The Sunday Poet: Bridget Galway

Poet Bridget Galway

Bridget Seley-Galway, an artist/poet, has exhibited throughout New England, and can also be seen on the Spanish Island Ibiza’s web site. Her poetry has been printed in Provincetown Magazine 2009-2010,Bagel Bards Anthology 2009-2012, and Popt Art 2011-2012. Her art has been presented in 1985 Artist Magazine, 1991 The Review Cape Cod Arts and Antiques, 2005 Cape Arts Review, and picked for the covers of Bagel Bards Anthology #5, Ibbetson Street Press #26-#30.

Son’s Light

In this mid day coming;

The great newness of joy,

Swaddled your being

Nestled in my arms.

Your small hands touch my cheek,

With the sweet scent

Of the lost natal sea.

My heart rests,

In the smile this bliss creates.

In contrast my soul cries,

Be perfect for this perfection.

A Star’s light,

From whose dust we are made,

Twinkles from your gray blue eyes, and

Offers up a long ago memory,

Of Angels, now ever present,

Define this forever Holy Day.

Written for my Blake

Somerville Novelist Randy Ross Didn't Need an Agent

Randy Ross

Somerville Novelist Randy Ross Didn't Need an Agent

By Doug Holder

  Somerville writer Randy Ross didn't need an agent because he sold his book on his own to a willing publisher.  The novel, “God Bless Cambodia” reached fruition through a long and arduous process. Ross, a man lingering on the cusp of 60, met me at the Bloc 11 cafe on a rainy, late spring morning. Ross is resplendently bald ( like yours truly) and has a lot of nervous energy and a quirky sense of humor.

Ross had a long road to publication—it took him seven years. The book, " God Bless Cambodia,” which Ross describes as a travel/literary/mystery was sent out to agents that Ross met at Grub Street (a literary center based in Boston). He wound up sending the book out to well over 100 agents and when that did not produce the desired results he sent it to a number of small presses. It was picked up by a small press in Long Island, N.Y.--run by a couple in their 80s.

Ross—for many years worked as an editor at PC World—but he quit that to pursue his writing and performance career. He had a sort of early version of “ God Bless Cambodia”-- a chapbook of sorts--- “ The Chronic Single's Handbook.” It was developed into a one man play—which he has performed at various fringe festivals, including the iconic one in Scotland. In preparation for this venture Ross took acting lessons to perfect his craft.

The “Chronic Single's Handbook” is based on Ross' travels in Asia after he quit his job at PC World. It came from his posts on his blog, “ Kvetching.” Ross told me, “The story basically dealt with my travels in Asia after I quit my job of many years. The character is looking for love—(or at the very least to get laid) and hopes for some kind of change. Unfortunately he comes back very disillusioned.”

Ross said he still performs around the country, and from time to time he lectures about the ins and outs of getting published. Now and then Ross teaches memoir writing. I asked him what are the essentials of writing a good memoir. He stated, “ A memoir is similar to fiction. You need a plot—not your whole life story—but an event or series of events that are interesting or revealing. Also standard elements are dialogue, good characterization, and some sort of theme.”

Ross has lived in Somerville since 1999. He likes the city—but said a number of his friends had to move out because the high rents of apartments, as well as exorbitant  home and condo prices. He also reflected, “ I'm not young and hip anymore—and that seems to be the prevalent vibe in the city.”

Ross has no regrets about leaving his high paying job at PC World. He lives on his savings—has taken the occasional consulting gig and lives frugally. He is in the process of writing a second book that deals, as he describes it as the dilemma of  “ men as victims.” He told me “ It starts out at a poetry reading at Whole Foods. It is about an angry middle aged white man taking a stand for—well--middle aged white men.”

Ross told me he has upcoming engagements at Timothy Gager's Dire Reader Series in Cambridge, at Duck Village in Somerville's Aeronaut Brewing Company, and Porter Square Books..  Go to Ross' website for more information.

 http://www.randyrossmedia.com/calendar.html

 http://www.portersquarebooks.com/event/randy-ross-god-bless-cambodia
   ( July 7  Reading at Porter Square Books)

Ibbetson Street 41 has been released!

Ibbetson Street--a Somerville, Ma. based literary magazine was founded by Doug Holder, Dianne Robitaille and Richard Wilhelm in 1998. Ibbetson Street is affiliated with Endicott College.

