Carousel Lounge (CD) by C.D. Collins

Carousel Lounge
CD Collins and Rockabetty
Produced by Pink Neon Productions,
Women Waging Peace, NoSweatShop.com.
The Carousel Lounge copyright 2008


I’ve always loved the South, albeit from a sly or reverent distance. Some associations for me as a poet/singer/actress are: ash blonde wigs, Emmy Lou Harris’ “Quarter Moon in a Ten Cent Town,” drinking Dr. Pepper and rum in a thunderstorm reading Truman Capote and bawling for my boyfriend from a porch in New Orleans, the sulfur smells in Alabama on a theatre tour, a cavernous motel lounge in Little Rock…the banana trees in Houston, the blue grass that entices my feet to dance, Elvis and Dollywood, the tragic-comedy epic movie “Nashville.” My images are impressionistic though, seen as a transient, not from the eyes of a native birch tree. I’ve never had real “mountain laurel” roots or the deep heart-break over coal mining damage that this multi-talented artist (writer, spoken word artist and short story writer) now a Somerville native, CD Collins, does. This self-proclaimed Southern tomboy, and once high school English teacher has managed to make the leap to successful spoken word recording artist in what she calls “chilly” New England. As she tells it in her artist’s statement:

I write to confront moral complexity, to discover my best self, to dig deeper than the first impulses of jealousy, rage or revenge. I write to discover beauty in the grotesque and the ordinary.

Because of this devotion to “dig deeper,” Carousel Lounge manages to conjure musically and poetically much more than roots-slinging. Her 3rd CD: this one is an artfully moving mosaic of time wanderings and tales from her native Kentucky, set to country rock/blue grass/goth rock –her group Rockabetty --that could go toe to toe with any rock band. Its unusual chord bendings and blending of genres remind me of Morphine, of great Nashville session bands, of T-Bone Burnett’s work.
I’ve had the pleasure of meeting CD Collins once, at the Newton Poetry Reading series a few years ago. Kind yet grounded, her fiery talent was clear. She had a couple of players with her then, maybe a fiddler and guitarist, not the full-blown kick-ass country-rock ensemble featured in her latest CD. By the way, it thrills me that there’s another woman out there doing what some would call, “Chamber Rock” again. Historically it was probably Anne Sexton who may have kicked this tradition off – the poetic enchantress of smokes and martinis, bridging madness and sanity as suburban housewife, with her band, “Your Kind.” Well, that was more than twenty years ago. CD is decidedly sober, funny, Southern “The men were farmers and carpenters – they worked, not worked out…” and one other poetess with mighty charisma who’s dared to put dramatic beats and vibes behind cohesive poetic works. She’s also a proponent of gay rights and an environmental rights activist. It’s her albeit skewed objectivity that gives her that brilliant story-teller’s edge.
My first CD, Being Visited, is surreal, dense and challenging, a brew of spoken ambient tracks, pop ballads and reharmonized jazz. It ain’t nothin’ like what CD Collins does real well. She, by contrast, casts a laser beam light of memory on her coming up years, constructing edgy concrete narratives of real times and rough loves, living proof stories mined from adolescence and those years when America was truly and deceptively expansionistic in its love for the land, its neighbors and its children. It was also easily distracted by speed boats and pop music and struggling with messy oppositions of race, convention and politics. CD emphasizes more than once that in the early 60’s time was slower, folks talked more (on party lines, cheaper than one number in most neighborhoods) and bonds were knitted together slowly like winter sweaters. Yes, she kids in one interview, they do have real seasons like us, “down there.”
It’s not that she plays it all straight –cause the lady’s too intriguing not to drop in some dissonance and juxtapose say, the Rolling Stones with a tomboy playing b-ball. That in one snapshot is CD herself, a girlfriend of the band in a letterman sweater, tossing the ball in from half court. Then there’s the off-beat Southern weirdness of it all –the 6 year old serving your bass for dinner, or the mascara blackened face of a beat up girlfriend or the bourbon bottles strewn across the living room carpet. She gives us the twists but she doesn’t over-warp the somewhat warped landscape too much so that we can’t hear the haunting crickets and appreciate the sexy gleam of Brillcream. CD’s got the gift of a captivating voice and she lays it out in a smooth as mint julep voice, never missing a moment, with some lovely elaborations like lacey layers of flute, soprano voiced mountain ridges hanging over “I am Losing Everything” and on the bottom, a consistently groovy bass.

