ESSAY: Thinking and Acting Radically About Climate and the Art World by Will South

“This is a real problem, with real consequences. The art world, as it turns out, is far from green.”

2017 Venice Biennale sculpture - SUPPORT - by Lorenzo Quinn reminds participants of rising sea levels that threaten Venice and all coastal cities around the world. The installation, first unveiled by Quinn at the Venice Biennale in 2017 and commissioned by Halcyon Art International, shows two gigantic hands of a child emerging from the Grand Canal in Venice to protect and support the historical building of the Ca’ Sagredo Hotel. "Venice, the floating city of art and culture that has inspired humanity for centuries, is threatened by climate change and time decay and is in need of the support of our generation and future ones”, said Quinn. “Let's join 'hands' and make a lasting change”. (United Nations Climate Change webpage)

Thinking and Acting Radically about Climate Change and the Art World

The positive effects of art on civilization would be difficult to list. Art and civilization are intimately entwined, each giving birth to the other in a continuous spiral of creative regeneration: that is, Leonardo produced the Renaissance at the moment it was producing him.

People all over this planet better understand now how tradition and innovation coexist, that tradition underscores identity and yet artistic innovations allow for inevitable changes. Art identifies what we value, and gives sound, narrative, movement, color, and shape to these values. As both process and product, we cannot remove art from the complexities of the human experience. It is fundamental to how we understand the world: To see a glorious sunset is one experience; to read exactly the right words to relive that experience is a minor miracle.

Readers of the present magazine will find no fault whatsoever with these two introductory paragraphs. This is a journal devoted to the support of art and artists in our community. Which may make the following statement a bit of a shocker:  The art world is a significant and unapologetic contributor to global warming.

No! you say, how can this be? Artists are the sensitive ones, the ones most open to change and action and to spreading the word (through art) that we all must act to create a sustainable, healthful world.

Relax. Of course, you, the artist/collector/reader of this journal are a proponent of mitigating the horrific symptoms of a heating planet—floods, fires, droughts, and virtually every other form of molecular mayhem.

Still, this holds: The art world is a bad actor when it comes to climate change. And here is why:            The art world is comprised of hundreds of thousands of galleries, museums, studios, art fairs, and private art collections worldwide. All of these entities ship art. Art is heavy, often, and needs to crating and boxing before it travels. To ship one two-hundred-pound crate by air from New York to London puts a thousand pounds of carbon into the air.

That is one shipment, one-way, a thousand pounds of carbon emitted.

One hundred such objects would result in fifty tons of carbon released into the air. The typical American car puts out about 4.5 tons of carbon, in a year. If those one hundred crates of art come back to New York (which they will, if they were on loan), then the emissions add up to a whopping one hundred tons of carbon requiring a mere eleven total hours of flight time to be released.

The art world thrives on shipping. Museums crate exhibitions and ship them not just to one venue, but to three or four before those crates return home. Now the math gets fuzzy, because there are so many museums, galleries, collectors, and art fairs shipping stuff and no one keeps track of it all vis-a-vis the climate. Someone should be, or a group of someones, as in a consortium of registrars.

There are 55,000 museums in the world. Not all are shipping monsters, but all of the big ones are—the Louvre, the Met, the Tate, etc. Let’s say, for sake of argument, that a mere .5 percent of all museums are “big.” That would be 225 museums. Further, let’s assume that each of the big museums hosts half a dozen traveling shows per year. That’s 1,350 shows, each with round trip shipping, let’s say, based on the New York to London numbers above—one hundred tons. That adds up to 135,000 tons of carbon in a single year. And let me assure you this: The actual art world number would be much higher—our example doesn’t include galleries, or projects from the other over 50,000 museums that are shipping more than a few things here and there all the time.

This is a real problem, with real consequences. The art world, as it turns out, is far from green. Like every other business, they are interested in green, a bit more it seems than the natural kind. Museums (and galleries, and art fairs) need cold, hard cash (or, warm, either way) to survive. The effects of non-visitation are instant and lethal. In 2020, worldwide museum attendance dropped a breathtaking 77%, from 230 million in 2019 to 54 million in 2020. Museums reduced hours, cancelled traveling shows, and laid off staff. Yes, many museums closed. Not any of our lovely little museums here in Columbia, but the pandemic isn’t over yet.

To get back to the vital, bustling businesses they were two years ago, museums will work to ramp up their schedules. Museums need money. It’s the fuel that drives their engines. But driving is the problem that is making the art world a carbon criminal. Getting all that art, all the time, from one place to another.

Is there a solution?

As with most enormous crises: Maybe.

For starters, museums can organize smaller, more lightweight exhibitions, which consume less energy to ship. Not all exhibitions need to be the theatrical behemoths they have become and to which museumgoers have become habituated. Most museum goers, however well intentioned, suffer fatigue after looking at 60 or 70 works and reading the labels and sharing comments with friends. Trying to experience 150 works of art is a job, not a treat. Museums, in their efforts to out-museum each other, have made shows ever bigger and ever more ponderous and, in many cases, a whole lot less fun. Get smaller. That’s the first and most obvious thing to do.

Build crates out of lighter material. Make use of crush-proof masterpacks when possible, as opposed to wood and steel. If an object requires tons of packaging, how about don’t send it anywhere. A tough choice, sure. But we’re in a crisis, and crises require sacrifices. Serious sacrifices.

Host fewer traveling shows. Yes, that will hurt any museum’s bottom line. On the other hand, it might inspire in-house innovation. What kinds of projects are possible with the permanent collection that are not boring collection surveys?

Some museums sponsor “close looking,” where a painting is set up to be looked at for over half an hour, up to an hour. Imagine what you could see, if you stared at an object that long, looking for every subtlety and nuance you could find. An hour won’t reveal them all. Close looking is just one idea. Be creative—that’s what the art world is good for.

Get people in the community to physically recreate their favorite paintings during a festival dedicated to just that—the tableau vivant, the living painting. Tableau vivants are fun to do, awards may be given out, and of course no art event is complete without booze, and that can be purchased locally.

And now, for the really radical idea: The big museums have way more art than they will ever be able to show. In America, the Met, MoMA the Art Institute of Chicago, all have collections numbering in the hundreds of thousands to the millions. If the largest collections gave away (not loaned, gave) a few thousand pictures each (which they wouldn’t even miss) they could greatly enrich the many small-to-midsized museums in the U.S. Point being, if the museums in South Carolina, Georgia, New Mexico, Utah, North Dakota, etc. etc. all had better art, they might increase visitation while reducing the number of traveling shows they, too, feel compelled to do.

That would be real change. The ridiculously enormous art collections are already teetering on unsustainability and would do themselves a spectacular favor by spreading their riches around.

Wait—what? This sounds like socialism. Well, yes, I suspect this idea does have a whiff of fairness, practicality, and sustainability about it. Mostly, though, it is a radical idea, submitted here in the spirit of let’s all be thinking radically.

Would such a proposal really “work”? Truthfully, I don’t know. But for an idea to be explored, it has to first be on the table. Sure, such an idea would be problematic. But the problems would be nothing compared to the devastating problem we are now facing.

At a distant point, and let’s hope there is one, future art lovers will be able to look back and say that early 21st-century art activists got radical in response to climate change, and the result was not just smart strategies to help cool the planet, but its radicality led to spreading art and its magic more equally throughout the world.

Not a bad legacy, however socialistic.

— Will South

Will South is an independent artist, curator and writer based in Columbia.

PRINT WORTHY! Coming back Around with Kasie Whitener

Kasie Whitener puts an unapologetic spin on nostalgia.

Whitener writes for Gen X, the forgotten generation: a generation of latch key kids who grew up in the ‘90s and now, according to Whitener, find themselves sandwiched and silenced between Millennials and Baby Boomers.

Her latest novel, Before Pittsburgh, was written during quarantine, but climaxes at the crisis of another generation: 9/11. Though Whitener originally tried to build the book around 9/11, “it didn’t work,” Whitener says.

For Gen X, 9/11 came at a pivotal time in their 20s, potentially changing the trajectory of their lives. After one event, their world was suddenly vastly different than the day before. Taking years to just survive after that kind of crisis, Whitener says that looking back today makes Gen X wonder if this is the same future that they had hoped for on September 10. As the 20th anniversary of 9/11 nears, Before Pittsburgh revisits how 9/11 was the turning point for everything for Whitener’s generation.

However, a large part of Whitener’s dedication to writing about Gen X is the recognition that most experiences aren’t unique to her generation. Whitener notes that the pandemic may be having a similar effect on the current generation of 20-year-olds that 9/11 had on hers.

Writing Before Pittsburgh during quarantine combined intentional nostalgia with current emotions of disconnection and uncertainty. “There’s a lot of emotion in there that might not feel like 2000, 2001— it might feel a whole lot like 2020,” Whitener says.

This notion of coming back around, perhaps lived in real time in the creation of Before Pittsburgh, is crucial to Whitener’s work as a writer. Whitener has used memory as a literary device consistently throughout her writing, now using more natural and meandering transitions than the snap flashbacks that her earlier work featured.

Whitener believes that the way the story is told is just as important as important as what is happening in the plot. “Those memories, when they come at you, they come at you for a specific reason …I wanna dive in. I wanna be back in that moment,” Whitener says.

Before Pittsburgh follows Whitener’s debut novel, After December, filling a three-year gap that was skipped over in the first novel. After December was decades in the making, as Whitener had been working with these characters since she was 13 years old. The novel was written, rewritten, put on hold, and edited again. “Those characters have always been there,” Whitener says.

After the time-intensive creation of After December, however, Whitener wrote Before Pittsburgh in just 18 months. Brian, the protagonist of Before Pittsburgh, navigates feelings of alienation from his friends, things that felt very relevant to Whitener’s experiences during quarantine. Using those feelings as guidance, the story came together very quickly for her.

While After December covered a period of just five days, Before Pittsburgh had to explain the years preceding the conclusion of After December. Instead of using chapters as markers, After December was divided by each day. With far more time to cover in Before Pittsburgh, Whitener used locations to section out the novel. This geographically based mode of storytelling allows the reader to see Brian’s compartmentalization of identities and ultimate growth into a more authentic version of himself.

Though Whitener has finally completed her work with the characters she’s been writing about since adolescence, she doesn’t imagine she’ll ever stop writing. After earning both undergraduate and graduate degrees in English, Whitener got her PhD in Organization and Management from Capella University. As her more full-time gig, Whitener teaches at the Darla Moore School of Business.

Whitener holds many different identities: Entrepreneur, educator, author, and radio show host, to name a few. On the side, she even visits book clubs that read her work. To Whitener, they’re all connected. “It all comes out of the writing,” Whitener says. “Everything I do is somehow related to writing. Always has been.”

Her radio show on 100.7 The Point serves as a weekly writing workshop and focuses on promoting South Carolina Writers. Her work as an entrepreneur goes hand in hand with her work as an author. Whitener notes that, while her writing career may look different from others, it’s common for authors to have multiple sources of revenue.

Whitener founded Clemson Road Creative in 2012, a business that functions as a for profit consultancy. Jodie Cain Smith, managing partner, firmly believes in Whitener’s role as an educator and a businessperson in addition to her work as a writer. “So much of being an author is being an entrepreneur,” Smith says.  

