Sep. 3 Documentary Screening at the Cambridge Public Library –– Grolier Poetry Book Shop: The Last Sacred Place of Poetry

Weiying Olivia Huang, Director/Producer (left), and Mengyuan Lin, Cinematographer/Editor (right) (CREDIT: Ru Fang)

Sep. 3 Documentary Screening at the Cambridge Public Library –– Grolier Poetry Book Shop: The Last Sacred Place of Poetry

Article by Meia Geddes

Filmmaker Weiying Olivia Huang’s beautiful documentary featuring the Grolier Poetry Book Shop, “the last sacred place of poetry,” will be screened at the Cambridge Public Library this Tuesday, September 3^rd at 6:30 p.m., followed by a discussion between Huang, director and producer of the film, and local poet-publisher Doug Holder.

The Grolier, the oldest continuously running bookshop dedicated to poetry in America, is a light-filled room beloved by countless bookish souls. It has been frequented by well-known poets and writers including T.S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, e.e. cummings, Robert Lowell, Anaïs Nin, and Seamus Heaney. This, coupled with the shock and sadness accompanying long-time owner Ifeanyi Menkiti’s unexpected death this past June 17, 2019, lends the documentary a certain gravitas.

Yet there is a kind of lightness that lifts the spirit, as well –– Huang captures her subjects’ love for poetry and poetry’s power to change the world with a quiet, urgent energy. The film is, in essence, serenely invigorating, in a way that makes one want to go buy and write books, and support those who do.

“This store as a cultural place belongs to all of us. So the thing for me is to make sure that we can keep it open,” says Menkiti, a poet and professor who bought the Grolier in 2006 to save it from closing and ensured its continued survival despite difficult finances. Menkiti’s kind aura and belief in uniting people through poetry makes for an uplifting time spent in this magical place. Watching the film, one senses the welcoming, open atmosphere fostered at the shop, which continues on to this day.

There is a lovely, unassuming accuracy to the documentary that warms the heart: long shots of customers browsing shelves of books, animated readings, those cordial-yet-somehow-intimate interactions at the cash register, local small-town gossip. Huang has an eye for lighting, living in the moment, and letting us, as viewers, linger on with those moments.

Those featured in the documentary include Menkiti and his wife, Carol Menkiti; staff Elizabeth Doran and Celia Muto; and local poets including Susan Barba, Doug Holder, Ben Mazer, Patrick Sylvain, and Gloria Mindock.

The footage Huang has captured is of immeasurable value to those of us in Cambridge, Boston, and beyond, who care for the Grolier and our literary destinations in general. It also serves as a reminder to support our local shops. “I want to make sure the bookstore continues for the next generation,” says Huang.

Many stores in Harvard Square alone have had to close their doors: Schoenhof’s Foreign Books, founded in 1856, closed its brick-and-mortar store in 2017 due to high rents and online competition. Crema Café, at Brattle Street, closed in 2018 after having trouble securing a new lease. The Menkiti family plans to continue keeping the shop open for the foreseeable future. I hope we can support their efforts as a community.

It is splendid what one room –– for it is a room, beloved and renown –– can do for the being. That Huang could create a documentary featuring this room and just some of the many folk who frequent it speaks both to her skills as a filmmaker and the way this humble, historic place has made it into our hearts.

***

Weiying Olivia Huang (Director/Producer) is from Guandong, China, and lives in Cambridge. She holds a master’s in Digital Media from Northeastern University and currently is working on a documentary featuring graffiti artists at “Modica Way,” located at Central Square in Cambridge, thanks to a grant from the Cambridge Arts Council. Her first documentary, “Grolier Poetry Book Shop: The Last Sacred Place of Poetry,” has been screened at the Massachusetts Independent Film Festival, Barcelona Planet Film Festival, World Premiere Film Awards, North Beach Film Festival, Alternative Film Festival, and others.

Mengyuan Lin (Cinematographer/Editor) has edited numerous documentaries and features including “Grolier Poetry Book Shop.” She received her B.A. from Communication University of China and her master’s degree in Digital Media from Northeastern University. She works as a TV Conductor at Sinovision in New York.

Disclosure: Meia Geddes is friends with Huang –– thanks to the Grolier. Additionally, her books are sold at the Grolier and she assisted Huang with subtitles for the documentary.

Film Screening and Discussion: The Last Sacred Place of Poetry

Doug Holder Interviews Karen Klein founder of the textmoves collaborative

One Lark, One Horse by Michael Hofmann.

