Review of the Briar Cliff Review, Volume 26, 2014

Review of  the Briar Cliff  Review, Volume 26, 2014

Alice Weiss

            Briar Cliff  Review, glossy, eight by eleven, book bound,  has riches: for the eye, for the mind, for the heart. There are poems, essays, short stories.  Every poem is accompanied by a color photograph, or a color photograph of an artwork, on a facing page.  The resulting experience is sumptuous.  The editor, Tricia Currans-Sheehan is an ironist and a gimlet eyed observer.  I know this because the photo given pride of place is black and white, pictures a man’s chest, hands pulling his shirt open to reveal the Superman logo reaching from his collarbone to mid abdomen.  Above the left fist gripping the shirt, is a smallish but readable name tag like one you would wear at a convention: CLARK KENT/ DAILY PLANET REPORTER/50 YEARS OF SERVICE.

             The editor’s theme: the international is local.  The editor’s choices broadly international.  Thailand, Paraguay and Pakistan, are examples of the reach. The first story “Thunder in Illinois” rather remarkably illustrates that theme. It spans the world from Champaignw-Urbana to Bangkok, but its locality is the marriage of the Evanses. Mister being an international contractor with a mistress in Bangkok and Mrs. being a fourth grade teacher who nonetheless and knowing his indiscretions stays married to him.  Their battleground is a scrabble-like weekly game.  They have been keeping score for all the years of their marriage.  He is losing by a few points although their scores are close and add up to more than a million.   She minds about the mistress.  He is dying slowly from Leukemia. What is amazing about this story is how adroitly the writer, Leslie Kirk Campbell, handles all this material so you never notice you are reading a novel in five pages.

            Rose Lane’s “Apogee,” the winner of BCR’s poetry contest, follows a dying father through all the last times he does the things he does in his life, selling his lobster boat, mowing neighbor’s lawn “for a couple of bucks.” While the family watches the tractor reel, and his head bob up over the tall bushes, the poem rises to a moment when the father picks up a dying baby bird, “no bigger than a knuckle,” holds it and merges weeping with it in their common death, the bird “pecking his path ahead.” Opposite this poem is the photograph of a painting, “Vespers,”by Arlene Laoesche Branwick,a gold and orange yellow cloudish color and a dark maroon, leading to a bright line horizon and then more darkness.  Apogee, the word, designates the point at which a planetary body is furthest from the earth, a dispersal or a movement of spirit both poem and painting share.

            Another coupling of the visible and the poetic: on the left side page a monotone  Roberto Kusterlle, A Silent Mutation 9A/Head.  gelled and spiked, spikes, sharp beige tipped, scalp hair dark, sie of neck and face a rich browny beige, skin rough even scarred.  The shocking sight is the spikes all over the head, but you can’t help thinking thorns.  No face show in the photograph.

The facing page, a poem by Jed Myers, “Another Start”

           

            Before all the stars there was a dark /magnificent woman. . . a run

            just under the knee in that black silk

            stocking with all the luck – that’s all

            it took, a little defect, maybe

            only as long as a light year

The power of that defect and the scars and spike resonate in such a way that again the picture and the poem become meditations on each other’s power and power, itself.

            This is a magazine with many such moments.

On My Way To Becoming A Man by A.D. Winans

(Left) A.D. Winans with the late Jack Micheline

On My Way To Becoming A Man

by A.D. Winans

© 2014 by A.D. Winans

NYQ Books

New York, NY

ISBN 978-1-935520-25-2

Softbound, no price given, 108 pages

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

I have read that A. D. Winans is the second coming of Charles Bukowski. That he is the new Allen Ginsberg. However, believe me he is neither of these, he is his own world class poet. Bukowski was mostly about himself and his booze or his women. Ginsberg was about everything else.

Winans in his new book On My Way to Becoming a Man shows where he is coming from: speaking out for the working class, the downtrodden, the poor, women, the abused, victims of war and his personal opposition to war.

Often described as the “last of the beats” Winans carries on their tradition with his uncompromising observations and exclamations.

This book begins on military bases where Mr. Winans is quick to learn the hard lessons of military life at Lackland Air Force Base and then Panama.

