"pale, absorbent fields of paper": A blackboard on Geoffrey Brock's "Family History: Oct. 15, 1848"

The fall semester has started, so it's time for another blackboard. This is from my Contemporary Poetry course this morning. As an introduction to the course, we discussed a poem by Geoffrey Brock from his book Voices Bright Flags, which we will be discussing for the next two weeks.

Family History: Oct. 15, 1848Geoffrey Brock, Voices Bright Flags, 58The instruments were various:the hollow pens that spilled their inkson pale, absorbent fields of paper;the notion that land belongs to men;apologetic rhetoric("the force of circumstance" and "hardnecessity"); the trade in rumand viruses; and guns, of course;and love: in Texas, a decade afterNew Echota and the Trail of Tears,an Alabama Cherokeewith rivers of hair and broken eyesmarried a white man. He was disowned;she fell into the pool of us and drowned.Note from Voices Bright Flags 99:The parenthetical quotations (which I found in Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States) are from Sen. Edward Everett's explanation of his decision, in 1836, to vote to ratify the Treaty of New Echota, which authorized the forcible relocation of the Cherokee Nation from the southeast to present-day Oklahoma.

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