Christmas, Don't Ask

     by Brett Rutherford

What was your Christmas like?
    they asked at school.
I changed the subject.

Stepfather sat at table end,
lording it over
his sage-infested stuffing,
whose scent concealed
the odor of rancid butter.

He often cooked
kielbasa, cheap meat
you could get by the foot,
from that unsigned place
expired food came from,
a gristle-tough lump
you would rather starve
than have its innards
within your own.

There was a room
in which a tinseled
Christmas tree blinked.
I never went into it:
the game-show and Western
television was not to be touched,
and the ashtray pyramid
of incipient lung disease
was never emptied.

Stepfather’s language
was all imperatives,
orders spat out
to the unwanted step-sons.
No praise was ever uttered,
no thanks. Years later I sit,
recalling,
he never addressed me once
by my own name.

How many ways, I wonder,
can an adult cancel
an unwanted child?

What did you do over Christmas?
    they asked at school?
Left home for good, I said.
     Best thing I ever did.

 

A Review of Tales of Wonder - Tales of Terror

 

Stephen Mariconda reviewed the first volume of my Tales of Terror project:

... Tales of Terror is a continuation of a project begun at the end of the eighteenth century by Matthew Gregory Lewis with Tales of Wonder (1801). The latter anthology, edited by the notorious author of The Monk (1796), proved to be a milestone of Romantic poetry and a bellwether of the Gothic. Lewis did yeoman’s work in collecting a wide range of horror ballads, including original and traditional works, adaptations, translations, and even parodies of the Gothic. Sir Walter Scott and Robert Southey contributed supernatural verses, and many important contemporaries, including Shelley (and therefore his successors) fell strongly under its influence. ...

In 2012, Brett Rutherford's own edition of Tales of Wonder (also from Poet’s Press) offered reliable texts of the poems, added extensive annotations, and documented the provenance (e.g., folklore) of Lewis’s selections. Popular balladry, with its strong basis in local legends, was the emphasis of the first volume; and this collection takes up the thread of that tradition. As such, the material in Tales of Wonder and Tales of Terror represents the antecedent of modern supernatural fiction. ...

... There are few more qualified to undertake such an effort as this: Rutherford is a distinguished neo-Romantic poet and scholar whose areas of specialty include Gothic, the supernatural, and classical mythology. … The book is well designed, and an excellent bibliography is provided. lt is to be followed shortly by Tales of Terror: The Supernatural Poem Since 1800, Volume Two, thus completing the venture begun by "Monk" Lewis in 1797. lt will be a boon to both readers and critics to have a complete chronological record of supernatural poetry with uniform layout and editorial concept. There can be no real study of a genre such as supernatural fiction until accurate texts and representative works are easily accessible to scholars for detailed analysis and study; and this effort will undoubtedly supply the needed platform for such work, in addition to providing an entertaining and engrossing read for long after midnight.   — Stephen Mariconda, Spectral Realms #4, Winter 2016.

The Poet's Press History and Mission

The Poet’s Press was founded in New York City in 1971, as part of the last great Bohemia of Greenwich Village, with the mission of publishing neglected or lesser-known poets. In those days a number of deserving poets, despite having many magazine publications, had no book publications. Brett Rutherford sought to publish affordable chapbooks and books for poets, and The Poet’s Press quickly emerged as an important part of the New York poetry scene. Working out of a loft in the "cast-iron" district of Chelsea, The Poet’s Press printed and bound its own books with a small offset press and a variety of binding equipment. The press hosted readings at the loft, and Rutherford and the circle of poets he published were a vital part of the West Village poetry scene. Distinct from the more avant-garde East Side poets, the poets chosen by the press, although almost all wrote in free verse, were more traditional in centering on coherent narrative and connections to historical content or classic literature. With the publication of the 1975 anthology May Eve: A Festival of Supernatural Poetry, the press started a second imprint, Grim Reaper Books, later used for a number of Gothic and supernatural titles. The writings of Brett Rutherford, Barbara A. Holland, Shirley Powell, and some other contemporaries indeed constituted an informal "New York Gothic" movement.

In the 1980s and 1990s, The Poet’s Press continued to produce poetry books in what might be called "medieval high tech," combining the emerging desktop publishing technology with hand-bound books printed by various methods on acid-free paper. The books sometimes had custom-designed typefaces and employed a combination of gluing and stitching as the press sought new ways to produce handsome books that were still affordable. It would have been easy to go the route of the letterpress fine presses, but the productions of those high-end hobbyist printers were costly, and not the kinds of books that a poet could carry around to readings or bookstores.

Short-run book printing came to the rescue in the 1990s, and then the new technology of print-on-demand, which made it possible to publish and distribute books-wide without the expense of warehousing many cartons of unsold books. The press continued in this vein in paperback, hardcover, and PDF ebooks, focusing on design and typography to make books that embodied many of the classic aspects of book design.

