George and Ruth, Songs and Letters of the Spanish Civil War

 

George and Ruth, Songs and Letters of the Spanish Civil War

By Dan and Molly Lynn Watt

Educational Alternatives

175 Richdale Avenue #315

Cambridge, Massachusetts 02140-3352

REVIEW BY WENDELL SMITH

Dan and Molly Lynn Watt have been performing George and Ruth, Songs and Letters of the Spanish Civil War for over two decades and, given how the news these days is filled with one or another government leader or leading candidate flirting with fascism, it has become a timely and thought provoking entertainment and we should thank them for publishing the play. The text for this two act play is the correspondence between Dan Watt’s father, 23 year old George Watt, and his wife of less than a year, Ruth, which occurs while George is fighting the fascists of Francisco Franco with the Abraham Lincoln Battalion in the Spanish Civil War, and Ruth is working as an organizer for the American Student Union in New York supporting the International Brigades and other leftist causes.

These are love letters of youthful longings interrupted by the political chaos of the 1930s as the world warmed up for WWII,

George, do you realize we have a celebration coming soon? Our first anniversary! Remember? So just imagine when you go to sleep, I say, push over. And I crawl in next to you and you say, brr you're cold. And I say, my, you're lovely and warm. Later, you're dying to go to sleep. But I won't let you because of the way I keep kissing the corner of your eye, and rubbing my nose in your cheek, and fiddling with your hair and murmuring silly things. And then you just turn around and go to sleep. And even then, I rub my face in your back and am so happy, I fall asleep too.

The metaphors of George’s sensuality were shaped by that chaos:

I wasn't issued a rifle instead I have the special honor of being a machine gunner for our section. And boy how I love that gun I got it last night took it apart and put it together a dozen times.

At present we are deciding on a name for the gun. But whatever it is called, i shall secretly name it after you, baby Ruth. And you'd be surprised it has many similarities to you. It's beautiful, a little awkward in spots, a little heavy, and oh, how I love to strip it I treat it with such tenderness and actually sleep with it under my blanket.

In performances the letters are given context by18 songs from the period adapted by Tony Saletan. Although most are songs that have themes of bravado, the mood they create is elegiac; the victories they promise didn’t occur. If you have ever attended protest meetings, many of them may sound, as “The Peat Bog Soldiers” did for me, familiar.

Wir sind die Moorsoldten

Und ziehen mit dem Spaten Ins Moor

We are the peat bog soldiers

We’re marching with our spades, To the bog.

* * *

But for us there is no complaining,

Winter will in time be past;

One day we shall cry rejoicing,

Homeland dear, you’re mine at last

Then will the peat bog soldiers

March no more with their spades, To the bog.

Dann ziehen die Moorsoldaten

NICHT MEHR mit dem Spaten, Ins Moor.

However, print isn’t a sufficiently effective medium for encountering this work; unless you are planning to stage a performance and will be reading it as a play script, you need to hear the exchange of letters with those songs, for without music the script seems flat. That is why I recommend you begin your encounter with the courage and idealism of George and Ruth, not by reading their letters, but by listening to the 2004 studio performances by Dan and Molly Lynn Watt accompanied by the folk music mastery of Tony Saletan on YouTube: Act I : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8fmUi5cs4E and Act II: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LAh4pfLWmE.

Reading Songs and Letters prompted me to refresh my chronology of the Spanish Civil War. In 1937 the Spanish Communist Party betrayed the youthful idealism, courage and enthusiasm expressed in these letters when it began purging the Republican side of rival leftist factions. The purges were well underway by August of 1937 when the Abraham Lincoln Battalion arrived in Spain. Those purges would weaken the Republican forces and would be one factor contributing to Franco’s and fascism’s eventual triumph. I recommend Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia as a good place to begin a refreshment.

When I followed Dan and Molly’s instructions to search YouTube for George and Ruth, Songs and Letters, I found, as you may, a couple of performances but they had music that was inferior to Tony Saletan’s. But, I also found a link for a virtual performance via “ “Evenbright” on February 3, 2024, https://www.eventbrite.com/e/george-and-ruth-songs-and-letters-of-the-spanish-civil-war-tickets-742234632767. Here is Dan’s invitation “For more information about possible live performances, you may email Danwatt40@comcast.net or Mollywatt@comcast.net.”

The Open Door by Ruth Smullin

 

The Open Door

by Ruth Smullin

Fishing Line Press

Georgetown, Kentucky

ISBN 978-1-64662-356-3




The 26 poems of Ruth Smullin’s chapbook, The Open Door, arrived in the mail just in time to provide perfect biscuits to go with my wake-up-from-your-nap-and-face-up-to-the-afternoon coffee; they so absorbed my attention that I stretched out my arousal, compelled to finished the poems before I finished my coffee.




The poems of this collection, with its ekphrastic title poem on a painting of Bonnard, are life drawings from the speaker’s earliest memories until as a grandmother she places her grandchildren into a Bruegel composition in “Yom Kippur Under the Night Sky:”




On this eve of the day of atonement, it's hard

to feel solemn – the balmy October evening warm

and humid as a summer night, sky a blur of gray,

the moon fuzzy with moisture.




Twelve hundred chairs line the parking lot.

Sitting in the back row, listening to rush-hour sounds

from nearby streets, I watch families trickle in,

find seats and friends, catch up on news – children

of all ages and colors, jeans and striped socks,

tutus and leotards, Superman and Alice.




Intoxicated by the night air, the children, the moment,

I think of my two-week-old grandson,

born into a new moon, a new year.




