Interview with poet Michael Graves with Charles Ries

ADAM AND CAIN
By: Michael Graves
Black Buzzard Press
Price: $15.95
80 Pages/ 9 Poems

ISBN: 0-938872-29-X

Order from:
Michael Graves
The Phoenix Reading Series
P. O. Box 84
Dyker Heights Station
8320 13th Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11228

Review/Interview By: Charles P. Ries


Adam and Cain is Michael Graves first full length collection of poetry. He work has been widely published, and well received within academic journal. In 2004 he was the recipient of a grant of $4,500 from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation. He has taught full-time for The Pennsylvania State University and been an adjunct for various branches of The City University of New York for fifteen years. Currently, he is an adjunct at New York City Technical College of The City University of New York

When Carol Novack, Editor of the edgy on line literary magazine, Mad Hatters Review (http://madhattersreview.com/) asked if I would review a new book of poetry by a writer named Michael Graves I was expecting free verse, something crazy and narrative like much of the work I read on her site. I was surprised when the book I got in the mail was (what I have come to consider), academic in style – a style that often leaves me lost, losing interest, and running for my dictionary. In Adam and Cain, Graves uses the original story of sibling rivalry, and turns it into a morality tale that transcends its biblical origins. Using a series of nine long poems Graves tells his version of this story. Here are part #1 and #2 from the forth poem in this collection titled, “Cain to Adam”: “#1 / At first, / There was one, / Adam, the Master, / Unrivalled. / Now, / There are brothers / Who envy their father, / But tremble to show it, / It is not so, / Abel, my brother, / You, whose face I see / When I look for my own / in the still waters of dream? // #2 / I would do anything / To quiet the voice / That argues within. / The unceasing voice / That drives me to fight / With arrogant Adam - / That tyrant! / And rages and quails / At the peacekeeping gestures and words / Of smooth, solicitous Eve! // O, brother, blest is your peace!”

While I have written over one hundred poetry book reviews, I don’t have an MFA. I wondered if I was qualified to review a collection of poems as erudite as this one. Everything I know about poetry has been through my own reading, living in the small press, and talking with (mostly) non-academically trained poets. Maybe I not a fan of formal poetry out ignorance, but I just don’t find it accessible. I think this issue of accessibility is at the core of the debate I often see in the small press between academically trained poets and non-academically trained poets. Some, in the non-academic small press would say poets like Graves have lost contact with the people and common expression; and some in the academic press would say the work of non-academic small press poets is not informed through study, and has not progressed.

So what was I supposed to do? Toss this book or deal with it? I knew certain poetry circles find Michael Graves work to be exceptional, and this made me curious enough to ask Graves if he would help me understand why I should care about his work. He graciously agreed to do so.

CPR: You are an academically trained writer; how does this training color or influence your writing?

MG: I am an academically trained writer, but one of the academics who trained me, James Wright, was a translator of and deeply influenced by twentieth century Spanish language poets such as Pablo Neruda and Cesar Vallejo, to mention only two. He also translated Georg Trakl, an important early twentieth century Vienese poet, among other German writers. Wright’s association with Robert Bly is well-known so I think I don’t need to go into it here. The brilliant Joycean Leonard Albert who arranged my introduction to Wright frequently encouraged me to be sure to read “juicy” work not included in the canon.

I think academic should be divided into at least two categories--the academic which honors and celebrates the archetypal, the universal, that approaches its subject rigorously, but humbly, say Socratically, with a genuine sense that basic assumptions and truths might be true but must be tested, explored, presented, etc., over and over and second the dead arrogant, prescriptive only academic. The letter killeth but the spirit giveth life. The arrogant academic would be that which honored only the canon of DWEMs –Dead White European Males, with only token exceptions, and it would assume it always had the final say as to what was worth reading and why. Dictionaries and those who work on them recognize the reality that language is a living thing and that words and meanings and usages phrases enter languages and become accepted, so why shouldn’t academics recognize that poems come into being and gain and deserve recognition, even if they compete with canonical works for attention.

CPR: Adam and Cain is your first full collection of poems; have you done chaps? How come so few books of poetry?

MG: I have a chapbook Outside St. Jude’s (REM Press, 1990) from an extremely small press that a friend, Remington Murphy published for awhile. It’s been reissued as an e-book by Ram Devineni who publishes Rattapallax. It’s available by going to the Rattapallax site and as a pdf. I also have a chapbook Illegal Border Crosser forthcoming from Gloria Mindock’s Cervena Barva Press

I have about another five to six hundred good or better than good poems on a wide range of subjects. I have one manuscript ready to mail out and the rest are waiting for me to find the time and energy to finish organizing into mss. That work was interrupted by my mother’s death in March, 2006. Gloria Mindock is interested in publishing a full-length collection. Last but not least, this is an opportunity for a good publisher to get some of my work while it’s still available!

CPR: Do you rewrite your poems extensively?

MG: Though I rewrite some poems extensively, in general, the answer is no, but they have long gestation periods. Some are looked at over many years, five, ten, fifteen until I know what to do. They are often not finished when they come, but they are often close. I jot notes for poems all the time. And I have long stretches when I’m thinking about writing on and off all day long. I suppose I’m obsessive and don’t mind thinking about trying to transform my life, especially my inner life, into poetry. However, I know that writers can be extremely unreliable commentators on their own creative processes, like a narrator in a novel.

CPR: In your Cervena Barva Press interview you say, “The book [Adam and Cain] was written slowly over many years. The initial impulse came to be during Leonard Albert’s course Religious Ideas in Modern Fiction, and I think the style of the poems might be indebted to Auerbach’s discussion of Biblical style in Minesis.” You also say, it was written in a ‘non-discursive in a high modernist manner.’ What is Minesis? What is a non-discursive in a high modernist manner?

MG: I started the book with the short story Cain in Exile, originally titled Cain and written for Leonard Albert’s course in the short story, probably sometime in 1976-77. I finished the book in 2005. So, the book took about thirty years to complete. Mimesis is the transliteration of Aristotle’s word for imitation. He writes that art imitates life; mimesis is the representation of life. After that, it gets complicated: we could probably say that any poem or work of fiction imitates life. I think it becomes a question of by what means, in what style, what degree of success, what truth?

By non-discursive high modernist manner I mean that the transitions are left out between the poems and that the reader must think about the relationship of the parts without help from the writer. Also, the reader is not told how to interpret the work. For example, he is not told Adam inflicts a psychic wound on Cain. The rationale is the writer need not tell the obvious to the reader and that the reader gets more pleasure out of participating in the creation of the text, and that the impact of what he gets is more powerful and profound, and that it is modern in a deep sense to give the reader the freedom to determine for himself.

CPR: What audience did you have in mind when you wrote Adam and Cain? Will my neighbors who shop at the Pic’n Save down the street enjoy this book?

MG: Everybody who’s interested in poetry. Everybody who doesn’t say I hate Biblical themes on principle. Everybody who doesn’t say there must be no difficulty in poetry. Everybody who doesn’t say the Bible is the final word and no one can add to or subtract from it. Anybody who hears the music in the poems and imagines the human situation will feel their power. I have already had a wide range of readers buy or praise this book, readers without college degrees, from various ethnic groups, people from various walks of life.

CPR: A few of your metaphors in Adam and Cain were meaningless to me because I am not a biblical scholar; so in a sense these metaphors have not deepened my appreciation of your work, but obscured it. Maybe as we read widely, travel, think, experience life with growing awareness and evolve, our art reflects this insight and complexity of thought that come with our personal and creative growth. For example, we may use metaphors that are common to us, but uncommon to most people. I recently read a New York Times Book Review interview with a noted poetry critic who said she didn’t review poetry collections from writers born after 1950 because she felt so out of touch with some of the cultural images they were using (cartoons characters, TV. shows, cultural events, movies etc) images that were very clear to them, but not clear to her.

MG: Absolutely, there are books I could not do justice to. For one example, I find Allen Mandelbaum's, The Maxioms of Chelm beyond me, I have not found the time and energy to look up the terms I don't know, though I have spent some time looking for critical articles on it, but I love its music. Though I like to think one could sense/perceive that something is interesting, worthwhile, etc., even if one's grasp of it were limited.

CPR: Do you feel elevated or formal language, such as you use in Adam and Cain, looses its audience because it is difficult to grasp?

MG: No. My most important audience is composed of people who can enter and/or accept the book. In one sense, the audience by definition is the people who read the book. I’m not writing for people who won’t look a word up when necessary. I suppose it’s fair to call the language elevated, but I think the better term, which you mention, is formal. It carries no negative or satiric connotations. And there are plenty of poems in the collection that are made of easily understood mono or disyllabic words only.

CPR: You wanted Adam and Cain to be read; yet your writing style will not be accessible to most people. Why publish it?

MG: I’m not worried about being a best seller and I’m not sure my work won’t reach a wide audience. Nonetheless, I am aware that it is quite possible that it won’t. Perhaps this comparison would be helpful: getting to really know someone takes time and effort. Even though there is a place for connections that are immediate and wonderful, all too often, when we connect immediately and “completely” we are sorry later. Most of us would agree that long term relationships need investments of time, energy, willingness, open mindedness, dialogue, etc and we are very used to saying reading a book is a conversation… In addition, I think that Adam and Cain has qualities that a reader could connect with immediately. Sir Philip Sidney settled for, “Fit audience though few.” I want as many fit audience members as possible, and I think a lot of them are out there. Whether or not I’ll reach them…

CPR: What attracted you to this morality tale?

MG: I think the key moment came in Leonard Albert’s class Religious Ideas in Fiction or The Bible as Literature, when he pointed out that God gave no reason for His rejection of Cain’s gift in the King James Bible. To paraphrase, I thought something like “What an amazing thing.” I didn’t have these words but it pointed to God’s nature as Manichean and suggested Gnostic perspectives on Biblical texts were possible. I think there was also something deeply rebellious in me. I had already shown some of my writing to Professor Albert and he had voiced the opinion that I had an argument with God, very unMiltonic I suppose! And I had already discovered my conflicted anger, which might be too mild an expression, at my parents.

CPR: In the same Cervena Barva Press interview you say Jame Joyce is a big influence of yours. The American writer, Max Eastman once asked Joyce why Finnegan’s Wake was written in a very difficult style and Joyce replied, “To keep critic busy for three hundred yeas.” Some critics considered this book a masterpiece, though many readers found it incomprehensible. I guess you don’t find Joyce incomprehensible? How come I do?

MG: I’m willing to read a lot of Joyce criticism and join Joyce reading groups.

CPR: Fair enough, but tell me why you love James Joyce and how has he influenced your writing?

MG: Joyce was one of the very first writers I was exposed to after I returned to school and he represented the triumph of the artist over repression. The first of his works that made a major impact on me was Dubliners. Central to Joyce’s purpose in that collection of stories was the revelation to both the reader and the characters that the characters were trapped and paralyzed in a living death, although the naturalistic surface of stories remained undisturbed. I encountered those stories at a messianic phase in my life and they filled me with enthusiasm.

I have spent many years misreading Joyce in important ways and unable to penetrate much of his work, especially Finnegans Wake, but what was accessible to me was so immediately rewarding, so full of beauty, human importance, respect for art, intellectual interest and excellence, I have been willing to persist in my attempt to read him. It is said of Joyce that one only rereads him. His work has inspired me to explore the sexual content of religious symbols and images, to strive to make theme/form and content inseparable, to explore indeterminacy in narrative sequences, to charge writing with as much meaning as possible.

