Manufacturing America by Lisa Beatman

( Somerville, Mass.)The Ibbetson Street Press will have a new title coming out this winter. It is a collection of poems by Roslindale, Mass. poet Lisa Beatman. Beatman had taught English As A Second Language to immigrant workers at the Ames Envelope factory in Somerville for a number of years. Susan Eisenberg author of "Blind Spot" writes of Beatman's book:

" Manufacturing America bears witness to the lyrical life of a factory and the individuals who inhabit it at the start-up of the 21st Century. Lisa Beatman adds the stories of immigrant workers, heard through the ear of a poet on site to teach literary skills, to the growing literature of work poetry."

Somerville Writer Nick Mamatas pens “Under My Roof"

Somerville Writer Nick Mamatas pens “Under My Roof"


Somerville writer Nick Mamatas is a novelist, short story writer, and essayist. His work has appeared in the Village Voice, the Mississippi Review, and numerous anthologies. His most recent novel is: “Under My Roof” (Soft Skull Press). In an article about Mamatas the book is described as: “… a short novel told from the point of view of a young telepath who lives on Long Island. His father has declared his independence from the United States and planted a nuclear device in a garden gnome on the front lawn.” I spoke with Mamatas on my Somerville Community Access TV show “ Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.”

Doug Holder: I’ve read a lot about the “Soft Skull Press.” a small press that publishes a lot of non-mainstream and innovative writers. Can you tell me a bit about them, and how you got involved with the press?

Nick Mamatas: It happened years ago. I was in a political group. I was thrown out of it. And I happened to see on the Web that the previous owner of Soft Skull Press was thrown out. So I wrote him a letter. I went to a party at his place, which at that point was a basement in Manhattan, where he worked as a janitor. He sort of roped me in to do work for them. I read the slush pile etc…Then a book came out “Fortunate Son,” published by St. Martins, which was a biography of George W. Bush. It was the infamous one that dealt with his drug abuse. Soft Skull republished it and it put them on the map. When I finished “Under My Roof” Soft Skull went under new management and I published with them, after being rejected by more commercial publishers. From the mainstream publishers, we got interesting rejections. I should mention “Under My Roof” is a book about a kid whose father makes a nuclear bomb. We would get letters like: “This is a really good book. You got the kid’s voice. Fantastic. Instead of a nuclear bomb can’t the kid have a girlfriend?” So we had to go an independent press like Soft Skull.

DH: If “Soft Skull” had a mission statement what would it be?

NM: Oh it has changed over the years. It started out primarily with poetry. It eventually moved to political nonfiction. 9/11 politicized it. It has gone back to fiction, innovative poetry, and graphic novels. It also has been sold. It is the imprint of a larger small press company “Counterpoint”

DH: Long Island seems an unlikely place for “Under the Roof” to take place.

NM: The most likely. Long Island is a very strange place. I grew up there. On some levels it is very suburban, with a shopping center, and a Starbucks in every town. But there is also an older Long Island that exists. That Long Island has local color and weird local traditions. There are people who are farmers and independent minded. Long Island is crazy both in the right and left wing. Long Island is a place where you go when you can’t deal with Manhattan anymore. There is a lot of high technology there, so to have a nuclear device somewhere can be a probability
.
DH: Would Somerville be a good place for the novel to be set?

NM: I don’t think so. Somerville has an idea of being free. Somerville probably has different countries in different apartments.

DH: The book has a very comical conceit. It reminds me a bit of Woody Allen. Have you been influenced by him at all?

NM: I like Woody Allen. But not this. Kurt Vonnegut would be more accurate for this. This book is really an adaptation of a play by Aristophanes.

DH: The kid Herbert Weinberg has a father who goes off the deep end. He has a lot of keen insight into the hypocrisy of the adult world; much like the protagonist in “Catcher in the Rye.” Could this be a 21st century version of the book?

NM: On some level. I am very interested in the idea of “Cult”fiction. I very much want a “Cult” audience, and have it replicate with every generation. The character in “Catcher…” has been crushed by hypocrisy. Herbert succeeds against hypocrisy. I wanted to raise the “freak flag” as cult fiction often does. My previous novel was about Jack Kerouac and H.P. Lovecraft, two other cult figures. I am really obsessed by cult figures and cult authors.

DH: What interests you about these disparate writers?

NM: On some levels they have similarities. They are both New Englanders; both tortured, and both lived with their mothers a long time. Both started movements. Kerouac the “Beats.” Lovecraft, the horror genre in the 20’s and 30’s. Kerouac was influenced by pulp or horror novels.

DH: I read in an interview that the Internet was instrumental in your development as a writer?

NM: I grew up in the Internet. I started using it in 1989. It was all text based. But there were a lot of people out there that I was exposed to. I learned a lot and I was in a good position to write about issues of emerging technology.

DH: How is the life of a freelance writer?

NM: It’s either feast or famine. There have been days when I made 6,000 dollars. There have also been years when I made 6,000 dollars. I live very humbly. I don’t have a car. I also teach at Grub Street. I write corporate copy for Websites. You can’t turn down anything. When you have to pay your bills writer’s block vanishes. I tell my students you have to be on time. It is more important than talent sometimes.

Dh: Do you think the ascent of the Internet spells the end of the book?

NM: The book is still revolutionary. It is infinitely tradable, and portable. It doesn’t break easily, easy to ship, and it is easy to learn how to use. The Internet will augment book sales.

Breaking It Down. Rusty Barnes. ( sunnyoutside.com Buffalo, NY) $12.

Breaking It Down. Rusty Barnes. ( sunnyoutside.com Buffalo, NY) $12.

Look—Rusty Barnes lives in Revere, Mass. but don’t expect his fiction to reflect the drama of the urban environs. Barnes was born and raised in Appalachia. De Witt Henry, founder of “Ploughshares” magazine writes of Barnes: “ His characters like Robert Frost’s are mostly rural, poor and farm-bound…Voicing these inarticulate characters with image, gesture and narrative eloquence, Barnes opens the core of their imagined lives.”

In the first story in this collection of flash fiction, a rural, long-suffering wife starts the day snapping green beans with her mother-in-law, and later winds up rollicking in the carnal hay with a farm boy many years her junior. In this scene she prepares to make love to the young “Purl”, one of her mother-in-law’s younger “boys”. Barnes has the boy’s penis rise in accusation:

“Purl had laid the blanket out already, wisps of hay stuck to his hairless chest. As I loosened his jeans, it wagged like a finger, an accusation I could never answer to anyone’s satisfaction but my own.”

But this woman understands her life of quiet desperation had to be addressed:

“ Thirty years of snapping beans, of lying placid while drunken Robbie poked away at me occasionally in the dead of night…”

Barnes portrays the tragedy of this woman’s life, and perhaps in small part her redemption, in plain language. The woman justifies her affair with the matter-of- fact
attitude she would employ to shuck an ear of corn. She says:” I was doing what needed to be done.”

And in “Certitude” Barnes focuses in on a couple: Mathilde and Warren. Barnes writes of the woman:

“Mathilde knew that Warren wanted to be nothing more than to be feral… a man who might chase down a kill with great loping strides like a wolf, neatly hamstring it, and howl his success to the stars.”

It seems that Warren is in the midst of a Robert Bly moment or a bad mid-life crisis. And like some scared, wounded critter, he is licking his wounds in some warren, or in this case a finished basement. In a beautifully rendered scene Mathilde comes to him and reaches out in a primal and touchingly vulnerable way:

“ Naked, she stood before him as a sob rose in his chest. She took the phone from his hand and lowered herself onto him. Even in his pain she could feel him stir beneath her, and it was no trick at all after so many years of marriage to put him inside her with minimal effort, and less a trick to take his head and firmly press it between her breasts as he convulsed.”

Barnes writing shows a true understanding of the human condition. And what happens in these gone-to-seed, rural burgs happens, with better props in the tony homes of the Back Bay and Beacon Hill sections of Boston or Central Park West in New York city.

Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update ing It Down. Rusty Barnes. ( sunnyoutside.com Buffalo, NY) $12.

Look—Rusty Barnes lives in Revere, Mass. but don’t expect his fiction to reflect the drama of the urban environs. Barnes was born and raised in Appalachia. De Witt Henry, founder of “Ploughshares” magazine writes of Barnes: “ His characters like Robert Frost’s are mostly rural, poor and farm-bound…Voicing these inarticulate characters with image, gesture and narrative eloquence, Barnes opens the core of their imagined lives.”

