Poet Charles Coe: Forgiving himself. Forgiving his Parents. All Sins Forgiven.

Poet Charles Coe

Poet Charles Coe: Forgiving himself. Forgiving his Parents. All Sins Forgiven.




Interview by Doug Holder






Poet Charles Coe has lost both of his parents, but he still talks with them through his poetry. In his new poetry collection from the Leap Frog Press: All Sins Forgiven: Poems for My Parents he writes about his parents with eloquence and insight. He has been around the block and realizes we are flawed, we love and hurt each other, we sin, and we forgive. In his collection he deals with the complex relations between parent and child in an evocative manner that only a skilled wordsmith could pull off. I spoke with Coe on my Somerville Community Access TV Show Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.








Doug Holder: E. Ethelbert Miller, author of Fathering Words: The Making of an African-American Writer wrote of your work: "Here is a collection that captures the and intimacy within the black family that sadly goes unnoticed by much of America." Why are these qualities not noticed by society?



Charles Coe: I think a lot groups, cultural groups, ethnic groups, are portrayed by the media in pretty stereotypical ways. A lot of the time when you see a black family portrayed on a TV show or movie, you see them in the context of violence and gangs, domestic discord, sports and music. But I think there is not enough about ordinary life. A lot of the poems in my collection All Sins Forgiven are about ordinary family life.




DH: Your new collection is from the Leap Frog Press. Ownership has changed recently. Can you give me a brief history of the press and your involvement with it.




CC: Leap Frog was started in the 1990's by the marvelous poet Marge Piercy and her husband the novelist and writer Ira Wood. In 1999 they approached me to see if I was interested in submitting a manuscript for publication. A I was very excited to and we worked out a deal for my first poetry collection Picnic on the Moon. Because of my other writing and my full time job it took awhile for the next to come out All Sins Forgiven. Leap Frog was under new ownership when they published All Sins Forgiven.



DH: You have an extensive background as a jazz vocalist. Can you talk a bit about your influences?




CC: That would be a large task. But my platinum standard is Ella Fitzgerald. She is my alltime favorite vocalist.




DH: Do you ever do Scat singing?




CC: I don't focus on that as some jazz singers do. Scat is like peppering a stew. I think scat singing is one of the influences that Hip Hop artists look to for inspiration. I think in some cases the most creative writing around is Hip Hop lyrics.





DH: Your new collection deals with your late mom and dad. How has your view changed about your folks from when you were young to now in your 60's?





CC: When you are young it is very difficult to realize that your parents are actually people and that they are flawed and complex. When you are young they are viewed like your high school teachers. It is as though someone puts them in a closet and unplugs the battery, and shuts the door. And they are awakened just in time to teach the next class. The older you get you realize there are a million questions you want to ask: What were they afraid of? What were they sad about? What were they proud of? I can't have those conversations with them now because they are gone. My book is in a way a route to asking them those questions.



DH: I remember when I was writing my Master's thesis on food in the fiction of Henry Roth, my thesis advisor thought food might be a trivial theme. You use food through out your book: your father cooking pot roast, a Thanksgiving dinner, etc... Through your use of food in your poetry you really get at the texture of life.



CC: I really like to eat food. I love food...perhaps a bit too much. I think food is an incredible way to share time together--bonding, comfort and community. The knuckle heads that told you food is trivial don't know what they are talking about. They practice a form of literary snobbery. There is no subject under the sun under the sun that is trivial. The only thing that is trivial is the mind that approaches the subject. You know great poetry can make the banal profound. Bad poetry can make profound, banal. It is not the subject matter--it is the writer.





DH: Did this poetry collection give you a sense of closure?



CC: Yes and no. I am very glad that I wrote it. I wrote it to understand something about my parents. But it was not just through writing the book, but it was in the process of getting out there, plunging into readings and explore things through the questions people ask me. The idea that I came to some ultimate understanding of my parents is not the case. The people you are closest to can be the most mysterious. We are a mystery to ourselves.



DH: Tell me about your work with the Mass. Cultural Council.



CC: I have been with them for 17 years. I oversee a grant program that gives money to arts organizations. This is not targeted money. The money can be used for many things. This is the hardest money to get. Part of my job involves traveling around the state. I go around the Commonwealth to see what art organizations are doing. Porch sitting I like to call it.



