The Uneaten Carrots of Atonement by Diane Lockward

The Uneaten Carrots of Atonement

by Diane Lockward

Wind Publications, 2016

101 p.

ISBN 978-0-9969871-1-0

Reviewed by David P. Miller

I laughed out loud – with pleasure – at my first look at the cover of The Uneaten Carrots of Atonement, Diane Lockward’s fourth collection of poems. For a start, the title itself put me in mind of religious allegory gone off the rails, like a surrealist Pilgrim’s Progress. And Brian Rumbolo’s watercolor illustration, of a rabbit with two intact carrots in its paws, seemed weirdly hilarious, given its baleful expression. It says something about the complexity of Ms. Lockward’s work, though, that when we read the poem in question, the laugh sticks in the throat. We’ll come to this later on.

Diane Lockward’s verbal dexterity is stunning, evidence of a ceaseless power of image-making. “Rampant imagination,” I said to myself many times, reading this volume. It’s hardly possible to select any so-called best examples, so here are some presented almost at random. In “Thinking Like a Buddhist,” the speaker’s sight of a dead grackle swarmed with flies – a mundane backyard tragedy – leads eventually to

[ …] Where do birds go to die?

Why isn’t the earth littered wrens, their wings folded,

eyes like glass beads? Why has no jogger ever been

pelted with deceased sparrows? Shouldn’t dead crows

be blocking the entrance to the Shop-Rite, blue jays lying

on highways? How do birds arrange their deaths in places

so obscure no one ever finds the bodies, like those corpses

dumped by mobsters into vacant lots and construction sites?

And the avian death speculations don’t end there. “How I Dumped You” might be read as the ultimate revenge/breakup poem, but goes so far beyond in relentlessness that you can barely pause to laugh:

I violated a local ordinance and hurled you like a bagful

of dog-doo onto someone else’s yard, tossed you like

watermelon rind after a picnic, like a brown banana peel,

like a used Kleenex, like a dead chipmunk. I scraped you

from the sole of my sneaker like a wad of chewed-up gum.

At least three poems explicate the nuances of colors. “The Color of Magic” elaborates red in at least two dozen dimensions (though taking a count is somewhat futile) and “Why yellow makes me sad” – the title a quotation from a Geico commercial – presents that color in a deluge of variations. It’s “A Polemic for Pink,” though, that may present the greatest surprise. After thirty-eight lines of praise for this often deprecated color, including –

I like a color that dares to be outrageous, but doesn’t

mind going soft and pink as a watered-down communist,

that eschews the ideological red of marinara

for the creamy compromise of pink sauce.

– we’re brought up at the close by this: “And Jackie Kennedy in the back of a black / Lincoln Continental, her pink Chanel suit like a drift / of blossoms blown across her husband’s body.” This sensibility, where ebullience lives cheek-by-jowl with terror, lies in wait throughout the entire volume, to this reader’s endless delight.

Lockward presents poems where the speaker’s identification with animal and plant life supersedes anthropomorphism. The voice is that of a kind of fusion not reducible to speaking in the Other’s voice. This can be difficult to untangle. In “Where Feathers Go When They Fall,” for example, the speaker imagines herself into a kind of bird consciousness but never declares “now I know how birds feel” or something to that effect. The latter variant on the persona poem is valued by many, but seems a shaky enterprise to me, at least so far. Instead, the poet’s own imagined transformation is given:

[ … ] Home is a tree

now, children hatched

and gone, none to peck

my heart. I do not worry

or grieve, only imagine them

in tall trees, too high for

cat’s paw, and go back

to fumbling for worms.

“Eminent Domain” features a speaker unambiguously human, but so melded with animal suffering that, beyond pity, she takes action almost without thought. A “large and terrifying” dog has killed a daughter’s pet rabbit, “a bundle of white fur, ruined, blood-spattered.”

Slowly she removed her belt, wrapped it around her fist,

buckle end in palm, as her father had done, and whipped

the dog, again and again, made it whimper and cry,

then untwirled the leather and struck with the buckle

until the dog ran, its fur streaked with blood.

You will notice the startling, and fleeting, reference to the father, from whom she evidently learned the practice of beating. You can be grateful, too, for the dog as a scapegoat, as the mother

[ … ] waited for hours on the porch, a mother at last,

waiting to explain to her child that sometimes what we love

goes away and doesn’t come back. She would not speak

of revenge, how it had seized her, how good it had felt,

knowing she could split a boulder with her fist.

A poem’s title has many potentials, including seduction and betrayal. It’s easy to imagine someone scanning the table of contents, spotting “I Want to Save the Trees,” and passing it by with tree-hugger assumptions. Or, maybe, turning directly to the poem with the same assumptions. Neither reader will be prepared for the poem’s eventual dissolving of boundaries between the speaker, the objects of her attention, and the fauna Others.

[ … ] On my knees, I beg the oak’s forgiveness.

If I’d known that the filthy knife wielder was rotten

as a diseased Dutch Elm, I would not have let him

shove in his blade and carve a heart into the bark,

his initials and mine forever locked inside,

my tree wounded, forever tattooed like a prisoner.

It is not simply that the speaker expresses sorrow for the damage done to a tree, but that her own woundedness is locked into the bark; the one-time lover is also condemned to his own tree life, “with his heart // rot and his ring of lies, his roots weak and shallow / as the willow’s uprooted in last winter’s storm.”

