Hank Kalet

Reminder: As an Alien in a Land of Promise is available for purchase

Hank Kalet’s As an Alien in a Land of Promise is a book-length mediation on homelessness and American capitalism. Interspersed with Sherry Rubel’s black-and-white photos, the hybrid work of poetry and journalism tells the stories of those living in a now-defunct homeless camp in central New Jersey, asking why our economic system turns people into refuse.

Based on a year of interviews and research in the former Tent City in Lakewood, Kalet tells the stories of people like Angelo, who lost his job in the crash of 2008, and the musician Michael. Interspersed with their voices – and those of “the pastor,” are writers like Jonathan Kozol and Michael Harrington, whose earlier research informs Kalet’s work.

The poet Eliot Katz, a former advocate for the homeless in New Brunswick, calls the book an “inventive mix of objectivist-influenced, journalistic poems and moving photographs” that “brings real, often-ignored human stories, statistics, and local geographies to life.”

B.J. Ward, author of Jackleg Opera, says Kalet “works in the poetic traditions of the inspired and observant narrator in Whitman’s ‘The Sleepers’ and, with his sense of lineation, Williams’ image-emphasis.”

Kalet is a journalist, essayist and poet, whose work appears regularly in NJ Spotlight and has been published by The Progressive, In These Times, The Progressive Populist, Main Street Rag, Lips, The Journal of New Jersey Poets and elsewhere. He is the auther of Stealing Copper, Certainties and Uncertainties, and Suburban Pastoral.

The book is published by the independent Piscataway House Press.

For more, see asanalieninalandofpromise.wordpress.com/ The book can be ordered at channel-surfing.blogspot.com/p/buy-books-by-hank-kalet.html, from Piscataway House, or Amazon. For press information, contact Hank Kalet at hankkalet@gmail.com. Press kit available upon request.

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I have a piece up today at NJ Spotlight on the Trump Sanctuary City order — municipalities like Newark and Jersey City are not backing down.

Executive orders by President Donald Trump late last week that mandated deporting undocumented immigrants, building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, and suspending entry to the country by refugees prompted protests around the United States, including in New Jersey — and spurred what is sure to be the first of many lawsuits.

Meanwhile, officials of New Jersey’s “sanctuary cities” say they will not capitulate to the president’s threat to use the power of the purse to punish them for providing safe havens to undocumented immigrants. One of Trump’s executive orders warned that federal grant money could be “stripped” from sanctuary states and cities that harbor illegal immigrants.

Municipal officials in such “sanctuary cities” as Newark, Jersey City, Princeton, and other towns limit their interaction with federal immigration officials and refuse to allow their police forces to be deputized by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. They say they will continue to resist federal efforts to force their cooperation because it would make policing their communities more difficult and could endanger local health and the economy by making immigrants fearful of government.

Read more here.

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It’s my wife’s birthday today. Here is a poem I wrote a while back (20130, though I don’t remember if I ever shared it.

I Wanted to Write a Sonnet

I wanted to write a sonnet to your eyes but the rhymes
fought me like a punch-drunk boxer
in his final bout. His wild swings
charged by desperation beat
upon my face until I cowered
in the corner, covered
by my gloved fists, my words
languid and dull under the onslaught
of your gaze. I wanted to write
a sonnet, a villanelle, an ode.
I wanted structure, unity, wholeness.
I needed to praise your thighs,
your breasts, compose an epic
to honor your touch. But foot work
failed and the right cross and the left
nailed me over and over, until I fell
senseless, a lost cause, silenced
by the power of your eyes,
your touch, your sweet and tender soul.

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I am pro-choice. I believe women have the right to determine the future of their bodies, to determine whether they should conceive a child and whether, should they become pregnant, to bring that child to term. I believe that they have a right to contraceptives and access to abortion and that both should be treated like other healthcare options.

I also understand and can respect the arguments made by many right-to-lifers, those who are committed to the belief that life begins at conception. I respect their view, but I find their arguments wanting. They are couched in a kind of certainty that is impossible, and they show little concern for the impact on others that their arguments imply.

Any debate over abortion has to consider two issues: When life begins, and who has control over women’s bodies. The first question, for me, is impossible to answer. There tend to be three potential answers: that life begins at conception, that it begins when the fetus is viable outside the whom; and that it begins only at the moment of birth.

Science is only nominally helpful on this — we can point to scientific arguments in favor of all three options, but we do not have consensus. And we can’t. The reason is that the meaning, the definition, of life, remains in dispute, in flux. Religions disagree. Philosophers disagree. Is life a physical thing, purely of our bodies? Is it ephemeral and tied to the soul? Do we retain some kind of life outside our bodies?

This uncertainty, for me, is key. And it is why this decision has to be left in the hands of the people who are most affected: Women.

As I said, I understand the arguments: Catholics, evangelical Christians, other religious groups, may be certain of the answer here, but we do not live in a Catholic nation, or a Christian nation. We live in a nation of secular laws that are predicated on the notion that no single religion or religious tradition should hold sway. My reading? No woman should be forced to abide by rules set by a religion to which she does not subscribe, and no religious should be able to impose rules on the rest of us.

I write this today, because thousands are in Washington today at the March for Life, and because Vice President Mike Pence offered these words: “You know, I have long believed that a society can be judged by how we care for our most vulnerable – the aged, the infirm, the disabled, and the unborn.” Not the poor. Not women. Not victims of domestic or other violence. Not women and men fleeing war and economic location. Not the condemned. Just “the aged, the infirm, the disabled, and the unborn.”

