By Abram Shalom Himelstein, editor-in-chief
With poets, the process is always part of making the book. It’s rare that we get a Word document, and then it moves like the flow chart indicates, smoothly onto the page of a printed book. There are always detours, and usually the book is richer for those turns.
But with Moose, there is ramble as process. First there is the motorcycle arrival of Moose (Raymond Moose Jackson) carrying an old manila folder of pages that are typed. Followed by dog walks through the Carnival fog, both of us curmudgeonly avoiding an actual foot parade during COVID times. We are oldsters working on books about the joys of Carnival, and so we step onto the grass and glower at the costumed jubilants over our medical masks.
And, as luck would have it, I have taken to doing my own writing by candlelight after Simone’s bedtime is accomplished. So I slide Moose’s poems onto Simone’s homeschool spot, light the candles, and dive in. It feels corny to invest in the analog to this degree, but if I am being honest, it is also a relief to have something to hold and to sort by candlelight. And just as I start to laugh at myself, of course, a poem will capture me.
In the case of “the knickerbocker,” Moose’s meditation on friendship and aging, the words will grab me and not turn me loose, even all of these months later:
the knickerbocker for Sascha DuBrul riding north; the knickerbocker a rocker on the rails smooth sailing out upon the sunny hudson again enroute to rendezvous with you, old friend my rootstock, my seed-gatherer; your crazywise eyes, barrelchested hugs the shock of your hair still punk rock after all these years to see you here in the functioning land to feel your hand on my shoulder though we're getting older we remember the smell of madness together and apart to still be alive and still have hearts which beat fierce and true to the wild spirits which drove us out and beyond in the first place to have guardians of the memory of our former faces this is the treasure which cannot find its measure in our current currencies the economies of making a killin' might work for them white collar villains but we came here to make a livin' so rosin the bow and wash off the hoe cuz its farmer's night at the pub and the kids clean up real nice so as to rub elbows with the old guys while the grub keeps getting better and we now talk more about the weather than any semantics of our anarchy and when i think of all the antics we perpetrated on unsuspecting society i gotta laugh, gotta holler hooray for the riff-raff i hope all the new blackcollars learn to sing along, cuz its a long song and if you want to stay strong it takes a sense of humor i think i can safely say that we made it to this day because we were interested in much more than survival so many of our people never make this arrival go insane or fall off the train before it ever pulls into station we know our destination is and will still be a little further down the road, so what will we say to these greenhaired youngbloods treadin' in our old tracks, other than to make them deep and clear enough that they're intrigued to follow? even st. ignatius grew sagacious by the artful mimicry of holy heroes so do you suppose as this knickerbocker expresses by steam and whistles that it's ready again to be underway we can hope for tomorrow's seeds to sprout in these our fertile valleys?
Books Worth the Trees They're Printed On 