Poet Philip Burnham, Jr.: A Poet of surfaces and depth

Poet Philip Burnham, Jr.:   A Poet of surfaces and depth

Philip Burnham, Jr. is a poet who can describe the sizzle as well as the steak.  A lake's surface may glitter in the sun, but beneath it are dark, murky depths. Burnham's poetry is a denizen of both settings--the light--the darkness- and everything in between.


Philip E. Burnham, Jr. lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was born in Rochester, New York, and grew up in New England. He attended Groton School, the University of Edinburgh, and Harvard College. A former member of the United States Foreign Service, he served as American Vice Consul in Marseille, France, from 1962 through 1964. For the next 35 years he taught history in both public and private secondary schools and colleges in the Boston area. He holds a PhD in Medieval History from Tufts University. He has traveled extensively in Europe and spent two sabbatical years abroad, one at Cambridge University and another in Paris. He was married to Louise Hassel for 42 years and has three children and four grandchildren, all of whom live in California. Burnham has been published widely, and his latest poetry collection is " Shore Lines" (Ibbetson Street Press.)

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




Doug Holder:  You are a longtime member of the Somerville, Mass Literary group The Bagel Bards. How important is literary community to you?

Philip Burnham: I think it is very important. I think the Bagel Bards is a great place to come to get ideas--maybe to decompress a bit--and to meet other people who do parallel things. Folks are often involved with readings, working on a book, etc...When you hear about the accomplishments of others it spurs you on to want to do it yourself. I really enjoy listening to other people. Tino Villanueva, who is a Bagel Bard member had a wonderful reading of his poetry collection " So Spoke Penelope" at the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Cambridge. He took  Penelope's perspective as she pined for Odysseus over 20 years. At the reading he spoke about it in Homeric tones--this is the kind of experience you have with the Bagel Bards.

DH: You have a PhD in Medieval History--how did your interest in poetry arise?

PB: Well... I was always into poetry Two things influenced my love of poetry. One was my mother reading poems to me as a kid. We belonged to the Episcopal Church and their hymns were rhymed, metered and set to music. I grew up with those in my head. My father was an English teacher and he knew some poets. In fact he knew Robert Frost. So I was familiar with the poems of poets he knew.

DH: Did you ever meet Frost?

PB: I did actually. I did know Frost.  Once I was in Washington, D.C. and he was reading at the Library of Congress, and we went up to talk to him. I was working at the State Department at the time and he looked me straight in the eye and said: "Don't you think working for the State Department is betraying your country?" This was right after the McCarthy Era. He was a man who talked a lot, and he liked to be the center of attention. I saw him in his native habitat of  Vermont near the end of his life. It was a very rural life and his connection to the land was profound. He saw the landscape--life in the countryside as very dignified and very tragic. I think he saw the isolation of people--it was a lonely life. He was lonely in many ways.

DH: We met years ago at a poetry workshop that I lead at Newton Community Education. You had recently lost your wife. Was poetry therapeutic?

PB: It was extremely therapeutic for me. My first book that you published Sailing From Boston dealt with my loss among other things. After my wife died, I sat down and wrote about 3 or 4 poems a month for about a year that were explorations of grief and remembrance.It was a way of working through things. It was a way of putting on paper of what I remembered about her. And I started to write poetry every morning. Even when she was ill I began to formulate what I was going to say about her. I didn't dare to be a poet when I was young. I had a family and I couldn't see me being a poet would support a family. It wasn't until I retired and lost my wife did I start taking poetry seriously.


DH: The noted critic Dennis Daly wrote in a review for the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene wrote that your poems are like the Impressionistic painting of say Monet. Do you agree with this and do you you go beyond the surface of shimmering light--so to speak?

PB: I think in some ways my work is Impressionistic. I hope it goes below the shimmering light of the surface as Daly puts it. If you talk about Impressionistic painting--yes, there is that superficial application of the paint to the canvas. But then there is also the sense that we come back to the poem and the painting again and again because somehow it reaffirms us. It reinforces our sense of our daily life.

DH: You wrote a poem about baseball titled "Assignment 1: Write a Poem about Baseball," that was on the "Writer's Almanac" on NPR, and other places. What is it about Baseball that attracts so many writers?

PB : It always attracted people who were intellectuals. Think about John Updike's fascination with baseball. I think it might be that there are so many possibilities of what can happen at any given moment.

DH: But isn't this true true of football, or basketball?

PB: Well--it is but the action that goes on before goes so quickly that you can't follow everyone. In baseball there are a lot of people involved, but at one moment only a few people are involved. It has a sort of grace to it--it is an interesting sport. A lot of people have grown up with moments of baseball in their lives. It is a game of failure and I think that is poetic. In baseball if you hit 3 out of 10 then you are dong well--but you missed 7 times--that's failure--but not in baseball.

