MEMOIRS OF A HACK MECHANIC By Rob Siegel

MEMOIRS OF A HACK MECHANIC
By Rob Siegel

Bentley Publishers
ISBN 978-083761720-6
410 pages

Review by Tom Miller

Someone said, “Hey Tom.  You’re a car guy.  This book is being released soon and it’s right up your alley, why don’t you give it a review?”  I said OK and the publisher Fed Ex’ed a copy to me.  I dove into it knowing that the release was scheduled within the next couple of weeks and I set myself a deadline to get the book read and the review written as quickly as possible.  But as I set about the task at hand, I found that each time I picked up the book I had this sense of resentment.  Odd. 

It took me a session or two before I realized that what I resented was the fact that I was under a deadline and that I needed to rush.  This is not a book to rush through.  Not if you are a car guy.  If you are a car guy this is a book to stroll through.  I don’t know how to define exactly what a car guy is, but I know that I am one.  And I know that all car guys know what the term means – and their loved ones probably know as well.  You know, you recognize the smell of brake fluid and old grease that lingers like cologne when you enter a room.  You have barked knuckles and a screw driver in your back pocket.  You think about shock absorbers and tune ups and stuff like that.

Anyway, this book is written by a car guy for car guys about car guy experiences.  It is part autobiography, part encyclopedia, and part advice column.  It is chocked full of useful hints about everything from acquiring a car, repairing a car and even when the sad event is necessary, disposing of a car.  It is a lifetime of experience hard won and passed on gladly.

Now I will forgive Rob for focusing on his passion – BMWs – since I am a died in the wool Detroit iron fan of the 50s, 60s, and 70s, (…and newer, …or older,  if a neat car pops up), but as all car guys know, experience generalizes and sound advice is sound advice.  And this book is full of sound advice.  Rob has written a column for the BMW Car Club of America’s magazine Roundel for over twenty-five years, no mean feat in itself.  To have accomplished that kind of longevity with what surely must be a group of BMW purists speaks volumes.

Included in the book are some amusing anecdotes as well as some self incurred foibles that get told, all of which adds to its entertainment value.  And there are some really neat photos of his passions and his rather unique five car garage – one bay of which is under the deck (why not?  Car guys know how to do that kind of stuff).

This is a book that I will lend out but only grudgingly and to friends who have demonstrated that they are responsible enough to be trusted to not abscond with it.  I also will buy copies of it to give to other car guys for birthdays and I most definitely would recommend it for the upcoming Fathers Day.  Especially if…your Dad is a car guy!









**** Tom Miller is a retired auto industry executive, and an occasional reviewer for BASPP.

Somerville Artist Pauline Lim: Equally at home with Archie Comics and Medieval Art

I am a bundle of neurosis by Pauline Lim

Somerville artist Pauline Lim walked into the Sherman Cafe with a very focused stare and joined me at my usual table. She told me that she just finished meditating in preparation for our interview. After wiping the few remaining crumbs of my luscious oatmeal scone from my table ( A staple of my morning fare for years now), we began to talk about her work and life as an artist.

Lim has for many years lived in the Brickbottom building, an artist residence outside Union Square. Lim said she graduated from Harvard University in 1988 and moved into the Brickbottom, but left for awhile returning yet again again in 2004. She adores living in Somerville stating: "  I love the upscale and downscale; it is scrappier than Cambridge but just as cultured-- a lot of super smart people live here, but Somerville has less the arrogant professorial types."

Living at the Brickbottom has been a great experience Lim told me. There are many group activities such as meditation, book discussion, annual barbecues, etc... Lim smiled: " It is like we are all playmates--surrounded by family. There is a high tolerance for kookiness. We are a bunch of misfits in a way. We are all aware of the false images society puts out about who is a winner and who is not."

Lim told me  that one of her early influences were comics, like Archie and Richie Rich,that she read as a child. And in fact she brings a very comic aspect to her work. At Harvard, where she studied art there was a big emphasis on abstraction. But Lim always liked the realism of comics, and the skill that is brought to the genre.

Lim is very upfront about having a long struggle with the Black Dogs of depression as Winston Churchill once characterized it. Lim reflected: " Being an artist was one step
above committing suicide." She was pressured by her Korean family to achieve success as a doctor or something along those lines. This and other emotional baggage haunted this artist for decades.

Lim made a trip to Europe years ago and came under the influence of the majestic cathedrals she visited. She was also brought up attending  a High Anglican church--all this lead to her interest in medieval religious art. Her paintings explore these serious themes, but she also infuses them with these semi-comical characters giving her work a very quirky appeal.

Lim said much of her work is self-focused and even a cursory look at her work reveals titles like: " I am making my way through life." or "The dream from which I can not wake" would indicate this sensibility. Lim said she is not sure if this intense self-focus  is good or bad. She stated: " It doesn't bring you happiness." But the artist said that after years of struggling with inner demons she is getting to a much better place with her life and art. She left our meeting with an engaging smile. There are many stories in the Paris of New England--this has been one of them.

