Henry Weinfield’s As the Crow Flies

Henry Weinfield’s As the Crow Flies (Dos Madres Press, 2021), reviewed by Gregory J. Wolos

REVIEW BY GREG WOLOS


I have read Henry Weinfield’s new poetry collection, As the Crow Flies, with a certain kind of limited pleasure. There is wit in these poems, satiric allusiveness, clever puns, unexpected rhymes, all delivered in classic (some might call archaic) forms. As I read, however, I found myself measuring the gap between my admiration for the poetic conventions Weinfield cleverly employs and my exasperation at the “straightjacketing” effect these forms have on the thematic and philosophical values he attempts to render through them.

In the collections opening poem, “The Ironies,” Weinfield establishes his poetic modus operandi. Heavily dependent on rhyme, meter, and repetition, the poem is a rumination on the vicissitudes of that determine the course and shape of one’s life: “What was it that you thought you had to say?/--Though possibly you said it anyway:/ It turned out different than you thought./ . . . / The things that you evaded or forgot/Were details deeply woven in the plot./ You couldn’t ever have imagined it.” There is truth in what Weinfield’s asserts in his verse, but it is a truth we’ve heard many times before, as in Robert Burns’s “To a Mouse,” (composed in 1785) in which we are told “The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men/ Gang aft agley,/ An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,/For promis’d joy!” There are disappointments in life we can’t anticipate, Weinstein similarly reminds us: “It didn’t seem impossible to seize/ The golden apples of the Hesperides/Where the eternal verities prevailed.” But, philosophically, Weinstein doesn’t take us much further. His “Ironies” concludes with the limp assertion that we can’t have all that we want: “Like everyone you wanted everything/ (The autumn simultaneous with the spring)—/ For which no kind of medicine availed.” This ending contrasts unflatteringly with Burns’s, who doesn’t merely reiterate our desire to “collapse” time (i.e., deem “autumn simultaneous with spring”). Rather, Burns, by contrasting the human epistemological state with the mouse’s, takes the philosophy to a more compelling conclusion: we are congenitally more miserable than the mouse precisely because we can’t help but distinguish past, present, and future: “Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me!/ The present only toucheth thee:/ But Och! I backward cast my e’e,/ On prospects drear!/ An’ forward tho’ I canna see,/ I guess an’ fear!”

The question remains: does an adherence to well-travelled conventions limit one to equally hashed over conclusions? Does Weinstein’s cleverness in rhyming “seize” with “Hesperides” (while at the same time providing the reader with an allusion to classical mythology) truly enlighten the reader with something new? Or are the allusions and formal conventions simply ornaments to disguise shopworn philosophy? I’d like to believe that Weinfield is, in fact, satirizing the conventions, and that many of his poems are intended to demonstrate what leaky vehicles these forms prove to be for fresh thought. But if Weinfield wants us to take the theme of “Ironies” and many of his other poems at face value, he fails to achieve Pope’s idea of “true wit,” which is to satisfy the reader with “what oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.”

Don’t get me wrong—there is much to admire in Weinfield’s ambitious (and often entertaining) long poems, such as “L’Dor V’Dor: Chant of the Jews of Michiana As They Contemplate the Past and the Future,” which provides a capsule version of the Jewish diaspora from shtetls to the Midwest of the United States. But the poet’s insistence on traditional forms too often yields unfortunate rhymes and twisted syntax: “Living in constant fear of a pogrom,/ Not knowing when the Cossacks next would come.” Similarly clever in conception, if not execution, is Weinfield’s “Paradise Lost: A Poem in Twelve Books: The Shorter Version.” The poem is introduced by a pair of epigraphs which inform the reader of the poem’s satiric intent: Samuel Johnson states of Milton’s masterpiece, “None ever wished it longer than it is.” And Milton himself refers to “the troublesome and modern bondage of Riming.” And so Weinfield’s version proceeds, ingeniously compressing Milton’s work, while at the same time illustrating the points made in the epigraphs. But such efforts can be extreme and tedious, as with “Book XI” of the poem, in which eighteen of the first twenty-five lines have end-words that rhyme with “plight.” To my mind, “true wit” is not “expressed” by emulating problematic verse form. As Tom Stoppard’s Player suggests in his play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, establishing a point through verisimilitude doesn’t necessarily yield great art: “I had an actor once who was condemned to hang . . . so I got permission to have him hanged in the middle of a play . . . and you wouldn’t believe it, he just wasn’t convincing! It was impossible to suspend one’s disbelief . . . the while thing was a disaster!—he did nothing but cry all the time—right out of character.” The Milton epigraph seems to be sufficient on its own: it’s both amusing and sobering that he found rhyme to be “bondage.” It’s neither entertaining nor enlightening for Weinfield to prove the point with a flood of rhyme—it’s only boring.