Vocally she owns her territory (“knows her chicken” as the samping girl-group Cibo Matto once sang in “Viva la Woman”) but her attitude is disarming, compelling and never strident. There are some knock-out punches in this collection which spans from the darkly declared wisdom of “Prologue” in which Collins’ explores the truth behind the way you both trust and mistrust anyone sitting across from you in a small town because they know “your Daddy and your cousins,” to three takes on the Kentucky eating parlour, “Carousel Lounge” to the wildly funny “Attention Deficit Disorder” in which in a Laurie Andersonesque sketch of automated voice mails, she combusts the efficiency/sanity of our modern techno inventions and asserts the right to a crazed and incensed persona.

The CD winds up with a multi-lingual anthem called “City of Dreams” – a title used once by the Talking Heads band as well. Its got that open-ended wistfulness of packing up your red goblets and moving North (as CD once did,) the magic of a jazzy Parisian night, of the stacatto Spanish of the Gulf of Mexico.
It’s the break for the wide world horizon of an artist who’s been viewing her small town under a microscope.

CD Collins may say that her original home planet is a 3rd world in a 1st world and decries its diminishing, but she wonderfully engorges that world with life, light, risk and the beauty of looking back. Writers always balance past and present, looking backwards to move us forward. In this sense, CD Collins has given us a very classy and original Southern Goth episode to treasure. She casts a net toward fathoming more than her self-scorned starched dresses and patten leather shoes or the hilarious dinners that ended with dancing or gunfire, but includes a rich vein of U.S. history, the intricacies of the land and generational ties.

For me, it’s got the brio and magic of “Twin Peaks.” And it breaks new ground for all spoken word artists using live music to enchant their words.

Carousel Lounge is available on www.cdbaby.com, Porter Square Books and on-line at www.cdcollins.com. When you buy any of CD’s compact discs, 25% of the proceeds will be donated to the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition to help fight the environmental devastation of mountaintop-removal mining. Also, catch her on tour by going to her website for dates in your area.

Lo Galluccio
Ibbetson St. Press
Lo’s forthcoming memoir “Sarasota VII” will
be released on Cervena Barva Press in the fall of 2008.
Her CD, “Being Visited” is available on www.cdbaby.com.
http://logalluccio.atspace.com

TWO NEW POETRY COLLECTION RELEASED FROM SOMERVILLE’S CERVENA BARVA PRESS

TWO NEW POETRY COLLECTION RELEASED FROM SOMERVILLE’S CERVENA BARVA PRESS

Almost every time I see Gloria Mindock at our Bagel Bards literary group in Davis Square, Somerville, Mass., she lays yet another published collection from her prolific Cervena Barva Press on me. And more often than not the collections are first rate and make for compelling reads. Her latest two releases are by local poet Chad Parenteau and
NYC poet Larissa Shmailo, who also happens to be the public coordinator for the acclaimed poetry journal “Fulcrum,” based in Cambridge, Mass.

Parenteau is the founder of the online journal “Spoonful,” and the host for the venerable “Stone Soup Poets” reading series in Cambridge, Mass. Parenteau has written an engaging and quirky collection “Discarded: Poems For My Apartment.” This book speaks to all of us denizens, past or present, of inner city apartments. Parenteau, a long-time resident of South Boston and now Jamaica Plain, has been there and done that. You will recognize yourself in these ironic and humorous poems. In “Rat Poem,” the poet wonders if an unwanted roommate, a Norway rat, abruptly left his Southie apartment for an abode in the tony Back Bay environs of the city:

“Maybe the rat left before that,
had saved enough for a flower bed
outside the Prudential Center
where, after nights of waiting tables,
I’d see other rats lounge openly,
Stare at them until they stared back
Like I was another tourist.”

