I would like to offer a preview of a manuscript I’ve completed, called Orphans and Strangers, a work of nonfiction. It tells of a river trip I took in 1984, under the guidance of a remarkable woman, into the Alaskan Interior: a voyage into life, death, and coming back.

It is dedicated to this woman, who is called Malfa Ivanov (1933-2004):

“You could say we are a tragic people. But, really, we like having fun.”

 

To the Reader

More than a decade ago, I began writing a counter-memoir about a remarkable woman. She was Alaska Native, a wife, mother, grandmother, businesswoman, and educator. When I lived in the Alaskan Interior, she became my second mother. At her request, when I wrote about her, I called her Malfa Ivanov. I had introduced her earlier, in Narrow Road to the Deep North, and an eminent novelist had told me he found her the most interesting person in the book. There was more to say. I hoped to portray her, often in her own words, as she had revealed herself and her world to me. She was my subject; I was the observant narrator. I had traveled with her and her husband on the barge they ran and seen the Yukon, the Koyukuk, the Tanana through their eyes as well as my own. I thought this was noteworthy. I thought that a woman’s voice would be good, too, for portraying a complex Alaska to readers in the world Outside. The work was consolation following her passing.

But the writing called up a long-stifled memory, of a desperate moment when her words flayed me, a white person, and I was forced to enter the narrative and to reexamine that person I was and my own part in the story, even as I wrote it.

The account centers on a crucial year in the mid-1980s, soon after the break-up of the Yukon ice, when Malfa Ivanov takes her surrogate daughter on a haunting voyage on the Koyukuk, Yukon, and Tanana rivers. As the waters flow, Malfa tells the younger woman the story of her life, even as she excavates the real history of her past. They encounter her intricate network of friends and relatives in the river villages; stories about Jesuits, medicine people, Native beliefs, and growing up orphaned in the Mission; the complications of American law and Native sovereignty; the aftermath of a terrible set of murders; and the mystery of a powerful animal, in a country where everything that lives has its own spirit, which must be respected It was a year of death and serious instruction about death in the midst of life, a somber, brilliant experience.

I’ve said that I was forced to enter the narrative and reexamine the person I was and my own part in the story. Who was that person? A version of her — of myself — as she was then would be: a white woman, born in a small town in Pennsylvania, well-traveled, a practicing poet, trained as an historian of European social thought, with an informed interest in Athabaskan literature. She had left Europe and academia for Alaska with an adventurer’s curiosity, and after a couple of years spent learning the ropes, had gone to work as an itinerant poet in village schools.* From the beginning, it was obvious to her that even the smallest children entered school with a lively sense of story and of storytelling, and that, in making their poems and telling their tales, they came with a communal sense of how stories worked: they brought with them an already-developing sense of form, a poetics. She wanted to learn more about this.

This writer’s responsibility, as I see it, is both to the story and to the people about whom she writes. These are not always compatible. I’ve addressed my disquiet:

I was the writer, the eye, learning to see her country. She and I were also working on a book together, although its subject isn’t clear in my notes, and so I think that, really, she was articulating who she was and whom she belonged to, because something larger was at work in herself that her scrupulous explanations did not wholly cover. When we talked about the book, she told me her most intimate stories. But I didn’t always write them down; they were too personal, I must have thought. I was her ear; I was her reluctant note-taker. I was absorbing the protocol of silence that lay over villages. And if I was an eye in her country, learning to see, I saw more than she meant to show me, and that is part of the difficulty of writing about her all these years later. We talked about writing a book together; but what kind of book was it to have been? Was it this one that I am writing in memory of her? She alone asked me to write it. No one else could have expected to appear in these pages. This troubles me. I am caught in this story: how can I be true to it? As I must be true, and yet, show respect to the people among whom I traveled. And yet, I have no choice, I must go on.

For some time, for family reasons, I put the narrative aside. Now that it is finished — now that I know how it ends I see that much of the past is still present, and not only in Alaska. Much that I was told and much that I myself witnessed — the violence in communities; the sterilization of Native women; the anguish of spiritual conflict; the imposition of white law on Native customary law; the buried emotional history of suppression; the immensity of what Malfa Ivanov called “the war against women” — is now spoken of publicly. In those years, so much was repressed, among whites and among Natives. Silence sat heavily on the land. It sat particularly hard on women.

