Delware's Pre-eminent Person of Letters

I have long held that Steven Leech is Delaware’s pre-eminent person of letters. He is a writer, critic, editor, archivist, journalist, promoter, disk jockey, and investigator of Delaware literary, musical, and visual arts, especially works outside the canonical metropole. This summer (2015), Leech will see a vindication, of sorts, of his life of letters on the periphery through his collaboration with the Delaware Art Museum in Dream Streets: Art in Wilmington 1970–1990, which will run June 27, 2015 through September 27, 2015. Leech edited the lit mag Dreamstreets almost from its founding in 1977 through issue #50 in 2006, and a commemorative Dreamstreets #51 is being published by the museum. Leech will be featured along with Dreamstreets alumni and new talent at a special Dreamstreets Downtown reading at the museum on July 18, 7-8 p.m. An early film by Leech, Having Come and Having Gone, is included in the exhibit.

Steven Leech’s scholarship uncoveres the critical edge of Delaware literature, from works that challenged Delaware’s slave economy to twentieth-century exposés of Chateau Country. Leech explains why he has chosen to take his stand outside the establishment but within Delaware boundaries in The Wedgehorn Manifesto: A Cultural Treatise from the Underground (2008):

It is because I see a cultural presence here that has been driven underground—so far underground that it often doesn’t recognize itself. It is a presence that is the true outgrowth, product and result of its own cultural past. It is a past that I can almost remember, but a huge social and political gash that spans the post world War II era has severed us, until only recently, from that which defines us as a cultural community.

In his Manifesto, Leech rescues Delaware’s artistic legacy from the Memory Hole. He traces the history of Delaware jazz, rock and roll, the African-American press, the counter cultural and alternative press, 19th and 20th century authors, cinema, and visual artists, not only the Brandywine Tradition of Schoonover and Wyeth, but what Leech identifies as the Christina Tradition: Edward Grant, Edward Loper, and William D. White, who was featured recently at the Biggs Museum in Dover, thanks in part to efforts by Steven Leech. In the Manifesto, Leech calls for artists to be caretakers of the community conscience. For a free pdf copy of Wedgehorn Manifesto, email your request to publisher@brokenturtlebooks.com. Soon to be release is a companion piece to the Manifesto, A City of Ghosts.

Leech carries on a family tradition. His father, Steven Leech senior, was a writer for FDR’s Works Progress Administration and published in the 1938 Delaware: A Guide to the First State. The work was reprinted by the Historical Society of Delaware in 2006, and Leech the son wrote the introduction.

Steven Leech is founder of Dreamstreets Press, Broken Turtle Books, Broken Turtle Booklist, and the Delaware Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He has also published numerous personal and whimsical imprints such as Screamweets, Creamtreats, Nemocolin Xpress, and Pinhead. In addition to editing Dreamstreets, Leech was editor of two African American Newspapers in Wilmington, The Delaware Spectator and The Delaware Valley Star, as well as Viewpoint, the public face of the University of Delaware Cosmopolitan Club. He was one of the founders in 1981 of 2nd Saturday Poets, now Delaware’s longest-running poetry venue. Recently Leech founded Dreamstreets Downtown, a reading currently held 3rd Saturdays at 3 p.m. at the Chris White Gallery in the middle of our struggling burg, Wilmington.

Leech is a leading radio personality. Folks in northern Delaware and three contiguous states know Leech through Even Steven’s Boptime, heard on WVUD 91.3-FM Saturday mornings from 6 to 10 p.m. Boptime features popular music, jazz, and show tunes in their cultural, historical, and political contexts. One of the show’s regular features is “Cliffords Corner,” where Larry Williams, Bob Fleming, and Maurice Simms join Leech to tell of personal encounters with luminaries like Betty Roché, Lem and Daisy Winchester, and Clifford Brown. Another feature is "Vietnam Rock," which Leech, a Vietnam veteran, uses as part tribute to the troops and part exposé of that dreadful conflict. Leech also produces Dreamstreets 26, a radio show on WVUD that has captured the voices Delaware poets and writers of the past half-century as well as readings from authors of the last 200 years. The show is currently broadcast Monday’s at 1 p.m. Leech even produced a video of this writer’s poem “String Quartet,” featuring the Delos String Quartet, for WHYY-TV12 in 1986.

