TWO NEW POETRY COLLECTION RELEASED FROM SOMERVILLE’S CERVENA BARVA PRESS

TWO NEW POETRY COLLECTION RELEASED FROM SOMERVILLE’S CERVENA BARVA PRESS

Almost every time I see Gloria Mindock at our Bagel Bards literary group in Davis Square, Somerville, Mass., she lays yet another published collection from her prolific Cervena Barva Press on me. And more often than not the collections are first rate and make for compelling reads. Her latest two releases are by local poet Chad Parenteau and
NYC poet Larissa Shmailo, who also happens to be the public coordinator for the acclaimed poetry journal “Fulcrum,” based in Cambridge, Mass.

Parenteau is the founder of the online journal “Spoonful,” and the host for the venerable “Stone Soup Poets” reading series in Cambridge, Mass. Parenteau has written an engaging and quirky collection “Discarded: Poems For My Apartment.” This book speaks to all of us denizens, past or present, of inner city apartments. Parenteau, a long-time resident of South Boston and now Jamaica Plain, has been there and done that. You will recognize yourself in these ironic and humorous poems. In “Rat Poem,” the poet wonders if an unwanted roommate, a Norway rat, abruptly left his Southie apartment for an abode in the tony Back Bay environs of the city:

“Maybe the rat left before that,
had saved enough for a flower bed
outside the Prudential Center
where, after nights of waiting tables,
I’d see other rats lounge openly,
Stare at them until they stared back
Like I was another tourist.”

Parenteau is the Bard of the cold water flat, the one-room walkup, the gone-to-seed or always seedy neighborhoods in our neck of the ‘hood.

In a “Cure for Suicide” by Larissa Shmailo, Shmailo writes (as the founder of Fulcrum Magazine Philip Nikolayev points out in his introduction) as if she is …” constitutionally predestined to sing out her lines…her eyes filled with life and love, pain and death, freedom and coercion, the real of the mind and the imagined of the heart.” In the poem “Dancing with the Devil,” the poet sings about the need to throw caution to the wind and trip the light fantastic with the Devil:

“They say if you flirt with death,
you’re going to get a date;
But I don’t mind—the music’s fine,
And I love dancing with someone who can really lead.”

Shmailo put herself in the deceptive calmness of the eye of a hurricane, asks us to tell her what makes us tic, and takes us on the Harlem River Line, like the “Duke” took us on the “A” train. In a sea of mimics this poet is an original voice.

To order go to http://cervenabarvapress.com

Or send $7 to Gloria Mindock Cervena Barva Press POBOX 440357 W. Somerville, Ma. 02144

Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update/ May 2008

Way Opens: A Spiritual Journey. Patricia Wild.

Way Opens: A Spiritual Journey. Patricia Wild. (Warwick House Publishers 72 Court St. Lynchburg, Virginia 24504) $15.

Some people live with blinders on. They are afflicted with tunnel vision. They block out the light of the plight of others and are members of the cult of “me” or their immediate circle of friends and family. Now these are not necessarily bad people. It is hard enough to keep one’s own head above water in these troubled times. And, if one is living in the envious environs of middleclass White America, then it is easy to be blinded to what’s happening behind their sheltered gates.

Well, Somerville journalist, novelist and playwright Patricia Wild to some extent, counted herself among these people. But for years something bothered her, nagged her, and goaded her. She wondered what happened to two African American who desegregated her high school in Lynchburg, Virginia in 1962. Wild, spurred on by her questioning nature and the activism of her Quaker faith found these two people: Dr. Lynda Woodruff (a college professor) and the Rev. Owen Cardwell, a Baptist preacher. Wild takes a good hard look at not only these people, their trials and travails, but also takes an unflinching critical look at herself.

Wild starts the book off with a posh family vacation in the isle of Jamaica. This effectively sets the tone of the book; lighting up the large divide between Black and White. Here Wild thinks about the inequity while being served a gourmet meal by ironically “white”-uniformed Jamaicans bustling in the kitchen:

“ I remembered that White men and women eat and laugh, lit by soft candlelight, while dark-skinned people cook White people’s food and serve them wine. …I remembered that every day, faceless and nameless dark-skinned people labor for me and my family, as dark-skinned people have been doing for generations.”

