Scarab-- the first literary magazine for the iPhone

PRESS RELEASE...

Hey folks, another medium for poetry... a brave new world:



Scarab, the first literary magazine for the iPhone, now available in the AppStore
Scarab, the only literary magazine for the iPhone, is taking poetry out of dusty journals andputting it into people’s pockets. Featuring well known poets like Tony Hoagland and Pulitzer Prize winner Charles Simic, Scarab is the first application where writers read their work to you.

Scarab represents the next step in literary magazines. The 2006 study Poetry in America,released by the Poetry Foundation, revealed that while the majority of Americans enjoyed poetry, less that 20% read literary magazines. Print journals are out of touch with their audience,of which about half reported listening to poetry as their main interaction with the art. By publishing through an iPhone application, Scarab offers a way for writers and readers to reconnect.

Scarab combines the intimacy of reading with the thrill of being read to by your favorite author.Taking full advantage of the iPhone’s capablilites, Scarab plays a recording of a poem, essay, or short story as the reader scrolls along with the text. Beta-testers found the experience to be an,“Ingenious concept that brought the poems to life.”

Each edition of Scarab consists of 11 works of poetry or prose, and an interview with a respected author. The content of the first issue is even more stunning than the use of the new medium.Scarab offers work by former Poet Laureate Charles Simic, National Book Critics Award Finalist,Tony Hoagland, David Rivard—recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship—and Chase Twichell,winner of the Hugh Ogden Prize for Poetry. There is also work by exciting new writers MRB,Chelko, Hannah Gamble, and David Blair.

The application is available through iTunes for $0.99 in the US, and makes use of the iPhone 3.0SDK’s new “in app purchasing”. The editions of Scarab are purchased and downloaded directly in the application to your iPhone or iPod Touch for $2.99 or a similar price worldwide.

About the Company Scarab is published by Old Brick Press, LLC, a company founded by former College of William and Mary roommates Ian Terrell and Brian Wilkins. Believing that exposure to the arts is vital to one’s quality of life, they work to take the best in contemporary poetry and prose available to the public. Because they want to support good writers as well as good writing, 20% of the purchase price for each issue of Scarab goes directly to the artists involved.

Review of TWINE by Martha Boss

Review of TWINE by Martha Boss, March Hare Press, 200 Norfolk Street, Cambridge, MA 02139, 2009, 35 pages

By Barbara Bialick

Martha Boss, the author of this chapbook, declined to print a bio. No problem; she’s been a locally-loved poet for years and the lucky ones have copies of her previous chapbooks, individually hand-typed on a manual typewriter, with original drawings. Indeed, she penciled a sepia roll of twine to be printed for the cover, with the poems presented in typed form. There’s even a length of light brown twine wrapped around the spine and middle.

In the entry poem, “this twine” she notes: ”these beads on a string/this twisted existence of mine/this dna/encoded stranded string of me…in this earth…/in that sphere we share/once entwined, and then/undone,/still the same twine we wear/ & now redo in verse” Her poems are wry, sardonic, and yet beautiful streams that demand you to read the whole poem, one poem after the other, till the end of the book…

Contemplating the every day in light of the cosmos, she writes in “same idea”:
“there are some stars that/take years to burn out./these are thoughts it seems…some days it seems a dream/can only be realized in another dream/this must be what the earth is thinking.”

Or check “how do we know”: “how do we know/the accumulated hurt of millions/when daisies are picked/when trees are cut/…wasn’t it sad/when the machine broke/when houses foreclosed/when the air can’t breathe/when men sent to war can’t wait/to kill the enemy/when they come home & if they do/did you hear they sometimes shoot/themselves…”

Which leads us to “people use the word ‘heaven’ a lot” She wonders isn’t there really a heaven: “isn’t there a star over there with a/forest with nibbling deer & people/with fires & songs & pets to caress/and cross-stitch samplers that say/god bless our home?”

I could and will keep pulling quotes, but I say just read the book. As the author concludes about her craft in “there’s no end to a poem”: “it’s growing/showing up somewhere./it seems to end at the desk/& later pops up in the living room/…then it wakes up a good sleep/like an infant’s demand feeding/you feel like killing it./this poem/that cord/you can’t cut/…take it out for a walk./throw it in one of those trash bins/that recycle./it doesn’t care./it’s even ok/with being a bottle label.” She’s still hoping there really is a heaven we ourselves recycle to…

9-27-2009

CHRIS CASTELLANI: FEEDS HUNGRY WRITERS WITH GRUB STREET

CHRIS CASTELLANI: FEEDS HUNGRY WRITERS WITH GRUB STREET
By Doug Holder

It is one thing to tell The Somerville News what a wonderful thing the Somerville News Writers Festival is, it is quite another to put your money where your mouth is. Every year Grub St., along with Porter Square Books and others sponsor the festival founded by Tim Gager and yours truly in 2003.

I recently met with Grub St. head Christopher Castellani at the Diesel Café in Davis Square, Somerville. Castellani frequents the café along with a slew of other writers. One the day of our interview Castellani pointed out Boston Herald sports reporter Steve Buckley. Never at a loss to press the flesh I introduced myself to Buckley and he told me he has a long Somerville lineage as well as a new book out: “Wicked Good Year: How the Red Sox, Patriots, and Celtics Turned the Hub of the Universe into the Capital of Sports.” Castellani told me Buckley was regular at this bustling hub of java and laptops.

Castellani is not only the director of Grub Street, but he is an accomplished author himself. He has published two novels, most recently: “The Saint of Lost Things.” He has long sunned himself in the light of the Academy—earning a M.A. at Tufts and an MFA at Boston University. After Boston University, Castellani, a tall, balding man in his late 30’s, told me he taught at the much lauded Grub St. (now located in Boston) after graduating from B.U.

Grub St. was founded in Brookline, Mass. by Eve Bridburg in 1997. It had a stint in Somerville. It was originally in Bridburg’s home in the “Ville (I remember interviewing her amidst the din of her crying newborn), and later moved to a storefront in Union Square, Somerville. Castellani said: “Somerville was a great place for Grub. You can’t throw a rock without hitting a writer.”

Castellani told me that the philosophy of the school is to be supportive of the writer but provide him or her with rigorous instruction. There are classes for the dabbler with no critical feedback, but he tells his students to be prepared for critical comments in the workshops. The workshops are on “university level” according to the website, and are full of constructive criticism by the students and teachers.

Grub St. is not only valuable for its teaching, but also for its outlets for networking. They hold many literary events and conferences, where the nascent writer can make important contacts. Castellani, is no stranger to giving recommendations to worthy students so they can enter graduate writing programs.

I asked Castellani why he is a supporter of The Somerville News Writers Festival. He said: “It is a great way to connect with other writers and readers. In fact many of the readers over the last seven years like former Somerville resident Steve Almond have taught at Grub St. Grub St will have a table at the Book Fair that will take place at the Arts Armory on Highland Ave, Somerville from 11:30AM to 4PM before the main event at 7PM. All happenings will take place on Nov. 14, 2009.

After our interview Castellani and I shared our table for awhile, he on his laptop, me, with a pen and a schoolboy’s notebook, doing what we like best…writing.

For more information about Grub St. go to http://www.grubstreet.org
For more information about the Somerville News Writers Festival go to: http://somervillenewswritersfestival.com

Ibbetson 26 due out in late October!

IBBETSON 26












Poetry from: Elizabeth Swados, Simon Perchik, Zvi Sesling, Kim Triedman, AD Winans, and more. Exclusive interview with poet Fred Marchant and great art work from Bridget Galway! $8 Magazine will be out in late October reserve your copy send check or cash to Ibbetson Street Press 25 School St. Somerville, Mass. 02143






*****Front and Back Cover by Somerville, Mass. artist Bridget Galway

The Gates Unbarred: A History of University Extension at Harvard 1910-2009. Michael Shinagel

The Gates Unbarred: A History of University Extension at Harvard 1910-2009. Michael Shinagel (Harvard University Press)
$15

Review by Doug Holder


" At the stroke of eight every lecture evening notebooks were spread and until nine o’clock not a glance wandered to the clock nor was there any sign of wavering interest. The students were all voluntary seekers of knowledge who elected philosophy as an aid in constructive thinking. Young and old, black and white, artisans and teachers, men and women--who had questioned the meaning of life, and the universe, were eager to compare their thoughts with the questioners of all time. It was an audience to challenge any professor's attention and respect...” (Quote taken from “The Gates Unbarred…” Boston Evening Transcript June 15, 1910)

Although this quote is almost 100 years old, it could still apply today. I remember studying for my Master's degree at the Extension School during the mid 90's. I was in my late 30's, working 40 hours a week at McLean Hospital while attending classes several nights a week. Was it a difficult course of study? Yes. But I loved it. The teachers were first rate, I feel in love with the winding, tome- filled stacks at the Widener Library, but most importantly I gained more confidence as a writer-- and I would like to think I graduated as a better, more complete person.