Review of Sweet Spot by Kenneth Lee

Review of Sweet Spot, Poems by Kenneth Lee, Antrim House, 21 Goodrich Road, Simsbury, CT 06070, www.antrimhousebooks.com, 2012, 78 pages, $17

By Barbara Bialick

Dr. Kenneth Lee, a pathologist in Boston at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School, has a keen eye for description in his book of slices of his life, from childhood to the present.

The sweet spot of a baseball bat is the perfect way to hit the ball, and so in this collection he shows how to stay in the game.

He takes us from his youth in Teaneck, New Jersey, through his fascinating stint as an air force pilot in Viet Nam to a busy life as a doctor, father, observer, and so on. The first half of the book is one well-crafted poem after another. However, as it travels through the years, I couldn’t concentrate on the growing examination of his many views of his life, often in an almost matter of fact way.

Early in the collection, he records his first trip to his grandfather’s watch shop. He is impressed by the way his grandfather referred to the watches as “movements”. This interest in the elegant fascination in his work carries him through his own profession. Lee knows he is able to save lives in a somewhat similar view of the minute human material he sees on his pathology slides. “I process them/according to established protocol:/a tiny foot, a hand/suspended in the purple slush,/ placental villi/lovely/all those once-ardent strivings/waving like anemones/anxious that I detect/that they had come at least this far.” (“Protocol”)

At a family reunion in New Jersey, near the end of the book, “Jersey Shore Reunion”, he looks back on it all. On the beach he relates his thoughts: “The droning rollers, ghostly foam/I think of how much water/the sea has thrown on its sloping shoulders/since I walked here last, a child on vacation./I turn, the far-off beach house lights,/Mars, the austere moon, indifferent stars.” Likewise the doctor has taken a lot of responsibility onto his own shoulders…

Kenneth Lee is the co-author of a popular textbook, with Christopher Crum, Diagnostic and Gynecologic and Obstetric Pathology. He has also published in many well-respected literary and other journals including Chest, Nimrod, Poetry East, Comstock Review, The Lyric, and Harp Strings Poetry Journal. Some of the poems in the book were published in an earlier poetry chapbook, Cleaning the Attic. He lives with his wife, Kathleen, in Boston, Massachusetts.

The Grind By Michael Cirelli

The Grind
By Michael Cirelli
Hanging Loose Press
Brooklyn, New York
www.hangingloosepress.com
ISBN: 978-1-934909-33-1
88 Pages
$18.00

Review by Dennis Daly

There’s something about a good breakfast diner that both comforts and reassures. It begins your day with needed nutritional rituals and provides you with a hopeful context to carry out into the real, less accommodating, world. And, if you have chosen your diner well, your coffee mug will never be less than half full.

In his new book of poems, The Grind, Michael Cirelli delivers a meditative homage to family, food, and hard work in an impressive poetic format. His narratives delve deeply and emotionally into this uniquely American restaurant institution with sometimes surprising results. Most of the poems in this collection are set in or revolve around Cirelli’s family’s actual diner, called J.P. Spoonem’s, located, and apparently still operating, in Providence Rhode Island.

In the initial poem, Dedication, the poet speaks directly to his mother with undisguised admiration. He says,

Mom, I know you want me to keep you out
of my poems, but people need to know

that you remember them by how they like
their eggs, that when I asked about the certificate

framed on the wall of our family restaurant
you told me, while refilling my coffee,

that the Mayor sent it for thirty years of doin’ this.

Right at the book’s get-go Cirelli establishes the work ethic that propels his family in their efforts to succeed. The poem Wedding Day describes the hours leading up to his parents’ marriage ceremony,

Hard work
Is open for business
Even on
His wedding day
Dad nervously
Buttered white toast
While my mom
Took the day off
To prepare her
Platinum feathered hairdo…

The poem Rivers, the masterwork of this collection, portrays the generative and connective power of the waitresses in Cirelli’s family. The poet puts it thusly,

My great grandmother, my Nana, my ma:
All waitresses full of rivers. Fit a river

Into a vein, and it looks like lightning
Or a supernova. Galaxies of rivers in the blood.

When the clock strikes Open, my mother opens
Up a new river. Chit chat flows.

Where I’m from it was the rivers that turned
Everything: river to turn water

Wheel to turn gears to turn looms to make textiles.
Rivers make costume jewelry and silverware…

Many of us have experienced the phenomenon of returning as observers to a past life of intensity and lessons. The poet describes this well in Scuba Diving in the Kitchen Sink. In this section he meets the former co-worker, who he then dedicates the poem to,

…Marty’s still there

Having not aged a bit, his thick
Glasses fogged from the Hobart’s steam.

In front of the house, everything
Has changed. Not enough stools

To seat all the angels of Edgewood—
I reminisce with Marty about

My time in the kitchen, like
A veteran of The Battle for Blue Collar,

Like the Patron Saint of Plates.
But Marty scrubs the hyperbole spotless.

