Literary /Musical Reception for Elizabeth Warren-- Sept 13, 2012-- Union Square, Somerville

                                       ELIZABETH WARREN FOR SENATE.

 

Elizabeth Searle and Steve Almond

 Invite You to a Literary and Musical Reception

In Support Of

Elizabeth Warren for Massachusetts Senate

Featuring

Ganesh Sitaraman

Policy Director for Elizabeth for MA

With readings by local authors

Andre Dubus III, Anita Shreve, Tom Perrotta,

Mameve Medwed, Anita Diamant,

Lise Haines, Suzanne Strempek Shea

and more

And a musical performance by

Amy Correia

Thursday, September 13, 2012

VIP Pre-Reception with Authors: 7:00PM

General Reception: 7:30PM

Precinct

70 Union Square

Somerville, MA 02143

VIP Pre-Reception: $250 (Give or Raise) › Friend: $100

› Supporter: $50 › General Reception Guest: $25

Please RSVP to Katherine O’Koniewski at Katherine@ElizabethWarren.com  

or by phone at 617-591-2816 or online:

http://events.elizabethwarren.com/event/Writers913

Contributions or gifts to Elizabeth for MA are not tax

Writer Rachael Popek takes the Write Step with 100,000 Poets for Change

Writer  Popek Rachael takes the Write Step with 100,000 Poets for Change

By Doug Holder

 Rachael Popek is the producer for R Jeffreys’ popular radio show the Write Step and is the Executive Coordinator, (working alongside Program Coordinator and Co-Chair R Jeffreys , and Coordinating Liaison and Co-Chair Kathleen Bitetti) for the 100,000 Poets for Change event at the Boston Public Library, Copley Branch, Sept 29 at 1PM to 3PM. According to Popek’s website the event will be”…the largest, single poetry reading in the history of the world. This event will also be archived, recorded and stored at Stanford University in California, and simulcast throughout the globe that day.”

  Popek is also a Master Pastry Chef working for MultiGrains Bakery as an R&D specialist and Quality Director. I talked with Popek on my Somerville Community Access TV show Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.

Doug Holder: You are intimately involved in the 100,000 Poets for Change event next month at the Boston Public Library in September. You are not a poet…how and why did you get involved?

Rachel Popek: I am not a poet. My good friend R. Jefferys is the poet; I produce his radio show The Write Step on Blogtalk Radio. So when he decided to organize the 100,000 Poets for Change event, I went along with it. And I have become absolutely enamored with it. It is amazing to me that something that is usually considered as benign as poetry can be used in an activist manner. Over the centuries people believed poetry was quiet, benign, artistic and eccentric. I’m learning about literary history. And I have found out to my surprise that poetry has been one of the motivating factors in our history.

DH: Any favorite poets?

RP: When I was a young girl it was Robert Frost. I love Frost, and I loved the stories he told through his poetry. My parents used to read Robert Frost to me. Later poetry had gone by the wayside in my life but now I have come back to it.

DH: Can you tell me about the 100,000 Poets for Change event that you are involved with?

RP: On Sept. 29, 2012 there will be over 600 events and readings across the country that will be broadcast over the internet. The events will be taking place at many times throughout the day. It’s going to be bigger than last year’s event. The reading in Boston will be in the mezzanine of the Boston Public Library from 1PM to 3PM—and will be open to the public.  Featured poets will be R Jeffreys, January O’Neil, Charles Coe, Harris Gardner, Doug Holder, Sam Cornish and Philip Robinson.

DH: You are the producer of the popular Blogtalk radio show the Write Step hosted by R Jeffreys. Tell me about the show and your duties.

RP: The show presents interviews with poets, artists, writers, and musicians. We discuss what it takes to write what they write. We cover their upcoming books, albums, etc… We explore their own personal process through their creative work. We ask questions like:  What does it take for you to create?

DH: How do you find your guests?

RP:  R Jeffreys has an intricate network of friends. Some people come to us. Others we contact when we hear a new book is coming out.

DH: You are a Master Pastry Chef. That is very creative. How did you get involved with this?

RP: It started when someone dared me. Originally I was doing cooking at home. So someone said I should take the course and see if I could promote myself. My father who was a salesman, and traveled the world, told me he had a friend in France who would take me on as an apprentice. My two kids went with me. It was a great experience. I was in Paris every weekend. I was told to stay in France because America was not a good place for a pastry chef, especially for a woman.  I didn’t know how right this was. When I came back I couldn’t get a job because I didn’t have experience—it was a man-driven business.

