“In the Spirit of Leadership” Cheryl Esposito (Review by Paul Steven Stone)

“In the Spirit of Leadership”
A Vision Into A Different Future By Cheryl Esposito
Plumb Road Publishing, price $18.95

Reviewed 2/20/09 by Paul Steven Stone

“In The Spirit of Leadership, A Vision Into A Different Future”, sounds more ponderous and self-important than this book of poems and insights actually proves to be. Designed (unconsciously, I believe) to resemble a box of luxury chocolates, this elegant book seeks to open minds to their own potential and hidden strengths, sharing through poetry and snatches of prose the author’s many insights gained over years as a leadership consultant to CEO’s, senior executives and world leaders.
The book starts off “on track”, giving you what you’ve been led to expect, poetry and insights focused on creating business leaders and fresh thinkers, teaching them “Being Leadership”—embodying leadership—rather than to wear the flimsy-but-oft-worn mantle of “Being Leaders”.
Soon, however, we wander off into realms farther afield than Applied Business School Philosophy. We are journeying with the author through poetic interludes as she takes wilderness solo journeys, overcomes fears of the unknown, recovers from being badly burned in a fire, pushes herself and her readers toward an ever-opening and never-resolved becoming. We are the chrysalis, the cocoon and the butterfly all in one.
The poems themselves use simple direct language, sentences often chopped up into fragments and stanzas.

A few examples…

There it is again.
That in between.
That place of uncertainty
That place where everything
is possible
and nothing
feels right.

The in between shows up all around me
In this writing I am in between.
The words are in between.
I am so good at seeing
what’s in between —
for others…
hearing the unspoken,
in between the words —
for others…
I listen.
I listen.
The lonely listener is
alive and well…in me.
How do I put her to work for me?
What are the words
from the place
in between
that she will hear?

Or when she is “Connecting with one’s nature.”

Open space. Big sky. Canyons that are endless. There I can breathe. I feel everything. I am alone with my fear, with my joy, with my self.
Out there I understand the insignificance of me…
And the significance of us, the humans inhabiting the earth. We are at once reckless and loving with the mother.
When I am there, I am vigilant with my care. I feel honored to be there.
There. To be there. To be.
I don’t experience “there” during day to day living.
I see and appreciate,
but the “there” feeling is quiet.
I lose the nature within me.
In solo, I connect with my true nature.

Cheryl Esposito is clearly a woman of many talents and the wisdom to pursue them with clarity and vigor. If there is a fault with “In The Spirit of Leadership” it lies in it offering too much for us to consider in a single package, too many themes heading in too many directions. But then again, once one connects with the zen of being leadership—of being our true selves—as Esposito envisions it, choosing what to read and what to leave unread probably becomes a natural act.

And there is much in this poetic enterprise worthy of reading.


Paul Steven Stone is the author of "Or So It Seems" ( Blind Elephant Press)

BREATHER by Bruce Dethlefsen

BREATHER

By Bruce Dethlefsen

83 pages / 59 poems / $15

Fire Weed Press
Send Check or Order To:

Bruce Dethlefsen

422 Lawrence Street

Westfield, WI 53964


Review by Charles P. Ries




Bruce Dethlefsen doesn't write many books of poetry. It has been six years since he came out with his second book, Something Near the Dance Floor by Marsh River Editions. And one doesn't see much of his poetry in and around the small press, but my-oh-my, when he decides to show us his good stuff, he comes out swinging. In this, his third and largest collection of poetry, Dethlefsen does most everything right. He is a master of drawing word pictures that are at once narrative stories, melodies, and free association free-for-alls.



The book is broken into five sections that broadly define the thematic mood of his mind: migrant, knots, poet warrior, secrets, and autopsy. There is great kindness here, and a mind with a very wide reach.



Here are two poems from Breather. Playing the Field: you hover / you say I'm not your first flower / your first lover // you lower yourself / how hoverly / how loverly / then leave // oh bee / my honey boy / oh baby mine / come back to me. And When Somebody Calls after Ten P.M.: /when somebody calls after ten p.m. / and you live in wisconsin / and you're snug in your bed // then all I can tell you / somebody better be missing / somebody better had a baby / or somebody better be dead.



In Breather, Dethlefsen flows from the concrete to ethereal. He orbits around the collective unconscious like a Jungian astronaut - his interior radar big enough to find meaning in both the great moments and the small nuances of life. This is the blessing of the mature poet, one who has lived hundreds of lives and can bring this diversity of experience to us as a numinous pool of images to soak in. Breather is an exceptional collection of poetry.


Charles Ries

Suffering Bastards by Alan Catlin

Suffering Bastards

by Alan Catlin

Platonic 3 Way Press

Warsaw IN

Copyright © 2009 by Alan Catlin



Review by Zvi A. Sesling ( founder of the Muddy River Poetry Review)





I read Suffering Bastards not long after seeing the movie The Wrestler and the movie missed an opportunity to use some of Alan Catlin’s characters – they are suffering and they exist in the rundown, bar infested sections of cities. Some of the characters are of a higher order – or are they?



Catlin’s bio says he is a retired barman and it is obvious he spent his time doing more than mixing drinks or serving beer. His observations of his customers are dead on descriptions written in verse. The poems made me glad I don’t spend time in bars.



What else is interesting to read are his embedded opinions of the people he chooses to write about. No names, but you have probably run into them at various points of your life. Or, perhaps, read them in Raymond Chandler novels or seen them in noir films. In addition to the title poem there are poems with titles like “The Bar with No Name Revisited,” “The Afterburner,” “The Bruiser,” “Double Rapid Eye Movement,” etc. You get the point. And if you frequented bars – the old fashioned kind – not the ones that serve sushi or lamb chops with potato au gratin or fancy named drinks, but the ones with small, dark porthole windows, smoke curling upward toward dim lights and no big screen TVs either, then you get the atmosphere of a Catlin poem.



In “Suffering Bastard,” the title poem, Catlin’s description is right out of a hardboiled detective novel:



Someone had punched

his clock with a jack

hammer, a shot right above

the eyes that left them

unfocused and as hard as

fired clay in a closed kiln....





There is also this excerpt from “Twenty years of hard drink,”



a stretch in county,

two or three times in the tank

and locked down in a ward

with all the full time lunatics

and all he had to show for it

was two knife scars on his chest.....



Having read Chandler, Hammett, MacDonald and seen (never enough) noir film, I found Catlin’s poems of real life people who many people never get to see worthy of a larger volume of poetic sketches than this small chapbook.



---Zvi Sesling.

Allen Ginsberg comes to Pittsburgh by Dave Newman

Allen Ginsberg comes to Pittsburgh

by Dave Newman

Platonic 3 Way Press

Warsaw Indiana

Copyright © by Dave Newman



Review by Zvi A. Sesling



Allen Ginsberg comes to Pittsburgh is a fun book of poetry if you don’t mind gratuitous foul mouthed use of language. And while I support First Amendment rights, it doesn’t mean I have to enjoy that freedom. Nor does mean I am prudish because I dislike Dave Newman’s choice of words.



Newman, who forthrightly claims to be influenced by both Ginsberg and Charles Bukowski, does his best to write in the barfly’s style, but Bukowski was Bukowski and Ginsberg was Ginsberg. There was only one of each. So to paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen:

I’ve Bukowski and Ginsberg and Newman isn’t either.



