CO-FOUNDER OF PLYMOUTH ROCK STUDIOS KEYNOTES 47TH ANNUAL CAPE COD WRITERS CENTER

CO-FOUNDER OF PLYMOUTH ROCK STUDIOS KEYNOTES 47TH ANNUAL CAPE COD WRITERS CENTER CONFERENCE, AUGUST 15 – 22, 2009



Two prominent leaders in the arts will address Cape Cod’s premier writing conference on Wednesday evening, August 19 at 7:30 PM: David Kirkpatrick, co-founder of Plymouth Rock Studios, and Marita Golden, founder of the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation of Washington, DC.



Contact: Anne Elizabeth Tom, Executive Director of CCWC 508.420.0200, AnneETom@alumni.tufts.edu



David Kirkpatrick, former President of Production at Paramount Pictures and co-founder of Plymouth Rock Studios; and Marita Golden, founder and President Emeritus of the Hurston /Wright Foundation - will address the 47th Annual Cape Cod Writers Conference, held during the week of August 15 to 22, at Craigville Conference Center on Cape Cod. Mr. Kirkpatrick, will provide insight into the decision to build a television and film studio in nearby Plymouth and its partnership with the MIT Media Lab to create The Center for Future Storytelling.



Marita Golden, Writer-in-Residence at the University of the District of Columbia, will tell her inspirational tale as a novelist inducted into the International Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent at the Gwendolyn Brooks Center at Chicago State University, and her founding of both the Washington-based African American Writers Guild and the Hurston/Wright Foundation.

Sunday evening, August 16, two other keynote speakers will address the first half of the conference: Roger Sutton, Editor-in-Chief of The Horn Book, and one of the country’s leading experts on children’s literature; and Martin Sandler, Emmy award-winning scriptwriter and author of over 60 books.



“For attendees interested in film and TV writing,” says Executive Director Anne Elizabeth Tom, we offer screenwriting and advanced screenwriting taught by Marc Weinberg, who has sold scripts and story ideas and written for many shows.” She explains why there are twice as many workshops this summer, “Our classes were growing too popular and too big, so we have more, smaller, and advanced classes - in literary blogging and how to get published, taught by acquiring editors from publishing houses; in memoir, novel and short fiction-writing, poetry with Martha Rhodes, and more. Likewise, twice as many literary agents, editors, and authors will give writers manuscript evaluations and mentoring, including Mary Lee Donovan, editor with Candlewick Press, publisher of books for children and young adults, since it began 18 years ago.”



THREE-DAY WORKSHOPS ($185) and ONE-DAY WORKSHOPS ($65) and MASTER CLASSES (135) in Fiction, Nonfiction, Screenwriting and Poetry are listed in a full brochure, downloadable on the website, www.capecodwriterscenter.org.

For more information, call Executive Director of the Cape Cod Writers Center, Anne Elizabeth Tom at 508.420.0200 or email AnneETom@alumni.tufts.edu

Novelist Paul Stone Interviews Poet Doug Holder on Poet to Poet: Writer-to-Writer

Novelist Paul Stone Interviews Poet Doug Holder on Poet to Poet: Writer-to-Writer


Paul Stone makes a living by being creative. Stone, the Creative Director of W.B.Mason in Boston, and the author of the novel “Or So It Seems” and “How to Train a Rock” had an idea. He thought it might be interesting to interview me, Doug Holder, on my interview show on Somerville Community Access TV “Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.” As you probably know I am the founder of the small literary press, “Ibbetson Street” and the author of a number of poetry collections including: “The Man in the Booth in the Midtown Tunnel.” We figured a novelist interviewing a poet might bring some insights to the creative process.


Paul Stone: When did you have the “calling” to be a poet?

Doug Holder: Well I am 54 years old now, but I didn’t start publishing till I was in my mid 30’s. But I was writing and formulating many of my writings into poems in my 20’s. I think I had ideas of being a writer in college, but I really didn’t start writing consistently until I started keeping journals in my 20’s after college. I recorded snippets of conversations in my journals, passages from novels, quotations, etc… and eventually this raw fodder became poetry.

