Doug Holder will be the guest poet for a guided tour of the surrounding and former grounds of McLean Hospital May 22, 2016

Poetry Walk at the Lone Tree Hill Reservation In Belmont

                                             



From  Ann-Marie Lambert/Belmont Citizen's Forum

Hello friends, colleagues, neighbors, and participants on previous Nature Walks:

I invite you to join a guided nature walk through the Lone Tree Hill Reservation in Belmont Sunday, May 22, 1:30-3:30.  I am delighted to be joined by special guest poet Douglas Holder, who has served since 1982 as a Counselor and Poetry Workshop Leader at the adjacent McLean Hospital.  Mr. Holder also plays many roles in the local poetry scene, including:  Host of “Poet to Poet, Writer to Writer” on Somerville Community Access TV; various roles at Endicott College in Beverly, Mass., including Adjunct Professor of Creative Writing, Director of the Ibbetson Street Press and Associate Faculty Editor of the undergraduate literary review;  Adjunct Professor of College Writing at Bunker Hill Community College; Senior editor at ISCS Press in Littleton, Mass.; Book Review Editor, Wilderness House Literary Review; Poetry Workshop Leader at Jewish Community Centers of Greater Boston; Curator of the Newton Free Library Poetry Reading Series; Arts Editor of The Somerville Times; and Advisory Board Member--Tapestry of Voices/ Boston National Poetry Festival.

Mr. Holder will help us enjoy poems which reflect on the drama and awakening taking place in this season, both within McLean and without, in Nature.  We will explore the forests, meadows, and trails in the gem of a landscape which surrounds the "Lone Tree Hill" and McLean.  We will stop along the way to read short poems from a variety of cultures, each with their own perspective on human and wildlife activities of Spring. We will meet at Belmont's Highland Meadow cemetery, stroll along the famous Pine Allee, take in stunning views of the meadow and surrounding forest from Lone Tree Hill, explore the forest habitat surrounding the old Coal Road, and discover the mix of clues that nature and civilization have left for us to learn about the history of this land. People have been strolling here for centuries, healing and gaining inspiration from this beautiful home to wildlife such as red fox, coyote, cottontail rabbit, voles, chipmunks, bees, dragonflies, and many residential birds such as wild turkey, red-tailed hawks, hummingbirds, woodpeckers, chickadees, tufted titmouse, and goldfinches.

Come reconnect with the land through poetry from New England and around the globe.  Poets are keen observers of nature and human nature, of the drama and rebirth of Spring, and of the importance of land and place.   Find inspiration from those whose poems express love and concern for the natural landscape, and for oftentimes more mysterious internal landscapes. Let the poets help you appreciate this nearby gem, with its rich history as a part of the grounds of the McLean hospital of Belmont.

What: Listen to poetry as we stop along a one-mile nature trail in Belmont with a special guest from McLean

When: 1:30-3:30 p.m. Sunday, May 22, 2016

Where:  Highland Meadow Cemetery, 700 Concord Avenue, Belmont.  If you are already familiar with the area, town officials strongly urge you park early at the parking lots by Rock Meadow on Mill Street and hike 10-15 minutes to the cemetery location. If not, park cars along one side of the cemetery driveway loop across from Somerset St. (stay on the pavement). 

Who: Anne-Marie Lambert is a Belmont Citizens Forum board member who has been leading local nature walks and writing Newsletter articles about Belmont history and storm water.  This is her fourth guided nature walk to explore the four seasons at Lone Tree Hill.

Bring/Wear: water to drink, closed shoes, weather-appropriate clothing, and, optionally, a walking stick for uneven terrain.

Rain: Only thunderstorms will cancel.