Having said all that, Newman is still a fun poet and his stories – true or not – keep the reader interested, often smiling and without the overtones of sadness that permeate Bukowski.



For those who feel inadequate in so many ways: psychologically, sexually, alcoholically, socially, to name a few, this chapbook will strike a familiar chord. For those feeling above failure or inadequacy, enjoy looking down on Newman and his neuroses.



Anyway, once I got past that Bukowski-Ginsberg jig – and the language – Newman’s poetry has a certain appeal despite the flaws and I have the feeling that on his own Newman could be a humorous but more serious poet.



The funniest poem in the chapbook is one entitled “Rick Santorum, For US Senator, Reviews A Reissue of Leaves Of Grass by Walt Whitman which begins



First, I didn’t understand it. But one

of my kids, who made the mistake

of going to one of these fancy liberal

colleges, said there’s gay stuff in

here, and I believe him and that’s

just wrong. The gay stuff, I mean.



I suppose you can really hear Santorum utter these words and it make you wonder what people elect to office from any end of the political spectrum.



Then there’s the title poem, which opens:



Allen Ginsberg came to Pittsburgh and tickets

were ten dollars at the door, and I figured

if I showed up a couple hours before the reading,

someone, one of my friends, would take pity, ....



And pity is something Newman seems to seek as he takes the persona of a Woody Allen schlemiel, a Bukowski barfly, failure at satisfying sex and whatever else he conjures up. But as I said, his poetry is fun.

Poet Molly Lynn Watt: A Poet Who Embraces the Political

Poet Molly Lynn Watt: A Poet Who Embraces the Political

By Doug Holder

Molly Lynn Watt is a dyed-in-the-wool Cambridge, Mass. poet and writer. She is a founding member of Cambridge Co-Housing, a progressive educator for peace and justice, as well as the curator for the monthly Fireside Poetry Reading Series. She is the editor of the annual “Bagel Bard Anthology,” a yearly collection put out by a Somerville-based literary group “The Bagel Bards,” and she published a collection of poetry “Shadow People,” (Ibbetson Street) in 2007. Watt, and her husband Daniel Lynn Watt turned excerpts from Daniel’s parents’ letters to each other during the Spanish Civil War into a musical CD and performance piece. I talked with Watt on my Somerville Community Access TV show: “Poet to Poet Writer to Writer.”


Doug Holder: The reviewer Hugh Fox noticed in your poetry that you are lamenting the shortness of life. He feels you are constantly grasping at the “Here and Now.” So are you an advocate of Carpe Diem?

Molly Lynn Watt: I think when you are in your 70’s it is a good idea to be. I am an advocate for “We are here now.” My poetry is a celebration of the here and now. But I also think I have a lament for the people who are no longer with us, the “Shadow People.” (The title of my poetry collection). These are the people who are no longer with us, but haunt us. I have a poem about hearing Billie Holiday singing “Strange Fruit”. She was a great and tragic person, and unfortunately died from drug abuse. Hearing her sing haunted me. She is a sort of “Shadow Person” in my life. She helped propel me to take some of the stands I’ve taken.

DH: You co-directed the Smoky Mountain North-South Work Camp in Blount County for Highlander Education and Research in Tennessee in 1963. Can you tell us about this, and tell us about your involvement with the Civil Rights Movement?

MW: In 1963 our ideal little family suddenly, who knows for what reason, looked at each other and said “ There must be more to life than this.” We packed everything up, gave up the apartment we were renting, and both my husband and I went off to get a Master’s degree in Community Organization. We went to the Putney Graduate School that became Antioch New England Graduate School in Vermont. Part of our work was traveling through the South, doing a sort of Sociology of the South, and studying the Tennessee Valley Authority. During that time we were in an interracial group, restaurants were closed to us, we were stoned, all kinds of stuff. At that time we saw the Birmingham demonstrations, and the children in the street who were being fire-hosed. I decided that there had to be something better. And so we took on a project of building with volunteers a facility that could be used to train voter registration workers. At that time it was illegal in Blount County for Blacks and Whites to live together, and we were living together. We were arrested, everything was burned. We were lucky to be thrown in jail instead of being lynched. Obviously, that’s what a lot of my poetry is about.

DH: Do you think poetry can have a significant role in political activism?

MW: I hope so. I am using it as my form of activism now. Songs have spurred me on. I guess “Strange Fruit” is a poem that is a song. Poems and songs travel where I can’t.

DH: Some people say political poems are just rants.

MW: One person’s rant is another’s rap. It is very subjective. I read that it is a poet’s job to “crack the truth open.” Elizabeth Alexander did that for me at the inauguration. She showed us the value in repairing a tire, a mother standing with her son waiting for a bus, the way we are in the world. It is our job to repair things including our Democracy. Alexander paid tribute to the people who have gone on before us in the Civil Rights Movement. She in essence said,” People have died for this day.”

DH: You wrote that poetry is an adventure for you—you always carry a little book around when you are on the road. You are ready for action, right?

MW: Life is an adventure. I do some of my writing on the subway. I wrote a poem on the Redline.

DH: Do you revise a lot?

MW: Sometimes things come out whole. Other times I can make 70 or 80 revisions.

DH: You have studied at the William Joiner Institute Writers Workshop at UMass Boston for years now. How has that been for you?

MW: Well, it is a community of writers. I have studied with Fred Marchant, Afaa Michael Weaver, Doug Anderson, Martha Collins and others. I’ve been going 6 or 7 years.

DH: You are very involved with music as well as poetry.

MW: I come from a family that has always been involved with song. My father was a sort of Irish tenor. My mother came from the Appalachian Mountains. In the mountains they still sing songs with Victorian words. When I was in high school I became friends with Pete Seegar. This was in New York State (Hudson Valley) during the time of Blacklisting. So Seegar had time to help kids discover song. He brought the idea to me that song can go where a person can’t. A song can travel without a passport. A song can take ideas with it. You can put a poem to music.

Seegar used to stop by our school. I went to his house once. It was a log cabin. His wife had a red refrigerator. This was in the early 50’s, and I had only seen white ones. I asked her where she got it. She said she went down to the hardware store and bought a can of paint. Both of them took control of shaping their lives. I have tremendous admiration for them. Seegar has crept into my poems. When I was arrested in the South he sent me a hundred dollars to get my car repaired to get home.

DH: You have run a very successful reading series in North Cambridge, the Fireside Reading Series. It has been around for a decade, what’s your secret?

MW: I’m lucky. It has to do with community organizing. Harris Gardner, a poet, told me that I should institute an open mic. That helped a lot. We host poets, we feed them, we treat them well, they are our friends—we are they. It’s a neighborhood. We always invite people to read who are in some way connected to the community.

THE WREN’S CRY by Dorian Brooks

THE WREN’S CRY by Dorian Brooks (Ibbetson Street Press 25 School St. Somerville, Mass. 02143) $15.


Review by Barbara Bialick


Dorian Brooks’ THE WREN’S CRY, is a great volume of poetry, which deserves to be better known, for it’s in the league of famous poets, far and wide.