Parenteau is the Bard of the cold water flat, the one-room walkup, the gone-to-seed or always seedy neighborhoods in our neck of the ‘hood.

In a “Cure for Suicide” by Larissa Shmailo, Shmailo writes (as the founder of Fulcrum Magazine Philip Nikolayev points out in his introduction) as if she is …” constitutionally predestined to sing out her lines…her eyes filled with life and love, pain and death, freedom and coercion, the real of the mind and the imagined of the heart.” In the poem “Dancing with the Devil,” the poet sings about the need to throw caution to the wind and trip the light fantastic with the Devil:

“They say if you flirt with death,
you’re going to get a date;
But I don’t mind—the music’s fine,
And I love dancing with someone who can really lead.”

Shmailo put herself in the deceptive calmness of the eye of a hurricane, asks us to tell her what makes us tic, and takes us on the Harlem River Line, like the “Duke” took us on the “A” train. In a sea of mimics this poet is an original voice.

To order go to http://cervenabarvapress.com

Or send $7 to Gloria Mindock Cervena Barva Press POBOX 440357 W. Somerville, Ma. 02144

Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update/ May 2008

Way Opens: A Spiritual Journey. Patricia Wild.

Way Opens: A Spiritual Journey. Patricia Wild. (Warwick House Publishers 72 Court St. Lynchburg, Virginia 24504) $15.

Some people live with blinders on. They are afflicted with tunnel vision. They block out the light of the plight of others and are members of the cult of “me” or their immediate circle of friends and family. Now these are not necessarily bad people. It is hard enough to keep one’s own head above water in these troubled times. And, if one is living in the envious environs of middleclass White America, then it is easy to be blinded to what’s happening behind their sheltered gates.

Well, Somerville journalist, novelist and playwright Patricia Wild to some extent, counted herself among these people. But for years something bothered her, nagged her, and goaded her. She wondered what happened to two African American who desegregated her high school in Lynchburg, Virginia in 1962. Wild, spurred on by her questioning nature and the activism of her Quaker faith found these two people: Dr. Lynda Woodruff (a college professor) and the Rev. Owen Cardwell, a Baptist preacher. Wild takes a good hard look at not only these people, their trials and travails, but also takes an unflinching critical look at herself.

Wild starts the book off with a posh family vacation in the isle of Jamaica. This effectively sets the tone of the book; lighting up the large divide between Black and White. Here Wild thinks about the inequity while being served a gourmet meal by ironically “white”-uniformed Jamaicans bustling in the kitchen:

“ I remembered that White men and women eat and laugh, lit by soft candlelight, while dark-skinned people cook White people’s food and serve them wine. …I remembered that every day, faceless and nameless dark-skinned people labor for me and my family, as dark-skinned people have been doing for generations.”

Wild did the hard work of research, tracking people down, the flights back and forth from Lynchburg to Boston, and the endless interviews. She examines the incredible pressure on these two young people in 1962, who were labeled with the kudos;” You’re a credit to your race.” Imagine, if you will, Woodruff and Cardwell, as two young, green sapling, adolescents integrating an all White high school. Woodruff tells Wild:

“ “My whole race was being judged by my success or failure. That’s too much of a burden for anybody.”

Wild explores the grating texture of life for these kids: the taunts from their White peers, the angry indifference of their teachers, and throws a metaphorical Molotov Cocktail at the notion of Southern gentility.

What really surprised me was the resentment that Woodruff and others felt towards certain aspects of Martin Luther King. In some respects they felt manipulated by King, and coerced to be less than honest about the difficulties they endured. Woodruff says:

“We were trained, we were dictated to. “We were told, “ You will not respond, if the media asks you anything, it’s ‘No comment or everything is fine,’ and we did exactly that. Whenever we were asked by anybody how things went, the answer according to Martin Luther King was: ‘Everything went well. It is fine.’”

