The Insects in the Soup: “There’s war in Paterson . . .” The second stanza quotes—and the poem relies upon—“War in Paterson” by John Reed in The Masses, June 1913. Reed was a major journalist who was radicalized by his experience of the Paterson strike. He soon accompanied Pancho Villa, the Commander of the División del Norte during the Mexican Revolution, and wrote an account of the Revolution called Insurgent Mexico (D. Appleton and Company, 1914). The subject of the film Reds, Reed is best known for his account of the Bolshevik Revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World (Boni and Liveright, 1919).
The Little Agitator: Elizabeth Gurley Flynn dubbed Hannah Silverman “The Joan of Arc of the Silk Strike.” The first stanza derives in part from “Paterson Strikers Mild” in The New York Times, June 21, 1913; the poem also relies on The Fragile Bridge: Paterson Silk Strike, 1913 by Steve Golin.
Vivas to Those Who Have Failed: This poem is based in part on an email correspondence with poet and professor Maria Mazziotti Gillan in December 2013. “Mazziotti” refers to Arturo Mazziotti, the father of Maria, who was a labor organizer in the 1930s. The “Sons of Italy” refers to a fraternal organization instrumental in uniting the Italian community in Paterson behind the strike; the “Workmen’s Circle” refers to a fraternal organization that performed the same function in the Jewish community. “Local 152” refers to the affiliate of the IWW that played a key role in initiating the strike. “One-eyed Big Bill” refers to the fact that Bill Haywood was blind in his right eye. “Flynn the Rebel Girl” refers to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a socialist, orator and leader of the IWW, beloved by the strikers. Joe Hill wrote his song “The Rebel Girl” in honor of Flynn.
The Right Foot of Juan de Oñate: Don Juan de Oñate y Salazar was a Spanish conquistador who founded Santa Fé de Nuevo México and became the first governor. In January 1599, Oñate suppressed the resistance of the Acoma Pueblo by killing eight hundred villagers and enslaving five hundred more. By Oñate’s order, Spanish troops amputated the right foot of all Acoma men over the age of twenty-five. In 1998, a Native American group used an electric saw to cut off the right foot of the statue at the Oñate Monument and Visitors Center in Alcalde, New Mexico. In 2007, another statue of Oñate—the largest equestrian statue in the world—was installed at El Paso International Airport. The poem is based on visits to the sites in Alcalde and El Paso, in the company of novelist John Nichols and scholar Arturo Madrid, respectively, and on conversations with both. Background sources include Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong (New Press, 1999) by James Loewen; “Oñate’s Right Foot” by Margaret Randall in Liberation Lit, March 31, 2008; and “Conquistador Statue Stirs Hispanic Pride and Indian Rage” by James Brooke in The New York Times, September 23, 2009.
Heal the Cracks in the Bell of the World: On December 14, 2012, gunman Adam Lanza killed twenty students—ages six to seven—and six educators at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. This poem is based on a visit to Newtown, and was written for the occasion of a National Children’s Day event entitled “Within Our Reach” at the Newtown Congregational Church on June 8, 2013. The “city where children gathered copper shells” is Tirana, Albania, site of the “Bell of Peace;” “I was born of bullets” comes from the bell’s inscription. The city “where cannons from the armies of the Great War / sank into molten metal” is Roverto, Italy, site of the “Campana dei Caduti (Bell of the Fallen)” or “Maria Dolens” bell.