And yet, when Weinfield is at his best, he is a skilled craftsmen and thoughtful philosopher, capable of producing poetic gems that are more than the “gestures of a jester” (my own brief parody of Weinfield’s poems in this collection, many of which are rife with punning). “Fragment of an Injunction to the Poets of the Future” begins with the simple assertion, “There is no God,” and concludes, “Forget the myth,/ The heroic journey to the Underworld./ The underworld to which you have been hurled/ Is this world—here you are and here it is./ You must abandon all mythologies.” Here Weinstein’s rhymes and allusions support his thematic intent: “hurled” and “world” work together in lines that are syntactically straightforward, and the whiff of Dante’s warning at the gates of Hell drives home the irony of Weinfield’s theme. The brief poem “The Afterlife” is clever and thought-provoking without being rendered in torturous diction and uncomfortable rhymes; the repetition and punning are central to the poem’s impact:

“The afterlife/Was after life./ There was no life/ That was not life.”

The poems that touch upon Weinfield’s personal memories are breaths of fresh air in this volume. “To Carla, in Lieu of the Lost Poem I Gave her in High School” reveals an irony that is more than simply clever; it is heartfelt. Regarding his youthful romance, Weinfield writes, “You never let me go too far,/ Wise young virgin that you were/ . . ./ So every afternoon I’d burn/ With longing, which itself was sweet./ It was too soon—we had to wait./ But then too soon it was too late./ For waiting soon became too long/ For so much longing—we were young: / Ours was an old familiar song.” “Old” and “familiar,” yes, but also vivid and poignant, personal, yet universal—the irony in the poem is meaningful, not mere cleverness.

Too often the poems in As the Crow Flies seem like exhibition for exhibition’s sake: rhyme, meter, and allusion are the sparkling things for which his crow seems to be searching. An exception might be found in one of the volume’s later poems, found in the section “From Old Notebooks.” This poem, “George Oppen’s Eyes,” (I think we can forgive in this instance Weinfield’s title pun), reveals without artificial adornment what Weinfield values in poetry: “Among the poets, yours were the only eyes/ That never dimmed themselves in fantasies,/ Or looked to compromise the poet’s craft/ Out of a vain desire to be heard./ The only motive for your poetry/ Was clarity, you said, your favorite word./ I looked upon you as another father,/ And hoped I might find favor in your eyes.” The values expressed in this poem seem to contradict those evident in too many of the others in the volume. Perhaps it’s only a matter of taste, but I prefer the succinct crafting of a poem like “The Afterlife” and the pathos of the personal “To Carla,” both of which provide “clarity” without “compromise[ing] the poet’s craft.

Hilary Sideris’s Animals in English

 

Hilary Sideris’s Animals in English (Dos Madres Press),

reviewed by Gregory J. Wolos




In the prologue to her poetry collection Animals in English, Hilary Sideris explains that she “was writing a series of poems in the voice of Temple Grandin,” who, because of her autism, “spent her youth and most of her adult life learning to speak the language of ‘normal’ humans so that she could tell us how animals . . . perceive, feel, and experience the world in pictures.” Sideris hopes that she can parallel Grandin’s intention “by translating Grandin’s experiences and insights into the language of free verse.” The “voice” of these poems is Sideris’s representation of Grandin’s: through the activist’s epistemological framework, the reader is brought closer to the inner worlds of animals, a rendering which expands our awareness of the greater existence we humans share with our fellow creatures.

In the collection’s opening poem, “Nantasket Lights,” Sideris begins her act of ventriloquizing Grandin. The poem details Grandin’s childhood frustration with language: “I didn’t think in words. Still don’t,” and describes how she was removed from school for slapping a classmate who mocked her repetitive attempts to tell a story by calling her “tape recorder.” What Sideris’s child-Grandin was trying to describe was a physical sensation, the pleasure of being “pushed up against a wall” while riding the tilting wheel of the Rotor at Nantasket Park. The comforting feeling of compression is continued in the next poem, “Squeeze Chute,” which describes how cattle are “clamped” in a metal cage to get there shots, a process which actually calms them down “like swaddled newborns.” Sideris’s Grandin suggests that she would find comfort in “a squeeze chute of my own.”

“Squeeze Chute,” as do more than half of Sideris’s poems, begins with an italicized quotation taken from a set of books cited at the volumes conclusion which are by or about Grandin. In the poem “Rapid Erratic Movement” the epigraph reads “It doesn’t jump out at normal people the way it does at me or a cow.” Sideris’s poem goes on to describe a child-Grandin who is “obsessed” with motion, such as “flags/ flapping in the wind,/the light reflecting off a fan’s rotating blades.” The narrator compares herself to a cat chasing a laser dot, “mindless,/ obsessed, their world/ a skittish dot,” and continues on to contrast her behavior with the purposefulness of a child, who, “cheered on by our mothers,/ makes a castle with/ a bucket & shovel.” Grandin, like the animals with which she empathizes, is observational, not planful, like the purposeful child. The epigraphs to Sideris’s poems tell us the activist “saw pictures inside her head,” and that during her thinking process had “no words in my head at all,” a revelation Sideris transliterates in her poem “Certain Infinites” as “Words came unnaturally,/ I learned to speak/ mimicking mom, who/ conjugated like a queen.” Sideris’s poems and the epigraphs upon which they are based suggest that Grandin was a difficult to child to raise, her condition nearly impossible to properly diagnose.