DH: The title of your new collection is All Sins Forgiven. Whose sins are forgiven here?



CC: I am sort of forgiving myself for not helping them more and spending more time with them. But I am also forgiving them, for their shortcomings as well.





TEACHING MY IMAGINARY SON TO FISH




Never take fishing too seriously. Find a shade tree

by a creek bank to lean against on a sunny day with

a mild breeze blowing. Toss your line into the water

and set aside, for awhile, the cares of the day.

Never move too fast; in fact, try to move as little as possible.

And remembe...r; sometimes your best days fishing

will be the ones you go home empty-handed.



These are lessons my father taught me; not in words,

but in the way he’d whistle while unraveling a tangled line,

or laugh when some big catfish slipped the hook. I am

the end of my father’s line, with no one but you to teach

those things I am only now beginning to understand.

And I struggle with his final lesson, the mere fact

of his absence, an the idea that wriggles in my grasp,

like a worm I can’t seem to thread onto the hook.     --- Charles Coe

Some Plum Poems Jane Etzel

Jane Etzel

 
Some Plum Poems
Jane Etzel
Dove's Wing Press
ISBN: 978-0-578-10317-4
2012  $10.00

“...As the old man prepares to resume his walk,
he sits a moment longer,
amazed to see these solitary birds

gathered together
in a flock on the sides of the dinghy -

a nautical vision
worthy of being called poem.”

This small book of poems plum the depth of what the poet hopes
we may hear. Love for one another:

“...The moon's reflection sparkled
across the water,

and I thought God
had flung a handful of diamonds
to create such a beautiful dazzle!

Now,
looking out over the moonlit ocean,

I believe He still does.”

Etzel's work reflects how she bites into the fruit and tastes
the sweet meat words offer and these poems give thanks:

“...to develop loving relationships
not formed
because of too much solitude

for unexplored decisions
resulting
in colorful consequences...”

We the readers delight in these truthful poetic expressions given
by the poet from her faith. I appreciate the poetry for what it says
and for what is written about gratitude.

“Encircle me Lord
so I may see with Your eyes...”

Irene Koronas
Poetry Editor: Wilderness House Literary Review

City of Possibilities by Jane Williams

City of Possibilities

by Jane Williams

Interactive Press

Carindale, Queensland, Australia

Copyright © 2011 by Jane Williams

ISBN 9781921869105

73 pages, softbound, no price given

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

The best way to explain the poetry of Jane Williams is to

present On entering the city of possibilities:

Cry a little. People expect it. It will show you are happy

to be there.

Reach out; touch all you can before it’s frowned upon,

before you are accused of appropriation

(any imprint you leave will have some historical value).

Learn the language. Learn how to speak it with your eyes,

with your hands. Lose your accent incrementally –

too slow and you’re not trying hard enough,

too fast and who do you think you are?

Experiment with suspension of disbelief as if

any city could be city of possibilities.

Don’t forget to breathe.

Sear for meaning. Briefly. It’s not worth the grief.

Turn your longing for something more into art,

into the opposite of neutral territory.

Fall apart. Pull yourself together. Fall apart. Don’t make

a habit of it.

Break all the rules but not all at once.

Remember you are just visiting. Try not to get too attached.

When you’re ready, come home. I’ve left a light burning

in the ruins.

The poem sums up a life or a divorce. A child gone off to live with someone or maybe just a temporary separation. It could be a poem of self-blame or a poem of realization or

even a memoir like tale.

Then there is Portal, a poem of which most people have probably experienced at one time or another:

A day in bed scribbling and surfing the net, looking out

through six panes of dirt-flecked glass. Like my mother I

need a window to wake to. The day is cloud-heavy but the

sun doles itself out in intense bursts, highlighting the blood

red roof of the house opposite. In the distance the rhythmic

thwack of our neighbour’s axe splitting firewood. Closer to

home a child’s superior weekend whine – insistent, defiant,

so sure of its place in the world. That was me I think,

decades ago, looking at the same sky, calling myself into

being.

googling my name still I can’t find myself

There are many more insightful, revealing and ultimately truth poems in this volume of poetry by Jane Williams, her fourth collection. She has received numerous awards in both Australia and New Zealand, where she now resides.