Cirelli’s piece titled The Taste of Love is a wonderfully evocative love poem. The phrasing melts in your mouth. The poet says,

and her lips bent
like prawn over flame
because she may have forgotten
then remembered—and that always
opens a smile—or because
she was anticipating it,
anticipating me
being me, and she loves me being me,
or because she wants more love
and more love
and more, like the bread we ask for…

Like Joyce’s Ulysses—only with food! Here’s another snippet, the ending of the same poem,

And I pour the oil/drip the balsamico
And pinch the salt,
To ward off the eyes, gooey
As oysters, staring at,
Envying us—gracing our way
Through dinner:
A dinner so good
That I could die with its taste
In my mouth.

In the poem Down with the King Cirelli speaks directly to the “King of Vegetables,” the eggplant. It’s pretty comic and exhibits some real depth. Here’s a for instance,

… I abhor the
Metaphor that exploits your name
In Sicily. I’ll go with the ancient
Indian: “King of Vegetables”
Solanum melongena! Outta space!
Sometimes long and curved like
Ganesh’s trunk. Sometimes fat and
Round like Ganesh’s belt…

The title poem, The Grind, praises the routines of everyday work and that work’s ability to keep one connected to a larger society. Someone in the Grind gets tired of it after a while.  But without the Grind one’s status is lost. The poet says,

…The Grind turns our feet
to ash. When Mom got in the car accident,
she couldn’t work for five months.
The first week off was fine, but slowly
lonely started to buzz in her ear,
and she couldn’t sleep,
like when I moved away to college,
and she couldn’t eat. College was the myth
that the Desk was better than The Grind.
The myth of: so you don’t have to
work like we do. Her first day back
I called her, and she told me, It’s good
to get back to the Grind.

Waiting for Poems nails the poetic conundrum perfectly. Poets wait to compose, the good ones, that is. Their poems are out there but often need time. The muse commands. The poet answers. Cirelli states it like this,

… Boiled eggs are low
and underappreciated. My first book (five years),
still low art—and when I tip my pen in the direction
of my father, I realize I haven’t waited long enough
to get it right. Haven’t the craft yet to craft him scrupulous,
in his long white apron, behind a pot of simmering
tomatoes, waiting.

Well I think Cirelli’s Dad has found his poem. And I think this delicious poetic collection will soon find its well-deserved audience.

Ibbetson Street 33 15th Anniversary Reading June 26 6:30PM The Book Shop at Ball Square

The original home of  the Ibbetson Street Press in Somerville, Mass.( Far back left  the late Jack Powers founder of the Stone Soup Poets.)

I was speaking with Gil Barbosa the owner of The Book Shop at Ball Square, and we decided his shop would be a great place for the Ibbetson Street 33 reading. ( June 26 6:30PM) All past and present readers are welcome to come and read from their work. This is our 15th Anniversary, and we have such great poets as Jean Valentine, Cornelius Eady, Kathleen Spivack, Brendan Galvin, Marge Piercy, as well as many others in this issue. The front and back cover art was contributed by Richard Wilhelm, a Ball Square resident. Also this bookstore is a great independent and I hope you will buy books and keep this joint running...Gil tells me he signed a new four year lease...  Here is the bookshop's website: 

http://www.bookshopsomerville.com Open Mic as well-- after contributors....Free.  6:30PM

**** Ibbetson Street is now affiliated with Endicott College in Beverly, Mass, and work was selected from it for a Pushcart Prize ( 2014)  ( Afaa Michael Weaver poem: Blues in Five/Four/The Violence in Chicago)

The Book Shop at Ball Square
694 Broadway
Somerville,Mass

Best--Doug Holder/Ibbetson Street Press
http://ibbetsonpress.com

Antisocial Network By Timothy Gager

 

Antisocial Network
By Timothy Gager
Redneck Press
Revere, MA
By way of Mosherville, PA
39 Pages
$9.00

Review by Dennis Daly

Stabbing the front cover of a poetry chapbook with a butter knife, normally used to slather my toast with marmalade, is no way to start off the day. Later, as I sat in my well-padded reviewing room chanting ommmmmmmmmmm,  ommmmmmmmmm, some anonymous soul again put this book back into my unreceptive hands and I reached for the scissors that I had hidden under the rubber mat. Another betrayal: someone had removed them.

Hours later, having, by secret techniques developed over a lifetime, reached the state of near perfect bliss, I tested myself. I took the aforementioned chapbook, turned it over to its unoffending (and blank) back cover and cracked it. I’m glad I did.

“Beep.  Beep.” The first poem of this book by Timothy Gager, entitled Many Different Positions, appears on page 38 and proves, dare I say it, you can’t tell a book by its cover. At first glance the poem seems overly accessible, a surface piece that conjures up the image of a comical Chihuahua driving an automobile under the directions of a would-be driving instructor. Almost laugh-out-loud funny. But something isn’t right here; beauty and love lurch off the road. Danger and possible death smile down on the scene.  Here’s how the poem ends,

Closing time comes quickly.

You bark, the dog’s going to kill us,
Like going over the waterfall in a barrel,
Or trapped in a theater that’s on fire.

You never looked as lovely as when
We kiss, the car lurches onto the shoulder.

