On Earth and in Hell By Thomas Bernhard

 


On Earth and in Hell

By Thomas Bernhard

Three Rooms Press

$19.95

Review by Thomas Gagnon

If Thomas Bernhard’s poems were paintings, they would be German Expressionist, emphasizing distortions of objective realities to convey subjective feelings (think of The Scream by Edvard Munch, not German but a definite influence on Expressionism). While, in 1957, the free verse of Bernhard’s poems is hardly renegade, his distortion of realities is much more so. It provokes.

A majority of Bernhard’s poems feature repetition, of words or phrases. This is impossible to miss. It is likewise impossible to miss what he is repeating: “decay,” “die,” “shadows,” “black blooms,” or “black is the grass.” It appears that Earth is Hell, with no salvation in sight. The joylessness of such a world begins to have a deadening effect, when, about halfway through the collection, there comes a different sort of repeated phrase: “I embroider.” And so he does. Bernhard is a maestro of language, which allows him to describe and claim his world. In one memorable image, he speaks of “a father who drove the northern storm like a beast/through the intestines/of Scandinavian cold.” (69) How vividly repellent! Mind you, Bernhard’s world is not always repellent, not “In My Mother’s Garden,” where 

 

The night is warm and my limbs

emanate my green ancestry,

flowers and leaves,

the call of the blackbird and the clack of the loom. (193)

Here, Bernhard “embroiders” a pastoral and domestic image. Language saves.

Bernhard does, however, accentuate the negative. If a poem begins with any joy or exuberance, it goes sour soon. In the second poem, a great-grandfather, apparently beloved by many, “wouldn’t give me a scrap of bacon/for all my despair,” and that’s the end of that. Others of his poems are (what I’d call) anti-Psalms. Most obviously, his poem “Nine Psalms” doesn’t particularly resemble the Psalms at all, apart from addressing the Lord. These are verses not of praise, faith, or exultation, but of anger, despair, and poverty. Many of Bernhard’s poems are anti-Romantic, in the sense that Romantic poetry often celebrated Nature. In his poetry, Nature is destructive. It is all “black”: “black chests of country earth,” “black woods,” “black grasses,” “black hills,” “black sun,” and so on. Nor does Nature nurture. This is most dramatic in the opening lines of “Summer Rain”: “Cease, you birds/no evening/comforts me…” (123) Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Wordsworth!

One of Bernhard’s poems, “At Twenty-Six,” brought to mind the Romantic poet, Lord Byron, who wrote the four-line poem, “On my Thirty-Third Birthday.” Unlike Byron, Bernhard has a lot to say about aging, that is, a lot of specifics:

Twenty-six years

among beer drinkers, saints, murderers and madmen,

in the city and in the swollen villages…

staggering from Christmas to Christmas…

Even Byron’s longer poem “Growing Old” is not so specific—witty but not specific. Anyhow, the vividness of “At Twenty-Six” redeems what might otherwise be a deadening dirge. Once again, language is the savior.

Bernhard makes big leaps. Often, he will lament the transience of existence. At another time, he will suddenly endow a character in a poem with thousands of years, or, once, with “hundreds of millions of years.” Often, he talks of decay and dying, and then he talks of glory and immortality—once in the same poem (“Into a Carpet Made of Water”). There is rarely a place between these extremes. “Chioggia” could well be the only poem evoking an everyday content (in one of my frankly favorite lines, “They scoop the sand from the skiff/and lie in the boat at night…”).

Safe to say, one would not confuse Bernhard’s Austria with the Austria of The Sound of Music. There is no edelweiss to greet you every morning, no vigorous nuns climbing ev’ry mountain. Nonetheless, there is a charm and a sweetness that emerges toward the end of this collection. There is a wise father and a nurturing mother; there are ever-present devoted ancestors. Even in a harsh world—and Bernhard presents a very harsh world—a home, it seems, can still be found.

The Lost Theatres of Somerville

Amidst grading seemingly hundreds of college writing papers; I found the time to interview Somerville artist Angela Cunningham.  Cunningham is a resident of Winter Hill, a full-time studio artist working out of the Mudflat Studio in East Somerville, as well as President of the Board of Mudflat Studio.  She co-curated the Lost Theatres of Somerville exhibit at the Studio along with Tracy Redmond. The Lost Theatres exhibit is courtesy of David Guss and The Somerville Museum, who own the intellectual  and theatrical rights.

What is the Mudflat Studio?

Mudflat Studio is a non-profit ceramic arts school and artist studio in East Somerville. We serve the metropolitan Boston area with classes, workshops, and outreach programs for students of all ages. We also provide private studio spaces to 40 clay artists. www.mudflat.org

Tell us about your event.

Lost Theatres of Somerville, courtesy of David Guss and the Somerville Museum, is a part of a larger series of events celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Broadway Theatre in East Somerville. The exhibit uses photographs, movie posters, artifacts, and memorabilia to explore the glory days when as many as 14 movie houses operated in neighborhoods throughout Somerville.  

Give us a brief history of Broadway Theatre.

