Love, dreams and dystopia: Karen Chase’s ‘Two Tales’

Provided
The writer Karen Chase was born in New York City but spent a lot of time living in and around Salisbury, Connecticut.
Chase is the author of several poems, stories, essays and books including a memoir about having polio when she was ten years old. Her new book, “Two Tales: Jamali Kamali and ZundelState,” consists of two narrative poems. The first is a long, free-verse poem about an imagined homoerotic love between two men who are historical figures from 16th century India, and the second is what one could call a “science fiction poem,” written mostly in free verse, and centered on a man and woman living in a dystopian techno-state a thousand years from now. Because Chase’s free-flowing poems align with “automatic” or “free association” writing, with a few forays into Dada-like absurdities, the best approach to reading them is to go with the flow.
Despite the fact that “Jamali Kamali” was written several years ago, and “ZundelState” completed only recently, the author considers them to be of a piece. Her free-verse structure offers a cornucopia of love, longing, sexual passion, dreams, art, history and science. The two stories are riveting, but absorbing the full impact of the artistry requires a big-time “suspension of disbelief.” Passages range from the lovely and loving to the jolting and violent. Sometimes things feel incomprehensible, sometimes perfectly logical, and sometimes we’re simply struck by beautiful phrases — “stinging sky,” “butterfly laugh,” or “the past shivering alive into now.”
Centuries after their death, Jamali and Kamali, whose names form the eponymous title of the first story, lie side by side in a tourist-destination tomb in Delhi that Chase visited while on a month-long residency in the city. Little is known about Jamali other than that he was a court poet and Sufi Muslim in the Mughal Empire; nothing is known about Kamali, or about the nature of the relationship between the two men.After visiting the tomb, without having any plan, Chase set about writing her story of their forbidden love, finishing the poem a few years later, after returning home.
“Jamali Kamali” is filled with details about 16th century India that Chase discovered through extensive correspondence with Bruce Wannell, a British scholar who specialized in the history of the period. What’s intriguing is the way Chase weaves these factual details together with her own details taken from direct observations of whatever happened to be in front of her while she was writing. While working on the poem in Nova Scotia, for example, she would look out her window and, noting the fog, sky, or flocks of birds, directly drop descriptions of them into her poem.
Chase writes compellingly about the deep love and intense sexual bond between two men and doesn’t hesitate to go deep into their super-charged sex lives. Chase says her fiction relies solely on her imagination, and she’s not interested in writing about herself. That imagination is enriched by a broad range of cultural and historical references, which is why “Jamali Kamali,” which isn’t written in the dactylic hexameter of classical poetry, recalls nothing so much as Homeric poetry — indeed, the name Homer appears early on in her poem.
In “ZundelState,” the second story, we again focus on two lovers who are “outsiders” in their society. Instead of being set in the past, we’re in a dystopian state a thousand years in the future, one where time is not linear, and a human being can even go talk directly with Socrates. A mysterious autocratic State that bans history and dreaming controls everything. Human beings divide their lives between the “Agora” — the public realm — and “Home,” where they are private. Home is where “people are like snowflakes, each one unique. Elsewhere [the Agora], they all match.”
A dutiful State apparatchik named Marianna feels stirrings of dreaming — and more dangerously, love — after meeting Joe, a rebellious sort. Against the rules of the State, Joe has discovered this thing called history, and walks long distances to reach “Junkyards” located deep inside forbidden territory where he forages for abandoned fragments of it.
“ZundelState” recalls the psychological TV thriller “Severance.” Both concern the “form and pressure,” to use Shakespeare’s phrase, of our times, where the techno-state, and the rise of the techno-state human being, threaten to obliterate freedom. An anxiety that human beings will eventually be emptied of their humanity hovers over both.Reading the “Two Tales: Jamali Kamali and ZundelState” drives home that our beloved humanity rests not in our capacity to reason, but in our wild, imaginative spiritedness that lives in our dreams and loves. Should these fall away, we are finished.
The author will be giving a talk on Thursday, June 26, at the David M. Hunt Library in Falls Village at 5:30 p.m.
Laurie Fendrich is an abstract painter, professor emerita at Hofstra University and vice-president of American Abstract Artists. She lives in Lakeville.
Join The Lakeville Journal for a community celebration, featuring local nonprofits and businesses, festive family fun, great food, and engaging activities.
What to Expect:
See you at the Lakeville Journal Street Fair!