Notice that the woman “barks,” and blames the dog. Intriguing for a last poem, or in our case, dear reader, a first poem.  I turn the page quickly to the penultimate piece, Everything’s Connected. This poem exudes an interesting mixture of innocence, blueberries, and most of all eroticism. The poet does this by seemingly contrasting (lightheartedly, of course) the non-scientific Law of Attraction with its opposite, a universe of probability. Consider these lines,

All magic, illusion…
The law of Attraction
had led me to
pancakes, pie, yogurt
and last night a Blueberry ale
with fruit swirling
around like lottery balls
about to be picked

Attraction is also a theme in About Allison. The poem deals with how we perceive others and, more importantly, how we need them to live up to our perceptions.  The poet’s persona wants a movie star. In fact he invents the movie. That’s not what he gets. The poet says,

I wanted a movie star, you wanted
to move back home where we
cannot take these walks,

and months go by
before you
call yourself an asshole,
for being out of touch,
then say, you think
of me often.

I suspect any poet who tries to convince his audience of his cynical hard-hearted nature may in reality be an unreconstructed (albeit disappointed) romantic. Gager in his very amusing piece entitled Black Heart Candy Company makes his argument,

My next great idea
Marketed for those
Anti-valentine’s day crusaders,
The true cynics who’ll
Gnaw on my little hearts,
And get me rich quick…
In a very different piece called Unwelcomed Guest the poet confronts his addiction and its demons. He’s not quite up for the fight but at least he now knows the score. He also will not back down and that is a good thing. The poet’s persona details his revelations,

you led me to drive down
a one-way the wrong way,
I blamed the Scotch,
started earlier when
it was still dusk
but then the blackness rose
up from below, I recall
I used to imagine hell’s address
was somewhere between my basement
and the center of the earth
but I know now different;
Hell is something
I’ve ingested…

I empathize with the image of hell geographically placed under the poet’s basement. I buy the plausibility of it. I have no doubt that my hell bustles directly beneath my cellar.

A Girl In A Loft, an imagistic piece, draws a line through life and then attempts to breech that boundary with a connecting vision. One side of the line collects an eye lash, panties, an easy breeze, a young girl’s cheek, and a “good morning.” The other side includes a course sofa, a gritty fabric, poverty, a groan, and the phrase “shit to all that.” The last sentence of the poem, “I’d like to know your name,” surprises with its weight and its ability to bridge the structural gap. I really like this almost-a-painting poem.

In the poem Like Moths in the Night the poet mulls over the deaths and survivals of addicted friends. It’s a serious meditation and one of the best poems in the collection. Culpability and guilt by identification enter the measures and are dealt with summarily. The poet’s persona emerges ever watchful with a determination to do no harm. Here is the poem’s ending,

Tonight, the outside air is cool
I feel his noose tighten
when I breathe,
and her needle
leaving a bruise
I feel his brains

blown out, like mine
splattered into the universe

for them, why not
me? I haven’t the guts.

I sit on a porch on a summer night
keeping the lights off
because there is nothing at all in that.

The first poem in the book (or the last, depending on which cover you start from), Ode to Wormwood, Gager constructs as a masterwork. The lyrical tone echoes its deep and rich notes, near prophetically. The attributes of wormwood, bitterness and a concentration of real poison (think alcohol and drugs), contrast and intermix with a wonderful resiliency (think the human spirit). It is this pollution and ultimate poison that kills the addict in the ruins of his soul—a love affair of sorts. The poem begins this way,

Growing on roadsides and wasted places
the wormwood braces itself against wind,
remains strong, please, there is a fierce poison
here, the water will be polluted, the
drink held in your hand, downed fast with eyes closed,
resting on the passage in the Bible…

This is top shelf writing by a prolific and thoughtful poet. I would only humbly suggest that in the future, when he publishes his Selected Works, he takes that book’s cover design in another direction.

Poet Tim Suermondt: A Headhunter on Wall Street: A Word Chaser in Somerville



Poet Tim Suermondt: A Headhunter on Wall Street: A Word Chaser in Somerville

Tim Suermondt is the author of two full-length collections: TRYING TO HELP THE

ELEPHANT MAN DANCE ( The Backwaters Press, 2007 ) and JUST BEAUTIFUL from

New York Quarterly Books, 2010. He has published poems in Poetry, The Georgia Review,

Blackbird, Able Muse, Prairie Schooner, PANK, Bellevue Literary Review and Stand Magazine

(U.K.) and has poems forthcoming in Gargoyle, A Narrow Fellow and DMQ Review among others. After many years in Queens and Brooklyn, he has moved to Cambridge with his wife, the poet Pui Ying Wong.

 I had the pleasure to interview him on my Somerville Community Access TV show " Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer"

Interview with Doug Holder

Doug Holder: For many years you were a headhunter on Wall Street. For the last 17 you were a partner in your own firm. Basically you had to sell people…you had to have a pitch. Words were important. Did your other life as a poet help you in that regard?