 The Broadway Theatre first opened in November 1915. It was built by a man named Hurst, who financed the construction by selling shares for $10, which entitled shareholders to free weekly admission for a year as well as to a share in the profits. Unfortunately, Hurst's Broadway Theatre went into bankruptcy just months after opening. Under new ownership, Hoffman's Broadway Theatre operated until 1929, when it was again sold to Arthur F. Viano, who was joined in business by his sons, Arthur Jr and Robert. The Viano family also came to own the Somerville Theatre and Teele Square Theatre, as well as the Regent and Capitol in neighboring Arlington. They were truly the "first family" of Somerville's movie theatre scene.

Broadway Theatre remained open until 1982. For decades after the theatre closed, the building was used as a warehouse, and later sat vacant except for a small, storefront dentist office until purchased by Mudflat Studio. Mudflat began renovations in 2010, creating artists studios, classrooms, offices, and a community meeting room. In 2011, Mudflat moved into the building, once again bringing life, community, and the arts back to the Broadway Theatre.

Mudflat's renovation of the building carefully and thoughtfully preserved as many details as possible from the former theatre, including grand wood and plaster molding that panels the walls, areas of tin ceiling, and a grand proscenium arch framing the back wall where the movie screen once hung. Mudflat also renovated the exterior of the building to highlight the original theatre's detailed decorative elements, and added a balcony and arched window that recall the original stained glass window that once emblazoned the front facade.

How did the germ of the idea for the Lost Theatres of Somerville come about?

The exhibit reflects the passion of Tufts University anthropology professor Dr. David Guss, who became intrigued by a 1945 photograph of the old Broadway Theatre and who set off to learn about the storied past of Somerville's movie houses. In the course of his research, Dr. Guss was invited by the Somerville Museum to curate an exhibition; the "Lost Theatres" project was the culmination. The exhibit has only been on view one other time in 2003-4 at the Somerville Museum. Here is a link to David Guss' award winning essay on the Lost Theatres of Somerville in the Journal of the Theatre Historical Society of America: http://www.losttheatres.org/Lost_Theatres_Marquee2006.pdf

This past summer, Mudflat approached David Guss and the Somerville Museum about the potential of hosting the Lost Theatres exhibit as part of our Centennial Celebration. Mudflat's exhibition of "Lost Theatres" focuses especially on the history of our own Broadway Theatre building.

What else?

Our sister event celebrating "A Century of Arts at the Broadway Theatre" is happening this Sat, Oct 24. Mudflat will revisit Broadway Theatres history as a movie palace with a special double feature that is free and open to the public. 3 pm face painting, 4pm Wizard of Oz, 7 pm Nosferatu with live score by organist Jeff Rapsis!  This event is sponsored by Somerville Theatre. For more info: http://mudflat.org/Mudflat%20Movie%20Event%20Oct24.pdf 

Although we call them movie theaters, the 14 theaters of Somerville's glory days really offered multi-media experiences, from movies to vaudeville to singing competitions, etc. Come to the exhibit and check it out!

A Seat at the Bar: WORKBAR UNION Brings Much Needed Work Space to Union Square

A Seat at the Bar: WORKBAR UNION Brings Much Needed Work Space to Union Square

By Doug Holder

While walking across Somerville Ave. in Union Square I noticed that the old Elegant Furniture storefront was inhabited by a new concept. So I took a detour from my usual haunts, the Bloc 11 Cafe, Market Basket, etc... and walked right in. At the front desk was Anne Sholley—the freckled-face and friendly “ Space Community Manager” of the WORKBAR. Like a grizzled reporter from the play “The Front Page,” I said: “ Doug Holder—The Somerville Times.” Sholley proved to be a gracious host and explained to me that the WORKBAR is a “co-working space” founded by Bill Jacobson, a pioneer of this work space movement. Sholley explained that folks can rent space in this expansive  venue on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.

Looking around the space I noticed a much welcomed veil of silence—unlike what you might find in the many bustling coffee shops in these environs. Sholley told me, “Many of the people who come here to work are independent workers—writers, people who work a distance from the home corporation, as well as small grassroots businesses. We offer office space on an ongoing basis.” And indeed, there were a series of long tables with computer outlets, with plenty of space for patrons to spread out and plug in.

Sholley said the WORKBAR at Union Square holds many events, panels as well demos from small companies to make it more of a community than an extended office.

Sholley believes the WORKBAR is in a great location, she opined: “Union Square is on the brink of being a great place for entrepreneurs with the much promised Green Line extension. There is a lot of energy here—it just feels awesome.”

WORKBAR is in partnership with US2-- a master developer that is intimately involved with the gentrification of the neighborhood.

Sholley gave me a tour of the facility. She guided me to a number of small conference rooms—one of which is named after Somerville's Hal Connolly –a 1956 Olympic-winner for the Hammer Throw. There is also a mural by Somerville artist Crystal Burney, that incorporates such Somerville hot spots as Brooklyn Boulder, etc... They also have a kitchen that offer free coffee and a variety of snacks.

I told Sholley that I might pay them a visit with stacks of papers to be graded, poems to write, and articles that have a deadline. Space is at a premium in Somerville, and now Somerville has a premium space.

For more info go to http://www.workbar.com
 

A Remembered Event: Bonded by Blood by Noelia Lopez

**** This is a memoir piece written by one of my gifted students at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston.

