Friday, July 25, 2025

I Ain’t Gonna Wait For Godot, No More

 




I Ain’t Gonna Wait For Godot, No More

by Doug Holder

Wilderness House Press

145 Foster St.

Littleton, MA

ISBN: 978-1-300-07796-1

29 Pages

https://tinyurl.com/2tarkbnb



Review by Dennis Daly



Doug Holder doesn’t beat around the bush. His poetry grabs you with its pent-up gusto and bohemian worldview. Maddening at times. Falling-down funny. Sad, beyond troubling. Ravenous. A direct poetic descendent of Ginsberg, Corso, and Huncke, this poet today stands alone in his alternate universe with his off-kilter, gritty observations. In his new collection, I Aint Gonna Wait For Godot No More, Holder wanders over the creaking floorboards of his poetic offerings confronting existential questions and supplying make-do answers. Mortality and meaning lurk between his insistent lines.



The title poem, I Aint Gonna Wait for Godot No More, doubles as the opening poem and is the perfect thematic lead-in. The allusion, of course, is to Samuel Beckett’s tragicomedy Waiting For Godot. “We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?” says Estragon to Vladimir, the other main character in that play. “Yes, yes, we’re magicians…” replies Vladimir. With lyrical exasperation and hopeful enthusiasm Holder suggests a complementary strategy of life building on Beckett’s stage reality: art, companionship, bestial attention, management of pain, the love of food, and procrastination. Here is the poet’s compressed manifesto,



I’ll be gone…

I will sport my battered bowler

I will do a sprightly. Vaudevillian shuffle

and continue to stumble

on this earthly floor.

I will take comfort with friends

the golden stare of my ginger cat

a wet lick of a chocolate truffle

and take my time going

to that so distant shore…,



In his poem Hamlet at the Yiddish Theatre, Holder draws a bead on Shakespeare’s most complex characterization by giving that protagonist Jewish parents. The results are predictable and pretty funny. They-- the parents-- admonish Hamlet to get real and forewarn him of the comeuppance he’s headed for. Holder obviously has some subject-experience in these matters. The poet’s concocted parents begin to confront Hamlet here,



“Such tsuris!

“Enough already!”

At his dramatic angst

“You think you

Had it hard!”

“To Be or not to Be”

“If that is the question

Then make a decision,”

They say with derision.



A father,

might have yelled

as mine did to me,

“You’ll be a drifter!”



And, a bit further on, here,



Some mother

might have responded

a maternal cliché

“You are 30 years old

you have your

whole life ahead of you.”



Mortality becomes less of an issue in a world that does not solidify around you. If reality is questionable, as it becomes in Holder’s piece entitled My Computer Wants To “Verify If I Am Human,” then all boundaries fade, especially the border between life and death. The poet reacts to his computer’s abrupt challenge with an ontological meditation. Then, after a Pentecost of sorts, Holder double checks his status,



Sometimes during

my dark night

of the soul

I wonder

if I am embodied

or an ethereal ghost

But the morning light

Streams in my faith

From the bedroom window

yet again.



The computer has

a nefarious rotating circle

that surrounds my visual plane…



I check my pulse

I feel the flesh and blood,

the flashing synapses

of my brain,

the crooked life lines

that are traced on my hands.



Tragic Cardigan, Holder’s ode to the invisibility of old age, questions not the fact of senescence, but humanity’s resistance to it. The poet uses his grandfather’s comfortable sweater (named after British general Lord Cardigan, who led the charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War and who expelled his Irish tenants into the tender mercies of nature’s wrath—just saying) as a jacket-like refuge from worldly discomfort. His self-evaluation follows a daily routine,



You are febrile

In your frumpiness.



You try to muffle

The invective

In your head,

“Old Man—shake a leg!”

And you would

If it wasn’t so

Painful.



Now put enough pens—

Perhaps a pipe or two

The overdue phone bill

Gnarled pencils in its

Deep, sagging pockets



Perhaps sip a well-timed

Scotch

And disappear



Counterculture attitudes and artistic sympathies often derive their impetus from family dynamics. The “beat” perspective exhibits this propensity in spades. Holder’s wonderfully revelatory piece, My Father with Jack Dempsey, catches his dad’s business relationship with the world’s heavyweight boxing champion and iconic celebrity of his day and freezes it in the form of a photo. The elder Holder was one of the legendary advertising madmen operating out of New York. The poet details one relationship of PR man and client that leads to another relationship of father and son in these lines,



Dad’s narrow black tie

his jet black hair

tamed by an oil slick of Vitalis

his left hand clenched in a fist

a pugilist meeting another pugilist.

Dempsey pretends to yell something in my dad’s ear

Like Ali to Cosell, a graceful athlete

To the Jewish Ed Sullivan posture of my PR man father.

My father did not seem to be living in the moment

He was always not here and nowhere.



On the contrary, Holder’s poetry, expressive and down-to-earth, is always here, always rooted in his askew stagecraft and always accessible in the most absurd way. Like Beckett’s Estragon, Holder agrees to go, puts on his hat, and then sits and waits with the rest of us.


For more info about Dennis Daly go to: https://dennisfdaly.blogspot.com/

Red Letter Poem #263

 The Red Letters

 

 

In ancient Rome, feast days were indicated on the calendar by red letters.

To my mind, all poetry and art serves as a reminder that every day we wake together beneath the sun is a red-letter day.