How We Could Have Lived or Died This Way: “Not songs of loyalty alone are these…” The epigraph comes from “To a Foil’d European Revolutionaire” by Walt Whitman. “The immigrant street vendor” refers to Amadou Diallo, an unarmed twenty-two-year-old immigrant from Guinea shot nineteen times and killed by four New York City police officers in the Bronx on February 4, 1999. “The deaf woodcarver” refers to John T. Williams, a fifty-year-old Native American artisan shot and killed by a police officer in Seattle, Washington on August 30, 2010. “The minister’s heart” refers to Accelyne Williams, a seventy-five-year-old Methodist minister from Antigua who had a heart attack and died in police custody after a mistaken drug raid on his apartment in the Dorchester community of Boston, Massachusetts on March 25, 1994. “The man hawking / a fistful of cigarettes” refers to Eric Garner, an unarmed forty-three-year-old African-American and asthmatic who died after a chokehold applied by a New York City police officer on Staten Island on July 17, 2014. “The conga player” refers to Martín “Tito” Pérez, a thirty-one-year-old Puerto Rican musician and photographer who died in police custody—alleged to have hanged himself with his hands cuffed behind him—in the East Harlem community of New York City on December 1, 1974. “The suspect / leaking blood from his chest” refers to Victor White III, a twenty-two-year-old African-American who died in police custody—said to have shot himself while handcuffed in the backseat of a squad car—in Iberia Parish, Louisiana on March 3, 2014. “The 300-pound boy” and “the body left in the street” refer to Michael Brown, an unarmed eighteen-year-old African-American shot six times and killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri on August 9, 2014. “The next Black man, fleeing” refers to Walter Scott, an unarmed fifty-year-old African-American shot five times and killed by a police officer in North Charleston, South Carolina on April 4, 2015. “The rebels marching, hands upraised” refers to the protests in Ferguson, Missouri and elsewhere after the Michael Brown killing.
Chalkboard on the Wall of a Diner in Providence, Rhode Island the Morning After George Zimmerman Was Acquitted in the Shooting Death of Trayvon Martin, an Unarmed Black Teenager: Trayvon Martin, an unarmed seventeen-year-old African-American, was shot to death by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida on February 26, 2012. Zimmerman was acquitted of second-degree murder and manslaughter charges in July 2013, provoking national outrage. The poem quotes “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” by Martin Luther King Jr.
Ghazal for a Tall Boy from New Hampshire: James Foley (1973–2014) was born in Evanston, Illinois and grew up in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire. He received his Master of Fine Arts degree in fiction from the University of Massachusetts in 2003. (I served on his thesis commitee.) From 2002 to 2004, he taught English to Spanish speakers at The Care Center, a High School Equivalency and alternative education program for adolescent mothers in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Foley obtained a journalism degree and ultimately became a freelance war correspondent, working for GlobalPost and Agence France-Presse. While reporting on the Syrian Civil War, he was abducted in November 2012. ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham) executed James Foley by beheading in Al-Raqqah, Syria on August 19, 2014.
Here I Am: The son of Portuguese immigrants, José “JoeGo” Gouveia was a poet, journalist, organizer and radio personality. He served as Poet in Residence at Cape Cod Community College and Poetry Curator at the Cultural Center of Cape Cod. He wrote the “Meter Man” poetry column for The Barnstable Patriot in Hyannis and hosted the “Poets’ Corner” radio show on WOMR-FM in Provincetown, Massachusetts. He published one full-length collection of poems, Saudades, with Casa Mariposa Press. At Gouveia’s request, this poem was included in his book as the foreword. He died in May 2014 at age forty-nine, one month after the book was published.
Barbaric Yawp Big Noise Blues: “I. Celebrate. Myself . . .” Stanza four quotes sections 1, 33 and 52 from “Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman. David Lenson is a veteran saxophone player who has worked with blues musicians John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters and Buddy Guy, as well as his own group, the Reprobate Blues Band. He is also a retired professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst. This poem is based on a visit with Lenson at a Northampton, Massachusetts nursing home in September 2013.
Castles for the Laborers and Ballgames on the Radio: Howard Zinn was a major historian, teacher and political activist. His landmark work, A People’s History of the United States (Harper & Row, 1980), has sold more than two million copies. Sandy Koufax was a Hall of Fame pitcher for the B
rooklyn/Los Angeles Dodgers. This poem is based on a visit to Zinn’s house in Auburndale, Massachusetts in January 2009.
From the Rubáiyát of Fenway Park: The poem is a parody of verse 51 of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám as translated by Edward FitzGerald: “The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, / Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit / Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, / Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.”
Marshmallow Rice Krispie Treat Machu Picchu: “All the world’s a stage . . .” This is the first line from the famed monologue called “The Seven Ages of Man,” spoken by Jaques in Act II, Scene vii of Shakespeare’s As You Like It. The poem quotes the monologue in stanzas one, four and six. Anthony Quinn played an aging boxer in the film Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962). “Machu Picchu” refers to the site of fifteenth-century Inca ruins in the Andean highlands of Perú, made famous by an epic poem, Alturas de Macchu Picchu (The Heights of Macchu Picchu) by Pablo Neruda. Francisco Pizarro González was the Spanish conquistador who conquered the Inca Empire in 1533. The “DVD of The Crucible” refers to the 1996 film version of the Arthur Miller play based on the Salem witch trials.