 

Though given always with care and with affection, my second mother’s guidance carried with it a complicated obligation: to convey in writing what she had told me that was important for outsiders to know about her people: but also – this was trickier – what was meant for me, a white woman trying to live in her country, where writers were not always welcomed. Conventionally, ethnology or life-writing might have served, but not for this work. It wanted a form in which I could be true to her, while offering enough context to inform distant readers, who would be Native and non-Native. If I could portray her in literature as if in life, I might embody her kind of knowledge, which though immense, was not abstract, but was implicated in place and relationships; nor did it fall easily into analytical categories.

Yet – here was the trickier part – a more personal matter kept pushing its way back into my narrative, no matter how I tried to delete it. In Alaska, I had carried a certain object: a small, black leather pouch holding a set of toe-bones of a wolverine, a sacred animal of mean and powerful spirit, which might cause harm to others and even to me, and which I didn’t know how to dispose of properly. It was to Malfa I had turned to try to make sense of this burdensome gift. My account became layered with dreams; with things seen and unseen, but felt.

I read back through memory and my journals, through the lens of age and experience. They grounded my story but were incomplete. Interleaved in this narrative is, for context, historical information not available until well after I left Alaska. I respect primary sources. I prefer quotations, not paraphrases. I use footnotes. Following the path of several stalwart independent researchers, a new generation of social scientists both Native and non-Native began to examine the records embedded in Native oral histories, and to recognize that, with guidance from elders and qualified speakers, they could be relied upon as accurate. More recent scholars published critical historical examinations of the transformation of Native lands, the effects on Native tribes, after American acquisition and under American governance. Russian historians examined newly opened records of the Czarist Russian America; translations appeared and fostered reconsideration of the American purchase in 1867, with the Treaty of Cession, and its fateful aftermath. The implications of the Alaska Native Settlement Act (ANCSA, 1971) are still unfolding. On the rivers, we were passing through histories revealed at a slant, as if when light refracts as it enters water.

 

In the last several centuries, those of us who arrived in Alaska from elsewhere — whitemen, Black whitemen; Russians, Europeans, Americans; explorers, priests and nuns and ministers, prospectors and commercial agents, anthropologists, linguists, reporters, novelists, poets — who wrote of our experience have tended to depict the Great Land in geological time, or from the time of Contact, or in view of our particular involvement, which might include interaction with Native people; or in some combination of the above. Always, its magnificence: land of the Great Weather. Then, just the other day, NOAA announced that Fairbanks, along with several other weather-station sites in the Alaskan Interior, exists no longer in a sub-Arctic climate, but in what is termed a “warm summer continental” climate. A boundary has been re-drawn. I suppose that this event might now mean that the immense Interior, Alaska’s sub-arctic region — where my story occurred — which has long considered itself separate from Outside, now is continuous with it. With climate change comes other change; because of other change comes climate change: a recursive engine, the Anthropocene. Our language, too, becomes altered.

 

On the Alaskan land there lives, sometimes intermingled with the incomers’ tellings, a prior mode of telling carried down in old stories, expressed in ancient languages in which sound traces and echoes of the Distant Time, the First Beginning. Thus, the importance of literature: of language; of including all that is needed, and nothing that is not; of finding the inner form of the narrative; of telling a true story.

Alaska — the whole North — is a land of dreams, a land of Imagination, through which we are always passing. The late Dena’ina Athabaskan writer Peter Kalifornsky described how his ancestors knew their world: “They lived life through Imagination, the power of the mind.”

What does this mean?

From Peter Kalifornsky I would learn that the stories say that everything that lives has its own spirit, its own life, and this life must be respected. They say that the spirit does not die but returns in a new body. They say that something unknown, something greater than the human mind, gives us what we breathe. The stories say that some people have the power to imagine: when the mind is touched by the spirit of another being, it gives form to that contact. In the mind, an image is formed that will be expressed to the people.

“The first stories came to the Dreamers,” he said.

 

In the First Beginning, the animals talked to the humans. They called humans the Campfire People.

A misunderstanding I’ve heard sometimes is that animals are innately benign, and that the “balance of nature” which before Contact seems to have existed between animals and Indigenous people was a happy thing, was about getting along together, was about mutuality. This is not quite accurate.

I was given a gift which carried, it seemed, danger: possibly to me, almost certainly to vulnerable Athabaskans. Ten years passed before I knew where to lay the gift down so it could return to its source. When I asked for advice along the way (I mean, of people other than Malfa), those Athabaskan women who would actually talk to me about this – very few, and they were elders – would say, without fail: “We can tell you what is true for us. But we don’t know what is true for white people.” We were alluding, cautiously, to great spiritual powers. I realized that I had to learn my own way, while trying not to cause harm.

