“Smugglers, Bootleggers, and Scofflaws”

Ellen NicKenzie Lawson

Excelsior Editions, $19.95

    It was near midnight on Jan. 16, 1920, and at the Park Avenue Hotel in New York, waiters and patrons were dressed in all black and drank liquor from black glasses. Let Ellen NicKenzie Lawson take it from there: “At midnight the ballroom was darkened and a spotlight focused on two couples ceremoniously taking a black bottle from an open coffin in the center of the room, pouring out the last drops, and holding black handkerchiefs to their faces to wipe away tears.”  

    And so descended the Great Experiment, the 18th Amendment, Prohibition. As Ms. Lawson points out in her new book from Excelsior Editions of the SUNY Press, “Smugglers, Bootleggers, and Scofflaws,” historians are often “merely amused that Prohibition ever existed, embarrassed that the Amendment was ratified, appalled that it gave a boost to organized crime, and relieved that it was repealed.”

    But what a rich trove for someone with a nose to find it. In neglected Coast Guard records in the National Archives, Ms. Lawson found not only documents and manifests but photos, including mug shots of captured gangsters and smugglers, maps, and nautical charts, among them one showing the locations of the supply ship Mazel Tov over the course of an entire year in what came to be known as Rum Row, southeast of Nantucket and Long Island, where liquor supply ships from Germany to Cuba stationed 12 miles offshore, outside the legal limit, waiting to run their lucrative errands to New York City.

    Ah, Babylon-on-the-Hudson, Satan’s Seat, the biggest, unrepentantly wettest city in the nation, and its largest liquor market. For Ms. Lawson the city is the booze-happy center of gravity around which circles the Prohibition era’s most significant criminal activity, enterprising importers, creative rumrunners, gunsels, pirates, and dogged G-men.

    And far out in that orbit, the rocky promontory that is Montauk came to be “a paradise for smugglers given its extensive coastal area and proximity to Rum Row.” Locals with intimate knowledge of the beaches and inlets were recruited to expedite the cargo to shore, where trucks with gangsters “riding shotgun” would haul it in nighttime convoys to New York.

    Montauk saw a fair amount of gunplay — the first Coast Guard fatality of the Rum Wars was one result — and no end of watery chases. Vessels were rammed, went aground on Shagwong Reef, were torched, and one took 25 rounds of Coast Guard gunfire. A “fishing launch” seized off Culloden Point led an official to wonder, “What fish needs 800 horsepower to catch it?” Capt. John Hayes of Montauk was stopped at the helm of what had been a World War I American Red Cross yacht carrying 4,000 cases of whiskey.

    In some instances, cases of liquor were tossed overboard to float for later pickup, or for retrieval from the bottom by hired divers. Thirsty locals could reap a bounty, too. After a Nova Scotia schooner went aground near Blackfish Rock, couples returning from a night out at a restaurant on Fort Pond Bay came upon hundreds of jettisoned bags of liquor bottles on the beach and soon found themselves fired upon by coast guardsmen. A group of men including Lennan Edwards and William Young returned at dawn with clam rakes, eel spears, and nets to retrieve the contraband liquor and were greeted by further volleys of bullets from Coast Guard vessels out of New London, leading the Suffolk County district attorney to lodge an official protest and complain to reporters.

    It was, curiously, just one of a number of instances in which the coast guardsmen were the ones with the itchy trigger fingers, while the bootleggers were reluctant to return fire, employed, as the were, “to deliver liquor and not kill or die for it,” in Ms. Lawson’s words.

    With the local police happy to be paid to look the other way, the liquor flowed. By the end of Prohibition, a syndicate run by T. Budd King and Emerson Tabor moved 10,000 cases a month between Montauk and Southampton, where scores of longshoremen were known to operate, with trucks stationed behind dunes and horse-drawn wagons waiting surfside.

    Ms. Lawson places Prohibition within the tradition of the Progressive movement around the turn of the 20th century, which ended child labor, led to the regulation of food and drugs, and gave women the vote. The 18th Amendment was also the product of an America that was majority rural at the time of its passage and suspicious of cities. By the time of its repeal, at the end of 1933, however, the country had turned majority urban, with more immigrants and diversity and less of a belief in social engineering as the answer to the scourge of alcoholism.

    The spirit of the scofflaw dates to the nation’s founding, of course, but what’s more, the “centrality of liquor” here, Ms. Lawson writes, can even be traced to the Pilgrims and their landing at Massachusetts because the shipboard supply of beer ran out.

    And Manhattan, the center of those 14 years of alcohol-fueled gangland mischief? The resident American Indians had a name for it, once Europeans had started settling there: Manahactanienk, the “place of general inebriation.”

    ’Twas ever thus.

    Ellen NicKenzie Lawson is the editor of “The Three Sarahs: Documents of Antebellum Black College Women.” She lives in Loveland, Colo.

    Russia’s gone blooey? Call in an expert.

    Masha Gessen, a Russian-American who blogs about that country’s culture and politics for The New York Times’s website, will try to make some sense of the turmoil when she speaks at the Stony Brook Southampton campus for the Writers Speak series Wednesday night.