As it became more and more apparent that poets could easily produce their own chapbooks, Rutherford turned the press to different projects, such as the landmark five volume historical series on Gothic and supernatural poetry, (two annotated volumes of Tales of Wonder, followed by three volumes of Tales of Terror.) The collected writings of departed poets from the Greenwich Village scene also came to pass: three volumes of the writings of Emilie Glen, and nine volumes of the poetry of Barbara A. Holland, known as "the Sibyl of Greenwich Village." Anthologies of writers from Rhode Island, and others from the Palisades Poetry movement of New Jersey, brought many new authors under the press’s umbrella. A collaboration with David Messineo and Sensations Magazine yielded the two-volume collected poems of Irish-American poet Moira Bailis. New poets adopted by the press often stayed for multiple titles, such as Annette Hayn, Joel Allegretti and Jacqueline DeWeever.

In the last several years, press founder Rutherford has turned his attention to a wider swath of world literature, producing, by his own and others’ hands, studies, translations and adaptations involving Ovid, the Chinese Emperor Li Yu, Greek poets Callimachus and Meleager, Rilke, Boston slave-poet Phillis Wheatley, World War I literature, and Heine’s satirical poems. Forays into essays, fiction and memoir have included volumes of Continental horror stories, a banned anti-war novel from World War I, the literary essays of Sarah Helen Whitman, a collection of Silver Age Russian fiction, and Boria Sax’s memoir of atomic espionage. The press has passed its 50th anniversary, having published poems and writings by more than 450 authors.

The Invention of Lithography

 

Everyone knows about Gutenberg, his perfection of casting and printing from moveable type, and the dubious first choice of printing the Bible. Hardly anybody knows about Alois Senefelder, the man who invented the next great breakthrough in printing, lithography. Printing from stone in Senefelder's method is the precursor of offset printing. It is a fascinating story.

Senefelder Invents Lithography

 

Oh You Who Loved Juvenal

 Some lines that Victor Hugo wrote in 1852 when he set out to write a whole volume of savage satire against Napoleon III. He remembered the Roman poet Juvenal, who perfected the art of the withering insult poem.

OH, YOU WHO LOVED JUVENAL

Adapted by Brett Rutherford
from Victor Hugo, Chatiments, 1852

Oh, you who loved Juvenal and filed
his style so sharp it drew
the blood from the brow
of an Emperor,

Oh, you, whose borrowed luster lit
the dark gloom of Dante’s forest,
raising his thoughts
from murk to the Divine,

You, my new Muse, Indignation!
Make haste, and arm my pen
before a pink dawn
and all its fruitless victories
makes the lesser better seem.

Shame is a paltry thing
when prophets proclaim
the Right; raise
pillories and people them
with the deserving foes!

Thanking the Guests

by Brett Rutherford

Alice, a vulture stuffed
with bread and celery,
onion and pomegranate,
is still a vulture,
tough as old moccasins.
We tried our best.

Vera, the cornucopia you sent

erupted snakes,

okra, and cauliflower.

Try as I might,

no recipe came to mind

so I placed most of it

in my guests' coat-pockets.

 

Philippe, that loaf you brought

looked tasty brown

until it bled purple,

a slime-mold fuligo

from a dead tree's base.

Well, it's the thought that counts.

 

Rose, the bouquet you brought

must have cost someone

a pretty penny.

I saw it just yesterday

in the nearby cemetery.

For me? You shouldn't have.

 

Next year, pot luck, chez vous.

To the Cannon Named After Me

 

by Brett Rutherford

Translated and adapted from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible, "December 1870"

IV

Listen to me today, for soon enough
your turn will come to be the one listened to.
O cannon, feared warrior and thunderer,
dragon full of anger and shadow, whose mouth
mingles fierce flame with every roar,
a heavy colossus with lightning in your veins,
you who will scatter in air the blinded dead,
I bless you. You are going to defend this city.

O cannon, I charge you:
     never turn your mouth upon us.
     Be silent in civil war,
but against the foreigner watch out. Just yesterday
you came from the forge, terrible and proud.
The women followed you. How handsome he is! they said.
Because the Cimbri[1] are out there. Their victories are such
that shame has been brought to us, and Paris signals
to the princes that she calls all people to witness.

The struggle awaits us; come, oh my strange son,
let us stand one beside the other, and make an exchange:
place, O black avenger, sovereign fighter,
your bronze in my heart,
     and take my soul within your brass.

O cannon, you will soon be on the ramparts.
Eight horses will drag you, your boxes
full of grapeshot jumping on the pavement.
From the middle of a crowd bursting into cheers,
you will go your lonely way,
     few among the crumbling hovels
     will take notice of your passage.
Take your haughty place at the large embrasures
where an indignant Paris stands, her saber raised.
There, never fall asleep or calm down.

I am one who hoped to heal all with austere indulgence;
since I have rumbled my complaints
     among the living, in the forum or from the heights in exile,
a sower of peace through the immensity of human war,
since towards the great goal where merciful God leads us,
I, sad or smiling, always have my finger raised,
since I, who have known mourning, am pensive now,
as much as one who loved the gospel and craved
     some union Biblical —
but you, ah, you who bear my name,
oh monster, you must become terrible!

For love becomes hatred in the presence of evil;
for the spirit-man cannot submit to the beast man,
and France cannot endure barbarism;
because the sublime ideal is the one great homeland;
and never was duty more obvious
to obstruct the overflowing wild flood,
and to put Paris, the Europe that she is transforming,
her people, under the shelter of an enormous defense.