Trail Map: Lone Tree Hill Map

History: McLean Hospital History, McLean Land History and Future

Fire Tongue By Zvi Sesling

Fire Tongue
By Zvi Sesling
Cervena Barva Press
Somerville, Massachusetts
www.cervenabarvapress.com
ISBN: 978-0-9966894-4-1
87 Pages

Review by Dennis Daly

Dark, darker, darkest. Zvi Sesling’s Fire Tongue descends through heat and mist and dust into a black oblivion of verbiage, both tellingly vacant and skillfully wrought.  Each geography, whether internal or external, hesitates in its own claustrophobia, offering up a hellish reality of bleakness, alienation, and tortuous terrain. There is no exit save death, and even death’s freedom leaves not a little doubt. This poet does not mince his words. For Sesling memory alone brings clarity and a measure of calming surcease.

The title poem, Fire Tongue, opens this collection with zeal and sear. Sesling describes an ill-fated priestess as damnable and fierce as an Apache warrior or the tempestuously saintly Joan of Arc. Her auguries embarrass and sting, but somehow convey the bloody truths of humanity. The poet addresses her this way,

O priestess of the mad, why did
they take you from us, your tongue
prophesied, even in anger or hate
your tongue spoke the truth, a prophet
they called you, others said you
were simply mad

An isolated heart pads through the barrooms of night seeking companionship in Sesling’s poem entitled Long Night of a Lonely Heart. His short lines create a pulse, a modulated beat which intensifies and then recedes in a dreamlike pattern leading to despondency first, then flickering hope. One wonders at the ambiguous conclusion,

street lamps are broken
or dead of old age
the heart beat increases
the blue veins of night
offering no comfort no hope
no desires fulfilled
the rotted gut of the streets
leaving the heart empty
each chamber compass points
to the oblivion of night
the heart expanding with hope
receding in despair receding
in loneliness stopping at last
beneath a lonely light
under a window

Consider the curious use of the phrase “stopping at last” referring to the movement of the human heart. That “lonely light” now seems a bit more ominous.

Sesling’s piece Gothic Fog strikes the right chords and adds some nice atmospherics to this collection. It begins typically in a graveyard filled with musty odors rising into the night. Then the poet imbues life with death’s nature under the lunar commander hovering above. Here’s the heart of the poem,

Queen of the Entombed

She gives them the night to waft
across fields and roads into the
windows of houses and to dance
their nightly gavotte

They enter the unsuspecting
who make love or dream
or enter into the bones of
the growling dog

Only a red ball held by a child breaks the urban gloom in City of Gray, a poem in which Sesling’s vision of a joyless civilization on automatic pilot plods on and on. Gregorian chant pervades the airways. The poet uses images from our waning industrial society. He opens the piece with newcomers pursuing in vain their dreams of felicity and joyfulness,

Like blind people they grope through
alleys and narrow streets of the city
of the lost—a purgatory of gray
buildings and gray walls, gray alleys
and streets where gray people lead
gray lives and the wanderers seek
happiness in a city that has none as
people in gray uniforms enter and
leave factories with high gray walls
like a prison and their children run
through the streets and never laugh

In Collector of Calamities, my favorite poem in this collection, Sesling sketches out a very human, if unattractive, trait of contrasting each other’s misfortunes. No matter how bad it gets, someone is worse off, that’s the beauty of life. Black humor does work after all. The poet chooses mortality as his subject and picks particularly gruesome episodes. It gets morbid and uncomfortable. But that’s the point—isn’t it? Sesling sets his details,

In Montreal, a brick from the 17th
floor of a building falls and hits a
woman eating lunch with her husband
at a sidewalk café

A car goes down a highway the wrong way
plows into a family of seven riding
to the beach, all die

Someone does not see a stop sign and strikes
a child in a crosswalk who is walking home
from school

Black and white newsprint cut out, placed
in a bowl, a record of lives extinguished
like flames, a history of calamities by a
collector who has survived…

Delusions and obsessions exist for a reason. The poet pushes the vulnerability of mankind to the fore in his piece entitled Paranoid. For one to sleep at night a lot must be ignored or pushed aside. The banality of evil needs to be hidden from sight. Predators denied victims. In fact security demands closure of all portals. Sesling explains,

The window is shut at night
To keep out the heat of stars
Shades closed so the wolf
Does not see the vulnerable

The window is shut at night
So the long fingers of trees cannot
Ensnare in their master plan to
Enslave humanity

This poet serves his poems neat like good whiskey, but, unlike good whiskey, they do not comfort. They afflict their readers with god-awful truths and disconcerting candor. Society needs both badly. Sesling accommodates with his dark, deft, declarative poetics, and we benefit. Heaven (or hell) help us.