 

It is not too much to say that, carrying the small pouch of wolverine bones, I knew I had entered a story, although I didn’t know its shape and, until long afterward, did not know its end. Even so, I knew that it was but an event in the timeless stories coursing through that country, which themselves come before whatever we humans might imagine. A traveler across literary frontiers, I wanted to learn to tell stories. But I also learned something else. I learned that we can tell ourselves the wrong story.

I am thinking about a conversation of more than twenty-five years ago with the late Barry Lopez. He was considering no longer writing for magazines, as he had done to make a living, after having come through a harrowing session with an eminent editor. He had journeyed into the immensity of the Brooks Range, to Anaktuvuk Pass, an Iñupiat village. The piece he turned in was very long. The editor called for drastic alterations. Barry’s desire had been for a prose that expanded both space and time, as he thought his did. The editor would not accept this. The sense of space, especially, would make readers “uneasy,” said the editor — they wanted facts, with which to orient themselves. Barry had composed four essential elements — not “facts” — in an open order: forming a circle, so to speak, around them. The editor suggested organizing the “three of them” hierarchically, in order of importance. “Three,” I said pointedly: “Three and one?” “Yeah,” said Barry, dryly. “Twos and fours always get changed: two terms need a third as mediator.” Even when you’re describing this conflict between more open and more hierarchical forms, he said, even if that’s your subject, they can’t hear it. More to the point, I said, they can’t bear it.

This is not a small point, when you think about it.

Not all stories are formed from beginning to middle to end. Some stories take other forms. For instance, a known Athabaskan story-form has been described, somewhat awkwardly, as having something like beginning-middle-middle-end. Put too simply, four is an organizing number in many Indigenous societies, as three has been in Graeco-Western traditions. In these multi-cultural days, the editor’s mythical “reader” may already understand this.

 

Here is another example. When Malfa Ivanov was at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, in the early ‘90s, a young woman student came up to her and asked if she was Native. (The young woman may have said “Inuit” or “Native American,” trying to be correct.) Malfa said she was. The young woman said she was preparing a presentation and asked if Malfa did beadwork. Malfa replied that she wasn’t an expert at it, but yes, she had beaded. The young woman said (as I recall Malfa’s anecdote), Oh. Thanks, but I need somebody authentic.

Imagine yourself in Malfa’s position.

 

A year or two after this account ends, Peter Kalifornsky told me a very old story, a sukdu, in which a starving man out searching for food for his people helps a little mouse over a windfall. He comes upon an enormous shelter and is invited to enter, after first turning three times with the sun. There reside a giant couple: the guardian of the animals and his wife, “the mother of everything over and over,” the mother of the animals. Later, in Fairbanks, I asked the Koyukon linguist Eliza Jones about these giants, whether they appeared also in stories from the Koyukuk River. I don’t recall my question precisely — it may have been about the mother of the animals — but her answer remains with me and has grown larger over the years. She said to me, “A spirit comes to a destitute person in a form he can recognize.”

This account is a work of nonfiction, a narrative of memory and deconstruction, set in 1984, with a flashback to the previous year and a conclusion in present time. The people, places, and events were real and are described as they occurred; the names of towns — Fairbanks, McGrath, Nenana — are as they appear on maps, as are the rivers’: the Yukon, the Koyukuk, the Tanana, the Kuskokwim; but the names of most persons and villages have been disguised for the sake of what remains of their privacy. I’ve employed this courtesy because this is a true account, a sort of mythopoeic travel book which draws from, but isn’t limited by, practices of ethnography, poetics, historiography, cultural studies, and memoir.  It does not embellish; nor does it fantasize. But nor does it intend to embarrass anyone but myself. The narrator, who may have been, after all, a destitute person, is a white American traveler drawn into the Alaskan Interior, where she lived and worked among Native people as a poet and where she learned a way to see the country.

