Newton Free Library Poetry Series --Gullette, Sesling, Vogt / Nov 13, 2018

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Grolier Poetry Book Shop Poetry Festival June 2, 2018

 

I interviewed Francine LaChance at the Bloc 11 Cafe about the Grolier Poetry Festival coming up this Saturday.  LaChance wrote a small piece about this important poetry event for Off the Shelf in The Somerville Times.

The Grolier Poetry Festival Brings Poetry, Music, Dance, and Dramatic Performances to the Street, Saturday, May 19, 2018, 12noon–8pm
 The Poetry Festival is one in a series of 90th Year Celebrations, and includes an exciting lineup of readings and performances, while featuring new collaborations with local organizations, workshops for children and adults, and a preview of future events.  This event is free and open to the public. 

The Grolier Poetry Festival will be held on Plympton Street, between Mass Avenue and Bow Street. Board Member and Poet Lloyd Schwartz will open the children’s hour, which will feature scene selections from Twelfth Night, performed by Boston Shakespeare Project, Shakespeare in Motion, followed by interactive segments, word play and a Q&A. X. J. Kennedy, will read children’s poetry, from his own work, and poems written by close Grolier poet friends from Elise Paschen’s anthology, Poetry Speaks to Children. He will also read later in the program. A poetry writing workshop for children will be held from 1-3pm. 

Proprietor and Director, Poet and Philosopher Ifeanyi Menkiti will give opening remarks at 1pm. David Ferry will lead an impressive lineup of poets, reading from his poetry and translations, followed by Kathleen Spivack, Lloyd Schwartz, Lillian Yvonne Bertram, and many great local poets. Dramatic performances will include Jim Vrabel, performing from John Berryman’s The Dream Songs, and Michael Mack, performing from Hearing Voice, Speaking in Tongues. Jimmy Tingle will make a guest appearance. 

Stan Strickland will play the saxophone and James Kamal Jones will play the drums from 3:40–4:10pm. They will both accompany Ifeanyi Menkiti while he reads one of his poems. Our performances include dance and music with poetry, and Audrey Harrer playing the harp. We will also feature Joe Burgio, Ensemble Inedit: Poetry, Song and Dance by performers from Turkey, Brazil, and Israel.

Diana Norma Szokolyai will read and perform with members of the Cambridge Writers' Workshop and lead a workshop based on CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos & Sourcebook for Creative Writing. a newly released book that she and Rita Banerjee edited. Whiskey Radish, who has worked at Ryles Jazz Club for over 20 years, will sketch throughout the day,  and and she and Philip O’Brien take photographs.

Lloyd Schwartz and Joyce Peseroff  will read poems and essays by Donald Hall, a dear friend of the Grolier who also turns 90 later this year. Readings will include excerpts from A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety, which will be released in July, and poems by Mr. Hall’s late wife, Jane Kenyon. 

Future events with Grolier poet friends will be previewed, including: Frank Bidart, Robert Pinsky, Tino Villanueva, Peter Balakian, Robert Perkins, David Ferry, Jim Vrabel, and Michael Mack.

We will conclude our Festival with a special video presentation of Ifeanyi Menkiti’s title and signature poem, Before a Common Soil, an original composition by George Emlen, Former Music Director of Revels for over 30 years, performed by the Revels chorus and musicians.

The Hastings Room Reading Series Welcomes Joan Houlihan 7PM May 9, 2018

Joan Houlihan

The Hastings Room Reading Series Welcomes Joan Houlihan on May the 9^th,  2018,

this coming Wednesday, 7pm at Christ Church ,O Garden Street--just outside of Harvard Square...

 

Our spring reader this year is Joan Houlihan. Joan’s previously released poetry, two narrative sequences, were forged in the deep past, out of the bubble of present times, in pre-historic hunter-gatherer days. The second book of the sequence, Ay, was published early in 2014. A motivation for the narrative’s setting in long-forgotten times stems from Houlihan’s concern for permanent human nature. Its central tragedy identifies with the story of Cain and Abel, and though of such a primitive region of our psyche, to this day it continues to be a major source of parental woe and daily news, not to mention Congressional gridlock.

 

Along with The Us and Ay, Joan Houlihan is the author of The Mending Worm, winner of the 2005 Green Rose Prize in poetry, and Handheld Executions, poems and essays 2006. She founded the Concord Poetry Center, and is the founder and director of the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conferences. Joan serves on the faculty of Lesley University’s Low-Residency

MFA program.

 

The Us was named a 2009 must-read by the Massachusetts Center for the Book.

 

As a Freshman in college, I learned in an Introduction to American Literature course that one distinctive characteristic of our stories and poetry is “primitivism.” I only remembered that label recently as I pondered the unique language that Houlihan smithied for her narrative book-length poems, and which is carried forth in her new book, Shadow-feast, released by Four Way Books. Houlihan’s language is unusual in its conscious preference away from Latinate or Scholarly English—mirroring the prehistoric or a-temporal  subject of those first two books. Oddly she achieves this American primitivism through language by harkening back to a use of English in poetry before America was even founded, in the alliterative diction of Old English poetry where the formal omission of articles (“a” and “the”) draws weight and blood back into nouns. It is a language keen in elemental perception of basic phenomena, seasons, plants, animals and birds, night and day, sea and land, stripped almost entirely of concept and abstraction. We see these signatures in the new book, Shadow-feast:

 

p. 3: SLEPT OUT to sea and sailing in a wave

            uncertain what was in the hold   then comes from years: a comb…

 

p. 6:                 She sat him up to sip / a bowl of broth

 

p.14: pulley-roped palliatives

 

p. 31 Lean me on you, I am rid of wish

 

p. 32 I am mute, but thought-loud.

I have recently noted in an article that the new book is presented in three dramatic parts, two monologues, Hers, His, and a sort of post script, Theirs. It’s a work of expressions from imagination—biographically referential howsoever. This organization and representation lend remove to the poems, allow us to read them as we might view or read a play. It also sets the book in perspective as literary genre, with Rilke’s wonderful poem on assisting the dying “Washing the Corpse,” or Faulkner’s streaming dramatic novel As I Lay Dying.

 

It is interesting to note that the Personae of Shadow-feast are possessive pronouns: Hers, His, Theirs. This links Shadow-feast with Houlihan’s two previous book-length poems, Ay (“I”) and The Us, with their titles evocative of nominal pronouns.

 

As is the case with every Hastings Room reading, this coming Wednesday’s will be the best one yet. Come join us.

 

 

The Hastings Room Reading series was founded in 2014 by Steven Brown and Michael Steffen.

It holds place thanks to the space allowed to us by First Church Congregationalist and is free, accepting donations which go to the church. We want to acknowledge the generosity of help, over these past four years, given by Irene Koronos, Dan Wuenschel, Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright, Kevin Cutrer, and many others, including our readers.

Stone Coast Reading Event--April 7, 2018

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