Ambition is a key word for Whitener. She wants more— not more money, fame, or, really, anything specific. “24 usable hours in the day, right? I just want all of them to be filled up with something meaningful.” Whitener says.

In addition to working with Whitener at Clemson Road Creative, Smith edited both After December and Before Pittsburgh, though she would never call herself Whitener’s editor. The two have been working together for years now; Whitener edits some of Smith’s work and the two share generational experiences.

“There are these generational truths in her writing that I struggle to find other places, so I really enjoy re-living my youth in her writing,” Smith says. She notes the detail with which Whitener remembers and writes the past, from fashion to music to even the cocktails characters drink. Though Smith was initially apprehensive about Whitener using 9/11 as a plot device in Before Pittsburgh, she changed her mind completely after reading the scene. Smith says Whitener captured the fear and grief of 9/11 and put it in real time. She had to read that section of the book several times, enjoying it as a reader, before she could edit it.

The story made Smith wonder what other stories should be created that address the shared terror of 9/11— something that, to her, Whitener proved could actually be done. Whitener carved out a space for generational representation, weaving in Gen X identity in a way that doesn’t feel exclusive.  “There’s a quality of almost numbness in lot of Gen Xers and we took independence and we stretched it to detachment almost,” Smith says. Before Pittsburg, in Smith’s opinion, explains that phenomena while maintaining a wide appeal.

However, this brand of “Unapologetically X,” as Whitener describes herself, didn’t always come naturally. Whitener noticed other creators from her generation being hesitant to identify as Gen X. Because so much of her work revolved around writing, even before the publication of her first novel, Whitener found that targeting people her age helped her establish an audience. By the time she turned 40, she felt no need to put on any kind of show or premise that wasn’t truly her— including any false professional identity.

While Whitener doesn’t expect that this authentic professional identity will ever be limited to just being an author, there’s certainly more coming. “One of my writing partners says that I’m like a popcorn maker,” Whitener says. “[I’ve] got all these kernels in the oil— at some point one’s gonna pop. And then they’re all gonna pop.”

Who knows what might pop next?

By Stephanie Allen

Celebrating 66 Years of Allen Ginsberg's HOWL

HOWL

by Allen Ginsberg

For Carl Solomon

I

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,

who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,

who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,

who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,

who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night

with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,

incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,

Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,

who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,

who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford’s floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi’s, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,

who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,

a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon,

yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,

whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,

who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,

suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark’s bleak furnished room,

who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,

who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,

who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,

who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,

who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,

who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,

who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,

who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,

who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,

who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,

who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,

who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,

who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,

who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,

who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,

who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,

who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman’s loom,

who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,

who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,

who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver—joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses’ rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,

who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hung-over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,

who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steam-heat and opium,

who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,

who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery,

who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,

who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts,

who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,

who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,

who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,

who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,

who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,

who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,

who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,

who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,

who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,

who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other’s hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,

who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,

who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,

who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other’s salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,

who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz,

who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,

who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,

who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,

and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia,

who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,

returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,

Pilgrim State’s Rockland’s and Greystone’s foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,

with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination—

ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you’re really in the total animal soup of time—

and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipsis catalogue a variable measure and the vibrating plane,

who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus

to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,

the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,

and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America’s naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.

II
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!

Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!

Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!

Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!

Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!

They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!

Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!

Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!

Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’ animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!

Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!

III
Carl Solomon! I’m with you in Rockland

where you’re madder than I am

I’m with you in Rockland

where you must feel very strange

I’m with you in Rockland

where you imitate the shade of my mother

I’m with you in Rockland

where you’ve murdered your twelve secretaries

I’m with you in Rockland

where you laugh at this invisible humor

I’m with you in Rockland

where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter

I’m with you in Rockland

where your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio

I’m with you in Rockland

where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses

I'm with you in Rockland
where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica

I’m with you in Rockland

where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx

I’m with you in Rockland

where you scream in a straightjacket that you’re losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss

I’m with you in Rockland

where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse

I’m with you in Rockland

where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void

I’m with you in Rockland

where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha

I’m with you in Rockland

where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb

I’m with you in Rockland

where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale

I’m with you in Rockland

where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won’t let us sleep

I’m with you in Rockland

where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls’ airplanes roaring over the roof they’ve come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny legions run outside O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we’re free

I’m with you in Rockland

in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night

First public reading, October 7, 1955, at the Six Gallery in San Francisco

Future Fortune Artist Talk: Dogon Krigga interviewed by Michael Murray at Tapp's Outpost October 3rd, 2021

Tapp's Outpost is excited to host an intimate discussion between Artist Dogon Krigga and Co-host of the Podcast Cultivated Ignorance, Michael Murray, on October 3rd at 4pm. Unpacking the vision and inspiration of the exhibition Future Fortune: A visual treatise on perspective, Dogon and Michael will hone in on the experiences, characters, and world views that shaped the artists visual story line. The talk will also be streamed on Facebook live for those community members who can't participate in person. The show is currently on view at Tapp's Outpost, 715 Saluda Avenue, Columbia, SC 29205, and is free and open to the public Tuesday through Saturday 10am to 6pm

Dogon Krigga expresses magick with the use of pixel and paper. Known as “the keeper of the crossroads between magick and mixed media”, Dogon incorporates divine mysteries, transcribed over time throughout their ancestors’ experiences to connect Black people to the future and the past.

Dogon immortalizes modern and ancient traditions, wisdom, and theory into majestic and whimsical digital and mixed media collages that venerate those that came before, those that will come, and those that exist outside of time. 

Dogon Krigga utilized over a decade of experiences, techniques, knowledge and training as a graphic designer and practitioner of Afrofuturism and other African diasporic traditional religions to illuminate the spiritual paths and possibilities for all whom receive their creations.

Dogon Krigga currently resides where they grew up, in Columbia, SC. Krigga is primarily a self-taught artist, with a creative lineage connected to legends like Romare Bearden and Tom feelings. Their background in creative writing, journalism, and music production also lends to their creative perspective.

Michael A. Murray is a local poet/author who has been writing stories and stanzas ever since his hand could hold a pen. He is also a photographer, filmmaker, podcast host, public speaker, mentor, and founder of the NU GRWTH Artist Collective: a premier conduit that gives black and brown artists of the south the resources, visibility, and appreciation needed to be as influential as their dreams aspire to be.

Since 2016 Michael has joined various creative circles and founded various artistic outlets with one objective constantly in mind: Do whatever it takes to help see both the world and all those who inhabit it reach their highest, truest potential. With this goal at the forefront, Michael founded Playlixt LLC, an event and multi-media based platform built to promote and celebrate artists of various backgrounds and disciplines looking for opportunities to showcase their talents to the masses.
 

The exhibition will be on view September 9th through October 30, 2021. The exhibition is free and open to the public Tuesday through Saturday 12pm to 6pm. Masks and social distancing will be required. For questions about the works on view or Tapp's Outpost, please email caitlin@outpostartspace.org. 

Announcing the Accepted Contributions to 2021 Fall Lines - a literary convergence & Winners of the Broad River Prize for Prose and Saluda River Prize for Poetry

The Jasper Project, in conjunction with Richland Library, One Columbia for Arts and Culture and Richland Library Friends & Family , is proud to announce the authors whose work has been accepted for publication in part II of the combined seventh and eighth edition of Fall Lines – a literary convergence, as well as the recipients of the 2021 Fall Lines Awards for the Saluda River Prize for Poetry and the Broad River Prize for Prose.

Congratulations to

Kasie Whitener whose short fiction, The Shower,

was selected from more than one hundred prose submissions as the winner of the Broad River Prize for Prose, and to

Angelo Geter, whose poem, Black Girl Fly,

was selected from more than 400 submissions as the winner of the Saluda River Prize for Poetry.

All additional contributors are listed below!

Judges for this year’s awards were

Randall David Cook for fiction and Nathalie Anderson for poetry. 

Mark your calendar for Sunday October 17th at 3 pm for the 2020-2021 Fall Lines Release and Reading at the Main Branch of the Richland Library. All contributors are invited to read ONE piece from the combined issues. The event is free and open to the public!

All accepted contributors should send a 75-word bio to be included in the journal to editor@JasperColumbia.com

CONGRATULATIONS TO THE FOLLOWING!

Aida Rogers – From Proust to Gibbs

Hannah Pearson – Where the Fox and Hare Say Goodnight

Liesel Hamilton - Drifting

Susanne Kamata -  The Lump

Loli Molina Munoz - Distance(s)

Carla Damron - Breaking the Surface

Arthur McMaster - Connecting Flights

Kasie Whitener - The Shower

Tim Conroy - Pendleton Street

Debra Daniel - How to Make Peach Jam

 

Angelo Geter -  Black Girl Fly

Lisa Hase Jackson – Dead Birds of the Great Leap Forward

Ray McManus – When You Can’t Tell the Vine from the Branches

Landon Chapman – Odysseus

Ken McLaurin – Procrastination

Terri McCord – Sense Making

May O’Keefe Brady – Pandemic’s Box

Adam Corbett – The Keys and Gertrude Stein

Patricia Starek -  Glass Travels

Jenny Maxwell – My Father on Tap Dancing

Nicola Waldron – Peach Harvest

Ken Denk – Propitiating the Pulmonic Plague and After the Fight

Ruth Nicholson – At Congaree Swamp

Glenis Redmond – She Makes Me Think of Houses and For Dark-Skinned Black Women You Know it’s Not Just About the Red Lipstick

Judith Cumming Reese – Twilight Song

Eileen Scharenbroch – Sisters

Worthy Branson Evans – Blues For Want of a Blues Song

Kristine Hartvigsen – Journey

Roy Seeger – Alluvial Patterns

Randy Spencer – Invitation to the Plague and When it is Over

Betsy Thorne – Quarantined

Amanda Rachelle Warren – How Many Reasons for this Up and Gone

Jo Angela Edwins – The Lichtenberg Figure

Susan Craig – Tell Me it is Enough

Danielle Ann Verwers – When the Lights Go Out

Ann-Chadwell Humphries – Golden Boy

Austin Hehir – Human

Libby Bernardin – Dear October

Horace Mungin – Flip of the Two-Headed Coin

Melanie McClellan Hartnett – untitled

Al Black – Prayers in the Spectrum

John Lane – Two Rifts on Montale

Gil Allen – The Chosen

Jane Zenger – What I Will Do For You

Lisa Johnson-McVety – Sad Feet

Remembering Thorne Compton, with Thoughts of Peace and Love by Dale Bailes

photo courtesy of Chris Compton

Thorne Compton and I met at U of SC in the early sixties. We were on the Junior Varsity, of the Debate Team. We made a mutual friend of Bob Anderson, and did our best to make this first black male student at USC feel welcome. That was an uphill battle in those days. I lost track of Bob after I left grad school in 1965; Thorne kept track and even told me of being in touch with Bob’s widow and child in recent years. 

Thorne and I met again in the early seventies. He had done a stint in the Peace Corps with first wife Jo; I had been a hippie mail man in San Francisco, among other West Coast Adventures. 

Those adventures led to my pulling together a crew of artists, Viet Nam vets, and singers and seamstresses to open the Joyful Alternative. Thorne was a regular there at our original 2009 Green Street location, stopping in for a record or a book every week, and papers. THE VILLAGE VOICE and GREAT SPECKLED BIRD, that is. 