Tim Suermondt: I definitely think it did. Sometimes you are groping for a word and you can throw one in much easier. This is because you are constantly dealing with words and writing.

DH: Did your years of working on Wall Street ever enter into your poetry?

TS: I wish I could say yes, but no, just on the periphery. This probably is because it was my job and I wanted to get away, do my poems, and be free. My poems are fairly grounded though. So when I am away from business I put on another hat more or less.

DH: The poet Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive. He was hesitant to tell people at work that he was a poet. He thought it might create doubt about his abilities. Was this a problem for you in your line of work?

TS:  No, that wasn’t a problem. I didn’t feel like I had to hide it.  My partner knew I was a poet.

DH: You moved from Brooklyn, N.Y. to Cambridge, Mass. with your wife. What was the impetus for this move?

TS:  Well, we have lived there so long.  I lived in NYC for over 30 years. We wanted to make a change. At first we thought maybe another part of NYC. But a lot of that was prohibitive. We thought of running away to Paris. But we decided on a base here. We found a nice apartment in East Cambridge and here we are. Recently we attended a Cervena Barva Press reading in the Arts Armory in Somerville. We are getting acquainted with the area.

 DH: Your wife Pu Ying is an accomplished poet.  Do you have a competitive relationship?

TS:  You would think so. But I don’t think of it as trying to outdo one another. But if Pu likes something I write I usually think:  “I got something there.” If she doesn’t like it more often than not she is right. I would like to think I can do the same with her—but her work is so good lately that I don’t have much room for commentary.

DH: How did you guys meet?

TS: We met at a master class, at Poets House in NYC at the old Spring St. location. The workshop was run by Jane Hirschfield.

DH: I read in an interview where you describe yourself as an outsider. Many poets feel this way. Why do you feel this way?

TS: I am not part of any MFA program. I more or less read a lot of poetry—I have read the poets who have stood the test of time. I thought to myself that I would love to do this. I knew what I wanted to write but I had to work my way through it all. I listened to many voices, but then I found my own. I am not going to be in a Paris Review interview, but I like what I am doing with my writing. I have a new collection out "Just Beautiful"     published by the New York Quarterly Books.

DH: Compare the NYC poetry scene with that of Boston.

TS: New York is monstrous …it is so huge. Boston compared to NYC is almost a town. In Boston you feel there is an end here. NY keeps going—we haven’t explored the poetry scene extensively yet—we are just getting started in Boston.

DH: You said in an interview that oddities in writing bring more clarity. Can you talk about this?

TS: I look for the quirks in a poet’s works. When I come across something unusual, I think: “I’ve never thought of it that way.” Oddities make you stop and think—they change your perspective. I like poets who have quirks. There are poets who have the blueprint down, but their work often seems a little cold or dead. I hope I have some quirks in my poetry.

DH: You wrote a poem “A Donut and the Great Beauty of the World.” You use a donut—with sprinkles mind you—to examine the theme of the beauty of the moment.

TS: I think we need to appreciate the moment especially when it is going well. I understand that a lot of poetry is a bit down, and that is understandable. If you live long enough you will have enough downers. In terms of appreciating when things go well—you must realize these things won’t last so appreciate it even more. There are so many tragedies—why not appreciate the good things? A lot of poets say “I don’t want to talk about walking with my loved one on a beautiful summer day.” They want to save the whales—they want to comment on something larger. Whatever the poet writes about is great—no subject is off limits.


 

A DOUGHNUT AND THE GREAT BEAUTY OF THE WORLD

I try not eating the chocolate one with sprinkles

and I don’t succeed—my pledge to my diet dies,

but the taste validates my backsliding, the fine

smudge on my lips beautiful as lipstick on a woman.

Someone wrote “the great beauty of the world”—

maybe I did, I can’t be sure—and I believe the words.

I remember the ugly of the past and I know the worst

of the future is already gearing up to make its visit—

I finish the doughnut, clean away the evidence

and head back to the couch to finish a book I love.

---Tim Suermondt

Beautybeast by Adina Dabija translated by Claudia Serea



Adina Dabija

Beautybeast

by Adina Dabija

translated by Claudia Serea

Port Alworth, AK: North Shore Press, 2012

ISBN: 978-0-9794365-5-0

Reviewed by David P. Miller

Romanian poet Adina Dabija, living in New York and a practitioner of oriental medicine, has published two award-winning books in Romania. Beautybeast is her first collection in English. Although I’m not able to respond to the poems as originally written, I find Dabjia’s poetry lively, dreamlike, and sometimes ecstatic. Her writing describes a world of continuous, unpredictable metamorphosis, grounded in the body and its many extensions.

Transformation pervades her work. The frequent density of her imagery makes any illustrative selection reductive, but examples are necessary. As one instance, in “The world seen through a toilet paper tube,” the lowly cardboard object begins as a tool for “cross section views” -

In a New York subway car, two rows of midgets.

Nature had fun carving us in various ways.

Yes, we are the latest adventure of the matter:

chunks of clay with eyes

making history on the edge of the pipes

that spit and swallow us again.

