YOUR NATIVE LAND, YOUR LIFE
(The poem “Sources” was first published in 1983 as a chapbook by the Heyeck Press, Woodside, California.)
Sources The phrase “an end to suffering” was evoked by a sentence in Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter: “No one knows where the end of suffering will begin.”
North American Time Section IX: Julia de Burgos (1914–1953), Puerto Rican poet and revolutionary who died on the streets of New York City.
Dreams Before Waking “Hasta tu país cambió. Lo has cambiado tú mismo” (“Even your country has changed. You yourself have changed it”). These lines, from Morejón’s “Elogio de la Dialéctica,” and Georgina Herrera’s poem “Como Presentaciön, Como Disculpa” can be found in Margaret Randall, ed., Breaking the Silences: 20th Century Poetry by Cuban Women (1982). Pulp Press, 3868 MPO, Vancouver, Canada V6B 3Z3.
One Kind of Terror: A Love Poem Section 6: “Now you have touched the women, you have struck a rock, you have dislodged a boulder, you will be crushed.” Freedom song sung by African women in mass demonstration in Pretoria, 1956, in which 20,000 women gathered to protest the issue of passes to women. See Hilda Bernstein, For Their Triumphs and for Their Tears, International Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa, 1975.
In the Wake of Home Section 6: The Jodensavanne is an abandoned Jewish settlement in Surinam whose ruins exist in a jungle on the Cassipoera River.
Emily Carr Canadian painter (1871–1945). At the height of her powers she painted, with deep respect, the disappearing totem poles of the Northwest Coast Indians. See Doris Shadbolt, The Art of Emily Carr (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979).
Yom Kippur 1984 The epigraph and quoted lines from Robinson Jeffers come from The Women at Point Sur and Other Poems (New York: Liveright, 1977).
Contradictions Section 16: See Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems 1927–1979 (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983), p. 173.
Section 26: See Cynthia Ozick, Art and Ardor (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984), p. 255: “the glorious So What: the life-cry.”
Section 27: Ding Ling, leading Chinese novelist and major literary figure in the Revolutionary government under Mao. Exiled in 1957 for writing too critically and independently. Imprisoned as a counter-revolutionary in 1970; cleared of all charges in 1976 at the end of the Cultural Revolution.
TIME’S POWER
Sleepwalking Title and opening words (“next to death”) from “Slaapwandelen (naast de dood)” by Chr. J. van Geel, Dutch poet and painter. For the original and my translation, see page 214.
Letters in the Family Section 11, Yugoslavia, 1944: See Hannah Senesh: Her Life and Diary (New York: Schocken, 1973). Born in Budapest, 1921, Hannah Senesh became a Zionist and immigrated to Palestine at the age of eighteen; her mother and brother remained in Europe. In 1943, she joined an expedition of Jews who trained under the British to parachute behind Nazi lines in Europe and connect with the partisan underground, to rescue Jews in Hungary, Romania, and Czechoslovakia. She was arrested by the Nazis, imprisoned, tortured, and executed in November 1944. Like the other letter-writers, “Esther” is an imagined person. See also Ruth Whitman’s long poem The Testing of Hannah Senesh (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1986).
The Desert as Garden of Paradise Section 2: Chavela Vargas, a Mexican popular and traditional singer.
Section 3: Malintzin/La Malinche/Marina are names for an Aztec woman given as a slave to Hernán Cortés on his arrival in Mexico in 1519. Her historical reality has undergone many layerings of legend and symbolism; more recently she has become a frequent presence in Chicana feminist literature. See, for example, Norma Alarcón, “Chicana’s Feminist Literature: A Revision through Malintzin,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Gloria Anzaldua and Cherrie Moraga (Watertown, Mass.: Persephone, 1981; distributed by Kitchen Table / Women of Color Press, P.O. Box 908, Latham, NY 12110). See also Lucha Corpi’s “Marina” poems, and the author’s note, in Fireflight: Three Latin American Poets, trans. Catherine Rodriguez-Nieto (Oakland, Calif.: Oyez Books, 1975); and Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters / Aunt Lute Books, 1987).