Many of his poems leave no doubt what they are about: “Growing Up In America,” “The System,” “Reaganites,” “Chinatown Sweatshop,” “We The People,” and his final “I Am San Francisco,” a not to be missed poem in which he combines all of the Beats and pieces of Bob Kaufman, Ginsburg, Bukowski, semblances of Kerouac and others.

What makes Winans poetry so good is that he knows and understands the low and high ends of society and most everything in between. He deals with San Quentin Prison, the Pope, Sitting Bull, Old Poets and more.

Who but Winans can criticize poets we hold near and dear? Who else can skewer politicians and dead presidents? Who would dare go after major corporations, the military, establishment heroes while commenting on the futility and corruption of so much in America?

We (the people) just don’t have any poets around who speak for us the way Winans does, whether you like how he does it or not. Too much poetry has degenerated in self-wallowing pity or self-created failure. This meaningless poetry is offset by the real poetry of Winans assaults on war, politics, religion and the wealthy.

Following are lines from Winans which are difficult to forget and worth remembering:

the IRS is a legal shake down

the Pentagon a slaughter house

--from San Francisco Blues

they cross the border

looking for a piece

of the promised land

entering a country that once

belonged to their ancestors

--from Poem for the Governor of Arizona

he toils on the assembly line

works an eight ten hour shift

leaves a piece of him behind

for every part he helps make

--from Factory Worker

U.S. generals claim substantial

gains and important victories

in the past month while fresh supplies

of bodies are ordered by the Pentagon

for expected vacancies computed

to exist from statistical backlog

and Vietnam (Cong) terrorist activities

--from Dial 890 Remembering The Old

Sixties

I watched the Cavalry charge

the Indian villages

like Attila the Hun

believing Custer a hero

and Sitting Bull a savage

-from Growing Up In America

this poem is for those

who gave their lifeblood

to wash the streets free of oppression

for those who rest in heroic

and not so heroic graves

in the struggle

for human dignity

--from Poem for Roberto Vargas and the

Nicaraguan Freedom Fighters

These are but a few examples extracted from the 52 poems and 108 pages of some of the more meaningful poetic lines written by a surviving member of the generation of poets who provided us with ideas to think about, actions to take and memories to last. You will find this trio of important concepts in A.D. Winans’s On My Way To Becoming A Man. Don’t miss this book

_____________________________________________________

Zvi A. Sesling

Author, King of the Jungle (Ibbetson Street Press)

Author, Across Stones of Bad Dreams (Cervena Barva Press)

Editor, Muddy River Poetry Review

Editor, Bagel Bards Anthology 7

Editor, Bagel Bards Anthology 8

Publisher, Muddy River Books

 

The Out of the Blue Gallery--To Close and Hopefully Move to New Location!

The Out of the Blue Gallery--Cambridge, Mass.

I got this message from Tom Tipton ,the owner of the Out of the Blue Gallery in Cambridge, Mass. For years I have attended events, hosted readings, and even contributed to an anthology of prose and poetry edited by Timothy Gager and Deborah Priestly The Out of the Blue Gallery Unites under the umbrella of the Out of the Blue. Many Somerville artists, and artist from around the area and the country, have found this venue a welcoming oasis for their creative output. This is a top shelf grassroots organization and I hope it lands in a new location.--Doug Holder. 



After nearly 18 years of providing a home for local artists at our present location, the Out of the Blue Gallery, must find a new home due to real estate issues beyond our control. 

The Gallery has been operating out of Central Square in Cambridge, providing a home for local artists of all genres. We provide a space for writers groups, dance classes, acoustic music and more to meet and showcase their talents. We hang art not only in our own gallery, but at several other Cambridge locations including The Middle East and 1369 Coffee House.

The Gallery has become known as a welcoming starter venue to those whose talents might not otherwise be recognized, as well as a home for more established acts and artists. We provide an intimate atmosphere for everyone, of all abilities, to benefit from each others creative accomplishments.

Thank you for all the love and support for the Gallery, and each other all these years. The plan is to keep it going.

We invite you to join us for a series of benefits to help us raise money to offset the financial burden of relocating. Every penny donated will go toward improving the gallery to better serve the community.

