Child Ward of the State By Eileen Cleary

Child Ward of the State

By Eileen Cleary

Main Street Rag Publishing

www.MainStreetRag.com

Charlotte, NC

ISBN: 978-1-59948-746-5

56 Pages

$14.00

Review by Dennis Daly

Poignant to the point of defining poignancy, Eileen Cleary’s first book of poems, Child Ward of the Commonwealth, shakes the soul with her truth-telling narratives of childhood trauma and dysfunction. Cleary somehow melds a mature poetic sensibility with a child’s wide-eyed ability to see the world’s wreckage with wonder and awe. Her persona relates adventures of fairy-tale-like brutality, not unlike fables from the Brothers Grimm. However, Cleary’s anecdotes are not mythologized; they are direct and very personal.

One of the collection’s most compelling poems entitled On What to Forget stakes out the mnemonic territory utilized by Cleary and delivers illuminating slivers of juvenile reasoning and adult pathos to boot. The piece begins with a four-year old cowering under a table as the skin of her sister’s arm, aflame from a kitchen fire, literally melts. Through negative constructions the narrator tries, through time, to assuage the little girl’s guilt and place it where it belongs. The poet says,

Not your mother.

    She wasn’t cooking,

didn’t leave that pan to boil,

     didn’t leave her children

under the porch,

    hide-and-go seeking

through its lattice.

    Ready or not here I come!

into the kitchen,

    She wasn’t even there.

Grow older, grow smaller

    because you did nothing, you

did nothing but hide

Left to their own devices, human youngsters turn feral like other mammalian offspring in synonymous circumstances. In her poem When the Social Worker Took Me, Cleary’s persona explains with perfect juxtapositions and impressive, if hair-raising, choice of specifics. Consider these lines,

…I watch

over myself—teach myself

to speak. I say lipshick or pisgetti,

poke holes in my tights, pull snarls

from my hair, toss and catch

a puppy on the stairs—I hide

in an attic, clamor through the halls,

map my slap-dash kingdom

in crayon on the walls. The neighbors

dial phones, shut behind their doors.

Childcare in the best of circumstances can on a bad day lead to neglect or dubious disciplinary behaviors.  Without the presence of permanent kinship, the possibilities of cruelty multiply exponentially. In her piece Toaster the poet describes in straightforward language one such unseemly incident, an assault on her little brother,

The baby sitter shouts.

John, when will you get serious?

She jams Johnny’s hand

into the toaster while I freeze,

bury my own unbuttered fingers

into the pockets of my jumper.

He screeches like a barn owl,

hissing, and flapping his arms

against the brute walls

of the too-small room.

Children on the outside of family life hunger for inclusion. They dream dreams of especial treatment, stability, and comforting acceptance. A full belly and an unchangeable name are part of the deal. Denial of these perks breed resentment and pugnaciousness. Cleary’s poem Foster Care Definition ends via a fantasy culminating in a very real demand,

I learn the zebra knows its herd

because patterns dazzle

their family names across the green.

I want my name to dazzle too.

I begin to wish myself an elephant.

At St. Boniface’s, St. Mary’s, St. Joseph’s,

St. Francis’, back to my third grade

report on pachyderms, how I pray:

make me an elephant, God.

Let my skin wrinkle over my hide,

Not for the size, Not for the skin.

I want to be family. Let me in.

Throughout the bulk of these poems the narrator’s mother takes center stage, even when she is not there. Sometimes it’s not pretty. Family bonds, even in dire circumstances, resist tampering. Children love unconditionally. The poet’s piece How the Goldfish deals with strategies of remembrance and forgetting. Here is the heart of the poem,

My foster mother tells me forget,

but not to forget my birth mom

passed out across the front threshold,

how we kids only use the back.

So I forget:

How-dee-dow-dee-diddle o  

Through our days and how she

Hums herself into a blanket.

How after again the ambulance

takes her, we play Wizard of Oz,

follow bricks through Flaxen

Park to a blackbird tower.

How when she’s back home

we think we wished her there.

How even on bad days,

her scoring paragoric—

Acceptance and reconciliation with old ghosts can be part of a healing process after years of hard knocks and open wounds. Cleary’s poem I’m Thinking of Re-entering My Body delineates such a curative progression. A damaged soul needs to be well grounded in flesh and blood. The poet’s persona seeks out her earthly shell in these lines,

We’ll have this reunion before it

thinks I’ve died and follows.

While it’s open to my custody,

keeping its musts of eat and drink.

When I re-enter, I like to think

we’ll scribble its history,

its journey erasable

without the ink of me.        

Confessional poetry such as Cleary’s that dwells on brittle emotion and memory is difficult enough to write. But, when told through the eyes of a child or a maturing adult, that same poetry becomes both magical and medicinal.  An amazing debut of an astonishing poet.

An Evening with Andre Dubus Feb 27

Click on Pic to Enlarge

Stephanie Schorow Brings Her Naked Eye to Boston's Infamous Combat Zone.

Stephanie Schorow Brings Her Naked Eye to Boston's Infamous Combat Zone.

