Five poems published recently in Literary Magazines

 

Three poems are appearing in the current issue of HeartWood Literary Magazine from West Virginia Wesleyan College

THE NEW APARTMENT

We had no trouble finding it.
The door was unlocked so we walked right in.

The outdoor staircase was beautiful.
We both loved the view of the Hudson River.

You would be busy with something else in the morning.
I took care of all the paperwork.

Even after I was awake for a long time, I did not stop to think
that we had decided on this apartment in a dream.

I HESITATED BEFORE THE MYSTERY OF YOUR ABSENCE

There was no warning in the mirror.

The world had halted.

Alexander’s famous horse began to dance.

My hands were full of grapes. Servants surrounded

me, carrying platters of snow from the Caucasus.

Alarm bells rang, gendarmes came running. The hour

was late. I lit a cigarette. You appeared before my eyes.

 

FOUNDATION

you almost choked on that wild golden

apple we found on a tree next to a field

growing out of the foundation of what

had once been a farmhouse overlooking a valley

a hundred and fifty miles from here

 

—MICHAEL COONEY

from  Boats Against The Current - a literary magazine

as we traveled north

We talked to people from various states.

We looked for rest stops with convenient bathrooms.

I picked up take-out for the motel.

I carried your oxygen concentrator out to the car.

We crossed into Georgia and South Carolina.

Last year we went up into the Smoky Mountains.

You were feeling much better, and we saw bears.

Our favorite café was closed.

The radiation seemed like nothing after the chemo.

The top of the mountain was beautiful.

Your hair had grown back.

We returned to the hotel overlooking the town.

In October we went to the coast and ate oysters.

You really liked apple martinis.

I don’t think you ever had the fish tacos.

I do not want to talk to anyone

or go anywhere without you

from Hidden Peak Press in Colorado

At the Waterfall

To what extent this will shorten my life is a question
I will not ask. I do not want an answer.
People get older. People forget. People die.
The calendar dictates, you could say, all things.

The waterfall that we visited in the morning
when you were nineteen was not Niagara.
We sat down beside it. Your head was in my lap.
Do you see that girl? She has your eyes.

— MICHAEL COONEY

A poem and an essay inspired by Simone Weil

  

Psalm for Simone Weil

From the highest heaven God throws a rope. Man either grasps it or not.
-	From the New York Notebooks of Simone Weil

Sir, what is humanity
that you pay such attention to us,
or men and women
that you let us love one another?

Words slide from you, dropping down
to where you stride
over glaciers and rocks
and down the icy walks of the sea,

trailing behind you a rope, my Friend,
that we can grasp
or at our choosing,
cast away.

My poem “Psalm for Simone Weil,”  written 20 years ago, is finally appearing in print in the current issue of Amethyst Magazine, which leads me to think that this might be a good time to re-publish the following essay which I originally wrote for the defunct Street Prophets site back in 2011. At a time when narrow-minded religious fanaticism is doing so much damage to our society in the form of recent Supreme Court rulings on women's freedom of choice, racial equality, and the human right to love, we need to remember this neglected French philosopher. Unlike the rigid Roman Catholicism of the Supreme Court majority of Alito, Robert, Thomas, Barrett, and Kavanaugh, she appreciated the beauty of the Catholic faith while remaining outside all formal creeds....

Simone Weil and the Primacy of Attention

Albert Camus called her "the only great spirit of our time" but she was certainly not what most people would call a happy or well-adjusted person.  She was almost certainly anorexic and her death at 34 was probably due as much to self-starvation as tuberculosis.  In 1930s Europe she was in the midst of radical movements, yet she was never really a part of them. As the Holocaust descended over Europe, she scribbled letters and notes, unable to strike effectively against the Nazis. As far as anyone knows, she never had an intimate relationship, emotional or physical, with any man or woman.  And for all her intense intellectuality, all of her books are posthumous, based on her journals and letters.

