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/

Homage By Kathleen Spivack

Homage

By Kathleen Spivack

Wilderness House Press

Littleton, MA

ISBN: 978-1-7331185-3-8

43 Pages

$12.00



Review by Dennis Daly



Spanning oceans and multiple generations, Homage, Kathleen Spivack’s newest collection of poems, delivers a movable feast of poets and other influencers of her estimable artistry. Spivack’s narratives celebrate famous poets, musicians, painters, and booksellers, many of whom she personally knew and some before her time, as well as teachers, a lighthouse keeper, and other oddly interesting individuals.



Each of these poems seem perfectly weighted, upbeat, and toned with appreciation and even affection. Not an easy task given the ever-present and dark backstories of some of these fraught individuals.



Set in Elizabeth Bishop’s apartment in Cambridge Massachusetts, Spivack, in her poem Ping Pong Sestina for Elizabeth Bishop, recounts a ping pong match between Bishop and herself. The match is much more than a game of course. The metaphors of career and life and youth and age and talent mesh together in this slightly irregular (read personalized), but masterful, form. Bishop, who is known for writing a terrific sestina herself, would approve.



Spivack’s admiration for Bishop’s determination, despite her arthritic hands, powers up through this poem as she plots to throw the game to her adversary. This passion pushes the piece forward past Bishop’s many unsaid torments. Consider these affecting lines,



… You so easily won

friends, admirers, yet always at play

was your encircled suffering, lack of love hinted, gamely

ignored; the poems and stories in which pain was handled

so far back behind the eyes that the poetry

stood for itself, was really poetry, not pain. You faced



it only obliquely. Once, showing me a photo, the face

of yourself as a baby, small, stubborn, not at all “poetic”

protesting abandonment in crumpled white lace, hands

tightly folded as if your dear life, even then, was not

a game, as if you sensed you had something dark to play

out, a despairing intelligence behind that winning



For Anne, Spivack’s amazing short poem lamenting the death of her poet-friend, Anne Sexton, seems to sear through its printed page. Yes, it has the necessary pathos. Yes, it is resentful of death. Yes, it provides a modicum of solace. But above all that, the piece affirms the friendship of the two poets and salutes Sexton’s life. The poem concludes this way,



Friend, from the phonograph you are still wise and true:

you go on talking, wry, amused.

No one could keep you from writing the poem-of-your-death

so I write a poem to your death, as you wanted me to.



Next stop Tours, France, in the lush Loire Valley. Spivack memorializes her former French teacher in her poem Madame Joelle Blot, my French Teacher. The piece is gorgeous and my favorite poem in the collection. One can almost smell the French language in the metaphoric lilac perfume flooding these well-wrought lines. Mentors with moral and/or emotional authority can often open interior doors in addition to the proper subjects they impart. This clearly is the case between Madame Blot and Spivack. Here is the heart of the poem,



Madame Joelle Blot, my French teacher, determined that



I should not spend another night without lilacs in my room.

Then you mouse-stepped down the ladder, little feet in little

strappy high-heeled shoes, set the lilacs firmly in a crate and



carried them inside, a bushel of lilacs. For me. No one

had ever… Selecting just the exact tool, you laid into the lilacs

with an enormous antique hammer, mashed down the woody



stem-ends splintery and flat. This is how it’s done, you showed me.

In France. Where they break eggs to make omelettes.

In Tours, where they speak the best French, unaccented



and pure, so they say. I wanted to learn that language from you.

I was foreign, foreign even to myself

And so applied myself diligently to your lessons.



Even the lilacs knew you were boss…



Many writers fantasize at one time or another about being a lighthouse keeper (I have.). The extreme seclusion coupled with grave and undeniable responsibility has its attraction. The Lighthouse Keeper, Spivack’s paean to that singular calling, does nothing to limit this allurement. She uses the Cape Antibes’ lighthouse on the French Riviera as her example. Listen to Spivack’s protagonist, enthroned in his glowing dome,



“I am in Paradise.

I live among the birds.

Sometimes I see angels:

I think I am becoming

an angel, drawn in a beam of

light, upward, spreading

hands over water, guiding ships.

If you listen, you can hear birds

also encouraging the sailors,

more benevolent than Ulysses’

sirens.”



If poetic romance and charm delights you, as well as mentoring power, muse upon Spivak’s poem, For George Whitman , Shakespeare & Co. Paris. Whitman was the proprietor of the second iteration of Shakespeare & Co., a gathering place for American expats, located in Paris, France. Described by Spivack as eccentric and generous, Whitman inspired and promoted his visitors and encouraged them in their writings. The poem exudes joy, possibility, and thankfulness, a far cry from the usual depressing caricatures inherent in literary life. The piece ends thusly,



… all roads led

to Shakespeare & Company. Always had. She looked

across the Seine. The vista took

one’s breath away: the bookshop; Paris spread



before her; conversation, Notre Dame….

To read to write, this was a writer’s dream.

All this, and more: the writer’s rooms, the cat,

the company, including lively Sylvia, she praised.

Few of us get to say thank you to friends, teachers, and mentors who have encouraged us along the way, either directly or indirectly. Kathleen Spivak, capping her storied career as poet, writer, and teacher, found an opportunity to express her homage to those who came before and, using her breath-taking artistry, took it. How refreshing!

A New Imprint of the Wilderness House Literary Review releases new book "Deer" by Susan Tepper

Steve Glines announces the debut of the Wilderness House Press, the book publishing arm of the Wilderness Literary Review http://whlreview.com . Their first title is a collection of short fiction "Deer" by Susan Tepper ( to be available this month)









Nothing is off-limits in Susan Tepper’s stories, yet not a single sentence feels gratuitous. Each of the tales that make up DEER exists as its own world, endowed with so potent a presence that one feels one has witnessed a truth unfold in the reading. Gladly our minds stretch wide to catch her fictions and weave them into our new reality.
Eric Darton, Free City


In her debut story collection DEER, Susan Tepper takes us into the forest of her imagination, shining a light on a pack of off-kilter characters caught in unusual and compelling circumstances. Tepper is one of the most original voices in fiction I've heard in quite a while. While reading her loopy-beautiful dark narratives, I was reminded of the first time I read Denis Johnson. Yes, she's that good. This is a writer to watch!
Jamie Cat Callan, The Writer’s Toolbox & French Women Don’t Sleep Alone


Susan Tepper creates brilliant, quirky, unpredictable worlds in her story collection DEER. Whether set in the Italian countryside, a post-modern house in the Hamptons, or backstage at a community theatre, they teeter between the familiar and the extreme, the peculiar and the poignant, and her characters, brimming as they are with eccentricities, never let us forget how deeply human they are at their core.
Ellen Litman, The Last Chicken in America