Many of the poems have first lines that seem to bear no relation to the title, for example:

Introduction to origami

The passenger from bus 42

reads like a who’s who

of the wrong side of town.

Living things

in a mood so absent

it could have been

the subject

of a post modern

still-life painting…

Levels of incapacity

it seems only yesterday

he was free loving his way

around a world open to

suggestion his suggestion

I found this book interesting not only because it is from “down under” but because it does not have the pretentiousness that many American poets seem to have. It is also a thinking person’s read.

__________________________________________

Zvi A. Sesling

Reviewer for Boston Small Press and Poetry Scene

Author, King of the Jungle and Across Stones of Bad Dreams

Editor, Muddy River Poetry Review

Editor, Bagel Bards Anthology 7

Editor, Bagel Bards Anthology 8

Somerville Artist Katherine Vetne Will ‘Spoon’ Feed You Her Work

Somerville Artist  Katherine Vetne  Will  ‘Spoon’ Feed You Her Work

By Doug Holder

  I have interviewed many Somerville artists who like the late Andy Warhol find rather banal objects like soup cans, shoes, etc… as material for their art. Katherine Vetne, a graduate of Boston University, who I met at my usual well- appointed table at Bloc 11 in Union Square is no exception. In the case of this young artist she has chosen the spoon as one of the objects of her obsession. One of her exhibits at the Somerville Open Studios this year was her pencil drawings of 30 spoons. Vetne is like a moth on a cheap suit when it comes to detail…she concentrates intensely and blocks out all the noise around her. She has spent time with these utensils and has a scholarly take on them. Now spoons to you or me might simply represent a way to transport grub into a salivating mouth but to Vetne they represent marriage, domesticity, family, and changing roles. Quite a mouthful—don’t you think? Vetne, 27, said her work is germane to her own phase of life in which women are expected to think about marriage, family, and silverware.

 

  Vetne also told me she also explores feminist themes in her work. And to take it another step further she examines her own biology. Her bowl shape constructions strongly hint at the womb.

  And of course Vetne is looking to produce innovative work. One installation she described to me was a pair of latex gloves she blew up, dipping the fingers in plaster and filling the concavity with gold leaf

.

 Vetne has a day job to pay the rent.  She works for a non-profit arts organization in Boston that provides artwork to human service organizations.

 She also started the Boston Critique Group in 2010. Here with other artist she shares ideas, and is involved in an ongoing conversation about art and life. She told me: “The group plays an important role for the artist to feel validated.”

 Although Vetne cannot survive on her art alone— she is making big strides to become an independent artist. As I always say there are a million stories in the Paris of New England—this has been one of them.



http://katherinevetne.com/  for more info

Refuge in the Shadows By Krikor Der Hohannesian

Refuge in the Shadows

By Krikor Der Hohannesian

Cevena Barva Press

Somerville, Massachusetts

editor@cevenabarvapress.com

44 Pages

$7.00

Review by Dennis Daly

Those of us who hear disembodied voices have been given a bad rap in today’s technology-based world. How unfortunate! A good case could be made that human beings are sentinels deployed by our planet, or perhaps universe, to listen and record. But even sentinels have a responsibility to their own species and must respond by acting accordingly.

Some of the most adept of these sentinels society calls poets. They provide conduits for the competing voices (or muses as other generations have labeled them) buzzing around the ether.

Krikor Der Hohannesian takes his responsibility as a poet-sentinel seriously and responds to his voices with a righteous fervor and a singular decency. His first poem, Elegy, sets the tone and stakes out his territory. The poet speaks from the Granary, a Boston graveyard. He says,

…But listen…

in the shadows of ancient elm and maple

and you may hear it…

the wispy, low keening

of founding ghosts

mourning the sins of us,

their promise. Take heed,

take heed they whisper—refuge

from their judgment elusive as grace

for the inattentive…

After these ghostly, somewhat pissed-off, whispers, the poet opens up the context to all creation, or at least all creation as we know it. The Poem In the Beginning ties the existence of nature’s many voices to man’s ability to hear and understand. Der Hohannesian explains,

