“Harvesting Her Heart after the Accident” first appeared in The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts/Matter Press. All other pieces are previously unpublished. Today’s poems appear here today with permission from the poet.
Stacy R. Nigliazzo‘s debut poetry collection Scissored Moon was published in 2013 by Press 53. It was named Book of the Year by the American Journal of Nursing. It was also short-listed as a finalist for the Julie Suk Poetry Prize (Jacar Press) and the Texas Institute of Letters First Book Award for Poetry/Bob Bush Award. She is co-editor of Red Sky, an anthology addressing the global epidemic of violence against women.
Editor’s Note: Stacy R. Nigliazzo imagines the unimaginable, writes those words which cannot be spoken. An emergency room nurse, it is when her personal losses make their way to the page that her experience becomes poetry, and that poetry becomes an act of healing for poet and reader alike. How visual her imagery, how visceral her grief. And yet her poems leave us not in darkness, but with the necessary reminder that even in our darkest hour there is a “ripple of light.”
JD: Hi Elizabeth! I thought I’d jump right in and say that as I was reading What Weaponry, which you call a novel in prose poems, and The Green Condition, which you call an essay, I started thinking a lot about the concept of story as somewhat separate from what we (or at least I) often think of when I hear the word ‘narrative’. (I suppose I’m thinking of what I encounter when I read what is termed ‘narrative poetry’.) To me, your work seems to speak very much to the power, and to the necessity, of telling stories, even as you let the reader create connections from what’s left unsaid in the spaces between lines, between sections, in the silences. I’m reading your work as a series of impressions that build, that accrete, into whole pieces. Lyric stories. Could you say more about the importance of story in your work and how/if that influences the mode you write in for any given project?
EJC: Well, they’re both hybrid texts, both poetry and. And so, as such, I’m interested in the tensions between genres, the tensions between modes of meaning-making. So while in each there is intense play with sound as well as a forward motion (the simple way I define narrative or story), there is also a haltingness, a turning back, echoing, re-vision of events, etc, that takes place. Which also adds to the sound-play. And is more like the way memory works: we obsess over the details, rarely thinking big picture all at once. I like what you say, letting “the reader create connections from what’s left unsaid.” That’s very important to me. What Weaponry is certainly story in jumps, gaps that intentionally wait for a reader to co-produce narrative, which happens in any work no matter how seamless the narrative hand-holding. I’m interested in making those seams apparent. As a reader we expect the writer to bring content and structure; I like to turn that back a little: I’ll bring the structure and let’s both bring the content and see what we can do together. I hope the collaboration is more inviting than vexing, though I’ve had both responses.
In reading your work I’m also interested in your relationship to narrative. It’s definitely not a straight-forward endeavor, but that you align your work with existing narratives says something about your desire to tell a story. What made you come to align your story for example with Young Werther’s in The New Sorrow is Less than the Old Sorrow? Of course Wine Dark also immediately conjures connections with Homer. How important is that parallel?
JD: I think the parallels are important in the sense that I, as the writer, am saying something like, “This is epic. All of this has happened before. (And will again.) You/I/We aren’t alone in this phase of your/my/our existence and even though many of our experiences will differ greatly from each other’s as we move through time and space, maybe the connections, the points where our lives touch each other’s, as well as how they touch pre-existing cultural narratives (as found in stories, literature, etc), may be what can, ultimately, offer comfort.” I’d say epic isn’t necessarily comfortable, so there’s a tension there, in my trying to make the epic lived in, livable. Comfort is important to me, in the sense of coziness as a soothing balm for frazzled nerves, restorative warmth, safety. My whole life, I’ve looked for this comfort in the books I’ve read and I think this is why I am so apt to involve pre-existing literary narratives in my writing. In The New Sorrow is Less Than the Old Sorrow, for example, the Speaker comforts herself by comparing her loss to the great literary loss of Werther, who loves Lotte but can’t have her and therefore commits suicide. But my Speaker decides, meh, maybe her situation is less tragic than it seems. She goes on. In Wine Dark, in my mind at least, all of the poems have the same Speaker, someone who is a bit at sea maybe, who connects to blood and the sea as she literally sails the ocean and figuratively sails in and out of the personae she climbs into—Heloise, Jane Eyre, Scheherazade, Elizabeth Bathory. So even though Wine Dark consists of separate poems, they comprise, again in my mind, an unofficial series, and in fact were written during a relatively short period of time, then revised over months, years even. To me, it’s a book-length project in feel (but maybe all books are!!), if not in name. I think what I’m trying to say is that these poems always lived together as a group.
Since we’re both clearly interested in longer projects, serial narratives (or stories, if you will), I want to ask you about the importance in your work of going on, as opposed to, say, ending. It occurs to me that there is always going to be a tension, in story, between continuation and ceasing. In What Weaponry, for example, you begin the text with the line, “We build a place to be safe, start talking in circles and so build that way.” And you go on to describe a process of building concentric circles with found objects that widen out and grow. It seems, to me at least, that a text that begins in such a way can never really end. How do you negotiate in your writing the tension between having to impose ending, structure, and arc, with the fact that, I think, you are also very much writing in order to continue?
EJC: Yes! I am interested in books that are controlled in craft, while the content and concept gets out of hand. Books that consume themselves uroburos-style. Books that refuse completion. In What Weaponry I have what feels to me like both the ultimate ending and an anti-ending. The last poem “No One Waits in the Side Yard” is, I think, the loneliest poem I’ve ever written. It serves as anti-ending in that all sentences written in negation, everything spoken is also taken away. Everything both there and not there at the same time. Part of this might be my lifelong interest in The Twilight Zone. There is often the world and the not-world and they replace each other at will. Isn’t this a little bit how life is though. Nothing’s ever wholly there, there’s also the fear of the thing’s absence and the language that keeps it there.
What is your writing process like? Do you have rituals? I’m interested in writers as conjurers. Like, for me, I’m always reading out loud. And that’s what makes the writing start up for me. And also do you have a whole-book plan before you sit down or do you figure it out as you go along?