Wild did the hard work of research, tracking people down, the flights back and forth from Lynchburg to Boston, and the endless interviews. She examines the incredible pressure on these two young people in 1962, who were labeled with the kudos;” You’re a credit to your race.” Imagine, if you will, Woodruff and Cardwell, as two young, green sapling, adolescents integrating an all White high school. Woodruff tells Wild:

“ “My whole race was being judged by my success or failure. That’s too much of a burden for anybody.”

Wild explores the grating texture of life for these kids: the taunts from their White peers, the angry indifference of their teachers, and throws a metaphorical Molotov Cocktail at the notion of Southern gentility.

What really surprised me was the resentment that Woodruff and others felt towards certain aspects of Martin Luther King. In some respects they felt manipulated by King, and coerced to be less than honest about the difficulties they endured. Woodruff says:

“We were trained, we were dictated to. “We were told, “ You will not respond, if the media asks you anything, it’s ‘No comment or everything is fine,’ and we did exactly that. Whenever we were asked by anybody how things went, the answer according to Martin Luther King was: ‘Everything went well. It is fine.’”

Years later the approach had its repercussions. Woodruff explains:

“That was published in the media. And twenty years later, the idiots who are now leaders instead of asking either one of us, as if we were dead, for the truth, they read the paper and were known to take national stands, and be on television, discussing civil rights and the desegregation of the schools, and how wonderful and nonviolent it was. They didn’t ask me if it was nonviolent.”

In the process of her research and travels, Wild had to confront herself. She had to put the breaks on her own ego, her impatience, her need to insert herself in the story to the detriment of the true story she was after. In this book Wild is not afraid to expose her own warts, which gives this accomplished memoir an air of authenticity. In this passage of enlightened self-criticism Wild questions the hunger of her own agenda when she encounters unexpected resistance from Woodruff around an interview:

“Did I try to understand why this handsome woman was so incredibly busy? Did I wonder what kind of experiences Lynda Woodruff might have had in the past with writers and journalists?

Wild, to use a cliché, comes away from all of this as a “better person” She realized she had to confront the complacency of her past, and her comfortable and privileged background that excluded African Americans. This whole process spurred Wild on to new heights of activism back home, and perhaps, and I am sure this is her hope, that it will lead you, dear reader, down a new road.

SOMERVILLE POET AFAA MICHAEL WEAVER WINS PUSHCART PRIZE IN POETRY

SOMERVILLE POET AFAA MICHAEL WEAVER WINS PUSHCART PRIZE IN POETRY


( Somerville, Mass.)

Somerville poet, Simmons College English Professor (Boston), Afaa Michael Weaver has won the prestigious small press literary award the “Pushcart Prize” for his poem “American Income,” which was included in his collection “The Plum Flower Dance,” ( University of Pittsburgh Press.) and also has appeared in POETRY magazine. Weaver has several collections under his belt, and has been widely published in such magazines as HANGING LOOSE, AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW, etc… Weaver is also a member of the Somerville-based literary organization “The Bagel Bards,” and was recently published in the independent Somerville literary journal “Ibbetson Street.” He was the featured poet in a recent issue of POETS AND WRITERS magazine, and was declared the Poet Laureate in his native Baltimore, among his many accomplishments. Weaver will be awarded the "Ibbetson Street Press Lifetime Achievement Award" on Nov, 22 2008 at The Somerville News Writers Festival. http://www.somervillenewswritersfestival.com


*The Pushcart Prize is a prestigious American literary prize by Pushcart Press that honors the best "poetry, short fiction, essays or literary whatnot" published in the small presses over the previous year. Magazine and small book press editors are invited to nominate up to 6 works they have featured. Anthologies of the selected works have been published annually since 1976.
Among the writers who received early recognition in Pushcart Prize Anthologies were: Raymond Carver, Tim O'Brien, Rick Bass, Charles Baxter, Andre Dubus, Mona Simpson, Seán Mac Falls, Joshua Clover, Paul Muldoon, Bruce Boston, Kathy Acker, William Monahan, and Peter Orner

Collins, Stern and Holder to be on U/Mass Small Press Panel

Martha Collins,( Field Magazine) Doug Holder (Ibbetson Street Press), Bert Stern (Off the Grid Press) TO BE ON SMALL PRESS PANEL / U/MASS BOSTON. June 23, 2008.