For if this Teutonic king were not punished,
everything that man calls hope, progress, pity,
fraternity, would flee from the earth without joy;
for Caesar is the tiger and the people are the prey,
and whoever fights France attacks the future;
because we must raise, when we hear from out
the formidable shadow the neighing
of Attila’s horse and his vanguard of Huns,
around the human soul an unapproachable wall,
and Rome, to save the universe from nothingness,
must be a goddess, and Paris a giant!

This is why the cannons that the lyre gave birth to,
that the azure stanzas issued, must be
pointed, mouths gaping, above the ditch.
This is why a quivering thinker is forced
to use light for sinister things;
before kings, before evil and its ministers,
faced with the world’s great need to be saved.
He knows that after dreaming, he must fight.
He knows it is a necessary fight,
     to strike, to conquer, to dissolve,
and so, with a ray of dawn,
     he manufactures a thunderbolt.

---

[1] Cimbri. A Germanic tribe defeated by the Romans in 101 CE.

A Message to President Grant

U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant

 

by Brett Rutherford

Adapted from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible, "December 1870." 

It matters when the United States takes the wrong side in a foreign conflict. It also matters when the United States declares neutrality. General Ulysses S. Grant, President of the United States (1869 to 1877), sent to the Prussian king a message of benevolent neutrality at the start of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, in effect abandoning France to its fate. This is Victor Hugo’s outraged response, summoning up the ghosts of Franklin. Lincoln, John Brown, Washington, and the Polish military officer Kosciusko who helped the American revolution.

III

In this way, Americans, people inclined to prodigious efforts,

thus, land of peaceable Penn,

of fire-and-steam Fulton,

of Franklin the Prometheus,

in the living dawn of a new world,

oh great republic,

it is in your name that we take a sideways step

into the shadow!

 

Treason! Because Berlin wanted Paris destroyed!

If you are for light, do not encourage its opposite!

What is this? Has freedom become a renegade?

Is this why, coming on his frigate

Lafayette gave Rochambeau his hand?

When darkness rises, would you extinguish your torch?

What? Are you now saying, as some others say,

“Nothing is true but force.” On the end

of a long-pointed glave, a shining blade

seems to have dazzled everyone.

Bend the knee, the work of twenty centuries is wrong.

Progress is called a vile serpent —

see how it writhes in the mire —

and the idealistic people are now the selfish ones.

 

The new order decrees that

nothing definitive and absolute exists.

The master is everything; he is justice and truth.

And everything disappears: right, duty, freedom,

the future that shines before us; even Reason that led us,

divine wisdom and human wisdom,

dogma and book. Blank out Voltaire as well as Jesus,

once a German soldier puts his boot on it! —

You are so good at gallows when you forget yourselves,

casting the dawning world’s shadow

onto the world that has gone before.

 

Hanging John Brown, you taught us all a lesson

from another Golgotha on another horizon.

Ghost, untie the knot from your neck, come, oh righteous one,

come and whip this President with your august rope!

It is thanks to him that one day history,

mourning, will say with regret:

— France once rescued America, and forged

its sword, and lavished all for its deliverance,

and then, trembling reader,

America then turned to stab at France! —

 

Some savage, preferring to crawl and lie in wait,

some Huron, decorated with scalping knives,

might have made league

with this bloody leader, the King of Prussia.

Certainly, the uncivilized admire the Borusse.

It’s quite simple; he sees him as a fellow raider,

beastly, atrocious, as wild in his woods

as the Prussians in their forests.

 

To think that the man embodying

before Europe the sense of law,

the man enveloped in Columbia’s rays,

the man in whom a whole heroic world is alive,

that he now would throw himself face down

before the dreadful iron scepter

of old funeral ages,

that from the shadows he slaps Paris in the face

that he would deliver her august homeland to the emperor!

 

Let him mix it up with tyrants, murders, horror,

so that in this horrible and dark triumph it overwhelms her,

that in this bed of shame he ravished this virgin,

that he shows to the universe, on a filthy chariot,

America kissing the heel of Caesar ֫—

Oh! it makes all the great tombs shake!

 

It stirs, at the bottom of the pale catacombs,

the bones of the proud victors and the mighty vanquished!

A quivering Kosciusko wakes Spartacus;

and Madison stands and Jefferson stands —

Jackson raises both hands to block this hideous dream —

Dishonor! shouts Adams; and Lincoln rises, too,

amazed and bleeding, as on the day he was murdered.

 

Be indignant, great people. O supreme nation,

you know with what tender and filial heart I love you.

America, I cry. Oh! painful affront!

She still only had a halo’s figment on her brow.

Her starry, sidereal flag dazzled history.

Washington, galloping on his horse of glory,

had spattered the folds with sparks

of freedom’s standard, witness to duties accomplished,

and, so that from every shadow he dissipates the veils,

had superbly seeded it with stars.

 

This illustrious banner is obscured, alas!

I weep ... — Ah! be cursed, you wretch who mixes

atop the proud pavilion that a wind from heaven shakes

into the drops of light a stain of mud!