JD: I’d say my writing process is pretty structured, and yes, I often have a plan going in, and rituals, like organizing my pencils and highlighters and index cards at my desk before I start writing. The preparation of hot beverages also plays a role. But for me, what makes the writing start up is reading. I especially love pouring over history, legends, hagiography, fairy tales, and any sort of criticism taking any of that into account. I love to do research, albeit in a not-so-academic fashion. The worst part about living in Germany is that I had to leave a lot of books behind in a storage space in Vancouver, Washington. If I could go back in time and do one thing over, I would make different choices about what books to bring with me. I have a lot of books on medieval history and on Anglo-Saxon England in Vancouver that I would die for a look in right about now. But I did make some good choices too, and I’m happy to have those books here, all my books on fairy tales, for example, which I’m using a lot right now in the fiction I write. And there’s also the internet. There is so much online and a lot of time I copy and paste text and create MS Word files for myself of research I’ve compiled on different topics. So to answer your question more succinctly, reading (a lot of different things) and then research is what inspires me, what wakes me up, what gets me going. I would only add that sometimes I read a lot on a topic but end up writing very little. “Bathory,” for example, in Wine Dark is a very short poem, but I’ve read quite a lot about Elizabeth Bathory and watched several movies about her life. Although, to be fair, she shows up in a poem sequence in an as yet unpublished manuscript. I don’t finish with topics/figures easily, I suppose, and possibly this is because I spend so much time with them as part of my writing process.
But what about you? How did you approach writing What Weaponry? Did you write these pieces as individual prose poems and then see the larger connections or did you have the idea of them as a novel beforehand? Also, I’m curious about order. Did you write the pieces in the order they appear in the book, because I do see a narrative arc as I’m reading, or did they come to you differently?
EJC: We’re alike in that with a lot of what I write (especially The Green Condition and Waiting Up for the End of the World: Conspiracies) I do a lot of reading / researching / thinking far in advance of any writing happening. I tend to work project by project, slowly establishing some strong concept of a book-length project (or multi-book-length) and not so much writing towards that, but holding that concept at the back of my head while I write whatever it is I’m writing. At some point the pieces start to cohere into the bigger plan. Then I see what I have, the unexpected connections, and revise heavily to bring those to the surface. So I start with the grand plan, but the project never ends up being exactly that. It’s just something to keep me grounded.
My daily practice before writing involves reading poetry out loud. It’s the only way I know to get started. And when I read poetry, I always read it out loud. So you should know, when we traded books for this, I stood in my kitchen reading your work out loud.
What Weaponry was written on the train one summer. The Coast Starlight and the Southwest Chief. I had less of a plan with this book. I had plucked these two characters out of my first book, and was existing within / writing from a place of strongly conflicting excitement and deep sadness. I had a loose story after a few poems; the thrust of the narrative was built during the many-month revision process a year or so later, once I was clear of my own emotional upheaval and could let the characters do their thing.
***
Jenny Drai is the author of Wine Dark and The New Sorrow Is Less Than The Old Sorrow, both from Black Lawrence Press. Her first full-length collection of poetry, [the door], was published by Trembling Pillow Press in 2015 and her novella, Letters to Quince, was awarded the Deerbird Novella Prize from Artistically Declined Press. She is an Associate Poetry Editor at Drunken Boat and lives in the Rhineland. She has recently completed a novel.
AND THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT SOFTNESS
By Gili Haimovich
People are still flirting
with trying to look younger,
to make each other laugh.
Their existence is softened
by the luxuries of having some time, some needs, met.
People are still eager,
not too tired of being keen,
I have found out
among the snow banks,
pushing
the stroller of my soft new baby.
Today’s poem appears here today with permission from the poet.
Gili Haimovich is an international poet and translator who writes in both Hebrew and English. She has six volumes of poetry in Hebrew, including her most recent, Landing Lights (Iton 77 Publishing House), which received a grant from Acum, as did her previous book. She also received a grant nominating her as an outstanding artist by the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption on 2015. Her poetry in English is featured in her chapbook, Living on a Blank Page (Blue Angel Press, 2008) and in numerous journals and anthologies, such as Poetry International, International Poetry Review, Poem Magazine, LRC – Literary Review of Canada, Asymptote, Drain Magazine, Blue Lyra, Circumference, TOK1: Writing the New Toronto and Mediterranean Poetry, as well as main Israeli journals and anthologies such as The Most Beautiful Poems in Hebrew (Yedioth Ahronot Books, 2013). Her poems have been translated into several languages including Chinese, French, Italian, Bengali, and Romanian. Gili is also presenting her work as a photographer, teaches creative writing, and facilitates writing focused arts therapy.
Editor’s Note: Today’s poem excels in the realm of wordplay. Double entendres luxuriate in a language that is as rich as it is simple, as straightforward as it is complex. The poet’s clear love of language — the sheer joy of it — culminates in a narrative of the unexpected, in a revelation that demands we enter the poem again and consider it anew. Delicate and layered, this poem is a labor of love that offers the reader the fruits of its bounty.
In need of air, she unhinged every
window, revolving ones downstairs,
upstairs skylights, mid-floor French doors,
swept into the house the salt-brine,
the cricket chirp, the osprey whistle,
the sea-current, sound of the Sound,
but had not noticed the basement
bedroom window shielded by blinds,
screen-less. Later that night when they
returned home, lights illuminating
the downstairs hall, insects inhabited
the ground floor rooms. She carried handfuls
of creatures across a River Styx—
the katydids perched on lampshades,
beach tiger beetles shuttling across
floorboards, nursery web spiders splotching
the ceiling—trying to put back
the wild fury she had released.
Elise Paschen is the author of Bestiary, Infidelities (winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize), and Houses: Coasts. Her poems have been published in numerous anthologies and magazines, including The New Yorker and Poetry Magazine. Co-editor of Poetry Speaks and Poetry in Motion, she teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her forthcoming book of poetry, The Nightlife, will be published in spring 2017.