For the second year in a row I have been asked to be on the Small Press Panel workshop at the University of Mass. William Joiner Writers' Workshop this summer. I was a student from 2000 to 2001 and enjoyed every minute of it. For more information about the workshop go to:




Contact: T. Michael Sullivan May, 2008

Phone: 617-287-5850

e-mail: michael.sullivan@umb.edu


21st Writers’ Workshop planned for UMass Boston


The 21st annual Summer Writers’ Workshop at the University of Massachusetts Boston will be held June 16-27. Sponsored by the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences with the university’s Creative Writing Program, the workshop offers instruction in poetry, fiction and prose non-fiction over the course of two weeks. A section on memoir writing will also be offered in 2008.

In addition to the writing sessions, a series of panels, master classes, symposia and special workshops complement the program. Two-week and one-week sessions are offered to participants. Writing on all topics is welcome, although themes of war and its consequences and issues of political violence and social justice permeate the program. This year special tribute is being paid to Grace Paley.

The faculty is diverse and notable. This year’s faculty includes: poets Afaa Michael Weaver, Fred Marchant, and Bruce Weigl; novelists Larry Heinemann and Demetria Martinez; and Lady Borton instructing prose nonfiction. Doug Anderson will offer a memoir section. Among the visiting writers are Martin Espada and Carolyn Forche. For more information e-mail Michael Sullivan at michael.sullivan@umb.edu or call 617-287-5850.

Tuition for the workshop is $400 for two weeks and $220 for the one-week track. To apply, interested writers should send a letter of interest, current and appropriate writing samples and a $25 deposit payable to the William Joiner Center to: Michael Sullivan, William Joiner Center, UMass Boston, 100 Morrissey Blvd., Boston MA 02125. Apply on-line at www.joinercenter.umb.edu.

POET MARIAN KAPLUN SHAPIRO IS A PLAYER IN A DREAM

POET MARIAN KAPLUN SHAPIRO IS A PLAYER IN A DREAM

Did you ever wonder where dreams end and real life begins? Well, this equation is no problem for Marian Kaplun Shapiro, the author of the poetry collection: “Players in the Dream, Dreamers in the Play.” (Finishing Line Press 2007) Her poems flow effortlessly from dreams to real life from the tip of her worn pen.

Shapiro, who was born in the Bronx, NY in 1939, and has a Masters and Doctorate from Harvard University, was guest on my Somerville Community Access TV Show: “Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer”

The Bronx, according to Shapiro, was unlike our promised land of Somerville. Shapiro grew up in a large housing project that was conventional, stifling; and left little room for the imagination or creativity. The cosmopolitan atmosphere of Manhattan across the river was a welcomed escape for this young Bronx provincial.

Years later after leaving the Bronx, and heading to New England to Harvard, Shapiro became a practicing psychotherapist. She feels poetry and psychotherapy come from the same source. Shapiro reflected: “I pay a lot of attention to words—in my profession I have to listen closely to what people say.” In fact at Harvard Shapiro wrote her thesis that concerned short syllable words, and how they are infused with a great deal of emotional content. As Shapiro said “ The shorter the words the more feeling involved.” She continued: “ I think psychology and poetry connect with the primary part of one’s self.”

This poet describes herself as a Jewish Quaker. I asked about this unconventional combination. Shapiro smiled “ I never thought of Judaism as a religion. It was more of a culture to me. I call myself a Jewish Quaker because I don’t want anyone to think I was avoiding revealing my Jewish background.”

Growing up Jewish wasn’t a negative thing for Shapiro, it was, as she puts it “irrelevant” Sexism was a given in the religious life, and there was strong sentiment against interracial dating. “ I found these attitudes repulsive,” she said. She disliked all the talk about finding a nice “Jewish Boy”, and the negativism surrounding having a Puerto Rican boyfriend for instance.

Shapiro has only really started to publish her work in the last six or seven years. It just never occurred to her. One day she opened a now defunct journal “Sacred Fire,” and decided to submit her work. She was published and then it was off to the races.

In her collection “Players in the Dream…” she combines “actual” events with dreams. “Dreams and real life are highly integrated for me,” Shapiro said. While a Schizophrenic can’t differentiate between a dream and reality, Shapiro has no such trouble. But she definitely feels the overlap.

