We remove the tougher of these
We remove the tougher of these
And get angry when we are wise
And get angry when we are wise
Remove these when of the angry.
Wise, we are, and we get tougher.

Have wisdom, a uselessness, wisely,
Have wisdom, a uselessness, wisely,
Teeth are with life we wisely extract
Teeth are with life we wisely extract
Wisely extract with a wisely wisdom
Teeth are a life, have uselessness

We have them, useless vestiges
We have them, useless vestiges
Teeth, yet not their teeth, get up
Teeth, yet not their teeth, get up
Vestiges get up, have useless teeth
Them, yet not have their teeth.

Wisdom teeth are the teeth we get
when we are wise. And yet, we wisely
remove them, these angry vestiges
of a tougher life.  We wisely extract
the useless teeth that have not
caught up with their uselessness.

Writes Curtis: I call this an upside down Paradelle because it is, by extension, a furthering of the spoof of the form Billy Collins invented as a retort to complex forms. A Paradelle—as defined by Collins—is a poem of four six-line stanzas in which the first and second lines, as well as the third and fourth lines of the first three stanzas, must be identical. The fifth and sixth lines, which traditionally resolve these stanzas, must use all the words from the preceding lines and only those words. Similarly, the final stanza must use every word from all the preceding stanzas and only these words.

In the Paradelles that have been published, e.g., PARAVALEDELLENTINE: A PARADELLE by Annie Finch, and as intended by Billy Collins, the lines of the first three stanzas are ones that tend to follow normal syntax and sentence structure, i.e. a structure that generally makes sense as we read them, while the lines in the final stanza sounds a little crazy in syntax and structure because they contain only words from preceding stanzas and no others.

I created a variation of this, by bringing all the words together to make a normal sounding final stanza and the first three stanzas pull only unrepeated words from the final stanza and therefore, sound a little crazy. So rather than, an overarching form of normal sounding stanza (nss) , normal (nss), normal sounding stanza (nss), crazy sounding stanza (css), my form is css, css, css, nss. That’s why I consider it an upside-down Paradelle. Rather than have the poem fall apart in the last stanza, my version the poem comes together in the end.

Grace Curtis is the author of chapbook The Surly Bonds of Earth, selected by Stephen Dunn as the 2010 Lettre Sauvage Book Contest. You can see her work in Waccamaw Literary Journal, Chaffin Journal, Scythe Literary Journal, Red River Review, and others. She has an MFA from Ashland University. She is from Waynesville, Ohio.

“Reunions with a Ghost” by Ai, read by Lea C. Deschenes

By titling her poem “Reunions with a Ghost,” Ai foreshadows the poem’s connections with the myths of Odysseus, Orpheus, and Innana. All three narratives feature encounters with the underworld: Innana descends to visit her dark sister in the underworld, is stripped of the badges of her queenly status, killed, and then ransomed back by those above. Orpheus strikes out in grief to retrieve his dead love Eurydice but loses her when he turns back. Odysseus goes to seek advice of Tieresias, meeting the shade of his mother who died of grief over his absence. Odysseus attempts to find mutual comfort by embracing his mother’s ghost, but is unable to touch the dead. In addition to Sumerian and Greek myth, the poem references the Bible with references to Genesis and Jacob. By contrasting mythic narratives, Ai details her character’s reactions to a complex relationship as a journey through a personal underworld.

Beginning with an opening line that evokes Genesis, “The first night God created was too weak;/it fell down on its back/a woman in a cobalt blue dress,” Ai establishes the mythic framework of the poem and a departure from the standard tropes of these stories. The common ground of this relationship is the damaged nature of both participants. Linking the speaker with an act of imperfect creation, Ai evokes a relationship based on weakness. The woman’s continued survival (“I was that woman and I didn’t die./I lived for you,”) subverts expectations of the Odysseus and Orpheus storylines and introduces the idea of the female half of the relationship as survivor.

The next section portrays the man in the relationship as indifferent, drunk and self-involved, matching the weakness attributed to the woman. The scar on the man’s thigh parallels Odysseus’ childhood scar from a boar hunt which serves as an identifying mark and badge of masculinity. It also evokes the scar left on Jacob’s thigh after he wrestles an angel. Ai further probes the man’s character by describing his wonder and self-contempt at surviving an accident with a train in his youth (“…because you didn’t die/and you think you deserved to).

The intersection of religious and sexual imagery from the opening lines reoccurs as the woman kneels to touch the man’s scar. This moment presents the two characters in mutual vulnerability: the woman locked in contemplation of his injury, the man mostly naked, hobbled by his underclothes around his ankles. This vulnerability and recognition transforms into sexual intimacy as the speaker acts, sliding her hand up the man’s thigh to the scar (also reminiscent of the sexual overtones with Jacob and the angel) and causing the man to shiver. He returns the contact roughly, grabbing the woman by the hair.

Swept away by emotional and physical contact, the lovers fall into an underworld described as a lightless void in which no real progress is made (“…our falling in place./We sit up. Nothing’s different, nothing.”) Echoing their loss of self in the relationship, the characters become ‘we’ rather than “I” and “you”. The underworld acts as a unifying force for these two characters: a bond of common experience.

Following this lapse of boundaries, the speaker wonders what causes their attraction to one another when the relationship seemingly serves no positive purpose for either party. The answer may lie in the myths that provide the background for these characters: descents into the underworld in search of knowledge, comfort, and lost love.