CPR: Let’s talk about whether or not poetry can not be formal. I believe this term (form) is most often used when referring to academics that choose to write within various forms (sonatas etc). Yes, narrative poetry is a form; but for the most part narrative poetry, of the sort I find throughout the small press and enjoy, does not obscure.

MG: There is no necessary opposition between form and clarity. It could be argued that form is a clarity that emerges from the flux or obscurity of experience or that form is the underlying structure or can be. The sonnet, for example, is based on the statement of a situation or problem in the first eight lines, which reaches its fullest tension about the eighth line and the comment or resolution in the last six. It is a form that is true to the mind’s perception of experience: problem and solution. It is true that some forms, such as the sestina, if followed rigorously, are complicated and difficult. But even so, the content in a form need not be obscure; need not be filled with arcane or specialized facts or allusions. Narratives have formal elements, as I assume you agree—plot, protagonists, narrators, conflicts, symbols, irony, setting, situation, rising action, climax, resolution, images. I think the question is always whether or not they are well used.

CPR: It feels like our poetry worlds are, indeed, worlds apart. Do your students at NY City Technical College relate to your poetry?

MG: Surprisingly, yes, some of the students do relate to my poems. I read them a selection from Adam and Cain and my other work. Of course, some of them have little interest in English and little if any of the course content seems to reach them. It’s not appropriate to read them many of my poems or spend a lot of time on them. I teach remedial writing and freshman composition. And City Tech students are not succeeding at passing the CPE, the Competency Proficiency Exam, so there is great concern to get them ready for the Final exam. I think that teaching poetry could be one way to try to get them enthusiastic about language, but our curriculum doesn’t really include that as much of an option. Our freshman composition course has a required text and there is only one poem in it, but I take a little time near the end of semester to give the students a sense of who I am as a writer, and some of them feel the emotion the poems generate and give –I can’t find the words,--grunts, wows, gasps. Not a whole lot of them, but some. This semester I had a student ask to purchase the book. I asked him to contact me after the semester ended, that is, after final grades went in. Though he asked twice, I haven’t heard from him, so he might have been hoping to influence his grade.

CPR: How old are you? What do you do for a living? Are you married? Do you have children?

MG: I’m 55. I work as an adjunct instructor; technically I believe the term is lecturer for the City University of New York and a reader for a faculty member at New Jersey City University with weak eyes. I’m single and don’t have any children. I still have fantasies, but I’m getting old….

CPR: We are both getting old; but (I pray) immeasurably wiser. Thank you for widening both my vocabulary and my mind with regard formal poetry and narrowing the great divide between academic and non-academic poets.

Graves earlier comment that, “long term relationships need investments of time, energy, willingness, open mindedness and dialogue” has timeless truth to it. How many times have I been surprised to become close with someone who after a first and second meeting I feel no connection with? Yet over time something begins to happen; we begin to be aware of something deeper. Through process of preparing this review I have had to look deeper, think deeper, and read again. Adam and Cain was no fast dance, but I got through it. It was hard work, and I will read it again. After all, we’ve become friends.

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If you would like to hear Michael Graves read his “Blatnoy Series go to: http://www.madhattersreview.com/issue3/poetry_graves.shtml

To find Michael Graves interview in Cervena Brava Press go to: (http://www.cervenabarvapress.com/gravesinterview.htm)

______________________________________________

Charles P. Ries lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His narrative poems, short stories, interviews and poetry reviews have appeared in over one hundred and sixty print and electronic publications. He has received four 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 (http://www.wordriot.org/) and Pass Port Journal (http://www.passportjournal.org/). He is on the board of the Woodland Pattern Bookstore (http://www.woodlandpattern.org/) 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/ .

Review of "The Gardner and the Bees " Helena Minton

Review of The Gardener and the Bees by Helena Minton

$9 plus $2 S&H to March Street Press, 3414 Wilshire, Greensboro, NC27408.> web site address: marchstreetpress.com email address:> _rbixby@earthlink.net_ (mailto:rbixby@earthlink.net)

Helen Minton has a new poetry book out called The Gardener and the Bees. Like Emily Dickinson1 and Marianne Moore2, Minton is a modern poet who pays intricate attention to word usage and concrete imagery. In her poems, Minton takes ordinary observations, adds some unusual twists and turns and makes her poetry something special to read. She writes about nature and its influences on human experiences, especially focusing on gardening, flowers, animals, and nature’s relationships with man/woman. She paints with words. Sometimes the tone of a poem is happy; sometimes it’s sad; sometimes it changes from happy to sad; or sometimes it’s simply angry.

And she writes about personal experiences, too, as seen in “The Birch” (p. 26), when the speaker recalled planting a birch with her father and says, “The week before my wedding/how did we find a moment, my father and I, who rarely/worked together with our hands?/During the tissue-paper preparations/it felt urgent that we dig,/heft the compact root ball. Lowered it. Pack in the dirt./Less urgent as we stood back and admired what we’d planted,”(Stanza 1) How more personal can an experience between father and daughter (or son) get?


Or, as read in “Building the Compost” (pp. 16-17), how more personal can a moment be as when the speaker describes a scene where a woman creates a frame for compost upon the request of her husband and Minton writes “Now, he thinks, she will be happy.” and has the woman “…herself moving/toward the thrift/of a woman in wartime,/saving scraps, starting seeds/for a victory garden.” (Stanzas 11-12) Though written in the third person, Minton has the reader appreciate the personal achievement of the woman.


In “The Birch” and “Building the Compost”, Minton has illustrated how the speaker deals with the main masculine figures in her life.


Minton writes with wit and imagination, as viewed in “Wedding Day” (p. 27). She has taken an ordinary, though special, event and changed it into a potentially disastrous one which, through a twist of fate and imagination, everything turns out okay. The speaker says, “Out of the branches, inch-long bodies fell/all afternoon, softly, on the patio,/on the chairs and the tablecloths/as the brown creatures stripped trees of green./My father paid the grandchildren/a penny a bug to collect them.” How unfortunate for the bride and groom and everyone present to experience this act of nature. But, Minton wittingly writes that “The caterpillars don’t appear in any pictures./They never dropped in my hair/or landed on the neck of a guest,/or were caught in David’s Mexican wedding shirt.” So things didn’t turn out as badly as the reader first thought they would. Though Minton’s use of imagery and description and wit, she has captured the reader’s attention and left him/her feeling like the children at the wedding – “…not frightened/as they filled their buckets/strung between the maples limbs,/close to lovely from this distance.” (Stanza 1)


Often she writes with vivid detail and description, as seen in her opening poem “Perennial Bed” (p. 3). The reader can visualize Minton’s bees who “spend hours/on the saucers of rose sedum, their curled legs moving over petals/fleshy as rubber brushes” (Stanza 1) or the lone bee who “lands on a filament/ of coreopsis moonbeam,/floating down, down to the dirt,/then flung back/through the undulating architecture.” (Stanza 2)


Her poetry is often sensual, appealing to the mind and the body, and allows the reader’s mind to look for pleasure3, as read in her poem “The Marie Selby Botanical Gardens”(p. 31), where the speaker “stroll(s) past hibiscus/jacaranda and frangipani,/ through the black shadows of the banyan,/crushed oyster shells underfoot,/in the early morning Florida cold/sharp as a comb across the scalp.” (Stanza 1) The speaker is enjoying herself as she is “trying, as I tried last year,/to learn the difference/between palmate and pinnate, royal and sabal,/and the lower fanned shrubs/which look like palms but are not.” (Stanza 2) The reader is having a pleasant time reading the poem that Minton ends happily questioning, “Who said we should suffer/to study flowers?” (Stanza 4) Minton’s style is sincere, sometimes feminine, sometimes heartwarming and sometimes heartbreaking. She doesn’t use traditional stanzas and doesn’t rhyme words, though her sentences flow smoothly, as if the speaker is having a conversation with the reader.

It may take a couple of reads to understand Minton’s inner meanings in her poetry, The Gardener and the Bees is just like the title suggests – a productive, happy yet possibly confrontational experience. As the speaker concludes in “Perennial Bed”,
“Let them sting me,/brash as I am.” (Stanza 3) Minton has written a book of poetry that should be read and enjoyed and discussed by both men and women.
###
1 enotes.com. “Dickinson, Emily │Introduction: Feminism in Literature”, 2007.
2 enotes.com. “Moore, Marianne │ Introduction: Feminism in Literature”, 2007.
3 John Timpane, Ph.D. with Maureen Watts, Poetry FOR DUMMIES, New York: Wiley Publishing, Inc., 2001, p. 31

Pam Rosenblatt/ Ibbetson Update

Alfred Nicol: From Printer to Award-Winning Poet

Alfred Nicol: From Printer to Award-Winning Poet.

By Doug Holder

Alfred Nicol, a graduate of Dartmouth College, worked as a printer for twenty years. During this time he continued to write poetry and honed his craft. Nicole left his printing business and now concentrates on his writing full time. He is a member of the Powow River Poets of Newburyport, Mass, and edited the critically acclaimed anthology “Powow River Anthology.” He is the recipient of the 2004 Richard Wilbur Award for his first book of poetry “Winter Light.” (University of Evansville Press). His poems have appeared in “Poetry,” “The New England Review,” and many others. I talked with Nicol on my Somerville Community Access TV Show “”Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer”

Doug Holder: You worked as a printer for many years after graduating Dartmouth. Can you talk about this, and why you gave it up to write fulltime?

Alfred Nicol: I began as a pressman. My father had worked in a factory. We take this model of what a man should do. I had the idea if I took this artisan position, then I would have my mind to myself in the evening. But I wound up exhausted at the end of the day. So I tried to get up earlier and earlier before the kids got up so I could write. It didn’t work out that well. Eventually I got the opportunity to give it up.

Doug Holder: What do you do for a living now?

Alfred Nicol: I live the life of Riley. I punch in to my studio and write my poems.

Doug Holder: You are part of the Powow River Poets, and edited their anthology. Can you talk about the group and your involvement?

Alfred Nicol: The Powwow River Poets don’t have a head. Rhina Espalliat brought the group together. There are so many personalities in the group. She is someone who can smooth over the rough edges. She is a great encourager. The Powow River is an absolutely democratic group. There is no one in charge. What I did with this anthology was to honor this diverse group. It has sold well for a poetry book. There are 24 poets represented. Bill Coyle, a distinguished poet from Somerville is included, as well as Len Krisak, Deborah Warren, Richard Wollman and others. There are more formalist poets in this group than there would be in a slice of any other group of poets.

Doug Holder: I am told that you started out as a Free Verse poet but switched to Formalist. What happened?

Alfred Nicol: This is true. I had been writing Beat-influenced verse for over 20 years. The first poem I brought to a workshop, the poet Len Krisak commented “Not bad for Free Verse.” I took offense. I thought: “I’ll show this guy.” So I did. I thought my experience with Formalism would be a hit and run affair, but having done it just once I was so taken with working with meter that I didn’t stop. I couldn’t stop playing with it. I haven’t stopped playing with it.