DH: Can you make parallels between being a chef, and writing?

RP: Both start out with a summation. Writing consists of these questions: what is the story  going to be about?—how am I am I going to break the story down?—what are the main characters, etc.?…  You do the same thing when you build a cake—when you are going to build a reputation. You go from scratch. The story and the cake have a foundation layer—so you are writing a cake in a sense.

DH:  You are working on a memoir Living Beyond Cancer: Not Just Surviving. Tell us about this.

RP: In Feb. 2012 I was diagnosed with cancer. I am a middle-aged, single mom-who without work would not have health insurance, and without insurance there would be no treatment. I wrote this book which is essentially about compartmentalization. I took out the unnecessary from my life so not only could I survive physically and financially, but I could live. I didn’t want to be overwhelmed with debt. I worked throughout my treatment. I never missed a scheduled day of work. I was able to physically and mentally compartmentalize.

….. For the 100,000 Poets For Change event go to: http://100tpfcma.weebly.com/performing-poets.html

Leo Racicot Remembers Julia Child

JULIA CHILD

                              A FRIEND INDEED!!

                                        by Leo Racicot



    I had become good friends with the well-loved American
writer, M.F.K. Fisher (Mary Frances) when, on one of my
many, cherished visits to her bungalow home in Glen Ellen,
her friend, Julia Child, phoned her for a chat.  After she hung
up, I saw a bulb light up above Mary Frances' pretty head.
She said, "Julia lives in Cambridge. You live in Lowell. I'd
love for the two of you to meet. You'll get along swimmingly!"

    I jumped at the chance to meet the famous French Chef.
MF made all the arrangements and in March of that year,
after Julia gave a talk at the Boston Public Library followed
by a book-signing at nearby Newbury Street's Harvard Bookstore
Cafe (now gone), I stepped meekly forward, calling out my name
to "Mrs Child".  "Oh!", she burbled to the long line of admirers
waiting for her autograph, "Leee-ohh's here!!  Leee-ohh  Rass-
ee-coe is a friend of M.F.K. Fishah!!"  Everyone clapped as I
ascended into Seventh Heaven.

    Every Saturday afternoon, when I was a boy, lying belly-
down on my living room couch, watching Julia Child, "The
French Chef", chop, dice, bake, parboil and joke her way
into everyone's heart, including mine, never in my wildest
dreams did I imagine I would one day be standing in front
of her (or rather, I should say, cowering under her for at
an imposing 6' 2" tall, she towered over my quivering smallness
like Juno halloo-ing down from Mount Olympus. To say I was a
tad nervous is to say that flames are hot).

    But she put me at ease immediately in that goose-y, Warner
Bros. cartoon of a voice, "Call me Jooo-leeah!!".  I had wondered
to myself whether some of her t.v. personality might be a put-on
for entertainment's sake. I was wrong; Julia was as
engaging, eccentric, generous, smart and daffy as she was
when she cast her magic spell every week over PBS viewers
here in Boston and all over the world.

    With a wave of her hand, Julia shooed her entourage away
proclaiming, "Leo and I shall be dining alone".  We were ushered
to a corner table by the head chef himself, a dark, jolly Buddha
from Tunisia called Moncef. We ate and drank lustily, and
spoke about many subjects (at least Julia did; I was happy
just listening to her hold forth on a constellation of topics
the scope and breadth of which was infinite, for Julia, I
would come to learn in the years ahead, did not care to talk
shop. Local politics, world affairs, space exploration, the
literary and arts scene, libraries, her days as a spy for the
O.S.S., the Cambridge community and neighborhood she
lived in -- these were the subjects she was more apt to
pile onto her conversational plate. She was one of the
most intelligent people I have ever met, as well as one of
the funniest; her comedic skills and timing could, at times,
rival Lucille Ball's; And she was possessed
of an Olympic energy. "I never tire!" was her motto, and I
saw her outlast, outdo, outshine people 20, 30, 40 years
her junior, including me.

    Our evening was a total delight.

    So it was with some regret when it ended that I hailed
her a cab and watched it whisk her away into the night.
My time with her was so once-in-a-lifetime and surreal,
it was as if it had taken place in a dream.  "Well, I probably
won't be doing that again anytime soon, if ever", I thought
as I made my happy/sad way home...

