River Styx #96

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Introduction from Issue 96

“. . . man is by nature a political animal, and a man that is by nature and not merely by fortune citiless is either low in the scale of humanity or above it . . .”

—Aristotle

In forty-two years of issues, many of them themed, we’ve never tried a political issue. If anything, we’ve probably avoided overtly political work as it can often sound preachy and un-nuanced, one-dimensional and didactic, and, of course, clichéd. For most of my life, I’ve held with Auden, who said, “Poetry makes nothing happen,” and I’ve been to and read in enough 100 Thousand Poets for Change readings to know that the only minds they tend to change are those of people on the fence about whether or not they like poetry.

But then Michael Brown was shot and killed in Ferguson, and the subsequent tensions and violence tore our city apart. While those events raged, another black man, VonDerrit Myers Jr., was shot and killed by a white off-duty police officer. The victim was my neighbor’s nephew. I never knew him, but I heard he’d had previous brushes with the law and read that he had a gun and fired three shots while running away. Those shots plus the officer’s, twenty in all, sparked a powder keg under our South Grand neighborhood, and soon afterward the streets and air outside our offices were filled with protestors, reporters, live bloggers, riot police, helicopters, tear gas, vandalism, and looting.

Despite the fact that we tend to stay in our little arts bubble—where we embrace and celebrate diversity and goodwill through literature—politics had literally come to our doorstep. Some of the photos from the series in this issue were taken right outside our front windows.

One of the most heartbreaking days of my life was walking to the River Styx office one morning—the morning after a night of protests, vandalism, and lootings—stepping over broken glass and tear gas canisters, and seeing friends’ and neighbors’ storefront windows broken out. It’s a beautiful, diverse neighborhood, one of the gems of St. Louis, but on that morning it looked like a war zone.

Since then, it feels like everything has become political, especially in this election season. As Carol Hanisch wrote, galvanizing feminist action in 1970, “The personal is political.” For us, the political had become personal.

I recently spent a spring break writing trip in Gulfport, Mississippi, which had been devastated by Hurricane Katrina—and other hurricanes before it. An astonishing amount of dead sea life—fish, small sharks, and even large dolphins—had been washing up on the beach as a result of oil spills, drilling, and agricultural pollutants. It was impossible not to get into a discussion about it with the few people also walking the beach, which inevitably led to politics. Several people there blamed Obama, the logic of which escapes me, but I went down to write, not agitate politically. While dipping beignets in my coffee at Port City Café, I overheard two men, who had previously been extremely polite to me and kind to my dog Ginger at my feet, say, “If Trump doesn’t get the Republican nomination, there will be a war.”

Two average dog-loving guys spoke as casually about a civil war as if it were the World Series. In many ways our country is already at war, and this issue reflects those divisions: racial, religious, gender, marital, economic, and class.

Putting this issue together made me realize that almost everything is political—every decision we made regarding what to include or not to include was political. Do we have enough women and people of color represented? Do we need more pieces about fracking and gay marriage? All art is political, and I mean art with a capital A. All arts become political when funding, public grants, awards, and university jobs come into play.

Almost every writer, artist, and editor I know works in higher education, which has grown more political than ever. The reliance on and exploitation of adjuncts at poverty-level wages contrasts to millionaire football coaches and millionaire chancellors . Across the country, adjuncts are fighting to unionize and negotiate contracts for livable wages. And despite many campuses relying on 70–85 percent adjuncts, college tuition is now unaffordable for all but a few. College administrators are decimating humanities programs while spending vast amounts on sports stadiums. The state of higher education is quickly becoming one of our country’s most pressing political issues, and two pieces here deal with university politics head-on.

Across campuses or outside political rallies , the anger is so palpable you can smell it.

After the days of unrest and some tense nights in our neighborhood, we created a new reading series called Lost Poets. We wanted to host events at a different venue every other month, a movable reading series, to bring the neighborhood together, to include as many different voices as possible rhyming, rhapsodizing, shouting, declaiming, storytelling, enlightening us, or making us laugh. Lost Poets hasn’t been perfect—some people will always complain, as is their right—but we’re trying to build community and bridge differences, neighborhood and citywide. We wanted the series to be as inclusive as possible, with writers from spoken word backgrounds to academics from some of the local universities to writers in between. We wanted to show people that when they steal air conditioners from Café Natasha or throw bricks through a window of Edward E. Jones investments, they may think they’re lashing out at The Man, but they’re actually hurting people like Affifa, a dear friend and neighbor who left Afghanistan to raise her family here in St. Louis. She works harder than anyone I know. She lets us use her fax machine in her investments office and puts up with legions of staff and interns stomping and clomping right above her office.

River Styx has always been a community-based organization, with our regular reading series at the Tavern of Fine Arts and our workshops. But our community has spread out across the world. With Lost Poets, we wanted to create community more than ever—a forum for different voices—and even included some law-enforcement officers who wrote poetry and memoir.

Like the Lost Poets reading series, we wanted this political issue to provide a forum for thoughts on politics, religion, and social justice. We wanted River Styx #96 to be a community of writers, a city of voices, not “citiless,” as Aristotle calls it. This issue features writers and artists from Ferguson to Poland, and, as in all our issues, we tried to include as many different points of view and demographics as possible. Our issue won’t change the world or make things happen, but at least it will be thoughtful and civil, entertaining and moving.

Finally, after compiling these works—stories, poems, essays, and art—we noticed that not one piece we published or received seemed to advocate the position that our political system is working. Not one “I voted and felt good about it” poem. Our contributors here express frustration over racial and religious discrimination, marriage inequality, the political primary process, earthquakes as a result of fracking, adjunct exploitation, and economic disparity. Which makes me think that despite the ugliness and messiness that is democracy, at least we can express this dissent, write it, publish it, and distribute it. At least for now.

—Richard Newman, June, 2016