A MEME by Trevor Cunnington

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A Review of Kenneth Lumpkin's "Song of Ramapough"

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I first encountered Kenneth Lumpkin on Twitter, through the hashtag #WritingCommunity. He posted a few poems of his that I found simple, elegant, direct, and beautiful in the tradition of William Carlos Williams. After a few friendly interactions, I asked him to recommend one of his books, as I had finally come into some extracurricular fiduciary spice (money), he recommended his most recent. But when I browsed his Amazon author page, I found he had written a book called “Song of Ramapough: A Poetics of Place.” My antennae bristled.

I wrote my PhD dissertation on the ideological representations of white trash in different cultural products including literature, photography, film, television, fashion, and journalism, in high culture and popular culture. This is an eggheady way of saying I explored how the social categories of race and class interact in the meanings made by these representations. For the reason of ever-disappearing horizons of space and time, I had to cut a few of my planned chapters, one of which was an analysis of the film Out of the Furnace, starring Christian Bale, Woody Harrelson and Casey Affleck, which featured a controversial representation of the Ramapough Mountain People, who sued the filmmakers. They are portrayed in the film as brutal meth-addled outlaws.

In fact, the history of the Ramapough Mountain People is fascinating. They are what is known as a tri-racial isolate community. What that means is that in the early colonial history of America, runaway and freed slaves often intermarried with poor whites (sometimes newly released indentured labourers) and Indigenous people driven to remote areas by the process of colonization. While the Bureau of Indian Affairs of the US does not officially recognize the Ramapough Mountain Indians as a federal tribe, the state of New Jersey did recognize them as a tribe descended from the Lenape Delaware, an Algonquin speaking Indigenous group. The Ramapough Mountains consist of a few ridges and valleys on the border of New Jersey and New York, about 40 km from New York City.

Needless to say, I had to buy the book. In the foreword, Kenneth discusses how writing the book was inspired by the place-centred poetry of William Carlos Williams’ brilliant book Paterson and the Maximus poems of Charles Olsen. The foreword, written by Flavia Alaya draws the same comparisons, although my opinion of Lumpkin’s work differs from hers. While she sees more Olsen in Lumpkin, I see an absence of the endearing confusion of Olsen’s poetry, and more the crystalline clarity of Williams’ verse. Lumpkin figures that through a poetic exploration of place, through lenses such as geology, history, and high Romantic wanderings through the wilds of the mountains, he might better come to know the earth itself, a mission I wholeheartedly endorse and aspire to myself. After all, the book is published by Hug the Earth Publishing.

I was eager to read and savour this one because Paterson is my favourite book-length poem aside from Byron’s Don Juan (which I must admit I haven’t read all the way through yet – some day), Shakespeare’s plays, and Anne Carson’s The Autobiography of Red. In it, Williams polished a uniquely polyvocal and American idiom. Song of Ramapough hews closely to these influences, but one can also detect the influence of the encyclopedic-style chapters of Melville’s masterpiece Moby Dick, especially in the parts near the end that rather factually guide the reader through the geological composition and history of the place.

While there are some moments that gave me pause, such as when he discusses the Haudensaunee (the Indigenous group that includes the Six Nations of the Confederacy, whose political structure influenced the United States’ own) stripping all political authority of the women. This contradicts the important role that women played in the politics of the Haudensaunee as caretakers of not only children and the home, but of the land itself. It is possible that Lumpkin is referring to Haudensaunee-Lenape relations that I’m ignorant of, however. There are charming moments in the book, alternating a newspaper’s account of a robbery of a woman homesteader in the area in 1790 with the first buzzing of a yellow jacket experienced by the poet on the next page.

I particularly loved poem 6, which I will reproduce here in full to discuss:

No more a mountain

stronghold or fortress

around me, but lighted

oak is my home

 

flames whisper the dying

secret of the wood,

forgotten grandfathers

are my company

 

teaching me the songs

of the wind, warming the Earth

while speaking the oldest

of languages.

 

The bracing enjambement of this poem draws the reader along its thread, and the line break between the first and second stanza really teases out the doubled meaning of “lighted/oak is my home.” One thinks of a wooded mountain side in the tradition of Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” being pierced by straight-lined shafts of evening light. However, the second stanza transforms the “lighted” wood from dappled sunlight to campfire burning. Alternating all the historical data of the book with a phrase like “forgotten grandfathers are my company” really lends the next lines some gravitas in the spirit of receiving wisdom from ancestors. The oldest of languages is of course the interpretation of the earth itself, its animal trails, its grumbles, its tree rings, its soil, where to find water and food, etc.

