Before 1968...before 1919....DC witnessed a race riot, its first-- one that engaged several period writers or literary figures. When was it, and what happened?
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As this fascinating graph at peakbagger.com illustrates, Washington begins as a relatively big American city—a crowd of clerks come down from Philadelphia. During the expansionist and war-ridden 19th Century, the period when the capital mattered the most to the fate of the country, it fell into relative burgdom as the demographic center of the U.S. shifted away from the East Coast. In the 20th Century came air conditioning, a depression and government expansion, and two World Wars and a Cold War. From 1970 to 2018, according to Census data, the capital’s population grew by over 130%, a rate more like that of Dallas or Miami than that of the Northeastern cities. Washington, until just the other day a hamlet where (Gore Vidal) "everybody knew everybody," has, rather suddenly, become just big enough to be unknowable, and therefore unknown. All the more so because so many of the people who do so much of the talking and writing about and on behalf of it have moved from elsewhere. Although the city no one loves and no one quite knows has been written about, to date the work has been done piecemeal, a hundred Mister Magoo's views of the elephant. Odd, that a city that touches the lives of so many people all over the world—a city of analysts and reporters, no less—should have so little idea of itself, and so few epics to go to begin to get one. All else being equal, the more people a town has, the more readers and writers, the more writer's groups and centers and conferences, the more (for now) book-buyers and libraries and bookstores, and the bigger the so-called literary community. For now, though, none of this growth has yielded much in the way of those big books. Perhaps this is because our most ambitious storytellers, in realism and otherwise, now tend to go into the movies and (lately) TV—where we can find complex pictures of Baltimore, but, as yet, nothing more than the usual Cardboard Capital. Interested in official poets? You may need a map. In the United States alone, notably since the 1990s, there’s a great national forest of them. The Librarian of Congress nominates the best-known one, the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. But forty-five U.S. states also have them; most of these positions are relatively new. So do the District of Columbia (though the seat is currently empty) and, since 1981, the Overseas Territory of Guam. Many of the 2,000-plus American counties have them. Cities and towns have them. Foundations have them. Churches have them. National Parks have them. The list doesn’t end there.
According to the NEA-Census Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, as of 2017 about one in eight Americans read any poetry that year, counting works published online. Granted that the figure doesn’t count attendance at readings or slams or other performances, live or on YouTube or otherwise, it's still far below the rate for movies (58.6%) or prose fiction (41.8%). But our national, state, county, and municipal governments haven’t, as yet, anointed thousands of official filmmakers or novelists. Even Hollywood is a lot older than the position of U.S. Poet Laureate. So why poets? Official poets generally serve short terms, and perhaps significantly, are paid little or nothing. In exchange for what amounts to an unheard-of (for most poets) form of publicity, they are expected to perform certain public and generally teacherly and often activist duties. Is there a quid pro quo? The Academy of American Poets, “the nation's largest membership-based nonprofit organization advocating for American poets and poetry,” even publishes what amounts to a set of guidelines for those jurisdictions and organizations still looking to acquire an official bard or bards. (The most interesting takeaway: a state official poet, on average, is worth four city poets.) The DMV has (or in the case of the national Laureate, oversees) its own share of offices. Here are the ones I was able to track down. The newest are listed first: Estab. / Patron -- Current Poet (term) 2018 Prince George’s County -- J. Joy “Sistah Joy” Matthews Alford* (2018-) 2014 Prince William County -- Natalie Potell (2018-) 2005 Takoma Park, MD -- Kathleen O’Toole (2018-) 1998 Montgomery County -- Cathleen Cohen (2019-) 1984 District of Columbia -- (vacant since the death of Dolores Kendrick in 2017) 1979 Alexandria, VA -- KaNikki Jakarta (2019-) 1959 Maryland -- Grace Cavalieri (2018-) 1937 United States -- Joy Harjo (2019-) 1936 Virginia -- Henry Hart (2018-) *According to her web site, retrieved 24 July 2019, Ms. Matthews Alford is also, since 2016, the Poet Laureate of Ebenezer AME Church in Fort Washington, MD. Arlington, Virginia? It had a poet between 2016 and 2018, when the office was eliminated. Katherine E. Young was its first and, to date, only Poet Laureate. However, the position will soon be restored. What should we do with Democracy, that love triangle set in the Gilded-Age capital? We should read it. When we do, though, we run into two problems the original readers didn't. First, reputation. Hey, wait—there is a Great Washington