The epigraph to the poem “1950” describes how childhood autism was once believed to be “a reflection of bad parenting, and most especially of a chillingly remote . . . refrigerator mother.” The poem itself describes how, as child-Grandin “painted walls/ with my feces, Doctors told her [mother]/ she was the cause,/ there was no cure.” Yet while Grandin seemed immune to “normal” parenting, the poem “Ariel” reveals her intuitively empathetic relationship with a horse she was learning to ride: “She shows you/ how to ride, knows/ when you want/ to canter, gallop,/ trot—dances with/ you when people/ can’t or won’t.” The horse, it is suggested, observes the details of the child’s discomfort and adjusts to accommodate them; to demonstrate Grandin’s empathetic understanding of animals, Sideris’s poem “Signs of Horse Distress” parallels the autistic child’s suffering with the distressed awareness of an animal like Ariel: “Head high,/ eyes wide, ears/ pointing toward/ the person of/ concern or pinned/ back, flat. Sweat/ without exercise./ Tail swishing/ without flies.”

Sideris channels Grandin as she considers the difference between language as used by “normal” humans and animals. Our own human understanding of language prejudices our conception of animal language. As the epigraph to “Prairie Dogs” explains, “instead of looking for animal language in our closest genetic relatives, the primates, we should look at animals with the greatest need for language in order to stay alive.” The complementary poem suggests their calls are intended to warn that “a predator/ is on the way, how fast,/ where from, what kind.” The epigraph to “Annabelle’s Bite” explains that “[a]nimals probably don’t have the complex emotions people do, like shame, guilt, embarrassment, greed, or wanting bad tings to happen to people who are more successful than you.” Sideris’s poem illustrates the concept: “The pet we let out/ kills with grace, Calm jaws clamp/ prey then shake/ methodically.” In “Slaughterhouse Lights” the Grandin-based epigraph emphasizes once again the similarity between animals and the autistic, asserting that “[a]utistic people and animals are seeing a whole register of the visual world normal people can’t or don’t.” The poem describes how Grandin was hired by a company to determine why pigs were stopping on a chute that would lead them to slaughter: “I got on my hands/ & knees, saw the reflecting/ lights in puddles; pigs fear not death, but sudden movement,/ rapid changes, foreign objects/ in their visual field.

Sideris’s art in Animals in English resides in her ability to complete a multi-level act of transduction in clear, simple language. Her poems are based on dual premises: first, animal language is not based on the same premises as “normal” human language; second, that the epistemological framework of those with autism, specifically the animal activist Temple Grandin, closely resembles that of animals. Sideris’s concluding poem, “Stairway to Heaven,” opens by telling the reader that “Cows think in pictures,/ not stories.” While being led to slaughter, the proceed along the chute that leads them to death as if they’re part of a herd that “spirals” over pasture land, and uncomplicated by emotions, they “never wonder where it ends.”

Andrew K. Peterson’s Good Game

 

Andrew K. Peterson’s Good Game, reviewed by Gregory J. Wolos

In his poem “Ars Poetica,” Archibald Macleish concludes, “A poem should not mean/ But be.” The implication is that the poem—a poem— is an experience unto itself, and not merely a rendering of an idea or set of ideas that could be paraphrased in prose. The experience (or set of experiences) occasioned by my reading of Andrew K. Peterson’s collection of poems, Good Game, is, I must confess, largely unparaphrasable. While the poems in Good Game display pyrotechnical virtuosity in their use of imagery and structure, too often I found my engagement thwarted by tantalizing allusions that hung just out of my reach, by semantic inversions that seemed linked only to themselves, and to scattershot experiments in form that seemed intended as a kind of Rorschach test for the reader’s journey to self-discovery, but which in fact came across as frustratingly solipsistic and opaque puzzles.

Looking for an entry, a point of embarkation, I turn to the collection’s title, and then to the first poem, “The Big Game is Every Night.” Peterson’s last stanza “it’s a big game/ & the big game is every night/ a mountainous rose/ swells of diamond surfers,/ dub sparks on the moon’s hood,/ a wolf at the brim of her kind” creates a hunger that I ache to have satisfied. As vivid as are the images of the rose, the diamond surfers, the sparks on the hood of the moon, and the wolf at the brim, for me, they collide without illuminating. Ever the pragmatist, when faced with weightlessness, I search for an anchor, and, as I have advised countless students over the years, when in doubt, return to the title. What’s to be made of Peterson’s offering up of the phrase “good game”? Seeking to experience Peterson’s work to the fullest, I run through any and all associations I can make. “Good game” is a platitude generally exchanged between competitors at the conclusion of a competition. Is it possible that Peterson has regarded his readers as opponents? Or are we ruminant targets, like rhinos and buffaloes, “big game” to be rendered fit for a museum diorama at the mercy of the poet’s obscurantism? Is Peterson’s title self-congratulatory, intended to describe the collection itself as a challenge that will ultimately benefit the reader? Adjectivally speaking, when I surrender myself to a poem or collections of poems, I like to think of myself as “game”—I am generally willing to suspend or accept, if even temporarily, the epistemological frame the poet is offering through their work. If I can make sense of their rules. But I want to be a participant, not merely an observer, of the poet’s “game.” Watching pyrotechnics for the sake of watching is a two-dimensional experience—it lacks depth.

