The Dark Side of the Diamond:The Dark Side of the Diamond by Roger I. Abrams

Baseball’s Sordid Past, Shaky Present


The Dark Side of the Diamond
Gambling, Violence, Drugs and Alcoholism in the National Pastime
by Roger I. Abrams
Rounder Books, 2007, $24.95, Hardbound, ISBN -13:978-1-57940-156-6

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

Hall of Fame baseball players who have been held up as icons for America’s youth are, in fact, among the very flawed. Roger Clemens, Mark McGwire, Rafael Palmeiro and other diamond legends whose images are dropping faster than a Dice-K splitter are just the latest in a long line of racists, cheaters, alcoholics and gamblers, not to mention fighters.

Adrian (Cap) Anson, according to author Roger I. Abrams, is single handedly responsible for the segregation baseball endured from the 1880s until 1947 when Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier. Anson had it put in his contract that his teams would not have to take the field against black ballplayers. As a result, before Robinson broke the color line
Moses Fleetwood Walker was the last black to play major league baseball.

Abrams also notes that it wasn’t long after baseball became more or less organized that gambling began, as did game fixing, in which players deliberately threw games in order to make more money. Gamblers were often in the seats yelling out bets and even sending or receiving signals from ballplayers. Abrams lays out a picture that makes Pete Rose seem like a piker compared to late 19th and early 20th century ball players, and there are plenty of Hall of Fame players who placed bets. It wasn’t until Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis banned the 1919 Black Sox from baseball that a lid was finally put on gambling.

But nothing stopped fighting or alcoholism. Ty Cobb was one of the best known battlers, once going into the stands to pummel a disabled fan, while two of baseball’s greatest heroes, Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle were notorious for their affinity for alcohol.

Abrams, who is a professor of law at Northeastern University and a Major League Baseball salary arbitrator for more than 20 years, lays out baseball’s entire dark underside with the passion of a true fan, the eye of a lawyer and the knowledge of a real insider.

If you think the Clemens affair is something new, read this book. It will educate you about often bizarre attempts to enhance athletic ability, from gross concoctions to testosterone (find out where it came from) to early steroids.

Abrams covers not only gambling and steroids, but drugs and alcoholism, including Pete Browning’s statement that “I can’t hit the ball unless I hit the bottle.” Babe Ruth’s exploits with the bottle are also visited, as is Mickey Mantle’s ultimately fatal encounters with booze.


Amphetamines, recreational drugs, cocaine, heroin and even LSD are all covered – Pittsburgh pitcher Dock Ellis is quoted revealing that he couldn’t remember pitching his no-hitter because he was high on LSD.

Abrams shows how the history of baseball is a microcosm of American society not only with gambling, but regarding drugs, alcoholism and violence.

Abrams was given access to 25,000 documents by the Baseball Hall of Fame. He has made excellent use of them with a sharp eye for facts and a keen sense of selection.

If you are interested in more than the myths circling around baseball, The Dark Side of the Diamond is a must read.

*Zvi Sesling is a member of the "Bagel Bards," and the winner of the International Reuben Rose Poetry Award-- 2007.

Timothy Gager Reads in NYC

Live Video see below:

Boston area poet Timothy Gager read recently in New York City for his soon to be released book from the Cervena Barva Press " This is where you go when you're gone." Click on the highlighted title above, (Tim Gager Reads in NYC) click on slamming poets and then put Timothy Gager in the search bar. Tim read at the Saturn Reading Series in New York recently.

Firmament by Kathleen L. Housley

Firmament

Kathleen L. Housley

Higganum Press Inc.

$12.95

ISBN 978-0-9776556-3-2



Wednesday, March 05, 2008
Firmament by Kathleen L. Housley


Firmament

Kathleen L. Housley

Higganum Press Inc.

$12.95

ISBN 978-0-9776556-3-2



Kathleen Housley opens with”The Magi,” a poem that takes me back to a biblical time in recollecting the Christ child and gifts of the Magi. Then it brings me to the present day. She is skillful in time travel and writes with daunting imagery. In the “Ravine of the roan horse,” “… lightning blasts a single tree. Like closed pine cones, our hearts burst open in the heat!” A miracle observed in the present. We could not be more astonished if a star slipped from the night to hover here beyond the dawn. She plays with the theme of the extraordinary in the ordinary and does it successfully. I amsurprised to find I am a time rider myself.



Again in “The Pharisees Confront Jesus In the Court of Caiphas” She bringsJesus to the present day and presents moral questions of our time. She asks Jesus if he would have taken the path to death if he knew the world wouldn't Change: “Would you take the road to the place of skulls if you knew for sure that the world will be no better for your death?” And yet in the conclusionshe brings up hope: “Who can tell. Love may echo through the silence of your last cry.”



The poet is in touch with the spirit world in a way that is fresh and
unusual. How many of us have at one time or another felt we were saved bygrace but couldn't put into words our feeling of gratitude. She does this in Strange Grace. In the poem, mountain climbers in a dangerous circumstanceare saved by inexplicable grace, not merely by skill or luck: “..but in thismoment of clear, high light, as we study where we have been, we are awed by the other tracing in the snow, near to our steps , as if of wings. An outdoor person and seeker , I can relate to this sense of the miraculous.



Finally I want to bring attention to the juxtaposition of the fractal images
and the poems in this collection and the resulting powerful meaning from the interweaving of science and poetry. I am fascinated. In some part of my mind I have been searching for this connection. In “The Speed of Light” is an astonishing vision of truth . Once again the poet uses the horse image as in the opening poem in this collection.: “The horse rides into a landscape of light, including the glimmer in memory condensate of a luminous horse slowing near the crest to whinny at the stars.” I am left with a sense of old-fashioned wonder.

Barbara Thomas. Barbara Thomas is a published poet and a member of the "Bagel Bards."

LO GALLUCCIO AND SQUAWK POET RICHARD CAMBRIDGE WILL HOST A TRIBUTE NIGHT TO LEONARD COHEN ON MARCH 13TH.

LO GALLUCCIO AND SQUAWK POET RICHARD CAMBRIDGE WILL HOST A TRIBUTE NIGHT TO LEONARD COHEN ON MARCH 13TH.

See details below!

Leonard Cohen Tribute Night: Songs of Love and Hate
Squawk Coffeehouse in the Harvard-Epworth Church
1555 Massachusetts Avenue, just outside Harvard Square
March 13th at 9pm $3- $5 donation

PERFORMERS INCLUDE:

Edrie of the Army of Broken Dolls/Ajda the Turkish Queen/Jme Caroline and his band/ Kevin O’Neil/James Christensen/Lo Galluccio/Lee Kidd/Portia Brockway/ Nathan Thompson/Ben Beckwith and others.

For pre-show sign up to perform one of Cohen’s songs, contact Lo at Lo747@hotmail.com. If you’d like to perform a poem from his works, including, “Spice box of the Earth” or “The Book of Longing” please come at 9 pm and sign up.


WE HOPE YOU’LL COME TO A SPECIAL SQUAWK EVENT TO HONOR THIS SEXY, MYSTICAL GENIUS OF LETTERS AND MUSIC.

WEE HOUR MARTYRDOM by Jason Tandon

WEE HOUR MARTYRDOM
Jason Tandon
Sunnyoutside publisher
ISBN; 978-1-934513-057
$13.00

in the beginning the young catch rays, throw them to
us and we throw those rays back. Jason Tandon causes
me to laugh, or my causal laughter, which ever way i’m
suppose to say this; the first few poems lift my young
spirit. his breezy way with his surreal images lend,
disarm me, an old crotchety woman often disgruntled by
youthful ’i am’s,’ I revel ate in his poem

"Untouchables”
…
an old woman’s rump
and the overfed birds
bored with all
her white bread.

my black molar.

“wee hour martyrdom” drives the reader into the
mystery of being, of being influenced by history,
personal as well as the history of a particular genre
of poetry. in this book I relate to the surreal images
and a more contemporary emphasis.

I built my Aztec temple without stairs
and Mrs Glover flunked me
I thought the gods just appeared
bursting from jags of light
head of a hawk, body of a man writhing with snakes

if your interested in an academic explanation, cadence
or whatever some reviewers write as they pull apart a
poem, verse by verse, I ain’t the one to tell you this
guy can write real well. even though I know you can
find whatever it is, to your liking, in his poetry.
I’ve long ago come to understand there is no
perfection. in Tandon’s poem, ‘interrogation,’ in the
first strophe, his own words explain my view of some
of his poetry.

the outdoor motion light triggers
and I stand illuminated
in a brilliant flood of white

his strength of understanding who and whereof that
white…sometimes I feel devoid of emotions and then I
read a poem like, ‘interrogation’ and a flood from my
own relationships rams my perspective, cracks the
mirror I view myself in every morning. the truth is he
is writing from all the influences that have
influenced him and has come to himself and in doing so
the reader enters his poetry like a ghost enters,
returns after ...

on page 71, close to the end, by the end, books
usually must end, ‘seeing the dead’ plunders us like
an old clock melting over all those toasted pieces of
white bread the young scoff down, then our self youth
shoots us with a plastic ray gun.

