Interview with " Night Train" Co-founder Rusty Barnes

Questions for Rusty Barnes


***Interviewed by Sue Miller

Rusty Barnes grew up in Appalachia and made his home in the Boston area. He's the author of Breaking It Down, a book of flash fiction (Sunnyoutside Press), and Redneck Poems, a chapbook (MiPOesias). Published widely in both print and oon the web, Rusty's shopping his first novel. He is perhaps best known as the co-founder of Night Train, but he is taking a bigger slice of literary pie these days, with both Fried Chicken and Coffee, a blog focusing on the voices of rural America and the issues that threaten it, and Live Nude Poems, which presents—with commentary--the work of poets that must be read. We had a few questions for Rusty, in advance of his appearance at the upcoming Somerville Writer's Festival on November 13.

What did you want to be when you grew up?
At various points, a preacher, an FBI agent, pro baseball player.

What was the first thing you remember writing?
Other than school assignments and a couple of 'poems,' I don't really recall. It's come to me so easily I felt (and sometimes still feel) as if I was born doing it. I listened a lot as a child, mostly to my family's stories. My extended family used to get together at someone's house, usually my grandmother's trailer on Sundays, brew some coffee, then sit and talk for six or seven hours. No joke. This happened throughout my childhood and up until my grandmother died in 1981. Then it more or less stopped, though on a good day you can still get them (my dad's family) going. This is where I learned to listen for the stories. Writing them down came later.

Who told you were good, and when?
I was encouraged all along by my parents. Our landlord, Edmund Tuton, this mysterious and wonderful man who came from exotic Long Island, often gave me money and books for getting good grades. He told me I was good. I found out how dumb I was in grad school—very—yet I got key encouragement from my teachers Christopher Tilghman and DeWitt Henry when I was ready to quit and go home.

How much time do you spend writing, in a week?
I actually think it's more important to read. My reading time counts 4 or 5 to 1 against writing. I read from midnight to 3 am nearly every day, usually a book of fiction, one of poetry, and one non-fic/memoir/biography at the same time. We have a two-year-old who has had sleeping issues, too, so that time is often spent singing silly songs very quietly or telling stories or walking around with her on my shoulder.

What is most satisfying to you as your fingers hit the keys?
I love building characters and putting them through hell in fiction. I love getting an image or feeling or seeing something strange, and nursing it into a poem. I enjoy the workmanlike feeling I get from non-fiction, of making myself clear when my nature is to speak quickly and get as much out as possible before something shuts my mouth.

I think I'm a poet first, even though my first three published books are (or will be) fiction.

What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?
There are many things I'm competent or even semi-good at, but none of them ever really appealed as a career. Once I made the decision to be a writer, that's what I was, though I worked as a house cleaner, janitor, teacher, editor, tutor in the many interims. I write because I'm not really good enough at anything else.

Which is stronger: the urge to create or the need to destroy?
I constantly struggle against my better self. I am so good at destroying and otherwise fouling up my emotional and inner life, turning it all haywire, so good, but I have to feel like a creator to feel right operating in the world.

Rusty Barnes will be reading November 13, 2010 at the Somerville Writer's Festival VIII, hosted by Timothy Gager at the Center for Arts at the Armory. Advance tickets are available through Brown Paper Tickets (617-718-2191). There will be a daytime book fair with readings beginning at 7 p.m. Features: Malachy McCourt, Sam Cornish. Writers and Poets: Jennifer Haigh , Steve Almond, Michelle Hoover, Ethan Gilsdorf,Rusty Barnes, Fred Marchant, Diana Der-Hovanessian, David Ferry, Martha Collins, and Douglas Holder. Sponsored by Porter Square Books and Grub Street

Endicott College/Ibbetson Street Press Visiting Author Series Nov. 18, 2010

(Beverly, Mass.)



The Endicott College/Ibbetson Street Visiting Author series will continue Nov. 18, 2010 with poets Miriam Levine and Bert Stern. The series directed by Ibbetson Street Press founder Doug Holder, will be held at Endicott's Halle Library at 4P.M. The series is open to the public, and will include an open mike after the features. Free admission. Check http://endicott.edu for directions to the college.








"I'm interested in people and their stories,"
says Miriam Levine. Her most recent book is The Dark Opens, winner of the 2007 Autumn House Poetry Prize. She is the author of In Paterson, a novel, Devotion: A Memoir, three poetry collections, and A Guide to Writers' Homes in New England. Her work has appeared in Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, and Ploughshares, among many other places.


A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts writing fellowship and grants from the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, she was a fellow at Yaddo, Hawthornden Castle, Le Château de Lavigny, Villa Montalvo, Fundación Valparaíso, and the Millay Colony for the Arts.

She is Professor Emerita at Framingham State College, where she chaired the English Department and was Coordinator of the Arts and Humanities Program.
Born in Paterson, New Jersey, Miriam Levine now divides her time between Florida and Massachusetts. Currently she is at work on a new novel and a poetry collection.









Bert Stern is Milligan Professor Emeritus at Wabash College, and has also taught at the University of Thessaloniki and at Peking University. At present, with his wife, Tamlin Neville, he edits Off the Grid Press. Bert also teaches in an alternative sentencing program called Changing Lives through Literature.

Bert’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Hunger Mountain, The American Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Review, Ibbetson Street, and in many other journals and anthologies. Steerage, his recent poetry collection, is on the “Must Read” list selected by the Massachusetts Book Award. He has been nominated tfour times for a Pushcart Prize, and is the recipient of an Artist’s Grant from the Somerville Arts Council.


Interview with Miriam Levine by Doug Holder


http://dougholder.blogspot.com/2008/04/poet-miriam-levine-makes-dark-open.html


Bert Stern's Blog

http://bertstern.blogspot.com




Interview with Miriam Levine by Doug Holder

Profane Uncertainties by Luis Raul Calvo, translated by Flavia Cosma

Profane Uncertainties
by Luis Raul Calvo, translated by Flavia Cosma
Cervena Barva Press
Somerville MA
Copyright © 2010 by Luis Raul Calvo
Softcover, $15, 45 pages

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

Argentina was the home of some great poets: Borges, Barbarito and Benitez. Now, thanks to Gloria Mindock and Cervena Barva Press and translator Flavia Cosma, we have a chance to read a poet every bit as good as any Argentine poet, Luis Raul Calvo, who sees the world not as utopian, not as hellish, but for what it is. His is a reality show of its own.

For example in the section entitled Lowest Depth of the Soul, poem XII tells us:

The man who sleeps today
In the middle of the road,
Once knew how to indulge
In the earthly pleasures

Once he loved submissive women,
Bought himself the finest liquors,
And squandered left and right
What belonged to him,
And what didn’t.
He lived as if wishing to negate the saying
That affirmed That nothing is eternal
In this life,

In times past,
Watching others sleeping on the pavement,
He would have said, loudly and firmly,
“They must have done something
to deserve their fate.”

These are words of the keen, observant eye, the writer who records what he sees and with
pen tells us bares the truth of the scene.

Then there were the days people used to say if you go far enough on the right, you are on the left and vice versa. Calvo’s take of this is:

Diffuse Limits

There is a plateau that separates
Words form gestures,
Hearts from pinciples,
Holiness from sins.

The diffused limits of love
Work out the differences

Calvo’s profoundness lies in his ability to take the complicated and make it simple; to take life and make it accessible. He is one of the poets who create their own language to explain life, who (to steal the concept of left and right in a circle) are so deep they are simple; so simple they are deep. I am left only with the impression that nothing of Calvo’s poetry is either profane or uncertain. Which leaves a bottom line: Calvo’s poetry is that the reader is left satisfied; the reader-poet inspired to write. Who needs more?

Clear-Eye Tea by Mary Bonina

Clear-Eye Tea
Mary Bonina
Cervena Barva Press
http://www.cervenabarvapress.com
$15.00

The wonderful thing about poetry is that it so often speaks to you through the reading. And Mary Bonina’s book Clear-Eye Tea did, indeed, speak to me. In particular her poem, “Small Town: A Death,” rang its bell loud and clear, triggering memories of a friend lost to a train, the same way the small girl Bonina writes about was lost.

The commuter train this morning
on the tracks that run behind the school
blows its whistle as it passes by, for the girl
who was killed the afternoon before,
crossing over, taking a short cut home,
a hole in the fence patched up from time to time.

I didn’t say that what you heard would always be happy. But, when you hear it in the reading, it’s a soft affirmation, a hug that can comfort in the empathy that you, as a reader, receive or give. In “Small Town: A Death,” Bonina takes a look at how the tragic loss of a life in such a public manner changes the landscape of grieving,

But at the girl’s house, a police car was posted,
out front the vans and wired poles and lights. . .
while others searching
for a story gathered around the corner.

then Bonina ends with a sucker-punch to our already sore gut

How cruel the piled up fallen leaves
coloring the driveway, blanketing the front lawn.