The viewing tube has already become both the “tube” of the subway and a kind of cloaca, morphing later on into her hat, and in the next poem, “At the end of the tube,” resuming its cloacal status:

[…] I descend carefully on a straw

into the garden. […]

through pipes clogged with clotted blood

and dinosaur bones,

through the hungry mouths of the earth,

into the digestive tubes of the worms

In the book’s title poem, an accidental encounter with an undescribed creature leads to a radical change in her sense of her own being:

Running, I stepped on

a sleeping beast.

She opened her mouth and swallowed me.

Now I sit in her black belly and bang on it with my fists.

[…]

Suddenly, I turn my head, and in a corner of the belly,

I see myself.

I’m afraid.

Is it possible that this creature

with bloody soles and phosphorescent breasts

is really me?

The human body, and in particular the woman’s body, is both the agent and object of changes among living states. “The woman who ate the day and the night” is a kind of anti-creation goddess, who “sucked all daylight / into my colossal breasts.” But even that was insufficient, as the night remaining “soon disappeared / into the crevice / between my legs.” This seemingly destructive energy is linked in other poems with unexpected acts of re-creation. In “The woman of wind,” deaths of relatives and acquaintances lead her to a new survival strategy, fashioning a surrogate body:

I’m thinking, if my body would die,

I’d hire a wind

to wear my dresses

and imitate my walk, my shape, the way I move.

I’d put lipstick on my lips of wind

and call men into my room.

And in “Jazz,” though violated and seemingly murdered by “the devil,” she finds a resurrection: “From my buried body, the good plants grow on my tomb / and embrace my lover’s feet.” Carnal being is inherently fluid and, of course, erotic. She describes “How I turn into an old wine”:

Your lips are the fruits that make me turn into wine.

Come, step down into the cellar

to drink me directly from the barrel.

To make oneself unavailable to this state, to keep this bodily knowledge at arm’s length and submit to hypothetical dualisms, enables another sort of metamorphosis, into desiccated being. “Impossible to make sense” describes this using images that, with humorous irony, invoke food in a metaphor that negates its function as nourishment:

Everything could ultimately be reduced to an idea,

you figure, walking down the street,

parting the world in halves with your chest.

The juicy, impenetrable world

seems rather a hard piece of cheese

you cut into pieces into order to chew on it easier.

[…]

The binary machine of making sense

ticks deep into your veins,

its cold metal slowly replacing your blood.

Strikingly, the act of lovemaking can only be imagined or described beforehand or afterwards, as - assuming it is not also reduced to an idea - sex’s immersion precludes the possibility of naming or distinction. In “On love and blowing bubbles,”

The best time I made love to you

was before making love to you.

Then we held hands, told everybody

everything.

We allowed ourselves to be watched from a window above.

We laughed, our hands filled with air,

throwing into the others’ faces the whipped cream

extracted from our ears.

This joy, which comes up again “after making love to you,” becomes “impossible”

while making love to you.

At that time, you don’t even exist

and I don’t even exist.

We can’t even imagine our existence.

[…]

with your mouth, with my fingers,

with my scar caressing your scar,

with my pain sipping your pain,

until nothing is left of us

Beautybeast concludes with the prose poem, “An undifferentiated state,” which may not have been intended as a summation for this collection, but serves as one for me. Adina Dabija describes the simple exercise of covering eyes, mouth, and nostrils - the latter “with your middle fingers, or, even better, with your little toes.”

Imagine you are an amoeba -- you don’t have lungs, eyes, ears or a mouth. You are the world itself, before the world existed.

Re-emerging from that imagined primal condition, you re-enter the world of distinct perceptions, separate things and beings:

Let the light come to you, the air, sounds, like an old friend coming for a visit. You sit together in the kitchen, share a watermelon slice, then you say goodbye and each of you goes back to your business.

The value is not in pretending you aren’t this person, with this body and this sense of self, but in remembering the flow beneath, where everything perceptible exchanges its matter with all other things and all boundaries are permeable. Where, as in “I chose the pumpkin pie,”

There is no difference between my poem

and the pumpkin pie.

It’s an undefined state, best described

by a bug climbing my leg

on a lazy afternoon.

Ibbetson Street Press Poet Lo Galluccio named Populist Poet of Cambridge

Lo Galluccio

We are glad to say Lo Galluccio, Bagel Bard, published Ibbetson Street Press poet (" Hot Rain" 2004), has been elected Cambridge Populist poet. Lo has been in numerous issues of Ibbetson Street, was on the planning committee for the Grolier Poetry Room Reading Series, sponsored by the Ibbetson St Press and the Blind Elephant Press, and was a reader at the Somerville News Writers Festival founded by Timothy Gager and Doug Holder in 2003. She has also participated in many of our readings for the last decade...so glad for you Lo!