Doug Holder: Rhina Espaillat wrote of your work “Nicol is much more than a poet’s poet, he is also a reader’s poet, and his work, though dazzling, is not intended to simply dazzle but to convey, with charm and profundity, the experience of our common life.” Do you think poetry is “common?”

Alfred Nicol: Well, poetry has to be uncommon no matter where it gets it start. I suppose what Rhina is saying is that if you are writing about your neighbors then you are writing about the common life. But you still better make it poetry if you are going to call it poetry.

Doug Holder: What makes it poetry?

Alfred Nicol: I’m not going to take the easy route; saying you put into verse and make it rhyme. You have to lift away from common speech. It has to urge the reader toward song. As you read it or write it, somehow the work has to be a magnet and take you away from common speech towards song.

Doug Holder; You won the prestigious Richard Wilbur Award for your book “Winter Light.” How would you have handled this when you were younger as opposed to now at 51?

Alfred Nicol: The way it affected me now is it allowed me to publish a book. I waited a long time. I started writing as a high school student. I never thought I was anything but a poet. You don’t need to have the world applaud you to keep on writing, but it sure does help. It helps for someone to acknowledge that it has been worthwhile. It tells you that you haven’t wasted your life.

Doug Holder: Would you have said you wasted your life if you didn’t win the award?

Alfred Nicol: I don’t think I would have. (Laughs.)

Doug Holder: Are you the product of an MFA program, or do you consider yourself part of any school?

Alfred Nicol: No, but I had a lot of good teachers at Dartmouth like Sydney Lea.

Church

In what sense am I nearer to my God
For being here? This priest's a kindly dullard:
His sermon's borrowed, stumbled through slipshod.
These windows are not art, though brightly colored.
The choirmaster's voice is grandiose.
My neighbor in the pew would have me gone.
(Such spinsters clutch the third commandment close.)
The muscles of the neck suppress a yawn.
How many of the men believe as I do,
Who come to waste part of this least of days
Waiting in hope to kindle faith, or try to
Affect the candle's flicker with my gaze,
Or watch, as the communicants parade
Back to their seats, to see the glimmer fade?

Alfred Nicol

Doug Holder/Ibbetson Update

Shay Duffin and His Portrait of an Irish Rebel

Shay Duffin and His Portrait of an Irish Rebel

By Doug Holder

If you want the full Shay Duffin experience then listen and keep your mouth shut. Duffin a master storyteller, is an accomplished Ireland-born actor and writer, who is in town performing his acclaimed one man show “Shay Duffin As Brendan Behan: Confessions of An Irish Rebel,” playing through March 31 at Jimmy Tingle’s Off Broadway Theatre smack dab in the heart of Davis Square, Somerville. This work pays homage to the iconoclast, novelist, playwright, Irish Republican Army operative and poet Brendan Behan (1923-64) Duffin, like the late Behan, is a man who has the gift of gab (or “crack” as they say in Ireland”) and has a reputation of regaling folks with his ribald anecdotes about the actors, writers, ner-do-wells, holier than thou hordes, drunks, stumblebums, and pikers he has encountered in his eclectic life. I talked with Duffin at The Somerville News offices on a bitterly cold March morning.

When I asked Duffin why he chose Behan as a subject for his play, and indeed for a fair amount of his creative work, the usually loquacious actor simply said “I admired his honesty.” Behan was not only honest according to Duffin, but he was sick, a dyed-in-the-wool drunk from a long line of people with “bad elbows.” Duffin said that he is totally different from Behan. For starters he rarely drinks. Behan’s extended family was very political, stolid Republicans; while Duffin’s was decidedly apolitical. Duffin who overcame the challenge of clubfeet as a boy, turned out to be a fine athlete, while Behan was chubby, slovenly, and after awhile toothless. Both men were residents of Dublin, but Duffin went out of his way to avoid the drunk and boisterous Behan when he would see him stagger down the street. In spite of this Behan was quite an influence on the budding actor. Duffin said: “I like what he had to say.” Behan according to Duffin did not tolerate any hypocrisy or sham.

Duffin said that the playwright wrote one great play “Borstal Boy” that was set at the Borstal School; a reform school Behan was a resident of. Duffin feels that Behan had other great plays in him, but he died at the tender age of 41, so they never saw the light of day… much less Broadway. He recounts that Behan wrote “Borstal Boy” when he was poor. Duffin opined: “Success is the worst thing that can happen to a writer. When he was rich he stopped writing. He became more popular for the character he was than the writer he was.” Duffin recalled that when Behan wasn’t drinking he was quite a charming and funny man, but when he downed more than a few it affected his “chemistry.” Behan was a Diabetic, and alcohol consumption had severe repercussions for him mentally and physically. Duffin remembered: “He had a long-suffering wife Beatrice who loved and stood by him. She literally wiped his “arse” for the 7 or 8 years that they lived together.”

Behan was involved with the Irish Republican Army. Duffin said that the IRA that Behan was involved in was a lot different from the very violent one that took over in the 70’s. Behan’s IRA did not indiscriminately kill. Although they could be vicious, Duffin feels:” It was more romantic—more patriotic. After 1969 or so the IRA turned to indiscriminate violence, and my sentiments turned against them.” Duffin describes himself as a pacifist, more of a lover—although he has had his share of fights.

Many writers like Dylan Thomas, Eugene O’Neil F, Scott Fitzgerald have turned to alcohol for comfort and maybe to open the floodgates of creativity. I asked Duffin about this. He said: “The writing life is a lonely life. When the writer picks up a bottle it is a lot easier. Maybe it does release some creativity. But in Behan’s case it probably was heredity.”

Duffin has a long resume as an actor with appearances in such classics as “Raging Bull,” and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” Recently he was in the movie “ The Departed” with Jack Nicholson that was set in Boston. He played “Jimmy” the barman to Nicholson’s gangster character. Of his experience with “Jack” he said: “Jack was very much to himself. Very quiet, just being ‘Jack.’”

When we moved our conversation to the Diesel Café right next to the theatre, Duffin shared anecdotes about Cardinal Law who he said berated him severely about bringing his Behan play to the Cardinal’s hometown some years ago. It seems, according to Duffin, that the Cardinal took objection to the hard drinking and talking Behan and was worried about the negative influence the play would exude. Duffin reportedly said in reply: “I don’t think he was a pedophile though.” Duffin recalled Law turned white as a ghost and left. This was in 1988 or 1989 before the scandals became public. There were also stories about former Boston Mayor Ray Flynn, and Whitey Bulger, who saw his play more than a few times.

Duffin, like Behan, calls a spade a spade, and doesn’t pull his punches, which is a refreshing quality in these oh-so-politically correct academic environs we live in. If Duffin’s performance for me is any indication of the play he stars in, get your hands on tickets now!

Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update *The play runs through March 31st at Jimmy Tingle’s Off Broadway Theatre. Davis Square Somerville.

Doug Holder, Harris Gardner and Jennifer Matthews At Squawk March 15 9 PM

Featured Poets













Doug Holder http://authorsden.com/douglasholder

Harris Gardner http://www.tapestryofvoices.com

Jennifer Matthews http://www.jennifermatthews.com


A Talk with Squawk
February 18, 2005 by Doug Holder
Somerville News

On any given day, at the Sherman Cafe, in Union Square, you are bound to run into any number of poets, writers, and artists nursing their respective cups of java.

On this particular Saturday I ran into the former owner of House of Sarah Books in Inman Sq. and June Gross who co-wrote the play “The Dangers of Empathy.” But, who I was really waiting for was Lee Kidd and Jessa Lynne, of the “Squawk Coffeehouse,” a long-time venue of music, poetry and performance housed at the Harvard Epworth Methodist Church just outside Harvard Square.

Since 1988, the coffeehouse has presented such folks as the poet/writer Ed Sanders, the singer and 60’s activist John Sinclair, the jazz musician and Kerouac confidant David Amram, and a host of local poets and musicians. Their other brainchild is “Squawk Magazine” an art and poetry journal that they have put out with artist/poet Mick Cusimano and others. There are 57 issues of the print magazine, and now “Squawk” is solely online, but a new print run may be in the works.

Lee Kidd, one of the founders of the “Squawk” enterprise, is decidedly a Renaissance man. Since 1976, he has owned and operated a language school in Harvard Square that specializes in foreign language immersion. Kidd is not just a self-educated bohemian. He attended Harvard Divinity School; he is a Fulbright scholar, and has been published in “The New Yorker.”

Jessa Lynne has an equally fascinating background. Originally from the Milwaukee area; she moved here looking for a counterculture venue when she heard of the “Naked City,” an earlier incarnation of “Squawk,” which was located at the “Allston Mall” in Allston. “I was impressed with the warm and open environment,” she said. Since then, she has graced the stage at “Squawk.” She has performed skits, political satire, dance and other modes of expression.
Lynne works at Harvard, and also has a gig where she portrays historical figures like Susan B. Anthony, Emilia Earhart, and other notable women, at libraries and schools in the area. Kidd said that “Squawk” has changed a lot from 1988 to 2005. Before it was basically music and poetry, now there is anything from jugglers to book signings, he said. “We are more eclectic now. We have a coffeehouse consciousness, a mix of people from the homeless to Harvard professors,” he said.

Kidd and Lynne are optimistic for the future of “Squawk.” Kidd said, “There will a great golden age of music and poetry in the third millennium, and we'll be part of it.” “Squawk” meets every Thursday night at 9 p.m. at the Harvard Epworth Methodist Church, 1555 Mass. Ave., Harvard Square, Cambridge. More information is available at www.angelfire.com/music/squawk.








SQUAWK Coffeehouse, an open-mike venue for musicians, poets, & other performing artists.





Every Thursday night, from 9:00 pm to 12 midnight,
located in the Harvard Epworth Methodist Church, 1555 Mass. Ave., Harvard Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA (between Harvard & Porter Squares, right next to Harvard Law School's Pound Hall), or call (617) 776-3625.

LYRICAL SOMERVILLE ARCHIVE

LYRICAL SOMERVILLE ARCHIVE

This is the archive of the "Lyrical Somerville" column in "The Somerville News" ( Somerville, Mass.) edited by Doug Holder. The column features a poem by a select poet each week. To submit your work to the "Lyrical" send it to dougholder@post.harvard.edu This archive is in progress. There are several years of columns to archive.

Oct. 14, 2009: Kirk Etherton "Perfect Day"

Sept. 30, 2009: Len Solo "Karner Blue"

Sept 23, 2009: Tino Villanueva "Sending Out A Note"

Sept. 16, 2009: Kate Chadbourne " Never Alone"

Sept. 9, 2009: Heather Angell "Tephra"

Aug 26, 2009: John Flynn " Gathering Contradictions In A Cheap Room."

Aug 12, 2009: Steve Glines. "Into the Heart of Winter"

Aug 5, 2009: Deborah Gage "Girl Place, MFA"

July 29, 2009: Bert Stern. "Buffalo, 1938"

July 22, 2009: Keith Tornheim "Three-Kiss-Funk"

July 15, 2009: Mary Rice "Mandalas"

July 8, 2009: Linda Larson "Dixie, 1960"

July 1, 2009: Ruth C. Chad "Regrettably, Mother..."