But it was Simone Weil who said this about human happiness:

Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention

.

For her, the entire meaning of life was centered in that single concept of attention. "Looking is what saves us," she wrote. "Attention is the sincerest form of generosity." In our media-saturated culture when there so are so many competing claims on our attention , from the outright false and trivial to the most vital, it is worth recalling the singular importance of this virtue.

Born into a secular Jewish family, steeped in the classics and in philosophy, and fascinated by the Catholic Church, she saw no enduring value in any doctrine:

A doctrine serves no purpose in itself, but it is indispensable to have one if only to avoid being deceived by false doctrines. 

Instead of any particular religion or philosophy, what animated this isolated woman was compassion for the oppressed:

Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand.

She grew up in a supportive and politically radical family, and at the age of ten she informed her parents that she was she was a Bolshevik and would be reading the communist newspapers.  Her parents were sympathetic to the exiled Leon Trotsky and hosted a meeting for him in their Paris apartment in 1930, where young Simone engaged him in fierce debate. She was incapable, however, of surrendering her independent judgment to any ideology and by the time she was in the university, she wrote papers sharply critical of Marxist theory.

Nonetheless she continued to oppose capitalist systems of production, not so much because the elite own the means of production but because another more fundamental conflict had been added, "by the very means of production, between those who have the machine at their disposal and those who are at the disposal of the machine."

Her classmate Simone de Beauvoir describes the young Simone in her own memoirs:

She intrigued me because of her great reputation for intelligence and her bizarre get-up. A great famine had broken out in China, and I was told that when she heard the news she had wept: these tears compelled my respect much more than her gifts as a philosopher. I envied her having a heart that could beat right across the world. I managed to get near her one day. I don't know how the conversation got started; she declared in no uncertain tones that only one thing mattered in the world: the revolution which would feed all the starving people of the earth. I retorted, no less peremptorily, that the problem was not to make men happy, but to find the reason for their existence. She looked me up and down: 'It's easy to see you've never been hungry,' she snapped.

Another idiosyncrasy setting Simone apart from the radicals of her time was her publicly announced decision to live a celibate life as part of her commitment to the working class struggle, prompting her fellow students to call her "the Red Virgin."

It is not surprising that Simone's career as a secondary school teacher quickly led to dismissal from her first and second jobs as she set out to radicalize her students and to organize unemployed workers. And it didn't help that even her best students failed to pass the rigorous national exams.  When a teaching career became impossible, she took a job as a piece worker in a Renault factory with the goal of organizing the workers. Due to her poor manual dexterity, this career also was unsuccessful.

In1937 she left for Spain to join the anarchist army fighting Franco's fascists.Simone was not much of a soldier, however, and failed even at target practice. After an injury involving a cooking pot and boiling oil, she returned to France just before her entire unit was massacred.  

Coming back from Spain, she was probably severely depressed. And it was at this point that after months of inward darkness, she became very conscious of a personal God. "We do not have to search for Him," she wrote in her journal. "We only have to change the direction in which we are looking."

She experienced a divine comforter beyond doctrine and dogma: "He cannot refuse to come to those who implore him long, often and ardently." And "if we agree to his entry, he comes. As soon as we cease to want Him, He vanishes."

Simone saw no contradiction between this loving God and atheism: "An atheist may be simply one whose faith and love are concentrated on the impersonal aspects of God." And she seemed to think that the soul did not outlast the body.

Her association with Roman Catholicism grew out of a friendship with the priest Joseph-Marie Perrin.  That personal relationship may be why she turned toward Catholicism, rather than seeking out equally rich spiritual traditions within Judaism, in an effort to explain her experience of God.  One might think that the close association between fascists and Catholic hierarchy, notably under Franco, would have made the Church unappealing to her, but evidently she was able to separate her personal experience of the divine from any feelings about the institution.