Editor’s Note: “After the Squall” is a masterpiece of sound and image. A modern retelling of Pandora’s Box, this rich, vivid poem reaches a perfect crescendo with it’s killer end-line: “trying to put back / the wild fury she had released.” Careful, concise, and expertly wrought, this poem is a stellar example of fine poetic craft.
“A lesson about the stones that wait to rise in our hearts”:
A Review of John Guzlowski’s Echoes of Tattered Tongues
By Eric Kroczek
My first encounter with a John Guzlowski poem was as desultory as anything in life: I was eating a solitary dinner and barely listening to the news on the local public radio station one evening after work in 2007 when I gradually became aware that I was hearing Garrison Keillor read a poem, a good one. The program was The Writer’s Almanac, and the last poem’s stanza haunted me for days:
He believed life is hard, and we should help each other. If you see someone on a cross, his weight pulling him down and breaking his muscles, you should try to lift him, even if only for a minute, even though you know lifting won’t save him.
At the time, I didn’t catch the name of the poet; I meant to Google it, but forgot. Life went on.
Fast forward several years. I friended this writer on Facebook, John Guzlowski, who was friends with some of my wife’s writer friends, because I liked some of his comments, and why not, right? In any case, he wrote a lot about Polish immigrants in Chicago, which intersected with a memoir-ish thing I was working on. I bought a couple of his books of poems, and I liked them. Their unpresuming, workmanlike free verse was hard and bleak, with only just enough black humor and sympathy to leaven it. From his poems, I learned that his parents had been slave laborers for the Nazis and his family had come to the U.S. after the War by way of a DP camp and settled in Chicago in the early 1950s. And in his book Lightning and Ashes, I found the poem I’d heard years before over dinner, “What My Father Believed.”
Last year, John published Echoes of Tattered Tongues: Memory Unfolded, an experimental yet deeply satisfying mongrel at the intersection of poetry, history, biography, and memoir—in the same vein as Art Spiegelman’s MAUS, but with poems instead of pictures. Many of its constituent parts have found print in other places, particularly in his previous collections The Language of Mules and the aforementioned Lightning and Ashes. But Echoes of Tattered Tongues isn’t a simple greatest-hits anthology by any means. Rather, Guzlowski resets the older material in a new framework, much as a composer might incorporate musical themes and ideas she’s previously worked out in piano sonatas and string quartets into a new symphony that coheres and magnifies her original pieces.
Echoes is largely the story of Guzlowski’s parents, as well as the story of how he came to learnfrom them the parts of that story he didn’t already know. It progresses in three movements, each movement delving deeper into the past—unfolding memory and uncovering missing pieces of the historical record: from his parents’ twilight years, to mid-century—John’s childhood—when they left the DP camp in Germany and emigrated to America, and finally, to the War itself, and the root of the deep unhappiness his parents carried with them to the grave.
Book I introduces us to Guzlowski’s parents in retirement, in Arizona, and gives us glimpses of what happened to them in their early lives, how it haunts them. In “My Mother Reads My Poem ‘Cattle Train to Magdeberg’”, a deft poem that is equal parts hilarious and horrifying, his mother, angry and sardonic, critiques John’s earlier effort at telling her story—a poem that we don’t actually read until Book III:
She looks at me and says “That’s not how it was. I couldn’t see anything except when they stopped the boxcars and opened the doors.
And I didn’t see any of those rivers, and if I did, I didn’t know their names.[”]
A serious, if wry, indictment, considering the original poem begins “My mother still remembers” and goes on to catalogue everything she supposedly saw from the eponymous cattle train. But then, she goes on to tell him some of what she did see, and to say, “Even though you’re a grown man / and a teacher, we saw things / I don’t want to tell you about.’”
We come to know Guzlowski’s mother well over the course of the book—the asperity of her outlook (“Why My Mother Stayed With My Father” begins “She knew he was worthless the first time / she saw him…” and ends “She knew only a man worthless as mud, / worthless as a broken dog, would suffer / with her through all of her sorrow.”); her violent, abusive rages (“Later in the Promised Land,” “Danusia”); her sardonic bitterness (“My Mother Was 19”—the harrowing denouement of a series of poems, written at different times, that are variations on the story of what happened to her and her family before she was sent to the camps). She stands in contrast to Guzlowski’s passive, sentimental, “worthless” father, who is the viewpoint character of much of the horror we see in the wartime Poland and Germany of Book III.
But before that, in Book II, Guzlowski guides us through his family’s experience as immigrants to America, who brought with them little more than a wooden trunk full of necessities, a heavy burden of trauma, and what few skills they had. As outlined in “What My Father Brought With Him,”
He knew there was only work or death.
He could dig up beets and drag fallen trees without bread or hope. The war taught him how. He came to the States with this and his tools,
hands that had worked bricks and frozen mud and knew the language the shit bosses spoke.
The family slowly finds its bearings in the Polonia Triangle neighborhood in Chicago (made famous by Nelson Algren in The Man with the Golden Arm) in spite of poverty, crime, pedophile priests, his father’s frequent drinking bouts, and his mother’s violent mood swings, in which she lashes out at John, his father, and his sister Danusia—an elusive figure who holds an obvious emotional valence for Guzlowski, but who never comes clearly into focus, and whose story, one of sweetness and innocence lost, is never resolved. Several of these poems are unsettling stories told by or about others who had fled Europe after the War, and one (the charming “Kitchen Polish”) is about being a non-native speaker, who grew up speaking Polish at home and English everywhere else:
I can’t tell you about Kant in Polish, or the Reformation or deconstruction
or why the Germans moved east before attacking west, or where I came from,
But I can count to ten, say hello and goodbye, ask for coffee, bread or soup.
I can tell you people die.
It’s a fact of life, and there’s nothing
you or I can do about it. I can say, “Please, God,” and “Don’t be afraid.”
If I look out at the rain I can tell you it’s falling. If there’s snow,
I can say, “It’s cold outside today, and it’ll most likely be cold tomorrow.”