June 24,2009: Ann Hutt Browning "An Ordinary Life"

June 17, 2009: Elizabeth Swados "Houdini's Private God"

June 10, 2009: Fred Marchant " For the Matinee"

May 27, 2009: Paul Bura " The Drunk on the Train"

May 20, 2009: Celia Gilbert "Coming Back"

May 13, 2009: Reza Tokaloo "Seeking the Leaf," "Letting Go"

May 6, 2009: A.D. Winans " 71 Going On 72"

April 29, 2009: Doug Holder "Mr. Freimour"

April 15, 2009 Lainie Senechal "Verdant" "Aubade"

April 8, 2009: Diana Der-Hovanessian "Angel in Somerville" "How to Ruin A Poem"

April 1, 2009: Cameron Mount "Abandoned Chair"

Mar. 25, 2009: Bridgit Brown "Back and Forth"

Mar. 18, 2009: Zvi Sesling "Breathe, Smell"

Mar. 11, 2009: Bridgit Galway "New Yoork 1960"

Mar. 4, 2009: Donna Bechar "Fog"

Feb. 25, 2009: Cynthia McGinty "The Congregation of Union Square"

Feb 11, 2009: Ellaraine Lockie "First Five Months in Venice"

Feb. 4, 2009: Susan Rosenburg "Trying To Bring It Back"

Jan 28, 2009: Rebecca Schumejda " Four Months From Now"

Jan 14, 2009: Carolyn Gregory " Holy Fool"

Jan 7, 2009: Leah Angstman " i don't respond to hey baby"

Dec. 24, 2008: Miguel Miro "North Star"

Dec.17,2008: Ed Galing "intitation"

Dec. 10, 2008: Irene Koronas "Family Tree"

Dec.3, 2008: Marilyn Jurich "Her Brother Feeding at The Breast..."

Nov 26, 2008 Sam Cornish "Sinatra"

Nov. 19,2008 Afaa Michael Weaver "In the Walking"

Nov 12, 2008 Kim Triedman "Best Laid Plans"

Nov 5, 2008 Lisa Kaufman "His House"

Oct 28, 2008 Martha Boss "to keep from splitting"

Oct 22, 2008 Nicole DiCello "Red Shift"

Oct 15, 2008: Jim Foritano " The Surly Waiter and You"

Oct 8, 2008: Michael Todd Steffen " A Blank"

Oct 1, 2008: Ruth Kramer Baden "Nuevo Ano"

Sept 24,2008: Linda Mannke "Little Sapling"

Sept 17,2008: Larry Kessenich "Shopping Cart"

Sept 10, 2008: Lucy Holstedt "Autumn"

ept 3, 2008: Dorothy Shubow Nelson "Recognition in Central Square."

Aug 27, 2008 Barbara Bialick "Sitting Alone in the Au Bon Pain--Davis Square"

Aug 20, 2008

Aug 13,2008 Ed Galing "Family Reunions"

Aug. 6, 2008 Deborah M. Priestly "I Fired My Therapist"

July 23, 2008: Julia Carlson " Advice to the Lovelorn"

July 16, 2008: Steve Lappen "Galloping"

July 9, 2008. Pam Annas " Find the line and cross it"

July 2, 2008 Bob Silverberg " A Self-Centered Writer Named Hank."

June 25, 2006 Linda Larson " Narcissus"

June 18, 2008: Ryk McIntyre " The Jesus of Ugly"

May 28, 2008: Elizabeth Quinlan "Promise Supermarket"

May 21, 2008: Gary Duehr "The Big Book Of Why"

May 14, 2008: Ed Galing "Boardwalk"

May 7, 2008: Doug Holder " Spring: This Ain't A Love Poem"

April 30, 2008: Jennifer LeBlanc " unrestrained"

April 23, 2008: Elizabeth Gordon McKim "Saas Fee Bridge"

April 16, 2008: Edie Aronowitz Mueller "The Fat Girl"

April 9 2008: K. Peddlar Bridges "Bikers are a strange breed"

April 2 2008: Ellen Steinbaum "Fortune"

March 26 2008: Tim Gager

March 19 2008: Barbara Helfgott Hyett "Consider Killing Him Instead"

March 12 2008: Kirk Etherton "Composition"

March 5 2008: Dorian Brooks "Pollution"

Feb. 27 2008: Philip Burnham, Jr. "1963"

Feb 20 2008: Chad Reynolds: " Women are from Venus, Victor is from Mars."

Feb 13 2008: Susan Rosenberg "Memorial Service At The Cemetery"

Feb. 6 2008: Doug Holder " The Bun"

Jan 30. 2008: Michael Graves "Mother"

Jan 23. 2008: Barbara Bialick: " The Silvery Spiral"

Jan 16. 2008: Lisa Beatman. " Good Bones."

Jan. 9 2008: Ed Galing "Diner"

Jan. 2 2008: Reuven Goldfarb "72 Virgins"


2008


Dec 26 2007 Richard Wilhelm "White Birch"

Dec. 19 2007: Ron Southern " Mary's Child"

Dec. 12 2007: Harris Gardner. " Among Us"

Dec 5 2007: Mary Bonina "Sleepless"

Nov. 28 2007: Dale Patterson. "In Transit"

Nov 21 2007: Michael Todd Steffen "Looks"

Nov 14 2007 Pamela Annas "Waitress"

Nov. 7 2007: Jenna Humphrey "The Weapons We Choose"

Oct 31 2007: Marc Goldfinger. "Sylvia Plath Flies Over Northampton"

Oct. 24 2007: Julia Carlson. "Hotel Caribe," "A Love Poem"

October 17 2007: Robert K. Johnson " Out There."

October 10 2007: Mignon Ariel King "Ken's Pub: When My Father Was Alive."

October 3 2007: Norma Roth "Soldier's Lament"

September 26 2007 Jack Powers "Birds"

September 19 2007 Jasen Sousa " Small Breasts"

September 12 2007 Jennifer Matthews " Captures The Light"

September 5 2007: Afaa Michael Weaver. "Radio Days"

August 29 2007: Ed Meek "Denis Martin"

August 22 2007: Taylor Altman. "Before Rush Hour."

August 15 2007: Linda Larson. "Bowery Time."

August 18 2007: Catherine Wang Hsu "Fishing A Wish"

August 1 2007: Dori Cameron. "Prince Diana"

July 26 2007: Lolita Paiewonsky: "Illusions of Movement."

July 19 2007 Freddy Frankel: "Black Jew/White Jew"

July 12 2007 Christopher Cunningham. "I Notice Wildflowers"

July 5 2oo7 Ifeanyi Menkiti. "Pretty Lady" "South of Fifth Avenue"

June 27 2007: Susanne Morning. "Yellow."

June 20 2007: Taylor Stoehr. "Reply to Chief Chang" "Too Many Words"

June 13 2007: Helen Bar Lev:" In The Old City of Jerusalem"

June 6 2007: Ruth Sabath Rosenthal: "For Sarah"

May 30 2007: Anne Barnett: " White Asparagus Child"

May 23, 2007: Mary Claire. "The Silver Sea." Marcia Felth. "Substances of Life.

May 16, 2007: Mort Brenner: "Rite of Passage" Mark Leonard: "Billy Collins Creative Process"

May 9 2007: Elizabeth Leonard. "Beantown Commute."

May 2, 2007: Jason Tandon: "Ars Poetica: While I Wait For Takeout At The Chinese Restaurant."

April 25 2007: Julia Carlson "Anorexia"

April 18 2007: Jade Sylvan "Paris"

April 11 2007: Richard Wilhelm " Continuance"

April 4 2007: Helene King "A Crown of Thorns" "St. Patrick's Day"

March 28 Llyn Clague "The Kenyon Review"

March 21 2007: Thade Correa " Winter Morning Poem"

March 14 2007: Flavia Cosma "So Many Clocks In The House."

March 7 2007 : Don DiVecchio " The Walk Down Newbury Street"

Feb 28 2007: Jared Smith "Dark Machinery of Maybe"

Feb 21 2007: Deborah M. Priestly "In the Backyard Waiting"

Feb 14 2007: Jacques Fluery "Learning My Mother Tongue."


2006


Jan 31 : Molly Lynn Watt "Aspiration"

Jan 24 : Gloria Mindock. "She's Not A Good Mother, Joe."

Jan 17 : Anne Brudewald. "Cat"

Jan 10 : Doug Holder "Jack's Joke Shop."

Jan 3 : Jennifer Matthews " Trees in December"

Dec. 27: Tim Gager "Rabbit Maranville."

Dec 2o: Steve Glines. "The Last View of Mortal Man."

Dec 13: Abbott Ikeler " Pistachios"

Dec. 6: Josh Cook. " Verse1 In The American Book of the Dead."

Nov. 29: Pam Rosenblatt. "Any Neighborhood."

Nov. 22: Michael Cantor. "Lament"

Nov. 15: Richard Wilhelm. "Behind Windows."

Nov. 8: Joanne Holdridge "Measure of Man"

Nov. 1: Doug Holder "The Undertaker Takes His Lunch."

Oct. 25: Roxana Boboc "Blues For a Little Girl."

Oct 18: Blossom Spigner "The Wrong Words."

Oct 11: james de crescentis "Clear Cutting The Heart"

Oct 4. Danny Sklar. "Books"

Sept 27: Tim Gager "Drinks at Five to Ten P.M. "Euthanized"

Sept 20: Alan Catlin. Plans.

Sept 13: Sue Red. Miss Muse.

Sept 6: Beatrzi Alba Del-Rio. "Walking Slowly By Andrew Craigie Spring House, CA. 1860 in Somerville."

Aug 30. Diamond Riley "Our Father"

Aug 23. Doug Holder. "Davis Square, Somerville: A Colonial Woman at the Au Bon Pain"

Aug 16: Gloria Mindock "Stunned"

Aug 9: Alison Ide Pech "Nursing Musings"

Aug 2: Robert K. Johnson " Why Ruth Is Not A Good Poet"

July 26. Edwin Arlington Robinson. "Richard Cory"

July 19: Lyn Lifshin. "I Wear My Hair Long."

July 12: Ed Miller. "The View" "Letter to McMahon ll"

July 5: Patricia Brodie. "Invested"

June 14: Lisa King. "The Death of Stars."

June 7: Susan B. Weiner "My Mother's Nails."

May 31: Marc Goldfinger. "Jumping Billy From Cambridge."

May 24: Danielle Remingo. "The Valiant Officer."

May 17: Doug Holder. "A Sherman Oatmeal Scone."

May 10: Lawrence Ferlinghetti. "Speak Out."

May 3: Tomas O'Leary. "Gathering The Cast."

April 26: Gloria Mindock. "Walking In El Salvador." "Glass Picture, Rosario Church, San Salvador"

April 19. Raffy Woolf. "A New Drug That Will Never Make it to the Shelf."

April 12. John Hildebidle. "Sheer Persistence." "Denver Omelet, Sausage, Hash Browns."

April 5. Ashley Roy. "Misreading Motives." "Affectionate"

April 22: Mary Beth Abel Hughes. "Monuments'

March 15. Jane Etzel. "Shifting Sands."

March 8: Mike Booth. "Buffing The Casket."

March 1: Walter McDonald. "A World of Books."

Feb. 22: Barbara Bialick. "September 24"

Feb 15: Ann Fletcher. "This Old House"

Feb 8: Molly Lyn Watt. "Songs of Consuming." "Eyes."