Here is the press Release from the Cambridge Arts Council:





FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE



May 14, 2013





Contacts:

Jason Weeks, Executive Director

617-349-4383 or jweeks@cambridgema.gov

Julie Barry, Director of Community Arts

617-349-4381 or jbarry@cambridgema.gov











New Poet Populist Named In Cambridge







Cambridge, MA –The City of Cambridge announces that Lo Galluccio has won election as the 2013 Poet Populist. The Cambridge Poet Populist is selected by Cambridge residents to represent the art of poetry for the City of Cambridge. During her two-year span, Lo will have the opportunity to affect the artistic landscape of the Cambridge community and help the unique creative spirit of Cambridge thrive. The official induction ceremony for Galluccio will take place under the Poet Populist Tent at the Cambridge River Festival on Saturday, June 1, 2013 2:30pm.







Lo Galluccio is a vocal artist, memoirist and poet whose roots lie in the Lower East Side of NYC, though she is a Cambridge native and a Harvard graduate. Lo has released three books in Boston, since returning in 2001: “Hot Rain,” a chapbook with illustrations put out by Ibbetson St. Press, “Sarasota VII” a prose-poem memoir published by Cervena Barva Press and “Terrible Baubles” a chapbook on Propaganda Press. Some of the poems in “Terrible Baubles” were set to music or made into songs for a CD released on Studio 234 records this past year, with piano by Eric Zinman and cello by Mobius artist Jane Wang. Lo has two other vocal CDs “Being Visited” on the Knitting Factory label in NYC, and “Spell on You,” self-released in Boston, an avant jazz and blues CD. Her websites are www.logalluccio.weebly.com and www.logalluccio.alalla.com. She was the Arts editor of the Cambridge Alewife from 2003-2007 and continues to review poetry for the Ibbetson St. small press blog. Lo has developed a distinctive lyrical style of poetry and uses spoken and sung iterations for some of her pieces, especially the more surreal texts. As a page poet, Lo often likes to follow a rhyming pattern, following poets like Anne Sexton. She hopes to combine her love of music and spoken word as the Poet Populist while reaching out to many venues in Cambridge and including all styles of poetry, including slam.







Cambridge Arts Council is a city agency that funds, promotes, and presents high-quality, community-based arts programs for the benefit of artists, residents, and visitors. Established in 1974, Cambridge Arts Council is one of the oldest and most dynamic arts agencies in the country. As a public nonprofit, Cambridge Arts Council operates through funding from local government, private foundations, corporate sponsors, and individual donors.



www.cambridgeartscouncil.org



The Cambridge Poet Populist program was developed in 2007 to celebrate the creation and appreciation of poetry throughout the city. The Poet Populist will be honored in an official capacity, receive a stipend, and maintain a schedule of public appearances for a two-year term. Cambridge poet Peter Payack initiated the role in 2007, and was succeeded by Jean-Dany Joachim in 2009 and Toni Bee in 2011.







The Cambridge Arts Council is supported in part by the City of Cambridge, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency.

Poet Sassan Tabatabai: A Persian poet of mourning, exile and love.

 

 

 

 

 

Sassan Tabatabai has composed a book of delicate mourning, exile, and love. Ancient Persia and modern Iran harmonize in his vision, as do the ancient poems of Rudaki and Rumi and the contemporary poems of Kadkani in Tabatabai’s translations. Sensuous, rueful and clear, these poems recreate lost worlds in imagination: their Beloved is both a country and a mysterious female figure worthy of the poet’s longing.
            — Rosanna Warren  ( Commenting on Tabatabai's new poetry collection UZUNBURUN ( The Pen and Anvil Press)
 

 

 INTERVIEW WITH DOUG HOLDER
 

 

Born in Tehran, Iran, Sassan Tabatabai has lived in the United States since 1980. As a poet and scholar of medieval Persian poetry, he is the author of Father of Persian Verse: Rudaki and His Poetry (Leiden University Press, 2010). He teaches humanities and Persian literature at Boston University and Boston College, and is Poetry Editor of the literary journal News from the Republic of Letters. Most recently, Tabatabai is the author of Uzunburun, a collection of poetry and translations published in 2011 by Pen & Anvil Press in Boston.

 

 

I had the privilege to interview him on my Somerville Community Access TV show Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.

Doug Holder: You are an accomplished poet, but you are also an accomplished boxer. Is this a surprise to many people?


Sassan Tabatatbai. To most people it is a surprise. I think they consider poetry to be soft and emotional and boxing the complete opposite. But they have a lot in common. There is something philosophical about boxing. Something that teaches you about yourself. There is a kind of deep introspection that you can get from both poetry and boxing. Nabokov took boxing lessons for instance.

DH:  You were poetry editor for News from The Republic of Letters founded by the acclaimed writer Saul Bellow at Boston University.  How was it working with the man?

ST: I got introduced to Bellows by some of my old professors, and that is how I got involved with the magazine. When I started working with Bellows--it was basically about running things by him for his approval. He was still sharp at that time. He kind of deteriorated slowly over time. He seemed to have a very piercing look. When he looked at you, it was as if he was formulating one of his characters. But he was always very sharp with details. Even when he got older he was still on top of all the material he read in the past.

DH:  Your grandfather served in the Iranian army reaching the rank of general, until 1979--the time of the Islamic Revolution. You are involved in a project translating his memoirs. Talk about this.

