OR SO IT SEEMS. PAUL STEVEN STONE.

OR SO IT SEEMS. PAUL STEVEN STONE. (Blind Elephant Press Cambridge, Mass.) http://www.orsoitseems.info $20.

If you like novels about Brooklyn-born, neurotic, Hindu, Woody Allenish, self-questioning guys with an active fantasy life, then you should get your hot little hands on Paul Steven Stone’s “Or So It Seems.” Stone, by day, a mild- mannered Cambridge-based advertising consultant (and a member of Somerville’s Bagel Bards) has penned a novel that centers on a character Paul Peterson, a mild - mannered advertising executive, and a former member of “The Seekers of Truth,” a cult-like school of self-development. Peterson is decidedly in the camp that believes “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Thus this book, in a very nonlinear fashion, examines a chain of events in the life of this middle-aged “Seeker” through a mystical prism of Hindu/Karmic jargon and sensibility.

The book’s beginning and focal point is set in a shabby Plymouth, Mass. apartment where the hapless protagonist is being dragged to an equally shabby couch for a carnal encounter with a mousy schoolteacher in heat. Throughout the novel Peterson is in constant contact with a laughing, ethereal Hindu holy man, who acts as a one man Greek Chorus to Peterson’s illusion, namely: “Life.”

Now you got to stick with this book, it has many rewards. Stone has Peterson going back and forth in time (hey—time is an illusion, right?) to the many events of his life: his divorce, his sorry relationship with an embittered father, his doting concern for his young son, etc… The book is certainly no dry spiritual tract, with stick figure characters pointing to ideology with big ham fists. Stone, has a way with words, a good satirist’s eye, and some of his best stuff is the descriptions of the ad agency where he works, his long exegesis of a single’s dance, the dissection of his failed relationship with his wife, and his bitter relationship to an angry, frustrated, deceased, father.


Having been a regular at a sad series of single dances years ago I appreciated Stone’s take on them. Here is a smoke and mirrors description of the clever deception one finds at these venues:

“ I remember like the fragment of some surreal dream a dance where the light ran amuck. Someone with a warped sense of humor must have taken control of the master dimmer-switch because for most of the evening, at moment when you least expected it, the lights would suddenly shift from dim to bright, instantly revealing a room full of shockingly older single men and women, far less attractive than those that had been attending the dance just moments earlier.

It was if monsters had been lurking in the shadows waiting to be cruelly exposed as soon as the frightmaster turned up the lights. What was even more unsettling was the way those ghastly apparitions melted from sight, back into hiding, once the lights were turned down again.”

And in this passage Stone describes the décor of the Boston Ad Agency his hero works in:

“ Now tell me what you think of these colorful arrangements of colorful shapes on the walls? Reminds me of the crayon drawings I did when I was a mere kindergarten artist. These are Hauschengaads, genuine originals or so I have been told. Have you heard of him, Hauschengaad? Big name in Confusion art?

Around here we have difficulty pronouncing his name so we call him “Who-should-care!” The general consensus that road kill mounted on the wall would be generally preferable to these original and highly eruptive Hauschengaards. But most of us are biased, you must realize, since we cannot help but associate the unwitting artist with the tasteless owners responsible for plastering his work all over our office walls.

Art collectors?

Who do they think they are kidding?

They purchase art as an investment whose tax liability magically disappears when it gets listed as office décor rather than partner enrichment.”

Stone’s novel’s conceit is an interesting one. He is constantly stepping back from the material world with his nonmaterial Hindu master to survey the scene. The most ordinary situation reveals profound truths about the human condition, and all our lives of quiet and not so quiet desperation.

Stone revealed to me over bagels one morning that David Godine, the well-regarded publisher, told him that a book like his is next to impossible to pull off well. I think Stone proved him wrong.

Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update/ Jan. 2009/ Somerville, Mass.

Review of poetry collections by Mnookin, Marbrook, and Stern

REVIEWS BY CATHERINE NICHOLS

Far from Algiers: Djelloul Marbrook
Winner of the 2007 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize
Published by: The Kent State University Press, 2008

Marbrook has written an angry, beautiful collection; it’s topics often dwell on the fury of the outsider, the fatherless boy, the foreigner. By turns snide and pleading, Marbrook quickly transitions from “Djelloul/ what kind of a name is that? I invite you to notice that is the sound of deportation,” to “I am to the left of belonging/forlorn, bereft and looking in.”

Marbrook says he was prompted to return to poetry after the 9/11 attacks. The poems are steeped in the romance of an Arab culture utterly different than the clichés of terrorism. Marbrook’s exile from his heritage in Algiers shows in the poems longing for “Granadan windows, battlements, places of which strangers smell” and “A Moorish garden in al-Andalus /where an old man is watching/aspens write on walls.”

Ultimately, the collection attacks on behalf of the obscure and exiled, but also attacks the idea that any of us belong where we are. “I’ve nothing to complain about/ except the poignant delusion/ that some of us belong and/ must be vigilant for those/ who live among us in disguise“










The Moon Makes its Own Plea: Wendy Mnookin
Published by: BOA Editions, ltd.

Mnookin’s style is deceptively direct—her words never obfuscate simple beauties “I love tomatoes/ on the vine, their smell of dirt and heat” and “a house finch darts from hollyhock to hollyhock/ bending each tall stem.” Taken whole, the poems grow into a look at the kaleidoscope of love and domesticity, the routines that seem to last forever till they’re abruptly over:

You said a pond of peaches
And I took them
From your hands, I floated

…

if I did, and what else
I might have done—
Some slight, some lack
That gave you the tumor

While I stood around
Like the desert, refusing you water,
Even a mirage of water.

These poems are a moving record of transient pleasures and sorrows—and by the end of the book, the title poem “The Moon Makes its Own Plea” –- “Nothing gets done/except existence” it’s not the fate of the few to spend their days entirely on impermanent things: It’s the fate of everyone, from the white lilacs to the moon itself.

Mnookin’s poems have been published in a number of journals, but the effect of the collection as a whole is powerful. If a single poem is about the loss of a friend, husband or pet, the book as a whole is about the growth from an immature to mature self—and the losses and gains of every kind the process involves. The Moon Makes its Own Plea is not, finally, a book of loss, but shifting, reorganization, and pleasure.






Armature: Sharon Stern

The most moving line in Sharon Stern’s Armature—“I know how to bite the bullet/but I have no taste for it” sets the tone for this collection. The poet alludes frequently to the childhood polio that left her paralyzed and in pain, occasionally in sorrowful poems like “One”:

I don’t even know
how tightly
I can be held
brittle bones
and metal rods
and all

but it’s not a problem
there has been
no one
to do it.

More often, the context of suffering gives Stern a kind of extra sensitivity to the pain of others, and to the meaning and beauty of acts of compassion, as precise as taking care of frightened sparrows trapped indoors (daunted to confusion), or moments of pleasure as small and yet momentous as winning a game of computer solitaire (a ghoulish game!) on the first day of the new millennium.

Each poem is dated, from September of 1988 to August 2002. As I read I found myself in a strange historical countdown to the moment I knew the poetry would register the shock of September, 2001. Stern’s heart, in its softness and strength, seemed peculiarly tuned to this exact sort of wound, both general and personal, public and private.

I once carried the world on my shoulders
Now I carry the World Trade Center.
It weighs heavy on my stricken back.