Feb1. Matt Rosenthal. "Momentum."

Jan 25. Simon P. Augustine. "When I am an Old Man."

Jan 18. Doug Holder. "Poem for the Sherman Cafe"

Jan 11. Sarah Hannah. "Quincy Quarry"


2005

Dec. 21. John Curtis. "Red Line Blessing For An Unborn Child."

Dec 14. Iole Damaskinos. " A Clash of Cultures."

Nov. 23. Doug Holder. "Wrestling With My Father." " Wallace Ave., Bronx,1965."

Nov. 9. Tomas O'Leary " Down-Time at the Tir Na Nog"

Nov. 2. Tina Louise Kayal. "Walking The Sands Alone."

Dog Watch by Valerie Lawson

Poets Michael Brown and Valerie Lawson.

Dog Watch. Valerie Lawson. ( Ragged Sky Press 270 Griggs Drive Princeton, N.J. 08540) $10.

Valerie Lawson, a veteran of the Boston poetry scene is known for her work both in the Slam and the more traditional Spoken Word genre. She is a dramatic reader and her writing speaks as well on the page as the stage. In her new collection “Dog Watch” Lawson covers pets, downtown Boston, the passage of time; with vivid and memorable language. Take her portrait of two lovers in the poem “1369 Coffeehouse”,” a well-known coffee haunt in Cambridge, Mass. In this poem Lawson appoints the stage with telling and evocative detail:

“ You wore that brown sweater and plaid shirt.
Throat clearing sounds of coffee machines.
The counter man was funny, said,
“Get desert, he’s buying.”
Food unnecessary,
we sit at the tiny table in front,
ignore cups of tea.
You face the back,
I the street.
Above our head hangs a map of Cambridge.
You show your first poem of the new year,
Images in my mind an Escher print.
I give you a turkey feather,
it gleams as you twirl it,
as you smooth the barbs.

And in “Time Addict” Lawson captures the frenzied nature of the rat race—a maddening, life-deadening pace:

“ I can make it, I know I can,
less than living wage just a point
on the line, I need to run faster, work later
do more, shave sleep fifteen minutes at a time,
sleep is the drug for the weak, give me some sleep deprivation,
heady buzz a counterpoint to the pounding in my temples,
gotta go, got a thing, got to get somewhere, fast,
where’d the time go?”

Reccommended.

Presa No. Five

Presa Number 5. Spring 2007. ( Presa Press POBOX 792 Rockford, MI 49341) presapress@aol.com $8.50

The new issue of Eric Greinke’s excellent small press lit. mag “Presa” has just hit the streets. In this issue Harry Smith ( the publisher of the famed small press magazine “The Smith”) has an essay titled” Poetic Personae and Our Fictional Selves.” The featured poet is ANTLER, who was much praised by the late Allen Ginsberg. There is also a review of Hugh Fox’s controversial memoir “Way, Way Off the Road…” ( Ibbetson Street) by Larry Hill, as well as a review from one of the doyens of small press reviews Charles Ries. The poets included in this issue are: Alan Catlin, Linda Lerner, Richard Kostelanetz, B.Z. Niditch, and Doug Holder to name just a few. Presa, in a very short time has made its name on the alternative press scene. Highly Recommended.

Doug Holder/Ibbetson Update/March 2007

"the new renaissance" at Endicott College

ENDICOTT COLLEGE http://endicottcollege.com

Several months ago I approached an acquaintance of mine Dan Sklar, head of Creative Writing at Endicott College in Beverely, Mass. about sponsoring "the new renaissance" literary magazine at Endicott. ( I am on the advisory boardof the magazine) http://tnrlitmag.net Dan set up an initial meeting forLouise Reynolds, the founder, and myself, and today after meeting with thepresident, and Peter Eden, the Dean of Arts and Sciences, we reached an agreement about setting up an office, and establishing an affiliation withthe college. We hope to have an association with Endicott like Ploughshares has at Emerson, Salamander at Suffolk University, etc...

What We Love: Poems by Ed Meek

What We Love. Poems by Ed Meek ( Blue Light Press 1st World Library PO BOX 2211 Fairfield, Iowa 52556) $16. http://www.1stworldlibrary.com/

Some years ago Ibbetson Street published a chapbook of poems by Ed Meek titled: “Walk Out” Since then I have seen Meek’s poems crop up in a fair number of journals in the small press. Meek’s poems are on the surface deceptively simple, but underneath lie the layers of meaning. Meek writes equally well about nature, as he does people. He captures the nuances and telling detail, so important in the construct of a poem. Case-in-point—in Meek’s poem “Divorce” he uses the conceit of divorcing the tired image of oneself, at say—fifty years old. Here is Meek’s convincing grocery list of a midlife crisis (believe me I know):

“Move to a new city. Leave behind/ that fat lazy fool who returns your hopeful gaze/ in cruel mirrors every morning/as you brush your caffeine-stained teeth/…This is the year to take a train into tomorrow/ one-way ticket in hand,/ where no one knows your name/ and you can be someone else..”

In “At the Beach on the Hottest Day of the Year” Meek describes floating on the water in a blissful state of suspended animation:

“…Instead I remain suspended, belly up,
eyes closed to time, which goes by, I guess, without me.
As if I’d left my body behind and become
nothing more or less than thought
buoyant as a bubble in the air.”

Recommended.

Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update/ Feb. 2007

Hugh Fox on Poet, Playwright, Publisher M. Stefan Strozier

M. Stefan Strozier: lives in New York City and is the artistic director of La Muse Venale Acting Troupe. His plays: Guns, Shackles & Winter Coats, The Whales, The Tragedy of Abraham Lincoln (and the upcoming The Green Game), were performed in lengthy runs, off-off Broadway, in the Midtown International Theatre Festival, and in other theaters. He has directed four plays and produced ten. His novels, short story collection, book of poems, essays, memoir, and plays are available for sale. His work has been published in many literary journals, online and in print. He is the chief editor and CEO of World Audience, Inc., the publisher of quarterlies audience, The audience Review, and books by excellent writers from around the world. Visit his 2nd blog. He also builds Web sites for very low prices. Please contact him: strozier@worldaudience.org for further information.








M. Stefan Strozier : “Sit Down Before You Start to Read This!”





OVERVIEW by Hugh Fox



When I read Strozier’s latest (2007) book, The Tragedy of Abraham Lincoln: A Two-Act Play (no real-place address for the publisher, just www.worldaudience.org) I was totally taken back by its total seriousness. Effective dramatically, but at the same time like a documentary about Lincoln’s assassination by John Wilkes Booth. As I said in my review, “The Lincoln Strozier creates here is super-real, and Booth, his assassin, is just as real/human. No heroes versus monsters, but real-portraits of real-people in real-time.” I saw Strozier as some sort of super-academic, history-soaked genius who saw the world through extended visits to the rare (history) book room at major libraries, a kind of documentary re-creator of time-past. And it was in that frame-of-mind that I picked up his The Essays and Criticism of M. Stefan Strozier ,Vol.I (World Audience, Inc., 2006)) and started to read “An Interview with Kurt Vonnegut: and, Phone Call from Dr. Louis Manand, of The New Yorker Fame:” and the whole interview is one vast burlesque-ridicule of Vonnegut and big-time writing which Strozier sees as overly academic, library- 2.centered, out of touch with everyday reality. Look what he has Vonnegut saying about academics: “....In order to talk in an educated manner about literature, one has to be an English professor, like Doctor Louis Menand; and, have published several books; or, at least an MFA in creative writing, from somewhere like Columbia University, where all the geniuses are. You have not created anything because you are just writing merrily along, undisciplined...” (p.14) To which Strozier replies: “Your generation...defined writing as serving other professions, such as academia, journalism via New Journalism...everything; except, writing as an art form.....writing is an art, which owns all processes. Your generation’s art has been rejected, a failure!....Also, who says professors are right? My experience with professors -- notably English professors -- has always, always been that they have dubious talent, suspect motivations...and, no imagination, whatsoever....” (p.15) And so it goes, more like a wrestling match than an interview. Eventually I began wondering if the whole “interview” was for real. And it wasn’t. There’s a note at the very end: “Editor’s Note: The proceding “interview” is a work of fiction.” (p. 24) So where does reality begin and fantasy end? Or vice versa?

3. Like it’s a little difficult to take Strozier’s autobiography, The Labyrinth (World Audience, 2006) totally serious. The part about him being a young alcoholic totally lost and spinning around in an infinity of nothingness seems more like science fiction than autobiography. Here he is talking about his weltanshauung during alcohol-withdrawal: I lifted and turned my head to study the thick leather belts on my wrists and ankles....I rotate my body forcefully to the left and instantly dislocate my shoulder. I scream. No one answers. Now every time I move my shoulder I am in severe pain. To this day, my left should clicks if I pop it.... My personal demon is over my shoulder. He is The Smiler. He is the thin veil I use to hide my insanity from the world. He laughs with me, as we are going insane. He is the one who I am ashamed of when I see that my insanity is showing, and when I can’t stop laughing at the game going on in my head for hours, he is there. He is in the mirror, smiling at me.... Presences, as I call them; there are more of them. They are not alter-personalities because I still retain my own personality; but I drift into these other entities. The presences are not imaginary friends because they are real.... Voices in my head arrive: intense, stressful, simultaneously loudly speaking, as if I’m at a boisterous cocktail party: A snotty, high-pitched, female voice says, “Trees, 4. bebe somedee wee-hee. Low are the days in heaven and ghosts and be there where to doodoodoodoodoodoodoo- doodoodooand boom.” A rambling, sophisticated, male voice says, “I went to the sky and some time pass-ed and da my oh my and double youins be some dumb shitens and whore by the door score so there was still plenty of time so fine why not dine but then rickety picket the whicker chair’s picket tricket bliket me ticket me ticket! I simply must have me ticket! Young son, won’t you please get me the gun?” (pp. 13-18) It’s more than a little difficult to stop reading/quoting, isn’t it. Really crazy/hallucinogenic of just crazily inventive, you want to read on and on. And that’s the way everything Strozier writes is -- compelling, hypnotic, habit-forming. He’s like a drug himself, isn’t he. Stopping reading is like going through withdrawal. When I put it to Strozier today, a publisher-writer-producer totally on target, the soul of effectiveness in terms of the agonzing mechanics of contemporary publishing, writing and play-producing, here’s what he said: I think my story is that I just had to figure out what (not who) the hell I was (am), as it all hit me very hard, when I was very young. This took much work and creative thinking; however, once I had more or less nailed it, I then applied my (self) in unique ways to the normal world with much luck. The secret, that I realized later on, was that if I had had

5. no clue about what I was, then other people would be very much uncertain. Other people with similar problems may not be so lucky, however, and I hope my book can serve as one example, bold and bare as it stands. Not “who,” but “what” he was/is! And perhaps the work itself is a part of the “what-is” process! As I read through Strozier’s poetry and find all kinds of links with the wildest of French poets like Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Baudelaire, I can’t help but think that this whole process of self-awarenessing and defining is practically a normal process for all truly original creative artists: In wandering up to an overlook, Where the sky is clear and blue, And birds circle high in the air The city stretches into distance, Abated by treed hillsides I am welcomed here, By no one and nothing The river is to my left -- Strong, but barely discernable -- Behind me, there is a tourist castle. I smile at the secret I hold. (“The Heights,” from Schizophrenic Poetry, published by World Audience, 2006, p.24)

6. Very easy to imagine this translated into French, n’est pas? And what is the secret that he holds? So I asked him, and by return e-mail got a 643 page essay (I’m playing Strozier now, it was “only” 20!) on the use of the subconscious in the creative process in which he states that “the subconscious...rules nature and man,” and that when he discovered its importance he felt he had “unlocked the staircase to heaven.” Writing became “a powerful tool for exploring the ego and the subconscious because writing forces the mind to think, like an individual.” He wrote allowing the subconscious to take over: “There is no controlling the process; the process controls itself.” And I hate to say it but I agree with him, don’t consciously force what I’m writing on to the page, but listen to the voices inside me and put down what they are saying. And Strozier’s work has a strange hypnotic, compelling quality about it. Once you start reading his work, you can’t stop. He is the most habit-forming writer I have ever read. Take his novel about the Gulf War, for example, Scarecrow Soldier. You start to read about night attacks from the enemy, and Strozier is so graphic, terse, to the point, so overwhelmingly realistic, that, I ask you, can you stop reading?

