I would like the reader to appreciate the gravity of the oppressions that humanitarians and civil libertarians continue to protest. Yes, these War Canticles describe atrocities, rape, and sundry Crimes Against Humanity. Including poet (and Communist) Langston Hughes “trying” Ezra Pound for supporting Fascist Italy-even in its evil warfare that saw Italy use poison gas against Ethiopian soldiers armed only with spears.
Herein, thou shalt find, in this chapbook, musings by Sally Bassett, a Bermudian slave, executed in 1730 for having almost fatally poisoned her white master, mistress, and a treacherous sister (black) slave but also by Napoléon versus the Haitian Revolution and by Haitian General Dessalines versus Napoléon not to mention Frederick Douglass calling upon Abe Lincoln to turn Dixie into a waste land and a Chinese mandarin advising his Emperor to undertake total war against Great Britain and France as they were invading to prosecute the Opium War (1860-61). These War Canticles are the loud left-overs of Canticles I (Guernica Editions), still caterwauling to join the earlier, published volumes of meditations on damnable history. Therein is a sampling of poems treating Christopher Columbus’s immediate introduction of gold-fever, enslavement, rapine, and theft upon his “discovery” of the Americas but also a poem in the voice of Arthur Rimbaud, recalling the joys of slave trafficking but also a poem that re-litigates Othello, repositioning Desdemona as Delilah, Othello as Samson. En route to publishing Canticles I (MMXVI) (2016), the first volume of an expected 6-volume epic and one that begins with the survey of two millennia of oppressive history (ending in Canticles I with Mao’s 1949 victory in China), I published Selected Canticles-a chapbook- with above/ground press in 2012.
0 kommentar(er)
