The Boston Area Poetry Scene: A Plethora of Poets and Poetry


There is rarely a day that goes by that I don’t bump into a fellow poet or writer of my acquaintance. In Somerville, where I live, a poet-couple lives in a house behind me, another lives on the adjacent street, and my landlord, a poet and writer of some local fame lives downstairs. The cafes of Somerville Cambridge and Boston overflow with Bards tapping away on laptops and scribbling in dog-eared notebooks. There are poets of the “academy,” poet/scholars of the street, slam poets, black-clad avant-gardes…you name it. And there is room and a venue for them all.

In Cambridge, at 106 Prospect St, just outside Central Square, is the Out of the Blue Art Gallery. This gallery owned by Cambridge’s own Deborah Priestly and Tom Tipton, hosts two well-known poetry venues. The most noted is “Stone Soup Poets,” that meets every Monday night, and was founded and is hosted by veteran Boston poet Jack Powers, who is assisted by the very capable Chad Parenteau.

“Stone Soup” has been around since 1971, at various venues in Boston and Cambridge. Many of the movers and shakers in the poetry world like Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, Robert Creeley, and others have read and have even been published by “Stone Soup Inc.,” the publishing imprint of the organization.

Deborah Priestly, a well-regarded and frequently published poet in her own right, hosts a poetry venue every Saturday night at the gallery. It is named after her ubiquitous dog, titled “Open Bark.”

But the republic of Cambridge is not limited to the Out of the Blue Gallery for poetry. The Cantab Lounge on Mass. Ave in Central Square, Cambridge hosts a competitive slam poetry night every Wednesday night, and the Lizard Lounge, near the Harvard Law School, has a “Poetry Jam” hosted by Jeff Robinson every Sunday night. Here poets of all stripes read their works accompanied by the music of Robinson’s jazz ensemble.

But poetry thrives not only in the galleries and bars, but in the hushed environs of a church. Jessa Pia and Lee Kidd run a poetry venue at the Harvard Epworth Church, just outside Harvard Square every Thursday night. The poetic couple describe their brainchild as a place,”…where everyone gathers weekly to practice their new scribblings.” Pia and Kidd also encourage musicians to partake in the open mic, and more often than not there is a sing-along with audience and performers.


There are perhaps more staid but no less valuable places for a poet to ply his trade. Harris Gardner, known as the impresario of the poetry scene, is the founder of “Tapestry of Voices,” which consists of reading venues at the Forest Hills Chapel in Jamaica Plain, Borders Books in downtown Boston, and perhaps his crowning achievement the annual Boston National Poetry Festival Marathon held at the main branch of the Boston Public Library during poetry month (April) each year. Over 50 poets, both established and emerging, read over the length of a weekend, as well as the general public at the open mic.

Affa Michael Weaver, a highly acclaimed Afro-American poet and professor at Boston’s Simmons College, runs the Zora Neale Hurston Center that has hosted such poets as: Askia Toure, Alicia Ostriker, and Marcia Douglas, to name a few. Weaver said the center is,” A resource to enhance diversity for Simmons and the surrounding community.”

One of the oldest reading series in the country was founded by Amy Lowell and Robert Frost in 1915. Diana Der- Hovanessian, the current president has hosted poetry readings at the Longfellow House in Cambridge for many years now. Personally I have heard such poets as Donald Hall, and Robert Creeley read from their work, while I sat on the well-manicured grounds of this historical site.

One of the newer but vibrant poetry happenings in the area takes place every Saturday at the Au Bon Pain Café, in Somerville’s Davis Square. A group of poets called the “Bagel Bards,” meet every Saturday, chat, kibbitz, edit an online journal “The Wilderness House Literary Review,” and publish an anthology, thanks to the techno-savvy poet Steve Glines. On any given Saturday poets gather in a sort of “Last Supper,” scene, seated and talking animatedly on either side of a long row of tables.

But we really haven’t covered the waterfront. In the metropolitan area poetry groups, venues, magazines crop, thrive and disappear with a breathless frequency. Any poet, of any persuasion, can find a niche, a place to plant a poem, in this rich lyrical soil.

Ibbetson Poet Jennifer Matthews ("Fairytales and Misdemeanors" 2003) http://jeniffermatthews.com/ has released a new acoustic cd, through thundamoon records. I have listened to this cd, and can attest to the fact that her voice and lyrics are beautiful and haunting. This is an accomplished production by an accomplished and passionate artist. Doug Holder/Ibbetson Update to order go to http://www.bostongirlguide.com/ or contact rose@bostongirlguide.com

Way, Way Off the Road. The Memoirs of the Invisible Man. Hugh Fox. Edited by S.R. Glines. $15. ( Ibbetson Street Press 25 School St. Somerville, Mass. 02143) http://lulu.com/ http://ibbetsonpress.com/

Hugh Fox, in his memoir of the small press movement, “Way, Way off the Road,” quotes the poet Charles Plymell:

“…the generation that came after the Beats, was overpowered by the Beats themselves. All that media hype. My god, the media fell in love with them. They were practically rock stars. And the post-Beats, the Hippie-Yippies, whatever you want to call them, were lost in the Beat’s shadow. They were and still are invisible!”

Plymell defined the group of poets Fox feels he was part of. Fox was solidly in his 30’s, a nerdy academic, equipped with a PhD and a foundation grant, when he picked up a copy of “Crucifix in a Death Hand,” by the “dirty old man,” of poetry Charles Bukowski. Fox was thrilled by the Buk’s use of language and felt a new door was opened for him outside the stagnant air of the academy. Fox wound up doing a critical study of the man. Here is an account of his first meeting with Bukowski:

“So I’d gone over and found him in this motel-hotel place in Hollywood. You know, the usual tattered, potted palms out in front, everything kind of run down.”

Fox told Bukowski that he wanted to do a critical study of his work. Fox was sick of Eliot and Pound, and wanted a taste of the wild side. Here is Bukowski’s response according to Fox:

“ …nothing wrong with Eliot and Pound, they’re some of my best friends, he answered, got up and started emptying the wall of bookcases that contained all of his printed work, all the books, all the magazines. Went into a closet and started taking out suitcases and throwing the books and mags inside.”

Bukowski said: “Ok I can trust you. I’m gonna give you the whole schmear. And if you find any duplicates, keep them.”

Fox wound up writing the first critical study of the man, as well as studies of Winans, and Lifshin, and began his life as a wandering-Jewish scribe, recording the comings, goings, happenings and personalities in the small press for the last 40 years.

Fox recounts his years at COSMEP, a seminal press organization, that he was a founding board member of, and his years of publishing the avant-garde lit mag “Ghost Dance.” Fox, who admits he has a very manic side, has written literally thousands of reviews of poetry books, chaps, and small press publications, as well has edited the groundbreaking anthology “The Living Underground.”

This book is not a straight narrative. It reads the way Fox talks. It is written in a rapid fire stream of consciousness style—so that often the reader has to catch his or her breath. His description of fellow writers is often inspired. Here is a portrait of a down-at-the-heels Richard Nason, a movie critic for TIME magazine,

“And when he’d come into the office out of the Captain Midnight dark, you always smelled the booze on him. Pickled full time. Fedora. Sports jacket. Topcoat. Remnants of former glory. Only when he pulled his topcoat off there would be five pens in the front pockets of his sports coat, all of them uncapped, leaking into the coat itself, another uncapped pen in his shirt pocket also leaking, so it looked like he had been harpooned and was bleeding blue blood.’”

Fox has an inquisitive, fascinating, and hungry mind, and he covers a wide range of subjects from drug-induced writing, ancient Indian cultures, men’s sexual prowess and perversions, you name it. In the books there are countless anecdotes about personages from the world of the small press like: Lyn Lifshin, A.D. Winans, Harry Smith, Len Fulton, Richard Kostelantz, Allen Ginsberg, “The Boston Underground,” Bill Costley, Sam Cornish , Bill Blatty, Donald Hall, and Fox has an original take on them all.

In ways Fox’s literary history reminds me of Howard Zinn’s writing. He gives you a view of the outsider, and how the outsider views things. This is a history you won’t find in the classrooms, although it should be there. Fox makes darkness visible, with this iconoclastic, zany and compelling memoir.

Doug Holder/Ibbetson Update

tnr # 37
Review
Walter L. Maroney
http://www.tnrlitmag.net

The Fall 2005 issue (#37) of the the new renaissance (tnr), an Arlington-based periodical with a long history of presenting excellent work by a wide range of international artists, makes for a fascinating, if ultimately saddening, read. Over the years, tnr has carved a niche for itself, by bringing together a diverse mix of visual art, poetry, prose fiction, lead articles, and memoirs. Given such an eclectic range of media and content, the challenge for a journal as ambitious as tnr is to impose some sort of order on the material, or, more precisely, to order the chosen material so that it speaks to the reader as more than just a well-selected miscellany. tnr tends to achieve that goal by arranging its pieces thematically, so that, if read cover to cover, the reader may come away with an approximation of the experience of having read a novel: the whole is intended to deliver a message that amplifies the substance of its parts.