One February 3, 2013, my mother called us to let us know our older brother was dying, and that we needed to get to Boston Medical Center right so that we could say goodbye. It was a long time coming; my older brother had been slowly dying from lupus for the past ten years. His body had been destroying itself cell by cell every day for an entire decade. Even so, the news came as a sucker punch. Perhaps I simply thought he’d suffer for ever, selfishly expecting things to stay the same. My mother and younger sister went to visit my older brother on a regular basis, but my younger brother and I never went. We had our reasons. And on our way to Maverick station, walking through a light powdery coating of snow, Jose and I talked about those reasons. Through sporadic bouts of tears and regret, we tried to justify those reasons to ourselves and each other.


For Jose, my younger brother, it was a matter of independence. Our older brother would scold him severely when he returned home late, or pick fights with him for dropping out of school, calling him a loser. Jose didn’t respond well to this; he was our brother, not our father. Lectures turned into screaming matches. They both went for the throat, aiming to cause the most damage to each other’s egos. What were they arguing about? Rules? Jose’s future? More and more it seemed like a bloodthirsty battle for dominance. Once, in the heat of battle, my younger brother said, as he had so many times before, “I can’t wait for you to die.” He said it through clenched teeth, fighting back angry tears. As he stomped away, slamming his bedroom door behind him, our older brother picked up a chair and smashed it into the door. It was only a matter of time before they killed each other.
In retrospect, it was petty; it was all petty and childish, and if someone on either side ever had the sense to be mature about any of it, things wouldn’t have turned out this way. But you can’t expect
a thirty-four year old man who has been slowly rotting away from the inside out to behave rationally. And you can’t expect a teenage boy to be the bigger man.

He was my older brother, but we were twelve years apart in age and thousands of miles away in mindset. He was my older brother, but we were more like roommates. By the time I was in elementary school, he had already left home. He was my brother in name only. He only returned home because his illness had made it impossible for him to live alone. For me, it was all avoidance. When he tried to speak to me, I turned away. I tried not to look the face of suffering in the eye. Every time he tried to reach out to me, I withdrew. Every time I walked past his room, I could smell the festering stench of sickness. I simply couldn’t bear with it.

When Jose and I arrived at the hospital, he was unconscious and barely breathing. There was no question; he was absolutely dying. If it weren’t for the medical equipment, we wouldn’t have been able to see him in time. Our mother told us to say our goodbyes. She was insistent about it. “It would be awful to spurn him at his deathbed,” she said. “I know you didn’t get along,” she pleaded in Spanish, “but just forgive him.” Our little sister was right next to her, silently dealing with the loss of the closest person she had to a father figure. They left us alone with the eldest son to cry in another room.

Sometimes his body would become engorged with fluid, his skin turn purple and bruised. I would ask myself, is this swollen sack of flesh really related to me? I couldn’t bring myself to look at him. But our older brother didn’t look like that this time. Instead, he was the classic image of a sick, dying man. He was thin and bony, hooked up to machines several different ways. There were tubes in his mouth, in his chest, in his abdomen, and who knows where else. The displays and beeps of his lifelines were slightly out of sync, but diligently working in a steady rhythm. They sounded quietly in the back of my mind as I tried to form my parting words.

Nurses would occasionally come in to check tubing and readings, interrupting as I started to speak. I quietly waited for them to leave. I didn’t want any of them to hear what I was going to say because I knew it would sound awful. I didn’t intend on apologizing or saying anything sentimental. I just wanted to explicitly say something that was always implied. I took a deep breath to steady my voice, but the words came out weak and shaky: “I just want you to know that, despite everything I said and did, I never really hated you.” Then I left, feeling much better about leaving him behind.

There was nothing I could do about it. That’s what I constantly told myself because that’s what I wanted to believe. I just wanted to let it happen, to have it have nothing to do with me. In truth, had I been able to muster up any sense of courage, I might have been able to provide him with a sense of support or comfort. But there’s nothing I can do about it now.

All I could see was a human being rotting from the inside out-- a literal manifestation of self-hatred. My older brother always had some sort of complaint about how privileged we were, how easy we had it. I suppose it would seem that way to someone who had a life as rough as his. But that had nothing to do with us. All he did was create a barrier between himself and his younger siblings. I couldn’t bring myself to love him, but I never truly hated him. We were simply too different. It was so frustrating.

It was decided to take him off life support. He was already on borrowed time and he wouldn’t want to live like that anyway. We had ten years to steel ourselves for this moment. When the nurses called our family back into his room, he was already cleaned up. They had removed the unsightly tubes and wires; only a single machine remained. Now we just had to watch him die.

All four of us stood there, watching and tearing up. He made motions as if he was taking in breaths, struggling to breathe. The nurses had already explained to us that whatever he did, it was all reflexes and did not indicate revival. Our mother poured some water into her palm and started brushing some water on his lips and tongue with her fingers, quietly cooing and shushing him. Then he finally stopped moving. “He was thirsty,” she spoke softly, “he just wanted some water before he left.” His skin started to fade in color, becoming an ashen, washed out yellow. You see the warmth of life leave his body and turn cold. The steady, soothing beeping rang out as we silently organized our feelings.

I don’t remember what Jose said, or if he even said anything at all. It’s the same with my little sister and mother. But none of that really matters anyway. What matters most in these circumstances is whether you can settle your spirit and walk away with your head held high. And that’s exactly what we did. Despite everything that was said, we managed to do this right.