Despite the hardship and sadness—a combination that creates its own rage and fine observation, Stern finishes the collection with a light, almost humorous summation
“If I had no cat/I would have left it at that.”


--CATHERINE NICHOLS is a writer residing in Somerville, Mass. You might catch her writing, or playing with her young son at the Sherman Cafe in Somerville's Union Square.

OPEN LETTERS. Carolyn Gregory.

( Carolyn Gregory)


OPEN LETTERS. Carolyn Gregory. (Windmill Editions. wileysister@yahoo.com. http://www.batescommunications.net) $12

Carolyn Gregory is the consummate Boston poet. She has been plying her trade for years, publishing her poems, participating in workshops, readings, and is a much-admired figure in the area poetry scene. So it is good to see her first collection of poetry “Open Letters” appear after all these years. It is a testament to her craftsmanship, her discerning eye, her masterful use of imagery, etc… A lot of her work is set in Boston (she lives in the Jamaica Plain section of the city), but Gregory is not purely an urban poet. She has a well-oiled acumen for writing about nature, be it in a pastoral setting, or sprouting from the cracks in the metropolitan asphalt.

In this time of recession, perhaps it would be germane to look at her poem “Unemployment Office, circa 1991.” Gregory deftly creates a Twilight Zone limbo in a nondescript room where one awaits his or her fate: `

“If there is a limbo in the universe,
this room must be it.
We cross our hands,
hoping for eligibility.
A name is called, a body lifts
from its inert stupor,
the phones ring like warnings,
When will I tell “my” story?”

Now I have written about buses in Boston, most notably the famed Dudley Bus that goes from the rarefied environs of Harvard Square, Cambridge to the less tony grounds of Roxbury in Boston. In her poem “Riding Home in the Dark” Gregory using her evening bus trip as a striking metaphor for her life’s journey:

“Perhaps I’ve been kidding myself too long.
When I ride the bus home,
I’m just like all the other older women,
Riding past high rise glass
columns that dissolve overhead,
all the women going home on Friday
in the dark.

We hang on to our seats when we’re tired,
Riding home to an empty house.
We don’t hang on to men for deliverance
But prop up our heads to keep going
Past city blocks, eager to strip off
Makeup and scarves so we can relax…”

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.


Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update/ Jan 2009/Somerville, Mass.

Expansion and Survival in Zero Boundaries by Irene Koronas

Expansion and Survival in Zero Boundaries by Irene Koronas

article by Michael T. Steffen



In poetry language is different. First encounters with poems enlighten us as to the spirit of songs, lyrics, which we sing from our youngest age, and which are often held together more by the measures and scale of music than by their sense.

Ring around the rosies
Pocket full of posies
Ashes, ashes we all fall down.

Of course, of course, we all grow up to learn that this nursery rime contains a mnemonic codicil about the beginning of the French Revolution, yet we have accepted the rimes for many many years before figuring out a significance for the deeply engrained melodic riddle.
When I first read Emily Dickinson in the 10th grade I was arrested to reassess my whole thinking about language and sense.

Because I could not stop for Death
He kindly stopped for me.

What could she not stop doing when death came for her? Death stops for us, or Death stops us? What did she mean? It was really that strange to me when I first had to read it for a class assignment, and until our teacher explained what personification was
I remained at an utter loss as to what this amazing woman was saying.
By my Junior year in college I had been reading and thinking about poetry long enough no more to flinch at its odd arrangements of language, its ironies and paradoxes. Theodore Roethke’s line made perfect sense to me without needing to think it through when I first read,

In a dark time the eye begins to see.

I had been in enough difficult relationships to hear a young Irish rock star sing, I can’t live with or without you, and know exactly what he meant. (That year in a Latin class we happened to read an ode by Horace whose well-balanced, syntactically sophisticated invention of the paradox might be translated, “I can bear living neither with nor without you.” With Horace it was more a point of wit and biting humor rather than a crescendo of intensity pitching into a cry of agony.)
For as long as poets have been using language relentlessly to express our deepest feelings, all the boundary-setters of language, logicians, grammarians and moralists, have been defied. I don’t believe that poetry is a language of zero boundaries, or else our shoulder wouldn’t twinge at sentimental verse and doggerel. Yet the title of Irene Koronas’ most recent chapbook, Zero Boundaries, intends to reflect (refract) something key to the nature of poetic language and key to this poet’s work and sensibility, as well as to the world she inhabits and is writing about.
At the onset in the book we find that the poet does not so much stand away from things to comment on them, but ventures herself into things “beyond my own/knowing,” and as we read through this first beautiful poem, “family trees,” the jammed lining and absence of punctuation as it were hurtle us into image upon associative image:

…my father forgiving without
grudge or elastic bracelets bound from one
country to another alive with possibility his
semi-precious stones strung together on thin
gold chain floating on top of mother’s soup…

The neo-symbolist French poet Guillame Apollinaire opened eyes by first publishing his entire celebrated book Alcools without punctuation. In the wake of Freud and Jung with our greater curiosity about the freely associative processes of our psyches and dreams, artists (cubism, surrealism) looked for ways to deconstruct the formal boundaries of art. E. E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams (in things, not ideas) and W. S. Merwin who leaves many of his poems unpunctuated, come to mind as well-known American poets who have sent us swimming as Koronas does into language which affects us as stream, as experience rather than as order, understanding or sense.
We go with Koronas on the imaginative excursions that are her poems. We find the odd things, out of the blue, among cypress trees,

the same naked rubber doll hanging
from an olive branch. no one seems to know why and
no one takes it down (“rubber doll”).

We go with her as a little girl to the boundary of awareness for sleep, when

the bed begins to move like
a small boat wobbles close to the shore. with eyes closed
red, orange, and yellow swirls start their cosmic dance
(“creative confession”).

The “zero” of boundary creeps into prominence as the poet hints at her mind’s otherness, an autonomous creative and processing entity that mesmerizes her as she records what begins to filter through her. In other poems, “lazy word that,” “lines” and “when”, the poet’s intense glare at the unfurling of language itself grows to a minimalist tone I want to say, Gertrude Stein in a kettle’s whistle:

…it takes at least three words to
denote explanation that that implies. The intellectual,
emotional or tactile that that that expresses maybe necessary
that lazy word
that
that is especially relevant…

The word that in its different functions, comparative (intellectual), conjunctive (emotional) and demonstrative (tactile), is multiplied and juggled with an alacrity (almost madness) that lets us know how carefully Koronas works over the drafts of her poems to make them so responsive to us. In a sense, no matter how thoroughly the poet immerses herself into her linguistic fields, the objects of the poems stubbornly retain their “otherness,” her ideas of that, not the this of me the zero boundary of all that is not me. (That last phrase comes from Mark Strand.)
While you are in Koronas’ book, reading, swimming in it, she is hard to locate, to keep track of. I want to say like Virginia Wolf Koronas enjoys her invisibility. Habits of mind define distinct personalities. Yet when a writer’s habit becomes a quest to avoid habit and to remain vigilant to perception, the stress of self gets deferred to things in their strangeness. This discipline for novelty bears traces of Transcendentalism: god of mind pervasive in nature, the thinking ego led out of the filial or social identity to gain the spherical awareness of all things it greets and comes to know.