Michael Shinagel, the present Dean of the Extension School has written a thorough and scholarly, (but not inaccessible) history of the said school titled: "The Gates Unbarred: A History of University Extension at Harvard 1910-2009." I took a course on the novel with Dr. Shinagel. I remember coming into his office with a convoluted proposal for a paper on Defoe’s "Robinson Crusoe" In his tactful, avuncular manner, he advised me (in so many words) to trash it and start fresh. He told me that it would be a rewarding challenge for me, this nascent scholar. I was doubtful, but in the end the man was right on the money. And this could be said about the development of the school itself, a rewarding challenge.

The University Extension was created in 1910 by A. Lawrence Lowell, with the idea to provide the community access to Harvard, and give them the opportunity to earn degrees. The Extension started small with courses mainly offered to teachers. But over the years,
and many battles, it expanded, offering TV courses to the Navy's Polaris submarine fleet, and by the 21st Century it offered advanced degrees to the general public. Because of the quality of the Harvard faculty, and the faculties of Boston University, Tufts and other area institutions, Harvard Extension has raised the status of "Evening Schools" nationwide; schools that were often afterthoughts of the Academy.

On a personal note I was fascinated to read that a Professor Bertocci, my old undergraduate philosophy teacher from Boston University, offered the first Extension radio course on WBMS FM titled: “Introductory Psychology.” He was one of the more popular professors at the Extension, and had a loyal and large following.

Throughout this century under Shinagel, the Extension offers a number of advanced degrees in management, journalism, creative writing, biotechnology, and other disciplines. The Master's in Journalism is of interest to this community journalist. Shinagel writes:

" upon completion of several courses, candidates put their skills to the test by completing internships at newspaper or magazine offices. In many cases the students work has been rewarded by appearing in print in local newspapers."

These days the Extension degree is a sought after sheepskin. And buyer beware, this is no diploma mill, it is a rigorous course of study, as Shinagel puts it:

" ... the high academic standards...were never compromised for earning a degree. Even though many more degrees are awarded now, it is important to bear in mind that the nearly 12,500 graduates to date represent a minute percentage of the 500,000 students who have taken classes...."many are called, but few are chosen."

This book is a fairly exhaustive study. It will definitely be of interest to folks who have been involved with the Extension School. But I think the casual reader can glean a great deal about the evolution of education in general, as well as the “Evening School." And hey, after reading the book, they may make haste to matriculate.

Review, Wisconsin Poets Laureate by Marilyn L. Taylor, Denise Sweet and Ellen Kort

Review, Wisconsin Poets Laureate by Marilyn L. Taylor, Denise Sweet and Ellen Kort, Marsh River Editions, Marshfield, Wisconsin, 29 pages, $10, 2009

By Barbara Bialick

It’s not often that you see a chapbook collection by not one but three poets laureate, these all from Wisconsin, going back to the year 2000 and up to the present. All three of these women have strong, creative, voices.

The current laureate is Marilyn L. Taylor, a contributing editor of The Writer magazine.

She taught English at UW-Milwaukee for 15 years in the honors program. In a poem dedicated to her students, “Subject to Change”, she writes in a villanelle: “They are so beautiful, and so very young/they seem almost to glitter with perfection…they’re traveling headlong/in that familiar, vertical direction/that coarsens beautiful, blackmails young…”.

Like the others, she gives us a flavor of Wisconsin, as in “Summer Sapphics”: “a rubber inner tube still can send us/drifting down a sinuous, tree-draped river/like the Wisconsin—“ where she imagines “It’s as if we’ve started evolving backwards: mammal, reptile, polliwog, protozoon—/toward that dark primordial soup we seem so eager to get to…”.

Denise Sweet was Wisconsin poet laureate from 2004-2008. A grandmother and faculty member at UW-Green Bay, she won The North American Natives First Book Award for Poetry, along with other publications and 100 public readings in the US, Canada, Mexico and Guatemala.

In “Palominos Near Tuba City”, she writes “I chase poems down like/wild mares into fenced corrals/…In “Sky Opens”, she calls out to “our relatives without names…”. She moves from “the star quilt/I hide under most nights” to musing “whether the stars we see now have been there all along…just like this/waiting to skid across /the sky, waiting to fall/into the blue canopy we occupy/…So I must think of them/as though no one has ever seen this before…”

The third poet laureate is Ellen Kort, who served from 2000 to 2004. She contributed all new poems for this collection. She has worked with her poetry as an expressive and healing art for cancer, grief, domestic abuse survivors and women in prison. Her poetry has also been performed by the New York City Dance Theater, among others, and she has traveled as a speaker, poet and workshop facilitator in the US, Australia, New Zealand and Japan.

She advises in “When You Write”, to “Do it with your eyes closed with the tips of your/ fingers circling air from the knot in your chest/from juices nerves and hollow bones. Write/ in the deepest well in water that licks your hand craves your salt…”

The publisher has wrapped the soft cover book in a heavy, colorful book cover apparently to elevate it to the status of a larger book. A good notion, as the poets laureate of Wisconsin are all good writers worthy of a second look.

Poet Djelloul Marbrook: A Poet Who Is Never Far From Algiers.

Poet Djelloul Marbrook: A Poet Who Is Never Far From Algiers.


I met Djelloul Marbrook through my friend Gloria Mindock, a fellow Somervillian and publisher. Marbrook wanted me to write a piece on Somerville's Bagel Bards and the literary scene in Somerville in general. I did and he published it, and later he sent me his book of poems "Far From Algiers", the 2007 winner of the Kent State University Stan and Tom Wick First Book Poetry Prize in Poetry. Marbrook has also had a distinguished career in Journalism writing for the Washington (DC) Star during the Watergate era, as well as The Baltimore Sun and other papers. His poetry has appeared widely and in top shelf literary journals like: The American Poetry Review, Istanbul Literary Review, The Ledge, and others. I spoke with Marbrook on my Somerville Community Access TV show " Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer."

Doug Holder: You were born in Algiers when the city was a French colonial outpost. Your mother was an expatriate American Artist. Your father, a Bedouin. Tell us a bit about your mother--and what was it like in Algiers at this time?

Djelloul Marbrook: I came to New York City as an infant. I have no memory at all of Algiers. I lived briefly in Algiers, then my mother went to England for a few months, then she came back to the U.S.

DH: What kind of influence did she have on you, the nascent poet?

DM: A big influence. I have a painting of hers on the cover of my book. Her name was Anita Rice and she was born right near this studio in Chelsea, Mass. She was one of 4children. She moved to New York City and started working as a fashion model, and then as a fashion "pirate." These women would model the design of the houses they worked for, but they would also memorize the other houses' designs. They would go back to the studios they worked for and report back about the other designs. In essence they pirated them. It was very lucrative. Many of the models were talented artists. And in fact some of them were art students like my mother. She used the money she made to go to France to study art. Eventually she wound up in Algiers, which at the time had several large art colonies. Before this she lived in a city that was literally the gateway to the Sahara and she fell in love with this famous Bedouin tribe. She met my father, who was a member of this tribe, and got into a romantic triangle with my father and his girlfriend. It was an exotic beginning but my life has been rather pedestrian in comparison since.

It seemed my father didn't want to leave his companion. He in effect didn't take responsibility for me. My mother took me back to New York City. She left me with my grandmother in Brooklyn. They raised me for the first five years of my life. And my mother continued her art studies in Manhattan, and also taught at the Art Students League. When I was five she sent me to a boarding school on Long Island where I stayed for 11 years. So I really only lived with my mother for three years. She married a very successful Sicilian immigrant. He sent me to prep school and college.

My mother's art did have an influence on me. Most of her paintings I have in my head, the way some poets always have some poets in their heads.

DH: You started writing poems when you were 14 while roaming around Manhattan. You stopped for awhile and began writing again at 67 after 911. What inspired you to write at both times?

DM: I always read a lot of poetry. The boarding school I went to was British. And they were very big in the arts. I knew the poetry of Oliver Goldsmith, I could recite Andrew Marvel, and so forth. So when I got to New York City, and discovered all the Americans, this was a huge revelation. It was quite exciting. It was a good experience. I actually continued to write poetry into my 30's. And after I had a series of breakdowns, I realized at this time that I was hiding behind the opacity of the language of my poetry.

I was horrified by 911. I was walking endlessly around the city-trying to get at the enormity of the situation. I had a notebook in my pocket to take notes, but I found these notes were lines of poetry. I started out just being deeply offended by the attack. I was not thinking about my own heritage. The American response of”Let's kill them all!" reminded me of my own feelings of not always being welcomed in my own country. I think America, even now, is in denial about its nativist impulses. If you look at the pictures that came out of Washington you see overweight, old, white men, guys who sent an army to Iraq and Afghanistan, an army that looks like our United Nations army. The men who send the troops are not part of this diverse demographic.

DH: Did your poetry act as a catharsis to this?