DH:  You were a finalist for the Loft Prize.

PB: Yes the Prize is based in Providence, R.I. You had to submit a poem based on a painting from a New England museum. I chose an Impressionistic painting titled: "New York Blizzard" by Childe Hassam.

PB: " Shore Lines" your new poetry collection from the Ibbetson Street Press, has an Impressionistic painting of a beach on the front cover.

 PB: Yes. It reminds me of a beach I go to  in New Hampshire between Hampton and Rye beaches. I started going there when I was very young. Ogden Nash use to vacation there. One day in early September we were all sitting on the beach. It was hurricane season, and they told everyone to get off the beach. Nash said" I think we better get off the beach or we are going  to be misspelled in The Boston Herald.

A Little Boat, My Heart

A little boat, my heart,
Curved gothic to its bow
From starboard and from port,
To plow an ocean’s row,

To turn the slightest waves
Brief furrows, to expose
The undersea, a spray
Of foam, a path to lose

Across the sea astern,
A dip and sweep of oars,
Cut circles that become
Skin smooth and disappear.

My heart, a little boat
Set on your waves of skin
That on my voyage out
I cross to cross again

A sea of passages
To India, a rise
And fall of tides.  It is
Moon driven. From your eyes

Glances like quick fishes
Leaping, circles that part
Still water round, kisses,
A little boat, my heart.

Shore Lines, 2012

A Theory of Lipstick by Karla Huston

 

A Theory of Lipstick

by Karla Huston

Main Street Rag Publishing Company

Charlotte NC

Copyright © 2013 by Karla Huston

ISBN: 978-1-59948-407-5

Softbound, 73 pages. $14

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

Last year I reviewed a poetry chapbook by Ms. Huston and Cathryn Cofell. This year Ms. Huston is flying solo and proving what a good poet she is on her own.

In the title poem it is beware men and women you will learn more about lipstick than you ever wanted to know, from lip plumper and bee stung devil’s candy to alizarin crimson and lead – to men who kiss women wearing lipstick to fruit pigments. It’s almost TMI.

But O it is fun. Huston as we learned can be fun with a lesson.

She can also be funny in a serious poem as in The Girl With God On Her Pants. It opens

I almost said “in” her pants/but this isn’t that kind of poem/and she isn’t that kind of girl.

As you read this one you learn that a good girl is chased by a hungry boy and the hunger is nothing less than the ultimate main course.

There is also Sway which begins:

The cruelest thing I did to my dog

wasn’t to ignore his barking for water

when his tongue hung like a deflated balloon

Huston is also capable of wonderful descriptions such as:

• his dark eyes like Greek olives, moist with desire
• pecking at her dreams like a chicken
• Were you always a shadow of a shadow, imitation of an imitation, a chameleon in sheep’s clothing?
• When I think of you, I think of earworms
• old woman skin that hangs like the hide of withered peaches

Huston is a sort of Mort Sahl or Dick Cavett. A Nancy Griffin or Chelsea Handler. She makes you laugh but at the same time she telling truths and you realize, not that you have been had, but instead that you have learned something, which raises that age old question about poetry—does it entertain or teach or both. Huston would fall into that last category, both.

Somerville Artist Ariel Freiberg: An interesting mix of found objects, eroticism and militarism.

Blazoning Arms by Ariel Freiberg

Somerville Artist Ariel Freiberg:: An interesting mix of found objects, eroticism and militarism.

Doug Holder

 Ariel Freiberg is an artist I see in passing at the Bloc 11 Cafe on any given morning from my table outpost. About a year ago I interviewed this 30 something woman in the said cafe. She contacted me recently about another interview and we decided to meet at another of my favorite haunts in Union Square-- the Sherman Cafe.

 Since the last time we chatted Freiberg, a colleague of mine at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston, landed a p/t teaching gig at Smith College. She told me: " I taught Drawing I to freshman students. I loved the level of discussion, and the focus the students brought to the plate." Freiberg told me she tries to instill the visual experience of seeing... seeing light, color and texture.

  Freiberg, who has a decidedly literary bent, recently had a show with the celebrated local author Steve Almond. The title of the event was " Art of the Erotic." Although not exclusively erotic, Almond touched on themes like: putting the body before the heart, and Freiberg complimented this erotic theme with her work. One of her paintings depicted a woman holding a book, wearing a corset and skirt, bearing a child's face and a well-developed woman's body.

  Freiberg revealed that she uses seemingly banal objects like gardening tools and shoes, to explore sexual or erotic themes. Freiberg explained: "The gardening tool cultivates the earth. With the shoe--well, it connects to the earth. The shoe in essence acts as a conduit to the fertile earth. At the same time its architecture restrains the foot from actually touching or  having consummation with the earth."

