The Sunday Poet: Kate Hanson Foster

Kate Hanson Foster

 Kate Hanson Foster's first book of poems, Mid Drift, was published by Loom Press and was selected by Massachusetts Center for the Book as a "Must Read" in 2011. She gained her MFA from Bennington College, and her poetry has appeared in Comstock Review, Harpur Palate, Poet Lore and elsewhere. She lives and writes in Groton, Massachusetts.




The First Gunshot

The first gunshot is not a gun—

It is a child playing with bubble wrap,

and small innocuous feet need the weight

of a whole body for a single, satisfying pop.

The first gunshot is a smile. A laugh. A fool

lit a firecracker in the hallway and someone

is going to ring their neck. There is no puzzle

in the echo—it is the muffled bone-snap

of a branch outside. The backfire of an old truck

turning the corner. The first gunshot is one

last pure breath, and the peace in the peak

of it. An unexpected flower in full vivacious

bloom. Not the start of something. A finger.

A trigger. A round. Not the first cave hollowing

within a body. Not a body hitting the floor

thinking how can I look dead enough—eyes

open or shut. Not run like a deer to the nearest

exit. Not resolving one’s body as a shield to cover

a lover, a friend, a child. The first gunshot

is a cloister of joy. A sweet stillness, so alive,

so subsistent after a burst of a big bright balloon.

No fear. No fight. No flight into action because

it’s not going to happen. Not to you. Not today.

From the Other Room by Anna M. Warrock (Slate Roof 2017)

 


From the Other Room by Anna M. Warrock (Slate Roof 2017)

Review by Doug Holder

'

The first thing I noticed about Somerville, Mass. Poet Anna. M. Warrock's new collection of poetry “From the Other Room,” was the physical book itself. Usually I merely glance at a book cover, but this was like love at first sight; I stopped to admire its simple beauty, The craftsmanship was at such a level, that it reminded of the many finely crafted books put out by Gary Metras' Adastra Press that-- like Slate Roof-- is located in Western, Massachusetts. Slate Roof is a small, collaborative press that published art-quality poetry books—the poetry that is between the covers in this case is more than worthy of its design.

I am in my early sixties so I can easily identify with what Warrock writes about. As the acclaimed poet Martin Espada opined, “Warrock speaks the the language of grief with eloquence and courage. She understands that experience of death changes the experience of life.” It usually takes someone with a little mileage to crack this nut open to the readers.

In her poem “Spring's Lament” the poet looks at a greening April tree, and sees the dark shadows below the nascent leaves. She understand how life and death are close dance partners, and indeed there may be a welcoming balm, and some forgiveness under Spring's incessant bloom,

So a tree turns green and green and green.

Then there's the shade.

I will not let go of that, the shadow under the tree,

dark, deep and forgiving.

Forgiven. That's what I mean, forgiven. (2)

Warrock captures a strikingly beautiful moment in the poem “Looking into her Death.” This is when a young girl ( Warrock—I assume) looks into her mother's hidden cupboard, and sees the luminous glasses on the shelf in a lineup of sorrow, waiting to be poured, to forestall their own demise—a perfect metaphor of absence-- for loss—for death...

… The glasses, stacked neatly,

become luminous on the shelves.

By opening the door, I shed light

on their curves, their brittleness.

They are so clear I can see the dust

caught on their transparent sides. Standing there, I realize they are waiting.

The glasses do not know my mother

is dead, so they wait for hands

to take them down, fill them with

beer or juice or milk. Then

her hands will wash them,

her hands will put them away.

“ She is dead,” I say softly, “she is dead.”

Warrock has long been on the Boston are poetry scene. Her poems have appeared in the Harvard Review, The Madison Review and elsewhere. Her poems have been  performed at the Boston Hayden Planetarium, and permanently installed in a Boston area subway station. The reader gets the whole package here, the beautiful physical book and the poems(to use a cliché)...at times left me breathless.

INTERVIEW WITH CLARE L. MARTIN with Susan Tepper

INTERVIEW WITH CLARE L. MARTIN

 with Susan Tepper

Clare L. Martin’s second collection of poetry, Seek the Holy Dark, is the 2017 selection of the Louisiana Cajun and Creole Series by Yellow Flag Press. Her acclaimed debut collection of poetry, Eating the Heart First, was published by Press 53. Martin’s poetry has appeared in Thrush Poetry Journal, Melusine, Poets and Artists, and Louisiana Literature, among others. She founded and edits MockingHeart Review.

