Bagel Bard 3 For Sale!

TO ORDER:

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BAGEL BARD 3 ANTHOLOGY NOW OUT: With an introduction from Regie Gibson. Poetry from this iconoclastic group of poets who meet at the Au Bon Pain every Saturday in Davis Square, Somerville.







Description:
Bagel Bard noun. 1. A poet that is glazed and ring-shaped whose poetry has a tough, chewy texture usually made of leavened words and images dropped briefly into nearly boiling conversations on Saturday mornings often baked to a golden brown. 2. verb. To come together in writership over breakfast. To laugh so hard at an irreverent statement that the sesame seeds of the bagel you've just eaten explode from your mouth like grenade shrapnel. Welcome to the third Bagelbard Anthology. As some of you know (or can guess from the above definition) the Bagel Bards meet every Saturday morning at a designated spot. We breakfast in the original sense of eating, but also, because most of us are so busy working on our writing careers that we often find ourselves starved for great conversation. Well, the Bagel Bards breakfast hang is not only a place in which to do the aforementioned, but also to observe characters who themselves could be the subjects of poems and fiction.

The Man In The Booth In The Midtown Tunnel by Doug Holder

(Somerville, Mass.)

Ibbetson Street Press founder Doug Holder will be releasing a new collection of his poetry this summer (2008) through the Cervena Barva Press (http://cervenabarvapress.com ) "The Man In The Booth In The Midtown Tunnel" ($13)


Here is a review from Luke Salisbury author of the award winning novel "Hollywood and Sunset," and a Professor of English at Bunker Hill Community College ( Boston):



The Man In The Booth in The Midtown Tunnel

Doug Holder is a very funny man and a very funny poet, but his new collection is much more than funny. There’s a profound seriousness in this book. Holder deals with his past and sometimes sour present. He doesn’t spare us the intensity and craziness he sees and feels around him. The title poem, a very fine poem, catches the fears and wonders of a New York childhood. I also felt loneliness, fear and a tantalizing feeling of being trapped in a grown-up world riding through the Midtown Tunnel.

Another poem speaks of “A bus full of exiles.” We’re all on that bus and Holder doesn’t let us off until we have shared his feelings of desolation and even madness everywhere from “effete ivied walls” to the wards of McLean Hospital, stopping off for some of “The Love Life Of J. Edgar Hoover (The poem is everything you hope and expect it will be –“Mother downstairs/Off her rocker”), to “Killing Time at The 99” which has the fine lines “And drink/To all/This/Loneliness/Made visible” (Great lines I think), to “hoping/there/is/still/someone/out there” when using the “Pay Phones On The Boston Common” to final observations of a “Rat’s Carcass.”


The collection isn’t depressing. It’s alive. Alive with vitality, ugliness, sadness, sex, even love. It’s all here. This is Holder’s best to date.


Hugh Fox ( a founding editor of the Pushcart Prize):

" If Winslow Homer had written poetry this is the kind of poetry he would have written, at least before he’d been bowled over by French Impressionism, and was still Mr. Sketchman. That’s what Holder is too, Mr. Sketchman, magically-realistically bringing his world right into yours:

“A skeletal man/His torso/Barely supports/A crisp white shirt --/His forehead/Violated by a jet black/Wedge of his toupee..//An old man/Pipes up/And fawns over/A prized cat/Who I think/With such/Suffocating attention/Must be miserable,/And I drink/To all /This loneliness/Made visible.” (“Killing Time at the 99).

Realistic sketches, but almost always with an underlying flow of melancholia. Which super-emphasizes the power of the sketches themselves. Never in the psychopathological abstract,he nicely identifies with the proletarian agonies, looks at the Out There and totally can splice with it and its problems: “The cars stream/Under a frozen/Catatonic/East River./And the man/in the booth/Paces the perimeter/Of his cage...//And we are/Faceless and a blur.” (The Man in the Booth in the Midtown Tunnel”)

You read Holder and you take a trip through the total Northeast/especially Boston mind-set as well as his own , personal, intimate world made (deeply) available to all.



Linda Lerner’s Comment on:

The Man In The Book In The Midtown Tunnel by Doug Holder


The man in Doug Holder’s, The Man In The Midtown Tunnel,who “Lost his face / Long ago / In a blue uniform” metaphorically becomes everyone struggling to survive in lives boxed in by a job that robs us of our humanity, by loneliness and the infirmities of aging. It is about the struggle to keep from being more than that “forgotten / Ineffectual man ”who passed away on Boston’s Red line subway, with passengers “On either / Side of the stretcher” watching. It is about clutching an outdated pay phone in a wireless world “hoping / there is / still / someone / out there.”


In a poem about the woman who sat on the toilet for two years, Holder enables the reader to see beyond a news story, to the person stricken with inertia or fear, unable to leave a job, a marriage, a room. That is one of the strengths of a collection which once begun, you will be compelled to read straight through. We see the poet, as an intuitive boy, watching a baseball game at Shea Stadium in 1972 as “Agee / Circled the Bases / In an Arrogant / Home run....” wondering if his “Life would / Ever be / So / Clear cut....

----Linda Lerner/ Adjunct Professor of English /City College of New York



Doug Holder is above all an urban poet, an observer chronicling the everyday sights and absurdities of Somerville, Boston and New York City in plain talk flavored with cool irony and sudden startling bursts of imagery. His settings include hospital rooms, bars, coffee shops, Harvard Yard, the post office, buses and subway trains, the Boston Public Library, Shea Stadium, housing projects, city streets, and the Midtown Tunnel from Queens to Manhattan which is the location of the book’s title poem. His characters are bizarre and ordinary like all of us. Several of the poems are inspired by newspaper stories—about a woman who sat on a toilet for two years in her boyfriend’s apartment, about an old man who murdered his equally aged wife, about a middle aged man who died on a subway train: “the Daily dropped/ From his hands. . . .The trains backed up/ From Cambridge to Dorchester.”

I’m reminded in the pages of this collection of meeting, a year or two before her death, the artist Alice Neel, who painted gorgeously surreal ironic portraits of famous and ordinary people in the 1930s and 40s--and shivering as she looked me over. Doug Holder looks at the world through a similarly sharp and amused set of eyes. Yet there is no malice but a profound sympathy here—for the helplessness of aging and of poverty, for physical and mental illnesses, for the complexity of family relations—and most of all, for the isolation and loneliness lurking underneath tenaciously crowded city life. In the title poem of the collection, the man in the booth in the Midtown Tunnel “paces the perimeter/ Of his cage” while outside the cars whip by: “And we are/ Faceless and a blur,/ Behind thick plates/ Of light-bleached glass.”

However, let me assure you this is not a gloomy collection of poems. There are rich nuggets of humor and wry reflection throughout this collection and, to combat the isolation of urban life, in almost every poem a relationship is forged between the observing eye and the subject of the poem. So, for example, as the speaker of the poem observes a woman nursing in a restaurant in “Private Dining Under a Blouse”:

I saw
The infant emerge
Sleeping
Held in an untroubled
Dream.

I sucked on my straw
Flattening the plastic stem
Still awake
And troubled.

A few of the poems in this collection, like the one above, segue gracefully in subject from Holder’s last book, Of All the Meals I Had Before: Poems About Food and Eating. Another is a poem toward the end of the book, “The Last Hotdog”: “She brought it/ to his sick bed,/ He bit through/ The red casing/ The familiar orgasm/ Of juice/ Hitting the roof/ Of his mouth”. And one more food-focused poem, “At the Fruit Stand,” which is about bananas and melons and grapes and is too erotic to discuss in a family publication. However, you will enjoy it. And the whole collection.


* Pamela Annas is a Professor of English at University of Massachusetts/Boston and the author of A Disturbance in Mirrors: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath.




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Somerville small literary press' score in the Small Press Review

SMALL PRESS REVIEW MARCH/APRIL 2008: Lisa Beatman’s “Manufacturing America… (Ibbetson 2008) a March-April pick for best of the month.



