Review for Emerson Presents/Emerson College Faculty Film Series Boston, Mass.

(Paramount Theatre--Boston)




Review for Emerson Presents/Emerson College Faculty Film Series Boston, Mass.

Oct7, 2011.

By Amy R. Tighe


Turns out, I know more than I think I do. When I got assigned to review the Emerson Faculty Film series called Emerson Presents, I was a little concerned. I admit it, I don’t really know the difference between a film and a movie. I probably never will. But I love to learn, to talk to artists about their work and to see film that I might otherwise not have access to view.


Emerson Presents offers monthly screenings of films made by faculty, local filmmakers and scholars who are available to talk to the audience after the screening. Viewers have immediate and personal access to the artists and experts who discuss up close their work in an atmosphere of inquiry and insight. We get to see the Wizard behind the curtain and learn more about OZ. It’s a perfect way to learn.


The kick-off film of the season was “Scum of the Earth.” It’s a sexploitation film, made in 1963, when film was rising as a mass media form while at the same time, societal sexual standards were changing. Presented by Professor Eric Schaefer, the film is a great example of the era. Big cars, small cityscapes, bumpy camera shots, blunt dialogue and simple characters. In a short clip prior to the film, the producer, Herschell Gordon Lewis, tells us that the trailers for his films were brilliant because they enticed people to come and that he made lots of money off of them. Overseeing his museum, in his garage in the South, is his main work now. We watched a trailer, it was full of T&A, lots of full frontal and nude shots of women, no nude shots of men. Sort of uninteresting, but I wanted to hear what the experts thought.


When we finally saw the feature, it was about a sweet young thing being coerced into having bad photos taken of her when scantily clad, and bad guys gaping around her. Yep, lots of schlock, lots of clichés. There are two murders, a few rapes (off camera) a graphic beating with a belt (on camera) and a suicide.



I was hoping for a discussion afterwards of what we had seen. How did camera angle, use of lighting in a limited technology, black outs and white outs on the screen become an integral part of the action in the film? The role of women as objects, specific techniques the filmmaker used to make us, as viewers, actually become voyeurs, and to ask ourselves whether a rape off screen was more violent than on screen -- to me, these would have been great topics. We didn’t get to any of that, which was a disappointment. The room was clearly full of intelligent and insightful people and an excellent discussion was completely available. We just didn’t connect. Too much T&A, not enough Q&A.



I will probably never see another sexploitation film from the 60s. But I most definitely will continue to come to this film series because I learned there are other ways to value a film, and to discuss how a film reflects and impacts its culture. I may stop going to movies. It’s more filling to watch the filmmaker in the room talk about their work. You can’t do that with most of what’s out there in movie land. Public discussion of public art is satisfying and ARTSEMERSON makes this happen for the seasoned and the novice.


The next film is October 14. Associate Professor Kathryn Ramey will present a program of her work, starting with her recent video Yanqui WALKER and the OPTICAL REVOLUTION, an exploration of the obscure American expansionist and military dictator William Walker. On November 4, Assistant Professor Hassan Ildari, a screenwriter and director originally from Tehran, Iran, will show his 1989 feature film Face of the Enemy, based on characters related to the 1979 Iran-US hostage crisis.
Tickets to Emerson Presents screenings are $10; $7.50 for members and seniors (65+); and $5 for students. The series is presented in the Bright Family Screening Room at the Paramount Center, 559 Washington Street, Boston, and will continue through April 2012. Check the website for screening times www.artsemerson.org or call 617-824-8400.


As an aside, I must say that the Paramount is a total sensory delight. If you go to the movies to escape, then come here. The restoration is entrancing. It’s better than having a fairy godmother. Upon entering, you’re transported into an Art Deco dream, suddenly adorned with diamonds and your sensible business suit has become a glistening gown. If you are not careful you might start dancing in the foyer. But that would be just grand because the staff is totally professional, accommodating and gracious, they might even dance with you. And if you go to movies to learn something new, again, come here. Overall, ArtsEmerson has an innovative and inviting program. Rarely seen films and prints of Katherine Hepburn, Charlie Chaplin, a collection called The Marriage Circle, portraying “the comedy and the awfulness of marital strife” are a few of their offerings. I’m bringing my 10 year old niece to see at least two of the matinees on the Big Screen.


Built in 1932, the Paramount has had many lives. It opened as a Palace, succumbed to decades of urban decay, and became another victim of the Combat Zone. Emerson College has thoughtfully and thoroughly embraced this history, and offers us a way to understand where we have been, and also, through its programming, where we can go. Definitely a Boston gem!

Reflections In A Smoking Mirror : Poems of Mexico&Belize by Paul Pines

Reflections
In A Smoking Mirror
Poems of Mexico & Belize
Paul Pines
Dos Madres Press 2011
ISBN 1-933675-60-2

Many of the poems seem to take place when seafaring
men jump out of their boats with sword in hand, ready to conquer
the enemy with the clash of weapons and political demise. Someone
has to lose but it is not the verse. These poems are similar to a
Keith Jarret Concert. They can rip your heart out and leave the reader
defenseless. So we have the ancients and the jazz musician combo:

“...Ollin
saw him coming
and warned his orchestra

-when the wind speaks
don't answer or you're lost

Robed in yellow red & green
they sat in silence...

until the Wind
began to sing

and they couldn't help
but accompany him

the above poem is a hymn that traverses the early story telling, chorus
and ancients collide on the page with a combination of mighty warrior
and old hags:

“a hag among young whores”

or

“descended
to find Mother Earth
a many – limbed monster
moving over water...”

Ahh. Not much changes. We kill and confiscate, claim as our own
the spoils of war and his 'him' dominates:

“Two days
after Blizean Independence
and almost all foreign visitors
have left...
in fact
there were so many
a West Indian P.M. Kept asking
where the Belizeans were
(many of whom had been reduced
to peeping through the fence)
It rained on Saturday
as the Belizean flag was raised
to a 21 gun salute
fired by a frigate
off shore
but the firework display
was scrubbed
after attempts to light it
failed
and it was clear
most of the population
had stayed home...

The poems are well written, informative and many readers will
revel in their myth and reality:

“...while Carib girls pace
the streets

coal black
in tight slacks
hair in corn-rows

smile at me
by the River Front Hotel
where I wait for the truck
to Mango Creek...”

Review of MUD SEASON, by Pamela Annas

Review of MUD SEASON, by Pamela Annas, Cervena Barva Press, PO Box 440357, West Somerville, MA 02144-3222, www.cervenabarvapress.com, 41 pages, $7, 2011

Review by Barbara Bialick, author of TIME LEAVES

MUD SEASON is an elegantly written chapbook that comes out when the author is nearing retirement—and deserves a wider audience in the military, civilian and literary realms. It’s written by a professor and associate dean of UMass-Boston who has previously written about poetry, but in a more academic sense. She is hereby encouraged to take off from this selection from her worldly childhood up through when she became a mother and an academic and began to work for peace and feminism. Just saying traveling with her “Navy” family is not enough. What specifically was she building on, let alone rebelling against, if anything, from that? We don’t know. What we do know is she writes about her experiences from one city to the next in imagistic detail, one word picture after another, until each poem is a succinct block of beautiful language by a world traveler.

One example of her style is the poem “Talking With Trees”. She writes, “For years at a time I forget/the slow liquid language of trees, touch talk of fingers caressed by bark./…This morning…/I stopped to put my hands one on each side/of a weathered spruce and felt its delicate/meditation of sap and water/a language of vowels mostly/though the occasional sharp crack/of a consonant throbbed into my skin/…I..then walked on, hands on fire.”