Supporting Out of the Blue Gallery is supporting local artists, musicians and more
--------------------------------------------
Upcoming Benefits:
online fundraiser

http://www.gofundme.com/a8l4uo

The Thursday Appointments of Bill Sloan Timothy Gager

The Thursday Appointments of Bill Sloan

Timothy Gager

Big Table Publishing

Release date: Only a few more weeks

$15.00 available as a special order from select books stores

and at most online book retailers

By Rene Schwiesow

A few years ago Timothy Gager contacted me and asked if I might like to read the draft of his novel and offer some edit suggestions. Who am I to turn down the opportunity to read a book, especially a book by a writer I respect and whose work I have admired? I accepted and, once I began reading, I happily took note of its unique formatting style. “The Thursday Appointments of Bill Sloan” showcases Gager’s development of his fearless, individual voice. He introduces us to his well-crafted characters first through the clinical notes taken by Bill Sloan, their more-than-struggling-himself therapist.

Gager offers this one line synopsis: “A story of a man whose job it is to help people, but in reality, he is inept, sarcastic, and each and every day represents something to get through.” Sloan is definitely inept and sarcastic and I’ll throw unethical into the mix. The journey through Bill Sloan’s days, however, brings transformation to Gager’s characters, ultimately also transforming Sloan; but as with all transformational journeys the shifts are not without their tragedies. Gager takes quirky characters experiencing grief, past trauma, and existential angst and adds his unique humor intertwining the characters’ lives through their clinical liason, and a twist on counseling Lucy Van Pelt style when the character Kate Hummingbird Warrior sets up a sidewalk therapy stand.

Sloan is therapist meet greed and self-centered absorption. More concerned with promoting Bill Sloan than healing his clients, he spirals downward and out of control. The question is can alternative healing, angry, self-deprecating clients, and a wolf be enough to save him from himself? Can his demise be enough to save his clients from their own self-absorbed morass?

No, Gager’s work does not follow your typical novel template. How refreshing. The formatting captures the reader’s attention from the get-go. Rusty Barnes, co-founder Night Train Magazine and author of “Reckoning,” calls “The Thursday Appointments of Bill Sloan” a “gangbusters novel.” Meg Tuite, author of “Bound by Blue” says “Get a Copy!” This reviewer agrees on both counts. Do yourself a favor and pick this novel up immediately upon release!

Monk Eats an Afro by Yolanda Wisher

Monk Eats an Afro

by Yolanda Wisher

Brooklyn: Hanging Loose Press, 2014

978-1-934909-42-3

$18.00

Reviewed by David P. Miller

Poet Yolanda Wisher, a Cave Canem fellow, lives in Philadelphia with her husband and double-bass player Mark Palacio, and their young son Thelonious. As you might guess from that brief bio and the title, her debut volume Monk Eats an Afro is full of music - lively, celebrating, eulogizing, lyric and reflective as the situation calls for it. I find this review to be longer than planned, and still it can’t do justice to this collection. But let’s start.

The first of four sections, “The Myth of Stew,” centers on the family, especially the women, deep and richly formative. As she writes in the title poem for this section, “a pot    don’t call it a cauldron / could feed millions for eternity” with “a woman and her girls / sitting at the table / like thick spoons”, both sustaining and being sustained. “My Family of Women” presents dense imagery in a brief space. The women keep the girl strong, autonomous, and protected, while at the same time opening her mind in ways they didn’t anticipate:

Church women and pinochle sinners

gave me my tutelage in fatherlessness, their tongues

commanded by a ruthless orgy of verbal desire

broke my mind into seven spheres.

In “Violin to Fiddle,” when the girl’s turn in a music recital seems forgotten, or maybe deliberately ignored, by the teacher (“his glass eye grinning / like an overseer / announced the end of the program”), her mother pushes her and the whole room for her claim her part: “you are Black / and have a right to this.” Again there’s an unexpected transformation, hinted by the title, as

a bumblebee found me quick

about three bars in

but I kept on playing

like a can of Raid in that dress

Goaded it seems by the bee, she comes to “this be your fiddle / claim it”.