Book III takes us into the nightmarish central Europe of Guzlowski’s parents’ wartime experience as prisoners of the Third Reich, and it is among the emotionally keenest of such chronicles. Few war poems I have read equal the intensity of “Landscape with Dead Horses, 1939”:
Look at this horse. Its head torn from its body by a shell. So much blood will teach you more about the world than all the books in it. This horse’s head will remake the world for you— teach even God a lesson about the stones that wait to rise in our hearts, cold and hard.
Or of “The German Soldiers” (“We soldiers are only human. We love / to kill. It is the hidden God in each of us.”); or of the surprisingly surreal, sinister beauty of the book’s longest poem, “The Third Winter of War: Buchenwald,” about his father’s imprisonment there:
He remembers a movie he once saw when he escaped from the camp.
In it, one of the heroes is a fat man, the other skinny. On a boat lost at sea, they look at each other in hunger and cry.
Then fatty smiles, and skinny cries harder.
[….]
He dreams dogs change into men and sit at a table to discuss the war, why it began and how it will end.
He wants to ask the dogs a question but they can’t understand his howling.
Guzlowski’s attempt to learn and feel the origins of his parents’ pain thus brings us into closer emotional touch with the entirety of the War in Europe, widening by necessity from the particular to the general. It is a unorthodox way of telling such a story: though there are many examples of poems written by poets who experienced the camps firsthand, examples of secondhand histories told in verse are thin indeed. And yet it works, in ways that defy analysis or easy summary. Guzlowski’s empathy and imagination are extraordinary, at times truly shocking. His verse, which brings to mind variously Charles Bukowski, Charles Simic, and Philip Levine, has a vernacular concreteness and clarity that is all the more startling when it breaks sharply with realism, and he deftly captures those quirks of personality that bring characters into full view. Less than halfway through the book, I had unconsciously slipped from thinking What a novel way to tell this story to I can’t imagine how else it could be told.
And as if that weren’t enough, Aquila Polonica Publishing deserves great credit for producing a book that is a beautiful artifact, from its cloth and leather binding, to its creamy paper, to the stunning photographs that accompany the text. In every respect, Echoes of Tattered Tongues is an achievement that deserves wide recognition and long remembrance.
In the Absence: Dara Barnat’s In the Absence evokes a yearning of the spirit so strong that it becomes presence, its light unstopped.
Dara Barnat is the author of the poetry collection In the Absence (Turning Point, 2016), as well as Headwind Migration, a chapbook (Pudding House, 2009). She also writes critical essays on poetry and translates poetry from Hebrew. Her research explores Walt Whitman’s influence on Jewish American poetry. Dara holds a Ph.D. from The School of Cultural Studies at Tel Aviv University. She currently teaches at Tel Aviv University and Queens College, CUNY.
Editor’s Note: Dara Barnat’s first full-length collection begins by declaring that “Dark is just dark.” But the assertion casts a shadow question: Is dark just dark? For it is light that is at the heart of this work: “I close my hand around a filament of sun as it filters / through the window, try to catch / its meaning, / but light is just light.”
But “light is just light” is no more the truth of these poems — and the poet’s journey that unfolds across them — than “dark is just dark.” This work is neither a book of questions nor of answers. Instead, In the Absence is an honest experience of grief that explores the inevitable, never-ending pilgrimage inherent within loss: “I hear you’re gone and I fall with you. / In that place part of me stays, / like a hand in clay.”
Not since Li-Young Lee’s Rose have I been so slain by a book of mourning. Like Rose, In the Absence mourns the loss of a father while acknowledging that such a loss is anything but simple, that the complications of life remain a reckoning for the living. “The imprint holds the loss of everything. / It holds what we thought was joy.”
Held close within this incredibly moving and painstakingly wrought collection is a poem titled “Walt Whitman.” I had the honor of featuring this poem here on the Saturday Poetry Series in 2013 as I marked my father’s first yahrzeit (Jewish death anniversary). Tomorrow will be five years since my father’s death. What at one year could be commemorated with a single poem, five years later needs an entire book. Such is the nature of grief — it does not diminish; it grows. And in its growing it becomes more painful and more beautiful all at once.
In the Absence transforms the poet’s personal grief into communion. I will re-read this book tomorrow as I remember my father on his five-year yahrzeit, and I will grieve. But, more than that, I will say a prayer that is the poet’s and is my own: “May we live / a thousand years together, / in another life.”
It is hard to quiet the blackberrying pain.
The little chronicles, the streaks, and the intimate workings.
I will face this by red-winging my truths.
I will push my blues into orchids.
BALLAD
I decided to claim more space
But I chose the opposite
What are the words I would go to: hunger// longing// love
When you feel drawn to something you should.
Whatever your terrible is is up to you.
The question is how you lead.
I lead myself to distress; I lead myself to happiness.
This is the history of our times.
I claw my way to the surface.
I get a hold of this world with my teeth
& wolf down what I thirst for.
How do I take the I out of here?
(why should I take the I out?)
*
I am always hungry
I am always thinking of my next meal
Is it the preemie in me?
Is it just the want?
*
We all have our oddities.
I am always trying to be practical, logical, rational,
but it doesn’t always add up.
There is so much of my life that I am forever holding under the light.
What falls below the seam?
What falls outside of this poem?
*
I want to put the happy in.
I want to put the hard world in.
I want to say this is a ballad, and so it is.
Let’s enter it differently.
Any mammal feeds a hunger
Any heart needs oxygen.
CARNAGE
Everyone is saying no to me
Just as they do now
Just as they will
A kind of civil riot
A staged parade
It makes every kind of sense
That carnage that comes with falling hard,
That carnage that hassles and times,
That carnage that language picks up;
I am wanting to be picked up.
It is rarely an accident.
Elements are employed
Pounds are ranged
The number of possible routes are lost
All to force my foot door to door
To match the heart of my drive to
Coffee after coffee after coffee.
Take me as a whole,
Take these birds outside my window
Alive with the world’s chirp
Alive with the everyday thrill of
Worm or bug or crumb. Take them,
Then remember my thrills.
Everyone is saying no to me,
And I am flummoxed each time
I ask for more; or try for more.
I strive and I strive.
That’s the 21st century calling.