PS: Did you read poetry when you were younger?

DH :Oddly enough I read poetry, but much more fiction. I got a lot of material from that, literary history, newspapers, etc…

PS: By the time you were in your 30’s did you call yourself a poet?

DH: By the time I was in my 30’s the dye- was- cast. I had a need to publish. I published my first poem when I was 35 or so in a Canadian journal Sub-Terrain. They are still around. It wasn’t until I was 40 or so that I graduated with my MA in English. I felt this was another step to become a serious writer. Through this education my writing improved a great deal and I was exposed to many other writers, ideas, and even theory.

PS: So you feel you needed to get an advanced degree?

DH: I think so. When someone on the Harvard faculty says you are a good writer that gives you a lot of confidence. It’s one thing when your friend, mother or wife says you are a good writer, it’s another when Ruth Wisse, a scholar of Yiddish Literature, a woman who worked with Irving Howe tells you. She was my thesis advisor at Harvard.

The thesis is an intense process. It takes more than a year and a half to complete it, and your initial proposal is often rejected three times before you can call it a go. They don’t make it easy for you. For a thesis you have to read closely, and do an exegesis of the work. This was hard for me because my writing is more impressionistic and journalistic. I did these “exercises” for years, while I worked fulltime at McLean Hospital. It was marvelous discipline, and exposure.

PS: You have a book of interviews out the “From the Paris of New England: Interviews with Poets and Writers.”

DH: The book has many of the interviews I conducted on my Somerville Community Access TV show “ Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.” I have interviewed a helluva a lot of people in the six years that I have had the show. The best thing I ever did was to come to Somerville Community Access TV. It opened up a whole new world for me. People are really enthusiastic about coming on the show from the accomplished writer to the novice.

PS: I found the book to be fascinating. Anybody who is interested about how the creative mind works, or what the creative process is like, will enjoy this book. It is very accessible. One of the things I liked about your poetry is that it’s accessible.

DH: Yeah. It is accessible. I hope it is layered with insight.

PS: I immersed myself with Doug Holder poetry. (laugh) And your “mundane” characters (as they were described in a review in The Harvard Crimson) are always
a little off balance, and they are caught in the moment. The “moment” seems to be what interests you. From the woman you wrote about who sat on the toilet for two years (From the collection “The Man in the Booth in the Midtown Tunnel), and the other characters you write about, you capture something that visually speaks to you in the moment.

DH: Someone told me at a reading that my book “The Man in the Booth…” reminded her of the Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters. “Spoon River…” was a portrait of townsfolk, just regular people. So I guess she was right. I am interested in the common man in the moment, maybe the uncommonly common man.

I always loved the old Twilight Zone on TV. You know Rod Serling would come out in a dark, tight-fitting suit, a cigarette in his hand, with that great enigmatic, narrator’s voice and say: “Have if you will. Mr. Henry Beamish, a bookish man, whose only passion is the written word.” These were marvelous character studies. I also loved Paddy Chayevsky, his movie “Marty” and “Requiem for a Heavyweight” these were great character study films I think.

I used to say to my father as we passed through the Midtown Tunnel to go to Manhattan, “Hey Dad, do you think the guy in the booth has a girlfriend, wife, family?” I was talking about a man in a plastic booth in the middle of fume-filled tunnel. He responded: “How the hell do I know?” Most people don’t think about these things. But I think to some extent we are all captured like that man by our own skins, our own baggage. The book was published by Gloria Mindock’s press Cervena Barva right here in Somerville, Mass.

DH: Can you name some poets you like?

PS: I like Philip Larkin, love his dark sense of humor. I know it is not fashionable but I like Edward Arlington Robinson: “Richard Corey,” “Miniver Cheevey” and other poems. Some contemporary poets I admire are Mark Doty, Sam Cornish, Robert K. Johnson, Afaa Michael Weaver, Ed Galing, to name just a few.

PS: Is there a poet out there who reminds you of you?

DH: T.S. Eliot ( Laugh). Sometimes Sam Cornish reminds me of me. If you read my stuff you know I am not a product of an MFA school. I have a signature style, whether you like it or not.