…when I look I
hear what bounces back from my
own perspective the point of
knowing returns when one becomes
both circumference and expansion…

The poem, “vanishing point,” is as definitive to the concept “zero boundaries” as to the book itself. When geographical, social, political and personal boundaries melt away, we confront by necessity if not by compulsion the world in its otherness. Traditional senses we ground ourselves by, history, language, family, home, me, must be ventured:

clutter all matter the vanishing point
does not exist

In the simple turn of the screw of the poet’s lining, Koronas has brought us to the breathtaking obliteration of ourselves onto the survival of that moment of lost or zero boundaries. It is a curious and powerful affirmation set forth in simple poetics and unaffected language, typifying the modest accomplishment of these poems.



Zero Boundaries by Irene Koronas is available for $7.00 from Cervana Barva Press/ P.O. Box 440357/ W. Somerville, MA 02144-3222
www.cervanabarvapress.com
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Founded in 2003 by poet, teacher, editor, journalist, reviewer, and overall impresario Doug Holder, this serves as a model “alternative literary” site dedicated to building, reporting on, and promoting a local literary scene. In this case, while centered in Somerville, MA, the scene is that of greater Boston, which Holder boosts as the Paris of New England.  His first affinity is for beat poets, but he celebrates a generous range of local poets and fiction writers, many of them nationally known.  --DEWITT HENRY ( Founder of Ploughshares Magazine)

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Emerson College
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-Alfred Nicol/ Winner of the Richard Wilbur Award.


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POET MAGUERITE GUZMAN BOUVARD: CAN JOY AND SADNESS CO-EXIST?

POET MAGUERITE GUZMAN BOUVARD: CAN JOY AND SADNESS COEXIST?

Review by Doug Holder


In the poem “The Years” in Marguerite Guzman Bouvard’s new poetry collection “ The Unpredictability of Light” ( Word Press) the poet writes:

“You walk with one foot in winter’s black ice, the other
in a burgeoning meadow. Can joy
and sadness co-exist?”

And in this collection of poetry Bouvard ,a resident scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University, mediates between the shoals of despair, and the light and hope of the shore.

In her poem “Balance” she skillfully uses the industrious of the bumblebee in contrast to mankind’s nihilism:

“…they do not know the text
conquer and subdue,
only the web and litany
of the Creation; stamen, pistil,
hive, haven, putting by
for lean times. They whir intently
on their miniature engines,
circling above me. They mean
no harm. They do not poison the air.”

In “March Rain” Bouvard ponders the wayward light in a litany of rain:

“…It is raining this morning
but how can we possibly predict
when and where true happiness
comes. It hides among the books
on my desk, in the tear stained
branches at my window.
It hides in the memory
Of my husband’s words when I cried out
I could go no farther. “You must try,”
He murmured, “You must try
because you are precious.”
In this bone chilling rain
of my illness, in the numbing
gray skies, a single word
opened a horizon, a road
where I could walk.

Highly Recommended.

Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update/ Jan. 2009/Somerville, Mass.

In the Limelight Jane Etzel

In the Limelight
Jane Etzel
Cloudkeeper Press
$7.00 2008
ISBN 978-0-615-25931-4

The poems in this chapbook require a gentle read, perhaps even a slow recognition of their simplicity of form and content which is reminiscent of haiku. these poems present the reader with glimpses into people’s lives. they are snapshots or still life poems:

“the old lady
with her prim
and oh so
still upper lip,
flings her heavy
and clumsy
being off -
now naked
and wild
and young

each poem belies a secret, envy. the envy of other’s lives even when the other life is broken down, or on the ‘wrong path.’ the poems draw their own conclusions about the choices made, the stance taken, the subject matter and the sitter pose as the artist insists and often the poet herself is being drawn. she is able to present others as herself. like Mary Oliver’s poem, “wild Geese”, Etzel’s poem, “our love will unfold” evokes the same message of redemption, in fact, even the rhythm is the same:

“tell me your hopes. let’s talk of our dreams.
please hold my hand on the way. with grateful,
humble, and giving back in our hearts,
our love will unfold as it may.”

Irene Koronas
Poetry Editor
Ibbetson Street Press

Lo Galluccio" A Writer Who Struggles With Passion and Intellect

LO GALLUCCIO: A Writer Who Struggles With Passion and Intellect.

With Doug Holder

Poet, memoirist, and vocalist Lo Galluccio grew up in Cambridge, Mass, the daughter of a prominent labor attorney. She graduated Harvard College and then attended acting school in Chicago. She was an understudy at the famed Steppenwolf Theater Company, and toured Greece with a theater troupe. She worked as a poetry columnist with The Cambridge Alewife, published a poetry collection with the Ibbetson Street Press: “Hot Rain”, and has a new memoir out with the Cervena Barva Press: “Sarasota Vll.”

Galluccio was very much part of the New York City Lower East Side arts scene in the 90’s, releasing a CD with the famed Knitting Factory label. She currently works as an ESL teacher in the Allston section of Boston, and was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize in Poetry. I talked with her on my Somerville Community Access TV show “Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.”

Doug Holder: You said in your interview with the Cervena Barva Press that men/mentors have taken your head off. How hard is it in the arts scene for a woman?

Lo Galluccio: I recently discovered Leonard Cohen and we did a tribute to him at the Squawk Coffeehouse in Cambridge. I read an interview with him in which he said he learned everything he knows from the opposite sex. In a song of his “Tower of Song” he writes, “They don’t let a woman kill you.” It made me reflect how many times I was metaphorically killed by male mentors. I feel I got as much as I could from the people I followed. If you are in a place like New York, especially, and you are precocious, ambitious, and temperamental and a woman, sometimes men will twist that around and have a hard time with it. I remember when I was working as a waitress, a man I admired a great deal told me “We’re done.” He was a poet I adored. I could have burned all his books. It was a matter of marital infidelity. I didn’t want to do it, so I told him no. I didn’t think this person would turn on me but he did. I was devastated, but two years later I sent him white roses—that’s how loyal I am. I have had my life threatened. I don’t think I come across as a very combative person. I have a side of me to me where I can be like a dog with a bone.

DH: Do you think things have changed for women on the arts scene from the time when you were cutting your teeth?

LG: Oh yes. It’s funny I opened up “Anne Sexton’s: Collected Works” recently, and she is someone who has had a huge influence on me. She has one poem that ends like this: “ I am sexless like Christ, beyond being a man or a woman.” And that’s Anne Sexton in the 60’s! I think people like her, Joni Mitchell, Patti Smith, paved the way for me.

DH: You cut your teeth in the East Village of NYC in the 90’s. This wasn’t the Village of the 60’s—what was the milieu like?

LG: It was in the 90’s but you had people around who dropped out of places like olumbia, like my friend Roy Nathan son (Leader of The Jazz Passengers), who told me: “You get a million chances.” I don’t really think that’s true, but I think it is a good thing to think.

DH: What was the scene like then?

LG: The milieu was experimental, it was diverse, it was pretty warm, open and communicative. A novice singer like me got to play with some top-notch people. I was told the East Village was where the “Weed trees grow,” I thought of myself as a weed tree. At this time I decided to give up an acting career that wasn’t booming. Although I was a stage actress and I did get some work.

DH: You have been an actress, vocalist, poet, journalist, educator, etc…. What hat fits you best?

