Thanks to Julie R. Enszer who posted these two poems by Jane Cooper. Cooper was born in Jacksonville, FL, my hometown.
Being Southern
1
It's like being German.
Either you remember that yours was the defeated country
(The South breeds the finest soldiers, my uncle said,
himself a general in one of his incarnations)
or you acknowledge the guilt, not even your own guilt, but
Can any white person write this, whose ancestors once kept slaves?
2
Of course there were "good" Germans.
My father was still under 30, a passionate Wilsonian, when he was named a delegate to the 1916 Democratic Convention. By the end of the first evening he had discovered that eleven of the other Florida delegates were members of the Klan, he couldn't answer for the twelfth, he was number 13.
Only a few years later he argued for, and won, token black representation on the Jacksonville school board.
And my aunt as a girl went into the sweatshops to interview Cuban cigar workers, all women. She found the first Girl Scout troop in the South for, as she put it, colored children. True, it was segregated. But it was the first.
Take your guilt to school. Read your guilt in your diplomas or the lines of the marriage ceremony. Face your guilt head-on in the eyes of lover, neighbor, child. Ask to be buried in your guilt.
Of course they were paternalistic. I honor their accomplishments. What more have I ever done?
When is memory transforming? when, a form of real estate?
3
Transplanted "north" in 1934 I never questioned
a town that received its distinguished refugees
with a mix of pride and condescension: the specialist in Christian iconography
in her man-tailored suits, Einstein like a disembodied spirit
pacing our leafy sidewalks. Only because my best friend lived next door
would I glimpse him, sometimes at twilight, tuning his violin
as his back yard filled up with tents
But why can't I remember the actual men and women who slept in those tents, among patches of ragged tigerlilies? the children with skinny arms, who would soon be passed along. . . ?
All he could vouch for. Not famous. At their backs
the six million.
Hotel de Dream
Justice-keepers! justice-keepers!
for Muriel Rukeyser and James Wright
Suppose we could telephone the dead.
Muriel, I'd say, can you hear me?
Jim, can you talk again?
And I'd begin to tell them the stories they loved to hear:
how my father, as a young boy, watched Cora Crane
parade through the streets of Jacksonville with her girls
in an open barouche with silver fittings;
how the bay haunches gleamed as they twitched off flies,
polished hooves fetched down smartly into the dust,
ostrich feathers tickled the palates of passers-by.
Muriel, I'd say, shall we swing along Hudson Street
underneath the highway and walk out together on the docks?
.the river would be glittering, my grandmother
would be bargaining
with a black man on a dock in Jacksonville;
grapefruit and oranges would be piled up like cannonballs
at the fort in Old St. Augustine. . . .
I'll never put you in a nursing home, you said early that year,
I promise, Jane, I'll never put you in a nursing home.
Later Cora Crane showed her dogs right next to my aunt's.
They had a good conversation about bloodlines
amidst the clean smells of kennel shavings and well-brushed dog
but never, of course, met socially
although she had dined with Henry James.
Jim, I'd say, remember that old poem "The Faithful"
you helped me by caring for? How what we owe to the dead
is to go on living? More than ever
I want to go on living.
But now you have become part of it, friends of my choosing years,
friends who magnificent voices
will reverberate always, if only through machines,
tell me how to redress the past,
how to relish yet redress
my sensuous, precious, upper-class,
unjust white child's past.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Being Southern
Monday, October 29, 2007
ED #104
These strangers in a foreign world
protection asked of me;
befriend them, lest yourself in heaven
be found a refugee.
Caveat: Emily's "heaven" was not a site of immortal reward, as her traditional reviewers assert. It was daily pursuit.
Grief Among Students
I've been working on an anthology of student writing - and emerged from the obsession of page formatting yesterday to recognize a strata of grief in their voices.
These are mostly young (20s) writers, burgeoning learners of the English language, refugees and asylees from Latin America, South America, the Near and Far and Mid East.
Their trials of English parallel the trials of their past, and their present. Death and memory are strong currents. Then, juxtaposed with the prevailing sadness, one or two voices that recall joy and rely on hope.
I'm pulled by two inclinations when I wonder about their writing. The total environment that attaches itself to the immigrant is my first thought. Is this an expression of an innate sadness, a longing and rue that accompanies people who leave their country, home, family, culture for the U.S.? Then I look at them as beginning writers, as neophytes who tap into those powerful emotions that surface so quickly and which seem so easily expressed. By why sorrow? Why not passion or its kindred, love?
Their writing has a restrained tone to it, unlike the usual messy purple quality of beginning writers. I burrow just a little deeper, and thoughts of content and tone are replaced by the practical realization that English is alien. Were I to compose a poem in Farsi or Haitian French Creole, would I plunge heart first or head first?
I'd tred slowly - aware of imminent mistakes in construction, fearful of the faux pas, wary of connotation and inexactitude. Finding metaphor would be a leap in cognition. Careful restraint might appear as disciplined emotion when in fact, it's just careful restraint.
But apart from construction, I keep returning to that sadness. Longing and loneliness.
NaPoWriMo?
well it sounds hokey even to me but when November rolls around, I recall the unfinished mss ("The Cottage") that I started a few years back during the NaNoWriMo and then as my focus narrowed, the NaPoWriMo that I dared the following year.