Lisa Beatman, author of “Manufacturing America…” (Ibbetson Press 2008) was a March/April pick of the month in the Small Press Review. Beatman’s poetry collection explores the lives of immigrant workers in a factory in Somerville, Mass., where she worked as an adult literacy teacher. To order the book go to: http://www.lulu.com/content/1593948





Somerville “Off the Grid” press scored a pick as well with Lee Sharkey’s “A Darker Sweeter String,” and Gloria Mindock’s Cervena Barva Press scored a pick with “Bird Scarer” by Glen Sheldon.



The Small Press Review has been reviewing thousands of books for the past 40 years. The Wall Street Journal called it the “bible of the business.” It gets hundreds of books a month and makes about 13 selections for its pick of the month selection…so congrats to all. The Small Press Review is carried at many university poetry rooms across the country. Kirby Congdon, a poet, writes to Len Fulton, the publisher:



“For me, your publication has provided not only a reference point to literary activity in this country; it has given me a literary perspective to my own development. In a world established on commercial success, I have been able through The Small Press Review, to get my feet on the ground, establish confidence in my own ideas, and to connect with people who provide the source of the country’s extraordinary genius for the spontaneous exercise of both poetry and prose for its own sake, despite the odds against its recognition…” For more information and to order SPR go to http://dustbooks.com



Recently Ibbetson authors have been the recipient of many picks of the month including: Irene Koronas, Richard Wilhelm, Gloria Mindock, Robert K. Johnson, and Molly Lynn Watt.



I have had the pleasure of being picked for my collections: “Poems of Boston and Just Beyond: from the Back Bay to the Back Ward,” (Alpha Beat Press) and “Wrestling with My Father” (Yellow Pepper Press)



I would advise folks to subscribe to this gem of a magazine.



Doug Holder/Ibbetson Update

Rooting, Sinking into the Earth, Surviving with Them in "Up from the Root Cellar", poems by Anne Harding Woodworth

Rooting, Sinking into the Earth, Surviving with Them in

Up from the Root Cellar, poems by Anne Harding Woodworth

(Cervena Barva Press http://www.cervenabarvapress.com $7.)



Review by Michael Todd Steffen





Anne Harding Woodworth’s peculiar attention, her attention for peculiarity, is drawn to things and situations out of the way, to fleeting moments of curious revelation. The epigraph for the poem “Autumn,” page 29, quoted from Richard Hugo, puts in a nutshell Woodworth’s penchant for the unexpected:



Never write a poem about anything that ought to have a poem written about it.



The more furtive the subject, the more intense the observation and expression. Yet her subjects, though marginal, remain familiar, the discarded household things on the escarpment of a train track, the message inside a Snapple cap, a homeless woman outside in the window of a restaurant. (The latter prompts Woodworth to wonder, “How do people find each another?”)

Had Woodworth been skeletoning for philosophy rather than poetry, she may have done so poetically by giving this collection the title Dendrology, after the poem on

page 27, which lays the poet’s cyclical thinking barest in terminology:



The rings of a tree show wide

from a wet season, narrow from a dry,

which is difference and balance.



It is one of the few of Woodworth’s poems in the collection that maintain to her silent situations, “creatures” and miscellany of things an illustrative gloss of meanings or abstract language, such as “Like attracts like,” “ingrained/into equilibrium. Nourish and starve,” or “Like repels like, too”… The poem comes toward the end of the book where a vision of life’s things set in a special light of meaning is being dissolved into terms, and from terms of “difference and balance,” into the complete difference of the hidden whence all this music came:



Out of the earth, secrets eventually rise to the surface.

Graves beneath tree roots and granite cave in

begging for rock…



The difference by then is forgetting…



The empty goblet is not always filled again.



Yet isn’t that a trick that the psyche plays on us, atonement once and for all, resolution? When we remember that the collection is called Up from the Root Cellar, and turn back

to the opening poem, it is precisely at the meagerly surviving level, of “Wintering,” hibernating, in “The creatures beside me,” down in the root cellar, “in Obscurity:/ roots



alive [read, cultural roots also], rhizomes,/ tightly wadded leaves, flowerets” where Woodworth began distinguishing these near and intimate presences from the broad sweep of the world’s furtive ambition which drives the sensitive and vulnerable into the earth’s hideouts:



Someone in the light-time

is looking for history, for ore, for water,

for mold that grows on skins and spreads,

for a paw scratching to get out.



The silent powers Woodworth senses, have her ask: “am I safe in the dark-time?”—perhaps to be reassured that “The creatures beside me [the roots, potatoes, carrots

—animate ‘creatures’!] smile in their sleep for not being found.” Of the many poets who have cast animate sympathies onto the vegetable world, Theodore Roethke knocks for acknowledgment. From his poem “Cuttings” comes a memorable strophe enacting evolution from mineral water into the water-life of the human body:



I can hear, underground, that sucking and sobbing,

In my veins, in my bones I feel it, —

The small waters seeping upward,

The tight grains parting at last.

When sprouts break out,

Slippery as fish

I quail, lean to beginnings, sheath-wet.



If those “looking for history” have driven the poet’s soul underground “waiting cool, but not freezing dead,” there are those among the mundane world still, children, whom the poet’s persona as the hermitesse “Miss Moore” can intimidate:



If Miss Moore catches them

playing in her grasses,

she yells from the kitchen window.

She’s hunch-backed,

has yellow-white hair.

Children know: she smells of fennel.

She threatens them

with her root cellar…



Children know. They choose flight

over being force-marched into the ground.



Terrible for the children, hilarious for us standing outside the farce, this is a marvelously imaginative passage (with extended meaning from a choice word, “flight,” for how the little playful ones react). Who wants to be force-marched into the ground?

Who wants to be? Who is?





I have taken space to comment on little. The poems are rich and well worth an interested reader’s exploration. To keep in mind some of the latter “philosophical” poems like “Dendrology” and “Northeast Corridor” helps the reader navigate through some of the quieter poems like “Elsewhere, Life,” “Centering the Universe” and “Miklos Radnoti’s Postcards 1946,” where situations speak through things and gestures.

I liked the cashier in “At the Supermarket,” who ostensibly doesn’t know what beets are, and I like Woodworth’s reply:



“Beets.” It’s as if I’m teaching



fresh vegetables as a second language.



I also liked the poem “Famine,” in which a cloth dyer’s work has failed to please his lord. (W.H. Auden compares the poet’s hand to the dyer’s hand.) In Woodworth’s poem, the color “the natural mole’s-back-gray-tan/…peat-bog purple” is not acceptable to the prospective buyer. The dyer therefore has to return home, where his daughter is weak with hunger, without being compensated for his work.



He lies down next to his daughter,

and while she sleeps,

he tries to solve the undyeing of a piece of cloth.



This last image approaches the pathos of the sublime, if not in elaboration or detail, in essence, of such works as Lear’s speech to the hanged Cordelia or of Michelangelo’s sculpture of Mary holding Jesus’ crucified corpse (la Pieta). It is a humbling tercet to read, and must have been so to find in composition. It resonates with the loyalty clutching at the boundaries of mortality down in the root cellar to its struggle for emergence on through the collection.

Hats off to Anne Harding Woodworth.

Michael Todd Steffen/Ibbetson Update/April 2008/Somerville, Mass.