LG: if I had to do it all over again I would have wanted to be a fabulous actress. I studied at the Goodman School in Chicago.. And I was very much encouraged to stay in school. But I dropped out. My Dad died when I was fifteen, so I just didn’t have enough of a foundation to stay with it. I had a wound that needed to heal in a lot of different ways, with a lot of different experience. It’s sad because I loved the craft of acting. I was an actress who was cerebral.

DH:What is your new memoir "Sarasota VII" about?

LG: The book is about how love can be warped by the memory of significant losses -- especially family deaths -- and it's a feminine statement about how desire is necessary and also how it can corrupt. It's in two parts and numbered and lettered paragraphs. Intertwined in the prose-poem narrative are scientific descriptions of Saturn's rings and the vortex of black holes....

DH: In your new memoir you write of the men in your life, the conflict of passion and intellect. Can you define that conflict? Can they coexist?

LG: You know, the brilliant reviewer Michael Todd Steffen, found a psycholinguistic dimension to the memoir. I really appreciated this, because I hope its there. Sometimes I think this book is just on long distorted rant. It is not a straight memoir.

My lover, John in the memoir, was a tremendous actor. We were both drawn to each other. When I conceptualized this book I thought of John as a black hole. Black holes are incredible vortexes of energy that have the ability to suck stars into them.

Basically the book is about the darker aspects of passion. How it can be dangerous and depleting. To live totally in a realm of sexual and visceral energy you need a place of sobriety. When I was in my 20’s and 30’s I could handle it, I don’t think I could now.

DH: Was there a writer who influenced when you wrote the memoir?

LG: Marguerite Dumas. Her memoir “The Lover” was a seminal work for me. It has a wonderful obsessive quality about it.

DH: Did your grief for you Dad’s death spur you on to become an artist?

LG: Oh yes. Grief for my Dad most definitely drove me to be an artist. The world just turned upside down for me. I confronted the concept of finality. How many unresolved things remained between us. How my father’s Italian spirit lives in me.

DH: If your father hadn’t died when you were so young how would your relationship be?

LG: I think we would have had a tremendous power struggle. That’s partly why some of my relationships have been marked by that power struggle.

DH: So you might have a better relationship to your dead father?

LG: Death opens up something. That dark tunnel—different forms of light. The first work of art that I made, that I am really proud of, is “Being Visited” on the now defunct Knitting Factory label. One of the songs was an elegy for my Dad.

Thankfully as I grow older I am able to let go of the narrative of my life. Other people pulled me outside of my grief over my father.

DH: Can you tell us about your time at the Knitting Factory in NYC? It was a hotbed of the avant-garde, no?

LG: It was thrilling to be at a club like that. I worked with John Zorn,the avant-garde saxophonist. I was green, so it had it scary moments for me.



* To purchase Galluccio's memoir "Sarasota Vll" go to http://cervenabarvapress.com

Doug Holder/Ibbetson Update/Jan. 2009/Somerville,

To the Life of the Silver Harbor: Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy on Cape Cod

To the Life of the Silver Harbor: Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy on Cape Cod Reuel K. Wilson. (University Press of New England One Court St. Lebanon, NH 03766) www.upne.com

The marriage of writers Mary McCarthy and Edmund Wilson was not an ordinary coupling. Their creative life spans more than half a century. Their collective literary opus consisted of criticism, fiction, autobiography, political journalism, travelogues, and to a lesser degree (in Wilson’s case) poetry.

In his memoir: “ To the Life of Silver Harbor: Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy on Cape Cod ,”Reuel K. Wilson, ( now well into his 70’s) the son of Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy focuses on his parents’ life on Cape Cod in the late 1930’s to the mid 1940’s, when their marriage ended after a tumultuous seven years. Reuel Wilson writes:

“They married in Feb. of 1938. Unfortunately, neither partner could peacefully coexist with the other under the same roof…Suffice it to say that Wilson, goaded by inner demons, was capable of boorish, cruel and even violent behavior. McCarthy, who carried the stigma of childhood trauma—as a young orphan she was cruelly used by her guardians—reacted emotionally to her husband’s frequent needling and criticism…”

McCarthy, author of the novel “The Group” among others, and Edmund Wilson, well-known for his “Memoirs of Hecate County,” decided to anchor their new married life in the environs of the Cape. Reuel Wilson writes that the Cape was a good fit for the couple:

“ Because of its great natural beauty and its odd mixture of locals and self-exiled, or vacationing writers and artists, the newly married couple decided to cast anchor in Wellfleet, just fourteen miles south of Provincetown at Cape’s end.”
Their life together was one of creative output, mixed with a great deal of boozing, idle flirting, infidelities, and violent arguments, all well-documented in this memoir. So whether you are a literary purist, or a gossip-monger, you will find much of interest here.

Although according to Reuel Wilson, the Cape was not Wilson’s high literary priority, he did write a lot about it as evidenced by his copious journal jottings. Here is a passage by Edmund Wilson concerning a favorite spot on the Cape, “Gull Pond”

"—pale dullish blue, as if unawakened yet with summer—smooth as metal with only a few glistenings of light, few but intensely bright and far out a loon… a float, silhouetting its neck and its long bill…”

Much of Wilson’s serious poetry was published in a volume “Night Thoughts” (1953), and a number of poems deal with the Cape. He writes in the poem “Provincetown”

“Here never in this place I knew/such beauty by your side, such peace--/These skies that brightening imbue/with dawn’s delight the day’s release.”

McCarthy wrote a novel “A Charmed Life,” that in some ways reflected the residents of Wellfleet. Reuel Wilson writes that the characters were “marked by weird idiosyncrasies that reflect inner distortions, willing slaves to their own weaknesses…” Overall the seacoast bohemia depicted in this novel lived contented lives. The novel got only a luke warm critical reception, and because of some unflattering descriptions of the townsfolk, it made McCarthy few new friends. McCarthy left the Cape behind for good shortly after the novel was released in 1955.

Although “To the Life of the Silver Harbor…” narrowly focuses on the couples life on the Cape, a much broader perception of these literary figure can be gleaned from this arcane scope.

Two Somerville Small Presses to be on Publishing Panel at Harvard University ( New England Poetry Club) April 6 2009

( Valerie Lawson--Off the Coast)



( Gloria Mindock-- Cervena Barva Press)






Doug Holder ( Ibbetson Street Press)



The Cervena Barva Press of Somerville, Mass, and the Ibbetson Street Press of Somerville Mass, as well as the well-regarded Maine-based literary journal "Off the Coast Magazine" will be represented on a small press panel at Harvard University sponsored by the New England Poetry Club. Publishers Valerie Lawson ( Off the Coast), Gloria Mindock ( Cervena Barva) and Doug Holder ( Ibbetson Street) will participate...