This issue for example, is dominated by thoughts, meditations and evidence of loss. It opens with a lead article co-written by H. Gyde Lund and Ashbindu Singh, that is part personal observation and part a statistical compilation about the rapidly increasing deforestation of the planet’s rain forests. A salient quote:

The number of species of birds alone in one square mile of the Amazon rain forest is more than the combined species in all of North America (Gore 1992). Destroying the rainforests is comparable to destroying an unknown planet – we have no idea what we’d be losing. Yet if deforestation continues at its current rate, the world’s tropical rainforests will be wiped out within 40 years.

Well, that’s interesting, arguably true, and certainly disturbing; but in the context of an arts journal, it seems a little inexplicably reportorial. Until, that is, one begins to read the ensuing stories and poetry. The rainforest meditation, for example, is followed by two poems by Daniel Tobin, the first a vision of a wasted western mesa that ends with the native leader Black Elk in a vision quest, imagining lost animals. The second, modeled after Munch’s The Scream, transfers that wasteland into the mind of a man, head shaped like a light bulb, while boats move in the distance toward a vanishing point.

From there, tnr takes us on a wide ranging journey across continents and into souls. The theme is constant: that we have no idea what we are losing; and yet we go on, doing all the things that cause our loss until our losses are staring us in the (sometimes screaming) face. One story, Louise Berchine, by M.E. McMullen, deals with an adolescent crush, minutely remembered by the now mature narrator with a compulsive personality disorder, that ends with the seemingly ordinary observation that the girl, the object of all his internalized affection, simply “grew up, moved away, met a nice guy, married him, had three kids that she drove to school in a new silver SUV.” But that ordinariness takes a sudden turn into pain in the following sentence:. “She never once gave a thought to her brother’s buddy for the rest of her life, but he thought about her every day …. Tough duty.” This piece finds an odd resonance with the story, Obsession by Bruce Douglas Reeves. In Reeve’s story, an apparently aging man ruminates, over a distance of decades, about his seeming friendship with an English family in post-war London. He is smitten by the wife and, for reasons he never discerns, she allows them to have a one-night affair shortly before he posts himself back to America. This quiet story is a gem of things left unsaid, and the reader comes away understanding that the narrator has never understood anything about the woman, and her war-bruised family, and pitifully little about himself - - losses perceived and unperceived.

There is a story, Greetings From Portugal, by Kenneth Rapoza about a young Portuguese student, on fellowship at an American university, whose guilt at having a barely consequential affair with a fellow student is so great that it reaches across the Atlantic to touch his fiancée; a devastating memoir Graves in London, by Barbara Honigmann, translated from the German by Lauren Hahn, of a woman’s lifelong struggle to understand her Jewish refugee mother’s adamant refusal to address her own past. This journey ends at the unmarked site of her grandparents’ graves. Four poems of Liu Yung, translated by Julie Landau: one starts with an image of boredom at a window that morphs into a cry of regret over giving up a woman years past; another, written while in exile, that is all of a moment, observing how “last nights third watch rain/Did add one more cool day to this uncertain life.”[1] An essay by Norman Ball on Keats’ “When I Have Fears That I May Cease To Be” that closes with a crushing invitation to “join me, dear friends in never joining anyone again. Together we can honor Keats’s memory, relegating togetherness to the dustbin of history.”

All in all, tnr #37 is a powerful collection of works, of which I’ve cited only a selection that do in fact deepen and enrich each other by spinning a hundred different skeins on a similar subject: the world, our lives, their fragility, all refracted through a plethora of souls. Makes for a pretty remarkable read – and a tough duty.

Ibbetson Update/ Walter R. Maroney







FYI:

Walter Maroney is a lawyer, poet, short story writer occasional storyteller and (so far) unpublished novelist. He lives in Manchester, New Hampshire with his wife and two sons.
























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Naiad by Marina Tsvetayeva of the name Father Neptune for the god called ??????-????, instead of some phrase closer to the Russian’s sound of “Okeana” for Ocean.






1 One further note: tnr adopts the practice, which is often not done for reasons of space, paper and money, of printing translated works in their original language. This is a profound gift, which allows readers with facility in one or another language to consult the artist’s original phrasing when working one’s way through a translated piece. A small pleasure, maybe, but a genuine bonus, as well. This reader, for example, spent an enjoyable few minutes debating in his head with Karen Braucher and Laura Weeks, their choice, in translating the poem

