The Graves Grow Bigger Between Generations by Jared Smith

The Graves Grow Bigger Between Generations. Poems by Jared Smith. (Higganum Hill Books PO BOX 666 Higganum Hill CT 06441 rcdebold@mindspring.com $12.95



Like Eliot, Stevens, and others, Jared Smith has been a businessman as well as a poet. In fact for years Smith was a highly sought after energy consultant. But Smith’s, (who graduated with an MFA in Writing from New York University), real calling is poetry. He was part of the literary scene in Greenwich Village in the 70’s writing for such journals as the “Home Planet News,” and the “New York Quarterly;” publishing his work regularly, downing shots with Gregory Corso, the whole ball of wax. But “real” life reared its ugly head, and Smith had to make a living—and as you well know you ain’t going to make it writing poetry. Poetry has never been a magnet for the greenbacks. After years in the hallowed halls of government and the boardroom Smith is back to his eternally young muse Poetry. In his new collection of poetry from Higganum Hill Books: “The Grave Grows Bigger Between Generations,” Smith not only writes about the hardscrabble life of the workingman, but his own rebirth as a poet. In his brilliant poem “Having Never Wanted To Own The Business” he writes to the ephemeral, dust to dust nature of the corporate milieu, and indeed of all of life, no matter how exalted:

“ I can tell you that having come back from countless halls.
I am a name on better than a thousand roll-o-dex from NY to Washington,
each one retired to rooms with shoeboxes of data cards and dust.
My eyes are the marble of office complexes and monuments.
Rodents scurry through my corridors with wireless whiskers
intent on gnawing their way to eternity on cockroach eggs.”

And here with bright flashes of evocative imagery the middle-aged businessman comes back to the trappings and truths of the poet’s life:

“ I have come back to the page-torn poetry books I read and wrote
and to the fiery shriek of invisible angels celebrating
my return and the echoes of my now never empty room
and to the shared nights of readings, cryings, lovings,
amid the shingles of material poverty where soup bones boiled
all day and a can of beans was what we ate on a good day
and we drank each evening on what we could borrow
amid cigarettes and marijuana and loud music espresso machines
and made love in that until the sun rose and we had to hand in
our time machine cards that marked down our uselessness,
making ourselves a mockery of the machinery of diatribe.”

And in the poem “Poets” he defines the poet as an enemy of the leaders, the establishment, and the status quo. Smith reminds us of the vital role of the poet, the absolute necessity for a weaver of words, a visionary, someone who can see beyond the quotidian.

“The enemies of our leaders are poets
who listen to winds at night as they walk dark alleys,


who stop at lonely diners for a cup of coffee
before jotting down a few notes and going off
into the shuffle of their tired footsteps;
who come together again in the workplace
speaking in tongues marketers do not understand,
and seducing women with eyes that do not waver.

The leaders cannot lead without the words
a culture creates within itself
within its needs,
poets.”

Highly Recommended.

Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update

The Dangerous Corner by Richard Moore

The Dangerous Corner by Richard Moore, David Roberts Books, 2007, $17.00, paper, ISBN 9781933456836.

Review by Bert Stern, PhD.


The publication of this, Richard Moore’s thirteenth book of poetry, deepens the mystery of his relative obscurity. His mock epic cum Bildungsroman, The Mouse – Whole, which Moore calls “the main poem in my life” didn’t find a publisher until some 40 years after it was completed, though it’s a comic masterpiece. His work has been praised by such poets as May Swenson, Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur, and Mona Van Duyn. Yet Moore remains, as he has always been, something of a castaway.

It’s possible to say, on his own testimony, that he was born such. His father wanted him aborted, and Moore matured to a kind of sympathy with his father’s position. Father, implicitly, and son, explicitly, agree that this world isn’t fit to live in. Not all his ironies or volumes of light verse do anything to change that view. And this new volume, in which Moore explicitly sees this world as hell, confirms it.

It also confirms that Moore can write free verse of amazing power and beauty, proof on nearly every page: In a Christmas poem, he says:

. . . All color has left the land,
been squeezed out, as from a sponge,
and let the land a thing of ashes.
And the great sponge has squeezed all
its soaked-up fire and color into

that shopping center, where sex-tools, soul helps,
screwdrivers and philosophies
are for sale. . . .

(“Into the Light”)

In “On High”:

Over the constant irritation of the avenue,
the irregular shrill quarreling of the tires
that keep whipping the pavement, as with dry wind
in gusts, in fits, and the library’s portico fitted

with pillars, caught in floodlight, where a flag
flops lazily that someone didn’t take down –
over all this tawdry nonsense of the town
and much more that I shan’t trouble to describe,

Venus rides in the blue night, a gem, a pulse
pillowed in richness like a queen.

Typically, in “On High” Queen Venus will collapse into a lover in bed, a woman Moore doesn’t “even much like,” but who offers him such

. . .lush variety,
each touch and squeeze, sure, exact, imaginative,
and all mingled with such a symphony of groans,
writhings, desperate pantings, tossings of the head

as Moore, having taken a mistress after his wife’s death, would never have dreamed possible in marriage.

The death of his wife, and the aftermath, is ostensibly the subject of Moore’s new book. His starting point is anguished grief, and, by design, the book’s four sections “somewhat resemble” the four movements of a musical sonata, moving toward what Moore calls “the final resolution.” But I don’t mean to suggest that Moore’s purpose is to take us through the stages of loss and grief and recovery. This powerfully non-formulaic book ranges ferociously and astonishingly beyond such bounds.

Moore’s poems are all energy and clash of opposing states. His poems are hard to nail because they are events and never, in fact, resolutions. Each goes through conflicting emotions, conflicting perceptions, and we come away shocked by combinations of anger and reconciliation, beauty and ugliness, and even flashes of spiritual tranquility.

Certain particulars remain more or less constant. The attitude, though placated by beauty, is often anguished, bitter, or plain curmudgeonly. The place is an upper middle class suburb, in which Moore lives in grim opposition. Near his house is a pond, in which Moore repeatedly finds a mirror of his mind. It can be “a thing of mournful shadows, / endlessly undulating into darkness” (“The Mirror”), an “image of the mind at peace” in “pure geometry,” or a place where “Girls in a giggling band” who go by, crying taunts at Moore, can be reflected in the pond as goddesses.

But in the poem that is a kind of signature for the volume,

The deep cold comes, and even the great
pond is frozen, dusted with snow,
luminous under Venus the moon,
suburban lights on the dark hills.

The cold wind has blown over and over
it, and not it is still, my mind,
frozen, determined, and still the wind
shrieks. Let there be no end of it.

Thus it is with Moore. He can pronounce, like Marlowe’s Mephistopheles, that this world is hell, “nor was I ever out of it,” and that, if anything, is the book’s “resolution. But Moore rancor and passions and meticulous craft leave us preferring his hell to many poets’ heavens.


Bert Stern/ Ibbetson Update/Somerville, Mass/ Feb. 2008

How About A Poet Laureate in Somerville?

( Sam Cornish- Boston Poet Laureate)


How About A Poet Laureate in Somerville?

Recently I was invited to a reception for the Boston Poet Laureate Sam Cornish at the Parkman House in Boston. It was a nice affair with many of the poets and players from the Boston area poetry scene in attendance. I got to eat a lot of fancy hors d’oeurves, drink a slightly diluted pomegranate punch, and admired the genteel trappings of this celebrated house. If I remember correctly Mayor Curley’s desk was stolen from the premises some years back. During the reception I spoke with Dan Tobin, the head of Creative Writing at Emerson College in Boston, Tino Villanueva, a professor of Romance Languages at Boston University, Elizabeth McKim, a poet and lecturer at Lesley University, Louisa Solano, former owner of the Grolier Poetry Bookshop, and many of my pals from the literary group the “Bagel Bards.’ Mayor Menino was there, and in his unaffected speech he mumbled;” I am not used to being around these literary types,” but he recognized the importance of the Poet Laureate. As my friend poet Jared Smith wrote in his poem: “Poets”: “The leaders cannot lead without the words, a culture creates within itself, within its needs, poets.”

Sam Cornish seemed to be a perfect fit for the position. A respected African-American poet, a longtime professor at Emerson College, he is not only an accomplished bard but he seems like a man who is genuinely comfortable walking the streets of the city, (I remember seeing him pounding the pavement of Commonwealth Ave when I lived in Brighton in the 80’s), and chewing the fat with the eclectic swath of people Boston is known for. He is a poet who knows how to navigate the back alleys of the Back Bay as well as the dusty corners of a classroom. As Cornish said in a Boston Globe article he was surprised to be selected because he wasn’t “connected.” And Cornish wants to be available to everyone: to denizens of nursing homes, homeless shelters, corporate board rooms, to the university classroom. He is a man who can bring the gift of poetry to the city, and articulate the city’s unique voice in a way that only poetry can do it.

Now it seems that Cambridge has a Poet/Populist. And I am thinking to myself “Damn! Why doesn’t Somerville have something like this?” In Somerville, according to a study in Granta Magazine, we have more writers per capita that the isle of Manhattan. Just think of the world class writers we have just a stone’s throw from Davis Square: Claire Messud, James Woods, Pagan Kennedy, Lloyd Schwartz, Afaa Michael Weaver, to name just a few. And so many have lived and passed through here like Denise Levertov, Lan Samantha Chang, Steve Almond, just a few names I can remember from the top of my barren, bald head. Somerville, referred to as the “Paris of New England,” is a city of many things, but is also a city of the arts. And anyone will tell you the arts are good for business. So why not create a committee to select a poet laureate? Someone like Cornish who is as good at outreach as he is at writing poetry? Money is an issue you say? I think the laureate in Boston has a budget of $3,000 and in Cambridge even less.

