A Moving Object
March 18, 2008    File under: Alabama , America , Civil Rights , Denver , Editing , Food , Information Technology , Intake , Interior Monologue , Labwork , Language , Listening , Lomography / Photography , Memory & Memorial , Poetry & Poetics , Postcards , Self-promotion , Steganography , Tapeworm , Teaching , The South

For my RSS readers, I am radically redesigning my entire site, so the blog root and RSS feeds are changing. Please visit me at www.jakeadamyork.com and let's go from there. It will probably be another 2-3 weeks before all the RSS feeds are in place, but maybe you can take a gander and let me know what you think of the new look and function until then.

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With Signs Following
September 3, 2007    File under: America , Lomography / Photography , The South

It's here. And I'm proud as a brother that my brother has made and published these photographs.

But, also as a native and a student of the South, I'm grateful for this work.

Because, I'm Joe's brother, it's hard to pretend to any sort of objectivity, but this book is one of those I would immediately have to buy had I seen it in a bookstore, for here is a window on the world through which I drove for many years, the cross-haunted landscape of the Deep South, often grayed through weather or familiarity, but always indelibly signed with the signs of Christ, of God, of church — from simple roadside memorials to the folk-apocalyptic sculpture gardens like W. C. Rice's Cross Garden in Prattville, Alabama.

Maybe all of the South is like this. I remember when I used to drive I-77 and I-81 into the middle of Virginia, I'd see a trio of crosses from Galax to Wytheville and beyond, almost alarming in their size, uniformity, and ubiquity, and also challenging insofar as the center cross was often painted yellow or gold, which I thought somehow missed one of the points of Jesus's crucifixion, among the lowly from whom he never stood apart.

But—maybe because I've logged more road-hours in Alabama than anywhere else and because that's where my brother's logged most of his road-hours—the scenes in this book take me back, both to Deep South roadside and to the practice of driving just to drive, to think, and being caught be these signs more often than I can remember.

You can get a preview here.

This weekend's celebration was wonderful, and it involved lots of eating, on which more soon (we have photos), but for now, let me say, go get this book.

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Migration
May 16, 2007    File under: Alabama , America , Denver , Editing , Information Technology , Intake , Interior Monologue , Language , Lomography / Photography , Memory & Memorial , Poetry & Poetics , Postcards , Self-promotion , Steganography , Tapeworm , Teaching , The South

This is for those of you who read my blog via RSS...

I am considering, very strongly, moving to WordPress in the very near future. I've already arranged a version of the Ladder at http://www.jakeadamyork.com/wp/, and I'm leaning heavily toward switching, in which case the feed addresses will certainly change. I will broadcast a warning before it happens however.

If you're reading via RSS, you probably aren't much concerned with the way the site looks, but if you're at all interested, please take a look and let me know what you think.

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Jimmie Lee Jackson
May 10, 2007    File under: Alabama , Memory & Memorial , The South

There are new indictments in the 1965 murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson.

For the last year I've been talking about this very case. The title poem of my new book, A Murmuration of Starlings, is about the murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson.

I'm glad to see this case is not slipping into memory, or from memory, but I'm sure what ensues will be interesting in many, many ways. Says James Bernard Fowler, the former Alabama State Trooper who, it seems, has been indicted for Jackson's murder: "The DA is trying to get a pound of flesh for civil rights, and I guess he's getting it from me" (source).

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New
August 6, 2006    File under: Editing , Information Technology , Poetry & Poetics , The South

The new issue of storySouth is up, with some redesign, by me, that I'm still working through.

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On Community
July 31, 2006    File under: Alabama , Denver , Information Technology , Poetry & Poetics , The South

For no good reason I looked at my stats for July. The month is ending, but I haven't looked at my stats in maybe five or six months. Probably because I thought I was going to give up the blog. Also because I had much else on my mind, a lot of life changes, a new book, &c. I see today I'm averaging about 120 visitors a day.

I suppose this is good news. At one time, I would have smiled at this. And perhaps I will, tomorrow, but at present I'm mostly confused, because I haven't the faintest idea who reads this.

...

How do you know your community? How do you know what your community is, your place in it, what community to which you belong?

I used to think the answers were fairly straightforward. I used to think direct reciprocity was the best sign. You approach someone. They approach you back. In the face to face lay a recognition in which mutuality could be registered and in which community could begin. But when I think this way, I sometimes get depressed, as I am reminded again and again what gestures I've made that have not been answered, and I'm not sure if that means my gestures failed, if the lack of answer means I'm not welcomed in some conversations, if I am asked to remain apart, if I am persona non grata.

I've been counselled recently against making stuff up, assuming that the reasons are negative, against imagining the motives or the thoughts of others.

And I've entered two conversations lately that have me thinking reciprocity may be a misdirection.

I was reading today another blog, which I found through yet another blog, in which our writer discussed the feeling we can have that we need to have or are supposed to have a spiritual experience after trying to push toward one and how frustrating it is when the experience doesn't happen. We work toward the spiritual but don't arrive. The writer suggested that the sense of work must be abandoned. You can't invest yourself toward the spiritual. But you can make yourself receptive. This struck me as true, recalling how, even in my most serious religious disciplines, I felt not the transforming encounter with spirit I imagined but the structure of discpline, and the comfort a community in which reciprocity situated me. My transforming encounters occurred when I stopped asking, stopped insisting, when I just shut up.

I'm thinking, too, about an exchange I had recently in the context of a salon discussion about writing and the senses.

I was advocating for what I called a transsubstantial writing, in which one commits to putting everything into the poem, all the sensory information that can be gathered, so the poem would become not the report of the experience that might evoke response, but instead the form of the experience, such that it might be replicable in someone else. I said you put your concentration into the poem, and a reader taking the poem for the substance of the world for a moment might enter into that concentration. The poet does not withhold but provides and a serious reader, entering fully into the poem, enters what's provided, what experience. The poem is like messenger RNA, providing the ends to which a reader's knowledge might be joined, allowing for some replication. The poet doesn't endeavor to become immortal, but the poet makes way into places and lives and states neither he nor she could imagine. Through the poem, experience has a wider ken, and it can draw us together in an ethical relationship.

Someone in the audience asked what I meant by a relationship, how I would call it a relationship especially if I never knew who read my poem, if they never wrote me or told me. How is literature a medium for relation?

I was thinking of Whitman, of the seventh and eigth sections of "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry":

7

Closer yet I approach you,
What thought you have of me now, I had as much of you—I laid in my stores in advance,
I consider'd long and seriously of you before you were born.

Who was to know what should come home to me?
Who knows but I am enjoying this?
Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?