Her strokes are sure, sometimes pointillistic and, when necessary, as fluid as these from the initial prose poem “Yellow,” which, besides being a dissertation on the color, “Sunflower, goldfinch, goldenrod, yellow jackets on a ripe peach,” is also an announcement of the time spanned by this collection from the yellow of “fat rendered from a chicken in Grandma’s kitchen,” to an impoverished present where “These day corn is too yellow, too sweet, watermelon yellow when it should be red; the seeds we loved to spit, gone.”




That mild complaint about seedless water melons provides a hint of an elegiac tone shared by many of these poems of which “Old Letters” (she has “saved every letter. … Six boxes full”) is a good example; here are its concluding stanzas:




Did you mean to sound so cold and hostile?

My mother writes. Dearest, his mother begins,

the phlox is blooming, we’re looking forward

to your visit.




Sarah is growing up at an alarming rate,

my now-dead friend tells me, she is thin,

complicated and moody –




Reading their letters an act of mourning

that sharpens the sense of loss.




I suspect Ruth’s favorite impressionist is Bonnard since, besides the title poem, the only other frankly ekphrastic poem is “Bonnard’s Nude in the Bath and Small Dog”:




In the bath, she floats, calmed

by warmth, wetness, a sensation




of lift. Around her, violet walls swell

blue-green tiles ripple. She drifts




like kelp on the open sea, the tub

holding her steady.




In addition to writing about painting she frequently writes as if painting a still life:




Pomegranate




on a white plate, my own still life.

Fruit lavish as a rose colors the room,

pleases my eye.




For weeks I study its odd shape,

angles like cheekbones, skin taut

with the fullness of what's hidden,

the blossom and a tiny crown.




or an intimate landscape:




Raspberry Patch in Winter




Rising from deep snow, the canes stand spare,

naked – bright calligraphy in late sun.




Their long shadows – delicate, insubstantial –

reach out across the white expanse.




But regrettably, as my initial pleasure was interrupted upon reaching the final poem, I must stop my praise somewhere, so I shall do it by letting the poet speak for herself about loss with the first lines from “Lost,” a poem where she approaches grieving with humor:




Why do people say we “lost” him when he died?

as if we'd left them on the beach by mistake

like a forgotten flip-flop, after we packed up

towels, shovels, sunblock, and somehow overlook




our husband and father asleep in the sand where we

buried him up to his neck, face covered with a hat

to protect him from sun. If we’d glanced back

from the car before driving home, surely




we'd have noticed the hat, the mound of sand.




Now, when you have obtained your copy from somewhere other than Amazon, such as with an old fashioned mail order from the publisher (Finishing Line Press, P.O. Box 1626, Georgetown, Kentucky 40324) make yourself a cup of coffee or tea or hot chocolate, sit where you have good light, and have some good reading.

—Wendell Smith

J. M. W. Turner Watercolors Mystic Seaport Museum Mystic, Connecticut 06355

J. M. W. Turner Watercolors

Mystic Seaport Museum

Mystic, Connecticut 06355

www.mysticseaport.org

Thursday through Sunday, 10-5 until February 23

This exhibit of Turner’s works may be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for us to enjoy the visual equivalent of sitting in the corner of a music studio listening to (pick your composer – Beethoven – Mozart – Paganini –…) practice and compose. I say maybe once-in-a-lifetime because these Turner’s so rarely travel from the Tate in London and this will be their only venue in the United States this trip and who knows when they might come again.

Turner was a prodigy who enrolled in the Royal Academy of Art at 14 and was included in their annual exhibition at 15. When he died 61 years later he left over 500 oils, 2000 watercolors and 30,000 works on paper. He was famously eccentric; when he chose his pigments he was interested in color and not in longevity, so much of his work is at risk of fading if exposed to light, which is one reason the Tate so rarely allows them to travel. We have this opportunity because the gallery at Mystic Seaport’s North Gate was designed so that it might safely display the Turner’s.

But enough of those sorts of details; if you feel the need for more of them, the review by Murray Whyte in the Globe would be a good place to start; the digital reproductions of the Turners in the online version are much better than those in the paper but no substitute for the real thing. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/01/08/arts/swimming-dreamy-romantic-world-jmw-turner-watercolors/

However, given the rare opportunity to witness these watercolors, which this exhibition affords, I suggest they should be approached in the romantic spirit with which they were executed. Don't drive down and arrive with your mind buzzed out by the realities of Expressways and Interstates; instead, use public transportation and travel with a compatible companion to arrive with your mind quiet, engaged and open for what these Turner’s have to show us.

My sister and I chose the Northeast Regional 93 (let us mourn for a moment the romantic past when it was The Shoreline of the NYNH&H and the trains had names like "The Owl"); it left the Back Bay about 9:30 and deposited us in Mystic an hour and 20 minutes later. The museum was a pleasant three quarters of a mile walk north, so we arrived at the gallery relaxed, warmed up and ready to receive. When we filled up on a first course of the Turners we paused for a light lunch (at Latitude 41 right next door) and conversation to digest what we had just seen. Then back to the museum for another helping, which we followed with a leisurely mile walk north to get the local bus to New London where we would catch the Northeast Regional 174 for our return.

Standing on the platform as our train approached, we shared an appreciation of the “Turner Sunset,” to which we were being treated. Turner had taught us, Turner was teaching us, how to look at the world, how to see.

--Wendell Smith

In Praise of Doug Holder's Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene/ Robert Murphy/Dos Madres Press

   




In Praise of Doug Holder's Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene:

BY ROBERT MURPHY--PUBLISHER OF DOS MADRES PRESS   https://www.dosmadres.com/

What is there not to like:  First of all, dear friends of literature and poetry, the online journal is beautiful. There is a richness about the visual aspect of Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene that is rarely matched. What is also rarely matched are the reviews that are a model of concision. (thank goodness there is such an entity that exists for the small press) As a publisher whose mission statement declares, "Dos Madres Press is dedicated to the belief that the small press is essential to the vitality of contemporary literature as a carrier of the new voice and new works by established poets, as well as the older, sometimes forgotten voices of the past. And in an ever more virtual world, to the creation of fine books pleasing to the eye and hand." I could not be more grateful. And as a writer myself of poetry, I have been blessed to have my own work come to be reviewed here. And then there is the added bonus, that even if a book is not reviewed they all go to the Endicott College's Halle Library collection founded by Doug Holder himself. So there is a place, an ever growing place that the work of the small press can call home.