PS: What is it like to write a poem?

DH: Well today I read a line: “Why speak to the monkey if the organ grinder is in the room?” I thought this might spur on a poem but I drew a blank. Right now I’m in a block, other times I’m in a streak. Paul, you are a Creative Director for W.B.Mason—how does it work for you?

PS: When I am paid to do a job something always responds. If I have more time I can go more deeply. Something always comes back to me to work with.

DH: I was shopping at Market Basket and there was a bunch of elderly ladies sitting there. There were lined up on chairs— the hustle and bustle of the market was their daily drama to view. You never know when your inspiration is going to come, and when this is going to translate into a poem.

PS: If I am writing commercials for W.B. Mason I know when it is not fully cooked. Over the years I have come to recognize that. I’ve come to understand how my creative mechanism works. I can sense ideas coming for my next novel—a sequel to “Or So It Seems.” An interesting idea comes into play and something inside me plays with it.
Doug, talk about poems you did complete.

DH: Samuel Beckett has always influenced me. Recently I revisited his play Krapp’s Last Tape. It concerns a 69 year old guy whose life is in shambles, lives in a gone-to-seed furnished room—the whole deal, you know the suicide suite. He keeps playing back this tape to a recording that concerns the one love affair he had at 39—at the end of his youth. He keeps going back and forth to that time. A constant replay, a constant rehash. I am a ruminator so I was very taken by this rumination, about age, love and lost chances.

PS: Can you talk about some favorite poems you have written?

DH: The poems I wrote for my late father in the collection: “Wrestling With My Father” were sentimental favorites. One poem concerned the image of my father reciting an old ditty he picked up from the Vaudeville halls he attended as a kid in New York City. There was this line he used to recite to me while I was on his knee: “Ladies and gentleman take my advice, pull down your pants and slide on the ice." I used to laugh—we had a great time. There were also the times we used to visit Benson’s Deli in my hometown of Rockville Centre, NY. Dad introduced me to Doctor Brown’s Celray soda, knishes; you know all the food he sampled from his seminal grounds of the Bronx. We lived on Long Island, so the Bronx to my brother Don and me was the exotic old world. Paul-you grew up in the Bronx so it was no mystery to you. But coming from the Island, going over the Whitestone Bridge to the Bronx, was a source of endless fascination. So these poems are steeped with sentiment. I wrote some poems I was quite pleased with in my collection: “Poems of Boston and Just Beyond: From the Back Bay to the Back Ward.” These were poems from the psychiatric ward. I have worked at McLean Hospital for the past 27 years, and many of the poems spoke to my experience there. It was a Pick of the Month in The Small Press Review, and is archived at the poetry collection at Harvard University.

PS: I found these poems had an interesting energy. Especially when you saw people from that environment out in the world. You shared an experience that have not witnessed.

DH: Yes. Working in a mental hospital you see a slice of life many don’t. I have seen highly accomplished men and women, professors, poets, entertainers, captains of industry in a raw, primal and psychotic state. I have also worked with the homeless, drug addicts, the whole gamut. One poem I wrote was about my first time I worked on the psychiatric ward as mental health worker in 1982. A very psychotic patient thought he was God, and he called me his “finest creation.” So he created me. And I created a poem. Another poem I wrote was about working the 11PM to7AM shift and this drop dead gorgeous girl came running out in the nude, and we had to restrain her. On one hand you are a professional, on the other hand you are a man, wrestling, well almost dancing with a woman in the dead of night. Romantic and horrific at the same time. Another poem was about a homeless guy I knew who was hospitalized on the unit. I lit his cigarette at one moment, a few minutes later he was dead. The drama on the psychiatric ward is certainly arcane, and most people want it that way.

When I was working on locked psychiatric wards, I ran poetry groups for patients for 10 years. I published patient poems in Little Magazines. There was a lead article in the Arts/Leisure section of The Boston Globe in Feb. of 2000 about the groups and my press Ibbetson Street.

PS: Now you have run poetry workshops. How does the workshops help you as a poet?