DM: No. But there was a realization that for me a poem is an algorithim which I came to comprehend anything that was on my mind for the moment. It helped me have a new understanding of poetry in my own life.

DH: In Henry Roth's "Call It Sleep," he writes of the lyrical beauty of the old world culture a young Jewish boy experiences while assimilating in the melting pot of New York City in the 1920's. Was this in a way why you wrote "Far From Algiers"-- a way to reclaim your culture, your roots?

DM: I was thoroughly assimilated. I grew up among British children who were sent here for schooling. I didn't have any roots that I remember. My mother renounced her former affection for Arab culture. My mother literally erased my father. I knew that my father was a Bedouin, so naturally I was curious about it. I had minored in Arab history at Columbia, so I had certain knowledge. I was curious. My name Djelloul has served to isolate me at times. People always stumbled over a foreign name. So it was a constant reminder to me of my otherness.

The role that Arabs played in Western Society was that as Jung wrote: "The Dark Other." There is nothing new about the clash with Arabs; it is a very old conflict. I don't really consider myself an Arab-American because I grew up in Wasp culture. I can't reclaim my culture but I can learn about it.



Far from Algiers

An unnamed race slips by
ethnographer and xenophobe,
roiling bowels and hackles,
electrifying space.

Genomes tell us nothing
about our overlords;
we know we're an underclass
to these corsairs and otherlings.

They break our doors at night,
take our wives and children,
foul our consensuses with ideas
and scat full-sail on glassy seas.

Though we take them to our beds
they're unwelcome in our churches;
they profane our certainties
and stir up gifts renounced.

South of every guarded circle
is a Barbary where our rules
stand on their heads and dance
to tunes of turbans and scimitars.

Their ships fly no flags until
it's far too late and we're engaged
in the kind of bloodiness youth
prays for to spite the social good.

Every simpleminded day
guards against kidnappers,
every complacency has its dey
fat on ransom in some Algiers.

If there were no Barbary Coast
to haunt our dreams and genes
we'd eat potatoes, bed our cousins
and be as stupid as we want to be.

Advertise and Support The Somerville News Writers Festival

Advertise and support The Somerville News Writers Festival


http://somervillenewswritersfestival.com



Support this great event by advertising in the program booklet for The Somerville News Writers Festival VII. The event will be held on 11/14 and this year our features include Rick Moody, John Buffalo Mailer, Margot Livesey, Steve Almond, Frank Bidart and Sam Cornish. It will be held at The Center for Arts at the Armory in Somerville and will feature an afternoon book fair before the evening readings which should reach thousands of potential targets.

The rates are $100 for a full-page and $50 for a half page ad. You will also receive exposure from the Somerville News which reaches 8000 people per week. Deadline is 9/25. Contact Timothy Gager, ctgager37@yahoo.com

Paul Steven Stone Interviews Rick Moody: Featured Reader at the Somerville News Writers Festival Nov 14, 2009.

Paul Steven Stone Interviews Rick Moody: Featured Reader at the Somerville News Writers Festival Nov 14, 2009.

Rick Moody, successful novelist and chronicler of the American zeitgeist (“Garden State”, “The Ice Storm” and “Purple America”) took a few moments to speak with us. Rick is one of the featured notables at the Somerville News Writers Festival, Saturday, November 14. Keep an eye out for his latest novel, a comedic work titled, “The Four Fingers of Death.”

Q: Tell us a little something of your writing discipline…how do you approach starting a new book?

RM: It sort of approaches me, really. I am somewhat undisciplined. An idea kind of seizes me, usually without much preparation, and then I go into this long period of turning it over in my mind, sometimes for months. Thinking, rethinking. When I finally have time to address it, it has often been marinating for a long time. Six months, maybe, sometimes a year.



Q: How much of the nascent book is already plotted out in your mind? How much do you rely on your ‘muse’ for guidance or inspiration as the story progresses?

RM: I never plot, at all. I let the story go where it wants to go. And then I assess l the damage during the editing phase.



Q: I spent 12 years writing my novel, but there were many periods where I took a break—sometimes for months—other periods where I felt compelled to sit at the computer whenever I could get home. How long does it usually take you to complete a novel, or something like your memoir “The Black Veil”? And what is the writing experience like?
Does it flow smoothly or are there starts and stops?

RM: Always starts and stops, always periods of despair and demoralization. But some periods of enjoyment and satisfaction too. They have each gone their own way, so there's no set length of time for composition. THE ICE STORM took 14 months. The new one, the just finished one, took four years.



Q: I noticed in “The Diviners” that you begin the book with a prologue, titled “Opening Credits and Theme Music”, that runs 12 pages and is essentially a travelogue following the sun as it rushes to rise around the globe. First, do you think it was risky, in the sense of holding onto your readers’ interest, to delay telling your story? Or was the literary or storytelling reward worth taking the risk?

RM: Boy, have I done things more risky than that! People are free to read something else if they find that bit too demanding. They're probably not going to like the rest if they don't like the prologue, so it's a truth-in-advertising approach.



Q: I must tell you I am in awe of your ability to construct sentences and imbue them with such emotion and cultural richness. Have you always had such facility with words? When did you first realize you had a calling as a writer? How did you learn?

RM: Thanks! I don't know that I have such facility, but it's nice of you to say so. And I never really thought of myself as a writer, but just as someone who read a lot and was passionate about books. The writing came out of my love of reading. And the craft of it came not only from the books I’ve read, but from the many, many great teachers I have had.



Q: Which of your works is your favorite and why?

RM: They all disappoint me. But I have a tendency to like the most recent one, so I like this one I just finished pretty well. It's a comedy called THE FOUR FINGERS OF DEATH.


• Paul Steven Stone is the author of “Or So It Seems,” and “How To Train A Rock.” He is the Creative Director of W.B. Mason in Boston, Mass.


THE SOMERVILLE NEWS WRITERS FESTIVAL: http://somervillenewswritersfestival.com

Spirit Bridges: Coming of Age in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taipei, Madrid, and New York City in the 60’s.: A Memoir by Li Mo.

(Li Mo)


Spirit Bridges: Coming of Age in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taipei, Madrid, and New York City in the 60’s.: A Memoir by Li Mo. $15 spiritbridges@gmail.com

This book has an exceedingly long title, and perhaps it befits this memoir by Cambridge, Mass writer and member of Somerville’s Bagel Bards Li Mo. Mo has lived, loved and lost in more places than most of us ever dreamed of, and she tells her (At times harrowing) tale of becoming an artist with the skills of a consummate storyteller. And Mo tells it like it is as she writes: “The opening of one’s self is the hardest work an artist undertakes.” Indeed Mo has opened herself, at times like a gaping wound, to give us a didactic on what it is to survive and thrive on one’s own terms.

Mo, who is also member of the Streetfleet women, a writers’ group that has an active Somerville-based branch, was born in China, lived in Shanghi (Where her father was imprisoned as a political prisoner and later executed), fled with her mother to Hong- Kong, Taipei, Madrid, and later to the lower east side of New York City. Eventually she wound up in Cambridge, Mass. She always had an affinity for the arts. Her mother a writer, and a steady and central presence in her life, instilled in her a love and appreciation of Chinese culture, art, and literature. This proved to be an anchor to a profoundly alienated Chinese girl who was at times lost to depression, poverty, and even Narcolepsy.

In this book there are rich, evocative descriptions of ethnic cuisine, poems that capture the sights, sounds and intense feeling experienced by Mo, a girl/woman in a perpetual state of Diaspora. In “To Fei Yen/Flying Swallow” Mo writes about an ancient man she befriended. He owned a Chinese laundry on Mott St. in Chinatown in NYC:

“ I eat tangerines sip Dragon Well
stare into the lone eye of a goldfish
think of you in a dark room on Mott Street
moon face, starry eyes, cherry mouth,
light peal of laughter
your hand delicately fingering
a blue-flowered porcelain cup
emptying Dragon Well
weaving another hand in the air
singsong talking about
the joy of three goldfish

on a full moon’s night
an invisible red thread of love
tied together our wrists
our souls-our next life…”

If you were a kid like me, the only Chinese culture you were exposed to was column 1, 2 or 3 inside the menu at the local Chow Mein Inn. In this book you will get authentic servings of the people and culture’s depth, stoicism, forget the hackneyed egg roll. This book works as a memoir, a story of inspiration, and a work of literature. It is a must for anyone who must survive, and hopefully thrive.

Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update

The Us, by Joan Houlihan

The Us, by Joan Houlihan
Tupelo Press. $16.95

Review by Kirk Etherton


Writing in the September, 2006 issue of “Poetry,” John Barr declared that “...American poetry is ready for something new because our poets have been writing in the same way for a long time now...the art form is no longer equal to the reality surrounding it.” He goes on to point out the lack of modern poetry in any number of important areas, from high school classrooms to the mainstream media. Barr points to careerism—poets writing primarily in order to impress other poets, and not necessarily anyone else—as one of the main problems.