I heard their stiff backs cracking
as they arched themselves
for earthward dives

you will dive into this book and come out assured by
its’ refreshing, clean, nakedness.

Irene Koronas
reviewer
ibbetson street press
poetry editor
wilderness house literary review
www.whlreview.com

To those who make the world work ( an article on "Manufacturing America" by Lisa Beatman)

3/2/2008

In the Sunday Globe March 2 ( City Weekly)

To those who make the world work

by Kristen Green

Poet Lisa Beatman, laid off from Ames, wrote "Manufacturing America," a tribute to her former colleagues.


A poet's inspiration can come from just about anywhere. Lisa Beatman found it on the factory floor of Ames Safety Envelope Co., the Somerville business where she worked for four years, teaching English and citizenship classes to immigrant workers.


As she drove to work in the dark to lead a 6 a.m. class for employees who worked the night shift, she said, an image would pop into her head from stories the workers had shared or from moments on the job.

Soon, she was weaving together poems about the employees' experiences in America and at work at the factory. She found fodder for her poetry in the lives of these immigrants from dozens of countries - sorting envelopes at Ames, learning to pronounce English words, working second jobs, and coping with layoffs. In January, the poems were printed in Beatman's second book, a collection called "Manufacturing America," from the Somerville publisher Ibbetson Street Press.


Beatman, who lives in Roslindale, said the book is an ode to workers. She said society's focus on celebrity takes away from workers who create and repair things. "People who make the world work are not given their due," she said.
Beatman's former boss at Ames, human resource manager Linda Hovey, said the poet writes well and seemed to use her experiences at Ames as a thread for some works. "I'm not sure all of the work here is attributed to Ames," said Hovey.
In the poem "First Shift," Beatman writes about a female employee who worked the early shift, often after a night of partying. She describes the way an employee she called Carmen "puts her face back on at 5 a.m." and how she "stumbles out of her dancing heels and into an old pair of Keds" to work the line at the factory.
Fresh-glued folders fly off
the conveyor belt


Catch, inspect, stack and pack
Catch, inspect, stack and pack
Her face dips and sways
She hums under breath
The machine flirts back
Cha cha cha cha cha

In "Rainbow," she tells of a pair of brothers who were fishermen in their hometown, Santiago, Chile, and picked berries on California farms before moving to Boston. The brother she calls Juan was "mute as a lake," she writes, but was able to work the factory line, sorting Ames folders destined for a children's hospital.
His calloused hands, tattooed with paper cuts
sort the folders that will hold each child's story

Watching the company lay off employees prompted her to write the poem "Hack Job," in which she considers the effects of downsizing, writing, "The boss just twists the tourniquet so we don't bleed dry.


"Hack,
one machine operator
on the dole,
hack,
two secretaries
shopping with food stamps,
hack hack hack,
three departments
decapitated

Beatman, 50, doesn't point fingers at Ames and never mentions the company by name in the book. She said she considered writing a poem about the "fat cats" who run the company but couldn't because Ames managers were "lean" and "worked really hard."
"I understand the company is trying to survive and provide jobs for local people," she said.

But seeing employees with whom she had developed close relationships be let go was painful, she said. Eventually she, too, was let go, and her classes were taken over by a local community college.


Doug Holder, founder of Ibbetson Street Press, a small literary publisher, said he found Beatman's perspective unique. Her approach is somewhat unexpected from a poet, he said, and she offers insights about people who are invisible.
"She exposes this little slice of life that most people aren't writing about," he said.

In "Good Bones," Beatman touches on one such slice: the trendy conversions of old factories into condo buildings.


Let's salvage the old signage
and mount it in the foyer.
Yes, maybe sink one of those
antique presses
next to the front gate.
It will be so quaint.

© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company

Somerville Poets Host: Ed Sanders and his “Tales of Beatnik Glory.”

(Ed Sanders-right Allen Ginsberg-Left)
Somerville Poets Host: Ed Sanders and his “Tales of Beatnik Glory.”

The Squawk Coffeehouse is a throwback to the bohemian coffeehouses of yore, with ample doses of the off-key, off-the-wall, outside-of-the box poetry and song. Presided over by resident Somerville bohemes Lee Kidd and Jessa Piaia, Squawk located at the Harvard Epworth Church, 1555 Mass Ave., Cambridge ( just outside Harvard Square) is a refuge for those of us who are still beatniks and hippies at heart. The doors for the reading opens at 9PM on Thursdays, and the readings usually last till 12 AM or so.

On Thursday, March 27th, “Squawk” is going to host the poet, historian, and musician Ed Sanders. Sanders is the doyen of the sensibility that “Squawk” embodies. Sanders is the founder of the “FUGS” ( a variation on a popular four letter word coined by Norman Mailer in his groundbreaking novel “The Naked and the Dead”) an influential 60’s avant-garde folk/rock band, as well as the publisher of the much sought after “Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts.” Sanders, cut his teeth in the Lower East Side of NYC from around 1960 to 1970. In his introduction to his autobiographical novel “Tales of Beatnik Glory” he writes of this once in a lifetime milieu:

“ Many of the stories are set in the Lower East Side of New York City, where I lived from 1960 to 1970. The 60’s were particularly intense in the Lower East Side, and I was in the middle of it as a publisher of numberless mimeographed tracts and literary magazines, and as the operator of the Peace Eye Bookstore, a cultural center and the location for some of the stories… It was at the Peace Eye Bookstore in late 1964 that Tuli Kupferberg and I founded the satiric anarcho-poetic folk ensemble known as the “Fugs”

Besides “Tales of Beatnik Glory,” Sanders is the author of “America, A History in Verse,” “1968, A History in Verse,” “The Poetry and Life of Allen Ginsberg,” “The Family: The Story of Charles Manson Dune Buggy Attack Battalion,” and others. He currently lives in Woodstock, NY with his wife where he publishes “The Woodstock Journal.” He also invents musical instruments including the Talking Tie, the Lisa Lyre, ( a musical contraption involving light-activated switches and a reproduction of Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.) I conducted an interview with Sanders recently:




Doug Holder: What made you drop out of the University of Missouri and head to Greenwich Village?

Ed Sanders: I headed for New York University, at first to study math and rocket science; but switched to classics after a few semesters of the glory of Greek. I had many good times at the University of Missouri, but, since I was already steeped in current poetry movements, I wanted to be close to where I perceived the glowing nexus resided, and that was New York
City.

DH: You wrote your first poem (a long one) on toilet paper. You sent it to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the founder of City Lights, and he published your first book. Can you tell me about the poem-- and what brand of toilet paper?

ES: Jail paper. I wrote Poem from Jail in two formats: on the backs of the insides of cigarette packs, and on toilet paper, which I kept hidden in my cell, since writing was forbidden. The poem is a long meditation on the Demeter-Persephone myth, plus material on Herman Kahn's Doomsday Machine, and from I.F. Stone's "Hidden History of the
Korean War."

When I was released, I managed to smuggle out one copy of the Poem from Jail in my tennis shoe, all wadded up under my foot; then typed it, and mailed it to Lawrence Ferlinghetti who, to my everlasting gratitude, published it in 1963.

DH: Your book "Tales of Beatnik Glory" deals with your times in the Lower East Side of NYC in the late 50's and 60's. It seemed possible then to live the "Bohemian" life on the cheap. Can kids "afford" to live that way in today's climate?

ES: No rent control now. A person of youth needs three jobs: one for the rent, one for the art, and one for the fun.


DH: Ginsberg's " Howl" was a great liberating influence on you when you were a kid. Did it break you out of the corseted 1950's Midwestern sensibility?

ES: The story, "A Book of Verse," in Tales of Beatnik Glory, Vol. 1 pretty much describes the effect reading "Howl" had on me when reading it for the first time in 1957.

It seemed to liberate my consciousness in a way that many of the strictures of my upbringing had prevented, although I was raised by literature-encouraging, liberal parents. It helped me became an "American Bard," that is, a poet who takes public stances.

DH: I have run a small literary press "Ibbetson Street" for the past 10 years now. Everything is high tech these days. You were part of the "Mimeograph Revolution" You put out a magazine "Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts."
Can you tell me about the nuts and bolts of putting out a small press magazine back then. What did “Fuck You” offer its readers?

ES: We were on the cutting edge, as they say, of the then-current poetry scene: published Ginsberg, DiPrima, Robert Duncan, Creeley, Olson's 'Maximus,' William Burroughs, Auden, Snyder, Dorn, and many, many others. It was given away free, and was much sought out during its three year run.

