Doug Holder interviews Marc Goldfinger about his new collection of poetry Heroin's Harbour

https://archive.org/details/zoom_0_202006   ( Click on for interview)

Somerville's Preeti Mehta: Brings Textiles With Style

Preeti Mehta

Preeti Mehta is a social entrepreneur and the sole proprietor of Premaasi Textiles, a social enterprise based in Davis Square, Somerville. 

Inspired by beautiful, hand-crafted textiles worldwide during her travels, Preeti chose to indulge her passion after pursuing careers in telecommunications, management consulting and non-profit management. Premaasi’s  mission is to promote unique, hand-crafted, globally-sourced textile products in the U.S. market and to educate consumers about the value of hand-made products, the techniques used to make them and the skill of the artisans. 

Preeti had long considered a textile venture, but the idea finally coalesced on a trip to India in 2018 when she visited artisan communities in Kuchchh, Gujarat India and had a small trunk show of her purchases for friends and family.  Guests at the trunk show roundly endorsed the treasures Preeti offered, most of which had been purchased over tea and buttermilk in the homes of artisans. 

By starting this enterprise, Preeti has also been able to use Premaasi Textiles to raise awareness about ethics in clothing and advance economic opportunities for artisans, many of whom are based in rural and often marginalized parts of the countries in which Premaasi sources. 

Doug Holder: Can you talk about the artisans you promote? 

The artisans I promote have deep knowledge and skill about their particular textile craft and are diverse in the techniques used. I work with weavers, surface design artists, embroiderers and block printers many of whom are master-craftspeople, whose ancestors have been honing their crafts for generations. I work with both men and women artisans from many different rural (and often marginalized) parts of India. Their crafts are rooted in India's rich textile tradition, but have evolved to meet more modern and urban tastes and become safer for the environment. I also with a low-income women’s co-operative in southeastern Madagascar.

Preeti Mehta:  Is Somerville a good place for a small business?

Yes, I think it is, though I haven't yet had the opportunity to show my products here. I had considered applying to several pop-up opportunities for small business but all have now been cancelled due to the Coronavirus.

Doug Holder: How has your business survived during the corona virus situation?

PM: I have tried to keep expenses low, though I expect sales to be significantly lower this year. I am moving my business online much sooner than originally planned as a response to the current corona-virus situation. 

DH:  What do you envision for future?   

 PM: I'm hoping that, for all of us, this period has been a time for reflection about how we consume and how our actions affect the environment. Specifically for my business and others like mine, I'm hopeful that as people realize how the actions of fast fashion brands have affected garment factory workers both abroad (millions rendered destitute in South Asia due to cancelled orders) and in this country (LA factory workers' wages of $6 per hour exposed during the pandemic) - that they will be more likely to buy handmade and artisinal products. 

www.premaasi.com

Poems from the Back Ward: Poem 1

This is a new series that will focus on people who work or worked in the psychiatric field. I worked as a mental health counselor at McLean Hospital for 36 years.  During many of those years I ran poetry groups for psychiatric patients in different settings. Here is a poem I wrote about watching a client at a Boston hospital. Send your poems to dougholder@post.harvard.edu --with a pic of yourself, bio, and poem--in one email.



ANOREXIA

Just a skeleton of herself.

Her teeth

A row of rot.

Her stringy arms

Starting to rival

The width of the

IV tubes.

But she is happy.

Smiling at the

Happy horseshit of the TV

Her cheeks sucked

To the bone,

A woman

With the voice

Of a gasping, callow child

Asks, clutching the phone:

“How many calories in a scone?”

Not Quite Noon by Paul Naylor

Paul Naylor’s Not Quite Noon, Dos Madres Press, reviewed by Gregory J. Wolos

            Paul Naylor’s new work, Not Quite Noon, has literally taken a lifetime of experience and reflection to compose. The book is comprised of two long poems recounting two trips twenty years apart over one route through the Wind River Wilderness Area in Wyoming. An even earlier exploration along the trail taken when the poet was a teen is referenced, expanding the physical and spiritual exploration Naylor undertakes to a seemingly lifelong endeavor. But it is the two later trips that the author has chosen to memorialize in poems, linking his older self to his younger, while at the same time juxtaposing the experiences in a way that depicts the evolution of his spiritual self.