Flowers and Bullets: “Cuba and Puerto Rico . . .” The epigraph comes from “Cuba y Puerto Rico Son” by Lola Rodríguez de Tió, a Puerto Rican poet and advocate of independence for both islands. José Martí was a major Cuban poet, essayist, translator, journalist and leader of the Cuban independence movement. After years of exile, he returned to Cuba in 1895, where he was killed by Spanish troops at the Battle of Dos Ríos.
A Million Ants Swarming Through His Body: José Luis “Chegüí” Torres, from Playa Ponce, Puerto Rico, was light-heavyweight boxing champion of the world (1965–66). He won the title with a ninth-round knockout of Willie Pastrano at Madison Square Garden in March 1966. He retired following his second-round knockout of Charlie “Devil” Green at Madison Square Garden in July 1969, after being knocked down in the first round. Inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1997, Torres became a writer, mentored by Norman Mailer and Pete Hamill. He published two books—Sting Like a Bee: The Muhammad Ali Story (Abelard-Schuman, 1971) and Fire and Fear: The Inside Story of Mike Tyson (Warner Books, 1989)—and wrote columns in English and Spanish for various New York newspapers. The poem is based on personal conversations with Torres. In conversation and in Sting Like a Bee, he compared the experience of being knocked down to the sensation of “a million ants” entering the body, thus providing the title for the poem. The third stanza derives in part from an Associated Press report of the Pastrano bout in the Chicago Tribune, March 31, 1966. The fourth stanza relies on a quote from Pete Hamill in “Torres’ Legacy Extends Beyond the Ropes” by George Kimball on ESPN.com, January 20, 2009.
The Discovery of Archaeopteryx: Archaeopteryx was a transitional form between birds and dinosaurs. The poem is based on a visit to Puerto Rico in December 1968. “Gallos de pelea” means “gamecocks.” “Día de Reyes” refers to Three Kings’ Day, the Epiphany as celebrated throughout Latin America.
Of the Threads That Connect the Stars: The title comes from section 24 of “Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman.
Haunt Me: “Noche Buena” refers to Christmas Eve. “Bendito,” which literally means “blessed,” is a common Puerto Rican expression, used here as a term of affection. In the second stanza, “the Spanish-American War” refers to the invasion and colonization of Puerto Rico by the United States in 1898. “The astronauts sending pictures of the moon” refers to Apollo 8.
After the Goose That Rose Like the God of Geese: “Everything that lives is Holy . . .” The epigraph comes from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake.
Mad Love: “No one wants to look at pictures of Puerto Ricans, Frank . . .” The epigraph comes from a personal conversation between Frank Espada and noted photographer Cornell Capa. My father would go on to found and direct the Puerto Rican Diaspora Documentary Project, a photo-documentary and oral history of the Puerto Rican migration, resulting in more than forty solo exhibitions and the publication of a book entitled The Puerto Rican Diaspora: Themes in the Survival of a People in 2006. His photographs are included in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress. The title and second stanza refer to the classic horror film Mad Love (1935). In the third stanza, “the captain of the slave ship” refers to Captain John Newton, the former slaver who wrote the hymn “Amazing Grace.” The fourth stanza refers to a series of photographs from the Puerto Rican Diaspora Documentary Project. “The fry cook / in his fedora” refers to a photograph of Agropino Bonillo, murdered in East New York, Brooklyn in 1966. “The poet in a beret / grinning at the vision of shoes for all the shoeless people on the earth” refers to a photograph of Jack Agüeros and his poem “Psalm for Distribution.” The “gravedigger and his machete” refers to a photograph of Jaime Jenkins in Utuado, Puerto Rico, my father’s birthplace. The “union organizer” refers to a photograph of Edelmiro Huertas, who organized San Francisco’s furniture factories in the 1930s.
