You Are Not Alone Series June 25 Doug Holder, Douglas Bishop, Kate Chadburne, Rene Schwiesow,

( Click on pic to enlarge)




Presents
You Are Not Alone
Poetry & The Arts
Saturday June 25th 2011

Brockton Public Library, 304 Main St, Brockton, MA
Free Admission - HC Accessible


12:00-12:30 Open Mic Sign Up - Share your poetry be the inspiration
12:30-12:45 Opening Remarks - Joyce Irene Benoit, Med., C.C.A.
12:45-1:45 Features and Open Mic
1:45-2:00 Intermission
2:00-4:00 Features and Open Mic
Closing Remarks - Philip Hasouris, Founder

POETRY FEATURES:

Doug Holder: Founder of Ibbetson St. Press, Arts/editor Somerville News. His poetry has appeared in Anthologies, Magazines and Newspapers.

Douglas Bishop: International Performer and Boston area favorite. He is well known for working with musicians, singers and other poets. His poetry has been published in journals, anthologies and periodicals.

Rene Schwiesow: Author of 2 books of poetry:  She has been published in many small press publications, anthologies and literary reviews.

MUSIC FEATURE:

Kate Chadbourne: Singer, storyteller, and poet whose performances combine traditional tales with music for voice, harp, flute, and piano. She was recently featured on NPR.

"The Glorious Ones" The Arsenal Center for the Arts

The Glorious Ones”
Reviewed by James Foritano

“The Glorious Ones” at The Arsenal Center for the Arts until May 7th is a scintillating revival of a a Broadway musical celebrating the Commedia dell’ Arte, a 16th century Italian theater based loosely on plot, but sustained mainly by improvisation and acrobatics.


Our modern slapstick - think The Marx Brothers, Charlie Chaplin or Lucille Ball, is inspired by the rowdy antics of these wandering players. Not only slapstick, but any theater in which quicksilver turns of incident and emotion seem to interrupt predictability – think Shakespeare – is indebted to the nimble minds and bodies of this tradition.


Such a weight of history could easily overbalance a night of fun, but F.U.D.G.E. theater company manages handily to tell this weighty history through the singing, grimacing, capering bodies of its dedicated actors.


Curt Fennell embodies Flaminio Scala, the driving force of this madcap band of thespians. He takes his fun, erotic and theatrical, where he can get it, but when the “Glorious Ones” are invited to perform for the court of the king of France, Flaminio is all business. Alternately baggage master and martinet, Flaminio carries his “glorious” troupe to new heights, but also to attendant slippery slopes.


“The Glorious Ones” focuses on that point in history when written theater is taking precedence and prestige over improvisation. Written scripts give nuance to stock characters and more detailed plotting gives marching orders to actors attuned to scanning restive audiences, ready colleagues, for just that right moment to insert a pertinent, and often impertinent, diversion.


The comedy and tragedy of progress is illustrated brilliantly, pognantly by actors who take their rollicking roles so seriously that, over a lifetime of rehearsals and applause, they’ve become Pantalone, Arlecchino, Columbina, Armanda. Take off that mask and you’ve taken off the face behind it. Ouch!


Flaminio as the impresario/lead actor of this doughty, star-crossed troupe performs their “swam song” to a plaintive, bitter end. But the audience senses portents of demise, and also of rebirth in the bouncing action, haunting songs which the F.U.D.G.E. ensemble sprinkles throughout this rare, polished tribute to actors past and to come of Commedia dell’ Arte.

Review of “what looks like an elephant” by Edward Nudelman

Review of “what looks like an elephant” by Edward Nudelman, Lummox Press, PO Box 5301, San Pedro, CA 90733, www.lummoxpress.com, 113 pages, $15

Review by Barbara Bialick

A good poet tends to have a keen eye for observation, irony and detail, metaphysics and philosophy, so it should be no surprise when a scientist poet arrives on the small press scene with his first “full-length” book, “what looks like an elephant”. While the first thing I think of when a writer uses the symbol of an elephant, is the republican party, the book doesn’t go too heavily into politics. Rather, one gets intrigued by the lingo he uses for some of his images, that of a noted and scientifically published biologist living in the Boston area, a published poet, too.

For example, in “Linear Equations” he writes, “The volume of air in a cave is greater than all its parts,/Ask a spelunker to differentiate light’s vector./Follow that course. Graph the activity of a winter bird/as a function of ambient temperature/…You should be dead, but you aren’t. Graph that.”

Or examine a less dense, poem, “Arrival”: “Who can tell a gnat from a mosquito, unless/blood is spilled? Outside, a dog wants in./Inside, a soul wears slippers and sips iced tea./…Nobody here remembers the Vietnam war/but they will not easily forget this one.” But what war is that?

A poet is a poet, I believe, but how often do poets start out, “I was splicing a gene/when Thayer walked in…” He has all sorts of tools and numbers and colleagues ready to mine for poetry, yet he is not bound by them. “If the fear of God/is the beginning of wisdom,/ why am I so ignorant?” (“Notes from an Ill-kept Journal”)

Edward Nudelman’s first book of poetry, “Night Fires” was published in 2009 by OSU Press. Some of the journals he has published in include “The Atlanta Review”, “Chiron Review” the “Orange Room Review” and many others. He is a noted cancer research biologist with “over 60 published papers in top-tier journals.” He has also published two books on Jessie Willcox Smith, an American illustrator (Pelican Publishing, 1989, 1990). He is a native of Seattle who lives “just north of Boston with his wife, Susan, and their Golden Retriever, Sofie.”

Bagel Bard Anthology 6--To be released this month!

To order Bagel Bard Anthology 6 and others go to: http://www.wildernesshousepress.com/p/bagels-with-bards.html




*****From the Introduction – Kathleen Spivack


The Bagel Bards are a loose group of local writers, many of them
poets, who meet once a week at the welcoming coffee shop Au Bon Pain in Davis Square, Somerville, Massachusetts to share coffee and bagels.But most importantly, they share information about the writing trade. They are a networking group for writers in the area.

The brain child of at least four superb and conscientious writers,
oug Holder, Harris Gardner, Steve Glines and Irene Koronos, the
Bagel Bards have been meeting weekly for years, providing a haven
for local writers and publishers engaged in the solitary practice of the
wordsmith profession. Writing and reading are the shared passions.
Bagel Bards range in age from 19 to 94-plus...



************ Kathleen Spivack has been a visiting professor of American Literature/Creative Writing (one semester annually) in France since 1990. She has held posts at the University of Paris VII-VIII, the University of Francoise Rabelais, Tours, the University of Versailles, and at the Ecole Superieure (Polytechnique). She was a Fulbright Senior Artist/Professor in Creative Writing in France (1993-95). Her poetry has been featured at festivals in France and in the U.S. She reads and performs in theatres, and she also works with composers. Her song cycles and longer pieces have been performed worldwide.