So publisher's and poets, do send on your books for possible review here. In a world that can use all the best poetry has to offer, for as Dr. William Carlos Williams wrote, "It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably everyday for lack / of what is found there." Find it you will in Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene, that "news" that is truly newsworthy - that always ineffable, but necessary something that makes all the difference in the world.

Special THANKS to all our ace reviewers who have made this site what it is--Dennis Daly, Wendell Smith, Mike Steffen, Gregory Wolos, Lawrence Kessenich, David P. Miller. Ed Meek and many others  over the 16 years of our existence.

Ibbetson Street 45

Ibbetson Street 45

Review by Wendell Smith

Ibbetson Street #45 is unique in my experience, a poetry magazine that may be picked up and read cover to cover. The editors lead us into the issue and catch our attention with three poems about craft, about the skills and observation needed to achieve and to perceive visual meaning. I think this arrangement serves a purpose; it provided an esthetic preparation for what follows. The first poem, “Song of Three Skies” by Eileen McCluskey, links this discussion of the visual arts to poetry.

You didn't usually talk

about your art, but this triptych,

you explained on the day you hung it,

was called The Song

of Wandering Aengus,

after the Yeats Poem.

The second poem, “Portrait Lesson” by Jesse Brown, is a humorous note on the frustrations of learning any craft when her instructor concludes her lesson, “Don't worry. I'm just giving you/everything in one shot.” But it is the third poem, “A Still Life” by Jennifer Barber that introduces the importance of paying attention. It speaks of attention to detail in the preparation before one even picks up a brush, and it follows through to the reward that may come to a viewer for paying attention when in the last two stanzas It happens[*] to Jennifer and, because of her use of the second person, to us:

the instant of your trespassing

the layers of the visible

to watch the painter’s hands

arranging three oranges

that glow like coals in you

before you disappear in them.

The clue that this opening arrangement has been intentional is the editorial decision not to interrupt this sequence by placing a second poem by Jesse Brown, “Eve Astonished,” alongside “Portrait Lesson,” where it would have been in most poetry collections, but to insert it some six poems later. Because of that decision these three poems become an invitation to pay attention to the poetry that follows them and let It happen. Some of these poems will have more of It than others and some less of It, but all of them have some of It. And, of course, which of those poems is which, when it comes down to It, will depend upon taste, upon what flavors of It trigger our receptors; here are a few selections that triggered mine.

I thought It happened in the contemplation of a central story of our classical heritage, “Stealing Troy i.,” by Gary Metras, which ends:

Blame a father’s honor, a brother’s honor.

Blame the lust and love the gods

inspire and envy so that, today, neither

the blood of passion nor the blood of

courage stain this soil, these broken stones

the rains of ages blotch without mercy.

 I felt It happen in “A Quiet Afternoon,” as Beatriz Alba del Rio told us that a marriage may end in divorce, but love doesn’t:

it is a benign summer day

we just had a light dinner at the Museum

we laughed while drinking our beloved Chianti

we reminisce of our times in Florence…

and ends,

it is dark

you say     i want to get divorced

i look at you     i answer softly     it's okay     it's okay

it is irresistibly dark.

When It happens, It is not sentimental. In fact It may be quite unpleasant as It is in “That’s My Story and I’m Sticking To It” by Claire Scott.

I was abused as a child. Period.

My body foraged. Period.

and ends

I know full well if the ice melts

his hands will be there – again.

Waves of shame will flood – again.

The cold stings, my face is numb.

there is frost on my fingers.

Suspended in ice, frozen forever.

–Period.

One innovation of Ibbetson Street #45 compared with earlier issues is its inclusion of longer poems. This allows us to enjoy It happening in the 91 lines of humor, “Walking Backward Along the Path of the Promenade,” by Ravi Teja Yelamanchili. These ten lines occupy the middle of the poem:

                                           I laughed when I saw the bags

of frozen chicken in the supermarket.

Some people asked me what was so funny,

and I replied saying, “What tragedy has befallen

Plato’s man!” as I walked away, I heard someone

whisper, “There’s all sorts of crazy at this time of night.”

Plato defined man as featherless biped and was applauded

for his clever definition. Diogenes plucked the feathers

from a cock, let it run loose on Plato and his crowd

and proclaimed, “Behold Plato’s man!”

The issue itself ends in humor with a superb parody of Robert Frost, “Awaking by Words on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Whelan. As It happens in this poem Ibbetson Street #45 ends its survey by anchoring itself to a corner post of American poetry, with a comparison that leaves us wondering about the price of progress.

Whose words these are I think I know.

His name is in my contacts though;

He will not see me waking here

To watch his words display and glow.

My little phone must think it queer

To call without a voice to hear

Because the words make devices quake

Their insistence in the evening, clear.

It rings its bells and starts to shake

I wonder if there’s some mistake.

The annoying sound disrupts my sleep

With noises its vibrations make.

The words are shallow, hardly deep,

Tell of appointments I must keep,

And now awakened I can't sleep,

And now awakened I can't sleep.

So there you have It; the satire directed, not at Frost, but at us. Wouldn't we be better off thinking about the promises we have to keep than being annoyed by this technology, which only leads to insomnia?

Go for IT.

