Historical Poem by Anique Sara Taylor

France 1943.

We huddle, freeze-framed
stems into embankments next
to railroad tracks that promise life.

Aligned with the iron churn
and clank of a German ammunition
train, we sprint beside it, leap to boxcar

rungs, clutch side ladder, clamber
to the top where we regroup. SS soldiers
travel in tandem below us in posh troop cars.

My shoe slips
off the metal crossbar.

One step.
One. Missed. Rung.

I flutter from the thread
of my wrist. Feet thrash, almost
slam against the frozen planet that spins
inches away from my tiny bones. Afraid roots
hungry for blood will try to pull me back into the earth.

They gather on boxcar
roof as the cars accelerate. Is
someone missing? I cling, alive still in
this hollow second, before I splinter into the void.

His shadow silhouetted against indigo sky
hurtles train top to train top, searching for me.
He hollers down. The first body, an anchor, fastens
himself to boxcar roof, grabs onto the next. The third locks
legs. His opening spine unfolds upside down, lowering torso.
Arms stretch a human link that reaches for the disappearing thread
of me, that hugs the speeding train’s side wall, yellow heat of velocity —

until his clutch of stone.
Sinews of his hands wrestle
my ghost back into a wish for life.

The Train was originally published in The Coil on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Poem by DeMisty D. Bellinger

I’ve lost count of the days that I close my eyes against,
try to sleep in spite of the sunlight seeping through,
red globules dance across my sight

and this day is cooler than any days I’ve known.

I lay on a quilt I made with a woman called Rebecca, a woman called Ruth,
and a woman we called ma’am because even though she was just like us, she stood tall — 
like us, she sewed for relaxation and knew enough to laugh at doing work for pleasure.

I close my eyes tighter and I can see their smiles, their high cheekbones.

The fat quarters were already worn bare and soft as brushed fresh cotton
when we got them, and the stuffing was only more scraps,
so the quilt was thin and beneath it, I felt the prick of the grass tips, the digs of the gravel

the grass and mud, cooling toward autumn.

Still, I was heading away and even in the light of day,
where I tried to sleep hiding beneath the trees of a hidden stand
I slept. I was learning to feel good. Heading away to a life of dreams

following a star like mythical wise men.

Nights Spent Flying was originally published in The Coil on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Poem by Linette Reeman

This poem has a layout that cannot be rendered properly in this format. To read the poem as a document, click here.

After I Get Top Surgery, J. Robert Oppenheimer Watches Me Make Out with My Partner was originally published in The Coil on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Alternating Current announces the winners and finalists of the 2016 Charter Oak Award for Best Historical.

This post has been transferred from our old blog, The Spark, first published in January 2016, and is being preserved here for posterity.

We here at Alternating Current feel that it is highly important to reward our authors with every possible chance for recognition of their fine crafts. We are pleased to announce our winners and finalists for the 2016 Charter Oak Award for Best Historical, honoring the independent press’ best writing on historical topics. The pieces are judged blind by our History and Acquisitions Editors to determine the semifinalist longlist and then a finalist shortlist. The winning and finalist pieces were published throughout 2017 on The Coil. All winners, finalists, and semifinalists will appear in Footnote #2: A Literary Journal of History. We congratulate these authors on their fine crafts.

First Place:

Mary Buchinger
“Michigan Sugar Beet Harvest, 1944”

Second Place:

Raymond Luczak
“Your Bonnet”

Third Place:

Holly M. Wendt
“Salt”

Finalists:

Rodney Wilhite
“The Search for John Doe №. 2”

GennaRose Nethercott
“The Death & Birth of Jesse James on April 3, 1882”

Charles Bane, Jr.
“I Meet Geronimo”

John Paul Davies
“Lodger in the Ripper’s Room”

Alan Catlin
“Ernest Hemingway and Hugh Casey, the Artist and the Ballplayer”

Holly M. Wendt
“That the true owner may have it again”

Yasmin Khan Murgai
“Out of the dust, light and power”

Cynthia Anderson
“Queen of the Mist”

Jon Sindell
“Emerald Beauties”

This piece was previously published on The Spark on 1/21/16.

2016 Charter Oak Award for Best Historical: Winners & Finalists was originally published in The Coil on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Alternating Current announces the winners and finalists of the 2018 Charter Oak Award for Best Historical.