Simone began to attend Catholic services but resisted all urging from Father Perrin to actually convert and accept baptism. In her notebooks she reveals the extent to which this turn toward religious faith was rooted in a self-abnegation perhaps akin to anorexia:

Weil wanted nothing so much as to lose herself altogether: "May God grant that I become nothing,"  she wrote in a notebook entry that would later be included in Gravity and Grace. "We must become nothing, we must go down to the vegetative level; it is then that God becomes bread."

In 1942 she fled to the US with her parents to escape the Nazis but was soon back in England where she offered her services to DeGaulle's Free French. Her proposal to organize a unit of nurses who would parachute into France to aid the resistance went nowhere. And as she insisted on limiting her own food intake to the same rations allotted to those in occupied France, she contracted tuberculosis and died in 1943.

The narrative of her short life certainly seems, on its surface, a tale of neurosis and failure. And yet her intense and very private writings reveal a rich inner life that is fascinating for anyone interested in the nexus of spiritual exploration, personal psychology, and political activism.

For me,  the most intriguing aspect of her thought is her concept of attention, which she emphasized almost to the point of downplaying the need for action. By her lights, people need attention second only to food. (And one cannot help but wonder how large a part attention or the lack of it played in her own life.)

She must have been talking about something beyond what most of us mean by this common word, some recognition of an inner godhead perhaps: "The capacity to give one's attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle."

And in a time when a debate over mere numbers obsesses our politics and media, she reminds us that:

The needs of a single human being are sacred. Their satisfaction cannot be subordinated either to reasons of state, or to any consideration of money, nationality, race, or color, or to the moral or other value attributed to the human being in question, or to any consideration whatsoever.

 

She never lost the anarchist's distrust of power and she was very aware of how effective brute force is in destroying human potential, as is happening this very moment throughout the world:

Who were the fools who spread the story that brute force cannot kill ideas? Nothing is easier. And once they are dead they are no more than corpses.

  

and

When once a certain class of people has been placed by the temporal and spiritual authorities outside the ranks of those whose life has value, then nothing comes more naturally to men than murder.

She is, to be sure, a troubling figure, so well-intentioned and yet ultimately so self-destructive. If you are interested in exploring her thoughts further, my experience is that her essays collected in Waiting for God (1950) are a good starting point.

 

"353 West 57" is published in Drunk Monkeys magazine

 

an excerpt from the 2022 story of a radical woman who disappeared in 1937..... Now online in Drunk Monkeys latest issue

I was standing there taking pictures with my iPhone when I heard a kind of moaning sound. Turning my head, I saw a woman holding her hands to her face. When she lowered her arms and I could see her face, I felt a huge shock. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind. I had seen pictures of her on the internet.

I immediately recalled the words with which Whittaker Chambers, my go-to author for that era, had described her: “a heavy-set, dark, softly feminine woman in her late forties.”

 “Juliet?” I said. “Miss Poyntz?”  

“Are you…” she started to say. “What has…I mean to say…who?”

I stared into her terrified eyes and pronounced the name of the man whom Tresca said had lured her out of the tiny room where she had hidden for weeks: “Schachno Epstein.”

A smile appeared and vanished. “Who? Why isn’t he here? Has something happened to him?”

“He’s fine,” I assured her. It was obvious to me that some kind of time warp had occurred. In the course of my extensive historical research, I had come to believe that such things were possible.

If this woman was indeed waiting for her onetime lover, Schachno Epstein, who could she be but Juliet Poyntz? Who else would even recognize the name of the totally forgotten Epstein, who had shuttled back and forth between Russia and the U.S. under a variety of names, doing the dirtiest of work for Stalin, setting up other people for the kill, never pulling the trigger himself? 

and who was this mysterious person? Whittaker Chambers, the onetime communist agent turned informer for the McCarthy Committee, says this about Juliet Poyntz, who was last seen in June 1937 in a Women's Hotel at 353 West 57th Street in New York City:

"She was living in a New York hotel. One evening she left her room with the light burning and a page of unfinished handwriting on the table. She was never seen again. It is known that she went to meet a Communist friend in Central Park and that he had decoyed her there as part of a G.P.U. trap. She was pushed into an automobile and two men drove her off.