Interview by Doug Holder


Inside the Combat Zone: The Stripped Down Story of Boston’s Most Notorious Neighborhood


"Upscale restaurants, majestic theaters, and luxury condos line the streets of downtown Boston today. Students, office workers, doctors, and shoppers navigate the busy sidewalks along Washington and Boylston Streets, giving little thought to the historical significance of their surroundings. The bustle distracts passersby from what may be the city’s dirtiest little secret: these blocks were once home to Boston’s most notorious neighborhood. The Combat Zone, a five-plus-acre, city- sanctioned adult entertainment district, was as sordid and alluring as anything found in Amsterdam or Vegas. Indeed, Boston’s now tony neighborhood once resembled the set of HBO’s The Deuce, all with the blessing of city officials."   (From the authors website)


I had the pleasure of interviewing journalist Stephanie Schorow on my Somerville Media Center TV show  Poet to Poet Writer to Writer.

Doug Holder: When I was at Boston University in the 1970s, I visited the Combat Zone to get a taste of  “real life.” I remember I walked into a bar, and a lady of the night looked at me and told the bartender: “Get this kid a glass of milk.”

Stephanie S: (Laughs). Yes a lot of young men went there. Someone once told me that they went there so they would have a story to tell for a lifetime.

DH: Why did you decide to choose the Combat Zone as the subject of your book?

SS: Well I have written extensively about Boston. I have written books on Boston's drinking history, the Brinks Robbery, etc... My subjects are usually offbeat. An editor said to me ,when I was looking for a new subject, “ What about the Combat Zone?” I knew immediately that was it---a real Boston story!

DH: Ironically the Combat Zone was set up to stop the spread of pornography.

SS: Yes it is ironic. In the 1960s the sort of red light district was Scollay Square—around where Government Center is today. It was a warren of little streets. It was a seedy area, and had a lot of burlesque houses, sailor bars, and tattoo parlors. At the time it was considered very risque. But it was nothing like the Combat Zone. A lot of folks went to the old Howard—a popular burlesque hall—that was more popular than the Bunker Hill Monument and the Fanueil Hall landmark, for instance. The centerpieces of the Combat Zone were the old Pilgrim Theater, and the Naked i. There were many other clubs-- there were at least 34 adult entertainment businesses in the area from bookstores to strip clubs—a lot of “adult options.” City planners, city elders, like Barney Frank, wondered “ What are we going to do about this?” We are trying to create the new Boston. We can't just close establishments down—there are Supreme Court precedents to consider.” So they started a zone—with the hope that all the adult businesses would stay there—and not travel anywhere else. Basically they said, “”If you have it here—you can't have it there.”

DH: Where there isolated pockets that developed outside the Combat Zone?

SS: Some cropped up near Kenmore Square, and Allston, but there was no concentration like the Combat Zone.

DH: A lot of musicians cut their teeth in the Combat Zone, right?

SS: I interviewed a couple of musicians from Berkeley. They wanted to go nameless. They talked about getting gigs at the strip clubs.  Comedian Jay Leno got his start playing the strip clubs... this is true of many comedians. From the early 1960s to the early 1970s many clubs had live bands. Later taped music, etc... took the bands' place.

DH: There was a quote in your book that said the average guy who went to the Combat Zone was a middle-aged, accountant from Newton--a family-man sort of guy.

SS: Well the business conventioneers were big business for the Combat Zone. Often while these men's wives were shopping they would ask a bellboy or such, “ Where is the action?”

DH: Were there mixed uses in the area?

SS: Yes there were some—like the famed Hand the Hatter hat shop and the Essex Deli.

The deli was housed in the Liberty Tree building.

DH: You wrote about some of the strippers, like Chesty Morgan, and Julie Jordan.

SS: Julie Jordan is very memorable. She went to one of my book events. She is a very sweet and articulate woman. Back in the day Jordan was a hippy sort. On a lark, she danced at one of the clubs—and then got hooked on it. She became know for her native-American costume, and was dubbed Princess Cheyenne. She was a real attraction for men back then.

DH: So,  was the cliched answer from strippers when asked why they do what they do: “I am working my way through college” to some extent true?

SS: Yes. I have talked with a number who said that. And some of them are highly regarded professional people now. And surprisingly they said they didn't regret dancing, but they are glad they got out of it.

DH: How did the Combat Zone get it's name?

SS: It started in the 50s. There were a lot of sailors and soldiers who went to drink there, and eventually some got into brawls. The military police were in there all the time. In 1950 a judge opined, "This is really a Combat Zone." But it was really coined by a series of articles in the Boston Herald American in 1964, in which they used the word throughout. 

DH” What caused the demise of the area?

SS: In 1976, there was a killing of a Harvard student-a native of Boston's North End—outside a bar in the zone.   Its reputation started to really go downhill then. The Combat Zone went on for another decade—but after this it was clear its days were numbered. Eventually legislation and city ordinances killed it.

J. M. W. Turner Watercolors Mystic Seaport Museum Mystic, Connecticut 06355

J. M. W. Turner Watercolors

Mystic Seaport Museum

Mystic, Connecticut 06355

www.mysticseaport.org

Thursday through Sunday, 10-5 until February 23

This exhibit of Turner’s works may be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for us to enjoy the visual equivalent of sitting in the corner of a music studio listening to (pick your composer – Beethoven – Mozart – Paganini –…) practice and compose. I say maybe once-in-a-lifetime because these Turner’s so rarely travel from the Tate in London and this will be their only venue in the United States this trip and who knows when they might come again.