The actual mechanics of typing stencils and operating a small
hand-cranked mimeo machine can be found, say, in my story, in “Tales of Beatnik Glory, Volume 1, "An Editorial Conference."

DH: You wrote a book "1968: A History in Verse." Why a history in verse? Is '68 the most pivotal year in that decade?

ES: 1968 showed the best and worst of a great nation. With its assassinations and broken dreams, riots and rebellion; but also itsmusic and poetry, it's awful war that went on for another 7 years; but also the Prague Spring, Columbia, Paris, the riots of Chicago and the rise of Nixon, the break-down of the Democratic Party just three years after Johnson's Great Society.

DH: At the Democratic Convention in 1968 in Chicago did you have any contact with the Yippies Abbey Hoffman and Jerry Rubin?

ES: Yes. I was one of the founders of Yippies, in early 1968. It's traced in my 1968, a History in Verse.

DH: You were influenced by the Beats. Do you pick up "On the Road" with the same enthusiasm now as you did when you were a young writer?

ES :"On the Road" is not quite as good as many other novels of the century. I was more of a "Howl" fan than a Kerouacian.

DH: I have a column in our local paper in The Somerville News, in which I interview artists, writers and poets. You publish "The Woodstock Journal" that publishes poetry and art. Ever publish Donald Lev of the "Home Planet News"? What do you find attractive about community journalism and the small press...

ES: Donald's a good old friend. He published my long poem, "In Praise of William Morris" in the current issue. Doing a benefit for Home Planet News in March in High Falls, New York, near where Donald lives.

Community Journalism is a good term for it. if it's done right it can help protect the water, protect open spaces, encourage home occupations, help all to survive and thrive, while creating a sustainable non-threatening, peaceful future.


DH: Can you describe how you became associated with SQUAWK, and what keeps you coming back?

ES: Well, I love that beautiful church. Its vibes are so powerful and historic. And Lee and Jessa have been friends since the time of the 1995 Beat Conference at New York University. They embody the best of the Community Spirit—helping all enjoy the fruits of poesy and center-left political power: the joy of freedom, and the strength of community action.


* Opening for Ed Sanders will be the musical group Dagmar2, the duo.


Poetry is Back!
(By Ed Sanders)

Osgood brings a smile
reciting poetry from his files,
He brings news that you can use
in a way that will amuse.
Poetry is back.

Jessee Jackson promotes,
preaches and orates,
using woven words
to help his message be heard.

Poetry is back.

The cowboy poets from all over
gather in Elko annually
to recite a verse,
tip their hats and houdy.
Poetry is back.

The rappers rap,
the hip hoppers hip.
Poetry is back.


These strange bedfellows
use verse and rhyme,
to preach their politics
and enjoy a good time.

They save for society
and for all time,
poems with proper meter,
and rhymes that really rhyme.

All the while they work
and write and speak,
the properly "educated" poets
write poems that truly reek!

Without any attention
to meter or proper time,
they write and recite
poems that don't even rhyme.

They gaze over their upraised noses
to us rabble far below.
writing verse that makes no sense
except to their friends in the know.

Many of these self appointed poets
who can't even make a poem rhyme,
suckle from NEA grants, writing
poems that only whine.

If their work had to pass the
free market test they wouldn't eat.
But they live high in fine clothes,
as they suckle the government teat.

In spite of the professional poets
talent or their lack,
Cowboys, preachers, radio folk and musicians keep on...

And poetry is back.








-- Doug Holder

Poet Lisa Beatman: A Poet for the unsung workers of the Ames Safety Envelope Factory.

Poet Lisa Beatman: A Poet for the unsung workers of the Ames Safety Envelope Factory.

Lisa Beatman has penned a new poetry collection “Manufacturing America: Poems from the Factory Floor ( Ibbetson Press) that was inspired by her stint as an Adult Literacy teacher at the Ames Paper Factory in Somerville, Mass. Beatman, after being outsourced from the factory, now manages the adult literacy program at the Harriet Tubman House in Boston. Beatman has won honorable mention for the 2004 Miriam Landberg International Poetry Peace Prize, and was awarded a Mass. Cultural Council Grant, as well as a fellowship to Sacatar Institute in Brazil. Her work has appeared in Lonely Planet, Lilith, Harvard Pacific Review, Rhino, Ibbetson Street and others. Her first collection of poetry was titled “Ladies Night at the Blue Hill Spa.” I spoke with Beatman on my Somerville Community Access TV show “Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.”

Doug Holder: What was it about the immigrant workers in a factory that made you want to write about them?

Lisa Beatman: There are so many different ways to answer that question. I’ll start by saying that I found so, so many stories compelling while I was at this manufacturing plant. The individual workers’ lives, the stories of immigration, and also the story of manufacturing. In the book there is a piece about my own family working in manufacturing in my hometown of New Britain Connecticut. It used to be called “Hardware City,” when it was in its heyday as a manufacturing center. Although most of the people in my family at this point are working in teaching, psychology, etc… I still have a great reverence for people working with their hands and produce things. I wish, at the end of the day I can hold something that I produced. Something very tangible.

DH: Has there been a reaction from the workers who were a subject of this book?

LB: On thing about teaching is that you develop a very close relationship with many students. This is especially true when adults are teaching adults. Some of the poems were inspired by individual employees, and I did show them individually. I was hired to teach English as a Second Language to line workers whose English wasn’t very good. Poetry is not always easy to get even for native speakers. Even though I tried to explain the poems to them they weren’t in a position to really tell their own stories. So I tried my best.

DH: How did they feel about someone who took the time to write the stories?

LB: It was very mixed. They tried to understand it. They always appreciated the time I took with them.

I worked with a wide variety of immigrants from many different countries. Some of them were very literate and some of them were not. Somebody who is not literate even in their own language and does not read at all, well, it is just a different orientation they have.

DH: You are a graduate of the Harvard School of Government. Does this explain the “social mission” in your work?
LB: I have spent my whole life both working in Adult Literacy, and also working inter-culturally. I spent several years working in various Latin American countries and in Spain. I do have a sense of mission in terms of communication, in terms of bringing people together, in terms of having as many people as possible from different walks of life communicate with each other.

DH: When you were in school did you ever think of poetry as a way of reaching people; as a cohesive force?

LB: I was not as much a poet then. Really it wasn’t until I was in my mid-30’s that I started writing. So it was after the Kennedy School.

DH: In your first collection “Ladies’ Night at the Blue Hill Spa” you write about a group of woman in a steam room in Norwood, Mass. In fact you did a reading there only adorned in a towel. Tell us a bit about this.

LB: I love reading theme poetry. I love linking ideas together. I like to link tangible ideas. “Ladies Night…” was inspired by an old fashioned steam room. Women would come together and let it all “hang out” so to speak. The spa in essence was the inner lives of these women, and the community of women. I realized in some ways I was writing about my mother. My mother, and the generation of women in her circle, would go to a beauty salon every Friday. In fact my mother had one of the last beehive hairdos. She was a small woman and I think she felt it gave her stature. I was rebelling against all that in the 70’s. But I have come to realize that my mother’s generation had these rituals to get away from the kids, husband, from being a mother, wife, etc… They could get pampered for once.

DH: What is your view of industrial America? You have worked both in academia and industry.

LB: Magic really happens when you bring sections together. Each of these sections has their strengths. I had the good fortune of being in this manufacturing plant that was part of the backbone of the American economy. To be in that milieu when the factory is dying in America, well, I felt compelled to document it.

DH: Characterize these workers you wrote about?

LB: I worked with line worker. Everyone is hard working. They worked overtime, moonlighted, most worked Saturdays, etc… The managers were not “Fat Cats” They were lean physically and worked very hard. Everyone had a strong work ethic.

DH: You run the Adult Literacy program at the Harriet Tubman House in Boston. Tell us about this?