With all the talk of dreams I asked Shapiro if she was a Freudian or perhaps a Jungian. She smiled, and with her tongue firmly in her cheek, she replied, “I am a Marian.” And indeed she is.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

NAMING


Apple! He tastes the syllables
again, hearing red, green,
smelling sweet with sweet white juice.
Wordless, his one-year-old fingers
punctuate the air, towards
the refrigerator. Hah!
(There! In there!)



Wanderers in the Museum of
Antiquities we find ourselves attended
by the ancient Buddhas of Tibet,
by way of China. Gazing down they watch
kindly over us, the unenlightened.
We are tutored by the bodhisattvas,
humble heroes whose names we can't pronounce.
Gladly they waited here on earth, postponing
Nirvana for the sake of those who needed
them. For us. Patience beyond patience.
Blessing beyond blessing. Names beyond names.

In the beginning was the Word

And the Word,

infinite unspoken unspeakable
rises,
rises,
a transparent
helium
balloon
a
coda of
ethereal
echoes
just out of reach
disappearing

like fog at sunrise.
Truth?
or mirage?

Alpha Slugger Before the Big Time: When Boston Still Had the Babe, the new book on the World Champion 1918 Red Sox Edited by Bill Nowlin

Alpha Slugger Before the Big Time: When Boston Still Had the Babe,
the new book on the World Champion 1918 Red Sox


Edited by Bill Nowlin
Associate Editors: Mark Armour, Len Levin & Allan Wood
Rounder Books Burlington, MA
visit www.rounderbooks.com




Review By Michael Todd Steffen


When we picture Babe Ruth it’s usually from one of the old newsreel clips of the great slugger in a New York Yankee uniform holding a bat or trotting around the bases after hitting a homerun. Not all of us remember how differently the destined hall-of-famer appeared at the onset of his career, known primarily as a pitcher in a 4-day rotation and, not as a Yankee, but in a Boston Red Sox uniform. (Fewer go back as far as to know that Babe was a native of Baltimore.)

Great events make great people. In April of 1917 the United States entered the First World War, a national commitment that touched the lives of most Americans and of most American institutions, including Major League baseball.

Editor Bill Nowlin comments that by spring training of the following year, "Assembling a team was far more difficult than usual, given the number of players…either gone to service or likely to be called," in the new book When Boston Still Had the Babe: The 1918 World Champion Red Sox (Rounder Books, 2008). Associate editor Allan Wood notes, "of the eight regulars in Boston’s Opening Day lineup, only two were holdovers from the previous year."

Initially Red Sox manager Ed Barrow tried to compensate for the absence of top athletes by filling in with little-known players who got their brief chance:
Eusobio Gonzalez (seven plate appearances over three games),
Red Bluhm (one at-bat as a pinch hitter), George Cochran (.117
average), and Jack Stansbury (who slugged .149 in 20 games).

Though a pitcher Babe Ruth it was known could outhit the amateurs trying to find their confidence, and in May Ruth went into the daily lineup, to have his first season as the dynamo of baseball that would make him a legend. By that year’s close the statistics and his achievement were staggering. Almost all of the players who pitched and played the field in the early 1900s either had very short careers or their performances were unexceptional.
In contrast, Babe led both leagues in slugging average by a wide margin in 1918…
Ruth’s 2.22 ERA was eighth best in the AL…In the World Series, Ruth beat the Cubs in Games One and Four,setting a new World Series record of 29.2 consecutive scoreless
innings, a streak he began in 1916.

When Boston Still Had the Babe comes out at a good time, 90 years after the 1918 season, the year of Ruth’s rise to superstar status with an invitation he could not refuse (he was traded by Red Sox owner Harry Frazee) to go play for the New York Yankees the following year.

After the 2004 and 2007 World Series championships, Boston fans may have proven themselves at last beyond the famous curse of 1918 marking the Red Sox’ last twentieth century Major League title. If this was a curse from beyond the grave, as some fans believed, it lasted 86 years. To write about the phenomenon before the Sox had a chance to vindicate themselves may have been unthinkable. Today it is palatable and timely. The book is a gem for true Boston fans with an appreciation for the city’s and the team’s history and tradition.