  Freiberg also has an interest in Heraldry . This is a visual way of describing a unit in the military. An example would be a coat of arms, and things of that ilk. Freiberg uses this conceit to explore the connection between the power of sexuality and the power of militarism.

  Freiberg has had a number of exhibits recently. One was at the Oresman Gallery at Smith College, and she will be curating an event of art and poetry at the New Art Center in Newton in the fall of 2013. She is also scheduled to have an exhibit of her work at Boston University's Sherman Gallery in 2014. She has a solo show "Blazoning Arms" at Miller Yezerski Gallery in Boston's South End through July 9, 2013.

Freiberg left the Sherman Cafe with a smile and a slightly far away look--obviously pondering another new idea in the  PARIS OF NEW ENGLAND.

  ****Freiberg told me if you would like to commission work from her she can be reached at ariel@arielfreiberg.com.

Spinning Wheels of Noir Fiction: Fausto Paravidino’s Still Life in Ditch

Spinning Wheels of Noir Fiction:

Fausto Paravidino’s Still Life in Ditch

article by Michael Todd Steffen

The denouement of the mystery plot in Fausto Paravidino’s novel noir drama Still Life

In Ditch (Natura Morta in uno Fosso) intercepts the reader—it is at once so unexpected, shocking and psychologically convincing. It is a revelation that silently encores the sum of its speakers and narrative with its illustrative guy-gal polarity, resonating with the reader (audience), as the play holds true to its proposal as a noir genre piece. A lot of the language is blunt, consistently stylistic in its display of brevity, irony and repartee. So if we at first wince at the rawness of the speakers’ vernacular, little by little we can come to appreciate the authenticity of the characters in their linguistic portraits as fulfilling and adhering to pre-established genre criteria. The text even transcends its literary intentions by capturing the gratuitous bluntness of our current day street and pop-culture speech.

                 If he gives me 5 million up front, I’ll sell him the 7-mil debt.

            Sounds pretty cool to me.

                 He thinks about it for a second. I quickly do the math and tell

            him that he’d be making more than 20% on the deal.

                 He thinks about it another second and says, “Will you give me

            back the 7 million?”

                 So I ask him if he’s shitting me. If I wanted a loan I would

            have asked him for a loan and he wouldn’t have charged me a 20%

            interest rate.

                 I’m turning over a debt to you—I tell him—you front me

            the 5 and then, whenever you want, you go and collect the 7.

                 So then he gets all pissed off and says he doesn’t like the idea,

            that it sounds like a rip-off, that he doesn’t buy debts from people

            he doesn’t know and besides, he doesn’t trust me.

                 So I ask him how things are going with Elisa.

                 “What the fuck do you care?”

                 “I was just wondering whether you killed her because you

            couldn’t stand to be with someone who was smarter than you, or

            someone else killed her to let you know that they didn’t want to

            deal with someone dumber than them.”

                 He asks me what the fuck I’m talking about. I don’t know if

            he’s playing dumb or if he really is a moron. (p. 28)

     To be released this September, Still Life in Ditch is the 2013 winner of the Loose Translation Prize sponsored by Queens College, The City University of New York, and Hanging Loose Press. Kimiko Hahn, Queens College-CUNY, comments, “The series name…speaks for our collaborative mission to introduce voices new to English through translators able to foreground the extraordinary writing with which they work with great craft and attention to the original language.”

     This translation of Paravidino’s writing by Ilaria Papini reads itself, effortless and transparent, as though it were an original text in English. Richard Schotter calls it, “luminous…a gift to English-speaking audiences and to anyone who loves challenging, intelligent theatre, artfully rendered.”

     Papini has shown her ability, moreover, to background Still Life in Ditch with an insightful Afterward in this edition.

As a lifelong reader of both fiction and theater, I find this play contains some of my favorite elements: the style of a literary noir, a multiple perspective narrative—among my lifelong favorites are such novels as Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and such films as Kurosawa’s Rashomon and Bertolucci’s The Grim Reaper (La commare secca)—and a group of very flawed, supremely human characters. Also, it has a very unusual structure for a play, with its long, uninterrupted monologues, blurring the line between fiction and drama. (pp. 60-1)

Papini’s Afterward goes on to reveal some depth of research into the text and its author’s inspirations.

I reminded [Paravidino] about his initial commission to write a one-man show, and asked him how he ended up with a multiple-perspective narrative with six characters, two of which are women. He told me that he did try, initially, to write a one-character dramatic monologue, but after a while the other characters just insisted on being heard.

     The elements of noir fiction, film and drama smack us, direct as they are recognizable: laconic, gruff characters caught up in the bang-up side-blinding consequences of decadent lifestyles. Sarcastic, stripped of sentiment, it portrays humanity at its rawest levels of gullibility, rage, selfishness and resignation. It’s easy to stratify or cross-identify the male speakers of Still Life in Ditch, as well as to make out polarities between the speakers, say, between Cop and Dealer, Mother and Hooker. The guy characters each have narrow objectives and blunt approaches, including abrupt and radical reversals of fortune. Loveless sex, greed, murder, bad drug deals, users run out on their luck and money, blackmail, burlesque brawls, hospital beds all make for stock turns in the genre, all employed adeptly and entertainingly by Paravidino.