For the woman, the Innana myth parallels the return of spring, her lover returned for six months at a time (similarly to the abduction of Persephone). While the attempt to reconnect with the lost feminine as a nurturer or lover is fruitless for both Odysseus and Orpheus, their descent plays a necessary role in the character’s future development. In Odysseus’ case, the dead mother emphasizes the need to return to heal his home and family. Unable to overcome his grief for Eurydice, Orpheus’ despair over his failure leads to his death at the hands of the Bacchae. The dual narratives present uncertainty and choice for the male half of the relationship.

The narrator lends the relationship the power of cyclical inevitability: “Is it love, is it friendship/that pins us down until we give in,/then rise defeated once more/to reenter the sanctuary of our separate lives?” This foreknowledge of periodic reprisal is echoed in the man’s last look with his “certainty that we must collide from time to time.”

The poem then shows the character’s renewed separation, now “me” and “you” once again. The man dresses, covering his scar. The woman goes “through the motions of reconstruction”, re-applying makeup. This reconstruction recalls Innana’s return from the underworld, reclaiming the items which are stripped from her in her descent.

The intimate ‘we’ returns for the character’s final kiss, then departs as the man returns to his separate sphere “arm in arm with your demon”. It is significant that Innana’s quest to satisfy her curiosity about the underworld succeeds after great trials, but her return requires the sacrifice of her lover to the underworld’s demons for six months of the year: The female character is willing to let her lover go to regain her station.

The final section of “Reunions with a Ghost” shows the disparity in what the two characters take away from the encounter. The woman draws on the more positive ending of Innana’s descent (“I’ve come through the ordeal of loving once again,/sane, whole, wise”). The man is associated more heavily with Orpheus: He turns back, losing the woman (“Yes. Yes, I meant goodbye when I said it.”)

The question Ai leaves readers to consider is, “Who or what is the ghost of this reunion?” There are many possible choices: the leaving woman, the fading man, the past trauma of both characters, their perceptions of one another, the mythic narratives that underscore the character’s actions, or the shadows of the separate lives to which they return.

i. Of Whom to Beware
Every English teacher has a brother with a gun,
somebody who goes out Thanksgiving for a duck.

The teachers sit home with red pens, or so you would suppose.
They’re planning the future, looking for odd Oxford commas.

ii. National Accountability
Listen up: all the English teachers have taken notice.
For instance, the burn marks never indicated arson, so
we’re killing the wrong man again.

If the indicators of fire suggest accelerant,
everything so quick, who wouldn’t believe
he killed his wife and kids? Junk science.
Don’t worry, he’s black or, anyway, poor.

All the death row murderers lie down in orange jumpsuits
and sleep until their last meal, the fried legs
of chicken, processed meat in a shell,
beans and gravy, fatback, boiled tongue, ribs.

iii. Nonviolent Means, the Chemical Plans: Exigency
All the lies about the country are coming true.
All the truths about the country are becoming lies.
They’ll pull Granny up by her bootstraps before they knock her down.

You can see every lie from your seat in the house.
Like Martin Luther King, link your arms with your neighbors.
Every English teacher has that violence inside.

See the violent sit on the ground. They point their eyes
like accusations. Have even you never wanted
to drop the stiffening toddler into bed as he resists?

When the officers come, they’ll aim red cans.
Last summer you covered your mouth
and sprayed at the fleas in the carpet.

They’ll tilt back your head and spray
your bloody throat. Haven’t you, Poet, been heard to sing?

The yellow spray is trained on your classroom
of literature bullies. You were taught to leave
when the poet smelled burning almonds.

        Oh, little Miss Lee, why don’t you ever have a gun?
        Your baby doll is marked and torn. The red stitches
        have broken where he sewed on the arm.

The traitors to the state trained for empathy.
Sonny’s glass trembles over the piano. The old
woman blows out the light. The fawn, still
warm in the belly, cracks at each jut
of the rock. The cat in the basket is going to leap.
Another three barns are burning. You’ve wanted the park
and the pantomime, the stage dog, and the wink
in the eye of the rogue.

Landmines and unmanned drones, baton carriers,
riot gear masks, zip cuffs, the boot in the neck or the face:
let the distractions be football or poems, the witty turn
of phrase. They’re coming with furloughs and exigencies,
be thankful for the canard’s jerky dried and served on a plate.

Laura Lee Washburn is the Director of Creative Writing at Pittsburg State University in Kansas, an editorial board member of the Woodley Memorial Press, and the author of This Good Warm Place: 10th Anniversary Expanded Edition (March Street) and Watching the Contortionists (Palanquin Chapbook Prize). Her poetry has appeared in such journals as Carolina Quarterly, November 3rd Club, The Sun, The Journal, and Valparaiso Review. Born in Virginia Beach, Virginia, she has also lived and worked in Arizona and in Missouri. She is married to the writer Roland Sodowsky.

I have blood that guarantees submission
I have eyes for revolution
fingers for information
and car keys for explosion.
I can say it aloud if required
that I have sex with both men and women
I like being disturbed and disturbing
I half revel in the vulgar
and speak of breaking shop windows
I disagree frenetically
and have much more to say than you any day.

How can you decide what I mean?
I refuse to be co-opted.
Lying naked on my text
I wrap pages on the genitalia
I’m love, sex, pleasure, towards
and backwards,
the meaning of all you’ve read,
the deferral of all you’ve understood.

Picking up guns—
I do that.

Shivani Mutneja straddles between Delhi and Ghaziabad in a normal week. She teaches English Literature at Delhi University. She holds a degree in Cinema Studies from School of Arts & Aesthetics in JNU and is thinking about pursuing a PhD. She recently spent a semester in Italy and Greece studying creative writing and art history with the Aegean Center for Fine Arts.