10 winning poems selected for Newton’s “Mother’s Day Poetry Walk,” one of the many events in the 2016 Newton Festival of the Arts

10 winning poems selected for Newton’s “Mother’s Day Poetry Walk,” one of the many events in the 2016 Newton Festival of the Arts

The winning poems were chosen from almost 100 poems submitted to an open competition juried by award-winning local poets: Grey Held, Doug Holder, and Clara Silverstein. Theese are not the typical “greeting card” poems. Rather they speak of the complexity, richness, diversity of motherhood.

Each selected poem will be chalked by local artists onto the grand staircase that fronts  Newton City Hall. The poems will become a temporary installation (May 8^th through May 22nd) of mother-themed poetry as part of the 2016 Newton Festival of the Arts.

Three of the wining poems-- Lori Kagan’s “Other Children’s Mothers,” Wendy Mnookin’s “Walking to the 58^th Street Library,” and Carol Hobbs’ “Her Days,” are written from the young child’s perspective. In her poem “Other Children’s Mothers, Kagan writes “Once in a while / other children’s mothers / lent me bits of their affection: / a smile that spread in my direction / as I sang / in the school concert / A reassuring pat / on the arm / if I was frightened by the sound / of a distant tornado siren…”

Three of the poems, Connemara Wadsworth’s “Washing My Mother’s Feet,” Margot Wizansky’s “In Assisted Living, My Mother Became Holy,” and Rachel Goldstein’s “Portrait of My Mother in Purses,” are touching portraits of mothers near the end of life. In her poem “Washing My Mother’s Feet,” Wadsworth writes “Next,  rub with fine pumice I tell her after / buying the stone for her hardened /  and fissured feet,  peasant feet she called / those size elevens she wore without /  thought, on which she ambled the souqs/  of Baghdad, Venetian calles, Manhattan’s /  grid, brick sidewalks of Harvard Square.”

In two of the poems, Pamela Gemme’s “My Mother, Speaking of Life,” and  Eric Hyett’s “in re: The Stars,” the mother’s presence enters into the home of the grown child. In “ in re: The Stars,” Hyett writes, “Next to my bed, a tin milagro my mother bought /  at the holy shrine at Chimayó. To heal my mind…”

Lani Scozzari’s poem, “Postpartum,” takes on the gritty subject matter of a new mother’s postpartum experience. And  Lee Dunne’s “For Mother” reads like a prayer: “I want her /  to go / slowly, / fall softly / as flicking silver / from the golden / rumps of apricots /  expand /  in sweetened space / as rising bread…”

Grey Held designed the project to allow viewers to experience poetry in a visual and kinesthetic way. “The Mother’s Day Poetry Walk brings poetry out into the community, honors motherhood, helps facilitate discussions of motherhood in all its richness and diversity,” says Held, “and allows people to experience poetry outside of the usual framework of books.”

These 10 poems will be viewable on the front steps (western facing) of Newton City Hall beginning on Mother’s Day (May  8). They will remain up through May 22^nd.

POET A.D. Winans withdraws his name from consideration to be San Francisco Poet Laureate

A.D. Winans

To San Francisco Poet Laureate Committee:

 

It’s my understanding that several people have nominated me for the position of San Francisco Poet Laureate. I’m writing to withdraw my name from consideration. I will try to keep my reasons brief.

 

In the old days the Poet Laureate served at the pleasure of the King’s Court.
Today the position falls under the office of the Mayor.

 

I was born in San Francisco and except for a brief stint in the military have lived here my entire life.

 

I have watched with alarm the gentrification of my once proud city and the rising economic disparity. The Silicone Valley technology explosion has caused real estate to skyrocket and people forced to leave the city to seek out affordable housing. Normal income families can no longer afford a home and one-bedroom apartments are going for $4.500 a month or more. If I were not fortunate enough to be under rent control, I could not live in the city of my birth.