In the first story in this collection of flash fiction, a rural, long-suffering wife starts the day snapping green beans with her mother-in-law, and later winds up rollicking in the carnal hay with a farm boy many years her junior. In this scene she prepares to make love to the young “Purl”, one of her mother-in-law’s younger “boys”. Barnes has the boy’s penis rise in accusation:

“Purl had laid the blanket out already, wisps of hay stuck to his hairless chest. As I loosened his jeans, it wagged like a finger, an accusation I could never answer to anyone’s satisfaction but my own.”

But this woman understands her life of quiet desperation had to be addressed:

“ Thirty years of snapping beans, of lying placid while drunken Robbie poked away at me occasionally in the dead of night…”

Barnes portrays the tragedy of this woman’s life, and perhaps in small part her redemption, in plain language. The woman justifies her affair with the matter-of- fact
attitude she would employ to shuck an ear of corn. She says:” I was doing what needed to be done.”

And in “Certitude” Barnes focuses in on a couple: Mathilde and Warren. Barnes writes of the woman:

“Mathilde knew that Warren wanted to be nothing more than to be feral… a man who might chase down a kill with great loping strides like a wolf, neatly hamstring it, and howl his success to the stars.”

It seems that Warren is in the midst of a Robert Bly moment or a bad mid-life crisis. And like some scared, wounded critter, he is licking his wounds in some warren, or in this case a finished basement. In a beautifully rendered scene Mathilde comes to him and reaches out in a primal and touchingly vulnerable way:

“ Naked, she stood before him as a sob rose in his chest. She took the phone from his hand and lowered herself onto him. Even in his pain she could feel him stir beneath her, and it was no trick at all after so many years of marriage to put him inside her with minimal effort, and less a trick to take his head and firmly press it between her breasts as he convulsed.”

Barnes writing shows a true understanding of the human condition. And what happens in these gone-to-seed, rural burgs happens, with better props in the tony homes of the Back Bay and Beacon Hill sections of Boston or Central Park West in New York city.

Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update

FENWAY IS THE MUSE FOR THESE LOCAL WRITERS

FENWAY IS THE MUSE FOR THESE LOCAL WRITERS

By Doug Holder



Writer Adam Pachter may no longer live in Somerville, but he tapped the Somerville talent pool for his second anthology of stories revolving around Fenway Park, “Further Fenway Fiction.”

Somerville writers such as Steve Almond, Jennifer Rapaport, Mitch Evich, Tim Gager, and Lenore Myka contributed work to a collection of poetry and prose that has a focal point of Fenway and its beloved denizen: The Boston Red Sox. Even the front and back covers are graced with the artful photography of Somerville resident Mary Kocol.

Pachter said he hatched the idea for the first anthology “Fenway Fiction,” (2004) when he was inspired by a short story written by his friend Rachel Solar. Pachter originally wanted to compile a literary travelogue with stories set anywhere from ‘Vegas to Venice. But Solar’s story about Sox slugger Manny Ramirez inspired him to edit a collection of writing around the iconic Boston institution Fenway Park.

Like any undertaking it requires talent and not a little luck for a project to grow wings. Pachter put out a call for manuscripts on the Somerville Arts Council email group, and got submissions not only locally but from around the country. Later, while watching the Sox at Fenway with a friend of his, he mentioned he was working on an anthology of fiction with a baseball theme. The friend, a former employee of Rounder Records, told him to “pitch” the idea to the powers-that-be at “Rounder Books,” a publishing division of that company. It seems the owners love baseball, and Pachter had the goods. So after Pachter made that fateful call, it was, as it was said in “Casablanca,” “The beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

Besides luck, timing is a very important element of success. “Fenway Fiction” was submitted just before the World Series. Of course that didn’t hurt sales. And now with “Further Fenway Fiction” sales are in an upswing with the Sox happily in another Series.

Pachter felt the work in the first anthology was interesting because it dealt with the history and the tragedy of the long suffering fans and their losing team. But since the Sox became the team to beat Pachter was worried they wouldn’t be as interesting. Happily Pachter has found that victory has it rewards in everyday life as well as fiction.

Pachter, now an Arlington resident, the father of three children, and former Washington, D.C. lawyer, plans a third anthology. “That would probably be the last.” he said. But for now both Pachter, as well as the dyed-in-the-wool local Red Sox fans want to ride on the comet tail of a Red Sox winning streak.

* This article originally appeared in The Somerville News.

a nobody’s nothings ($12.00 U.S.A.) (Bone Print Press, P.O. Box 684, Hanover, MA 02339)

a nobody’s nothings ($12.00 U.S.A.) (Bone Print Press, P.O. Box 684, Hanover, MA 02339) www.boneprint.com or www.askewreviews.com
By Denis Sheehan

Review by Pam Rosenblatt



Imagination is a wonderful and effective writing tool – when you use it correctly and don’t abuse it. Denis Sheehan’s a nobody’s nothings is a 160 page collection of short stories, poetry, and “Brain Scribbles” that are developed out of Sheehan’s imagination.

Sometimes the works are morally acceptable and other times they’re outrageous, even
repulsive. Usually, the works contain sarcastic humor and wit.

Through vivid and concrete imagery Sheehan writes about ordinary observations and experiences and, while the reader is following his train of thought, something totally unexpected happens, something which may be good or bad. Let me show you what I mean:

In his “Brain Scribbles 6”, Sheehan has the speaker recall a childhood experience.

When I was in the second grade, my pals and I were
running through the woods playing S.W.A.T. While
playing, I ran right into a tree branch. About three inches
of the stick was in my eye socket and punctured the tissue
under it. I remember screaming my lungs out and seeing
through my good eye the look of pure horror on my friends
faces as I ran by them to my pal’s house.

With such graphic description and element of horror, Sheehan draws the reader into his story, which is confessional but may or may not be fictious. The reader is probably panicking for the young narrator too. But all is not lost in the fantasy world of Denis Sheehan, as the narrator says, “I was one lucky little prick, and I got to ride in a police car with sirens on to the hospital. I needed surgery to remove the stick but everything turned out OK.”

A nobody’s nothing is a difficult book to read. Sheehan writes of harsh realities in a down-to-earth style that makes the reader feel like he or she trying to swallow a very large pill. You know you can do it, and you know that it is there, but you wonder if there’s an easier way to accomplish the task. In Sheehan’s work, he has the reader swallow a lot of large pills, but very few of them make us the readers better. The narrator is generally mean and likes to be that way, except when speaking about his four-year-old daughter. He often gives cute anecdotes when discussing his daughter.

Conversation I had with my four-year-old daughter the other day:
‘Daddy, can we go to the store and by a mermaid doll?’
‘No.’
‘Daddy, why can’t we go buy the mermaid doll.’
‘Because I don’t have any money.’
‘Well, let’s go buy some money, then buy the mermaid doll.’

This humorous story is beautifully written and captures the naivety of a young four year old girl. It breaks up the other sometimes silly but yet serious and irking vignettes.

Sheehan’s anecdotes often make the reader uneasy and often repulsed, but that may be just what he wants to achieve. Such can be viewed in “9 Minutes in the Flophouse”, a short story in which an innocent abused housewife meets with unfortunate circumstances when she flees to a flophouse to escape her husband, and in “The Squeeze”, another short story where the narrator describes a sexual experience with his girlfriend with very graphic words.

In a nobody’s nothings, Sheehan seems to raise the question what exactly is the writer’s responsibility to his reader? Is Sheehan taking advantage of the reader’s faith in the power of the pen and word? As a reader, you trust the author to write good material.

In a nobody’s nothings, the writing style is excellent and Sheehan’s twists and turns
of the stories’ plots are intriguing but sometimes the content is difficult to handle. Sheehan’s imagination is at full force.

Sheehan gives the truth as he sees it. As in “Go Away”, he confronts us with negative and often mean observations. He writes about “Jared, ‘I used to be a fat slob’ spokesman for Subway Sandwich Shops” and “Gas Station attendants who are nice enough to clean your windshield, but leave streak marks all over the place” and “Cops who pull you over for speeding and say, ‘You better slow down when you drive through my town’” and “Inconsiderate maggots who invite me over and insist that I don’t bring any beer because they already have beer, but when I get there, mentioned beer is Amstel Light”. Here, in “Go Away”, the narrator is just a moody son-of- a-gun who is complaining and saying “Go Away” to everyone, including “Anyone who likes a second bite of their sandwich before chewing the first.” This is a funny, sarcastic piece, gentler than other works in the book, and makes the reader think about ordinary situations, happenings, and people in a different light.
His list isn’t short. It never seems to “Go Away” as it is seven pages of insightful insults. He even includes Hillary Clinton whom, he says, “has done nothing to help anyone. It’s time we put her to good use.” He mentions “Terry McAuliffe, former Chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Not because he’s a lying, cheating, money hungry socialist, but because he can’t string together more than two sentences without saying ‘at the end of the day.” He writes about “Ziggy, the unfunny, ugly, and bald comic strip character who doesn’t wear pants.” In “Go Away”, Sheehan seems to have stopped degrading woman, something which he does throughout the book, until the end of the piece that is. He abruptly changes his train of thought and reveals he doesn’t like “sluts who fart while fucking.”