 

Katherine McNamara

Charlottesville, Virginia, January 2022

*Notes:

an itinerant poet in village schools: This was between 1976 and 1983. In 1976, Tobeluk v. Lind (the “Molly Hootch case”) required the State to build high schools in all villages, so that children beyond sixth grade would not be sent to boarding schools, as they had been sent for several generations, depriving them of parenting and cultural instruction during their vulnerable teenaged years. I traveled to a number of these new village schools, as noted in this book; I observed good teachers, but also some egregiously terrible, hurtful teachers, nearly all non-Native. In this work, I tell how Malfa wished to become a teacher, through the old field-based program X-CED. (I wrote about rural schooling for Cultural Survival.)

As has been reported regularly and is currently a front-page story in Canada and the U.S., Indigenous students suffered suppression of language, forced behavioral changes, sexual molestation, even death in boarding schools. A useful timeline of non-Native schooling in Alaska has been assembled by Jane Haigh: https://sites.kpc.alaska.edu/jhaighalaskahistory/history-of-alaska-native-education/.

See also:

Katherine McNamara, Narrow Road to the Deep North

From the First Beginning, When the Animals Were Talking

From the Believing Time, When They Tested for the Truth

photo: A storm coming in over Creamer’s Field, Fairbanks, Alaska, 1984. Katherine McNamara

 

 

 

Storm coming in, Fairbanks, Alaska, 2004

I’m pleased to announce our publication The Heart Is A Drowning Object, an artists book, a collaboration between three women who with their art explore the workings of grief on a woman’s body in the face of possible loss, her descent into profound solitude, her unexpected emergence into joy.

Isabel Pavão is an internationally-known visual artist working in various pictorial and tactile media. Katherine Vaz is a novelist whose work appears in many languages. Together, exchanging versions of poems — sounds into words, words into lines — and paintings — marks on paper, collaged, photographed and printed, then marked again and intensified — they made a dialog of emotion on the skin, echoing in the mind.

Now they asked themselves, can we put poems and pictures together on our computer screen? They made a Power Point. That is where I came in. It was awful! Look, I said. The lines are crowded and smashed against the images, and why did you use Helvetica? Hmm, they said. We didn’t think about it.

Your poems are deeply moving, I said. Your pictures are gorgeous! But you have to think about fonts. Friends, you do have to think about fonts.

I proposed taking their dialog into my own medium, this multi-touch construction for the iPad and Mac. What we’ll have, I explained, is a new version, in a new form, of your dialog. Let me lay out these lines and art. Let’s record your voice, Katherine Vaz. Isabel Pavão, we can let readers explore your images in detail. I’ll make a little video poem.

And so on. Over the last six months we exchanged edits and revisions, until our various elements settled into place on the screen. Here is an intimacy between you and the artists. You can read her poems as you listen to the poet. You can follow the artist’s line deep into the slubs of her canvas. The video poem offers you their voices as if in harmony with your eyes as they move across the canvas of the screen. You and the artists are present to each other. We give our artists book today into your hands.

About the book and how to order it.

From the Believing Time, When They Tested for the Truth is now available on Apple Books. It contains Peter Kalifornsky’s stories of marvels: the great invisible powers and the moral—sometime mortal—tests the old Dena’ina underwent to prove to themselves whether their beliefs were true.

In our long discussions about these stories, he tells how their minds worked. “They lived life through Imagination,” he said, “the power of the mind.”

He explained what this meant. The word for Imagination is eynik’ delnish. It implies a theory of mind. Eynik’is joined from the words for “in between” and “nose,” to mean: Something—a spirit—works on the mind invisibly, contacting it; implying: breathing into it. Delnish is a jointed word meaning “it turns over,” the motion of turning side to side, regularly, cyclically, as the seasons turn; and is related both to “nose” (breathing) and dnelnish, the pattern that we recognize: the truth that underlies our making sense of the world.

The Dena’ina did not recognize a duality of real/unreal between the incorporeal vision and material beings, although they recognized that the imagination might work “for nothing,” which Peter associated with fantasy or useless thinking, solipsism. In their world, everything that existed had its own spirit, and truth occurred when the spirits of two things connected with one another. The power of the mind was to see the image of this connection. It appeared as a vision, to an alert, conscious person. This was real, and it was a truth to be tested.

I suggested that our word inspiration, in-breathing, the oldest sense of the poetic imagination, also corresponded to this form. “An inspired imagination” might convey this sense of connection.

But it is a deeper experience to read him — his stories, his commentary — than my interpretation.