The poems already cited here indicate another thread running through this work, that of the permanent ambiguity of human relationships, particularly within the family, with partners and lovers. “Original Sin” puts the book’s title and cover in its (actually shocking) context. Lockward tells how her sister pulled off the tail of their pet rabbit, but that she took the blame rather than defend herself:

I wondered then and wonder still why I took

the blame for hurting the pet I’d loved. I only know

that once Karen said I’d done it and my father

looked at me as if I had, I was guilty,

as guilty as those unbaptized babies

in Purgatory.

The rabbit did not survive, leading us to this: “Her sweet body, already stiff, / lay among the uneaten carrots of atonement.” The mastery is that, 1) the metaphor remains outrageous, but 2) at the same time, the image burns, and there is no resolution.

In contrast, “Your Beard, I Love It Not” is a riotous denial of an ardent lover’s facial prowess, and another instance of the poet’s unstoppable invention:

Take a blade and hack it off—that birdless nest,

that crumb catcher, chinful of tumbleweed, duck

blind, lice hotel, that bugaboo of children, that pile

of leaves I dare not dive into.

Although this poem drives toward one specific possibility — “Let me be / your Delilah, lost in the wild field of your face” — sustained relationships cannot really be surmised, only imaged. The title of “The Seasons of a Long Marriage” suggests one of those “how did we get here, hubby” paeans, but of course it is no such thing. Images of late autumn bend toward the twinning of decay and persistence. The speaker, attempting to clean glass doors shone through by the sun, finds

[ … ] though I’ve squeegeed them

twice in two days, smudges

show on the other side.

Some spots just can’t be removed.

They’re here forever. Like scars.

The autumn and the marriage, not otherwise noted, come together only in a near-glancing conclusion: “Soon the green ground will be covered / with snow. The days turn cold. / My husband’s hair is gray.”

Two final poems are linked in a kind of inverse relationship. “Signs” is written in spacious couplets: the speaker tentatively, perhaps gratefully takes the observations of an outdoors walk and finds in them tokens on a path out of darkness:

[ …] To stand beside the playground

to gaze at the giant concrete turtle, without hating

the young mothers whose children climb across

its capacious back. [ … ]

[ … ] the turtle is now

your emblem, and if you’re lucky, which you are,

those you have shut out, those you have hurt

with the hard shell of your silence will somehow

still love you and you will move toward them,

carrying the ancient notched shell, your back

uncrushed by its weight, the mystery

of its hieroglyphics unfolded and laid at their feet.

The collection’s emblem reappears: “a soft // rabbit still lives inside you and after its long sleep / rubs its pink eyes”. But this is not the volume’s conclusion. The final poem, “And Life Goes On As It Has Always Gone On,” presents endless one-damn-thing-after-another contingencies in one relentless verse paragraph. Here again we have Diane Lockward’s breathtaking verbal fecundity:

Bees built nests under the eaves of your house.

They hunt you down and stab you many times

with their tiny switchblades—even your lips

while you’re eating a ham sandwich.

Blinded by an armful of fresh towels, you fall

down the stairs while rushing to answer the phone.

Your vertebrae shattered, that call from your lover

forever unanswered, sex forever impossible.

“Are you looking for compensation? / A rabbit nibbling the grass—does that console?” she asks later on, and yes we are looking, and no, we don’t know if the rabbit will help. What saves this from ordinary bleakness is the evident reveling in the world as it is, the sustained curiosity that makes such detail possible. “Life goes on as it has always gone on,” yes. And also yes, there are “Signs” infused in every moment. Both are inevitable, and there is not really a choice between them.

The book includes a couple of production errors. Two poems are missing from the table of contents: “In Defense of the Cashew” (page 31) and “August 11: Morning Prelude” (page 55). Also, the tercet structure of “Losing Daylight” is not well served by the break between pages 57 and 58 (compare “Where Feathers Go When They Fall”). I hope that this remarkable collection sees additional printings, or another edition, so that these may be remedied and the presentation of Diane Lockward’s astonishing work becomes immaculate.

Steve Glines: Winner of the Ibbetson Street Press Lifetime Achievement Award

Steve Glines  ( Photo courtesy of Joe Cohen)

                                                         

Steve Glines: Winner of the Ibbetson Street Press Lifetime Achievement Award

By Doug Holder

The Ibbetson Street Press Lifetime Achievement Award was started back in 2003 as part of the Somerville News Writers Festival that Timothy Gager and I founded ( It ended in 2010). Since the award's inception we have awarded such literary figures as Robert Pinsky, Afaa Michael Weaver, Louisa Solano, Jack Powers, Robert K. Johnson, Sam Cornish, Gloria Mindock and Harris Gardner for their writing, but more importantly for their lifetime of contributions to the literary community.

Steve Glines-- a founding member of Somerville's Bagel Bards, publisher, editor and designer—fits perfectly in this template. Steve has designed countless magazines, and books for the Ibbetson Street Press, the Bagel Bards, and the Wilderness House Press--often donating his time for free—though he now gets a small stipend twice a year because of the Ibbetson Street's affiliation with Endicott College. He has been instrumental in publishing books for Ibbetson Street, the Endicott College Young Poet Series, and has birthed many books for the fledgling and established author. In the 70s Steve had a print shop in Harvard Square, he worked for Sail magazine for a while, and later in the high tech industry-- both writing columns and consulting, and wrote a highly touted text on Unix-- an ancient computer operating system.. He also founded the Wilderness House Literary retreat in Littleton, Mass, which during its short life hosted poets and writer such as: Robert Creeley, Lois Ames, Afaa Michael Weaver, Kathleen Spivack , Hallie Ephron and others.