---Wendell Smith

---

[*] Whether or not “It happens” is a critical criterion I have purloined from Ramon Guthrie’s poem and guide to what's important in art “It Happens,” Maximum Security Ward and Other Poems, Persea Books, New York, 1984, p. 56.


To order go to:  http://lulu.com/ibbetsonpress

William Stoner And the Battle for the Inner Life by Steve Almond

William Stoner

And the Battle for the Inner Life

© 2019 by Steve Almond

Ig Publishing

Box 2547

New York, NY 10163

ISBN: 978-1-63246-08-75

REVIEW BY WENDELL SMITH

The title of this monograph on display at Porter Square Books grabbed my attention because reading Stoner by John Williams had provoked an abreaction five years ago. Once I read Almond’s introduction with my Sunday coffee I did not put it down except for bodily necessities until I finished it so I could go to bed. That kind of absorption is unique in my experience reading criticism.

For a book to have had such an emotional impact as this one has had on the both of us, Stoner is deceptively simple. Here Is Almond’s masterful succinct summation of the story:

Stoner, the only son of subsistence farmers, attends college, unexpectedly falls in love with literature, and becomes a teacher; he endures a disastrous marriage, a prolonged academic feud, and a doomed love affair, then falls ill and dies.

That hardly seems a story capable of meeting Aristotle’s requirement for a tragedy, but, as Almond will show us, William's genius takes his spare tale and infuses it with a power that is more than sufficient to evoke pity and fear and the weeping purging of those emotions.

The success of Almond's essay rests on a foundation he creates with his subtitle, “and the battle for the inner life,” and his willing engagement and perseverance in that battle. My engagement with Almond’s argument was created by the rhythm of his writing as he swings between lucid, if traditional, explication of the work, and narrative considerations of his own life problems elicited by Stoner. He has read the book some 13 times precisely because it provokes him to self-examination.

Here's a lengthy illustration from Almond’s third chapter, “Love Makes Us Zombies (aka Worst Marriage Ever).” First with a sample of his explication from the chapter’s middle:

The description of this honeymoon spends six excruciating pages. We know from the jump that Stoner’s abject desire will be met by dread, because the narrator tells us so. And yet these scenes are among the most heart-rending of the entire book, because Williams does just what most writers lack the courage to do: he slows down where his characters are most exposed and helpless.

Then as he concludes this chapter Almond, in his battle, charges into a territory that I would not have considered to be part of literary criticism, suggesting, as he does, when he shifts from an analysis of Stoner’s marriage into an arrestingly candid discussion of his own, that literature has a use as marriage counseling:

This is why Williams portrays them as zombies, I think: to suggest they have no conscious capacity to choose one another. Stoner is dumbstruck at the site of Edith and decides that he must marry her. She accedes to his ardor. They operate at the level of glandular instinct and social programming.

*

It's an extreme portrait, but anyone who has been in a long-term monogamy, especially a marriage, will recognize the outlines. Romantic love always begins with the dream, one designed to liberate us from the burdens of the past but inexorably bound to them. Erin and I dreamed of building a family impervious to the bullying and anxiety we'd experience growing up, though our relationship was fraught with elements of both.

I've often portrayed our romance as a tale of heroic self-determination, in which we boldly hurtled from long-distance lovers to rookie parents in a few exuberant months. But I was consistently controlling during our courtship, and Erin too often silenced her doubts and resentments, for fear I would abandon her. Like William Stoner, I fell in love with an idea and charged ahead, ignoring the woman I claimed to adore.

This approach reminds me of a mantra of my medical residency: See one; Do one; Teach one. I think Almond is advocating something similar: Read Stoner; Think about Stoner; Think about your life as you thought about Stoner, and, if you can be as honest about your failures as Williams is honest about Stoner’s failures, then the exercise may prove worthwhile. Indeed, later in the essay Almond will assert that this is the purpose of literature and that Stoner is supreme in fulfilling it.

That last sentence makes Almond sound all too serious, when he full of wit and self-aware self-deprecation. He follows chapter 5, “Everybody Loves a Good Fight (A Short History of My Many Feuds),” with chapter 6, “The Perfect Martyr,” which begins

The foregoing chapter should make two facts pretty obvious:

1. Most of Stoner is about a guy getting pummeled

2. The author of this book is somewhat pathologically inclined toward feuds.

And he is pragmatic when he shows us how these understandings that have come from his facing up to his feuds in the “battle for the inner life,” may have a use in in politics:

Edith and Lomax dominate Stoner in the same way demagogues dominate their political opponents; not through superior ideas or logic but the seductive force of uninhibited aggression. This is the secret sauce modern conservatives used to advance a plutocratic and bigoted agenda. At a primal level, they project a willingness to fight.

If John Kerry had turned to George Bush during any of their presidential debates and said, “In 1969, I was on the Duong Keo River killing the Vietcong and watching my friends bleed out. Where were you in 1969?” he would've been elected president. Just as Hillary Clinton would be president today if, during her second debate with Trump, she had turned to him and said: “Stop stalking me around the stage. It doesn't make you look tough, Donald. It makes you look like a creep who harasses women.”

But look: that's not who liberals are. They don't punch bullies. They go high, like Stoner, and wind up on the ground wondering what went wrong.

Almond applies this same intelligent analysis to the rest of the novel as Stoner deals with parenting, teaching, reading, writing, and death.

But for all of his book’s virtues and Almond‘s insights and humor that claimed my attention for that Sunday, a flaw in the last chapter brought me up short with its unconscious white privilege. Here is the flaw, which continues to rankle me:

My mom made it through the hike [during which her husband bullied her] but wound up in the ER with a racing heart. When we met the next day, she had recovered physically, but was uncharacteristically subdued. I assumed she was ashamed, though I can see now that I was ashamed. She glanced down for a moment and then said very quietly, “Stevie, I was the n[xxx]er of this family.”