It’s doable. I travel great lengths
So I can match the heart
With the focus of each and every obstacle.
Can there be a rallying point?
This is not an accident.
(Is that what I should be learning here?)
Well, isn’t that magnificent.
“Hard” originally appeared in Thrush, “Ballad” originally appeared in The Inquisitive Eater, and “Carnage” originally appeared in Queen Mob’s. These poems appear here today with permission from the poet.
Leah Umansky is the author of the poetry collection, The Barbarous Century, forthcoming from London’s Eyewear Publishing in 2018, the dystopian-themed chapbook Straight Away the Emptied World (Kattywompus Press, 2016), the Mad Men–inspired chapbook Don Dreams and I Dream (Kattywompus Press, 2014), and the full length Domestic Uncertainties (BlazeVOX, 2012). She is a graduate of the MFA Program in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and teaches middle and high school English in New York City. More at www.LeahUmansky.com.
Editor’s Note: It seems I can’t read (or write) anything these days without seeing it through the lens of politics. Least of all poetry. Today’s poems — at once political and private — may or may not have been crafted to address the current moment. And yet they can be read as a direct address and used, accordingly, as a salve. What can we do, we ask? “I will face this by red-winging my truths,” says the poet; “I will push my blues into orchids.” Even in an ars poetica the poet’s words can function as a mirror: “The question is how you lead. / I lead myself to distress; I lead myself to happiness. / This is the history of our times.” No matter their intent, today’s poems are in the world now, speaking to us as they will. They might incite action or nurse wounds or take stalk of our humanity. “Take me as a whole,” they say, “Take these birds outside my window / Alive with the world’s chirp / Alive with the everyday thrill of / Worm or bug or crumb.”
A Review of American Justice on Trial: People v. Newton
by Assena Fairuz
Author and Film Co-Producer/Co-Director Lise Pearlman’s book American
Justice on Trial: People v. Newton is a welcome exposition of the key
components in the 20th century’s Civil Rights movement. It’s also a
much needed examination of how the U.S. judicial system destabilized
freedom movements and failed its citizens– events which burn a clear
line leading to the present. The methods of planning used by Civil
Rights leaders bear a great deal of responsibility towards informing
the way we deal with the social ills continuing to plague this new
century.
Objective and factual, American Justice On Trial gives a detailed
account of the movements and motivations of the well-known activist
group The Black Panther Party For Self Defense, while also being an
account of reactions from the public and from other Civil Rights
leaders. Voter suppression in the 1960’s, the Watts riots in 1965, and
the FBI’s involvement with attempts to destabilize movements from
within are all touched on, their connections to the larger picture of
the Civil Rights movement made plain.
The piece focuses largely upon the trial of Huey P. Newton, one of the
founders of the Black Panther Party, who in 1967 was accused of the
murder of a police officer.
The assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. just before the trial
increased the strain on the populace. The trial ended up being watched
around the world due to the public’s recognition of its potential
change the course of the U.S.
Prisoner’s rights activist and lawyer to the BPP Fay Stender, and
political essayist and one time leader of the BPP Eldridge Cleaver are
also given center stage in some areas of this book, their motives and
actions spotlighted and scrutinized with the author’s keen historical
eye.
Reporters and writers alike who supported the causes of the Black
Panthers were forced by their consciences to weigh involvement with
the movement with the possible loss of their careers. In Stender and
Cleaver we see that tenuous line between personal and professional
collapse in regards to the BPP, ultimately leading to individual ruin.
Far from glorifying the violent acts committed by the Party, American
Justice On Trial also refuses to shy away from humanizing them along
with the other major players in this chapter of history. The book
focuses on the gains won by their much-needed fierce activism, but it
also touches–in parts–on the misogyny and non-activism-related
violence of some of the Party’s leaders.
The book’s sections are arranged in a fashion that is chronologically
loose using highlights regarding events which occur before or after
the era of the trial in comparisons with modern day events. I found
this style of arrangement made the book a bit difficult to follow in
some parts, but many other readers may have no trouble with this.
With its unflinching exposition of the U.S penal system’s treatment of
Black freedom fighters, American Justice on Trial: People v. Newton is
critical reading for activists and anyone wishing to become involved
with activism in our current, turbulent political climate.
***
V. Fairuz is a writer at The Dog-Eared Dragon blog: dogeareddragon.blogspot.com
Lise Pearlman’s American Justice on Trial: People v. Newton is available at:
Yours faithful editor, with 14-month-old son in tow, visiting “The New Colossus” at the Statue of Liberty Museum, Liberty Island, NY THE NEW COLOSSUS
By Emma Lazarus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
(Today’s poem is in the public domain, belongs to the masses, and appears here today accordingly.)
The New Colossus: “In 1883, a young writer, Emma Lazarus, donated a poem to an auction raising funds for the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. ‘The New Colossus’ vividly depicted the Statue of Liberty as offering refuge from the miseries of Europe. The sonnet received little attention at the time, but in 1903 was engraved on a bronze plaque and affixed to the base of the Statue. Still, it was only in the late 1930’s, when millions fled fascism, that the poem became fully identified with the Statue.
“Between 1886 and 1924, 14 million immigrants entered America through New York. The Statue of Liberty was a reassuring sign that they had arrived in the land of their dreams. To these anxious newcomers, the Statue’s uplifted torch did not suggest ‘enlightenment,’ as her creators intended, but rather, ‘welcome.’ Over time, the Statue of Liberty emerged as Emma Lazarus’ ‘Mother of Exiles,’ a symbol of hope to generations of immigrants.”
— “Mother of Exiles” historical marker, Statute of Liberty Museum, Liberty Island, NY
Editor’s Note: Forget the wall. Lift the ban. Let Lady Liberty’s torch, once again, be a beacon of welcome. You want to make America great again?
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
Lise Pearlman appeared in Stanley Nelson’s acclaimed 2015 film “The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution” as the country’s leading expert on the 1968 Huey Newton death penalty trial. She then moved to the Bay Area where she attended Berkeley Law School and then clerked for California Chief Justice Donald White before practicing law in Oakland. From 1989-1995, she served as the first Presiding Judge of the California State Bar Court.