NEW ENGLAND POETRY CLUB first Monday POETRY READINGS 2009

Location: the Common Room of the Yenching Library Harvard University
2 Divinity Ave (off Kirkland near Memorial Hall)

Time: 7pm to 8.30pm

Free and open to the public



April 6th Panel on Publishing with Valerie Lawson (Off the
Coast), Doug Holder (Ibbetson Street Press), and Gloria Mindock
(Cervana Barva Press)

Little Things by Harry Smith

Little Things
Harry Smith
Presa :S: Press
2009 $13.95
ISBN 978-0-9800081-3-5

the opening poem is a killer story, it reads like a thriller with plot, tension and sympathy, as do all seven poems in the first section, Modern Ballads:

“…He started in on me.
I blocked his first three punches. A sideways bear
swipe knocked me down.
-’Please, Mister, lay off me. I won’t take no more.’
-I’ll break your neck.
He launched himself straight down on me and he
landed on my knife…”

my only criticism is I think the first section might work better as the last section because it feels so complete. it becomes an effort to get into the next set of poems after reading the intensity of those first ones. ending with the ballads seems a better evolution. Smith continues in a biographical vein:

“when Beethoven intoned, “must it be?”
the words inscribed above his quartet notes,
he meant that resoundingly
abysmal, simple question. smitten motes
of dancing dust…”

Smith freely plays with form in most of the poems and he lets us know in his poem, ‘a farewell to Ammons’:

“…style, you know, arbitrary one line spaces inserted, as
above, irregular uncontained couplets, line

breaks like this, floated jot jot jottings, his typical
stuff: this one about urine, his creatinine test…”

with a full range of forms, Smith gives us haiku-like glimpses through the nature of his experiences and often reminiscent of Nurada’s questions:

“is it a bad thing
to see everything as if
for the last time”

He is a story teller poet with an emphasis on small personal truths. the lives some people live effect our need to tell. “a measure of merit, your friends will find they keep the ideal climate of you mind.”

Irene Koronas
Poetry Editor
Ibbetson Street Press
Poetry Editor
Wilderness House Literary Review

An Alien Here by Leah Angstman

An Alien Here
Leah Angstman
Copyright 2008
Propaganda Press
Alternating Current
PO Box 398058
Cambridge, MA 02139
$3


A little bigger than a matchbook in size, this collection lives up to its title – Leah as an alien – as female, poet, visionary – and rivets us with maniacal, often shot-gun style almost cut and pasted language. I wouldn’t call the associations completely free, but they’re often jagged, lunar, with repeating edges and expressive frames. There is a lack of clear punctuation, so more like a zine in format the little poems run in tiny type-written texts through the book, coming to full-stops with others lunging ahead.

“stale in the air you
humanize public breathing waste”

Her radiant goes way out in some cases and then contracts to a very real, visceral moment. There’s great word-play, like good avant-pop, punk and goth lyrics. The line breaks are precise and do much to craft the startling effects she achieves.

“light light-source sabertooth
interpret this jungle it is
nicotine wasteland like the air I am
breathing”

Leah likes to go to the edge of inventing language patterns that disrupt our normal constructions.

But there is a also a thread of quite elegant lyricism running throughout the often dark, post-modern, or beat, forest of brute trees. In “Afternoons like This” we have:

“there are afternoons like these
when you learn you are not in love
and when you learn you are”

Still it includes the “alien” aspect as well:

“hollow tubes inside me
draining out color”

and then a series of the artificial manipulations we use to sexually attract:

“we are dyed hair
we are boob-adjustments right before
we catch his eye….”

These poems take wild, unexpected turns in the middle or the end; you can ride them like a riddle or an absinthe high.

“your touch though is so
heavy so many bricks so
cautious but courageous
isn’t that screen story a bit like us
don’t i have her attitude
and don’t you have peter’s excuses.”

And for a moment peter is the character in the film, a peter she knows – some acquaintance-- or he could be the famous Saint.

She’s packed a lot of voltage in a miniature book you keep fingering on the train from its home in your coat pocket. From the epic poem about her ancestry, “1926,” to a poem blatantly about a sexual encounter, “Riding Bareback,” she lassos a lot of material for us to imbibe. (Caution: if you prefer less to more, you won’t like the sometimes “piled on” and finger-paint-like instinctual use of language. If you think free verse should be unbridled and slightly crazed, you will.) The latter poem, while not a totally original metaphor for sex, is fine with me, recognizable and the verse unrolls like a movie:

“he is warm
so fucking warm
and wet
covered in necessity”

And there is the awkward moment when cowboy (or horse, as it may be) wants to know if she has climaxed. And she hesitates to give him a true account so as not to offend his ego—almost a cliché by now but real enough. His bravado and subsequent baby’s sleep is the amusing habit of the human male:

“I’ll make you cum
twice
next time he says”

And there is her simple reticence to jabber:

“I have nothing to say
but
yeah”


A thumbalina rocking collection.

Leah Angstam is a poet/writer, editor, publisher, musician, actor, and visual artist raised in a small town outside Lansing, MI. Her poetry blog can be found at leahangstam.blgspot.com.



Lo Galluccio
Ibbetson St. Press

Lo’s new prose-poem memoir “Sarasota VII’ is out on Cervena Barva Press. Her fictional text, “Denebola” will soon appear in Heide Hatry’s collection on Charta Books, “Heads and Tales.” Readings in February. http:logalluccio.atspace.com.

Base Metals by Jessica Harman

BASE METALS
Jessica Harman
Cloudkeeper Press
2009 $7.00

‘Base Metals’ is a love story, an intimate story of loss; not just the loss of a lover but sometimes the loss of cognition, perceived reality, touch, and balance, yet balance is always present in memory:

“…everywhere,

you are the sound of the train passing
through the city at night, that soothing rattle sewing
the distance to streetlights.

the sound tastes like moonlight and smoke.
the sickle moon’s base metal sets behind a maple tree
then the stars die out, one by one.

you are memory itself…”

Harmon doesn’t rush the reader, instead she lets us feel all the details, the voice often profound with succinct truths and the voice is always clear in its presence, never pretending otherwise. these poems open, or pull aside the curtains we sometimes close against what we don‘t want to know about ourselves:

…”but to you, sunlight was a pop song,
and pop songs were great - and light hearted - you liked
to walk on the sunny side of the street -

but sunshine to me was what
dried out the dust

and lifted your bed
when the wind scattered leaves and paper cups -”

the writing of love pulses through the dim halls of writing, and are reinvented generation after generation. here the poet tells us of anther kind of love of self and love of the past as a line to the present, even when the poet traces back, traces on dust on windows closed for winter. she constantly reaffirms her presence:

“even here in this place, where the sidewalks
buzz with filaments of snow. I am a body, a template
for your needles and blood pressure gauges. I am a magnet
for your pills, their sweet and salty. I am here in this city”

the directness: Harmon writes to the reader, there are no separations; all boundaries surround the reader with an emphasis of being all the characters at play. all treated with gentle respect even the face of tragedy become universal. we are left with an insight merged by the love of being a poet:

“the poem has meandered its way through
being. a poem’s pulse
is like night
in the naked wrist - “

Harman ends the chapbook with another endearment that twists and strongly suggests, question the next move, which I will not repeat here. it is up to you to buy the chapbook and find the ending:

“…the soft - boiled waves, to let my wings be quenched by salt.
and how often does the boat need to leak for us to learn to swim?

or am I talking only to myself? we’re out there,
looking for a place to plant our feet, walk…”

once you’re delved into the works presented, you will realize the importance of such a writer. Harman deserves a wide audience.

Cloudkeeper Press has once again offered a chapbook unlike any other. I’m convinced all great poets and writings from our present day culture, are being published, only, by small presses.

Irene Koronas
Poetry Editor
Wilderness House Literary Review
Poetry Editor
Ibbetson Street Press

BAGEL BARD BOOKS: BUY A DOZEN: FRESH BAKED!

