WHO BUT! (The Birth of an Iconic New England Brand)

 

 A good friend of mine --Somerville Bagel Bard Paul Steven Stone sent me an article about the birth of a brand-- the W.B. Mason brand and logo that he created.  An accomplished novelist and children's writer, Stone has created a bestseller, as his logo and copy appears on trucks throughout the country. Once when I had Paul lecture at Endicott College, a W.B.Mason truck pulled up outside my office even before he did. "Who But!" Paul Steve Stone could pull this off! I think this story says a lot about the mystery of the creative process.

 

WHO BUT! (The Birth of an Iconic New England Brand)

By Paul Steven Stone




A Dream Or A TV Commercial?

I dreamt last night I was at Fenway Park. The Red Sox were on one of their customary losing streaks but, with the bases loaded in the bottom half of the ninth inning, they were poised to rally back from a one-run deficit against the Yankees. There were two outs on the scoreboard, so the next batter would either be the game’s hero or its final out. Then, as if the dream were one of my cornball W.B. Mason TV commercials, the man of the moment stepped up to the plate and it was none other than W.B. Mason.

Yes, here was the personification of the W.B. Mason Company—‘W.B. Himself’ as I used to call him on the nameplate beneath his official portrait—the man I had fashioned from my imagination into dozens of heroic roles in print and TV advertisements: W.B. Mason as Prizefighter, as Hercules, Atlas, Genie of the Lamp, Broadway Star, G.I. Joe, Doo Wop Singer, Low Price Assurance Detective. And now, walking to the plate with a murderous gleam in his eye, W.B. Mason, Red Sox Slugger

Standing at home plate, W.B. tugged at his famous mustache, surveying the scene on the field before him. Red Sox runners were waiting anxiously at every base. The Yankee infield was playing him close to prevent a bunt. And there, most conspicuously splashed across Fenway Park’s left field wall, a sign proclaimed, as if in silent encouragement, “Who But W.B. Mason!”

Since 1898 Or 1986?

“Since 1898,” the sign declared, and that much was historically true. The W.B. Mason Company has been in existence since 1898, starting out as a print shop. But the company whose distinctive “Who But!” brand is blazoned across the Green Monster in Fenway Park has only truly existed in its present persona since 1986. I know because I am godfather to their now ubiquitous brand, the man whose fertile imagination originally spawned “Who But W.B.Mason!” If we can leave my dream baseball game briefly, even at such a melodramatic moment, I’d like to share with you the true story of the birth of W.B. Mason’s iconic brand.

A Brand Born Out Of Torture And Pain

It’s axiomatic in this ever-changing world that chaos and destruction usually precede rebirth and creative inspiration. So it was with the creation of my most famous, recognizable and singular brand identity.

Surely, these days, “Who But W.B. Mason!” is highly familiar and understandable to most people in W.B Mason’s sales territory—today when its’ wavy-type logo can be found on outfield walls in baseball parks throughout the northeast, and on trucks that crisscross city streets from San Francisco to Miami Beach, but there was a time when we would get stares and looks of disbelief as our ads first appeared in newspapers around Boston’s South Shore

“What the hell is that all about?” sums up the gist of most of the remarks I would hear in response to the half-page newspaper ads we created for the introductory phase of our branding campaign.

The ads, curiously resembling circus posters, were half page illustrations depicting W.B. Mason in heroic metaphorical guise. W.B. Mason as a prizefighter boxing a Boston furniture dealer; as a balloonist flying a hot air balloon across Brockton skies, as a Mason truck driver flouting speed limits to deliver a much-needed conference table. All with headlines grandly declaring, “Who But W.B. Mason Would Battle Heavyweights To Furnish Your Office!” or “Who But W.B. Mason Would Leap A City Block To Furnish Your Office!” or “Who But W.B. Mason Would Break The Law…” Well, you get the idea.

And that’s our brand in a nutshell: W.B. Mason as hero, as daredevil adventurer and, yes, as earnest and upright businessman. W.B. Mason, the quintessential purveyor of old-time American values. A man, a company and a brand one can believe in.

Who But, Indeed!

You’ll notice from these headline constructions that back in 1986, office furniture was W.B. Mason’s principal line of business. Office supplies were merely a sideline, while all their other product lines—coffee, school, snack room and janitorial supplies—were years away from earning a place in the Mason catalog.

A Phoenix Rising From The Ashes At Arnold & Co.

But let’s return to the chaos and destruction I mentioned earlier. Back in 1986, before anyone outside of Brockton ever heard of W.B. Mason, I was working at Arnold & Company, one of Boston’s largest advertising agencies. Arnold was going through its own form of chaos and destruction, reeling from the loss of two of its largest accounts, Fayva Shoes and John Hancock Insurance. In those days, Arnold was one of the area’s largest agencies, but it was not highly regarded for its creative punch or ingenuity. In award show competition after competition, Arnold would lose out to Hill-Holiday or Mullen or to smaller-sized, but mammothly-creative Leonard Monahan from Providence. So, by the time Arnold went through the pain of losing both Fayva Shoes and John Hancock in the same year, the agency was already suffering from a massive and deeply cutting creative inferiority complex.

For a painful period, six months at least, the creative department at Arnold was in a shambles. Our creative director, a likable fellow who came from J. Walter Thompson in New York, was allowed to retain his title but almost none of his authority. Outside advertising pros were brought in to supervise the agency’s creative underlings, to show us what “real creative advertising” looked like. Those interventionist supervisors, none of whom had any actual management experience or interpersonal skills, would block all our ads and commercials from leaving the agency until they themselves had a chance to come up with ideas that were better or more creative. If an ad wasn’t ‘hot’ according to their inner creative thermostats, it would never get served to a client.

You can imagine how demoralizing it was to walk by the office of one of these creative “supervisors” and see, through the glass door, one of your ads being dissected, belittled and used as a jumping off point as they struggled to create something they deemed sufficiently more creative.

For six torturous months, I could not get a single advertisement or commercial out of the agency and presented to a client. By the time my work was sufficiently massaged and tweaked by our supervisors it was hardly recognizable and usually not measurably more creative than my original concept.

My Escape From Arnold

So, you can easily understand why I decided to leave Arnold for an advertising agency that was just starting up down in Hingham, on Boston’s South Shore. A highly risky career move, to say the least, leaving a big Boston agency to work for an unknown and unformed entity out in the burbs. But aside from escaping the craziness of an ad agency disintegrating under the crushing weight of its own identity crisis, I was also reaching for a chance to create something new, something special for myself, working with nothing but raw ingredients and simmering ambition. As creative director I would not only have the opportunity to help create a new advertising agency, but to re-launch a seemingly stagnant advertising career.

Or so I assured myself.

Out Of The Frying Pan Into The Fire

My new agency, TJ Clark, was located in a recently constructed office condo. A condo so new, in fact, I had never seen it before, having interviewed for the job in an office the agency owner borrowed for the interview. Which is why I was totally surprised—shocked, actually—when I came in that first morning to discover the agency didn’t have a single stick of real office furniture to its name. Long rectangular tables from Taylor Rental were set up everywhere, reminding me more of a runaway Bar Mitzvah than a professional advertising agency.

My first thought as I stood there surveying this fledgling, wannabe advertising agency was, “Could this be the end of my advertising career?” Then, after a day filled with mounting evidence to support the reality and threat of that question—an art director who didn’t know how to spec type (a critical function later made obsolete by the advent of desktop publishing), a paucity of clients, an agency owner whose only real advertising experience was as ad manager at a supermarket chain—I went home to confront my demons in a sleepless night that saw me write down a list of Ten Commandments: 10 actions my new employer needed to undertake for me to stay at his agency.