 

ST: My grandfather had a whole career in the military. He reached the rank of the general. With the Revolution we all went into exile and left the country. Ultimately he settled in Atlanta , Georgia. I inherited his papers. His papers consisted of his memoirs, and his poetry. I am in the process of translating both the memoirs and poetry. Most of the memoir was from the time he was stationed in the mountains of Kurdistan. This was right after World War 2 when Soviet troops still occupied parts of Iran. It is very fascinating stuff as far as giving historical insight on a real human level on the political situation.

 

DH Was it difficult translating from the Persian?

 

ST: Translating poetry creates all kinds of problems from any language. In Persian-- for instance-- our pronouns don't have gender. We don't distinguish between he and she. Persian does not have articles--this also creates problems. When translating poetry you need to transfer the meaning of the poem--at the same time you can't kill the poem...the musicality of the lines. Oscar Wilde said and I paraphrase:" A literary translation is either faithful or beautiful, but rarely both."

 

DH:  Are Americans aware of Persian verse?

 

ST: I would say yes and no. Rumi is over- represented here. This 13th Century mystical poet was the bestselling poet in the U.S. just a few years ago. There is something about Rumi that resonates with the contemporary reader. But there is a huge Persian canon that is neglected.

 

DH:  In your poem Caspian Summer from your new collection UZUNBURUN,  you use a phrase  your mother used during your childhood and it seems almost like a poetic prompt, bringing the reader into a womb of memory:

 

"Come inside, she would say, it's almost dark"

 

Yes this is a poem of childhood memories. The Caspian Sea brings back the memories of childhood. The humidity, salt, garlic, the moist sheets--is still something I remember. We as kids played outside and at some point we were called back to the house. Part of these memories is a full sensory experience. And it is sound and one of the sounds is the voice of my mother calling me back in.

 

 

Caspian Summer

 

 

I can still hear my mother’s voice
sifting its way through the orange grove,
broken by dusk and distance, calling
me back to the villa on the hill
away from my August friends:
local boys who didn’t need sunscreen,
who caught water snakes with their bare hands
and carried frogs in their pants pockets.

"Come inside," she would say, "it’s almost dark."
Inside the screened porch, safe
from mosquitoes and night sounds,
glowing comfort awaited:
smell of fried garlic, rattle of dice
rolling on the wooden backgammon board,
and moist, sticky tiles under my bare feet.

Later, tucked into cool, damp sheets,
my little sister asleep,
I listened to the ebb and flow
of adult conversations downstairs,
cornices of excitement followed by lulls
filled with the sea’s silence, distant
waves crashing, mute on the deserted shore.

Strange, that as autumn leaves
bruise in New England, I can still
taste the air of a Caspian summer,
heavy with humidity and salt.
Strange, that as time thickens, the distance
between us shrinks.

Coffee House Confessions by Ellaraine Lockie

Coffee House Confessions

Silver Birch Press

Los Angeles CA

© Copyright 2013, Ellaraine Lockie

ISBN-13: 978-0651727677

Softbound, $10, 43 pages

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

How many times have you sat in a coffee house or café observing people, taking notes or writing poetry? Most poets have at one time or another. In the back of Coffee House Confessions, Ellaraine Lockie’s tenth volume of poetry, it states she, “writes every day in a coffee shop no matter where she is in the world.”

Often we find her in a Starbucks, but no matter, the poems carry humor and keen observation as in White Noise and Other Muses:

The woman sitting next to me in Starbucks says

I wish I were as dedicated to something

as you to whatever you do here every day

Little does she know I’m eating her alive

Dissecting her and spitting her out on paper

Or in another poem titled Ashes:

He’s been to this Starbucks before

Someone at a nearby table says

he rotates to avoid arrest

A mountain man or maybe Santa Claus look

Except skinny as a stage-four Jesus

Guitar on top of his grocery cart

over piles of clothes and a bag of cat food

Cat food, when there’s no place for a cat

Twenty-six degrees last night and damp

But not everything is stateside or Starbucks. Indeed we find her in Italy and Portugal and other unnamed locations, yet each poem provides insight into the people at each site.

A few samples include Man About Town in which “His stride was a study in meter/And any female looking his way/from the Leaf and Bean/as he crossed the street/would become an immediate student”

Or there is the study of a female in Short-Shorts on Midlife Legs: “Does she know/how the back of her thighs/look without shadow of shade

Ms. Lockie knows what to look for and how to put it down on paper. The latter was in a Peet’s somewhere that doesn’t really matter because it is the observation and its placement on the page that brings it all to life.

In reading this I was often chuckling or smiling inside at the descriptions of people who might turn purple if they read this book and recognize themselves. Are you one of them? After all, one of the coffee houses could be in your town.

__________________________________________

Zvi A. Sesling

Reviewer for Boston Small Press and Poetry Scene

Author, King of the Jungle and Across Stones of Bad Dreams

Editor, Muddy River Poetry Review

Editor, Bagel Bards Anthology 7