Up from the Root Cellar by Anne Harding Woodworth

Winner of the 2006 Cervena Barva Press Poetry Contest

Cervena Barva Press copyright 2007

$7.00

visit Bookstore at http://www.thelostbookshelf.com

Famous Faces and Steven by Niama Leslie Williams

Famous Faces
By Niama Leslie Williams
Lulu Publishers
102 pages/$17.95

Steven
By Niama Leslie Williams
Lulu Publishers
84 pages/$17.50

By Thomas Gagnon

As I read Niama Williams’ poetry, I thought of Joan Armatrading’s early ‘70s songs, like the emphatic “Back to the Night” or the melancholy “Save Me.” A lot of Williams’ poetry is, on the one hand, about passion, physicality, and intimacy, and, on the other hand, about sadness, longing, and oppression. She also often writes about the need for safety, thankfully, since nobody (that I’ve met) talks about needing safety outside of group therapy. So, a brave woman and good writer speaks—
First, on safety—In Famous Faces, the poem “Forty Years” begins with “that voice that saved me/in the midst of a mad, mad sea.” (22) Halfway through, Williams writes six lines ending with the word ‘safety’: “my first thought of them…/is of safety/the gift of safety/a dangerous childhood I survived/but in their house/always safety…” The poem concludes, “I know safety/what it feels like/how it sounds/how to bring it/home.” (23) The word ‘safety’ may not thrill the soul, but it is crucial to staying alive, as she demonstrates in a powerful onrush of a poem, “For Vincent D’Onofrio as Bobby Goren,” farther on in the book. This over-riding need for safety appears again in Steven, in the poems “Black Wool Coat” and “Mama’s Washcloth,” in which these small things (coat and washcloth) signify a lasting sense of warmth and health.

Second, on passion, physicality, intimacy—All of them definitely break through in the poem “First Time,” when a black man, “nothing I have ever wanted/parts my legs/crushes my disdain/helps me entertain/for the first time/a black penis/without recoiling.” (18-19 of Famous Faces) So, Williams throws us seven lines of rhythmic, rhyming passion (and an inner shift, away from repulsion). The passion of “First Time” is followed not much later by “The Gaze,” “In the Elevator,” and “For Lisa,” all of which contrast physicality and artificiality: wet palms vs. a song, whamming your gut vs. politeness, warm lips vs. Renaissance studies. In Steven, Williams claims in “The Chain Sestina” that “i once fell in love with a bicycle chain,” but most of the poem is about her love for a Korean, Hun Ku, a name that she repeats rapturously, before her fall into an oxymoron of livable longing. (47-48) The opposite of all this appears in a poem called “There will be no Passion in This House.” Instead, there will be dust, sadness, fatigue, and phantom-existence. Moving right along—

Williams evokes sadness especially beautifully in two poems in Famous Faces: “The Cleaning Lady” and “Jasmine.” The opening lines of “The Cleaning Lady”—“the thin line of hair removed/makes me wonder”—become an over-arching metaphor for the rest of this poem, about a silently long-suffering cleaning lady. This metaphor gets poignantly repeated, in “vague pencil strokes,” “the pencil lines are what remain,” and “eyebrow pencil eyebrows.” (64-65) The cleaning lady’s pain is not a metaphor, after all. “Jasmine” conjures up good memories, like “liqueur of jasmine cooling throat.” Jasmine spells relief, until it fades to “no scent; thirst.” (85) Williams evokes oppression (the oppression of family obligations) in “Bending,” with recurring reference to her knees, knees habitually bending, knees beginning to break, knees getting tired, knees screaming. (My knees empathize.)

In Steven, Williams writes two powerful poems on longing. One is “A Vacant Lot,” once a place in which she ran barefoot, now neglected and overgrown with weeds, so that she tries “to walk barefoot in the city…/the concrete and glass assault my feet…” (66-67) Not being able to run barefoot, as she did then, could be literally painful, now. If only then were now. The other poem on longing is called “Marian C.’s Sestina.” The tension in this poem is summed up in four lines in the third stanza: “no farmboy, even in the abstract/was going to make her stay in arkansas./she’d been born south/but she wasn’t going to stay there and give up her painting.” She longs to leave “the hell that was Arkansas” for the first 36 lines, and then, in the last three lines, she does. (74-75) For Marian, longing leads to fulfillment.

There are many other excellent poems in both Famous Faces and Steven, too many to list here. Also, each poem is excellent for a different reason, for instance, playfulness with diction, or an incantatory style that suddenly shocks. This is not to claim that these poetry collections are flawless. In some poems, less would definitely be more. But, overall, there is a lot to love.

Thomas Gagnon./ Ibbetson Update/ Somerville, Mass./ April 2008

Poet Miriam Levine makes the dark open

Poet Miriam Levine makes the dark open

Miriam Levine is the winner of the 2007 Autumn House Poetry Prize for her collection “The Dark Opens.” She is also the author of “In Paterson,” a novel, “Devotion,” a memoir, three poetry collections, and “A Guide to Writer’s Homes in New England.” Her work has appeared in the Harvard Review, the Kenyon Review, the Paris Review, and Ploughshares, as well as others. She was a guest on my program “ Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer” on Somerville Community Access TV.




Doug Holder: I read your essay “Food, Sex and Betrayal” Do you often use food in your poems? Can you judge a person by the food he eats?

Miriam Levine: I’m not sure I want to judge anybody. Poets who call themselves “Poets of the Body” certainly would include food. They deal with the whole notion of the “Love Feast”: the meal you have with a lover, either literally or in the imagination. It is the food you would prepare for your lover, the food you would prepare for yourself, the food you would take from the lover’s body, and the lover from yours. We see this all the time. The Honeymoon has a special meal. There is the food that increases desire—the French are very good at that. I think food is entwined with the whole notion of pleasure. If you think of poetry as the spoken word, you can see the entwinement, —the sound of the word in the mouth—certainly. Whitman was known for that. He had some wonderfully delicious lines like: “Beautifully dripping fragments.” These words come from the mouth. So for me poetry is connected, sometimes connected to food.

Doug Holder: In your memoir “Devotion” you air a lot of your family skeletons. Philip Roth once said you have to be willing to insult your mother if need be to be a good writer. A good writer isn’t a “polite” writer. What’s your take?

Miriam Levine: Well I think you have to be honest to some extent. There are many ways to go about it. If you have the bird of judgment sitting on your shoulder saying: “Don’t, Don’t, you mustn’t say this!” then you might have a problem. If you muzzle subjects that are really central to your material (what Henry James called the “germs” or “seed’) you really are not going to write. In some way if you are writing good memoir you will betray.

Doug Holder: Did you alienate your family?

Miriam Levine: No. Not in the least. When the memoir came out I did a couple of readings in New Jersey, and I changed the names. When I was reading at one venue, my aunt yelled out from the audience “That’s me!” There was nothing in the material that identified her. So for some members of the family this was validating. My mother experienced a great sense of release when she told me these family secrets. So it was something that we shared. She said, “ Everybody’s got something.” I grew up with secrets and it was very important to release the shame.

Doug Holder: Again in your essay you write: “Metaphor gives my life meaning. I can also stuff myself with words and not get fat. Words are a pleasure in the mouth. My mouth is moist when I write.” So in a way you align writing with eating; a sort of satisfying mastication?

Miriam Levine: I do ally it with a satisfying mastication. But that’s not all there is. There is the music and the mind working at the same time. For some poets, and I hope I have this in my work, the held note, the music note, the pleasure of words. I view art as it was said in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” as “flaming amazement.”

Doug Holder: The poet Mark Doty was the judge of the Autumn House Prize that you won. Have you read his work? His recent collection “Fire to Fire?” Is your work similar?

Miriam Levine: I haven’t read “Fire to Fire” yet. I have read some of the poems that are in it. My knowledge of his work is spotty. I don’t know Mark Doty. I admire his taste and I admire his poems, and I feel very lucky that he chose this manuscript.

We do have similarities. I thought that never in a million years that Mark Doty would pick my manuscript. I was in awe. His work is elegiac—he likes to write of the dead. We share that. He love music and so do I. He wrote a wonderful poem about “Chet Baker” His work has a wonderful sense of music. The music that continues and the music that is lost. Lorca describes something that translates into “deep song.” The music escapes along the horizon to a point of common longing. And what we do long for we have often lost.

Doug Holder: In your collection “The Dark Opens” you have a poems that centers around the Winslow Homer painting “Summer Evening” In the painting there are two woman dancing with the backdrop of a vast ocean. You write:

“He got it right, the proportions
our place is as small as the woman dancing
in each other’s arms near the ocean.”

