Tess Gallagher to read at the Hastings Room Reading Series April 18, 2016

TESS GALLAGHER reads

with LARRY MATSUDA

from their collaborative book of poems

Boogie-Woogie Crisscross presented by

Marc Vincenz, editor of MadHat Press and Plume Editions

with the Hastings Room Reading Series

                                       

Monday April 18, 7:00–9:00 pm

The Friends Meeting House

5 Longfellow Park

(opposite the Longfellow House)

Cambridge, MA 02138

Tess Gallagher’s latest book is Midnight Lantern: New and Selected Poems (Graywolf, 2011). She recently

companioned the film BIRDMAN, which includes her late husband Raymond Carver’s story: “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” She lives and writes in Port Angeles, Washington, her birthplace, as well as intervals spent in her cottage in the west of Ireland, where all of the poems included here were written in

her chair that overlooks a green field in County Sligo.

Lawrence Matsuda was born in the Minidoka, Idaho, World War II Relocation Center, one of the concentration camps where approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans were held without due process. Matsuda has a Ph.D. in education and was a visiting professor at Seattle University.

In 2015 he completed two graphic novels with artist Matt Sasaki and interviews with Japanese American

fighters from the 442nd and their relatives, An American Hero: Shiro Kashino, and Fighting for America: Nisei Soldiers.

Boogie-Woogie Crisscross, an intercontinental collaboration/exchange between two poets of international stature is rowdy, rambunctious and heartfelt. With a combination of joyful shared experiences and attention to human suffering, past and present, its authors bring a thoughtful and poetic focus to bear upon global events and their own histories.

These poems developed via e-mails exchanged between Tess Gallagher and Lawrence Matsuda over a number of years. The resulting collaboration is a poetry jam session where they trade and borrow images, and run riffs on each other’s poems in a responsive, competitive, and lighthearted way. Early on, Tess characterizes the style as being “kind of hip and comic book and jangly.” Like any dance it’s also an invitation to lose time and as Larry says—to show your “chops.” A kind of dueling banjos.

It is impossible to read Tess Gallagher’s poems without being drawn into their mesmerizing rhythms and convinced of the rightness of her intense yet unforced images. —Joyce Carol Oates

Remembering The Grolier Poetry Book Shop before 2006

( Left to Right: Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti with the late owner of the Grolier Gordon Carinie)

Remembering The Grolier before 2006

by Richard Dey

The sign “No Law books, No Text Books” was taped to the door, the long couch to the left of the door and beneath the big window stretched invitingly, and above the shelves of books, out of reach and not easy to see, hung the framed black-and-white photographs of poets you found in anthologies of twentieth century poetry. Proprietor Gordon Carinie, by then an old man, was in the shop, standing around. I first went up the two or three high, unlevel steps and into the shop in the fall of 1970 and continued to buy books there for some 35 years. It was the shop everyone at The Harvard Advocate went to, and I was on the Advocate board, eventually as poetry editor.

While Cairnie seemed aloof, Louisa Solano, who took over the shop in 1974, was always friendly and helpful even as she was always busy running the business. Her loyal dog lay somewhere close by, a kind of medic in case she who had epilepsy had a seizure. Louisa replaced the couch with a table for book and magazine displays. You could do nothing but stand and circle slowly the big middle table, and open and sample and close more books and chapbooks of poetry than you could imagine. There was hardly room to turn between the table and the wall shelves, and pull a book down from a shelf. The little bookshop, crammed as a mussel bed, was in its pleasant, redolent way overwhelming.

Louisa carried and sold my first chapbook, Bequia Poems, in 1979. She did the same with my first book, The Bequia Poems, in 1988. At that time, I was publishing what could be called “boat poems” in various journals and magazines including SAIL. In the April 1987 issue, as a main illustrated feature, appeared a dramatic narrative of mine, “The Loss of the Schooner Kestrel.” I gave a copy to Louisa and she passed it on the Andreas Tauber, then the artistic director of The Poets’ Theater. A month later, on May 8, in the Cambridge home of Molly Adams, he produced a staged reading of the poem. 

Just as Louisa was more than a bookseller, the Grolier was more than a bookshop. I went to book signings there, and to readings it sponsored in the common room of nearby Adams House. In my collection of chapbooks is Nightfire by Gail Mazur who on the title page inscribed “To Richard Dey at the Grolier 9/16/87” and signed it. Louisa herself gave creditable introductions to the poets reading. The big store window in those days before the Internet was, with its posters and announcements, a main source of information for upcoming readings in the greater Cambridge area.

Richard Dey

I graduated from  Harvard College in 1973 and after a year living near Porter Square moved out of Cambridge. For years I returned to go to readings and the Out of Town newsstand, and to buy supplies at Bob Slate’s Stationary, and various things at The Coop. For sentimental reasons I continued to eat at the Wursthaus or get a turkey sandwich at Elsie’s for as long as those places lasted. On these forays into Cambridge I parked on or near Plympton Street. While I may have stopped in at the Star Book Store in search of used treasure, it was the Grolier that I passed by first and last on my errands, and often enough went into to buy something that I really couldn’t afford—but could not afford not to have. And Louisa, ready in the rear corner at the cash register, was of course glad to look up and smile and ring up the sale.

*********************************************************************************


Dey graduated from Tabor Academy and, after two years at St. Lawrence University and three in the U.S. Army, from Harvard College in 1973. He has worked as a commercial fisherman in the offshore lobster and swordfish fisheries off New England. As freelance journalist, he has contributed to Yachting, Sail, Offshore, The Boston Globe, and Harvard Magazine, among other publications. Currently, he is an instructor of maritime history and literature in the SEAmester program of Southhampton College, Long Island University. The father of two boys, he lives on the south shore of Massachusetts and visits Bequia in the West Indies frequently.

