Amounting to Nothing Poems by Paul Quenon, OCSO

Paul Quenon

Amounting to Nothing

Poems by Paul Quenon, OCSO

Paraclete Press

Brewster, MA

www.paracletepress.com

ISBN: 978-1-64060-201-4

93 Pages

$18.00

Review by Dennis Daly

Like Tibetan prayer flags hung outdoors, pervading the natural world with wisdom and blessings before fading into invisibility, Paul Quenon’s newest poems, included in his collection Amounting to Nothing, are wind-blown mantras of belief and renewal.

Quenon, a Cistercian (Trappist) monk living at Gethsemani Abbey in rural Kentucky, atomizes himself into his wondrous community of creatures and phenomena. His self-deprecation informs both his wit and wisdom. Inconveniently, however, the poet's brand of humility questions even his own judgment and thus his attempts to measure out a life. A flaw perhaps, but also an artistic irritation and poetic spur.

Abnegation of being or a merging with the divine holds the key for any good monk seeking holiness. In Quenon's opening poem, Mad Monk's Life Ambition, his persona tries to figure things out. Double negatives aside, clever word play animates the piece. Here the monk considers his mission,

Did someone lay on a jinx and say:

You'll never amount to nothing?

How sad, since I took nothing

as my monastic goal.

I still don't amount to nothing,

still think I'm something.

I hardly amount to a hill of beans but

this already is too much of something.

What ever might you mount

to amount to nothing?

Where is that magical mountain?

Hide and Seek may be a popular children's game, but Quenon discovers that it suits his monkhood perfectly. In practice the poet finds hiding as an opportunity to observe and understand the nature of creation. Other poets would agree. Quenon goes one step further in his poem entitled Alone with the Alone and declaims the divineness in distraction,

Some poet said galaxies

are a good place to hide-- in a thicket of stars.

But any Kentucky thicket would be good enough for me;

there I could secretly watch small creatures

who want to go hide. And then I'll know

the thousand and one ways to be

and to be unknown.

It might seem like playing God on a small scale.

But God doesn't mind. God likes to pretend

at being God on a small scale.

Mankind unpleasantly ages in parcels that bump into the future and fall back into an inescapable past. But there is a whole, a smooth sphere with no outer rims, an eternity of centers. Quenon mulls over timelessness in the context of his friend and mentor, Thomas Merton. His poem entitled Merton’s Anniversary explains, for lack of a better term, monk’s time. It opens this way,

“passed” 50 years ago, they say.

Well, that number counts for nothing.

Better to say, “subsists in the ever untimed.”

Years count not, no measure there is

for boundless embrace of All-time.

Was-is-will be

co-exist there

simultaneously.

Outside this, nothing is.

Time inside this revolves;

history is a closed circle

ever completed, ever changing.

My favorite poem in this collection Quenon calls Critical Change for Whom? It begins with a troubling exchange between Quenon and Fr. Matthew. The perturbed Matthew questions the reality of things at hand as illusion. He further posits that reality is something other. Quenon, concerned with his friend’s state of mind, asserts that simplification makes more sense. What you see, a table, a bed, really exists or at least is anchored in the real. Then the poet delivers the rest of the story,

I step from Matthew’s room,

leave him to his dark concerns—

suddenly I wake, startled to find myself

elsewhere, alone, on a mattress prone,

under Orion, stars and night—

no table, no room, no Matthew,

already three years passed,

all except for this—the dream he knew

was a dream.

Quenon excels in externalizing his thoughts and emotions. In his poem Winter Conversation of Trees he imposes expressionistic attributes on a variety of Trees with an ear to attention and expository internal need. The resulting tableau quantifies his human concerns and suggests much higher levels of discussion. The poet dispenses his fervors thusly,

Complex cherry branches look cross.

Tearless weeping willow

faints earthward

from summer’s heavy losses.

Cottonwood widely embraces year’s completion.

Gingko finely probes every minute detail of space.

Cedar of Lebanon—straightforward

In all he speaks or tells.

All herewith written

is foreign language unto

their lofty discourse.

The phenomenon of illumination and understanding Quenon chronicles in his poem Fireflies. Here he contemplates in the humble firefly’s existence and obsessive activity, specifically the unresting continuity of the fly’s off-on body switch. Individually, the fly seems to be trying a little too hard to highlight bits of earthly knowledge. In contrast the community of such creatures creates the context for their own magnificent artwork. The poet explains,

… night crowds in.