While the narrator seems like a genuinely dislikeable character, Sheehan creates a character that is actually meaner than his narrator in “A Death Notice and Obituary”. The character is called “Mean” Russ Taff. “Mean” Russ has just been killed by a lawn mower driven by his brother Chester Taff. Sheehan writes:

My fondest memory of ‘Mean’ Russ was the second time
I ever met him. I was attending a bash at Ben’s (Medved’s founder,
who Russ managed) apartment when I made the mistake of
referring to ‘Mean’ Russell Taff as ‘Mean’ Russell Taffy. Within
a blink of eye, ‘Mean’ Russ charged across the room and got me
into a reverse headlock. This effective hold had ‘Mean’ Russ’s
thick arms wrenched around my neck with my face pointing
towards the ceiling. Russ had my body bent over backwards
which took away all of my leverage and left me helpless
to resistance. As Russ gently squeezed my neck, he looked
down upon my face and told me never to make fun of
someone’s name again.

While every reader may think the “mean” narrator finally got what he deserved,
Sheehan once again offers a creative alternative way of thinking about a pretty
black and white situation. The narrator says,

Some might find what ‘Mean’ Russ did as extreme. I think of
it as more along the lines of a ‘tough love’ thing. If ‘Mean’ Russ
had simply given me a slap on the wrist, his lesson may not have
stuck with me.

Sheehan’s a nobody’s nothings is not for the weak and sensitive reader. If you want to read a book that is filled with sarcastic wit, lots of sex, and skillful unexpected twists and turns of content that may be disturbing, this book will capture your interest.

Pam Rosenblatt/Ibbetson Update/Nov. 2007



###

More Pictures From The Somerville News Writers Festival 2007

Photos: Steve Glines



1-- Left to Right: Mike Amado, Molly Lynn Watt, Linda Larson

2-- Walter Howard

3-- Front to back: Irene Koronas, Julia Carlson, Emily Singer, Tim Gager

4-- Emily Singer

5-- Left to Right: Robert Pinsky, Doug Holder

6-- Right to Left: Rita Holder, Irene Koronas

7--Right to Left: Rita Holder, Lo Galluccio

8-- Errol Uys

9-- Tim Gager

10--Gloria Mindock

11-- Michael Todd Steffen

12--Robert K. Johnson

13-- Coleen Houlihan




* click on pics to enlarge

Ibbetson Street Arts/Editor Richard Wilhelm's new poetry collection to be released :AWAKENINGS

Somerville, Mass.

Ibbetson Street Press, Somerville, Mass.

Poet Richard Wilhelm's new poetry collection: AWAKENINGS will be released by the Ibbetson Street Press of Somerville, Mass. Nov. 31, 2007. Wilhelm, the arts/editor for "Ibbetson Street..." has penned his first collection of verse. A long-time Somerville resident, Wilhelm has been published in both online and print journals, and has had his own art work exhibited at galleries in Somerville, Boston and Cambridge. Wilhelm said of his new book: " I've been hanging out with these poems for a long time and so I figured they needed to see the light of day." To purchase
a copy write send $15. Ibbetson Street Press 25 School St. Somerville, Mass. 02143

Below is an introduction from Cambridge poet and author of the poetry collection "Catch the Light" ( Higganum Hill) Douglas Worth.



INTRODUCTION

In Richard Wilhelm’s powerful free-verse, sonorous, image-tapestried first collection, the mature poet takes us through a remarkable series of awakenings, most of them to profound interconnections between himself and primordial riches of the natural world—half-buried treasures that glimmer with mystery, ecstasy, and the divine, and that contemporary humans have to a great extent lost touch with in their techno-industrial materialistic lives.
Many of the poems involve the poet out walking in nature, feeling deep yearnings for

something I will try
my whole life to get back to,
something dreamt of in the moist night
something risen from salt water and earth,
a language I spoke
before my grandparents were born.
(“Self-Portrait with Moon”)

As these poems move through the seasons of the year, Wilhelm feels deep resonance with pre-Christian nature worship, as in these three titles: “Imbolc” (an ancient Irish celebration of the first signs of spring in early February); “Walpurgis Nacht” (the night before the beginning of May when witches gathered to revel at Brocken Peak in the Harz mountains of Germany); and “Samhain” (a festival of the ancient Celts, held around November 1st to celebrate the beginning of winter).
In one of the collection’s most powerful poems, “The Night of the Blood Red Moon,” the poet loses track of the trodden path he is on soon after he perceives the birth of “a blood red moon,” which appears to be dripping blood into the tidal flat that “seemed a great chalice.” Wilhelm feels such a strong connection to the scene that he says he wouldn’t be surprised to find himself making passionate love to the earth; and he feels an “unsummoned muscle memory” in his arms and shoulders that takes him back (through some collective unconscious ) to a time when he was “an excellent archer,” recalling
how it felt to draw back a bow,
release an arrow and the pause
of the breath at the grace of its arc
to a clean, swift, silent descent to its mark.



It is only when he finds the path again that the moon, turning from red to orange


i

soon faded to yellow,
and finally shrank
to a silver coin.

--a stunning concluding metaphor for how we have reduced the vast spiritual/sensual/visceral bounties of nature to a small, insensate, materialistic token.

There is an accumulating weight of feeling, in this extraordinary sequence of poems, of what has been lost to us beneficiaries of modern civilization and so-called progress. In “Samhain,” Wilhelm describes

the witchy fingers of gnarled pines claw
the clotted sky. Landforms are now
unadorned as crones, each tree
becomes more itself. Hints of divinity
disembodied no longer, gathering power
from the bowels of the earth, power
from the diamond air. O for too long
we’ve carried these absences!

In poem after poem Wilhelm plunges into nature, seeking to regain something of what feels “unrecovered” (“Something Unrecovered”), to begin to refill such absences with a sensuous, ecstatic, sacred, healing energy that binds humans and the natural world despite its submergence into latency in recent ages. One of his most lyrical and beautiful poems gives us a visionary glimpse into what early human existence may have been like as an integral part of nature, before the age of bronze and male aggressiveness devolved us to a state where

…gold is everywhere
being turned into lead
The stock market is up
but the water tastes strange.

(“And So”)

Here, in its entirety, is his “We’ll Grow New Faces”:

If the dream comes again—
if once more the dream comes,
we’ll sit at tables, sipping tea,
recall the taste of blue oranges.
We’ll burn incense and remember


ii
how the red horses ran
wild in the yellow valley.
We’ll lie in soft grass,
among dandelions and buttercups.
Warm breezes will finger our hair

If the dream comes again—
sweet May will scent the air
and we will leap about
in mountain meadows
and dance and shout each
other’s names, even
grow new faces
if the dream
comes again.

Having drawn us through so many images that speak to our seemingly-lost, but still-vibrant connections to nature, and the narrow regards and deficits of much of current civilized existence, Wilhelm is still searching and exploring in the collection’s final poem, still trying

all the doorknobs in the hallway
seeking yet another rebirth.

(“A Passenger”)

No doubt his masterful AWAKENINGS will inspire many readers to join Richard Wilhelm (and branch off on their own!) in his ongoing quest for some new/old/fresh original way of being harmoniously in our endangered natural environment, moving in awe, wonder and celebration to (as he concludes in “Ciborium”):

a rhythm that could bring back the sun.