I search for anchors, for clues: Peterson offers a direction in his opening poem, suggesting that what we’re searching for is “slow going, but it is going.” So there is movement to watch for—but movement to where (and from where), and how do we recognize it? In “Poem on Joan Mitchell’s Birthday,” there is a suggestion after imagery hinting at the singer’s cover art (“wild blueberry/ when I could/in the middle of that blued & purple cinema”) that “form shatters the void/ as a knife slides off her palette.” So it seems that the decision to “make” something, i.e., to impose form, equals “art.” And what then to make of Peterson choosing to refer to Joanie Mitchell as “Joan”? Naming (or renaming) is an aggressive act—a hint of cultural imperialism. I have a brother who intentionally mispronounces the names of French actresses. To what end? To draw attention to himself? To make it clear that he is possessing these personalities in his own, unique way? But what am I to get it out of it? As with Peterson’s poems and many of the forms he chooses for them, my first feeling is that of exclusion.

But I’m in “the game,” and I’m no quitter. And, seriously, I want to play. Reading Peterson’s “Serious Moonlight,” I’m drawn to the last lines: “in the moonlight/ in the serious moonlight/ oh unserious moon.” Peterson here seems to suggest the subjectivity of interpretation—whatever we make of the moon, it exists nakedly; if we turn moonlight into “a monument to memory’s fresh dance clothes set to tremble,” as Peterson does in the poem’s opening line, it is a matter of choice. Yet before I can dive deeply into “Serious Moonlight,” I’m confronted by Peterson’s decision to “i.m.” the poem to David Bowie. A handful of poem’s in the opening section of Good Game are “i.m.-ed” to musicians and writers, all dead. Is an “instant message” a dedication? A declaration of inspiration? A tribute? Deference to or ironic condemnation of a culture lost to social media? (Full disclosure—except for Bowie, I had to Google Peterson’s other “i.m.” reciptients.)

And so the reader is taken out of the immediate experience of the poem itself, connected to (or becoming lost within) a different kind of experience that requires assistance—either we look up Peterson’s allusions, or we defer to the final pages of the volume, which list the poet’s “Notes” on several of his poems. Is the added information these notes supply meant to further our interface with the poem? Are they intended to offer us glimpses into the poet’s notebooks so we can trace the genesis of a work from its birth-idea to its completion? Are they meant to show off Peterson’s wide-ranged exploration of diverse texts? If so, is the “Notes” section intended less as an explanatory connection to the volume’s early poems and more as a separate section in and of itself, in which Peterson noisily stakes his ground as an iconoclast? What is a reader to make of a note such as Peterson’s on his “Poem for a Disappearing Roommate”: “The poem’s form—stanza length, line word count, quotation length and page location of source material—was determined by chance methodology (I-Ching consultation).”

There are several poems in Good Game, particular in an eponymous section, that suggest the movement implied in the also-eponymous introductory poem—poems that “are going.” At least the titles of these guerilla poems (guerilla poetry involves, among other things, placing poems in unusual or unexpected places or circumstances) imply action. They also, perhaps for the only occasions in this volume allow me to place my feet on solid ground for a moment. Among these titles are: “Poem Placed on the Green Monster During Law Enforcement Counterterror Practice Fenway Park June 12^th 2016”; “Poem to be Dropped into Encore Boston Harbor Resort and Casino Construction Site (Failed)”; “Poem Placed BU Footbridge Over Storrow Drive Where Santos Laboy was Shot and Killed by Massachusetts State Trooper June 19^th 2015”. There is vivid imagery in some of these poems; I struggled however, to connect the language of the poems themselves to the clearly political implications of the titles (especially a long segment in the “Green Monster” poem that tested my lost years of intermediate level Latin.)

Andrew K. Peterson’s poems are a festival of forms, of fecund imagery, of challenging allusiveness. The collection features: the aforementioned descriptions of guerrilla poems (the thrill of participating in such guerilla activity is somewhat neutered by reporting them on paper in conventional form: they become cold history rather than a living statement); collages of meaning presented as a midnight cloudburst; instant messages to dearly departed artists; abstruse notes that do less to illuminate the poem they are connected with than draw attention to their own obscurity. If part of Andrew K. Peterson’s goal with Good Game is to open this reader to fresh thinking by breaking down preconceptions, he has accomplished that end. Is it fair of me to question whether or not the collection hangs together when Peterson’s object might be akin to proving Yeats’s observation in “Second Coming” to be true: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold./ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”? Does Peterson’s collection spring from an impulse parallel to that of Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who believed “The passion for destruction is also a creative passion”? Maybe. I can only report, for good or ill, that experiencing Good Game left me feeling as if I’d been invited to the gym to play ball, but never got picked for a team.