We here at Alternating Current feel that it is highly important to reward our authors with every possible chance for recognition of their fine crafts. We are pleased to announce our winners and finalists for the 2018 Charter Oak Award for Best Historical, honoring the independent press’ best writing on historical topics. The pieces are judged blind by our History and Acquisitions Editors to determine the semifinalist longlist and then a finalist shortlist. Most of the winning and finalist pieces will be published throughout 2018 and 2019 on The Coil. All winners, finalists, and semifinalists will appear in Footnote #4: A Literary Journal of History, due Winter 2018. We congratulate these authors on their fine crafts; stay tuned throughout the year to read their pieces.

First Place:

Linette Reeman
“After I Get Top Surgery, J. Robert Oppenheimer Watches Me Make Out with My Partner”

Second Place:

Rebecca Pelky
“Yara ni ’Ua”

Third Place:

Arthur Allen
“The Nurseryman”

Finalists:

DeMisty D. Bellinger
“Nights Spent Flying”

Robert Busby
“Twenty Mile Dead”

Lenore Hart
“The Well-Shooter’s Wake”

Marion Lake
“Athanasia”

Kindra McDonald
“Lost Language”
“Maternal Bonds”

Charissa Menefee
“Get the Story”

Rebecca Pelky
“Brothertown”
“Let’s Ask Leda about Consent”

2018 Charter Oak Award for Best Historical: Winners & Finalists was originally published in The Coil on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Poem by Jesseca Cornelson

(According to the complete record of lynchings in Alabama from 1871 to 1920 — compiled by Monroe M. Work, Director, Department of Records and Research, Tuskegee Institute, at the request of Marie Bankhead Owen, Director, Alabama Department of Archives and History — from 1889 to 1920: 240 black men, 33 white men, 10 black women, one white woman, and one man, race not given, were lynched in Alabama.)

Murder, of course, and rape,
robbery and miscegenation,
but also being a desperado,
incendiarism, testifying
against whites, being an outlaw,
arson, barn burning, political
activity, alleged arson,
giving evidence, burglary,
incest, turning state’s evidence,
passing counterfeit money,
elopement with a white girl,
being mistaken for another,
murderous assault, giving
evidence against “White Caps,”
paying attention to a white girl,
accomplice in a murder,
being unknown in name or offense,
mistaken identity, race prejudice,
rape and murder, complicity
in a murder, robbery and shooting,
criminal assault, dynamiting,
insulting white woman,
attempted attack on woman,
murder of deputy sheriff,
being whipped by landlord
Sam Spicer and out of revenge
later shooting Mrs. Spicer,
being half-witted and frightening
women and children near Birmingham,
burglarizing a store, shooting a white man,
dangerously wounding a Deputy Sheriff,
poisoning mules, being released
on bail, robbing a store, highway
robbery and not giving enough of road
to white men and being insolent,
making unruly remarks, being reported
to have fired a gun and boasting
of getting a policeman, killing an officer
of the law, not reported, having killed
a policeman, raping a six-year-old girl,
murderous assault on white woman
and having a father accused of rape
of same white woman, insulting
a woman, striking a man with iron
pipe and fractioning his skull.

JESSECA CORNELSON is an assistant professor of English at Alabama State University. She has been an artist-in-residence in the Platte Clove Artists-in-Residence Program, and her poems have appeared in Platte Valley Review, Salamander, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, and elsewhere.

The non-italicized words of this piece were taken directly from lynching records.

2015 Charter Oak Historical Award Finalist
Originally published on The Spark on 5/27/16.

Lynchable Offenses in Alabama, 1889–1920 was originally published in The Coil on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Poem by Claudia Serea

O

obedient obey obituary
object objectify obligatory
obliterate oblivion

O forms in the mouth,
in the throat, above the tongue:

an outward movement of air,
a hollow, round sound.

Open the page at letter O.
See what you find.

Oancea, Gheorghe. Peasant. Sentenced to 15 years.

Oancea, Ion. Peasant. Arrested with his son Stefan, teacher. Tortured by Securitate. Sentenced to 10 years and his son to 5 years. Wife Agmira and the other 2 children deported for 6 years to forced labor camps (stone quarries).

Oancea, Soare. From Bessarabia. Arrested by NKVD and deported to Siberia in 1946. No further information avail.

Oancea, Traian I. Student at the Polytechnic Institute. Sentenced to 8 years for conspiracy against social order.

Oancea, Vasile. Tortured by Securitate. Sentenced to 5 years. Wife Floarea and 2 children deported.