Number One on the list: buy real office furniture!

First thing next morning, the second day on my new job, I presented my list. I can’t recall if I issued an ultimatum with the list, but I’m certain my new employer understood he and I were at a crossroads. To his credit, he accepted my list of action steps with grave silence, afterwards spending most of the morning phoning Boston office furniture dealers, attempting to get just one to come out to Hingham and meet with him.

Around noon, my new boss left the office without a word as to where he was headed. Two hours later—and this is one of those indelible mental images one holds onto for the length of one’s days—he returned with an entire crew from W.B. Mason in Brockton hauling loaner office furniture—desks, chairs, tables—into our office.

That of course was my first glimpse of W.B. Mason and their aggressive, climb-any-mountain, swim-any-sea commitment to winning a client’s business. A business attitude that stood in bold contrast to the arrogance of Boston’s big-shot furniture dealers who thought TJ Clark too small and insignificant to merit a sales call. That hungry sales stance of Mason’s was made indelible in our first Mason newspaper ad depicting W.B. Mason as a prizefighter punching out the lights of one of those Boston dealers: “Who But W.B. Mason Would Battle Heavyweights To Furnish Your Office!”

A Relationship Grows In Hingham

I realize I’m getting a little ahead of myself, and my story. Before we arrive at the period where I would conceptualize a branding personality and advertising campaign for W.B. Mason, there were weeks, perhaps months, where two consecutive lines of communication were being developed and nurtured between TJ Clark and W.B. Mason. On one side, Mason was providing both office supplies and furniture to our small but growing agency, at one point even supplying the trucks and manpower to move us to larger digs. On the other side, I was developing a friendship with Mason’s VP of sales (today, CEO and President), Leo Meehan, whose strong interest in marketing and advertising led him to drop by for an early morning visit almost daily on his way to Mason’s in Brockton. During those visits we would smoke chains of cigarettes, drink vats of coffee and talk about Leo’s growing vision for Mason juxtaposed with my understanding, crude at the time, about advertising and marketing.

My understanding about marketing and advertising may have been crude at the time, but it was definitely informed and enlivened by the six months I had just spent in creative Siberia at Arnold & Company. Having to defend one’s creative ideas everyday, having to watch others slap down your work on a consistent basis, having to live under a constant state of creative storm warnings and alarms, had fashioned me into a ferocious creative animal and a surprisingly adept branding philosopher. Once I was able to hire Bill Dahlgren, a talented art director I had known at Arnold, TJ Clark unleashed a reign of creative advertising upon the South Shore’s business community unlike anything ever seen before.

We Don’t Do Ads!

“We don’t do ads!” I would proclaim to prospective clients at TJ Clark, my way of saying I didn’t believe in creating individual ads for a client if there wasn’t an underlying brand personality to give them direction and a unique voice. And so we refused to create ads on a one-shot, brand-less basis. Somewhat arrogant for a young man of 40, but I was empowered and inspired by the crucible of fire I had survived at Arnold. And so, rather than creating an advertisement for a W.B. Mason sale or to help sell their Lite Price line of furniture, Bill and I created an entire branding and advertising campaign that displayed the “Who But!” brand in all its circus finery and “fun-ery” emblazoned on everything from business stationery to newspaper ads to trucks.

And maybe because the folks at Mason didn’t know enough to realize how weird and different this campaign was— or perhaps because it was obviously a branding concept with great potential—or maybe they were just desperate for any advertising that might set them apart from the pack…for whatever reason, they bought into “Who But W.B. Mason!” and bought into it big. So big, in fact, that within months at the most, they, the company, “became the brand.” By that I mean Mason took on the personality of the campaign at all levels within the company, rising to a level of service, value and friendliness promised by their brand’s unique expression of old-fashioned American values and cornball entertainment.

Two Men Playing With Toys!

So, how the hell did I ever come up with something as distinctive and bold as the “Who But W.B. Mason!”campaign? Looking back with the hindsight of history there were three principle ingredients I can credit:

1. My burning drive to prove myself as a creative powerhouse after my humiliating experience at Arnold; I would try anything in those days to stand out or create excitement, break down any doors to prove my worth;

2. Leo Meehan’s burning desire to create a company that was different, better and more memorable than everyone else’s and…

3. The remarkable, enjoyable and wholly fortuitous chemistry Leo and I experienced working together. We were kids with keys to the toy store and, at some level, we knew it. For the first few years after the Mason brand was launched, we would occasionally spend a few laugh-filled moments (usually with drinks in hand) reliving the high spots of this most enjoyable collaboration. Together, as the saying goes, we were unstoppable.

The Circus Coming To Town

One other element should not go unmentioned: old-fashioned American circus artwork. Before Bill Dahlgren and I started developing the Mason brand, I went to the Hingham library and borrowed a book of circus posters, most of them from the late 19th century. As mentioned earlier, I had had the idea that Mason because of its aggressive posture and its commitment to providing superior service and value was the embodiment of old-time American values,

What better way to convey old-time American values than by using materials that reminded everyone of 1890’s America? 19th Century America was a much simpler time in people’s minds, a time when advertising language sounded corny and stilted, and the public expected a dollar’s value for a dollar spent. ‘Who But’ must have come directly off one of those old posters, describing some feat of dare-devil artistry or unexplainable legerdemain.

Who But The Amazing Houdini could escape alive from the Sealed Box of Doom!

Match that against Who But W.B. Mason would leap a city block to furnish your office!

A Headline, Logo And Call To Arms

As for how I came to actually create the line “Who But W.B. Mason,” there’s no way for me to accurately reconstruct it. The creative process is more often a chain of linked impulses, one leading to another, than a singular Eureka moment. As I mentioned earlier, I had the impulse—quickly acted upon—to borrow a book of circus posters from the library. Did I know I’d be creating a campaign fashioned in that distinct look? I doubt it. More likely I was looking for inspiration. Even once the campaign was fully formed, it was always subject to the litmus tests of “Does it Work?” and “Is it great?” As happens so often with the creative process in developing ads or campaigns, you go down many avenues before you decide which road will go the distance.

Most likely, Bill Dahlgren and I designed the look of the introductory ads first. I just usually work that way; probably because one can say more (and learn more) in an ad than in a logo or a billboard. After the ads we would have tackled everything else. As for the line, “Who But W.B. Mason!” it was never intended to be a logo. We wanted headlines in our ads whose look mimicked circus poster headlines. But once we had created Mason’s distinctive wavy type headline, we realized we had a great looking logo on our hands as well as a circus poster-like headline.

The only aspect of the process I can testify to with certainty goes back to how I usually work. At the very beginning of a creative process, I usually play all sorts of games to get the juices flowing. Sometimes I’ll just free associate, typing up words that come to mind in response to the client’s business or their stated mission. Other times I’ll take the initial letters of a client’s name and see whatever word constructions they would lead me to. For instance, Monroe Community College (MCC) ultimately became “My College of Choice” in a branding campaign. After almost 40 years as a copywriter and creative director, I know myself well enough to be certain I would have started off the W.B. Mason creative process playing with the W.B. “W.B.” would have quickly taken me to “Who But,” given the way my quicksilver mind generally works. And the rest, after many hours of additional sweat and inspiration, is history.