She both enriches and breaks our hearts with well-edited, polished lyrics carved out of love, nature and memory. But don’t stop till you read the last poems, which will almost kill you with their powerful anti-war messages, one after another, landing as a dead monarch butterfly on Sitting Bull’s hat…

The book calmly but pointedly begins with memories of her family, first with her grandfather leaving his little girl (Brooks’ mother) his”collection of speckled eggs”
She says, “It’s from him I inherit/my sense of the natural order…” But she’s not so rational that she doesn’t see nature’s transformative power, hinting at reincarnation of the soul, even as creatures or plant life. She says her own mother may have had the “soul of a butterfly” or could be heard in “The Wren’s Cry”. She envisioned herself coming back as tumbleweed…”how often I whizzed past/the little things/…a wavering comb of moments behind me.”

Her memories and creativity help her create such vivid images, as when she imagines her father talking to Bach “On a Cold April Day.” In “The Wish” she wants to be talking with him over a beer instead of waiting as he “finished revising despair’s long manuscript.”

She moves from her parents to her sometimes traveling husband. They share the love of nature. In “The Willows”, she notes. “How beautiful (the willows) are” she writes of the trees, “in their sadness”…/Timeless, they touch the depths of loss…lithe as dancers/mourning whole kingdoms…I harbor sorrow on my own shore, /among my own kind”. Then she brings us to “Ground Zero”, where she just discovered the death of their baby boy happened at the same time as the largest ever underground nuke test in November, 1971 in the Aleutian Islands: “and I can’t help thinking, /No wonder you left.”

People are also expressed as that part of nature in which they get ill…from her breast cancer to her husband’s heart attack. She muses about a neighbor she never knew who apparently died of suicide, but having a view of the same Blue Spruce that she loved. She touches on her academic side with a tribute to a professor who died: “the dark earth yields its shimmering tassels.” She calls on the Celtic goddess of poetry but also reminds us of the death of young girls who used to paint radium on watch faces.

Naturalism deftly falls into politics. In a powerful scene she asks us to imagine a place being named not for a famous man, but for a woman giving birth some time in history on that spot. In “Historical Marker” she writes: ‘On this site, no man/was ever bayoneted/or shot, not battle /fought for God or country./But once , long ago a woman lay here/gasping and straining/…for hours, then lifted/her baby to her breast…”





Keep reading. You will love these poems, such as “Whales”: “the heart/is an open book where/nothing is written except/whom we shall love, whom not/snow on water.”
And you must read the book through to the end where she presents a potent batch of anti-war poems good enough to finish off the book as well as the reader!

She speaks against current wars in “Friendly fire” or” How the Dead Come Back To Us”…to “Tumbleweeds” where she describes herself as an innocent cow girl with her toy guns shooting the imaginary Indians, not realizing then the tragedy of her game. Which leads to “Mariposa”, a Spanish butterfly…being the name of the “U.S. battalion/sent to fight the Indians/who lived in what became/Yosemite National Park…Mariposa. I can’t get/the sound out of my head/as I stare at the famed/black and white photo/of the park’s great Half Dome,/pale moon rising over/sheer rock, no living thing/in sight. Maybe the souls/ of the dead really do/come back as butterflies--/or else maybe as words/that,when spoken, flutter/across time, on wings/brighter than blood.”

Her words are certainly bright. As assistant editor of the literary review “Ibbetson Street”
she is a big part of the “small press” scene in Somerville, Massachusetts. But she deserves to also be a part of the “big press” which oozes out of academia, rarely noticing all the talent the small press finds. She is definitely part of that talent!


--Barbara Bialick is the Author of TIME LEAVES (Ibbetson Street Press)

Recurring Dreams by MRB CHELKO

Recurring Dreams

by MRB Chelko

sunnyoutside

Buffalo NY

Softbound, ISBN 978-1-934513-163-3
Review by Zvi A. Sesling





I have always been a sucker for short poems that

say something to the reader – sometimes on the first

read, sometimes on the second or third time around.



Chelko’s poems are very short, each three lines, influenced by

haiku or perhaps other poets. I tried reading the six poems in

this tiny chapbook as one poem and it could work – almost.



These poems have something to say. After you breeze through

the six of them quickly go back and read them again. Then

again. You will find some hidden meanings (I dislike reviewers

who find things the author never said or intended, so I’ll dispense

with that) or maybe something about yourself.



Whatever, these six three liners are quite enjoyable and I think I would

enjoy reading Chelko’s full volumes of poetry.



Here is poem No. 5:



The dog of my childhood is put to sleep

My parents do not bring her body home –

We bury sticks.



Did you ever have a dog as a child – or even as an adult? Did you have

to euthanize it? I remember several dogs that never came home when I

was a child. Different excuses, but always the same result. We didn’t

bury sticks, but when we drove by a cemetery I always thought of the

dogs. And there was the one pushed into a green garbage bag...well enough

of that.



Let’s say the other five poems brought back different memories. So bring

on more MRB Chelko. I’ll read them.


---- Zvi Sesling is the editor of the Muddy River review. http://muddyriverreview.com

Elizabeth Kirschner: Poetry Amidst the Madness.

Elizabeth Kirschner: Poetry Amidst the Madness.

With Doug Holder


Poet Elizabeth Kirschner is alive. She has survived a childhood heavily peppered with physical, verbal and sexual abuse. She has lived to write about it in her new collection of poetry “My Life As A Doll” (Autumn House Press), and a forthcoming memoir “Walking With Winter.”

Kirschner is an accomplished poet and lyricist, and has published a number of well-received poetry collections. She has collaborated with many composers both here and abroad. She set her own poetry to Robert Schumann’s “Dichterliebe.” A CD of this music featuring soprano Jean Danton and pianist Thomas Stumpf was released in the fall of 2005.

Kirschner has taught at Carnegie Mellon University, Boston University, Boston College, as well as the public schools in New Hampshire. I talked with her on my Somerville Community Access TV show “Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.”

Doug Holder: You have collaborated with composers in your work as a poet. You most recently wrote lyrics to a Schumann composition.


Elizabeth Kirschner: The piece by Schumann is now titled “The Dichterliebe in Four Seasons.” It is a sixteen-song, cycle. It concerns a tragic love affair. I wrote poems for each season. I had a CD and a score, and I would listen to the composition over and over again to help with the process. Composer Thomas Oboe Lee helped me enormously. I also collaborated with a young, up and coming Cambridge, Mass. composer Carson Cooman.


DH: What was the germ of the idea for this project?


EK: It was the idea of the composer Thomas Oboe Lee. It never entered my mind before this. I loved the marriage between poetry and classical music. He was the one who encouraged me. It was a very difficult undertaking. He was a real taskmaster. He stayed right on me. He made sure every note was precise and sing able.

DH: Can you tell us about your new poetry collection “My Life As A Doll?”

EK: It is about my relationship with my late mother, who was very abusive. It is also about the mental illness that came out of it. Between the physical abuse of my mother and the sexual abuse of my father it is really amazing that I survived.

DH: Was the book therapeutic for you?

EK: I couldn’t express my experience If I didn’t have my art. I don’t view it as art therapy. Poetry is too complicated for that. It all came ripping out of me. I feel it can be a tool for healing for people who are reading it.