Mad Hatter’s Review is among the most content rich literary web sites on the internet. Its depth and scope are almost scary. Equally captivating are the graphics and ease of maneuvering from one location to another. I have come to realize that literary magazines, whether print or electronic, are the children of their founders. It is not surprising that Mad Hatter’s Review is the brain child of Carol Novack. As Novack’s bio tells us, she “is a re-emerging, angst-ridden writer of sociopolitical neurotic rants and raves, comic emails, and image drenched, lyrical whatnots.” Carol's frequently enigmatic and totally misunderstood writings have appeared in numerous anthologies. One of her prose poem narratives, "Destination," was selected as a best of Web Del Sol fiction. She's attempting a blog: http://carolnovack.blogspot.com. I asked Carol to provide a few samples of her work so readers could better know her mind, but first I wanted to know how Carol Novack could manage and sustain a site of this scale.
Q: I don't think I have ever seen an electronic zine with as many editors, covering as many topic areas as Mad Hatters' Review. Amazing. You must be a very persuasive, charismatic person to get all these good folks to help you out?
A: Hell if I know! Maybe I've always wanted to live on a Kibbutz. Maybe because I have no siblings. Maybe it's my cyberitic pheromones.
Q: How do you handle the triaging of submissions out and back from your editors?
A: I don't. Editors are not "readers," as in most other magazines. Decision-making is a group process. We congregate virtually in a secret place (or sometimes, secretly in a virtual place) during every reading period over a few flagons of Aussie shiraz-grenache and discuss submissions as they arrive. If we all go "wow" over a sub, it's accepted. If one or two of us wonder what the author was thinking when s/he submitted the whatever/s to MHR, and it's obvious that the sub's not for us, it's rejected. If some of us are hot and others cold or tepid, the sub is usually (ultimately) rejected with an invitation to please submit again. Occasionally, I or I and my associate editor, Alla Michelle Watson, overrule the majority or make the ultimate decision when a consensus can't be reached and one or both of us feel strongly one way or the other. Individual editors often work with authors, suggesting revisions. Some highly original writers make grammatical mistakes that make us stand on our ears. While such mistakes are irksome, they're curable. The authors are usually happy to work with us.
Q: When was MHR born and what was your core goal in creating it?
A: At first, I envisioned becoming a multimillionaire and star. When people laughed at me, I altered my vision.
As I've said in my "Editor's Rave," "[w]ay back in summer, 2004, I decided that the Internets [sic] didn't have enough exciting multimedia "literary" magazines, not to mention edgy ones. I envisioned something real flashy and eccentric, experimental, collaborative, multicultural, playful and even meaningful, in the social change/progressive sense." I wanted to create a unique online publication and I knew that I'd enjoy the process. The magazine emerged in an early version of its current form in March, 2005.
Q: I mean, there are SO MANY e-zines popping up; why bother? Can one e-zine really rise to the top?
A: Good question. I must be mad. Well, of course I am!
Seriously, it's not a matter of one e-zine rising to the top like la crème de la crème (a tired phrase I find absurd). There's no big Olympics for artsy e-zines, thank the cybergods. There are quite a few excellent online magazines, and hundreds or maybe thousands of mediocre ones, and worse, and far worse. Hatters and friends find most magazines publishing the same types of write-by-the-MFA-rules stories and poems, the kind that make us yawn, if not scream – you know, those gritty realistic stories about bad marriages, divorces, dying relatives, kids discovering morality and sex, and the same puerile "comic" tales of college students on sexual rampages, "shocking" tales about brilliant writer dope addicts nearly killing themselves, heartbreaking tales about unloved children, etc. Might as well watch made for tv movies. Very few quality magazines publish writings by relatively unknown authors who are writing original, out-of-stream pieces, literature that sounds like literature, demonstrating lyricism, playfulness, love of language. Very few magazines are visually and aurally exciting, as well as truly entertaining. "Entertaining" is a consistent adjective that readers use when they talk about MHR. Yet, MHR is "literary" in its focus on language, originality, imagination and substance over schlock and shock. Quality literature can be entertaining!
Moreover, we offer a variety of media: mini-movies, cartoons and parodies, art galleries, columns (soon expanding to include those by "guests"), contests, reviews and interviews, plus art and music custom-made to enhance the writings we publish. Special thanks to our incredible Art Editor Tantra Bensko.
A review of MHR Issue 3 in Eclectica cited the artwork as "bordering on the astounding." Authors whose works we accept are given the option to either recite their works or request musical accompaniment; we have some excellent composers on staff. Next issue, we'll present a "mental" multimedia theater and visual poems created by our new Director of Digital Multimedia Fusions. It's all so much fun and I know I sound like an overly proud mother.
Q: Okay, I have to know. "Paper or Electronic" -- which form do you think has most credibility? What form thrusts a writer's work into the great "out there" and gets it read by the right people, like agents and publishers?
A: I think that both forms have equal "credibility," though the "establishment" is still pushing the concept that print magazines are innately superior to webzines. This makes no sense for various reasons, one being that there are incredible writers published on the Web and e-zines can offer so much more than print magazines, in terms of innovative multimedia presentations, exciting collaborations, virtually unlimited space and expandability. (Ok, so you can't get into bed and cuddle up with a warm webzine.) Imagine MHR as a print mag – the cost of reproducing the glorious artworks would be prohibitive. And we'd have to include a CD of the music, but how would one manage easily to play simultaneously the recitation or music made for the text one were reading? And what of our animated art and movies? One can't reproduce them in print! The integrated visual and audio experiences presented online would be impossible to duplicate in a print mag.
Agents do read Internet magazines; I'd wager that some actually scout webzines for talent. I was contacted by an agent who'd read one of my quirky comic pieces in an online magazine. In fact, the agent encouraged me to write a novel based on the characters in that piece, but he also urged me to seek publication of my stories in well-known print magazines in order to impress putative publishers of the putative novel. So okay, the big publishers and agents want print credits from their authors. There's this snobbish perspective that print publications are superior to online publications, and there's this crazy "top tier" approach most writers buy into – e.g., better to publish in The New Yorker or Harper's than literary magazines such Mississippi Review; better Ploughshares than Conjunctions, Tin House than New England Review; better Wanky Dink (stapled print magazine published by the Ohoochitaha County Poetry Society) than Mad Hatters' Review. One sees the same "successful" authors over and over again in the "top" publications, rarely the innovative/risk-taking writers, but the tried and true, the ones who are selling. "We welcome innovative/experimental writers" is most frequently a sad joke.
Writers are tripping over themselves in order to get into top tier print magazines -- if not the top tier than the next to top or the next to the next to the top and so on ad nauseum and absurdum – that's the reigning mentality in this brutally competitive field, and most of us succumb to this mode of conventional thinking. Most people want to write like well-published X and Y, with their perfectly crafted characters, arcs, plots, and resolutions, or maybe like B and C, those awfully witty, stylish boys and gals so popular at readings. Few print mags pay well, and pay is supposedly an incentive. But how many writers of fiction and poetry make decent incomes from publishing in magazines that pay? Hell, I'd love to pay my contributors more than the token the usual "paying" print (or occasional online) magazine offers to include itself as a member of the "paying" market. Instead, we give our contributors custom-made art and music, a nice fat bio with pics, and global exposure. Our artists and musicians also benefit, exposure-wise, from the collaborative package. One volunteer artist won an award for a painting she'd created for an author's poems.
Just think how much exposure a writer gets when s/he publishes online. People from all over the world can access her work. Compare the potential readership to that of even the most prestigious literary (print) magazine and the reasonably popular or well-known webzine obviously wins hands down.
Judging by the Best Seller lists and ads in Barnes and Nobles windows, the vast majority of publishers and agents are going for memoirs -- memoirs are the latest craze. (Big yawn from some of us.) Those "right" people are following their green noses, looking for comic pop novels and heartbreak tales that will appeal to the literate masses. Hardly surprising for business people. They're certainly not going for innovative, surprising, and intellectually challenging fiction like Raymond Federman's (we're featuring him, and also presenting translations of avant-garde French poets). Federman is not a New Yorker writer! And lyrical/rhythm and image-driven prose? What's that? Thank goodness for Dalkey Archive, the FC2 Collective, and the other quality independent presses out there (e.g. Ravenna Press and Ugly Duckling Presse), that print books by unconventional writers as a labor of love. Actually, I'm hard pressed to figure out what print or online zines persistently demonstrate a love of narrative prose that focuses on lyricism and imagery rather than STORY. How many of those sought after print zines would publish an unknown Robbe-Grillet or Borges?
So what's the future? I believe that as long as the telephone monopolies in the USA aren't permitted to charge people for every click, USA-based Internet art and literary zine will thrive and become more and more accepted as credible publications that offer top quality creations. If monopolies win out over here, webzines in other countries will thrive without much of an American audience.
Q: Your site is very active, I love how you post bios and photos, you have so much going on, WOW you must be exhausted. Who is your web slave? You have to pay her more money!
A: Yes, it's exhausting but so rewarding to create MHR with my staff, and the possibilities are seemingly endless --- what can be done with the Internet as a communicative, expressive tool. Our web slave is Shirley Harshenin, maestress of nutheadproductions, a wonderful, creative web designer in BC, Canada. I don't believe in saints, but she is the most patient person I've ever known, putting up with all sorts of confusion and alterations and always willing to expend the considerable time and energy it takes us to create each issue. She definitely deserves a salary in the six figures. Fortunately, Shirley feels like one of the gaggle, which she certainly is (a true Mad Hatter) so she doesn't expect to be paid her worth, at this time. I feel really lucky to have found her. Shirley comes up with great ideas; the mag is a labor of love and passion for all of us.
Q: Alla Michelle -- How did you find Carol Novack and her Mad Hatters?
A: I didn't! Carol found me. She read my bio, my flash fiction on Zoetrope (excellent resource for writers, btw), my pieces published in various e-zines and then…she still offered me a role of Assistant Editor! Carol is amazing. She has gathered the most talented editors, artists and musicians, and anchored us solidly in cyberspace as one of the most innovative, far-reaching e-zines out there. What I admire most about her is that she didn't wait until all the pieces fell perfectly into their spot from the get-go; the mag evolved over the past year, and continues to push the boundaries of creative imagination, now offering a truly prodigious variety of media. I guess Turgenev was right when he said: If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything is ready, we shall never begin!
Q: Give us some of your favorite Carol Novack first lines and paragraphs. Maybe this will give potential submitters a clue as to where your Top Hatter head is at (or isn't).
A: First lines:
1. “In Siberia, the trains are exhausted from the smells of potatoes, onions and sots; and they are never fast enough." (from A Tourist in Siberia, published in Milk Magazine)2. “In Utah she will meet a man of god in a brown suit white socks and tassel loafers, a little bit old not at all like the usual cleft-chinned ones in deep blue or sometimes oil green Joe's Garage t-shirts and running shoes, disappointed Norman Mailer men with dangerous low flying pheromones and large plastic dice and Barbie dolls dangling from their dashboards; no she will not meet the man everyone says she will meet again and again particularly in Utah she imagines so many versions but he is always burned with youth bursting with seeds like a fat cactus, always obsessed." (from A Tourist in Utah)3. “Foolhardy with the three of them you said but hardly a fool seeing full well how well I played with Jimmy Timmy and Bop in all our backyards when the mothers were out they had me I had them down on the perfect lawns they would plant their seeds and they were all three big like columns, Corinthian, Ionic and Dorian, my favorite one Bop the laconic Ionic one ramming like a spring lamb." (from Power Trilogy)
A: A few favorite paragraphs:
"Now it's your time to listen, so listen. I have this to say. Picture a donkey with a cargo of bananas and hens. She is stumbling on stones through the night, smells a bewildering frenzy of unidentified flowers, somewhere under the shared sky of dim, far flung stars. She hears the voices of creatures she can neither smell nor see and trembles, feeling vulnerable to their genetic destinies. Inevitably, the donkey, exhausted, sits down by the roadside if she is allowed. Her nose longs for only one scent, her eyes for only one vision, and her ears for only one sound." (from Interview with Self)
"Comes a dry, quiet Sunday right for reading Leibniz and counting Monads at the edge of the field when I see the bride rising out of the flat planet, nearing fast with veil and train, and she puts her finger to her lips, maybe thinks I'm going to tell my dead daddy he should rise from the mud to get a shotgun. She's running so like desperation that her left off-white shoe takes off from her right foot, landing on a goat's ear. I hear the constipated yearning strains of Wagner and surmise that the cops are almost on her heels 'cause she's a bit dark complicated and in these parts the cops are always chasing whoever doesn't look like the underside of a hamburger roll. So I roll on my back, making like a tailless dog with my paws in the air to show her I'm not in attack mode and she smiles suddenly and totally which tells me everything I've ever wanted to know about my unexpected glorious future. And she sees right then and there how smart I am despite my issues with set tables; she grasps my hands to lift me up, floats a dewy caterpillar kiss on my little boy lips, attaching me like magic to something surprisingly elegant beyond myself. Says Spinoza: "All happiness or unhappiness solely depends upon the quality of the object to which we are attached by love." (from My Life with the Runaway Bride, Part I)
"In the beginnings endings of galaxies exploding imploding, birthing stars together falling apart together twinkling and belching the indigestible jet sum phoenixes and flotsam; before and after, is all the zero times zero, meaning one in its parts fractions of no things parting departing breathing always in and out breaking up into fractious star bits ego bits id bits alpha bit soup, genetic stew, caves, pyramids, igloos, coffins, mud huts, holes and monkfish revolving madly breaking into molecules into galaxies exploding imploding, birthing stars falling twinkling and belching the indigestible jet sum corsets and flotsam, casino chips, pterodactyls, blue hats, canaries, pompoms and pantaloons, the hollow cries of wolves." (from In the beginning is).
I found the quality of writing on Mad Hatter Review to be consistently high. I remain amazed at its scale and complexity. But what I loved most about it is how it reflects the curious mind of Carol Novack. It is both her electronic magazine, and her work of art.
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Charles P. Ries lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His narrative poems, short stories, interviews and poetry reviews have appeared in over one hundred and twenty print and electronic publications. He has received three Pushcart Prize nominations for his writing and most recently read his poetry on National Public Radio’s Theme and Variations, a program that is broadcast over seventy NPR affiliates. He is the author of THE FATHERS WE FIND, a novel based on memory. Ries is also the author of five books of poetry — the most recent entitled, The Last Time which was released by The Moon Press in Tucson, Arizona. He is the poetry editor for Word Riot (www.wordriot.org) and on the board of the Woodland Pattern Bookstore in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Most recently he has been appointed to the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission. You may find additional samples of his work by going to: http://www.literarti.net/Ries/ .