Do you think in these days, when we are out of touch with nature, we become centers of our universe, and forget the scale of things?

Miriam Levine: Absolutely. Absolutely. Particularly now where the star, the picture of the star, the cult of personality, abounds. In one of the Greek tragedies our lives are described as sparks escaping from the fire. I am not sure about the Old Testament idea that the whole universe was given to us. I am not sure we figure that big.

Doug Holder: You wrote a book “A Guide to Writer’s Homes in New England. Is there any communality in writers’ home that you discovered?

Miriam Levine: What got me going was going out to The Old Manse and seeing Hawthorne’s little room. The desk that he used is very small. It is about the size of the seat of a child’s door. The theme in the 19th Century was the privacy of a room where the writer could go and be “private.” Edith Wharton would write in bed, Hawthorne wrote on what was in essence a tiny shelf. Mark Twain certainly had a grand desk. I was very interested in the interplay between family life and private life of the writers of this era. In the case of Melville his sisters and his wife were his copyists. His, was a home industry. Thoreau walked daily from his cabin to visit his mother daily. I was interested in these writers who presented themselves as the “imperial self” Their domestic life said something entirely different.

--Doug Holder

THE LENGTHENING RADIUS FOR HATE: POEMS BY GARY FINCKE

THE LENGTHENING RADIUS FOR HATE
Poems by Gary Fincke
Cervena Barva Press
PO Box 440357
Somerville, MA 02144-3222
Price: $7.00


Gary Fincke’s chapbook of poems brings back to this reviewer memories of another era, a time when the US Government was pursuing another unfathomably insane war, not unlike the one it is currently pursuing. It was a time, like these times, of a divided nation ruled by arrogance, a time when the nation’s young, even those in elite colleges, were beaten and even shot for voicing their opposition to the war’s insanity. The first poem is titled “Kent, Ohio.” Fincke recalls that horrible day at Kent State “where thirty-five years ago/ I survived the guardsmen’s volley.”
It may be difficult for those who have not lived through those years to understand just how divided the nation was in those years. Though the nation was hardly ripe for revolution, the prospect was talked about seriously in dorms and coffeehouses around the nation. Espousing ideals of love and peace was often met with a hatred that was palpable and personal. Here are the opening lines of “Mother’s Day, 1970:”

“They should have shot you too,” my uncle said
After I chose between the protesters
And the blunt authority of the Guard.
Sick of my mutton chops and thick mustache,
He hated how I thought I knew the world
Better than he did without picking up
A gun or grenade or the requisite
Gumption to wear a uniform with pride.

George W. Bush’s monumental blunder of a war will prove to be more disastrous in its consequences and it has certainly divided the nation. But, other than members of the military and their families, Americans have not been asked to sacrifice anything. During the Vietnam War, a young man had to try to wrap his head around the fact that the government wanted to send him off to die in an enterprise that was morally bankrupt, an enterprise which even its architects, we found out much later, had realized by 1967 was doomed to failure. Since admitting mistakes is something politicians are not wont to do, the war continued for another seven years. This had the effect of twisting up my and Gary Fincke’s generation to no small extent:

I hitchhiked, believing in the Kingdom
Of rootlessness(------------------------
-------------------------------------) saying
Nothing to bored or curious drivers
About my history of Presidents
By name: Kennedy, the office-buyer;
Johnson, the quitter; Nixon, the liar,
who had called my classmates “bums” and killed them
Three hundred yards from my classroom at Kent.

--“All Through May, 1970”

Also found in Fincke’s lines are signs of the transformation America was undergoing, signs of what was fast disappearing:

Some nights my father would drive us north where
Farms were turning into streets of houses.

--“The Fire Landscape”

A sense of dread in the form of the Selective Service System hangs over Fincke and his friends during their last semester in college. Some poems flash forward to pay respects to the dead, those classmates who later died in Vietnam, or in car crashes, or in a jeep in basic training. But death was impatient and didn’t feel compelled to wait for semester’s end:

Early in an evening of remembering death,
I tell my friend that after the Kent State shooting,
After students like me went home and waited out
Our anger, the police came armed to Jackson State
Like a recreation of the Ohio Guard.
They herded those students, I tell him. They backed them
Against the front wall of a dorm and suffered stones
And bricks until they opened fire as if they’d loved
The headlines from the week before, (-------------
-----------------------------------------------------------)
Almost five hundred times, I say, they hit that dorm
Two dead, twelve wounded, all of them “nigger students”
According to the cop who called in the shooting,
That speaker’s nickname was “goon,” something history
Can’t make up, his casual slurs, on tape, leaching
Into the voiceless future to poison language,

--“The Casual Slurs”

Toward the end of the book the language quiets, grows beautiful. One reason America is so divided today is that many people don’t understand what was actually happening in the 1960’s and 70’s. This is even true of many who lived through those years. THE LENGTHENING RADIUS FOR HATE could help provide a way toward that understanding. All I’m saying is give it a chance.

-- Richard Wilhelm, Ibbetson Update

Gold Star Road. Richard Hoffman

Gold Star Road. Richard Hoffman. ( Barrow Street PO BOX 1831 Murray Hill Station NY 10156) $25.

Review by Doug Holder

There damn well should be a poem for a doorman, a poem that celebrates in-your-face blue-collar wisdom, and a poem that sings for the many unsung Gold Star Roads
(Designated roads where soldiers killed in the line of duty lived and are memorialized), in far flung communities across the country. And poet/memoirist Richard Hoffman is just the man for the job. If you read Hoffman’s acclaimed memoir “Half the House…” you would know that he sprung from a hardscrabble working class background, and has had more than his share of sorrows over the years. This is not some freshly scrubbed MFA churning out another unearned angst-laden collection. Hoffman has walked the walk, and has been around the block several times. But unlike these tired clichés his work is original and evocative.

I’m no scholar and I respond to poetry on a very gut and emotional level. So a poem like “ Summer Job” speaks to me. It brings out my sense of longing: for my youth, and that no-nonsense type of guy who befriended me and cut through all the crap and posturing we all engage in, in this hyperactive society. In this poem “Summer Job” Hoffman remembers a grizzled boss from his early years who proved to be an unexpected font of wisdom. The poem is so tight and cohesive it would be a disservice not to quote it in full:

SUMMER JOB

“The trouble with intellectuals,” Manny, my boss
once told me, “ is that they don’t know nothing
till they can explain it to themselves. A guy like that,”
he said, “ he gets to middle age;--and by the way,
he gets there late; he’s trying to be a boy until
he’s forty, forty-five, and then give him five
more years till that craziness peters out, and now
he’s almost fifty—a guy like that at last explains
to himself that life is made of time, that time
is what’s all about. Aha! he says. And then
he either blows his brains out, gets religion,
or settles down to some major-league depression.
Make yourself useful. Hand me that three –eights
torque wrench—no, you moron, the other one.”

There is a lot of other great work to recommend this collection of course. “ Airfare” deals with a chance encounter the poet had at an airport with a man he knew when he was young. The encounter consists of a “brittle conversation,” but the memories the meeting evokes releases a flood of perceptions about the confusion and continuum of life:

“I wondered at how we change,
inhibit, inhabit one another;
friends, enemies, teachers lovers,
neighbors, students…

…I
was trying to find, through layers
of scratched Plexiglass and drifting
clouds, a sign of where we were
and how much farther we had to go…”

Gold Star Road is a five star collection in my book. And Hoffman is a star of a poet.