But death and grieving are not Bonina’s only subjects in this work that gives honor to the everyday experiences of life, to the ordinary moments that raise their poetic wings in flight. In “The Reindeer of Green Hill,” Bonina celebrates visiting a father at a factory. Her words the echo of four small children poignant in their love

The whistle blew and my father
appeared with the herd of men
outside the loading dock.

We brought him sweets:
a cookie or a plum
pushed through the fence.

We collected his kisses.
Mary Bonina shows us vivid images. She confronts us with what is real and asks us not to avert our eyes from the weeping or the laughter. The words ask us to meditate on the images, on the tactile emotions that pour themselves through the strophes, and the words ask us to find the gap that leads us to the clear eye tea of her title. A tea that will take us to a place of Zen, if we allow the paradoxes to steep within us, just as the tea ceremonies of Japan are meant to do.

There is water and there is fire within this book. Sound the gong when you pick it up and allow yourself to experience the mantra of the words. You will not want to sound the gong again until you have read cover-to-cover. Then you will have come to know the inspiration of the joy, the sadness, the emptiness and fullness of life as Mary Bonina has described it for us.

***Rene Schwiesow is a writer and poet. She is the co-host of The Art of Words poetry venue in Plymouth, MA

Rocks Stars and Bad Poetry: Interview with Steve Almond

Rocks Stars and Bad Poetry: Interview with Steve Almond

by Cam Terwilliger


Steve Almond’s prose walks a tightrope between irreverent humor and deeply felt sorrow. Half the time, Almond’s readers bust a gut laughing. The other half, he breaks their hearts. The author of two story collections, a novel, and three books of nonfiction, his newest, “Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life”, offers Almond’s take on the experience of rock and roll “drooling fandom.” Meanwhile, his recently self-published works, "Letters from People Who Hate Me" and "This Won’t Take But a Minute Honey", have not only received sterling reviews from readers, but have also caught attention for his grass roots method of distributing them. Fortunately for me, I had a chance to talk with Almond about some of these things this week. Fortunately for you, you can catch him for yourself on Nov. 13 at The Somerville News Writer’s Festival.


CT: I’m excited to hear you’ll be featured in The Somerville News Writers Festival next month. Can you tell us a little about what you’ll be reading?

SA: Yeah, not sure exactly. But the work will probably come from these little DIY books I've been making. The new one is called “Bad Poetry”, and with any luck it'll be out in time for me to bring some to the festival.


CT: This spring, when I heard you read from the new book, "Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life", I was happily stunned not only by a great reading, but also a slick PowerPoint, accompanying music, and a performance by a rocking band afterward. Do you have any philosophy when it comes to performing your work? Do you take any inspiration from the rock stars you admire?

SA: I take plenty of inspiration from rock stars. I worship and shamefully covet them. And obviously, with a book about music, it made sense to have a soundtrack for those readings. But I do think there's a danger to jazzing up the readings, which is that the performance begins to overshadow, or obscure, the prose. My interest, when I'm reading, is to get people excited about the language, to make them realize that literature is not some esoteric pursuit, but the ravings of mad men and women. So I want people to have a good time and party like it's 1999. But I want them to leave the reading excited by what words can do, not the bells and whistles around them. Does that make sense?


CT: Your self published books, “This Won’t Take But A Minute Honey” and “Letters from People Who Hate Me”, have been popular sellers at The Harvard Book Store. But you’ve also written about how these books are intended to be “artifacts,” available mainly at readings. Can you tell us about your recent experience of distributing books in this do-it-yourself fashion?

SA: Oh it's just been a delight. That's why I keep making new ones. It's such a nice way to combat the prevailing late-model-capitalist-vertical-integration-media-platform nonsense. I just head out and do readings and if people want the books they come up and give me a little cash and I give them the book. It's a lot like a drug deal. As much as I appreciate the help I've received from traditional publishers, selling directly to readers is a much more personal and organic a way of putting art into the world. And I get to work with an amazing visual artist (Brian Stauffer). And I get to put whatever I want in the book. There's no executive to say: You can't do that! Of course, there's a lot of schlepping involved. And some low-level humiliation. But that's the life of a writer anyway these days.



CT: You recently concluded your web feature on “The Rumpus”, “Bad Poetry Corner,” where you revisited some wretched poems you’d written as a less experienced writer, some of which, for better or worse, had their sordid origins right here in Somerville. How was it to return to that work? Cathartic? Were there any pockets of unexpected embarrassment?

SA: The whole point was to get to the pockets of unexpected embarrassment. All the terrible language I was flinging at the page, hoping some poor misguided English major would sleep with me. But, you know, a big part of how writers get better is that they just get tired of their bad decisions and start making better decisions. So I'm happy to wallow in the wretchedness of those Somerville years, and to remember how awesomely lonely and hopeless and vulnerable I was. (Also: I live about a hundred yards away from Somerville, so I'm still honorary!!!)


CT: Part of “Bad Poetry Corner” allowed people to submit their own bad poems. How was the response by readers? And what do you think we stand to gain as writers by spending time with our failed attempts?

SA: Like I say, part of getting better is confronting your suckassitude. But I have to say that I never got as many bad poems as I thought I would. Not everyone is such a jolly self-mortifier, I guess.


CT: As a former Somerville resident, how do you feel about the literary scene here? Any fond memories of your time in the city? Any favorite places to write, or dependable spots for inspiration?

SA: I moved to Boston, basically, because I found this amazing apartment in Somerville. It was one of those great old houses, built in the 1870s, I think, by a Senator. I lived on the first floor and had a big sun room where I wrote. Or sat around not writing. In a way, Somerville is more of a mood to me, a kind of yearning loneliness, a desperate desire to connect, to make sense of my life and the abundant sorrows of the world. The country moved in a really dark direction while I was in Somerville, and a lot of my work has been about trying to make sense of that, the cruel delusions of our diseased hearts.

###

Jennifer Haigh: From Writer’s Cloister to Far-reaching Novels

( Photo by Asia Kepka.)





Well folks, the Somerville News Writers Festival is upon us (Nov.13 6:30 P.M. Arts Armory—Somerville, Mass.) and Somerville Bagel Bard Rene Schwiesow interviewed one of our featured writers Jennifer Haigh. For more information go to: http://somervillenewswritersfestival.com






Jennifer Haigh
From Writer’s Cloister to Far-reaching Novels

by Rene Schwiesow


It was a lovely New England, autumn morning when I spoke with Jennifer Haigh by phone. A perfect day I thought for talking with a writer who has won the PEN/L.L. Winship award for outstanding book by a New England author. Haigh will be appearing at the Somerville Writer’s Festival on November 13th. While she is not on tour at the moment, she accepted the speaking gig in Somerville because the Writer’s Festival reputation precedes itself and out of friendship for the hard-working Timothy Gager who hosts the festival each year. Those in attendance will be the fortunate recipients of her sharing.

Jennifer spoke easily from her home and one can imagine the author who maintains a “large, lively circle of imaginary friends,” relaxing in the space where her words are allowed to spin themselves into fine novels. Jennifer Haigh is the author of four books. Mrs. Kimble, her first novel, won the PEN/Hemingway award for debut fiction. Her second novel, Baker Towers was a New York Time’s Best Seller in addition to winning the PEN/L.L. Winship award for outstanding book by a New England author. Her third novel, The Condition, was published in 2008. Her fourth novel, Faith, will be published by HarperCollins in May 2011.

It is “absolutely inevitable,” Haigh said. A writer, by the nature of the vocation, “spends a lot of time sitting alone in a room.” She understands that there is no way around it and she welcomes the aloneness. Yet, as an author with four published books, the fact is she must travel, must be in the public eye. How, I asked her do you find your quiet time then? “I don’t,” she said matter-of-factly. She made it clear that she enjoys those engagements that go along with each book publication, but that they are incompatible with quiet time and writing. In the beginning she attempted to combine the two, but has since learned that to write while promoting deprives her of the focus she needs for her work.

She talks about time and focus as a gift for the writer. And Haigh, who is a graduate of the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop and their MFA program, says that time and focus is exactly what she had in Iowa. Haigh feels that time spent in an MFA program can be very valuable. In addition to her novels, she writes short stories, many of which were written while in Iowa and, subsequently, published. She has been working on a short story collection though a possible publication date for that collection remains a nebulous dot on the timeline. Her novel, Mrs. Kimble, which was written during the time she was in Iowa, was not a product of the workshop or the MFA program, because she feels strongly that showing a novel piecemeal in workshop is dangerous, allowing for judgment to be passed on the work via small segments. “Too much can be taken out of context,” she said. It was, however, written alongside the work she did for the workshop and her grad work.

