Book Launch Dec 2, 2012:With Robert Lowell and His Circle Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop, Stanley Kunitz, & Others by Kathleen Spivack

Please celebrate with us!

The Harvard Bookstore and the Grolier Poetry Bookshop

invite you to the book launch of

With Robert Lowell and His Circle

Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop, Stanley Kunitz, & Others

by Kathleen Spivack

A memoir of a famous poetry circle

published by the University Press of New England, November, 2012

Sunday, December 2, 2012, 4-6 p.m.

Co-hosted by the Harvard Bookstore and the Grolier Poetry Bookshop

Refreshment, books, and celebration at both locations

The Harvard Bookstore: 1256 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA, 617-661-1515

The Grolier Poetry Bookshop: 6 Plympton St, Cambridge, MA, 617-547-4648

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The book is available for pre-order through the University Press of New England, and will be released on November 13.

Call toll-free, 1-800-421-1561, email university.press@dartmouth.edu, or visit their website here.

Also available at your local bookstores and online.

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"This book is absorbing and alive, human and compelling . . . the best memoir yet about Robert Lowell."
-- Steven Gould Axelrod, University of California, Riverside

"A portrait [of Lowell] that serves to define his role as poet and teacher in fresh and significant ways . . . . This is a memoir that will make an impact right away and that will be referred to by scholars, readers and biographers for many years to come."
-- Thomas Travisano, Hartwick College

"I devoured your book in one sitting last weekend; it's extraordinarily evocative of the poet and his time, your time. Thank you so much for writing it . . ."
-- Don Share, Senior Editor, Poetry Magazine

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With Robert Lowell and His Circle

Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop, Stanley Kunitz, & Others

by Kathleen Spivack

A memoir of a famous poetry circle

In 1959 Kathleen Spivack won a fellowship to study at Boston University with Robert Lowell. Her fellow students were Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, among others. Thus began a relationship with the famous poet and his circle that would last to the end of his life in 1977 and beyond. Spivack presents a lovingly rendered story of her time among some of the most esteemed artists of a generation. Part memoir, part loose collection of anecdotes, artistic considerations, and soulful yet clear-eyed reminiscences of a lost time and place, hers is an intimate portrait of the often suffering Lowell, the great and near great artists he attracted, his teaching methods, his private world, and the significant legacy he left to his students. Through the story of a youthful artist finding her poetic voice among literary giants, Spivack thoughtfully considers how poets work. She looks at friendships, addiction, despair, perseverance and survival, and how social changes altered lives and circumstances. This is a beautifully written portrait of friends who loved and lived words, and made great beauty together.

A touching and deeply revealing look into the lives and thoughts of some of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, With Robert Lowell and His Circle will appeal to writers, students, and thoughtful literary readers, as well as to scholars.

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At the Feet of the Master: Designer and Publisher Steve Glines

At the Feet of the Master: Designer and Publisher Steve Glines

.

Doug Holder

 One of the major reasons the Ibbetson Street Press of Somerville is still around is because of Steve Glines. Glines has been in the business of designing and publishing since the 1970’s when he had a small shop in Harvard Square. Since those days Glines has worked for magazines, high tech companies, taught college and did consultation work worldwide. I met Glines some years back at a meeting of the Stone Soup Poets at the Middle East Restaurant in Cambridge. Since then Glines and I have collaborated on a number of projects, but the most consistent one has been publishing poetry books, and putting out the lit mag Ibbetson Street. Glines, 60, is an energetic man with an easy laugh, and is the kind of guy who likes to have a lot of things on his plate. Glines founded the Wilderness House Literary Review http://whlreview.com  and has his own publishing press the Wilderness House Press. Glines is a member of Somerville’s literary group the Bagel Bards that meet at the Au Bon Pain in Davis Square, Somerville. I recently caught up with him to chat about publishing, design, and whatever came to the Master’s mind.

Doug Holder:  What is a good product?

Steve Glines: A good product is one that everyone is happy with and sells well into its target market: well written, well edited, well designed and well marketed.