Why would my mother – who had marched into segregated restaurants with African-American students and demanded service – utter such an indefensible word?

She was struggling, I think, to convey how powerless she felt, the enormity of the hurt she'd experience living within our family, nearly all of it invisible. The word was meant to startle and offend, in the same way Yoko Ono and John Lennon meant when they released “Woman Is the N[xxx]er of the World.” or maybe it would be more accurate to say that she was simply unburdening herself of her most closely guarded secret: the sorrow of her inner life.

This is the one place in his essay where, I think, his public exposure of a private detail doesn't work. I find his apology for her insufficient; it reveals a failure of the inner life of his mother and of Almond. I think it reveals that, because of their white privilege, neither of them know what “n[xxx]er” means in its historically American context, which is far uglier and more complex than what it means in the context of, say, Conrad’s The N[xxx]er of the Narcissus. Almond’s list of his mother's liberal credentials and his speculation about her motive does not excuse her lapse nor does the equally egregious example he gives of Yoko Ono and John Lennon's use of the word. John was British and Yoko Japanese so neither of them could have known the ugly extent of the word in American usage. We know his mother isn’t aware of what the word means in these United States because she has the leisure to play Bach and Mozart, because she's a graduate of Yale Medical School, because she's a psychoanalyst, because the day before she made this claim she had been on a vacation hike in the mountains, and because she (and Almond) don’t have to worry about him being shot at a routine traffic stop. They are Jews so they should know that Almond’s mother isn’t the “n[xxx]er” of her family for the same reasons that a goy who survived Auschwitz isn’t a survivor of The Holocaust.

In an ideal world Ig Publishing would recall this edition until Almond could do battle with a revision, but ideal worlds can be dangerous, so let’s hope in the world we have that this book will get to a second printing and that by the time it does he will have found the resources in his inner life to craft an adequate revision. But, I must admit when I saw Almond's book on display at Porter Square, I was primed to pay attention and my attention was rewarded with an essay as engrossing, in spite of its genre, as I once found John Williams’ masterpiece; when I finished I had to reread Stoner and Almond’s criticism has enriched my re-experience of the novel.

The Hate U Give written by Audrey Wells

The Hate U Give

written by Audrey Wells

directed by George Tillman Jr.

Based the YA novel of the same name

© 2017 by Angie Thomas

Harper Collins

ISBN 978-0-06-249853-3

REVIEW BY WENDELL SMITH

The Hate U Give is an adaptation of Angie Thomas' best selling YA novel of the same name. The title is shortened from the source for an acronym, THUG LIFE, coined by the rapper Tupac, which stands for “The hate U give little infants fucks everyone.” The novel was begun as a response to the shootings of Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Mike Brown, etc. (How dispiriting that such at sentence can end with “etc.”) I hope you will find The Hate U Give as challenging as I have and accept its challenge to seek answers for this question: “What is wrong with us that we need a movie like THUG?”

Even though the story is straightforward, the life of its heroine, Starr Carter, is complicated. She's the daughter of an ex-con and former gangbanger, Maverick Carter and a nurse, Lisa Carter. Her parents have enrolled Starr and her two siblings in Williamson, a suburban, virtually all white, prep school where they hope to educate their children out of Garden Heights. This hope means that everyday Starr must flip her personas back and forth between her black Garden Heights neighborhood and her white Williamson prep school.

The movie begins with a voiceover of Starr describing her discomfort with these necessary personality flips. However, this is not a sentimental movie “I remember mama” voiceover; it is an introduction to a tragic story told in the voice of an 18-year-old who is still processing the trauma of her 16th spring. As her narration proceeds it bleeds into a flashback of their father, Maverick, giving 10-year-old Starr and her 12-year-old brother "The Talk" (instructions on how people of color, must behave for the police during routine traffic stops) and we realize that this movie is not going to be a Hollywoody coming-of-age story. As surely as the gun in the first paragraph of a short story will be used before the last one, this flashback lets us know we will soon see a routine traffic stop fulfill the implied tragic promise of “The Talk.”

The movie led me to read the book because Starr has another flashback this one of a drive-by shooting of a childhood friend she witnessed when much younger. A stray bullet kills her playmate, part of the random violence of the neighborhood. This incident went by so rapidly in the movie that I missed the playmate’s name and became uncomfortable with that anonymity. I got the book from the library to find out and by the time I discovered the friend’s named was Natasha I was so involved in the new details of the novel that I had to finish it.

The Hate U Give in both media entertains as a tragedy of our culture, which is to say both claim our attention to inform us in a way that the nightly news cannot. When, during a routine traffic stop, a White cop shoots her unarmed childhood friend, Khalil while Starr watches and then holds him while he dies, The Hate U Give by association frees the deaths of Oscar Grant, Tamar Rice, Mike Brown, Sandra Bland and a myriad of others from the abstraction they have on the news and gives them an urgent presence. Khalil’s death and Starr’s response to it demand our empathy and provoke a catharsis as theater and other narrative arts have since Aristotle.

The two works complement each other. The young adult novel has five sections and 26 chapters covering the 13 weeks between the murder of Khalil and the grand jury decision not to indict the cop. Each chapter is a coherent scene so that the movie follows the book with minimal modification. What the book gives us that the movie cannot are details of the lives, the families and the community of Garden Heights. What the movie gives us that the book can't is the emotional immediacy of the shootings and deaths. So I recommend them both because they expose us to our cultural ignorance and to the consequences of that ignorance while encouraging us in our remediation.

Racism is a spectrum disorder; out on the right end of that spectrum, we have David Duke, Steve Bannon and Republican strategies to stay in power; out on the left we have biracial couples (the fastest growing demographic in the country) and a human desire to replace politics with a commitment to care for each other. The rest of us us are in the middle and, I hope, trying to grow toward the left. The Hate U Give provides us with an entertainment to nourish that growth. It educates us about a community of which, if we are honest white folks, we know little. This movie and book will help you stop wasting energy on any defensive need to declare, “I’m not racist!” It will free up that energy so you can use it to grow.

