Prayer: fix my set: Poems by Martha Boss

Prayer: fix my set

Oddball Publishing

Copyright 2016

44 pages

Poems by Martha Boss

Review by Lo Galluccio

The new book of poems by Martha Boss, recently released by Oddball Magazine Publishing, is truly a genius treat to read. Martha’s thinking and her pen are tightly bound so that you feel as though the ink on the page is her very own blood. But these are not poems inked in dry salty blood – their effect is more like cherry juice or a Manhattan cocktail. Martha seems loaded with brilliant insights about her own process of creating and the world around her. She eschews capital letters and uses an ampersand instead of “and.” Her book begins with this Whitmanesque declaration:

“i celebrate my pen.

keeper of protest & riot.”

And later in the poem she writes:

“my pen, desperate avatar

Of truth, translating

Crammed passion.”

Boss, a regular at Stone Soup on Monday nights, writes in free verse, her stanzas no set length and without rhyme schemes. Her own logic about things is jazz enough. In the title poem: Prayer: fix my set, she engages in a monologue to the Maker, in which she begs him to get the remote working and turn on the TV. This is quite entertaining until, at the end, she issues one more request:

“so

Where are you from. Anyway, God?

Give me a sign.

I’m praying.

I’m guessin’ radioshack, please.

Can you fix my set?” p 8

I love the idea that God is at radio-shack, hanging with the other employees in a uniform.

Poems about the movie, “The Ten Commandments,”

“hmm …now I’m thinking with my pen.”

Ends with “did God give the order to have Jesus killed?

Wassup with these guys?”

In a confessional poem about her own process she writes that she starts by drawing the sky every day and birds.

“I draw every day. Every day I draw

the sky. It’s usually indigo blue. It usually gets me past a bad memory. …& birds. I draw

birds.” P 12

In the playful poem “Cookie Man” Boss coyly feeds a flock of birds some fig newtons...identifying with the birds as they

“peck at one & then another & another like they’re seeing if they all taste the same

and they’re not sure what it is” p 26 

 

She notes from the box that they were made in Mexico which prompts Boss to finish the poem in Spanish:

“hay chica. esta la fantasma del galeta-hombre./el cookie-man esta viviendo en el arbol

y ahora we know eso es que pasa a los fig newtons.” P 27

Roughly translated, the cookie man is living in the tree and now we know that is what is happening with the fig newtons. 

 

In “I walk by the river of everything” Boss takes on a musing stance toward probably the Charles River in Cambridge –

“along the reedy banks/of high bio research/I am a single digit/wrapped tight in wool

some other/Ireland river. In a lyrical declarative voice she then sings: in spring we will

float/ our boats/the river of everything/will flow with experiment…and the waste of

ideas/have given it new data./the river moving the mystery/the unknowable genome/in

the undertow.”p 34

All the poems in this collection are good and riveting. In her plain-spoken eccentricity Martha Boss brings her own vision and life to the poetry she writes. There is a staccato feel to these pieces but then sometimes a well-spring of aria that extends the lines. It feels home-made and well spun, like plain funny and fantastic clothes you want to try on again and again. From the aluminum space suit to the cotton dress – all the birds she invokes—draws us into her mind’s resonance of language. I highly recommend checking out prayer: fix my set out.

The Sunday Poet: AD WINANS

POET AD WINANS

Poet A D Winans is a native San Franciscan who came of age during the heyday of the beat generation in His hometown. The beat poets along with Kenneth Patchen and Charles Bukowski had quite an influence on the direction he would take in his own poetry. It's a poetry of the streets and a poetry of the common language, going back to Walt Whitman. Over the years, Winans has written about some of his literary heroes, always with passion, always with a deep understanding of how the tradition of poetry is passed hand-to-hand down the generations.