Cristina Deptula: People who remember, or have heard of, the Black Panthers can have various positive and negative conceptions of them. Could you explain who they were and what kind of social climate they were responding to, and what they did? Basically, give a more full and balanced idea of the group.
Lise Pearlman: In my book the answer to that question took several chapters. The Black Panther Party arose in 1966 after other black militants based in the South began rejecting the peaceful civil rights demonstrations led by Dr. Martin Luther King in favor of aggressive demands for black power to oppose Southern white racists who viciously attacked protest marchers.
Inner city blacks across the country were already impatient with the snail’s pace of racial progress, erupting first in the Watts District of Los Angeles in 1965 with days of riots that prompted President Johnson to get Congress to invest far more funding in ambitious anti-poverty programs. Bobby Seale and Huey Newton were hired for the Oakland federal jobs program, specifically aimed to prevent a new Watts-type riot in Oakland. They formed the Oakland Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in October of that year just after riots in San Francisco prompted by an officer killing a fleeing black teenager suspected of car theft.
The Panthers aggressively confronted Oakland’s mostly white police force, which blacks in the city’s ghettoized neighborhoods had long considered abusive and racist. Many local policemen beat up arrestees with regularity and knew they could kill unarmed black suspects with impunity.
The bitterly divisive Vietnam War brought the Panthers White Leftist support. The Panthers opposed the war as both racist in its objectives and in the way it was waged with disproportionately black draftees. They also established large-scale breakfast programs for poor black children, which drew support from churches and synagogues, and set up medical clinics and testing for sickle cell anemia – health issues the government had long left unaddressed. The Panthers began to gain far more support from the black middle class after the death of the teenager they called their first martyr.
In early April of 1968, just after King’s assassination, Lil Bobby Hutton (their first recruit) joined Eldridge Cleaver in a gun battle with Oakland police, but when Hutton tried to surrender unarmed, he died in the street in a hail of police bullets. The police faced no charges, but many in the black community remained convinced Hutton was murdered. (This past October as part of the official 50th anniversary celebration of the Panthers’ formation, the city dedicated Bobby Hutton Memorial Grove in his honor).
Through their underground newspaper, the Panthers addressed many issues that had been simmering for two decades. Each semi-monthly paper featured the Panthers’ 10-point Party platform including demands for jobs, housing, education, trials before juries of their peers and an end to police brutality. The Panthers distinguished themselves from other black militants by openly carrying loaded weapons and urging all black men to do the same in an era when that was legal in California. The law was changed in June of 1967 to ban “open carry” in response to armed Panthers led by Huey Newton following police around on their beats to make sure they read arrestees their rights.
Many of the Panthers’ recruits were violence-prone; some were ex-felons like Newton. Contrary to their published rules of behavior, some Panthers strong-armed black businessmen for contributions to their programs; some dealt drugs. By the fall of 1967 the Panthers were still only about a score in number – counting those both in and out of jail. Those on the streets were in open war with the local police and admired as heroes by young blacks in the Oakland flatlands.
The Panthers were also already unknowingly harboring the first of many informers reporting to COINTELPRO, a secret web of state and federal law enforcement agents first formed by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in the 1950s during the Cold War. Over time, some Panthers committed assaults, robberies, rape or murder—sometimes breaking the law at the instigation of FBI moles.
Cristina Deptula: Was the Black Panther Party like Black Lives Matter? Did the Panthers influence BLM?
Lise Pearlman: The Black Panthers consider themselves — and I believe are also acknowledged by Black Lives Matter spokespersons — as the grandfathers of Black Lives Matter. Beyoncé linked the Panthers and Black Lives Matter in her half-time tribute at the 2016 Super Bowl.
The Panthers were among the first to openly take to the streets to protest police brutality and shooting of unarmed suspects and to aggressively demand major societal change to combat systemic racism.
Unlike Black Lives Matter, the Panthers quickly grew to become a single, albeit loose, organization with many chapters, all of whom studied revolutionary works, trained to use guns and wore a distinctive, intimidating uniform. The Black Panthers were a political party and ran candidates for office in alliance with the Peace and Freedom Party, and later for the Panther Party. Black Lives Matter appears to serve as an umbrella for several different black activist groups who have developed long lists of societal objectives for redressing systemic racism.
Cristina Deptula: Could you explain why the jury on the Newton trial, and Huey’s defense team, was so unusual and revolutionary for the time? What sorts of precedents did they put in place to ensure there would be less racial bias in jury selection?
Lise Pearlman: Historically, the jury “of one’s peers” guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment consisted in practice almost exclusively of white men, especially in death penalty cases. Newton and his radical lawyers boldly put the American justice system itself on trial for racism.
Demonstrators drew an international spotlight to the trial, making it the first “Movement” trial –drawing wide support among college students and Leftists for the claim that no black man could get a fair trial anywhere in America, especially when charged with killing a white policeman.
Through ground-breaking techniques, including pioneering testimony of expert sociologists on race bias, the legal team managed to get most white men dismissed from the jury panel. The resulting jury consisted of seven women and five men — four of whom were minorities. Only two were white men. The diversity of the jury was extraordinary. Observers were even more astonished when the jurors chose the lone black man on the panel – banker David Harper – as the foreman, the first known black foreman of a major American murder trial. Observer Thelton Henderson (who was then a rare black civil rights lawyer and is now a federal judge) called Harper’s selection “completely revolutionary.”
Civil rights lawyer Ann Fagan Ginger, head of the Meikeljohn Civil Liberties Institute in Berkeley, recognized how ground-breaking the Newton jury selection techniques were and used them to create a new criminal defense practice guide. That handbook, Minimizing Racism in Jury Trials, quickly became the Bible for defense lawyers for minorities seeking juries “of one’s peers” nationwide.
Cristina Deptula: How did the Newton trial go beyond just influencing how we carry out jury trials to affecting our whole culture in a broader way? How/why did the trial affect race relations in our country? What about the trial influenced everyday life beyond the courtroom?