This was written by a “Navy Brat” who grew up with “saluting in the family car/prefab green housing/trampled dirt of the playground/Armed Forces Day—cotton candy/and climbing on tanks:/It’s a hell of a note/when you’ve spent your life/teaching peace…”

Her memorial poem to her father is well-done, dense with word pictures. Called “After the Fact” (for F.A., 1923-1989), it begins “My father’s eyes were bitter chocolate/my legacy thick Greek hair that Sappho/might have braided with rosemary/and sweet clover, childhood on the slope/of a smoldering volcano. Still the savor--/fava beans in olive oil, dark bread, thick coffee, blackberries and yoghurt on the balcony/of a hotel near the grand bazaar…/Dolphins leap/in the wake of the ferry to Istanbul…”

In her Bio, Annas writes that “She singlehandedly raised a child who’s now in college and is herself a professor and associate dean at University of Massachusetts, Boston.”

She is also a member of the editorial collective of the THE RADICAL TEACHER, author of a DISTURBANCE IN MIRRORS: THE POETRY OF SYLVIA PLATH and co-author of two textbook/anthologies, LITERATURE AND SOCIETY and AGAINST THE CURRENT. She “looks forward to taking up blues harp in her retirement…”

Our Daily Words by Bernard Horn

Our Daily Words
Bernard Horn
Old Seventy Creek Press Poetry Series 2010
ISBN 1450526004


It is impossible for me to not love these poems when in the first poem
'The Smell of Time,' emits beauty and turtle shell hard as rock to knock our
heads against, the poems are at once our home and the author's home:


“...time enters the mind on waves of odor:
in chills and songs, in turtle eyes
that are sharp black dots
on warm jade, in the tastes
we remember, we relive
and get recaptured by our old attachments...”

We read each poem in this collection, because,
it considers how far we dig to find a complete sentence, one that holds
the earth, our experience, our dreams, then when the sentence ends, we
feel complete, and only in a poem our daily refreshment:


“the old familiar talk, that
everything passes, that nothing
passes or is certain, that language
itself only yearns, can never inhabit
this earth that recedes from articulation
like a calf forever just eluding
the red hot iron, the insistent
talk, last night, of Chekhov’s words and life
rang true, and yet, snowed in
in Framingham a Tuesday workday,
school day, Hedya and I
tramping, sculpting, repeatedly
sledding a long run in the thick snow
on thin plastic sheets, one red,
one blue, while Gabi and you
prepare the first full lunch
we've all sat down to together in longer
than any of us remembers:
Hebrew National salami on rye,
Campbell's salt-and- wonton soup,
cucumbers, scallions, hot spiced cider, words
knocking against words, and Hedya dancing to
Isn't She Lovely in her long johns,
aching for her seventh birthday, so filled
with pleasure, she calls her pal, Prageeta
and bursts into laughter before she finishes
dialing, while Gabi, darkly gorgeous today,
alternately three years older and younger
than twelve, suddenly, formally,
rises, walks around the table
plants a kiss on your cheek,
walks back to her chair, sits,
shoots a grin at me, and now,
from her bedroom yells
for the spelling of “science” but presses
against my left side at this desk before
I get to the “I,” while Hedya leans in,
hangs around my other side, writing, “aske,”
“dabe,” “eat,” “fed,” on labels for me to read
out loud before she sticks them
to the back of my sweater, while you're
on the phone with Bev, and then,
lunchtime, and now, at my desk, and now, and
now, I'm almost crying, thinking of
Max von Sydow with the juggler's family
in the clearing eating wild strawberries...”

All the words in the world cupped into a book. This is without a doubt
a “must read” book.


Irene Koronas
Poetry Editor:
Wilderness House Literary Review
Reviewer:
Ibbetson street Press

DEWITT HENRY: PLOUGHSHARES and other ‘Sweet Dreams’

DEWITT HENRY: PLOUGHSHARES and other ‘Sweet Dreams’



Interview with Doug Holder



DeWitt Henry is an acclaimed essayist, and fiction writer. He is the founding editor of Ploughshares literary magazine. Ploughshares is perhaps the most influential literary magazine in the country. Henry has a new memoir out, Sweet Dreams, that covers his youth, his time at Harvard, the formation of Ploughshares, and his coming of age as a writer and a man. I spoke to him on my Somerville Community Access TV show: "Poet to Poet to Writer to Writer."





Doug Holder: You are one of the most educated men I know. You have a PhD from Harvard and completed course requirements for an MFA from the Iowa Writer's Workshop.


DeWitt Henry: I wanted to avoid the draft (Laugh).


DH: You came from a Philadelphia Main Line family, but your childhood was far from idyllic. Your dad was an alcoholic, a racist, and he abused your mom. Some people would retreat into drug abuse, mental illness, etc... in reaction to all this. Do you think literature was the elixir that saved you?


DWH: I was a child when this was going on--so I had an innocent perception of things. My father was a decent man; he tried to make up for what he did. I was the baby of the family; my older siblings experienced the brunt of it. But really--I don't think anyone has a so-called totally "happy" background.

Yes. Literature was a shelter for me. My mother was a writer and artist. During the trauma caused by my father she had her own nervous breakdown. My mother hooked up with a prominent psychiatrist--and later on she became a sort of psychiatrist's assistant. She helped my father and in a way protected me. In retrospect I grew up in a protective environment. My sister and mother promoted reading. My sister was very literate and a good writer. She encouraged me to read stuff over my head. So in eight grade I was reading Crime and Punishment. I probably didn't understand it!

DH: Your father was a successful candy manufacturer. What did he think of your desire to be a writer?

DWH: He wanted me to be a candy maker. I considered it--we all did at one point. He himself was second generation. My grandfather started the company. He sent my father to business school. My father got into chemistry which was sort of the high tech of the day--very in vogue. This was in the 1920's. He worked for DuPont for a year, then briefly for the family business, where, during the depression he attracted the attention of a chemist at Walter Baker Company here in Boston. One thing led to another; he was hired by Baker, and before I was born, he was moving up in the Baker management. But then my grandfather had a heart attack, and begged him to come home and take care of the family business. He essentially sacrificed a corporate career for the sake of family.

DH: You got your PhD at Harvard and you also attended the Iowa Writers Workshop where you studied with Richard Yates, author of Revolutionary Road among other novels. Was Yates' background similar to yours?

DWH: Well, he was born in Yonkers, N.Y. His mother was socially pretentious and ambitious. She appeared in many different guises in his fiction. He was 14 or 15 years older than me--but both our families had the drive to rise in society. The Main Line Philadelphia society where I grew up was very socially stratified. It was worse than the Boston's Brahmins. It was the kind of a place if you went into a dry cleaner or a Woolworth's, within five seconds they tried to place you . So we had that common background of parents dreaming of gentility.

DH : Was there elitism prevalent in the Boston literary scene when you arrived?

DWH: When I arrived there was a literary stratification between the establishment and the young and unknown writers. The big Boston publishing houses, Harvard, were not interested in the newer or younger people. They did not encourage community. They were just the opposite. It was a Brahmin culture.

One thing about starting Ploughshares at the Plough and Stars Pub in Central Square, Cambridge, with the co-owner Peter O'Malley--was that it was Irish. Behind it was tradition of the Irish against the Boston Brahmins, against Harvard, against the established order.

DH: Is a pub a good place to birth a magazine?

DWH: I'm not sure I would recommend it, but there is the Irish tradition of the literary pub. It goes way back to William Butler Yeats and the Irish Renaissance. The literary pub has a tradition of readings and publishing broadsheets. The tradition was inherent in the presence of Peter O'Malley . O'Malley is still around--you will probably find him having a drink at the pub to this day.

DH: The memoirist Malachy McCourt told me that when you write a memoir you should not get bogged down with facts. Memoir is more about impressions.

DWH: The kind of memoir I write is more like fiction--rather than literal fact. You have to look hard for details for your writing. I tell my students to look for artifacts around their homes that are unexplained ... kind of bizarre. In my family we have these bear skin rugs--bear skin rugs--how do you figure that? You really have to use your imagination to make things come alive.