Turner was a prodigy who enrolled in the Royal Academy of Art at 14 and was included in their annual exhibition at 15. When he died 61 years later he left over 500 oils, 2000 watercolors and 30,000 works on paper. He was famously eccentric; when he chose his pigments he was interested in color and not in longevity, so much of his work is at risk of fading if exposed to light, which is one reason the Tate so rarely allows them to travel. We have this opportunity because the gallery at Mystic Seaport’s North Gate was designed so that it might safely display the Turner’s.

But enough of those sorts of details; if you feel the need for more of them, the review by Murray Whyte in the Globe would be a good place to start; the digital reproductions of the Turners in the online version are much better than those in the paper but no substitute for the real thing. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/01/08/arts/swimming-dreamy-romantic-world-jmw-turner-watercolors/

However, given the rare opportunity to witness these watercolors, which this exhibition affords, I suggest they should be approached in the romantic spirit with which they were executed. Don't drive down and arrive with your mind buzzed out by the realities of Expressways and Interstates; instead, use public transportation and travel with a compatible companion to arrive with your mind quiet, engaged and open for what these Turner’s have to show us.

My sister and I chose the Northeast Regional 93 (let us mourn for a moment the romantic past when it was The Shoreline of the NYNH&H and the trains had names like "The Owl"); it left the Back Bay about 9:30 and deposited us in Mystic an hour and 20 minutes later. The museum was a pleasant three quarters of a mile walk north, so we arrived at the gallery relaxed, warmed up and ready to receive. When we filled up on a first course of the Turners we paused for a light lunch (at Latitude 41 right next door) and conversation to digest what we had just seen. Then back to the museum for another helping, which we followed with a leisurely mile walk north to get the local bus to New London where we would catch the Northeast Regional 174 for our return.

Standing on the platform as our train approached, we shared an appreciation of the “Turner Sunset,” to which we were being treated. Turner had taught us, Turner was teaching us, how to look at the world, how to see.

--Wendell Smith

In Ibbetson Press #46 out of Somerville, MA, 2019. Doug Holder, publisher.

In Ibbetson Press #46 out of Somerville, MA, 2019.  Doug Holder, editor.

Edited by Harris Gardner, and Julia Cirgnano

Design: Steve Glines

Front/Back Cover Photos:  Bonnie Matthews Brock

Arts/Editor Jennifer Matthews

REVIEW BY MARCIA D. ROSS

If there were a contest of best first lines in Ibbetson Street (#46) the winner would have to be a toss up between several contenders. Mary Buchinger’s brief “Song” begins with “The river didn’t say” – an effortless glide into the exquisite (but never fancy) river of the language of imagery and sound that comprises the entire poem. In a distinctly different way, Denise Provost’s first line, “You might have crept up, grabbed us by surprise–“ is, like the rest of the poem, in fetching Petrarchan sonnet-form, trying to fend off a brutal hurricane’s dreaded arrival. These two have many rivals, but first lines are important.

 As for last best lines, another tie. Michael Ansara’s closing for his tender poem, “As a Child I Felt the Wind,” echoes and resolves the entire drama of learning how to listen in the last lines “. . . that passed quickly / As a sigh, skimming the surface of this, my one, life.”  By contrast and equally exceptional, Dennis Daly’s final line in “The Harrowing of Hell” produces a gaze of sudden desire: “Eve, bedazzled, eyes transfigured Adam” (eyes is a verb here). This line ends the packed and powerful poem that never lets up for a second, and finally crashes into the lustful ruin and guilt of the world’s first couple.  And, as for pure and brilliant finale, there is Harris Gardner’s “This masquerade unmasked in empyrean au bade” at the end of four full dancing stanzas, in “Acolytes of Terpsichore.”

Not counting Doug Holder’s gold nugget interview with the esteemed Ifeanyi Menkiti, there are 62 entries in the fall 2019 publication of Ibbetson Street.  Of these, if I may say so, at least half are worthy of the ink for printing the issue, and half again of those are worth reading at least twice (or sometimes twelve times); a handful can make your head spin and cause you to shift in your seat, and a final few that are right up there with Milton’s “fittest though few.” My growing feeling is that to read a poem once is to have looked at only the gift wrap on a package, which, as we all know can be a poor representation of the quality of the gift itself, or even a garish overstatement. Even with such limitations there are many more poems here than can be given their due. The poets themselves range in age from grownups to grandparents and write with everything from urgency and anger to humorous winks or grateful or subtle praise for life itself.  They also vary in world view, sexual definition, and political positions, if any. All of the usual subjects are here, with mothers perhaps outnumbering fathers, then, in no order, children, friends, lovers, siblings, uncles, neighbors, ghosts or cats and dogs, crows, bicycles, smells, desire, Zen, death, rivers, weather, clothing, food, crops, ageing, grief, rage, revenge and Fine! I’ll not go on. (You’re welcome). By virtue of basic arithmetic, each of these fewer-than-62 subjects has its very own own poet.  Some of these poets are well known, some are unknown or ingénue or gifted, and some could benefit from examining what makes a poem a poem or simply practicing their craft with more diligence. (And of course the writer of this review has been known to be dead wrong.)