Oancea, Zosima. Priest. Married, father of 4 minors. Arrested because he helped the families of political prisoners. Sentenced to 9 years.

Name:
a succession of sounds
to which a face is attached.

The name might as well be spelled
by vowels, clangs of shackles,
consonants, thuds
of fists against skin,
bangs of prison doors, rattle
of cattle trains.

observe obsessed obsolete
obstacle obstinate occupied occur
ocean oculus ocular

Ocular. Eye. Eyewitness.

Obancea, Gheorghe. Arrested for giving food to partisans. Tortured by Securitate. Sentenced to 15 years forced labor.

Obarseanu, Florea I. Peasant. Arrested on October 21, 1959, for activities against land nationalization. Tortured by Securitate. Sentenced to 5 years.

Oberding, Dominic. Arrested by NKVD and sent to forced labor camps in Siberia.

Oberkirch, Barbara. Born in 1934. Arrested by NKVD and sent to forced labor camps in Siberia, where she died.

Oberkirch, Magdalena. Deported since 1951.

Obician, Arcadia, Dragutin, Dusan, Mara. Peasants. Deported on June 18, 1951.

odious offend offensive
official often old omen
ominous omission only one

Only one. The one.
Every one is the one.
The only one.

They once had bodies,
flesh, voice, life.

Now all that remains
are lists of names,
bones in a cemetery online.

Olaru, Aurelia. Born on August 19, 1941. Arrested on May 5, 1952, 11 years old. Deported.

Olaru, Constantin. Born in 1929. From Bessarabia. Deported to Siberia (Kurgan) with his wife Alexandra on July 6, 1949.

Olaru, Constantin I. Worker. Arrested with his father, Ion, and brother, Stefan, in 1949. His cooperation with the investigators resulted in multiple arrests.

Olaru, Petre. Arrested because of statements made by his son. Interrogated by Securitate, where he was beaten by his own son.

ongoing onslaught on purpose
open operate operative
oppose opposition oppressive

Faces blurred,
eaten by time.

O forms in the mouth
that blows binary dust across
the computer screen,
byte by byte.

Names, names,
enough to populate a small country
of pain.

But do you hear them scream?

Oprescu, Gheorghe I. Born on October 28, 1934. Sentenced to 5 years for conspiracy against social order, then deported.

Oprescu, Grigore S. Sentenced to 2 years forced labor.

Oprescu, Puiu. Economist. Sentenced to 7 years.

Oprescu, Toma. Priest. Sentenced to 8 years.

Opret, Iacob. Peasant. Arrested in December 1956. Tortured during interrogation. Sentenced to 7 years forced labor.

Opris, Constantin. Lawyer. Sentenced to 5 years in 1950. Arrested again in 1958 and sentenced to 24 years forced labor.

opprobrium opprobrious ordain ordeal
order orderly orphan ostracize our

Our. Our Father,
Who art in heaven,
Holy is Thy Name.

My father
and his father and brothers.

Our. Our fathers.
Our grandfathers, uncles, brothers.
Their names.

Opris, Ilie. Greek-Catholic priest. Killed during interrogation.

Opris, Nicolae. Arrested because he helped several people cross the border to Yugoslavia. Sentenced to 12 years.

Oprisan, Constantin Costache. Sentenced to forced labor for life.

Oprita, Ileana. Born on January 1, 1951. Arrested in 1958 (7 years old) and deported.

Oprita, Octavian. College student and partisan. Killed by Securitate in Apuseni Mountains.

Oproiu, Ion. Arrested with his father (priest, 74 years old) for refusing nationalization. Sentenced to 20 years forced labor.

O forms in my mouth
and in my bones.

O forms in the way my hair follows
the oval of my face,
my father’s forehead,
my grandfather’s nose.

My blood carries Os.

Search: trialofcommunism.com/
testimonials/
arrested, tortured, imprisoned, killed/
dictionary/N-O/

Scroll down to Orasel,
my maiden name.
It means small town.

Orasel, Eliodor V. Born in 1939. Sentenced to 8 years for conspiracy against social order.

Orasel, Lucian V. Born in 1937. Sentenced in 1956 to 10 years.

Orasel, Petre Gh. Sentenced to 6 years for conspiracy against social order.

Orasel, Vasile. Father of Eliodor and Lucian. Sentenced to 25 years for refusing nationalization of the land.

Oust out outcast outlaw outwear
over overflow overkill overwhelm

O, the sound of wind
winding through the hollow of bones.