                            *    *    *    *

    Years later, I took a job as caregiver to the son of
former members of The Roosevelt Administration, Hilda
and Francis Shea. My responsibilities were solely to instill
living and language skills in their son, Richard. I was told
to report to an address on Francis Avenue. And though
I knew the street was only a stone's throw away from
Harvard Yard (having trained at Harvard Divinity School
years before), I had no real idea where Francis Avenue
was in relation to its neighboring streets.

    Imagine my surprise, then, when, about a month after
taking up my duties there, the house manager, Bob Stone,
took me over to the kitchen window, pointed to a grey house
in the near distance and said, "I bet you don't know who lives
there".  I said I did not and Bob exclaimed, "Julia Child!!"
I was so beside myself, I made the mistake of telling Bob I
had actually had dinner with Julia and the story of our evening
together, and about M.F.K. Fisher. I say "mistake" because the
very next day, Ms. Shea, my employer, came down to the kitchen
asking if I knew how to make a sauce soubise. I said I did not
and told her the on-going joke among my friends that "Leo could
burn boiling water if you give him the chance".  "Oh, come, come
now", tittered Ms. Shea, "I know you're friends with M.F.K. Fisher
and Julia Child. You're being much too modest."  No amount of
protest could convince Ms. Shea that knowing M.F.K. Fisher
and having dinner with Julia Child once did not mean I could
cook.  She led me over to a wall spilling over with cookbooks
galore and declared, "You are my son's companion and now
you will be my chef as well."  I swallowed hard. Was I ever in
the stew. Because Hilda Drosnicop Shea never took "no"
for an answer. From anyone. Ever. She handed me a cook's
apron, showed me where all the pots and pans were kept
and said, "Let's see what you can whip up for this evening's
meal."

                              *    *    *    *

    Only God knows what came out of the oven those first,
few months because I certainly didn't. Somehow, my concoc-
tions didn't look a thing like the pictures in the cookbooks.
Let's just say it was not uncommon for staff to call out for
pizza delivery as soon as they saw what I had plunked down
for them on the table.

    One particular fright that was supposed to be Hungarian
goulash but looked like a volcano had erupted in the Dutch
oven and tasted even worse, became the final straw. It was
time to call in the cavalry (a.k.a. Julia Child, or as we all in
the house came to intone whenever something inexplicable
sat bubbling on top of the frightened stove, "What Would
Julia Do??")

      It is little known about Julia, I think, that she was one
of the most accommodating celebrities on the planet. Her
home phone number was listed in the book; not only did
she not mind people calling her for culinary rescue; she
also welcomed them, for she loved all things food-related
and saw herself as a teacher and felt it her duty to school
her students or at least listen when they needed kitchen
assistance. Perhaps because fame had come to her later
in life, she had not let it go to her head. Down-to-earth,
practical, and having herself made many mistakes on her
way to "Mastering the Art of French Cooking", she more
than understood (the reader will please forgive my use of
the obvious idiom here) that "You have to break a lot of eggs
before you can make an omelette".

    And so, Julia and I became better friends this second time
around. We went to the movies together, took fine walks
around The Writers' Block, shopped at Farmer's Markets
and local grocerias, went for rides to see the New England
foliage.

    Mostly, we spent happy hours in her kitchen, her patience
and good nature explaining why my souffle had taken a nose
dive, why eating my Apple Brown Betty was like sticking your
tongue into a giant sugar bowl or why the catfish casserole
"should never have been put into a recipe book in the first
place; some recipes simply don't work!!"  She helped me
become, over time, if not her or M.F.K. Fisher, then certainly
a reasonable facsimile thereof.  I can whip up a mean jam-
balaya, can tease the most succulent juices from the driest
meats, and my Beef Bourgignon has been known to draw
near-orgasmic sounds from those lucky enough to find it
on their plates. Ahem.

    For this is the basis of what Julia Child did. Her gift
to America. That she was able, through talent, but also
through hard work and perserverance, belief in herself
and a soupcon of "funny" thrown in for taste, to turn a
country of unculinary dolts like me into cooks who won't
flinch when handed a pot, a pan or a brand new recipe
to grapple with.  Julia Child changed the way we think
about food, about eating, about ourselves in our kitchens.
She liberated the American palate, mired for generations
in a diet of meat, potatoes and gravy. She introduced new
foods to the American table, opening our minds to ex-
perimentation and international cuisines. We eat better
because she explored better foods for us to eat. Julia
was a true pioneer and like all pioneers, found the courage
to step out onto an unknown road and bid us follow...

