Four by Four #54

Publication News

May 2026, next month, marks the 20th anniversary of the publication of my first book of poems, The Silence of Men, which I think is worth celebrating because it is—and this is a testament to CavanKerry Press’ commitment to its authors—still in print and, somewhat remarkably (to me at least), still selling. I just received my 2025 royalty check for $4.83. It’s easy to laugh at that amount, and we’ve all heard the jokes about how poets are only in it for the money (right?), but I have always believed that poetry does its work in the world very slowly. I don’t know how many copies of the book that check represents, or how many people will ultimately read those copies, but it makes me happy and not a little bit humbled to think that poems I wrote more than two decades ago are still doing their work somewhere.

In other news, Bryant Literary Review has published “Faith,” a poem from my next book of poems, 2020, for which I just signed a contract, again, with Fernwood Press. The book is tentatively scheduled to come out in Spring 2027.

Four Things To Read

Dawn, by Sevgi Soysal, translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely:

The oppressors…know exactly what they’re doing, and what they’re out to prevent. They need their scapegoats. Why else did the kings and emperors of old put so much faith in cruelty? The spectacle of cruelty most of all. They used it to change the past to suit their story. And to prevent what might become. Did they throw their slaves to the lions just for fun? Oppressors need a constant stream of victims to survive.

First published in Turkey in 1975, as Maureen Freely says in her introduction, the story this novel tells “could just as easily have happened yesterday,” though if she were writing that introduction now, she would probably replace yesterday with today. Soysal, who had a distinguished career as a writer and translator, was imprisoned for spreading communist propaganda and obscenity by the Turkish government after the military seized control of the country in 1971. Dawn, the plot of which takes place over twelve hours, recounts the story of a group of friends and acquaintances whose evening meal is interrupted by a police raid. They spend the night in police headquarters, where at least one of them is interrogated quite brutally, and they are released the following morning. What makes the novel so compelling is the way Soysal captures—by moving almost seamlessly between and among the perspectives of both primary and secondary characters—the ordinariness of everyone involved, leaving the contrast between that ordinariness and the political stakes mostly implicit. Oya’s brief meditation on the nature of oppression, in fact—she is the protagonist—is one of the few places in the novel where its politics are explicitly invoked. The parallels to the current state of affairs in this country were hard to miss. I kept having to remind myself that I was reading a novel written more than fifty years ago in a very different country.

§§§

How To Write A Political Poem During These Unprecedented Times, by Adrian S. Potter:

Perhaps we sink too much energy into pretending to be unoffended when we really should feel insulted. As part of his unapologetic reign of bluster, one of our so-called leaders keeps teaching a master class on how to parlay hot takes and brash rhetoric into votes and profit. Meanwhile, I’m busy trying to write a poem that will finally put an end to bigotry, and yes, even within the false mythology of a post-racial society, bigotry still exists.

The tension in this piece is between the self-important navel-gazing that characterizes the way some writers live “the literary life” and the implicit call to action with which Potter ends the piece: “But when I try to write about [these unprecedented times]…my hand instinctively tightens into a fist hoisted high above my head.” The essay was published in 2004, and I imagine that, in light of what’s been happening in the United States and the Middle East, it lands with even more urgency than it did back then. I found myself thinking of Louise Glück’s essay “The Idea of Courage,” in which she critiqued the use of the term courage to described what it took for a poet to write poems that revealed aspects of their life they might not otherwise have revealed. Specifically, I found myself remembering Glück’s point that this usage of courage “concentrates attention on the poet’s relation to his materials and to his audience, rather than on the political result of speech.” We all know the stories of the poets in totalitarian nations throughout history who risked that political result and paid with their lives. Iran, of course, is one of them. How far are we, I asked myself when I finished reading Potter’s essay, from a time when the difference between writing a political poem and raising one’s tightened fist into the air will not be as different as he suggests..

§§§

Refusenik, by Lynn Melnick:

Experience tells me
editors want to read my rape poems

until someone else sends rape poems
that are an extended metaphor

for this ancient god or that well known myth
and not a spirited description of what becomes of labia

when a man forces himself between.