Lise Pearlman: The Newton trial was widely expected to end in a death sentence and instigate renewed riots across country like the devastating riots in Watts and elsewhere in 1965-66, in the summer of 1967 in cities like Newark, Baltimore and Detroit, and in 125 cities following Martin Luther King’s assassination in the spring of 1968.
Instead, the diverse jury came to an unexpected verdict on the conflicting evidence, concluding Newton had no gun of his own – none had been found. They also concluded that John Frey, the policeman who died, was abusive and that his back-up officer, Herbert Heanes, shot Newton first. Gravely wounded, Newton overreacted and killed Officer Frey with Frey’s own gun.
The verdict of voluntary manslaughter resulted in its peaceful acceptance by both white and black communities. It attributed fault for the shootings to both the policeman who died and to Newton. That outcome of a highly-politicized trial in such a tinderbox setting demonstrated American democracy at its best — a fair trial conducted under difficult circumstances with exemplary behavior by a judge, prosecutor, and courageous jury foreman determined to ensure justice was both done and perceived to be done. The diverse jury demonstrated that when decision-makers in the justice system reflect the communities they serve, they get far more buy-in for their actions.
Current Alameda County D. A. Nancy O’Malley, the first woman to hold that office, sums the benefits of a diversified justice system up with her motto: “If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.”
The Newton trial featured at the defense table a then rare woman lawyer, who became his principal lawyer on appeal. Fay Stender’s brilliant work led to unexpected reversal of his conviction, elevating Stender to international fame as one of the most sought-after Movement lawyers in the country.
The Newton trial also became the Panthers’ most effective recruitment tool both nationally and around the world — the centerpiece of their efforts to gain wide support for their 10-point platform. Huey’s older brother Melvin believes that the Panther Party would have disappeared quietly within a year of its creation but for that headline trial.
Cristina Deptula: Please explain more about the legacy of the Black Panthers and how they influenced African-American civil rights.
Lise Pearlman: The “Free Huey” Movement engendered branches of the Party in cities across the country and support from millions of college students on hundreds of campuses. One major outcome was the Panthers’ success in demanding that ethnic studies be taught in colleges and high schools, leading not only to creation of ethnic studies departments, but giving impetus to the establishment of women’s studies and LGBT studies in the ‘70s.
The Panthers also played a key role in establishing one of the first Citizens’ Police Review Boards, which have since become increasingly common across the country. The Panthers’ demands for police recruits to be drawn from the black community helped spur diversification of the Oakland police force. Diversity is a key feature of guardianship of the community policing promoted in many cities today. This is promulgated to replace the historic warrior philosophy with a primary duty to protect property owners – a view still prevalent in many communities today.
The Panthers’ legacy cuts both ways. They sped up diversification of the local police, bench, prosecutor and public defender’s offices. They also succeeded in pushing for more police accountability to the black community through oversight by a citizens’ review board. But in the process, the Panthers also became a lasting symbol of black militancy to many in white communities, engendering strong backlashes.
In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, the FBI decimated the Panthers’ ranks and trashed their offices after Hoover labeled them the biggest internal threat to national security. The FBI was responsible for at least four Panther murders and incited a violent split in 1971 between followers of Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, who had fled to Algeria to avoid prosecution in 1969 (joined by his wife Kathleen, the Panthers’ Communications Secretary). The Panthers themselves played a major role in imprinting in the public mind a frightening image that politicians have used for decades to justify harsh sentences for black convicts, to deprive ex-felons of the vote, to adopt Stand Your Ground Laws and vilify Black Lives Matter today as a dangerous group of black militants.
Cristina Deptula: Why would you say the Newton trial was ‘the trial of the century?’ Why more so than say, the OJ Simpson trial, or anything else?
Lise Pearlman: The best definition I have seen of “the trial of the century” was by historian Anthony Lukas: “A spectacular show trial, a great national drama in which the stakes [are] nothing less than the soul of the American people.”
The Newton trial occurred during an extremely violent year in American history when American were deeply divided politically and racially. Race war was predicted. Yet the trial ended peacefully—creating a model for prosecutors and judges handling potentially explosive political trials.
Newton’s was the first Movement trial, encouraging hordes of protesters to demand his freedom and use him as a symbol of all black men caught up in an unjust system. His innovative lawyers pioneered the use of expert jury consultants and included a woman in a key role on the defense team. They engineered — with the consent of prosecutor Lowell Jensen — a diverse jury with an unheard of female majority in a death penalty case. That jury then elected the first black foreman of a major murder trial, who used his talents at organizational management to guide the jury to consensus.
In my first book, The Sky’s the Limit: People v. Newton, The Real Trial of the 20th Century? I made the argument that the unexpected verdict averting national riots created an opportunity after King’s assassination for inter-racial collaboration that led to election of black mayors, Congress members, Senators and Governors that eventually laid the groundwork for the nation’s first black President.
The O.J. Simpson trial was viewed as remarkable for featuring a woman lead prosecutor assisted by a black prosecutor, almost thirty years after Fay Stender played her pivotal role in the Newton trial. It was also still unusual in the 1990s for a high-profile murder prosecution to seat a mostly black jury. That jury wound up electing a black forewoman (again three decades after David Harper’s pioneering role in the Newton murder trial).
The stakes were much lower in the mid-90s than in 1968. Simpson himself never testified at his trial. In contrast, Newton was a revolutionary with activist lawyers who put him on the stand with his life at stake so he could educate the judge and jury about hundreds of years of racism in America – a powerful historic moment that mesmerized the packed courthouse. Also, O. J. Simpson never faced the possibility of execution; if he was convicted, national riots were far less likely than in 1968.
Unlike the O. J. Simpson case which involved innocent victims of gruesome domestic violence, the Newton trial put a dead policeman on trial as a symbol of racist abuse – gaining the Panthers an international political following when the country was already divided over a war criticized as racist. O.J. Simpson drew worldwide attention to his televised trial primarily because he was a celebrity who could afford a Dream Team to defend him.