Joan Houlihan’s new book The Us is truly Something New, in all the best ways: it is completely original, thought-provoking, timeless, and written in a way such that any intelligent reader—from the pre-undergraduate to the most jaded professional poet—will quickly be captivated and intrigued.

The Us is a novel-like sequence of poems spoken in a collective voice. “Us” is identified at the outset as a “group of primitive people who speak as one.” Us is comprised of six individuals, including “father” (leader of the us), “ay” (oldest son of father), “brae” (the second son) and “g’wen” (the wife and mother). What follows is a description of everyday life, travels, pivotal events, successes and setbacks faced by this tribe of hunter-gatherers as they make their way in the world—a world which includes a stronger, more advanced group (“Thems”), with whom they can exist only as slaves.

Houlihan has achieved something remarkable in the way the Us speak to us: you may feel as though you’ve stumbled across something written thousands of years ago in an unknown language—something almost pre-literate you can, for some reason, understand without difficulty. The writing manages to be simultaneously primitive and poetic. (The last place I encountered language this unexpected was in the beginning of The Sound and the Fury. )

In a time when many poets choose to write in a manner that is either gratuitously self-involved or densely overwrought to the point of near opacity, Houlihan comes as a hurricane of fresh air, followed by the calm after the storm. By stripping away all that is pretentious, predictable or simply unnecessary, this poet has opened the way for all sorts of essential human predicaments to be spoken of in a radically simple and memorable way. Here, the poem “Had labor and more,” describes the experience of ay (the oldest son) as a slave of thems:

Had labor and more: gnarl and beard, close to the sun and shiver.
Had dirt and hole, hand-hurt and plow, cut, bend and dig.
Had days and no end.
Had kneel. Had burn. Had sore and stings and many.
Had keep of the tongue, no kin.
Had stone-mouth, suffer and weather.
Had ay, and ay alone.

One of the great things about The Us is how it opens the way for reflection and discussion on any number of topics—from language and ritual to violence, empathy, grief, human rights and cultural differences. This collection of poems belongs in high school and college classrooms, book groups, and on the shelf alongside the works of Noam Chomsky, Seamus Heaney, Bruce Chatwin, Paul Theroux and Margaret Mead (among others).

--Kirk Etherton

The Madras Press- A Non-Profit Press that will be profitable for charities

From Publisher: Sumanth Prabhaker



This winter will see the launch of Madras Press, a non-profit publisher of individually bound short stories and novellas. The format of the books will provide readers with the opportunity to experience a story on its own, with no advertisements or unrelated articles surrounding it; this will also provide a home for stories that are often arbitrarily ignored by commercial publishing outfits, whether because they’re too long for magazines but not trade-book length, or because they don’t resemble certain other stories. These are clumsy, ill-fitting stories made perfect when read in the simplest possible way.

Published in regular series of four, the books will serve as fundraising efforts for a growing list of charitable organizations. Each author has selected a beneficiary to which all net proceeds generated from the sales of his or her book will be donated; they include organizations dedicated to environmental protection, community development, human services, and much more.

Starting October 1, the first series of books can be pre-ordered on the press’s website, www.madraspress.com. These titles will include stories by Aimee Bender, Trinie Dalton, Rebecca Lee, and Sumanth Prabhaker. The books will ship in early December, and the next series¬—including stories by Joy Williams and Yoko Ogawa—will soon follow. At the online store you can also subscribe, two series at a time, to receive new releases at a discounted rate. Additionally, you can find Madras Press titles at independent bookstores around the US.

About Madras Press authors:

Aimee Bender is the author of the story collections The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and Willful Creatures and the novel An Invisible Sign of My Own.

Trinie Dalton is the author of the story collection Wide-Eyed and the editor of Dear New Girl or Whatever Your Name Is, an art book composed of notes confiscated from students, and of MYTHTYM, an anthology of essays on unicorns, werewolves, and the horror genre.

Rebecca Lee is the author of the novel The City Is a Rising Tide. She teaches at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

Yoko Ogawa has published numerous books in Japan. Recently, Picador released two of them in the US: The Diving Pool, a collection of three novellas, and The Housekeeper and the Professor, a novel. Ogawa has won every major Japanese literary award.

Sumanth Prabhaker is the founding editor of Madras Press.

Joy Williams is the author of many books, including The Quick and the Dead, Ill Nature, and Honored Guest. Among the awards her work has garnered are the Harold and Mildred Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Rea Award for the Short Story.

For further information, contact Sumanth Prabhaker: sumanth@madraspress.com.
You can find Madras Press on Facebook at www.facebook.com/pages/Madras-Press/103821053971, on Twitter at www.twitter.com/madraspress, and, starting October 1, online at www.madraspress.com.

Poet Tino Villanueva to read at The Somerville News Writers Festival Nov. 14, 2009

Poet Tino Villanueva to read at The Somerville News Writers Festival November 14, 2009 7pm at the Armory Arts Center

By Doug Holder

The Somerville News Writers Festival is hitting its seventh year thanks to the folks at The Somerville News, Tim Gager, and the spanking new Armory Arts Center in Somerville. This year Tim has secured the services of such writers as Rick Moody, John Buffalo Mailer (that’s right Norman’s son), Steve Almond, Margo Livesey, and Kim Chuinquee. I had the pleasure of booking poets Sam Cornish, Richard Hoffman, Tam Lin Neville, Frank Bidart, and Tino Villanueva. Villanueva is a Senior Lecturer of Romance Languages at Boston University, and recognized as one of the most important Chicano voices today, according to the The Texas Observer. The noted poet Martín Espada opined that Villanueva was “…central to the vibrant Hispanic literary scene that began flourishing in Boston during the 8o’s.” Indeed Villanueva has no doubt influenced a whole generation of Latino writers.

Villanueva, who had youthful aspirations to be a baseball player, published in Boston in the 1980s an influential internationally focused literary magazine Imagine, and has published a number of critically acclaimed poetry collections, as well as works of criticism on Spanish poetry. His collection Scene from the Movie GIANT won a 1994 American Book Award. His other books include: Primera causa/First Cause (translated by Lisa Horowitz) Shaking off the Dark, Chronicle of My Worst Years, and others. I had the opportunity to catch up with Villanueva before he started his busy teaching schedule at Boston University.

DOUG HOLDER: You have completed a set of thirty-two poems titled: So Spoke Penelope (poems based on Homer's Odyssey) that is written from the point of view of Queen Penelope, Odysseus's wife. Penelope waited 20 years for Odysseus' return from the Trojan War. Do you think there are contemporary applications for the modern woman today considering we are in a constant of war in Iraq and Afghanistan?

TINO VILLANUEVA: In a couple of places Penelope does comment on the war--you bet there's a connection with our current involvement in two wars. In the final analysis, she holds an anti-war attitude which is also part of her agony and lament, asking at one point: “Cannot the gods bring on all-out peace? / Enough with this madness." And a bit later: "people have not always relished war, / and the rage of armies clashing gives me pain."

Beyond that, the book is about absence, and having to wait twenty years makes her--for all intents and purposes--a war widow, and Odysseus an M. I. A. These are, certainly, two consequences of war, and it's my belief American readers will identify with Penelope's predicament, especially those whose memory runs from the Korean War onward to this moment of Iraq and Afghanistan. In Penelope's case, she's quite fortunate her husband returns.

DH: You really dig deep into the mind of Penelope--her dream state, mind vs. body, what she prays for, etc. You wrote that Homer only gives us glimpses into her mind set. Was this because during this era in history a woman's mind was not deemed worthy of a lengthy exegesis?

TV: This may be true, but not so fast--give Homer some credit. In The Odyssey, Penelope is regarded as "wise Penelope." She is shrewd, smart, and wily, I would say, enough to match wits with Odysseus when he finally shows up (disguised as an old man) at the palace in Ithaca.

Now then, I was being very specific: what I said is that Homer does not reveal much about Penelope's ideas on weaving. It would've been quite extraordinary if the poet had given us a glimpse into her views on the craft on working with wool--Penelope as weaver, Penelope as artist, as it were. In more than a couple of my poems she launches into this facet of herself, especially in these two: "In Color and in Cloth" and "A Width of Cloth."

DH: You said in The Texas Observer that you didn't want to live in a literary ghetto. At any time in your career were you being forced into that direction?

TV: The quote actually says, "literary barrio." And it's true that, in the past several magazines / journals have asked me to contribute to their "Chicano Issue," let's say, or their "Latino Issue," when, really--if my work is of any merit--they should simply invite me to the mainstream pages they publish the rest of the time. I appreciate that a journal would want to showcase my poems, but I bristle a bit when editors try to pigeon-hole me. I don't always write about the Chicano reality, you know. As a poet, I write on many subjects; I'm not a one-trick pony. Not unlike Denise Levertov's strong conviction of wanting to be invited to read her work for being a poet, not for being a woman.

DH: You are an accomplished artist. I have seen your prints in a number of lit mags. How did this art develop? Is it in confluence with your poetry? Whom are you influenced by?