Chain links, chained Os.
Eyes. The round eyes,
the fixated pupils of death.

Orban, Andrei. Butcher. Killed during detention, in 1951.

Orban, Carol. Accountant. Sentenced to death and executed on September 1, 1958.

Orban, Cornel. Sentenced to death in 1956. Executed on September 1, 1958.

Orban, Stefan. Sentenced to death in 1956. Executed on September 1, 1958.

Ordeanu, Danila. Worker. Arrested in 1951. Killed in the Cernavoda camp, on February 9, 1953.

Orendi, Ioan I. Clerk. Arrested in 1950. Killed during detention in 1952.

Who stole their years,
their lives? Who?

Letters ignite into funeral fires.

The dead are baking ovals of bread.

My grandmother places
torn pieces of meat
into the gaping O
of the pot on the stove.

Oh, the stories untold.

Orescu, Gheorghe V. From Bessarabia. Deported in camps from Irkutsk, Siberia, with wife Maia and children Fiodor, Varvara, and Ecaterina.

Orezeanu, I. County clerk. Arrested by NKVD and deported to forced labor camps in Pecioara, Komi region, Siberia.

Organ, Alexandra E. From Bessarabia. Peasant. Deported to camps from Cita region with children, Vasilisa and Victor.

Organ, Ivan I. From Bessarabia. Peasant. Deported to camps from Cita region with wife Feodosia and children, Alexandru and Alexei.

Organ, Vasile. From Bessarabia. Peasant. Deported to camps from Kurgan region with wife, Eudochia, and son, Andrei.

Overrun overswarm overthrow
overturn own own up

My own drops,
small drops
in an ocean of Os.

I owe them words,
own, own up.

Own up to the Os.

CLAUDIA SEREA is a Romanian-born poet who immigrated to the U.S. in 1995. Her poems and translations have appeared in Field, New Letters, 5 a.m., Meridian, Gravel, Apple Valley Review, RHINO, and many others. She is the author of Angels & Beasts (Phoenicia Publishing, Canada, 2012), A Dirt Road Hangs From the Sky (8th House Publishing, Canada, 2013), To Part Is to Die a Little (Cervena Barva Press, 2015), and Nothing Important Happened Today (Broadstone Books, 2016). In 2015, Claudia Serea was featured in the documentary Poetry of Witness, alongside Carolyn Forché, Bruce Weigl, Duncan Wu, and others. Serea co-hosts The Williams Readings poetry series in Rutherford, NJ, and she is a founding editor of National Translation Month.

This poem uses lists of victims found in the online archive Procesul Comunismului (The Trial of Communism), which can be found at http://www.procesulcomunismului.com/marturii/fonduri/ioanitoiu/dictionar_no/, and in Victimele terorii comuniste: Dicţionar N-O, Vol. 7, by Cicerone Ionitoiu (Editura Maşina de scris, 2005). The lists of words are selections from The Merriam-Webster Thesaurus (Pocket Books, 1978).

2015 Charter Oak Award for Best Historical Finalist.
Originally published on The Spark on 6/24/15.

The Dictionary was originally published in The Coil on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Historical Creative Nonfiction by James O’Brien

“While reading Nicholas Roe’s ‘Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years,’ I was struck by a passage about one supposed interaction between William Wordsworth and Thomas Carlyle. In his book, ‘Reminiscences,’ Carlyle maintains that Wordsworth told him, at a dinner party they both attended around 1840, that he’d witnessed the guillotining of Antoine-Joseph Gorsas in October 1793. Roe is not the only historian to write of that section in Carlyle’s late-in-life book. The consensus, however, is that there is a lack of evidence indicating Wordsworth ever made such a trip into France in the fall of 1793. Roe writes, in describing Carlyle’s reference to the story: “Perhaps Carlyle’s recollection should be taken as an imaginative truth, in which case Wordsworth’s shadowy presence at the scaffold was not only as appalled spectator but simultaneously as victim and as executioner, too. [1]” This effort in narrative nonfiction, then, is a description of “imaginative truth,” regarding that probably-apocryphal detail about Wordsworth, and Gorsas’ sudden end. The piece is set in March 1841, in London, extrapolating a timeframe from Carlyle’s writing. It is my hope the research into pertinent details of Wordsworth and Carlyle in that period — modest as the effort proves in light of what could be done in such a narrative fleshing-out — is sufficient to summon a convincing picture of Roe’s “imaginative truth,” and that the reader will forgive a minimum of injected particulars in connection with what might have been served for supper or what the party imbibed that evening. [2]”