I have approached Alderman Trane about this and he said he would bring it up if I emailed him with some details. I did. He is a busy man but perhaps if more citizens expressed an interest it might speed the process. Send me an email if you think it is a good idea and I will forward it. You will never know unless you try.

dougholder@post.harvard.edu


---Doug Holder

The This and That of Balances in a "Roomful of Sparrows," poems by Mary Buchinger

The This and That of Balances in a "Roomful of Sparrows," poems by Mary Buchinger

( Finishing Line Press POBOX 1626 Georgetown, Kentucky 40324 $12)


A poet is her or his language and poems, like people, as T. S. Eliot said, communicate before they are reduced to understanding. The poems in Mary Buchinger’s Roomful of Sparrows beset us again and again with surprising juxtapositions of terms (great and small, present and past, nature and technology) that jar and intrigue us to an unpredictable, lively sensibility. They are poems deft rather than copious in observation of the natural world around us, as we find in the final poem “White Cairn Trail, Mid-October”:

…we breathe in esters of pine
as we hike a path lit by ferns
until all is granite undulations with dark

pearl basins and we, alongside blue jays,
look down on the shiny backs of ravens.

We sense, breathe and see the wooded area of the description, but the next line,

The world is made of gold

—as though the lens were suddenly filtered, turns the landscape suggestively to allegory.
We can not take for granted or literal only the meanings of “esters” or “pine,” and see more closely that the poet’s observation has de-materialized the landscape already into “undulations,” its physical essence. We wonder what “pearl basins,” “blue jays” and “ravens” betoken, perhaps the way the Ant and the Cicada in Jean de la Fontaine’s fable are masks in a dialogue between frugality and prodigality.
Yet when Buchinger announces that she is going to speak about object and its meaning, in “The Higher Purpose of Bees,” she gives us simple intransitive statements that hint at a flirtish—or is it serious?—stubbornness and reticence:

The bee is a bee
—in all cases, a bee…

can be holy, can be desired,
studied, can hurt, can be all
but without meaning…

She so nearly says that language is subjective and the point of the poem is that bees, “unknowable alone,” take on meaning “in relation” to whom they may concern,

to the beekeeper,
to the gardener, to the poet,


to the artist with the gold-
dipped brush. The bee to the
botanist. The bee to the boy

with the swollen lip.

Like herbs, lemon and wine in a sauce, these lines need to be held in one’s mouth to be tasted and analyzed. How many different ways to see an intricate creature! For its resources and guardianship, for its natural function of pollination, for its symbolic or phonetic meaning or aesthetic beauty, for the threat it poses. Basil, thyme, oregano…
The passage with its subtlety reminds us why reading poetry is like reading no other form of writing.
If Buchinger can be so simple—so difficult?—as to craft the line, “The bee is a bee,” she has a dazzling knack to undermine expectations between noun and verb. In the book’s first poem, “Grizzly Bear on Pratt Museum’s Alaskan Webcam,” we read among much else that

…fish prance…

I comment: !
The poem begins remarkably with a mountain stream, in which the bear fishes, suddenly compared in the stroke of a conceit to a modern convenience:

—dip that paw one more time
dig around in the back of the refrigerator
must be something there…

The potential for allegory again is striking. Is the poet talking about a bear fishing in a river or about me watching a Patriot’s game? (I only watch figure skating, steeple chase, and Doug Holder’s Author to Author, really…)
Buchinger herself is not spared subversions or surprises in the life with the oddly matched. In “Mosquito Lesson,” the minute insect sends her into a frenzy,

I beat the air
slap my neck
chase her neediness…

What are mosquitoes these days with the repellants we have? Who am I to act this way?—the poet is perhaps asking. Human is human. Buchinger is vulnerable. She can also be tongue-in-cheek spoiled the way we find her in “Flying to Vancouver,” a passenger in Business Class, being served “chicken risotto and tapenade”—with a sense of humility remembering her childhood,

how on the farm I used to hoe
sugar beets and soybeans, knowing
nothing about tapenade or Chardonnay.


My jean cuffs holding straw,
I knew kernels of red wheat
could be chewed to gum…

I appreciate the proportions in registers of sentiment Buchinger has kept to. The common resounds more commonly throughout the book. She observes sparrows, beetles, reads Tolstoy, goes skating (on a pond with a frog frozen in it), companionably in a day to day world that is familiar to us. As she trumps the exceptional experience of flying in Business Class, she elevates mundane occurrences into exceptionally perceptive moments. In “Reading A Wrinkle in Time ” moths gathered at a porch screen door by the light in the house are seen as an intense illustration of the poet’s deepest endearment:

—their ache for the light
primitive as my love of my mother’s voice
reading L’Engle’s book to me.

This deepest spring of her feelings is mediated through books, seen in a marvelous conceit of the nocturnal insects:

How the moths beat
their own white pages
against our porch screens

thin spines rippling as they
opened and closed against
the fine mesh holes…

In “Redeem/The unread vision in the higher dream” Buchinger probes further to that which is behind the mother’s voice and intimates,

We all want…that finest shot of ourselves, but what we need is someone with the eyes to look for it, to show us what it is.

In her muse, in her memory and with her fellow poets she has found the elements of this “someone” who gives us an excellent “shot” of her. The medium forms a circle to us. When I read these poems my faculties put on different lenses that help me find something truer and better within myself. That is the benefit of reading good writing.
Mary Buchinger’s Roomful of Sparrows is available online at www.finishinglinepress.com as well as at amazon.com.

---Michael Todd Steffen is the winner of the Ibbetson Street Poetry Award 2007. He is a regular reviewer for the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene.

Wild Strawberries by Eric Greinke

Wild Strawberries
Eric Greinke
Presa Press 2008
$15.00
ISBN 978-0-9800081-1-1

Eric Greinke’s poems, like messages in a bottle, found
after so many years of being afloat, his poems are the
experiences of being within, the experiences of being
in nature. each poem is a cathedral of actuality, of
thought, of inspiration. we can take this walk with
these poems or we can stay in our homes, inside, never
venturing out of doors; we can listen to the telling
after the fact. he has the rare talent to walk with
our environment then to bring us a profound lesson
that nature often has if we listen to the ice crystals
or growing green. he takes our hand and shows us what
we have forgotten to look at,

the rain is the key
the dolls are asleep

there are books in the field

Irene Koronas
poetry editor
wilderness house literary review
www.whlreview.com
poetry reviewer

Somerville poet/publishers for the senior set.

( Bert Stern and Tam Lin Neville)





Somerville poet/publishers for the senior set.

In the 60’s the saying was: “Don’t trust anyone over thirty.” To Union Square residents and publishers Tam Lin Neville and Bert Stern it might be said: “Don’t trust anyone under sixty.” No, Stern and Neville don’t have anything against us younger folks; in fact some of their best friends are under sixty. But it just so happens they have a three year old press “Off the Grid” that caters to the sixty-plus literary crowd. I asked Stern why he chose this graying demographic. He replied: “We’re old. Why not stick with your own.” And it seems to this publishing duo that the “older crowd” is overlooked to a great degree in the publishing world. Stern reflected: “The kids coming out of the Iowa Writers Workshop” just don’t have the experience and experiences we have. The writing is vastly different.”

Stern and Neville are both accomplished poets and writers. Stern was a professor of English at Wabash College in Indiana for many years, and has published scholarly articles and poetry. His first poetry publication was in a sort of mini-book or chap titled:
“Glass Hill” Gene Magner, the late curator of the University of Buffalo Poetry and Rare Books Archive published it. The poet Robert Creeley read it and wrote Stern and praised his work

Neville has also taught on the college level, and has a host of publication credits in prestigious journals. She has a collection of poetry out “Journey Cake” that deals with her experiences in China some years ago.

Both Stern and Neville moved to Somerville eight years ago after Stern retired from teaching. Stern said: “It is hard to be a retired academic in a small college town. You shrink. You sit around in a coffee shop and wait for someone to talk to you. I wanted to be in a different place.”

The couple looked in several locations like Brooklyn, N.Y. and the Republic of Cambridge, but settled in Somerville. They are happily living in a large house on Quincy Street in Union Square. They frequent Sherman’s Café and Bloc 11.

Stern and Neville started Off the Grid Press with Stern’s childhood friend Henry Braun (they met as cub scouts) In fact the Press’s first poetry collection was penned by Braun titled “Loyalty.” The next book out is Lee Sharkey’s: “A Darker, Sweeter String.” The book was recently featured by Poetry Daily and Verse Daily online.