Dark flees lamps lifted,

cautiously hides from

that fly-filled field spread with

lonely, drifting stars

that never collide—

earthly constellations swarming

the dark, grassy range

ever without owning it.

Belief trumps death as Quenon , in his piece Walking Meditation, strolls through the monk’s graveyard at Gethsemani. He connects with tradition and individual remembrances delineated by simple crosses. Comfort turns to monastic anticipation,

I sense a kind acquaintance

at each step pressed in grass

soles to souls

assembled below

outside of space.

The wash of dew is cleansing,

is peace, and pleasure.

This brief moment awaits

that blink of eternity’s

eye

Monastic traditions have always offered little insights and large illuminations. Paul Quenon, steeped in that heritage of great silences, offers a bit more—first rate poetry.

Poplar Hill By Stephen Ramey Glines

Poplar Hill

By Stephen Ramey Glines

Wilderness House Press

Littleton, MA

www.wildernesshousepress.com

ISBN: 978-0-9827115-9-0

268 Pages

Review by Dennis Daly

Living well demands a nobility of style, opportunity, ability and daring. Dying well demands a good sense of self, stoicism, and a lot of luck. Very few mortals, unfortunately, achieve both estimable objectives. Stephen Ramey Glines, in his first novel, Poplar Hill, chronicles the life of one rather eccentric woman named Kitty Stevenson, who, with finesse and karma to spare, attains each of these aspirations.

Kitty, the scion of a once prosperous New York society family fallen on hard times, exudes a sense of royalty and command. She is one of those characters who centers herself in any context and watches with wry satisfaction as the world adjusts. Pictou County in rural Nova Scotia provides the setting for most of these adjustments.

Glines’ quasi-fictional (Kitty was a real person) account of this singular woman divides into two tracks: her end-of-life adventures in Pictou County, and her stories of personal exploits in the “cabaret atmosphere” of pre-war Nazi Germany. This counterpoint technique adds wonderful depth to both the emotional and historic sides of the building chronical.

Right off the bat Glines draws the reader in with the unconventional celebration of his protagonist’s wake, orchestrated and managed by that same protagonist, the very much alive Kitty Stevenson. He accomplishes this effectively in a seductive Prologue. Kitty’s celebration of her upcoming passing is suitably covered by Canadian TV and catered by the local Oddfellows Retirement Home. Appropriately, the cooks from the retirement home are students of Kitty, who, it turns out, is one of only six master chefs in all of Canada.   

Among the end-of-life scenes constructed by Glines, the January ice storm, which opens the book proper stands out with memorious authenticity and gut-wrenching detail. Here is a comical section of that scene, which mixes in marvelous local flavor with anxiety, in between power outages and shortly after Kitty’s heart attack,

…To Kitty’s surprise, she heard a dial tone. As she

was about to dial Earl’s phone number, she heard the pound-

ing, thud, thud, thud, on her back door.

   “Hello Missy,” roared the voice. It was Earl, crashing

through the door.

   “Hello yourself. Barb got a hold of you I see.”

   “Oh yes Missy, she said you were feeling poorly, and that

I should check on you. Are you all right? It’s still icing out,

must be an inch or three all over everything; probably lost

most of me orchard. The roads are bad enough, and me

truck’s in the ditch so I can’t take you no place but I see you

have plenty of food. That’s good. I bought you some milk,

Missy. I’ll put it right here. You shouldn’t open the refriger-

ator when the power is out ya know. The lights should be

Back on in a bit. It’s cold in here. It’s a pity you sold off that

Beautiful wood stove. How much did you sell her for, Missy?

Would you like your quilt?”

In the country everyone knows a character like Earl.

Glines, following his protagonist’s physical decline, switches back and forth onto his second narrative track, Kitty’s resurrected memories of pathos, danger, and murder.  During the late 1930s she studied opera in Munich Germany. Her family still had some money but it was tied up in German investments and those German marks could not be exported. Kitty’s job was to spend the money in intellectually stimulating Munich and freewheeling Berlin. Every teenager’s dream… except for the looming catastrophe of Adolph Hitler and the Nazis.

