INTERVIEW WITH POET MIGNON ARIEL KING: THE WOODS HAVE WORDS.

(Photo: Jack Scully)


INTERVIEW WITH POET MIGNON ARIEL KING: THE WOODS HAVE WORDS.


Mignon Ariel King is a dyed-in-the wool Boston poet. In her introduction to her new collection of poetry “The Woods Have Words,” she invites the reader to:"…stroll along the Charles River… walk through the streets of Boston,…or zip under and over the state of Massachusetts on the country’s oldest subway.” King was born some 40 odd years ago in the bosom of Boston City Hospital. She grew up in Roxbury,later earned a couple of advanced degrees, and was an adjunct professor of English at several local colleges.

She describes herself as a woman who is happily single, bookish, urban, multicultural, nocturnal; a complex woman of refined sensibilities, but she can just as easily down a few beers, and yelp for the home team.

King said she was introduced to poetry as a young kid when she was given a “fat” anthology of children’s poetry edited by Helen Ferris. She read it cover to cover, and soon started to write her own poetry. And finally, after all these years, she has penned her own poetry collection.

King said that poetry is her favorite medium because she said: “ I can’t write fiction.” King lists some of her favorite poets and writers as: Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros, to name a few.

“The Woods Have Words” is of course set in Boston—a place that King will always consider home. She can’t imagine a city without a river, and Boston has the Charles, and as the song goes: “She loves that muddy water.”

Interestingly enough King said she views Boston as a character in her book. She explores the different sections of Boston, many of them which she has lived in and worked in. “They all become part of you,” she reflected.

And this denizen of the asphalt, this walker in the city, considers herself a nature poet as well! She laughed: “ Skyscrapers are as natural as trees to me.”

King is no wallflower at the party, a weeping willow in the woods. She said her poetry is the poetry of a strong woman – a message that is clearly evident in her work. King doesn’t want to be know as an “African-American” poet. She won't be typecaste by biology, she insisted. She simply wants to be known as a writer with a capital W. She identifies with no school of poetry. She says simply and firmly that her work is multicultural.

King said she finds a lot of women writers write about their kids and gardening—a subject matter she see too much among her peers. She lists Sharon Olds and Deborah Garrison as poets who break the mold. Local poets Carolyn Gregory and Jessica Harman are poets she greatly admires.

She is currently working on a new collection “View of the Charles,” that will be a straightforward, Bukowski-style collection. It will be a lyrical journey through Boston, the home of the Bean, the Cod, and the King.



To order “The Woods Have Words” go to: http://lulu.com/ibbetsonpress




Chestnuts

Sox-capped men with silvered white pushcarts peddle
honey-roasted peanuts on the Boston Common.
Whatever happened to roasted chestnuts, clutched
in tiny brown paper bags, crooked in fedora-topped

daddies' grey-tweeded arms, the evening edition
of the Globe absorbing the extra heat? My officemate
offers a dissertation on today's male after I am foolish
enough to ask her opinion on the vanishing breeds.

It seems wrong not to love trees and men
and the fruit of them while shuffling the pulp of
a thousand murdered trees in an attempt to make
a living without missing another life.

--from The Woods Have Words, p.7

If The Delta Was The Sea by Dick Lourie

If The Delta Was The Sea

by Dick Lourie

Hanging Loose Press, $18

Brooklyn, NY

Copyright © 2009 by Dick Lourie

ISBN 978-1-934909-02-7



Review by Zvi A. Sesling



Let me preface this review by saying I have never been a big fan of Dick Lourie’s poetry. There were some poems in Ghost Writer (Hanging Loose Press) that I liked a lot and some that I just liked. The totality was mostly unsatisfying.



Now Lourie has a new volume of poetry which, for me, would have been much better as a memoir or even a non-fiction travel piece. Yet as poetry, it provides insight into things few of us know about: the blues, the Mississippi Delta and Dick Lourie’s thoughts and experiences. Of particular interest is Lourie’s “eastern liberalism” which reflects his deep felt feelings for minorities and women.



For example in “Three Recent Trips To The Golden Past: East Village, Clarksdale, Athens” Lourie reminds the reader of what the “old south” was like as well as his humanitarian views about slaves and women:



“in Athens I walked through the Agora

where the ancients shopped gossiped argued sent

slaves on errands and male citizens met

for democratic decision making”



However, he also has keen sense of what it was to be Native American, particularly Chicksaw, and since that particular tribe were in the Delta and Memphis areas, back in the 1950s the Chicago White Sox had a minor league team in Memphis called the Chicksaws, Chicks for short. But rather than digress with my trivia here is more of Lourie who has explained how the Chicksaw were treated and what kind of reward they received. It comes from his poem “Rights”:



“...after the

Chicksaw wrote this to Andrew Jackson

in 1831 they were moved west –

in Mississippi the white pioneers

thrived with black slaves cleared swamps planted cotton”



or take this piece from “Dear Manager” in which Lourie discovers all is not what it appears to be:



after lunch with Andy Carr at the Rest

Haven my wife and I joke that there are

some topics we must manage to avoid

discussing with Andy his politics

being conservative and quite far from

our left end of the spectrum but then it

occurs to me that (as so often in

Clarksdale) the joke is on me...”



To find out what the joke on him is, you might want to read this poem.



Overall, I wish this were a prose travel piece, then it would have a wider circulation and provided non-poetry readers with some education they could probably use because as purveyor of Delta blues and Delta history, Lourie provides a good read.

*Zvi Sesling is the editor of the Muddy River Poetry Review

Review of The Curvature of Blue by Lucille Lang Day

Review of The Curvature of Blue by Lucille Lang Day, Cervena Barva Press, 2009

By Barbara Bialick, author of TIME LEAVES (Ibbetson Street Press)


The Curvature of Blue is a fascinating collection of poems from a great small press whose publisher is particularly fond of languages. But the language from which the power of this volume evolves is not eastern European but the language of science. Like other poets who love nature, the author, who has a Ph.D. in science and mathematics education from the University of California at Berkeley (and several other degrees, including zoology and creative writing), has a palette of words that gives her a unique voice.


Here is how she dealt poetically with the death of her father in “A Death”—

“It was inevitable as the day the universe lit up/after a hundred million years of blackness,/as clouds of gas collapsed and ignited/…It was impossible as the intricate movements/of millions of creatures since the dawn of life,/each one finding its only mate to enable/my father’s life to blaze for a moment, eons/later, on a blue-green planet, in a sea of stars.”


She’s certainly a scientist, but is she a mystic? She sometimes acknowledges a sense of the divine, but she doesn’t seem to be religious. She’s wide eyed in amazement, but not directly spiritual. She addresses this in “God of the Jellyfish”:


“The god of the jellyfish/must be a luminous, translucent bowl/the size of a big top,/drifting upside down/in an unbounded sea…And the god of the jellyfish/gave them ocelli/that shine like the eyes on a butterfly wing/…and does not/expect worship or even praise…”


In “Birding: A Love Poem”, the dance of DNA continues on: “I surrender my molecules, too,/swirling in flocks, layer upon layer,/in my cells, like so many birds/with hollow bones and rapid hearts/heading south, the air full of wings,/dazzling, alive with offerings.”