I finally got a caricature "The American Dissident" http://theamericandissident.org put me in their series of Lit Toons. I have been mocked with the best, Including Harold Bloom, Martin Espada and a host of others....

Mark Pawlak is a longtime editor of the respected small press “Hanging Loose,” http://www.hangingloosepress.com , and the author of the poetry collection “Official Versions.”
His poetry and prose have appeared in The Best American Poetry 2006 (Billy Collins, ed.), New American Writing, Off the Coast, Pemmican, and The Saint Ann’s Review, among other places. In addition, he is editor of four anthologies, most recently, Present/Tense: Poets in the World, a collection of contemporary American political poetry, featuring work from some of the country’s best-known writers. Pawlak is Director of Academic Support Programs at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he also teaches mathematics. He has been the recipient of two Massachusetts Artist Fellowship awards. He lives in Cambridge with his wife and his teenage son. Mark was a guest on my Somerville Community Access TV show: “Poet to Poet/Writer to Writer.”



Doug Holder: Marc, you have been at Hanging Loose Press for some twenty-six years. Tell me a bit about the press and your involvement.

Mark Pawlak: Forty years ago Hanging Loose was literally loose sheets of paper inside of an envelope with a cover on it. It literally hung loose. We used to advertise that if you wanted to edit the magazine, you could throw the pages you don’t like in the garbage, and the ones you like you can tack on the wall. Over the years it has evolved to perfect bound.

Doug Holder: What is your press run?

Mark Pawlak: 1500.

Doug Holder: How did you get involved with Hanging Loose?

Mark Pawlak: I got involved through the poet Denise Levertov. She was a contributing editor. She taught a poetry class at MIT, when I was a student. She published a supplement to issue No. 12 in 1970 that included her students’ work. That’s how I was introduced to “Hanging Loose,” through her. Subsequently, I met Ron Schreiber, another of the founding editors, at U/Mass. Later the editors invited me to join them, when on member stepped down.

Doug Holder: This is the 40th Anniversary of Hanging Loose. What keeps the press together?

Mark Pawlak: This year is our 40th. Many small presses are one person operations, and it is a labor of love. We have four different people editing Hanging Loose so when one of us is ill or doesn’t have the energy, we just pick up the slack. That has helped us through the difficult years. Presses with only one or two people might have folded.

Doug Holder: You say this is a labor of love. You don’t make much or any money from your efforts. What keeps you keeping on?

Mark Pawlak: I am a “holy fool.” It has become a community of writers for me. There are people I have never actually met who I consider dear friends. It does distract me from my own work. It took me three years to complete “Official Versions.” The press distracted me.

Doug Holder: You teach math at U/Mass/Boston. How does this fit with the art of writing poetry?

Mark Pawlak: It does and it doesn’t. It does in the sense of the esthetic of math—getting to the solution, much like knowing you finished a poem. There is a formal precision in poetry and math.

I was a math geek as a kid. I did read some poetry on my own. I discovered Whitman one summer and fell in love with him. I am from Buffalo, NY—a really provincial, working class place. I wasn’t until I encountered Denise Levertov at MIT; during my final year at college did I try my hand at poetry.

Doug Holder: I know I use the newspapers as fodder for my poetry. How about you?

Mark Pawlak: I read The Boston Globe and The New York Times. I pick up the METRO on the train, and if I am really bored I read The Boston Herald. I am always foraging. The language, human interest stories interest me, as well as the political pronouncements of the government, all sources of my poetry. I also have used Billboard’s Best Song titles. I did a poem that involved Hallmark greeting card clichés. I am interested in language out in the world and how it is used and abused.

Doug Holder: It has been said that your poetry cuts through “political doubletalk.” Do you consider yourself a political poet?

Mark Pawlak: I do. In the sense I want to empower people to think critically how language is used. I would like them to understand the disinformation of the headlines. I want to speak plainly.

Doug Holder: Some people say that political poetry is no more than polemic disguised as poetry..

Mark Pawlak: It certainly can be. Political poetry has been accused of being too much of the moment. But what’s more permanent than war, oppression and injustice?

Doug Holder: I characterized you as a “lyrical junkman,” in that you sort of forage through newspapers, ephemera, etc… for words and phrases to flesh out a poem. Is this fair?

Mark Pawlak: Poetry can be conservative. I want to take what’s around me—basic language, and put it together in informative ways.

Doug Holder: Is being an editor drudgery?

Mark Pawlak: It can be drudgery. As you get more practice, you are able to read a few lines—by the energy and language—you can decide where a poem is going or not going. So you can minimize drudgery. There is always the excitement of finding unexpected things. It happens a lot. The thing I am most proud about is that we have a special section in our magazine for high school writers. They are not jaded. High school students are very open to experience and language.

Doug Holder: Is it necessary to have a higher education to be a poet?

Mark Pawlak: You have to be able to read and read deeply. I don’t think a PhD is necessary. Denise Levertov said that poets who became grad. students needed a number of years to shed their skins to get back to their “work.”

Doug Holder

Eric Greinke

Up North. Harry Smith. Eric Greinke. ( Presa S Press http://www.presapress.com/ ) $6




Presa Press has released a chapbook of poetry by Harry Smith and Eric Greinke. Harry Smith is well-known in small press circles as publisher of "The Smith," and a founding member of COSMEP, ( a seminal small press organization). Eric Greinke was the publisher of "Pilot Press Books" in the 70's, and recently founded the Presa Press. Both Smith and Greinke choose the territory of northern/rural/wilderness environs to set their poems. In Smith's case it is Maine, and in Greinke's Northern Michigan. Being a dyed-in-the wool city boy, with a need for the smell of asphalt to keep me honest, I approached the work with trepidation. But these two poets welcome the inspiration, respite and solace the hinterlands seem to offer. In Smith's poem "Paths." the reader gleans something about the journey of life from a wilderness trail:

" When I was young, I made my paths...
I saw my paths as metaphors
for all my art and thought, and now
the forest and the bog reclaim my toil
I keep no trails; I blunder on
through thickets green beyond conclusion."

Greinke's poem "Green Wood," is sort of a "This Old House Poem." The house at first is made from unformed green wood, and later becomes something more solid. In this poem we learn about the life of a house, but more importantly the man:

"The wood was swollen,
Heavy and green
Sap bubbled
Around the spikes
As I drove them in.

I burned through
Two sabre-saws
cured through
The wet, green wood.
A year later
When it cleared,
It was so hard & dark
That no nail could penetrate."

Hey... if you ain't out of the woods yet, you will be well-served by these two trail blazing poets.

Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update

For Immediate ReleaseLiterature:

New Issues ReleaseMay, 2006Mary Curtin, Events Coordinator, 617-241-9664, 617-470-5867 (cell), marycurtin@comcast.netPeter Coyle, Store Manager, 617-629-4840, info@mcintyreandmoore.comDoug Holder, Ibbetson St. Press, 617-628-2313, dougholder@post.harvard.eduMcIntyre & Moore Booksellershosts theIbbetson Street PressIssue No.19Reading and CelebrationSaturday, June 10, 3:00 pm(Somerville, MA) McIntyre & Moore Booksellers hosts the Ibbetson Street Press: Issue No.19 Reading and Celebration. Saturday, June 10, 3:00 pm at McIntyre & Moore Booksellers, 255 Elm St. in Davis Square, Somerville, near the Red Line. Free and open to all, with an open read and reception following; wheelchair accessible. 15% book discount* for all those attending [*discount available for day of event only]. For information call McIntyre & Moore Booksellers (617) 629-4840 or log onto www.mcintyreandmoore.com.Somerville's Independent Poetry Press, the IBBETSON STREET PRESS, will have a poetry reading in celebration of its recent release Issue No.19. Featured readers include Doug Holder, Marc Goldfinger, Lainie Senechal, Steve Glines, Robert K. Johnson, Dorian Brooks, and others. The Ibbetson Street Press has published award-winning books of local and national writers for about eight years. Recent issues of IBBETSON STREET were picks of the month by the Small Press Review.Founded by Doug Holder (http://www.authorsden.com/douglasholder), along with Dianne Robitaille and Richard Wilhelm, the press is dedicated to publishing poets from all walks of life. Poets such as Lyn Lifshin, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, X .J. Kennedy, Jack Powers, Diana Der-Hovanessian, Hugh Fox, and historian Howard Zinn have praised Ibbetson's books. Each issue of IBBETSON STREET has a large sampling of local poets. For further information on the press, see www.ibbetsonpress.com.PAST AND PRESENT CONTRIBUTORS INVITED TO READ!McIntyre & Moore Booksellerswww.mcintyreandmoore.comOn the Red Line, in the heart of Davis SquareGreater Boston's best source for scholarly used booksOpen for browsing 7 days a week until 11 pm###--submitted by marycurtinproductionsc/o Mary CurtinPO Box 290703, Charlestown, MA 02129617-241-9664, 617-470-5867