— James O’Brien

Thomas Carlyle was expounding his book, the one opposing certain economic theories held by certain English liberals, that much was clear; the man’s voice cut the din [3]. William Wordsworth turned his fork and cut his pork, and answered Spedding’s thought on Francis Bacon. Spedding seemed obsessed with the man, tonight. Wordsworth thought of Spedding as a man displaced, out of gainful work for adhering to his principles. Which was a good enough reason to be out of work, in any case. Natural, perhaps, that Spedding would gravitate to philosophies of duty and ethics — Bacon, or anyone else for that matter [4]. But it was Bacon.

While Spedding spoke, Wordsworth’s eyes wandered to the outside wall, where afternoon faded from the windows. It was a sharp air, out there, still a winter’s air despite the lateness of March. He thought of the coach ride from the north, from Ambleside [5]. Down to the city, with lunches on the first day in Preston, on the second in Northampton. The overnight had been in Birmingham, where the bed at the inn looked more comfortable than it proved. That made for a long morning, and this afternoon there had been Faber, with whom he had to visit in London, and with whom he’d be asked to sit again, he imagined, before he could return to Ambleside. It was a whole business, this back and forth to talk of Oxford and laureates; it was Faber’s irritation, particularly. Wordsworth’s back hurt; the return ride threatened piles [6]. Still, Faber, in all his agitation, was easier on the ears than a room full of writers and their rum. It wasn’t the rum he disliked, anyway. Someone laughed at Carlyle, and there followed much clapping of backs. Wordsworth finished the tail ends on his plate, moving around what he didn’t want. The peas weren’t very fresh at all.

Later, for whatever reason, he found himself once again gravitating to Carlyle. Or Carlyle to him, as the formula worked out. Wordsworth took the corner spot first, and so here the man came for more discourse [7]. He imagined Carlyle liked to hear him talk, and despite his earlier audience, Carlyle did seem, at these times, inclined to listen, as well as speak. Before, at dinners like these, they’d talked of poets, and issues generally English. Tonight, with the soreness in him, and the general weariness, Wordsworth worried he’d wax darkly with his corner companion. Perhaps he should give him fair warning. Didn’t Carlyle deserve a warning? Carlyle, for all his good reminiscences of the past — the orange tincture of the fire on his cheeks — far enough from the crush, but not too far from the fat black bottles of rum?

It had been a morning party at some other tavern, maybe on St. James’s — their first real conversation [8]. Wordsworth had been in good spirits, that day, and talk of literature and poems and people had turned around and around, and that was the first day he’d really taken notice of Carlyle. Over the months since, at dinner parties and suppers (more than one of them called by Faber, or involving Faber, persistent Faber), when Carlyle appeared, Wordsworth had felt some compulsion to draw him near, to ask the man his thoughts on this matter or that matter; he had liked the man’s French Revolution, in the first place [9]. And here he came again, only Wordsworth wished he brought with him cups of the rum, but they’d both neglected such details, in breaking away.

“Not a slight cast, these characters,” said Carlyle. “Good men, these, do you think, William?”

“I think they are fine men, some of them, and most of them useful,” Wordsworth said. “Although, if we are to talk of good men, I say it is in struggle against great odds toward which I considerably weight my evaluation; it is not always this pleasant conversation over pork and peas.”

Carlyle let him go on, and not long into it, as Wordsworth suspected from the start, the Revolution rose between them: the Assembly, the Girondins, and the Mountain. He spoke of Godwin, and the island of thought for Wordsworth that Godwin’s writing made in the months of blood that followed those first hopeful celebrations in Calais [10].

“Do I speak too freely?” Wordsworth asked. He really rather would have had some rum, then. “We all spoke freely, in those days, and some of us to our later regret. [11]”

Carlyle waved a white-shirted server toward them, and soon a cup of the rum was produced. Wordsworth knew what questions would follow, given that he’d broached certain subjects, and he let Carlyle take his course, as he took the cup proffered. The liquid stung his tongue and sizzled the back of his throat. He deflected Carlyle, in part, speaking instead of the Courier, and then of Gorsas [12].

“Do you mean that you knew him?” Carlyle asked.

For a moment, Wordsworth let the inquiry linger. In the ruddy haze of the fireplace, Carlyle’s face was suffuse with contrast. It seemed to shift as he dipped his head slightly, sipping from his cup.