            The first poem, “A Form Before Us,” is introduced by the Taoist philosopher Lao Tzu’s epigram: “The way that can be named is not the way.” I have always found it paradoxical that attempts are made to render expressions of Taoist or Zen philosophies through language; is it possible to experience the concepts they intend to extol through the physically linear and time bound process of reading? We progress through the reading of a sentence, we accumulate information, comparing it to our past experience, and ultimately synthesizing all parts to actuate enlightenment. But, of course, this dependence on language is exactly what must be sloughed off if we are to truly to inhabit the intended experience. Naylor’s poetic record of his first journey through the Wilderness Area represents his efforts to reevaluate his relationship to time, space, memory, and language. Naylor begins his journey by invoking the mythic Native American voice of the Coyote who gave shape to the Earth: “Listen close/ as Coyote calls/ the rendezvous to order./ Words . . ./ are elements of life lived among earth,/air fire and others/ we find as they are,/ not as we will/ . . . No thought but listening.” The Coyote invites him to “Begin this time with a part of/ rather an apart from.” Traditional reason must be defeated: “Let Descartes’ dictum/ that we must render ourselves/ masters and possessors of nature/ set up camp on the other side.” Naylor’s goal is to “hike with Lao Tzu,” so that he can achieve what the Taoists call “tzu-jan--/ the self-so.”

            As the journey of “A Form Before Us” begins, Naylor recalls his first trip, taken when he was sixteen: “a photo shows a skinny kid, . . ./ years from needing a shave.” In this poem, Naylor weaves three narrative modes of exploring experience in order to achieve the “self-so.” First, there is the scientific definitiveness of geologic time, beginning with “the big bang/ fifteen billion/ years ago” and continued throughout the poem by reference to particular geologic eras and historical events which marked the land: “Rocks below among the oldest on earth,/ Precambrian core of schist and gneiss/ cooled and crystallized as granite/ two and a half billion years ago/ . . . Read them as angle,/ texture and weight/ of a world we share,/ . . . the pasts looks back/ on itself as a line/ leading to and from.” Also part of this physical history is the history of humans: the imposition of trade and traders on the Native Americans, “where trappers get paid whiskey for pelts.” Naylor imbeds these events within the afore-mentioned earth-origin myths overseen by Coyote, who “sings white water rumbles/ like a river in Orion/ without thought of origin or end,/ which we need to know/ to find our way without/ force or forethought.” Finally, there is the immediate present and the experience of the hike itself: “Black clouds build/ in the southwest./ Flickers of light/ between aspen leaves/ give way to gray./ Pick a place in a tight stand of trees,/ pull out my poncho and get ready for rain./ First scent, then sight, then sound,/ or all at once/ the taste and touch/ of rain on rock/ runs over time/ and back to the sea/ out of which we came.”

            Naylor’s experience along the trail in “A Form Before Us” teaches him that though there are transitions in form, there is no loss: “What’s lost when ice/ becomes water/ and water air/ the eye can’t see?/ For and substance for certain,/ but not memory of the mix--/ of the self-so/ ingrained in each cell, unassigned but imagined/ by the form we take./ . . . No map made it,/ No way knows it all,/ Not quite noon, the sun says.” Continuity in form can be imagined in innumerable ways: “A lake is the earth eye/ Thoreau says--/ or a hole/ I say./ Or shattered by wind,/ a shiver of light/Along its surface/ the same appears/ more varied than thought.” And what are the lessons of Naylor’s journey? “Writing now/ about sitting then, /Not the imagined event of being/ here or there now,/ but one event/ with so many/ ways to say it./ . .  Breathe as if/ there’s no beginning,/ as if turning the light up as/ well as around./ Reflect on reflection/ reflecting/ On being/ being over.” As he strives to experience “self-so” on his journey, Naylor learns that “things go on,/ not as they were/ but as they are--/ as new forms unknown,/ like the sound silence contains.”