 

––Steven Ratiner

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Red Letter Poem #263

 

 

 

 

Aunt M.S.                     


When she makes it down the stairs     one step

one     stops at the landing to catch

what breath she can

and hobbles into the kitchen

her cane     a starless wand

I want to hide behind the woodstove

disappear     like springtime 

Sometimes I can’t believe

I let her stay          but

she came with the house          fine

print            

after the lawyer’s signature

Oh          she buys her own

food     pays her way          

Thursdays          Amazon     drops     boxes 

on the porch          She sorts

and puts away

keeps herself

clean     charges 

up her hearing aids  

 

She tries          not to complain

but her body isn’t right           

her back aches          her legs tire.                  

her arthritic fingers

often          clench so tight

she hooks them onto a table edge

to bend them     straight            

Nights     when sleep eludes

her     she paces 

the third-floor corridor like a wraith

 

I’ve seen her glide     cane-less

in her Emily-white nightdress

toward the window blessed with stars

I’ve learned not to check on her          unless           

she calls for me

She calls when she’s afraid     of what

she might become

and I climb the stairs

                                          one step

one                

and take her in my arms 

          as though I love her.

 

 

––Susan Roney O'Brien

 

 

 





What else is a poet to do?

Susan Roney-O’Brien has spent much of her life focused on the written word. She’s published two chapbooks and three full-length poetry collections, the most recent being Thira (‎Kelsay Books). It’s an entrancing sequence of poems that conjures within our consciousness a once-thriving ancient Aegean isle so that we might appreciate, in simpler terms, what is at the heart of our human enterprise on this planet. Her poetry has been published widely, translated into Mandarin and Braille, and much honored for its deep and life-affirming spirit. So what should such a writer do when confronted with a devastating medical diagnosis––multiple sclerosis––and the cascading fears and dark thoughts it engenders? She writes about it, of course––even if it upends part of her creative approach and wreaks havoc with her emotions. Even if it lays bare her wounded spirit and surprising vulnerabilities––the very things we humans tend to hide from public view. She follows the twisting paths her imagination takes her, so that it might help her come to terms with what is taking place––within her body and around her in the world. She tells the truth––or tries to, as best she can. And so a whole new collection of poems is emerging slowly which will––at least according the samples I’ve read so far––break readers’ hearts while, at the same time, fortifying them.



One continuing character who appears in the manuscript is this ‘Aunt M. S.’, a sort of familial projection of the illness so that the lifelong self––who has always been the one to navigate torrential language––can examine this new incarnation with a bit of objectivity. I immediately felt this poem has some kinship with Sylvia Plath’s “In Plaster” and, in each case, the aim is simply survival. I was taken by the way the unsteadiness of her condition helps shape the form of the poem, negotiating its uneven gaps and hesitations. “When she makes it down the stairs one step/ one stops at the landing to catch…”––my heart was caught off-guard by the gap between one step and that one half-rhyme stop, catching our breath as well. The narrator has the urge to hide behind that familiar source of warmth, the kitchen woodstove––a metaphorical echo of that other fervid dream of new life: spring. Her new aunt attends to the quotidian tasks of contemporary life (groceries, Amazon boxes, charging the hearing aid), trying “not to complain” (which, of course, means she does––and here we can’t help but join our own sufferings to hers). But when “her arthritic fingers/ often clench so tight/ she hooks them onto a table edge/ to bend them straight,” the more profound nature of what the speaker (no, we’re not able to maintain that literary convention––what the poet) is going through is viscerally present.



And yet there are moments when this new version of Susan glides cane-less down the hallway “like a wraith”, dressed in white, the way her literary ancestor from Amherst might have done. And the poet does––what each of us must learn to do when facing our own fragile bodies, the longing of our mortal selves: “I climb the stairs/ one step/ one/” (oh, the profound despair and joy, to take that one treacherous step again, to navigate these precarious lines of poetry) “and take her in my arms/ as though I love her.” As though. Sometimes that’s the best we can do, though we pray we’ll uncover love’s deeper resources, our deepest selves. Not surprisingly, William Stafford’s moving little lyric, “Bess,” came to mind. In it, the local librarian hides her cancer diagnosis from her community. “She had to keep her friends from knowing/”––and the enjambment of his line-break trips up our expectations, not unlike Susan’s uneven spacing––“how happy they were.” Indeed, because just a mention of her mortal jeopardy would cast our ‘ordinary’ lives into such relief, how could we be anything but happy, not to be facing what Bess does––what Susan does––every morning. I think that’s the gift both of these poets are offering to readers: be glad; your day is not as hard as it might be. Savor what is present now: this sunlit window, this bowl of cut hydrangeas, these beloved voices echoing in our homes, this sip of morning coffee, this poem.

              

 

 

 

The Red Letters

 

* If you would like to receive these poems every Friday in your own in-box – or would like to write in with comments or submissions – send correspondence to:

steven.arlingtonlaureate@gmail.com

 

 

To learn more about the origins of the Red Letter Project, check out an essay I wrote for Arrowsmith Magazine:

https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/community-of-voices

 

and the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

http://dougholder.blogspot.com

 

For updates and announcements about Red Letter projects and poetry readings, please follow me on BlueSky

@stevenratiner.bsky.social

and on Twitter          

@StevenRatiner

 

And coming soon:

a new website to house all the Red Letter archives at StevenRatiner.com