Doug Holder

* This review will appear in the May 2008 issue of "Fight These Bastards"

*Doug Holder is the founder of the Ibbteson Street Press. His two most recent poetry collections are: “ No One Dies at the Au Bon Pain” ( sunnyoutside) and “Of All The Meals I Had Before” ( Cervena Barva Press)

Double Crossing: New&Selected Poems. Eva Salzman

Double Crossing: New&Selected Poems. Eva Salzman ( Bloodaxe Books Highgreen, Tarset, Northumberland NE48 IRP. http:///www.bloodaxebooks.com ) Distributed in U.S.A. by Dufour

Review by Doug Holder

I am afraid of Eva Salzman. This woman is as sharp as a tack, and in her writing she is not stifled by tact, or afraid to attack. She sizes up my gender with a laser-like eye, and more than once I felt like my fly was down. The woman has a high-toned resume, but her poetry in the best sense remain accessible, sparkling with word play, leavened with levity, not to mention a delicious dash of world weariness.

In the poem: “The Having of the Cake,” Salzman wonders what separates men and boys, and is it simply the size of their toys? This poem examines a woman when the blush of youth has flown the coop. She wonders about the callused brush off from the man or should I say the boy?

“ He burdens her with images of someone gross and elderly
stuffed into short, tight skirts, accentuating all the fat,
with images of missing woman’s destiny—he burdened me,
his feet upon a desk, and made his cruelty resemble tact.

The girls with babies clutch them close, and blessedly.
The boys arrange their separate lives, convenient flats
both north and south (an urban nest, a nest in the country)
and wait for 45, and newer girls with wombs entirely intact.”

And how about the dearly departed? Read the following poem at the wake, when you sit shiva, and when they read that purple flourish of an eulogy… and then get back to me:

Mneme Re-Writes History

I’m so damn tired of love for the dead,
of the lies of the living about their dead.

Minus the bodily subject of their praise,
they dig up corpses of buried words,
powder the vowels, adjust the consonant limbs
and prop them up on silk pillows.

They take into their mouths cold lips
with passion, finally, for their own grief.

Salzman lives in England but was raised in the New York City/Long Island axis. And being the dyed-in-the –wool New York Jew that I am, I can detect that very wisecracking, wonderfully jaded, brand of humor I grew up with in her work. Yes Salzman’s work made me laugh, but it is dead serious.

Highly Recommended.

YOUR PRETTY TYPE FACE IS GOING TO HELL
Bradley Lastname

the press of the third mind 2008
1301 north Dearborn parkway
loft #1007
Chicago Illinois 60610
bradleylastname@hotmail.com

PROTEST POETRY? the title “your pretty type face is
going to hell” is apropos. what is it about some
writers. do they think the reader can’t see or the
reader might miss the point of this writing and what
is the point of the emphatic bold face type beating us
over the head. it reminds me of bible thumping. it
reminds me of elmer gantry, the con man trying to con
an audience into believing “I’m the messenger” and “we
jerks out here are the sinners?” give me a break.

“last Wednesday, Oscar De La Rentstrike
asks me to fill in for him at the hardware
store; he was too hung over to come in.
“what do I know about hardware?” I ask.
to which Oscar replies, “bongHog. if you
can make it through the metal detector
without triggering it, that’s all you need
to know about hardware.”

this is a rip off of the old joke, “this guy goes
grocery shopping and orders bread. the guy behind the
counter asks him if he is a poet. how did you know I
was a poet. because this is a hardware store. duh.
well this is what this book is about. ordering bread
and getting a screw driver. Bradley Lastname
lameblasts almost everything he thinks is sacred or in
need of being put in its place. yet he has his own
righteous god. he gives himself permission to
denigrate:

“you shouldn’t sail here
throw down the life preservers
chicks and children first”

some readers will be amused, finding reason illogical.
it is not that this book from hell is not logical, it
is burning, it is a furnace of telling. surprising to
me is, how alike the protesting is to the
presentation, how much this book is similar in its
stance to what is being protested. telling us how to
think or not to think or to think as the writer deems
real:

“the dadaist ran from his forehead to his neck,
cutting his face into looks forward to the day, fully
aware that a flowerpot may fall on his head.”

or

“to whom else should one offer sacrifices,
to whom else should one pay honor”

or

“to say the least, and he curtains dry out fetuses
on blotting paper in order to grind them up and sell…”

or

“the mothers I’d like to find are mothers I’d like to
grind.”

hidden under the heading of dada or surrealism is
hatred by the author’s “its them” attitude, the blame
game attitude.

“if Isabella blow married steven jobs
she would be isabella blow-jobs”

there are a lot of isms in this book and I’m sure
there might be an audience who wants to invest their
money in a book of rants.

Somerville’s Steve Thomas & The Co Conspirators Brings Jazz to the Nave Gallery.

Somerville’s Steve Thomas & The Co Conspirators Brings Jazz to the Nave Gallery.

By day Steve Thomas is an editor at a prestigious publishing house, by night his music takes flight. Thomas, a tall and lanky man, is a composer, lyricist and jazz vocalist who founded the group: “ Steve Thomas and The Co-Conspirators.” The Conspirators consist of Thomas, John Funkhouser (bass), who is on the faculty of the Berklee School of Music, Rich Greenblatt (vibraphone) also a Berklee faculty member, and Gary Feldman (drums) an accomplished musician who has worked with such important musicians as Bill Frisell, Joanne Brackeen, etc…

Thomas grew up in Pennsylvania and moved to Somerville in 1988. Since arriving in Somerville he has involved himself with the area arts scene. He has worked with MOBIUS, an arts group based in Boston, and he won a Somerville Arts Council Grant, when the council was headed by Cecily Miller.

Thomas, who is an English major from way back in the day, has a real passion for music. He plays around Somerville and Boston, and has performed at The Somerville Museum, Third Life Studio, McIntyre and Moore, and has an upcoming gig at the Nave Gallery. Thomas has been influenced by jazz artists as varied as Louis Armstrong, Thelonius Monk, Miles Davis to Ornette Coleman and Steve Lacey.

Coleman said there are a lot of Brazilian influences in his work. He writes original music, and like most jazz compositions his leaves a lot of room for improvisation. He employs scat singing and says he has ample doses of “soul” in his work.

The music scene in the area according to Thomas “is a hard nut to crack,” but he is happy to have a chance to engage his passion in anyway he can. Thomas will be performing with The Co-Conspirators at the Nave Gallery, May 3, 8PM 155 Powderhouse Blvd., Somerville.

For more information go to: http://www.stevethomasjazz.com

Ghosts by Hugh Fox

Ghosts. Poetry by Hugh Fox. ( Green Panda Press 3174 Berkshire Rd. Cleveland Heights, Ohio 44118 greenpandapress@yahoo.com

When you reach a certain age I am told, you start seeing ghosts. They lurk in the corner of your eye, a familiar voice calls to you and then vanishes into the ether. Poet Hugh Fox, author of the controversial memoir “Way, Way Off the Road…” ((Ibbetson 2005) has reached a point in his life where there is much more to look back on than to look ahead to. In “Ghosts” Fox is haunted by the “old gang” in Chicago: “…all the old gang at the Swedish Club in Chicago 60 years ago, 40 years ago, all starting to hang around the house now,/ wait for me in the backyard, /get inside my arms and /brain so that everything I do or say/echoes/re-creates them…”

Fox always uses a wild infusion of images in his work: the old warehouses in Boston and Chicago, the literary and pop culture references, the litany of names and faces from his past. Fox’s poetry is like a grand, lyrical grocery list. It is as if he has to get it all out, and quick, before the fat lady sings or the shit hits the fan.

Highly Recommended.

Doug Holder/Ibbetson Update

Broken Promises, Broken Dreams:Stories of Jewish & PalestinianTrauma and Resilience

Broken Promises, Broken Dreams:
Stories of Jewish & Palestinian
Trauma and Resilience
By Alice Rothchild
Pluto Press
238 pages/

By Thomas Gagnon

In what is clearly a labor of love, Dr. Alice Rothchild brings amazing clarity to the long-standing Israeli-Palestinian conflict (most of the time; periodically, it stops making sense). Not only does she clarify a conflict that usually defies clarification, but she describes it from a new angle, of the feminist physician. She achieves all this with a fiction writer’s focus on specifics: specific people and their stories, quotes and scenes, sometimes involving herself. She also writes helpful overviews of the situation in Israel and her method of examination.