THE BAGEL BARDS: THAT GROUP OF ENIGMATIC POETS AND WRITERS BASED IN SOMERVILLE,MASS HAVE A NUMBER OF INTRIGUING TITLES OUT BY AREA POETS:

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Wilderness House Literary Review Volume 1Wilderness House Literary Review Volume 1 (book)
Print: $24.95

The Wilderness House Literary Review was form out of the desires of a group of writers and poets to create an online journal for their works. As promised this is a print summary of the best of volume 1.



Bagels with the Bards No. 3Bagels with the Bards No. 3 (book)
Print: $15.95

Bagel Bard – noun. 1. A poet that is glazed and ring-shaped whose poetry has a tough, chewy texture usually made of leavened words and images dropped briefly into nearly boiling conversations on Saturday mornings— often baked to a golden brown. 2. –verb. To come together in writership over breakfast. To laugh so hard at an irreverent statement that the sesame seeds of the bagel you’ve just eaten explode from your mouth like grenade shrapnel. Welcome to the third Bagelbard Anthology. As some of you know (or can guess from the above definition) the Bagel Bards meet every Saturday morning at a designated spot. We breakfast in the original sense of eating, but also, because most of us are so busy working on our writing careers that we often find ourselves starved for great conversation. Well, the Bagel Bards breakfast hang is not only a place in which to do the aforementioned, but also to observe characters who themselves could be the subjects of poems and fiction.



Bagels with the Bards - No. 2Bagels with the Bards - No. 2 (book)
Print: $16.95

It all came to fruition the day we made our first bagel, after a few energetic drafts of the thing. It got up from the table, shook its rolling shoulders, yawned from the hollow core mouth of itself, and began to dance. At that precise moment, the miracle came as sure as the Matrix Oracle would have predicted from over her pan of cookies. Sunlight hit the bagel, and it became lines on the floor, long lines that would have been perfect for any chorus line, but instead filled themselves with words, words that made promises to all of us. These words spoke the premise. The poet is a baker although he may never have the dough. We looked at each other and knew this was our creation myth, this dance of language on some piece of paper, or in our hearts, or in the burrowed brow of the manager trying to wrap his head around the idea that poets gather in the corner of his place on Saturdays and spend a few hours living, living, living. O bard, a bagel has become a poem.

Human Derivatives in Doug Holder’s: The Man in the Booth in the Midtown Tunnel

Human Derivatives in Doug Holder’s: The Man in the Booth in the Midtown Tunnel (Cervena Barva Press)

article by Michael Todd Steffen



The man in the booth in the Midtown Tunnel, not the title of a poem but its subject, gives us, the passengers on the subway, a fleeting camera click of glimpse of a man defined in his function. He is confined to an extreme example of a human reduced from nearly all that makes him human, precisely because of how the world today is structured, encountered and processed. He is like a zoo animal. He paces the perimeter Of his cage, poet Doug Holder writes in lines reminiscent of Rainier Marie Rilke The Panther.



Holder typically takes these sorts of verbal photographs of people unusually overridden by probably what is not a definitive moment for the people as they really are, but by awkward vivid moments that would package them palatably for our quick-take-for-thrills media consciousness. People confined to monotonous jobs of function in a tunnel booth or at a post office machine, confined ridiculously for two years in a toilet, gotten up in colonial attire, apprehended at a maddened moment painting the statue of John Harvard red while tourists snap pictures.



The poet is snapping these photos partaking in the mania of his contemporary culture, and in doing so he is exercising a mimesis of the dynamics of 21st century perception, how data about ourselves is created and presented to others. As though our experience today consisted of a rapid succession of sudden images, spaced messages left, brief chats, sandwiches in wrappers on the go, news headlines, shifting windows, all with a hawks eye out for the next quirk or embarrassment to give cause to the perpetual laugh-track that must punctuate each moments joke, each segment of the day.



These are as serious implications as one would want to draw from a poet whose (can it be?) earnest intention is to humor us. Yet that Holder's perceptions are so keenly attuned to how the world works today gives an underlying substance to his seeming legerdemain, short poems of truncated lines, almost epigrammatic,laconic, tongue-in-cheek, yet at the same time oddly in the sympathetic spirit that Auden remembered in William Butler Yeats:



In a rapture of distress

Sing of human unsuccess.



And Doug Holder's disappointments succeed because, in partaking of the swift momentum of today's mediatized mindset, he stubbornly entertains his subjects as human in their dilemmas of being exposed. If the man in the booth of the Midtown Tunnel appears caged to us, how must we appear to him?



Faceless and a blur,

Behind thick plates

Of light-bleached glass.



Poignantly from so little, Holder produces a rather profound insight, articulated with lyrical simplicity:

And we will

All remain

Ignorant of

Each other.



A danger the poet risks in tailoring verse to popular contemporary expectations is that his or her work may be read with no more attention, say, than that ordinarily given to a cartoon strip or a note to the editor. Holders deft word-smithing, however, can halt us in the slaloms down the slopes, to want to mull over such coinings and scrivennings as blue uniform (Man in the Booth), It is only a hassle, (The Woman who Sat ), sea of manila (Postal Worker), the oxymoronic age's inertia (Two Old Women) and the metaphysical conceits of Bites of memory (The Last Hotdog) and of the final strophe in Postal Worker,

You feel

Ready to

Be returned to

Your sender



a dazzling compression of the momentary and mechanical with the ontological and transcendent.



In the recent year we have seen Doug Holder, a prolific and generous advocate of emerging poets in the Boston area, up in arms defending the worthiness of small press publications. Tirelessly he has organized readings and conducted interviews with local and national writers, giving them light of day on the Ibbetson Street website pages, in the Lyrical Somerville, and on the local Public Television program Author to Author. He has greatly helped give purpose to area intellectuals who meditate and labor to find expression in poetry and share as a community on Saturday mornings with the Bagels & Bards at the Davis Square Au Bon Pain. Cambridge/Somerville is a better place because of Doug Holder, and the small press made vital and serious because of the many publications he has been involved with, not least this latest collection of his own poetry that yields and yields enjoyment and meaning on reading after reading.



The Man in the Booth in the Midtown Tunnel by Doug Holder is available for $13.00 through Cervana Barva Press/P.O. Box 440357/W. Somerville, MA 02144-3222. http://cervenabarvapress.com



Check out also Bookstore: * HYPERLINK "http://www.thelostbookshelf.com" *www.thelostbookshelf.com*.

Signs, Translations by John Hildebidle

Signs, Translations
John Hildebidle
Salmon Poetry
ISBN 978-1-903392-83-6
2008 $12.00

through out this collection of poems the poet John Hildebidle directs our senses, our translations of what family or how we are creatively influenced by our most intimate situations:

“as a child, like you I moved
never so vastly, of course,
but again and again and
until it became something
deeper than habit…”

each page is an adventure, a discovery of each object, each sign, each person or food encountered on any given day:

Specialty of the House

“it looked like nothing I’d ever eaten.
surely that word on the menu meant pork.
the waiter tried so hard to explain.
my wife smirked, visibly:
“how is it? (no innocent question.)”
“what is it, I’d like to know.”
“he told you. pig’s feet. didn’t you understand?”
we sipped some wine.
“you mean you knew what I was doing
and let me go right ahead?”
“you’re a big boy.” “and often a bigger dolt,
as you know well. I rely on you to rescue me.”
“a full-time job, and more besides.”
“all that was called for in this case was a subtle hint.”
“was it that bad?” “I won’t say, one way or another.
that’s your punishment.” “you ate it all, and it was
‘the specialty of the house.’ consider it an adventure.”

the next to the last section in the book compliments the readers expectations with ‘poems on the life of Henry David Thoreau.’