The rich creamy center of a Boston Crème, or the frightening sugar shock of a glazed donut. There is nothing delicate about the gut-heavy sensation of fried goodness. I made donuts for the first time for Hanukkah this year, piped them with strawberry jam or chocolate-hazelnut filling. And then, a few months later I find “Donut Parade” by Laura Read in Jelly Bucket for Reading number 3, 2012.  And it all comes back to me.

Her poem is summer; the boring summer following high school’s end; the summer where good girls work all day, party all night. Boys too, but it’s not about them this summer. In this summer girls dominate the kitchen heat, provide the service, and make claim to their bodies. This is the summer before life begins in the fall, a concrete summation as reality approaches: college begins, or you succumb to full-time working life, or maybe a combination of both. Regardless, this is the summer youth ends:

That was the summer I got up
in the middle of the night
to squirt raspberry filling and cream
into maple bars, a layer of grease

crackling and shining around them
like a spirit of goodness.

We are all adolescent for a short period of time, discriminate in our own ways, very choosey about everything. Rebellious in others in how we use our bodies or lend them out for a peek:

I put fresh Old-Fashioneds
on mint green plates and dropped coffee

into plastic mugs. I let men pour
their old eyes down my hairless legs,
lift their cups for more.

I remember pride in keeping my body sexualized for the enjoyment of others. A look obtained from one to another is like entrapment, deceiving one into something they might regret, or never experience. You know what you’re doing; it is not always a matter of feeling good for yourself but the desire to accept an obtrusive glance where they take a part of you to their memory and do with you what they will and it is out of your control. Maybe you never thought it through that far, maybe you have. Maybe you have a memory like I do:

Summer, 1984. You and three girlfriends hanging out for the day and you think it would be fun to walk around town in your bathing suits knowing there’s no swimming hole for miles. You’re lucky if there’s a stream nearby to dip your feet.  You just recently discovered your body; all those prayers to God and exercise have sprouted something beautiful below your neck. Your legs have developed shape, a special curve appears between ankle and heel; no stick figures allowed. At the time you think this is great. Yes, I’ll throw on my solid dark blue one piece; hike the leg holes over my hips to get that sharp, hip-bone appeal. And we did. Maybe you did, too. You walked around town in your bathing suit. Years later you wonder what the hell were you thinking, as you recall all those eyes you collected staring at you in possible wonder, maybe with desire, but likely outlandish bereavement for ‘young people today’:

They drink acidophilus milk. Their skin

was stained paper and they sat inside it,
backs against the fat red booths,
staring at the comics, blank and fierce
as fish.

You can see these men staring at you, and ignoring you as some continue reading the paper, drinking their probiotics, checking things out. Sometimes they look thirsty, or confused because they know they shouldn’t be looking at you. You think it’s a good time you’re giving them, and yourself to recognize the power and control you have over others.  But they wonder how old you are

~
Two other girls worked

at the Donut Parade, twins. They had
long, black hair, innocent and smooth.
They had long, thin legs, brown from
the heavy sun that we caught

in the afternoons, feeling the heat
push at us, and at the lake,
as if the water, twins, and I were, all of us
the same.

We are replicas of each other, women regardless of body image, but we treat each other like strangers, look away from each others skinny legs, overgrown thighs, thick necks, slim arms. We do not help each other because we compete for everything. It doesn’t matter to me if this is what Read had in mind, and actually I don’t think it was, but like any good piece of writing it takes you somewhere whether you like it or not.

~

They wore their shorts short
and their apron strings hung down
like ribbons. At night, we went down
inside parks, into ditches where the boys
dragged kegs of beer. After the red plastic

cups, we crawled behind bushes with boys
who wanted to kiss us but in the morning
we were back in the kitchen,
our fingers thick with sugar.

All those collected glances, memories; the sweet taste of kiss after kiss and not once do you ever wonder what the hell you were doing there. Why you did what you did. The way you were girl and woman all at the same time, the way you grew into yourself in those short shorts, and dangling ribbons for cats to play with. How time changes our bodies from the days we were forever eighteen, changes our minds about decisions we made. And then you get married, feel the guilt, and spill it all from the sugar bowl, mixing fact with fiction because you sort of want your partner to know who, how many, and all the ridiculous, fattening  ingredients that creates a soft, delicious donut. Have no regrets. Enjoy the memory of each bite.

Jean Macpherson writes from New England. Although she still enjoys the occasional donut she tries to refrain from too much sugar. Read more by Jean at her blog, Devils On Horseback.

Today I am none of those things. I am in the office working late. It is a special evening, the hour when new product enhancements are scheduled for release. Out from the darkness of engineering and staging sandboxes, new services are born into the light of a store. Covers go up to give teams time to validate, which means commercial business on these pages screeches to a halt. Blogs identify the sudden pulling down of tent poles and wonder what’s happening. There’s a buzz on the Web. Could this mean a new phone, more magic?

Before the main event, work groups gather one last time for dinner. It’s a feast for the long hours ahead ranging from gourmet pizzas, or for larger work groups, a meal with delicious curries, lentils, and vegetables preferred by the predominantly Indian software engineering crowd.

Tonight the word is Chinese. I’m expecting two tables with offerings of vegetarian and meat options. I’m hoping for garlic eggplant and tofu with egg-rollish things, stuffed spiced munchies and different dipping sauces joined by a selection of waters and sodas sitting in ice-cube baths. All plastics are recyclable. Welcome to the future.

After we eat, my group walks past lime green walls to locate an empty conference room. In this part of the building, rooms are named after lakes. A project manager enters wearing shorts and a T-shirt emblazoned with the logo of a resort in Napa Valley. He removes a pair of ear buds and says, “With everything that happened today, I’m keeping on my happy face.”