The Sinking of the San Jacinto: According to multiple sources, a Nazi U-boat torpedoed and sank the steamship San Jacinto, en route from New York to Puerto Rico, on April 22, 1942. Listed among the fourteen dead were Ramón Castillo, a fireman, and Antonio Cortez, a messman. La Parguera is a bioluminescent bay on the southwest coast of Puerto Rico, inhabited by microscopic dinoflagellates that glow when the water is disturbed. “Jacinto” means “hyacinth.”
There But Not There: “the way they look at you . . .” The epigraph comes from the poem “Not Knowing, in Aztlán” by Tino Villanueva.
El Moriviví: “Moriviví” (“I died/I lived”) is the term, in Puerto Rican Spanish, for the pantropical weed classified as Mimosa pudica. Pudica is the Latin for “bashful” or “shrinking,” a reference to the plant’s shrinking reaction to contact. The second stanza derives from an unpublished essay by my father called “The Beast.” The third stanza describes my father’s history of political activism, beginning in December 1949, when he was arrested and jailed in Biloxi, Mississippi for refusing to sit at the back of the bus. In April 1964, he was arrested and jailed again along with three hundred other protesters associated with the Brooklyn chapter of CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality) for demonstrating at the New York World’s Fair. The protesters were locked up incommunicado at a jail on Hart Island in the East River, the site of a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp in 1865 and still the potter’s field for the city of New York, where almost one million people have been buried since 1869. (This passage relies in part on “Visiting the Island of the Dead” by Corey Kilgannon in The New York Times, November 15, 2013.) As the head of a community organization called East New York Action, my father was called in to act as peacemaker during the riots in the community. In December 1964, he spoke at a rally in Brooklyn for community control of schools with Malcolm X. He photographed Malcolm taking questions after the rally; it is his most celebrated photograph. Malcolm X was assassinated in February 1965. This poem was written for the occasion of my father’s memorial at El Puente, a community center in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on May 17, 2014.
Acknowledgments
These poems have appeared or will appear in the following publications, to whose editors grateful acknowledgment is made:
Aethelon: “The Socialist in the Crowd”
The American Poetry Review: “The Discovery of Archaeopteryx,” “The Goddamned Crucifix,” “Here I Am,” “The Sinking of the San Jacinto,” “Vivas to Those Who Have Failed: The Paterson Silk Strike, 1913”
Anthology of Modern American Poetry (Oxford University Press): “The Right Foot of Juan de Oñate,” “Hard-Handed Men of Athens”
Cutthroat: “Haunt Me”
Drunken Boat (online): “The Right Foot of Juan de Oñate”
Goodbye, México: Poems of Remembrance (Texas Review Press): “The Right Foot of Juan de Oñate”
The Great Falls: Poems About Paterson, New Jersey: “Vivas to Those Who Have Failed: The Pater
son Silk Strike, 1913”
The Great Sympathetic: Walt Whitman and the North American Review (North American Review Press): “Barbaric Yawp Big Noise Blues,” “How We Could Have Lived or Died This Way”
Hanging Loose: “Flowers and Bullets,” “From the Rubáiyát of Fenway Park,” “The Right Foot of Juan de Oñate”
Harvard Review: “The Shamrock”
Irish Examiner: “The Shamrock”
La Bloga (online): “El Moriviví”
Michigan Quarterly Review: “A Million Ants Swarming Through His Body,” “Marshmallow Rice Krispie Treat Machu Picchu”
Milk: “The Right Foot of Juan de Oñate”
Morning Star: “The Socialist in the Crowd,” “How We Could Have Lived or Died This Way”
Naked Punch: “Haunt Me,” “The Beating Heart of the Wristwatch,” “The Right Foot of Juan de Oñate,” “How We Could Have Lived or Died This Way,” “A Million Ants Swarming Through His Body”
Nautilus II: “Ghazal for a Tall Boy from New Hampshire”
North American Review: “Heal the Cracks in the Bell of the World,” “Mad Love,” “Barbaric Yawp Big Noise Blues”
The Norton Introduction to Literature (W. W. Norton): “Of the Threads That Connect the Stars”
Paterson Literary Review: “After the God That Rose Like the God of Geese,” “Bills to Pay,” “Once Thundering Penguin Herds Darkened the Prairie,” “Chalkboard on the Wall of a Diner in Providence, Rhode Island the Morning After George Zimmerman Was Acquitted in the Shooting Death of Trayvon Martin, an Unarmed Black Teenager”
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