J Journal: New Writing on Justice will be publishing my latest long poem. This one is from the western Pennsylvania series and is titled "The Testimony of Various Witnesses" [1859]. The subject is a murder trial; and the poem, which arose from an actual case in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, blends the remarks of various unreliable, disputatious, racist, clueless, and secretive trial witnesses for both the prosecution and defense. The murdered man is white, the defendants are black, and yet in the actual trial transcript, it gradually becomes clear that the white judge, lawyers, and jurors are dealing with a brutal, low-life jerk who has been harassing a group of responsible businessmen who just happen to be black and that the white witnesses are conflicted, confused, and at times even honest about this situation. I wanted my poem (rather like the previous sentence) to jumble together these confusions while also revealing character and time. I also wanted to retain a degree of ambiguity; for, after reading the actual transcript, I'm still not sure who killed the dead man. Some of the defendants were found not guilty; others received relatively lenient sentences. That in itself seems remarkable. This, after all, was the era of Bloody Kansas.

I'd already been planning to read this poem at the Frost Place this summer. I always like to read rough new work there--stuff I can't yet read anywhere else. Last year, participants got a draft of "Mr. Kowalski"; this year you'll get an unsavory, tragicomic, mysterious slice of the 1859 judicial system. "He do the police in different voices," as Dickens would say.