SUSAN TEPPER: ‘Seek the Holy Dark’ is an enticing title for a book of poems. What do these words mean to you?

CLARE L. MARTIN: The title of the book comes from the poem of the same title. I must go to it to explain what it means to me. In the poem, “Seek the Holy Dark,” there are supernatural beings—whether they are angels or demons, or something entirely different, I do not know. These beings exist alongside humans. The beings speak in the poem. Their speech in the poem is prophetic. The title “Seek the Holy Dark” is an imperative plea to acknowledge the darker aspects of existence in the spiritual journey. We uncover and discover through darkness to light. I suppose I am urging the reader to go with me into these dark places to find illumination and enlightenment for themselves. I also have tried to tap into that prophetic voice for many of the poems. Sometimes prophecy can be very mundane. My hope is that the language that I use rises to a level so that what is ineffable can be intimated. This ties into the declaration to “seek the holy dark” that enfolds the entirety of the poems.

ST: Though this is not a typical collection of love poems, your poems are inclusively about love in all its myriad forms.

CLM: In my belief system, God is love. So, spiritually, I want to aspire to my “godself” and be love. I believe Love energy permeates the universe, and is both the Infinite and the infinitesimal. Many of these poems are in pursuit of godliness and/ or are love poems to humanity. Even though I write about God, this book is not religious in any way. I think this will be obvious to any reader. Some might call these poems heretical or sacrilegious but I would protest those characterizations. I take readers to the very edge with me, and we come back from the poetic experiences wiser and stronger. I hope that doesn’t sound boastful. I mean it sincerely.

In the poems that are more typical “love poems,” I express with abandon myriad passions. The erotic or love poems are dangerous for me. They may not seem as daring as some poets have been able to express, but for me they are risking a great deal. If I cannot risk it in life, I will risk it on the page.

I also feel that the poems that are the most sensual express a womanliness that I have grown into. It has something to do with my mother’s death. Many of these poems were written after her death. I was both in mourning for her and in a sense freed as well when writing these poems. She was proud of me and loved me and I loved her, but I do not believe she would have approved of this book. I wrote it anyway. I had to. I do not mean that in a callous way. The unwritten words would have consumed me. This book is an exclamation of my personal womanhood and adulthood.

ST: Your poems deal with the displaced and disenfranchised people of the world and how they are inter-connected to the luckier people. Yet I would not categorize you as a protest poet. At least not in the traditional sense. In your poem BODY you write:

“I am a million bodies / laid upon each other / a million bodies in a mass grave / …”

CLM: This poem came to me through viewing the shore at Dingle, Ireland as photographed by Myriam Jégat. I saw the stones as bodies and the imagery came from there. There is a fury in this poem that outpaces the language. I hope the reader senses this. My protest is against hatred, egoism, injustice, and malignancies of human character. I put my life on the line in each poem. I hope that comes through for the reader.

SFT: One of my many favorites in this collection you have titled “Woman in Prayer.” It seems to be a poem of repentance, though I’m not quite certain of that. What can you tell us about this poem that begins:

“I am penitent; / poured on rail of the pew / somber Mary alit, / red-glassed candles / no smoke, but a hint / of myrrh…/”

CLM: This poem is a personal excoriation because of my own (at-the-time) perceived spiritual failings. I was raised Roman Catholic and left the Church at thirteen, before my Confirmation. I am a believer in God, but all my life I have been told I am doing it wrong because I don’t attend Mass and follow the Catholic Church’s teachings. I do, however, enter Catholic church buildings often for prayer and mystical solitude.

This poem is nearly the exact truth of an event. It occurred at St Anne’s Catholic Church in the city I live in. The poem was written shortly after I left St. Anne’s building. I suppose the overwrought contrition I felt expanded to many things in my life that I perceived as wrongdoings. I will likely never be free of “feeling guilty,” because of my upbringing. But, I am on a path of reclamation of my own sense of wholeness and inner peace. The book itself is a declaration of that purpose.

Thank you, Susan, for your thoughtful and thought-provoking questions and for caring enough about Seek the Holy Dark to ask them.