8

Ah, what can ever be more stately and admirable to me than mast-hemm'd Manhattan?
River and sunset and scallop-edg'd waves of flood-tide?
The sea-gulls oscillating their bodies, the hay-boat in the twilight, and the belated lighter?
What gods can exceed these that clasp me by the hand, and with voices I love call me promptly and loudly by my nighest name as approach?
What is more subtle than this which ties me to the woman or man that looks in my face?
Which fuses me into you now, and pours my meaning into you?

We understand then do we not?
What I promis'd without mentioning it, have you not accepted?
What the study could not teach-what the preaching could not accomplish is accomplish'd, is it not?

Whitman was fond of thinking the book, the form he'd chosen for the poems, into his texts. Knowing the reader would hold the book, he imagined the reader holding it, and began using that book, that thing in the reader's hand, as a meeting place. For Whitman, the book was a structure for delay of relational attention, for holding his curiosity and later delivering it to a reader (if anyone's interested, I did the scholarship on this in an article that appeared in Walt Whitman Quarterly Review back in 2001). He knew the relationship would be asymmetrical, that he might never have the return gesture, but he trusted that his hand — his physical hand, yes, but more to the point his writing, his handwriting that then became translated into the type in the book, which was designed for the hand (why he shrunk the 1856 and 1860 editions to better fit the traveling hand)— went out, open, and that it would find some hand.

So, too, I need to enter a renewed trust.

...

I do wonder, however, who reads my ladder, in part because, as a poet, I wonder where I fit, where I operate. My teachers, I would say, were what would be considered conservative, and I believe that I write poems that others would consider conservative. Richard Greenfield once described my work that way, meaning that I still held useful old concepts of line and poetic genre. And I think anyone who'd read Murder Ballads might agree: I wrote the book, most often, in song lines. Yet, I don't feel entirely comfortable understanding my self and my work situated in a community defined by poetic conservatism of one kind or another, for I value the conversation of Richard Greenfield, of Noah Eli Gordon, of Joshua Marie Wilkinson, of Hadara Bar-Nadav, of Major Jackson, of Natasha Tretheway, of Dan Albergotti, of Simmons Buntin, of Zachary Schomburg, of Adam Clay, of Tony Tost, of Joshua Poteat, of Shanna Compton, of Aaron Anstett, of Steve Mueske, of Stephen Schroeder, of Craig Arnold, of Larissa Szporluk, of Diann Blakely, of Gina Franco, and the less direct exchange I find in reading the books and blogs of Joshua Corey, Joshua Clover, Richard Siken, Gabriel Gudding, Elizabeth Robinson, and so many others. I find myself moving between two kinds of communities that have long been thought of as separate, opposed, and I have no idea what this means.

At times I'm a ghost, at others a distant greeting. Most often an open hand that, I hope, doesn't look like a slap about to happen.

...

Reader, who are you?

Where are you, so I might know, between you, where I am today?

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The Sound of Real
July 6, 2006    File under: America , Information Technology , The South

Yesterday, I picked up the latest Cash CD which I am enjoying, though more than ever I am thinking about the sound of his oldness, which seems more and more important to the experience of Cash in recent years. In the most immediate frame, it's impressive in its expressiveness, not of anything in particular beyond hurt or pain, an audible measure not simply of age but of pathos and thereby of artistry. But, of course, it's also a measure of his venerability, his longevity, even of his particular biographical difficulties, his long abuse of alcohol and drugs and, more recently, the loss of June Carter Cash. And in this disc, the sound is here, the slight tired that has become the timbre of the last few volumes of the American recordings and even the interesting hiccups in the tempos of the songs, Cash's variance with the traditions he continues to engage, something you can hear precisely because so many of the songs are covers.

Like Paul, I'm taken with "God's Gonna Cut You Down," which seems to address the not-too-old performance of it (under the title "Run On For A Long Time") by the Blind Boys of Alabama. In Cash's version, drums and hand-claps help build the country-church feel that's important to the song while an acoustic guitar, played with a slide, connects the performance to the blues tradition; in the Blind Boys' version, an upright bass carried both melody and rhythm under the gospel harmonies that made me forget that even Elvis recorded this tune.

There's a wonderful feeling in the Cash album, all the way through, and it's especially audible in this song when Cash sings about God's calling him by name, by his first name. Against the background of the Cash legend, we are invited to read the song as a miniature narrative of his conversion from his hard-drinking years, a turn back to gospel roots, which is exactly what the song calls for. There's something anamnestic about it. Strongly so.

Powerful as it is in its narrative and in its self-reading, it wouldn't be nearly as affecting, I think, if it weren't so heavily acoustic. Everything here is acoustic, from the percussion to the accompaniment, to the voice. This is, again, part of the second or third coming of Cash, the unadorned, the stripped down, the bare to the barren. But in moments like these when Cash addresses a blues tradition, the acoustic—the aggressively acoustic qualities capture me particularly.

I'm now working on a lecture about the electrification of the blues and the ways in which, historically, acoustic and electric sounds have connoted sincerity (or the lack of it), with deeping interest in the racial complexity of blues diasporas, and my time with this latest Cash record is helping me bring it, somewhat, into focus.

Blues, guitar-based blues, is rooted in the Mississippi Delta. The recordings of Delta musicians in the Delta itself are often referred to as country blues, though this must be a retronym, something applied to the music after it had, in some obvious persons, moved to the city, most notably to Chicago, for what distinguishes country blues from the Chicago-based blues of, say, Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf (both of whom recorded some early work in the Delta, is electricity. The tonality is the same, the scales are the same, the rhythm is the same, even the songs are the same, in some cases. Once blues moves to the city, it is louder, and it gains some new timbres—Muddy's guitar, for example, gets a little cleaner in its high-note slide solos, Hubert Sumlin's work on Wolf's records can also organize around various single-note lines rather than voluminous chords that mark the work of someone like Mississippi Fred McDowell—but in many ways, it's the same music. As Muddy Waters once explained, they just plugged in to be heard.

Ironically, however, despite a relatively strong increase in audience through the agency of modern record companies and radio stations and an importantly influential hold on American music in the late 1950s and early 1960s, in some ways the electrification of the blues ensured the gradual silencing of the blues. Electrified and citified, the blues seemed to become more accessible to white listeners and, more importantly, to white musicians, who adopted blues forms, especially blues solo guitar, and by the mid-1960s the most popular blues musicians in the world may have been the Rolling Stones.

To the Stones' credit, they did a lot to recognize the influence and the importance of black blues musicians. As Muddy Waters would say: "Before the Rolling Stones, people didn't know anything about me and didn't want to know anything. I was making records that were called 'race records'. Then the Rolling Stones and other English bands came along, playing this music, and now the kids are buying my records and listening to them."