Stern said the Press looks for poetry that goes beyond the personal, that goes beyond the “poet’s nose.” So in these days of navel-gazing Off the Grid is a welcome addition to our literary scene. To find out more about the press go to:

http://www.offthegridpress.net

A darker, sweeter string by Lee Sharkey

A darker, sweeter string


Lee Sharkey
Off The Grid Press
www.offthegridpress.net
2008, $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-9778429-1-9

Lee Sharkey lures the reader, catches us, shows us the
webs of deception; as a captured audience we face the
reality of what was, what is,

soon enough the dead return and cross the threshold
may slouches her belly good as gold

and from her poem ‘by moon light’

one will lie beside the unsound of not breathing
eating out the night

and from ‘the suicides’

we’re circling the hole where the ones who abandoned
us lie
absent electric

Her sparse emphatic look at the past/present frees the
reader like, "sudden pure white," to pursue our own
responsibility to understand how frail existence is,

this is how the brain relearns to speak
up stairs
downstairs
left hand right foot
right hand left foot

Lee Sharkey’s language is exquisite, self referential
and we are able to devour every thought provoked by
the larger reality, history. Sharkey uses repetition,
sequence and timing in a struggle to release,

what do you do with an eye in the cup of your hand?

This is not an easy book of poetry, (for me, at least)
each poem compels me to read more, to put the book
aside, take it up again.

it is thought that cows’ unhurried lowing
the rise and fall in the evening of toad ululation,
the dense sweet penetration of grasses
in air drawn through the nostrils and deep into lungs
will offer our minds a place to return to
from the caves where they cower

if you buy no other book for the next five years, this
is a must, must read, must possess, must repeat,

there came the time we were moved to move into the
rubble

and

the one who has been silent is the one who sends a
message to the future.

Irene Koronas
poetry editor
wilderness house literary review
www.whlreview.com
poetry reviewer
ibbetson street press

Somerville Poet Richard Wilhelm: An Artist Who Paints Poems.

Somerville Poet Richard Wilhelm: An Artist Who Paints Poems.

Walk into Richard Wilhelm’s studio on Highland Street in Somerville and you will see canvasses covering the waterfront of his artist’s digs. Wilhelm, 60, has been painting and writing for as long as he can remember. His poetry and art cover the landscapes of Somerville, the roads of his childhood, and the dreamscapes of his inquiring mind. Wilhelm’s poetry, like his paintings, exhibit evocative hues and that sensibility of the painter always seems to be present in his work.

Wilhelm holds a B.A. in Journalism, and for over twenty years has been a counselor at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass. Wilhelm is the arts/editor for the Ibbetson Street Press, and has had his own artwork exhibited at such venues as the Piano Factory in Boston, Cambridge Adult Education Center, etc…His poetry has been published in such print and online journals as “Ibbetson Street,” “Lyrical Somerville,” “Istanbul Literary Review,” “Poet’s Market,” “Spare Change News,” “Wilderness House Literary Review,” and others. Wilhelm is also a regular reviewer for the “Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene,” an online literary blog.

Wilhelm released his first collection of poetry through the Ibbetson Street Press: “Awakenings.” It has been described by award-winning poet Doug Worth as: “powerful free verse, sonorous—image tapestries… the mature poet takes us through a remarkable series of awakenings, most of them to profound interconnections between him and primordial riches of the material world.”

Doug Holder: You have had your first poetry collection published “Awakenings.” You just turned 60. What have you awakened to?

Richard Wilhelm: The title of this book is taken from one of the poems “Awakenings” That poem really talks to my friends and myself as kids. It’s about the awakening of boys becoming young men. A lot of the poems deal with the spiritual aspects of nature. An “Awakening” to the spiritual aspects of nature. I guess you can say a lot of the poems have an Emersonian quality to them.

Doug Holder: How does your other life as a visual artist inform your work?

Richard Wilhelm: There are some elements of crossover to be sure. It goes both ways. It doesn’t happen all the time. One aesthetic idea can cross over to the other.

Doug Holder: You were an active member in the “Students for a Democratic Society” (SDS) in the 60’s. Does your political sensibility crossover to your poetry?

Richard Wilhelm: I have some political poems in the collection. There was a poem that appeared in the anthology “City of Poets: 18 Boston Voices”: “And, So.” That has a real environmental message. I don’t write a whole bunch of political poems. It’s hard for me and for a lot of people to write political poems. I know sometimes when I try they become rants.

Doug Holder: You are a good student and observer of nature.

Richard Wilhelm: Emerson talked about seeing things in nature as signs of inner states. I think this has a big influence on my work. In “Awakenings” there are a lot of poems that deal with the Moon. The Moon has always been a mysterious thing for me. It is the spiritual aspect of the “other” that we look up to the sky for. We try to figure out how that relates to us, and what connection we have to it. I have been reading a lot. I am still trying to make sense out of the world.

Doug Holder: Do you think we look to nature for spirituality because religion has failed us?

Richard Wilhelm: Organized religion has failed us. Certainly since the mid 19th century. Religion has failed as an interpretation of reality.

Doug Holder: Would you describe yourself as a Pagan?

Richard Wilhelm: No. My world view is a science-based, empiricism. But at the time I was writing these poems I was reading about Paganism. I am trying to find the language to express things I want to express. I want to give voice to spiritual expression. What language do we use? We wind up too often falling back on religious expression.

Doug Holder: Can you talk about your role as the arts/editor for the Ibbetson Street Press?

Richard Wilhelm: Initially a lot of the covers for the journal were drawings or photos by me. More and more I am interested in doing other peoples’. We had Jennifer Matthews’ photos on the front and back cover recently. Robin Weiss, our boss at McLean Hospital will be on a cover in an upcoming issue. The magazine has gotten good critical reviews, so it’s a good place to display work.

Doug Holder. You have worked at McLean Hospital, a famed psychiatric hospital that is now a national literary landmark, for over twenty years. Plath, Sexton, Lowell and others were all here. Has this influenced your work?

Richard Wilhelm. I think it has influenced you more than me. Not really.



NOVEMBER 1963

The motorcade rounded the corner
Jackie so sharp in pink
and pillbox
The President smiled and waved

We headed up the hillside
the day after--the grass
was yellow and dry
leaves off the shrubs

The killer raised his rifle slowly
aimed long I carried
my shotgun in front
of me, safety on

He waited for the perfect shot
I instinctively leaned
forward, bringing shotgun
to shoulder My aunt and uncle fired

but missed the rabbit that sprang
across my range, kept bounding
after the blast
my uncle’s beagle in pursuit

The President lurched, jerked again
secret service men hopped aboard
the motorcade sped off
the dog dropped the rabbit at my feet

identifying me as the killer, blood ran
out of its ear; Jackie smeared
with her husband’s blood
I never went hunting again

--Richard Wilhelm

Boston, Fall and Other Poems. B.Z. Niditch

Boston, Fall and Other Poems. B.Z. Niditch (POBOX 187 Farmington, ME 04938) http://www.encirclepub.com $12.

B.Z. Niditch is one of the most prolific poets in the small press, joined by the likes of A.D. Winans, Lyn Lifshin, Hugh Fox and Ed Galing. The poems in “Boston, Fall and Other Poems,” deal with the environs of Harvard Square, Boston, and the interiors of the poet’s mindscape. Niditch paints a pretty picture of June in his poem about Boston’s famed “Public Gardens.”

“To rest
in front of the sun
planting your steps
by sacks of rose petals
in public gardens,
noon day seems endless
and a friend waits up.

Breathing in
punctuated silence,
a butterfly brushes
against the June wind,
for a deafened half-hour
your arms are sealed
by wheel barrels
of rose tattoos.”

This is a collection that should be of interest to those who have followed Niditch over the years.

Doug Holder/Ibbetson Update/ Feb. 2008/Somerville, Mass.

Dan Tobin and Marty Beckerman sign on for Somerville News Writers Festival--Nov. 15 2008

Poet Dan Tobin ( above) and cutting-edge journalist Marty Beckerman have agreed to read at The Somerville News Writers Festival Nov 15, 2008. Also included: Junot Diaz, Meg Kearney, Tino Villanueva, Afaa Michael Weaver, Bert Stern, and others to be announced.






Daniel Tobin


Chair and Professor (2002) Emerson College--Boston
B.A., Iona College; M.T.S., Harvard University; M.F.A., Warren Wilson College; Ph.D., University of Virginia
On Leave
Daniel Tobin is the author of three books of poems, Where the World is Made (University Press of New England 1999), Double Life (Louisiana State University Press, 2004) and The Narrows (Four Way Books, 2005). Among his awards are the "The Discovery/The Nation Award," The Robert Penn Warren Award, The Greensboro Review Prize, the Robert Frost Fellowship, the Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize, and a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Most recently, The Narrows was a featured book on Poetry Daily, as well as a finalist for the Foreword Magazine Poetry Book Award. Four Way Books will publish his fourth book of poems, Second Things, in 2009.

His poems have appeared nationally and internationally in such journals as The Nation, The New Republic, The Harvard Review, Poetry, The American Scholar, The Paris Review, The Southern Review, The Sewanee Review, The Hudson Review, DoubleTake, The Kenyon Review, Image, The Times Literary Supplement (England), Stand (England), Agenda (England), Descant (Canada) and Poetry Ireland Review. His critical study, Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney, came out to wide praise from the University of Kentucky Press in 1999. Tobin has also edited The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), Light in the Hand: The Selected Poems Lola Ridge (Quale Press, 2007), and (with Pimone Triplett) Poet's Work, Poet's Play: Essays on the Practice and the Art (University of Michigan Press, 2007). His work has been anthologized in Hammer and Blaze, The Bread Loaf Anthology of New American Poets, Poetry Daily Essentials 2007, Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn, Third Rail: The Poetry of Rock and Roll, The Norton Introduction to Poetry, and elsewhere. He has also published numerous essays on modern and contemporary poetry in the United States and abroad.