The riveting trial acquainted millions of viewers for the first time with the intricacies of criminal procedure explained nightly on the news along with DNA evidence. The Dream Team also focused viewers and the jury on accusations of racist evidence-tampering by the Los Angeles Police. When polled after the trial, whites were split over the propriety of the acquittal verdict (42% agreed with the acquittal and 49% favored his conviction). Black viewers mostly endorsed the acquittal — 78% in favor, 10% believing he should have been convicted. Not until 2015 did a poll of African-Americans reveal a majority who believed that Simpson got away with murder.
The differing reactions to the O. J. Simpson case was an eye-opening look at the different prism through which blacks and whites view the same experience. That illustrates why diverse juries comprised of people with very different life experiences help cancel out each other’s bias and reach more defensible verdicts.
Cristina Deptula: For the younger generation, or just for everyone really, why is it important to know the history of the Black Panthers and the Huey Newton trial? How does that knowledge of history help us as we seek a more just world today?
Lise Pearlman: The Black Panthers were mostly in their teens and early to mid-twenties. They took to the streets for a cause of social justice they believed in and brought international attention to the history of racism in America. They also worked hard to start major community programs and lobby for ethnic studies programs. They trained for a revolution they could never have carried off, but were willing to lay down their lives if need be. Some did. Others went to prison.
They made mistakes to learn from, but they also achieved amazing results. Most of them never realized how much they accomplished in helping move the long arc of the moral universe toward justice, as Dr. King sought to do with his life’s work. Most Panthers considered banker David Harper an Uncle Tom. Few had any idea that the jury foreman knowingly risked his career and his life to make sure justice was done. Nor did most of the Panthers who picketed that 1968 trial learn about Ann Ginger’s resulting 1969 handbook that led to far more diverse juries “of one’s peers” for minority defendants nationwide.
Most Americans today do not know that including women and minorities among the cross-section of citizens routinely serving in jury pools got jump-started by the defense team’s aggressive efforts to seat women and minorities in the 1968 Newton death penalty trial.
Today’s issues of inequality and injustice can be addressed with similar zeal by young people focused on social justice, but it is important for them to learn from the history of this pivotal trial what worked then and what did not.
Cristina Deptula: How can we continue to further transform our legal system to treat all fairly regardless of race, class, gender etc? What reforms still need to be made?
Lise Pearlman: Oakland’s diverse police force, bench and prosecutor’s office are at the cutting edge of modern law enforcement, partly because of court-ordered reforms to the police department. Similar reforms have recently been ordered in Ferguson and Baltimore following widely publicized shooting incidents. Two black Attorneys General in a row under the nation’s first black President favored federal intervention.
This requires leadership committed to evenhanded justice regardless of race or ethnicity, class, gender, sexual identity or religion. Key reforms that should be replicated more widely are body cams for police, more cities creating police review boards with meaningful authority, and diverse police forces that mirror the populations they serve.
Oakland is also among the cities that have adopted restorative justice programs to redirect high school offenders away from the drop-out to prison pipeline, and Operation Cease Fire, an innovative program in which police, prosecutors, social workers and other government personnel sit down with gang members to intervene and give them the chance to lay down their weapons in exchange for help obtaining education, jobs, health care, and counseling to turn their lives around. This program acknowledges the handicaps that many minority youths grow up with in a society of haves and have nots and has made inroads in reducing gang membership and murders.
Legislatures committed to reform are also key. In the past few years there have been bipartisan proposals to reduce prison populations for nonviolent crimes, a population that is disproportionately minority. There have also been efforts to address racial profiling in arrests. Since Trayvon Martin’s death Black Lives Matter protesters have dramatically increased media attention to police and vigilantes killing unarmed black suspects. But sniper attacks on police are also disturbingly on the rise, exacerbating a racial divide and a split among those employed in law enforcement on how to proceed to best ensure the safety of our citizens.
To become more representative of our citizenry, the justice system needs more women and minority judges and prosecutors. Some states still seat almost all white male judges; nationwide, about 80% of elected prosecutors remain white male. We need to choose more prosecutors who emulate Newton prosecutor Lowell Jensen’s commitment to jury diversity and to doing justice rather than winning at all costs.
We need to change the macho culture of too many criminal justice personnel, including the continued hiring of predominantly white prison guards who often maintain a dehumanizing “us” versus “them” attitude toward incarcerated minorities.
The transformation of warrior-policing to guardianship of the community policing occurred in Watts in Los Angeles and is currently under way in Baltimore. After the death of Freddie Gray, the Baltimore police hired a female trainer and more recruits with a background in sociology. Prosecution of police for misconduct remains rare and convictions are often elusive.
But the public demands more accountability; police departments are increasingly using body cams and implementing other reforms under the leadership of progressive police chiefs and/or federal oversight in civil rights cases brought by legal specialists. Implementation of such reforms requires judges who care about achieving those goals. Many states have been moving in that direction; the federal courts now may be headed in the opposite direction.
Cristina Deptula: Well, we certainly hope that the moral arc of the United States judicial system will continue bending towards justice for all, regardless of race. And we thank you for your time and encourage people to order and read American Justice on Trial.
from what we (or at least I) often think of when I hear the word ‘narrative’. (I suppose I’m thinking of what I encounter when I read what is termed ‘narrative poetry’.) To me, your work seems to speak very much to the power, and to the necessity, of telling stories, even as you let the reader create connections from what’s left unsaid in the spaces between lines, between sections, in the silences. I’m reading your work as a series of impressions that build, that accrete, into whole pieces. Lyric stories. Could you say more about the importance of story in your work and how/if that influences the mode you write in for any given project?
obsess over the details, rarely thinking big picture all at once. I like what you say, letting “the reader create connections from what’s left unsaid.” That’s very important to me. What Weaponry is certainly story in jumps, gaps that intentionally wait for a reader to co-produce narrative, which happens in any work no matter how seamless the narrative hand-holding. I’m interested in making those seams apparent. As a reader we expect the writer to bring content and structure; I like to turn that back a little: I’ll bring the structure and let’s both bring the content and see what we can do together. I hope the collaboration is more inviting than vexing, though I’ve had both responses.
As It Ought To Be 