 Susan Tepper, an award-winning writer, has been at it for twenty years. Six books of her fiction and poetry have been published, with a seventh book, a novella, forthcoming in the fall of 2017. FIZZ her reading series at KGB Bar, NYC, is sporadically ongoing these past nine years. www.susantepper.com

Inward Accompaniment in ‘hundred and eight prayer flags’, a book of poems by Simrin Tamhane

Simrin Tamhane

Inward Accompaniment in ‘hundred and eight prayer flags’,

a book of poems by Simrin Tamhane

article by Michael Todd Steffen

In the February 13 & 20, 2017 issue of The New Yorker (pp 93-5), Joyce Carol Oates comments on refugee and fiction writer Viet Thanh Nguyen. “It is hardly surprising,” Oates writes, that the displaced person “is obsessed with identity, both personal and ethnic…likely to be highly sensitive to others’ interpretations of him and his ‘minority’ culture. And so his peripheral status confers certain advantages, for he is in a position to see what others do not.”

The insight applies to Simrin Tamhane and her expressive debut book of poems, hundred and eight prayer flags, issued this year as part of the Endicott College Young Poets Series by Ibbetson Street Press (series director Emily Pineau,  Founders Dan Sklar, Doug Holder).

Tamhane sees from her experience and memory, in the title poem, the embodiment of her natural and homeland energies, in

thousands of faded mantras printed on

rows of endless white

prayer flags that cling

onto tall bamboo poles while

dancing with the swirling Himalayan wind… [page 3]

The poet poignantly documents the significant coincidence of her young displacement from India to America with the loss of a cherished grandfather:

When I was flying

to the United States, leaving

behind everything,

the time zone didn’t let me

know that you died

until 2 days later…

And so I lit candles for you,

In this foreign land,

And prayed for your soul…

Hidden in the dorm bathroom,

Silencing my pain with

Cheap toilet paper [“my father’s father,” page 9]

The physical sense of isolation, however, is sustained inwardly with accompaniment in images of multiplicity like the “hundred and eight prayer flags” of the poem, or even more subtly in Tamhane’s choice word for a particular red denoting plenitude:

i am vermillion

power clouds [“who am i” p. 6]

The genius of the poetry, however, while allowing the consolation and inspiration of memory, faces its counterweight in what has happened with a striking concluding image:

Goodbye was 3 pistachios placed

On your hand while you

Struggled to have them touch your lips [page 9]

Whether she is conjuring from her past in India a poor maid that looked after her, forays with other children stealing passion fruit from her grandfather’s bamboo trellis, or witnessing the contradictions in the lives of her young American encounters (a would-be animal-rights activist who wears a vintage leather jacket, a medical student who works as a nightclub stripper) Tamhane’s vision is pristine and her language vivid and to the heart.

Charlotte Gordon has called this book “luminous and clear-sighted.” Mark Herlihy has noted the range of Tamhane’s powers of empathy which convey “loss, longing and heartache on personal and universal levels.” It is a promising first collection, accented with talent, imagination and consideration.

Michael Todd Steffen curates the Hastings Room Reading Series in Cambridge. His poetry and articles have appeared in The Boston Globe, Connecticut Review, Poem (HLA), ACM (Another Chicago Magazine), Ibbetson Street, Taos Journal and in the window of the Grolier Poetry Bookshop. His first book Partner, Orchard, Day Moon was published in April of 2014 by Cervena Barva Press edited by Gloria Mindock. 

“La La Land” – a movie review by William Falcetano (written before the Oscars)

“La La Land” – a movie review by William Falcetano (written before the Oscars)

I went to this movie on Valentine’s Day; it was one of those things guys do, along with buying flowers and boxes of chocolates and dinner. Guys do this sort of thing not because we are hopeless romantics – we’re not – but because the women in our lives are romantics and we must go along. So I went to see the musical “La La Land” a skeptic determined to put on a happy face, grin and bear it (if it proved to be a really painful experience I could always get my comeuppance in a movie review); but I left the theater a convinced believer – and you will too.