Someone in the know responds. “I told him we’re not going to roll-out anything until we validate in staging.” In the hours proceeding launch we relive the drama, meetings and phone calls and work-arounds to make up for the fact that one service is incompatible with another and how engineers on the project tried to reassure everyone that everything would be okay despite the fact that they had blown process out of the water. “And don’t forget, this wasn’t your normal got-cha.”

A small group passes through our doorway and says, “Have you read my email?” followed by a tirade in another language. This is a global company where we join hands and fall down together.

Close to time, we dial into a chat that binds all conference rooms and participants. We are quality assurance, business and content owners and engineers who monitor the site as each service with its code and new content is blessed and flies out an electronic door. We plug computers inside table outlets. If someone is without an extension, people promise to swap during the long night.

The chat goes down. Something is wrong. We’re greyed out. Okay. A conference call number gets circulated via email. Each room can listen in on the play-by-play. In short order, the chat comes back online, each ping another voice. The place is filthy with engineering genuis.

“Can we start testing?”

“Go for it!”

“GOB is back up.”

“Sami, do you still see issue number 4?” followed by a “No,” and a happy face.

It’s not time to be OOO, away from floating hierarchies of data that meet inside an arena. The stands are packed with crowds of people watching a lion-tamer circled by a ballerina on horseback.

I’m in Staging, the sandbox where we are hoping for a minimum of static before a new enhancement goes live.
“How is issue 3?”

“Fine is a long story.”

“Can we have a full list?”

“ETA from SPM is about 10 minutes away.”

“Randy, are we restarting shipping?”

The night passes with a variety of pings. People roam from one room to another with questions, clarifications.

“BR PHS looks funny.”

“Lorenzo, funny is not part of the QA vocabulary. Try harder.”

Almost there. Most issues are no longer reproducible. Once again, I’m almost OOO. It seems digital but it’s not. I’m almost home where trees are bloated with rain, like a dinner party after a great meal where everyone leans back.

All the rain we’ve been having, white petals on the ground confusing the seasons. Almost home where tomorrow if I’m lucky I’ll see a red-tailed hawk splice the sky into blue film strips. I’ll want to run that movie. Almost OOO. Hi-ya, Robert Frost.

The Radius is a variable-length, syllabic form.  I was inspired to create it last year, not surprisingly, by the name of the Radius site.  Each Radius must have an even number of lines, and each line must have exactly half the number of syllables as the total number of lines in the poem.  For instance, a Radius which is 12 lines long must have 6 syllables in each line, and a Radius with 14 syllables per line must be 28 lines long.  No rhyming is required.  The poem can be a single stanza, or it can be divided into regular stanzas, as desired.

The form lends itself well to pieces with an inner tension, but any theme can work as a Radius.  Below, I’ve included 2 examples.  The first one is an Ekphrastic poem, which is 16 lines of 8 syllables each, and the second one is a Rejection Letter poem which is 20 lines of 10 syllables each.

The Cathedral
– Based on the painting by František Kupka
By Robert Wynne

It is a patchwork of colors,
mostly cool blues, a crazy quilt
to comfort you in the presence
of a silent God. You pass through
a dark red door at the bottom,
try not to tear it from hinges
and sink your teeth deep into it –
but if you must, be sure to tie
the stem in a tight knot. Learning
where to sit can be difficult
with all this refracted light; still,
every prism blushes when asked
its favorite hue. Do not neglect
the darkness, splitting the two spires
and collecting prayers from below
for blind bats, who fly them skyward.

Rejection Letter While Being Resurrected
By Robert Wynne

The light is blurry, creamy, like a sieve
filtered the bright sun and even pine cones

began questioning the longevity
of trees, how they claim to embrace the sky

even though no one really knows quite where
the sky begins. The earth begins at my

fingertips, clawing their way through thick loam
to reach the sweet breeze, but I emerge stale

as your similes, breath rasping for some
original sound. Desperation’s all

I can muster, like the bluster of your
endings, all fire hydrant, no hose. You flood

each page with tears, margins so soaked I can
barely wring them dry to respond. Still, I

come back from drowning, cough up wet mouthfuls
of extra adjectives and slip a note

of apology in the mail. I wish
I could say your S.A.S.E saved me.

Even your postage was insufficient.
A vulture shrugs his tiny shoulders, leaves.

“Entertainment offers the image of `something better’ to escape into, or something that our day-to-day lives don’t provide. Alternatives, hopes, wishes – these are the stuff of utopia, the sense that things could be better, that something other than what is can be imagined and maybe realized.” (Richard Dyer)

John Carter is that rare creature in Hollywood Cinema: a well-crafted, professionally made, work of entertainment lacking either the infantile regressive features of the Star Wars films (with the honorable exception of The Empire Strikes Back co-scripted by Howard Hawks’s collaborator Leigh Brackett) or the bloated pretensions of Avatar. Unlike the George Lucas franchise, it is a film that can appeal to both adults and children. It never attempts  to insult the intelligence of the audience. Nor is it a weak film derived from other sources that have treated the subject matter much better, such as Run of the Arrow and Dancing with Wolves. It is not dependent on 3-D special effects to make it technologically significant in the twenty-first century. It is more of a high budget B-movie of the type associated with past masters such as Samuel Fuller, Joseph H. Lewis, and Howard Hawks in its aim of telling a story simply, but none the less meaningfully.  Currently available in theatrical 2-D and 3-D versions, it represents a unique alliance of form with content in a balanced type of representation. This is as equally true of the special effects contained within the 2-D version and the extended perception of the 3-D version. In Howard Hawk’s phrase, the film does not “annoy” the audience in bombarding them with special effects, “high-tech” devices that distract from the narrative.