Jennifer, it seems, has the heart of a writer. It beats through her as she speaks about writing, about the process of becoming a writer, about the writing coming before the need for publication. “No one becomes a writer overnight,” she said. Several times during our discussion she reinforced the need for time and focus, the inevitability of the aloneness and quiet that one experiences as a writer. Becoming a writer to Haigh is an evolutionary process. She always wanted to write, so she wrote. “The writing you control,” Haigh said. She feels that what happens once the writing is finished and sent out with the hope of publication is subject to so many variables that are not within personal control. Jennifer Haigh writes from a creative spirit. Her books have no biographical slant nor does she intend to write with a theme. “I love research,” she said, and her stories are often born through a serendipitous experience during research. For example, it was while doing medical research for a project never written that she stumbled across Turner’s Syndrome, the medical affliction Gwen suffers from in The Condition. From that discovery of a chromosomal abnormality, the story of Gwen and her family was conceived. It is the discovery that triggers her inspirational thought processes, the discovery that births the story.

Jennifer Haigh has had no concrete future agenda for what happens with the work after she has completed the writing, she simply writes. And through writing, her well-rounded characters develop; the story evolves. Later, when the book has left her control, the reader will lift the story from the page and allow it entry into their world. It is there, in the reader’s world, where insight may be drawn from Haigh’s gift to us. The gift of her time and focus, the weaving of her words that crafts her fiction.

***Rene Schwiesow is a Massachusetts poet and writer, co-host of The Art of Words poetry venue in Plymouth, MA.

All Of Your Messages Have Been Erased by Vivian Shipley

All Of Your Messages Have Been Erased

Vivian Shipley

Louisiana Literature Press

ISBN 978-0-945083-28-3

2010 $14.95

　

"but you will still inhale my history"

In trying to live with the full, "squall", tipping the poetic boat ,

to the point of sickness, Shipley's poems rock reality, like a sibling

who always excels at everything, and finds no comfort trying

to speak with a father who is always composing in his head:

　

"Who cherishes the crooked, the stained, the crossed eyed?

Here for forty-seven years, silence has embalmed me,

I will die soon. I was twenty-eight in 1935 when with chain

linked logic my mother and Giorgio, my brother, quarantined

me for life in this asylum outside of Paris. For them, everything

was either flat or upright. I was not insane, but they wanted

to cage their history, razor my face out of family photos.

At first, I used to hurl a pewter vase into my window to hear

something break. Some days I never unclenched my teeth.

but helium filled, my anger defated. Now, I keep my pain

walled, knowing it's all there is left to feel. My body sloughed

off home. Yet, Because memory is a tapeworm threading

through my veins, in spring, I can not sit on a lawn chair near

purple lilac. I am seventy-five. I can't tourniquet my nerves

but I have been able to dam expectations, even in my heart."…

　

We are forced to hold our breath while the poems hold us under

water. Opening our eyes trying not to resist before our last

breath escapes and we drown or push ourselves to the surface.

Coming from a place we are not at home with. The individual

experiences in this book, each poem expose us to the inner

longings of others:

　

"…fingering the peel like Braille or a palm reader unable to predict

her own future. I had stored my poems on a disk, turning from

words that flattened injustice, unwilling to file genital mutilation

under G, rape under R. I was a woman of action, pictured Eve

barging up the river…"

　

and the others become part of the history, so long dismissed, so

many clouds hiding a sliver moon, even the full moon,

that feminine presence which silhouettes so many woody waves

that some people find themselves walking on water or trying

to traverse the night, without a map. so many stars can be seen

when Shipley puts us in touch, lifts our heads out of the water,

takes the apple out of our mouth and reads to us.

Irene Koronas

Reviewer:

Ibbetson Street Press

Poetry Editor

Wilderness House Literary Review

Stone Soup Poetry Founder Jack Powers: Doug Holder Looks Back…

Stone Soup Poetry Founder Jack Powers: Doug Holder Looks Back…

By Doug Holder

The last time I saw Jack Powers was the last night I worked at McLean Hospital in the summer of 2009. Out of the blue he visited me with his companion Margaret at Waverly House, the hospital program that I worked at for the past seven years. The house was empty save for my co-worker Richard Wilhelm, who also has been involved with my Ibbetson Street Press since its inception in 1998. Jack obviously had seen better times. He had suffered several strokes, so this always articulate man was alarmingly mute. That was the last time I remember seeing him. I knew he was in a nursing home in the North End of Boston. My friend, the poet and artist Deborah Priestly recently told me he was near the end. She later told me that he passed.

I had lost touch with Jack the past few years. But I can remember 10 years ago bringing a rather affected editor of some tony arts magazine to Jack's ramshackle abode so we could conduct an interview. The editor hailed from some upscale suburb and had a fancy degree from some arts college. He was cutting edge, and as haughty as Betty Davis in her prime. He seemed very dismissive of Jack. He looked askance at his bohemian digs. But I think after the meeting he was rather impressed with this very complex and nuanced man. He just wouldn’t invite him to his Lincoln, Mass. cocktail parties or anything.

In addition to the above mentioned interview, I also had conducted several solo interviews with Jack at his apartment around this same time. This ranged from his birth at Boston City Hospital, to his last apartment in the North End of Boston. This was before he became incoherent from the booze and the strokes.


I had been aware of his poetry series since the 1970’s when I was an undergraduate at Boston University. I was even in the audience at one of his events back then. In those times I had no idea of myself as a poet so I never read.

He was a striking man in the old days, with a thick black Afro, broad shoulders, and standing well over six feet tall. He was to say the least charismatic. He was admired by many women and men alike; he had a deep and commanding reading voice, and was very adept with hand gestures. When he read he evoked something in you—you reacted—you weren’t inert. He was deeply spiritual; a mixture of Boston housing project Catholicism and Eastern Religion.

His gone-to-seed apartment in the North End was a living archive. In a dark and damp basement there were piles of letters, posters, and books from the poetry world. He used to show me correspondence from Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Herbert Huncke, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and many others in his makeshift living room. There were piles of videos of the thousands of poetry readings he held over the years. I once asked my friend Mike Basinski, the curator of the University of Buffalo Poetry and Rare Books Archive to come down to Boston and bring back items from Jack’s apartment to start a Jack Powers collection. But when Basinski arrived Jack couldn’t bare to part with his stuff. It was so much a part of him. A second skin, an arm or leg—his heart.

Jack showed me a good selection of the eighty or so books he published under his Stone Soup imprint. Many of the poets he published are now in academic posts and in the bright lights of the literary world. Ironically, this is not where Jack felt comfortable. Most any poet I have talked to has had some experience with Jack. They have either got their start at one of his venues, or passed through there. I read for the first time there in 1985, and I was absolutely thrilled. I read my McLean Hospital poems, and Jack was very encouraging. Julie Stone, his long-time girlfriend was also very supportive. The rest is history—I haven’t stopped reading since.

I will always will be grateful to Jack for the help he gave us putting out the anthology “City of Poets: 18 Boston Voices” (Singing Bone Press 2000). He got blurbs from his old pals Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Lyn Lifshin, and Dianna der Hovanessian. He set us up with his printer in Boston and he promoted the hell out of the book.

When Timothy Gager and I started The Somerville News Writers Festival in 2003 I wanted and did give Jack the first annual Ibbetson Street Press Lifetime Achievement Award for his contribution to the small press. Jack was always a friend of the small press—to the poet “outside the academy.” And he gave a voice and a venue to them.

From his early days Jack was dismissed by the mandarins of the Boston poetry world. He started Stone Soup in 1971 at the foot of Beacon Hill (or as it was know “Beatnik Hill”) as a reaction to this. Although many poets have not read at the hallowed halls of Harvard, or the Blacksmith House, and other venues of that ilk, he always gave a place for them at Stone Soup.

Like many artists and writers from Robert Lowell, to his pal John Wieners, to Anne Sexton, he suffered for substance abuse and perhaps mental illness. It is hard in this society to live as an artist. But Jack did. His last years were spent in poverty, surviving on the kindness of strangers and friends like the street artist Sidewalk Sam. Deborah Priestly was a close friend and was with him near the end and Chad Parenteau, carries on the tradition of Stone Soup at the Out of the Blue Gallery in Cambridge.

Jack Powers—no matter what you thought of him-- inspired countless people. He inspired me to start the Ibbetson Street Press that publishes poetry books like Stone Soup did. He truly believed poetry could transform things, and as he put it “You translate yourself when you write a poem.” This quote needs no translation…it comes from the heart—may he rest in peace.

The Boston Globe: Jack Powers founder of Stone Soup Poets-- Obit.

(Wendy Maeda/Globe Staff/File 1987)

Jack Powers, 73; helped poets bring verses to life


Jack Powers, who grew up in and near projects in Roxbury, founded Stone Soup nearly 40 years ago.