Thorne managed to function in the academic environs better than I had. He earned a doctorate and became an English professor. When I published my first book CHERRY STONES and went to work with the Arts Commission, he invited me to do poetry readings for his classes. He would go on to deanships and department chairs. 

I pursued other interests—running a music hall at Folly Beach, getting an MFA in Screenwriting at USC/West. I taught in prisons and on Navy ships, and a planned two-year gig as an adjunct at Moorpark College in California ending up being twenty-five or thirty years. 

At one point in the eighties, Thorne got in touch to make sure I got the scoop on Carolina’s big celebration of James Dickey.  He got me in, and I was privileged to see and hear such literati as Harold Bloom and John Simon hold forth. 

It must have been about that time I began to make an effort to find a full-time teaching job SOMEWHERE, and I made yet another request of the most stolid academic friend I knew for a letter of recommendation. 

He must have written a dozen letters, without complaint. 

Until I was visiting in Columbia from California in the early nineties and ran into him at the campus bar Hunter-Gatherer. After some catch-up conversation over a beer or three, he blurted out in faux exasperation—I think—“Please don’t ask me to write anymore ________________ letters of recommendation!” 

I didn’t. 

I spent a few more years adjuncting at Moorpark until I got tired of freeways, and retired to live with my best friend Jo Baker at Pawleys Island.  Thorne, having lost his Jo years earlier, was remarried, retired, and removed to Michigan for several years. 

The odds were long that two old friends would meet again at the top of the hill where Saluda meets Heyward , but it happened. About two years ago. 

I stopped at the sign and waited for a man and his dog, motioning them to go ahead. 

Thorne and his dog Bo weren’t taking any chances, so I rolled down the window when Thorne looked closer to check my plans. Two happy old codgers, I guess we seemed to any passersby. And although Bo tugged on the leash and whimpered about having more peemail to check, we caught up a bit. I was on my way home from  my work at U of SC School of Nursing, where I occasionally was a Standardized Patient.  

He didn’t know the term. I explained I portrayed scenarios of different illness situations, with student nurses.  The irony was thick as he managed a smile and said, “I’m the real thing.” He had months, or maybe a couple years, left. 

We ended our car window conversation with a promise to get together soon for a nice bottle of red, and lots of “telling lies.” 

My personal lethargy, isolation at Pawleys, the pandemic…it didn’t happen. Most of us have made the same mistake. 

Thorne’s son Chris Compton messaged me from Los Angeles that if I was going to see him again, it should be sooner rather than later.  Thorne’s wife Raven was kind enough to arrange a visit with him the week before Easter. 

Even without a good red, we had a very good hour. We talked about Bob Anderson, the early days of Joyful, those letters of recommendation. He smiled and mentioned a memory that surprised me. “Those parties on South Walker Street. Live music and a hundred of your closest friends. Some of the best times I ever had!” 

As usual, he asked what I was writing, I told him an artist named Janet Kozachek had provided two pieces of work that had inspired some ekphrastic poems. New as the term was to me, he remembered learning it a dozen years ago. I told him I would send the art and the poems.  

I don’t know if he was able to see the stuff before he passed. One of them, with the artwork that inspired it used with the artist’s permission, is printed below. The poem, “Obeisance,” has a puckish tone that I associate with Thorne Compton, and is dedicated to his memory. As is the next glass of red I wrap my hand around.

Artist - Janet Kozachek

OBEISANCE

  by Dale Bailes

The posture is apotropaic.

To appease Thanatos, back when.

And now to fend off his vengeful

Sibling, Erinyes.

 

It is not a conscious thing.

It is brought forth by naked fear

As pandemic stalks the land.

The gesture is archaic, bold.

 

Bare haunches taunt our oldest

Dread.  They show contempt

For knowing time is never

Long enough, nor safety certain.

 

What I create may have

A longer span. A gesture, small,

To thwart some master plan.

A wrench in the machine.

 

So. Black-robed, grinning bearer

Of the scythe—or shrieking sister

Eris—bring forth your deadly kiss.

I here present, a target you can’t miss.

Retired English instructor Dale A. Bailes commutes from the ‘hood in Pawleys to the ‘wood in Columbia for his part-time work as a Standardized Patient at the U of SC School of Nursing. He has poems upcoming in Fall Lines and AMERICAN WRITERS REVIEW.

Columbia Poets Al Black and Randy Spencer Featured in Piccolo Spoleto’s Sundown Poetry Series

Al Black and Randy Spencer are effervescent poets, speakers who refuse to hold back or look away from what asks to be gazed upon. In their work, readers are taken on a journey of intertwining rivers where you learn about their histories, intimate parts of yourself, and the spaces and places in which we dwell. Keep reading to learn more about Piccolo Spoleto’s Sundown Poetry Series and Black and Spencer—and discover two poems from the artists. 

Former Charleston Mayor Joe Riley launched Piccolo Spoleto in 1979, two years after Italian composer Gian Carlo Menotti founded Spoleto Festival USA. Piccolo, alluding to the smallest woodwind and thus the smaller festival within the larger Spoleto, has reflected the City of Charleston’s desire to showcase local art and artists. 

The Sundown Poetry Series is one of the oldest events in Piccolo history, with the goal of featuring a select number of local poets. The current selection committee consists of Ed Gold, Katherine Williams, and Curtis Derrick. According to Derrick, the application process for poets parallels the process for all Piccolo Spoleto artists and is based on a submission of work. At times, however, the selection committee directly invites applications from poets who have “achieved particular notoriety or had recent book publications.”  

The original venue for the Sundown Series was the courtyard at the Dock Street Theater—so drama patrons could enjoy poetry as an art “appetizer” before a performance—but this year Sundown is being held in the Lenhardt Garden of the Gibbes Museum of Art to accommodate more efficient social distancing. 

Eight poets are being featured this year, one per evening, in the following order: Al Black, Valerie Nieman, H.R. “Randy” Spencer, Lola Haskins, Dr. David B. Axelrod, Kwoya Fagin Maples, Grace C. Ocasio, and Ren Ruggiero—two of the poets, Black and Spencer, are Columbia-based. 

Al Black has published two poetry collections: I Only Left for Tea (2014) and Man with Two Shadows (2018), both with Muddy Ford Press. He co-edited Hand in Hand, Poets Respond to Race (2017) and has been published in several anthologies, journals, periodicals, and blogs. He hosts various arts events, co-founded the Poets Respond to Race Initiative, and was Jasper Project’s 2017 Literary Artist of the Year. 

Black expresses anticipation for the reading—while often not the type to seek out readings and more so the one to host them, he deeply enjoys being a part of them. Derrick reached out to Black in 2019 and asked if he would be interested in reading for Sundown, and Black accepted and was slated for 2020, but when the festival was cancelled due to COVID-19, the poets were moved to 2021. 

Spencer was also originally slated to read in 2020 and is looking forward to reading this week. H.R. “Randy” Spencer is the author of several chapbooks, and his first full collection, The Color After Green, was published in 2019 by Finishing Line Press. As stated on Piccolo Spoleto’s Facebook, “Recently featured on SCETV’s By the River, this collection of contemporary nature poems is both personal and reaches for larger concerns around climate and ecological changes, sometimes set in the South Carolina Lowcountry.”

Spencer previously read as part of the Sundown Series in 2012 and had such a positive experience that, after the required waiting period between reapplying, he immediately applied to read again. “I don’t do many readings, and my favorite are small groups where we can sit and talk,” he divulges, “I’m looking forward to sharing my work with whoever comes.”   

Spencer says that he will start off the reading with poems from his collection but will mix up what he reads to fit this event. “I change it up due to where I am,” he shares, “Since it’s in Charleston, I’ll do more poems that have to do with the coast and the low country and traveling.”  

He will also read outside the book, reading some books from a chapbook of poems about the COVID-19 pandemic. He also recently wrote a poem in the Gullah language as a means to preserve and honor the lyrical language, and he hopes to read it during the event as well. 

Black also likes to switch readings up based on where he is performing. He will have the time it takes to read a work at the top of each poem’s page to ensure he fits within the time limit—each reading is approximately 40-45 minutes with time for a Q&A after. 

“I never have a set list of poems to read—I’ll have 2-3 poems in my head that I might open the night with, but I’ll walk in and try to get a feel for the night,” Black intimates, “based on people’s reactions I may end up reading a poem I’ve never read before.” 

Black intends to start “edgy,” potentially touching on racism and/or women’s issues. He will likely start with his first book (I Only Left for Tea), then move to the book about his father (Man with Two Shadows), then various publications, then a book about his mother—which he is currently prepping for publication—before ending with new work. 

Both Spencer and Black look forward to sharing work new and old in a fresh space. In that vein, both poets have offered a poem for the audiences of this blog. Spencer’s poem is from The Color After Green, and he feels it is a companion piece to the Gullah poem he may read at the event. Black’s poem is a recent one he was compelled to write after watching an ad card fall from a magazine.

Beatitudes

Blessed is the morning.

Blessed is the coffee.

Blessed is the sun before the rain.

Blessed are the birds

that dampen traffic noise.

Blessed is the train that wails

and the siren song that fades.

Blessed is the drone of the plane that stays aloft.

Blessed are the dog walkers, the couples,

the skateboarders, the bike riders,

the joggers, the mommies pushing strollers,

and the daddies carrying daughters on shoulders.

Blessed are the lonely.

Blessed is the greening tree.

Blessed are the flowers that grow wild.

Blessed is the broken fence rail

I step over to enter the park.

Blessed is the cat that chases the squirrel

and the dog that scares the cat.

Blessed is the silent leaf blower

when the neighbor takes a break.

Blessed is the moss that fills

the empty spaces with color.

Blessed is the blue recycling bin

that sits outside our kitchen door.

Blessed is the card stock magazine ad

that falls at my feet

for it shall become a bookmark.

—     Al Black, 2021

Wind

                        September 23, 1989:

I can still feel it. The wind last night

sucked the breath out of me, flung it screaming

over the live oak and limbless pine.

Then the water swelling, some deep voice

sliding up to us, a dark face, its white woolen beard

spilling over us, straining the ballast

that kept our house rooted like a stiff barnacle

to some tether in the sand

My ears still roar like a seashell.

The ominous calm coming next. That calm

without even the random rustle of life,

birds appearing, silent in the dead air.

When the eye came, I walked outside.

There was a hole straight up

through all that darkness, like a tunnel,

starlight like pinhole punctures in a black screen.

I could barely see the pines, stunted, still straight,

but snapped off midway up, all clipped

the same height, bodiless legs

left planted in clay boots. I could see

cuts opened up in hardwoods, limbs broken

from live oaks, shrubs uprooted, scattered, terrifying.

It came back worse than before,

blowing oppositely, humming its tune

differently over the stringed forest. Inside,

when I could fall sleep I dreamed my ankle

braceletted by a whirl of rope leaping overboard

after an anchor, dragging me after it,

dreams of fish flying, their silver pancaked scales

covering my eyes, cutting into me like razors.

Then, this morning. Coming out

seeing sailboats piled like cordwood,

battered and strewn over the marsh,

masts stepped vertically yesterday

laying over now, angled north

as if they were still carrying sail,

reduced to sundials marking shadows in the morning sun,

birds blown north, vagrants, wounded, dazed,

Shells everywhere, freshly gutted open,

still slick with gristle or beaten white

and smooth, broken on some rock,

then carried inland, a whelk settled in a cowshed,

a purplish clam in a seaside garden

where chrysanthemums should be in bloom,

with my neighbors empty house half lifted

from its foundation and nesting in spartina grass,

on an ordinary autumn day

               with bright sunshine, mild sea breezes, soft breakers.