TV: I don't know if I deserve the "accomplished artist" label, but for me it started summer of 1973 when I went to see an exhibit of William Blake's watercolors at the Museum of Fine Arts here in Boston. I had seen several ads around town for the exhibit, and was curious as to this Blake fellow who had the same name as the poet I'd read as an undergraduate at Southwest Texas State University. Could it be the same person, I wondered. That drew me to the MFA one day in August, and what a surprise--a poet whose poems I admired turned out to be a painter as well. That opened my mind to the idea one could possess two creative outlets, could be a writer "and" a painter at the same time. Quite a revelation that was, believe me--it changed the direction of my creative life, to be sure.

So I went out and purchased a watercolor set, some brushes and the appropriate paper, but soon thereafter, to my dismay, I discovered that watercolors are not that easy to master. All the more respect I poured on Mr. Blake. But what a let down for me. I have to say I squarely faced what could've been a ego-busting setback by promptly promoting myself to acrylics, and then to oils, the results of my efforts with these media being more satisfactory. Then I moved on to pastels, and wound up working with collage, and my own mixed-media of sorts: a combination of watercolors, crayon, and pencil and pen. Journals such as Green Mountains Review, and TriQuarterly have displayed my art work on their covers. And in 2003 Parnassus published one of my drawings in its inside pages. TriQuarterly, I remember, wanted to buy Dreamscape (1989), the painting they'd published, but I declined. It hangs proudly in my livingroom. As to the painters I mostly gravitate towards, and whose work holds my undivided attention: Kandinsky, Klee, Miró, any of the Futurists, plus Picasso and Braque for their Cubist view of life.


IN COLOR AND IN CLOTH


It’s done…finished.
Three days ago, as an impatient sun was dropping fast
behind the sea,
and a starlit sky appeared, I finished it—
a piece of cloth in wool that took too long to weave.
Half a year dragged on, but at last I have it:
the likeness of Odysseus,
splendid husband and gentle father to his infant son.
One day I managed from early dawn to dusk,
then until the brightness of the morning shone again
to keep on weaving, to get it right. And there it is
folded up across the bed in color and in cloth.

Now, when the sting of absence is too much,
when the weariness of why-keep-waiting wears me out,
I reach for it to satisfy my love-struck eyes.
The background: I’ve simply made it dark,
against which stands Odysseus looking rapt into my eyes.
Beside us—our longest table in the palace hall, and
because he’s speaking to me,
I gave him speaking lips. He’s telling me he doesn’t
care for war, that he loves me “to the Pleiades and back.”
In turn, I’m offering wine to him from my wooden bowl.
A long pose from each of us,
standing there,
is what I remember most: he and I glowing
from two bowls of sweet and mellow wine.

Need I say I pleasure in bringing out this piece of cloth—
such felicity unfolding it,
running my hands over it, and embracing
both ourselves each time.

—Tino Villanueva

Appleseeds--- Poetry anthology from Sacred Fools Press

Appleseeds
$10.00
Sacred Fools Press
Johnston, RI
www.sacredfoolspress.wordpress.com

Review by Renee Schwiesow


Anchored by poems honoring Johnny Appleseed, the anthology “Appleseeds,” a Sacred Fools Press book edited by Melissa Guillet, germinates scattered seeds page by page which offer us blossoms of poetry that produce the fruit of Americana.

The compilation weaves its way across our nation with highways of words that speak to the many, varied and honored traditions and cultures that have become part of our nation’s quilt. Our American family is represented in a patchwork of color, much as Michele Sackman posits in “The Quilting Bee.”

These small pieces of cloth pieced and sown onto a white
cotton top

creating memories. . .

Guillet has artfully chosen the pieces needed to fashion this quilt on paper. And a beautiful quilt of talented poets “Appleseeds” is. What remains with me are the people showcased in the lines and stanzas of the work, the people who are at the heart of every American hour. John Flynn takes us back to the North End of Boston in the early 60’s with his “In Praise of Boston Aunts.”

In The European restaurant
Perry Como and Vaughn Monroe
croon out of the jukebox.
Aunts Louise, Etta, and Anna play hopscotch.
I trace them back to Holy Days,
Monsignors and hopeful pews,
Masses in Latin when weddings were easier
to trust.

Lewis Gardner relates another Boston aunt story in the humorous “A Gift from Great-Aunt Prudence.” In the mid-60’s, during a period of “liberated consciousness,” Great-Aunt Prudence innocently makes a purchase of hand-carved hands with their middle-finger upraised:

One night a little old lady –
since this was Boston, a very Bostonian
old lady – brought six of them
to my counter. “Such lovely ring holders,”
she said to me, “just the thing
for my grandnephews this Christmas.”

While aunts and mothers, grandmothers and sisters-in-law star the pages of the book, it is not only the members of biological family that swell our emotions: Sheila Mullen Twyman breaks our heart only as Sheila Mullen Twyman can with her soulful, “On the Fourth Day,” a southern Spiritual sang to the tune of the New Orleans Flood in 2005.

He was always amazed his lips could blow his horn
as sweet and easy as spitting out cherry pits.
He marveled at the way his long fingers
could flutter endlessly, effortlessly
up and down on the valves
redirecting his breath from the lead pipe
through the brass innards and out the flared bell.

But now his lips are cracked, his hands shaky
from too long sitting in putrid waters,
in the heavy, humid air that takes his breath away.
Not like those nights he used to sit for hours
playing through clouds of weed
smelling smoldering tobacco and
spilled bourbon drying on tabletops.
Lord, I been sitting in this tree
like a parrot on a perch for days now. . .
ain’t nobody coming for me?

And through Sheila’s empathic understanding, we take him; we take his plight to the bosom of “family” too.

I cannot end without giving Laura Lee Washburn’s ode, entitled “S & H Green Stamps,” a mention. A must read for those of us whose tongues have not forgotten the bitter taste of the glue that was tolerated happily as the book pages swelled with the stamps and the promise of iron stone dishes or Teflon pans came closer to reality. Yes, those S & H stamps are, too, an oft-remembered part of what makes this land, the land that was made for you and me, America.

Transcending the Dilemma, Blowing out the Moon, the poetry of Philip Hasouris

Transcending the Dilemma, Blowing out the Moon, the poetry of Philip Hasouris


article by Michael T. Steffen


There is something to be said, in this age of great technical production, of an art that sinks through the concern for its production to attain the primary language of human thought in crisis, the self-doubt and humility exemplified in the poems of Philip Hasouris in his new book Blow out the Moon.

Fred Marchant has called Hasouris “unflinching, devoted and determined,” and indeed Hasouris’s approach is that of a documentary film maker, close inside, though not literary like James Joyce and T.S. Eliot, reminiscent of those masters of Modernism in his side-stepping of conventional written language to trace the stream of his thoughts as they come in their anti-heroic uncertainty, contradiction and even exacerbation at the limits of comprehending experience.

In the middle of the night
I felt you leave,
the pillow empty,
hollow sound of the clock echoed time.

It was just me crying.
It was just you closing the door.

The morning wept on the outside world
no rainbows,
empty sound of nothing
edged through my body.

It was just me walking into walls,
trying to find my way
stumbling graceless into the unknown,
demanding to make sense.

Again and again thrown into similar dilemmas of the spirit [of a particular context clarified by commentary from other scholars and writers throughout the book] Hasouris copes and abides with admirable dedication to his difficult inspiration, by putting words to his pain and wonder, regardless of expectations or satisfaction.

Readers find fruit in breaking down predeterminations on any author they read and live with for a time. The survival of a love documented by Blow out the Moon ultimately attests to how Hasouris’s special moments with poetry, that mirror he sits at, is near and intimate and binding to us all, transcending the permutations of our lives to the ground fact and mystery of our being.

Philip Hasouris “has been featured at many local and national venues. He was founder of the performance group, Spiritous, which combined poetry, music, and movement. He has performed with a variety of musicians in improvisational jazz/poetry, collaborated in the making of the CD, Dreams and Schemes, and a second CD with music by Adam Mujica, Cross the Double Line, and published a chapbook, Swimming Alone.

“With fellow poet, James G.H. Moore, Philip coproduced the poetry video series P.L.A.C.E.S. (Poetic Language Artful Communication Elemental Speech), filming poets in their homes, creative space and natural surroundings, giving the audience a virtual tour of the inner workings of poetry.

“Philip is the Co-host of the Brockton Library Poetry Series, www.gbspa.org.”

Blowing out the Moon by Philip Hasouris is available for $15 from
Beachcomber Press
27 Strawberry Lane
Scituate, MA 02066

A Cup of Comfort for Breast Cancer Survivors

A Cup of Comfort for Breast Cancer Survivors
$9.95
Adams Media, Avon, MA
www.adamsmedia.com and www.cupofcomfort.com


Review by Rene Schwiesow

It is a yearly inconvenience, the mammogram. First one, then the other breast clamped in between cold plates, flattened, not into a pancake, but a crepe. Yet it is this yearly inconvenience that offers the authors of “A Cup of Comfort for Breast Cancer Survivors,” the opportunity to share their stories. As the subtitle says, the book is full of inspiring words that celebrate the courage and triumph of woman, man, family and friends over breast cancer. Here, the saying it takes a village to raise a child expands itself into it takes a village to birth a new life, to grow in ways previously unimagined as these woman have.