By Bryan Marquard
Globe Staff / October 16, 2010

Poems were more than just words on a page for Jack Powers, who believed that verse needed to be freed from the confines of musty books and the stuffy halls of academia.
Mr. Powers, who died Thursday in the North End, founded Stone Soup nearly 40 years ago. Young and old, beginners and accomplished writers, the ever-changing collection of Stone Soup poets met every Monday night to recite in a series of venues before an attentive audience that was not above voicing its opinion. The readings gained a national profile as he persuaded poets such as Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, and Robert Bly to participate.

The performances, Mr. Powers insisted, were part of the poetry.

“You translate yourself when you speak a poem,’’ Mr. Powers told the Globe in 1992

“I think the most important thing for a writer to recognize is that this on the page is one thing. The delivery of the same is a translation. There are a lot of nuances, and lots of times I’ll change words. I’ve never read a poem the same way twice.’’

An activist who gave away everything from the coats he wore to uncounted hours helping the poor, he was a poet and publisher, a teacher and organizer, a man whose great height still seemed too small to contain his frenetic energy.

A series of strokes over the past several years slowed Mr. Powers, then silenced his voice and constrained his mind. He had lived in the North End for many years and was 73 when he died in the North End Rehabilitation and Nursing Center of complications of dementia.

“Boston is full of elite universities and institutions, often very exclusive, where if you don’t have an academic pedigree you’re out of the scene,’’ said Doug Holder, a poet and teacher who at one point worked with Mr. Powers on the Stone Soup readings and founded Ibbetson Street Press. “What Jack did was bring poetry to the people. He published books and had a venue where all kinds of people came through. He opened it up in Boston, which was old and stodgy until Jack brought a populist flavor, a new flowering of poetry.’’

Years before poetry slams made open mike nights fashionable, Mr. Powers insisted that poetry should be an event, something to add to each week’s calendar.

“He really did devote his life to keeping poetry as part of the public discourse, and he did it with great verve and enthusiasm,’’ said poet Gail Mazur of Cambridge. “He wanted to gather everyone into the performance of poetry. In that way, he was a little ahead of his time.’’

The oldest of six children, Mr. Powers grew up in and around housing projects in Roxbury and graduated from Cathedral High School in the South End. A semester studying chemical engineering at Northeastern University was enough to show him his path lay elsewhere.

He traveled to California, spent time in San Francisco, and returned to New England to write about sports for a New Hampshire newspaper. Then he came home to Boston, where he worked in a bookstore and launched a life of social activism.

At various points during the late 1960s and ’70s, Mr. Powers founded a free school on Beacon Hill and started free suppers for the elderly in the same neighborhood. He helped launch free concerts on Boston Common and taught remedial reading at the Columbia Point housing project, where he also organized a food co-op.

“I’m very solid on volunteerism,’’ he told the Globe in 1987, “because the extraordinary weight of problems that visits the modern industrial society can’t be met with dollars alone.’’

Eric H. Sorgman of Randolph, a nephew who acted as guardian for Mr. Powers, said his uncle was known among his relatives for, among other things, donating his coats or gloves to those who were cold or in need.

“He was a philanthropist in the truest sense,’’ Sorgman said. “He didn’t have anything, really, but what he did have, he gave away, and he didn’t want praise or recognition. He felt good about helping other people.’’

Chief among those he helped were other poets. Some wandered into Stone Soup readings at places such as TT the Bear’s and Out of the Blue gallery, its previous and current homes in Cambridge. Others he found at home.

“He taught me about life and how to treat people,’’ said his son Andreas of Boston. “He inspired me to create and was a big influence on my writing. I would always run my writing by him, and he would write things for me. We would write back and forth.’’

Sarah Jensen, a Boston poet who began reading at Stone Soup nearly 20 years ago, said Mr. Powers made the gatherings “a welcoming place.’’

“No matter what level of poetry you were writing at, it was a comfortable place where you could have your moment on stage and be just as welcome as anyone else,’’ she said. “And he would tell stories about meeting and being friends with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg. It was a passing down of his experience to the newer poets, a passing down of history.’’

In addition to his son Andreas and nephew Eric, Mr. Powers leaves his wife, Tamara Oraschewsky of Boston; another son, John Kolya of Boston; two sisters, Cecelia Sorgman and Maureen Daniels, both of Quincy; and two brothers, Colin of Carver and Michael of Florida.

A memorial service will be held at 10 a.m. Oct. 24 in the International Community Church in Allston.

On Monday, Stone Soup will award its second annual poetry prize, named for Mr. Powers. A week later, on Oct. 25 at 8 p.m., the regular Monday gathering at Out of the Blue will be a memorial reading honoring Mr. Powers, who estimated that he stood up thousands of times to introduce poets. The beauty, he said, emerged from the unpredictable mix.

“Our readings are open,’’ he told the Globe in 1993. “A nightingale may come in and sing the most beautiful song, or a bat could fly in and scare everyone. You take some chances, but our audience is ready to listen.’’

Bryan Marquard can be reached at bmarquard@globe.com.


Comments...



Oh, what a loss...a very great loss. I met Jack in the mid-90s. I don't know where he'd heard of me, but he called me to invite me to read for him at the Cantab, I believe it was called, in Central Square. He introduced me, and gave me about 20 minutes. Weeks later, he saw me on the street, recognized me, and said he wanted me to read for him once more. Alas, we never got in touch with each other again, and that I much regret. To me he seemed an unassuming guy who got things done---he promoted poetry in the area. He left a positive impression on me, certainly, for he was always willing to give established poets, fledgling poets, would-be poets, and diverse and variegated wordslingers and wordsmiths an opportunity to read from their work at his venue. He shall be missed.

Tino Villanueva




So passes a literary giant!! Jack Powers was one -of-a-kind spirit; a force of nature
to whom many of us owe our beginnings in the poetry world. Many of us would not be where we are today if it weren't for Jack's encouragement. In his own way, he achieved greatness but never actively sought it; yet recognition found him. It is amazing how much he accomplished living on a shoestring and a prayer. He was not perfect, but, according to some stories, many saints lacked perfection in their lives. In his way, Jack was the patron of the small press and numerous poets, not of the Academy. He was, despite himself, larger than life. Now he is legend as he joins those who made their literary mark over the generations. As a poet, he was spiritual , yet earthy; erudite , yet simple; profound, yet plain-spoken. He was also prolific in his out put. He had his issues; so do most of us. What artist doesn't have issues?
Jack has left us; however, I suspect he will continue with us in spirit. G-d rest him; G-d Bless!
Warmly,
Harris Gardner



.....I recall Jack back in the '70's or was it the '80's when he would swing by the Annual Greek Festival sponsored by the Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church on Park Drive in the Fenway with his young son perched on his shoulders.....you cld never mistake Jack with that unruly shock of black hair.....I also remember him from the time that the Stone Soup Gallery was in full swing just around the corner from MGH on Cambridge Street altho regretfully, I never attended any sessions....& I further remember him telling me about the free suppers that he organized at the Old West Church on Cambridge Street for the poor & his constant attempts to scrounge food around town for them.....& about him telling me about trying to get a job with the City to work on their Annual Arts Festival or Arts in the Park (or something like that).....I believe he did work for the City on some artistic endeavors, back then.

........I wonder how many young & not so young poets, poor & not so poor, were inspired, encouraged & supported by him over the years........I wld not be surprised if they number well into the hundreds & more... ....he was an icon in certain literary circles in Boston.....he will NEVER be replaced, he was unique among men, in so many ways.....

.......helen cox, 11 Park Drive, Fenway section of Boston.........


There was no sexism, no racism, no ageism at Stone Soup- and no favoritism. I remember when Chronicle visited T.T.'s, giving Jack some long-overdue and too-rare major media publicity. Who did he send up to read as scheduled? The most outrageous and least prime-time friendly poet of all, Lee Litif. Lee was scheduled to be #2, and Jack was not to take the scheduled spot away from anyone. Fair and balanced? That was Jack Powers. That's why he was the first to let the Slam in to his venue before deciding that competition was not right for Stone Soup. Jack was the patriot of all poets.

--- Susie Davidson

EVERYTHING HAPPENS SUDDENLY by Roberta Swan

Review of EVERYTHING HAPPENS SUDDENLY by Roberta Swan, Cervena Barva Press, PO Box 440357, West Somerville, MA 02144, 2010, $15.
Bookstore, www.thelostbookshelf.com

By Barbara Bialick

For poets or other poetry lovers, part of the fun of reading a good book is to look for its hidden meanings. I’ll let the readers draw their own conclusions, but given that this book was praised by the great poet Mary Oliver and is written by the co-founder of the American Jazz Orchestra, I first looked for jazz riffs and rhythms and themes about nature. Where Mary Oliver’s nature is very mystical, I would say Roberta Swan is not a spiritual writer but one with a keen eye for observation and a love for even the smallest, cutest wildlife, such as a family of chipmunks outside her window.