In this new volume, Peter Kalifornsky explores how the Dena’ina were willing to test the truth of their dreams and beliefs, by going up against great powers—the great invisible power that the k’ech’eltanen followed; the animal powers, of which bear’s was the greatest; the various shamanic powers; the Man Whose Word Comes True—for the sake of learning truth. They put their very lives at risk, according to the stories. And why was this so? There is a mystery that he said should go at the end of every story:

Yadidi sukdu egh? k’ushta beq’eynikdelnik. What is this story about? We cannot find what is behind it.

Sukdu beq’ quht’ana ghuda ch’ulani. The story lays a trail before us; we follow it to become human.

Bech’ nayich’chi. Something gives us what we breathe. What is it?

 

The Kalifornsky Project Journal

 

 “Long time ago the Dena’ina did not have songs and stories. Then came the time that Crow sang for them. Till then, as they worked together and traveled, they chanted di ya du hu to keep them in time.                                                                                                                                                             Peter Kalifornsky, “Crow Story”      From the First Beginning, When the Animals Were Talking

Artist’s Proof Editions has just opened its first crowd-funder, the Kalifornsky Project on Indiegogo. I’ve got more to tell you, here, but, from the beginning, if you think it worth supporting, Artist’s Proof and I will be very grateful for your donation.

Peter Kalifornsky (1911-1993) was the first writer and the last native speaker of his dialect of Dena’ina, an Alaskan Athabaskan language. For his Dena’ina texts he was praised as a literary stylist. He was also an intellectual, who, with his theory of writing and meaning, preserved his native language, adapting the writing system he was given to the intrinsic patterns of his tongue. He was the author of traditional stories, essays, songs, word lists, commentaries. But he wanted to tell us more: the“back story,” he called it, a way of knowing the world, the visible and the invisible, which is rich, profound, demanding. Yet, he knew he would never write it, in either Dena’ina or English. He asked for a secretary.

I was an itinerant poet and an independent scholar and had lived in Athabaskan country for some years. I became his secretary.

At some time during the early 1980s, I was given a book of stories by this writer, Peter Kalifornsky, who, through his language, was related to people in whose village I had lived for a while. I was told that he was of the stature of, for example, Amos Tutuola. The stories were in Dena’ina and English, though not in fluent translations. But you could tell that this was a writer, in every sense we know the word.

One story caught my attention and then began to live with me, the “Crow Story,” about how Crow—the great Raven; they would not name a powerful creature directly—gave the first songs and stories to the People Who Sit Around the Campfire. It is a funny, clever story full of wonders. What did it mean? I thought I saw something in it, but wanted to ask the author if I had got it right.

Peter Kalifornsky was a charming host, pleased that a visitor wanted to talk about meaning. He persuaded me to return, with pen and paper in hand. For five years, I returned, again and again, with pen and paper in hand. I listened; I wrote; I asked questions; I wrote, until he joked about my “little hand making chicken scratches.” And so we went on, until by 1988, I had hundreds of pages of our translations of his stories—and of all the new stories he had written since we began talking—and of our conversations, linked by footnotes to his texts. It was an impossible manuscript.

And then he died, in 1993. Time passed. About six years ago, I returned to the task: how to prepare this manuscript for publication. I opened the box it had lain in for nearly twenty years and found (how could I have forgotten) not only the 800+ manuscript, but also: cassette tapes, for Peter Kalifornsky had recorded himself reading in Dena’ina so that we would always know how to pronounce his tongue. A Xeroxed copy of his own manuscript, also given to me. Annotated copies of his earlier publications. My hand-written field notes. Other memorabilia. None of it digitized. How to turn this glorious collection into—a book? A digital archive? A what-to-make-of-this?

And here came the iPad, and here came Apple’s free application for making books, the iBooks Author. And here came, suddenly, a sense of possibility: I could take all this beautiful material, digitize it carefully, and put it on the iPad. And Peter Kalifornsky’s people—the rest of us, too, for he did not exclude us, but welcomed us into his language—could hold his knowledge in their hands. They could read, they could hear his voice, they could examine scanned copies of his manuscript pages. They  could learn what he had wanted to tell them. “They lived life through Imagination,” he said of the Old Dena’ina, “the power of the mind.”

As we all can read and listen and imagine. At Artist’s Proof, I’ve published the first of the four volumes of his writings, our conversations, his digitized sound files, images of his manuscript, notes. Three more volumes will follow (I update Vol. 1 periodically), till the work he entrusted to me is completed, and I can take it home.