Having said that, I want to present several poets’ work, and have a go at saying something meaningful about them.  For starters, there are poets included in Ibbetson St. #46 who, although famous, are continuing to experiment with the genre, in this case to great comic effect. Dewitt Henry’s “On Rank” is breathlessly clever and essentially an essay in poetic form, a riff on Shakespeare, and a rollicking tease. It also has the funniest line in the entire collection. Rounding up plethora of nasty smells, the speaker spews out: “Pee-yew!” Then again, that may be a Court Jester speaking, a very low “rank”ing Fool right out of Lear or Hamlet, although Hamlet himself fooled around with the varieties of rotting flesh; his noted mention of “thinks,” rhymes of course with “stinks.” Henry’s poem fools with Shakespeare’s high-ranking Sonnet 94 which itself smells to high heaven, and presents a presumably farcical but accurate footnote to his own un-poem.

Speaking of fun, Diana Cole’s “My Father’s Annual Stint in the National Guard” presents the problem of whiskers in a marriage. Managing to induce even pathos, Cole’s verse trips through the awkwardness and hilarity of a couple’s difference of opinion about the value of a moustache. The effect upon the observant and loving daughter (poet) is both priceless and cautionary.

Another impressive yet slightly off-kilter poem is the beautifully written “Acolytes of Terpsichore,” by Harris Gardner.  Not rude or ugly or vain or guilty or clumsily losing control, it is an accomplished and attractive poem, with fine, dazzling imagery and luscious sound. It may have been written as a specimen of artifice or even sleight of hand, with glittering twirling ballerinas vacantly but perfectly dancing around in circles– in which case it has achieved his deliberation; it’s damned good, but its elegant and artificial beauties may be marred by an overindulgence in uncommon words. For a perfect poem, its stanzas split jarringly in new directions or purposes. To be fair, this poem is unquestionably meant to be artificial and pristine, and to be read with a dictionary handy. It reminds me of one of those perfect dresses that cannot express the real woman wearing it. I’m not sure how a masquerade is unmasked, either, though I admire the sound of it. Altogether impressive.

A very different kind of poem in this edition captures one’s entire attention while never for a moment explaining itself.  It’s so slender, it doesn’t even have the time! Isabelle Kenyon’s “Breakfast Is an Important Part Of the Afternoon” puts sensual pleasure and indulgence hand in hand with the discomfort and anxieties of the body in a hot Italian town. Along with these are indefinable hints of timelessness, desire, discomfort, bliss, unavailability, and physical pain. It even has pretty polka dot spider bites and sweet hands that touch the sores. However, the sores seem to be spreading. In contrast, a plain but exquisite poem by Zvi Sesling, “Ghostly Memories,” produces an old sock from a drawer that becomes a portal or arena for the return of long-held but heretofore distant memories. In another drawer, an instruction manual for a short-wave radio signals anguish for all the fine things that time has kicked aside, discarded and useless. Towards the end of the poem, long-deceased parents are about reappear, and the speaker casts an eye on bones sunk in a La Brea tar pit, embodying the worst of all possible endings in a life: separation.

 There are many more poems that should be included in this discussion. The delightful and perfect “Full Service,” Ted Kooser’s amused and poignant meditation on a windshield washing at an ordinary gas station, observed from inside the car. There’s a sad but surprised smile in this poem, with its hint of troubled vision.  We also have Gary Metras’s very physical yet mystical poem of line-casting for a fish at the ocean, in “As If a Dream.” In the midst of repetitive casting motions and physical sensations, suddenly the speaker’s dead mother’s voice cries out, “Let me go.” And the speaker complies: “I cut the line.” Linda Fischer’s poem, “As a Season Ends,” is succinct, wise, and witty. “How much is finite!” she writes:

Even the universe threatens

to self-destruct as everything

we know flies off into space—

defying gravity, eroding

the pillars of faith.

Finally, in case (like me) you are forgetful, Steven Ostrowski’s “Old Woman”­ presents a brief encounter between an old wizened woman in her “sunbox garden“ and our speaker, perhaps a young poet who happens by, not for the first time, not realizing he is learning to listen. In her mirthful voice she responds to his question about how she knows about next year’s weather: “Remember. Remember I told you.”

Were We Awake, L.M. Brown

Were We Awake, L.M. Brown, Fromite Press, Burlington, Vermont, 216 pages, $15.00.

Book Review

By Ed Meek

In her new collection of short stories, L.M. Brown quotes Emily Dickinson for her title “it is good we are dreaming—It would hurt us—were we awake—.” In her poem, Dickinson goes on to say “It is prudenter to dream.” Brown refers to Dickinson to imply that reality is so painful that we need to bury it. In her stories Brown digs beneath the surface to unearth the painful truth we bury and hide. In writing as in life, it isn’t always easy to delve into tales of infidelity, accidental deaths and murder, but Brown explores those subjects with authority.

