Image Credit: Susan Bee, Alphabet of the Trees, 2012, 20″ x 24″, oil on canvas. Collection: Ruth Lepson
Shields Green* (1836-1859)
The life lives after the life As a seed is a void in the world-as-is Opening paths to worlds-could-be. If and as, where and when, remains Sewn into the Heavenly Garment Of the Unknown, halfway between there And hereafter, lodged in an either Of times’ remorseless ether (Concoctions and fever). Justice is never abstract but we Abstract it at mineral peril, against Bodies laid waste in the pillage –– Hope’s desperate pilgrimage.
*A poem is not a monument, but my nomination for an American hero worthy of commendation is Shields Green. Green, who had liberated himself from slavery, was 23 in 1859 when he was executed by the Commonwealth of Virginia as a result of his participation in the armed struggle against slavery led by John Brown. Green had met Brown at the home of Frederick Douglass. While Douglass declined to join Brown, he reports that Green said, “I b’leve I’ll go wid de ole man.”; Douglass continued: “Shields Green was not one to shrink from hardships or dangers. He was a man of few words, and his speech was singularly broken; but his courage and self-respect made him quite a dignified character.” Douglass also reported that rather than escape capture after Harpers Ferry, “he simply said he must go down to de ole man.” In an article on Green’s trial, Steven Lubet notes that Green’s lawyer successfully argued that Dred Scott (decided just two years earlier) established that Green could not be charged with treason since he was not an enfranchised citizen who owed allegiance to the state. Denied the vote, Green had no obligation to be loyal to Virginia or to the U.S. With the treason charge thrown out, Green was convicted of murder and conspiracy. After the hanging, Green’s body was seized for defilement by dissection by medical students from Winchester, VA. Lubet reports that six years later the town of Oberlin created a memorial to Green and two other Brown freedom fighters from Oberlin. “These colored citizens of Oberlin,” the inscription reads, “the heroic associates of the immortal John Brown, gave their lives for the slave. Et nunc servitudo etiam mortua est, laus deo.”
Frederick Douglas. The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Hartford: Park Publishing, 1882), pp. 187-192 Steven Lubet, “Execution in Virginia, 1859: The Trials of Green and Copeland” (2012). Faculty Working Papers. Paper 209. http://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/facultyworkingpapers/209, pp. 11-12, 25-26
Charles Bernstein, Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature (emeritus), taught poetry and poetics, with an emphasis on modernist and contemporary art, aesthetics, and performance. His web CV links to poems, essays, and books. He retired from Penn on June 30, 2019.
Bernstein has published five collections of essays — Pitch of Poetry (Chicago, 2016), Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions (Chicago, 2011), My Way: Speeches and Poems (Chicago, 1999), A Poetics (Harvard, 1992), and Content’s Dream: Essays 1975-1984. His books of poetry include Near/Miss (Oct. 2018), Recalculating (Chicago, 2013), All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Girly Man (Chicago, 2006), With Strings (Chicago, 2001), and Republics of Reality: 1975 – 1995 (Sun & Moon, 2000). His libretto Shadowtime, for composer Brian Ferneyhough, was published in 2005 by Green Integer; it was performed as part of the 2005 Lincoln Center Festival. Bernstein is the editor of several collections, including: American Poetry after 1975 (Duke University Press / special issue of boundary, 2009), Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word (Oxford, 1999), The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy (Roof, 1990), and the poetics magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, whose first issue was published in 1978. He is editor of the Electronic Poetry Center and co-director (with Al Flireis) of PennSound.
He has collaborated with painters Susan Bee, Mimi Gross, Amy Sillman, Francie Shaw, and Richard Tuttle on several artist’s books and projects. In 2001, he curated Poetry Plastique, with Jay Sanders, a show of visual and sculptural poetry at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York. He has written libretti for Ben Yarmolinsky, Anne LeBarron, Dean Drummond, and Feryneyhough.
Bernstein, who was born in 1950, grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and attended the Bronx High School of Science. He graduated from Harvard College, after which he worked for many years as a freelance medical/healthcare writer. From 1989 to 2003, he taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he was co-founder and Director of the Poetics Program and a SUNY Distinguished Professor. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and of the Roy Harvey Pearce/Archive for New Poetry Prize of the University of California, San Diego; for lifetime contribution to poetry and scholarship. In 2006 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2015 he was awarded the Münster Prize for International Poetry and the Janus Pannnious Grand Prize for Poetry. In 2019, he received the Bollingen Prize for American Poetry, for lifetime achievement and Near/Miss.