 TO ORDER GO TO:
http://www.lulu.com/shop/doug-holder/ibbetson-street-41/paperback/product-23210808.html

Or send a check for $12 ( includes postage and handling) to Ibbetson Street Press  25 School St. Somerville, Ma. 02143

Lord’s Own Anointed Poems by Kevin Cutrer

 

Lord’s Own Anointed

Poems by Kevin Cutrer

Dos Madres Press

Loveland, Ohio

www.dosmadres.com

ISBN: 978-1-939929-49-5

71 Pages

Review by Dennis Daly

Like a 2 X 4 to the head Kevin Cutrer’s new poetry collection, Lord’s Own Anointed, gets your attention fast. Set in rural Louisiana, Cutrer’s lyrics preach everyday Southern life writ both large and small. He marbles in pointed comedy and homespun wisdom. His subject matter is the human condition and his regional angle works wonderfully well. The riveting drawings by Rob Fairburn, who hails from the same small town as Cutrer, capture the poet’s tone perfectly.

From the opening poem, entitled Sounding Out, Cutrer harnesses a wide range of emotions to buttress his mature arguments. Here he narrates his persona’s travails as a slow learner and, concomitantly, the rote methods used by his scowling, scary, overworked teacher. His mother supplied the antidote of love and patience. Listen to these first affecting, then magical lines,

I don’t know how others learned

but in my case my mother taught me

into the evening… a boiling cauldron

of butterbeans on the stove, that hated meal

which nourished me whether I wanted it or not;

the phone ringing so loud, so often, I thought

it would lose its voice the way I could shout

my own away. A sound that smarted, the little clang

lingered in my ears like a burn. The business line.

Even as she repeated yes and no

to the caller, she tapped the page gently

where I should pencil in, with one

of those thick, soft-pointed pencils

given to children (Merlin’s wand at playtime)

letters that spelled my primer’s totems,

the cat and dog, the happy family.

Lord’s Own Anointed, Cutrer’s title poem and my favorite piece in this collection, does double duty, detailing the divine madness of preacher and poet. Henry Hebert, the protagonist, is not quite right. Not unlike a few poets that I know. Bug-eyed and bulbous, Henry proffers an absurd appearance. But he has “the spirit” and his words matter. Cutrer concludes the piece describing pure artistry generically this way,

Our preacher calls on him to pray each Sunday,

and every time he has a different prayer

more blessed than any message that young pastor

with all his years at college could invent.

He prays with all the energy a workingman

puts to his pillow every night to sleep,

that hard-won peace that only comes from struggle.

His words step slowly like a man who winds

on through the wilderness without a trail,

sure of the right way, moving tree to tree,

humming to free his spirit from the thick,

and sentence after sentence simply sings.

If it wasn’t so horribly sad, Cutrer’s poem entitled Fall On Your Knees would be hilariously funny. Santa Claus shows up at Shorty’s Tavern, a local bar, jolting childhood memories from the protagonist, who is drinking up a storm. A father/ son relationship hangs in the balance. Mortality and life’s meaning (if any) are considered. I teared up reading the last stanza of this poem. That’s a first. I won’t spoil it by quoting; it needs the whole poem. Here’s another section addressing Santa Claus at the heart of the piece,

You know, my father always wanted us to believe

in you, and every year he had a scheme

to put out all our doubts once and for all.

One Christmas morning there were reindeer tracks

out in the front yard where the grass was thin

and it was muddy from a thunderstorm.

Well, that was all the proof it took for me.

Later I learned he’d sawed a hoof from a buck

his buddy killed, to fake those tracks. He went

to all that trouble just to fool his kids.

Brother love can be a complicated affair. In the piece Phil Kills the Neighbor’s Dog on Easter Sunday, Cutrer infuses his versified argument with passion, shame, and internalized anger (You can literally feel the acid burn.). Then he nails it. Consider these concluding lines,

There wasn’t any call for it,

but there it was. You can’t pretend

it hadn’t happened when you’d seen it.

Forgiveness is a lie we tell.

Sometimes there ain’t no other way

To live, but live by lies we tell.

After what he’d done, what to do?

The men, we just stood around and spit.

The women tore him up like panthers.

Perhaps the strangest poem in the collection is Truck Stop Chapel Testimony. It works as both a page poem and a performance poem. In fact I’ve seen the poet read this piece at the Hastings Room Reading Series in Cambridge Massachusetts. During the performance he morphed into a latter-day Elmer Gantry, stretching his repentant hands out of hellfire towards heaven and undeserved redemption. Cutrer’s preacher rails against the Prince of Darkness,

Sins are hard-headed, my repentance limp.