Directed by Andrew Stanton, a long-time fan of pulp fiction writer Edgar Rice Burroughs — popularly known as the creator of Tarzan — John Carter follows both the spirit and content of the original source novel in a unique manner. Unlike the exploitative and gratuitous appropriation of a Quentin Tarantino, Stanton treats his source material with respect. Despite sporadic criticisms by Burroughs fans concerning fidelity to the original, a concept extremely difficult to follow in any form of cinematic adaptation, the film honors A Princess of Mars (1912) to a greater, rather than a lesser, degree. This is because of its origins in the world of pulp fiction. Once a despised genre according to the guardians of high culture, whether in American New Criticism or F.R. Leavis definition of a “Great Tradition,” this area saw the emergence of writers such as James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, and Dashiell Hamett, a trio whom a past establishment would not even allow admission to the far side of any literary canon.  Their stylistic and thematic operations have long received recognition by informed critics.

By contrast, no such case could ever be made for Edgar Rice Burroughs. His fiction lacks any characteristic form of literary style equivalent to Hawthorne, Melville, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway – to say nothing of Henry James.  Yet, what Burroughs lacks in literary embellishment he more than makes up for by well-crafted adventure stories involving heroes and heroines fighting for causes more noble than those characterizing recent decades in our own historical period. Burroughs was a craftsman but a good one. Days have long passed where we elevate auteur (whether Bergman, Griffith, Hawks, Hitchcock, Lang etc.,) above  lowly metteur-en-scene such as Richard Brooks, John Huston etc. They all have their virtues (and vices) in one degree or another. John Carter is a work of cinematic craftsmanship by a director seeking to tell a good story in the manner of Howard Hawks and never annoying the audience – unless they regard box-office returns as the only guarantee of quality.

Richard Dyer once wrote about the musical representing the yearning for a better world in his pioneering article “Entertainment as Utopia.”1 John Carter operates in similar directions by returning to utopian, rather than dystopian, premises of science fantasy/fiction in its hopes for a better word. It eagerly desires new worlds for old according to the title of Michael Moorcock’s important British journal New Worlds. But to discover any new world, one must not only escape from the old one but also discern the inherent nature of its problems to ensure they never occur again in whatever type of journey results.

The film opens in a dystopian vision of the urban environment of New York in 1881, a world characterized by bleakness, rain, and interminable crowds where one person pursues another. We will learn the identity of both characters as the film progresses. But what is of interest in this opening scene is its links with the future world of Blade Runner. Rain falls, clouds cast darkness on the streets making New York a city of perpetual night predicting the bleak environments of a dystopian future presented in so many literary and cinematic works. The pursued man (whom we learn is millionaire, former Virginian Cavalryman John Carter) writes a letter to his nephew who travels by train from William and Mary College arriving too late and finds his favorite uncle dead. After standing before a sealed tomb, locked from the inside, he begins to read Carter’s journal.

During the opening scenes of the flashback, viewers enter the world of the western, a genre that has now merged with the science fiction film as Outland (1981) and the Star Wars saga exemplify. Yet Carter is neither Dustin Hoffman of Little Big Man nor Costner’s cavalryman who chooses to live with the Indians in Dances with Wolves. 2 He is alienated from society, seeking merely to find gold and remain aloof from all causes. When pressured by Colonel Powell to aid the military against warlike Apaches, Carter responds, “You all started it. You finish it.” He is no Lt. Dunbar of Dances with Wolves, since he rebuts the accusation that he has “Gone native”. Carter rejects both the Union and Apache cause, seeing all humans as “a savage, warlike species. I want no part of it.” This definition of human savagery, whatever racial group is involved, is no gratuitous reference, since it foreshadows the role of the Therns in stimulating conflict on Earth and on Mars. Like the novel, the film mentions that Carter fought on the Confederate side during the Civil War but changes him from Burroughs’s “typical southern gentleman of the highest type” to somebody who has been traumatized by War, as the Civil War flashback sequences — indebted to Clint Eastwood’s The Outlaw Josey Wales (1975) — reveal. As Burroughs tells Carter’s attorney Dalton,” My mother said Jack never really came back from the war. That it was only his body that went west.”  Stanton’s John Carter is a traumatized veteran suffering from P.T.S.D. in all but name (the condition was never recognized medically until the Vietnam War) rejecting society and seeking isolation, never again to engage again in any cause. However, Carter will find such isolation impossible when he travels to a world very similar to his own in sharing identical militaristic attitudes, ones which continue into the twenty-first century.

Carter escapes. He tries to avoid a conflict between his pursuers and a band of Apaches but efforts fail. A cavalryman shoots an Apache. Carter then  contradicts his isolationist tendencies by rescuing the wounded Colonel Powell who notes this change in his character. “I thought – you didn’t care.” Seeking refuge in a cave dominated by the carved image of a nine-legged spider that halts the Apache pursuers, Carter takes Powell inside before avoiding death by shooting a strange robed figure bearing a medallion with the spider design. Repeating the last word of the dying figure, Carter takes up this medallion and begins his strange journey. In contrast to the novel where Carter uses a method of astral projection to travel to Mars, the medallion is a scientific device, one linked to the experiments Princess Dejah Thoris uses to attempt to save her people, the nine legged spider imagery having rational scientific, rather than mystical, overtones. John Carter, despite its science fantasy origins, emphasizes science and technology, rather than the myth and religion the Therns use to enslave chosen subjects across the galaxy. As unseen forces, they use religion to further their own political agendas very much in the manner that the Koch Brothers and conservative Republicans do today. The film’s heroine is no maternal figure associated with spiritual realms of science fantasy  but one who is Regent of the Royal Helium Academy of Science yearning for former days when heroes  would fight for noble causes.

