Ghost Stations: Poems 2015-2016
by Richard Milazzo.
First edition paperback: January 2017.
Designed by Richard Milazzo.
104 pages, with a gatefold 2-color cover reproducing in black and white a rephotographed image of Oranienburgerstrasse train station, Berlin, Germany, a black and white photograph of the author on the frontispiece by Joy L. Glass, Berlin, Germany, April 14, 2015, a portfolio of 36 black and white photographs and a text by Fausto Ferri, and an introduction by the author.
9.25 x 6.5 in., printed, sewn and bound in Turin, Italy.
ISBN: 1-893207-38-2.
ISBN: 978-1-893207-38-7.
Published by Tsukuda Island Press, Hayama and Tokyo, Japan, 2017.
RETAIL PRICE: $24.00 (includes postage and handling)
In the introduction to Ghost Stations: Poems 2015-2016, the author, Richard Milazzo, writes: “What else did we, did I, expect from a culture savagely feeding upon itself like cannibals? It is only natural this spectacle would lead to the world, ‘the romance[,] of the unbearable and inconceivable’. So what is our, my, saving grace? A Babylonian world in which we must learn that “love [comes] in inimitable, irreversible forms.”
About the portfolio of black and white photographs by Fausto Ferri, executed in 1974, and accompanying the poems in Ghost Stations, the author says: “When I look at the ruins of Ferri’s city, Castelfranco Emilia, not just the old buildings becoming older with time, but the architectural havoc and horror of urban development in the 1970s to the present, documented by him in the frankest, most factual, yet most poetic way, it becomes abundantly clear why we continue to spiral not just downwards but, as a species, wildly, in an all-encompassing, self-delusional, self-destructive manner.
“Which is to say, the ‘ghost stations’ of Berlin were not and are not the only ones in existence. In Berlin, there were literally four: Potsdamer Platz, Brandenburger Tor, Friedrichstrasse, Oranienburger-strasse (the latter illustrated on the front and back covers here), train stations in East Berlin that were closed to West Berliners during the period of the Berlin Wall, from 1961 to 1989. The trains would pass from West through East to West Berlin without stopping at these four stations in East Berlin, and it was these highly surveilled (sic) but abandoned stations that became known as ‘ghost stations’. In the United States, such ‘stations’ exist everywhere, in the form of thousands of city centers and downtown areas that were abandoned during the ‘White Flight’ of the 1970s (Whites fleeing the presence of Blacks), and thousands of other smaller urban areas that have all become essentially ghost towns (mostly due to the ubiquitous presence of the automobile and the loss of manufacturing jobs to corporate out-sourcing). What happened to Castelfranco Emilia happened to many urban areas around the world, especially in Third World countries, which were and continue to be exploited by urban developers, not only destroying city life but also the environment.
“But there are other kinds of related ghostly spectacles, often unsuspected or imperceptible – Bachelard-like, ghostly stations. It could be said they describe a phenomenology of “ghost corners,” which are not so overtly ideological in nature. These ‘corners’ include memories of a ‘ghostly lover’ (in Fausto’s case), or, in mine, the memory of an old reading room annihilated years ago at my college. In them, we can also find “little bastard dog[s]” (among them Fausto and me) sniffing at their more sensuous configurations; spectacles of helplessness and sorrow no matter where we turn (or wag our tails); a mournful ‘universe of walled-up windows’. ‘It was the time’, let’s face it, in Castelfranco Emilia and elsewhere, in the 1970s, ‘of sad butchers with blood-stained white aprons / staring off into the distance’.
“More generically, but not less humanely, there are the ghosts of those on Flight 93 who went down in a field in Western Pennsylvania, victims transformed into heroes by their collective actions on 9/11. And there are the ‘ghost iron and steel mills’ of Pittsburgh that no longer exist except as reminders of our ever-eroding self-sufficiency as a nation.
“Not just in ‘picturesque’ places like Dachau, but in picturesque places like Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, that is, in very unimaginably serene ghostly corners of the world, transpire unspeakable crimes against humanity. For it was in the Mount Washington Hotel in the White Mountains of this backwoods state, in July 1944, that the global take-over of nation-states by banks and corporations masking as nation-states was hatched as an idea and took place. It was at the Bretton Woods Conference that the IMF (The International Monetary Fund) was established.
“For me, personally, beyond the inhumane sweep of history, which is never more than a chain of pearls pieced together randomly, and often without regard to facts or to actual circumstances, there perdures still, against the odds, against time itself, the ghostly corners of places like Castelfranco Emilia, which Ferri has documented so affectionately and profoundly for us in his black and white photographs, underscoring the helplessness of these corners, these places, lost to the grander but far less authentic horizons and horizon-lines of history.
“About vision, about the things lost to history, about sorrow, there are Ferri’s own precious and beautiful words about the function of his photographs: ‘They are the candle inadvertently shedding light on a collective memory. I only hope these places and little stories might find their rightful place once more, latching onto each other to recreate that ‘grand tour’ of those little streets and courtyards within the context of their everyday life in those ordinary days of 1974’.”