(cell), marycurtin@comcast.net"dedicated to staging insightful entertainment, particularly in non-traditional venues"http://www.marycurtinproductions.com

"Way, Way, Off The Road." by Hugh Fox edited by Steve Glines
(Ibbetson Street Press-2006)

To order go to: http://www.lulu.com

Introduction

Several years ago the “Ibbetson Street Press,” publisheda Hugh Fox poetry collection: “Angel of Death.” I had neveractually met Fox in the flesh, but I was aware of his substantialcontributions to the small press over the past 40 years. Foxwas a founding member of the “Pushcart Prize,” a foundingboard member of COSMEP, (a seminal small press organization),edited the groundbreaking anthology “The Living Underground,”to name just a few achievements.One day, in my apartment on Ibbetson Street, inSomerville, Mass., I was just about asleep when I heard mydoorbell ring. I went to answer it and this man of a “certainage,” with long gray hair sprouting from the sides of his capand a heavy Bronx-like accent said: “ Hi Doug, what do ya’have in there, a Blonde?” I said: “Well my wife is here, she’ssort of blondish.” I asked him in but I guess he sensed I was inno condition for company. He declined and promptly took acab back to his hotel.Since then I have had the opportunity to meet him on acouple of occasions. Fox is full of anecdotes about many of thestumblebums, poets, poseurs, players, publishers, editors, withall their infinite variety, on the small press scene. I am glad thismanuscript has seen the light of day. And when you read ithopefully you will see the ‘”light” too.

Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Street Press

Dick Lourie Brings The Blues to the “News”


Somerville poet, publisher and Blues musician Dick Lourie, is a man who is never without a project. Currently he is working on a collection of poetry: “Overdue At The Crossroad,” that deals with the vibrant Blues community in Clarksdale, Mississippi, that Lourie visits frequently. Lourie talked to the “News” staff at our regular contributors meeting. Although Lourie has been a Somerville resident since 1981, he feels equally at home in Clarksdale. Clarksdale, although much smaller than Somerville, is similar, in that it has a large and vibrant population of musicians. Deep in the south, Clarksdale has an unusual degree of sophistication because according to Lourie, “Many international visitors pass through for the Blues Festival and the plethora of blues clubs.” Lourie said he has an “obsession,” with the town, and has become friends with many of the accomplished musicians and singers who reside in this burg. He hopes to have the poetry book out next year, and is currently soliciting a number of University presses.

Meanwhile Lourie remains active in a Doo-Wop group, and performs regularly with “Weeping Willy”, a Blues musician in the Boston area. Currently, Lourie and his wife Abbey Friedman (a documentary filmmaker) are working on a film documenting a Boston-based Afro-American singing group the “G-Clefs.” This group has been performing together for well-over 40 years, in such venues as the “Apollo Theatre,” in Harlem, to name one.

Lourie, who considers himself a poet first, and a musician a close second, told the “News” reporters that he continues to be intimately involved with the “Hanging Loose Press” that is based in Brooklyn, NY, with former Somerville resident Mark Pawlak and others. Lourie has several poetry books to his credit, most recently: “Ghost Radio Blues” that brags an accompanying CD.

Lourie, who played his 60 year old sax at the end of the meeting, said that his poems are often related to the 12 bar Blues form. Lourie said that poetry and music have always been related. Their separation has only been a relatively recent development in modern cultural history. Lourie, ever the iconoclast, ended the meeting with an unexpected remark: “I realized I was never going to make a living in music, so I went into poetry.” Spoken like a true artist!

Doug Holder

Author Steve Edington Sees “The Beat Face of God.”



Steve Edington is the author of “The Beat Face of God,” a book that explores the spiritual aspects of the “Beat” generation of writers who emerged on the American literary landscape in the 1940’s and 1950’s. Among the poets and writers in this rebel group of writers were Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg, to name a few. Edington, a Unitarian Universalist minister and “Beat” Generation Scholar, argues that these writers were religious, but not in the conventional sense. I spoke with Edington on my Somerville Community Access TV show “Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.”

Doug Holder: You are a minister. How does being a religious leader fit with your love of “Beat” literature that often glorifies drugs, promiscuity, and things not usually associated with the religious life?

Steve Edington: Writing the book was a way to bring together two of the worlds I move around in. Unitarian Universalist is a very liberal form of Protestantism. My other interest was with the “Beats” that I had since I was in theological school in the 1960’s. The way I saw them coming together is a theme in the book. A colleague of mine offered this thought and definition of the nature of religion: “It’s our human response to the reality of being alive and knowing we will die.” It is a way we find meaning and purpose in death and life in the face of our mortality. I really took a look at the writing of the “Beats,” and decided this is what they were really trying to do. This was beyond some of the more self-destructive behaviors that they were engaged in. Jack Kerouac said that the “Beat” generation was a religious generation. When Kerouac was on the “Steve Allen Show” and was asked why he wrote: “On The Road,” he said: “Well, I wrote the book because we all are going to die.” This caught a lot of people off-guard. What he really meant by that harks back to the definition we discussed. There are two sides to “On the Road.” One is the America of the 1940’s, and the other is the soul of Kerouac, in the person of Sal Paradise ( a character in “On the Road”). He was trying to answer the question: “Who am I?” “Where do I belong?” Kerouac said on a radio show: “I want God to show his face,” hence the title of the book.

DH: So you choose to concentrate on the positive spiritual quest of the “Beats.” You don’t advocate all the other stuff attributed to the “Beats,” like using drugs, etc…?

SE: I have a twenty-two year old son. I have tried to give him an appreciation of these people. I would not want him to live the life that some of these people lived. Interesting. He has one more year of college to go. He and his friend want to drive across country this summer. How can I say, no? He has been hearing about “On the Road,” all his life, and now he wants to do his own road trip. I would never be an advocate for these people’s self-destructive behavior. I would ask that people try to look at what they were searching for. Try to find some meaning in life. The “Beats” tried to find meaning against the backdrop of cultural conformity.

DH: Were “Beat” generation writers like Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg, religious people?

SE: I would say so. Kerouac was a life-long Catholic. He was born a Catholic and he had a Catholic burial. He tried to embrace his Catholicism, later her embraced Buddhism. Kerouac was very captivated by the concept of the tortured Jesus. There was something about that suffering that really attracted him and caused him a lot of trouble.

DH: Did Ginsberg wrestle with his Judaism?

SE: Ginsberg went easier with his Judaism than Kerouac did with his Catholicism. I don’t think Ginsberg ever renounced his Judaism, he just sort of added Buddhism on to it. His poem “Kaddish” ( Kaddish being a Jewish prayer for the dead), is an incredibly moving poem. His poem “Howl,” is a walk through the demonic in search for the holy. The “Beats” they felt were walking through the demonic aspects of the society they were in. They were in the end looking for a divine dimension to life.

DH: In 1948, Jack Kerouac, the author of “On the Road,” wrote: “In America today there is a claw hanging over our brains, which must be pushed aside or else it will clutch and strangle our real selves. Is that still true today?

SE: My last chapter of my book is built around this quote. That grabbed me. I thought: "What was the claw he saw in 1948, and what is the claw right now? Some of the claws today are consumerism and anti-terrorism.

The Backdrop the “Beats,” were writing against was a country that wanted to get back to normal after the Depression and Second World War. The “Beats” were what I call “holy misfits.” They were the people that could not fit to where the culture was going at the time.

DH: Who are the “Beats” today?

SE: I find the “Beats” on a local level. I don’t know of any big names. Young poets find their own venues. Places like “Squawk” or “Stone Soup Poets.” I see the new “Beats” at mostly smaller venues like these. I can them at the poetry slams we have at the Kerouac Festival in Lowell, Mass.

DH: Can you tell me about the “Scroll” that will be exhibited at the Kerouac Festival in the summer of 2007?

SE: What is referred to as the scroll is a 120 foot roll of paper that Kerouac wrote the original manuscript of “On the Road.” on. I believe that was in April of 1950. Kerouac was a “stream of consciousness” writer, and didn’t want to break his chain of thought. He could type so fast and he didn’t want to stop to change paper.

The scroll will be on display in Lowell at the “Blue Cotton Mill Museum,” in Lowell. For more information go to: http://cultureiscool.com/

DH: Who has the best archive of “Beat” literature?

SE: Stanford University has the Ginsberg archive. The New York Public Library has the Kerouac archive. Stanford paid Ginsberg a million dollars for his papers before he died.

DH: Which “Beat writer speaks to you the loudest?

SE: On the East Coast-- Kerouac. On the West Coast-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Ferlinghetti is a businessman/poet, as he needs to be to run the “City Lights” bookstore in San Francisco. He has become the grand old man of the “Beats,” and is now in his 80’s. He is an amazing guy. He was in World War ll, and his transformation came (according to him), when he was stationed in Nagasaki shortly after the Atomic Bomb was dropped. He realized the potential destructiveness of humans. My main “Beat,” now is Ferlinghetti. His poetry is wonderful. It has a whimsical quality—but it will zap you too.

DH: Is the “Beat” body of literature best read when you are young?