But at the same time that the rise of blues-inflected British rock was becoming more and more popular and drawing attention to blues music, the interest of many white consumers turned to the country blues, and musicologists and afficianados scoured the country in search of new talents and lost musicians, like Son House, who was "re-discovered" in Rochester, New York, in 1964 (or so), and brought to public attention as a solo acoustic guitar player and singer. More and more, authenticity of black blues music was measured by the lack of electricity. More largely, sincerity itself, in the cultural imagination, seems to have been tied to lack of electricity, as is witnessed in the uproar over Dylan's acoustic set at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 (or in the story of this uproar, which some dismiss as legend).

Though against these developments the perseverence of musicians like Muddy Waters and the emergence of funk and the continued rise of James Brown as a major music figure are all even more miraculous than they seem at first, there's still something about the association of sincerity with the acoustic sound that is especially tragic for the blues musicians, especially since folks like Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf had to move north to gain access to electricity, even at a time when the South was extensively wired for electricity. There's something about the situation in the mid-1960s that requires blues music to return to the Delta, to sound poor, even when the increased prosperity of some of the genre's greatest musicians is largely dependent on their move out of that Delta.

Now the Delta is thoroughly electrified, in its music especially, as the work of greats like Junior Kimbrough and R. L. Burnside show, and the electric North Mississippi sound has made bands like The Black Keys possible. Even the White Stripes betray a strong North Mississippi influence as they cover songs like Son House's "Death Letter." And in many ways, this issue of authenticity seems historical rather than contemporary.

But in Cash, it's all renewed. At least for me.

I remember getting the first American Recordings album and thinking, as Cash alternated between songs of devilment and songs of prayer, that in many ways this was an answer to, if not an out-and-out remake of, Son House's Delta Blues and Spirituals. Of course, the rhythm isn't peculiar to blues, and it's even a bit problematic to separate blues from country or folk music fundamentally, especially since the musics were very closely intertwined in the days of the Mississippi Sheiks and Jimmie Rodgers, before "race records" were introduced as market segmenting devices. But Cash, in the studio with Rick Rubin, manages to evoke the intersections of race in American music since the mid-1930s.

That Cash, as a singer and song-writer, shares gospel roots with musicians like the Blind Boys of Alabama, makes this sort of evocation inevitable. That the present offering sounds so wonderful, so energetic, makes me wonder at the status of the racial dimension in this music and at how long it will continue to be a part of the experience of this music. That Cash also sounds tired in places makes me wonder if this will fade, something I both want and do not want.

Is there a peace that won't forget? And if so, what will it sound like? Will it sound real? And can we sing it together?

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Unseen Images of the Civil Rights Movement
February 27, 2006    File under: Alabama , America , The South

Go here now.

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Walking History
January 13, 2006    File under: Alabama , America , The South

Byron Williams writes over at The Huffington Post that he wants "a different King," a different Martin Luther King, Jr., than the one most at play in the popular culture. Williams prefers the uncompromising King of the "Letter from Birmingham Jail" to the less threatening King of the "I Have A Dream" speech and to the imminently-ascending King of "I've Been To the Mountaintop."

Williams writes:

If one dares to conduct a modicum of research, they may soon discover that contrary to the myth, the "I Have a Dream" speech may not be representative of King's best work of 1963, let alone his lifetime.

Earlier that year, King wrote his "Letter from Birmingham Jail," which was a radical, non conformist response to an open letter by eight white clergy that believed his methods were extreme and precipitated violence.

And:

If I must watch King's final speech (I've Been to the Mountaintop) please show me more than the final 60 seconds where he seems to come to terms with the inevitability of his own death.

I want to hear the part of the speech were he links his movement to the "wells of democracy that were dug deep by the Founding Fathers." I would like to also hear how he was calling for economic boycotts, urging African Americans to exhort their economic strength by supporting black owned businesses.

This may be a King that is harder to digest. In fact, I am not certain that we even have a quorum to take up a vote for this King.

Indeed, the "I Have A Dream" speech is a perennial favorite and is much more well known than "Letter from Birmingham Jail," which I believe is not only one of King's great works but one of the greatest prose works in American literature.

"Letter from Birmingham Jail" contains my favorite sentence in all of English prose:

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jet-like speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say "Wait." But when you have see vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: "Daddy why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (howeverold you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"—then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.

The long periodic sentence is one of my favorites because the syntax embodies the thought — having to wait for the main clause of the sentence, the grammatical delay, embodies and forces a kind of experience of the waiting King refuses. Frustrate your frustrators. King's protest philosophy embodied in language.

More readily quoted, however, are the dream-tableaus from the "I Have A Dream" speech:

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of "interposition" and "nullification," one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today.

I remember many times my own mother quoting from the last two of these paragraphs. In the hope for judgment "by the content of their character," my mother saw, I think, not just the hope of the Civil Rights movement, but as well the hope and promise of America. And because we were in Alabama, I think, my mother thought the image of white and black children joining hands was the image we had to realize. In those images, I think, my mother found a way to imagine herself and her children as participants in the struggle—she wasn't even old enough to drive when the great events in Birmingham and Montgomery, just a few hours away, swept the television screens—and I think that may explain why many people, many white people especially, may turn to "I Have A Dream."

Participation is still important, I think, even at this historical remove, and I know that Williams is calling for a more robust participation, which is why he's chagrinned at some of the more facile, more packaged forms of participation, asking "Can someone explain to me why Netscape is offering MLK Jr. weekend trips from $199.00?"

But I can't join Williams in equating common memorial forms with a kind of ameliorationism.

He writes:

How many reenactments of marches and "freedom rides" will it require before we realize that those of us that participate in such events are unwitting co-conspirators in a movement committed to making King as non-threatening as possible to the general public?

I find the tour a particularly important exercise.

Over the Christmas holidays, I drove across south Alabama from Dothan to Marion, where on February 18, 1965, one of the most important — and most forgotten — moments in the Civil Rights movement occurred.

That night, the congregation of the Zion AME church gathered to march from the church's front doors into the town square, gather outside the city jail and sing to James Orange, a voting rights coordinator who was being held there. Once they entered the square, they were met by the Marion police and a large contingent from the Alabama State Patrol and a number of other whites. Asked to disperse, the congregation stood while their Reverend knelt to pray. A state trooper clubbed the Reverend over the head, someone cut the lights in the square, and the police and state troopers began to beat everyone, even chasing the protesters into adjacent buildings, including a cafe, to continue the beating.

In Mack's Cafe, just behind the church, two troopers ascended to the upper room where they continued their beating. One of them beat an old man named Cager Lee. When Lee's grandson, Jimmie Lee Jackson, tried to protect him, a state trooper shot Jimmie Lee in the stomach and, according to some witnesses, drug Jimmie Lee downstairs and into the street to beat him further.

Jimmie Lee's shooting and subsequent death galvanized the Civil Rights movement. It led to the Selma gathering just weeks later, to Bloody Sunday, and the five-day march to Montgomery.