Section 7: See Peter Masten Dunne, S.J., Black Robes in Lower California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968); Antonine Tibeson, O.F.M., ed., The Writings of Junipero Serra, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Academy of American Franciscan History, 1955); Robert F. Heizer, ed., The Destruction of California Indians (Santa Barbara and Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1974); Van H. Garner, The Broken Ring: The Destruction of the California Indians (Tucson, Ariz.: Westernlore Press, 1982).
Sections 10, 11: Italicized phrases from John C. van Dyke, The Desert (1901) (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1980).
The Slides Thanks to Janis Kelly for her keen eye on the medical details.
Harpers Ferry In 1859, the white abolitionist John Brown rented a farm near Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), as a base for slave insurrections. On October 16 of that year, he and his men raided and captured the federal arsenal, but found their escape blocked by local militia; the U.S. marines then seized the arsenal. Ten of Brown’s men were killed in this conflict, and Brown himself was later tried and hanged. Harriet Tubman (1820–1913), Black antislavery activist and strategist, led more than 300 people from slavery to freedom via the Underground Railroad. She was known as “General Moses.” Though in contact with John Brown, she withdrew from participation before the raid. Tubman never actually came to Harpers Ferry; her appearance in this poem is a fiction.
Living Memory “it was pick and shovel work …”: quoted from Wally Hunt’s Vermont (Brownington, Vt.: Orleans County Historical Society, 1983).
AN ATLAS OF THE DIFFICULT WORLD
An Atlas of the Difficult World Part V: “over the chained bay waters”: From Hart Crane, “To Brooklyn Bridge,” in The Poems of Hart Crane, ed. Marc Simon (New York and London: Liveright, 1989; poem originally published in 1930).
“There are roads to take when you think of your country”: From Muriel Rukeyser, U.S. 1 (New York: Covici Friede, 1938); see also Muriel Rukeyser, The Collected Poems (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978).
“I don’t want to know how he tracked them”: On May 13, 1988, Stephen Roy Carr shot and killed Rebecca Wight, one of two lesbians camping on the Appalachian Trail in Pennsylvania. Her lover, Claudia Brenner, suffered five bullet wounds. She dragged herself two miles along the trail to a road, where she flagged a car to take her to the police. In October of that year, Carr was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole. During the legal proceedings, it became clear that Carr had attacked the women because they were lesbians. See Gay Community News (August 7 and November 11, 1988).
Part VI: “Hatred of England smouldering like a turf-fire”: See Nella Braddy, Anne Sullivan Macy: The Story behind Helen Keller (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1933), p. 13.
“Meat three times a day”: See Frank Murray, “The Irish and Afro-Americans in U.S. History,” Freedomways: A Quarterly Review of the Freedom Movement 22, no. 1 (1982): 22.
Part X: The passages in italics are quoted from Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (New York: Bantam, 1970), pp. 24, 26, 93, 245.
Eastern War Time Part 2: Text of a telegram sent through the American legation in Bern, Switzerland, August 11, 1942, to the U.S. State Department in Washington, and transmitted after several weeks’ delay to Rabbi Stephen Wise in New York. See David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews (New York: Pantheon, 1984), pp. 42–45.
Part 4: Charged with the murder of a fourteen-year-old girl employed in his uncle’s pencil factory in Atlanta, Leo Max Frank (1884–1915), a mechanical engineer, was tried and found guilty, and the decision appealed, in a climate of intense anti-Semitism. When his sentence was commuted from death to life by the governor of Georgia, he was dragged by a mob from prison and lynched.
Part 10: “A
coat is not a piece of cloth only”: See Barbara Myerhoff, Number Our Days (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978), p. 44. Myerhoff quotes Shmuel Goldman, immigrant Socialist garment-worker: “It is not the way of a Jew to make his work like there was no human being to suffer when it’s done badly. A coat is not a piece of cloth only. The tailor is connected to the one who wears it and he should not forget it.”