It features not only the story of Babe Ruth’s incipient greatness and the challenges of holding the team together during the war, but includes ample background on each of the 32 players of that year’s team, a Day by Day of the 1918 season, and a detailed account of daily events of the 1918 World Series between the Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs.

There are even 2 ½ pages dedicated to Harvey "Red" Bluhm who only stepped up to the plate once that year as a pinch hitter on July 3rd. His at-bat was lost to official records for 44 years, only to be corrected in the November 17, 1962 issue of Sporting News by sportswriter Lee Allen, who soared to the muses for a complimentary verse:

There once was a player named Bluhm.
To pitchers he symbolized doom.
Record-keepers insist
He belongs on the list.
But just when did he play, and for whom?


Michael Todd Steffen/Ibbetson Update/Somerville, Mass.


contact: Jennifer Sacca at (617) 218-4503, email jsacca@rounder.com

Louisa Solano Corner in Cambridge, Mass.

FORMER GROLIER POETRY BOOK SHOP OWNER 'Louisa Solano' WILL HAVE CORNER NAMED AFTER HER AT CEREMONY JUNE 21





Louisa Solano sent me this letter about Louisa Solano corner in Cambridge, Mass:


Cambridge, Mass.








Dear Doug: Thank you: The ten minute ceremony will be on June 21st, 11AM, at the corner of Plympton and Bow Street. Ifeanyi Menkiti as my favorite Community Elder will give the blessing, Jim Henle who initiated the measure as well as having initiated the move for the creation of the Ellen La Forge Memorial Poetry Foundation will unveil the "Square" plaque, and I'll say a few words.

How do I feel? Very happy. When you consider that almost five decades of my life have been spent in and around that corner, I can't think of a better location. Being born in Cambridge, graduating from the public schools, and having a father on the faculty of Harvard, I feel that Plympton and Bow straddle the world of town and gown quite nicely. I attended Sunday School, Brownies, Girl Scouts at St.
Paul's, Club 47, Cafe Mozart, Cronin's, etc., in the community and met poets, critics, students, professors primarily working out of the universities in the Grolier from the 'fifties on. I was introduced to the Grolier by Jacqueline Springwater, the wife of a Harvard Graduate Student, whom I met when we both worked at the Cambridge Public Library. One of the major motivations in my life has always been to bridge the gap between the general community and the university.

Since poets have always been "outside the cave," it seemed perfectly natural that if both communities were exposed to a variety of poetry, they would be drawn away from their confines and a greater awareness of each other would follow. I'm not sure this was logical but it certainly set me on a mission. I'd like to think that this plaque suggests that to some degree I've succeeded.

Doug: It is kind of
crazy wonderful isn't it? Regards, Louisa


YES IT IS LOUISA!

Greatest Uncommon Denominator (2) – Review

Greatest Uncommon Denominator Issue 2 – Review ( http://www.gudmagazine.com)
By Caroline Hunter

Greatest Uncommon Denominator brings together a group of provocative, disorienting, imaginative and crafted pieces of writing with disconcerting confidence. Each piece offers its own dark twist upon reality with nuance and skill but questionable sanity. It carries the reader into a wild journey of surreal inquiry and exploration.

Some of the short stories stretch the imagination and bring it back to a concluding relief, such as “El Alejibre” by D. Richard Pearce. This story is a harmless trip into magical realism and self-reflection, and includes animated skeleton dolls and a shape-shifting cat. The characters are boldly drawn and the environment described in delightfully peculiar detail. It leaves the reader with a feeling of incredulous amusement.

Other short stories take one on a trip to stranger and stranger metaphysical destinations, only to dump him/her in a state of mind similar to what I would imagine LSD might induce. Such a one was “The Salivary Reflex” by Tina Connelly. Its portrait of the main character, a woman who has a fixation with licking, is interesting in its intricacy; Alison describes her husband as tasting like “dust and dry-erase-marker stench.” However, the idiosyncratic details lead nowhere. Instead of bringing the reader to a new place of understanding, the many tastes that Alison describes as she moves through a short stretch of her life leave a bad taste in his/her mouth.

The characters in these stories are all unique; the problem is that you eventually realize that you would rather not have met them. Several stories, like “Offworld Friends Are Best” by Neil Blaikie, initially grab the reader with a confident narrative voice. Then this voice bunches up and spirals down into a psychological standstill while minute patches of illumination attempt to surface along the way. One gets the feeling that the story got bored with its narrator and went off to find somewhere else to be.