Monk Eats an Afro includes poems framed as “Songs,” with a distinct layout and a different voice. In the Song titled “Ancestors,” Yolanda Wisher asks where the family has gone, finds them not lost at all but manifest everywhere: “Walt say / in the bubbles of the stew // Pablo say / in the iridescence of fish”.

“Slow Drag,” the second part, moves away from home to neighborhood, lover, future husband, and friends. “5 South 43rd Street, Floor 2” gives us a thick description of the speaker “hungry” for the West Philadelphia neighborhood where she lives:

Once we went into a store sunk into the street,

owned by a Cambodian woman. She sold everything,

from evening gowns to soup. Over to Walnut and 45th,

where the Muslim cat sells this chicken wrapped in pita,

draped in cucumber sauce.

And everything makes her neighborhood, including the adult video store (where “a white man hustles” furtively away), the “shit stain from a wino,” and a murder, which doesn’t constrict the meaning of home, though it happened:

One night, a man was shot and killed on this block,

right outside our thick wood door. But not today.

In the song “Worthy,” stunning imagery tells of the speaker’s joining with the man who would become her husband. Their love was

Deeper than Iraqi oil

Darker than Belgian chocolate

More opaque than midnight sky

More comely than Sheba

And in their devotion,

She saw fingers wrought for good fortune

Locks like the tallest trees

He took her thighs for hymns & mantras

Her scars for heirloom jewelry

I have to mention “English Department Meeting Query,” which opens with one of those godawful classroom study questions: “What is cultural tension? What are some examples that we see in the world, in our neighborhoods, in our school?” Wisher replies to this question in the kind of detail that heightens its basic cringeworthiness: “The working class guy named Jim next door / with his bumper sticker about Unions and his / shit about Puerto Ricans”, just to begin with. It makes me wonder about the rarefied activity of writing this review, even.

The third section, “Harriet,” presents the lengthiest, most complex poems in this collection, First, though, it opens with the song “Melon Rap,” a coming-out from a very particular closet - the love of watermelon:

Can’t indulge in public

Folks might call me coon

So I grow you in my backyard

By the light of the moon

“American Valentine” is a sustained meditation about Phillis Wheatley, whose legacies Wisher plays out in a multiplicity of images without reaching for a single unity. The colonial-era slave woman poet, “who used to be a sellout / who used to dance / that waitress two-step” (II), also

[…] slashes out

pulpit with pen

to sister-friend,

knows a thing or two

about BARBARITY, EVIL

and CRAFTINESS,

and still talkin bout REVOLUTION,

American as the LIBERTY

on her tongue

of Latin-edged lingo.  (I)

There is much more here, suggesting the scent, the resonance, of Wheatley as misplaced transplant who nevertheless perfuses culture and identity, surreptitiously and persistently.

Similarly, “Harriet” presents multiple facets of Harriet Tubman, as a critical historical figure and necessary strength and medicine for every day:

so invoke her

when they belittle you

push you to the fringes

of your own city

invoke her

when you’re feeling

like a credit score

bent and bleeding

from this American

cat’s toying

Following quickly, the prose poem “Dear John Letter to America” is a series of coruscating images of what America keeps promising and can’t get right: “I am a slaveship and you are a skyscraper. […] Used to woo me with roses carved from melons, douches of Colt 45 and holy water, ivory pearls that turned out to be my Grandpa’s wisdom teeth.” And still it seems that if the apostrophized America would only show simple directness and real vulnerability, the relationship might have a chance: “Show me your dirty drawls and your secret birthmark. Maybe then, America, I might give myself to you.”

The epic “Notes from a Slave Ship” begins with an epigraph from Essex Hemphill, imaging a city bus populated with mostly Black riders as a slave ship. Its nine sections play on this theme, mostly using specific transit lines and/or locations as jumping-off points for a wide range of stories, observations, and reflections. This is a poem of great scope.

“Monk Eats an Afro” is the title of the fourth and final section, bringing us back to the family: Wisher’s own family now. “Dawn in East New York” moves from a well-drawn, remembered story from high school, told to her by her husband in high school, to a quiet scene on their bed as she is expecting their child:

[…] And now

lying in bed for the past three nights

he studies the manual of a Nikon F60

holding the camera in lamplight, getting

ready to take a morning portrait of

my belly full of his son.