 

The mayor seems comfortable with the Silicone Valley “techie” revolution that has benefited the well off at the expense of the working class and poor. Eviction rates continue to rise and small neighborhood businesses forced to close down when their lease expires and rent is increased two or three fold.

 

All my life (as expressed in my poetry) I have spent supporting the cause of the ordinary working class man and woman and those who have fallen through the cracks of the system.

 

It’s indefensible for a city like San Francisco to have the large homeless population it has, many of them elderly and veterans. The administration has been heartless to send the police out to slash homeless people’s tents and take their meager belongings under the dark of night.

I would find it hypocritical of me to accept any position under the current administration.

 

The second reason I can’t accept the position of Poet Laureate is the requirement the Laureate organize an event at the annual “Lit Quake.” Festival. Lit Quake from its inception has been a self-serving organization that panders to in-group favorites. In an effort to look like it is more representative of the poetry community at large, it encourages small venues to organize and put on events at bars and such under the umbrella of Lit Quake, thus taking credit for events they provide little or no support too.

 

The third reason is I am more a recluse than a public figure. I write and pretty much live in solitude. I do not wish the label of Poet Laureate to be a marker I will be remembered by. I want to be remembered for my word alone and not by any position I held.

 

I have never written or read for poets, but for people who do not generally read poetry, those who need it the most. Pomp and ceremony are not markers of who I am.

 

I wish to thank those who nominated me for Poet Laureate, as I know they did so with the best and most honorable intentions.

 

Sincerely,

 

A. D. Winans

The Glass Factory by Marilyn McCabe

Marilyn McCabe

Review of The Glass Factory by Marilyn McCabe

By Alice Weiss
 


Marilyn McCabe is a poet of neighboring upstate New York, its rural emptiness and disused railroad tracks and, also of cosmopolitan, intellectual spaces.  In her most recent book, The Glass Factory, the poems are characterized by arrow-sleek natural imagery, philosophical precision, and subtly shifting lenses.   Take the poem “The Face of the Waters.” Unabashedly alluding to Genesis, her speaker positions herself to question the very basis of the ‘sacred’ metaphor, “What moves on the face of the water but the wind, the sky, the restless eye of the clouds.” seeming to be only lyrical, but attempting  to find realism in the metaphor of God’s face on the water.   ‘Restless eyes.’ we think, OK, clouds reflecting in the water, almost mechanical, but then her mind plays with the image. “Water thirsts at island’s edge.”   It is a process that happens often in these poems, the speaker is taken over, almost slyly by the image she stretches for.  The water thirsting, the reversal, instead of merely extending the image, upstages it.  A narrative emerges at the edge of the water. The speaker is at a campsite.  A bear has visited in the night, again.  “In the morning I put my hand/ in the print of the bear’s sole. . .”  The risky pun teases us. It doesn’t seem up to the thirsting water, but it introduces a shift, almost of levity, then, staring at the horizon, earth, heaven, water, in between, the speaker seems to restart, reassess, break camp, to canoe, a “long row home”


    in God’s teeth
    his shuffling nostrils
    scent of musk, damp duckweed.

finally letting herself  and us flow into vivid interplay with the animal and biblical, not to say comical presences.

    This fracturing of tone, imagery and narrative and for that matter, voice,is implied in the book’s title,  “Glass factory:” the lens, the fragility, the heat of making glass, the danger, the shards.  Often, as in the “Face of the Waters,” The speaker contemplates the unreliability of her vision.  “The Dark Is Shifting Almost Imperceptively.” is another poem where the reader is fooled, this time by the proselike “almost imperceptively”  What is really shifting the poem asks.  Don’t trust me, she seems to say, but play with me while I figure out what I know and how I know it.


