Thursday, March 14, 2019
P O E T R Y R E A D I N G S Presented by The Hastings Room Reading Series Wednesday March 27, 2019 at 7pm
P O E T R Y R E A D I N G S
Presented by The Hastings Room Reading Series
Wednesday March 27, 2019 at
7pm
At First Church
Congregationalist, 11 Garden Street, near Harvard Square
f e
a t u r i n g
Joyce
Wilson, who has taught English at Suffolk University and
Boston University. Her first poetry collection The Etymology of Spruce
and a chapbook The Springhouse both appeared in 2010. She is creator and
editor of the magazine on the Internet, The Poetry Porch (www.poetryporch.com),
which has been on-line since 1997. Her poems have appeared in many literary
journals, among them Poetry Ireland, The Lyric, and Salamander.
Her profiles of the poets Eavan Boland, Julia Budenz, Etel Adnan, and Diana
Der-Hovanessian (TBA) can be seen at the Women Poets Timeline Project at Mezzo
Cammin (www.mezzocammin.com). Her chapbook The Need
for a Bridge is just out with Finishing Line Press in 2019. A full length
collection Take and Receive is scheduled to appear with Kelsay Books in
August 2019.
Ben Berman, the author of two books
of poetry, Strange Borderlands and Figuring in the Figure, and
the newly released small book of short prose, Then Again. Ben has received awards from the Mass Center
for the Book and New England Poetry Club and fellowships from the Massachusetts
Cultural Council and Somerville Arts Council. He writes a regular column for
Grub Street about Writing While Parenting, and teaches in the Boston
area, where he lives with his wife and daughters. Visit him at www.ben-berman.com
Tuesday, March 12, 2019
Sunday, March 10, 2019
Peaches Goes It Alone by Frederick Seidel.
 |
| Frederick Seidel |
Peaches Goes It Alone by Frederick Seidel. $24.00.
REVIEW BY ED MEEK
Frederick Seidel is now in his eighties
so he can’t be an infant terrible anymore but he still has the
ability of shock, delight and offend. He is a wit and a skillful one.
He is urbane and well-read. He is sometimes a little silly and his
use of easy rhymes can be annoying but he isn’t afraid to tackle
big issues. He is in the group of those poets who, as Frost said,
want to be understood. That is, he is accessible. From “November 9,
2016” (you remember what happened that November):
I’ll use a cleaver to cut my hair.
I’ll wear asparagus for underwear.
I took the elevator to the thirteenth
floor
To find the fiends.
They opened the door.
A couple of stanzas later:
My country, ‘twas of thee.
Sweet land of one, two, three
JUMP
Into the swamp…
Trump ran on cleaning up the swamp.
That’s kind of like a pathological liar promising to tell it like
it is. Oh, wait… So, Seidel is not afraid to take on Trump and
those enigmatic followers of his. He really is not afraid to write
about anything. He seems to enjoy the role of provocateur. Here is
the beginning of “Abusers”:
Every woman who wants to be spanked
should be
Spanked for wanting to be.
It’s for excitement and as
punishment for her ascent.
She should be put on a pedestal so you
can look up to her
From below and get outstanding news
and views
From beneath and
see what you want to see.
Look at her clean
machine, her beautiful guillotine!
A few lines down:
I’m interested
only in the power of their flesh.
I turn the fire
hose on them when they protest.
Seidel is happy to
dive into the #metoo movement in a way that is at once supportive and
offensive. He appears to be alluding to the civil rights movement and
making fun of the #metoo movement in comparison, but doesn’t that
make light of the civil rights protests? He’s also not afraid to
confess his own transgressions. This might be the time to note that
one of the roles of art and comedy is to go after taboos. Our current
era provides plenty of material to work with including the oppressive
aspects of political correctness, trigger words and personal pronouns
of choice. Is there anything more ridiculous than someone choosing
z’s own pronoun? Well, maybe professors who kowtow to students who
choose their own pronouns. Seidel’s poem ends surprisingly with:
The world is
nearing war.
The homeless clog
the streets.
It certainly does
feel that way, doesn’t it? With our trade wars and our corruption
and conspiracies and the rise of the strong men! Or is he just
talking about the war between men and women?
Most often though,
Seidel is self-deprecating and funny: “I had a girlfriend who
dumped me for a better job---Which, frankly, made me laugh so hard I
started to sob.” He writes poems to Athena and to Aphrodite. He
quotes Sappho in Greek. He knows French. Here is another poem about
“Trump”:
I look past the big
face of my computer
At what was once
New York
Outside my window
And now is a
plateau
Of smiling bra-less
Breasts of the
contestants.
It’s time to wake
From this
cryrogenic sleep
In which I’ve
been preserved, and vote.
The endlessness of
America ends.
And what an ending.
A few lines later:
I turn the TV off
Which comes back on
All on its own.
It’s all about
climate change
And fracking girls.
And every bidet is
transgender
Or ought to be.
Trans is the time
of day.
Many people these
days are Trump or trans or gay.
On Emotion Avenue
in Queens—
Near Trouble
Street—
Cops on horseback
clatter
In their yellow
slickers
through the
springtime drizzle
Toward Black Lives
Matter.
White Working class
Clouds of tear gas
Cloud emotion.
You can see how
Seidel got into trouble offending various groups. He has had prizes
taken away. He’s been accused of being anti-Semitic and
anti-Catholic. Jesse Smollet will accuse him of being anti-gay.
Andrea Dworkin would call him anti-women. Or you could just call him
funny. His lines are often surprising, his word choice imaginative.
In any case, he provides an artist’s perspective. He combines wit
and non-sequiturs a la John Ashbury with a taste of the erudition of
A.E. Stallings and his poems are about something. They have content.
In the age of truthiness, Seidel is a welcome voice.