Not only has Leech published many hundreds of incisive articles on politics, history, and the arts, but his fiction and poetry are as daring as anything by the predecessors he admires. Works such as Raw Suck, Untime, and 2000 Years are at times dark and painfully personal, sometimes humorous, and always prophetic. He floats his characters in and out of alternative universes, some hellish, some as life was supposed to be. His work is never lukewarm. As the Good Book says, the lukewarm the Lord spits from His mouth.

Steven Leech is the recipient of both Emerging and Established Artist fellowships from the Delaware Division of the Arts. Events associated with the exhibition at the Delaware Art Museum are available at the Museum’s Website.

Most of Steven Leech's literary works are listed on his Broken Turtle Booklist Page. There is also an archive of some of his works and old photos at Flying Snail.

Delaware Artist William D. White Retrospective at the Biggs is a “Must See”

I’ve written a fair amount about William D. White on this blog space and in other places. Now you can see for yourself the sizable collection of his art on display at the Biggs Museum of Art in Dover, Delaware. It’s all thanks to the heroic efforts of Nancy Carol Willis, who as a girl was fortunate to have known White. All during my own adolescence, growing up in Richardson Park, I had also heard about White from my father, who had known him during their years together working for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the late 1930s.

Nancy Carol Willis' Exhibition catalogue

I daresay that White was one of the most important artists working in Delaware in the 20th century. As far as I’m concerned, his stature ranks with that of Edward Loper as an artist of great vision. Yet, it may become apparent why William D. White’s work was nearly rubbed out of the legacy forged by Delaware artists. Part of the reason may have been caused by White’s own nature, which was as an unassuming gentle human being who never sought to direct attention onto himself. He lived his later life in poverty, almost as a hermit, for lack of a better term, in not much more than an adobe hut in the Penny Hill vicinity north of Wilmington.

Another reason his work fell into obscurity and his artistic legacy came fatally close to becoming forgotten was the nature of his artwork itself.

Even while providing large amounts of artwork to the corporate chemical giant Hercules Company during the late 1920s and early 1930s, he largely depicted the workingman and the ordinary people who could be our neighbors. It was his artwork from the later 1930s that his depictions of his subject matter took on a greater role as social commentary. Nancy Carol Willis, who compiled the catalogue that accompanies the Biggs’ exhibit, says it best:

“He invariably chose to depict laborers rather than foremen or managers. What stands out as highly unusual for the time was his honest and empathetic depiction of society’s marginalized members. European immigrants and African Americans rarely achieved prominence in such large paintings.”

William D. White was Delaware’s first, and maybe only, true Social Realist.

An untitled William D. White painting from my
own collection that's in the Biggs exhibit

Nancy Carol Willis’s catalogue is essential for gaining a complete story of William D. White’s life and artistic career. Inside are reproductions of works not available for the exhibit, along with photos of White’s parents and those of his youth.

Willis, herself a fine artist who is well acquainted with the history of 20th century American art, provides examples by other of White’s contemporaries to give context to White’s artistic endeavors. We see, in much the same manner Delaware artist Edward Loper kept pace with the development of American art and new trends in its expression, how White absorbed and learned from his peers and national contemporaries. Among Delaware’s 20th century artists, Loper and White sustained their careers as artists by understanding and learning from what was going on around them in the development of American art, from the Ashcan school to Social Realism, with that which came before and that which came in between. White even took some incursions into the realm of abstract art.

With some fortunate serendipity, when the Biggs Museum exhibit ends on June 21st, opening on June 27th, the Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington will present Dream Streets: Art in Wilmington 1970 – 1990. William D. White died in 1971, just as the art movement in Wilmington was getting under way. Much of the art produced in the Wilmington vicinity during this period has much in common with the socially conscious art of William D. White. Unavoidably, it’s easy to see how the life and work of William D. White flows nearly seamlessly into the endeavors of those who followed and launched artistic careers in the early 1970s. White’s artistic career ended in obscurity while those beginning to work in the 1970s began in obscurity, subjected to marginalization and living, often times, in poverty, yet remaining true to a vision that comprised something more progressive than the bucolic landscape and elitist sensibilities of The Brandywine Tradition that held sway over Delaware artists.