William Evans’s: We Inherit What the Fires Left

William Evans’s We Inherit What the Fires Left, Simon and Schuster Paperbacks, reviewed by Gregory J. Wolos

            As I reread William Evans’s powerful new book of poems, We Inherit What the Fires Left, in preparation for writing this review, I couldn’t help but think of Covid-19 and its oversized impact on the Black community. The virus, to me, seemed an apt metaphor for the enmity—the kind of toxic, historical racism—Evans struggles to rise above as a father and a Black man as he examines through his poetry his own defeats and victories. The reader watches as Evans attempts to convey to his daughter—and interpret for himself— the particular vulnerabilities their flesh is heir to. But viruses, even devastating pandemics, are not willfully malevolent; diseases eventually succumb to therapies and vaccines deriving from humankind’s united intelligence and effort. And metaphors, while they may serve to explain, are only shadows. Evans, through his poems, carries the reader with him as he maneuvers through the actual landscape left by the fires of ignorance and hatred that represent his and his family’s inheritance. As I read the poems in We Inherit What the Fires Left, I’m forced to confront the fires fed by my own inherited white privilege, even as it inoculated me against the flames’ destructive force.

            In the collection’s opening poem, “The Engine,” Evans, as he records his daughter watching as a sunset “fell out of the window,” offers us his own point of view: “I had a cut above my eye once/ and assumed everything I saw was bleeding.” He understands nightfall as “a black they can’t murder” and celebrates “days my car makes it /to the garage” as “days I can live forever.” He sees himself in the present through his past: “Even flattened against the street, an officer’s/ knee in my back, I look young for my age.” And how will this legacy help Evans educate his daughter, who, as he observes in “Mimic,” “is already my mimic after all,/ having taken my nose/ and eyes and smile for her own”? Knowing what to share with his child and what not to is a continuing struggle, because “I never/ know what windows are worth/ destroying.” His daughter knows he is Santa Claus, and he corrects her when she calls a baseball a football. He equivocates when she says her grandparents are in heaven, telling her “close enough.” But how to deal with the threatening paradoxes of life? When together they see a deer, “beautiful and liquid” and “the girl’s eyes widened/ until light came from them,” the father is silent and smiling as she tells him “it’s so cool.” He thinks, but does not tell her, not yet, “Did you know that some people shoot them?” Evans reveals his own ambiguous feelings toward mercy in “Might Have to Kill,” in which his own pacifist father (“who marched against the war”) wants him to kill a groundhog that’s messing up the lawn. Did Evans learn his pacifism “after the third fight/ in the third white neighborhood”? He distracts his daughter when she asks him to kill a spider, and identifying with the gopher, wondering what it would do “if it knew it were being hunted.” Ultimately, he argues that the “summer is nearly over,” giving his father to understand that “the boy who looks like him/ waiting for the sun to finally go down” is hoping to avoid being the deliverer of death.

            Evans expects that there are lessons his daughter will learn for herself by simple observation. In “Waves,” when she wades in the ocean and wonders what secrets the ocean will bring to the shore, he mutters under his breath, “Probably slaves,” keeping his own cynicism to himself for the time being. He remembers “what lessons/ I give without ever offering,” a point illustrated on the ride home, when “an officer/ pulls us to the side of the road/ and asks me whose car I am driving/ my family home in.” As a father, Evans must perform a delicate balance between protecting his daughter and teaching her to protect herself. When, in “Passing for Day,” she climbs into her parents’ bed late at night, he waits until he hears her “soft snore,” like “a subtle prayer against my neck, then I know it is safe to rise” before sliding out of bed, because “building a heaven doesn’t mean you get to stay.” In “Sharks and Minnows” Evans forces himself to play an active role in his daughter’s education. As the girls on her soccer team dash around the field, giggling as they avoid the soccer balls kicked to “tag” them by their own coach and their parents, the poet follows the pattern of near misses until he feels compelled to offer a necessary toughening: “because I haven’t tagged anyone/ with a ball in a long while and my role/ could not be more clear, I begin/ to kick the soccer balls harder.” Some lessons seem impossible to teach: in “Looking Over My Shoulder She Discovers a Lynching” Evans hopes his daughter will “please remember this picture” as she learns to distinguish between the whites in the photograph (the same “not-people” who “pulled your dad from the car”) and her “friends from school, from gymnastics, from Build-a-Bear,” and teachers who “look like the not-people.”

            Raising his daughter in a racist society, Evans ruminates about his own issues with assimilation, unable and unwilling to forget in “After the Storm, It Was Business as Usual,” about “the time a cop appeared/ and asked me if I lived at the home I was punching my garage code into.” How can Evans make peace with the society he describes in “I Will Love You Most When I Barely Remember Anything,” in which “I drop my daughter off at school/ An officer pulls/ me out of the car as the sun goes down. Something died in between”? In “How to Assimilate” Evans remembers surprising a visiting white friend with an empty gun “even though I knew it wasn’t/ that funny.” For the friend the experience “wasn’t cool,” and the poet “could never really/ figure out why I aimed a hollow/ threat at my friend except/ to say that I probably gave him something I know so well.” As for his fears regarding his role in his daughter’s education, Evans muses in the first poem of the collection’s third and final section, “You haven’t been right/ since your high school teacher told you to stop/ showing off in class. Now you get nauseous/ when your daughter aces her spelling test./ When you were younger, your father overheard you/ talking to you white friends and told you/ code-switching will kill you.”

