Fred Whitehead
There’s a kind of book in America that is turned out by our college and university writing programs; they tend to be cool, detached, slick, middle class and boring. This is not any such book. Janet Kuypers is rooted in quite a different world: the scene of the streets, late-night bars, the prisons (now our only true growth industry), and the kitchens of homes where people live, argue with each other, and sometimes try to stay in love.
Reading these poems and stories, I was reminded of Sherwood Anderson’s statement that the Americans are the loneliest people in the world. Janet sees this also, and how could it be otherwise in a society pivoting on the doctrine of Individualism? Like Anderson, Kuypers’ people seethe with anxiety, despair, conflict, and a desire to escape without any real place to go, but also with a terrible yearning that amounts to love, which is the only hope. Her earlier work focused on themes of abuse: alcoholism, rape, and that daily harassment we find in our lives and work. The women’s movement has brought forward a great truth-telling literature of this kind, exposing the horrors of a patriarchal system which was worse because it seemed so strongly entrenched that it could not be challenged, let alone overcome.
In a preface to one of those earlier collections, Kuypers relates that people used to inquire if she was disturbed in some way, as if in revealing all this chaotic torment, she must be crazy or at least neurotic. This is an old suggestion about writers who tell the truth, going back to William Blake, the surrealists, and so on. She rightly protested in defense of her mission, to take the side of the outcasts, the beaten, the destroyed.
By this point in our history, even the “mainline” magazines and newspapers talk about the crisis of American society, the turmoil, crime, corruption and brutality we feel we cannot face, but must face. As in previous books, Janet deals with that, but now I discern a new element in her writing, to quietly but resolutely move toward solutions. The section of poems for and about her mother finds grounds for sense and humor and calm, as if writing of such a resilient woman induces a healing perspective. The essays about pornography are reflective and full of insights into how commercialism infects the most personal relations in our lives. Buying and selling and being powerful is so common in our society that many do not even question what it is, or what it does.
I am struck by how the present collection of work strives to forge new ways of thinking; indeed, there is often a modest but steady insistence that thinking as such is necessary and will help us through it all. Kuypers has no belief in the easy solutions of the churches; she must find her way forward with purely human means. Yet her writing has that quality of intensity and purpose which is generally but falsely attributed to the “spiritual.” In “The State of the Nation” she communes with our revolutionary ancestors, about what is happening in America. She reinvigorates the language of rights, of democracy, of a future for the continent in spite of degradation and decay. Finally, in “Everything Was Alive and Dying” she confronts head-on the fate of nature herself, in a poem which I find to be one of the great sustaining visions of our decades on earth.
The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda has an essay in which he says literature must have a “duty toward life.” This is a book that undertakes that same responsibility; it’s hard-won, by turns painful, bitter, harsh, but loving and fighting too. We should be proud to have it, by our side, as we take on the thousand challenges of staying alive when so much is aiming at death.
Scars Publications and Design
in conjunction with Penny Dreadful Press
first edition
copyright @ 2004 Scars Publications and Design
This book, as a whole, is fiction, and no correlation should be made between events in the book and events in real life. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher.
Information about past books is available upon request through Scars Publications and Design. Materials from the literary magazines “Children, Churches and Daddies” and “Down in the Dirt” are available on line at http://scars.tv, as are .mp3 files, .ra files, .aif files, .au files, .wav files .mov and mpeg files of Kuypers, both reading her work and singing with three sets of musicians.
Oeuvre is published through Scars Publications and Design, whose publisher is a member/minister through the Universal Life Church. Scars Publications and Design, the logo and associated graphics @ 1979 - 2004. All rights reserved. Kuypers and Scars Publications and Design welcome your comments, tips, compliments or complaints. Direct all comments and suggestions to the e-mail addresses listed above.
The definition of oeuvre (the works of a writer, painter, or the like, taken as a whole) is from the Websters Unabridged 2001 Dictionary.
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and assistance from Freedom & Strength Foundation, Troy Press, Hawthorne Press & Dried Roses Press
printed in the United States of America
writings @ 1979-2004 Janet Kuypers
book design @ 1998-2004 Scars Publications and Design