Steve's participation in the poetry scene dates back to his friendship with Gordon Carnie (the original owner of the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Harvard Square) that has since passed hands from Louisa Solano to Ifeanyi Menkiti. Steve has been a regular at Stone Soup Poets, and befriended the founder the late Jack Powers for many years.

For myself...I couldn't have done all that I do without the steady hand of Steve Glines. His encouragement, his skills as a writer and a graphic designer, his friendship, have given me the confidence to keep on keeping on. And I think many people in our community of small press writers and poets can say the same thing.

****Glines will be presented with the award July 6, 2016 at 7PM at the Ibbetson Street Press Issue 39 reading at the Somerville Public Library ( Central Branch).

Poem: A Thought on Father's Day: Lawrence J. Holder 1917 to 2003

Lawrence Holder (Left) Doug Holder ( Right)

I read this poem at my father's funeral on April 23, 2003. Lawrence J. Holder was 86, and one
 helluva guy.



And yes
it has come to the time
when I see my father's face
in the mirror,
my squint is his
the nascent crow's feet
stretching into laugh lines
my angry brow
solicits the always surprising question
"What's wrong?"
"Why--nothing."
Didn't I always ask him the same question?
Do I find myself
praying over the New York Times
like a scholar over a sacred text?
A drink to my side
my legs crossed right to left
just like him ?
Was that him the other day
that reflection in the store window
slightly hunched
arms stiff
swinging robotically
clothed in Seersucker?
I looked back
but he was gone.
Was I chasing a hallucination?
Like him
I am drawn to the sea
to the sound of breaking waves,
on the shore-
to the eternal ebb and flow
to the primal smell of death and life
to the gulls sitting shiva
on the rocks
to the purple death
of the sun each evening
its bright rebirth
from the portals of the sea's horizon.
Who is this man I see?
It is my father
and it is me.

The Sunday Poet: Howie Faerstein

Howie Faerstein

Howie Faerstein’s full-length book of poetry, Dreaming of the Rain in Brooklyn, a selection of the Silver Concho Poetry Series, was published in 2013 by Press 53. His work can be found in numerous journals, including Great River Review, Nimrod, CutThroat, Upstreet, The Comstock Review, Off the Coast, Cape Cod Review, Mudfish, and on-line in Gris-Gris, Connotation Press et al. He lives in Florence, Massachusetts and teaches American Literature at Westfield State University.

At the Locust Street Dump

Someone from town

grows African Violets

from a mother leaf,

pots up the seedlings

when they measure a kinglet’s heart,

brings them to the transfer station

and places them

on the freebie stand

by the compactor.

I’ve taken a half dozen over the years,

the two in my kitchen bloom

everlasting,

purple, bruised-white, candescent.

Others I’ve given to neighbors,

my love.

Someone from town

raises African Violets

for strangers,

coaxes them from a mother leaf,

puts up plantlets at three months.

But I fear the person took sick,

maybe died.

All that’s on the table this summer:

broken toasters, battered toys.

Unspeakable Things ( Knopf 2016) By Kathleen Spivack

Unspeakable Things ( Knopf 2016) By Kathleen Spivack

Review by Doug Holder

If you like a wild ride—with ample doses of magic realism, eroticism, perversion and poetry—then, perhaps the novel “ Unspeakable Things” by Kathleen Spivack is just the elixir for your staid existence. Spivack is a noted poet, with a slew of poetry collections under her authorial belt, and a few years back she published a much-lauded memoir of her experiences with Robert Lowell—titled, “Robert Lowell and his Circle.”

In this novel Spivack's central character --known affectionately as the “Rat” is both a creature and a human. She is a miniature hunch back with a beautiful face, hypnotizing eyes, and a painful and fascinating past. And despite having her curves in the wrong places, she has been ravished in sulfuric splendor by the likes of a well-endowed Rasputin, and an old Austrian doctor who views Hitler as a great man and an object for sexual release.

This all takes place in the early 1940s in New York during World War ll. It centers around a group of world-weary Austrian refugees. These immigrants struggle with the open and “can do” sensibility of the new world of America, as opposed to their homeland—one of refinement, high culture, and the highbrow—but also dark and festering-- a place with history and deep-seated racism, etc...

Spivack focuses one family—the patriarch being Herbert-- a well-respected bureaucrat in Austria—with connections. Herbert tries to keep his family in one piece and helps the Tolstoi String Quartet, who have lost their key fingers that are instrumental to play their instruments, as a result of the nefarious rise of Nazism. The fingers are in the hands ( pardon the pun) of a warped Austrian doctor named Felix. The way they are secured by the Rat—well, Spivack took my breath away.

The question of the New World vs the Old World is always a subtext throughout this novel. Spivack writes,

“ Home. A different concept in the New World. How to find oneself at home again? Far away, the blanketed cities of Europe huddled, the rust of blood on their stones. All that dark tragic history, that sense of cynicism and fatalism, led to a point of view that would be known in the more dignified sense as “ European Philosophy.” All founded on certainty, fear and the inability to prevent death. Europe reeked of death. As it did of philosophy about death.”(265).