DH: How important was the founding of Ploughshares in your development as a writer?



DWH: As I say on p. 196 of Sweet Dreams, the venture of starting Ploughshares lent me social identity as a writer...I was taken seriously by writers my age who had themselves managed to publish books and land teaching jobs." I needed that because my first novel was such slow going. The magazine also exposed me to contemporary poetry and fiction, and to the emerging writers producing it, like colleagues, and I felt both in my editing and my writing that I was talking back to them in "the cultural conversation." I think of Tim O'Brien, Andre Dubus, Fanny Howe, Thomas Lux, James Tate, Jim McPherson, Sue Miller, Frank Bidart, David Gullette, Joyce Peseroff, the list goes on. The magazine helped to forge my sense of literary enterprise, combining editing, writing, and teaching. It also proved to be the credential--more than my PhD--that helped me find my place at Emerson College and the Creative Writing Program there. Of course, in the long view back, I had been writing and producing magazines since my school days with a toy printing press, and later a basement print shop, and then in college editing the Amherst Literary Magazine. My love of reading, writing, and publishing had been one love for most of my life.

Mike Amado’s "The Book of Arrows"

Mike Amado’s The Book of Arrows


reviewed by Alice Weiss



Mike Amado’s posthumous fifth book of poetry, The Book of Arrows, edited by Jack Scully and Nancy Grace Cunningham, gives us a chance to do two things, consider his poetry as Amada himself said, “In all its beginnings. . .its blooming. . .its endings,” and to consider his position as a poet in a community.


It is this last that I want to consider first. I never knew Mike so when Doug Holder asked me to review the Book of Arrows, one Saturday morning at Bagels with the Bards, I began asking other bards about him. Many said as a reader he was unmatched, electric, spiritual, performing so fully his empathy strengthened his listeners. He was, they said, a healer. Although a slight man when he performed his voice was deep and projected, reaching the whole room, taking on a different character with each new persona. There was a selfless quality about his projection that said, “not me, but you. . .I speak of your experience.” It seems as if he was the heart of whatever community he felt himself to be part of. As such he filled an oracular role, like Isaiah or Homer. He told us stories about ourselves and in so doing healed us.

It is in this context that I consider his poems. First the communities the poems create because to be the heart of a community is also to create it. It may be that until you hear the poet’s voice you do not even know you have a community. At its root and maybe at its most powerful, Mike’s poetry creates the one community of which we are all members: we mortals.

Mike’s mortality is a restless one. He wants “to be reborn/Reborn as a gun that shoots sound.”

He morns his friend Philip “His Body lies—But Still He Roams,” “You know I’m not a bad son [this addressing his mother], just a dead seed.” In his meditation on the Iraqi war, “Yes, dead don’t forget:/Their eyes stand open like curses.” Mortality is intimate, indeed intimately connected with his dis-ease: Life, he says
is a journey of forgetting.

"Every cough that barrels from my chest tires to erase
the ill from my body but it keeps growing.
I don’t believe in fate,
but now I remember who I am.” [Misrepresentations]

Who he is, as I have already implied, is also a matter of community, but the issue of identity, as opposed to mortality turns him back to human institutions. So his first community is his family and inextricably his connection to his Wampanoag forebears. But also to the confusion that race and color causes for him personally and for the larger community. In “I Love Rock-N-Roll…” he says “I’m playing around with colors in words/until I can find the color I own.” Mike’s narrator in the Rock-N-Roll poem begins in the middle of a dance, sister and brother in the mirror. The detail of the mirror, which doubles the number of dancers, also works as a complex metaphor for what we see. “She smiling into a coarse bristle brush,” and then the next line, “The kind my hair is too fine for,” requires us to see that the mirror is reflecting more than the dance. It’s allowing the speaker to meditate, even in all that noise and movement, on how he and his sister are different racial mixes. The lines that follow pinpoint his dilemma,

“I, like alabaster. I always thought
that I was adopted."

but the poem finds a release “both of us are day-glo under the black light, shrieking. . .”

It is through his grandmother that he is connected to the Wampanoags.

My native name is Spider Song
Spider is my guide,
a strong Medicine woman.
Spider Grandmother wove
the world and I live to sing about it; [Name]

It seems that Spider Grandmother wove more than the world; I found the two poems about his grandmother, elegies really, “6-13-1916 11-13-2006,”and “Talisman” to be among the most moving in the collection. But then there are the poems, or poetry, or Mike as word smith. “Like my Native blood,” he says, “poetry is a live fish, un-caught.”

The watchers around me are Baudelaire, Blake and Bly;
Shaman and Storyteller. Just to be alive with a found soul

is all the test I have time for.

We are bones swimming in soil-waves,

We emerge with a sunken jewel. . .[Test]

This collection tells the story of a guy who struggled mightily to express beauty in his life despite his long and desperate illness. There are some very angry poems about doctors and their failure to acknowledge his fellow humanity, much less save his life, and a few angry political poems. But what jumps out at me are the moments of simple lyricism:
He smiles in the bathroom mirror,
knows it looks cool with his safety-pin ears.

That thin sheet of paper
On a table cloth of pastel flowers.
Sitting in the kitchen, after dinner,
her voice the voice of God.

Prayer is her rock, fire, wood, and water.
Her whisper calls in the dawn.

You don’t have to hold my ashes.
Return them to the earth.

It is almost as if you can hear the drums that gave him his first artistic experience still drumming the poems past his time, here.

Lawrence Kessenich: A Somerville Bagel Bard with a flair for “flash” playwriting

Lawrence Kessenich: A Somerville Bagel Bard with a flair for “flash” playwriting.

Lawrence Kessenich is a member of Somerville ‘s Bagel Bards and was an editor at the prestigious Boston publishing house Houghton Mifflin. During his time at Houghton Mifflin, Kessenich recruited W. P. Kinsella author of “Shoeless Joe,” Rick Boyer’s “Billingsgate Shoal”, a mystery that won an Edgar Award for best mystery novel of the year, “Confessions of Taoist on Wall Street,”by David Payne, and “Selected Poems of Anne Sexton,” edited by Diane Middlebrook. Here Kessenich writes about his experience in a 10-minute play competition…this piece should take you about 5 minutes to read!







10-MINUTE PLAYS: THE POETRY OF DRAMA

The first company to have an official 10-minute play festival was the Actors Theatre of Louisville in 1977. Since then, such festivals have sprung up nationwide, usually associated with competitions that draw entries from around the country – and even from around the world. Boston has one of the most extensive festivals I’m aware of, every May at the Boston Center for the Arts. It’s called The Boston Theater Marathon – eight solid hours of 10-minute plays, five per hour – and it’s entirely captivating. Very few of the plays are boring, and when one comes along that is, it’s over in 10 minutes, anyway!

If your response to this is: “10-minute plays? What can possibly be conveyed in 10 minutes?” you’re clearly not a poet. Though ten minutes may seem like a short amount of time for a play, it’s an eternity for a poem. Heck, many of us have had group readings where we got 10 minutes total to read our poems – and we’ve said a lot in those 10 minutes.

What are these plays about? I’ve seen one about an old boyfriend and girlfriend meeting on the street in “the hood” years after the woman had moved away. Another was a socio-political satire about people shopping at The Hate Store. A third was, believe it or not, about a pair of mismatched socks talking about their relationship – and it was delightful!

You have to be good with dialogue, of course – or with conveying ideas through movement (as in one I saw about a bird that falls in love with a human that relied mainly on dance moves).

When I decided to start entering plays for the Boston Theater Marathon, four years ago, I was blessed with a lot of experience writing dialogue in novels (novels that remain unpublished, sadly, but they were good practice), and I always enjoyed writing that dialogue. I’d also been an amateur actor and had written one play adaptation in college.