Finally, with these two back-to-back art exhibitions, we are getting a truer picture of the Wilmington art world. Beginning with artists like William D. White, Edward Loper, Edward Grant, Bayard Berndt, Jeannette Slocomb Edwards, Walter Pyle, Henrietta Hoopes and many others who painted during the period of the late 1930s, we begin to see how an earlier art community morphed into the one that blossomed on the heels of the vibrant counter-culture of the 1960s and into the 1970s. Among those earlier artists, William D. White, along with Edward Loper, embodies the greatest element of cohesion with the aspirations of a later generation of local artists.

George Lippard, Local Novelist and Another Friend of Edgar Allan Poe, and his Hidden Relevance for Today

The body of canonical American literature serves to enlighten us regarding that which lies behind or beneath our American history. It serves to bring to light those conditions, incidents or events from our past. Often those events or conditions deliver a work into the canon. A good example might be Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. On the other hand, works by American authors of extraordinary talent can enlighten us about the ground floor nature of our psyche that led to, or surrounded, those conditions from various periods in our history. Examples are evident in the works from authors of the post Civil War era to post World War years like Clemons, Melville, Cather, Wharton, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway, just to touch upon some of the literary giants of that era. There are many others who contributed, as well, to giving us a “feel” for a broad portion of our history –– if indeed we are knowledgeable about a history from which we continue to learn its lessons.

The great fatal flaw in American history is that we are a country built on twin pillars. One pillar is the legacy of slavery, and the other is the genocide of our Native Americans, which in large part led to those imperial designs that drove our “Manifest Destiny,” to be a country “from sea to shining sea.”
Of the antebellum era, three major canonical literary figures come to mind: Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and Edgar Allan Poe. With the exception of Fenimore Cooper, none gave much space or effort in addressing those issues associated with those twin pillars.

The politics embraced by Edgar Allan Poe are largely an enigma. His politics are not readily apparent or discernible from his fiction, non fiction, or poetry. On the one hand, Poe wrote many stories about ordinary people caught up in extraordinary situations. On the other hand, Poe, as a Southerner who grew up surrounded by slavery, did line up behind the racist writing of James Kirk Paulding. However, there is some reason to believe Poe’s attitudes were subject to revision. He certainly grappled with the issue in his only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, and there is some sketchy evidence that he had a friend who was black, Armistead Gordon. Otherwise, Poe rarely dwelled on the matter, though he was intelligent and well traveled enough to be capable of critical thinking.

As I have suggested in my own fiction, Poe had been influenced, or given pause to reflect, by others, particularly by Delaware author and poet John Lofland, a staunch Abolitionist. In his travels between Virginia and New England, Poe was exposed to new views and perspectives on the subject.

In 1841 – 1842, Poe was editor and critic at Graham’s Magazine in Philadelphia. It was in Philadelphia during this time that Poe met George Lippard. Poe and Lippard were two authors who shared literary styles. Both wrote gothic tinged subject matter, combined with a uniquely American romanticism. These were stories about the underbelly of American life. However, Lippard wrote with a different purpose.

George Lippard

Lippard met Poe early in his career when he was working as a copy editor of the newspaper Spirit of the Times. Poe worked across the street at Graham’s Magazine. There is some evidence Poe influenced Lippard’s literary style. There are also some sketchy reports that Lippard rescued Poe from some dangerous situations in the streets of Philadelphia.

Recently the University of Pennsylvania published a new edition of Lippard’s long out of print novel The Killers. Originally published in 1850, the novel is set during the events leading up to a race riot in Philadelphia the previous year. The time frame is also during the same election cycle, ironically enough, when Poe was “cribbed” in Baltimore in an incident that eventually led to his death.

The plot of The Killers involves Philadelphia street gangs, one of the most vicious of which was “the Killers," located in the Moyamensing district of that city. Major characters are a set of half brothers, one brought up in abject poverty and the son of an absentee rich woman who has turned to a life of crime. The other brother has become the leader of “the Killers.” The father of the former son, whom he discovers only shortly before the incidents described in Lippard’s novel, is a manipulative banker who had made a fortune off the illegal slave trade. During the riot in which the white gang of “Killers” descends upon blacks in a nearby neighborhood, burning and pillaging it, rich banker Jacob D. Z. Hicks kidnaps Kate Watson, the common law sister of his long lost and abjectly poor son, in an attempt to drive her into a like of prostitution. Through a rather complex set of circumstances, a black man variously known as Black Andy, or “the Bulgine,” saves her from a burning building.