A great villanelle and love poem is “Color of the Universe”, where she addresses a startling scientific claim by John Noble Wilford, who wrote in the New York Times, “The universe is really beige. Get used to it.”


“I can’t believe the universe is tan,/Not red or green or lavender or blue./I feel carnelian when you take my hand—“ But one poem over, she writes of “A Blessing in Beige”: “A bird in flight outshines its silver cage./If the sky’s too bright the stars shine unseen./May our stars burn brighter as we age./Hurray, the color of the universe is beige!”


But the most important question of this book is who is this poet,Lucille Lang Day,
and why haven’t I heard of her before?! She’s written four previous collections and three chapbooks. She’s also the director of a small press, Scarlet Tanager Books, and is the director of an “interactive children’s museum” in Berkeley, California.




Once again the small press gives voice to poets just as deserving of being a “known” as the bigger, commercial houses, who fortunately have captured at least some of the greats.


But Day also proves she can write in other voices altogether in her poetry repertoire. In a section of the book called “Strangers”, she gets into some political and other themes such as “The Liberation of Baghdad”, “The Product is Safe”, and “At Dulles International After Visiting the Holocaust Museum”, to name a few.


She also shows her keen eye for detail in such poems as this one about a flood in her home, “After the Deluge”: “…when the water floods office and bedroom,/then drains into the hall and dining room downstairs,/filling the chandeliers like vases/and staining the ceilings/whose paint now hangs loose/like curling sheets of ancient parchment…”


These are modern, yet ancient pages well worth reading. I strongly encourage you to read “The Curvature of Blue”!


--By Barbara Bialick, author of TIME LEAVES (Ibbetson Street Press)

Paul Steven Stone: “It was if someone hit me on the side of the head and said: ‘Now you are going to write the novel you are supposed to.’”

Paul Steven Stone: “It was as if someone hit me on the side of the head and said: ‘Now you are going to write the novel you are supposed to.’”

By Doug Holder

Paul Steven Stone is the creative director of W.B. Mason, and the author of “Or So It Seems” released by the local Blind Elephant Press. He is a regular at the Bagel Bards, a literary group that meets in Somerville, Mass., and since he has promotion in his blood, he is never without cards and bookmarks to tout his novel. “Or So It Seems” deals with a Woody Allenish, neurotic, type of guy, who searches for truth, spiritual salvation, and sex, guided by an odd and avuncular Hindu deity figure. This all takes place in the environs of Boston and Cambridge, Mass. With this unusual conceit of eastern religion and borscht belt humor, Stone takes us on a rollercoaster of a ride that only lets up when we finish reading. I spoke to Stone on my Somerville Community Access TV Show, “Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.”

Doug Holder: When you started this novel “Or So It Seems” you were divorced, bitter and angry. How about when you finished the novel?

Paul Stone: It is an interesting arc that I traveled. The novel evolved into something bigger and less driven by the forces that made me start the novel. There has always been a novel in me. When I started “Or So It Seems’ I was bitter, I needed to feel like the victim, and my now ex-wife was the guilty party. I was told that my first attempt with the novel lacked narrative tension. I sat down to reorder events. As soon as I did this, this spiritual aspect came in to play. It was if someone hit me on the side of the head and said: “Now you are going to write the novel you are supposed to.” All of a sudden all these concepts and ideas came flooding in. I really hadn’t wanted to rewrite.

DH: Was it therapeutic for you?

Ps: Absolutely. It saved at least 20 years of paid therapy. It allowed me to vent…the time to look closely at something. I moved on from feeling like a victim all the time. I am no longer a victim but the author of a novel.

DH: Before you started your rewrite of you said it was like you heard a voice guiding you. If you had to personify the voice who would it be?

PS: Well I am not hearing voices! But I feel there is someone, a muse, or some force, an elder, whatever that helps me. An entity that wakes me up at 3AM with ideas. I’m in advertising. I get ideas for my work as well that way —they come from somewhere. I get a lot from these “voices”

DH: The protagonist, Paul Peterson, constantly steps back with his spiritual guru—to observe the material world/ reality. In a way this is like the novelist, right?

PS: I think so. One of the intriguing conceits of the novel is that Petersen talks in the present moment sharing the action with the reader, as if the reader was there. It is almost as if the narrator and the reader are there at the same time together—going through it. The first time I wrote this I didn’t need the conceit. The 2nd time it made sense.

DH: The writer Thomas Wolfe holed up in the Chelsea Hotel in NYC and wrote (standing up) for hours on end. It was described as “automatic writing” Anything like that happen with you?

PS: No. I have had experiences where things get done through me so easily all I have to do is make the pen hit the paper. Other times I have to sit down and think about it.

DH: A lot of writers self-promote these days. How do you going about getting the word out for your book?

PS: I took a workshop at Grub Street, given by this lady who recently had a successful book. I was amazed at how she had treated marketing her book as if it was an advertising campaign. Up until this time I had not thought about it this way. But she was very methodical. She had a website in place; she had pieces that she would send out to the different publishing arms. She had different elements—it seemed all part of a brand. So I saw what I was supposed to do. The way I approached it was I looked at every avenue that was low cost. I made business cards. I have unique cards that fold out like little books, with reviews from readers inside. I try to take the least expensive avenues and try to do it at a high level. A level that people don’t expect from someone who is doing it himself. If you act as if the book is important in everything you do it will seem important. The book will be treated importantly.

DH: In the book you write about the advertising world. It is not a flattering picture.

PS: I think the world would be a much better place without advertising. But there is always going to be advertising, and it is a business, so I think of myself as a positive influence. So it is good to have people in the industry like that. The work I do for W.B. Mason is fun stuff. People enjoy seeing the TV commercials. But I think there is something shallow where art is second to commerce.

DH: Can you tell us about your next book that will be a collection of columns you wrote for a south shore newspaper.

PS: Yes. They were written in many different voices and with many different subjects. Some were short fiction pieces, one column celebrated adversity. The columns deal with things I found of interest or concerned me at the time. The book will be called “How to Train a Rock.” I wrote a series of columns on training rocks. This will be a diverse collection.

The Light of Fields by Michael Kriesel

The Light of Fields
Michael Kriesel
Propaganda Press 2009
alt.current@gmail.com
Pocket Protector Series: book seven

two inches by about three inches; this book of poems fits in the palm of a hand like something new born; the soft tiny words barely audible:

“how to come to the frozen numb
bodies
speaking of fields showing gold

knowing no cold
that the warmth of flesh cannot survive

and to come to these starving
whose tongues sing their stomachs of
air

telling of bodiless songs rising in them
whose sight follows stars against
darkness

to come to those silhouettes
pressing themselves against ledges
to listen for wind

and to tell them of others who listen

and know it is true”

the succinct continuality is established from the first poem to the last poem,. they read like a small novel, a small telling, “with a terrifying love I’ve seen, unreasoning, clings past its season…” don’t let, ‘the light of fields’ slip out of sight, or off your hands. keep the tiny flecks written within the yellow pages, “go beyond the poking stubble to the stand of spruce.”