My initial reaction to the first few stories was fearful and sad and sitting in the doctor’s office waiting for a routine check-up, I wondered if bringing the book to read had been a grave mistake. I mean who wants to read about long-term illness, about loss of hair, about painful recovery when waiting to see a doctor? Indeed, who wants to read such material anytime? Yet, though tears leaked their way out and rolled down my cheeks despite my attempts at swiping them away, it only took those first few tales to uncover the real story and the depth of honesty brought realization. The depth of honesty made it very clear that the common bond those diagnosed with breast cancer have is one that will never be severed. These are soul sisters who can and do show us how to live.

A few years ago, I was excited to have two out-of-state girlfriends visit me. We spent a couple of relatively sleepless days in laughter, playing tourist, rehashing old parties, sharing stories about our children in preschool, then elementary school and beyond. On the last of our evenings together while we sat on my screen porch, each wrapped in a blanket on a crisp October evening, two of us received the news that the third had breast cancer. She was clear and articulate in her goal of overcoming the dreaded diagnosis. Her breast cancer had been detected in the very early stages and treatment allowed us to be together again, just two years ago. This book is a legacy for the millions of women who share her story.

Maria Judge, who was born in Germany and raised in Ireland, Chili and India, is a Boston area writer and survivor of breast cancer. In her story, between the covers of this Cup of Comfort book, Maria writes with conviction and courage. She tells the tale experienced by many who sit in the chemo chair, while red poison flows into them, killing deadly cancer cells but leaving them weak and without hair. Maria speaks candidly but with humor about confronting her hair loss, preparing herself to let go of her tresses bit by bit, about the process of acceptance and the vulnerability and insecurity one goes through to get there. She not only writes it, but also lived it admirably. With love, support, Dove bars and Dolly Parton wigs, Maria survived her deepest fears and while she may sport a few physical scars, she spins any psychological trauma into reminders that she has endured, and that not even the tears, could scar her survivor spirit.

But before you write this off as a chick-book, the men that have put pen to the page in this book will set you off on another swell of emotion. These men are the wind beneath the wings of their cancer diagnosed wives, mothers or girlfriends. And they are a reminder to all of us that breast cancer is not just a woman’s disease. It is a disease that affects all members of a person’s family as well as their co-workers and friends. It does, indeed, take a village and what an inspiration these stories are for us to embrace those who are part of our lives. What an inspiration for all of us to live now, in the moment, when it counts.

Rene Schwiesow, co-owns an online poetry forum (www.poemtrain.com) and is a co-host for The Art of Words: Mike Amado Memorial Poetry Series in Plymouth, MA. Rene can be reached at duetsdove@yahoo.com

What Americans can learn from Gypsy culture: A talk by Sonia Meyer

What Americans can learn from Gypsy culture









Littleton Massachusetts – September 1 2009 –Wilderness House Literary Review is pleased to announce a one hour lecture by noted Gypsy (Roma) scholar Sonia Meyer at 7:00 P. M. on October 14 2009 at the Out of the Blue Gallery in Cambridge Massachusetts. Tickets are $5.00 at the door.

Sonia Meyer will speak about the Roma (Gypsy) culture and what we can learn from them in this high tech, money-worshipping society. She hopes the audience look inside the Gypsies self-exiled world, and come to realize that their freedom is available to all of us.

Sonia Meyer was born in Cologne, Germany in 1938 and spent her formative years living in the woods among partisan and Gypsy fighters during WWII. She has been fascinated by Gypsies, or the Roma people ever since becoming a self-educated scholar of Roma (Gypsy) culture.

Meyer, who may indeed be part Gypsy herself has been intrigued by the freedom, the art, and the celebration of magic and mysticism of the Roma people. She encountered them throughout her travels in Europe, and struck up fascinating conversations with these enigmatic vagabonds. She lived much of her life like a Gypsy, moving from city to city across Europe, and eventually landing in the states. In Geneva she worked with Jewish refugees, she spent time with the Bedouins in the Negev desert, eventually moving to the States.

In the narrow and winding stacks of the Widener Library at Harvard she discovered a translation by Matteo Maximoff, Russian Gypsy, which concerned Russian nomadic Gypsies. She visited him, and traveled to Macedonia to visit the so-called “Queen of the Gypsies,” and lived with a family in the Gypsy section of Skopje where the Gypsies were well off.

She is the author of a novel to be published in the Summer of 2010. “Dosha” is about a Gypsy girl. The novel spans her childhood spent with Russian partisans in Polish forests to her defection during Khrushchev’s visit to Helsinki on June 6, 1957 “Dosha” will be published by Wilderness House Press (www.wildernesshousepress.com) and will be excerpted in the spring issue of Wilderness House Literary Review (www.whlreview.com ). For further information see www.soniameyer.com.

For further information contact Steve Glines (sglines@industrialmyth.com ) 978-800-1625 – Industrial Myth & Magic (www.industrialmyth.com ) is a public relations firm specializing in literary persona and events.

The Soil of Industry by Ezra Ben-Meir

The Soil of Industry
by: Ezra Ben-Meir
Reviewed by: E. Hanson

Ezra Ben-Meir is, I am ashamed to admit the first Israeli poet I have read. His book, The Soil of Industry, is of interest on many levels. First, it is about a finite space of time (1978-1991); this said, these thirteen years of themed poetry deal with his great love of his work and with his day-to-day living.
I would like to compare a visual artist to a word artist because of their very different approaches to their art. Henri Rousseau who was a provincial man, (termed 'a primitive' by most), was a great visual artist; who worked as a postal worker in Paris. His day-to-day existance was, one can only imagine, to be repetitive and deadening. Rousseau used escapism as a theme for his art. ie. The Dream (the lady and the tiger painting at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City)
Unlike Rousseau, Mr. Ben-Meir hunkers down and in this book of verse doesn't try to escape, but he does quite the reverse, he pays homage to his life as a metal worker.
Walt Whitman has written volumes on this theme of the common man. So I would say that this loyalty and his struggle to accurately convey in poetry these thirteen years is admirable, this is what I like about him.
He is a traditionalist in his approach, trying out many different forms as a vehicle for this homage. He writes about what he knows on an intense and intimate level.
I enjoyed the last poem in this collection, "The Hardness Tester", because, like E.E. Cummings, Mr. Ben-Meir uses the visual form of concrete poetry to reinforce his poem. He has woven technical information with the lyric. ie. And I quote:

"...A world never to
glisten lustre on human hands
ordered and reordered
properties, seg-
regated and
aggregated
by the
Standard Hardness
Tests"

In conclusion, this reviewer would like to state that Mr. Ben-Meir juxtaposes human vulnerability with the power of metal and I will be very interested to read more than this "five percent" of his poetry. I had an e-mail correspondence between myself and Ezra Ben-Meir in which Mr. Ben-Meir states that he is "contemporary". However I will still stick to my original statement that I feel Mr Ben-Meir is a traditionalist. ie. On his web site one can find some haiku such as (281) haiku, "The Earth Cried", because not only in form, but also in content and in the heart of the matter, Ezra is a traditionalist in the finest form.

Reviewed by: Elizabeth Hanson

Poetry That Is Pure Fluff...

Poetry That Is Pure Fluff...

On an oppressively hot morning in August I met with Mimi Graney at one of my haunts in Union Square, Somerville: Bloc 11, a quite cafe (in the morning at least), and an ideal refuge from the heat. Graney is the executive director of "Union Square Main Streets," an organization whose mission statement is to (according to their website): " Increase the vibrancy of Union Square's business district and surrounding neighborhoods through active community collaboration."

Graney dropped by to tell me about the 4th Annual Fluff Festival (Sept. 26 --4 to 7 PM) to be held in Union Square Somerville. This iconoclastic celebration honors the late Somervillian Archibald Query, who invented Marshmallow Fluff, a sticky remnant of our gourmand childhood years ago. What interested the poet in me is that Graney and her band have the idea to have a Limerick and Poetry contest to be judged by the audience during the festival.

A number of respected local poets will select the poems to be voted on. Graney said tongue in cheek (Or perhaps not) that the entries for the contest should deal with the "Fluffernutter" (The sandwich composed of the said Fluff) and the dramatic tension between Sweet Fluff, salty peanut butter, wondrous bread, and jealous jelly! Well, I must admit I almost choked on my bagel hearing that one.

Graney has been a Somerville resident for 20 years, is a graduate of the Weston Jesuit School of Theology, and formerly headed Somerville Community Access TV. She said her community outreach is natural extension for her divinity studies. She is a lover of our city and all that it has to offer.