            Evans recalls times in his youth when he silenced his own voice, that “I was once a beautiful bouquet of new stalks,/ but nobody told us what it takes to bloom.” In “Pledge to Raising a Black Girl,” he asks, “Do you know how many/ classrooms I either dulled my sharp or dulled/ my black until I got tired of being the only/ kingdom without its own campaign?/ How do you know what you have a taste for/ if you’ve been told never to show your teeth?” Part of the “pledge” alluded to in the poem’s title seems aimed at allowing his daughter to retain her own voice in the face of the difficulties she is sure to confront. There is a touch of pride in the poet’s voice as he describes his daughter: “You would’ve thought we set that girl on fire/how she got so cocky, smart as a broken window.” Evans argues, “Can’t be mad at the talk/ back because we did teach her to talk shit.” A lesson learned that he hopes to impart to his daughter.

            In the final poem of We Inherit What the Fires Left, Evans concludes that the way “things don’t die” is that “[t]hey are loved on by those/ too young to believe in death’s/ argument.” And in a brief prose piece that ends the volume, he questions “What happens when black bodies are still full of life and ambition?” He claims that he has “planted a stake in a neighborhood and a future and have decided that nothing will move me so easily.” He acknowledges the survival of his father, “born after the dawn of the civil rights era, as well as his own “as the boy who can chart the violence against [his father] through the neighborhoods he has lived.” When he and his father are gone, “there is another—my daughter—who may have to fight in similar ways . . . to rebel in similar ways. But she will do it, from her own plot, a governance unto herself. We,” Evans asserts, “aren’t going anywhere.”

            And I, a father and grandfather myself, can admire and sympathize with Evans’s ambition and fears, vividly and tenderly expressed in We Inherit What the Fires Left: sympathize, but not empathize, secure but guilty about the protection my privileged skin provides me against viruses metaphorical and real.

Matthew Henry's Teaching While Black

 Main Street Rag Publishing Company

   Reviewed by Gregory J. Wolos



“my third grade teacher,” the opening poem of Matthew E. Henry’s new collection Teaching While Black , is a lit fuse, quietly sizzling. The short poem recounts Henry’s experience as an elementary school student whose white teacher tried to explain to him that his black skin “lacked/ the ability to bruise/ or blush.” Though the young Henry tried “to show her a patch/ darker than the rest,” the teacher merely nodded, explaining that the patch “was harder to see on [Henry’s] skin.” As Henry’s collection moves from this introduction to the poems that detail the tension of his experiences as a Black educator, the reader anticipates the explosion promised by the references to Langston Hughes’s “Harlem” that surface, sometimes ironically, sometimes not, through the volume. It is a tribute to the strength of Henry’s skill and character that, though his rage at the injustices and ignorance he and other minorities suffer is evident in virtually every poem, he maintains a public cool in his role as educator.


Henry’s first poem, which shows how completely he is “otherized” by what in his last poem he characterizes as “the frumpy lies of well-intentioned white women” demonstrates the power teacher’s wield. As a retired educator myself, I am still haunted by the possible harm I may have done during a career that stretched well over thirty years. Am I still responsible for everything I did and said? For every interaction with a student or parent? Plaudits and platitudes received can’t erase my awareness that good intentions can leave collateral damage. Yes, I’m responsible, and can only hope to be forgiven for those I might have harmed. For those I helped—well, that was part of the job description, wasn’t it?


How, I wonder, could Henry not explode after being called a nigger in class by a white boy simply because the teacher “deferred his dream” by telling the student to put his phone away? In his poem “the surprising thing,” Henry remains frustrated by the “mandatory minimum expectation” that his students “consider their complicity” with racial and societal outrages “through complacency, yet . . . remain unmoved in all the worst ways.” The students find “academic ease” with familiar stories of Western literature, yet find the lives of minority characters “inscrutable—lives they ‘can’t relate to.’” Henry, somehow “still employed” forges on, fulfilling his duty as an educator, though it means “picking cotton from fresh aspirin bottles after every utterance which slices a peace from my soul,” as he asks “questions that make them cringe.” The “light” Henry exposes his charges to “is unsettling.” His own rage is courageously sublimated to his poem.


Henry, in his poems, permits himself to characterize his students’ ignorance in ways that would be impossible in the classroom. There is the student with the “D-minus in social studies mind” whose “future as a captain of industry . . . has already been purchased by [his] parents.” This student spews racist claptrap, though falls silent when “a Brown friend—whose family hails from the lands you hate” joins him at the lunch table. Then there is the student who minimized Harriet Tubman’s contributions because she saved “only 300” runaway slaves. Henry’s outrage, though confined to the poem, reverberates: “i hear you, my young white brother . . . now shut the fuck up and sit down.” Henry finds it a constant inner battle to maintain the kind of restraint demanded of an educator, as when confronted with a student who believed “the Klan didn’t exist anymore, hadn’t killed anyone in ages.” Ultimately, Henry, making “the only appropriate contact i could,” tells the student to “‘Stop talking,’ a finger slicing across my throat, miming the tracks of chins, knives, nooses.” And though the student silences himself, Henry concludes, “i should have said more.” It is up to the poem to reify the gesture and serve as the crucible within which Henry is free to fully express his frustration with his student’s ignorance and the society the child believes insulates him from criticism.