7. The air attacks came every night, never letting up, always worse than the night before. Things never got better, not even for a moment. Every soldier knew the routine they had to follow. They knew how long it would take before they might meet Great Allah. In the darkness, the wraiths of men wrapped their lanky arms around their thin, bony knees. Large white eyes flickered from terror in the cold, pitch black bunkers like muttered muttered incoherent sentences about things “precious” to them...the numbness of the chill reached down to the souls of the soldiers. The desert cold ate into their skin and their blood and then like a wet blanket, it pressed down on them, seepling slowly into their bones like lead. The cold had a way of weighing a mind down and burdening it. First the low, steady hum from the enemies’ B-52’s came unmistakably into the ears of the soldiers in the bunkers...... (Scarecrow Soldier, Chapter Two, “Scarecrow of a Man,” p.22) World Audience,Inc., 1992). You see what I mean? It’s narrative reduced not only to its basic, no-nonsenseness, but with little personal, subjective touches thrown in, references to Allah, the bunkers talking, nothing really literarywise “thought out,” but allowed to “come out” of the creative subconscious mind in a sense dictating the whole work. Strozier is very aware of exactly where he and his mode of

8.functioning stands in the publishing world that surrounds him in New York. And he enjoys being a total outsider, with his own publishing business has begun a whole new , alternative publishing universe. But back to his work itself. The Whales is one of the funniest, strangest, and most cogent/penetrating plays ever written. A whale on the cover. The play partly about whales/whale-choruses in a way, but what it’s really about is the mystique of the contemporary NYC publishing/drama-producing world. Toward the end, with the whales and whale chorus standing by, a character named Harry (Strozier himself?) comes out with one of the most to-the-point monologues ever written: We all want toi fall in love with it again. We want our theaters to have emotion, not attend a lecture. We want real characters we understand and love and hate. We want to get angry at our characters and cry with them. We want our theater back. $150 is too much to pay for a ticket. Add in the roses for the lady, drinks;and, parking and you are set back two to three yards -- hundreds of dollars....our feelings and our desires are more important than lining a producer’s pocket with money. We want control. We want our theater back. Our theater does not belong to tourists or the mayor. Our theater belongs to us!... (The Whales: A Comedy in Seven Scenes, p.43,World Audience, Inc., 2006,originally performed by La Muse Vénal, Inc. at Where Eagles Dare Theater in NYC, Jan., 2006).

9. Strozier is a writer, publisher, play-producer to keep your eye on. Amazing energy, a fanatic sense of purpose/direction, and always that sense that the “real” him is at work, not some sort of societally-engineered individual, but a man totally in touch with his own inner realities that drive him forcefully through the world that (oft-times negatively) surrounds him.

John Hodgen: A Poet In Search of Grace.

John Hodgen: A Poet in search of “Grace.”

John Hodgen lives in Shrewsbury, Mass., holds a M.A. in English from Assumption College, and teaches at Mt. Wachusset Community College, Assumption College, and the Worcester Art Museum.

He has won the Grolier Poetry Prize, the Yankee Magazine Poetry Prize, and most recently the Donald Hall Poetry Prize.

He has been widely published both in magazines and anthologies. His most recent poetry collection is titled: “Grace.”

I talked with him on my Somerville Community Access TV Show “ Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.”

Doug Holder: Both you and your daughter Christie Hodgen are the recipients of prestigious writing awards. Is there a run of writers in your extended family?

John Hodgen: Christy as far as I can see, is the only one to win the AWP in fiction, and has an old man who won one in poetry. I know there is something there; there is some kind of connection. She’ll send me something she is working on, and I will feel there is some kind of flow, a rhythm. Some things she has written I feel I could have written too. She’s a pretty talented writer. I don’t know how she does what she does. She started writing for me. I was her advanced placement teacher in high school. Now she is a novelist and even writes essays. I don’t know any other writers in our family’s ancient past. My dad wrote a few things in high school that were published.

DH: Some say the writing life is a curse, some say a blessing. What’s your take?

JH: I’ve heard that you grow up with that awareness. Depression, alcoholism, and suicide are something we attach to poets. There is a curse and blessing. If you are a gifted kid, you are looking at things with eyes wide open---which most of us may not be looking at. You have to look at the hard things—it could put you in danger—but you have to be able to pull back.

DH: Many of your poems dealt with your father, who died suddenly at a factory he worked at during the night shift. Did his untimely demise spur you on to be a poet?

JH: I foolishly told my father at age fifteen, to go to hell. It turned out that he died a week later. And we hadn’t said a word to each other since I told him to go to hell. I struggled with that. At the time I thought I killed him. As he had that heart attack, and lay on that boiler room floor for four hours, I often tortured myself with the thought that this was the last interaction he had with me. I thought the weight of that he took with him. You start looking for words to heal, bring something better. You look for words that are not a curse but perhaps a blessing.

DH: If your father could read these poems you wrote about him; how would he receive them?

JH: I think he would be proud. That’s easy to say. He was proud of the papers that I brought home as a kid. He valued writing—he would be proud. He read all the time. He urged me to read Carl Sandburg’s trilogy for instance.

DH: In your poem “Forgiving Buckner” you use the fateful fielding error Bill Buckner made in the ’86 series between the Mets and the Soxs. You write:

“The world is always rolling between our legs,
It comes for us, dribbler, slow roller,
humming its goat song, easy as a pie.”

Do you always have the sense that things slip away in life, just before you realize their beauty, their significance?

JH: We are all Buckners. We lose that every day. We should smell the coffee and the roses, but we don’t—we rush—we miss them. There are poems I haven’t gotten to yet, but I better get to. I know the clock is ticking. There are some poems from basic training that I want to write.

DH: Why do so many writers have a fascination with the game of baseball?

JH: It has it all. The dream, the heart break, the beauty. The beauty of a well-made play. I know more and more writers who have something to say about the game.

DH: In your poem “The Sound that the Earth Makes” you write:
“
I do not know where the old men go
when they walk out alone in the night.
I know they must carry the weight of their lives
in the curl of their sullied and empty hands…

that they stand by themselves in the darkness
That they hold what is in them for as long as they can…

to where they are going, to where they remember,
to the endless river of stars.”

When did you write this poem? Is this a young man’s poem for an old man? Now that you are closer to that “endless river of stars” does this poem ring true?

JH: It’s an old poem. I know I felt at the time that was what an old man’s pain must be; or what he dreams. The poem sounds right. I remember my father going out on the lawn, looking up at the sky, and telling me about all the constellations. His silences were as important as anything he was saying. I had a sense how strongly my father was drawn to the sky.

DH: You went from teaching high school to teaching college. How was that transition?

JH: The kids were just wonderful in high school. I used to go up to Gardner, Mass. to teach one college course a week because my mother was living up there. I wanted to find out what it was like teaching at that level, and I just kept doing it. When I retired from teaching I joined a writer’s group in Worcester, Mass... The head of the English Dept. of Assumption College was a member of the group, and asked if I could teach. So I did. It has been great.

DH: Can poetry writing be taught?

JH: I think you can encourage anyone with talent. You can tell them what you know.


DH: What is the poetic life for you?

JH: I think we have a sense of even through our suffering we are given a gift. The poetic life is to find the gift and give it back

Doug Holder/Ibbetson Update/ Feb. 2007/ Somerville, Mass.

The Outernationale by Peter Gizzi

The Outernationale
By Peter Gizzi
Wesleyan University Press
Copyright 2007
p. 107