Marty Beckerman, is the author of Dumbocracy, Generation S.L.U.T. and Death to All Cheerleaders.

He has written for Playboy, Reason, Discover, Radar, Huffington Post, Jewcy and New York Press. He has been featured by the New York Times, the New York Post, ABCNews.com, MSNBC, Salon.com, Fox News Channel and National Public Radio.

Originally from Anchorage, Alaska, Beckerman lives in New York City.

Review of Manufacturing America: Poems from the Factory Floor by Lisa Beatman Review by: Pamela Annas

Review of Manufacturing America: Poems from the Factory Floor by Lisa Beatman
( Ibbetson Street Press-2008) $15. http://ibbetsonpress.com

Review by Pamela Annas

For the American working class, immigrant and native-born alike, factory America is fading like an old sepia photograph. Since the late 1980s, plants have been closing and factory jobs migrating to countries where workers struggle to feed their families on less than a dollar a day. Meanwhile, such workers and their families, trying to find a more economically secure situation, immigrate-- as those in search of a better life often have--to the U.S.A. The tide carries the workers in and the manufacturing jobs out. This is the reserve army of labor. This is globalism from a working-class perspective.

In Manufacturing America: Poems from the Factory Floor, Lisa Beatman offers vivid and individual portraits of workers whom she came to know while teaching basic language skills in a paper and printing company: women and men from El Salvador, Haiti, Brazil, Uganda, Cambodia, Russia, Albania, Somalia, Mexico, the Azores, Vietnam, Portugal.

Lisa Beatman’s collection contributes to a growing number of poems about working-class work and workers by poets such as Deborah Boe, Jim Daniels, Philip Levine, Gwen Houser, Todd Jailer (who also has a series of portraits of individual workers), Susan Eisenberg and others. Here are a few: “Citizen Delia” is “a samba-hipped woman/ who wants to be a hyphenated-American.” Chitra, in “Hand Operator,” applies her bookkeeping skills/ to her new job, creasing each folder/with mathematical precision,” while in “Rainbow”:

Juan is mute as a lake, but he knows
his colors; purple is A-F,
blue is G-K, yellow is L-P,
red is Q-T, green is U-Z.
His calloused hands, tattooed with paper cuts
sort the folders

I was particularly taken with the Latin rhythm and the persona of Nina in “First Shift,” who puts her face/ back on at 5:00 am . . . then stumbles out/ of her dancing heels”

onto the factory floor
She goes to her post
and holds out her hands
Fresh-glued folders fly off
the conveyor belt
Catch, inspect, stack and pack
Catch, inspect, stack and pack
Her face dips and sways
She hums under her breath
the machine flirts back
Cha cha cha cha cha
Manufacturing America takes us through the collective workday. In “Santa Benigna del Carmen de la Cubeta”

Saint Beni of the bucket
starts at six
her hair a twisted black rag
her arms round as roasts
her feet chucks of wood.

She swabs the chief’s toilet
till it gleams like a tooth

on into the dead of night in “Third Shift”, where

Atman, Martir, Fatima, Areik
the souls who work
the graveyard shift
bind books they cannot read
with fluent hands.

Lisa Beatman’s images are strong and accessible, with turns which are sometimes quite startling. In “Hack Job,” she images downsizing as a kind of cannibalistic butcher shop decapitating departments, cracking the bones of the body one by one. Or takes us from the factory into the service sector in what may well be the only poem extant on working at a Krispy Kreme donut shop; here the customers, the donuts, the boss, and the day are rising like yeast

and Julio was meant to sweep and polish and lunch
on fried dough rejects and send half his pay,
little as it was, home to Rosario and Mama.


The question arises of how we are supposed to see these immigrant workers. Certainly they are not threatening. And, though struggling, they are mostly not presented as victims but as solid and vital persons, each with a rich cultural background. They come without many possessions but vivid memories—their homeland as a hard rusk of bread, as a house near the Mekong River made of bamboo, as a rainbow lake where red breast tilapia swim into the net.

In addition to the montage of lively human voices and characters, scampering and creeping through Manufacturing America is a cluster of poems inhabited by mice. The first of these, the prologue to the whole collection, is “New World”, where a “raggedy” mouse jumps ship into a dark shivery world “where gaslights bared the bones

of looms pumping night and day
but there was food aplenty
dropped by the shadow figures
at their brief suppers,
crusts scented with the tall grass
of fields he’d almost put out of mind,
red rinds, sticky with Gouda,
and the new taste—
rich broth of knackered horses
boiled down into an irresistible paste.

and where, importantly, there was no ship’s cat. In the second of these poems, “Crumbs,” “mouse punches in./ He knows the building by heart” and makes his living on croissant crumbs from the bosses, salted rice from the Vietnamese temps, melba toast from the secretaries, tuna subs from the graveyard foreman. The third poem, “Serpent,” is an ominous history of smoke and fire in industrial plants. In the final poem in the collection, “Nursery,” the mouse is female and has moved outside the factory into the brush.

She rations out the hoarded seed
and fills her babes with tales
of monster mouse-holes, dust-mountains
and near-death encounters:
the spray, the traps, the kicking foot,
highways of heating ducts,
and, night and day,
the pounding concerto
of compressors and clanking belts.

Clearly, the mice are a metaphor, and a rather charming one, for the many generations of immigrants to the U.S.A. They allow Beatman to provide an outline of the history of immigration and manufacturing in this country, its rise and fall. Together these four poems add an extra dimension, a meta discourse, to the individual portraits of contemporary workers which form most of Manufacturing America. Finally, as a parent I couldn’t fail to be reminded as I read these poems of the famous literary mouse from Margaret Wise Brown’s classic picture book, Goodnight, Moon, and the game children love to play of finding the tiny mouse tucked away in each color plate, which tends to add an edgy texture to a deliberately placid bedtime story. Ironically, the mouse babes in “Nursery” are shivering to surreal tales of giants. Beatman’s immigrant mice are small unobtrusive survivors, enjoying the tastes of their new world, existing in the interstices of the system, trying to ride with the changes and survive.

One last point: I was glad to see the poet take up the ethics of writing about human subjects in her last poem, “Copyright.” One of her strong voiced women, Leyla Chang, invades the poet’s dream “like a page on fire” to ask: “What’s this she says/ about you writing my life?” It’s a question that always needs to be asked.

Lisa Beatman’s Manufacturing America: Poems from the Factory Floor is highly recommended. *

--Pamela Annas


*Pamela Annas teaches courses in Working-Class Literature, Modern and Contemporary Poetry, and Personal Narrative and is an Associate Dean at the University of Massachusetts/ Boston. She is a member of the editorial collective of The Radical Teacher journal, author of numerous articles and the book A Disturbance in Mirrors: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath, as well as co-editor of two textbook/ anthologies: Literature and Society and Against the Current. She has poems forthcoming in Northwoods Anthology and Ibbetson Street Journal.

Made in Hero-The War for Soap by Betty Hugh

Made in Hero ~ The War for Soap ($14.00 U.S.A.) (Clay Dog Books) by Betty Hugh

www.claydogbooks.com


Review by Pam Rosenblatt



Betty Hugh’s Made in Hero ~ The War for Soap puts truth in the old favorite adage,

“You can’t tell a book by its cover.” Hugh has drawn a plain yet inviting cover with a pen or pencil drawing of a man and a mountainous scene on white background. Upon looking at the cover, the reader probably wonders who the man is, why he is on the cover, and where he and the mountain scene are located? These are pretty simple questions. Once the reader starts reading Hugh’s novel, he realizes this is no ordinary modern book. It’s a creative and imaginative story that is a challenge to complete. Made in Hero ~ The War for Soap is a really complicated read that is best understood if you have a background in Homer’s Iliad1 and Sophocles’ Antigone2 before you read the book. In fact, it’s such a different type of book that, at the end of its 178 pages, the narrator says, “And I am still unsure whether Hero is the crime mystery disguised as epic tragedy, or the epic tragedy masquerading as crime mystery.” (p. 178).

To help us get a handle on the book, I thought I’d use the narrator who is separate from the protagonist in the story but, at the same time, the same character and referred to as “I” or “J. R. Teheda”.3 The narrator is storyteller; the protagonist is the character of the storyteller; the narrator/protagonist is not the novel’s author, Betty Hugh. To prove this last point, perhaps, Hugh makes the narrator/protagonist a man, not a woman.

The narrator tells the reader stories about people found in “Hero” which “at the beginning, was a transient and mute idea” and is “Today…a nation within a city, a modern Troy under siege.” (p. 2) As protagonist, the narrator gives the reader the point of view of “Teheda”, a war journalist working in Hero at the request of his friend and mentor nicknamed “Pea Nut” who is the “Editor-in-Chief of the Heroaen bureau” of The Chronicle. (p. 7) Through the “I”, the first person pronoun, which begins the “Prologue” of Hugh’s Made in Hero ~ The War for Soap, Hugh has spun a story in journalistic style, not poetic style like that found in Homer’s The Iliad. Hugh begins her crime mystery with a down-to-earth, descriptive yet factual paragraph:


HILLSIDE, Hero ― I sit in my rented room with the lights out;

nothing running but the fans. They make the noise of electric

bellows, heaving in mechanical rhythm to no particular beat.