Novel! Our expectations are likely to be too high. Second, the big title seems to promise a panoramic extravaganza. You know: Senator Claudius takes the wrong exit and runs his German horse over a gravedigger...and dozens of people who in normal life barely cross paths are…haplessly entangled in as many subplots…that…illuminate every social nook of every social cranny, etc. The book's not like that. It's a sardonic snow globe. Inside are a white dome, a handful of cozy or official interiors, some Virginia greenery, and a dozen-odd legislators, appointees, diplomats, lobbyists, and hangers-on. There's a farmer President who's in over his head, but he figures only peripherally, and the story largely stays away from the Capitol, and also from the newspapers. There are no civil servants, no back alleys, no Chinatown, no police, no morphine addicts, and no horse dung. The Civil War ended, there are some ruined Confederates, but there’s no sign of Reconstruction or of its failure. "Negroes" figure only as wallpaper. Indeed, the book spends more time with the wallpaper in the heroine's rented house than it does with all its freedmen and maids put together. The heroine, Mrs. Lee, is a demographic compromise. A relation of the Great Virginian, Robert E., she's also a New Yorker and (as widow) heir to a business fortune. Bored with New York, with Europe, and with hard books, in that order, she moves with her younger sister to Lafayette Square (Henry Adams lived there) to play political tourist. (It's Lafayette Square before the tour bus; it’s always empty.) Half-blind to her own motives, she gets mixed up with and taken in by a forceful, fortune-hunting sophist from Illinois, Senator Ratcliffe, who stands in for the Grant-Hayes era’s politics generally. The third side of the triangle is a shabby Virginian knight—shabby in the book’s terms—who sees through and, with the sister’s help, tries to steer Mrs. Lee away from Ratcliffe, who’s also dying to be President. (Mrs. Lee has badly underestimated the rat, mainly because he doesn’t speak French.) The story gets underway quickly, has few flat spots, and doesn't linger at the end. It isn't overfilled with officials, either. Adams has chosen his focal characters carefully. A sequence of leisurely set-pieces provides an excuse for giving close readings of them and of their exchanges. There's Mrs. Lee's parlor; riding in rural Arlington; a steamer trip to Mount Vernon; a blowout at the British embassy. There's plenty of nastiness or gamesmanship, depending on your point of view, but no weapon heavier than a cane is drawn. This is an action story—a great deal happens—in which the talk is the action. There's a third voice in the dialogues, too: Adams' narrator, who pretends not to know everything about his characters, also maintains a running commentary on them; it’s like those reflective asides that break up medieval treatises. Much of it treats the differences between how they see themselves and how others see them, and how the truth of them lies somewhere in between, though neither they nor the narrator attempt to say exactly where.
The book, published anonymously in 1880, is a refresher for those of us who’ve forgotten that unfit executives and amoral legislators weren’t invented yesterday or even in our lifetimes. Through Ratcliffe’s speechifying, Adams even attempts to explain why it’s like that and perhaps, as country and prizes grow ever bigger, cannot help but be like that. Indeed, Democracy feels like Adams’ shot at answering this: “From John and John Quincy to this…how did things go so wrong?” What could be more useful reading than that? PHOTOS - CREDIT: Scott Wheeler (YouTube Channel). Stills from "Democracy: A Sampler," from 2005 Washington National Opera production of Democracy, An American Comedy (2002) by Scott Wheeler (music) and Romulus Linney (libretto). Retrieved 11 July 2019. Ever wanted to know what books are set in the District? The crowdsourced project DC By the Book has a map of scenes from fiction set within the District. Search for a book or books, click on the location on the map, and you get an excerpt.
For example, here's the text from one of the 21 locations from David Swinson's 2011 police-detective retrospective, A Detailed Man: "So I walk 5th Street to H and head west through Chinatown...I feel like this neighborhood – afflicted with dilapidated, vacant row homes and thriving Asian-owned liquor stores. The streets are dark for lack of working lamps. But the liquor stores shine through like beacons." The project also includes collections of short stories, like Edward P. Jones' All Aunt Hagar's Children. From the web site: "DC By the Book is the brainchild of Tony Ross and Kim Zablud of DC Public Library. The project explores the richness of non-Federal civic life in Washington and its character as a city, as brought to life by fiction. The project goal is to highlight and crowd-source passages from the (largely undiscovered) rich body of literature set in DC that illuminate its social and geographic history." This sculpture is the so-called Adams Memorial. It’s located in Rock Creek Cemetery—which, incidentally, is not in Rock Creek Park but in Fort Totten. Henry Adams commissioned it after his wife’s suicide in 1885; he was later buried there himself.