Years later the approach had its repercussions. Woodruff explains:

“That was published in the media. And twenty years later, the idiots who are now leaders instead of asking either one of us, as if we were dead, for the truth, they read the paper and were known to take national stands, and be on television, discussing civil rights and the desegregation of the schools, and how wonderful and nonviolent it was. They didn’t ask me if it was nonviolent.”

In the process of her research and travels, Wild had to confront herself. She had to put the breaks on her own ego, her impatience, her need to insert herself in the story to the detriment of the true story she was after. In this book Wild is not afraid to expose her own warts, which gives this accomplished memoir an air of authenticity. In this passage of enlightened self-criticism Wild questions the hunger of her own agenda when she encounters unexpected resistance from Woodruff around an interview:

“Did I try to understand why this handsome woman was so incredibly busy? Did I wonder what kind of experiences Lynda Woodruff might have had in the past with writers and journalists?

Wild, to use a cliché, comes away from all of this as a “better person” She realized she had to confront the complacency of her past, and her comfortable and privileged background that excluded African Americans. This whole process spurred Wild on to new heights of activism back home, and perhaps, and I am sure this is her hope, that it will lead you, dear reader, down a new road.

SOMERVILLE POET AFAA MICHAEL WEAVER WINS PUSHCART PRIZE IN POETRY

SOMERVILLE POET AFAA MICHAEL WEAVER WINS PUSHCART PRIZE IN POETRY


( Somerville, Mass.)

Somerville poet, Simmons College English Professor (Boston), Afaa Michael Weaver has won the prestigious small press literary award the “Pushcart Prize” for his poem “American Income,” which was included in his collection “The Plum Flower Dance,” ( University of Pittsburgh Press.) and also has appeared in POETRY magazine. Weaver has several collections under his belt, and has been widely published in such magazines as HANGING LOOSE, AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW, etc… Weaver is also a member of the Somerville-based literary organization “The Bagel Bards,” and was recently published in the independent Somerville literary journal “Ibbetson Street.” He was the featured poet in a recent issue of POETS AND WRITERS magazine, and was declared the Poet Laureate in his native Baltimore, among his many accomplishments. Weaver will be awarded the "Ibbetson Street Press Lifetime Achievement Award" on Nov, 22 2008 at The Somerville News Writers Festival. http://www.somervillenewswritersfestival.com


*The Pushcart Prize is a prestigious American literary prize by Pushcart Press that honors the best "poetry, short fiction, essays or literary whatnot" published in the small presses over the previous year. Magazine and small book press editors are invited to nominate up to 6 works they have featured. Anthologies of the selected works have been published annually since 1976.
Among the writers who received early recognition in Pushcart Prize Anthologies were: Raymond Carver, Tim O'Brien, Rick Bass, Charles Baxter, Andre Dubus, Mona Simpson, Seán Mac Falls, Joshua Clover, Paul Muldoon, Bruce Boston, Kathy Acker, William Monahan, and Peter Orner

Collins, Stern and Holder to be on U/Mass Small Press Panel

Martha Collins,( Field Magazine) Doug Holder (Ibbetson Street Press), Bert Stern (Off the Grid Press) TO BE ON SMALL PRESS PANEL / U/MASS BOSTON. June 23, 2008.











For the second year in a row I have been asked to be on the Small Press Panel workshop at the University of Mass. William Joiner Writers' Workshop this summer. I was a student from 2000 to 2001 and enjoyed every minute of it. For more information about the workshop go to:




Contact: T. Michael Sullivan May, 2008

Phone: 617-287-5850

e-mail: michael.sullivan@umb.edu


21st Writers’ Workshop planned for UMass Boston


The 21st annual Summer Writers’ Workshop at the University of Massachusetts Boston will be held June 16-27. Sponsored by the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences with the university’s Creative Writing Program, the workshop offers instruction in poetry, fiction and prose non-fiction over the course of two weeks. A section on memoir writing will also be offered in 2008.