DH: What have you learned about abuse from your experiences and writing?

EK: What is interesting about abuse is when, where, and how, you retrieve a memory.
When I wrote “My Life As A Doll” I retrieved the key memory of my mother striking me with a baseball bat. That was after my hospitalization. I was in my late 40’s or early 50’s before that memory hit me. The memory came back to me when I was driving back from Cambridge to Newton, after my visit with my therapist. In my memoir I talk a lot about living in a sort of coma—a perpetual out of body experience…I just wasn’t there. I was gone. I have moved from this state thanks to all the difficult work I have done. I have learned that you don’t get the memories until you are ready to retrieve them.

DH: The reviewer Mignon Ariel King said that she felt that you fell in love with your madness. What’s your take?

EK: To me that comment was horrendous. My experience with mental illness has been so excruciating. Mental illness is traumatic. I have been curled up in a ball in my house screaming my head off—out of pain and psychosis. There is no way you can love that. It is a pain so profound that you think you can’t survive it.

My life as a doll

was a life of waiting__hours
reeled like pinwheels, days
passed like wind blown
through black holes, weeks
hung heavy as headstones
The God took a knife
cut me into pure pain,
alive amid birds
wilding in the grapevine
while my dreams angled
into me like hooks, dragging me
away from Mother
into a world
he forget to bless.


e.kirschner1@gmail.com
http://elizabethkirscner.com

WHIMSY: A NEW POETRY, PERFOMANCE VENUE IN INMAN SQUARE CAMBRIDGE

WHIMSY: A NEW POETRY, PERFOMANCE VENUE IN INMAN SQUARE CAMBRIDGE

By Portia Brockway


Whimsy is a monthly performance venue organized and MCed by Markus Nechay (Surrealius), a local artist, at the Outpost 186, a small art gallery in Inman Square, Cambridge.

Markus recruits various types of performers, including musicians, poets, rote and improvisational actors, and dancers. He interweaves performances with his whimsical oratory.

He sometimes centers the night around a theme: such as this coming Sunday’s Valentine’s Day Special; or Edgar Allen Poe’s 200th birthday, on our January evening together.

In addition to Whimsy alternatives, OUTPOST 186 “hosts series of experimental music and performance events Wednesday through Sunday, and special art exhibits. It also serves as a node for progressive and experimental media. Open 1-4pm Tuesday-Sunday or appointment.” Contact: Rob Chalfen - robchalfen@hotmail.com
http://zeitgeist-outpost.org/

About the history of Outpost 186: Have you visited the Outpost 186 yet? You may have enjoyed its antecedent, the Zeitgeist Gallery hot node in Inman Square; preceded by their original location on Broadway, in Cambridge. Egg Al (Nidle) cultivated it to be a place where people could come, and sleep, or lie on the couch, or just gaze in to space at all the art around them, from Nick Wynekin’s comics to Mick Cusimano’s animation, and wander about the heart.



Whimsy is as Whimsy Does


Whimsy is
as whimsy does.
It’s full of imagination
and light and love.

For Poe’s 200th birthday,
in a pretty room:

We tune
at the Blue Moon.
Clara Neelands
tremolos harmonic howls.
We re-iterate: Owo-o-o-o-o- -

Josh Putnam is astute:

“I am a puzzle and a lock
and a bomb and a dangerous drug.
She is the glass key to unlock my sky.
Let her in; everything changes.

Let it out!
It never hurts
so much as when hurting has no voice.
Why does it take so long sometimes
to remember what can never be forgotten.”

On guitar Ed Ayoub
sings from his original place,
bearded with a Semitic face,
this Fertile Crescent
runneth over.

Ben Beckwith plays
with his great nose down,
grinding notes from
boogie woogie goods,
our right hand of God, Ben,
Ground, Tree, Water.

Jane Chakravarthy
offers us Neruda’s penchants,
the sought smooth skin,
forms, human fondues,
cherries, the peach.

Markus Surrealius (Nechay)
in his top hat, black, and ascot,
Poe, raps at Lenore’s door.
What did the Raven say to Lenore?
“Never more!”
Nicole Edgecomb (Lenore)
stands fraught in her hood,
silent, grave.

Circulation. Tim Horvath. (sunnyoutside. POBOX 911 Buffalo, NY 14207) http://sunnyoutside.com

Circulation. Tim Horvath. (sunnyoutside. POBOX 911 Buffalo, NY 14207) http://sunnyoutside.com


Tim Horvath, a recent graduate of the University of New Hampshire MFA program, has penned a short novel “Circulation.” It deals with a young Circulation Director at a town library, and his past relationship with his late father. His father was a dyed-in-the wool eccentric with a capital “E”, who held close to his breast a never completed opus: “The Atlas of the Voyager of Things.” It is described as an impossibly all encompassing work: “That documents the marvelous, intricate, globetrotting chain of events by which things come to be what and where they are.” The father did complete an arcane book “Spelos, An Ode to Caves” that had a small, but loyal cult following.

The father in this novel reminds me of a character in Joseph Mitchell’s nonfiction account of eccentric New Yorkers “Up at the Old Hotel,” Joe Gould. Gould went to New York City and worked as a reporter in the 1920’s for the New York Evening Mail. During his time at the newspaper, he had his epiphany for the longest book ever written. He would title this book An Oral History of Our Time. The book was supposedly based on a word for word account of people’s lives, which Gould had listened to. The book never existed, but Gould insisted, often raving in the streets of Greenwich Village, that he was feverishly working on it.

The casual reader and the bibliophile will love this book. It traces these men’s lives through their obsession with books and arcania. Here is an inspired passage that describes the son putting himself in the place or, well, the jacket of a old, underused, book:

“… likely it has sat on the shelf next to its companions, growing old, peering out at the movements of patrons, sizing them up perhaps just as readily as they are sized up. Yes, I know it sounds strange—you might conclude that I, and not my father, was the one suffering from delirum, but I have occasionally tried to take the perspective of the books on my shelves, imagining that they choose their recipients as much as they are chosen. Like animals in the wild, they can, I suppose, camoflauge themselves such that at times they blend in with their surroundings as readily as a tree frog, hugging the walls of the shelves around them, appearing less palatable than the plump bestseller they lean against… Or like abandoned puppies in a pet store… perhaps l, like these books, can only hope to make an impression—they can poke themselves out just a bit further, than the nearest competitor, jutting forth an irresistible moist black nose between pouting eyes.”