The first scene – on a jammed highway overpass – was amazing, but almost backfired for an excess of energy, too much kinetic, balletic movement. Our leading lady Mia Dolan, played by the beautiful and talented Emma Stone, is busy texting (what else is there to do when stopped in traffic?) while our leading man Sebastian Wilder, played by the handsome and gifted Ryan Gosling, is stuck behind her, fuming with road rage (more than once a woman in the audience was heard to say to her boyfriend or husband – “that’s just like you!”). When the chance comes to move ahead a few feet she is busy texting and he, full of umbrage, leans on his horn while passing her. She responds by flipping him the bird – not an auspicious start to a love story! The couple meet again when Mia finds her car has been towed (cars again!); she wanders into a piano bar where this same fella is acting out a little rebellion by improvising complicated jazz numbers when the owner (J.K. Simmons) just wants traditional Christmas melodies. He’s fired on the spot and she falls in love; but when she approaches him he turns out to be the same jerk again. Strike two. But winged Cupid has brought these two love birds together and will not quit until they meet a third time – this time three’s the charm. Now he’s reduced to a shoulder slung keyboard in a cheesy band playing 80s pop tunes at pool parties for the pretty and the vacuous – a painful fate for a jazz purist. They manage to save each other from their mutual entanglements and begin their dance around and with each other.

Music is an integral part of this film: it stands alone in jazz scenes and is interwoven with dance numbers. Song and dance are what make musicals a distinctive art form – and the musical film is one of America’s great art forms, along with Jazz. Yet Jazz is dying and the musical – well it’s all but dead. In Sebastian’s lamentation over the death of jazz we are invited to think also about this other art form which is so characteristically American, and so much a part of our American story. There are plenty of allusions to the history of musicals – this is after all a film about film making just as “Singing in the Rain” – perhaps the most well-known and celebrated movie musical. Mia is a barista on the Warner Brother’s lot and she is gobsmacked by the movie stars who dash in for a take-out cappuccino. We see scenes being shot as they meander around the back lots with the Hollywood Hills in the background. Mia wants to make a drama, a film, something; Sebastian wants to restart an old jazz club. They are millennials so full of ambition, so short of success, so hungry for auditions and gigs; this is as much “La Boheme” as La La Land. They pursue their dreams with the ardor and purity of youth – you can’t help but root for them. Besides they are so good looking you can’t take your eyes of their faces – Emma Stone works small miracles in lots of close up shots.

This is a very knowing work of art, it alludes to and incorporates the Griffith Observatory from “Rebel without a Cause” – an LA landmark; dance scenes take place in Paris against cartoon backdrops that recall that other musical – “An American in Paris”. The staging, lighting, costumes all work their magic and mix together almost seamlessly with the realism of the Los Angeles sun and the California nights as street scenes jammed with parked cars under romantic street lights somehow come to life to evoke a strong sense of place.

But LA exists in a larger world and Paris beckons to Mia – how can she resist? In the end they both find success; but love...ah love…such a tricky, slippery thing...let’s just say they find love but not in the way we might have imagined or hoped for – and it is this which saves this movie from the worst faults of the movie musical – the predictably happy ending. The dollop of realism with which this film ends blends reality with fantasy in a way that works; at least it worked for me: a determined skeptic and an old codger familiar with love and loss.

During the Great Depression, in the 1930s, musicals rendered a real service for a country that needed an escape, even if only for an hour or two, from a national reality that was less than savory; and this musical can do that for you too just as it did for me and my gal on Valentine’s Day.

 

 

Endicott College/Ibbetson Street Press/Visiting Author Series

( Click on to enlarge)

The Sunday Poet: Heather Nelson

Heather Nelson

Heather Nelson is a poet, teacher, mother and recovering attorney based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She studied writing under the poet C.D. Wright as an undergraduate at Brown University. Most recently she has studied poetry with Tom Daley and Barbara Helfgott Hyett. Heather's work has appeared in Constellations, The Somerville Times, The Sunday Poet, he Compassion Anthology and Ekphrastic Review.

The Leaning Tower                          

is climbed by appointment-

timed clusters of travelers wound into queues,

shuffling along the edge

of 4:30’s scorching shadow.

I am searching for Sophia

when a dark-garbed guard turns my head

with a sharp bark: Watch your son!

My blond boy as always is climbing the rails.

I spot her at last-far off

on the grass, behind the Pomodoro,

where at 4 she practiced her shaky

walk-over, dark hair sweeping the ground.