Unspeakable Things' is a book of poetic flourishes, constant surprises, wonderful characterization-- highly recommended.

Amaranth by Robert Carr

Amaranth

by Robert Carr

published by Indolent Books

Review by Alice Weiss

These poems are rhythmic , unabashedly erotic, in the broader sense of Eros, love of body, its joys and breakdowns, unabashedly homoerotic. The populations of Robert Carr’s sensibility cluster in dramatic stretches. They include the “Clay” of his childhood, a molester, an abandonment, and the earth from which he blooms, muscular and wounded. Those who hurt and those who nurture: the difference is almost invisible. Love in “Porch in a Storm” is

blood-lipped, standing flame,

fast wood with tearing eyes

we burn in a forest of distant

beating hands. Collapsed

in our sorries, on the floor

beneath his weight, I understand

why he cries and licks

my familiar salt.

In “Milk Bath,” where the speaker is no longer on “location” when a former lover dies, finds “Behind the desk drawer pull . . . our rings. . . .

Relieved I’m not there to see your body

I run a scalding water in the tub.

The velvet ring box is open on the sink,

bath salts turn a steam to milk.

Once again, a slippery knuckle refuses

your band as I lower myself into a burn.

The vivid sensual imagery in these lines, coupled with the grinding honesty of the speaker and the way the physical images carry the emotional weight is characteristic as is the accurate tradeoff of relief and scalding.

The organizing metaphor, starkly intellectual amidst all the sensuality, is the Amaranth, the flower of the title. The book isdivided into three sections, each named for a particular species of Amaranth: Prince’s Feather, Goosefoot, Wormseed. The three species all contain healing, nutritious, and poisonous properties. The term Amaranth itself comes from a Greek word meaning unfading, or undying. and indeed memories of boyhood and family appear here, sometimes poisonous (as in Clay”) and sometimes healing. Even funny, unfadingly funny, as in “Before you,” which begins, “there was a youth/he jerked off. . .” and goes on in a long phallic shape, but charmingly.

Throughout the poems there are moments that stop you with their wit;

in Hawk, a hawk, “cocky/ as a bar stool drunk/ with a bowie,” a “Valentine,”

White tulips—along one binding petal

We cross a red line

a small streak of mosquito

on our white wall[,]

or in “Two,”

We rarely talk, except through blue jeaned

knees beneath a diner counter.

This collection is above all about a life, family, lovers, disease and healing

but it is a life lived with hands deep in the dough with which we make feeling and muscles, mourn and cure ourselves of mourning, if not of loss. It is a book which does what poetry, I think, is destined to do, heal with the twists and plays of language, that which is otherwise appears to be incurable.

From the Bloc 11 Cafe : Is it Hip to be a Hipster?

From the Bloc 11 Cafe : Is it Hip to be a Hipster?

By Doug Holder

I was sitting in the Bloc 11 Cafe in Somerville when a gentleman of my acquaintance approached me. He said, "You really took a good picture of me for The Somerville Times—but the text labeling me as a “hipster” in the Square (no pun intended) was insulting. Another man would look at me and see me differently. Call me a street punk, call me homeless, but don't call me a hipster.” He went on to explain the word “hipster” had a long and proud heritage—but the word now has been bastardized. He continued to explain that hipsters, real hipsters—are original people, genuinely offbeat—not the hordes of bohemes flocking to Somerville. I had no intention of offending him. This man is intelligent, well-read, and certainly from what I have observed-- a man off the beaten path. He has faced his share of challenges and he is obviously much more than the neat category of hipster.

In all fairness, one has to admit that in recent years we have seen the flocks of bearded, tattooed, funky-hatted hordes swarming the community. They hang in coffeehouses, bars, nightclubs, and other environs. They cop a certain attitude, walk a certain walk, and talk a certain talk. But wasn't this the same with earlier versions of bohemians, like the Beat Poets, sitting in a swirl of smoke in some dark hole-in-the wall, listening to Ginsberg recite his poem “Howl” for the first time—with its angry negro streets, and renegades from society looking for a fix—be it sex, drugs, etc...? These Beat hipsters sported a certain attire—the beret, the scruffy beard, etc... They hung out in jazz clubs—coffeehouses in North Beach in San Francisco or the Village in New York City. Now maybe those hipster didn't actually experience what Ginsberg's poem spoke to—but by being there—witnessing this groundbreaking poem, spreading the word, taking it in, deep reading it, inhaling it...well this is a very-hipster- like act. The poem broke out like a raw wound in the conformist 50s—so these new kids on the block were going against the orthodoxy of their parents and the literary world. Sure some were just posturing—but I would argue that even posturing can be a daring act. There is a need for hipsters—they keep us honest—bring in new ideas ( bad or good)--they give some alternative from the mainstream—somewhere else to hang your fedora.

So I say to the present day hipsters in Somerville, Williamsburg, Austin, and elsewhere-- good for you. I spent some boheme years in rooming houses in Boston in the late 70s when I was right out of college. I was quite a sight—waxed mustache, a red scarf around my neck—sporting a beret—and reading Genet, Kerouac, Camus, Miller, etc... I used to leave the books I was reading in plain sight on the counter of a grocery store I worked at—so I could start conversation with other hip customers. In the wee hours, in my spartan furnished room—with my hot plate, cockroaches, stained sink—I wrote in my journal—loving it—thinking that, this was the life. There is a great romance, creativity and freedom in being hip. So if you can live the hipster life in Somerville with its outrageous rents, gentrification, etc... I say welcome aboard.