Thousand Star Hotel by Bao Phi

Bao Phi

Thousand Star Hotel

by Bao Phi

Coffee House Press 2017

Minneapolis, Minnesota

ISBN9781566894708

Thousand Star Hotel is an unusual memoir of some 62 poems in 105 pages with a one page lyrical introduction. It tells of a life of escapes, from Saigon, as a three month old, in a C-5 transport while his father looked “over his shoulder once/to see shells dropping where we once stood,” and, as a teenager and adult, from the fate of many in his neighborhood who “At a prison reading … [have] come to listen to the art that kept me out of this place.”

It is a memoir that chronicles a bigotry he can't escape:

It's not a majority white school. In seventh grade, the tall blonde tomboy asks you to dance. You have no idea all the boys have a crush on her; you've been busy with comic books, and the only romance you know are tragedies from Greek mythology and Arthurian legends. She's your best friend and you've laughed together every day, so of course you say yes. … Suddenly you notice three white boys looking at you, two snickering. They come right up to both of you, and whisper in her ear. Loud enough for you to hear. Everyone can see you dancing with that gook, they laugh. She responds by flicking them off, pulling you closer. Years later you'll wonder how she created her armor.

And it is a memoir of a single parent wondering what do I do “When My Daughter Asks Me to Check and Make Sure Racists Can't Come In and Kill Us.”

It has powerful prose written in the short lines of verse:

The worst powerlessness

is when wicked men and boys

come for your family

and you can do nothing.

And lyrical language in prose, “That a raindrop can weep inside of itself so hard it drowns and, looking at it, you would never know."

The reality described in the poetry of Thousand Star Hotel, is discomforting; most of the time we avoid looking at it, but, as Bao Phi presents it, you can’t. Flip to any page and you will find lines like these from “Shell”:

Brown people getting bombed –

how can you

even think

about

love?

But you do.

That accusatory “you” implies, if they were white people getting bombed, our response might be different and, reluctantly, you have to admit, “He’s right.” However, that “But you do” is also a colloquial equivalent for the formal “But one does” so that Bao Phi is asking of himself the same question he asks of us. The fact that, in the face of the daily bombing of brown people, both he and we “even think//about//love,” creates the possibility, if we are willing to tolerate our discomfort, for a shared humanity.

But this poem and these poems are not going to let us off easily with the question, “What else is more important to think about in the face of horror than ‘Love?’” Later in “Shell” Bao makes the impersonality of contemporary war, the consequence of bombing, and our passive witness more explicit:

The news crackles

drones drop

blossoms

empty

the heads of children

no science fiction

to save them.

To the extent that, as we watch the news we are passive witnesses to bombings, we are complicit in them and our agency becomes remote; children get their brains blown out by explosions that look like blossoms from our distant vantage; and we are helpless.

Many of the raw images of these poems are the traumas of his life and the lives of his family; traumas such as the one he would have witnessed at three months old, and to which he alludes in the poem, “To Combust”:

When his oldest son comes home from the corner gas station

beaten for no reason

we can venture to guess Dad sees blood and thinks

how he risked his life to get us all on that plane,

jumping in, last minute,

prayer and opportunity,

looking over his shoulder once

to see shells dropping where we once stood

before becoming an alien to his homeland for ever.

Later, during the narration of a trauma in the poem, “Cookies,” he introduces another thematic question of his memoir: how should he share this history with his daughter?

For the holidays, our Lutheran sponsors used to give us a blue cookie tin. … For Christmas my sister gave my daughter a box of shortbread cookies. … She wanted to share them with me, and they tasted so much like those cookies from our childhood I had to close my eyes and look away. Her five-year-old eyes track some commercial in which white men are playing at battle and she asks me about war. I want to tell her that her grandpa once told me how one of his friends in the front lines got hit in the side with the rocket while crawling out of a foxhole, and he had to pick up the smoking pieces of him and put them in a cookie tin to send the remains home to his family.

Because of the eloquence of its expression, the pain of these poems is tolerable. In “Say What?” a short poem that introduces the collection, Boa Phi reveals one source of that eloquence by parsing the variations in Vietnamese for “ma,” where it has six different meanings depending upon the tone of expression [Ma–ghost, Mà–but, Må–tomb or grave, Mã –horse, Má–momma and Mā–to plate].” The poem concludes:

Vietnamese people have always been spoken word poets.

How you say it

is as important to the life of the word

as the word itself.

In the Minneapolis of their exile English replaced the music of Boa Phi’s parental Vietnamese, yet he has managed, with this adopted English, to create a music, which, though it must often be a dissonant music, is worthy of our attention.  

These poems are difficult, but not in an academic way, nothing to puzzle out, no obscurities to excuse by calling them “experimentation”, just a clarity of vision that is hard to take but impossible to ignore. Thousand Star Hotel is evidence that our War in Vietnam won't be over until all of its wounds have healed. We encounter some of those wounds in the faces of homeless veterans on our corners holding out cups for alms. These poems are evidence of other wounds, which have an importance we have yet to acknowledge. What are these injuries, caused by being torn from home, if not “wounds”?

The value of these poems is that they erode the denials that interfere with our healing and in doing so encourage us, give us the heart we will need to persist in our own repair. These 14 lines at the beginning of “It Was Flame” describe as succinctly as anything I have ever read the history, which we must cease denying if we are to heal:

Slavery

indentured servitude

migrant labor

genocide to clear land for theft

minimum wage so low

we can see the ceiling:

America has been in business.

Shackled to sow.

Smallpox to blanket.

