A message for 2022 from 1980....
Miss Liberty’s Monologue and Meditations presents seven poems from Miss Liberty’s Dreams, the second section of a longer poem entitled Carbuncle Resurrectrix: Antar, Miss Liberty, and the Prince of Pigs.
Miss Liberty is a long-term patient in a mental facility whose dreams and reflections are recorded by the book’s narrator, Artz Carbuncle. Through her vivid account of her life’s oppression, and the images of the world that nourish her determination to resist, the reader is provided a focus of reflection on some enduring issues of American social values. The poems excerpted here were originally drafted during the energy crisis of the late 1970's, when President Carter installed solar panels at the White House (later removed by President Reagan), calling the energy crisis 'the moral equivalent of war'. Carter thus became one of the first American politicians to urge the nation to begin serious efforts to conserve energy and assert some control over our extravagant consumer culture. The issues and images central to these poems illuminate certain aspects of our current situation and our nation's indulgent and abusive conception of Liberty. The longer narrative poems in the collection portray some of Miss Liberty's dreams, which recast in narrative terms her experience of the nation's history of male domination, misogyny, racism, intellectual vanity, and alienation from the natural world. However, one central sequence of the book provides Miss Liberty's 12 "images of meditation", short poems that are built up from sensory images; these are printed over full-color reproductions of watercolor paintings. The paintings in their forms and colors extend the ideas and feelings of the poems themselves, inviting the reader to reflect on the full implications of the words. Responsive readers will find themselves contemplating a wide range of concerns, engaging some of the most basic elements of our experience of the natural world and the troubled realm of human relations.