     Under the shadowy fun-making veneer, however, the author suggests a sharp eye for humanity, by dealing his cards with credibility. The bereft Mother as a speaker makes a strong case against embellishments and sentimentality. Her daughter’s death still fresh and surreal to her, she wants the grounding of the plain facts, no matter how stark.

                 “The body is this way. If you will follow me I’ll take you there.”

                 His frankness makes me think better of him.

                 He takes us to her. Bruised, swollen, pale.

                 Naked in a way she hasn’t allowed us to see her in years.

                 Her broad nipples, the curls over her vagina are not familiar

to me.

                 But I recognize her smile over the teeth that someone has

smashed in.

                 I look at the policeman, who is waiting for a verdict.

                 “It’s Elisa Orlando, my daughter. Here are her papers,” I

hand them to him.

     We are all idiotically embarrassed. Should we leave? Should

he? How does it work? The policeman gives no sign, perhaps we

get to pick.

                 Mario keeps on looking at our girl and says in a low voice,

            “Find the bastards who did this.”

                 Hearing him invent these words that have no place in his

            mouth endears me as never before. He is infinitely small,

            suddenly I love him as if I were discovering something wonderful

            in him that he had never before shown me.

                 The policeman replies, “That’s what I live for.”

                 And of course that fucks everything up. (p. 14)

     Noir plays on stereotypes. As direct and brutal as the males are, the female characters are typically revealed as weak, confused, contradictory and passive—the victims. Yet with their feminine patience and allowance, the gals show more acceptance, insight and roll-with-the-punches turn-of-fortune. Paravidino enhances this intuitive nature of the ‘female’ by making the Hooker, who is a key witness, an illegal immigrant with a fluent fumbling grasp of her new nation’s language, rendered with delicacy and humor by Papini.

                 I am afraid, I don’t want to do it, because if my bosses find out

            that I there with them I get in big trouble.

                 Policeman insist it is very important for me to talk with him

            because girl in photo disappear and I can help them for girl.

                 I don’t want to, and cry and say let me go, let me go away,

            that this scare me.

     Policeman explain to me that he know our situation well and that

he not want to hurt me. And he say also if I want he guarantee

his protection, my bosses don’t find me and he help me get home again.

                 I tell him that at home there is war, I don’t want to go and I

            want Italian papers.

                 He tell me that what I ask is little too much for what he is want

            me, but if I tell him interesting thing and I can be useful to him

            again for trial and things like that, he will ask his boss to get me

            papers and in meantime he will put me in protection program. (p. 54)

     While creating his story within the criteria of noir, Paravidino demonstrates a curiosity to push his genre piece at its assumptions. To an extent, in the Marxian paradigm that crime and justice necessitate, and rely on, one another, the Cop and Dealer bear identity in apposition as two chess players across a board of strategic players. Yet at moments our Inspector Salti lends a suggestion of the virtue of magnified awareness on the side of justice.

I am following only one lead, one given to me by a snitch with

ulterior motives.

                 I want to believe it. I want this to be just about drugs.

                 I want my victim to be a woman selling sex in exchange for

            drugs.

                 I want this so I can neutralize the violence.

                 Make it less dangerous.

                 To prove that they kill only each other.

                 That those who die have chosen this and the victims know

their killers, just as the killers know their victims

     and all their lives they are hurtling toward this appointment

     and no one else has anything to do with it

     because the only ones who die are at-risk individuals.

     I want to catch Gipo so he can confirm this theory.

     I want to ruin the Orlando girl’s reputation

     sully her past

     so everyone can go to bed happy.

     But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe that’s not how it was.

     Maybe violence is not quite so predictable…  (p. 36)

    

     Could anybody have been the murderer? Is it the Dealer? Is it the Boyfriend? Could this be a noir noir drama with the culprit one of the most unlikely, the Mother or the Detective?

     To wonder, keep score for oneself, be on the trail of clues and cues of personality is all part of the fun and intrigue of reading a good mystery. Yet the speakers in Still Life in Ditch are so beguiling in themselves, it’s easy to forget, as we are being entertained, that the story has its objective of unmasking the murderer. And this makes the moment of the enigma’s solution all that much more startling, a moment duly left for the reader to discover.

Still Life in Ditch, 64 pp

by Fausto Paravidino

translated by Ilaria Papini

ISBN: 978-1-934909-36-2

published by

Hanging Loose Press

231 Wyckoff Street

Brooklyn, NY 11217

will be available for $18

this September

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