Douglas Worth,
Cambridge, 2007



Douglas Worth was born in 1940 and grew up in Pennsylvania, Florida, and India. He has been writing poetry since the seventh grade, attempting for half a century to express his sense of the miraculousness of existence and the rich weave of human joy and suffering, his growing concern with modern humanity's disrespect for Nature, and his deepening conviction of universal interconnectedness. He taught English at public and private schools in Manhattan and Newton, Massachusetts, from 1965 to 1990, after which he retired to devote himself to writing and playing jazz alto sax. Worth lives with his artist wife Patricia and their half-wild cat in Cambridge, Mass. Douglas Worth's poetry has been published widely in periodicals and anthologies; he has received a number of fellowships, grants and prizes; and he has been profiled in Who's Who in America, Contemporary Authors, and The International Who's Who of Poetry. In addition to his volumes of poetry, Worth is the author of a young-adult novella and an illustrated children's book. His published works are:

Of Earth, William L. Bauhan, 1974
Invisibilities, Apple-wood Press, 1977
Triptych, Apple-wood Press, 1979
From Dream, From Circumstance, Apple-wood Books, 1984
Once Around Bullough's Pond, William L. Bauhan, 1987
Some Sense of Transcendence, William L. Bauhan, 1999
Echoes in Hemlock Gorge, Higganum Hill Books, 2003
Deerfoot's Mile, Creative Arts Book Company, 2003
Grumpy the Christmas Cat, MightyBook, 2003
Catch the Light, Higganum Hill Books, 2004

"Almost all of Worth's poems contain some fresh act of the imagination." -- Richard Wilbur

"Douglas Worth strikes me as one of the most gifted and accomplished of younger poets." -- Denise Levertov

"Mr. Worth is working the hardwood loads." -- A.R. Ammons

Pictures From The Somerville News Writers Festival Nov. 2007

From Top to Bottom.

Gloria Mindock
Irene Koronas
Tom Perrotta
Lo Galluccio
Richard Wilhelm
Michael Todd Steffen
Doug Holder
Steve Glines
Steve Almond
Tim Gager
Robert Pinsky/Doug Holder
Danielle Legros Georges
Doug Holder

"The Sea Never Drowns" Jason Heroux

"The Sea Never Drowns"
by Jason Heroux
$10.00, Sunnyoutside Press 2007

www.sunnyoutside.com

ISBN-13: 978-I934513-02-6

Sunny outside

P.O. Box 911

Buffalo, NY 14207



Reviewed by Mike Amado



Surrealism enters reality and real life trips on a rug pulled from under by invisible hands.

This was my initial impression of "The Sea Never Drowns", the second collection by

Canadian Poet Jason Heroux.

These poems are full with observations of daily routine and reflective ruminations.

The speaker is always at the center of the viewing, peering forward; past the common veil

of life and revolving 360 degrees like a beacon amid a sea that never drowns.

It’s not often I can blend the title of a book I’m reviewing into the review itself!



To be honest, I enjoyed Heroux’s "The Sea Never Drowns", not only for its

catch-you-off-guard-in-a-good-way images and its thought-firing style but for the surrealism

that these latter two create. Surreal poetry always produces chuckles for me, I’m like a kid

hearing a dirty joke for the first time. More so, I enjoy the ‘turning the world on its head’

aspect of surreal poetry as it petitions: Imagine a world where . . .

The poems in "Sea" do this with a wise child vigor. There is a fresh wit, (fresh as in new

and not sarcastic), through out. The poem, "Codeine" speaks for itself:



"The Moonlight shines on the wall

showing blank slides

of vacations it never went on."



Heroux, through his imagery is evident to have a third eye working overtime

or just a hyperactive imagination. Which is great to read these days.

Cryptic without being obtuse, inventive without being MFA obscure.

The following are just a few of Heroux’s extended images that got me:



"The clouds overhead look like blank crumpled up suicide notes." ("Octoberland"),

"The other day the sun / broke its tooth / gnawing / on a tough/ speck of dust."

("Rue de la Quarantine"),

"The tiny stars / reflected in puddles / look dirty as vitamins / fallen under the fridge."

("On This Street").

Back in college ,I had a Creative Writing instructor that would never

stop asking us about our image choices: "What do YOU mean by that? What is it’s true

relevance to YOU and to the poem? - If she read Heroux’s "The Sea Never Drowns"

she just might seek other employment!



There is the themes of time and seasonal reflection found in "Sea".

Heroux takes us from autumn, to winter and to summer his seasonal poems.

In "Remember", Heroux begins:



"Don’t forget the bright summer afternoons:

the clock hands pick the hours pockets,

last year, a decade ago, in another lifetime

. . ."


"The Sea Never Drowns" is right up the alley for buffs of the sensible

and the off-the-wall. And readers who like the everyday shook up.

This chapbook of twenty poems is worth the read and many re-reads.











Mike Amado

is a reviewer for dougholder.blogspot.com.
a Bagelbard, and a performance poet from Plymouth, Massachusetts.

Noted for performing lyrical tomes attuned to the social and the spiritual.

Amado has featured at over ten various venues in the Massachusetts

and Rhode Island areas. His first book is entitled

"Poems: Unearthed from Ashes" (2006).

Hugh Fox, POTPOURRI Piano Compositions, 1987

Hugh Fox, POTPOURRI
Piano Compositions, 1987
A DVD, self-produced by Fox
Reviewed by Lo Galluccio for Ibbetson St. Press


What can you say about an artist like Hugh Fox, an archeologist, poet, top-notch reviewer, chronicler of his times, who you find out, years later, is also an accomplished pianist who studied violin and composition (on piano) with P. Marinus Paulson at the Curtiss Music School in Chicago, as well as voice and opera with the ALL CHILDRENS' GRAND OPERA, a group run by
Zerlina Muhlman Metzger from Vienna? Well, you can say, wow.

Only Hugh, with his passion for self-transfiguration as well as a generous spirit toward many spheres, could produce such an iconoclastic DVD of his own playing that sways as if it’s been shot on the deck of “Night at the Opera”….

He mugs it up in a fey blonde mode for the camera and deftly plays runs of notes that I, a primitive avant-garde pop and jazz vocalist, am hard-pressed to figure out. I’m astounded thinking about all the time this guy has spent in front of a metronome, at the slender fingers and the way they trip over the keys. Monk he ain’t. But Fox can definitely spin you around from waltz to march with humorous wit on top. And he’s to date penned about 80 books and 100’s of reviews of works by other writers. That doesn’t leave a whole lot of time to practice your scales.

In this 1987 video creation, against a drab cement wall that says JOB in one spot, Hugh Fox enchants with a series of melodic compositions on an old wooden piano. He’s in a sailor shirt and cap and starts in with a lovely Chopanesque piece.

Where is he, one asks as the camera angles to his hands, across the black and white ivories, through chord progressions and even glitches in the tape here and there that cause fast repeats and begin us on our journey through a special Hugh Fox concert. It’s low key but highly comedic in a wry and brilliant way.

“Okay, kid,” he raps, “you wanna little waltz, you wanna little march, a ghostly march?”

“Midnight,” he explains and the ghost begins to come upon us. “Creepy ghost,” the often child-like Fox says. What follows is a rendition on the piano of the beautiful ghost of Lady Godiva on a horse. This is not so much a piano recital as a puppet show of sonic voices as famous characters, a high-blown but almost commedia del art morality play. As he imitates, he’s silly and engrossed like a child playing improvized games we watch with fascination.

“In a terrible minor key,” Hugh then introduces us to the ghost of Henry VIII -- famous for killing off his wives and starting the Anglican church. “What a terrible guy he says,” holding his head – “Oh, he cuts their heads off,” as he pings a high note…

Back to our narrative – then comes in the ghost of Thomas Moore who in a perfect 4/4 sonorous march both holy and upright, is trying to convince old gout ridden Henry the VIII to change his bad ways. Henry’s already got Anne Boleyn’s head on a pike staff and the other heads are about to roll.

Hugh’s playing remains in sync with Phillip II, a new character he introduces, who comes to the New World with Christ the savior and whose motif is like, well, it’s very much like Thomas Moore’s. This in turn brings back Henry VIII's villainy and then we are led back musically to the ornate Spanish triplets of Phillip II:

Then Dawn
Henry VIII
Dawn
Henry VIII

Finally the angels of the day in golden major scale crescendos and tiny bright waltzes finish the section off.

After a long and funny stare into the camera, and a note in his hand, Fox renders a grand finale with another beautiful progression. The room is lemon yellow and back-lit now – or have we switched location to a practice room elsewhere?

Like a splurge of gentle white fireworks against a 4th of July sky, Fox concludes with a short ode to Buckner in the finale which is topped off by his banging out Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture with crazed verve.

This concludes the first part of this 1987 Potpourri DVD of piano compositions. The second half is devoted to the reading of a handful of poems. While I am a huge fan of Fox’s poetry – it’s multi-lingual, mystical and metaphysical edge – I was about spent watching the music portion of the tape. This is not a reflection on Hugh, but more on my own human attention span. For me instrumental music as a performance art and spoken text are two very different mediums and one needs to treat them differently. However, as an example of Fox’s brilliance, I did catch and capture this one line, read on a couch
Somewhere, maybe from his home in Michigan;

“There ought to be places you can listen and still move.”