 
DH: Which printers are responsive?

SG: That depends. Every printer has slightly different equipment, expertise and focus. The most responsive printers are the ones that sell only in their sweet spot. By that I mean one printer may have a good offset press and a full case binding setup. You wouldn't send a short run
paperback to this printer because he can't utilize his equipment
effectively. The printer I use most effectively is one that has a modern
efficient digital web printer with directly connected paperback binding
system. This printer can effectively print from 100 - 10,000 books in a
couple of days but don't even ask him to quote on a case bound book.
 
 
DH: Should a small press use digital or offset?

SG: The breakeven between offset and digital has gotten blurred to the point where for runs under a few thousand there isn't much difference in cost although digital has become the better quality in the short run. By that I mean the quality of good quality short run digital printing (1-500
copies) is better than short run offset (500-5000 copies).  At larger
press runs offset is by far cheaper and quality offset can be near
perfection. Offset also offers many different choices with regards to
paper and ink. Digital printing is limited to very flat paper, Xerox
style paper, and 4 color printing. Digital printing can look great but
offset printing can be extraordinary.
 
 
DH: What are the pitfalls of e-books or cheap hard copy printing?

SG: The hardest part about e-book printing is cleaning up the manuscript.
Authors are known to change their minds (often in the same page) about
what constitutes the end of a paragraph. The end of a paragraph may be
signaled by a carriage return, a carriage return (or two) with one or
more tabs and/or multiple spaces. The manuscript should be just the
words with as little formatting as possible to suggest to the designer
how to design the book. Writers who try to "design" their books in
Microsoft Word just create a lot of extra work (and expense for the
publishers) for the real designers.
 
Before a book can be designed for hard copy printing the MS has to be
cleaned up anyway and once it's cleaned up and rendered in RTF (Rich
Text Format) it can easily be converted to an e-book, any version.
 
One thing that bothers me is that major publishers are charging far
more, relatively speaking, for an e-book than they are for hard copies.
For example a 300 page hard back book might cost about $8 to
manufacture. The list price is $25.00 and the publisher gives up 55% to
a distributor/bookstores and/or Amazon. The publisher will make about
$3.00 per book sold. The same book sold by a major publisher as an
e-book will most likely be around $10 but the e-book has no
manufacturing cost. Most publishers could sell the same e-book for $6.00
and make the same profit. If the demand for the product has any
elasticity, that is cheaper books sell in greater volume, then a
publisher could sell far more books (and garner a greater profit) by
selling an e-book for $6 than for $10. The big boys don't appear to
realize this which is why there are so many Romance e-books out there
for $.99.
 

Steve Glines can be contacted at steveglines@gmail.com and is available for a wide range of services.

Review of Angles of Incidents by Jon Curley

Review of Angles of Incidents by Jon Curley (Dos Madres Press, 2012)




Lawrence Kessenich



There are the poets of image and emotion and there are the intellectual poets, poets of ideas, and Jon Curley falls solidly in the latter category. The poem from whose text the title of this collection was drawn (more or less), “Existents and Precipitants,” conveys this as well as any other poem in the collection:



Like watching the scene from an angle

As it stretches itself out, grows anamorphic

And between the bodies and their outlines

You can see the widening inner spaces growing

Outer, indications of the ingenious layering effects

of perception which, if stripped, reveals the sub-

phenomena of aura, arriving into this world

from some others:



These we can call the angels of incidence



How often do you read such a short poem – or any poem, for that matter – that contains words like “anamorphic,” and “sub-phenomena”? Even the rhythm of the poem is intellectual, the rhythm not of an event unfolding but of a thought process. “Thought process” is perhaps the best way to characterize Curley’s poems overall. They are not often experiential, in the way highly personal poems are, not emotionally revealing, the way confessional poetry is, but seem to work as explanations—a man standing back and making a case for an idea. Here are the opening lines of “Exhibit B” (itself a title that implies the presentation of a case).