In addition to the writing sessions, a series of panels, master classes, symposia and special workshops complement the program. Two-week and one-week sessions are offered to participants. Writing on all topics is welcome, although themes of war and its consequences and issues of political violence and social justice permeate the program. This year special tribute is being paid to Grace Paley.

The faculty is diverse and notable. This year’s faculty includes: poets Afaa Michael Weaver, Fred Marchant, and Bruce Weigl; novelists Larry Heinemann and Demetria Martinez; and Lady Borton instructing prose nonfiction. Doug Anderson will offer a memoir section. Among the visiting writers are Martin Espada and Carolyn Forche. For more information e-mail Michael Sullivan at michael.sullivan@umb.edu or call 617-287-5850.

Tuition for the workshop is $400 for two weeks and $220 for the one-week track. To apply, interested writers should send a letter of interest, current and appropriate writing samples and a $25 deposit payable to the William Joiner Center to: Michael Sullivan, William Joiner Center, UMass Boston, 100 Morrissey Blvd., Boston MA 02125. Apply on-line at www.joinercenter.umb.edu.

POET MARIAN KAPLUN SHAPIRO IS A PLAYER IN A DREAM

POET MARIAN KAPLUN SHAPIRO IS A PLAYER IN A DREAM

Did you ever wonder where dreams end and real life begins? Well, this equation is no problem for Marian Kaplun Shapiro, the author of the poetry collection: “Players in the Dream, Dreamers in the Play.” (Finishing Line Press 2007) Her poems flow effortlessly from dreams to real life from the tip of her worn pen.

Shapiro, who was born in the Bronx, NY in 1939, and has a Masters and Doctorate from Harvard University, was guest on my Somerville Community Access TV Show: “Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer”

The Bronx, according to Shapiro, was unlike our promised land of Somerville. Shapiro grew up in a large housing project that was conventional, stifling; and left little room for the imagination or creativity. The cosmopolitan atmosphere of Manhattan across the river was a welcomed escape for this young Bronx provincial.

Years later after leaving the Bronx, and heading to New England to Harvard, Shapiro became a practicing psychotherapist. She feels poetry and psychotherapy come from the same source. Shapiro reflected: “I pay a lot of attention to words—in my profession I have to listen closely to what people say.” In fact at Harvard Shapiro wrote her thesis that concerned short syllable words, and how they are infused with a great deal of emotional content. As Shapiro said “ The shorter the words the more feeling involved.” She continued: “ I think psychology and poetry connect with the primary part of one’s self.”

This poet describes herself as a Jewish Quaker. I asked about this unconventional combination. Shapiro smiled “ I never thought of Judaism as a religion. It was more of a culture to me. I call myself a Jewish Quaker because I don’t want anyone to think I was avoiding revealing my Jewish background.”

Growing up Jewish wasn’t a negative thing for Shapiro, it was, as she puts it “irrelevant” Sexism was a given in the religious life, and there was strong sentiment against interracial dating. “ I found these attitudes repulsive,” she said. She disliked all the talk about finding a nice “Jewish Boy”, and the negativism surrounding having a Puerto Rican boyfriend for instance.

Shapiro has only really started to publish her work in the last six or seven years. It just never occurred to her. One day she opened a now defunct journal “Sacred Fire,” and decided to submit her work. She was published and then it was off to the races.

In her collection “Players in the Dream…” she combines “actual” events with dreams. “Dreams and real life are highly integrated for me,” Shapiro said. While a Schizophrenic can’t differentiate between a dream and reality, Shapiro has no such trouble. But she definitely feels the overlap.

With all the talk of dreams I asked Shapiro if she was a Freudian or perhaps a Jungian. She smiled, and with her tongue firmly in her cheek, she replied, “I am a Marian.” And indeed she is.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

NAMING


Apple! He tastes the syllables
again, hearing red, green,
smelling sweet with sweet white juice.
Wordless, his one-year-old fingers
punctuate the air, towards
the refrigerator. Hah!
(There! In there!)



