City of Possibilities by Jane Williams

City of Possibilities

by Jane Williams

Interactive Press

Carindale, Queensland, Australia

Copyright © 2011 by Jane Williams

ISBN 9781921869105

73 pages, softbound, no price given

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

The best way to explain the poetry of Jane Williams is to

present On entering the city of possibilities:

Cry a little. People expect it. It will show you are happy

to be there.

Reach out; touch all you can before it’s frowned upon,

before you are accused of appropriation

(any imprint you leave will have some historical value).

Learn the language. Learn how to speak it with your eyes,

with your hands. Lose your accent incrementally –

too slow and you’re not trying hard enough,

too fast and who do you think you are?

Experiment with suspension of disbelief as if

any city could be city of possibilities.

Don’t forget to breathe.

Sear for meaning. Briefly. It’s not worth the grief.

Turn your longing for something more into art,

into the opposite of neutral territory.

Fall apart. Pull yourself together. Fall apart. Don’t make

a habit of it.

Break all the rules but not all at once.

Remember you are just visiting. Try not to get too attached.

When you’re ready, come home. I’ve left a light burning

in the ruins.

The poem sums up a life or a divorce. A child gone off to live with someone or maybe just a temporary separation. It could be a poem of self-blame or a poem of realization or

even a memoir like tale.

Then there is Portal, a poem of which most people have probably experienced at one time or another:

A day in bed scribbling and surfing the net, looking out

through six panes of dirt-flecked glass. Like my mother I

need a window to wake to. The day is cloud-heavy but the

sun doles itself out in intense bursts, highlighting the blood

red roof of the house opposite. In the distance the rhythmic

thwack of our neighbour’s axe splitting firewood. Closer to

home a child’s superior weekend whine – insistent, defiant,

so sure of its place in the world. That was me I think,

decades ago, looking at the same sky, calling myself into

being.

googling my name still I can’t find myself

There are many more insightful, revealing and ultimately truth poems in this volume of poetry by Jane Williams, her fourth collection. She has received numerous awards in both Australia and New Zealand, where she now resides.

Many of the poems have first lines that seem to bear no relation to the title, for example:

Introduction to origami

The passenger from bus 42

reads like a who’s who

of the wrong side of town.

Living things

in a mood so absent

it could have been

the subject

of a post modern

still-life painting…

Levels of incapacity

it seems only yesterday

he was free loving his way

around a world open to

suggestion his suggestion

I found this book interesting not only because it is from “down under” but because it does not have the pretentiousness that many American poets seem to have. It is also a thinking person’s read.

__________________________________________

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

Editor, Bagel Bards Anthology 8

Somerville Artist Katherine Vetne Will ‘Spoon’ Feed You Her Work

Somerville Artist  Katherine Vetne  Will  ‘Spoon’ Feed You Her Work

By Doug Holder

  I have interviewed many Somerville artists who like the late Andy Warhol find rather banal objects like soup cans, shoes, etc… as material for their art. Katherine Vetne, a graduate of Boston University, who I met at my usual well- appointed table at Bloc 11 in Union Square is no exception. In the case of this young artist she has chosen the spoon as one of the objects of her obsession. One of her exhibits at the Somerville Open Studios this year was her pencil drawings of 30 spoons. Vetne is like a moth on a cheap suit when it comes to detail…she concentrates intensely and blocks out all the noise around her. She has spent time with these utensils and has a scholarly take on them. Now spoons to you or me might simply represent a way to transport grub into a salivating mouth but to Vetne they represent marriage, domesticity, family, and changing roles. Quite a mouthful—don’t you think? Vetne, 27, said her work is germane to her own phase of life in which women are expected to think about marriage, family, and silverware.

 

  Vetne also told me she also explores feminist themes in her work. And to take it another step further she examines her own biology. Her bowl shape constructions strongly hint at the womb.

  And of course Vetne is looking to produce innovative work. One installation she described to me was a pair of latex gloves she blew up, dipping the fingers in plaster and filling the concavity with gold leaf

.

 Vetne has a day job to pay the rent.  She works for a non-profit arts organization in Boston that provides artwork to human service organizations.

 She also started the Boston Critique Group in 2010. Here with other artist she shares ideas, and is involved in an ongoing conversation about art and life. She told me: “The group plays an important role for the artist to feel validated.”

 Although Vetne cannot survive on her art alone— she is making big strides to become an independent artist. As I always say there are a million stories in the Paris of New England—this has been one of them.



http://katherinevetne.com/  for more info

Refuge in the Shadows By Krikor Der Hohannesian

Refuge in the Shadows

By Krikor Der Hohannesian

Cevena Barva Press

Somerville, Massachusetts

editor@cevenabarvapress.com

44 Pages

$7.00

Review by Dennis Daly

Those of us who hear disembodied voices have been given a bad rap in today’s technology-based world. How unfortunate! A good case could be made that human beings are sentinels deployed by our planet, or perhaps universe, to listen and record. But even sentinels have a responsibility to their own species and must respond by acting accordingly.

Some of the most adept of these sentinels society calls poets. They provide conduits for the competing voices (or muses as other generations have labeled them) buzzing around the ether.