Our old-time circus artwork is why—according to my theory— everyone notices our Mason trucks. When you see one of our trucks with its “Who But W.B. Mason!” logo and with W.B.’s giant portrait framed by American flags, you almost naturally feel the way children feel when they see the circus coming to town. It’s an almost primal childhood experience. Back in the beginning, when Mason had only four trucks, people would tell us “I see your trucks everywhere.” Now that Mason has over 400 trucks, people actually do see them everywhere. Another case of the company catching up to the brand.

As godfather and keeper of the Mason brand, I periodically have to remind people what the W.B. Mason brand stands for—what its soul is all about. Whenever someone in the company or on the creative team starts to take W.B. Mason too seriously, I remind them W.B. Mason is the circus coming to town. Repeat: the circus coming to town, and nothing more. Doesn’t matter that Mason has grown to two billion in sales, or that they now employ a few thousand people, rather than the 30-40 who worked there when we first created the brand. W.B. Mason was, is and always will be (I hope) the circus coming to town. Our ads, our TV commercials, our catalog covers were all meant to be as corny as the circus and as American as apple pie.

Start up the calliope, pop the popcorn, put on the clown makeup, W.B. Mason is coming to your office or your town. And don’t mind if he dresses up as a cinema noir detective, Hercules or Jack Dempsey.

And by the way, going back to that dream ballgame we interrupted with bases loaded in the 9th inning, turns out W.B. Mason walloped the ball out of the ballpark to score four runs and win the game against the Yankees. No surprise there. Just another magical feat in the heroic and mythical life of W.B. Mason Brand Personality.

A grand slam home run against the Yankees! Now, who could do that?

Who else?

Who But W.B. Mason!

———————————–

Paul Steven Stone is a former creative director who retired to write novels and live a simple life on a pond with his wife Amy. Stone is a member of The Bagel Bards, a much vaunted Boston-area writers group.

Katrina Borowicz’s Rosetta

 

Katrina Borowicz’s Rosetta (Ex Ophidia Press, 2020)

reviewed by Gregory J. Wolos

I am moved by the quiet ambition of the poems collected by Katrina Borowicz in her prize-winning collection Rosetta—“moved” in that I find myself unsettled as I surrender myself to the poet’s skillful yet quiet manipulation of time and perspective. It is the poet’s eye that controls what we see—what details are chosen to be placed under a magnifying glass and enhanced for the reader’s attention. Without the poet, how would we know what to see? Without the poet, how would we know how to think about what we see? Subtly, almost imperceptibly, Borowicz constructs a tableau, situates the reader’s focus, and then expounds on the value of the experience she has created.

In the poem “Moment,” Borowicz seems to be validating the poet’s license to be an interpreter of experience for the reader: “I was there/ at just the right time./ That is my/ life, showing up/ at the moment/ others don’t. Maybe/ that moment/ was meant for me/ maybe it even/ waited. Maybe it was/ nothing but/ the silk of chance/ roaring/ in a sudden wind/ And I/ alone/ was there.” Borowicz, in “From the Deck” draws our attention to what we she is privileged to see, yet also exercises her own judgment on how much we are allowed to experience from what she has chosen to reveal: “Perhaps it means/ nothing/ the constant/ gesturing of the sea:/ look over here, here/ I am— / a small swell/ I like to think only I/ see suddenly flatten/ because what was/ almost there/ must never break/ the surface.” In “Caw,” the title of which reminds us of the “mood changing” crow in Robert Frost’s “Dust of Snow,” Borowicz again glorifies the role of the poet as one who has the ability and responsibility of articulating an experience as personal as a dream: “. . . who am I that can lie/ content in the fragile dawn, nerves in the ear/ purring, fingers curling and stretching/ like a pianist’s before the velvet curtain decides to part.”

When Borowicz contemplates the “frightening” and “inevitable” power of spring in the poem “Fingers,” as she experiences “so much movement suddenly pulling me along,” she does not lose sight of her role as poet-observer, the bestower and revealer of sensibility, concluding: “maybe I’ve willed it all.”

In Borowitz’s poems, discovery and revelation go hand and hand, and it is the poet that achieves both, as she expresses in “Circling”: “pen/ between fingers,/ How odd is that?/ The everyday / startles me/ with its baldness.” It is the poet-observer who draws connections over time, and thus controls our understanding of history: “A hand moved/ over paper long ago,/ forming the words/ Beauty/ is energy./ That perfect circle/ has no beginning/ just the discovery/ of being said.” Borowitz as poet teaches her readers how to connect to their own pasts by illustrating her connection to her own, as in her poem “The Old Country”: “There was another country,/ always spoken of with reverence./ I didn’t understand/ why we’d left,/ I didn’t yet/ understand the saw blade of history.” It is through the imagination that, as in a fairy tale, a connection to the past is forged: “Our fireplace was where/ the stories were read/ from a burning book:/ molten logs, lit from within./ See the shadow of a man/ in there. See a terrifying/ creature with wings./ See it all fall down.”

Yet it is not only history that the poet frames through imaginative “storying;” it is also the poet who extracts meaning from the cacophonous present, as Borowitz suggests in “Rosetta,” (the title an allusion to the Rosetta stone, which has been used as a key to interpret ancient languages): “It’s like listening/ to three different songs/ at once—/ if you hear all/ of them, you hear/ none of them.” Though we may “[l]ie in bed,/ thankful/ for your blanket/ . . . / Vaguely warm in the beat/ of your own/ private blood,” we are aware of events occurring outside of ourselves, such as the comet that “is making a terrible/ noise somewhere,/ everywhere.” Yet if the world is full of such “terrible noise,” how do we dare leave the security of our bed and blanket to enter the fray? In “Truce,” Borowitz suggests that, despite the cacophony, we share common forms of experience: “For everyone who steps on the bus/ what fear and disappointment comes on/ what tenderness what memories of childhood nightmares/ and family gatherings what secrets are bundled up/ in our arms fallen into a shallow sleep.” On the bus—i.e., the world we share, we agree, the poet tells us, to maintain a truce: “a truce exists among us/ an uneasy silence/ ancient silence the native realm/ of strangers and dreamers.”

Borowitz’s poems return again and again to her contemplation of her role as poet—to act as a filter through which the incomprehensibility of a too-vast world can be limited and described. In “Tiny” she suggests that the process, for her, is challenging, yet physical: “My voice not even a momentary quiver/ in a great sea of silence./ . . ./ Yet there are times/ I feel my body—heart/ beating, hands at work—/ is a passage, an opening/ the size of a needle’s eye/ but big enough to let it all/ pass through.” Borowitz as poet, she believes, possesses a kind of objective vision that allows her to see what is not readily available to others. She describes, in the poem “Escape,” her “true habitat”: “the not here,/ that maybe island/ at the other end of a long gaze.” Her poetic sensibility, “a part of me with no name/ wanders far from the I whose cold hands/ are in her pockets,” enabling her to make sense of what others do not or cannot see, such as a metaphorical ship that “is out there/ going about its slow-motion business,/ neither arriving nor departing./ The lives on board invisible as insects in winter.”

The clockman of Borowitz’s eponymous poem seeks to understand the mechanism of time: “I’ll find out what the matter is,/ he says.” The narrator-poet marvels at his ability to focus in spite of the chaos of the outer world, yet it is a concentration that parallels the efforts of the poet: “I wonder how he can think/ in that room filled with footsteps—/ some delicate as a cat’s/ others empty suits of armor/ marching in circles.” It is the clockman’s questions that focus his investigation and that will provide him with the answer he seeks. In such a way the poet makes her choices, which define and limit her own investigation—though she remains aware that she is drawing these limits in a world that contains infinite possible sets of questions and answers. She is unlike the clockman’s parrot which sees only the world of the shop: “From its perch it can’t see / the huge flock of blackbirds/ mobbing the backyard feeder.” Wallace Stevens may give us “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” Borowitz seems to be telling the reader, but thirteen is far less than infinity, and the poet’s job in any single poem is to depend on her own vision to give the reader one way of making sense of the world.