Rescued by Tars Tarkas, leader of the aggressive Thark tribe, Carter witnesses a society dominated by violence and war, akin to the Apaches he encountered in the Arizona desert and Union soldiers he once fought against. However, differences exist within that society exemplified both by its leader and Soja whom we later discover is Tars’s own daughter. Both exhibit qualities of sympathy and sensitivity to the stranger in their strange land as opposed to Tars’s rival Tal Harjus who is totally aggressive. Mars is a society trapped in the realm of eternal war as seen in Thark culture and the conflict between Helium and Zodanga whose leader Sab Than becomes a puppet in the hands of the Therns. Yet, exceptions exist even in Thark culture.  Brought before Tars after violating the precincts of a holy shrine, the Thark leader criticizes Carter for placing Sola in a dangerous situation that will result in her death. As a former parent himself, Carter intuitively recognizes that Sola is Tars’s own daughter preserved against tribal customs by her mother. “Sola is the last flicker of our ancient greatness”. Thark father and daughter represent the last remnants of a society once completely different from its present incarnation now devoted to violence and bloodshed in a manner paralleling a contemporary American society engaging in constant war. They will eventually conquer their cultural fears overcoming phobias against technology to aid Carter in his final victory.

Zodanga appears to be the instigator of a conflict that has destroyed everything in its path except Helium. The tide of battle looks like turning against Zodanga until the appearance of the technologically superior Therns who will keep the conflict alive by recruiting Sab Than for their own unscrupulous ends in a manner evoking American support of Saddam Hussein against Iran several decades ago and other similar strategies. Thern politics has several  close parallels to American imperial aims in past and present aimed at making war a continuing part of the human condition and recruiting puppet figures to this end. Unlike the novel, Carter discovers a Thern in Arizona and later realizes that they have also been active on Earth as well as Mars. When captured  by Thern leader Matai Shang, Carter learns something about  their activities that bear more than a passing resemblance to those contemporary corporate forces who remain in the background to manipulate historical events for their own ends.  Matai describes Therns as a myth as if admitting that religious motivations underlying wars, whether promoting the interests of a “City on the Hill” or “holy wars” are actually irrelevant. “The Therns do not exist .I do not exist. Indeed I work very hard at that.” Matai recognizes Carter’s Southern origins.  “The Carolinas? Virginia? It’s Virginia, isn’t it. Lovely place.” When Carter asks if he knows it, Matai replies, “Not well, yet. But I will.” Although the film must have gone through the last stages of post-production before the recent Republican primary elections, the notoriety of Virginia as a state now hostile to women’s control over their bodies and South Carolina’s population containing 60% of evangelical Christians are parallels too striking to ignore. Whether these similarities are  conscious or unconscious is beside the point since, due to recent events, the references are undeniable. A particular political segment of the population in both states have announced their willingness to engage in further military conflicts despite the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan, to say nothing of Viet Nam several decades ago.

The fact that the Therns have established an outpost in Arizona is not accidental. According to Alan Sharp, screenwriter of Robert Aldrich’s Ulzana’s Raid (1972), the brutal conflicts characterizing the American Southwest from 1860 to 1886, especially Arizona, “represented one of the most terrifying periods in all recorded history.” 4 It resembled the later Vietnam War, as director, screenwriter, and star (Burt Lancaster) were at pains to show. Unlike A Princess of Mars, John Carter has Colonel Powell attempt in vain to recruit Carter to fight the Apaches. The film’s opening scenes contain undeniable parallels between both worlds. Individual earthly inhabitants seen in the opening scenes of the flashback certainly fall into the category of a “savage, warlike species” like the Tharks. But exceptions exist even on Mars such as Tars and Soja as well as Helium inhabitants forced into a conflict they did not start.

Matai also refuses to answer Carter’s question “What — what gives you the right to interfere?” Instead, he denies that the Therns even have a cause, choosing instead to say, “We are everywhere. We’ve been playing this game since before the birth of this world, and we will play it long after the death of yours.” The Therns represent a perversely destructive version of Vance Packard’s “Hidden Persuaders” manipulating people in perpetual conflict. “You see, we don’t actually cause the destruction of a world. We simply manage it … feed off it, if you like. But on every host world, it plays out the same way. Populations rise, societies divide, wars rage. And all the while, the neglected planet slowly dies.”    Unlike William H. Whyte’s “Organization Man of the 1950s, these deadly descendants of the managerial bureaucracy no longer promise security and a higher standard of living in exchange for the surrender of democratic hopes and ambitions. Instead they offer  a state of eternal warfare characteristic of George Orwell’s 1984, a text more relevant to capitalism and Obama’s Imperial Presidency actively engaged in making people give up their freedoms in exchange for insecurity and permanent war 5 Despite generic science fiction associations, the Therns  represent contemporary  behind-the-scenes managerial bureaucratic forces controlling politics and institutions for their own deadly ends. They also embody the dangerous threat of a Death Instinct, one that Freud recognized in his later writings as threatening the very nature of human existence with the aid of technology used for destructive ends. 6 The film is not as escapist as some of its supporters presume. It also reveals that technology can be used progressively.