But being a poet was probably my biggest advantage. In an essay on the Boston Theater Marathon website, BU playwriting professor and co-founder of the Marathon, Bill Lattanzi, writes: “It's been said that the theater is really closer to poetry as an art form than it is to movies, television, or the novel. It's a form that relies on artful compression of events into a single small space; that makes strong use of imagery, often spoken, to carry the day.” So, there you have it, poets. You’re half way there!

I find it a great joy to write plays. A new friend of mine, poet and playwright Lynne McMahon, tells me that she thoroughly enjoys the freedom that play writing gives her. “So liberating after the rigors of the poem,” she writes. “ Or rather the rigor is of a new and different order so it feels liberating – that's probably a temporary hallucination . . .” Okay, so maybe the sense of liberation isn’t permanent, but it makes a nice change from writing poetry.

I’ve also been fortunate enough to mine my poems for 10-minute play ideas. For years, people had been telling me that some of my poems were like little stories. So, I went back them and, lo and behold, found four that did seem to contain the seeds of something longer. I’ve turned all four of them into 10-minute plays.

After entering a number of plays in the Boston Theater Marathon, I decided to enter other 10-minute play competitions. And this year I finally succeeded. My play “Ronnie’s Charger,” based on a poem I’d written years ago, was shortlisted for a new festival in Durango, Colorado. The play is a series of monologues (with one brief interaction in the middle) spoken by a couple who lost a son in the Vietnam War. The Charger of the title is a Dodge Charger their son bought after high school graduation and enjoyed for the summer before going to boot camp. It becomes the metaphor for Ronnie’s life while he’s away and after he is eventually killed in Vietnam.

The play was given a dramatic reading with the five other finalists in May. The grand prize went to a play by Lynne McMahon, my new playwright friend, and mine won “The People’s Choice Award,” which is voted by the audience. Both plays, along with three other s, were performed at a festival in Durango on September 17 and 18, and I was fortunate enough to be there.

It’s quite an experience to see your characters embodied by real human beings, to hear your words come out of their mouths as if those words were their own. It’s a very different experience from reading a poem out loud at a reading, or even from hearing someone else read it. The work literally comes alive.

So, dust off any “story” poems you might have, or give an original 10-minute play a shot. And consider entering your play in one of the many national competitions. The writing is a lot of fun, and seeing you work performed is deeply rewarding. It’s an experience I highly recommend.

Somerville Writer Alan Ball: Working with kids after work and after-school.

Somerville Writer Alan Ball: Working with kids after work and after-school.

Interview with Doug Holder.



Alan Ball has worked 25 years as a medical journalist. He moved from NYC to Somerville in 1978. Since then he has worked with school kids by organizing after school creative writing groups at the A.D. Healey School, and formed the student newspaper. He founded the print and online magazine Happening Now!everywhere-- run by a collective of young writers that produces an online and print magazine of literature and art that is read worldwide. I talked with Ball on my Somerville Community Access TV Show " Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer."

Doug Holder: You started your first novel at age 12. What was it about?

Alan Ball: Well I wrote one page and that was it. It was about an abandoned house that kids took over. I never finished it.

DH: Did you come from a bookish-literary background?

AB: I grew up in Freeport, N.Y. I didn't come from a bookish family. My dad was a supermarket worker--my mom was stay-at-home. I later figured out that she was an artist but there was no outlet for women then. I remember reading E.E. Cummings in school and he made me realize you could become a writer and not have to worry about all the formalities--you could experiment.

DH: You said you were grateful for the education your kids got in Somerville, Mass. A popular misconception is that Somerville schools are less competitive than some of our more affluent neighbors. How do you answer that?

AB: My kids got a great education here, and I am grateful. It had to do with me wanting to give back to the community. I know the controversy--it is a big misconception. The high school has always been a fine place. A lot of high powered people have come out of Somerville High. My kids did well-- both got into Boston College--and they are able to pursue their chosen careers.

DH: As we have mentioned you have taught creative writing to young children. Aren't kids natural creative writers--they view the world through fresh eyes--and there is still that fascination with everything?

AB: Absolutely. That is why it is enjoyable. The creative writing classes I teach are part of an after school program centered around the school newspaper. We teach creative writing mostly from the point of view of journalism. We jump around a lot. I look forward to do more "classroom" stuff but right now I am focused on publications. The kids do it all: read, write and research.

DH: Tell me about your magazine HappeningNow!everywhere--which consists of a collective of young writers.

AB: We started out in print, but we wanted to extend our reach. So we went online because the Internet is worldwide.

The print arm of our project is much smaller--we print around 100 copies of the magazine. The kids sell it--we go to public events like The Somerville News Writers Festival last year to sell our publications. We also have published poetry books. We published a small collection: " Poets for Haiti." It was a response to the tragedy that befell Haiti--we raised 800 dollars.

DH: Where does your funding come from?

AB: We recycle old print cartridges. We take donations--or we ask people to buy any number of our books.

TO find out more about this project go to: http://12zine.com

Mortal Terror: A Play by Robert Brustein

Mortal Terror
A Play by Robert Brustein
At the Modern Theater, Boston MA.

Review by Zvi A. Sesling


Robert Brustein’s “Mortal Terror” is more a comment on contemporary life than life in the Shakespearean era it portrays. It is also an expression of the universal theme “what goes around, comes around.”

Using the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, Brustein presents seven characters who represent not only 1605, but happenings 500 years later, perhaps even 500 years before. The use of this revolt is Brustein’s vehicle for expressing his feelings about war, terrorism, torture and much more.

Brustein, who is a Founding Director of the American Repertory Theater, delves into the mind of writers. As Shakespeare (Stafford Clark-Price) is writing “Macbeth” his friend Sir John Harington (Dafydd aps Rees) suggests he write a play critical of the king. Shakespeare’s desperate response is, “I am a dramatist Sir John and dramatists do not take sides. Their characters do. I simply record the discord in blank verse.”

Many novelists and playwrights have uttered that line: “It’s not me talking, it’s the character.” But is not the character merely a creation of the author? Do they not think or feel that which they are writing, even if they try to show both sides? Brustein poses this question as he does questions of the integrity of authors.

From Brustein’s perspective, Shakespeare’s writing of Macbeth is less creative inspiration and more monetary necessity and appeasement of royalty. In one of the more comical scenes King James I (Michael Hammond) commissions Shakespeare to write a play that includes witches for a tidy sum that will keep the author financially secure for a time.

King James I, played superbly with varying portrayals of anger, humor and cold blooded dictator, is the king who orders the revision of the bible while at the same time authoring a book about witches and the supernatural. Perhaps this is Brustein’s way of saying that we are all driven by competing forces. James, who is in a loveless marriage and accused by his Queen of having numerous affairs, has no knowledge of her affair with Robert Catesby (Christopher James Webb), an overly serious, scarily staring revolutionary who leads the Gunpowder Plot. The king also has little knowledge of the growing friendship between his wife and the Bard. Here again, Brustein makes a morality statement. When Shakespeare learns of the queen’s affair with Catesby he chooses to spurn her and return to Stratford-on-Avon.

Ben Jonson (Jeremiah Kissel) is perfect as the sarcastic, insulting, vocabulary filled friend of Shakespeare, jealous of the Bard’s talent and ability to procure women, is even more so when he discovers the friendship between the Bard and the Queen. If there is a fault with the casting it is that while Jonson was eight years younger than Shakespeare, Kissel’s appearance is that of an older man, which brings to mind the fact that Shakespeare was 41 years-old during the Gunpowder Plot, but Clark-Price, without beard and moustache, looks to be much younger.

Nevertheless, Kissel’s performance rivals Hammond’s as star of the show. And then there is Georgia Lyman as Queen Anne. In one scene, when the King announces the execution of Catesby, Anne’s face turns into a tortured, silently weeping woman, with no tears, but obvious anguish. Discovering her lover Catesby, despite a promise to spare her son, had planned on including him in royalty’s destruction, the devastation in learning of the betrayal is clear. And when she first appears at Shakespeare’s room and removes her hat to reveal flowing hair and a beauty unseen in her queenly garb, she commands attention not only for her acting, but her startling good looks.