First Generation Krikor der Hohannesian

First Generation

Krikor der Hohannesian

Loveland, Ohio: Dos Madres Press, 2020

93 p.

ISBN 9781948017817

Review by David P. Miller

djamangeen gar ooo chagar: an Armenian invocation, the introduction to storytelling, sits quietly on the cover and title page of First Generation. “A long time ago there was and there wasn’t.” The almost insupportable tensions between the death and life of a people and culture, the reality of genocide and the viciousness of denial, infuse Krikor der Hohannesian’s first full-length collection of poems. It is dedicated to Armenag Nazar, “who fled Turkish Armenia in 1910 to escape the Armenian genocide along with his wife Gulenia and four young children, one of whom was to become my mother.“  At least in part, these poems are his attempt “to slide beneath the shield of that which he kept to himself.” Vivid paintings by the abstract expressionist Garabed Der Hohannesian (1908-1992), the poet’s father, serve as cover art and as introductions to the book’s sections (see http://garabedderhohannesian.com/).

Although the poems aren’t in a strictly chronological sequence, there is movement from the poet’s youth into adulthood and later age. This is intertwined with the complexities of bringing a partially suppressed heritage to light, more fully realizing it, and striving to carry it forward. Part One, The Bearer, begins with “our first naked thrust / into a blue and eerie world” (“Entrance”). As the child grows, he begins to hear “the stories… Zeitun, / Musa Dagh—strange sounding names / not easily rolled off the tongue.” This poem, “Death March: Deir al-Zor,” shows us something of the boy’s struggles to grip the past, paralleling his difficulties with place names. With time, his knowledge deepens; he speaks to his grandparents in retrospect:

Now, nene, I understand that which

as a boy I could not comprehend. [ … ]

It was told that many, knowing their fate,

threw their babies into the amniotic waters of

the Euphrates, then joined prayerful hands

to leap in behind [ … ]

It was told that others, half-crazed by thirst and hunger,

too paralyzed to resist, submitted like docile sheep

to the cruelest sexual perversions. [ … ]

Now, mairig,

the words we could never share.

In this section, der Hohannesian intertwines memories of his childhood with muted hints that came from his elders. In “The Attic” he finds “crazed sepias / of austere gentlemen / in over-starched high collars / and ladies bedecked / in lacy décolletage.” These curiosities reverberate with what the living both show and hide: “Old Armenian men, hunched / on cane-backed chairs, / drinking Turkish coffee in dim, / smoke-blue cafes – sotto voce / exchanges punctuated / by a knowing nod or /arched eyebrow [ … ] eyes now and / then misting over …” (“The Secret”). The loving bond between him and his grandfather does much to catalyze his emerging consciousness, particularly as he watches his grandfather write:

a river of discourse

flowing in strange, squiggly-looking characters

of Armenian script. I was awash

in his serenity, basked in his aura,

smelled the sweetness of his presence,

wishing to spend the rest of my life

in that room. (“The Birth of a Poet”)

The final poem of the first section recounts the poet’s night visits to a local cemetery. Although he can’t account for his fascination to skeptical friends, or even to himself – and although the place isn’t clearly identified with his ancestry – he can’t help but ask of the stones, “alive with family sagas,” the question “Who were you?” (“Requiescat in Pace”).

In Part Two, Passages, we see the adult der Hohannesian’s full-blown awareness of the genocide perpetrated and its continuing resonances in daily living. Despite an inherited sense of Armenia as “a corpse veiled … a derelict of history best forgotten,” the poet’s generation took on the burden of making the history manifest:

To us

fell the task of giving voice to the ineffable –

to erase the shame that murders the psyche [ … ]

We scour freighter manifests

for clues, badger Congress for acknowledgement,

devour memoirs of survivors, thirsting to know

as our forebears thirsted at Deir-al-Zor. (“The Stain”)

This is an emotionally contradictory burden to bear, however, as several poems in this section attest. “Passage to Ararat” witnesses the struggle of a friend whose father renounced his Armenian heritage, even to the point of ridicule: “he chose / anglophilia, changed his name, / became an English dandy [ … ] Worse yet, / the mocking of his forebears as ‘quirky’ / and besides, ‘the language was impossible.’” The friend’s return to his origins therefore means acting against his father. In Yerevan he tosses “a yellow rose / into the burning oil, your tears / a cascade down your cheeks / like snowmelt from the slopes / of Ararat.” The poet himself is torn over the possibility of return, conflicted over what he may claim: “I fear the ghosts. I fear mourning / what was never mine, the grief / that belongs not to me but to those / who gave up their birthright” (“The Cherry Tree”).

And yet grief is certainly his. In “Hear the Wind Blow,” written in memory of the poet and steelworker John Beecher, der Hohannesian sets his friend’s fate during the McCarthy era against the hell of polluted factory towns during that period. The deaths of seventy from the notorious Donora smog of 1948 – “gagged on smog from steel / and zinc plants, the inversion of air, / the trapped poisons without a breath / of wind to purge the valley” – find an echo in the unspecified “accident” which ended Beecher’s work in the mills. “Old Man John the Melter,” though he “stood tall for steely men … was blackballed / in the witch hunts of the 1950’s / for not signing a loyalty oath.” Even more stark, perhaps, is the eruption of heartache chronicled in “Soul Brother.” After three days of celebrating the life of a deceased friend with food, drink, and music, the inevitable arrives:

The day-after tears – not the choked back kind but

full-bore gushing – finally swamped me

like a rogue wave. I am lost,

marooned on an isle of mourning.

Part Three, The Eternal Flame, opens with a poem that poses one of the book’s central questions: “What do you do / with the weight of the unspeakable, / the grief which you could not lift?” (“What Do You Do?”). First Generation takes a great step toward making this weight both speakable and spoken, and many of the poems in this final section address the question how to move forward with the knowledge the poet bears.

“Walking Toward the Edge” grapples with the burden of a lack all the more devastating for having no particular shape: “How do you measure silence, / its vacuum of sound, dead air / absent before the storm?  / What happened to the Armenians? ” In reply to someone’s well-meant but inadequate advice – “’You need to grieve,” she says” – the poet replies that the conditions for grief have been undermined.  The possibility of achieving grief feels liberating, but the reality is illusory:

How does one grieve absence,

its nothingness? I have walked

toward the edge many times,

excitement in my step [ … ] Yet

a hesitation as I near,

the fear that I will no longer

recognize myself, that I am

staring at death, the paradox

of its comfort.

The devastating realization is that grief is “the cold ash / from a fire that never burned.”

Nevertheless, der Hohannesian is able to express some of the marvels of his own life. In “These Hands,” he takes a look at those extremities so often taken for granted, and how they bear the deep traces of a long life with guitar playing, holding newborns, planting roses, dancing with speech, and, of course, writing. He sees “Wrinkles / like wind-blown ripples on desert sand, / veins the blue-gray of the river, / knurled knuckles, nails ridged like bark …” – eloquent, elegant marks of aging.