It sounds wrong to say I like this book, as if the book were not all that different from a delicious piece of cake or a well-cooked meal. At the same time, though, to say that I respect the book, that I admire it, falls far short of the ways in which Melnick’s poems—their exploration of the connections between and among her identities as a woman, as a survivor of sexual violence, and as a Jew—moved me and made me think. Overwhelmingly, though, the feeling I have carried with me since I finished Refusenik is the sense of identification I felt when I read the lines I quoted above, because I have found myself, when it comes to the poems I’ve written about my own experience of sexual violence, in the same position as Melnick’s speaker. Except for that declaration of solidarity, though, I don’t want to make this brief paragraph about me or my work, because Refusenik deserves your attention wholly on its own merits. The poems are meticulously crafted, but what I found most interesting in that regard are the poems where, to my ear, the speaker’s speech- and thought-rhythms have the flat, declarative, sometimes disorganized, and somewhat digressive character of someone who is trying to bring coherence to their memories of a trauma they have suffered. I don’t know if that was a conscious choice on Melnick’s part or if it is something I am reading into the poems, but it captured my imagination throughout the book.

§§§

Why I Didn’t Report My Rape, by Anna Krauthamer:

The simple answer to the question of why I never reported the rape is that I believe in the abolition of police and prisons. The less simple, less articulate answer is that to pursue prosecuting and potentially incarcerating other people is inconceivable to me, even when they have hurt me more than I could have ever believed possible. Because of this, I can only vocalize what I want in negative and inherently impossible terms: that all I want is for it to never have happened. The prospect of being a participant in other peoples’ incarceration is as alien to me as anything could be, to the point that I can only conceive of it in childish terms—how silly and strange it would be to have a group of people incarcerated at my expense when doing so would do nothing to fix the damage they have already so thoroughly done.

At the heart of this essay is Krauthamer’s attempt to understand the emotional roots of what she says in the paragraph I’ve just quoted. There have been times in my own life when I have wished I could be alone with the men who violated me while they were strapped down on a table, helpless. I never imagined what I might do to them in concrete terms, but I have been angry enough that I was willing to walk up to the edge of that fantasy. At the same time, I understand Krauthamer’s insistence, if I understand her correctly, that to deny the humanity of the men who raped her—which is what she believes would have happened if she’d reported her rape—would ultimately be, under the guise of justice, to validate the act of dehumanization of which those men were guilty. I remember when I told my father about the men who sexually abused me. He and I had not spoken in many years and I was by then in my thirties. “You should have told me,” he said. “At that time, I knew guys who would have broken their legs if I’d told them about it.” When I asked him what good that would have done me, what good he thought it did me in the moment to hear him say it, he was completely at a loss. I remembered this while reading Krauthamer’s article, and it made me think that maybe I agree with her. What I want is for those men not to have done to me what they did, and while I do think it’s important to devise ways for people like that both to be held accountable and to be restored in the community’s eyes to whatever we want to call the status of that accountability, the kind of punishment my father’s response represented——and let’s be honest prison is only a state sanctioned version of that response—will never accomplish that.

Four Things To See

These Disney cartoons are from the Internet Archive. (Unfortunately, if you want to watch the videos, you need to click through to the copy of this issue on my website.)

Steamboat Willie - 1928

§§§

The Karnival Kid - 1929

§§§

The Skeleton Dance - (1929)

§§§

When The Cat’s Away - 1929

Four Things To Listen To

Piers Faccini & Ballaké Sissoko - Special Rider Blues (Skip James Cover)

§§§

Bartok String Quartet No.1: 1. Lento - Emerson String Quartet

§§§

Clarinet Yontev - The Klezmatics

§§§

Engineering Memories - Arash Sobhani / مهندسی خاطره - آرش سبحانی

Four Things About Me

From 1989, a dream I wrote down in one of the journals I kept when I was in South Korea: In a Chinese restaurant, I am walking with a friend past Dan [whom I think was my music theory professor when I was an undergraduate] jamming on the piano with someone whose face I can’t see and whose instrument I don’t remember. My friend and I are seated at a table with two other people, a man and a woman. The other man—whom I thought in the dream was someone else, but who turned out to be me—releases from his fingers a poisonous insect. His finger had a hole in it, and I remember thinking in the dream that it was hollow and that it must have held other insects as well. When I woke up, though, I remembered it as a penis, not a finger. Anyway, the insect was aimed at my companion. It took a few second before I could find where the insect had landed on the table, since it was same color as the tablecloth, and then I flicked it to the floor where a Korean waitress squashed it with a piece of bamboo weaving she held with a pair of tweezers. She was openly disgusted by the squashed insect. Then, my friend and I left in his red sports car. As we drove past a truck, the back of the truck caught fire. We stopped to help put it out and then I woke up.