    I miss her. I imagine we all do. With a spirit as
brave and nonesuch as hers, how can we not?



**********   Leo Racicot's work has been featured in "Co-Evolution Quarterly","Utne Reader", "Spiritual Life", "Gay Sunshine Journal", "First Hand","The Poet", "Ibbetson Street Press", "Poetry", "Shakespeare's Monkey"and "Yankee". Two of his award-winning essay-memoirs appear in "Best of..."anthologies, and he is the recipient of the Antonio Machado PoetryForum Award (1992). His holiday story, "The Little Man" is beingpublished by Snug Harbor and will be available in audio and animatedform on fablevision.comHe has been a schoolteacher/librarian/cook/counselor/poet/actor/clown

Review of BURDEN OF SOLACE, Poems by Teneice Durrant Delgado

Review of BURDEN OF SOLACE, Poems by Teneice Durrant Delgado, chapbook, Cervena Barva Press, PO Box 440357, W. Somerville, MA 02144, www.cervenabarvapress.com, 2012, $7.

Review by Barbara Bialick, author of TIME LEAVES

Like Cervena Barva Press is often known for, Teneice Durrant Delgado’s new chapbook, BURDEN OF SOLACE, is a disturbing eye-opener at yet another human miscarriage of justice—the slavery trade in young Irish women, on the same boat with the black slave trade, all used to harvest sugar and breed mulatto slaves in Barbados, in the Caribbean.  She quotes a statement paper from London in 1742 which called it, “…a great benefit to the West India sugar planters, who desired men and boys for their bondsmen and women and Irish girls…to solace them…”

In the compressed space of 10 poems, Delgado gives us an ugly picture of “forced emigration to hell or Barbados…” (“Mary Margaret”)  In the poem about “Anne Glover”, the girl is told “…If you stop bleeding, she said, in Irish, forbidden, don’t ever let yourself love that child./Don’t/you ever think that child yours…”  In the turmoil, “her work-bent fingers worry over imaginary rosaries for three/long days…”

Teniece Durant Delgado, of Dayton, Ohio has published in literary magazines and has published two other chapbooks:   FLAME ABOVE FLAME and THE GOLDILOCKS COMPLEX.  She is pursuing a degree in Community Counseling at the University of Dayton. She is also co-founder and poetry editor for BLOOD LOTUS: AN ONLINE LITERARY JOURNAL and publisher and managing editor for Winged City Press Chapbooks and is on the editorial board for New Sins Press. She has an MFA from Spalding University’s Low Residency program.

The Aurorean Editors Present: A Selection of Favorites from the first fifteen years

The Aurorean Editors Present: A Selection of Favorites from the Frst Fifteen Years

Encircle Publications 2012

ISBN 13: 978-1-893035-14-0

www.encirclepub.com/store/product/favorites


Review by Irene Koronas



'Favorites' is a golden soft cover perfect bound book of poets

from their collection from the past fifteen years, which says

to me the reader that the selection of poets has been care-

fully chosen from the many fine poems that have graced

the pages of this fine journal.



There are almost one hundred poems and seventy one

contributors. In the introduction the reader learns how

this journal got its start in the world of small press. The

journal's, 'Favorites' starts with a poem by Lillis Palmer:



“Observe this

evidence of faith,

the gardener

kneeling on her piece

of earth,

spading the soil with

blistered

hands, breathing

the humus-sweet

cold air;...”



And the Aurorean editors, Cynthia Brackett-Vincent & Devin

McGuire, choose to complete the book with Robert M Chute:



“I've never found an arrowhead,

one flinty chip of history.

Young Thoreau, they said, if he walked by

some farmer's fresh plowed field, could just

stoop down and pick up one...”



Between these two poems, there are an array, verse depicting

season, meditations, and New England. Each section flowers

and wanes, crashes onto our consciousness, and sleeps in our bellies.

The book itself illumines our senses with tones ranging from new

gold to old gold. Here Cathy Edgett spills the last drops into words:



“ I drank grief like tea in Tibet,

Holding the cup with both hands,

Steam a womb,

I drank,

Water trickled down rocks,

Ochered in gold,

To the sea.”