In the book’s final part, we also return to der Hohannesian’s family, with elegies for his parents. “Saying Goodbye” concentrates our attention on the final scene in his father’s hospital room. These last moments are burdened with “the unsaid” that “shall stay unsaid … It can’t be helped in the few hours left.” The continuing trauma of genocide is felt even here: he arranges for cremation because “Mother didn’t believe in funerals – / after all, none of the 1.5 million / dispatched by the Ottomans were so graced. / She was two years old and had survived.” “Requiem” begins with the death of his “dear Mother – last of those from home,” and develops toward an unexpected, perpetual vengeance. The slaughtered Armenians cannot be eradicated, despite rumors that “Osman’s descendants intend to plow under / all vestiges, once and for all to silence the screams”:

Anatolian breezes

will forever betray them, bearing bone dust

and blood motes into every fissure and crevice

where Armenians once lived.

Where you, Mother, once lived.

“How long does the spirit linger / in dust motes dancing / in cones of sunlight / before it is all forgotten?” This key question is from “To the Author of my Epitaph,” the book’s concluding poem. In First Generation, Krikor der Hohannesian presents us with a deeply vested inheritance, intertwined not only with sorrow but also with friendships, love, and the possibility of realizing joy. He takes the essential risk involved in any bold creative act: asserting his voice against the inevitability of disappearance we all share. We should pay attention, with gratitude.

THREE HANDS NONE BY DENISE BERGMAN

“THREE HANDS NONE” BY DENISE BERGMAN  ( Black Lawrence Press)

Review by Lee Varon

Denise Bergman’s new book of poetry “Three Hands None” is a stunning collection. The incident at the heart of the book is the assault of the narrator by a stranger who breaks into her apartment. She describes: “a twenty-year old woman alone in a tiny speck of bed/ deep inside sleep wakes up to a man with a knife at her throat.”

The “three hands” in the title refers to the confusion and disorientation the narrator feels as she attempts to recount her horrific ordeal: “his three hands one on my mouth one with his knife one/ holding the flashlight so close my eyes were on fire.

She feels as if her attacker has three hands to her “none” since she feels paralyzed in the moment of the attack— “this is what powerless is.”

The ten poems of the book are divided by long dashes enclosed in brackets which give the reader a pause between each of the connected poems. The often long lines without capitalization create a strong forward momentum—I couldn’t put the book down.

The story moves from the night the narrator is assaulted to her attempt to recognize her assailant from the many mug shots she is shown by the authorities—“photos of men was it this one that I tell them that I hadn’t seen his face.” In the aftermath of the assault the narrator is haunted by the feeling that threat is pervasive: “he knows who I am/ each man I pass on my way to work/ knows who I am.” He could be anywhere with his “surveillant camera” watching her, ready to strike again. And apart from the daily way in which the attack intrudes in every aspect of her life is the overarching question so many survivors ask: “why me/who was I to him…”

Like all survivors, the narrator’s being is shaken to its very core. The attack has stripped her of her sense of self and safety: “he he he gleaned me. what’s left are leafless stalks too thin to/ catch a wind.”

Bergman keenly depicts the disconnection and confusion which disrupts everything in the narrator’s world: “she sleeps I sleep for weeks a waking sleep though I can’t sleep/ can’t fall or stay asleep.”

Yet there is still a kernel of herself that endures and pulls her through the nightmare she is experiencing. It is midway through the book that: “on hands and knees I retrieve the kernel lock it in my fist.” There is a glimmer of reawakening and yet the narrator keeps circling back to the assault even as she moves forward.

It will take decades in which “speech was a pageless lexicon” before she is able to write about her experience. Some people don’t understand and wonder why she chooses to write about her ordeal after so many decades. Her answer to them rings out with conviction and clarity: “I say to sleep” and then, “to find the me back then.”

In this volume of striking poems the narrator finds “the me” that was stripped from her as a young woman and we as her readers are in awe of her courage and gratified by her incremental triumphs in regaining her selfhood.

In the final section of the book, the narrator broadens her view beyond her own experience to encompass the plight of all survivors of violence—both women and men. She connects with other survivors and encourages the reader to: “go to her though she doesn’t ask beg or hint” and also, “bring her a siren bring her a bell bullhorn megaphone/ microphone but know she will choose to whisper.”

In “Three Hands None” Bergman goes beyond a whisper to a full-throated, powerful, beautifully crafted work of art that will reverberate long after you have finished her book.

Animalalia Liz Hutchinson

Poet Liz Hutchinson

Animalalia

Liz Hutchinson

Salem, Mass.: Yes/No Press, 2017

ISBN 9780692837757, $14.95

Reviewed by David P. Miller

Poems about animals: a keyword search in Poetry.org on the simple word “animals” brings 326 results on July 19, 2018, including titles such as “Four Questions Regarding the Dreams of Animals” (Susan Stewart), “To Pipe the Animals Aboard Noah’s Ark” (Constance Urdang) and “O My Sweet Animals” (Salvatore Quasimodo). I immediately think of Ogden Nash’s poems for The Carnival of The Animals, read by Noel Coward on an LP I had in childhood. The book in hand, Liz Hutchinson’s Animalalia, doesn’t have animal, beast, creature, etc. words in any of the poems’ titles: the titles themselves are mute. That is, the titles are drawings: the contents page matches thumbnails with page numbers. There are thirteen sections, each dedicated to the creature in the drawing. In the drawings (by Scout Hutchinson), those creatures who have faces (not all do) have their backs to us or regard us obliquely. None of them face us. They aren’t performing or posing, and they certainly don’t explain themselves to us. They’re not available to become videos on social media.

Animalalia consists mostly of prose poems, with one numbered statement or section per page. The book design is generous, with plenty of white space to invite reflection or daydreaming before moving on. Most are in four to ten sections; the longest (fox) has twelve. The briefest consists of one unnumbered page: this is for the animal represented by a drawing of a constellation. It would be a spoiler to say more about that one. Three of the sections (rabbit, fox, and cat) are presented in pages of verse paragraphs.

It is difficult to generalize about Liz Hutchinson’s animal-writing, and that’s a sign of the work’s strength. Each creature requires its own approach to the challenge of minding the gap between our (often facile) sense of identification with other humans, and our typical difficulties with “understanding animals,” once we drop the habit of anthropomorphizing. We’re all sentient beings, but the spaces among our sentiences are permanent mysteries. And we just have to keep trying to find our way in: we don’t really know how Dr. Doolittle managed it, say. We can be sure, though, that “Hello, I’m a giraffe, have you ever seen anything like me?” or the like is pretty much played out.

Human/other animal communication is immediately enabled and prevented by the premise of Bear. The reader has been waiting, apparently – “After what feels like a long time” – and the spark almost jumps the gap – “the bear rips the page out of her notebook, folds it twice. When you open it, you see that her folding has marred the ink.” It’s the instant failure of anthropomorphizing hope: the bear has a notebook with a message just for you, available and impossible. “It might have been […] it might have been” a great many things: esoteric bear dance steps, a story about her break-in to the house of Three Goldilockses, a refutation of your intrusive action: “Do I come to your den in the middle of the day? I don’t think so, I do not.” It might have been a berry stain. The bear is gone, and nothing remains but an undefined gesture between species.