Wanderers in the Museum of
Antiquities we find ourselves attended
by the ancient Buddhas of Tibet,
by way of China. Gazing down they watch
kindly over us, the unenlightened.
We are tutored by the bodhisattvas,
humble heroes whose names we can't pronounce.
Gladly they waited here on earth, postponing
Nirvana for the sake of those who needed
them. For us. Patience beyond patience.
Blessing beyond blessing. Names beyond names.

In the beginning was the Word

And the Word,

infinite unspoken unspeakable
rises,
rises,
a transparent
helium
balloon
a
coda of
ethereal
echoes
just out of reach
disappearing

like fog at sunrise.
Truth?
or mirage?

Alpha Slugger Before the Big Time: When Boston Still Had the Babe, the new book on the World Champion 1918 Red Sox Edited by Bill Nowlin

Alpha Slugger Before the Big Time: When Boston Still Had the Babe,
the new book on the World Champion 1918 Red Sox


Edited by Bill Nowlin
Associate Editors: Mark Armour, Len Levin & Allan Wood
Rounder Books Burlington, MA
visit www.rounderbooks.com




Review By Michael Todd Steffen


When we picture Babe Ruth it’s usually from one of the old newsreel clips of the great slugger in a New York Yankee uniform holding a bat or trotting around the bases after hitting a homerun. Not all of us remember how differently the destined hall-of-famer appeared at the onset of his career, known primarily as a pitcher in a 4-day rotation and, not as a Yankee, but in a Boston Red Sox uniform. (Fewer go back as far as to know that Babe was a native of Baltimore.)

Great events make great people. In April of 1917 the United States entered the First World War, a national commitment that touched the lives of most Americans and of most American institutions, including Major League baseball.

Editor Bill Nowlin comments that by spring training of the following year, "Assembling a team was far more difficult than usual, given the number of players…either gone to service or likely to be called," in the new book When Boston Still Had the Babe: The 1918 World Champion Red Sox (Rounder Books, 2008). Associate editor Allan Wood notes, "of the eight regulars in Boston’s Opening Day lineup, only two were holdovers from the previous year."

Initially Red Sox manager Ed Barrow tried to compensate for the absence of top athletes by filling in with little-known players who got their brief chance:
Eusobio Gonzalez (seven plate appearances over three games),
Red Bluhm (one at-bat as a pinch hitter), George Cochran (.117
average), and Jack Stansbury (who slugged .149 in 20 games).

Though a pitcher Babe Ruth it was known could outhit the amateurs trying to find their confidence, and in May Ruth went into the daily lineup, to have his first season as the dynamo of baseball that would make him a legend. By that year’s close the statistics and his achievement were staggering. Almost all of the players who pitched and played the field in the early 1900s either had very short careers or their performances were unexceptional.
In contrast, Babe led both leagues in slugging average by a wide margin in 1918…
Ruth’s 2.22 ERA was eighth best in the AL…In the World Series, Ruth beat the Cubs in Games One and Four,setting a new World Series record of 29.2 consecutive scoreless
innings, a streak he began in 1916.

When Boston Still Had the Babe comes out at a good time, 90 years after the 1918 season, the year of Ruth’s rise to superstar status with an invitation he could not refuse (he was traded by Red Sox owner Harry Frazee) to go play for the New York Yankees the following year.

After the 2004 and 2007 World Series championships, Boston fans may have proven themselves at last beyond the famous curse of 1918 marking the Red Sox’ last twentieth century Major League title. If this was a curse from beyond the grave, as some fans believed, it lasted 86 years. To write about the phenomenon before the Sox had a chance to vindicate themselves may have been unthinkable. Today it is palatable and timely. The book is a gem for true Boston fans with an appreciation for the city’s and the team’s history and tradition.

It features not only the story of Babe Ruth’s incipient greatness and the challenges of holding the team together during the war, but includes ample background on each of the 32 players of that year’s team, a Day by Day of the 1918 season, and a detailed account of daily events of the 1918 World Series between the Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs.