Michael Hofmann

One Lark, One Horse by Michael Hofmann. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 87 pp., $23.00

Review by Ed Meek

Michael Hofmann is in that small, eclectic, erudite group of internationally recognized poets that includes Frederick Seidel, Jorie Graham, Paul Muldoon, etc. He is well-known as an excellent critic and translator. This is his first book of poems since 1999. During that protracted interregnum he once said, “I’ve forgotten what a poem is—or worse can only remember.” In this new collection, he appears to have remembered. He has a self-deprecating sense of humor that is similar to Frederick Seidel’s. The title of the book comes from a joke about two Jewish deli owners. One, Goldberg, has a much more successful business. “What’s your secret?” Cohen asks him. “Lark pate,” he says. “But how can you afford it?” “I add a bit of horse,” Goldberg says. “How much?” “One lark, one horse,” says Goldberg. Is this a metaphor for Hoffman’s book or just a joke? Here’s the first poem:

The Years

Nothing required an account of me

And still I didn’t give one.

I might have been a virtual casualty,

A late victim of the Millennium Bug.

No spontaneity, no insubordination,

Not even any spare capacity.

It’s a brief explanation of his absence from poetry writing, and it is witty, although it doesn’t give us much to grab onto. Like Seidel, Hofmann likes to take on a number of different sources and topics for poems: a ride along the Hudson, Brexit, Australia, poems for Seidel and Auden, commentary on the age we live in.

Less Truth

More denials, more prevarication, more #real

Hashtags, and pop-ups and calculating interesticles, more clickbait,

More straight-faced, bare-faces, faceless, baseless

Counter-allegations, more red herrings, crossed fingers,

Rehearsed answers, turned tables, impossibilities

Before breakfast, more ‘accepting responsibility’, less truth.

Lusher menus. Bigger bonuses. Less contrition. More Shamelessness.

Less truth.

Hofmann nicely captures our age of truthiness and alternate facts and multiple perspectives as well as the temporary feeling of everything from the news-cycle to pop-up restaurants amidst all the money and advertising and he does this in a playful tone with internal rhymes and surprising turns.

In a poem entitled “Auden” Hoffman refers to an earlier time period, maybe the forties or fifties when Auden was in his prime. “It was another world, the world of turned collars and polished shoes…” It does seem to be such a different world today from the world those of us over sixty grew up in:

Suitcases wore characterful labels and tags on their

heavy, leather-effect cardboard…

The world of facecloths and napkin rings and coal-

scuttles…

And shoe trees and tie racks and plumped down

pillows and cufflinks and weskits and hats

And hardbound children’s books for our hardbound

children …

How careless, cheap and profligate we have become…

How true! Details like this bring back memories. Even if they don’t apply directly to our experience, they call up images of Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart and Katherine Hepburn dressed up for dinner in The Philadelphia Story and enjoying a cocktail by the pool in the moonlight. We were more formal then, as was the poetry of Auden. Of course, that formality had its drawbacks. The hardbound books were nice, but the hardbound children, not so much.

Later in the book, Hoffman has a funny send up called “On Forgetting.” It begins

‘Empiricism’ has been gone far more often than not;

I think I originally learned it in my teens.

Now I sometimes find it by alphabetizing, but most of

the time it’s gone and stays gone.

I don’t know if I dislike it because I can’t remember it,

or I can’t remember it because I dislike it.

It’s as though it’s on permanent loan somewhere…

He goes one to list places he has gotten lost, times he’s mixed up terms or events. “I disappear into my room to look for a book, / and emerge hours later with the wrong one, or with none at all.” For those of us getting older, this all sounds very familiar. And Hoffman is only 62! Plenty of time to write more poetry. As long as he can continue to remember what poetry is. For all of our sakes.

Ibbetson Street 45

Newton Free Library Poetry Series: New England Poetry Club Reading: Conte, Sallick, and Bodwell : Sept 17, 2019. 7PM

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Curious Peach by Denise Provost

Curious Peach by Denise Provost ( Ibbetson Street Press)

Review by Robert Cable

These poems reward our senses of sight, hearing, smell and taste! The poet observes that “ordinary seeing makes us blind.” She herself, however, has cultivated particularly keen perceptions, which she shares in these colorful, musical, fragrant, tasty poems. A winner in the Maria C. Faust Sonnet Contest, Provost’s poems tend to be of 14 lines, more or less. They are short and sweet, as is the poet herself. (Last night I had a front row seat at her public reading.) A few longer poems also tell interesting stories.