And here is a description of a library in Borge’s fiction “Library of Babel” that describes the life of the book, and thusly the life of man:

“One of the most striking stories I read when I was in college was Borge’s “Library of Babel”, and on occasion I have thought myself the proprietor of that very library. Borge’s
library is a metaphysical marvel, a library that essentially comprises the whole of the universe—the universe as library… Within the library that Borges conjures, not only is every book written shelved somewhere but every possible book is shelved…The conceit is too dizzying to think about too long, but it serves as a good antidote to certain fundamental realities: funds are limited, books go unread, tumble out of print, serve as doorstops—all too effectively I might add; the greatest libraries of civilizations burn down, suns collapse…And each life is limited…there is only so much reading that one can consume in the course of a lifetime…”

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Doug Holder/Ibbetson Update/Somerville, Mass/Feb. 2009

From the Paris of New England: Interviews with Poets and Writers by Doug Holder (click on to order)

From the Paris of New England: Interviews with Poets and Writers
Print: $18.50










http://lulu.com/ibbetsonpress to order



A series of interviews with poets and writers that took place in the "Paris of New England," (Somerville, Mass.) Doug Holder the founder of the small literary press "Ibbetson Street" conducted interviews on his Somerville Community Access TV Show "Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer," as well as for his literary column in The Somerville News, and at the Wilderness House Literary Retreat, founded by his friend Steve Glines. Poets and writers included in this volume are Mark Doty, Tom Perrotta, Pagan Kennedy, Claire Messud, Lan Samantha Chang, Afaa Michael Weaver, Lois Ames, Steve Almond, and many more... There is also some striking photography by Elsa Dorfman and other photographers in this collection. Included is an introduction by Michael Basinski, curator of the University of Buffalo Poetry Collection...

Renowned African American poets Afaa Michael Weaver and Major Jackson to be in a filmed public discussion at Somerville Community Access TV

Major Jackson

Afaa Michael Weaver




Renowned African American poets Afaa Michael Weaver and Major Jackson to be in a filmed public discussion at Somerville Community Access TV April 2 7PM Channel 3
MODERATOR: Gloria Mindock




Renowned African American poets Afaa Michael Weaver and Major Jackson to be in a filmed public discussion at Somerville Community Access TV. It will be moderated by Gloria Mindock of the "Cervena Barva Press"

( Somerville, Mass.)

Doug Holder, founder of the independent literary press “Ibbetson Street,” and the host of the Somerville Community Access TV Show “Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer” has started the process of organizing a public discussion featuring renowned African American poets Afaa Michael Weaver (http://afaamweaver.com) and Major Jackson (http://www.majorjackson.com) on April 2, 2009 ( Poetry Month)

Somerville poet Afaa Michael Weaver has won the prestigious PUSHCART PRIZE (2008) for his poem “American Income,” published in POETRY magazine and in his collection "Plum Flower Dance" ( U/Pitt Press.)

Henry Louis Gates, historian and professor at Harvard University writes of Weaver:

"Afaa Michael Weaver is one of the most significant poets writing today. With its blend of Chinese spiritualism and American groundedness, his poetry presents the reader (and the listener, for his body of work is meant to be read aloud) with challenging questions about identity, about how physicality and spirit act together or counteract each other to shape who we are in the world. His attention to the way language works is rare, and the effects of that attention on his poetry are distinctive and expansive."




Major Jackson is the author of two collections of poetry: Hoops (Norton: 2006) and Leaving Saturn (University of Georgia: 2002), winner of the 2000 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Hoops was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award in the category of Outstanding Literature - Poetry. He has received critical attention in The Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, Parnassus, Philadelphia Inquirer, and on National Public Radio's 'All Things Considered.' His poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Boulevard, Callaloo, The New Yorker, Post Road, Poetry, Triquarterly, among other literary journals and anthologies. He is a recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. Last year, he served as a creative arts fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and as the Jack Kerouac Writer-in-Residence at University of Massachusetts-Lowell. Major Jackson is an Associate Professor of English at University of Vermont and a core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars. He is the current poetry editor of the Harvard Review

A description of the discussion is as follows:

“Two Generations of Black Male Poets/
Two Sets of Eyes on the Urban Landscape

Afaa Weaver & Major Jackson

In a public chat in the SCAT television studios in Somerville,
these two poets share the experience of their lives as black
men who came of age in large American cities, Baltimore
and Philadelphia. They discuss the music, visual art, and
literature that were influential in their times, from The Temptations
to Grandmaster Flash and Chuck D, from Ron Milner
to Susan Lori Parks, and more. They share intimate moments
in their lives and some of their own work as well as that
of poets they know and admire in an evening setting in the
burgeoning artistic community north of Cambridge to be
recorded in front of the live audience.



Contact: Doug Holder: dougholder@post.harvard.edu for more information.

Reviews of two new poetry collections by Suzanne Owens

Over the Edge by Suzanne Owens
Pudding House Publications, 2007

Reviews by Barbara Thomas


Suzanne Owens first poem is a poignant reflection of her childhood and the event of her father’s betrayal greatly influences the trajectory of her life. “This is what I remember…I keep hidden, as silent as a pocket knife, trying to carve the truth”. She brings back the anguish both she and her mother feel and continues this theme in “Keeping My Mother’s Tears” using the symbol of the music box. “I don’t want my mother’s tears to reign on me…I have my own box now, a strong box, hidden away. “ Her poetry is evocative without being sentimental. She tells the truth of betrayal and tragedy as it is. Other poems document her mother’s decline and the continuing tone is a deep sadness. After her mother’s death, she writes about her son in “Mites versus Pee Wees”. In this poem about a mother’s concern, the metaphor of a hockey game adds a new vigor, “Did I forget your white horse…Have I dressed you in armor too soft for this battle?” The reader is in the game too hoping he wins. In the wonderful last poem the poet takes us to another sphere as she reflects on life and death. “But if the history of the earth is an hour, and we have existed no longer than a millisecond…I ask you why, why do we unlock our souls to write of it with music.” And in this book Suzanne does write about her deepest experiences with music that invokes us to listen.

Harvesting Ice by Suzanne Owens

Finishing Line Press, 2008
In her latest book ‘’In Harvesting Ice”, Suzanne Owens reveals at this stage of her live, she is open for love, but reluctant. “I am territorial, and I don’t find it easy to give away my heart.” In “Thirst” she faces her fear when she finds “her files trashed and her life suddenly empty. ‘’ And then takes us on a journey thru various relationships, and moves before she finds home again.
As in her first book, she writes without sentimentality ; her language precisely capturing intense emotion. She is skillful in weaving imagery and form which make the poems memorable. Many times her imagery startles as in “Gone The Cross-Country”. “ I will be grass growing, and water. Even now, a tree is pumping my blood. ‘’ “Matinee”, captures her ongoing spirit of hope in spite of adversity and this thread of optimism resonates throughout the book. “ All we can keep, small splendors sealed in our heads: a few words voiced or read: the bridge of flowers, thunder, arms thrown out in a welcome gesture. “

*Barbara Thomas is a writer residing in Cambridge,Mass. She worked for many years as an English teacher in the Boston Public Schools. She is a member of the literary organization the "Bagel Bards" that meets in Somerville, Mass.

Barbara Bialick's Review of Carol Frith's, Looking for Montrose Street

Barbara Bialick's Review of Carol Frith's, Looking for Montrose Street (Finishing Line Press of Georgetown, Kentucky http://finishinglinepress.com)

Carol Frith’s chapbook, Looking for Montrose Street, is a good and powerful little work, that expresses how memories of those we love who are gone stay with us. “The mind will go back to the stream it’s used to.”

Using both poetry forms and vivid imagery, she reveals how memory is both a constant part of and disconnected from the present. Parents, aunts, and relatives like David “pursue” her. Indeed, even the 1950s are awake and alive in her mind.