The puffs of cumulus born of

sea mist and updrafts, wind-blown urns

for thirsty primeval forests. The desultory

sowing of pod and seed, the destruction

by wildfires, hurricanes, tornados,

ice, snow, flood and drought. Rebirth

rode the fickle winds of change. Until

erectus, habilis, neanderthalis, sound  

fell on no human ear. But once heard

there was no denying a force to be heeded:

a herald of tidings, bearer of gifts, the messenger

that warned of danger…

In the same poem the author fearlessly engages his voices with indignation and passion. Consider these lines,

… human sounds, too, that rise

on the wind but are easily lost:

the wail of a Darfuri child, starved,

black flies feasting on black skin,

a Shia wife keening—

her lost husband lost to a vest

of detonated shrapnel,

the shouts for justice

from the disenfranchised,

from those who have lost heart

a thunderous silence, whispers

from the souls of the dead…

Sometimes the voice of silence both comforts and confounds, whereas the alternative introduces another reality, nullification. The poem entitled A Way of Life sounds out   clattering, splintering, a screech, and a thud. These are sounds of demolition, the end of a way of life. The poet describes the terrible suddenness of change and life’s non-transitions here,

Henry and his wife both near 100 years,

eight decades together in this his house of birth,

defying entropy—suddenly vanished

like wraiths in the night…

Voices come in many forms. Sometimes even the motion of hands delivers a jaw-dropping eloquence. Der Hohannesian begins his poem These Hands this way,

How strange to look at them

with a young child’s awe

these hands I take for granted.

These hands that point

and beckon, clap and slap,

accent speech with dips and swoops,

and held my children new-born,

tiny fists clenched, grasping at air…   

In the poem A Man is Down the poet’s persona lies awake listening the musical voices of nature. He uncodes the dirge of wind and rain and discovers death by violence. The sounds of suffering fill the air. The poet expresses it this way,

a wife is keening…

            a child is squalling…

I must grieve with them, I must

mourn him and all like him who

choose to rise against the oppressor

a man is down…

and others will rise in his stead,

the rain, and wind, they tell me so…

I found the poem entitled Lest We Forget irritating, grating, and probably the most interesting piece in this collection. The narrative focus on an adolescent Iraqi child named Ali who has lost both arms, his parents and his siblings in an American missile strike. He whispers a wish for new prosthetic arms. Apparently the news media has taken an interest in Ali for the moment and his voiced wish has possibility. But the fickle media jumps onto the infamous rescue of Private Lynch and Ali is abandoned to his horrendous fate. I accept the story line and the ensuing pathos. Only a hard-hearted son-of-a-bitch realist would suggest apologies, reparations, and leaving these devastated people alone. The emphasis placed on the word leaving. A feel-good trip to the US for Ali seems beside the point. Hundreds of limbless, perhaps less photogenic, children would never be considered for such staged missions of mercy.  Such a mission strikes me as just as dishonest and as political as the Lynch rescue farce. But  Der Hohannesian sees it differently. Whether he’s right or wrong, the world needs more people who think as Der Hohannesian does.  He’s clearly a better person than I am.  He believes one act of kindness, staged or not, cynical or not, should carry the day. His poetic passion rages defiantly from the page.  Here is a lovely meditation hidden in the heart of the poem’s narrative that says a lot about the sensitivities of this poet,

…His pain pulsates

Behind dilated eyes, brown

Iraqi eyes, soft as those of a desert

camel. Bewilderment flickers like passing

shadows through the merciless yellow-white

of klieg lights. I wonder where

his adolescent soul wanders…

The poem Requiem, a hymn of remembrance to the poet’s dead mother, conjures up the genocide against the Armenian people perpetrated by the Ottoman Turks around the time of the First World War. Ghosts are everywhere, haunting the wind with atrocity after atrocity. Memories like this do not die. Der Hohannesian laments,

Almost a century has passed, fresh rumors float on the wind.

Osman’s descendants intend to plow under

All vestiges, once and for all to silence the screams,

The pleading, the cursing against a forsaking God,

The raging against their butchers by ghostly spirits…

But, the poet continues,

…Anatolian breezes

Will forever betray them, bearing bone dust

And blood motes into every fissure and crevice

Where Armenians once lived…

Many of today’s Turks, it is worth noting, including the great writer Orhan Pamuk, are breaking with the past and admitting these long denied historical truths. Here’s hoping that this trend continues.