Tattered Kaddish “The Reapers of the Field are the Comrades, masters of this wisdom, because Malkhut is called the Apple Field, and She grows sprouts of secrets and new meanings of Torah. Those who constantly create new interpretations of Torah are the ones who reap Her” (Moses Cordovero, Or ha-Hammah on Zohar III, 106a). See Barry W. Holtz, ed., Back to the Sources: Reading the Classic Jewish Texts (New York: Summit, 1984), p. 305.
For a Friend in Travail “The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him, ‘What are you going through?’ ” Simone Weil, Waiting for God (New York: Putnam, 1951), p. 115.
DARK FIELDS OF THE REPUBLIC
What Kind of Times Are These The title is from Bertolt Brecht’s poem “An Die Nachgeborenen” (“For Those Born Later”): “What kind of times are these / When it’s almost a crime to talk about trees / Because it means keeping still about so many evil deeds?” (For the complete poem, in a different translation, see John Willett and Ralph Manheim, eds., Bertolt Brecht, Poems 1913–1956 [New York: Methuen, 1976], pp. 318–20.)
“our country moving closer to its own truth and dread …”: echoes Osip Mandelstam’s 1921 poem that begins “I was washing outside in the darkness” and ends “The earth’s moving closer to truth and to dread.” (Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin, trans., Osip Mandelstam: Selected Poems [New York: Atheneum, 1974], p. 40.) Mandelstam was forbidden to publish, then exiled and sentenced to five years of hard labor for a poem caricaturing Stalin; he died in a transit camp in 1938.
“To be human, said Rosa …”: Rosa Luxemberg (1871–1919) was a Polish-born middle-class Jew. Early in her abbreviated life she entered the currents of European socialist revolutionary thinking and action. She became one of the most influential and controversial figures in the social-democratic movements of Eastern Europe and Germany. Besides her political essays, she left hundreds of vivid letters to friends and comrades. Imprisoned during World War I for her strongly internationalist and anticapitalist beliefs, she was murdered in Berlin in 1919 by right-wing soldiers, with the passive collusion of a faction from her own party. Her body was thrown into a canal.
On December 28, 1916, from prison, she wrote a New Year letter to friends she feared were both backsliding and complaining: “Then see to it that you remain a Mensch! [Yiddish/German for human being] … Being a Mensch means happily throwing one’s life ‘on fate’s great scale’ if necessary, but, at the same time, enjoying every bright day and every beautiful cloud. Oh, I can’t write you a prescription for being a Mensch. I only know how one is a Mensch, and you used to know it too when we went walking for a few hours in the Südende fields with the sunset’s red light falling on the wheat. The world is so beautiful even with all its horrors.” (The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, ed., trans., and with an introduction by Stephen Eric Bronner [Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1993], p. 173.)
Calle Visión Calle Visión is the name of a road in the southwestern United States—literally, “Vision Street.”
“that tells the coming of the railroad”: “With the coming of the railroad, new materials and pictorial designs and motifs, including trains themselves, appeared in Navaho weaving (ca. 1880).” (From the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe.)
“a place not to live but to die in”: See Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (1635): “For the World, I count it not an Inn, but an Hospital; and a place not to live, but to dye in.” (Religio Medici and Other Writings by Sir Thomas Browne [London: Everyman’s Library, J. M. Dent, 1947], p. 83.)
“Have you ever worked around metal? …”: From a questionnaire filled out before undergoing a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan.
“The world is falling down. …”: From the song “The World Is Falling Down,” composed by Abbey Lincoln, sung by her on the Verve recording of the same title, 1990 (Moseka Music BMI).
“And the fire shall try. …”: I Corinthians 3:13: “Every man’s work shall be made manifest … and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is.” Used by Studs Terkel as an epigraph to his Working (New York: Pantheon, 1974).
Reversion This poem is for Nina Menkes and her film The Great Sadness of Zohara.
Revolution in Permanence (1953, 1993) The phrase “revolution in permanence” is Marx’s, referring to his concept that the creation of a just society does not end with the uprooting of the old order, “but must continue to the new, so you begin to feel this presence of the future in the present.” (Raya Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom [New York: Columbia University Press, 1988], p. 12.)