Not being a jazz expert, I can’t really break down the rhythm that way, though I did note recurring themes about her similarities and differences with her husband, and also, the sense of suddenness that can occur in the most regular times of personal events, such as the overnight change in her mother’s status as an aging go-getter to a proud, but physically collapsed woman in a wheel chair.

On the back of the book, Mary Oliver is quoted: “Roberta Swan’s poems have a welcome vivacity; they are deft and full of charm and humor. But not entirely…It is the mixture of light and dark—the embrace of all of it—that is her special gift.”

The first section of the book, where she interacts with her elderly mother, is my favorite. “I want her to live forever,” Swan writes. At age 80, she “doesn’t want to call it quits,” but at 90, she “phones long distance/to report her TV went kaput/and wonders if death is like that.” In the poem “Hawkeye” she says “I should have been prepared, but old age happened overnight.” Still, Swan relates a story about her mother’s good sense of fun, when she could get around, of accidentally finding her daughter in her Victoria’s Secret
underwear looking for a hidden box of chocolates in the middle of the night. She asks for some chocolates and comments, “Nice lace. Get me one…”

In a different batch of poems that relate some of her husband and wife interaction, Swan writes in “Another One of Those Days” that a tombstone in a cemetery “says a husband and wife/died on the same day./a good thing I’ll tell him.” In “One Kills, the Other Doesn’t,” she excuses killing flies by saying “I’m doing something holy,/hastening resurrection/pushing them up the insect ladder…” But some of her word usage is lacking in originality, such as an overused phrase like “Getting Lucky.” or “In a Nutshell.” On the other hand, in “For the Birds,” she produces such a good lines as “Goldfinches spill around House For Sale.” and “Mr. Takala stands in his garden, looking at nothing, mourning his wife,/wearing a windbreaker/she would have talked him out of.”

Roberta Swan was program director of Great Hall at Cooper Union, and also taught there. She has taught at Indiana University, The New School, Baruch College and at the Bennington Writing Workshop.

North From Yaounde by Jim Beschta

North From Yaounde

Jim Beschta

Adastra Press 2010

ISBN: 978-0-9822495-6-7

$18.00

"…through the shrinking mimosa."

North From Yaounde is substantial in its collection of gathered poems,

by the skilled poet, Jim Beschta. His ten poems are hand sewn on 14 pages,

with small illustrations on a few of the pages, including the cover, from

Cameroon folk art. This handcrafted book is a pleasure to behold

as well as mindful. I recommend buying a few for friends,

it is the perfect gift.

The poem's experiences are considered and gentle in that their insights

give us a sense of place and people, "to the boom and chatter of drums

from Bikil…" Once we have read the poems we then travel back into

their lucid appeal and find the metaphors rolling throughout:

Night Travel

"Thieves," Issa spit

into the West African night

toward a solitary light,

some erratic bobbing

alongside the isolated road.

"Thieves," his disdain of bandits

and scorn for lean gendarmes

as strained as his grip

on the wheel,

as suspicious as Maroua

uncertain in the distance.]

Although he claims brothers

as far north as Garoua

and spoke the Fulfuldi

of markets and artisanats,

even though he waved

to stock boys herding cattle

and stopped to pray

when required,

in the pitch of night

he grumbled, "Thieves."

In this dark land

where no ambulance arrives

after an accident,

where people slide

into the night

for beer and sex,

even conversation,

Issa fled the small light

fading in the rearview,

skeptical of anything

but intimate darkness."

　

　


irene koronas
poetry editor:
Wilderness House Literary Review
www.whlreview.com
http://artamust.blogspot.com
xperimagazine@gmail.com

BECAUSE OF WINN-DIXIE, by Kate DeCamillo, review by Susan Major-Tingey

GIRL LOVES DOG WITH PATHOLOGICAL FEAR

BECAUSE OF WINN-DIXIE, by Kate DeCamillo, review by Susan Major-Tingey

Move the brothers Grimm aside, skip over saccharine rhymes and put another check in the column under realistic children’s literature to represent the well-crafted style of author Kate DiCamillo. Her first book, Because of Winn-Dixie, has been awarded numerous accolades, including the coveted Newbury Book Honor and it was the inspiration for the successful movie by the same name.

Because of Winn-Dixie came to my attention when it was first released. I was browsing in a library, chatting with a librarian who recommended it as the new book that was popular with children, parents, and teachers. She said it was flying off the shelf because not only was it witty and endearing, but also it dealt with important issues like sorrow and loss without being too sad. And if that were not enough, the author has taken care to feature characters from different backgrounds and social standings without being judgmental -- an enormous plus.

Between the hard covers (which are child-friendly at 5 ½” by 7 ¼”) ten-year-old Opal goes to the supermarket for macaroni and cheese and ends up saving a mangy hound from the pound. Opals was ready for something to love and the skinny, balding, limping, smelly intruder seemed just right to her when he skids to a stop and smiles right at her. It helps that she can read his facial expressions and body language so she always knows what he is thinking. She reasons that the imperfect dog probably is just like everyone else in the world.

This story helps readers see people and animals as complex, multi-faceted individuals with weaknesses and strengths. It addresses issues that children can relate to and apply to their lives. For instance, Opal calls her father Daddy, but most of the time she thinks of him as a distracted man dedicated to his work. She describes him as a turtle that does a lot of thinking but does not relate well to the world.

All of the characters in Because of Winn-Dixie are imperfect and that’s okay because the way they deal with predicaments impacts their lives and alters relationships. One of the characters even says that she has made mistakes on the way to learning some of the most important things.

Sometimes the characters handle difficulties in a roundabout way, but it is their different responses that reveal their thoughts and feelings, their personalities, that special part of them that makes them unique. It is to the author’s credit that readers come away with empathy, wondering how they would feel in similar situations.

Opal is afraid to ask questions about her mother, who left them when she was three, but she faces her fear and finds it is not as hard as she thought. The bonus is that she realizes there are plusses to her positive action that she did not anticipate.

Opal and Winn-Dixie find that people of all ages, even people with very different backgrounds and reputations can get together to enjoy a party where Dump Punch is served and the youngest attendee contributes to the festivities by decorating the yard with pictures of dogs she had cut out of magazines. That sounds like my kind of party.


Title: Because of Winn-Dixie, Author: Kate DiCamillo, $15.99
Reviewed by Susan Major-Tingey, September 2010, tombrants@yahoo.com
Proofread and edited by Heather Campbell
Pages: 182, ISBN #978-0-7636-0776-0, first edition 2000
Candlewick Press, 99 Dover Street, Somerville, MA 02144

Review of HIGH COUNTRY, chapbook by Arthur Winfield Knight

Review of HIGH COUNTRY, chapbook by Arthur Winfield Knight, Presa:S:Press, Box 792, Rockford, Michigan 49341, www.presapress.com, 32 pages, cover art by Ronnie M. Lane, $6.00.

By Barbara Bialick

I’m so glad I have a copy of Mr. Knight’s HIGH COUNTRY. I can stash it away with my favorite poetry “refer to” books. You should grab one, too, and try to figure out how he could present such perfect, narrow poems, only 20 lines or more, story teller vignettes that keep his clear voice of the historian, artist and observer of Nevada and California always fitting that guy in the picture wearing a cowboy hat and a big, snide smile.

This chapbook is the author’s first collection of poetry in ten years. But just to pick it up and check the compliments on the back of the book and to stare at that mystical green cactus on the cover, it starts you out with positive feelings before even reading it.
He’s apparently an expert who’s published more than 3,000 poems, short stories, and film reviews that “chronicle life in the old and contemporary west” that have been translated into Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese and more. His bio claims “Knight’s poetry remains one of the most distinctive voices of his generation” in the small press. (He was born in 1937).

The book opens as he and his wife Kit have just moved from California to Nevada. How could you not want to read a poem called “THE WHOREHOUSES AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY.” He writes, “We’ve driven past them/for thirty years, but it’s different now./We moved from California to Nevada/two weeks ago. Everything’s different./Slot machines are everywhere: in grocery stores, gas stations, whorehouses, chocolate factories,/Laundromats and strip joints…/and the owner of Casino West/runs ten thousand head of cattle…”

One of my favorite poems is THE TUMBLEWEEDS. He took some of that rural Nevada plant and mailed it to an American West buff in England. The post office charged eleven fifty and stamped it “Fragile”. Two weeks later the English man said it was tumbling well in his back garden. The poem concludes: “it’s stamped all over FRAGILE,/but it’s Tough as Old Boots,/and has been bouncing across the desert/for Donkey’s Years./What’s wrong with those people/at the post office?”