I’d turn a week’s pay into a letter to Penthouse,

then weep clean the taint of my crimes, and worse:

I’d skip and sing the wide road back to go romp.

From his couch stained with evil, Satan-times-3

addles me to bad my good, turn rights to wrongs.

He holds my steel will-power in his tongs

to weld all kinds of wickedness to me.

After reading this volume, grace (or presumptuousness) from the almighty (or the infernal one) descended (or ascended) upon me and I immediately reserved a retreat room in a Cistercian monastery located in the American South to deal once and for all with my unholy shortcomings. Cutrer is that good.

The Sunday Poet: Zvi Sesling

Poet Zvi Sesling

Zvi A. Sesling, Poet Laureate of Brookline, MA is a prize winning poet. He edits Muddy River Poetry Review, publishes Muddy River Books and reviews for Boston Small Press and Poetry Scene. He is author of Fire Tongue (Cervena Barva Press, 2016) and King of the Jungle (Ibbetson Street Press, 2010), and two chapbooks Love Poems From Hell (Flutter Press, 2017) and Across Stones of Bad Dreams (Cervena Barva Press, 2011). He lives in Brookline with his wife Susan J. Dechter.






Manipulation

Raindrops on the window

tears from her eyes

serious conversation

they hold hands

smile

then serious again

then she cries

raindrops plink on

the window

she wipes her tears

whatever he is saying

her emotions respond

smile

tears

smile

tears

which of them is

being manipulated

Doug Holder Interviews Poet Ben Berman

Boston Area Small Press Poetry Scene: DeWitt Henry--Woven Tale Press

 

 

 

 Back in Feb. of 2017--DeWitt Henry wrote this nice review of the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene http://dougholder.blogspot.com   in his column in the Woven Tale Press online magazine. Henry is the founder of Ploughsares Magazine, and taught at Emerson College in Boston for many years.  Here is a link to the magazine: http://www.thewoventalepress.net/2017/02/01/featured-bookmarks-literary-3/

 

 

Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

Founded in 2003 by poet, teacher, editor, journalist, reviewer, and overall impresario Doug Holder, this serves as a model “alternative literary” site dedicated to building, reporting on, and promoting a local literary scene. In this case, while centered in Somerville, MA, the scene is that of greater Boston, which Holder boosts as the Paris of New England.  His first affinity is for beat poets, but he celebrates a generous range of local poets and fiction writers, many of them nationally known.
His weekly interviews are carried on Somerville Cable (“Poet to Poet/Writer to Writer”), transcribed and published in the Somerville Times, and featured and archived on the blog. He and his circle of regular contributors, known as “The Bagel Bards,” also write engaged and perceptive reviews of new books by locals (and each other). Recent high points include interviews with X.J. Kennedy, WTP Contributing Editor Joyce Peseroff, Margot Livesey, and the former Poet Laureate of Boston, Sam Cornish, whose book Holder had published with his indie press, Ibbetson Street. 

The Brighter House By Kim Garcia

The Brighter House

By Kim Garcia

White Pine Press Poetry Prize Volume 21

Review by Kate Hanson Foster

William Wordsworth wrote in his poem, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality and Recollections of Early Childhood” that we are but “trailing clouds of glory…” and boldly declared, “Heaven lies about us in our infancy!” Wordsworth believed that children are wise and celestial, and as we grow we veer further and further from our divine selves. In her collection, The Brighter House, Kim Garcia suggests the opposite—that we are not de-spiritualized with age, and instead describes a personal transition from uneasy earthly child to heavenly poet. “Who can say what is a blessing?” says the speaker in the poem, “In the beginning was all the after.” “I am blessed with curses.” Childhood, for all its pains and progressions, is a universal human phase we all must go through, and for some, an innocent child can be exposed to not so innocent circumstances. For some, as the poet suggests, the “beginning” starts in the “after.”

The Brighter House contains poems that ruminate over childhood wounds—most of which are centered on an abusive father and the psychological imprint left on his daughters. There are several “Tales of the Sisters” poems strewn throughout the collection—various scenes of three young girls: the speaker, one “light sister” and one “dark sister,” implying that the abuse each withstood had its own individual impacts.