When you think about this deceptively simple observation, you realize how true it is. Despite the age of the I pod, we need more chances to move with and in the medium of finely wrought poetry and music. Not just with headgear attached to our eardrums, but with the wavelengths resounding once again in recital halls and concert chambers, lounges and living rooms, where we can still move around, dance, live.

If you are interested in Fox’s work, I highly recommend one of his latest poetry collections on Higgenaum Press, a book called, “Defiance.” It inspired me to write a poem called, “In the Eye of the Beholder” which is up on my new blog: http://logalluccio.blogspot.com. Viva Hugh Fox. We need his gusto and his genius. He’s one of the rare ones who can risk making a fool of himself for the sake of entertaining and who can intertwine high and low brow art. As quick to tell a story about a cherished friend, as he is to compose a theme to the ghost of Henry the VIII, we should treasure all that Hugh’s done and continues to do in his career. For more information on his career and his poetry also see. www.poetsencyclopedia.com.


Lo Galluccio/Ibbetson Update



















Lo Galluccio/Ibbetson Update/Nov 2007

“

Purgatory Chasm by Susan Edwards Richmond

Purgatory Chasm by Susan Edwards Richmond
Adastra Press, 2007, 49 pages, $20.
ISBN: 0-9776667-5-1

Review by Eleanor Goodman


Nature often serves as the central metaphor for a poem. There are a few poets – Wordsworth, Kinnell, and Oliver come to mind – who can be said to use nature as the driving force of nearly all of their work.

In Purgatory Chasm, Ms. Richmond enters into this tradition. The book is a collection of poems all set in a state park of granite cliffs near Worcester, Massachusetts. The pieces are probably best read as a single poem divided into three large sections: “Geologic History,” “Voices in the Rocks,” and “The Chasm Loop.” Those pieces that stand on their own as poems succeed admirably.
“The Earth Opened, A Story,” is one such piece. Here is its entirety:

Shouldering his musket, taking
his keen-nosed bluetick hound for luck,

he thought he knew every grove and streambed,
the whole sweep of the Blackstone Valley.

So when he sighted along the deer’s withers,
and the head, with its mighty rack, went up to test the air,

he was dead certain where the sharp report
would chase that buck down the twig-snapping trail,

but when he followed it, he saw the gorge
instead, stretched out before him,

where none had been before. Or so he swore.

Later, he would say it was the fault of that earthquake
rippling down eight hundred miles from Halifax.

If it could sink a Worcester meadow,
change the course of the Quinapoxet River,

surely that earthquake could dig itself
a piece of purgatory right where he stood.


There is much to enjoy here: the alliterative intensity of “keen-nosed bluetick hound for luck,” or the internal rhyme of “where none had been before. Or so he swore.” The lines have an appropriately vaunted quality, something like a battle hymn. The reader gets a clear sense of the landscape as well as the psychology and character of this explorer.

Ms. Richmond experiments to good effect with the voices of people who have died in the chasm. In each section of the three part poem “The Ghosts That Lead Me,” she takes on the voice of a different ghost: Simon Such, who presumably committed suicide in one of the chasm’s caves; Thordis Tapper, a teenager who fell to her death; and Mrs. George Prentice, who died while picnicking with her husband. The voices are perhaps not as distinct as they might be, but “Attachment”, the second section of the poem, in which Thordis speaks about following a man through the chasm, is lovely. The sections ends (italics are the poet’s):

I pick my way,

sure-footed, weightless,
straight ahead,
toward the back that keeps
receding, the body moving

forward, away.

This is a wonderful imagining of what it is like to be a ghost: always watching an endlessly receding body, still tempted by the corporeal without being able to access it.

Ms. Richmond understands poetically intense language, and when she uses it, the sounds produced are impressive. Here is the first half of the penultimate piece, “What I Leave Behind”:

The see-saw of chickadee notes rising and falling,
the scramble of chipmunk tucking acorn in root drawer,
squirrels cascading over bridges of trees;

deadfall, the wreckage of oak
released from the tightrope ledge
to tumble between;

trunk growing straight to the light,
dodging like a crooked pipe
around an outcrop, then straight again,
bearing its cargo of green


The verbal resonances of “chipmunk” / “tucking acorn” and “oak” / “tightrope” take no small degree of skill to create. When Ms. Richmond is at her best, she is quite good indeed.




Eleanor Goodman/Ibbetson Update/ Nov. 2007/Somerville, Mass.

Interview with Doug Holder concerning the Somerville News Writers Festival

* This interview in Spare Change News was conducted before the festival and before it was known that Jimmy Tingle's Off Broadway Theatre was to close. Emily Singer was the host in place of Jimmy Tingle and it was held at the VFW Hall in Davis Square Somerville.




A Talk with Douglas Holder about the Upcoming Somerville Writers Festival
By Jacques Fleury: The Haitian Firefly

The Autumn chill has dawned. Soon we will all be in search of something warm and toasty to heat up our bodies. But I want to tell you about something that will heat up not only your bodies, but your minds and souls. Something warm and “literary.” I’m talking about the annual Somerville News Writer’s Festival to take place on Nov. 11, 2007 at 7 p.m. at the Dilboy VFW Hall 371 Summer St. in Davis Square in Somerville and it will hosted again by Jimmy Tingle.


In the past, the Festival has attracted writers from Hollywood and Pulitzer Prize Winners. The Festival was co-founded by local writer-publisher Douglas Holder, who is also a member of the Bagel with the Bards: a group of poets and writers who meet every Saturday at the Au Bon Pain in Cambridge/Somerville to share their works, resources, and create good vibes with each other. Some of the other writers participating this year are Haitian American writer Danielle Legros Georges, festival co-founder Timothy Gager, Lo Gallucco, Gloria Mindock and Douglas Holder just to name a few.

Spare Change News: Can you tell me when and why was the Somerville News Writers Festival established and what role did you play in this FABULOUS literary project?

Douglas Holder: The festival started in 2003. I was writing for The Somerville News, and the new owners came aboard and I was made Arts/Editor. The owners, the Norton and Tauro families wanted a higher profile for the paper. I had the idea of a Writer's festival, and I contacted Tim Gager. Gager and I proposed it to the board, and they were on board from the start.

Scn: How do you keep the festival running? Who are your sponsors and most ardent supporters?

Dh: Porter Square Books and Grub Street have been consistent supporters. The Somerville News does the lion share of funding.

Scn: What method do you use to attain and select your writers?

Dh: We want people who are respected for their writing, and can bring people in. Both Tim and I are connected in the Poetry and Fiction communities, so getting people hasn't been that hard.

Scn: Can you tell me a brief synopsis or interesting anecdote of a few of your writers, particularly the ones that you know personally like Tim Gager , Lo Galluccio etc…?

Dh: Well Lo is going to read the poetry of the late poet Sarah Hannah.

Hannah committed suicide last Spring and was scheduled to read at the festival. Lo will read from Hannah's work and from her own.

Scn: What are your aspirations for the festival? What do you hope to achieve in the next five years?

Dh: I hope to achieve another five years. Tim has plans to have a workshop sponsored by a local college.

Scn: Do you think that the writer's festival is necessary and why?

Dh: I think it is a good thing for Somerville- a showcase for national and local talent. It is a focal point for the writing community.

Scn: What do you get from co-hosting the festival?

Dh: Well of course I get publicity from it. Also I enjoy hosting, and introducing many of my friends and fellow writers.

Scn: What have you seen the writer's festival done for the writing careers of past participants?

Dh: Well many of the writers are very established, so the festival really doesn't affect them. I am sure the less established have gotten more recognition--and hopefully sold a few books. I hope the festival gives recognition to some of the emerging writers we have. The big names like Perrotta, Almond, Wright, Pinsky etc..do it out a sense of service to the community.

Scn: I know in the past the festival have sparked the interest and participation of popular a Hollywood actor and Pulitzer Prize winners. Do you have any high profile writers this year?

Dh: Robert Pinsky will be receiving the Ibbetson Street Press Lifetime Achievement Award ( former US Poet Laureate) Tom Perrotta, his screenplay "Little Children"was nominated for an Oscar, and of course Steve Almond, etc...

Scn: You do so much for the artistic family, how do you balance work, a personal life and your active participation in the writing community?

Dh: I don't have kids so that helps. I have a flexible job AND AN UNDERSTANDING WIFE DIANNE ROBITAILLE. .IT IS ALL A LABOR OFLOVE.

Scn: I read that Heny Roth have greatly influenced your writing. Can you tell me why?

Dh: Well he wrote about being Jewish, and he wrote beautifully about food. I did my thesis at Harvard on him. I am very interested in Jewish-American literature...I am Jewish. Both food and being Jewish often shows up in my work.

Scn: In your opinion, what do you think makes a good writer?