According to local historian James Goode’s 2008 survey, Washington Sculpture, the memorial, by Adams’ friend Saint-Gaudens, was erected in 1890-91, and restored, by the Adams family, in 2002. Deliberately androgynous, derived partly from the sculptor’s study of Buddhas, it bears no inscriptions. Goode writes: “The sculptor called it The Mystery of the Hereafter, while Adams called it The Peace of God that Passeth Understanding…Mark Twain’s remark that the figure embodied all of human grief led to its most commonly but incorrectly used name of Grief.” The subject of this month’s upcoming Capsule: Henry Adams’ Democracy (1880). TWW's first book of note is Christopher Sten’s Literary Capital (2011), an impressive anthology of the fiction and nonfiction of writers, from Abigail Adams to George Pelecanos, who’ve written in or about Washington. Sten, a professor of English at George Washington University, gives us seven chapters of ten selections each. With some overlap, four chapters cover time periods, while the other three are organized by theme (black writers, poets, “Private Lives and Public Views”). Though the book makes much of natives like Jean Toomer and Edward P. Jones (also at GWU), most of the selections, inevitably, are from tourists (Dickens, Mailer) or transients (Whitman, Bret Harte) or transplants (Ward Just). The oldest selection, Abigail Adams complaining about the half-finished White House, is from 1800. The most recent is Andrew Holleran's Grief (2006), a spare, well-observed novel set in gentrifying Dupont Circle that (to my mind at least) also just happens to be about gay life and peopled with gay men.
What’s not in the book: Histories. Guidebooks, like Christopher Buckley's Washington Schlepped Here (2003). Journalism. Plays, screenplays, and teleplays—and drama shapes the received image of the city at least as much as the news does. Significantly, too, thrillers like The Cobra (2010) and King of Torts (2003) and The Lost Symbol (2009)—not even those whose authors (David Balducci, or Tom Clancy once) live around here. In Sten’s quieter choices you can read Washington’s history from annex of colonial Georgetown (and Mount Vernon) to the suburban “Imperial Washington” of the freeway era. What comes through in them is not just the city’s original rawness but its newness. Though the Civil War greatly expanded it—to about the size of present-day Akron, Ohio—the capital (as Gore Vidal points out in one selection) didn’t explode until after the arrival of air conditioning just before World War II. Demographically, America’s sixth metro has at least as much in common with Sunbelt sprawl-towns like Atlanta and Dallas and Phoenix than it has with the older and more static Northeastern cities it is often lumped together with. As the nineteenth-century selections in particular illustrate, though, what makes Washington what it is not simply the federal payroll. Hampton Roads and Honolulu have long federal payrolls. It’s location, location, location. Back before telecoms and airplanes began to make every latitude and longitude the same as every other, the national capital, with its parade of Virginian executives, was a Southern town. It lay well within the tobacco zone of a border state—and sat directly on the hot border of 1861-’65. It was also the patch where the emancipating Union happened to be headquartered. And yet after Reconstruction—the establishment of Howard University was one of its triumphs—Jim Crow would hang on as tenaciously here as anywhere. The story the book's selections tell was already set in stone well before all the masons showed up. 16 Jun 2019. Upstairs at Rock Creek Park’s Nature Center, the kids were gawking at the taxidermy animals—“That was fun!” Downstairs, in the little auditorium, fifteen or so people had gathered for the third week of the eight-week Joaquin Miller Poetry Series. Up front, on the roll-up screen, a slide show played: period and modern photos of Miller’s cabin. (Until 2011, the readings were held in the cabin.) Sistah Joy Alford, the P G County Poet Laureate, hosted the show. After her opening remarks the two featured poets, Mi’Jan Credle and Brandon Johnson, read from their work—or, to put it more accurately, performed it. (Credle is the 2019 P G County Youth Poet Laureate.) An open mic session—five more poets, some of them polished performers, others not—followed. “Not every place has a community [of poets] like [the Washington area] has,” Johnson said, after his readings. The reading was cozy. Most of the audience, on this sunny Father’s Day afternoon, were organizers and participants. A number of the poems were about fathers. What does the series, which has run since 1978, have to do with Joaquin Miller, the 19th-Century