Many of the stories are written as mysteries with information slowly revealed. Someone has been found bludgeoned to death behind a bar. It is well known he cheated on his wife so it could be any one of a number of people. In another story a woman driving home at night in the rain runs over a boy who suddenly appears in front of her car. Was the boy committing suicide? Whether he was or not, Brown goes into how we might deal with something like this. In another story, a young woman finds out that the relationship between her parents and her aunt is much more complex than she thought. Most of the stories either take place in or refer back to Sligo, Ireland, the setting of earlier books by Brown. In this collection of stories as in Treading the Uneven Road, we are introduced to characters who reappear in later stories where the same event is looked at through different eyes.

In “Anniversaries” Brown has characters reflect back on the murder of Nick Moody. When Brown does this, it has the unique effect of making the reader think about the earlier stories and it brings a coherence to a collection of short stories that we don’t often find. The mother of the woman who was working at the bar that Nick Moody was found behind thinks about her daughter Margaret who left Ireland years ago to go to Australia. “Nolllaig wanted to imagine Margaret as the little girl who stood shyly on the sideline of the green watching the other children play, but just as her daughter’s smells had disappeared from the room, it was impossible to hold onto that little girl.” Although the mother is losing touch with her daughter, the reader is reminded of her and of the way we lose all touch with relatives and old friends.

In the same story, Nollaig finds herself visiting a neighbor Eilish who loves cats and takes in strays. Nollaig thinks Eilish should name one that keeps showing up. But Eilish thinks “certain things can’t be owned, like a cat or grief. But Nollaig owned her grief. She held it to her, and on a certain day every year, she examined it.” A few pages later Nollaig “thought of all the things people kept inside, like the grief for a cat, and questions about a certain night.”  Nollaig wants to ask her daughter what happened that night and why she had to go all the way to Australia to get away from it, but Brown knows there are certain questions in life that we just never get the answers to.

There are also stories in Were We Awake not directly related to Sligo. In these there is a similar sense of unease or even dread, but I found myself wanting to get back to Sligo when reading them.

Like the characters in Were We Awake, as we get older, we continue to think about people we knew who died young, Mike, a kid I played basketball with in middle school who died of “a mysterious kidney ailment.” My best friend Richard from high school who died of early Alzheimer’s. There are no good answers to these questions but L.M. Brown gives us much to think about in the hidden stories she brings to light.

In Praise of Doug Holder's Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene/ Robert Murphy/Dos Madres Press

   




In Praise of Doug Holder's Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene:

BY ROBERT MURPHY--PUBLISHER OF DOS MADRES PRESS   https://www.dosmadres.com/

What is there not to like:  First of all, dear friends of literature and poetry, the online journal is beautiful. There is a richness about the visual aspect of Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene that is rarely matched. What is also rarely matched are the reviews that are a model of concision. (thank goodness there is such an entity that exists for the small press) As a publisher whose mission statement declares, "Dos Madres Press is dedicated to the belief that the small press is essential to the vitality of contemporary literature as a carrier of the new voice and new works by established poets, as well as the older, sometimes forgotten voices of the past. And in an ever more virtual world, to the creation of fine books pleasing to the eye and hand." I could not be more grateful. And as a writer myself of poetry, I have been blessed to have my own work come to be reviewed here. And then there is the added bonus, that even if a book is not reviewed they all go to the Endicott College's Halle Library collection founded by Doug Holder himself. So there is a place, an ever growing place that the work of the small press can call home.

So publisher's and poets, do send on your books for possible review here. In a world that can use all the best poetry has to offer, for as Dr. William Carlos Williams wrote, "It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably everyday for lack / of what is found there." Find it you will in Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene, that "news" that is truly newsworthy - that always ineffable, but necessary something that makes all the difference in the world.

Special THANKS to all our ace reviewers who have made this site what it is--Dennis Daly, Wendell Smith, Mike Steffen, Gregory Wolos, Lawrence Kessenich, David P. Miller. Ed Meek and many others  over the 16 years of our existence.

Spreading Like Wild Flowers By Timothy Gager

Spreading Like Wild Flowers

By Timothy Gager

Big Table Publishing

Boston, MA & San Francisco, CA

www.bigtablepublishing.com

ISBN: 978-1-945917-58-5

52 Pages

Review by Dennis Daly

Well-titled and well-introduced, Timothy Gager’s new poetry collection, Spreading Wild Flowers, both celebrates and broods on everyday life and the persistence of a medieval-generated, but contemporary version, of a morally centered Everyman. Gager’s wiry verses come at you from all directions, each bloom well-rooted and well protected against predatory aesthetes and lackadaisical flower pickers. Lushness seems beside the point to this poet. Themes of hardscrabble continuity and day-to-day endurance drive these poems.

Good first poems are often set to convey a tone or emotion that engages the reader’s psyche with a key to the miscellany that follows. Gager’s initial piece, Concerto, does just that, while serving as a guidepost to the immediate. Listening to the plaintive and insistent music of a saxophone does not preclude the intrusion of an unwanted serpent. Spreading out reality’s old comforter with (presumably) his lover, Gager, not only seeks the raw enjoyment of an outdoor concert, but, concomitantly, confronts insidious threats to his best intentions,

I became lost in the bell curve,

which a saxophone’s note made

me contemplate: please stay present

because I found this watching out

for snakes is something celebrated.