Sir John Harington is an excellent wise elder dispensing advice and criticism. He is every bit the knight striding the stage of the period piece not only in appropriate attire, but manner as well.

Marston/Guy Fawkes is well acted by John Kuntz. Marston is Jonson’s sidekick, while Guy Fawkes is one of the lead perpetrators of the Gunpowder Plot. Kuntz in his dual role presents a well nuanced balance between humor and drama.

Directed by Daniel Varon the play moves quickly through its roughly two hours, the actors playing their roles flawlessly and the director deserving as much credit as the actors for the success of the play.

In “Mortal Terror” Brustein has written a play of contemporary themes based on 500 year-old themes perhaps even older which replay throughout history so that as you watch
Brustein’s retelling of Jamesian England, the parallels to today’s America are unambiguous. It is an enjoyable, enthralling play which does not have a slow moment and, stripped of most Shakespearean language, is accessible to everyone.

Review of THE POSSIBILITY OF SCORPIONS by Connemara Wadsworth

Review of THE POSSIBILITY OF SCORPIONS by Connemara Wadsworth,
Winner of the White Eagle Coffee Store Press Fall 2009 Chapbook Contest, 24 pages, White Eagle Coffee Store Press, PO Box 383, Fox River Grove, IL 60021-0383, www.whiteeaglecoffeestorepress.com

Review by Barbara Bialick

It’s easy to see why this chapbook was a winner. It’s trim, neat, and organized.
It’s well on the mark as a travel memoir of a seven year old American girl from Boston who voyaged with her parents and brother on an architectural Fulbright grant to Baghdad, Iraq from 1952-1954, whose vivid images are interpreted by her status as an older grown woman who has since traveled to other foreign places such as Nepal and Kenya. These other places sometimes glint with a memory of her trip to Baghdad, but, she explains, “I see Iraq now like an old photo/yellowed, torn. Only moments of a story/survive. I hold lost images under my skin./Think of crazy quilt patches/of a flowered dress worn only twice.”

I think it would be a disservice to the author to tell you more than a brief imagery of the rude, yet intriguing place she was happy to leave again. For she reveals her secrets slowly and carefully, bringing you through a these experiences in exactly 24 pages. The cover, a close up on a young girl’s “mary jane” shoes on a strange rug, from a wood block print by April Kendziora Smith, sets the stage perfectly. These experiences were to her “like beads found under a radiator…” with voices “from tinny radios, I begin to take/comfort in the music’s new familiarity…”

Beware of what can happen when familiarity is not really family at all. Observe the brutality with which a donkey is beheaded to feed circus animals. These incidents and more make the book a bit painful to read, but is well done.

The author notes, “I began writing about our lives there long before the onset of the Persian Gulf War and our current ‘war against terror,’ both of which rekindled many more memories. Living in a vastly different culture…laid a foundation for a deep sense of a wider world and led to a commitment to exploring other cultures…”

Connemara Wadsworth graduated from Friends World College, an international program. She studied education and later became an elementary school teacher, after first working as a weaver. Her poems have appeared in Ibbetson Street, Bloodroot Literary Magazine, and others. She has three grown children and lives in Newton, Massachusetts.

If I Take You Here by Martha Carlson-Bradley

If I Take You Here
by Martha Carlson-Bradley
Copyright 2010 by Martha Carlson-Bradley
Adastra Press
Easthampton, MA 01027
Softbound, 34 pages, $18.00
ISBN 10: 0-9822495-9-4
ISBN 13: 978-0-9822495-9-8

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

In reading chapbooks from Adastra Press, Gary Metras’s publishing house in Easthampton, MA, I have never been disappointed by the poetry they contain and If I Take You There is no exception. Martha Carlson-Bradley has woven together poems of appealing and clear images that churn up visuals as you read.

If I take you here
what do I hope?

that our eyes will focus
in the same direction –

low hills, for both of us,
edging in the field?

Or here, inside:
why should you

witness the sofa
too formal to sit on
Victorian horsehair –

or the Times watch
as it ticks on the bureau
the tips of its hands

green with radium?

My grandfather’s bedroom
narrow, long as a freight car,

holds its one note:
half warning, half lament


Here is another example:

Something broken grates underfoot.

Chilled, with my hands in raincoat pockets,
I study the Last Supper

my family discarded.

Disciples hold their sudden gestures –
fist on money bag, a finger point.

Tender flesh of a palm


Here, like DaVinci, the moment is captured, the action frozen as today, money is the key to the moment, the trapdoor of action, the sale of life. Religion broken down to its monetary base, its evil. Even at the end of a life, someone must make a profit, though not the victimh.

Here are scattered lines from other poems:

• A drip from the faucet; a tick of the clock
• Only winter birds a speaking
• a shot glass is lying; knocked on its side
• Exactly the hue of old photographs
• the world outside like flame

These are just five examples of what I think are creative images, clever use of what might be everyday things that we tend to overlook, even as poets, because we are too busy with our own lives, our own language to notice the obvious and make it not only creatively accessible to a reader, but provides a quick, Oh, I wish I’d thought of that. It is this kind of “fun reading” one can usually find in a Metras published volume of poetry.

“MADNESS” KICKS OFF POETRY SERIES AND NEW POETRY VENUE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

“MADNESS” KICKS OFF POETRY SERIES
AND NEW POETRY VENUE

MADNESS AT THE GROLIER
UPSTAIRS AT BLOC 11
11 Bow Street, Somerville
November 6, 2011 at 3:30 P.M.

Madness is the theme, poetry the vehicle, enjoyment the promise when the Grolier Poetry Book Shop inaugurates its new poetry room above the Bloc 11 Café in Union Square, Somerville. Billed as a “wild concoction of poetry, mixed media and twisted genius”, “Madness” is a celebration of the borderlands where madness brushes against artistic genius, as evidenced most notably in the community of famous poets—Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell and John Berryman—whose lives and writings cycled tortuously through McLean Hospital in Belmont.


Not an ordinary fundraiser, nor an ordinary poetry reading, “Madness at the Grolier,” is a kickoff fundraiser for the Grolier Poetry room, a fledgling satellite of The Grolier Book Shop, an all-poetry book store that has become a Harvard Square literary landmark. “Madness at the Grolier” will be the first of an ongoing series of thematic poetry events.


Well-known local poets and writers who will read from the works of the McLean poets, as well as their own, include Doug Holder, himself a counselor and poetry workshop leader at McLean for almost thirty years, poet and singer Lo Galluccio, novelist Paul Steven Stone and Alice Weiss. Robert Clawson, manager of Anne Sexton’s band will present poetry and anecdotes, Kathleen Spivack will share her memories of Robert Lowell, soon to be published in memoir form, and Lois Ames who wrote the introduction to Plath's "Bell Jar," will talk about her friendship with Plath and Sexton.


Last but far from least, local poet and performer Michael Mack will offer powerful vignettes from his wrenching one-man show chronicling the pain of growing up with a schizophrenic mother.


“Madness at the Grolier” is a joint presentation of the Grolier Book Shop, Ibbetson Street Press and Blind Elephant Press. Like madness itself, it promises to be both dramatic and unforgettable.


FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT DOUG HOLDER at ibbetsonpress@msn.com or (617) 710-0163

Headstone: October 27, 1915 to August 30, 1984 bY Brian James

Headstone:
October 27, 1915 to August 30, 1984

Review by Alice Weiss

Brian James’ account of his relationship with his “non-traditional” father bills itself as part truth, part fiction. Which is truth and which is fiction? The bare facts of the father’s life are: he was short, earned his living at a job where he worked the midnight to eight shift (that shift, it seems, so he could pretend not to have a job when he hung out at Drake’s Bar from 8 AM to 3 P.M. every day). He had a wife, one son, Brian, died at the age of 68, drank vodka, worked just enough hours to support his family and his drinking and gambling habit.