LB: It is one of the oldest settlement house in the United States. We have programs for youth, adults, and seniors. And we have many other programs also. I run the Adult Literacy program. We are very practical. We help people to learn to read and write, get their GED’s etc…


To order book go to http://www.ibbetsonpress.com or order through http://www.lulu.com


Doug Holder

The Graves Grow Bigger Between Generations by Jared Smith

The Graves Grow Bigger Between Generations. Poems by Jared Smith. (Higganum Hill Books PO BOX 666 Higganum Hill CT 06441 rcdebold@mindspring.com $12.95



Like Eliot, Stevens, and others, Jared Smith has been a businessman as well as a poet. In fact for years Smith was a highly sought after energy consultant. But Smith’s, (who graduated with an MFA in Writing from New York University), real calling is poetry. He was part of the literary scene in Greenwich Village in the 70’s writing for such journals as the “Home Planet News,” and the “New York Quarterly;” publishing his work regularly, downing shots with Gregory Corso, the whole ball of wax. But “real” life reared its ugly head, and Smith had to make a living—and as you well know you ain’t going to make it writing poetry. Poetry has never been a magnet for the greenbacks. After years in the hallowed halls of government and the boardroom Smith is back to his eternally young muse Poetry. In his new collection of poetry from Higganum Hill Books: “The Grave Grows Bigger Between Generations,” Smith not only writes about the hardscrabble life of the workingman, but his own rebirth as a poet. In his brilliant poem “Having Never Wanted To Own The Business” he writes to the ephemeral, dust to dust nature of the corporate milieu, and indeed of all of life, no matter how exalted:

“ I can tell you that having come back from countless halls.
I am a name on better than a thousand roll-o-dex from NY to Washington,
each one retired to rooms with shoeboxes of data cards and dust.
My eyes are the marble of office complexes and monuments.
Rodents scurry through my corridors with wireless whiskers
intent on gnawing their way to eternity on cockroach eggs.”

And here with bright flashes of evocative imagery the middle-aged businessman comes back to the trappings and truths of the poet’s life:

“ I have come back to the page-torn poetry books I read and wrote
and to the fiery shriek of invisible angels celebrating
my return and the echoes of my now never empty room
and to the shared nights of readings, cryings, lovings,
amid the shingles of material poverty where soup bones boiled
all day and a can of beans was what we ate on a good day
and we drank each evening on what we could borrow
amid cigarettes and marijuana and loud music espresso machines
and made love in that until the sun rose and we had to hand in
our time machine cards that marked down our uselessness,
making ourselves a mockery of the machinery of diatribe.”

And in the poem “Poets” he defines the poet as an enemy of the leaders, the establishment, and the status quo. Smith reminds us of the vital role of the poet, the absolute necessity for a weaver of words, a visionary, someone who can see beyond the quotidian.

“The enemies of our leaders are poets
who listen to winds at night as they walk dark alleys,


who stop at lonely diners for a cup of coffee
before jotting down a few notes and going off
into the shuffle of their tired footsteps;
who come together again in the workplace
speaking in tongues marketers do not understand,
and seducing women with eyes that do not waver.

The leaders cannot lead without the words
a culture creates within itself
within its needs,
poets.”

Highly Recommended.

Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update

The Dangerous Corner by Richard Moore

The Dangerous Corner by Richard Moore, David Roberts Books, 2007, $17.00, paper, ISBN 9781933456836.

Review by Bert Stern, PhD.


The publication of this, Richard Moore’s thirteenth book of poetry, deepens the mystery of his relative obscurity. His mock epic cum Bildungsroman, The Mouse – Whole, which Moore calls “the main poem in my life” didn’t find a publisher until some 40 years after it was completed, though it’s a comic masterpiece. His work has been praised by such poets as May Swenson, Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur, and Mona Van Duyn. Yet Moore remains, as he has always been, something of a castaway.

It’s possible to say, on his own testimony, that he was born such. His father wanted him aborted, and Moore matured to a kind of sympathy with his father’s position. Father, implicitly, and son, explicitly, agree that this world isn’t fit to live in. Not all his ironies or volumes of light verse do anything to change that view. And this new volume, in which Moore explicitly sees this world as hell, confirms it.

It also confirms that Moore can write free verse of amazing power and beauty, proof on nearly every page: In a Christmas poem, he says:

. . . All color has left the land,
been squeezed out, as from a sponge,
and let the land a thing of ashes.
And the great sponge has squeezed all
its soaked-up fire and color into

that shopping center, where sex-tools, soul helps,
screwdrivers and philosophies
are for sale. . . .

(“Into the Light”)

In “On High”:

Over the constant irritation of the avenue,
the irregular shrill quarreling of the tires
that keep whipping the pavement, as with dry wind
in gusts, in fits, and the library’s portico fitted

with pillars, caught in floodlight, where a flag
flops lazily that someone didn’t take down –
over all this tawdry nonsense of the town
and much more that I shan’t trouble to describe,

Venus rides in the blue night, a gem, a pulse
pillowed in richness like a queen.

Typically, in “On High” Queen Venus will collapse into a lover in bed, a woman Moore doesn’t “even much like,” but who offers him such

. . .lush variety,
each touch and squeeze, sure, exact, imaginative,
and all mingled with such a symphony of groans,
writhings, desperate pantings, tossings of the head

as Moore, having taken a mistress after his wife’s death, would never have dreamed possible in marriage.

The death of his wife, and the aftermath, is ostensibly the subject of Moore’s new book. His starting point is anguished grief, and, by design, the book’s four sections “somewhat resemble” the four movements of a musical sonata, moving toward what Moore calls “the final resolution.” But I don’t mean to suggest that Moore’s purpose is to take us through the stages of loss and grief and recovery. This powerfully non-formulaic book ranges ferociously and astonishingly beyond such bounds.

Moore’s poems are all energy and clash of opposing states. His poems are hard to nail because they are events and never, in fact, resolutions. Each goes through conflicting emotions, conflicting perceptions, and we come away shocked by combinations of anger and reconciliation, beauty and ugliness, and even flashes of spiritual tranquility.

Certain particulars remain more or less constant. The attitude, though placated by beauty, is often anguished, bitter, or plain curmudgeonly. The place is an upper middle class suburb, in which Moore lives in grim opposition. Near his house is a pond, in which Moore repeatedly finds a mirror of his mind. It can be “a thing of mournful shadows, / endlessly undulating into darkness” (“The Mirror”), an “image of the mind at peace” in “pure geometry,” or a place where “Girls in a giggling band” who go by, crying taunts at Moore, can be reflected in the pond as goddesses.

But in the poem that is a kind of signature for the volume,

The deep cold comes, and even the great
pond is frozen, dusted with snow,
luminous under Venus the moon,
suburban lights on the dark hills.

The cold wind has blown over and over
it, and not it is still, my mind,
frozen, determined, and still the wind
shrieks. Let there be no end of it.

Thus it is with Moore. He can pronounce, like Marlowe’s Mephistopheles, that this world is hell, “nor was I ever out of it,” and that, if anything, is the book’s “resolution. But Moore rancor and passions and meticulous craft leave us preferring his hell to many poets’ heavens.


Bert Stern/ Ibbetson Update/Somerville, Mass/ Feb. 2008

How About A Poet Laureate in Somerville?

( Sam Cornish- Boston Poet Laureate)


How About A Poet Laureate in Somerville?

Recently I was invited to a reception for the Boston Poet Laureate Sam Cornish at the Parkman House in Boston. It was a nice affair with many of the poets and players from the Boston area poetry scene in attendance. I got to eat a lot of fancy hors d’oeurves, drink a slightly diluted pomegranate punch, and admired the genteel trappings of this celebrated house. If I remember correctly Mayor Curley’s desk was stolen from the premises some years back. During the reception I spoke with Dan Tobin, the head of Creative Writing at Emerson College in Boston, Tino Villanueva, a professor of Romance Languages at Boston University, Elizabeth McKim, a poet and lecturer at Lesley University, Louisa Solano, former owner of the Grolier Poetry Bookshop, and many of my pals from the literary group the “Bagel Bards.’ Mayor Menino was there, and in his unaffected speech he mumbled;” I am not used to being around these literary types,” but he recognized the importance of the Poet Laureate. As my friend poet Jared Smith wrote in his poem: “Poets”: “The leaders cannot lead without the words, a culture creates within itself, within its needs, poets.”

Sam Cornish seemed to be a perfect fit for the position. A respected African-American poet, a longtime professor at Emerson College, he is not only an accomplished bard but he seems like a man who is genuinely comfortable walking the streets of the city, (I remember seeing him pounding the pavement of Commonwealth Ave when I lived in Brighton in the 80’s), and chewing the fat with the eclectic swath of people Boston is known for. He is a poet who knows how to navigate the back alleys of the Back Bay as well as the dusty corners of a classroom. As Cornish said in a Boston Globe article he was surprised to be selected because he wasn’t “connected.” And Cornish wants to be available to everyone: to denizens of nursing homes, homeless shelters, corporate board rooms, to the university classroom. He is a man who can bring the gift of poetry to the city, and articulate the city’s unique voice in a way that only poetry can do it.

Now it seems that Cambridge has a Poet/Populist. And I am thinking to myself “Damn! Why doesn’t Somerville have something like this?” In Somerville, according to a study in Granta Magazine, we have more writers per capita that the isle of Manhattan. Just think of the world class writers we have just a stone’s throw from Davis Square: Claire Messud, James Woods, Pagan Kennedy, Lloyd Schwartz, Afaa Michael Weaver, to name just a few. And so many have lived and passed through here like Denise Levertov, Lan Samantha Chang, Steve Almond, just a few names I can remember from the top of my barren, bald head. Somerville, referred to as the “Paris of New England,” is a city of many things, but is also a city of the arts. And anyone will tell you the arts are good for business. So why not create a committee to select a poet laureate? Someone like Cornish who is as good at outreach as he is at writing poetry? Money is an issue you say? I think the laureate in Boston has a budget of $3,000 and in Cambridge even less.