—    H.R. Spencer, from The Color After Green (in reference to Hurricane Hugo)

If you’re interested in potentially hearing these poems out loud and in hearing more from these poets, both readings occur in the coming days in Charleston. Black opens the Sundown Series tomorrow, June 1st, and Spencer reads Thursday, June 3rd. Both events begin at 6:30pm.  

Spencer’s collection can be purchased at larger retailers or directly from the publishing house, Finishing Line Press: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/the-color-after-green-by-h-r-spencer/  

Black’s books can also be purchased at larger retailers or the publishing house, Muddy Ford Press: https://www.amazon.com/Man-Two-Shadows-Al-Black/dp/1942081162

-Christina Xan

JASPER WRITES! A New Opportunity for SC Writers

JASPER WRITES!

The Jasper Project invites SC writers and writers with a connection to SC to submit poetry and prose for weekly publication on the Jasper Project website.

Jasper is delighted to announce our newest project—JASPER WRITES!

Hosted by Jasper Magazine poetry editor Ed Madden and editor-in-chief Cindi Boiter, the Jasper Project invites SC writers of both poetry and prose to submit their best work to us for publication consideration in a new segment on the Jasper Project website.

• Our immediate goal is to cultivate an online space where SC writers and readers can visit for inspiration and pleasure and to bask in the abundant literary talent this state offers.

• Our long-term goal is to collect samples of this talent from the accepted submissions to publish in a perfect bound compilation on a regular basis.

• Our over-arching goal is to preserve for posterity the eloquence of the Southern voice as it is created in SC at this point in time.

Submission Guidelines may be found here.

Gracious welcome to our first two contributors, Jennifer Bartell and Gina Ercolini.

FALL LINES 2021: CALL for SUBMISSIONS for the 2020-2021 DOUBLE ISSUE

Fall Lines – a literary convergence is a literary journal presented by The Jasper Project in partnership with Richland Library and One Columbia for Arts and Culture.

Fall Lines will accept submissions of previously unpublished poetry, essays, short fiction, and flash fiction from April 1, 2021 through June 30, 2021. While the editors of Fall Lines hope to attract the work of writers and poets from the Carolinas and the Southeastern US, acceptance of work is not dependent upon residence. 

Publication in Fall Lines will be determined by a panel of judges and accepted authors (ONLY) will be notified by September 30, 2021, with a publication date in October. Two $250 cash prizes, sponsored by the Richland Library Friends and Foundation, will be awarded: The Saluda River Prize for Poetry and the Broad River Prize for Prose.

DOUBLE ISSUE: Due to restrictions surrounding COVID-19, the 2020 issue of Fall Lines will be published in conjunction with the 2021 issue as a DOUBLE issue. Two unique sets of poetry and prose and two sets of winners will be bound together in ONE BOOK and celebrated with ONE Launch and Reading event at a TBD date in October. Both 2020 and 2021 prizes will be presented at the October 2021 launch event.

Ø  POETRY: Up to five poems may be submitted with each submitted as an individual WORD FILE.

Include one cover sheet for up to five poems. Submit poetry submissions and cover sheet to FallLines@JasperProject.org with the word POETRY in the subject line.

Ø  PROSE: Up to five prose entries may be submitted with each submitted as an individual WORD FILE.

Include one cover sheet for up to five prose submissions. Submit prose submissions and cover sheet to FallLines@JasperProject.org with the word PROSE in the subject line.

COVER SHEET should include your name, the titles of your submissions, your email address, and mailing address. Authors’ names should not appear on the submission. Do NOT send bios.

ALL ENTRIES SHOULD BE TITLED.

There is no fee to enter, but submissions that fail to follow the above instructions will be disqualified without review.

Simultaneous submissions will not be considered. Failure to disclose simultaneous submissions will result in a lack of eligibility in any future Jasper Project publications.

 __

 The Columbia Fall Line is a natural junction, along which the Congaree River falls and rapids form, running parallel to the east coast of the country between the resilient rocks of the Appalachians and the softer, more gentle coastal plain.

CALL FOR POETRY! Columbia City Poet Laureate Ed Madden Issues Call for POEMS ON THE BUS!

A new call for poems for our Columbia area bus system! South Carolina writers welcome, Midlands writers and young writers encouraged!

CALL FOR POEMS!

POEMS ON THE COMET – SPRING 2021

WHEN IT’S OVER

Again this spring we are putting poems on the Comet, our regional transit system buses. Past projects have included poems on the stories of our city, poems about our rivers, poems about time. This spring, let’s think about what to do when it’s over.

We’ve all seen lists on social media of things people plan to do when the pandemic is over. What do you dream of doing when the pandemic is over? Or thinking more broadly, what will you do when that interminable office meeting is over? Or when the semester is over? Or when winter is over?

These are poems about dreams and plans, poems about transitions. What’s next?

Poems should be 10 lines or fewer. Submit to poetlaureate@onecolumbiasc.com for consideration. Rolling deadline, but we are hoping to have 30 great poems by the end of April.

PLEASE SHARE!

Spotlight on Writer Aliada Duncan

Aliada Duncan

Aliada Duncan was born in Beaufort, SC in 1992 and relocated to Columbia in 2008. A graduate of Limestone College, she will be graduating this year with an MSW from Winthrop University.

Duncan says she began writing at the age of thirteen. “Writing was a way for me to express myself. My pre-teen and teen years were tough. I started off writing poems. I was most inspired by Langston Hughes.” 

Duncan says, “I’ve self-published six books thus far in total. My first book, Wordplay: A Potion Name Poetry was officially my introduction to the world of writing. It was composed of poems that I had written throughout the years.”  

Her other publications include Gumbo: A Potent Poetry and Parables, a novella titled Satan, You Can’t Have My Marriage, two books of erotica titled Secrets Under My tongue and Flames: Magic at Midnight; and her most recent book is, Tongues: Enter My Ethos. All have been self-published and are available from Amazon. 

Duncan started her own business in June of 2020, Anu Vision LLC and says, “I’ve been busy with getting that off the ground. I haven’t written in a while; however, you haven’t seen the last of me.”

And here’s a sample of Duncan’s work:

The G.O.A.T Chronicles

 I am God frequency energy

The inner-G in me is key to immortality

What I am relaying is a result of what I am displaying

Slaying the odds with my warmest regards

I am the essence of this message

I have opened a portal and undefeated by mortals

In totality and in total

Whether local or worldwide, my illumination, you just can’t hide

Fruitful and forbidden, my power cannot be hidden

With pride and stride, I conquered the battles presented to me

Now they realize that my presence is a present

I am King to the peasants

Power I devour, it’s what I represent

I ascend and send solutions for my revolution

I descend and suspend executions of my evolution

Consistency is infinitely embedded inside of me

My levels is hard to reach, hard to sustain

My reign on the throne is solidified

 My magnetism defies the isms

My prism holds the light—

It cannot be dimmed, try as you might

I have summoned my sanctuary

Building contrary to what was meant to bury, me

You’re not even worth my stardust

I am governed by the divine

This brilliance is my shrine

This is the rhythm, this is the rhyme

My potency should be a crime

The G.O.A.T— Greatest of all time

POETRY: Three More from Al Black

Poem Before Dying

Lorca wrote of roosters,

of eating cemetery grass,

of weeping little boys,

of snow, of guitars, of murder,

of women dropping off to sleep,

of a resurrection that will never come,

and he makes me weep.

I write of barking dogs and feral cats,

of trash on asphalt courts,

of weeping little boys,

of warm summer nights,

of thumping bass and staccato beats,

of blue light custodians of violence

who sweep streets for casings

to put in envelops and file away,

of women dropping off to sleep,

of the resurrection that came

as a thief in night,

and still I weep.

Who will write our vignettes of revolution,

let barking dogs and feral cats come inside,

gather trash in the park,

comfort weeping boys,

organize funeral processions

on country roads where bodies lie hidden,

sip liquor from red plastic cups

at candle lit memorials,

clean the house and feed the children

so women can sleep at night,

sing the songs of freedom,

live scriptures left half-open on the night stand

revealed on scraps of light

before the rooster crows, again,

and who will dry our tears.....we will.

 ~~~

In My Veins

In my veins,

my parents walk hand in hand

reading letters written

across the ocean of a world war.

I look out with my father’s eyes

remarking on the country he fought to preserve

and the sad state of his Grand Old Party

or with my mother’s eyes

to see what season it is

and what flowers and vegetables

she needs to plant.

I see with grandfathers’ eyes,

two farm boys pushed from the land

now gardening their backyards.

My father’s father talks of fishing

and how Lake Okeechobee

is a fisherman’s paradise.

My mother’s father sees again

after decades of being blind,

still blames FDR for the loss of his farm,

ignores the greed of his brothers

and that he was going blind.

One grandmother looks in a mirror

to see how tall I’ve grown

and offers pastries.

The other stares in a mirror

no longer angry or judgmental,

but I still don’t know what

or how she sees the world.

In my veins,

run my parents’ blood

and their parents’ blood

and their parents’ blood

on and on through generations

I can’t decipher

and only blood knows

 ~~~

Chain Link Fence

She lives on a corner, her back yard a chain link fence Walks alone each morning six times around the park Cocked arms pump right angles, rapid short steps, eyes ahead, speaks to no one I don't know her name; someone told me once But I am horrible with names and forgot

She goes in her front door, lets her dog out the back If he barks too much at walkers, she comes to the door Hollers his name, goes back inside What she does all day in her house I don't know