Like an umber fan, hair hid

her burning face, her trembling legs,

the trace of amused scorn at the corner

of her older brother’s mouth.

Still waiting, I’m wishing for morning

a return to the wall where they all

walked abreast, two boys and a girl,

tramping together along Lucca’s rim.

Truthfully there was morning

fighting too, over three bottles of

water, bought just for the bathroom,

spilled struggling over who gets whose first.

Lunch served us a respite under the cover

of a wide canopy, we all had room

for seven wines poured by the owner’s daughter

whose red hair wound across the label of the Rosato.

Our family runs toward noir,

thick brow and olive skin,

sister and big brother twine, arms wrestling,

each boasting a greater darkness.

The last wine served is darkest

and sweetest lingering in the late afternoon light,

blurring Sophia’s lithe and livid frame, her simmering shame,

all she is hiding in her halter of yellow flowers, daring me to find her.

--Heather Nelson

I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO A film by Raoul Peck

James Baldwin

I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO

A film by Raoul Peck

From the writings of James Baldwin

Cast: Samuel L. Jackson

93 minutes

Vintage Trade Paperback

Edited by Raoul Peck

IBSN 980-0-525-434696-6

eBook 978-0-525-434471-9

Review by Wendell Smith

I Am Not Your Negro is a challenge to our liberal certainties that we are not racist; it questions all our claims that we are “colorblind.” In answer to those questions I must admit that I have been tardy in looking at my own denials; I was in my 70’s before I began using “slave labor camp” rather than “plantation” to describe the birthplace of my mother’s maternal grandmother. Recently I had to listen to an otherwise right-thinking friend claim Andrew Jackson was despised by some of his right-thinking contemporaries because he did not treat his slaves well. Well, if this right-thinker of our times could still think that it was possible to treat slaves well, rather than only less sadistically, and, if (as that example and this film demonstrate) less sadistically is still a measure of virtue for some of us, we have a long way to evolve in our ethics and understanding.  I hope you too will find that I Am Not Your Negro facilitates that evolution.

If we are going to survive these times with our souls intact we must be willing to change our makeup. Our changes must be more than cosmetic and, as the soul is written on the visage, we will need mirrors to assess our progress. While I can't tell you where we will find those future mirrors, I can tell you where to find a current one that tells us where we are and why we must to begin to change. That mirror is the documentary I Am Not Your Negro by James Baldwin, edited and directed by Raoul Peck, and narrated by Samuel Jackson.  

May I suggest that in our current reality, which has Orwell’s books flying off shelves, that Baldwin is the writer we should turn to. He tells us clearly what we need to know about ourselves and our betrayals.  No harm in cheering the soaring sales of Orwell but I don’t think we should be satisfied until we see, as evidence that we are willing to face the truths with which he confronts us,  James’ books taking wing along with George’s classics.

My one frustration watching I Am Not Your Negro was relieved with my discovery that it is also available in a Vintage Paperback. Often during the movie I would want to reach out and grab what Baldwin was saying only to have him continue with such eloquence that I immediately would say, “No, that's what I want to hold onto.” If I had known the paperback existed I would have relaxed knowing I could soon have all his words to savor at my leisure. One of the earliest of these passages that caught my attention was his praise for an early influence Orilla Miller, or as he referred to her, Bill:

I had been taken in hand by a young white

schoolteacher named Bill Miller,

a beautiful woman

very important to me.

She gave me books to read and talked to me

about the books,

and about the world:

about Ethiopia,

and Italy,

and the German Third Reich;

and took me to see plays and films, to which no one else would have dreamed of taking a 10-year-old boy

It is certainly because of Bill Miller,

who arrived in my terrifying life so soon,

thatI never really managed to hate white people.

Though, God knows,

I have often wished to murder more than one or two.

Therefore, I began to suspect that white people

did not act as they did because they were white

but for some other reason.

That passage in the film is an excerpt edited from chapter 1 of The Devil Finds Work. It is presented in the paperback as free verse, which I have copied here, because that form reveals the poetry that empowers Baldwin's prose.

Reading and rereading his words I am often brought up short and must stop to ponder them. Watching the film you are moved from one instinctive agreement: yes; to the next, oh, yes; to the next Oh! Yes! But, while with these yesses we accept the documentary’s thesis, the speed with which we are carried forward in the visual media is too rapid to permit the pleasure, which the book allows us, time for contemplation.

