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.
Jesse Willcox Smith, 1900
My newly-shorn rue and its illustration in my favorite Renaissance herbal, that of Giovanni Cadamosto (late 15th Century, British Library MS Harley 3736); A much more OBVIOUS poisonous plant in my garden, baneberry or Actaea Rubra: beware of those berries!
Alnwick’s Poison Garden; a Colin Stimpson 
A Curtain Lecture pub. by J. Lewis Marks, 1824, British Museum; illustrations by John Leech for the first edition of Mrs. Caudle’s Curtain Lectures, 1845; Mrs. Caudle Card (with real hair!), Victoria & Albert Museum; 1907 stereoview from the Library of Congress; postcards, c. 1900-1910.