Are you curious about the title of this book? The phrase comes from a 17th C. poem by Andrew Marvell, when "curious" meant “interesting because of novelty or rarity” rather than "eager to acquire information or knowledge," as it does today. "Curious Peach" is also the title of Provost’s concluding verse, where it refers to consciousness of the fruit, which the poet imagines.

Denise Provost grew up in Maine, studied in Vermont (where Marvell was her favorite poet at Bennington College) and now lives in Massachusetts. She is intimately familiar with rural nature and with urban gardens. In addition to being a poet, she is an attorney, housewife, mother of three; and for the past two decades she has also served as a city alderman and then as a state legislator.

This chapbook provides a virtual poetic calendar or "declension of the year,” naming or describing a month, a season, a solstice or an equinox in most of the poems: "fledgling time of year," "the tender season," "that shadow, Autumn" "September's sharpening cold," "the Harvest's gaudy show," "winter's monochrome.” It also describes times of the day: "pre-dawn greyness," "sunrise pinks," "fresh-peeled day," "lovely day, so warm at its height," "colors grown dull/ when the sun slipped and fell," "deepening dark," "evening shroud," "dazzling day, then swift, seamless dark."

Provost’s poems are filled with specific flowers, fruits, trees and animals: bearded iris, bees, Bradford pear, cardinal, cat, chicadee, chicory, cicadas, cornstalks, daffodils, finches, forsythia, grapes, juncos, leopard frogs, lichens, lilacs, lindens, maples, "mere grass," milkweed, mockingbird, moss, mountain ash, mulberry trees, peach tree, peonies, pumpkin vine, Quaker Ladies, quince, rabbits, raspberries, red-winged blackbirds, robins, runner beans, skunk cabbages, sparrows, spring peepers, strawberries, sumac, tulips, water chestnuts, "noxious weeds," wild aster, wild rose, willows. Whew! The poet is steeped in nature; and we can share it through her words.

In two poems, the poet voices apprehension about the unnaturally changing natural world of our time. "Unseasonable" mentions "a world whose thermostat has gone awry." “Lament from a Wingless Thing” (the poet herself) voices the classical theme of Ubi sunt?: "Where are the birds/ of years gone by?/ To which rich banquet/ did they fly?" If we want to continue enjoying the wonderful nature described in these poems, we should seriously consider the question.

The cost of this delightful volume of 28 poems is $0.36 per verse; but its value is immeasurably higher. You will like it.
On page 28 there is a single typo: "juncos" not "junkos." (Ten cents discount.)



To order go to  Curious Peach

The Devil Who Raised Me By Robert Cooperman

The Devil Who Raised Me

By Robert Cooperman

Lithic Press

www.lithicpress.com

ISBN: 978-1946-583116

104 Pages

Review by Dennis Daly

If you like old fashioned western stories, where hard scrabbled virtues and youthful spirit go unrewarded and tragedy begets more tragedy, you’ll love Richard Cooperman’s The Devil Who Raised Me. Cooperman’s fictional antihero, John Sprockett, brought up by a doting mother and Jesus-loving hypocrite father, devolves from childhood innocence into a stone cold killer in antebellum Missouri. Along the way Cooperman breathes vitality into a cast of larger-than-life characters, some of whom abet evil, some who cherish goodness, and some who do both.

Cooperman conveys his story through colloquial verse. The episodic poems center intensity on individuals or actions and then gallop at breakneck speed to the next tale. Each character is thickly lined, so thickly lined in the way of cartoons or myths that the reader must choose his or her path of perception. Myth wins out. Cooperman’s dramatis personae rise to lofty and detailed heights or fall to nightmarish destruction.

Schooled by his mother in poetry, protagonist and future bad man John Sprockett courts Sarah, his true love, despite parental ignorance and cultural bigotry. Here, in Cooperman’s piece entitled John Sprockett, Seventeen, in Love, Sarah’s father speaks his mind and John envisions escape in a Romeo and Juliet redo,

“I blame those poems

your Ma filled your head with!”

Mr. Gilchrist declared:

“Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day

dirty as French postcards,”

though Sarah smiled, took my hand,

and kissed me, each time I recited it;

her knowing one feller, at least,

who’d stay true-in-love with her forever.

Still, a plan’s drumming in my head

like a fine horse rode fast and hard

over baked-dry prairie.

“Satan’s work!” Pa would’ve sworn,

had he known. A good thing

he don’t suspect a thing.