I got déjà vu reading“Waxed Linoleum”: “The plaster is delaminating on the wall,/ blue flicker of a fifties’ television set/…shining blue as the Honeymooners at 8 P.M.” as her father “rigid” (like someone dead) sits in his “Naugahyde recliner…”‘The poems highlight both the power and fragility of memory, in such phrases as a “Ferris wheel of air…” or “I feel my skin remember you in fragments”. The theme of this book could be: “the mind will go back to the stream it’s used to drowning in…”

Carol Frith, of Sacramento, California, is co-editor with poet Laverne Frith, her husband, of Ekphrasis, “which publishes poems addressing individual works of art.”This chapbook is part of the New Women’s Voices Series of Finishing Line Press of Georgetown, Kentucky. She may be “new”, but she is also an ancient and wise voice I recommend you read.

* Barbara Bialick/Author of Time Leaves,from Ibbetson Street Press

Reversals in Love: On the Platform/Sur Le Quai, a one-act play by

Reversals in Love: On the Platform/Sur Le Quai, a one-act play by
Denis Emorine, translated by Brian Cole

Article by Michael Todd Steffen


The Princess in the fairytale is playing with a ball and the ball rolls into a well.
A Frog hops up onto the well and announces that he (grnouille, “she” in French) will retrieve the ball for the Princess if the Princess will take the Frog back to live in the King’s palace with her. I may restore something precious for you (no less than your whole world in the globe of the ball), but for a promise. Once the Princess has her ball back, she doesn’t want to keep the Frog hanging around, though he follows her back to the castle to make things miserable for her anyway.
This see-saw up-and-down and back-and-forth shift in roles between lovers is enacted in the very strange play On the Platform by Denis Emorine.
At their initial greeting at the station waiting for a train from Paris, the young lady Laure holds the upper hand, with her youth and engagement to the young man she awaits. Marek is a middle-age man who appears to want to dissuade Laure of her certainty in young love in order perhaps to have a chance at a romance with her himself. The situation is classic, Samuel Beckett in Sunday clothes. Marek is 45ish, uncertain of his profession, expressive of a desire for a less certain set of circumstances—for the incredible intervention of love?
Laure is not yet 20 years old, awaiting her fiancé to arrive on a train from Paris, quite happy with life’s uncertainties and serendipity, possibilities and adventures.
Another twist: Laure is a native French person (Western European). She has an enthusiasm for her freedom and its potential to blossom.
Marek is “of Polish extraction” with some bitterness. He despairs of or disdains her idealism, and appears to want to undermine Laure’s commitment to her fiancé.

MAREK: …By the way, who is Julien?

LAURE (smiling): I already told you. The man I love.

MAREK: You didn’t say that. You said “my fiancé”.

LAURE: Well?

MAREK: It’s not the same thing!

The delayed train from Paris arrives. Julien is not on this train. Laure claims that her fiancé is only late, that he must have missed this train and will be on the next one.
When the play takes a bizarre turn.
Enigmatically Marek announces to Laure that he is “The Messenger.” Laure is baffled. As Marek insists that he is “The Messenger” we sense the strange shift. Laure loses confidence:

LAURE: I really do not understand you. Now you make me
afraid! Don’t look at me with those eyes!...

The advantage of the situation has shifted with his strange announcement and her fear. The Princess doesn’t want the Frog to come home with her.
As we read to the end of the play, we find that Marek is possessed of a prophetic gift, he is an angel or Orson Well’s third man. He knows already that Julien has been killed trying to jump onto the train back in Paris. Laure has been called to a window in the train station as the play ends. In the background she can be seen slumping and falling into the arms of “two men.”
On the Platform is written in choice demotic French—Y’ en a marre…Fusillez-moi tout ca…But also, Les années bien remplies passent si vite. D’autres comptent double sur l’échelle du temps… Emorine is a prize-winning poet who has attained a wonder theatrical patience for timing. The translation by Brian Cole, another award winner from London, is superb.
Everything the play offers is fine, yet strange, strange in a way I believe which announces a silence. Works of art now and then use little tricks to get what is an invisible idea to the public in an acceptable way. It is Emorine’s prop of the surprise of “The Messenger” that leads us to wonder at a fecund silence. Did Marek have Julien killed? I like better to wonder whether Laure isn’t an escapee from a psych ward and Marek is playing the situation ever so delicately and roundly to bring her back in. But ultimately the author has left something personal to each reader with this wonderful play, their curiosity to decide what happens next. It is a well-hosted read, and don’t miss the choral effect of the other three passengers waiting on the platform.


On the Platform/Sur le Quai by Denis Emorine and translated by Brian Cole includes the French text. It is priced at $14.00 from Cervena Barva Press/
P.O. Box 440357/W. Somerville, MA 02144-3222/www.cervenabarvapress.com
Check also at Bookstore:www.thelostbookshelf.com

English Poet David Caddy on Hugh Fox's "Way, Way Off the Road" ( Ibbetson Street Press)

SHWA 19: A Note on Hugh Fox --- from: http://davidcaddy.blogspot.com

Hugh Fox, one of the co-founders of the Committee of Small Magazine Editors & Publishers (COSMEP) network, has been an abiding and colourful presence on the small press scene for forty years. COSMEP was founded at Berkeley in November 1968, by a generation born in the Thirties, to foster the post-Beat boom in small press publishing. Closely linked to Sixties counter-culture, the founders of COSMEP were interested in breaking down social, psychological, personal and literary barriers. Hugh Fox has continued on this route unabated, combining an academic career with his small press activity. He wrote an acclaimed book on pre-Columbian religion and edited, Ghost Dance, an international quarterly of experimental poetry from 1968 until 1995 that featured Latin American and outsider poets. He is a poet of exuberant mental states and shifting voices. He has published more than one hundred books of poetry and is one of those poets that is forever looking and moving forward. The direct opposite of, for example, the English poet, Philip Larkin, who published only five books and was predominantly introspective. Widely read with an inquisitive mind, Fox’s poetry exudes the spirit of opening the doors of perception and its arc of development is outwards towards the new.

His work jumps from perception to perception, allusion to allusion, drawing upon vast knowledge in literature, history, archaeology, anthropology and languages and experience. Like Charles Olson, Fox works on a grand scale, seeking out a universality and global and or comparative perspective. Fox, though, is more divergent than Olson and works in shorter units. He is a beguiling poet, continually experimenting with different techniques and personae and using cultural, historical, autobiographical and linguistic references to open out meaning and ways of being.
It is this constant quest of moving forward, onwards to the next technical problem, book, chapbook, and a desire to publish with independent presses that he shares with his English contemporaries associated with The English Intelligencer newsletter started in 1968 and the Association of Little Presses, founded in 1966.

Quoting from Fox’s own autobiographical comment, he writes:

‘After attending grammar school with the Irish nuns at Saint Francis de Paulo school in Chicago, and then high school with the Christian Brothers of Ireland (not just the regular Christian Brothers), the pre-med and medicine at Loyola University in Chicago, then a switch to English, a Ph.D. in American Literature from the Univ. of Illinois and marriage to a Peruvian who was mostly Indian and getting involved with the mythologies of the ancient world, making discoveries no one had ever dreamed of before (like discovering Phoenician writing all over the pottery and ruins of the Mochica Indians in Peru and the Yopi Indians in Mexico, discovering Sumerian writing on pots in ancient Bolivia), and then becoming a Jew after I discovered that the ‘Czech’ grandmother who had raised me was really Jewish too ...’ (Hugh Fox – Defiance Higganum Hill Books 2007 page 88) Note the emphasis upon discovery and the movement from one discipline to another, from one religion to another. His second wife was from Kansas and his third is a Brazilian MD. From the same autobiographical note, we read ‘When in Spain or Latin America he is usually identified as an Argentinean.’