The Sunday Poet: Llyn Clague

Llyn Clague

Llyn Clague is a poet based in Hastings-on-Hudson, NY.  His poems have been published widely, including in Ibbetson Street, Atlanta Review, Wisconsin Review, California Quarterly, Main Street Rag, New York Quarterly, and other magazines.  His seventh book, Hard-Edged and Childlike, was published by Main Street Rag in September, 2014.  Visit www.llynclague.com

The Lined Pad

Stung again,

I sit with ancient envy

and a pad,

a pad lined like a keyboard,

the cold black-and-white instrument

my always older sister, as a child,

used so brilliantly to grab love –

a pad, whose slat-like rows,

blank with potential, stretch to the far edge,

and, from last night,

a memory that evokes, instead of envy

and its darker sisters fear and greed,

light –

a memory, after we both,

in our old age, confessed to depression,

blank with possibles and stretching out far, too far, out to the edge –

of her saying that,

however dark the despair,

by sitting at the piano and playing,

improvising, toying, almost doodling, she could lift

it;

however briefly. 

The Sunday Poet: Mano Suttner

Mano Suttner has published work in literary journals in Australia, South Africa, Israel and the UK, and his work has been anthologised in four different anthologies. In 2007 his collection Hidden & Revealed was co-published by Snail Press and Quartz Press. He can be reached at mano@justalittlegreen.net

 I bequeath to my children



I bequeath to my children
the Pomegranate tree
and if fire devours it
I bequeath to them the charcoal

I bequeath to my children
the piano keys
chipped like teeth
from chewing notes
their granny played
In Benoni and Johannesburg
and their mother played
In Joburg and Sydney
I bequeath to my children
the Hebrew books they cannot read
and the Yiddish ones I cannot read
but keep
as a vague monument to an amputated limb
I bequeath to them the English books
the big words and the small
enjambments, commas and full stops
with the caveat that
no matter how delightful
the pointing finger
will never be the moon
I bequeath to them time in the garden
I bequeath to them time with friends
I bequeath to them time with creatures
that do not speak with words
I bequeath to them my memory
and to them I bequeath
my tidal heart

----Mano Suttner

A Berserker in Traffic: Poems by Erik Richardson

 

poems by Erik Richardson

ISBN: 9 780692 251324

© 2014  36 pages/ $12.95

Pebblebrook Press, an imprint of Stoneboat

www.stoneboatwi.com

Last Christmas, my husband gave us an Ancestry.com DNA test. I knew there was a lot of Norwegian in him. Little did I know that I had some of the Norse in my DNA, too, which is why I especially enjoyed this small book of poems.

Berserkers were said to be Norse warriors who fought with a trance-like fury, hence the origin of the word “berserk.” Richardson’s poems are made of a bit gentler stuff, but they manage to sneak up on readers and, like “a Valkyrie, whisper in your ear:” be wary, be afraid. These berserkers are pop culture, the person in the next cube, the woman in the express line with six-too-many items.

a berserker stuck in traffic

or at a desk, staring at a screen.

standing in a long slow line at the store

when a valkyrie whispers in your ear,

“you were not born for this.”

you remember that your bearskin shirt

is stashed in the bottom if your dresser,

but the trance is on … . 

These are everyman/woman poems, the howl of the little and small: the teacher, the scientist, the child, the motherless son.

There are other reasons to like and respect Richardson’s poetry. First, he’s an accomplished wordsmith; his poems are rife with story, filled with momentum and music of a good tale. Though he uses little punctuation, he leads readers through his poems using words, pauses of syntax and line. 

perched on the edge of 92^nd street

stressed for infecting my  neighbors’ yards

with wind transmuted diseases—

incriminating dandelions point back to me

even in the dark—I have no clear idea

what time the sun died today or will rise again.

Second, Richardson is a skilled storyteller, incorporating mythologies of the Irish, the Norse, the Greeks. He also manages to weave his tales, using math and science, the voices of Hemingway and Merton, the soft whispers of Heaney, and the mystery of the Bhagavad Gita. How does a man of heart and principal, a man of spirit, a man of words, live and live well in a culture such as this? 

when one is free of individuality

and his understanding is untainted,

even if he quits his job,

he does not quit and is not bound.

All is not lost in Richardson’s poems. He hasn’t gone entirely gone mad. There is humor; there are constellations of wondrous light. In “the berserker stuck in traffic,” “… the light goes green, the line moves on…/

your morning meds kick in

pulling you down … , the rage

that would have once made you holy …

you are just an accountant.

poems of the skalds were not true. a sword in the trunk

of your car is a really. bad. idea.

Savoring Richardson’s poems in this lovely book is a good idea, a good idea, indeed.


*** originally published in   Wisconsin People & Ideas

The Sunday Poet: Zvi Sesling

Zvi Sesling

Zvi A. Sesling, a prize winning poet, has published in numerous magazines. He edits Muddy River Poetry Review and publishes “Muddy River Books.” He authored King of the Jungle (Ibbetson Street Press, 2010) and a chapbook Across Stones of Bad Dreams (Cervena Barva, 2011). His volume, Fire Tongue, is due from Cervena Barva Press. He lives in Chestnut Hill, MA with his wife Susan J. Dechter. ( Photo by Susan J. Dechter)

The Fools Are Marching

The fools are marching

in the streets carrying

symbols, waving flags

counting cadence, singing

drunken songs, marching

to victory, to defeat, to

cheers or madness, they

march over cliffs, into sewers

drowning waters, cleansing

waters, the fools march as if

ignorant, they march for love

they march for hate, they march

for the past, and for the future

while in the present

they are fools marching