    Want to learn more about human rights abuses and the jailing of the band Pussy Riot? Ms. Gessen has just released the book “Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot,” which she will read from starting at 7 p.m. What’s more, she co-edited “Gay Propaganda: Russian Love Stories” in answer to the pre-Sochi Olympics anti-homosexual measures in Russia.

    Anxious about the annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and curious about the psychology of the man behind it? In 2012 Ms. Gessen published “The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin.”

    Dan Menaker, a professor at the college and formerly an editor at The New Yorker, will interview her about all that and more. It happens in the Radio Lounge, upstairs in Chancellors Hall.

“The Cool School”

Edited by Glenn O’Brien

Library of America, $27.95

     It’s early in 2014, but I’m already throwing in my bid for most rankling title of the year with “The Cool School: Writing From America’s Hip Underground.” It takes a special kind of hubris to declare oneself an arbiter of cool and hip, never mind the naiveté to ignore the effects of years of irony on these words, mangled as they are now to the point of near incomprehension.

    “Hip,” as most of us know, has more likely become the idiom of advertising rather than modern parlance, and, arguably, is just as often used as a term of derogation and satire than as a compliment: “Tragically hip” being one example, along with the Brooklyn “hipsters” who work in finance or for dot-coms during the day and don fedoras by night, as if bohemianism were just six ounces of apparel away.

    What a relief it is then to open this volume, edited by Glenn O’Brien, a Rolling Stone writer, and see that the editor is hip to the irony, as evidenced by his superlative introduction. “The scary thing about this project is that you begin to realize that the underground as we used to know it doesn’t exist anymore except in our nostalgia for it,” writes Mr. O’Brien. “Marketing has simply turned the forbidden, the underground, the enemy even, into something marketable.” No one is hip when everyone is; it’s just another demographic.

    So what was hip, back in the day? There has never really been a satisfying answer to this. Generally it is agreed that hip came out of the lingo and lifestyles of the black jazz musicians of the late 1940s, spilling over from the clubs into white culture. This begot the Beats, the white embodiment of hip: creative, anti-corporate, impulsive, promiscuous, sometimes gay, often high; the living antidote to the staid ’50s.

    Included in “The Cool School” is an excerpt from Norman Mailer’s difficult but quintessential 1957 essay on hip titled “The White Negro.” Mr. O’Brien summarizes it aptly: “Mailer’s hipster is a white man who removes himself from the culture because of existential dread. Dread from the A-bomb’s threat of mass extinction or the corporate world’s mass identity extinction.” Mailer’s essay is even more specific: “One is Hip or one is Square . . . one is a rebel or one conforms, one is a frontiersman in the Wild West of American night life, or else a Square cell, doomed willy-nilly to conform if one is to succeed.”

    How quaint this all seems — at least from a contemporary perspective, where the consumer culture flatters us that we are all cool, or just a car lease away from unleashing the rebel inside us. So indeed “The Cool School” is a nostalgia tour, with most of the selections here 50 years old or more. There are omissions — Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” being the most glaring — but the writing featured here is mostly very good and tastefully chosen. There’s a heavy emphasis on the legacy of jazz, of course, with excerpts from the autobiographies of Miles Davis and Art Pepper, the latter especially searing in his self-laceration, as well as an interview with Lester Young.

    The Beats, of course, get their turn, with a particularly paranoid selection from William S. Burroughs’s “Nova Express”; a letter from Neal Cassady to Jack Kerouac (“I’m sitting in a bar on Market Street. I’m drunk, well, not quite, but soon I will be”), and Joyce Johnson’s forlorn memory of Kerouac in “Minor Characters.” There is the funny and sad poem “Marriage” by Gregory Corso (“Should I get married? / Should I be good?”), and Kerouac himself in an article for Playboy, trying to explain exactly what Beat “means,” and growing pugnacious in the process: “But yet, but yet, woe, woe unto those who think that the Beat Generation means crime, delinquency, immorality, amorality . . . woe unto those who are the standard bearers of death, woe unto those who believe in conflict and horror and death and fill our books and screens and living rooms with that crap. . . .” Too late for that, Jack.

    The writers with ties to the East End fair less well. A sweet but minor poem from Frank O’Hara, “The Day Lady Died,” announces he will “go get a shoeshine / because I will get off the 4:19 from East Hampton / at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner / and I don’t know the people who will feed me.” There’s a section from Andy Warhol’s forgettable “a: a novel,” and the pages from David G. Rattray’s “How I Became One of the Invisible” hits that “On the Road” vibe it strives for, but fails to offer anything fresh or distinguished.

    By the chronological end of “The Cool School,” the quality of the selections grows more inconsistent. The anger in the poems of Emily XYZ may bear some relation to hip, but that doesn’t necessarily make them any good, and Eric Bogosian’s excerpt from “Pounding Nails in the Floor With My Forehead” works better as a performance (which was its origin) than as a piece of prose.