Dh: A good writer is someone who makes you cut yourself while shaving, as you read their work. A good writer is evocative, leaves you with something, captures a person,place or thing…

Scn: What advice if any do you have for up and coming writers?

Dh: Read, Read, Read. Write, Write, Write. Study. Study. Study. Get an internship in a lit.mag, join writers groups, attend readings, immerse yourself in the writing life.

Sc n: Is there anything that I did not ask that you wish to address? And merci for this interview!

Dh: That's about it.

For more information please visit: www.somervillenewswritersfestival.com!

Winners of the Ibbetson Street Poetry Award

* This article will appear in the Nov.21, 2007 Lyrical Somerville. The selections were made by Richard Wilhelm http://richardwilhelm.blogspot.com



LYRICAL SOMERVILLE

Edited by Doug Holder

Well, the Somerville News Writers Festival has come and gone and I am going to present the poetry of the winner of the Ibbetson Street Poetry Award, and the runner-up: Michael Todd Steffen, and Dale Patterson. The award was presented at the festival. To have your work considered for the Lyrical send it to: Doug Holder 25 School St. Somerville, Mass. 02143 dougholder@post.harvard.edu




Looks

The bubbled look of fish, the look of a carp
Panicked little sympathy in my fluid world
Young and less prone to think than to react,
Lurch at motion, flinch. I called on the flight.

I refused to be composed by common sense
Other than excitement for the lake’s obscure
Guessing labyrinth, those shadows chased and fled.

Mine was a life of mirrored circumstances
Where some seeding of “it” or “they” were consonant
With my fear, o heartbeat for another’s size
Surfaced for a breath upon the water.

High in the disobliged lake of the sky
The condors were an anxious fact of life.
In profile, symbols of their habitat,
Steep hooked-beak lopsided perspective like
A hot moon on the tree line, screwed their eyes
Deep into the peepers of sharp heads.

I lost my gaze on them assuming
As cold a magnificence to turn the same
Scan down from altitude for prey
On grids of contour with rigid difference.
The scope was sweeping. My cartography.

Out on that vast prairie of the universe
The eyes of the stars like grass sparkle and stare
As from one mind that has been everywhere,
Seen everything and found no one thing to
Turn its look from. Seeded in this valley of time
Where the moon is a pebble in a shallow stream

Those furthest peers into our own depth burn on
And say, Oh no you don’t, you don’t disappear.
Trace your mother in a bear’s shape if you must.
Sting. Draw arrows. Weigh this and that. But find
Your reflections. Somewhere. See? Way out here.

--Michael Todd Steffen







IN TRANSIT

Announcements commanding vigilance
spit from gritty loudspeakers hanging over
today’s news-stained subway platform.

Report suspicious activity do NOT leave packages unattended
and thank you for riding the green line.

A roar of white light
approaches
bright windows decelerate
passed me
and stop
green doors folding open
with a rush.


Tracking indistinctly within the tunnel
beneath the breathing city I am
with a hundred others reading

about the war the game the crash the rain celebrities
the big deal prophecies posted on the moving car’s wall.

An electric guitar swirls
around amber earbuds
nicely next to me.
She sees
I can hear.
Smiles.
That’s big treble.


Now’s our chance to start singing something together but no
we won’t while we
stall out in this gonging long long tunnel.

You and me, baby, baby! Squeezed against each other
in the tunnel of love love love get this goddam car moving!

Can’t call it crazy—
crowded, trapped
underground—
but cursed at
the train moves out
like a maniac
lurching toward a girl.


Opposite where I sat once
a young woman squatted on the subway car floor.
Black beetles crawled in her greasy hair.

You dirty loser staring at me want me to flash my tits?
Stop looking stop like you’re after what’s up with my mind—

She yanked up her tee shirt
and I saw.
My idea of perfect.
Now I am charged
with all
of her mad
memory.


I am the refocused light approaching
the platform. I am the suspicious activity
now I must report.

See that hair see that nose see that chin that is me
my glassy reflection collapsing as the green door folds open.

I denounce myself perversely
while stepping down
as yesterday’s bad news.
In transit
lies truth.
Arrival
results.

-- Dale Patterson

Ibbetson 22 Reading Dec. 9

McIntyre & Moore Booksellers
hosts a reading of
Ibbetson Street 22

followed by an open mic

Sunday, December 9, 5:00 pm

(Somerville, MA) McIntyre & Moore Booksellers hosts a reading of Ibbetson Street 22, followed by an open mic. Sunday, December 9, 5:00 pm at McIntyre & Moore Booksellers, 255 Elm St. in Davis Square, Somerville, near the Red Line. Free and open to all; wheelchair accessible. Light refreshments will be served. 15% book discount on store inventory for all those attending* [*discount available for day of event only]. For information call McIntyre & Moore Booksellers (617) 629-4840 or log onto www.mcintyreandmoore.com.

Ibbetson Street Press will celebrate the release of issue 22 of “Ibbetson Street”, its popular literary journal. At McIntyre & Moore Booksellers, there will be featured poetry by Robert K. Johnson, Marc Goldfinger, Jade Sylvan, Thade Correa, Sarah Hannah, as well as Somerville poets Linda Haviland Conte, Eleanor Goodman, and others. And as always, an open mic will follow the featured readers.

This latest issue includes an interview with the late poet Sarah Hannah who took her own life this past spring. The lead poem by Marc Goldfinger and others in the issue pay tribute to this brilliant writer who died at the tender age of 40.

On the front cover of the new issue is featured a photo of McIntyre and Moore Booksellers taken by Ibbetson arts/editor Richard Wilhelm. McIntyre and Moore, a well-respected used bookstore in the heart of Davis Square, has been the setting for the “Ibbetson Street” readings for many years. The back cover photo is by Kirk Etherton, an artist from the Union Square section of Somerville.

Since 1998, when the press was founded by Doug Holder, Richard Wilhelm and Dianne Robitaille, the Ibbetson Street Press has published a literary journal “Ibbetson Street” as well as over 40 collections of poetry by local and national authors. Its journal and books have won numerous “Pick of the Month” awards in the Small Press Review. Recently “Ibbetson Street” has been included in the prestigious “Index of American Periodical Verse,” along with many other top small press literary journals. “Ibbetson Street” has been reviewed favorably by any number of small press literary magazines, both in print and online. Its books are collected at Harvard, Yale, Brown, and Buffalo University libraries to name a few.

For more information on the press, visit www.ibbetsonpress.com.

Comp. By John Shea. (Boston Playwright’s Theatre. Boston University) http://www.bostonplaywrights.org

Comp. By John Shea. (Boston Playwright’s Theatre. Boston University) http://www.bostonplaywrights.org


Coming back to the Boston University campus after many years can be shocking. Walking with my companions for the evening I noticed the Agganis Sports and Entertainment arena, several theatres, a huge gym with students cycling on bike machines (generating enough energy to light the city of Somerville), and
huge crowds parading down the sidewalk. This was quite different from the gone-to-seed armory I passed everyday on Comm.Ave. as a B.U. student in the early 70’s. What brought me back to my seminal stalking grounds was Somerville playwright John Shea’s new play “Comp.” presented at the Boston Playwright’s Theatre at Boston University. Shea, a Magoun Square resident, and graduate of Boston University’s playwriting program, has written a play set in the “Ville, and centering around the conflict between two brothers over a work-related accident. It seems that one brother Kevin played by Michael F. Walker was involved in an accident that left him a cripple. His brother Marc played by Benjy Schirm was supposed to work that shift, but Kevin filled in because Marc imbibed a bit too much the night before. The brothers have come back to the family home to boil in a hotbed of resentment and recrimination resided over by an archetypical Somerville/Catholic Mom expertly portrayed by Marina Re.

The acting by this trio of brothers and mother is authentic. Having lived in Somerville for quite awhile I can attest to the fact that Shea has captured the banter of the boys in the “Ville, and their caring but overbearing Mom.

The set can only be described as “Somerville minimalist.” The props consist of bottles of Budweiser, a litany of cigarettes, and an ever-present basketball hoop- a symbol of Kevin’s more mobile recent past, and of course the endless sorrows of the plastic Madonna that is well appointed in the boys’ bedroom. The elocution of the words “Retard” “Retarded” as well as others, was executed with the expertise of a linguist with a concentration in Somervillese.

The brothers’ conflict in the confines of a home in the Magoun Square vicinity alternates between boyish jocularity, to the visceral confrontations about the past, and the uncertain future.

Shea told me he is influenced by the great American playwright Eugene O’Neill, and in ways the conflict of the brothers reminded me of the two lost young brothers in “A Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”

The play demands the audience’s attention. It is more often than not loud, brutish, vulgar, and even sentimental. It never seems forced and does not fall into the pits of affectation.

