark purple violets, accompanied by dark leaves with purple in them as well, making for aesthetic interest close to the ground. You have to get low to visit them. It's worth it; they reward discovery. But I can never predict where they will from year to year.

The pictures on this page were all taken a week ago on a cool, but bright late Saturday afternoon, before the oppressive run of darker, wetter days began. Since they were actually taken on April 30, what they show is a pre-May moment. I like looking at plants in their youthful, immature state -- it's the change as much as the finished product that intrigues me.

The four last photos on this page, taken from wider angles, interest me just for the range of plant forms, shapes, and varieties of perennials in this half-grown or quarter-grown state.  Some of those reddish plants, Astilbe will launch tall stems with feathery flowers. Other low purplish colonies, called loosestrife, grow stems several feet high and produce yellow flowers. 
         Most of the low groundcovers that are flowering now will stop flowering by the end of the month. Many of them will scarcely be visible when their larger neighbors take up all the air space above them.

Delving Into Poetry Month: Thirty Days of Planting Words

        April is (or now was) National Poetry Month, a nice designation but nothing near the impact of a national holiday. Emily Dickinson's birthday maybe? Or Walt Whitman's? 
         Still, poets get excited about it in sort of busman's holiday way. Let's write more poems this month, they say. Let's write a poem every day. A National Poetry Month website encourages this workaholic tendency, offering clever and original prompts on each of the month's 30 days. In fact, any number of other websites do a similar thing. 
          Prompts are a new discovery for me, perhaps an invention of the instant communication possibilities of the digital age. If someone says, 'why don't we all write a poem about trees, or birds, or women whose image deserves to be on the twenty dollar bill?' you could say that was a prompt. But things are considerably more elaborate in the industry these days. 
         Here, for example, is the National Poetry Month [http://www.napowrimo.net/] website's prompt for the April 24th:

Today I challenge you to write a “mix-and-match” poem in which you mingle fancy vocabulary with distinctly un-fancy words. First, spend five minutes writing a list of overly poetic words – words that you think just sound too high-flown to really be used by anyone in everyday speech. Examples might be vesper, heliotrope, or excelsior. Now spend five minutes writing words that you might use or hear every day, but which seem too boring or quotidian to be in a poem. Examples might be garbage disposal, doggy bag, bathroom. Now mix and match examples from both of your lists into a single poem. Hopefully you’ll end up with a poem that makes the everyday seem poetic, and which keeps your poetic language grounded. 

          Or kinda wicked paradoxically incongruous.
           Nevertheless I gave the monthly project a try, working not everyday but with a start and stop rhythm. I frequently fell three or four days behind and went doggedly back to the days I missed to try to catch up. And while I never did get to all 30 prompts, I enjoyed the process. Two of the poems I wrote this way turned into 'garden theme' poems and appear in this month's Verse-Virtual.
            They are titled "Visiting Roses: Under the 'Lune' " and "A Family Garden." [www.verse-virtual.com/robert-c-knox-2016-may.html]

             "Visiting Roses" originated with a prompt to write in a poetic form called a "lune": 

This is a sort of English-language haiku. While the haiku is a three-line poem with a 5-7-5 syllable count, the lune is a three-line poem with a 5-3-5 syllable count. There’s also a variant based on word-count, instead of syllable count, where the poem still has three lines, but the first line has five words, the second line has three words, and the third line has five words again. Either kind will do, and you can write a one-lune poem, or write a poem consisting of multiple stanzas of lunes.

             "A Family Garden" came from this prompt:

...write a poem that takes the form of a family portrait. You could write, for example, a stanza for each member of your family. You could also find an actual snapshot of your family and write a poem about it, spending a little bit of time on each person in the picture. You don’t need to observe any particular form or meter.

           A more challenging prompt introduced me to the form of the "tritana."

The tritina is a shorter cousin to the sestina, involving three, three-line stanzas, and a final concluding line. Three “end words” are used to conclude the lines of each stanza, in a set pattern of ABC, CAB, BCA, and all three end words appear together in the final line.
Confused? No problem — here’s an example!


I did read the illustrative tritana, and liked it. The poem that resulted from this formal challenge, titled "The Slow Tritina We Will Dance," has been accepted by another literary journal for an upcoming issue. Never too late, I guess, to learn something new. 

One last offering from my month's work, to illustrate the range of the imaginative and wholly unpredictable universe of the 'prompt.' (There is no end to it.) Here's the prompt for June 17:

I challenge you to find, either on your shelves or online, a specialized dictionary. This could be, for example, a dictionary of nautical terms, or woodworking terms, or geology terms. Anything, really, so long as it’s not a standard dictionary! Now write a poem that incorporates at least ten words from your specialized source.