Irene Koronas
Poetry Editor
Ibbetson Street Press

A Z Two: Words of Travel by David Giannini

A Z Two
Words of Travel
David Giannini
Adastra Press
ISBN 10: 0-982249500
2009 $18.00

David Giannini slows the process of reading poems, of thinking about the surroundings, the space and all therein. letterpress print on a hand-feed C&P, the
collating and hand sewing of each book, each book becomes the entire world memory:

the rasp of something
owning very little-

perhaps an old man
filing the edge

of his voice, wanting
to receive

and be received
only if

outside of
rain.

the taught lessons in each poem, the way the cliffs jut, make shadows, seem stuffed. like a prayer book, A X Two, follows the up and down of a spring stream, river rock, muddy boots stuck by the door. the poems run their current:

up
on
a
hill
looking
ahead at my
tracks already
there as if
begging
me
to
keep
up

spiritual is a word that wants to describe everything, anything in nature, anything someone thinks is beyond nature or one-self. Words of Travel, has all
the elements of leaving behind, letting words go, lighting a fire and sitting with a song of sorrow, the sunset rose peach motions, time ethereal passing..

highly recommended.

Irene Koronas
Poetry Editor
Ibbetson Street Press

Poet Rebecca Schumejda: Pens a Collection of Verse “ Falling Forward”

Poet Rebecca Schumejda: Pens a Collection of Verse “ Falling Forward”


Rebecca Schumejda stopped by my interview show “Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer” for an interview on her way to visit the New Hampshire poet Nate Graziano. Both are young writers who have published books with the former Somerville, Mass. press “sunnyoutside.” Rebecca’s latest book of poetry is “Falling Forward” ( sunnyoutside-2009). Rebecca lives in Kingston, NY with her husband and daughter, and teaches English at a local alternative school. She got her B.A. in English from SUNY New Paltz and her MA in Poetics from San Francisco State University. She was the coeditor of the little magazine “reuben kincaid” for a number of years. She has a number of collections of poetry out the most recent is “Falling Forward.”

Doug Holder: You wrote that your father Doug, a roofer, was the first advocate for your poetry. You had a troubled adolescence, and wrote “‘dark” poems. What did your father see in your poetry that the authorities in your school didn’t?

Rebecca Schumejda: My father and I didn’t get along, but he had energy, and that energy he saw in me. I had a lot of energy with writing—that was my thing. I think he wanted me to be educated. He wanted me to get out there and say what I felt, whatever it was. I had actually gotten in trouble with school officials and they were looking at my dark poetry and were saying:” I think she needs some help.” My father said: “No, she is just writing. This was the first connection I made with my father that was through my writing. He wanted me to write. And he said write whatever you want. He kind of laughed at the school administration, and the school teacher. So I became comfortable with my writing.

DH: Philip Roth said you have to be honest in your writing, to the point of insulting your own mother if need be. Your take?

RS: I am willing to insult myself in my writing, as well as anyone else in my life. But I wouldn’t insult them in a way that would hurt them as people. You should share your experiences whatever they are.

DH: Do you think poetry provided you with a “center that held” throughout your life?


RS: I don’t think I would have survived anything in my life without writing. Anytime I am going through a difficult time I write. It’s grounding and it is a way to save a lot of money. I would have spent a lot of money on therapy. I might as well spend my time on writing.

DH: Do you write with a specific audience in mind?

RS: I am not about getting my work out there and published as much as some other writers. I do write for myself. I write because I can’t imagine not writing. You record your history—the way I see it, my perception. But of course I want people to read my work—I want people to read a good story.

DH: You published an early chapbook with Ian Griffin of the very prolific Green Bean Press. Can you talk about Griffin and the press?

RS: I was sixteen or seventeen when I met Ian. I had submitted work to him. We both grew up in Long Island, NY. He published me in his literary magazine “brouhaha” We got together and hung out. He no longer has the press. He lives in Brooklyn, New York presently.

DH: In your new collection of poetry “Falling Forward” you write about your fears around having a baby. Is there a similarity between a birth of a baby and a birth of a poem?

RS: Yes. Because when we decided to have a kid we had these ideas where we wanted our lives to go. Just like when you start out to write something and it comes out totally different.

DH: How do you handle motherhood, and writing?

RS: At this time I am writing more than I have ever written, in this last year—the year I had my child. We have childcare. I work fulltime as a teacher—but I still find time. I write at school, on my lunch break—a lot of inspiration comes my way. My husband and my mother also help with the children.

DH: You tell me you are working on a poetry collection on pool halls?

RS: Yes. My husband and I met at a bar in New Paltz ( while playing pool) where I was going to college. It was my husband’s dream. We opened one but it didn’t work out. The economy in Kingston, NY was depleted. Pool, the game, isn’t what it used to be.

DH: Who frequented your hall?

RS: Old school players. The stories they told! Pool players are poets. I got to watch them in their element—a place a lot of young women would not be allowed to go. So I got to hear stories about their lives. There were stories about life around the game, marathon pool matches, etc…There were outlandish stories, drug stories…you name it.

DH: Do you know the celebrated upstate New York poet Alan Catlin?

RS: We have been emailing each other lately. He was a bartender in Albany, NY for many years. I will be reading with him in Schenectady real soon at the Café Luna. He has a great poetry collection out; “Only the Dead Know Albany.”


When the Check Clears

he’ll buy a package of corn-dogs
a bottle of ketchup, seven boxes
of macaroni and cheese
a newspaper. A spider weaves
a hammock across the trophy,
he won in a third grade spelling-bee.
A fly buzzing around the room
crashes into the blinds over
and over again; he chuckles,
life melts like ice cubes
he chews
to forget
hunger.

He wants to be cremated:
no obituary notice, no flowers
no grave marker, just ashes tossed
indiscriminately into the wind.
After the days’ second AA meeting,
he assures himself that good times
are waiting between the serenity
prayer and the horizon, so he
keeps walking past gas stations,
laundry mats, parked patrol cars
back and forth across
the same bridge
six times
as the sky turns
dusty feet sore.

Back at home, he waits for the spider
to notice the fly, twisted in the web.
For a brief second, he considers
running his fingers through the web
to sever the fly from its fate
but he knows better than to prolong
the struggle, instead he walks
to the window, peeks out through
the blinds to count the cars that pass by.
He considers the icicles clinging
to steering wheels, hopeful fingers
starved
and searching
for direction.

The Woods Have Words: Poems of Tribute by Mignon Ariel King

The Woods Have Words: Poems of Tribute by Mignon Ariel King





The Woods Have Words: Poems of Tribute
by Mignon Ariel King
Ibbetson Street Press
Somerville, MA 02143
Copywright 2009 60 pages

To order: http://lulu.com/ibbetsonpress

Review by Lo Galluccio

Apparently, Mignon had a Grammie too, to which she dedicates this vivid, rooted, musical collection of poems that seem to grow like the sycamores, out of Boston’s earth. My Grammy was on the Welsh side of my family, but I must confess it really grabbed me; Mignon’s little portrait of the old North End –obviously Italian-- where you are hard-pressed these days to buy a Ricotta pie on Easter. In “Mario the Tailor Works on Wednesdays” she writes:

“and bistros where the bisotti
is mwah and the gelati a tapestry
of smooth, rippled almond.” p3

In Mignon’s book, the City issues reverence, imagery and drama in formal and idiomatic language and so much more -- out of objects and food and people of all stripes….including visceral scenes in institutions, job-sites, apartments, and historical avenues. In King’s book, it’s not just the graceful trees talking, though they do pack their wizened meaning along rivers and parks in Greater Boston, a Greater Boston Mignon knows inside and out. It makes me realize how much of a snob I am for always touting New York as the truly great metropolis in the USA, “fire of my loins,” my Gotham.