Will you ponder a geometrical illusion?

Area and circumference?

The formulas? Always the formulas.

Bromley’s Funeral Home, Gager’s memento mori poem, staggers its reader like a sucker punch. The piece’s simplicity belies our poised acceptance or quiet response to the dearly departed. Our myths and well-meaning suppositions melt in the face of mortality’s starkness. Gager here contemplates a tatty funeral card and it’s not going well,

…your face creased

On a piece of wrinkled cardstock—you were

so young, but the memory so ancient,

Bromley inserted a few lines

from an ancient Catholic Prayer

printed over a cliched picture:

Heaven’s light beaming down.

Or is it shining up? I can’t question this,

or understand a damned thing

In his poem The Last Time I Saw You Gager reconciles or attempts to reconcile remembrances with his once “present” life. The poet’s persona recalls the horror of drug dependence in words seemingly dictated by the “loser bird’ in his head. All the while Gager punctuates this poetic anti-world of his with unpleasant smells (dead mice and acrid gas) and sounds (snorting and sniffing) heightening the piece’s earthiness. The poet mourns the loss of a lover, who has found a new kind of happiness in sobriety, with mixed emotions. Gager ends his narrative wonderfully underfoot with first rate imagery,

Six months later, I heard you lived in N’Orleans,  

married an unveiled version of me, with all my “yets”

still to come, worse than all those

wretched “nows.” I feel I can’t stop

from mourning you, or the sidewalks

from cracking, my stumble toes catching

that uneven place where elm roots

raise the concrete higher.

Revivals of the body and the spirit from near endings may well be the only miracles most flesh and blood humans will ever experience or witness. In his poem The Miracles of Recovery Gager dwells sparsely on the phenomena underlying these marvels. When survival happens the mind bends in unpretty ways. Blooms filled with life retreat to the basic, the necessary for sustenance. The organism shrinks to consolidate strength. The poet puts it this way,

Who would have thought salvation is no longer

found in the piss jars in old isolated bedrooms?  

the mind snaps

the body

quakes its resistance.

I am one step away from

being pushed

in a wheelchair

when my body fails

the mind

perhaps just wilts

as a petal, the rose might—

we are all stem, we salvage

ourselves from this withering.

Throughout this collection the poet exhibits a mix of raw images and damaged contemplations. It can get exhausting. In his poem Faith Gager reaches an oratorio of exhaustion, a creed of despair, or perhaps, more pointedly, an enlightenment. The poet contemplates,

I wonder why

everything has to be.

And I’ll never wonder,

if we will go on forever.

And I believe,

one day, I will close my eyes,

to pray—for nothing horrific to happen,

again and again until the very last breath.

Connections of a Bridge, Gager’s poem about new beginnings, moves in metaphoric wonderment from fear to hope. I especially like his stanzas on the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, where illusion merges into realty until police intervention becomes necessary, and the Beverly-Salem Bridge, where the soft curve of the connector inspires remembrances of new love and upbeat anticipation. The poem opens as an anthem to all such thoroughfares,

I cannot look down from above,

driving eyes locked forward to

where I’m headed, water underneath..

The banks are afflicted with ugly

six-pack rings, oily vermin, and shopping carts.

But there’s also marshland with wild flowers,

a shadow spreading from her structure

shading ex-lover’s torn blankets. I miss

the beauty within these passages.

Ripped and torn in the world’s thorny bracken Timothy Gager has bridged his way out and across to the promised, but not perfect, land.  In the process he has delivered his readers a book of searing poetry and redemptive hope. Bravo!

Doug Holder Interviews poet Jake Tringali

Newton Free Library Poetry Series. Feb 11, 2020 7PM Open Mic

( Click on Picture to enlarge)

Review of Rosie Rosenzweig’s Bring Me Into Flesh, reviewed by Gregory J. Wolos

 

Review of Rosie Rosenzweig’s Bring Me Into Flesh, reviewed by Gregory J. Wolos

            The poems Rosie Rosenzweig shares in her latest book, Bring Me Into Flesh, illustrate, with passion, bravery, and quiet contemplation, the enigma of our humanness: we yearn for a sensed spiritual wholeness that transcends the self while being bound by the physical limitations of our bodies, linear time, and language. Rosenzweig’s poems explore the ways memory, ritual, and symbol aid us in our quest to gain/regain connection to a power beyond our temporal experience. In her poetry, her personal journey entails the use of her Jewish immigrant background as a lens through which she can examine her personal and cultural history: for her, memory and ritual, and symbol are both the subject and means to transcendence.

            The title poem of the collection suggests a timeless, out of body perspective from which the narrator observes the joyful, “loved” young woman who, after she “blossomed into blush” and was “courted, possessed, then, catching her breath, taken to bride,” will literally “bring [the narrator] into flesh.” In the following poem, “Hush, the baby is awake!” we find the newborn, “Newly turned from the other world,” helpless now, dependent on her “mother, brimming with milk” who “raised and rocked me with a Yiddish lullaby.”  As the child grows, she becomes connected to her history through the baby-sitter her mother selected, a “Yiddish landsman, the old world countryman,” who, in the poem “Communal Bathroom,” “enlivened a young girl’s innocence,/ and initiated her ongoing quest for words.” Memory and language are associated, in that the first can only find definite form in the latter. In “The Haskalah,” the poet “dreams” into the present the life of her father before she was born, “a Polish cantor, a peddler,” “busheling out his songs, up and down Canadian streets.”