One of the things, which this documentary helps us, as whites, to do, is to admit that, when it comes to the reality of the African-American experience, we don't know squat and, therefore, we need a witness we can trust. Baldwin is that witness. I Am Not Your Negro is a narrative of Baldwin’s witness to the lives of his friends, Medgar Evers, Malcom X and Martin Luther King; and his reactions to their assassinations. He receives the news of each death in circumstances that any of us would consider comfortably normal even gentrified, however, while in I Am Not Your Negro his circumstances are unavoidably violated by the racism at the root of the assassinations, we may pretend that our circumstances are not.

I Am Not Your Negro takes up his observations of these three friends in the chronologic order of their deaths. While speaking of the first of these, Medgar Evers, he tells us about bearing witness; it is because of how he tells us, we will trust him. He is travelling in rural Mississippi with Evers:

I was terribly frightened,

but perhaps that "field trip" will help us define

what I mean by the word "witness."

I was to discover that the line which separates

a witness from an actor is a very thin line indeed;

nevertheless, the line is real.

I was not, for example, a Black Muslim,

in the same way, though for different reasons,

that I never became a Black Panther:

because I did not believe that

all white people were devils,

and I did not want

young black people to believe that.

I was not a member of any Christian congregation

because I knew that they had not heard

and did not live by the commandment

"love one another as I love you,"

and I was not a member of the NAACP

because in the north, where I grew up

the NAACP was fatally entangled

with black class distinctions,

are allusions of the same,

which repelled a shoeshine boy like me.

Baldwin tells what he is going to tell us; he tells us; he tells us what he has told us and then he tells us again. Through all that repetition of such a tired story his words remain fresh; he has a genius so astonishing that you must conclude it is some cosmic consciousness trying to capture our attention through him and tell us the truth about ourselves. Sometimes this truth is expressed at some length:

For a very long time, America prospered:

this prosperity cost millions of people their lives.

Now, not even the people who are the most

spectacular recipients of the benefits of this

prosperity are able to endure these benefits:

they can neither understand them

nor do without them.

Above all, they cannot imagine the price paid

by their victims, or subjects, for this way of life,

and so they cannot afford to know

why the victims are revolting.

This is a formula for a nation's or a kingdom's

This is a formula for a nation's or a kingdom's 

decline for no kingdom can maintain 

itself by force alone.

Force does not work the way

it'itss advocates think in fact it does.

It does not, for example, revealed to the victim

the strength of the adversary.

On the contrary, it reveals the weakness,

even the panic of the adversary

and this revelation invests the victim with patience. 

and sometimes briefly:

The story of the Negro in America 

is the story of America.

It is not a pretty story.

One of the final pages of the book is dominated by a photograph of a black woman in a modest ankle-length flowered dress with long sleeves. She has a wedding ring on the relaxed fingers of her left hand. Her toes are pointing down like a dancer’s at the apex of her leap. The sleeves of the dress are pulled slightly above her wrists by a rope that is bunching the collar of her dress. The rope rises vertically to bleed off the edge of the photograph and, were it not for the way her neck is twisting her face to the left and downward, you could imagine it to be part of a theatrical device to create an illusion that she is in flight.  In the closing moment of the film this is one of a series lynchings for our witness; images, which go by too fast for the attention we can give to this one. That of course is the difference between the two media, a contrast that presents this question, "Aren't all of those extinguished lives equally deserving of our attention?" Under the photo Baldwin's narration serves as caption:

You cannot lynch me

And keep me in ghettos

without becoming something monstrous yourselves.

And furthermore, you give me a terrifying advantage.

You never had to look at me.

I had to look at you.

I know more about you then you know about me.

Not everything that is faced can be changed;

but nothing can be changed until it is faced. (Italics mine.)

And then he goes on to his conclusion:

History is not the past.

It is the present.

We carry our history with us.

We are our history.

If we pretend otherwise, we literally are criminals.

I attest to this:

the world is not white;

it never was white,

cannot be white.

White is a metaphor for power,

and that is simply a way of describing

Chase Manhattan Bank.

                      *   *   *

If I’m not the nigger here and you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you've got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that, whether it is able to ask that question. (The italics here are not mine)

Amen; 

“Not everything that is faced can be changed;

but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”