November will be exceedingly busy for me (international education poetry reading & launch of a student journal) but I've got to get in some poetry writing - even if it's unrestrained lines spewed at the end of a day. NaPoWriMo - the concept of writing one poem a day for the month - gives me a challenge that can be fulfilled without the censor of perfection tightening my throat.
Daily poems will be posted here - with small regard to their content, messiness, drivel, C-status - and with the goal of just eking them out, my one-a-day vitamin during this month. They'll fall under the columns of prelude and practice and to hell with publish-ability.
Jane M. Cooper, Poet, 1924-2007
Obituary
Jane M. Cooper, Poet, 1924-2007
Jane Marvel Cooper, poet, Professor and Poet-in-Residence Emerita at
Sarah Lawrence College, died peacefully at Pennswood Village, Newtown,
PA, on October 26th from complications due to Parkinson's Disease.
Family were with her at the end.
She was the daughter of the late John C. Cooper Jr. and Martha Marvel
Cooper, and sister of the late Rachel C. Baker, all formerly of Armour
Road, Princeton. Jane Cooper was born in Atlantic City, N.J. in 1924.
She spent her early childhood in Jacksonville, Florida and then moved
with her family to Princeton in the mid-1930s. There she went to Miss
Fine's School where, in her senior year, she won the Leslie Shear Poetry
Prize for two works: "We are the Generation of War" and "I have Sung
Solitary Various Worlds", early signs of future acclaim.
She attended Vassar College 1942 to 1944 and earned a B.A. from the
University of Wisconsin in 1946. She joined the faculty of Sarah
Lawrence College in 1950, where she remained as a teacher and poet in
residence until her retirement in 1987. Over that period, together with
Grace Paley, Jean Valentine, Muriel Rukeyser and others, she helped
develop and enhance a writing program that became one of the most
distinguished in the country.
In 1953-54 she took a year off to get a M.A. at the University of Iowa,
where she studied with Robert Lowell and John Berryman. She received
much recognition in her lifetime including awards from the Guggenheim
Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the National Endowment for
the Arts, the Bunting Institute and the American Academy of Arts and
Letters.
Jane Cooper maintained her links with Princeton over the years, but she
lived most of her adult life in New York City. She also spent several
summers at Yaddo and the McDowell Colony, working on her own poetry. Her
first book, The Weather of Six Mornings, appeared in 1969 and was
followed at intervals by four others: Maps and Windows (1974),
Scaffolding: Selected Poems (1984), Green Notebook, Winter Road (1994)
and The Flashboat: Poems Collected and Reclaimed (2000). She was named
State Poet of New York for 1995-97.
She is survived by her brother, John C. Cooper III, of Tucson, AZ, five
nephews, two nieces and three grandnieces. There will be a service at
All Saints Church, Princeton on Saturday, November 3, at 1:00 p.m. All
are welcome. In lieu of flowers, please send donations to the Immune
Deficiency Foundation, 40 W. Chesapeake Avenue, Suite 308, Towson, MD 21204.
(Prepared by the family of Jane M. Cooper, October 2007)
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Monday, October 15, 2007
games in the middle of the night
well it's 1:20am EST - time for most people to be sleeping in my time zone, especially if we share Monday morning work rituals. But I'm awake with lots of time to kill before I begin to feel sleepy. A nap in late afternoon is the culprit. But the nap came because my bones were tired, and my eyes, and shoulders, even my hair. Problem is the nap went into overtime without my permission. Now here I sit in front of the computer, surely not a good thing but regardless.
So I found a little pastime roaming around blogs. I'm copying straight from the source (Mary Biddinger's blog) with my own alterations. The following 106 books are the Least Read among the Library Thing folks.
The Rules:
Bold what you have read, italicize books you’ve started but couldn’t finish, and strike through books you hated. Add an asterisk* to those you’ve read more than once. Underline those on your "To Be Read" list.
[I rarely reread prose though poetry often deserves many readings. Wonder why there's no poetry on this list?]
Jonathan Strange & M. Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: a Novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveller’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World*
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Riot police evict nuns
65 Polish nuns, defrocked by the Vatican, were evicted from their convent by police in riot gear.
According to a spokesperson for the Catholic Church, the nuns were "disobedient" when they refused a Vatican order to replace their mother superior.
“They were disobedient,” said Mieczyslaw Puzewicz, a spokesman for the Lublin diocese of the Roman Catholic Church. The Vatican formally expelled the women from their Sisters of Bethany order last year, but has revealed almost nothing about the dispute.Their electricity was cut-off a year ago, according to MSNBC.com and the nuns survived on food smuggled to them by nearby residents.
One version of the story is here.
Monday, October 1, 2007
Find Previous Posts Here
If you'd like to read any of my previous Red Hibiscus blog posts, you can find them all here: http://redhibiscus05.blogspot.com/
The former blog stretches back for about four years.
New Address, Same Blog
I suppose it was bound to happen: my gmail account was compromised and as a result, I have permanently lost access to my email and to my blog. Rather, I can look at the old Red Hibiscus blog but cannot add new posts. And I can receive email through my old gmail address but cannot send.
And incidentally, this occurred after I requested tech support from gmail for some odd happenings with my email.
Now begins the time-consuming task of developing a new blog, shifting over all those links, one by one, deciding what to keep, what to drop.... I'm opting for a simplified blog right at the moment.
Great American Poetry Anthology
Speaking of anthologies, Larry Ziman sent an invite to my email the other day, promoting the Great American Poetry Anthology.
What's this?
Who is Larry Ziman?