What I especially like is the fable-like-realism that Mignon is able to employ for most of these exquisitely concrete episodes of life as she comes of age and then colorfully sketches her fair City’s environs and happenings. Shut up in Brigham and Women’s Hospital, after some procedure, Mignon is fiddling with the oxygen tube and the CD player to get a pumped in bang of Aerosmith, the great Boston rock band. In a delightful punk unraveling, Mignon envisions Steven Tyler in his “nails shiny black, sculpted face and perfect teeth pleading for me to dance with him.” p.14 “Oxygen and Aerosmith {To Steven Tyler.} In her pneumonia-induced dream-state she must decline a dance with the Cherokee-boned rockstar and in the end, humorously reports,

‘Steven was truly hurt, but very forgiving:
Maybe another time, then?”

In her introduction: A City of Trees, she says she hesitates to call the book “autobiographical” because she herself is an embodiment of many women and their perspectives –“urban, multicultural, bookish, educated, creative, professional, happily single, nocturnal, or some combination thereof.” And what is striking about the collection is how comfortable with all these emblems she is while also capturing the love and ambivalence that reigns between the male and female, in poems like “Love without Sex” p .44 and “My First Love” p 37.

In “Another Creation Legend” she invokes the pagan origins of love and poetry from a matriarchal point of view. In a simple ode she runs it down this way:

‘When god was a woman….pagans worshipped
Mere human endeavors, like love.” And ends with:

“I guess when god was a woman
is when poetry was born.” p. 27


In “A Real Job at 9:11 am,” Mignon brilliantly describes the strictures she’s facing, the “prissy temp in wedge heels stuffing envelopes as of with valentines…..” And ends on an ominously poignant note: “Sink-water draining in the ladies’ room sounds like something being strangled.” In a couplet she sums up what others might have just called that sick feeling in the pit of their stomach when they’ve got to face a “real” or “corporate” job. She gives us something more….precise and scary.

Mignon pays tribute to her Daddy – gone now – while also in a kind of choked up nightmare poem describes how his going and coming imprinted her as a child:

{WHEN YOU LEAVE ME}

“I know it seems finished.
You only left me once,
Yet in my dreams

you are always leaving,” p 30

The bond between them is manifested especially in another great poem about a Boston pub and its fare, pastrami, where she and her Dad used to go and imbibe the great messy stuff. In”Ken’s Pub: When my Father was Alive,” she describes:

“The pickles lured us in, floating like an experiment
In avoiding temptation. But the pastrami’s black edges
sealed the deal for me –“ p 32

That poem is dedicated at the bottom as many of Mignon’s works are to her favorite and local poets – this one to Ed Galing. There are many other finely crafted and fascinating scenes dedicated or let’s say influenced in some mysterious way, to Michael Afaa Weaver, Regie O’Hare Gibson, Doug Holder, Walt Whitman and Sharon Olds, among others.


In a tribute to Regie Gibson, (SCOWL: Ballad of a Face), the streets are the varied constructs (colors?) of race and they also shout their critical relevance:

“I still hear you, there in Roxbury! So here is
one truth written across the face of America.
Feel free to label it my scowl as it trails quietly down
the tan, bronze, caramel, mahogany, black street.”
p. 58

In “Freedom Trail” King perhaps epitomizes her credo as a poet and an artistic person, one which makes her poetry both fascinating and generous to those around her: in Ariel’s work there is an explicit balance between the objective and the deeply-felt subjective:

“Contradictions are okay. One hopes anyhow
that it makes cosmic sense to love both trees
and books, the city and the dirt trails, breathe salt….”

Freedom Trail, p 49

I very highly recommend this wondrous collection. Mignon Ariel King’s work encloses my spirit like a sister of the Boston-planet.

Lo Gallucio is the author of "Sarasota Vll" (Cervena Barva Press)

Bird Effort by Ronald Baatz

Bird Effort by Ronald Baatz, Kamini Press (Sweden and Greece)


By Barbara Bialick

When turning to read Ronald Baatz’ new chapbook, BIRD EFFORT, first you note it’s undersized with a handsome bird watercolor cover and some 24 pages of minimalist poems without much punctuation by an experienced poet. Will it be easy to read, you wonder, but no, the book is very deeply written about death as visualized through nature imagery, particularly of birds…

But who is the poem’s persona speaking to? That remains a mystery, though now and again he’ll mention either the presence of or a memory of his mother, his dead father, old girlfriends, his three-legged dog, a dead pet canary, and yes, the lord. There in the foothills of the Catskills in New York, nature and the seasons are always present, ultimately leading him to conclude “how soft my ashes will be…” He maintains sadness throughout, wishing he could be as happy as his dog “just being let in”…

You wonder who else is there because the goal or theme of the book is expressed early:
“You sing to the bird in me/I sing to the bird in you/an effort/we love to face/each dawn.”
With that line’s staccato rhythm, he also suggests a pace like bird songs.

“If time had a shadow…,” he says, “It’d be a swiftness having/no nest to return to”.
“enough/sleep is so difficult/now dreams of my dead father/have come to/spend the winter/Oh lord, let me stay drunk somehow/without all this drinking…”

The life in the poems is often cold to him. There are “crows in fog-/their backs turned to me/ignoring me”; and “winter’s white shoulders--just how beautiful and cold/they really are.” Or his old three-legged dog ”chasing after/a winter sun/that’s cold and/hobbling on one leg”.

To go on pulling beautiful quotes would be unfair to the author and reader. Readers there certainly should be. It’s a nice pocket-size book to carry with you on a nature walk when you might wish to ponder poems about the cruelty of death in the elegance of nature. By all means read them out loud…


By Barbara Bialick, author of Time Leaves (Ibbetson Street Press)

Women’s Work: Modern Women Poets Writing in English

Women’s Work: Modern Women Poets Writing in English
Eva Salzman and Amy Wack, Eds.
Seren Books
www.seren-books.com or http://amazon.com
ISBN 978-1-85411-431-0


A review by Mignon Ariel King


The editors of Women’s Work intend to counteract the “glaring gender imbalance” in anthologies of modern poets, incorporating both famous and lesser-known women poets from the US, UK, and Ireland. This admirable and complex goal is combined with a reluctance to detract from the poetry itself by reducing the poets to political pawns in a radical, separatist feminism. In a fair world, Salzman’s introduction assesses, “the writing is all that should count,” but in the absence of such fairness the scales must occasionally be tipped in the direction of “positive discrimination” (8).