Some the other poem titles include, MORGAN FREEMAN COMES TO SACRAMENTO, BIBLE THUMPERS, WYATT EARP, CROP DUSTERS, DUELING PIZZAS, and WEED HEIGHTS, NEVADA. The only problem is it’s just a little chapbook. On the other hand, that’s part of its magic. Read it fast and realize that now as even an easterner you sort of get something of the flavor of the American West from a western point of view

The Somerville News Writers Festival--The Poster

( Click on picture to enlarge)

Moments Around the Campfire With a Vietnam Vet

Moments Around The Campfire

With a Vietnam Vet

Thom Brucie

Cervena Barva Press

2010 $7.00

　

Brucie introduces the reader to what appears to be a ghost,

poems hidden in script, wrapped in a worn out leather satchel,

a gift which many still try to brush aside as a 'then thing.' The

reader is brought into the presence of verse, given an opportunity

to receive what is given, or to reject what was:

…"Harold liked to watch

the war across the bay,

tracers arching under the moon like

the 4th of July,

reflecting orange along the tongues

of the waves

in rhythm to the sounds of gunburst.

It calmed him down.

Sometimes he'd doze a little

and wake up before sunrise

and pick up

right where he left off."

The poems stark realities carry the veteran's voice deep into what

'surpasses,' why we expect a soldier to fight without an understanding

of the actuality of meanings and all the many ways to lose:

"There was a kid from Spokane named Quincy.

He went to church and didn't cuss.

He loved his girlfriend named Alice

since high school.

He stayed away from the whorehouses,

but he would drink a beer

sometimes on a real hot night.

When his "Dear John" letter arrived,

he cried.

He asked for emergency leave,

but nobody gets leave for love,

so he took an R&R to Hawaii

and got on a commercial plane in Honolulu

headed for Seattle.

He figured if he could talk to Alice

he could fix everything,

but the Mps arrested him before

he got out of the airport.

They put him in the stockade for six months

and later sent him back to Da Nang

for another tour.

By the time he got home,

Alice had two daughters and a station wagon."

Each lasting story works as part of a unit, bringing the same conclusions;

coming back from disastrous 'situations' is daunting, is life altering:

　

…"The explosion flung his body in a somersault,

and a piece of angle from the frame stuck in his forehead

like a piece of glass might penetrate a piece of soft wood.

When he hit the tree, the impact broke his hip

and the recoil broke his jaw.

He felt pretty bad when he passed out."

…"They flew him back to the states in a commercial airplane

which landed in Oakland

on a day some protesters were demonstrating.

One of them threw a rubber filled with urine

at Mark,

and when it hit him, it broke

covering his face and jacket.

One of the other protesters called to him,

"welcome him, baby killer."

Tightly wrapped in clean narratives, Brucie records: "the hissing, acid

steam of monsoons…"

This is the best chapbook of the year 2010. It cuts close to the bone

with healing portraits of a real war and peace; stark, sharp, shadows…

and within the shadows of each poem is forgiveness. Bravo…Thank You

Welcome Home.

　

Irene Koronas

Poetry Editor:

Wilderness House Literary Review

Reviewer:

Ibbetson Street Press

Review of A Prayer for Everyone by Tomas O’Leary

Review of A Prayer for Everyone by Tomas O’Leary

Review by Lawrence Kessenich

Broadly speaking, most of the poems in Tomas O’Leary’s new collection fall into two categories: idea poems and story/character poems. Most of the idea poems occur in the two earlier sections of the book, “What One Has Said” and “Confession on a Tight Budget.” Most of the story/character poems occur in the final section, “A Sorceress of Rate Note.”

I find the idea poem daunting, but O’Leary takes on the form with unbridled gusto—and often with humor. In the section’s title poem, “What One Has Said,” he examines “truth” and “candor:”

I speak now only that I not be lying.
If I should die before I wake, well, hell,
at least the light is on. The darkness drops again
each time I hesitate. I train my tongue
into orbit around silences.

Even a poem about a cat named Ashes ends up a Buddhist meditation:

The cage of consciousness is not hers to pace
As she flattens down to refuge in the Buddha.
Lordly, they take the sun together,
Fur and stone – the ravager
And the holy one, fast friends…

O’Leary has a clever way of personifying ideas, so that they’re not just dry thoughts, but things that move around in front of the reader, as in “Hands Without Pockets,” where the contrast between what men and women do with their hands says much about the differing natures of the two sexes:

So often have women turned
their hands into grace, through gesture
or occupation, without

misgivings all will come out
right, they clearly manage
naked. Men, though, are lost, their hands

determined to hide deep in their pockets…

I was so enamored of O’Leary’s ability to manipulate ideas in his poems that I wanted more, so my less enthusiastic response to the story/character poems probably reflects that wish. It’s not that the cast of characters isn’t interesting and colorful: “The Perfectionist’s Midlife Crisis,” “Dick Cheney on Iambic Truth Serum,” “A Monk Gone Larking,” “The Alehouse Lion Rises and Orates.” The book’s first and title poem, “A Prayer for Everyone,” which might have served better as the introduction to this last section, captures O’Leary’s appreciation for the wonderful variety of human nature:

Blessed are the saved and the damned, for both
are born to blessing;
Blessed are the best and the worst, the wisest,
the most foolish;
Blessed are the fallen, the risen, the reverent,
and the ghoulish.

And he delineates these characters, tells their stories, with great enthusiasm. The “Monk Gone Larking” is not actually a monk, but the thumb of coast-to-coast hitchhiker who meets a lovely lass along the way:

…as I pass her the blackberry brandy.
She takes a belt that’s neither

greed nor daintiness and passes
back the bottle. Does she mind
if I smoke? Hell no,

go right ahead, do I have
any hemp, ha ha? I do ha ha.
Now the Chevy’s on air jets five feet

above the highway, in perfect gear…

“The Book of Shite” pillories a mythical landlord, Lord Owen Shite – I’m assuming he’s meant to be an English landlord in Ireland – and the ass-kissing Irish priest who convinces the Irish, represented by Doug MacDeep, that serving Shite is an honor:

In jags contumely strove
the florid pigwit Doug MacDeep
to caution tenants by the drove
they’d Christwise best contain their peep,
scale down the larder and eke out
the doubled rent since sunset last
they must be paying Owen Shite,
who suffers them to till his dust.
…

The priest was circumspect and pure,
a man of God who loved a story:
Spreading his subject like manure,
he harvested a Shite of glory!

Though certainly bold and enthusiastic, these story/character poems don’t quite have the impact for me that O’Leary’s idea poems have. He’s clearly a man of profound thought, even when he’s making ideas do cartwheels for us. In fact, it’s those cartwheels that help us reconsider ideas in a new light – and how many writers of poetry or prose are capable of making us do that?

Somerville Renaissance Women Yani Batteau: An artist who believes in transformation through the arts.

( Batteau--front right)





By Doug Holder


I met Somerville artist, musician Yani Batteau at a recent meeting of the Bagel Bard's in Davis Square. She was wearing a big cowboy hat, and carrying a banjo case. She is a woman with optimistic, bright blue eyes and a down home manner about her. She is an artist who believes that art has the power to transform people--the power to change things. More than once she has involved folks in one of her many projects and they came away with a new sense of their potential.

Batteau is decidedly a renaissance woman. She is an accomplished banjoist, vocalist, and even has a flip art book published about the Statue of Liberty titled: " The Statue of Liberty Takes a Dive" that is housed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. She has worked as a graphic artist, college instructor, and has won Somerville and Mass. Arts Council Awards. One memorable project she undertook was the " Living Statue" project at South Station in Boston. She painted live humans in bronze body paint. These statuesque humans motionlessly postured amidst the din and rush of commuters as they made their way to yet another work day.

Batteau also plays the five string banjo. She describes her music as mountain style, or "vintage country" She said: " My voice and my music meld together well." Batteau has played Club Passim, Johnny D's in Davis, and The Somerville Theatre to name a few venues.

Batteau often works with the Somerville Arts Council. Although she admires Gregory Jenkins the current head and thinks he is a great organizer, she looks fondly back to when her close friend Cecily Miller was at the helm.

Batteau loves being in Somerville with its "quirky people" and its decidedly artistic vibe. But like many artists she looks to the time she won't be able to handle the high rents and stringent parking regulations.

Batteau who is of French and Puerto Rican descent does house painting on the side to help keep food on the table and the wolves from the door. She remains optimistic and very busy, and in spite of these "post-recessionary" days she still believes that art can truly change things.

Jewish Book Festival Nov. 21, 2010

The Jewish Book Festival will be Nov. 21, 2010. I am glad to say Steve Glines, Doug Holder, and Paul Steven Stone will be on a publishing panel at this gala event. Read details below:


JCC Boston Jewish Book Fair




The JCC Boston Jewish Book Fair is a series of literary events featuring an eclectic line-up of notable authors. Programs include panel discussions, readings and workshops by some of the best voices in Jewish literature.

JCC Boston Jewish Book Fair




The JCC Boston Jewish Book Fair is a series of literary events featuring an eclectic line-up of notable authors. Programs include panel discussions, readings and workshops by some of the best voices in Jewish literature.