 Bonded by Blood by Noelia Lopez

Once a would-be editor, now an aspiring preschool teacher, Noelia Lopez is a first generation American living in East Boston and experiencing the realities of the American dream. Nevertheless, she hopes to somehow enrich the lives of the people around her by nurturing young minds to embrace education and learning through picture books and nursery rhymes.

The Hastings Room Reading Series presents David Ferry

The Hastings Room Reading Series

presents 

 

 

David Ferry

 

D a v i d   F e r r y
Recipient of the National Book Award
Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize
Ruth Lily Poetry Prize

Wednesday 4 November 2015 at 7:00pm
First Church Congregationalist
11 Garden Street, near Harvard Square


As if the leaves that were falling, but not the day,
Had read, and understood, the calendar.  “October”

To Part Is to Die a Little By Claudia Serea

 

Claudia Serea

To Part Is to Die a Little
By Claudia Serea

(Cervena Barva Press, 2015)

  Review by Lawrence Kessenich

To be an exile is to both be estranged from one’s homeland, more deeply attached to it, and also able to see both one’s homeland and one’s adopted country with an objectivity unavailable to lifelong inhabitants. All of this comes into play in Claudia Serea’s poetry collection, To Part Is to Die a Little.

Serea emigrated from Romania to the U.S. in 1995, evidently to New York City or nearby, because that city appears often in this collection, acutely observed and with attention to the concrete details of places and people:

From “Soap opera”:

December again on 38^th Street,
where statues push their heads through the walls
over a DVD store, a barber shop, a deli,
to better see what’s happening…

From “Paper cup city”:

The dark coffee

     Of the mornings
in a paper cup
    city

People stand in line;
their loneliness
    is the loneliness
of plastic straws
    on the shelf…

Daybreak is
    a plastic
teaspoon in the sky,
    over
paper plates
    and brown napkins…

From “Mr. Hoffman”:

Mr. Hoffman has a bright green hat
and red jacket, has glasses,
sits on a small chair
play waltzes on the accordion
in the 57^th Street station.

A little town with steep streets
and old buildings with geraniums,
scenes from old European movies,
pour from his waltz…

Through the eyes of this immigrant, one sees one’s own country through fresh eyes, always an enlightening experience—and sometimes painful, as when she points out the ignorance of Americans about her homeland in “Breakfast at Cucina”:

Are you a gymnast?
the woman asks
when she finds out
my accent is Romanian.

Sure, I’d like to say.

In my country,
the little girls balance on beams
as soon as they come out
of their mothers’ wombs.

More poignant, however—and my favorite section of the book, Letters to Romania—are the poems where Serea looks back longingly at the land where she was born, grew up, and where her family and friends of many years still reside. What often sticks in her mind, of course, are concrete images that make the places and people come alive for the reader.

In “Es-tu-là” she imagines her mother singing in the kitchen:

My mother sings to the chopped onions.
She sings to the parsley and pots.
She sings to the stirred stew.
That’s why America is rich,
because it’s where you live,
you, my only true treasure.

The kitchen is filled with sun.
The windows are filled with wind.
No letters came today…

In “On Easter morning” she remembers:

After church, we won’t enter the house
until my father digs a shovelful of grass
and places it on the threshold, roots and all.

Step on it, for a new beginning, he says…

In “Ovidiu” she recalls a Romanian town she visited:

A bright yellow Muslim minaret and a white church
hang upside down from the clouds…

From these low hills, the poet looked on,
with exiled eyes,
into the eyes of the Black Sea…

A school, a bread store, a closed pub,
A skinny Pegasus pulls a carriage with corn…

And in “The last way” she shows us a country funeral:

Dressed in black with headscarves,
    like ravens, they come
to walk the dead man
    on his last way.

Up on the tractor,
    his coffin is decorated
with crying daughters
    and orange lilies.

There is so much life in these people and places that the reader can hardly help feeling the loss of it all along with Serea. There is so much longing in this book that it tugs at the heartstrings, but that longing also forces the reader to look at the riches in his own life, to contemplate their loss, and thereby to appreciate them more.

Chloe Garcia Roberts amid the Spaces of Poetry

Chloe Garcia Roberts

Chloe Garcia Roberts amid the Spaces of Poetry

in her new book THE REVEAL

article by Michael T Steffen

There’s a great joy in recovering lost and forgotten things, even the old lost things of language we call archaisms. This accounts for one of the true delights Chloe Garcia Roberts brings us with her new book of poems THE REVEAL (ISBN 978-1-93489-45-6) from Noemi Press. The titles of the poems, somewhat elaborate, hinting at paradox or suspended with grammatical complexity, are reminiscent of old anthology titles, first lines from Emily Dickinson (“After great pain, a formal feeling comes”) or one of Shakespeare’s sonnets (“That time of yeeare thou maist in me behold”). Thus Garcia Roberts gives us: IN ORDER TO SEE A TRUTH IN DARKNESS ; THOUGH TRANSPARENT IN THE DAY, AT NIGHT LIKE GLASS I BECOME A MIRROR. Some of the titles go postmodern in their old Baroque constructions and metaphysical evocations: I AM A SUSPENSION, NOT A SOLUTION ; ONCE WHEN LIGHT RETURNED AFTER A BLACKOUT, I FOUND MY FACE PRESSED INTO A WALL ASKING FOR HELP ; FREEDOM IS THE THICKET WITH WHICH YOU FILL YOUR DELINEATED AIR.

