My latest book, Under Albany, just arrived via UPS from the publisher, Salt. I would say that it looks beautiful, but that’s my face on the cover and it would be immodest. On the other hand, the book is beautiful. The thrill of a new book never gets old.

 

The book is a memoir constructed through the sentences of “Albany,” the first section of my poem The Alphabet. I’ve treated each sentence as tho it were a topic – as indeed most are – and written a short accompanying piece about each, ranging from a single sentence to several pages. One side benefit of this approach that I had not anticipated is that the “table of contents” feature on the Salt site is, literally, the poem “Albany”:

 

If the function of writing is to “express the world.” My father withheld child support, forcing my mother to live with her parents, my brother and I to be raised together in a small room. Grandfather called them niggers. I can’t afford an automobile. Far across the calm bay stood a complex of long yellow buildings, a prison. A line is the distance between. They circled the seafood restaurant, singing “We shall not be moved.” My turn to cook. It was hard to adjust my sleeping to those hours when the sun was up. The event was nothing like their report of it. How concerned was I over her failure to have orgasms? Mondale’s speech was drowned by jeers. Ye wretched. She introduces herself as a rape survivor. Yet his best friend was Hispanic. I decided not to escape to Canada. Revenue enhancement. Competition and spectacle, kinds of drugs. If it demonstrates form some people won’t read it. Television unifies conversation. Died in action. If a man is a player, he will have no job. Becoming prepared to live with less space. Live ammunition. Secondary boycott. My crime is parole violation. Now that the piecards have control. Rubin feared McClure would read Ghost Tantras at the teach-in. This form is the study group. The sparts are impeccable, though filled with deceit. A benefit reading. He seduced me. AFT, local 1352. Enslavement is permitted as punishment for crime. Her husband broke both of her eardrums. I used my grant to fix my teeth. They speak in Farsi at the corner store. YPSL. The national question. I look forward to old age with some excitement. 42 years for Fibreboard Products. Food is a weapon. Yet the sight of people making love is deeply moving. Music is essential. The cops wear shields that serve as masks. Her lungs heavy with asbestos. Two weeks too old to collect orphan’s benefits. A woman on the train asks Angela Davis for an autograph. You get read your Miranda. As if a correct line would somehow solve the future. They murdered his parents just to make the point. It’s not easy if your audience doesn’t identify as readers. Mastectomies are done by men. Our pets live at whim. Net income is down 13%. Those distant sirens down in the valley signal great hinges in the lives of strangers. A phone tree. The landlord’s control of terror is implicit. Not just a party but a culture. Copayment. He held the Magnum with both hands and ordered me to stop. The garden is a luxury (a civilization of snail and spider). They call their clubs batons. They call their committees clubs. Her friendships with women are different. Talking so much is oppressive. Outplacement. A shadowy locked facility using drugs and double-celling (a rest home). That was the Sunday Henry’s father murdered his wife on the front porch. If it demonstrates form they can’t read it. If it demonstrates mercy they have something worse in mind. Twice, carelessness has led to abortion. To own a basement. Nor is the sky any less constructed. The design of a department store is intended to leave you fragmented, off-balance. A lit drop. They photograph Habermas to hide the hairlip. The verb to be admits the assertion. The body is a prison, a garden. In kind. Client populations (cross the tundra). Off the books. The whole neighborhood is empty in the daytime. Children form lines at the end of each recess. Eminent domain. Rotating chair. The history of Poland in 90 seconds. Flaming pintos. There is no such place as the economy, the self. That bird demonstrates the sky. Our home, we were told, had been broken, but who were these people we lived with? Clubbed in the stomach, she miscarried. There were bayonets on campus, cows in India, people shoplifting books. I just want to make it to lunch time. Uncritical of nationalist movements in the Third World. Letting the dishes sit for a week. Macho culture of convicts. With a shotgun and “in defense” the officer shot him in the face. Here, for a moment, we are joined. The want-ads lie strewn on the table.

 

Because “Albany” was written fairly close to my starting of the project of The Alphabet – tho not actually right at the beginning – the topics it generates tend to reflect a relatively young Ron Silliman, for the most part up to the age of 32. When I reread ”Albany” itself – and I’ve been doing so in readings of late – I’m struck at its crisp, even clipped tone. I don’t think I heard that exactly when first scribing these lines. Here is a sample of what lies “under” just one of those phrases:

 

Her lungs heavy with asbestos.

 

Evelyn Schaaf was short, heavy, almost always angry and abrasive. She also had a quick sense of humor and the second loudest laugh in the world. Her husband, Valmar, a civil engineer who financed her political activities and usually served as the president of the board of whatever nonprofit they were running at the time, still liked to identify himself as a “union thug.” His laugh is louder.*

 

When, over the phone, I’d first asked her what CPHJ was, she laughed and responded “Two fat ladies!” In fact, there was a core of around a dozen volunteers, most of them older women, all but two widowed or divorced, who’d been galvanized around the death in San Quentin of a young man by the name of Fred Billingslea, an African American who’d suffered a psychotic break in prison—not such an unusual occurrence—and had been screaming in his cell, smearing feces on the wall until the guards came up and fired tear gas canisters into it with shotguns. One canister hit him in the throat and he went down instantly. They moved him unconscious to the prison hospital by dragging him down several flights of stairs by his ankle, his head hitting the concrete and metal steps again and again.

 

What made CPHJ possible as “alternative military service” was the presence of certain names on the letter head, U.S. Senator John Tunney, plus Congressmen Leo Ryan and Ron Dellums.

 

My first day on the job, I opened perhaps a hundred letters that had come in the mail from different prisoners, their friends and family, learning the complex code by which these letters were used to document complaints, problems, practices. At the end of the day, I was given a key to the office and told to open it up the next morning and start with the mail as soon as it arrived. But when I got to the office on the second floor of an old legal building on Fourth Street in San Rafael across from the absent original civic center, a nervous man in his mid-forties was literally cowering in the doorway. He was, he said, an escaped prisoner, at least technically. He’d been released to a halfway house at the edge of San Quentin to work for a few months prior to his parole and had obtained work in a local body shop. The boss, thinking he was doing the man a favor, told no one on the staff of the man’s situation and one of the administrative workers had invited him home, first for dinner and then to spend the night. After several years away from even the sight of women, the offer proved impossible to decline. But now, with dawn, he realized he’d be reported missing and that the police would be looking for him. “Escape” in those days tended to carry a five-year term.

 

I opened the office, let him in (I was probably harboring a fugitive), then called Evelyn at home, who suggested a lawyer to call. I did, explaining the situation, and he agreed to phone the prison and arrange a “surrender” if they would agree not to prosecute. They consented and all that remained was to transport the man to the lawyer’s office without him getting picked up or arrested in the mean time. So I walked down the hall to the office of Sally Soladay, another lawyer who had been instrumental in the formation of CPHJ (she was the lawyer handling the Billingslea wrongful death action for his family), explaining the circumstances all over again and they agreed that a lawyer should act as his chauffeur. One did. This was my second morning on the job.

 

 

* In the late ‘40s, when it was already apparent just how debased the Communist Party had become, Ev and Val been infatuated with Mao, some of whose ideas still wafted through the air of the office, the entire idea of a project of recreating consciousness, “socialist man.” By 1971, when I first met her, they’d decided to focus specifically on local issues and had spent most of the previous decade running the United Farm Worker support organization in Marin County. They’d met sometime around, perhaps during, the Oakland general strike in the 1940s. She’d spent the war “double-bottoming” boats with asbestos insulation, protecting them in theory from torpedoes.