There are poems from morning, from each horizon

as it shows itself, just as in a poem by Martha Boss:



“It's so quiet

you can hear

sun working the flowers,

glory opening up the morning,

days from here & there



becoming hybrid

and time wondering

what time is.



It's so quiet

you can almost hear

your mood changing

into a loud outfit.”



These poems are cut long stem roses and worth the price

of the entry. The perfect gift for friends and lovers.

Jim Barton's poem:



“where

heated words

storm out

to sit and cool

then float

(at peace)

back home”





Irene Koronas

Reviewer: Ibettson Street Press

Poetry Editor: Wilderness House Literary Review

Somerville Poet Cornered by Two Novelist Cops

Somerville Poet Cornered by Two Novelist Cops

By Doug Holder

  Yes. I was cornered by two cops. One was Kevin F. Branley of the Cambridge Special Investigation Unit, and the other  Bill Chipman, from the Harvard University police. What was my crime you ask? Have the skeletons jumped out my closet? No. I met both men of the law at the Bloc 11 Café on Bow St. Union Square, Somerville, where they cornered me for an interrogation at my usual window seat. However in this case the interrogation…I mean interview,  was conducted by yours truly.

  Bill Chipman, the Ivy league cop lives on the border of Somerville and Medford. He said “ I sleep in Somerville.”  Chipman has written a novel Sucker's Dance, a crime story about an insurance scam and murder, and is currently working on another book: Last Seen in the Caribbean.

  Kevin Branley is a native of Medford, Mass and the child of Irish immigrants. He told me:" I grew up in a large Irish family. At 17, you were out of the house and on your own." His novel  Mourning Twilight deals with a disgruntled spirit that wreaks horror through the tunnel system of a psychiatric hospital, modeled after the old Metropolitan State in Waltham. Branley, like yours truly, worked on the locked wards, while earning undergraduate and graduate degrees from Northeastern University and U Mass Lowell respectively.

  Although both men are not graduates of tony MFA mills, they have had real life experienec that most graduates of the said institutions don't have. Both men have taken courses in Creative Writing however.  Branley , at UMASS Boston with Pancho Savory, while Chipman has studied at the Harvard Extension School.

  Chipman's protagonist in his novel Sucker Punch  is Cole Pierce. He told me his mother once considered naming him Cole or Pierce, thus the name. Pierce is persistent and like all of us flawed. Chipman told me: " We don't start out evil, it sort of creeps up on you one step at a time." Chipman's Pierce starts out as an idealistic cop, but he gets into a car accident, gets addicted to pills, and goes down hill. But as Chipman said: " We all struggle with good and evil--it is the human condition."

  Branley's main character in Mourning Twilight is named Tommy Nevefka. The novel takes place in Medord, Mass. I asked Branley how he got the name. He smiled; " In Medford it is almost like you are either Italian or Irish. Thus Tommy Nevefka." So an Irish first name and Italian last name is in order. And given that Branley is Irish we know why Tommy comes first. Branley's character struggles with the duality of good and evil. And Branley like Chipman acknowledges the fact that each dwells in the other.

 Both men are busy with their professional careers. Chipman,  who holds an advanced degree from Harvard University's Kennedy School, has to deal with the recent rapes that have taken place on the Harvard campus, and Branley  has to deal with illegal drug trade in the Central Square section of Cambridge,  Mass. and other areas. But beware, like any writers worth their salt, they use fodder from all walks of their lives. And as it was once said on  a famous crime TV Show:

"There are a million stories in the Naked City...." And in this case my friends you could be in one of them.


**** Both Branley and Chipman will read from their work at The Book Shop at Ball Square in Somerville...Sept 22..check website for details.  http://www.bookshopsomerville.com/

  

 

Without a Net By Ana Maria Shua

 

Without a Net 

By Ana Maria Shua 

Translated by Steven J Stewart 

Hanging Loose Press 

Brooklyn, New York 

www.hangingloosepress.com 

ISBN: 978-1-934909-28-7 

128 Pages 

$18.00 

REVIEW BY DENNIS DALY

Review by Dennis Daly 

These uncaged micro-fictions claw at their cream-colored context, crouch on the page, oozing hostility, catlike, and insatiably curious, waiting for the next reader, the next fearless trainer to breathe them into existential space and coax them through art’s flaming hoops. 