     The book’s leading title, THE REVEAL, does something of its own. Words such as “shoot”, “fly” and “find” like Brock Holt play different positions with ease. Without changing forms, they can be either nouns or verbs. You play on the stage when you stage a play. But “reveal” does not do this so readily. Only very recently, mostly in context of media disclosures or TV drama denouements, has it been used and accepted as a noun. “Revelation” is its normative noun form. So the effect of the title THE REVEAL, especially in context with the other grander, old-style titles, is one of peculiarity. On the book cover the article THE is set almost a line above REVEAL, denoting spaces, perhaps for a fill-in-the-blank sentence, like THE_____ REVEAL______. This is not “reveals” with an “s”, so we are dealing with a third-person plural, required by the definite article, for the subject noun. For example: THE MOVEMENTS IN THE CURTAIN REVEAL THE CAT IN THE WINDOWSILL.

     Because the titles are given all in capitals (mimicking the majority solution to resolving grammatical and typographical uncertainties), there is support for the idea of gaps between THE and REVEAL. This carries over to the furled lining of the hemi-stitches in the poems themselves, leaving gaps of delineation and silence down across the page. One very concrete definition of poetry lies in the deliberate margins of its composition and presentation, denoting the metaphysical speech of silence, transposed as “DARKNESS” in the book’s first title and remarkable opening statement:

                                                IN ORDER TO SEE A TRUTH IN DARKNESS

            Listen for its edge.

            The border always                   —silhouetted, glancing—

            divines the real from

                                                the form.

The fragmentary lining gives rise to different contextual possibilities. Written out as an ordinary sentence, there is a definite sense to the statement, “I know only one voice in the swarm and am not interested and refuse to see the cloud, the skin, you wreathe it in.” The meaning draws particularly to “the one voice in the swarm.” But lined out as it is in the poem, we get something with more amplitude and a much wider reach:

                                                            I know

            only one voice                          in the swarm

            and am not interested

                                                            and refuse to see

            the cloud,

            the skin,

            you wreathe it in (page 3).

Given these spaces, the eye is apt to land on “I know…and am not interested…and refuse to see…”—a credo of diffidence we may generally own while not wanting to, yet helpless in the barrage and volume of information we are prone to, in the spill out 24/7 holding the world in our hands, in our cell phones, IPODs and tablets, everywhere we go, let alone whatever newspaper or book in non-updateable print we happen to pick up. These notions from the first page reflect back to the contemporary sense of “REVEAL” as a noun, indicating a media news disclosure, that a Hollywood couple has had a fallout, or that another personality has come out of the closet. Trivia. In its short form, the word means substantially less than it does in its traditional form, revelation, which distinguishes poetry as a created and significant form of writing.

     It’s reassuring when poems delving at confinement, within one’s room, can be suggestively reflective of what’s going on outside around the house. It affirms the continuity, in Seamus Heaney’s terms, between center and circumference, fruit and tree. This is so even if Garcia Roberts’ poems robe themselves with much referential plumage in the way of language poems, anonymously assertive without formal regard for completion: I AM A SUSPENSION, NOT A RESOLUTION—speaking by turns in defense of her sources of inspiration, by turns in her own defense.

     Who precisely her counterpart is… In one passage she describes the process of disintegration between structure and surface:

            Bathe the body from the bones

            and only the us is left,

                                    leafing silently beneath. (page 7)

Most captivating about Garcia Roberts is her deliberation in earnest. These poems are written, not scribbled or edited like show poodles. She keeps her readerly self, that inheritance, at hand for light in its different senses of wit, affirmation and elucidation.

The Underworld of Lesser Degrees By Daniel Y. Harris

The Underworld of Lesser Degrees
By Daniel Y. Harris
NYQ Books
www.nyqbooks.org
New York, NY
ISBN: 978-1-63045-000-7
148 Pages

Review by Dennis Daly

Betwixt the poetry of Bandersnatch and martyrdom’s bleakness comes Harris (Daniel Y.) the Hadean all sulphured up. Spleen-bound, prettified Priscoan, he bocks and burbles to Madame or Sir, real as the darker angels. He chirtles away behind the scenes. Consider this rite of ecclesiastical longing, an introduction, Hypostasis, an opening here,

Pray to appease Asmodai
zombied with fog horns in the dark, hollow
hole of salted ousia. Antic disposition
or ontic dispossession? Never feigned.
Always canonic. To be the tilted palm,
Packing in the prick-light of prayer,
Asmodai is Iago bloated as faith’s
Negation. Tongues are unsigned.

Notice the Bard’s bilious one cleaves into the wrathful king of nine hells, a heart of unrestrained lust. The Book of Tobit says more.