I drove to Marion to see the square, to understand the geography in which this all occurred. I drove to internalize the geography in which this all occurred, my plan to continue on to Selma and then to Montgomery, to trace the events of February and March 1965, from the shooting of Jimmie Lee Jackson to the shooting of Viola Liuzzo, my plan not to joy in the uplifting vision of Dr. King, but rather to look toward the terror that made the fight necessary, to look toward the terror of the fight, to take it in, as much as one can.

I grew up in Alabama, but I felt very out of place. As I walked around the square, a trio of gentlemen — one black, one white, one Asian — eyeballed me, knowing me foreign. Local suspicion is part of small town life, but in their gaze my respect was growing for those who came to these towns in the 60s from elsewhere and my respect was growing for those who stood up to the most powerful people they'd ever known.

Thinking back to King's refusal to wait, I can understand the motives to frustration, the call to action.

Much more difficult to understand, however, is the courage. And my own small Civil Rights tour made me admire the difficulty and the courage of the movement all the more.

An hour later, I was in Selma, outside Brown's Chapel where all Selma's protesters gathered. Outside the Chapel, as outside Marion's Zion, is a black granite slab inscribed with the names of those who fought in the movement. Here, too, is a monument to King that says "I Had a Dream." I wondered at this past tense. True enough, historically, King had his dream, but I didn't want to think of the dream being past as well, especially as, at that moment, I was the one white person anywhere to be seen.

To be there, to think about the beatings that cracked John Lewis's skull, that killed James Reeb, to wind through the almost claustrophobic streets of Selma and its sometimes ghostly buildings, to rise over the Alabama River on the Edmund Pettus bridge and cruise through the slow rolling barrens and swamplands, to consider the five-day march, their sleeping in fields in the hard wet cold that it seems only Alabama can harbor — well, all that was nothing, really. Just a day's drive. Nothing.

But it made me recall that the marching wasn't just about walking. It was about putting the body in harm, both the more immediate harm of the billy-club or the attack dog and the slower harms of miles of hard clay and cold, about opening one's self, not just to be seen, to be witnessed, but as well to be tracked, followed, perhaps attacked, as Viola Liuzzo was on March 25, 1965, hours after the climactic speech on the Capitol steps in Montgomery.

There, King recalled the martyrs of the movement, including Jackson and Reeb. Liuzzo would go later that night. "In spite of this," he wrote, in spite of their deaths, "we must go on and be sure that they did not die in vain. The pattern of their feet as they walked through Jim Crow barriers in the great stride toward freedom is the thunder of the marching men of Joshua, and the world rocks beneath their tread."

King said as well:

... it was normalcy in Marion that hled to the brutal murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson. It was normalcy in Birmingham that led to the murder on Sunday morning of four beautiful, unoffending, innocent girls. It was normalcy on Highway 80 that led state troopers to use tear gas and horses and billy clubs against unarmed human beings who were simply marching for justice. It was normalcy by a cafe in Selma, Alabama, that led to the brutal beating of Reverend James Reeb.

If we drive, if we tour, if we walk, let it be not, as Williams worries, to take from the movement what King called "a certain kind of fire that no water can put out." Rather let us go in order to keep the stories of that fight from sinking back like footsteps into weathered ground. Let us go to find their footprints and to keep it all from being normalized.

I'm writing this from Denver, where I work, and Monday is Martin Luther King Day. My wife and I plan to join the city's "marade," a march/parade from Civic Center Park to City Park where stands a statue of Martin Luther King, Jr. Denver, I suspect, was much more hospitable in the 1960s than either Selma or Marion, so I won't feel the unease I felt in Marion, but we'll still be walking for something, if for nothing else then to make our bodies feel something small we can multiply in imagination into some astonished, admiring disbelief. Or into some astonished, admiring belief.

(cross-posted at storySouth)

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Brad Vice's Tuscaloosa Night
November 6, 2005    File under: Alabama , Editing , Information Technology , The South

As you may know, the University of Georgia Press recently recalled Brad Vice's recently-published Flannery O'Connor Award-winning volume The Bear Bryant Funeral Train with the intention of pulping it. The Press stripped him of his award and declared "no future editions are planned."

What started all this?

As the Tuscaloosa News reported, a readers' adviser at the Tuscaloosa Public Library, reading Vice's story "Tuscaloosa Knights," "heard echoes from one of her favorite books," namely Carl Carmer's 1934 book Stars Fell On Alabama.

The reader, who (according to the Tuscaloosa News article) believed she was the first to hear an echo of Carmer in Vice's story, began comparing the two texts and then prepared a small dossier marking the similarities between Vice's story and a chapter in Carmer's book. She sent this dossier to the University of Georgia Press and as well to the University of Alabama Press, which has published the most recent edition of Stars Fell on Alabama.

Daniel J.J. Ross, of the University of Alabama Press, wrote: "This seems a flagrant case, intentional and indefensible, with the feeble efforts to alter the original all the more blatant evidence of unacknowledged borrowing" (from the Tuscaloosa News).

And you already know what UGA Press has decided.

I have been — as a reader, as a writer, as an editor, and as a publisher — troubled by the immediacy of the assumption that Vice committed plagiarism, rather than some artistic quotation or allusion or some other form of appropriative artisanship, and by the willingness of many of the principals in the exchange to damn Vice for what they see as fraud and theft.

When I first read Vice's story — he sent it to me and to Jim Murphy so we could reprint it at Thicket, the site we've dedicated to Alabama writing — I heard the echoes of Carmer right away, and I thought Vice had done a smart thing. He had written his story right on top of Carmer's, set his own characters in the very Tuscaloosa Carmer described among the very Klan that disgusted Carmer. It seemed to me a clear case of allusion.

And necessary allusion. For the echoes allow Vice to perform two difficult but important things.

The first is to suggest that Alabama, culturally, isn't all that different from the Alabama Carmer described. The more exactly Vice quotes Carmer's situation and the more exactly Vice evokes Carmer's Tuscaloosa, the more powerful is the comparison. That comparison both forces us to consider our cultural critically, which is continuously necessary, and very quickly establishes the environment for the real drama of the story, which invites us to consider how this environment conditions our love — what and whom we love, when and where and how we can love. We need to feel that the terror incited by the Klan, the same Klan, is the same terror Carmer felt, so that the climactic scene of Vice's story is one of terror.

The second is to connect not only the world within the story to the world within Carmer's memoir but as well to connect Vice's own writing, his act, with Carmer's. And this connection seems to me the more valuable and essential. In connecting himself to Carmer, Vice enters and expands the too-small sphere of Alabama's literary inheritance (where is our Faulkner, our Welty, our Williams?) and invites us to consider that inheritance not as something that is past and locked away but as something that is living and extensible. If we see Vice's Pinion as a version of Carmer's own guide, then we will understand Vice as an extension of Carmer and this Alabama as not so divorced from that one. Vice's story argues for the essentiality of Carmer's work by making Carmer's work essential to his own, and in doing so makes Alabama a larger place.