Here in the off-chance oblivion’s staved off

and ordinary life does not fixate itself too lovingly

on itself we can herald some formulations

encrypted as myth but trusted to us as forms

through which we move



Can we agree that deferring out obligations,

those typical hesitations,

only helps to beck us back to where we had come…



And this opening from “Polarities”:



Intersecting angles

The imposture of doubt

bordering the premise

colliding with self-impression



I stagger over and over

at the rupture line of tension and release

words and movement

wishing for errancy and ardency…



Occasionally, some more passionate words and feelings do make themselves known in the poems, such as in the line “I stagger over and over” in the poem just quoted. However, even the more intense moments tend to be subsumed in a more intellectual whole. “Body Politics” is a good example of this:



Traumatic impulse in the brain, enhanced tremors

Of terrors, the night cries of the body contemplating

itself encased with mixed signals, chromosomal divination,

the faculty of predestination, preparing for cell division

to go libertarian, arbitrarily, subject to no fathomable

arbitration, the cancer secreting its cells, its selves

going haywire, re-wiring all to anarchy, where state

upends into mirage of sanity then goes weak with the

husbandry of self devouring self, genomic entropy

which calls for nothing but grief and utopia of the gone



Presumably, this is a poem about cancer taking over a body, but it has none of the gritty physicality of other poems I’ve read on the subject, nor the emotionality of someone dealing with impending death.



I also must admit to not always understanding what Curley is trying to say in his poems, though his convincing diction usually makes me believe it is important. And being that convincing is an achievement. The poem “Blake in 1989” exemplifies this so well that I’ll end this review with it, and leave it to the reader to decide if he or she is convinced:



The walls fell. Most ceilings

trembled. Foundations floundered.

Some sundered, some stayed the same.



The firmament was still an umbrella.

Under it, rained change. The watchtower

became voyeur, yet its beacon still

burned. Flies crowded to its beams.



That nine-year-old girl in the crowd,

near the ramparts, imagines herself

a goddess, wandering through

dead furnishings, new futurities.

She wonders how the walls that fell

could keep propped their fearful lies.



I whisper phantoms in her ears.

Drive By: Shards & Poems By John Bennett

Drive By

Shards & Poems

By John Bennett

Lummox Press

San Pedro, CA

www.lummoxpress.com

ISBN: 978-1-929878-09-3

139 Pages

$15.00

Review by Dennis Daly

John Bennett’s persona reels through this tormented book of poems and prose pieces with an anarchist’s witty spontaneity and an almost saintly intensity. The outside world seems to draw Bennett in to its pathetic havoc and uncaring cruelty leaving him questioning, tearless, and above all observant to a fault. He would agree with Thomas Hobbes’ sentiment that the life of man {is} solitary, poor, brutish, and short.

At first I hated it that Bennett calls his prose pieces shards. The word “shards” connotes for me the artsy-fartsy oh-so-precious world of the elite, the special people. But clearly Bennett’s world and writing angles away from anything that even resembles the elite as I understand them. His shards are not pieces of ancient pottery decked out on a fancy well-appointed museum shelf. They are instead broken smudged pieces of a mirror, scattered over the bloody floor of a crime scene. Some of the jagged slivers rage up at you. Others blind you with awe. Still others combine earthy grittiness with inexplicable logic.

If Bennett does seek connections with a type of illuminati, he has chosen well.  For Bennett it is the sense of wonder which separates a scattered band of initiates from the rest of humanity. In this collection’s very first poem, an oddly surreal piece, entitled A Rare Moment in Warfare Bennett shows the power of wonder. The poem begins this way,

The chieftain came

riding out of

the trees &

across the

corpse-strewn

field in Germania,

bareback on a

candy-striped

unicorn.

During this moment of awe and wonder the appreciative Roman general ordered his archers to hold their fire. It reminds me of the Christmas day truce during the World War I when soldiers came out of their murderous trenches and briefly shared their food and company.