George Lippard was a strong anti-slavery advocate, and in The Killers he demonstrates the extent of the greed of those who sought to benefit from the illegal slave trade, along with other illegal activity stemming from it. One is reminded of similar implications suggested by today’s illegal drug trade as well as the gluttonous and unregulated arms trade, especially in terms of spawning other out of control illegal activity. As a result, corruption was rampant even among “respectable” politicians and businessmen.

Lippard, unlike Poe, was called a “reformer” in some circles, and a “muckraker” in others. He clearly saw the relationship between chattel slavery and wage slavery. In fact, near the end of his life he formed one of America’s earliest labor unions, The Brotherhood of the Union, which drew its inspiration from the principles of the revolutions that spread throughout Europe in 1848. One must wonder at how much Lippard’s attitudes rubbed off on Poe.

George Lippard was born April 10, 1822 in a place called Yellow Springs in Chester County, which directly borders New Castle County, Delaware. He died, probably from tuberculosis, on February 9, 1854. During his short life he wrote over a dozen novels. Of them was Blanche Of Brandywine, set during the Battle of the Brandywine during our Revolutionary War. His most noteworthy novel was The Quaker City: The Monks of Monk Hall, a Romance of Philadelphia Life, Mystery & Crime. In this novel, Lippard exposed widespread corruption in Philadelphia.

Throughout his works, Lippard displayed progressive thinking still relevant today. At one point in The Killers he declares that those elected to Pennsylvania state government “might go there as especial hirelings of Bank speculators, paid to enact laws that give wealth to one class, and poverty and drunkenness to another.”

The more things change, the more they remain the same.

One wonders how our history might have been shaped had Lippard’s literary works remained in print and given greater consideration by publishers and in the halls of academia. Certainly Lippard wrote within an important historical context, especially a local one.

We don’t often understand the genesis of some of America’s historical events. For example, T. S. Arthur’s 1854 novel Ten Days in a Barroom, and What I Saw There was as popular as Lippard’s novels and their contemporary novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Arthur’s novel is often credited with bringing the issue of temperance into prominence, culminating decades later with Prohibition during the 1920s. Incidentally, T. S. Arthur was also one of Poe’s acquaintances, and is an author who is largely forgotten. Thus, we are also deprived of better realizing the tightly knit nature of the literary world during Poe’s time within the confines of a smaller United States than the one from “sea to shining sea” that we take for granted today.

Our current literary canon is inadequate. We could have a better understanding of who we are by giving a better understanding of where we’ve been. Every region of our country has authors and poets who have represented, portrayed, or depicted our past experiences. If an expanded national canon might be considered too unwieldy for academia, then might we begin to build one on a regional basis? Here, in the mid-Atlantic, in the birthplace of the United States, there are plenty of forgotten authors who could tell us more about ourselves from the perspective of our past history. George Lippard is another one of those.

Art for Whose Sake?

Okay, you've got art for art's sake, art for propaganda, and a slice of personal horn-blowing in between. What goes with this sandwich? The pickle we're in. My first need here is to define "propaganda." Remember Brenda Lee's ancient hit, "I'm Sorry?" I sure do, with love, but I also remember a line in it that I was raised on by my parental generation: "Mistakes are part of being young." Oh yeah? Well... yeah, actually. True enough. The young make lots of mistakes characteristically. What's not true is the implication: that older people don't, that when you "grow up" you grow out of making mistakes, so do as I say not as I do, blah blah blah. And that implication is the lie hiding behind the truth, because making mistakes is part of being older too. (My own experience is that the young tend to make varied experimental mistakes, whereas older people tend to make the same tired old mistakes over and over.) So propaganda is a lie hiding behind a truth.

Thanks to Steven Leech for the Laura Bush/Poetry story, which I missed at the time, and which is instructive-- in microcosm it was just yet one more ugly american assumption that the rest of the world is no more than a classroom of sing-along children (it's a small world after all, it's a...), and that implication is the lie. A lie that this time around got revealed. Propaganda by gently coerced default.

Phil Bannowsky touches this base as well. What's wrong with an overt message in art? Is the problem fundamental, or just a slippery slope issue wherein the message might overwhelm the medium and hammer us where a magic wand might weild more savvy weight? From another angle, is it even possible to open your mouth and not advertise? Is there a love-poem in creation that doesn't advertize me or mine above others in the marketplace of life?