I have approached Alderman Trane about this and he said he would bring it up if I emailed him with some details. I did. He is a busy man but perhaps if more citizens expressed an interest it might speed the process. Send me an email if you think it is a good idea and I will forward it. You will never know unless you try.

dougholder@post.harvard.edu


---Doug Holder

The This and That of Balances in a "Roomful of Sparrows," poems by Mary Buchinger

The This and That of Balances in a "Roomful of Sparrows," poems by Mary Buchinger

( Finishing Line Press POBOX 1626 Georgetown, Kentucky 40324 $12)


A poet is her or his language and poems, like people, as T. S. Eliot said, communicate before they are reduced to understanding. The poems in Mary Buchinger’s Roomful of Sparrows beset us again and again with surprising juxtapositions of terms (great and small, present and past, nature and technology) that jar and intrigue us to an unpredictable, lively sensibility. They are poems deft rather than copious in observation of the natural world around us, as we find in the final poem “White Cairn Trail, Mid-October”:

…we breathe in esters of pine
as we hike a path lit by ferns
until all is granite undulations with dark

pearl basins and we, alongside blue jays,
look down on the shiny backs of ravens.

We sense, breathe and see the wooded area of the description, but the next line,

The world is made of gold

—as though the lens were suddenly filtered, turns the landscape suggestively to allegory.
We can not take for granted or literal only the meanings of “esters” or “pine,” and see more closely that the poet’s observation has de-materialized the landscape already into “undulations,” its physical essence. We wonder what “pearl basins,” “blue jays” and “ravens” betoken, perhaps the way the Ant and the Cicada in Jean de la Fontaine’s fable are masks in a dialogue between frugality and prodigality.
Yet when Buchinger announces that she is going to speak about object and its meaning, in “The Higher Purpose of Bees,” she gives us simple intransitive statements that hint at a flirtish—or is it serious?—stubbornness and reticence:

The bee is a bee
—in all cases, a bee…

can be holy, can be desired,
studied, can hurt, can be all
but without meaning…

She so nearly says that language is subjective and the point of the poem is that bees, “unknowable alone,” take on meaning “in relation” to whom they may concern,

to the beekeeper,
to the gardener, to the poet,


to the artist with the gold-
dipped brush. The bee to the
botanist. The bee to the boy

with the swollen lip.

Like herbs, lemon and wine in a sauce, these lines need to be held in one’s mouth to be tasted and analyzed. How many different ways to see an intricate creature! For its resources and guardianship, for its natural function of pollination, for its symbolic or phonetic meaning or aesthetic beauty, for the threat it poses. Basil, thyme, oregano…
The passage with its subtlety reminds us why reading poetry is like reading no other form of writing.
If Buchinger can be so simple—so difficult?—as to craft the line, “The bee is a bee,” she has a dazzling knack to undermine expectations between noun and verb. In the book’s first poem, “Grizzly Bear on Pratt Museum’s Alaskan Webcam,” we read among much else that

…fish prance…

I comment: !
The poem begins remarkably with a mountain stream, in which the bear fishes, suddenly compared in the stroke of a conceit to a modern convenience:

—dip that paw one more time
dig around in the back of the refrigerator
must be something there…

The potential for allegory again is striking. Is the poet talking about a bear fishing in a river or about me watching a Patriot’s game? (I only watch figure skating, steeple chase, and Doug Holder’s Author to Author, really…)
Buchinger herself is not spared subversions or surprises in the life with the oddly matched. In “Mosquito Lesson,” the minute insect sends her into a frenzy,

I beat the air
slap my neck
chase her neediness…

What are mosquitoes these days with the repellants we have? Who am I to act this way?—the poet is perhaps asking. Human is human. Buchinger is vulnerable. She can also be tongue-in-cheek spoiled the way we find her in “Flying to Vancouver,” a passenger in Business Class, being served “chicken risotto and tapenade”—with a sense of humility remembering her childhood,

how on the farm I used to hoe
sugar beets and soybeans, knowing
nothing about tapenade or Chardonnay.


My jean cuffs holding straw,
I knew kernels of red wheat
could be chewed to gum…

I appreciate the proportions in registers of sentiment Buchinger has kept to. The common resounds more commonly throughout the book. She observes sparrows, beetles, reads Tolstoy, goes skating (on a pond with a frog frozen in it), companionably in a day to day world that is familiar to us. As she trumps the exceptional experience of flying in Business Class, she elevates mundane occurrences into exceptionally perceptive moments. In “Reading A Wrinkle in Time ” moths gathered at a porch screen door by the light in the house are seen as an intense illustration of the poet’s deepest endearment:

—their ache for the light
primitive as my love of my mother’s voice
reading L’Engle’s book to me.

This deepest spring of her feelings is mediated through books, seen in a marvelous conceit of the nocturnal insects:

How the moths beat
their own white pages
against our porch screens

thin spines rippling as they
opened and closed against
the fine mesh holes…

In “Redeem/The unread vision in the higher dream” Buchinger probes further to that which is behind the mother’s voice and intimates,

We all want…that finest shot of ourselves, but what we need is someone with the eyes to look for it, to show us what it is.

In her muse, in her memory and with her fellow poets she has found the elements of this “someone” who gives us an excellent “shot” of her. The medium forms a circle to us. When I read these poems my faculties put on different lenses that help me find something truer and better within myself. That is the benefit of reading good writing.
Mary Buchinger’s Roomful of Sparrows is available online at www.finishinglinepress.com as well as at amazon.com.

---Michael Todd Steffen is the winner of the Ibbetson Street Poetry Award 2007. He is a regular reviewer for the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene.

Wild Strawberries by Eric Greinke

Wild Strawberries
Eric Greinke
Presa Press 2008
$15.00
ISBN 978-0-9800081-1-1

Eric Greinke’s poems, like messages in a bottle, found
after so many years of being afloat, his poems are the
experiences of being within, the experiences of being
in nature. each poem is a cathedral of actuality, of
thought, of inspiration. we can take this walk with
these poems or we can stay in our homes, inside, never
venturing out of doors; we can listen to the telling
after the fact. he has the rare talent to walk with
our environment then to bring us a profound lesson
that nature often has if we listen to the ice crystals
or growing green. he takes our hand and shows us what
we have forgotten to look at,

the rain is the key
the dolls are asleep

there are books in the field

Irene Koronas
poetry editor
wilderness house literary review
www.whlreview.com
poetry reviewer

Somerville poet/publishers for the senior set.

( Bert Stern and Tam Lin Neville)





Somerville poet/publishers for the senior set.

In the 60’s the saying was: “Don’t trust anyone over thirty.” To Union Square residents and publishers Tam Lin Neville and Bert Stern it might be said: “Don’t trust anyone under sixty.” No, Stern and Neville don’t have anything against us younger folks; in fact some of their best friends are under sixty. But it just so happens they have a three year old press “Off the Grid” that caters to the sixty-plus literary crowd. I asked Stern why he chose this graying demographic. He replied: “We’re old. Why not stick with your own.” And it seems to this publishing duo that the “older crowd” is overlooked to a great degree in the publishing world. Stern reflected: “The kids coming out of the Iowa Writers Workshop” just don’t have the experience and experiences we have. The writing is vastly different.”

Stern and Neville are both accomplished poets and writers. Stern was a professor of English at Wabash College in Indiana for many years, and has published scholarly articles and poetry. His first poetry publication was in a sort of mini-book or chap titled:
“Glass Hill” Gene Magner, the late curator of the University of Buffalo Poetry and Rare Books Archive published it. The poet Robert Creeley read it and wrote Stern and praised his work

Neville has also taught on the college level, and has a host of publication credits in prestigious journals. She has a collection of poetry out “Journey Cake” that deals with her experiences in China some years ago.

Both Stern and Neville moved to Somerville eight years ago after Stern retired from teaching. Stern said: “It is hard to be a retired academic in a small college town. You shrink. You sit around in a coffee shop and wait for someone to talk to you. I wanted to be in a different place.”

The couple looked in several locations like Brooklyn, N.Y. and the Republic of Cambridge, but settled in Somerville. They are happily living in a large house on Quincy Street in Union Square. They frequent Sherman’s Café and Bloc 11.

Stern and Neville started Off the Grid Press with Stern’s childhood friend Henry Braun (they met as cub scouts) In fact the Press’s first poetry collection was penned by Braun titled “Loyalty.” The next book out is Lee Sharkey’s: “A Darker, Sweeter String.” The book was recently featured by Poetry Daily and Verse Daily online.

