Over the past few weeks Salem residents have learned that our city will become the site of yet another dark attraction, styled a museum of course, an establishment that seems even worse than the last arrival in terms of tackiness, kitschiness, darkness, and removal from anything to do with our past or present. I’m not going to name it as I don’t want to shower any publicity on the horrid thing, but you can read about it here. I got all revved up as I usually do, but then found that I could not act (write). All the work on the book, all the anxiety about the launch of the book, all the presentations I’ve been giving on the book, all of my immersion in Salem’s history for years just sort of emptied me, I think. And I truly felt despair. Usually rant writing revives me, but I had nothing to give, nothing to write, and I knew it wouldn’t matter anyway. So I was just kind of stuck. And then, for some inexplicable reason, I picked up an old poetry anthology and started reading it, and one poem led to another and then to another and so I experienced sort of a poetry immersion/conversion over the last week. I say conversion because I’ve had a notable lack of appreciation for poetry my entire life. I remember calling up my father, an English professor and a poet, when I was in college and complaining that I had to read Gerard Manley Hopkins and his work was awful and my father swearing at me in frustration, after which we both hung up and then he called back and calmly explained to me why Hopkins’ work was not awful, and I said ok, but basically I’ve been faking it since then. But the words that I have read over the past week–expressing sorrow over the loss of place, the trivilization of tragedy, and just general futility–really helped me. I discovered all sort of new poets and perspectives and I’m going back for more, but these are some of my favorite lines so far, set against the soon-to-be location of Salem’s newest “museum.”
I’ve always tried to find answers for what has happened and is happening to Salem in academic literature: there is now quite a robust discussion about “dark tourism” and the lure and exploitation of tragedy in general and the Salem scenario in particular. My colleagues Margo Shea and Drew Darien have contributed insightful chapters on tourism to Salem’s Centuries, both with personal and local perspectives (and Salem’s verty first Poet Laureate, J.D. Scrimgeour, closes our book). But it seems to me that Salem has gone way beyond just exploiting the Witch Trials of 1692: an entirely new layer of commodified horror seems to have been grafted onto the city’s identity, completely detached from its human history. I don’t have the tools or the patience to deal with this erasure, so I think I’ll stick to my poetry regimen.
April 13th, 2026 at 7:18 am
Welcome to the world of Poetry, Donna! As a teacher of literature for 34 years, I can tell you that poetry touches the soul like music.
April 13th, 2026 at 7:55 am
Thanks Nancy! Please forward recommendations!
April 13th, 2026 at 9:32 am
Dear Donna, I’m so sorry Salem is considering another attraction based on inciting fear and adding to the disturbing
commercialization of the witchcraft tragedy. To call it a museum is preposterous! I signed the petition. Good luck with it this week!
April 20th, 2026 at 4:50 pm
Hi Donna, hope you enjoy this and that it brings solace and peace. Salem has wonderful poets:
Beloved
The Song of Solomon
No part of me has ever been likened to a gazelle
or a dove, or a fawn, and I’m not sure
what it means to have a nose like the tower of Lebanon or locks anything like purple threads.
My love does not have eyes as black as raven
nor are his legs pillars of alabaster.
His mouth is not always full of sweetness.
The garden we are raising is small by most standards;
there is nothing grand or golden, no balsam or lilies,
and we share strawberries instead of pomegranates.
But I know what it is to imagine his absence
and be afraid, and I know what it is to be loved.
Our garden is small, but we can share the sights,
smells, sounds, and tastes of it, and we can get
a tiny glimpse of the paradise that might have been,
recreated in a faint murmur like a mother’s love, in
comfort like a father’s hand under my head.
We have climbed together to the ridges of mountains
and have felt awesomely connected to this
earth and undeniably detached from it, at once.
Inextricably bound to each other, yet alien, at once.
What is the meaning of things, plants, animals, places,
without love? What is the joy of metaphor, of cadence,
of music, of solitude, without the innuendo?
Would you after me you after
We come to the banquet as invited guests, no more
or less than those who came before: we ache, yet
are satisfied. We grieve and we fear. We stand
on our own. We cling to each other. We are
thoughtless and weak. We delight and affirm.
We are a fair way past young and sometimes we are
scared to death of time. So I am not the Shulammite
maiden, and my love is certainly no king.
But in our little garden or on some majestic
mountain overlook, I trust in the promise we made
and can say it simply now, no longer giddy with analogy,
that this is my beloved and this is my friend.
Linda Dini Jenkins
April 20th, 2026 at 5:27 pm
Thanks Tim—and Linda!