The poems are rich in metaphor, creating a more sensory experience—a place where lyrics can do what prose cannot. There is no clear narrative present, and the reader can only guess the concrete details in the stories. In “Transfusion, 2p.m.” the speaker describes her ailing father by saying, “I cannot find in myself a single hard word against the sturdy weave of sentiment or any human grasping.” Perhaps this desire for the right word or words could explain the many reoccurring images in the collection. There are “wriggling legs” of a child and “wriggling bodies” of frogs—two separate scenes in two separate poems, both describing a squirming out of something difficult. Other images frequent the book as well (i.e. water, darkness, dust, clouds) and yet there isn’t a sense of redundancy in these familiar words, instead a sort of strategy of meditation—returning and evaluating the same memories and ideas in order to travel from dark to light. But what if the mind is a “mind full of tar…almost solid or suggests a solid, as mercury suggests steel, and these clouds stones.” (“It’s Simpler) The poet cannot dwell in this space forever—and admits, “If I were dying/tomorrow I would be bitter I would/ buy a brighter house. I would leave bad/memories. I would be the brighter house.” (“Aubade”) There is acceptance of the events that transpired—a new awareness and ultimately even forgiveness and peace. The speaker proclaims, “I am saying yes. Not to death, which isn’t my business, but to heaven,” implying that heaven is something that doesn’t have to come after death. There can be a blessed afterlife following childhood, a spiritual transcendence when you climb the dark stairs to something lighter—A Wordsworthian might even agree with that.

About the Author

Kim Garcia: Kim Garcia is the author of DRONE, winner of the 2015 Backwaters Prize, Tales of the Sisters, winner of the 2015 Sow’s Ear Chapbook Contest, and Madonna Magdalene, released by Turning Point Books in 2006. Garcia teaches creative writing at Boston College.

Evie Salon Studio: A Place Where Hair and Art Commingle.

Yvonne Bonaccorso

Evie Salon and Studio: A Place Where Hair and Art Commingle.

By Doug Holder

I am not a patron of hair salons. When I go to have my sparse bit of hair and my beard trimmed I go to an old school barber in Harvard Square. But on this occasion, I made the trip to the Evie Salon and Studio in Davis Square, Somerville. The owner, Yvonne Bonaccorso met me at the salon.  Bonaccorso impressed me as warm and friendly, and of course she was well-coiffed. She told me that the stylish black dress she was wearing was designed at a local shop “whats—nu,” right down the block from her.

Bonaccorso has long been in the hair business. She owned a shop in the 80s in Harvard Square. She has been at her location in Davis Square for the past three years. She told me that, “ Davis Square has been great. We have a lot of foot traffic. We have a lot of students, and young professionals who come to the shop. A lot of Harvard and MIT folks get there hair done here. I definitely see a future for the salon.”

Although Bonaccorso lives in Melrose—she did live on Elmwood Ave. in Somerville for a number of years. She said at times—she misses living in the Square—with all the great activity it seems to be the center of.

Now—you might ask—what is the “studio” part of this salon about? Bonaccorso told me she designed the store like an artists' studio. She has stark white walls that display the works of artists who show their work here. And there is a sort of industrial chic ambiance to the salon as well.

Bonaccorso is a staunch believer that hair dressing is an art. She told me, “ Most people are misinformed about what a hair stylist really does. I capture tones from around the world. Everyone of my stylists try to create a masterpiece. Stylists should be good actors but most importantly humane. They should have an innate way with people. We have to perfect a style that goes with a client's skin color, the shape of their head, and the texture of their hair. We want to achieve a color for a client. We actually paint their hair. She continued, “ I am constantly looking towards nature to inspire my creations.”

The Evie Salon and Studio is very community-minded. And right now they host a number of artists and their work. Bonnaccurso told me that currently they have a series of works by the artist Kim Dyres-Villard on display. It is tilted the “Reforestation Series.” The viewer will see the forest through printmaking, graphite and water color. Bonaccorso also plans to have wine-tastings, and other events to draw people into the store.

As a poet I was interested to hear that Bonaccorso in her long career-- has done the hair of Marie Howe (She describes Howe as a real feminist with a great mane of red hair), Steven Cramer ( the former head of the MFA program at Lesley University), the founder of Agni magazine-- Askold Melnycuz, as well as the writer Gail Caldwell. Bonaccorso told me that poets that inspire her are  Robet Bly,  Reiner Maria Rilka, and Yeats. She said,"The Two Trees by Yeats is my constant companion." I might have asked for a haircut of my own—but my head is devoid of the much desired flora. So I walked out of the shop—further enlightened—here in the “ Paris of New England.”