These editors are an American whose bio is as vibrant as her poetry and a classic British poet-scholar, both of whom have been working with words for their entire lives. The reader is in very good hands with this pair. Salzman points out that editors who are charged with judging the importance of poets generally know too little about modern women poets to have an informed opinion about which women poets have earned the term “important.” The highly learnéd yet extremely entertaining introduction explains that the purpose of the anthology is not to “take gender politics as [its] main subject” (17); however, the fact that anger and resistance still confront the mere discussion of gender inequalities in canonizing literature hammers home the need for this work.



Separated into fourteen themed sections—rather than being arranged in chronological order—this is no gloomy tome. Remember compare and contrast papers from high school English class? Here the editors make such connections for the reader, helpfully placing compatible poems for the reader’s true enjoyment as well as understanding. This format allows the non-scholar to simply enjoy the poems at will. That is, read from the “Culture…” section at night and save “History…War” for daylight hours, if you please. Read according to your current mood. The diversity of voices represented roots this collection in the 21st Century. It is all quite good poetry, no low-quality work appearing because of a poet’s demographics. Here is a sample of the 283 pages of poetry, spanning one-hundred-plus years and three major English-language locales:



“Please can I have a man…Who when I come trotting in…
opens his arms like a trough for me to dive into.”
—Selima Hill, “Please can I have a man”


“Now, when he and I meet, after all these years,/
I say to the bitch inside me, don’t start growling.”
—Carolyn Kizer, “Bitch”


“What does she do with them all?/They warm her throat like pearls/
They fasten her dress, stud her shoes….”
—Amy Wack, “Tooth Fairy”


“In my dream I take the white man/slap him til he loves me.”
—Diane Glancy, “Kemo Sabe”


“When I am old…I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves/
And satin sandals, and say we’ve no money for butter.”
—Jenny Joseph, “Warning”

“Here comes another alpha male--,/a man’s man, a dealmaker,/
holds tanks of liquor,/charms them pantsless at lunch….”
--Deborah Garrison, “Please Fire Me”


“…What would we have called each other laughing/
joking into our beer? Where are my gangs,/
my teams, my mislaid sisters?”
--Lucille Clifton, “The Lost Women”


The anthology is an excellent read, a sourcebook for writers and students, and a formal scholar’s delight(with outstanding front and back matter, brief but relevant bios, an index, and flawless organization.


English teachers from secondary to college level could not ask for a better text. It is also good for men who have a clue about modern women’s poetry or for those who would like to get one from experts. Impatient readers who could not be paid to read an intro can crack the book open anywhere and be absorbed. Read it because you are in love, or doing your laundry, or lonely, or truly annoyed. It weighs comparatively little, a fine companion on the train at 8am. For women poets there is almost the urge to be discouraged. Instead, be humbled. Be inspired. Be prepared to throw an “it’s about time” party when this anthology becomes required reading in modern poetry courses. Women’s Work has just begun.

--available on amazon.com




Mignon Ariel King is an alumna of the Graduate Program in English at Simmons College, a former adjunct professor of English, and a multicultural woman poet

Falling Forward by Rebecca Schumejda

Falling Forward by Rebecca Schumejda

Copyright 2008

sunnyoutside

PO Box 911

Buffalo, NY 14207



ISBN: 978-1-935613-12-5



Rebecca Schumejda’s titular poem is also the last one in the collection, set off by its own section heading and center justified. It’s a special poem that acts as a sort of afterword and comments, in a fairly direct manner, on the collection as a whole. The image one gets is of a prayer, but not just any prayer—a prayer of supplication in the face of adversity.



Indeed, the collection as a whole works on that level. The section titles are all lines or images from the title poem, “The Truth Is Too Heavy,” “Folded Like Two Hands in Prayer,” “Overgrown with Weeds and Regrets,” and “Falling Forward.”



The first poem begins “This afternoon / I buried your cat / while you were at work.” It is economical language broken into clauses, but the enjambed first line lends a sense of tension, which is borne out through the rest of the poem. The narrator dreads the idea of relating this event when her significant other returns home from a day at work.


Other poems follow a similar theme—two characters with distance between them, avoiding topics that need to be addressed and fumbling through crumbling or crumbled relationships, all in an attempt to maintain grip on the ungrippable.



This tension between the things that ought to be said and things that are not said creates a space of broken relationships and cross-purpose discussions. It’s similar to a Pinter play in that the space between spoken thoughts is as much a character as the actual characters within the poems.



Ultimately, the reader is left with the last poem as an answer to all the problems within. “Falling Forward” is an apt description of the lives of Schumejda’s characters. They don’t so much move through time as stumble, trying to keep their feet in an uneven world. But “[w]hen the truth is too heavy…[t]here’s no way to avoid failure,” says the narrator. This is the very essence, the underlying motif of each poem, that the only thing you can do is “just lean forward / let your knees cushion your fall.”



Very much recommended.



Review by Cameron Mount

Blue Collar Poet. G. Emil Reutter.

Blue Collar Poet. G. Emil Reutter. ( Stone Garden Net Publishing 3851 Cottonwood Dr. Danville, Ca. 94506) http://www.stonegarden.net

Poet G. Emil Reutter has worked in factories, steel mills, and other hard knock type of jobs across the Mid Atlantic region of the U.S. He makes no bones that he is mostly self-taught. He is not a product of an MFA mill, maybe a steel mill. So when he was dubbed with the title “Blue Collar Poet” he stuck with this designation with pride.

And the poems in “Blue Collar Poet” are solid, tight, workman like pieces that leave you thinking. The poem “sweet inside” has a delicious innuendo,

“sweet center
surrounded by fruit
tongue glides along
slowly entering
tasting sweetness
of all
that is inside
ah
nothing is quite
like
a creamsicle
on a hot summer day.”

And in the poem “Moment” Reutter captures it and reels it in:

“she sits
on edge of bed
long wavy hair
covering frame
silhouetted by
early morning sun
i sit up
our bodies meet
her head rests
upon my shoulders
a moment frozen
in time
a moment
that will always
be in my mind.”

Recommended.

Here Comes a-ha’s Biggest Fan!

Here Comes a-ha’s Biggest Fan!

The Scoundrel Days of Hobo Highbrow Touches Down in Boston/Chicago

Boston - Yes, here comes a-ha’s biggest fan – or at least, that’s how Hobo Highbrow, the main character of Pål H. Christiansen's novel The Scoundrel Days of Hobo Highbrow, sees himself.

People from as many as 24 countries have already ordered their copies of the English edition of this light and entertaining novel first published in Norwegian in 2002. The book is finally available to readers in the Boston and Chicago areas through several local bookstores*. It is far from necessary to be an a-ha fan to be captivated by the endearing Thurber-like character of Hobo Highbrow.

Hobo, a newspaper copywriter who writes on the side and dreams of winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, believes he is the only one able to fully understand the three band members of a-ha (particularly Paul Waaktaar-Savoy), who hit the top of the U.S. and many other countries’ music charts back in 1985 with their unforgettable hit Take On Me. On his way to revealing his inner self to the genius he believes Paul Waaktaar-Savoy to be, the struggling writer Hobo loses his job, almost loses his girlfriend, and most definitely loses his grip on reality!

