The Forts of Paris

The outline of the old Paris forts can still be seen today.

 

by Brett Rutherford

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

Seen from the sky, they have the shape of stars.
Crouching on hill and mound,
forts are the enormous watch-dogs of Paris.

In case we can be surprised at any moment,
in case a horde arrives, in case the vile ambush
tries to creep up to the city walls — they watch.
Nineteen of them are ever on guard,
alert and worried, threatened and menaced
by whatever amasses in the dark of night,
they can warn each other
     whenever something stirs
         that ought not be there.
Their bronze necks stretch all around
    the high and formidable walls.

During our slumber they stay awake,
hoarse lungs ready to cough out thunder.

The hills, sometimes, erupt in earth-born stars,
throwing a flash of lightning,
    the valleys and plains below lit up,
in sudden alarm in the dark of night.

When heavy twilight falls upon us,
its silence might be a trap, its peace
the lull concealing an enemy camp.

To lure, ensnare, encircle us
   is their intent, in vain.

Our trust is in the guard-dog cannons,
horizon hugging, monstrous in size,
respected by all the populace.

Paris, the armed camp in bivouac,
Paris its own tomb, Paris
     imprisoned within its own close quarters,
standing in solitude
     among a universe of empires,
Paris its own sentinel ever-wary,
     weary grows, and dozes off.
The sleep of some spreads out and muffles all,
men, women, children alike must slumber.
What sounds, the sobs, the strident burst
of hysterical laughter cutting itself short,
the dim and fading footsteps
around the water-tanks, the quay,
     street-corners and riverbanks,
the thousand roofs beneath which dreams
rise trembling and then still themselves,
the groan of settling boards and stairs
mistaken for the tread of burglars,

The lifted hope that believes everything;
the famished sigh that says, I just might die.

All keep, as out of respect
    for those distant guardians,
a close-to-silence half-wakefulness.

Sleep now, forget everything,
     count on the fact that they are there.

We stand up with a start! We gasp and pant!
Lending our ears from doorway and window-peep,
something like a mountain howling reaches us.
The whole town listens, bed-sheets clutched:
everyone, on every road and farm, wakes up.
After the first rumble, a second cry responds,
the inarticulate utterance of deaf terror,
fierce howl, hint of inclement weather,
no! a hundred more voices echo, thunder
piled upon thunder, this is no storm!

It is them, our guardians! Somewhere amid
the clotted darkness they saw the hides
of covert creatures moving about.
They sparked; they lit them up in silhouette,
and there was no mistaking it: the enemy!
Is that it? Did they make out, in some wood
so dark that even an owl would shun it,
at field’s edge, the black swarm of a battalion,
the sound of muffled feet, marching?

Amid the thicket, did our dogs
make out the tell-tale gleam of human eyes?
How beautiful the forts of Paris,
like strong and faithful dogs who bark,
and, once awakened, roar their challenge.

 

Prowess of the Prussians

by Brett Rutherford

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

V

PROWESS OF THE PRUSSIANS

When conquest admits that fraud is its sister,
this is progress. In vain conscience cries,
what began as an exploit is now exploitation,
a poor neighbor claiming the right
     to the rich neighbor’s gold.
On the back of winged Victory
     they have placed a bag for loot.

While waiting to swallow Lorraine and Alsace,
one snatches a watch from a watchmaker’s nail;
if one wants to immerse himself in immense glory,
breaking a window is a stupid thing.
Just walk in the door and take what you want.
Despite being brought up as honorable men,
the soldiers need tobacco — damn it all! —
so they steal it. Through Reichshoffen[1] and Forbach,[2]
through this war where we had scant hope
of a dwarf Napoleon delivering great France,
in battles where generals failed to appear
(imagine if Marceau,[3] or Hoche,[4] or Condé[5] went missing!);
through Metz betrayed for bribes
     and Strasbourg smoldering beneath the bombs;
among the cries, when grapeshot felled the living,
one showing to the morning light his brains,
     and other his cascading entrails,

Through all of this, the flags one moment advancing
     the next drooped down in flight, the waves
of galloping squadrons like a roiling sea;
in the middle of this vast and sinister spiral,
an avaricious conqueror (with his stingy household)
half Shylock and half Galgacus,[6]
reduced to offering a side-street’s stolen clock
from some looted shop of the vanquished,
as a love-offering to some blond-haired nymph
at the foot of Mt. Adule.[7] Bellone herself,
war’s goddess, descends disheveled and fierce
from the lightning-flashing cloud, from which
blood falls instead of the nurturing rain.

She takes up a hammer to nail packing crates,
and helps out with the loot-inventory.

A country is being ransomed village by village.
The terrible victors turn out to be rascals,
wolves, tigers, and bears in clownish guise.
They overthrew an empire to cut a purse.

Caesar, upright in his war chariot, says:[8]
     I came, I saw, now pay me my fare.

One massacres a country, the blood is still fresh;
then one decides to charge for it —
     Can one really invoice murder?
     How does one render a bill for famine?
— Pay up now, it’s almost six months
     since I exterminated you. —
How much? That much? That’s far too much! —
We couldn’t be brought to slit your throat for less. —
even if we upset, in the depths of heaven, those proud witnesses,
our ancestors, the heroes, pale in the clouds,
by shows of war, to which admission fees are attached,
we don’t worry much about these ghosts.

Five billion in gold will give the Prussians
     a place of their own in Valhalla.
They boarded a bank as pirates.
They copied in plunder, in fraud, in brigandage,
the shifty-eyed Bedouins and the cowardly Baskirs;
and Schinderhannes[9] puts on the false nose of the god Mars.

For our part, we have as leaders
     kings born in a ditch, and their princes
have ministers the way a thief has pincers.
At bay beneath their feet we trample scruples;
in short, they lie in wait along a woodland path
     intent to rob us blind.
They rob — we strip, we grieve — they round up, they pillage.
Perhaps, in the honorable days of old
     it was more beautiful to have taken the Bastille.[10]

---

[1] Reichshoffen. A Prussian victory over the French at the village of Wörth in Alsace, on 6 August 1870, with 5884 men killed and wounded and more than 9,000 captured.

[2] Forbach. The Battle of Forbach, also called the Battle of Spicherin, also on 6 August 1870, was a French defeat characterized by inept leadership.

[3] Marceau. François Séverin Marceau (1769-1796), general, hero of the French Revolution.

[4] Hoche. Louis Lazar Hoche (1768-1797), a quick-thinking general, hero of the Revolution.

[5] Condé. Louis II de Bourbon, Prince of Condé (1621-1686), favorite general of Louis XIV, a hero of the Thirty Years’ War.

[6] Galcacus. Caledonian chieftain who spoke out against Rome’s exploitation of Britain, and organized the Britons against Rome.

[7] Mount Adule. Mt. Adula or Rheinwaldhorn in the Swiss Alps. It was the first Swiss peak to be the object of mountain-climbing, and is the watershed from which both the Rhine and Po Rivers originate. Hugo’s allusion can be read as both about the strange passion for conquering empty mountain peaks, and for a summit from which one might overlook two empires.

[8] The lines from here to the end of the poem were likely added after February 1871, when Bismarck demanded a five-billion-franc war indemnity from France.

[9] Schinderhannes. Johannes Bückler (c. 1778-1803), an outlaw and one-man crime wave in Germany.

[10] Bastille. An allusion back to Marceau, whose Revolutionary career commenced with the storming of the Bastille.

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!