Ana Maria Shua, via the crisp translations of Steven J. Stewart, unleashes her circus fictions on us with dreamtime logic and dangerous humor. Beware of the clowns; some of them are dead men.  Distrust the trapeze artists; they somersault from one universe to another. And for God’s sake stay clear of the magician; he’ll plunder your dreams to intercept and terminate your most secret wishes. One more thing: read Shua’s history pieces with a jaundiced eye. I don’t believe for a moment that William F. Cody was a happy man. But it would appear that Diane Arbus, before her suicide, was a happy woman.  

The Secret Wish, which serves as the book’s prologue, strikes me as blood-curdling and sociologically accurate. Shua walks us into the heart of darkness of the circus goers. They wish, says Shua, “to see the trapeze artist fall, to see him smash his bones against the ground, spill his dark blood on the sand… to see the lions fight over the tamer’s remains…{and}to see the horse drag the rider around by her foot caught in the stirrup, striking her head in rhythm against the edge of the ring. But even havoc like this can become tiresome. That’s when” the audience’s desires shift: sick of disasters and failures they begin to wish that the trapeze artist’s hands reach it in time, that the tamer keep lions under control, {and} that the rider makes it back to the saddle.” How nice that civilization has progressed! But Shua’s not done. The circus goers now become prideful of their humanity and aware of what a “decent, sensitive, and well-intentioned people” they are. We know where this leads. 

One of my favorite pieces in this big top collection Shua entitles Immortal. The poem drubs poets and other artists who seek fame believing it the logical end to their creation-quest. The narrator, who sews sequins on circus costumes, believes that immortality is the key to becoming a great trapeze artist or acrobat. However two hundred years later, having escaped mortality, he is still sewing sequins and explains that the means to his artistic glorification has now become the end. He confesses to his “always new,” friends: “I don’t want to die.” Most artists realize that art without danger, without some imaginative risk loses its definition and dims away. 

The fiction Magician and Saw captures you with its irony and, finally, with its all-out black humor. Shua takes the usual magic trick of sawing a woman in half and, uncomfortably for us, turns it on its head. The audience for this classic circus act has evolved. It no longer needs proof that the woman assistant is still intact.  The audience applauds the whole bloody event wildly. The author then leaves us with this cautionary ending: “Now everything is easier. Except, of course, finding assistants.” 

Many of Shua’s micro-fictions resemble the pieces of Jorge Luis Borges. They aren’t as dense as Borges, but the tone and logical leaps are at times quite similar. Years ago, when I first read him, Borges sent me over and over to the Encyclopedia Britannica to see whether I was dealing with a fictional construct or something with an historical, biological or geographical reality. Shua’s piece The Liger sent me to Goggle.  And there it was.  A liger turns out to be the product of mating between a male lion and a female tiger.  According to Shua, “Bigger than its mother and father, a liger can grow to more than 13 feet long and weigh up to 900 pounds. As the gene that limits growth is transmitted maternally in lions and paternally in tigers, the liger doesn’t inherit it and thus never stops growing its whole life.” Shua’s imagination takes off at this point and she places the universe and its long history within the liger’s enormous mouth. In fact the cover of this book specifically places her metaphorical circus inside the gullet of a liger. 

In Buffalo Bill, the character of William F. Cody comes across as a modern day Borges. After  a lifetime of killing Shua makes him into an omnivorous reader and in the piece Diane Arbus  she brings to life the famous photographer of freaks and monsters, portraying her as childlike in her curiosity and suggests that she joined the ranks of her subjects by her suicide.  

But perhaps Shua’s most thoughtful story, doubling as a cautionary tale is called The Bearded Woman. The author begins and ends her fiction with this sentence: Some stories don’t even give your imagination a chance. Shua sets the story in Mexico in 1854. A circus promoter finds and falls in love (maybe) with a bearded lady. He exhibits her all over the world. Now it gets dicey. The woman becomes pregnant and gives birth to a little daughter who has the same odd characteristics as her mother. Both die during birth or shortly after. The husband embalms both and winds up exhibiting them throughout the world. Charmingly the husband then remarries—another bearded lady, and dies insane. I’m shocked! No not at the story’s details as much as my own reaction to them. That’s what this writer, Ana Maria Shua, does. And she does it well.

Poet Wendy Ranan: A psychotherapist. A poet. Motivated by beauty.

Poet Wendy Ranan: A psychotherapist. A poet.  Motivated by beauty.