DH: You learn from other people. They are commenting on your poems. When you constructively criticize you work you realize there are parallels in your own work. It’s like anything else—you can’t work in a vacuum.

The Hunger Season by William Taylor, Jr.,, After the Honeymoon by Nathan Graziano / Reviews by Irene Koronas

The Hunger Season
William Taylor Jr.
Sunnyoutside Press
ISBN 9781934513170
2009...$15.00

“The tourists get drunk
buy T-shirts
and fondle the bones of poets…”

Taylor administers wafers, homemade bread, not only to himself, but to any open mouth. He takes the mundane experiences of the moment like a priest‘s hand:

“something beautiful they forgot
to take away

something simple
and real enough

that doesn’t ask too much of you
or taste so much
like death.”

He imparts what we already know, yet, we have forgotten, even in hunger and maybe because of hunger we forget, until we are served the poem, plain and without any apology, even, sometimes, with humor:

“I have decided
as soon as they finish
building that
suicide
fence on the
golden gate bridge
I will be the first
to try it out.”

With an honest reliance on what the poem puts on the line, “but the loneliness in the air just drifts like fog,” the reader may only take one phrase from this book, and glean all notions, all sad relaxations on a park bench, all the familiar smells and odors of decay, relief:

“The train moves on and the feeling
is pleasant and
all I know is I don’t want to
be anywhere”

William Taylor Jr. writes the story of people’s lives, each poem is a complete rendering in a few phrases, verses. I feel as if I’m treated as an intelligent person who can surmise the fullness of every word, meaning, we are able to use our own imagination, relating to experiences that maybe buried on the surface of familiarity. We find meaning where there may not seem to be meanings. this collection of poems is weighty, substantial, and it sustains. Read, “angry at the Sun,” on page 33

Irene Koronas
Poetry editor
Ibbetson Street Press
Poetry editor
Wilderness House Literary Review





The Hunger Season
William Taylor Jr.
Sunnyoutside Press
ISBN 9781934513170
2009...$15.00

“The tourists get drunk
buy T-shirts
and fondle the bones of poets…”

Taylor administers wafers, homemade bread, not only to himself, but to any open mouth. He takes the mundane experiences of the moment like a priest‘s hand:

“something beautiful they forgot
to take away

something simple
and real enough

that doesn’t ask too much of you
or taste so much
like death.”

He imparts what we already know, yet, we have forgotten, even in hunger and maybe because of hunger we forget, until we are served the poem, plain and without any apology, even, sometimes, with humor:

“I have decided
as soon as they finish
building that
suicide
fence on the
golden gate bridge
I will be the first
to try it out.”

With an honest reliance on what the poem puts on the line, “but the loneliness in the air just drifts like fog,” the reader may only take one phrase from this book, and glean all notions, all sad relaxations on a park bench, all the familiar smells and odors of decay, relief:

“The train moves on and the feeling
is pleasant and
all I know is I don’t want to
be anywhere”

William Taylor Jr. writes the story of people’s lives, each poem is a complete rendering in a few phrases, verses. I feel as if I’m treated as an intelligent person who can surmise the fullness of every word, meaning, we are able to use our own imagination, relating to experiences that maybe buried on the surface of familiarity. We find meaning where there may not seem to be meanings. this collection of poems is weighty, substantial, and it sustains. Read, “angry at the Sun,” on page 33

Irene Koronas
Poetry editor
Ibbetson Street Press
Poetry editor
Wilderness House Literary Review










After the Honeymoon
Nathan Graziano
Sunyoutside Press
ISBN 9781934513194
2009...$15.00

And what is the illness that plagues the poem, “Cracker and Me (for Dan)”? Is it the malady of universal immaturity? Questions are useless when faced with being sick inside and these poems may not answer any questions, except, “can someone pour me a drink?” In asking someone to pour the ending into a glass, the dry inspiration lifts these words as we clink our shot glasses to what merges and swirls like liquid gold burning our throats:

“We wonder if this is creation.
or the illness winking
and rubbing our backs
before driving the knife
between our shoulder blades.”