Stern said the Press looks for poetry that goes beyond the personal, that goes beyond the “poet’s nose.” So in these days of navel-gazing Off the Grid is a welcome addition to our literary scene. To find out more about the press go to:

http://www.offthegridpress.net

A darker, sweeter string by Lee Sharkey

A darker, sweeter string


Lee Sharkey
Off The Grid Press
www.offthegridpress.net
2008, $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-9778429-1-9

Lee Sharkey lures the reader, catches us, shows us the
webs of deception; as a captured audience we face the
reality of what was, what is,

soon enough the dead return and cross the threshold
may slouches her belly good as gold

and from her poem ‘by moon light’

one will lie beside the unsound of not breathing
eating out the night

and from ‘the suicides’

we’re circling the hole where the ones who abandoned
us lie
absent electric

Her sparse emphatic look at the past/present frees the
reader like, "sudden pure white," to pursue our own
responsibility to understand how frail existence is,

this is how the brain relearns to speak
up stairs
downstairs
left hand right foot
right hand left foot

Lee Sharkey’s language is exquisite, self referential
and we are able to devour every thought provoked by
the larger reality, history. Sharkey uses repetition,
sequence and timing in a struggle to release,

what do you do with an eye in the cup of your hand?

This is not an easy book of poetry, (for me, at least)
each poem compels me to read more, to put the book
aside, take it up again.

it is thought that cows’ unhurried lowing
the rise and fall in the evening of toad ululation,
the dense sweet penetration of grasses
in air drawn through the nostrils and deep into lungs
will offer our minds a place to return to
from the caves where they cower

if you buy no other book for the next five years, this
is a must, must read, must possess, must repeat,

there came the time we were moved to move into the
rubble

and

the one who has been silent is the one who sends a
message to the future.

Irene Koronas
poetry editor
wilderness house literary review
www.whlreview.com
poetry reviewer
ibbetson street press

Somerville Poet Richard Wilhelm: An Artist Who Paints Poems.

Somerville Poet Richard Wilhelm: An Artist Who Paints Poems.

Walk into Richard Wilhelm’s studio on Highland Street in Somerville and you will see canvasses covering the waterfront of his artist’s digs. Wilhelm, 60, has been painting and writing for as long as he can remember. His poetry and art cover the landscapes of Somerville, the roads of his childhood, and the dreamscapes of his inquiring mind. Wilhelm’s poetry, like his paintings, exhibit evocative hues and that sensibility of the painter always seems to be present in his work.

Wilhelm holds a B.A. in Journalism, and for over twenty years has been a counselor at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass. Wilhelm is the arts/editor for the Ibbetson Street Press, and has had his own artwork exhibited at such venues as the Piano Factory in Boston, Cambridge Adult Education Center, etc…His poetry has been published in such print and online journals as “Ibbetson Street,” “Lyrical Somerville,” “Istanbul Literary Review,” “Poet’s Market,” “Spare Change News,” “Wilderness House Literary Review,” and others. Wilhelm is also a regular reviewer for the “Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene,” an online literary blog.

Wilhelm released his first collection of poetry through the Ibbetson Street Press: “Awakenings.” It has been described by award-winning poet Doug Worth as: “powerful free verse, sonorous—image tapestries… the mature poet takes us through a remarkable series of awakenings, most of them to profound interconnections between him and primordial riches of the material world.”

Doug Holder: You have had your first poetry collection published “Awakenings.” You just turned 60. What have you awakened to?

Richard Wilhelm: The title of this book is taken from one of the poems “Awakenings” That poem really talks to my friends and myself as kids. It’s about the awakening of boys becoming young men. A lot of the poems deal with the spiritual aspects of nature. An “Awakening” to the spiritual aspects of nature. I guess you can say a lot of the poems have an Emersonian quality to them.

Doug Holder: How does your other life as a visual artist inform your work?

Richard Wilhelm: There are some elements of crossover to be sure. It goes both ways. It doesn’t happen all the time. One aesthetic idea can cross over to the other.

Doug Holder: You were an active member in the “Students for a Democratic Society” (SDS) in the 60’s. Does your political sensibility crossover to your poetry?

Richard Wilhelm: I have some political poems in the collection. There was a poem that appeared in the anthology “City of Poets: 18 Boston Voices”: “And, So.” That has a real environmental message. I don’t write a whole bunch of political poems. It’s hard for me and for a lot of people to write political poems. I know sometimes when I try they become rants.

Doug Holder: You are a good student and observer of nature.

Richard Wilhelm: Emerson talked about seeing things in nature as signs of inner states. I think this has a big influence on my work. In “Awakenings” there are a lot of poems that deal with the Moon. The Moon has always been a mysterious thing for me. It is the spiritual aspect of the “other” that we look up to the sky for. We try to figure out how that relates to us, and what connection we have to it. I have been reading a lot. I am still trying to make sense out of the world.

Doug Holder: Do you think we look to nature for spirituality because religion has failed us?

Richard Wilhelm: Organized religion has failed us. Certainly since the mid 19th century. Religion has failed as an interpretation of reality.

Doug Holder: Would you describe yourself as a Pagan?

Richard Wilhelm: No. My world view is a science-based, empiricism. But at the time I was writing these poems I was reading about Paganism. I am trying to find the language to express things I want to express. I want to give voice to spiritual expression. What language do we use? We wind up too often falling back on religious expression.

Doug Holder: Can you talk about your role as the arts/editor for the Ibbetson Street Press?

Richard Wilhelm: Initially a lot of the covers for the journal were drawings or photos by me. More and more I am interested in doing other peoples’. We had Jennifer Matthews’ photos on the front and back cover recently. Robin Weiss, our boss at McLean Hospital will be on a cover in an upcoming issue. The magazine has gotten good critical reviews, so it’s a good place to display work.

Doug Holder. You have worked at McLean Hospital, a famed psychiatric hospital that is now a national literary landmark, for over twenty years. Plath, Sexton, Lowell and others were all here. Has this influenced your work?

Richard Wilhelm. I think it has influenced you more than me. Not really.



NOVEMBER 1963

The motorcade rounded the corner
Jackie so sharp in pink
and pillbox
The President smiled and waved

We headed up the hillside
the day after--the grass
was yellow and dry
leaves off the shrubs

The killer raised his rifle slowly
aimed long I carried
my shotgun in front
of me, safety on

He waited for the perfect shot
I instinctively leaned
forward, bringing shotgun
to shoulder My aunt and uncle fired

but missed the rabbit that sprang
across my range, kept bounding
after the blast
my uncle’s beagle in pursuit

The President lurched, jerked again
secret service men hopped aboard
the motorcade sped off
the dog dropped the rabbit at my feet

identifying me as the killer, blood ran
out of its ear; Jackie smeared
with her husband’s blood
I never went hunting again

--Richard Wilhelm

Boston, Fall and Other Poems. B.Z. Niditch

Boston, Fall and Other Poems. B.Z. Niditch (POBOX 187 Farmington, ME 04938) http://www.encirclepub.com $12.

B.Z. Niditch is one of the most prolific poets in the small press, joined by the likes of A.D. Winans, Lyn Lifshin, Hugh Fox and Ed Galing. The poems in “Boston, Fall and Other Poems,” deal with the environs of Harvard Square, Boston, and the interiors of the poet’s mindscape. Niditch paints a pretty picture of June in his poem about Boston’s famed “Public Gardens.”

“To rest
in front of the sun
planting your steps
by sacks of rose petals
in public gardens,
noon day seems endless
and a friend waits up.

Breathing in
punctuated silence,
a butterfly brushes
against the June wind,
for a deafened half-hour
your arms are sealed
by wheel barrels
of rose tattoos.”

This is a collection that should be of interest to those who have followed Niditch over the years.

Doug Holder/Ibbetson Update/ Feb. 2008/Somerville, Mass.

Dan Tobin and Marty Beckerman sign on for Somerville News Writers Festival--Nov. 15 2008

Poet Dan Tobin ( above) and cutting-edge journalist Marty Beckerman have agreed to read at The Somerville News Writers Festival Nov 15, 2008. Also included: Junot Diaz, Meg Kearney, Tino Villanueva, Afaa Michael Weaver, Bert Stern, and others to be announced.






Daniel Tobin


Chair and Professor (2002) Emerson College--Boston
B.A., Iona College; M.T.S., Harvard University; M.F.A., Warren Wilson College; Ph.D., University of Virginia
On Leave
Daniel Tobin is the author of three books of poems, Where the World is Made (University Press of New England 1999), Double Life (Louisiana State University Press, 2004) and The Narrows (Four Way Books, 2005). Among his awards are the "The Discovery/The Nation Award," The Robert Penn Warren Award, The Greensboro Review Prize, the Robert Frost Fellowship, the Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize, and a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Most recently, The Narrows was a featured book on Poetry Daily, as well as a finalist for the Foreword Magazine Poetry Book Award. Four Way Books will publish his fourth book of poems, Second Things, in 2009.