Unlike Bear, Skunk lives where we do. Skunks have a knowledge of our extended spaces, but theirs is alien to ours: skunks map. “Skunks map your driveway.” “They have maps for things you’ve never heard of.” “They map out whole neighborhoods in chicken bones, draw slippery trails through lo mein.” We more or less know that our garbage can make their landmarks; we didn’t know that “night, the smell of snow, despair” are mapped too, as well as “more constellations […] more stars, all the things they point to.” Skunk’s knowledge is hermetic to us, but unintentionally: they just make different transparencies overlaid on the same phenomena. We might have access to something like this if, when “stoop[ing] down to pick up one skeletonized leaf” from the driveway, you might then “trace the map of your life: the taste of something sweet gone sour.”

Cat is, of course, famously one anchor of the cat/dog polarity. Is Cat actually there for you, cat lover? Is she, as some insist, faking it for food and housing? Does she maybe have only an orthogonal relationship with what we call affection? “Cat is a cat / accidentally // She didn’t mean / to do it / but there it is”. Maybe both she and you form relationships out of continual misunderstanding:

When Cat is inside

she is a cat

She wears her

self for you

You don’t know

who Cat is

when she’s outside

She looks at you

with big eyes

brings the sparrow inside

You watch its head

turn back and forth

in her mouth

It could be a matter of misread signals — “you see her / out in the neighborhood // looking at you / like she’s never seen you // like she’s never seen anything / on such slow stupid legs” — which have somehow stayed in a wobbly balance for millennia.

Perhaps it is because rabbits are inherently furtive (rarely living with us as pets, mostly seen running away) that the rabbit poems are elusive. Full of suggestion but bounding off into the underbrush. Plums, a jacket, rain, rabbits (but mainly the idea of rabbits): these elements combine and reconfigure in a multiply-folded puzzle. Who is speaking here?

mother told me

not to run

with plums in my

mouth mother

isn’t always

right

(Note in passing the stark brief line, “mouth mother” and the affirmation of “right” free of the denial “isn’t always.”) Or, what is a rabbit’s paw – a good luck charm or a means of escape? “there is no way // or knowing / which one it means / at any given time”. Perhaps they’re not animals at all, but tokens for “your hands // which you fold / like two rabbits / in your pockets” over-filled by plums. In most of the sections of Animalia, the creatures are named in upper-case (Bear, Crow, Fox), like proper names assigned to individuals. Not here, as there’s barely any actual rabbit anywhere.

Two more instances will further suggest the range of animal being in Animalalia. Coyote is an antihero: his is the outside case here of solo animal readable as solo human. This coyote is one we all thought we knew. His name is silenced, and I won’t tell you, but we know him as an animated figure fixated on a roadrunner. (Oh, that coyote.) What might it be like if his cartoons were documentary, a kind of cinema verité? His obsession blossoms into self-loathing and regret, his ACME bills are out of hand, he becomes the object of his desire, the archetypal Roadrunner, in his dreams. He finds roadrunner roadkill: “consumed by lust and terror … He devours it, bursts into tears and shakes for days afterward.” When he “falls from a great height,” as we’ve so often seen him do in these pursuits, what does this actually mean? “He does not collapse into a limbed accordion. He sprains his wrist, twists his ankle and hits his head. It’s all he can do to crawl home.” Existentially miserable, a prisoner of his compulsion, Coyote goes to the mountain, “dances Roadrunnercoyote, Coyoteroadrunner, round and round.” A new transformative legend arises from the hilarity of the premise: Liz Hutchinson beautifully works a piece of popular culture away from any expected meme.

The final example is the first: Owl, whose section begins the book. Owl is not found to be wise-old, and does not utter “whoo.” He begins in relationship with a dying tree, a state which seems apparent (“The owl rides the tree bareback. The owl and the tree are old friends.”) But the owl’s connections also seem opaque though plainly stated. He abandons the tree as soon as it dies and “takes the long way around the forest” to avoid it afterwards. The longings between owl and tree are asymmetric: the tree wants an owl hat but the owl only wears hats of other owls. The owl might stalk newborn kittens in a dumpster behind Burger King, but we only learn of the owl listening to their “collective, unsorted mewl.” Does the owl deliberately conceal its meanings from us, or are they disconnected by the owl’s very nature? (The opposite of the coyote’s tale.) Was it always impossible to go beneath bare observation? “Nobody knows if owls bury their dead because owls have a different definition of both the word bury and the word dead.” There’s a suggestion of linkage, that we might find owls in ourselves, but it stays empirical: “If I am an owl and you are an owl then we are probably all owls who drink from the same ceramic bowl.” The owl grazes us, scratching If you are an owl into the glass of a bedroom window, but there’s no then to go with if. A suggestion abandoned as soon as made.

I am pleased that Microsoft Word does not recognize the word Animalalia. Liz Hutchinson’s lucidly written but subtle parables could have been brought together under the title “Animalia,” of which the software approves. That could have signaled a more expected approach to the theme, instead of the faceted surprises found here. Congratulations and thanks to Yes/No Press for bringing this forward.

Spirit Boxing By Afaa Michael Weaver

 




Spirit Boxing

By Afaa Michael Weaver

University of Pittsburgh Press

Pittsburgh, PA

ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-6458-2

112 Pages

$15.95

Review by Dennis Daly

How does a man endure a lifetime of mind-numbing physical work, then go on to write a body of profound, ethereal poetry unlike anything else being written today? Ask poet Afaa Weaver. He’s not the first poet/writer that has broken out of a hard knocks life. But his measured, sometimes soaring verse, distilled from years of drudgery, offers up an unusual intoxication worthy of the most engaging, indeed the best, of modern writing.

Using Chinese mystical metaphors Afaa Weaver, in his new book Spirit Boxing, revisits his coming-of-age experiences and blue collar workplaces he and others labored in with keen insight and a racial sensitivity both adamant and gentle.

Appropriately enough the collection opens with a poem, John Henry Sleeping in the Grass, that summons a vision of the African American folk hero, John Henry. Charged with hammering holes into rock for explosives, Henry met his end in a mythic contest against a steam-powered hammer drill. Henry, according to the story, won the contest before his heart gave out. Weaver’s piece highlights a dream-like potential and determination in the sleeping figure of the symbolic Henry. Consider these telling lines,

… black steel

his destiny, John is motion at rest,

tides of moon and waves in still waters,

suns igniting hearts of molten iron,

a hardened conviction, rose petals in rain.

Sleep is a dream, the real world a poundage,

work a sentence for being his mama’s son,

the hammer in his crib…

Working in an ice house not only negated seasons and froze passions, but it molded the human will with its metaphoric inclinations. Weaver in a poem entitled Houses of Ice, 1969 meditates on operation, on how harsh manufacturing abnormalities devolve into their natural elements and even human sentiment. Notice the bit of generational rivalry and the pride toughness dispenses to the protagonist son. The poet says,

… In the freezer

it was a winter I had to bundle up to fight,

in an insulated coat my father used to wear

working in the steel mill where I thought

things must have been kinder because

this frozen hell was against all nature,

each block the same except for the chips

the ice hook made when I grabbed them

to feed the scoring machine. Things need

a process, a method for becoming real,

even ice, which is wise enough to return

to water, to unmask itself from the stamp

of human hands, to become mist, steam,

dried spots where it spreads itself as light

as air or nothing, not enough of it for miles

to become three hundred pounds again,

each pound the weight it takes to kiss,

or to fall in love, hoping love will last.