By Doug Holder

  Some people are motivated by love; some are motivated by money, others by power. Poet Wendy Ranan is motivated by beauty. More specifically the beauty of nature.  And there are generous and evocative doses of nature in her work. Ranan has worked for years at a major psychiatric hospital just outside of Boston that at one time housed such poets as Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath.  I met with her at her office, a Spartan hole-in –the wall, to interview her in light of her new poetry collection “The Quiet Room.”  Ranan, like most writers is no trust fund baby and struggles to find time in her busy day to  manage work, raise a family, and keep the creative fires burning.

  Her collection  “The Quiet Room”( Deerbrook Editions) deals with her experience at the said hospital, as well as other elements of her life. Peter Balakian ( Professor of Humanities—Colgate University) writes of Ranan: “ She is one of the few poets now writing in America who uses her professional understanding of psychology  in ways that are inventive and fresh, giving her poetry a unique dimension. ‘The Quiet Room’ is a beautiful and powerful book.”

  Ranan’s  poetic history dates back to grade school . She told me: “ I have been writing  poems my whole life.  In the fourth grade I heard Paul Scofield the famous Shakespearian actor read “adult” poems on T.V.  The poems did not rhyme, and I felt I could write without the constriction of rhyme and meter for the first time. So I wrote a poem and without me knowing it my teacher sent it to Paul Scofield. Scofield sent me  a card back.     For the first the experience of writing was not private anymore.

 Later Ranan attended Sarah Lawrence College and studied with poets like Jane Cooper, and Galway Kinnell-who turned out to be a major influence on her. After college she took a writing workshop with  the feminist writer Erica Jong in New York City. Ranan was also living in NYC at the time and supporting herself with odd jobs.  She decided to attend Smith College and get her Social  Work degree. This gave her steady work, a focus, and she had a long-time interest in psychotherapy and the Human Services, making it a good fit for her.

Ranan who comes from a family chockfull of writers and artists, decided after working for a awhile to get her Masters in Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Boston University. There she studied with former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, and Derek Walcott.

 Ranan published in magazines like Crazy Horse, AGNI,   The Seattle Review,  The Poetry Miscellany  and Tendril and in 1982 came out with her chapbook “Inside Out.” (State Street Press).

  Nature plays a big role in Ranan’s poetry. Ranan told me she is motivated by beauty. And nature for her is a font of beauty. And indeed in her work nature constantly bumps up against the walls of the institution where she works.  Wildlife at times provides comic relief to what goes on behind the walls of a psychiatric hospital. In short metaphors “bloom” in her poetry. In the first stanza of her poem “Greener” she almost makes a mission statement about her relationship as a poet with the natural world:

“I have always admired a landscape

of simple lines; the redundant

blue and brown of sand dunes, sky.

poets of few words

who could articulate

any lake.

Stars. Condensed fire

made to stay cooling in place,

monument to desire,

 in-vitro grave

 I asked  Ranan  about another one of her poems from her new collection, titled: Anesthesia

“ It was a kind of speeded sleep

I spun through, into

a lack of, blacker

than a moonless lake

and without the lappings of dream.

It was like

intaglio; a zinc plate

unscratched by any shape

and rolled with ink.

It was the epiphany

of unconcern for the body;

whatever they did to me was fine,

for I was away

at time’s beginning

when bones, still feathery, yielded

this way and that

to the will of water

pumping me into existence

layer by layer, not one

speck superfluous.

I wake to the weight of decades,

deflated, a thing

at the mercy of mortals

who bring me back

with a name.”

I told her that I felt the poem talked of anesthesia as an escape—a way to be outside one’s self, a form of transcendence, a limbo where one sheds the heavy baggage of life—a sort of temporary death. In a way it was like a poet’s need to escape into a special mindset to write—to be outside looking in. Ranan commented: “In this poem I was both relieved and scared."   Ranan said from her own experience with anesthesia she has come up with the “Oh-Well” response  to certain clients. She suggests in times of stress they say “Oh-Well”, and accept faith without fear.

Like most writers anything is grist for the mill. In “The Quiet Room” she explores the passage of time, relationships, with her unique gimlet poet’s eye.

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Ranan, unlike many of the poets I interviewed over the last decade or so is not a self-promoter. She is not a denizen of social media, and certainly is no computer whiz. This is not to say the poet has no ambitions. But for Ranan the writing comes first—and this purity leaves its imprint on her accomplished body of work.

For a review of The Quiet Room by Wendy Ranan go to:Off the Self: The Somerville News