Cornelius Eady, judge of the 2012 Marsh Hawk Press Prize and prize winner Jason McCall

The poems in Jason McCall’s Dear Hero, are sometimes apostrophes to heroes, if not epistolary gestures, but often reflect on why a hero is “dear” or not dear (or dear enough) to people. Uses of heroism itself can be dearer than a specific figure, as when the title “Hero Wanted” is followed by: “Because we don’t want our children/ To dream of being us.” When he ends the poem with the hope that “heaven cares enough/ to save us from ourselves,” Human pathology and incompetence, Mr. McCall suggests, call forth heroism as their antidote.
     One salient irony in the book— pointedly reflecting how the U.S. has generally treated its veterans in poems like “Furlough for Non-Deified Heroes” and “Termination Procedures for Excess Heroes”—is that heroes are often treated badly.“Job Description for Potential Hero Applicants” cautions the applicants—just in case there are any of you here in the audience who want an interview from Jason—that “it’s temp work, really, no benefits/ or schedules.” Such a temp is not “consulted on… decisions” with momentous consequences “but we expect you to respond to them immediately.” “Homecoming” pres ents us with an Odysseus who has technically reached home but is still psychologically awaiting his own arrival.
     The poet also demystifies the idea that heroes’ virtues constitute their essence and that their negative traits are merely secondary, incidental. In “Plea of Hercules,” one of the most celebrated heroes tells us of his own extremely violent impulses, which could be turned against the very people he would be expected to protect. Further, some heroes in the book seem to perceive their vulnerability—really, their mortality—as much larger factors than their monumental feats of strength and courage. McCall’s Hector complains of the gods’ cruelty and concludes: “When the earth moves/ against us, we can only charge/ forward and hope/ to leave a brave name.” Later in the book, “Hector Reenlists,” and he seems eerily similar to our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan who fulfill what they perceive as a duty without really believing in the wisdom of their country’s cause. Even Odysseus in “Odysseus Gives His Debriefing” asserts, “the gods don’t answer us, either.”
     Various poems include the word “Sidekick,” and they remind us that the hero is not an autonomous individual. Recognition of heroism is socially constituted by PR agents, friends, and followers, as in “Sidekick’s Creed” and the “Sidekick Funerals,” especially the one for John the Baptist, in which Jesus’ sidekick, declares the poet, “made sure the message pumped/ through every speaker in heaven, hell, and earth.” Another “sidekick” is Stonewall Jackson who “had to die for the dream to live”; it’s a dream of white supremacism ironized by a contemporary African-American author.
     And the discourse of race in the U.S. and its material implications are skillfully addressed in such poems as “What a Dying Race Leaves Behind,” which poignantly asks, “Why do black kids bother to dream/ so big?” and finds an answer in “the rejection/ of… earthly laws”—the causal structures of institutional racism. “Because Black Kids Can Read// Comics Too” addresses tokenism in the world of comics, and “I Hate Batman” signifies lucidly on Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s celebrated “I Wear the Mask.”
     Jason McCall teaches at the University of Alabama. His prior collections include Silver (Main Street Rag) and I Can Explain (Finishing Line Press). His poetry has appeared in Cimarron Review, The Los Angeles Review, Mythic Delirium, New Letters, Poems & Plays, and other journals. And now… for the New York debut of Jason McCall.

Many thanks as always to Poets House for being here – and to the staff, Lee, Jane, Stephen and all – our allies in poetry. It is a pleasure to be here to celebrate as Marsh Hawk Press finishes its twelfth year with more than 70 books. of poetry in print.
     I am very happy to be able to introduce the award-winning poet from San Francisco. California, Susan Terris. She has six full-length books of poetry, twelve chapbooks, three artists’ books, more prizes and awards than can be listed here, and she has a career as an editor and teacher of writing as well. Marsh Hawk published her collection, Natural Defenses, in 2004 and this year Ghost of Yesterday, her new and selected poems, from which she will be reading this evening.
     I want to say a few words about these poems: their titles, themes and style, interrelated of course. Susan Terris has a gift for titles that are unassuming, provocative, drawing one into the book or the poem, for example, Curved Space and The Homelessness of Self. The title of this new collection, Ghost of Yesterday, also evokes recognition in ourselves. Yes, of course, we assent, yesterday is a ghost that haunts our inner landscapes. We are similarly alerted by The title of Terris’s previous Marsh Hawk book, Natural Defenses. Its title poem begins: “I never mastered the art/ of protection,” and we recall those times we didn’t defend ourselves when we should have.
     The subtly simple language of the titles continues in the texts where the direct imagistic approach and condensery – to use a Lorine Niedecker expression -- gives equal word-power to dreams and everyday experience – “the natural object is always the adequate symbol,” said Ezra Pound. Thus for Terris the stink of a boxcar in a Holocaust museum is a present reality that brings to life those dead “begging for refuge, those who would not have been spared,/my children, my sister’s Mischling children.” 
     The consciousness of linguistic word-power characterizes the new poems, written in pairs with titles that use and reverse common expressions: “Push & Pull,” “Pull & Push,” “Cock & Bull,” “Bull & Cock,” “Double or Nothing,” “Nothing or Double” that open up with perceptive wit, poignancy and irony the permutation of family relationships, the multiple ghosts of the past that, shimmering and vital, live today in a new, human concrete life.
     I like these poems so much. Let’s hear them. Please welcome Susan Terris.