Carter uses a technological device unfamiliar to him in flying to Deja’s rescue.  Sola overcomes her hesitation over flying. “Tharks do not fly.” Even her father will fly to Carter’s rescue later in the film after the victorious hero announces in the area following his victory over the giant apes and Tal Hajus. ”We must throw off the yoke of old hatreds. Tharks did not begin this, but by Issus, Tharks will end it!” His penultimate sentence indirectly suggests Thern responsibility for  making the Tharks into a bloodthirsty nation engaging in perpetual conflicts and enjoying “blood and circus spectacles” like an audience envisaged by corporate forces controlling Hollywood who use Lucas, Spielberg, and Tarantino in the same way as the Thern manipulate Sab Than. Carter wins a battle but the final victory is still not his since Matai Sheng returns him to Earth where “the Therns were a presence on this world as well as Mars.”

Filmed from a novel written a hundred years ago, two years before World War I, John Carter is more than an escapist fantasy. Like the best works of science fiction, it has much to teach us today if only by showing that opposition is possible rather than succumbing to the pessimism surrounding the defeat of former causes. At the climax, Carter can return to his beloved Barsoom. We cannot, since we are still bound to our own world. But John Carter reveals that we can exchange a new world for an old one if only by struggle and choosing a cause to fight for. Carter will finally return to Mars, a world where he can fight for a cause again, leaving his nephew and others to choose what cause they will choose to fight for on Earth. John Carter is a utopian film in the best sense of the word. Rather than embracing the despairing and nihilistic tones of dystopian science fiction, it offers a sense of possibility not just for its fictional hero but those in the audience.  Subjected to undeserved criticism and a promotion mismanaged by Disney (one wonders if John Carter is the Heaven’s Gate of its era?), sabotaged by its own production company, (perhaps by malevolent design on the part of some corporate Thern existing in an organization wanting to ensure that no alternatives exist in a contemporary Hollywood collaborating in perpetuating the worst tendencies of our contemporary political structure?), the film deserves a receptive audience.  Whatever the financial fate of the theatrical version, John Carter will continue to exist on DVD and other formats and perhaps inspire a better type of Hollywood cinema than we have experienced in the past few decades.

NOTES

1. Richard Dyer, “Entertainment as Utopia.” Movie 24 (1977): 2-13.

2. Costner’s character probably originated in Dean Reed’s cavalryman who reacts against the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre and joins the Cheyenne in the more politically orientated East German Western Blutsbrueder (1975) directed by Werner W. Wallroth and co-scripted by Reed.

3. Edgar Rice Burroughs, “A Princess of Mars,” Mars Trilogy. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010, p. 4.

4. Edwin T. Arnold and Eugene I. Miller, The Films and Career of Robert Aldrich. Knoxville, Tennessee: University of Tennessee Press, 1986, p. 167. See also Alan Sharp, “White Man Unforks Tongue for `Ulzana’”. Los Angeles Times Calendar 14 May, 1972, p.20.

5. See Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders. New York: McKayCompany, 1957; William H. Whyte, Jr. The Organization Man.  New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956.
6. See, for example, Sigmund Freud, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” (1915); “Civilization and its Discontents” (1929); and “Why War?” (1932), co-written with Albert Einstein.  Civilization, Society, and Religion.  The Pelican Freud Library Volume 12. England: Penguin Books, 1985, pp.57-89; 243-340; 343-362.

Tony Williams is Professor and Area Head of Film studies in the Department of English at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. His recent publications include George A. Romero: Interviews (2011) and the second edition of Vietnam War Films (2011), co-edited with Jean Jacques Malo first published in 1994.

i remember when
i was a kid that i would
pray to jesus for all of the things
in the world i was grateful for &
all of the people in the world i hoped were safe & happy

now i don’t because i remember when i was a kid…

rocky marriage
By KJ Hays

my two problems:
can’t stop. won’t stop.

there was the seventy page i l-o-v-e you,
the eulogy to a blowjob gone but not forgotten,
and a lot of long awful crap to her fingers
weaving strange braids from the rain; that
is
all
dried
up
now. the letters were trashed. the perfect
ladies moved on to perfect men. i’m still here —
writing.

Sorry for Making a Balcony Scene
By KJ Hays

Lovesong:

Why am I so hard on you? Has blood rushed to my head?
No, the wines just springing through my whore gorgeous

priapus explain such twitterpated veins. Dearest heartache,
breathe in the bouquet of flower souring the velvet lattice of

your gagged elegy that consoles me like hope only warmer. Churn
the abyss so its spiny waters overflow in a nightmare tide stifling

this accordion of nerves in shivery blues. Carry me off
the brink inside of you; I hear the drop is deep enough

to lose a mouth in. Sure it’s a very pretty penis, but when
was the last time you two opened up to each other anyway?

The tiny red headaches sighing their last
in the pink nothingness demand a reply!

(Go out
with me.)

Nice, now open your dress & snip that loose thread of cleavage,
or I will be forced to scissor my mouth all over your woven blouse

sincerely.

KJ Hays wrote two of the poems you read at a pole dancing bar on loose leaf paper while Mother by Danzig played. He has poems in Shampoo, decomp, gutter eloquence, OF ZOOS, and Zygote in My Coffee (Print). One of his favorite poems is The Bear by Galway Kinnell.

It seems, these days, we are awash in the heroic fantasy adventures of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries; the iconic heroes and monsters born in the turbulence of the dawn of the modern era recasting themselves in a new mythology, or an old mythology told and retold so often that it begins to take new forms. Take Sherlock Holmes. The great Victorian detective created by novelist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1887, is running around these days in multiple guises – the excellent BBC series Sherlock, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, the fun steampunk-inspired Sherlock Holmes movies starring Robert Downey Jr., the recasting of the character into a medical drama setting on House, and soon in yet another contemporary televised version, “Elementary,” which will be set in the United States and feature Lucy Liu as Watson. That’s a lot of mileage for an old story, and it doesn’t even take into account numerous comic book adaptations, including one by Boom! Studios which recast the stories with Muppets (including Gonzo as Holmes and Fozzie Bear as Watson) and appearances in contemporary fiction, perhaps most notably Michael Chabon’s excellent novel, The Final Solution.