Some featured writers:


Barney Frank

Hank Philipi Ryan

James Carroll



Miriam Goldman Authors Fund presents
BE YOUR OWN PUBLISHER!
A Workshop on Publishing-on-demand • 3-5:30pm

Print–on-demand and self-publishing remain avenues whereby authors can get their books out into the market without costing a fortune, providing they do their homework and don’t get carried away by dreams of best sellers. Paul "Steven" Stone, author of Or So it Seems and creative director at W.B. Mason; Steve Glines, founder of the ISCS Press; and Doug Holder, founder of the Ibbetson Street Press, will introduce this brave new world of publishing.

Pre-registration required
JCC members: $25; Nonmembers: $30

Register online.





Leventhal-Sidman Jewish Community Center (Newton)
333 Nahanton Street
Newton, MA 02459
(617) 558-6522
www.lsjcc.org

Bunker Hill Community College: New Perspectives/Now Perspectives Reading

FEATURED READERS:

Doug Holder
Jean Dany Joachim
Tony Bee
Luke Salisbury



New Perspectives/Now Perspectives –
Books/Words/Reading/Learning
Featuring Local Writers and Poets
Thursday, October 14 • 6:30 – 8:00 p.m.





250 New Rutherford Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts 02129-2925
617-228-2093 • www.bhcc.mass.edu/artgallery
The Bunker Hill Community College Art Gallery is free and open to the public.
We are located at the Community College stop on the MBTA Orange Line.
Gallery hours: M/W/F 11 a.m. – 4 p.m.; T/Th 1 – 6 p.m.; Sat. 11 a.m. – 2 p.m.

The Boston Globe: SOMERVILLE: Literary Partnership

SOMERVILLE
Literary partnership
September 26, 2010

This month, Somerville’s de facto poet laureate Doug Holder announced a partnership between Ibbetson Street Press and Endicott College in Beverly. It’s running on a test basis for this academic year. “It’s kind of a joining of Somerville and Beverly,’’ said Holder, who has been teaching at Endicott and Bunker Hill Community College for the past year since losing his 27-year position at McLean Hospital. The relationship is a classic win-win, he said: Ibbetson, which publishes a quarterly poetry journal as well as books, gets funding, prestige, and an office, and the college gets attention and student support. “They want to promote their arts program — they have a new arts center,’’ Holder said. In addition to publishing the journal, Holder will start a reading series and send students into the community for literary internships. The college is supporting only the journal, not Ibbetson’s poetry book line. Holder will still maintain the press’s primary office in Somerville. Learn more at dougholder.blogspot.com. — Danielle Dreilinger

Where Sanity Begins by Hugh Fox

Where Sanity Begins
by Hugh Fox
Cervena Barva Press
copyright 2010
www.cervenabarvapress.com

Review by Lo Galluccio


Hugh Fox is one of the most prolific and genius voices on the poetry scene in America. His writing spans generations, cultures, cosmos and concepts of time and self. With a deeply subjective eye he manages to orient us as the compass of his heart would, toward people, places and things that flash through his awareness. His poems read like little short stories sometimes, or flash fiction snapshots of the real. There is also a journalistic flavor to some of his best poems, disjointed or elliptical as they may be, a sheer and jumbled travelogue of this wondrous man's life. In “Where Sanity Begins.” he has put together quite a fine collection of these poems and the picture on the title portrays the irony of it. Sanity is important to Hugh Fox, the everyday sanity of childbirth, of worldly transactions, of chit chat, and his grandchildren, but he has his demons too and they edge his poems like the angular play masks on the cover of the book. Sanity is really multifaceted and manifold. And it means seeing things your own way, from different perspectives. What any poet or songwriter must do to succeed.

First, there is the generosity factor of the poet's big heart, in “The Invisible Woman,” who he describes as having “a look of stark terror on her face, like she's face to face with a King-Kong sized spider.” And furthermore “the old lady and her terror totally invisible.” So what does he do but befriend her by picking her up for ice-cream every afternoon at 2 pm? And in a typically beautiful and dissociative way, the poems ends with “as I walk to the top of midnight and over down to dawn.”

And memory. There is much remembrance in these pieces, of a sage older man looking back through time. At one point he remembers how, in his youth, he would marshal a culture brigade in his family to hit the theatre and concert scene, putting these excursions before even the money at hand, “I feel that we're all pulling together toward the cooperative kibbutz realization of The Circle of Light, educated, enlightened, knowledge = Power DREAM..” p 12

Hugh's poems resemble hyper-journal entries replete with lists and sub-dubbed with precise and colorful details of city streets and familiar places. Often threaded in is a movie title like “BONNY AND CLYDE” OR a sign like “CHAMBER OF COMERCE OF GREATER JACKSON AREA.” These are both fixed and moving markers of pop culture, and landscape. All parts of a travelogue of his life where people, places and things are collected, recollected and indemnified.

I love the way he interjects a drop of dialogue in the center of a descriptive-narrative piece, this one not so disjunctive, but following the thread of taking his 1 and half year old grandson (or is it his son?) out to the sandbox in the autumn. The kid sees leaves and wants to eat them. “You don't eatum for god's sakes” cautions the narrator to his beloved boy and then off onto an aria of earth bits: “lilac seeds, pieces of acorns chewed on by squirrels...” Called “The Lowest Layer” Hugh Fox seems to be reaching down through this fragmenting hearth, to see the earth as a home and to tell his legacy that “you'll have a feeling when Fall comes and you're in a place like this, that someone loved you,” “look at things, don't just run away, but stop....” p 21

Another charming poem about his grandson is “Tantric Moon.” Together in the bathtub he “scrambles after the big white soap...” And then “I take him out into the cold late-October dark, the first time I've ever showed him the moon, “Look at the moon!” And the ending, again, pieces on an ethereal wonder: “I'm teaching Night too, Water, doesn't want to go in, dying. Awe.” A bulleting through description of the states he moves through at that moment looking at the moon after the bath.

One fine poem is Irdische/Earthly wherein he defines himself as an “I-Robot remembering when I was a man,” he conjectures “She must remember too. When the girls were born and her body flooded in all the good hormones, centered, the center of love, flowing out, flowing toward her, current and counter current.” It unravels with “sails/gloved/domed/the dew inside continuing skin...” A lyrical treatise on how again and bodies changing remains a constant in our impermanence but how the time of succulence and love-making still hovers by from when it was manifest.

In another portrait poem called, “Fireworks” the poet watches a woman dressed up with “an onyx medallion around her neck,” “trying on flowered pants and holding earrings up to her ears” – in this Fellini-like flashpoint of an image of beauty, there is “only the burst of light in the black Time sky.” In “Houdini Returns” the poet plays escape artist with the illusion or dream of life, its many rooms and the juxtaposition of timelessness and time with the human condition: “the petty but painful “individual neurosis or perversion” – “to walk into the jaguar forest to meet the gods.”

The gods, the moon, Kali, time, seasonal shifts all enter into Fox's poetry as it is in touch with the primordial and cosmic aspects of civilization as well as the contemporary antics of modern man. In an aside in a poem called, “The Light” he writes “I always wanted to write a book about the migration of the morning star symbol out of Asia to the Americas....” p.37 A magnificent poem of many threads, Fox begins with “The light goes so early, fugaz,” and ends with a meditation on the Nazis: “instead of killing the Jews, the Germans should have said LETS DRINK WINE, DO BUSINESS, AND EAT WELL AND BUILD HOMES AND BE JUST AND LIGHT CANDLES AND PRAISE GOD.” p 37

Fox's hunger for life and for loved ones is curdled sometimes by depression. – his consciousness haunted by the great ones who've gone before him. However, in “In the Moment” he writes: “The last fine day before the herds of Winter come and I feel like I've died and almost come all the way back, a spider thread between a dead pine tree and the Design Studio, a bright sag for a moment, then invisible, then bright again, invisible.” p. 40. It is an almost Puck like persona that can flicker back and forth from visible and invisible on the heels of the hell-frost. It seems to refer back to the theatrical masks on the cover of the book, to a man whose real and imaginary lives remain in great balance, neither eclipsing the other, both vivid, devoted and compelling.

The Ibbetson Street Press/Endicott College Visiting Author Series launches Oct. 6, 2010

(Sam Cornish)








There is a new series on the North Shore at Endicott College directed by Somerville's Ibbetson Street press founder Doug Holder. Its title: "Endicott College/Ibbetson Street Press Visiting Author Series. " It will be held at the Halle Library on the beautiful, sea-breeze infused Endicott College campus in Beverly, Mass. The series is part of the new affiliation that the Ibbetson Street Press of Somerville has formed with Endicott College. The first reader will be the first Boston Poet Laureate Sam Cornish. It will be held at 4P.M. Open mic to follow. Open to the public. Help launch this new literary series at the "Hub of the Arts" on the North Shore.