Review by Lo Galluccio http://www.logalluccio.com

This book by Peter Gizzi released on Wesleyan U. Press comes to me hailed hailed and praised. It makes me question again what poetry can and should do; what I want from it; and how it actually works. In the course of my reading this work, Peter’s fourth and most ambitious, I would imagine, I found myself dipping into a bit of red wine, looking up some terms and words in the big red dictonary and googling, "The Internationale." I also listened intently to Nina Simone’s "Pirate Jenny" and Leonard Cohen’s "If It Be Your Will" by Antony from the latest soundtrack of "I’m Your Man." Am I a hopeless, generationZ multi-tasking failure, or was there a logic to my diversions? Well, I’d like to think so. And also, that like a good Robert Wilson opera with it’s Suzuki like friezes, I had time to leave the theatre, free-associate and breathe. Perhaps it was "Pirate Jenny" that led me to find the lyrics of the famous socialist anthem to understand what it stood for and how powerful were its words. If Gizzi is writing an "Outernationale," what’s the relation between the two, or is there one at all?
The Internationale was written in Paris in 1871 by Eugene Pottier. It was composed to celebrate the Paris Commune of March-May 1871 –the first time workers took state power into their own hands. And the Commune was drowned in blood, according to the Marxist descript on the web, by the conservative French government in Versaille. However, the anthem took on future meanings and revolutionary uses in Spain, Chile and Poland. It is worth noting the 6th verse of one of its versions:
"Laborers and peasants, we are
the great party of workers
the earth belongs only to humans
The idle are going to live elsewhere
How much they feast on our flesh
But if the ravens and the vultures
Disappear one of these days
The sun will shine forever
l: It is the final struggle
Let us gather, and tomorrow
The Internationale
Will be mankind:l
Gizzi does not present a socio-political tract in the poems of the "Outer…" It is not revolution for Martians either. He follows in the walk of Whitman and Ashbury in creating architecture of a personal and subjective vision of humankind. He plays with language like an engineer but his perspective is more metaphysical than scientific. He’s referring to the world outside us, as it is reflected in us, as it even becomes us, in his writing. He might echo Walt’s "Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you." And he certainly believes in some kind of tribal interstices of artists as he embeds quotes and references from the works of Ashbury, VanGogh, John Cage and Mandelstam in this collection.
The Outernationale is indeed, "beyond the grid," beyond the wrenching pain of industrialization and class struggle. Gizzi sees us as evolving through and with many strange, ordinary and splintered things. He likes to play with perspective, like a painter, to investigate color and simulate depth.
I must say my favorite poem in this collection is not its title track, which I find like the worst of his poetry, too obtuse, fragmented and maddeningly pretentious in form. (Hey, that’s just me. I would certainly admit that some of his poetic gamesmanship is probably above my head) but it still comes back to the fundamental question of what vibes and messages language can create in us, and for us. No, my favorite poem is called, "Vincent, Homesick for the Land of Pictures" – a kind of ode to Van Gogh that takes on a beautiful, fugue-like life of its own. Its structure is almost classical though it’s language distinctively modern. Here is the crux:
"O to be useful, of use, to the actual seen thing
to be in someway related by one’s actions in the world.
There might be nothing greater than this
Nothing truer to the good feelings that vibrate with us+
Like in the middle of the flower I call your name."
And then another repeating stanza:
"But felt things exist in shadow, let us reflect
the darkness bears a shine as yet unpunished by clarity
but perhaps a depth that outshines clarity and is true."
When Gizzi puts forth an idea and imbues it with light and dimension, I’m completely drawn in. When he seeminingly masturbates with syntax, I could care less, no matter how brilliant most of his writing is.
Another wonderful poem is "Nocturne," for it is again like a gorgeous abstract painting, for which we have at least some known reference:
"To know is an extreme condition
like doubt, and will not rest
Even the dailies unravel in the end.
The aperture shut tight.
It is so difficult to admit light
In its unconditional noise
Its electric blur, its red
Cherry red, red of the advertisements.."
And he moves on to:
"All, under blue, a prison shirt blue
that torch song blue of the crooner’s eyes"
And resolves to:
"The throaty blue
in a doorway after a party."
And so color comes alive as an entity we can feel.
I’m also fond of "Human Memory is Organic" which also has a Whitmanesque flair:
"I am just a visitor to this world
an interloper really headed deep into glass.
I, moving across a vast expanse of water
Though it is not water maybe salt
Or consciousness itself
Enacted as empathy. Enacted as seeing."
Yes, it is a bit abstract, but the abstraction works, moves us, as if we are all at once and in transition visitor, then consciousness, enacted empathy or seeing. I guess Whitman would have named others, asserted tribes, proven his passionate bonds. With Gizzi it an implied connection and an explicit displacement in language that we find. Sometimes this works magically as in "The Western Garden" where the notion of history is introduced:
"The wood grain is deeper
than a forest
deeper than the sea.
The solid indication
Of space in time,
These whorls testify
This pattern inside."
Indeed in this poem he objectifies the role of the West in history as a garden:
"In a Western garden
there are broken tiles
like the broken history
like the objects broke under
the rims of the conquerors wheels.
In a Western garden
It gets darker faster
It is home this dark
This flag invisible in wind."
This hints at colonization and power struggles. It’s a delicate rendering –through a garden with broken tiles – of something which has rocked whole civilizations and cultures. And so it is with Gizzi, that he prefers to provide us with verbal clues and hypnotic, if elliptical descriptions of our world rather than the bold crass flashes of traditional verse. He does not rhyme; he does not construct sonnets or villanelles.
Please make no mistake, this is a book that will turn your wheels and make you think and associate beyond it’s frame – what good poetry should do – for it is fascinating and musical enough and flecked with expansive meanings.

Lo Galluccio
Ibbetson St. Press
"

Review of Poems For Dave Tronzo by Lo Galluccio

POEMS FOR DAVE TRONZO
By Lo Galluccio

Lo Galluccio’s “Poems For Dave Tronzo” is a small, self-published chapbook containing nine poems. (There is no price listed on the book.) The no-frills design, the typeface and its spatial relation to the page give the poems a sense of intimacy and immediacy even before reading. The line lengths vary in the poems, some lines ranging five to seven beats, some four or less. Galluccio lets the content give form to the poems, which adds visual as well as poetic spice to the book.
It would be helpful to the general reader if there were a title page with some mention of who Dave Tronzo is (an acclaimed New York-based guitarist known especially for his slide work, hence the cover photo) and perhaps why the book was “for” him. Beyond this minor quibble, this reviewer found the poems bursting with arresting imagery. From “The Color of January” we find:

Sometimes you say I’m a hot hot star in your bed. “What color would
you like me to be?” you ask. I say, “Blue.”

Galluccio’s images and language suggest a vision of poetry that is Rimbaudian and Orphic. She pushes her language. The language takes risky leaps, pushing off like a ballerina performing a tours en l’air and landing like a kung-fu fighter inches from your face.
Here are the first three stanzas of “Itinerary”:

Past castles in Brabant. Thirsty I drink a sweet dream of union.
My horse, a thief

In Gent. Pale fish serve as my communion. As symbols
go in eyes streaming where they went.

A hell topless and civilized extremely like Paris,
a cabdriver screws off his head.

Like I said, Rimbaudian; the imagery is surreal, dreamlike and haunting, as in “A Terror In Spring”:

I believed in silence but you
Kept opening up my mouth.
When your tongue finished foraging,
Words fell out like old shoes.
These words put tracks on your
Back.

The poem ends with these tasty lines:

Levitation is not the same as resurrection.

It takes faith.

I’m nobody,
and I use a pen.


This reviewer particular enjoyed “Your Amsterdam”, a poem more compact but no less charged by elevated language. Here it is in full:

I think I thought
I lived there
In a courtyard with pink
Flush egg lights
Where birds
Erupt at looping

Barbed wire

And finding you
at a table—
alabaster face
risen over a grey bowl
steaming—

My penitent kiss
to your forehead

gets pierced.

“Poems For Dave Tronzo” is a chapbook to savor. To cop a line from the speaker of “Three Dollar Poem,” you will come back and say yes, baby, yes.

--Richard Wilhelm
Ibbetson Update

Donald Lev on Enid Dame

An Essay by Donald Lev about his late wife the poet Enid Dame




(Enid Dame)




This essay is by Donald Lev who is the publisher of the New York-based independent literary review: "The Home Planet News." Donald Lev was born in New York City in 1936. He attended Hunter College, worked in the wire rooms of the Daily News and The New York Times and drove a cab for twenty years. He also ran messages for and contributed poetry to The Village Voice. Donald also operated the Home Planet Bookshop on the lower east side, and, in 1969, reached the pinnacle of his underground film career with his portrayal of "the poet" in Robert Downey Sr.'s classic, "Putney Swope." Currently, Donald lives with his reclusive cat, Kit Smart, in High Falls New York, continuing to publish and edit the literary tabloid Home Planet News, which he and his late wife, Enid Dame, founded in 1979








SOME THOUGHTS ON THE LIFE AND WORK OF ENID DAME
by Donald Lev



I first met Enid (who was my companion, wife, and colleague for 25 years) through some poems she sent to the New York Poets' Cooperative--it could have been as early as 1975, but more likely 1976 (my sense of chronology is as weak as my sense of direction). The Co-op started in ’69 as an organization that promoted readings—at that period you couldn’t get more than five minutes anywhere in NYC to present your work orally unless you kissed ass at one of two holy edifices—St. Marks in the Bouwerie or the Ninetysecond Street Y. I thought, what is this? Who is this? Does she really spell her last name with an m not an n? Does she either not know what she’s doing or does the sober but funny magic of those unusual poems come from a genuine ability and authority. I guessed the latter and voted with the majority (I believe it was unanimous) to welcome her into membership. One of the poems, “Before,” which subsequently appeared in her first Downtown Poets chapbook Between Revolutions began:

The catshit reproaches me in the bathroom.
The icebox has regressed:
incontinent, it leaks
and puddles on the floor.
The drain’s in pain again.
It vomits when I do the dishes.
The dishes crack.

We’re all of us
a bit unwell.

I finally got to meet Enid Dame at a meeting of the New York Poets’ Cooperative. And I came to appreciate her cool literary and political intelligence as well as her inner warmth, honesty, and humor. We soon became friends and allies in some of the controversies rife in the organization (of which I recall nothing now—which fact at least reveals how petty they must have been). When,.in 1978, Mike Devlin and I were beginning to produce issues of Poets Monthly out of Mike’s strategic office in Union Square, I suggested to Mike that we needed a good, organized, literary-minded person to center the enterprise. He agreed. So I got Enid, who at that time was looking for an excuse to lay off her doctoral dissertation for a while (she eventually finished it and became a fully exploitable member of Academia) to take on the task with the title of “associate editor.” But before that time Enid and I met in connection with two other interesting New York City literary institutions of the time: The Print Center and the Downtown Poets Cooperative.
The Print Center, in Brooklyn, was where all the small press publishers went in the ‘70s and ‘80s to put their chapbooks and other publications together. Any work you could do yourself, say saddle stitching, trimming, or even typesetting on one of their fine IBM Composers, you did yourself, without any cost to you. And anything the Print Center did for you—which was printing for the most part—was done at very reasonable rates—thanks to NYSCA and NEA funding. The operation was run by poets. When I first dealt with the Print Center—I notice my third book of poems, copyright 1973 was done there—it was located in a little storefront on State Street. The manager was a pleasant chap named George Faust. All the work was done by the long-suffering Larry Zirlin. By 1975 the Print Center was occupying the first of two similar spaces—large commercial lofts in downtown Brooklyn, near the BQE and the waterfront. In these new locations the manager became Robert Hershon (of Hanging Loose fame); and of course the long-suffering Larry Zirlin was on hand to do all the work. At some point the long-suffering Larry Zirlin was replaced by the uncomplaining Frank Murphy, who also printed the New York Poetry Calendar, which I came to distribute for about fifteen years. (Hershon currently runs something called the Print Center out of offices in Manhattan, which is a much different animal from its predecessor). Among the many many small presses (those were the days when we were a truly powerful movement) that enjoyed the benefits of the Print Center was the Downtown Poets’ Coop. headed by David and Phillis Gershator, two excellent writers and poets themselves, who managed on grants, which were much more plentiful those days, to publish several books and chapbooks. The Downtown authors whose names are most recognizable today were Ivan Arguelles, Irving Stettner, and Enid Dame.
Enid’s two Downtown Poets chapbooks, Between Revolutions (named “one of the half dozen best of the year” 1977 by Bill Katz of the Library Journal) and Interesting Times (1978), both well printed and illustrated with interesting collages and photographs by her husband of the time, Robin Dame (who, changed in name and gender, is still a good friend and important member of the Home Planet News editorial staff), consists of poems reflecting a period of Enid’s life when she was coming off a long hiatus during which poetry had been replaced by politics (she was a member of that section of SDS which did not use drugs or play with bombs, but also did not get to write the histories of the movement). Now, having left the party which denounced her as a “Bourgeoise Individualist” and moved with husband and cats to Brooklyn, she began writing the funny, sad, nostalgic poems that appear in these books—all soaked in a marinade of place, politics, and Jewish ethnicity.

four days a week
I manage
the streets, the terrible subways
the human explosions
skirting disasters
between revolutions

food cats poetry
sex keep me sane

the recent past
almost sustains me:
Browning and Ruskin
Victorian novels

energy
hoarded and measured
an inch at a time

my friends
know the score:
“politics
are meaningless,
the past a bad joke…”
…
yet
history rumbles
under the surface
the sea
caught in a conch shell
(Between Revolutions)

Today
Brooklyn looks like Russia
In the snow.
The subway stop:
snow on its roof
snow down the tracks
like a railroad station
after a revolution.
People stand muffled:
boots woolen mittens furs
and shopping bags. A woman
reads a Yiddish paper.
A man reads The Daily World.
…
We huddle
like survivors…
(“Waiting” in Interesting Times)