The real Paul Waaktaar-Savoy, who today lives in New York with wife Lauren (formerly of Boston) and their son, Auggie, says he enjoyed reading this “funny and charming” book, and even stands by Hobo, saying, “I’m like that, too” when it comes to being obsessed with someone. “I can latch onto people for their energy or inspiration to get me going. And it works a lot of times, too. There’s rarely a time when I’m not obsessed about some amazing musician, painter, or writer, and then I have to know every little thing about them and see if it somehow relates to me.”

The author, Pål H. Christiansen, also has Norwegian-American roots, as his grandmother, Margaret Nannestad, was born and raised in Evanston, Illinois.

Several American book-bloggers have already enjoyed reading The Scoundrel Days of Hobo Highbrow. In his review, Michael Lundin of Bent Bindings Book Blog says: “And sometimes characters you love to read about might not necessarily be people you’d like to hang out with . . .. Throughout this book, Hobo Highbrow reminded me of Ignatius J. Reilly from John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces.”

German magazine Der Spiegel wrote of the German edition published in 2007: “Pål H. Christiansen has created a wonderful, grumpy hero - a tedious but friendly chap. Christiansen contemplates with empathy how difficult it can be to find one’s place in this big, wide world while the character you are carrying around inside of you is taking up all of your attention.”

When published in Norway in 2002, Drømmer om storhet received considerable attention from the reviewing press. The British translator and writer Jon Buscall did the English translation and gave the book the new title of The Scoundrel Days of Hobo Highbrow, which refers to a-ha’s second album of 1986, Scoundrel Days. (Text: schwindt-pr, Ingerid White)
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
*Bookstores with The Scoundrel Days of Hobo Highbrow in stock:
Schoenhof’s Foreign Books, 76A Mount Auburn Street, Cambridge, MA 02138 / Harvard Book Store, 256 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138 / Porter Square Books, 25 White Street, Cambridge, MA 02140 / Out of the Blue Gallery, 106 Prospect Street, Cambridge, MA 02139 / Trident Booksellers & Café, 338 Newbury Street, Boston, MA 02115 / Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard Street, Brookline, MA 02446 / New England Mobile Book Fair, 82-84 Needham Street, Newton Highlands, MA 02461 / Back Pages Books, 289 Moody Street, Waltham, MA 02453 / Europa Books, 832 N. State Street, Chicago, IL 60610

A printable jpg file of the book cover can be downloaded for free use from the author’s virtual press center at www.phc.no/press.

Court Green 6

Court Green 6

Cora Jacobs, Managing Editor
Court Green
Columbia College Chicago
English Department
600 S. Michigan Ave
Chicago, IL 60605
312/369-8212



Copyright © 2009 by Columbia College Chicago

ISSN 1548-5242





Review by Zvi A. Sesling





Court Green 6 is an annual publication of Columbia College Chicago and a whopper of magazine with 65 pages of poems and another 62 pages entitled “Dossier: Letters.”



Let me begin with the poems. There were so many I liked it is difficult to highlight some. However, Charles Jensen’s poem “Barcelona, City of the Sad Divas” speaks in a language of creativity that fascinates and frightens a reader, while being exhilarating.



Here from the middle of his poem are a few lines, but I recommend you read the whole poem for its full impact:





Where men felt anxious, they offered

two bee-stung lips for company.



Where men felt abandoned, they offered

torn up pictures of forgotten parents



They provided salt for every wound, every corner

of the city was ripe with good junk.



Where they offered junk, they substituted

coffee grounds, homemade breakfasts.





Other poets in this volume include Michael Homolka, Kate Greenstreet, Ron Padgett, and

then there’s Shana Cleveland’s “Chickenfight at the old lake tonight” from I select the second of four short paragraphs:



At the place everyone goes there were

movies and loneliness. There were big pillows for

sitting and popcorn but don’t say I didn’t warn you.





This one too is worth reading in its entirety and depending on the kind of poetry you like

there is something in here for everyone.



However, the most fun I had was reading the section entitled “Dossiers: Letters.”

They are poems and prose poems opening with Rachel Loden’s “Dear Question Mark”

which is a poetic letter to the rock singer of 96 Tears. A clever ditty indeed.



Teddy Macker has several letters entitled “The Cockeyed Prayers” which live up to their names such as ‘TO EVERY PRETTY GIRL I HAVE EVER SEEN IN MY ENTIRE LIFE,” “MARATHON FEELER” and others.



Alice Notely, wife of the late Ted Berrigan chimes in a series of letter poems, one of which she wrote with Allen Ginsberg back in ’82:



I walked past Leven’s window on Mirror Street

I knew it by the sign that said “Leven’s Window”

in wispy old-fashioned script, on a

postcard beneath the window (shade drawn)

It started snowing. When I (slowly)

turned & faced the street I would wake up:

“Come back next year.”





There are many more, most of them clever, insightful or just plain fun. You’ll find the living and the dead here including Elizabeth Savave, Kimiko Hahn, James Schuyler, Albert Goldbarth, Nicole Cooley, Anne Sexton, Allen Ginsberg (a personal favorite of mine no matter what he wrote), Trey Sager and Lynn Xu to name a few.



I recommend this issue not only for the talented writers, but also for the writing they produce, some of which is unusual yet interesting and, if you seek to learn from reading, you will receive some wonderful lessons.

The Scoundrel Days of Hobo Highbrow by Paal H. Christiansen

The Scoundrel Days of Hobo Highbrow by Paal H. Christiansen Translated by Jon Buscall (Forlaget Fabula N-1321 Stabekk Norway http://www.forlaget-fabula.no

They say, “Music has charms to soothe the savage beast.” I suppose it does, although in my case, a good shot of Dewar’s does the trick. But in Norwegian write Paal H. Christiansen’s new book “ The Scoundrel Days of Hobo Highbrow,” the music of the pop group “a-ha” provides solace, and makes the center hold, for this struggling, not that young writer, Hobo Highbrow. Frankly I was not familiar with this group, and based on what was represented in the novel, I had trouble figuring out why the protagonist was so enamored with them. But of course I love Billy Joel, and I have been vilified for that.

It seems that Hobo is in the midst of a nervous breakdown of sorts, after losing his job, later his manuscript (that involves the construction of a birdhouse) and suffering a largely imaginary slight from his girlfriend. The book follows Hobo’s confused journey through his mental maze and haze in which he eventually emerges more or less intact. In this scene the 40-year-old Hobo sees one of the a-ha members on the street, and he swoons like a hormonal teenager:

“ I sensed a strength and joy seeping through my body, through my legs, my arms, across my chest and up to my head. I had met Paul Waaktaar! I had looked straight into the eyes of Paul Waaktaar! And I felt a shock jolt through my body as if for a second I was momentarily connected to an electric network with an unknown power. The power of the massively talented. It was power of those who created art that would last for eternity.”

He later opines about pop music and its purpose—at least for him.

“As far as I am concerned the whole purpose of pop music is to drown out all the world’s misery. Music is all about keeping your dreams alive!”

The book contains interesting literary tidbits and linguistic diversions—as the character obsesses as much about his writing as his music. This short novel attempts to explore the struggle of the artist to maintain, create and stay sane in an often-insane world.