As the verse smashes into our systems we realize we are inebriated, cold stone sober:

“but the illness still creeps
into the last chapters of our novels,
into the guts of our poems,
into our twisted symbolism,
into the irony we never intend.”

Nathan Graziano does not trip the light fandango. There is no place here for current music, or any music we may think we know how to dance with. Instead:

“The three of us board
the paper ark I built
while the world drowns
in things we can’t afford

I sing sailor songs
and hold you both

while we dance to the rhythm
of a distant drip.

a slow dance.

our wedding song.”

Irene Koronas
Poetry editor
Ibbetson Street Press
Poetry editor
Wilderness House Literary Review

Journey: Anthology by Eden Waters Press review by Lo Galluccio

JOURNEY
Anthology by Eden Waters Press
Edited by Anne Brudevold
Copyright @ 2009
by Eden Waters Press
pages = 136

http://edenwaterspress.com
http://edenwaterspress.blogspot.com

Review by Lo Galluccio

Anne Brudevold’s latest issue by Eden Waters Press called, “Journey” offers an enticing and enlightening range of poetry and non-fiction reckoning with the concept of travel or personal transport. It’s too extensive a volume to cover in great depth, but here are some standouts (in my estimation) to consider.

First, the late Mike Amado’s poem, “We are here” wonders at a petroglyph “off in the desert where the Anasazi lived” through a personal cascade of revelations about how we are all interdimensional beings across space and time. In the second to last stanza, he affirms: “For nothing in the human heart is foreign.” And finally, “You and I exist.” “We are here.” In fact, though Mike’s not living and breathing on planet earth, his profound etchings remain, like his memory, in the desert-blasts of our terrain.

In “Drawing the Moon” Edward S. Gault writes of his daughter’s request of him to draw the moon for her, which he compliantly does, realizing in this delightfully compact piece, that there may well come a day when “you will not care what I can do.” Beneath the poem is a lovely black and white photo of a young girl with an over-sized hat negotiating her way on a rocky trail.

Yvonne Baginsky takes us to Shirati, Tanzania where in a place called Safi Safaris Arusha or “Jo and Judith’s Place” she has arrived to witness again the slow-moving tribal beauty with SOUNDS, SMELLS, TASTES AND MOTION. “The air is warm and completely full. It sort of sits effortlessly on your skin and makes you feel welcome.” She had been invited in 2006 by a volunteer medical association called Touru University Global Health Initiative to go to Shirati, a large village in rural Tanzania. There she ran a number of art workshops in local primary schools who were without basic art supplies. One of the products of the children’s work is pictured in the essay: a magical mural of fish and plants and clouds and flowers, intermingled and mosaic-like, now gracing the maternity ward of Shirati’s Hospital.

John Flynn’s “Four Cent Trip” takes us back to Depression-era Boston where a young Irish boy works two jobs, stocking boxes and selling newspapers, to keep his family going. It seems that John Flynn is Mickey Shea, the fictionalized name he uses, or maybe an intimate friend he knew as a boy. Of course I could be wrong, but the exactitude of detail makes me believe this is a work of non-fiction. Flynn describes the daily routine of awakening before dawn to catch the early morning editions of The Globe, The Herald, The American and the current issues of The Traveler, Life, Look, Colliers, Time and the Saturday Post to hawk on bustling street corners downtown for a few pennies profit. “Three years I took my lumps as a newsy and wore that apron with pride. It always bulged with change.” He writes lovingly of his evenings at home, after supper, when the living room was lit up with the entertaining voices of radio programs like “The Fat Man” and “the Whistler” – his father dancing a little in his silk smoking jacket. The heavy labor shouldered by the young boy, who consistently misses out on schooling, till his mother insists on transferring him to a tough parochial school – finally ends when he’s caught on the street dehydrated and sick with scarlet fever. In this case the illusory and real glow from his laboring life, burn down to a stay in a hospital, where his old boss comes to visit, going by the nickname Red. The boy can smell the decades of “unfiltered Old Golds” and “pickled herring” on his breath as he leans over and asks the barely recovered child, “Where’s my money?” At that point his parents realize that the exploitation of their son must end and pull him off the beat. But Mickey ends blithely saying, “In a way, I’m grateful to Red. He schooled me in what it meant to own a corner.” Thus his ingrained American pragmatism and not self-pity prevail.

