No small crimes

Let's begin before the beginning. Here's a bit of Reed Farrel Coleman's introduction to The Lineup 4: Poems on Crime:

"I’ve heard it said many times by veterans of war, by cops, firemen, surgeons, that they never felt more alive than when death was close at hand. Humans are never more human or less human than when mortality is on the line. ... When viewed through that prism, the marriage of crime and poetry makes perfect sense. Poetry has its roots in heightened emotion, in crystal clarity. Poetry has always been about life’s lines and edges, the tensions between love and hate, ugliness and beauty, exaltation and despair. The poet’s job has always been to focus the laser, to distill, to sharpen, to filter and translate for the rest of us."

The poet focuses the laser. Makes sense, doesn't it? Joseph Brodsky once said as much. Americans too busy to read poetry? Nonsense, he replied (if I recall correctly); poetry, packing so much truth into so few words, is perfect for today's busy reader.

Poetry is efficient; poetry gets to what's important, and it gets there fast. Maybe that's why The Lineup's poems feel intimate, like David Goodis' non-heroes huddled in lonely Philadelphia cellars. Here's John Stickney's "Creation":

Make me a long coat of a dark cigarette color
Make the cities dark
No one will notice I am ash
Make me a dark fist
Clenched and subtly bitten
Watching the village’s one prostitute show a vast
Though never sentimental
Sympathy

See what I mean?

No one saves the world in these poems, no one takes over an entire town, knocks over a bank, terrorizes a city, or slaughters a classroom full of students. That would be too easy; that stuff is for the newspapers. These poems are about small crimes or about the quiet, intimate moments before and after big ones. Or rather, they remind us that for those most intimately involved — victims, perpetrators, survivors, a son who prays for vengeance on the man who mugged his father — any crime can radically alter the world. There are no small crimes.

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The Lineup 4, edited by Gerald So, Reed Farrel Coleman, Sarah Cortes and Richie Narvaez, is available from Poetic Justice Press.

Gerald has asked members of the crime-fiction community to write about The Lineup each day in April, National Poetry Month in the United States (and Canada). Kevin Burton Smith, Bill Crider and Patti Abbott were up before me. Here's the full month's schedule.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

A non-crime post — or is it?

I'm taking a break from crime fiction with an essay by Joseph Brodsky.

***

I interrupt the post to bring you, verbatim, this sentence from a story by Joe Biddle of the (Nashville) Tennessean just transmitted on the Associated Press sports wire:

"For every positive Newton presents, there are questions about his ability to transcend his game to the highest NFL level."

Who needs Biff Burns when we have Joe Biddle?

***

Back to Brodsky. His essay "Ninety Years Later" has this to say about Rilke's poem "Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes": "For all the obvious attractions of a round-trip story, the origins of this conceit are not literary at all. They have to do, I believe, with the fear of being buried alive."

Brodsky writes of Orpheus "literally dogged by fear," of underground dwelling places, and I think of all the cellars in David Goodis, dark places of violence, fear and death, but also, in "Black Pudding," of shelter. And what is a good, chilling noir story if not the narration of the protagonist's trip to and return from the world of death, fear and darkness?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Disjointed again (a bit of Bruen and Joseph Brodsky)

I promised you eccentric, disjointed posting, and now, by God, I'll deliver.

First, I would not want readers to think that Ken Bruen and Jason Starr's Slide is all self-reference. The self-reference, in fact, is in keeping with a larger spirit of mischief and fun that pervades the book, as in the following:

"Angela. Max wished he could strike that name from his brain, like they did in that Schwarzenegger movie, Total ... what the fuck was the name of it?"

================================

I've read some non-crime this week, notably a commencement address by Joseph Brodsky called "A Commencement Address" that has not a whiff of Pomp and Circumstance about it. Brodsky warns his audience of the deadly consequences of misinterpreting the Sermon on the Mount as a text in passive resistance, of misremembering its most famous passage as ending with that bit about turning the other cheek. The verse, he reminds us, "continues without either period or comma" thus:

"And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also. / And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain."

"Quoted in full," he says – or said to those lucky graduates of Williams College in 1984 – "these verses have in fact very little to do with nonviolent or passive resistance, with the principles of not responding in kind and returning good for evil. The meaning of these lines is anything but passive, for it suggests that evil can be made absurd through excess; it suggests rendering evil absurd through dwarfing its demands with the volume of your compliance, which devalues the harm. This sort of thing puts a victim into a very active position, into the position of a mental aggressor. The victory that is possible here is not a moral but an existential one."

More:

"In this situation, there is very little room for tactical maneuver. So turning the other cheek should be be your conscious, cold deliberate decision. Your chances of winning, however dismal they are, depend on whether or not you know what you are doing."

Turning the other cheek as a strategy of aggression could be an intriguing basis for a crime story. What kind of a story do you think it would be?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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