    Perhaps it isn’t surprising that by 1990 Mr. O’Brien strains to find writing that fits his collection. The very idea of a “hip underground” implies rebellion, but how to rebel when everything is permissible? In Kerouac’s Playboy essay he argues, “. . . America must, will, is, changing now, and for the better I say.” That was 1959. We now live in an age of gay marriage, legalization of marijuana, and a black president. The culture war is over: The hipsters won. Whether we’re better off is debatable.

    What’s not debatable is that it was the artists who were on the front lines of that war, and many of the most prominent are well featured in “The Cool School.” It’s a legacy worth remembering.

    Kurt Wenzel’s novels include his 2001 debut, “Lit Life,” and, more recently, “Exposure.” He lives in Springs.

“Leaving China”

James McMullan

Algonquin, $19.95

    Before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941 and so entered World War II, war had been raging between China and Japan for four years. In 1937, long-simmering tensions burst into warfare, as the Japanese rapidly occupied large swaths of China. One family’s life in that time and place is revealed to beautiful effect in James McMullan’s graphic memoir, “Leaving China.”

    In full-page watercolor paintings, each matched with a brief elucidation of some moment of the author’s childhood, frequently placed in historical context, that world is brought to life in lovely, poetic detail. Though the book is aimed at young readers, one wonders if it won’t appeal even more to adults interested in this period of history and in the emotional development of a young artist.

    Mr. McMullan’s family began its Chinese sojourn as missionaries. His Irish grandfather and British grandmother met in Yangchow in 1887, when both had come to work with the China Inland Mission, a Protestant missionary group. They settled in Cheefoo, a northern port city, where they encountered dire poverty and widespread female infanticide. Devoting themselves to the cause of saving the babies regularly abandoned in a cemetery tower nearby, they eventually founded an orphanage.

    As the fortunes of Cheefoo improved, fewer babies were abandoned, and the McMullans turned their attention to establishing an embroidery school, where the girls learned to make lace and embroider the local silk and cotton. Their efforts were so successful that these girls — English-speaking, Christian, and trained in a craft — became more valued in the marriage market than girls who had been raised by their own families. The James McMullan Company exported the lace and embroidery made by the girls.

    Alongside this business venture, the McMullans founded their own missionary organization, the Cheefoo Industrial Mission. The pair’s four children — among them the author’s father — would continue both the evangelical and the business strains of their parents’ accomplishments, making a comfortable life for their own families in Cheefoo.

    Mr. McMullan offers a rare and fascinating glimpse into expatriate life in the prewar China of his earliest childhood. Describing his musician father playing songs from “Anything Goes,” he tells his reader, “Those popular songs and movies influenced much of what my father and mother wore, what they drank, and how they arranged their social life. It was for them a special connection (and a style tutorial) to that fabulous world very far away from Cheefoo.”

    This stylish expatriate life is pictured in gorgeous watercolors, where purple shadows fall from majestic porches, his young mother selects flowers from the garden in a pink gown, and his father stages musicals at the community theater, chorus girls lined up beneath the stage.

    The McMullans held luncheons in a cottage overlooking the ocean, took part in endless balls, dressed up for costume parties. This social whirl stood in contrast to the austere missionary life Mr. McMullan’s grandparents had come to Cheefoo to lead, and he tells us, “Occasionally, I would overhear my father proclaiming that they must stop all this partygoing and lead more Christian lives.”

    It was, of course, not their moral rigor but the war that ended the partygoing and set the author’s life on a new path. When the British Consulate instructed British citizens to leave in 1941, the family quickly lost its wealth and James and his mother embarked on a peripatetic life, while his father joined the British Army to fight for the Chinese. Moving from Shanghai to San Francisco to Seattle to Vancouver to a family home in the Gulf Islands off the western coast of Canada, as Mr. McMullan tells it, “My mother and I were now wanderers, not yet attached to any particular place and without any clear destination.”

    The story is captivating enough, but Mr. McMullan brings to it the dreamlike sheen of childhood memory, infusing these long-past events with the glow of lost time and the bittersweet taste of a long-ago family pulled apart by war, but also by the emotional push and pull that animates all families. James and his mother both are haunted by the fear that they will disappoint his father, a war hero. Sadly, their fears seem justified. The young McMullan is nervous, not masculine enough to please a father who barks, “Oh, for God’s sakes, be a man!” at his 10-year-old son, who cries as his parents leave him at his new boarding school in India.

    The emotional divide between father and son, and the artistic son’s anxiety as he realizes that he will not be the kind of man his father wants him to be, is beautifully illustrated in the watercolors. In the early years in Cheefoo, we see the father playing piano while his son plays with toys on the floor. They occupy opposite ends of the room, separated by stark lines of rug and light, and they don’t look at each other, each absorbed in his own activity.

    This distance would never be crossed; Mr. McMullan’s father was killed in a plane crash a month after the end of the war. Some of the most evocative writing describes Mr. McMullan’s complicated feelings in the wake of his father’s death.

    The loveliest moments of the narrative — both verbal and visual — are those where we step away from the historical framework and enter the pure sensorial memory of childhood. We might glimpse the young artist’s perceptions as he describes “that moment when the sun coming through the tall windows would be carved into clear rectangles on the carpet into which I could steer my trucks and cars as if they were entering a city of light.”