Kate Snodgrass, the artistic director of the theatre, and a very accomplished woman, who I talked to briefly impressed me as being as “ real” as the characters on stage. She even brewed a pot of coffee for my caffeine- deprived mother before the show. Now try to find that treatment on Broadway!


Doug Holder/ The Somerville News.

Sonatina. by johnmichael simon Review by Hugh Fox.

Sonatina.
By Johnmichael Simon
2007; 86pp;Ps; Ibbetson
Street Press, 25 School
Street, Somerville, MA
002143.$13.00.

To order: http://www.lulu.com/content/1105362


Simon’s poetry is a fascinating blend of the quotidian and the horrific. Some of the poems are heavily realistic throughout. Like “Age is Heavy on the Ground”: “Age is heavy on the ground/alongside the pansies and begonia/the fuchsia and snapdragons.../Age is heavy on the ground/from flower to fruit/to candle glow on silverware and china//Age is heavy on the ground/weightless as a butterfly.” (p.33) A very on-target poem about human mortality. In “Night Dies over the City,” at the beginning it sounds simply like a description of night-workers getting up, but slowly we move to a nicely chosen star metaphor for death: “...somewhere in the heavens/the darkness parts/as a falling meteroite/ burns itself to death.” (p.16) In “Fruit Trees in the Mist” “...the witches rule these slopes/raising the wind, curling their fingernails,” as Simon rushes home “...a rain phantom...to dream that once again I am a tree/dancing with those witches in the rain.” (pp.46-47) As Jendi Reiter notes on the back cover “childhood delights are interwoven with the...reflections of an older man making peace with mortality.” And throughout, very effectively done. Very effective meditations on mankind skimming through Time.

Hugh Fox/Ibbetson Update

Hard Work by Gager, Holder Produce Fifth Festival

Hard Work by Gager, Holder Produce Fifth Festival
By Gary Wayne/Correspondent



Timothy Gager’s phone rings again. It is the fifth time it has rung in the past hour, all related to the Somerville News Writer’s Festival. Timothy Gager is very busy. He has organized this festival along with Doug Holder for the past five years. “I am still a writer,” he says. “Believe it or not I have time to write through all this.” Indeed he has. Since the last festival in November 2006 he has had seventeen works of fiction and twenty-one poems accepted for publication. He was also named a finalist in the Binnacle Ultra Short Award, The Bukowski Tavern Pint and Pen Competition and had a short story short listed as notable in the Story South Million Writer Award.


“That was exciting,” Gager notes. “Always a bridesmaid, never a bride, but in this case being a bridesmaid is quite alright.”

Gager juggles many hats. Besides all of this he has run The Dire Literary Series, a monthly author series for the past seven years. “The difference between Dire and the Writers Festival is that working on the festival is like running an All-Star team. The line-up this year is packed!” On Sunday at Dilboy Post VFW Hall the event has superb lineup. Besides Gager and Holder readers include Tom Perrotta, Steve Almond (making his fifth appearance), Stephanie Gayle, Errol Uys, Joe Ann Hart, Gloria Mindock, Danielle Legros Georges, Irene Kornas, and Lo Galluccio. “It’s really fabulous reading with such heavy hitters. In the past we’ve had Pulitzer Prize winners and this year Tom Perrotta was nominated for an Academy Award for best screenplay for his adaptation of his book Little Children. “It’s just really mind blowing to be involved with such talented writers.”

Not that it’s all smooth sailing. This year’s festival has survived some bumps in the road. “With changing the venue set us back for about a day…only a day,” he laughs. That is how long it took to find the new location after Jimmy Tingle’s Off Broadway Theater decided not to renew its lease. Tingle also had to bow out because of scheduling conflicts. “As much as I will miss Jimmy, I am sure Emily Singer will do a great job,” Gager says. “Emily is a wonderful comic this October she performed at The Funniest Female Showcase at The Boston Comedy Festival. I don’t think there will be any downside about Emily taking the ball as she is absolutely wonderful. It’s a win-win for the festival.”

The event will take place on Sunday, November 11. Tickets can by charged by phone by calling The Somerville News Office, 617-666-4010 or at the door of the VFW, 371 Summer Street in Somerville, the day of the show.

Interview with poet Jane Katims

Poet Jane Katims: “Dancing on a Slippery Floor.”


Poet Jane Katims seems to be a woman supremely in love with her work. She slips easily into a smile, and seems no stranger to laughter. Jane has taught at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education for many years, has co-produced six radio series for Wisconsin Public Radio, and has earned a George Foster Peabody Award in Broadcasting. She has written radio documentaries for WEN, WGBH, WBUR, and other stations over the years. In 2004 she was awarded a John Woods Scholarship in Fiction Writing (Western Michigan University), and has completed a poetry collection “Dancing on a Slippery Floor.” I talked with her on my Somerville Community Access TV Show “Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.”

Doug Holder: You won the prestigious Peabody Award for your work on Wisconsin Public Radio. Can you talk about your work on radio?

Jane Katims: It was an exciting time. I went to NYC and sat next to people like Arthur Godfrey (it was awhile back) So it was quite fun. I won it in the late 70’s.

Doug Holder: Can you tell me about your work in Radio?

Jane Katims: I was an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. I loved the city so much that I wanted to stay after I graduated. We are talking 1970. So I needed a job to stay. I got a job at a TV station writing advertisements. Then I showed my school papers to a gal at WHA radio. They needed a scriptwriter for educational radio programs for children. I was happy doing something where the writer is really valued and was given a lot of freedom. I was very lucky to land this job just out of college.

Doug Holder: Is radio a good medium for poetry, fiction, etc…?

Jane Katims: Well I think so. I love radio. And when I think about it was probably the best job I had. I was given a desk, a topic, I wrote the script, and it was immediately produced and broadcast. It was instant gratification. But it was also good training. I had to write within a timeframe. I had to communicate through language. There were no visuals. I also had a great mentor Claire Kinsler. She really did respect the writers’ freedom, the need for space and time, and gave gentle and constructive criticism. So it was great on- the- job training.

Doug Holder: I have seen you billed at Cambridge Adult education as a poet/therapist. How do you weave both into your course?

Jane Katims: Well I worked with writers before I trained as a therapist. My sense was that you are dealing with peoples’ internal psyches when you teach writing. So it was the teaching of writing that led me to psychoanalysis. And then I brought it full circle. I think a lot of my training in psychoanalysis has helped me with writers. I see them closely intertwine the expression of their thoughts and feelings. They learn about themselves as they write.

Doug Holder: Do you consider yourself more a poet or fiction writer?

Jane Katims: I haven’t thought of myself as a fiction writer until recently. I always just wrote poetry. Poetry has always been my first love. But I think in the back of my mind I always have the dream of writing fiction. It wasn’t until four or five years ago that I tried my hand at it. I have really enjoyed it. Every story I start I hope it turns into a novel. They all seem to become short stories. I am working on a novel now.

Doug Holder: The title of your new poetry collection is “Dancing On A Slippery Floor” Why has dancing inspired your work?

Jane Katims: I had my first dance recital when I was five years old. Dancing was a way of expression for me as a child. The title has a little more to do with the notion of persevering in spite of some rough terrain.

Doug Holder: In the poem: “ N.J. 1952” a raucous barking dog, contrasts the straight laced 1950’s America, and the stifling milieu of suburbia at that time. Do you feel your mother who appears in this poem, felt corseted by this environment?

Jane Katims: I was an only child. We had a very quiet household. My mother was a very timid, retiring sort of woman. The stereotypical 1950’s woman. Right next door to me was a family that had a lot of kids; lots of activity, and it seemed very exotic and desirable. It was in direct contrast to the stillness and quiet in my house. I wasn’t trying to get to the era in the poem but it comes through.

Doug Holder: Do you prefer adult education teaching to college-level or secondary education?

Jane Katims: I love teaching adult education populations. People come incredibly motivated. I structure my courses at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education for people to come back to again and again. I get a chance to follow my student’s progress over the years. I have taught at Middlesex Community College—it was a valuable experience, but I feel most comfortable in my Adult Education classes.


Doug Holder: “Dancing…” is your first book of poetry. What motivated you to undertake the hard working of producing a collection?

Jane Katims: Some of the poems were written as long as 25 years ago—some are very recent. I decided to collect all my poems together. I wanted to choose the ones that fit together—that were meant to be together. I wanted to make a collection that was shaped coherently. I split the books into three sections. The first section is called “Terrains” It’s about the physical and psychological terrains that that we have to negotiate in our lives. The second is called “Seeing.” It is about how we look around to find out how to manage these terrains. The last section “Dancing” is the celebratory part. Once we learn to negotiate the terrain we have freedom.