“I knew this man,” Wordsworth said, at last [13].

“How did the news of the end, then, come to you?”

Wordsworth again lifted his cup; the twinge in his back seemed wrapped now in warm and layered gauze. “He was the first deputy sent to the scaffold. And this was a thunderhead, Carlyle. Or like a mist of some ominous quality, coursing the same bricks along which we had happily rushed. But where were the French flowered arches, now? Baskets of horror, instead, and a different bloom of rose. The word spread. [14]”

“Do you mean that you were there, William?” Carlyle asked. “For I have never heard of this, a public sentiment, such spread of news. [15]”

“Where will it end, when you have set an example in this kind?” Wordsworth said [16]. “So it was, the end of Gorsas; not so very long ago, it seems to me, tonight.”

Carlyle pressed him for more, wanting the details of the days around it, wanting to be certain on the point: Had Wordsworth set foot again on French soil in 1793? Had he seen the lead-gray blade under the bruised bowl of that October afternoon [17]? Wordsworth felt Carlyle’s urgency, but how to steer him to the main point? Not whether he had been there on any particular day; rather, they had all set ink to page in the days before the sails appeared on the Scheldt, before Louis’ end in that awful mid-sentence of the scaffold [18]. They had set ink to page again afterward, too, but they had suffered little for it — he and Coleridge and others — while another man certainly wanted for the poet’s shield [19].

“What do you think of Spedding?” Wordsworth asked, of a sudden [20]. The two of them stopped, then, for a moment. A single log, round and thick as a man’s arm, shifted atop the stack in the hearth, halfway across the room from them. A white-shirted boy took their cups. Perhaps there would be other cups. Perhaps Faber would make his entrance, soon. It was the end of a long day for an old man of seventy [21].

Footnotes

[1] See Nicholas Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988): 41.

[2] All such details, however, are culled from foods Wordsworth seems to prefer in Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere Journals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).

[3] This exercise in narrative nonfiction is set in London in early 1841, about one year after Thomas Carlyle published Chartism (December 1839), his treatise on poverty, the poor, justice, and the English economic system. His passion for the work ran high; though getting the words into print involved some struggle on his part. It sold briskly, however, rattling English liberals, who found Carlyle’s criticism of their economic theories unorthodox. Given the minor uproar he’d created, it is conceivable Carlyle would be asked about and would speak of the book at dinner parties during the year that followed. See James Anthony Froude, Thomas Carlyle: A History of His Life in London, 1834–1881 (St. Claire Shores, Mi.: Scholarly Press, 1970): 182–186.

[4] Wordsworth is speaking to James Spedding, recorded present at least once at a party also attended by Wordsworth. See Thomas Carlyle, Reminiscences (London and New York: J. M. Dent and E. P. Dutton, 1932): 300. Spedding, a scholar and writer, was, in early 1841, ending — or just about to end — his work with the colonial office. He would soon start a 30-year project of editing the work of Francis Bacon. See Leslie Stephen, “Spedding, James (1808–1881),” rev. W. A. Sessions, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, May 2006, http://oxforddnb.com/view/article/26090 (accessed October 20, 2009).

[5] In 1841, Wordsworth lived in Ambleside, near to Grasmere. There was some promotion in that year of Wordsworth as a candidate for poet laureate by theologian, Frederick William Faber. It is conceivable that Faber would arrange for gatherings of the authors and academic elite around Oxford and London to press his candidate into the minds of others. Wordsworth ultimately took the title in 1843, following the death of Robert Southey. See Stephen Gill, “Wordsworth, William (1770–1850),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, January 2008, http://oxforddnb.com/view/article/29973 (accessed October 20, 2009).

[6] There is some precedent for such an affliction within the spectrum of Wordsworth’s various lifelong physical complaints. See Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere Journals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991): 30.

[7] Carlyle remarks on Wordsworth’s tendency to stay clear of the noisy middle of a party: “He was willing to talk with me in a corner, in noisy extensive circles; having weak eyes, and little loving the general babble current in such place.” See Thomas Carlyle, Reminiscences: 302.

[8] As for the year of their first meeting, there is some discrepancy. Carlyle writes: “It was perhaps about 1840 that I first had any decisive meeting with Wordsworth, or made any really personal acquaintance with him,” and he goes on to describe the first substantive conversation between the two at an unnamed tavern on “St. James’s Street.” In a footnote to this assertion, however, C. E. Norton notes that Carlyle made an entry in his Journal, on June 1, 1836, that he’d “seen Wordsworth again.” See Carlyle, Reminiscences: 299, 299n.