Meanwhile, although Rothchild is Jewish, she does not have a pro-Israeli bias. Sometimes, it seems that she has a guilt-induced pro-Palestinian bias, but that is not the case, either. She does have a feminist bias, translating to “dove” rather than “hawk,” but she presents this without expecting or demanding us to share it. Above all, Rothchild is presenting valuable information—do what you will with it.

At the outset, Rothchild writes emphatically about major events that I’ve been only vaguely aware of, for instance, “Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza since the 1967 war.” (16) She calls it “military occupation,” not “disputed territories,” as Israel does. She is clarifying that this is not a conflict, or dispute, between political equals, but a horrible vicious cycle perpetuated by master (fearful Israel) and slave (desperate Palestinians) demolishing each other. In short, the occupation is creating war. Ending the occupation is the beginning of peace. She is not alone. On the contrary, she writes, “I have learned from Israeli peace activists that there are inspiring ways to frame this ongoing conflict. In the words of Jeff Halper, “I am on the ‘side’ of Israelis and Palestinians who seek a just peace that addresses Palestinian rights of self-determination as well as Israeli concerns of security and regional integration…”(20)—versus Israelis and Palestinians operating within the “box” of the occupation.

Although not primarily focused on women’s rights, Rothchild is obviously coming from a feminist angle. She works with several human rights organizations, “to bear witness to voices that are rarely heard…” (19-20). Bearing witness to rarely heard voices is a very feminist activity (I wonder why). Rothchild begins her activist/sociologist journey in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, by meeting with a woman who is in her late sixties and not economically or politically powerful. The feminist plot thickens. This woman, Dr. Ruchama Morton, speaks of the First Intifada, the Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation in 1987. Specifically, she speaks of the shockingly unsanitary conditions of a hospital in Gaza, prompting protests by an association of Israeli and Palestinian physicians, which evolved into Physicians for Human Rights—Israel (PHR-I). She talks about the separation wall between Israelis and Palestinians as a kind of splitting, that allows “the ZIC (Zionist Israeli Collective) self not to see itself as aggressive, violent, cruel, possessive…by projecting all these traits on the Palestinians beyond the Wall.” (39) This is a crucial, memorable insight.

The specificity of Dr. Ruchama Morton’s experiences and opinions, recorded into a story, is an effective way to shed light on a dark cave of ever-potential sabotage. Many people and their narratives come after Ruchama, also shedding light on darkness. Gila Svirsky speaks of Women in Black, an Israeli movement to end the occupation. Rabbi Levi Weiman-Kelman speaks of political confusion in Israel resulting in “a right-wing party pushing a [left-wing] peace plan that pretty much speaks to the needs of the big center in Israel.” (95) Dr. Allam Jarrar recounts the story of a frightening and politically charged conflict at a checkpoint. Dr. Muntaha Hamarsheh demonstrates the challenges of managing a maternity home in the West Bank. These are only a few.

Along the way, Rothchild describes herself in the midst of disturbing scenes, for instance, her paranoia on a bus to Jerusalem. She recalls that “…half of the bus riders are soldiers, late teens, early twenties, men and women in military uniform with their automatic rifles leaning between their legs…I have never been this close to so many weapons in my life.” (86)

Are there irritating moments in Broken Promises, Broken Dreams? Yes, such as rhetorical questions with incredibly obvious answers. Is this a major flaw? No, of course not. Therefore, find your way to the Book of Alice! Read, learn, enjoy!

Thomas Gagnon/Ibbetson Update/ April 2008/Somerville, Mass.

Somerville Philosopher Ajume H. Wingo Examines What’s Behind The ‘Veil’?

Somerville Philosopher Ajume H. Wingo Examines What’s Behind The ‘Veil’?

For a year or so Ajume H. Wingo and I sat across from each other at the Sherman Café in Union Square. We would nod politely to each other and then resumed our respective reading. We never really talked. Of course I wondered about this tall, and distinguished African man who seemed to have a scholarly bent. But as fate had it, on a rainy April evening we found ourselves walking together just outside Harvard Yard and started to chew the fat. A few days later we met at Sherman’s to converse some more. Wingo is an associate professor of Philosophy at U/Mass Boston, a Senior Fellow at the McCormack Graduate School of Public Policy for Democracy and Development, and also a Fellow at Harvard’s Du Bois Institute. He is the author “Veil Politics in Liberal Democratic States” His book describes how politics in the Western World relies heavily upon the veils of icons and symbols, and how they are potent conduits for political ideology. Wingo is interested in the idea of freedom as it is thought to be by Africans. Africans have for many years been the subject of control from outside forces, such as: colonial masters, home grown tyrants, etc… This professor wants to examine what political power and freedom is and could be for Africans.

Ajume, who recently purchased a house in the Prospect Hill section of Somerville, is a native of Cameroon. He came to this country years ago to obtain an advanced education. He received his Doctorate in Philosophy for the University of Wisconsin/Madison in 1997.

Wingo loves teaching at U/Mass because of its body of diverse students, minorities, foreign students, and first generation students. Wingo smiled and said, “It teases my mind.” He feels it is a wonderful laboratory for his ideas about cultural connection and influence.

Wingo told me that when he was in Africa he was always fascinated by the United States and how its democracy worked so well. He thought the government was transparent and rational. But he came to realize that the government displayed non-rational elements like his native Africa, with icons such as: Lincoln, the White House, etc… that were used in an effective way to convey ideology.

Wingo is convinced the arts, particurally poetry is a very potent force to instill ideology in the populace. He said: “Just read the Koran, it is full of poetry. Even Sadam Hussein wrote poetry, even if it was pretty bad.” Wingo pointed out that Hitler was a brilliant manipulator and cultivated artistic images to promote his campaign of evil.

Wingo, a transplant from Cambridge finds Somerville a perfect place to hang his hat. He loves the American Flag that waves atop Prospect Hill…( well; of course, it is a symbol, an icon, no?) He loves the converted churches, the relatively subdued atmosphere of Somerville in contrast to a more raucous Cambridge or Boston.

Wingo, in spite of a busy schedule hangs out at Sherman, where his cousin works baking a delectable selection of scones and such.

He told me that he is often up in the wee hours writing, and is working on another book “The Citizen of Africa.” The book explains how to maintain a responsive government in African states.

Wingo, like most Renaissance men, has varied interests, and plans to delve deeper into the medium of poetry. One can only assume that this inquisitive man will report back with unique insights about the art.

The Endicott Review Vol.25, #1, Spring, 2008.

The Endicott Review Vol.25, #1, Spring, 2008.
Editorial Board Dan Sklar, Noga Ambar, Janet Calcaterra, etc.
Faculty Editor: Ruth Henderson, 88 pp.
Endicot College, Beverly, Massachusetts 01915



Not one of those suffer-while-you-read quarterlies, The Endicott Review is mainly nicely impacting snippets of REALITY: “ The summer of ‘72 / My father’s last garden/These flowers burgeoned/In bright oranges and yellows.../I could see him creating his own genetic planning/Masterminding new vegative forms/And the vines and shoots would have/Swallowed up the house in the middle/Surrounded by ideas and green/Much like I imagine his Eden is/That is returned to him now....” (Betsy Retallack,“Nasturtiums,” p.37). And Betsy Retallack is typical of the contributors, a music teacher in Beverly, Mass by day, a poet by night.

No mind-boggling cryptograms here. Get ready for meditations on real REALITY: “The first autumn chill is here,/ Though a hint of summer still lingers in the air.../ Long shadows in early afternoon,/Remind me of how fast the summer went by.,// It’s a good bye day to summer,/And a gentle greeting to autumn’s first cool couch.” (Jim Mulholland, “A Good Bye Day to Summer,” p. 43).
The prose is very similar too, almost impossible to distinguish between personal tale-telling essay and fiction:
All this happened, more or less. The world has changed
quite a bit since the events of this story, and so to you
this may seem untrue, but this is my story, and this is
how I’m telling it.
One day, one single day, changed history forever.....