 

Kenneth Lumpkin now lives in London, Ontario. I highly recommend his work if you love the poetry of the English or American Romantics such as Whitman, or if you love the work of Olsen and especially Williams. His latest book, available on Amazon, is Possum: Tales of the Wood. He has a total of five books available for sale there. Here is a link: Amazon.ca : Kenneth Lumpkin

Funny Cat

We have returned to funny cat pictures, in this case digitally manipulated, in this cycle of The Invisible Truth. 

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An Excerpt from one of my long, difficult poems (Poetry) (Trevor Cunnington)

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E-stim

helmets bear the grim news that we win

every single time we play

the grim reaper’s anthem unto the day

four horses meet up and draw-and-quarter

the dead-eyed dog of a reporter

barking into the assimilated mortar;

shells are shot into the Mariana trench

while we’re on social media judging from them benches.

and we find that no matter the dopamine trigger

scatter those picket fences in the diagonals

uprooted and re-booted until the narrative

world vanishes, tarnishing a record comparative

of three oddly off-centre orthogonals

clashing in the daylight wearing Sheraton™

paraphernalia.

A sprig of Queen Anne’s lace,

An evening of saturnalia without disgrace

I’ll be there when the wind blows and the earth quakes

Before all the other times that my senses shake

With ripples like a pebble, thrown in a pond

 

Whatever those feelings bode, they come from beyond

The bounds of your skin, as soon as light creeps in

We become evacuated of all yonder qualms

Under homilies with unexpected invective; receipts dim –

The sublime art of ink fading, collecting alms

Afterwards and being grateful for the jeremiad,

Talking to the people in the crowd, jeering mad

With the Athabasca lustre,

An icy morning to beat around the bush with bluster

Burghers by the boat-load, some of whom will usher

In a new age of overloaded senses with crop duster

Chem trails, crop circles outside the temple

The paranoia is familiar, an all-seeing eye in the sky,

Isn’t that what a satellite is like? Or is it all mental?

 

When was the last time a child asked you why

The sea in pencil sounds like an es, and we use utensils?

Scarborough Bluffs (Beyond the FluTrucksKlan)

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Scarborough Bluffs. 

The Power of the Dog, or The Power of the Gods

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The bible is a powerful text that has shaped a large portion of humanity's understanding of both itself and the world. The emergence of monotheism in humanity's history has been a force matched perhaps only by the influence of technology and its uses. I am not, however, a technological determinist in the tradition of Marshall McLuhan and others. I much prefer the network theory of Bruno Latour. McLuhan has a point about the subconscious influence of technological innovation; however, his scope is too narrow and leaves little room for role conscious, creative innovation plays in the relationship between technology and humans. For McLuhan, television and electricity changed human consciousness irrevocably, thus giving objects power over the subject (the human). For Latour, humans interact with both the environment, non-human organisms, and objects in mutually productive ways. Monotheism itself was a kind of technology in human history. It was an understanding of the world that shaped, and continues to shape human behavior and endeavor. It encompassed a way of making that influenced art. The religious taboos against idolatry was a proscription of a certain kind of representation. In Islam, the taboo against representation has shaped its arts; that's why geometric and other non-figurative forms play such a large role in its arts and systems of representation. 

We do not necessarily have access to the first text of monotheism,  as it is axiomatic that our knowledge of the past is incomplete, relying on documentation, which in turn relies on the technology of writing or inscription. Despite that, we generally credit Akhenaten, an ancient Egyptian king, with presiding over the earliest known instance. The people of his kingdom worshipped Aten, a sun-god. The Jews, enslaved in ancient Egypt, were liberated by Moses, and another instance of Monotheism began, although this chronology is not necessarily this linear. Their Torah, which in Christianity became the "Old Testament" began, as most epic poetic traditions do, as a repertoire of oral poems, told and retold by specialists in their communities. This group of texts is among the most fascinating I have ever read. As a sidenote, another fascinating book that explores the beginning of Judaism from a quasi-anthropological perspective, is Sigmund Freud's Moses and Monotheism. 

Let's first be clear: I'm agnostic. However, I have some esoteric interpretations of Genesis in particular that clearly support the book's claims as prophecy. It seems to me that the general philosophical maxim of "Know Thyself," attributed to Socrates, has always been more about the journey than the destination. Genesis encapsulates a kind of profound, but ultimately unconscious, self-knowledge of the human species such that it embodies the past, the present, and even the future. 