                                                                                    - Whittaker Chambers, Witness  (1952):

For more on the historical record of her disappearance and almost certain murder, see my sources at:  The Disappearance of Juliet Poyntz in 1937

Also of interest is the recent study of the Poyntz case and its political uses by historian Denise Lynn, reviewed here:     Who Was Juliet Poyntz?

"Good Catholic Girl" published by ELJ Editions, Ltd.

 

Kathleen Mazzetti has transferred to a small Catholic high school in the North Bronx to escape years of harassment from an older boy at Teddy Roosevelt High. It is the 1970s and neither the courts nor the police will protect her from John Rovazzi. At St. Finbarr’s, she keeps her head down, eager to avoid attention. Her classmate Paul Hanlon is sympathetic to the shy newcomer but busy with his own life of sports and friends. Then, thanks to a well-meaning priest, he learns that Rovazzi has followed Kathleen to her new school and threatened not only her but also her family. When it becomes clear that her life is truly in danger, Kathleen and Paul come up with a risky plan to stop the stalker once and for all, a plan that involves a carefully written script, the Rocky Horror Picture Show and the New York City subway system.

Available for $10 in paperback

or free with Kindle Unlimited

Cantico, inspired by San Juan de la Cruz, is published by The Decadent Review

 

Juan de Yepes was born in 1542 in Spain into a family of “conversos,” Catholics who had been forced to convert from Judaism. As a monk, Juan took the name Juan de la Cruz and was persecuted by fellow Carmelites for his adherence to the reforms instituted by his beloved St. Teresa of Avila. Imprisoned by his clerical enemies, Juan wrote poems of a highly erotic nature, including his Cantico Espiritual. Later, he published lengthy explications of the erotic poetry in which he explained away each phrase as a reference to a spiritual love. In his Cantico, Juan professes that the Esposa represents the soul and the Esposo, Christ. 

The poem was begun 25 years ago and only published last month. Closely patterned after the mystical Cantico Espirituel of San Juan de la Cruz, this poem expresses the complexities of a more worldly love. 

The opening lines are below. To read the entire work, go to the website of:

  The Decadent Review

ESPOSA
My gracioso
has passed through many groves
like a deer pursued by weekend bowhunters.
I run after him calling and calling.

I seem to be climbing toward the snowline.
I ask my oldest companions:
Did you see him?
Do I seem pitiful?

Seeking other opportunities, I wait in bus terminals.
I watch the circling of birds near the ceiling.
I fill my pockets with small pieces of paper.
I declare nothing to the ticket agent.

The People Who Live in the Feeney Flats:

 

Don't miss The People Who Live in the Feeney Flats in the latest edition of Bandit Fiction - a story of three boys, a missing rabbit, and a murder. 

Co-authoring with ChatGPT

 

You’ve probably been hearing the alarm bells ringing in academia since the arrival of ChatGPT a couple months ago. This latest free “gift” to the public from OpenAI has been seized upon by unethical students, we are told, who have used it to write essays assigned by their profs – who are sometimes fooled by the clever AI or not. When this discussion came to the teacher lunchroom in my school, I consulted with my old English Department from the 80s and they were sure they could spot a phony essay on Macbeth from a mile away, and if they couldn’t, they’d simply ask the students to write essays by hand during class time. You can see that my old colleagues are a little out of touch. Handwriting? Is this 1959?

 

I knew I needed to spend some time with the robot writer.

 

First off, the program works. Give it a simple science prompt like “Explain photosynthesis in 500 words or less” and the resulting answer deserves an A. Of course, if you know your students, you might be amazed at their sudden mastery of subject matter, syntax etc.