Holmes is hardly alone, though, in having a busy dance card after all these years. The vampire Dracula, for instance, never seems to have left. Recently, he’s been a regular presence in numerous comic books, including Dark Horse’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Marvel’s X-Men, and there’s a Dracula 3-D film headed our way from director Dario Argento, starring Rutger Hauer as vampire hunter Professor Abraham van Helsing, a character who, increasingly, is cast less as an academic (as he was in Bram Stoker’s original novel, although there was some physicality to that character) and more as an action hero, such as in Hugh Jackman’s tedious 2004 movie, Van Helsing.

Never mind that both Dracula and Holmes, as well as numerous elements from their respective stories, play roles in Alan Moore’s pastiche comic book commentary on evolving heroic fiction, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and Warren Ellis’ excavation of many of the same tropes in the comic book Planetary.

The list goes on. Recently, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars made reappearances in both cinema and comic book forms, and if the film hasn’t burned up the box office, it’s at least stoked a cultural conversation about the story’s relevance today. And that’s the question, isn’t it? Old stories are there for the plucking, waiting to be reintroduced to contemporary audiences, but the method and manner of those retellings becomes key. The classic Green Hornet can reappear as both a comic book by Kevin Smith and a comedic movie starring Seth Rogen, but at what point is the retelling simply a pale reflection of what’s come before, with nothing to add save imitation and parody? At what point does media become merely an echo chamber? And does that echo chamber itself serve a literary purpose?

The venerable DC Comics recently took the bold step of rebooting its entire franchise — launching 52 titles as “The New 52” — with lighter, younger iterations of Depression and World War II-era classics such as Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. That some of these stories are more successful than others is beside the point. Eventually, there comes a point where two seemingly contradictory literary impulses collide: The need to keep old stories alive, and the need to create new stories for a contemporary audience. The latter seems more natural, in a lot of ways: An artist wants to tell a story which is fundamentally his or her own, and a new generation of adventure heroes can, in theory, speak to a contemporary audience without the baggage of decades (or longer). Buffy Summers, Harry Potter and Katniss Everdeen have seized their perches among the first iconic heroes of the 21st  century (with the understanding that, for the purposes of literary discussion, the 21st century probably began in the early 1990s. These things never work on a calendar schedule, and art often precludes mainstream cultural discussions.)

But what does it mean to be an iconic hero? Leaving aside the question of what constitutes a hero or a villain (or a monster, for that matter, or a trickster), even characters such as Buffy, Harry and Katniss have a resonance with what’s come before them, stretching back across the 20th century, through Superman and Wonder Woman, to John Carter and Doc Savage, to Sherlock Holmes and Dracula, and back further than that, to King Arthur and Hercules, to Gilgamesh and Beowulf. In a sense, our contemporary heroes are iconic because they constitute a break in the echo, a new point of cultural reference. And in a sense, they are merely Gilgamesh dreaming, Joseph Campbell’s singular hero with a thousand faces.

It’s in this connection to the great stories that we see a common root between contemporary heroic fiction and contemporary poetry. The stories of Gilgamesh, Beowulf and others were preserved as classic poems, and indeed, it becomes difficult to discuss them in a contemporary context without holding them aside as an “other.” We recognize them as poems, and great contemporary poets do new translations of them, but it would seem problematic to publish a new story today in that format. Would Hunger Games have become what it has if it were the epic poem of Katniss Everdeen? Which begs the question: Is The Hunger Games the epic poem of Katniss Everdeen? It’s not as ridiculous as it might sound. The language in Suzanne Collins’ novels is straightforward and workmanlike, more prosaic than poetic, but still she uses the conceits and metaphors that we’ve become so accustomed to in speculative literature that we almost forget they are conceits and metaphors. These elements of the fantastic, where the rules of physics and nature need only apply so long as they suit the conceit, are a feature both contemporary poetry and speculative fiction share, a hallmark of their shared ancestry. Moreover, Collins builds a structure that allows a narrative to move, differing little from the epic poem of distant memory, a form which emerged in order for a story to be preserved in the absence of the written word. And her hero, Katniss, takes on both a classic action heroic role and the mantle of what a contemporary audience might see as the best in themselves — perhaps not what they are, but what they aspire to be. In that, it is difficult to separate Katniss Everdeen from her classical forebears.

We look at fiction and poetry as though they were different animals, but at a certain point, that distinction becomes irrelevant. The Epic of Gilgamesh is a classic poem, but that poem is echoing through every hero of the contemporary age. Gilgamesh, Katniss, Sherlock Holmes, King Arthur, Dracula, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Beowulf and a thousand others, all part of a grand monomyth, the edges of which our literature constantly skirt. Writers — particularly poets — talk ourselves into circles to both acknowledge this history and simultaneously build some separation between the concept’s current iteration. We use derogatory descriptors such as “commercial” and “pulp” to cast doubt on speculative fiction, while poets as prominent as Seamus Heaney work new translations of Beowulf.

There comes a point where it seems counterproductive to deny a connection between poetry and speculative fiction, to overly concern one’s self with questions of genre and market niche, when — at least to my mind — the questions of connection are far more interesting propositions, the question of this hero that skirts our collective unconscious, which we continue to create new artistic tools — and indeed, new artistic forms — in order to sketch.

Editor’s Note: This essay is an extension of a series on heroes began in Victor D. Infante’s personal blog, which will be continuing here with different authors.