In the beginning was the word, and it was good. The seed of language became the source of fruitfulness. No argument here. Over seven days, God makes everything. There have been fascinating critiques of this creation story coming from Indigenous North American communities with regards to the absurdity of attributing all of creation to one entity, and their creation stories tend to reflect this with much more collaborative practices. It was the creation of humans that I find particularly prophetic, despite that very valid critique. God makes us from dust, dirt, mud. In the historical process of coming to know the world through science in the last few hundred years, humans have "decoded" material reality to enable them greater and greater control of that reality. One of the things we've learned is that silicon is the second most abundant element in the earth's crust, and that 90% of this crust, the part of earth we inhabit, is made of silicate minerals. This includes the aforementioned dust, dirt, and mud. We were made from silicate minerals.

Do you know what else is made from silicate minerals, especially in the last seventy years? Circuit boards, computers, artificial intelligence. Hell, the global hub of computers, their software, and artificial intelligence, until recently, is called "Silicon Valley." We were made by God of silicate minerals (not precisely chemically accurate, but bear with me); we made artificial intelligence out of silicate minerals. Is there not an uncanny resemblance between these stories, one from the Torah, and the other the human history of technology? This story has perhaps always lived in our unconscious. The implications of this interpretation for time as a phenomenon itself are immense, but I don't have the time or the will to explore that right now. 

Another part of Genesis I have a heterodox and esoteric interpretation of is the fall. God gives us one rule in the garden of Eden, by this account a paradise of plenty. One rule. Compare this to contemporary situation of nation-states where only a small group of powerful people use jargon to hoard their knowledge of labyrinthine legal systems and wield power in the form of wealth derived from this specialist knowledge. We have thousands of rules now, and even different interpretations of those rules as they have been written, because of course, consciousness changes over time, and so does language. One rule: don't eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. 

But of course, Lucifer, that fallen angel whose English name has etymological origins in the Latin word for "light," takes the form of a snake in the tree, to convince Eve to eat the fruit. The anthropological analog to Lucifer in some Indigenous North American creation stories is Coyote, who is always throwing some kinks into creation. However, these stories are not nearly as catastrophic as the fall in Genesis: going from plenty to scarcity, ease to difficulty, innocence to shame. Rick Roderick has claimed that Lucifer's conversation with Eve represents a turn to interpretation, away from the "word" as transparent, direct communication. Lucifer eggs Eve on to interpret God's rule, and introduces doubt into her mind. Thus begins the hermeneutics of suspicion, which we still are struggling with today. 

If you take a step back, however, and consider what the Torah is as a whole, is it not a handbook of moral conduct? What is moral conduct if not a consideration of what counts as good and evil? Does this not make the Torah itself analogous to the fruit of the tree (it's written on paper, the skin of trees) of good and evil? Could this episode be a hidden message of God's to humans to ultimately disregard his messages? Or, in my agnostic interpretation, a message from our own collective unconscious to go, in Nietzsche's words, beyond good and evil? 

The background of skipping pebbles (by Trevor Cunnington)

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Round pebbles can be skipped

over the surface of water

whether a lake or a river

is not really the question. Rather,

we should be asking the rate

at which the pebble sinks

when it does,

after skipping.

 

Question the pebble

surface when water

sinks, it does, skipping

after asking a certain record

river of round when rather

than whether or not weather

co-operates, the bee

can fly over the water’s surface;

it slides down into the riverbed.

Spider Face (Drawing by Trevor Cunnington)

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Ibises in the Tree

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A Solar System (painting by Trevor Cunnington)

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Fungi in Gatineau Park

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Warping light

I was going through some old photos and I found this one. I have always been fascinated by pattern, and I love how the glass of the wine goblet warps the light. 

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Artificial Intelligence

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Kasparov, young and cocky 

from last year’s match

sits down at the knotted wood table 

on which the flat chess board 

sits, tessellated with white and black 

space

and the pieces glower in anticipation.

a man sits across from him, a cypher 

carrying out the instructions of a machine – 

Deep Blue – a black tower with silicon chips 

inside

that pulse with coded information. 

move, countermove. again. a gain. 

hundreds of millions of possibilities 

course through the computer’s circuitry. 

then, Blue forces Kasparov into a bad move. 

a shadow flickers across his face, a twitch 

he cannot be aware of. 

he sees it, the mistake played out 

in quadratic lines blurred by time. 

the recognition contorts his face; 

he can’t believe what he’s seeing. 

he pushes the table away in frustration 

and stands up, walks away: one fluid motion. 

the people watching open their mouths; 

History has been made today. 

soon human dominance will fade

today chess, tomorrow the novel, 

the next day brain surgery. 

humans will have to stake their claim in a world that 

doesn’t need them 

any more.

White Guy Diary: The Cultural Appropriation Edition

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How can we reconcile the anthropological concept of cultural diffusion with the arising critique of the practice of cultural appropriation? I will never argue against the idea that systematic oppression exists, or that it marks with trauma wherever it goes, but the instinct to always protect against hurt -- a noble one surely -- is it always in our best interests? When I was hurt, I knew where my cards lay, where others' cards lay, so I could best play the hand I'd been dealt. The asymmetrical power of a host and a minority culture makes the profiteering off the minority culture certainly odious in a Marxist framework of understanding.

