Tribute to Edwin Forrest Ward

Edwin Forrest Ward – a Tribute 

By NC Weil 

In every community, at its heart 

Is a person who either made it start 

Or took it on as their own commitment, 

To grow, sustain, to care what it meant. 

For writers and songsters in Denver here 

The man who stood in the middle is clear – 

Ed Forrest Ward set up a venue, 

Inviting us all to be on the menu – 

Stories, Stories spread the plate 

To write, to tell, to captivate. 

You and Marcia reserved the Merc 

And Imagemaker got to work 

To craft the invites to us all:

“Fourth Tuesday – heed the siren’s call 

Of voices varied, come and share. 

Creative sparks will fill the air!” 

So many have, for ten fine years 

Embraced assembly with our peers. 

Leading off with a Philly tale 

Or seventies Denver: he’d unveil 

A place we maybe thought we knew, 

But from Ed’s unique point of view: 

Gone in a Taxi to the Dark Side 

Or with Lucia on a Pow-wow ride, 

Or a ghost from a bygone neighborhood 

The man in the attic lonely stood 

And watched cops puzzling in the street – 

Where can he be? He’s got them beat. 

All through life your stories rose 

Insisting to you: Stop! Compose! 

Share your thought and incidents, 

Steep them in your eloquence. 

An impresario is one 

Who trades in the phenomenon 

Of gathering, and drawing out 

The storytellers round about – 

The songs, the memoirs, and the fiction 

Made us richer through depiction – 

The deadline looms to stand on stage 

Painting us all another page. 

Thank you, Ed, for the groups you founded, 

Those magic nights we sat astounded. 

And we remember, by the way, 

That aphorism you liked to say: 

“A contract with the muse is a contract for life” 

You kept her happy – she’s been your midwife!

The Master and Margarita

Mikhail Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita, begun in the 1920's and still in some draft version when he died in 1940, is nevertheless a masterpiece.

Four stories entwine in the narrative: the devil visits Moscow with his retinue, predicting to the editor of a literary journal the improbable circumstances of his death. Satan's presence soon leads to overcrowding in the mental hospital as people babble about impossible occurrences. The second story, a novel rejected by Soviet publishers, recounts Pontius Pilate's days during and immediately following the crucifixion of Yeshua Ha-Nozri. The novelist, despairing of a life of fruitless endeavor, throws the manuscript into his stove, but as the devil remarks, "manuscripts are not so easily destroyed." We're given a taste of life in Moscow, among theater-goers and at a large restaurant frequented by writers and poets. And the author of Pilate's story, the Master, is the lover of Margarita, a woman of strong will and courage who makes a pact with the demons in order to bring peace to the man she loves.

In the satiric vein of Gogol, whose comic novella The Nose ridicules bureaucratic self-importance, Bulgakov's devil plays with people's greed and vanity. Booked for a magic show at the city's largest theater, the devil materializes a boutique and invites women to come try on - and keep - the lovely gowns and shoes. They hurry in, shedding their own clothes, dressing in finery. He flings money at the audience, who scramble to collect the notes. After the performance's abrupt end the crowd leaves the theater, only to find their new clothes vanished and the money worthless. A thousand women in the streets in their underwear must of course attract attention, but since the truth - that magic has been practiced - is impossible, officials deny the reports. They ascribe the sight to mass hypnosis, just one of the author's digs at the lockstep mentality of Stalin's time.

Bulgakov fought obscurity and the censors, and he portrays officialdom as selfish, incompetent and short-sighted. Likewise, the literati ignore the poet who witnessed the editor's bizarre death; from his room in the mental hospital he struggles to convince anyone of what he's seen. 
Something strange happened to [the poet] Ivan Nikolayevitch. His will seemed to crack, and he felt weak and in need of advice. 
"But what is to be done?" he asked timidly.
This is the famous question posed by Lenin during the Revolution, and coming from this poet who mistrusts his own senses, it strikes an absurd and pitiful note in contrast to the thundering challenge issued by Soviet Russia's hero. Small wonder the novel didn't see publication until 1966.

The chaos sown by the devil and his henchmen is wild and fantastical. Scoundrels inflict their bombast and corruption on other scoundrels, and bureaucrats scurry to gather evidence they refuse to believe, while credulous men populate the mental hospital - the perpetrators do not strike us as evil. Rather, they have come to torment the pompous and reveal the idiocy of fools - we could wish for such powers!