This morning, I thought I'd go stand at the fence Call the dog's name, tell him he will be alright But I am horrible with names and forgot

~~~~~

The Jasper Project thanks board member Al Black for generously sharing his poetry with our readers. Watch for more in the Al Black Jasper Project Poetry Series in days and weeks to come.

Al Black is a writer, poet, host, and social activist. He is the author of two poetry collections, I Only Left For Tea (2014) and Man With Two Shadows (2018) and he co-edited, Hand in Hand, Poets Respond to Race (2017) and his work has been published in several anthologies and periodicals. Contact Al Black at albeemindgravy@gmail.com.

POEM: How Zappa Met Suzy Creamcheese by Al Black & Our 1st BOOMERPEDIA Entry

You climb out of bed, put on a tee-shirt, sweat pants and a ball cap

Walk to the corner store, buy coffee in a Styrofoam cup

Lady at the counter tells you to zip up

Instinctively, you reach down and zip your pants

She barks you could have turned around to zip your pants

You reply she had already seen you unzipped

She calls you rude

Trying to keep peace, you turn to leave

She raises her voice - your Zappa shirt is ugly, too

You turn back around and ask if she ever washes her shirt

Halfway home, you realize sweat pants don't have zippers, go back

Tell her you're sorry that you argued over non-existent zippers

She says it'd been a bad day and she apologizes, too

You realize she is naked from the waist up and ask about her shirt

She tears up, says it was filthy so she took it off to make you happy

You take off Zappa, tell her to put him on

She turns it inside out, puts Zappa next to her skin

You laugh and say that will make Zappa smile

Hand her a napkin from the sandwich display to wipe her eyes

She says quietly she gets off at 8

Back in bed, you wake from your dream, get up

And look for Zappa in the dirty laundry on the floor

The Jasper Project thanks board member Al Black for generously sharing his poetry with our readers. Watch for more in the Al Black Jasper Project Poetry Series in days and weeks to come.

Al Black is a writer, poet, host, and social activist. He is the author of two poetry collections, I Only Left For Tea (2014) and Man With Two Shadows (2018) and he co-edited, Hand in Hand, Poets Respond to Race (2017) and his work has been published in several anthologies and periodicals. Contact Al Black at albeemindgravy@gmail.com.

BOOMERPEDIA: FRANK ZAPPA

Frank Zappa was a multi-instrument musician, singer-songwriter, producer, and filmmaker. A penultimate non-conformist, Zappa injected satire into his art as his musical virtuosity spanned genres and decades. The enigmatic artist often juxtaposed sophomoric humor against cerebrally complex musical compositions and was heavily influenced by the dissonant sounds of composer EDGARD VARESE who he idolized as a child. With his band, MOTHERS OF INVENTION, the self-taught Zappa released more than 60 albums. One of the greatest guitarists of all time (Rolling Stone ranked him #22/100 in 2011) Zappa gave us the concept of PROJECT/OBJECT, or CONCEPTUAL CONTINUITY which means that he connected musical themes and phrases across albums, essentially making the whole of his life’s creative output one large project. In a March 1986 episode of CROSSFIRE, Zappa warned that the United States was on the road to becoming a “fascist theocracy.” Zappa was married to Gail Sloatman Zappa from 1966 until his death from cancer at the age of 52 in 1993. Their children are Moon, Dweezil, Ahmet, and Diva. - Cindi Boiter

POEM: Concrete Mary by Al Black

Concrete Mary

Against the chill of morning
I put on shoes and a warm jacket.
Robins and sparrows scavenge seeds;
Call back and forth from fence to ground

Squirrels in fur coats
Don't mind autumn's approach.
In high grass, a lone cricket
Chirps along the fence

Unafraid of the old man
With an empty coffee cup 
Four city deer snort and graze
On overgrown shrubs

Seven days remain of summer
One week, a quarter moon
Before earth tilts away,
Before solstice chases the sun.

As if she knows a secret, she cannot tell
Concrete Mary smiles her Mona Lisa smile
Practices yoga on the wall
And holds asana pose

Mary, when did you become holy?
Was it when they pulled you from the mold,
Loaded the truck, took you to a garden shop,
Tagged, sold and someone took you home?

Or was it the act of setting you on a wall where
Lichen took root and pulled substance from air?
How many tenants have you known?
Do you know movers come on Wednesday?

Sun peers through overcast skies
Warms Mary’s plaster gown,
Outstretched hands gather light,
Her face becomes a moon

Chipmunk chatters at plastic owl
Roosting on the patio wall
Red birdhouse in neighbor’s yard
Sits empty waiting for spring

Rain comes, drips from fingers
Concrete Mary holds her pose 
Somewhere Joseph
Holds the baby so nothing disturbs her peace

Rain comes, drips from finger tips,
Puddles at feet; she holds the pose 
she struck when she became an Italian citizen
And awaits her son’s reanimation 

The Jasper Project thanks board member Al Black for generously sharing his poetry with our readers. Watch for more in the Al Black Jasper Project Poetry Series in days and weeks to come.

Al Black is a writer, poet, host, and social activist. He is the author of two poetry collections, I Only Left For Tea (2014) and Man With Two Shadows (2018) and he co-edited, Hand in Hand, Poets Respond to Race (2017) and his work has been published in several anthologies and periodicals. Contact Al Black at albeemindgravy@gmail.com.

An Election Day Poem by Ed Madden

At the Most Worshipful Prince Hall Grand Lodge,

Columbia, SC, October 31, 2020

Across the parking lot, a man with a mic

is calling out drop, pop, and roll, and two

women just in front of us in line dance

along. It’s getting a little festive, a little

restless as we get closer to the door,

where they let in six or seven at a time.

One woman shuffles the heel-toe in fluffy

pink house shoes. They name the moves,

call out a few they don’t think quite right.

A golfcart bumps by with boxes of popcorn.

A church offers bottled waters at a table

where the line curls along the back fence.

It’s been a two-hour wait. We got here early

enough, but the line was already around

the building. Everyone is wearing masks except

a middle-aged white couple in black and

sunglasses, taking occasional deep pulls

on their electric cigarettes. Most of us look

at our cellphones as we wait, another

kind of social distance. The line wraps

around the building then coils around

an adjacent parking lot. An old woman

leaves crying because the county isn’t

providing provisional ballots for early voting

sites. I don’t know why. Once inside

we line up on the thick strips of gray

tape that mark off the floor. A poll worker

behind a plastic shield stares at my license

a bit—I can’t tell if she’s comparing

signatures or if it’s just the COVID hair. Finally,

she hands me a slip of paper, a cotton swab,

points me toward the wall of voting machines.

I use the cotton swab to touch the screen.

I get an “I Voted” sticker when I leave.

—Ed Madden

Ed Madden is the poetry editor for Jasper Magazine and Muddy Ford Press, a full professor at the Uof SC, the poet laureate for the city of Columbia, and the author of four books of poetry--Signals, which won the 2007 SC Poetry Book Prize; Prodigal: Variations; Nest; and Ark. His chapbook My Father’s House was selected for the Seven Kitchens Press Editor’s Series. His poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2007, The Book of Irish American Poetry, and in journals such as Prairie Schooner, Crazyhorse, Poetry Ireland Review, Los Angeles Review, and online at The Good Men Project.

Muddy Ford Press Releases Second Collection in Laureate Series with Ann-Chadwell Humphries’ An Eclipse and a Butcher

“I'm in awe of the masterful clarity, the perfectly weighted brevity of Ann Humphries' poems. There's an immense comfort in her vivid scenes, her people and places so rich in presence, and her clear gaze. … A stunning collection!”

Naomi Shihab Nye, Young People's Poet Laureate

This month, local poet Ann-Chadwell Humphries is releasing her first collection of poetry with Muddy Ford Press as the second feature of their Laureate Series.

Muddy Ford Press is a family owned publishing company dedicated to providing boutique publishing opportunities particularly to, but not limited to, South Carolina writers, artists, and poets. The founders of the press, husband and wife team Bob Jolley and Cindi Boiter, created the Laureate Series with the goal of initiating relationships across South Carolina poets.

“We wanted to promote mentorship between established poets and beginning poets,” Jolley describes, “So we invite all the poets laureate in SC to choose an emerging poet who they are willing to work with, and the laureate then helps build and edit their protégé’s first book.”

The selection of poets for the Laureate Series is the decision of the South Carolina laureates. The first book in the series, as well as this upcoming collection, were both written by poets selected by Columbia Poet Laureate Ed Madden.

The first collection, Theologies of Terrain, featured poet Tim Conroy. Conroy ruminates that, through this series, Muddy Ford Press provides the guidance and care that only poet laureates can deliver to a poet's first collection.

“I am so happy that Muddy Ford Press selected Ann-Chadwell Humphries as the second poet in their Laureate Series,” Conroy shares, “Ann's poetry raises the bar for all to follow. Her award-winning poetry is lyrical, deeply observed, and sound haunted.”

Ann-Chadwell Humphries - photo courtesy of the author

Several years ago, Humphries was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic condition that caused her vision to get smaller and smaller until she could no longer see. However, while this was an obstacle, it carried with it a gift with which to see the world anew.

While always a lover of literature, Humphries, who had worked in the medical field, had never tried her hand at creative writing. Then, she started taking creative writing classes at the Shepherd’s Center with her friend.

“I remember where I was sitting,” Ann reflects on the day she was first introduced to Mary Oliver’s poetry, “and I thought, ‘I have to do this’.”

This emerging love for poetry became concrete when, in Fall 2016, Humphries audited a graduate poetry workshop with Nikky Finney at the University of South Carolina. This workshop was one of the first times Humphries had the chance to work so closely with her ideas and form.

“It demands careful attention, it demands truth, honesty, and essence,” Humphries remarks on the writing process, “It helps me find goodness.”

Since that workshop, Humphries has published poems in Jasper Magazine, Emrys, Indolent Books, The Collective Eye and more. When Madden and Boiter approached Humphries about the Laureate Series, she had a mix of surprise and pride.

“’What? Really? Me?’ a voice in my head said,” Humphries recalls, “But then I said, ‘Why not me’—I dropped self-doubt at 65.”

With an arsenal of poems and a constant thirst for writing, Humphries knew she had the materials to make a collection, but stitching them together into a book was a different story. Luckily, she had Madden by her side to edit the collection.

"Ann Chadwell Humphries is a poet of many eclipses—celestial, such as the unexpected 'metallic light' beheld with solar glasses, but also eclipses of vision as her sight was lost later in life to the ravages of a recessive gene. And though these poems beautifully document that loss and its attendant difficulties, An Eclipse is the record of a woman who sees with her entire being.”

Nickole Brown, author of Fanny Says and

Jessica Jacobs, author of Take Me With You, Wherever You’re Going

Madden says that when Humphries first sent him a selection of poems, his priority was to give her a sense of her voice and an idea of some overriding themes that were running through her work. Specifically, his work as an editor is a two-fold process.

“I divided poems into yes and no and maybe, and I started arranging poems around my living room in groups that seemed to work together, to speak to each other,” Madden reflects. “Ann was a master at revising, always attuned to line and sound and image, and I enjoyed working with her.”

What stood out for Madden in this collection were the poems about solar eclipses. Once he read them, he knew they could anchor the book, punctuating it with the seen and unseen.

“Thinking how one thing can eclipse another seemed such a resonant theme for her memory poems, her family and relationship poems, and her poems about coming to terms with blindness,” Madden shares. “Once I had those three anchor poems, the book seemed to almost organize itself, like iron shavings organizing themselves around the poles of a magnet.”

From her experience with Madden, Humphries learned valuable lessons, not just about this collection but herself as a poet.

“It was a willingness to say yes, and to put myself in the position where I allowed myself to receive kindness,” Humphries says of the experience, “It was better than I ever imagined. To be in the company of good writers who are helping me grow, I really flourished in that.”

Of course, there is more than just the poems. Humphries worked with her dear friend, Susan Craig, and her niece, Eleanor Baker, and together they crafted a cover, featuring an image from Humphries’ childhood on the front.

Once Madden and Humphries finalized selection of poems and a cover, it went to Boiter and Jolley for edits. Boiter copyedited, proofed, and built the book, then Jolley laid it out in In Design before sending it to the printer, where he ensured the final product was as it was supposed to be.

“Ann Humphries’ debut collection of poems, An Eclipse and a Butcher, is anchored by poems about the solar eclipse, which serve as the perfect metaphor for the blindness experienced by the poet.  But Humphries tells us that “blindness provides insight.” … Humphries is a survivor, and we are so lucky she has chosen to share her words and her wisdom.”

Marjory Wentworth, former South Carolina

Poet Laureate

Now, after months of work from all parties, a book, a collection of stories, recollections, dreams, and hopes has come together.

From the titular poem, “An Eclipse and a Butcher,” that recalls a July childhood day in 1963 to a reminisce of her own father’s birth to the experience of tracing the waves of Van Gogh’s art, Humphries’ collection takes the reader through the throws and thrills of life with a final promise to walk with you wherever you may go.

“It’s myself. It’s a piece of me. It’s an honest gift,” Humphries declares. “It’s a piece of beauty in the world where there’s a lot of ugliness.”

The launch event for An Eclipse and a Butcher will take place via Zoom on November 22nd at 4:00pm. Muddy Ford Press will not sponsor any public readings until after pandemic precautions in the area have been lifted. The book will be $15 and available for purchase via Amazon, BandN.com, and via the author.

By Christina Xan

Fall Lines 2020 Saluda River Prize for Poetry Winner LISA HAMMOND talks with Jasper & Shares a New Poem

Hydrangeas 

by Lisa Hammond

They plant them in trailer parks. I am standing

between the topiaries and the statuary, mossy urns

hiding me from the women’s view. Fragrant hoops

and balls, rising spires of rosemary—they do not

know I can hear them, back behind stone fountains

splashing, zen temple bell, the little St. Francis.

Poor Hortensia, with her matronly name, flowers

I mostly see now run rampant alongside fallen fences,

old foundations, old fashioned, blowsy pink or blue.

At home I have the county extension agent’s flyer,

Change the pH of Your Soil, and I remember

how the grandmothers buried tin cans at the roots,

to bring out their blue eyes. I loved the fat conspicuous

blooms, thick-barked stems, how they’d overtake beds

when your back was turned. One neighbor poured hot

bacon grease on roots to kill hers—come spring they’d leg

themselves right up over her sorry fence again. Standing

in the nursery next to the pot feet, those two old ladies

so like that cranky neighbor, I remember the spring

I planted mine, my first year in the new house, how

I hoarded catalogues, Ayesah or Annabelle, Blue Bunny

or Snowqueen, how the first years it struggled, every

winter I thought it dead, every spring it crept back

a bit, a lone small nosegay budding, nothing like

the wild oakleaf outside my old bedroom window.

I had thought them so Southern Living, lacecaps

and mopheads trailing with grapevine over the silver

and linen. I carried them at my cousin’s wedding,

thirsty bouquet drooping alongside the sheer ribbon

before well before the toasts, photographs hurried.

O Dear Delores, O Silverleaf, O Brussels Lace,

here your solitary representative, a potbound pink

Everlasting tucked away behind begonias, object

of scorn. O Endless Summer, unhurried maiden,

I wait months for your snowballs, each heavy flower

spreading open to the wind, minding her own business.