  • Vol. 1, From the First Beginning, When the Animals Were Talking: the Animal Stories
  • Vol. 2, From the Believing Time, When They Tested for the Truth
  • Vol. 3, From the Time of Law and Education
  • Vol. 4, From the Time When Things Have Been Happening to the People (“the last two or three thousand years!”)

Please join me in this enormous, thrilling work. Welcome. Thank you.

 

Andraž and Tomaž Šalamun

Andraž and Tomaž Šalamun,
sitting in green armchairs,
two awesome salesmen from the least.
(I meant to write from the east,
but mistyped.)
He with his madness,
I with my Christ.
Both of us stare at the smoke.

Yeah, I fuck his brain.
He loves my cries.
(I meant to write Christ,
but mistyped,
word of honor in both
cases.)
The same, mum!

 

Tomaž Šalamun died today. Most of us read him only in translation. Was he as sardonic, as bitter, as jocular, as raunchy a poet in Slovenian? Even more, I’d guess. He was called an absurdist, which seems the only possible response in words to much of life, even in New York, where he came to live. He was a friend of some people I knew here; they liked the man very much.

Howard Sidenberg, founder of the estimable English-language press The Twisted Spoon in Prague, brought out A Ballad for Metka Krašovec, translated by Michael Biggins, in 2001, and offered me a selection of the poems for Archipelago. The volume “offers readers a unique opportunity to glimpse the author at a particular stage in his life and creative development, the poems ranging from the incantatory to reflections on his lovers, family, and country, to narrative-style recollections of stays in Mexico and the United States.”

I’ve not found this volume listed in Šalamun’s conventional bibliography. I thought it might be good to recall the book as we remember the poet. The picture, which graced A Ballad for Metka Krašovec, was of his mother.

 

Prologue I

God is made of wood and doused in gasoline.
I take a cigarette to burn a spider’s leg.

The gentle swaying of grasses in the wind.
Heaven’s vault is cruel.

 

Tomaž Šalamun, “From A Ballad for Metka Krašovec,”  tr. Michael Biggins. Archipelago, Vol. 5, No. 1
_________, The Poetry Foundation
_________, The Twisted Spoon

The poet Samuel Menashe died a little more than three years ago, on August 26, 2011. I hadn’t seen him in a while. We were introduced at a writers’ party on the Upper West Side and discovered our mutual interest in Hubert Butler. We had both visited Maidenhall; we knew a number of Irish people in common; and he, who was much older than I, had met Hubert and Peggy Butler. Some thought he was Irish, as he went there often, and poems of his were published there and published well. He began reciting, beautifully, in his cantorial baritone. 

O Lady lonely as a stone

Even here moss has grown.

I used to visit him when I still went to New York. Once he took me to lunch — was it? or to supper? or for a glass of wine?; or, I invited him — to the Boathouse, in Central Park. He was courtly, with worn collar and cuffs, white hair curling over his collar, just a bit disheveled. He pointed out to me the gondolier, who swept his long boat hopefully to our water-side table, then floated away as Samuel began telling his poems.

He gave me six poems for Archipelago, from The Niche Narrows.

The Offering

Flowers, not bread

Cast upon the water—

The dead outlast

Whatever we offer

Several years later, I asked him for more. He promised some wonderful poems which he said were variations on poems about to appear, or on old poems. Instead he sent a war story. He was 19 when he went for a soldier, in 1943, and his best friend died. He fought at the Battle of the Bulge.

Today, for a while, I wished that I had died instead of him because I think that his life would have been better than mine now is — though I have all my limbs and my senses.  Two months ago, I was thirty and I am still in pretty good form — I am just beginning to wrinkle around the eyes — but as I once said to myself with sudden sententious knowledge, a young man who go[es] to war should die.  Don’t try to make me defend this statement.  Either one knows it for oneself or one does not know it.  I think it tells the truth but not for everyone. (“Well Everyone Must Die and Today Was the 11th of December”)

“In 1950,” he wrote, “I presented a thesis at the Sorbonne called Un essai sur l’éxperience poetique (étude introspective). By poetic experience, I meant that awareness which is the source of poetry. I had been a biochemistry major before enlisting. Although I was well read for my age, the only literary influences on my word so far as I can tell were the short poems of William Blake and the English translations of the Hebrew Bible. ‘The still small voice’ of Elijah was my article of faith.” 