 

However, it also works very well if you give it a fairly sophisticated history prompt, like this:

 

Explain the roles of Leon Trotsky and Josef Stalin in the development of communism in Russia and their relationship in the years following the Bolshevik Revolution.

 

Okay, I said to myself, the AI can draw on topics covered in textbooks but how about a subject American school books studiously avoid, like the Ludlow Massacre of 1914? So, I tried this prompt “Explain the significance of the miners strike in Ludlow Colorado in 1913, the sides involved in the conflict and the tragic outcome” and got this essay back in a little over a minute:

 

The Ludlow Massacre of 1914 was a significant event in the history of labor relations in the United States. The conflict began as a strike by coal miners in Ludlow, Colorado, who were demanding better pay, working conditions, and recognition of their union, the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). The strike began in September 1913 and lasted for several months.

The miners were opposed by the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I), which was owned by John D. Rockefeller Jr. and other wealthy industrialists. The company refused to negotiate with the UMWA and instead hired strikebreakers and private security guards to break the strike.

The situation escalated in April 1914 when the Colorado National Guard was called in to protect the strikebreakers. On April 20, 1914, guardsmen and company-hired guards attacked a tent colony of striking miners and their families, killing at least two dozen people, including women and children.

This tragedy, known as the Ludlow Massacre, became a rallying point for the labor movement in the US and led to further strikes and protests across the country. It also led to the formation of the National War Labor Board in 1918, which was established to resolve labor disputes during World War I.

In conclusion, the Ludlow massacre was a tragic event that happened during the miners strike in Ludlow, Colorado in 1913, where the miners were striking for better pay, working conditions and recognition of their union, the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) against the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I) owned by John D. Rockefeller Jr, which lead to tragic deaths of many including women and children.

 

But when I gave it a prompt for a little known 1913 textile strike in upstate New York, ChatGPT made up a bunch of “facts” that had nothing to do with the actual history of my small home town. I next asked it why it did this and it told me the following:

 

Chat GPT, like other language models, is trained on a large dataset of text, which includes a wide range of information. However, it is not capable of understanding the context or veracity of the information it's been trained on. The model is also not able to access any external information beyond what it's been trained on.

Additionally, Chat GPT is designed to generate human-like responses, which means it will try to generate an answer even if it doesn't have the correct information or doesn't know about the subject. This is because the model is programmed to provide an answer to any question it is asked, even if it is not accurate or relevant.

The model also does not have consciousness or self-awareness, it does not "know" if it doesn't know, it cannot reflect on its own knowledge or lack thereof.

In summary, Chat GPT is not able to admit when it does not know about a subject because it is not capable of understanding the context or veracity of the information it's been trained on and also because it is programmed to provide an answer to any question it is asked, even if it is not accurate or relevant. It's important to keep in mind that the output generated by the model should be considered with a critical eye, and not taken as fact.

 

Well, that seems like a fair answer. My new friend ChatGPT is unable to say “I don’t know.” But the I-don’t-know response could be included in a future version.

 

Then I tried some other prompts, like “Does God exist?” “Describe the presidency of Donald J. Trump” “Describe the Ukraine war as if Russia is winning” and I got some even-handed, noncommittal essays. It likes bothsides-ism but it did admit that Joe Biden won the 2020 election.

 

But wait, I thought, if ChatGPT excels at writing to a specific formula, why couldn’t it replace the kind of formula writing so many of my students love, Young Adult Fiction? I gave it this prompt which may seem familiar to anyone who keeps track of the YA world:

 

PROMPT: Write a short story of approximately 2000 words about a future society in which the threats of climate change, pandemics and economic inequity have been solved. The main character should be an 18-year-old woman who is dissatisfied with the lack of challenges inherent in her society. Include description of the future society and realistic dialogue.