    Or we might hear of darker times in Cheefoo under Japanese control, in which the young McMullan hears Japanese soldiers running outside at night — again we get the dreamlike consciousness of the child: “I lay in bed listening to this ominous percussion and imagining many of the bad things my parents had assured me were never going to happen.”

    Or, at another moment his enchantment with his aunt’s beautiful house on Salt Spring Island, as he recognizes “how much comfort I found in the intelligence of my visual surroundings.” There are many moments of such simple beauty, and a reader can spend hours exploring the watercolors that so powerfully convey these childhood fears and early glimmerings of artistic leanings.

    Those leanings would eventually take the shape of a very successful career, one in which Mr. McMullan, a Sag Harbor resident, has illustrated posters for Lincoln Center musicals (including “Anything Goes,” which his parents so loved in Cheefoo), a New York magazine piece on 1970s discos in Brooklyn that would inspire the movie “Saturday Night Fever,” book jackets that continue to turn up on bookstore shelves, and popular picture books written by his wife, Kate McMullan.

    Mr. McMullan has said that it was only recently, in his 70s, that “I began to recognize and accept how much my boyhood self is a large part of who I am today, and how much his anxieties and enthusiasms are the underground river always bubbling up in the tone of what I draw and paint.”

    Readers should be glad that he did come to this realization, and that he chose to share it in the breathtaking form of “Leaving China.”

    Sasha Watson is the author of “Vidalia in Paris,” a young-adult novel. A onetime reporter at The Star, she lives in Los Angeles and has a family house on North Haven.

    Styron fans, prepare for an insider’s view: Alexandra Styron will be the first to the lectern for the spring’s Writers Speak series at Stony Brook Southampton on Wednesday with “Reading My Father,” her recent book about her relationship with William Styron, who died in 2006. The free event starts at 7 p.m., upstairs in Chancellors Hall’s Radio Lounge. Ms. Styron is the author of a novel, “All the Finest Girls,” and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and elsewhere.

    The series continues on March 5 with the poet Susan Wheeler and, on March 12, with Megan Abbott, a crime novelist. On April 2, the college’s Dan Menaker will interview Masha Gessen, a journalist and activist for sexual minorities. April 9 brings Mark Epstein, a psychiatrist who writes about Buddhism, and on April 30 it’ll be Dinah Lenney, who that month will be coming out with a new collection of interconnected essays, “The Object Parade.”

    Students in the M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature will read from their work on May 7.

“The Heart Of

Everything That Is”

Bob Drury and Tom Clavin

Simon and Schuster, $30

    “The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, an American Legend” is an inspired achievement. The authors Bob Drury and Tom Clavin have dug deep into contemporaneous newspaper stories, eyewitness accounts, military records, and a long-lost autobiography dictated by Red Cloud, “the only American Indian in history to defeat the United States Army in a war, forcing the government to sue for peace on his terms.”

    The Sioux warrior’s accomplishment puts Custer’s subsequent last stand in perspective — a military victory, for sure, but one made possible through Red Cloud’s leadership, intertribal diplomacy, and military strategy, all of which broke from longstanding Indian tradition.

    The Battle of Little Big Horn followed by a year the Battle-of-the-Hundred-in-the-Hands (the name coined by a hermaphrodite seer), during which a combined force of Lakota, Oglalas, Brules, Miniconjous, and Sans Arcs Sioux joined with their former enemies — Cheyenne, Arapaho, Nez Perce, and Shoshones — to massacre 81 soldiers they had drawn out of Fort Phil Kearny in northern Wyoming in June of 1866.

    The fort was meant to protect gold miners, white hunters, and settlers heading west on the Bozeman Trail. The Bozeman was a northern extension of the Oregon Trail and wound through prime Sioux hunting ground. And, it abutted the Black Hills of South Dakota, the Sioux’s sacred Paha Sapa, the heart of everything that is.

    The depth of research and page-turning strength of narrative bring the reader back in time to take the Hollywood out of the picture and give an unflinching portrait of Indians and whites alike. For the Sioux, Paha Sapa was heaven on earth at the time, or close to it: buffalo as far as the eye could see, fresh streams from mountain snowmelt, cool forests, oceans of grassland, fish and game abounding.

    The authors point out that while Sioux culture possessed what might today be thought of as a higher consciousness about their relationship to their environment, it did not extend to a willingness to share it. The Sioux and most of the Plains Indians at the time were warriors who put great store in protecting their territories, and in the process killing, torturing, and humiliating their enemies — other tribes and white settlers — before, during, and after death.

    “The Indians are desperate; I spare none, and they spare none,” Col. Henry Beebee Carrington wrote in a dispatch he knew might not make it to the telegraph at Fort Laramie to the south. He was begging for reinforcements after realizing that nearly all of Fort Phil Kearny’s defenders — they had been suckered out to fight Crazy Horse and over 1,000 Indians — would not be coming back, or would be brought back, “like hogs brought to market,” scalped, disemboweled, beheaded, gelded, and sodomized with spears.