(“Isolation” by Joseph Stucker,pp. 15-16)

Every piece in this issue drags you on to read more....more....more....

A refreshing change from enigmatic windowless work elsewhere.
And just in case you start to get bored with words, there are a number of splendid color photos by Johnny Bonacci, Andrea Marchosky, Carolina Bara, etc.
One little critique. There should be a more specific street address and subscription cost somewhere in the magazine. For individual subscribers and libraries that want to keep abreast of the vivacity of The Now !

Hugh Fox/ Ibbetson Update/April 2008

* Hugh Fox is a founding member of the Pushcart Prize. He is a regular reviewer for the Small Press Review.

Hard Blessings by Patrick Carrington

Hard Blessings
Patrick Carrington

Main Street Rag
P.O. Box 690100
Charlotte, N.C. 28227
ISBN 13:978-1-59948-115-9
$10.00

Carrington’s story poems my not resemble our story,
but it is certain, the reader will relate to some of
the poems in Hard Blessings. His unique definite
lines, the sudden stop from end to beginning;

“that most unexplainable thing

to me, to be magical enough
to raise her hands and lead me,
like Moses through water”

The sassy voice, a voice which defies the usual pin to
black velvet board; his voice flies over, around,
straight up, straight down. we land on solid ground
and just when we think it is time to rest we find
words blowing, pushing toward a perceived truth,

“…where you see yourself
in window of every dead end,
among the Maytag’s and moderate dresses,
and let’s say, for the sake of consumers,
you need more bang for your buck,…”

Patrick Carrington takes us on his ride, the chrome
spokes on his Hudson, the ignition start with love,
“you have woven them onto the map of your body like
silk.” we trace the highway, “this moving from nowhere
to nowhere else makes that person hard to keep…” this
persistent look out the back curve, glass. the speed
it takes, the destination, and all the pull over rest
stops, all anticipation, the relief, the refills, the
restless stretches, all the stuff packed in the trunk;
the poems carry us, “the sound of your spirit
crunching like saltines,” and I wonder who is driving?
the proverbial parents, or society, or ”the toes that
creep to the edge with cheap perfume of salvation in
their nostrils…”

Irene Koronas
Poetry Editor, Wilderness House Literary Review
www.whlreview.com
reviewer, Ibbetison Street Press

Somerville Poet Ifeanyi Menkiti Hosts Poet Aeronwy Thomas: Dylan Thomas’ Daughter

Dylan Thomas



Aeronwy Thomas


Somerville Poet Ifeanyi Menkiti Hosts Poet Aeronwy Thomas: Dylan Thomas’ Daughter

I found myself on a cool evening in April walking to Dunkin Donuts in Harvard Square with Aeronwy Thomas, daughter of the late great Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. Aeronwy Thomas, a well-regarded educator and poet in her own right, is on a national tour talking about her father Dylan, who wrote some of the most revered verse in the 20th Century, as well as a critically acclaimed play “Under Milk Wood.”

Somerville resident, Wellesley College professor, and owner of the famed Grolier Poetry Book Shop, Ifeanyi Menkiti hosted a reading with Aeronwy Thomas, her husband Trevor Ellis, and Peter Thabit Jones, a respected Welsh poet and editor of the Seventh Quarry Magazine Magazine. I asked Menkiti why he decided to host this event organized by publisher Stanley Barkan of Cross - Cultural Communications. Menkiti said:” I Love Dylan Thomas’
sense of community. His work releases a poetic impulse across the world. It travels across borders. In the publication “Wellesley Week” Menkiti adds: “ Whether one reads his poems alone, by oneself, or hears them read aloud by him or others, or perhaps hears read aloud the captivating words of “ A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” one always comes away with a sense of ineffable magic in the air—a sense that words are potent things.”

Dylan Thomas (who died at 39 in 1953) first gained significant praise for his poetry collection: “ 18 Poems” He is also well-known for his poem to his dying father “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” as well as many other works. He died in New York City at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village from suspected chronic alcohol poisoning.

Thomas’ Daughter Aeronwy first read the poems of her famous father 20 years after his death in 1973. She was sheltered from his “wild public” lifestyle. Now she is the midst of a whirlwind national tour: “Dylan Thomas Tribute,” where she and Jones read from Thomas’ poetry, their own poetry, and discuss Thomas’ body of work and his life.

The evening started out on Plympton Street in Harvard Square at the Grolier, but the actual reading took place at Harvard’s Adams House several doors down the block. In addition to the reading by Jones and Thomas, Tino Villanueva, Aldo Tambellini, Kristine Doll, Pavel Grushko, and Aled Llion Jones read translations of Dylan Thomas’ work.

Jones' read a poem of his own during the evening that concerned of all things: a rat: (Rats do make appearences in Dylan's work as well.)

“Rats swam the canal of my childhood fears…/ a rat’s meal is my thought/ it eats in my sleep.”

Aeronwy Thomas read her own poem that harked back to her childhood memories of the great poet titled: “Later Than Laugharne:”

“…The memories race back—
… And the thrill of peeping through
the keyhole (I was always the most naughty)
to see my father writing his poems about
gulls, hills, cormorants on estuaries
which he saw through his wide-vista window,
as he sat, bent, writing in crabbed letters,
pressing against the hard surface of the
kitchen table that was his desk…”


Aeronwy’s husband Trevor sang traditional Welsh folksongs that were a welcomed addition to the reading.

After the event I managed to interview Thomas about her late father. As for Dylan Thomas’ ill-fated love affair with alcohol, Aeronwy said his trips to the United States did him no good. When he was in his native Wales he was surrounded by family and friends and drank the weak beer of the local pubs. He wrote in his “shed” every day. In the United States he was offered hard liquor like whiskey and Martinis, etc… He was unmoored, away from home and structure, and this lead to his downfall.

As far as Bob Dylan, who lifted Dylan Thomas’ first name for his last, Aeronwy Thomas admires his song lyrics. But she did say that Bob Dylan did admit to lifting Thomas’ name, but now he states that he has done more for Thomas than Thomas did for him.

I asked Thomas about the movie adaptation of “Under Milk Wood” that starred Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. She said that she was grateful someone made a movie of her father’s play. She feels Burton was a classic narrator. She did have some reservations about what she characterized as “additions” to the work, but overall she was happy with the movie.

The evening ended with a small wine and cheese buffet. Thomas signed books and was surrounded by admirers and well wishers. After this long evening no one would blame Aeronwy Thomas if she did “go gently into that good night” to get a well-earned sleep.

DO NOT GO GENTLE INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

_-- Dylan Thomas

RIFT. Barbara Helfgott Hyett

RIFT. Barbara Helfgott Hyett (The University of Arkansas Press Fayetteville 2008) $16.

W. C. Fields once said, “ Marriage is a great institution but I’m not ready to be institutionalized.” One of the main themes in “Rift,” an accomplished poetry collection by Barbara Helfgott Hyett is the breakup of her long marriage. And indeed, after I have personally witnessed the many long honeymoons, and their bitter ends, I think Fields may just have a point. Hyett often uses striking imagery to paint her pain in bold strokes, and to chronicle her despair.

In the poem “Vacation” her husband’s gaping emotional void and monumental neediness mark what is inevitably down the road:

"You don’t worship me," he says,
eyes on the marsh, arms stretched
on the table before him. "I love you,"
she answers behind him, her palm brushing
his hair. "I want to be adored," he says.
She kisses the top of his head lightly.
I love you, and now she is stroking
his shoulder, This very shoulder. This hair.
It is late afternoon. The beach still clings
to her thighs.

And in “Considering Killing Him Instead” a woman scorned has been revealed with full sound and fury:

Considering Killing Him Instead

Something simple: a hammer.
One whack. A kitchen knife,
serrated. A kitchen match,
kerosene from the orange can
in the garage. The garden hose.
The garden itself. Those tubers
could do it if she trained them.
The fence post if she could tear it
from its mooring. A sidewalk
square, in pieces—too complex.
Then teeth that grind. Hands—
nothing to mediate that blow.