The poem Substitute is certainly one of the highlights of this book. The writer describes his father’s step father in harsh terms, but with understanding insight. The uneducated Irish pipefitter who uses his belt to discipline his six step children comes across as a good man trying to do what is right as he understands it. The pathos in the last stanza between father and grandfather might inspire a religious person to wonder in admiration on the sometimes amazing grace of God or Whoever. Here it is:

The last

thing to die

was a

question in

his eyes

answered by

my father’s

tears his

great head

descending to

the

shock-white

sheets.

Another piece which deals with a people marked by grace or wonder is a shard called Original Sin. Bennett posits that we are all born with wonder but then something happens, perhaps something traumatic. Here’s the first paragraph:

It’s as if we’re born angels, and those who came before us put a pillow over our faces after they’ve tucked us into bed and hold it there until our tiny feet stop kicking. When they lift the pillow again we’re one of them, our eyes vacant. Bennett goes on to explain that some of us pretend to have died before our soul leaves and thereby we survive with our wonder left intact. Those others—the vacant-eyed ones—plod through the world in a state of numbness.

In the poem Crazy John Bennett, the poet, seeking attention, approval, or perhaps just wanting to break up the monotony of life among the vacant-eyes-ones, acts out to the cheers of all as only a barfly can. His audience awaits the spontaneous, the outrageous. He describes his entrance into his chosen tavern,

I would

walk into the

Corner Stone Tavern

on a

quiet afternoon &

a cheer would

go up from

the regulars.

They knew that

before the

night was over

I’d be

biting the

heads off

chickens.

Fear and Understanding is a short poem that confronts the underside of spontaneity as exemplified in art. A woman complains that she doesn’t understand what Bennett writes and it scares her. The poet’s persona replies,

You understand it

more than you

realize

if it

scares you

I said,

& then she looked

really scared.

A very scary shard Bennett calls He Tried To Consider His Options. In it the writer’s persona details the crackup of his marriage. After giving up a music career, raising four children, and playing by the rules of society the writer’s wife turns on him for his admittedly excessive drinking habits.  His answer, reasonably enough, is that he never missed a day of work. No dice. By this time his wife has joined Al-Anon and has substituted her husband for her support group. The protagonist now loses his way. Jim Beam offers solace and numbness. He accepts. Thus he temporarily joins the ranks of the vacant-eyed-ones.

A follow up shard entitled Economic Crises finishes the story. The writer says,

This is more than a roll. Life begins turning on a dime. Something inside floats to the surface like seaweed.

He hits bottom, recovers, and faces the wondrous world unconfused.

In Drive By, his title piece, Bennett describes writing what he calls a super shard infused with other inspired writers and pouring it “into a narrow-necked bottle like gasoline and then stuffed with a rag…and tossed through the first window I drive by.” His rage against the normality of art is, of course, both violent and well-placed.

Keep a watchful and wary eye on this guy Bennett and his well-constructed Molotov cocktails full of poetry and inspired prose.

Kenneth Lee’s ‘SWEET SPOT’ Hits Home

Kenneth Lee’s ‘SWEET SPOT’ Hits Home




by Michael T. Steffen





While reading through Kenneth Lee’s recent book SWEET SPOT, my reader’s eye couldn’t leave the poem on page 32, “Final Diagnosis”—wondering again and again what kind of weight and seriousness the collection might have taken on had this poem been the first and titular poem, so profound the implications of genuine self-examination presented by the opening strophes:



My report—

Biopsy, anterior cervix: Moderate Dysplasia

sent Katherine McCloud for a conization

(removal of the core while leaving the apple)

which may have prevented a possible cancer

but later was blamed for the miscarriage

of a possibly beautiful daughter.



At 9:15 one Tuesday morning

I had deemed her nuclei too densely packed,

their shapes somewhat irregular

and their chromatin too coarse and darkly staining.

So Mary Ann McCloud was never born.



Though Lee in fact is a pathologist and Professor of Pathology, and the poem may well be an honest confession, the potential reach it has as metaphor is breathtaking. As metaphor the poet, that microcosmic god of imagination, makes decisions on future life to be or not to be. And, what is more, in doing so, he comes much later in life to question those decisions, wondering—



Had they been a little less crowded,

a little smoother, a little more powdery-looking,

I might have called them “mildly dysplastic,”

avoiding the procedure, and Mary Ann

would now be the mother of three.