The poet propanes another bauble bilious from the scatological heap of sacred syllables, the cause before the cause, the original bubble beneath. In the sixth part of his piece, Excerpts from Seven Dead Kafkas and a Fork, credulity strained, he divulges in a way his train, his thoughts go further,

… back to the dipshittery of Holy shit:

better to be the shit, hot shit and louse shit,
than the shit of fans, etiolated and crotchety
to constipated drives to buy a shit remover:

stick it up your argumentation ex stercore
tauri—money talks bullshit walks arse up
and arching, shoots the shit on a book tour

Oh The Last Man shines his decrepitude and faltering immortality, for now in the eyes of his shadow partner fading into the synthetic sheets. As the description swells among chocolate and kelp into the new man, the modern erasure of animal flaw maximizing absolute pleasure, the porn male of nothingness crowned in misbegotten strewed  moments doomed to be first tolerated before immunity takes hold. So you think nonsense fires these Pascalian wagers! 

Well-named and prickly the Prophet Daniel demands our damned attention, preaches the Viagra vicissitudes of deadly lust and mortality celebrating the Prometheus moment of procreation telemetry.  Give us our daily climax and deliver the last Olympic player from passivity. Here Harris effectively touches the religiosity of his orgiastic subject,

…From the heights, the numen
coded in copper scrolls, redacts the tasty
shibboleth of lust. Persists a sore ganglion

below the rub-flutter of thighs, waits to
spit glitter, arches neck-face projectile in
the crease with nitric oxide. Groans and

grinds. The hung light and forepangs, this
athlete’s chemical curse to stay aroused,
tosses pillow at these gods of perineum.

Blasted by sand, a desert dirge, the parched air pirouetting out a century of beauty as souls (the unmentionable word) evaporate over the melting transcontinental highways running beside the River Styx, yes the poet dishes this and more in the entitled Threnody of Reach. He minimizes with motels, suburbia, and small bills. Charge cards would not fit the neutered world of suicide luck. The ode well-wrought, the sorrow collected in rain barrels. Says Harris in a geologic trekking out,

Fires of stone and sedge, dried below a mantle
of basalt. Walls of pink clay shaped like teeth
clenched on bone. Mineral stained arcs high-
striped in cracks. Petrified sand dunes layered
in conical rings. Evapotranspiration in a matrix
of orange runoff. Rainshadow tundra littered
with red spiked prickly pears…

Invention, like playing God for fun, comes from grave-like depths and a density beyond documentation. Demons flit about the creators as they work up a storm of life, a day of days with mockery and humor. Drink from this cup, The Fabulist, all of you. Do you hear me! Dead story tellers walk among us. The word “shard” must be cut from their flesh before cleared to jump. And they do jump into the moonlight, mid-phrase.  The poet observes the game, calculates the odds, then the rewards, and concludes thusly,

I double take standing up to flip
in stills of rote spin and win
repeat play, lost in some Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern are Dead
limbo of an uncertain likely day.
Reflexive as we are we reify
the effect the causes rebuke
and settle scores left on the edge
of an edgy place. If I anoint
you catalyst then you may
anoint me. You may go first
and share the fabulist call
to inspire, each a well of living
sight, mingling cohorts in a lit
loci of chance from which we
mime the daft and shapely puns
of circumstantial fun.

This experimental baseball breathes its uncomfortable prolepsis into the routine of everyday life and colors the rush and run etching with remnants of mystical oddness and daft ethos. Bravo the pastrami sandwich infused with mustard-seed rapture. Bravo Harris.

The Chintz Age: Tales of Love and Loss for a New New York by Ed Hamilton

Ed Hamilton

A friend of mine, Ed Hamilton has finished a new collection of fictional stories that deal with the gentrification of New York City but can easily apply to what is happening right here in Somerville, Mass. and other cities across the nation. In fact, the collection is published by another friend, Gloria Mindock of the Cervena Barva Press of Somerville, Mass. I have read the Chintz Age... and I think Hamilton has hit it on the head with these heart-wrenching stories of artists, writers, eccentrics, and other people of limited means being forced out of neighborhoods they called home for many years.  Hamilton has walked the walk and is acquainted with the night—the night these people face as real estate interests and corporations destroy Jane Jacob’s ideal of an urban village. Hamilton is still a resident of the Chelsea Hotel in New York City—a long time residence for painters, writers, poets, composers, etc... He has seen the hotel gutted, the eviction of tenants, as it slowly becomes yet another boutique hotel. The hotel and the neighborhood of Chelsea are changing drastically, and the diversity, the quirkiness that made New York City unique is being replaced by high-toned  shops, and skyscrapers, changing the face of the city. On a smaller scale this is happening in Union Square in Somerville, as it has in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and countless other areas where people once could afford the rent, partake in the community, and live modestly. Ed will be reading from his book at the Arts Armory on Highland Ave., in Somerville on Oct 30, 2015 at 7P.M.  Check out:   http://artsatthearmory.org/events/ for directions and more information.

--Doug Holder

The Chintz Age: Tales of Love and Loss for a New New York

by Ed Hamilton

Ed Hamilton resident of New York’s storied Chelsea Hotel, featured in New York Times, Village Voice, and Vanity Fair pens debut collection of stories of artists in gentrifying times.

Somerville MASS, Oct. 1, 2015 –Gentrification has been going on for a long time, maybe for as long as there have been cities. In the past, gentrification was almost an organic phenomenon, with creative/alternative lifestyle types moving into poor neighborhoods for the cheap rent; then, when the creatives had “improved” the neighborhoods to a certain degree, they, in their turn, were replaced by more affluent homeowners. But it was a process that took decades. These days, with government programs designed to benefit developers and real estate speculators whole neighborhoods are changing character in a matter of a year or two. Outside of millionaires, we’re all at risk these days. And it’s not only happening in New York, either; this is a world-wide phenomenon. So, how are these creatives choosing to make their last stand? This is the story told by The Chintz Age.