One may protest that by failing to announce this connection more explicitly Vice has unwittingly admitted intent to deceive, but I believe that such a protest misunderstands Vice's text, fails to consider the necessary conditions for the kind of allusion I seek to describe here and, at the same time, undervalues Carmer's work by requiring it to behave in a very specific way.

To make the case for intentional, deceptive plagiarism, one must say that Vice's intention is to hide from us the inspiring and well-quoted source, must say that Vice assumes we will not (could not) make the connection between his work and Carmer's. It assumes that Vice's quotation is meant not to evoke Carmer's text but to pillage and thereby erase it. But it seems difficult, at least for this reader, to imagine that one could read — and I mean really read — Vice's story or Vice's collection without considering it as an act of Alabama literature, which would necessitate at some point a consideration of Carmer's Stars Fell On Alabama, one of the few outstanding works of classic Alabama literature. And it's hard to imagine that, with Carmer's work in mind, we could read Vice's work without hearing the quotations and without understanding them as such and without understanding the quotations not as a simple homage to a segment of another work of Alabama literature but as well as an appropriately rich response to a work that is itself so heavily invested in quotation, taking its name from a popular jazz tune and frequently quoting real people in the course of its narrative.

This is to say that the quotations are themselves acknowledgments of borrowing and that the act of quotation is in some measure suggested by the source text here.

Vice has, in interviews, explicitly acknowledged his debt to Carmer. And in allowing us to reprint "Tuscaloosa Knights" at Thicket alongside a selection from Carmer's own "Flaming Cross," Vice implicitly acknowledges the relationship, allows the evidence to be made public, and is interested in his readers entering the intertextual space in which he has worked.

This is not an author with anything to hide.

To have been more explicit within the story itself, Vice would have had to have included an epigraph from Carmer's work or perhaps named Carmer, but such a gesture diminishes the allusion, which works when the reader makes the connection the author has already made. The joy of allusion lies in the reader's arrival at that place already inhabited by the author, a place in which reader and writer come to be in profound sympathy with one another. To force this arrival, as an author, is to mistrust the reader. To provide the evidence but leave the connection to be completed is not only to trust the reader but to depend on her.

Which makes the Tuscaloosa readers' adviser's reaction all the more disappointing. Except for her assumption that this borrowing was deceptive, she was the ideal reader, able to hear the echoes and identify them.


Some, who don't feel that this is intentional and deceptive plagiarism, argue that this is a case of "unacknowledged borrowing" and that this is a violation of copyright law, a charge Vice has countered by asserting that he thought his use of this material was within the bounds of "fair use."

Perusing the resources on fair use, it's easy to see how Vice could have come to such a conclusion. The Stanford University Libraries digest of copyright law states that "In its most general sense, a fair use is any copying of copyrighted material done for a limited and 'transformative' purpose such as to comment upon, criticize or parody a copyrighted work." If Vice views his work as a comment on Carmer's or even as a transformation of it, though Vice does not mean to parody the work exactly, it would seem that he has worked within the spirit of the law, at least as it is presented here.

Of course, the issue of fair use is more complicated. According to the Stanford University Libraries digest (and to other widely available sources, including the Tuscaloosa News), judges of copyright suits use four factors to determine whether or not a use if fair use:

  1. the purpose and character of use
  2. the nature of the copyrighted work
  3. the amount and substantiality of the portion taken
  4. the effect of the use upon the potential market

I've already discussed the "purpose and character" of Vice's use of Carmer's work (which will still, of course, be up for debate). But these other factors, which have been only partially addressed, also have a serious bearing on any determination of copyright violation.

What of the nature of the copyrighted work?

Interestingly, copyright law digests (such as the one provided by Stanford I am using as a reference throughout this post) state that if the source work in question is a factual work the borrowing may be more excusable, since the spread of information is essential to ongoing dialogue. Purely fictional works (because they are not factual or do contain facts?) are more heavily protected.

So, we have to ask whether Carmer's work is a fictional work or a factual work and whether the determination of the nature of the source work makes a different here. Though written with a literary flair, Stars Fell on Alabama is essentially a memoir, if we can take seriously the "Author's Note" that opens the book. There Carmer declares that:

All of the events related in this book happened substantially as I have recorded them. It has been necessary in a few instances to disguise characters to avoid causing them serious embarassment (for instance my hosts during the lynching). I have also taken the liberty of telescoping time occasionally—since I have attempted to select significant occurrences which took place over a span of a half-dozen years.

While Carmer's note only confuses the question of its kind for me, these statements do encourage our understanding of Stars Fell on Alabama as truthful and as factual, more or less. And that determination supports Vice's claim that Carmer's work was a historical source he used to create the Tuscaloosa for his story.

But it's the third question about the "amount and substantiality of the portion taken" that has received the most attention.

In explaining its decision to recall the book and strip Vice of his award, the University of Georgia Press stated that Vice's work "borrowed heavily" from Carmer's book.

Certainly, Vice borrowed from the work. But did he borrow "heavily"? It depends on what you consider to be borrowed. If we're talking about exact quotations of lines and phrases, it's obvious, but the amount of material that's adapted isn't a significant portion of either work. If we're talking situations and ideas, it's a much larger proportion of each. Is it substantial? As a proportion of Carmer's work, the material in question (most broadly construed), though well-known, is miniscule: we're talking about four pages of material in a 300-page work. As a proportion of Vice's work, we're talking (again broadly construing "material") about maybe five of fourteen pages (depending on which edition you're considering).

Maybe this is enough for most people. But the copyright law digests state that those borrowing for purposes of parody — and I would consider that the kind of allusive updating I've considered the story to be is akin to parody in that it builds itself on the other work, even if the purpose isn't a humorous one — may borrow much more than is normally acceptable, "even the heart of the original work, in order to conjure up the original work."

Quoting from Justice Souter's remarks in Campbell v. Acuff Rose Music, Inc may be interesting here:

the enquiry focuses on whether the new work merely supersedes the objects of the original creation, or whether and to what extent it is "transformative," altering the original with new expression, meaning, or message. The more transformative the new work, the less will be the significance of other factors, like commercialism, that may weigh against a finding of fair use. The heart of any parodist's claim to quote from existing material is the use of some elements of a prior author's composition to create a new one that, at least in part, comments on that author's work.

Finally, what was the "effect of the use upon the potential market"?

Carmer's work was a best-seller in 1935. But judging from the difficulty of finding the title on the University of Alabama Press's website, it's not a top-priority title. My guess is that the two- to three-dozen sentences from Carmer's work that appear, often altered, in Vice's work, does not constitute the kind of reproduction that will substantially diminish demand for Carmer's work. This isn't the kind of sidewalk-table DVD that sells for a fifth of the cost of the real deal.