Pence, of course, is a hypocrite and an extremist — as are many on the pro-life side. Pence supports the death penalty (unlike the Catholic Church, which views capital punishment as a threat to life), He is willing to attach strings to state assistance for the poor, essentially telling them that their life has less value than the rest of us. (Testing welfare recipients for drugs to get aid but not the rest of us when we get far more in government benefits than the average poor person is the height of disconcern.) He approves of discrimination against the LGBTQ+ community, has backed military interventions, and so on.

This is where my respect for many pro-lifers’ arguments comes to an end. Life is sacred, you say, but you prioritize life, you make the woman’s life less valuable than the life of those not yet born. Kill the prisoner, drop the bomb, withhold help from the drug-addicted — you are ranking lives, you are judging some to be less valuable than others. You are saying, if not explicitly, that some lives are less worthy, less sacred, or perhaps not sacred at all.

I don’t to have the answers on these questions, but I try to come to them with humility, with a sense that, maybe, just maybe, I could be wrong. And because of this, as I said, I have to let the people most affected, the ones who have to weigh the various options, have the final say.

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I wrote this poem several years during one of my MFA modules at Fairleigh Dickinson. We were having a discussion about prompts and topics, and my mentor Kathleen Graber mentioned something about using comic books or superheroes as a possible jumping-off point for the creative process. I honestly don’t remember the specifics, but this poem was the result:

HOW MATT BECAME DAREDEVIL
(Listen to the poem)



He knew he was more
than the shirt-tail-tucked kid

who’d stay after class
and pound erasers.

Picked last for sports,
left to watch as the kids

banged line drives deep
beyond the infield in summer.

Pressed into lockers,
beat bloody in the back of the gym.
Maybe the radioactive liquid
that blinded Matt Murdock
in the comics would spill
from a passing truck,
heighten his senses,
and he’d then scale the walls
of his apartment house,
and chase the villains
across the city’s rooftops.

The poem obviously plays off Daredevil’s origin story. Young teen Matt Murdock, living in Hell’s Kitchen, saves an old woman who is crossing the street from an oncoming truck and, in the process, injures himself and gets doused with a liquid (depending on the version, it is radioactive, or toxic in some other way). He is blinded, but also empowered. His remaining four senses take over — which is not unusual — but the extent to which his hearing and touch, in particular, are heightened are superhuman. Murdock, a brilliant student, is the son of a boxer, a real Joe Palooka-type who gets beat down often and is in bed with the mob. Some versions present the elder Murdock being violent at home, but most show a strong bond between dad and son, a father who is protective and sacrifices a measure of integrity — by throwing fights — to put food on their table. Jack Murdock is eventually killed when he refuses to throw a last fight and Matt is left on his own.

Murdock eventually develops unparalleled acrobatic and martial arts skills, which he combines with his superhuman senses (his touch and hearing give him a radar-like ability to sense what is coming) to become a crime fighter, defending the downtrodden of his low-income Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood.

The nut of the origin story, of course, is the transformation from good-hearted and altruistic, but incredibly vulnerable kid (poor, blind, eventually orphaned) to defender of the downtrodden, both in costume and as a lawyer representing tenants, the cheated and the accused.

My poem, of course, plays off this transformation in the form of a wish, of desire, and I like to think that its power (if it has any) derives from the off-page understanding that it is a dream that will be left unfulfilled.

I presented the poem to my class earlier this week. It’s a freshmen composition class that uses graphic novels to explore the questions of ethics and morality and that I use as the basis of my writing assignments. I’m not in the habit of using my work in class, but I thought this poem — and a poem tied to Spider-Man fit the thematic concerns of the class. (I will be teaching another 10 or 12 poems, including those by Sherman Alexie and Lucille Clifton.)

I projected the poem on a screen and read it aloud, which opened it up not just for my students, but for me — I saw things in the poem that had not been apparent, and they found and talked about things I’d not realized were there when I wrote it.

The big one was that the first half, the description of the bullied student, a description based partly on me (I had some experience with being the brunt of bullying, for instance, and I was never a great athlete in organized sports, though I was usually one of the captains when we’d pick sides in the park) and partly on the experience of friends. The students picked up on the bullying theme — no surprise at a time when bullying has been elevated as an issue that administrators and teachers have to take seriously.

But as I read it, I had the realization that the first half describes Peter Parker — Spider-Man’s alter ego — who was bullied until being bit by the radioactive spider. In fact, there is an element of many of Marvel superheroes’ origin myths in this poem — Murdock and Parker, but also the scientist Bruce Banner (Hulk) and soldier-wannabe Steve Rogers (Captain America). The students picked up on this and led the discussion — day one of class, mind you — and made the point that this also serves as the origin story for man super villains (and rich bad guys in other media).

The question, then, which my poem does not explore, but that is at the heart of the Daredevil, Spider-Man and Captain America origins, is how the influence of something good imposed from the outside — a parent, a friend, an aunt and uncle, a sense of patriotism and humanity — can prevent the buried rage from taking control. Daredevil and Spider-Man engage in some questionable actions — Daredevil seeks revenge — but ultimately settles on a path of good. They easily could have tipped in the other direction.

As for how this might affect my own writing: It’s a reminder that writing begins as a private act, but ultimately ends as a public one. The reader is a participant in creating meaning, and while we don’t compromise to please the reader we have to recognize the roll the reader will play when our poems, stories, reported articles make their way into the real world.