In seven stories and a novella, Ed Hamilton takes on this clash of cultures between the old and the new, as his characters are forced to confront their own obsolescence in the face of a rapidly surging capitalist juggernaut. Ranging over the whole panorama of New York neighborhoods—from the East Village to Hell’s Kitchen, and from the Bowery to Washington Heights—Hamilton weaves a spellbinding web of urban mythology. Punks, hippies, beatniks, squatters, junkies, derelicts, and anarchists—the entire pantheon of urban demigods—gambol through a grungy subterranean Elysium of dive bars, cheap diners, flophouses, and shooting galleries, searching for meaning and a place to make their stand.

 “Greg had started his shop, the aptly named Fat Hippie Books, in the mid-eighties on a burned-out block of New York’s East Village. The shop was around the corner from the famous punk venue CBGB and the former office of the Yipster Times. When he moved in, the store was right across the street from a rubble-strewn lot where junkies shot up. Now, in 2004, there was a brand new condo building there. The neighborhood had gentrified, but the bookstore remained the same: aged tomes spilling off the sagging wooden shelves onto unstable piles rising up from the creaking floor. And when the door popped open with a clatter of bells, plate glass, old boards and rusty hinges, a gust of wind might set the dust to swirling, some of the same dust maybe as back in the eighties, and patrons would catch a whiff of that unmistakable used bookstore smell. And these patrons, each of that furtive, clandestine race who frequent such places, would feel that familiar tingle of recognition deep in their brain stems that told them instinctively what this place was about: the preservation of knowledge, the suspension of time.” -- From The Chintz Age

Ed Hamilton is also the author of “Legends of the Chelsea Hotel: Living with the Artists and Outlaws of New York’s Rebel Mecca” (DaCapo 2007) which is now in its eighth printing. As of this writing Hamilton is still living in the famed Chelsea Hotel. www.edhamilton.nyc

978-0-9861111-9-8 | $18.00 | Trade Paperback | 6 X 9, 287 pages| Červená  Barva Press | Small Press Distribution | On Sale: Nov 2, 2015

Červená Barva, a small press operating out of Somerville, Mass., which has to date published 160 titles (70 books and 90 chapbooks), celebrated its ten-year anniversary in April of this year. http://www.cervenabarvapress.com

House You Cannot Reach Poems in the Voice of My Mother And Other Poems by Tom Daley

House You Cannot Reach
Poems in the Voice of My Mother
And Other Poems by Tom Daley
Futurecycle Press
Lexington, Kentucky
ISBN: 978-1-938853-68-5
89 Pages

Review by Dennis Daly

A respected local poet and esteemed (some would say, “beloved”) teacher of poetic craft pens his first full length book using his deceased mother’s voice in fashioning a persona that vents from deep within his (and, perhaps her), now unbridled unconscious. What could go wrong? If the reader answers to a highbrow persuasion he or she may consider the fate of Oedipus. Others may think with some trepidation on Norman Bates.

Well, be at ease. What Tom Daley does concoct is remarkable. Many of these penetrating pieces, taken together, stake out a claim for a new genre of modern poetry—certainly personal, decidedly expressionistic, but pointedly anti-confessional. While Daley clearly uses elements of Browning-esque dramatic monologues, his persona’s manipulation of daringly personal details and the self-referral direction of its singular voice verges on unique. It’s as if each page of poetry utilizes a palimpsest of Ouija board insights from the skinned souls of past and future ghosts. Daley’s invented persona speaks back to his own receptive ego, among other parties, with a profound sadness, a targeted truth-telling and, above all, toughness. 

My Mother Revisits the Scene of a Tryst with My Father at the Great Falls of the Potomac, the first poem of the “Mother” series and the second poem in the collection douses the reader with a romantic remembrance of early love. Daley words the scene lovingly, and adds in resistance and complexity of feeling with a seamless touch. The piece concludes with not a little narrative tension.

I still buckle
under the old taste
of your tongue’s slow bruise;
still fret, marking your hand,
mute and sly,
where it once worked its furious glee

I still listen for your torso
tuned square as a suitcase,
for the vows we soothed
with crossed fingers.

Here, in rapids
jostling a bilious remorse,
I drag back to your rampages
tricked out
as accomplice with scar.

Family tragedy generates unanswerable questions and opens the eyes of survivors to strange ironies and everyday absurdities. In My Mother Speaks with Two Police Officers Who Arrive at Her Door on Good Friday Afternoon Daley’s persona deals with the suicide death of one of her sons. Here’s a bit of everyday detail that the poet’s persona uses to absorb the oncoming waves of grief,

Gentlemen, come see our piano,
its black keys all stooped
by the weight of his knuckles.

Here’s a hope chest
where mothballs
seal the rot in his slapstick.

They hoard the stains where his T-shirts
sweated out Trotskyist proverbs.
Here’s a cruet for his chrism,

a vat for his vinegar.
See? That sticky flytrap
dangles his tear salts

with the smut of his incense.