SE: In a way it is. I first read ‘On the Road” when I was in my early twenties. You read it in different stages in your life and you see different things. You read it later and you see a counterpoint to the joy and excitement—an undertone of sadness and tragedy.
Kerouac picked up on this in his twenties. He was able to write on all levels.
--------------- Doug Holder

One Art. Juliana Bures. Cheryl Reed Devitt. A.S. Henderson. George Locke. Cam Terwilliger. Edited by Julia G. Henderson. http://jgalhenderson.etsy.com $12.


Julia G. Henderson, the editor of the poetry anthology “One Art,” writes in her introduction:

“This anthology was conceived based on my hope to highlight the work of five talented twenty-somethings. The voice of each writer is unique, and reflects a wide range of emotions and beliefs, and the images are modern and striking. With the anthology, I also hope to pay homage to the art of the small press publishing and self-publishing, as a forum in which the thinkers, philosophers, artists and writers of our time can let their voices be heard.”

Being a long-time small press publisher and editor myself, I was like a dog on a meat truck when I read this introduction. Henderson, a graduate of the Emerson College (Boston), writing and publishing program, has created a winning- looking book complimented by the abstract artwork of George Locke.

In any anthology there is a mixed bag of work. In “One Art,” there are more than a few choices morsels to whet a poetry-lover’s appetite.

Somerville poet Juliana Bures in her poem “”Determine The Source,” writes of our world of chaos, and the façade of control:

“The sky is an endless layer upon the world,
a blanket to the wild.
Clouds come to cover,
but the sun burns above, always,

The procession is constant,
forward is the way the water flows.
Slants stretch out the afternoon,
without any purpose other than to begin again.

The world is an endless layer
cradling what cannot be controlled.”


Cheryl Reed Devitt has a simple but evocative poem about the sweet and not so sweet mystery of love, titled “i used to.”

“love a boy with blue eyes,
but he moved away. and
he didn’t know what to do
with me, nor i him,
i suppose.

i used to be sure
it was all figured out
it was all a done deal
‘til these past couple days
came and ripped the threads out…”


To have a book published is thrilling; which I am sure is the case with these young poets. And to have a book published with such high production values is even more thrilling. “One Art” is a welcomed addition to the world of the small press, and showcases the work of these talented poets admirably.

Doug Holder/Ibbetson Update

Dead Stars Have No Graves: A Poem. Joseph Kerschbaum. (http://www.pathwisepress.com/) $6.

“Dead Stars Have No Graves… ” is a long-poem that dives deep in the black hole of a dying or dead relationship. There is a touching mix of fragile, dashed hope and resignation, to this work. Here is a heated riff that explores the road from infatuation to the morning-after reality in a long relationship with the perquisite could-of, would-of, speculation:


“She could have been
anything. She could have been
a philanthropist who works with disabled children.
The way she talked, her slow drawl, sharp wit, could have
sustained conversations for hours. I could have
talked with her for days in those months when I was talking
with no one. Her smile could have been
the most alluring I’ve ever seen. Her walk could have
led me to cliffs ready to leap from upon command. Her perfume
could have fogged my mind till her eyes became color-less.
She could have been all this. Her mouth dispelled
all the myths I constructed.
I woke to find her smile simply composed
of teeth, not diamonds. Roses were not planted
in her mattress, just sweat.”

Kerschbaum, an award-winning poet from Bloomington, Indiana, rages against the dying of the light in a relationship, and does it with style and deeply layered use of language.

Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update

Lee Briccetti: The Woman Behind “Poets House.”

I met Lee Briccetti executive director of “Poets House” during the “Poets House Showcase” this April (2006). “Poets House” is located in the SOHO section of New York City, and offers classes, lectures, readings, a library with thousands of poetry books, chaps, broadsides, etc… for the benefit of poets, writers, publishers, editors, and the general public to study and enjoy. Briccetti graciously agreed to be interviewed via the internet .







Doug Holder: “Poets House” was started in 1985 by Stanley Kunitz and Elizabeth Kray. Their vision was to create a “Place of Poetry.” They felt this was lacking in American cultural life. Do you think things have changed in the last twenty years?

Lee Briccetti: My work as executive director of “Poets House” convinces me that the whole culture of reading is in evolution. Desktop publishing has democratized the means of production, giving many more Americans, and a wider range of voices, access to print.

There is much poetry in this nation, and in many ways that poetry is being experienced—as text in books and magazines; on the internet and the radio; and in reading series in libraries, bars and bookstores, which continue to provide a social context for the exchange.

Finally, I would like to say that I do believe Poets House has made a contribution by creating a more visible presence for poetry in our culture. Initiatives like our poetry installation at the Central Park Zoo, a permanent addition to the Zoo’s signage near the dazzling animals, surprise audiences with a discovery of the pleasure of poetry in unexpected places. Also our “Poetry in the Branches,” program has become a national model for librarians who learn how to make their sites centers of poetry. My real point here is that for love of the art to thrive, first there must be exposure. And many more organizations and presses are working together to create these points of public contact.

DH: Poets House has over 45,000 items including books of poetry, chaps, biography, criticism and anthologies. You say you are the most comprehensive archive. How do you define “most comprehensive”? Are you more comprehensive than say the poetry collections at Buffalo and Brown Universities?

LB: Our Poets House Showcase gather’s the entire year’s harvest of poetry books—nearly 2,100 this year. Through this program we have become one of the most comprehensive collections in open stacks, open to the public. We need and love many university collections—but Poets House exists to reach out to the unmatriculated and unaffiliated—to poets and readers at every level of learning.


DH: You have a “Password Series.” It invites poets to read and discuss the work of other poets. How do you pick your guests? Why do you have them discuss other poets, instead, say, their own work?

LB: The “Password Series” celebrates poetry through the enthusiasms of contemporary poets who focus their presentation on the oeuvre of some other writer. One of the great interests for me is the match: watching two literary imaginations engage with and inform each other, in the dialogue of reading.

Most frequently we determine the match through long conversations with poets to learn of their literary loves.

The beauty of this kind of programming is that it communicates, here in our magnificent library, that readers and listeners are in a continuing conversation with all the poets who have ever lived. Indeed, I think that opening this conversation that crosses barriers of place and time for everyone, makes for a lively experience of the art.

DH: You have created an “Online Directory of American Poetry Books.” Can you tell me a bit about this?

LB: The Directory is a compilation of records documenting each book that has appeared in the Showcase since its inception nearly fifteen years ago. The Showcase is open annually to all publishers with new books of poetry who submit their books to us. There are forms on our website: http://www.poetshouse.org/

DH: You are a poet with a new collection out: “Day Mark.” Are you part of any “school,” of poetry? How do you define yourself as a poet?

LB: Temperamentally, I am well suited to the democratic embrace of the Poets House. I love getting the overview of what is out there each year; and there are many poets whose books I look for and whose “projects’ I want to keep up with. I think of myself as interested in experimental writing but I am foremost a devotee of Shakespeare, Keats and Dickinson. These are the poets I memorize devoutly so that I can carry their words with me.

DH: How do you find time to write? Any major influences?

LB: Discipline is my only hope in terms of getting writing time. I dream of whole days alone to read ten books at a time and think and enter a writing trance. But for now it is the local Café and a few mornings a week before work.

The whole idea of influence is tricky, no? Since as artists we are always making and articulating new connections between everything in our experience; but okay, oh well… the writers I hope I am most influenced by this year are Borges, Calvino, and Mandelstam.

DH: Poets House will move from the SOHO to Battery Park City. You will have a rent free space for many years. What other advantages will there be?

LB: As we move to the new permanent home, we aim to find ways to keep the intimacy of our current space while professionalizing the library and its services. The new home will give us room to grow our programs and services:

--comfortable reading and writing places where one will be able to lounge with books of poems or listen in the Multimedia room;

--exhibition space

--an expanded Children’s Room where school classes can visit in the morning and families can visit in the afternoon.

--expanded classrooms spaces for writing workshops or reading seminars

--Doug Holder

For more info. On Poets House go to http://www.poetshouse.org/

INTERVIEW WITH DOUG HOLDER appearing in http://www.cervenabarvapress.com
Write a bio about yourself.

I was born July 5 1955 in Manhattan. I graduated the State College at Buffalo in 1977 with a B.A. in History. Later, in 1997, I got an M.A. in American Literature and Language from Harvard University. I have worked at McLean Hospital since 1982, and for many of those years I have lead poetry workshops for inpatient psychiatric patients. I have been an editorial assistant for the Boston Review, assistant to the poetry editor at Spare Change News, and former president of Stone Soup Poets. I am currently the arts/editor for The Somerville News, director of the Newton Free Library Poetry Series, and host of the Somerville Community Access TV Show: "Poet to Poet/Writer to Writer." I founded the small independent poetry press "Ibbetson Street," in 1998. My poetry and articles have been widely published in the small press, and my books and taped interview with contemporary poets are archived at Buffalo, Brown, and Harvard University libraries.

Describe the room you write in.

I do a lot of my writing at the Sherman Cafe in Union Square, Somerville. I've written poems in many settings: from the comfort of my toilet seat to the back of a cab. Whenever the spirit moves me, as the saying goes.

What are you working on now?

I am working on promoting "Wrestling With My Father," a collection of my poetry, and "Inside the Outside," an anthology of American Avant-Garde poets released by the Presa Press that I am included in.