He did send me more poems, later, and was pleased by the title I suggested for them: Eyes Open to Praise, from “Hallelujah.” He said, “You’ve understood my work well. It is one of the most important lines I’ve ever written. Indeed, it’s pre-speech in its meaning, isn’t it?” I can almost hear his joyous laugh. He was a joyful man. I wonder if his joy was not a true act of perfect will.

His first language was Yiddish; his second, English, at age 5; his third, French, age 11. He loved his mother and father; his poems about them are affecting.

Stephen Spender: “Samuel Menashe is a poet of entirely Jewish consciousness, though on a scale almost minuscule. He is not one of the prophets, concerned with exodus, exile, and lamentation: but he is certainly a witness to the sacredness of the nation in all circumstances in life and in death. His poetry constantly reminds me of some kind of Biblical instrument — tabor or jubal — and the note it strikes is always positive and even joyous. His scale is, I repeat, very small, but he can compress an attitude to life that has an immense history into three lines.”

He was never given to length. His work unaccountably was not more widely known in this country, though it was brilliantly published in England and Ireland; but it is known by the best of serious poets. He won the Pegasus Prize “Neglected Masters” awarded by the Poetry Foundation. As part of the award, his Selected Poems was published, with an introduction by Christopher Ricks, by the Library of America in Autumn 2005. The composer Otto Leunig drew the text of his cantata No Jerusalem But This from two collections by Samuel, The Many Named Beloved and No Jerusalem But This, which included the poems I put in Archipelago. Between 2005 and 2010, the composer Ben Yarmolinsky set 37 of Samuel’s poems to music, for solo voice with accompaniment.

There is a little video of Samuel in his small apartment on Thompson Street. He is telling his poems, as he loved to do. A friend wrote me after seeing it, “I could describe every decayed, cluttered corner, crack in ceiling, desk, layering on bathtub board. Terrifying to think of living that way but he wears it all like his comfortable grey suit. I wonder if he was an Orthodox Jew, who seem to feel that cleanliness is unholy, and yet there are volumes in the bible on cleanness.”

I am so happy remembering him.

 

Hallelujah

Eyes open to praise

The play of light

Upon the ceiling—

While still abed raise

The roof this morning

Rejoice as you please

Your Maker who made

This day while you slept,

Who gives grace and ease,

Whose promise is kept.

 

For further reading:

Samuel Menashe: New and Selected Poems, Expanded Edition. Christopher Ricks, ed. iBooks

Eyes Open to Praise, Archipelago, Vol. 8, No. 4

Six Poems, Archipelago, Vol. 5, No. 2

Poetry Foundation 

Poetry Archive 

Library of America 

Library of America American Poets Project

Ben Yarmolinsky, Setting Samuel Menashe’s poetry to music

 

 

A few days ago, Mr. Willie Louis died, aged 76. As an unimaginably frightened, incredibly brave young man, aged 18, he had testified at the trial of the killers of Emmett Till, who were found not guilty, though they were guilty. His name then was Willie Reed. He changed to Willie Louis, after having escaped in hiding from Mississippi and going to Chicago, where he lived “discreetly,” according to the Times, and worked as a hospital orderly.

I don’t think we ought to forget him, or what happened in 1955 near Money, Mississippi, when two white men beat the 14-year old Emmett Till to death for verbally insulting (as they saw it) a white woman. A boy who found himself in the wrong neighborhood.

You might wish to read this account of the trial by the important African American reporter James L. Hicks, which I published ten years in Archipelago, all the while remembering that, if we are indeed a nation of laws, not men, the laws, and their administration, are very often subject to the wilful interpretation of men. We might recall a recent trial in Florida, State of Florida v. George Zimmerman, in which an armed man who killed an unarmed youth (the age of Willie Reed as he was then), and was found not guilty of taking a life. We might recall the recent Supreme Court decision Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted our most important, far-reaching, successful civil rights legislation, the Voting Rights Act (1965).

Lives. Votes. Laws. Men.

 

 

“They Stand Accused by C-P Reporter:

Jimmy Hicks Charges Mss. Officials Aided Lynchers”

James L. Hicks, Cleveland Call and Post, October 8, 1955

New York, N.Y. — Here for the first time is the true story of what happened in the hectic five-day trial of two white men in Sumner, Mississippi, for the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till of Chicago.

This story has never been written before. I did not write it in Mississippi for fear of bodily harm to myself, and to my colleagues.

No one else has written it because no one else in the capacity of a reporter lived as close to it as I did.