~~~

Lisa Hammond

Earlier this summer Jasper announced the winners of the Fall Lines 2020 Broad River Prize for Prose & the Saluda River Prize for Poetry and shared some of winner Randy Spencer’s prose and process.

Today we’re delighted to talk with Lisa Hammond, winner of our poetry prize.

Welcome Lisa!

JASPER: For the Jasper followers who haven’t had the pleasure of meeting you yet, please tell us a bit about how you got to where you are now. For example, where did you grow up and go to school, and how and when did you make your way to Columbia?

HAMMOND: Cindi, thank you so much for the chance to meet some new friends through Jasper! I’m originally from South Carolina, born in Florence, and I’ve lived in South Carolina most of my life. I was a first-generation college student at Francis Marion and then went to graduate school at the University of Alabama. I felt like such a country girl on campus (well, I was such a country girl!)—it was a big, exciting university, amazing faculty and writers, beautiful architecture, a great library and natural history museum. When I finished my PhD, I taught for two years at Michigan State University. I loved the fall in Michigan, but winters seemed endless. I was very fortunate to find a job at a small university in Lancaster, South Carolina, close to my family, and I have been there ever since.

JASPER: Call you tell us about your work as a professor as USC Lancaster? What do you teach and what is your area of research?

HAMMOND: Most of my teaching is first-year composition, general education courses—so ENGL 101 and 102, Intro to Poetry, that sort of thing. I enjoy teaching those courses because I remember so well what it felt like to be a new college student who had no idea what to expect from college. I love helping students learn to see from different perspectives, to understand their preconceptions and to test those—do they always hold up? how does new information change your first way of thinking about and seeing a question? how do you present your ideas in a persuasive way? You hear a lot these days that college professors indoctrinate students—goodness, sometimes it feels like a victory if I can get them to do the reading! I think what we are actually seeing is students beginning to understand new ways to read, interpret, analyze. Those processes, fully engaged, change your thinking and your life.

Most of my research falls under the broad category of gender issues in American literature and culture. I’ve done a good bit of research on teaching with technology—I taught my first online women’s studies class in 2000, which is hard to believe now. I’ve written a great deal about Ursula K. Le Guin, one of American’s most talented and powerful writers. I study contemporary American women’s memoirs about motherhood. And I gave a talk at a conference about a year and a half ago called “What We Did in the Resistance: Public Poetry, Political Response, and the Women’s March” that I should really finish up as an article, but the political landscape is changing so quickly that it’s hard to keep up with. I’ve lately focused more on writing and publishing my own poetry as my scholarly work, but I like to stay in touch with my academic research areas too—my interest in one area informs my work in the other. Sometimes that means it takes me a long time to finish a project, but I think the work is richer for the connections.  

JASPER: Does your work at the university inform your writing much? How so?

HAMMOND: Grant Snider, the artist of the Incidental Comics series, has this great comic called Day Jobs of the Poets. I am pretty sure that if I won the lottery and suddenly could write full-time, I wouldn’t want to. I’m very lucky to have a professional life with a lot of range, many interesting projects and colleagues and students, so I often stumble across ideas at work that plant writing seeds. One drawback to my work for my writing life, though, is that I write a great deal for my job; the larger part of my job the last few years is my work as Director of Institutional Effectiveness and Research at USC Lancaster. I write a series of large reports every year. I just finished our annual state agency accountability report for the Governor and the General Assembly. Writing a university reaccreditation compliance document and writing a poem are two very different projects, but they both use my writing brain. So when I’m on deadline for large work writing projects, my own writing really dwindles in those periods.

My teaching, though, often brings me back to my own writing. Teaching any kind of writing keeps you close to your own writing, I find. In the last few years, I’ve been teaching more upper-level courses writing courses. I teach a senior-level business writing class that is fascinating—so much analysis of your audience there, understanding how to direct a message. I’m teaching an internship class right now, helping students learn outside the classroom; those students work in all kinds of organizations and businesses, so I have the opportunity to learn more about their careers and interests and am always running across interesting new ideas as I respond to their writing. I occasionally get to teach a 300-level creative writing class, which I LOVE because I write alongside my students. I write so much more in the semesters I teach that class because I stay in a daily writing practice with them. I find that writing a little every day means that I rarely finish a first draft of a poem in a sitting, but I write more over time. If I waited until I have big blocks of time, I’d never write another poem again.

JASPER: Are you primarily a poet, or do you practice prose writing as well?

HAMMOND: My prose writing is largely strategic planning documents! I am working on a prose poem series right now, which is something of a surprise for me, because I have always been in love with the poetic line and stanza form. Where does the line break? How does using couplets change the rhythm of the poem? The prose poem is an interesting challenge because you can’t rely on the line break to help you signal the importance of a word, for example. It’s also freeing; sometimes I spend so much time worrying a poem over stanzas and lines, but with the prose poem, you just start and keep going. The rhythm of a prose poems is different too, more accumulative, sometimes faster, so there’s an interesting opportunity to find ways to vary those rhythmic patterns. I’m finding these poems great fun to write, although I sometimes have to stop myself stewing over a line that ends with of, for example, or the—it’s not really a line, I have to tell myself. But often I tweak the spot that’s bugging me to shift the end word anyhow.

My mother took me to the library every week, usually when we came into town to the laundromat. She tells me I was an old soul early on

JASPER: Are you a life-long poet or did you begin writing later in life? What was the impetus for you to start writing?

HAMMOND: I can’t remember starting to write, so I’d say that qualifies me as a lifelong poet! (That sounds like a grand title, doesn’t it?) I come from a family of storytellers. My mother took me to the library every week, usually when we came into town to the laundromat. She tells me I was an old soul early on; I remember a second-grade teacher who made a deal with me—as soon as you finish your work for the day, you can skip recess and read the rest of the day. What a great year that was! I teach students who want to be writers that first they must read, often and widely. It may be that writing just runs in the family, though. One of my cousins is a poet, and so is my daughter. My daughter is at least as good a poet at twenty-five as I am now after a lifetime’s practice. Maybe better, if you consider that she won this same prize in 2018. I have a dear artist friend who says that it takes three generations to make a real artist. Now, having said that, let me hasten to add—talent is not inborn. What makes a writer is writing. Practice and persistence and putting the pen to the page, the fingers to the keyboard. 

JASPER: Who has influenced your writing and who are some of your favorite writers?

HAMMOND: I mentioned Ursula K. Le Guin above; one thing I love and admire about her writing is that her books can be so different from each other. When people ask me what Le Guin they should read, I say, well, if you like myths and fairy tales, The Wizard of Earthsea. If you like politics, The Dispossessed. If you like exploration, The Left Hand of Darkness. I love how she challenges her readers and herself. When The Left Hand of Darkness was published, she faced criticism for using male-gendered pronouns to describe an androgynous race. She defended her thought experiment and found it good—and then she came back several years later and said, wow, wasn’t I defensive? and I was wrong. She wrote an afterword for a later edition acknowledging her critics’ and imagining other ways she could have written the book. She changed the pronouns in three different chapters—three different approaches to the pronoun problem—so readers could see how the change affected their perception of the characters. She couldn’t rewrite the book, but she never stopped seeing it again either. I think she would have loved to see the current moment when the third person pronouns have been accepted by major style guides. What a gift, to watch a writer grow and change over such a long and amazing career.

I read a great deal of contemporary poetry, keeping a stack of books in rotation on my desk when I am writing: Claudia Emerson, Camille Dungy, Louise Glück, Kevin Young. Chelsea Rathburn, Tina Mozelle Braziel, Li-Young Lee, Eavan Boland, Nikky Finney. I tend to stay close to the lyric exploration of ordinary moments, so I love Linda Pastan, and Pablo Neruda’s Odes to Common Things is a special favorite. I am also fascinated by how we understand history through poetry—Robin Coste Lewis does amazing things in Voyage of the Sable Venus. And Terrance Hayes’s American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin, wow. I love poetry anthologies as a way of meeting new poets and finding things outside of what I might normally first reach for. Sandra Beasley’s Vinegar and Char: Verse from the Southern Foodways Alliance. Sam Hamill’s The Erotic Spirit: An Anthology of Poems of Sensuality, Love, and Longing. Sandra Gilbert’s Inventions of Farewell: A Book of Elegies. You can while away quite a few lovely quiet hours with food, sex, and death.

And once you see something a new way, you can’t unsee it.

JASPER: You are the winner of the Saluda River Prize for Poetry in this year’s Fall Lines – a literary convergence for your poem, Hydrangeas, with which we opened this post. What can you tell us about the roots, if you will, of your poem Hydrangeas?

HAMMOND: Hydrangeas come in so many beautiful varieties, with all these amazing names.  Some names suggest the flower itself, like Brussels Lace, while others have these old-fashioned people names like Hortensia. The names are a song by themselves.