For directions to Endicott go to the website http://endicott.edu




http://samcornish.com/interviews.htm his website is http://www.samcornish.com


Sam Cornish, poet, essayist, editor of children's literature, photographer, educator, and figure in the Black Arts movement. He is the first City of Boston Poet Laureate.

Cornish served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps (1958–1960), then returned to his native Baltimore, where he published two poetry collections—In This Corner: Sam Cornish and Verses (1961) and People Beneath the Window (1964). While working at the Enoch Pratt Free Library, he became part of Baltimore's political and literary underground, self-publishing a sixteen-page pamphlet entitled Generations and Other Poems (1964). A subsequent edition of Generations (1966) appeared when Cornish was editing Chicory, a literary magazine by children and young adults in the Community Action Target Area of Baltimore. Lucian W. Dixon and Cornish edited a selection from the magazine entitled Chicory: Young Voices from the Black Ghetto (1969). In 1968 Cornish won the Humanities Institute of Coppin State College Poetry Prize for his “influence on the Coppin poets” and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Soon poets as diverse as Maxine Kumin, Clarence Major, and Eugene Redmond would acknowledge Cornish's significance.

By 1970 Cornish was represented in the LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) and Larry Neal anthology Black Fire (1968) as well as in the Clarence Major collection New Black Poetry (1969). He reconsidered his early poems of black historicized kinship, restructuring them into the Beacon Press's Generations (1971). After a brief stay in Boston, Cornish returned to Baltimore to work in secondary school and college writing programs. While there, Cornish published Sometimes (1973) with Cambridge's Pym-Randall Press. Teaching poetry in the schools led to several children's books: Your Hand in Mine (1970), Grandmother's Pictures (1974), and My Daddy's People (1976).

Returning to Boston in the mid-1970s, Cornish worked with the Educational Development Corporation and attended Goddard College in Vermont. He appeared in a host of new anthologies, from George Plimpton and Peter Ardery's American Literary Anthology (1970) and Harry Smith's Smith Poets (1971), to Ted Wilentz and Tom Weatherly's Natural Process (1972) and Arnold One Hundred Years of Black Poetry (1972). Sam's World (1978) continued the historical and genealogical project of Generations.

Since the 1980s Cornish has divided his time between bookselling and teaching creative writing and literature at Emerson College in Boston. Songs of Jubilee: New and Selected Poems, 1969–1983 (1986) recasts earlier work into sequences of a historical and biographical nature. His autobiographical narrative, 1935: A Memoir (1990), blends poetry and prose into a montage of twentieth-century history. The poems of Folks Like Me (1993) offer political and cultural portraits of African Americans from the depression to the early 1960s. Current projects include the next volume of his autobiography, 1955, and a critical study of Langston Hughes. His latest collection of poetry is an "Apron Full of Beans"

Ibbetson Street Poetry Award Winners..... Announced 2010!

We are proud to announce the winner of the Ibbetson Street Press Award, poet Kim Triedman. The winner will be given her award at The Somerville News Writers Festival, Nov. 13, 2010. The runner up and honorable mentions will also be announced at the Festival.


About Kim Triedman:












Kim Triedman began writing poetry after working in fiction for several years. In the past year, she's been named winner of the 2008 Main Street Rag Chapbook Competition, finalist for the 2007 Philbrick Poetry Award, finalist for the 2008 James Jones First Novel Fellowship, semi-finalist for the 2008 Black River Chapbook Competition and, most recently, semifinalist for the 2008 Parthenon Prize for Fiction. Her poems have been published widely in literary journals and anthologies here and abroad, including Main Street Rag, Poetry International, Appalachia, The Aurorean, Avocet, The New Writer, Byline Magazine, Poet's Ink, Poetry Salzburg Review, The Journal (U.K.), Asinine Poetry, Poetry Monthly, Current Accounts, Ghoti Magazine, IF Poetry Journal, Great Kills Review, Trespass Magazine, Mature Years, ART TIMES, Literary Bird Journal, and FRiGG Magazine. Additionally, one of her recent poems was selected by John Ashbery to be included in the Ashbery Resource Center’s online catalogue, which serves as a comprehensive bibliography of both Ashbery's work and work by artists directly influenced by Ashbery. This poem has also been included in the John Cage Trust archives at Bard College. Ms. Triedman has been nominated for the anthologies Best New Poets 2009 and Best of the Web 2010. She is a graduate of Brown University and lives in the Boston area with her husband and three daughters. Her first poetry collection -- "bathe in it or sleep" -- was published by Main Street Rag Publishing Company in October of 2008.





Ibbetson Award 2010



Winner: Kim Triedman: "(Captiv)ated"




Runner Up: Linda Larson: "Sweet Dixeyland, Early Sixties"



Honorable Mentions:


Pamela Annas: "Saturday Sock Hop, 1959."


Rose Scherlis: "Poker Circle"


Marilyn Jurich: " My Lost Mothers."

Review of PROFANE UNCERTAINTIES by Luis Raul Calvo

Review of PROFANE UNCERTAINTIES by Luis Raul Calvo, Translated from Spanish into English by Flavia Cosma, Cervena Barva Press, Somerville, Massachusetts, USA, 2010, poetry, 48 pages. Bookstore: www.thelostbookshelf.com

By Barbara Bialick

The book PROFANE UNCERTAINTIES by Luis Raul Calvo, is intriguing in its fascination with things universal, especially considering it’s written profanity-free by a man from Buenos Aires, Argentina and translated by a woman, Flavia Cosma, born in Romania, who lives and writes poetry, children’s books and TV documentaries in Canada in North American English.

Calvo’s philosophical wondering about life and death flows like a river in the tradition of other Latin American writers I have read but am not an expert in. “Real Life”, the first poem in the book starts you thinking right away: “Real life is nothing but a carroded/priesthood/in magnificent cities…But you who disowned the dogma and the customs/and chose the freedom of the blind…/you wander today/…wavering, your head bent/and staggering with your hands tangled/…in a dubious banquet.”

What does this mean? isn’t even a question I asked right away. Rather I just kept reading the book from beginning to end in its gentle language ironically frought with diatribes on death and memory. “When we think we have everything, something reminds us that the void also exists,” he writes, in “Nomadic Beauty (Fragments”). “When we start asking ourselves about love, we have ceased to be in love.”

Then he brings us into “Bajos fondos del alma, The lowest depths of the soul”, a long series of poems. In XIV, he notes “We were obliged to reach an understanding/that neither the world or our parents/resembled our primitive sensations.” In XIX, he says, “There are no memories/that can survive with dignity…the business of living becomes something similar to a fleeting/and fickle absence.”

A poet’s poet, Calvo is someone whose work you’d want to read when looking for inspiration. Indeed, he is a well known poet and essayist who was born in 1955 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He is editor-in-chief of “Generation Abierta” (Literature-Art-Education), a prominent cultural magazine founded in Buenos Aires in 1988. He’s also director of the weekly radio show “Generacion Abierta”, president of Literary Café Antonio Alberti, and a member of the Directorate of Argentina para la poesia foundation.
He has published more than six other books and his poems have been translated into English, French, Italian, Romanian and Portuguese.

At the End of Time: The Incomplete Works of Richard Krech

At the End of Time

The Incomplete Works of Richard Krech

Volume II Poems 2001 - 2009 $20.00

Sunnyoutside Press Buffalo 2010

ISBN: 978-1-934513-27-9



There are seven sections in this book of self realization, of how

worldly interruptions may effect the creative life. Krech breaks

out of his self imposed retreat from poetry, because…



"The statue with no face and broken legs

no longer stares out at the long green valley.

The frightened men have shattered their own

image. They

diminish themselves as they step beyond

their banal legacy of oppression

and turn to destroying the very history of the world.

The statue no longer stares out at Bamiyan valley,

the enlightened gaze takes in the reflection

still."



The collection of poems is a mixture of Buddhist thought, political

treaties, and biographical sketches. The poet places himself outside

the portraits and renders in fine lines the intentions of those he writes

about. The poems are mannered, concise, and full of insights…



"I have accomplished several remarkable

feats in poetry, I thought,

after coming off a 25-year line break.

I wrote a poem about the vibrate mode

of a cell phone;

another about Valerie Solanis

and Enver Hoxha.

I saw old friends and made new ones.

I found out that my spelling

has improved."



There is a stillness within the poems, and are often pulled up from the

ground, gritty, earthy. Krech uses form to express his word play.

The reader can relax with this worthy book, with its sense of history,

personal references and experiences, the poet/monk/activist/teacher,

writes with a wider audience in mind…



"…as yesterday's sun flattens out

and sinks into mountain ridges,

lights twinkling on

in West Oakland,

first evening breeze,

and the adventure continues."



　

Irene Koronas

Reviewer:

Ibbetson Street Press

Poetry Editor:

Wilderness House Literary Review