[9] Carlyle had written a history of the war: The French Revolution (1837).

[10] Wordsworth visited Calais on July 13, 1790, witnessing the celebration of the first anniversary of the Revolution. It moved him, and he wrote about it in Book Six of The Prelude: “How bright a face is worn when joy of one/Is joy of tens of millions.” See Nicholas Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988): 20.

[11] A bit of license taken here. It is clear, however, that Wordsworth’s initial support and enthusiasm for ideas of parliamentary reform (Godwin’s Political Justice, for example), and his support of the French Revolution at its outset, became an issue with which both he and his likeminded community, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, would have to grapple as the violence in France became acute, come 1793. Coleridge did so on the page, in letters of 1803, for example, in which he denied connections to “any party or club or society.” Wordsworth responded by somewhat sublimating his feelings about France’s transformation between 1789 and 1793, obscuring portions of his history of involvement with politics, reformists, and Revolutionary France in Book Ten of The Prelude. See Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years: 3–7.

[12] Antoine-Joseph Gorsas, French politician and dissident, who in 1792, published a newspaper, the Courier, in connection with the French Revolution. See Hugh Gough, The Newspaper Press in the French Revolution (Chicago: Dorsey Press, 1988): 91.

[13] In a volume from Wordsworth’s library, Adam Sisman writes, “There is a marginal note where Gorsas is mentioned: ‘I knew this man. W. W.’” See Adam Sisman, The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge (New York: Penguin Viking, 2007): 58.

[14] Carlyle wrote of this part of the conversation: “He had been in France in the earlier or secondary stage of the Revolution; had witnessed the struggle of Girondins and Mountain, in particular the execution of Gorsas, ‘the first Deputy sent to the Scaffold,’ and testified strongly to the ominous feeling which that event produced in everybody, and of which he himself still seemed to retain something: ‘Where will it end, when you have set an example in this kind?’” Emphases are Carlyle’s. See Carlyle, Reminiscences: 303.

[15] In Reminiscences, Carlyle notes his surprise at Wordsworth’s details about the “ominous feeling which that event produced in everybody.” The passage reads: “I knew well about Gorsas; but had found, in my readings, no trace of the public emotion his death excited.” See Carlyle, Reminiscences: 303.

[16] See Carlyle, Reminiscences: 303.

[17] Gorsas was executed on October 7, 1793. See Kenneth Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998): 279.

[18] Several historical details in a row, here: In December 1792, French ships sailed the River Scheldt, a waterway shared by northern France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. In doing so, the Prussians deemed a British-Prussian treaty forbidding international trade in those waters violated, and the pressure on England to react to the French intensified. The French guillotined Louis XVI in January 1793. The French ambassador was dismissed, and the British government from then on considered itself at war with France. See Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years: 120.

[19] In another moment of license on my part, Wordsworth is thinking here about the harsh treatment by the British government of some reformist writers of the early 1790s, such as Thomas Paine, who was found guilty of seditious libel in 1792 for such monographs as The Rights of Man. He compares, in his mind, Paine’s lot to his own experience of dissidence, in the role of poet. See Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years: 118–119.

[20] Following his utterance about Gorsas, according to Carlyle, Wordsworth would say nothing more substantial about the story. They soon switched topics, Carlyle writes. See Carlyle, Reminiscences: 303.

[21] The story is set prior to Wordsworth’s birthday on April 7. He would turn 71 in the spring of 1841.

The 2015 Charter Oak Award for Best Historical
FINALIST

We are pleased to announce this piece as a finalist for the 2015 Charter Oak Award for Best Historical, honoring the independent press’ best writing on themes of historical people, places, events, objects, or ideas. The winners are selected by an external panel that judges all pieces blind and selects the full list of finalists from hundreds of entries. Alternating Current does not determine the final outcome for the judging; the external judges’ decisions are final.

JAMES O’BRIEN holds a PhD in Editorial Studies from the Editorial Institute at Boston University, where he researched and edited Bob Dylan’s other-than-song writings. He is engaged in a bibliography for Oxford University Press, covering writings about the filmmaker John Cassavetes. His journalism, short stories, and poetry are published in numerous journals and magazines. He lives in New York City, and you can find him at jamesobrien.cc.

Originally published on 9/23/15.