His memoir, Way, Way Off The Road (Ibbetson Street Press 2006) sheds light on what he terms the invisible post-Beat hippie generation of poets. It’s full of vignettes of poets and literary figures and criss-crosses over time and place in a collage of stories.

Fox is fascinated with the roots of individual identity and language that is backed up by research in Peru, Columbia, Chile, Mexico and Trinidad, a facility in several languages and the first critical studies of Charles Bukowski and Lyn Lifshin. He was attracted to Bukowski’s non-academic, non-Latinate English and its lack of pretension and Lifshin’s sense of isolation that he links to her father’s hidden Jewishness. (Way, Way Off The Road pp 10, 101-6, 128-134) He admires both for their artistic integrity and yet sees their outsider status as masks. The same perspective can be applied to Fox’s poetry. For he also plays the outsider card and similarly employs masks. The most notable of which is his alter ego, Connie Fox, which he played out in dress and print. (See Connie Fox’s Blood Cocoon: Selected Poems Presa Press 2005) The creation and writing of an active female self with a life and history can be seen as an extension or unfurling of the creative self and a movement against another barrier or plain exhibitionism. Certainly he has remained true to the post-April 1968 Berkeley sensibility of the gypsy poet vagabond and continues his outward journey of discovery and the books continue to appear at a prolific rate.

His Brazilian poems, Finalmente / Finally translated from the Portuguese into English by Glanna Luschei (Solo Press 2007) has been followed by Nunca Mais / Never Again (Cornerstone Press 2008) a series of sequentially numbered first person narratives that places the perceiving self within the living culture of Florianopolis, Brazil. It is a subjective study of the body in flight, crippled and fighting against the ravages of time and the backdrop of a holiday from Michigan to distant relatives.

23

Teresa walking slowly with her cane,
talking about “I…I…I…w…w…would..I…I…
like…to go t…t…t..to…the..b…b…bathroom,”
her son who spoke perfect English last
year yesterday told me (eating coconut
sweets) “I’ve already forgotten everything,”
his sweetheart, Neiva, has a son from another
guy..the commandments here:

1. More coffee,
2. More butterflies,
3. Papaya,
4. News on the TV,
5. Clothes,
6. Free time,
7. Sea,
8. Hills,
9. Grilled beef,
10. Eternities.

The movement here from pathos to bathos gives extra depth and humour to a sequence that effortlessly sprawls across intercultural relations into philosophical
probing. Fox positions words to employ their full meaning in poems and in so doing makes easy poems more complex and brings in a wider range of reference, as here:

16

Lovers Day tomorrow – the TV shows
kisses,
kisses,
kisses,
men lifting women over to beds, me
castrated like a monkey from another planet,
trying to learn how to be a human being
in the middle of assassinated sons, drugs,
rifles, cocaine, cocaine, cocaine,
communion / the body of Christ in
the twenty-first century

Coca = Herb
and herbas are natural products of the earth.

The tone of casual reportage begins to unwind towards the end of the sequence.

54

The church channel on TV, hypnotizing,
Hail Mary to the computers, hail to
to the TV with a thousand channels,
hail to the cost of gas going up, hail
to the motorcycles that go like bullets
and use less gas, hail to inflation
lowering the salaries and raising prices,
hail to all the faces in the world together,
no differences because of color or language,
or the name of the tribe, waiting for Jesus
to come back again, and for the difference
between heaven and earth to disappear
forever. Amen.

‘Hail’ here of course can be pellets of frozen rain, to greet enthusiastically and to acclaim as the reader knows and thus the tone of the poem is both enhanced and potentially mocked. As the news and films of violence escalates, the narrator becomes more isolated by thoughts of mortality and this eventually leads to a poetic implosion.

64

My poetry itself begins to
undo itself, the intellectual-
creative landscape undoing
itself and the philosophical
richness of the present moment
here re-becoming the great
emptiness of my life (almost
over) there.

This reinforces the Bukowskian theme of the body with teasing comic puns in the bracketed ‘almost’ and line broken ‘over’ coalescing thoughts of mortality into the kind of self-pity that Bukowski would have ridiculed. Fox employs a knowing self that seeks to embrace the world as fully as possible and calls upon the full gamut of emotional responses within a continually evolving exploration of identity.

***David Caddy Poet, Writer, Critic. Caddy edits the international literary magazine, Tears in the Fence. My most recent books are Man in Black (Penned In The Margins 2007), London: City of Words (Blue Island 2006) and The Willy Poems (Clamp Down Press 2004). I also write the occasional episode of Middle Ditch, the internet drama serial.

* To order a copy send $19 ( includes postage and handling ) to Doug Holder 25 School St. Somerville, Mass. 02143

REBUILDING THE PYRAMIDS: Poems of Healing in a Sick World by Mike Amado

REBUILDING THE PYRAMIDS:
Poems of Healing in a Sick World
by Mike Amado, Ibbetson Street Press, 2008

Review by Marguerite Guzmán Bouvard

Mike Amado’s extraordinary book redeems society from its deliberate efforts to render illness, death and suffering invisible. It explores and reveals the three sides of living with End State Kidney Disease: Dis_Ease, the reality of medical practices that often make a person feel like an organ, Coping, the dailiness of living while facing death, and Healing. The latter shares Amado’s extraordinary celebration and contemplation of his spirit and soul as well as his understanding of his connection to the life of our earth. He understands that our lives are extraordinarily complex, that our dealings with the medical profession are often frustrating, that we gain perspective and wisdom while dealing with what seem like overwhelming problems.

It is astonishing that such a young person, a man in his early thirties, can give us such a clear perception of the problems of dealing with the medical profession, a practice overrated by the healthy. In the first section of his book his poem TALES FROM THE CHAIR, Amado explores the pain of his treatment and expands it into metaphysics.

“Many smiles
in scrubs would say:
You look good as
Self-esteem drains
three times a week.

Catheters draw Chi
from body tissues.
Technicians say:
We’re removing excess
fluid, it can kill you.

The poem ends with a view of the universe that encompasses the tragedy that affects humanity around the world and is inspired by a power that is deeply personal.

The world is burned fields,
heavens evaporate,
angels, hit with layoffs,
leap from skyscrapers,
their bodies never found.

One of the most moving poems in this section, TO THE WOMB connects Amado’s suffering with his reentry into earth and sky. The third stanza lifts us into a spiritual and enlightened world that accepts scars, silence, graves and the many paths to eternity.

There runs a river I call sky,
Horizon names me. My mind disembarks,
I enter the Earth that I call Mother.
Dry shores soaked by waves.

Mother, my body is scars over scars.
I lay in a medical grave of cold,
White sheets, silent call buttons.
Your song disappears.

Mother, meet me in the water
with my cast-off flesh,
see if we choose to let go

or wake up. Mother,
open me to let in more light.
Your womb shapes snowflake stars.