One of the more complicated of Cooperman’s characters is Joseph Hawk Wing, a Kiowa and the tracker for the Sheriff’s posse that chases Sprockett and company on two different but continuous occasions. He nurses his own racial resentments and has come to a different conclusion on who the good guys and who the bad guys are. In the poem The Tracker Joseph Hawk Wing, Hawk Wing deliberates and comes up with an initial plan during the first chase thusly,

I’d have left this posse in circles

and when bedded down,

slit their throats, scalped them,

and helped Sarah and John find

a safe place in the wilderness,

or pointed them toward some city

where folks won’t root around

in their love business.

But I’m just white enough

to believe in the sanctity

of contracts and business deals:

well-paid by Henry Gilchrist,

I’ll find young Sprockett

and while Henry or the Sheriff

tosses a rope over a tree limb,

I’ll press knees to my mount’s withers

Before the killing starts.

One rhythmical action follows another in quick succession in Cooperman’s verse. Even the protagonist’s internal thoughts spin from scenario to scenario, expanding our understanding of the character. After his getaway, in a piece entitled John Sprockett Escapes, Sprockett considers a bleak future,

… slung low in the saddle,

lead hornets buzzing past my head:

one nicked poor Mrs. Lydia Smith,

howling whilst I slapped leather,

to pay Ma and Neddie a last visit,

tell ‘em we’d meet in Heaven, though

I fear I’m heading down the hot chute,

knowing if they send the tracker after me,

my only chance is to kill him:

no one else can pick out my trail

like it was clear as a page of poetry.

Saddens me: I’ve sunk so low,

preparing to murder a man,

just for doing his honest job.

Unusually in a story like this, Cooperman gives voice to the collateral damage inflicted by the combatants—both good and bad. In the poem Mrs. Millicent Gilchrist, Hearing of Her Husband Henry’s Death, Mrs. Gilchrist bemoans her own fate this way,

You’ve gotten yourself killed, Henry,

on this manhunt I warned was doomed

when Young Sprockett escaped, first time.

You’d’ve given our darling daughter

to the banker’s rapscallion son;

I’d not let him near a mangy cur,

let alone our Sarah. Well, he’s dead too,

and good riddance to the vermin.

Young Sprockett rounded on your posse

like a grizzly. For that, I hate him

almost as much as I do you, Henry,

getting yourself killed, leaving me to mourn.

Cooperman even fleshes out an oracle in the guise of a local midwife to issue cautions to the rather ignorant menfolk running the show. In the piece The Midwife, Hannah Macalester, Months After the Sheriff Returns Alone, Macalester speaks as follows,

…the Tracker and Sheriff

the only two to escape, and Sheriff wounded

so bad, he still ain’t fit to protect this town.

“Leave that boy be, or he might kill

the whole state,” I’d warned him and Gilchrist.

“Him and Sarah just dumb kids in love,

running off the best idea since canned peaches,”

but men never listen to sense, especially

from a woman they scoff is demon touched.

Like the fictionalized outlaw supermen Billy the Kid and Jesse James, Cooperman’s John Sprockett provides the antidote to this iniquitous age of class-governed legal systems and mythic neediness. Applause to Cooperman. Long live the cowboy anti-heroes, and their attendant legends.

Eliot Cardinaux, Dreadsummer

Eliot Cardinaux 

First, the title: Dreadsummer. Before I’d read a single poem, the title bespoke (to me) some call of the wild, a terrible loss, a subject matter emotionally wrenching, like Heathcliff and Catherine tragic love. And I was wrong, but I was close. This chapbook of poems by Eliot Cardinaux turns out to be much subtler and more musical than my cheap dramatic expectations, but I would not be exaggerating to call the poems odd, like dreams, and arresting, invasive, suggestive, and large in their life upon the page. They live.

To go straight to a poem that clasps you in its arms and then—wonderfully—lets you go, “To Osip Mandelstam,” the young poet speaks directly to the great Russian. He “lays these things down for the first time,” he says, “in a grave,” and ends up “saying these things out loud.” That is how the poem ends, with a spoken voice, a bare, respectful, and dedicated voice that hints of Whitman’s wide embrace or Louise Glück’s lucid garden secrecy or the strange (yet common) unforgettable imagery of Elizabeth Bishop.

But Cardinaux is no imitator; he is not afraid to lay down his own word or phrase, seemingly detached, and let it fend or float for itself. In the book’s first poem “Sigil” he writes, “I grieve my splinter out”; in “Procession” it’s “Your breathing broke across the bow,” and then “I walk with my nostrils down.” Splinter! Nostrils! Breathing an ocean wave! The man has perfect pitch, and produces heartbreaking and thrilling images. He is thoughtful. He fulfills his subjects. His poems are intimate, evocative, assertive, exquisitely sensitive to all that’s alive, and he does it with a few words. He reveals the catastrophe of existence, the completeness of loss, and the phantom mind of a rose that, in the final poem, “A present history of air,”

grows deep

in the azure, keeping

one thought to itself,

that the present is history.

