Lynchings: Postcards from America by Lester Graves Lennon Review by Douglas Manuel

Lynchings: Postcards from America by Lester Graves Lennon

Review by Douglas Manuel

Publisher: WordTech Editions

Publication Date: December 31, 2021

ISBN: 9781625493972

Pages: 128

The Nadir of the Black American Experience – A Review of Lester Graves Lennon’s Lynchings: Postcards from America

The Reconstruction Era is my least favorite sliver of Black American literature. How to display how hopeful it began? How to do justice to its woefully deep injustice? How to contextualize Ida Bell Wells-Barnett’s The Red Record? How to have the students read about more horror after the greedy needs of slavery? How to keep their eyes on the bodies, the actual bodies? The gore? How to not make trauma porn? How to not fatigue their senses? How not to make them exhausted and different? How to show them the past is now? How to show what it would wound us to forget? How to breach the surface of Black experience without showing the lynching postcards? A whole day of viewing Without Sanctuary and listening to Billie Holiday harangue/sing “Strange Fruit,” that’s how I do it. It’s not enough. So much not enough! It doesn’t do the subject justice. Nothing does. Nothing will. That’s why I’m so thankful for Lester Graves Lennon’s Lynchings: Postcards from America. This text steps to this impossible task. This text does what poetry has always attempted to do: put words to the ineffable, but essential. Lennon’s work is here to remind us of dark, long nights so that we know we can get through our current deep, extended evening. 

Lynchings: Postcards from America is one of the most urgent and timely texts I’ve read. How does it ring true with poetry and not polemic? How does it persuade without symbolic violence while depicting violence? How does it remind and memorialize without trivializing, without sensationalizing? How to wade the dark waters and even more, how to contain them, how to plumb them? Lennon heeds poetry call, does so by limning his own form, a closed linear vessel of repetition where the first and last word of each line are the same or drastically the same sonically. This relentless song of repetition evinces Stein’s claim that “there is no such thing as repetition . . . [only] insistence.” Moreover, the repeating words and sounds bookend each line causing a staccato effect that more than center line integrity and send each poetic line in the realm of a poem on its own. Also, slowing the reader’s pace and making them set with the very culled and purposeful repeating words, meaning here is heightened, the lyric moment extending in an echoing song. Notice the connotative possibilities and psychic weight of these repeating words from “The Forty-Fifth President of the United States:” “beautiful,” “horror,” “blood stains,” “stain,” “his,” “guttural,” “nasty,” “losers,” “virus,” “spitting,” “old,” “preacher,” “protection,” “against,” “hoaxes,” “shame,” “horror,” and “beautiful” again. All of these words drip with resonance and nearly form their own poem when read aloud in succession. That’s how purposeful and deliberative Lennon’s craft is. That’s how he walks the tightrope of writing poetry of witness without falling. Form is his net, always there to catch him and bounce him to even higher ropes of meaning. The risk is high but so is the gift. It’s the painful gift memory affords: the chance to know better and to do better.

“Postcard Showing the Lynching of Virgil Jones, Robert Jones, Thomas Jones and Joseph Riley” is perhaps my favorite poem in the book. How to select a favorite from a text that goes for broke gorgeousness on every page? How to see the snowy, wintered mountain top of a text filled with numerous peaks? How to sift truth from a sandy beach of meaning? How to lift up one poem without hammering down the rest? “Postcard Showing the Lynching of Virgil Jones, Robert Jones, Thomas Jones, and Joseph Riley” announced itself to me, called upon me with its first lines, bookending the word “lie” and making it truer and deeper each and every time: “Lie–These lynched men raped one white woman–Lie / Lie–These men plotted to kill white men–Lie.” What a way to speak truth to power, what a way to speak back, what a way to couch truth, between two lies. As is the case with all the poems in the book that adhere to this form, Lennon’s selected repeating words all punch the reader in the face with emotive force and dynamic significance: “lie, truth, they, got, rope, they’re, not, no, four, men, claimed, one, faces, staring.” And even more pressure is placed on the words “lie” and “truth” as they’re both repeating multiple times in the first stanza, “lie” two times and “truth” four times–truth beating lies twice over, truth taking the crown in our moment where truth is so often beaten, so often brought down.

“Lynchings: Postcards from America” ends as it began, in remembrance. After showing us a newly created form early on in the book and haiku sequences later, Lennon leaves the reader with a sonnet. A sonnet with the restless and insistent title, “Remember This.” In this tender, nostalgic lyric, the aged speaker rhapsodizes weary as Tennyson’s “Ulysses.” Talking directly to his daughter, he asks her to usher him through the “doors [he] won’t hear shutting,” to take care of him in life’s cold dark winter, and assures her that “The last word [he] forget[s] will be [her] name.”  After so much talk of the horrific past and how it’s caused and informed our current horrific times, this tender turn to self, to family, to one’s greatest legacy, one’s child, moved me more than I can convey here. But I’ll try, just as Lennon’s book has tried to tackle the impossible by writing about lynching and red, dark history. Lennon’s book made me pick up my son, hold him, and look deeply into his brown eyes. Awed. Afraid. Aware. 

Lester Graves Lennon is the poetry editor for Rosebud magazine and an investment banker whose career in public finance exceeds 40 years. His first book of poetry, The Upward Curve of Earth and Heavens, can be found in 70 public and university libraries including the Los Angeles Public Library, Yale, Oxford and the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he received his B.A. in English. His second book of poetry, My Father Was a Poet, was published in 2013. His third book, Lynchings: Postcards from America, was published in January, 2022. He was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2021. Mr. Lennon sits on the board of directors of the Community of Writers and is a member of the Friends of the Center for Humanities at the University of Wisconsin. He is an emeritus member of the Board of Visitors for the English Department at the University of Wisconsin, and a past member of the board of directors for Red Hen Press and the Poetry Center at West Chester University. Mr. Lennon was the primary mover in the creation of the Poet Laureate positions for both the City of Los Angeles and the City of Oakland, California. He was a founding Los Angeles Mayor’s Poet Laureate Task Force member and lives with his family in the Los Angeles megalopolis.

Douglas Manuel was born in Anderson, Indiana and now resides in Whittier, California. He received a BA in Creative Writing from Arizona State University, an MFA in poetry from Butler University, and a PhD in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Testify (2017) and Trouble Funk (2023). His poems and essays can be found in numerous literary journals, magazines, and websites, most recently Zyzzyva, Pleiades, and the New Orleans Review. He has traveled to Egypt and Eritrea with The University of Iowa’s International Writing Program to teach poetry. A recipient of the Dana Gioia Poetry Award and a fellowship from the Borchard Foundation Center on Literary Arts, he is an assistant professor of English at Whittier College and teaches at Spalding University’s low-res MFA program.

6 September 2023