There are many other subjects that Hyett tackles with equal passion and skill. Richard Hoffman, author of "Half the House" and "Gold Star Road" writes of Hyett's work:

" Barbara Helfgott Hyett's "Rift" is a book born of acute psychic necessity and there is not a trifle or bauble in it... Faced with the annihilation of the life she has known, Helfgott Hyett employs her imagination, her learning, and her poetic virtuosity to search among biblical and mythic narratives, artic expeditions, memories, meteor showers, classical and romantic art, and history for a way forward. This book, is that way, a profund gift to all of us. The title sequence is itself a major work, a rich, polyvocal, unflinching vision of the world we live in now."

Highly Recommended.


Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update



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

Richard Hoffman: Poet and Memoirist writes from a traumatic past.

Richard Hoffman: Poet and Memoirist writes from a traumatic past.

Richard Hoffman is the Writer-in Residence at Emerson College. For a man who has experienced years of trauma during his hardscrabble past he seems remarkably together. He has a professorial manner, and seems to be comfortable in his own skin. Hoffman is the author of “Half the House: A Memoir,” that deals with his early years as a victim of child abuse. It tells of a 10 year old’s sexual abuse at the hands of a trusted baseball coach. The book was responsible for the man’s eventual arrest, and it reached a mother lode of boys and men who suffered past abuse in a tortured silence.

Hoffman’s poetry has appeared in many prestigious journals such as the: Painted Bride Quarterly, Cedar Hill Review, Janus Head, Barrow Street, etc… His most recent collection of poetry is “Gold Star Road.” I talked with him on my Somerville Community Access TV program “ Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.”


Doug Holder: In your memoir “Half the House…” you inscribed in my personal copy a quote from Camus: “Freedom is the right not to lie.” Before you wrote your memoir were you lying to yourself about the past, and with the memoir’s writing are you now free?

Richard Hoffman: I don’t think anyone is ever free from trauma. I don’t think it is a question of catharsis. I think it is a question of integrating what can’t otherwise be integrated. The part of you connected to the trauma, that is. When you don’t have access to that you are not whole. To be whole you need to integrate. One way people have done this is through “story.” When you make it part of a narrative you own it. You see it in relation to all the other events in your life. You don’t make this up, or lie, why would you? It is part of your history.

DH: But you can deny certain memories, no?

RH: Yes, and society colludes with that; in that denial. This sort of “unwelcome knowledge” can be very threatening to the status quo. So I am free of this.

DH: Isn’t memory fickle? Does your poetic sensibility color your memoir?

RH: Well a lot of people have talked about the poetic qualities of the book. I think what they mean is the use of imagery, and that it is written for the ear. You are being told a story. And I am also a fiction writer. The writing is restrained. That’s part of its lyrical quality. Isaac Babel said: " There is nothing quite so heartbreaking as a period exactly in the right place.” So the writing comes out straight forward in terms of being immediately accessible. This is to make you one with the event—not focused on the writing. It is a hellu’va lot of work to do.

DH: You confronted your elderly father about his own abuse of you, and his negligence around your abuse by a baseball coach. Was this closure for you? Did you ever feel it was overkill to bring this up with your Dad at this point in the game?

RH: Yes, I felt it was necessary to bring it up. If I was going to have a relationship with him that was real I needed to. I remember when my mother died; I thought that she didn’t really know me. By the time I was eleven I was pressured to be someone I thought they needed me to be. I kept all my trauma to myself. I didn’t want to burden them with it.

I grew up in a family with two terminally ill kids. My parents were overwhelmed. So when my mother died I thought I would be burying my father one day without even knowing each other.

My father and I had a relationship but it was very cartoonish. It was “ Hey, how about those Red Sox?” So I wanted to make the first step to break through. Writing should be the axe to crack the frozen sea within us. There was certainly a frozen sea there.

DH: So did this confrontation work?

RH: The proof is in the pudding. My father is ill now. We are in touch constantly. We have been in touch for a while and we are able to talk about anything. Before all this we were able to talk about nothing. We were literally frozen in a father/son cartoon.

DH: Has there been a marked change in you?

RH: The change happened before the book. It’s not like you tell the story and it’s ok. I was involved with this project for 17 years.
DH: In your poetry collection “Gold Star Road” there is a poem titled “Humility” where it implies the writer’s vision is always impaired or encumbered to a certain degree.

RH: Yes. I think it is always encumbered. I think that is a good word for it. If you write I hope you believe the words matter. But you know—90% of the thinking that’s going on in your head isn’t even yours. It’s Pop Culture. It is really hard to get to what’s really yours. When you do, well, then you really have written something. It all comes together. You like the way it sounds—still, you are not quite if you believe it. That’s why you have to sit with it. Encumbered? Yes. I want to be sure about what I am saying.

DH: Do you revise a lot?

RH: Continually. For years sometimes. I say when I am writing, and finish the first draft: “ This is a real poem but it is not right just yet.”

DH: Are there poets you know who didn’t revise much?

RH: Ginsberg claims he didn’t revise much. Creeley didn’t. He wrote at a snail’s pace, and literally carved his poems out.

DH: Do you believe poetry should be able to cross over from the academy to outside the gate? Has their been too little exchange?

RH: There are academics that view poetry as fodder for theory. It should be more than that.

DH: You have had problems with alcohol. Many younger viewers look at substance abuse as a romantic part of the writing life. Your take?

RH: I hear a lot of that. It’s fine. I can’t do it.

DH: Do you think it helps creativity?

RH No. Not at all. Drinking in a sense helps you be a partial person. It quieted that part of me, the demons, so I could write. I would pour a little booze on them and they would go away. But I couldn’t write the whole story at the heart of my life.

WELCOME

They speak an appropriate language here.
Listen to them sometime.

There are never gnats in the evening. No matter.
No one here knows what that means.

The people pretend to believe the man pretending
he is blind is blind and give him money.

Handbills advertise classes in breathing,
cheaper than all their competitors.

Bacon has happy pigs on the wrapper,
smiling under the red star.

And a man with toenail-yellow teeth
greets new arrivals, hands them a brochure

that's been carefully written, carefully photographed,
lovingly put together just for them

-- Richard Hoffman

Grolier Poetry Book Shop and Poetry Month

( 6 Plympton Street--Harvard Square)


Well on this crisp morning in April, Poetry Month, I stopped by the Grolier Poetry Book Shop, on Plympton Street in Harvard Square. I spoke to my friend Dan Wuenschel, the manager of the store. I asked Dan what he recommends:

Here it is:

TRANSLATIONS

Eternal Enemies by Adam Zagajewski
Selected Sonnets by Louis de Camoes
The Complete Fables of Jean de La Fontaine by Norman R. Shapiro


And I bought a copy on Dan’s recommendation of Somerville poet David Blair’s collection "Ascension Days". Dan tells me he teaches at the Art Institue in Boston, along with another Somerville poet of my acquaintance Tanya Larkin.

Dan also directed me to “Girly Man” by Charles Bernstien ,and "Kingdom of Ordinary Time" by Marie Howe.

I asked Dan to give me an off-the-cuff quote for poetry month. He quoted Zagajewski:

“ Poetry searches for radiance. Poetry is the kingly road that leads us farthest.”

Oh, and Dan told me Jorie Grahm and Taha Muhhamad Ali stopped by the store this week— so why not you for crying out loud?! …Tell Dan Doug Holder sent you!

Oh and don't forget, next Tuesday April 15 ( according to my friend poet and B.U. professor Tino Villanueva) the Dylan Thomas Tribute Tour stops at the Grolier 7PM.

"The tour features Aeronwy Thomas, daughter of Dylan Thomas, answering questions about her father and reading his poems and original poems of her own."

Ibbetson Update/ April 2008