    These poems reveal a speaker whose world is broad populated .  Her populations include the cedar waxwing,  Orion in the night sky, the body, skin.  “Dermis” is a meditation on this “vast organ”, its edges, its layers, “layered, it sheds, unthreads as a rag” images seem to stone the very strands of the narrators’s voice, a danger with all this glass around.  Her eyes pick up other lenses: Magritte’s light, undoing the dying, “You can slip out behind the trees/ Get while the going is good;” Munch’s Melancholy; a sculptor, new to me, Goldsworthy, (google it) whose works are constructed to entwine with the landscape. In her three part poem, “Goldsworthy Variations,” McCabe finds in his art a passion for her own art: “what nature tosses, man must assemble,” a decisive counterpoint to the brokenness she finds in her world. Harsh rural and industrial landscapes appear in these poems, copious and abandoned.  It is an America she catches broadly strewn with broken things where “time is not so much the healer as the peeling label torn of its shelf life.”

Local Writer Volunteers His Talent and Advertising Experience To Help Boost Bernie Sanders

Local Writer Volunteers His Talent and Advertising Experience To Help Boost Bernie Sanders

    By Paul Steven Stone

( Click on to enlarge)

If you follow what’s happening on the internet, you will witness the Democratic Party’s political battle for the American presidency being fought fast and furiously in the trenches. Featuring home-made videos, media story hyperlinks and highly creative memes hyping or haranguing the candidates, this battle allows the followers of both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders to personally engage in the battle for the hearts and minds of the voting public.

As a politically astute writer with progressive leanings, I was surprisingly unaware of Bernie Sanders for the first half year of his campaign. But then as I listened and watched him move across the country espousing the very same beliefs and observations I had developed over the last 30 years—especially after the protests of the Occupy Movement—I began to, yes!, ‘Feel The Bern.’ And next I knew I was stepping wholly into the fray, creating an entire ad campaign with the aid of a partner who would design the ads. Together we help people start to realize (mirroring my own experience) just who Bernie Sanders is, and what he stands for.

  Our first ad in our “CHANNELING BERNIE” ad campaign, a series of 36 ads so far, created to elevate the underwhelming online communications I had seen coming out of Bernie’s camp. It was an effort wholly epic in the great American tradition. Two advertising veterans creating an online campaign for Bernie Sanders' seemingly quixotic reach for the presidency.

It's been an amazing journey, creating these ads, one in which I've honestly felt like I've been channeling the candidate's vision and perspective. Of course, there’s always the possibility he's been in my head over the years and I just didn't know it. Check out the campaign at http://www.paulstonesthrow.com/channeling-bernie-the-complete-series/ and decide for yourself. 

A short word about the unusual format of the ads themselves. I recently saw an ad from an advertising award show that gave me the idea to have my headlines serve as the start and finish to the ad's entire text, creating a sandwich effect, so to speak. It just meant I would create each ad’s headline in two pieces, an interesting effect by itself, no matter what the message might be.

I'm not sure why, but the ads proved to be highly compelling and more readable than the usual run of political online or print ads.

As to why, it could be I’ve excited the reader's natural curiosity about how I, the ad-maker, forced the start and the finish of the copy to fit within the narrative flow. Or there might be some momentum-building effect by having the beginning of an ad suddenly leap to the ad's conclusion? Either way, the ads are uniquely readable in this format.

And so, with art direction by Bill Dahlgren, concept and copy by Paul Steven Stone, I offer for your inspection, enjoyment and further distribution the 36—Count 'Em!— 36 ads that make up the Primary Phase of our "Channeling Bernie" advertising campaign.

Whether Bernie wins or loses his campaign, I will certainly feel I did my best!

Again, you can find the campaign at: http://www.paulstonesthrow.com/channeling-bernie-the-complete-series/



Cambridge-based Paul Steven Stone is a long time veteran of Boston advertising and other writing ventures. His best-known work is the branding and multi-faceted advertising campaign he created for W.B. Mason. Novelist, humorist, political commentator, bloggist, Stone has been writing for over half a century. To see more of Stone’s work and biography, go to PaulStevenStone.com. You can find his blog at PaulStonesThrow.com.

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