Not for nothing is Spirit Boxing, the title poem of this collection, reprinted on the back cover of this book. The lines rivet one’s attention with a vengeance. Set in a soap factory, the protagonist seeks his internal spirit and intellectual life while fending off the back-breaking labor of his allotted duties. The irony of providing the soap for America is not without wit. Weaver even invokes John Henry for a second, and very effective, appearance. Here’s the heart of the piece,

… the shift is young, my body

a heavy meat on bones, conveyors not wired

for compassion, trucks on deadlines, uncaring

pressure of a nation waiting to be washed, made

clean, me looking into the eye of something like

death, and I look up, throwing fifty-pound boxes,

Jesus now John Henry pounding visions of what

work is, the wish for black life to crumble, snap

under all it is given…

Throwing bales of hay with one arm leads into a poem entitled When the Farms Give Out. Weaver describes a promised land that has betrayed its owners and which ultimately evicts them into an amoral urban world where humans are commodities. The piece concludes contemplating a dismal future,

… the farms worn down to rusted weeders,

manure spreaders, mules too high on themselves

to keep a simple humility, and what do we know

when we have to take to reaching for electric fans

as clerks in stores that go way out to sell paper

shacks, lard, and salt to folks living in the hills

chewing on piles of dry corn. Call me Isaac,

trying to ward off what’s coming to all of us,

the day the end comes to these, the hot mills,

cement plants, grain silos, docks, the places

we left the land for when the land could not give

back what we planted. We moved to cities,

the broad hand of justice turning dirt into dust.

Weaver’s poem Grabbing Lunch in the Morgue surprises in this collection with its rude audacity and existential bent. A female morgue assistant plays the protagonist perfectly, observing the peculiarities of the morticians and each dead person’s kin. The poet sets up the piece with earthy humor and indelicate description. Then the tone turns to a philosophical lamentation against death and finally rage. Weaver begins the tone transition this way,

The families come just after the Coca-Cola made her burp,

opening the door to the cabinet so they can see how naked

death is, none of the things we accumulate beside us,

none of the failures, the prizes, the big houses, no thing

in itself, while whatever memories they had are somewhere

where dreams go and die. When peering eyes of parents wet,

then burst into the floods of sorrow, she stares at nothing,

the bright glow of sunlight under the morning clouds, and

when they are gone she presses the door closed, her hands

holding each other, her arms in a bow like a hammer …

Yet another sublime poetic collection from Afaa Weaver.

A review of g emil reutter’s Carvings

A review of g emil reutter’s Carvings

Paperback: 144 pages

Publisher: StoneGarden.net Publishing (November 20, 2010)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 1600761895

ISBN-13: 978-1600761898

        Review by P C K Prem

A collection of verses, Carvings (Stonegarden.net Publishing California, USA 2010) celebrates life’s experiences picturesquely and underlines universal viewpoint.   

            g emil reutter is effortless and placid as he thinks, writes, and excavates the trajectory of life, its little experiences, happenings and words. He talks of feelings and tiny thoughts and recognizes familiar patterns in trivial happenings, otherwise infusing meaning to life. He looks at life, its wrecks, uproars and triumphs, losses, childlike promises and pains, paints pulsating and striking word pictures, clings to the soil of experiences and hides a few truths and half-truths. g emil’s lyrics dig deep, thrill, coax and abandon in between somewhere or possibly nowhere, and you still breathe in lyrical sparkles. He charms, haunts and taunts with the objet d'art.  Like Anne Ridler, g emil’s lyrics focus on experiences is significant and it highlights modern perspective with subjectivity in narration of tiny incidents constituting life.

  If a man aspires for more, life is miserable. Limiting desires enriches and world looks worth living even in chaotic settings. A petty man often does not boast but speaks truth in great lingo. If one humiliates a little poor man, even if wisely pragmatic it repulses. Men hide intrinsic flaws and inanity. Adoring man lives with a rationale ‘Brief Moments’ conveys. A man is hardnosed and uncaring to others’ sufferings. Ambulance and police car are symbolic of fake tragic anxiety- a paradox.   ‘Sirens in the night’ is a wakeup call to get up, help the suffering, bring innovation and avoid a beaten track, for stupor and passivity immobilize an impotent shrunken age. Visiting and collecting remnants of past turns out a possession 26 he thinks.

            A figurative reprimand in ‘Puddle in the dust’ pierces as thoughts of absolute void reoccur in ‘Rain and Linear Lines.’ Emptiness confronts a man with a lost objective. It is atypical when g emil raises eternal questions in ‘Ever So slowly’ 29, as destiny puzzles.   

Pull up the shades open the window,

Fresh air fills the room venture out.

The time when one is alone,

Reality sets in, choices made,

A new home, time to move on.

            Man takes birth, wakes up, works hard, grows bald, belly protrudes, and abruptly, he faces the enigma of redundancy from failure to success amid agonized tang.

                                                        ****

 Invoking nature for interpreting love is a strong weapon men pick to enhance intensity. ‘Nature’12 avidly talks of created beings as sunrays pierce and instill life. He recalls old romance as beauty and vastness of love of the beloved electrifies.  

 I know the myths of great

power, emotion, seduction; all that pale when

I look into your eyes…

I had forgotten long ago; your soft touch surreal

until your lips meet mine, my hands cup the

small of your back and reality takes hold.

Love-feelings seize in ‘Eliot and Love’ 15 as a beloved eternalizes a joyful experience. Magical feelings travel in ‘The Waters by New Hope.’ Time spent in love carries an ineffaceable impress –the eyes, the red cheeks and a warm embrace charm and thrill ‘as hope continues to /be restored each day I am /drawn closer to you’. To resurrect intensity defies portrayal and sharing, an exclusive experience that trickles in ‘Yellow Pages, Concourse and Shopping’ and speaks differently of love-tale-time gone, as memoirs revitalize thrills and pains.

Recognition of the eyes never seems to leave us

Histories exchanged we said our goodbyes

She as beautiful as that first day in junior high…

                                                (Shopping)

  Intimacy continues undefined as a slow collapse in relations cautions. A voice known and still anonymous, perhaps an old love with unstipulated identity, turns an instant, sensitive.

Façade of elegance and grace

gives way to words

that draw me near

to bask in the radiant smile

eyes I cannot look away from. (Not an Old Testament Psalm 39)

            Debris from past refresh old bonds lived and cherished passionately make running away edgily irresistible and create an aura of supernatural experience when a fanatical lover (Orbit 139) loves words dipping from the lips of a beloved…and takes a lover to unfamiliar land of ecstasy. 

                                                         ****

Ironically, experience of a night wasted proves acerbic. People drink but it offers no pleasure. A man enjoys life if sane or else stimulants dishearten and renounce. ‘Beer and Marlboros’ 13 signifies feral life wasted. In many verses like ‘Stormy Night’ 48, a night of drinks, passions and joys appears vain and sordid. A thought of joy flows in Blue Jay 17 narrating a strictly private experience.  When one watches nature alone, one cannot share fulfillment. ‘Nature’ fills man with an experience of hugeness and stunning depth.  

I cannot for if I do the flow will turn to a trickle the ocean will not be met.

Sun showers break out, droplets caress my skin and I envy the Atlantic.

                                                                                 (Envy the Atlantic 34)

 A man is a merely a droplet, a trickle before the huge ocean. Awfully engaged in various pursuits, ‘City’ paints a picture when roads bubble as ‘Sweat beads drip along her arching spine, / chest heaving forward—/moaning and alone./The homeless guys /wear coats in the summer’ 38.  The kids run about and play mischief and worn-out women sit to relax without ever thinking why the cops run around. Everyone is busily hectic and lives in safe restricted dwelling.  Anxieties of a father for a daughter who travels on an errand are genuine, for security perturbs in a difficult age and women’s safety worries parents.