“dead summer, and the air sags from use.
his tramps persist. heavy with dust,
as if the earth rose to claim
anything fool enough to roam…”

before the reader completes the reading of these poems, you will be tempted to revisit the beginning, turning back the pages many times. Signs, Translations, will sit next to my morning coffee. I will sip both with the expectations of a pick me up

Irene Koronas
Poetry editor
Wilderness House Literary Review
Poetry editor
Ibbetson Street Press

The Light at the End by Lyn Lifshin

Light at the End
The Jesus Poems
Lyn Lifshin
Clevis Hook Press 2008
ISBN 978-9821718-0-6
$12.95

Review by Irene Koronas

wow. this book of poems took me by surprise. I read through a few times before I let go of my own attitude of what was being written, once I let go did I found a sardonic collection of situations, a continual jab at the preverbal relationships women and men sometimes have. Lifshin cuts open all the wounds and images of how the sexes may act on occasion. there are, the younger than mary episodes, jesus running buck shot over innocence and innocence growing bitter. jesus represents some men:

“…some how there’d always been some
woman who found him divine
I did, for longer than many
marriages last. when opened
to him, the most ordinary
days seemed magical. blood
on our shin…”

there is enough irreverence between these sheets, pages, to feed all the readers who enjoy punk rock or hippie flowers. if the poems were set to music people might throw themselves into or onto the audience with reassurance of being caught, carried up and out:

“…me bareback, our lips and kisses reins
‘I’ve touched your perfect body,’ he sang better
than Leonard Cohen himself and in his passion,
yelped yippy I o and I squealed oh Jesus
and Christ and Lord until I was hoarse.”

it takes a few readings for me to place jesus as a Spanish lover or all the lovers or all the men the author can conjure but when I place the poems in perspective I start to laugh.

the poems are clever, interesting, and not charming. Lifshin ‘pulls off’ another book of difference. the reader will ride a stormy night or a bright blinding morning after…:

“I don’t care if it rains or freezes
as long as I’ve got my plastic Jesus”

he has risen to
walk-where the
hell has he been,
what’s happened,
our nation has turned
its back on Jesus
lost its way
sideshow suckers,
heathens killing
babies, presidents
with their pants
around their ankles
I’m on the road
that leads to Jesus
send 50 dollars to
my 800 number and
get yourself a
good road map

poet preacher Lifshin, like a sharp shooter who can hit a nickel dead center from 10 miles away, nails it


Irene Koronas/ Ibbetson Update/ Jan 2009

The Fearful Symmetries of Lo Galluccio’s Sarasota VII

The Fearful Symmetries of Lo Galluccio’s Sarasota VII

article by Michael T. Steffen



From the sepulchral artifacts of ancient Egypt to the horror films we watch in our cinemas, civilizations have attested again and again to the powerful creative articulation people find in the loss of loved ones. Far from any form of closure, grief resonates irresolutely within us, demanding response after response, a virtual wellspring of language, the poet’s torment and treasure. Formally approached, art provides a medium of exploration to channel and cultivate the enormous curiosity that loss bequeaths to us. Yet drawing expressions from these sources of our inspirations hardly depletes the well. So much happens simultaneously in our relationships: you as you are, you as I perceive or desire you, I as am and as am perceived/project myself. Factor in time and the complexity deepens: you as you are, you as you were and would want me to be this new year… Many writers feel some accomplishment in extracting an element or so from the complexity in a given piece of writing. More boldly, however, attempts now and then are made exposing the artist in a defiant embracing of as much elemental psychic transference as she or he can, resulting in some of the works we read in classes at the highest levels, The Odyssey, Hamlet, The Waste Land. I don’t mean to mince values by comparing Lo Galluccio’s Sarasota VII with the great masterpieces of world literature. (Irene Koronas in Sarasota VII sees traces of Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, to name a few.) Yet reading Sarasota VII gave me the impression of a poet drawing into that kind of perilous arena, a tamer in a cage surrounded by dangerous “symmetries.” While wary of falsely glorifying Sarasota VII, I think it important to acknowledge the work’s barest formal venture, the confrontational expectations proposed and that Galluccio was able to contain this material and shape it into one work. It attests to a great character of faith and resilience in it author.

The perceiving of multiple identities (I-thou, am, are, is, was…to become…) haunts Sarasota VII and also seeds the work with brilliant insights.



…those of us who lose a reflection of ourselves

in childhood have two lives. We know ourselves

against life and against death. As a tree knows

itself against a space of sky and against a density

of earth (I,3).



We know hot from cold, both of shared elements, water or air. So life from death, yet again of shared elements, memory and language, which make us human, the creature for whom so much of the present is composed of the past, memory, language.

And the life of the body is known from that of the mind.



The smell of barbecue rising through the open

window, caress of wind, a desire to lie on the

floor and feed kisses with kisses on some mouth,

even a woman’s, even her own. The sensation

makes her dizzy and enormous. Enormously earth-

bound and stupid. Smarter than words. The body

defies all ideas and projections of ideas. The body

wants only to move, to rest and to touch. It offers

ecstasy and expression. The mind dangles spiders,

spins cobwebs, and explanations that mummify

the rest. Split? (I,8).



This is wonderful poetry, naming—this from that, Adam in the garden, Joyce in The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It is the beginning of a galaxy, analysis, the splitting or separation of matter, this from that, the poetry of the discovery (rediscovery) of each thing, consummately of the beloved, the so significant other, at whose meeting we begin to synthesize, to know and identify with and in part become one with.



We kissed. Again and again. For nine months.

I sent you home. I loved you. I loved the taste

of you. Knew the danger of you and you walked

home in my jacket. “I already expect to die,” you

said. Just like a survivor. I knew that better than

almost anyone else, you knew the art of survival

and how to feed yourself (I,15).



Anxiously in section 12 of Part I Galluccio asks, “Can one form a work of art without attention to form, without a basis in it?” In fact, Sarasota VII enacts a universally recognizable formation in its taking apart and synthesizing things, people, psyches, worlds. The form of human life synthesizes the fetus out of a series of meiosis or splitting of cells. That is nature’s task, initiating a life out of the initiation of two deaths, those of the lovers or sexual partners. The anxiety of that natural death ignites the intellect of the artist in defiance, whose spidery mind at some point refuses and steps back away from the completion of the natural sexual death.



you’d feed off me. Now you say, “You were lonely.”

Now you say, “You shouldn’t have let me steal your

power.” I say: “We were twins.” I say: “You shouldn’t

have needed to steal the power you admired and hated”

(I,15).



So the lost lover, the subject of Part I, failed to become the provider. Instead, “You offered heat. You breathe lies and drama… You became my theatre… (ibid).

Classically, in the Latin poet Horace’s terms, dramatic form was linear and consisted of a beginning, a middle and an end. It established the characters in the setting of a significant moment, troubled those characters with that moment, then (comedy) resolved that trouble or (tragedy) further unraveled the characters in the exaltation of their dilemmas. It’s not the lack of formative polarities that is missing in Sarasota VII. It is their linear playing out, a more obvious and logical sequence, which we are denied, perhaps which we today expect to be denied.