His poems have appeared nationally and internationally in such journals as The Nation, The New Republic, The Harvard Review, Poetry, The American Scholar, The Paris Review, The Southern Review, The Sewanee Review, The Hudson Review, DoubleTake, The Kenyon Review, Image, The Times Literary Supplement (England), Stand (England), Agenda (England), Descant (Canada) and Poetry Ireland Review. His critical study, Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney, came out to wide praise from the University of Kentucky Press in 1999. Tobin has also edited The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), Light in the Hand: The Selected Poems Lola Ridge (Quale Press, 2007), and (with Pimone Triplett) Poet's Work, Poet's Play: Essays on the Practice and the Art (University of Michigan Press, 2007). His work has been anthologized in Hammer and Blaze, The Bread Loaf Anthology of New American Poets, Poetry Daily Essentials 2007, Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn, Third Rail: The Poetry of Rock and Roll, The Norton Introduction to Poetry, and elsewhere. He has also published numerous essays on modern and contemporary poetry in the United States and abroad.











Marty Beckerman, is the author of Dumbocracy, Generation S.L.U.T. and Death to All Cheerleaders.

He has written for Playboy, Reason, Discover, Radar, Huffington Post, Jewcy and New York Press. He has been featured by the New York Times, the New York Post, ABCNews.com, MSNBC, Salon.com, Fox News Channel and National Public Radio.

Originally from Anchorage, Alaska, Beckerman lives in New York City.

Review of Manufacturing America: Poems from the Factory Floor by Lisa Beatman Review by: Pamela Annas

Review of Manufacturing America: Poems from the Factory Floor by Lisa Beatman
( Ibbetson Street Press-2008) $15. http://ibbetsonpress.com

Review by Pamela Annas

For the American working class, immigrant and native-born alike, factory America is fading like an old sepia photograph. Since the late 1980s, plants have been closing and factory jobs migrating to countries where workers struggle to feed their families on less than a dollar a day. Meanwhile, such workers and their families, trying to find a more economically secure situation, immigrate-- as those in search of a better life often have--to the U.S.A. The tide carries the workers in and the manufacturing jobs out. This is the reserve army of labor. This is globalism from a working-class perspective.

In Manufacturing America: Poems from the Factory Floor, Lisa Beatman offers vivid and individual portraits of workers whom she came to know while teaching basic language skills in a paper and printing company: women and men from El Salvador, Haiti, Brazil, Uganda, Cambodia, Russia, Albania, Somalia, Mexico, the Azores, Vietnam, Portugal.

Lisa Beatman’s collection contributes to a growing number of poems about working-class work and workers by poets such as Deborah Boe, Jim Daniels, Philip Levine, Gwen Houser, Todd Jailer (who also has a series of portraits of individual workers), Susan Eisenberg and others. Here are a few: “Citizen Delia” is “a samba-hipped woman/ who wants to be a hyphenated-American.” Chitra, in “Hand Operator,” applies her bookkeeping skills/ to her new job, creasing each folder/with mathematical precision,” while in “Rainbow”:

Juan is mute as a lake, but he knows
his colors; purple is A-F,
blue is G-K, yellow is L-P,
red is Q-T, green is U-Z.
His calloused hands, tattooed with paper cuts
sort the folders

I was particularly taken with the Latin rhythm and the persona of Nina in “First Shift,” who puts her face/ back on at 5:00 am . . . then stumbles out/ of her dancing heels”

onto the factory floor
She goes to her post
and holds out her hands
Fresh-glued folders fly off
the conveyor belt
Catch, inspect, stack and pack
Catch, inspect, stack and pack
Her face dips and sways
She hums under her breath
the machine flirts back
Cha cha cha cha cha
Manufacturing America takes us through the collective workday. In “Santa Benigna del Carmen de la Cubeta”

Saint Beni of the bucket
starts at six
her hair a twisted black rag
her arms round as roasts
her feet chucks of wood.

She swabs the chief’s toilet
till it gleams like a tooth

on into the dead of night in “Third Shift”, where

Atman, Martir, Fatima, Areik
the souls who work
the graveyard shift
bind books they cannot read
with fluent hands.

Lisa Beatman’s images are strong and accessible, with turns which are sometimes quite startling. In “Hack Job,” she images downsizing as a kind of cannibalistic butcher shop decapitating departments, cracking the bones of the body one by one. Or takes us from the factory into the service sector in what may well be the only poem extant on working at a Krispy Kreme donut shop; here the customers, the donuts, the boss, and the day are rising like yeast

and Julio was meant to sweep and polish and lunch
on fried dough rejects and send half his pay,
little as it was, home to Rosario and Mama.


The question arises of how we are supposed to see these immigrant workers. Certainly they are not threatening. And, though struggling, they are mostly not presented as victims but as solid and vital persons, each with a rich cultural background. They come without many possessions but vivid memories—their homeland as a hard rusk of bread, as a house near the Mekong River made of bamboo, as a rainbow lake where red breast tilapia swim into the net.

In addition to the montage of lively human voices and characters, scampering and creeping through Manufacturing America is a cluster of poems inhabited by mice. The first of these, the prologue to the whole collection, is “New World”, where a “raggedy” mouse jumps ship into a dark shivery world “where gaslights bared the bones

of looms pumping night and day
but there was food aplenty
dropped by the shadow figures
at their brief suppers,
crusts scented with the tall grass
of fields he’d almost put out of mind,
red rinds, sticky with Gouda,
and the new taste—
rich broth of knackered horses
boiled down into an irresistible paste.

and where, importantly, there was no ship’s cat. In the second of these poems, “Crumbs,” “mouse punches in./ He knows the building by heart” and makes his living on croissant crumbs from the bosses, salted rice from the Vietnamese temps, melba toast from the secretaries, tuna subs from the graveyard foreman. The third poem, “Serpent,” is an ominous history of smoke and fire in industrial plants. In the final poem in the collection, “Nursery,” the mouse is female and has moved outside the factory into the brush.

She rations out the hoarded seed
and fills her babes with tales
of monster mouse-holes, dust-mountains
and near-death encounters:
the spray, the traps, the kicking foot,
highways of heating ducts,
and, night and day,
the pounding concerto
of compressors and clanking belts.

Clearly, the mice are a metaphor, and a rather charming one, for the many generations of immigrants to the U.S.A. They allow Beatman to provide an outline of the history of immigration and manufacturing in this country, its rise and fall. Together these four poems add an extra dimension, a meta discourse, to the individual portraits of contemporary workers which form most of Manufacturing America. Finally, as a parent I couldn’t fail to be reminded as I read these poems of the famous literary mouse from Margaret Wise Brown’s classic picture book, Goodnight, Moon, and the game children love to play of finding the tiny mouse tucked away in each color plate, which tends to add an edgy texture to a deliberately placid bedtime story. Ironically, the mouse babes in “Nursery” are shivering to surreal tales of giants. Beatman’s immigrant mice are small unobtrusive survivors, enjoying the tastes of their new world, existing in the interstices of the system, trying to ride with the changes and survive.

One last point: I was glad to see the poet take up the ethics of writing about human subjects in her last poem, “Copyright.” One of her strong voiced women, Leyla Chang, invades the poet’s dream “like a page on fire” to ask: “What’s this she says/ about you writing my life?” It’s a question that always needs to be asked.

Lisa Beatman’s Manufacturing America: Poems from the Factory Floor is highly recommended. *

--Pamela Annas


*Pamela Annas teaches courses in Working-Class Literature, Modern and Contemporary Poetry, and Personal Narrative and is an Associate Dean at the University of Massachusetts/ Boston. She is a member of the editorial collective of The Radical Teacher journal, author of numerous articles and the book A Disturbance in Mirrors: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath, as well as co-editor of two textbook/ anthologies: Literature and Society and Against the Current. She has poems forthcoming in Northwoods Anthology and Ibbetson Street Journal.

Made in Hero-The War for Soap by Betty Hugh

Made in Hero ~ The War for Soap ($14.00 U.S.A.) (Clay Dog Books) by Betty Hugh

www.claydogbooks.com


Review by Pam Rosenblatt



Betty Hugh’s Made in Hero ~ The War for Soap puts truth in the old favorite adage,

“You can’t tell a book by its cover.” Hugh has drawn a plain yet inviting cover with a pen or pencil drawing of a man and a mountainous scene on white background. Upon looking at the cover, the reader probably wonders who the man is, why he is on the cover, and where he and the mountain scene are located? These are pretty simple questions. Once the reader starts reading Hugh’s novel, he realizes this is no ordinary modern book. It’s a creative and imaginative story that is a challenge to complete. Made in Hero ~ The War for Soap is a really complicated read that is best understood if you have a background in Homer’s Iliad1 and Sophocles’ Antigone2 before you read the book. In fact, it’s such a different type of book that, at the end of its 178 pages, the narrator says, “And I am still unsure whether Hero is the crime mystery disguised as epic tragedy, or the epic tragedy masquerading as crime mystery.” (p. 178).