    In the final minutes of the battle, “Captain Brown was still standing, surrounded by an orgy of butchery . . . [he] had one cartridge left in his revolver. He put the barrel to his temple and pulled the trigger.” The Sioux were playing for keeps.

    It is the authors’ explanation of why the Sioux were playing for keeps that is most enlightening, reasons that meant virtually nothing to people back East, especially in the wake of the Civil War. Was it any wonder that Gen. Phil Sheridan, who took the scorched-earth approach during the Civil War — and who coined the expression “the only good Indian is a dead Indian” — was chosen to push the Sioux onto a reservation after gold was discovered in Dakota’s Black Hills, right in “the heart of everything that is”?

    In addition to the scholarship that went into this book, the authors should be hailed for their careful description of the times. These were hard, tough people, Indians, soldiers, and settlers alike. We meet buffalo hunters and mountain men like James, Old Gabe, and Bridger, half-breed scouts and translators, cowboys, mule skinners, and Crazy Horse, whose daring rides appeared as though he possessed supernatural immunity to bullets. We meet Young-Man-Afraid-of-His-Horses and the Cheyenne Dull Knife.

    And, of course Red Cloud, who began life as a hot-tempered orphan but who was able to rise through the hierarchy of Sioux and intertribal leadership by way of his intellect rather than brute force alone. He was a fighter who harnessed guerilla strategy and terror to overcome an army that had just won the War Between the States, and he was the man who realized, before Custer lost his scalp, that resistance was futile.

    Wagon trains endured insufferable heat in summer, brutal subzero temperatures when the snows came, and no shelter except for what could be hewn by hand or, in the Indians’ case, by animal hides and ancient tradition. And then there were the horses, their immeasurable value. Nothing moved without them, and they lived and died hard. We are given the story of the amazing horse that delivered Colonel Carrington’s desperate dispatches through a blizzard and subzero temperatures, but you will have to read it for yourselves.

    We meet soldiers battle-hardened by the Civil War, many who were brave, some fatally overconfident. There were the weapons: arrows loosed by expert bowmen versus outdated muzzle-loaded guns. But then came canon and grapeshot, repeating rifles, Colt pistols, and, finally, the railroad.

    Philosophically, it was a case of an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object, at least at first. There was a right of it, and a wrong of it, and some in Washington realized the difference at the time.

    But there was also the momentum of Manifest Destiny, the idea that the people of the United States had a moral duty to “tame” the West by displacing or exterminating its native inhabitants. It seems maddeningly cruel and ignorant by today’s standards, although modern societies, here and everywhere, apply virtually the same arrogance to the squandering of natural resources, plants, and animals.

    In many ways, “The Heart of Everything That Is” is just that.

    Bob Drury and Tom Clavin’s previous books together include “The Last Stand of Fox Company” and “Halsey’s Typhoon.” Mr. Clavin lives in Sag Harbor.

“The Pushcart Prize XXXVIII”

Edited by Bill Henderson

Norton, $19.95

    Bill Henderson: Here’s a guy who saw that something was missing in the literary landscape. Hey, this man who had been a player in mainstream publishing uncovered gaps in the intellectual terra firma. Lapses in the American literary emotional playing field. The idea behind Pushcart? So much beautiful writing is published in small journals but seen by too few people. Why not go on a treasure hunt, find the best, then highlight the works, make sure that they are brought to the attention of a much wider audience.

    Thirty-eight years ago Mr. Henderson began redressing literary voids by creating a prize. Not a press. A prize. Do good: You will be rewarded. Do poorly: Well, that’s our little secret. He began letting the presses know that even more people cared. He was also saying: Because all those presses have believed in the power of writing and have slaved to create a safe haven, a soapbox, a podium, they also deserve recognition and encouragement to keep on fighting for literature.

    This edition is replete with writing that alerts us to the power of imagination. The strong-arming of emotion. Take Amy Hempel’s searing “A Full-Service Animal Shelter,” which ran in Tin House. The short story takes us into an extraordinary world — that of a city-run facility in Spanish Harlem where dogs that are not adopted are euthanized. Through the eyes of a volunteer trying desperately to give the dogs quality of life, we see the horrors of bureaucracy, cruelty — as well as the extraordinary kindness of many strangers.

    “They knew us as the ones who got tetanus shots and rabies shots — the latter still a series but no longer in the stomach — and who closed the bites and gashes on our arms with Krazy glue — not the medical grade, but the kind you find at hardware stores — instead of going to the ER for stitches, where we would have had to report the dog, who would then be put to death.”

    Others of the 69 selections in The Pushcart that stand out as the best of the best of the best: In Louise Gluck’s “A Summer Garden” (Poetry), she writes: “How quiet it is, how silent, / like an afternoon in Pompeii.” Lorrie Moore’s “Wings” (Paris Review), which is included in her new collection of short stories, starts with this very funny line: “The grumblings of their stomachs were intertwined and unassignable.”