In “Diane,” there is a moving contrast between the casual disrespect for the body of a deceased friend (maybe a family member?) and her own body full of a new life, a scene at a funeral home:

did you know

they had you lying in a

cardboard box

covered in bedsheets

with tea-covered stains […]

I wanted to tuck you in

wanted to give you

my stomach swollen with promise

And at last the title poem: “Monk Eats an Afro,” funny and full of unsettling imagery, as Thelonious Monk consumes an Afro “on a silver platter / with a choice of two sides”.  As he gives some to her and some to the baby, the scene opens up with pleasurable morphing energy: Ella Fitzgerald puts the leftovers

into her purse

where tiny blues singers

hotcombed them on a conveyor belt

into sheets of butter

with notes of bop

That’s it right there. In Yolanda Wisher’s poetry, nothing need remain fixed or finally identified. Viewed rightly, through memory, observation, or dream, our engagement with world and heritage is a constant source of new life and renewal:

kiss the pyramids and trap doors of history

for me. give my love to the sea bottom and the sharks. (“Notes from a Slave Ship”)

Mark Redmond: A curator of jazz at The Green Room in Somerville.

 

Jazz at Somerville's Green Room

Mark Redmond: A curator of jazz at The Green Room in Somerville.

Mark Redmond looks more like a lumberjack than a jazz aficionado.  This tall, imposing man with a thick beard joined me at my usual table in the back of the Bloc11 Café in Union Square to talk about his relatively new series: “Jazz at The Green Room.” The Green Room is at 62 Bow St. in Union Square and was founded by Somerville musicians and vocalists Michael and Anney Barrett. The space, according to Redmond, was a former dry cleaning establishment. It hosts a variety of events that lean toward the classical side, but not exclusively.

Redmond said Union Square Somerville is a great place for his venue. The Green Room is an “intimate” space which Redmond feels is a perfect fit for the intimate art of jazz. He likes the vibrant scene here in Somerville, with places like Sally O’Brien’s, Bull McCabe's, P.A.’s Lounge  and others in close proximity. “All these places cater to a variety of musical tastes,” Redmond said.

Redmond told me that his series started in late November of last year. He has hosted many jazz musicians, including a number from Somerville.  Garrison Fewell, a Somerville resident and a noted jazz guitarist and educator, as well as Somerville denizen Jean-marie-Corrois, an accomplished drummer, have been on stage. Another Somerville resident of note is saxophonist Russ Gershon, founder of the famed Either/Orchestra and impresario of the Accurate Records label. He and the pianist Rusty Scott played for Redmond and said of the experience: “The Green Room is like a nano-concert hall—intimate, creative, great sound and good piano.” Other musicians of note who have featured there are Bert Seager, who teaches at the New England Conservatory, as well as Somerville vocalist Laura Grill, who recently appeared at Somerville’s Joe’s Jazz & Blues Festival.  Matt Glaser, a violinist who directed the string department at Berklee for decades and founded their American Roots Music department, will bring a trio in the fall.

Redmond told me he has had a long love affair with jazz. He used to listen to his father’s albums when he was a kid. He listed some of his early influences as: Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Bill Evans and other classics. I asked Redmond about the genres of jazz has he hosted. He said: “I’ve booked folks who play straight-ahead traditional jazz, avant garde stuff, bebop, Gypsy Jazz. I like a variety of music—I like the energy and creativity it brings.”

Before the interview I did a little research on Redmond. I noticed he works as an existentially-oriented psychotherapist.  Visions of Sartre, the meaningless of existence, and the connection to jazz ran through my pretentious head.  But Redmond, a straight-no-chaser sort of guy, said: “I don’t know about the connection between the two, but live music, that sacred place in time, the energy, the movement, is a vital element for me.”

The good news is that The Green Room is owned by the Barretts—so when the gentrification of Union Square is complete they won’t be forced out by the skyrocketing rents that will displace many others.

Redmond has several events scheduled this summer and into the fall. They are usually held on weekend  evenings, and the admission is ten dollars. To find out more about his series:

 Jazz at The Green Room