Stéles bt Victor Segalen, trans. And ed. Timothy Billings and Christopher Bush, Wesleyan University Press, 2007. Review by Bert Stern

Stéles bt Victor Segalen, trans. And ed. Timothy Billings and Christopher Bush, Wesleyan University Press, 2007. $34.95, paper, ISBN 0-8195-6832-5.

Review by Bert Stern, PhD.


There’s something so grand and powerfully willed about the spiritual/aesthetic project of Victor Segalen (1878-1919) that it can be described only as it describes itself. The impulse of Segalen’s short life and prolific work was to uncover the spirit of the Other, or, more exactly, of the space that separates two different mind-systems. The context of the project was the “Romantic” assumption that science, commerce and industry and the colonial system, along with Philistinism and propaganda, were rapidly homogenizing the world.

Segalen brought to his project an enormous range of developed talents: he was a French naval medical officer; twice librettist and co-composer of two operas by Debussy (significantly on the subjects of Orpheus and Siddhartha), neither of which was completed; a Sinologist who, after scarcely having set foot on Chinese soil, set off on an archaeological expedition that discovered what was at the time the oldest piece of carved stone identified in modern archives. Segalen published articles in areas like Chinese porcelain and Chinese carved stones that changed the nature of these disciplines. His work on aesthetic theory has become a founding document for academic thinking about Otherness (Segalen’s term, “l’Exotique.”)

Segalen also published several novels, two of them available in English though one out of print. A book of his called Paintings, which I haven’t seen, was published, like much of his work, posthumously. His archaeological writings won the attention of Levy-Strauss himself, and today, though belatedly, his work has gained much national appreciation in France, though there remain important letters that are still unpublished. Stèles, the book I’m reviewing was published for the first time seven years before Segalen’s mysterious, untimely death. Today, the book is a national classic, taught in French schools.

Speaking about “the Other” can quickly lead to mystifications, which I will try to avoid. Everyone is familiar with Yins and Yangs, but it’s harder to take in that our own tribal way of looking at the world is but one of any number of tribal ways. By tribal ways I mean here the whole system of assumptions about reality that form our outer world into the familiar shapes we are used to.

Segalen was no friend of democracy, on the ground that it was just another homogenizing process. But he was a great friend of “diversity,” which for him meant giving the Other its due, aspiring to think the Other rather than describe it. To know the other was to be its subject, not the other way around, as our knowing apparatus ordinarily arranges epistemological events.

Segalen spent a good part of his life studying and reflecting on Chinese language and culture, and published both a novel and this collection of poems that probe toward the hidden centers of Chinese thinking and acting. In the semi-autobiographical novel, René Leys, a narrator called “Victor” recounts his relations with his young Chinese tutor, a Belgian who has won the favor of the Forbidden City, even so far as to have luxuriated in the arms of the Dowager Empress, Tsu Hsi, though she’d have to have been quite old and scary at the time. Victor, who himself wants more than anything to be brought closer to the secret world he imagines as contained behind the walls of the Forbidden City, persistently pries into his friend’s mind, begging for stories of his adventures and penetrations. Among other things, Leys is the head of the palace secret police, and he carries on love affairs with slaves given to him by the emperor and with near-mistresses from among the wives of highest Ming families. Ley is finally poisoned by enemies, as the narrator had forewarned him might happen.

After Ley’s death, Victor, the narrator, reflecting on that final sequence, sees Leys in an entirely new light. Everything Leys reported was the result of something that Victor had put into his head. Although nothing is sure, Leys seems to have imaginarily played out for the narrator the narrator’s own fantasies about the mysteries of the Forbidden City. Perhaps none of what he reports has actually happened. The upshot is that in the end the narrator is as far away from true knowledge as he was in the beginning.

I could say that this is where Segalen wants us, or, at least wants himself. For him, exoticism was marked by the perception of Diversity and the knowledge that something is other than one’s self.” Exoticism is the act of the conscious being who, in conceiving of himself, can only do so as “other than he is.” What he wants to know can’t be gained through external, appropriating knowledge, which is merely another form of colonialism. Segalen’s method, true to Romantic practice, requires the undoing of subject/object relationships.

There are aspects of René Leys that are jejeune, and sometimes the action rises no higher than two young men talking out their sexual fantasies, fantasies that one of them claims to have made real. But, although an erotic element is present in Stèles too, it is only one aspect of a perfectly serious subject, which I’ll pose as a question: Once we have invested all our resources of mind and spirit to understand l’Exotique, in this case, the ancient Mandarin mind at its richest and wittiest, playing with cultural and historical allusions as if they were pretty butterflies, to be moved here and there so as to make a slightly new arrangement – after we have done all that, do we understand anything at all? And in that very non-understanding may we not find the subject we seek, now that we have released it from the position of subject?

A beautiful fact about all this is that the subject-object of these poems is the steles themselves, large hexagonal stones not quite 20 centuries old, half sunken back into the earth but still carrying, in inscribed epigraphs in their upper right hand corner, the edict or proclamation or piece of wisdom once inscribed on them, in a script just barely legible to the present.

The new Wesleyan University Press edition of Stèles mirrors some of Segalen’s own careful bookmaking. Segalen gave much thought to the script in which to print the epigraphs, to the blend of Chinese and Korean papers that balanced the delicacy and strength he was after, and to other such ‘details.” He intended this to be a realized book, not just in its letters but in its very presence.

Wesleyan has made remarkable efforts to present that book – for one, an en face facsimile of the French text – so as to invoke the original edition. As the same time, though the poems have strong appeal even to a reader ignorant of their background, admiration deepens with greater knowledge. The book preface and forward by the translators and by the scholar Haun Saussy help the reader move closer and thus to better experience the energy of Segalen’s project. So do rich footnotes and précis of individual poems. Notes follow the poems, and there are also helpful précis. To make full use of the volume requires some heavy lifting, but the rewards are great. With the help of the editorial apparatus, even the reader with no knowledge of Chinese language and culture can feel some appreciation of Segalen’s adroit and deep mastery. (Interestedly, Segalen professed to have no interest in the Chinese, only in China.)

Segalen’s poems are alternatively petitions to stone or the recording of monitions by stone. Yet the monitions themselves, vestigial imperial decrees, tend to deconstruct themselves. The opening poem, for example, entitled “With No Reign Mark,” declares itself uninterested in honoring “renowned Sages” enumerating “the Just,” or repeating “on all sides that such a man / lived, & was notable, and his countenance virtuous.” Instead, the speaking stone is “Attentive to what has not been said, subject to / what has not been promulgated, prostrate / before what has not yet come to be.” Often as here, the English is dignified and grave, carrying authority. The voice concentrates “my joy & my life & my piety to / declaring reigns without years, dynasties / without accessions, names without people, people without names.”

The poems can also be impish, as in the one in which a Chinese mind looks with polite irony Christian legend (the Holy Ghost is rendered in this way: “The newborn even / fond itself adopted b a bird that cradled / him with one wing & fanned him with the other”; or with a naked eye at the cruel practices of warrior tribes. Some of the poems are courtly, and suggest an amatory relationship with an invisible other capable who is evasive if not outright treacherous. Along these lines it would be possible to reconstruct a tale of a similar kind as that of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

Often, as with medieval English lyrics, Segalen’s amatory poems can be understood in either secular or spiritual terms, though in his case the veiled feminine is not, say, the Blessed Virgin, or the Shekinah, or Buddhism’s Blue Tara, but, still more simply and mysteriously, the face of the other itself. “To please her,” one of the poems says, “I have lived my life.”

Segalen groups these poems around the four directions, plus the wayside and the middle as “directions.” Some of the poems of the wayside are indeed advice to spiritual travelers, but they rest on uneasy, gossamer foundations: “Beware of choosing a refuge. Do not believe in / the virtue of a virtue that lasts: break it / with some strong spice that burns and bites / & gives a taste even to blandness.”

There are strong resemblances between the state Segalen’s steles evoke and the Buddha mind: in both, there is to be experienced “the intoxicating eddies of the great river Diversity,” once we have relinquished our customary point of view.

To a reader who complained that he’d have to spend the rest of his life in order to read Finnegans Wake, James Joyce replied, ‘Why not, I’ve spent most of my life writing it.” Segalen worked faster, but, then, he had less time. He leaves us with a book of poems that open onto the wellsprings of the imagination. He points the way to a new that stays new, once we have the courage to abandon our orientation.