Hydrangeas seem to embody the contradictions of the South, lovely and vexed all at once. As part of the traditions of Southern entertaining, they suggest wealth and elegance, but some see them as common pests. I’m not sure they are actually classified as invasive plants, but some people do seem to see them that way. And they can change colors, like magic! How can the same plant mean such different things? But this is true throughout the South, with the many ways we tell our histories. The same wedding venue through one set of eyes is a gracious home, but through another, it is a haunted gravesite of enslaved people whose names have been erased. And once you see something a new way, you can’t unsee it. I can’t imagine wanting to. Hydrangeas grow in elegant Charleston gardens, but they also grow in ditches. In our grandmothers’ gardens, Alice Walker might say.

I was working on this idea at a retreat and went one afternoon to a greenhouse in Pawley’s Island, where I did actually overhear the first line of the poem. In some respects, this poem feels unfinished to me, perhaps because as Le Guin did, I am always learning to see things a new way. I don’t think the poem says everything I want to say. But at a certain point, the poem is done. You have to go write another one. And I’m still not very good at growing hydrangeas, although I do have a big beautiful bunch of them dropping those little blue speckles all over my desk right now.

JASPER: What do you do with yourself when you aren’t writing, teaching, or doing research?

HAMMOND: I’m a photographer and I love to draw. My poor family—I am always taking photos of them and writing poems about them. Art is another way of seeing, and my poetry and art are deeply connected, but for me the visual arts feel more like play. When I travel, the first thing I do is find the local museums and bookstores and art supply stores.

I don’t think our world will go back to what it was, and I don’t want it to—this moment is teaching us how we can change. But whoever said change is hard was seriously not kidding.

JASPER: How has COVID-19 affected you and your ability to practice your art?

HAMMOND: Artists are struggling, as we all are. Most people I know have either lost their jobs or are working harder than they’ve ever worked. One minute things seem ordinary, and the next you realize you left your mask in the car. Someone you know is sick or dead. The anger boiling in this country, George Floyd, Breanna Taylor, and who knows who will be next. The protests that we march in, or are afraid to march in because we are at risk. Well, we are all at risk. We pass some horrifying marker, 100,000 dead in the United States, 150,000, and we’re approaching 200,000. How do we even understand these numbers? I can’t read anymore—books from before seem very much from before. The real world is as frightening as any apocalyptic novel now.

I’m lucky, I know, to be in the camp of folks who are working harder than they’ve ever worked, though some days that luck feels like hard luck—helping my students navigate the transition to online learning, working with several faculty one-on-one to help them with their classes, working on our university-wide reaccreditation. I’ve written exactly two poems since March, and that I finished anything feels like a miracle. I don’t usually write in the moment—I would love so much to be able to write and publish a poem in Rattle’s Poets Respond! Instead I keep journals and I draw. I note a thing or two each day that in a year I will come back to, will try to see again. I read as best I can and to have faith that I will come back to the writing as we settle more into this moment, the next. I don’t think our world will go back to what it was, and I don’t want it to—this moment is teaching us how we can change. But whoever said change is hard was seriously not kidding.

Sometimes you write your life, and sometimes you live it.

JASPER: Do you have any hints or recommendations for other poets on how to get through this strange period in all of our lives?

HAMMOND: I am doing several things to try to take care of myself.

A big piece of this is managing how I follow the news. The early days of the pandemic, we were all refreshing our newsfeeds constantly. That continuous exposure to changing circumstances meant constant adrenaline, constant anxiety, for me and I believe for many. I am not great at not looking at my phone first thing in the morning, but I do try. I have cut way back on my social media—this makes me a little lonely, but it gives me more time and lets me choose when I can take hearing the day’s bad news. I subscribe to a daily email summary from a small handful of trusted news outlets. I’m grateful for Heather Cox Richardson’s daily Letters from an American, but I have no idea how she writes that and teaches and sleeps. I can’t wait for the day I can read that collection and remember this time, and it will be history.

I feel a great need to do something to help, so I have chosen a few causes and significantly upped my donations. I certainly am saving a lot of gas money working from home, and it makes me feel I am making some small difference. I wish it were a bigger difference, but maybe together all our small differences will make the bigger change.

And I try not to beat myself up, for not being ok, for not getting through everything I need to do, for not having the energy some days to even text a friend. I would never talk to a friend the way I talk to myself in my head, but I have to remind myself of that pretty regularly. Of course you didn’t get through all those papers to grade today, of course you will write again.

I’m a slow writer in normal circumstances—I recommend Louise DeSalvo’s The Art of Slow Writing: Reflections on Time, Craft, and Creativity. Time is so strange in this moment—fast and slow, the markers we normally use to note the progress of our days and years gone or fundamentally changed. It’s ok to take time to sit with this grief and wonder. When you are ready to write again, write a little every day. It’s ok if it’s bad. It’s ok if you don’t finish. A little every day will take you places, when you are ready.