Guns bristled the border.

Lighter kisses hooch,

and how many times would you burn down Chinatown,

or what ever enclave we have been forced into,

to manifest your destiny.

This collection is worth owning if only to have those 14 lines close at hand as a reminder of the history, which we must acknowledge, if we would heal.

–Wendell Smith

The Black Clown Adapted from the poem by Langston Hughes By Davóne Tines and Michael Schachter

The Black Clown

Adapted from the poem by Langston Hughes

By Davóne Tines and Michael Schachter

Music by Michael Schachter

Directed by Zack Winokur

At the American Repertory Theater

Loeb Drama Center

Harvard University

August 31 to September 23

Review by Wendell Smith 

The first thing you should do with this review is put it down and get online to see if you can get tickets to The Black Clown at the A.R.T. before it sells out. Ironically, given its subject, it is an entertainment not to be missed.

Ironic, because this entertainment grows from a poem that says a black man must overcome his culturally imposed role to be a clown and entertain us. Published by Langston Hughes in 1931, it can be read in less than the three minutes allotted at most open mikes. At the A.R.T. it has been turned into 70 minutes of absorbing theatre. 70 minutes where we are captured by the Muses through word, music and dance and led to a prospect where we are forced to look back at truths about our collective selves (the awful truths of our history) to seek to be healed and find hope for redemption through tears and shared community.

With one agonist, The Clown, exquisitely sung by Davóne Tines, and a chorus of equally accomplished singers and dancers, The Black Clown is rooted in the 6^th century BCE Greek origins of our theater, fulfilling the Aristotelian purpose for poetry: it evokes our pity and fear to cause the purgation of those emotions.

The poem, as published in 1931 and provided in the program, has this stage direction for an epigraph, "A dramatic monologue to be spoken by pure-blooded Negro in the white suit and hat of a clown, to the music of the piano or an orchestra." A line runs down the left-hand margin of the poem to separate it from an outline for the music and the actions of the chorus called, “The Mood.” Here is a short sample from the beginning of the poem, which demonstrates that Hughes’ knew the potential for his poem, knew it would flourish, if it were ever to find the right soil, water and nurturing attention, would bloom as it has at the A.R.T.:

THE MOOD                 THE POEM

A gay and                     You laugh

low-down blues.           Because I'm poor and black and funny –

Comic entrance            Not the same as you –

like the clowns             Because my mind is dull

in the circus.                 And dice instead of books will do

Humorous                     For me to play with

defiance.                       When the day is through.

The program identifies 17 musical numbers by name but they flow into each other so that, with two exceptions they do not stand as separate songs. Those exceptions are, as Hughes calls for their use in “The Mood:” “Nobody Knows [the trouble I've seen],” and “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Chile.” In their adaptation Tine and Schachter do not use these songs in their entirety but impress them upon us by repeating their iconic phrases.

“Nobody knows the trouble I've seen, nobody knows my sorrow,” in their rendition becomes a refrain without the solace of, “Nobody knows but Jesus.” and is presented, as Hughes suggested it should be, when the performance has progressed through his poem to this section:

Three hundred years

In the cotton and the cane,

Plowing and reaping

With no gain –

Until, at last, through the staging of that repetition we come to see and feel those “troubles” and “sorrows” as the chorus turns them from an abstract lyric sung by a Gospel choir into the visual substance of dance, and, in doing so, connects them with their source, slavery; a source, which we haven’t experienced but, until now, only observed. Here we cannot avert our gaze from this foundation of our culture but must see what whiteness does.

Hughes wants the second of those traditional songs to follow these lines:

Freedom!

Abe Lincoln done set me free –

One little moment

To dance with glee.

Then said this again –

No land, no house, no job,

No place to go.

Black – in a white world

Where cold winds blow.

Here Tine and Schachter have the chorus begin a funeral procession while singing “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child;” repeating it again and again as a dirge and carrying a chair above their heads as a symbolic casket they flow off the stage through the audience and back on the stage where the procession concludes the dirge as a member of the chorus lies down on the stage and a banner printed with Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation is used for a shroud while they sings these lines by Hughes:

Not wanted here; not needed

there—

Black—you can die

nobody will care.

With that The Clown reaches his nadir, and we are halfway through the poem; now the performance pivots and begins to swing up. Initially this is through the resistance of Jim Crow illustrated with piece of magical stagecraft. The Clown sings

Yet clinging to the ladder,

Round by round.

Trying to climb up,

Forever pushed down.

as a ladder made of light comes down from the scenery loft; The Clown tries to climb it, he get one rung off the floor but can’t climb any higher because, as he pulls this endless ladder of light past him, it disappears into the floor. The production has that kind of theatrical flair from its opening through the triumph its conclusion:

Cry to the world

That all might understand:

I was once a black clown

But now –

I'm a man!

The Black Clown is the culmination of collaboration between Davóne Tines and Michael Schachter that began 2010, a year after their graduation from Harvard. The A.R.T. became involved in 2015. The result is a complete piece of absorbing theater directed by Zack Winokur with choreography by Chanel DaSilva, music direction by Jaret Landon, sets and costumes by Carlos Soto, lighting by John Torres, and sound by Kai Harada, tickets on line at https://americanrepertorytheater.org/shows-events, at the Loeb Theater through September 23.