What may well be fiction, or put together from the stories his father or his father’s friends told, is the most interesting part of the book. This is because James takes us into Drake’s Café, “a happiness hangout and conduit for anything except drugs,” and introduces us not only to his father, Junior, but to all his father’s buddies, their nicknames and their various activities. He tells us Junior who drinks “more vodka than Rasputin” typically comes out of work at 8:00 A.M. passes Spike, the bookie, and says ’give me the zero for twenty dollars, Soldier Boy in the Fourth at Rockingham and Cincinnati in the series for my limit.’ Spike without so much as breaking his stride says, You got it Junior.”

James describes the hourly doings of this cast of characters devoted to hanging out in the bar, but who seem to be also secretly working at their eight hours, five days a week jobs, among them, Dad, a night watchman, ‘Mickey Mantle’ half the municipal waste management crew, the big “O” a retired state police officer, Carrier Jack, the mailman. The guys form a community based on all the illicit activity they think is going on and they can pretend they are really a part of. There are two real numbers runners, Spike and Whirl-away but what the rest do is talk trash to each other in the way of 1940’s gangster movies, drink, and have tournament bouts of Name that Tune, oh yes, and fix one another’s cars.

This book is also fun because of the swagger that Brian James has when he talks about his father. There’s a Tom Sawyer scene where Junior gets Brian and all his buddies to paint the house (his mother is away) for a keg of beer. The neighborhood kids, James says, loved Junior, “the highlight of every visit by Tony, Rocco, Paulie, Cedge and Big Kid was an exit via Dad’s cellar gallery of stars. Dad would attach celebrity heads to generic centerfold torsos. Famous persons, the likes of Queen Elizabeth and Mamie Eisenhower, never looked so good as in his collage.” You can feel the rhythm.

The thread that holds the book together, though, is that whatever else his father was he dearly loved his son and his son grew up feeling loved by his father. In one of the last short chapters (and they are all very short) Brian is grown up and working as a law enforcement officer, and discovers that the names of two of the Drakes Café characters, Hughie and Las, appear up in the evidence of one of Brian’s criminal cases. He fears his father might be involved in some way, so he tells him what’s going on. It’s an interesting account because you know he is risking a great deal in exposing his investigation to Junior. Junior brushes him off, tells him not to worry, but what becomes clear to the reader, if not to James himself is that Junior has never really been involved in any criminal endeavor, and, is embarrassed that he has to reveal that to his son, so he doesn’t quite. But you can see the tenderness and care.

All that being said, this is a book that could have really used an editor. The stories are fun but given the half jokey, back hand way Brain tells them, you have to go back and try to figure out what is going on and sometimes you just can’t. At times I got very confused as to what was happening when. This guy has great material. It could have been told much more clearly.

Ibbetson Street Press to release new poetry collection "Choir of Day" by Robert K. Johnson

"Choir of the Day" a new poetry collection by Robert K. Johnson, (a long time poetry editor of the Ibbetson Street Press) will be released
this October (2011).


***** To preorder send a check or money order for $16 to Ibbetson Street Press 25 School St. Somerville, Mass. 02143

"Robert Johnson writes poems I wish I had written

and read — again and again. He’s a real underground

American poet with a strong, mature poetic voice

in the tradition of writers with a commitment to

a realistic, honest life experience. Forget The New

Yorker, The American Poetry Review, books from

Copper Canyon or Graywolf Press. Finding Robert

Johnson is hard work, but it’s worth the effort. — Sam

Cornish." (Boston’s first Poet Laureate)



"Robert K. Johnson’s poems read like little stories. This

collection of beautifully written poems captivates,

seduces, and transports the reader on a journey of a

life traveled. I was deeply moved by these poems." —

Gloria Mindock, Cervena Barva Press

Out of the Woods into the Sun by Guy R. Beining

Out of the Woods
into the Sun
Guy R. Beining
Kamini Press 201
ISBN 978-91-977437-6-1
order@kaminipress.com


“New eyes are needed”

My initial impression: the Kamini Press has done it again. The
reproductions in color and the laid paper are fine selections again.
This small chap book is a gem, again.

Beinings art work combines figurative, narrative and metaphor,
“memory is a branch” and the immediacy in the painting strokes
depicts an abstract sensibility, as well as, the gestural drawing offers
an expressive attitude. Viewers will find a painting on every page,
with a poetic sentence below. “the shoreline pretends to be an ointment.”
The juxtapositions are immaculate; poetry and painting works in this
book because the words redirect the reader back into the paintings
and the tension between the images and the words draw us into
the presence on the page.

I highly recommend this book for those who love art and writing.

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

Endicott College/Ibbetson Street Press Visiting Author Series: Every Broom and Bridget with Tom Daley

Endicott College/Ibbetson Street Press Visiting Author Series is presenting a one man play by Tom Daley that views the 19th Century American poet Emily Dickinson through the eyes of her Irish servant Tom Kelley titled: "Every Broom and Bridget." The series is directed by Professor Doug Holder.

Thursday Sept 29th 3:30PM Tia's Theatre Center for the Arts Endicott College 376 Hale St. Beverly, Mass.

Reflecting the prejudice of much of the Yankee upper crust towards Irish Catholic immigrants in America, as a young woman, the poet Emily Dickinson recommended to her brother (and half-seriously) that he kill some of the Irish boys he was teaching in Boston (“There are so many now, there is no room for the Americans”). However, later in life, she entrusted her poems to a beloved Irish housekeeper, Margaret Maher, who kept them in a trunk in the Dickinsons’ attic (and who refused to follow Emily Dickinson’s instructions and burn them after Dickinson’s death).

Every Broom and Bridget—Emily Dickinson and Her Servants, a play by poet and educator Tom Daley, dramatizes these contradictions. The play is narrated by the character Tom Kelley, an Irish-born Dickinson family groundskeeper whom Emily Dickinson appointed her chief pallbearer. The play weaves poems and letter excerpts by Dickinson together with excerpts from communications from the Dickinsons’ Irish housekeeper, Margaret Maher; Emily Dickinson’s friend and posthumous editor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson; and others to elucidate a relationship imagined to include affection, condescension, and resentment between the poet and the people who served her well-to-do family.

The poet and her servants are all “channeled” through the voice of pallbearer Kelley, who is haunted in later life by a vision of the day of “Miss Emily”’s funeral. Using minimal costume changes and different accents, Daley (as Tom Kelley) re-creates events, real and invented, surrounding the burial of the poet who “could not stop for Death.”



Tom Daley is a member of the faculty of the Online School of Poetry (http://onlineschoolofpoetry.org/index.html) and has served on the tutorial faculty of Walnut Hill School for the Arts. Tom’s poetry has been published in numerous journals, including Harvard Review, Fence, Prairie Schooner, Barrow Street, Poetry Ireland Review, and has been anthologized in Hacks: The Grub Street Anthology, the Bagel Bards Anthology, and Poets for Haiti. He graduated with highest honors in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina, where he won the Charles and Fanny Fay Wood Academy of American Poets Prize.

Excerpt from the play:

Tom Kelley, Emily Dickinson’s Chief Pallbearer, Muses over Her Memory the Night after Her Funeral.
by Tom Daley

Ah, Miss Emily! There’s no lamplight
burning your windowpanes this evening.
There’ll be nothing burning ever again
for me in this place. How many nights have I run
here from my watchman’s rounds at the college
to keep a secret vigil under your windows
as the shadow of your pen feathered
its mysterious codes out to the Milky Way?

Just around the corner,
in your garden, is where we
committed our first confidences—
spring mornings when I helped
you dig rows for your flowers,
or brought you a load of manure.
Or in autumn, when we put
the beds to sleep, and you told me
of your squelched yearnings and how
sometimes that other world pierced
you clear through, like the tines
of a pitchfork.