And maybe they would be, were I to look

at that slide again, after thirty more years

of looking at them.



Lee goes on to summarize his practice in the lab, moving from familiar to technical vocabulary, using anaphora to close the poem very aptly with a wide statement that generalizes the pains any of us take on our paths to better knowing:



Thirty more years

deciding what’s fine and what’s coarse,

what’s granular, smudgy, bubbly,

what’s myxoid or hyaline,

cuboidal, columnar or flat.

Thirty more years of honing this art,

of coming to know a thing by what it’s not.



Magnetized under this moment, much of the rest of the book, recalling pristine moments of a life richly allowed, fond and endearing, takes on more poignancy—might have served as a reminder, had he dispersed the handful of “medical” poems throughout the chronologically linear sequence, how those special moments of our lives forever share a border with death, which ultimately gives our lives their meaning.

The title Lee has chosen, SWEET SPOT (not to be confused with the spot of joy on the cheek of Browning’s Duchess!) refers to the mid part of a baseball bat, that zero thick of the pine ideally a batter veers the bat into a pitch with, taken from the poem “Ground Rule Triple”

(page 11), another from the poet’s personal history:



That summer saw the end of pick-up stickball;

chasing the flies thenceforth was supervised.



So I learned to fear the flubbing of a grounder,

flailed at laughing fast-balls flying past.



But once one came in fat and I connected,

met it in the sweet spot, sent it a mile.



It bounced into the woods (we didn’t have a fence)

and they gave me a ground rule triple…



As the title for the book, symbolically this sweet spot associates, I think, with what we call the “soft spot” in one’s heart, the innocent fondness with which most of these poems go about reminiscing. To this extent, the poem chosen to open the book, “309 Griggs Avenue,” is both exemplary and charged with incipience, already displaying the poet’s familiar yet separate consciousness as a cosmogenic agent, or



…master of the linoleum.

I roam there with a wooden brindle cow,

a bright red fire truck, a small giraffe.

Like pale blue streams the liquid hours run…



The objects here so effortlessly placed from the poet’s childhood memory (cow, fire truck, giraffe, streams of hours) gleam associatively for nearly all there is surrounding any of us: providence, danger, endearment and the magic of time’s machinery.

Lee sustains this quality of consciousness throughout a book that demonstrates awareness of craft with keen turns of phrase. A home-made kite is “fractious,” ripples on a lake “nacreous,”

a Christmas tree with a Keatsian epithet “still-unravished.” A new bicycle’s fenders make “twin convex mirrors holding the whole neighborhood.”





SWEET SPOT by Kenneth Lee

can be purchased for $17.00

from Antrim House

Simsbury, CT

www.antrimhousebooks.com

Dennis Daly: A floor sweeper. A union organizer. A journalist. A poet.

Dennis Daly: A floor sweeper. A union organizer. A journalist. A poet.

By Doug Holder

 Like many poets I know Dennis Daly has worn many hats in his working and personal life. He has swept the floors of the General Electric plant in Lynn, Mass.; he has organized workers; he edited a newspaper; he traveled the dangerous hinterlands of Afghanistan and Turkey, and has written his first full length collection of poetry The Custom House (Ibbetson Street Press). The poems in this collection deal with his hometown of Salem, Mass, the men and women he worked with during his General Electric days, his family, and his wanderlust that took him into the tribal badlands of Afghanistan. I have talked extensively about poetry, politics and life with Daly at my usual early morning perch at the Bagel Bards meeting in Somerville, Mass., and I was glad to have him in the studios of Somerville Community Access TV on my show Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer where the following interview takes place.

Doug Holder:  You got your advanced degree in English from Northeastern University. You studied with Samuel French Morse. He was a well- respected poet and scholar. What was the experience like under his tutelage?