Enid’s next book, also from Downtown Poets, was a full collection called On the Road to Damascus, Maryland (1980), which included two types of poems not to be found in the chapbooks: family poems (of which the only example in this particular volume is the title poem), and what Enid was later to call “midrashic poetry”—poems concerned with biblical characters and stories with a view to fill in the blank spaces and answer questions raised in the scriptural narratives. This latter category fills most of the second half of the book in a section called “Traveling Companions.” Here is the first appearance in print of Enid Dame’s signature poem, “Lilith”:

Kicked myself out of paradise
left a hole in the morning
no note no goodbye

the man I lived with
was patient and hairy

he cared for the animals
worked late at night
planting vegetables
under the moon…

Taking hints from a 1972 article by Lilly Rivlin in Ms and Susan Sherman’s poem “Lilith of the Wildwood, of the Fair Places,” which was first printed in 1971 (both pieces are reprinted in Which Lilith? Feminist Writers Re-Create the World’s First Woman (Jason Aronson. 1998), an anthology edited by Enid Dame, Lilly Rivlin, and Henny Wenkart), Enid converted Lilith from the Judaeo-Christian Demon to a perennial hip Jewish feminist with some sisterly connections to Mae West and Sadie Thompson.

the middle ages
were sort of fun
they called me a witch
I kept dropping
in and out
of people’s sexual fantasies

One transitional poem did appear in Enid’s chapbook, Interesting Times. This is “Vildeh Chaya” which she pointed out in her article “Art as Midrash” (published posthumously in Home Planet News #53) was “(a) pivotal poem for me…(n)ot exactly a midrash since there is no such character as Vildeh Chaya in Jewish text. I invented her—a wild Jewish woman—because of a misunderstanding on the part of my mother (who) thought this Yiddish expression actually referred to an archetypal shtetl character—wild Chaya.”

Vildeh Chaya
in the woods on the edge
of the shtetl she hides
mud-splattered dress torn
barefoot she won’t
peel potatoes get married
cut her hair off have children
keep the milk dishes
separate
from the meat dishes

instead, she
climbs trees talks to animals
naked sings half-crazy
songs to the moon. …
(Interesting Times p.26)

Midrashic poetry is featured also in all of Enid Dame’s subsequent books. Her chapbook Lilith & Her Demons (Cross-Cultural Communications, 1986) and her last book, Stone Shekhina (Three Mile Harbor, 2002) were wholly midrashic in content. In Confessions, an earlier chapbook (1982) from Cross-Cultural Communications, she joins the midrashic “Lot’s Daughter” with two other dramatic monologues (almost all of her midrashic poems were dramatic monologues) featuring Martha Scott, a victim of the Salem witch trials, and Adah Isaacs Mencken, a mid-nineteenth-century American (probably Jewish) poet, actress and femme fatale. Her 1992 collection, Anything You Don’t See (West End Press) is the most comprehensive to date (I have been putting together two posthumous collections, one of which should be out soon from Three Mile Harbor) in that it gives the reader a fine sampling of Enid’s entire oevre. including midrashic and family poems, poems of place, and poems of politics; and contains good examples of the sestina and the dramatic monologue, forms of poetry in which she particularly excelled.
Poems in Anything You Don’t See catalogue Enid’s family history from her birth in Beaver Falls, a small mill town in western Pennsylvania

The walls shook, and I broke into the world,
skidded into a bedrail and found my voice
in the summer hospital room, in the quiet milltown.
Mother shuddered, “I think it’s already happened.”
“Impossible!” Father insisted. “It’s still too early.”
The doctor, meanwhile, was out fishing. …
(“Birthday”)

to politically progressive parents who met at a labor rally in Washington, D.C. when they were young government workers during the New Deal ‘thirties who suddenly removed to Pennsylvania where her father (originally from The Bronx) became a furniture salesman (introduced into that calling by his father-in-law); to the city of Pittsburgh, where Enid spent her early teens, and her Indiana-born mother—who suffered from depression, and, later, from multiple sclerosis—painted.

In Mother’s city, there are no doorknobs.
Someone has pulled up the trees.
In this Pittsburgh, the sky is yellow,
oilspilled, streaky. The color of despair.
Telephone poles throw up hands,
gawky crosses, then fall over backward.
No wires. No birds. Here,
everything is inside.
(”Mother’s City”)

In Pittsburgh Enid started high school—which had a writer’s club. Then the family (which by now also included her younger brother Phil Jacobs—currently editor of the Baltimore Jewish Times) moved to Baltimore where there was no writer’s club. So Enid joined the gun club. Thence to Towson State Teacher’s College (now University) where she published poems in the Talisman (Towson’s literary magazine), got involved with the science fiction “fanzine” movement, where she met her first husband, married, got involved with the Baltimore peace movement, graduated, taught high school; then dumped it all, “caught the red-eye to New York/ reading “America” in the City Lights Edition,/ ecstatic on no sleep and bursts of fantasy…” (“The Seders”, published in the Woodstock Journal).
The city Enid loved so passionately is celebrated even more strongly than in the previous volumes in Anything You Don’t See. Consider such classics as “Brighton Beach” (“…a place of immigrants, radicals, exiles,/ serious eaters and various gifts…”) and “Riding the D-Train”:

Notice the rooftops,
the wormeaten Brooklyn buildings.
Houses crawl by,
each with its private legend.
In one, a mother
is punishing her child
slowly, with great enjoyment.
In one, a daughter
is writing a novel
she can’t show to anyone. …

In this volume also, her powerful sestinas begin to appear: “My Father and the Brooklyn Bridge,” “Sestina for Michael,” and “Ethel Rosenberg: A Sestina”:

I picture you in your three-room apartment, a woman
singing snatches of arias to yourself as you set the table,
loving and hating the house. I know the type.
Scraping and rearranging, refusing to take things easy,
Foreboding washes over you, an extra sense.

Dramatic monologues are here in abundance. Besides the midrashic Lot and Eve, we are addressed in the voices of Cinderella, Persephone, and citizens of Brighton Beach like the persona of “Closing Down: Old Woman on Boardwalk”:

Still holding on in this body,
an old house;
One by one they’re sealing its rooms off.
Heat’s disappearing
like ghosts through the cracks.

In the last section of the book, Enid celebrates her parents’ lives and deaths in several haunting poems.

Now hold your mother
lingeringly on your tongue.
Her fruit is still alive.
It tastes as it always did:
heavy resonant edgy.
It makes you think of old coats
fur collared camphor-scented
worn in another country.
(“Fruit Cellar”}

Inside my father’s blood
a battle is raging,
directed by doctors and chemical companies.
He’s been invaded twice.
Like any other war,
this one is heavy with talk
of blasting, destruction, intrigues,
and, naturally, false reports.
(“What We’re Here For”)

In the elegant “God’s Lioness,” also in Anything You Don’t See, Enid Dame addresses one of her great models, Sylvia Plath:

Art can do just so much—
it can’t save you.

These lines move me to reflect on Enid Dame’s late poems, haunted by cancer, 9/11, and impending war. This from an unpublished poem, “Bulbs”:

You gave me six daffodil bulbs
to plant in my upstate front yard,
letting each one stand for an unrescued name
entombed in the Tower wreckage.

I carried the box to my mountain,
set to work with a shovel.
It proved slow going,
that ungiving October day.

One of the bulbs had split:
two bodies joined at the stem.
I thought of those mythic co-workers
who held hands before they jumped.
…
I thought: I’m burying six people
I probably never knew,
their bodies unfound their names amputated.
All we’ll have is six flowers

if they actually bloom next spring,
if we’re here to see, to remember.

Those daffodils have been blooming ever since, more profusely each spring. The theme of remembering became important in these last (perhaps Anthroposophy-influenced) poems. In “Catskill Mountain Book Fair: May 2003” (published in Heliotrope) she begins:

Remember it all.
It won’t be here next year.

Woman poet in red velvet blouse on stage.
Grand piano (covered like a toaster) behind her.
Pieces of quilt on the walls.
Publishers listening at their booths.
Backdrop: a road climbing a mountain,
trees slowly finding their green,
an apple tree in frail flower.

One poem lays cold fingers
on your shoulders.
You shudder in ecstasy.
The next poet reads too much.
Everyone here is good-humored.
Remember them all.

You reach for a hand.
It is here this year.
It feels warm and comfortable. You handle it
while the poems’ rhythms gently rock the room.
This is a pleasure. You will need
to remember it later. …

In emulation of another great role model, especially during the last year of her life, the Mexican painter and political activist Frieda Kahlo, Enid participated in peace demonstrations and recorded what it felt like to be in those moments in poems like her villanelle, “The War Moves Closer,” printed posthumously in both Home Planet News and the “Beat Bush” issue of Long Shot:

The war moves closer and we can’t stop it.
Four million marched in Rome and London.
We read our poems on a Woodstock stage.
Winter goes on forever.

Four million marched in Rome and London.
A few lay down in the snow in Antarctica.
Winter goes on forever. …

and the monumental “This One,” also published posthumously, in Tikkun:

The first one wasn’t real.
But I opposed it.
I opposed it in a workshirt.
I opposed it in a mini-skirt.
I opposed it on my way to buy birth-control pills.
I oppposed it ecstatically.
I opposed it in my kitchen bathtub
on the Lower East Side.
I opposed it on the streets with my friends
who were scruffy and raucous and funny,
who opposed it with their youth and great bodies.
…
This one is different.
We’ve lost so much already:
a city
a democracy
a way to be together
a fantasy of hope
(which glimmered like a silver-misted island
at the edge of possibility).

Now it’s hard to see that island
through the thickening smoke.
…
An awful force is gathering.
It’s real. It’s getting stronger.
It doesn’t mean us well.

But I’ll oppose it
With my smoke-clogged brain.
I’ll oppose it with a stone in my breast…

On December 3, 2003, during a bitter, unseasonable, cold spell, Enid flew out to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to read at a fundraiser for the Jewish feminist journal Bridges, of which she had been a poetry editor. She died of pneumonia and complications from breast cancer three weeks later, on Christmas day.
I’m going to conclude here. Not that there isn’t more to say. This has been little more than a brisk survey covering the small part of Enid Dame’s work included in the seven books and chapbooks published during her lifetime. I have said nothing of her fiction, which included one completed unpublished novel, and many short stories, including parts of the novel, which appeared in small press periodicals and anthologies over many years. I have said little of her editorial work on three periodicals and an important anthology; the readings column, for instance, which she developed in Poets and Home Planet News; nor have I spoken much of her scholarship, which included writings on Victorian literature, Jewish-American fiction, and of course midrashic poetry and Jewish feminism. Besides her work on Which Lilith? noted above, she wrote papers, gave lectures and presentations of her own and other women’s work, and at the time of her death was working on a second anthology, this one of writings on the Prophetess Miriam. This project will reach some fruition in a forthcoming issue of Bridges.
Hundreds of notebooks attest to Enid’s serious life-long reflections on, and struggles with, poetry, teaching (which she took very seriously), politics, history, Jewish-American literature and religion, and, finally, cancer, and the meaning of life. This little essay is meant to break some ice over deep, deep water.
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