That’s where we had our short laughs
about the long lunacies
of men and women. And that’s where
I told you of my terrible feeling
that I was only a tenant
in the garret of my own heart.

There was never a woman to talk
to like you, not Maggie, or my
wife Mary, concerned as they were
with their travails, worrying over
children sick or dying,
or constantly maneuvering
the negotiations over
housekeeping out of deadlock.

But you had your distractions, too,
and after all, you were the daughter
of a Protestant squire—only
occasionally and then discreetly aware
of the constant and fervent attention
of your Catholic serf.

You and your people never had to sing
for your supper like the fishmongering
Molly Malone; you never wheeled
anything like a barrow up a street
or down a lane. And, yet, I know you
lugged a magnificent burden
all the same.

Miss Emily, I’d ask God to grant you eternal
rest—but I somehow I know your unquiet soul
will be having none of it.
I remember overhearing you say
that at school there was always
a clock—and always a regiment of girls
gripping their hymnals and standing at stiff
and compliant attention. I’ll wager my right
arm you turned on the sour heel
of your theology and stared them all down.
That’s my girl!

Lord, if the apostate Emily Dickinson
refuses your gift of everlasting peace, may
perpetual light shine upon her all the same.
She was a trinity of illumination to me:
Whale oil, lamp wick, and above all, flame.
I curse my fate for having lived
long enough to see you snuff it all away!

from Every Broom and Bridget, a play about Emily Dickinson and her Irish servants
by Tom Daley

Part of this address was originally published as a poem, “To Emily Dickinson,” in Alehouse Review


*** A highlight of the Oxford University roundtable was daley's performance of Tom Kelley's elegiac address to the deceased poet as he gazes up at her bedroom window.... the audience was powerfully moved--some to tears." -- Jonnie Guerra, past president of the Emily Dickinson International Society

To Hugh Fox by Lo Galluccio

( Lo Galluccio and Hugh Fox at The Somerville News Writers Festival)









small epiphanies you take me into your secrets

I'll take you into mine, rigid white sprouts of rich

decay....Inside fuchsia, the world streams, monkeys

across the stone faces of god.”

****Hugh as Connie Fox from Blood Cocoon


There we are cheeks pressed against

each other --- your round baby face

and blue eyes crowned by a cap and

me blowing a pink kiss with fake fur

thrown over shoulders. November

and you read at the Somerville News

Writer's Festival about your grandson.

You and I have been affectionate pals

ever since you called me a vampira

from reading my first chapbook

“Hot Rain.”


I think back on all of your work I

have devoured and reviewed with such

pleasure, always amazed at your cosmic

wonderment and lush and clashing

details of earthling

activites. You were enamored of feminine beauty

and dared to become a woman

yourself with lacy tights and lovers. You even

gave her a poetic voice.


We traded music and reviewed each others'

styles....your cat-like playing on the piano,

lifting from each composer the swatches

of genius you wanted to invoke, and then

you writing up my “Spell on You” and

naming me a new Marlene Dietrich for the

velvely smoothness you generously heard

in my voice.

You investigated traces of the ancient

gods, a unique authority on pre-Columbian

American cultures and the green unity

of all things.

Ganesha, Moloch, the Buddha, Yama –

your fascination with the gods sparked

thunder in your verse. You were never

afraid to reach up and outward to over-

turned stars. In “Way way

off the road” your most authentic travelogue

memoir you recounted the “Hippy, Post-

Beat, Flower-Children, Invisible Generation,”

of which you were a member.

In “Defiance” – the book with the howling

fox on the cover you wrote:


“I was more beautiful than Beauty herself,

but more beast than the beasts in the forest,

far from my friends, the poetry that a bird

that never comes to sing in my brain, seventy-four

years of Bach, Holst, The Little Girl

with Honey Hair, now clouds, everything clouds,

and when there aren't any more, the hand of Nothing

touches my shoulder,

“It's time to

become a cloud.”


You are a cloud In Michigan and a star

in Paris and a mountain in the Andes

and a red flower in Brazil.

I remember you with the pigeons around

us at Au Bon Pan in Harvard Square –

you always scribbling poetry and

conversing with strangers to make

them friends. I am grateful the

suffering is over and know that you

dreamed into your death like an oracle.


You are forever in our hearts.


Lo Galluccio

Hugh Fox: Way, Way Off On His Final Road: 1932 to 2011

Hugh Fox: Way, Way Off On His Final Road
By Doug Holder








*From the introduction of “ Way, Way Off the Road: The Memoirs of The Invisible Man” by Hugh Fox (Ibbetson Street Press)

Several years ago the Ibbetson Street Press published a Hugh Fox poetry collection “Angel of Death.” I had never actually met Fox in the flesh, but I was aware of his substantial contributions to the small press over the past 40 years. Fox was a founding member of COSMEP, (a seminal small press organization), a founding member of the PUSHCART PRIZE, and edited the groundbreaking anthology “ The Living Underground,” to name just a few achievements.

One day, in my apartment on Ibbetson Street in Somerville, Mass. I was just about asleep when I heard my doorbell ring. I went to answer it and a man of a certain age, with long gray hair spouting from the sides of his cap and a heavy Bronx accent said: “ Hi Doug, what do ya’ have in there a Blonde?’ I said: “Well my wife is here, she’s sort of blondish.” I asked him in but I guess he sensed I was in no condition for company. He declined and promptly took a cab back to his hotel.

Since then I have had the opportunity to meet him on a couple of occasions. Fox is full of anecdotes about many of the stumble bums, poets, poseurs, publishers, editors, with all their infinite variety, on the small press scene. I am glad this manuscript has seen the light of day. And when you read it hopefully you will see the light too.

--Doug Holder (2006)

I don’t remember when I first became aware of Hugh Fox. He was a prolific writer across all genres. It might have been through one of the many reviews he wrote for the Small Press Review; it might be from the manuscripts he sent me to publish, or through the many poets of the “Invisible Generation” ( A term he used to describe his peer group of writers) he befriended over the years. Whatever you say about Fox, he wasn’t a cliche of a man—he was a total original. He was a PhD with a big disdain for the academy; his breadth of knowledge left me breathless; he could be incredibly kind and incredibly rude, but I loved him warts and all—-hey ain’t that what love is after all?

I asked Fox a few years ago what he would like to be remembered for. He told me: "That I reminded people to take a close look and engage the world around them.”Fox took it all in: from sex, the Aztecs, religion, the meaning of being, the meaning of meaning…you name it.

He was a firm believer in the small press—not the New York publishing houses where the buck is the bottom line. It was his religion, his passion, to review the thousands of small press books of all genres for the late Len Fulton’s Small Press Review, and other publications. To Hugh, the chap, or the big tome was all high holy. Nothing was too obscure, too raw. He called many a writer a “genius,” but what I think what he really was trying to say was he recognized the genius in all of us.

He took many a writer under his wing. He could be unapologetically flirtatious but more often that not he would charm the pants off you—and in his younger days I am sure he literally did. Hugh had a huge cadre of writers that were the objects of his affection.

He introduced me and countless others to the short form or capsule book review. In one of his short reviews he could really get to the core of the book with an economy of words, and he nixed the deadening academic jargon that could bleed the life out of any writing.

I would get unexpected calls late at night from Fox. He would say: “ Hey I miss you pal—why haven’t you called?” When I was laid off of my job of many years he offered to put me and my wife up at his home in Lansing, Michigan; he lobbied for me to be included in the important avant-garde poetry anthology “ Inside the Outside.” Fox told me he loved me more than once… and you know what?... I truly think he did.

I thought that Fox would never die. He told me for years he was on his last legs with cancer, and his time was short. He even wrote a play that concerned him and the noted small press poet Lo Galluccio, meeting cute while in the throes of ovarian and prostate cancer. To my knowledge Galluccio has never suffered from ovarian cancer, but she was a dear friend of Fox and he included a lot of us in his work.

