History, Natural History & the Arts
Toward a Covid School of Poetry
Dante self-quarantined for the Black Death,
which killed his muse Beatrice, as well as
Francesco Petrarch’s muse Laura, inventing
modern poetry, even as it killed one-third
of Europe’s population. Folks fear bears
and mountain lions now, but lowly fleas,
rat-vectored, proved the executioners,
to become the world’s most deadly being.
Walt Whitman’s original essay, “A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads,” was printed at the end of the 1891-92 edition of Leaves of Grass. The following adaptation is an attempt to quite radically “translate” its disorganized, disgressive, awkward “Whitmanese” into the standards of prose clarity expected by 21st century readers.
When I say prose clarity, I am not only referring to a very aggressive copy edit. I have also subjected it to a critical, discerning lens of historical perspective. The result is Whitman’s clearest directions on how to read Leaves of Grass. — Mitchell Santine Gould, Curator, LeavesOfGrass.org. [Read more…] about Walt Whitman On How To Read Leaves of Grass
Metaphysics with No Sunblock
If the crescendo of soundbites
holds you back from that inner
silence touted as metaphysical
just turn your eyeballs inward
where it’s dark inside your head.
Now, conjure up a placid river
Then watch just how cautiously
deer come down to drink as you
imagine floating by on your back
trusting the river’s buoyancy.
But try not to think things
like: “I should wear sunblock.”
Lunacy
Inflation is the whip, greed is its master,
Scheming megalomaniacs creating mass disaster,
For all of those people, psychological slaves,
Caught up in the whirlwind, a shuttle to their graves.
Life too complicated for mankind to enjoy,
Overpopulated, the Land being destroyed,
Hard to find a place alone, with room to wander free,
Now plugged in from dawn to dusk, electronic lunacy.
Wires dangling from the ears, fingers pushing keys,
Prisoners in concrete towers, away from Nature’s breeze,
Glued to screens for endless hours, not outside in the sun,
Better re-evaluate, for time is on the run.
Throughout the 1840s, members of the commercial and professional classes of New York’s Capital Region cities established “Young Men’s Associations,” loosely based upon the Young Men’s Christian Association recently founded in England. In Schenectady, ten prominent men formed their own Young Men’s Association in an attempt to bring culture to their growing city of 10,000.
Although the Association required an annual fee of $2, members and ladies were allowed to attend the lectures for free. The entrance fee for men who were not members was 25 cents. “The association is the only place in our city, aside from the pulpits, where you are able to find any discoursing,” announced its founders in the Schenectady Reflector. “It is the only place where an amusement of a miscellaneous nature is to be found…It is the only place where the clerk, the mechanic, or lawyer, can spend an hour (profitably) out of his store, workshop, or office.” [Read more…] about Ralph Waldo Emerson in the Capital District in 1852
Cabin Pantry Discovery
On first opening the cabin for summer,
in the pantry, a mustard jar sits ringed
with the mouse turds of ubiquity.
Mice are so sly that we do not deny
they’re adeptn at coining speech, here
homonyms of spices and species.
Alfred Billings Street was born in Poughkeepsie on December 18th, 1811. He was descended from an Englishman, the Reverend Nicholas Smith, who immigrated to Connecticut around 1659.
His father, Randall Sandal Street, was a general in the New York Militia and served in the War of 1812. A practicing lawyer, Randall Street was also active in politics; he was a two-term district attorney and a Democratic congressman from 1819 until 1821. His wife, Cornelia, was the daughter of Revolutionary War veteran, Andrew Billings. [Read more…] about Alfred Billings Street: Albany’s 19th Century State Poet
Local But Epic
A semi-straight crow
lands on the palm reader’s
arthritic index finger.
Our futures—we must
understand—will
now never again
be the same.
Reciprocity
Walking the paved path atop the embankment
leading down to the long-term-care facility,
I recall how poet William Stafford stopped
his car to roll a dead deer off the highway,
down into the canyon below, out of simple
respect for this other blood, in witness to our
reciprocity with the more-than-human world.
Before the arrival of European settlers, the flatland area that would become Harlem (originally: Nieuw Haarlem after the Dutch city of that name) was inhabited by the indigenous Munsee speakers, the Lenape. The first settlers from the Low Countries arrived in the late 1630s.
Harlem was an agricultural center under British rule (attempts to change the name of the community to “Lancaster” failed and the authorities reluctantly adopted the Anglicised name of Harlem). During the American Revolutionary War in September 1776 it was the site of the Battle of Harlem Heights. Later, rich elites built country houses there in order to escape from the city’s dirt and epidemics (Alexander Hamilton built his Harlem estate in 1802). [Read more…] about Harlem on Fire: Langston Hughes & Wallace Henry Thurman