If anything, I would think that Vice's quotation would potentially increase interest in Carmer's book (which is a great book everyone should own). Maybe the University of Alabama lost their licensing fee which, from my guess based on my own permission-seeking, would be well less than the $950 someone is asking on Amazon today for a single copy of Vice's book.

If none of this actually clarifies what it was Vice did or intended to do or what the University of Georgia Press or the University of Alabama Press thought it was that Vice did, it does suggest how complicated the issue is. I feel certain I've gotten something wrong in the law, but I've done the best an intelligent, well-educated person could do without a lawyer, which I hope suggests something of how Vice himself might have worked though the issue.

I would think that the University of Georgia Press would have been aware of the quotations — one presumes they're careful and also well-educated and well-read and would, as the sponsors of the premiere award for Southern literary fiction, be cognizant of Southern literary history to a degree that would render Carmer's text familiar and readily accessible — and would have had the legal resources to make the proper reckoning.

In my own experiences as an author over the last few years, I have found, however, that even the most prestigious presses, like Routledge (which published my work The Architecture of Adress) like to put the burden of the legal work on their authors or their production staff, people who can do no better than to read the laws they can find.

Vice might have been left with this burden. I don't know. He might have, as I did, gone looking for a copyright registration for Carmer's text in the United States copyright database and might have, as I did, found nothing.

I don't have all the facts, but I do know that there may be a defense of Vice's quotation, contra the official response from the University of Alabama Press.

Perhaps Vice has not borrowed in accordance with fair use. But if he thought others would know, would hear, would understand, I don't understand how anyone can accuse him of intentional and deceptive plagiarism unless we treat texts solely as properties and do not consider their cultural place or value.

The University of Georgia Press has had its troubles this year, accused of corruption in its poetry contests (a dialogue instigated by the folks at Foetry and that resulted, at least in part, in Bin Ramke's resignation as series editor), and some bloggers are already making the connection. And maybe this has had some bearing on their reaction to the recent accusations.

As of this writing, I haven't received the copy of The Bear Bryant Funeral Train I ordered, and I suspect I won't see it any time soon, but I do hope to read it at some point soon, even if I have to read it in manuscript. I continue to think that Vice's writing is not only good but smart and brave as well.

I'm especially sorry to see an Alabama author treated so harshly before a thorough analysis of the facts has been made, and I can only hope, as an Alabama author with a first literary work freshly out, that this is not a sign of how hospitable things are in our beautiful, tangled state.

(This post also appears at storySouth.

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Materiality / Orality
September 17, 2005    File under: Alabama , America , Information Technology , Poetry & Poetics , The South

I'm very much enjoying the breadth and clarity of this post over at Jane Dark's Sugarhigh.

I especially like the use of "residual poetics" to describe what I think Silliman would put into the "School of Quietude." I find that in my own work, I am using residual poetics but consciously, as I am most often writing about residues or traces, and it seems the right way to go.

I understand the critique of the "common sense" argument, which I find offensively ahistorical as well. So I want to separate the class of "residual poetics" into two classes at least, into "consciously (even ironically) residual poetics" and "residual poetics that presents itself as presiding poetics" (aka the common sense school).

For it seems to me that residue is not only interesting as fuel for nostalgia but as well as a form of recognition of the past's inflection of the present. It's hard to bring this off, and I think in many ways it's intellectually safer to enter into what Jane calls "emergent poetics" since the formal and significant forms this poetics creates clearly break from and can then more obviously comment on the past without being used or assumed by it. The "consciously residual poetics" I am interested in is always in danger of being assumed or subsumed by the presumptively presiding ahistorical "common sense" residual poetics, and indeed is often claimed by it and in some cases even becomes such poetics.

Take Seamus Heaney as an example. I think in his early work Heaney was playing very seriously with the traditional inheritance from both English and Irish prosody, and he used one to slighly destabilize the other, setting up through seemingly nostalgiac echoes of the Irish tradition, a kind of protest to English in his work. At the same time, his tactic was not to destroy or deform the English as sereverly as someone like, say, Medbh McGuckian, whose work is more clearly a linguistically and poetically formalized protest. So, Heaney, at once delightfully wry, is now claimed by the staunchest common-sensors (censors), as his late blank-verse and Anglo-Saxon work give him trad-cred, while McGuckian finds an audience in those who are interested in "emergent poetics."

But Heaney should not so quickly be aligned with, say, the William Logans and Timothy Steeles, those poets whose metrical histories are decidedly skewed to underwrite the claim of a "common sense" order and who more often than not seem to wish to live and write in another, earlier era. That is a more nostalgiac kind of residue, though it's not altogether clear that such a nostos existed, in the English speaking world anyway.

I'm particularly interested in this as I consider my own writing, not so much because I'd be surprised to discover that I'd been characterized as a School of Quietude poet or as a residual poet, but because I find myself uncomfortable with some of the company I'd be given in such characterizations (there are disagreements, fundamental ones) that seem to me like so many false distinctions. It's not that there's no difference in color that could or would sustain a line of demarcation, but that there's a middle ground --- and it's not just one where (as Silliman implies) people don't think about what they're doing, but a place where the gestures of encampment cannot be made with the same clarity. Some are interested in working in that area of potential dissonance achieved by emulating both signals at once, or by using one for a purpose that's been unforeseen.

Admittedly, such ruse is hard to keep up, and one can find a comfortable embrace by a community with whom one disagrees significantly, but sometimes comfort overcomes disagreement. It makes the lines even harder to discern properly, but if we're cartographing, I want some more complicating shading on this border.

...

Such strict marking says the Southern accent (and it always assumes there's only one) is a sign of ignorance and bigotry, or a witness to it, or a sign that it once existed.

But even if this sound long ago became the auditory marker of these behaviors, does that mean that its survival or its use today should so clearly be nostalgiac, retrograde, Stephen Foster?

Must the Southern diasporite always be representing the planter class or the poll-tax class?

When the answer is yes but the Southerner does not harbor such characters or positions, then there is that doubleness, a necessary, a militated betweenness.

Must I shed my accent to become emergent? Or can I emerge with these ghosts in my mouth?

...

All this to say that while I'm taken with the clarity and the general cartography of Jane's schema, I'm concerned especially by the ways in which emergence is witnessed by and militated by a demonstration of a decidedely Marxist interest in the materiality of language, over and above its oral qualities. I'm concerned because I think the belief that language can ascent above or can transcend the accident into the materialization of language is an especially middle- and northeast-American fantasy.

