Like A Tree That’s Planted By The Water

Open Mic at Barnes & Noble welcomes award-winning poet Neil Silberblatt this Monday evening as guest reader. First drawn to the form as a student of Frank McCourt (Pulitzer Prize-winner, Angela’s Ashes), who taught English at Stuyvesant High School in New York at the time, Neil began writing his own work while attending Cornell University.

Now a New Milford resident, Neil travels around Connecticut coordinating Voices of Poetry, a multi-venue poetry and music program that has been hosted by the Minor Memorial Library in Roxbury, Gunn Memorial Library in Washington, Wooster School in Danbury and the New Britain Museum of American Art.

A contributor to VerseWisconsin, the Naugatuck River Review and other literary publications, it was from Hennen’s Observer that Neil received a nomination for the Pushcart Award, as well as the Grand Prize in its Open Community Poetry Contest for “Madison Avenue” (click here to read its efficient and unflinching commentary on how financialized trade breeds inequality and consumer narcissism). You can get a live feel for his timely social insight from this April reading held at the Hartford Public Library last April:

So Far, So Good, Neil’s 2012 collection (Lulu), will be followed later this year by Present Tense.

In addition to a March appearance at Curley’s, Neil has been the featured reader at Naugatuck Valley Community College’s Confluencia literary reading series in Waterbury and at the Wednesday Night Poetry Series in Bethel.

The choice between standing passive and standing firm in the piece below demonstrates historically how repeatedly both witnesses and perpetrators often enable one another in a cold dance of public atrocity.

Stand Your Ground

Stand your ground 
like a tree that’s planted by the water, 
near the banks 
of the North Canadian River 
this clear day in May, 
as you jostle with others 
for a good spot 
to take pictures 
of Laura and 
her 15 year old boy Lawrence* 
hanging from the bridge 
like strange fruit.Stand your ground 

by the large sycamore tree 
near City Hall in Waco 
on another day in May, 
as 17 year old Jesse,**
his body muscled
from hauling bales of hay
now naked and beaten,
baptized in coal oil,
hoisted like a flag
by his neck, and
lowered into the fire,
as the flames lick his skin
and his wordless screams fill thesmoke-filled
spring sky.
Stand your ground
near the noisy fairgrounds
by the silent railyard
as young Henry***
is placed upon a scaffold,
ten feet high,
and his body is caressed
by red hot iron brands
as kerosene is poured upon him,
and set alight,
as little ones eat fried dough
and wave banners.

Stand your ground
along an asphalt road
this dark night in June,
as James,+ his feet bound -
like a latter-day Saint Sebastian -
is driven across the back roads
of Jasper
greeting every rock
every stone
until his body
gives out.

Stand your ground
for this child,
          his skin,
          the color of
          the soil of those river banks
          the bark of that sycamore
          the lumber of that kerosene-soaked scaffold
          the dirt of that Jasper road
has not been the first
who has been laid low
for no reason.
Stand your ground 
though it quakes 
though it opens beneath you 
though it threatens to swallow you whole.

Stand your ground, 
like a tree that’s planted by the water; 
you shall not, 
no, you shall not be moved.

* - Laura Nelson was raped; she and her 15-year old son Lawrence were then hanged from a bridge over the North Canadian River on May 25, 1911. Hundreds of sightseers gathered on the bridge the following morning, and photographs of the hanging bodies were sold as postcards.

** - Jesse Washington was a 17-year old farmhand who was tortured and lynched on May 15, 1916 after he was found guilty in a one-hour long trial for the rape and murder of a wealthy 53-year-old white woman. Although Jesse signed a confession, he was by all accounts illiterate.

*** - 17-year old Henry Smith was tortured and murdered at a public, heavily attended lynching on February 1, 1893 at the Paris Fairgrounds in Paris, Texas. Six days later, Henry's stepson, William Butler, was also lynched due to suspicion that he had known, and not divulged, the whereabouts of Henry Smith after he had fled.

+ - James Byrd, Jr. was murdered by three white men in Jasper, Texas on June 7, 1998, when he was dragged behind a pick-up truck with a heavy logging chain wrapped around his ankles. Byrd was pulled along for about three miles as the truck swerved from side to side. Byrd - who reportedly remained conscious throughout most of the ordeal - was killed when his body hit the edge of a culvert, severing his right arm and head.

Hosted by Frank Chambers and PoemAlley's Nick Miele, the Barnes & Noble Open Mic Poetry program meets the second Monday of each month in the cookbook section on the main floor of the bookstore (located in the Stamford Down Center), beginning at 7:15 p.m.

For more information, contact:

Barnes & Noble

100 Greyrock Place Suite H009

Stamford, CT 06901

203-323-1248

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Of related interest:

Low-budget exploitation movie maestro Roger Corman is justifiably proud of The Intruder (AKA Shame), his 1962 adaptation of Charles Beaumont's intense novel dissecting the symbiotic dynamic animating power, bigotry and mass violence in a story of unreliable first appearances and unexpected sympathies in a Southern town adjusting to school desegregation:

When Reality Gets Tossed, Like A Salad

Tonight’s featured poet at Curley’s Diner was initially drawn to the form by no less than Frank McCourt (Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Angela’s Ashes), his English teacher while attending New York City’s Stuyvesant High School. Neil Silberblatt began penning his own work while at Cornell University.

In addition to his writing, Neil is very active in organizing Voices of Poetry, a traveling venue for prominent poets and musicians, held at The Sherman Museum, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (Ridgefield), the New Britain Museum of American Art and other locations around Connecticut.

Most recently, Neil has placed two pieces in last October’s “It’s Political” issue of the literary publication Verse Wisconsin. So Far, So Good (Lulu), his 2012 collection, is prized by fellow poet and Voices participant, Joan Kantor, for its blend of “… honesty and accessibility” with humor and elegant word-choice.   

Madison Avenue (part of his New York Suite), Grand Prize Winner in the Open Community Poetry Contest sponsored by Hennen's Observer (which also nominated the poet for a Pushcart Prize), conveys with sparse power how standard mandates of self-worth, opportunity and integrity get twisted out of all meaning on the altar of globalized consumerism:

MADISON AVENUE

At the Viand Coffee Shop...

on Madison Avenue

          which must not be confused

          with the Viand on East 86^th

          or the Viand on Broadway

come the young ladies fresh from

their visit to the Met

or, if they dare, the Whitney

         because one can only

          take so many Rothkos

          or Van Goghs

          in a morning

wearing their

dazzling tennis whites

which have never seen,

and will never see,

a ground stroke,

as they pick apart their

salads

and each other.

Now enter

the ladies

bearing handbags

with names

like children,

     the real thing

     of course,

     no knock offs here

as they survey the

dieter’s special

and eye the desserts

cordoned off

behind the counter.

Their conversations hushed

as they spread

butter

and gossip.

Two blocks away

from the Viand Coffee Shop

on Madison Avenue

     which must not be confused

     with the Viand on East 86^th

     or the Viand on Broadway

stands a refugee

from Senegal

as black as the plum

into which she bites,

its juices dripping

down the side of her hand,

as she quickly sets up

her display of

counterfeit handbags

on the street-corner.

 

She is

real;

the plum is

real;

the bags –

     as she will quietly tell you

     in her rich Senegalese accent,

     with her breath scented by plum -

are beautiful,

but fake.

  

Neil has a second collection of poems, tentatively titled Present Tense, due for release later this year.