            The young narrator of “Migration: After Moshe” imagines herself the spiritual partner of birds, like an eagle: “floating to the highest seaside crags/ I held the air still, and dived with needle sharp aim.” She senses no limits to her power, when, as a plover now, “my hunger emboldened me to pick the teeth of crocodiles, and, finally, as the “original Bird of Paradise,” she envisioned herself “with a wing span towering over the curving earth,” and “cradled it in my fine-haired palm.” But the poet, though she hopes to imitate the birds, is separate from them, bound by her humanness; she abandons study (“undid myself from my desk”) to approach a flock of geese whose flight and landing have mesmerized her, but even as she “reached to touch them” and found herself beginning to become absorbed into their world, the geese are startled into flight: “Their thunder/ struck me just ten yards short with my loss caught, heavy and round, like an apple in my throat.” The fruit of knowledge, then, chokes the poet, reminding her of the separation she hoped to transcend.

            In “The Boy I Didn’t Marry,” we see the poet vitalize a memory of a fantasy love from high school, putting to use a poet’s skill with language she gained after a life’s experience: “Tortured by convention and conscience/ structured into the wannabe writer’s role, I traveled far to find this exact and skillful experience.” Yet, the poet laments, “All I have now is this forensic vapor of memory,/ a scene that may have never happened./ All really have now are these words.” The poet has preserved, even, perhaps, created, memory in language, but is that enough?

            The poems in Part Two of Bring Me Into Flesh continue the poet’s search for transcendence, the promise of which is suggested in “A Wash of Waves,” in which the narrator finds the rhythm of the waves connecting her to memories, but not just “[a] roll of facts/ that photograph the mood”; what “moves” her is “not just arms and legs,/ but body, breath and sound,/ singing to the sea/ in me.” Ritual and symbol connect the poet to memory. In “The Western Wall,” she describes “a wall whose words rise up from the sealed bonds of memory./ Hymns sound, spread and fly/ like the preened wings of birds.” The words of the hymns rise, and “[t]he wall grows bright and brighter at each round.” “Daughter to these prayers,” the poet asks, “ can I . . . blend with the sun and moon and stars?/ I want to be the wall. . . /Yearning to become one mouth with You / I crave to sing in choir, note by note, to rebuild rock by pillar,/ And to become myself with You.”

            Still, the poet realizes in “Malignant,” a word which causes “a mortal hush,” we must struggle to find solace in our physical, temporal world in which “catastrophe chastens me”; though she wished for a prayer that would “gather, build, and protect us/ with the promise of never-ending life, and “sages say this life is a waiting room for the next,” she puzzles over “which door leads to which and why?” Ultimately, she offers comfort through a reminder of the cycle of life, “flowers blooming, rising, praising their time to live/ and their time to seed.”

            The quest for transcendence is not achieved easily, as old forms may provide wisdom, but fail in the moment. In “Remember the flesh-pots of Egypt,” the poet acknowledges that “Freedom does not undo the harm/ of old time sin,” and that, ultimately, “our minds [are] still enslaved with memory. Unhappiness can lead to thoughts or actual attempts at suicide, a false route to transcendence, as the would-be suicide hopes in “145 Tofrinals”: “Take me, take me,/ take me to my home in the clouds.      Rosenzweig examines the difficulty in finding a route to inner peace in a world full of personal pain in many of the poems of Part Three of Bring Me Into Flesh. In “The Waiting Room,” the narrator imagines “Hari Krishnas chanting” as she is anesthetized, and “float[s] up/dying to live among the clouds. . . /and I sink lazily into a soft silk sky,/ until a steadfast booming voice disagrees:/ “Return! You have a lot of work to do.” Several of the poems that follow suggest a breakdown where old forms fail to resolve the narrator’s inner turmoil, as in “The Double Room,” in which she states, “A mind takes at least three months to turn, / to even find the corner to turn,” yet “She tried to say the watchword prayer: ‘Hear of Israel. God is One,’ but/ a ratcheting wheel of sobs turned her mouth closed.” Poems titled “My First Shrink Said . . .”, “Relapse,” and “Group Therapy,” convey the narrator’s struggle to establish a secure grounding, the last concluding with a shred of hope that transcendence is possible: “I enter this room, receipt in hand,/ all paid up for healing/ to play with hope/ and the comforting shelter/ of wings to inspire me once again.”

            The poet’s struggle to find inner peace and ultimate transcendence is shown again in “Heaven must be a Stand of Lilies,” in which the narrator hopes to see “tall stand of rube-rum lilies,” but, though “hunched” in prayer, can see “no lilies blooming on this carpet floor.” Instead, she “afflict[s] my soul and reads the ritual list of all I did, almost did, or didn’t even do.” At the end of ineffectual prayer, she is left longing “for language to lift me like a shofar’s blast,/ to lift and alight me in a wisp of wind/ that catches fragrance, please,/ and transforms,/ like sacrifice into a perfume for the Force of all that lives.”