The Cape Cod Writers Center Announces State-of-the Art Classes at the Summer Conference August 4-7, 2016

 

 

 

 

 

The Cape Cod Writers Center

Announces State-of-the Art Classes at the Summer Conference

August 4-7, 2016

(OSTERVILLE, MA; June 8, 2016)-- The Cape Cod Writers Center Conference, one of the oldest broad-based writers’ conferences in the nation, presents a series of state-of-the-art courses and workshops at its 54^th summer Conference on August 4-7 at the Resort and Conference Center of Hyannis (MA).

“This year’s conference offers courses reflecting the latest trends in publishing and the skills needed to acquire them for writers of all ages, genders and cultures,” said Nancy Rubin Stuart, Executive Director of the Cape Cod Writers Center. “Thanks to the explosion of ebooks and self-publishing, readers have more books to choose from today than ever before and that, in turn, means writers have to become increasingly skilled as storytellers and promoters on social media.”

Our lunchtime keynote speaker is Peter Abrahams, the Edgar-award wining author of thirty-five novels whom Stephen King called his “favorite American suspense novelist.” Beyond Abrahams’ boundary-pushing crime novels such as Oblivion and End of Story, and his children’s books like Down the Rabbit Hole, Abrahams is known from his New York Times bestselling Chet and Bernie series written under his pen name Spencer Quinn.

Other prominent faculty for this year’s conference include Yale writing professor Adam Sexton, author of Writing Fiction for the Masters; acclaimed children’s book writer Lauren Mills, humor writer and NPR radio host; Colin McEnroe; Leslie Fishlock, founder and CEO of Geek Girl; award-winning mystery writer Ron MacLean; and sportswriter Leigh Montville, a former columnist for the Boston Globe.

Classes at the 2016 conference include a wide range of topics. Among them are Writing for Social Change, The Graphic Novel, Social Media Promotion, Writing Magical Characters, and Agent Quick Query Conferences. Conference participants will also have an opportunity to practice pitching their books, participate in mentoring sessions with agents and author-teachers, participate in lunchtime roundtable discussions, and enjoy evening readings of their work.

Contact: Sara Kass, Business Manager FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

phone: 508-420-0200

website: www.capecodwriterscenter.org

email: writers@capecodwriterscenter.org

Podcast: Doug Holder interviews Sharon Shaloo/Executive Director of the Massachusetts Center for the Book

Sharon Shaloo with Doug Holder

To listen to podcast click on: Podcast: Doug Holder interviews Sharon Shaloo

Sharon Shaloo is the executive director for the Massachusetts Center for the Book, located in Boston. Every year Mass Book presents the Mass. Book Awards that honors writers in the Commonwealth and beyond. A resident of Arlington and member of the town’s Tourism and Economic Development Committee, Shaloo has worked on a literary map of the state, which  includes landmarks from every city and town in the commonwealth. 

Shaloo grew up in New Jersey and earned her undergraduate degree from Rutgers University. She has lived in Indiana, New York City and participated in a teaching exchange in London. When her husband’s career path brought her to the Bay State, she originally moved to Boston, but later chose to settle in Arlington.

Former Somerville News reporter talks about the trajectory of her career

Former Somerville News Reporter Ashley Troutman with Somerville Times Arts Editor Doug Holder

Former Somerville News reporter talks about the trajectory of her career

with Doug Holder

Former Somerville News reporter Ashley Troutman and I hit it off well when we met at my usual haunt at the Bloc 11 Cafe in the Union Square section of the city. She told me she was a big fan of mine, mentioned a “classic” poem I wrote “ Mashed Potatoes,” etc... Hey, I am as prone to flattery as the next guy. Troutman is an upbeat presence and back in 2006 she worked at the Somerville News ( now the Times), and commuted from New Hampshire where she was going to college. She told me, “I worked with editor Bobie Toner , and this formed a foundation for my future journalism experiences. I loved covering The Somerville News Writers Festival (2003 to 2010), and I interviewed Mayor Joe Curatone—I never interviewed a politician before this. What I liked about the Festival was the variety of writers it showcased. I remembering thinking that writer Steve Almond was so hilarious, that he missed his calling as a stand up comedian.

Troutman told me that she recently moved to Somerville—just outside Davis Square. Originally from Malden, Mass., she is a big fan of Somerville. She reflected, “ The people are friendly and there always seems to be something going on.”

Since leaving The Somerville News, Troutman has had a wide variety of experiences with journalism and related endeavors. She has worked at FOX 25 in Boston, as a digital content editor. During her time there she wrote stories, engaged social media, worked on the website, etc... I asked Troutman why she left such a plum of a gig. She told me, “ I was working on the Tsarnaev Trial ( Boston Marathon Bombings) story—I covered the trial in-house and reviewed all these very graphic documents, videos etc... I also covered a lot of mass shootings and such. I just needed a break from it all. It was hard for me to distance myself from it.” Troutman has also worked for the Patch online newspapers. She loves the idea of community journalism. She was based in North Reading, Mass., and her makeshift office was located at the local Starbucks. She said she got to know a lot of the folks in the town and felt very much a part of the community life.

