[[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE NEW SAMIZDAT  
[[link removed]]


 

Lee Rossi
August 27, 2025
Portside

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ These two anthologies showcase poets that are responding to the
anxieties of our time. _

,

 

_At the Corner of Hope and Despair: An Anthology for the Trump Era_
Charlotte Muse, Chris Cummings and Patrick Daly, eds.
Pope Street Press
ISBN-13: ? 979-8218526832

_Beautiful Little Fools: Poetry of Glamour, Obsession, and the Gilded
Age_
Alan Parry & Karen Pierce Gonzalez, eds.
Broken Spine Ltd.
ISBN-13: ? 979-8288199141

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, there lived poets and
writers whose lives were often endangered by a large, malicious
bureaucracy whose only purpose was to frustrate any expression of
change or freedom. The leaders of those societies (Darth Hitler, Darth
Mao), determined to maintain their hold on power, found enemies
everywhere, internal enemies as well as external, warning their
citizens of the dangers that surrounded them. They, the citizens,
didn’t have much, but what they had (their clothes, their pitiful
homes, their families, their pitiful lives) would be taken from them
if those enemies ever came to power. But wait, isn’t that true of
many modern Earth societies?

 

I don’t know about you, but the things the nuns, priests and
politicians used to warn me about in grade school—especially Russian
and Chinese totalitarianism—seem to have taken root here, in our
precious, freedom-loving U. S. of A. I don’t plan to spell out the
details, the various goose steps we’re taking on the road to
fascism. Read the papers. (Maybe not WSJ or USA Today.)

 

Read the poets.

 

Remember what William Carlos Williams used to say: “It is difficult
to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack
of what is found there.”

 

With that in mind I picked up a couple of recent anthologies,
gatherings of poets aghast at the state of so-called Western Civ. One,
_At the Corner of Hope and Despair,_ published on  America’s Left
Coast by a small group of hopeful individuals, is conceived as an
“An Anthology for the Trump Era.” The other, _Beautiful Little
Fools_, a title taken from _The Great Gatsby_, was published in the
U.K., its subtitle, “Poetry of Glamour, Obsession and the Gilded
Age,” pointing to its relevance to the current Gilded Age, an era
dominated by despot plutocrats.

 

Let’s start with _At the Corner_, a volume published what seemed
like minutes after Trump’s second election. How have we come to such
a pass, the editors ask? How have we managed to ignore all the
struggle and suffering that is our recent patrimony? At the beginning
of the prior difficult century V.I. Lenin wrote a short pamphlet
entitled “What Is To Be Done?” At the beginning of another
century, short and already difficult, poets Charlotte Muse, Chris
Cummings, & Patrick Daly have conjured a chapbook that might be titled
“What Can Be Done?” The shift in tone—from the aggressively
programmatic to the anxious and tentative—hints at the
disappointments of recent human history. Perhaps you are unsure of
your place in society.  Perhaps your ideological bedrock is shifting
underneath your feet. Then perhaps these poems will give you the
courage and confidence to continue.

 

Many of the poems in this volume adhere to current poetic conventions,
offering imagistic narratives, many of them very powerful, which
describe the horrors perpetrated by Trump and his cronies. But of
course there are other ways of deflating a swollen dictator-wannabe.
We remember that some of the earliest poetry in the Western Canon
swerved from the celebration of the mighty and victorious, to sympathy
for their victims (Hector and Priam in the Iliad) or to burlesque,
parody and satire (which, as in our present day, could have lead to
your disappearance). One of my favorite pieces is Charlotte Muse’s
re-write of Leonard Cohen’s (lovelorn) “Suzanne”:

 

            Trump takes you down to his place near the
ocean

            You can play a little golf there, you can hear
his self promotion

            And you know that he’s half crazy and
that’s why you want to be there . . .

            And just when you mean to tell him that you
think he’s full of bullshit

            Then he gets you on his wavelength and he
wishes to remind you

            He’s been many women’s lover

                                                                       
(“Song”)

 

Another poem by Muse, “Small Ode to Joy,” provides a glimpse into
neglected and overlooked corners of life: “Hurry,” she tells us:

 

            The redbud won’t wait , or the freesia,

            or the silver-bark cherry. All the new webs,

            shining and floating like unrounded bubbles,

            won’t wait.

 

There are riches all around us, silver and shining; all we have to do
is notice them. All we have to do is turn away from our screens and
the hectic pageant of our politics:

 

            We don’t owe everything to madmen who think

            we’re only empty shoes in the jig with death.

            We don’t owe everything to sorrow.

 

On a parallel track, Iranian American poet Esther Kamkar engages the
great mysteries—you know, life, the universe, and everything—but
settles on a direct confrontation with feeling:

 

            How to press our heart against

            the great broken heart of the world

            without understanding,

            without turning away.