    In the beginning of Charles Baxter’s “What Happens in Hell” (Plough­shares), the humorist relates a question he was once asked: “ ‘Sir, I am wondering — have you considered lately what happens in Hell?’ No, I hadn’t,” he notes, “but I liked that ‘lately.’ ” In “Your Body Down in Gold” (Sugar House Review), the poet Carl Phillips conveys a different mordant set of thoughts: “saying / aloud to no one I have decided how I would / like to live my life, and it isn’t / this way . . .”

    But a true killer piece? Andre Dubus III and his essay “Writing & Publishing a Memoir: What the Hell Have I Done?” which originally ran in River Teeth. Mr. Dubus muses over whether the persona he presents in his memoir is his true self or whether it’s a completely different character. His musings go to the heart of the matter for all memoirists. Have I got this right? Am I being too kind to myself? Am I trying to atone for my sins? Or am I creating a bad boy (or girl) image simply for the sake of causing a sensation?

    Mr. Dubus quotes the writer Janet Burroway, saying that when readers pick up a novel what they’re actually saying is: “ ‘Give me me.’ ” Mr. Dubus talks about looking out at an audience as he’s about to give a talk: “. . . please don’t confuse me with that Andre in the book; he’s a character and I’m real. That was then, and this is now.”

    And then something magical happens: “. . . they stopped clapping and the hall grew quiet. I could hear the rain on the roof and against the windows, and I could see so many of their faces — expectant, slightly wounded, hungry for something helpful, many masking this hunger, and I felt the younger Andre, the only one they knew, descend into my legs and arms and chest and face. Then we were both stepping toward the microphone, and together, we began to speak.”

    A review of the anthology in Publishers Weekly makes an extremely valid point: “With large publishing houses facing an uncertain future, the Pushcart Prize is more valuable than ever in highlighting the treasured voices thriving in America’s small presses.”

    But the battle the Pushcart Prize is waging is larger even than that. The National Endowment for the Arts has been foundering. Funding has been severely cut back, and the organization has been without a chairperson for over a year. (The same is true for the National Endowment for the Humanities.) A candidate is currently being vetted. But if, in a liberal administration, the arts are not “treasured” by the federal government, many of the small presses and literary reviews have a much harder time existing.

    One wonderful touch in this edition is the dedication: “For Harvey Shapiro (1924-2013); Poet, editor, friend.” Shapiro lived here on the East End for many decades. A longtime editor of The New York Times Book Review, he was extraordinarily generous with other writers and editors. He was also a very fine poet. It was Harvey Shapiro who told the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that the next time he was incarcerated he should write about the experience. The result? “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” a stirring document during the civil rights movement. What Shapiro understood deeply was the need for encouragement, which is what Mr. Henderson also supports wholeheartedly.

    Forty years ago Pushcart Prize editors began their search. And all those presses whose editors took the time to nominate the works they felt were the strongest? Mr. Henderson makes sure they’re listed in the PP. Along with their addresses, so that we can track down the publications and editors whose sensibilities mesh most closely with our own.

    Laura Wells, a regular book reviewer for The Star, lives in Sag Harbor.

    Bill Henderson lives in Springs.

“A Shed for Wood”

Daniel Thomas Moran

Salmon Poetry, $21.95

    “A Shed for Wood” begins with a quote from Henry David Thoreau: “The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length the middle-aged man concludes to build a wood-shed with them.”

    The book is dedicated to the memory of Samuel Menashe, Allen Planz, and Siv Cedering, all South Fork poets, deeply revered and recently departed. This, along with the opening quote, is a significant gesture. It speaks directly to the modest mission of poetry, one Daniel Thomas Moran has successfully served. In addition to being the poet laureate of Suffolk County from 2005 to 2007, he was a respected dentist on Shelter Island for many years.

    Mr. Moran has made a long and distinguished career of cultivating two worlds into one. “A Shed for Wood” combines the intimate moments of private life with the critical awareness of artistic persona. The work has compassionate precision, coming from someone who knows enough not to say too much.

Here is the place I have found,

of fertile earth between tumbled stone. . . .

Where water spills from mountains,

over and down between hills,

and breaths, on winter nights

are seized by the gelid air. . . .

Where we can be with our aloneness,

at rest with its bottomless still,

and inhabit the life which inhabits us.

    That opening poem, “At Davisville, New Hampshire,” represents Mr. Moran’s verse well; it reveals the personal with genuine thought, yet goes beyond the self to become public property. At first, his lines sound deceptively familiar, simple Frostian rhythms in elegant, cosmopolitan vernacular. Upon further reading, they manifest something quite different from the usual, overly serious, confession.

    If it were not for the sincerity of Mr. Moran’s existential nature, one might be in the company of an avuncular comic. In “Christmas Eve at the Waldorf Astoria,” the poet meets a porter by the name of Jesus. The poem demonstrates Mr. Moran’s ability to turn an absurd situation into a memorable encounter:

He was shorter

than I might have

imagined, from those

paintings of Caravaggio,

and all of the

crucifixes of my childhood.