DREAM POEM


I see you in my dreams
you are wearing a silk scarf
your smile hovers over me like
a hummingbird
you are standing at a public square
in Mexico
The women are selling pottery
the men drinking wine
a cat crosses the road
purrs against your slender legs
you an early century Madonna
with no need for church or man
you sit cross-legged like Buddha
fill me with words that twist in my mind
like helicopter blades
your words soft as a feather pillow
blend with mine like buttered toast
explode like shrapnel inside my head
sweet fragrance of lilacs draws me in
sweet as a virgin’s innocence

I take refuge in a sea of stars
walk back into my mother's womb
no longer stumbling like a blind man
in the dark
your limbs sing like crickets in the night
rub their hind legs in applause

Little Kisses, Lloyd Schwartz.

Poet Lloyd Schwartz

Little Kisses, Lloyd Schwartz. The University of Chicago Press. 73 pages. $18.00. ISBN-13: 978-0-226-45827-4.

By Ed Meek

Lloyd Schwartz has become a cultural icon in the Boston area. Like Robert Pinsky, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Helen Vendler, his is a name you probably recognize. Part of the reason for this is that Lloyd Schwartz has a wide range. I first ran into his work in the 80s when he wrote about opera for the Boston Phoenix. He is a well-known Elizabeth Bishop scholar and he won a Pulitzer Prize writing criticism about her. He does a little acting. He teaches in the MFA Program at University of Massachusetts Harbor Campus, and he writes poetry.

In his new book of poems, Schwartz is often funny in a bittersweet way. His humor has a sadness and a sentimental undercurrent whether he is writing about a conversation with his mother who has Alzheimer’s, or a close friend who disappeared, or a ring he can’t find, or being mistaken for Gerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead in a parking lot in Somerville.

Some of these poems do not exactly read like poetry but rather like the hybrid form of prose and poetry that is showing up more and more these days (see Claudia Rankine for example). Other poems are tighter with rhyme and assonance and cadence. He uses some of his expertise in music here and there, and sometimes engages in a kind of playfulness as in “Howl.” “How’ll I learn my lines if there isn’t any script? /How’ll I find my shoes if I can’t find my glasses?”

In a poem entitled “Crossword,” he is both funny and clever.

You’re doing a crossword.

I’m working on a puzzle.

Do you love me enough?

What’s the missing word?

Yet, he can also be serious. In a poem about a missing friend, he concludes with these lines: “Our birthdays are looming. The older I get, the less and less/ I understand this world, /and the people in it.” The ending is unexpected, yet as with all good endings, it rings true and hits the mark in this puzzling period we are living through.

Here he is describing an orchestra conductor:

Breezing easily between exotic Chinoiserie

and hometown hoedown, whisking lightly between

woodwind delicacy and jazzy trombone…

He’s all dippy knees, flappy elbows, and floppy wrists…

He threw himself into the music—and very nearly into

the first violin section…

Late one night in a parking lot in Somerville he sees two young men smoking marijuana. He is worried as he walks to his car. Then one of the two men tells him a silly joke and offers him a drag because he looks like Jerry Garcia: “long gray hair and a bushy gray (almost white) beard…” He laughs about the encounter all the way home.

My favorite, “Goldring,” is about losing a ring he’d worn for thirty years. He goes from obsessing about losing the ring to trying to find it to connecting it to other types of loss. Then he does what all writers do, he writes about it.

Why should he lose it now?

He’d been having a run of bad luck.

A downward spiral…

His finger feels empty.

He feels empty and sad…

Another little hole in his life…

Endings, separations, partings—always leave him melancholy.

At a party he is always last to leave…

Maybe he should write his own poem—the way other poets turn their losses/into poems.

When Schwartz comments on other writers turning loss into poetry, he is making fun of them but he is also being self-deprecating and poking fun at himself since he is doing that too.

In these poems what comes across in his poetry is a sense that Schwartz is both warm and likable and using poetry as a means of dealing with the world. Warmth and likability are not attributes one automatically assumes about poets and artists. In these difficult times, reading “Little Kisses” is reassuring. There may be Alzheimer’s, people may disappear from our lives, sometimes we lose objects we care about, but there is great music to be listened to, people can be nice, and there’s a lot of good poetry to read.