            Near the conclusion of “A Form Before Us,” Naylor reflects that he “[h]eard the same sounds/ at seventeen when/ I sat here then/ . . . not an essence/ but a repetition/ not of the same/ but of the new.” The second poem of Not Quite Noon, “Crooked Wood,” sets us back on the Wind River Wilderness Trail after an interval of twenty years, and Naylor’s rendering of this later experience is indeed “a repetition/ not of the same/ but of the new.” Naylor informs us that he didn’t “draw on any photos from the trip that led to ‘A Form Before Us.’” And the depiction of this second journey suggests that, while Naylor might be the same individual who wrote the first poem, his “form” has definitely changed, both in terms of his own physical “essence” and the style in which he renders the poem. Structurally, this poem shapes the journey along the trail as a series of photos connected by wandering strings of verse: “In lieu/ of writing/ the picture/ one writes/ of memory/ retrieved/ in sentence/ or line in lieu of form/ image other/ than any/ photo shows.” Much of what Naylor sees and experiences transcends the bounds of these photos, but the older Naylor can’t escape his physicality: “Pretty sure I couldn’t haul my sixty-one year old bag of bones up this steep trail . . . carrying a sixty-pound backpack . . . I want more oxygen then there is.”

            Naylor “reads” the trail differently as he accepts the form time and experience have settled upon him. His new perch yields fresh insights—it’s as if he’s rereading the same book after twenty years have passed. There is a wry humor in “Crooked Wood.” The mythic “Coyote” of the first poem has been replaced by the llama that shares the burden of Naylor’s excursion, “who lets me think I’m in charge . . . He’s much more sure-footed than me. But who’s carrying whose stuff?” Less esoterically than in the first poem, but still philosophically, Naylor speculates, “Is it possible/ not to project/ a world of what/ we imagine a llama/ might imagine while/ riding a jet-boat/ or carrying/ stuff for us?” With age comes a certain wisdom that includes practicality: “Coyotes and ears keep their distance from llamas.” The llamas themselves teach a lesson, as one of Naylor’s “photographs” illustrates: “I loved watching the llamas. In this shot . . . they’re settled on their haunches, munching grass and flowers while we eat lunch—summer sausage and manchego cheese, pita bread and plums. My camera meant nothing to them. No pose. No need to please.”

            The elder Naylor stays alert to the elements of the physical world that stimulate spiritual contemplation and the search for Truth: “Nature’s beauty—/ fraught topic/ seen in each/ digitized image/ unearthed/ as wonder recalled . . .Which wily/ Zen master/said looking/ for truth outside/ wonder is like looking for fish in trees? . . . But what about wonder outside truth? Did my ear remember plums because that word half rhymes with summer, which made them part of the poem remembered as?” But concerns about his own humanness remain, as he contrasts his present self from his younger: “Ceding to the breach among species, we each carried a can of bear spray. Easy to forget it when a midnight whiz beckons. . . . Wondering now what I wondered then, is there a sentence to place me back where I wasn’t sure I wanted to be—cold, feeling old, not up to.”

            Naylor of the second journey quotes the Wilderness Act of 1964, which establishes the wilderness as an “untrammeled” area where “man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” He is disturbed by changes of form that suggest a violation of trust on the part of humans who have intruded on the wilderness: the “crooked tree” of the latter poem’s title refers to the white bark pine, a tree that suffers from a beetle infestation caused by an artificially warmed environment. He questions, “Does the reach of human need exceed nature’s grasp?” Instead of the specific geologic changes he cited in the poem based on his first journey, Naylor in his second poem “photographs” a trade-marked compilation of the “needs” he’s brought with him this time, such as “Columbia Silver Ridge Cargo Shorts” and “Under Armour Threadborne V-Neck T-Shirt.” He laments, “I’m inside a sentence that reveres wilderness, but lacks the stones to live there.”

            In spite of physical frailty and eventual injury, Naylor continues his pursuit of enlightenment: “fifteen miles from/ the trail head/. . . / no choice but/ to limp my way out./  . . ./Pain and beauty shared/ each step to the end.” Though “these mountains have gotten steeper since I last laid a boot on them,” Naylor concludes, “The frame/ of pain--/ not enough/ to stop me,/ enough not/ to ignore--/ hones time/ in ways/ no photo/ can show.”