    The beauty of that aesthetic, besides that it is humorous, is that Mr. Moran genuinely regards his subject matter with palpable gratitude. “A Shed for Wood” is full of praise — tongue-in-cheek and often laugh-out-loud. There is an inherent humanism to the work, full of faith that we will survive difficult occasions.

    The poet attends to the minutia of composition with such tangible joy that even acts of eulogy carry benevolent truth.

Out there in the world,

some brittle oak leaves

have survived the worst of it.

They cling, like the rest of us,

beset and shivering on

threads in March’s wind.

    That’s from “Thinking About the Death of John Updike,” one of many poems in the collection that address incomprehensible loss, larger than life, on a personal level. There are elegies on a father’s anxiety as his son goes to war, aging friends who receive bad news from their doctors, the decline of an artist’s ability to work, the notoriously short life of a mayfly, a professional wrestler called Killer Kowalski, and the late singer Amy Winehouse, among others.

We would like it to be different.

But it can never be different.

We try to talk about it even more,

as if the words were a salve, but

there are not the right words, not

even the wrong words arranged well.

    From “Now, a Month Beyond,” the most painful poem in the collection. It, too, speaks for the civil tone of Mr. Moran’s work. He writes out of necessity, about what matters most to people.

    Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote “ ’Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all.” “A Shed for Wood” burns with equal affection and unique imagination. Hank Williams sang “There’s a tear in my beer, ’cause I’m crying for you, dear.” Daniel Thomas Moran also writes of loss, and, in time, reminds us to laugh.

So much for us to know,

all the more to be imagined.

Surely we should not

spare time to grieve.

Our time passes, and we

must pass with it.

    From “A Poem of Necessity”

    Lucas Hunt is the author of the poetry collection “Light on the Concrete.” The director of Hunt & Light, a poetry publisher, he lives in Springs.

    The Old Schoolhouse in Greenport last held a kindergarten class in 1932. And now for something completely different: On March 15 Robin Becker will read there from “Tiger Heron,” her new collection of poems from the University of Pittsburgh Press with subject matter ranging from her lesbianism to her Russian-Jewish heritage to her upbringing in conformist 1950s America to art history.

    You want bio? Ms. Becker is a summertime North Forker who teaches English and women’s studies at Penn State, where she was recently poet laureate. Her seven previous collections have earned her a Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry and Prairie Schooner magazine’s Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing. She edits poetry and writes a column about it for the journal Women’s Review of Books.

    The reading starts at 5 p.m., and joining in will be Vivian Eyre with her new chapbook of poems, “To the Sound.”

    The Old Schoolhouse is at the corner of Front and Second Streets (not its original location, but close enough). Now a museum, it dates to the first half of the 19th century, back when the village was known as Stirling. (Not as ruinous a loss as the Oysterponds-to-Orient name change, and perhaps even understandable.)

    So the question becomes: What’s so funny about a couple of jaunty ferry rides to catch some poetry in funky Greenport?

“Seedtime”

Scott Chaskey

Rodale, $23.99

    An unassuming byway off Deep Lane in Amagansett, crowded with brambles common to Long Island, leads to where members of Quail Hill Farm are told by chalkboard what’s available for harvest this week. When you reach the fields, if you look closely at the rows of vegetables, you’ll see they cohabit with weeds (no herbicides applied here). The fields generally look as though the farmers have more work than they can finish. It’s all so low-key, a first-time visitor might whisper to a companion, “This does not seem like the fabulous Hamptons I’ve heard so much about.”

    Your first sense that Quail Hill may be hallowed ground arrives when you see the milkweed with monarchs flitting from flower to flower. Glance around and you will spot the Quail Hill prophet, right over there with his foot on a hay bale. A thicket of white beard sprouts from his face, and there’s a circle of followers. If he weren’t already so well known as Scott Chaskey, I’d call him Jeremiah, whose task was to remind Israel about their covenant with Yahweh and the consequences of their ignorance of the covenant.

    Mr. Chaskey’s task is to remind us we have a covenant with nature and there are consequences of ignoring that covenant. This covenant exists ipso facto because we live on the earth and depend on it for life. His new book, “Seedtime,” is this era’s The Book of the Prophet Jeremiah, the literary prophet. Like Jeremiah, Mr. Chaskey’s book is beautiful literature with a dreadful warning.

    Scott Chaskey is a farmer. He has worked the land of Quail Hill Farm for the Peconic Land Trust for a quarter of a century. He is a pioneer in the community farm movement with all that implies; he grows food in the most wholesome and healthy way it can be grown for the farm’s members and the area’s restaurants; he trains people to do the same thing with an intern program, and he leads organizations that educate and promote healthy farming practices throughout the country and, yes, even worldwide.

    At the same time, the farmer is a poet and scholar. “It took several hundred million years or more to move from the birth of a single cell to the evolution of seed cones to the formation of seeds,” he notes, “and yet we now take for granted this magnificent dispersal — the language of transport of the plant kingdom — as if it were simply a mechanical inevitability rather than a mysterious gift of time.” No one can grow food the right way without humility, without a little perspective on the relative place of mankind in the time of the universe. “Seedtime” prods us to regain the sense of reverence needed to protect the earth and its abundance. That respect glows from the book.