celebrity line-shooter and poet whose “Columbus” (a reading of which opens the series) was once familiar to American schoolchildren? Not much. At one point in his wayfaring life, Miller, who had a nose for publicity, settled in Washington and in 1883 built a rustic cabin for himself in what would become Meridian Hill Park. It was later moved to where it now stands, next to Rock Creek just north of Military Road. You can read the rest of the story here. Every few years someone announces the death of poetry, but we are surrounded by metered rhymed English. Nearly 100% of it is popular music. This is arguably the most popular art form in the world, and no one can escape knowing or knowing something about it. Poetry-- traditionally read from the page or sometimes, in an even older tradition, heard (and then, poet and publisher hope, read from the page)-- is far less widely consumed. The Miller series showcases poetry of this smaller, second, and more strictly defined sort. Though more obscure than popular music, it's far from dead: according to the NEA-Census 2017 Survey of Public Participation the Arts (SPPA) nearly 12% of Americans read at least one poem a year. Though it's a little less than the rate of 2002, it's up from just over 6% in 2012. The reading series runs Sundays through July 21 at 3 pm at the Rock Creek Nature Center. In this post we cast a backward glance at Bookend, a monthly interview show which ran from 2012-2015 on WAMU, D.C.’s public-radio station. The show was created “to talk with writers who have deep connections to the nation’s capital, whether they grew up here or were simply inspired by the city,” and promised and delivered “[a] regular look at the writing life here in the D.C. area.”
For the first interview, in June 2012, host Jonathan Wilson talked with Kim Roberts, a poet and founding editor of the online—and strictly regional—literary journal, Beltway Poetry Quarterly. (Ms. Roberts is also, among many other things, co-curator of DC Writers’ Homes, a fascinating website that documents precisely that.) Part of the first part of the interview went like this: Wilson: As a poet in D.C., a person who works creatively for a living, a lot of people wouldn’t…identify D.C. as a place to stay. We identify writers [with] New York, San Francisco, the South. Do you think it’s fair to say that D.C. doesn’t have that reputation…? Roberts: It’s very fair to say that people don’t think of us as an arts city. They think of other cities that have less going on…in a way that’s been good for the [Washington] literary community because I know of no other city where people are quite so generous to one another…this is a great literary community. We support one another. We go to each other’s readings. We buy each other’s books. We publish one another…I’ve got friends who live in New York and L.A. and they hear about the community here and they’re jealous of what we’ve got going. Though she didn’t discuss in what ways the quality of literary community is correlated with the quality of literary output, Ms. Roberts was, I think, getting at something that TWW will turn to again in the coming weeks and months. Not to put too fine a point on it, the capital has a cultural inferiority complex. It goes back to its remote and (for the East) late founding and its raw early decades as a mudhole with more streets in it than people. When you declare yourself a public monument, one based on Versailles no less, expect people to piss on you. Right from the start, the national capital has been a national and international joke town. And what’s wrong with that? I think it's this. Cleveland can be Cleveland and sleep at night. But Washington is a world capital…isn’t it? Isn’t a world capital supposed to be the main city of its own country? Isn’t it supposed to have—along with antiquity, ruins, styles, catacombs, ghosts, bankers, markets, ports, manufacturers, international trade, hot dogs, daring architecture, European ethnic ghettoes, breadth of interests and a metropolitan sense of humor—along with all that, isn’t it supposed to have hordes of its own artists, architects, designers, writers, choreographers, composers, filmmakers, and the like, plus swarms of aspirants? Do, or so the joke continues, do a lot of potboilers, speeches, memos, bills, briefs, reports, transcripts, subway maps, and parking tickets, plus USA Today and The Washington Post—and blogs, of course—really count as literary coin? Surely there must be more to the place than that. Is there? To be continued… NB. Read Mark Athitakis' interesting take on this from 2013, and also this one from 2008. |
AuthorI'm a freelance writer and editor who lives in Washington, D.C. Archives
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