Galluccio owns this work, though, as a memoir, yet the notion of drama is frequently conjured so that a nifty sleight of the theatrical echoes over into the reader’s perceptions. I particularly liked the section that identified actors and criminals:



Both refuse a set place. A legitimate space. They ribbon

graffiti on the walls of worlds solid hands and straight

minds have constructed. They wear masks. What

distinguishes the outlaw, the actor? His long-term

cowardice or his continuously summoned, quickly

spurted courage? (I, 10).



Part II shifts its focus from lost lover to lost father, and also visits Galluccio’s experience with drama. Rather than being disappointed sexually, the child orphaned by the parent’s death deals with a larger, more cosmic sensation of abandonment, and the poet sings the plangent refrain, “Because I’m fatherless…”



Because I’m fatherless the director wants me to come

by his bungalow for a drink so he can confide in me

all the frustrations of his theatrical kingdom. Like

Viola in “Twelfth Night” I’m to become sympathetic

and marooned by this Duke’s forlorn appetite. I decline…

(II. I.)



Though it is refused the presentation of linear form, there is a story, a drama to Sarasota VII. Out of a similar refusal Vladimir Nabokov wrote his memoir-style novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. Formally the memoir is appropriate to the spirit of post-modernism in that its narration is topical rather than temporal, its narration simultaneous rather than linear, all things happening at once in the out-of-time moment of remembering and writing.

If Sarasota VII elicits comparison with great works, it is I think because Galluccio has dared to flutter around some very long-burning flames, love and death, the rules of the mind vs. the joys and pains of the body, the comforts of being accepted vs. the stings of rejection, deeply the daughter and the father.

It would be wrong simply to flatter and inflate the author unjustly. Sarasota VII is not a bad attempt at artistic surrender in amplitude. Whether it is enough for a young literary talent to rest upon, that is the author’s decision. It is a generous gift to us readers certainly.

About The Book of Nightmares Galway Kinnell was told that it was a great poem despite its many flaws.

Impressive in scope, continuity and sustained melody, Sarasota VII bears everything necessary, high and low, to be read with enthusiasm and consideration.





Sarasota VII is available for $12.00 from Cervana Barva Press/ P.O. Box 440357/

W. Somerville, MA 02144-3222/ www.cervanabarvapress.com.

See also, Bookstore: www.thelostbookshelf.com.



Michael Todd Steffen Jan. 2009

"The Holy Fool" ( For Mike Amado 1974-2009)

THE HOLY FOOL (for Mike Amado, 1974 - 2009)

Tapping congas in a red shirt,
he brought music to all of us
from ordinary life
where magic does not rule.

Non-listeners did not challenge him
when he uttered his poems
directly from an open heart.
He was wiser than his years.

A transplant failed
and years in dialysis taught him
how to blur out time
when needed,
how to fly like an eagle
above his body.

He brought me back to youth
when animals and gypsies caught fire
and those who witnessed
became Holy Fools.

He was one, too,
turning ruin to beauty,
his mortal pain soaring
on careful wings.

--Carolyn Gregory, 1/3/09

I Will Always Remember It Well: The Chelsea Hotel

I Will Always Remember It Well: The Chelsea Hotel





I have always heard and read about the Chelsea Hotel, in the Chelsea Section of New York City. Recently I visited, and resided for a short stay in this literary landmark. Of course I remember Leonard Cohen’s lament of a song “I Remember You Well At The Chelsea Hotel,” and Dylan Thomas’ daughter talked to me about her father’s last days at the Chelsea, (during the time he drank himself to death), in an interview I conducted with her. The composer Virgil Thompson was a long-term resident; Sid Vicious and Nancy were holed up in a room there, as well as the novelist Thomas Wolfe of “You Can’t Go Home Again” fame. I am told he wrote for days on end standing up, rather than sitting at a desk. Arthur C. Clarke wrote “2001: A Space Odyssey” while staying at the Hotel. The playwright Arthur Miller spent part of his honeymoon with Marilyn Monroe at the Chelsea; Bob Dylan stayed there and composed several songs (there was a failed attempt to renovate his room recently). A friend of mine Philip Segal, a professor of English in NYC, told me over dinner during my stay at the Hotel, that he attended several parties at the Chelsea. The rooms were so small and cramped that the parties spilled out into the generous halls that were and still are peppered with artwork of all stripes. He told me that the space in the hallways is so spacious that a ballet company practiced there regularly.



The Chelsea has a reputation of being a literary and artistic flophouse of sorts. A place where the famous, not so famous, the shut-in, the dreamer and the drifter coexisted. And since I was making a trek to New York to meet with some fellow poets, I decided to book a room for a few nights.



The Chelsea, a twelve story builiding with brick and wrought iron balcony balustrades, was the first building in NYC to be listed as a cultural preservation site and historic building of note. It opened in 1884 as one of the first private apartment cooperatives. Since 1946, the hotel had been managed by the Bard family, and since 1955 Stanley Bard ran the joint, until he was ousted by a management company in 2007. Bard was a much loved manager, presiding benevolently over the residents and the guests who lived there. Bard seemed to understand the concept of the starving artist, allowing some to pay rent by paintings, etc… However the new management is much more bottom line, and since Bard left there has been controversy, as residents have mounted a campaign of banners, pranks, and protests toward getting Bard back. Ed Hamilton a resident and author of “Legends of the Chelsea Hotel…” told me that “Unfortunately, the hotel is no longer accepting permanent residents and that is a shame. The permanent tenants are as important to the hotel as the tourists.”



Upon arriving at the Chelsea my wife and I noticed a guitar store adjacent to the hotel was having a “Bernie Madoff Clearance Sale.” Now the lobby ain’t your typical Holiday Inn affair. When we entered we saw a man staring intensely at us, looking for all the world like the resurrection of Samuel Beckett. He was sitting under a suspended paper mache scultpure of a fat lady on a swing. The lobby was full of artworks, murals, etc… There was a painting of an elongated, long-faced Fido, aptly named “Chelsea Dog” that captured my attention. The front desk looked like a prop from Eugene O’Neill’s play “Hughie.” I saw that play some years ago. It starred the actor Jason Robards, who played a down-at-the-heels snake oil salesman, living out his failed life, in a failed, gone-to seed hotel.

We took a squeaking elevator to our room on the third floor. A balding, distracted gentleman asked my wife if she knew where “The Shining” painting was (based on the Stephen King movie). We didn’t now but we ran across it later. The floor we stayed on, and in fact all the floors, are full of artwork, many from of the residents. Even the fire extinguishers were adorned with stickers and graffiti, that made them look like sites of art installation…I guess they are. There is an eclectic selection of paintings on the walls in the gothic halls, including prints of Roy Cohn (of all people), Eisenhower, Jimi Hendrix, Hunter S. Thompson, a beguiling “Horse On Oil Canvas” by Joe Andoe, a photo montage of Andy Warhol and Muhammad Ali, and a huge mural that depicts residents in dialogue: “Myra Resnick in 308 says the Chelsea rocks!” On the top floor you experience ethereal sky light, and series of suspended mobiles, wafting images on the ceilings.

Forty percent of the rooms are saved for residents, and there is a definite sense of community in the place. Ed Hamilton wrote that the Chelsea is the “Last Outpost of Bohemia.” I advise you to visit and make haste/ the way things are going /there is no time to waste!