 

This was the result:

 

In the future, society had finally solved the long-standing issues of climate change, pandemics, and economic inequity. The world was a greener, healthier, and more just place, thanks to the tireless efforts of generations past. But for 18-year-old Sarah, this utopia left her feeling unfulfilled. She longed for adventure and a sense of purpose, something that her society's lack of challenges couldn't provide.

Sarah grew up in a world where food, water, and energy were in abundance. Natural disasters were a thing of the past, and people lived in harmony with the environment. Medical technology had advanced to the point where diseases were eradicated, and everyone had access to quality healthcare. And poverty and unemployment were non-existent, as a fair distribution of resources and opportunities had been implemented.

However, Sarah couldn't shake the feeling that something was missing. She couldn't help but feel bored with her life, and she yearned for something more. She had always been an ambitious person, and she couldn't help but feel that her society was holding her back.

One day, as she was walking through the city, she stumbled upon an old, abandoned building. It was the only one of its kind, as the rest of the city had been rebuilt to reflect the ideals of the utopia. Curious, Sarah ventured inside, and was surprised to find a group of people huddled together, talking in hushed tones.

"What's going on here?" Sarah asked, approaching the group.

"We're the rebels," one of them, a young man, said. "We're trying to overthrow the government and bring back the challenges that have been taken away."

Sarah was intrigued. She had never heard of such a thing before, and the idea of rebellion in this perfect society was both exhilarating and terrifying.

"But why?" Sarah asked. "Isn't this utopia what everyone wants?"

"For some, yes," the young man said. "But for others, like us, the lack of adversity has made life pointless. We want to be tested, to be pushed to our limits. We want to be able to fail and to succeed on our own terms."

Sarah was torn. On one hand, she understood the rebels' yearning for challenge and excitement. But on the other, she couldn't help but think of all the people who had been saved from suffering by the utopia.

"I don't know," Sarah said. "I see both sides of it. But I do know that I want to help you. I want to be a part of this rebellion."

The rebels welcomed Sarah with open arms, and she quickly found herself caught up in their plans and schemes. She trained and prepared for the rebellion, and soon she was an integral part of the group.

As the day of the rebellion arrived, Sarah felt a mix of nerves and excitement. She knew that what they were doing was dangerous, and that there was a real chance they could fail. But she also knew that it was what she had been looking for her entire life: a true challenge.

The rebellion was a success, and the utopia was overthrown. But the new society that emerged was not what Sarah had expected. Instead of the challenges she had craved, she found only chaos and suffering. She realized that the utopia, while not perfect, had been the best possible solution to the problems of the past. She learned that sometimes, the easy path is the best one, and that true fulfillment comes not from overcoming obstacles, but from working together to create a better world for all.

 

Not too bad, right? Except that ChatGPT is clearly programmed to support the status quo. Our protagonist here, Sarah, learned that “sometimes, the easy path is the best one.” Why bother to rebel? Of course, it could be programmed so the rebels always beat the oligarchy.

 

At present, the programs seems unable to write more than 500 or 600 words so you cannot  assign it a novel, wait ten minutes, and then submit it to your publisher but that obviously can be adjusted. And this is the free version of the program so it’s easy to see that formula fiction could easily be churned out in the very near future. 

When I tried a subject that offended the machine,  I got a content warning. I was inspired by a Muslim student who wrote in her college essay about how her parents threatened to marry her off to an old man if she continued to “act like an American girl.”  The program didn’t like that topic and I think was triggered by words like Muslim, Pakistani, and mosque. ChatGPT doesn’t want to offend anyone at this early stage of its life.

I continue to explore this, and I suggest you do the same if the future of the written word is of concern to you. There is little doubt that only slightly more advanced versions of the program could write news stories to meet certain criteria. Advances in AI image and voice technology could conceivably provide synthetic reporters to read such stories to us – or am I getting carried away???

 

 

 

Oh, btw, OpenAi which released ChatGPT in November is at least partly owned by Elon Musk.

This essay is cross-published at the Daily Kos site.