Three of them are pointed at my head from different angles,

their irate forces tangling in a whirlwind. But they offer no

relief. The heat, packing its sour sweet odor, throbs to its own

pulse, and drives me to wonder if was all an accident that my

writing of the war had turned into the story of a corpse. (p. 1)


Hugh has drawn the reader into the book with the simple, ordinary statement of “I sit in my rented room…” The reader can visualize the narrator, or “I”, inside a room sitting. But then Hugh twists the sentence a bit making it unusual, or unexpected. The narrator isn’t sitting in the room in light but “with the lights out”. Who would sit in a room rented or not “with the lights out” instead of on, unless the person is going to rest or perhaps wants to save money? The only electric things on are “the fans” that “make the noise of electric bellows, heaving in mechanical rhythm to no particular beat.” While the reader realizes the room is in darkness, he can almost hear the ruckus of “the fans”. Hugh has carried the reader into Made in Hero ~ The War for Soap through articulate description, though the images conjure up “irate forces tangling in a whirlwind.” The journey already is rather unpleasant like “The heat, packing its sour sweet odor” that “throbs to its own pulse”. This novel’s opening paragraph is loaded with images that are not pleasant. The narrator summarizes the situation saying, “my writing of the war had turned into the story of a corpse” Something large and broad gets minimized “into the story of a corpse”. The reader knows the words on the pages that follow aren’t your typical everyday newspaper readings. And the reader has already begun the wonder about the significance of the “corpse”.

Who is the corpse then, and why is he significant? The corpse was a man nicknamed “Commander”, and the unburied dead body turns out to be the real reason why Teheda returned to Hero:


FROM THE OUTSET, I understood that I’d come back

to investigate the death of the Commander, the circumstances

precipitating it, as well as the events which immediately followed

― increasingly referred to as GU-2 (rebellions here have a way

of recycling themselves). But I realized, and only after a period

of catastrophic reflection, that my real purpose was to tell the

story of his life. I did not foresee how much this purpose was to

become my obsession, until something odd happened one evening

while stepping over the city’s crumbling cobble pavements. Crunching

underfoot, they recalled to me that Heroaens have a saying “If the

stones could speak, what story would they be telling?” It occurred

to me that the Commander’s life was none other than the story of

the stones. (p. 11)


Through reputation, the Commander “was a martyr, a champion of the cause, defender of the people. From others, [Teheda] heard he was a victim of the system”. (p. 11) And for these reasons, the Commander’s death and situation caught Teheda’s interest.

Considered a hero, the Commander achieved his notoriety as a rebel militant active in The Great Uprising. What was The Great Uprising (GU)? The narrator explains:


….Over seven years in duration, GU would surge over the borders

of at least three nations, and rip through the economies of countless

others. It had magnificent range. In short, GU would destabilize

The Empire nearly to the point of collapse (some of its instigators

anointed themselves the “New Barbarians”). More remarkable,

however, was that GU had fomented in the seemingly insignificant

streets of Hero―a locale The Empire had largely considered a remote,

forsaken outpost. (p. 9)


The narrator has the protagonist “I”, or “Teheda”, think it was his mission to figure out the war in more minute terms:


Over time, too, I’d come to realize that my responsibility

was greater than it initially appeared. It involved no mere

examination of the current revolt, but rather the attempt to

it in terms of the larger war the reading public is all but

sick of. And there lies my dejection. Even for myself,

the war grows tiresome. I have been writing it too long

the recent violence strikes me simply as an echo of that

large interminable conflict. (p. 11)


Teheda takes on the heroic responsibility of making sure the Commander is buried:


Yet my job remained the sorting of the one: the burial of the

body if an outlaw. I understand now that this crime, in its

simplicity, was the true beginning, not the ending, to the

story. And yet, it was a beginning that hurled me nowhere

but into the past. That is the place where time becomes

inverted, and must be turned, like a bloodstained garment,

inside out…. (p. 13)


Through the use of creative imagination and description and imagery, Hugh

has begun to create a composite of Teheda, a war journalist who is searching

for the truth behind the death of a militant, the Commander. At the beginning of

the novel, the characters aren’t well developed. Hugh introduces Teheda and Pea Nut

and Dusty, the Chronicle’s Chief International Desk Editor. Unlike Pea Nut and

Dusty, Teheda is looking for change, not the same path a journalist takes where “[His]

sole purpose is to record the truth.” (p. 12) Teheda is looking for excitement. And his

request is filled while discovering that the body of the Commander has been stolen.

Upon discovering this fact, the protagonist “I”, or “Teheda”, begins a journey throughout

Hero to recover the body. Along the way, he meets several hero figures: Hektor, the rebel militant hero who has been captured and put in prison; Antigone, a complex character with whom the hero Teheda falls in love with; and Antigone’s sister, Sophi, the woman whom Teheda really loves, who is introduced to Teheda through Hektor and shows Teheda key sites on the journey to locating the Commander’s body.

The Commander, Hektor, Antigone, and Sophi all have heroic qualities, but it’s Teheda, the narrator and protagonist in the novel, with whom the reader can relate to most and achieves the status of a mythical hero by the novel’s conclusion.4

In Made In Hero ~ The War for Soap, Hugh makes many references to what a hero is. Teheda asks Hektor outright, “Do you consider yourself a hero?” when he first meets the militant for an interview in the Hero Prison. Hektor just gave the following response:


After thinking it over, [Hektor] replied in a mild scowl,

‘What do you think?’

‘You strike me as a man of quiet courage,’ I ventured,

‘and generally grumpy outlook.’

This, too, provoked a sputter of laughter.” (p. 26)


Through the use of wit and dialogue, Hugh has put humor into a tense situation. She has Hektor explain what being a hero is all about in a later chapter of the book. The

narrator tells the reader what a martyr is in Hero:


Men long for honor in places they can least find it. At the

gym, they carved a pocket where it was possible to shut out the war.

‘In there, what matters most is the contest,” Hektor explained. ‘Boxing

is all about grace―of heart, of mind, of body. In the fight, we give our

best, and afterwards, embrace. We forgive.” (p. 97)


Unlike Hektor, Teheda isn’t graceful but he did do the best journalistic job he could, by the end of Made In Hero ~ The War for Soap. He has all the qualities of a modern day hero: he finds a story with a mission; he has a love affair with Sophi5; he saves his former lover, Antigone, from possible death6; he has a traumatic experience that affects his outlook on life in Hero7; he keeps searching for his identity outside of being a war journalist8; and he searches for the truth.

Made in Hero ~ The War for Soap is based on Greek myths, especially Homer’s The Iliad, an epic filled with characters who are gods or human often with divine ancestors, are courageous and strong, and praised for their heroic endeavors and in good standing with the gods.9

Hugh’s Made In Hero ~ The War for Soap is a fine effort at creating modern day everyday martyrs for the literary world. Hugh has written a novel that makes the reader imagine and think about today’s society, its citizens, and its heroes. Made In Hero ~ The War for Soap is well worth your time spent reading.

Winter Journey (2008) by Tony Towle

Winter Journey (2008)
by Tony Towle $16.00

Hanging Loose Press
Brooklyn, New York
isbn 978-1-931236-93-5


Review by Irene Koronas

many of the poems are complete stories; his poem,
‘Ethnicity,’ is a succinct visit to the laundry, the
cleaners: “are you Jewish? asked /the elderly Chinese
lady at /the dry cleaners my girlfriend had
recommended…“ the poem ends with his telling his
girlfriend of the encounter. and in the poem
’Illuminations (Diverse Miniatures)’ 1. tableau.
“…into the sink of the Pennsylvanian present where she
washes the dishes to the violins of the rainswept
interstate.” Towle shows us a slice of contemporary
life, almost a photograph except for the some times
juxtaposition of an out of context jabber wacky.

some of the poems are simple scenes and require simple
form and words but Towle insists on couching his view
of the world and people within the rhetoric or
language of the language poets. “Anthropomorphic
Etiquette’ 6. “the female rooster should always follow
her instincts and then perhaps apologize for the
misunderstanding.” I quote the above because I’m not
sure what he is referring to. and why should I have to
guess at the meaning. yes, I know what anthropomorphic
indicates.

Towle has one foot on past poetic forms, surreal and
lets say a villanelle, and another foot on a
dictionary. : 2. ‘Impertinence.’ “like the sun, I
endured a turbulent childhood and became allergic to
interstellar dust while contending with encircling
debris that would have made any entity dizzy, hot,
unstable and content to just float there and smolder
for eons in a grumpy and extended recovery period as
the center of a gratuitous and onerous “system” before
imploding into cosmic isolation.” indeed a grand way
of talking about death.

this book of poems is a picture book taken from his
momentary and perhaps his present journey through
life. the reader will find themselves engrossed and at
times repelled by his encounters. in his poem ‘The
investigation,’ we tour the great central library with
him. Towle is looking at himself and finding himself,
not who he wants to be but who he is and how he is
perceived. “…what I was tossing from the cup were
three-dimensional symbols that in my pose I could not
quite turn my head to comprehend.”

Irene Koronas
reviewer
Ibbetson street press
poetry editor
wilderness house literary review

Poet Meg Kearney has accepted a slot in next year's Somerville News Writers Festival.

Poet Meg Kearney has accepted a slot in next year's Somerville News Writers Festival. http://somervillenewswritersfestival.com



She will join poets Afaa Michael Weaver, Tino Villanueva, fiction writer Junot Diaz, and others to be announcedNov. 15, 2008.