I found a dictionary of geological terms that attracted me because on the first page appeared "alluvial fan." I loved the double meaning possibility there. Here's the resulting poem, with notes below to explain the unfamiliar terms.
 

School of Hard Rocks

The Alluvian Fan is rooting for mud

While the Spirit of New Mexico prays for dry weather to save his handsome Butte

A Density Current pores through the country with an angry thump:

many votes for Donald Trump.

An increased dip in a dipping trend says Monocline is now your friend,

while tumbling on Scree in a bald Reverse Fault, a stumbling Roughneck calls a halt.

Put down your cup of early joe and help me wind yon Pahoehoe

It coils around the Tourmalines that color grew in deeper mines

And persevered through many fights

with blind, albino Troglobites

The Caldera yawns at Yellowstone 

While for its loss a Cation moans

In deeper days in heavy dirt

A crystal nodule strives for Chert

Attorneys for the Deeps in opposition

Await a geological Deposition

To rule at last, without dispute

That Fossil Fuels aren't worth a Hoot 

[NOTES from a glossary of geological terms:

http://geology.com/geology-dictionary.shtml

Alluvial Fan:A fan-shaped wedge of sediment that typically accumulates on land where a stream emerges from a steep canyon onto a flat area.

Density Current:
A gravity-driven flow of a dense fluid down a slope through a fluid of lower density

Monocline: An area of increased dip in otherwise gently dipping strata.

Scree: A mass of small loose stones that form or cover a slope on a mountain.

Pahoehoe: A Hawaiian term for a lava flow that has a surface flow structure that looks like coiled rope or cord.

Tourmalines: a crystalline boron silicate mineral compounded with elements such as aluminium, iron, magnesium, sodium, lithium, or potassium

Troglobites:Small creatures that have adapted to a permanent life in a cave.

Caldera: A large, bowl-shaped crater associated with a volcanic vent

Cation: An atom with a positive charge that has been produced by the loss of one or more electrons.

Chert: The precipitation of chemical sediments from mineral rich waters. 

Deposition:

A word used in reference to sediments or sedimentary rocks that are composed of particles that were transported and deposited by wind, water or ice.

Hoot: Slang sense of "smallest amount or particle"]

DAY TEN She challenges us to write a “book spine” poem. This involves taking a look at your bookshelves, and writing down titles in order (or rearranging the titles) to create a poem. Some fun images of book spine poems can be found here. If you want to take things a step further, Lillian suggests gathering a list of titles from your shelves (every third or fifth book, perhaps, if you have a lot) and using the titles, as close to the originals as possible, to create a poem that is seeded throughout with your own lines, interjections, and thoughts. Happy writing!

Far Side

The Far Side of the World

We travel when the wind is fair

One Palestine Complete

Turn the pages back on time's mistakes

After King Philip's War, Mayflower,

The Invasion of Europe by the Europeans

Time's Last Chance and Other Riddles

Laws of Number, Excluded Middles,

The World Without Us,

Shame of the Cities,

Clever Men and Clever Ditties

Eye of the Storm by Namesake Knox

Wings Over Cape Cod and Ancient Rocks

The Journal of Albion Moonlight

and All Such Stuff from Other Days

Lord of Chaos rules The Ways

Festive Time and Haunted Hours

A Field Guide to Wild Trees and Flowers

New England Mysteries All Must Fear

The Tempest, The Inferno, and King Lear

Tragedy in Dedham, Marcel Proust Along

Swann's Way, Falkner's Hamlet, Old Will's Play

Florida and Samarkand, Places we will find to stand

and dip our toes in soothing sand

But don't forget Blue Fruit for Sal, or Toad for Owl,

Something to Beguile the Hour,

The Day We Ran Away, Adventure Calls,

Defiance Hurled, Taking Daddy's Little Girl

to The Far Side of the World  

 

School of Hard Rocks

The Alluvian Fan is rooting for mud

While the Spirit of New Mexico prays for dry weather to save his handsome Butte

A Density Current pores through the country with an angry thump:

many votes for Donald Trump.

An increased dip in a dipping trend says Monocline is now your friend,

while tumbling on Scree in a bald Reverse Fault, a stumbling Roughneck calls a halt.

Put down your cup of early joe and help me wind yon Pahoehoe

It coils around the Tourmalines that color grew in deeper mines

And persevered through many fights

with blind, albino Troglobites

The Caldera yawns at Yellowstone 

While for its loss a Cation moans

In deeper days in heavy dirt

A crystal nodule strives for Chert

Attorneys for the Deeps in opposition

Await a geological Deposition

To rule at last, without dispute

That Fossil Fuels aren't worth a Hoot