Timing is everything and much of the story’s tension revolves around Kitty and her expat American friends as they plot their eventual escape before war breaks out. Leaving Germany at that time often involved complicated machinations beyond the scope of the American Consulate—especially after the devastation of Kristallnacht. It doesn’t help that Kitty and her crowd frequent Café Heck, a hangout that also accommodates the likes of Hitler and Hermann Goering.

Glines’ technique often contrasts the utter seriousness of those dark times with youth’s lightheartedness and recklessness. Here Kitty describes the group’s amateurish, but well-meant preparation to photograph a concentration camp,

…We rode out from the ‘English

Garden’ single file with Joe leading the way; I was right

behind him with Sam behind me. Kozie brought up the rear.

The plan was to ride out to the Dachau camp then ride by

on the access road while I photographed it with the camera

Joe had given me. If there was any trouble, I was to toss the

camera over my shoulder and keep riding if possible…

… the pack was supposed to

split into four groups, each pedaling down a different road.

Unexpected success sometimes rewards recklessness and Glines’ narrative takes that plausible turn.  

Kitty’s growth as a woman and her growing horror at Nazi atrocities, Glines ties to the plight of a Jewish bookseller and his family unable to get out, but still trying to survive the insanity. They are personal friends of Kitty. Add to the plot’s intrigue an SS officer, who has infiltrated their group of friends and the stage is set, inexorably, for violence.

In the book’s denouement Kitty finishes her hitherto untold story with flourish, then, showing off a bit of classical knowledge, comments on Plato’s description of Socrates’ leg numbness as he died. She now notices the same phenomenon in herself. Having bequeathed her body to science, Kitty fades quickly. She dies. The book ends. But the usefulness of this well-lived life, fictional or not, continues.   

Inez Hedges and Avriel Hillman : Two Talented Somerville Women Behind 'Kafka in Palestine'

Avriel Hillman ( left)   Inez Hedges ( right)  

By Doug Holder

Playwright Inez Hedges and Director Avriel Hillman seemed to be joined at the hip when they met me at the Diesel Cafe at Davis Square in Somerville. It seems that the duo has great chemistry—sharing knowing smiles and quick laughter. Inez Hedges, who was a film studies professor at Northeastern University for many years, has a new play out titled, "Kafka in Palestine” that  deals with the friendship of the noted writer Franz Kafka, and his sister in the early 20^th Century. It is directed and Is being further developed for an NYC production by Avriel Hillman.

Inez Hedges, who lives near Davis Square, is very invested in the community  Avriel Hillman, who resides in Union Square, is an accomplished actor, teacher, director, and script coach who is very passionate about theater development. She studied play development and directing at Brown University with the likes of playwright Paula Vogel and director/dramaturge Oskar Eutis of the Public Theater.  She is known for her years on the HBO distributed video series, “ The Babysitter's Club” and as the voice of Penny on Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.

Hedges told me she has lived in Somerville since 1994. She loves the area — noting the block parties, the community spirit, and she has a particular place in her heart for Somerville Open Studios -- that she tries to attend every year.

Hillman’s reflections on our city, as a native New Yorker, were much about it’s unique beauty and peace, a change from New York, where she maintains many professional contacts, clients, and projects.  She travels back and forth for work often, if not weekly, but values the energetic contrast of Somerville, and the opportunity to build something here that is missing in the community as a professional acting coach and developer of new works, where much of her passion lies. 

Hedges, whose father was an American diplomat -- had a wanderlust of a childhood, living in Germany, France, Turkey, Switzerland and elsewhere. She told me under the regimented French school system—she never learned about French antisemitism, or even the Holocaust.“ The curriculum stopped in the 17^th Century. Talk of antisemitism was brushed to the side. This, in spite of the fact that 76,000 Jews were deported to concentration camps during World War 11 from France,” she said.  When Inez married the noted historian Victor Wallis, and talked to his extended Jewish family—she was informed fully about the long history of hatred toward the Jews. So it follows Hedges would write about Kafka, who fretted about antisemitism in his native Prague.

I asked Hedges why she chose Kafka as a focal point for her play.   She replied “I studied German as well as ancient Greek at Harvard. It happened that I was helping a friend on a project centered around Kafka's works. I wound up reading many of his stories. I was interested in many of the ideas he espoused in his writing. For instance: his concerns with stifling bureaucracy, the hamfisted, illogical rule of the state, things like this spurred me on to write a play where he was featured.” 