Manhattan, An Archaeology by Eileen R. Tabios

Manhattan, An Archaeology 

by Eileen R. Tabios  

Copyright 2017 by Eileen R. Tabios  

Paloma Press 

Tucson, AZ 

ISBN 978-1-365-87509-0 

Softbound, 111 pages + notes & acknowledgements $40 (before discount) 

Review by Zvi A. Sesling 

Since the 1990s-- when I first encountered  Eileen Tabios’s poetry , she has continually taken readers on a different journey of creativity with each book.  Ms. Tabios is one of the Philippines' great gifts to the United States.  Her poetry is innovative, definitely creative and never repetitive.   

Manhattan: An Archaeology is  in six parts:  The Artifacts, Post-Nostalgia, Big City Cante Intermedio, Winter on Wall Street (A Novella-in-Verse), Vacation: Skiing Away From Manhattan, Clyfford Still Studies and 2016 Diptych.  For our edification she adds Selected Notes to Poems. 

My personal favorite is Chapter Nine in the Novella called “The Firm”  

Bellowing like a bull in heat  

was encouraged 

But certain things just weren’t done –  

we learned them in our first year: 

Do not dress better than your boss  

Do not get drunker than your boss 

Come to work neat and pressed 

like a fine pair of sheets 

But if your tie was not undone 

sleeves rolled up 

shirt tail hanging out of your pants 

by 9 a.m. 

you weren’t working hard enough 

Never wear Hermes ties 

leave those to lawyers and golfers 

Never wear cheap shoes 

When you get a new pair 

polish them 20 times 

before debuting them 

Your shoes should not look bought 

but like you inherited them 

from a rich uncle 

Never get a cheap haircut 

A bad apartment at a good address 

is greater than 

a fabulous apartment at a bad address 

If your boss gives you a Mont Blanc pen 

at the end of a salary negotiation 

you were taken to the cleaners 

Never insult a client – no matter 

how stupid or rude, they have 

the required $20 million to open 

an account at The Firm 

If one of your colleagues is fired 

never speak to him again: 

failure is transmittable 

Never show excessive zeal 

Never never never 

Always always always 

* 

A wealthy father 

can exist 

A wealthy uncle? Never 

The wealthy never  

underestimate  

lineage 

One feels compelled to read Ms. Tabios not only for the humor, the entertainment, and the talent, but for the lessons.  And there are usually many from which you can pick .In “The Firm” there are lessons like the one I  taught myself-- when my first public relations boss said: To be a good PR man you need to have three straight martinis and not feel a thing. 

To which I replied:  If I had three straight martinis I wouldn’t feel a thing. 

But as Tabios often writes, I digress.   Back to the review. 

  

With Tabios the reader is always headed to new ground, new thought,a certain joy, an enlightenment, if you will, that free the readers from the dullness they have read before.  Here are some examples:

On Conceiving Silent Pleas(e) 

--after PH-635, Only on canvas (1967) 

I believe I am reminding you that no one owns space, though you can cup it 

within a folded palm and feel the same power that ignites a short, fat man  

looking at his thin, tall wife—diamonds studding the platinum manacles around 

her scented neck and wrists— 

Park City, Utah Tabios unleashes these six lines to open a five page poem: 

1. 

Together, we have only imagined the sky 

a trapdoor with a lost key bow seducing eagles 

whose darting eyes never reveal affection— 

Once, yours did (the setting the back seat of a cab) 

which made me gather fallen petals 

from roses gifted by an unnamed chambermaid— 

Finally this one: 

Letter From Paris to New York 

--November 2016 

When offered Versailles 

I shook my head 

Once was enough for me 

No need to gorge 

on Foie gras, etcetera 

though many do 

There are many other lines in Tabios’s poetry that intrigue – there always are.  Her language is light years ahead of many poets from countries around the world, yet remains accessible and exciting. 

This book is well worth the time you spend reading it. 

__________________________________________ 

Zvi A. Sesling 

Author: The Lynching of Leo Frank (Big Table Co., 2017), Love Poems From Hell (Flutter Press, 2017), Fire Tongue (Cervena Barva, 2016), Across Stones of Bad Dreams (Cervena Barva, 2011), King of the Jungle (Ibbetson Street, 2010). 

Editor of Muddy River Poetry Review, Bagel Bards Anthologies Nos. 7, 8 and #12. 

Publisher, Muddy River Books