                                                           
(“Question as Shelter”)

 

Probing deeper philosophical ore, Mary Dederer surveys “Ancient
Maps,” and notes  that, despite all our knowledge and planning, the
world eludes our desires, our designs. “The wind does what it
pleases . . . ,” she tells us, “folding intention back on itself,
/ the whole world sputtering, wincing, / and starting all over
again.”

 

And latter-day Beat Terry Adams offers a disarming conversation with a
rock, one that might remind us of Polish poet Wisława Szymborska.
“If I Were a Rock,” he laments, “I’d worry / whether I was the
right rock, lying in the right place . . . .  I would hope to be
moved to allow / a passage to peace, // or stacked / with my brothers
/ to point the way.”

One finds moments like this, of whimsy, consolation and hope,
throughout this wonderful little book.

The second volume under review, “Beautiful Little Fools,”
approaches our current political crisis from a different angle, but
also offers a richness of variety and insight. Why an anthology
centered on _The Great Gatsby,_ now a century old? According to the
editors: “The simple answer is: because _The Great Gatsby_ is a
remarkable cultural artefact. Flawed, fabulous, unrelenting. It speaks
volumes about the society it was created by, for, and about. And like
any serious object of cultural value, a carved bowl in an Amazonian
rainforest, a Nike trainer laced by a teenager, it deserves
interrogation.”

 

And what kinds of questions do these poets ask of the hallowed text?
Questions about wealth. Questions about power. Questions about care
and carelessness. Questions about innocence and guilt.

 

“The Woman at the Party with Her Entourage” is unhappy with her
privileged lot. Zen abbott Richard Collins peeks into a soul in which
emptiness (not the good kind) has come home to a “cluttered house
full of beautiful objects.” Once a celebrated violinist, she is
still sought after but not by those she herself seeks. “Parties are
such sweet sorrow,” she tells a fellow party goer, wryly echoing
Juliet. And memory is no balm:

 

                                 . . .
not long

ago she had a brace of poets among

her beautiful objects read to her.

They put everything in their mouths

(including her) and left the house

(and her) in ruin.

 

With Jazz Age nonchalance, Susan Richardson (in “The Drowning”)
tosses Gatsby’s vocabulary into a cocktail shaker, shakes it, and
then arranges it in prescient lines:

 

            Slippery thumbs toss trinkets at jewelled
mirages

            suspending dreams in patches of stale whiskey
breath.

            Pearls sink like chipped teeth to the bottom of
crystal tumblers.

 

As with any enterprise dedicated to a writer known for his stylistic
flourishes, one finds ornate and euphuistic vocabulary, things like
“A silky velvet evening bag / With sequins that twinkled”
(“Message from the Stars”); or like this meditation by James
Lilliefors on visiting Fitzgerald’s grave in Maryland:

 

            I felt darkness softly rain down, the night’s
message

            pooling into a conviction that I would take
with me,

            and keep, in diminished form, for the rest of
my life

                                                                       
(“Rockville”)

 

Of course, adherence to one’s hero can be perilous as well. One
notes the occasional strain of barely tamed misogyny, as in Paul
Short’s “Depraved New World”: “All these pretty dancing girls.
Sequin-stitch smiles / and beaded dresses that rattle and swish on
approach.” And yet the editors also find room for Claire Painter’s
sympathetic portrayal of “Tom’s Girl”: “She straightened up
her / dress, lifted her chin just so and took up that great, wide
carelessness / that breezed and drifted through them all.” Myrtle
has her own aspirations, no better and yet no worse than her wealthy
boyfriend, or his wealthy wife.

 

 Every generation invents or re-invents the classics. Did Fitzgerald
care about the evils of racism? Not as much as David Birch who in
“Atlantic Crossings” describes how black musicians, the inventors
of the Jazz Age, fled the oppression and violence of their homeland:
Louis Armstrong, denounced as an ‘untrained gorilla,” but also
Parker, Gillespie, Holiday—“voices of the dispossessed.”

 

If one were to do a structural analysis of this volume, one might note
how often these poems rely on the positing of binary opposites for
their _mise en scène_: wealth vs. poverty; rich & elegant v. cheap &
tawdry; lofty & sophisticated v. animalistic. Is this a proxy for
dramatic tension, a lo-cal substitute for the full fat of real drama?
Or can we take the book as an allegory for our current era, in which
wealth substitutes for real accomplishment, ability and concern. The
pleasures of such a volume are many, but when we turn the last page,
we must turn again to our lives, thwarted like Gatsby’s by our
dreams and the inexorable pressures of our times.

 

Finally we must ask ourselves if we are the kind of people chided by
Jennifer Leong in “on their part, they threw parties”:

 

            Simply put, they really couldn't care less ---

            Though "carefree" was the term they preferred

 

 

Lee Rossi is a Portside moderator.

* Poetry
[[link removed]]
* Trump
[[link removed]]
* contemporary U.S. literature
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit portside.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 



########################################################################

[link removed]

To unsubscribe from the xxxxxx list, click the following link:
[link removed]