Sometimes you write your life, and sometimes you live it.

~~~

Elizabeth Warren Dreams of Kissing Babies

by Lisa Hammond

It is good and over, the long campaign, debates, VP

speculation. Would you say yes? Yes. I would help any way

I can. He called himself to tell me, of course. He’s a

decent man. Another disappointment, but not a

surprise. All those pinky promises and all those little girls. The

Zoom convention, a soft cornflower blue sweater,

balancing careful scripted banter with hope. Kamala is

making history. All my plans long ago pulled down from

the headquarters wall and recycled, Empowering

American Workers and Raising Wages, Strengthening

Our Democracy, My Plan to Cancel Student Loan

Debt on Day One of My Presidency. Whether or not I

smile enough. Only the election left, and in truth, there’s

some relief—they cannot blame me for what is

coming. The reporters yelling from the sidelines, will

you be a key player in the new administration? We both

want the same thing. The reporters and the crowd surge

forward, I know it is before because the mothers push

their babies towards me, no one masked, no one

distancing, no one knowing what is coming. Dream big,

the mama says, fight hard, the children reply. I can’t stay

in this crowd and I want to say it again but don’t, I am

running for president because that’s what girls do. The choices

left now. We want this country to work and we want it to work

for everyone. Smiling or strident. Either way my face

hurts.

Corona Times - Guest Essay Curated by Ed Madden - Essential by Peyton Nielsen

Last spring, as South Carolina went into lockdown because of COVID19, I was teaching a creative writing course. Many of my students found themselves back at home, but some stayed here, working. A couple worked for Instacart. One student took over the homeschooling of her little brothers, another started helping out in his family's liquor store (alcohol, like groceries, ruled essential).

And for a few of them, the disruptions of their daily lives began to appear in their creative writing assignments, in poems, in essays. Peyton was an essential worker, wait staff at a Columbia restaurant that continued to offer curbside takeaway. This little essay captures the anxieties of those moments, the precautions we took (and are still taking), the careful attention to our environment and to those around us. With her permission, we're posting this to our "Corona Times" series -- a moment in the pandemic captured with precision.

-Ed Madden

Jasper Magazine poetry editor

Peyton Nielson is originally from the Chicago Suburbs, 21 years old, and a senior Public Health major at USC.

(photo courtesy of the author)

Essential

by Peyton Nielsen

lockdown, spring 2020

Twice a week each week, she gets a treat: to not spend every waking moment in the confines of the four walls of her townhome. Usually, waking up for work is a chore. But now she practically leaps out of the shackles of her bed and into the bathroom to put on makeup and look nice. It has been a while since she has brushed her hair. She cuts the chains off the door, skips to her car, which sits idle most of the time these days. The drive is the best part: windows down, sun hitting her left thigh, melodies bouncing around the car. It’s hard not to sing at full volume even if others look over. She sounds bad, but she feels free.

*

The chairs and stools are put up on the tables, only half of the restaurant is lit, and the bar is blocked off. Usually there are multiple coworkers setting up, cooking, cleaning the restaurant. This time, it is just her and her manager, who now works in the kitchen too, and in a pinch is the occasional dish washer. She picks up a pair of extra-large flour-dusted gloves – that’s all they have here – and wraps rubber bands on her wrists so they stay on. She sprays down every surface, prepares the to-go bags, and hangs up signs on the doors so people stay on the curbside. No one is allowed in anymore. But this is her temporary paradise from the stir-crazy she feels the other five days. This is the treat she gets, as long as everyone keeps their hands to themselves, coughs in the other direction (preferably into their elbows, but that is wishful thinking sometimes), and has prepaid online so she does not have to touch cash or a credit card.

*

The sunlight has slipped below the windowsills and into the ground, and she begins to count her tip jar out (with gloves on of course). She lays out each dollar denomination in their respective values and counts it out for herself: part of rent, light bill, water, groceries, and some money to help pay off the new shoes she bought before the shift cuts and layoffs. A decent shift – people are kinder these days. She immediately goes to wash her hands for the umpteenth time. Her hands are dry and beginning to crack from the hot water, soap, the flour from the gloves. She will remember lotion next time.

*

There isn’t any music on the drive home. She calls her mom, so her mom won’t have to call later at two in the morning in a panic wondering if her girl made it home safe. They talk about nothing really. There is nothing to talk about. The windows are up, it’s stuffy, and her work shoes are starting to make the seats smell. She won’t bring them inside when she gets home, that’s probably unsafe. The car is put back into park for another week and is Clorox-wiped before she locks it up.

*

Immediately the clothes are off and in a separate laundry bin to be safe, and she climbs into the shower. Her shins hurt from standing for twelve hours. The arches of her feet ache, and anxiety makes her chest tight, but at least she can pay her rent tomorrow. She dries off and starts over the two-week time clock to make sure no symptoms arise so that she can continue to go to work. She is young, she’ll probably be fine, right? That’s not what CNN said last night, maybe she should quit. At three in the morning, sleep finally finds her. The hum of her oil diffuser replaces the diminished white noise outside.

In observance of the 75th anniversary of the US use of atomic weaponry on Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- A poem by Randy Spencer

This month marks the 75th anniversary of the use of the atomic bomb and the atrocities of nuclear war. The United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, leading to the end of World War Two. The explosion in Hiroshima killed an estimated 80,000 people and thousands more would die as the result of exposure to radiation. Midlands poet Randy Spencer commemorates this anniversary with his poem, "Yasuhiko Shigemoto's Walk." No more Hiroshimas.

- Ed Madden

Poetry Editor, Jasper Magazine

The “Shadow” of a Hiroshima Victim, Etched into Stone Steps, Is All That Remains After 1945 Atomic Blast — Open Culture

YASUHIKO SHIGEMOTO'S WALK

                                                August 6, 1945

a curled red oak leaf

crab-walks across a flat stone

our summer will end soon

half my schoolmates and I

lunch in cool shadows beneath the bridge

an almost dry river bed

my belly exposed,

a white flash in the southern sky

blisters its soft skin

sudden, violent heat

as if something touches me

with hot tongs

in the bright light

inerasable shadows

where someone stood

on a wall, how could

empty space become shadows

light become dark

shadows that cannot

move with the changing sun,

trees leveled, no leaves

cicadas have hushed,

a silence waiting

the season to reverse

a huge jellyfish

a mushroom high in the sky

dust clouds

become a column

a pillar of fire rising

in the dark air

injured begin

to appear, walking along

the narrow river

from their outstretched arms

flesh hangs, sheets of skin drape

from backs, abdomens

if their arms drop

pain is overwhelming

screams shatter the calm

half of my classmates

were working in the city center.

are they dead? One calls

to me from the river

and I fall into the line

marching away

pink chrysanthemum

blossoms open their dark hearts

black rain is falling

Based on "My A-Bomb experience in Hiroshima," a speech given by Hiroshima survivor Yasuhiko Shigemoto on July 29, 1995 at the Plenary Session of "No More Hiroshimas Conference" at London University commemorating the 50th anniversary of the end of W.W. II.

                                                            H.R. Spencer

                                                            hrspencer@gmail.com

Corona Times -- Cassie Premo Steele talks about poetry, pandemic, and love

“One of the things I’ve learned from all this is that there’s very little under our control as humans. We must work with each other and with the earth in harmonious, healing, and honestly, hard ways if we are to survive.”

—Cassie Premo Steele

Cassie Premo Steele - all photos courtesy of the artist

During these Corona Times the Jasper Project strives to continue to support and promote communication among artists and arts lovers. In this interview, Columbia-based poet Cassie Premo Steele shares what both her personal and professional life have been like since the onset of quarantine and we come to realize that there is little separating the personal from the professional these days, and what a gift that might actually be.

Here’s Cassie.

Thanks for sharing with us, Cassie. Let’s start with some basic info for the few people who haven’t had the pleasure of meeting you yet.

JASPER: Tell us about your background, please – where did you grow up, go to school, and how did you come to live in the SC Midlands today? You live in Forest Acres, right?

STEELE: Thanks so much for inviting me. I was born in Detroit, where my grandfather, an immigrant from Czechoslavakia, was Henry Ford’s secretary, and my grandmother, the oldest daughter of Irish immigrants, helped take care of me while my mom was in college when I was a baby. I grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Winona, Minnesota, before moving to Reston, Virginia, a progressive, planned community outside Washington, D.C., when I was 12. I went to high school at Immaculata on Tenley Circle, which was an all-female Catholic school run by the Sisters of Providence, an experience that is still very important to me today. I settled in Columbia after finishing my Ph.D. at Emory in 1996. I was married to a professor at USC and we raised two girls together, and I have lived with my wife in Forest Acres for six years now.

JASPER: How long were you in academics and what made you leave the academy to write full time?

STEELE: I taught at the undergraduate and graduate levels from 1991 until 2008 – in English, Comparative Literature, and Women’s and Gender Studies Programs at several institutions. I love teaching and I still teach but in a different capacity now, working with women academics and educators from around the world through my coaching business.

As an adjunct for that many years, I had an insider’s view to the inequalities of power and the ways academe reinforces those, especially for women and people of color. I use this to help women academics navigate those treacherous waters and still do the writing and teaching that they care about.

JASPER: You have published quite a few books – can you tell us about them – a chronological listing of your publications would be fabulous.

STEELE: The ReSisters. A #1 bestselling LGBT YA novel about an indigenous teen who decides to try to kill the president after her mother is taken to a detention center, with art by Amy Alley. All Things That Matter Press, 2018.

Tongues in Trees: Poetry 1994-2017. Collected poems published since 1994, plus new poems with #resist and #metoo themes. Unbound Content, 2017.

Beautiful Waters. Poetry about lesbianism, love, and marriage. Finishing Line Press, 2017.

Earth Joy Writing: Finding Balance through Journaling and Nature. Experiential practices, ecofeminist reflections, and writing prompts. Ashland Creek Publishing, 2015.

Wednesday. Poems co-created on Facebook each Wednesday since 2010 with over 300 Facebook friends from around the world. Unbound Content, 2013.

The Pomegranate Papers. Twenty years of poetry about marriage, mothering, and creativity. Unbound Content, 2012.

This is how honey runs. Poetry based on work with clients using writing as a way of healing, finding balance, and empowering oneself creatively. Unbound Content, 2010.

Shamrock and Lotus. Novel set in Ireland, India, and the United States, about the way mothers and daughters can heal from histories of colonization and globalization through renewed connections to each other and the land. All Things That Matter Press, 2010.

Easyhard: Reflections on the Practice of Creativity. Thirteen lessons on overcoming doubt and fear and living a creative life. WordClay, 2009.

My Peace: A Year of Yoga at Amsa Studios. Lyrical essays on the connections between yoga practice and achieving healing and peace in life. WordClay, 2008.

Ruin. Poems about loss and recovery based on work using writing as a way of healing, which Marjory Wentworth, the Poet Laureate of South Carolina, called “A beautiful book: courageous, spiritual, and timeless.” New Women’s Voices Series by Finishing Line Press, 2004.

We Heal From Memory: Sexton, Lorde, Anzaldúa and the Poetry of Witness. A scholarly study of how the writing of Anne Sexton, Audre Lorde, and Gloria Anzaldúa bears witness to and provides visions of healing from multicultural American traumatic histories, both individual and collective. Palgrave, 2000.

Moon Days: Creative Writings about Menstruation. An edited collection of creative writings and art about menstruation. Personal narratives, short stories, and poetry selections that move from reflections on first experiences to visions of spiritual celebration and reclamation. Summerhouse Press, 1999.  Distributed by Ash Tree Publishing.

JASPER: This is the place where we make you crazy by asking you to name your top one or two favorites of your books and tell us why you are most proud of them.

STEELE: It would perhaps surprise you to know that I think We Heal from Memory is my most important book. I trace the legacies of our national collective traumas in that book – colonization, slavery, and sexual violence against women and girls – and walk readers through how poetry can be a way of witnessing to and healing from these legacies. I think, even though it was published 20 years ago, that many people are just now able to begin hearing what that book had to say.

JASPER: From social media it looks like you and your wife, Susanne Kappler, have really gone back to the land. Did this start before COVID-19 or as a reaction to the pandemic? Can you tell us about your little Eden and how you’ve spent your non-writing time since March?

STEELE: Oh, my goodness, this is one of the things that brings me the most joy in life! We had chickens and a garden before the pandemic but we’ve basically doubled down on providing for ourselves since March. We don’t have a lot of land and we live in a very modest neighborhood, but we make the most of what we have with a vegetable garden in the front yard (our long-term vision is that we can grow enough that this can be a place where neighbors can harvest what they need), and three chickens in the back yard who give us fresh eggs, and the cutest dog in the world who sleeps next to me while I meditate and write and work every day.

I won’t say that being in quarantine has been easy, but it has been filled with joy knowing that we are cooking food from scratch and brewing beer using ingredients we harvested in our own yard and being grateful for what is here, right now, because we are alive and working -- and working in a way that upholds our vision of sustainability and gratitude for the abundance of the earth.

JASPER: What have you missed about the World Out There during our sheltering-in period?

STEELE: I used to love to go out to dinner! It was my go-to treat when I’d had a hard day or something was stressful or I just needed a date night with my wife. You know what? I didn’t really need it after all. We have found that when we’re both working from home and I can spend time cooking in the morning and she can brew on the weekends, then our dinners on the back porch are as fun as anything served to us somewhere else.

JASPER: Is there anything you have come to love tremendously during this time?

STEELE: I have come to love South Carolina in a new way. Every Friday morning, I take a drive with my dog to a state park or heritage preserve and we walk, mostly without seeing any other humans, up and down hills and next to rivers and through swamps and over creeks and sometimes off trail. The land here remembers so much. It’s beautiful. It has stories to tell.

Premo Steele with wife Suzanne Kappler

JASPER: Now, professionally, can you talk about how the pandemic has affected your work life? Have you been more or less productive? Are there any new projects you can tell us about?

STEELE: Well, honestly, I don’t like the word productive. We are not products. Art is not a product. I would say my writing methods are the same, but the intensity and depth of them is deeper.

I know I just said, “the depth is deeper,” and that bothered me, so I looked up alternate words for “deeper” and found these: bottomless, unfathomable, mysterious, serious, pressing, graver. I think that about sums up the multifarious ways this pandemic has affected my writing—and I’ve been writing both poetry and memoir this year.

And of course, I keep a journal and write by hand every day. I was recently looking through one of my journals from a couple months ago and I found an entry where I was heartbroken that the US had suffered 7000 deaths from Covid.

“Three times as many as 9/11!” I wrote. “And it’s as if no one cares or can really deal with it.”

Now we’ve passed 160,000 deaths. That’s what I mean by graver.

JASPER: What’s next for you as an author?

STEELE: Who knows, you know? One of the things I’ve learned from all this is that there’s very little under our control as humans. We must work with each other and with the earth in harmonious, healing, and honestly, hard ways if we are to survive.

I don’t just mean survive Covid. I mean life on earth, life in this nation, especially for people who are not white, Cis, hetero, males, is very, very hard, and we must be strong enough to find new ways to survive together or not at all.

I hope my writing helps people do that in some small way.

JASPER: Where can our readers find more of your work and where can they purchase copies of your books?

STEELE: All of my books are available online, and people can visit www.cassiepremosteele.com if they want to read excerpts. I also have a series of audio coaching lessons called Joywork that I made available for free on Insight Timer when the pandemic started. [The link for that is http://insig.ht/cassiepremosteele ]

JASPER: Is there anything we didn’t ask you that you’d like to share with our readers? Any advice or wisdom to pass along?

STEELE: Life is very beautiful, and very, very short. Who do you want to love? How to you want to live? What work do you want to do? What legacy do you want to leave? What brings you joy? Go do it. Now.

JASPER: Could we possibly prevail upon you to share a piece or two of your recent work with us?

STEELE: Sure! Here are two recent poems.

Butterflies on the Floor

I saw butterflies once on the floor,

swampy Sunday morning forest, startled

them as they were eating down below

and something dead was sweet

to them, they piled on the wet

carcass like children playing

with a cadaver as children

do when they are starved for

life and their hunger goes deeper

than the body into a kind of

morbidity and pornography

and I felt ashamed for even

seeing this as if it were my

guilt I carried inside me most

moments that had spilled

outside me and I wanted to turn

away or even pretend I had

not seen it but I couldn’t because

the woman I love was with me and

I heard her gasp, “How beautiful.”

What I Love About Lesbian

is the island of love in it, the Sappho and

fragments on papyrus, the skin of words

and the she. Moonlight, goddesses, spring

flowers, women’s bodies. The be in the middle

syllable. I will be. You will be. She will be.

They will be. Morphing and transforming

like menses and moon cycles and tides into

I be, you be, she be, they be, we be.

The we of it. The smallness that can only

be seen when you get skin to skin, eyelashes

fluttering, and you notice her lips get bigger

and darker as you come in for a kiss. The les

of the we. The let’s. The less patriarchy, less

male gaze, less misogyny, less gynophobia,

less frat boy drunken haze. The lez, and les,

with a French pronunciation, les girls,

les femmes, les sorcières, les poètes

les philosophes, les mères, les soeurs.

The lay of it, like eggs, like rugs, like soft

round things that lay themselves down

close to the ground, like thighs. Hers

and mine. And the final syllable, an—

as in an opening, an affection, an emotion,

an ideal, an uncovering. The word âne

in French also means donkey, as in ass,

as in what we show to those who disrespect

us as we walk away, and what we watch as

she sidles up to the bar or home base or the

podium or the microphone or the courtroom

or the boardroom or the surgery floor,

taking charge, giving orders calling shots,

making plans, changing laws, changing

lives, saving bodies and so much more.

Lesbian is woman and full and curve and

wave and the too muchness of moon

and earth and ocean pulling on each other

with love and gravity, and no wonder

it came from an island because we are

indeed separate and green and lush and

fertile with our sweet scent of possibility.