For Want of Water by Sasha Pimentel

 

For Want of Water

by Sasha Pimentel

ISBN 9780807027851

Beacon Press

Boston, Massachusetts

Review by Wendell Smith

Sasha Pimentel has anchored this uneven collection with a substantial appendix: "Lines I’ve Stolen, and Other Notes," as if we might drift with these poems into a sea of vague references unless we were given lots of ancillary and factual information. So, whether you find her to be a good poet or a mature one will depend upon whether you are inclined to quote the apocryphal, “bad poets imitate; good poets steal,” attributed to TS Eliot or what he actually wrote, “Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.” I do commend these notes for their honesty; they reveal that the best lines in the collection, "as freezing persons recollect the snow:/first chill, then stupor, then the letting go," are Emily Dickenson’s, stolen (Sasha’s word) from “After great pain, a formal feeling comes —” to conclude her poem “Grave, ma non troppo tratto.” Unfortunately the implication of these notes, that the poet has an interest in accuracy, creates an expectation that is often unfulfilled, beginning with the first lyric of the collection, "If I Die in Juarez."

Her casual attention to detail in this first lyric undercuts its power. I give you the complete poem because I feel it is only fair to the poet and to you that I give you enough data to assess the validity of my rant.

When violins in our home are emptied

of sound, strings stilled, missing

fingers. This one can bring a woman down

to her knees, just to hear again

it's voice, thick as a callus

from the wooden belly. This one strings

are broken. And another, open,

as a mouth. I want to kiss

them as I hurt to be kissed, ruin

their brittle necks in the husk of my palm,

my fingers across the bridge, pressing

chord into chord, that delicate protest –:

my tongue rowing the frets, and our throats high

from the silences of keeping.

"My tongue rowing the frets," is a line that triggered my criticism of her craft; violins don't have frets. (If they did, how would a tongue row them!?) Did she choose violins as her metaphor without bothering to acquire a basic familiarity with them? And because of these lines, "my fingers across the bridge, pressing/chord into chord," I doubt that she knows how the instrument is played. Yes, a violin does have a bridge; it elevates the strings above the fingerboard, or top of the violin’s neck, so when you arch your fingers over the neck (not across the bridge) and press the strings to the fingerboard, you vary the vibrating length of strings and change their pitch. What is frustrating about this poem is that this metaphor could have served her purpose if only she had been observant and accurate. I give you my clumsy example of what she might have said, "my fingers massaged the neck pressing chord into chord," (or cord into cord) which would have turned the violin’s strings into the the neck cords of victims to produce the musical “chords” of mourning (or of the morning). Am I unfair to demand that once she chooses her metaphor, which I think we can agree has potential, that she has an obligation to use it with precision?

This poem also demonstrates another problem for this collection caused by the way she anchors the poetry to her notes. In them, after she informs us that the namesake for the title of that first poem is Stella Pope Duarte's novel, If I Die in Juarez, she carries on for some 200 words to give us facts about the killings of young women around Juarez and elsewhere in Mexico. Of course these facts are awful and deserving of our attention but I felt they are used here as emotional blackmail, that if I don’t praise these poems for their lamentations for injustice, I must be a philistine. This attempt to make her subject the reason to appreciate her poetry brought to mind these lines by Jack Gilbert: … “To make injustice the only/measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.”ⁱ Would that she had honored that truth and spent as much time examining violins and how they are played as she spent examining the journalism about her subject, and then let the journalism go so the poem could speak for itself.

Here is another example of her lack of precision this time in her use of language in “Old Beds and Hollywood,”

… My father

slumbered so loudly I could

never hear my mother's

sleep …

* * *

all joists trembled to him

from behind the plaster,

Those aren't joists behind the plaster they are studs. Her father’s room may have joists beneath the floor and joists above the ceiling plaster but it would have had studs behind the plaster of the walls. And if you don’t believe me go to a dictionary as I (not wanting to trust my years as a carpenter) did and she should have. And because she didn’t she missed the ironic pun of having her father make studs tremble, even as he slept.

Frustrated by how often I found myself going “?!” about poems (tongue rowing, vide supra) in this celebrated collection (it is one of five winners in the National Poetry Series for 2016) I went to the title poem, "For Want of Water." There I found evidence for why this poetry has garnered praise and awards. But even this poem begins with another distracting error, “an ant will drown himself.” Ants are female; these first lines should read, “an ant will drown herself, her body, etc.” This inaccuracy would be trifling were it not that she is so careful in her notes to let us know that the poem is based on a fact: “On August 2, 2006, the El Paso Times reported a case where a 13-year-old boy, Julio Hernandez, dragged his dead mother through the desert after she’d collapsed.” Once I got by the male ant of the first three lines, (ironically, because it is a mother who is dead, these lines would have been more powerful if she had gotten the sex of the ant correct) this poem showed that she can transform journalism into powerful poetry:

an ant will drown himself, his body submerging

into ease, his mandibles, head, antennae, baptized. How lovely

to lose your senses to the cup of your want. A boy

drags his mother's body across the desert, her fluids rising

to heaven in order to quench her skin. How divine

her body must have looked, clutched at the ankles, her

arms reaching out in exultation, her head stippled in rings

of sand and blood as he walked with her, slowly, her fallen

and moving shape the fork of a divining rod, her body shaking

with each of his steps, and for water, shaking to find

that deep and secret tributary.

Those lines confirm that this collection of Pimentel’s does have its genius. If you approach it with a will to dig away like the optimistic boy on the manure pile who felt “there must be horses in here somewhere,” you will find poems that are horses. I found some, but came away from this collection thinking that Sasha Pimentel needs to find some one to help her clean the stall, find someone who will be to her what Maxwell Perkins was to Thomas Wolfe.

Finally for the record here are those lines used by Ms. Pimentel to conclude “Grave, ma non troppo tratto.” as they appear in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickenson,” edited by Thomas H. Johnson, our best guess for how Emily would have wanted them to appear in print:

As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow —

First — Chill — then Stupor — then the letting go —

I think they answer the question posed by T. S. Eliot’s statement. The altering of the capitalization and punctuation as they appear in For Want of Water means they are not stolen; they are imitated.

i“Brief for the Defense” in Refusing Heaven, by Jack Gilbert, Knopf, New York, 2007