To help us get a handle on the book, I thought I’d use the narrator who is separate from the protagonist in the story but, at the same time, the same character and referred to as “I” or “J. R. Teheda”.3 The narrator is storyteller; the protagonist is the character of the storyteller; the narrator/protagonist is not the novel’s author, Betty Hugh. To prove this last point, perhaps, Hugh makes the narrator/protagonist a man, not a woman.

The narrator tells the reader stories about people found in “Hero” which “at the beginning, was a transient and mute idea” and is “Today…a nation within a city, a modern Troy under siege.” (p. 2) As protagonist, the narrator gives the reader the point of view of “Teheda”, a war journalist working in Hero at the request of his friend and mentor nicknamed “Pea Nut” who is the “Editor-in-Chief of the Heroaen bureau” of The Chronicle. (p. 7) Through the “I”, the first person pronoun, which begins the “Prologue” of Hugh’s Made in Hero ~ The War for Soap, Hugh has spun a story in journalistic style, not poetic style like that found in Homer’s The Iliad. Hugh begins her crime mystery with a down-to-earth, descriptive yet factual paragraph:


HILLSIDE, Hero ― I sit in my rented room with the lights out;

nothing running but the fans. They make the noise of electric

bellows, heaving in mechanical rhythm to no particular beat.

Three of them are pointed at my head from different angles,

their irate forces tangling in a whirlwind. But they offer no

relief. The heat, packing its sour sweet odor, throbs to its own

pulse, and drives me to wonder if was all an accident that my

writing of the war had turned into the story of a corpse. (p. 1)


Hugh has drawn the reader into the book with the simple, ordinary statement of “I sit in my rented room…” The reader can visualize the narrator, or “I”, inside a room sitting. But then Hugh twists the sentence a bit making it unusual, or unexpected. The narrator isn’t sitting in the room in light but “with the lights out”. Who would sit in a room rented or not “with the lights out” instead of on, unless the person is going to rest or perhaps wants to save money? The only electric things on are “the fans” that “make the noise of electric bellows, heaving in mechanical rhythm to no particular beat.” While the reader realizes the room is in darkness, he can almost hear the ruckus of “the fans”. Hugh has carried the reader into Made in Hero ~ The War for Soap through articulate description, though the images conjure up “irate forces tangling in a whirlwind.” The journey already is rather unpleasant like “The heat, packing its sour sweet odor” that “throbs to its own pulse”. This novel’s opening paragraph is loaded with images that are not pleasant. The narrator summarizes the situation saying, “my writing of the war had turned into the story of a corpse” Something large and broad gets minimized “into the story of a corpse”. The reader knows the words on the pages that follow aren’t your typical everyday newspaper readings. And the reader has already begun the wonder about the significance of the “corpse”.

Who is the corpse then, and why is he significant? The corpse was a man nicknamed “Commander”, and the unburied dead body turns out to be the real reason why Teheda returned to Hero:


FROM THE OUTSET, I understood that I’d come back

to investigate the death of the Commander, the circumstances

precipitating it, as well as the events which immediately followed

― increasingly referred to as GU-2 (rebellions here have a way

of recycling themselves). But I realized, and only after a period

of catastrophic reflection, that my real purpose was to tell the

story of his life. I did not foresee how much this purpose was to

become my obsession, until something odd happened one evening

while stepping over the city’s crumbling cobble pavements. Crunching

underfoot, they recalled to me that Heroaens have a saying “If the

stones could speak, what story would they be telling?” It occurred

to me that the Commander’s life was none other than the story of

the stones. (p. 11)


Through reputation, the Commander “was a martyr, a champion of the cause, defender of the people. From others, [Teheda] heard he was a victim of the system”. (p. 11) And for these reasons, the Commander’s death and situation caught Teheda’s interest.

Considered a hero, the Commander achieved his notoriety as a rebel militant active in The Great Uprising. What was The Great Uprising (GU)? The narrator explains:


….Over seven years in duration, GU would surge over the borders

of at least three nations, and rip through the economies of countless

others. It had magnificent range. In short, GU would destabilize

The Empire nearly to the point of collapse (some of its instigators

anointed themselves the “New Barbarians”). More remarkable,

however, was that GU had fomented in the seemingly insignificant

streets of Hero―a locale The Empire had largely considered a remote,

forsaken outpost. (p. 9)


The narrator has the protagonist “I”, or “Teheda”, think it was his mission to figure out the war in more minute terms:


Over time, too, I’d come to realize that my responsibility

was greater than it initially appeared. It involved no mere

examination of the current revolt, but rather the attempt to

it in terms of the larger war the reading public is all but

sick of. And there lies my dejection. Even for myself,

the war grows tiresome. I have been writing it too long

the recent violence strikes me simply as an echo of that

large interminable conflict. (p. 11)


Teheda takes on the heroic responsibility of making sure the Commander is buried:


Yet my job remained the sorting of the one: the burial of the

body if an outlaw. I understand now that this crime, in its

simplicity, was the true beginning, not the ending, to the

story. And yet, it was a beginning that hurled me nowhere

but into the past. That is the place where time becomes

inverted, and must be turned, like a bloodstained garment,

inside out…. (p. 13)


Through the use of creative imagination and description and imagery, Hugh

has begun to create a composite of Teheda, a war journalist who is searching

for the truth behind the death of a militant, the Commander. At the beginning of

the novel, the characters aren’t well developed. Hugh introduces Teheda and Pea Nut

and Dusty, the Chronicle’s Chief International Desk Editor. Unlike Pea Nut and

Dusty, Teheda is looking for change, not the same path a journalist takes where “[His]

sole purpose is to record the truth.” (p. 12) Teheda is looking for excitement. And his

request is filled while discovering that the body of the Commander has been stolen.

Upon discovering this fact, the protagonist “I”, or “Teheda”, begins a journey throughout

Hero to recover the body. Along the way, he meets several hero figures: Hektor, the rebel militant hero who has been captured and put in prison; Antigone, a complex character with whom the hero Teheda falls in love with; and Antigone’s sister, Sophi, the woman whom Teheda really loves, who is introduced to Teheda through Hektor and shows Teheda key sites on the journey to locating the Commander’s body.

The Commander, Hektor, Antigone, and Sophi all have heroic qualities, but it’s Teheda, the narrator and protagonist in the novel, with whom the reader can relate to most and achieves the status of a mythical hero by the novel’s conclusion.4

In Made In Hero ~ The War for Soap, Hugh makes many references to what a hero is. Teheda asks Hektor outright, “Do you consider yourself a hero?” when he first meets the militant for an interview in the Hero Prison. Hektor just gave the following response:


After thinking it over, [Hektor] replied in a mild scowl,

‘What do you think?’

‘You strike me as a man of quiet courage,’ I ventured,

‘and generally grumpy outlook.’

This, too, provoked a sputter of laughter.” (p. 26)


Through the use of wit and dialogue, Hugh has put humor into a tense situation. She has Hektor explain what being a hero is all about in a later chapter of the book. The

narrator tells the reader what a martyr is in Hero:


Men long for honor in places they can least find it. At the

gym, they carved a pocket where it was possible to shut out the war.

‘In there, what matters most is the contest,” Hektor explained. ‘Boxing

is all about grace―of heart, of mind, of body. In the fight, we give our

best, and afterwards, embrace. We forgive.” (p. 97)


Unlike Hektor, Teheda isn’t graceful but he did do the best journalistic job he could, by the end of Made In Hero ~ The War for Soap. He has all the qualities of a modern day hero: he finds a story with a mission; he has a love affair with Sophi5; he saves his former lover, Antigone, from possible death6; he has a traumatic experience that affects his outlook on life in Hero7; he keeps searching for his identity outside of being a war journalist8; and he searches for the truth.

Made in Hero ~ The War for Soap is based on Greek myths, especially Homer’s The Iliad, an epic filled with characters who are gods or human often with divine ancestors, are courageous and strong, and praised for their heroic endeavors and in good standing with the gods.9

Hugh’s Made In Hero ~ The War for Soap is a fine effort at creating modern day everyday martyrs for the literary world. Hugh has written a novel that makes the reader imagine and think about today’s society, its citizens, and its heroes. Made In Hero ~ The War for Soap is well worth your time spent reading.