§§§

These are four dreams from a journal I kept in 1985: I found these dreams in the pages of a journal I kept in 1985. Dream One: Ricky Schroeder in a space suit chasing what I think was a dragon, also in a space suit. Schroeder threw a hook at the dragon which somehow landed in an eye that was attached to the end of the tail of the dragon’s suit. I think they were on the moon. Dream Two: A little girl with glasses runs out of a United Synagogue Youth function and tries to hide behind the rear wheel of a car as it drives way. I chase her, somehow, back into the building and go to look for Harvey, the youth director. He is watching a movie with Gina [his wife]. I see the kid and chase after her again, but when I come back I can’t find Harvey. He calls to me. He is in a chair with Gina in his lap and her arms around his neck. Dream Three: I am walking with two bags of groceries out of which things keep falling past the Knight of Columbus building where the drum and bugle corps I was in used to practice. Maureen, the girl who was the drum major, is standing outside, looking like she wants to help, but she doesn’t. I cross the street to the John Lewis Childs schoolyard [of the elementary school I went to from third through sixth grade] and the bags break. I am trying to tie everything up with two pieces of wire and suddenly I am George Burns telling jokes to an audience that has appeared in the schoolyard. They can’t stop laughing. Then I am on stage with Bing Crosby, but he is the center of attention. Dream Four: I am in a house, at the bottom of a stairwell, and there is a devil upstairs whom I don’t recognize. I am in the middle of a crowd that is challenging the devil, which appears suddenly at the top of the stair case and spits onto someone standing near me something that obliterates him. Everyone starts crossing themselves and saying “Our Father.” Those are the only words I hear. I’m not sure if I say the words with them, but I do not cross myself. We run to another room, which is a classroom being cleaned by a group of students. I’m the last one in. When I enter, everyone else disappears and I am alone with the devil. I either think or say, “If I think you away, you can’t hurt me.” I do it and the devil disappears.

§§§

When I was an undergraduate, I usually went home for intersession. One year, though, I stayed on campus. Since the dorm I lived in closed for the break, I had to move into a room in the only dorm that the administration kept open year round, the one where the college’s international students were housed. One evening, a graduate student from India and I were cooking dinner at the same time, and we ended up having a conversation about Judaism and Jewish culture. He’d never met a Jewish person before and he was very curious, specifically about our religious ceremonies. I was describing for him the point in Shabbos services when the Torah is taken out of the ark, when he interrupted me. He wanted to know if the Torah was one our idols and if the ark was where we kept them. I could understand why he might think that. I’d just finished telling him that everyone stood up when the Torah was taken out, that it was an honor to be the person chosen to do that and then to walk the Torah around the room while everyone sang the prayers, and that the congregants would touch the Torah as it passed—with a prayerbook or the edge of their prayer shawl or sometimes just their fingers—and then kiss the surface they’d touched the Torah with. To someone whose religious practice included actual idols, it would certainly sound like the Jews were venerating the Torah as a representation of the deity and not, simply, a sacred text. I don’t know if my explanation of the difference between the two made sense to him. I never spoke with him again.

§§§

In the early 1990s, I befriended a woman from Hungary named Katalin. I don’t remember why she’d come to New York, nor do I remember the circumstances under which we met, but we became good friends very quickly over a shared interest in language, literature, and language teaching specifically. I’d just started in my position as an English professor at Nassau Community College, where I was one of just a handful of people in the English as a Second Language program who actually had academic credentials in that field. I wasn’t sure back then whether or not I would stay at NCC, and Kate and I would sometimes fantasize about starting an English language school in Budapest. Obviously, that never happened. We stayed in touch by mail for a while after she went home, and I just found a letter that she sent me in August of 1992. On the back is her translation of a poem by the Hungarian poet Gyula Juhász. It’s called “What Was.” I have no idea how good the translation is, but this is exactly how Kate wrote it out:

What was her blondness like, I don’t know already,
But I know that the meadows are blonde,
When the summer turning yellow comes with thick corns,
And in this blondness I feel her again.

What was the blue of her eyes like, I don’t know already,
But when the skies open in autumn,
At the faint farewell of September
I’m day-dreaming back the colour of her eyes.

What was the silk of her voice like, I don’t know already either,
But on the spring’s coming, when the green field sighs,
I feel as if Anna’s warm words speak
From a spring which is as far as the sky.

You are receiving this newsletter either because you have expressed interest in my work or because you have signed up for the First Tuesdays mailing list. If you do not wish to receive it, simply click the Unsubscribe button below.