Carolyn Gregory contributes several poems, all well-constructed , moving reflections; my favorite being “Among Crayon Flowers (for Peter)” about her own imagistic memories of a broken but hard-fought for marriage:

“I forgot my name in the depths
of your blue eyes.
Schubert flowing through the brook stream,
though we stumbled
when deception burned oil
across our vows and brought us to our knees.”

Chad Parenteau offers an elliptical haiku list through the movement of seasons that is quite striking in its strange spare imagery; each haiku an emblem for his feelings on the four seasons:

2. Winter
Find skeleton tree,
Stare, repeating mantra: it’s just
Recuperating




In Jennifer Lang’s “Sirens and Vows,” a young married couple weather a possible Scud missal strike on their adopted home, Israel, as they remain mostly hopeful and stalwart in their vows to “love cherish and protect each other, whether in good fortune or in adversity, and to seek with each other a life hallowed by the faith of Israel.” As they huddle in a sealed off room with plastic sheeting and duct tape on a blue sofa, these vows take on a greater gravity, as the young wife still checks in with her close friend to make sure she’s all right and their parents worry about them from California. The story examines in unembellished detail the exacting price of moving to a country that is potentially a player and a victim in the tribal factions of Middle Eastern warfare.

Hugh Fox turns in a hyper-real outline poem called, “Dreamland” -- a kind of stream-of-consciousness journey melding edgy existential awareness:

3. Clever-intuitive little ape people to be
able to
fly
cry
sleep
reproduce
meditate
die

with the absurd irony of an America where:

7. A two day Epigraphic Convention, Westerville Ohio,
Christ-town reincarnated, Messiah town past the Arby’s
and MacDonald’s, the Olive Garden Fifth Third Bank, Taco Bell,
a rough stone Jesus ressurectus Est stained glass windows church
almost

In Fox’s wild sensibility, there is great affect in juxtaposing Zen cosmic awareness with the objects of commerce and religious belief in our landscape. He’s always striving for greater reach of vision:

“If only I could change bodies
the way I change cities….”

There are other brilliant poetic turns by Tomas O’Leary in “A Monk Gone Larking” and Elizabeth Kate Switaj’s “Winged Leaf like Flight of Stairs.” – Beatriz Rio del Alba’s “Rest” who takes up Einstein as a muse and ends with the the lines, “My girl rest your tired head on this bed of roses and rest rest again.” And from Tim Gager’s “These Other Days:” looking nostalgically back at a doomed relationship:

“These other days
I had are plain, simple
not devastating, basic
as jokes about elephants
that left footprints in a cheesecake.
these are the ones
that made me laugh –
I wonder why they stopped.”

“Hanoi,” a travel essay by Anne Brudevold begins with her own awareness that the Vietnam War once caused her to flee America for Europe and this same country is now the adopted (at least temporarily) home and mission of her daughter who works as a psychologist for “trafficked children, children sold into sexual slavery and luckily rescued.” Her expectations of a “drab, battered country” are defied by what she finds in Hanoi – a city which “blows her mind.” With its booming tourist industry, packs of Moped riders which make crossing streets hazardous, and a constant Western-style bargaining and hustling in the marketplace. Threaded throughout are political insights and revelations about the aftermath of the war, and in turn of all wars. She writes: “I see Ho Chi Minh’s house. He’s a hero to his people, but of course presented as a villain to us.” And, “The Vietnamese War was, of course, a power-play between leaders, not ordinary people.” She even recalls Churchill’s famous quote: “Truth is so precious she must be protected by a battalion of lies.”

She captures a high-impact shot of the outside of the prison-turned museum where John McCain was jailed – a cement or wood structure in which are sculpted human skeleton-like figures. Some are bound by their hands; others face out in a line. They are somehow not gruesome, but ghostly remnants of what had transpired during the war years.