It's been shown again and again that there is a lattitude that marks what we enshrine as a culture as "standard" American English, and the line runs through Pennsylvania all the way west into South Dakota (Tom Brokaw, anyone?). Those who have lived near the line to the north have been allowed to participate in the fantasy that their accent is not only specifically but significantly different from the accents below the line, as if an auditory map of the United States could provide a spectrum from ignorance to genius. Those below the line carry the accent and the marks.

It is not possible, in the dominant parlence, to be both Southern, in a culturally recognizeable or meaningful sense, and emergent.

Yet we emerge.

Can't you hear it?

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Preach It
September 4, 2005    File under: America , The South

Anne Rice.

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Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans?
   File under: America , The South

I've been quiet. But taciturn. The last week has been hectic here in Denver, but the news keeps me sick. It's nearly debilitating.

Fortunately, all my family and close friends who lived in the area are fine. I have yet to hear from a few people, but I trust that they've found their ways to safety.

But it's been paralyzing to watch the unfolding in New Orleans. And infuriating to witness the general inaction of the federal government and the general failure to assess the situation properly.

Other bloggers, other figures, have said it better than I, and I won't attempt to retrace the difficulties that make me nearly blind with anger and with sadness.

New Orleans' flooding and its related descent has struck me personally, though, and not just because I have so many friends, so much family there. I spent part of almost every summer of my youth, from about age 6 to 16, in New Orleans and Baton Rouge, and have continued to return there throughout my adult life. My best friends and I traveled there to celebrate our college graduation. While the President seems to recall it fondly as a place where he got drunk — I believe the town where I used to come -- from Houston, Texas, to enjoy myself, occasionally too much will be that very same town, that it will be a better place to come to — New Orleans has always been much more for me, a near-paradise where the pace and philosophy of life had acknowledged and even abetted nearly all that is bad but managed nevertheless to provide a source of comfort and joy in the knowledge that we were all in it together. Like Whitman, the city has always seemed to say: It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall, / The dark threw its patches down upon me also.... And for that, and for the consolations offered there, in music, in food, in accidental friendships, and even in the occasional menace that reminded me who I was and what I was in for, New Orleans became an ideal city and a part of my internal, psychological geography. I don't think I realized until this week how often I turn to New Orleans in my mind so I can forget about the stupidity of a local situation. If I can recall myself to the Cafe DuMonde, smelling the Mississippi through beignets and praline-sugar, I can weather anything. Except this.

When, on my graduation trip to New Orleans, I woke early Sunday morning, I decided to cross town on food to see another college friend who had just moved to New Orleans to attend Tulane. She was a dear friend who had helped me through a small nervous breakdown and several months of nervous exhaustion earlier that year. I remember vividly losing it one night in my apartment, crying so hard I couldn't move. Who knows how she knew, but she did, and she came to make sure I was alright. Kind of Blue was on the stereo on a loop, one of the few calming things to which I could turn. I was thinking about that night and the intervening months and in general about how good a friend she had been to me when, descending one of New Orleans' curving streets, I heard one of the most awful sounds I have ever heard. I followed it a half-block, then looked up.

On a sign that likely once advertized a nightclub with a loop of colored incandescent bulbs but which was now entirely inscrutable, I saw a pigeon. Its eyes had been plucked out, were now dark stains descending from empty sockets down all the gray feathers of its breast. It was crying out, terrible. Beside it, another bird, wing around the crying one.

It was the worst and most wonderful thing I have witnessed in this life.

That is my New Orleans as surely as anything else: the unwanted comforting the wounded.

When I am cast out, that is where I turn. And where I hope to turn again.

If I thought I could do any good, I would leave today and return there to become the unwanted to comfort the wounded. Now I send my hope and my money on other wings.

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Back / In School
August 10, 2005    File under: America , Poetry & Poetics , The South

I have returned to a much cooler and moister Denver: it was raining as I drove into town and has continued to rain for several hours, a rarity. It will be fine to sleep in the natural cool with the waves of crickets to time my breathing.

I did not detour to Williamsburg or even slow down through Salina, both through a lack of cash, an unbelievable surfeit (after, if my count is correct, 24 barbecue meals in a row), and a birthday present to myself (today was the day) to make it to the pub in time for happy hour (where I enjoyed a 1972 Glenury-Royal, a dram as old as I).

There's much to digest & much to catch up on. I just read Ron's post on contests and significant poetry, and while I have to say that I've enjoyed many recent contest winners, especially Maurice Manning, I will accept the general observation. Indeed, as the winner of a young contest, though ecstatic, I am aware that I have no literary community, not as Ron describes it. I admire Tim's response in that it draws attention to the fact that community, while supportive and challenging in creative ways, can also be normative to the point that a device that may be alien to the community, or to the policers of that community, can help redefine the norms.

Though I wouldn't claim that Southern-ness is an ethnicity exactly, I think that young writers who self-define as Southerners (even those witth some larger ethnic community to appeal to) have a difficult time finding their publishers, if not their audience. Among the most exciting Southern writers today are Manning and Natasha Trethewey, each of whom had perhaps an even more difficult-than-usual effort toward publication (if my anecdotal evidence can be trusted). Difficulty in this effort certainly can result from lack of a community — but I suspect in cases where the poet's effort cannot easily be defined it becomes even more difficult to identify, let alone benefit from, a community that might support that work. Once the work emerges, things may change, as they have for both Manning and Trethewey. But what southern press looked at or considered their work? What press is interested in publishing southern work?

I suspect Ron would suggest that we start our own presses.

I'll look into that tomorrow.

Sleep now. Barbecue dreams.

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July 18, 2005    File under: Editing , Poetry & Poetics , The South

Tony,

I hope I wasn't putting you on the spot in an uncomfortable way. Your post came up as I was thinking a lot about the editing I do at storySouth and Thicket and what I've begun to do with my students here in Denver with Copper Nickel, and I was hoping to enter into an exchange in which I too could think about what I think about journals.

I think that, at storySouth we probably fall into a standard format situation such as you describe, though I think I do a few things differently --- and am trying to do those more and more often. We do try to anchor each issue (for the benefit of those readers who even now are just coming to online journals (surprisingly a lot of readers)) with a well-known poet or a poet who might be considered a rising talent, someone who has enough work from which we could assemble a retrospective or a prospective grouping so that the feature would be interesting in and of itself.