Henry opens the second section of “Teaching While Black” with a poem titled “in loco parentis,” reminding the reader that teachers take the place of parents while students are under their care and supervision. But, as the glimpses of students’ lives Henry provides in the subsequent poems of this section demonstrate, a teacher often functions not only in place of a parent, but also as a social worker, psychologist, and confessor—someone who may become cognizant of the factors within students’ lives that informs the individual that a teacher sees within the classroom. Poems like “little red,” “hide and seek,” and “justice” display the threats that lurk behind the “disguise” of “a badge” or a “stiff white collar,” the immediate danger of “bullets with the name of her brother or mother,” or of sexual predation that results in retaliatory wounds worn as “a badge of honor among his friends.” The tension for Henry the teacher between the classroom and a student’s real life is depicted in “kenosis,” where “Katrine’s silence” during a literary discussion “split my heart.” Later he learns that the poem’s subject, a drunken father, reminded the girl of her experience with a violent stepfather, and how “she nightly endured his endless gropes and gasps . . . a knife untucked from his thrusting back.” Other poems in this section relate traumatic episodes of students forced to deal with the misfortunes of parents: “happy birthday” shows a thirteen year old girl caring for an abused mother, who “curses your birth and pleads forgiveness,” then puts her mother to bed before she can “eat the cupcake Ms. Lowe gave to you at school.” Or the student who walks into his house, discovering “instead of a glass of milk or a tray of pizza rolls” the dead body of his suicidal father. Henry’s daily experience connects him to students with hidden problems such as “auditory and visual hallucinations” and students with issues stemming from gender identity. In the poem “show don’t tell” Henry juxtaposes the kind of standard critical comments a student might receive on a written assignment with vivid images of the student’s hidden life as a self-cutter: “cotton sleeves conceal hashmarks of silence/ precise rows against porcelain skin” vs. “So what’s the point you’re trying to prove in this paper?/ What’s your thesis?” How does a teacher, aware of the former facts, limit himself to the latter commentary?

Henry’s poems bring the students and their serious issues to life. But within the context of the classroom, how much can the teacher offer besides an attentive and sympathetic ear? Is bearing witness enough? Especially when the majority of students, as in Henry’s poem “muscle memory” are willing to allow the horrors that surround them to be “swept under the social rug.” A poem his only outlet to express his frustration, Henry watches as “eyes ahead, they file past the covered bodies, and head to A.P. stats.”

Are we waiting for an explosion in part III of Teaching While Black? What are the politics of oppression Henry can clarify in the classroom (and to the readers of poems)? Henry opens Part III of Teaching While Black with “etymology,” a prose poem in which Henry explains why “white” is not an “adequate ethnic label in America,” while “Black” has been accepted as such—a difference, he asserts “that often falls to me—their ‘Black teacher’—to explain.” While white Americans can attach a specific European association to their identity, Blacks, taken from “several possible ports [that] are not a country . . . are known by our hue (Colored, Negro, Black).” In the following poem Henry distinguishes by analogy between “all lives matter” and “Black lives matter,” accepting the responsibility to explain: “because my job description doomed me/ to be more didactic, to explain appropriate time, place, and manner,/ intent versus impact, the guilt and shame required to derail communal grief and hijack a narrative to make oneself more comfortable.” In an ironic hypothetical letter to the parents of an “Aryan Princess” in his class, Henry “is sorry to report/ the white supremacy you have patiently sown,/ watered, and sunned, has fallen on fallow soil.” He suggests they “invest more energy in imparting [their] white ways” instead of wasting time complaining about a classroom assignment concerning identity. In a subsequent “open letter to the school resource officer who almost shot me in my class,” Henry describes the various ethnic assumptions and markers that led to the near calamity, and “how the two who share my skin saw everything. made eye contact” later calling him “almost Tamir,” while the offending officer’s “near-miss story was met with laughter in [his] squadroom.” In “said the band-aid to the shotgun wound,” Henry again uses satire and irony to expose the hollowness of sensitivity training organized in response to racist behavior in his school, concluding “all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well/ when they ask what we have done about these who/ instagramed the blackface in our assembly, tweeted/ the careful geometry of beer pong swastikas, or/ the myriad Halloween costumes our faculty now knows / they should not have posted on Facebook, or worn to school . . . focused on how much more unites us/ than divides, convinced—eyes closed—we’re all pretty much the same.”

Matthew E. Henry, Black teacher, fantasizes about a future moment in “an imminent nonet,” the poem’s form itself dwindling through its nine lines from nine syllables to one as if it is a dream that fades upon waking: “later I would correct my title/ before the school board: ‘that’s doctor/ “uppity nigger” to you,/ and don’t mumble into/ the microphone. You’re/ setting a bad/ example/ for the/ kids.’” While this confrontation may not take place in reality, it is cathartic for the Black teacher who must use poetry to declare his anger and frustration. In “to the Dreams that Explode” Henry again references Langston Hughes as he offers a personal manifesto: “after they question your magnitude,/ your right to produce more heat/ more light than they can comprehend, be not dimmed. Count your candles, increase/ your wattage.”