“I see

you and remember all those things a father never forgets about

a daughter; you are with me, safe from your travel.” Travel 55

In an age of crisis, each one wants an identity.  To leave footprints and identity in a period of convolution overwhelm. Man exists and still appears nonexistent. Life between yes and no, with no specifics, torments in contrasting mind-sets.  Man thinks people love but hate governs life as he suffocates in stifling emptiness and builds shelter in a hollow carrying philosophic strain. He talks of pragmatic approach, warns against meddlers in life, for they do nothing but only talk, suggest and advice, gossip and run away from responsibility.  

                                             ****

Nostalgia lengthens out, as one looks at the frames pegged on walls, opens windows but looks at the world inside.  

people in frames hang on wall

shelves full of memories…  (Window open, 14)

            Breathing in reminiscences, offers contentment. Everyone goes back and back to reconstruct cheery meadows. ‘Snowstorm’ 27 is reliving ‘and I savor this small memory /of those who have passed on to another place.’ Man vibrantly recalls days spent in the warmth of mom, now dead but the house breathes in mother’s aroma.  In Carvings 40, a common wish finds expression. Somewhere, a man wants people to remember or may be, if he comes back, he revisits areas of shared memories.

It makes one wonder

where these people have gone,

and if they are standing

as tall and proud as the tree.

Memories of dead relations stay refreshing. A man without feeling for human relations is almost dead, for among bonds one lives a happy and definite life. (Emil 79) Past opens a photo album, a journey begins and one finds the dead alive the moment one touches…for little memories are tiny ‘pieces of life’.  A man ignores the living and enjoys in memories of the dead –a hypocritical, perhaps an unwise outlook.  ‘Open Hearth’ relates to frightful tomblike experience. When man experiences death so near, he fears, tastes, defeats death to relate an experience and goes back, and observes a melancholic strain in depiction elsewhere in ‘At the Station.’

In a slightly different vein, ‘Leather Couch’ 43 talks about the mental state and gives feelings of hell and heaven. “in this moment of silence so much is said and I know/ what heaven is like, not what the pious say it is,/ just what it is when I sit on the couch holding you.’ A man lives in false awakening, false youth and dreams and as old age dawns he resurrect jaunts.  

  Curiosity rises each moment as one sits on the steps and finds a girl next-door smoking even as pleasantries excite, an old woman looking questionably at the man flinging glances and at another corner, old women’s talks barely interest adolescents, creates a scenic marvel. None is prominent, nothing happens ever and still ordinary people stay central. A few loving, warm and passionate moments offer unique stimulation. One rejoices in impish feelings as coffee, cigarette and smoke define movements of words, lips, feelings and passions.

The telephone rings and I hear

your voice, extinguish the smoke, the coffee goes

cold. I sleep in the warmth of your voice.  (Warm January Night 44)

It speaks of the state of mind, a bare truth. Engaged in various pursuits, a man visits graveyards and pays floral tributes…in many verses he evokes tepid loving moments.  

Plastic flowers can be as cold as granite

even when the intention is warm…  

 In that strange way, cemeteries are for the

living not the dead…  (Resurrection 45)

   He speaks of depth, of reluctance in expression and love unlimited and the strain of love continues.

“Do you think we will live that long?”

“Yes,” I say

And we will make it look dam good

            Again ‘the beauty that is you/draws me near each day/the smile/that took away darkness’ (You 75) speak of love, earthily and ethereal. ‘A Day without You’ 81 demonstrates passion as the lover waits for the beloved and glorious time.  Elsewhere, he requests to understand life, for each little episode or occasion is noteworthy. Genuine efforts to value the mysterious flow of life reveals rationale and import. In ‘Re-creation’ 122, the poet is thoughtful and talks of a botched, withered life, wishes to restructure life and trim ‘infected’ weeds to recreate a lost man.   

                                                        ****

He talks of a routine human attribute. One reads a newspaper, and observes most of the words provide irrelevant gratification and joy. Papers speak of incidents, events, politicians, persons noble and scoundrels, films and actors -hot and frigid that in nutshell constitutes psyche of society. Soldiers’ death somewhere does not create a stir. Families suffer but none worries.  Men are inhuman and cold but sympathy looks false, a two-faced attitude. News about the price of rice, gas, oil and daily necessities attracts interest. A man lives in cocoons of self-image, and death of close relations creates little noise and so a man lives secure in self-built cubicle.

You won’t read about families

grieving, devastated by loss

of never being complete again

those complaining about

the price of rice, gas and parking

of global warming

of how bad your day has gone. (News 18)

Greatly stressful yet warm, agonizing but pleasure giving strain travels in a few verses. Life in routine offers no pleasure. One meets people, talks, smiles, separates and forgets but life moves with a motif and still without purpose. Everyone looks at life through a window and experiences joy of a large park, a mere thought.

            One is mechanical in acts and words, and acts even when none watches. Engaged in monotonous matters without inkling, a man feels focused.  He starts with an objective and ends up without any purpose as vanity stares.  ‘It is Just the Nature of Things’ 116 that a man grows and, ‘…sees the real nature of things, /‘as I move toward the noon of my life/ with these eyes that have witnessed the/ worst in the human condition…’ speaks of life’s experience in bits and in whole but a man reaches everywhere, and still nowhere.

 He is graphic, vivid and genuine. ‘It’s Tuesday’ 133,  a wonderful lyric tells about the business and jokes aged men indulge in, speaks of the puffs and dreams of youngsters at some isolated corners, of pastors getting ready for prayers… nothing escapes him -an observer par excellence. Bitter and unsavoury experiences and encounters educate. Time, place and persons do not always favour and gratify. Even adverse happenings offer a lesson but adversity also exists without a rider, for ‘Everyone has something nice to say.’

‘Smell of Pines Oak Canopy’ 59 sings song of beauty and charm. He is realistic- ‘winters are tough /energy drained /natures’ renewal/ fills me /a seedling/ canopy above.’ Love for nature thrills in ‘Boom Boom Boom’ with a different strain. He is disturbed when ‘gray clouds above weep/ and you/ can’t stop thinking …  and ‘You can’t stop thinking/ as water beads streak across/ windows that surround you/ joining the gray clouds’ ‘Gray Day’ 123. A man relates pains and anguish to the objects of nature and nature sympathizes with the man in suffering, ‘April sun stands behind dreary/ clouds with no intention of casting/ streams of light, rainbows, just the/ melancholy of mist, gentle wind/ drizzle sprays the soggy ground,’ ‘Melancholy’ 124.  

Melancholy haunts a sensitive poet and in contemplative moments, man tries to seek relief in nature, a perennial truth.

g emil experiences life in little bits and pieces and presents a rational viewpoint. He looks at life, paints fantastic word-pictures, and connects each one to everyone without philosophic stress. As one reads verses, one enjoys a pleasing fragrance without intellectual hang-ups and encounters enlightened realization in love despite balmy ennui life offers. Through seemingly little and often unobtrusive incidents and innocuous experiences, he builds a structure of thought and creates a favourable audience response and here, g emil demonstrates poetic strength.

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An author of more than forty books in English and Hindi, P C K Prem (p c katoch)   post-graduated in English literature from Punjab University, Chandigarh in 1970, taught in different colleges before shifting to civil services and then served as a Member, Himachal Public Service Commission.  With three books on criticism in English, seven novels and two collections of short fiction, he has brought out nine volumes of poetry.  Katoch Prem (a winner of several awards) is a poet, novelist, short storywriter and critic in English from Himachal, India