See Bio below:



Meg Kearney (“car-nee”)



Meg Kearney’s first collection of poetry, An Unkindness of Ravens, was published by BOA Editions Ltd. in 2001. The Secret of Me, her novel in verse for teens, was released by Persea Books in 2005. A paperback edition of the novel will be published in tandem with a teacher’s guide in late 2007.

Her poetry has been featured on Poetry Daily and Garrison Keillor’s “A Writer’s Almanac,” and has been published in such publications as Poetry, Agni, Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, Black Warrior Review, and the anthologies Where Icarus Falls (Santa Barbara Review Publications, 1998); Urban Nature (Milkweed Press, 2000), Poets Grimm (Storyline Press, 2003), Never Before: Poems About First Experiences (Four Way Books, 2005), Shade (Four Way Books, 2006), The Book of Irish American Poetry from the 18th Century to the Present (Notre Dame Press, 2006), and Conversation Pieces: Poems that Talk to Other Poems (Knopf, Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets series, 2007). She is also co-editor of Blues for Bill: a Tribute to William Matthews (Akron University Press 2005). Her nonfiction essay, “Hello, Mother, Goodbye,” will be appear in The Movable Nest: A Mother/Daughter Companion, edited by Marilyn Kallet and Kathryn Stripling Byer and forthcoming by Helicon Nine Press in fall 2007.

Meg is Director of the Solstice Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program at Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, MA, as well as Director of Pine Manor’s Solstice Summer Writers Conference. For 11 years prior to joining Pine Manor, she was Associate Director of the National Book Foundation, sponsor of the National Book Awards, in New York City. She also taught poetry at the New School University. Early in her career, she organized educational programs and conducted power plant tours for a gas and electric company in upstate New York.

Recipient of an Artist’s Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2001, Meg also received a New York Times Fellowship and the Alice M. Sellers Academy of American Poets Award in 1998; the Geraldine Griffin Moore Award in Creative Writing from The City College of New York in 1997; and the Frances B. DeNagy Poetry Award from Marist College in 1985. She was a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in 1999, 2000, and 2001. She is a former poetry editor of Echoes, a quarterly literary journal, and past president of the Hudson Valley Writers Association of upstate New York.

Meg was born in Manhattan and grew up in the Hudson Valley, 75 miles north of New York City. She received her MA in Poetry from The City College, City University of New York, in 1999. She resides in New Hampshire with her husband, writer Mike Fleming, and their three-legged black Lab, Trooper.

Manufacturing America: Poems From the Factory Floor by Lisa Beatman

Manufacturing America

Poems from the Factory Floor

by Lisa Beatman

Ibbetson Press, Somerville, MA

Copyright 2008

61 pages, $14.95

Review by Lo Galluccio



"We are not wholly bad or good, who live our lives under Milk Wood"

Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood


“Hands are tongues on the graveyard shift or are they wings?”

Lisa Beatmen, Manufacturing America


It’s not so much that Lisa Beatman’s soon-to-be American citizens laboring for factory wages and learning English in Manufacturing America, resemble those of Thomas’ small town in Wales; it’s just that I can hear the same kind of radio play rise from the vividly acute portraits of this book. While Thomas was despairing, ironic and a dreadful alcoholic from that lyrically poetic and estranged country, Beatman and her characters are for the most part, strong, cool and sober, give or take the indulgence of a Krispy Kreme donut. They are, however, more eccentric and varied in their struggle for survival. And that includes one industriously dreamy mouse who appears three times in the book, as a kind of shadow play from the very bottom rung. All creatures, afterall, must find their niche and scrap their way through the factory floors that once kept America in full industrial tilt. What’s amazing is the way Beatman captures the language and expressive nature of their day-to-day grind, each detail lacquered on to a beautiful mosaic of faces and voices and souls. Though their jobs may be outsourced, we are left with a sense of tenacity and high spirit from this community.


In the poem “Rainbow” Lisa presents Juan from Santiago, Chile in the beginning and beams him onto the paper factory-- from casting his net on a Rainbow Lake to another man, in another kind of state::


“Juan is mute as a lake, but he knows

his colors: purple is A-F

blue is G-K, yellow is L-P,

red is Q-T, green is U-Z.

His calloused hands, tattooed with paper cuts

sort the folders that will hold each child’s story.”


While Beatman may not be wholly optimistic about the conditions of the Factory Floor, she doesn’t cast her subjects as Marxist victims, bur rather as mostly their own inventions -- as efficiently creating what others will use. They are worker bees, but they can sting and bob and wear sexy clothes too.


In “Citizen Delia” Beatman writes about a Latina woman who determines to present her own image of womanhood in order to gain her citizenship:


“Delia is getting citizened up.

A samba-hipped woman

who wants to be a hyphenated-American.

She glues perma-clips on folders.

One by one. And grabs lunch on her feet.

Except for Tuesdays.

Pizza and Citizenship day.

Delia doesn’t like pizza

but what can you do?


>>>>


Delia has another idea.

She already put her clothes on the bed.

A red blouse down to here.

A black mini-skirt, short-short.

The new push-up bra.

In the store Manuela the baby

said Mami your boobs are growing.

Good.

She hopes the immigration officer is a man.”


(While never faced with a citizenship wardrobe test, I can remember what it was like to go before a ladies man judge in NYC Housing Court four times in one year. A pretty skirt and well made up face never hurt my cause as a struggling apartment renter on the Lower East Side.)


In the second part of the book, labeled, “Second Shift” our mouse makes his second appearance. In a jolting metaphysical moment filled with “snakes of smoke” and “the tiny atom…yoked and whipped and branded,” our furry friend is found in a state of bewildered fear:


“Mouse sniffs all around.

This new trail of gauzy heat –

What lies at the other end?

Will it, charmed, wind lazily upwards

To weave into the grey pall overhead

Or snap its tail, rattling

The timbers and bricks down?

Mouse waits in a corner, trembling.”


And we hone in on a meaner side to this exhibit of workers and their dilemmas.


I In “Coffee Break,” “Scrap” and “Hack Job” the more brutal realities of factory life come to the fore.


“Hack,

one machine operator

on the dole,

hack,

two secretaries

shopping with food stamps

hack, hack, hack,

three departments decapitated.


How will the body live

with no framework

to hang its flesh on?”


And so, we come back to the perennial American question, brought to us in part by a 12-step program mandating those “stay positive” mantras. You know the question. “Is the glass half empty or half full?” What’s the better way, the survivalist way, to look at it?


In “Parking,” Lisa poses the same question from a backdrop of how a parking lot can determine who punches in on time and whose used car gets protected.


“Maria sat in the cafeteria

next to an empty chair.

She’d finally got a spot

where her “67 Chevy wouldn’t cook.”


>>>>>>>


The foreman is talking to Abner

whose brother is home with the want ads.

We only need happy people here.

How do you see it my friend –

is the parking lot half empty

or half full?


Well, if I had a quibble with this brilliant pink (pink like fingernail polish, pink like a rose tombstone, pink like Asian kitsch) expose of a paper plant and its workers it would be the lengthy addendum, “Firng Uncle Hillel” which seems to me a bit out of place, as a long prose piece in the collection. A minor point. Lisa well makes up for this lapse in her finale, “Copyright.”


“Like a page on fire,

elbows cocked into question marks,

Leyla Chang invades my dream

strips the white sheet

from my body

plucks the pen from

my twitching fingers

What’s this she says

About you writing my life?

Since when did I

Become a page number

In your table of contents?

Since when did I volunteer

to furnish your castle

honey

who died and gave you

the right to copy me?



Many near perfect poems, an arc that sustains, and a subject that deserves much light, levity and attention paid to it. This book is a winner. As the daughter of an Italian immigrant who would have died to play baseball with the Red Sox and became a Labor Lawyer instead, I can fully appreciate Lisa Beatman’s grasp of these tough, savvy and wonderful people.


Doug Holder’s Ibbetson St. Press evolves yearly into an ever more fascinating literary enterprise.


NB: Lisa Beatman is now managing adult literacy programs at the Harriet Tubman House in Boston. She won Honorable Mention for the 2004 Miriam Lindberg International Poetry Peace Prize, and was awarded a Massachusettts Cultural Council Grant, as well as a fellowship to Sacatar Institute in Brazil. She may be reached at lisabeatman@yahoo.com.


Lo Galluccio

Author of “Hot Rain,” a poetry chap

on Singing Bone Press & two solo CDs,

“Being Visited” and “Spell on You.”

The Trapeze Diaries. Marie Carter.

The Trapeze Diaries. Marie Carter. ( Hanging Loose Press Brooklyn, NY) $16.


Most of us in a time of need, when we seek the sap of succor, look to find the sympathetic ear of a psychotherapist, a clergyman, a guru, or even a local barkeep. But in your wildest imagination, would you seek wisdom, the answer to the myriad of ontological questions from a trapeze artist? Most definitely not. But Marie Carter in her evocative and engaging memoir released from the Hanging Loose Press:” The Trapeze Diaries,” an aerialist seems like a natural choice.

Have if you will, as Rod Serling would phrase it on “The Twilight Zone,” a one Miss Marie Carter. A young woman, quiet and overly cautious, with a literary bent, who finds herself newly transplanted from Scotland to the Naked City of New York, coming to terms with herself and the recent death of her father. Being a solipsist I was fascinated by what I could see of myself in the insecurities of Miss. Carter. Her fears and doubts have been and are very much my own, and may I dare say , perhaps yours?