Still, the journeys juxtaposed in Not Quite Noon beg further questions. As Naylor in “Crooked Tree” looks for a connection to his former journey, he wonders, “Was Coyote in any of the dreams I can’t recall?” If “philosophy . . . / begins in/ wonder, “What does it end in?/ And what/ about the poem?” Regarding the wilderness, Naylor wonders with the practical wisdom of age “have we broken what we’ve been given?” The destruction of the white bark pine is only one story of many: “Or many of one question we neglect to ask.”

Poem During the Plague: Poem 50

Donald Johanson

Donald Carl Johanson is an American paleoanthropologist. He is known for discovering the fossil of a female hominin australopithecine known as "Lucy" in the Afar Triangle region of Hadar, Ethiopia.

PILLOW TALK IN THE TIME OF CORONAVIRUS

DONALD JOHANSON

This sunny, virus-laden

Monday

exudes quiet, even absent

sirens

Taking a momentary

Look

at the impression of my

Head

caved into a soft

Pillow

Standing staring into my

Soul

Is this all that is left of

Us

when we leave this

Life

A silent softness in an

Anonymous

Place

where the new

Pillow

Awaits

High Tide By Ed Meek

High Tide

By Ed Meek

Aubade Publishing

Aubadepublishing.com

Ashburn, VA

ISBN: 978-1-951547-99-8

80 Pages

Review by Dennis Daly

Holding court in his realm by the sea, Ed Meek mines the details from every corner of his kingdom for poetic nuggets that teach and transform. The raw materials include mushrooms and ethnic sensibilities, a mythological crossing guard, family memories, meatballs pertaining to human nature, and barbarian children. Meek is a veritable Everyman (in the medieval, morality play sense). His upwardly mobile progress, as he negotiates around or through annoying obstacles, is toward goodness and evolution’s steady continuity.

Nor does Meek avoid intellectual confrontation. He seems to welcome it. In Meek’s world understanding must precede judgment. But judge he certainly does. Even time bends to his moral percipience as he retrospectively determines when and where childhood happiness reaches its pinnacle.

Meek’s poem Hunting Mushrooms with Mina delights with a tour de force of description and mystery. Mina is Sioux and knows what she is doing. The poet’s persona is along for the ride. As the two seekers uncover and collect their savory dinner of morels, they seem to exchange wordless tension back and forth with a bit of playfulness. The poet’s keen senses and black humor flirt with fantasies of danger and historical fact. Here is the descriptive heart of the poem,

… She lifted leaves

and poked through thatch

to find them crouching in damp quarters,

secreted in moss and duff. They were

long-dead shrunken dwarfs

buried in their hats, their bodies

a stump beneath their shaggy, fetid heads.

They’d wept for years and moist riverbeds

Coursed down their spongy faces.

“What about these?” I asked

Pointing to a yellow disk, speckled with white freckles.

“Death cap,” she said. “I can poison you with that.”

Her long black hair reflected light and my eye

caught the tip of the blade

she kept on her hip.

Meek has a knack for hiding horror in the comfort of everyday images. In his piece entitled The Crossing Guard the poet unveils the mythological Charon, known for his transportation of the newly dead across the River Styx, in his training role as Crossing Guard guiding children across a neighborhood street. Here is the lead-in stanza to the metamorphosis,

With hands as old as vines twisted by time

he holds the divine red lollypop—

its simple command in four black letters.

When he raises his arm, bikes cars, and trucks

like well-trained soldiers grind to a halt

as he ferries the children across the dangerous divide.  

High Tide, the title poem of Meek’s collection portrays his younger self set in an idyllic family composition. His father doubles as Elvis Presley. His mother looks the part of majorette marching down a football field. It’s perfect! Well, not exactly. Meek’s uses omniscience and irony to convey a prelude to the coming change of fortune. Snap shots of life are momentary and often deceiving, that is, until connected with context. The word play is quite clever. Consider the heart of the poem,

My father held me up

in the water and my mother

waved from her beach blanket

on the sand. This was before

the brothers and sisters, those

uninvited guests, crashed

the party, back when my mother

was fun to be around

and my father was glad

to be home from the war,

working the only job

he would ever have.