Somerville’s Lucy Holstedt and the Women Musicians Network Connection

( From left to right: Berklee Professors: Lucy Holstedt, Christina Karem, Student Leader: Jenna Hardy)


Somerville’s Lucy Holstedt and the Women Musicians Network Connection


So I am sitting at the Sherman café in Union Square on a snowy Sunday, and two local artists blow my way. In fact, they live a mere two houses down from me on School St, and we happen to be fellow “Bagel Bards” as well. Lucy Holstedt, an associate professor at the Berklee School of Music, and her husband Kirk Etherton, (an artist in his own right), are at it again, promoting and putting on the 12th Annual Women Musician Network Concert March 12, 2009 at 8:15PM at the Berklee Performance Center in Boston.

Lucy and Kirk have lived in Somerville for a while, and some years ago we shared the same street in the “ville, Ibbetson Street. (The namesake of that small press Somerville literary magazine.) Lucy told me over a delectable oatmeal scone, not to mention a piece of mouthwatering carrot cake, that she loves Somerville because of its accessibility to public transportation, and it has, as she so succinctly put it: “A small town or village feel to it.” Lucy is teacher of music theory, ear training, and may I say a damn fine poet to boot. She is also a composer, lyricist, and performer. She performed at the sorely missed Jimmy Tingle Theatre and many other venues, and was a member of the “Planet Girls”, a well-known performance group.

Lucy told me that she started the Women Musicians Network in 1998 with Jane Stachowiak. The mission statement of the group according to Lucy is:

“To provide an opportunity for women students to present compositions, compose new work, perform, direct, and learn how to produce a major concert.”

Women are a minority at Berklee Lucy said, and a minority in the music industry at large. So any help is needed. Women are often lead singers in bands, but there are few behind-the-scenes, and in the business aspect itself, she lamented.

Lucy talked about the upcoming concert while her public relations man of a husband handed out concert cards to bemused patrons. The concert will have many special features including Latin vocalist Mili Bermejo, and her husband the bassist Dan Greenspan. There will be performances from students from many different countries including: Israel, Sweden, Scotland, Turkey, etc….

The style of music will be mostly Pop, Jazz and Celtic. There will be an innovative arrangement of Stevie Wonder’s “I Wish,” by a Japanese student; There will also be a beautifully performed ballad by Maureen McMullen, who is quite well known in her native Scotland. And don’t miss the violin duo by Julie Kang and Rika Ikeda, as well as a performance by an African drum/dance troupe—to name a few highlights.

Tickets are a bargain at 10 smackers---go to http://www.berkleebpc.com for more info

Review of: From the Paris of New England: Interviews with Poets and Writers by Doug Holder

From the Paris of New England:
Interviews with Poets and Writers.
By Doug Holder
2009; 133pp; Ibbetson Street Press,
25 School Street, Somerville, MA 02143.
http://ibbetsonpress.com
http://lulu.com/ibbetsonpress


It’s really true, Somerville, Massachusetts, right next to Cambridge, is a kind of New England Paris, all kinds of little eateries and galleries and everything-else-ries, like an Asian market, a Peruvian cafe, you name it. And what Holder has done here is to take the interviews he has done with Somerville (and other fancy-wancy, avant-garde, or no-guard-at-all) writers, book-store owners, publishers, etc. and put them together in a book -- with photos.

Masterfully done, Holder really brings the Somerville lit-world alive, alive, alive. There’s Louisa Solano, who ran the Grolier Poetry Book Shop for over thirty years, talking about Robert Lowell, Philip Levine, Bukowski, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ed Hogan, there’s poet Lisa Beatman, talking about her recently published working-class-centered poetry (author of Manufacturing America: Poems From the Factory ), there’s poet Martha Collins who established the Creative Writing Program at U/Mass Boston and who teachers Creative Writing at Oberlin College, there’s Dick Lourie, poet-musician-publisher (of Hanging Loose mag and publishing house) talking about the old (and new) days in Somerville, Beat poet and organizer Jack Powers, Eva Salzman, who has spent years and years in England, there’s poet Afaa Michael Weaver, a professor of Literature at Simmons College in Boston talking about being an African-American poet in a community that gives you the space to be eccentric, poet Sarah Hannah, a professor at Emerson College in Boston, talking about Ph.D.’s versus poetic creativity, there’s poetic genius Lo Gallucio talking about

2.
psychological problems and creativity, poet-publisher Gloria Mindock who glories in the richness of cultural life in Somerville, filled with writers, painters and actors.....

It would take another book to just write about this book, that’s how rich it is. Interviews with Mike Basinski, Errol Uys, Lan Samantha Chang, Miriam Levine, Mark Doty, Claire Messud, Ed Sanders, Robert Creeley, it’s a veritable Who’s Who of artistic souls in Somerville. You go to the Bagel Bard readings in Somerville, hang around with the Somerville poet-artist gang, and it is like going back to Paris at the end of the nineteenth, the beginning of the twentieth century.


*Hugh Fox is a founding editor of the Pushcart Prize and author of “Way, Way Off the Road: Memoir of an Invisible Man.”

When Performers Swim, The Dice are Cast by Judy Katz-Levine

Review, When Performers Swim, The Dice are Cast by Judy Katz-Levine (Ahadada Books, Ontario, Canada)

Reviewer: Barbara Bialick, author of Time Leaves (Ibbetson Street Press)


There are many different languages a poem can speak in. For Judy Katz-Levine, it’s the language of jazz. Music plays her rhythm and meter, her unusal imagery, and the world of dreams of past lives. For out of jazz and Judaism, her mysticism is born.
It peppers her poems, her motherhood and her marriage. Herself a singer in a choir and a jazz flutist, her husband is an acupuncturist and jazz sax player. (It helps to be told these tidbits in her bio, for saxophones, presumably her husband’s, keep cropping up nameless in her poems.) But where she’s particularly proud is of her unnamed son, who she hailed as a prodigy by age 4 in “Sunset III”:

“trees with leaves like the hands of prodigies/…a son about to redeem himself/…
saxophone moaning its scales…/prodigies who can’t fit in, and talk strange languages/prodigies who wait for the morning’s river./being 4 years old and speaking perfectly/…a boat not quite ready, but we are patiently waiting for that day.”
Near the end of the book her son is attending college orientation in Amherst, Mass.

In “On Mortality”, the first poem of the book, she ends up with a lily, to me a symbol of Easter, “the lily that comes up on the young man’s computer screen” It doesn’t seem coincidental that the book comes out before Easter—and yet it is a Jewish woman’s book…Meanwhile, a young man “whoops it up over the/ universe’s peculiarities. Then he doesn’t eat. You and i, we/talk about what’s hard to talk about. Mortality whispers in/the night rain. The will to survive emerges…” Yet the ones she’s speaking of and to are to me a mystery.