If you have any questions, please email streetfair@lakevillejournal.com
Cobbler n’ Cream
5 to 7 p.m.
Freund’s Farm Market & Bakery | 324 Norfolk Rd.
Canaan Carnival
6 to 10 p.m.
Bunny McGuire Park
Canaan Carnival
6 to 10 p.m.
Bunny McGuire Park
Cocktail Party
5 to 7 p.m.
Douglas Library | 108 Main St.
Canaan Carnival
6 to 10 p.m.
Bunny McGuire Park
Boot Drive
8 a.m. to 2 p.m.
North Canaan Fire Co. | 4 E. Main St.
3rd Annual Fly-In
8 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Triumph Airfield | 547 W. Main St.
Canaan Railroad Station Museum
10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Canaan Union Station
New England Accordion Connection
9 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Canaan Union Station
Canaan Carnival
3 to 10 p.m.
Bunny McGuire Park
Berkshire Resilience Brass Band
5 to 8 p.m.
Canaan Union Station
Barbecued Chicken Dinner
5 to 7 p.m.
St. Martin of Tours | 4 Main St.
Canaan Fireman’s parade
6 p.m.
Rosa setigera is a native climbing rose whose simple flowers allow bees to easily collect pollen.
After moving to West Cornwall in 2012, we were given a thoughtful housewarming gift: the 1997 edition of “Dirr’s Hardy Trees and Shrubs.” We were told the encyclopedic volume was the definitive gardener’s reference guide — a fact I already knew, having purchased one several months earlier at the recommendation of a gardener I admire.
At the time, we were in the thick of winter invasive removal, and I enjoyed reading and dreaming about the trees and shrubs I could plant to fill in the bare spots where the bittersweet, barberry, multiflora rose and other invasive plants had been.Years later, I purchased the 2011 edition, updated and inclusive of plants for warm climates.
On the cover of the new edition, a quote from Adrian Higgins of The Washington Post boasts, “Michael Dirr is the oracle of ornamental horticulture. I trust his judgements implicitly.”I heartily disagree with Mr. Higgins:I blame this book — and my poor use of it — for some of my worst tree and shrub choices.
I realize some readers might find this declaration inflammatory. The book still occupies a place of high regard among experienced and novice gardeners alike, so please allow me to explain.
In addition to giving the reader his opinion on the aesthetic worthiness of the woody plants included in the book, Mr. Dirr makes good on the book’s title with a review of each species’ hardiness. What makes a tree hardy?It thrives in its intended site, resisting disease with leaves and bark not readily eaten by insects and other critters.
Non-native plants make up the majority of the recommended hardy plants in the book.And here is why:Native trees and shrubs are, by evolution’s design, food source and host to our native fauna — critters large and small. There is no substitute equal to the fauna’s co-evolved flora.A native caterpillar cannot eat a kousa dogwood leaf, as it has not evolved to digest it.Non-native plants seemingly have the advantage if the lens we look through values pristine, uneaten leaves.
In the days when there were sufficient thriving ecosystems to maintain local habitats, a non-native specimen tree here and there was just fine.But where we live in Northwest Connecticut, our woods, meadows, marshes and other natural areas have, for a couple of decades, been severely compromised by invasives that have almost entirely removed the food sources for native insects. It is up to us — now — to plant native plants to save the food chain.Without insects, not only will native animals die, but human food sources will also be at risk.
The security of our food pipeline seems a worthy exchange for some caterpillar-eaten leaves — and to be clear, we’re not talking about non-native infestations such as spongy moth, but rather native caterpillars, which are the singular food source for nesting birds.
My issue is that, in being a trusted source for plant selection, Dirr’s book should give equal — if not prioritized — space to information on ecological impact.For example, it would be good to know when selecting a tree, that a native oak provides food and other ecosystem services to more than 400 native animal species, while a native tulip poplar supports fewer than 30 — though that includes the Eastern tiger swallowtail. Including information on the birds and insects attracted to a given plant would enable reader to weigh these factors in choosing what to grow.But this information is not mentioned at all.
Dirr makes no mention of the role some of these plants have played in the degradation of our natural areas — an omission that is highly relevant, as many of the plants featured in his book are, in fact, invasive culprits. Plants like barberry, porcelain berry and tree of heaven are showcased for consideration alongside native plants without recognition of the devastating infestations they can manifest. Tree of Heaven is now responsible for hosting the spotted lanternfly, which is devastating crops.