If you like a writer who puts his conscience first before other considerations and you appreciate the delicate and intricate language of weather and wind chimes you will love Der Hohannesian. Another terrific book from Cervena Barva Press.

Poet Philip Burnham, Jr.: A Poet of surfaces and depth

Poet Philip Burnham, Jr.:   A Poet of surfaces and depth

Philip Burnham, Jr. is a poet who can describe the sizzle as well as the steak.  A lake's surface may glitter in the sun, but beneath it are dark, murky depths. Burnham's poetry is a denizen of both settings--the light--the darkness- and everything in between.


Philip E. Burnham, Jr. lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was born in Rochester, New York, and grew up in New England. He attended Groton School, the University of Edinburgh, and Harvard College. A former member of the United States Foreign Service, he served as American Vice Consul in Marseille, France, from 1962 through 1964. For the next 35 years he taught history in both public and private secondary schools and colleges in the Boston area. He holds a PhD in Medieval History from Tufts University. He has traveled extensively in Europe and spent two sabbatical years abroad, one at Cambridge University and another in Paris. He was married to Louise Hassel for 42 years and has three children and four grandchildren, all of whom live in California. Burnham has been published widely, and his latest poetry collection is " Shore Lines" (Ibbetson Street Press.)

I had the pleasure to speak to him on my Somerville Community Access TV show  Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.




Doug Holder:  You are a longtime member of the Somerville, Mass Literary group The Bagel Bards. How important is literary community to you?

Philip Burnham: I think it is very important. I think the Bagel Bards is a great place to come to get ideas--maybe to decompress a bit--and to meet other people who do parallel things. Folks are often involved with readings, working on a book, etc...When you hear about the accomplishments of others it spurs you on to want to do it yourself. I really enjoy listening to other people. Tino Villanueva, who is a Bagel Bard member had a wonderful reading of his poetry collection " So Spoke Penelope" at the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Cambridge. He took  Penelope's perspective as she pined for Odysseus over 20 years. At the reading he spoke about it in Homeric tones--this is the kind of experience you have with the Bagel Bards.

DH: You have a PhD in Medieval History--how did your interest in poetry arise?

PB: Well... I was always into poetry Two things influenced my love of poetry. One was my mother reading poems to me as a kid. We belonged to the Episcopal Church and their hymns were rhymed, metered and set to music. I grew up with those in my head. My father was an English teacher and he knew some poets. In fact he knew Robert Frost. So I was familiar with the poems of poets he knew.

DH: Did you ever meet Frost?

PB: I did actually. I did know Frost.  Once I was in Washington, D.C. and he was reading at the Library of Congress, and we went up to talk to him. I was working at the State Department at the time and he looked me straight in the eye and said: "Don't you think working for the State Department is betraying your country?" This was right after the McCarthy Era. He was a man who talked a lot, and he liked to be the center of attention. I saw him in his native habitat of  Vermont near the end of his life. It was a very rural life and his connection to the land was profound. He saw the landscape--life in the countryside as very dignified and very tragic. I think he saw the isolation of people--it was a lonely life. He was lonely in many ways.

DH: We met years ago at a poetry workshop that I lead at Newton Community Education. You had recently lost your wife. Was poetry therapeutic?

PB: It was extremely therapeutic for me. My first book that you published Sailing From Boston dealt with my loss among other things. After my wife died, I sat down and wrote about 3 or 4 poems a month for about a year that were explorations of grief and remembrance.It was a way of working through things. It was a way of putting on paper of what I remembered about her. And I started to write poetry every morning. Even when she was ill I began to formulate what I was going to say about her. I didn't dare to be a poet when I was young. I had a family and I couldn't see me being a poet would support a family. It wasn't until I retired and lost my wife did I start taking poetry seriously.


DH: The noted critic Dennis Daly wrote in a review for the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene wrote that your poems are like the Impressionistic painting of say Monet. Do you agree with this and do you you go beyond the surface of shimmering light--so to speak?