In his concluding poem, Henry brings the reader of Teaching While Black full circle, back to the white suburban elementary school to which he was bused, where his skin color was explained to him by “well-intentioned white women.” The poem is a litany of lessons he learned: “to be a chameleon; to code-switch;/ to bite my tongue instead of theirs; to make excuses/ for them, yet allow awkwardness to paint circles around heads/ asking what I prefer to be called (Colored? Negro?African American? Black?) never landing on my name.” Ultimately, he learned “to admire the ants who rebuild their lives after every collapsing storm/ or malicious white sneaker.” And it is to the classroom the adult Henry returns, admirably battling ignorance with truth, confronting ignorance with powerful poems that depict genuine suffering endured not only historically, but also in the real lives of sharply drawn young people. What poem, I wonder, would Henry compose about the recent Wellesley anecdote of the Black student mistakenly hustled onto an afternoon bus delivering students “back where they came from” in spite of the fact that he lived around the block from the school and had been waiting for his mother to pick him up? What did that mother make of her son’s absence?

Keith Moul’s The Journal

Keith Moul’s The Journal, published by Duck Lake Books, reviewed by Gregory J. Wolos

            “Like so many other men of his generation, the war was transformative, making him almost mute on the subject,” writes Keith Moul of his father, a veteran of World War II, in Moul’s foreword to his poetry chapbook The Journal. My own father was of this generation, and, like Moul and many other children of these soldiers, my brothers and I grew up in an atmosphere largely defined by his silence. We the nearness of history—the war was less than a decade distant. We played with our toy guns and plastic soldiers, fought backyard battles, and vanquished imaginary enemies. But though we were aware that our parent was a human artifact of that “transformative” time, something about the cocoon of silence around my father, a silence that seemed nurtured by our mother, kept us from satisfying our curiosities about the war. Passively, we concluded that this was what all men—all fathers—were like. We saw so many of them at family and social gatherings, at church, working on our cars and plumbing, standing behind the counters of our hardware and shoe stores.

            The thing about monuments is that it becomes easy to believe that they are stone all the way through, and so my brothers remained distant from my father until his death. As the youngest, maybe because I was furthest from the defining conflict, maybe because something in my own personality allowed me to see through the chinks in my father’s rusting armor, I found a softer parent. Maybe I created him myself. We became friends, my father and I, but never companions—I learned no more about the war and what it had done to him than had my siblings.    

 

            Keith Moul, a fellow child of a soldier, was gifted late in life with a chance to peek into the inner life of a man whose life experiences had made him hard to know. His father, he discovers, had kept a journal for a short time while serving as a radar man on an aircraft carrier in the South Pacific at the height of the war. Moul’s mother had held onto that diary for years after his father’s death, passed the journal on to Moul’s brother shortly before her own, and his brother gave it to him. As Moul writes in “Silent Man,” “His silence lasted emptied almost fifty years . . . / I got the journal on her death. I never knew/ his eloquence, his effort to write to her his love,/ his sifting of boogies through tedium, the carrier/ tracing burial sites over the ever-swirling waves.”

            And thus, in this chapbook, The Journal, the reader participates in Moul’s creation of links to a man long dead, to an experience his father kept to himself for “almost fifty years.” Like an archaeologist, the poet uses the fragments his father leaves to reconstruct an inner life that, had they not been discovered, would have remained forever buried: Moul provides, in each of his pieces, first his father’s journal entry, followed by a poem extrapolated from the detailed experience. For example, in “The Axis,” we learn from the senior Moul’s entry of March 26, 1944, this seemingly mundane fact: “Crossed the equator again yesterday. This makes it about 15 times I have been across it.” From this information son Keith hypothesizes about the inventorying—of trips, of planes, of mines and bombs—that fill his father’s journal: “As it happened, even if asleep at the crossing, he counted it;/ he captured it as an electric surge, extending life, running life/ as if attached to a long umbilical, as if overruling death’s generator.”

            In “Darling Honey,” Moul quotes an entry from his father’s journal intended to explain to the poet’s mother why there may have been a lapse in his letters home: “I was scared a few days, and when you get that way, you just can’t write, honey.” The son’s poem intuits his father’s feelings: “Fear in battle . . . the momentary scare of known death/ on the deck, or unknown death waiting for its moment/ . . . that reaper hanging above every breath . . ./ This is why, dear, another letter may have failed,/ may have given you the wrong impression of both me, now, and my universe of war.”

            But Keith Moul’s poems in The Journal are more than an explanation or expansion of his father’s wartime journal entries; they are also more than simple acts of ventriloquism. Because of the son’s enrichment of the journal through his poetry, the father is both memorialized and resurrected. The relationship between entry and poem is both symbiotic and synergistic: the pair becomes a unit that not only recreates the father’s past war experience, but fills a void in the poet’s understanding of his father’s silence. The poem “The Fact of Circling Light,” poses the question, “And what of coming generations amassing questions,/some risking long stifled memory?” The answers to Moul writes are “too often wide of the grisly mark, too grisly to confront.” The truth, however, is that by inhabiting his father’s wartime experience, the son has forged both a truce and truth from that silence. As Wordsworth states in the opening lines of his “Ode on the Intimations of Immortality,” “the child is father of the man.” In a very real sense, Moul himself in his poems has created the father he needed and missed from his father’s brief journal entries. And through these poems, I find that I myself gain insight into my own soldier-father’s silences.