            Rosenzweig nears the close of Part Three of Bring Me Into Flesh with her poem “Caught in the Cave,” in which she meditatively “dreams” while “cross-legged and “open-palmed” of emerging from a cave of ignorance, doubt, and guilt. As she emerges, she is unsure if the spiritual guide she sees is “my guide Elijah in disguise dressed like me?” Is the “glimpse of light,” the “bright shining mist . . . a mirror or a doorway to the sky?” The poem ends with the hope that she has escaped herself as she prepares to leave the cave, as “The sky rolls out its sun, redeeming me./ I start to climb the never-ending path.”

            Part Four of Rosenzweig’s book reveals the narrator moving toward the redemption/transcendence she seeks. History, memory and ritual provide the faith to “hear but not quite sing” the song that emerges from “old volcanic rock,” “the dark past,”
“Hebraic cantillations” and is part of herself, “running unseen in the hidden chambers of my ribs.” Emphasizing that the song can be heard in the “rising and falling of a scribe writing on parchment,” she seems to accept the biblical direction to “choose life, walk between/ the parting waves, to the music that I am, have been,/ and always will be.”

Accepting the song, the narrator hopes, means accepting herself, perhaps as the transcriber or “minstrel” of the biblical message.

            In Rosenzweig’s poem, “In the Meditation Hall: At Bhante Gunaratana’s Silent 10-day Jhana Retreat,” the poet furthers the meditative pose she assumed in “Caught in the Cave.” Her silent meditation brings forth memory and history, “Mother, Father, . . . Sister, Brother . . . our Holocaust family, long gone. In the silence, Buddhist names are “a mere chill from an open window, and the “wordplay” of the “mystical rabbis/Whom I’ve studied for decades” are unavailable “in this sangha of silence Without End.” But in this enforced silence of a Buddhist form, the narrator hears the opening of Jewish prayer: “Hear O Israel,” ultimately discovering that “You can hear the unshackling/ of the fettered shells of the mind.”

            Paradoxically, a poem is an expression of the ineffable—perhaps it is up to the poet to come as close as is possible to committing spiritual experience to language. This is the awesome responsibility Rosenzweig confronts in “Let Me Not Be Afraid,” subtitled “A Prayer to Pray.” “Let me not be afraid of Your letters,” she writes. In them, she hears “an echo/ Sparking images of the first creation . . . / and all sensation/ Becomes a silent rush toward the curved embrace of time.” “If I could  close my eyes and remember You  who . . . can make the tablets bloom/ with holiness,” the poet writes, she could get “honey from a rock . . wrestle with an angel/ Know my true name and not fall/ A victim to this wall of chatter.” The poet prays for the holy power to know herself, which might give her the power to translate her experience into language: “Give me the power of the first aleph,/ The soundless sound before the first word./ . . . Before my long journey into meaning.”

            Prayer for Rosenzweig takes the form of the poem, and our observance of and participation with of her struggle to put that experience into words becomes part of the holiness of her endeavor. 

From the Bloc 11 Cafe: Ajda the Turkish Queen

Ajda: The Turkish Queen at the Bloc 11 Cafe in Union Square

By Doug Holder



Ajda Snyder is a talented singer/songwriter, who met with me at my usual spot at the Bloc 11 Cafe in Somerville, MA. She told me that she has lived in these environs since 2012. Snyder said of our city,  " I love it here. I would like to buy a place, but it is just too expensive."

Snyder describes her music as a confluence between the East and the West. She reports, " My music has been described as roots mixed with the ethereal." Snyder, a graduate of the Berklee School of Music in Boston, said as a kid she was inspired by Judy Garland.. She started performing in the Houston, Texas Public School System when she was growing up.

Snyder told me she recorded at the famed BC35 Studio in Brooklyn, NY. This studio was founded by Martin Bisi , and has recorded members of the Sonic Youth, Swans, White Hills, JG Thirlwell, Cop Shoot Cop, Live Skull reunion, Pop 1280, The Dresden Dolls, Alice Donut, Lubricated Goat, Sxip Shirey, Parlor Walls and many more....

Ajda plays a number of instruments including: the mandolin, guitar, melodica, organ, piano and the banjo.

I listened to one of her songs, "Bobby's Car." It takes place in one of the more carnal places--none-other than a car. The tune is evocative, a sad/sweet homage, to a long lost love. Her voice is hypnotic--it seems to float through the air like an early morning mist.

Ajda is a voice teacher as well. She teaches privately at a shared-studio in Boston, and at Somerville's " Union Lesson Studios," right above the Bloc 11.

Ajda has played in many Somerville venues, such as the defunct Johnny D's, the Arts Armory, and elsewhere.

Snyder credits a former roommate, and  a one-time drummer for the Dresden Dolls-- Brian Viglione, as helping her get started--with his extensive contacts and his collaboration on any number of projects.

Snyder who founded the band "Black Fortress of Opium," as well as others" is focusing on " Ajda: The Turkish" band for now.

To find out more about Ajda  go to:
https://ajdatheturkishqueen.com/