Troutman told me that years back she got her MFA in Non-Fiction from Southern New Hampshire University. She studied with such writers as Kim Ponders, Rick Carey, Diane Les Becquets, and others. She said the experience was essential to her growth as a writer.

Currently Troutman is working for the “ Solutions Review.” The company posts videos (that Troutman often hosts) that explore things like the different facets of ORACLE and other such computer-related programs, etc... that are Greek to this writer. Troutman also told me that Solutions provides breaking high tech news, as well as other services.

For years Troutman has been working on a memoir about her and her brother's troubled youth. During her formative years she witnessed the ravages of addiction and abuse. She is still in the process of revising the memoir and is hopeful that she can find a publisher.

Troutman seems to be in love with writing and her work. She shows a genuine interest in people-- a necessity if you want to get them to trust you and tell their stories. Hopefully this former Somerville News reporter will continue her upward trajectory of her career—that started—here--in the Paris of New England.

Doug Holder Interviews Jazz Composer Ken Field

Ken Field 

Just interviewed Ken Field ( Internationally acclaimed Jazz Composer) at the famed Bloc 11 Cafe in Somerville --

We talked about his work with Peter Wolf, his opening for Patti Smith at the Kerouac Festival in Lowell,, and highlights of his long and varied career.. Also we touched on his work with the Honk Festival, Sesame Street, New Orleans Jazz and so much more.... here is the podcast:

https://archive.org/details/Z0000059

Ken Field is a saxophonist, flautist, and composer. Since 1988 he has been a member of the internationally acclaimed electrified modern music ensemble Birdsongs of the Mesozoic, with whom he has recorded eight CDs.

Field leads the Revolutionary Snake Ensemble, a New Orleans-inspired improvisational brass band. Year of the Snake, the group's 2003 debut, was included on best-of-year lists in NYC, New Orleans, and Milan. The 2008 release Forked Tongue spent 2 months on the CMJ North American jazz top 20 chart, and appeared on best-of-year lists in the Village Voice and in Georgia, Kansas, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, NYC, and Estonia. Live Snakes (2014) was an Editor's Pick in Downbeat Magazine. The group has performed at Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), Berklee Performance Center, the Redentore Festival in Venice, Italy, and numerous other venues, and has been nominated for a New England Music Award, a Boston Music Award, and several Boston Phoenix/WFNX Best Music Poll awards

The Sunday Poet: Michael C. Keith

Poet Michael C. Keith

Here is some prose poetry--from the Michael C. Keith universe.  Keith is a professor of Communications at Boston College. He is widely published in a number of genres.

Wound Dresser

Whitman brings them candy, books, and solace as their injuries from the uncivil war fester and resist healing. He loves their youth and listens to their battlefield accounts as intently as any minister or parent would. The great army of the sick relentlessly fills hospitals with its maimed and distressed as the bard of democracy holds vigils for the countless dying. Later at his makeshift desk in the embalming station he sets to paper the tears that have accumulated in his quill.

Photo Noir

A body slumps in the Chevy convertible sedan. Its bloodied head hangs from the window. Cops are standing around waiting for the coroner to arrive. Already on the scene is Weegee, the ubiquitous press photographer. This is the second killing he’s shot since midnight. He hopes he’ll get in a couple more black-and-whites of low-life before the night is over. It’s been a slow one, he thinks. 

Podcast interview with Ifeanyi Menkiti: From Malcolm X, James Laughlin, Ezra Pound, Grolier Poetry Book Shop

( Left Ifeanyi Menkiti--Right Doug Holder)

Podcast: Interview with poet Ifeanyi Menkiti https://archive.org/details/Z0000058 Doug Holder interviews Ifeanyi Menkiti, the owner of the famed Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Harvard Square. The interview touches on Menkiti's interview with Malcolm X at a Harlem storefront shortly before X was assassinated in the Audubon Ballroom. Also included are his experiences with James Laughlin, the founder of the " New Directions Press," Ezra Pound, his history with the Grolier, his years teaching moral philosophy at Wellesley and a lot more. Menkiti appeared on Holder's Poet to Poet: Writer Show on Somerville Community Access Tv

Fashion Designer Sandhya Garg Lifts A Middle Finger in the Fashion World

Fashion Designer Sandhya Garg Lifts A Middle Finger in the Fashion World

By Doug Holder

Somerville fashion designer Sandhya Garg does not lift a middle finger to offend the mandarins of the fashion world. But she uses it as part of her design concept of provocative, beautiful and engaging clothing.

I met Garg at my usual seat at the Bloc 11 Cafe in Union Square, Somerville. Garg was dressed simply, and looked more like a bookish graduate student than a fashion designer. Although Garg lives in Boston with her husband ( A doctor who is on a fellowship at a major hospital), she has a space at the Joy Street Studios in Somerville. Garg told me, “ I love the artistic vibe of the city.” She revealed that Joy Street has space for sixty artists, and it proves to be a stimulating environment for her.

Garg, who teaches at MASS ART in Boston and is a graduate of the London College of Fashion, told me that her attire has bold colors combined graphically to create bold prints. The clothing is influenced by world travel, regional folklore, superstition, etc... And Garg keeps in mind that she has hopes that the garments will provoke conversation, perhaps something more than, “ Hey girl...nice rags.”

