"Stalin's Fingers" & "3 in the Morning" were reprinted in Home Planet 24 as a tribute to Michael Parenti, who died earlier this year. Both poems first appeared in Exacting Clam (Spring 2024) thank you & subsequently in my topsy-turvy, two-books-in-one collection Ordinary Fish/Watt Worris.
When I first wrote "3 in the Morning" in the '90s, channel surfing was common among chronic insomniacs such as myself. Though I felt sure the idea behind it was sound, somehow the poem didn't quite click the way I thought it should or could, which is to say, not the way old remote controls were prone to do back in the day. Fast forward thirty years & voila! my current anti-captialist, post-punctuation, mind-liberating poetics allowed the lines to blend & blur, simulating the mental state of one listlessly flipping through random channels in TV's wee hours' dead zone.
Does anyone still go channel surfing? Nowadays you can find much more interesting things to watch on the internet, such as a Latin translation/rendition of David Bowie's "Heroes" & a Medieval-flavored reworking of Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire."
I dedicated "Stalin's Fingers" to Parenti, not only out of respect for his work, but also because his Blackshirts and Reds inspired me to write the poem, a fanciful re-imagining of a historic incident related in the section called "Stalin's Fingers," which I took as the title of my poem. Questioning the validity of the vastly differing, wildly varying estimates of Stalin's purges, Parenti writes,
In the absence of reliable evidence, we are fed anecdotes, such as
the story Winston Churchill tells of the time he asked Stalin how
many people died in the famine. According to Churchill, the Soviet
leader responded by raising both his hands, a gesture that may have
signified an unwillingness to broach the subject. But since Stalin
happened to have five fingers on each hand, Churchill concluded—
without benefit of a clarifying follow-up question—that Stalin was
confessing to ten million victims. Would the head of one state (espe-
cially the secretive Stalin) casually proffer such an admission to the
head of another? To this day, Western writers treat this woolly tale as
an ironclad confession of mass atrocities.
While Blackshirts and Reds is a good read, my favorite Parenti books are The Assassination of Julius Caesar; A People's History of Ancient Rome, & To Kill a Nation; The Attack on Yugoslavia, both of which I highly recommend, but hey, why not read all three? For that matter, why not read all his books?
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| The Harvesters, Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1565) |
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