There are even 2 ½ pages dedicated to Harvey "Red" Bluhm who only stepped up to the plate once that year as a pinch hitter on July 3rd. His at-bat was lost to official records for 44 years, only to be corrected in the November 17, 1962 issue of Sporting News by sportswriter Lee Allen, who soared to the muses for a complimentary verse:

There once was a player named Bluhm.
To pitchers he symbolized doom.
Record-keepers insist
He belongs on the list.
But just when did he play, and for whom?


Michael Todd Steffen/Ibbetson Update/Somerville, Mass.


contact: Jennifer Sacca at (617) 218-4503, email jsacca@rounder.com

Louisa Solano Corner in Cambridge, Mass.

FORMER GROLIER POETRY BOOK SHOP OWNER 'Louisa Solano' WILL HAVE CORNER NAMED AFTER HER AT CEREMONY JUNE 21





Louisa Solano sent me this letter about Louisa Solano corner in Cambridge, Mass:


Cambridge, Mass.








Dear Doug: Thank you: The ten minute ceremony will be on June 21st, 11AM, at the corner of Plympton and Bow Street. Ifeanyi Menkiti as my favorite Community Elder will give the blessing, Jim Henle who initiated the measure as well as having initiated the move for the creation of the Ellen La Forge Memorial Poetry Foundation will unveil the "Square" plaque, and I'll say a few words.

How do I feel? Very happy. When you consider that almost five decades of my life have been spent in and around that corner, I can't think of a better location. Being born in Cambridge, graduating from the public schools, and having a father on the faculty of Harvard, I feel that Plympton and Bow straddle the world of town and gown quite nicely. I attended Sunday School, Brownies, Girl Scouts at St.
Paul's, Club 47, Cafe Mozart, Cronin's, etc., in the community and met poets, critics, students, professors primarily working out of the universities in the Grolier from the 'fifties on. I was introduced to the Grolier by Jacqueline Springwater, the wife of a Harvard Graduate Student, whom I met when we both worked at the Cambridge Public Library. One of the major motivations in my life has always been to bridge the gap between the general community and the university.

Since poets have always been "outside the cave," it seemed perfectly natural that if both communities were exposed to a variety of poetry, they would be drawn away from their confines and a greater awareness of each other would follow. I'm not sure this was logical but it certainly set me on a mission. I'd like to think that this plaque suggests that to some degree I've succeeded.

Doug: It is kind of
crazy wonderful isn't it? Regards, Louisa


YES IT IS LOUISA!

Greatest Uncommon Denominator (2) – Review

Greatest Uncommon Denominator Issue 2 – Review ( http://www.gudmagazine.com)
By Caroline Hunter

Greatest Uncommon Denominator brings together a group of provocative, disorienting, imaginative and crafted pieces of writing with disconcerting confidence. Each piece offers its own dark twist upon reality with nuance and skill but questionable sanity. It carries the reader into a wild journey of surreal inquiry and exploration.

Some of the short stories stretch the imagination and bring it back to a concluding relief, such as “El Alejibre” by D. Richard Pearce. This story is a harmless trip into magical realism and self-reflection, and includes animated skeleton dolls and a shape-shifting cat. The characters are boldly drawn and the environment described in delightfully peculiar detail. It leaves the reader with a feeling of incredulous amusement.

Other short stories take one on a trip to stranger and stranger metaphysical destinations, only to dump him/her in a state of mind similar to what I would imagine LSD might induce. Such a one was “The Salivary Reflex” by Tina Connelly. Its portrait of the main character, a woman who has a fixation with licking, is interesting in its intricacy; Alison describes her husband as tasting like “dust and dry-erase-marker stench.” However, the idiosyncratic details lead nowhere. Instead of bringing the reader to a new place of understanding, the many tastes that Alison describes as she moves through a short stretch of her life leave a bad taste in his/her mouth.

The characters in these stories are all unique; the problem is that you eventually realize that you would rather not have met them. Several stories, like “Offworld Friends Are Best” by Neil Blaikie, initially grab the reader with a confident narrative voice. Then this voice bunches up and spirals down into a psychological standstill while minute patches of illumination attempt to surface along the way. One gets the feeling that the story got bored with its narrator and went off to find somewhere else to be.