Graney said the winning poets will read from their work at the festival, the winning poems will be printed in The Somerville News' "Lyrical Somerville" column, and the poets will get a "silly" trophy--perhaps with a Fluff jar attached.

Go to: http://www.unionsquaremain.org for more information.

Fred Marchant: A Happy Person: A Turbulent Poet

Fred Marchant: A Happy Person: A Turbulent Poet

Poet Fred Marchant is not stingy with a smile, or the hail-fellow-well met. He is a gracious and thoughtful subject for an interview. Although Marchant told me he is a happy person, he said there is turbulence in his life and in his poetry. He describes his new collection of poetry from the Graywolf Press "The Looking House" as having many poems that can only be described as harsh.

Marchant has a considerable number of accomplishments under his belt. He is the editor of “Another World Instead: The Early Poems of William Stafford, 1937-1947,” as well as being the author of four books of poetry, the most recent: "The Looking House" from Graywolf Press. Marchant teaches at Suffolk University in Boston, and founded the Suffolk University Poetry Center. He has been a recipient of fellowships from the Ucross Foundation, the Yaddo Foundation, and the McDowell Colony. I talked with him on my Somerville Community Access TV Show: "Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer."

Doug Holder: William Stafford was a conscientious objector during World War 2, you were during the Vietnam War, is this in some way the reason you were attracted to his work?

Fred Marchant: Yes. As a ground level truth. I knew his poetry before I knew the biographical fact. But when I read that biographical fact it amplified his poetry and it made more sense. And then over the years it has meant a lot to me. Not that he was much in the way of talking about his C.O. experience. He wrote about it in prose as part of his Master’s thesis at the University of Kansas.

DH: He started writing poetry late?

FM: Well- because of the war. Yes and no. He started as a graduate student. Then the war intervened. And during the war he was in the Civilian Public Service. CPS was a middle ground between going in as a non-combatant, or resisting outright and going to jail. It was alternative service. It was typically in the wilderness. It was in remote places. I studied with Stafford and we became corresponding friends. He was the first poet that I brought to Suffolk University in Boston. The Creative Writing Program began with this first writer. He passed in 1993 and his son edited and selected his New and Selected Poems (Graywolf Press). He connected with me a few years ago. I was approached by the son and Graywolf to write his biography. So I went out to the archives in Portland, Oregon. But I decided I was getting on in years and felt that a biographer should be younger. I needed to write my own poems. I thought that Stafford would approve of that decision. But as I was leaving the archives I thought I would like to write an essay about his early poems that I discovered. I was given a Xerox of his first ten years from his file. There were 400 poems. I thought a third of them should be read. They weren’t available anywhere. Through the editing process I was trying to understand his C.O. experience and how it reflected on mine.


DH: In an interview with Stafford he states: "I keep following this sort of hidden river of my life. You know, whatever the topic or impulse which comes, I follow it along trustingly. And I don't have any sense of it coming to an end, or crescendo, or it petering out. It is just going steadily along."


FM: I would like that to be case. Bill Stafford seems to have a calm direct access—more than I do. I am more or less a turbulent person. I’m a happy person, but turbulent none-the-less. There is serenity to his poetry. There is an effort to create a peaceful relation with his world. It meant paying attention to the way things are speaking to him. There is a good part of myself that has an allegiance to that. I also feel that that I am much more a struggler. I do need to that dialectical back and forth. The point of convergence is that I understand the virtue of the sustained writing process.

Stafford would wake up at 4 or 5 in the morning everyday to write. I can't say that I am able to do that. But I do know that I am at my best when I am writing regularly.

DH: You have been an editor at GRAYWOLF PRESS, a prominent small press for a number of years. Small presses are essential venues for emerging poets to established ones. Have the small literary presses been good for you?

FM: I write very slowly. I revise. I am a gradualist. Every small press gesture or commentary has been a gift. I was 46 years old when my first book of poetry came out. I wasn't a kid, but I was still a young poet. I can say the small press has saved my life in terms of writing. If you really take a stern look at recent American capitalism, the small press operates under the assumption that this is really not for profit. It is really for the art, for the culture, or the circulation of things in that order. I think there is something spiritually profound in that fact. Non-profit may be the business model for sustaining literature.

DH: You got your PhD from the University of Chicago in the 70's. What was the academy like then?

FM: I was in a program called: "The Committee on Social Thought." It was a group of philosopher, social scientist and literary folks. The reason I applied there was that Saul Bellow was teaching. I read Bellow's novels and I knew there was a kind of wisdom there that I was very interested in. Bellow was my thesis advisor. The reason why he was good is that he wasn't the ordinary academic. I was an ordinary graduate student. I thrived in the fact that he gave me a great deal of independence. He had a lot of ambition on my behalf. Some of the projects he proposed were beyond my capability at the time.

DH: I love Bellow; I started out with his novel "The Dangling Man." I heard that he was a real character.

FM: I don't think he was a character. I think he liked to make people think he was a character. I felt he was a day to day artist. His daily practice was writing. And when he wasn't writing he was reading. There was a great openness.

I remember visiting him once at his apartment for a conference about my thesis. I forgot which novel he was working on. But when he was working on a novel he had large notebooks, but he also had stacks of books he was reading. And I noticed he was reading the letters of Wallace Stevens. I don't know if this is a fact, but I think he's got some characters that are woven out of the kind of figure that Wallace Steven's conveys in his letters.

DH: Ilya Kaminsky wrote in a blurb of your book: "In a time of lies and mediocre ironies in literature, here is a voice that is never afraid to say what matters." What do you think is meant by mediocre ironies?

FM: I'll make my guess. There is a kind of irony that's basically self-protected--keeping things at a distance--not letting you be open or vulnerable to things that are truly hurtful. One of the ways of coping with this in our society is to be ironic about it. There is a distance that is created. Irony is a deeper resource than that. It stems from a broken sense of the world.

DH: In your latest collection: "The Looking House"(Graywolf Press) your poem "Pickney Street" captures the fleeting beauty of a street, on Beacon Hill in Boston.

Pinckney Street

A view from the crest of Boston to the river--
a walk and my friend stopping to say that
for three weeks each year
and beginning tomorrow
this will be the most
beautiful place in the city--
our respite in the brick-faced buildings
blushing in sunlight,
in star magnolias swelling,
about to burst into bright badges,
medallions of tangible life and light
the shook foil that Hopkins wrote about--
the minutes we have of granduer, hope, gratitude.

You refer to Gerald Manley Hopkins who wrote of the granduer of life: "It will flame out like shining from foil...”

Do you think this is the job of the poet to remind the reader that the flame will be a burning ember so carpe diem?

FM: I will say this about that poem. It has fragility to it. It is a poem that is fully aware that all this is ephemeral. On the other hand, just because it is ephemeral doesn't mean it we have to mourn. Of course mourning is part of life. The poems in this book are quite harsh. This poem was intended to soothe. The poem has a gentle affirmation of the pleasure of recognizing the granduer of things. I think we should all take pleasure in the granduer of things.

Poesy #38

Poesy #38.
Edited by Brian Morrisey (Santa Cruz)
and Doug Holder (Boston).
4/year; POB 7823, Santa Cruz, CA 95061.
$12 (four issues).info@poesy.org. http://poesy.org


Review by Hugh Fox


The real center of this issue is remembering poet Dave Church,
1947-2008. A touching little personalized essay from A.D. Winans,more
remembering Church from Tom Chandler. Church kind of the incarnation of the whole esprit of Poesy : “The Pelting of sleet/against the window./That scary roar of wind./The tick and tock of the clock./Another scotch and soda/to take my mind/off what deep-down/I know I’m really missing.” (“Alone in a Small Dark Room,” p. 12).

There’s also a deep meditation by Debbie Kirk on Church’s book Hack Job, published by Green Bean Press in 2002: “Dave Church romanticized his sleazy lifestyle, and I believe he enjoyed it most of the time. In this book, Dave is a storyteller, a philosopher, a psychologist of sorts, a fragile boy at confession, and the most incredibly resilient
personality.” (p. 13).


All kinds of Beat , Live-It-Up Now poetry here, poems by poet-heroes
like A.D. Winans, Alan Catlin, B.Z. Niditch, Frederick Davis, an
interview with Cesar Vallejo translator, Clayton Eshleman, not just
about Vallejo but Eshleman’s own life too. And the whole mag is filled
with pictures, not just of Church, but photos by experimental poets
like Ellaraine Lockie, T. Kilgore Splake, etc., a picture-word statement that says: STAY HERE, BE HERE, EXPLORE HERE, EXPAND HERE...AS LONG AS YOU CAN. Not just a poetry mag but a strong immersion in a positive existential philosophy
that we could all use a lot of these days.

City Lights: An Anthology of Poetry and Art. Shelia Mullen Twyman, editor.