One of the ways in which, I think, we diverge from the norm is that, while I do like to see very good poems in my inbox, I treat the feature as a kind of license that allows me to accept and present poems that might now clearly be the most excellent examples of the aesthetic projects they represent. I like to collect groups of poems that say something to each other --- not necessarily or even often in a propositional fashion. I mean pieces that implicitly question each other's aesthetic and cultural positions, especially those positions that say something or suggest something about the South --- what it is, what it means, &c. When I'm considering this, I'm thinking, very much as you are, that I am "finding out ... what is going on there that is interesting/challenging/etc... then presenting that, or making that one component of a view of poetry." It's not always easy presenting what I want to present, but this is my aim in any case, and I couldn't have said it better myself. The established writer is part of that scene, part of what's happening, but just as important are those writers with little or no established reputation, and those are the writers I'm most interested in. All this is to say that my own aesthetic concerns are involved but they're often necessarily sublimated to my interest in presenting an account of, or evidence of, what's happening in and about The South, not just as a locale, but as an idea, a concept. Just so with the spin-off project Thicket which looks at Alabama writers and is becoming a sort of hybrid journal/weblog/anthology/repository, collecting both those who are well-reputed and those who are coming up and those who just have something to say. I like it if the pieces are articulate in some manner, but I think in each case I may be seen as choosing work that falls well beyond my own aesthetic interests (though to confirm that you might have to look at what I didn't choose).

Another thing we're doing more and more of is asking poets --- not editors --- to compile and present views of poets they admire or to create editions of work that will address a particular question that might be asked of Southern writing and Southern poetry in particular. In this way, we're both expanding toward a question model (while not entirely abandoning the poet model) and toward an aesthetic-accounting model, wherein editorial predilection is foregrounded so the conversation, which is what's always been most important to me in storySouth can be fueled.

This is not very interesting to many people, but this is what we try to do.

Working on Copper Nickel with my students, I have found that the "famous writer angle" is much more important, mostly because we have to pay the bills --- it's a print journal (if anyone wants to check it, you can subscribe for a mere $8) --- and the money people like to have some measures of success that appeal to their, shall we say "general"?, cultural knowledge. At the same time, I find myself thinking more and more about design as responding to particular pieces, often daring work by people I never knew (we have some interesting work in our September issue that's forced a complete redesign) --- thinking about the journal as an artifact itself, as a locality itself --- ideas I think I hear in your considerations of FASCICLE, ideas that excite me personally and intellectually, which is why I entered this.

Maybe I'm missing something, maybe I don't get something important here that would show where we don't intersect --- I often think that I'm blind to something important everyone else sees and that what I'm doing is essentially stupid though I can't see it as such, though I keep working on principle until I can be shown my own stupidity --- but it seems like, again, we're in a similar mental space....

All this to say I am excited by your thoughts and am looking forward to your new projects...

Thanks again,

Jake

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New Issue of storySouth due out this week.
July 11, 2005    File under: Information Technology , Intake , Poetry & Poetics , Self-promotion , The South

Later this week, Jason Sanford and I will launch a new issue of storySouth after a brief hiatus. I'm very happy to announce two features, one on the poetry of Charles Wright, edited by Daniel Cross Turner, and the other on the poetry of Tom Hunley, edited by Jeff Newberry. Also, poems by Nate Pritts, Angie DeCola, Shane Allison, and many others.

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41 Years
June 22, 2005    File under: Alabama , The South

Is justice delayed justice denied?

41 years to the day after Cheney, Goodman, and Schwerner --- three Civil Rights workers who were killed in Nashoba County, Mississippi while investigating a church fire --- were murdered, Edgar Ray Killen was found guilty of manslaughter, joining a growing list of elderly Klansmen who have been convicted of racial crimes the committeed in the 1960s.

Several years back, of course, Thomas Blanton and Bobby Cherry were convicted for their roles in the 16th-Street Baptist Church Bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, and we rememer Byron De La Beckwith's 1994 conviction for the murder of Medgar Evers.... And, you will recall, that Emmitt Till's body was recently exhumed for an autopsy, over 50 years after his murder.

The South --- led by a number of determined Attourneys General and District Attourneys --- is trying to revisit these old but still-painful crimes and to right the record, to bring known criminals to account at last.

I feel a sense of relief when these trials close, the moral and ethical relief that an answer has been made to violence, the elegiac relief that a consoliation (however inadequate) has been crafted and offered, that all has been weighed and made commensurate in one scale.

I am mindful of Wai Chee Dimock's work, and I know, as she argues, that the measure of justice is never perfect and that there is always a residue, just as in elegy the consolation can never be a perfect answer to the motivating loss. Nevertheless, I am glad to see the elegists of the Civil Rights Martyrs making their measures, glad to see justice, however imperfect, achieved.

Gladstone's words --- "Justice delayed is justice denied" --- haunt. But how absolute must we take this to be? We can understand that justice has been denied as it has been delayed, but can we say that it is still being denied? We remember Martin Luther King, Jr.'s extension, "Justice denied diminishes justice everywhere." And I hope we see the recent trials as responses to this idea and as responses to particular violence and attempts to rectify this diminishment, to show justice fullsome again.

There is in all of this another conversion to be sure, a region wide racial conversion, of the type descibed by Fred Hobson in his book But Now I See, a narrative (or perhaps a drama) of the South's conversion from the racist ethic of the segregated South to an integrated society that founds its egalitariianism on its capacity to balance the large scales, to rectify past crimes, to undo the old ethics. Of course, many Southerners, white and black, never subscribed to the racist ethic. Some were run out. Some stayed, political minorities in their communities. Some fought and spoke. Some went back to court again and again. Some won their case yesterday.

These events are among the many that make me wish I were back in Birmingham....

A few weeks ago, I was visiting my family back in Alabama. After a morning in the Birmingham Public Library, I decided to take a walk to Kelly Ingram Park, the site of much well-known conflict between the city police and Civil Rights protesters. I stood under the statue of Martin Luther King, Jr., to take a photograph, and an older black man came up to me. He asked why I was taking pictures. The import of the question soon became clear. He said, "I was there. I don't need no pictures. I lived it all."

He wanted to walk me around the park, which contains several sculptures that memorialize specific moments in Birmingham's Civil Rights fight. He said that the museum, the Civil Rights Museum on 16th Street (just over our shoulders), was "full of lies" and that he would "tell me the truth."

I went along, curious. He told me nothing I didn't already know, nothing no one else in Birmingham wouldn't know. There were no facts I hadn't already gathered. But I could tell he was working up to something.

There was a sense of pleading in his voice, something strange.

I could hear and understand --- especially in his repeated "you've got to understand" --- the need to testify, to tell the story, to ask for recognition if not reckoning, a need I feel as well, even as distant as I have been from the South of that era.

When, finally, he asked me for some money so he could get something to eat and I could at last identify that scent of alcohol expressing from the skin like a shock of aftershave, I heard the second tone.

I was caught wondering whether this request made his testimony of 1963 less or more sincere, whether this had been all put-on, a sales pitch, or if the story and the request were discrete even if they had now collided.

I gave him the film canister I keep my change in, maybe two dollars, and left thinking that, this day, this is the measure of Birmingham. There is a continuing need to testify, to tell the story, though the city fought it for many years. And there is also the need to anesthetize, the need to get drunk, to forget. And those are too deeply intertwined for anyone's comfort.

We grope, nevertheless, toward some satisfaction.

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