Critiques of cultural appropriation tend to be morally consequentialist. That is, they focus more on the outcomes of actions and behaviour, rather than on the motivations and intents of the actors in such actions and behaviour. They argue that the harm done to those traumatized by oppression by these images, by the act of appropriating culture, often rooted in rude parody, taken up by the host culture renders them morally suspect at best and simply morally wrong at worst. They tend to discount the intent of any member of the host culture as insignificant to their moral calculus, to use a term of William Vollmann's. Certainly the appropriation of cultural practices can come out of a place of respect, admiration, and love. But by sacralizing the trauma of the oppressed's experience, by prioritizing theoretical future pain against any notion of beneficial intent, they reify it and make it harder to overcome. I tend to lean consequentialist, but I must admit outright eliminating considerations of intent makes me uncomfortable. But who knows. . .perhaps this is white fragility, and perhaps they are right.

We cannot be killed with even a thousand paper cuts. On the other hand, pain is an obstacle to pragmatic organizing in anti-oppression work. Humans have always learned from each other; learning is always an appropriation. How am I, as a white guy, supposed to engage this great "shut-up and listen" exercise, without being somehow influenced by what I hear, by taking it to heart (too much, some will whisper to each other behind their backs). And hasn't this "taking it to heart" affected me, consciously and unconsciously, such that I might not appropriate that culture without any conscious intent at all, but simply through the processes of psychological sublimation and Freudian slips? Does this not produce a cyclical relationship between host and minority, where I listen, learn, appropriate, then lose the cultural war? Nobody likes losing all the time. Cultural diffusion: contact produces sharing, whether you like it or not.

One thing that irks me about cultural appropriation debates is how inconsistently they are applied. A straight, white man writing through the voice of a black woman is a no-no, but a Korean family in Toronto opening a Sushi shop is a-ok. Again, here is where the asymmetrical power card comes in handy, because we can aver that the Korean family is making a peer-to-peer cultural appropriation, whereas the white man, even if he is "raising awareness" of issues faced by black women,  is making a downward appropriation. No Korean family is going to chastise a white guy eating in their restaurant, no matter how blatant a downward appropriation it is because you don't bite the hand that feeds you. The irony cuts both ways. That Korean family could not give a flying $^$# about cultural theorists' arguments about appropriation, or they might have a college-going child who does, at most.

Cover art for bands that don’t exist 2.

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Cover art for bands that don’t exist

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The Daily Regimen - Trevor Cunnington

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The sound of aggregate activity

Breezy in the late, stabbingly bright blue

Of an afternoon

Soft yellows caress

The late-out-of-the gate lilacs

Smelling sensual, lurid.

What rest can be got from this swirl

Of smells overpowering

Malefactors everywhere

Actors and blinks, nods, and who’s hooligans.

Read them the Cactus riot act.

She flowers every seven years

Or if the new moon follows on the first

Friday after Easter infection,

Then, only then, will she spread her. . . petals

It was in a photograph, or –gram

Heavy metal pelt stain melt brain; ham radio

Operator; one caught in the electricity

Wires.

I saw him on my walk home from world.

Singing ‘ole glory to the world,

A face turned murderous

As if a cloud smirched the soulful sky.

In the corner of the photograph,

A figure in sticks, wrapped in the dangerous

Sourcery of the exorcism,

Darkness swirling off him in colour grids

Dextrous fingers of the toppling dominoes

In the foreground, under the table,

Barely visible.

Flim flam, hone it for the street corners.

In the hides of summer, wearing

Sun’s great glory on the sweat-sheened skin

We can write about life,

Or we can write about life.

Precipitating the “oh, not the ‘we’ shit again.”

II

The happiness of a single fuck not given

The apathy trickle-down vectors

Swerving high on unpredictable

Ever veritably new, improved

Dazzling desuetude.

III

Suet in a fur-trap.

A straw, balanced on a camel’s back,

Photographed.

For a response to a query

Responded to and refuted

From every corner of the crypto-verse.

The cacti, in a row, made a fence

To keep the cattle in,

Some do it,

Some don’t.

IV

The next time she appeared,

A blue streak ran rampant around

The orbituaries climbing out of the newsstands.

Surprise factor, attention disperser.

Social facts uncalled upon.

This is poetry’s rent.

Tantamount to a slope of fine powdered salt

To cushion our 20 feet jumps

Down a steep incline.

Don’t think too much

Or you will start to smell the cowpaste
Piling up in the meadow.