She won’t give up all her secrets. “I get by,” she says in the poem of the same name.
Is that the song “I’ll get by as long as I have you”? Either way, she’s “stern” at a party where she’s had a glass of wine…But musicians are controlling the imagery. “Seagulls float. The sax was smooth,/as delicious as a chili with wine. The guitarist did tasty licks/from his days on the road….?” It takes a woman drummer to get her to loosen up…The woman said “Sometimes you just have to shake your money-maker…”

“When performers swim,” the poet declares in the title poem “Performers”, “the dice are cast.” (You’ve got to keep up the performance no matter what?).”when performers tango, stages turn into bridges, an aster in/a garden blooms…when performers die, the oceans leap up and keen as seals/emerge and fly.” (a vivid and surreal or holy moment?)
Like most of her poems, the title poem is a hard one to analyze. But that’s a poet’s fun.

Poets and English teachers alike can have such fun throughout the book. Try analyzing “The Attributes”: “the attributes of this saintly presence are to be numbered/according to flowers. The initiate will enumerate laughter/according to myths and waterfalls; giant spiders, miners/lost in mines due to seismic tremors. What is lost, and/what can be seen—the white circle above, the woods/below…”

But when she speaks of horses, she is impressed with their power and beauty, like her mother apparently was as in “Games of Survival”: “I remember my mother on lonely days. The gusto/She loved…the stallion that couldn’t race…I am poised to play.”
Or this image in “She speaks of horses.”: “Who will I meet, what stranger, emerging/from the dark wells of the eyes of those horses/what body lit under a midnight crescent?”

And finally, she includes space as if it is the so-called thing to do, which is include a little politics in your manuscript: In “Blood Storms” she writes “they say a storm will come. E-mail the whitehouse on/Darfur, imagine what a youg girl suffers in a camp in/Darfur as the snow starts to fall/to be raped as a child…to starve/…every night we hear about/the limbs of soldiers maimed, Iraqis killed…” A good poem, but it lacks any imagery of music, which surely it needs!

But it all gets somehow connected in the final poem “She has said…”: “that she would be able to sing again, after the hoarseness/subsides/she has said that all belongs to the red shooting twig./she will still mother, trembling in the car/…she has said everything will turn out okay, and she hopes/she is exactly perfectly correct/the guitar responds to her fingers, a strong rhythmic/ cadence, and a lamentation”

It’s always in the music where she finds her meanings, mysteries and explanations, and her uniqueness as a poet

By Barbara Bialick, author of TIME LEAVES (Ibbetson Street Press)

Streets. Poem Book by Mel King.

Streets. Poem Book by Mel King. ( Sensations Publishing A Division of Sweetie’s Books Silver Spring, Maryland http://sweetiesbooks.com/sensations.aspx

Mel King has been a presence on the Boston political scene for more years than most of us have been alive. I remember his unsuccessful run for mayor—this tall, dignified Blackman, sporting a dashiki, amidst a sea of Brooks Brothers suits. King was born in Boston in 1928, and grew up in the “New York Streets” neighborhood of Boston, named after the towns served by the New York Central Railroad. For years he pounded the pavement, or the streets as a political activist, a gadfly in the status quo’s eye. When I lived in the North End of Boston in the 1980’s I used to see King walking down the winding, fragrant streets, sampling the colorful array of produce that decked the bins in the markets. Like the title of Alfred Kazin’s famous memoir, King is a “Walker in the City.”

King realizes the value of the “street”, thus this poetry collection’s titled “Streets.” With wonderful illustrations by Allan Crite, B.Z. Nunez, and other local artists, King tells the reader that streets have long been symbols of political action:” take it to the streets,” or “take the high road,” for instance, are common enough call to action phrases. King reflects:

“Streets are a major player in all aspects of our lives. Just look at the many ways they shape our songs, poems and stories. There are over 50 songs and thousands of stories and poems inspired by roads and streets. Streets are part of our social rhetoric, as in “street smart” or “hit the road, Jack.”

The poems here fit beautifully with Allan Crite’s paintings. Crite was noted for his painting of street scenes in Boston in the 1930’s and beyond. He portrayed a plethora of street activity, and included in this book is a picture of a parade on Hammond St. in the South End by the artist. King dedicates this book to Crite, who King describes as a “chronicler of life on the streets of Lower Roxbury.’”

And of course being a lover of everything that has to do with food, I loved King’s description of the fare of the thoroughfare. Here are some mouthwatering descriptions:

“streets are a venue for prostitutes and hustlers/ hawkers and peddlers for rags and bottles/ fresh fish get your Porgies today/matzos and ‘ranges as the words faded away/some came with goodies like roasted chestnuts/and popcorn waffles melted butter lemon slush/ and snow cones…. matzos kielbasa feta cheese rolled apricot sheets/delis with pickles and pastrami/pistachio and frozen pudding ice cream…/eel for the holiday wine whiskey beer…”

My word—what a tasteful riff!

There are many stories of the street in this book. On Seneca Street King gets a lesson from a homeless man about life, he remembers organ grinders with their monkeys (I remember a guy on the Commons in the 70’s, the monkey tipped his hat and you put change in it—now that’s what I call monkey business), the bastions of break dancers on the hot, cracked pavement and much more…

King has had a long, and varied life. He was a State Rep in Mass. for a number of years, taught at MIT, and to cap his career, what better way than a book of verse, a love letter to the streets of Boston, his home, the beginning and end of his journey.

Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update

Behind Our Memories by Michael Hettich

Behind Our Memories
By Michael Hettich
ISBN 0-938566-93-8
Adastra Press
16 Reservation Road
Easthampton MA 01027

Review by Steve Glines

It’s the Strathmore laid paper, 80 lbs. at least that catches your eye. The paper is hand folded into a single hand sewn signature binding a beautiful little volume of Garamond letterpress type titled “Behind Our Memories,” by Michael Hettich. It catches your eye. The cover is also done in letterpress but in 5, yes, 5 subtle colors. The book, the binding, and the colophon all say old time, even Victorian quality and it is.

The book carries a simple dedication, “for Colleen” and after reading the first, second, … poem you know Colleen must be his wife. This simple volume is a love story, not sappy, not sentimental but almost mater of fact images we can feel of two young lovers being in love. We see this from the perspective of newlyweds, as well as a father of a young butterfly-chasing daughter. It’s refreshing and not in the least bit cynical but rather fits the almost classical image promised by the letterpress cover. It’s old-fashioned love and it’s pleasing without being “pretty,” its worm without being hot and it’s loving without being “feminine.” Yet in spite of its Victorian promise it’s very much 21st century.

Christmas in the Woods

Our twelve year old daughter walks around the cabin
wearing a red velvet sweater with fake zebra
collar and silky underpants, singing.
Her toenails are bright red. Outside small birds
flit through the trees in the gray light, and beyond
down the bluff, the river pulls.

The radio in the bedroom is tuned to a discussion
of refugee repatriation in various
unfamiliar countries. In the kitchen my wife washes
dishes and sings Christmas carols with out daughter.
I pour us more coffee. Yesterday, a friend explained
the coming extinction. He shared all the details:

Squirrels and weeds, he said, and pigeons
will be our wildlife. Since then I’ve been making
lists of what I need to see. My son has started videotaping
everything we do and say, as though he might save us that way.

And so I’ll sing with my wife and daughter –
smiling at the camera, in this cabin in the woods –
to celebrate the season, and to remind us
someday, how happy we were.

This is the kind of book anyone will enjoy reading and when you’re done give it to someone you love … it’s worth at least 20 points … but who’s counting.