Your chapbook, Wrestling With My Father, was just published by Yellow Pepper Press. It is a beautifully written chapbook and tribute to your Father. Please talk about this chapbook.

"Wrestling With My Father,"was compiled after my father's death in April 2003 at age 86. Before his death I had written a number of poems about our relationship. I also wrote a few after his death. I completed this collection first for myself. I wanted a sense of closure. I wanted to be honest ...I wanted to deal with the ying and yang of our relationship. I hope other fathers and sons can relate to this collection. I feel its themes of conflict and love are universal. Of course I wanted to pass this book on to my family in memory of my Dad.

I read that one of your biggest influences was Henry Roth. Explain why?

I wrote my graduate thesis at Harvard on Roth. It was titled: "Food in the Fiction of Henry Roth..."You can find it at Harvard's Gutman Library. Roth wrote a classic novel: "Call It Sleep," that dealt with a Jewish boy, David Schearl's, assimilation into the New World of the Lower East Side of NYC in the early part of the 20th century. First off I have always loved writing about food. Food is very evocative, and I include it in a lot of my poetry. Second, Roth wrote about a milieu that my older relatives were part of, and would always talk about when I was a boy, often in Yiddish. I was always fascinated about what went on back then: the smells, the taste, the textures...

What writers do you read over and over?

I have so much new reading to do: poetry, books for reviews, etc...that I have very little time to read the same book over and over.

You founded Ibbetson Street Press in what year? Talk about your vision for the press. Have the other editors Diane Robitaille and Richard Wilhelm been involved from the beginning?

I founded the press in 1998, with Richard Wilhelm and my wife Dianne Robitaille. Richard and Dianne have been involved in one degree or the other since its inception. Richard and I are fond of saying we found the Press over "bagels." We had been discussing starting the press at our usual breakfast meeting at Breuger's Bagels in Porter Square, Cambridge.
What type of work do you look for as editor?

Any thing that hits me on an emotional or gut level.

You have done so much for the community of Somerville and the surrounding areas. I would like to start out this section of the interview asking you to talk about the Somerville Writer's Festival you founded.

I founded the festival with Tim Gager, a local writer and literary activist. We have put on three festivals so far. When The Somerville News was taken over by the Norton and Tauro families they wanted to improve the image of the paper.Tim and I thought holding a writers' festival would do just that. So for the past few years we have put on a festival held at Jimmy Tingle's Off- Broadway Theatre or The Somerville Theatre. We have had such readers as Franz Wright, Afaa Michael Weaver, and novelist Robert Olen Butler, to name a few.

For "The Somerville News", you are the Arts Editor. How long have you been writing for them? Every week you interview a writer, this must be so rewarding and interesting. Talk about your experience so far. Adding to this also mention your Poet To Poet/Writer To Writer Program on the Somerville Community Access Program.

I have been writing for The Somerville news for about 5 years now. I love interviewing people. It gives me the opportunity to talk to people I normally wouldn't have the opportunity to. I have always loved interview shows. I grew up listening to Barry Farber, Long John Nebble, and other radio personalities on WOR radio in NYC. On TV I watched David Susskind, Dick Cavett, and Alan Berk. Now I have a chance to do what they did, granted, on a much smaller scale. I love to explore the creative process, and I love to be surrounded by interesting people who have something to say.

Every Saturday in Davis Square, Somerville, at the "Au Bon Pain" cafe, a group of writers from all over meet at 9:00AM, hence the name "Bagel Bards. Since I have been attending this, I have met so many wonderful people. I look forward to going every week. Please talk about how you and Harris Gardner came up with this idea. Attendance Saturday morning has been growing and more people are becoming involved. This must be so exciting for you and Harris to see. What is this like for you?

My idea for "Bagels with the Bards" came from comedians. I was reading that for many years a group of comedians met informally at the "Stage Deli," in NYC for years. People would come and go, just shoot the breeze, talk shop, whatever. I thought this would be great for poets. A poet, Doug Worth, had written me about how cliquish he found the poetry scene in Boston and Cambridge. So I approached my friend Harris Gardner, and we came up with the name, and launched it in the basement of "Finagle-A-Bagel" in Harvard square, where we met for breakfast for awhile. I love it...its like having a secret club or something.

There are other magazines you are involved with. Discuss your role. You are also on the Board for The Wilderness Retreat in Littleton, MA. Discuss this.

I am the Boston editor for Poesy Magazine http://poesy.org/, a regular contributor to the Small Press Review, on the advisory board of 'the new renaissance " literary magazine, http://tnrlitmag.net/ , a fairly regular contributor to "Spare Change News," and the book review editor for the online journal: The Wilderness House Literary Review http://whlreview.com

The Wilderness House Literary Retreat was started by Steve Glines on a nature reserve in Littleton, Mass....a short drive from Boston. Steve asked me to helpout with publicity and literary guests. We have had the late poet Robert Creeley, Atlantic fiction editor C. Michael Curtis, Hallie Ephron, Afaa Michael Weaver, Suzanne Berger, Lois Ames...to name a few.

I am amazed at all your energy. You have heard me say that a zillion times now. You have given so much to the writers and community. Would you like to mention anything else here.

I am blessed with an abundance of energy. I also don't have kids, so I have a lot more time to devote to this. I find by giving to the community you reap rewards too.

Thank you so much for the interview Doug.

Buying A Suit on Essex Street. Ed Galing. ( Iniquity Press./Vendetta Books POBOX 54 Manasquam, N.J. 08736) No Price. iniquitypress@hotmail.com
http://www.iniquitypress.com/


Ed Galing writes of lost worlds. Approaching 90, he recalls The Lower East Side of NYC, the great Jazz players sensuously dancing with their axes, the joys and bountiful flavors of Moishe's Café, the memories of the great and obscure men and women he knew, the prize of a shiny new suit from an Essex St. shop, a boy looking at the riotous streets from a tenement fire escape, and all these images are rendered simply and evocatively. In "Jazz Man," Galing recalls a musician in a cold underground subway station in NY, who transforms the rather unforgiving environs:

eyes closed
his sax intruded
on the din and noise
of a cold subway
station where the
only music one
heard was the
screeching of a
train.

and suddenly the
bland, cruel world
of unseeing non-
caring people became
a paradise where the
only thing that counted
was the beautiful music
he was making,
a solo on sax
both sweet and caressing
in such contrast
to the shrill cacophony
around him.

And here we have Galing as a young kid in The Lower East Side viewing the world from the confines of his tenement building . From: "Fire Escape":

Mine was on the
fifth floor

A small iron
cage....

Down below I
could see pushcarts:

Crowded streets
people pushing and
shoving,

Screams and mutterings:
shouts of despair.

Up here, when I sat
outside the window
in my fire escape
refuge

I was six years old:
and already I knew
what if felt like

To be caged in
like
some wild animal.

Ed Galing and I have been friends for awhile; keeping in touch on the phone and in letters. Ed does not do email! Long ago I told Ed I would publish a poem of his in Ibbetson Street for as long as he is around. To this day Ed Galing goes to "Jack's Deli," in Philadelphia, plays his harmonica, and regales folks with stories of the "old days." The letters he writes me are full of the fears of old age and mortality. And I can tell you this: I love Ed Galing ,and so do many others in our small press community.

Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update

The Powow River Anthology
Edited By: Alfred Nichols
Ocean Publishers, 2006
Soft cover ISBN 0-9717641-0-7 $11.95
reviewed by Amy Brais amy.brais@gmail.com

The product of over a decade’s worth of meeting, collaboration, and creativity centered in Newburyport, The Powow River Anthology accomplishes one of the great feats of any anthology of poetry – while each poem remains a strong entity of singular import, the pieces all fit together to form a cohesive whole, joined not only by thematic similarities but by their painstaking attention to language and structure, with no one poem eclipsing another. And the best part about that whole is that it’s a book you can live with, think about, and share. Perhaps the most notable experience I had with the book while carrying it around was when I passed Rhina Espaillat’s "Weighing In" to a co-worker, who had been complaining about recent weight gain, in what was admittedly an overly dramatized effort to comfort her. Espaillat writes:
"What the scale tells you is how much the earth/has missed you,
body, how it wants you back/ again after you leave it and go forth/
into the light."
In a final stanza that is both warm and dark, the speaker concludes:
"But look at you now, body, soft old shoe/ that love wears
when it’s stirring, look down, look/ how earth wants what you weigh,
needs what you know."
It’s no surprise that the poems in this anthology deal with the themes of love, death, and spirituality, but the ways in which the poems explore these familiar subjects are inventive. Brian T. O’Brien’s Pantry Mouse takes a seemingly mundane encounter between a man and a mouse in his kitchen and applies the dynamic of the encounter to the loss of love:
"You slid with whatever dignity/you could muster down a vertical/
partition, and I threatened and swore/ like a man—though without
conviction. / It was very much like when love departs. / There will be
no traps or poisoned bait. / I put a brick in front of your hole, / as I did
another time with my heart."
A. M. Juster’s Cancer Prayer is a modern sonnet that beautifully captures small wishes to make a terminal situation more bearable. The speaker prays:
"Please smite that intern in oncology who craves approval from
department heads. / Please ease her urge to vomit; let there be/ kind but
flirtatious men in nearby beds. /…Surround her with forgiving family/ and nurses not too numb to cry."
Len Krisak’s What of the Night? recalls a scene of love often overlooked – a father’s nighttime ritual of locking the house to keep his family safe, and wonders of the father, "When he’s townsman of the stillest town,/ Who will I be to set his burden down?" Noah’s Wife by Nancy Bailey Miller tells the Genesis story from the wife’s perspective and shows how, in the midst of all the other animals boarding the ark two by two, she boards alone. And James Najarian evokes loss and the passage of time through reminiscences of life on a goat farm, in his at times whimsical Goat Song.
Countless poems in the anthology are replete with striking, sensual imagery and language. Of particular note are Bill Coyle’s Anima, Alfred Nichol’s Sunday, Robert Crawford’s The Whole of It, Michele Leavitt’s Ladies Night, Karen Nelson’s Flamenco Dancer, and Deborah Warren’s Elizabeth’s Dress, which cleverly describes through claims of not describing.
With a blend of appropriate gravity and wit, the poems of The Powow River Anthology have tremendous resonance with the reader, long after the anthology has been put down.