“Under the Flowers a Carcass Waits,” a poem by Rusty Barnes, is one of a group of pieces in this collection that carries the reader up a few stories from the circus of pathology that makes its rounds through the rest of the book. The first line, “Under a pear tree a sloppy-jawed mutt chews on a raw beef knuckle,” is a good example of the rich imagery that dominates the poem. In this piece and a few others, natural imagery carries an unsettling and vague plotline through to satisfying literary coherence.

Unfortunately, the majority of the writing in the Spring 2008 issue of Greatest Uncommon Denominator is more exploration than composition. I enjoy experimental writing, but came out of these stories feeling I had been used as a therapist by writers who should have let these stories mull a little longer in their minds before tossing them onto a page. Being strange is what you do on your own time; don’t let these authors break through the door to your psyche in the half-baked nightmare that is this issue of Greatest Uncommon Denominator. At least stick to your own nightmares, because the devil you know is better...


Caroline Hunter/Ibbetson Update/May 2008

BLUE LAND C.D. COLLINS (Polyho Press 10 Howard St. Somerville, Mass http://www.polyho.com)

BLUE LAND C.D. COLLINS (Polyho Press 10 Howard St. Somerville, Mass http://www.polyho.com)


In Somerville, Mass, the home of C.D. Collins, she lives amidst the east coast literary establishment. The fiction that is produced in these parts is often first rate. It often deals with the young, the disaffected, the urbane and privileged. The characters often are jaded, over-educated, underemployed, and in short not reflective of the hinterlands south, west and even north of the Brahmin waters of the Charles River. But in the west of Somerville, Collins writes about the folks who habituated the bygone tobacco farms of rural Kentucky, and other gone-to- seed burgs. Like William Faulkner or Flannery O’Connor she writes with a gothic and highly emotional acumen that is at times striking. Collins who moved to Somerville from Kentucky some years ago, is an accomplished singer/songwriter as well as poet, who now has written a collection of short stories titled “Blue Land.” It examines the lives of mostly agrarian, poor white, folks in an unsentimental, authentic, and even spiritual style.

One of the most harrowing stories in this collection “Sin Verquenza” deals with a coke addict who works the line at a Delmonte Plant. The first paragraph of the story grabs the reader immediately in a chokehold, as the female protagonist describes the difference between a “Coke Head,” and a “Junkie":

“ A Coke Head and a Junkie are two different things. With Junk you hit up and just drop out. You feel very benevolent, but all you can do is sit there trembling and nauseated, your eyes slamming shut. With cocaine you are fascinated by your own mind, you feel smart and interesting and full of energy. Your life is suddenly ideal. Then the high is tainted by craving for more and you rev and rev till you climb the fucking walls. I do coke, but I am not in the gutter, you understand. I’m a worker. I save all my money past rent and food, for my Friday night date with the snowman.”

And here, in the same story, Collins exhibits her talent for the telling detail. In this passage she describes the evolving physical traits of a dysfunctional couple:

“ Same stiff dinners, same exact fights on Saturday night. My mother drew more and more inside, her head sinking into her shoulders like a turtle, her shoulders rolling forward. My father did the opposite, his chest popped out more and more, and his back began to sway, like a bad horse.”



In the story “Hiroshima” a young woman ponders the simple twist of fate that prevented one young man from courting her, and the consequence it may have had for the unborn child:

“ Would it have been different if Mr. Greenway had not been walking this way to the dairy, if the other young man’s step had not quickened as the image of her eyes surfaced in his mind? For it was not much time, just a moment, between the arrival of one and the arrival of the other, leaving with one, and leaving the other with the grandparents or an empty porch. Would the child that comes later have been the same soul destined to pass through this woman? Or is there a child whose soul still waits?”

In the best tradition of the small press, the Polyho Press has published a veteran writer who is hopefully on the cusp of the literary limelight.

* The Ibbetson Street Press will be releasing a poetry collection by Collins " Self Portrait With A Severed Head" this summer ( 2008)


Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update/ May 2008/ Somerville

Bagel Bard 3 For Sale!

TO ORDER:

http://www.lulu.com/content/2425340







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