Gorsas’ Guillotine: A Nonfiction Narrative of Wordsworth and Carlyle was originally published in The Coil on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Poem by Luther Jett

You stand blocking
the doors to your palace
with mile-wide shoulders and
brass sleeves — knives
for smiles and guns for a handshake.

Grimacing, your mild voice thick
with venom, you say
it’s all been said that can be said.
And there are no new territories
to light out for, no eyelands
green, untrodden.

No entry is your password, no
regrets, you shrug, and turn your back.

But I am History,
with my frayed, damp cuffs,
my undimmed eye, my lonesome teeth.
And I will wait here by your door,
with my broken songs, unfinished,
waiting only to be written down.

And the stars
reel in their orbits round
some pole that neither you
nor I can reckon. Stranger!
Do not ask to know — 
the final line has not yet
been crossed.

The 2015 Charter Oak Award for Best Historical
FINALIST

We are pleased to announce this piece as a finalist for the 2015 Charter Oak Award for Best Historical, honoring the independent press’ best writing on themes of historical people, places, events, objects, or ideas. The winners are selected by an external panel that judges all pieces blind and selects the full list of finalists from hundreds of entries. Alternating Current does not determine the final outcome for the judging; the external judges’ decisions are final.

LUTHER JETT lives in Washington Grove, Maryland, and has recently completed his first novel. His poetry has been published in numerous journals, including The GW Review, ABRAXAS, Beltway, Innisfree, and Main Street Rag. His poetry performance piece, “Flying to America,” debuted at the 2009 Capital Fringe Festival in Washington, D.C. He was also a winner in the 2011 Moving Words Poetry Competition in Arlington, Virginia. Luther’s chapbook, Not Quite: Poems written in search of my father, was released by Finishing Line Press in fall, 2015. Find him at lutherjett.com.

Originally published on 10/30/15.

No Pasarán! was originally published in The Coil on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Poem by GennaRose Nethercott

When the bullet rippled through his forehead
to a picture frame on the opposite wall,
Jesse James did not die.

His body wilted to the ground
like a plucked & thirsty violet
while his horses scuffed hooves & rattled

teeth against bit — One may think those mares
would be fluent in the air of last breaths,
but when Jesse’s final lungful broke

from him & the horses pulled it as steam
through their muzzles, they tore from their hitching posts.
Black mane & muscle river-ran

across the plain, raising murders
of crows as they rioted through cornfields
until they shot straight out of Missouri.

Those crows, shaken from their feast
by the sprint of death, hung in the sky
for three full days & nights before returning

to earth. Yes, a bullet sounded,
& the outlaw Jesse James spread across the floor
both piercing & soft like morning snow.

But if the highway robber were truly killed, the way
his body was killed, the way only bodies can be killed,
we would not have these stories.

While Jesse James survived, Jesse Woodson James did not:
Confederate guerrilla, murderer of Union-supporters,
crooner of Confederate pride through public letters

& political burglary, cog in the great wheel
of abolitionist massacre. This namesake met death
for his head’s price, & he died there in the dust —

but from Jesse Woodson James rose Jesse James:
bandit, folk-villain, whisper, immortal
in the telling & retelling of his name.

Before the pistol cooled, James shuddered
into thousands of seeds, winged silver maple
that took to wind. Twisted across the land

until they spun downward, driving like screws
into the soil. There, they rooted, sprouted,
stretched skyward into thick-trunked legends.

Soon, Jesse James, once just a thief,
became a forest. What Bob Ford,
that trigger-happy fool, didn’t know

is that the quickest way to make a myth
is to kill a man.

The 2016 Charter Oak Award for Best Historical
FINALIST

We are pleased to announce this piece as a finalist for the 2016 Charter Oak Award for Best Historical, honoring the independent press’ best writing on themes of historical people, places, events, objects, or ideas. The winners are selected by an external panel that judges all pieces blind and selects the full list of finalists. Alternating Current does not determine the final outcome for the judging; the external judges’ decisions are final.

GENNAROSE NETHERCOTT is the author of The Lumberjack’s Dove (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2018), selected by Louise Glück as a winner of the National Poetry Series. Her other recent projects include A Ghost of Water (an ekphrastic collaboration with printmaker Susan Osgood) and the narrative song collection Modern Ballads. She tours nationally and internationally composing poems-to-order for strangers on a 1952 Hermes Rocket typewriter. GennaRose can be found at www.gennarosenethercott.com.

Originally published on 4/3/16.

The Death & Birth of Jesse James on April 3, 1882 was originally published in The Coil on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.