I have never deliberately been a "political" poet in the sense of instrumentally serving a specific organized cause, but I have also never tried not to be, understanding that truth is not something that fits in a box. Or, to put it the other way around, if it does fit in a box, it's probably not the truth-- which is why art for art's sake is probably a lie, since it chooses to live in a box. And so, (at long last) I vote for advertising, provided it is honest. It is simply physically impossible at any moment to see the universe except from one place instead of from all the others. That doesn't mean the truth will sell or not hurt. It just means that if you don't want to live under a box-top, but under the sky, you've got to accept the weather, rain or shine.

Following What Money There Is

In Delaware author Victor Thaddeus' unpublished novella "Leo Rex," from the late 1930s, there is buried in it the suggestion that there ought to be, and very well could be, a U. S. Department of Arts and Culture, which would enjoy equal status with the Departments of State, Treasury, Interior, Commerce, and War as part of the President's Cabinet. This was not a notion that Thaddeus held alone. Many, who, like Thaddeus, were members of the various Federal Arts, Writers’, Theater, and Musicians' Projects of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) during FDR's Administration in the late 1930s, thought those projects might evolve into a new United States Department of Arts and Culture. After all, many developed countries have Ministries of Arts and Culture that serve in the highest echelons of government, including the former Soviet Union and Cuba. Why not in the United States, the most "developed" country on the planet?

While the FWP (Federal Writers' Project) did not accept works of fiction, Thaddeus' novella was accepted as a piece for a dramatic adaptation for the local Theater Project. All those in the various Projects, whether they painted murals, wrote, worked in the theater, or played a musical instrument, got paid for their work. It was a real living.

The various Projects never got the opportunity to evolve into a Department of Arts and Culture. The Second World War came along, supplanting the WPA and gobbling up a lot of budding artists, writers, and cultural workers into the Draft, and the idea of such a noble seat in the President's Cabinet evaporated.

After the War, soldiers came home war-weary to social problems endemic to peacetime conversion, to the launching of the "baby boom," and to a slowly growing social and political paranoia that would blossom into a Cold War that would bury any serious cultural endeavors in a heap of McCarthyite, HUAC-driven cultural conformity and emotional mass apathy. Television put people to sleep in what former FCC Chairman Newton Minow in 1961 would call a "vast wasteland." For many, Minow’s warning was a wake-up call to the plight of our country's cultural health.

In 1965 the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) was created by an act of Congress and in 1967 the Public Broadcasting Act was enacted, which established the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The Public Broadcasting System (PBS) was founded in 1970. Finally, after nearly a quarter century of mind-numbing 1950s cultural vacuity, some sort of public funding for the arts was established. Though not on the scale that the WPA had funded and supported the arts, the establishment of these institutions did coincide with the cultural flowering of the counter-culture. The multiple events may have sent nascent right-wingers of the day into a lather.

The Roe v. Wade decision from the Supreme Court in 1973 provided the opening wedge issue that galvanized the right wing for the culture wars that have been raging ever since. Things sprung into high gear in 1981 when Ronald Reagan attempted to abolish the NEA, but it gave right wingers like the late Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina the claim that they didn't want their tax money paying for public programming of the kind or content they disapproved. Incrementally, they made enough reductions in public funding for public broadcasting to lead to the interminable fund-raisers being broadcast on public radio and television today which drive many viewers and listeners back to that vapid vast wasteland.

Funding for the arts is a different matter. According to my experience and from what I've observed at close range from other arts organizations, public funding provides only enough money to place an organization into a fund raising-mode, so that the organization is spending valuable time and effort raising the remainder of the funds needed to produce artwork. For individual artists, of whatever discipline, public funding is usually a pittance, even with the largest awards. And it has been my experience, regardless of the quality of the writing itself, that one must be careful of what one writes about. What it all means is that for the individual artist, keep that day job, and for arts organizations, be prepared to put some arts projects on the back burner in order to spend time and effort scrounging around for patronage. This is a far cry from the kind of funding and support established during the New Deal.

For funding of artists, writers, thespians, musicians, and composers, as well as for organizations of and for artists of all kinds, a Brand New Deal is needed; maybe even one which some conservatives in "red states" or under the spell of the "Tea Party" can accept for whatever positive cultural contribution they can make to their constituents. Regardless of whatever reaction might come from the reactionaries, might this be a relevant issue for all artists, writers and poets, thespians, and music makers to adopt and make an effort to achieve? Or might it be better to keep that day job and spend that spare time leftover from the creation of artwork to go around begging for patronage from the fat cats?