Looking back on it now, I am ashamed that I did not throw caution to the winds and at least try to get out the story exactly as it was unfolding to me. I’m convinced, however, that if I had tried this, I would not be here in New York to write this.

. . .

I finally charge that if Leroy Collins is brought forward at this date and given all opportunity to talk where he is assured that he is not in any danger, he will be able to tell where Henry Lee Loggins is and that the two of them will prove to be the two colored men who were seen on the truck the night of the murder by Moses Wright and Willie Reed.

I believe that Henry Lee Loggins is dead and that he was disposed of because he knew too much about the case.

These are serious charges. But I welcome this opportunity to write down the evidence on which they are based.

This is the fantastic story as lived by this reporter:

 

Above is a digitized image of a photograph of Emmett Till, aged 13, taken by his mother.

Here is a photograph of Emmett Till’s encoffined remains, displayed openly at his mother’s insistence.

Emmit_Till_body

 

(Both images via Wikipedia, judged as fair use.)

 “We are not the country we say we are. What we are arguing about is the distance between the two.”

 

In the June 2002 issue of Archipelago, I published an important speech by then-Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis), the only United States senator to have voted against the USA PATRIOT Act. This speech is still timely, even as the recent leaks about the extent of NSA intercepts of metadata (and who knows what else, or how they’ve been doing it?) seem to have come as a huge surprise to so many people who should have been aware that we had long since become the National Security State. Even the usual pundits seem taken aback, as they scramble to accommodate to what they sort of knew, sort of didn’t know, and don’t really understand, because not many of us really comprehend how much we are, all of us, enmeshed systemmatically in Big Data.

Does NSA know more about any of us than Google does? Than Facebook? What are they going to do with all those data? The political blogger Charles Pierce cuts to the chase, or one of the chases — because there are parallel runs on this matter of collecting information about citizens/customers/suspects — by circling back around:

 

“First of all, it’s past time to re-examine everything that was done in such a panic after 9/11. Daniel Patrick Moynihan was warning us about the NSA and secrecy three decades ago. Jim Bamford has made his living writing about the NSA. These problems are not new. This re-evaluation especially includes the Patriot Act, which keeps getting renewed by a Congress which long ago abdicated its oversight role in intelligence as thoroughly as it has abdicated its War Powers. . . .

“Fear is the new normal. I lived through the Church Committee hearings. That was the last time the secret state-within-a-state was revealed to this extent, and that was by an empowered congressional committee. Business as usual opened again in 1980. We are not the country we say we are. What we are arguing about is the distance between the two.”

About a dozen years ago, the historic legal reading of the Second Amendment — that it pertained to rights and responsibilities of state-based milita and their armaments, but not to individual rights to own guns — was sharply upended and re-interpreted to allow nearly unlimited personal ownership of rifles and pistols, including those designed as man-killers. I thought the subject worth close attention and ran an occasional series in Archipelago called Living With Guns. An essay was sent me by Mary-Sherman Willis, based in family history, about a bloody battle in May 1856, in the Kansas-Missouri Border Wars. I published it: “The Fight for Kansas.” It remains relevant, because of its double subject, guns and the de facto civil war being fought on the Western selvedges of a fraying nation.

I bring the essay to your attention because of its merits, and because Mary-Sherman Willis is the author of Caveboy, A Poem, our inaugural title at Artist’s Proof Editions, a nice coincidence.

Welcome. Artist’s Proof Editions is the new venture from Archipelago Publishers, and Archipelago, the journal I published on the Web from March 1997 to March 2007. Archipelago was an old-fashioned site, each quarterly issue built by hand  in HTML, with even older-fashioned literary values loyal to the printed text. But the Web changed my mind. This new construct wasn’t — it turned out — just a way of imitating words on paper, distributing them across borders. This new medium was a cat’s-cradle of light-threads. Our words danced along those threads like dust motes. All that was solid melts into air. Our journal is ended now but remains on the Web, enmeshed in those light-threads.

And what follows? Well, we know, now, that the codex is not the only book. Here came the iPad, little window for the hand, and we guessed at once some new kind of making and reading was going to come of it. Here is our first contribution. Artist’s Proof Editions has now published the very fine chapbook Caveboy, A Poem, by Mary-Sherman Willis, with art by Collin Willis. An edition — the multi-touch book (as Apple likes to call it) — for the iPad. An edition for the hand, an old-fashioned artist’s book typed, lovingly and furiously, and assembled of paper and paste. Come and read.