Garg who hails from India is influenced by the artwork of the native Gond tribe, as evidenced by her graphics. Many of the prints she uses in her clothing are strong reflections of the work of these creative people.

Garg said her creations are wearable and avant-garde. She explained, “ My designs which are unique, bold and conversational are also wearable. They are not just their to make a statement or illustrate a concept, but to be worn and worn comfortably."

Garg worked at the Gucci factory in Italy, and honed her skills with hand embroidery craft, and vintage lace-making. She even created her own dress during her tenure there.

Garg tod me she has been influenced by the late, innovative fashion designer Alexander McQueen. She polished her skills at the McQueen design studio, as well as the Alice Temperley and Izmaylova studios.

McQueen was known to use “shock tactics” in his work. Garg follows a similar path with  her series called “Abusive Prints,” in which she uses the motif of a raised middle finger on some of her dresses to protest the indignities, sexism, and abuse many Indian women suffer in her country.

Her label, “Sandhya Garg” now has international standing thanks to a successful stint on the TV smash show “ Project Runway.” Her work was lauded by such fashion icons as Heidi Klein, Nina Garcia, and Zac Posen.

Garg told me that I could wear her clothing and perhaps start a conversation that is inspired by them. And indeed, perhaps I should. Although I might shy away from the raised middle finger motif—I have enough problems!

For more information go to  http://www.sandhygarg.com

For a related article go to:     http://www.stlabel.com/how-to-become-a-fashion-designer/

The Sunday Poet: Susan Red

Poet Susan Red

Susan Red is a writer, photographer, and artist currently living in the NYC area. While living in the Somerville area, she read at many open mics and self published her first chapbook containing poems and a short story.  Some of her writings and photographs can be found at www.instagram.com/caitandthemoon

My Criteria For A Lover

Call me darling

often and say it 

sincerely 

Touch my lips with

your fingertip until

you can not 

Wait...

another moment 

to kiss me

When I tremble 

from nervousness,

wrap me in 

my favorite blanket 

and tell me all good 

things about myself 

When I tremble 

from pleasure,

hold my body close,

get lost in the sound

of my breathing 

Instead of fancy cars,

let's take a hippie van

to the mountains and

watch the stars

When one of us is sad,

let's simply say "I Care."

Let's watch each other's 

favorite movies, listen 

to our favorite songs

then discuss the meanings

in depth all night long

And when we're tired,

too tired to do anything, 

let's simply be 

with each other,

until we fall asleep 

whispering Goodnight.

 

Interview with poet Jennifer Martelli: A poet who looks at her life as an 'Uncanny Valley'

Interview with poet Jennifer Martelli: A poet who looks at her life as an 'Uncanny Valley'

With Doug Holder

Poet Jennifer Martelli sees her life as an "Uncanny Valley"- a term she told me that is used to describe the fact that what seems right doesn't always feel right.-- thus the title of her new poetry collection “ The Uncanny Value” ( Big Table Books).

 Jennifer Martelli is the recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant in Poetry, and has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net Awards. She’s taught high school English and women’s literature at Emerson College. She’s an associate editor for The Compassion Project: An Anthology, and lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts with her family.

I had the privilege to speak to her on my Somerville Community Access TV program  " Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer."

Doug Holder: You have said in an interview that you write in the plainest language possible. So you have no problem with accessible poetry?

Jennifer Martelli: No—not at all. Early on this was a problem. So many professors would say that my writing is so beautiful, but they didn't understand what it is about. There was a part of me that felt-- for poetry to be deep or important it had to be inaccessible in a way. So half the time I didn't understand what I was trying to say. Eventually I went the other way. I tried to just tell a story. I learned that from Marie Howe. Now I am coming back to the middle, a little. I am trying to balance heightened language that is beautiful—with some artifice. But first I want to communicate with people. It is a razor's edge sometimes.

DH: You also mentioned in the interview that Elizabeth Bishop, Marie Howe, and,Sylvia Plath have influenced you. What is the common thread among these poets that attracts you?

JM: First off they are strong female poets. There is a strong female voice. Over the past six months if I bought a poetry book it was written by a woman. I didn't start this consciously. I love male poets too, of course. I love Robert Haas, Thomas Lux-- with his brilliant short lines, and Tony Hoagland—he was a teacher of mine—probably the smartest man I know. The women poets I mentioned are all different—but again I am attracted to them. What I love about Bishop—Bishop is talking to you in her poems. Like in “ One Art” she is making discoveries in the poem, and she is surprised in the poem.

DH: You studied at Boston University as an undergraduate, and you got your MFA from Warren Wilson. Who were some of the folks of note you studied with?

JM: You know—when I lived in Cambridge, Mass.-- you could more or less create your own MFA without entering a program. Major poets were living in Cambridge and for as little as a 100 dollars you could opt in. I remember folks like Steven Cramer and Robert Haas had workshops that folks could attend. When I was at Warren Wilson a big influence on me was Ellen Bryant Voight—she is a brilliant woman. Her notes were wonderful. Before the Internet took hold we wrote each other letters. tThe letters I have from her are like a textbook.

DH: You are the associate editor for the Compassion Anthology. Tell us about this and your role there.