Heart-wisdom swells in a sliver of a breath,
I know now my name:
I rise on Serpent’s head to bring to the sky
The orange crescent amid the webbed stars!

The section COPING reveals the inability of the medical profession to deal with the pain of illness and dying. In the poem, DOCTOR, DOCTOR, Amado responds to the shallowness revealed by the so- called healing profession. The end of this long poem is a stage where the physician and the patient argue over how to confront reality.

May I chose the road that ascends,
self-assertive,
but not sterile?
No, you may not.
Like landscaping and plumbing,
medical science is here to provide a service!
All we give is all we have.
…And not all I need.
My life in medical hands does not demand
I dream your reality.
Patient, stop your dreaming,
Fill out this annual smiley-faced survey.
And on the survey, I wrote
I have filled up many suggestion boxes
with dead forests. My T-shirt reads:
I survived a “failed” transplant
and all I got was this brochure.


One of his loveliest poems in the final section, THE FIRST EMANATION OF LIGHT helps us experience his dialysis and his pain, but ends with these affirming lines, “Cells/ are micro-Gods. /They thwart the darkness, /this harvest season/ that promises burial. / Cells secretly invent light.

In this section Amado’s spirit is alive and intense, burning with light as well as agony. His poem MY MANTRA is wider than prayer, is already a soul that has shed its bodily limitations and is soaring. “What sustains me trembles /with curiosity/ The whistle of a humming bird/ and the tongue of a Spider Flower/ in perfect pitch. / What sustains me/ could be a mantra/ “Remember, Transcend, Reclaim, Ascend”/Remember: who you are/ where you come from/ Transcend: your limitations. / Reclaim your inner wisdom/ and…Ascend!.

This book belongs in hospitals and doctors’ offices to heal the isolation of the seriously ill. It also belongs in medical schools so that physicians can deepen their understanding as well as bring wisdom to their patients. Most importantly, it is a collection of prayers and a celebration. Truth usually emerges from small, secret places, from the extraordinary range of personal experience. Thus, this book is a wonderful guide that helps us all understand the hidden dimensions of life.


*********To order go to: http://lulu.com/ibbetsonpress

Marguerite Guzman Bouvard/ Ibbetson Update/Feb 2009




* Reviewer Marguerite Guzman Bouvard was for many years a professor of Political Science at Regis College and a director of poetry workshops. She is multidisciplinary and has published 15 books, numerous articles in the fields of political science, psychology, literature and poetry. Both her poetry and essays have been widely anthologized. She has received fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute, the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women and from the Puffin Foundation. She has been a writer in residence at the University of Maryland and has had residencies at the MacDowell Colony the Yaddo Foundation, the Djerassi Foundation, the Leighton Artists’ colony at the Banff Centre for the Performing Arts, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

The Darkness Above. Selected Poems: 1968-2002. by Donald Lev

The Darkness Above. Selected Poems: 1968-2002. by Donald Lev ( Red Hill Outloud Books POBOX 86 Claryville, NY 12725)

Donald Lev, the founder of the venerable New York-based literary tabloid “The Home Planet News” has a new collection of his “ancient” poetry out ,as he described it in a note to me.

The poems in this book go back forty years. If I remember correctly this was the time of my first Robert Hall suit and my Bar Mitzvah. I’ve met Lev at a couple of gatherings at Poet’s House in NYC, and he impresses me as the proverbial, old school, New York, bohemian, poet.

Lev is in his seventies and in his time operated the Home Planet News Bookshop in the Lower East Side, had a brief stint as an underground actor most notably in “Putney Swope,” was a regular poetry contributor to the Village Voice, worked the wire rooms of the Daily News and the New York Times, to name a few gigs.

The poems presented in “The Darkness Above…” are chockfull of wit, irony, kosher chicken hearts, Westchester County, astrology, spirituality, that is to say a very wide swath. It sort reminds me of the poetry of my old pal Hugh Fox—although Fox dwells more in the long and rambling form.

In the poem “Higgins Again” Lev compares an old wino falling off his stool as a metaphor for the poet trying to perfect a poem night after night:

higgins again
why?
Pat Higgins was an old man, used to be
an elevator operator at the
Forest Hills Inn
and used to sit in
Marshall’s Bar night after night till closing time
drinking beer and stout and
talking to himself
he fell off his stool a
couple of times
before he died
Why
night after night do I
attempt this poem?

In “Thoughts on Allen Ginsberg” Lev writes about his mentor , and in turns defines his own artistic life and vision:

“…but he for me somehow was always
a permitting presence.
i’d scan the universe for hints on how
a jewish dropout in America, reluctant to leave queens,
makes poems:
the way ads read, ferlinghetti’s lines, Dylan
Thomas’s resonant consonants, the way
things looked stones…”

Recommended.

Doug Holder/Ibbetson Update/Feb. 2009/Somerville, Mass.

Bagel Bard Gloria Mindock to Tour Romania in Spring on Book Tour for "At The Heaven's Gate"

Gloria Mindock’s book, “At the Heaven’s Gates” will be published by Cogito Press in Oradea, Romania. with translation by Flavia Cosma.

The editor/publisher, Mr. Ioan Tepelea will write the introduction in her book. Mr. Tepelea has published Gloria’s poetry before in an anthology called “Murmur of Voices” and in the magazine he publishes called, UNU: REVISTA DE CULTURA.

Gloria and her translator are planning a book tour with her publisher in Romania in May of this year.

Ibbetson Street Press Poets Lisa Beatman and Elizabeth Quinlan nominated for St. Botolph Arts Award!

ELIZABETH QUINLAN



LISA BEATMAN







Lisa Beatman author of: “Manufacturing America” Elizabeth Quinlan author of: “Promise Supermarket”

Ibbetson Street Poets Lisa Beatman and Elizabeth Quinlan Nominated for St. Botolph Arts Grant.


Dear Friend of the Arts:

The Saint Botolph Club Foundation now in its 45th year, has provided more than 300 grants to artists in New England. Grants are awarded in three disciplines: literature, music, and the visual arts.


History of Club

The St. Botolph Club was founded in Boston on January 10, 1880 following the circulation of a letter sent to some three hundred prominent male citizens. Signed by Henry Cabot Lodge, Francis Parkman, the club's first president, Phillips Brooks, William Dean Howells and seven others, the invitation proposed a club which would feature an art gallery with monthly exhibitions open to the public, a reading room, and rooms for general use. Its purpose, as noted in the club constitution, was established for the "promotion of social intercourse among authors, artists, and other gentlemen connected with or interested in literature and art."

Modeled after New York's Century Club, the newly founded club debated over its name, finally deciding on the St. Botolph, the patron saint of Boston (a corruption of St. Botolph's Town in Lincolnshire, England).

The organization's first quarters were located at 87 Boylston St. The club resided in two other locations, 2 Newbury St. (later 4 Newbury St.) and 115 Commonwealth Ave. before securing its current location, 199 Commonwealth Ave. in 1971.
In addition to social intercourse, the club offered its members a variety of activities. Sunday afternoons were reserved for concerts. "Smoke talks," lectures which surveyed politics, science, social issues, and the arts, began in 1883.