As Samuel Beckett wrote: “ We are born astride the grave,” and Fox is gone. He died in a hospice in Michigan at 79, heavily sedated, out of pain finally, drifting up into the ether in a dream—to the cosmos—to that grand poem—infinity.

Legendary Small Press Activist, Poet, Critic, Reviewer Hugh Fox dies at age 79.

I got word from Hugh Fox's family that he passed Sunday, Sept. 4th in a hospice in Michigan. Fox was a iconic figure in the Small Press--for another interview I conducted with him on litkicks go to http://www.litkicks.com/HughFox

"Poet and Polymath Hugh Fox"

I am reprinting an interview I did with Hugh Fox in 2008 that appeared in Reconfigurations magazine and " From the Paris of New England..."
Hugh Fox is in an hospice now, and is in the final stages of his battle with cancer.

"Poet and Polymath Hugh Fox"
Interview with Doug Holder

Poet and Polymath Hugh Fox: Still a Wunderkind at 76

At the Sherman Café in Union Square (Somerville, Mass.) I met poet, translator, critic, playwright, Hugh Fox and his wife, before a taping we were to do at Somerville Community Access TV of my show “Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.” Fox was visiting his daughter who lives in Somerville and teaches at area universities. Two of my next-door neighbors Kirk and Lucy Etherton joined us as Fox held court. At age 76 Fox shows no signs of slowing down. He regaled us with stories of his extensive travels, all peppered with his vast wealth of knowledge of ancient Aztec culture, mythology, literature, and publishing. Fox talks like a Bronx cabdriver (decidedly from the side-of-his mouth), and he is not afraid to use, to put it mildly, unsavory language. My friend described him as “Larger than life.” And so he is.

Fox, who was a tenured professor at the Michigan State for well over 30 years, recently completed a controversial memoir “Way, Way Off the Road” (Ibbetson Street) that dealt with many of the figures from the small press movement, a movement that has produced thousands of small literary magazines and books, and is the lifeblood of poets and writers of all stripes.

Small Press books and magazines are typically defined as having press runs of less than 5,000. Fox has championed a movement that gave a start from everyone from Allen Ginsberg to Mark Doty.

Fox was a founding member of COSMEP, (a seminal small press organization), and he published the well-regarded literary magazine “Ghost Dance: The International Quarterly of Experimental Poetry,” (1968-1995). He is the recipient of two Fulbright Professorships and penned the first critical study of the dirty old man of literature himself, Charles Bukowski, as well as a critical study of the poet Lyn Lifshin. Fox was a founding editor of the Pushcart Prize, has written and published over 80 books and chapbooks of poetry, and has reviewed countless small press books for Len Fulton’s “Small Press Review.” Fox was the Latin American editor of the Western World Review & North American Review, and a former contributing reviewer on Smith/Pulpsmith magazine founded by Harry Smith.

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Doug Holder: Hugh you wrote critical studies of Henry James and Charles Bukowski, two vastly different writers. Whom did you have the greater affinity for?

Hugh Fox: I got my PhD from the University of Illinois and my dissertation was on Edgar Allen Poe. I was raised as an Irish Catholic, and all I read was Irish Catholic literature. I had no idea what was in the outside world. I decided to take on Henry James because it would be an Americanization process and I thought I would learn to write novels. I did like James’ work a lot.

I never intended to get involved with Bukowski. I was totally academic. And then one day I was in this bookstore in Hollywood, the “Pickwick.” Anyway, I bought Bukowski’s book: “Crucifix and the Death Hand.” I got a hold of his press LouJon in New Orleans, and they told me to look him up in the phonebook. So I called him up and said: “This is Hugh Fox. I love your work. I want to meet you.” He said: “OK, come over tomorrow.” He was living in a motel in Hollywood. I talked with him a while. He took out these suitcases and there were all his books and magazines in them. He gave me five full suitcases and told me if I saw doubles to keep them. My entire way of seeing the world changed after this. Bukowski and Henry Miller were big influences of change for me.

DH: You were friends with Harry Smith, the book publisher, and founder of “The Smith…” magazine. Smith published such writers as: Duane Locke, Ruth Moon Kempher, John Bennett, Lloyd Van Brunt, Jeff Sorensen, Alan Britt, and Tristram Smith as well as my friends Luke Salisbury and Jared Smith. Can you talk about your relationship with Smith?

HF: I’ll tell you what happened. Smith had no money at all, and he meets Marian Pechak up in Rhode Island at Brown. So he marries her and her parents died and she got millions. So they move to Brooklyn Heights. They had a big Brownstone mansion. So Smith tells her he wants to be a publisher. His wife said:” Hey, we have the money do what you want to do”. So he started to publish. He had an office right by City Hall in New York City. I met Smith through COSMEP and used to go to Smith’s all the time. I went between semesters, and in the summer. I’d go for a month a year for twenty years. Smith published everyone who was anyone. I did a lot of reviews for him. He paid me—I stayed at his house—he set up the basement for me. We used to go out for lunch and dinner and his wife told the kids to call me: “Uncle Hugh.” I was closer to Smith than anyone else. Through him I met Menke Katz who was a great Yiddish writer.

DH: You edited the groundbreaking anthology “The Living Underground,” that our Boston Poet Laureate Sam Cornish was in. How did you get this collection together?

HF: It was formed due to my connection with COSMEP. This was the “Committee of Small Press Editors and Publishers.” Len Fulton and others formed it in the early 70’s. Len Fulton still runs the magazine “The Small Press Review” and “Dustbooks Publishing” in Paradise, California. COSMEP used to have annual conventions around the country: St. Paul, New York, and New Orleans. Every convention had a huge reading and almost every small press editor in the country was there. I got to meet all the writers and all the publishers and I got to know people in Boston, and of course Sam Cornish was in Boston, and as it happened he was included in “The Living Underground…” Cornish was at the convention in Boston.

DH: What is an “underground poet?”

HF: Someone who is not published by the big New York publishers.

DH: What was “groundbreaking” about the anthology?

HF: We had living, contemporary small press poets. We had folks like Charles Potts, Richard Krech, and many others. We had a reunion almost forty years later in Berkley, Ca.

DH: How did you get involved with the small press literary award the “Pushcart Prize?”

HF: I got involved through a COSMEP conference in New Orleans. The Prize doesn’t have as much impact as it did in the day. I go to a Barnes and Noble today and nobody is buying anything, everyone is there with his or her computer. Everyone is having coffee with his or her computers.

DH: Hugh you are the most prolific reviewer I know. How did you get involved with reviewing books, and why do you spend so much time on an activity that doesn’t provide you with monetary compensation?

HF: I became good friends with Len Fulton of the Small Press Review. Now, every four months or so I get a package of books to read. It’s good for me because I get to find out what’s going on with the poets. It influences my style—all these poets I read. It helps me get my name in the Small Press Review all the time. I want to be involved.

DH: Your are the doyen of the short review. How are you able to get to the essence of a book with such few words?

HF: Before I go to bed I always read a few things. Then I just react to it. It’s funny it is like I listen to an inner voice. The inner voice tells me what to write. The reason I got a degree in American Literature was really to learn how to write reviews of books. To react to books. My first draft of my Poe dissertation was horrible. My advisor said as much. He told me that I was going to write his way. He said: “You are going to react, feel, and so forth. I learned to react. I learned this from academic teaching.”

DH: You said you always considered yourself a wunderkind, a boy genius. How about now at 76?

HF: The same at 76. I haven’t aged mentally or psychologically. I’m still 26. I may have cancer of the prostate, arthritis, but my mind is the same. When I was in California recently I wrote 100 poems in two weeks.

DH: What do you want your legacy to be?

HF: I haven’t thought about it. I would like to see other people do the same thing. I want them to react to the world around them.