Anne plays multiple roles during her visit: mother, documentarian and tourist, eager to pick up souvenier bargains at the various market places. Her prize being a string of pearls she vows to treasure as long as they last.

This is a triumphal collection of fascinating paeans to journeys, both interior and worldy, personal and political – and the line blurring at times as how often can the two be adequately separated? This is one of many interesting questions we are left with after reading such a brave and distinguished collection.


Lo’s latest chapbook of poems will be released on Propaganda Press in the fall of 2009.

Review of SEASON OF MANGOS by Clarence Wolfshohl

Review of SEASON OF MANGOS by Clarence Wolfshohl (Adastra Press, limited edition, Easthampton, MA 2009)

By Barbara Bialick

SEASON OF MANGOS by Clarence Wolfshohl is a handsome, hand-set, hand-sewn little book limited to 220 copies of his 12 evocative poems about Belem, Brazil, at the mouth of the Amazon River.

A professor and author from Fulton, Missouri, Wolfshohl edited and was letterpress printer of Timberline Press for 30 years. These poems are written from the point of view of a tourist to an alluring city of mango trees where one must “watch out” for the ripe, fertile mangos that are falling “on the hoods of idling cars./On the dreams of sleeping dogs on the sidewalk…”

To the American poet, these mangos are like baseballs: In “High Fly Mango” he writes: “It was like catching the white blur/off the bat two beats before the crack…I flip the yellow orb in my hand/to feel its seams, to judge its heft,/and look up into the evergreen mango’s/finger-waving leaves like fans cheering/ the play.”

In “Heap of Mangos”, he paints a picture: “greens, yellows, and reds heaped/on this stand are slivers of the dresses and shirts/of the vendors behind the tables. Slivers/of the carimbo jouncing from the speakers that make you dance at noon. Slivers/of the paint on the popopos putting across the bay/to fill these booths, the boats stacked like burros/with their cargo of color, of fragrance, of ripeness/heaped on the Ver-O-Peso.”

Wolfshohl also pays homage to Brazilian beer and ice cream. He captures what’s special about the city in snapshots such as a prison turned jewelry museum and in the sight of “thousands of parakeets/(that) double the foliage/on this amazon tree.”, an “Easy Rider” he calls “Captain Brazil”, and the mysterious looks of a woman, a “yara” (siren) who turns out to be a university student.

Fortunately, he has notes at the end that help with some of the Portuguese words and traditions. But this mango-y introduction to the area also made me want to look up pictures on the internet. And it led me to speculate on the symbolism and imagery he interjected into the poems, as you would expect from a professor-poet. This book would make a fine gift to an arm-chair traveler/poet, or to one who has been to or wishes to travel to Brazil.

Anezka Ceska by Jaromir Horec, Three Islands by Micah Ling /// Reviews by Zvi Sesling.

Anezka Ceska

by Jaromir Horec

Translated into the English

by Jana Moravkova Kiely as Agnes of Bohemia

Cervena Barva Press

Somerville, Massachusetts

Softbound, 54 pages with an Introduction, Endnotes and Postlude

ISBN: 978-0-578-02262-8



Review by Zvi A. Sesling





Eastern European poets have fascinated me for two reasons: the quality of their poetry

and their creative use of language. It is a shame that few of these poets have made their

mark on American poetry either by being read widely or by their lack of influence on

American poets. Two of my favorites are Wislawa Szymborska and Charles Simic. The

former a Nobel Prize winner as was Czeslaw Milosz. This leads us to Jaromir Horec, a Czech poet of considerable talent and Jana Moravkova Kiely whose translations of Horec

bring not only Horec’s poetry to life but the subject of his verse: Anezka Ceska (Ann of Bohemia).



Anezka lived in the Czech nation during the 13th Century, a princess, an abbess and builder of a hospital for the poor. It took more than 700 years before she was canonized.