    A prophet is also a teacher, and there is much to learn from Scott Chaskey: the history and nature of seeds, the difference between an open-pollinated seed and a hybrid seed, and what a GMO is and how it is genetically modified.

    Mr. Chaskey states: “Hybrid seeds are not inherently evil, and more often than not our farm members are surprised to hear that we purchase and sow hybrid. . . .” But here’s the problem: If you choose a hybrid and learn to love it, say for instance a tomato, you are then tied to a seed company in order to secure the seed for next year. Thus begins the process of decreasing biodiversity. “Our increasing tendency to homogenize all aspects of our ecosystems limits our ability to adapt to ever-changing conditions of climate and culture.”

    A prophet, by necessity, has a stern nature. “Thus saith the Lord of Hosts, ‘Amend your ways and your doings, and I will cause you to dwell in this place. Trust ye not in lying words.’ ” Jer. 7:3-4.

    Mr. Chaskey speaks: “Now I am compelled to write in response to the urgent needs of planet Earth and to recover some sense of balance in our understanding and care for the land, in how we choose to manage and distribute seeds and to grow the food that sustains us.”

    He both explains the process and warns about the transgenic methodology responsible for GMOs (genetically modified organisms). There are the known consequences, the reduction in biodiversity, as powerful seed companies try to get every farm to grow plants with their seed. Then there are the as yet unknown possible results.

    In natural breeding, new kinds of chickens can be obtained by breeding a chicken of one variety to a chicken of another variety in order to enhance certain desired qualities. Transgenic breeding is like mating a chicken with a mouse or a potato. The long-range result of changing edible plants and animals by the transgenic method currently is unknown.

    The argument in favor of GMOs is that they produce a greater yield than traditional varieties or even hybrids. The yield is needed to feed a hungry planet. So far, the argument has been persuasive. Mr. Chaskey reports that by 2010 in the U.S., 93 percent of soybean acreage, 63 percent of corn acreage, and 78 percent of cotton acreage were planted with GMO seed. One known result: less biodiversity. In the Philippines, there were once thousands of varieties of rice. Today, two varieties account for 98 percent of all rice grown. Think! Ireland. Potatoes. Blight. Famine.

    Jeremiah warned Israel if they did not honor their covenant with God, the enemy from the north, the Babylonians, would carry them into captivity. Mr. Chaskey warns, “As we face the challenges of climate change and the loss of prime agricultural soils, we need a diverse seed supply to counter the unpredictable and the unknown. Instead, we continue to lose plant species — and the seeds of the future — at an alarming rate.” The diversity found in seeds is nature’s way of providing food for the earth. The destruction of biodiversity is the Babylon that threatens us.

    Mr. Chaskey and other leaders of the biodiversity movement believe variety is the ultimate form of food security. “A holistic agricultural system, innovative by definition, includes different cultures and numerous producer-consumer relationships. ‘Freedom of Seed’ proclaims the right of farmers to save seeds and to breed new varieties, to exchange and trade seeds, to have access to open source seed (seed free of patents), and to be protected from contamination by GMO crops.”

    Jeremiah spoke Yahweh’s message. “I brought you into a plentiful country, to eat the fruit thereof and the goodness thereof; but when ye entered, ye defiled my land, and made mine heritage an abomination.” Jer. 2:7.

    With the striking language of his art as a writer, Mr. Chaskey in “Seedtime” conveys the voice of the natural world. “Seeds, like words, ‘behave like capricious and autonomous beings,’ so if we give them space to perform, perhaps we stand a chance to inherit their intelligence. This seems like a wiser choice to me, rather than to force our intelligence upon them.”

    The author of “Seedtime” works a farm in what was once a humble farming and fishing community. His book is dense with language, information, insight, and hope. Remarkably, the book’s message is not strident, considering the strength of Babylon, the companies that seemingly will do anything to protect their perceived right to dominate the distribution of seeds through patents and legal maneuvers. The word about the threat is out, in newspapers, magazines, and all media. You see the pieces from time to time, mostly balanced with both points of view that I’d summarize as, “No GMOs,” “Yes GMOs.”

    Now, this era’s Jeremiah has spoken. What Scott Chaskey works at in his small sphere of influence, an organic farm, seems tiny as a clover seed when compared to the enormity of the problems of world hunger and climate change, as well as the resources and the will of corporations to dominate governmental policy regarding seeds. However, without those tiny seeds sown by Mr. Chaskey and others, where would we be? “Behold, a sower went forth to sow; and some seed fell on good ground and brought forth fruit, some an hundredfold, some sixty fold, and some thirty fold.”

    “Seedtime” is the most elegant and comprehensive description yet written of the fierce battle being waged over biodiversity.

    Gary Reiswig lives in Springs and grew up on a farm in Oklahoma that harvested the best of each year’s crop for next year’s seed. His new book, “Land Rush: Stories From the Great Plains,” will be released soon.

    Scott Chaskey lives in Sag Harbor. He will read from “Seedtime” at Sylvester Manor on Shelter Island on Friday, March 21, at 7 p.m.