Dennis Daly:  Sam was a great guy. He was an eye-opener for me as poetry goes. He spent serious time with his graduate students reading their work and taking it seriously. I became very close with him, along with two other student-friends of mine. One is Bob De Young, who later became head of the English Department of U/Mass Lowell. The other was Patrick Dudy who became ambassador to Venezuela. Both are very good poets and very good people to write poetry with.

DH: Was Morse a formal verse type of guy?

DD: Sam wrote with rhyme and usually with meter. But he didn’t insist on it in terms of the poetry he read. He was into all types of poetry. After studying with him you didn’t feel you were in the corner as far as formalism or fee verse. At that time I was interested in all types of poetry.

DH: After graduate school you strayed from literary pursuits.

DD: I became angry at poetry. I am not quite sure why. A number of things happened. Other poets I knew were able to get up and read their poetry—I couldn’t. I had a pretty bad stutter. It always was getting a little bit better but even when I was in grad school it was still pretty bad. It seemed I couldn’t get up and read my own poetry. I thought: What’s the point?” I tried to forget about poetry. I wrote journalistic pieces for The Salem News, etc…

DH: It is almost like you had a romantic relationship with poetry that you later tried to forget.

DD: There may be a bit of truth to that.  It wasn’t like I stopped writing it. I could have gone the literary route—perhaps working as a professor…but I took a job with General Electric. I was a floor sweeper.

DH: Why did you do that? I mean you were a highly educated man.

DD: It paid well for one thing. I had a family to support. The job was also quite interesting. I met a lot of really great people. There was one guy for instance who ran a lathe machine who had a PhD in physics. I met people like that all the time—poets too.

DH:  You translated Sophocles’ Ajax that was released by the Wilderness House Press and was praised by the likes of X. J. Kennedy. Ajax takes place during the Trojan Wars. You seem to be attracted to war and living on the edge. I mean you traveled in very dangerous areas in Afghanistan and other places, and were put in harm’s way. What Makes Sammy Run?—so to speak.

DD: I guess to some extent I like situations that are different. It is a change of scenery. I found going to Afghanistan and Turkey very interesting. You meet people who are outside of the box, and some real fascinating stuff usually develops. When I went to Afghanistan I was going to interview President Karazi. I had talked to the Ministry of the Interior but by the time I arrived on the scene he took off for India.

DH: I noticed in your new collection you wrote about my favorite Shakespearian character Falstaff.  Fat men often appear in literature. Offhand I can think of the gourmet and gourmand detective Nero Wolfe, Big Daddy in Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and others.  What is it about fat men as a literary device?

DD: I’m not quite sure. The jovial, fat men, who know a lot does appear often—I agree. I mean Falstaff tutored King Henry the Fifth—in all the wrong things—like drinking and whores. But he was a mentor and did have a keen insight into human nature.

DH: You were a union leader and a workingman. Do you think there is poetry in the day to day grind of the working stiff?

DD: I think you can find poetry almost everywhere. Certainly in a place like General Electric, in which 16,000 people worked, you saw the best and worst of a wide selection of folks. You would meet other poets, and very intelligent individuals. These people worked very hard jobs. I don’t regret a minute working that job sweeping the floors of the plant and organizing workers.

The Custom House

Another age: our greed- governed ancestors

Venture forth, significant super cargoes

Compelling the twins: speed and economy.

They bounded oceans for Madagascar

Or Malay, craved the Orient’s garb.

We watch for their return with telescope

Of brass:  pennants streaming, hull stowed with teas

And silks:  we dream them into our harbors.

We await tribute from captains now arrived,

Long doldrumed—their ships in need of repair:

Sails split and rotting, spars sprung.

Ascending the granite steps, these dangerous men,

These men unable to meet our tariffs

Curse the collectors of the world, the weights

And measures; their minds unbalanced, salt-eaten.

They sulk impatiently, clawing their daggers:

We’ve seen their kind before.

Once in every while a revolution;

They murder us at our desks: stabbed with pen,

Bludgeoned with ink bottle. We disappear

For a time: there are advantages,

Our ghostly machinery still keeping account.

In the end they always pay.