Horec’s poetry and Kiely’s translation resurrect her, with lines like this from Gentleness Nestled in Her



Gentleness nestled in her

it came to her

at dawn

in silence

over dew



The poems also relate the travails of the Czechs seven centuries ago as in the lines from Mother of Seven Sorrows



Countless times has the land

heard its streams and torrents moan

as swords of intruders washed their blood in them

and forces of darkness broke encampments on the

midnight shores

Linden trees glowing with honey even towering oaks

countless times burned to the roots and wells

blocked with human bodies polluted the soil



There are many fascinating poems about the hero of this book, about light and

dark times of the period with Anezka at the center of it all.



This is a book about a woman hero, life, religion, bravery and destiny. It is a book

with an introduction that places a perspective on what the poetry is about. The

endnotes are taken from historical sources and explain some of the poems, while

the postlude expands on these notes. A biography of Horec is also vital in understanding the author and the poetry.



One personal note: the translations of Czech (and many Eastern European languages) can often be difficult and Kiely’s translations might be criticized in some places, but they are tense, lively, colorful and sensitive, all reflecting the deep religiousness of the subject, the author and the translator.



You don’t have to be Czech, Eastern European, Catholic or even religious to enjoy this

book not only for its poetry, but its history. And Cervena Barva Press should be commended for bringing it to American readers.





Three Islands

by Micah Ling

sunnyoutside

Buffalo, NY

Copyright © 2009 by Micah Ling

ISBN: 978-1-934513-18-7



Review by Zvi A. Sesling



Everyone once in a while a poet comes along who successfully achieves a new and difficult approach to poetry. Micah Ling is such a poet. Her first full length collection is a three-in-one special. Each section of her book Three Islands could be a separate chapbook, and in fact, the final section of the book "Amelia Earhart" was a chapbook entitled Thoughts on Myself (Finishing Line Press, 2009).



So, what’s new? Many poets have spoken in the voice of other people, something I have not particularly enjoyed. But Ling puts Robert Stroud, Fletcher Christian and

Earhart together, hence the islands: Stroud’s was Alcatraz, Christian’s Pitcairn and Earhart on the island where she crashed her plane. Three islands, three prisons: Stroud in Alcatraz for his murderous ways. Christian on an island from which he couldn’t leave because of mutiny. Earhart alone on a deserted island waiting to be rescued.



That these three sections of the book work is a testament not only to Ling’s talent as a poet, but her ability to match such seemingly disparate people in a poetic tour-de-force. Her poetry is strong, her voice clear and her interpretation of these individuals fresh.



You would think after seeing Bird Man of Alcatraz, reading Mutiny on the Bounty, or seeing any of its three cinematic versions or after all the documentaries and biographies of Amelia Earhart there would be nothing new. You’d be wrong. Ling puts Stroud’s thought process into perspective as the lines of the chilling opening poem show:



“Alcatraz Island, 1945: D Block 41”



This birdhouse is barren country,

worse than Alaska,

no sky to escape to,

no hope of gravy trapped by potatoes.



I’d kill again for a decent meal.



Just outside this ghost town

there’s a world that never strays

from comfort, never rises to the heat

of sauteed and sticky, never cools

to chatter or frost. I need more

than a mother now.

I need to be fed.



This stark language, this cold view of life, this self-centered need and the 16 other poems in this section are what makes Micah Ling’s work compelling.



In the section on Fletcher Christian, Ms. Ling conjures these thoughts in the first stanza of “November 22, 1789”:



There’s something about the sound of truth:

cracks of thunder, lashes to skin.

Tiny hairs rise and fall again. Truth

has its own mind



These are words I recognize, perhaps you too: we’ve all heard the cracks of thunder Christian has heard. We have all felt the lashes to skin, even if not administered by a whip. And truth truly has its own mind. These are descriptions that excite, stimulate inspire others to write poetry.



All three poems have people who long for freedom, for a return to civilization, to sanity, to associate with “normal” people, to live again, for they are all doomed to their own island, their physical and mental prisons.



As Ling has Earhart saying:



I fill Noonan’s bottles

with secrets, cork them

with seaweed, and send them away

to find other stone faces,

and assure them,

not crazy.



Talking to no one is better than quiet.



And reading to myself is better than not reading. This book is highly recommended.