Krikor Der Hohannesian takes his responsibility as a poet-sentinel seriously and responds to his voices with a righteous fervor and a singular decency. His first poem, Elegy, sets the tone and stakes out his territory. The poet speaks from the Granary, a Boston graveyard. He says,

…But listen…

in the shadows of ancient elm and maple

and you may hear it…

the wispy, low keening

of founding ghosts

mourning the sins of us,

their promise. Take heed,

take heed they whisper—refuge

from their judgment elusive as grace

for the inattentive…

After these ghostly, somewhat pissed-off, whispers, the poet opens up the context to all creation, or at least all creation as we know it. The Poem In the Beginning ties the existence of nature’s many voices to man’s ability to hear and understand. Der Hohannesian explains,

The puffs of cumulus born of

sea mist and updrafts, wind-blown urns

for thirsty primeval forests. The desultory

sowing of pod and seed, the destruction

by wildfires, hurricanes, tornados,

ice, snow, flood and drought. Rebirth

rode the fickle winds of change. Until

erectus, habilis, neanderthalis, sound  

fell on no human ear. But once heard

there was no denying a force to be heeded:

a herald of tidings, bearer of gifts, the messenger

that warned of danger…

In the same poem the author fearlessly engages his voices with indignation and passion. Consider these lines,

… human sounds, too, that rise

on the wind but are easily lost:

the wail of a Darfuri child, starved,

black flies feasting on black skin,

a Shia wife keening—

her lost husband lost to a vest

of detonated shrapnel,

the shouts for justice

from the disenfranchised,

from those who have lost heart

a thunderous silence, whispers

from the souls of the dead…

Sometimes the voice of silence both comforts and confounds, whereas the alternative introduces another reality, nullification. The poem entitled A Way of Life sounds out   clattering, splintering, a screech, and a thud. These are sounds of demolition, the end of a way of life. The poet describes the terrible suddenness of change and life’s non-transitions here,

Henry and his wife both near 100 years,

eight decades together in this his house of birth,

defying entropy—suddenly vanished

like wraiths in the night…

Voices come in many forms. Sometimes even the motion of hands delivers a jaw-dropping eloquence. Der Hohannesian begins his poem These Hands this way,

How strange to look at them

with a young child’s awe

these hands I take for granted.

These hands that point

and beckon, clap and slap,

accent speech with dips and swoops,

and held my children new-born,

tiny fists clenched, grasping at air…   

In the poem A Man is Down the poet’s persona lies awake listening the musical voices of nature. He uncodes the dirge of wind and rain and discovers death by violence. The sounds of suffering fill the air. The poet expresses it this way,

a wife is keening…

            a child is squalling…

I must grieve with them, I must

mourn him and all like him who

choose to rise against the oppressor

a man is down…

and others will rise in his stead,

the rain, and wind, they tell me so…

I found the poem entitled Lest We Forget irritating, grating, and probably the most interesting piece in this collection. The narrative focus on an adolescent Iraqi child named Ali who has lost both arms, his parents and his siblings in an American missile strike. He whispers a wish for new prosthetic arms. Apparently the news media has taken an interest in Ali for the moment and his voiced wish has possibility. But the fickle media jumps onto the infamous rescue of Private Lynch and Ali is abandoned to his horrendous fate. I accept the story line and the ensuing pathos. Only a hard-hearted son-of-a-bitch realist would suggest apologies, reparations, and leaving these devastated people alone. The emphasis placed on the word leaving. A feel-good trip to the US for Ali seems beside the point. Hundreds of limbless, perhaps less photogenic, children would never be considered for such staged missions of mercy.  Such a mission strikes me as just as dishonest and as political as the Lynch rescue farce. But  Der Hohannesian sees it differently. Whether he’s right or wrong, the world needs more people who think as Der Hohannesian does.  He’s clearly a better person than I am.  He believes one act of kindness, staged or not, cynical or not, should carry the day. His poetic passion rages defiantly from the page.  Here is a lovely meditation hidden in the heart of the poem’s narrative that says a lot about the sensitivities of this poet,

…His pain pulsates

Behind dilated eyes, brown

Iraqi eyes, soft as those of a desert

camel. Bewilderment flickers like passing

shadows through the merciless yellow-white

of klieg lights. I wonder where

his adolescent soul wanders…

The poem Requiem, a hymn of remembrance to the poet’s dead mother, conjures up the genocide against the Armenian people perpetrated by the Ottoman Turks around the time of the First World War. Ghosts are everywhere, haunting the wind with atrocity after atrocity. Memories like this do not die. Der Hohannesian laments,

Almost a century has passed, fresh rumors float on the wind.

Osman’s descendants intend to plow under

All vestiges, once and for all to silence the screams,

The pleading, the cursing against a forsaking God,

The raging against their butchers by ghostly spirits…

But, the poet continues,

…Anatolian breezes

Will forever betray them, bearing bone dust

And blood motes into every fissure and crevice

Where Armenians once lived…

Many of today’s Turks, it is worth noting, including the great writer Orhan Pamuk, are breaking with the past and admitting these long denied historical truths. Here’s hoping that this trend continues.

If you like a writer who puts his conscience first before other considerations and you appreciate the delicate and intricate language of weather and wind chimes you will love Der Hohannesian. Another terrific book from Cervena Barva Press.