While reading the above lines it also occurred to me that high tide temporarily protects a whole swathe of shore and water creatures that live on the edge. When the tide ebbs weaknesses and vulnerabilities appear for all to see. Predators, of course, know this. Meek also knows this and ponders the fragility of family life. 

Expectations play a significant part in the way we read literature. Perhaps poetry especially. A remembered tone may pull us in. Perhaps a hardscrabble story of working stiffs grabs us. Next the details may enchant our sensitivities with their unexpected simplicity. Finally, we look for the denouement and uplifting catchall. Meeks slyly removes this last element in his poem How to Make Meatballs and substitutes a more diabolical and witty ending that smacks of life’s true realities. The poet concludes his poem,

The meatballs baked while I fried

eggs, bacon, and home fries

for the working girls and drunks

who stumbled in.

This was before Tony went away

for printing twenties in his basement,

before Joey broke in and stole our TV,

and the bank took their house.

Sometimes goodness can only be defined against a background of its opposite inclination. In his poem Miss Maloney, Meek’s persona teases out a moralistic outrage from his readers using memories of welled up juvenile cruelty. Meek’s classmates perpetrate this meanness against their inexperienced but well-meaning fifth grade teacher. The poet joins the classroom festivities with gusto. His over the top description signals his own disgust at his collaboration. The piece opens by setting the stage,

A doll, my mother proclaimed,

after meeting Miss Maloney

the new fifth grade teacher.

Just out of Bridgewater State Teacher’s College,

an eraser over five feet tall,

natural blond hair in a bun,

blue eyes in a field of freckles.

Smiling, she invited us

to set goals for the year.

At recess, our war council convened.

We aimed to make her cry

for being so pretty and perky.

Throughout these well-structured poems Meek champions an almost Aristotelian sense of goodness and moral rectitude. His unabashed didactic bent seems unforced and infused with humility and a happiness born of intellectual truths. The word “organic” comes to mind. `Refreshing. Very refreshing.    

Poem During the Plague: Poem 49

Sergio Inestrosa

Two strangers

In the twists and turns of this pandemic

In the meanders of the uncertain and unknown

Today, when leaving the confinement for the first time, 

Two strangers 

With their mouths protected by masks 

For fear of contagion 

They are, by chance, in the same row. 

Her body trembles from the proximity, now banned, 

(formerly perhaps longed for) 

Almost an invasion of the space of personal safety 

That she feels puts her at risk

(of course there is no guarantee of anything). 

From his clear eyes a luminous ray 

Filled with fear 

Paralyzes the other, strikes him as reckless; 

Fortunately, he realizes in time of his daring, 

Of his gross error. 

In what is called the new normality 

(no matter what it means) 

fear separates them and drives them away, 

The healthy distance, which repels even the shadow 

Of that other who retreats scared 

To his designated place, 

Leaving a void between them, 

That area denied, 

(which may, for the moment, give them security) 

Forbidden not to touch the other or with their breath.



*****   Sergio Inestrosa received his PhD in Literature from the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City, Mexico in 1998. Sergio was a Jesuit student for 8 years in Central America, living in El Salvador, Panama and Nicaragua. While in El Salvador he studied with Ignacio Ellacuria, a well known Jesuit scholar who was killed in 1988 by the military. When Professor Inestrosa returned to Mexico, he studied to receive a Masters in Communication and became a professor and researcher in the Communication field. He has presented many research papers in Mexico, Latin America, USA and Asia, and has published 6 books in Mexico. In 1999 he taught Spanish at the Estrella Mountain College in Avondale, Arizona, and in 2000 he conducted Postdoctoral research at Harvard, focusing on the works of Octavio Paz. Since coming to Endicott, Professor Inestrosa has been teaching Spanish and Mexican Culture and has been busy organizing a Spanish Cine Club on campus. He has also developed the Spanish minor and designed many new courses, including Spanish for Professionals, Spanish Cinema, Spanish Translation, Spanish Composition, Latin American History and Culture, and a Latin American literature course. 
Sergio Inestrosa's area of expertise includes: US/Mexico relations. His recent collection of poetry is Los Bordes del Placer