Hillman has a similar affinity with Kafka.  She shared that the first piece she directed out of Brown University was a version of Kafka's “The Castle” in Seattle, and how she has always been drawn to Kafka's unique intelligence and ability to identify the absurdity of beaurocracy and authoritarian structures and his identification of systemic roles and identities that impede free will, the liberation of the spirit, and the consciousness of man.  Kafka spoke to her in his innate way of challenging how societal constructs, which “we” consume and absorb, can belittle the soul. 

Hillman, who is intent on developing film/theatrical work that is political in nature, is the progenitor of the “Authentic Acting Approach” dedicated to enhancing organic connections to material for actors, and is a certified instructor of the Chubbuck technique, which is hailed by A-list stars for creating dynamic award winning performances. She is also launching a new theater company that will inspire new voices that provocatively explore the notion of the heroin archetype and, like Kafka, the importance of discovering and speaking the truth.

Hedges told me she would be presenting a shortened version of the play at the Playwrights Platform Festival in Boston, and a full production is slated to be presented in Austria.

These two brilliant women, are just part of the many fascinating stories that we have here in “The Paris of New England.”

Book Launch: Poplar Hill by Steve Glines-- June 10- 6PM Valley Wild Book Store Littleton, MA

( CLICK ON TO ENLARGE)

Doug Holder interviews poet Ravi Yelamanchili

Doug Holder interviews poet Ravi Teja Yelamanchili

                                      Doug Holder interviews poet Ravi Yelamanchili

Alec Hutson: Working Outside of the Music Box.

Alec Hutson at the Bloc 11 Cafe

Alec Hutson: Working Outside of the Music Box.

By Doug Holder

It is hard to label Alec Hutson, and that's OK with him. He is an eclectic artist who is involved with many different projects. I met Hutson in the backroom of my usual haunt, the Bloc 11 Cafe in Union Square, Somerville. Hutson is a 30ish looking man, with a shaved head, a well-trimmed beard and an intense intellectual look about him. Hutson told me that he has lived in Somerville for the past 4 years.

He said he loves living here, but qualified it. “It is very expensive. Because of gentrification artists have to be very creative about how they earn income. Hutson lives in a cooperative house in the Spring Hill section of the city. He works as a freelance graphic designer, a waiter at the famed Club Passim, and the leader of the band, aptly named, “Alec Hutson.”

He defines the music he and his six piece band play as experimental pop music. Hutson explained, "It is a tricky genre. My music revolves around several different types. Categories like soul, rock or folk don't quite fit. My music is both catchy and experimental.” Hutson told me that the band “Talking Heads,” is an inspiration. Like the Talking Heads he incorporates many different types of music into his work like: Bossa nova, jazz, Russian and Jewish music, etc...

Hutson told me he started out studying classical piano. He went on to play the guitar in high school. He went to school at U/Mass Amherst for architecture, but as a post graduate he trained himself in video production, design, and multi-media production, thus his part time gig as a freelance designer.

In terms of lyrics for his music Hutson counts singer/songwriter Ainslie Wills, and Jeff Buckley as influences. He said, “ I like how they draw things from their experience, not from whatever is popular at the time. The lyrics feel true. They write about what moves them. I can relate to what they are saying.”

Hutson told me he has been involved in Buddhist meditation for the last year and a half. He recently went on a 10 day retreat. Hutson believes that these periods of silence and meditation help him as a person and a musician.

Hutson told me there are Somerville residents in his band, one of whom is his roommate. Another one of his bandmates lives down the block from him. It is evident that Somerville is fertile ground for a harvest of creatives.

Hutson has played at a number of venues in Somerville such as :The Burren, Thunder Road, Bull McCabe's and others. He told me he is about to embark on a three week West Coast tour with his band this summer and he hopes it bears fruit.

I imagine Hutson will progress with his work, and will be another artist who has lived and thrived in the “Paris of New England.”


