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And the river's clean where the raw blood flowed
My poem "Colonial" is now online at Mithila Review.
It was a slow-burning poem: the spark was last spring's protests, but the fuse was the information about my ancestry that had come to light the previous fall, by which I mean that that all my life I had been used to thinking of myself as descended from immigrants on the margins and suddenly there was a recognizable name on the rolls of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1636. It was sort of a reverse Lovecraft. I decided the realities of the past did not change my responsibilities to the present and the future, but I would still have felt a lot less weird about fish people.
I wish I had not had to do the recording with a hard cold, but I love the choice of illustration: the same painting was the cover for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Talking to the Sun: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems for Young People (1985), which was almost the first book of poetry I owned. It introduced me to Edna St. Vincent Millay, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Frank O'Hara, of course.
I am especially glad to have the poem in company of this issue. Check out all the stories and poems and do not miss the editorial by Ishita Singh. Aliens and outsiders it is, always. And sometimes you are the insider, and that is the strangest of all.
It was a slow-burning poem: the spark was last spring's protests, but the fuse was the information about my ancestry that had come to light the previous fall, by which I mean that that all my life I had been used to thinking of myself as descended from immigrants on the margins and suddenly there was a recognizable name on the rolls of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1636. It was sort of a reverse Lovecraft. I decided the realities of the past did not change my responsibilities to the present and the future, but I would still have felt a lot less weird about fish people.
I wish I had not had to do the recording with a hard cold, but I love the choice of illustration: the same painting was the cover for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Talking to the Sun: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems for Young People (1985), which was almost the first book of poetry I owned. It introduced me to Edna St. Vincent Millay, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Frank O'Hara, of course.
I am especially glad to have the poem in company of this issue. Check out all the stories and poems and do not miss the editorial by Ishita Singh. Aliens and outsiders it is, always. And sometimes you are the insider, and that is the strangest of all.
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And sometimes you are the insider, and that is the strangest of all.
I'm pondering this now.
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Thank you!
I'm pondering this now.
The thing about in-groups and out-groups is you don't always get just the one.
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For the 2020 census, the Trump administration insisted that one couldn't just say white, as had always been a choice, but had to elaborate. My mother and sister carefully wrote in the genealogical stuff. I put colonizer. More like early 1700s, and way farther south than the Massachusetts Bay.
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Thank you. I had a sore throat at the time and I think it affected my assessment of the reading.
I'm trying to decide whether by fish people you meant people who pulled fish from the sea, or mermaids. I'd be pretty surprised (but maybe not entirely?) for you to have genetic evidence of the latter.
I was thinking of Lovecraft's Innsmouth, but mermaids would also have been cool.
For the 2020 census, the Trump administration insisted that one couldn't just say white, as had always been a choice, but had to elaborate.
My mother has never listed herself as white on a census and always just writes in "Jewish," sometimes "Ashkenazi," but this time I think she listed all the different countries of her immigrant grandparents, which I approved of.
My mother and sister carefully wrote in the genealogical stuff. I put colonizer. More like early 1700s, and way farther south than the Massachusetts Bay.
Fair enough. May I ask where?
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I just checked my driver's license, and there is no race or skin color designation. I'm pretty sure there was when I first got one (1971). My eye color is there, though.
The basic lines of my four grandparents can be traced back to NC in most cases as far back as mid-1700s or before. It is possible that some people came in through Virginia.
By the time the farm in Orange County that now belongs to my late cousin's wife was built in the 1740s, many (most?) of the native people had been forcibly displaced or died of smallpox, as far as I can tell from a quick search, but I wonder. Hence colonizer. There were native people living basically where I am sitting (or within a few miles) in 1709, at the time surveyor John Lawson published his book of maps. I don't know how many were still here not long afterward. I have not done enough work. It makes things difficult that names kept being used over and over, that some of them were very common names (my ancestry is not very Irish, but the name Thomas Hogan sure as heck is, just as an example, and it would be easy to chase down the wrong one via census records). Another problem is ancestry.com, which is useful in many ways, but allows people to share their trees, and I worry that wholesale copying perpetuates mistakes. And the census takers, bless them, presumably did their best, but there are spelling and date oddities. And things on death certificates that might be wrong. I was always told that my father's father died of pneumonia, but his death certificate said heart attack.
I believe with fairly reliable evidence that I am a direct descendent of both Revolutionary and Confederate soldiers. I thought that was weird - if your grandfather (great-grandfather?) fought to establish a country, why would you fight to tear it apart? Or maybe it's the other way around - if you know someone who helped start a new country, the idea might not seem outlandish.
Arthur's family for the most part hasn't tried to get much farther back than his great-great grandparents. There is a truism that Jews don't name children after living relatives. Arthur's oldest brother has claimed to me this with a straight face, even though their family had a heap of relatives named Conrad (and one Connielee, the daughter of a Conrad) all named after the original Akiva who changed his name to Conrad, some of them living at the same time as each other. They're all within 140 years (I'm guessing - I don't have the info on me). There are people I know who remember many of them, so we're not likely to find census records confusing in that regard.
Probably a longer answer than you wanted.
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Thank you!
Also, I love that one of the first poetry books you owned had Frank O'Hara in it!
"When I woke up Mayakovsky he was / a lot more prompt."
(I had no idea who Mayakovsky was for years. That line was even funnier when I found out.)
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*waddles off*
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You're welcome! I am glad to help. I still think punching Clive of India is the ethical choice.
*hugs*
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We with wild geese and pogroms in our families
carry the homes we know we must always leave.
No one who brings an empire everywhere with him,
my Puritan haunting, gets out of it alive.
are particularly devastating, I thought.
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Thank you.
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Thank you! (I was thrilled when I saw it.)