If you care to slow down, you can hear the internal rhymes and personal rhythms.

There is something new about Eliot Cardinaux’s voice, too, or perhaps reborn. He can conjure little sparks of Akhmatova, cries of the innocent in Blake, touches of Frost. And he has a sense of humor. “A snake was charmed / on the eve of possession” begins the poem “Allegory”; but it takes a serious turn soon enough, as one image consumes another in a “lover’s last poem / whose head witnessed everything at once.” Everything at once? Whose head? Whose everything? We are not instructed. Cardinaux continues:

Their escape is the smoke

from a flame that erases

everything but absence

for your rage to fill:

black water

under the light of migraines

a bullet

brought weak death two scales.

We’re talking notches on belts and musical events. These poems play with words seriously but wittily; they require one’s full attention. They are for quiet readers who have some literary familiarity, can catch a hint, can see a line go into a cartwheel, and are attentive to spoken sounds and imagined images.

Come Closer and Listen by Charles Simic.

Come Closer and Listen by Charles Simic. HarperCollins, 75 pages. $24.99.

Book Review by Ed Meek

Charles Simic is now 81 years old. He’s been a force in the world of poetry for many years. He has penned forty books of poetry. He writes articles about poetry for The New York Review of Books. He was a Poetry Editor for The Paris Review, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1990, and was the recipient of a MacArthur Grant. His poetry is somewhat enigmatic. His poems are generally short, combining colloquial language, observed details and surrealism. Here’s an early poem that has stuck with me. 

It’s called “Fear”:

Fear passes from man to man
Unknowing,
As one leaf passes its shudder
To another.

All at once the whole tree is trembling, 
And there is no sign of the wind.

Despite being so short, it’s a poem that resonates. The imagery perfectly captures the idea and it makes a big statement about the way that fear can take over even when people forget what caused it in the first place. Sometimes lately it feels like we’re living in The Republic of Fear these days.

In his current book, Simic employs the same elements though he seldom achieves the intensity he once did. “The Hand that Rocks the Cradle” is a two-line poem: “Time—that murderer/ No one has caught yet.” That’s the right idea but feels as if it could keep going.

     

 Simic is in the group of poets who are accessible. He uses simple language and a casual off-hand tone. “Some birds Chirp”

Others have nothing to say.

You see them pace back and forth,

Nodding their heads as they do.

It must be something huge

That’s driving them nuts—

Life in general, being a bird.

Too much for one little brain

To figure out on its own.

Still, no harm in trying, I guess.

Even with all the racket

Made by its neighbors,

Darting and bickering nonstop.

So, the question is: Is it enough to be an economical, amusing observer?

Many of the poems in this collection are about death—not surprising given the writer’s age. This one is called “The Last Lesson”

It will be about nothing.

Not about love or God,

But about nothing.

You’ll be like the new kid in school

Afraid to look at the teacher

While struggling to understand

What they are saying

About this here nothing.

There’s a big argument going on these days about pronouns. When Simic says “What they are saying” is the pronoun singular? Does it refer to the teacher? In addition, although poetry should be about the ineffable, Simic doesn’t have much to offer here beyond the ambiguity of the word nothing.

The best poem in the book is called “Ghost Ship.”

Those blessed moments

That pretend

They’ll stay with us forever—

Soon gone,

Without a fare-the-well.

What’s the rush?

I heard myself say.

You have the right

To remain silent,

The night told me

As I sat in bed

Hatching plans

On how to hold the next

Captive in my head.

I recall a window thrown open

One summer day

On a grand view of the bay

And a cloud in all that blue

As pale as the horse

Death likes to ride

Always happy to shoot the breeze,

That lone cloud

Was telling me

As it drifted out to sea,

Toward some

Ship on the horizon,

That had already

Set sail

And was about to vanish

Out of sight,

On the way to some port

And country

Without name.

A ghost ship,

Most surely,

But mine all the same.

In this poem, we have simple language paired with imagery and each line takes the poem a little further, yet each is surprising. There is some subtle rhyming and the usual economy. At first the subject seems to be memory but soon it becomes clear Simic is talking about death and here he gives us something we can take away. The fact that he is still writing good poetry is inspiring.

Ibbetson Street Press: Presents: Denise Provost reading from Curious Peach Aug 15

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