But Carter doesn’t take a sedentary approach to matters. This intrinsically unathletic, bookish woman throws herself into the art of the aerialist. She takes regular lessons and stretches both her mind and body in a truly original fashion. Carter writes with strokes of clarity and simplicity and her prose is never weighed down with purple flourishes.

Carter emerges from her lessons transformed from a woman seriously out of touch with her mind and body to a woman in love with the human form:

“I am coming to fall deeply in love with the human body and its nuances; mine is more useful than I ever had imagined. I start reading anatomy books and then mouthing the words of the muscle groups in my body, my hands covering my forearms, elbows, triceps, shoulders, feeling the texture of my muscles, the hardness of each bone. I do this with my eyes closed, as though reading Braille.”

At each lesson Carter gleans bits of worldly wisdom from the aerialist’s instructions and she eventually is able to let go of the ghost of her deceased father, and the stranglehold of fears that corsets her life. In this passage the aerialist as sage is fully realized:



“ The Aerialist has more faith in me than I have in myself. I am trying to take my knee off the bar for One-Knee Hang. It is a trick that I believe to be beyond me; nonetheless when it is my turn, I can the Aerialist watching me out of the corner of her eye, hoping I will complete it….

The Aerialist has told me to imagine I am strong, and I as I do that, I actually feel myself becoming stronger.

“Sometimes you can change a person’s whole path of doing something with the tiniest adjustment of movement.”

I thought she was going to say: ‘ You can change a person’s whole life.’”



A wonderful read. Highly recommended.



Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update/ Feb 2008/ Somerville, Mass.

Junot Diaz, Afaa Michael Weaver and Tino Villanueva to be featured at the Somerville News Writers Festival Nov. 15 2008

Well we are already booking for The Somerville News Writers Festival, http://www.somervillenewswritersfestival.com which will be in its sixth year next November. We have secured Junot Diaz in Fiction, Afaa Michael Weaver and Tino Villanueva in Poetry. Weaver will be the recipient of the Ibbetson Street Press Lifetime Achievement Award. Previous winners have been Robert Pinsky, David Godine Jr, Robert K. Johnson, Louisa Solano, and Jack Powers.




JUNOT DIAZ










Junot Diaz's fiction has appeared in The New Yorker magazine which listed him as one of the 20 top writers for the 21st century. He has also been published in Story, The Paris Review, and in the anthologies Best American Short Stories four times (1996, 1997, 1999, 2000), and African Voices. He is best known for his two major works: the short story collection Drown (1996) and the novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). Both were published to critical acclaim..




AFAA MICHAEL WEAVER









Afaa Michael Weaver in 1985 received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Immediately upon receiving the NEA fellowship he retired from factory life to enter Brown University's graduate creative writing program on a full university fellowship. In that same year his first book, Water Song, was published by Callaloo Press at the University of Virginia. He received his B.A. from Excelsior in 1986 and in 1987 he received his M.A. (M.F.A.) from Brown. At Brown he studied poetry with Keith Waldrop, C.D. Wright, and Michael S. Harper. His focus was in playwriting and theater, and for those concentrations he studied with the late George H. Bass and Paula Vogel.

In 1985 Weaver was commissioned to write a poem in honor of Roy DeCarava. The poem entitled "The Dancing Veil" was presented to DeCarava at the annual conference of the Society for Photographic Education on March 20-23, 1986 in Baltimore, Maryland. The poem was subsequently published in Hanging Loose.

He began his teaching career as an adjunct in 1987, teaching at New York University, the City University of New York, Seton Hall Law School, and Essex County College. In 1990, he began at Rutgers Camden and received tenure with distinction there as an early candidate. In 1998, he took a full time position at Simmons College as the Alumnae Professor of English.

In that same year he was named a Pew fellow in poetry.

Weaver was a member of the faculty of Cave Canem in 1997, and he was later given the honor of being the organization's Elder.

In the spring semester of 1997,he was named the sixteenth poet-in-residence at the Stadler Poetry Center of Bucknell University. He was the first poet of African descent to hold that position.

Between 1985 to 2005, he published nine collections of poetry, had two professional theater productions, published short fiction in journals and anthologies, and served as editor of Obsidian III, based at North Carolina State University. His short fiction appears in Gloria Naylor's Children of the Night, the sequel to Langston Hughes' anthology, Best Short Stories by Negro Writers. He has given several hundred readings in the U.S., Great Britain, France, China, and Taiwan.

Weaver is featured in the film A String of Pearls, a Camille Billops work which is part of the Hatch Billops Archives in New York City.

In 2002 he began studying Mandarin Chinese formally after teaching at National Taiwan University as a Fulbright scholar that spring. In 2004, he convened the Simmons International Chinese Poetry conference, the largest such gathering of contemporary Chinese poets held outside of China and Taiwan to date.

He was recently featured on the front cover of Poets and Writers Magazine and Poetry Magazine, and has new poetry collection “Plum Flower Dance.” ( Univ.of Pitt.)




TINO VILLANUEVA




Tino Villanueva is a Chicano writer who according to celebrated poet Martin Espada invented (along with Gary Soto), a new genre of poetry. Espada opines that Villanueva conceived: “…serious literature about farm workers. That in itself guarantees Tino a place in literary history.” Villanueva, who earned a PhD in Spanish Literature, and is a professor at Boston University, does not however live in a literary ghetto of Latino literature. Reginald Gibbons, former editor of Tri- Quarterly magazine wrote that Villanueva has: “… found a way, to write of both worlds (Chicano and Anglo) that makes sense, I believe to all readers, even those who might be interested in one of those worlds or the other.”

Villanueva has received a 1994 American Book Award for “Scene for the Movie Giant,” and has penned a number of books, including: “Primera Causa/ First Cause,’ “Shaking off the Dark,” and others. He also edited the literary magazine: “Imagine: International Chicano Poetry Journal.”

Review of "Manufacturing America: Poems From The Factory Floor" Lisa Beatman

Manufacturing America
Poems From the Factory Floor
By Lisa Beatman
ISBN 978-0-6151-8124-0
61 pages at 14.95 soft cover
Ibbetson Street Press
25 School Street
Somerville MA 02143
Review by Laurel Johnson

Historically, since the America’s beginning, factory jobs have been held by immigrants hoping for a better life. Today those jobs are disappearing at a disturbing rate. With each manufacturing plant closure -- or relocation to foreign soil -- workers find themselves without jobs or income. Lisa Beatman’s second book gives readers a view of immigrants we won’t find on the news. Ms. Beatman’s hopeful immigrants come to us from the Mekong Delta, from south of the Rio Grande, from Europe, and every corner of the globe to become scrub women, fruit pickers, factory workers, meat packers. Immigrants today look to the “New World” for the same promise sought by our parents and grandparents:

This new world
was all coal-stink and pandemonium,
the shouts of men caught
by low ceilings and careened back,
twofold in strength.

In “Rainbow” young Chileans with calloused hands pick fruit while working their way across country to Boston, where they learn their colors and numbers making folders for a children’s hospital:

Juan is mute as a lake, but he knows
his colors: purple is A-F,
blue is G-K, yellow is L-P,
red is Q-T, green is U-Z.
His calloused hands, tattooed with paper cuts
sort the folders that will hold each child’s story.

In “Manufacturing America” Russian Jews come seeing a Cossack-free world. Regardless of what their profession was once, they work in factories so their families can eat:

These Russian Jews
conjugate each Wednesday
in class at the paper factory.
They bite their lips to say ‘visa’ and ‘vinegar’
They purse them to say ‘want ads’ and ‘why.’

For every worker in America, immigrant and non-immigrant, life has changed. “Hack Job” is a powerful poem that shares truths both painful and poignant. How will American workers -- and our country -- survive outsourcing and downsizing?

The bones of the body
are cracking
one by one
their marrow sacked
in a welter
of downsizing.

Hack,
one machine operator
on the dole,
hack
two secretaries
shopping with food stamps,
hack hack hack,
three departments
decapitated

How will the body live
with no framework
to hang its flesh on?

The boss just twists
the tourniquet
so we don’t bleed dry.
Who will stay the axe?
Who will trim the stumps?
How will we learn
to walk again?

Neither readers nor Ms. Beatman have the answers, but she presents facts for our consideration through exceptional poetry and prose. This book should be required reading in every school and university in America because it shines a kindlier light on immigrants and their struggles, a light seldom seen today.


Review by Laurel Johnson . Laurel Johnson is a reviewer for the Midwest Book Review.

Novemberly by Lyn Lifshin

Novemberly
By Lyn Lifshin
e.s.p. press
Box 337
Brookhaven, NY 11719
Copyright 2007
$10.00
Review by Lo Galluccio


You have to wonder when the woman has time to dry her hair….but then you figure she’s just letting that long lavish mane dry in whatever wind comes along. Why can’t I picture Lyn Lifshin with a blow dryer in her hand anyway?