In the poem, Ethel Rosenberg is a secular vision. But she was, of course, a real woman, electrocuted in 1953 with her husband, Julius, on charges of conspiracy to commit espionage. The original charges were rapidly translated by the presiding judge and the media into “selling the secret of the atomic bomb” to agents of the Soviet Union. After the Rosenbergs’ conviction, “twenty-three motions and appeals for new trial, reduction of sentence, stay of execution, and presidential clemency were made on the basis of perjury; unfair trial; cruel, excessive, inapplicable, and unprecedented sentencing; newly discovered evidence; subornation of perjury by the prosecution; application of incorrect law; and justice, mercy, or both. All appeals were denied. … [The day after the electrocution] Justice Hugo Black’s majority opinion was published, noting that the Supreme Court ‘had never reviewed the record of this trial and therefore never affirmed the fairness of this trial.’ ” (Virginia Carmichael, Framing History: The Rosenberg Story and the Cold War [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993], pp. 63–64. See also Walter and Miriam Schneir, Invitation to an Inquest [New York: Pantheon, 1983]; Robert and Michael Meeropol, We Are Your Sons: The Legacy of Ethel and ]ulius Rosenberg [Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986]; and Michael Meeropol, ed., The Rosenberg Letters: A Complete Edition of the Prison Correspondence of ]ulius and Ethel Rosenberg [New York: Garland, 1994].
Then or Now This sequence of poems derives in part from Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Correspondence 1926–1969, ed. Lotte and Hans Saner, trans. Robert and Rita Kimbel (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992). While reading these letters, I had been reflecting on concepts of “guilt” and “innocence” among artists and intellectuals like myself in the United States. The poems owe much also to the continuing pressure of events.
Late Ghazal See “Ghazals (Homage to Ghalib)” on pages 275–85 and “The Blue Ghazals” on pages 307–12. See also Aijaz Ahmad, ed., Ghazals of Ghalib (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971).
Six Narratives The narratives are spoken by different voices.
“Vigil for boy of responding kisses, …”: See Walt Whitman, “Vigil strange I kept on the field one night,” in The Essential Whitman, selected and ed. Galway Kinnell (New York: Ecco Press, 1987), pp. 123–24.
Inscriptions “I need to live each day through. …”: These two lines are quoted from an earlier poem of mine (“8/8/68: I”) in “Ghazals (Homage to Ghalib)”; see above.
“When shall we learn, what should be clear as day, … ?”: These two lines are from W. H. Auden’s “Canzone,” in The Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden (New York: Random House, 1945), p. 161.
“Medbh’s postcard from Belfast”: I thank the Northern Irish poet Medbh McGuckian for permission to quote her words from a postcard received in August 1994.
“suffused / by what it works in, ‘like the dyer’s hand.’ ”: I had written “suffused,” later began looking up the line I was quoting from memory: was it Coleridge? Keats? Shakespeare? My friend Barbara Gelpi confirmed it was Shakespeare, in his Sonnet III: “
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand / And almost thence my nature is subdued / To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand.” I have kept “suffused” here because to feel suffused by the materials that one has perforce to work in is not necessarily to be subdued, though some might think so.
MIDNIGHT SALVAGE
Char Italicized phrases and some images from Leaves of Hypnos, the journal kept in 1942–1943 by the poet René Char while he was a commander in the French Resistance, and from some of Char’s poems. I have drawn on both Jackson Mathew’s and Cid Corman’s translations of Char’s journal in integrating his words into my poem. Char joined the Surrealist movement late and broke with it prior to World War II. It was André Breton who said, “The simplest surrealist act consists of going down into the street, revolver in hand, and shooting at random.”
Modotti. Tina Modotti (1896–1942): photographer, political activist, revolutionary. Her most significant artistic work was done in Mexico in the 1920s, including a study of the typewriter belonging to her lover, the Cuban revolutionary Julio Antonio Mella. Framed for his murder by the fascists in 1929, she was expelled from Mexico in 1930. After some years of political activity in Berlin, the Soviet Union, and Spain, she returned incognito to Mexico, where she died in 1942. In my search for Modotti I had to follow clues she left; I did not want to iconize her but to imagine critically the traps and opportunities of her life and choices.
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