“Under the Flowers a Carcass Waits,” a poem by Rusty Barnes, is one of a group of pieces in this collection that carries the reader up a few stories from the circus of pathology that makes its rounds through the rest of the book. The first line, “Under a pear tree a sloppy-jawed mutt chews on a raw beef knuckle,” is a good example of the rich imagery that dominates the poem. In this piece and a few others, natural imagery carries an unsettling and vague plotline through to satisfying literary coherence.

Unfortunately, the majority of the writing in the Spring 2008 issue of Greatest Uncommon Denominator is more exploration than composition. I enjoy experimental writing, but came out of these stories feeling I had been used as a therapist by writers who should have let these stories mull a little longer in their minds before tossing them onto a page. Being strange is what you do on your own time; don’t let these authors break through the door to your psyche in the half-baked nightmare that is this issue of Greatest Uncommon Denominator. At least stick to your own nightmares, because the devil you know is better...


Caroline Hunter/Ibbetson Update/May 2008

BLUE LAND C.D. COLLINS (Polyho Press 10 Howard St. Somerville, Mass http://www.polyho.com)

BLUE LAND C.D. COLLINS (Polyho Press 10 Howard St. Somerville, Mass http://www.polyho.com)


In Somerville, Mass, the home of C.D. Collins, she lives amidst the east coast literary establishment. The fiction that is produced in these parts is often first rate. It often deals with the young, the disaffected, the urbane and privileged. The characters often are jaded, over-educated, underemployed, and in short not reflective of the hinterlands south, west and even north of the Brahmin waters of the Charles River. But in the west of Somerville, Collins writes about the folks who habituated the bygone tobacco farms of rural Kentucky, and other gone-to- seed burgs. Like William Faulkner or Flannery O’Connor she writes with a gothic and highly emotional acumen that is at times striking. Collins who moved to Somerville from Kentucky some years ago, is an accomplished singer/songwriter as well as poet, who now has written a collection of short stories titled “Blue Land.” It examines the lives of mostly agrarian, poor white, folks in an unsentimental, authentic, and even spiritual style.

One of the most harrowing stories in this collection “Sin Verquenza” deals with a coke addict who works the line at a Delmonte Plant. The first paragraph of the story grabs the reader immediately in a chokehold, as the female protagonist describes the difference between a “Coke Head,” and a “Junkie":

“ A Coke Head and a Junkie are two different things. With Junk you hit up and just drop out. You feel very benevolent, but all you can do is sit there trembling and nauseated, your eyes slamming shut. With cocaine you are fascinated by your own mind, you feel smart and interesting and full of energy. Your life is suddenly ideal. Then the high is tainted by craving for more and you rev and rev till you climb the fucking walls. I do coke, but I am not in the gutter, you understand. I’m a worker. I save all my money past rent and food, for my Friday night date with the snowman.”

And here, in the same story, Collins exhibits her talent for the telling detail. In this passage she describes the evolving physical traits of a dysfunctional couple:

“ Same stiff dinners, same exact fights on Saturday night. My mother drew more and more inside, her head sinking into her shoulders like a turtle, her shoulders rolling forward. My father did the opposite, his chest popped out more and more, and his back began to sway, like a bad horse.”



In the story “Hiroshima” a young woman ponders the simple twist of fate that prevented one young man from courting her, and the consequence it may have had for the unborn child:

“ Would it have been different if Mr. Greenway had not been walking this way to the dairy, if the other young man’s step had not quickened as the image of her eyes surfaced in his mind? For it was not much time, just a moment, between the arrival of one and the arrival of the other, leaving with one, and leaving the other with the grandparents or an empty porch. Would the child that comes later have been the same soul destined to pass through this woman? Or is there a child whose soul still waits?”

In the best tradition of the small press, the Polyho Press has published a veteran writer who is hopefully on the cusp of the literary limelight.

* The Ibbetson Street Press will be releasing a poetry collection by Collins " Self Portrait With A Severed Head" this summer ( 2008)


Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update/ May 2008/ Somerville