One of the most prolific poets of our time, Lifshin has put out a new chapbook called Novembery, on e.s.p. press. It draws its images and free verse (dribbled like a careful sandcastle in lines usually 3-4 words long) from this time in her life, and a major relationship of her past. – her relationship with her mother. At first, Lifshin writes as if she’s managing a time lapse photo, each poem a slightly different unfolding of the themes of the one before, each one contributing to our deepening sense of the entire subject. Thematic and lyrical – as many but not all of her works are – Novemberly starts with a “night drive from Austerlitz/an hour north to bring in my plants/early September….” The poem introduces the geraniums which are recast in the succeeding poems, as if they were so real as to be animals….”geraniums under a quilt last night, a blotch of red opening/on the front steps what looked like lint/ has small pink claws and feet.,” from the first poem of the collection: Today, Longing for Upstate, Unseasonably Cold, Highs only in the Mid Thirties.”

She draws from Greek mythology in the poem, “Maybe but it Feels More Septemberly” in writing about herself as Persephone, the goddess who must spend six months in the underworld before her mother Demeter draws her back up into the earth’s arms: “under my hair I’m /Persephone, not quite/ up for so much bloom,/ I feel more like some/ thing dark under layers/ of night, the brown/ seeds of silver dollars…”

Something like a swift and deftly traced travelogue of that fall-time, she includes poems about her sister as well at the time of her mother’s death – the recriminations one can feel within a family in “The Images, the Faces, My Sister’s Eyes,” when there are “15 years no truce, no phone.” Furthermore she writes, “I stopped the cards. ‘You murdered the victims twice’ she squealed at a last funeral. Someone said my face turned snow.” We can feel the sting of reproach in the compactness of the last sentence. Again Lifshin turns to the oncoming season of winter, her face turning into snow to match it.

Like a Bergman film clip, she repeats the scene in the next poem, “Another Woman who Looks like my Sister,” “dove grey eyes or/ maybe the sea/ruby birth, the same blood we share /but of course don’t/It made it easier,/ what you said, /knifed what I’d /have needed /to go on/….Your /scream shriek,/ then, face distorted/ I didn’t know you.” Her sister, in her hateful and shocked explosion, literally becomes something else, an abstraction, another woman to Lyn Lifshin.

She documents the turning points in her mother’s aging. “I Lift my Mother to the Commode,” describes a heart-wrenching moment when her mother losses mobility and Lyn and a stranger help her. “Our/ awkward dance to lift /her hopeless as prayers/ for mercy, a reprieve/ but I try to not show my/ fear and now see her/ tremble as the doorbell/ rings, Verizon, to install/ a private line she’ll be/ alive less than a week to/ use. Still on the commode,/ my stranded mother is/ lifted by the smiling man /as if it was part of every/ day’s phone service,/ gently as if carrying /a bride over the threshold/ for a new life.” In this way, Lifshin again conjures an elegant travail – like a dancer on a beam of light.-- out of a moment many of us would find humiliating and awful.

The arc of the book, from Lyn’s remembering her mother alive, her funeral scenes that flash by with her estrangement to her sister, and Lyn always seeing herself a figure in the midst with emails and boxes to pack and feelings to explore like her plants, we come back to a poem about Lyn’s illustrious mane of hair, as if it were part of the trademark of her many extensions of living from roots to fly-away ends. In “The Mad Girl has Butterflies in her Hair,” she writes, “not just Monarchs/ but owl butterflies, swallow/ tails, mourning cloaks,/ viceroys and painted/ ladies. Wings brush/ her skin….”

The chapbook includes several lovely photos of Lyn’s mother and herself, as both child and adult.

It is a book like the sign of Virgo, entreating us like a deceptively small white rose.

I am always a fan.

Lo Galluccio
Ibbetson St. Press

Feb. 2008
Somerville, Mass.

Home Planet News:Winter/Spring 2008/Interview with Jared Smith

An Interview with Jared Smith

with Doug Holder

Poet Jared Smith’s latest collection of poetry is ‘Lake Michigan and Other Poems” (Puddinhead Press). His other collection include: ‘ Walking The Perimeters Of the Plate Glass Factory” (Birch Book Press, NY 2002), “Keeping the Outlaw Alive” (Erie St.Press, Chicago 1988), Dark Wing (Charred Norton Publishing New York, 1984), and “Song Of The Blood” (The Smith Press, New York, 1983.) He has published hundreds of times in a wide number of literary journals and magazines over the past 25 years. I met with him after a reading he gave at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston.


Doug Holder: You said at your reading that you don’t have much of an affinity for the academy or academic poetry.

Jared Smith: That’s not quite what I mean. I had an academic upbringing. My father won scholarships to Harvard and Brown. He was the Dean of Continuing Education at New York University. I grew up knowing an awful lot of literary types…intellectuals. I mean there is a real difference between shallow, stylized academic thinking and hardworking people who build a culture.

Holder: You seem to have an affinity for the workers. You said not enough people are writing about them these days.

Smith: It is not popular to write about them in media circles. But the workers themselves are writing. You have tremendous energy on the open mic scene. Many of the participants are dishwashers and such during the day. In Chicago we have active poets from all walks of life. There are a lot of people with raw literacy, and it is important not to loose touch with that.

Holder: Can you tell me about your friendship with Donald Lev, the founder of Home Planet News, a respected independent lit mag started in Greenwich Village in the 70’s?

Smith: Home Planet News has been around for 28 years, but Don has been editing magazines before then and I had the honor of having a regular column in one of them. I met Lev through a wonderful poet around my age named Paul Henning. Paul was writing an epic poem—a science fiction poetry epic called La Via Del Tren Subterraneo es Peligrosa—or “ Subway Tracks Are Dangerous.” He had no money but knew how to take advantage of the system. He share a loft in NYC with a slightly older, wiser and somewhat humorously grumpy Bohemian poet, Donald Lev. We would sit around the studio and talk poetry. This was around 1977, after he had finished publishing HYN and was starting up POETS with Mike Devlin and Philippe Chaurize. I was honored when he asked me to be guest columnist. Paul was involved also, and he also wrote reviews under the name Wergild Krank. My column ran five times and then in the first issue of Home Planet News. I was also on the screening committee of the New York Quarterly.


Holder: You say you are a Transcendentalist. How do you define that?

Smith: If you study objects closely, you discover that all things are basically of the same nature. Whitman and Emerson felt that there was a life source or awareness that people can reach into. I feel it differently. I feel an affinity to animate and inanimate objects, as well as to people. If you open your awareness of what is around you, that which is outside your body, you realize there is something much bigger than you are, but you are part of it. I try to push that---feel what the human experience is about, rather than what my body is about.

Holder: Where did the germ of the idea for your poem “Lake Michigan” come from?

Smith: Who really knows what triggers a poem? It was a very intense learning process. It started with my walking the dog under the stars along the lake one night. I started thinking, “Why does the Lake—Lake Michigan—fascinate me so much? Why does the water fascinate me and everyone so much?” So I started out on a personal level, then on a human level, and then beyond all that. I wanted to know why water is so important. And the ideas and visions just kept opening outward.

Holder: You are not afraid to write political poems. You have strong views. Some say political poetry is polemic, not art. What do you say?

Smith: I have an awful time saying what poetry is. If you read someone like Robert Lowell, or you read Allen Ginsberg, they’re quite different from each other. It is totally different than an open mic rant, if you will. In all these cases, though, poetry is a condensed rhythmic language. You bring things down to a few words—to explore something that cannot be talked about in commercial terms. Poetry should be a language of ideas. There is no taboo for art.

Holder: You left Greenwich Village and went back to your home in the Midwest why?

Smith: Life does strange things to one. And it did it to me. You have to be flexible—you have to respond. I was in graduate school, my father passed away, and my family was in debt. I was busy writing poetry, but as you know you don’t make much money. I started consulting for an energy-consulting firm. I just walked in and said;” You write bad promotional copy.” I can do better.” So I built a career. When you put in 16 or 17 hours a day at a job, you don’t have time to write poetry. I gave up the job 5 years ago.

Holder: How do you make a living now?

Smith: I write, think, travel and invest. I live frugally. I really wanted to return to writing from the beginning but I had two children to raise.

Holder: You are a small press activist. You are also friends with small press icon Harry Smith?

Smith: I love the small press. Harry Smith is a very significant figure. He was a giant at the time when he took me in. A big reason we have the small press is because of people like Smith. Smith felt there had to be a place for independent thinking. He published folks like Studs Terkel—a whole host of writers who were published under “The Smith” press.

Holder: What did Smith do for you?

Smith: He published me in an anthology: "Eleven Young Poets.” On the back of the book he wrote: “Will poets conquer the world?” He published an epic poem of mine: “Song of the Blood.” That was the first book I had published (1983) It lead to a number of interviews (NPR) and parts were adapted for a modern dance at Lincoln Center. Smith is a monster intellect. He graduated Brown University. He is a great believer in democratic ideals. He was a voice of Greenwich Village.

Holder: Are there any folks like Smith out there, like Eric Greinke of Presa Press?

Smith: Greinke has a press in the 70’s “The Pilot Press.” He published some amazing poets like Denise Levertov, Robert Bly—he knew all these people. But like me, for whatever reason, he dropped out of the publishing scene for 15 years. Then he started publishing again. He started Presa press to remind today’s young poets of what Avant-Garde poetry was in the 70’s and 80’s. He wanted to remind people of Lyn Lifshin, Harry Smith and others.

Holder; Any advice for novice poets out there?

Smith: Keep learning. Try on new things. If you don’t the magic will die for you. Remember the excitement of creation—don’t get stale.

--Doug Holder