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    Things Come On: An amneoir
    Things Come On: An amneoir
    Things Come On: An amneoir
    Ebook104 pages52 minutes

    Things Come On: An amneoir

    By Joseph Harrington

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    About this ebook

    Things Come On is a broken and sutured hybrid of forms, combining poetry, prose narration, primary documents, dramatic dialogue, and pictures. The narrative is woven around the almost exact concurrence of the Watergate scandal and the dates of the poet's mother's illness and death from breast cancer, and weaves together private and public tragedies—showing how the language of illness and of political cover-up powerfully resonate with one another. The resulting "amneoir" (a blend of "memoir" and "amnesia") explores a time for which the author must rely largely on testimony and documentary evidence—not unlike the Congress and the nation did during the same period. Absences, amnesia, and silences count for at least as much as words. As the double tragedy unfolds, it refuses to become part of an overarching system, metaphor, or metanarrative, but rather raises questions of memory and evidence, gender and genre, personal and political, and expert vs. lay language. This haunting experimental biography challenges our assumptions about the distance between individual experience and history. A reader's companion is available at http://thingscomeonreader.site.wesleyan.edu/

    Hardcover is un-jacketed.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWesleyan University Press
    Release dateJan 1, 2012
    ISBN9780819571366
    Things Come On: An amneoir

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      Book preview

      Things Come On - Joseph Harrington

      Things Come On

      Wesleyan Poetry

      Things Come On

      { an amneoir }

      Joseph Harrington

      WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS

      Middletown, Connecticut

      Wesleyan University Press

      Middletown CT 06459

      www.wesleyan.edu/wespress

      2011 © Joseph Harrington

      All rights reserved

      Manufactured in the United States of America

      Wesleyan University Press is a member of the Green Press Initiative. The paper used in this book meets their minimum requirement for recycled paper.

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

      5 4 3 2 1

      Dedicated to

      Elizabeth Peoples Harrington,

      and all others

      who have fought cancer,

      Nixon, or both.

      Contents

      Acknowledgments

      I. INVESTIGATION

      II. RESIGNATION

      Notes

      Acknowledgments

      I am very grateful to the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Kansas for a sabbatical semester, during which I completed the research for this book and for the others in a series about my mother’s life and times. I very much appreciate the interest and care of the editors of the journals in which portions of this work have appeared: David Lazar at Hotel Amerika; Andrew Rippeon at P-Queue; Chad Lietz & J.D. Mitchell of Cricket Online Review; and Charles Jensen at LOCUSPOINT.

      The author wishes to thank the following parties for their kind permission to quote the following texts:

      From The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde. Copyright © 1980, by Audre Lorde; 1997 by Aunt Lute Books. www.auntlute.com

      From Alternatives by Rose Kushner, by kind permission of Mr. Harvey Kushner.

      Illustration, page 14, from Burket, Walter C. (ed.), Surgical Papers by William Stewart Halsted: 1852–1922 (Plate L), reprinted with kind permission of the Johns Hopkins University Press.

      From Breast Cancer: A Challenging Problem, ed. M.l. Griem et al. Recent Results in Cancer Research 42 (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1973). Copyrighted © material from this volume used with kind permission of Springer Science+Business Media.

      Thanks also to all those who have read and suggested salubrious changes to this book (or parts of it), especially Susan M. Schultz, Rachel Loden, Judith Roitman, Megan Kaminski, Lyn Hejinian, Ben Lerner, Kevin Rabas, and an anonymous reviewer for Wesleyan University Press. I owe a deep dept of gratitude to Suzanna Tamminen, editor-in-chief at Wesleyan, for her sustained belief in this project, as well as for her editorial guidance.

      Most of all, mil gracias a MariaAna Garza, for all her emotional and editorial support over many years.                                                                            [ — BLJ]

      The sum total of our thoughts creates the world.

      Cecilia Vicuña

      The world is everything that happens to me.

      Jean-Michel Espitallier

      I prefer to say: I know that I am a human being,

      and I know that I have not understood the system.

      Søren Kierkegaard

      Things Come On

      Your Mother was a Perfect Southern Lady!

      Bubbly . . . very pleasant person to be around. Real cheerful, outgoing personality. Very good sense of humor. She got angry, though not frequently. She was a very feisty woman when she wanted to be. A redhead. She wasn’t what I’d call pretty, but you didn’t notice that, because her personality was so delightful. She wouldn’t stoop to sarcasm. Your mother was the quintessential southern lady. She was just a very genteel person. Just a very, very nice lady that anybody would like to be around. But she had a lot of personality and was not the type of person that anyone would walk over at all.

      She’s always cheerful and out-going. Did she ever express negative emotions to you? I ask. Oh, no. She was not at all a depressed person. Very upbeat person. Even when she was sick, she didn’t complain. No man wants a sicky wife, she’d said.

      My prosthesis I’d like to offer to the Cancer Soc. as it could sure help someone. Phyllis could do this for you. The size is on the Bra.

      — E

      I. INVESTIGATION

      A TRUE COPY

      [A]

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