Notice that the presence of the police officers turns an excruciating private interval into an almost public tour. But isn’t that what funeral rites do?

Daley shows his poetic range in a piece entitled My Mother Calls Her Portfolio Manager in the Middle of a Bad Week on the Market. The poet provides a comedic antidote for those who have lost their 401k and IRA savings in the manipulated and unsavory machinations of the stock market. His persona-Mother shows her laugh-out-loud archness and biting anger in a good cause. She complains,

What do you mean by subterranean economies?
If these dips are mavericks,
are they thirsty calves, then,
bleating for their brands?
I am wise to your feints, to your doping indicators,
to your tribe of tyro soothsayers who teethed
on their own sound bites.

Sir, I am proud
of my prudent weather. I never swore
off my sweeteners completely,
but I know how to stretch the dregs
in a bottle of ketchup. I cancelled the milkman
long before you cashed in your Krugerrands.

But, my man! This is slapdash, this is kidnapping!
This is all my collectables cheek-cheek
with the ukuleles
in the pawnshop window.
This is a deadletter box destination
for a mail-order bride.
These are the decades of tinned pilchards
against which you said you had me inoculated.

My favorite poem in this collection Daley entitles After a Stroke, My Mother Speaks to a Stuffed Pheasant in her Son-In-Law’s living Room. At first reading I thought the poet’s engagement with the stuffed bird bordered on the surreal. After a second read I realized my mistake and saw absolute logic in the poet’s monologue. Daley’s persona waits for death to make its move. In the meantime she marvels at the bird preserved beyond its time. During a peculiar set of stanzas the persona delves into the (D.H. Lawrence-like?) motivations of the pheasant’s killer and the kindness of his wife, the persona’s daughter. The poet says,

Give me back my girl’s ministrations.
Yes, her husband’s backbone is maimed,
but let her attend to my squalor,

my blatant and durable envy.
If her man is courteous,
His pockets are bulging with buckshot.

His hands are forever tying tiny lures.
His hunt fills my girl’s need.
He fishes her and fills her.

Throughout this book Daley peppers in non-persona poems which act as a sort of terra firma to the conjured up and versed metaphysics. One entitled Benediction especially caught my attention. Very much a tone poem, this piece signals a reconciliation between the poet and his dead brother. Daley couches all emotion in narrative, a detailed description of a snapshot on a bookshelf. It ends in an affecting prayer, with echoes of Francis of Assisi’s exhilarating canticle and the confessional. The poet concludes his piece this way,

Afternoon light honors and disturbs you.
Your smooth skin, your blue shirt have absorbed
their portion of the light.
What they shed is what I am given.

Bless with me now, brother,
the good ministrations of the daylight
that swaddled you then
and still frames
an unmendable chaos of loss.

No, nothing went wrong in this collection. Quite the contrary.

POUNDING THE DOOR INTO GRAY By James DeCrescentis

POUNDING THE DOOR INTO GRAY

By James DeCrescentis

Igneus Press

Canyon TX    $10.00

     Joan Didion has spoken of how writers impose “a narrative line upon disparate images” in order to “freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”  That is to say, writers generally impose a narrative, impose ideas, to create an aesthetic whole.  James DeCrescentis’ recent chapbook of eleven prose poems takes a wrecking ball to that model.  He does away with narrative, or at least with imposed, plotted narrative, to allow the free reign of what Didion calls the “shifting phantasmagoria” and the free play of the imagination. 

     DeCrescentis uses streams of images, many of them surreal, that come fast on the heels of the preceding ones, often in run-on sentences that serve to build the intensity of the poem.  But most images are striking enough to put the brakes on just a little, so the poem does run off the tracks.  DeCrescentis is very much in control of his material.  And though the poems present a shifting phantasmagoria, meaning nonetheless erupts like crocuses in early spring.   A strong moral tone is evident as well in certain of the poems.  In “The Italian Haircut,” a man barred from a neighborhood club in 1948, because of his race. dreams of opening his own club, which he eventually does.  The concluding stanza reads:

    

     And I’ll make it born into the same year, watching those

     victory gardens burning up one by one the children must

     change racism without money or violence, or catchy bumper

     stickers on foreign cars—-let everybody in.

     

     The opening lines of the next poem in the collection, “We Put Transistors Everywhere,” also burn with moral fire:

     And forget the places as they get razed by bulldozers

     with cranes flattening to dirt what took so long to be

     born a religion of death so far out of touch flames bring

     candles lining small squares----

     DeCrescentis spent much of his working life as a counselor in psychiatric facilities and his experiences enter into or color several of the poems.  “The Shift” is short enough to be quoted in its entirety:

     I walk up and down the halls of the ward and see a

     two-tone paint job clogging my lungs, which hoard all

     pollutants like back room meetings, terrible colors

     walking the straight line around a bend of ladders on

     fire, even the paintbrush loses direction.  I do this

    long walk because the zombie wants some shuffle.

POUNDING THE DOOR INTO GRAY is a nicely designed chapbook that features a cover painting by the author titled “Wally’s Café.”   The book is available for $10.00 from Igneus Press, 1301 Eighth Avenue, Canyon, TX 79015 or at www.igneuspress.com.

                                                                                             --Richard Wilhelm