For more info go to:  https://www.alechutson.com/

Review: Sex & Other Slapsticks by Ellaraine Lockie ( Presa Press)

Review: Sex & Other Slapsticks by Ellaraine Lockie  

--reviewed by Gregory J. Wolos

The title of Ellaraine Lockie’s latest poetry collection, Sex & Other Slapsticks, begs a question, which her poems answer with candid mirth, spirit, and often a touch of wisdom: what do sex and slapstick comedy have in common? Remembering that the term “slapstick” derives from the joined slats of wood used in 16^th century commedia dell’arte (think “Punch and Judy”), we have our answer—the two terms of Lockie’s title both require bodies, both imply performance, both can make us laugh or cry; and both remind us of our shared humanity.

A slapstick is a prop, and props and performance draw Lockie’s keen comic appraisal in the poems and brief prose pieces comprising this collection. In “To Dana,” (subtitle :“Whose Deathbed Wish Was for a Friend to Dispose of Her Vibrator Before the Family Found It”), Lockie describes her personal history with props of self-stimulation, highlighting her own fear of “embarrassing” exposure as she imagines her own “piece of personal plastic” “mauled in front of my mother-in-law” by the family dog or accidentally activated at airport security where it “purred itself into a bomb bluff.”

Another poem centered around a prop and imbued with physicality is “Bidet in a Haebun,” in which the narrator and her husband consider with growing curiosity the bidet in the bathroom of their Florentine five-star hotel. At first they guess at its function, then misuse it. After discovering its purpose on Google and absorbing the knowledge that “Americans are unhygienic” compared to most of the world, the poet’s period arrives during the night, while “Light from the full moon/ floods the bed where she sleeps.” The next morning, she follows the instructions on the internet and, experiencing the satisfaction of “[w]ater like a spring brook,” orders her own “Biffy bidet converter” for her “American” toilet.

As in “Bidet,” ignorance or misunderstanding is pivotal in many of Lockie’s poems, such as “Sex 101,” where the narrator is informed “[a]fter forty years of pacifying penises” that her lover’s “morning erection” did not signal “a need for sex,” and she wasn’t “obligated . . . to lighten his procreative load/ in my most copulatory capacity.” In “Reading at the Little Joy,” the narrator, “Daydreaming on a winter evening . . . on Sunset Boulevard,” is mistaken by two young men as a prostitute. After she asks, “You guys wanna read,” they move on, determining she’s “[t]oo whacky” for what they had in mind.

In “Nomenclature in Montana” Lockie uses language as a prop to trace the loss of innocence that parallels a loss of ignorance. “As children,” she writes, “there were no body-part words” for the animals as they were “making babies.” Her father used simple “bodily function” words like “Pisshole and Asshole,” and her mother favored “a more refined Number 1 Place and Number 2 Place” /Like they were addresses.” Eventually, the narrator discovers “Number 1 ½ Place” that could accommodate fingers “and even welcome houseguests,” but didn’t learn the word “vagina” until high school, believing until then that “twat” was the past tense of “twit.” Like most of Lockie’s “ignorance to knowledge” poems in this collection, “Nomenclature” concludes on a note of personal affirmation, as she considers how the value of “my little piece of property . . . increased exponentially when it served/ as an annex through which my two daughters passed.”

Because, after all, the poems of “Sex & Other Slapsticks” are about accepting ourselves: of our ignorance and fear of humiliation; of our bodies and our sexuality. With or without props, Ellaraine Lackie performs her “slapsticks” for her readers with a kind of warmth and humor that enables us to accept ourselves. She encourages us to appreciate our lives as we would a situation comedy, as in “Sitcom in a Café,” where we watch the narrator’s deaf and nearly blind ninety-one year old mother deposit leftover restaurant food in what she believes is her handbag, but is actually the mouth of “my niece’s Guide Dog for the Blind in Training.” And, in a final prose poem, “The Robe Also Rises,” Lockie sacrifices her dignity for our mutual identification and self-forgiveness. Futilely chasing after her escaped dog at a mountain resort, she lies down in the snow, and oblivious to the public performance, “spread[s] out into an X-rated snow angel,” a trick that had lured her dog in the past. She raises her arms, revealing a “naked pubis that was as black and silky as my robe,” and, in spite of a little boy’s concern that “Mommy, that lady doesn’t have any underwear on,” the trick works: the dog returns to see what she’s up to, and she snares the pet’s collar. As she leads the dog back to her room, she “ignored the fairly large audience of gaping faces.”

Sex and slapstick, props and performance: in the same way Lockie recaptures her dog, her poems capture us, and we share not only the humiliation of exposure, but the triumph of her successes.