PB: I think in some ways my work is Impressionistic. I hope it goes below the shimmering light of the surface as Daly puts it. If you talk about Impressionistic painting--yes, there is that superficial application of the paint to the canvas. But then there is also the sense that we come back to the poem and the painting again and again because somehow it reaffirms us. It reinforces our sense of our daily life.

DH: You wrote a poem about baseball titled "Assignment 1: Write a Poem about Baseball," that was on the "Writer's Almanac" on NPR, and other places. What is it about Baseball that attracts so many writers?

PB : It always attracted people who were intellectuals. Think about John Updike's fascination with baseball. I think it might be that there are so many possibilities of what can happen at any given moment.

DH: But isn't this true true of football, or basketball?

PB: Well--it is but the action that goes on before goes so quickly that you can't follow everyone. In baseball there are a lot of people involved, but at one moment only a few people are involved. It has a sort of grace to it--it is an interesting sport. A lot of people have grown up with moments of baseball in their lives. It is a game of failure and I think that is poetic. In baseball if you hit 3 out of 10 then you are dong well--but you missed 7 times--that's failure--but not in baseball.

DH:  You were a finalist for the Loft Prize.

PB: Yes the Prize is based in Providence, R.I. You had to submit a poem based on a painting from a New England museum. I chose an Impressionistic painting titled: "New York Blizzard" by Childe Hassam.

PB: " Shore Lines" your new poetry collection from the Ibbetson Street Press, has an Impressionistic painting of a beach on the front cover.

 PB: Yes. It reminds me of a beach I go to  in New Hampshire between Hampton and Rye beaches. I started going there when I was very young. Ogden Nash use to vacation there. One day in early September we were all sitting on the beach. It was hurricane season, and they told everyone to get off the beach. Nash said" I think we better get off the beach or we are going  to be misspelled in The Boston Herald.

A Little Boat, My Heart

A little boat, my heart,
Curved gothic to its bow
From starboard and from port,
To plow an ocean’s row,

To turn the slightest waves
Brief furrows, to expose
The undersea, a spray
Of foam, a path to lose

Across the sea astern,
A dip and sweep of oars,
Cut circles that become
Skin smooth and disappear.

My heart, a little boat
Set on your waves of skin
That on my voyage out
I cross to cross again

A sea of passages
To India, a rise
And fall of tides.  It is
Moon driven. From your eyes

Glances like quick fishes
Leaping, circles that part
Still water round, kisses,
A little boat, my heart.

Shore Lines, 2012

A Theory of Lipstick by Karla Huston

 

A Theory of Lipstick

by Karla Huston

Main Street Rag Publishing Company

Charlotte NC

Copyright © 2013 by Karla Huston

ISBN: 978-1-59948-407-5

Softbound, 73 pages. $14

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

Last year I review a poetry chapbook by Ms. Huston and Cathryn Cofell. This year Ms. Huston is flying solo and proving what a good poet she is on her own.

In the title poem it is beware men and women you will learn more about lipstick than you ever wanted to know, from lip plumper and bee stung devil’s candy to alizarin crimson and lead – to men who kiss women wearing lipstick to fruit pigments. It’s almost TMI.

But O it is fun. Huston as we learned can be fun with a lesson.

She can also be funny in a serious poem as in The Girl With God On Her Pants. It opens

I almost said “in” her pants/but this isn’t that kind of poem/and she isn’t that kind of girl.

As you read this one you learn that a good girl is chased by a hungry boy and the hunger is nothing less than the ultimate main course.

There is also Sway which begins:

The cruelest thing I did to my dog

wasn’t to ignore his barking for water

when his tongue hung like a deflated balloon

Huston is also capable of wonderful descriptions such as:

• his dark eyes like Greek olives, moist with desire
• pecking at her dreams like a chicken
• Were you always a shadow of a shadow, imitation of an imitation, a chameleon in sheep’s clothing?
• When I think of you, I think of earworms
• old woman skin that hangs like the hide of withered peaches

Huston is a sort of Mort Sahl or Dick Cavett. A Nancy Griffin or Chelsea Handler. She makes you laugh but at the same time she telling truths and you realize, not that you have been had, but instead that you have learned something, which raises that age old question about poetry—does it entertain or teach or both. Huston would fall into that last category, both.