JM: This is really Laurette Folk's baby. Laurette is a jack of many trades. She is a writer, novelist, and visual artist. She created this anthology online. What she wants to do is to bring compassion through action.-- like creating art and poetry. I am a poetry reader for the project. I give my input. We are starting to see amazing poets and poetry being contributed to the anthology.

DH: Your new collection is “ The Uncanny Valley” ( Big Table Books). Tell us about the germ of the idea for this poetry book.

JM: It is essentially biographical. It is about growing up in Revere, Mass.to my life now-- in middle-age. It covers marriage, love, and writing. It deals with how one navigates one's way in the world. I find it inevitably hard. Robin Stratton, my publisher and editor, steered me to discover a great title. An “Uncanny Valley” is a term in aesthetics that describes things that look right but don't feel right. That describes my 54 years on this earth.

DH: In the collection you have a great poem titled: “Devil Tide.” You describe this group of nefarious  unforgiving rocks, the laments of seagulls, as a metaphor for how we cut ourselves off from people.

JM: That poem—is a prose poem. It is a conglomerate of the many beaches I visited and lived near. I have always lived near a beach. I have lived in Marblehead, Gloucester, and Lynn. The poem has to do to with how to say goodbye to people who might be dead or not in your life anymore. All these images came together for me and the poem was birthed.

DH: Was there a literary community in Revere where you grew up? I know poet Kevin Carey was born there and the novelist Roland Merullo.

JM: There was no real literary community. It truly was a working-class city. My parents grew up during the Depression and they felt poetry was frivolous. There were really not many places to go with my interest, aside from English class. If you look at Carey's work and Merullo's you'll see what I mean.


 

The Devil Tides

There are rocks off the coast shaped like eggs. There are rocks shaped like misery and one like a skull. Bodies have washed up on the slippery barnacles at low tide. There is a brown island I can walk to from the crushed shell beach. If you are born up here, you know sadness and you know gulls. You know how a good clamshell makes a good ashtray. You know the land is as flat as any place where men change into wolves under the mutton moon. You know that. Resent everything, for it’s the only way you don’t forget. Resent everything you love, it keeps you anchored to the beach. Fishing boats bring in cargo from pink and white tulip fields in the Orient. The heroin is cheap and it is hot. Just past King’s Beach the seaweed is red clogged with pennies or fingers. It smells even in the cold. Too many villages are connected by thin causeways pinched on either side by the Atlantic. Devil tides cut them off from the world. Folks go out and never come back. There are empty graves engraved in marble in big churches. Folks go out hot and turn blue. No one ever forgets, except how to measure. If you knew this, you’d never ask anything more of me.

Review of Works on Paper by Jennifer Barber

 

review of Works on Paper

by Jennifer Barber

published by Word Works

Winner of the 2015 Tenth Gate Prize

Review by Alice Weiss

Spare and lovely, the poems in Jennifer Barber’s Works on Paper resonate with answerings. Not just call and response, mind you, although that is there too, her poems seek out the moment when there are mysterious answerings even though the call is inaudible. In “Source” the opening poem, the leaves, hearing the rain before it sounds, lean “toward the place where the rain is about to begin. . .widening the surface of their urgency, their need/to register each shifting of air.” In “Almanac,” a graceful and gracious compression of one of Virgil’s Georgics, where beehives are ruled by a king, she wonders “Who first discovered/ it was a queen.” Always she is in conversation.

In “Assembling a Psalm,” phrases propose a psalm, without being one, and at the same time, being one: the sun, the cedars, grass like flesh, and where is she? She doesn’t know and not knowing still, and we find an answering:

there is always a turn

a way to open the lips

At one point in the collection she asks, “Is bereft some kind of command,” making the language have a conversation with itself. And indeed, the conversation she would most like to have, that with a father who has died of cancer, she cannot. So she preserves what must be the utterly inadequate question of dying, in On Morphine, his last words

Are these my eyes

under my hand.

And in the poem “After a year,”

What if he had dreamed

death as light on a windowsill,

shorebirds running at a wave?

She does not so much struggle with her grief as let it make images of itself. It doesn’t feel effortless so much as full of grace.

he was growing wings,

and would leave us when the wings grew in.

The valet that holds his clothes, “with its limited/knowledge of the body of a man.”

In “Benign” after the death begins to recede, conversation begins again with the world and other voices. She reads The Death of Ivan Ilych, and of his last three days, but putting the book aside, hears that

The wind

roughs up the highest branches of the oak.

The ear opens like an eye

—Unable to fit in the sack

or work free of it, he howls and howls.

There are conversations, as here, with Tolstoy, Goya (a delicious poem about an etching of four bulls where I suspect her father peers out at us), Chekov, the Bible and Near Eastern Creation myths. This last contains my favorite of all the lines in the collection,

After the great battle

when the leader of the gods

split with his arrow

the Mother of All.

he stretched half of her out as heaven,

he fattened the rest of her as land.

The other singular quality of an underlying call and response pulse is music. Barber’s lines are like measures, often couplets, always short, but her language is flowing so the tension between the stops and the flows is like, well, I flounder for a metaphor of my own, but it’s simple. It’s like song. These are the notes that struck my ear reading this time through.

The moon

naked as a slate

impossible to write on or ignore.

A gazelle is wearing

antelope pants.

By pear I mean pear,

not a riddled heart.

At least I think I do.

The flesh of it laid bare