City Lights: An Anthology of Poetry and Art. Shelia Mullen Twyman, editor. ( Beachcomber Press 27 Strawberry, Lane Scituate, Ma. 02066) $15 http://www.gbspa.org

I was recently a featured reader for the Greater Brockton Society for Poetry and the Arts at the Brockton Public Library. I read with Kate Chadbourne, and had the pleasure of having dinner with the principals of this poetic enterprise: (Frank Miller, Shelia Mullen Twyman, Arnie Danielson, and Phil Hasouris) These guys are putting Brockton on the map as a center for literature and the arts. They told me they admire what our city of Somerville has done in revitalizing our community, and they are on the way there themselves. Unfortunately Brockton has gotten a lot of bad press, but the Brockton, Mass. I saw was populated with friends of the arts, as well as an attractive downtown center. The City Lights anthology is a first publishing effort by this band of brothers and sisters. It has attractive production values, with front cover art by Arnie Danielson, and cover design by Shelia Twyman.

There are many poets in this collection I admire including Somerville poets Gloria Mindock, Timothy Gager, Irene Koronas, Patrick Sylvain, as well as Marge Piercy, Robert Pinsky, Mike Amado, Elizabeth Quinlan, Joanna Nealon, Rene Schwiesow, Fred Marchant, Louisa Clerici to name a few. And the poetry for the most part is top shelf.

Marge Piercy has a poem “ Growing Up Female In The 50’s” about the corseted values of the era, where the cult of the “little woman” prospered. Here is the shopworn and repressive advice of two mothers to their young daughters:

“Keep your head down, don’t
stand out. Nice girls don’t.
Nice girls never ask for it.
Nice girls die with clean under

wear. Nice girls do it only
after a gold ring and then
they close their eyes. Do you
Want him to think you’re a whore?…”

And the late poet Mike Amado’s lead poem “The Poet’s Fire” is like a lyrical sucker punch to those of us who knew and loved this talented young man. Mike died at the tender age of 33 from kidney disease.

The Poets Fire

The last time I checked
I only have one body.
The time I held a mirror behind my back
and looked in the bathroom mirror
I could not find a zipper on my spine.
This is my flesh-vehicle.
It won’t run forever.
When the arrow finally ends on “E”
And its time to leave,
don’t scrap me to the graveyard.
Let those whipping flames flutter
around my remnants like butterflies.
My fly-ash will be a swirl of ravens and wax paper.
This won’t be a usual cremation,
just a ceremony of freedom.
A final cleansing of black tar, toxins
and thoughts: useless coat of paint.
No, this won’t be anything somber,
The flames are happy like chanting monks,
they chant a melody of beginnings.
The flames will cuddle me like a lover
having his first time.
As my dwindling body glows,
I will make love to those flames
because I do not want to be swallowed by the earth
with all the poison, preservatives and putrefaction
that my one-and-only body steeped in
to make the stomach of the earth turn and retch.
She doesn’t deserve this.
She had too much of this.

Highly Recommended.

Review of DEEP LANDSCAPE TURNING by Ann Hutt Browning

Review of DEEP LANDSCAPE TURNING by Ann Hutt Browning, Ibbetson Street Press (Somerville, MA), 2009 ($14.95)

By Barbara Bialick


Ann Hutt Browning, with her poetic last name and lyrical poetry, is known by many for the writer’s retreat center she runs with her husband of 50 years—Wellspring House, in Ashfield, Massachusetts. All those she helped inspire—and others—should certainly buy this book by the English-born, southern California-raised Radcliffe girl. With master’s degrees in both psychology and architecture, she has the bedrock foundations of nature interplay with human relationships.

The cover of this attractive book is a sepia photograph of huge, smooth rocks, “Maine Seacoast, 1976” by Jim Weigang. It brings the reader right into the book’s natural imagery. The first poem, EACH MORNING I HOLD YOU, is a villanelle on the daily connection between love and light.

Then, in A DAY IN THE DORDOGNE, FRANCE, she shows our relationship to rock: “All day we tramp weary over old stones/…as we crunch the surface stone we are pulled,/Drawn across abandoned fields…/follow ancient paths to the river…” where they drink “rough red wine” and tear bread.

She continues in her travels to a ‘WAYSIDE TABLEAU” where “three ancient women” sit in black clothes of mourning with “sorrowful” purple lilac… “…But “the one white spray of lilac…whispers…snatches of singing/from their young marriage nights.”

In all of these poems, her long lines are built on the blank page like edifices she would build on land. In BLINDED BY LIGHT, she writes: “I want to be with you on wild white bedrock,surfaced…/where Doric columns, rooted in the foundation are rooted also in that rocky mount…”

Her poems range from travel and nature (“SESTINA FOR A HUMMINGBIRD”) to her childhood relationships. In CUSTODY, she hears in a courtroom about the divorce of her parents and custody by her mother, and also starts her period. She learns by LETTER FROM MY ENGLISH AUNT that her father has died (“Cremated. No service”). As a 14-year-old she’s among adults with loud voices discussing McCarthy, among other topics, and has to “put my hand on (the white stone) Ulysses’ curls/and was calmed.”

But one of her best poems is MY YOUNGER BROTHER: “He and our mother strolled in the garden,/…he filled her skirt with ripe tomatoes,/laughing as he dropped each one/into the billowing cloth,/his opened fist a fat starfish/…her loaded skirt swaying./back to the house…stained with red juice/her eyes like stars.”

She also adds some political poems, such as AN ORDINARY LIFE: “She threw back her all-cotton sheet,/cotton woven in a far-off country/by a dark-skinned girl chained to her her large loom…”(and so on!)

Ann Hutt Browning is a poet more people should know about.

BEATS AT NAROPA: Edited by Anne Waldman and Laura Wright

BEATS AT NAROPA

An Anthology

Edited by Anne Waldman and Laura Wright

Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, 2009

ISBN: 978-1-56689-227-8

$15.95

Review by Richard Wilhem



This enjoyable and illuminating anthology consists of never before published essays, talks, interviews and panel discussions with folks such as Ginsberg, Burroughs, Corso, Clellon Holmes, Kyger, Snyder, Baraka, DiPrima, McClure, Pommy Vega, Whalen and Waldman. Many other well-known folks also appear, either writing or written about. There’s a great piece on Bob Kaufman by David Henderson.

Clark Coolidge’s essay, “Kerouac’s Sound,” is a must for any poet or fan of Kerouac’s. Coolidge says Kerouac was listening to bebop alto sax-man Lee Konitz play and was inspired to try to write lines like the lines Konitz was playing. From Kerouac’s “Beginning of Bop”:



Lester droopy porkpied hung his horn and blew bop lazy ideas inside jazz had everybody dreaming.



That’s all one breath. Or, from “Mexico City Blues” (146th Chorus):



The blazing chickaball whap-by extry special super high job ole 169 be foundering down to Kill Roy.



Coolidge discusses how Kerouac, again emulating jazz, would extend his parentheses; that is, he’d go “outside,” riffing over a vamp, then come back to the main progression of his thought.

Amiri Baraka, in “Pulling It Down,” makes the case that the role of the poet is, or should be, to penetrate minds with alternative visions.

There’s a forum on “Women and the Beats” with Hettie Jones, Joanne Kyger, Janine Pommy Vega, and Anne Waldman in which they recount their varying experiences with the male writers. Diane DiPrima’s “By Any Means Necessary” is a fascinating account of her involvement with mimeograph publishing in the 60’s and her work with the Liberation News Service. She stresses the importance of poetry and the need for writers to get their work out there “by any means necessary.”

The book closes with a powerful essay by poet and musician Steven Taylor, “Remember The Future: Archival Poetics And The War On Memory.” Taylor opens with: “ Memory is the object of war. War is the attempt to replace one archive with another. You want to rewrite the memory of people whom you wish to dominate.” He cites the suppression of African speech, the separation of kin, the banning of drums during the slavery period. He references Nazi book burnings and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, noting; “---popular memory can sometimes be reprogrammed by simple insistence on even the most outlandish propositions.” He cites Karl Rove’s memoir that claimed that it was Congress rather than the White House that rushed us into war with Iraq. (One thinks of the current nonsense about “death panels” which the right-wing has foisted on the gullible.)

In tribal cultures, says Taylor, it is the poet, the singer of tales, that maintains the tribe’s culture and its rootedness to reality. He describes Ginsberg’s philosophy of the democratization of the arts and the value of communities built around the small press, underground film, garage bands playing in local clubs, and galleries that show local artists. The idea is that these independent artists are writing their own history and making their own cultures. Taylor says Ginsberg said to him that one has to write one’s own history. Taylor adds: “Now I see he was speaking to something much larger; ours is the work of memory against the mass amnesia that made the twentieth century the bloodiest in human history. The imperative to give voice, and to preserve it, can be summed up in Allen’s command on occasions when I hesitated to perform:’Speak, poet!’”

If these words stir you, reader, as they did me, you’ll hasten to get a copy of this book.



Richard Wilhelm is the arts editor of the Ibbetson Street Press.

Ibbetson Update