Reviewed By: Amy Brais /Ibbetson Update/ April 2006/Somerville, Mass.

Why I’m Still Married. Women Write Their Hearts Out on Love, Loss, Sex and Who Does the Dishes. Edited by Karen Propp and Jean Trounstine.

Although the title of this collection of essays: “Why I’m Still Married,” is not posed as a question, it would be a good one to ask. And the writers in this evocative anthology answer it with a warts-and-all account of their “successful” relationships. When we are young, and even not so young, we let ourselves imagine that marriage will be angst- free, a union of undying love with our much desired mate. Ah! But then reality rears its ugly head! The ladies in this anthology, expertly edited by Jean Trounstine and Karen Propp, have a wide range of stories to tell, and they ain’t always pretty. Often many of our partner’s flaws reveal themselves after the wedding ceremony, and tolerance, compromise, compassion, and accommodation have to come into play. According to statistics many couples today are quick on the trigger for divorce as soon as they see a few red flags. The testimony of the women in this book is that in spite of the problems a relationship can present; it is worth it to try to make a go of it.

The celebrated poet Marge Piercy has had multiple relationships, open relationships, affairs, the whole spectrum of liaisons. Finally, in her later years, she married a man 13 years her junior, the writer Ira Wood. Piercy writes about what she feels is the secret of a good marriage, and how it often fits us better as we age:

“I need to know that my partner has my back, is on my side, can be trusted out of my sight; Ira needs that also. He had to learn to live with cats in order to live with me. I had to learn to follow and understand football in order to live with him….

“You learn where your real boundaries lie as you make your way through a marriage, where you can give away, and where you cannot. When you are young, it’s no particular advantage to be married unless you are having a baby and want help and support. When you’re older, it is much more valuable to be in a marriage. Who has time or patience to date over forty unless you absolutely have to. We need each other more as we age, not less. Growing old together is, in part not forgetting to grow.”

Kathleen Aguero, a poet and educator, writes about her relationship with a man who had a very hard time controlling his explosive anger. But she stuck by him, and has not lived to regret it. Aguero writes:

“Describing the tender disciplines and pleasures of marriage is difficult for me. The pleasures of our relationship are mundane—shopping together for kitchen linoleum at the Home Depot, reading together in bed… He buys me flowers for no particular occasion. I buy him espresso beans covered with dark chocolate….All that anger and shouting, all those tears had bound us in good ways as well as bad. We’d seen the worst of each other and still on balance wanted what we saw. We love each other. But that’s not it, not enough. In the end I can’t explain why I didn’t divorce any more than I can explain why I married. I wanted to/I didn’t want to. At the core of my deepest commitments is something mute, a koan.”

This book is written by women, but this man got a lot out of it. I saw myself in many of the men portrayed here. When I read some passages to my wife of 12 years, she laughed in recognition. The women in this book are not pointing fingers. They admit to flaws and multiple mistakes themselves. What this book provides is a “true” account of what a relationship is: its ups and downs, its ying and yang,

For these women the right move was to stay in their marriages. But the point is clearly rendered that there are no definite answers in matters of the heart. In the end it is your decision to stay…or go away.

Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update/ April 2006.

The book is $25 from Hudson Street Press. ( Penguin Group)

David McNamara: For this Somerville, Mass. publisher it is always: “sunnyoutside.”

David McNamara founded and operates “sunnyoutside,” (http://www.sunnyoutside.com/ ), an independent literary press located in Somerville, Mass. McNamara studied literature at Long Island University, Ohio State, the “Poet’s House,” in Ireland, and Farleigh Dickinson University, where he earned his B.A. David has been widely published in the small press, as well as being the director of the magazine “ism,” that was based in Seattle in the late 90’s. He still is writing and has a collection of poetry coming out “Or,” from Hemispherical Press.

Doug Holder: “sunnyoutside” was founded as an online literary journal in 2000. In 2004 you went to print. Why did you decide to make the change?

David McNamara: “suunyoutside” online folded because I was unable to keep up with submissions. I basically just submitted and wrote for awhile. Later the creative urge to start publishing came out. “sunnyoutside” had a logo, a website and somewhat of a following. It just seemed logical to stay with the name.

DH: Can you tell me about the Emerson College (Boston, Mass.) publishing program you graduated from?

DM: The program is basically 12 months. They break it up into four modules. It is a crash course for publishing in the ‘real world.’ Most of the people in it are looking to get editorial and publishing positions with trade publishers. The modules were editorial, marketing, business and production. I’ve been working in publishing for 10 or 12 years. I really didn’t have a good grasp of the business side of things. So the program prepped me to run a business and to market it.

DH: Small press publishers of poetry rarely if ever make a profit.

DM: There is a couple out there. One is the University of Pittsburgh Press. Of course they have university funds to depend on. “Black Sparrow,” made money on Bukowski and other authors.

I hope to expand from poetry to fiction. I also have an interest in non-fiction.

DH: Is there a mission statement for “sunnyoutside?”

DM: That’s a tough one. I think I changed it a few times. I want to publish works that are crafted and skilled on the contemporary literary landscape. From a production standpoint we really emphasize the quality of the product. We want to create a visual format that represents the text well. The presentation should not detract from the text. It should accenuate it.

DH: You describe your press as a “Fine Book,” press. What is that?

DM: We are an ‘aspiring’ fine book press. Fine presses usually work with a letterpress. They are not going to use digital reproduction. The technology that I use goes back to Gutenberg.

DH: Do you think the physical book is threatened by the internet?

DM. Threatened? I can’t dispute that. Readership for books has and will go down. I don’t think extinction will happen. There is too much value with holding what you are reading. We are still seeing more and more books on the market.

DH: Are production values as important as the actual content of the book for you?

DM: Yes and no. Only once did I publish something based on what I thought I could do with it. The text really has to stand out by itself. It still has to be good.

DH: Reviewers don’t often comment on production value. Is this frustrating for you?

DM: It’s at times loveless work. It is kind of frustrating. I put in a lot time into something like paper and soliciting an artist to do the work. Then the review comes out and says what a great job the artist did. And the artist did do a good job, but the reviewer doesn’t see behind the scene. There is a part of me that wishes I got more attention.

Dh: You just published a book by the San Francisco poet William Taylor, Jr. titled: “So Much is Burning.” What attracted you to his work?

DM: Everything I accept has to be accessible and more than one dimension. With Bill’s work, anyone who reads it, can appreciate it. He writes about the downtrodden of society in a way in which anyone can enjoy it. He explores the dichotomy of beauty and ugliness in a skillful way.

DH: Where are your books carried?

DM: “Powell’s” in Portland, Oregon, hopefully the “Trident,” in Boston, hopefully “Porter Square Books,” in Cambridge, Mass. and “City Lights,” in San Francisco. The cover of William Taylor’s book is modeled on the “City Light,” books style. We also have books at “Logos Books,” in Santa Cruz, California.

DH: You publish in other formats, right?

DM: The first publication we did was a broadside (one sheet of paper- published on both sides) I am going to start a postcard series, and we also have produced mini-chaps.

DH: Talk about the writers you published?

DM: We have done a few things by William Taylor Jr. We have published a couple of things by the poet Nate Graziano. I have four essays by A.D. Winans that might be our first work of non-fiction. Winnans founded the “Second Coming Press,” in the 70’s in San Francisco. The press was well-known for publishing Bukowski, among other things.

DH: What do you think of Bukowski’s work?

DM: I respect it. Bukowski is Bukowski. There are a lot of spin-offs in the small press by people who are trying to write like him. This is a paradox because, again Bukowski is Bukowski. He was one-of-a-kind.

DH: Do you need a formal education to be a poet? Do you need an MFA?

DM: Not necessarily. My education has definitely helped me as an editor. There are a lot of writers out there whose work I like, who don’t have their MFA. On the other hand there are a lot of people who have them whose work I like. I think if you are going to write novels what you learn in an MFA program is invaluable. This is being said by a person who does not have one.

DH: What are your ambitions for the press?

DM: I’d love to do trade publishing. It’s hard when you are dealing with relatively obscure writers. I would like to transcend the small press yet still be in it. I want to do trade publishing as well as fine press publishing.

Doug Holder for more info. About sunnyoutside go to: http://sunnyoutside.com/