Similarly Euonymous alatus (winged euonymous) and Actinidia arguta (hardy kiwi) — two highly invasive plants touted in the book — have been banned or are close to being banned for sale from nurseries in the state of Massachusetts. To his credit, Dirr does point out the invasive nature of Ligustrum sinense (Chinese privet), calling it “a terrible and devastating escapee that terrorizes floodplains, fencerows and even open fields, reducing native vegetation to rubble.” Yet Japanese honeysuckle gets an understated warning, with Dirr describing this massively invasive shrub as “bullying their way into understory and open areas.”
The latest edition of Dirr’s book devotes seven pages of copy and photos to various Berberis species, about which Dirr waxes poetic. He notes the addition of “30 new cultivars” in the latest revision and complains that “this species is under assault for its aggressive invasive nature.” He refers to Berberis thunbergii — Japanese barberry, the most invasive of them all — as “the species of major importance in garden commerce.” This plant has already been outlawed for sale in New York, Pennsylvania, New Hamphsire and Maine.A few weeks ago, a bill was passed in Connecticut recognizing the harm of a broad group of invasive plants. Under this new legislation, barberry will be phased out from sale or transport by October 2028.
In understating the invasive nature of many non-natives and de-prioritizing the importance of native species, Dirr’s widely used reference may be partly responsible for many a devastated woodland, forest, meadow and marsh in New England — if not across the U.S.Certainly, the evolution of species, and scientific knowledge about the environment, is changing faster than new editions of books can be printed. I can only hope that if a new edition of Mr. Dirr’s reference book is in the works that it will account for this criteria we now know to be vital in plant selection.
Which brings me back to that quote on the cover from The Washington Post and the larger issue it suggests:Should “ornamental horticulture” get a pass when it comes to ecological survival?I think we can agree — it should not.The consequences are simply too destructive.
Dee Salomon ‘ungardens’ in Litchfield County.
Foxtrot Farm & Flowers’ historic barn space during UAW’s 2024 exhibition entitled “Unruly Edges.”
Art lovers, mark your calendars. The sixth edition of Upstate Art Weekend (UAW) returns July 17 to 21, with an exciting lineup of exhibitions and events celebrating the cultural vibrancy of the region. Spanning eight counties and over 130 venues, UAW invites residents and visitors alike to explore the Hudson Valley’s thriving creative communities.
Here’s a preview of four must-see exhibitions in the area:
1. Wassaic Project (37 Furnace Bank Road, Wassaic)
“So It Goes” is a powerful group exhibition curated by Eve Biddle, Bowie Zunino, Jeff Barnett-Winsby, and Will Hutnick. The title, drawn from Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five,” signals a reckoning with how we process the horrors of the world. Through play, reflection, and immersive scale, 43 artists respond with urgency and imagination. Installations can be seen throughout the town of Wassaic at Maxon Mills, Gridley Chapel, and Luther Barn, each space transformed by this deeply thoughtful show.
2. Foxtrot Farm & Flowers (6862 Route 82, Stanfordville)
“Queer Bestiary,” a group show curated by Charlotte Woolf, is inspired by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian’s book “Forest Euphoria.” The exhibition investigates queer ecology and human relationship to land through the work of 10 artists using painting, sculpture, textiles, and photography. The exhibit is accompanied by a variety of interactive experiences including tattoo pop-ups, karaoke, book readings, and pick-your-own flowers.
3. ChaShaMa North/ChaNorth (2600 Route 199, Pine Plains)
ChaShaMa North (ChaNorth) will have open studios all weekend and has partnered with Paradice Palase, a platform for emerging artists, to mount a site-specific sculpture exhibition featuring 20 artists entitled “Alone, You Are Heard.” On Saturday evening, July 19, stop by for Weird Music Night for an audio-visual synthesis of experimental music, performance art, and unexpected happenings. Don’t miss this opportunity to experience an eclectic lineup of acts that redefine the boundaries of performance.
4. Millbrook Arts Project(3 Friendly Lane, Millbrook)
The Millbrook Arts Project is hosting a curated exhibit entitled “Generated Utility” at the newly renovated gallery at the village library. The exhibit will feature the work of artists Natalie Beall and Kathy Greenwood. Additionally, visitors will have access to 12 open artists studios across town. The weekend culminates in a free outdoor concert on Saturday evening at 6 p.m. at the Millbrook Bandshell. Enjoy the Indie-Folk sounds of Strawberry Runners and She Keeps Bees.
For more information and a complete list of participating artists and locations, visit: upstateartweekend.org