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Saturday, August 05, 2017

The Sunday Poet: Paul Marion

Poet Paul Marion
Paul Marion has been a writer and community activist since the 1970s. He is the author of several collections of poetry as well as the editor of the early writings of Jack Kerouac, Atop an Underwood, and other titles. His recent book Mill Power tells the story of the innovative national park in Lowell, Massachusetts, and the city’s acclaimed revival, a model for small industrial cities everywhere. His work has appeared in anthologies and literary journals such as Alaska Quarterly Review and The Massachusetts Review. In 1978 he created Loom Press, a small publishing company that promotes writing from the Merrimack River Valley. Among other accomplishments on the community front, he co-founded the Lowell Folk Festival and Lowell Heritage Partnership, an alliance of people and organizations whose mission is to care for architecture, nature, and culture.  His latest collection of poetry is Union River.


From Union River: Poems and Sketches by Paul Marion (Bootstrap Press, 2017)

The Yellow Gate

We crossed Harvard Square at twilight.
Bluegrass troubadours caught coins in an alley.
Our lemonade at the Café Algiers was tall and sour.
We kept our voices down. At slim tables
Night’s royalty sipped pomegranate soda.
New Yorker couples puffed twin thin cigars.
A temptress who could have ruled a sandy country
Ordered a cup of goat yogurt, and next door
Jugglers tossed fire outside the place with the yellow gate:
Women upstairs would peal sheer grace if they were bells.
A man stretches muscle strings into a physical region
Where the dance will decide what the body can do.
In this great well of action, rhythm bounds out of beings
As if they were trees releasing their inner rings.

Doug Holder Interviews Voices of Poetry founder Neil Silberblatt at the WOMR Studios in Provincetown, MA.

Neil Silberblatt ( Right) Doug Holder ( Left) at the WOMR studios in Provincetown, MA

 Click on to listen to the PODCAST
 https://archive.org/details/Z0000007_201708


Neil Silberblatt’s poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in various journals, including Poetica Magazine, The Otter,The Aurorean, Two Bridges Review, Verse Wisconsin, Naugatuck River
Review, Chantarelle’s Notebook, and The Good Men Project. His work has been included in the anthology, Confluencia in the Valley: The First Five Years of Converging with Words (Naugatuck Valley Community College, 2013); and in University of Connecticut’s Teacher-Writer magazine. He has published two poetry collections: So Far, So Good (2012), and Present Tense (2013). He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and one of his poems received Honorable Mention in the 2nd Annual OuterMost Poetry Contest (2014), judged by Marge Piercy. Neil is the founder of Voices of Poetry - which has presented poetry events, featuring distinguished poets & writers, at various venues throughout CT, NYC and Cape Cod - and host of the Poets Corner program on WOMR/WFMR (out of Provincetown, MA), for which he has interviewed acclaimed poets both on and off the Cape.

Monday, July 31, 2017

Whimsical magic: THE LITTLE QUEEN by Meia Geddes




Whimsical magic: THE LITTLE QUEEN by Meia Geddes


Illustrated by Sara Zieve Miller
 Publisher: Poetose Press, 2017
ISBN: 9781945366666


Review by Timothy Gager

This novella, beautifully illustrated by Sara Zieve Miller, transcends the world into a place of whimsy and adventure. It is an adventure that will capture the imagination of children and those of any age. In The Little Queen, Geddes tells the story of a little girl whose parents pass on, leaving her to live on as the little queen. It is a role the little queen initially wants to rid herself of, willing to trade places with anyone to become something else.

In her adventures, the little queen meets folks such as the book sniffer, the wall sawyer, the tree woman, the window builder, the poop encourager, the string woman, the editor of the Digital Dictionary of Sounds, the bodily linguist, the architect of chaos, and the reflector. All of these characters, with various imaginary vocations, glue the work together as pieces of a greater whole. The book reads like a modern Little Prince, with the truth sought through adventures. But unlike in The Little Prince, in which the title character leaves his planet, Geddes has the little queen leaving the palace, the only home she’s known.

Geddes deftly takes us through this philosophical fairy-tale. She explores the beauty of the world, coming-of-age, the notion of what or where home is. "A home is a resting place for the heart," the little queen says. Geddes shows that home is a combination of all the elements in the world, the seeking of completeness through shared love. Home is something you may seek, a place you may try to run away to, but it is located back to where you find the most comfort and with the souls of many of which pure experiences are harvested. The Little Queen is a lovely book, filled with mythical understanding and life lessons. 

Sunday, July 30, 2017

The Sunday Poet: Frits Fairhurst

Poet Frits Fairhurst






Fritz Fairhurst graduated from UMassDartmouth in 1988-- magna cum laude-- with a concentration in Creative Writing and English Literature. Fairhurst was mentored by Yvonne Sandstroem and Everett Hoagland. He then completed a Masters of Liberal Studies at NYU in 1990.under the auspices of Stephen Rudy and Friederich Ulfers. His thesis is titled, “Nietzsche’s Passages: Metonymical Flux...”




 PRESSED BY THE MOON



Pressed by the moon
Into an unknown 
Lured into the mystery
Of its spell
Staring at the glow
Knowing of the effect
On the oceans tides
Wondering if an internal
Change really happens
What I see reminds
Those who gaze
Those who wish
And those who count on
The forces of the orb
Will you pull
On the waters 
Of my life with
The ebb and
The flow
Like an opened page
Giving and emitting
Energy to make dreams
Filled with passion
That exercise the strength
Of the brain 
The organic computer
Shine more shine